Staging the Clash of Ideologies in Depression-Era Black America
Spoiler alert! This article reveals some major plot points of Big White Fog. If you don’t want to know the ending, we recommend reading this piece after you see the production.
When Big White Fog premiered in 1938 under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), Theodore Ward brought to the American stage one of the most complex portraits of a working-class Black family ever dramatized. Set on Chicago’s South Side in the depths of the Great Depression, the play transforms the domestic space of the Mason household into a crucible for competing visions of racial and economic uplift—Garveyism, capitalism, communism, and gradualist reform. Ward’s staging, both intimate and politically charged, renders the Mason family a microcosm of broader African American debates in the interwar years, debates sharpened by economic collapse and the looming specter of political repression in what would become the Red Scare era.
The Family as Ideological Battleground
At the center stands Victor Mason, a charismatic Garveyite whose worldview is rooted in racial separatism and the belief that dignity can only be reclaimed through a “Back to Africa” movement. His commitment is both a political conviction and a deeply personal moral anchor, shaped by Marcus Garvey’s call to “emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.” Yet the play does not romanticize Victor’s politics. Ward allows us to see both the nobility of his self-determination and the impracticality of his vision in the harsh realities of Depression-era Chicago.
Opposite Victor stands Dan Rogers, his brother-in-law, a small-business advocate of the “American Dream.” Dan’s integrationist capitalism is premised on self-reliance within existing economic structures—structures that the Depression has rendered fragile, if not entirely illusory, for Black entrepreneurs. His gradualism and faith in economic advancement echo the philosophies of Booker T. Washington, filtered through the more precarious conditions of the 1930s.
Victor’s son, Lester Mason, represents a third ideological pole: communist internationalism. Denied a scholarship because of his race, Lester gravitates toward the Communist Party and its vision of interracial working-class solidarity. His political awakening aligns with actual Depression-era history, when the Communist Party in Chicago organized unemployed councils, led integrated anti-eviction protests, and defended the Scottsboro Boys. In Lester, Ward stages the appeal of radical class politics to disenfranchised Black youth.
Finally, Ella Mason, Victor’s wife, is the voice of pragmatic reform. Her politics are grounded less in ideological purity than in the daily struggle to keep her family fed and sheltered. She is not apolitical—her gradualism reflects a belief that progress can be made incrementally—but she views survival as the prerequisite for any broader political program. Ella’s stance resonates with the historical reality of Black women’s labor and civic engagement during the Depression, when navigating relief agencies, churches, and mutual aid networks often took precedence over party politics.
The Federal Theatre Project and the South Side Stage
Ward’s Big White Fog was produced within the FTP’s “Negro Units,” part of a New Deal program that sought to employ theatre professionals during the Depression. The FTP’s sponsorship was politically charged; while it offered unprecedented opportunities for Black playwrights, directors, and actors, it also operated under the scrutiny of a federal government wary of “radical” content. Ward’s decision to stage a multi-sided ideological conflict—without offering a simple resolution—was daring. It suggested that African American political life could not be reduced to a single orthodoxy and that the state itself was implicated in both the possibilities and the limits of these debates.
The play’s setting on Chicago’s South Side underscores this complexity. In the 1930s, the South Side was both a hub of Black cultural life and a site of severe economic marginalization. The Masons’ cramped home becomes a metaphor for the constricted space in which Black political futures must be imagined. Ward’s staging—dialogue-laden confrontations at the kitchen table, private spousal arguments spilling into public disputes—collapses the boundary between personal and political, showing how national ideologies are refracted through the lived experiences of ordinary people.
The Climax: Death and Protest
The ideological tensions erupt in two key events. First, Victor’s fatal confrontation with police during an anti-eviction action dramatizes the lethal repression faced by Black nationalist leadership. While historically Garveyism’s decline was due to multiple factors—internal division, economic collapse, and Garvey’s deportation—Ward condenses this history into a single, searing act of state violence. Victor’s death is not only a personal tragedy but also a symbolic curtailment of militant separatism.
Second, the multiracial crowd that gathers to resist the Masons’ eviction—largely through Lester’s organizing—momentarily embodies the possibility of interracial solidarity. This scene mirrors the historical reality of communist-led anti-eviction campaigns in Chicago, where Black and white neighbors sometimes stood together against landlords and police. Yet Ward resists portraying this as a final victory; it is an emergency coalition born of shared precarity, not a fully realized political realignment.
The Metaphor of the “Big White Fog”
The title’s metaphor operates on multiple levels. On one level, it refers to the Depression’s economic blight, the “fog” that obscures the path forward for working-class families. On another, it names the political uncertainty of African American life in the 1930s—a landscape where no ideology offers a clear and certain route to liberation. Ward’s staging captures this uncertainty not as a failure of vision, but as the lived reality of communities navigating conflicting demands for survival, dignity, and justice.
Relevance in 2025
Eighty-seven years after its premiere, Big White Fog remains uncannily relevant. The ideological conflicts it stages—between nationalism and integration, capitalism and socialism, immediate survival and long-term transformation—still animate debates within African American communities and across the broader United States. In an era marked by widening wealth inequality, resurgent racial nationalism, renewed labor organizing, and political polarization, Ward’s microcosm of the Mason family continues to speak to the dilemmas of coalition-building, the persistence of systemic barriers, and the challenge of imagining freedom under constraint.
In 2025, as in 1938, the “big white fog” has not lifted. The metaphors Ward staged—ideological collision within the intimacy of a family home, solidarity born in moments of crisis, and the shadow of state repression—remain urgent reminders that the struggle over the direction of political life is as much about our households and neighborhoods as it is about the halls of power.
WILLIAM L. BALAN-GAUBERT is a Haitian-born writer, historian, and philosopher who has studied in Haiti, France, and the United States. A former scholar-in-residence and lecturer at the University of Chicago, he has written extensively on Haitian history, political thought, Vodou as ethical life, and the geopolitics of empire. His work is informed by a lifelong commitment to critical thinking, intellectual clarity, and the pursuit of justice for Haiti and its people. He also has a keen interest in theatre and the theatricality of politics.