Hallie Flanagan

Hallie Flanagan Davis (August 27, 1890 – July 23, 1969)

Early life

Hallie Ferguson was born in Redfield, South Dakota in 1890. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Grinnell, Iowa. She attended Grinnell College where she majored in philosophy and German, and was an active member in the literary and dramatic clubs. During her time there, she became friends with Harry Hopkins, who also grew up in Grinnell and was a year behind her at the college. Her friendship with Hopkins would later be instrumental in her obtaining a leadership position in the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

She met her future husband, Murray Flanagan, at Grinnell. He was also a member of the dramatic club. She graduated with a BA in 1911. Soon afterwards, she and Murray got married; they relocated to St. Louis, Missouri and then to Omaha, Nebraska. They had two sons, Jack and Frederick. While in Omaha, Murray was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died in 1919. Three years later, Hallie's elder son Jack succumbed to spinal meningitis.

While at Vassar, she received national publicity for producing and co-writing the theatrical adaptation, Can You Hear Their Voices?, based on a short story that Whittaker Chambers had written for New Masses magazine in 1931. Over the years, Flanagan pushed the Vassar administration to start an independent major in drama, but it was not approved until after she left the college. She would later write:

The FTP was funded and operational by August 1935. Flanagan's vision was to bring high-quality, cutting-edge theatre to the masses of American people, many of whom had never witnessed live theater. The Project paid salaries to struggling artists and crafts workers, and staged affordable productions across the nation. The FTP created children's theatre as well as Living Newspaper plays, based on German director Erwin Piscator's concepts, that would reach out to the culturally unaware.

Though the Project staged a wide variety of works, conservatives took issue with the apparent political agendas being delivered by some of the plays. Concerns over works with messages deemed to be communistic plagued Flanagan and jeopardized the continued existence of the FTP. She would later say in her Congressional testimony, "The basis of the choice of plays is that we have always believed in the Federal Theatre Project that any theater supported by the Federal funds should do no plays of a subversive, or cheap, or shoddy, or vulgar, or outworn, or imitative nature, but only such plays as the Government could stand behind in a program which is national in scope and regional in emphasis and democratic in American attitude."

thumb|Flanagan at the opening of [[Voodoo Macbeth|Macbeth (April 14, 1936)]]

By 1936, Flanagan had hired 12,500 people across 28 states. In New York City alone, the FTP's productions played to weekly audiences of 350,000. Since the plays were federally funded, the Project could afford to sell tickets at drastically reduced prices, making the productions accessible and inclusive to a wider audience. She was accused of supporting a communist agenda and subverting American values. The FTP was also attacked for its focus on racial injustice. Flanagan had called for a theatre free of racial prejudice. She "directed her subordinates to enforce strictly the WPA prohibitions against prejudicial actions." The accusations of communist infiltration, combined with the Project's efforts at racial integration, resulted in Congress cancelling the FTP's funding, effective June 30, 1939.

After operating for less than four years, the Federal Theatre Project was shut down, and Flanagan returned to Vassar. She soon published a history, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (1940), which chronicled her experiences with the Project, her theories on the social and political possibilities of federally funded theater, and some of the successes the Project was able to achieve. In a tribute published shortly after her death, former FTP participant John Houseman wrote:

Smith College

Despite the political controversy surrounding the demise of the Federal Theatre Project, Flanagan was recognized for her contributions to modern theater. In 1941, she received an honorary degree from Williams College. She was a recipient of the first National Theater Conference Citation award in 1968.

In the 1960s, Flanagan's health began to fail. Her Parkinson's disease, which she had been diagnosed with in 1945,

In popular culture

In Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (1999), Cherry Jones played Hallie Flanagan.

Flanagan is a minor character in the novel The Group, written by Vassar grad Mary McCarthy. Flanagan is mentioned in the novel's first chapter and appears briefly again in the last chapter.

Bibliography

Co-written with Margaret Ellen Clifford, and adapted from a short story by Whittaker Chambers.
Co-written with Janet Hartmann.
Co-written with Mary C. St. John.
Co-written with Sylvia Gassel and Day Tuttle.

References

External links

Hallie Flanagan papers, 1923–1963, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Hallie Davis Flanagan papers, held by Smith College Special Collections
Profile of Flanagan on a website about the Federal Theatre Project
Hallie Flanagan entry on WomenArts.org
Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare. Lesson by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca (Hallie Flanagan is featured in this lesson).