Chapter 6: The Roosevelt Year
[Pare Lorentz:] So we laid it out and brought it out, The Roosevelt Year, 1934.
I put running captions across the top so you could do it like an old stereopticon slide and you could look at the captions and turn the pages, and then, in decent type, I had a summary of the facts, but the big ones in caps were supposed to be like titles and [unclear].
I went to several people in New York City about an idea of forming a company to photograph the U.S. and all the migrants, the great change in the portrait of the country, that we discussed–that nobody was doing it. And as usual, the Wall Street type would say, “Well, what you should do is form a non-profit corporation and get a half million dollar loan from the government,” and all this sort of thing.
Not being a money man, or a corporation man, but it didn’t seem a correct idea to me. So, on a trip to Washington I had the book and it had very good notices. Even Mark Sullivan, the old Republican in this story, wrote a very pleasant notice in the Saturday Review. So I brought the book down and showed Jim [James Le Cron]. Why doesn’t somebody do something? He was the closest friend in Washington. He was assistant to and personal secretary of the Secretary of Agriculture. Jim was an uncompromising, big, old, good, sturdy man. He introduced me to Mr. Wallace.