1. Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York and London: Zone Books, 2005), 65Google Scholar.

2. My summary of Warner's argument invokes Charles Taylor's concept of “modern social imaginaries.” Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2003)Google Scholar.

3. Warner, 66, 65.

4. In this essay, I invoke theatre's “democratic” potential to capture political aspirations of broad, inclusive participation. As Nicholas Ridout characterizes this frequent formulation, before contesting it: “issues of both participation and representation are often addressed in terms that point toward a ‘special relationship’ between democracy and theatre.” Ridout, Nicholas, “Performance and Democracy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Davis, Tracy C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11–22 Google Scholar, at 12. While taking up this vernacular usage of “democratic,” I acknowledge that the word has myriad connotations, both normative and descriptive. Giorgio Agamben notes, for instance, that democracy connotes two different meanings, one pertaining to a mode of governance, and another pertaining to a mode of constituting a polity. Agamben, Giorgio, “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy,” in Democracy in What State?, ed. Agamben, et al. ., trans. McCuaig, William (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–5 Google Scholar, at 1. Katherine Harloe points to a slightly different “bivalence” in democracy's usage, observing that at times it is descriptive (naming a set of arrangements for governance) and at times it is normative (naming a positive feature of political and nonpolitical institutions alike). Katherine Harloe, “We Are All Democrats Today,” lecture, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, 18 June 2010; per my notes on the lecture. Wendy Brown suggests that democracy circulates as an “empty signifier” or worse, coupled with neoliberalism, “a gloss of legitimacy for its inversion.” Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now,” in Agamben et al., 44–57, at 44, 57. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted that in America, democracy has always been dialectically connected to structural racism, contending “America begins in black plunder and white democracy.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014), www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/, accessed 1 May 2017.

5. Dolan, Jill, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53.3 (2001): 455–79Google Scholar, at 455. See also Warner, 66.

6. Balme, Christopher B., The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., 69, 201.

8. Sara Freeman and Robert Shimko have characterized live theatre as a “liminal realm somewhere between an intimate coffeehouse discussion and the massively wide address of a television or radio broadcast.” Shimko, Robert B. and Freeman, Sara, “Theatre, Performance, and the Public Sphere,” in Public Theatres and Theatre Publics, ed. Shimko, and Freeman, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 1–19 Google Scholar, at 6.

9. Loren Kruger has contended that it is through the materiality of “place and occasion” that theatre qua institution can represent and legitimize nationhood, and national prestige. Kruger, Loren, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12Google Scholar.

10. For the term, see Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1991)Google Scholar.

11. Cf. Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919–1968, ed. Peters, John Durham and Simonson, Peter (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004)Google Scholar, esp. the editors' Introduction; Sproule, J. Michael, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, [1997] 2005)Google Scholar; John, Burton St. III, Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalistic Double-Mindedness, 1917–1941 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

12. Welky, David, Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Douglas, George H., The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

13. Bybee, Carl, “Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age? A Return to the Lippmann–Dewey Debate about the Politics of News,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 1.1 (Spring 1999): 28–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 31.

14. Igo, Sarah E., The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

15. Keith, William M., Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007)Google Scholar. I explain how Living Newspapers negotiated conflicting standards of civic communication in my dissertation: Jordana Cox, “‘Propaganda for Democracy’: Dialogue and Dissemination in the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers, 1936–1939” (Northwestern University, 2015).

16. Scholars of theatre and performance have done important work in this area. See Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: NYU Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Srinivasan, Priya, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Herrera, Brian Eugenio, Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For treatments beyond theatre and performance studies, see Iton, Richard, Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Eaklor, Vicki Lynn, Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century (Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO, 2008)Google Scholar; Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, ed. Noll, Steven and Trent, James W. Jr. (New York: NYU Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Gerber, David A., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

17. Lippmann, Walter, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1925] 2011)Google Scholar, 10.

18. In the 1920s and 1930s, voting was mostly restricted, de jure and/or de facto, to white Americans. On the relationship among structural inequalities, racism, and civic engagement, see, for instance, Waldman, Michael, The Fight to Vote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)Google Scholar; Manza, Jeff and Uggen, Christopher, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Yellin, Eric Steven, Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2013)Google Scholar; Fraden, Rena, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Iton; EaklorGoogle Scholar.

19. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.” Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, new ed. (Athens: Swallow Press, [1927] 1954)Google Scholar, 207.

20. For Carey's seminal work on the Lippmann–Dewey Debate, see Carey, James W., Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar. For some recent reassessments of the debate, see Schudson, Michael, “The ‘Lippmann–Dewey Debate’ and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1985–1996,” International Journal of Communication 2 (2008): 1031–42Google Scholar; Jansen, Sue C., “Walter Lippmann, Straw Man of Communication Research,” in The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, ed. Park, David W. and Pooley, Jefferson (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 71–112 Google Scholar, www.citeulike.org/group/14507/article/9566306, accessed 20 May 2015; Crick, Nathan, “The Search for a Purveyor of News: The Dewey/Lippmann Debate in an Internet Age,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26.5 (2009): 480–97Google Scholar.

21. Lippmann, 3.

22. For Hannah Arendt, see her The Human Condition, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), and Crisis of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972)Google Scholar, as well as Villa, Dana R., “Theatricality in the Public Realm of Hannah Arendt,” in Public Space and Democracy, ed. Hénaff, Marcel and Strong, Tracy B. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 144–71Google Scholar. For Cicero, see Cicero, De oratore; Connolly, Joy, “Republican Theater,” in The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 198–236 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Rousseau, see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Letter to D'Alembert,” and Writings for the Theater, trans. and ed. Bloom, Allan, Butterworth, Charles, and Kelly, Christopher (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, for Dartmouth College, 2004)Google Scholar; Strong, Tracy B., “Theatricality, Public Space, and Music in Rousseau,” SubStance 25.2, no. 80 (1996): 110–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Dewey, 183.

24. Ibid., 184.

25. On the global circulation of living newspapers, see Marquardt, Virginia Hagelstein, “Centre Stage: Radical Theatre in America, 1925–1934,” RACAR: Revue d'art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 19.1–2 (1992): 112–22Google Scholar; Deák, František, “‘Blue Blouse’ (1923–1928),” TDR: The Drama Review 17.1 (1973): 35–46 Google Scholar; Mally, Lynn, “Exporting Soviet Culture: The Case of Agitprop Theater,” Slavic Review 62.2 (2003): 324–42Google Scholar; Casson, John W., “Living Newspaper: Theatre and Therapy,” TDR: The Drama Review 44.2 (2000): 107–22Google Scholar; Gardner, Colin, “The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper,” New Theatre Quarterly 30.3 (2014): 249–68Google Scholar.

26. Marjorie Louise Platt Dycke, “The Living Newspaper: A Study of the Nature of the Form and Its Place in Modern Social Drama” (Ph.D. thesis, NYU, New York, 1948); Morris Watson, “‘Writing the Living Newspaper,’ Report for the National Service Bureau,” 1938, Library of Congress Federal Theatre Project collection, Washington, DC (hereinafter LoC FTP), Container 133; Arent, Arthur, “The Technique of the Living Newspaper,” Theatre Arts Monthly 22.11 (1938): 820–25Google Scholar [also repr. in Theatre Quarterly 1.4 (1971): 57–9]; Flanagan, Hallie, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940)Google Scholar.

27. Cobb, Gerry, “‘Injunction Granted’ in Its Times: A Living Newspaper Reappraised,” New Theatre Quarterly 6.23 (1990): 279–96Google Scholar; Stuart Cosgrove, “The Living Newspaper: History, Production and Form” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 1982); Theatres of the Left: 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America, ed. Samuel, Raphael, MacColl, Ewan, and Cosgrove, Stuart (New York and London: Routledge, 1985)Google Scholar; Himelstein, Morgan Y., Drama Was a Weapon: The Left-Wing Theatre in New York, 1929–1941 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Taylor, Karen Malpede, People's Theatre in Amerika (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1972)Google Scholar; Rabkin, Gerald, Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Williams, Jay, Stage Left (New York: Scribner's, 1974)Google Scholar; Goldman, Arnold, “Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit,” Theatre Quarterly 3.9 (1973): 69–89 Google Scholar.

28. Browder, Laura, Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Manning, Susan, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar; White, Ann Folino, Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Witham, Barry B., The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Saal, Ilka, New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Osborne, Elizabeth A., Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)Google Scholar; Melosh, Barbara, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood In New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Klein, Emily, “‘Danger: Men Not Working’: Constructing Citizenship with Contingent Labor in the Federal Theatre's Living Newspapers,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23.2 (2013): 193–211 Google Scholar; Kruger; Fraden.

29. Browder.

30. Saal.

31. Clurman, Harold, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties (New York: Da Capo Press, [1945] 1983)Google Scholar.

32. Lyons, Eugene, The Red Decade: The Classic Work on Communism in America during the Thirties (Safety Harbor, FL: Simon Publications, [1941] 1970)Google Scholar; Manning, 57–113.

33. While I think, primarily, with Lippmann to theorize and historicize ghosting in this paper, I am indebted too to a rich body of work on ghosts, memory, and haunting in theatre and performance, especially the following: Young, Harvey, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schneider, Rebecca, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Marx, Peter W., “Challenging the Ghosts: Leopold Jessner's ‘Hamlet,’” Theatre Research International 30.1 (2005): 72–87 Google Scholar; Carlson, Marvin A., The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Ballif, Michelle, “Historiography as Hauntology: Paranormal Investigations into the History of Rhetoric,” in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. Ballif, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: South Illinois University Press, 2013), 139–53Google Scholar; Rayner, Alice, Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006)Google Scholar. I engage Marvin Carlson's work in this paper's conclusion.

34. On the figure and significance of the “crowd,” as distinct from the “public” in modern social and political thought, see Shilarna Stokes, “Playing the Crowd: Mass Pageantry in Europe and the United States, 1905–1935” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2013; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing), http://search.proquest.com/docview/1364612096, accessed 20 May 2015; Crowds, ed. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. and Tiews, Matthew (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

35. Editorial Staff of the Living Newspaper Unit, 1935, in “Liberty Deferred” and Other Living Newspapers of the 1930s, ed. Brown, Lorraine, Liller, Tamara, and Smith, Barbara Jones (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1989), 1–60 Google Scholar, at 10. All subsequent citations of this play are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

36. I take the distinction between chronic time and acute time from John Durham Peters's analysis of media that figure time and space. Peters, John Durham, “Calendar, Clock, Tower,” in Deus in Machina: Religion and Technology in Historical Perspective, ed. Stolow, Jeremy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 25–42 Google Scholar, at 32.

37. The New Year's Eve tableau presents a complicated relationship between modernity and the public: for although the modern American body politic is dispersed by its size and geography, as Lippmann noted, innovations in modern architecture, like the skyscrapers in Hermanson's backdrop, create meeting places and focal points. I am grateful to Nick Ridout for observing this paradox.

38. In her entry on the revue in the Oxford Encyclopledia of Theatre and Performance, Felicia Hardison Londré defines the revue as “a programme of light entertainments, largely musical, but including satiric sketches” that “focuses on a topical theme or … is presented in a periodic series.” By these standards, 1935 owes much to the revue form: it is full of satirical sketches, and its title suggests a (planned) series of up-to-date editions. The NYLNU was likely inspired by productions like the Ziegfeld Follies (1907–31) and the Shuberts’ Passing Show (1912–24), which emerged during the “golden age of the revue” on Broadway (1890s–1920s). Londré notes, however, that the revue had even earlier prototypes, such as Henry Fielding's The Historical Register, for the Year 1736. Strikingly, Fielding's play, like 1935, satirized the events of a single year, and explicitly addressed its public in a lengthy dedication. Felicia Hardison Londré, “revue,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, 2 vols., ed. Kennedy, Dennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, online at Oxford Reference (2005), www.oxfordreference.com.newman.richmond.edu:2048/view/10.1093/acref/9780198601746.001.0001/acref-9780198601746-e-3312, accessed 11 June 2017.

My thanks to Marlis Schweitzer for bringing the Ziegfeld Follies and the Shuberts to my attention. For more on revues, including the Follies and the Shuberts’ Passing Show, see Mark Fearnow, “Ziegfeld, Florenz,” in Oxford Encyclopedia, www.oxfordreference.com.newman.richmond.edu:2048/view/10.1093/acref/9780198601746.001.0001/acref-9780198601746-e-4328, accessed 11 June 2017; Hirsch, Foster, The Boys from Syracuse: The Shuberts’ Theatrical Empire (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000)Google Scholar; van der Merwe, Ann Ommen, The “Ziegfeld Follies”: A History in Song (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Westover, Jonas, The Shuberts and Their “Passing Shows”: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld's Rivals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

39. As Colin Gardner notes, “the revue format” offered a “kaleidoscope of front-page issues” that contrasted with the single-issue “chronicle” dramaturgy that dominated the Living Newspaper form. Gardner, 256.

40. On the one hand, John Osburn explains that “condensed forms” entail a potentiality in their “sensibility of advance revelation, technological novelty, and temporal efficiency.” On the other hand, they also evoke the “stigma attached to being both a reduction and a copy.” Without the “buildup to climax and resolution that one might expect in the theatre,” the tabloid's brand of “truncated experience” is easily dismissed as repetitive and fragmented. Though “tabloid” had not yet become a pejorative term when 1935 debuted, the play's condensation of familiar events elicited many negative receptions. John Osburn, “The Dramaturgy of the Tabloid: Climax and Novelty in a Theory of Condensed Forms,” Theatre Journal 46.4 (1994): 507–22, at 521, 507.

41. Bixby's entrance foreshadows a popular device in the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers: in Power, a spotlight would illuminate the protagonist, Consumer, from the shadows of the stage; in One-Third of a Nation, the somewhat pluckier Little Man would demand a light to help him enter the stage from the audience. Federal Theatre Project et al. ., Federal Theatre Plays, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1938)Google Scholar, 1: 19, 2: 39.

42. Sarah Igo traces the development and impact of social scientific data in the mid-twentieth century in her book The Averaged American.

43. Liberty Deferred, a Living Newspaper by and about African-Americans, would offer a striking alternative to 1935’s white-dominated representation of the Public. In Liberty Deferred—written, but never produced by the FTP—an African-American couple and a white couple contest the racialized news they witness onstage. See Abram Hill and John Silvera, Liberty Deferred, in “Liberty Deferred” and Other Living Newspapers, ed. Brown et al., 249–303; Nadler, Paul, “Liberty Censored: Black Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project,” African American Review 29.4 (1995): 615–22Google Scholar.

44. My use of “interpellation” follows that of rhetorician Maurice Charland, who draws in turn on Louis Althusser, Edwin Black, and Kenneth Burke. Charland uses interpellation to describe the process by which people take on the personae ascribed to them through a particular discourse (such as a speech, founding myth, narrative, or in this case, a play). Warner seems to have something similar in mind when he argues that a public “exists by virtue of being addressed” (67; his italics). Charland, Maurice, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois, ” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73.2 (1987): 133–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 137–8.

45. Philosopher Jacques Rancière has generatively identified a modern tradition, evident especially in Brechtian and agitprop theatre, that identifies spectatorship with passivity. Imbuing spectatorship with emancipatory potential, he offers a much needed theoretical corrective to unchecked assumptions that spectatorship is debilitating. However, the historical premise of his critique, which holds that participatory techniques in radical theatre are monolithic in their denigration of spectatorship, flattens a rich and often nuanced tradition that theatre history unearths. Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Elliott, Gregory (London: Verso, 2009)Google Scholar.

46. Playbill for The Events of 1935, 1936, LoC FTP, Container 1096.

47. Arent, 822.

48. See Ellis, Jack C., The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1989), 79–81 Google Scholar.

49. Elizabeth Osborne offers a comprehensive analysis of the FTP's national reach in her Staging the People.

50. A 1936 playbill for the Living Newspaper at the Cleveland Repertory Theatre announces “a dramatization of world news events” and lists series of scenes presenting different headline stories. “Playbill for ‘The Living Newspaper’ at the Cleveland Repertory Theatre,” LoC FTP, Container 1095. McDermott also cites two productions in Norwalk, Connecticut. McDermott, 90.

51. Brooks Atkinson, “Headlines of 1935 in the Second Issue of the WPA ‘Living Newspaper,’” New York Times, 13 May 1936, § “Amusements,” 28.

52. “Footnotes on a Fortnight,” New Yorker, 23 May 1936, 31; transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

53. “Living Newspaper—1935,” New York Evening Journal, 13 May 1936, transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

54. Archer Winsten, “In the Wake of the News,” New York Post, 18 May 1936, transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

55. Arthur Pollock, “‘1935’ New Issue of the Federal Theatre's Living Newspaper a Lively Sheet, Opens at the Biltmore Theatre,” Brooklyn Eagle, 13 May 1936, 12, transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

56. “Living Newspaper Takes Up ‘1935,’” New York Daily News, 13 May 1936, transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

57. “The New Play,” New York Sun, 13 May 1936, transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

58. “Events of 1935 Dramatized by WPA Actors,” New York Herald-Tribune, 13 May 1936, transcribed clipping in LoC FTP, Production Records, Container 1047.

59. Ibid.

60. Pollock, Container 1047.

61. McDermott, Douglas, “The Living Newspaper as a Dramatic Form,” Modern Drama 8.1 (1965): 82–94 Google Scholar. Smiley, Sam, “Rhetoric on Stage in Living Newspapers,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54.1 (1968): 29–36 Google Scholar.

62. The term was not invented by the FTP; before living newspapers emerged in the United States, the Blue Blouse company had already coined the term живая газета (zhivaya gazeta) to describe its work in Russia and across Europe. Yet the fact that Federal Theatre artists chose to appropriate the term rather than invent a new one suggests its resonance in the United States. In fact, it might attest to the efficacy of the moniker that Federal Theatre staff chose to adopt a direct translation of the Russian, even as they insisted the form was quintessentially “American.” When anti-Russian sentiment in the late 1930s prompted American artists to deny their form's “un-American” origins, the FTP still retained the Russian moniker in translation. In her memoir Arena, FTP National Director Hallie Flanagan insisted that despite its “occasional reference to the Volksbühne and the Blue Blouses, to Bragaglia and Meierhold and Eisenstein” the Living Newspaper was “as American as Walt Disney” (Flanagan, 70). Playwright Arthur Arent maintained even more boldly, “while admitting the possibility of a whole avalanche of predecessors, I deny their influence” (Arent, 820). On the zhivaya gazeta in Russia, see Deák; Gardner.

63. Ad for Power at the Alcazar Theater, San Francisco, 1937, LoC FTP, Playbills File, Container 1096.

64. Playbill for One-Third of a Nation at the Walnut St. Theatre, Philadelphia, Oct. 1938, LoC FTP, Playbills File, Container 1096.

65. “The Living Newspaper,” Literary Digest, 8 May 1936, LoC FTP, Playbills File, Container 1096.

66. New Theatre, May 1936, LoC FTP, Administrative File, Container 963.

67. Barbara Melosh (8) writes that the FTP, like New Deal public art initiatives, anachronistically sought “to shore up archaic cultural forms amid a burgeoning mass media.” Emily Klein (194) reflects further on Hallie Flanagan's administrative negotiation of economic precarity in the FTP.

68. Flanagan, 321.