In December 1941—the same month when Lead Belly and Josh White opened at the Village Vanguard and Jean Evans filed for divorce—the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Ray landed not in the army but in clover: with another good government radio job and a new boss—John Houseman—whose helpfulness and influence would outstrip that of any previous mentor or friend.
Nearly forty—a decade older than Ray—John Houseman was physically imposing: tall, elegant, always impeccably dressed, with pale bue eyes, aristocratic eyebrows, and a plummy, vaguely English accent. Behind the scenes he was the ablest of producers: “A great animator,” in the words of Norman Lloyd, “he could make things happen.” Houseman had helped many great things happen during his time with Orson Welles, including the Negro Theatre Project, the stage and radio productions of the Mercury Theatre, and a little picture called Citizen Kane, directed by Welles and produced by Houseman, which had premiered in May 1941.
By the end of 1941, though, Houseman was estranged from Welles and treading water in Hollywood under ill-defined contract to David O. Selznick. He was helping director Pare Lorentz prepare a documentary about the conditions of production-line industrial workers when a telegram arrived summoning him to the White House. In Washington, Houseman met with two men: playwright Robert Sherwood, a speechwriter and aide to President Roosevelt who was heading up the new Foreign Information Service to channel war news overseas, and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a decorated World War I hero and career intelligence officer who was serving as a national security coordinator. They asked Houseman to organize the Overseas Radio Bureau under the Office of War Information, a division to be known as the Voice of America.
Quite apart from his impressive résumé in film, theater, and, crucially, broadcasting, Houseman held three nationalities before the age of twenty-one. In his words, he was “Rumanian by birth, French by inheritance, English by upbringing and naturalization.” He knew Europe and spoke “French, German and Spanish and a smattering of Italian,” which would aid his assignment to disseminate wartime propaganda to multiple foreign nations.
Houseman immediately foresaw the value of “music as an instrument of propaganda” and he began planning to incorporate “a lot of music” into Voice of America broadcasts “in order to convince everybody—our allies, our enemies—that we were brothers under the skin.” A fan of Back Where I Come From who recognized his own limitations as a musical expert, Houseman called Ray to Washington as soon as he’d accepted the Voice of America job and asked him to run the bureau’s music branch. He also recruited the Lomaxes; the Voice of America would be headquartered in New York, but Houseman wanted Alan Lomax and his wife Elizabeth as advisers. (Alan’s sister Bess would relocate to New York to organize the music library for the broadcasts.)
Ray was gung-ho about the job, talking it over with Houseman and the Lomaxes. (Corresponding with Woody Guthrie on December 13, 1941, Alan wrote, “Nick always looks happier outside of New York.”) Up to this time Ray and Houseman had enjoyed only a passing acquaintance through mutual friends like Joseph Losey and Elia Kazan. As they brainstormed ideas for the Voice of America at the Washington meetings, though, their chemistry was fast and electric.
The laid-back Houseman was an enabler; Ray had management experience as well as pent-up energy and a bottomless well of ideas. Houseman would define the parameters, but Ray was ready for action. In Washington, Alan Lomax helped pass the torch to a new partnership: Houseman and Ray. Neither of them could have imagined the path and heights that partnership would reach.
Houseman flew back to Hollywood to arrange his personal affairs and vacate his house. Ray returned to New York, soon moving into temporary offices at the Foreign Information Service at 270 Madison Avenue. The important job—and its annual $3,800 salary—turned a new page in his career.
With America at war, the Voice of America had to make a running, jumping start. As soon as possible in the New Year, the radio propaganda bureau had to assemble the manpower and technology necessary to beam “close to a thousand shows a day in twenty-two languages including Swahili,” in Houseman’s words, to armed forces and civilians overseas. Brief segments of daily news—carefully written and vetted before delivery by actors—would be interspersed with music and drama and features. The BBC helped initially by lending its transatlantic medium-wave transmitters to the nascent American operation for several hours a day.
As with the Works Progress Administration, the talent wasn’t all that hard to collect. The famous and destined-for-fame rushed to volunteer. A complete accounting of all the Voice of America personnel, in Houseman’s words, would boast “native and foreign luminaries—journalists, authors, poets, designers, publishers, executives, actors, musicians, economists, philosophers, educators and financiers—of such celebrity in their past and future careers that it is almost impossible to believe that they were all assembled under one roof.”
By midsummer of 1942, the Voice of America was on its feet and going strong. After a few months of Madison Avenue occupancy, the radio bureau took over the entire General Motors Argonaut Building on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Broadway, including a storefront that once had been a Cadillac showroom. The staff ballooned to three thousand people.
One of the people joining the talent stream was Constance Ernst, the daughter of American Civil Liberties Union cofounder Morris L. Ernst. A beautiful young woman whose dark eyes stared out from under a black mop of hair, Ernst had an executive mind and a can-do attitude to equal Ray’s. After graduating from Bennington College, she had tried an acting career before landing backstage at the Mercury Theatre. Houseman knew her from the Mercury, and after that Ernst had been instrumental behind the scenes of the short-lived Cabaret TAC and then as a producer in radio for Norman Corwin. She could write, she could produce, and in a pinch Ernst could act or sing. Ray swiftly homed in on her to produce his music-oriented shows, and just as swiftly he fell head over heels. The two became inseparable.
Ernst was in charge of several Voice of America staple programs, including a series called States of the Union, based on Federal Writers Project guides to the states, and another mixing common people and celebrities on a panel that fielded burning questions on the war and American society. As Houseman anticipated, once again Ray’s work went far beyond his job description. He ran the music division but took a hand in virtually everything else. He worked over Ernst’s scripts, as well as those for other Voice of America broadcasts; conducted man-on-the-street interviews for news and features; and staged dramatic vignettes for the microphone.
His primary task was organizing the music for all the broadcasts—from background music for general programming to whole shows entirely devoted to music. Some of the music they used was prerecorded; some was performed “live” in the studio under Ray’s direction. Some of the songs were traditional folk music; others were original, written to order on wartime topics.
All of Ray’s New York folksinger friends joined the broadcasts. Among the Voice of America mainstays were Earl Robinson, Lead Belly, and the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie and a newcomer to the group, Oklahoma protest singer Sis Cunningham. The folksingers—dubbed “the barefoot brigade” inside the building for their informal wardrobe—drew on much the same repertoire they’d been grinding out at the Almanac House and for political benefits: work songs, battle songs, patriotic songs, songs condemning Nazis, and, increasingly, songs promoting the antifascist underground resistance in Europe, which very often involved Communists, and the bravery of America’s new Soviet allies. (Pete Seeger sang the Russian national anthem for the Voice of America—in Russian, no less.)
Ray was still in and out of the Almanac House in the first half of 1942, and he staged a Town Hall concert in late June that offered a compendium of the Voice of America approach. Sponsored by Native Son author Richard Wright under the aegis of the Negro Publication Society, the concert featured Lead Belly, blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and the Almanac Singers, sharing the stage with amateu
rs in military uniform or workingman’s garb. Earl Robinson was the emcee of the show; Lee Hays and Millard Lampell wrote the script. A swing band was on the bill (the Nazis had denounced jazz as degenerate) but another musical highlight extolled the Red Army, which in the summer of 1942 was taking heavy losses battling Hitler in the Ukraine. “The wonderful ‘Red Cavalry’ song from Russia” generated storms of applause, as Howard Taubman wrote in the New York Times. It “almost stopped” the show.
Not everyone was happy about America’s marriage of convenience with Stalin, however. The Voice of America programming, along with public events like the Town Hall concert, spurred a persistent rearguard attack from citizens and organizations pushing their anti-Communist views. Among these were “certain groups in exile and organized groups of hyphenated Americans,” in Houseman’s words, that were already jockeying for power in a postwar Europe.
It was Houseman’s job to mediate disputes concerning the content of the radio shows, and in his autobiography he recounts a “most bizarre” example that involved Ray—Ray’s politics and cleverness. The radio bureau had produced a program saluting Michigan as part of its States of the Union series, focusing largely on Detroit and “the hundreds of thousands of skilled workers freely organized in a great voluntary union—the United Auto Workers of the C.I.O.,” in Houseman’s words. This created an opportunity for a union song, and Ray suggested one he knew from his Brookwood Labor College days—“UAW-CIO”—sung by militants during the sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s.
As the recording was being pressed, however, Houseman fielded a call from the man in charge of labor relations for the Voice of America. Louis Cowan tremblingly relayed the complaint of James Petrillo, head of the Musicians Local 802 of the American Federation of Labor. “Some craft-union fink in our building must have denounced us to Petrillo,” Houseman wrote, “who was now charging us with favoring the C.I.O. over the A.F.L. in our overseas propaganda, thus proving ourselves to be radical and subversive if not outright Communistic.” Petrillo threatened to rescind the Voice of America’s free access to music and musicians.
Alarmed, Houseman sent for Ray, Connie Ernst, Bess Lomax, and the Almanac Singers. “They took it calmly,” wrote Houseman, noting “that Michigan was known as a C.I.O. state and, furthermore, that the A.F.L. was such a square, old-fashioned outfit that it did not even have a marching song of its own. However, if necessary, they would be delighted to create one.”
The barefoot brigade marched off under Ray’s command. By midafternoon they had returned with “a shiny new acetate entitled ‘A.F.L.—The One and Only!’ ” Houseman recalled, “a standard marching song with banal lyrics, but it was executed with the same zest as the offending C.I.O. recording.” Houseman phoned Petrillo, assuring him that he’d “been misinformed: an A.F.L. song every bit as rousing as the offending C.I.O. record had been in the Voice of America’s library for weeks and had been frequently beamed overseas.” He sent it over to Petrillo, who called back “delighted with the song and said he was recommending it for general use among the craft unions. And the O.W.I. continued to enjoy the free use of Union-recorded music.”
Most of the anti-Red groups, Houseman felt, weren’t simply opposed to Communism; they were the same rabidly illiberal interest groups that had been dead set against the New Deal from the beginning. “It sometimes seemed,” he wrote, “as if there were two wars being fought—our officially declared, national war against the Axis, and that other bloodless, continuing conflict between Roosevelt’s New Deal and its enemies, who had grown increasingly frustrated and embittered during the ten years of his presidency.”
The OWI was undoubtedly filled with people with “radical leanings,” in Houseman’s words, but he didn’t care. Houseman wasn’t alone in thinking that the former or current Communists were often the most dedicated workers with the sharpest minds. The Communists “talked sense,” recalled author Howard Fast, who contributed to the daily newscasts; “they understood the forces involved in the war, and their positions were always constructive.”
Was Ray himself still a Communist? That is unclear. By the time of the Voice of America, he probably had left the Party. The Hitler-Stalin Pact prompted a mass exodus, especially among Jews; many more quit when America entered World War II. Ray was tight-lipped about it. “We never really discussed politics,” Ernst, herself not a Communist, recalled. “He lived his life very much in compartments—he was very masculine in that.”*
The anti-Communist attacks on the Voice of America waxed and waned, and Houseman concluded that the opposition was pesky but manageable. Along with the so-called civic groups who monitored the radio propaganda bureau, however, the U.S. government still had pockets of resistance that worked independently of President Roosevelt and stubbornly subverted New Deal policies. Some of these made a veritable religion of anti-Communism. One was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Early in 1942, shortly after accepting his Voice of America post, Ray became the subject of his first known background check by the FBI. That is the date of the first document that exists in his FBI files, released to this author under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines.
Ray had likely been under intermittent FBI surveillance since his radical awakening in La Crosse. A confidential source gave his name to the Dies Committee as far back as 1938, when Congress was rooting around for Communists infesting the Federal Theatre Project. FBI memos in 1942 traced the full arc of Ray’s pre–Voice of America career: his involvement in the Theatre of Action and the Living Newspaper; his brief teaching stint at Brookwood Labor College; his conspicuous employment by the Works Progress Administration in Washington, D.C.; along with the suspicion that Ray lived in a house hosting a Communist cell group, with Red literature bundled in the basement.
The memos note that Ray was once employed by CBS, though it doesn’t mention whether the FBI contacted network boss William Paley or spread any rumors about Ray and others involved in Back Where I Come From that might have spurred cancellation of the radio series. (It remains a distinct possibility.) Curiously, perhaps for lack of inside informants, Ray’s FBI file contains no mention of the Almanac House, where Ray had bedded down sporadically since late 1940.
At least once, Ray himself was questioned about his loyalties and politics. Asked in a 1975 interview whether he had ever been personally hassled by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Ray sidestepped the query, answering flippantly that he had been “thoroughly investigated” by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during wartime. (The OSS, precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, was run by Voice of America sponsor William “Wild Bill” Donovan under the auspices of the OWI.) “ ‘On the night of so and so, such and such a young lady was seen to enter your apartment at 8:30 at night and not leave until eight the next morning. What do you have to say to that?’ ‘It was a delightful evening.’ There were lots of questions like that. Finally, I said, ‘Gentlemen, when I volunteered to serve the United States in this war I was not asked to take a vow of celibacy.’ But they knew every goddamned thing about me.”
The FBI scoured Ray’s life, including his postal, bank, and police records, looking for aberrations. The investigation took months, carrying on until the late summer of 1942. In August the FBI drafted an official letter to government and law enforcement officials, classifying Ray as a proven Communist and recommending him and a long list of others for a secret “B-2” rating in government records, indicating their special level of “dangerousness” to America. Ray and others on the B-2 list, according to the FBI, were legitimate candidates for “custodial detention in view of the existing emergency,” i.e. the war.
This letter, urging detention for the program director for the Eastern Press and Radio Section of the Office of War Information—Ray’s official title—was signed by none other than J. (John) Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. Hoover routed the letter to the chief of the Special War Policies Unit in D.C. and the special agent in charge of t
he New York bureau of the FBI, while copying it to higher-ups in the Justice Department. Then he sat back and waited for approval to act.
Ray knew about the background check but not about its alarming result.
Most FBI files are full of assumptions and errors—even ludicrous whoppers—and the agency certainly got it wrong when they reported, in late summer 1942, that the dangerous Communist running the music branch of the Voice of America was living with his wife and young son in an East Village flat.
In fact, Ray’s divorce was moving along, and by the end of the summer he had moved in with Connie Ernst. Ray was back to his best smiling self, and Ernst was a big reason. While his lightness of heart was always ephemeral, hers was permanent. Serious and purposeful at work, she was invariably fun-loving and exuberant after hours. “She reminded me of a family of ponies bouncing around a field of daisies,” wrote a friend who knew her later in London.
The two treasured their breaks and worked long past quitting time. Sometimes they’d try to catch the last movie of the night, often the latest Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s plot-driven pictures were the opposite of Ray’s own later films, but everyone loved a Hitchcock film; the director had even turned a folklorist-musicologist into the hero of The Lady Vanishes.
After the show, the couple often ended up at a favorite East Side restaurant for pasta. Houseman and other Voice of America personnel from the Argonaut Building would drift in for “midnight meetings,” in Houseman’s words, which “took on something of the character of a club or secret society.” Years later, Ernst recalled that the group was like a tight-knit family, “ingrown and incestuous.” Ray and his friends felt they were helping to win the war: In his memoir, Houseman pronounced his time with the OWI and the Voice of America “one of the most satisfying affairs of my life,” a period he spent in a “state of perpetual exhilaration.”
Nicholas Ray Page 12