CHAPTER 12

The World at War

(1940–1942)

When the Robesons docked in New York in mid-October 1939, their old friends Minnie Sumner, Bob Rockmore, and Bert McGhee were waiting for them. So was a small battalion of reporters. Robeson had prepared a written statement—suggesting his high level of concern for being quoted accurately—but the statement itself was anything but cautious. He referred contemptuously in it to “those Munich men” (Chamberlain and Daladier) whose supineness had served to abet fascist aggression in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Ethiopia; still in power, they were prosecuting a war, in the name of democracy, that was in fact aimed at saving Germany from her own leadership, in order ultimately to secure her support for a crusade against the Soviet Union. (“The gentlemen of Munich,” Robeson wrote in his private notes, “are seeking to preserve … a Nazi Germany with one exception—without Hitler.… It is interesting in this connection to note the campaign in the pro-Munich conservative press, to build up Goering by pointing out that he is a gentleman—not a proletarian sign painter like Hitler, that he hunts … that a Germany headed by Goering could get peace terms.”) A Western triumph in a subsequent conflict with the Soviet Union would, in Robeson’s opinion, mean the continuing dominion of a colonial spirit scornful of Asians and Africans and devoted to maintaining oppressive foreign control over their countries. He could see no reason, therefore, for blacks anywhere, or for the United States as a nation, to take part in a dispute that was lining up as fascist versus communist.1

Robeson’s remarks were reprinted in the British press and infuriated, among others, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Though an acquaintance of the Robesons, Beaverbrook let it be known that his newspapers would refuse to advertise or review Robeson’s forthcoming picture, The Proud Valley. The London columnist Hannen Swaffer, also a Robeson acquaintance, joined in the denunciation of him, prophesying that his ill-timed remarks—“after all, this country is now fighting for its existence”—would mean the end of his career in Britain. Undaunted, Robeson in the next few months repeated and expanded his views to reporters. In his opinion, the massing of Western imperialists (calling themselves “democracies”) for a showdown against the Soviets warranted Russia’s decision to march into Poland and Finland. He characterized the Soviet moves as “defensive,” a response to the “reactionary” influence Britain had been exerting in Scandinavia and to the pending alignment of Western Europe—including the “purified” new regimes expected to replace Hitler and Mussolini in Germany and Italy—against the “threat” of Bolshevism. The Soviet Union’s subsequent peace treaty with Finland, Robeson insisted, proved that the Russians had been interested only in securing strategic border points. Robeson was not alone in holding “the men of Munich” in contempt. English socialists with whom he said he had “discussed causes and conditions of the European conflict,” such as Harold Laski, J. B. Priestley, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, shared that estimate. Robeson’s views were also shared by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace, who in a speech at the Engineer’s Club made exactly the same prediction Robeson had about the pending political realignment in Europe—though, unlike Robeson, he applauded the coming crusade against Communism.2

Robeson insisted that in making his remarks he was speaking neither as a Communist nor even as a fellow traveler, but, rather, as someone who subscribed to the philosophy of “real democracy” and spoke “from the point of view of the son of a slave,” aware and concerned about issues affecting the fate of millions of subject black people in the world. But his views did parallel those of the Soviet leadership, and one black reader wrote to the New York Amsterdam News in protest: “No, Paul old boy, you can’t expect right thinking people whether they be black or white to denounce Hitler and Mussolini for their sordid deeds, and acclaim Joe Stalin for his depredatory acts.” Claude McKay also rebuked him. McKay had been to the Soviet Union ten years before Robeson and, like him, had, as a black man, been fêted and acclaimed; unlike him, McKay had become rapidly disenchanted. He now took to print to chastise Robeson publicly for not seeing “beyond the pleasantries with which the Soviets deluge a much wanted guest,” for his uncritical approach toward a Soviet state grown “mindlessly cruel and powerful,” persecuting its own peasantry, suppressing its trade unions, sentencing “its intellectual minorities to a death purge”—and setting out to destroy “the cooperative and semi-social democratic regime of its little neighbor Finland.” It was nonsense, McKay claimed, for Robeson to defend Russia because it was “a land free of prejudice against Negroes.” There had never been any such prejudice, McKay argued, not even under the czarist regimes—“Before the Revolution an American Negro was the popular proprietor of the most fashionable cabaret in Moscow.” The true “minority parallel,” McKay insisted, was between the American treatment of blacks and the Russian treatment of Finns: “Stalin’s attack upon Finland is as vicious as Crackers lynching Negroes under the assumption that they are all rapists.” Hailing Finland as “a valiant fighting minority nation,” McKay called upon the Afro-American minority to lend its support to the Finnish cause.3

Robeson would not budge. In follow-up interviews he reiterated his conviction that the Soviet Union was fighting a “defensive war,” and he refused to participate in theatrical benefits to raise money for the Finns. “According to my reasoning,” he said, “aid to the Finns is aid to reactionary forces”; the Chamberlain and Daladier governments, and Mannerheim’s in Finland, did not represent “the progressive” segment of public opinion in their own countries. He could not see, he added, why blacks—“millions of whom are victims of a British Empire” that maintained its oppressive rule in South Africa and of a British government that continued to refuse independence to India and Jamaica—could possibly believe that Chamberlain was fighting in any sense for them. Anyone genuinely interested in freedom for colonial minorities, Robeson insisted, would do better to applaud “the Soviet action in freeing the Western Ukrainians and White Russians” by moving their armies into those regions. Van Vechten, still brooding over Robeson’s neglect, relished the opportunity to assail his politics. “I see Paul has come out in favor of Russia against Finland,” Carlo wrote Walter White. “This is very bad business, indeed.” To another correspondent Carlo waxed philosophical about how “One-third of America may be enslaved, but everybody in Russia is a slave, with no hope of ever climbing out of it. Here there is that possible chance for any one.…” To Robeson’s old acting friend Dorothy Peterson, Van Vechten was more succinct: “I spit on Russian sympathizers.”⁴

Within six weeks of their arrival home, the Robesons had settled into a five-room apartment in the Roger Morris, a fashionable Harlem building at 555 Edgecombe Avenue. Ma Goode and Pauli were installed in a separate three-room penthouse in the same building. Initially Pauli had been interested in the Soviet school in Brooklyn, but after Essie “went back and back” to the Russian Consul, she “finally realized it was no go, but they didn’t want to say so,” and Pauli was enrolled in Fieldston, the Ethical Culture school. Robeson himself, within three weeks of landing in New York, participated—almost inadvertently—in a radio broadcast that reaped him nationwide acclaim, erasing (or at least neutralizing) whatever distaste his initial remarks to the press had created.5

The composer Earl Robinson had written music for a number of WPA-sponsored shows during the Depression, including a revue called Sing for Your Supper with the poet John LaTouche that had featured as its finale “The Ballad of Uncle Sam.” After the revue closed, Robinson suggested the ballad to his friend Norman Corwin at CBS for his new series of half-hour programs called “The Pursuit of Happiness,” an upbeat salute to democracy that had already featured Ray Middleton singing Maxwell Anderson’s “How Can You Tell an American” and Raymond Massey reciting from Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Robinson sang his ballad at the piano for Corwin, who liked it and had him perform for the CBS brass—Vice-President Bill Lewis’s reaction was “Wouldn’t Robeson knock the Hell out of this!”⁶

“Pursuit of Happiness” had already approached Robeson to appear on the series, but his asking fee of a thousand dollars had been considered too high. Corwin now decided to pay the fee, and in late October—just weeks after Robeson’s arrival in New York—Robeson and Robinson set to work. Commenting on the rehearsal experience years later, Earl Robinson said, “I have never had such a cooperative person to work with—never! There was nothing of the prima donna about him, nothing of arrogance. We had only one argument—about pitch.” Robeson’s voice was richer in the lower keys, and when recording he could use a microphone to avoid having to reach for the extra volume needed to produce the low tones—volume that he sometimes had trouble creating in a concert hall. He “would insist,” according to Robinson, “on moving pitch down, three, four, five keys down. And I argued with him. I said, ‘Paul, you’ve got those notes up there. It’s no problem for you.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but I don’t like them. I’m a folk singer. And I sing in my key.’” Then he added, with a twinkle, “The Russians transposed Boris Godunov down for me.” Robinson gave in. “It was a wrench, especially since I knew he could sing it in E if he wanted to.”⁷

During rehearsals, Norman Corwin rechristened the piece “Ballad for Americans,” and the broadcast took place on November 5, 1939. It created an instant sensation. The six hundred people in the studio audience stamped, shouted, and bravoed for two minutes while the show was still on the air, and for fifteen minutes after. The switchboards were jammed for two hours with phone calls, and within the next few days hundreds of letters arrived. Robeson repeated the broadcast again on New Year’s Day, then recorded “Ballad” for Victor and watched it soar to the top of the charts. Norman Corwin congratulated him on “making radio history.” Brooks Atkinson, the Times theater critic, wrote him directly to say what a “deep impression” “Ballad” had made on him and to thank him “for your voice, which God gave you, and especially … for the fortitude and honesty of your character, which are qualities for which you are responsible yourself.” More unpredictably, Robeson’s friend Robert Minor, the Texas Communist he had met in Spain in 1938, wrote to say that he had heard the broadcast “with wet eyes and wonder,” hearing in it the death knell of “an age old slave system” and rejoicing that it had been sung by one “whose inner fire is generated by the fight to overthrow it.” Minor—and Robeson—had been stirred by those LaTouche lyrics which acknowledged the dark side of the American dream (“the murders and lynchings … the patriotic spoutings”), and proclaimed

Man in white skin can never be free

While his black brother is in slavery

Other Americans, coming in on their own terms, thrilled to the rapturous patriotism of

Our Country’s strong, our Country’s young

And her greatest songs are still unsung.8

With something for everyone, “Ballad” stampeded the nation. It was a time when the United States, in a crescendo of patriotism, was offering itself double congratulations for having emerged from the Depression and for having kept out of a European war. Tin Pan Alley spawned a batch of hit tunes catering to the national mood—“I’m a Yank Full of Happiness,” “Defend Your Country,” “I Am an American”—of which “Ballad for Americans” became the favorite. When the Republicans opened their 1940 national convention with Ray Middleton and a chorus singing “Ballad” (the Democrats offered Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”), a groaning Earl Robinson predicted, “Next thing you know boy scouts will be singing it.” Presto! Thirty-six Boy Scouts did sing it—in Gimbel’s basement, as a seasonal come-on.⁹

After the second broadcast, also a huge success, Paul and Essie went to lunch with Marie Seton, who was visiting from England. It was served upstairs in Marie’s hotel room at the Elysée. Only years later did she tell the Robesons why: the hotel had informed her in advance that they would not serve Robeson in the public dining room. Nationally acclaimed one day, on the next he could eat in a hotel only if kept out of sight of its other guests. Earl Robinson, too, realized “the tremendous irony, the marvelous contradiction,” of Robeson’s being all at once a second-class citizen and CBS’s choice as the spokesman for the All-American Ballad.¹⁰

At the end of November, Robeson—home only a little more than a month—went into rehearsal for John Henry, a Roark Bradford play based on the valorous feats of the legendary black folk hero. He had been considering the role for some time, against the advice of Larry Brown and Essie, who thought the script inadequate. But Robeson told Ben Davis, Jr., that he would do the play “because I want to get back to American folk life. I want to work with my people with whom I belong.” The project went poorly from the start. The talented cast included Josh White and Ruby Elzy—and a member of the chorus named Bayard Rustin who remembers having been “absolutely taken” with Robeson: “He was so large, so full of life, so warm, and so totally respectful of everybody on the stage and in the play.… He didn’t play superstar.… Anybody could knock on his door and go in and sit down and talk to him.” Essie was less popular, by a considerable margin. She ran “interference in every respect for Paul,” “bulldozing her way” through all obstacles with “a kind of arrogance”—or so it appeared, Rustin cautions, to people unfamiliar with an “I-don’t-take-any-shit-from-anybody” attitude from a black person, let alone a woman. After opening to mixed notices in Philadelphia, the production returned to New York for additional rehearsals, substantial rewrites, and a new director. Yet the Boston opening that followed went no better. Arriving on Broadway—Robeson’s first appearance there since the revival of Show Boat in 1932—on January 11, 1940, the play failed to move either critics or public, and closed after a mere seven performances.11

The following week, Paul collected an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Hamilton College, in upstate New York, presented at the instigation of Alexander Woollcott, a Hamilton alumnus. In accepting the award, Robeson cautioned that the “future reorganization of civilization” that so many now heralded would, if it was to represent a true synthesis, include elements of African and Asian cultures. Referring to “Ballad for Americans,” which he read from, he said it represented “how naturally wide in human terms is our civilization” and declared that he himself, on returning to America, felt “so much a part of all America.” Acknowledgment from the mainstream did not deflect Robeson from his commitment to the margins. He lunched at the Soviet Embassy in Washington with Ambassador Oumansky (with whom he established a personal friendship) and the Russian colony, and arranged for Pauli to take special lessons at the Soviet school in New York to keep up his Russian, and to attend the Soviet summer camp upstate.¹²

In 1940 Robeson could still openly display his friendship for the Soviet Union without the American public’s taking any notable affront. There were, to be sure, some occasional ripples. His appearance on a Kraft radio program was delayed because, as the Columbia Management Bureau explained to Fred Schang, Robeson’s American concert manager, Kraft officials “are a little leery about Robeson as they understand that he is a Communist.” When the Dies Committee of the House of Representatives held hearings in the spring of 1941 on “Un-American Activities,” its research director, J. B. Matthews, cited an interview with Robeson five years earlier in Soviet Russia Today as proof that “he has made his choice for communism.” And Columbia Masterworks, when drawing up a 1941 recording contract with him, specified that he had “the right to record with another firm those selections which, for political reasons, we find unsuitable for our catalogue.” Schang himself warned Bob Rockmore, “If it gets around that Paul is endorsing Stalin against the Finns he can kiss his concert tour goodbye.” But in fact that was not the case. Robeson’s support of the Soviet Union did raise some incidental murmurs against him, but in a man otherwise considered so exemplary a figure, and in a country still debating the wisdom of entering the war as an ally of England and France, his views remained within the acceptable range of political dissent.13

That Robeson’s popularity with the general public remained at a high level is evident in the reception he got when The Proud Valley opened in 1940. The prominent black trade-unionist A. Philip Randolph expressed his private doubts to Walter White (who was now executive director of the NAACP), saying he feared the picture would exert a “bad influence” “because the Negro worker [Robeson] in the film was excluded from consultations with management,” and was shown as a “mendicant” whose death failed to produce a “collective expression on the part of the workers of sympathy and remorse.” But, although the film in general got lukewarm notices, Robeson himself emerged unscathed. Not a single reviewer—not even in Britain—rebuked him for what some had earlier called his “dangerous” new tendency to dilute art with politics.¹⁴

His stage work and concertizing also met with near-uniform applause. In May 1940 he appeared in a star-studded (John Boles, Norma Terris, Helen Morgan, Guy Kibbee) revival of Show Boat with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Association, in which whites and blacks had to use separate dressing rooms and (as Edwin Lester, the producer, later recalled), “We had to be very careful that no black man on the stage ever touched a white girl.” Oblivious to such contradictions, the gala first-night audience greeted Robeson’s appearance on the stage with an ovation, and the critics, even while expressing some doubt about the cohesion of the production, singled him out for special praise. In the ultimate accolade, one of his costars literally swooned with admiration: Bertha Powell, the great Hall Johnson singer who played Queenie, was relatively inexperienced in theater and, toward the end of the dress rehearsal, during her scene with Robeson, broke into a fit of sobbing. When she seemed unable to stop, Robeson took her in his arms and helped her offstage. She later explained that she’d simply become overwhelmed at the realization that she was actually playing opposite him.¹⁵

Robeson’s singing tour in 1940 met with a comparably rapturous reception. He opened it with a Lewisohn Stadium concert in New York dedicated to democracy and notable on several counts. It marked Robeson’s first appearance at the famed outdoor concert series and featured, along with his now obligatory singing of “Ballad,” a double premiere: Roy Harris’s “Challenge 1940,” and “And They Lynched Him on a Tree,” with words by Katherine Garrison Chapin (Mrs. Francis Biddle, wife of the U.S. Solicitor General), music by the black composer William Grant Still, and the lead role sung by the black soprano Louise Burge. But it was Robeson, according to the reviewers, who carried off the honors, and proved the crowd pleaser; welcomed with a “rousing” ovation, he closed to the applause of an audience “gone wild.” Afterward he and Essie met with Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come up from Washington to cheer Katherine Chapin on; Essie recorded in her diary that they found Mrs. Roosevelt “charming but tired, and very gracious.”16

In the cross-country tour that followed, Robeson was everywhere accorded the same rousing reception. In Chicago tens of thousands packed into Grant Park—the management estimated the crowd at 160,000—and, after (in the words of the critic Claudia Cassidy) a “deeply satisfying” performance, “roared” for more and refused to go home until Robeson sang an “indescribably moving” “Ballad for Americans,” without orchestra or chorus, only Larry Brown accompanying him. August saw him in a two-week stock-company revival—directed by his old friend Jimmy Light—of The Emperor Jones, one reviewer hailing his performance as even better than the riveting version of some fifteen years earlier; it so impressed Lawrence Langner, head of the Theatre Guild, that he sent Eugene O’Neill a laudatory account and for a time considered the possibility of moving the production to Broadway.¹⁷

Perhaps the apex of the summer successes was Robeson’s performance of “Ballad” in the Hollywood Bowl, the sold-out crowd estimated as the largest ever to attend an event there. The public honors, however, were not matched by private ones. When “Ballad”’s composer, Earl Robinson, appeared by invitation at a breakfast thrown by the Hollywood Bowl Association, he was surprised not to find Robeson there. On the assumption that Robeson had simply been too busy to attend, Robinson quickly put the matter out of his mind. Later in the day he asked Paul why he hadn’t seen him at the breakfast. “Why?” Paul answered evenly. “Because I wasn’t invited.” On top of that, Earl Robinson recalls, Robeson’s agent was at first unable to get him a hotel in Los Angeles. The Beverly Wilshire finally agreed to take him—at a hundred dollars a day for a suite and on condition he change his name. It was idiocy for the hotel to think a pseudonym would prevent Robeson from being noticed, but, just to be sure, he “made it a point to sit in the lobby of that hotel two hours every afternoon.” When Robinson asked him why he bothered, Robeson replied, “To ensure that, the next time black singers and actors come through, they’ll have a place to stay.”18

When Robeson gave a concert that same month at the Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia, Essie went down for it, noting cryptically in her diary that “Freda was there too.” Freda Diamond was now the wife of Alfred (“Barry”) Baruch, an industrial engineer, and well launched in her career as a designer and home-furnishings consultant. Before she and Barry Baruch had married in 1932, they had agreed on a marriage that, although conventional enough by other standards, would eschew hidden affairs and the guilt that usually attends them. No questions were to be asked about past or present relationships. Barry also encouraged Freda to use her maiden name professionally and to pursue her career. Freda says in retrospect, with a formidable sense of independent identity not characteristic of women of her generation, “I was rarely Mrs. Alfred Baruch until after five p.m. That was my second identity. I was Freda Diamond. Both Paul and Barry loved me over the years—and I loved them—in very different ways: Barry in a constant, happy marriage for thirty-two years, Paul in an enduring relationship despite his extensive travels and long absences. Sometimes we saw each other seldom while he lived abroad or during his other intimate relationships, but we kept in touch, and our love and friendship for each other continued until he died.”¹⁹

Robeson was most consistently attracted to strong and intelligent women. Several of his relationships went on for years in one way or another; some began in friendship; some transmuted to friendship. It was inevitable that a few of these women were married to men he knew well. The husbands, for the most part, seem to have been aware of these affairs (some of the men were not themselves monogamous and may have been better able therefore to accept Paul’s presence in their lives). None seems to have objected, or left any record of objection, opting instead for a cordiality compounded in unmeasurable and varying degrees of denial, disinterest, resentment, discreet compromise—and genuine pleasure in Paul’s company.

Barry Baruch was friendly but not close to Paul. They shared an enthusiasm for sports, played chess, and occasionally argued about politics. Barry was a political liberal, not a radical, and as Paul’s public commitment to the Soviet Union grew during the forties, their discussions sometimes turned to serious disagreement. Paul and Freda were much closer in their political identification; indeed, one of the strengths of their long-standing relationship was its political aspect, with Freda an active participant in several organizations—particularly, in the postwar years, the American Labor Party, the Progressive Party, and the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship—with which Paul was affiliated.

Even though Paul and Barry were less politically sympathetic, the two men were friendly enough to take a studio together briefly in the early forties in Greenwich Village (Paul rehearsed, Barry sculpted). Soon after, Paul came to live with Barry and Freda. For the better part of three years in the early-to-mid-forties, first in a townhouse on Charlton Street in the Village and then in Murray Hill, Paul had his own separate floor within their household, which he occupied between his travels. Freda prided herself on making it a genuine home for him—“We didn’t use Paul as bait,” she later said, “or as a social lion around which to build our lives.”

Freda also became a good friend to Essie, listening to her troubles, encouraging her to believe in her own gifts and to become independent. Early on, Essie was describing Freda as “very lovely. I always thought she was attractive in the old days, but now she seems to have ‘jelled.’” By the fifties, she was introducing Freda (in a letter to Nehru) as “a very dear friend of ours.” And she was. Over the years, Essie grew genuinely fond of Freda and appreciative of her friendship—even though, in the forties, she still suffered periodic alarms that Freda might someday officially displace her. “If Essie had these qualms,” Freda has since said, “they were completely unfounded because she knew first-hand that I would never divorce Barry. Once, when the subject came up between us, I assured her that as far as I was concerned she would always be Mrs. Paul Robeson—and she knew I meant it.”20

Essie, for her part, had learned to compromise since the stormy scenes over Peggy Ashcroft and Yolande Jackson a decade earlier, and to adopt tactics more commensurate with worldly-wise middle age. If Essie wanted to remain Mrs. Paul Robeson (and she did), she had to accept—not only tolerate—the needs of Paul’s nonmonogamous nature. If she felt reassured that her marriage would, formally, be maintained, she continued to feel dismay at the erosion of her actual role within the partnership. On returning to the States, Robeson gave his lawyer, Bob Rockmore, complete control over the management of his affairs, removing business and artistic matters alike from Essie’s jurisdiction. He had steadily grown to trust Rockmore, even though the lawyer’s politics leaned to the conservative side. Valuing Essie’s opinion, Paul sometimes still consulted her, but she felt this transferral of power as a wounding and humiliating blow, one she would thereafter periodically protest. The blow struck her the harder because her own attempts at a separate career were not going well. Her novel, Black Progress, had still failed to find a publisher, and her screenplay, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had failed to interest a film studio. Never one to accept defeat, Essie gamely tried other career options. During the spring term of 1940, she registered at Columbia for courses in radio writing, film writing, playwriting, and elementary Russian, and worked at them with her usual commitment and intensity, enjoying especially her work with Erik Barnouw, the well-known radio figure. To pursue her interest in photography, she went off in August 1940 on a trip to Central America, vowing, “I will make the most of myself these next six months and see what happens.” An admiring Nehru wrote her, “Your mental energy is something amazing.”21

Paul, meanwhile, continued his occasional concertizing, interspersed with considerable political activity. He agreed to serve on a board of eight (including Richard Wright, Edna Thomas, Max Yergan, and Alain Locke) for the Negro Playwrights’ Company, launched in the summer of 1940 to help fill the void left by the demise of the Federal Theatre, and he sang at an inaugural celebration for the company that drew five thousand people (three-fourths of them white; Ben Davis, Jr., ascribed the lack of attendance by blacks to the high admission price).²²

Additionally, Robeson went on the radio to introduce songs of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, appeared at a rally in behalf of the China Defense League, helped to dedicate the Children’s Aid Society in Harlem, and, along with a host of other celebrities, appeared at a mass meeting sponsored by the Committee to Defend America by Keeping Out of War, to protest conscription and other preparedness measures. There he argued, yet again, that under their present leadership Britain and France were essentially engaged in a struggle to protect the profits of plutocrats, not the rights of the people. As late as March 1941, Robeson told a reporter that he was against aid for Britain because he believed the mobilization was primarily aimed at saving the British Empire. According to the reporter, Robeson spoke “angrily” and “stormed” over the refusal of the British ruling class to do anything “about giving India and Ireland and Africa a taste of democracy.” But after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the war would become, in Robeson’s eyes, an unimpeachable and united struggle against fascism.²³

Starting out on another concert tour in the fall of 1940, Robeson took along with him as “associate artist” Clara Rockmore, the pert, feisty, attractive second wife of Bob Rockmore, and the world’s leading theremin player (an instrument whose tone and dynamics are created by the juxtaposition of the hands in an electromagnetic field). Clara Rockmore had begun her musical life as a prodigy (as had her pianist sister, Nadia Reisenberg), winning admittance at the unprecedented age of five (Heifetz had been eight) to the conservatory in Petrograd to study violin with the famed Leopold Auer, teacher of Heifetz, Zimbalist, and Elman. An injury to her arm forced her, at age nineteen, to give up the violin and turn to a career with the theremin. She and Paul were already good friends before their tour together in 1940, when they became “just good friends,” affectionately addressing each other as “Clarochka” and “Pavlik.”²⁴

They were to do three tours together in the forties, and during their long months on the road Paul would sometimes confide in Clara, shedding the everyday cordiality that had become second nature to him (and which, along with being an expression of his genuine warmth, had long served as protective coloration as well, as a guard against unwanted intrusion). Paul’s generosity of spirit showed itself, Clara Rockmore recalls, in his delight at her success with the reviewers. It was not some undefined “charisma”—so often remarked upon—that set Robeson apart, in her opinion; it was “a weight of concern”—the sense he transmitted of concentrated interest in others.25

He also let Clara see more of the depth of his hurt and anger in the face of racial discrimination. When they played the college towns there was rarely a problem, but elsewhere racial incidents did occur, despite Robeson’s celebrity and his presumed immunity from discrimination. Clara Rockmore recalls “the indignity of having to go through a different door than Paul and Larry did, of coming into a railroad station with signs marked ‘For Whites Only.’” She remembers, too, once impulsively throwing her arms around Larry in public, only to have him gently reprove her: “I’d better teach you the facts of life”; when she persisted—“I don’t care what they think”—Larry replied, “I know you don’t care, but do you want to get me lynched?” To deflect intrusion—and hostility—Paul and Clara would usually talk to each other in Russian when in public places, amused at the stupefaction on onlookers’ faces at the sight of a giant black man and a diminutive white woman chatting away in some unintelligible tongue. (She found his Russian “beautiful”; he spoke it “almost too well,” having learned, from his reading, the literary language of Pushkin and Dostoevsky.)²⁶

Following a concert in San Francisco one night in November 1940, famished after the performance and high-spirited from its success, Clara and Paul (still dressed in evening gown and tails) went with friends to get some food at Vanessi’s, a well-known spot in the cosmopolitan North Beach area. Their party included Revels Cayton, the black labor leader (then an official of the Maritime Union of the Pacific), who was becoming a good friend of Robeson’s; his wife, Lee; Louise Bransten, the wealthy white left-wing supporter (a devoted friend of Robeson’s, and a sometime lover); and John Pittman, black foreign editor of the San Francisco People’s World. The light-skinned Pittman, first to enter the restaurant, was told by the headwaiter that he was welcome but that big guy behind him—pointing to Robeson—was not. They left quickly and went back to the Fairmont Hotel, “made quite a joke” of the incident, ordered food in the room, and had a party. On the surface Robeson reacted “philosophically”—but he was angry. Friends of his in San Francisco subsequently brought suit against Vanessi’s for discrimination, but it never came to trial.²⁷

The episode, including the way Robeson handled it, was characteristic. His polite exterior was no accurate gauge of the intensity of his inner feelings—and now and then the geniality gave way and his rage poured out. Once, in the privacy of the Rockmore living room, he stormed around in such indignation over a racial slur that Clara, in alarm, tried to soothe him with some folksy parable about “being careful when cleaning a chicken not to let the bile touch the sweet meat, because just pricking that bile would embitter it”; Paul laughed and allowed himself to be mollified. But, as Clara herself recognized, “When he was insulted, he knew he was being insulted. When he wasn’t, he knew that he wasn’t. He knew where he was welcome, and why, and for what reason. Or not. He was a very wise man who would not only hear what you asked, but would know why you were asking it.” (However, a close friend describes him as being, by the end of the decade, in a controlled rage “most of the time.”)28

Paul also confided to Clara his doubts about the quality of his musicianship. He worried about his lack of training and the fact that he had never led a musician’s life—he did not go frequently to concerts, did not travel in musical circles, was not familiar with various instruments and with musical literature, was not able to sight-read. These were serious deficiencies, he told Clara. His sense of inadequacy in part reflected his high regard, as an instinctive scholar, for those who had thoroughly mastered all aspects of a given subject over those who proceeded on the basis of natural gifts alone. But he “made too much of it,” had, in her view, “an exaggerated respect for musicians who were trained classically.” She would scold him for belittling himself, for internalizing a negative, patronizing evaluation of his gifts by musicians who were in fact envious of the unique quality of his voice—a specialness their academic training had failed to provide. Besides, Clara did not believe that his lack of training had actually hampered his development. Even with the requisite background, he would not, in her opinion, have wanted to perform operas or oratorios. She never sensed a strong temperamental inclination on his part toward opera, or any significant frustration at being denied (as a black singer) the opportunity to perform it. “He was not dreaming about operas. If he had all the equipment under the sun, I doubt that he would want to sing opera. It didn’t make him less, it didn’t make him more. He was what he was. He was an actor-singer, carrying a message in the song. I don’t think that with some training he would have been any greater a Paul Robeson. He might have been less. There will not be another Paul Robeson. There’ll be people with as good a voice, but they won’t have as much heart.”²⁹

While Paul, Clara, and Larry toured, Essie was not thriving. Her weight soared to 153 pounds; her socializing narrowed to a few old friends like Corinne Wright and Minnie Sumner; her writing was still unpublished, her photography unrecognized. She turned her restless energy to attending parents’ functions at Pauli’s school and to taking lessons in jiujitsu. She sent letters to Paul reporting her prowess in learning the hip throw and—in pointed detail—her excursions with Pauli, such as buying him his “first young man’s clothes” at De Pinna’s (“I said they were your present, because you had always said YOU were going to give him his first grown up clothes”). Her efforts at retaliation—“Pauli was thrilled with your wire. I’m so glad you did send it. It was a little confusing, with the signature Paul Robeson. Pauli could not understand why it wasn’t signed Daddy?”—did nothing to narrow the growing gulf between them.30

In the early spring of 1941, bowing to Essie’s importunities, willing to indulge her stylish fantasies if simultaneously they would serve to remove her and her overbearing mother from his proximity (and give him, as well, the tax advantages of an out-of-state residence), Paul agreed to purchase an imposing two-and-a-half-acre, twelve-room Georgian-Colonial house in Enfield, Connecticut, for nineteen thousand dollars. Complete with servants’ quarters, a swimming pool, and a separate recreation building that had a bowling alley and billiard room, the house was so large and in such disrepair that one of the workmen hired to fix it up told a reporter, “He’s gonna hafta sing alotta songs to heat this place.” Essie did some of the manual labor herself, including painting much of the house (Freda’s brother, on a visit, was “shocked to come upon her balanced on a scaffold while putting a coat of paint on the staircase ceiling”)—though Bob Rockmore’s sense of fiscal propriety was nonetheless jarred by her expenditures. On May 1, 1941, Essie, Pauli, and Ma Goode were able to move into the Enfield house. “We are all simply crazy about the country,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, adding that “Big Paul loves the quiet and low gear of the place, and flies home for every moment he can spare even when on tour.” She was adamantly putting the best face on it, as her concluding comment—“it is all much too good to be true”—inadvertently acknowledged. Paul did occasionally spend time there, but his primary residence alternated between the Freda Diamond/Barry Baruch household and the McGhees’, and the focus of his life was in New York, not at Enfield. Which is not to say Paul did not still have an occasional burst of affection for Essie. While in Los Angeles in August 1941, he wrote her a letter that began, “I miss you terribly and would so like to nestle [you] on my nice shoulder and be patted and called Sweetie Pie and oh so many things,” went on to give her news of mutual friends, and then teased her good-humoredly with having met Hollywood celebrities:

And most exciting of all, at a British benefit (swanky) I met all the stars, and had a special chat with—breathe hard—Mr. Charles Boyer.… I told him of you and he’s waiting, he says. He came to my recital and told Morros [the producer] that he has all my records. So the ground is laid. I said the ground! I feel grand, completely relaxed and am sleeping thru anything.

He then went on to ask about Pauli: “… How’s my boy. Everyone, everywhere asks about him and I tell them how sweet, intelligent and thoughtful he is, what an athlete—and a few other things. They conclude I like him enormously and am very proud of him. I think they are perhaps right about that.” He ended the letter with as sweetly tender a message as any he ever sent her: “I love you very, very much and miss you until it hurts. I do like my place so much both in Conn. and in your heart—and I feel I’m camping out until I get back to both.” Although Paul was capable of dissembling, this does not seem such an instance. More likely, this complicated man was having a genuine spell of nostalgic affection for Essie. On her side—never one to indulge introspection or wallow in self-pity—Essie plunged into the maelstrom of painters, plumbers, and pipe fitters with renewed zest (Freda Diamond visited her frequently and helped her choose furnishings), establishing a home in which she knew she would, for the most part, live without Paul.31

The years from 1935 to 1939 had been the heyday of the Popular Front, a time when a substantial consensus was reached internationally on the left. The Communist Party/USA (CPUSA) refocused its sights away from revolutionary bellicosity and toward cooperation with mainstream liberalism in a combined effort to resist the rise of fascism abroad and to work at home in behalf of trade-unionism and racial equality. CP leader Earl Browder’s declaration in 1936 that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” plausibly affirmed this solidarity—and also signaled the marked influence Communism had come to have in American life: CP membership rolls dramatically lengthened, hundreds of new Party units formed, and Communists were welcomed to affiliate in large-scale coalitions with “radical democrats.” The Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 effectively ended this antifascist unity.

In the two-year period following that pact, and until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Robeson took his position on the CP side of the sundered left-wing coalition. He sounded the themes and advocated the policies simultaneously being endorsed through the linked voices of the Communist Party, the newly powerful National Negro Congress (NNC), and some of the left-wing unions in the recently emergent Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The particular fortunes of the National Negro Congress illustrate the shifting general pattern of left-wing alliance and Robeson’s own role within it.³²

The Communist Party had played a prominent but not a controlling role in the creation of the NNC, joining forces with a diverse spectrum of black-activist organizations and leaders. At the first NNC convention, in 1936, eight hundred delegates representing a wide range of civil-rights organizations, church groups, fraternities, and trade unions gathered to form a broad coalition dedicated to struggling against fascism and for civil rights and unionism. John P. Davis, a black economist and Harvard Law School graduate (and possibly a secret CP member), was the leading figure in the NNC from the beginning, but its notable supporters initially included Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Lester Granger of the Urban League, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. This pluralistic combination held at the NNC’s second convention, in 1937, but strains had already appeared. The affiliated mainstream liberals were beginning to be unnerved by the fact that increased funding for the NNC was coming from the Communist Party and from the left-wing unions. When John P. Davis launched an antilynching drive in 1938, the coalition was further rent: the leadership of the NAACP had been working for years on securing federal antilynching legislation and deeply resented this “encroachment” on its territory. The Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 drove off additional legions, and by the time of the NNC’s third convention, in April 1940 (it had held no national meeting either in 1938 or 1939), numerous non-Communists had drifted away. After a blistering speech to the 1940 convention, in which he equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, A. Philip Randolph resigned the presidency and was succeeded by a rising figure in left-wing circles, Max Yergan.33

Still, over five hundred delegates from twenty-nine states did show up for the third convention—a concert engagement prevented Robeson from attending—to hear NNC speakers emphasize, as had Robeson in his own recent public appearances, that the current European conflict was a struggle between rival imperialist powers—and to call upon American blacks to focus their energies instead on the struggle for rights within the United States. That message made sense to many blacks. World War I, they remembered, had also been fought with noble slogans about making the world safe for democracy—and had resulted in the colonial powers’ extending their control over people of color; more recently, protestations of democratic fervor had not extended to concern over Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia. As Robeson had been arguing for a year, dark-skinned people could not be expected to believe the British claim that they were “fighting for freedom” when they continued contemptuously to deny it to the people of India.³⁴

Following the Nazi-Soviet pact, the CPUSA, too, reversed its call for collective security against fascism and revived its historic insistence that the working class of the world refuse participation in an “imperialist” war. Using that same line of argument, Robeson spoke out continually against American involvement in a European conflict ultimately aimed, in his opinion, at destroying the threat of Soviet-inspired peoples’ revolutions. He also played an energetic public role in protesting the American government’s 1940 sentencing of Earl Browder, the Party leader, to four years in prison on the pretext of having violated passport regulations. Claiming that the real animus against Browder related to his antifascism, Robeson in March 1941 joined the labor hero Warren K. Billings, New York Labor Party Congressman Vito Marcantonio, the Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Max Yergan, and the Spanish Civil War veteran Conrad Kaye (now of the American Federation of Labor) in a rally in Madison Square Garden to “Free Earl Browder.” Gurley Flynn announced at another public meeting that Robeson had contributed more money to help free Browder than had any other single individual. When Robeson was introduced at an antifascist fund-raising dinner in March 1942 as “America’s leading anti-fascist,” he declined that title to bestow it on Browder (who was finally released from prison in May 1942).35

In regard to trade-union issues, Robeson typically advised black workers to defy their employers and to join the CIO, declaring his belief—one shared by the NNC and the CPUSA—in a biracial trade-union movement as the most promising vehicle for extending American democracy to blacks. In May 1941 Robeson put in a dramatic appearance in Detroit in behalf of the United Automobile Workers’ CIO organizing drive, just days before its successful showdown with Henry Ford. Three months later he told reporters, “The future of America depends largely upon the progressive program of the CIO,” and he claimed that “the Negro people, for the most part, understand that the CIO program is working for all laboring groups, including their own minority.”³⁶

In making this hopeful assertion, Robeson chose to minimize some disfiguring realities. In the mid-thirties, the CP had abandoned “revolutionary unionism” based on proletarian rule in order to cooperate, under a Popular Front banner, with trade-unionism. By the late thirties, the logic of that decision had forced the CP to make some accommodation to the racism that characterized even such left-leaning CIO unions as the Transport Workers or the Hotel and Restaurant Workers (though these unions were light-years ahead of most AFL affiliates in accepting blacks for membership). Mike Quill of the TWU never made any substantial effort to fight for expanded job opportunities for black workers, placing priority instead on issues of union recognition and the protection of the rights of those already enlisted in its ranks. Other left-wing labor leaders did have strong convictions about the need to change patterns of racial discrimination within industry, but were sometimes reluctant to push their more conservative memberships in a direction that might split their unions and jeopardize their own positions of leadership. And the CP did not exert much pressure in that direction on labor leaders sympathetic to its ideology. Preoccupied with the international crisis, the CP by the late thirties placed more emphasis on maintaining its alliances than on pushing aggressively for the kind of action against job discrimination that might shake those alliances. In choosing to “Americanize” the Party, in other words, the CP’s leaders had inescapably become enmeshed in the contradictions of American life: to maintain its influence within the labor movement, it had to compromise somewhat on its vanguard position regarding black rights. The CP and CIO’s comparative inaction against racial discrimination during and after World War II (when measured against their earlier clarion calls) would lead black militants, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to press for “black caucuses” within each union. Robeson’s friend Revels Cayton would play a central role in that movement—and Robeson, who would never sanction a back-seat role for blacks for long, would also become involved.

The dilution of the CP’s mission to press the issue of job rights for the economically depressed black working class, in combination with the CP’s aggressively secular scorn for Christian institutions and values so central to the culture of Afro-Americans, seriously constricted its appeal to the black masses. But if Communism failed to ignite the enthusiasm of any significant segment of the black working class—the agency on which it theoretically relied for producing social change—it did turn out to have a broad appeal for black artists and intellectuals. When emphasizing the class struggle in the years before the Popular Front, the Party as a corollary had downplayed the specialness of black culture. But during the Popular Front years, with the centrality of class struggle deemphasized, the Party threw itself into pronounced support for black arts, helping to sponsor a variety of efforts to encourage black theater, history, and music. Robeson was hardly alone among black artists in welcoming this uniquely respectful attitude toward black aesthetics. Here was an “Americanism” that exemplified real respect for “differentness” rather than attempting, as did official mainstream liberalism, to disparage and destroy ethnic variations under the guise of championing the superior virtue of the “melting pot”—which in practice had tended to mean assimilation to the values of white middle-class Protestants.37

Symbolizing this appreciation of black culture, the fraternal organization International Workers Order sponsored a pageant on “The Negro in American Life” (with the Manhattan Council of the NNC as cosponsor) dramatizing major events in Afro-American history. Robeson enthusiastically offered his services. The pageant, written by the black playwright Carlton Moss, proved weak in its dramaturgy but strong in its emotional appeal. Its dedication “to the Negro People and to Fraternal Brotherhood Among All” roused a racially mixed audience of five thousand to an ovation—and then to an ecumenical frenzy of cheering when Robeson called for all minorities to unite in making “America a real land of freedom and democracy.”³⁸

Another event cosponsored by the NNC led—for the very reason of its sponsorship—to a major controversy. Robeson had already given his support on several occasions in 1941 to benefits for Chinese war relief when the Washington Committee for Aid to China put together a gala “Night of Stars” and asked him to headline it. He quickly agreed—but the Daughters of the American Revolution did not. Approached by the China Committee with a request to lease Constitution Hall, the DAR flatly refused, reiterating its policy of barring the hall to black artists, despite the uproar that had attended its denial of the hall two years earlier to Marian Anderson (which had led Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her DAR membership and personally to welcome Anderson to a huge alternative concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial).39

The China Committee appealed to Cornelia Bryce Pinchot for help. A friend of Mrs. Roosevelt and wife to Gifford Pinchot, the former governor of Pennsylvania, the patrician Mrs. Pinchot was nationally known as an activist supporter of human rights (Marian Anderson had stayed at her house while in Washington for the Lincoln Memorial concert). She responded to the committee’s appeal by taking on the concert chairmanship herself and organizing an illustrious sponsorship committee that included Mrs. Roosevelt, the Chinese Ambassador Hu Shih, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald MacLeish, Senator Arthur Capper, Oscar L. Chapman, and the wives of Francis Biddle, Hugo L. Black, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas—the “left wing” of the New Deal establishment. The DAR’s ban created additional publicity for the concert and, due to the heightened demand for tickets, Mrs. Pinchot rented the seven-thousand-seat Uline Arena.⁴⁰

At that point she discovered that the NNC was cosponsor of the concert and that it had made an agreement to provide money and services in advance of the event in exchange for 50 percent of its proceeds—a proportion initiated by the China Committee, not the NNC. Mrs. Pinchot protested the “diversion” of funds to the NNC and notified the committee that she could not sanction any arrangement that did not call for the entire proceeds from the concert to go to the advertised cause of aid to China. John P. Davis, the leading figure in the NNC, offered to terminate his organization’s contract with the committee if two conditions were met: reimbursement for the NNC’s expenses, and a guarantee that the Uline auditorium, which had agreed to suspend its Jim Crow policy for the single night of the Robeson concert, not discriminate in the future. The Uline management refused to provide such a guarantee, and since that meant the NNC would not retract its cosponsorship, Mrs. Pinchot announced that she—along with Mrs. Roosevelt and Ambassador Hu Shih—were withdrawing support, saying that “the ramifications from the original errors have spread too far to be corrected.”⁴¹

The only “ramification” Cornelia Pinchot mentioned in the telegram she sent Robeson—signed also by Mrs. Roosevelt, and simultaneously released to the press—to account for their withdrawal was the refusal of the Uline management to give a pledge against future discrimination. She alluded in the telegram to “a number of other reasons which it is unnecessary to burden you with,” explaining their resignations wholly on the grounds that they were unwilling “to ask a great Negro artist to appear in any place which is believed to discriminate against members of his race.” But the telegram was at the least disingenuous. The condition that Uline agree not to discriminate had, after all, been set by John P. Davis, not Cornelia Pinchot, so it alone could hardly account for the sum of her discontent. More likely, that hinged instead on nervousness at being publicly associated with the Communist-leaning National Negro Congress. The nervousness may have been compounded by the fact that both Walter White of the NAACP and A. Philip Randolph had broken with the NNC in 1940, and those two men (unlike John P. Davis) had the ear of the administration; because of Randolph’s January 1941 call for a March on Washington to protest federal job discrimination, he had its decided attention as well.42

Robeson, sympathetic to the NNC, was not swayed against performing by Mrs. Pinchot’s solicitous refusal to ask a “great Negro artist” to appear under such clouded circumstances. Not only did he appear, but he sold out the house. The National Negro Congress remained on the program as cosponsor, and John P. Davis spoke words of welcome from the platform. An estimated crowd of six thousand gave Robeson an ovation that one reporter likened to “the Willkie gallery at Philadelphia,” and the organizers later wrote to thank Robeson for his “magnificent” contribution to the event’s success.⁴³

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet pact that followed soon after, created an international realignment that abruptly brought Robeson’s views into greater consonance with mainstream patriotism. The Soviet Union was now hailed among the Western democracies—as Robeson had hailed it all along—as the front line of defense in the struggle against fascism. The image of the bullying Russian bear bent on aggression quickly gave way in the West to the image of a heroic homeland battling to preserve the integrity of its borders against fascist incursion. The Communists and their pro-Soviet allies in the NNC and the left-wing CIO unions were no slower in repainting their political canvases. A year before the Nazi invasion, CP leader William Z. Foster had branded the British Empire “the main enemy of everything progressive,” but after the invasion the main enemy rapidly became Hitler’s Germany—so much so that, out of its concern for a unified war effort, the Party would support a “no-strike” pledge by labor and dilute its protest against racism in the armed forces, thereby partly compromising the vanguard position in the civil-rights struggle that it had earlier staked out for itself.⁴⁴

Robeson, too, shifted his advocacy from nonintervention to massive aid for the Soviet Union. He urged the Roosevelt administration to help arm the now combined forces of antifacism—to support the Allies against the Axis (as the struggle soon came to be called, once the Japanese completed the diametric symmetry by bombing Pearl Harbor at the end of the year). He freely lent his voice in concerts and his presence at rallies in support of an all-out effort to assist the Soviets, Britain, and China, alternately joining fellow artists like Benny Goodman in presenting an evening of Soviet music, or cosigning a letter that deplored the “strikingly inadequate” information available in America about the Soviet Union and offering to make up the deficiency with free copies of The Soviet Power, a book by Reverend Hewlett Johnson (the “Red” Dean of Canterbury). At a time when Soviet military fortunes were at a low ebb and predictions of the U.S.S.R.’s collapse widespread, Robeson insisted in statements to the press that the Russian masses, convinced they had a government that offered them hope, would never succumb to the Nazis.45

With the Soviet Union now a wartime ally, the cause of Russian War Relief became so entirely respectable by 1942 that, in a rally at Madison Square Garden on June 22, Robeson was joined on the podium by a full panoply of American life—Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, Mayor La Guardia of New York, William Green (president of the AFL), Harry Hopkins, U.S.S.R. Ambassador to the United States Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish leader Dr. Stephen S. Wise, Jan Peerce, and Artur Rubinstein. The shift in public opinion from antagonism to approval of the “heroic” Russian ally became dramatically complete over the next few years, with the mass-circulation magazines illustrating—and fostering—the changing image. Collier’s in December 1943 concluded that Russia was neither Socialist nor Communist but, rather, represented a “modified capitalist set-up” moving “toward something resembling our own and Great Britain’s democracy,” while a 1943 issue of Life was entirely devoted to a paean to Soviet-American cooperation. Wendell Willkie’s enormously popular One World contained glowing praise of Soviet Russia—and Walter Lippmann, in turn, praised the astuteness of Willkie’s analysis. A nationwide poll in September 1944 asking whether the Russian people had “as good” a government “as she could have for her people” found only 28 percent replying in the negative. By 1945 no less a figure than General Eisenhower told a House committee that “nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.”⁴⁶

None of this diluted the suspicion of Bolshevik intentions harbored by the right wing—and notably by its chief champion in the federal bureaucracy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—or its rising conviction that Robeson was playing a sinister role in Soviet councils. As early as January 1941, special agents were reporting to FBI headquarters in Washington that Robeson was “reputedly a member of the Communist Party” (which he was not, and never would be). Three months later a zealous agent in Los Angeles sent a brown notebook to Hoover, “apparently belonging” to Robeson, that “contains Chinese characters”; the Bureau’s translation section examined the notebook and concluded it was “clearly of significance to no one other than its owner.” In the summer of 1942 an agent was present when Robeson visited Wo-Chi-Ca, the interracial camp for workers’ children, and portentously reported that Robeson had signed “Fraternally” to a message of greeting and that “tears had rolled down his cheeks” when a young camper presented him with a scroll.47

As Robeson stepped up his activities in behalf of the Allied war effort, Hoover stepped up surveillance of him. By the end of 1942, the Bureau had taken to describing Robeson as a Communist functionary: “It would be difficult to establish membership in his case but his activities in behalf of the Communist Party are too numerous to be recorded.” The FBI began to tap his phone conversations and to bug apartments where he was known to visit. Special agents were assigned to trail him and to file regular reports on his activities. By January 1943 Hoover was recommending that Robeson be considered for custodial detention (that is, subject to immediate arrest in case of national emergency); such a card was issued on him on April 30, 1943—the same month that he was being hailed in the press for a triumphal concert tour and just before he starred in a giant Labor for Victory rally in Yankee Stadium. By August 1943 “reputedly” was being dropped in special-agent reports to Hoover, with Robeson now being straightforwardly labeled “a leading figure in the Communist Party … actively attempting to influence the Negroes of America to Communism.” From this point on, the FBI fattened Robeson’s file with “evidence” to support its view that he was in fact a dangerous subversive. During the war years, Robeson’s secret dossier and his national popularity grew apace—their collision was still half a dozen years off.⁴⁸

For the time being, national and personal priorities coalesced. President Roosevelt’s reaffirmation of democratic values on the home front, in tandem with the country’s joining hands internationally with a Russian ally Robeson believed free of racial and colonialist bias, meant that national purpose coincided with his own special vision more fully than he had ever imagined would be possible in his lifetime. The juncture galvanized him, releasing in him a torrent of energy and resolve. Over the next three years—until the death of Franklin Roosevelt, in April 1945—Robeson operated at the summit of his powers, in an escalating spiral of activity and acclaim, and in the glow of a political optimism that would be as brutally shattered as it had been, briefly, unexpectedly plausible.

Even at its height, Robeson’s optimism was not unblinkered. Roosevelt might now speak kindly of his “heroic” Russian ally, but Robeson hardly took that to mean the President had converted to socialism. In the same way, he did not regard New Deal domestic policies, promising though he found them, as signifying the imminent attainment of social justice. The Roosevelt administration did much to excite the hopes of black Americans: it opened itself to the counsels of such notable black figures as Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, William H. Hastie, and Walter White; it issued the President’s 1941 Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) order; it included blacks in the AAA-sponsored voting on cotton-control referendums. Yet, as Robeson well knew, the Democratic Party remained tied to its racially unreconstructed Southern wing, and the actual execution of policy had produced only marginal changes in the oppressive pattern of daily life for the black masses. In the mid-forties Robeson told a friend that he thought Roosevelt’s reformism would have as its chief result the guarantee that capitalism would exist for another fifty years.49

As Robeson crisscrossed the country in a whirlwind of rallies, concert appearances, meetings, dinners, and testimonials, he tempered his enthusiasm for the nation’s wartime mission to defeat fascism with reminders about its obligation to combat oppression at home. The CP opted for primary attention to the war overseas, downplaying the black struggle at home; Robeson did not. He encouraged blacks to support the war effort, warning that the victory of fascism would “make slaves of us all”—but he simultaneously called on the administration to make the war effort worth supporting for blacks by destroying discriminatory practices in defense industries and the armed forces. “Racial and religious prejudices continue to cast an ugly shadow on the principles for which we are fighting,” he told a commencement audience at Morehouse College in 1943. At the prestigious and widely broadcast annual Herald Tribune Forum that same year, he devoted most of his speech to warning that continuing economic insecurity, poll-tax discrimination, and armed-forces segregation were arousing “the bitterest resentment among black Americans”; they recognized that under Roosevelt some progress was being made but rightly felt that the gains thus far had been “pitifully small” and that their own struggle for improved conditions was intimately bound up with “the struggle against anti-Semitism and against injustices to all minority groups.”⁵⁰

Robeson insisted that “The disseminators and supporters of racial discrimination and antagonism [appear] to the Negro and are, in fact, first cousins if not brothers of the Nazis. They speak the same language of the ‘master race’ and practice, or attempt to practice, the same tyranny over minority peoples.” He called on the Western democracies to match the Soviet Union in the explicitness of their stated war aims: “abolition of racial exclusiveness; equality of nations and integrity of their territories; the right of every nation to arrange its affairs as it wishes.” He gave the same two-pronged message to trade-unionists, applauding the breakthrough efforts during the war of left-wing CIO unions to lower racial barriers, but reminding his audiences of how many barriers still remained before any biracial trade-union movement worthy of the name could come into being. Robeson raised his eloquent voice everywhere in praise of the national purpose, singing for the troops, appearing at war-bond rallies. But he also sought to universalize the struggle against oppression, linking the cause of black Americans with that of Spanish Americans, Asians, Africans, and underprivileged white Americans: “this is one of the great ends of this war—that the very concept of lower classes, colonial or backward peoples, disappear[s] from our minds and actions. For Fascism means degradation and inferior status. A people’s war is fought for dignity and equality.” And everywhere he went Robeson kept his incomparably sharp ears and eyes open for continuing signs of racial bigotry.51

In Kansas City, Missouri, in 1942, those eyes scanned the concert audience gathered to hear him sing and saw that blacks had been seated in the top balcony. When he reappeared on the platform after the intermission, Robeson abruptly announced to the startled audience that he was continuing with the second half of the program under protest. “I have made a lifelong habit,” he told them, “of refusing to sing in southern states or anywhere that audiences are segregated,” and had accepted the Kansas City engagement on the assurance there would be no segregation in the auditorium. He agreed to finish the concert, but only because “many local leaders of my own race have urged me to.” Robeson then proceeded to sing a group of Russian songs, followed by the “Jim Crow” song, delivering it, as a local critic reported, “with stronger feeling that he had put into any other number.” At that point several whites in the audience left; a hundred more trickled out before the close of the concert.⁵²

The very next day, a hotel in Santa Fa canceled Robeson’s advance reservation. When the chairman of the Santa Fe concert series at which he had been due to appear justified the hotel’s policy by citing “New Mexico’s proximity to the southern states,” Robeson promptly refused to fulfill his upcoming concert date. The Kansas City and Santa Fe incidents were widely reported in the national press. Lucile Bluford, news editor on the black Kansas City paper, the Call, wrote to thank Robeson “for the stand you took against segregation in the Municipal Auditorium here. I think that your protest has spurred the Negro citizens here to wage a campaign against discrimination in our tax-supported buildings. You have given us a good start.” The black columnist Joseph D. Bibb wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier that by his action Robeson had “held himself out in bold relief to the majority of ‘shoot crap, shortening bread Sambos’ of radio, screen and stage.”⁵³

Max Yergan was one of several who reported to Robeson that everyone was “tremendously pleased and proud” of the stands he had taken. Yergan had resigned his YMCA post in South Africa in 1936 and returned to the United States, gradually becoming an influential public figure as an officer in the National Negro Congress, a sympathetic adherent (though not a member) of the Communist Party, and the executive secretary of the Council on African Affairs. By 1942 Yergan had become Robeson’s political liaison to the same pronounced degree that Rock-more had become his artistic one. Yergan filtered requests for political appearances, Rockmore for concert ones, the two comparing notes to avoid scheduling conflicts. As regarded the CPUSA, however, Robeson maintained an independent liaison through Ben Davis, Jr., who was in the Party’s highest councils and whom Robeson trusted as fully as he did anyone—which is to say, with only minimal reservation. The only other direct channel to Robeson during most of the forties was Essie, though her centrality had been greatly reduced since their return to the States in 1939. She sometimes had to fall back on her close personal friendship with Yergan to exert influence (which she could not do with Rockmore; the two disliked each other, even while maintaining formal appearances of friendship).54

Yergan’s own public prominence had come to hinge increasingly on his role in the Council on African Affairs (CAA). The Council had been founded in 1937, and by 1941 Robeson had become chairman and Yergan executive director; in 1943 Alphaeus Hunton (a Marxist who had taught at Howard University) became its educational director. The Council’s central purpose was to “provide a sound basis of accurate information so that the American people might play their proper part in the struggle for African freedom.” Pan-Africanism—“the conviction that all persons of African descent are commonly oppressed by a common enemy”—can be traced in the United States to such early-nineteenth-century proponents as Martin R. Delany and Alexander Crummel, but in the twentieth century the view is centrally associated with W. E. B. Du Bois, who was arguing its tenets for two decades before World War II. By the end of the war, though, concern with the fate of black Africa—and the linkage of its fate to that of black America—had become a commonplace among Afro-American intellectuals and organizations. The Council on African Affairs was designed as a clearinghouse of accurate information on Africa and as a lobbying force for African interests, not as a mass organization. Although Hunton periodically argued for conversion into a mass-membership organization, in the early forties the Council had fewer than two dozen members and met only three times a year, with subcommittees convening somewhat more frequently and with Hunton and Yergan carrying out most of the daily administrative work. Robeson involved himself far more with the actual organizational mechanics of the Council—though rarely on a day-to-day basis—than with any of the other manifold groups that counted him as a supporter. The CAA—as Alphaeus Hunton later put it—“was the one organizational interest among many with which he was identified that was closest to his heart.”55

In its fusion of anticolonial and pro-Soviet sentiments, the Council did accurately reflect Robeson’s basic perspective. Because the United States was relatively unencumbered by a history of colonialist activity in Africa, Robeson and the CAA hoped that the United States might spearhead the drive among the Western democracies to apply the principle of self-determination to the African continent. Even before Roosevelt’s death (which shattered that hope), the brilliant West Indian theorist George Pad-more, less sanguine than the CAA, had argued that the United States would emerge from the war not as a liberating force but as the dominant imperialist power, using dollar diplomacy rather than outright annexation to control the key commercial and strategic routes on the African continent. By 1942 the FBI had decided that the CAA was not just a Communist front organization, but first among those groups “presently active in creating considerable unrest among the negroes by stressing racial discrimination.…”⁵⁶

Soon after the Kansas City and Santa Fe episodes, Robeson made his first trip into the Deep South to attend a convention of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was dominated by CP activists. The SNYC gathering at Tuskegee of over five hundred representatives from twenty Southern states, Mexico, and British Guiana heard a message from President Roosevelt calling for unity in the fight against fascism and declaring his conviction that out of victory “will come a peace built on universal freedom such as many men have not yet known.” The conference responded with a unanimous pledge of “the full and unswerving loyalty of Negro youth,” coupled with a letter of reply to the President expressing concern about the extent to which “discriminatory barriers remain against our fuller participation in our democratic way of life.”⁵⁷

The SNYC conference marked Robeson’s initial contact with a number of future Party activists, including Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Ed Strong, Louis Burnham, and James Jackson. Stretch Johnson recalls the vivid impression Robeson made on him: “He was awesome. He exuded magnetism and charm and charisma. And then he was so gentle and nonegocentric. He had the … common touch. You know, you felt you could communicate with him directly. There was no screen. He was available to you.” Five years later, at another SNYC convention, another rising young figure in the Party, Junius Scales, had much the same initial reaction to Robeson: “He strode onto the crowded stage with a combination of dignity, grace and responsive enthusiasm.… When the gentle thunder of his greeting broke over them, it was as though each person there had been struck by the lightning of that smile, the grandeur of that presence. There were no formal phrases; he spoke straight to the hearts of all present.… Robeson was as genuine and magnetic socially as he had been on the stage. He managed to listen to every word spoken to him and to reply graciously. When I was introduced to him he made me feel like the guest of honor.”58

Leaving the Southern Negro Youth Conference in Tuskegee, Robeson went directly to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare at Nashville. The short-lived SCHW, concerned with both economic and civil rights in the South, was denounced by conservatives as a Communist front, but in fact, like so many liberal organizations of the period, it was conceived and controlled by progressives of varying affiliations. Mrs. Roosevelt joined Robeson on the SCHW platform, presenting awards for “service to the South in 1942” to Mary McLeod Bethune (the black director of the National Youth Administration and president of Bethune-Cookman College in Florida) and to Dr. Frank P. Graham (president of the University of North Carolina and a leading white advocate of black rights); in her remarks, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the need to accept responsibility for the “miniature world of all races right here in America.” Robeson, in turn, repeated his call for “full integration” and again added an appeal for the release of Earl Browder. According to H. L. Mitchell, a founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, who was in the audience when Robeson spoke, his appeal to free Browder “was enough to convince the southern liberals that they were being used to advance the cause of the Communist Party and they abandoned the Southern Conference for Human Welfare”—but it is at least as plausible to believe that they were driven out by Robeson’s demand for “full integration.” In her “My Day” column the next morning, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote that hearing Robeson sing “Ballad for Americans” at the conference had been “a thrilling experience.… It always stirs me as a ballad, but last night there was something peculiarly significant about it.”⁵⁹

Robeson’s reputation as “hero of the race” was slightly dented in May 1942 when Tales of Manhattan, a film he had made in Hollywood the previous year, was released for public showing. The picture follows the trail of a dress coat as it passes from owner to owner, spinning a vignette about each in turn, until finally the coat, stuffed with money, drops from an airplane into the hands of a group of sharecroppers who divide it up and “praise de Lawd.” Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Eddie (“Rochester”) Anderson played the resident sharecroppers—and the film’s vignettes were peopled with an array of stars that included Ginger Rogers, Cesar Romero, Rita Hayworth, Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, and Edward G. Robinson. This glittering gallery of co-workers may have been part of the film’s attraction to Robeson, but the more potent appeal lay in a chance to depict the plight of the rural black poor, shown in the film, additionally, as investing the bulk of their windfall in communal land and tools, and as believing in share-and-share-alike, with “no rich an’ no mo’ po’.”60

Some black reviewers, focusing on the film’s depiction of sharecropping, came out in its favor. But the majority did not, with the New York Amsterdam Star News headlining its negative review “Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters Let Us Down,” and declaring, “It is difficult to reconcile the Paul Robeson, who has almost single-handedly waged the battle for recognition of the Negro as a true artist, with the ‘Luke’ of this film … a simple-minded, docile sharecropper.” The left-wing white-run paper PM was no less brusque, denouncing the film’s “utter failure to visualize Negroes in any realer terms than as a Green Pastures flock in a Thomas Hart Benton setting.” The black actor Clarence Muse spoke out in Robeson’s defense, claiming that the “ideological” words spoken by Luke in the film gave the lie to dismissals of the character as a mere Uncle Tom; and from Hollywood came reports of a “secret meeting” at Eddie Anderson’s home to deny that “the human interest sequence of rural Negro life” was in any sense “disgraceful.”⁶¹

Still, the outcry against the film was sharp, and when it opened in Los Angeles, the militant Sentinel and Tribune organized pickets to demonstrate. Robeson threw in his lot with the demonstrators, declaring he would join any picket line that might appear during the film’s New York showing. In a widely publicized series of interviews, he explained how his initial hopes for the film had been dashed during production, the portrayal of a Negro sharecropper degenerating into just one more “plantation hallelujah shouter,” into a simple-minded, docile darky mistaking money dropped from an airplane for a gift from the Lord. Robeson denied that he’d made the picture for money—correcting his reported fifty-thousand-dollar salary to an accurate ten thousand, and pointing out that he had recently turned down more lucrative offers. He had been led to believe he would be able to make script changes; when they were rejected, he could not afford to buy his way out of the contract. This was a familiar enough result—indeed, with a few changes in detail, it could stand as a paradigm for most of Robeson’s career in films.⁶²

This time around, Robeson drew the line. Calling a press conference, he announced that he was quitting Hollywood for good. A New York Daily News reporter ascribed Robeson’s discontent to “a way of feeling” Communists have “about any play, book or movie that was not engineered by a Communist.” He had, in truth, tried the only options available to a black performer and had found all of them wanting. He had acted in a “race movie” (Micheaux’s Body and Soul), had tried making an experimental film (Borderline), and had used his limited leverage to change the roles and the scripts available from the major studios. None of these routes had proved satisfying; none had offered him the chance to play parts commensurate with his sense of political responsibility. Reflecting on Robeson’s film career, Sidney Poitier, a leading figure in the subsequent generation of black performers, speaks sympathetically of the mix of “uneasiness” and admiration he feels when seeing Robeson on the screen: “None of that generation of black actors—Robeson, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters, Hat-tie McDaniel, Rochester, Frank Wilson—was given anything to play that did not characterize ‘minority roles.’ They were appendages to the other actors, the white actors. They were there almost as scenery. To have them as full-blooded individuals with the ability to think through their own problems and to chart their own course—American films were not into that. Difficult as it is today, it is nowhere near as impossible as it was for Robeson.”63

In announcing to the press his retirement from films, Robeson said the only solution to big-budget stereotyping was for the federal government to impose standards of “honest treatment”—and for filmmakers to turn to low-budget projects not reliant on a reactionary Southern market for profits. Native Land was exactly the sort of alternative cinema Robeson had in mind. Directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, with a score by Marc Blitzstein and with Robeson narrating off-camera, Native Land was a feature-length documentary that re-enacted scenes of civil-liberties violations as actually revealed in testimony before the LaFollette Senate Committee during its investigation into infringements against the Bill of Rights. Robeson accepted the minimum fee AFTRA allowed—and then made a gift of the fee to the nonprofit, progressive producers, Frontier Films. Because of financial stringency, the film took nearly five years to complete (as early as 1939 Robeson had been one of several celebrities to join in sponsoring a benefit screening of rushes), and was finally released in New York in May 1942. The timing proved inauspicious. Frontier Films had by then disbanded, and in a wartime climate stressing the need for national unity, some viewed Native Land as impolitic, others as subversive. An FBI report labeled the film “obviously a Communist project,” and Texas Congressman Martin Dies, head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, included Robeson, along with Frontier Films, on the list he presented to Congress in September 1942 of people and organizations he considered “Communist.” In 1942 that accusation was aberrant; within a few years it would be commonplace.⁶⁴

Tales of Manhattan did not seriously compromise Robeson’s image in the black community: even if he had not patiently explained his reasons for accepting the role and freely confessed to his error, blacks knew that the odds against a black man’s making his way necessarily made him something less than a free agent. In the face of those odds, many blacks in the comparatively optimistic, patriotic climate of the early forties were heartened by any evidence that one of their own could still come through, yielding to the momentary comfort of tokenism even as they (and Robeson) decried its inadequacy. To the minimal extent that Robeson’s image had been tarnished by his appearance in Tales, this would be forgotten and then some in the wake of the new project he embarked on in the summer of 1942—an American production of Othello, a triumph that would mark the apogee of his career.65