Chapter 9: Stryker was a Brilliant Man
[Pare Lorentz:] I had at no time seen or heard of Roy Stryker because of the nature of my life in New York. He was a professor at Columbia University and I never would have encountered him in the ordinary warp and woof, running around. So the first time I saw Roy was when he came in Judge magazine’s office and said, “I hear we’re going to be working together in the history department of Resettlement.” I want to repeat here that Rexford was a co-professor at Columbia. So I was startled and in an instant thought I think might speak a little, he had a merry face. I had not known he had been in the 34th division.
All I knew was this merry-faced fellow came in eagerly and said that we’re going to be together in the history department. Me, I didn’t want to be together with anybody, anywhere. I wanted to do one thing. So, that’s my first meeting with him. Then, I must reiterate this about the lack of people in Washington. Good hard-bitten newspaper men, good rewrite men, good novelists. This group did not arrive in Washington really until naturally we all go to the Second World War.
So my whole thing, I am not yet 30 years old, was to try to get professionals, trying to get people across the railroad tracks. I had no intent of being a government employee. I wanted to keep writing for a living. I had two books published. Therefore there was no hostility, but I certainly didn’t want to be with an academic group and I didn’t want to think in terms of a library. In no way wanted to join up with a group. The next thing is, as I’ve said before, I had no home in Washington. My home was in Sneden’s Landing [NY]. The inordinate working hours mainly in hotel rooms in New York and a hotel room wherever and in the Carlton Hotel in Washington. So that I lived in a suitcase, very much at this time working for the government.
I did not want to move my life to Washington. I felt it was inbred, a caste system. So, I just wanted to get the work, come, get the money, get out, and get to work. Roy moved his family here and therefore he was part of the hierarchy. I think we were far apart but that was because it was a difference in concept of a college professor thinking of history and me thinking of getting on a public screen to show people something of America, therefore that was our beginning relationship.
I want to be fair, I’m left-handed and I usually start out describing any friend with his absolute worst characteristics. So allow me to start out this way. Stryker was a brilliant man, as I say. First, he lived in Washington. Secondly, he was like a faculty member with his favorite backwards students who said–and he was a mother hen. Now, the men who worked for him were still, well, there’s many of them so they can explain their relationship.