Rice was one of the more politically outspoken dramatists of his time and took an active part in the American Civil Liberties Union, the Authors' League, the Dramatists Guild of America where he was elected as the eighth president in 1939, and P.E.N. He was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the Project's "Living Newspaper" dramatization of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. An outspoken defender of free speech, he left that position with a "blast of scorn" at the Roosevelt administration's efforts to control artistic expression. (In 1932, Rice reluctantly supported the Communist Party candidate in the presidential election because he found Hoover and Roosevelt equally displeasing alternatives with an insufficient grasp of the crisis the country faced. though in subsequent elections he became an FDR supporter) He also spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s.