Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  He was careful to identify his political position, which was a sensible precaution. The FBI and its informers, now hot on his trail, had no doubt as to where Welles’s sympathies lay, even though they could never quite pin anything on him. ‘The scaly dinosaurs of reaction,’ Welles said, ‘will print it in their papers that I am a Communist. Communists know otherwise. I am an overpaid movie producer with pleasant reasons to rejoice – and I do – in the wholesome practicability of the profit system … surely my right to having more than enough is cancelled if I don’t use that more to help those who have less. This sense of humanity’s interdependence ante-dates Karl Marx.’ Describing the war as ‘the current plot against liberty’, he avers, in classic Popular Front phraseology, that ‘when all the fascist armies have formally surrendered, the end of fascism will still be out of sight’. As so often in his speeches, he consciously used the references of his profession – ‘This world fight is no melodrama. An armistice is no happy ending’ – and concluded with some ringing curtain lines: ‘The people well know that Peace is harder won than war … none of us will live to see a blameless peace. Our children’s children are the ancestors of a free people. We send our greetings ahead of us to them. To history yet unmade our greetings. To the generations sleeping in our loins, be of good heart, our children! The fight is worth it.’

  The response to this speech was enormous, both from individuals and from organisations. Identifying herself as a black woman, Muriel Miller wrote to say that she honestly felt ‘that it was one of the most tremendous talks of all time and regret that it was not broadcast for the nation’;34 another member of the audience testified to Welles’s perhaps unexpected seriousness: ‘You were confronted by almost insuperable conditions.35 The audience had been exhausted by an intolerably long program. What they had been led to expect from you was more entertainment and they were not in a mood for more entertainment. The manner in which you were introduced was no help. – And yet you prevailed, and delivered an address that was a masterpiece of genuine eloquence, intensely and convincingly personal, but with the speaker standing behind rather than in front of his message.’ Someone else told him that, as a political speaker, ‘you’re a red-hot potato’.36 The Packinghouse Workers, perhaps surprised to find such a glamorous figure so wholeheartedly adopting a radical line, praised him for his ‘liberal and courageous remarks’, adding that ‘we wish you to know that we deeply appreciate your comments and your position regarding the common men and women in America’.37 His words had redoubled their enthusiasm ‘in their fight for a free and liberal labor movement in America’. Polly, of the United Automobile Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers, obviously had her doubts: ‘I’d give anything to know if you really believe what you so convincingly said – please tell me and the big fraudulent “ego” bubble of the paltry press will be burst in the hearts of all your avid followers who will see you in a true light for the first time.’38 Nevertheless, she still signed off ‘Fraternally yours’. The Trade Union Press headed its report: PLAIN TALK BY THE MAN FROM MARS.39 There were many requests for copies of the speech, not least from the Vice-President; before long it was printed as a pamphlet by the Chicago United Nations Committee to Win the Peace.

  It seemed as if Welles’s entry into the arena of political speech-making was to be every bit as spectacular and precocious as his entries into the professional theatre and film-making. His speech to the Overseas Press Club was printed in Elsa Maxwell’s widely syndicated column: something of a harangue, it first dwells on the word ‘fascism’ and its interpretation. Then he pauses to consider the nature of the enemy. ‘The armies of our united nations seem pretty sure by now that they’re going to lick the hell out of the fascists.40 It seems the only question is: how soon? Here’s another question: are we fighting all the fascists?’ He notes that the Allies are doing business with fascists, and the fascist view has its spokesmen both in the press and in the government:

  I hope no one will understand me to have said that we have a fascist administration or a proto-fascist journalism. I merely repeat an opinion widely held, that our free press is sometimes and in some places in the hands of freedom’s enemies. If you ask me the names of the enemies of freedom, I will answer that this is your job and thank you for doing so much of that job so very well. The freedom to take away freedom is the fifth freedom, and the hope of the fifth column. Against this assault on freedom stands the free press. I am here in the name of your readers to celebrate that stand.

  He speaks with real urgency, even if it is a little difficult to imagine what the assembled hardened journalists can have made of it. ‘The advocates of defeat – the isolationists, the counter-isolationists – are preparing for [democratic man] a terrible burden of despair. You can lighten that burden.’ Again, education is his central theme. ‘You are the scouts – mark his path for him, and mark it well. Name his enemies. Teach him the value of his vote – believe in him as he believes in you.’

  Welles’s inclination to speak on behalf of mankind was even more strikingly indulged when he addressed the Soviet-American Congress. In a memo, he had promised that he would acknowledge ‘the debt our theatre and motion pictures, our writing and our music owe to the genius of the Soviet generation’,41 reassuring the organisers that ‘the speech will be very short and will be wholly uncontroversial politically’. In the event, it was uncontroversial to the extent that it endorsed the new-found rapprochement between the two governments, but in the course of doing so Welles smuggled in a number of somewhat contentious statements about the relationship between art and society. Entitled to speak, he says, only by ‘my own small work’, he identifies the artist’s duty: ‘he speaks for his nation to all the nations.42 He goes before the diplomat into far lands, interprets for the races of man, translates for the generations, declares for the people.’ Then, in the strangely archaic prose considered de rigueur at such gatherings, he roundly declares that ‘who speaks for an interest but not the peoples’ – he is no artist. He is a hack and a whore’ – a phrase that would surely have made Stalin’s cultural commissar Zhdanov positively beam. He insists that ‘the men and women of Russia could not fight as they fight now for freedom without owning it’. America and Russia are friends, he says, ‘because we are free’.

  Welles was hardly alone on the radical Left in his idealisation of the Soviet Union; his friend Marc Blitzstein, in particular, had inculcated in him a deep respect for the Stalinist experiment. But something oddly thuggish and menacing enters his tone as he denounces the lawyers – ‘the gangster lawyers’ – who, he predicts, will filibuster at the peace. ‘The people will remember them,’ he says, ominously. ‘They have good cause who would divide us. They are the enemy. The people will remember them and have their way with them.’ This has the feeling of a speech from Danton’s Death, the Büchner play he had directed in 1937 (whose production, ironically enough, the Communist Party had tried to prevent); it is quite unlike the urbane and persuasive Welles of some of his other political utterances, but it exemplifies a tone that surfaces in his speeches from time to time – hectoring, bullying, threatening. He was a natural chameleon, setting out, as his revealing remarks to Kathleen Tynan indicate, to please his audience: if this was his aim, his Soviet-American speech was a triumph.

  For all his emotional enthusiasm for the USSR, the goons of the FBI were quite wrong to suspect Welles of communism (though reading this speech, they may be forgiven their error). His radicalism had nothing to do with Marxist-Leninism, whose authoritarian prescriptions were personally insufferable to him, and everything to do with classical prescriptions of liberty, equality and fraternity, modified by a peculiarly American sense of justice and an instinctive internationalism. Thus racism, imperialism and corporate tyranny were all anathema to him. He was moved by the idealism of Blitzstein and Co., and inspired by what he took to be Russia’s collective endeavour to eliminate ancestral injustice. But his intellectual models were closer to home. As his mind became increasingly eng
aged by politics, he moved rapidly away from the non-aligned position of his early twenties, via a brief flirtation with communism, to a stance that was non-doctrinaire but highly consistent, and passionately – almost obsessively – held. ‘Elsa,’ Welles told Elsa Maxwell over supper one night, as she reported to her readers in the New York Post, ‘having a theatre and putting on plays is FUN.43 But working for the cause of human liberty against reactionism and retrogression is the most serious job I can do today, and I know you agree with me for you are fighting for the same thing yourself. The theatre must wait for a few months until I see what part I have to play in this greater drama, no matter how small the part may be.’

  The part Welles had in mind was not small at all, in fact. ‘I thought I was going to be King of the World, you know,’ he told Kathleen Tynan.44 ‘No: I thought I would be President.’ He had acquired, at around the same time, both a political hero and a political mentor; their joint influence amounted to a political conversion of sorts. The example of these two radically different men helped him, in the one case to crystallise his views, and in the other to learn to think politically. Between them – one unconsciously and at a distance, the other by direct instruction – his hero and his mentor led him far away from his former haunts of Hollywood and Broadway, so far that it seemed that he might forsake them permanently for a political life.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It All Comes Out of the Tent of Wonder

  THE HERO WAS Henry A. Wallace, since 1940 Roosevelt’s unlikely Vice-President – that uncommon figure, a politician who genuinely disliked politics. A visionary, both politically and scientifically, Wallace was acknowledged even by his enemies, of whom there were a great many, to have been the greatest Secretary of Agriculture of the century. As an agronomist he had pioneered hybrid corn, transforming the production of food and guaranteeing the prosperity of the farming industry – and thus of America itself – for generations to come. Privately, he was a searching philosopher of a somewhat mystical religious bent, and chronically indifferent to political manoeuvring, a weakness that would ultimately unseat him. In 1942, however, when Welles and he first met, he was – as controller of the wartime Economic Defense Board – almost as powerful as the increasingly unwell President himself; the New York Times dubbed him the ‘Assistant President’.

  Welles’s initial contact with Wallace seems to have been fleeting; but by 1943 he was in regular contact with him, advising him, for example, on the use of slides in visual propaganda. But more significant than any personal contact the two men may have had was Welles’s response to the vision adumbrated by Wallace in his speeches. Despite his private reclusiveness, Wallace was an exceptionally charismatic figure and a compelling public speaker, never more so than in the speech he had delivered in 1942 as a riposte to ‘The American Century’, Henry Luce’s influential and consciously provocative Life magazine editorial of the same year. In the piece, Luce had laid out in the most unqualified terms a view of America’s place in the world. ‘America must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world,’ he had asserted.1 ‘America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skilful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice – out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.’ But that was only the beginning. ‘The vision of America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas,’ he continued, ‘the vision of America as the dynamic leader of world trade, has within it the possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination. Let us rise to its tremendous possibilities.’ Luce’s apparently idealistic world-view was in its essence steeped in a realpolitik profoundly inimical to the radical Left. It offered a scenario that contained all the Left’s worst fears – a continuation of the old dispensation based on latent antagonism of interests, which would and could only be resolved on the battlefield – ‘nor need we assume that war can be abolished … large sections of the human family may be effectively organised into opposition to each other’. Luce’s peroration as an unashamed paean to American supremacy: ‘we must accept whole-heartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit’.

  Luce’s intemperate and vainglorious assertion of the values of capitalism, red in tooth and claw, caused widespread repugnance (to the publisher’s wounded surprise); but it provoked a speech from Wallace that provided the battle-cry for Welles and his generation of radicals, their Gettysburg Address. Wallace’s speech was entitled ‘The Price of Free World Victory’, but it soon came to be known by another title. ‘This is a fight between a slave world and a free world,’ Wallace said of the war in progress:2

  Just as the United States in 1862 could not remain half slave and half free, so in 1942 the world must make its decision for a complete victory one way or another … everywhere the common people are on the march. When the freedom-loving people march – when the farmers have an opportunity to buy land at reasonable prices and to sell the produce of the land through their own organisations, when workers have the opportunity to form unions and bargain through them collectively, and when the children of all the people have an opportunity to attend schools which teach them truths of the real world in which they live – when these opportunities are open to everyone, then the world moves ahead … some have spoken of the American Century. I say that the century on which we are entering – the century which will come out of this war – can be and must be the century of the common man.

  This last potent phrase immediately became the radicals’ slogan; Welles would return to it again and again. ‘Everywhere,’ Wallace continued, ‘the common man must learn to build his own industries with his own hands in a practical fashion. Everywhere the common man must learn to increase his productivity so that he and his children can eventually pay to the world community all that they have so far received. No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialisation, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.’ With precise eloquence, he repudiated Luce’s national Darwinism: ‘There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the US are no more a master race than the Nazis.’ His global vision was essentially inclusive: ‘Those who write the peace must think of the whole world.’ It was a crusade, one in which Welles enlisted unhesitatingly. ‘There can be no half measures … no compromise with Satan is possible. We shall not rest until all the victims under the Nazi yoke are freed. We shall fight for a complete peace as well as a complete victory. The people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it. They cannot prevail, for on the side of the people is the Lord.’ Wallace was no more a Marxist than Welles, as might be inferred from the strongly religious tenor of his Common Man speech, but (somewhat gulled by his visits to carefully stage-managed model villages on one of his many fact-finding tours of the world) he enthusiastically embraced the positive aspects of Soviet communism. ‘Russia, perceiving some of he abuses of excessive political democracy, has placed strong emphasis on economic democracy,’ he wrote, somewhat ingenuously, in his Tribute to Russia. ‘This, carried to an extreme, demands that all power be centred in one man and his bureaucratic helpers. Somewhere there is a practical balance between economic and political democracy. Russia and the US both have been working towards this practical middle ground. The new democracy by definition abhors imperialism.’

  It is striking that both Luce and Wallace were thinking, even at this early stage of the war (early, that is, from America’s point of view), about the post-war period. Between them, th
e terms of the opposing views of America’s future place in the world were now defined, the battle-lines drawn. Both acknowledged, as did Welles, with increasing desperation in his speech-making and his political writing, that the world was at a crossroads; it was a matter of some urgency to lay plans for the peace. Wallace’s thinking, and indeed his rhetoric, shaped and informed Welles’s whole political being, and for some years, that was the centre of his life. Wallace, born and raised in the agricultural communities of Iowa, a world away from Welles’s cosmopolitan and theatrical world, spoke with the particular passion and precision of a man who had devoted himself to ensuring that those who worked the land – farmers and labourers alike – should receive their honest due; but what he said represented everything that the twenty-seven-year-old Welles believed, and he was everything that Welles hoped for from his politicians. Like many of his generation, Welles had a complex attitude towards Roosevelt, admiring and sharing the vision that had given birth to the New Deal, but deploring the degree to which he was prepared to compromise it in the interests of an achievable result. Wallace was untarred by this brush. For Welles, Roosevelt was King Arthur, old and sick and cunning; Wallace was Lancelot, incorruptible, shining bright in his service to the people. There was no doubt as to which of them was Welles’s model. His ambition was never, strictly speaking, to become a politician: what he wanted to be was the Tribune of the People, a role that, in the American system, could perhaps lead to the ultimate prize.