The Loudspeaker and the Little Man: Mass Media and Democratic Participation in the Federal Theatre Project’s One-Third of a Nation

ABSTRACT

In a 1938 hearing with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), director Hallie Flanagan claimed that the U.S. Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935-9), which she led, disseminated “propaganda for democracy.” In this paper, I explore the possibilities of propaganda for democracy to describe FTP rhetoric. My focus is a body of work that greatly concerned HUAC. Living Newspapers were full-length, documentary plays about hot-button issues. At the New York Living Newspaper Unit (NYLNU), where journalists and theatre-makers worked side-by-side, Living Newspapers wove original reporting into dramatic narratives. Using theatrical conventions, they reimagined democratic communication for a mass society. My case study is the NYLNU’s most popular Living Newspaper. “One-Third of a Nation” was most explicitly about the lack of affordable housing across the U.S. It was also, however, about how to participate in democratic life. More specifically, it was about how to look at, listen to, and speak up about social issues. One-Third of a Nation addressed these themes by way of two recurring characters: a resounding Loudspeaker, and a plucky Little Man who represented the “average” citizen. Their interplay modeled propaganda for democracy as a dynamic relationship between responsive mass media and self-conscious public speech.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the following people for their generous engagement with this article: Ned O’Gorman, Aileen Robinson, Tara Rodman, and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a compelling analysis of gender’s crucial role in the FTP hearings, see Dossett (2013).

2. While Flanagan had a distinctive vision, she was not the only Interwar thinker to argue that propaganda could aid democratic life. See: Edward Bernays (1928). Propaganda. New York: H. Liveright.

3. The group of theatre artists and journalists collaborating in New York usually called themselves, simply, The Living Newspaper. I refer to them throughout this paper with a more specific name (the NYLNU) to distinguish them from other FTP artists who created Living Newspapers within other regional and generic units across the country.

4. For a comprehensive collection of essays on American theatre-makers who sought to challenge segregation and other forms of racism in the first half of the 20th century, see Black and Shandell (2016).

5. Throughout this paper, I capitalize “Living Newspaper” to distinguish the FTP’s distinctive adaptation of the form from precedents and variations in the Soviet Union and Germany.

6. My thanks to Aileen Robinson for the insight about the confederate from her scholarship on magic.