structural:summarization, stylistic:style_transfer, quality:corruption
Politics and activism

Welles was politically active from the beginning of his career. He remained aligned with left-wing politics and the American Left throughout his life, and always defined his political orientation as " progressive ". A Democrat, he was an outspoken critic of racism in the United States and the practice of segregation. He was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and often spoke out on radio in support of progressive politics. He campaigned heavily for Roosevelt in the 1944 election.

In a 1983 conversation with his friend Roger Hill, Welles recalled: "During a White House dinner, when I was campaigning for Roosevelt, in a toast, with considerable tongue in cheek, he said, 'Orson, you and I are the two greatest actors alive today.' In private that evening, and on several other occasions, he urged me to run for a Senate seat in either California or Wisconsin. He wasn't alone." In the 1980s, Welles still expressed admiration for Roosevelt but also described his presidency as "a semidictatorship ".

During a 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Welles claimed to have met Hitler while hiking in Austria with a teacher who was a "budding Nazi ". He said that Hitler made no impression on him and that he could not remember anything of him from the encounter. He said that he had no personality at all: "He was invisible. There was nothing there until there were 5,000 people yelling sieg heil."

In 1946, Welles took to the airwaves in a series of radio broadcasts demanding justice for a decorated black veteran, Isaac Woodard, who had been beaten and blinded by white police officers. Welles devoted his July 28, 1946 program to reading Woodard's affidavit and vowing to bring the officer responsible to justice. He continued his crusade over four subsequent Sunday afternoon broadcasts on ABC Radio. "The NAACP felt that these broadcasts did more than anything else to prompt the Justice Department to act on the case," the Museum of Broadcasting stated in its 1988 retrospect Orson Welles on the Air: The Radio Years.

For several years, he wrote a newspaper column on political issues and considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1946, representing his home state of Wisconsin—a seat that was ultimately won by Joseph McCarthy.

Welles's political activities were reported on pages 155–157 of Red Channels, the anti-Communist publication that, in part, fueled the already flourishing Hollywood Blacklist. He was in Europe during the height of the Red Scare, thereby adding one more reason for the Hollywood establishment to ostracize him.

In 1970, Welles narrated (but did not write) a satirical political record on the rise of President Richard Nixon titled The Begatting of the President.

In the late 1970s, Welles referred to Josip Tito as "the greatest man in the world today" on Yugoslav television.

Welles spoke before a crowd of 700,000 at a nuclear disarmament rally in Central Park on June 12, 1982, and attacked the policies of President Ronald Reagan and the Republican party.

American: An Odyssey to 1947, a documentary by Danny Wu that looks at Welles's life against the political landscape of the 1930s and 1940s, had its premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival in October 2022.