(Editor’s notes: American: An Odyssey to 1947 will be screened at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Iowa on Wednesday, April 26, at 12:30 p.m. and Thursday, April 27, at 10 a.m. For details, visit julienfilmfest.com/schedule. Todd Tarbox is the grandson of Orson Welles’ mentor and lifelong friend Roger “Skipper” Hill. Tarbox is also the author of the acclaimed Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, as well as one of the narrators in the Danny Wu directed documentary American: An Odyssey to 1947.)
By TODD TARBOX
My introduction to the documentary AMERICAN: AN ODYSSEY TO 1947 was when I received an email from the film’s assistant director, Shania Kumar, in late October 2021, reading in part:
“I have just finished your wonderful book ORSON WELLES AND ROGER HILL: A FRIENDSHIP IN THREE ACTS. I was most taken aback by the story of Isaac Woodard, a story which is often overlooked in Welles’ career. Isaac Woodard’s great-niece and nephew are co-producers in our film, and the story itself is the centerpiece of our story. Mr. Tarbox, would you be interested in being interviewed about your experiences with the Todd School for Boys and Orson Welles?”
What resolved any doubt about not accepting her invitation was her concluding ego-inflating final paragraph:
“Our director will be in the United States next week and would love to catch you in person. If unavailable, we hope you are doing well during this time, hopefully, as well as we were while reading your book.”
Five days later, Canadian film director Danny Wu,, arrived at our front door with a sound engineer in tow After cordial greetings, Danny spent the next several hours peppering me with perceptive questions concerning the progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, IL, where I spent my first ten years until the school closed in 1954 and where Orson Welles attended from age nine through sixteen.
It was at this private boarding school, sixty miles northwest of his home in Chicago, where Welles flourished in the arts—including acting, directing, writing, and painting—from the moment he arrived on campus and continued unabated until he graduated. The one most responsible for encouraging and directing young Welles’ creativity was the school’s headmaster, my grandfather, Roger “Skipper” Hill, who for the rest of Welles’ life remained his mentor, collaborator, and abiding friend.
At the close of our conversation, Danny shared with me that Orson, from his youth until he decamped America for Europe in 1947, was the central focus of his cinematic project. The scope of the film would be examining the zeitgeist of the 1930s and ‘40s in America: the country’s pulse, its roiling politics, and racial inequities. To exemplify the life drama of this era, Wu would feature Isaac Woodard, an African American soldier in World War II, who returned from three years in the Pacific Theatre and was beaten and blinded by a racist sheriff in South Carolina, and Howard Kakita, a Japanese American who, at age seven, bore witness to the atomic bomb’s devastation at Hiroshima.
I hadn’t heard from Danny in nine months when in early September last year, he emailed me, “I’m excited to let you know that our film has been invited to world premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival and has been selected to be their closing night film on October 20th at the ‘Big Newport Theatre.’ I would love for you to attend the premiere.”
My wife, Shirley, and I were delighted to be among the sold-out audience of movie mavens at AMERICA’s unveiling in Newport Beach. At the film’s conclusion, the audience’s response was effusive in its applause. Each of us in attendance was handed a rating card and asked to judge the film as either “poor,” “fair,” “good,” or “excellent.” The overwhelming response was the latter.
When the last hand ceased clapping, the festival’s film programmer, Philip Patsel, thanked everyone for attending and remarked, “What I liked so much about this exceptional documentary was that it not only gives an in-depth look into the life of Orson Welles, it also explores the era in which he lived expanding the film’s scope. Not only does it show Welles’ concern about social justice going on at this time, but it also highlights other injustices occurring during this period to bring in parallel stories of the people experiencing them.”
He then invited Wu to join him and comment on his documentary. “AMERICAN: AN ODYSSEY TO 1947 is a story of three Americans,” Wu began, and their journeys and relationships with this country, culminating with one American leaving the country while two return home.
“As you saw, our film opens with America circa 1947, the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Near You’ with a passenger ship landing. Then a shot of the back of an unidentified man alone on a couch followed by an image of another faceless man in a taxi cab.
“The documentary ends similarly. But now the faces of each of the characters are shown. We recognize that it is Howard Kakita arriving back in America. There’s a closeup of Isaac Woodard on the couch, and the camera shows Orson departing in a taxi to LaGuardia Airport, then fading to the opening song ‘Near You.’”
Before inviting questions from the audience, Wu concluded, “I attempted to create a type of rhythm to the film. I see the cast members as dancers, complementing each other’s moves and performing the melody.
The ensemble of “dancers” includes first-person narrators of their stories and an expansive array of third-person academics and authors. In addition to my minor contribution, those “performing the melody” include:
Catherine L. Benamou, Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies, School of Humanities, University of California-Irvine and author of IT’S ALL TRUE: ORSON WELLES’S PAN-AMERICAN ODYSSEY.
Gray Brechin, American geographer, architectural historian, founder and Project Scholar of The Living New Deal at the University of California Berkeley, and author of IMPERIAL SAN FRANCISCO.
Robert Carringer, Emeritus Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and author of THE MAKING OF CITIZEN KANE.
Simon Callow, English actor, director, writer, and author of a four-volume biography of Orson Welles.
Satsuki Ina, Professor Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California, and producer of the documentary on the Japanese American incarceration, CHILDREN OF THE CAMPS.
Howard Kakita, a seven-year-old American child in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb exploded.
Harlan Lebo, Senior Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg and author of CITIZEN KANE: A FILMMAKER’S JOURNEY.
James Naremore, Chancellors’ Professor Emeritus, Film, English and Comparative Literature scholar, Indiana University, and author of THE MAGIC WORLD OF ORSON WELLES.
Mark Stoler, Professor Emeritus, The University of Vermont, U.S. diplomatic and military history and World War II scholar, and author of GEORGE C. MARSHALL: SOLDIER-STATESMAN OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY.
Laura Williams, great-niece of Isaac Woodard, author of I AM SERGEANT ISAAC WOODARD, and
Robert Young, nephew of Isaac Woodard.
* * *
Like animated conversations where participants amplify, clarify, and complete one another’s thoughts, Wu masterfully interweaves the insights and conclusions not only of those whom he interviewed but personalities he extracted from archival footage, including Orson Welles, John Houseman, William Randolph Hearst, J. Edgar Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt.
“Knowing there would be considerable back-and-forth discussions throughout the film,” Wu reflected. “I decided I would shoot closeups of the participants at opposite angles, so during the cuts, there would be smooth transitions, and it would appear that the cast members were facing one another.”
Wu’s deftness as a documentarian is displayed as he adroitly weaves archival footage. 3D modeling and narrative vignettes together into seamless, cohesive harmony, like a string of exquisite Russian Matryoshka stacking dolls.
* * *
Orson Welles is the centerpiece and most fully explored of the three AMERICAN odysseys. A voiceover introduces him: “In Hollywood news, according to our insider, it seems the director Orson Welles will be moving out of America indefinitely. The reasons are still unclear at the moment.
“Other than that, no further information has been given. Stay tuned to our broadcast as the story develops. In the meantime, perhaps an introduction to Welles’ background is in order.
“So, who is Orson Welles?”
SIMON CALLOW AND I BEGIN TO RESPOND AND ARE JOINED BY OTHERS.
SIMON CALLOW: “He was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It was apparent from a very early age that Orson Welles was an exceptional child.”
TODD TARBOX: His father, a genius inventor, held patents for over a dozen items. One of which—that made him the most money—was a lighting device for bicycles and then for cars.
SIMON CALLOW: His mother, Beatrice Ives, was originally a stenographer who was also an extremely skilled pianist. She was very frail, and looked after by a doctor called Maurice Bernstein. His father and Dr. Bernstein determined that he be sent away to a very strict school.
Unbeknown to them, the headmaster of the Todd School had retired in favor of his son, Roger “Skipper” Hill. Roger Hill, who, it turns out, was an absolute education radical. He took over the school and transformed it into a progressive school.
JAMES NAREMORE: It had an unusual approach to education. It wanted to encourage creative work by the boys there. Let them follow their interests.
SIMON CALLOW: Some boys were involved in market gardening, growing cabbages and various other vegetables. Other boys were involved in constructing an airplane. Right in the middle of the school was this wonderful and newly equipped theatre, and Welles made a beeline for that theatre.
JAMES NAREMORE: They had an important theatrical tradition. The boys would put on plays. They traveled to Chicago. They won prizes.
RICHARD FRANCE: Orson became Hill’s assistant very early on—ten, eleven years old. By the time Welles had entered his teens, he was already directing the Todd Troopers.
SIMON CALLOW: Welles adapted plays, directed them, starred in them, and designed them. He was already, as it were, at that early age the man who made CITIZEN KANE. But, at the same time, he was increasingly in charge of an alcoholic unruly father. People began to worry for him. And among those who were worried was Roger Hill, his headmaster and really great supporter and friend.
TODD TARBOX: My grandfather counseled him that perhaps one way to have his father become a little more responsive would be if Orson distanced himself for a while.
SIMON CALLOW: That he wouldn’t speak to him until he stopped drinking. And, of course, the opposite occurred. Dick Welles began to miss Orson deeply and terribly and, in his distress, drank more and more, and finally, he died of alcoholic excess. Welles was in his last term at school at only fifteen. They were already thinking of him going to Yale or Harvard or whatever. He, of course, had only one ambition, which was to become an actor and be involved in the theatre.
TODD TARBOX: Welles wrote to Bernstein after counseling with my grandfather. He said, “Let me go on a painting trip tour of Ireland for a couple of months. Get that out of my system, and then I’ll consider where I should go to college.”
SIMON CALLOW: So, off he went to Ireland. Traveled across the Atlantic Ocean.
THE FIRST OF THE FILM’S SEGUES DISCUSSING THE GREAT DEPRESSION.
GRAY BRECHIN: The Great Depression started with a terrible stock market crash in the fall of 1929.
MARK STOLER: There is massive unemployment, and there is no safety net.
GRAY BRECHIN: So, people kept losing more and more money. And nobody knew where the bottom was.
MARK STOLER: At that time, the Democratic party is made up of urban liberals in the North, Southern segregationists, and conservatives in the South.
GARY BRECHIN: It was a tossup between John Nance Garner and Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt needed the help of the press, and at the time, the press didn’t really know where Roosevelt stood. But the most powerful press baron in the United States by far was William Randolph Hearst.
TAYLOR COFFMAN: A lot of people in this country read Hearst’s newspapers.
GRAY BRECHIN: He had enormous power not only with his press but also with politicians and the country because they needed the endorsement of his papers. Hearst liked what Roosevelt told him. One of the things Roosevelt told him was that he would not raise taxes if he were elected president. So, Hearst threw his support behind Roosevelt, and it was his support that put Roosevelt over the line and secured him the Democratic nomination.
TAYLOR COFFMAN: You could say that if it weren’t for Hearst, there wouldn’t have been Roosevelt as President. Roosevelt won a landslide in the election against Herbert Hoover, but only with the support of William Randolph Hearst and his media empire.
CUT TO YOUNG WELLES IN IRELAND
SIMON CALLOW: Orson did indeed do some sketches and a bit of painting, and he got himself a donkey and a cart, but what he was really headed for was the theatre.
RICHARD FRANCE: He goes around with this cart and donkey until he finally winds up in Dublin.
ORSON WELLES: Without what is technically referred to as without financial resources. Oh, I had a few shillings, but I blew them on a good dinner and a ticket to the theatre. The theatre was the Gate.
RICHARD FRANCE: The Dublin Gate was about to stage Jew Süss., and Welles was cast as the villain of the piece.
SIMON CALLOW: So, at sixteen years of age, he found himself on the stage of one of the most renowned Avant-Garde theatres in Europe and became the talk of Dublin.
RICHARD FRANCE: From there on, his roles became smaller and smaller at the Dublin Gate.
SIMON CALLOW: And they, as the saying goes, let him go.
RICHARD FRANCE: He goes back to the Todd School, and the Hills take him back under their wing again. The Hills were invited to a party at the University of Chicago, and they took Welles along with them. Thornton Wilder, the American author, was there.
SIMON CALLOW: Wilder very politely asked himself, and Welles told him of how he ended up at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. And Thorton Wilder said, “I know all about you. My sister lives in Dublin. She wrote to me about you. She told me the whole story. It’s an extraordinary story. What are you going to do with your life?” Welles said, “Well, I’d like to act, but I don’t know where to go or whom to turn to.” And Wilder said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll sort that out.” And he phoned his friend Alexander Woollcott, who was one of the great critics of the day and one of the great personalities of the day, and Woollcott said, “Well, Katharine Cornell is about to do Romeo and Juliet. She’ll find something for Orson Welles to do in the play.”
RICHARD FRANCE: Welles immediately leaves Illinois and goes to New York. Katharine Cornell, at the time, was starting up a tour all around the country, and she hired Welles.
SIMON CALLOW: Nobody much noticed the fact that Orson Welles was playing Tybalt. In the audience was a youngish Englishman, John Houseman, who had come to New York to work in the avant-garde theatre.
JOHN HOUSEMAN: I had seen a very remarkable performance in Katharine Cornell’s “Romeo and Juliet.” I’d been struck more than anyone on the stage by a young man who played the part of Tybalt.
CUT TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION.
BRECHIN: When Franklin Roosevelt became president on March 4th, 1933. He hit the ground running. Within 100 days, sixteen major pieces of legislation were passed. It began to restore confidence. And that’s exactly what was needed at that time. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt created the WPA, which is the most famous of all his ‘make-work’ programs. The Works Progress Administration.
SIMON CALLOW: That included people who were normally neglected in these situations—that’s to say, artists. It was an incredible shot in the arm for theatre in America, which had never really known subsidy. Suddenly, it was possible for all kinds of theatre makers—puppeteers, dancers from various sections of the country, ethnic theatre, and Black theatre. Chinese-American theatre suddenly became subsidized by—quite reasonable sums of money from the central government. They rather unexpectedly gave the running of the Negro Theatre Division to John Houseman. He had an extraordinary idea of getting the very first production directed by Orson Welles.
ORSON WELLES: I wanted to give the black actors a chance to play classics without it being funny or even exotic; just there it is.
RICHARD FRANCE: VOO-DOO MCBETH was the very first production he had ever directed outside of the Todd School for Boys. It had a cast of one hundred actors. He was able to shape and mold one hundred actors of varying degrees of competence into an ensemble creating a production that is still considered a landmark in the history of American theatre.
ORSON WELLES: Opening night, there were five blocks in which all traffic was stopped. You couldn’t get near the theatre in Harlem. Everybody who was anybody in the black-and-white world was there. When the play ended, there were so many curtain calls we finally left the curtain open, and the audience came up on the stage to congratulate the actors. That was magical.
JAMES NAREMORE: But all this while, there were republicans who were objecting to the Federal Theatre Project. The Hearst press attacked it.
RICHARD FRANCE: Hearst was always critical of anything that the government did in terms of giving to the population, anything that could smack of socialism. The reason they could attack so readily was the argument that it had been infiltrated by the communists. It was the easiest part of the W.P.A. program to attack. By starting there, you could gradually eat away at the whole thing.
GRAY BRECHIN: So The W.P.A. Theatre Project was the first to be hauled up before Congress and essentially tried. There was a literal trial of the Federal Theatre Project.
CUT TO THE INTRODUCTION OF THE SECOND STORY: HOWARD KATITA
HOWARD KAKITA: My name is Howard Kakita. I’m a Japanese-American. I’m a Sansei, which means a third-generation Japanese-American. Both my parents were born in the United States. My father, after graduation, got a job and had a nice girlfriend. And, all of a sudden, he got a letter from my grandfather, and the letter stated, “You are now married, and your wife’s on a boat arriving at the San Pedro Harbor on such and such a date. Go pick her up. They got married and had a child about a year later, my brother, Kenny, who was born in 1936. I was born in East Los Angeles in 1938.
CUT TO THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT, AND THE CREATION OF THE MERCURY THEATRE AND SUBSEQUENT FILMING OF CITIZEN KANE.
SIMON CALLOW: Welles and Houseman decided they would create another theatre. They called it the Mercury Theatre. They started that season with JULIUS CAESAR in Nazi uniforms, lit like the Nuremberg Rallies.
RICHARD FRANCE: Welles’s audience for the Mercury Theatre was largely leftist. A huge percentage of them were Jewish. There was an inherent fear, seeing what was going on on the stage and the rise of fascism, afraid for the safety and security of their friends and relatives in Europe. The Mercury Theatre was launched and was an extraordinary success, the greatest theatrical success of Welles’s career.
SIMON CALLOW: He and Houseman decided they would go on air as well, and they created the Mercury Theatre of the Air. Welles used sound effects to a degree that no one had done before.
HARLAN LEBO: Welles was already a big star, at least in New York and the radio world. Then he leaped to the world’s attention in October of 1938 when he produced a radio show based on H.G. Wells’s WAR OF THE WORLD. A very large part of the American population listening to that show thought that the United States was being invaded by Martians.
RICHARD FRANCE: That was a national controversy.
HARLAN LEBO: He was on the cover of every newspaper in the world and then became an international celebrity.
SIMON CALLOW: Hollywood picked up on this. They thought this guy was the greatest showman who ever lived. They needed him in Hollywood. So, they made overtures to Welles, inviting him—first of all—to act in films, which he had never done. But he said no. Then they said they wanted him to direct films, and he said, “Well, only if I can have my whole company in Hollywood.” And they said yes. He said, “But I won’t do it either until I have final cut.” This was a privilege that almost no filmmaker had.
ORSON WELLES: When you honestly don’t want to go, then the deals get better and better. In my ignorance. I didn’t want money. I wanted authority.
SIMON CALLOW: Welles found life a little difficult once he got to Hollywood. Britain was at war; most of Europe was at war. The studios were extremely anxious about not giving offense to the Germans. Germany was a big market. They didn’t want to cut the country off. Almost every project that he offered up had an anti-Nazi slant to it. So, project after project after project was turned down by the studio.
HARLAN LEBO: By January 1940, when screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz entered the picture. Welles sent Mankiewicz to Victorville, California, along with John Houseman to ride herd on him and to be his editor. Mankiewicz and Houseman produced the first draft from February to April of 1940, a huge script titled AMERICAN. Not long after that, AMERICAN was renamed for a short time JOHN CITIZEN USA. Then JOHN CITIZEN USA got thrown out as a title. No one could think of a good title until George Schaefer came up with the title himself, which was CITIZEN KANE.
ROBERT CARRINGER: Orson once explained to me the secret to how he works; he said, “I can’t stand repeating a pattern—something that someone else has already done. I have to approach it as an experiment. Anything that I work on is an experiment.
CUT TO HAROLD KAKITA
HAROLD KAKITA: In early 1940, my parents got a letter from my grandmother saying that my grandfather was extremely ill and they didn’t expect him to survive. My parents decided to pack up, and we went to Japan. We arrived in early February. Around June, it was time to return to the United States. My parents left me and my older brother in their care/
IMAGE: 1941 DECEMBER 7, PEARL HARBOR.
CUT TO NEWS OF THE BOMBING OF PEARL HARBOR.
VOICE: We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Washington, the White House announces the attack on Pearl Harbor.
GRAY BRECHIN: The United States before December 7th, 1941, was a very different country than it was the day after. That was because there was a very strong isolationist element in the United States until December 7th, when all of a sudden, because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the sympathy changed.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. A state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.
CUT TO GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY.
VOICE: Today, the President’s Good Neighbor Policy is being vigorously pursued by the State Department’s Division of the American Republics to the 21 neighbors to the south. The United States has given assurance that its sovereignty will be respected and, if necessary, defended.
JAMES NAREMORE: One aspect of the Roosevelt administration was it wanted to make a large soft power diplomacy effort in Latin America to avoid fascist influence.
CATHERINE BENAMOU: At that time in South America, it wasn’t clear exactly how some governments would go. Whether they would go with the Axis powers or help the Allies, they wanted to make sure Brazil would stay in the Allies’ ambit of the Allied forces.
SIMON CALLOW: Welles was recruited into this war effort to go to Brazil and shoot a nice little tourist film about the Carnival.
ORSON WELLES: I was sent to South America by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney. I was told it was my patriotic duty to go and spend a million dollars shooting the Carnival in Rio.
CATHERINE BENAMOU: The day after he wrapped the shooting of Welles’s second movie, The Magnificent Ambersons, he started making his way to Rio.
JAMES NAREMORE: During this time, RKO was bought by the Floyd Odlum Company, and a new management moved in that was really hostile to Welles.
SIMON CALLOW: The studio took hold of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, and put it out to preview audiences. The film is about the disastrous innovation of the automobile. It’s a eulogy for a lost and more gracious America. The timing could not have been worse. The audience was kids, mostly, and they wouldn’t understand any circumstances of the film. At a time when they were about to be called up to go to war, it was exactly what they didn’t want to see.
JAMES NAREMORE: RKO cut a significant amount from the film and added a new ending. But it’s a sentimental mess and very different from the way Welles wanted to do it.
ORSON WELLES: So they destroyed AMBERSONS, and the picture destroyed me.
CATHERINE BENAMOU: RKO is dispatching people back to Hollywood, saying, “Ok, Welles’s contract is up. We’re not going to stay down here shooting in Rio any longer.” Everyone was sent back to Hollywood
SIMON CALLOW: RKO threw Welles and the whole Mercury Theatre unit out of the studio, literally putting the filing cabinets on the pavement. They put up infantile statements like, “All’s well that ends Welles.”
RICHARD FRANCE: Welles came from Boy Wonder to the world’s youngest has been.
CUT TO SATSKUI INA
SATSKUI INA: Asian Americans came to this country at different times in history and always faced racism and discrimination. Other than their value as laborers, they were no longer needed. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Japanese-Americans were shocked and angry that Japan had attacked their country. This was their home. Japan at that time intended to dominate Asia.
HOWARD KATITA: The military committed their atrocities across the world. They killed millions of people in Korea and China.
SATSKUI INA: Japanese-Americans were collateral damage. It took less than a day for the finger to be pointed at anybody who had the face of the enemy. Pearl Harbor had been attacked, and the government was not going to protect the rest of the country. They were going to gather up anybody who had 1/16th Japanese blood and put them into prison camps so that the rest of the country would be safe. America turned its back on us as we were taken from our homes and put into prison camps.
CUT TO INTRODUCING THE THIRD STORY: ISAAC WOODARD.
LAURA WILLIAMS: Isaac Woodard, is my great-uncle. His eldest sister is my grandmother. Isaac Woodward enlisted in the Army at 23, and he served in the Pacific in a segregated unit for three years.
ROBERT YOUNG: About eighty years ago, we were living in the Bronx. Isaac came into the house, and everybody hugged him. That’s my first impression of him. From there, he went into the military.
LAURA WILLIAMS: A lot of African-Americans enlisted to have a better life. That was their opportunity to remove themselves from poverty. They knew that with the Jim Crow laws in place, it was difficult for any change. And they hoped they could show America that they were worthy. They were patriotic and willing to fight for our country and fight for our freedom.
CUT TO HOWARD KAKITA AND SATSKUI INA DISCUSSING JAPANESE INTERNMENT CENTERS.
HOWARD KAKITA: My parents came back to the United States to take care of the housing and sell their business. They planned to return to Japan, but unfortunately, they were sent to an internment camp.
SATSKUI INA: People who were interned were Americans. Some of them were immigrants who made their lives in America.
HOWARD KAKITA: The only thing that was different than other citizens in a similar situation, like German-Americans, and Italian-Americans, was the color of our skin.
SATSKUI INA: Not one single person of Japanese ancestry was ever convicted of sabotage or fifth-column activity. If you had one-sixteenth, you were a threat to national security. And this included orphans who were in orphanages on the West Coast. They were removed from foster care orphanages and placed in Manzanar, where they created an emotional orphanage for children. Part of the trauma was that people didn’t know how long they would be incarcerated. It wasn’t like you got charged with a crime, and you were given a penalty, and you knew how long you would be held.
CUT TO HOWARD KAKITA COMMENTING ON THE BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA.
HOWARD KAKITA: I got up early in the morning on August 5th 1945, and at 8:15, the bomb was dropped. I was less than a mile from the epicenter. I dug myself out, came into the courtyard, and found my older brother. Our grandmother was buried underneath the kitchen. When they dug her out, she was bleeding quite profusely. My grandparents, brother, and I survived for some reason. There were a number of families in the neighborhood completely disappeared. My grandfather told my grandmother, my brother, and me to escape toward the mountains. As we were fleeing the city, we saw hoards of people in the inner city slowly trying to escape. Many of them had tremendous injuries, mostly bad burns. Some of the burns were so bad that their skin was dripping from their bodies. It was like a march of zombies. We found a train station that was still functional, the Kabe Line. Our grandmother got us on that train, and we escaped from the Hiroshima fire, and we stayed with relatives in Kobe until the end of the war.
CUT TO LAURA WILLIAMS
LAURA WILLIAMS: Isaac Woodard worked as a longshoreman and earned four medals. One was a Battle Star, unloading battleships under enemy fire. And he was honorably discharged on February 12th, 1946. He boarded a Greyhound Bus, and during this time, there were no bathrooms on the bus. He requested to use the restroom.
ROBERT YOUNG: The bus driver cursed him and told him, “No, sit down.” My uncle responded back to him, “Speak to me like I’m a man. I’m speaking to you like you’re a man.”
LAURA WILLIAMS: The driver then allowed him to go and use the restroom. Sargent Woodward left, came back, and boarded the bus, and there was no further incident until the next bus stop.
ROBERT YOUNG: This was Batesburg, South Carolina. He saw a police officer who stopped the bus and said my uncle disturbed him and was causing a disturbance and had been drinking.
LAURA WILLIAMS: They followed the driver back to the bus. The driver then went to Sargent Woodard and told him there was someone who wanted to speak to him outside. Officer Lynwood Shull hit him over the head with a baton and told him to shut up.
ROBERT YOUNG: Shull commenced beating him with his nightstick. My uncle grabbed the nightstick and would not allow him to beat him. Another policeman walked up and told him that if he didn’t drop the stick, he was going to drop him with his gun and kill him. My uncle let go, and they commenced to beat him.
RICHARD FRANCE: The NAACP, horrified by what happened to Woodard, started a campaign to bring justice to this sheriff. A publicist who worked for the NAACP, said, “Why don’t you bring it to the attention of Orson Welles?” Welles was given a copy of Woodard’s affidavit. In a day or two, he was on the air with the Woodard case.
ORSON WELLES: Good morning. This is Orson Welles speaking. I would like to read to you an affidavit. For just now, we’ll call the policeman, Mr. X. He might be listening to this. I hope so. Officer X, I’m talking to you. We invite you to luxuriate in secrecy. Go on, suckle your anonymous moment while it lasts. You are going to be uncovered. How long will you get along in these United States? Which of the states will still consent to get along with you? I must know where you go, Officer X, because I must know where the rest of us are going with our American experiment.
To be born free is to be born in debt. To live in freedom without fighting slavery is to profiteer. The morality of the auction block is out of date. There’s no room in the American Century for Jim Crow. Race hate isn’t human nature. Race hate is the abandonment of human nature. But this is true, we hate whom we hurt. We mistrust whom we betray. There are minority problems simply because minority races are often robbed. The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is to fight for him. And this morning comes word that the search has been narrowed still further. I have before me a man by the name of Shaw, Chief L.L. Shaw has admitted he was the police officer that blinded Isaac Woodard. Officer X, we know your name now. Now that we found you out, we’ll never lose you.
RICHARD FRANCE: Again and again and again, he was warned by the network to stop it. Put an end to this. He ignored that.
SIMON CALLOW: His films were banned in the Deep South.
ORSON WELLES: Well, I’m used to being banned; I’ve been banned by whole governments. The Nazis in Germany have banned me. The fascists in Italy and Spain 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 scaly dinosaurs of reaction, if indeed they notice what I’m speaking here, will say in the newspapers that I am a communist. Communists know otherwise. I’m an overpaid movie producer with pleasant reasons to rejoice, and I do.
RICHARD FRANCE: Finally, Welles was removed from the air.
ORSON WELLES: That’s the end of all my broadcasts to you. My thanks for listening and for all your letters. Until another series which I hope comes someday, some time, believe me, friends of the democratic persuasion, I remain, as always, obediently yours.
RICHARD FRANCE: Welles was removed from the air in October 1946, and he had no radio career ever after that
CUT TO HOWARD KAKITA
HOWARD KAKITA: We were in the first ring of the blast, the area of total destruction. Our parents had little hope that we had survived. After several months with the help of the Red Cross, they learned that my grandparents, brother, and I survived. But it wasn’t until several years after the war ended that they were able to send for us. It took two weeks to go from Yokohama to San Francisco. Finally, we got to San Francisco. I remember that moment when we came off the boat in San Francisco. We were kind of hesitant. But our parents grabbed us and hugged us and kissed us. With much credit to my parents and a tremendous amount of patience, we gradually got acclimated to the United States.
CUT TO WELLES
SIMON CALLOW: America had nothing to offer him. America had rejected him. The radio had rejected him. The theatre had rejected him; film had rejected him. Politics had rejected him. He decided that he would leave the country. It was very abrupt, quite extraordinarily abrupt.
TODD TARBOX: I think he left for a multiplicity of reasons. I think he was terribly frustrated at the reaction he was receiving. Who wouldn’t, when you initially come up with, quote, the greatest film ever made, to then crumble in the eyes of Hollywood? It had to be painful.
SIMON CALLOW: He was asked to act in a film in Rome, and I think Welles considered living in Italy to be a new route in his life.
RICHARD FRANCE: It’s hard to believe, but you could defend those so-called liberties guaranteed in our constitution and be called a subversive. But that’s what happened. On November 4th, 1947, Welles left Manhattan. He went out to LaGuardia Airport and got on a plane to Rome.
IMAGE: ORSON WELLES 1947 INTERVIEW IN ROME
ORSON WELLES: I like living on this side of the Atlantic very much, but I like living in America, too. I’m not a refugee either, politically or emotionally, from my country. I’m very happy in America, but it happens that America is not as happy with me as I am with it.
THE ANDREWS SISTERS SINGING “NEAR YOU.”
AMERICAN concludes with a scroll briefly updating what became of Welles, Woodard, and Kakita beyond 1947:
ORSON WELLES WOULD SPEND THE NEXT 20 YEARS OF HIS LIFE IN A SELF-IMPOSED EXILE WITH ONLY BRIEF RETURNS TO AMERICA. IN EUROPE, HE BECAME A “ONE-MAN BAND” AND A PIONEER OF INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING.
HOWARD KAKITA WOULD GROW UP IN LOS ANGELES. AFTER A CAREER IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING, HE BECAME AN ACTIVIST IN SHARING HIS ATOMIC BOMB EXPERIENCE.
ISAAC WOODARD WOULD LIVE THE REST OF HIS LIFE IN NEW YORK. AFTER HIS BLINDING, HE BEGAN A NATIONAL SPEAKING TOUR TO RAISE AWARENESS AGAINST RACIAL INEQUITIES.
One of AMERICAN: AN ODYSSEY TO 1947’s greatest strengths is at the end of the scroll, wanting to know far more of how time and chance affected the odysseys of the three, who, in an hour and forty-two minutes, we’ve come to know so well. We owe Danny Wu a debt of gratitude for bringing to the screen three Americans whose odysseys broadened our awareness of and sensitivity to what it was to be an American in America, arriving and departing in 1947.
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