Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  A month later the set was still languishing at the Adelphi Theatre; finally, at considerable expense, it was moved out and into storage, where it stayed until it was eventually scrapped. The same fate had befallen the set of an earlier beloved behemoth of Welles’s, Five Kings, of a revival of which Welles continued to dream, until one distant day it mutated – the idea, if not the set – into Chimes at Midnight, first, unhappily, on stage, and finally and gloriously on film. No such apotheosis lay in store for Around the World, although the memory of a gallant folly lingered. ‘The show flopped,’37 wrote Stanley Kauffmann in his New Republic obituary of Welles, ‘but sometimes I meet someone who saw it. Immediately we start to bore everyone in the room by reminiscing about it.’ But nostalgia was the last thing Welles was feeling by the time the curtain finally fell on Around the World. In its last days he had embarked on a crusade that engaged him as passionately as anything in his life ever had – or ever would.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Officer X

  TWO DAYS BEFORE Welles put up the sign backstage at the Adelphi Theatre giving his Around the World company a week’s notice, he received a letter from Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; they had an urgent matter on which they wanted to communicate with him. The following day White, the executive secretary of the organisation, visited him in his dressing room with Oliver Harrington, famous in the black community as creator of the radical cartoon Bootsie in the Pittsburgh Courier, but now starting his new job as publicity director for the NAACP. The story they brought Welles cannot have been unknown to him, because a fortnight earlier Harrington had secured headlines for it in the left-wing press to which Welles subscribed, and which – not least because of the incessant search to find material for his weekly Commentary programme – he studied assiduously. His old rag the populist New York Post had carried a front-page story, but it was the Daily Worker’s headline that put the story as succinctly and as shockingly as possible: SOUTH CAROLINA COP GOUGED OUT EYES OF NEGRO VET WHO FOUGHT IN PACIFIC;1 in a boxed inset was the phrase GET THAT COP!

  The story had first broken in the Lighthouse and Informer, South Carolina’s leading black paper, after which the NAACP had taken it up, approaching the War Office for redress. It was the rejection of responsibility by the War Office’s legal department on the grounds that Sergeant Isaac Woodard Junior, the veteran in question, had been officially discharged (albeit only five hours earlier) that provoked the NAACP’s release of the material to the major newspapers; and it was the determination of White and Harrington to secure not only justice for Woodard, but also maximum publicity for the cause, that led them to Welles. Welles’s access to the airwaves, however relatively small his listenership, meant the possibility of a nationwide campaign. They, like everyone else, never ceased to think of him as the man who brought America to a standstill with The War of the Worlds – radio’s Barnum and Bailey, its unparalleled showman. They also knew him and profoundly respected him for his absolutely consistent and unwavering support for racial equality, not merely as an ideal, but in professional and personal practice, from as early as the Harlem Macbeth ten years before, through his constant sponsorship of black jazz musicians, his plan to film the life of Duke Ellington, and the rumours of how he had intended in It’s All True to feature the black population in the Rio de Janeiro favelas. He was, in a way that few of even his most liberal colleagues were, genuinely ‘colour-blind’.

  Welles had long anticipated the growing demand among black people for equal opportunities and rights and constantly – in speeches, in articles and on radio – warned of the lurking dangers of the continuing privation and humiliation of a large section of the populace. The war, as he frequently observed, had changed everything; black servicemen had seen a world in which racial prejudice was not institutionalised, and had fought side by side with their white companions-in-arms, experiencing a proximity and a parity, almost a camaraderie, that they would never have known at home, especially if they came from the South. Moreover, the particular circumstances of war had given black activists at home a lever with which to extract concessions; the establishment in 1941, under threat of a mass protest in Washington, of the first all-black flying squadron, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, at Tuskegee in Alabama (lyrically celebrated on the Broadway stage the following year in ‘Flying Man’ from Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones), was a giant first step towards self-respect. Similarly, but more sombrely, the return from war of veterans accustomed to being treated at the very least as human beings – and no longer prepared to tolerate their former servility – had given rise to a series of incidents of which the Isaac Woodard story was not necessarily the worst, but was certainly the most poignant. The NAACP, keenly aware of the historical moment, was understandably eager to make the very most of it, and looked to Welles to fan the flames.

  They knew that he was fearless. After a recent Commentary (7 July 1946) in which he had mildly suggested that, on the face of it, there was no reason why a black man and a white woman might not get married – a broadcast for which he had received the enthusiastic support of Negro organisations – he had received a letter from a young woman in Los Angeles, Mrs Edna Fraser, which showed something of what he was up against; what they were all up against.

  My dear Mr Welles2

  You are not advocating inter-racial marriages between the Whites and Negroes, are you, Mr Welles? Your commentary last Sunday, July 7th, would lead one to believe that perhaps you are. It is very difficult for me, who have believed in you so much, to believe that a man possessing the intelligence that I have credited you with possessing, could be swayed by a trend of insidious propaganda, or would lend his time and talents to championing such an unworthy cause. – No, Mr Welles, I am not prejudiced against the Negroes … but the Negro, as a race, is mentally incapable of taking a place alongside the white man. He is not competent to make intelligent decisions for himself …

  I do not expect you to understand the humiliating experiences that young women of today are being forced to endure from Negro men. But – your young daughters are growing up, Mr Welles – your own lovely little daughters – Christopher and Rebecca – and it will not be many years before they too shall be attractive young women, like myself. How will you feel then, if Negro men whistle at them? Undress their slim bodies, join their eyes? Try to pick them up in cars? … It is something to think about, Mr Welles. Think about it, Mr Welles, think about it a long, long time. Would you consent to your lovely daughters being touched by Negroes? God knows, surely, you couldn’t! And yet, Mr Welles, by your very words of last Sunday you are helping to contribute to a condition that is already subjecting other men’s daughters to that very thing. Think about it, Mr Welles – take a long walk in the park, and think about it – while there is still time! You are not advocating that, are you, Mr Welles? – If you are advocating that, Mr Welles, then as I have loved and admired, so I should despise and loathe the very sound of your name and voice. I should never want to see you again, nor to hear you, nor to hear of you. And I should ask God to forgive me for ever believing in you as I have believed. Will you please save my belief in you, Mr Welles. It is very important to me. I wait your word.

  Ever sincerely

  Edna Fraser.

  It is the world of the Wentworths, the nice, suburban Americans, the depth of whose prejudice is all the more dismaying for being expressed in tones of reason. ‘Dear Mr Welles,’3 wrote the staunch Democrat Miss Mary Houston of Chicago, a bookkeeper of a somewhat pious bent:

  loving the memory of our beloved President Roosevelt so much I certainly resent the way you conduct yourself on the radio. You make believe you are a lover of right and fair dealing, yet you incite a bitter hatred in the minds of those of us who want REFINEMENT in all things. I called up the radio station and they tell me you are a Jew, which doubtless accounts for quite a bit in your broadcast. You and that half-wit, half-breed Ben Grauer, the other announcer over at ABC … now believe me, forme
rly I have loved you so very much for your so-called loyalty to my happy and deeply-missed PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT … PLEASE don’t right off say ‘Oh, she hates the Jews too’, that is most certainly not true, for my LOVING SAVIOR was a Jew when He trod this earth more than nineteen hundred years ago, but HE was refined … ask any REAL SOUTHERN NEGRO and they will tell you they are proud of their race, they will open your eyes, and will most certainly tell you they are mighty proud of their white friends and as for this, right here in the slums where I work, the worthwhile negroes will say the low type are simply IGNORANT NICGERS. You are doing more harm for your own race as well as for the Negroes and I simply detest you for dragging down my beloved Democratic Party … I can associate with whom I want and still I will know that my HEAVENLY FATHER loves me … if you and other Jews of your class and the Negroes want us to love you and be friends with you, why not better yourself … please pardon if you think I am not a Christian for I am and love our HEAVENLY FATHER much and want always to follow in HIS STEPS, that is why I want to LIFT UP the low standards and not pull down the high standards, and excuse errors in type, but I want to send this right off, sincerely your friend.

  Welles received literally hundreds of letters of this sort, representing a deep, pervasive and widespread racism among what would properly be described as ordinary people. The letters cannot have been pleasant to read, and are almost inconceivable a mere few months after the end of a world war waged against a dictator whose genocidal activities had only just been revealed in their full horror, but they were scarcely threatening.

  The emotions inspired by the case that White and Harrington brought to Welles in his dressing room at the Adelphi were of an entirely different order – both in quality and in intensity – from the petty racism of Mrs Fraser and Miss Houston; for one thing, it happened in the South, which was presently in a state of uproar, bellowing and lashing out wildly like some cornered animal. The profound sense that something had indefinably changed, and that the tide of history was, however gradually, flowing irreversibly away from it, its entrenched world-view dissolving in the wake, sent a wave of terror through the Southern states. It was a time of extraordinary ferment: in February of 1946 the riots in Columbia, Tennessee, had rapidly descended into what the black writer and activist, Langston Hughes, described as ‘a hate-filled orgy’;4 twenty-eight Negroes were charged with attempted murder in the first degree, and although (thanks to the NAACP) they were all finally acquitted, it was, as Hughes wrote, ‘a dangerous, costly and heartbreaking process – one hardly calculated to bolster a returning veteran’s faith in democracy’.

  The very day before the NAACP delegation’s visit to Welles at the theatre, there had been a particularly brutal quadruple lynching of two men and their wives in Walton County, Georgia, where the governor-elect, Eugene Talmadge, had called for mob action to ‘keep negroes in their place’. Walter White, that heroically tireless campaigner against lynching, had issued a statement to the Associated Press denouncing the deaths as ‘the inevitable, inescapable result of Talmadge’s and the Ku Klux Klan’s advocacy of outright violation of the laws of the Federal Government and human decency’.5 Describing Talmadge as ‘a man as brazen as Hitler in his racial theories’, White observed that his election made ‘other such dastardly crimes’ inevitable, calling on the Federal government and public opinion to halt it. ‘Negroes were the victims yesterday,’ he said. ‘Other minorities and eventually democracy itself will be the victims tomorrow.’ The Federal government had failed to stop mob violence. ‘What other alternative is left to these citizens, many of whom are veterans?’ Other NAACP officials linked the outrage in Walton with what they called ‘the bestial gouging out of the eyes of veteran Isaac Woodard in South Carolina’;6 while White forwarded a telegram to the Attorney General, Tom Clark, pointing to suspected police complicity in the lynchings and, by implication, sympathy with the Klan. ‘At a time when our statesmen are demanding democracy and a restoration of morality in Iran, Germany, China, Japan, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, it seems ironic that Americans are dying because of a lack of this same democracy in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina (the home of our Secretary of State) and other parts of the South.’7 Welles had been saying the same thing for years: there were atrocities in America’s own back yard that ranked with the atrocities of the Axis powers. The NAACP was an organisation after Welles’s own heart: radical without being doctrinaire. Few of its members belonged to any other left-wing grouping, and virtually none was communist (though Oliver Harrington was eventually to leave America in disgust, first for Paris and finally East Berlin, as he recounts in his autobiography, Why I Left America). Welles scarcely needed persuading to take up cudgels on Isaac Woodard’s behalf.

  When he heard the full story, and read Woodard’s affidavit describing precisely what had happened to him, Welles knew that he could do full justice to it; moreover, he knew it was exactly what he was looking for. ‘It was on Friday night. When I and my associates read it in my backstage dressing room, we knew we must begin the fight immediately.’8 Just as the NAACP knew that it was an ideal story to make their case, both human and particular – who cannot respond to a story about a blinding? and the blinding of a soldier returning victorious from war at that – so Welles was aware that it would give sharp focus to his radio programme, which was in danger of becoming a catalogue of complaints against non-right-thinking people; a couple of weeks before he had taken on A-bomb tests and the ending of rent and price controls, and had struggled to make the programme cohere. Woodard’s affidavit (no doubt composed with a little help from his friends at the NAACP) was a clear and credible statement of events,9 but was shot through with a sense of bitter irony and injustice, its opening paragraph setting the tone: ‘I, Isaac Woodard Jr, being duly sworn, do depose and state as follows – that I’m 27 years old and a veteran of the United States Army, having served 15 months in the South Pacific and earned one battle star … when they discharged me from Camp Gordon, I’d given four years of my life to my country. I had survived the war and come home to “the land of the free”. I became a casualty five hours later.’

  As he described it, on the afternoon of 12 February 1946, Sergeant Woodard had been discharged from the army at Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. That evening he boarded a bus for Winnsboro, South Carolina, where his wife lived. At Aiken, South Carolina, the bus stopped and he asked to be allowed to disembark and use the toilet; the driver was aggressive, accused him of being drunk (which he was not) and told him to sit down. Woodard persisted in asking to use the toilet, which he was finally allowed to do, but when the bus next stopped, he was taken off it by police and arrested. When he protested, he was viciously beaten around the head with a blackjack, a lead-weighted bludgeon, and taken to jail. Next morning, his eyes red and swollen, he found that he was unable to see. Brought to the mayor’s court, he pleaded guilty to being drunk and disorderly, for which he was fined $50; he only had $40 in his wallet, plus another $4 in his watch pocket, which the court accepted. At first they wanted him to cash in the cheque for his army discharge payment, but gave up after ascertaining that he was unable to countersign the cheque because he could no longer see it. From court he was taken to the Veterans’ Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina; three months later, in May, he was discharged, totally blind, the bulb of both eyes having been irremediably ruptured. On leaving the hospital, he was helpfully advised by the doctor to enrol at blind school. After that, he went to New York to be looked after by his sisters. His wife stayed behind; and that was the end of his marriage.

  Once in New York, Woodard went to the NAACP, where he met Thurgood Marshall, the chief legal counsel, and his assistants. They approached the War Office which, as we have seen, denied responsibility because Woodard had been discharged – even if only for five hours. After the NAACP broke the story in the Daily Worker, the Post and PM, the FBI finally sent someone to Aiken to investigate, while Woodard himself started to talk publicly about his story, with extraordinary calm and
modesty. ‘Down South they think we are worse than dogs,’10 he said. ‘Nobody would treat a dog like they treated me. But the harm’s done now and I’m not near as bitter as my mother and father.’ It was the NAACP’s offer of $1,000 for the arrest and conviction of the policeman who beat and blinded Woodard that finally resulted in headlines in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune as well as the Post, which in turn stirred the War Office and the Department of Justice into action at last.

  The crucial thing Welles seized on was the fact that no one had yet identified the policeman responsible for the crime. GET THAT COP! the Daily Worker had declared,11 and that is what Welles set out to do. Working closely with Oliver Harrington, who spent each Saturday night after the show working with him on the broadcasts, and using the latest unpublished on-the-spot reports from the Lighthouse and Informer, Welles wrote what were in effect a series of dramatic monologues, which are among the most deeply felt, revealing and personal utterances he ever made, recklessly outspoken on a subject that, as we have seen, was a matter of deep ambivalence for many (if not most) Americans in 1946. In the broadcasts he plays the role of a kind of omniscient avenger determined to track down the perpetrator of the assault. It is a role – pitched somewhere between The Shadow and Inspector Javert from Les Misérables, with maybe a touch of Captain Ahab thrown in – and yet it is Welles, too, recognisably the same commentator who had been engaged in intense, urgent dialogue with the American public for nearly a year now – passionate, rhetorical, now angry, now lyrical. These weekly fifteen-minute Sunday afternoon programmes had developed a distinct identity, building on the telephonic intimacy of the early programmes (still sponsored by Lear) to become almost confessional in tone, expounding Welles’s deepest political feelings, communicating his hopes for democracy and his frequent disappointments with it.