Abstract
In early 1937 John McGee, head of the southern region and deputy director of the FTP, and the employees of the region compiled a multivolume scrapbook as a gift for Flanagan. Entitled A Brief History of the Federal Theatre in the South, its opening featured ten pages of hand-written signatures from eight different FTP units, including those in Atlanta, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, North Carolina, and Oklahoma City; all offered their support of the FTP as a whole, and Flanagan specifically.3
The South has sometimes been called “the great American theatrical desert.” Even a casual survey of American theatre history shows relatively little organized professional theatre south of the Mason-Dixon line.1
—John McGee
And the other thing that we could have done with a little longer run of the Federal Theatre is gotten into experimental regional things that actually grew out of the region itself, rather than being controlled and sent down to us from New York.2
—Josef Lentz
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References
Glenn Feldman, Politics, Society and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 219.
Ibid., 219–20; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 14.
Neal R. Pierce, The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven Deep South States (New York: Norton, 1974), 282.
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 303.
William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flint, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 480–5.
Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 92;
Kenneth Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation, 1901–2001 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 164–6.
Henry P. Guzda, “United Steelworkers of America: 26th Convention,” Monthly Labor Review 115, no. 12 (1992), 46–7;
Maeva Marcus, Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 51; Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation, 164–6; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 223–227; Feldman, Politics, Society and the Klan in Alabama, 243–246.
Ralph T. Jones, ‘Altars of Steel Highly Praised as Best Drama Ever Presented Here,” Atlanta Constitution, April 2, 1937, 11;
Tarleton Collier, “Behind the Headlines,” Atlanta Georgian, April 6, 1937, 3;
Mildred Seydell, “Altars of Steel Aids Communism with Tax Money,” Atlanta Georgian, April 4, 1937, 4D; Flanagan, Arena, 89. For a detailed discussion of the newspaper coverage of Altars of Steel in Atlanta,
See Susan Duffy, American Labor on Stage: Dramatic Interpretations of the Steel and Textile Industries in the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 96–101;
John Russell Poole, The Federal Theatre Project in Georgia and Alabama: An Historical Analysis of Government Theatre in the Deep South (PhD Diss., University of Georgia, Athens, 1995), 80–88; McGee, A Brief History of the Federal Theatre in the South, 12.
Jane de Hart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 181.
Quoted in John McGee, Federal Theatre of the South: A Supplement to the Federal Theatre National Bulletin, Quarterly Bulletin 1, no. 2 (October 1936), NARA, E920, Box 357.
For further discussion of TCI’s role in creating Fairfield, see Marlene Hunt Rikard, “An Experiment in Welfare Capitalism: The Health Care Services of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company” (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 1983), 132–6
Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 41.
Verner Haldene, “Production Bulletin for three-month period beginning January 1, 1937,” December 29, 1936, NARA, E850, Box 62, “Southern Play Bureau.”
The Birmingham audience submitted only 22 surveys, which serve as the basis for this report. Dana Rush, “Audience Survey Report for It Can’t Happen Here,” November 23, 1936, NARA, E907, National Play Bureau Audience Survey Reports, Box 254.
Rogers et. al., Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, 470; Marjorie Longenecker White, The Birmingham District: An Industrial History and Guide (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Historical Society at the Birmingham Publishing Company, 1981), 65; “Oysters, Junk, Perfume, Steel,” Time, June 3, 1935, accessed February 9, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,883430-1,00.html;
Henry M. McKiven, Jr., Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995);
Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 169.
Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham, AL: Chamber of Commerce, 1910);
Joseph Bishop Bucklin, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters, Vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 54–63.
Dennis G. Jerz, Technology in American Drama, 1920–1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 88.
Thomas Postlewait, “The Criteria for Evidence: Anecdotes in Shakespearean Biography, 1709–2000,” in Theorizing Practice, Redefining Theatre History, ed. W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65.
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© 2011 Elizabeth A. Osborne
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Osborne, E.A. (2011). “The Great American Theatrical Desert”: Federal Theatre in the South. In: Staging the People. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119567_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119567_4
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