Like the other WPA/FAP programs, the Federal Theatre Project was intended to provide socially relevant work to starving citizens as an alternative to bread lines and hand-outs.  During its four year life span, the FTP provided jobs for 13,000 theatre artist in 31 different states.  Just as the well known murals of the WPA brought original art to a people that had previously had no contact with such things, the FTP brought theatre to an audience which was, for the most part, wholly untouched by commercial theatre.  Thus, the goal of the New Deal to bring art and culture to people of all socio-economic levels and of all regions was fulfilled in the FTP.
    But the FTP has an even greater importance to the contemporary American theatergoer.  Many viewed the FTP as the first step toward the creation of a national theatre like those in European nations where monarchical patronage had  been replaced by a municipal patronage. The vision of a national theatre, however,  was never fulfilled. The tone set by the abolition of the FTP and other WPA art programs set the precedent for the role that the government would play as a non-patron of the arts that still endures today as the NEA is slowly whittled down towards nonexistence. Despite the absence of a federally subsidized national theatre program today, the legacy of the FTP remains.  The opportunity for unification of theatrical art in America that the FTP provided caused what had previously been a scattered and regional art form to coalesce and refigure itself as a national art.  Many of the great American theatrical artists found a start in the FTP.  Among them were Joseph Cotton, Jules Dassin, John Huston, Burt Lancaster, Joseph Losey, Arthur Miller, Nicholas Ray, and Virgil Thompson.
    The FTP also exhibits the juxtaposition of artistic and practical concerns that was common to WPA/FAP art.  The FTP made its social contribution in the form of "Living Newspapers" or theatrical performances that addressed social issues ranging from housing problems to syphilis.  The function of the Living Newspaper demanded that it be more flexible than conventional drama. In order to adjust to social conditions that were in flux and successfully disseminate its propaganda to a geographically vast region, the Living Newspaper adopted a brief and mobile form.
    Thus, the FTP provides us with what is arguably the most enduring legacy of the WPA/FAP as well as yet another illustration of the way American culture was rendered necessarily pragmatic during the Depression era.