On December 6, 1938, for the first and perhaps only time in U.S. history, the purpose of theater and its place in American democracy was hotly debated in a congressional hearing. The fraught exchange took place on the second floor of the Old Congressional Building in Washington, D.C., where the recently formed House Un-American Activities Committee questioned its witnesses. The venue, with high ceilings and large chandeliers, its walls lined that day with theater exhibits, resembled a stage set for a courtroom drama. Two long tables had been arranged in the shape of a T. At its foot was a solitary witness chair. An audience of stenographers, reporters, photographers, and cameramen sat behind long tables on each side of the room. They were drawn there in part by the committee’s theatrics, vividly described in the Washington Star: “Under a blinding glare of spotlights and a bombardment of photographers’ bulbs,” committee members “shout insults at each other or at witnesses, who retort in kind. Spectators and witnesses exchange taunts. More than once the audience has been permitted to rise and cheer a pronouncement of the chairman.”

Sitting at the head of the T that Tuesday morning were five members of the investigative committee: J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, John J. Dempsey of New Mexico, Joe Starnes of Alabama, Harold Mosier of Ohio, and its chairman, Martin Dies, a tall and charismatic Texan in his late thirties who worked his way through eight cigars in the course of a day’s hearing. While officially known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, everyone, including reporters, referred to it as the Dies Committee. Its other members struggled to be more than a supporting cast. The committee, authorized by Congress on May 26, 1938, was due to present its findings in less than a month. Its budget had been a measly $25,000, perhaps half of what it needed to hire enough investigators, signaling Congress’s uneasiness with authorizing this special committee, which it hamstrung by underfunding it. This meant that the Dies Committee lacked both the time and manpower to look into its ostensible targets, Nazism and Communism. So it reached for lower-hanging fruit, public relief, which many Americans had grown weary of, focusing its attention on one of the more controversial divisions of the WPA’s Federal One, a program that had put to work thousands of unemployed writers, musicians, photographers, painters, and actors. It wasn’t easy attacking murals adorning public libraries, or concerts, or photographs, or tourist handbooks. Theater offered a richer target, in part because it had become remarkably popular; in part because it was easy to find and then read aloud incriminating passages from plays that sounded obscene or subversive; and in part—and this is what justified linking it to un-American activities—because it attracted many on the political left who hoped, at a time of massive unemployment, racial division, and income inequality, that plays could expose and help change what they found wrong in America.

Back in August, at the end of its first week of hearings, the Dies Committee had heard from a half dozen or so witnesses who, based on hearsay evidence and unchallenged allegations, had traduced the Federal Theatre as communistic and its plays as subversive of American values. The accusations were front-page news. Subsequent reports of the wild and unpredictable hearings, which Americans seemingly couldn’t get enough of, had generated growing public interest. With only weeks left before the committee members had to submit their report to Congress, they had not allowed any officials representing the Federal Theatre to respond to these accusations, despite repeated requests to do so. The previous day the committee finally invited, then grilled, the first of these, the formidable Mississippian and high-ranking WPA administrator Ellen Sullivan Woodward, and that hadn’t gone well. Woodward had turned the tables, deriding their biased proceedings as “un-American,” and accused them of giving “widespread publicity to testimony given before your committee” by “unqualified, irresponsible, and misinformed” witnesses. She was admonished in turn: “You are not here to ask the committee questions. You are here to answer questions.” Dies had made a tactical error in rebuffing Thomas’s request to skip Woodward entirely and turn directly to the testimony of a more vulnerable witness who worked under her, forty-eight-year-old Hallie Flanagan, a professor at Vassar College who had risen to national prominence in 1935 when chosen to run the Federal Theatre. From Dies’s perspective, Monday’s outcome must have been a disappointment, if not a potential disaster, especially after the New York Times headline had declared “WPA Plays Upheld at Dies Hearing,” and the anti-administration Chicago Tribune had not even bothered running a story.

Since August, Flanagan had sought to appear at the hearings to defend the Federal Theatre, but until now the Dies Committee had stonewalled her. The committee couldn’t hold off any longer on allowing her to speak; and Roosevelt’s administration, having told Flanagan not to respond in public, had reversed course as well, belatedly recognizing the damage already done by this strategy. Flanagan had come prepared, reports and affidavits in hand. Nobody knew the Federal Theatre more intimately or could speak about it with greater passion. She was possessed of considerable poise, but, unlike Woodward, a veteran politician, had never found herself in such a hostile environment. Her mission was to defend the Federal Theatre; Dies’s was to trip her up, vilify her program, and, in so doing, make national news and extend the life of his committee. What Flanagan failed to grasp—and it would haunt her to her dying days—was that the hearing room (which to her producer’s eye looked “like a badly staged courtroom scene”) offered a different sort of drama than she had ever encountered. That shopworn set masked a nascent form of American political theater far more dangerous than the one she had come to defend.

Dies entered the Old Congressional Building that morning bolstered by a successful weekend of politicking in New York City. On Saturday he had spoken at a luncheon at the Hotel Pennsylvania for six hundred members of the nationalist American Defense Society. Before this sympathetic crowd, risking President Roosevelt’s wrath, Dies lashed out against Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins for having “gone to great lengths to ‘ridicule and destroy’ his investigation.” His strategy was to play the victim while wrapping himself in the flag: “The enemies of this country … have been stupid. Their tactics of ridicule, misrepresentation, lies, abuse, etc., have done more to arouse the patriotism of this country to the seriousness of the situation than all the testimony we have heard.” Dies’s hosts were furious that no radio station had covered the popular congressman’s speech (though Dies had not asked any station to do so, and he had been on NBC radio alone seven times since April). Arnold Davis, cochair of the society, wondered aloud, “Who had the power to do that?”—intimating that Roosevelt’s administration was conspiring to subvert Dies’s investigation. National papers jumped on the conspiracy theory, several running a version of the headline that appeared in the Los Angeles Times the next day: “Six Radio Stations Refuse Time to Dies.” The press also reported that those at the luncheon voted unanimously to urge “Congress to appropriate sufficient funds for continuation of the investigation.” While this was a vote of confidence, the need for one was a sign of how vulnerable Dies’s committee now was. Dies told the crowd that “long before he undertook the investigation … he was advised by a friend not to begin it because a concerted attempt would be made to ‘smear’ it,” hinting at an even deeper and long-standing conspiracy to silence him.

Buoyed by this response, on Sunday he spoke to an admiring crowd of over three thousand at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where he declared (in a barely veiled attack on Communists in the country) that anyone “who advocates class hatred is plainly un-American.” He was still struggling to find effective ways to attack the Communist threat, since there was nothing illegal about being a member of the Communist Party in America. So he had to find a better way to persuade people that Communist values were fundamentally un-American, and at the same time quietly absolve fascism, which he had been far less keen on investigating. That evening Dies tried out a fresh argument, suggesting, as the New York Herald Tribune reported, that “property rights were closely linked to human rights,” and that history has shown “if you lose one you lose the other.” By this logic, to oppose private corporations and to advocate for public programs—socialized medicine, say, or state ownership of utilities—was by default un-American, as well as against human rights. This crowd, too, adopted a resolution “asking Congress to increase the appropriation of the Dies committee.” His fellow...