¹ Investigation of Un-American Activities and Propaganda Report Pursuant to H. Resolution 282, 75th Congress, 7. “Hate Besets Ickes, Says Carter Glass,” New York Times, 28 Aug. 1938, 6.

² “Miss Perkins Firm against Dies Plea to Deport Bridges,” New York Times, 31 Aug. 1938, 1, 10.

³ Reflecting Democratic dominance of Congress, the House Committee was composed of five Democrats and two Republicans. Of the Democrats, only John J. Dempsey of New Mexico was a clear supporter of the New Deal. Arthur D. Healey of Massachusetts was a wavering New Dealer; Joe Starnes of Alabama and Harold G. Mosier of Ohio were not New Deal enthusiasts. The two Republicans were J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, an outspoken critic of work relief programmes, and Noah M. Mason of Illinois.

⁴ The White House tried to remain aloof and FDR rarely commented on its proceedings, until the Dies Committee became so obviously partisan in its hearings into communist activities in Minnesota and Michigan, where gubernatorial elections were due to take place. Dies received such one-sided anti-Democratic testimony that FDR issued a damning condemnation of a committee which had “permitted itself to be used in a flagrantly unfair and un-American attempt to influence an election.” House of Representatives, 75th Congress, 3rd Session, Hearings, Special Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda on House Res. 282, Volume I, 918–19 (hereafter Hearings); Ogden, August Raymond, The Dies Committee: A Study of the Special House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities 1938–1944 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945), 64–6, 80Google Scholar.

⁵ “Dies Selects Team of Hate Purveyors,” New York Times, 14 Nov. 1938, 12.

⁶ The Department of Labor, which had oversight of the Bureau of Immigration, had postponed action against Bridges pending an appeal to the US Court of Appeals with regard to another case, where the constitutionality of deportation on grounds of communist affiliation was being tested. “Miss Perkins Firm against Dies Plea.”.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Melosh, Barbara, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institute, 1991)Google Scholar. See especially chapter4. For WPA posters and the manly worker see Carter, Ennis, Posters for the People: Art of the WPA (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2008)Google Scholar, especially 6–25.

⁹ Melosh; Kleinberg, S. Jay, Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006)Google Scholar, especially chapter 5; Kessler-Harris, Alice, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For an interpretation that focusses on New Deal women's networks and how women used their patronage to promote both women's political roles and women's causes more generally see Ware, Susan, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Ware, Susan, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 192Google Scholar. Ware argues that women tended to fare better in newly established New Deal agencies than in long-established governmental departments.

¹¹ Swain, Martha H., Ellen S. Woodward: New Deal Advocate for Women (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 105Google Scholar.

¹² I borrow the phrase “gendered imagination” from Kessler-Harris, 5–6.

¹³ It was a member of the Dies Committee, Rep. Noah Mason, who in 1943 used the womb analogy to dismiss Burns's, Evelyn “American Beveridge Plan” for an expanded postwar welfare state. Landon Storrs, “Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism, Journal of American History, 90, 2 (2003), 491–524, 523, 518CrossRefGoogle Scholar.”

¹⁴ Abbott, Philip, “Titans/Planners, Bohemians/Revolutionaries: Male Empowerment in the 1930s,” Journal of American Studies, 3 (2006), 463–85, 464CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Ibid., 465.

¹⁶ Ibid., 468–72.

¹⁷ Houck, Davis W. and Kiewe, Amos, FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2003)Google Scholar; Costigliola, Frank, Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ The list included the Chicago Unit's production of Paul Green's chain gang drama Hymn to the Rising Sun, as well as the Harlem Negro Unit's Haiti. Huffman's testimony covered over fifty pages in the first volume of proceedings, Hearings, I, 775–829. She was allowed to come back and respond, again at length, to Flanagan and Woodward's testimony on 8 Dec. 1938. Hearings, IV, 2987–88.

¹⁹ It was not just that African Americans were allowed to put on plays at taxpayers’ expense that angered opponents of the FTP, but rather that the Theatre Project encouraged integration through its strict policy of integrated audiences and, where necessary, mixed dressing rooms. At the same time, the FTP had separate units, including seventeen Negro Units, as well as Hispanic, Jewish and other ethnic and language based units.

²⁰ Hearings, I, 857–60.

²¹ Dies equation of racial mixing, and particularly interracial marriage and sex, with communism was a common refrain among American anticommunists who charged the Communist Party of the USA with using white women as bait for black male members and of promoting promiscuity. Maxwell, William J., New Negro Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 125–29Google Scholar.

²² Literary Digest, 120 (6 July 1935), in Swain, Ellen S. Woodward, 54.

²³ Swain, 57, 104–7. Ware, Beyond Suffrage, 7–10.

²⁴ Swain, 62–63, documents how Woodward used her position to defend publicly the rights of all women to work, including married women with minor children, a group about which even the Department of Labor under Perkins was ambivalent.

²⁵ Swain, 126.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Flanagan, Hallie, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965; first published 1940), 339Google Scholar.

²⁸ Elsie George, “The Women Appointees of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations: A Study of Their Impact and Effectiveness,” PhD dissertation, American University, 1976, 183, quoted in Swain, 129.

²⁹ Dies had eventually responded to Woodward's September letter by informing Flanagan that she would be called in due course. Swain, 128–29. Flanagan suggested that it was WPA administrative assistant David Niles (and therefore presumably Hopkins) who decided that Woodward, rather than the project directors, should defend the Arts Programmes. Flanagan, 339.

³⁰ Swain, 109, suggests that Woodward was a buffer.

³¹ “Mrs Woodward Clashes with Dies on Reds,” New York Times, 6 Dec. 1938, 8; Washington Post, 6 Dec. 1938, cited in Swain, 130.

³² Kathleen Sexton in the Jackson Daily News, 11 Dec. 1938, cited in Swain, 130.

³³ Hearings, IV, 2730.

³⁴ Hearings, IV, 2731.

³⁵ Storrs, Landon, “Left Feminism, the Consumer Movement, and Red Scare Politics in the United States, 1935–60,” Journal of Women's History, 18, 3 (Fall 2006), 40–67, 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Hearings, IV: 2731.

³⁷ Hearings, IV: 2763.

³⁸ Hearings, IV: 2764–65.

³⁹ The most notorious of whom was J. B. Matthews, a former “fellow traveller” who became a professional anticommunist and later the chief investigator for the Dies Committee, and then research director for McCarthy Senate committees. See Matthews, J. B., The Odyssey of a Fellow Traveller (New York: Mount Vernon Publishers, 1938)Google Scholar and Lichtman, Robert M., “J. B. Matthews and the ‘Counter-subversives’: Names as a Political and Financial Resource in the McCarthy Era,” American Communist History, 5, 1 (June 2006), 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Heineman, Kenneth, “Media Bias in Coverage of the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities 1938–1940,” The Historian, 55, 1 (1992), 37–52, 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alongside other ACPS members, Steele was one of 15 Americans whose names appeared in a 1933 Nazi book recommended for American readers. In 1942, US Army Intelligence would describe Steele's National Republic as “fascist.” See Bellant, Russ, Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and their effect on U. S. Cold War Politics (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1991), 32–33Google Scholar. See Hearings, I, 278–455 for Steele's testimony.

⁴¹ Hearings, IV, 2827.

⁴² Hearings, IV, 2828.

⁴³ Ogden, The Dies Committee, 95.

⁴⁴ May Thompson Evans commended Woodward's courage; Holger Cahill, director of the Federal Art Project, thought her a “real fighter.” Cited in Swain, Ellen S. Woodward, 131; and Flanagan, 339.

⁴⁵ Hearings, IV, 2839.

⁴⁶ Hearings, IV, 2843–44.

⁴⁷ Hearings, IV, 2844–45.

⁴⁸ Hearings, IV, 2845

⁴⁹ Hearings, IV, 2844–45.

⁵⁰ Hearings, IV, 2857.

⁵¹ Tim Robbins, dir., Cradle Will Rock, 1999 (Buena Vista, 2006); “On the Newsfronts of the World,” Life Magazine, 19 Dec. 1938, 8. Time magazine, 19 Dec. 1938.

⁵² Houchin, John H., Censorship of American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 149–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sproule, J. Michael, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 126–27Google Scholar.

⁵³ Houchin, 149.

⁵⁴ “Federal Theatre Held UnAmerican,” New York Times, 13 Sept. 1938, 28.

⁵⁵ Hearings, IV, 2862. Living Newspapers are regarded as the Federal Theatre Project's major contribution to the development of theatre. In the 1930s, however, their dramatization of controversial news stories frequently landed FTP directors in trouble. See Brown, Lorraine, ed., Liberty Deferred and Other Living Newspapers of the 1930s (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Lavery, Emmet, “Who Killed Federal Theater,” Commonweal, 30 (1939), 351–52Google Scholar, cited in Ogden, The Dies Committee, 95.

⁵⁷ Hearings, IV, 2864.

⁵⁸ Hearings, IV, 2864.

⁵⁹ Hearings, IV, 2865.

⁶⁰ Hearings, IV, 2865.

⁶¹ Ogden, 95.

⁶² Stuart Cosgrove, “The Living Newspaper: History, Production and Form,” PhD thesis, University of Hull, 1982, especially chapter 4.

⁶³ Hearings, IV, 2878.

⁶⁴ Hearings, IV, 2879.

⁶⁵ Hearings, IV, 2883.

⁶⁶ Flanagan, 345.

⁶⁷ Flanagan, 346. See n. 35 for Dies's one-to-one sessions.

⁶⁸ Washington Post, 2 Nov, 1938, in Ogden, 102.

⁶⁹ Christian Century, 55, 1938, in Ogden, 109.

⁷⁰ New York Times, 4 Jan, 1939 in Ogden, 108.

⁷¹ Ogden, 110.

⁷² Democratic voters were less likely than Republicans to support the committee, with 68% and 84% favouring continuation respectively. New York Times, 11 Dec. 1938.

⁷³ Report Pursuant to H. Res. 282, 75th Congress, 7.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 8.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 9–10; Dies had earlier released his letters demanding help from the FBI, Harry Hopkins and the President in August 1938 to the press. See Ogden, 66–67.

⁷⁶ New York Times, 8 Jan. 1939. Ogden, 109.

⁷⁷ Tribune, 5 Jan. 1939, in Ogden, 109. For full coverage of newspapers’ attitudes towards the Dies Committee see Heineman, “Media Bias.”

⁷⁸ In March 1939 the Committee on the Judiciary passed a unanimous vote against pursuing impeachment proceedings on the grounds of no evidence, though a minority, while agreeing, argued that Perkins and fellow members of Department of Labor had been unprecedented in their tolerance of Bridges. Ogden, 110–11.

⁷⁹ Goodman, Walter, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969), 168Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Barringer, Milly, Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Storrs, Landon, “Red Scare Politics.” Also see Storrs, “Attacking the Washington ‘Femmocracy’: Antifeminism in the Cold War Campaign against ‘Communists in Government’,” Feminist Studies, 1 (2007), 118–52Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage, as Abbott, “Titans/Planners, Bohemians/Revolutionaries,” 475 n. 37, notes, suggests that a number of influential women formed networks which provided the support, patronage and power to sometimes challenge gendered hierarchies.