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Democratizing Cultural Production: a Theory Cultivated with Hallie Flanagan Davis

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Democratizing Cultural Production: a Theory Cultivated with Hallie Flanagan Davis DEMOCRATIZING CULTURAL PRODUCTION: A THEORY CULTIVATED WITH HALLIE FLANAGAN DAVIS by ANGELA KRISTINE MOORE Bachelor of Arts, 2010 University of Texas Austin, Texas Master of Arts, 2013 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2017 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my dissertation committee, my mother, and my partner, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I would especially like to thank my dissertation director, Ann George for the tireless hours and invaluable feedback and insight she contributed to this project. I would also like to extend gratitude to the New York Public Library for awarding me a Short-Term Research Fellowship, which enabled me to focus my full attention on Hallie Flanagan Davis’s archival materials for four weeks. Specifically I would like to extend thanks to Annemarie van Roessel and the staff of the Billy Rose Theatre Division. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………..…………………………………ii List of Figures….……..……………...……………………………………………………...........iv List of Tables.………………..……………………………………………………………………v Chapters: I. Introduction: Cultivating Theory with Hallie Flanagan Davis……………………1 II. Locating Flanagan Davis’s Keystone Arguments………………………………..42 III. Living Newspaper Micro-Features: the “Education and Growing Up of America”...............................................................................................................91 IV. FTP Macro-Features: the “Rethinking, Rebuilding, and Redreaming of America..............................................................................................................138 V. Conclusion: Democratic Cultural-Rhetorical Infrastructure Theory.…………..190 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………….……………227 Vita Abstract iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Keystone Ecology Chart…...………………………………………………………….46 Figure 2: Holding Company Visualization…..…………………………………………………113 Figure 3: 1935 FTP Resident Theaters over 1940 Population Map……………………………138 Figure 4: Twelve FTP Regions of 1935…...…………………………………...………………160 Figure 5: Five FTP Regions of 1937……...……………………………………………………160 iv LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Rhetorical Power/Rules Continuum……………………………………………182, 198 v Chapter 1: Cultivating Theory with Hallie Flanagan Davis “At a time when all are inquiring how we can make democracy more effective, it is perhaps pertinent to inquire whether the democracies have not neglected the theatre as a powerful force for enriching life.” -Hallie Flanagan Davis, Theatre in a Changing World Introduction The year is 1938. It’s springtime in New York, but the dry shadows of depression and war push back against everything spring stands for. While walking through a neighborhood in Brooklyn, you see a small, run-down theater advertising performances of a play titled One-Third of a Nation. The painful articulation of President Roosevelt’s second inaugural address echoes through your mind, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Just below the play’s title is a price scribbled in chalk—25ȼ: a live play for the cheap price of a movie ticket. Curious, you decide to go in. Upon entering the theater, “you would see on the un-curtained stage, no tenement and no rooms but, suspended in space, a strange phantasmagoria of actual objects so gigantic and awesome that it would be difficult to say whether it was real or the materialization of a nightmare” (Flanagan Davis, Arena 212). Among these objects are a giant, leaking faucet, an overflowing trash can, and a rusty fire escape. The play begins with a fire on stage, and “gradually, through changing light, [you] become aware of these [giant] objects not as a visual pattern but as actual elements of the disease, misery, and crime bred in the slums,” elements that, among other things, facilitate fires and make them difficult to escape from (Flanagan Davis, Arena 212). A few scenes later you watch as a beam of light, sickeningly green in color, illuminates “contagion spreading from the gigantic faucet down to the head of the child” (Flanagan Davis, Arena 212), causing you to think back to a young girl you saw coughing wildly as she walked down the street with her mother just moments before you entered the theater. You hear a voice over the theater’s loudspeaker comparing disease rates in New York City slums to 1 those of the overall city, “Tuberculosis . 129% higher. Diphtheria . 97% higher” (Arent 79).1 The play continues in a series of montages, a voice over the loud speaker narrating and announcing statistics about slum housing in different cities throughout each scene: “50% of all juvenile delinquency found in eighteen percent of the city area—the slums! Cleveland, Ohio” (Arent 107). You wonder if the statistics are real. As the play nears its end, a man and a woman stand on stage. The woman calls out impassioned words to the audience, “And if we don’t make them hear us you’re going to have just what you’ve always had—slums—disease—crime— juvenile deliquence, and. and. .” her voice trails off as chaos and fire once again break out on stage, sirens begins to scream and the loudspeaker announces, “Ladies and Gentleman, this might be Boston, New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, but let’s just call it one-third of a nation.” The stage goes black and the curtains close (Arent 154). As the house lights come up you inspect the playbill, noticing an address given for more bibliographic information, but also that the play you just watched, clearly driven by the task of making the dangerous conditions of slum housing—and the impacts of those conditions—more visible, was funded by the government, put on by part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) called the Federal Theater Project (FTP)—a national-scale project directed by a woman named Hallie Flanagan Davis.2 You leave the play not only more informed about the dangers of slum housing conditions than you were before, but also more concerned. (End scene.) 1 The play being quoted was written and produced collaboratively with the help of the Staff of the Living Newspaper, but officially authored under the name Arthur Arent. 2Hallie Flanagan Davis is most often referred to as Hallie Flanagan. In a letter to her publishers she requests to be referred to as Hallie Flanagan Davis so as to reflect bot her first and second deceased husband. Her publishers appear to have responded by explaining that Hallie Flanagan was the more recognizable name, as she responds to such a remark in concurrent letters and continues to argue for the right to choose how she’s referred to (Letters to Pearce, Duell and Sloan). This work will thus refer to her as she wished to be referred to: Hallie Flanagan Davis. 2 It is now almost 80 years after One Third of a Nation took cities across America by storm.3 Despite Hallie Flanagan Davis’s position as director of the largest and arguably most radical government-funded arts organization in American history (Denning), her influence shaping and promoting the genre of theater in the scene above, and her impressive publication record that, for example, refers to the FTP as “an accurate and brilliant means of communication” needed by democracy (Arena 372)—she has rarely been mentioned in the fields of rhetoric or political theory, and remains predominantly associated with the field of theater and artistic production. She belongs to a long list of rhetorically powerful and innovative women, active in 1930s public and civic life, who have been all but erased from history. Ann George, Elizabeth Weiser and Janet Zepernick began the monumental task of recovering some of these women in their recent collection Women and Rhetoric between the Wars (2013) and call for other scholars to continue in this effort. George et al. argue that “women between the wars were not only using rhetoric; they were creating rhetorical theories, enacting them, and even writing them down—but they were writing in ways the mainstream either did not see, or did not acknowledge as ‘theory’” (George et al. 13). They list Flanagan Davis, along with many other women who did not make it into the collection, as promising sites for future research. This project is in many ways a direct result of and indebted to their work. Like the women recovered by George et al., Flanagan Davis created, enacted, and sometimes even wrote down rhetorical theories, but not typically in ways that have been acknowledged as “theory,” which has likely contributed to her relative absence from rhetoric and political theory, until now. The goal of this project is to yield theories rooted in Hallie Flanagan Davis’s arguments and practices, but cultivated through a modern, civic-rhetorical approach to those roots. First I’ll 3 One Third of a Nation is said to have been performed to great success in at least 9 major cities and to have reached an estimated 217,000 people in New York City alone (Flanagan Davis, Arena 217). 3 briefly explain my choice of the words roots and cultivate, then my use of the term civic- rhetorical. Throughout this project I will use words like roots and cultivate to invoke an ecological metaphor of theory. In a 2008 article, “The Importance of Harmony: An Ecological Metaphor for Writing,” Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Clay Spinuzzi, Rebecca J. Rickley, and Carol Clark Papper propose that approaching rhetorical theories—and especially multimodal rhetorical theories—as ecologies of interconnected concepts, rather than contained, distinct categories of concepts may allow our exploration of those theories to be more “harmonious” with their lived nature. Hallie Flanagan Davis’s arguments and practices are multimodal, messy, and deeply interconnected. As I attempted to categorize her arguments, I found that they seemed to resist categorization, always overlapping a bit too much with almost every other argument. In order to talk about Flanagan Davis’s ideas in any way that does them justice, approaching them through an ecological metaphor (as recommended by Fleckenstein et al.) is therefore necessary.
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