Federal Theater Project The entire world felt the effects of the
stock market crash in October 1929, which ushered in the Great
Depression. The effects were no different for those in the
theater industry, which was already facing difficulty with
increased competition from the motion picture industry with the
advent of talking pictures in 1927. Theaters were closing in
cities across the country and tens of thousands of theater
workers were unemployed. The Works Progress Administration (WPA)
was created in 1935 as part of an effort to create useful jobs
for the unemployed in their areas of expertise. The arts were
just one of the areas of employment that the WPA focused on. The
Federal Theater Project (FTP) was one of four arts programs
developed by the WPA. Although the four areas combined used less
than three-fourths of one percent of the entire WPA budget, the
FTP was highly controversial and widely criticized as being
wasteful, non-essential and undemocratic. There were also
concerns about censorship and pr