Jordana Cox, Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York

Reviewed By J.J. Butts

Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York
by Jordana Cox
University of Massachusetts Press
February 2023, 168 pp.

As the New Deal Arts programs brought white-collar workers of different professional backgrounds together on work relief cultural projects, they offered an opportunity to reassess the relationship between the arts and other modes of communication. In New York City, where newsrooms sat in close proximity to theaters, the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Living Newspapers joined these different institutions for stage productions that presented the news while simultaneously remaking it. Jordana Cox’s excellent study Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York explores the history of the New York Living Newspapers (NYLN) unit, revealing its complex engagement with news and performance. The focus on journalism within the FTP separates her book from many others on New Deal writing and performance arts. Scholars highlighting the value of the FTP and Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) have often made a case for them around the artistic innovations or careers they nourished. However, journalists constituted one of the major categories of writing professionals seeking work relief, and journalism prepared them for the kinds of fact-based work that typified many of the FTP and FWP productions. In consequence, Cox’s focus on the way the newsroom shaped and was reshaped by the Living Newspapers refreshingly spotlights a crucial element of the story of New Deal culture.

Cox’s introduction establishes the book’s key concepts and sets up the historical background of the Living Newspaper form. Since William Stott’s 1973 study Documentary Expression and Thirties America, scholars of the interwar era have used documentary as a central concept in exploring the tendency to use experiments in form to document reality. Cox does so as well, but she conceptualizes news as more specifically temporal: “the cultural production of the present” (25). The Living Newspaper form offered an opportunity to remake the news by staging it, using newsroom techniques to craft stage productions while developing innovative theatrical techniques to help audiences develop a more critical understanding of the processes by which news is made. The FTP Living Newspapers had avant-garde theatrical origins in the Soviet Blue Blouse group living newspapers and in the German theater experiments of Erwin Piscator and Bertholt Brecht, which sought to disrupt immersive theater experiences. However, Cox notes, the Living Newspapers also drew on the significantly less avant-garde American historical pageant in their representation of recent events as products of specific histories.

While Living Newspapers were created in other FTP units, Cox focuses tightly on the New York unit, blending archival research with historical, institutional, and textual analysis to reveal the interrelated national and international dynamics shaping local innovation on the stage. In the first chapter the idea of “News Sense,” serves as a way of thinking about how institutional factors permeated the production of Living Newspapers. The NYLN was heavily shaped both by the New Deal work relief and national self-representation imperatives of the FTP, and also by the labor activism in news journalism that had led to the establishment of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG). Reflecting these new labor dynamics, a Supreme Court case between the Associated Press and NYLN managing producer Morris Watson cemented the authority of the Wagner Act and National Labor Relations Board. One key consequence of this conjunction was a focus on staging large scale productions, i.e. ones that insured widely distributed work relief with significance for a mass public. At the same time, Cox shows that the cancellation of Ethiopia, a play dramatizing the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, over State Department concerns about its depiction of world leaders demonstrated that the NYLN would need to focus on more local, though not necessarily less contentious, subjects.

The chapters that follow each communicate crucial innovations and dynamics in the NYLN through one or more of its productions. Cox highlights the way that The Events of 1935, an early production, figuratively recast a debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippman over the nature of the American public through a “gimmick,” an innovation developed to solve specific representational problems, that presented the public as a jury. She shows how the 1938 NYLN production One-Third of a Nation developed a narrative figure called the Loudspeaker, which echoed the controlling narrative voice of the March of Time newsreels but offered a more responsive narrator that could intervene in the narrative on behalf of the audience’s learning. Giving the audience a figure with which to identify, the NYLN also developed the Little Man. Emerging from the audience, the Little Man interrupted the Loudspeaker and asked questions about the topic of the play. Over the course of the production, the Little Man demonstrated an increasing capacity with the issue at hand, modeling an engaged public.

Many of these productions advanced the movement priorities of the Popular Front labor Left and the New Deal. The book highlights how Guild Parade of 1937 reframed the story of Watson’s labor lawsuit, while Injunction Granted! explored the larger context of the labor movement. As the New Deal developed, Living Newspapers such as Power and One-Third of a Nation advanced the narrative of the New Deal as a modernizing force, similarly to FWP guidebooks and the Farm Securities Administration documentary films. As they did, Cox notes, the plays’ protagonists became identified more often as consumers than as workers. The Living Newspapers’ power as propaganda, Cox also shows, led to attacks by the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, helmed by Texas conservative Martin Dies. The Dies committee accused the FTP of presenting propaganda, the ongoing negative connotation of which Cox historicizes in the wake of propaganda campaigns for the unpopular First World War. FTP director Hallie Flanagan countered by asserting that the Living Newspapers were “propaganda for democracy,” attempting to reclaim a broader understanding of the term (86). Flanagan conditioned democracy as a horizon of good on the imperative that democracy must still be argued for. Dies saw this proposition as evidence of insufficient patriotism and used the New Deal arts programs’ labor advocacy and its attacks on Jim Crow as grounds for Red-baiting.

As Cox shows, one irony here is that, like the New Deal and its arts projects more broadly, the FTP itself was not immune to racial discrimination. While New Deal arts projects often included African American artists, the artists still faced a number of hurdles in seeking relief employment, and their concerns were often sidelined. Exploring this problem, Cox focuses on Liberty Deferred, an anti-lynching living newspaper by Abram Hill and John D. Silvera that the NYLN never staged. Cox shows that Liberty Deferred played with the Living Newspaper’s conventions to highlight the way that the news often ignored issues of importance to Black citizens. In particular, it divided the Little Man role into several characters that exposed the ways the news tended to generate a present that mattered to White citizens by filtering out issues and perspectives of Black citizens. The play also pushed back against the speed at which news and theater aimed toward resolutions, foregrounding instead a figurative presentation of the issue that stressed both White deferrals in reckoning with lynching and the difficulty of creating and maintaining coalitions to fight Jim Crow, figured as a manipulative character in the play. Cox also describes the racial double-bind that killed the production: its “creators were never afforded a journalistic team or the material resources to produce collaborative multi-perspectival reporting,” and then White FTP administrators judged it inadequately representative of NYLN conventions of objectivity (128). Ironically, “the NYLN championed professional rigor over objectivity,” so the appeal to objectivity as a standard in the decision not to stage Liberty Deferred illustrated the play’s critique of the news’s racial imagination (128). Liberty Deferred explored the frustrations of coalitional resistance that Richard Iton calls the “solidarity blues,” and which the FTP’s decision also effectively demonstrated (129). Highlighting a pattern of relegating work on the issues facing minoritized groups to secondary status, except where they directly advanced the interests of the New Deal, similar problems plagued the FWP’s African American subunits and left many important manuscripts unpublished.

Cox’s conclusion reinforces her assertion that the remaking of the newsroom as part of the process of the Living Newspapers was an important part of its truth-telling. By enacting “truth-telling as the achievement of multiple interpretations engaged at multiple phases,” as collective and processual, the NYLN contested journalism’s focus on “independence and impartiality” (133). However, Cox also shows that the survival of the living newspapers depended primarily on their formal innovations rather than their epistemological ones. The Living Newspapers’ gimmicks became conventions used in other theatrical productions and eventually objects of parody in plays such as One-Third of a Mitten. Cox also highlights how Living Newspapers by Illinois Humanities and London’s Royal Court Theatre continue to define the present by interrogating important subjects including anti-Black violence and urban housing crises. Situating the NYLN in the context of national and local events and institutions, Staged News deftly captures the way that the New Deal afforded New York-based workers in theater and journalism, as it did for arts workers in other locations and cultural fields, an opportunity to reframe the possibilities of their craft in ways that intersected with the changing dynamics of the nation. Joining several other recent scholars, Cox demonstrates that the lessons of New Deal cultural production and cultural politics remain vital.

J.J. Butts taught literature courses in New York before moving to Iowa, where he teaches at Simpson College. He has written several articles focusing on the Federal Writers’ Project and is the author of Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project (Ohio State UP, 2021).