CHAPTER 9 THE DISCOVERY OF AFRICA (1932–1934)

1. New York Sun, Times, Herald Tribune—all Jan. 19, 1932; New York Post, Jan. 28, 1932 (Russian); Goldman to Berkman, Feb. 5, 1933, IISH (courtesy of Paul Avrich); ER Diary, Jan. 20, 1932, RA (“keen”).

2. BostonGlobe, Jan.27,1932(“excellent”); Boston Herald, Jan. 27, 1932 (“untutored”); Des Moines Register, Feb. 5, 1932 (“blues”); PR to CVV, postcard, postmarked Feb. 5, 1932, Yale: Van Vechten; Gazette (Montreal), Feb. 29, 1932.

3. Prince Touvalou to ER, April 27, 1932, RA (Guitry); Jannett Hamlyn to Larry Brown, May 21, 1932, NYPL/Schm: Brown (Guitry); ER Diary, March 15, 22, 25, April 8, 1932, RA; ER to George Horace Lorimer, May 6, 1932; ER to Brown, March 7, 1932, NYPL/Schm: Brown. Essie completed Uncle Tom’s Cabin in May, showed it to various friends (including Buddy Herring and Tony Butts), who encouraged her, and sent it in mid-May to the Theatre Guild, to Cochran, the London producer, and to Fox Films in New York (ER Diary, March 17, April 3, 4, 11, 18, 28, 29, May 17, 23, 1932, RA). ER to CVV, June 2, 1932, Yale: Van Vechten (Uncle Tom). At around the same time, Essie got rather daunting news from her editor at Harper & Brothers, Eugene F. Saxton, who let her down gently about the “ineffectiveness” of her novel, Black Progress, which she had submitted to him. Essie then tried to persuade Saxton that it was really intended as a “travel book” about Harlem, not as a novel, but when he dutifully reread it in that light, his judgment remained negative. She accepted the final rejection in good spirits and even with magnanimity, writing Saxton that he was “a peach” for having responded so thoughtfully and in so much detail (Saxton to ER, March 28, May 5, 1932; ER to Saxton, April 10, May 17, 1932, RA).

4. ER Diary, April 8, May 27, 31, June 4, 6, 25 (journalism), 1932, RA. ER, Ms. “I Believe in Divorce” (from which the first quotation comes) and “Divorce,” both in RA. During her trip to Paris, Essie met and got friendly with Bricktop, the singer–nightclub owner. Bricktop told her she had expected not to like her, since “she heard I didn’t bother with niggers, and was high hat,” but in fact they “got on beautifully.” Bricktop sent her car to take Essie out to her house at St. Cloud a few days after they first met and ended up, according to Essie, “thick as thieves” (ER Diary, June 10, 13, 17, 1932, RA). On another trip to Paris, a few months later, Essie met Marcel Duchamp through the actress Rita Romilly, saw him nearly every day during her week-long stay, and suggested in her diary that the two had been romantically drawn to each other (ER Diary, Sept. 26, 29, Oct. 1, 2, 4, 1932, RA).

5. N.Y. Daily Mirror, May 2, 1932. The Mirror’s story was widely circulated: e.g., New York Amsterdam News, May 4, 1932; Philadelphia Tribune, May 5, 1932. Cunard’s stylish part of the story is stylishly told in Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard (Knopf, 1979), pp. 194–96.

6. The Daily Mirror story of May 2, 1932, does not, in fact, quote Robeson at all—let alone use the word “insult”; Cunard to PR, Dec. 10, 1930 (Negro invitation), May 2, 1932 (“amazing”); Dabney to Schomburg, May 5, 1932; McKay to Schomburg, June 15, 1933; Smith to Schomburg, May 7, 1932, NYPL/Schm. Albert A. Smith was, along with Henry O. Tanner, one of two blacks in the American Professional Artists League (Paris). The anonymous threat to Cunard, signed “X22” and dated May 2, 1932, is in UT: Cunard.

7. Daily Mirror, May 20, 1932; The New York Times, May 20, 1932; New York Herald Tribune, May 20, 1932; Ferber to Woollcott, as quoted in The Portable Woollcott (Viking, 1946), pp. 162–63; James Weldon Johnson to PR, June 2, 1932, Yale: Johnson. Ferber told much the same opening-night story to the Robesons themselves (ER Diary, Jan. 5, 1932, RA), saying it was “one of the great moments in the theater, for her.”

8. ER Diary, May 31, 1932, RA; The New York Times, June 26, 1932 (“ennui”); New York American, June 26, 1932 (“separation”); Sunday News, June 26, 1932 (“leave forever”).

9. ER Diary, June 22, July 9, 1932, RA; interviews with Marie Seton, Aug./Sept. 1982. The black press covered the proceedings fully: Chicago Defender, July 2, 1932; New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 26, 1932; Pittsburgh Courier, July 2, 1932; New York Age, July (?) 1932. A summary of the libel hearing is in the Star (London), July 8, 1932. Lord Mountbatten’s most recent biographer, Philip Ziegler, who has had access to the family’s private papers (including Edwina’s diary; the quote from the diary in the text is taken from Ziegler, p. 114), wholly dismisses the veracity of the story (Ziegler, Mountbatten [Knopf, 1985]). But if Edwina Mountbatten had “never met” Robeson when she wrote that claim in her 1932 diary, she met him very soon thereafter. John Krimsky, coproducer of the film version of The Emperor Jones, came to London to talk with Robeson early in 1933 and, on going to his suite at the Dorchester, where he was entertaining, was introduced to Robeson’s guests—among them, he distinctly recalls, Lord and Lady Mountbatten (John Krimsky, “The Emperor Jones—Robeson and O’Neill on Film,” The Connecticut Review, April 1974, pp. 94–99). Further confirmation that Edwina Mountbatten and Robeson were acquainted, despite the denial in her private diary, comes from Edwina’s biographer, Richard Hough. “Their friendship was widely known in Society,” Hough writes, “and many people today remember him at Brook House parties” (Edwina, p. 124). But Hough includes no documentation for his statement, and his chief—perhaps sole—source seems to have been Marie Seton. Hough also insists (though again without citing evidence) that Edwina instituted the suit only because of pressure from the Palace, was herself “outraged at the whole business, its covertness, hypocrisy and censoriousness,” “never forgave the Palace,” and “was virtually barred from the Court during the remainder of George V’s reign” (p. 127). For a follow-up on Edwina and Robeson, see note 37, p. 727. Right in the midst of these proceedings, the unflappable Essie went to see Peggy Ashcroft perform in The Secret Woman. “Peggy is definitely a good actress,” she wrote in her diary (June 25, 1932, RA).

10. FM to CVV, July 18, 1932, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.; ER Diary, July 11, 1932, RA; ER to CVV, July 13, 1932, Yale: Van Vechten.

11. PR to ER, Aug. 2, 1932, RA. PR’s Rutgers citation is in RA. He called the honorary M.A. in 1933 “the greatest hour of my short life”—it was the first time Rutgers “had paid such a tribute to an artist, black or white, and I was certainly the youngest man Rutgers had ever chosen for such a distinction” (PR in John Bull, May 13, 1933). His Show Boat broad cast and Lewisohn Stadium appearance were widely reported: e.g., Brooklyn Eagle, June 12, 1932 (broadcast); World-Telegram, Aug. 1, 1932 (Sanborn), Musical Courier, Aug. 6, 1932.

12. PR to ER, Aug. 2, 1932, RA; Telegraph, June 28, 1932 (Aid Society); The New Yorker, Aug. 5, 1932 (Duranty).

13. ER to Jackman, Aug. 30, 1932, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 20, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, March 17 (Woolf), 25 (Teichner), 1932, RA; A. O. Bell, ed., Diary of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1982), vol. IV, pp. 84–85.

For more on Plomer (a considerable figure in English literary circles), see A. O. Bell, ed., Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, pp. 84–85; P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (Harcourt, 1977), pp. 178–79; Autobiography of William Plomer (Cape, 1975).

There were other indications of ER’s mounting interest in Africa: ER to George Horace Lorimer, ed. of the Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1932, RA, suggesting a series of articles on the Negro, including several on Africa; ER Diary, Feb. 25, May 21, 25, 1932, RA—including letting her hair go “native” (ER Diary, March 4, 1932, RA). Yet when Barrett Brown, the principal of Ruskin College at Oxford, asked her to have a look at an African student who had had a mental breakdown, Essie described her as “pure nigger in every possible way; no trace of refinement or culture, awful hair, smelled, was untidy, domineering, and completely impossible. I told the authorities frankly that I thought she was too primitive for their kind of education, culture and civilization and thought the strain of trying to live up to it had been too great, and I thought the best thing was to send her straight back to Africa, among her own people” (ER Diary, Feb. 21, 1932, RA).

14. PR to ER, Aug. 2, 1932, RA; ER Diary, June 6–13 (fittings), Sept. 16, 1932, RA; PR to Larry Brown, n.d. (1932?), NYPL/Schm: Brown.

15. ER Diary, Sept. 27, Oct. 7, 8, 12, 15, 23, 1932, RA; Jannett Hamlyn to Larry Brown, Nov. 15, 1932 (engagement), NYPL/Schm: Brown; Nancy Wills to me, Dec. 11, 1983; Pat Gregory (Stitt) to me, Oct. 18, 1985 (lost nerve). Though Seton (interviews, Aug.-Sept. 1982) urged on me with some insistence that Yolande’s father disliked people of color, Rupert Hart-Davis, who was actually a guest in the Jackson house frequently in the late twenties and early thirties, has written me (June 30, 1987) that “although old Jackson never appeared until dinner in the evening, when he wore a cloth cap and a dressing-gown, he must have known that black visitors frequently came. It is the only house I’ve ever been in where there seemed to be no colourbar.” According to Marie Seton, the Jackson family enlisted the help of Frank Benson (of the famed Benson Shakespeare Co.) to help break up the romance. Benson, in turn, solicited the help of the actor Henry Ainley in the effort to discredit Paul with Yolande. Ainley’s recent Hamlet in London had not been a success—Gielgud’s Hamlet being much preferred by the critics—and, according to Seton, Ainley agreed to help out of “unadulterated, green-eyed jealousy” of Paul (whom he didn’t know personally) for having been successful playing Othello. (The back-to-back Hamlets had been performed in London in the spring of 1930. The Robesons saw them both. Essie thought Ainley “dreadful” and Gielgud “fine” [ER Diary, April 25, May 7, 1930, RA]). In a follow-up comment to our interviews, Seton wrote me, “Paul was vulnerable to hurt because he was more sincere than sophisticated” (Seton to me, Nov. 23, 1982). Rupert Hart-Davis, however, once again disputes Seton’s account. He feels it is “certain” that Yolande “wouldn’t have consulted her parents” if she had been contemplating marriage to Robeson (Hart-Davis to me, June 30, 1987). Moreover, if Robeson knew of the role Frank Benson purportedly played in alienating Yolande, it did not keep him from attending a luncheon over which Benson presided to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the old Temple Shakespeare and to inaugurate the publication of the new version (Morning Post [London], April 28, 1934). According to Pat Gregory (Stitt) [see note 43 for more on her], “Paul told me he had actually left home expecting that they would go away together.… He took it hard” (Stitt to me, March 5, 1985). In Dec. 1932, less than three months after their breakup, Essie recorded in her diary that Yolande had telephoned “and said that if Paul wasn’t in Paris that night [where Yolande was], she would catch a plane over to London. So I helped Paul pack a bag, gave him all my cash, and wished him Godspeed” (ER Diary, Dec. 6, 1932, RA). Three weeks later she wrote, “We discussed Yolande at great length, and I advised him how best to get her off his back” (ER Diary, Dec. 31, 1932, RA). It may be that was just the impression Paul wished Essie to have about his feelings for Yolande.

16. ER Diary, Oct. 29 (stop divorce), Nov. 2, 3, 7, 8, 20 (new life), 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, Dec. 1, 2, 1932, RA; interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; multiple interviews Freda Diamond; Nancy Wills, Shades of Red (Communist Arts Group [Australia], 1980), p. 91; Nancy Wills to me, Dec. 11, 1983. Even later, writing in Freedom, Robeson described how “one day I heard one of these Aristocrats talking to his chauffeur in much the same way as he would to his dog. I said to myself, ‘Paul, that is how a southerner in the United States would speak to you’” (Ms. dated Feb. 23, 1949, RA).

17. The quotes are from Payne to Brown, April 19, 1950, May 17, 1950, Yolande Jackson to Payne, May 13, 1950, NYPL/Schm: Brown. Other letters in the correspondence from Payne to Brown are dated Dec. 20, 1932, June 3, 1945, Feb. 2, 1947, June 3, 5, 1949, March 26, 1950, April 17, 19, May 12, 19, 1950, June 12, July 5, 1950—all in NYPL/Schm. Payne was seventy-eight years old in 1950 and had taken to writing somewhat in shorthand; I have made minor grammatical and punctuation changes to make the quotations readable.

18. The four letters from Yolande Jackson to Larry Brown in NYPL/Schm: Brown are dated July 10, 1949 (Monte Carlo); Sept. 5, 1950 (Sussex); n.d. (Sussex, 1950?—“stolen hours”); n.d. (London, 1950—“rules are hard”).

19. Jackson to Rockmore, April 22, 1950, RA (the only Yolande Jackson letter in RA); Jackson to Brown, n.d. (1950), NYPL/Schm: Brown.

20. Rupert Hart-Davis to me, June 6, 7, 1987, enclosing four letters from Yolande Jackson to him (March 24, April 8, 11, 29, 1953), from which the quotations have been taken. Among the Yolande Jackson-Larry Brown letters in NYPL/Schm, hers are postmarked “Worthing,” and thereby hangs one last installment of the Yolande Jackson story. An old friend of mine, Terence Higgins, has long been the member of Parliament from Worthing. When I discovered the Worthing postmark, I enlisted Terry’s help in trying to track down Yolande Jackson’s later history. After digging up the deed for “50 Broomfield Avenue, Worthing,” Terry reported back that Yolande Chervachidze had indeed lived there with her parents and a sister—but not a husband—until they sold the house in 1955. Rupert Hart-Davis, however, doubts if Yolande ever lived with her parents as an adult, though in her “wild, wandering life” it may have been “an asset to have one fixed address”—and so she used the Worthing one as long as her family owned the house there (Hart-Davis to me, June 30, 1987). Terry Higgins’s wife, Rosalyn (my still older friend), and their son Daniel nobly joined the search, looking through Public Records Office materials, trying to discover Yolande’s later whereabouts. But their search yielded no further information. In a last-ditch effort, I hired the genealogist Michael S. de L. Neill to try to find current members of the Jackson or Chervachidze clans. He did locate Lady Richard Jackson—who denied me additional information on Yolande, saying “all that was in the past”—but otherwise came up empty-handed.

21. ER to LB, Dec. 24, 1932, NYPL/Schm: Brown; ER Diary, Dec. 15, 25, 1932, RA; ER interview with T. R. Poston, New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 8, 1933. Essie told Poston that she and Paul were once again “terribly happy” together. She also made (unless Poston misquoted her) some obtuse remarks about the current economic depression: “In London many people who have enjoyed large fortunes and estates have lost almost everything. They are being forced to move into small quarters, and are constantly worried by the lack of space and other inconveniences. But do they talk about it—lament aloud? Of course not. But here, everyone talks about the depression. We who are only a generation removed from the washtubs—and who can go back to the tubs if need be—are loudest in our lamentations. Over there, the situation is much worse. Lady So-and-so cannot very well apply for a job as someone’s maid.” Essie seems not to have followed through with her plans to take acting and playwriting courses, though there is one mention in her diary (Feb. 24, 1933, RA) of taking “my first private lesson at the Repertory Theatre, with Mr. and Mrs. Gellendre … one in improvisation, and one in lines. Think I did well. I was surprised at myself, and interested.”

22. PR, “Notes: December 5, 1932,” RA; Manchester Guardian, Nov. 14, 1932.

23. PR, “Notes: 1932,” RA (“favorite part”); Malcolm Page, “The Early Years at Unity,” Theater Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1971); André Van Gyseghem, “British Theatre in the Thirties: An Autobiographical Record,” Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, ed. Clark, Heinemann, Margolies, and Snee (Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), pp. 209–18. Van Gyseghem went on to have a distinguished theatrical career as both actor and director. He remained firmly pro-Soviet in his views until his death in 1979. ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 25, 1932, Yale: Van Vechten; Sterner interview with Van Gyseghem; my interview with Flora Robson (PR, Jr., participating), September 1982.

24. Sterner interview with Van Gyseghem; my interview with Robson (PR, Jr., participating) September 1982; The Observer, March 19, 1933. A wide spectrum of the British press wrote in comparable terms (“the most superb exhibition of histrionics that London has seen for years”: Daily Express, March 14, 1933). Flora Robson received no negative reviews, Robeson only a few: The Spectator, March 17; Sketch, March 22, The Lady, March 23. On the other hand, O’Neill fared poorly. Among the many reviews that called his play to task, the Manchester Guardian’s is representative: “It is not a well-made play, and its first half is seriously inadequate.”

25. The film was produced by John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran and directed by Dudley Murphy (best known for his work on the Bessie Smith vehicle St. Louis Blues). The contract, with Krimsky and Cochran, dated Feb. 24, 1933, is in RA, Screenland, Oct. 1933. Fritz Pollard, the black football star and an old friend of Robeson’s, had a tiny part in the film, assisted Krimsky in casting, and served as Robeson’s dresser. Jones also had J. Rosamond Johnson as musical director and anable supporting cast that included Dudley Digges, Fredi Washington, Frank Wilson, and Ruby Elzy. DuBose Heyward was hired to write an opening segment for the film designed to provide background events leading up to the point where O’Neill’s play began, prompting the New Statesman critic later to write, “The people who made this film would adapt King Lear to show you the birth of each of his three daughters, or Hamlet to show his father and mother courting” (The New Statesman, clipping date illegible, 1933), ER to CVV, postmarked June 24, 1933, Yale: Van Vechten. According to Krimsky, considerable pressure was put on him and his partner, Gifford Cochran (like Krimsky, twenty-five years old), to cast Lawrence Tibbett in the leading role, but Eugene O’Neill made it clear that he would give them the film rights only if Robeson was cast in the part (Krimsky, “The Emperor Jones,” pp. 94–95). In high spirits over accompanying Paul to the States, Essie wrote Harold Jackman (April 19, 1933, Yale: Van Vechten), “I’ve got some gorgeous new clothes—yes, more of them—which my lord and master has just bought for me—and I’m a hussey in them.” After spending an afternoon alone with Van Vechten during her stay, Essie wrote him: “I always feel I like to ‘report’ our progress to you, as you are a sort of Godfather to us both. Especially when the report is good news, as it is these days” (ER to CVV, postmarked June 24, 1933, Yale: Van Vechten).

26. “Interview: William Lundell and Paul Robeson,” Screenland, Oct. 1933. O’Neill had “dug down into my racial life,” Robeson added, “and has found the essence of my race. Every word he wrote for ‘The Emperor Jones’ is true to the Negro racial experience.”

27. New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 27, 1933; Philadelphia Tribune, Nov. 2, 1933; Muse to Barnett, Nov. 22, 1933, CHS: Barnett. Two contemporary film critics who have written with special sympathy for the “breakthrough” aspects of The Emperor Jones, despite all its limitations as stereotype, are Thomas Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity in American Movies,” The Massachusetts Review, Summer 1970, and Richard Dyer, “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over,” ms. courtesy of Dyer (subsequently published as Heavenly Bodies [St. Martin’s, 1987]). New York Evening Post, Sept. 20, 1933; Daily Express, March 18, 1934 (too civilized). Samples of favorable reviews for Robeson are: Daily News, The New York Times, New York Journal-American, New York Sun—all Sept. 20, 1933; The Film Weekly, March 16, 1934; Cinema, Jan. 31, 1934. Among the many damning reviews of the film are: The Observer, May 18, 1934; The Times (London), Feb. 19, 1934; The Tatler, March 28, 1934; New Britain, March 28, 1934. The film, according to Peter Noble (The Negro in Films [Arno reprint, 1970], p. 57), was a financial failure, in part because of distribution problems encountered in the Southern states.

Most of the criticisms expressed in the white press had to do with cinematic, not racial values and are aptly summed up in a letter from Frank Merlin, managing director of the Little Theatre in New York, to Essie: “It definitely has helped Paul in introducing him to a new audience, but it’s a damn shame that Paul was not helped by those around him. He is good in spite of his director, and this, of course, should not be so. The photography is not good. The trick camera work is obvious, and old-fashioned.…” Essie was at that time suggesting scripts to Merlin—including bringing over John Gielgud in Richard of Bordeaux—who was expanding his theatrical organization with the hiring of Eleanor Fitzgerald (Fitzi) of the Provincetown Players, as his general manager. Essie also passed along Countee Cullen’s Leavin’ Time, which (so she wrote Cullen, Sept. 23, 1934, RA), “was definitely good theatre, and had an authentic folk quality.… It was such a relief to read a play about Negroes which didn’t call upon the (by now) very tired audience to get up and sympathize with the poor downtrodden black.…” She added that she’d told Merlin “I’d like very much to read the part of Delia, and if I was any good, to play her.” Essie told Merlin exactly what she had written Cullen, adding (in regard to both Leavin’ Time and Wallace Thurmond’s Jeremiah, the Magnificent), “I was so surprised and glad to read Negro plays by Negroes, which were not about lynching and all the wrongs of the poor black man, that perhaps I am over generous. But I really think “Leavin’ Time’ is good” (ER to Merlin, Sept. 17 [1934], RA).

Bess Rockmore, recently divorced from Bob and remarried to Motty Eitingon was also involved with Merlin and the Little Theatre. The Eitingons were generous people (at one point they gave Essie the present of a silver-fox fur) who were devoted to Paul (and Bess always remained friendly to Essie). Bess Eitingon’s opinions about both the Robesons, cited throughout, have struck me as unusually insightful (interview with Bess Eitingon [PR, Jr., participating], March 30, 1982). The half-dozen letters between Essie, Bess, and Merlin in RA not only detail Essie’s intense activity for a time as a kind of play-reader and scout for Merlin, but also reveal her often shrewd assessments of theatrical properties and players.

28. Star, Aug. 3, 1933 (“doubtful”); New York World-Telegram, June 13, 1933 (“subtleties”); The Film Weekly, Sept. 1, 1933 (Hollywood).

29. The Film Weekly, Sept. 1, 1933 (Negro culture; “trifle exaggerated”); Daily Express, Aug. 4, 1933 (“a great race”; “modern white American”); interview in Tit-Bits, May 27, 1933 (“essentially an artist”).

30. PR, “The Culture of the Negro,” The Spectator, June 15, 1934. A letter in RA from Mrs. Manet Harrison Fowler, president and founder of Mwalimu, School for the Development of African Music and Creative Art, to ER, April 7, 1934, is in response to her inquiry about “the possibility of Mr. Robeson’s continuing his work in an African language of the West Coast of Africa here in New York.” PR’s registration card in the School of Oriental Studies (University of London) shows him enrolled in two courses only during 1933–34: Phonetics in the first term and Swahili in the second.

31. ER to CVV and FM, April 5, 1934, Yale: Van Vechten (“our people”); Zora Neale Hurston to ER, April 18, 1934, RA (I’ve corrected the typos in Hurston’s hastily typed letter [e.g., “steaedily” to “steadily”]; Du Bois to ER, March 27, 1934; ER to Du Bois, April 22, 1934 (U. Mass.: Du Bois). Ultimately, Essie studied more than two years at LSE with, among others, Malinowski, Firth, and W. J. Perry (ER to E. Franklin Frazier, Oct. 10, 1943, MSRC: Frazier Papers. For Padmore, see note 34, p. 634.

32. His 1927 comments on Hayes and Cullen are in Wisconsin Literary Magazine, Nov. 1927. He himself refers to “discovering” Africa while in London in Freedom, June 1953. For a 1920s reference to the “artistic stature” of ancient Africa, see p. 72.

33. Walter White, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,” Ebony, Feb. 1951.

34. Robeson’s notes for 1934 in RA are in four sections, totaling eight to ten thousand words. One of the four sections, about one-fifth of the whole, consists of technical philological notes—the position of the tongue in making particular sounds, the use of phonemes, assorted language groupings, etc. The other four-fifths is in the form of jottings, a mix of half-thoughts and fully developed sentences. For the sake of simplicity I’ll use the abbreviated citation “PR, Notes, 1934, RA,” in the rest of this section to designate all four batches of material.

35. For more on the group around the Menorah Journal, see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), especially ch. 2.

36. It is necessary to differentiate here between what one can call Nationalism (with a capital “N”)—i.e., political separatism—and cultural nationalism (with a small “n”)—i.e., an identification with the folkways, institutions, special historical experience and perspective, etc., of one’s group. PR, Jr., told me (interview, March 3, 1984) that his father had “no use at all” for the Garvey movement or for the Nation of Islam. “You will never find a single instance of his seeking out, relating to, talking about, having a good word to say about any Nationalist movement in the United States. He saw them as reactionary to varying degrees.… Paul Robeson was not a Nationalist (with a capital “N”) … and made it plain he wasn’t.” Yet, even as regards cultural nationalism, Robeson should not be overly categorized; even at the height of his cultural nationalism in the 1930s, his sympathies were more broadly gauged. Freda Diamond recounts a telling episode: hearing from Freda that Paul, Jr., had described him on a television program in the early seventies as first and foremost a black nationalist, Paul, Sr., said to her, “Has he cut me down to that size?” She told the anecdote during the question period of a panel on PR [with both PR, Jr., and me participating] at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists on Sept. 5, 1987.) The chief proponent of the theory of PR as black nationalist is Sterling Stuckey (Slave Culture [Oxford, 1987], pp. 303–58).

37. PR, Notes, 1934, RA; Levy, Johnson, pp. 65–70 (Johnson’s support of eventual assimilation).

38. PR, Notes, 1934, RA; PR, “The Culture of the Negro,” The Spectator, June 15, 1934 (“Confucius”); Stuckey, Slave Culture, p. 334 (de-emphasizing tribal differences).

There is a letter in RA from Essie to Dr. Ronald Moody, who had apparently solicited assistance for his brother Harold’s League of Coloured Peoples, then surveying Africans living in London with a view toward ameliorating their condition (see note 59). In responding, Essie claimed she and Paul had talked the matter over and “He has definitely said No, and I agree with him.… We are really not interested at all in any Negroes who have decided to stay in this country, whether accidentally or no. We feel they are of no importance whatever, in comparison to the major problem, which is the Negroes, 150,000,000 of them, in Africa. The Negroes here are separated from their natural background.… We feel they really don’t belong here at all, and shouldn’t be here.… Many of them are not even interested in themselves, but in white people’s ideals and ideas, and many of them are trying hard to fit into a white world and a white future. That is their affair, not ours” (March 3, 1934, RA).

But this may have been one of the times Essie wrongly believed (or deliberately set out to create the false impression) that she and Paul were of one mind on an issue. On Seton’s ms. of Robeson (lent to me by Seton), Robeson, in reference to another event in 1934, scrawled: “I was at a meeting called by League of which Ronald Moody’s brother was President. Many Africans & West Indian students were discussing Africa.…” So apparently Robeson did lend his name and presence to a league of whose purposes Essie (at least in 1934) disapproved. Robeson possibly shifted between both views, sometimes identifying with “displaced” Westernized Africans, sometimes scorning their “debasement.” As another example, Seton quotes him in 1934 as saying to her, “… if necessary, I will die for Africa, but what should Africans care about American Negroes when most of them are Americans in culture? Can one expect a Chinese in China to be as concerned about the Chinese in San Francisco as about his own neighbors?” (Seton, Robeson, p. 87.)

39. PR, Notes, 1934, RA.

40. PR, Notes, 1934, RA. It may be a comment on the low state of American Indian studies at the time, and the general contempt with which Native Americans were held, that Robeson did not use that culture to draw analogies with the black one, although wisdom for the Indian also consists in not trying to reduce behavior to “logic,” regarding the spiritual dimension as the pre-eminent one. Five years later he had made the connection, referring to the “many analogies with American Indian cultures” (PR, Notes, 1939, RA).

41. PR interview with The Observer, July 29, 1934. Arnold Toynbee, for one, congratulated Robeson on his “intuition of the malady which a Late Modern Western Society had inflicted on itself,” for “putting his finger on the difference between an integrated and a disintegrated culture,” and for perceiving “that the structural and the spiritual disintegration of culture are two aspects of a single process” (Study of History [Oxford University Press, 1954], vol. 8, p. 501).

42. PR, Notes, 1934, RA; Pearson’s Weekly, Oct. 20, 1934.

43. Star, Dec. 13; Evening Times (Glasgow), Jan. 26; Oxford Mail, March 9; Journal of Living and Learning, March—all 1934. Along with interviews, Robeson published several articles in 1934–36 on these same themes. The most important were collaborations with Leonora (Pat) Gregory (now Stitt), a young Australian-born journalist he met in 1934. In a series of letters to me (1985–86), Pat Gregory has outlined in detail her relationship with Robeson and has generously sent me as well the draft outline of a book she at one point was preparing to write with him, as well as the ms. for her own unpublished book, New Ways. The three articles she co-authored with Robeson were “Negroes—Don’t Ape the Whites,” Daily Herald, Jan. 5, 1935; “Want Negro Culture, Says Paul Robeson,” News-Chronicle, May 30, 1935; “Primitives,” The New Statesman and Nation, Aug. 6, 1936. Gregory has asked me to state, if I mentioned these articles, that “the ideas and nearly all the words were wholly Paul’s” and that she merely “organised” the material. In one of her letters (Oct. 18, 1985), Gregory emphasized Robeson’s need to find someone—as he did in her—to whom he could speak freely without fear that his confidences would be broken; he was so widely known and admired in London that he had trouble finding any protective anonymity. Among the confidences he related to Gregory was that of his broken love affair with Yolande Jackson, though without ever naming her (see note 15). When Gregory found herself in financial difficulty in 1937, Robeson insisted on making her an allowance so she could get on with her writing; he continued to help her financially until he returned to the States in 1939. She saw him again in 1949–50 and visited him backstage at the Stratford Othello in 1959 (“The other friends wondered why he took me by the hand and kissed me. I never told them”: Gregory to me, Feb. 21, 1985).

44. Daily Herald, Jan. 3, 1935 (Nigeria); Star, Dec. 13, 1934 (“lonely”); Daily Mail, Dec. 11, 1934 (“companions”). In a letter in RA from Tohekedi Khama to Dr. Roseberry T. Bokwe (June 21, 1934), in response to an inquiry about the Robesons’ possible trip to South Africa, he promises them “a hearty welcome to the Bechuanaland Protectorate. If you know them and they are your friends, I do not require any further particulars.”

45. Daily Mail, Dec. 11, 1934 (“some day”); The Spectator, June 15, 1934 (“vocal genius”); Huddersfield Examiner, Dec. 4, 1934 (“Wagner”); Film Pictorial Feb. 27, 1934 (“Wagner”).

46. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, March 14, 1930 (“High Water”); Yorkshire Herald, Feb. 14, 1930 (“spiritual significance”); Evening News (London), Feb. 13, 1930; Huddersfield Examiner, Dec. 4, 1934; Sheffield Telegraph, Feb. 21, 1935; Newcastle Journal, Feb. 25, 1935; Sheffield Independent, Feb. 21, 1935; Dundee Courier and Advertiser, March 27, 1935; Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, p. 173 (Harlem elite); Melody Maker, July 19, 1958 (“most important”); PR, Notes 1950s, RA (“Savoy”). In his Music Notes (n.d., 1960s?, RA), PR wrote, “The jazz scale is a new and significant development in the history of music in general and American music in particular … [there is] a unique immediacy, a direct communication here and now—from the living to the living—which jazz seems to provide.” In her diary entry for July 19, 1932, Essie wrote, “Went to Louis Armstrong’s opening, at the Palladium, this afternoon, and was terribly disappointed. I thought he was awful. I saw him in his dressing room afterwards, and thought he was worse. He may be alright on records, but he’s a mess on the stage and in person.” On the other hand, PR wrote in his Notes, 1934 (RA), “Ellington-Calloway have appeared and showed how shallow was all that went before, almost too late—for having received the synthetic, public hardly knows real—when it sees or hears it.” And when Cab Calloway came to London, Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that she and Paul “lived at the Palladium, listening to his Hi-de-hi-de-ho, and pretending we were in Harlem. He was handled very badly here, which is a shame” (ER to CVV and FM, April 5, 1934, Yale: Van Vechten).

47. Sheffield Telegraph, Feb. 21, 1935 (“decadent”); Star, May 20, 1936 (“genuine”); Daily Collegian (Pennsylvania State University), Dec. 10, 1940 (“St. Louis Blues”); interview with John Hammond, Aug. 8, 1985 (joined by Basie’s biographer, Albert Murray, who corroborated Hammond’s version). The “Kingjoe” record had verses by Richard Wright. Robeson, Wright, and Basie gathered at Okeh for the recording session, along with a group of reporters, photographers, and friends (including Max Yergan and Walter White). Clearly the record was widely regarded as a major event. In evaluating the special qualities of PR’s musical gifts, my interviews with John Hammond (Aug. 8, 1985), Pete Seeger (July 4, 1986), and Earl Robinson (Aug. 17, 1985) were especially helpful. Additionally, I found the insights in Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness and Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society particularly useful.

48. Perth Advertiser, Jan. 20, 1934 (Hebridean, etc.); Gambs to ER, April 18, 1934, RA (Russian); Glasgow News, March 18, 1934 (folk songs); Glasgow Exhibitor, Jan. 3, 1934 (Jews); Jewish Transcript, Nov. 22, 1935. Marie Seton describes Robeson as late as 1933 as innocent and uninformed on the Jewish question and at first reluctant (“I’m an artist, I don’t understand politics”) to play a special matinee of All God’s Chillun to benefit Jewish refugees. Seton claims he agreed after she helped clarify the parallels between the persecution of the Jews in Germany and the blacks in the United States, and further claims that “In later years he referred to this matinee as the beginning of his political awareness.” That event may have been contributory, but in my reading does not bear the heavy weight Seton puts on it (Seton, Robeson, pp. 66–69).

49. Birmingham Post, April 20, 1934. Among the other notices that expressed doubts about his ability to carry off his new repertory were: The Times, April 18, 1934; Oxford Mail, May 5, 1934; Yorkshire Telegraph, Jan. 23, 1934; Liverpool Post and Mercury, Jan. 19, 1934; Eastbourne Gazette, Aug. 15, 1934; Irish Times, Dec. 18, 1934.

50. The Observer, July 29, 1934; F. C. Schang (Metropolitan Musician Bureau) to PR, Aug. 24, 1934, RA (Amonasro). Robeson was paid two thousand pounds for appearing in Sanders, plus 5 percent of the gross in excess of eighty thousand pounds. The contract, dated June 25, 1934, is in RA; also B. Bleck (Contracts Dept., London Film) to ER, July 3, 1934, RA.

51. The Observer, July 29, 1934.

52. The Era, Sept. 12, 1934 (“accurate”); World-Telegram, Oct. 5, 1935 (porttowns); ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten.

53. New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 5, 1935; Freda Diamond ms. comments. The advertising for Sanders is in Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity,” p. 480.

54. Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973; 2nd ed., 1979), p. 217; Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 4, 1938 (“Fascist”). Robeson and Kenyatta struck up a friendship on the set, which was to continue. During the filming Robeson told Leslie Banks, who played Sanders, that in the role of Bosambo he felt he had “accomplished a lifelong desire—to show negroes on the screen as human beings” (Banks, Film Pictorial, April 6, 1935). Flora Robson (Sterner interview) relayed an anecdote relating to Sanders: Robeson “wore a leopard-skin and he was ticked off by a prince of the Ashanti who was up at Oxford who said what do you wear a leopard-skin for, so he said well what do you wear in Africa, tweeds? And the prince said Yes, we do.”

55. Daily News, June 27, 1935; Sunday Times, April 7, 1935; The Times, April 3, 1935; New York Herald Tribune, June 27, 1935 (“melodrama”); New York World-Telegram, June 27, 1935 (“sacredness”); The Sketch, April 10, 1935 (“punctilious”).

56. Yorkshire Post, April 3, 1935 (“sophisticated”); Picturegoer, April 20, 1935 (“Vagabond”); unidentified news clipping, 1935 (Beery); New Theatre, July 1935 (Stebbins). Melville J. Herskovits, specialist on Africa and an acquaintance of Robeson’s (for more on their relationship see p. 198 and note 36, pp. 634–35), wrote him that he “didn’t like the ‘white man’s burden’ plot” in Sanders (MH to PR, Dec. 11, 1935, Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University (henceforth NUL: Herskovits).

57. ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 20, 1935, RA.

58. Frances Williams interview with Kim Fellner and Janet MacLachlan, June 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of Fellner (part of the interview has been printed in Screen Actor, Summer 1982); New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 5, 1935; PR interview with Ric Roberts, Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 13, 1949 (“hate the picture”). Further evidence of Robeson’s later regret at having made Sanders is in an exchange of letters with Anne Cohen, a librarian at the 136th Street Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Cohen wrote him in 1944 to invite him to a screening of Sanders that she had arranged at the Harlem branch. Robeson wrote back to ask her to try to substitute Desert Sands, Song of Freedom, or King Solomon’s Mines for Sanders—“I personally am sorry about doing Sanders” (Cohen to PR, Jan. 27, 1944; PR to Cohen, Jan. 31, 1944, RA). In her book Robeson, Marie Seton (p. 97) claims that he—“a tower of ice-bound fury”—walked out of the Leicester Square Theatre in protest on the first-night showing of the film. The evidence will not support this claim. Though the press covered the opening extensively, no mention was made in it of such a protest—as surely there would have been had it occurred. Robeson may have slipped out briefly, the result of nerves (as reported in Daily Mirror, April 5, 1935), but if so he definitely returned. Indeed, at the close of the premiere he made a speech to the audience, one that the publicity manager for London Films, producers of Sanders, thought “was quite the best speech that has been made on such occasions for years”—an opinion he would hardly have entertained had Robeson included in it any statement of protest (John B. Myers to ER, April 11, 1935, RA). Since Robeson cooperated with Seton on her book and went over the ms., it’s possible he himself, in a retroactive fit of anger, fed her the tale of having walked out on opening night. Interestingly, though, the ms. (lent to me by Seton) has the sentence about his “ice-bound fury” crossed out—though by whom is not known, nor why the sentence reappeared in the printed version. Seton’s ms. also has written on it, in Robeson’s hand, this sentence: “All money earned from Sanders went to help Africa”; the business records in RA show that Robeson received royalties from Sanders through the early forties.

Another possible version of what happened at the Leicester Square Theatre on opening night is found in a Daily Express report (Oct. 18, 1937) and in an interview Ben Davis, Jr., did with Robeson in the Sunday Worker (May 10, 1936). Both items suggest that Robeson was sufficiently angry on opening night to refuse to perform when a piano was pushed onto the stage after the screening. As he told Davis, “… when it was shown at its premiere in London and I saw what it was, I was called to the stage and in protest refused to perform.” In other words, if Robeson’s account to Davis is accurate, he did let his displeasure be known on opening night—but it took the form of refusing to perform, not (as tradition has it) leaving the theater.

59. Eisenstein to PR, undated (1934), RA; Seton’s undated letter (1934) to PR, introducing Eisenstein (“You both have a thousand interests beyond your immediate work”) is in RA. Seton had originally met Eisenstein in 1932, when she carried some books to him in Moscow from Maurice Dobb the Marxist economist (interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982). Eisenstein’s letter was one, but not the only, triggering event that led to Robeson’s first trip to Russia. On the ms. of Seton’s Robeson, he wrote this comment in the margin next to the text describing how and why the trip came about: “I thought I told you … [at a political meeting filled with African and West Indian students] in the audience were many English ‘Liberals.’ Suddenly a man got up in the back of the Room and told us all to stop our mouthing. ‘If we were honest’ he said, ‘we would be interested in the African Peasants and Workers. And in the Soviet Union.’ Why didn’t I go there. I accepted the challenge. His name was Ward.”

Subsequent to his trip to the U.S.S.R., Robeson several times referred to its having been triggered by a Dec. 12, 1934, meeting of Harold Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples at which he spoke. Moody had founded the league in 1931 to provide social services for West Indian and African students resident in London. Its moderate Pan-Africanism contrasted with the more militant group surrounding George Padmore and C. L. R. James (Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Carvey: Race and Class in Modern Society [Louisiana State University Press, 1986], pp. 268–69). Since the Dec. 12 meeting of the league was a mere eight days before Robeson’s departure for Moscow, it is impossible that it carried the importance in his decision that he subsequently assigned it. Indeed, at the meeting itself, he referred to the fact that he was about to visit the U.S.S.R. (West Africa, Dec. 22, 1934), and no contemporary account of the meeting refers to any interruption by questioning (e.g., Daily Telegraph, Dec. 13, 1934). Marie Seton (interviews, Aug.-Sept. 1982) confirmed that Robeson “didn’t go plunging in,” that his trip to Moscow was preceded by a good deal of study and planning. The black U.S./Soviet actor Wayland Rudd later reminisced in a letter to Robeson about an “all night conversation” prior to his first trip to the U.S.S.R. “when you told me that your knowledge of your duty before our People, and your love for the Soviet Union compelled you to postpone pending Contracts and make your long intended first visit to Moscow in the Spring following! I’ll never forget the ring in your voice, Paul, when you said: ‘Way I’ll come!’ Man of your word, that you are, you came” (Rudd to PR, n.d. [1959?], RA). (And he had already attended a reception at Harrington House given by the Soviet Ambassador and Madame Maisky [The Times, April 3, 1934; The Taller, April 4, 1934].) Robeson was never, by temperament, a “plunger”—he made the important decisions in his life only after careful, deliberate reflection. Seton also thought she remembered—but wasn’t sure—that William Patterson had been pushing the idea for some time that Robeson ought to visit the U.S.S.R.

Although Robeson’s connection with the League of Coloured Peoples seems to have been minimal, the whole issue of his relationship with West Indian and African students and organizations in London is short on documentation. Future scholars pursuing more evidence on this question will want to note two possible leads from the RA. The first is a letter from W. A. Domingo (chairman of the Planning Committee of the West Indies National Emergency Committee) to PR, July 29, 1940, in which he refers to “… your magnificent assistance in the cause of West Indians two years ago in London.…” The second is a passage in a 1973 statement by Michael Manley (then Prime Minister of Jamaica) on the occasion of Robeson’s seventy-fifth birthday: “I was once, as a young student in London, privileged to spend a quiet evening with Paul Robeson. Our host was Errol Barrow, now the Prime Minister of Barbados. I was warmed by his kindness, humbled by his simplicity, and inspired by his vision. It was a milestone in my life—such was the power of the man.”

60. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, trans. Herbert Marshall (Houghton-Mifflin, 1983); Seton, Robeson, pp. 78–80; Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (The Bodley Head, 1952; rev. Dennis Dobson, 1978), pp. 316–34; Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton University Press, 1960, 1973, 1983), p. 299; interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; interview with Jay Leyda and Si-lan Chen, May 26, 1985; interview with Ivor Montagu (PR, Jr., participating), Sept. 7, 1982.

CHAPTER 10 BERLIN, MOSCOW, FILMS (1934-I937)

1. ER Diary, Dec. 21, 1934, RA; Seton, Robeson, pp. 81–82.

2. ER Diary, Dec. 21, 1934, RA; Seton, Robeson, pp. 83–84; Berliner Zeitung, June 21, 1960, an interview with Robeson—apparently a condensation of a longer interview he gave Klaus Ullrich for Neues Deutschland—in which he reminisced about his visit to Berlin in 1934. I have followed Robeson’s own version of events on the platform rather than the one in Seton—which has struck me as suspiciously elaborate and pat.

3. ER Diary, Dec. 22, 23, 24, 1934, RA. ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 5, 1935, RA. For more on the Afinogenovs and on Wayland Rudd and other black Americans living in the U.S.S.R., see Langston Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander (Hill and Wang, 1956), chs. 3–5. ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten. Returning to Harlem after three years in the Soviet Union, John Goode gave an interview to the Pittsburgh Courier (April 3, 1937) in which he said “social discrimination as practiced in America is unknown in Russia.” According to the Afro-American toolmaker Robert Robinson, who lived in the U.S.S.R. from 1930 to 1964, John Goode later became disillusioned but his brother Frank remained in the Soviet Union (interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988). In Homer Smith’s Black Man in Red Russia (Johnson Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 196–201, there is a poignant description of Frank Goode’s difficult life in the U.S.S.R. during World War II. Following the war, he lived on a wrestler’s pension in Gorky, his lot somewhat improved. According to Robert Robinson (interview, May 18, 1988), Frank Goode enlisted his sister Essie’s help in trying to get an apartment in Moscow, but her efforts to that end failed.

4. ER Diary, Dec. 23, 1934, RA; Moscow Daily News, Dec. 24, 1934; Chatwood Hall article on Robeson’s arrival in U.S.S.R., Chicago Defender, Jan. 12, 1935 (comment on Soviet theater); The Observer, April 28, 1935 (Uzbekistan). According to Hall, Robeson told the reporters that “The whole future of the Race is tied up with conditions in [Russia, Soviet Asia, Africa, and Soviet China] … especially the Chinese situation, which is much like the situation in Africa.”

5. ER Diary, Dec. 24, 25, 31, 1934, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 20, 1935, RA.

6. ER Diary, Dec. 24, 1934 (she further described Litvinov as “nice, pleasant, homely” and Ivy, “who pays no attention to clothes, or her personal appearance,” as “a curious woman—downright, gruff”); ER to “Mama,” Jan. 20, 1935, RA; interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982. For more on PR and Ivy Litvinov, see note 12, p. 659. Essie was very fond of Coates (“as fat and as jolly, and soft as ever; full of fun”), and the Robesons saw him fairly often in Moscow, attending one of his concerts at the Conservatory, pleased at the enthusiasm it produced (ER Diary, Dec. 24, 29, 30, 1934).

7. ER Diary, Dec. 24, 28, 1934, RA; Seton, Robeson, pp. 91–92; interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982. In his autobiography (The Man Who Cried Genocide) Patterson makes no reference to this episode. PR several times in later years credited Patterson with helping along his political education (e.g., Freedom, Aug. 1951). In a letter to her mother (Jan. 20, 1935, RA), ER refers to three visits to Pat, though her diary accounts for only two. “Pat was very pleased and flattered that we came so often to see him,” she wrote Ma Goode. She thought he “seemed better, but I think he has botched up some business of the Government, and is not in too high favor at the moment.” Shortly before PR had left for Moscow, he had sentacheckforfifteen pounds to the Negro Welfare Association to be used for the defense of the Scottsboro boys (Reginald Bridgman to PR, Nov. 24, 1934, RA). According to Robert Robinson, Essie “intensely disliked” Patterson. So did Robinson, who in our interview of May 18, 1988, made some serious allegations about Patterson’s role in the fall from official favor of Lovett Fort Whiteman, another Afro-American resident of the U.S.S.R. For more on Whiteman, see Robinson, Black on Red (Acropolis, 1988), p. 361, and Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia, pp. 77–83.

8. ER Diary, Dec. 24, 25 (women), 26 (hospitals), 29, 30 (Luria), 31, Jan. 1 (nurseries), 2 (Luria), 1935, RA; Seton, Robeson, pp. 87–88; interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten. On her return, Essie sent Luria a packet of books (Luria to ER, March 20, 1935, RA). Essie several more times in her diary referred to the “roughness” of the Russian temperament and then, toward the end of her stay, isolated another side of the Russians she “didn’t like”—“the maudlin sentimentality, and introspection … the ineffectuality, and tiresomeness” (ER Diary, Jan. 6, 1935, RA).

9. ER Diary, Dec. 25 (primitives), 1934, RA. Toward the end of their stay, the Robesons spent a few days in Leningrad (ER Diary, Jan. 8, 1935, RA), which is where he came into contact with the Samoyeds (tape of PR’s speech in Perth, courtesy of Lloyd Davies, is the source for PR’s comments on the Samoyeds).

Whereas much is disputed among specialists about the actual extent of Moscow’s sympathy for ethnic diversity (in the thirties and since), there seems general agreement that the Soviets marked an advance over the czars in regard to respecting national minorities and providing for “ethnic enclaves” and for the preservation of minority languages and literature in the schools (though not for separate political organizations). This was especially true during the years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution—and even in 1986 the official Soviet publishing agency printed textbooks in fifty-two languages to serve its disparate minorities, and the state radio broadcasted in sixty-seven languages (The New York Times, Dec. 28, 1986).

10. ER Diary, Dec. 27 (Tairov), 28 (Children’s Theater), 1934, Jan. 2, 1935, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 5, 1935, RA; PR, Notes, 1938, RA (little boy); ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten. The Robesons went to see Tairov’s production of All God’s Chillun.

11. Interview with Si-lan Chen Leyda and Jay Leyda, May 26, 1985; Silan Chen Leyda, Footnote to History (Dance Horizons: 1984), ed. by Sally Banes, pp. 196–97. According to Louis Fisher, the Moscow public which had earlier gone “wild” over Chen’s Spanish fan dance, “frowned” on her effort to “dance Marxism”—“For an interpretation of the theory of surplus value one does not go to Terpsichore” (Men and Politics, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941, p. 156).

12. Robinson, Black on Red, p. 311; interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988; ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1934, Jan. 3, 1935, RA; Seton, Robeson, p. 88; William Lundell interview with PR, 1933, transcript in RA; Ben Davis, Jr., interview with Robeson, Sunday Worker, May 10, 1936. The black actress Frances Williams, who was in Moscow at the time of Robeson’s visit in 1934, also recalls how impressed he was with the conditions he found there (Williams interview with Kim Fellner and Janet MacLachlan, June 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of Fellner). Frances Williams was later administrative secretary of the American Youth Congress (Williams to PR, July 15, 1941, RA). Homer Smith, an Afro-American resident of the U.S.S.R. until 1946, reports that at least until the first purge trials, efforts at racial equality were abundantly evident in the Soviet Union (Black Man in Red Russia, especially ch. 8). Robert Robinson, however, in his bitterly anti-Soviet book, Black on Red, disputes the “myth” of Soviet racial egalitarianism even for the period of the thirties (see especially ch. 25).

13. PR, Notes, 1938, RA (Pauli); ER Diary, Jan. 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 1935, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 6, 1935, RA; ER, PR, Negro, pp. 138, 140 (manners).

14. ER Diary, Dec. 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 1934, RA; ER to the Boilings, Jan. 5, 1935, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 20, 1935, RA. Picturegoer Weekly, Oct. 26, 1935, for PR’s comment on General Line; interview with Si-lan Chen Leyda and Jay Leyda, May 26, 1985; Vladimir Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein, trans and ed. Ivor Montagu and Jay Leyda (Hill & Wang, 1963), pp. 27, 170–71). According to Leyda, Eisenstein thought Robeson was physically too large for the Toussaint role. Leyda thinks Black Majesty “was probably doomed even before it became a subject for discussion,” because of the hostility of Film Commissar Shumyatsky—a great pity, in Leyda’s view, since the two men would have “worked together wonderfully” (interview, May 26, 1985). For other projects: Evening Standard, Sept. 19, 1936; Chicago Defender, Jan. 12, 1935; Amdur to ER, Dec. 30, 1935, RA. In 1937 discussion centered on a film about the war in Spain. In July (?), Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Attasheva, wrote Ivor Montagu: “What do you think about Robeson playing the part of a Morocco soldier in Spain—that is the new idea, instead of ‘Black Majesty’ (sweet dreams! while Shumyatsky sleeps!)” (as printed in Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work [Pantheon Books/The Museum of Modern Art, 1982], p. 95). Although there is no mention of Mikhoels in Essie’s diary, which is detailed for the trip to Moscow, Robeson later said he met Mikhoels during his first visit to Moscow, in 1934. “First in the film CIRQUE, his entrance with little ‘Jimmy’ was electrifying and very moving” (PR to Dolinsky and Chertok, Feb. 28, 1958, RA).

15. Seton, Robeson, pp. 94–95 (“human dignity”). In the Daily Rundschau (Berlin), June 17, 1949, PR refers to his 1934 visit as the first time he felt “the sympathy of a whole people for me, a Negro.” The notion that Robeson may have been bisexual, and had an affair with Eisenstein, has gained some currency (see, e.g., WIN magazine, Sept. 1, 1981). I have found absolutely no evidence to support these suggestions, and my sources have included an interview with a gay man, Bernard Koten, who lived in Moscow in the thirties and knew Robeson there. Eisenstein’s sister-in-law, Zina Voynow (interview Feb. 1987), also scoffed at the idea of Robeson having an affair with Eisenstein—though she did not deny Eisenstein’s homosexuality. (Si-lan Chen and Jay Leyda, as well as Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, have also confirmed that Eisenstein was homosexual—contrary to Marie Seton’s wholly unpersuasive argument that he was not in her Serge M. Eisenstein.) Also utterly without corroboration is the rumor that Guy Burgess once “revealed” that PR had had affairs with men. My futile efforts to trace it led me to this passage from a BBC TV show (aired in New York City, April 14, 1983, script courtesy of PBS): “‘Now listen Guy,’ he said, ‘when you get to Washington, remember three things: don’t be too aggressively left wing, don’t get involved in race relations, and make sure there aren’t any public homosexual incidents.’ ‘I see,’ [Burgess] said, ‘what you mean is I mustn’t make a pass at Paul Robeson.’”

16. Record (Glasgow), Feb. 1, 1935; ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson. In an unpublished interview enclosed in a letter from J. Steinberg to ER, Jan. 23, 1936 (RA), PR is said to have deplored violence against blacks and to have commented that “Even Soviet-Russia which is now connected with America economically and politically will not protest either against these murders”; the quote seems garbled, yet does convey another instance of Robeson’s continuing to express doubt in 1935 about Soviet intentions. The New York Times published a curious article (Jan. 2, 1935) reporting that “high officials” in Soviet radio had been dismissed for broadcasting a Robeson recording of “Steal Away to Jesus.”

Maisky to PR, Jan. 6, 1936, RA. For a lively picture of Ivan Maisky and his “gay, confident” wife, Agnes, see Victor Gollancz, Reminiscences of Affection (Gollancz, 1968), pp. 132–33. As for Stalin’s forced collectivization programs, the Soviet expert Edward Allsworth has put it to me this way: “In 1934 almost anyone would have missed what Robeson did.”

17. ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 8, 1935, RA; FM to CVV, June 3, 1935, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.; ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 17. 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Cunard to Schomburg, Aug. 4, 1930, NYPL/Schm.

18. ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 21, 1935, RA.

19. Soviet Russia Today, Nov. 1935. The concert manager in Belfast reported that in “thirty years experience he never remembered such a pressing demand for seats at any celebrity or other concert” (Belfast Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1935). As for audience response, there are newspaper reports of enthusiastic calls for encores, favorites being shouted up from the crowd, cheering applause, and half the audience staying to clap twenty minutes after the last encore (e.g., Manchester Daily Dispatch, March 4, 1935; Aberdeen Press and Journal, March 26, 1935). A different, politically noteworthy kind of reception was the party thrown for the Robesons by some twenty-five black university students in Dublin (Irish Press, Feb. 21, 1935), during which Robeson talked about the problems of race. To whites as well, Robeson reiterated his intertwined new themes of racial and musical integrity. He told reporters that his recent studies had further convinced him that the “basic melody” of all national folk music was the same, that “peasants and labourers of all races and nationalities think alike up to a point, and this brings about a basic similarity of their music, which is their form of self expression. If the Hebridean fisher folk and the African fisher folk are doing precisely the same work, under conditions which are very similar, they express themselves similarly” (Northern Whig, Feb. 8, 1935; Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, March 16, 1935). His contention was that “differences between civilisations disappear in folk-music,” and that folk music, “being melodic, is also particularly congenial to his race, to which melody has always meant more than harmony” (Manchester Guardian, Feb. 31, 1935).

As an example of the contradictory critical reception, The Scotsman (March 18, 1935) complained that “this born artist” did not extend “the bounds of his repertory,” while the Evening Express complained that, when he moved beyond the black spirituals, his “inimitable genius” failed him (or, as the Birmingham Post declared, “Mr. Robeson thrilled us with familiar echoes rather than with new tunes” [March 21, 1935]). Similar comments are in the Belfast News Letter, Feb. 18, 1935; the Glasgow Bulletin, March 19, 1935; and the Northern Whig, Feb. 19, 1935. More technical criticism of Robeson’s musical qualities mentioned a “phrase-moulding” that was “too level in tone-amount” (Glasgow Herald, March 19, 1935), “a slight break in his voice,” an occasionally unattractive “tremolo” (Glasgow Times, March 19, 1935), and a tendency to be “over-weighted with considerations of tone-quality and sostenuto” (Leicester Mercury, March 22, 1935).

20. Margaret Webster was in the cast of Basalik and came away with the best set of reviews (e.g., the Morning Post and the Daily Sketch, April 8, 1935). Coral Browne, as the governor’s wife, also did well, winning applause for her “cool and stylish” performance (The Observer, April 14, 1935). In calling the play “thin and unsatisfying,” the Daily Telegraph (April 8, 1935) struck the representative note. The contract for Basalik in RA reveals that the author was an American woman, Norma Leslie Munro (she adopted the pseudonym Peter Garland, and her identity was kept secret). She granted Robeson exclusive rights to the play for six months.

21. The New York Times, April 29, 1934; Seton, Robeson, pp. 99–101. Just before opening night, Essie wrote Ma Goode, “I think it will be a success, and am only worried for fear they will get riled over its revolutionary speeches” (ER to “Mama,” May 6, 1935, RA). Both the secretary for the Theatre Union, Margaret Larkin, and the director of its Stevedore production, Michael Blankfort, wrote Robeson prior to his opening in the play in London. Blankfort sent him general enthusiasm and good wishes; Larkin sent him photos, prompt script, staging and light cues, music, and reviews of the New York production (Larkin to PR, Aug, 8, 1934, Blankfort to PR, n.d., Herbert Marshall Papers, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, henceforth SIU).

22. Sunday Times, May 12, 1935. Several critics singled out Van Gyseghem’s production as misguided (e.g., New English Weekly, May 16, 1935; The Observer, May 12, 1935). The Tory press expressed some fear that the play was an inflammatory bit of Bolshevik propaganda (Daily Herald, May 10, 1935). Nancy Cunard’s review is in The Crisis, Aug. 1935. Larry Brown also got good reviews (e.g., West Africa, May 11, 1935).

23. Pabst to PR, Aug. 6, 1935; Antheil to PR, Aug. 6, 1935; Pabst to ER, Oct. 3, 1935; Antheil to ER, Oct. 3, 1935, RA. Munsell, business manager of Theatre Guild, to PR, Feb. 21, 1934; Gershwin to ER, April 25, 1934; Heyward to PR, June 21, Aug. 19, 1935, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 5, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten. The role of Porgy went to Todd Duncan.

24. The half-dozen telegrams and letters relating to the Edinburgh offer are in RA.

25. James’s play was one of four on various aspects of the Haitian revolution that Robeson had been considering (ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Carl Laemmle, Jr., to ER, Oct. 8, 1935, RA). The novelist Waldo Frank sent Robeson an outline for yet another possible play about Toussaint and, when Robeson didn’t respond, sent Essie a testy letter, complete with a glowing account of having met Richard Wright: “Beautiful deep brilliant … You two dont know what you’re missing spending your life in a stagnant eddy (swiftly turning into a sewer) like England. Yes, there is struggle here, and hope—and beauty. And a whole younger generation of Negroes second to none in value. I am happy to find these young men close to my own work” (Frank to PR, Sept. 18, 1935; Frank to ER, Dec. 4, 1935, RA).

26. ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 14, March 29, 1935; there are some dozen other letters from Essie to her mother in 1935, all in RA. There is also a typed ms. by Ma Goode of roughly twelve thousand words in RA entitled “The Education of My Grandson,” in which she details her strict theories of pedagogy, as well as numerous anecdotes about Paul, Jr.’s upbringing—and especially the kind of incidents involving racial discrimination that contributed to the decision to educate him in the Soviet Union.

27. ER to PR, Jr., April 20 (“sissy”), Sept. 14 (“nigger”), 1935, RA. There are some half-dozen other letters from ER to PR, Jr., during 1935.

28. ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 21, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Hammerstein to PR, Oct. 17, 1935, RA; CVV to Knopf, Sept. 30, 1935, UT: Knopf (Van Vechten also passed on the rumor that Robeson was to do Green Pastures); ER to Hattie Boiling, December 12, 23, 1935, RA.

Along with her series of portraits “of interesting Negroes wherever we go,” with an eventual book in mind (ER to Harold Jackman, July 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten), Essie had a variety of her own projects. She continued her studies at LSE, where Bronislaw Malinowski was one of her professors, and in the summer of 1935 had enrolled in a six-week course of theater studies at the Malvern Festival (ER to Harold Jackman, March 9, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Malinowski to ER, March 13, 1935, RA; ER to Jackman, July 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten). She greatly enjoyed the drama-school course at Malvern: “It is giving me exactly the kind of information and experience I need,” she wrote her mother, still hoping and intending to apply the knowledge toward forging a career as actress and playwright (ER to Ma Goode, Aug. 12, 16, Sept. 12, 1935, RA). In addition, in line with her temperamental drive to keep busy, Essie had a two-hour massage every other day, did fifteen minutes of exercise every night and morning, attended dancing class once a week, and took up horseback riding (ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 8, 1935, RA).

29. ER to Hattie Boiling, Dec. 12, 1935, RA; ER to CVV, Dec. 17, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Jackman, Dec. 26, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten. Robeson apparently surprised the sound engineers by moving in from the standard ten-foot distance to less than two feet from the microphone, singing in an intimate, less-than-full-volume style, which allowed him to keep his voice projection even and unstrained and to repeat a song twenty-five times with the same phrasing—which in turn allowed for nearly perfect synchronization (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 1936; The Referee, March 8, 1936; Picturegoer Weekly, Jan. a, 1937).

30. For the elaborate and hectic logistics: New York Evening Journal, May 9, 1936; Sidney Skolsky in the Daily News, May 16, 1936; Picturegoer Weekly, Jan. 2, 1937; New York Herald Tribune, May 24, 1936 (which reports on special makeup problems in “aging” Robeson). The Robesons nonetheless managed to get to Mexico for Thanksgiving, and Paul also found time to do a radio broadcast for Alexander Woollcott (Woollcott to Robesons, two telegrams, Dec. 25, 30, 1935, letter to ER, Dec. 18, 1935, RA); ER to Hattie Boiling, Dec. 12, 23, 1935, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 30, 1935; ER to Jackman, Dec. 26, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten.

31. Whale to PR, April 28, 1936; Hammerstein to PR, Feb. 25, 1936, RA; Hammerstein to ER, May 25, 1936, RA.

32. Sunday Times, March 1, 1936 (“Wordsworth”); The Observer, March 22, 1936 (“careful”); Daily Herald, March 17, 1936; The Times, March 17, 1936; Evening Standard, March 17, 1936.

Before beginning rehearsals, PR gave a few recitals, including one at the Albert Hall. The most significant element in the critical response was the nearly uniform opinion that the group of Russian songs he offered was unsuccessful. Robeson’s voice, the Manchester Guardian wrote, “has nothing in it of the real Russian sonority and dark timbre,” and his singing of Gretchaninov’s songs deprived them “of what little national character they possess” (Jan. 20, 1936). The same opinion was echoed in the Daily Telegraph (Jan. 20, 1936) and the Morning Post (Jan. 20, 1936).

Robeson continued to consider material about the Haitian revolution as a vehicle. A year after the James play, Essie wrote an aspiring writer that they had read fifty books and some hundred plays and scenarios about Christophe, Dessalines, and Toussaint. “All have been strangely disappointing save one, which we actually did produce here in London at a special experimental theatre. Even that didn’t prove good enough. We feel the history, and the characters are too good to spoil in a poor play, and so we are continuing to read manuscripts” (ER to Downing, Oct. 23, 1937, UT).

33. Interview with C. L. R. James, Nov. 1983 (the interview was conducted by Jim Murray, then assisting James in archival work, after I first forwarded a set of questions to James for his consideration). The single line about “great gentleness” is not from the interview, but from James, “Paul Robeson: Black Star,” Black World, Nov. 1970, p. 114.

34. James interview, Nov. 1983; Seton, Robeson, pp. 75–76 (detachment). Elaborating further on Robeson’s “reserve,” James described him as “a figure, but Padmore was a reality.” PR and Padmore were acquainted, but no more than that. On the ms. of Seton’s book on him, PR wrote in the margin at one point, “I never talked with Padmore & would not know him if I saw him” (ms. courtesy of Seton).

35. Emma Goldman to ER, Dec. 16, 1935, IISH (courtesy of Richard Polenberg); multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. By 1937 Goldman did believe that Robeson had committed himself to the Communists; commenting on the political mood in Britain, she wrote Rudolf Rocker that “95% of the intellectuals have been caught in the Communist trap including so great a mind as Paul Robeson” (Dec. 30, 1937, as quoted in David Porter ed., Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution [Commonground Press, 1983], p. 306). In his note 51, p. 326, Porter reports that Robeson appeared at a fund-raising event Goldman organized (even though the Communists “had organized a competing affair for the same date”) and also gave a strongly supportive public statement to a meeting Goldman and others sponsored that same year (even though the Daily Worker had refused to accept an advertisement for the event). Porter confirmed this information in a letter to me of Sept. 23, 1982. Moreover, Richard Drinnon, one of Goldman’s biographers, reports that earlier, in 1933, when the English edition of her autobiography, Living My Life, appeared, Robeson had sung two songs at a “literary luncheon” in her honor (Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise [Beacon, 1961], p. 274); that event is confirmed in Daily Sketch, March 2, 1933. Three years later, however, when Goldman asked PR to appear on a platform with her, Essie wrote back, “… his managers have forbidden him by contract to speak about anything, even vaguely connected with politics, etc.” Goldman replied, “Indeed I understand Paul’s position, Not for worlds would I ever want to embarrass him” (ER to EG, March 6, 1936, EG to ER, March 8, 1936, IISR).

36. ER to CVV and FM, April 27, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten (Webbs); Herskovits to PR, Nov. 11, 1935; ER to the Herskovitses, Dec. 1, 1935, NUL: Herskovits. Jean Herskovits, their daughter, is the source for her father’s and Robeson’s having roomed together; Herskovits’s biographer, however, makes no mention of the fact, printing instead a recollection by Margaret Mead in which she recalls that the sociologist Malcolm Willey was Herskovits’s roommate before his 1924 marriage (George Eaton Simpson, Melville J. Herskovits [Columbia University Press, 1973], pp. 2–3). The Robesons and Herskovitses stayed in touch and occasionally socialized at least through 1938, judging from the additional correspondence between them in the Herskovits Papers, NUL (Melville J. Herskovits to ER, Dec. 11, 1935; ER to Herskovitses, n.d. [1937]; MH to ER, Aug. 18, 1938). In the late forties, however, there seems to have been a polite political falling-out. PR invited Herskovits to join the National Non-Partisan Committee to defend the rights of the twelve leaders of the CP under indictment. Herskovits replied that the request “leaves me cold” (PR to Herskovits, July 26, August 31, 1949, Herskovits to PR, July 28, 1949, Herskovits Papers, NYPL/Schm); West Africa, Nov. 7, 1936 (“applause”); Charles S.Johnson to PR, June 21, Sept. 27, 1935; Hughes to PR, Jan. 7, 1936, RA; ER to? (“race war”).

37. Leys’s Kenya was first published in 1924 and reissued in its fourth edition in 1973 (Frank Cass [London], with an introduction by George Shepperson). For a full discussion of Leys’s life and work, see the Introduction by John W. Cell to By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham 1918–1926, ed. John W. Cell (University of Chicago Press, 1976). Robeson’s remarks about “decadent,” etc., are from PR, Notes, 1936, RA. Leys sent a copy of his June 11, 1935 letter to Leonard Barnes (PR ambivalences) to the Robesons as well (June 14, 1935) to be sure he hadn’t misrepresented their views. There is no evidence that they found Leys’s characterizations of their opinions inaccurate (also Jane Leys to ER, March 9, 1935; Norman Leys to PR, June 12, 1935, RA). The Robesons stayed in the Leyses’ house in Brailsford, Derbyshire, “on a number of occasions” (Alan Newland to me, July 1, 24, 1988).

38. PR, Notes, 1936, RA.

39. Ibid.; Leys to Barnes, June 11, 1935, copy to the Robesons (RA). Leys’s remark about “vague and confused” is repeated in a letter from Winifred Holtby to William Ballinger (the 1935 letter, undated, is in the Ballinger Papers, University of Cape Town Archives, courtesy of Tim Couzens, African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand). For more on the interaction of these people with PR, see p. 205.

40. Leys to Barnes, June 14, 1935, copy to the Robesons (RA).

41. In this and the following paragraph I am quoting directly from PR’s own Notes, 1935, as sent to the journalist Marcia de Silva. Despite her efforts, these were neither included in the article as published in Nash’s (Dec. 1935) nor subsequently printed as a corrective in the letter she wrote to the editor (a truncated version of her letter is in Nash’s for Jan. 1936). De Silva explains all this in a letter to PR of Nov. 16, 1935, RA.

42. PR, Notes, 1935, and Notes, 1936, RA; Nash’s, Dec. 1935. In his Notes, 1939 (RA), PR continues to speak of the Afro-American as “essentially African in his cultural heritage.” For one example of Robeson being mislabeled an “African nationalist” in this period, see Fischer, Men and Politics, p. 192. Fischer met Robeson soon after Sanders and, visiting him at home, found him “immersed in Black Zionism, and the rooms were filled with African masks, weapons, trophies and jungle knickknacks.” Fischer claims to have predicted that “Moscow would cure him of his African nationalism” and claims, too, to have suggested Robeson go there. Although Robeson would not, after the thirties, often sound in public the themes of cultural nationalism, his reaffirmation in PR, Stand, p. 35, and the reference in a statement he drafted in 1957 suggest they continued to exert at least some hold over him: “As for me, my proudest heritage is the knowledge of the richness and depth of the age-old African culture from which I and my people spring” (ms. statement in response to article in The Worker, Jan. 23, 1957, RA).

43. PR, Notes, 1935, and Notes, 1936, RA.

44. James, “Paul Robeson: Black Star,” p. 112.

45. The various drafts of the prologue to Best’s film are in RA, along with Best to PR, May 26, June 2, 1936; Best to ER, May 28, Sept. 4, 1936; The Worker, April 12, 1937. Ten years later Joseph Best sent Robeson an account of the film’s subsequent history, also revealing that Robeson had invested £250 in it. According to Best, the film was well received in the trade papers, but he “soon found that there was a dead set against it originating from S. Africa House.” He was asked to cut out “many references,” but refused. When the film failed to get many bookings, Best withdrew it and then put out a shorter version under the title Africa Sings. This got a “fair showing,” and he “managed just to recoup” expenses and to draw “about even” (Best to PR, Feb. 18, 1944, RA).

46. Telegram, Carl Laemmle, Jr., to Universal, Sept. 20, 1935, RA; New York Tribune, May 15, 1936; The Taller, June 17, 1936; New York Amsterdam News, June 20, 1936; California Eagle, May 8, 1936 (“shiftless moron”); The Black Man (London), Jan. 1937; Robinson to ER, Aug. 26, 1936, RA; Emma Goldman to PR, Oct. 21, 1935, IISH, courtesy of Richard Polenberg; Eisenstein to PR and ER, Feb. 1, 1937, RA. The Show Boat reviews are also summarized in Beulah Livingstone (Universal Pictures) to ER, May 22, 1936, RA, and ER to CVV and FM, May 25, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten.

47. ER to CVV and FM, April 27, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten; Pittsburgh Courier, May 20, 1937.

48. Interview with Elizabeth Welch, Sept. 6, 1982 (PR, Jr., participating); Pittsburgh Courier, May 20, 1937; Hughes to ER, July 16, 1938, RA. The white press was largely favorable—e.g., “A thoroughly entertaining film” (The Era [London], Aug. 19, 1936); “Robeson comes into his own” (Film Pictorial, March 6, 1937). However, there were some decided negatives—e.g., Picturegoer, March 6, 1937; The Spectator, Sept. 26, 1936, and The Bystander, Sept. 30, 1937, which called the film “sentimental, over-coloured and unreal.”

49. PR, Jr., ms. comments (authorities opposed), as borne out by an editorial in The Cape Times (Feb. 1, 1935) expressing the hope that “if Paul Robeson comes to South Africa it will be to confine himself [to the] field of music, and not to indulge in the fanciful suggestions given to the Press.” ER’s remark was made in a newspaper interview she gave to a South African newspaper (the Argus, undated clipping in RA); ER to CVV and FM, May 25, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten.

50. Interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982. The remaining information about the Leys circle comes from Tim Couzens of the African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, the product of his research into the Winifred Holtby Papers at Hull Central Library and the William Ballinger Papers at the University of Cape Town Archives (research he has generously shared with me). The quotations are from the following documents: ER to Holtby, n.d. (1935), Holtby Papers; Holtby to Margaret Ballinger, April 16, 1935; Holtby to the Ballingers, May 20, 1935; Holtby to Leys, April 17, 1935, Ballinger Papers. Tim Couzens also generously put in my hands a copy of the novel Wild Deer by Ethelreda Lewis. The leading character in Wild Deer is a black American singer of international renown, and the novel recounts his experiences when visiting Africa. Lewis wrote PR to say, “The central figure … is not Paul Robeson,” but it is probably based on a composite of Robeson and Roland Hayes (Lewis to PR, Oct. 31, 1932, RA). This entire backlog of events may help to explain Essie’s caution with the Cape Town reporters when responding to questions about Paul’s political plans.

51. ER to CVV and FM, May 25, 1936, RA; the letters of introduction are in RA; ER to CVV and FM, postcard.June 6, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to PR, June 4, 1936, RA. I. Schapera (professor of anthropology at Cape Town University), Dr. Bokwe, Max Yergan, Dr. James Moroka (later president-general of the African National Congress), and Rheinallt Jones of the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg were especially helpful (e.g., Jones to ER, June 12, 1936, RA).

52. ER to PR, June 4, 17, 21, 23, 1936, RA; ER to Marie Seton, July 28, 1936, courtesy of Seton; ER, African Journey (John Day Co., 1945) passim; Cape Town Argus, n.d., (clipping in RA); Johannesburg Sunday Times, July 5, 1936 (interview with ER); New York World-Telegram, Sept. 11, 1936 (report on trip). C. L. R. James was also of the opinion “that people were looking to Paul to start … a movement.” (James, “Paul Robeson”) ER to Jackman, Oct. 6, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten (“grand dreams”). Jackman had begun to edit Challenge with Dorothy West, and in the issues of Jan. and June 1936 had published Essie’s “Black Paris” in two parts. Arthur Schomburg, for one, was acid about the new journal: “It does not seem to challenge anything,” he wrote Nancy Cunard (Schomburg to Cunard, June 9, 1936, NYPL/Schm).

53. PR referred to his Aug. 1936 vacation in the U.S.S.R. in the five-page ms. Notes, 1938, RA, subsequently published as “Why I Left My Son in Moscow,” Russia Today, Feb. 1938. Robert Robin son, who again saw PR during his 1936, visit, found him more fully committed to the Soviet Union than he had been in 1934 (interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988). Peggy Dennis told me about the consultation over Pauli (interview, April 1982 [PR, Jr., participating]). She has also written about it in The Autobiography of an American Communist (Westport, 1977). pp. 119–20.

54. New York Amsterdam News, July 1, 1938; Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 14, 1937. The negative critics were particularly harsh about the artificial placement of the songs and the foolishness of their lyrics (e.g., The Spectator, July 30, 1937). Robeson did not have the contractual power to veto the anachronisms, but he seems to have had enough informal clout to bring about some changes in the plot line: a handwritten note by Essie appended to the screen treatment (RA) registers objection to indiscriminate scenes of killing: “No blood orgies. OK one or 2 killed in melee … but no general killing.” PR was paid eight thousand pounds for ten weeks (Harold Holt to ER, Dec. 14, 1935, RA). For a persuasive reading of King Solomon’s Mines as a defense of the British Empire, see Jeffrey Richards, “Patriotism with Profit: British Imperial Cinema in the 1930s,” British Cinema History, ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter (Barnes and Noble, 1983).

55. Interview with Elizabeth Welch, Sept. 6, 1982 (PR, Jr., participating); Picturegoer Weekly, Oct. 26, 1935 (comic part); ER to “Ann,” postcard, Jan. 3, 1937, Yale: Van Vechten. “We are both so proud of YOU,” Van Vechten wrote ER on hearing about her movie role, knowing well her need for acknowledgment as an independent person (CVV to ER, June 22, 1937, RA). Hearing the news that Essie was going to act, Flora Robson wrote to congratulate her: “I hope you’ll love it and succeed, and get where you want to—the production side” (FR to ER, Dec. 30, 1936, RA).

56. Fenn Sherie (one of the two scriptwriters) and “Arthur” to J. Edgar Wills, Oct. 14, 1936, RA (script; title). Welch and Essie did not get along well: “Essie didn’t care for me. Essie didn’t care for a lot of ladies. She was nervous of Paul, you see.… She had no humor. I mean, she may have had some in her own way, but she didn’t have any of ours” (interview with Welch, Sept. 6, 1982).

57. ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 9, 1937, postcard, Yale: Van Vechten; Moscow Daily News, Dec. 20, 1936; also Moscow News, Dec. 30, 1936. The Dec. 1936 Workers’ Moscow review was translated for me (as well as much other Russian-language material) by Eisenstein’s sister-in-law Zina Voynow; she characterized the Eisenstein review as typical of his style “when he was not doing real criticism.” Ma Goode’s ms., “The Education of My Grandson” (RA), details both the discrimination young Pauli had already faced and his contentment at the contrasting atmosphere of the Soviet school.

58. ER to “Ann,” Jan. 3, 1937, postcard, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 9, 1937, postcard, Yale: Van Vechten; Sunday Worker, May 10, 1936 (Davis). On Stalin’s collectivization policies, see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford, 1986); however, for exaggerations in Conquest’s account, see Jeff Coplan, “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust,” the Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1988, and also the follow-up letters in the Voice, Feb. 2, 10, 1988.

59. Film Pictorial, May 10, 1937 (“mix”); ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 9, 1937, postcard, Yale: Van Vechten.

60. California Eagle, May 21, 1937; Picture Show, May 15, 1937; New York Amsterdam News, n.d. (1937) (Kalsoun); Egyptian Gazette, Feb. 6, 1937 (cinema); Evening News, April 13, 1937: “My voice is embarrassingly delicate. I simply can’t afford to play tricks with it.”

61. Interview with Henry Wilcoxon (PR, Jr., participating), Sept. 1982. Wilcoxon and Essie seem to have gotten along well despite his finding her “sharp”; there are several chatty (undated) letters from him to her in RA.

62. Wilcoxon interview, Sept. 1982.

63. Evening Standard, Dec. 22, 1936 (Kouka); The New York Times, Aug. 17, 1938. The Times (London), Nov. 11, 1937, ran a representative English review: “This film begins admirably … then declines into the commonplace.” In a reverse of the usual reception, Washington Afro-American, Aug. 20, 1938, praised Robeson more highly than did any of the white reviewers: “… in ‘Dark Sands,’ he is permitted to redeem himself completely.” On the commercial failure of fericho, see Ernest Betts, Inside Pictures (Cresset, 1960), pp. 11–14.

64. Pablo Azcarate (Spanish Ambassador) to PR, April 26, 1937, Jan. 19, 1938; Yergan to PR, May 25, 1937, RA. The program for the Victoria Palace concert is in RA; among the patrons listed are Dame Sybil Thorndike, Rebecca West, Havelock Ellis, John Gielgud, and John Cowper Powys.

65. ER to CVV and FM, May 30, 1937, Yale: Van Vechten; Moscow Daily News, May 15, 1937; E. C. Goode (“Ma” Goode), “The Education of My Grandson,” ms., RA. Jean Blackwell Huston (interview, Sept. 21, 1983) told me an anecdote about meeting PR in Moscow in 1937 that bears repeating for its insights into his personality: “I was walking along the street, and I was wearing the homespun clothing that they wore, which I had acquired by exchanging with some people I met going south on a train.… However, I was still wearing my American shoes. And when Robeson saw me, he thought he must be seeing somebody from home.… So he followed me. You know, he had a wonderful sense of humor.… I remember then I turned around and he said, ‘Is you is or is you ain’t?’… Then he walked along and showed me the sights of Moscow.… I think this was characteristic of him—that he would forget where he was supposed to be and just impulsively be kind and cordial to a person.”

66. ER to CVV and FM, May 30, 1937, Yale: Van Vechten. The quotes expressing Paul’s views in this and the following paragraphs are taken from two of his statements, “National Culture and the Soviet Union” (written for the Sunday Worker, Oct. 10, 1937; ms. in RA) and an untitled four-page ms. in RA, there given the title “Soviet Worker, 1937.” Years later, recalling his 1937 attendance at the Uzbek National Theater (and writing for a pro-Soviet journal), Robeson described the performance as “national in form, socialist in content,” and the Uzbek people as “quite comparable to some of the tribal folk of Asia—quite comparable to the proud Yoruba or Basuto of West and East Africa, but now their lives flowering anew within the socialist way of life” (New World Review, April 1953).

67. The three-page typescript of PR’s speech, dated June 24, 1937, is in RA. The account of threats to ban or jam his broadcast is drawn from: Manchester Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Worker—all June 25, 1937; News-Chronicle, June 19, 1937; Daily Herald, June 24, 1937. The News-Chronicle, June 25, 1937, is among the papers reporting his speech as “the most striking.” The program of the event, listing the sponsors, is in RA. Yvonne Kapp, the principal organizer of the rally, called Robeson’s speech “the finest an artist has ever made,” and Hilda Browning, of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, credited Robeson’s personal appearance with the sellout crowd. John McMillan, of the publishing firm of William Heinemann Ltd., was so enamored of his “magnificent speech” that he tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to broaden it into a book (Kapp to PR and ER, Browning to ER, McMillan to PR—all June 25, 1937, RA).

68. T. H. Lee to PR, Nov. 7, 1937, RA; Gollancz to PR, Sept. 22, 1937, RA (there are three versions of a blurb PR gave, at Gollancz’s request, for Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, written in ER’s hand on the Gollancz letter); A. C. Thomas to ER, Nov. 8, 1937, RA (Friends U.S.S.R.); Agnes Maisky to ER, Jan. 16, 1938, RA; Daily News-Chronicle (London), Nov. 7, 1937 (“aspirations”); Reynolds News, Oct. 10, 1937 (“decadent”); Daily Worker, Nov. 22, 1937; Cripps to PR, Oct. 12, Dec. 4, 1937; Cripps to ER, Nov. 25, 1937, RA. For more on Robeson’s connection with Unity Theatre, see pp. 223–24. Ambassador Azcarate invited the Robesons to dinner on Nov. 18, 1937, to meet Pablo Casals. Programs for PR’s benefit concerts are in RA. At the Nov. 6, 1937, Queen’s Hall meeting in support of China, PR shared the platform with the Dean of Canterbury, P. J. Noel Baker (Master of Balliol), and Ellen Wilkinson, MP. Robeson told the black press he was sick and tired of playing Uncle Tom roles, admitting that those who had earlier attacked his acceptance of such parts had been justified in their protests. He vowed for the future to avoid portraying caricatures (New York Amsterdam News, undated, 1937; Philadelphia Tribune, May 20, 1937).

69. For more on the changes in lyrics, see note 14, pp. 604–05. The programs for PR’s benefit appearances are in RA. Newspaper accounts of the Albert Hall rally include the Daily Herald and News-Chronicle, both Dec. 20, 1937. During this same period PR’s gift of $250 initiated a fund-raising drive for the Negro People’s Ambulance to Republican Spain, a cause whose sponsors came to include such black luminaries as Channing Tobias, A. Philip Randolph, William Pickens, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright; the mimeographed report on the ambulance’s Eastern tour is in RA. Finally, Robeson made a record in aid of the Basque Refugee Children’s Fund for His Master’s Voice.

CHAPTER 11 THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND EMERGENT POLITICS (1938–1939)

1. ER to William Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson; ER Diary, 1938, and her eighty-page reworking of it (entitled “We Go to Spain”)—the two mss. are in RA and are hereafter cited together as ER, “Spain”; ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 21, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten.

2. On the visa problem: James E. Parks (American Consul, London) to PR, Dec. 21, 28, 1937; Parks to ER, Jan. 7, 1938, RA. Robeson may have decided to go to Spain with Charlotte Haldane after he had sung at a benefit concert for the International Brigade (Dependents and Wounded Aid Committee) at Shoreditch Town Hall; Charlotte Haldane was hon. secretary of the group (CH to PR, Jan. 3, 1938, RA).

3. The Guillén interview was originally published in the radical Cuban journal Mediodía, reprinted in a translation by Katheryn Silver in World Magazine, July 24, 1976; Manchester Guardian, Feb. 2, 1938.

4. News-Chronicle, Feb. 4, 1938; Scotsman, Feb. 4, 1938.

5. ER, “Spain,” RA; ER Diary, January 23, 1938, RA (Minor).

6. ER, “Spain,” RA.

7. PR, Notes, 1938, “My Impressions of Spain,” nine ms. pp., RA; ER, “Spain,” RA (black soldiers). In the documentary film The Good Fight, Tom Page, another black American in the brigade, is quoted as saying, “For the first time in my life I was treated with dignity.” Langston Hughes, who was in Spain the year before Robeson and friendly with Guillén, also reported that “All the Negroes, of whatever nationality, to whom I talked, agreed that there was not the slightest trace of color prejudice in Spain” (I Wonder As I Wander [Hill & Wang, 1956], p. 351; the Hughes volume has considerable information on blacks who served in Spain). Additional detail on the experiences of black Americans including information on Gibbs, Mitchell, and Pringle, is in James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoirs of a Black American in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1938 (Shamal, 1986).

8. PR, Notes, 1938. “My Impressions of Spain,” RA; Daily Herald, Feb. 4, 1938 (film). PR expressed the same sentiments to Nicolás Guillén about “big capital” controlling the film industry and insisting on “a caricature image of the Black, a ridiculous image, that amuses the white bourgeoisie, and I am not interested in playing their game.…” When Guillén asked him if that meant he was abandoning films, Robeson purportedly replied, “No, not that. What I won’t do any more is work for the big companies, which are headed by individuals who would make me a slave, like my father, if they could. I need to work with small independent producers” (Guillen interview with Robeson, as reprinted in World Magazine, July 24, 1976). For more on Oliver Law, including a description of his death, see Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett, and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson: American Radical (University of Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 205–18.

9. ER, “Spain,” RA; Sterner interviews with George Baker and Tommy Adlam. Charlotte Haldane published a series of brief notes in the Daily Worker (London) describing the trip to Spain. In The Worker for Feb. 15, 1938, she paid tribute to Essie as “one of the most gifted women I have had the pleasure of knowing” and made some affectionate fun of her recent obsession—much in evidence during the Spanish trip—of snapping pictures. Essie had taken up photography with her usual enthusiasm; on returning from Spain she took a course for a time with Marcel Sternberger (ER to CVV and FM, April 4, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten). She gave some of the Spanish photographs to William Patterson to publish and was annoyed when he captioned some of them inaccurately (ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm).

10. ER, “Spain,” RA.

11. ER, “Spain,” RA; ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1938, RA; Daily Worker, Jan. 29, 1938.

12. ER, “Spain,” RA. Apparently Robeson also met Hemingway, who was in Spain as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and was undergoing his own political metamorphosis. According to Norberto Fuentes (Hemingway in Cuba [Lyle Stuart, 1984], pp. 148, 187), Hemingway and Robeson were together at least twice (there is no mention of such meetings in Essie’s diary or elsewhere), one time at La Moraleja, the palace of the Loyalist supporter, the Duchess of Aldama, on the outskirts of Madrid, where Hemingway drank too much and fell asleep.

13. ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1938, RA; Manchester Guardian, Feb. 15, 1938 (Gols).

14. ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1938, RA; ER, “Spain,” Jan. 1947, RA (“barrier”).

15. PR, Stand, p. 53; PR, Notes, 1938, “My Impressions of Spain, RA; Worthing Herald, Sept. 23, 1938 (“murdered”); ER, “Spain,” RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 4, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (Cortez; Moscow); Madeleine Braun (Paris) to PR, Feb. 11, 1938, RA; ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson. The importance of the Soviet role in Spain in cementing loyalty to the U.S.S.R. for many others besides Robeson is well documented (see, for example, Steve Nelson, The Volunteers [Masses and Mainstream, 1953], and John Gates, The Story of an American Communist [Chilton, 1961]). There are a half-dozen letters from Castillo in RA. L’Humanité, Feb. 7, 1938; Ce Soir, Feb. 12, 1938. ER to CVV and FM, April 25, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten (Ruiz). In 1947 Castillo and his family were living in exile in Mexico (ER, “Spain,” Jan. 1947, RA). When Rockmore declined his help with the exhibition, Freda said to Paul, “Rockmore may be your lawyer but he’s not your friend”—causing Paul “to roll on the floor with laughter” (multiple interviews with Diamond; ER to Freda Diamond, April 11, 15, 21, 1939, courtesy of Diamond). According to Freda Diamond, Paul showed up at the New York opening of Cristobal’s paintings as a surprise, carrying under his arm a portrait Cristobal had done of Pauli.

16. ER to Kaye, March 21, 1938, RA (return to States); ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson; ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, NYPL/Schm, PR Coll.

17. The interview with Ben Davis, Jr., is in the Sunday Worker, May 10, 1936; multiple interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; Hugh Thomas, John Strachey (Harper & Row, 1973), p. 159. According to PR, Jr., his father told him in 1938 “that because he [Paul] had developed a close friendship with Kazakov, Kazakov’s arrest and the absurd charges against him had been an important factor in fueling his [Paul’s] doubts about the charges leveled in the 1937 trials” (PR, Jr.’s written comments on ms.). I have found no evidence in specific support of this claim, but one fragment of general evidence has emerged in Lia Golden’s reminiscences, “Black Americans’ Uzbek Experiment,” Moscow News, Sept. 20–27, 1987. Golden reports that in the summer of 1937 the Robesons vacationed at Kislovodsk with her parents, Oliver John and Bertha Golden, and she, Lia (age four), remembers “the adults discussing some thing and arguing heatedly. During that trip Paul Robeson could not find many of his friends. My father too lost many of his acquaintances.… Later I found out that Paul Robeson had made official inquiries regarding his arrested friends, trying to help them. In reply, one of them was brought from prison.…” The latter statement may be a garbled version of the PR-Feffer incident in 1949 (see pp. 352–53). Robert Robinson believes that PR knew almost nothing of the purges (which to Robinson were familiar from disappearances within his own factory), and ascribes PR’s comparative ignorance to his unwillingness to talk at length with other blacks resident in the U.S.S.R. who might have disabused him of his growing faith in the Soviet system (interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988). On the other hand, PR may have been concerned about Robinson’s already welldeveloped anti-Soviet sentiments (on account of which, apparently, he decided not to help Robinson get permission to leave the U.S.S.R.) and may simply have decided not to discuss the purge trials with him (Robinson, Black on Red, esp. pp. 313–17).

18. ER to CVV and FM, April 4, May 18, July 16, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten; Ma Goode, ms., “The Education of My Grandson,” RA; Ma Good to the Associated Negro Press, Feb. 20, 1942, CHS: Barnett (“we left Moscow in tears”); News-Chronicle, Jan. 25, 1938 (“Russian children”). There is a letter full of veiled references about the situation in the U.S.S.R. and the inadvisability of keeping Pauli in school there (“I am telling you this strictly privately.… The idea of bringing Pauli up in Russia was originally a good one, but according to reliable information—circumstances have changed”) in RA from Kurt Shafer of the International Relief Association for Victims of Nazism to PR, April 26, 1938. Interviewed after his return to London, Pauli told a reporter he had had many friends in Russia and hoped to go back there to school (Soviets Today [Australia], Oct. 1, 1938). Because of the Spanish and Russian visas on Essie’s passport, the Germans had already confiscated it once (ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm). Not wanting anyone “to believe that we have taken him out,” the Robesons at first explained Pauli’s reappearance in London as merely a holiday visit (ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm).

19. Philip Noel Baker to PR, Feb. 9, 1938 (IPC); Nancy E. Bell to PR, Feb. 14, 1938 (IPC); E. E. Brooke to ER, April l2, 1938 (Basque); Marian Wilbrahan to PR, May 10, 1938 (BYPA); Trent to ER, April 2, 1938 (music); Walter Starkie to ER, April 26, 1938 (music); Eisenstein to ER, April 9, 1938—all RA; Leyda, Kino, p. 360 (roadblocks). The preliminary draft of a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for an International Theatres Foundation is in RA, along with a letter from Ambrose to PR, Jan. 5, 1938, making reference to earlier discussions.

20. Holt to PR, June 10, 1938, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 4, 1938 (Albert Hall), Yale: Van Vechten. For the 1937–38 season, Holt, in his advertising, had placed Robeson’s name alone, above all the others, in a star-studded list that included Gigli, Richard Tauber, Kreisler, Yehudi Menuhin, Lawrence Tibbett and Rachmaninoff (placard courtesy of Freda Diamond). The critics of the Albert Hall concert were less ecstatic than the audience (e.g., Evening News and Daily Mail, April 4, 1938). Daily Worker, June 16, 1938 (anthem); Mary Atherton to PR, June 13, 1938; Judith Todd to PR, June 27, 1938, RA. In signing a contract with Roman Freulich of Los Angeles to make a film, PR insisted on a clause guaranteeing him final cut—and when Freulich failed to come up with a script that met his approval, he canceled the deal. However, it was probably not for political reasons but for musical ones—his antipathy to appearing in opera, even one by an old friend—that at this same time Robeson turned down an offer to appear in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, recommending Todd Duncan as a replacement. The contract with Freulich, dated Feb. 1938, is in RA; ER to CVV and FM, May 18, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (film refusal); ER to Mrs. Kaufman, June 9, 1938, RA (Saints).

21. The Cine Technician, Sept.-Oct. 1938; Daily Record (Chicago), Feb. 28, 1939; Daily Express, June 9, 1938, and PR ms., “The English Theater,” n.d. (1938), RA (“inside turned”; “talented tenth”).

22. Malcolm Page, “The Early Years at Unity,” Theater Quarterly, Oct.-Dec. 1971, pp. 60–66; Raphael Samuel, Theaters of the Left 1880–1935 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 59–64, 94–95. The Program for Unity Theatre (RA) contains its statement of purpose; interview with Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985. Robeson also lent his name to Unity Theatre’s fourteen-person General Council, along with (among others) Sean O’Casey, Harold Laski, Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz, Tyrone Guthrie—and Maurice Browne, the producer of the 1930 Othello; but Robeson did not actually attend the council’s meetings (interview with Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985). At the inaugural ceremonies for Unity, on Nov. 25, 1937, Gollancz spoke, Robeson sang, and O’Casey sent a message of support.

23. Page, “Early Years”; interview with Marshall and Brilliant, July 20, 1985. The program for Plant (RA) does indeed omit the names of the actors, but a contemporary photograph of the Unity Theater (Weekly Illustrated, June 25, 1938) reveals a large placard over the building’s entrance prominently advertising PR’s name immediately underneath the play’s title. Herbert Marshall (interview, July 20, 1985) recalled that Robeson lent him money during the run of Plant but begged Marshall not to let Essie know.

24. Time and Tide, July 16, 1938; Unity Theater, “Press Statement,” 1938, RA.

25. Beste’s recollections are in a 1979 letter to Ann Soutter (who had also been a member of Unity), as copied and sent to PR, Jr., May 14, 1985, courtesy of PR, Jr. In her covering letter, Soutter recalled Essie as “a real watchdog, and needed to be, for Paul was very soft hearted. She would send a taxi to pick him up after the performance.… If he wasn’t home in time she would telephone to know the reason why.” Sterner interview with Alfie Bass.

26. Haemi Scheien, “Paul Robeson Becomes an Amateur,” Drama, July 1938 (“drying up”); Weekly Review, June 23, 1938 (“compact”); Evening Standard, July 25, 1938 (“gentle strength”); Manchester Guardian, June 16, 1938.

27. The ms. of PR’s speech at the Jamaica meeting (Town Hall, July 17, 1938) is in RA; Marie Seton, Panditji: A Portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru (Taplinger, 1967), pp. 94–97. Seton, who was working on a biography of Krishna Menon before her death, recalled (in our interviews of Aug.-Sept. 1982) that Menon and Robeson had very much liked each other.

28. Daily Worker, June 29, 1938 (Dutt); two-page typed notes of PR’s welcoming remarks, RA.

29. Nehru to ER, July 7, 21 (“delight”), Oct. 13, 1938, Jan. 27, 1939; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to ER, Sept. 15, 1938, RA; ER to Richard Wright, April 19, May 31, 1939, Yale: Johnson; ER to CVV, July 16, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (“thrilled to death” with Wright’s Children). Four versions of the introduction Robeson wrote to Uncle Tom’s Children are in RA (all contain the sentence quoted). When Wright’s theatrical adaptation of Native Son, written in collaboration with Paul Green, opened on Broadway two years later, PR telegraphed him, “You have advanced the cause of your people immeasurably and doubly strengthened your place in American letters. Congratulations and thanks!” (March 24, 1941, Yale: Johnson). Contrary to PR, Van Vechten thought Native Son “an overrated book if there ever was one” (CVV to Harold Jackman, Feb. 8, 1941, Bruce Kellner, ed., Letters of CVV, p. 176. When imprisoned in 1941, Nehru asked Essie to send him more books, enclosing a list of thirteen titles, which included Reinhold Niebuhr, Ortega y Gasset, Carl Becker, Admiral Mahan, and Upton Sinclair (Nehru to ER, Aug. 2, 1941, RA). Harold Leventhal, the theatrical agent who served as a GI in India during World War II, recalls meeting Nehru soon after his release from prison; almost his first question was “How is Paul Robeson?” The very next week, according to Leventhal, he met Gandhi—who asked him exactly the same question (phone interview with Leventhal, Oct. 13, 1983).

30. Nehru’s remarks about Essie are in a letter to “Betty,” Oct. 12, 1943, as published in S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Orient Longman Ltd., 1980), vol. 13, pp. 255–56. For a time in 1938, Robeson was thinking of visiting India as a stopover on his way to Australia—but the tour was canceled. Seton (interview, Aug. 31, 1982) told me she was convinced not just that Nehru was available for an affair with Essie but that she backed off because of the “cultural divide” between them.

31. Essie’s U.S. trip is most fully reported in the New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 6, 1938. While in New York she saw, as always, a lot of theater, including Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free? Hughes had written her to suggest she read the play, even while doubting it was “anything Paul could do abroad,” since he had written it “expressly for a Negro theater” (i.e., Negro audiences) (Hughes to ER, July 16, 1938, RA). Descriptions of PR’s tour are from: Eastbourne Gazette, Aug. 10, 1938; South Wales Evening Post (Swansea), Aug. 13, 1938; Herald and Express (Torquay), Aug. 22, 1938; The Scotsman, Sept. 2, 1938; Daily Mail, Jan. 14, 1939; Aberdeen Express, Jan. 18, 1939; Express and Star, Jan. 23, 1939. Preparations and arrangements for the tour are recounted in a series of letters from H. M. Horton (of Harold Holt Ltd.) to Larry Brown, May-July 1939, in NYPL/Schm: Brown. At Glasgow, Robeson sang in aid of a food ship’s being sent to Spain, and just before he stepped onto the platform, the mother of two little boys, George and Eric Park, brought them to him in an anteroom to show him an autograph book belonging to their father, which Robeson had signed in Spain—just days before their father was killed. Robeson was deeply moved by the encounter and referred to it “in the quietest of voices” when he took the platform (Glasgow Bulletin, Aug. 19, 1938). In September 1938, Robeson further demonstrated his commitment to the Loyalist cause by taking supper with thirty Manchester members of the International Brigade and singing at a Merseyside meeting to commemorate the Brigade’s fallen members (Manchester Guardian, Sept. 19, 29, 1938). Star, Nov. 16, 1937; Daily Mail, Nov. 24, 1938 (poll).

32. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (University of Illinois, 1983), pp. 198–99; Barnett to PR, July 19, 1938, Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (hereafter CHS: Barnett). The American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., felt the need to censor part of an article on Robeson that referred to his pro-Soviet sympathies, to avoid having “many readers in this country condemn him” (Charlotte Kett, author of the article, to ER, June 27, 1939, RA).

33. Daily Telegraph, Nov. 1, 1938; News-Chronicle, Nov. 2, 1938; PR interview with J. Danvers Williams, “Why Robeson Rebelled,” Film Weekly, Oct. 8, 1938. At this time a potential film deal fell through with British National Films Ltd., though the main reason seems to have been financial rather than ideological (John Cornfield to ER, Nov. 14, 1938, RA). Robeson sought legal advice in successfully breaking an earlier contract agreement with Walter Futter, who had produced Jericho, to make another picture with him (Crane to PR, Feb. 14, 1939; the agreement with Futter, dated Feb. 10, 1937, is in RA).

34. Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 4, 1938 (cinemas); Cambridge Daily News, Dec. 1, 1938; News-Chronicle, Dec. 23, 1938; Daily Herald, Dec. 24, 1938; Answers (London), April 8, 1939 (fees).

35. Edney to PR and Hannington to PR, both Dec. 29, 1938 (NUWM), RA; Fred Copeman to PR, Jan. 10, 1939 (NMF); Monica Whately to PR, Feb. 17, 1939 (League); J. R. Cox to PR, Feb. 20, 1939 (Coloured), RA; The Times (London), May 1, 1939 (SCR). In these same months, Robeson also adopted a hundred Spanish children for a month, was signatory to a letter urging the American government to lift the embargo against Republican Spain, and was invited to become a vice-president of the Society for Cultural Relations … British Common wealth and the U.S.S.R. (SCR) (Judith Todd to PR, Oct. 13, 1938). When S. I. Hiung solicited a statement from him to be sent to the Chinese people, Robeson replied with this message: “Greetings to the Chinese people who are so heroically defending the liberties of all progressive humanity” (Hiung to PR, Oct. 16, 25, 1938; PR to Hiung, n.d. [1938], RA).

36. Western Mail, Dec. 8, 1938; Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (Macgibbon & Kee, 1960) (Welsh hunger marches in 1927, 1929); Mark A. Exton, “Paul Robeson and South Wales: A Partial Guide to a Man’s Beliefs,” M.A. thesis, University of Exeter, Oct. 1984; Sterner interviews with Tommy Adlam and William Paynter.

37. ER to Harold Jackman, April 12, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten (Australia); Seton, Robeson, p. 119 (anti-Nazi); Rockmore to Larry Brown, Feb. 21, 1938, RA. The New York Post, June 20, 1939, called the revival of Jones “magnificent,” and the New York World-Telegram, June 22, 1939, thought Robeson “in brilliant form.” Luretta Bagby Martin, a student at Pennsylvania State University, when Robeson gave a concert there in 1939, asked an employee at the Nittany Lion Inn, a college property, whether the college “honored the non-discrimination rule in the dining room. He reported that Robeson took his meals in his room” (Martin to me, June 1, 1985). Robeson was also in contact with the radical labor organizer, Ella Reeve Bloor (“Mother” Bloor) during his stay in the States (the references are in letters from Mother Bloor to her children, in Bloor Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (henceforth SSC: Bloor).

38. Sunday Worker, June 4, 1939; Woollcott to PR, May 28, 1939, RA; Yergan to PR, June 2, 1939, RA; Walter White to PR, two letters June 15, 1939, one marked Special Delivery (“I have been trying to reach you for several days without success”); Parkinson to White, June 14, 1939; White to Parkinson, June 15, 1939, LC: NAACP; ER to PR, May 31, June 2, 1939, RA; ER to CVV and FM, July 19, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten.

39. CVV to FM, Aug. 2, 4, 1939, Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, pp. 167–68; FM to CVV, Aug. 3, 1939, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.

40. The Worker, Sept. 1, 1964 (met in Harlem early twenties); PR to Ben Davis, n.d. (1954–55), courtesy of Nina Goodman (Mrs. Ben Davis); Herndon to “My dear Paul” (suggesting prior acquaintance), June 17, 1939, RA; accompanying Herndon’s letter is a news clipping from the Birmingham World, describing the activities of the Negro Youth Congress. In 1934 Herndon had written his own appeal for justice, You Cannot Kill the Working Class, and then, in 1937, a second book, Let Me Live, which credited the Communists as being the most effective rallying point against white supremacy. For more on Herndon, see Naison, Communists in Harlem.

41. Dorothy Heyward to PR and ER, May 3, 1939; ER to PR, June 25, 1939 (Vesey), RA; for PR’s interest in the Hey ward play during the forties, see note 47, p. 665. Anderson’s letter to PR (March 3, 1939) is reprinted in Laurence G. Avery, ed., Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson (University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 84–86, which also refers to ER to Anderson, March 29, 1939, in which she cites PR’s refusal to perpetuate a stereotypic image of blacks. In 1941–42 Robeson was marginally involved in abortive negotiations by Clarence Muse for an all-black production of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. In a letter to Essie, Weill characterized the contract Muse offered him as “the most shameful proposition that has ever been made to me,” and in response Essie expressed relief that Weill had held on to his rights—“We feel the idea of a Negro Theatre is a splendid idea, but I must say the actual workings of it at the moment are not so splendid!!” (ER to Kurt Weill, March 22, July 15, 1942; Weill to ER, June 11, 1942, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music [henceforth KWF].) For the subsequent history of Eneas Africanus, and the renewed possibility in 1945 that Robeson might become available to perform in it, see Ronald Sanders, The Days Grow Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). In turning down the script, ER wrote Anderson a long and revealing explanation, an attempt to blend diplomacy with self-respect.

You may perhaps know, that the general public has taken it for granted that Mr. Robeson REPRESENTS to some extent, the Negro race, the Negro thought, and the Negro behavior. This is extremely inconvenient for us, as it limits our scope a great deal. It is also very unfair and unreasonable and irritating. If he plays a drunk, then Negroes are drunkards; if [he] plays Ol’ Uncle Tom, then all Negroes are “handkerchief heads” and don’t want to be free. It is ridiculous, of course, but there it is.

We both feel very deeply about our problems as a race; while we are not at all sensitive, we are deeply conscious—which is another matter altogether. Mr. Robeson feels that one of the reasons for the almost universal prejudice against our race is the fact that very few people know anything about us (as a race). The ignorance is largely deliberate, we feel. The general public’s idea of a Negro is an Uncle Tom, an Aunt Jemima, Ol’ Mammy, and Jack Johnson. These types have always been sold to the public deliberately. Well, now they don’t exist any more except in the sentimental minds of credulous people, and we feel that we certainly must not do anything in any way, to prolong their non-existent lives!!! We feel Mr. Robeson must play a Negro who does exist, who has something to do with reality. That’s all he asks.…

She added that she herself had “loved the story” in Anderson’s play, and thought it “very funny, very folky and very touching.” Paul did not agree. But Essie thought that perhaps later on, when he “doesn’t have to consider it merely as a vehicle for himself, he too will find it amusing and interesting” (ER to Anderson, March 29, 1939, UT).

42. Hughes to ER, July 25, 1939, RA; Naison, Communists in Harlem, p. 209; ER to PR, June 25, 1939, RA. The following year Robeson was again briefly tempted by a possible Langston Hughes project (Charles Leonard to PR, Nov. 26, 1940, RA). PR stayed abreast of the activities of the Harlem Suitcase Theatre; an eleven-page description of its “Summer Season and Activity—1939” is in RA, along with a covering letter (James H. Baker, Jr., to PR, Oct. 6, 1939). During his New York trip PR made himself more accessible to the black press than the white. Interviews with him and articles about him appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, May 20, 1939 (plus an editorial on May 29 that seconded his decision to educate his son in the U.S.S.R. to avoid racial prejudice, saying his statement “just about sums up the feeling of most Negroes today: it isn’t Communism that they are seeking, but equal opportunities”); the Chicago Defender, May 27, June 17, 1939; and the Pittsburgh Courier, May 27, 1939. The Defender (June 17) quotes him as praising the Roosevelt administration for having rebuked the DAR after it refused Marian Anderson permission to sing in its hall. PR also gave an interview to the Sunday Worker (June 4, 1939) in which he’s quoted as saying, “I feel that it is now time for me to return to the place of my origin.…” Robeson did agree to appear, while in New York, in behalf of Spanish Intellectual Aid (Spanish Culture in Exile), singing at its meeting in the grand ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel (Jane Sherman to PR, June 30, 1939, RA).

43. News Review, June 1, 1939 (Balcon); Hampstead and St. John’s Wood News and Advertiser, June 1, 1939 (Tennyson). Pen Tennyson had made a promising directorial debut at age twenty-seven with There Ain’t No Justice, a boxing exposé; he was killed early in the war, having completed only three films (George Perry, The Great British Picture Show [Hill & Wang, 1984], p. 85).

44. ER to CVV and FM, July 18, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten.

45. Leonard Lyons’s column, “The Lyons Den,” New York Post, Dec. 26, 1940, printed PR’s letter to Lyons (“in no way whatsoever”) denying Lyons’s earlier report in his column that the Nazi-Soviet pact had produced a change in Robeson’s sympathies; four-page typewritten ms., “The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union,” undated (1940?), RA (pact).

46. ER Diary, Sept. 1–30, 1939, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 22, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten; Walter Legge (of His Master’s Voice) to PR, Aug. 10, 1939 (recordings); Sterner interviews with people in Wales (Rachel Thomas, Dilys Thomas, Evelyn Jenkins, Clifford Evans, Roderick Jones, W. J. Davies, Dai Francis) who either acted in The Proud Valley or got to know Robeson during the filming. The interviewees all agree in their profound admiration for PR, all echoing in different words the view of Rachel Thomas quoted in the text. My own interview with Herbert Marshall and his wife, Fredda Brilliant (July 20, 1985), who together had written the original script for The Proud Valley especially for Paul, elicited the additional information that an American cameraman on the picture had to be removed because of his racist views. Finally, there is the testimony gathered by Mark A. Exton (“Paul Robeson and South Wales”), including interviews with Rachel Thomas, Martha Edwards, and Annie Powell, of the uniformly high esteem in which the Welsh held Robeson. The original script of The Proud Valley had a group of unemployed miners defying the owners by opening up the pit themselves and operating it as a cooperative—a strong left-wing statement with obvious appeal to Robeson. That ending, however, was ultimately changed; Balcon, the producer, decided it was not sufficiently “tactful,” given the wartime call for greater production (Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents [Hutchinson, 1969], p. 126).

47. At first they gave some thought to leaving Pauli in school in London, but decided it was too dangerous (ER to Harold Jackman, Aug. 12, 1939, Yale: Johnson). In her diary (Sept.-Oct. 1939, RA) Essie noted with pleasure the warmth of their reception from the dining-room staff on the ship home (the S.S. Washington). The truth of that reception has emerged in a phone interview with Ted Rolfs (Feb. 17, 1987). Rolfs, then a dining-room steward on the ship and a trade-union activist, witnessed the Robesons being “placed in a very undesirable area near the galley.” He informed the chief steward who Robeson was, and the steward said to him, “Well, if you think so much of him, give up the captain’s table [where Rolfs had been the waiter] and serve him.” Rolfs did. Thereafter the rest of the dining-room staff became “unctuous and oily” to Robeson. He refused a request to sing to the passengers—“He was hurt”—but accepted Rolfs’s request to sing to the crew at a union meeting. Rolfs and Robeson maintained contact (see note 17, p. 701, and note 19, p. 710).

CHAPTER 12 THE WORLD AT WAR (1940–1942)

1. ER Diary, “End of October” 1939, RA (docking); PR’s ms. statement is in RA; PR’s remarks are from an interview with the New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 21, 1939; PR, Notes, 1939, RA (Goering). Essie noted in her diary that they paid no duty on their enormous number of bags, the customs inspectors showing interest in nothing except the heads Jacob Epstein had done of both Pauls and the African artifacts from her trip. (There are a number of letters in RA during 1938–39 from Epstein discussing the two sculptures.)

2. Hannen Swaffer, World’s Press, March 14, 1940; New York Post, Feb. 1, 1940 (Laski, etc.). Additional interviews with PR from which the above statements are drawn are in the Daily Worker, Dec. 12, 23, 1939 (interview with Ben Davis, Jr.); the Philadelphia Record, Dec. 11, 1939; and the Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia), Dec. 8, 1939. Four-page typewritten ms. entitled “The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union,” undated (1940?), RA (peace pact). In an article on PR in the Sunday Worker, 1940, his career is said to have been seriously damaged as a result of his refusal to defend Finland (“… no manager would dare rent an auditorium to Robeson”), to be rescued only by the huge success of “Ballad for Americans”; but I have found only minor evidence of any career setback. After the war Swaffer and Robeson renewed contact, and with considerable cordiality (e.g., Swaffer to PR, Dec. 13, 1961, RA).

3. New York World-Telegram, Jan. 20, Feb. 1, 1940 (“real democracy”); the black letter-writer was Cyril W. Stephens (New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 23, 1939); a similar rebuke to Robeson is in the Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 14, 1940; McKay, The New Leader, Jan. 20, 1940. McKay’s criticism of Robeson was later echoed in the assessment of Shostakovich in his Testimony (see note 42, p. 690). For a detailed exposition of official CPUSA reaction to international issues in this period, see Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

4. New York Post, Feb. 1, 1940; New York World-Telegram, Feb. 1, 1940; Daily Worker, Oct. 26, 1939; CVV to White, Dec. 14, 1939, CVV to Noel Sullivan, Feb. 13, 1940, CVV to Peterson, Dec. 3, 1939—all in Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, pp. 169, 171–72.

5. ER Diary, “End of October,” “End of November,” 1939, RA.

6. Time, Nov. 20, 1939 (background on “Pursuit”); interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986.

7. Interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986. Later in life, PR wrote, “… now I always try to pitch my songs in the range of my speaking voice. Therefore practically all of my songs have to be transposed to lower keys, since my natural voice is a deep bass” (music notes, n.d. 1960s?, RA).

8. Liner notes inside cover of Victor recording; interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986; Norman Corwin to PR, Nov. 8, 1939, RA; Atkinson to PR, Dec. 29, 1940 (Atkinson was writing in response to the Victor recording, not the broadcast); Robert Minor to PR, Dec. 31, 1939 (Lydia Minor wrote him separately, also raving about “Ballad,” n.d.)—all RA.

9. Luther Davis and John Cleveland, “And You Know Who I Am” (profile of John LaTouche), Collier’s, Oct. 19, 1940 (convention, “Boy scouts”). Time, July 8, 1940, reported that Robeson’s Victor recording of “Ballad” was “the popular number most in demand at the R.C.A. exhibit at the New York World’s Fair.” Time also reported that the Republicans had considered inviting Robeson to sing “Ballad” but had decided against it because of his color. But Earl Robinson (interview, Aug. 17, 1986) insists that the Republicans did invite Robeson to sing at their 1940 convention, but he had to turn them down because of a prior engagement in New York. When The New Yorker asked Robinson for his reaction to the Republicans’ doing “Ballad,” he said, “Fantastic!—we wrote the Ballad for everyone.”

10. Seton to ER, Jan. 5, 1951; interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986.

11. ER Diary, “End of December,” 1939, “End of January,” 1940, RA; Daily Worker, Oct. 26, 1939 (Ben Davis); interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 15, 1939; postcard, Jan. 6, 1940, Yale: Van Vechten. Essie’s warning to him about the Bradford script is in ER to PR, June 25, 1939, RA. A sample of the mixed-to-negative out-of-town reviews: Variety, Dec. 13, 1939; Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 12, 1939; Evening Public Ledger, Dec. 16, 1939; Boston Herald, Jan. 4, 1940. A sample of the New York reviews: Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, The New York Times, all Jan. 11, 1940. Only the Telegram was strongly favorable to the play, but almost all the reviewers liked Robeson’s performance—“a man of magnificence who ought to be on the stage frequently in plays that suit him,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the Times; and in a letter, PR’s friend Jimmy Sheean said, “I thought your performance … one of great power and beauty. It’s hard luck that the play itself didn’t rise to the height of that performance” (Sheean to PR, Jan. 11, 1940, RA). Because of a dispute between the producer and the theater manager, a financial brouhaha developed, and Robeson had trouble securing his salary for a time (New York World-Telegram, Jan. 20, 1940; ER Diary, “End of January,” 1940, RA; Sterner interview with Leonard de Paur, who supervised the show’s music). Two organizations, the Harlem Cultural Conference and the Negro People’s Committee for Spanish Refugees, took over the house for one performance of John Henry (Yergan to ER, Dec. 8, 1939, RA).

12. ER Diary, Jan. 21, 1940, RA; PR, ms., “Notes on speech at Hamilton College,” RA; Woollcott to PR, May 25, 1940, RA. When Woollcott died in Jan. 1943, Robeson read the Twenty-third Psalm at his memorial service (The New York Times, Jan. 29, 1943; Utica Observer Dispatch, Jan. 22, 1940). Oumansky to ER, Dec. 11, 1939, RA; ER Diary, Jan. 28, July 18, 1940, RA.

13. Rudolph Polk to Fred Schang, Jan. 18, 1941 (Kraft); Moses Smith to PR, May 9, 1941 (Columbia); Schang to Rockmore, Feb. 1, 1941—all RA; Hearings Special Comm. (Dies) UnAmerican Activities, May 22, 1941, 60 (in hearings three years later, Matthews again cited the SRT article against PR, falsely claiming that in it he had “stated categorically that communism was the only way”: Sept. 29, 1944, p. 10337.

14. A. Philip Randolph to Walter White, Feb. 6, 1941, LC: NAACP. White forwarded Randolph’s criticisms to Gilbert Josephson, director of the World Theatre (Feb. 13, 1941, LC: NAACP). The Proud Valley was released in 1940 in Britain, 1941 in the United States. Several of the British reviewers liked the film (Listener, March 21, 1940; Picturegoer, May 18, 1940; Scotsman, April 1, 1940), but the majority found it, in the words of the Manchester Guardian (March 7, 1940), “undistinguished” (see also Punch, March 27, 1940; The Times, March 11, 1940; New Statesman, March 9, 1940; The Observer, March 10, 1940). A radio-broadcast version of The Proud Valley was given before the actual release of the film (The Times, London, March 7, 1940). The American reviews were marginally more favorable; the New York Daily News (May 17, 1941) seems representative: “roughly made … fine Welsh music … The plot is a routine affair.… Robeson’s magnificent voice is one of the picture’s chief attractions.…” The Afro-American (May 24, 1941) hailed the film as “a triumph for Robeson, and for the British motion picture makers as well” because of its unorthodox casting.

15. Los Angeles Examiner, Los Angeles News, Los Angeles Times (responsive); Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express (ovation)—all May 14, 1940. Betty L. Richardson, 1982 interview with Edwin Lester (producer of the Civic Light Opera), under auspices of Oral History Program, UCLA (Bertha Powell). In the interview Lester also reports that he had to let Helen Morgan go because of her drinking problem. He recounts, too, an aborted effort to present PR in the role of Porgy at the Civic Light Opera. According to Lester, PR initiated the idea, and Lester went along with it, though warning him that he thought the role lay too high for his voice. Robeson was at first confident he could sing it (and Lester proceeded to make tentative production plans), but he subsequently backed out, afraid his voice would not stand up under the strain.

16. New York Sun, June 26, 1940; New York Amsterdam News, July 6, 1940; Time, July 8, 1940; ER Diary, June 24, 1940, RA. Time reported, “Last week Mrs. Robeson, who chaperones her husband in interviews, shushed him on politics, said ‘there is a witch hunt on in America now.’ Asked if Communism is compatible with the U.S. Constitution, the Robesons declined to reply.”

17. Chicago Journal of Commerce, July 29, 1940 (Cassidy); on Aug. 31 Robeson performed “Ballad” again in Chicago, this time under the baton of the black conductor James A. Mundy (Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 14, 1940); New York World-Telegram, Aug. 6, 1940 (Jones); Langnerto O’Neill, Aug. 20, 1940, RA; Langner to PR, Aug. 15, Sept. 13, 1940; Rockmore to Langner, Aug. 29, Sept. 11, 16, 1940—all in Yale: Langner. (Langner also tried, unsuccessfully, to interest Robeson in appearing in a new play, Not on Friday.) There is a letter from PR to O’Neill, July 31, 1940 (Yale: O’Neill) requesting permission to use a special Hammond Organ for offstage sound effects in the Jones production; perhaps O’Neill denied the request, since the reviews don’t refer to such effects.

During Aug. PR also found time to sing at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, an interracial camp for the children of workers that had declared Paul Robeson Day (Hackettstown Gazette, Aug. 16, 1940)—for more on the camp, see p. 254—and also to sing at a benefit for the monthly journal Equality, prompting Lillian Hellman to write him, “It is a fine thing to hear you sing, and like all really decent art, it makes you feel sad and happy and good” (Hellman to PR, Aug. 12, 1940, RA).

Robeson had somewhat less than full success in his first indoor New York City concert in nearly five years in Carnegie Hall in early Oct. 1940; it was enthusiastically greeted by the audience, but somewhat less so by the critics (New York Herald Tribune, Sun, World-Telegram, and Times—all Oct. 7, 1940—expressed varying degrees of reservation). When he returned to sing in New York two months after that Carnegie Hall concert, Robeson was again treated with politeness rather than acclaim by the critics—at least in comparison with the thunderous welcome he got on tour; as in Britain, his provincial receptions were more enthusiastic than his cosmopolitan ones (New York Herald Tribune, Sun, Times, World-Telegram, PM—all Dec. 18, 1940; the Sun review seems representative: “… Robeson’s richly sonorous but somewhat monotonous voice …”). During the war years, Robeson gradually expanded his concert repertoire. He added a number of Russian songs, especially by Mussorgsky (including “The Death Scene” and “Varlaam’s Ballad” from Boris Godunov), and also a number of popular English ballads (“Oh No, John!” became a great audience favorite, though its trivial, arch nature was hardly well suited either to Robeson’s voice or his temperament). The programs for PR’s concerts in 1939–45 are in RA.

18. Chicago Defender, Aug. 3, 1940; interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986. Robeson flew to Hollywood; it was his first time on a plane and, according to Essie, he “loved the trip” (ER Diary, June 5, 1940, RA).

19. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond.

20. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond; ER to Toni Strassman, June 6, 1938; ER to Nan Pandit, Aug. 15, 1951; ER to Nehru, Sept. 17, 1957, RA. Many entries in PR’s datebook for 1941 (RA) list appointments with Freda.

21. The executed documents turning over control to Rockmore are in RA. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984; ER Diary, June 5 (Columbia), 9, 12, 1940, RA; Frances Taylor Patterson (who taught Essie film at Columbia) to ER, May 20, 1940, RA (Black Progress); David Bader to ER, June 1, 7, 1940 (Uncle Tom), RA; Nehru to ER, July 10, 1940, RA. In Erik Barnouw’s recollection, Essie registered for his class because “She wanted to develop a formula for a series to present her husband on the air” (Shannon Shafly and Mark Langer interview with Barnouw, 1975, Columbia University Oral History Project). ER’s trip to Central America is fully documented in her diary for Aug. 1940 and in the several long letters she wrote to Pauli and to her mother (all in RA). No letters were sent directly to Paul, nor do the other letters make any mention of him—which cannot have been an accident. Paul also signed up at Columbia—for nine credits in Russian and Chinese—but there is no record of his attending classes.

In the years immediately preceding their return to the States, tension between Paul and Essie had receded but not disappeared. In 1938, for example, she wrote the Van Vechtens, “Paul actually came out on the tender to meet me at Southampton when I returned. I was so astonished. I never expected anything like that and never even looked. Idly watching the tender arrive, I noted a very big lump of brown, and it was Paul!! Well, well” (ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 17, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten).

22. Theodore Ward (president, Negro Playwrights) to ER, May 30, 1940; Ward to ER, June 25, 29, 1940, RA; Daily Worker, July 27, 1940 (inaugural); Sunday Worker, Sept. 15, 1940 (Davis); the Pittsburgh Courier (Sept. 14, 1940) and the New York Amsterdam News (Sept. 14, 1940) also carried articles about the opening; Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Andy Razaf, Hazel Scott, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Morris Carnovsky (of the Group Theatre) were among the other participating celebrities.

23. PM, Sept. 17, 1940 (Spanish songs); Jessica Smith to PR, July 5, 1941, March 26, 1942, MSRC: Jessica Smith Papers. At the same time, a film PR made while in Spain was recovered (William Pickens to PR, Oct. 22, 1940, RA, enclosing a statement from Nancy Cunard about the film); George Gregory to PR, Oct. 12, 1940, RA (Harlem); Madame Sun Yat-sen to PR, Sept. 1940, RA (China); Frederick V. Field to “Brother Robeson,” Sept. 20, 1940 (conscription); Dreiser to PR, May 14, 1940, RA; Herald, March 30, 1941; Daily Province (Vancouver), Oct. 31, 1940; Jane Swanhuysen to Marcantonio, Nov. 11, 1940, NYPL, Ms. Div.: Marcantonio (Emergency Peace Mobilization).

24. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984.

25. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984. “Paul’s attitude to me is really touching,” Clara Rockmore wrote her husband (n.d. [1940s]); also PR to Bob Rockmore, Nov. 3, 1944—both courtesy of Clara Rockmore.

26. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984. PR’s popularity with college audiences is amply attested to in the local and campus reviews of his concerts. Daily Home News (New Brunswick), Oct. 10, 1940: “tumultuous applause by 3,600”; Hamilton Republican, Oct. 17, 1940: “established a record for the largest attendance at a non-athletic event in Colgate history”; Daily Cardinal (University of Wisconsin), Oct. 22, 1940: “a tremendous ovation”; Seattle Times (University of Washington), Nov. 7, 1940: “turbulent applause.” Clara and Larry Brown were very fond of each other; there’s a letter in NYPL/Schm: Brown, Nov. 5, 1940, from Bob Rockmore to Brown expressing his gratitude for “all your kindness and consideration to Clara.”

27. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984; follow-up phone interview with Revels Cayton, May 30, 1987 (Vanessi’s); the incident at Vanessi’s is also described in the San Francisco People’s World, Nov. 15, 1940, The New York Times, Nov. 10, 1940, and the Sunday Worker, Nov. 17, 1940; the lawsuit in the Chicago Defender, Nov. 30, 1940, which reports that damages in the sum of $22,500 were being sought. In a lighter vein, Leonard Lyons reported in his gossip column, “The Lyons Den” (New York Post, Dec. 4, 1940), that, when Robeson was dining on a Chicago-bound train with Oscar Levant and Marc Connelly, a Pullman waiter approached Robeson for an autograph. He obliged, and the pleased waiter left—without asking Levant or Connelly for their autographs. Robeson purportedly smiled and said, “No offense—it’s just racial solidarity.”

28. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984; multiple interviews with Helen Rosen (rage).

29. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984. In some of the quotes from Rockmore I have removed ellipses between comments she made at different points in our interviews, combining them to avoid endless diacritical marks. Of course, as Alan Bush, who accompanied PR in the later fifties, pointed out to me: “There’s no such thing as natural singing. If there is, it’s unbearable to listen to. People who think they sing by the light of nature, you would never wish to hear them a second time. Now, he was a developed singer, very highly developed technically, but he sounded absolutely natural. And so you would think he was born to sing.… He had relative pitch” (interview with Alan Bush, PR, Jr., participating, Sept. 3, 1982).

Toward the end of the tour, Robeson started to cup a hand behind his ear in order to hear himself better; he retained the habit of ear-cupping thereafter. He also participated, during this same period, in an experiment with an electronic device (“Synthia”) developed by Prof. Harold Burris-Meyer, theater sound-research director at the Stevens Institute of Technology, to enable a singer to hear his own sound without producing acoustical distortions or amplification in the concert hall (papers, newspaper articles, and correspondence surrounding the experiment are in RA).

30. ER to PR, Nov. 3, 5, 9, 1940, RA; ER to CVV, Nov. 7 (weight), 9 (parents’ functions), 1940; ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 15, 1940, Yale: Van Vechten. “We’ve been hanging around for months, doing nothing, since ‘John Henry’ closed, and were beginning to get restless,” Essie wrote John P. Davis, describing her own turmoil more than Paul’s (ER to Davis, April 20, 1941, National Negro Congress Papers—hence-forth NYPL/Schm: NNC).

31. Hartford Courant, April 2, 1941 (worker); ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 27, 1941 (“Big Paul”), RA; PR to ER, Aug. 29, 1941, RA; Freda Diamond ms. comment (scaffold). Essie bombarded Bob Rockmore with itemized bills and enthusiastic reports about the detailed adventures of settling in. Various friends—including Minnie Sumner, Hattie Boiling, Bert and Gig McGhee, Sadie Sumner, Essie’s brother John Goode, Freda Diamond, and Walter White’s son, Pidgy White (to visit Pauli)—came up for a look at the new place, and all expressed enthusiasm (e.g., ER to Rockmore, June 16, July 13, 23, Aug. 10, 25, 1941, RA). Rockmore periodically showed his exasperation with Essie’s nest-building expenditures, writing her that until the last of the renovations and improvements were finally finished, there would “be no peace on earth for anybody” (Rockmore to ER, Aug. 12, 1941, RA).

32. Of special value in understanding the Popular Front years (though it is concerned primarily with the leadership, not the rank and file of the CP) is Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism (Basic Books, 1984).

33. It’s impossible to cite with any thoroughness the large literature on these issues, but I found of special value (along with Klehr, Heyday) Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression (Greenwood, 1970), Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism (Princeton, 1977), John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era (University of Tennessee, 1980), and, above all, Naison’s indispensable Communists in Harlem.

The Robesons were never more than marginally acquainted with the Ralph Bunches. In 1932 Essie interviewed Bunche for a book she was planning at the time on prominent black figures and found him “attractive and very, very interesting” (ER Diary, Sept. 26, 1932, RA). A telling anecdote about Robeson and Bunche was told to me by Jean Herskovits, daughter of Melville Herskovits: The family had recently returned from Trinidad where Jean (age four) had picked up fluent pidgin English. Robeson was the first black man Jean had seen since Trinidad, and when he swept her up in his arms on arriving at the Herskovits house, she enthusiastically greeted him in pidgin. Robeson and Jean’s parents burst out laughing. “Thank God she didn’t do that with Ralph [Bunche]!” Paul said. In 1949, when Robeson was under fire from the established black leadership, Bunche is quoted as saying, “I have always admired Mr. Robeson’s singing more than his social philosophy” (as quoted in Gilbert Ware, William Hastie: Grace Under Pressure [Oxford, 1984], p. 229). Subsequently, Robeson apparently made a disparaging remark about Bunche (Corliss Lamont to PR, Dec. 1, 1950, NYPL/Schm: PR Coll.).

34. ER to Davis, April 20, 1941, NYPL/Schm: NNC; Rajni [Patel] to ER, April 26, 1940, RA (India); PR joined Theodore Dreiser in cabling his support of the British People’s Convention (Jan. 4, 1941), hailing its struggle against imperialist war aims—both men’s statements are in RA. Alphaeus Hunton served as a chairman of the NNC’s Labor Committee, and Doxey Wilkerson headed its Civil Affairs Committee. Both men subsequently moved to the Council on African Affairs, and Hunton became a close Robeson associate. John P. Davis resigned from the NNC early in 1943; at that time the national office closed, though the Council continued to function for a while longer in New York before folding into the Civil Rights Congress (Dorothy Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant [privately printed by Dorothy Hunton, 1986]).

35. Daily Worker, Feb. 1, Oct. 1, Dec. 16, 18, 1941 (Browder), March 25, 1942 (“anti-fascist”); Citizen’s Letter to Free Earl Browder, 1941–42 (PR was one of the Sponsors of the National Conference to Free Earl Browder), NYPL: Marcantonio. Gurley Flynn’s statement about PR’s expenditures in Browder’s behalf was reported in War Dept., March 15, 1943, FBI 100-26603-1067, p. 2. The March 17, 1941, mass “Free Browder” rally was formally billed as a sixtieth birthday celebration for William Z. Foster, general secretary of the CPUSA. Browder himself appeared at the rally and received an ovation; as did Robeson when introduced by Robert Minor, then acting secretary of the CPUSA. In tribute to Foster, Robeson sang Marc Blitzstein’s “The Purest Kind of Guy.” Other speakers included the black Communist leader James W. Ford and Israel Amter, New York State chairman of the Party. Theodore Dreiser sent a telegram.

36. In a commencement speech he gave at the Manual Training School on June 10, 1943, PR advised blacks to “view the whole struggle within the Labor Movement as our struggle. We must fight for our rights inside our labor organizations—for here are, for the most part, our real allies—those who suffer as we, subject to the same disabilities as we. Organizations as N.M.U.—militant sections of C.I.O.—prove point” (typed ms. in RA). He reiterated the theme yet again in accepting an honorary degree from More-house College in 1943 (the typed ms. is in RA). For a full discussion of Robeson’s role with the UAW, see Charles H. Wright, Robeson: Labor’s Forgotten Champion (Balamp, 1975), pp. 83–103. In the general discussion which follows of CPCIO interaction, I am heavily indebted to Mark Naison’s study Communists in Harlem, especially pp. 261–73. A sympathetic view of the relationship between the CP and the CIO is ably argued in Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO (Greenwood Press, 1981). In Levenstein’s estimate, as many as eleven of the CIO’s thirty-three affiliates during World War II had substantial Communist leanings (including the UEW, the ILWU and the NMU). For the contribution of the CP to industrial unionism in Detroit, see Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union (Indiana University Press, 1980). For a less favorable interpretation of the CP’s influence on trade-unionism, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home (Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also p. 419, and note 33, p. 712.

37. In his brilliant discussion of Communism’s failure to ignite the black working class, from which many of my own views derive, Naison additionally suggests that the CP’s “artificially imposed interracialism” made workingclass blacks, who preferred the coherence and integrity of their own fraternal and social institutions, uncomfortable; similarly, the demands the Party placed on the skills of verbal dialectics alienated the many blacks who were recent rural migrants (Naison, Communists in Harlem, especially pp. 279–83).

38. Daily Worker, Dec. 17, 1941; Ford Facts, May 17, 1941; News of Connecticut, Aug. 1, 1941 (hailing the CIO’s stand against discrimination). The program for “The Negro in American Life”—which was repeated—is in RA, along with newspaper accounts of the event and an enthusiastic thank-you letter from Dave Greene (executive secretary of the IWO) to PR, April 4, 1941. Fort Wayne U.E. Herald, April 1, 1943.

39. Lucy Martin Donnelly to PR, April 23, 1941 (PR’s concert for Chinese scholarships at Bryn Mawr, April 18, 1941), with enclosures, RA; Frank Kai-ming Su (China Aid Council) to ER, Feb. 5, 1941, RA; PM, March 30, 1941 (DAR). Anson Phelps Stokes, who had been a canon of the cathedral in Washington when the Marian Anderson issue arose and had helped spearhead the protest, sent PR his deep regrets over the DAR’s latest refusal, along with a copy of the pamphlet Art and the Color Line, which he had written in response to the Anderson protest (Stokes to PR, April 19, 1941, RA).

40. Press release of the Associated Negro Press, CHS: Barnett.

41. Press release of the Associated Negro Press, CHS: Barnett; Cornelia Pinchot to Eleanor Roosevelt, April 13, 1941, along with ms. drafts of her press release, Roosevelt Papers, Hyde Park (hereafter FDR). On Aug. 7, 1941, Zola Ardene Clear, who had been publicity director of the Washington Committee for Aid to China, gave extended testimony about the incident before the Dies Committee in which she accused the NNC of Communistic duplicity throughout (House Hearings concerning Un-American Propaganda Activities, 1941, pp. 2366–79).

42. NNC press release, CHS: Barnett; Pinchot to Roosevelt, April 13, 1941, FDR. Pinchot’s statement to the papers about her reasons for withdrawing, and also a separate statement she released to the black press, are printed in full in House Hearings concerning Un-American Propaganda Activities, 1941, pp. 2374–76.

43. The program for the April 25, 1941, Uline Arena concert is in RA. It did list Dr. Hu Shih as an “Honorary Sponsor”—apparently he changed his mind—and contains a printed “commendation” from the NNC to the Washington Committee for Aid to China for its “excellent work.” Apparently Robeson sang the Chinese Communist “Cheelai” (“March of the Volunteers”) for the first time, of what would become many, at the Uline concert (Liu Liang-mo to ER, April 11, 1941, RA, containing the words to “Cheelai” and a piano accompaniment, as PR had requested). Newspaper accounts of the concert are in the Washington Post, April 26, 1941, the Times-Herald, April 26, 1941 (“Willkie”), and the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 1941. Letters of thanks from Muriel Koenigsberg (executive secretary, WCAC) to PR and to ER, both April 30, 1941, and from Frank Kai-ming Su to PR, Sept. 5, 1941, are in RA.

44. Klehr, Heyday, p. 399.

45. Daily Worker, July 4, 23, 1941; Sunday Worker, July 6, Nov. 2 (masses), 1941; Vancouver News-Herald, Vancouver Sun, Nov. 22, 1941; Chicago Defender, Nov. 1, 1941; Rose N. Rubin to PR, May 1, 1941; Harriet L. Moore (American Russian Institute), May 2, 1941, RA; PM, April 30, 1941 (Benny Goodman); Hewlett Johnson letter dated Oct. 17, 1941, RA. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Robeson, in a single five-day period, sang before a record crowd at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, gave a benefit concert in Oakland for Medical Aid to Russia, and participated in the Russian War Relief concert in San Francisco (People’s World, Dec. 18, 1941); programs in RA.

46. These examples of the shift in American opinion about the Soviet Union are quoted in Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (Da Capo Press, 1974), pp. 431–33.

47. R. P. Bonham, District Director, to FBI Special Agent in Charge (hereafter SAC), Seattle, FBI Main 100-12304-1 (“reputedly”); R. B. Hood, SAC, to Director, April 3, 1942, blurred file number 100-12304-?; “Summary of Chinese Writing in Brown Notebook,” by Harold L. Child, April 24, 1942, FBI Main 100-12304-5; Hoover to SAC L.A., May 27, 1942, file number blurred; Foxworth to Director, Sept. 19, 1942, FBI Main 100-12304-6 (Wo-Chi-Ca). According to Mother Bloor, Robeson “helped a lot to build one of the finest music rooms in the country” at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca: “It is like a temple” (Bloor to “My dear Family,” Sept. 28, 1947, SSC).

For a discussion of the provenance and substance of the FBI files used here (and throughout the rest of the book) see my Note on Sources, p. 557. The year 1941 saw a general increase in FBI activity regarding “the threat of Communism.” Its efforts remained somewhat episodic until early 1946, when the Bureau inaugurated a formal strategy of “educating” the public by a variety of devices, including the selective leaking of confidential files to “friendly” newspaper columnists like Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, and George Sokolsky (Kenneth O’Reilly, “The FBI and the Origins of McCarthyism,” Historian, vol. XLV [May 1983], pp. 372–73).

48. Hoover to Lawrence M. C. Smith, Chief, Special War Policies Unit, Jan. 12, 1943, FBI Main 100-12304-8 (custodial detention); Guy Hottel, SAC, to Director, Aug. 26, 1943, FBI Main 100-12304-10 (“leading”); Office of Naval Intelligence memo, Jan. 14, 1942, FBI NY 100-25857-3A; War Department letter, March 15, 1943, 100-26603-1067, p. 2, NY 100-25857-8.

49. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

50. The typed mss. of PR’s speeches at Morehouse and to the Herald Tribune Forum are in RA. In a radio address over WEAF on Jan. 2, 1944, PR decried the continuing denial of full citizenship to blacks (typed ms. of speech, RA).

51. Typed ms. of speech delivered at the commencement of the Manual Training School on June 10, 1943, RA.

An encyclopedic listing of Robeson’s nonstop round of appearances during this period would be tediously repetitive, and I’ve decided instead to cite only a few of the more significant: At a “Defend America Rally” in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1941, called by the NNC in conjunction with “100 leading Negro citizens,” he encouraged the full mobilization of the black community (People’s World, Dec. 22, 26, 1941). In Dec. 1941 he gave a brief concert for the inmates at San Quentin Prison (The Other Side of the Inside!, December 25, 1941; Daily Worker, Dec. 27, 1941). His appearances at warbond rallies included one in Boston (Boston Post, Aug. 12, 1942) as well as the first interracial bond rally in Detroit, in which he was joined by Supreme Court Justice Murphy, Marian Anderson, Joe Louis, Olivia De Havilland, and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson (Detroit Evening News, June 1, 1942). His work for the troops included a radio broadcast, “Salute to the Champions,” for which Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson sent him a letter of thanks (Oct. 1, 1941, RA). The following year Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, sent him a gold-embossed citation (dated May 17, 1942, RA) “In recognition of distinguished and patriotic service to our Country”—namely, a recital at West Point (Alvin D. Wilder, Jr., to PR, Jan. 12, 1942, RA), and a “Salute to Negro Troops,” a pageant celebrating black war heroes held at the Cosmopolitan Opera (New York Amsterdam Star News, Jan. 17, 1942). On March 22, 1942, PR was the guest of honor at a dinner “in tribute to Anti-fascist fighters” held at the Hotel Biltmore, chaired by Dorothy Parker and attended by a thousand people, including a large turnout of celebrities (Dorothy Parker to ER, March 17, 1942; New York Amsterdam Star News, March 28, 1942). Another dinner, however, was attacked as “Communist-inspired.” Also held at the Biltmore, it was a dinner-forum in behalf of exiled writers interned in French concentration camps, with Lillian Hellman and Ernest Hemingway as cochairs. Seven hundred people attended, but Governor Herbert H. Lehman and others withdrew after the World-Telegram attacked the event as “Communist-inspired.” At the dinner, Hellman protested the accusation. PM quoted her as saying (Oct. 10, 1941), “I am damn sick and tired of these attacks; I am sick of their ignorance, their irresponsibility, and their malice and their cowardice.” In her invitation to PR to attend, Hellman wrote, “It will make me feel much better to have you there, and it will make everybody else feel better, too” (Hellman to PR, Sept. 29, 1941, RA). Hellman would have felt sicker still had she seen the FBI report characterizing the Biltmore dinner as in reality designed to raise funds “for the transportation of Communists to Mexico and other Latin-American countries,” branding participants Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Webster as “of course close to the Communist Party” and describing Benny Goodman as having “long been an ardent Communist sympathizer” (report from San Antonio, Texas, dated March 16, 1942; the file number, FBI Main, is blurred but appears to be 100-12304-2).

52. Chicago Defender, Feb. 21, 1942; People’s World, March 5, 1942; Kansas City Times, Feb. 18, 1942 (“stronger feeling”). A month before the Kansas City episode, while traveling by train across New York State, Robeson found himself seated alone at a table in the crowded dining car because no whites were willing to sit next to a black man. The incident—hardly the first such that Robeson had experienced—may have helped to fuel his anger in Kansas City (Judith Green, The Columbia Law Alumni Observer, April-May 1982; David W. Meltzer to Judith Green, July 16, 1982, courtesy of Green).

53. Albuquerque Journal, Feb. 18, 1942; Bluford to PR, Feb. 21, 1942, RA; Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 28, 1942. Fred Schang, PR’s agent at the Metropolitan Musical Bureau, which booked the tour, applauded Robeson’s position and promised to redouble vigilance in the future when booking his concerts (Schang to PR, Feb. 18, 1942, RA). The following year PR canceled an appearance in Wilmington when he learned of discriminatory policies there against blacks; he had been reluctant to fill the engagement from the first after receiving a letter from the president of Wilmington Concerts Association that sought to “allay” his fears about segregation by assuring him, “There is not segregation because there are no negro members of our Association.… We have not discriminated against negroes becoming members of our Association since none applied for membership” (Harold W. Elley to PR, Dec. 28, 1942, RA). Robeson also, during a Robin Hood Dell concert in Philadelphia, refused to honor a request to sing “De Glory Road,” declaring it “an insult to the colored race” (The Afro-American, Aug. 1, 1942). Jacques Wolfe, the author of the ballad, wrote a letter to Variety (Aug. 12, 1942) protesting that he himself had played “Glory Road” for Robeson back in 1928 and Robeson had not only expressed approval of the song but had also recommended it to Schirmer’s for publication. Wolfe expressed puzzlement as to why a song Robeson found acceptable in 1928 “now suddenly becomes ‘an insult to the entire Negro race.’” But it was no puzzle. Robeson’s view of what was “acceptable” had undergone radical transformation in the intervening fourteen years.

54. Yergan to PR, Feb. 18, 1942, RA; Yergan to PR, Feb. 10, 18, 1942, RA, are examples of Yergan’s itemizing and suggesting a calendar of political events for PR to attend. In his new capacity as Robeson’s political aide, Yergan tried to use the Kansas City incident as an opening to President Roosevelt. He telegraphed Roosevelt’s secretary, Stephen T. Early, requesting “an immediate appointment to confer on the larger aspects of ‘Negroes and the War,’” including its international ramifications. Yergan subsequently sent a proposed agenda (as the President’s office requested), using the occasion to plead as well for the release of Earl Browder, still confined in the Atlanta penitentiary. But the only response was a last-minute invitation to Robeson and Earl Robinson to sing Robinson’s new Roosevelt Cantata at the White House, which Robeson’s schedule prevented him from accepting. Yergan to PR, Feb. 18, 1942; PR to Watson, April 2, 1942; PR to FDR, April 2, 1942, RA; Earl Robinson to ER, April 5, 1942, RA.

55. The original members of the Council of twelve people included seven black Americans, among them Hubert T. Delany, Channing Tobias, Ralph Bunche, and Mordecai Johnson, but the latter two soon resigned because (according to the FBI) “the organization was ‘too left.’” The FBI also reported that black CP leader James Ford had been active in helping to form the Council and that the “Communist leaders” became “increasingly active in controlling the organization” (FBI Report of SA, Oct. 20, 1950, 100-19377-545). At the time when E. Franklin Frazier was invited to join the Council late in 1941, it had only fourteen members, including officers; along with Frazier, eleven others were issued invitations in 1941, of whom five accepted (including Earl Dickerson and Dr. R. T. Bokwe of the Union of South Africa). By 1945 membership had grown to twentyseven, and in 1946 was augmented to seventy-two, 20 percent white, mostly politically radical Jewish intellectuals (Yergan to Frazier, Oct. 3, 1941, Jan. 29, 1946, MSRC: Frazier). Additional details on the early years of CAA, its membership, financing, and goals, is in Hollis R. Lynch, Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs 1937–1955 (Cornell University Press, 1978), especially pp. 17–28. For the background discussion of Pan-Africanism (along with the definition quoted), I have relied centrally on Mark Solomon’s fine “Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,” in T. G. Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 205–11, and on Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Archon Books, 1978), especially ch. 10. My interview with Doxey Wilkerson on May 7, 1984 (PR, Jr., participating) was also helpful. Hunton’s quote is from an appendix he wrote to PR’s Stand, pp. 117–19 (“A Note on the Council on African Affairs”).

56. FBI 100-28627-70, p. 22.

57. The previous year, Walter White had tried to get Robeson to give a concert at the First Congregational Church (White’s family church) in Atlanta. Because “Paul has told me at various times about his unwillingness to go South,” White enlisted Essie in the project, but she wrote back, “No, no south so far” (Eugene Martin to White, April 7, May 1941; White to Martin, May 6, 1941; White to ER, April 16, 1941; ER to White [appended to a letter from ER to Martin], April 29, 1941—all in LC: NAACP). Later that year, Robeson did venture to the all-black North Carolina College for Negroes where he sang “Ballad for Americans” and had “a grand time” (PR to ER, Oct. 7, 1941, RA).

58. Interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 5, 1985; interview with Junius Scales, March 10, 1986. The quote is from the ms. of Scales’s autobiography, which he kindly showed me (since published as Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson, Cause at Heart (University of Georgia Press, 1987], pp. 164, 166).

59. Klehr, Heyday, pp. 276–78 (SCHW); National Negro Congress News, April 24, 1942; “The Reminiscences of Harry L. Mitchell,” interview by Donald F. Shaughnessy, 1956–57, Oral History Project, Columbia University; Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” New York World-Telegram, April 22, 1942; Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle (University of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 154–55, also has a brief account of PR’s appearance at SCHW. H. L. Mitchell sent me the list of a dinner committee “from the late 1930s” for the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, which includes among its sponsors both Robeson and Ronald Reagan (Mitchell to me, July 13, 1985). The year following SCHW, Mary McLeod Bethune wrote Robeson, “It gives me a thrill to know you and to know that you are a part of us” (Bethune to PR, Nov. 10, 1943, RA). In 1944 Robeson lunched with Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park, along with Judge Delany, Mrs. Pratt, and the Laskers, to discuss the Wiltwyck School for Boys, which Mrs. Roosevelt had founded (Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, was among its graduates). Subsequent to the luncheon, Robeson spent a day at Wiltwyck and offered to give a benefit concert for the school (Eleanor Roosevelt to PR, June 2, Sept. 23, 1944; PR to Roosevelt, June 30, 1944, RA).

60. Pittsburgh Courier interview, Sept. 26, 1942 (rural poor); The Worker, Sept. 24, 1942; Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1942.

61. Dan Burley’s review in the New York Amsterdam Star News, Oct. 3, 1942, hailed the film as “the most powerful indictment of the absentee landlord and sharecropping system in the South I have ever seen on the screen”—though it was that same paper, two months earlier (Aug. 15, 1942), that had headlined the negative review; PM, Sept. 25, 1942; Amsterdam Star News, Aug. 29, 1942 (Anderson meeting); Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 5, 12, 1942 (Muse). “Many persons,” Walter White later wrote, “wondered why he had not been perceptive enough to understand what he was doing while the picture was being filmed” (Walter White, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,” Ebony, Feb. 1951).

62. Associated Negro Press, Oct. 1, 1942; PM, Sept. 22, 1942; Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 26, 1942; People’s World, Sept. 22, 1942. The film’s opening grosses were the highest recorded that week—topping Mrs. Miniver (Variety, Aug. 12, 1942). To some extent PR’s script suggestions were heeded (Boris Morros to Larry Brown, Nov. 22, 1941, NYPL/Schm: Brown). Boris Morros, producer of Tales of Manhattan, later became a counterspy for the FBI (My Ten Years as a Counterspy [Dell, 1959]). PR’s stage prospects could not have appeared any more appealing than filmic ones for a while: Vincent Burns (author of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) professed excitement about a play he was writing for PR that “begins in a chain gang and ends in heaven, with a chorus singing on the balcony of heaven” (Burns to ER, Jan. 25, 1943, RA.

63. Phone interview with Sidney Poitier, Oct. 20, 1986; Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity,” p. 484. The New York Daily News (Oct. 13, 1942) outright called Robeson “a Communist or anyway a fellow traveller.” In 1945 Robeson was again tempted to make a film, this time on the life of Félix Eboué (the Guyanese-born Governor General of French Equatorial Africa during W.W. II), but the project never took off (ER to Larry Brown, Aug. 14, 1945, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

In assessing PR’s abilities as an actor, Poitier characterized him as “a very strong presence and a capable actor. I would go so far as to say he was a good actor.” Agreeing that Robeson was not in a class with those few extraordinary performers who can both transcend the particular acting style of their own day and subordinate their own personality to the demands of a role, Poitier added, “But Robeson’s character was bigger than any he would have to create” (interview, Oct. 20, 1986). Donald Bogle has offered a much less generous estimate of PR’s film career in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks (Viking, 1973). He credits PR with conveying a view of black males far removed from the usual servile caricature, but further (and inexplicably) describes PR’s image as lacking “gentleness, an overriding interest and sympathy in all of mankind. No matter how much producers tried to make Robeson a symbol of black humanity, he always came across as a man more interested in himself than anyone else” (p. 70). I find this characterization far off the mark.

64. A thorough account of Frontier Films and the making of Native Land is in Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942 (UMI Research Press, 1982). See also William Alexander, Film on the Left (Princeton University Press, 1981), ch. 6. At the time of its release, a number of reviewers hailed the film as pioneering and powerful (e.g., Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, May 13, 1942, and Joy Davidman in New Masses, May 19, 1942); the Daily News (May 13, 1942) was among those expressing doubt over timing. Sterner interview with Leo Hurwitz for the information about Robeson’s fee. In the interview Hurwitz also spoke of what an “absolute joy” it was to work with Robeson—he was free of vanity, a hard worker, and a man of “tremendous gentleness.” Later on Hurwitz and PR planned to make a film based on Howard Fast’s Freedom Road, but the onset of the Cold War made it impossible to raise money (interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986). The FBI report (Main 100-12304-7) also labeled Frontier Films “a Communist instrumentality.”

65. Stretch Johnson, whose sister married “Stepin Fetchit” (Lincoln Perry) in 1937, has urged the point that even Perry was not widely resented for playing stereotypical roles. “The black community understood that that was the only way to succeed, and most black performers had to make that adaptation in order to function on the American stage or in American movies.… Robeson was regarded, despite the pro-British imperialist character of Sanders of the River, as a successful black artist who had much more dignity from the point of view of the roles that he played, even in imperialist films, than Stepin Fetchit. And even Stepin Fetchit was not regarded as a bad guy” (interview, March 5, 1985).

CHAPTER 13 THE BROADWAY Othello (1942–1943)

1. MW and PR discuss Othello on a tape, n.d., in RA; Webster, “Paul Robeson and Othello,” Our Time, June 1944. Even before Webster’s proposal, Lillian Baylis, manager of the Old Vic, had sounded Robeson out about the possibility of playing Othello to Laurence Olivier’s Iago—but there is no known follow-up to the suggestion (Baylis to PR, Nov. 13, 1936, RA).

2. Margaret Webster, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage (Knopf, 1972), pp. 107–8.

3. Born in 1905, Margaret Webster was an actress as her first career. In the 1920s she played the gentlewoman in John Barrymore’s Hamlet, and performed at the Old Vic in London in the early thirties under Harcourt Williams’s direction. His influence on her, and that of Harley Granville-Barker, is detailed in Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (McGraw-Hill, 1942; rev. ed., World, 1955), and Ely Silverman, “Margaret Webster’s Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States (1937–1953),” New York University, Ph.D. thesis, 1969. Webster’s successes as a director had included Richard II (1937), Hamlet (1938), and Macbeth (1941), all with Maurice Evans, and a 1940 production of Twelfth Night with Helen Hayes as Viola. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984. See also Susan Spector, “Uta Hagen, the Early Years: 1919–1952,” Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1982.

4. Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; Webster, Daughter, pp. 109–11; the fantasy about Ben Davis was told to me by PR, Jr.

5. Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

6. Boston Post, Aug. 11, 16, 1942; Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 11, 28, 1942; Boston Herald, Boston Daily Globe, Boston Evening American, Boston Traveler—all Aug. 11, 1942; Harvard Crimson, Aug. 12, 14, 1942; Variety, Aug. 12, 1942; The New York Times, June 12, Aug. 16, 1942; Flora Robson to Webster and Whitty, Aug. 15, 1942, LC: Margaret Webster. Flora Robson confirmed her view in our interview of Sept. 1982 (PR, Jr., participating).

7. Boston American, Post, Globe, Herald—all Aug. 11, 1941; The New York Times, Aug. 16, 1942; Variety, Aug. 12, 1942. The Times review praising PR’s performance was signed “E.N.”—almost certainly Elliot Norton of the Boston Post. Time magazine’s review (Aug. 24, 1942) voiced misgivings over Robeson’s “overacting”—he sometimes “throbbed awkwardly”—but on balance thought he gave a performance “that even at its worst was vivid and that at its best was shattering.”

8. PM, Aug. 13, 1942; Variety, Aug. 12, 1942; see also Boston Post, Traveler, Globe—all Aug. 11, 1942.

9. Webster, “PR and Othello”; Webster, Daughter, p. 113; Langner, Magic Curtain; Sterner interview: Marshall.

The program for the McCarter engagement at Princeton of Aug. 17–22, 1942, is in ARC: Fredi Washington Papers. For that production, the black press was represented by the Pittsburgh Courier. Its correspondent reported (Sept. 5, 1942), “We sat in McCarter’s theater … and watched this whole scene bewildered … a Negro artist who courts, kisses, marries and kills a white woman.… A short time ago the whites would have advanced a thousand objections.… But today the audience and press applauded.… We were buoyant when we left the theater … the day of our redemption had not yet dawned, [but] the darkest part of the night has passed!”

A black man recalled years later (“Discussion at Old People’s Meeting in Princeton,” Sterner) that his mother, who “worked in several of the homes in the university,” would overhear at parties after the tryout performances “much discussion about the fact that in the McCarter Theater Paul Robeson kissed a white woman.… It was a play but they could not accept that and they showed their Southern upbringing and their Southern attitudes.…” Also on the Princeton production: Jean Muir to PR, Dec. 31, 1942, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 18, 1942, Yale: Van Vechten.

10. A description of the India rally is in the Daily Worker, Aug. 29, 1942, and The Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1942; the transcript of PR’s speech is in RA. Apparently his speech was recorded in a somewhat sketchy fashion (Diane Sommers, Yergan’s secretary at the CAA, to ER, Nov. 23, 1942, RA). New Masses, Oct. 20, 1942; Lin Liang-mo, Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 19, Nov. 7, 1942; FBI 100-25857-1875, Referral Doc #16.

11. People’s World, Sept. 10, 17, 19, 1942; Labor Herald, Sept. 17, 1942; Daily Worker, July 28, Sept. 19, 20, 1942; transcript of Oct. 19, 1942, New Orleans speech, RA.

12. Robeson’s itineraries and date-books are in RA. Throughout the tour he shared the platform with the pianist William Schatzkammer. Mansfield Times, April 6, 1942; the many other reviews of the tour are in RA and are too numerous to cite. Robeson had to cancel his March 17 recital in Tacoma because of illness (Tacoma News Tribune, April 9, 1943). Apparently he was also ill in Nov. 1942, seriously enough to prompt a letter from Earl Browder: “Reports of your health give me much concern. May I urge you not to overexert yourself, nor assume too many responsibilities” (Browder to PR, Dec. 1, 1942, RA). The FBI agent who attended the Detroit concert reported that “Communist literature in the form of pamphlets and leaflets was distributed following the conclusion of the concert” (Detroit Report, 4/14/43, 100-9292-211A, p. 3).

Robeson occasionally interrupted the concert tour to attend political rallies of special importance to him (e.g., Daily Worker, April 19, May 20, 1943; North to Marcantonio, Jan. 18, 1943, NYPL Ms. Div.: Marcantonio). In Nov. 1942 he returned to New York to appear at a mass rally in Madison Square Garden, “Salute to Our Russian Ally,” where, according to the FBI agent who covered the gathering, “Robeson received the greatest ovation of the afternoon when he read a letter of a Soviet soldier and sang Russian war songs in English and Russian” (FBI New York 100-39062-17). For his continuing work with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, a group that had attracted the support of innumerable non-Communist liberals, Robeson was denounced by an FBI informant as “undoubtedly 100% Communist.” As proof, the informant adduced the further information of having “seen him in company with Madame LITVINOFF [sic] alone in a theatre” (FBI New York, 10/15/42, 62-7713-4, p. 2). He was again linked with Ivy Litvinov the following year when misquoted as saying, “America gives her minority groups more of a chance than just about any country on earth.” Robeson immediately issued a statement denying that he had been quoted accurately, and Mrs. Litvinov wrote a letter to PM asserting the U.S.S.R.’s total lack of segregated facilities. The Robesons had been entertained by the Litvinovs in the U.S.S.R. in 1934 (see p. 186) and in denying the quotation PR added that on his visits to the U.S.S.R. from 1934 to 1938 he had “found the real solution of the minority and racial problem, a very simple solution—complete equality” (Chicago Defender, Sept. 25, 1943).

13. Daily Worker, April 24, 28, May 4, 1943; Atlanta Daily World, June 2, 1943; Chicago Defender, June 5, 1943; The Chronicle, June 12, 1943; the Morehouse program is in RA. In February 1943 Robeson had received another distinguished award. The Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature (NYPL) named him among the twelve black and six white individuals, organizations, or institutions that had done the most to improve race relations in the preceding year (The New York Times, Feb. 7, 1943). Among the others named were Wendell L. Willkie, Dr. Franz Boas, Lillian Smith, Duke Ellington, Dr. George Washington Carver, Judge William H. Hastie, Dr. Channing Tobias, Margaret Walker, and Dr. Alain Locke.

14. PM, July 1, 2, 1943 (Lewisohn); The New York Times, July 2, 1943 (Lewisohn); Chicago Defender, July 31, 1943 (Apex); Apex Allayer, Aug. 1943; Daily Worker, Aug. 28, 1943 (CIO speech). Robeson’s speech in Chicago on July 24, 1943, is printed in “The Metal and Human Engineering Magazine,” the Apex Alloyer, Aug. 1943. The FBI kept PR under surveillance during his California trip, its agents dutifully reporting his activities, including his visit with the actor Clarence Muse, a car ride with Louise Bransten (“a wealthy woman, extremely active in Communist Party Front organizations and a heavy contributor to the JAFRC”), and a party attended by local left-wingers, such as Harry Bridges of the CIO and Revels Cayton. The FBI was again in close attendance when Robeson flew back out to Chicago in mid-Sept. to address a rally dedicated to “winning the war and peace.” He did so on the direct appeal of Vice-President Henry A. Wallace. Although by then in rehearsal for Othello, he let himself be persuaded and, along with giving a speech to the rally, attended various functions in honor of Wallace—with whom he would soon be closely associated in the Progressive Party (FBI New York 100-25857-1875; 100-47315-1053, 2459; 100-4931-3645, 3645, 3677). Already an admirer of Wallace, Robeson wrote to congratulate him on his “great speech … Everyone is still excited and grateful for your clear and beautiful exposition of the practical working plan for the World of the Common Man” (PR to Wallace, Nov. 12, 1942, RA).

15. MW to May Whitty, Aug. 1943, LC: Webster. Additional details are in Spector, “Hagen,” and Webster, Daughter. The prestigious Theatre Guild was led by Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn. The Guild agreed to raise the money, manage the business affairs, and serve as the official producer of Othello—but artistic control remained with Webster, Robeson, and their stage manager, John Haggott. In her interview with Sterner, Langner’s wife, Armina Marshall, says that the directors of the Guild “were around the rehearsal all the time,” but she, too, portrays their role as essentially a back-seat one, recalling their care in giving their “notes” to Webster rather than directly to members of the cast or crew. The Robesons had been frequent guests in the Marshall-Langner household during the 1920s. For PR’s help with Ferrer’s draft status, see note 5, p. 707.

16. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond.

17. References to the original contract are made in MW’s Feb. 28, 1944, contract with the Guild (RA); MW to May Whitty, Aug. 25, 1943, LC: Webster; Janet Barton Carroll, “A Promptbook Study of Margaret Webster’s Production of Othello,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, LSU, 1977, as quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 207 (Schnabel contract); MW to May Whitty, Feb. 17, 1944, LC: Webster, for the later dispute over billing for the tour—when MW did resign her role, Edith King (who had been playing Bianca) replaced her; MW, Daughter, p. 116 (“sweet, unassuming”; “Svengali”).

18. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

19. John K. Hutchens, “Paul Robeson,” Theatre Arts, Oct. 1944.

20. As early as 1924, Essie recorded in her diary Paul’s frequent acting lessons from Koiransky, the Russian critic and Stanislavski’s collaborator: “They will go over ‘Othello’ together, Koiransky suggesting and Paul learning the part” (ER Diary, Aug. 27, 1924). Similarly, she recorded frequent vocal coaching from the great teacher Proschowsky in 1926 (e.g.: “Found him absolutely marvelous. Showed him all his faults and showed him how to correct them and how to sing right” [March 16, 1926]; “Paul’s progress is remarkable.… We are confident now” [March 17, 1926]). In his own diary for 1929 Paul enthusiastically recorded working on his “soft-voice problem” with Miss Armitage, whom he found a “really wonderful” help (Nov. 11, 1929, RA). On Uta Hagen’s suggestion, Robeson consulted with her own singing coach, Jerry Swinford, and off and on studied with him for nearly three years (interviews with Hagen).

21. The fellow director, Edgar Reynolds, is quoted in Silverman, “Margaret Webster’s Shakespearean Production,” p. 161. “What the old boy meant” is in a New Yorker profile of MW by Barbara Heggie (May 20, 1944). MW took pained exception to that profile in her book Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, p. 87.

22. Webster, Daughter, pp. 109–11.

23. Ibid.

24. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982. Sept. 28, 1984. A very different version is in an effusive exchange of letters between Essie and Dame May Whitty. Initially, during the 1942 rehearsals, Robeson was enthusiastic about Webster’s directorial skills: “We had a couple of swell rehearsals Webster & I,” he wrote to Essie. “She’s going to be wonderful, exactly what I had hoped.… She’s going to get me to do plenty—and she’ll fill in the gaps. I’m really excited and encouraged” (PR to ER, n.d. [1942], RA). Twenty years later Webster told an interviewer that Robeson’s “innate dignity” and “sweetness” could not compensate for the fact that he “was not an experienced actor,” with the result that in a few scenes she had “to construct a cradle around him, a production structure that would sustain him and mask his weaknesses” (Ely Silverman interview with Margaret Webster, Jan. 26, 1962, printed as “Appendix C” in Silverman’s “Margaret Webster’s Shakespearean Production”). Another cast member, James Monks, the young actor playing Cassio, in retrospect puts a far higher estimate on Webster’s directorial skills—though Monks’s recollections of everyone tend to be uniformly beneficent (Sterner interview with Monks). Flora Robson, writing to Webster’s parents, decidedly gilded the lily: “They [PR and ER] are tremendously grateful to Peggy and Paul believes in her implicitly” (Robson to Webster and Whitty, Aug. 15, 1943, LC: Webster). According to PR, Jr., his father never—either publicly or privately—had an unkind word for Webster. A sample of PR’s public praise for her is in an interview with the Princetonian, Aug. 17, 1943. At the end of the Othello tour, Webster wrote PR, “… since we started to work … there have been a lot of ups & downs—way ups & way downs … but let’s remember only the heights” (June 11, 1945, RA).

25. Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; phone interview with Sanford Meisner, April 12, 1985. Meisner, unlike Hagen, feels that enough good teachers were then available to have helped Robeson. Meisner saw the Broadway Othello and in his view Robeson was “no actor,” but he “could have been helped.” Though he had a “singer’s voice,” it was a “beautiful” one and he could have been shown “how to use it better, so as not to sound too amateurish.”

26. Sterner interview with John Gerstadt.

27. Ibid.

28. Sterner interviews with Monks and Gerstadt.

29. Sterner interview with Gerstadt; phone interview with Joseph Gould, March 17, 1985 (“powerfully cool”). Gould met PR in 1947 when they worked together on a film version—ultimately aborted—of Howard Fast’s Free dom Road.

30. P. L. Prattis’s column, “The Horizon,” Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 18, 1944 (for similar statements, see Jerome Beatty’s quotes from an interview with PR, “America’s No. 1 Negro,” The American, May 1944); interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

31. “Negro warrior” is in Beatty, “America’s No. 1 Negro”; PR, “Some Reflections on Othello and the Nature of Our Time,” The American Scholar, Autumn 1945. Robeson’s views on the importance of putting Othello’s jealousy on a cultural basis are from an interview with Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1943.

32. Beatty, “America’s No. l Negro.”

33. John Lovell, Jr., “Shakespeare’s American Play,” Theatre Arts, June 1944. My discussion of the historical background to Othello is also indebted to Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors (Harvard University Press, 1948); Margaret Webster’s program notes, “The Black Othello” (and her Tears and Daughter); William Babula, Shakespeare in Production (Garland, 1981); and Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). The Maryland woman, Mary Preston, is as quoted in Webster, Daughter, p. 112.

In the decade immediately preceding Robeson’s Othello, serious black actors, when able to secure work at all, had been allowed to appear on Broadway in stereotypical roles only, and plays by black writers were nonexistent (except for the 1935 production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto, in a production heavily doctored—without Hughes’s consent—so as to emphasize the lurid and underplay the social commentary). For more on the history of Mulatto, see Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (Lawrence Hill and Co., 1983), pp. 241–43, and Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford, 1986), vol. I, pp. 311–16. More common were casual references to “niggers” in several first-run plays of the period. Gerald Weales, “Popular Theatre of the Thirties” (Tulane Drama Review, summer 1967), is the best summary of black theater in the period; his conclusion is that”… the Negro exists in the popular plays of the 1930’s—if at all—as a background figure who gets no special comment.” To some limited extent, the decade of the thirties contrasts unfavorably with the preceding decade of the twenties and the comparatively greater platform it offered for the “black voice” to be heard (e.g., see Johnson, Black Manhattan, chs. xv-xvii in the 1968 Atheneum reprint).

34. In “Shakespeare’s American Play,” Theatre Arts, June 1944, John Lovell, Jr., lists several professional stage productions with a black Othello—including the B. J. Ford Company in the 1880s, the Fine Arts Club of Denver in 1938, and the Lafayette Players in 1916 (Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United Stales [Duffield and Co., 1930], p. 130, refers to this performance as having been given by the Edward Sterling Wright Players—and having “made a favorable impression”). Howard Barnes (New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 31, 1943) refers to “a dozen or more correspondents” who wrote in correcting his early statement that Robeson was the first black to play Othello, citing productions that went back to the nineteenth century. Errol Hill, in Shakespeare in Sable, has documented a considerable number of black Othellos, dating back at least to 1880 (see especially pp. 38–39, 45–47, 53–57, 82, 101–2, 110). Among Robeson’s predecessors was Wayland Rudd, hired by Jasper Deeter to play Othello at the Hedgerow Theatre in 1930. Rudd later became a Soviet citizen and was part of the welcoming committee when Robeson arrived for his first visit to Moscow in 1934 (see note 3, p. 629). Robeson also knew William Marshall, the black actor who performed Othello in 1953 at Mother Zion A.M.E. (brother Ben’s church). Marshall played the role again in 1955 for the Brattle Street Players, and when PR’s passport problems temporarily cast doubt on his ability to fill a Stratford, England, engagement, director Glen Byam Shaw hired Marshall as a replacement; he gracefully bowed out after Robeson’s passport difficulties cleared up. For PR’s acquaintance with Ira Aldridge’s daughter, Amanda Ira Aldridge, in London during the twenties, see p. 91.

35. Webster, Tears, pp. 236–37. See also her article—appearing in The New York Times on the day the play opened on Broadway—“Pertinent Words on His Moorship’s Ancient,” The New York Times, Oct. 19, 1943. The black writer J. A. Rogers (in his Pittsburgh Courier column, “Rogers Says,” for Nov. 13, 1943) provides a learned and persuasive case for believing Shakespeare precisely meant to portray Othello as a Negro—and chides Margaret Webster for muddying the issue by saying in the New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 31, 1943) that “Othello was a black man, a blackamoor. Oh, we know the Moors aren’t Negroes, but Shakespeare either didn’t know or didn’t care.” On the contrary, Rogers argues, Shakespeare did know—Negroes in his day were called “Moors.”

36. PR interviews in The American (May 1944), the Philadelphia Record (Oct. 5, 1943), and the Rochester Times-Union (Oct. 3, 1944). Laurence Olivier also felt Othello was the most difficult role Shakespeare ever wrote (Webster, Daughter, pp. 87, 109).

37. Pearl Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire,” 1944, twelve-page ms., RA (interview for Bradley’s M.A. thesis). Margaret Webster’s own exhausting schedule is recounted in an undated letter to Essie (RA): “I have been in the theatre from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. without any break for the past three days!”

38. Uta Hagen as quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 210. The superlatives were “F. R. J.” in the New Haven Journal-Courier; Paul Daniel Davis in the Chicago Defender, Oct. 9, 1943; Helen Eager in the Boston Traveler, Sept. 21, 1943; Jerry Gaghan in the Philadelphia Daily News, Oct. 5, 1943; Robert Sensenderfer in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Oct. 5, 1943. Only two years before Robeson appeared in Philadelphia, Langston Hughes’s Mulatto had been prevented from opening when the commissioner of licenses rejected it as an “incitement to riot” (The People’s Voice, Oct. 23, 1943).

39. Elinor Hughes, Boston Herald, Sept. 22, 26, 1943; Elliot Norton, Boston Sunday Post, Sept. 26, 1943; Spector, “Hagen,” p. 210 (“thumbs”). Leo Gaffney’s review in the Boston Daily Record (Sept. 22, 1943) also came down hard on Robeson, giving the acting palm to Ferrer, and revealing something of a racist bias: “… his Moor is too black.… The tragedy of miscegenation comes into disquieting prominence.…” Judging from one newspaper account, the opening-night audience in Boston sided with Elinor Hughes: “Hundreds cheered and the curtain kept doing a St. Vitus dance to accommodate the curtain-calls” (Boston Evening American, Sept. 21, 1943). The Philadelphia reviews were also mixed: Philadelphia Record (Oct. 5, 1943), Philadelphia Inquirer (Oct. 5, 1943).

Offstage, Robeson was widely interviewed and hailed during the tryout. In Boston he was fêted at the Ritz Hotel, was presented by Mayor Maurice Tobin with the first key to the city since the outbreak of World War II, and received a letter of apology from Governor Leverett Salton-stall for having had to depart early from a luncheon held in Robeson’s honor at the Tavern (The Afro-American, Oct. 2, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 9, 1943; Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 2, 1943; The Worker, Oct. 3, 1943; Saltonstall to Robeson, Oct. 4, 1943, RA).

40. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; Webster, “Paul Robeson and Othello,” Our Time, June 1944. Mrs. Roosevelt, too, caught the excitement; on Oct. 16 she sent a note to the Shubert management in advance of her intended visit to the theater on November 4 to make sure PR would be performing that night (note dated Oct. 16, 1943, RA).

41. Newsweek, Nov. 1, 1943; World-Telegram, Oct. 20, 1943; Uta Hagen to her parents, quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 212; MW to May Whitty, Oct. 20, 1943, LC: Webster; interview with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982; V. Rogov, “Othello in the American Theatre,” translated from Literalura i Iskustvo, February 9, 1944, RA; multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. Accounts of what Webster said in her “speech” vary from a choked “thank you” (Webster, Daughter, p. 114) to (turning to Robeson), “Paul, we are all very proud of you tonight” (Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 1943). MW’s later memories of opening night (in Daughter, pp. 113–14) closely parallel the feelings she expressed at the time. As she wrote (Our Time, June 1944) about the opening-night ovation, “I have never, in any theatre in the world, heard a tribute so whole-hearted, so tremendous, so deeply moving.…”

42. New York Daily Mirror, Journal-American, World-Telegram—all Oct. 20, 1943.

43. Lewis Nichols in The New York Times, Oct. 20, 24, 1943; Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 20, 24, 1943; John Chapman in the New York Daily News, Oct. 20, 24, 1943; Wilella Waldorf in the New York Post, Oct. 20, 1943; Ward Morehouse in the New York Sun, Oct. 20, 1943. Waldorf, Chapman, and Morehouse expressed the three reservations about Robeson. The critics especially admired the punchy quality of Webster’s staging—her rich melodramatic sensibility, so suited, they felt, to the play’s central tone (see especially Wilella Waldorf’s review, Oct. 20, 1943). Lewis Nichols in the Times and Howard Barnes in the Tribune both registered some minor reservations about the production, but Nichols called it “the best interpretation of ‘Othello’ to be seen here in a good many years,” and Barnes called Webster’s rendering “a triumphant handling of the tragedy.” Sanford Meisner (phone interview, April 12, 1985) thought “the good performance in that production was José Ferrer.” Uta Hagen agrees: “… probably the finest Iago that ever was”; in her opinion Ferrer couldn’t then or ever sustain the quality of his performance: “He hates long runs.… It got more and more tricks, and outer gimmicks, or vocalizations,” but “initially … he was sensational.… He was the only actor on stage.… I know I wasn’t good.… It was shape without content—borrowed outer form, conventional and traditional in the worst sense. Everyone whose opinion I really respected did not like me as Desdemona—‘nice quality but conventional’” (interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982).

44. Kronenberger, PM, Oct. 20, 1943; Gibbs, The New Yorker, Oct. 30, 1943; Young, The New Republic, vol. 109, pp. 621–62; Speaight (SOS, p. 231); Marshall (The Nation, vol. 157, pp. 507–8. Writing much later, George Jean Nathan appended to a column of his the only entirely negative (and irreducibly succinct) verdict Othello got; his one-line notice read: “One of the very few virtues of Margaret Webster’s production of Othello is that it contains no ballet” (Nathan, “Such Stuff as Dreams Aren’t Made On,” American Mercury, May 1945). The Robesons had met Nathan at least once, back in 1925, at a party given by the Knopfs. In her diary Essie had described Nathan as “the nicest little spic and span fellow.” Time echoed exactly the views expressed by the other weekly critics: “Robeson did not bring to the part poetry and drama so much as sculpture and organ music. He was not so much Othello as a great and terrible presence” (Nov. 1, 1943).

45. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; phone interview with Sanford Meisner, April 12, 1985. Earle Hyman, who in 1953 was to be the next black actor to portray Othello in New York, had a very different view. He saw Robeson’s performance ten times and pronounced it “magnificent.” Hyman further recalls that in 1953 Robeson came backstage to congratulate him on his performance (aware that Robeson was in the audience that night, Hyman froze and gave, in his view, one of his worst shows). A photographer backstage wanted to take a picture of Hyman and Robeson together, but Robeson, at the time widely denounced for his “Communist leanings,” waved the photographer away: “No, don’t do that. It won’t do this young man any good” (Sterner interview with Hyman).

“Impressive emptiness” is, curiously, precisely the defining quality F. R. Leavis and subsequent critics have seen in the character of Othello. That interpretation of the role began with T. S. Eliot’s essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927) and was then elaborated by Leavis in “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” The Common Pursuit (Salem House Publications, 1984). Leavis refers to Othello as “self-centered and self-regarding,” far more interested in his own “heroic self-dramatization” than in Desdemona; he sees his life in operatic terms and is given to stentorian speechifying about it. I am grateful to Seymour Kleinberg for introducing me to this interpretation—one that Olivier took as his own in both his stage and film versions of the role. Robeson never saw Olivier’s version, but when Freda Diamond described it to him he expressed disbelief that so great an actor would lend himself to so “distorted” a version of the role (multiple interviews with Freda Diamond).

46. Interview with James Earl Jones, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 1982.

47. Fredi Washington, The People’s Voice, Oct. 23, 1943. For other accounts in the black press, all stressing the racial issue, see the Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 30, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 30, 1943; the Chicago Defender, Oct. 30, 1943 (far more sanguine than Fredi Washington in its reference to the effect of Robeson’s Othello in “sweeping aside” “whatever silly racial prejudices New Yorkers may have had in the past”). Along with Howard Barnes in the Tribune, the only other white reviewer to make any reference at all to the cultural aspect of race, to which Robeson had directed his efforts, was the anonymous critic for Cue magazine, and in that instance the reference was compromised by the description of a “primitive” Othello being “bewildered by the effete products of 16th century Venetian civilization” (Oct. 30. 1943).

Though Robeson’s Othello was never made into a film, it was recorded. Nobody, however, was happy with the results. Margaret Webster and the Theatre Guild were outraged at Robeson and José Ferrer for agreeing to a recording contract without consulting the producers, but “decided it would be wisest to acquiesce rather than imperil the tour by a fight with Paul.” Webster took some consolation in the fact that “The records were not good,” but regretted that they would “be considered a fair representation of the production” (Daughter, p. 117). Uta Hagen, to this day, thinks the recording so bad that “I can’t hear it—I just find it embarrassing.” As Hagen remembers it, the recording sessions had been done “with great care” over an extended six-week period, but, “having played it, there was a sense of compensating for what couldn’t be seen … a kind of deliberate overemphasis on every line that to me is agonizing” (interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982). To my contemporary ear, Webster and Hagen’s judgment is sound, though perhaps exaggerated.

Three years later Fredi Washington took the lead in a public campaign to persuade Robeson to accept the role of the insurrectionary leader Denmark Vesey in Dorothy Heyward’s play about him, Set My People Free. Washington wrote two “Open Letters” to him in The People’s Voice (June 1, Aug. 17, 1946). She was joined by the columnist Earl Conrad (Chicago Defender, July 6, 1946), and the Afro-American publisher, Carl Murphy, who wrote directly to Robeson, asking him to consider the role (Murphy to PR, June 12, 1946, ARC: Fredi Washington). Judging from an FBI phone tap (March 9, 1946), Rockmore strongly discouraged Robeson’s initially favorable response to the script (see p. 230).

CHAPTER 14 THE APEX OF FAME (1944–1945)

1. FBI 100-6393-1A 181 (Red Army); FBI 100-26603-1271, p. 3 (Loyalist); FBI 100-28715-150, p. 24 (common man); FBI New York 100-25857-1875 Referral Doc. #18 (wealthy woman); FBI 100-7518-699 (serfs); FBI 100-47315-2573, p. 36 (Anthem); FBI 100-47315-2252 (high officials); FBI 100-28715-150 (100%).

2. Dawson to PR, Nov. 23, 1943, RA; Uta Hagen to her parents, Oct. 25, 1943, as quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 213 (advance sale); CVV to ER, Nov. 22, 1943, RA; White to Langner, Nov. 24, 1943, Yale: Theatre Guild; Coward to PR, Dec. 31, 1942, RA; Du Bois to PR, Jan. 5, 1944, U. Mass.: Du Bois (Phylon). Among some of the other noteworthy letters of congratulation were those from Clarence Cameron White to PR, Oct. 27, 1943, Arthur Judson (president of Columbia Concerts) to PR, Nov. 23, 1943, and Franklin P. Adams, Feb. 2, 1944—all in RA.

3. The New York Times, Oct. 29, 1944; New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 31, 1944 (Scholar); Associated Negro Press, May 20, 1944 (Gold Medal). The Donaldson Awards were set up by Billboard and were arrived at by a poll of theater people, including actors, critics, stagehands, producers, and technicians. Robeson won in the category “Outstanding lead performance (actor)”—José Ferrer and Elliott Nugent were the runners-up (PM, July 5, 1944). Dreiser to Mencken, June 28, 1944, in Thomas P. Riggio, ed., Dreiser-Mencken Letters (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), vol. II, p. 713. PR was a guest of Dreiser’s in California in 1944–45 and in the latter year Dreiser suggested he do an interview with PR about his views on how to advance the black race (Dreiser to PR, Feb. 15, 1945, Riggio, ed., Dreiser Letters). According to a third party, Dreiser himself “disclaimed godhood, though he thought Paul Robeson might qualify” (Ish-Kishor to W. A. Swanberg, as quoted in Swanberg, Dreiser [Scribner’s, 1965], p. 418.

4. ILWU Dispatcher, Nov. 19, 1943; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 7, 8, 12, June 8, 1944; World-Telegram, Oct. 13, 1943; The New York Times, Jan. 19, 1944 (equity). In 1944 Robeson was made an honorary member of the Fur and Leather Workers union at its biennial convention (Daily Worker, May 17, 1944).

5. There are dozens of letters in RA requesting various favors from him. The log of PR’s conversation with Yergan on Nov. 23, 1944, as recorded by the FBI, is Main 100-12304-25. Even before the pressure created by the election, Robeson wrote Van Vechten, “I’ve been a little worn and rushing about doing benefits, etc.… The matinee days are so wearing” (postmarked May 24, 1944, Yale: Van Vechten).

Robeson always kept a retreat to which he could repair when feeling overwhelmed, or simply in need of privacy. During his London years he had sometimes used producer Earl Dancer’s place (for more on Dancer, performer and nightclub owner, see Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, [Pyramid, 1967], especially pp. 172 ff.). In New York in the early forties, Jean Blackwell Hutson remembers that in order to locate him she had to “penetrate some personal hideaway of his own” (interview with Hutson, Sept. 21, 1983). For more on PR’s “retreats,” see note 19, p. 710.

6. New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 17, 1943, April 4, 1944 (Africa); Daily Worker, Aug. 28, 1943; Chicago Defender, July 24, 1943; Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 25, 1943, Jan. 8, 1944 (hurt); PR speech, Jan. 2, 1944, radio station WEAF, several versions, RA; transcript of the radio program for the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee, May 19, 1944, RA (black resentment); telegram signed by Walter White and PR soliciting additional signatures to protest lack of funding appropriation for the FEPC, June 10, 1944, LC: NAACP; PR’s opening statement to the “Africa—New Perspectives” conference called by the Council on African Affairs, April 14, 1944 (Soviets; new imperialists), transcript in RA; the agenda and program for the CAA conference on Africa are in NYPL/Schm: NNC, as is the call for the Aug. 8, 1943, San Francisco Conference on Racial and National Unity in Wartime, at which PR spoke; transcript (RA) of broadcast interview, WHN, by William S. Gailmor with PR, April 1944, for the quote about black patriotism (the style is not PR’s but the sentiment is).

Robeson also continued his activities in behalf of the war effort, appearing at bond rallies and participating in programs for the Office of War Information and the War Production Board (e.g., Silverman to PR, Feb. 3, 1944; Baren to PR, Feb. 15, 1944; Nelson to PR, June 7, 1944; Betz to PR, June 13, 1944; Smith to PR, Aug. 27, 1944—all RA). During the outbreak of race riots in Detroit, he sent a confidential memo to Roosevelt suggesting that “the tension is being fostered deliberately by anti-administration and anti-war elements” among white reactionaries (PR to Roosevelt, June 21, 1944; Jonathan Daniels to PR, June 27, 1944, RA).

7. Interviews with Ishmael Flory, July 1–2, 1986; Daily Worker, Dec. 4, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 11, 1943. On the career of Landis, see Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment; Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (Random House, 1983), pp. 30–43. Ben Davis, Jr., records what seems to be a later (1945) meeting with the club owners and also notes that he and Robeson attended a small reception for Jackie Robinson after the Dodgers had signed him (Communist Councilman from Harlem [International, 1969], pp. 133–34).

8. Daily Worker, Oct. 23, 1943, Nov. 11, 1943; Wilson to PR, Nov. 1, 1943, RA; Naison, Heyday, p. 313; Ben Davis, Jr., to ER, April 27, 1943, RA (“membership”); FBI Main 100-12304-13 (Robeson for Congress). According to Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, head of the “Black Mafia” and later a protector of Robeson’s “contributed heavily” to Davis’s campaign (interview with Johnson, March 5, 1985); for more on Bumpy Johnson and Robeson, see p. 312 and note 17, p. 695. Davis’s record as a city councilman is discussed in Edwin R. Lewison, Black Politics in New York City (Twayne Publishers, 1974), especially pp. 76–79. Davis moved actively against segregated housing, police brutality, and inadequate fire-department services in Harlem. He was also known for being available to his constituents.

9. Interviews with Barney Josephson, March 23, 1982, April 2, 1985; In Person: Lena Horne, as told to Helen Arstein and Carlton Moss (Greenberg, 1950), pp. 180–85; Pearl Primus interview, The New York Times, March 18, 1979; metro-Newark!, Oct. 1979 (Vaughan). John Hammond recounts a similar incident in On Record (Summit, 1977), pp. 261–62. Interviews with Uta Hagen. Hagen also remembers one unhappy occasion when she and Paul went backstage to congratulate Billie Holiday after she had just given a “spectacular, totally controlled” performance—and found her crawling around on all fours, far gone on drugs.

10. The many letters and telegrams are in RA, including a letter from Lillian Hellman (April 7, 1944) that she sent out to solicit greetings. In declining to serve as a sponsor for the event, Eleanor Roosevelt described Robeson as a man “whom I greatly admire” but added, “I wonder however, if your group would not be better off without my name this year when everything I do brings the cause criticism?” (Roosevelt to Yergan, March 3, 1944, FDR.) After seeing Othello, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Joseph Lash, “Robeson is moving in it because the lines might be said by him today!” She added, however, that “the character is never quite convincing and all of a piece … to me” (as quoted in Joseph Lash, A World of Love [Doubleday, 1984], p. 84).

11. The New York Times, April 17, 1944; Daily Worker, April 10, 18, 1944; PM, April 17, 1944. The following year Robeson in turn paid his respects at the celebration for Mary McLeod Bethune’s seventieth birthday (New York Amsterdam News, July 19, 1945).

12. Department of the Army, File No. 100-25857-63. PR had sent Roosevelt a letter protesting a deportation order issued against Raissa Browder (Daily Worker, Dec. 14, 1943); the FBI was aware of the letter.

13. Theresa Helburn (Theatre Guild) to PR, June 30, 1944 (closing), Yale: Theatre Guild. The previous record-holders for Shakespeare on Broadway had been a tie at 157 performances each for Jane Cowl in Romeo and Juliet in 1923 and Orson Welles’s Julius Caesar in 1937.

14. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984. All Hagen quotations hereafter in this section, unless other sources are cited, are from my interviews with her.

15. PR to ER, Aug. 29, 1941, n.d. (1942), RA.

16. Sadie Davenport Shelton, who knew PR back in his undergraduate days, recalls, “He always liked light-skinned women” (interview, March 26, 1985, PR, Jr., participating). Skin color, of course, was not the sole variable in determining his preference. Sustained attraction for him seems to have hinged on a woman’s being forceful, tough-minded, motherly, and loyal—an indomitable earth mother.

17. Spector, “Hagen” (hate mail). Robeson later remarked that in Cincinnati he felt the climate was especially tense and in the performance that night “I was careful how close I got to Desdemona” (remark on “A Closer Look,” aired in 1979).

18. Langston Hughes, for one, roundly applauded Robeson’s refusal to play segregated houses, contrasting his attitude, in print, with Bill Robinson’s: when Robinson’s Hot Mikado hit segregated Washington, D.C. (a town Robeson refused to play), and blacks were denied admittance to the theater, Robinson “defended himself by saying that he was making $2,500 a week out of it. And he went right on playing” (Hughes, Chicago Defender, July 22, 1944, reprinted in Negro Digest, Sept. 1944).

19. Another moment of hilarity had come while the show was still playing on Broadway. In saying his line “Since these arms of mine had seven years pith,” Robeson accidentally said “piss” instead of “pith.” Hagen, who had just turned upstage, shook with laughter, and they collapsed all over again later when Robeson added, “How would you feel if you’d been pissing for seven years?” (Sterner interview with James Monk.)

20. Richardson to PR, April 6, 1973, courtesy of Paulina Forsythe. Richardson had been elected to the state legislature in Indiana in 1932, during the height of KKK influence, and later won the first public-housing desegregation case (Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 16, 1972). According to Earl Dickerson, a post-performance party in Chicago lasted until 6:00 a.m., with Etta Moten Barnett singing and Duke Ellington playing the piano (1969 tape, courtesy of Terkel; interview with Dickerson, July 2, 1986).

21. Interview with Studs Terkel, June 30, 1986. The pertinent Chicago reviews are: Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago Sun, Chicago Herald-American, Chicago Times—all April 11, 1945—and Chicago Sun and Chicago Herald-American, April 15, 1945. A large batch of other tour reviews are in RA. Though Hagen thought PR’s performance on the tour was better, it was on the political platform that she felt he was without peer—his marvelous voice, his personal magnetism, and his profound conviction blending to produce “remarkable impact.” During Othello’s six-week engagement in Chicago, Robeson made a number of political appearances. He was featured at United Nations Day (sponsored by the United Packinghouse Workers/CIO), attended a membership meeting of the United Auto Workers/CIO (Local 453 made him an honorary member), sang and spoke at a meeting sponsored by American Youth for Democracy, at a large event organized by the Chicago Council on African Affairs, at two synagogues, and at a hundred-dollar-a-couple dinner to benefit the Abraham Lincoln School (of which William Patterson was assistant director). Robeson sat for a portrait by Edward Biberman while in Los Angeles on tour and Biberman has provided a vivid account of Robeson’s hectic schedule: “… we were never alone. He would always make several appointments here for the time that he was posing. Earl Robinson would be sitting at this piano banging away a new tune that he wanted Paul to hear, and somebody would be reading a script, and somebody else would be interviewing him” (Emily Corey interview with Biberman in 1977 for UCLA: Special Collections; Biberman to me, July 31, 1982).

22. ER to PR, Dec. 1, 1946, RA; ER to Larry Brown, July 15, 1945, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

23. ER to CVV and FM, July 15, Aug. 12, Sept. 9, Nov. 14, 1943, April 26, Aug. 18, Sept. 15, Oct. 3, 31, Dec. 14, 1944—all Yale: Van Vechten; ER to PR, Jr., Jan. 28, 1947, RA (Ma Goode); CVV to ER, Nov. 22, 1943, RA; ER to E. Franklin Frazier, Oct. 10, 1943, MSRC: Frazier (summarizing her work at Hartford). The Robesons had known Frazier as far back as the twenties (Frazier to ER, Oct. 21, 1932, MSRC: Frazier). As students, Pitt and Robeson had often sat together because of the alphabetical listing of names, and became friendly. I am grateful to Pitt’s widow, Mrs. Juliet Pitt, for sending me the Robeson-Pitt correspondence, which suggests some marginal contact over the years. The correspondence consists of three letters from ER to Pitt from the forties (April 6, July 25, 1942, Sept. 9, 1945) and one (n.d. [probably 1931]) in which she apologizes for having spent one evening in London “burdening you with my troubles.” There is also one letter from Malcolm to Paul (March 30, 1942). When Shirley Graham published her largely imagined biography of Robeson in 1946 (Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World [Julian Messner, Inc.]), Pitt wrote to Robert C. Clothier, the president of Rutgers, to express his “discomfort” over Graham’s “fictionalized” version of his undergraduate friendship with Robeson (Pitt to Clothier, July 11, 1946; Meder to Pitt, July 22, 1946, RUA).

24. Herman Shumlin to ER, Oct. 5, 1944 (pronouncing Goodbye Uncle Tom on the “ponderous side”); ER to Shumlin, Oct. 16, 1944 (accepting his verdict with grace); Owen Dodson to ER, Nov. 2, 1944 (liking the play); Arthur S. Friend to ER, April 8, 1945; ER to Friend, July 19, 1945—all RA. She sent a film treatment to Kenneth Macgowan, then at Paramount Pictures (Macgowan to ER, Dec. 14, 1945, Jan. 2, 1946, RA). ER to Earl Browder, April 18, 22, July 11, Sept. 28, Nov. 7, 1944, Browder Papers, Syracuse University (henceforth SU: Browder); Browder to ER, May 29, 1944, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 9, 1945, Yale: Van Vechten (Paul’s phone call). She was also delighted at a call from Paul, Jr., saying that the whole campus at Cornell was talking about her book; he encouraged her to forget about attending his athletic events so dutifully if they stood in the way of her accepting lecture dates (ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 12, 1945, Yale: Van Vechten). Essie liked to remind Paul that she went to many more of Paul, Jr.’s athletic events than Paul did, even mentioning to Earl Browder how much Paul, Jr., would have liked it if his father could have attended more often (ER letters to Browder, 1944–45, SU: Browder). Apparently Essie’s old friend Minnie Sumner was hired to prepare maps for the book (Day Co. to ER, Aug. 3, 1945, RA).

25. ER to Larry Brown, Aug. 14, 1945 (enclosing two reviews), NYPL/Schm: Brown; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 9, 12, 1945, Yale: Van Vechten; Viola V. Boyd (“Vie”) to Larry Brown, n.d. (1946); Rockmore to Brown, April 20, 1946, NYPL/Schm: Brown. Mary McLeod Bethune to ER, Feb. 27, 1946, RA (NCNW selection). RA contains many other letters congratulating Essie on the effectiveness of her lectures. The mss. of Essie’s lectures during the 1944–46 period are in RA. The typed ms. of one talk is a stenotype and clearly demonstrates her effectiveness in question-and-answer exchanges. “I took off 20 pounds,” Essie exuberantly wrote Paul’s sister, Marian, “exercised myself hard and flat, and have cleared my face out and have just had my hair done. What do you know? I think the big boy will be quite pleased. I’m at my best. And now is the time!!!!!” (ER to Marian Forsythe, April 4, 1945, courtesy of Paulina Forsythe.) Essie wrote this letter just a few days before her disastrous trip to see Paul in Chicago.

26. The transcript of PR’s WHK talk is in RA; ER letters to Earl Browder, 1944–45, SU: Browder; ER to Ben Davis, Jr., July 27, 1944; Davis to ER, July 27, Nov. 18, 1944, Feb. 17, March 30, 1945, RA. Essie wrote Mrs. Roosevelt about her electioneering, enclosing a copy of one of her speeches (ER to Mrs. Roosevelt, Nov. 1, 1944; Mrs. Roosevelt to ER, Nov. 6, 1944, RA). Hubert T. Delany congratulated Essie on her role in the campaign (Delany to ER, Nov. 10, 1944, RA).

27. According to Revels Cayton, “The Party just railed at his ‘exploits,’ you know, his personal life … but they never had him up on the carpet about it, I don’t think.… I guess Ben spoke to him some” (interview with Cayton, April 29, 1982).

28. James M. Nabrit.Jr., to PR, April 20, 24, 1945, RA (Howard); Howard University Bulletin, Oct. 1, 1945, for the Howard citation to PR, delivered at the ceremony by President Mordecai John son. Acting Sec. NAACP (Wilkins) to Spingarn Medal Award Committee, March 21, 1943, LC: NAACP; interview with John H. Hammond, Aug. 8, 1985. The only written ballot I’ve found in the NAACP papers from absent committee members is Langston Hughes’s. He voted, in order of preference, for Robeson, Joe Louis, and Tobias (Hughes to Wilkins, March 24, 1945, LC: NAACP). It was also in April 1945 that Robeson won an award from the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association (Frank L. Stanley to PR, April 18, 1945, RA). PR crossed out this passage from the Seton ms. of Robeson: “… it had become a custom during the war years for Walter White to suggest someone other than Paul Robeson for the Springarn [sic] Medal. It had, in fact, reached the proportion of a Robeson family joke with everyone guessing as to whom Walter White would come up with this time. But in the summer of 1945 there wasn’t anyone, so, at last, Robeson had to get the Medal.”