Chapter 5: Mr. Lorentz Goes to Washington
[Pare Lorentz:] I had been fired by Mr. Hearst in person from the New York Evening Journal, but Joe Connelly, the head of King Features Syndicate, their feature syndicate, hired me again for Mr. Hearst to come to Washington upon the election of Mr. Roosevelt to write a column called the “Washington Side Show.” It had about three men and they all got fired, but it was a revelation, the extraordinary excitement. The whole country came to Washington. They came with poems. They came with ideas. The great part of it was the NIRA [National Industrial Recovery Act] code hearings. Again, I attended these hearings instead of taking the handouts as did 95 percent of my colleagues of the press who would sit in the anteroom of the Department of Commerce and get a summary of what was going on.
I got fired from that job. Again directly by Mr. Hearst because I had summarized the cabinet and said that [Secretary of Agriculture] Henry Wallace, bumbling as he seemed to the press, was going to prove the strongest and most controversial man in Mr. Roosevelt’s cabinet. I hadn’t known that Hearst had a fruit company. I think the Del Monte Fruit Company. Whatever, he was against Wallace’s agriculture policy because the person who rigged it and in the wire said, “Wallace is crazy, discontinue Lorentz’s column.”
So, I had had enough of the daily grind anyway so I went back to New York. I was still movie critic at Judge. It was failing, but that was my trade and I kept that trade as long as I worked for the government. Matter of fact, the only way I could afford to work for the government. But what I wanted to do is put together a one-hour newsreel from the election of Mr. Roosevelt to the extraordinary events of the repeal of Prohibition, the beginning of horse racing in New York City. The whole, well, I can just say it, not only the 100 days but the hope and yet the violence that took place and the kidnapping and the tear gassing of striking workers.
I only had one or two acquaintances with large money. I didn’t even attempt Hollywood and they just thought I couldn’t do it for limited funds. They thought in terms of million dollar production. So I turned to still pictures, got big 36-inch cardboard and with the help of Dr. Agha, who was the art director of Conde Nast—
Interviewer: Yes, Vanity Fair.
Lorentz:–So we laid it out and brought it out, The Roosevelt Year, 1934.
