1. The most important articles about the Living Newspaper are Goldman, Arnold, “Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit,” Theatre Quarterly 3, no. 9 (01 1973): 69–83Google Scholar; McDermott, Douglas, “The Living Newspaper as Dramatic Form,” Modern Drama 8, no. 1 (05 1965): 82–94Google Scholar; and Smiley, Sam, “Rhetoric on Stage in Living Newspapers,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54 (02 1968): 29–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bigsby, C. W. E., in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 1Google Scholar, analyzes the New York productions on pp. 214–36. Also, a number of dissertations have been written on the Living Newspaper over the past forty years.

2. Manuscripts are in the Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress, on loan to George Mason University Fenwick Library and in the Records of the Federal Theatre Project (Record Group 69) at the National Archives. Subsequent references to these collections will be GMU or NA.

3. Hopkins, Harry, Spending to Save (New York: Norton, 1936), p. 38.Google Scholar

4. Arent, Arthur, “The Technique of the Living Newspaper,” Theatre Arts Monthly 22 (11 1938): 820–25Google Scholar; and “Writing the Living Newspaper,” anonymous twenty-page mimeo published by the Federal Theatre Project, n.d., GMU.

5. Flanagan, Hallie, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pierce, 1940)Google Scholar, continues to be the best book on the FTP; Mathews, Jane DeHart, The Federal Theatre 1935–1939: Plays, Relief and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, has an excellent account of the congressional investigations and the closing of the FTP; O'Connor, John and Brown, Lorraine, Free, Adult, and Uncensored: A Living History of the Federal Theatre Project (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1978)Google Scholar, includes many production stills, posters, and designs from the productions; Craig, E. Quita, Black Drama of the. Federal Theatre Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980)Google Scholar, examines the black drama produced or written during the Federal Theatre Project years; and Tony Buttitta and Barry Witham have written a memoir of Buttitta's experience on the Project, Uncle Sam Presents (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Bigsby, Besides's Critical IntroductionGoogle Scholar, two other books with good chapters on the FTP are Rabkin, Gerald, Drama and Commitment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, and Goldstein, Malcolm, The Political Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

6. Bentley, Joanne, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)Google Scholar, is a recent biography by Flanagan's stepdaughter.

7. Flanagan, , Arena, pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

8. Flanagan, Hallie, “Democracy and the Drama,” The Listener, 04 20, 1939, p. 824.Google Scholar

9. Watson, Morris, “The Living Newspaper,” Scholastic, 10 31, 1936, p. 12.Google Scholar

10. Mathews describes in detail both the censorship of Ethiopia and the congressional hearings of 1938 and 1939.

11. Philip Barber, oral history, FTP Collection at GMU, p. 15.

12. New York Times, 01 28, 1936, p. 15Google Scholar; Times, 02 14, 1936, p. 27.Google Scholar

13. New York Times, 01 28, 1936, p. 15Google Scholar; Times, 02 14, 1936, p. 27.Google Scholar

14. De Rohon, Pierre, ed., Federal Theatre Plays: Triple-A Plowed Under, Power, Spirochete (New York: Random House, 1938), p. ixGoogle Scholar. All quotations from Triple-A Plowed Under are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

15. Cf. “There is very little public sympathy for… the poorest agricultural folk.… it must be one of our first considerations to try always to conciliate public opinion so that we may go ahead in the efforts to lift the levels of these people.” Rexford Tugwell diary entry, May 7, 1935, cited by Stange, Maren in “Symbols of Ideal Life: Technology, Mass Media, and the FSA Photography Project,” Prospects 11 (1987): 81–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Schlesinger, Arthur M., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958), pp. 27–84Google Scholar; Campbell, Christiana, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 53Google Scholar; and Saloutos, Theodore, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1982), pp. 87–128.Google Scholar

17. Scenes 12–14 are listed as one scene in the program and as separate scenes in the published text. The same is true for scenes 15–17. I will refer to the published text's scene numbers.

18. “Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! Bryan!” Fortune Magazine (01 1934): 60Google Scholar; the companion article was by Tugwell, Rexford, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, “The Price Also Rises,” pp. 70–71, 107–8.Google Scholar

19. The Living Newspaper Staff was listed as the author of Triple-A, but Arent has generally been recognized as the primary author; among those claiming credit for scenes are Phil Barber, Morris Watson, and Ned Glass.

20. Bliven, Bruce, “Milo Reno and His Farmers,” New Republic (11 29, 1933): 61Google Scholar; Reno also published a brief statement about the Farmers Holiday in the New York Times, 08 26, 1932, p. 6.Google Scholar

21. In an article not cited by Triple-A, Mary Heaton Vorse makes the same point: “Certainly the Farmers' Holiday has got away from Milo Reno and its other leaders who had planned a farmer's holiday and not a farmer's militant strike” (“Rebellion in the Corn Belt,” Harper's, 12 1932, p. 8Google Scholar). On the other hand the authors of the essential source, “Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! Bryan!” suggests “attempts, some of them wishful attempts, have been made in badly informed New York newspapers and magazines to picture the farm strike as the beginnings of the overthrow of capitalism” (p. 116).

22. Coauthored by Margaret Ellen Clifford (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar Experimental Theatre, 1931).

23. Popularly known as the “Black Eagle,” Colonel Julian had volunteered his services to Haille Selassie, but returned to America disillusioned. In an interview with the New York Times, the Colonel announced, “the Ethiopians are savages, just plain savages, that's all. It is an act of God that Italy should go in there and take over the land” (New York Times, 12 14, 1935, p. 8Google Scholar). In the Living Newspaper, Julian is revealed to be petty, selfish, and arrogant. The Negro actors on the Project refused the part, and the role was to be played by a white man in black face.

24. Cited in Daniel, Pete, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 105Google Scholar; according to Daniel, the AAA “offered an opportunity to bury the decaying sharecropping system and, by stabilizing landowners, to build a capitalist farm structure more like that of the business world” (p. 104). See also Conrad, David, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).Google Scholar

25. Besides Watson, Arent, and Losey, others receiving credit in the program were Lee Wainer for the musical score and Hjalmer Hermanson for set design.

26. New York Sun, 03 14, 1936.Google Scholar

27. New York Sun, 03 14, 1936.Google Scholar

28. Barber, , GMU, p. 145.Google Scholar

29. “The Raw Deal Presents a Thrilling Drama (You Pay for It) Starring Mr. Earl Browder of Moscow,” New York Evening Journal, 03 16, 1936Google Scholar; “Police Halt Vets' Raid on WPA Red Play,” New York American, 03 16, 1936Google Scholar; J.K.H., “The Living Newspaper Finally Gets Under Way With ‘Triple-A Plowed Under,’” New York Times, 03 16, 1936Google Scholar; Brown, John Mason, “‘The Living Newspaper’ Acted at the Biltmore,” New York Post, 03 16, 1936Google Scholar; and Mantle, Burns, “They Boo and Cheer Living Newspaper at the Biltmore Theatre,” New York Daily News, 03 18, 1936.Google Scholar

30. Mullen, John, “A Worker Looks at Broadway,” New Theatre (05 1936): 27.Google Scholar

31. New York Sun, 03 16, 1936, p. 26Google Scholar; and New Republic (04 1, 1936): 225.Google Scholar

32. The scripts are in the FTP collection at GMU. Quotations from the plays are cited parenthetically in the text.

33. Daniel, , Breaking the LandGoogle Scholar; and Conrad, , Forgotten Farmers.Google Scholar

34. Caldwell, Erskine and Bourke-White, Margaret, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937).Google Scholar