Chapter 4: Nobody Anywhere Was Reporting
[Pare Lorentz:] I would go home to West Virginia to see my own people and would see the Monongahela Valley practically closed down and the coal cars rusting and this feeling of nobody anywhere reporting. I started to write about it and I even wrote in the Journal. That if I wrote one piece about news reels and how was there was no reality, and I said that if Tom Paine–I believe he sold a hundred thousand copies of the Age of Reason, when there couldn’t have been many more than a hundred, other than a million white people on the eastern seaboard.
That’s almost ten percent of the population bought the Age of Reason. Well, I argued that if he were alive in ‘31 he’d be using a newsreel and not printing Age of Reason, because outside of Main Street and Wall Street, and perhaps one or two men, Stuart Chase and Lewis Mumford perhaps, but [to read something about] the sale of anything analyzing the rampant speculation, careless bank practices looking back in history you will find very few records in words.
I met up with a wonderful group of older men who listened to me tolerantly and I told them about [an idea I had for] a best seller. Two newspaper men in Chicago collected nothing but bloody pictures of the gang wars of all the prohibition gangs and [unclear] so they got out a little publication called X Marks the Spot. But, rightly, they got a newsstand distributor. So instead of going to bookstores, and they sold hundreds of thousands of copies. That gave me an idea.
I went to Mr. Curran who was in New York on a committee to repeal prohibition and tried to do a great big picture book more distinguished than X Marks the Spot. A marvelous man named Tom Cleland, who was the art director of a new magazine not yet out, on which I worked last week, called Fortune, so I tried to pedal it. In other words, I tried to get the literary or financial people to see the power of the photograph used as a polemic, and as you want, propaganda medium. Yes, eventually I finally did put together a book and it was published.
You must remember, you’re too young, but in ‘30, ‘31, ’32, until Mr. Roosevelt was elected, there was a great suppression in news partly from fear. When the banks started failing in Detroit, long before the bank holiday, there was a fear that it would cause panic and there were all sorts of shenanigans that were known to communities, but the publisher was frightened. In a legitimate way, as fear set in. And that fact that nothing to fear but fear itself, of Mr. Roosevelt, had a validity all through the warp and woof of what’s to say. So it wasn’t just that I had a closed idea of photographs, it was that somebody say something about what was going on.
Well, I had been on a cross-country trip and met some in-laws in Detroit. They all had bullet proof glass. There were at least a hundred and fifty thousand unemployed United Automobile Workers, of course there wasn’t any United Automobile Workers [union at the time], but they were automobile workers. And a great, great many of the tire and automobile workers were ex-GIs from the AEF [American Expeditionary Forces] and the First World War and a majority of those ex-veterans–or veterans–were from the southern highlands, my part of the world: Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia. So they were unemployed, standing around, sitting around up at Belle Isle and every type of agitator was at them — Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, Holy Rollers and they weren’t paying any attention. What they wanted was work. Some of them rode over to Canada and became bootleggers. Some tore down their shacks in the winter in order to get enough fuel. But no one, but no one, was reporting and no one was photographing.