On January 23 Elmer Rice, the well-known playwright, resigned as regional director for New York of the WPA Theater Project. Mr. Rice's resignation was accepted with obvious alacrity by Jacob Baker, national administrator of the WPA arts, but it is difficult to see how the incident can fail to be embarrassing to the Administration.
Mr. Rice, who says that he was promised an absolutely free hand and that partisan politics would not enter into the matter, charges the government with bad faith and a determination to exercise a censorship which it had agreed to withhold. Ostensibly the clash came over the first edition of the proposed "Living Newspaper," which dealt with the Ethiopian situation, but Mr. Rice insists that the issue raised here was merely a pretext. Baker and Hopkins, he says, were alarmed by the possible political consequences of two other proposed scripts, one dealing with relief, the other with the plight of the share-croppers, and were determined to force his resignation on a less clear-cut issue. Accordingly Mr. Cabinet just before the production of "Ethiopia," issued an order forbidding the representation on the stage of any foreign ruler, minister, or Cabinet member, well knowing that "Ethiopia" could not be presented under the ruling and that Mr. Rice would be compelled to resign. Miss Hallie Flanagan, though sympathizing with Rice, feels that the whole project is too important as a relief measure to be dropped at the present moment and will remain as national director of the theatrical and musical projects of the WPA. Philip Barker has been appointed temporarily to fill Mr. Rice's place.
The situation raises a good many complicated questions. One of them concerns the extent to which it is advisable to attempt to combine relief and cultural objectives as they were combined in this project. Another and even more complicated one concerns the extent to which, either in theory or in practice, even a democratic government can be expected to give active aid to the spread of doctrine which it regards dangerous to its existence or even to its program. On the one hand it may be argued that the doctrine of free speech is merely permissive, that it denies the right of any group to forbid the free expression of opinion without imposing an obligation on any such group actively to further opinions which it does not hold. On the other hand, if this is the attitude which the present Administration planned to take, it is hard to understand why it chose to appoint such a well-known and notoriously intransigent radical as Mr. Rice, or to give him every assurance that he would not be subject to censorship. The whole incident is certainly the result of a blunder if not of a crime.
Mr. Rice, who has been insistent in expressing his belief that the private theatrical enterprise is doomed by economic conditions to triviality, may well ponder again the question whether such enterprises do not, after all, permit a greater freedom of expression than, for the present at least, seems likely to be enjoyed by any governmental project in any country. He has declared himself "done with the commercial theater"; it will be too bad if he is now done with the state theater also.
