The Spanish Civil War and Emergent Politics
(1938–1939)
“I want to go to Spain,” Paul announced early in December 1937. Essie, who thought of herself as the adventurous member of the family, afraid only of cats, demurred. “I am essentially a practical person,” she wrote, “and I thought: Paul is doing some very good work for Spain, here in England … singing at important meetings … speaking and writing quite frankly, and enthusiastically, about his great interest in the struggle.… Why need he go into the war area, into danger, perhaps risk his life, his voice?” She fought the idea but it soon became clear that Paul was determined to go whether she accompanied him or not. He tried to clarify for her the importance of the trip. “This is our fight, my fight,” he told her (in Essie’s paraphrase). She decided to accompany him.1
Initially the U.S. Department of State denied them a visa, but, “after a lot of worrying and cabling,” it was issued. The Spanish Embassy sent them two “safe-conduct” orders, Paul spent the afternoon of January 21 recording songs from Porgy and Bess at Abbey Road, and that night they caught the ferry train for Paris, accompanied by Charlotte Haldane, wife of the left-wing scientist J. B. S. Haldane. The Robeson party arrived at the Spanish border on January 23. A government army lieutenant drove them across the frontier, where they were “greeted by everyone, with a smile of welcome, and ‘Salud!’, with the raised, clenched fist.” From there a militiaman took them in a car directly to Barcelona.2
On arriving at the Majestic Hotel, they were met by the press. The Afro-Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén found Robeson “blockaded by a crowd of people hanging on his most insignificant gestures. Robeson pays attention to everyone, smiling. He poses repeatedly for photographers, answers the most diverse questions without tiring.… When he talks, he talks passionately, his enormous hands contracted and palms turned up, an invariable gesture of his when talking.… His solid personality projects great attractiveness, and his body moves with the elasticity of an athlete.” Asked by Guillén why he had come to Spain, Robeson replied, “It is dishonorable to put yourself on a plane above the masses, without marching at their side, participating in their anxieties and sorrows, since we artists owe everything to the masses, from our formation to our well-being; and it is not only as an artist that I love the cause of democracy in Spain, but also as a Black. I belong to an oppressed race, discriminated against, one that could not live if fascism triumphed in the world.” As militant and as Marxist as the Guillén interview makes Robeson sound, for contrast there is the Manchester Guardian account, which quotes Robeson as saying, in moderate terms far more reminiscent of his earlier formulations, “In the democracies the Negro has to struggle against prejudices, but not against an actual crushing law. He finds opportunity if he has the initiative to seek for it and the courage to fight for it.” Very likely Robeson did alternately sound a militant and a moderate note, accurately reflecting some lingering ambivalence which would very shortly solidify in the direction of militance.3
After the interviews, the Robeson party was taken to see the effects of an air raid that had taken place that very morning—residential apartments, schools, and even hospitals bombed by Franco’s planes. It was a point in the war where Republican hopes were alive but fading. The Loyalist offensive against Teruel would culminate in success on January 8, 1938, but the Franco forces would retake the city on February 22, form a government, and by spring reach the border of Catalonia (on March 9, Hitler would occupy Austria). Faced with the “absolute savagery” of the bombings of Barcelona, Robeson told the press that he could not “understand how the democracies of Britain, France and America can stand by inactive.”4
In that first evening, Robert Minor and his wife, Lydia Gibson, visited. Minor was a singular figure—a Communist from Texas, a talented cartoonist, he had been active in the early thirties in the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and would later be the Party’s Southern representative. Essie thought Minor “the warmest, most human, delightful man—Imagine a Texas man really understanding Negroes. But he did and could.” Minor told them that Earl Browder, the Communist Party/USA general secretary, might be in Barcelona when they got back at the end of their trip. They went to bed that night carefully arranging dressing gowns, slippers, and torches for a quick escape in case the warning sirens went off.5
For their tour, a seven-passenger Buick was put at their disposal and an army captain, Fernando Castillo, was assigned to them as escort and guide, along with a driver. The Robesons warmed immediately to Castillo. He had studied in London, spoke English fluently, and, Essie wrote, had “a delightful sense of humor”—“our dignified military captain, and our dignified, serious Paul, became two, mischievous, small boys. There are stories, and jokes, to which Charlotte and I contribute occasionally. Paul sings softly, by the fire, and our captain hums with him.” On the long drive to Benicasim, Castillo told them that his father, a physician, had been an elected member of the assembly that had drawn up the Spanish Republican Constitution of 1931, and had been killed by the fascists in 1936. Five of his brothers were fighting at the front.6
Benicasim, once a summer resort for wealthy Spaniards, was now the base hospital nearest the front line, and the roads to it were thronged with wounded and convalescent soldiers. Robeson sang at three different places in and around Benicasim, all within an hour. As their car came to a halt at one spot, he saw a young black soldier stare in disbelief at him. Robeson spoke to the soldier and found that he was a Spanish black from Harlem who had been fighting in Spain eleven months and had just been wounded at the battle of Teruel. They were soon surrounded by other volunteer soldiers, the International Brigadists, from Britain and the States. Two days later, at Albacete and Tarazona, they “were delighted to meet many of ‘the brothers’”—Andrew Mitchell from Oklahoma, Oliver Charles Rose from Baltimore, Frank Warfield from St. Louis, Ted Gibbs from Chicago, and Claude Pringle, a coal miner from Ohio. They “talked at length with them all, and gave them the latest news from America. The men were all keen, and aware, and sturdy spirited”—the Lincoln Brigade was the first U.S. unit ever integrated up to and including command positions.7
The most celebrated of the black volunteers was Oliver Law, a thirty-three-year-old regular-army man from Chicago who had never been promoted above the rank of private but had risen to be commandant of the Lincoln Brigade and had died on the Brunete front. The more Robeson heard about the “quiet, dark brown, strongly built, dignified” Law and how he had kept up the morale of his men by personally undertaking any assignment he asked of them, the more Robeson determined to do a film that would center on Law, but also tell the story of “all of the American Negro comrades” (in Robeson’s words) “who have come to fight and die for Spain.” The project never got off the ground; “the same money interests that block every effort to help Spain,” Robeson wrote, “control the Motion Picture industry, and so refuse to allow such a story,” preferring to produce profitable films of “mediocre entertainment.”8
Everywhere he went, Robeson was immediately recognized by the troops. They had read about him, seen his films, heard his songs. Astonished to see him in Spain, they crowded around him at several stops, and at each he sang without accompaniment, the soldiers calling out favorite songs. At the International Brigade training quarters in Tarazona, he was warmly welcomed by soldiers from a dozen countries—some fifteen hundred men packed the church, after passing in review and saluting the Robeson party, to hear him sing and Charlotte Haldane talk—so movingly, her own eyes full of tears, that the men stood up and cheered her at the close. Two of the British volunteers still remember the impact Robeson himself made. The soldiers “were thrilled to bits to see him,” George Baker recalls—that is, once they believed he was actually there. “You don’t get people like that every day of the week running into a war to see how things are going,” says Tommy Adlam, then a sergeant in the medical corps, recalling that at first most of the men discounted the rumor that Robeson was in the vicinity. After it was established as fact, “the whole place lit up.” Robeson was so “alive and vivid,” he had an instantaneous effect—“it was just like a magnet drawing you … as if somebody was reaching out to grasp you and draw you in.” After he sang and talked with the men, they felt they had been with “a friend of lifelong standing.”9
From Tarazona the party drove to Madrid, finishing the last part of the trip in darkness and at a crawl because that stretch of road was within range of the fascist artillery and was regularly bombed. Madrid itself had been shelled on a nearly daily basis since 1936, and no women and children were being allowed to enter the city; the Robesons got through only because they had special government papers. Driving directly to the Presidencia, they were received by the acting governor of Madrid, Dr. F. Grande-Covian, and went from there to luxurious accommodations in the Palace Hotel, “astonished” that such facilities were still available. They were only a few miles from the front line and could hear artillery fire clearly.10
The next day, from the observation tower in the former royal palace, they could see the trenches, government troops on one side, the insurgents on the other. While they were still in the tower, a shell whizzed over and burst into a nearby building; another landed on a nearby bridge, destroying it. They took refuge in the staff room and were entertained on the guitar by a young lieutenant, as other soldiers joined in singing flamenco songs (Robeson told Nicolás Guillén, “the Flamencan song is Black in its rhythm and its sad depths”). Robeson, in turn, sang for the soldiers—the Mexican folk song “Encantadora Maria” and spirituals (“My songs,” he told the Daily Worker reporter in Spain, “came from the lips of the people of other continents who suffer and struggle to make equality a reality”). The soldiers seemed as absorbed in the singing as if there were no war at all. On the streets, too, the Robesons had been impressed with the remarkable capacity of the people to remain cheerful and to carry on, between shellings, with daily life. It was Essie’s impression that they harbored little bitterness against the adversary, were optimistic that Franco would be defeated and anxious not to sully their own cause by adopting the barbarous tactics of the enemy (the Robesons were elated when news came over the radio that the government had successfully bombed Saragossa—only to hear their Spanish friends disapprovingly comment that the government had resorted to “murderers’ weapons,” had mistakenly adopted Franco’s antilife values).11
The Robeson party was welcomed everywhere in Madrid. They met the remarkable Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria), the press came for interviews, Robeson broadcast to the nation, and Dr. Grande gave a party for them at which the great Pastora Imperio danced and Paul sang. At a performance of Cervantes’s Numancia, Paul was recognized in the audience; the cast then performed some special folk songs and dances in his honor—and he in turn sang from the stage while the audience stomped and shouted its approval. On January 29 the Robesons went to the barracks where soldiers from the front lines were resting, and then to the parade grounds, where he talked and sang to the men; the soldiers called out requests to him in various languages, and a motion-picture crew shot him “from every possible angle” with the troops; Robeson later dubbed in two songs as sound background for the film—choosing the militant “Joshua” and Rosamond Johnson’s “Singing wid a Sword in Ma Hand, Lord!”12
From Madrid the Robeson party drove to Valencia, stopped all along the road by earnest young militiamen “armed to the teeth” who recognized the official car but nonetheless insisted on the precaution of checking their papers. A fierce air raid on Valencia had preceded them by only a few hours, and they saw the terrible devastation on all sides. After resting for the night, they moved on to Barcelona by way of the coast road; they were again fortunate in their timing, and arrived there just after two morning air raids. In Barcelona, Essie thought the reporters “depressing, rather like vultures. Not sympathetic at all … I doubt if they really care who wins or loses.” They saw Robert Minor again and had lunch with Earl Browder, who had just arrived from Toulouse. “Browder was a quiet middle-aged man, very sympathetic and interesting,” Essie wrote in her diary. “We had a good talk over lunch, and afterwards over coffee.…” The Commissioner of Information of Catalonia, Jaume Miravitlles, and the well-known folklorist and musician Joan Gols i Soler also paid visits; with both of them Robeson discussed the music of Catalonia, and Gols promised to send him a collection of songs.13
After another overnight, they headed out of Spain to the French border, stopping at Figueras to pick up their driver’s brother. During the trip he told them that the Spanish people “lack all sense of color prejudice and are actually proud of whatever Moorish blood they have”—perhaps deliberately broadening his own Republican principles to cover a less than spotless historical record. Lieutenant Conrad Kaye, a popular New York volunteer, had earlier told them that they had had “quite a time at first with some of the southern white Americans and the British on this Negro question … the really difficult ones [having been] the British. They refuse to eat in dining rooms with the Negroes, etc., and have to be drastically educated, because neither the Spaniards nor the International Brigade will tolerate such heresy.” Essie, for one, “never felt any barrier because of Race or Color with the Spaniards.” As they drove toward the French border, mingling political talk with a song fest (the Robesons teaching the others the words to “I’se a Muggin’”), Captain Castillo unpinned the medal he had won for heroism in 1936 from his uniform and handed it to Essie with the simple words “I give you this.” At the border there were fond farewells and embraces. The Robesons got into a small sedan and crossed over into France; they arrived in Paris on the morning of February 1.14
Robeson later called the 1938 trip to Spain “a major turning point in my life”—in the sense of intensifying his already well-developed political sympathies. “I have never met such courage in a people,” he told a reporter. He disliked the notion of turning to war to solve problems, but felt the Spanish people could not stand there and “be just murdered.” In his notebook Robeson wrote, “We must know that Spain is our Front Line.… We are certainly not doing anywhere nearly enough. We don’t feel deeply enough.… If we allow Republican Spain to suffer needlessly, we will ourselves eventually suffer as deeply.” He deplored the failure of the Western democracies to aid the Loyalist cause in Spain. In contrast, Robeson felt, Communists had proved themselves enthusiastic allies in the fight against Franco, and the Soviet Union’s support of the antifascist struggle confirmed for him—and for many others—that it stood in the forefront of the struggle for democratic liberties everywhere. On Essie, too, the trip to Spain had a profound effect. “Hitherto,” she wrote William Patterson, she had not been “fundamentally interested” in politics, but now felt she was rapidly “catching up” with Paul’s commitment. Less than a week after returning to London, Paul and Essie left for Paris so he could sing for the exiled delegates of the Cortez (the Spanish Parliament) on their way back to their respective countries. From Paris, Essie went on to Moscow to discuss with Ma Goode whether she and Pauli should return to London because of the worsening international situation, and Paul went back to London. They stayed in touch for many years with Captain Castillo, subsequently put him up with his family, and financed an exhibition of the paintings of his father-in-law, Don Cristobal Ruiz, in London (Freda Diamond took on the job of getting him an exhibition in New York), and then essentially supported the family until it could resettle in Mexico.15
Disgusted and alarmed at political developments, Robeson felt he could not simply “stand by and see it happen.” He began to consider returning to the States, where he could speak out without being dismissed as an “alien.” In England, as a noncitizen, he had to try to remain “reasonably discreet,” but, as Essie wrote William Patterson, the “attitude and behaviour” of the “ruling classes” in England “has soured us, and we despise them openly.” Essie also conveyed to Patterson her approval of the recent purge trials in the Soviet Union. They had given her “a bad scare,” she wrote, because they brought back to mind the personal contact she had had with Ignaty N. Kazakov, the doctor who had just “confessed” to murdering OGPU Chairman Menzhinsky. Kazakov had asked Essie, when she and Paul left Kislovodsk after their 1937 vacation, to bring him “some compound of tungsten” for his laboratory when she returned to Moscow. She had managed to secure the tungsten from her London physician, but, being unable to learn what it could be used for—other than in light bulbs—she had decided to return the tungsten to her doctor; she did not want to “be responsible for importing anything I didn’t understand myself.” On returning to the Soviet Union, she had gone to explain to Kazakov—and found that he was in prison. “Can you imagine my being so dumb??” she wrote Patterson. “It develops that he used this marvelous clinic of his for poison, as well as for more constructive work.” She thought the treachery of the “conspirators” “a very terrible thing” and was “glad they have been punished.”16
There is no record of Paul’s reaction to the 1936, 1937, or 1938 Moscow trials, but as early as 1936 he had given an interview to Ben Davis, Jr., in which he is quoted as saying that the U.S.S.R. had dealt properly in the trial of the “counter-revolutionary assassins” of Kirov—“They ought to destroy anybody who seeks to harm that great country” (and while saying it, according to Davis, he looked “as if he could strangle the assassins with his own hands”). Marie Seton recalls a far less histrionic and apologetic version. Paul, she says, acknowledged to her in 1937 that “dreadful things” had taken place in the Soviet Union, implying sympathy for those who had “confessed” to an antigovernment “plot” but blanketing his doubts with the extenuating argument that rapid social transformation comes with an inevitable toll. That was a view common in the ranks of pro-Soviet intellectuals everywhere, exemplified in Britain by John Strachey’s influential 1936 book, The Theory and Practice of Socialism, in which he could “find no meaning in the allegation” that Stalin had made himself a dictator and hailed the Soviet system for producing a “far wider measure of democracy than do parliaments or congresses.”17
The Robesons’ alarm over the world situation made them anxious about leaving Pauli, now age ten, in school in the Soviet Union. It had become difficult to reach Moscow except through German-controlled territory (even the Scandinavian air route stopped at Hamburg), and with Spanish and Russian stamps on their passports guaranteeing German hostility to them, the Robesons finally decided to send for Pauli and Ma Goode. They did so reluctantly, knowing how happy the pair had been in Moscow; indeed, Pauli agreed to return only because (as Essie wrote the Van Vechtens) “we PROMISED to spend a lot of time with him, and after all, he hadn’t seen his parents enough.” Ma Goode went to the States for a prolonged visit, and Pauli was able to live with his parents on a daily basis for the first time since their summer vacation together in 1937. He was also happy when they immediately enrolled him in the Soviet School in London, maintained for the children of U.S.S.R. officials, an arrangement that allowed him to continue his studies without interruption (and to continue to be shielded from some of the rawer daily manifestations of racism—“Russian children don’t look at you as if they hated you,” Pauli told a newspaper reporter).18
Robeson stepped up the pace of his political appearances in London. He sang at a variety of rallies—the International Peace Campaign at the Royal Opera House, a Save China assembly at Covent Garden (with speakers including Edouard Herriot and Madame Sun Yat-sen), the Basque Children’s Committee, and the British Youth Peace Assembly. He also contacted experts on Spanish music, with the aim of learning more about the cante jondo style, and was involved in preliminary discussions for setting up a foundation called International Theatres of the People. And for a brief time it looked as if he and Sergei Eisenstein might finally get together on a film project: Eisenstein wrote from Moscow in April 1938 to say that “all my troubles are over. New people are running the film business”; he was completing “one of the most important pictures to be made this year” (Alexander Nevsky), was “thinking in the direction of the brotherhood of nations and races,” and suggested that if Robeson had “some fine ideas in that direction to be made together,” he should let him know immediately. But although Eisenstein was to receive the Order of Lenin on February 1, 1939, and was soon to be made artistic head of Mosfilm, his projects would again run into roadblocks, and he and Robeson would never make the film they had long hoped to.19
Once again Robeson was warned that his political activities might hurt his artistic career, this time by Harold Holt, his London agent, who admonished him to curtail his outspokenness or face the likelihood of losing concert bookings. “It is my duty, as your representative,” Holt wrote, “to point out that your value as an artist is bound to be very adversely affected.… You are doing yourself a great deal of harm.” Robeson ignored Holt’s warning and—for the time being—suffered no loss in public popularity. His first concert in more than two years at the Albert Hall was packed, and the applause greeting his entrance was so prolonged that, before the concert could proceed, Larry Brown had to play a piano introduction through twice, and Robeson had to give a little speech thanking the audience for its welcome. In the same month (June 1938) that Holt admonished Robeson about his political appearances, he was—perhaps in a gesture of deliberate defiance—particularly active, singing the Soviet anthem at a huge rally organized by the Emergency Youth Peace Campaign, and appearing at two other public meetings.20
Instead of retreating from his political commitments, Robeson was establishing their primacy. He explained to the press that “something inside has turned”; long-standing discontent over the stage and film roles he had played had finally crystallized into a coherent vision of how he wanted to employ his talents in the future. He would never again, he said, do a part like that in Sanders of the River—a film he now saw as “a piece of flag-waving … a total loss.” Even the movie version of The Emperor Jones he now regarded as “a failure”: the changed order of the scenes had destroyed the play’s psychological integrity, and its director, Dudley Murphy, had misused him in the title role—rushing him through whole sequences lest his “mood” change, on the “fool notion that negroes had moods and could only play” when they were in the proper one. For the future, Robeson vowed to appear only “in stories that had some bearing on the problems” ordinary people faced in their daily lives (and at a box-office price they could afford). He no longer believed, he told another reporter, in the once-prevalent notion—held by most of the major figures in the Harlem Renaissance—that a “talented tenth” of the black people could or should, through their own demonstrated achievements, lead the black masses out of bondage. In line with his new convictions, Robeson chose for his next stage appearance the Unity Theatre production of Plant in the Sun. 21
Political theater in Britain, as well as in the United States, had taken on new life in the early thirties. A group of British actors, encouraged by André Van Gyseghem and Herbert Marshall (who was then studying filmmaking with Eisenstein), had performed at the First International Workers’ Olympiad in Moscow in 1933. On returning home, they formed the Rebel Players and, after a striking success in 1935 with Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, had reconstituted themselves as the Unity Theatre, renovating a large hall that had once been a derelict mission, in Goldington Crescent. In a wave of enthusiasm, they declared themselves “a people’s theatre, built to serve as a means of dramatising their life and struggles, and as an aid in making them conscious of their strength and of the need for United action.”22
Plant in the Sun was the third play performed in the new Unity building. Written by a young American, Ben Bengal, it was directed by Herbert Marshall, who had gotten to know Robeson during his 1934 visit to the Soviet Union. The two men had talked over Robeson’s difficulty in finding politically astute material that would not be mutilated during production by commercial managers, and Marshall had suggested he read the script for Plant in the Sun. Robeson was immediately attracted to its forceful advocacy of trade-unionist principles, its story line about the irresistible success that follows when white and black workers combine their forces in a sit-down strike. He also liked the idea of playing a lead role that had originally been written for an Irishman. He found additionally appealing the Unity Theatre’s policy of having everyone in the cast—which included a full complement of real-life carpenters and clerks—appear anonymously. Robeson decided to accept the role.23
Word spread rapidly of Robeson’s pending appearance in the play, and the limited, month-long run immediately sold out, fashionable West Enders vying with Unity’s usual working-class audience for seats. Time and Tide noted that Robeson, “who can fill any great hall in London on his own,” had not only given his services free to Unity, but was also prepared to make a personal plea to Parliament for support of a theater that “should put on plays of working-class life.”24
Rehearsals had to take place on weekends and on evenings, because most of the amateur cast held daytime jobs. Neither the evenings nor the amateurs fazed Robeson. Enthusiastic, he would arrive early for rehearsals, and would sit outside in front of the theater chatting with Vernon Beste, Unity’s chairman. (Robeson told Beste he didn’t like doing concert tours—they made him feel too lonely—and recalled the deep kinship he had experienced talking with mill workers on the Isle of Man; in general, he seemed to Beste “greatly worried by the worsening political situation.”) Rehearsals were run along the lines of a pep rally. The actors discussed the social significance of the play, watched documentary films about “stay-in” strikes in France, made a special study of the dialect of the East Side of New York (where the play’s candy factory was set), visited two British confectionery factories, and even heard a formal lecture on “spontaneous struggles and their expression in strikes.” Robeson’s rapport with the amateur cast was complete. The actor Alfie Bass, who had been connected with Unity from the beginning and worked with Robeson on Plant, measured him against the other “stars” he’d known and decided, “Nobody I’ve ever met for intelligence, humanity and so on would ever come up to this man—and I tell you I’m not easily fooled, I look with contempt on people that are supposed to be ‘big’ people.”25
Robeson, for his part, was delighted to be working in a setting and on a script that suited his political vision. Before the Unity experience, he told a reporter, he had felt himself “drying up … acting in plays and films that cut against the very people and ideas that I wanted to help. For me it was a question of finding somewhere to work that would tie me up with the things I believe in, or stopping altogether. It was as strong as that.” Robeson’s satisfaction with Plant in the Sun found considerable echo among the critics. They were generally respectful of the “compact little study” and widely admiring of the “dignity and gentle strength” of Robeson’s own performance. “It was a melodrama of course,” the Manchester Guardian commented, “but with reality in it.”26
Even during the run of Plant, Robeson managed to fit in a few political appearances—notably at a large rally for Loyalist Spain held at the Granada Cinema, and at a meeting to protest conditions in Jamaica (“I have appeared on many platforms for various causes. Tonight I am appealing for, as it were, my flesh and blood”). It was also in 1938 that Robeson made the acquaintance of another leader of another oppressed people—Jawaharlal Nehru, the foremost figure in the Indian National Congress. Nehru came to London in June, directly from a five-day tour of Spain with Krishna Menon, the dominant force in the India League and the man who had earlier enlisted Robeson’s support in behalf of Indian independence. Robeson gladly accepted the League’s invitation to appear at a public meeting welcoming Nehru to London, and in turn Nehru and Krishna Menon were taken to see Robeson’s performance in Plant in the Sun.27
The rally to welcome Nehru drew a large crowd to Kingsway Hall on June 27, 1938. The Dean of Canterbury, Stafford Cripps, Harold Laski, Ellen Wilkinson, R. Palme Dutt (the Communist Party’s expert on colonial affairs), and Robeson were among those who spoke to the gathering. Dutt gave the chief address, emphasizing that “the Indian problem” could not be solved within the framework of British imperialism and hailing Nehru’s success in raising the membership of the Indian National Congress within two years from half a million to over three million. Robeson’s welcoming remarks stressed the indivisibility of the struggle for freedom, and called for an “even greater measure” of unified action by “democratic and progressive forces” to combat the “common onslaught by reactionary forces” in Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, and the West Indies. He claimed, with perhaps a touch of wishful thinking, that black Americans “have closely watched the Indian struggle and have been conscious of its importance for us.”28
Within a few days of the rally, the Robesons lunched with Nehru, accompanied by his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi—“Nan”—Pandit (she would remain a lifelong friend, particularly of Essie’s), and Essie followed up the luncheon by sending Nehru a copy of her book, Paul Robeson, Negro. He responded cordially (“It was such a delight to meet you and Paul Robeson. I am looking forward to a repetition of that experience”), and a friendship quickly blossomed. Within a few months of their first meeting, Nan Pandit was writing Essie to say “I feel as if we were old friends—it seemed so easy to establish contact with you,” and Essie was adding to Nehru’s reading list a gift of Richard Wright’s first (1938) published work, Uncle Tom’s Children (a book she and Paul were so taken with that he wrote a foreword to it when Victor Gollancz published it in England: “Wright is a great artist, certainly one of the most significant American authors of his time.… Would that everyone who has read Gone with the Wind would read Uncle Tom’s Children!!”).29
The Robesons and Nehru began to meet frequently, and Nehru later remembered that Essie “would dash in occasionally into my flat and announce, in the American way, that she was feeling like a million dollars. I am sure she has that capacity of feeling that way whatever happens.” Nehru clearly became fond of Essie, describing her as “one of the most vital and energetic women I have ever met. She is overflowing with an exuberant vitality.” Essie, in turn, told Marie Seton that she thought Nehru immensely attractive. There is even a hint that she and Nehru moved to the edge of having an affair—and that Essie was the one who backed off.30
When Plant in the Sun closed, Robeson and Larry Brown went off on a concert tour of the provinces while Essie made a brief trip back to the States to tie up some loose business ends surrounding the release of Jericho and to have a look at the successful WPA production of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Haiti as a possible vehicle for Paul in London (the decision was negative). Paul’s provincial tour was the most successful he had ever had. Far from abandoning him for his outspoken new political stance, audiences embraced him with fervor. At Eastbourne hundreds of would-be ticket purchasers were turned away; at Swansea a large throng waited to cheer him outside the theater after the concert; at Torquay police had to be called in to restore order when a “surging mass of people” carried Robeson into the concert hall “to the accompaniment of tremendous cheering”; and at Glasgow the papers reported “amazing crowd scenes”—people forming a line four deep and a quarter of a mile long outside the concert hall. Robeson had succeeded in his new aim of “reaching the people”—the “ordinary” people who sat in the galleries. They had always loved him—more uncritically than the professional arbiters of taste; now that he had become a self-identified “people’s artist,” they adored him. The London paper The Star reported that Robeson was among the ten artists whose recordings sold best, and in a Motion Picture Herald popularity poll he came in tenth among British film stars—though he did not place among the top ten in the United States.31
Robeson, of course, had his detractors. Between 1936 and the 1939 signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, criticism of the Soviet Union was rarely heard in Harlem intellectual circles—even among such bitter later critics as A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins (the NAACP journal, The Crisis, edited by Wilkins, carried not a single article critical of the Soviets during this four-year period). Yet within black ministerial circles “anti-Communism” had already surfaced. Claude A. Barnett, director of the Associated Negro Press, wrote Robeson from Chicago to report a recent visit to his office “by the president of a great religious association,” bearing a huge placard designed to portray black celebrities in commemoration of the forthcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of emancipation. During the ensuing conversation, he told Barnett that Robeson’s name had been suggested for a place on the placard but the suggestion had led to “quite an argument” among members of the anniversary committee—one minister insisting that Robeson had made “a disparaging comment relative to the Negro church, which he attributed to certain acquired communistic views,” and another insisting “that no man who sang spirituals” as Robeson did could do so “without loving them or believing in them.” Barnett asked Robeson a few queries of his own: “Are you planning to relinquish your American citizenship? Are you planning to become a citizen of Russia? Would you be interested in making Russia your home?”32
Robeson ignored the detractors. In his very next public statement, in September, soon after returning to London from his provincial tour, he further consolidated his populist image. In more forceful terms than ever before, he told the press about his disenchantment with commercial filmmaking. “I am tired of playing Stepin Fetchit comics and savages with leopard skin and spear,” he told one reporter. The film industry had refused to give him the kind of roles he wanted to play—the life of the black composer Coleridge-Taylor, say, or a film based on the Joe Louis story. As a result he was determined, he said, to try to make pictures independently—at the time he still hoped to do a film with Eisenstein—or to get a picture off the ground based on the life of Oliver Law, the black American soldier who had died in Spain. It was not an unrealistic path: documentary films had recently come into prominence, and such talented film personalities as Robert Flaherty, Paul Muni, and Leslie Howard had washed their hands of the film industry proper and gone their independent ways.33
Meanwhile, he agreed to sing as many as three shows daily in a few of the popular cinema palaces—Gaumont State, the Trocadero, the Elephant and Castle. He was willing to work harder and at reduced fees—eighteen performances at one of the giant cinema houses brought him a salary equivalent to the fee for one performance on the Celebrity Concert series at Queen’s Hall—in order to reach the people he now considered to be his “natural” audience, and at a price they could afford. But Robeson could never be a “pop” singer in the Frank Sinatra mode, and whenever he tried to stretch his voice and repertoire in that direction he invariably stumbled. Essie wisely counseled him to return to what he did best, the spirituals, and he quickly heeded her advice.34
Simultaneously, Robeson maintained a hectic pace of political appearances, lending his name and presence to a plethora of organizations and events—the Spanish Aid Committee, Food for Republican Spain Campaign, the National Memorial Fund (for the British members of the Brigade), the Labour and Trade Union Movement, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, the League for the Boycott of Aggressor Nations, the Coloured Film Artists’ Association, the Society for Cultural Relations, and, in December 1938, the Welsh National Memorial Meeting at Mountain Ash, to commemorate those “men of the International Brigade from Wales who gave their lives in defence of Democracy in Spain.”35
The Mountain Ash meeting in Wales held special meaning for him. Ten years earlier, a much less political but nonetheless instinctively egalitarian Robeson had impulsively joined a group of Welsh miners demonstrating in London when he ran into them while coming out of a posh affair dressed in a dinner jacket. In the years since, his identification with the Welsh had grown—with their ethnic insistence, their strength of character, their political radicalism. His strong bonds with the people of the Rhondda Valley would endure for the rest of his life, and the film he was soon to make about the Welsh miners, The Proud Valley, would always be the one in which he took the most pleasure. In 1938 at Mountain Ash, seven thousand people gathered to commemorate the thirty-three men from Wales who had died in Spain. Veterans of the International Brigade marched behind the flags of Wales and Republican Spain onto a platform filled with one hundred black men, women, and children from Cardiff, as well as a group of orphaned Basque children. The speakers included the Dean of Chichester and Arthur Horner, president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, who introduced Robeson to the audience as “a great champion of the rights of the oppressed people to whom he belongs.” Robeson sang, recited two poems Langston Hughes had composed in Spain, and told the audience, “I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for Spain but for me and the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here.” The audience gave him a standing ovation.36
Robeson had next planned a trip to Australia for a recital tour, but it had to be called off because of the uncertainty of the political situation in Europe. In April 1939, though, he and Larry Brown did manage a brief Scandinavian trip, performing in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, where enthusiastic crowds turned the concerts into anti-Nazi demonstrations. Then, in May, Robeson sailed for a two-month stay in the States, perhaps at the prompting of his lawyer, Robert Rockmore—increasingly his confidant and business manager—who felt concerned that he “has been away so long that I am afraid that he may lose his so-called American audience, which, as you know, at best is a very fickle one.” Robeson had wanted to make a trip to New York anyway to discuss with Oscar Hammerstein II the possibility of doing the play John Henry, and while there he agreed to do some concert engagements and also to appear in what turned out to be a well-received week-long revival of The Emperor Jones (directed by Gig McGhee) at the Ridgeway Theater in White Plains.37
Soon after arriving in New York, he told the Sunday Worker that,
Having helped on many fronts, I feel that it is now time for me to return to the place of my origin—to those roots which, though imbedded in Negro life, are essentially American and are so regarded by the people of most other countries.… It is my business not only to tell the guy with the whip hand to go easy on my people,… but also to teach my people—all the oppressed people—how to prevent that whip hand from being used against them.
Robeson was besieged by requests for additional interviews and public appearances, but hid out at the McGhees’ apartment. No one could find him—and everyone seemed to be trying. Alexander Woollcott wanted to take him to lunch, Max Yergan wanted to discuss a pending conference on Africa, NBC wanted to discuss the possibility of radio dates, and Walter White wanted him to speak at the thirtieth annual conference of the NAACP. What Robeson wanted was to conserve his energy and call his own shots. “Nobody can find you,” Essie wrote in consternation from London—which was precisely how Paul had planned it. But his inaccessibility did ruffle some feelings. Carl Van Vechten was so put out over Paul’s failure to contact him that Essie had to write a lengthy apology, diplomatically claiming that Paul “feels terrible” about “the mess he made of things while he was in America.”38
He did not. And Carlo knew he did not. “There is no word from Paul that HE is sorry,” Van Vechten wrote his wife, Fania, “It’s pretty obvious that Paul doesn’t want to see us very much, or most of his old friends.” “There is only one thing to do,” Carlo decided, “and that is refrain from flattering them by letting them think we are MAD.” Two days later, still smarting despite his resolution not to, Carlo returned to the subject in another letter to Fania,
The point about Paul is that he only wants to talk about himself and how he’s improving and how he is working on new songs and he can’t talk to his old friends that way because they’ve heard this story so long: so he hunts up new ones to listen.… There is no earthly use in going into all this because it is a matter of indifference whether we see him or not.… If they want to call up and come round in the fall, why let them. I don’t think they will bother us much. Essie’s whole idea is to keep us from getting sore, because she knows that would do Paul harm, but the other people he has treated like this will do him more harm.
In reply, Fania, who shared her husband’s distaste for being ignored, let go with an accumulated backlog of venom against Paul:
[He is] weak, selfish, indulgent, lazy—really if it were not for his meagre talent and his great charm he would be just the traditional “lowdown worthless nigger”—is in spite of himself thoroughly ashamed of his failure to function as a worthwhile and fine human being when he was on his own, without needing Essie to “remind him” and prod him along. I feel sorry for him in a way. But I think it’s about time Essie “reminded” him that even HE can’t treat his friends with large doses of indifference and neglect and expect to keep them. We understand him. Besides we don’t give a dam [sic]. But his other American Buddies perhaps won’t take his behavior so lightly. In any case, they will talk about it, and HOW we will keep silent; as you say, in the Fall it’s all up to them. More and more I admire Essie.… He’s utterly consumed with his own importance. Nobody else matters. I say to HELL with people like that!39
Paul, having established his own set of priorities, went about meeting them. One was to contact Angelo Herndon, the black Communist who had been arrested in Atlanta in 1932 for leading a biracial demonstration of the unemployed and been sentenced by an overtly racist trial judge to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. In 1935 the Communist Party—after the Supreme Court had refused to hear Herndon’s appeal—had led a petition drive in his behalf that attracted “united-front” support from Communists and non-Communists alike, and had led in 1937 to the Court’s narrowly overturning Herndon’s conviction. Benjamin Davis Jr., the black Harvard graduate and the son of a wealthy Atlanta real-estate operator, had served in the 1932 trial as Herndon’s attorney (and would himself later rise into the CPUSA hierarchy). Reading of the trial in the London papers, Robeson resolved “to learn how a man did that in the heart of Georgia.” He and Davis had at least met in the early twenties, but as he wrote him many years later, after the two men had long been close friends, “Your courageous example in the Herndon case was one of the most important influences in my life.” During his trip to New York, Robeson not only saw Ben Davis but also volunteered his services to Herndon in support of the Negro Youth Congress’s current drive to place five hundred new black voters on the county list in Birmingham, Alabama. Herndon was unable to take up Robeson’s offer to help raise money because, as he wrote him, “the people who would make such an affair a success” could not be contacted on short notice.40
While in New York, Robeson also scouted for suitable new properties. Prior to leaving London, he had turned down the lead in Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s Eneas Africanus, reacting negatively to the patronizing story of an ex-slave’s eight-year effort to locate his former plantation—and to the condescension of Anderson’s covering letter, which referred to the slave as never having been “obliged or encouraged to make an ethical decision for himself” or having “to worry about” any “responsibilities.” Robeson had been more excited by a possible new play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (authors of Porgy and Mamba’s Daughters) about the black insurrectionary Denmark Vesey; from London, Essie seconded his enthusiasm: “I like the Vesey conception because I feel it IS what you think and feel, and you could therefore go for it in a big way.”41
While in New York Robeson met with Langston Hughes and heard part of his blues opera, De Organizer, which Labor Stage planned to put on in the fall. He also checked out the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, affiliated with the International Workers Order (the CP’s fraternal society), whose first production, Langston Hughes’s agitprop drama Don’t You Want to Be Free?, had opened in 1938 and attracted an enthusiastic following in Harlem. Essie thought that play “ineffective” and “definitely amateur,” but she agreed that soundings made to Paul about plans (which never matured) for a Langston Hughes-Duke Ellington musical, Cock o’ the World, were “very intriguing.” As Paul considered various prospects, Essie supported his determination not to accept a trifling role: “You are now too aware, too definite minded, too militant.… You couldn’t do a small person, because you are too big, inside and out. Amusing, mischievous, rascally trifling—yes. But permanent inherent trifling—no.”42
The new project that finally crystallized carried no danger of being trifling. Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, announced in the spring of 1939 that he had persuaded Robeson to return to films. He would play the lead role in a fictionalized story about the life and plight of the Welsh miners, as told through the eyes of David Goliath, an unemployed American black who, through a series of plausible accidents, goes to work in the Welsh mines and becomes centrally involved in the miners’ struggle for a better life. The youthful Pen Tennyson, hired as the film’s director, told the press that Robeson would not be used as “a negro or a famous singer”; he would play the role of a penniless man who lands a job in the Welsh mines and shares the life of a poor Welsh family—“It is a real life story showing Robeson as a simple, likeable human being, who has to take the rough with the smooth, the same as all of us.” The prescription was ideally suited to Robeson’s political vision. It remained to be seen whether good politics could be translated into good art.43
Shooting on David Goliath (the title was later changed to The Proud Valley) was due to begin in August. To trim off some pounds before going in front of the cameras, Robeson entered a “nature-cure” rest home as soon as he returned to London in July. His weight, as he reached age forty, had been gradually increasing until, in Essie’s view, “all semblance of that grand figure has long since disappeared under bulk.” She had been pestering him to go on a diet, but he ignored her until friends in New York who hadn’t seen him in years joked about how he had lost his figure and become “an Ox.” He stayed in the rest home—a mansion with 150 acres of grounds—for a full four weeks, subjecting himself to a repetitive round of electrical baths, massages, fasts, and colonic irrigations, and emerged “feeling like a million.”44
He also emerged into a full-scale European war. The news in August 1939 that Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler proved shattering to some believers in the revolutionary purity of Soviet ideology, but Robeson publicly stated that the pact “in no way whatsoever” “weakened or changed” his convictions. He saw the Nazi-Soviet agreement as having been forced on Russia by the unwillingness of the British and French governments “to collaborate with the Soviet Union in a real policy of collective security”—in his notes he recorded his certainty that an Anglo-Russian pact “would have stopped Nazi aggression”—leaving the U.S.S.R. with no alternative way of protecting its borders from a German attack. But if the pact provided the Soviets with some security, it provided the Nazis with more. On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s battalions moved into Poland, plunging Europe into war.45
Essie, with typical efficiency, had been stocking up on supplies for a year. Now, with the sky full of barrage balloons, civilian police manning clogged traffic points, anti-aircraft guns going up on building tops, sandbags against windows, the Robesons decided it was time to return home. They delayed passage only until the shooting on The Proud Valley could be completed. Essie drove Paul out to the studio early each morning, and he came home in the dark every evening by underground. The routine was exhausting, tension compounded because of air-raid precautions and blackouts, and because Paul, between takes, had to squeeze in recording sessions for His Master’s Voice. Even so, he pulled no star turn on the set, indulged in no histrionics. On the contrary, his fellow actors found him (in the words of one of them, Rachel Thomas) “so easy to work with, so easy to get on with. No temperament at all.” In the view of another cast member, Roderick Jones, Robeson’s concern centered on his fellow actors, not himself: when his stand-in was kept hanging around for hours under hot lights while the technical people made their adjustments, Robeson—without raising his voice or losing his temper—told them, “Now look, this has got to stop. You can’t keep these people waiting around like this all the time.”46
On September 25 the film was completed; on September 28 Robeson saw a rough cut and was delighted with it; on September 29 Essie sent off twenty-four pieces of luggage to the boat train; and on the morning of September 30, Pauli in tow, the family bid goodbye to London.47