The Phantom Public, the Living Newspaper: Reanimating the Public in the Federal Theatre Project's1935(New York, 1936)

Abstract

Stories of American democracy, whether critical or congratulatory, canonical or popular, feature “the public” as their recurring protagonist. “The public” is a rhetorical fixture of political campaigns and democratic theories, opinion polls and calls to action. Its influence is formidable: the very idea scores political speech, and calls citizens into being. Yet as many scholars have argued, “the public” is a moving target, and possibly even a total fiction. Perhaps the best-known challenge in recent decades has come from literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner. “Publics” he writes in hisPublics and Counterpublics,“have become an essential part of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are.” If a public is difficult to describe, it is in part, Warner explains, because the idea hovers in modern imaginaries between the concrete and the abstract. “A public” can conjure at once: a bounded audience—“a crowd witnessing itself in visible space”; a more abstract “social totality” like the constituents of a nation; and a community conjured through shared texts or identities.