by Simon Callow
From his first words, there can be no question that Welles is deeply and genuinely scandalised by what has happened to Woodard the man, and to Woodard the unwitting representative of his race. Welles starts quietly, evenly, with the affidavit: ‘I, Isaac Woodard Jr, being duly sworn, do depose and state as follows …’12 He reads it quickly, almost casually, slowing down only for the doctor’s advice to Woodard to enrol in a school for the blind. Then, leaving Woodard’s statement hanging in the air, he segues, in a characteristic device, into a story – almost a parable – told to him, he says, early that morning when he went for a coffee with Woodard’s affidavit burning a hole in his pocket. The story, told to him as a joke by someone in the coffee shop, concerns a commercial traveller, a white man who stays in a black hotel, sharing his room with a black man. The next day he goes to get on the train, but is refused admission and told to go to the Jim Crow part of the train. He protests, but as he reaches out his hand he realises that he’s turned black, and realises why: ‘They woke the wrong man!’ Welles then comes back to Woodard:
Now it seems that the officer of the law who blinded the young negro boy has not been named. The boy saw him while he could still see, but of course he had no way of knowing which particular policeman it was who brought the justice of Dachau and Oswiecim to Aiken, South Carolina. He was just another white man with a stick, who wanted to teach him a lesson – to show him where he belonged: in the darkness. Until we know more about him, for just now, we’ll call the policeman Officer X. He might just be listening to this. I hope so.
Now Welles’s tone changes: he becomes almost seductive. ‘Officer X, I’m talking to you. They woke up the wrong man. They woke up the wrong you – the you that God brought into the world all innocent of hate, a paid-up member of the brotherhood of man. That you could have been anything – it could have gone to the White House, it could have gone to heaven when it died. They woke up the wrong man!’ The other Officer X, he says, the servant of the feudal South, blinded Woodard. ‘Wash your hands, Officer X! You’ll never wash away that leprous lack of pigment, the guilty pallor of the white man.’ He dwells on the question of payment in this life: ‘Nothing is ever paid back. Everything has a price.’ He considers the price of things. ‘You want love?’ he asks, and gives an answer it is impossible not to take autobiographically. ‘The cost of love is independence. You want to be independent? Then pay the price and know what it is to be alone. Your mother paid for you in pain.’ He continues, ‘What does it cost to be a negro? In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as white? In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his soul.’
He returns to the question of price. ‘What are they quoting for one eye? An eye for an eye? You had eyes to see, but you have never seen. You were born in a pit.’ Then suddenly, passionately, he asks: ‘Where stands the sun of common fellowship? When will it rise in your dark country? When will it be noon in Georgia? I must know, Officer X, because I must know where the rest of us are going with our American experiment.’ In this phrase, Welles articulates the despairing, underlying quest of his past few years. He returns to Officer X:
We invite you to luxuriate in secrecy. It will be brief. Go on, suckle your anonymous moment while it lasts. You’re going to be uncovered. We will blast out your name, your so-called Christian name. We will give the world your given name, Officer X. If he’s listening to this, let him listen well: Officer X, after I have found you out, I’ll never lose you. If they try you, I’m going to watch the trial. If they jail you, I’m going to wait for your first day of freedom. You won’t be free of me. I want to see who’s waiting for you at the prison gates. I want to know who will acknowledge that they know you. I’m interested in your future. I will take note of all your destinations. Assume another name and I will be careful that the name you would forget is not forgotten. I will find means to remove from you all refuge, Officer X. You can’t get rid of me. We have an appointment, you and I – and only death can cancel it.
The effect is rousing, certainly, but also somewhat disturbing. Who exactly is speaking, one wonders? The tone is personal, vengeful, obsessive, but also melodramatic, stagy. As if to answer the unspoken question – and to puncture the theatricality – Welles asks: ‘Who am I? A masked avenger from the comic books? No sir. Merely an inquisitive Citizen of America. I admit that nothing on this inhabited earth is capable of your chastisement. I am simply, but quite actively, curious to know what will become of you. Your fate cannot affect the boy in the county hospital for the blind. We want a word to lighten his darkness. You’re sorry for him? He rejects your pity. You are ashamed? He doesn’t care. We want to tell him soon that all America is ashamed of you.’ The rhetoric resumes, mounts; the sentences become shorter. There is endless play on the idea of eyes and seeing. Woodard will never see, but the lids are merely closed on Officer X’s eyes. One day, Welles hopes, he will learn ‘to try the wild adventure of looking … then there will be a shouting of trumpets to raise the dead at Gettysburg. A thunder of cannon will declare the tidings of peace and all the bells of liberty will laugh out loud in the streets to celebrate the good will towards all men. The new blind can hear. It would be very good if they could hear the news that the new blind can finally see. Then, Officer X, you’ll find you can wash off what should be washed, and it will be said of you – yes, even you – that they awakened the right man.’ He pants, seems to be shaking with emotion. The programme ends with him broken-voiced as he signs off ‘Obediently yours’. There is nothing obedient about it: the commentator is no one’s servant, except perhaps blind justice’s.
It is a remarkable performance, both in conception and execution, a passionately eloquent affirmation of human values; but – certainly at this distance – there is a quality of hysteria about it that seems curiously solipsistic. In dramatising the events, the feelings of the pursuer come to seem as important as those of the victim, while the perpetrator of the crime – however loathsome he might be – is elevated under the weight of this onslaught to an almost sacrificial status. As has been noted elsewhere in these pages, it is characteristic of Welles to identify an enemy, a villain (whether the Hollywood studios or Governor Dewey or John Houseman), and to denounce them relentlessly. Equally characteristic is his sense of Evil: Officer X has become Satan. It is Welles’s natural tendency as a dramatist, from as far back as Bright Lucifer, his fifteen-year-old exercise in Manichaeism.
The impact of the broadcast on his listeners was understandably electric. ‘Orson,’13 Les Lear, his former sponsor, wrote in a letter after the first Woodard programme, ‘I can’t begin to express the profound admiration you have won on the part of thinking America for the magnificent manner in which you are championing everything and anything that has to do with the American way of life. I am confident that, should you ever elect to head a world-wide movement to further tolerance, your followers would outnumber all other mankind-benefiting societies a million to one.’ Another letter of support, more personal, came from the all-Negro Santa Fe Waiters’ Union: ‘as soon as your broadcast message were reported to all the waiters and bartenders on the Santa Fe Railroad from LA to Chicago, at union meeting we suggested someone should send our appreciation to such a loyal an liberal white person … the young negro appreciates people like yourself, Mrs Roosevelt and other liberals in America for fighting pieceful for we believe the pen is mightier than the sword. – We thank you very very much for ever your loyal friendship from over 1,500 people we remain yours, Al Laster.’14 The children’s writer Sol Stein wrote, ‘Yes, Mr Welles, you spoiled my week that’s coming up – and pray god you keep right on the microphone, continuing to spoil it, and the weeks ahead. – There’s so damn much work to be done. You’re doing a swell job.’15 It was not all roses: someone signing himself A FORMER FAN wrote to Welles that Woodard was trying to get away from the policeman,16 and anyway he had already been blinded in an earlier fight with another Negro; and the f
lagrantly reactionary Congressman John Rankin sent a copy of the broadcast to J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
More disturbingly, at the urging of Police Chief Sprawls, Aiken mayor Odell Weeks wrote to Welles: ‘Since your Sunday night broadcast went out to the nation, and the locale of the story was wholly untrue, I urge that you have the courage and forthrightness to retract the wrong you have done this city in your broadcast next Sunday night, giving to your retraction the same emphasis that you placed upon your original broadcast of the story.’17 The city of Aiken, a former health resort, prided itself on its southern charm; once a winter colony for the wealthy, it had become an equestrian sporting centre, and its population included a number of well-heeled socialites. Mayor Weeks was genuinely affronted by the slur on the city’s good name, although the county of which it was the seat was rather less fastidious, boasting as it did a sign on its borders that stated: NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU IN AIKEN COUNTY. But the mayor had a point. No one had been able to trace either the policeman who had assaulted Woodard, or the incident itself: there was no record of it in Aiken’s jail or its courtroom. In fact, both the FBI and the NAACP had good reason to believe that Woodard had mistaken the place where the bus had stopped, but both were biding their time until they had made thorough investigations; they did not let Welles into their suspicions.
He took to the air again the following Sunday (the day after the closing night of Around the World, which may have somewhat affected his mood). It was a typical Commentary, starting with Welles musing on the betrayal of Yalta and the Peace. He denounces all the Allies: Stalin, who has reneged on the terms of the treaty a mere week later in Bucharest; Roosevelt’s party, which follows a Republican programme; the Labour Party in Britain, which is dancing the Dance of Death of Tory ignorance and Tory cowardice; it is the eleventh hour for mankind, as people prepare for a Third World War. He brings to his bitter reflections a tone of scathing despair at the post-war world: is this, he asks, what we fought for? The feeling is very personal and hurt – above all, weary – but it is something of a harangue, and listening to it is like being trapped in a bar with a very gloomy fellow on New Year’s Eve; it is almost impossible to believe that the speaker is only thirty years old. After a general survey of the world and the state of democracy, delivered in a listless monotone (even the jokes are weary: ‘some people feel Mr Truman should stay out of local politics; some people think he should never have left it’18), he introduces Woodard, and suddenly becomes very lively.
Quoting from Mayor Weeks’s letter, Welles turns the tables on him, inviting him to join in the manhunt. He hopes, he says, to be able to retract the story and be able to apologise to Aiken. ‘There are thousands of cities where negro soldiers have not been blinded. I hope that it will be my privilege to announce that your city is one of these … I’ve sent investigators to your city who should bring out the truth, unless it is too skilfully hidden … there is an American soldier who believes that it did happen in your city. And I cannot forget that. It is to him, Mr Weeks, that you should address your first and most indignant letters. They will of course have to be transcribed in Braille.’ He is on curious ground here, arguing that there are more important things in life than Aiken’s amour-propre; but if you pose as the champion of truth, it doesn’t do to get your facts wrong – far less to hurl around false accusations. The tone is, again, worrying: ‘I’ve sent investigators to your city.’ Who does he think he is? Aiken was certainly not mollified, and duly delivered to the New York Times a packet of evidence exonerating itself from the indictment, securing itself a front-page headline the day after the broadcast: AIKEN IS ANGERED AT WELLES CHARGE. Welles’s answer was to broaden the terms of the debate in the following week’s broadcast. His text was drawn largely from the speech he gave at the great Peace Rally in Chicago in 1943, subsequently published in pamphlet form under the title Moral Indebtedness, as he acknowledged: ‘I’ve said this before: to be born free is to be born in debt; to live in freedom without fighting slavery is to profiteer.’
In the broadcast he dilates on the idea of progress, dwelling particularly on racism. ‘Race hate isn’t human nature; it is the abandonment of human nature … the Indian is on our conscience, the Negro is on our conscience, the Chinese and the Mexican-American are on our conscience. The Jew is on the conscience of Europe, but the neglect gives us communion in that guilt, so that there dances even here the lunatic spectre of anti-Semitism. This is deplored; it must be fought, and the fight must be won. The lynching must be stopped. What business of mine is it?’ he asks. ‘God judge me if it isn’t the most pressing business I have. The blind soldier fought for me during this war. The least I can do now is to fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn’t. I was born a white man … and so I come here not as a radio dramatist (although it pays better), not as a commentator (although it’s safer to be simply that). I come in the boy’s name, and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I come in the name of justice.’ He extends the case to embrace all racism, in the United States, in the world. Now quoting from his article for Free World, he says: ‘I come with a call for action … I know that the word action has a revolutionary twang in some quarters – it wouldn’t surprise me if I was accused of inciting to riot. I’m very interested in riots: I’m interested in avoiding them.’ Exhorting his listeners – ‘we, the people – black, brown and red’ – to ‘rise to the occasion of our brotherhood’, he declares race hate a disease. ‘Anything very big is very simple. If there’s a big race question, there’s a big answer to it, and a big answer is simple like the word “no”. 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! The fight is worth it.’
It is fine, rousing stuff, delivered with the sweeping rhetorical power that was uniquely his, and it produced a passionate response. ‘Keep up the marvellous work,’ said an anonymous correspondent. ‘We’re all behind you 100%. Too bad you’re not in politics … we need such men as you.’ Another note said: ‘I wonder if anywhere in the world today [a Sunday, of course] was preached a sermon that was comparable to your expression.’ Yet another listener wrote: ‘I can think of nothing nobler expressed by anyone at any time in world history. You deserve the deep gratitude of everyone that has a spark of nobility and I hope you continue to devote your great ability to the same noble purpose.’ Quite separately from his work as actor, writer, director, Welles’s impact as an inspirational non-party-political figure was immense; for many people, he was a beacon.
The momentum in the Woodard case was building inexorably. The NAACP arranged a huge rally in the vast Lewisohn Stadium in New York under the sponsorship of the black newspaper Amsterdam News and the Isaac Woodard Benefit Committee; the singer Carol Brice and the great boxer Joe Louis were prominent members. Thirty thousand people heard Louis read a statement by Welles, who was by now in Los Angeles, preparing the film he was to direct for Harry Cohn:
Isaac Woodard is on the conscience of America.19 – The sin which was committed against him is the sin committed every day against his race – which is the human race. We cannot give him back his eyes. But we can make tough new laws – laws to drive the concentration camps out of our country – we can make laws to stop lynch law. – We can make prejudice illegal, and see to it that our American Nazis are punished for their crimes. – If Isaac Woodard had to lose his sight to show us that we need those laws, the least that we can do for him is to make those laws and make them now and make them stick. – If we don’t, we are more blind than he. – The only defence against the mob is the people.
Woodard himself spoke with his characteristic simplicity and dignity, and then – to what he later said was the most tumultuous reception he ever received, Woody Guthrie sang the specially written ‘The Blinding of Isaac Woodard’, sung to the tune of ‘T
he Great Dust Storm’.
It’s now you’ve heard my story, there’s one thing I can’t see How you could treat a human being like they have treated me; I thought I fought on the islands to get rid of their kind; But I can see the fight lots plainer now that I am blind.
That afternoon from California Welles broadcast the fourth of his programmes devoted to Woodard, armed with a telegram from the NAACP saying that the attack probably took place in Batesburg, South Carolina, nineteen miles away from Aiken. HOSPITAL RECORDS AMAZINGLY BRIEF NO MENTION NAMES POLICEMEN WHO DELIVERED VET TO HOSPITAL NOR PLACE WHERE ATTACK OCCURRED THIS EXTREMELY UNUSUAL FBI REPORTS CONFIRM OUR INVESTIGATORS.20
Welles starts the broadcast with Aiken. He notes that the film he had made a couple of years before – Tomorrow Is Forever, with Claudette Colbert – had been scheduled to play in the local movie house; it was banned, ‘the actual celluloid driven out of the city as with a fiery sword’.21 Under the direction of the city council, a detachment of police officers solemnly tore down the posters advertising the film and burnt all printed matter having reference to it, in a formal bonfire in the public streets, ‘to protect the impressionable and youth of Aiken from the shock of my name and likeness’. Later, Welles himself was hanged in effigy. ‘That’s nothing. I’m used to being banned,’ he says, with a certain playful modesty. ‘I’ve been banned by whole governments. The Nazis in Germany have banned me. Here at home, the merest mention of my name is forbidden by Mr Hearst to all his subject newspapers. But to be outlawed by an American city is a new experience. The movie in question is neither controversial nor obscene but I’m in it, and for the taste of Aiken that makes any movie too offensive to be endured.’ Without undue anguish, he apologises to Aiken, and reveals that the work of ‘my investigators’, and those of the NAACP and the FBI, has revealed that the place Woodard thought was Aiken appears to have been the town of Batesburg in South Carolina and – he seems to be reading from Associated and United Press reports as they come in – claims that ‘we’re getting close to the truth’: the chief of police of Batesburg, a Mr Shaw or Shawl or Shull, is almost certainly Officer X, the man who blinded Isaac Woodard. He recollects that he promised Woodard that he would find his assailant. ‘Well, we have. And now that we’ve found you out, we will never lose you.’ He repeats another promise, in the identical words with which he ended the first programme: ‘If Chief Shaw or Shawl or Shull is listening – and I have good reason to think that he is – I say: if they try you, I’m going to watch the trial … we have an appointment, you and I – and only death can cancel it.’ And then he moves on to deal with the Texan gubernatorial election.