Weekly Welles Radio Discussion - Week 6: Abraham Lincoln (15 Aug 1938)

[Store Hadji]

Oh my God! This may be my favourite episode. Welles' performance is utterly amazing. His voice characterization of Lincoln is perfect and haunting and effuses weariness and pain and grit and pith and captures more than a hundred other of Welles' roles I could think of. He certainly had an affinity for Honest Abe, whether its the Gideon Welles connection or for any other reason. The sound of Welles voice on this one is like really good sex for my eardrums, if I may venture such an absurdity.

Fabulous script. Actually brought me to tears, which may be the only instance of Welles' work in radio having that effect.

[Glenn Anders]

Hadji: I had a late and lamented friend who was a history teacher, and I used to give little bits of "Old Time Radio" I had collected. Of all the pieces I ever laid upon him, this adaptation of John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln was the one he found most impressive.

Glenn

[Store Hadji]

Thanks, Glenn - I was actually reflecting as I listened to the broadcast that hearing something like that might have made my high school history classes interesting!

Yes, the radioplay was based upon John Drinkwater's play and was apparently appended further by Lincoln's speeches and correspondence.

It's rare when Welles found the emotional truth of a role, as he did here - the exhuberance of the young Kane, the devastation of Falstaff, the lingering agony Erich Kesler, the weary march into Fate of Lincoln, these were all those exceptions when Welles actually "felt it" (as he commentated after destroying Susan Alexander's bedroom.) What was he doing the rest of the time, I wonder...going through the motions? NOT feeling it? Such a performance might be said to be charlatanism rather than truth (or cinematic truth, which Welles said Cagney exemplified.) I have no idea what makes an actor, what enables that capturing of cinematic truth, but I don't think Welles always caught it. When he did, his unavoidable genius was coupled with his emotions, and the result is enough to blast me through a wall.

The vocal characterization for Lincoln is a unique one - it was his "Lincoln" voice, and I haven't heard him employ it for any other roles. He used it again for reading the Lincoln speeches on those Decca records in the mid 40s (In the American Tradition and No Man Is An Island.) Some of Welles' "voices" seemed to recur for other characters...Georgie Amberson is the same as the character in Seventeen which is the same as in I'm a Fool. His accents for Russian (Arkadin,) Transylvanian (Dracula,) Turkish (Colonel Haki,) and Hungarian (Oja Kodar's Grandfather) all sound so similar I can't differentiate them very well. Add Barastro and Cagliostro to this list as well. But Lincoln - that one stands alone...

[Glenn Anders]

You know your voices, Hadji.

I think that Welles had an extraordinary gift for mimicry, as well as the nuances within that mimicry, and so in most of his acting, he just let it go. It flowed out of him. But as you suggest, on a certain limited number of occasions, he felt the essence of a character to the deeps of his emotions. Then, he produced a Kane or a Lincoln, the climactic Dracula or a Harry Lime.

Yours, I believe, is a valuable insight.

Glenn

[mteal]

With a fine, world-weary performance by Welles, ABRAHAM LINCOLN seems to me to be one of Orson Welles's most heartfelt radio programs, and I wonder if the reason doesn't have something to do with MARCHING SONG, the epic play about John Brown that Welles wrote as a teenager with Roger Hill. I had a chance to skim through the manuscript when I was at the Lilly Library not long ago, and one thing that struck me were the parallels drawn between John Brown and Kurtz from Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. From what little I was able to read, I got the impression that Welles and Hill considered John Brown to be a potential Kurtz-like figure who may have wanted to set himself up as a kind of monarch in the Old South once slavery had been overturned. In this sense, the program could also be thematically related to the Voodoo MACBETH, which does take place in the aftermath of a successful slave revolt. Abraham Lincoln might have had that kind of power had he lived.

The program shows Lincoln as a political puritan, unwilling to compromise with the South, or with those members of his cabinet who wnated to make a shameful peace with the South. The section of the program dealing with the siege at Ft. Sumter is used to illustrate this. To withdraw from Ft. Sumter, which the Confedracy demanded, might have postponed the war, but it would have compromised the Union's principles. Lincoln figured that, to avoid temporizing would leave the Union with a clean cause, simply and loyally supported. He felt that war could be made impossible only by destroying it's causes, chief among them the betrayal of trust. With the South's sacred trust broken, it was the Union's duty to resist secession.

John Drinkwater's play also seems like a product of the radical 30's as it has Lincoln in a speech consider the fine line between Wage slavery and outright slavery:

"It is assumed by many that labor is available only in connection with capital, that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, uses it to induce that person to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether that capital shall hire and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceded that far, one can conclude that all laborers are either hired laborers or slaves, and that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

"But there is no such relationship between capital and labor as assumed. Nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor hadn't first existed. No men living are more worthy to be trusted then those who toil up from poverty. Let them beware of surrendering to a political power which they already posess, and if which surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancenent against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty is lost."

'The Union Forever!" shouts the 9-year-old Charles Foster Kane in 1871. I've always wondered if it was a coincidence that the victorious Union and Charles Foster Kane were so close in age, that perhaps Kane was even a metaphor for the union itself. To Abraham Lincoln, the "Union" stood for common rights, including the rights of labor and the working class ("The working man and the slum child", as CFK later says). Lincoln believed that there was a proper balance between having a government that was too strong to allow it's people those rights and freedoms, and too weak to protect itself and prevent secession. He saw the war as a defense of popular government and the rights of the people, including working people.

It's also worth noting that, some 30 years later, during a guest appearance on The Dean Martin Show, Welles delivered a stirring tribute to the woman who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic ("John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave, but his truth goes marching on...").

[Glenn Anders]

A most interesting speculation, mteal.

I've often pondered a hidden meaning myself for young Kane's line: "The Union forever!"

To me, it has always been a comment on Kane's divided soul. He will always be gathering an army to charge up a hill, an army of his imagination. In his imagination, he will be the leader, the men, and the equipment. But in his heart, he will be alone. All people and things he collects are substitutes for the loss of his "union."

The line, of course, is at ironic counterpoint to the fact that the bequest being discussed that day in 1871, for all intents, is a means for sundering what has been an unhappy family. Young Kane, imagining himself one of the heroic leaders of the recent Civil War, is both part of the union of his father and mother, part of their war. And so, when he throws his snowball at the boarding house sign he is throwing it in frustration at the end of his family, at the end of his childhood.

The death of Welles' mother when he was nine and his subsequent estrangement from his father is also reflected bravely and cruelly in that line. Bernstein, the banker who becomes his guardian and takes him away to Chicago, is almost a perfect fit for Dr. Maurice "Dada" Bernstein, who performed a similar duty in Welles' life.

It is interesting, in the context of the Mercury radio play, the broader relationship you make with American History, mteal.

Glenn

[mteal]

Young Kane, imagining himself one of the heroic leaders of the recent Civil War, is both part of the union of his father and mother, part of their war. And so, when he throws his snowball at the boarding house sign he is throwing it in frustration at the end of his family, at the end of his childhood.

That theory makes sense, but does the boy really know his childhood is ending when he throws that snowball?

Bernstein, the banker who becomes his guardian and takes him away to Chicago, is almost a perfect fit for Dr. Maurice "Dada" Bernstein, who performed a similar duty in Welles' life.

Yes in a way, but I don't think Welles regarded Dr. Bernstein with anywhere near the hostility that Kane regards Thatcher. It's also interesting to me that Thatcher is played by George Colouris, the most obviously British of the Mercury players. If Kane is a metaphor for the post-Civil War Union, young and rich with western gold, then Thatcher might be seen as a metaphor for the Wall St./London banking alliance that put the U.S. under the Gold Standard in 1873 in order to monopolize the Railroad industry. The striking shot of young Charles's abandoned Rosebud sled buried in the snow is accompanied by the sound of a train taking him away.

[Glenn Anders]

Well, mteal, young Charlie Kane has no doubt, as an only child will, sensed what is going on. He probably has seen or heard evidence of the mysterious inheritance long before that day we meet him. The evidence is that his mother and father have argued over how the fortune is to be handled, the father has been drinking, and the boy been sent outside to play in the snow while the adults in this lonely spot hash it all out. Mom, the dominant one, already has her mind made up. She tells her husband that she has had the boy's bag packed since morning.

For a little boy in the freedom of a wild western winter, to be sent away from his mother and father, in the custody of a strange man to a far city, is tantamount to an end of childhood. He might not be able to articulate it, but then, Bernstein is only too happy to do that for him.

Your speculation about Colouris being selected because English ethnicity represents British-American banking and railway interests seems a little precious to me. However, the subsequent great financial panics, the raising of freight rates by the railways, which devastated farmers, herders and miners in the Middle and Far West, would give support to your idea.

But I'll stay, con permiso, with Charlie's snowball. It has a simple metaphorical trajectory.

Glenn

[mteal]

young Charlie Kane has no doubt, as an only child will, sensed what is going on

Yes, perhaps that's why he is cold towards Thatcher right from the start.

For a little boy in the freedom of a wild western winter, to be sent away from his mother and father, in the custody of a strange man to a far city, is tantamount to an end of childhood.

Over the years I've had the pleasure of introducing several people to the brilliance of CITIZEN KANE, and without exception they always ask why a mother would do that to her son. The only answer I can think of is that she knew she was dying (just as Welles's mother died when he was nine) and didn't want the family fortune squandered by an incompetent drunkard of a father (just as Welles's father was something of a drunkard). In the end we can only guess at what this mysterious scene really meant to Welles, but I think that mystery was his intention, as with so much of his other work.

Your speculation about Colouris being selected because English ethnicity represents British-American banking and railway interests seems a little precious to me. However, the subsequent great financial panics, the raising of freight rates by the railways, which devastated farmers, herders and miners in the Middle and Far West, would give support to your idea.

I don't have nearly enough expertise on that period to do anything more then speculate, although I find that period of American History very intriguing. The effect of foreign capital on American History is not something they generally teach in the American Public school system.

Some more random research notes and observations:

1. Before being elected president, Abraham Lincoln was one of the country's leading railroad lawyers. It must have been obvious to both North and South that the railroad would be the primary means by which the territory west of the Mississippi would be settled. In fact, the discovery of gold in California is often cited as a decisive factor in the tensions that eventually led to Civil War.

2. The railroad has also been cited as a decisive factor in the Union's victory over the South. Because of the greater Federal power in the North, railroads were able to cut across state lines, something they could not do in the South because of the greater emphasis on state's rights. As a result, the Union was able to supply and re-supply it's armies much more quickly and efficiently.

3. The war took so long however, and proved to be so expensive for the Union, that by the time Grant rode down the South in 1865, the victorious Union had been pretty much sold-out to eastern bankers, like JP Morgan. Wall Street's dominion over Washington DC (the golden age of "wage slavery"?) would continue until the late 1890's, when Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt declared war on Spain, the first American Empire was born, and Washington and the mass media began it's attack on the trusts.

4. This imperial push was financed in part by the 1896 discovery of gold in Alaska, which had been purchased by the U.S. in 1867 ("Seward's Folly"). Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State during the Civil War, had wanted Lincoln to let Ft. Sumter go and re-invade Mexico instead, in order to surround the South, which would then be squeezed to death. Seward wanted the entire North American continent, including Canada, to be under U.S. control, hence his purchase of Alaska.

5. 1873 was the year Major Amberson "made his fortune while others were losing theirs", probably by investing in Vanderbilt's railroad, the only one left standing after the panic. In this sense, the Major can be seen as a miniature Vanderbilt the same way Eugene Morgan can be seen as a miniature Henry Ford. Apparently Vanderbilt's children did a good job of squandering his fortune as well.

6. Meanwhile in Europe, France's foolhardy transgressions in Mexico were the first of a series of political blunders by Napoleon III that would eventually see France crushed by Bismarck's Prussian empire in 1871 (when Charlie Kane throws his snowball). Bismarck was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln and modelled his politics after him. The victorious Germans then went to the Gold Standard but by 1873 were in the midst of a financial panic of their own, which left most of continental Europe in an economic shambles, and put nuetral London at the head of international finance (just in time to help Wall Street settle the American West with railroads).

7. Book excerpt: 'The populist party of the early 1890's were essentially opponents of America's entry into the gold standard, mobilizing the discontent of midwest farm workers ("By Golly, I guess you think you own this town" the farmer shouts angrily at George Amberson Minafer). However, the Populist party's critique of the "gold gamblers of Europe and America" and the "secret cabal of the international gold ring" had a strong anti-Semitic as well as anti-English component, due not least to the prominent role played by the London Rothschilds in the loans which facilitated the American transition to gold. The populist party decried the resignation of the U.S. into the hands of England, as English finance had long been resigned into the hands of the Rothschilds'.

[Glenn Anders]

mteal: Thank you for all the interesting information.

The motivation for the act of abandonment by Charlie Kane's mother has alway been suggested to me by her angry, bitter comment to her husband that she is going to send her son away from what she suggests is his destructive influence. There seems to have been a similar schism between Beatrice and Dick Welles.

I can only add to your list of facts concerning relevant late 19th Century American History that there is a very interesting documentary, set in Welles' home state of Wisconsin, entitled WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP. If you have never seen it, you might look it out.

Here is a review that I did of the documentary which covers some of the material that you mention from the standpoint of ordinary people who suffered from the effects of the combines, trusts, etc. (as I fear ordinary people will again soon from their modern counterparts):

http://www.epinions.com/content_102132780676

The photography in this film, mteal, could have been directed by Welles.

Glenn

[mteal]

Thanks for the tip, Glenn, and an excellent review. WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP sounds fascinating. I'll have to see if I can get ahold of a copy.

[Glenn Anders]

Addendum: BTW, this thread stopped abruptly with "Abraham Lincoln."

I've always assumed that lack of an easy access to all the Mercury Theater and Campbell Playhouse shows was the reason.

If so, a resource that I did not know was so far advanced is "The Mercury Theater on the Air" site, maintained by, Kim Scarborough, a computer expert from Chicago. He has recently updated in one or two formats almost all of the above shows, and he promises to gradually add the rest.

The past several evenings, nursing a cold, I've listened to The Campbell Playhouse, a series I had virtually ignored. Let me recommend "Only Angels Have Wings" and "Algiers." Both have marvelous (what would be called now) sound stages. If one can get by the idea, which John Houseman derided, that these shows will sell you on Campbell Chicken Soup being better than homemade, the shows are an artistic equivalent.

Great Radio!

["Algiers" was the show which got Welles in trouble for the cost of the street scene sound effects. Well worth whatever they cost, after 65 years.]

Also, let me plug an old favorite: "The Green Goddess." If you change the name of the villain of this piece to Osama bin Laden, you have the basis of a ready-made modern action/adventure screenplay.

Glenn

[Tashman]

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS would ideally make a great radio show. There's first of all a radio show built into the story, that is the communications between the airfield and the "look-out" in the pass, and between airfield and flyers. Even without that congruency, though, Hawks' soundtrack is beautifully textured throughout. It would, one would think, please a radio man watching the movie. That said, I was never taken with the Mercury rendition. It fulfills neither the spirit of the piece nor the great radio potential of it. This is not a big insult as I don't like the (mostly) actual cast's version for Lux, either, which was done concurrent with the picture's original release.

An inherent bias should be confessed, in that I consider ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS to be Howard Hawks' best picture and among the greatest of all movies.

"Algiers" is a really terrific show.

[Glenn Anders]

Okay, Tashman, I can accept that. I just thought that Joan Blondell and Welles, the bi-play among the flyers, the atmosphere in the little airport bar, and all the sound effects work pretty well. It is not equal, not superior, granted, to a commercial movie classic like Hawks' film.

What was true of the Mercury Theater on the Air was also true of the Campbell Playhouse. Even the best of the shows tended to run down after good beginnings. I gather, in the good shows, Welles and his team had too much material, and in the bad shows, not enough. There was seldom a balance.

Nevertheless, as the Mercury brought a breadth of literature to the air in a style, with maybe exception of the Columbia Workshop, never heard before in American Radio, the Campbell Playhouse, with its increased financial resources, introduced some of the newest or exciting properties and talents to the medium:

Rebecca, Our Town, Rabble in Arms, The Patriot, The Green Goddess, June Moon; Laurence Olivier, Maureen O'Sullivan, Frances Dee, Paulette Goddard. Too many to list.

Not to mention authors and important contemporary figures.

All in a kind of family setting.

The impact of Welles' Radio work is as hard to measure and track as his influence on film.

The passing of that impact and those influences leave us with what we have today.

Glad to hear of another Radio fan, Tashman.

Glenn

[Tashman]

Glad to hear of another Radio fan, Tashman.

I'm a radio nut. I should have added, too, that I appreciate the implicit "endorsement" given to the film by having been featured as it was by Welles. A kind of acknowedgment of its especial interest among then-contemporary works of popular romance. I was doomed to be disappointed, perhaps, but I think the more tangible conclusion is that Welles as a teller of tales had more of a personal affinity for cops and robbers romance ("Algiers") than with the particularities of Hawks' death-defying brand. You mention Olivier, and I think of "Beau Geste." I think Welles had the right idea there by putting another in the lead of the brother Geste. Even though Welles as Beau is ultimately valorous, he gets to seem to be a rascal, and Welles was better suited to that kind of adventurer (Pepe le moko, Harry Lime) than to a Jeff Carter.

You mention another favorite show, "June Moon." Which reminds me that the density of the sound effects ("Dracula", "Algiers") is definitely something to admire, but it is only the most obvious thing to admire. Like the tracking shot that opens TOUCH OF EVIL. Hardly anyone notices the unbroken shot in the shoe-clerk interrogation scene, or the one that opens THE TRIAL. The same invisible craft can be overlooked in radio. Listen to Welles and Paulette Goddard's exchanges in "Algiers," the delicate overlaps for instance, and the incredibly sexuality of that play in the voices, and you know what I mean. Or Benny's patter-prone songwriter in "June Moon"--the sound effects are all Kaufman.

I will have to listen to "The Green Goddess," given your emphasis. Maybe that can be a future headliner here in due course.