Wellesnet

By MIKE TEAL

Indiana University launched its superb Orson Welles on the Air, 1938-1946 website in October 2017. It has provided innumerable hours of listening pleasure for those who love Welles’ radio work, including many programs that hadn’t been heard in good sound – or even heard at all – in decades. Among the offerings is what turned out to be his swan song to U.S. radio:  Orson Welles Commentaries, broadcast on ABC Radio from September 1945 to October 1946.

Prior the opening of the IU website, only seven or eight of the 56 Commentaries episodes were available, including the famous Isaac Woodard broadcasts.  Now, the full series is available to explore — providing a sweeping view of Welles’ progressive political convictions during a fraught period, and illuminating why those convictions brought him such peril.

Shortly after launch, one of Wellesnet’s more tech‑adept members combed through the website’s source code and discovered several programs absent from the visible archives. One of these, a previously unknown 13‑minute recording entitled We the People, had eluded notice until then.

We the People was erroneously listed as having a broadcast date of November 14, 1943, but after listening to it was likely recorded in late spring of 1947 since Welles mentions (and criticizes) the Truman Doctrine, which was not announced until March 1947. Welles also indicates that this is his first radio program in eight months, so this would appear to put this show at around June 1947, right around the time between staging Macbeth in Salt Lake City, Utah, and filming it at Republic Pictures, and about three months after finishing retakes on The Lady From Shanghai ordered by Columbia Pictures.

During We the People, which may never have been broadcast, Welles rails against the fact that he has been prohibited from having any kind of platform on radio, whether political or not, unless his show’s content was approved by sponsors. He also mentions that several sponsors have made generous offers to him concerning a new radio series, but only if he agrees to have all his statements approved by those sponsors… both on and off the air:

Your obedient servant, as a result of his efforts as a radio commentator, has been successfully muffled, now even in his old profession of radio actor. This indeed is the first occasion in eight months that he’s been involved in anything resembling a broadcast. Not that he hasn’t had some offers; the radio is always available if you promise never to use the radio to say anything.

A big, big manufacturer of breakfast food, for example, sent out a feeler that five shows a week at big money might be mine if I would deal exclusively with the “human interest” side of the news. The proposed contract covered not only airtime, but all my waking time. Every public utterance of mine was to be checked for content by a special board of advertising agency ideologists. In short, they were putting up a heap of dough to buy outright a man’s total longterm opinion.

We’ll probably never know for certain as to whether Welles intended for this 13-minute recording to be broadcast, or whether he was simply doing a Nixonian “Secret Honor” kind of venting. No matter, We the People comes across as a fascinating post-mortem on both Orson Welles Commentaries and his U.S. radio career in general. (Welles starred in the British radio series The Adventures of Harry Lime and The Black Museum in 1951-1952.) We the People reveals his U.S. radio career ended due in large part to his refusal to surrender to political censorship.

Further, We the People comes across as a warning of a changing political tide.

Only four months later, as Welles was leaving for Europe, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began to issue it’s first subpoenas which led to the Hollywood blacklist and the eventual imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten. Interestingly enough, the famous 1950 short, The Hollywood Ten was made by a former Mercury player, John Berry, who called Welles his “spiritual father”, even though Welles was only two years older than he. Interestingly, Berry’s short ends with an appeal to “the people,” just as Welles’s program does.

 

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