The Progressive Party
(1947–1948)
Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s Vice-President and now Truman’s Secretary of Commerce, began to speak out against administration foreign policy in 1946. He, like Robeson, deplored Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, and counseled Truman to adopt a more flexible attitude toward the Soviets in order to control atomic energy and to maintain peace. Truman ignored him. On September 12, 1946, Wallace delivered a crucial speech at a meeting sponsored by two groups (Robeson was affiliated with both) that later that year were to merge into the Progressive Citizens of America; in it, Wallace forcefully attacked the emergent Anglo-American “get-tough” policy toward Russia, arguing that nations with different economic systems could and must live in peace together (the same argument Robeson employed when testifying before the Tenney Committee three weeks later in California). Wallace’s speech caused an uproar, with Secretary of State Byrnes threatening to resign and the foreign-policy hard-liners in both parties repudiating it. On September 20 Truman requested and received Wallace’s resignation from the Cabinet. The rift had been opened that would lead to Wallace’s third-party Progressive race in the presidential election of 1948, but throughout most of 1947 he explicitly refrained from declaring his candidacy. Robeson, meanwhile, remained primarily absorbed in fighting political battles on his own front.1
They began to multiply. As early as the spring of 1946, local rightwing forces had succeeded in banning various Win the Peace meetings at which Robeson had been scheduled to appear, or in forcing him to shift concert halls. Embarked on yet another four-month, cross-country concert tour with Larry Brown in January 1947, Robeson arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, to find himself in the middle of a controversy about segregated facilities in the city’s theaters. When the Civil Rights Congress of St. Louis called for a demonstration in front of the American Theater, Robeson joined the picket line of about thirty people. At a press conference the next day he created another flurry by announcing that at the conclusion of his current tour in April he intended to abandon the theater and concert stage for two years in order to “talk up and down the nation against race hatred and prejudice.… It seems that I must raise my voice, but not by singing pretty songs.” For the immediate future he would sing only “for my trade union and college friends; in other words, only at gatherings where I can sing what I please.” A few days later the left front wheel came off a car in which Robeson was riding on a highway near Jefferson City. Fortunately the car had been moving at a moderate speed and no one was hurt. The Pittsburgh Courier did not hesitate to report the episode as “a prejudice-prompted attempt on the life of Paul Robeson.” The driver of the car told the Courier that “the wheel showed definite signs of having been tampered with.”2
Both the FBI and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, on their respective fronts, took due note of Robeson’s announced intention to devote himself to political activity. J. Edgar Hoover, in an apparent decision to formalize charges against him, had already ordered the New York Office to “prepare a report in summary form” setting forth “only such information of a legally admissible character as will tend to prove, directly or circumstantially, membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party, and knowledge of the revolutionary aims and purposes of that organization.” Hedda Hopper rushed to her own set of barricades. When Robeson came to California in March, she devoted most of her column to lambasting him for having sung the Russian “People’s Battle Song” and for remarking in public on the effort “in America today to kill the liberal movement, to crush the labor movement, to stifle the cries against reaction.” Such talk, in Hedda Hopper’s view, was an example of Robeson’s “abusing the precious heritage of freedom given us by our Constitution in flaunting the preaching of our most dangerous enemy.…”3
When Robeson reached Peoria in April, the sniping against him mushroomed into a full-blown public confrontation. From the first announcement of a Robeson concert in Peoria, there had been rumblings of opposition. Then, two days before the concert, the House Committee on Un-American Activities cited him, along with nearly a thousand others (including Henry Wallace, David Lilienthal, and Harlow Shapley, the Nobel Prize-winning astronomer from Harvard), as one “invariably found supporting the Communist Party and its front organizations.” Edward E. Strong, organization secretary of the National Negro Congress, gave vent to the anger felt by many progressives: “The Un-American Committee in Washington has allegedly been carrying on an investigation of un-American organizations and subversives. Whom have they attacked? The C.I.O. but not the Ku Klux Klan; Paul Robeson but not Theodore Bilbo; not a single group guilty of burning Negroes, gouging out the eyes of veterans, and subverting the Constitution throughout the South … have been called to the stand.… The un-American forces … in the name of ‘patriotism’ would deny the great Robeson the right to sing in Peoria, while the supporter of fascism during the war, Flagstad, is singing and being acclaimed at Carnegie Hall in New York.”4
When word of HUAC’s citation reached the Peoria City Council, it immediately passed a resolution opposing the appearance of “any speaker or artist who is an avowed propagandist for Un-American ideology.” A group of local citizens protested this affront to civil rights, declaring that “there are few progressive independent thinking people who have not been branded ‘red’ at some time or other since Hitler developed this technique to destroy democracy and bring Nazi-fascism to Europe.” Peoria Mayor Carl O. Triebel agreed momentarily to make City Hall’s assembly room available to the citizens’ group so it could hold a reception for Robeson. But Triebel held to his promise for only one day, rescinding it under a barrage of pressure from “patriot” groups on the following afternoon—the day Robeson, accompanied by Max Yergan, arrived in Peoria. He came despite rumors of impending violence and although William Patterson had reported that he had seen more guns in Peoria “than he ever had before.” Denied a place to sing, and refused time to present his case on the local radio station, Robeson was reduced to meeting with a handful of people in the living room of Ajay Martin, a union official and the president of the Peoria branch of the NAACP.5
Interviewed by the local press, Robeson declared, “I have been all over the world and the only time I have seen hysteria reach these heights was in Spain under Franco and Germany under Hitler.” (Mayor Triebel responded that he and the City Council were only trying “to prevent bloodshed.”) Asked by the reporters for the fiftieth time that week whether or not he was a Communist, Robeson responded with the same formula he had used when testifying before the Tenney Committee: “There are only two groups in the world today—fascists and anti-fascists. The Communists belong to the anti-fascist group and I label myself an anti-fascist. The Communist Party is a legal one like the Republican or Democratic Party and I could belong to either. I could just as well think of joining the Communist Party as any other. That’s as far as you’ll get in any definition from me.” Robeson put it more succinctly still to a reporter from Marshall Field’s liberal paper, the Chicago Sun: “If Communism means pointing out to the people that their lives are being dominated by a handful, I guess I’m a Communist.” He vowed that he would return to Peoria, and swore to “fight this violation of civil liberties.”6
The repercussions within Peoria itself centrally involved Clifford Hazelwood, commander of the black Roy B. Tisdell American Legion Post in the city, and also local vice-president of the NAACP. Hazelwood had spoken out against the anti-Robeson campaign, and the executive board of Tisdell had then accused him of “communistic activities and ideologies.” It did so without first consulting the membership, and a fight within the Tisdell post ensued; the membership voted against the executive board’s denunciation of Hazelwood, which in turn led the Legion’s state commander to revoke the post’s charter, to padlock its meeting house, and to confiscate its material assets. The word was spread that the entire Tisdell post was “communistic.” Hazelwood had in the meantime appealed to his friend Senator Everett M. Dirksen for FBI information about the validity of the accusations against Robeson, and Dirksen sent the letter on to J. Edgar Hoover. Simultaneously Hazelwood appealed to the national offices of the NAACP for help in clearing his name, and Roy Wilkins supported his request for an FBI investigation, emphasizing in a letter to Hoover the need to refute “the misguided (or deliberate) attempt to use Hazelwood’s connection with the NAACP to imply in some manner that this Association is engaged in spreading communistic ideology”; Wilkins made no protest or appeal in Robeson’s behalf. J. Edgar Hoover turned over the entire Dirksen-Hazelwood-Wilkins correspondence to the Attorney General’s office for further action, and eventually all parties were notified that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department felt empowered—in the absence of any “violation of federal law”—to proceed with an investigation.7
“The Peoria affair,” Robeson told the Chicago Sun, “is a problem bigger than just me.” He characterized “the situation in America” as “much more serious than people realize” and predicted that the incident would be a signal to other localities to proceed against him. Within weeks, the Albany, New York, Board of Education announced that it was canceling permission for him to give a scheduled concert at Livingston High School. Albany’s Mayor Erastus Corning II proudly took credit for being the moving spirit behind the cancellation. But this time around, local protest proved substantial, and the black sponsors of the recital (an affiliate of the Israel A.M.E. Church) brought legal action to restrain the Board of Education from barring Robeson.8
In the ensuing hearing, Albany’s corporation counsel argued before the court that neither the Board nor the city “will subsidize Communism or anything having to do with Communism. The color of Paul Robeson’s skin has nothing to do with this case, but the color of his ideologies has.” But Supreme Court Justice Isidore Bookstein ruled that Albany could not bar Robeson from singing because of his alleged sympathies with Communism and issued an injunction restraining the Board of Education from interfering with the concert. Bookstein did stipulate, however, that Robeson confine himself to his musical program. According to the newspapers, he did just that, “speaking only to describe some of the songs he was about to sing as encores.” But to the Army Intelligence agents covering the event, he “complied with the letter of the law” while defying its spirit; in singing encores relating to Republican Spain, the Soviet Union, and the Chinese antifascists, Robeson had, the intelligence agents insisted, “managed to further the CP line by means of his songs.”9
The following month, the police commissioners in Toronto also issued Robeson a permit to sing only on condition that he not talk at his concert. Angered by the escalating restrictions on him, Robeson spoke out at a Council on African Affairs rally in New York. “This could happen,” he said, “to any American who believes in democracy and says so fearlessly. This is the heart of the issue. Whether I am or am not a Communist or Communist sympathizer, is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights. If the government is sincerely concerned about saving America from subversive forces, let our officials … stop worrying about the Communists whom they suspect of subversive activities and start doing something about the fascists who are openly parading their disdain of civil rights and democratic procedures here in America today.” He concluded by saying, “I, however, am going to function exactly as I have tonight, at other times.… I come from the people, and from the side of the people.… I want nothing back but the kind of affection that comes to me tonight, the kind of feeling that you’re there—that’s what allows me to do what I do—because you are there! I want no political office of any kind, nor will I ever seek one.…”10
Two weeks later Newsweek published a sardonic article entitled “Paean From Pravda,” reporting that the Soviet Union had recently expressed “gratitude” for its American friends, listing among them Henry Wallace, Albert Einstein, Professor Ralph Barton Perry of Harvard, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Joseph E. Davies—and Paul Robeson. The nationally syndicated conservative columnist George E. Sokolsky followed through with an article holding Robeson himself responsible for the Peoria incident: “If Robeson chooses to be both singer and propagandist, that is his risk. Those who favor causes must risk the consequences of opposition. Better men than Paul Robeson have been thrown to the lions.” (J. Edgar Hoover liked Sokolsky’s column so much he wrote on the bottom of it, “A good summary on Robeson so don’t let it get lost.” It wasn’t.)11
When Robeson made a brief trip to the Panama Canal Zone at the end of May, the FBI monitored his movements. The agent covering Robeson’s concert in Panama City sounded crestfallen that “In spite of predictions the concert was free from any Communist or union propaganda.” But if Robeson held his tongue while in the Canal Zone, he immediately aired his views on returning to the States. Speaking in Miami under the sponsorship of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, he “stunned” the assembly with the vehemence of his views on U.S. policy in the Zone. Blasting the U.S. government for “keeping the black masses in ignorance and pitiful poverty,” he excoriated as well the powerful clique of local politicians who cooperated with U.S. officials. He devoted the proceeds from several subsequent concerts to setting up a Canal Zone scholarship fund for the education of black teachers, and in 1948 he joined Du Bois, Charlotta Bass (publisher of the California Eagle), and Charles P. Howard (lawyer and publisher) in establishing a committee to fight Jim Crow social and economic discrimination in Panama.12
Despite the mounting harassment, Robeson remained a popular public figure during the summer and fall of 1947, and very much in demand. In a Gallup Poll released in June, he was one of forty-eight runners-up in a survey of the public’s “ten favorite people.” That same month he sang to a capacity house at Symphony Hall in Boston “while scores outside vainly sought admission,” and in July he sold out Lewisohn Stadium in New York City. Dozens of left-wing organizations vied for his presence as guarantor of a large turnout; he gave preference to the Civil Rights Congress, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and, as the prospects of a Wallace campaign increased, to the Progressive Citizens of America. He agreed to become one of the PCA’s host of notable vice-chairmen, and on September 11 shared the platform in Madison Square Garden to hear Wallace, on the first anniversary of his dismissal from Truman’s Cabinet, tell the crowd of nineteen thousand that the country was suffering from a “psychosis about communism, which has been carefully nurtured by men whose great fear is not communism but democracy.”13
The battle lines for the coming presidential election were forming rapidly, and the jockeying for position becoming intense. In June 1947, heeding the advice of the liberal wing of his party, Truman vetoed the antilabor Taft-Hartley Bill—arguably his most important single move in cutting away the support of organized labor from Wallace and assuring his own re-election. In 1946 A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, had vowed to spend his union’s entire treasury to defeat Truman after the President had threatened to draft railway strikers; following Truman’s Taft-Hartley veto, Whitney declared that a third party was “out of the question.” At the same time, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the administration’s commitment to underwriting the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe (the so-called Marshall Plan)—a move that proved popular in the nation but split the progressive ranks. Wallace and Robeson came out vigorously against it. They argued that, in combination with the Truman Doctrine of three months earlier—which had called for aid to Greece and Turkey to prevent those nations from going “communist”—the administration was making a deliberate attempt to circumvent the United Nations and to “hem Russia in.”14
Additionally, the progressives were divided over whether to accept proffered support from the Communist Party. In the first half of 1947 the CPUSA still remained on the sidelines, but its reasons for supporting the new progressive organization were mounting. When Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Bill over Truman’s veto, that bill’s Section 9H, which required all labor unions wishing to use the collective-bargaining procedures of the National Labor Relations Board to file non-Communist affidavits, became the law of the land. Section 9H threatened, alternatively, to destroy the left-wing unions or to lead them to sever all connection—even all signs of friendship—with the CPUSA. Simultaneously, Wallace’s cross-country tour in June 1947 revealed unexpectedly high enthusiasm for the progressive cause, further confirmed by favorable showings in the Gallup Polls. Meeting that same month, the CPUSA’s national committee heard William Z. Foster hail the emerging divisions within the American ruling class, and Eugene Dennis, the Party’s general secretary, warn against the Party’s taking precipitous steps of any kind. That same mood of cautious commitment continued to characterize the Progressive movement itself throughout the summer and fall of 1947, with Wallace still resisting the formation of a third party and any overt declaration of his own candidacy, and with the CIO left wing still flirting with the strategy of trying to revitalize the Democratic Party (while a simultaneous trend was developing toward compliance with the required affidavits of Section 9H).15
In this clouded and volatile atmosphere, Robeson lent his name to a move to coordinate an agenda for outlawing lynching and the poll tax and for restoring the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Essie seems to have played a large role in the effort, possibly stimulated by her earlier attempt with Pearl Buck to come up with a set of propositions for federal action in behalf of blacks. The initial invitation to meet with Essie and Paul in October brought a sparse response; only Louis T. Wright, Dr. Marshall Shepard (the recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C.), and Alphaeus Hunton showed up. The meeting was brief and politic; it stressed that their effort to coordinate a black agenda “would not interfere or compete with the fine work which many organized groups had already accomplished.” The decision was made to invite an additional hundred or so black leaders to gather in November. Essie cast a wide net in trying to enlist support for that meeting, inviting, among others, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lester Granger, A. Philip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.16
Walter White responded to her invitation with a lengthy private letter illustrative of the divisions within the black leadership—current and future. During the war years the NAACP, following the trend in the black community itself, had become militantly anticolonialist (Walter White’s denunciation of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech had been as uncompromising as Robeson’s). The organization had shown a dramatic increase in membership from 1940 to 1946, its branches tripling in number and its rolls going up nearly ten times over. After 1946 the pace of growth slowed, in tandem with the national shift toward Cold War confrontation and away from any willingness to grapple with domestic problems. With the NAACP’s values and organizational fortunes in flux, Walter White was in no mood to broach opposition, to take kindly to a political project that might circumvent established lines of power in the black community—especially not if it emanated from Dr. Du Bois, a longtime personal antagonist of White’s who, on returning to his association with the NAACP in 1944 in the role of director of special research, had already begun to threaten White’s authority.17
Robeson and Walter White were no longer on the terms of personal intimacy they once had been. “Although Paul and I have not seen eye to eye on some points—political and strategic—during recent years,” White began his letter to Essie, “I have had much more respect for him in that he has spoken out frankly about his views instead of wiggling and wobbling as so many other people do who favor Communism but take to cover when the going gets hot. I have the same respect for Ben Davis.” Nevertheless, White continued, he had to “very frankly question that the kind of conference you suggest would do what you want it to do.… I think it would promptly be smeared as being just another ‘united front.’” He believed organizations were already in place to combat the various ills the conference planned to address, and expressed his personal view that no such legislation had a hope of passage “until the Senate rules are amended” to prevent filibustering. He declared his preference for channeling efforts in that direction.18
Only eighteen people convened for the November meeting at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library; except for Du Bois, none of the established black leadership attended. Essie, who chaired the meeting, opened it by declaring that the general idea behind the gathering was to try “to find some kind of basic program behind which all Negroes, organized and unorganized, could unite” in order to exert mass pressure on Congress for some kind of constructive legislation. Paul then spoke of his conviction that “division” was the “greatest weakness” keeping blacks from winning their rights. He had been pleased in his travels around the country, he reported, to find that “the rank and file of the Negro people everywhere, especially in the South, are anxious to see and know and hear their Negro leaders and artists; if they can hear their voices,” he insisted, “they will follow and support these voices.” He suggested that those present form themselves “into a loose, temporary organization to unify the Negro people.” Discussion thereafter was desultory and repetitive. Du Bois argued that “there was already unanimity of opinion among Negroes on such fundamental issues as the poll tax, FEPC and anti-lynching,” to which Essie replied that “unanimity of opinion” now required “unanimity of action.” First Robeson, and then Du Bois, declined nominations to chair future meetings (the nod then went to Reverend John Johnson of New York City). Another gathering was tentatively planned, “to work out a concrete program.”19
Ultimately the group did manage to launch the “National Non-Partisan Mass Delegation to Washington” on June 2, 1948, to demand passage of civil-rights legislation. But it caught on with neither the black masses nor the black leadership. The organizers were able to add to the list of cosponsors a few nationally recognized names—Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Earl B. Dickerson, Ewart Guinier, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, William L. Patterson, Mary Church Terrell, and Coleman Young—but the front-rank black leadership remained aloof. And with Walter White and the NAACP, an uneasy politeness prevailed—for the moment.20
In December 1947 Henry Wallace formally declared his candidacy for the presidency on a third-party ticket. Robeson announced for Wallace immediately, stood on the platform with him in Chicago in mid-January 1948—heard the crowd shout, “Robeson for vice-president!”—and became one of five cochairmen of a national Wallace for President committee. At the Progressive Party nominating convention in July, Robeson took his name out of consideration early in the planning sessions for any headline role. But he gave himself over entirely to electing the Progressive Party ticket and prepared to appear at rallies ranging from the anonymity of high-school gyms to the hoopla of Madison Square Garden—and in every section of the country.21
In anticipation of Wallace’s candidacy, Clark Clifford, part of the liberal wing in the Truman administration, had presented the President in November with a lengthy confidential memo outlining a strategy for the 1948 campaign. In it, Clifford not only predicted that Wallace would run but laid out a plan for destroying his candidacy, a plan that Truman carefully—and successfully—followed. The strategy was shrewd and prescient. “Every effort must be made,” Clifford wrote, “to identify [Wallace] in the public mind with the Communists,” even though, as Clifford acknowledged, the Progressive Party movement could not legitimately be dismissed as Communist-inspired. As a necessary corollary, Clifford further recommended that Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union be maintained at a taut level of unease. Truman himself should remain above the fray, leaving it to “prominent liberals” to attack Wallace directly—a job that the recently formed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) took on with aggressive zeal. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., led the way with The Vital Center, a book linking liberalism to anticommunism and indulging in an inflamed red-baiting rhetoric that prefigured the McCarthy years.22
The Communists, both at home and abroad, made their own profound contribution to the Progressive Party’s problems when the CPUSA decided formally to declare for Wallace. He honorably refused to disavow their support, though he did suggest in one speech that if the CP would run a separate candidate, his new party would lose ten thousand votes but gain three million; still, he insisted on defending the CP’s right, as a legal political entity, to participate fully in American life. He made it clear that he himself was neither a Communist nor a Marxist, but added that he could find “nothing criminal in the advocacy of differing economic and social ideas, however much I differ with them.”23
International developments, meanwhile, further undermined Wallace’s credibility. The Progressives could mount a strong argument that American belligerence had done much in the crucial 1945–46 period to initiate the Cold War, but by 1948 the Soviet Union had severely compromised its aura of injured innocence. The expulsion of Tito’s Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc, the coup in Czechoslovakia and the death of Masaryk, and the blockade of Berlin followed hard one on another, making the earlier argument for the Soviet Union’s essentially defensive posture in reaction to American bellicosity ever less persuasive. As Soviet policy, in tandem with ADA belligerence, combined to make a shambles of Wallace’s foreign-policy position, Truman himself took the high road, radiating bonhomie and dispensing rhetorical largesse to special-interest groups—particularly to the black community. Though he put little emphasis on civil rights during the campaign, and though he was later to ignore or renege on almost all that he did promise, he made some shrewd and large concessions, issuing one executive order calling for desegregation of the armed forces and another creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee—and made the gesture of choosing Harlem to deliver his one major civil-rights address.24
This end play on civil rights ultimately wooed black voters into Truman’s column—where the only real opportunity for legislative progress resided. But early in the campaign Wallace’s strength among blacks was high (a poll in Minnesota in March showed 54 percent of black voters leaning to Wallace), and even at the end he got a much higher proportion of the black vote than the white (17 percent in Harlem, but only 8 percent of the total vote in New York State). Most of the prominent black leadership—pre-eminently Lester Granger and Walter White—did what they could to foster allegiance to Truman, with only Robeson and Du Bois among the front-rank figures working actively for Wallace.25
The Wallace campaign generated considerable excitement and respect within the black community. The Progressives nominated proportionately more black candidates—including Eslanda Robeson to run for secretary of state in Connecticut—and for a wider variety of offices than did the other two parties. And Wallace called repeatedly for equal justice everywhere he went, South as well as North; in the South he took the unprecedented step of refusing to speak before segregated audiences. His defiance of local Jim Crow ordinances—with attendant cross-burnings and egg-splatterings at his rallies—generated considerable emotion on both sides of the racial divide, stirring black enthusiasm and white racism alike.
Robeson himself campaigned in the Deep South, and at no little risk, especially since he put the chief emphasis in all his speeches on the struggle for black rights, not on a defense of Soviet (or an attack on American) foreign policy. Representing in his person the doubly unpopular image of black and red, he was an open target for the aggression of bigots and superpatriots, and it took considerable courage to invade their territory repeatedly. In Memphis, Boss Crump tried to prevent a planned Progressive Party rally featuring Robeson, but a black minister offered a meeting space, and two to three thousand people, white and black, showed up. Much the same happened in Savannah: after being denied the right to appear by the authorities, Robeson and Clark Foreman (the Party’s treasurer) found a warm welcome in a rally sponsored in the black district of the city. On one occasion, traveling in the club car of a train with George Murphy (the radical member of the family that owned the Afro-American newspaper chain) and Wallace, Robeson was slouched down out of sight when they heard two white men discussing with satisfaction the violence they expected the integrated Wallace campaigners to run into south of the Mason-Dixon line; Robeson “got out of his chair by stages, like a djinn coming out of the bottle, and said in this very deep, soft voice, ‘Something’s likely to happen to other people before we get to the Mason-Dixon line.’” Both men got up and left.26
Robeson was deeply moved by the courage of his own people everywhere in the South. The protective cordon they formed around him gave him “a sense of great safety” but, beyond that, he marveled at their refusal to buckle under to terroristic threats against their own persons. At Tampa he met a black preacher whom the Klan had threatened to kill for openly supporting the Progressives; the preacher announced from a sound truck that he wasn’t going “to get out of a party that is fighting for my people … and if anybody wants to find me my address is 500 such-and-such an avenue.” During a Progressive Party meeting at Columbus, Georgia (as Robeson later described it),
the Klan drove up actually in cars, opposite the building, their lights trained on it, and [James] Barfoot, running for governor, says he didn’t know what was going to happen. He walked up to the building, and he saw about a hundred Negroes around, sort of standing around, smoking and saying hello. He invited them up to the meeting, and they said, “No, we’ll stay down here.” And they stayed there, and it was a very fine meeting, and the Klan didn’t move. Now, Barfoot told me … he found out a little later that there was a very good reason why the Klan didn’t move in: because each one of the boys had a gat in his back pocket. There was going to be no disturbance of that Progressive Party meeting. And it’s extremely interesting that these were not Progressive Party Negroes; they were just Negroes who understood that this party was fighting for them.…
In Georgia, too, Larkin Marshall, the black editor of the Macon World, running as the Progressive candidate for the U.S. Senate, reacted to the Klan’s burning a cross on his lawn by putting an advertisement in the paper asking whoever was responsible to come and get the remains; when no one did, he left the charred cross on his lawn for months. “They won’t run me out,” he told Robeson. “They might carry me out, but they’ll never run me out.” Robeson found this spirit all over the South. It gave him hope for the future, regardless of how the ’48 election itself came out—even as the outright murder of other blacks (including several who merely tried to vote) continued to feed his anger.
Robeson ran into personal hostility outside of the South as well. In St. Louis he was denied accommodations at the Statler Hotel. In Indianapolis the state police had to be called out in force to forestall a threatened riot. He was denied the use of a high-school auditorium in Chicago and of university facilities at Ohio State and Michigan State, where the dean of students told reporters that he had checked with the FBI and learned that Robeson “was a known Communist.” Interoffice FBI memos during these months were repeatedly reporting that (in the words of one) Robeson “consistently follows the Communist Party line.” There was apparently frustration at the Bureau at the inability of its agents to turn up “any positive evidence” that Robeson was actually a CP member—but it nonetheless continued to insist that “there is every reason to believe that he may well be.”27
The FBI’s inability to find evidence was not for want of trying. When Robeson made a week-long tour of Hawaii in March 1948 under the auspices of the Longshoremen’s Union, J. Edgar Hoover directed the special agent in Honolulu “to closely follow his activities while he is there to determine if he contacts any Communist Party members or representatives of allied organizations.” Because Larry Brown intensely disliked flying, Earl Robinson, the composer of “Ballad for Americans,” agreed to accompany Robeson on the Hawaiian trip. It was “one of the beautiful times in my life,” Robinson recalls, working and living closely for a week with a man “so loaded with love—the love he gave out, it was beyond belief.” Rapturously received in his concerts, Robeson responded by performing three songs in the language of the islands, having learned them in twenty-four hours, and by telling his union-packed audiences (as Earl Robinson remembers his words), “I stand by you and with you, and as for the Big Five [the companies that controlled sugar production in the islands], I ask you to give them no quarter.” These unabashedly political remarks were not quite what the FBI had been looking for; the special agent had to report back to J. Edgar Hoover that “no information has been developed during the period of his stay that would indicate that Robeson was in Hawaii on a special assignment on behalf of the Communist Party.”28
After returning from Hawaii in late March, Robeson spent April campaigning in Iowa with Charles P. Howard, the Des Moines black attorney and NAACP leader. On arriving in Sioux City, they learned that the superintendent of schools would agree to let Robeson use a high-school auditorium only if he signed an affidavit promising not to make any “un-American statements.” He “politely refused,” Howard wrote in his diary, adding, “It was interesting to observe the dignity with which Robeson handled this situation. He stated simply that he had no objection to signing anything that other speakers were required to sign, but refused to subscribe to any treatment that other American citizens under similar circumstances were not required to subscribe to.” Robeson and Howard took their campaign to a local union hall, but one of its top officers managed to bar its use, and they were likewise frustrated in their efforts to arrange alternate facilities with city officials. Finally, as often before, a black minister came through, offering the use of his church; neither the source of the rescue nor the routine nature of the prejudice that necessitated it came as any particular surprise to Robeson.29
Late in May 1948, he took time out from the campaign to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was holding hearings on a pending bill (Mundt-Nixon) that would require all Communist and “Communist-front” organizations to register (the bill’s significant features would subsequently be incorporated into the McCarran Act of 1950, providing the government with its official rationale for proceeding against “subversives”). Henry Wallace and the Progressives had taken the lead in denouncing the Mundt-Nixon Bill, Wallace characterizing it as an effort “to frighten all the American people into conformity or silence,” and insisting that “our present laws against treason and sabotage are adequate for a democracy, but they aren’t adequate to establish a smoothly functioning police state.” The House passed the bill by a lopsided vote on May 20, and the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on it the following week. Wallace appeared before the committee two days before Robeson and in a blistering statement called the bill “the most subversive legislation ever to be seriously sponsored in the United States Congress.” Referring to Hitler’s campaign against the Communists, Wallace warned that “the suppression of the constitutional rights of Communists is but the prelude to an attack upon the liberties of all the people.”30
Taking the stand on May 31, Robeson reiterated Wallace’s warnings and added some pungent remarks of his own. He testified for an hour and a half; Republican Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan did most of the questioning, with occasional assistance from Chairman Wiley of Wisconsin and periodic jabs from Republican Senator Moore from Oklahoma. Robeson was asked to define what the American Communists “stood for.” “For complete equality of the Negro people,” he shot back—emphasizing his own paramount reason for supporting the Party’s position. He went on to deny that American Communism “is an offshoot of Russian Communism”—other than in the sense that Russian Communism itself could be called an outgrowth of and reaction to the desperate social conditions prevalent in nineteenth-century Europe. And “Are you an American Communist?” Senator Ferguson asked. “That question,” Robeson responded, “has become the very basis of the struggle for American civil liberties,” representing an invasion, among other things, of the constitutional right to a secret ballot—since the CPUSA was a legal entity. Robeson therefore refused to answer the question, though he volunteered the information that he had “many dear friends who are Communists” and he thought “they have done a magnificent job.”31
The Senators were neither pleased nor persuaded. Moving along to the next item in what had become a familiar litany of accusations, they asked Robeson if it wasn’t true that American Communists owed primary allegiance to the Soviet Union. Robeson parried with an end run: “I don’t think they do have as much allegiance to Russia as certain Americans seem to have today, say, to fascist Greece or to Turkey.” And what did he mean by “fascist”? Two things, Robeson replied: a belief in racial superiority and a monopoly of resources in the hands of the few. At the heart of Communism, he said, was an interest in representing the interests and alleviating the suffering of the have-nots.
Would he comply with the Mundt-Nixon Bill, if it were passed? Robeson replied with a question of his own: during World War II, was a Frenchman faced with a law passed by the Vichy government curtailing civil liberties obligated to observe it? No, was his implied answer—he would be obligated to join the Resistance. “I would violate the law,” was Robeson’s spoken response. The Senators preferred their own analogy: surely the American people were better protected in their rights than the Russian people, who faced “liquidation” if they dissented from official policy. Well, said Robeson, “I have been threatened with death two or three times,” and “my sharecropping relatives” in North Carolina faced the daily threat of lynching if they dared assert even their minimal rights.
Did he believe he could “best carry out” his ideals by backing the third party? “I certainly do,” he answered. Did that mean he was “disloyal to the United States”? No, it made him feel “infinitely more loyal to the United States,” since the starting point of the Progressives was “the suffering and the needs of millions.” But “the Communist Party is supporting Wallace,” one of the indignant Senators interjected. “I think they should,” Robeson replied, “because he represents the struggles of the people in this country, as they do. That doesn’t make Mr. Wallace a Communist, though.” Did Robeson think “Communism a better system of government than our own system”? “There are many ways to enlighten the world,” Robeson said, “Socialist systems, Communist systems, our so-called private enterprise systems. Well let’s see which can work better.… We should be able not to think that we have got to wipe something else off the face of the earth.” He believed the Mundt-Nixon Bill was “part of that hysteria”; it would encourage the American people—who today “are extremely confused”—to sacrifice their own civil liberties in the name of a needless holy crusade against Communism.
When the session ended, the gathered reporters questioned the Senators on the committee. Senator Moore told them that “Robeson seems to want to be made a martyr. Maybe we ought to make him one.” Wiley made the comment, “I’m not interested in whether Robeson is a Communist or not. I am interested in the dignity of the committee.” Ferguson added that, since a quorum of the committee was not present, a contempt citation might run into legal problems. Robeson stayed in the capital long enough to join five thousand pickets at the White House protesting the Mundt-Nixon Bill. He told the press that Truman could not justifiably “pass the buck” on civil-rights legislation to Congress and brought the protest to a close by singing “Ol’ Man River” at the foot of the Washington Monument. The Pittsburgh Courier called the racially integrated demonstration “the most impressive ‘march-on-Washington’ since the Bonus March,” but Time insisted it had “so riled some Senators that they angrily trumpeted their determination to push the Mundt-Nixon bill through—although it had been headed for the shelf. That was O.K. with the Communists,” Time asserted. “If the bill became law they would be martyrs. If it didn’t, they could chortle triumphantly that they had killed it.” Robeson returned to the campaign trail.32
Serious divisions opened within the black community over the continuing accusations of “communism” being leveled at the Progressive Party. In September, Lester Granger, head of the Urban League, declared that “Communist decision established the Wallace party, Communist support has given the campaign such impetus as it maintained and Communist strategy determines Progressive party policy.” The division was further accelerated by a momentous rupture in the Council on African Affairs.33
As anti-Communist fervor had mounted nationwide, Doxey Wilkerson, third in command at the Council, noticed that Max Yergan, its executive director, “began to sort of shift with the winds.” Wilkerson also helped to edit The People’s Voice, the militant Harlem weekly Yergan part-owned and published (Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had been its editor-in-chief until 1946, when he severed connection with it as “Communist-dominated”). After Attorney General Tom Clark released his list of subversive “Communist-front” organizations in November 1947 (which included the Council), Wilkerson and Yergan got into a mounting number of disputes over policy pronouncements on both the paper and the Council, and Wilkerson finally went to Ben Davis, Jr., and Henry Winston, two other black members of the Party in leadership positions, to warn them of Yergan’s growing disaffection. As Wilkerson remembers it thirty-five years later, “they sort of discounted” his assessment—“it was almost unthinkable that Max Yergan would be turning.”34
Yet he was. At a meeting of the Council members on February 2, 1948, Yergan argued that the organization should publicly declare its “nonpartisan character,” should openly avow that it was not “identified with any partisan ideology.” Robeson and others insisted that such a statement would play into the hands of “reactionary red-baiters and would not help the Council.” After prolonged debate, Yergan’s suggestion was tabled by the close vote, including proxies, of thirty-four to twenty-nine. The matter was referred to a policy committee, headed by Du Bois, to report its recommendations to the full Council.35
As the policy committee began its deliberations, Yergan first denied its authority and then, that failing, tried to circumvent it. He so obstructed its working that Du Bois finally resigned the chairmanship in protest. Yergan, on his own authority, called a meeting of the full Council for March 12, prompting Alphaeus Hunton, the educational director, to warn the other members that Yergan was planning a “coup” at the meeting and urging them to be present. Robeson telegraphed Yergan asking for a postponement of the meeting until March 25, when he could fly in from the campaign trail to attend.36
The March 25 meeting marked a decisive defeat for Yergan. When a report from the finance committee containing censure of some of his financial transactions was adopted, Yergan and his supporters stalked out of the meeting, claiming that no quorum existed. It did, but barely: twenty-one of the sixty-nine members attended, with sixteen proxies having been sent in—fourteen of them assigned to Robeson—for a bare majority of thirty-seven. William Jay Schieffelin, a white member of the Council, accused Robeson of being “absolutely unfair” in disqualifying Yergan’s proxies—and walked out. The next day Yergan fired Hunton, and on April 5, deciding to go public with his case, called a press conference. That act sealed his fate with the Council’s membership. Yergan told the reporters—and the story was widely printed—that a struggle had broken out “between Communist and anti-Communist factions,” that the Communist faction, led by Robeson, Hunton, and Wilkerson, had become determined to capture the organization as a lever “to swing the Negro vote to the support of Henry A. Wallace,” and that he intended to fight back against their unlawful seizure of power at a meeting of the Council he was calling for April 21.37
Under Robeson’s name, a counterstatement immediately went out to the press, denying (accurately) that the Wallace issue had ever come up at a Council meeting, describing Yergan’s bolt from the previous meeting, rejecting his authority to call a new one, and expressing surprise that “for reasons of his own, and quite in contrast to his former position, Dr. Yergan is now unwilling to challenge the imperialist policy of the U.S. State Department.”38
The schism was now in the open, the skirmishing intense. Yergan persisted in his call for another meeting, Robeson hotly protested the date (fixed for when Yergan knew Robeson would be out of town), and Essie joined the fray by circulating a letter to fellow Council members in which she stressed that “Max Yergan has not—until now—ever challenged the political opinions of Paul Robeson.” She did not, she wrote, know whether any or all of her fellow members were, as Yergan charged, Communists, nor did she consider it any of her business: “I find it surprising that it is now suddenly of such grave concern to Max Yergan, because as a matter of fact, it was in his home on Hamilton Terrace that I first met Earl Browder; this very well known Communist was the guest of honor there.” It seemed to her that the sudden eruption of charges of Communism was “a recognizable part of the frightening and very un-American pattern,” currently abroad in the land, of trying to discredit dissenters. “When we bring up the normal relevant questions of American intervention abroad, high prices, lack of housing, discrimination, political corruption at home, we are met with the irrelevant answer, Communism.” Yergan’s comment to the press that he was “determined to restore” the Council’s “true function” of working to improve conditions in Africa wrongly implied that it had ever been diverted from that function. “If the Council has ever been used for any other purpose, Max Yergan himself has so used it, for he has kept the political, financial and social direction of the Council’s affairs exclusively in his own hands, and we have not been able to say as much as we would like about them.”39
On April 21 the Council members met again in what proved a near-rerun of the March 25 meeting. When Robeson and nine other members arrived at Yergan’s office at the appointed hour, his secretary told them that Yergan was not in and that the meeting would be held downstairs in the library. Yergan never appeared in the library, and so the assembled members proceeded to hold an informal meeting, which was interrupted when Yergan was spotted leaving the building. Robeson and two other members went after him, stopped him on the sidewalk, and demanded an explanation. He told them he had been waiting for them in his office, and since they had failed to appear, the meeting was canceled. In fact, they later learned, Yergan had conducted his own rump gathering with two of his supporters, “elected” a new set of officers to replace everyone except himself, and “dropped” twenty-three Council members from the organization.40
Outraged at this attempt to “thwart a democratic resolution of the problems facing the Council,” the executive board suspended Yergan from the office of executive director on May 26, 1948. Further maneuvers, including legal threats on both sides, continued throughout the summer, with the members of the Council unanimously resolving in its September meeting to discharge Yergan from office and expel him from membership. In his capacity as chairman, Robeson issued a press release expressing gratification that the disruption was at an end and the way clear for the Council “to go forward with its work” in behalf of colonial peoples.41
But in fact the organization had sustained heavy damage. Several of its members, including Mary McLeod Bethune, simply stopped attending. Six formally resigned, including some of the most prestigious—Judge Hubert T. Delany, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Channing Tobias. Whether or not “Communist control” was chiefly responsible for the resignations, Yergan’s charges to that effect, widely publicized as they were, seemed confirmation of the Attorney General’s “subversive” listing for the Council, and under continuing government pressure it slid into decline, finally disbanding in 1955.42
Yergan himself emerged within a few years as an enthusiastic, fullblown Cold Warrior, moving far away from the principles espoused by the Council that he had helped to found. In 1953 he went on assignment to Africa for U. S. News & World Report and then wrote a lengthy article entitled “Africa: Next Goal of Communists” in which he argued that it was necessary to cultivate a “sympathetic and constructive” attitude toward the white government in South Africa, and characterized the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya as “a criminal, conspiratorial movement.” Robeson responded in print: “If one did not know that Yergan was a Negro (no insult intended to my folk—I’m just stating the hard fact of life!), [one] would have to assume that the article was written by a white State Department mouthpiece assigned to working out a formula for maintaining white rule throughout Africa.” In the early sixties, Yergan joined the conservative black columnist George Schuyler in forming a right-wing lobby called the Katanga Freedom Fighters in support of Moise Tshombe’s separatist movement in the Congo, and then in 1966 served as cochair with William A. Rusher (publisher of The National Review) of the American-African Affairs Association, a group designed to “save” Africa from Communism by propping up the breakaway, segregationist regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia.43
The same charges of “Communism” that split the Council grew loud in the country at large as the Progressive Party campaign neared its conclusion. On July 20 the FBI raided the national headquarters of the CPUSA and, under the Smith Act, indicted a dozen of its leaders for “advocating forcible overthrow of the government and membership in organizations which did same.” The ensuing trial was to carry over into the next several years. Robeson, Du Bois, Charles P. Howard, and Roscoe C. Dungee (editor of The Black Dispatch of Oklahoma City) immediately sent out a letter to black leaders warning that the “round-up” of national Communist leaders “reminds us all too much of the first step fascist governments always take before moving to destroy the democratic rights of all minority groups.” Unless an aroused public put a halt to the government’s campaign, the letter warned, “we Negro Americans will lose even our right to fight for our rights.” They solicited signatures to an enclosed statement emphasizing that “we raise here no defense of the principles of the Communist Party”; the concern instead was to protect “the right of all minorities to fight for the kind of America they consider just and democratic. Unless this right is protected, the Negro people can never hope to attain full citizenship.” Eventually the statement got nearly four hundred signatures, but the “Negro leaders” listed as endorsing it were in fact a relatively obscure collection of Progressive Party congressional candidates, trade-unionists, clergymen, businessmen, artists, and miscellaneous others—with the actor Canada Lee perhaps the single name, other than the original four sponsors of the statement, that might have drawn national recognition.44
The dwindling base of support for the Robeson-Du Bois position was further highlighted in September, when the NAACP board voted to sack Du Bois from his position as director of special research. The action was widely deplored in the black community, and Robeson devoted nearly his entire speech at a Progressive Party rally in Chicago on September 14 to denouncing the summary dismissal of “this patriarch of the Negro people,” this man who had refused to permit the NAACP “to be utilized as a tool for the Truman Administration in the prosecution of a foreign policy that would enslave Negro peoples throughout the world while paying lip service to democracy at home.” But the dismissal stuck. And so did the red label to the Progressives. By late summer the lesser-of-two-evils theory had come to hold sway with many liberals; they preferred to believe in the authenticity of Truman’s newly acquired Rooseveltian rhetoric, because the prospect of the election of Republican Thomas E. Dewey was abhorrent. The persistent charge that the Progressives were “reds,” in combination with the fear that Dewey would waltz through any division in liberal ranks, drove off large numbers of Progressive Party adherents. The only remaining question was just how severe its electoral defeat would be.45
Robeson maintained an optimistic stance, at least for public consumption, up to the end of the campaign. In a radio broadcast with Henry Wallace on October 29, he described himself as full of “tremendous hope,” and in strong language denounced Truman’s civil-rights program as “a program on paper—of words—it has nothing to do with the background of terror, the atmosphere of horror in which most Negroes live.… No, Truman is with Dewey—words, only words: empty lies, vicious lies. Truman is with the Dixiecrats in deeds.”46
On election night Robeson sang to the hundreds of campaign workers and supporters who gathered at Progressive Party headquarters in New York to await the returns. They proved even more disheartening than expected. Wallace’s popular vote was only slightly over one million—less than the total given to J. Strom Thurmond, presidential candidate of those Dixiecrats who had bolted the Democratic Party in protest over its promise to extend civil rights to blacks. In electing Harry Truman, the nation seemed to be giving sanction to his “get-tough” policy with Communists abroad and at home—and their “sympathizers” as well. Truman was to waste no time in exercising that mandate.