ABSTRACT
A documentary vanguard committed to socially critical truth-telling can face serious obstacles at historical moments that illicit popular calls for national unity. The story of radical and liberal documentary theatre between 1920 and 1945 was very often a case study in the vicissitudes that vanguard movements can undergo when they try to engage with large social or political institutions, change them from within, or simply latch onto them in order to survive. In 1935, Hopkins asked Hallie Flanagan to head up the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the Works Projects Administration that was intended, along with the Federal Writers Project and Federal Artists Project, to create paying jobs for the nation's unemployed creative workers. One-Third of a Nation, the Federal Theater's most successful Living Newspaper, uses a fast-moving historical narrative and inventive staging choices to present the misery of the poor as essentially a regulatory problem.
