By LAWRENCE FRENCH
During the month before this year’s Presidential election, Wellesnet will be presenting some of the political writings of Orson Welles, as first published in FREE WORLD magazine starting in 1943, and continuing through the election of 1944 when Welles was a huge supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Welles’ views were well in advance of the political thinking of the time and I daresay, they are also far in advance of the rather regressive and backward political thinking of this year’s Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, who has said 47 per cent of America’s poorer citizens think of themselves as “victims.”
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“MORAL INDEBTEDNESS” by Orson Welles
Free World, October, 1943
To be born free is to be born in debt: to live in freedom without fighting slavery is to profiteer.
By plane last night I flew over some parts of our republic where American citizenship is a luxury — beyond the means of the majority. I rode comfortably in my plane above a sovereign state or two where fellow countrymen of ours can’t vote without the privilege of cash. Today I bought my lunch where Negroes may not come except to serve their white brothers, and there I overheard a member of some master race or other tell those who listened that something must be done to suppress the Jews.
I have met Southerners who expect and fear a Negro insurrection. I see no purpose in withholding this from general discussion. There may be those within that outcast 10 per cent of the American people who some day will strike back at their oppressors.
To put down the mob, a mob would rise. Who will put down that mob? We speak here of the peace. Black and brown and yellow men must vote freely in that peace. We speak of the Great Powers. But we have a brave ally in this war, seldom mentioned in these speculations. If Europe’s Underground is kept from the Peace Table, a simpler peace can be agreed upon. That peace, however, will be very short. The scaly dinosaurs of reaction (if indeed they notice what I’m writing here) will say in their newspapers that I am a Communist. Communists know otherwise. I’m an overpaid movie producer with pleasant reasons to rejoice—and I do—in the wholesome practicability of the profit system. I’m all for making money if it means earning it. Lest you should imagine that I’m being publicly modest, I’ll only admit that everybody deserves at least as many good things as my money buys for me. Surely my right to having more than enough is canceled if I don’t use that more to help those who have less. This sense of humanity’s interdependence antedates Karl Marx.
Man admitted his responsibility to man when the first murderer cried out to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” However, those in the current plot against liberty would drive all social virtues underground by calling its simplest expression communism. The war news suggests that there are worse terms of abuse. Still, the proud citizenry of our own democratic persuasion do not credit to the Russian Soviet the authorship of the proposition that all men are created equal. My subject is the question of moral indebtedness. So I’d like to acknowledge here the debt that goes with ownership. I believe—and this has very much to do with my own notion of freedom—I believe I owe the very profit I make to the people I make it from. If this is radicalism, it comes automatically to most of us in show business, it being generally agreed that any public man owes his position to the public. This is a debt payable in service and the highest efforts of the debtor. The extension of this moral argument insists that no man owns anything outright—since he owns it rent free. A wedding never bought a wife. And the devotion of his child is no man’s for the mere begetting. We must each day earn what we own. A healthy man owes to the sick all that he can do for them. An educated man owes to the ignorant all that he can do for them. A free man owes to the world’s slaves all that he can do for them. And what is to be done is more, much more, than good works, Christmas baskets, bonuses and tips and bread and circuses. There is only one thing to be done with slaves—free them.
When all the fascist armies have formally surrendered, the end of fascism will still be out of sight. This world fight is no melodrama. An armistice is no happy ending. The people know well that peace is harder won than war. Soon we shall hear much favoring the sort of statesmanship which is termed “realistic.” We heard much said in defense of expediency, even cleverness, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. France marched on democratic Spain and, finding it politically advisable, the hardheaded men of the world stood by and lost the world. China was raped and these political realists winked. Idealism would have been more practical. A measure of courage. But cynicism supports no courage.-Some small faith in decency at least. A very qualified expression of men’s responsibility to each other.—These are such stuff: as dreams are made on. But they would have saved the world from bankruptcy and spared some twenty million lives. No, giving the world back to its inhabitants is too big a job for the merely practical; too brave a task for pessimism. The architects of an enduring peace must be capable of hope. They must believe in people—all the people. They must face the unimaginable vistas of man’s destiny. God grant them steadfast hope—and the rest of us enduring patience. For we must not expect from any leadership a shiny, ready-made millennium in our time. No one of us will live to see a blameless peace. We strive and pray and die for what will be here when we’re gone. Our children’s children are the ancestors of a free people. We send our greetings ahead of us, to them. — To history yet unmade, our greetings.
To the generations sleeping in our loins: Be of good heart! The fight is worth it.
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