Orson Welles: Hello Americans (60 page)

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 ‘The 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.

Chief Lynwood Shull (as opposed to Shaw or Shawl) had indeed been found, and admitted to having struck Woodard with
his black jack when he became unruly, taking the stick from him. ‘I grabbed it away from him and cracked him across the head. It may have hit his eyes.’
²²
Thus vindicated, the NAACP took the case to the Department of Justice, which – purely because it was an election year, in the view of the judge who finally tried the case – finally intervened, filing federal charges. Oliver Harrington had no
doubt about Welles’s influence on this outcome:
YOUR TRULY GREAT COMMENTARIES IN BEHALF OF ISAAC WOODARD ARE RESPONSIBLE MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE FOR THE APPREHENSION OF THE POLICE TORTURER IN BATESBURG COUNTLESS THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS ARE BETTER HUMAN BEINGS FROM HEARING YOUR BROADCASTS AGAINST FASCIST SADISM NOW SWEEPING A LARGE SECTION OF OUR COUNTRY.
²³
Samuel Procter, a black man who fought
in the Second World War, wrote: ‘The crying need of the minorities, particularly the coloured man, is a spokesman. I believe you can fill that job, even though it means being a martyr … I hope you will accept the enclosed check to help defray expenses involved in making America conscious of its duty and its opportunity’
²⁴
– a phrase that must have moved Welles, because that is exactly what he
hoped and believed he was doing. Someone else wrote to say that he had fought in the war, but ‘it seems that I was fighting in the wrong place’,
²⁵
a common reaction. A nameless fan was even more enthusiastic: ‘Thousands of years ago/ God gave to the world Moses – the great teacher/ Then Jesus the Saviour/ Then Abraham Lincoln the Emancipator/ Then Franklin Delano Roosevelt the great Humanitarian/
and Now Orson Welles – the most wonderful fighter for the rights and freedom of all mankind.’
²⁶

Aiken felt a little differently. ‘Please don’t come to Georgia,’
²⁷
said one sinister little note, ‘we don’t think it would be very healthy for you down this way.’ The Republican county chairman John Willingham had issued a ghoulish invitation –
COME OVER HERE SOMETIME WE ARE ANXIOUS TO ENTERTAIN YOU
– followed by a more explicit threat of a libel suit:
YOU MUST REALISE THAT AN IRRESPONSIBLE PERSON OF YOUR CHARACTER CANNOT MERELY HAVE ACCESS TO THE WAVE FREQUENCIES AND DEFAME A WHOLE COMMUNITY WITHOUT PROVOCATION
.
²⁸
No doubt it was this that
put
the wind up Adrian Samish, vice-president of ABC, and his colleagues:
OUR NEWS DEPARTMENT HAS BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION,
²⁹
he wired Welles,
THE PROBLEMS
THEY HAVE BEEN HAVING LATELY ABOUT TRYING TO GET YOU TO WRITE A SCRIPT AND TRYING TO GET YOU TO SUBMIT IT IN SUFFICIENT TIME FOR THEIR REGULAR REVIEW OF ALL COMMENTATORS FOR LIBEL, GOOD TASTE AND APPROPRIATE NEWS AUTHORITY.
His script, Samish continued, must be submitted at least two hours before broadcast time. Welles will not be permitted to ad lib; if he persists, they will be forced to cut
him off the air, explaining that he is broadcasting material he has refused to submit to ABC.
WE ARE HAPPY TO GIVE YOU THE OPPORTUNITY OF UTILISING YOUR GREAT TALENT BUT UNDER THE FCC LAW THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF BROADCASTS ARE ABC’S I AM SURE YOU WILL UNDERSTAND OUR POSITION AND I AM TELLING OUR NEWS DEPARTMENT THAT I PERSONALLY KNOW YOU WILL CO-OPERATE.
And he added, a little desperately,
PLEASE
DON’T LET ME DOWN
. It was scarcely to be imagined that Welles would be allowed to get away with it for much longer.

Ignoring Samish and with only the merest nod in the direction of Aiken’s offended civic pride, he returned to the fray the following week. ‘The place was Batesburg,’
³⁰
he says firmly, then recapitulates what happened the week before in Aiken: the banning of the movie, the stripping
down and burning of the posters, the hanging in effigy. ‘They’ve even threatened to sue me for $2m for goodness’ sake.’ He reviews the case in the light of the new evidence, describing how Woodard was witnessed in the street by a minister and a workman, having his face washed over and over again by a policeman, who asked him repeatedly: ‘Can you see yet?’ Everything, he says, points to chief of
police Shull. ‘Mr Shull is not going to forget me. I will haunt him.’ Then he quotes the letter from his Former Fan who claims that Woodard was blinded by another Negro. ‘It seems the Yankees always have to pick on someone about something, especially from the South.’ Southerners respect blacks, he says, it’s just that the two races shouldn’t live together. Welles is trying to engineer some kind
of mulatto nation, an abomination to the gallant men and women of the South who have ‘certain well-founded beliefs’. Welles wants to give the Negro a better chance than they would the white man. ‘Dear Former Fan,’ replies Welles, ‘Batesburg is not a battle in the civil war.’ He eloquently rebuffs is ex-fan’s specious arguments, mocking the suggestion that Woodard wanted to spawn a mulatto nation:
‘he went to see a woman of his own race bearing his own name, but
he
never did see her. He’ll never see her. Even Chief Shull, he says, doesn’t pretend that he was preventing Woodard from marrying his sister.’ Welles sums up his own contribution to the story, returning to his Shadow mode:

When I stumbled upon this story several weeks ago … the name of the guilty policeman was unknown and it looked
as though it always would be. I promised to get that name. I have it now … we won’t let him go. I promised I’d hunt him down. I have. I gave my word I’d see him unmasked. I have unmasked him. I’m going to haunt Police Chief Shull for the rest of his natural life. Mr Shull is not going to forget me. And what’s more important, I’m not going to let you forget Mr Shull. Well, that’s enough of that
for now. We’ll come back to Mr Shull next week. And the week after that. And the week after that.

He moves on to a retelling of the story of the Unknown Soldier, one he had already written up for
Free World
, to which he brings exactly the same degree of emotion as he brought to Woodard’s story. ‘The people want world government,’ he cries, ‘standing side by side, when the tools of war are put
down forever.’

There is no contradiction in this, no insincerity: but in the end it is rather like being at Hyde Park Corner, with Welles, the radical gun for hire, on his soapbox, ready to sound off on the good causes of the week. In fact, he didn’t return to Woodard, or Chief Shull, until the penultimate
Commentary
some weeks later; after which Samish, true to his word, cut him off the air,
selling his space instead to
Chimney Sweep
, the latest in a long line of ignominious substitutions that had started with
Tarzan
at RKO. Samish offered him a lifeline: if Welles was interested in doing a
Commentary
that completely ignored politics, Samish believed he had ‘a commercial spot where he can be sold’.
³¹
It was not a proposition Welles cared to entertain. Significantly, just before Samish
made his new offer, Dick Wilson had asked ABC whether they might like to use Welles as roving reporter from Europe: Welles was of course planning a number of films in London with Korda, but there is a sense that his patience with America was running out. In that penultimate
Commentary
, he says, wryly, ‘I’m being sued for $2 million, and I’ve been burned and hanged in effigy because of the things
I’ve said on this program. I’d like to thank ABC for giving me the chance to say those things … and I’d like to say that if I ever got the chance to say those things again … I’ll say them again.’
³²
Then,
with
justified pride, he quotes the telegram Oliver Harrington had sent him, informing him that Lynwood Shull had been made the target of a criminal information charge by the Department of Justice
for violating the Civil Rights Statute, a seldom-used statute passed by Congress in 1870 giving civil rights to black people:
ACTION OF JUSTICE DEPT IS HISTORIC MOVE PROFOUND IMPLICATIONS I PERSONALLY FEEL YOU MORE THAN ANY OTHER RESPONSIBLE PLEASE ACCEPT DEEP GRATITUDE OF THE NAACPS
700,000
MEMBERS.
³³

In a letter to radical Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, Welles said that he had had thousands
of letters, almost all of which were commendatory, and hundreds of requests for the script. ‘You will all be disappointed to know,’
³⁴
he said, alluding to the 1870 statute, ‘that the penalty is only one year and the fine an extremely nominal one … Attorney General Clark has stated that he will ask for an amplification of the penalties … we must hold him to it … and use the publicity generated
by this case to guarantee other minorities’ rights.’ It was the single most effective political action of his life, though not in its immediate outcome, because, as the trial judge J. Waties Waring feared, Truman and his Attorney General – ‘alarmed at the increased racial feeling in the country’
³⁵
– were more interested in being seen to have done something about the situation than in actually
doing it. Waring was none too impressed by Welles’s involvement, either, directing the jury not to be influenced by ‘publicity seekers on the radio agitating for the prosecution of this case, or by politicians, mindful of the ballot box’. To his wife he wrote, ‘I do not believe that this poor blinded creature should be a football in the contest between box office and ballot box.’ The prosecution case
was at best half-hearted, crucial witnesses were not called, defence witnesses were indulged, and despite Waring’s instruction to the jury that they were trying ‘only one white police officer, not the South’s racial customs’, the defence attorney declared: ‘If delivering a verdict against the federal government means that South Carolina will have to secede again, then let’s secede.’ The judge
had to force the jury to discuss their verdict for at least twenty minutes. The instant they re-entered the courtroom, they returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict. Chief of police Lynwood Lanier Shull resumed his job, ending his days, covered in respect and affection, in a retirement home in Batesburg, South Carolina.