The Great Depression; Interview with Robert Schnitzer. Part 2

INTERVIEWER:

We're going to talk about the Federal Theatre Project. Give me a sense, I know you had been involved in the theater before the Theatre Project and in fact afterwards, that that's a part of your theater career. But give me a sense of why you think there was a need for the theater project in the first place? What was happening in the American theater?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, what was happening in the American theater was what was happening in America generally. People were out of work. And Mr. Roosevelt, who was one of my deities, felt that one should put people to work at their own professions or trades so that they could go back into them when the, when the Depression was over. He, he thought, and it seems to make sense that a pianist should not be forced to use a pick and shovel and then try to go back and have his hands handle a piano again. And so it was part of the, the general need of the country.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, apart from, apart from putting people back to work when Hallie [Flanagan] finally got, was selected as the head of the theater part of Federal One, she developed some other goals. Maybe you can talk about this, this issue of bringing theater to people who have never seen it.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Hallie, of course, had a, had a vision that was quite beyond putting people to work. She felt that this was the opportunity to use this emergency, perhaps, as, as work, as a tool towards bringing us a national theater. Of course, and, of course, I'm very partisan to, to Hallie's theories, because I like, I think almost everybody who worked for her, we practically worshipped her. She had, she was a hell of a leader. And she saw American national theater not as a single company in one city, like, which is logical, so to say, in England, with a homogeneous public. Now it's not quite so homogeneous as it was, then. Or France, though you have a national theater that tours a small geographic area and is based in the national capital. We are such an eclectic culture that she thought that a national theater would have various characteristics in various parts of the country. We had so many different national traditions and, and so many different styles of life, that a national theater would be a very dispersed one, with not only the classics, but also with very regional themes and, and a great variety of programming.

INTERVIEWER:

Give me a little insight because you knew Hallie Flanagan fairly well. Her background was in college theater. How would someone—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

We have to change batteries.

INTERVIEWER:

Oh, I'm sorry. The question I'm about to ask him, we'll just wait to, is how, how someone—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

You were going to tell me, try and give me some insight into how someone with a relatively limited background in theater education would develop such a broad vision.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, although Hallie came from what some people consider a very secluded part of the theater world, the academic theater, like various, there are people with special talents who break out of whatever mold they're supposed to be in, and, Hallie is true—Hallie, of course, never expected to be a professional at all, you know that don't you? She was a wife and mother until her husband tragically died, and she had a baby in her arms, and she had to earn a living. And she began teaching theater at her old school. And then she became involved in it, and having the kind of a mind she had, she developed an interest world-wide in theater. And she was the first Guggenheim woman. You know that story, do you, that Guggenheim, who was the great man who ran the Guggenheim Foundation from the beginning. Oh, dear—

INTERVIEWER:

It's OK. We can start over. Do you remember?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

No, I, I don't. And, he was brought by some friend to see a production she had done at the college. He went back afterward and said, \"You're going to be the first woman Guggenheim!\" And she chose—at that time there was a great ferment in the Russian theater with Vakhtangov and, and Stanislavsky and all of, of the great ones of that period. And she chose to go to Russia, which did her no good later on, of course, with the, with the congressional committees. But she went there purely as a student, and was very much struck by the various styles, the new developments that hadn't seeped out into the Western world at all, excepting, I guess, a few experimental people, probably in, in Paris, maybe. And so she came back excited about the possibilities of a great variety, not the standard theater with a, a box with the curtain and an audience sitting out there, and, the well made three act play. And she began working at that. And then she was asked to go to Vassar, and there she instituted for the first time—Vassar, all the plays that the girls put on had, had girls playing the men's parts. And she shocked the whole campus by getting any man she could find in the town or on the faculty to play the male parts in, in plays. And from there, of course, she became known nationally in the academic theater, and, and I think to a certain extent in the professional theater. She was not the first choice for the job, you know, as head of the, the Federal Theatre. Several thorough professionals turned it down. And Actors' Equity wasn't favorable to it at all at the start. And they didn't want to fool around with this business of amateur, semi-pro theaters they thought it would be. And, Hallie—thank God they did, 'cause Hallie then was, I don't know, second or third choice, whatever it was.

INTERVIEWER:

She had a challenge, right there.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Right there she said, \"Boy, let me take hold of it!\" And, and she did.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, now when you got involved, you, you, your original connection with the theater project was in Maryland, right?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, I had the same Broadway attitude towards it that everybody else did. I, I had been making my career. I had been at it only six or seven years, I guess. And I did it at the Theatre Guild and with Walter Hampden and with Katharine Cornell, and, you know, I was thoroughly Broadway. You know George M. Cohan's line, \"When you get west of the Hudson, it's all camping out.\" [laughs] So , but I, I had, I had, a summer theater in, in Delaware outside of Wilmington which I had had almost since I started professional work. It was one of the first barn theaters even before our famous Westport Playhouse. I and my partner converted a barn there.

INTERVIEWER:

So what I, what I want to get a sense from you is, is, is how, how the experience touched you from, from the Broadway showbiz guy to someone who believed in Hallie's vision.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

It was just because my theory had always been, \"Don't wait and sit by the phone. Take the first offer that comes along.\" And it happened that that fall nobody had called me yet when I got through the summer season in, in Delaware, nobody had called me for a job in New York. I was still then an actor and a stage manager, though I moved on into administration. Anyway, I guess, that my first fully administrative job was with the Federal Theatre. And I was called up by the WPA in Delaware and said, \"We're organizing a, a theater unit here. We have enough, theater people to justify a unit, and, would you like to run it?\" I come in to be interviewed for it. I said well, \"Take the first job that's offered, if it is offered.\" I went in, went to see, of course, the Arts, Director of the Arts Project, reported directly to, to Washington, which always irritated the politically appointed directors of all the other WPA jobs in the state. I had to go down and see him, however. And I was ready for a fight, because I expected to be asked how I had voted. And I was not asked that. I was asked whether I believed in putting people to work at their own work. And that was an easy answer. And the only other question was, \"Do you think you could do it?\" Well [laughs] , at nearly, I guess around thirty years of age, there was no question about that! So I took the job because it was a job to do. And then I pitched in and then I, being, not being too dumb, I, I acquired Hallie's theories. I found out what she was up to, and found out what kind of a person she was, too. I was called down there after I had done the first Julius. I think I told you I did the original Julius Caesar in modern dress. Orson Welles and John Houseman had my prompt script, although I wouldn't claim to be the director that Orson Welles was. But anyway she called me down there and asked what I had done wrong. She said \"Nothing, we just like what you're doing. We want to talk to you.\" and she said, \"Do you need anything?\" which was typically Hallie. And I said, \"Yes, I need, for one thing, the great honor of being allowed to charge admission.\" If you were good enough, why, you charged admission. So she said, \"That's all right.\" And I said, \"I need an administrator.\" And I named the person that I had in mind, and a treasurer, and she said, \"Well, all right, we'll ask the unit that she's working for if she can be released.\" And she said, \"Anything else?\" I said, \"Yes, you're not paying me enough.\" And she turned to her assistant and said \"What's he getting?\" and he told her. She said, \"Well, that's true, we'll give you a little more.\" So you can imagine that I, I was completely sold. But that was the kind of a leader she was. She, she was—

INTERVIEWER:

Give me your impression of that first meeting. How did she seem?

INTERVIEWER:

So that was it. The, the theater project was sacrificed and, and the great experiment was over. If you—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Excepting for the experiment, the great experiment was not over because its affects on the American theater are still being felt.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, what, help me try and understand what those affects were.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, the major affect was the idea of expanding out of the three-sided box into, sometimes into the audience into different type of things, the, of course, the Living Newspaper technique has been adopted widely by authors for years now, but that was a novel technique in those days. And the modern dress expanded, although it had been done now and then, the modern dress version of, of classics and therefore the adaptation of it, perhaps to contemporary life, the adaptation of the script of modern life. And, also, I think the regional theater which now, of course, is a great factor in, in our theater, got a new boost. Many of the units were, continued to exist, were supported locally, because the people in Squeedunk Corners or wherever it was, decided that they wanted this to continue. They'd had enough good out of it to continue. So, I think there was a, a value, yes. It didn't just stop like that.

INTERVIEWER:

But, try, sort of, I mean, I know you were a theater person, you continue to be a theater person. You weren't a politician or a New Deal brain truster, but how do you think, how do you think this whole work in the arts fit in with what the New Deal was doing in terms of changing the country and the way people worked during the decade.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, as you say, I am, I am not a political authority. I, I, all I can—is it was part of something that I believe was very good for the country and, and many features of which should have been continued even though we did go to war, and particularly after the war should have been picked up again.

INTERVIEWER:

Did the war, I mean, was the war something that sort of put everything on hold, or was that really the end of the era? Once the war was over, was it all gone?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, your political reading will tell you better than I can. I, I guess, certainly it was a new era, wasn't it?

INTERVIEWER:

But specifically, let's talk about artists and theater people. Once the, the art project was cut, what, what was their fate? Did they go back on relief or...?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, by that time employment was picking up. And, also, many of us went into the service, also. And there the government shamelessly uses, used the arts to maintain morale, among other things, or to teach the technique of shouldering a gun or whatever. The arts, although the mob don't know it, the arts are a very important part. I would like—

INTERVIEWER:

The arts did sort of make a transition from the Depression to the war themselves?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Yes, and after the war, of course, the GI bill was used. A great many—I became, when I came back I was a counselor to veterans who wanted to re-enter the theater, or who, having gotten a taste of it overseas, thought that they wanted to make it their careers. And among other things, Hallie was then dean at and head of theater at Smith. I helped her establish the first male students at Smith College. There's quite a group of guys who for a long time were kidding me and they said they got their MA in Theater at Smith College, because they only men in a woman's college then. Of course, all the women's colleges, or most of them now, have long since accepted men.

INTERVIEWER:

Let's cut for a minute. I want to check [inaudible]

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Talking about after the war, also the theater wing developed a lot of courses for, for the men wanting to go back into it.

INTERVIEWER:

Let's go back to the prewar period. I mean, you were pretty much involved with the Federal Theatre Project through its whole history, weren't you from '36 on?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Pretty much from '36 on to the end, yes.

INTERVIEWER:

To '39. At what point, even though your, your focus is on the theater, at what point were you personally getting involved, or aware of the fact that a war is coming, that America can't stay out of trouble? Wen do you have a sense that there's war clouds?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, well, I, I think that, anybody who had an interest in, in the daily newspaper knew for years that we were going to have to get involved. That is one thing when I talk to people who don't want to bother with the AB General Education, I point out to them although I, I majored in something entirely different than theater, my, my education has given me a lifetime interest in all sorts of other things. And to me, the daily papers have always been more interesting than a novel.

INTERVIEWER:

But when you'd read the daily papers, were you thinking, were you worrying about Hitler and the war in Europe, or were you worried about Asia?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, of course. In the first place, although I come from a line of atheists on both sides, way back on one side I'm German Jewish. On the other side, Italian Catholic, that's the atheist side. So I was certainly aware of what Hitler was up to and that it was something that had to be stopped.

INTERVIEWER:

And then, but apart from reading the newspapers, is there a certain point later on in '38 or '39 when it starts getting closer when you feel like...?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

I don't know. I was very much involved then, 'cause, I, after a year's intermission after the, after the Federal Theatre closed, oh, I guess two years' intermission, I was out in, speaking of west of the Hudson, I was in Kalamazoo directing a community theater. And it always seemed to me, you know, if you played Kalamazoo and Peoria, you were a trooper, but I found a very lively group there interested in community theater. And then I came back and, and I became assistant to Hallie at Vassar. And then that was the year that she got the offer to go to Smith. So I was deeply involved first in settling in as her assistant at Vassar and then in helping her transfer to Smith. So, but then, of course she was the, she offered the Waves as soon as they were created, the use of the North Hampton Campus, so we had the first group of Waves training officers, naval offices training there. And, they were a bunch of bright women, and we, we got involved with them and their theater work and our, our theater work.

INTERVIEWER:

I have, I guess, just one more general question. Again, people's experience with the Depression depends on what they did and how well they were working, how much they were working. Did you have a sense in '36 and '37 that, that the US was going to get back on its feet, or did you think, did you feel like the Depression was just going to go on?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, I, in the first place, I was young, and I've always been optimistic. And in the second place, those of us who were working at something that we believed in were surely, surely believed that it was going to, things couldn't help but get better.

INTERVIEWER:

And they did. But I mean, but looking back, were you surprised that it was the war that made things better as opposed to the New Deal?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

I don't think I gave it a great deal of thought.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, why don't we stop right there? I think that we have probably done it all.