Gender and the Dies Committee Hearings on the Federal Theatre Project

Abstract

This paper examines the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda's investigation into un-American activities in the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it examines the performances of committee chairman Martin Dies and his Republican colleague J. Parnell Thomas, who led the interrogation of Federal Theatre witnesses. Relying on so-called “friendly witnesses,” usually disaffected former Federal Theatre employees or former communists, Dies and Thomas devoted three days to the testimony of Hazel Huffman, a WPA mail clerk, who never worked on the FTP, while allowing Hallie Flanagan and Ellen Woodward, the two women who directed the national theatre programme, just a few hours each. While Huffman gushed and flirted, Flanagan and Woodward refused to perform the version of femininity the committee demanded. The reordering of gendered roles that resulted was startling. The Dies Committee took to presenting itself as emasculated, a victim of masculine women and New Deal–communist conspirators, who were stripping not only them, but also America, of manhood. This paper suggests that it is only by analysing the powerful gendered performances of the key characters in this unfolding drama of un-Americana that we can understand how and why un-Americanism gained so strong a foothold in mid-century America.