Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  It is these folk artists that I hope to be able to motivate. They can assist in distributing war information through the following channels: the phonograph record (in the home and on the juke box), the local radio program, the folk church, the folk theatre (the rep theatre, the medicine show, the Mexican religious play, the foreign minority theatre), the many locales for swapping songs, stories and by-words.

  Song was what Alan knew best, and he would start by collecting songs and commercial recordings with war content, surveying hillbilly, black, and Mexican American radio programs, and encouraging the film industry to make short musical films. He planned a two-week trip to the major cities to find the principal singers and composers, work out some new songs with them, then set up the project with the recording, radio, and publishing industries. He’d work to make alliances with several universities, and look for funding with the major foundations. Everything he proposed would take two forms: the local, and the national or international. Alan envisioned local performance settings that would encourage different parts of the community to entertain one another and also strengthen communities. At what he called the “United Nations level”—the nations allied against fascism—he wanted to see more research and collecting among groups like the Mexicans and Eastern Europeans in the United States as a means of connecting to other allies. It was a plan perhaps a bit too grand and novel for his bosses, and they were slow to act on it. Instead, Alan was cast as the house music man, the person you asked about background music for a film or radio show, or if you wanted to know the title of a tune.

  The war was already affecting Alan’s work and throwing blocks in his path: the shellac used in records was now rationed, as were gasoline, oil, and auto parts; recordings for any purpose were becoming harder to make. But there was also the non-war-related issue of the American Federation of Musicians’ ban on recording to stop the use of records on radio in place of live musicians. The ban was in effect between August 1, 1942, and late 1944, and the union was monitoring studios to make sure that no commercial recording took place. In spite of being a government employee who was not engaged in commerce, Alan was unable to do some of the Latin American and Mexican recordings he wanted to make for two programs, “United We Sing” and “Corridos de la Guerra,” and he was warned by the union that any recordings sent up from Mexico would be viewed as bootlegging.

  When Christmas came around, his father reminded Alan that he had not seen his family for three years. His father had met Elizabeth only once. John had been writing him repeatedly, asking if he had received his letters: “As a final mark of indifference you fail to acknowledge money that I send you ... until this last failure is repaired I won’t send you any more money!”

  Alan soon realized he’d transferred into an organization that was even more hierarchic and less flexible than the Library of Congress. OWI was completely occupied with communicating what the war was about to a country that the polls said was not yet convinced of its necessity, trying to assure them that Britain was seriously committed to the conflict, and easing fears of Russia’s seeming overly committed to it. Alan found himself having to answer to upper-level management who were in civilian life corporate broadcast executives with little knowledge of the implications of what he called the patchwork of American culture. Their vision of the country was hopelessly East Coast, he thought, with no notion of what their audiences were making of their programs, and for that matter, little idea of who their audiences actually were. At the start of 1943 he wrote proposal after proposal intended to educate his bosses on what he could do. Some of these suggestions read like manifestos; others appeared to be reports on what he was already doing without their approval. Behind them all was the message that he would not be deterred.

  Among his plans were two fifteen-minute programs of recordings that would communicate war information to poor whites and blacks: “They will contain topical songs about the enemy, the United Nations, the fighting fronts, rationing, the necessity for sacrifice, etc. These songs will be composed and sung by the leading juke box and Southern radio artists, Negro and White, by Negro ministers, Negro choirs, cowboy singers, etc.” He contacted the writers and operators of traveling repertory tent theater groups in hopes of convincing them to produce plays aimed at rural areas and small towns in the Midwest. He proposed that a black newscaster be used on the air in Norfolk, Virginia, as an experiment in integrating the news. Antifascist songs should be recorded in various foreign languages to be used overseas on different fronts of the war, he said, especially the Near East and South Africa. Alan had made a survey of what types of music were popular in these areas and was prepared to find singers in the United States who could record them. He also wanted to compile a songbook of fighting songs, freedom songs, and songs of liberation from all the Allied countries that could be used in schools and communities.

  At the same time, he continued to operate as if he were still working at the library, answering letters forwarded to him and pleading for library or foundation help for people he thought were doing good work. He asked the Rosenwald Foundation to support Woody Guthrie’s writing and the work of two black scholars, William Harrison Pipes at the University of Michigan and his studies of a black Holiness church in Memphis, and Professor Willis James of Spelman College for his research on folk song in Georgia. He was also lining up experts whom he felt could help with “wartime issues among isolated groups of Americans.”

  By March it was clear to him that his ideas were not being accepted with much enthusiasm, and even his plans for radio programs for the South were being cut. Instead of his campaign to reach people on the margins of society on their own terms, the OWI was planning to mail out informational bulletins to local media and “to insert ‘Buy War Bonds’ in the middle of a Camel ad.” When he saw what was happening, he wrote William B. Lewis, the deputy director of the Domestic Division of the Office of War Information, a former vice president of CBS:

  I still don’t see how you can do the job of reaching underprivileged Americans without (a) budget, (b) planning linked up with the rest of the OWI programs, (c) vigorous administrative backing. Sending out the bulletin you mention to the people whose help we need in reaching these special groups would, I fear, be like throwing into the sea a bottle containing an angry note to Adolf Hitler. In this field one has to work either by example (i.e. transcriptions, church services, etc.) or better, by personal contact. What budgetary considerations seem to have pushed us into is a policy of reaching largely those Americans who are already reached by commercial channels, and of giving them information much of which they’d get anyway.... My mistake in OWI was that I assumed when I was hired that my plans had been approved in advance and that means for immediate action would be provided. This was awfully naïve of me. The failure of my projects has been due as much as anything to my failure to get a hearing for them. I thought that time was too short. I do not now want to continue to feel useless. If there is nothing in OWI for me to do, I want to get out and get closer to the job of killing Fascists. The problems of the South are still there and something might be done if a group of people like Arthur Raper (FSA [Farm Security Administration]), Lewis Jones (OWI), and Don Young (Army Specialist Corps) got together with us and decided on an action program that would get OWI backing. The Southern local station job remains to be tackled, if you can give me the authority to tackle it. But I don’t want to just be kept on. If you are convinced nothing can and will be done, let me know, because in that event I want to resign at once. I know you’re busy as hell now and I will be too, for about ten days more. Let me hear from you, if possible, by then.

  Despite his misgivings, Alan did succeed in getting on the air more than a hundred hours of radio shows of antifascist and morale-boosting songs featuring Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Woody, and others in the Lomax circle. He also managed to complete a three-hundred-page mimeographed volume of Freedom Songs of the United Nations, a collection of texts and a descriptive bibliography of what he called “democratic
songs” that he had developed from materials in the United Nations Information Center in New York with the help of Svatava Pirkova Jakobson, a Czech folklorist and translator and the wife of the émigré linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson.

  Away from the eight-hour days at OWI, Alan was producing and performing in clubs and concerts, some of which were quite elaborate: “In Time of Battle,” for example, at Town Hall on April 18, was a concert that offered music as a weapon in the war. Symphonic works by Ives, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich were performed, Jewish folk songs by the People’s Philharmonic Chorus, and songs sung by Alan, Josh White, Lead Belly, and Earl Robinson that ended with an audience sing-along.

  Alan’s unhappiness at work grew to the point that he applied for a passport, with rather vague plans for touring Europe, and maybe becoming a war correspondent. After he gave his father as a reference, John was asked to come to the State Department to sign papers in support of the application. He did so, but then wrote Alan and chided him about it. Seeing no future left for himself at the OWI, Alan knew he would soon be called up for the draft. While he was waiting he considered returning to his old job at the library, but that would mean that Ben Botkin, his replacement at the archive, a man he liked, would have to be let go just so that he could have his job for the short time before induction.

  His dilemma was solved when he got a call from the Columbia Broadcasting System offering him a job that would pay him $8,000 a year ($71,705 in contemporary dollars) and also make him eligible for a deferment. He was to be one of the writers and editors for Transatlantic Call: People to People, a program that CBS conceived as a means of building friendly relations with the United Kingdom. CBS and the BBC would each produce its own biweekly programs that would be aired in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The American contributions would be built around subjects such as “American Heroes in Song,” “The Indians of New Mexico,” or “Lumbering in the State of Washington,” and would each originate in a different city. It was a big and high-budget series, and CBS backed it with their best efforts, using Norman Corwin as the lead writer and on-air commentator. Alan and the other writers’ job was to arrive two weeks before a broadcast, survey the area, conduct interviews, and then write the scripts in time for them to be approved by the Office of War Information, the Censorship Department of the United States Armed Services, and other oversight groups. As the series progressed, it changed to a more complex format, shifting to a split program, with fifteen minutes from New York and fifteen minutes from London, maybe with both segments describing a wartime Sunday in the two countries’ capitals; or a visit to two schools; or backstage in a British music hall and a look at the movie industry in Hollywood.

  Because the Office of War Information had a stake in the series, it saw no problem with giving Alan leave and requesting a continuing deferment until December 31, 1943. On May 1 Alan officially went on leave, although the last day he actually worked for the government was April 17; he was scheduled to begin his new job on June 30, and until then he wrote for CBS freelance and borrowed advances on his radio salary. The timing of this new position not only got him out of an unhappy situation, but one that was doomed: by 1944 the budget for the domestic branch of the OWI was cut so deeply that it could barely function, and by September it was closed down.

  The first of the new CBS/BBC programs—on Savannah, Georgia—was broadcast on June 6, and Alan wrote his father that “the program, as I hear it, was not very good; but most of that was faulty direction and not my responsibility—though some was due to my amateurish script.” It was at this point that Norman Corwin withdrew from the series because of illness, and Alan took his place. After his first two shows as chief writer and on-air commentator, Alan wrote his father about the weight of responsibility he was feeling:

  I had worked for ten days practically continuously on the Spokane show. It was the hardest one to date because I had only four days to find the material and write the script. You see those shows have to be cleared by about 8 or 9 agencies—Censorship, War & Navy, WPIS, CBS, all the local plants involved, etc. And so they have to be done & ready for inspection four or five days ahead of time. I wrote this one in about 36 hours and so high on coffee at one A.M. when I finished I didn’t get to sleep until the next night.... I continue to have my personal troubles. Two stations have complained about me because I failed to wear my coat into the dining room of some local hotel. I’ve been fighting about this for the last two days. Two weeks ago I had censorship troubles. These stuff-shirt bastards who are supposed to run the world can’t keep their hands off anybody who comes around them. They have kept me in a G-D emotional turmoil for the past three weeks when I should have all my time for my job. The particular s-o-b finally forgave me for the coat deal when he found out I had never belonged to a fraternity in college. The little snob. I wanted to smack him and instead I grinned and took it.

  On the other hand, the producer of the BBC portion of the programs, D. Geoffrey Bridson, loved his work: “In the first of [Lomax’s] Transatlantic Call productions, American actuality came alive: he spoke the same language and sang the same songs as Americans everywhere. More to the point, he was able to help them speak that language into a microphone, and to get the full flavor of their characters across. The shows that he handled came over with the same American impress as the prose of Thomas Wolfe or the poetry of Whitman. He could interpret America because he was so American himself.... I never knew any American who more fully embodied the virtues—and the more engaging vices—of all his countrymen.”

  When he took on the program on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Alan threw himself into it like an ethnographer who had only three days to learn everything about a very large group of diverse people. He mapped the streets, took notes on people’s ages, national origins, jobs, and entertainment, saw what they bought and sold, participated in their street life. He interviewed a lawyer who ran a free legal aid office, listened in on people’s opinions about anything and everything, recorded arguments over baseball and politics, women’s personal love stories, pushcart peddlers’ spiels, and spent a day at the Henry Street Settlement House. When he saw a parade of a marching band, majorettes, faculty, and student body leaving a high school he fell in behind them and followed them to the American Red Cross, where they presented a new ambulance the school had raised the money to buy. While he was in the streets he wrote down what the signs and placards said, and recorded games and children’s songs and jokes, many of them on the subject of the war. At Katz’s Deli on Houston Street, where they had recently put up a sign in the window that would become part of New York City lore—“Send a salami to your boy in the army”—the manager read him letters from servicemen begging to be put on the list. Alan managed to get most of it into his script, and also admitted that though he had lived in New York for a few years, he had never been on the Lower East Side and wasn’t even sure where it began and ended. In the flush of his new discovery he wrote a glowing tribute to a virtual utopia:

  This is a neighborhood of people who have known persecution and poverty and family troubles. This is a neighborhood of friendly people where the Rotary Club label of “self-made man” really fits. This is a neighborhood of night schools and hard jobs and small incomes and dreary walk-up flats. This is a neighborhood that is deeply religious. You’ll have to look far and wide before you can find one where there is as much tolerance and warmth and mutual understanding. But out of it has come hundreds and thousands of our leading citizens in all walks of life.

  As Alan was leaving OWI, their office’s chief investigations officer had requested that the FBI start another investigation of him, and its agents retraced their first inquiries back to Harvard, the University of Texas, and Washington to reinterview people who knew him and to reexamine his records. By the time they forwarded copies of their reports to the OWI on July 17, Alan had been added to the list of alleged Communists drawn up by Texas representative Martin Dies’s Co
mmittee Investigating Un-American Activities, which declared him to have been a member of the National Student League, the Washington Book Store, and the Washington Committee for Democratic Action, all of them targets of anti-Communist forces.

  After conducting their investigation the FBI wrote its own biography of Alan Lomax. He was possessed of an “artistic temperament”; a “Bohemian,” “singlemindedly devoted to folk music”; “ornery”; he was not “discreet” in his choice of words; and was slovenly in appearance. He was “intensely interested” in Negro and “underprivileged classes”; was sometimes slow to pay his rent; had several arguments with his father “on the Negro question, wherein he termed his father as a fascist and himself as a communist on this question, his father being anti-Negro minded”; and he was “known to associate with a Negro by the name of ‘Lead Belly’ who was released from a southern penitentiary.”

  He was accused of treating the Library of Congress’s recording equipment roughly in the field; “tries to live within his means but due to the limited salary he was paid by the Library of Congress and his lack of appreciation of money values, he had a difficult time”; his wife was reported to be more politically liberal than he, but “that the great desire and ambition to collect folk lore music overshadows any political influence his wife may exercise upon him”; he was an outstanding writer; but had no hobbies; was never known to be a drinker, though his father was accused of intoxication and “breaking up the furniture” on weekends; he was “always singing peculiar songs of a Western or Negro type” or reading books. He had “considerable company in his apartment and on three or four nights a week there was a great amount of singing and music emanating from his apartment (the neighbors enjoyed it, but his landlord did not).” Each of the investigators found Lomax to be described by those who knew him as a “rugged individualist” and a loyal American. The investigators had finally accepted that Lomax, like many in what was called the Cultural Front, was too independent and undisciplined to ever be completely loyal to a single party or ideology. The FBI nevertheless continued to quietly trail him for the next sixteen years.