Postwar Politics
(1945–1946)
In the closing days of World War II, Robeson had continued to feel broadly optimistic, as he told several interviewers, that “the forces of progress are winning,” that Jim Crow in the United States was on the run, that the days of colonial rule in Africa were numbered, and that international acceptance of the Soviet Union’s right to exist was assured. But within months of Truman’s accession to the presidency in April 1945, and the shifts in policy that his administration inaugurated, Robeson’s optimism was shaken, and his mood gradually darkened.1
The first major setback to his hopes came at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in April-May 1945, when the Western powers adopted a set of resolutions on the colonial issue that, from Robeson’s perspective, raised the specter of continuing exploitation of Africa and other parts of the world. He had been hopeful that the United States would lead the way in establishing the principle that all colonial possessions—not merely those wrested from the defeated Axis powers—would be placed under United Nations trusteeship as a guaranteed route to effective independence. Robeson, and the Council on African Affairs he headed (which by the mid-forties was the most important American organization dealing with Africa) considered the trusteeship issue of crucial importance for the postwar world.
Instead, the United States introduced a set of proposals at San Francisco for a trusteeship system that fell woefully short of what the CAA had desired: no firm limits set on the length of supervision, no insistence that the Allied powers put their own territorial possessions on the path to self-government, no provision for the representation of colonial peoples themselves in trusteeship administrations—and no guarantee that the Soviet Union would have a voice on the Trusteeship Council. With the call of American naval authorities in the summer of 1945 for permanent U.S. control of strategic Pacific islands like the Marshalls and the Carolines, the future of the underdeveloped world seemed once more thrown into doubt—and white-supremacist imperialism once more thrust to the fore. Robeson began to fear that the United States would throw its weight not behind freedom for dependent peoples but for maintaining the prewar colonial systems of France and Great Britain—a move concealed behind politics of confrontation with the Soviet Union. The columns and editorials in New Africa, the influential monthly bulletin of the CAA, measure the gradual decline in expectations: from enthusiastic congratulations to President Roosevelt for refusing to postpone the UN conference (Roosevelt died just before the San Francisco sessions convened), to sadness and anger over the actual trusteeship proposals and resolutions that emerged from there. By the close of the UN conference, New Africa was writing, “The hope and faith which the people of Africa and Asia had in America when Roosevelt was alive is now at low ebb.”2
In his capacity as chairman of the CAA (which the FBI had already begun to brand a “Communist” organization), Robeson wired President Truman and Edward R. Stettinius, chairman of the U.S. delegation to San Francisco (and soon to become its chief delegate to the UN), urging more clear-cut “expression to and support [for] the principle of full freedom within [a] specified time for all colonial peoples.” Stettinius replied belatedly and evasively; John Foster Dulles, also a member of the U.S. delegation, wrote to Robeson the following year on the specific issue of incorporating South-West Africa into the Union of South Africa, declaring, “I did not feel that the United States, in view of its own record, was justified in adopting a holier-than-thou attitude toward the Union of South Africa.” To Robeson, the UN conference in San Francisco, and the subsequent defense of its decisions by U.S. officials, signaled a dangerous revival of imperialist ardor both at home and abroad.3
A USO overseas tour that Robeson undertook in August 1945 heightened his uneasiness. He had planned to take Othello to Europe immediately following the close of its American tour to perform before black troops, but when it proved impossible to clear in time all the necessary channels—diplomatic and theatrical—he and Larry Brown decided to accept the USO offer as an alternative arrangement, especially since they would be part of the first interracial unit to be sent overseas (it included as well the violinist Miriam Solovieff and the pianist Eugene List). The month-long trip involved thirty-two appearances, taking Robeson to Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France, and the black paper the Chicago Defender reported that his presence overseas proved “a boost to the colored troops’ morale who needed it badly.” He did bring the black troops an essentially optimistic message about the increased economic opportunities they would find on returning home, but in other regards he warned them that they would “find an America not greatly altered in terms of their position.”4
But he did not share with the troops the full extent of his concern. In fact, what he saw and heard overseas profoundly disturbed him. The “unwillingness” of American authorities to proceed with de-Nazification seemed to Robeson a deliberate strategy for restoring German power as rapidly as possible, to serve as a counterweight to the influence of the Soviet Union. This interpretation was confirmed in his mind on hearing American army officers in Germany—in particular, officers in Patton’s Third Army, in Bavaria—talk glibly and ferociously of “pushing straight on to Moscow and destroying the Bolshies while they’re weak.” In Czechoslovakia, Robeson’s observations persuaded him that the American military would support only those Czechs who had been “collaborationists and Sudeten soldiers” (the Sudetenland, a part of western Czechoslovakia on the German border, had been strongly pro-Nazi).5
As soon as he got home, Robeson asked Max Yergan to arrange through the auspices of the CAA a private meeting of seventy-five to a hundred people in which he could “unburden himself” about his experiences in Europe and, he hoped, raise ten thousand dollars to go on the air for one or two national hookups so he could get his message of concern across to a large audience. The meeting took place on October 21, 1945, at the home of Frederick V. Field, the wealthy white left-wing sympathizer whose wife, Edith Field, served as CAA treasurer. A somewhat disappointing forty or fifty people showed up. The FBI had bugged preparatory phone conversations between the organizers, and the reports reveal that the effort to gather people to hear Robeson may have been hampered by a growing distrust of Yergan among progressives—a distrust that would erupt into bitter confrontation on the Council of African Affairs within two years.6
Disappointing though the turnout was—only four thousand dollars was raised, not enough to put Robeson on the air—he delivered a strong message to the people gathered in the Fieldses’ living room. He stressed two points: the continuing, even flourishing existence of the Nazi spirit and leadership in Germany; and the determination among the traditional European power elite to maintain colonialism in Africa and the Far East. He specifically connected these developments with Truman’s assumption of the presidency, his appointment of Southern segregationists to his cabinet, and the immediate falling away thereafter from Roosevelt’s concern with the plight of the underclass around the globe. Among Truman’s advisers, Robeson held Edward L. Stettinius, Jr., and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes particularly responsible for the shift in policy emphasis. And overseas he held Winston Churchill predominantly accountable for resurgent imperialism.7
Robeson and the Council on African Affairs had distrusted Churchill’s intentions while the war was still on. They had hailed the statement on colonies that had issued from the opposition Labour Party’s 1943 conference on postwar policy as “a serious and detailed document” notable, despite its weaknesses, for demanding that the “color bar” be immediately abolished in all territories subject to Parliament. When the British Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, won a sweeping election victory over Churchill and the Tories in July 1945, Robeson cabled Attlee his congratulations, choosing to see in the results a defeat for imperialism which would open the way to positive action on independence for colonial peoples.8
But within months Robeson had to revise that estimate, as evidence quickly mounted that the new British government was adhering to the same old Tory policies in regard to Java, India, and Africa. The CAA published in New Africa a series of articles decrying the “indecent haste and anxiety” of Attlee to “re-establish British authority in Hong Kong and other possessions liberated from Japan”—“exactly what might have been expected of a Churchill government”—and expressed its grief in an editorial at the “revolting and base” spectacle of American troops being used to assist the British, French, and Dutch in their “coercive restoration of the colonial system” in Indonesia.9
At just this time, the fall of 1945, the postponed Spingarn award ceremony took place, and Robeson decided to use the occasion to express his mounting concern over world developments. The NAACP, on the other hand, had expected to use the occasion for its own purposes. When planning for the event had begun the preceding spring, Roy Wilkins had telegraphed Walter White that the presentation ceremony “offers chance to place Association before many persons attracted by Robeson but unaware of our work.” Since Wilkins believed that the “downtown audience will follow Robeson anywhere,” he suggested the affair be held in either of Harlem’s three-thousand-seat auditoriums—the Golden Gate or the A.M.E. Zion Church, where Robeson’s brother Ben was pastor. (Ultimately the Hotel Biltmore was decided upon, the seven hundred guests straining its ballroom to capacity). Wilkins suggested Helen Gahagan Douglas, Fredric March, or John Mason Brown to make the presentation to Robeson. Walter White was attracted to the possibility of Lawrence Tibbett, but that name was scratched when Clara Rockmore, among others, let it be known that Tibbett’s selection would “rankle” Paul because of Tibbett’s “envy and resentment of Paul’s success” in the past. Bob Rockmore suggested to Walter White that Robeson’s own preference would be either Mayor La Guardia, Marshall Field, Henry A. Wallace, or Henry Morgenthau. The name of Harold Ickes was later thrown in, and Orson Welles was briefly considered—until word arrived that he would ask the NAACP to pay his expenses from Hollywood (“I don’t think it worth that,” was White’s comment). Scheduling conflicts finally took most of the contenders out of consideration, and the NAACP settled on Marshall Field, publisher of the Chicago Sun, to make the presentation.10
Walter White officiated at the gala ceremony. Marian Anderson, Louis T. Wright (Robeson’s old friend and himself a Spingarn Medalist), J. J. Singh (president of the India League of America), playwright Marc Connelly, Arthur B. Spingarn (president of the NAACP), and Essie were among those seated on the dais; and Mrs. Roosevelt, Judge William Hastie, and Henry Wallace were among those who sent congratulatory telegrams. In his presentation, Marshall Field settled for rather bland and sonorous phrases, citing Robeson’s “broad human sympathies.”11
But in his response Robeson struck a far more overtly political note than was traditionally associated with the august Spingarn event, and in the process “shocked” (according to a headline in the Pittsburgh Courier) many of the notables in attendance. Venting his concern over the drift of events in the six months since Roosevelt’s death, and what he perceived as a shift in emphasis away from civil-rights reform on the domestic scene and toward renewed colonialism on the international one, Robeson warned against abandoning the ideals for which the recent war had purportedly been fought. “The people of Asia, China and India want to realize promises made to them,” he said, and black Americans, too, expected the “fight for democracy” to be realized at home. Further, Robeson denounced renewed signs of hostility from the United States and Britain toward the Soviet Union as symptomatic of a resurgent fascism (leading the FBI in its report on the dinner to note ominously that Robeson had said “full employment in Russia is a fact, and not a myth, and discrimination is non-existent. The Soviet Union can’t help it as a nation and a people if it is in the main stream of change”).12
Six years later, at the height of the Cold War, when Walter White and Robeson had become estranged, White wrote a bitter account of Robeson’s performance at the Spingarn dinner. The NAACP’s initial intention, White claimed, had been to present the medal at Town Hall, with admission free, but Rockmore—despite Robeson’s strenuous “espousal of the ‘little man’”—had insisted on a “‘good downtown hotel,’” thereby excluding all but the reasonably affluent (no evidence in the NAACP papers or elsewhere supports White’s claim). After faithfully promising to be prompt for a photographing session at 6:30 p.m., Robeson, according to White, arrived at 7:45—at the conclusion of the reception and after the platform party had moved to the dais (this part of White’s charge, given Robeson’s tendency to be late, is credible). Robeson refused to submit the text of his speech in advance for the press, claiming that he planned to speak from notes, but, as White told it, just before Robeson started, Max Yergan purportedly came to the speakers’ table and began to “whisper earnestly” to him—in a voice loud enough to be overheard—that “They say” and “they want you to say” such-and-such in the speech (“they” being, in White’s view, the CPUSA). White described the speech Robeson did give as “a lengthy and vehement attack upon all things American and indiscriminate laudation of all things Russian,” thereby missing a “magnificent opportunity to make converts,” “stunning” the audience and producing only scattered, tepid applause—an overstatement more heated in its choice of words than Robeson’s speech had been.13
The Spingarn Medal marked both the apex of Robeson’s public acclaim and the onset of his fall from official grace. Henceforth his own disillusion with the promise of American life would proceed in tandem with his ejection from it.
A few weeks after the Spingarn event, at a World Freedom Rally in Madison Square Garden on November 14, 1945, Robeson reiterated his fears about postwar developments. He forcefully assailed the role of the American government “in helping British, French and Chiang Kai-shek governments to crush the peoples’ struggles toward democracy, freedom and independence,” reminding the audience that while “millions of Africans faced unnecessary starvation” and “the tragic plight of Europe’s anguished Jewish people has still to be solved,” it was premature to talk of “world peace and security”—a goal that would not be advanced by “reliance upon mighty armaments, military bases and atomic bombs.” At the end of November, at a two-day “institute on Judaism and race relations” convened by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Robeson again spoke out bluntly against the “active counter-revolution” that had abruptly arisen, calling upon American public opinion “to bring to task our State Department and President Truman for their part on the side of reaction” and specifically warning that blacks are “not only miserable, but … determined not to continue miserable.” Six months earlier an FBI report had hawked the false rumor that Robeson had joined the Communist Party; a Bureau agent now insisted that, although “his Communist Party membership book number is not known”—for a time the FBI believed he had become a member under the name of John Thomas—“his actions, connections and statements definitely classify him as a Communist.”14
Simultaneous with Robeson’s developing distress over Western policies came the disarray within the American Communist Party following the release of the “Duclos Letter.” Published in the April 1945 issue of Cahiers du communisme (the organ of Communist Party theory in France), the article by Jacques Duclos, a leading French Communist, denounced Earl Browder for having made the unorthodox suggestion that the time had come for capitalism and socialism to coexist peacefully and to collaborate in the United States. Browder had first presented those views, the culmination of his long-standing Popular Front efforts to “Americanize” the Party, to the national committee of the CPUSA in January 1944. He had recommended the dissolution of the Party and its replacement with a new organization, the Communist Political Association; with only William Z. Foster among the leadership dissenting, Browder’s views had been adopted. But Duclos now took Foster’s position, denouncing Browder for “a notorious revision of Marxism, an acceptance of the possibility of class peace in the postwar period which was tantamount to nothing less than a rejection of the inherent disharmony in the struggle between labor and capital.” Browder for a time tried to sustain the notion that Duclos’s viewpoint was peculiar to the French Communists and had not emanated from Moscow. But that proved not to be the case, and when the National Committee of the CPUSA met from June 18 to 20, 1945, “Browderism” was routed and William Z. Foster emerged as the Party’s new head.15
Despite his personal friendship with Browder, Robeson agreed that Browder had been moving the CP in the wrong direction. The FBI monitored a phone conversation between two unidentified parties immediately before the meeting of the National Committee in which one of them reported having had an extended discussion with Robeson that same day; during it Robeson purportedly said he hadn’t paid much attention in the past to Browder’s new strategy, thinking of it “as purely something tactical,” figuring that at some later time the CP would regroup under the old banner. He had been surprised in reading Duclos’s article to learn how far the Party had gone in Browder’s direction—“too far,” he now believed, given the resurgence of imperialism and of anti-Soviet animus. He credited William Z. Foster with having foreseen these developments, which Browder had not. He said he was going to try to get in touch with Browder.16
These political developments further dampened Robeson’s mood as he set off on an extensive concert tour with Larry Brown late in September 1945. What he saw and heard on the tour concerning the deteriorating circumstances of black Americans put him into a worse humor still—the sight of wretched housing and declining job opportunities, the tales of police brutality and a sharp increase in the number of lynchings in the South. The tour was the longest Robeson and Brown had ever made, lasting seven months (with a brief break for Christmas), covering thousands of miles, including 115 engagements and, according to the Pittsburgh Courier, grossing two hundred thousand dollars. In Brown’s opinion, Robeson was at the peak of his power as a singer and, as the tumultuous reception proved, still very much a popular favorite. And yet Brown reported that Robeson was in a foul mood for much of the tour, and “more difficult to work with than during all the years before.” His energy depleted by the round of concert commitments, Robeson nonetheless made frequent political appearances (or, as the FBI agents who reported on his activities preferred to put it, he continued to lend “his presence and influence to various meetings sponsored by known [Communist] front groups”). Among the “subversive activities” the FBI agents noted was Robeson’s defense of the right of actors to appear at rallies sponsored by the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, his endorsement of the “known pro-Communist” Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union, in his race for re-election to the New York City Council, and his appearance while in Toronto at a gathering of the Labour Progressive Party (“similar to the Communist Party in the United States”), at which he “sang the American Left Wing Song, ‘Joe Hill,’” and “made a MARXIST speech”—namely, reporting that on his recent USO trip to Germany he had found many American army men anti-Russian and pro-German and alarmingly willing to place ex-Nazi leaders back into positions of influence.17
Winston Churchill’s speech on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, did nothing to improve Robeson’s state of mind—nor did his public response to it improve his reputation with the FBI. After being voted out of office in 1945, Churchill had come to the United States to lobby for support of British intervention in Greece on behalf of the monarchy. Churchill and Truman conferred together in the White House and then journeyed to Fulton, where the President introduced Churchill and sat on the dais while the former Prime Minister delivered a searing indictment of the Soviet Union—his celebrated “Iron Curtain” speech—warning that “the Dark Ages may return” if Communist expansionist policies were not firmly resisted.18
Robeson was on tour in San Francisco when Churchill delivered his speech. He and Yergan immediately got on the phone to discuss a public response, their call monitored by the FBI. Yergan read Robeson a draft statement he had prepared over Robeson’s signature, denouncing Churchill’s speech “as both a slander upon the Soviet Union” and—because Truman’s presence had seemed to give assent to the slander—“an affront to the American people,” and calling Churchill’s characterization of Soviet policy a “warmongering” distortion designed “to sow dissension” between the wartime allies. The real contrast between British and Soviet policy, the statement went on, was between the Soviet attempt to build “a strong Federation of equal peoples advancing together toward a common goal” and the British determination, exemplified by Churchill’s speech, to preserve “the Imperialist System and to secure America’s help in order to do so.” It was Churchill’s policy, not the Soviets’, that pointed to “a path of war and disaster.” “The negro people in this country … will never consent” to an American commitment to such a policy.19
“That’s all right,” Robeson said when Yergan finished reading the statement, “I feel like you … [though] I probably personally wouldn’t sit down and say it, that’s all.” Picking up on Robeson’s hesitation, Yergan assured him that he had “consulted a lot of our friends here and their view was … that a pretty sharp statement is required.” “Yeah, sure,” Robeson responded—he could become laconic when pushed—but “it ought to be I say a little more than a personal blast at him.” Perhaps the problem could be solved, he added, simply by appending “Chairman of the Council on African Affairs” after his signature—“I just always want to make it as modest as I [can].… I don’t want to sort of obviously attack the President and get a lot of notice, you know and all that sort of thing.”20
Yergan got the message. The letter to Truman as sent went out from the Council on African Affairs, signed by Robeson as chairman and cosigned by Max Yergan as executive director. The wording, moreover, was somewhat softened. Churchill was still accused of aiming at “preserving the British imperialistic system with the help of the American troops and military power,” and Truman’s presence on the platform was still characterized as an “affront” that “makes Americans question whether Mr. Churchill was speaking not only for himself and the British Government but the Administration of this country as well.” But the remaining language was modified to sound more tentative (“we are confident” that black Americans, “who know from bitter experience the oppression and suffering which Fascists and near-fascists can impose,” will refuse consent to a policy in support of imperialism). And while the letter called upon Truman to “keep faith” with the views of his “illustrious predecessor,” it also contained the compliment and reminder that he, Truman, had himself “made high commitments as to the rights of all peoples.”21
Even with its modifications, the letter was sharp enough, and Robeson further honed its edge in some of his public comments during the ensuing weeks. At a mass meeting in support of famine relief for South Africa, he declared that the basic cause of hunger was the withholding of freedom: “Let the colonial peoples … govern themselves and they will no longer suffer from landlessness and labor exploitation which are the reasons for their present starvation”—and he denounced Churchill’s recent speech as exemplifying a scheme for “Anglo-Saxon world domination,” which would continue to deny the suffering of subject peoples. In April, Robeson was elected by the seven hundred delegates to a Win the Peace Conference to cochair the national organization, along with Colonel Evans Carlson, the Marine Corps hero who had led the famed Carlson’s Raiders; in accepting, Robeson warned the convention that the world was facing the prospect of a continuance of colonial tyranny under a “more highly developed kind of benevolent Anglo-American imperialism.” In a speech at Temple Israel in May, he contrasted the “dither” over the presence of Soviet troops “in a country directly on the borders of the Soviet Union” with the “silence” over the “continued presence of British and American troops in country after country all around the world far removed from either Great Britain or the United States.”22
Robeson was by no means isolating himself on some narrow sectarian margin. On the contrary, his sentiments were still widely shared, and he was joined in his various public efforts by a broad range of American opinion. The sponsors of the Win the Peace Conference, for example, included three Senators and twenty Congressmen and was addressed, among others, by Congressman Adolph Sabath, dean of the House of Representatives; Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University; and Senator Claude Pepper, who reiterated the very theme Robeson himself stressed: “War is a danger that can be avoided only if that unity of the Big Three molded by Roosevelt is not lost.” In 1946 it was still acceptable, even popular, to decry the direction of Anglo-American policy and to insist on the benign, essentially defensive strategy of a Soviet Union exhausted from its devastating war toll. It therefore seemed perfectly appropriate, when Harry Hopkins died, for his widow to invite Paul Robeson to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at her husband’s funeral. And when Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., U.S. representative to the UN, was laid up with an acute sinus infection and could not meet with representatives of Win the Peace, he troubled to write personally to Robeson to apologize for his absence.23
Nor did Robeson isolate himself by denouncing renewed outbreaks of racial violence at home. Between June 1945 and September 1946, fifty-six blacks were killed in a reinaugurated reign of terror highlighted by a particularly brutal lynching in Monroe, Georgia, and a white police riot against blacks in Columbia, Tennessee. In South Carolina, a man named Isaac Woodward, a black soldier who had served fifteen months in the South Pacific, was falsely arrested on disorderly conduct charges and blinded in a vicious beating at the hands of a South Carolinian police chief who was later tried and acquitted. The NAACP had, all through the thirties, battled against antiblack violence but had never managed to convince President Roosevelt to commit himself to a federal antilynching bill, though he had periodically leaned in that direction. The latest tide of violence seemed aimed at “uppity” black veterans who had returned from the “struggle for democracy” overseas determined to struggle for it at home as well. Robeson was indignant at the silence of the federal government in the face of the resurgent barbarity: “This swelling wave of lynch murders and mob assaults against Negro men and women,” he angrily told a Madison Square Garden rally on September 12, 1946, “represents the ultimate limit of bestial brutality to which the enemies of democracy, be they German-Nazis or American Ku Kluxers, are ready to go in imposing their will. Are we going to give our America over to the Eastlands, Rankins and Bilbos? If not, then stop the lynchers! What about it, President Truman? Why have you failed to speak out against this evil? When will the federal government take effective action to uphold our constitutional guarantees? … The leaders of this country can call out the Army and Navy to stop the railroad workers, and to stop the maritime workers—why can’t they stop the lynchers?”24
But instead of taking action, the United States waxed vocal in the UN about its determination to spread “the blessings of democracy” to the four corners of the globe, and Taft Republicans and Rankin Democrats in the Congress succeeded in filibustering the Federal Employment Practices Committee to death and in preventing any action from being taken against the poll tax. Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois decided, along with the liberal white lawyer Bartley Crum, to issue a call for a gathering in Washington, D.C., on September 23, 1946—timed to coincide with the anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—to launch “an American crusade against lynching,” to demand that killers be prosecuted and that the Congress enact a federal antilynching law.25
The NAACP leadership was angered by the Robeson-Du Bois call. Walter White wrote Robeson privately to say that he would not attend and—trusting that “our friendship is such as to permit me to speak very frankly”—to deplore what he characterized as a duplication of effort. The NAACP had already held a meeting of what White called a “broadly representative group” to discuss unified action against lynching, and to work “in cooperation with the NAACP” on antilynching legislation (a struggle which the NAACP had “pioneered for many years”). Robeson’s call, a mere month later, would, in White’s view, “create confusion in the public mind and would also give comfort to our enemies who would believe that there are rival groups fighting for anti-lynching legislation.” Not only did White personally refuse to cooperate, but the National Office of the NAACP also advised its branches, by special-delivery letter, not to participate. In a memo directly to Dr. Du Bois (who was still officially connected to the NAACP), White expressed his displeasure at the old warrior’s having lent his name: “It would be most helpful on issues which are an integral part of the Association’s work like the fight against lynching if inquiries could be made by you on such matters inasmuch as the calling of this conference has tremendously complicated and overburdened the office.” Du Bois sent back a sharp note claiming that White’s memo was the first he had heard about “your new Anti-Lynching movement. My cooperation was evidently not needed. It was certainly not asked. If I had been notified, I would gladly have cooperated. On the other hand I have been fighting lynching for forty years, and I have a right to let the world know that I am still fighting. I therefore gladly endorsed the Robeson movement which asked my cooperation. This did not and could not interfere with the NAACP program. The fight against mob law is the monopoly of no one person, no one organization.” In reply White wrote, “The tone of your memorandum was distinctly surprising in its tartness.” There the matter rested for the moment between the two men—their dispute would reach a climax two years later in Du Bois’s dismissal from the NAACP.26
Ultimately, Robeson’s American Crusade proved only a partial success. On September 23, three thousand white and black delegates gathered in Washington, D.C., officially to launch the Crusade. Scheduled as a one-hundred-day intensive campaign for federal action, it drew the support of dozens of celebrities, headed by Albert Einstein—but it also drew the scorn of Gloucester Current, NAACP director of branches, who insisted Robeson had brought “extraneous issues” into the antilynching campaign, thereby confirming that “responsible organizations such as NAACP” had been wise not to affiliate with “groups which merely use the Negro issue as an opportunity to foist their opinions on other matters on the unsuspecting public.”27
Immediately following the gathering in the capital, Robeson led a seven-person delegation to the White House to petition Truman’s support for antilynching legislation. Meeting with the President in the Oval Office, Robeson had barely finished reading aloud the first paragraph of the delegation’s prepared statement when Truman irritably interrupted him. He was concerned about lynching, the President said, but the time was not propitious for passage of a federal bill; for an issue so fraught with potential political repercussions, timing was all-important. Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the United Council of Church Women and a member of the delegation, suggested that the principles currently being enunciated at the Nuremberg trials were inconsistent with the American government’s refusal to punish lynchers. Truman retorted with a “reminder” to the delegation that the United States and Great Britain represented “the last refuge of freedom in the world.” With that Robeson took direct issue. The British Empire, he said, was in his view “one of the greatest enslavers of human beings,” and added that the temper of black people was changing. A snappish Truman asked him to elaborate. Robeson—who later told reporters he had felt it was important to be polite, but not “excessively polite”—said that if the federal government refused to defend its black citizens against murder, blacks would have to defend themselves. Truman declared the interview at an end.28
Within two weeks Robeson was called to testify before the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California, chaired by Senator Jack B. Tenney (and informally known as the Tenney Committee). Robeson took the stand on October 7, 1946, and remained under questioning for several hours. Chairman Tenney and his committee counsel, Richard E. Combs, were polite, and at moments the hearing took on a tone of outright cordiality—a friendly disputation among rival philosophers. Robeson was not yet a pariah to be publicly whipped and displayed, not even by congressional investigators. That would come later.29
In the course of the unhurried discussion, a number of pointed questions did get posed—and answers made. Directly asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Robeson suggested that Tenney might just as well have asked him if he was a registered Republican or Democrat—since the Communist Party was not less legal in the United States. But in fact, he continued, he was “not a Communist,” and if he had to characterize himself it would be as “an anti-Fascist and independent.” He added, though, with precision, “If I wanted to join any party I could just as conceivably join the Communist Party, more so today than I could join the Republican or Democratic Party”; after all, “the first people who understood the struggle against fascism and the first to die in it, were Communists”—so he had “no reason to be inferring communism is evil.”
But had not the Soviet government purged some of its own intellectuals and officials? Counsel Combs asked. Was not that “evil”? Were the purges not comparable to lynchings in the United States? No, Robeson answered, they were not. Russia had been living for a long time under a state of siege—England “has been determined to destroy the Soviet Union since 1917”—and also under conditions of “civil strife,” beset by internal enemies at odds with the government’s goal of “giving life to the common people.” Disliking the Soviet system, having “no faith in the potentiality of the Russian people,” these dissenters “ought to get out of there or get shot.” Did not the democracies of the West shoot traitors during wartime? Had not even the Norwegians—those “nice people”—shot Quisling?
It was important to understand, Robeson emphasized, that ordinary Russians backed their government, felt it represented “their leadership.” He likened the situation to his experience as a football player—“The coach tells you what to do and we do it”; it was not a question of being under a “dictatorship” but of agreeing to work for a common goal believed to be in the interest of all. If you wanted to talk about such matters as “freedom of speech,” Robeson suggested, you might better turn to the American South, where blacks were being “shot down” for speaking their minds, for asserting their right to the supposed guarantees of American citizenship (“The Negro people,” he added, “are no longer willing to be shot down”).
“You don’t find that sort of thing in California, do you?” Chairman Tenney asked. “Yes, in California,” Robeson replied, and recounted a recent experience in Fresno. He had gone into a restaurant with friends and been told they were not serving. “But you are serving,” Robeson said, seeing people sitting around eating. He was asked what he meant by “coming in here with your hat on with white folks.” “I started for the guy,” Robeson said, but a friend saw the man reach for a gun and warned Robeson to hold back. “I could have been dead” in Fresno, California, he said, “exactly like I would have been dead in Georgia. I am not saying the state of California wouldn’t have done more [about] it, but I would have been good and dead.” Plenty of white workers were “just as bad off” in California, Robeson added; moreover, he’d gone into the fields and seen the abominable conditions under which Mexican laborers suffered. The struggle against inequality, he believed, was a “unified struggle [of] … Negro and white workers, both divided because the fellows at the top keep them divided; but their essential interests are the same.” Still, in his view, neither this internal struggle at home nor the worldwide struggle between competing American and Soviet systems necessitated violence. He himself believed that “the only way people can get back on their feet is to nationalize the means of production,” but he also believed “there is still plenty of room for private enterprise” in the world—“we shouldn’t have to go to war with Russia because they haven’t got free enterprise.” Revels Cayton, the black union leader, who had accompanied Robeson on a series of political appearances in California just preceding the Tenney hearing, reported to Max Yergan that “This red-baiting outfit took the shellacking of their life. Paul made a tremendous talk … extremely timely and to the point.”30
Cayton and Robeson had known each other earlier but had drawn close together after Cayton’s arrival in New York City in the summer of 1945 to become executive secretary of the National Negro Congress. An exuberant, earthy, outspoken man, Cayton was the grandson of Hiram Revels, the black Senator from Mississippi during Reconstruction, and the brother of the distinguished sociologist Horace Cayton. A veteran trade-unionist (he had for years been chairman of the California CIO’s state committee on minorities), Revels Cayton was also a CP stalwart who was rambunctiously independent of the Party when it came to black issues.31
In 1946 Cayton was intent on orienting the work of the NNC around the needs of the black working class and the trade unions, challenging the domination of “the NAACP and the other conservative organizations.” That much was fine with the Party. But when, in the late forties, Cayton came to argue for the necessity of forming separate black caucuses within the industrial unions, part of the CP leadership would balk—even though these early attempts, in Cayton’s own view, never amounted to more than “a quiet gathering of blacks to talk things over.” Nonetheless, Cayton would continue to insist that the caucuses were needed in order to push for more job opportunities for blacks, an effort that, by the early fifties, even the left-wing unions had become reluctant to undertake—and the Party became reluctant to press them for fear of jeopardizing its influence. By the fifties, the Party leadership came to distrust, in varying degrees, what it viewed as a resurgence of black nationalism and of dual unionism—divisive threats to its continuing and overriding concern for black-white unity based on shared class interests. It was the character of the unity—integration without equality—that Cayton would challenge in the early fifties. In practice, he argued, “unity” had meant whites leading blacks and putting the interests of whites first. In the United States, Cayton understood, divisions based on race were often a more important determinant of behavior than commonalities based on class. Like any good Marxist, Cayton believed that class unity would ultimately be the instrument of liberation—but in the interim, he insisted, injustices based on race could best be attended to by the unification of blacks.32
Cayton came to have an important influence on Robeson. Increasingly in the postwar years, they shared political platforms, and Paul would often stay over at Revels and Lee Cayton’s apartment, sharing meals, crooning their baby to sleep, arguing political points into the night. He came to agree with Cayton that the black working class had become the central agency in the struggle for black rights. The black trade-unionists who had gotten a toehold in industry during World War II were (like Robeson) strongly connected to the black churches and strongly identified with black culture—but otherwise had scant patience with any form of black nationalism (whether it be Marcus Garvey or the Nation of Islam) that called for a separatist political solution. In the early thirties especially, Robeson had stressed the importance of preserving a black cultural identity, but he had never sought to preserve its integrity through political separation. He remained committed all his life to a strategy of political coalition and, after his exposure to socialism in the late thirties, had vigorously supported alliance with the white oppressed.
Robeson believed the Party emphasis on “Black and White Together” represented a genuine commitment to the ideal of brotherhood, but by the late forties he recognized, too, that this could serve some of the less racially enlightened whites in the Party with a rationale for ignoring black aspirations and for maintaining their own control. As early as 1946 Robeson brought Ben Davis, Jr., over to Cayton’s house one night, “just to see,” according to Cayton, “if Ben and I would get into an argument.” Cayton and Davis never got along more than passably well; Ben represented Party orthodoxy, Cayton represented the mavericks. That night, running true to form, Davis accused Cayton of “petit-bourgeois nationalism” in pushing for black power within the unions, of forgetting that the Party, not a separate group of black trade-unionists, was the vanguard of struggle. As Cayton recalls it, he told Davis to “just look at the facts: the white working class is supposed to be leading us, and where the hell are they going?! God help us if we follow their lead. They’re not doing a goddamn thing for blacks! When are they going to start leading, Ben? Our folks are really moving, and if I have to decide between the two, I’m going to go with my people.” Robeson had brought the two men together to let them argue it out, and for most of the evening he simply sat quietly and listened. Then he took off the month of October 1946 to stump with Cayton on the West Coast in behalf of the National Negro Congress.33
Cayton reported back to the NNC staff in New York that he and Paul were “pounding away on the need of building” that organization, speaking on the radio, at community meetings, in churches and to a variety of union gatherings: to striking maritime workers on the San Francisco waterfront, to a luncheon gathering “of practically every ranking official of the CIO in San Francisco,” to Dishwashers Local 110, to Cayton’s own local union (the Shipscalers and Painters Local 10 in Seattle), to the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in Los Angeles, and in that same city to Harry Bridges’s International Longshoremen and Warehousemen union. They met everywhere with “tremendous good will and enthusiasm,” but also, in Cayton’s view, “the circle of followers was growing smaller, due in part to the deepening of the Cold War; not only was there a basic lack of understanding of the Congress’ program,” but the black working class was preoccupied with pending “economic annihilation” due to the closing down of wartime industry. Indeed, the heralded “rebirth” of the NNC never materialized. In Cayton’s words, “We didn’t have a base, we didn’t have any credentials in the black community.” With no significant growth in membership, the NNC, in less than two years, folded into the newly formed Civil Rights Congress—for which another Robeson friend, William Patterson, would become the chief spokesman. Patterson was more of a doctrinaire Party man than Cayton, who over the years would become estranged from the CP and would eventually leave it.34
At several times during the fall of 1946, Uta Hagen had flown out to be with Paul as he crisscrossed the country filling political and concert engagements. By Christmastime he was back in New York briefly, and Uta planned a festive holiday. She and Joe Ferrer had recently separated—he went to stay at their country place in Ossining, she kept the New York town house—but had remained on friendly terms. On Christmas Eve, Uta went to Joe’s dressing room (he was performing Cyrano), put up a German Christmas tree complete with candles and a little music box, left gifts from herself and their daughter, Letty, and told the cast seamstress to light the candles just before Joe came in. Then she went home to wait for Paul’s arrival at her house for their planned Christmas Eve dinner together.35
It was a cozy evening. Paul and Uta exchanged gifts, had dinner, and curled up—Paul in an armchair, Uta on the sofa—to talk (sex was out: “I was having a bladder attack and was in pain,” Uta later said; “The Lord was with me—we weren’t doin’ nuthin’”). Uta suddenly thought she felt a draft. At the door to the room, she had put a high screen which stood about six inches off the floor. Glancing over to see where the draft was coming from, her eyes fixed on a man’s feet showing under the screen. She jumped up, went to the door, found Joe there, and impulsively threw her arms around him—“Oh! You came to wish me a Merry Christmas!” As she hugged him, she found herself face to face with two men standing in the doorway. One was a lawyer, the other a detective. Joe strode into the living room. “I’ll never forget it,” Uta recalls. “Joe looked so little and Paul so big. He looked up at Paul and said something like ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ All Paul said, in a quiet, sorrowful voice, was ‘Oh, Joe, no.’ It was just awful. Finally Joe got embarrassed, and the lawyer got very embarrassed,” and the detective just stood there—and then all three walked out.
Paul, in Uta’s view, “had a most peculiar reaction, and got very paranoid. He panicked. He called all his friends. He had them come—I forget who they all were—they came in a limo, they came with guns.… One of them was a pale black man with light white hair. I remember him vividly. And I’d never seen any of them before. They went off in a big limo. It was like a Chicago gangster movie.” Indeed it was. “They” may well have been members of the “Black Mafia,” lieutenants of the famed Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a friend—and devoted protector—of Robeson’s. The “panic” can only be guessed at, assuming in the first place that Uta read it right, that Paul was not to some significant degree consciously embellishing his distress for secondary gains (such as perhaps wanting to disentangle himself from Uta anyway). Yet, if Hagen’s further details are reliable, panic is what it certainly sounds like: while awaiting his friends—they didn’t arrive until two o’clock in the morning—Paul paced up and down the room “in a sweat,” “talking himself into more and more fear,” mumbling that if Joe would raid them he was capable of anything, that he might even then be waiting outside with a gun. “I still think it was unreal,” Uta said some thirty-five years later, “to assume Joe was going to do him bodily harm, that he needed an escort to get out of my house.… It was paranoid. What would they shoot him for?”—though she does agree that in those years a black man found with a white woman could easily be accused of rape, especially a famous black man who had recently defied the President of the United States and was a plausible target for an FBI setup.36
Ferrer’s behavior was grounds enough for shock; the affair between Uta and Paul was, after all, two years old, and Ferrer seems up to then to have treated it with exemplary understanding—indifference, even. He had never done or said anything to suggest outrage, or even shown any diminution of his affection for Paul. To this day Uta finds Joe’s motives for the raid puzzling. They probably hinged, she thinks, on the fact that divorce proceedings were in progress and Joe wanted to avoid paying alimony. But, beyond the shock at Joe’s behavior, Paul must have been reacting to the certain knowledge that publicity about being “caught with a white woman” could be used to ruinous effect—to his career, to his credibility as a political spokesman, to his standing with the black community. The raid did become common gossip, and some accounts did appear in the press; but the only overtly sensationalistic—and wholly garbled—version appeared in Confidential, and then not until 1955.37
The raid marked the end of the affair between Paul and Uta. “It was like suddenly the relationship had become a threat,” as Uta recalls, “and he had to end it. But he did not say so in so many words.” After that night, through the intercession of the actress Rita Romilly, they exchanged a few letters and met a few times—“maybe six times after that”—but when they did get together Paul made no attempt to explain his remoteness other than to say that they “had to be careful until the whole thing calmed down.” In short order the “silences got longer and longer.” Paul soon stayed away entirely, and the affair “just disintegrated.” Between her husband’s raid and her lover’s disengagement, Uta “was mad at men for a long time.” Mad, and flat broke. Ferrer refused to give her a nickel of alimony, and Paul volunteered only a couple of hundred dollars now and then for a short time; it wasn’t until her starring role in A Streetcar Named Desire a few years later that she got back on her feet, financially and professionally. The last time she saw Paul was in Chicago in 1949, when he came to see her in Streetcar. They had dinner afterward and, according to Uta, it was “unbelievably nostalgic,” Paul “making a very big pitch towards me again.” She felt “rather objective about it all—I still adored him, but the spell was broken, completely broken that one night.”38
Paul and Essie’s life together had become so attenuated that, whether or not she knew of the raid, she had long since learned that any attempt to interfere with Paul’s privacy could only jeopardize her standing with him. It was a time in her life, in any case, when her newfound success as writer and lecturer had given her a sense of independence. She had spent May through November 1946 in French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, was writing a book about it, and was collaborating with Pearl Buck on another. Feeling riskily outspoken, she wrote Paul a thirty-five-hundred-word letter in December 1946—just before the raid—on the subject of money, her lack of it and Bob Rockmore’s “vindictive” withholding of it. The letter had been triggered by a recent episode involving Paul, Jr. Inducted into the Air Force in the spring of 1946, he had been stationed in Spokane, had found a girlfriend out there and needed a little extra money. When he wired Essie for forty dollars from his own savings, she used the occasion—to Paul, Jr.’s dismay—to sit down and write Rockmore, asking him to send Paul, Jr., a hundred dollars. According to Essie, Rockmore got “very angry” and reluctantly agreed to send him an additional fifty. Essie decided to use the episode as an occasion for challenging Rockmore’s stewardship—which she had always resented—over her own finances.39
Rockmore feels, Essie wrote Paul, Jr., that “you should behave like a modest little colored boy, efface yourself, play it low,” dutifully applying to him as a supplicant so he could feed his “power complex”—he “wants to run everybody”—and his “VERY patriarchal attitude toward Negroes”; it seems we have “a lot of folks among our friends who will always TELL you what to do, and how to do it. YOU must always be the last word for YOU. Even against me and The Papa. And I mean that.” As for herself, she refused to be patronized any longer; she intended to be polite to Rockmore “but that’s all.” None of this, she stressed to Paul, Jr., had been Paul, Sr.’s fault—“The Papa is too generous, he has never been tight in his whole life.”40
Yet, when she wrote to Paul, Sr., herself a day later, she felt the need to expound again on the subject of finances. Her set of grievances turned out to be much broader than that, but she started with a restatement of her money problems—“to get it off my chest,” so that “the few times we do meet,” money would not have to be discussed. “I’ve never had a personal allowance of any kind ever since we’ve been back in America,” she wrote, “and I’ve never had enough to run the house properly”; on occasion she had been reduced to cutting the grass herself after Rockmore announced they couldn’t afford a gardener. The breaking point had come when she came back from Africa late in 1946 and had had to put Ma Goode into a nursing home; Rockmore’s reaction had been to cut her allowance from ninety dollars a week to eighty. “I suddenly saw the light: He’d never have dared to do that to a white woman. Never. But I’m colored folks, and so I can take low.… I really don’t believe, in all fairness to Bobby, that this kind of explanation has ever crossed his mind. (He tries consciously, VERY consciously, to be pretty liberal).… Suddenly, I’ve had my stomach full. I feel at 50 [her upcoming birthday was December 15] … I’m going to start a new life altogether. I’m going to get myself settled and straightened out, so I’ll know where I am, where I’m going, and how.”
That said, Essie advised Paul to “heave a deep breath.… I’ll take you further along the garden path and prepare yourself, because its going to be rough walking.” She had a couple of questions she needed to ask. First and foremost: “Am I to continue to be Mrs. Robeson? Yes or No.” The last time she’d been in Rockmore’s office, he’d confided “that you had been going to marry Freda, and proved to me that you were.” That news, Essie continued in her letter, “set me back. Maybe I wasn’t even Mrs. Robeson any more.” She wanted to know. And she also wanted a guaranteed personal allowance (“I should have had one ever since we returned to America. Otherwise I’m being your wife for my living, only, and am merely a paid housekeeper. I feel I rate better than that. Anyway, good housekeepers come high, these days”). The assured income would allow her “to do something on my own.… I may even be able to make myself independent, so if ever you want to shed me, it should be easy.… My wings are itching, and I think I’m going to fly. But I want good visibility before I take off.” Having had her say, Essie promised not to bring up “my personal business” again; “I’ve said everything that’s been on my mind for some time, and I feel better for saying it, no matter how it comes out.”41
Essie knew how to tough it out, but Paul knew when and how to acknowledge the din—in order to neutralize it and to be better able to proceed on his own unencumbered way. He told Essie (as she reported to Paul, Jr.) that he “couldn’t imagine anything more reasonable” than her insistence on a hundred dollars a week for the house and a hundred a month for her personal allowance, and said that in the future, if she needed more, she should come to him directly, immediately. Just two months after sending her husband what read like a firm ultimatum, Essie was confessing to her son that she herself wasn’t “clear” about what was going on. “Bobby does his ground-work dirty. He tells me one thing, and The Papa another. And what with all the misunderstanding, and inefficient (deliberately so) interpreting, The Papa and I get more and more distant.” Essie may to some degree have decided against greater clarity with Paul, Jr., to spare him—he had apparently expressed concern over the possibility of a formal split between his parents—for when she did allude to additional complications it was in a protectively evasive way: “Of course, bad news is bad news, but if its well delivered, it isnt as bad as it could be. Maybe this is over your head. And anyway, there may be no bad news at all.… Anyway, you make plenty of sense when you say: If the three of us cant work everything out, we ought to give up. That’s my sentiments. And I too, think its high time the three of us DO work it out.”42
Essie, quick to flare, knew how to back down when it appeared her belligerence might threaten her own vital interest in remaining Mrs. Robeson. She knew that Paul, ordinarily less quick to react, capricious about the details of ordinary life, had a powerful will. If he came to feel that his essential interests were at stake, he could prove by far the more intractable of the two, difficult to turn from any course of action upon which he had decided, insistent, ultimately, on doing exactly what he wanted and telling others only precisely what he wanted them to know. “Nobody tells me anything,” Essie complained to Revels Cayton, aware somewhere in her depths that the brash appurtenances of command she liked to flaunt were pale shadows of her husband’s quietly powerful authority (and no match for it). Having openly broadcast her complaints, she now wisely decided, “once and for all, to close ranks with him.”43