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‘Injunction Granted’ in Its Times: a Living Newspaper Reappraised

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Gerry Cobb
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Abstract

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 23 , August 1990 , pp. 279 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes and References

1. Brown, Lorraine, ‘Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest, and Genius’, Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, XXXVI (1979), p. 18Google Scholar.

2. For a full and engaging account of the committed theatre of the ‘thirties, Williams's, JayStage Left (New York, 1974)Google Scholar is both comprehensive and enthralling, containing scripts and documents from the period, and written from the viewpoint of actual participation in the movement rather than from a scholarly remove. Also good is Taylor's, Karen M.People's Theatre in Amerika (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, which treats the subject favourably with in the context of a wider-ranging study. Taylor also includes scripts and articles from the period often difficult to access elsewhere. For more recent work, see also Bradby, David and McCormick, John, People's Theatre (London, 1978)Google Scholar, and Samuel, Ralph, MacColl, Ewan and Cosgrove, Stuart, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935 (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

3. Himelstein's, MorganDrama was a Weapon (Westport, 1963)Google Scholar, is written with the express intention of proving a communist plot to take hold of the American stage as a whole to serve as an organ of the Party. Goldstein's, MalcolmThe Political Stage (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, whilst stopping short of such statements of overt intentionality, echoes the idea of ‘insurgency’. See Jay Williams for a useful corrective.

4. See Note 2, above.

5. For a discussion of reasons for the failure of American socialism, see Degler, Carl, Out of Our Past (New York, 1959)Google Scholar.

6. See Bernard, Heinz, ‘A Theatre for Lefty: USA in the 1930s’, Theatre Quarterly, I, No. 4 (10.–12. 1971) for a useful, brief contextualization of the theatre of commitmentGoogle Scholar.

7. Williams, Stage Left, p. 36.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. For a full discussion of the possible origins of the Living Newspaper, see McDermott, Douglas, ‘The Living Newspaper as Dramatic Form’, Modern Drama, VIII, 1 (1965–1966), p. 82 ffGoogle Scholar.

11. Williams, Stage Left, p. 80.

12. Taylor, People's Theatre in Amerika, p. 37.

13. The version used here is the one reproduced in Williams, p. 90–6, which he points out is the original. Another version is preserved in the New York Public Library Theatre Collection, prepared for the League against War and Fascism by Gregory Nabikov. This differs considerably, clearly deriving from the Popular Front era of American communism. For those interested in a comparison, both Taylor and Samuel et al. reproduce the second version in their respective books.

14. Newsboy, in Williams, Stage Left, p. 90.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., p. 91.

17. Ibid.

18. The Scottsboro case involved nine black youths accused of raping two southern white girls. It was felt that ‘justice’ was meted out more on the basis of race than of hard evidence. In the same way, the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, two foreign-born anarchists convicted of murder in the 'twenties, were felt to be a judgement on their politics rather than a considered judicial action.

19. Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, edited and translated by Willett, John (London, 1964), p. 121–9Google Scholar.

20. The official daily paper of the CPUSA.

21. Newsboy, in Williams, Stage Left, p. 96.

22. Hallie Flanagan's book, Arena: the History of the Federal Theatre (1940; reprinted, New York, 1965) remains the most comprehensive account of the FTP from its inception to its premature end.

23. Goldman, Arnold, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, Theatre Quarterly, III, No. 9 (01.–04. 1973), p. 80Google Scholar.

24. Both of these were to return to plague her in her evidence before the HUAC in 1938 – the hearings which were largely to determine the fate of the FTP. For a full transcript of the testimony see Bentley, Eric, ed., Thirty Years of Treason (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

25. For example, after the premiere of the Living Newspaper Power, which argued for the New Deal policy of public ownership of the utilities, Hopkins commented: ‘Now let's get one thing straight: you will take a lot of criticism on this play. People will say it’s propaganda. Well I say what of it? It's propaganda to educate the consumer who's paying for power.… I say more plays like Power and more power to you. ‘Flanagan, Arena, p. 185.

26. McDermott's article, op. cit., is the best available account of the purely formal elements surrounding the development and origins of the Living Newspaper. In terms of how the Unit itself came to be created, Flanagan, in Arena, claims that she and Elmer Rice conceived the idea (p. 64–5). Most other accounts follow this lead unquestioningly, as they do in other areas arising from Flanagan's memoir. Perhaps it is safest to suggest that, whilst Flanagan and Rice may have been responsible for the broad conception, it was workers like Arthur Arent, Morris Watson, and Joe Losey who shaped the policy and methodology the Unit itself adopted.

27. McDermott, p. 89.

28. The similarities to Brecht are obvious; yet how far these can be seen as conscious is open to conjecture. Joe Losey, director of Injunction Granted, saw his work in terms of a parallel development rather than as imitative. Brecht saw Triple-A Plowed Under and is reputed to have approved. See , Losey's article, ‘The Individual Eye’, Encore, 03.–04. 1961, for an account of the relationship of the two menGoogle Scholar.

29. O'Connor, John S., ‘Spirochette and the War on Syphilis’, The Drama Review, 03. 1977Google Scholar.

30. See Flanagan, Arena; Goldman, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’ and Mathews, Jane, The Federal Theatre, 1935–39: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, 1967)Google Scholar.

31. Bigsby, C. W. E., A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Vol. I, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 224Google Scholar.

32. And, indeed, as offering an alternative editorial viewpoint to that expressed in the conservative press, particularly the papers owned by William Randolph Hearst.

33. Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (1938; reprinted, New York, 1956).

34. Injunction Granted (Federal Theatre Project Play Bureau, 1936), p. 99. The actual script was published in mimeograph form only, never as a book. The Fall 1973 edition of Minnesota Review contains the only published version to date, with an excellent introduction by Arnold Goldman, and Losey's own prefatory notes.

35. Levinson, Labor on the March, p. 118–22.

36. Ibid.

37. The fight against Little Steel continued long after the writing and production of Injunction Granted, culminating in the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, when police shot and killed ten strikers outside Girdler's Chicago plant. Levinson details this along with the unscrupulous tactics pursued by Little Steel employers, often with the connivance of police and military authorities, in direct contravention of recent laws which made free collective bargaining the right of every US worker.

38. Flanagan, Arena, p. 390; Leuchtenberg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, 1963), p. 239Google Scholar.

39. Hunter, John O., ‘Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock as a Document of America, 1937’, American Quarterly, XVIII (Summer 1966), p. 230Google Scholar.

40. Arent, Arthur, ‘The Techniques of the Living Newspaper’, Theatre Quarterly, I, No. 4 (10.–12. 1971), p. 59Google Scholar; reprinted from Theatre Arts, Nov. 1938.

41. Ibid.

42. In any case, Arent's observations must be taken with a pinch of salt for two reasons: first, the Project, at the time of writing, was under assault from the HUAC, and therefore strenuous attempts were necessarily made to distance the Living Newspapers from any radical or ‘foreign’ antecedents; and second, the process of production was itself a collective one, and it is likely that much credit for the style of Injunction Granted is due to Losey, who may have had a broader artistic conception of the way he wished it to be executed. See Ciment, Michel, Conversations with Losey (London, 1985), p. 47–8Google Scholar.

43. Thompson, Virgil, quoted in O'Connor, John and Brown, Lorraine, eds. The Federal Theatre Project (London, 1980), p. 80Google Scholar.

44. Ibid., p. 83.

45. Injunction Granted, p. 26.

46. Ibid., p.29.

47. Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 47; Losey, ‘The Individual Eye’, p. 11.

48. Injunction Granted, p. 78.

49. Norman Lloyd, in O'Connor and Brown, The Federal Theatre, p. 84.

50. Injunction Granted, p. 3.

51. Johnson was the administrator of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), nominally responsible for guaranteeing union rights.

52. Injunction Granted, p. 80.

53. Ibid., p. 83.

54. Levinson notes this hostility, and comments that the Government's attitude to the CIO had, by 1936, ‘caused millions of workers to term the NRA “the National Run Around”’ (p. 141).

55. Power, for example: public ownership of the utilities; One-Third of the Nation: provision for publicly funded housing to tackle the slum problem; the anti-fascist critique of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here.

56. Flanagan, to Watson and Losey, quoted in Mathews, The Federal Theatre, p. 111.

57. Flanagan, Arena, p. 73.

58. Mathews, The Federal Theatre, p. 111.

59. McDonald, William F., Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (Columbus, 1969), p. 533–5Google Scholar.

60. In a recent biography of Flanagan, Joanne Bentley affirms Flanagan's firm allegiance to a New Deal position by 1936. See , Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: a Life in the American Theatre (New York, 1988), p. 245Google Scholar.

61. Rabkin, Gerald, Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties (New York, 1973), p. 118Google Scholar.

62. Injunction Granted, p. 101.

63. Flanagan, quoted in Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason, p. 19.