Orson Welles: Hello Americans (58 page)

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, formerly 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.

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: