Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow

Author:Simon Callow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446484555
Publisher: Vintage

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

An Occasional Soapbox

IN ADDITION TO the newspaper column, Welles had continued throughout 1945 to pursue his political interests, preparing for a new radio programme in which he was actively encouraged to address current affairs, making speeches across the country, and editing Free World magazine; for a while he was authorised correspondent for the Rio newspaper Oglobo. In fact, Welles was one of a number of contributing editors to Free World under the general supervision of Dolivet, and could be relied upon to run up a piece on pretty well any subject of current concern. A typical wire from Dolivet requesting an editorial reads: EITHER LATIN AMERICA OR PALESTINE WITH EMPHASIS BRITISH OR OTHER MANDATES NO LONGER CAN BE KEPT AS EXCLUSIVE PRIVILEGE OF RULING NATION;1 Welles chose Latin America. The cover of the Special Peace Issue of the magazine, devoted to fears about the bomb and other chemical means of warfare, carried the headline FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST TO ATOM BOMB and focused specifically on Welles’s own history,2 recalling the War of the Worlds panic. ‘Among the closing lines of Mr Welles’s broadcast was this one: “We annihilated the world before your very ears.” By now the gigantic hoax can become a terrible reality and the author is writing in deadly seriousness about the important decisions humanity has to make since the mastery of atomic energy.’ Welles’s piece itself ends with a curious rhetorical flourish, which might have worked as oratory, but whose grandiloquence seems rather overwrought on the page:

The alternative to Chaos is grander than all dreams, and we are greater than our dreams. We, the living, are the ancestors of a people who will be, truly, men like Gods. We will not fail them. Among all creatures, the human has the marvellous bent for the art of survival. The universe is none too big for him. Man is no puny thing. He is greater than all his tools. He burned himself with the first fire, but there came a day when he built a forge and he made a plow. Today man turns the key in the last padlock of power. Tomorrow he will be worthy of his freedom.

Elsewhere he takes a slightly more pugnacious tone. ‘We know that for some ears even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise us if in some quarters we’re accused of inciting them. Free World is very interested in riots. Free World is interested in avoiding them. We call for action against the cause of riots. Law is the best action, the most decisive.’3 His conclusion reverts to the cause that he espoused above all others throughout his career as a commentator, and indeed throughout his life, with truly admirable tenacity, lending his name and his authority to it whenever he could, often at considerable danger to himself. ‘This is our proposition: that the sin of race hate be solemnly declared a crime.’ He was something of a beacon to his fellow-liberals, and his presence on various progressive platforms was perpetually in demand.

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