“Danger: men not working.” Constructing citizenship with contingent labor in the Federal Theatre's Living Newspapers

Abstract

Try to remember all you've seen here. Remember that every man … ought to have the right to work and eat. Every man ought to have a right to think things out for himself.– Hallie Flangan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, Can You Hear Their Voices? (1931)I don't know why I still hang on the idea that unemployed actors get just as hungry as anybody else.– Harry Hopkins, Works Progress Association Supervisor (1934)Theater critics and historians have done valuable work to canonize the scripts of Depression-era Living Newspapers. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the modes of contingent and affective labor that structured daily life for the Federal Theatre employees responsible for writing and staging those texts. This study examines a unique moment in American theater history in which discursive tropes of uncertainty helped to frame the dramatic arts as symbols of a patriotic work ethic and the American democratic ideal. An investigation of the classed and gendered labor discourses of New Deal Federal Theatre Project administrators from 1935–9 reveals the creative strategies that they used to cope with their own professional and economic precarity. Although Federal Theatre employees encountered these demands within the framework of government sponsorship, their responses to such pressures resonate with patterns in industry, non-profit, and academic settings in the twenty-first century. Producing affect, reviewing performance, re-framing goals, and justifying expenses are all part of today's late-capitalist rubric of professional contingency, just as they were under the Works Progress Administration.