The Great Depression; Interview with Robert Schnitzer. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Let's now move it over to how you came to get involved with the project out on Treasure Island. How did that assignment start?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, well, I had been brought down from Delaware to be an assistant to Hallie in Washington, which I was for a year. And my work was mainly analyzing reports. We had very thorough reports from all the projects all over the country, and I, I did a lot of analyzing of them for her. And then, when it was decided to have a federal building at Treasure Island, Hallie asked me to go out there and organize the Federal Theatre out there. And there, too, I was introduced to the, to the state director who said, \"We don't need you out here. We've got somebody already that can do it.\" One of his favorite old boys, an old theater ham he'd wanted in that job. I said, \"Well—\" He said, \"You've got two strikes against you.\" And I said, \"Well, give me the third anyway.\" [laughs] And I was very flattered that when I, when Hallie called me back to help with the hearings in Washington that he protested my going.

INTERVIEWER:

When you got out to Treasure Island, what state was it in? Were the buildings...?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, the building was not, not yet built. I worked with the architects on the plans for the theater. It was a very, for those days, an advanced theater. It had no footlights and steps right down to the audience. It had a very wide stage. And it was where George Eisenhower, the great lighting man, got his first chance to try his mad theory that you didn't have to have a rheostat for to dim a light. You could do it, he thought then, electronically with a light bulb. And, of course, now we've gone one to chips. But, immediately he had a switchboard on which you could do this with little switches. And none of you people are old enough to remember, why, a switchboard, where if you wanted to make a dim of more than two lights, you had to stand on one foot and one hand up here and one hand out there on, on the rheostat and another foot, perhaps running another rheostat down here.

INTERVIEWER:

So part of your job, also, was to put together the troupe, the performers. How did you do that?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Yes. I also had to put together the troupe. I assembled units from all over the coast, from Portland, Seattle, from San Francisco, from Los Angeles, of course, and from San Diego. And one was a dance unit, another was a musical unit, mainly of the Hall Johnson choir people. And another one was the Living Newspaper. And some of them, some of them we put together there. And some we brought the whole unit in with its program. The dance unit brought their program. We created all Run Little Chillun with the Hall Johnson Choir there. We created a series of, of short versions of Living Newspapers from a unit that had been doing Living Newspapers. We edited what there was and, and added to it.

INTERVIEWER:

Did you stay for the fair to open to get a sense of how audience—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh yes, I, I was there for quite, quite a long time, yes.

INTERVIEWER:

And did you get a sense of how people—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, well, it was well received. The Federal Theatre was everywhere well received except by a few people who, in my opinion, had bigoted views, either politically or artistically, or, or, what shall I say, socially. Theater people, you know: thieves, rogues, vagabonds and actors.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, now you're out on the coast and Treasure Island is this beautiful, spectacular place, but you're in touch with the office in Washington, and you learn of Hallie's being attacked.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh yes, oh yes.

INTERVIEWER:

What were you hearing about what was happening back east?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, I was hearing nothing good about what was happening back east. And, finally, when the hearing started and she was called, she asked me to come back and again do some analysis, among other things. I, I established what we all had believed, but now, now I could prove statistically, although the congressional committee didn't want to hear it, that ninety-five percent of the production done in, in all over America had been classics, contemporary theater, comedies, dramas, mystery plays, circuses, children's plays, puppet shows, musicals. And maybe five per cent might have been considered serious discussions of, of the human condition, and of that maybe one percent might even be called possibly radical. And, but, of course, Congress didn't want to hear anything like that. The Committee didn't, at least. So it did no good for me to present Hallie with all these statistics. She wasn't even allowed to present most of them.

INTERVIEWER:

Did, did you and, from what you got from her during that period, did you have a sense early on that, of that Hopkins and the higher-ups might abandon the project, or how did it look originally? How did it look when you were first, when she was called to testify.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, almost from the beginning, we were aware that the wagon train was surrounded. There was a woman named Kerr who was in charge of, in Washington, of the, of all of the projects, that is above the arts level, and on the political administration level. She had been a very good fundraiser for the party, and she was rewarded with this job. She was a knowledgeable woman, but when it came down to a question of whether it was politically advisable to do it or not to do it, she was on the side of the politicians, not on the side of the artists. And Hallie was constantly fighting that battle, which had nothing to do with her job. Her energies were taken frequently, and more and more frequently. And even Harry Hopkins, who certainly was at the beginning one of her staunchest supporters and a believer in what we were up to, gradually, since he was also had to, had to think politically about the welfare of his, of his boss, the president, more and more, not opposed us, but he, he was no longer the shield that we needed, and, so that—

INTERVIEWER:

—hadn't Hopkins been quite enthusiastic about theater, specifically?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Yes, yes, I guess so. I, I had never known him before I met him here, but he was, he was very enthusiastic about we'd been doing. Yes, he was all for it, but, political considerations took over, of course.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, I read that, that the first time the committees met that Hallie Flanagan wasn't even allowed to testify the first time, that, that she was almost reined in, the—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

I don't remember that, but I do recall that she wasn't allowed to give all the testimony that she wanted to give. They didn't want to hear the good things.

INTERVIEWER:

Did, did, did you see it as just an attack on the arts or did you see it as something bigger?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, it was an attack on the arts as, as something that society's always suspicious of. And here was a great opportunity for the demagogues to tie it up with communism and so on, something that's never threatened our country either in, from the inside or from the outside. [laughs]

INTERVIEWER:

I mean, how would you react when you'd hear that the theater project was full of Reds and doing subversive plays? How would that strike you?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Mostly lies. I just, I was always on the defensive with, with civilians who didn't know what was going on, and I had all the statistics to prove it. I developed them. But, of course, I wasn't called to testify at all. And as for my friends and acquaintances, well, they thought, \"Well, if good ol' Bob is doing it, it can't be too bad.\" [laughs] And, but I don't know if that answers your question or not.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, I mean, let me sort of ask another question which is related. I mean, did, how did it feel when you're there fighting and, and presenting theater and, and doing good stuff, and audiences are reacting? Did, did you feel like you were being sacrificed or what, what, how did it...?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

You know, I must say that you remind me of your colleagues in the news world who, who watch, come up to a woman who's just seen her son killed by a car and says, \"How do you feel about this?\" How do you think I felt? I was, of course, mad. I was angry. I, I felt, yes, I felt abused. I felt that we were being used by demagogues, or misused. Sure, what else would I feel? Particularly with the personal loyalty that I developed to Hallie, as so many people developed a loyalty to her, quite beyond professional respect.

INTERVIEWER:

I've heard that in 1938 when these hearings were starting that—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

We have 40 feet.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. That—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

You might get a quick one.

INTERVIEWER:

—that Hopkins had, had serious political ambitions, that Roosevelt was grooming him to replace him. Do you think that could have been a factor?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, I don't know. I, I really wasn't, either I've forgotten it or, or I wasn't that deeply involved in the interior cuisine of the Democratic Party.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, I mean do you think, do you think he [Hopkins] felt that by sacrificing you, he could save the rest of the WPA?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, I, I think, I don't know whether he, he thought he could, I think he hoped, It was a start. We were really the baby thrown overboard to lighten the sleigh, with the wolves running afterwards. The theater was the first arts projects. Then the rest of the arts projects went. And then, of course, finally the whole WPA went.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Let's change right here.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I was, I was wondering if you could, I know it's a long time ago, but give me your impressions of her [Hallie Flanagan] from that first meeting.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, in the first place, they were using a, a great old mansion, the McLean Mansion in Washington. And her office, for some reason she'd been assigned to the ballroom, I think, and at the far end of it there was this huge desk with a little woman behind it. And I marched down to it, and I thought, \"Boy, she's pretty small for the job.\" But, she was a powerful personality, and, and she made you feel that she was interested in you and that she wanted to help you do your job. She never, that I ever knew of, went in and said, \"This is to be done!\" And let's say artistically, particular. She'd come in and see a production in rehearsal, and it's always to the director, \"What would happen if,\" or, \"What do you think about this?\", so forth, things like that. She brought out the best in you rather than imposing her, her thoughts on you.

INTERVIEWER:

And when she [Hallie Flanagan] would make those kinds of comments, it wouldn't be as an administrator, it would be more like someone giving you notes after rehearsal?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

She's a, an artistic colleague of course. She was primarily a stage director rather than an administrator. She took that on. She had to learn that. She was very good at it. She, she was the kind of administrator that people want to lie down in front of a bus for because she always backed you up. She, she—when I did the Caesar in modern dress, it was the first time that it had been tried, except in Shakespeare's time, of course, they did it in modern dress, but, there was a lot of fuss about it. We were supposedly on good terms with Mussolini at the time, and, it was, it was some political people in religious places that made use of the fact that we had a large Italian population in Wilmington to complain that I was insulting Italy. I said that if Mussolini prided himself on looking like the Naples bust of Caesar, that was not my fault. I had picked my Caesar to look like the Naples bust. And, and I said, I asked the gentleman who was making the protest whether he would like to come and see the fact that we had not made any changes in Shakespeare's lines at all. There was no change at all. I just put them into khaki and black shirts, and, it seemed to fit the times. And he said, he, there were some places you've made up your mind about without seeing them. And for awhile I contemplated running an ad saying, \"Come to Schnitzer's Whorehouse.\" But then I didn't, I didn't try that. Anyway, Harry Hopkins got out of Washington. Harry Hopkins went to Hallie and said, \"Look, can't you put them into togas?\" And Hallie said, \"We're not going to put them into bedsheets. If you force us to, we'll pull it off, but otherwise, we'll run it the way it is.\" Hallie went to bat for you. And we continued to play it.

INTERVIEWER:

She, she [Hallie Flanagan] would be a sort of a, if there were problems from upstairs, from Hopkins or Roosevelt, she would be the, she would—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

—the buffer, absolutely, never passed the buck. When in the latter days, when serious cuts had to be made, particularly the New York project, which was by far the biggest and took cuts of a thousand people at a time, they were killing it by inches, and she, herself never sent up word to the director of the New York project, \"Cut a thousand people.\" She came up, called a mass meeting of the, of everybody in the, in the New York Project and said, \"Here's the situation. We have to do this, and I'm sorry, but there it is.\" And she took the heat of the people who, you know, hated the administration anyways. And that was always her way. It taught me a lot when I—I learned a lot from her when I went on into purely administrative work. She was a hell of a leader!

INTERVIEWER:

Now, let's, let's switch gears back to Delaware, to the project you were running there before you did other things with the theater project. What was it like taking all these different actors, some of whom might have been amateurs, some of whom were summer stock, some of whom were old vaudevillians? What was that experience like?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, I, I chose the, the Caesar because the school board was studying, the schools were studying Caesar that year, and I had been instructed to cooperate with the, with the schools. So I chose Caesar as a hell of a good melodrama and tried to prove that it wasn't just a lot of lines that you memorized or anything like that. And, as you say, I had a very mixed bag of people, and I had come from a very, very legitimate thing.

INTERVIEWER:

What kind of people did you have?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Vaudevillians, circus people—

INTERVIEWER:

Will you start that over again? Just say, \"We had...\"

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

We had vaudevillians, circus people, some from the legitimate theater. It was a very mixed bag. And I was very suspicious at first because it—I said I came from a very, very, legitimate—I'd been several years with Walter Hampden and Miss Cornell, and, it—but that stood me in good stead, because I was able to make them realize that it was a play, not, not something on a shelf, a bookshelf. And we went at it. And I cut it very severely at first, and these old boys would come to me and say, \"Hey, Bob, I can read that line,\" and we'd put it back in. And then we did a number of other plays. We did a very amusing play called Help Yourself about making a job for yourself. I don't whether you've ever read that script. You'd find it very amusing. It's about—

INTERVIEWER:

About how much have we got on this magazine?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Oh, almost 190.

INTERVIEWER:

So now, before we get to Treasure Island, I don't know whether the Delaware unit was involved in them, but one of the most unique theatrical forms that the Theatre Project developed was the Living Newspaper. Tell me a little bit about that.

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Yes. We never, we never did that in Delaware, but I was in Delaware, oh, less than a year before they moved me down to Washington.

INTERVIEWER:

You were aware of how the thing developed?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh yes. That was another good thing. The news of what was being done all over the country was circulated to all the unit directors, so you know what was being done. And you had, it gave you ideas, too, as Orson got his ideas from—

INTERVIEWER:

So, can you explain to me what the theory behind the Living Newspaper was? Or what, what the people...?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well it, it was a very novel thing. Hallie, I don't know who, where the idea came from to Hallie, whether it sprang from her own thinking or whether she had seen something somewhere that had moved her to it. But she just thought that this documentary stage play was something worth doing. Of course, it was one of the brilliant successes and one of the causes of our downfall, because it was too verbal and showed up too many cracks in the structure of our government.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, well how do you about whether a theater should do that? Is that a legitimate thing?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, is it legitimate for PBS to run documentaries? Why shouldn't the theater do it? I, of course, having all my life dealt with the round actors and not with the flat ones, I believe that the living theater is the best means of communication. I'm not alone in that of course. The Catholic Church has always known that. They, the theaters you know it was saved on the steps of the Church in the Middle Ages. And certainly the, the Mormons use it as not only for religious teaching, but generally for recreation and for general education.

INTERVIEWER:

Let's talk a little more about the Living Newspaper. I mean, if someone picks up the New York Times and reads the news, that's not controversial. Why does it become controversial when it's put in a play?

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Well, I can only give you my prime example, and that is that there was, when the various relief, housing relief measures were in Congress, there was one gentleman who got up and said, \"Oh, you can't do too much with these people. If you give them a bathtub, they'll fill it with coal.\" Well, that was in the Congressional Record, and that was one of the scenes in One Third of the Nation, the living newspaper on housing. And here was the character said to be Senator So-and-so making his statement. Well, that didn't make him very happy, because it's been hidden away in the Congressional Record, but when you put it up on a stage, it's pretty, pretty serious stuff. So, of course, the, the Living Theatre's the most dangerous means of documentary presentation. Yes. Films, secondly, as you know, there is lots of pressure on the media to mind their manners in these matters. And—

INTERVIEWER:

Do you remember how the public received these Living Newspapers? I mean, did they find it—

ROBERT SCHNITZER:

Oh, they were a tremendous success. You can find that in all the records of, of the time. There wasn't one of them that wasn't welcome. Spirochete on the subject of syphilis, and, and of course, the One Third of a Nation, which was the most famous, perhaps, Triple-A Plowed Under on agriculture, some, all of them to the point, all of them absolutely documented so that nobody could say there was anything untrue about them at all. And constructively critical, which is what a good newspaper is, too.

INTERVIEWER:

Have we got enough to keep on going on this? Or...?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

No.