Sixty-three years after its opening night, Marc Blitzstein’s musical drama The Cradle Will Rock remains one of the most celebrated events in the annals of Broadway. Orson Welles, the director, and John Houseman, the producer, had originally intended to present Blitzstein’s pro-union work under the auspices of Project #891, the classical-theater wing of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP). But when the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—the New Deal relief agency of which the FTP was a part—canceled the premiere, the cast marched 21 blocks to another theater. There, an improvised performance, accompanied by the composer on a rented piano, was given before a crowd of passionate supporters.

The story of Cradle‘s premiere has been told many times, most memorably in Run-through (1972), the first volume of Houseman’s memoirs. Now it has been filmed by the leftist actor-director Tim Robbins with a cast whose members include such Hollywood luminaries as John Cusack, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, and Susan Sarandon. Though the reviews of Cradle Will Rock (as the film is titled) were mixed, many prestigious critics, ranging from Janet Maslin of the New York Times and Anthony Lane of the New Yorker to John Simon of National Review, praised it enthusiastically.¹

The credits describe Cradle Will Rock as “a (mostly) true story.” Though Robbins has made no secret of his having fictionalized real events, most commentators took it for granted that his script was essentially faithful to what happened in 1937 and that (in Simon’s words) “despite some oversimplification, the film works.” Whether Cradle Will Rock “works” is a matter of opinion, but the word “oversimplification” is a gross understatement. Except for the names of some of the participants and the use of excerpts from Blitzstein’s score, virtually every aspect of Robbins’s script varies significantly, often drastically, and always tendentiously from the historical record.

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The real story of how The Cradle Will Rock came to Broadway is both more nuanced and far less heroic than the version that has passed into American theatrical folklore and that Robbins has used as the basis for his film.

The Works Progress Administration, founded in 1935, was charged by Congress with creating federally funded jobs programs for healthy, non-handicapped Americans who were unable to find work during the Great Depression. Harry Hopkins, the confidant of Franklin Roosevelt who administered the WPA, created a white-collar division intended to provide employment for writers, musicians, artists, and actors; under its rubric, Hallie Flanagan, who ran an experimental theater program at Vassar, was invited to organize the Federal Theatre Project, which hired out-of-work actors and other professionals to present plays throughout the country for free or nominal admission.

Flanagan was deeply committed to the ideal of a socially relevant theater. In 1926, she had used a Guggenheim fellowship to study theatrical techniques in the Soviet Union; six years later, she co-authored a stage version of Can You Make Out Their Voices?, a proletarian short story by Whittaker Chambers, then an open member of the Communist party. The story had been originally published in the New Masses, the party-controlled magazine that Chambers briefly edited before embarking on his underground career as a Soviet spy.

Not surprisingly, the FTP reflected Flanagan’s own “socially conscious” priorities. Though she claimed, then and later, that no more than 10 percent of its productions were politically oriented (a convenient assertion whose basis in fact has never been established), it was the newly commissioned political plays, most notably such pro-Roosevelt productions as Triple-A Plowed Under, One-Third of a Nation, and Power, theatrical documentaries known as Living Newspapers, that attracted the greatest attention. Of Power, Harry Hopkins said:

People will say it’s propaganda. Well, I say what of it? It’s propaganda to educate the consumer who’s paying for power. It’s about time someone had some propaganda for him. . . . I want this play and plays like it done from one end of the country to the other.

These frankly partisan productions soon brought the FTP to the attention of Republicans in Congress, who already suspected (correctly) that Flanagan was seeking to create a permanent, federally funded national theater under the guise of a temporary relief project. Ironically, the situation was brought to a head by Project #891, one of the few FTP units specifically charged with presenting wow-political plays.

Project #891 was launched by Orson Welles and John Houseman in the wake of the success of their all-black version of Macbeth, produced in Harlem in 1936 by the FTP’s Negro Theatre Unit. Flanagan then allowed the two men to start their own FTP troupe, based on Broadway at Maxine Elliott’s Theater and devoted to classical revivals. They responded with a brilliantly innovative version of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Horse Eats Hat, a zany adaptation by the great dance critic Edwin Denby of Eugène Labiche’s 1851 farce, The Italian Straw Hat.

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It was at this point that Welles and Houseman, taking a sharp left turn, decided to stage The Cradle Will Rock. Marc Blitzstein, still an obscure composer-critic in 1937, had embraced Communism only three years before; Cradle, written not long after his political conversion, was a musical parable about the rivalry between Mister Mister, the boss of Steeltown, U.S.A., and Larry Foreman, a labor organizer who works for a union modeled after John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which at that time was heavily infiltrated by Communists. Strongly influenced by the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill Three-Penny Opera of 1928, Cradle is a piece of broad-brush agitprop set to a sophisticated but accessible score in which Blitzstein manipulates a variety of popular-music styles to pungent effect.

Given the ongoing recovery of the American economy, Congress’s growing hostility to large-scale federal relief programs, and the controversy caused by such overtly political productions as the Living Newspapers, the decision of Welles and Houseman to mount a pro-union musical by a composer known for his close ties to the Communist party inevitably put the entire FTP at risk. As Houseman would recall in his memoirs, events quickly conspired to make Cradle more controversial still:

The day The Cradle Will Rock went into rehearsal there were riots in Akron and Pontiac and strikes halted work at the Chrysler and Hudson auto plants. . . . During the first week of June, as we were starting our technical rehearsals, 5,000 CIO sympathizers invaded the business section of Lansing, Michigan, forced the closing of factories and stores and blocked all traffic in protest against the arrest of pickets.

Four days before the first public dress rehearsal, the WPA ordered the FTP to cut its payroll by 30 percent and postpone any new play, concert, or art exhibit set to open prior to July 1, a move generally regarded as a bill of attainder aimed at Cradle. On June 15, the day before the first official preview performance, a dozen uniformed WPA guards sealed Maxine Elliott’s Theater; the next day, Actors’ Equity refused to allow the cast of Cradle to take part in any other production of the play.

Welles and Houseman then decided to undertake a “wildcat” performance on their own, heedless of its likely effect on the rest of the FTP. “There is nothing to prevent you from entering whatever theater we find,” Welles told the cast, “then getting up from your seats, as U.S. citizens, and speaking or singing your piece when your cue comes.” The show opened that night at the Venice Theater in precisely that manner: Blitzstein sat on stage, narrating and vigorously pounding out the score on an upright piano, while the members of the cast, stationed throughout the house, performed from their seats and in the aisles.

The next morning, the premiere made the front pages. Capitalizing on the publicity, the members of Project #891 took a two-week leave from their relief jobs that made it possible for them to present a brief run of Cradle at the Venice Theater. The FTP then officially canceled its own production and destroyed the sets, and Welles and Houseman left to start the Mercury Theater. A year later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated the FTP, finding that “a rather large number of [its] employees . . . are either members of the Communist party or sympathizers with the Communist party.” In 1939, Congress voted to shut down the FTP for good.

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In transferring this tale to the screen, Robbins has stripped away its myriad subtleties. The participants are rendered as black-and-white caricatures—Flanagan (Cherry Jones) is a noble earth mother in suits, Welles (Angus MacFayden) a blowhard with a Scots-Irish accent, Houseman (Cary Elwes) a flamboyant crypto-homosexual—and the underlying issues are reduced to leaden bumper-sticker orations. (Here, for instance, is Flanagan’s initial response to Blitzstein’s Cradle: “Marc, you’ve written something groundbreaking here. Never before, to my knowledge, has an American musical dealt with content, social issues, dramatic themes.”) At the same time, the FTP’s tendency to mount high-profile productions of propagandistic plays is subtly downplayed, while the presence of hardline Communists in its ranks, though freely acknowledged later by Houseman and others, is treated as a joke.

Robbins has rewritten history in other ways, some obvious, some less so. To take one egregious example, Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) is asked by Welles in the film if he is “a Red.” His answer: “Officially, no. I am a homosexual and that excludes me from membership in the party. I am faithful to the ideals of the party.”

Indeed, Blitzstein was a homosexual. But in his 1958 appearance before HUAC he also readily acknowledged having joined the Communist party in 1938. Eric A. Gordon, his highly sympathetic biographer, adds that Blitzstein’s “activities of the preceding three years suggest earlier membership. . . . Blitzstein had accepted Communist party leadership on the Left, had worked closely with it, publicly supported its line, and wrote for its press.” By all accounts an ardent Stalinist—among many other things, he played a conspicuous role in the postwar Soviet-controlled Waldorf Peace Conference—he did not leave the party until 1949, around the same time the Daily Worker published an unfavorable review of Regina, his musical version of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

Another example: in the film, numerous musicians join Blitzstein and the cast in the opening-night performance. In fact, however, only one instrumentalist, an accordion player, took part in the premiere, since the American Federation of Musicians, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, was uninterested in supporting a performance of a work regarded by its leaders, in Houseman’s candid recollection, as “straight CIO propaganda or worse.” The subsequent run of Cradle at the Venice Theater and the Mercury Theater’s 1938 revival were also accompanied by Blitzstein alone (though the Mercury was required to pay for a union conductor-contractor and a twelve-piece orchestra whose members played cards backstage while the show was performed).

In the film, again, Flanagan casually dismisses a colleague’s warning that the production might put the entire FTP in jeopardy. “It’s pro-union, yes, but so is our audience,” she says, going on to deny that the play is an attack on capitalism: “Not at all. It’s an attack on greed.” Aside from misrepresenting the show’s actual content, this scene entirely obliterates the well-known fact that Flanagan, though she admired Cradle, was horrified that Welles and Houseman would choose to imperil the FTP at so sensitive a juncture. As she later wrote to Blitzstein:

Important as the issue raised by The Cradle Will Rock was, it was not the only issue facing us. The thing that people on the New York project never cared about, never understood, and never took the trouble to find out, is that this is a big country. Federal Theatre was bigger than any single project in it. It included not only The Cradle Will Rock but the theater for the children of coal miners in Gary, Indiana, the enterprise for vaudevillians in Portland, Oregon, the Negro theater in Chicago, the research being done in Oklahoma—and other projects employing several thousand people in other states.

Robbins never so much as hints that, from their own point of view, it might have been grossly irresponsible for Welles and Houseman to proceed with Cradle in light of these awkward political realities.

A final example: in the film, Flanagan testifies before HUAC immediately prior to opening night (the hearings actually took place more than a year later). Her cross-examination focuses on Communist infiltration of the FTP, leaving the impression that the project was closed down for that reason alone. In fact, however, HUAC’s final report on “un-American propaganda activities” in the U.S. devoted only a single paragraph to the FTP. Congress’s decision to terminate the project, though driven in part by the content of the plays, derived primarily from other considerations. As John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown write in their history of the FTP:

According to the chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, Clifton Woodrum, the Project had forgotten its purpose—“to furnish relief assistance to unemployed theatrical people”—in its desire to “enter the field of amusement and entertainment,” in competition with private enterprise.

Nor, it may be assumed, were Republicans interested in continuing to spend tax dollars on a federal agency that from its outset had produced explicitly partisan plays described by Harry Hopkins himself as “propaganda.” But such matters, too, go unmentioned in Robbins’s script.

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The obvious purpose of these distortions is to present a sanitized account of the making of The Cradle Will Rock in which each and every leftist, union member, and supporter of a federally funded national theater is shown to be a paragon of political virtue. But Robbins’s most fantastic departures from reality are to be found in the film’s two subplots. The first concerns the commissioning by Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) of a fresco for Rockefeller Center by the Marxist painter Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) and his later decision to have the painting razed upon discovering that it contains a portrait of Lenin and other anticapitalist symbols. The actual events took place several years prior to Cradle, but in the film, Rivera’s fresco is destroyed on the day the show opens.

In the second, more convoluted subplot, Gray Mathers (Philip Baker Hall), a fictional anti-Communist steel magnate and art collector, brokers a deal between William Randolph Hearst (John Carpenter) and Mussolini’s government in Italy by whose terms Hearst will funnel money to the fascist regime and Mathers will “put frames on Italian trucks” in return for Old Master paintings. In his afterword to the published script, Robbins implies that these paintings were confiscated from European Jews: “We may never know the complete truth about where confiscated art wound up after World War II, but we do know from recent lawsuits that many of these pieces are now in private collections.”

This flight of Oliver Stone-like paranoia has nothing to do with the prosaic reality of ongoing legal disputes over the provenance of several paintings stolen during the war by the Germans (not the Italians) and subsequently shown in blockbuster exhibitions in Europe and America. Robbins spun it out of whole cloth in order to make possible the most absurd scene in Cradle Will Rock. In this scene, Hearst, Rockefeller, and Mathers discuss Rivera’s pro-Soviet fresco:

Hearst: We control the future of art because we will pay for the future of art. Appoint people to your museum boards that detest the Riveras of the world. Celebrate the Matisses. Create the next wave of art. . . .

Mathers: Nonpolitical.

Rockefeller: Yes, abstract. Colors, form, not politics.

Hearst: My papers will hail it as the next new thing. We will canonize the artists, make them rich. Before long all artists will be doing the next new thing.

Mathers: DO you think? There’s something about artists that always gets socially concerned.

Hearst: Sure. But they won’t be paid for it. They’ll have no influence. They won’t be seen. And rather than starve, they’ll adapt.

As anyone conversant with Marxist art criticism will recognize, this scene is very loosely based on the harebrained but nonetheless widely accepted theory that the postwar success of such abstract expressionist painters as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning can be attributed in large part to the nefarious manipulations of the CIA and corporate America, aided and abetted by staunchly anti-Communist art critics like Clement Greenberg. These combined forces allegedly promoted abstraction over representational art because it was “non-political,” and thus less likely to incite the masses.

Preposterous as this theory is—the inclusion of Hearst here is an especially surrealistic touch, since he had no use for Henri Matisse or any other modern artist, and would certainly never have “canonized” them in his newspapers—it is central to Cradle Will Rock. The movie ends with a montage cutting back and forth between the opening night of Cradle and lingering shots of Rivera’s portrait of Lenin; the last thing we see is a long shot of Times Square circa 1999, dominated not by Broadway marquees but by brightly lit corporate billboards. Robbins’s message is clear: had the Federal Theatre Project been allowed to continue disseminating state-subsidized left-wing propaganda, the soul of America might have been saved. Instead, art as a weapon was replaced by art as a tranquilizer, and corporate fascism won the battle for American hearts and minds. In place of The Cradle Will Rock, we now have Beauty and the Beast; in place of Rivera, Matisse.

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“I’m inspired by dangerous art,” Robbins writes in his introduction to Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment. But it is hard to see what dangers he courted in making a politically correct movie that caters slavishly to the preening limousine liberalism that has long dominated the American entertainment industry.

And what of Cradle itself? How did it endanger the men and women who produced and performed it at the Venice Theater in 1937? Welles and Houseman went on to long and illustrious theatrical careers. Some of the cast members, to be sure, later found themselves on the anti-Communist blacklist of the 50’s, but that short-lived, famously porous ban applied only to film, radio, and TV; it was never honored on Broadway, where Howard da Silva, who had played Larry Foreman in the original Cradle, worked regularly for the rest of his life.

Even Marc Blitzstein found his Communist ties to be no obstacle to a successful career. During World War II he served in the army air force, working as an official military composer and turning out such earnest pieces of propaganda as the Airborne Symphony (1946). His English-language adaptation of The Three-Penny Opera, which opened off Broadway in 1954, ran for 2,611 performances. Cradle was revived on several occasions during his lifetime, the last time in 1960 by the New York City Opera; that same year, the Ford Foundation commissioned him to write an operatic treatment of the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists who were patron saints of the Communist party; the Metropolitan Opera would have produced this work had he not left it unfinished at his death in 1964.

In the end, the only “dangerous” thing about Blitzstein’s radicalism was the devastating effect it had on his art. Cradle remains his best-known piece, but it is now rarely revived, not because the music is uninteresting but because of the irredeemable banality of his libretto, in which men of flesh and blood are turned into crude, lifeless symbols. The rest of his output is also largely forgotten, mostly for similar reasons. As for the cause to which he devoted much of his adult life—Stalinism—outside Hollywood and the academy one would have to search far and wide to locate defenders of a political system whose sole achievement was the butchering of several million innocent human beings.

Not that any of this matters to Tim Robbins. He continues to see “something deeply inspiring in the idealism and courage of artists from the 30’s” who refused to “prostitute themselves” by selling their services to the highest bidder. Evidently, in Robbins’s moral calculus, prostituting one’s art in the name of the foremost mass murderer of modern times does not in the least derogate from one’s idealism and courage, any more than utter ignorance of the crosscurrents of cultural politics in the 30’s disqualifies one from making a relentlessly preachy movie about that decade’s complex history. Clearly, what is “dangerous” in Robbins’s case is a little learning—very little.

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¹ An abridged version of the original show was commercially recorded in 1938 by Blitzstein and most of the opening-night cast. This recording, the first-ever “original-cast album” of a Broadway musical, was reissued on CD last year as part of Marc Blitzstein (Pearl GEMS 0009, two CD’s). Robbins’s script for the movie has been published as Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment (Newmarket Press, 150 pp., $32.95).

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