Breakdown
(1955–1956)
On the national scene, scattered signs were emerging to indicate a thaw in the conservative deep-freeze. The army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954 precipitated a Senate censure vote against McCarthy on December 2. Cold War tensions, too, began to dissipate by 1955: the long-standing Russian-American deadlock over a treaty with Austria was finally broken, a United Nations Conference on Disarmament produced some positive results, and an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting eased relations so notably that “the Geneva spirit” became a tag reference for every intimation of international cooperation. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court pendulum took a swing toward the liberal side; the Justices modified a host of loyalty-security laws, reasserted concern with protecting the rights of political dissenters, and, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, struck down segregation in the nation’s public schools. Such developments, of course, were auguries only, not automatic guarantors of a new day.
Robeson hailed these “tokens of sanity,” these “hopeful signs that the commonsense of rank-and-file America will yet prevail,” but he was not ready to discount the power of the “atom-maniacs in Washington.” He noted that one of the immediate effects of the Supreme Court’s shift to the left was to produce a countervailing shift to the right, uniting Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans behind a defense of segregation and militant anti-Communism. He was therefore not surprised when the black Communist Claude Lightfoot in Chicago, and Ben Gold, the Communist leader of the Fur and Leather Union, drew jail sentences, when William Patterson was remanded for contempt, and when Ben Davis, after serving nearly four years in the penitentiary, was rearrested. Robeson spoke out at public rallies in their defense and in the 1954 fall elections supported the American Labour Party in New York State, which ran John T. McManus, general manager of the National Guardian, for governor. Robeson did not know it at the time, but the Justice Department was giving thought to indicting him as well. Despite its best efforts, however, the FBI was still unable to come up with any “specific information from any source” directly linking him to the Communist Party.1
Early in 1955, however, Robeson was subpoenaed to testify before a joint state legislative committee. It had been empowered to investigate alleged misappropriations in philanthropic fund-raising charged against three “Communist-front” organizations with which he was closely affiliated: the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and the Civil Rights Congress. The prosecution claimed that “millions of dollars given by public-spirited citizens for a variety of causes” had been “diverted to subversive uses.” Dorothy Parker, the economist George Marshall, and Dashiell Hammett (who had headed the New York State Civil Rights Congress from 1946 to 1951, when he went to prison for six months for contempt of court) were among the witnesses called during the three-day hearing; Hammett testified that “Communist to me is not a dirty word. When you’re working for the advancement of mankind it never occurs to you if a guy’s a Communist or not.” Robeson’s turn on the stand proved stormy. He said he was “very proud” to be a national director of the Civil Rights Congress and, when asked for specifics about how the CRC raised and dispensed funds, replied, “I sing for Hadassah and the Sons of Israel and any number of worthwhile causes and no one asks me how much money they raise.” The New York Times pronounced his answer evasive, and an editorial in the Herald Tribune fulminated against “Red-fronters” whose “refusal to give accounting” of their “dangerous … double-dealing … charity rackets … cannot be tolerated.” No, Robeson decided, the Cold War had not yet evaporated, any more than the national climate had been miraculously purged of unbalanced suspicion.2
He remained wary. Delighted though he was with the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision—he characterized it as “a magnificent stride forward in the long battle of colored Americans for full equality”—he noted the white South’s negative reaction and warned of the need for black vigilance and firmness in equal measure. “As might be expected,” he wrote in Freedom, “the Dixiecrats have responded with howls of anguish and threats of retaliation.… The planters have organized a new Ku Klux Klan. They have laundered it a bit, given it a face-lifting, and called it White Citizens Councils. But no Negro in Mississippi will be fooled. He knows the Klan when he sees it, by whatever name it’s called.” Robeson hailed Mississippi’s “heroic” black people for the “stirring chapter” they were writing in the history of resistance and, four months after the Supreme Court decision, called on blacks everywhere to “fight to see that it is enforced”; he warned, in the face of spreading white opposition, that the decision could turn out to be merely “a token gesture,” yet another paper promise falling far short of the “full freedom” he continued to demand. Robeson’s health might be weakening, his outlets for singing and speaking all but gone, but his tenacity, his galvanizing sorrow held.3
He used the occasion of a concert booking in California early in 1955—his earlier hope for a full-scale tour of the state had been dashed by a lack of response—to express enthusiasm about the unity movement developing between black organizations to break Jim Crow barriers in television and radio, and about the recent election of the radical Norman Manley to head the government in the British West Indies (“a powerful voice for dignity and equality of colored peoples everywhere”). While Robeson was in Los Angeles, the front wheel twice came off the car in which he was being driven by Frank Whitley. There had been a similar incident in St. Louis in 1947, and there would be two more in 1958. Whitley’s conclusion was that the wheel had been tampered with, but if so, the uncertain evidence makes it impossible to say by whom—whether racists, red-baiters, or even, conceivably, federal agents (who had both Robeson and Whitley under close surveillance in L.A.), acting either under orders or on their own.4
When the conference of Asian and African nations—denounced in advance by Secretary of State Dulles as a misguided form of self-segregation—assembled in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 Robeson sent a message hailing the gathering as a certain sign of “the power and the determination of the peoples of these two great continents to decide their own destiny.” Prior to the Bandung gathering, William Patterson wrote directly to Prime Minister U Nu of Burma appealing for a statement from Asian and African leaders deploring the continuing “persecution” of Robeson by his own government. Instead, at Bandung, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., took it upon himself to rebuke Robeson and to dismiss “Communist propaganda” that no progress was being made in the United States toward equality for its black citizens. Essie sent an angry response to The Afro-American in which she accused Powell of exaggerating the amount of progress made, but Robeson himself continued to sound a positive note. Invited to sing and speak at the City College of New York (having been barred four years earlier) and also at Swarthmore, he expressed delight at the overflow crowds, at “the stirrings of new life” among students, at the “fresh breeze of free expression beginning to filter into the stale atmosphere of the cold-war classrooms.”5
Robeson’s often reiterated public optimism was a function both of temperamental expansiveness and of a proud refusal to let the enemy know he had been hit, to concede the toll taken from a decade of being followed by agents, of having his mail intercepted, his phone conversations bugged, his public appearances monitored and reported. Years of downplaying, perhaps even to himself, the wearing negative effects of his confinement and of refusing, as well, fully to acknowledge the profound psychic costs—in one so naturally affirmative—of having always to maintain a stance of opposition, contributed to building up a potentially explosive amount of anguish and rage. The crunch—the moment when anguish overwhelmed affirmation—finally came in late 1955, triggered by a particularly bruising round in the ongoing fight to regain his passport.6
The receipt of several unusually appealing offers from abroad became the occasion for going back once more into court. From Prague had come an invitation to appear in concert at the National Opera House, from the British Workers’ Sports Association the prospect of doing a series of concerts in celebration of the association’s silver jubilee, from the leading cultural agency in Tel Aviv an inquiry about coming to Israel, and from Mosfilm Studios in the Soviet Union the offer to star in a planned film version of Othello. Singly each invitation presented a notable opportunity; taken together they held out the real promise of a restoration of Robeson’s international career. There was reason to believe, this time around, that the courts might finally rule favorably on his application. In February 1955 a U.S. district court had returned a passport to Otto Nathan (Albert Einstein’s executor), and in subsequent legal actions passports had been given back to Clark Foreman, Joseph Clark (foreign editor of the Daily Worker), the atomic scientist Dr. Martin Kamen, and others previously refused on security grounds. On May 10, 1955, with Robeson’s hopes higher than they had been for years, his attorneys, Leonard Boudin and James T. Wright, started up the judicial process again by making application to the Passport Division of the State Department. The application was immediately denied; Robeson was again told he had to sign a “non-Communist” affidavit before a passport for him could even be considered.7
Late in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Max Schachtman—whose organization, the Independent Socialist League, was on the Attorney General’s “subversive” list—that “the right to travel is a national right” that could not be withheld except by due process of law. The ruling was widely hailed as historic and also as presenting an exact precedent for justifying the return of Robeson’s passport. Following that logic, Robeson’s attorneys reapplied in mid-July. “In view of recent court decisions,” his application read, “and the granting of passports to others whose passports were previously refused, I insist that my right to travel be granted at once.” He and his attorneys were called to Washington for a conference.
In the course of the seventy-five-minute meeting on July 18, the State Department officials promised “careful and prompt” attention to Robeson’s passport request, and he left Washington feeling buoyed. His spirits got a further boost a few days later, when official word arrived that he would henceforth be allowed to travel to Canada—though still not to other places where Americans normally went without a passport, like Hawaii, Jamaica, and British Guiana. Singing his fourth annual Peace Arch concert at the Canadian boundary line the following week, Robeson told the crowd that he was jubilant at the partial victory and predicted he would soon be granted the right to travel anywhere.8
He was wrong: the State Department quickly announced that it had decided not to issue Robeson a passport. His attorneys immediately took the matter before Judge Burnita S. Mathews in a hearing on August 16 at the district court in Washington. Judge Mathews had recently returned a passport to Clark Foreman (for whom Boudin had also been counsel), but in the Robeson case she decided that the plaintiff “had not exhausted his administrative remedies”—meaning he had not signed a “non-Communist” affidavit. Leo A. Rover, the federal district attorney representing the State Department, argued that the Robeson case was different, that “this man” (he was called “Mr. Robeson” only once during the hearing) was “one of the most dangerous men in the world.” In Leonard Boudin’s recollection, Rover addressed the court in “stentorian tones,” passionate in his conviction that Robeson was a direct threat to the security of the United States. In accepting Rover’s argument and denying Robeson his passport, Judge Mathews blasted his raised hopes. The effect on him, in Boudin’s opinion, was “traumatic”—he keenly felt that he had been singled out for unjust treatment.9
So did the black press. “Why is the State Department more afraid of Robeson than of the whites to whom it is giving passports?” asked J. A. Rogers, the Pittsburgh Courier columnist. The obvious answer was echoed widely in black newspapers: racism. As Rogers put it, “it’s getting to the point where to prove you’re not a subversive you must be a Ku Kluxer, a McCarthyite, or some other ‘thousand percent American,’ that is a Fascist at heart.” The conservative New York Amsterdam News stood apart from most of the black press in calling on Robeson to sign the affidavit: “We think he should level with all of the necessary facts in the case, if he is really in dead earnest.” In response, Robeson issued a public statement thanking the black news media for their support and taking issue with the Amsterdam News for ignoring two important facts: that the affidavit was not a standard requirement demanded of other Americans, and that he was not being charged with membership in the Communist Party or accused of any illegal act, such as espionage, for which he would be subject to indictment. An affidavit had been demanded of him, Robeson argued, because he had refused to keep silent about the treatment of blacks in America and of people of color throughout the colonial world. He suggested the State Department stop persecuting him for advocating better conditions for blacks and start prosecuting those in Mississippi “who have unleashed against our people a reign of terror and bloodshed.” He was a “threat” (a security risk) because he told the truth.10
The State Department had openly acknowledged the accuracy of Robeson’s interpretation as early as 1952 when, in a legal brief submitted to the Court of Appeals, it had argued that the revocation of his passport was justified because his activity in behalf of independence for the colonial peoples of Africa was potentially a “diplomatic embarrassment.” At the August 1955 hearing, U.S. Attorney Rover had reconfirmed that Robeson’s interest in colonial liberation abroad and equality for blacks at home constituted the basis for the animus against him. In explaining to Judge Mathews why Robeson was peculiarly “dangerous,” Rover had pointed directly and solely to his speeches and writings: “During the concert tours of foreign countries he [Robeson] repeatedly criticized the conditions of Negroes in the United States,” and in his message to the Bandung conference he had asserted—as, indeed, he had—that “the time has come when the colored peoples of the world will no longer allow the great natural wealth of their countries to be exploited and expropriated by the Western world while they are beset by hunger, disease and poverty.”11
To deny black Americans the right to disclose their grievances abroad was tantamount to denying them one historic means they had always employed for winning their struggle at home. As early as 1830 the black abolitionist Reverend Nathaniel Paul had gone to England to promote the antislavery cause, later followed by Charles L. Remond, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, who in 1845 had said, “So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.” This historical point was forcefully made the following year in an amicus curiae brief that a group of black Americans submitted in support of Robeson’s passport claim. The brief further pointed out that Robeson’s views were in fact wholly in accord with officially declared U.S. opposition to colonialism and with its formal ratification of the Charter of the Organization of American States, which, among other things, supported the right to work and the right to free speech. Had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (the brief went on) once raised his voice to denounce the persecution of black people in the South—for example, over the recent murder of Emmett Till—Afro-Americans would feel less need to look overseas for support. Instead Dulles had spoken out in support of the Portuguese claim to Goa and—exercising his constitutional right to utter unorthodox views—had issued his notorious “brink-of-war” statement, bringing down on his head the rebuke of Governor Harriman of New York, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and ex-President Harry Truman, who said Dulles had “brought dishonor to our national reputation of truth and honesty.” No one, however, had suggested that Dulles’s passport be revoked.12
The powerful voices and arguments raised in Robeson’s behalf failed to budge the State Department. And so, after a brief period of high hopes, Robeson was flat up against the fact that he remained, in his words, “a prisoner in his native land.” Because his expectations had soared, his ensuing disappointment was proportionately great. Six weeks after Judge Mathews’s decision returned him to square one in the passport fight, Robeson noticed that he was passing blood in his urine. He consulted the young black physician Aaron Wells, who was on the staff of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, had occasionally treated Essie, and was also physician to the Ben Robeson family. Paul confided to Wells that he thought the trouble might be the result of gonorrhea he had had as a younger man, but Wells told him the trouble was a degenerative condition of the prostate and recommended surgery with McKinley Wiles, a urologist at Sydenham. Nearing his fifty-eighth birthday, Robeson had only been in a hospital once (for a football injury) and, as both his son and Helen Rosen remember it, was “frightened stiff.” His nerves were already raw from the passport fight, and the accumulated strain of years of surveillance by the FBI fueled his fear of what might “be done” to him in the hospital, a fear given a certain plausibility by the government’s demonstrably malignant attitude toward him. He decided that he had cancer and was going to die. The last few days before entering Sydenham, he kept telling Paul, Jr., “If something happens to me, please do this, and that,” and revising his will.13
He did have a difficult operation—some friends thought it had been “botched”—and suffered considerable pain in the postoperative period (both the white and the black press reported he had been operated on “for an abdominal obstruction”). His three-week stay in the hospital, with round-the-clock private nurses for most of that time, proved a grim experience. Released early in November, he decided not to return to Ben’s parsonage but to take up life again with Essie. Since he and Essie had gone almost entirely separate ways after the sale of the Enfield house, his agreement to let her buy 16 Jumel Terrace in Harlem and his decision to take up his own residence there surprised many of his friends. Lee (Mrs. Revels) Cayton recalled in bemusement a joking remark Paul had made earlier: “I’ll never be in that rocking chair.”14
But the decision had its own logic. Essie had herself been ill that summer, and the diagnosis had turned out to be cancer, leading to a radical mastectomy. She kept the news a tight secret, determined, with her usual grit, to live out her life at full steam and without the pity of others. In fact she made a good recovery and it would be several years before she would have a recurrence, but at the time the prognosis was chancy and Paul felt he owed it to Essie to go back and live with her again. Besides, he needed her, needed the approval of black public opinion which a return to her side would create, and needed, too, beset by the debilitating effects of political repression and physical decline, her competent, efficient ministrations. It had been convenient in the forties, for a man bent on avoiding an exclusive commitment to any one woman, determined to lead several lives simultaneously, to be able to point to the existence of a formal marriage that actually made no difficult demands on him. Now, during the mid-fifties, older, unwell, and unnerved, less interested in romantic attachments and sexual adventures, he was tired of living in other people’s homes, and his primary need was for comfort and stability. He knew Essie wanted—had always wanted—him back again, even if only in name. He knew she would manage and organize his life as no one else could, protecting him completely while being careful not to impose any requirements other than his formal presence in the same house. Paul needed to be taken care of again, and Essie was happy to work hard again at the job.
Besides, she was far more of a political creature than in her youth. Her views on the Soviet Union now closely coincided with Paul’s, and over the years she had become powerfully engaged with the struggle for black freedom and against colonialism. She remained more elitist than Paul, less alienated from the white power structure, less profoundly identified with the working-class poor, white and black, less ideological and theoretical, less responsive to Party discipline, but was nonetheless, in her awareness and commitment, a more acceptable political mate than she had once been.15
In 1955 Essie was accredited to the UN as correspondent for New World Review, but in between her journalistic chores she delighted in having a new house to fix up. Resuming her role as world-beating shopper, she raced off to auctions looking for bargains, and her close friend Freda Diamond often came up to Jumel Terrace to give her professional help with decorating. At one point Essie saved money by buying up parachute material to use for draperies; at another, deciding they couldn’t afford new carpeting on a much-reduced income, she located miles of thick used beige and taupe carpets, bought them for a song, and, after “scientifically” studying printed instructions, consulting a local Armenian tradesman, and purchasing the necessary tools, laid them herself. In her spare time she supervised Paul’s diet and welcomed her grandchildren for occasional Saturday-night sleepovers.16
Even so, Paul’s recovery was slow. In December 1955 he consulted Dr. Morris Perlmutter, whose partner, Ed Barsky, had performed the mastectomy on Essie. Perlmutter found elevated blood pressure and a “somewhat enlarged” heart, but when Robeson returned for a second visit, in January 1956, both conditions had disappeared. Perlmutter therefore decided that it was all right for Robeson to keep a concert date in February in Toronto, where he had been invited by his old friends the Mine and Mill workers after the State Department restored his right to cross the border into Canada. On February 7, along with Alan Booth, his temporary accompanist, and Lloyd L. Brown, who had been helping out in a general managerial capacity, Robeson left the United States for the first time in six years. He went straight to the national Mine, Mill convention in Sudbury, Ontario, telling the delegates that “no attacks from any quarter will force me to tread backward one inch,” and then stayed on in Canada to fulfill other engagements until the end of the month. For his Toronto concert in Massey Hall, every one of the twenty-eight hundred seats was filled, and he was given a standing ovation when he stepped onto the stage. The critics commented on how much thinner he was—“almost frail”—and lamented that his pacing seemed off and his vocal color dimmed; still, they hailed the continuing power of his “magnetic” presence. Robeson ended the concert with a dramatic reading from Othello and from Pablo Neruda’s Let the Rail Splitter Awake, then spoke a few words to the adoring audience: he had, he said, but one purpose in life, “to fight for my people that they shall walk this earth as free as any man.”17
The trip did not mark, as Robeson had hoped, a restoration of his health. No sooner had he returned to the States than he was hit with a serious blow: a U.S. Court of Appeals decision not to overrule the State Department’s refusal to grant him a passport. Then, four months later, Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress were published in The New York Times. In contrast to the many white Communists who went to pieces over the Khrushchev report, deserting the CPUSA in droves, few black members left the Party, preferring to read Khrushchev’s revelations as a sign of renewed hope, an indication that the U.S.S.R. was about to return to the purity of its earlier revolutionary goals. Even so, it would be the calculus of phony heroics to claim—as some of Robeson’s intimates do—that the Khrushchev report had no impact on him. Such an interpretation would reduce a greathearted man to a wooden warrior. He was, demonstrably, mortal—susceptible to disappointment, weariness, despondency—if anything, more susceptible than most, given his enormous capacity for empathy. He did, however, make the decision not to comment on his reactions to anyone, instead maintaining silence and outward equanimity, and even managing, on March 10, to show up at a party celebrating William Z. Foster’s birthday. But within the week he suffered a recurrence of urinary-tract infection, this time followed by an emotional collapse as well.18
His dream had been closing down with an abrupt vengeance of late: some nine months before the Khrushchev revelations, and simultaneous with the failure of his 1955 passport appeal, both Freedom and the Council on African Affairs had suspended their operations. Then had come the prostate surgery, which, especially when coinciding with a set of external pressures, does frequently bring on depression. In Robeson’s case, however, his initial bout of what would later be called “bipolar disorder” was primarily manic (though it turned to severe depression two months later). At first, instead of confusion, fatigue, paralysis of will, lack of motivation, inability to concentrate or conceptualize—the classic symptoms of depression—he became, according to his son, “a dynamo of intellectual energy,” much of it going into compulsive and vocal elaboration of what he claimed was a universal music theory based on the pentatonic scale. The universality of the pentatonic scale (what amounts to the five-note harmonics of the black keys on a piano) in folk music around the world is a “discovery” as indisputable as it is unoriginal—it is a scale, as Pete Seeger has said, “as natural to music as making a basket is once you’ve learned how to twist a thread.” Musicologists do disagree, however, as to whether the harmonic scale is built into the sound of wind and string instruments or has been historically transmitted primarily through human contact—a point of disputation in which Robeson had scant interest and to which he made no theoretical contribution. His concern—to the point of obsession when in an agitated state—was in the proven universality of the pentatonic scale and in the case that could be extrapolated from that proof for the commonality of human experience. He would tell Helen Rosen and others that in solving the riddles of Bach he would somehow succeed in solving the problems of the world; and once thrillingly announced to Freda Diamond that he saw similarities between cantorial liturgy and some parts of Bach’s masses, therefore “proving” that Bach was a converted Jew.19
Helen Rosen, one of the very few people allowed to see him during these months, confirms the obsessive zeal with which he went “on and on” about the pentatonic interconnection of practically everything (trying out his theories on the composer Marc Blitzstein, Robeson got angry when it became clear that Blitzstein, attempting to be polite, was in fact “astonished and appalled”). When Paul stayed overnight at the Rosens’ place, Helen would sleep with one ear cocked, concerned about what he might do. At four o’clock one stormy winter morning she discovered him trying to leave the house; when she asked him where he was going, he said he had to get a book to track down an idea he’d just gotten about his pentatonic theory. “He didn’t know what he was doing,” in Helen’s opinion. On another day he seemed so “disheveled” to her when she visited Jumel Terrace that, coming downstairs from his bedroom and finding Revels Cayton and Ben Davis in the living room, she couldn’t restrain her tears. “I can’t bear to see him like this,” she said. Revels and Ben tried to persuade her that Paul would be all right. Although he did improve—indeed, judged by externals, would soon appear entirely normal—in Helen’s opinion he was “never again quite the same.”20
His physician Dr. Aaron Wells listened to him rattle on about pentatonics and how he intended to learn more languages in order to prove additional similarities between seemingly disparate cultures, and decided he was “off the wall.” Wells prescribed sleeping pills; they didn’t work. Dr. Perlmutter suggested a psychiatric consultation, and a psychiatrist friend of Ed Barsky’s did come to see Robeson, who refused to cooperate. Wells believed Robeson was in “deep trouble” psychologically but that the problem might have an essential organic component as well, perhaps the onset of some form of “early senility triggered by underlying arteriosclerosis.” Perlmutter thought otherwise, believing his condition had resulted from the combined stress of prostate surgery and the accumulated pressure built up from years of harassment and confinement—though warning that medical diagnosis, particularly after the fact, is not “an exact science.”21
By the middle of May, Robeson had lapsed into a deeply depressed state. With the doctors in disagreement and with Robeson refusing to see a therapist, he simply stayed in his room at Jumel Terrace and remained almost totally inactive, going nowhere and seeing almost no one except family. Then, just as he seemed to have reached rock bottom, word arrived from Washington that he had been subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as part of its investigation into “passport irregularities by Communist sympathizers.”22
The doctors advised him not to go, and even wrote letters to HUAC declaring him unfit to give testimony without serious risk to his health (Wells, in his letter, overplayed Robeson’s minor cardiac condition in order to downplay rumors of an emotional collapse, but the prostate surgeon, Dr. Wiles, did emphasize in the letter he wrote that “stress” had produced Robeson’s “weakened condition”). HUAC granted Robeson a two-week postponement but did so reluctantly and hoped to use the delay as a way of trapping him. Don Appell of HUAC phoned Wick of the FBI to say “it occurred to the staff of the Committee” that if it could be shown Robeson left his house between May 29 (when he had been scheduled to appear) and June 12 (his new date), “it will be possible for the Committee to cite him for contempt”; HUAC asked the FBI to inform the committee of “his movements.” (A note on the memo, in what appears to be J. Edgar Hoover’s handwriting, reads, “I don’t think we should be making investigations for the House Committee.”) Beyond the two-week postponement, Robeson refused to request a further delay. He “insists upon making a trip to Washington, D.C., which he considers urgent,” Wells wrote in disapproval to Milton Friedman (whom Robeson had retained to represent him before HUAC), and was disregarding Wells’s opinion that “at this time he should not make any public appearances.”23
Essie and Paul, Jr., along with Milton Friedman, Lloyd Brown, and William Patterson, accompanied Paul to Washington. Just before he entered the hearing room, he appeared so depressed and his eyes looked so vacant that it was doubtful he could go on. Friedman got Paul to agree that on prearranged signal he would ask for time out to consult with counsel. Essie told Freda Diamond that she had decided to pull a fainting spell if Paul’s testimony seemed to be going haywire. But, to everyone’s surprise, he performed with élan. His steady, even caustic testimony was all the more remarkable because the committee did what it could to unnerve him further—refusing to let him read the prepared statement he had brought (he had accurately predicted in the statement that “those who are trying to gag me here and abroad will scarcely grant me the freedom to express myself fully in a hearing controlled by them”) and, ignoring all pretense of discussing the purported focus of its investigation on passports, took every opportunity to goad him into answering whether he was a member of the Communist Party.24
The hour-long session proved stormy, the committee members gunning throughout for an angle to justify throwing the book at him, taunting him with implied accusations, and reading into the record previous and tainted testimony from professional informers like Manning Johnson. Robeson, on his part, at first cagily parried blows, then, toward the end, bellowed at his tormentors in full defiance. “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” asked Representative Gordon Scherer (Republican, Ohio), not two minutes into the hearing, and implying that Robeson’s membership now was the only unresolved question. “What is the Communist Party?” Robeson responded, then added, “As far as I know it is a legal party … a party of people who have sacrificed for my people.…” HUAC Counsel Arens persisted, “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” This time Robeson gave a tart reply: “Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see?” Pressed yet again, he took the Fifth Amendment and told the committee to “forget it.”25
Arens moved on to the tired accusation, which the FBI had failed for ten years to prove, that Robeson’s Communist Party name was “John Thomas.” Robeson burst out laughing—as Essie later wrote, “the idea of this world-known giant with the fabulous voice trying to hide himself under an assumed name” was absurd. Recovering his gravity, Robeson replied, “My name is Paul Robeson, and anything I have to say or stand for I have said in public all over the world—and that is why I am here today.” The committee was neither amused nor impressed. Chairman Francis Walter—one of the architects of the McCarran-Walter Act—took up the cudgels, doing his best in a series of questions to assert Robeson’s friendship with a variety of Soviet espionage agents. Feigning not to recognize Walter, Robeson asked if he was “the author of all of the bills that are going to keep all kinds of decent people out of the country.” No, Walter replied, “only your kind.” “Colored people like myself,” Robeson shot back. Arens then confronted Robeson with the 1948 testimony of Max Yergan: “It became clear to me that there was a Communist core within the Council [on African Affairs].… Paul Robeson was … certainly a part of that Communist-led core.” Robeson replied: “I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second class citizens in this U.S. of America.… You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people.…” Walter cited Jackie Robinson’s disparaging testimony about Robeson from 1949 as proof that he did not represent his people, and when Robeson replied “that in his heart” Robinson “would take back a lot of what” he had said about him, Arens countered with the flat assertion of Thomas W. Young (the black editor of the conservative Guide Publishing Company) that Robeson “does not speak for the masses of the Negro people whom he has so shamelessly deserted.”26
When Robeson asked to read from other black publications and to quote from other black leaders about his reputation, he was denied permission; Representative Kearney (Republican, New York) suggested that instead he read “from some of the citations you have received from Stalin.” He had been cited, Robeson retorted, for his efforts for peace, and he asked, “Are you for war, Mr. Walter?” Then he repeated a new variation of his own 1949 Paris statement that “it was unthinkable to me that any people would take up arms in the name of an Eastland [Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a rabid segregationist], to go against anybody.” That, in turn, induced various committee members to scoff at his notion that blacks would not fight against the Soviet Union, to which Robeson in turn retorted that in 1956 it was still “perfectly clear” that, taken as a whole, the nine hundred million colored peoples of the world would not go to war in defense of Western imperialism.27
From there, what remained of civility gave way. Scherer asked Robeson why he had not remained in Russia. “Because my father was a slave,” he responded, “and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” Why had he sent his son to school in the Soviet Union? To spare him from racial prejudice, Robeson answered. “What prejudice are you talking about?” Walter asked. “You were graduated from Rutgers.” Robeson tried to explain that “the success of a few Negroes including myself or Jackie Robinson” did not atone for the fact that thousands of black families in the South had a yearly income of seven hundred dollars, living still in a kind of semislavery. “I’m glad you called our attention to [the] slave problem,” Arens quipped. “While you were in Soviet Russia, did you ask them there to show you the slave labor camps?”28
That was as close as the committee came to landing a body blow, but Robeson refused it. This deeply stubborn, angry man would neither denounce nor defend Stalin’s crimes, choosing instead to place them in the context of the United States’ crimes against black people. The Soviet Union’s problems were its own problems, he thundered: “I’m interested in the place I am in, the country where I can do something about it.” He pounded so hard on the table, Milton Friedman feared his fist might go through it. As far as he knew, Robeson insisted, the Soviet slave camps were occupied by “fascist prisoners who had murdered millions of the Jewish people and who would have wiped out millions of the Negro people could they have gotten hold of them. That is all I know about that.” He would not discuss the camps further, he added, “with the people who have murdered 60 million of my people”; back “among the Russian people some day singing for them, I will discuss it there. It is their problem.” After a few more exchanges of insults and Robeson’s shouted insistence that the committee members were the true “un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” a furious Chairman Walter banged down the gavel and adjourned the hearing. Robeson got in the last word: “you should adjourn this forever, that is what I say.”29
The indignant committee members immediately retired behind closed doors, and within minutes voted unanimously to recommend that Robeson be cited for contempt. “There was no contempt,” Robeson told a reporter outside the building. “I answered every question. I was just standing my ground.” His counsel, Milton Friedman, noted that only the House of Representatives had the power to vote an actual contempt citation and predicted that Congress would not act on the committee’s recommendation. Robeson had indeed shown contempt, blistering contempt for the committee. But the legal grounds for a contempt citation were narrow: failure to appear or failure to answer questions. Trying to get around that limitation, Chairman Walter argued that Robeson’s “entire conduct” at the hearing, his “personal attacks on the Committee,” and in particular his “smear” of Senator Eastland were sufficient grounds for a citation. The House disagreed, refusing, finally, to take any action against him.30
Back in New York that same day, Robeson got on the phone with Ben Davis (the FBI got on the phone, too) and told him he thought that it had gone “fine.” Davis had received an eye-witness report from William Patterson and agreed that Robeson had done “a grand job.” So did a host of political fans and supporters. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham, sent their “congratulations,” and Mary Helen Jones reported from California that her phone “rang all night” with “people expressing their admiration for you.… You made such fools out of them.… The Negro Community is strictly in your corner.” James Aronson, executive editor of the National Guardian, wrote Robeson that he had “cheered the reports of your exchanges.… Keep yourself whole; you are sorely needed,” and Aubrey Williams of Southern Farmer congratulated him “on one of your finest performances, and God knows you have given some great performances in your life time.” The black press was also warmly supportive. “Mr. Robeson Is Right,” headlined the editorial in The Afro-American, agreeing with him that House members “could more profitably spend their time passing civil rights measures and bringing in for questioning” white supremacists. Thomas Flemming in the San Francisco Sun Reporter wrote that Robeson “says the things which all [blacks] wish to say about color relations,” while Horace Cayton in the Pittsburgh Courier challenged the government either to prosecute Robeson if it actually had any evidence he was engaged in a “Communist conspiracy” or, if not, to restore his right to travel.31
The confrontation did wonders for Robeson’s spirits. A month later he was able to make a three-day visit to New Jersey, where Ernest Thompson, a black officer in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, arranged a successful series of get-togethers with black groups, deliberately keeping interested whites and CP functionaries at a distance—Thompson, among others, felt the CP had misused Robeson in the past by keeping him too distant from blacks. A few weeks later Essie was writing Rockmore that Paul was “well and happy.” (By the early fall, he was even back to the point where he once again had a concert canceled for political reasons, this time in Newark.)32
In November, with the U.S.S.R.’s occupation of Hungary in process, Paul and Essie attended the Soviet Embassy party in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the thirty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution; except for the surprise appearance of Justice and Mrs. William O. Douglas, official Washington boycotted the affair. One week later Robeson again thumbed his nose at prescribed behavior—and this time was directly attacked for it. Arriving to attend a peace rally sponsored by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, he was greeted by a furious crowd of two hundred egg-and-tomato-hurling hecklers, mostly of Hungarian descent; carrying placards denouncing “Communist Barbarians,” they shouted their anger at the “murderers” arriving to attend the meeting. A large detail of police kept the demonstrators in check and escorted Robeson into the building. Somebody in the crowd tossed a bottle of ammonia at him, but it splattered harmlessly on the ground close by.33
Inside the hall, a small crowd of about five hundred heard Dr. Harry F. Ward, professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary, counsel against gearing up hysterically for the “inevitability” of a third world war. It then listened in surprise (and silence) as Reverend William Howard Melish of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Brooklyn deplored the Soviet “error in judgment in resorting to armed coercion” in Hungary; Melish softened his reproof by pointing out that “all of us have compromised with our ideals”—as witnessed by the U.S. imperialist venture in Guatemala and the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. When Robeson’s turn came to speak, he left out the reproof—subsequently he suggested that “somebody” had fomented trouble in Hungary, probably the same somebody who had been at work in Egypt. According to the New York Post, Robeson told a reporter on leaving the hall that “The Hungarian revolution was brought about by the same sort of people who overthrew the Spanish Republican Government.” William Z. Foster wrote to congratulate him on his “militant stand”: “In view of the wobbling and confusion to be found in our ranks, it is good to see someone showing clarity of understanding and fighting spirit.… This is a moment when steadiness is especially necessary in Left ranks. Undoubtedly there has been much confusion and vacillation caused by this Stalin affair, especially the tragedy in Hungary. It is one of those great obstacles that the movement has to overcome in its historic march ahead. It is a crisis of growth.”34
Robeson’s negative view of the Hungarian “freedom fighters” found considerable echo in the black press. “The cynicism of America’s Negro citizens in respect for the Hungarians’ ‘fight for freedom’ is thick enough to be slashed with a knife,” the Pittsburgh Courier editorialized, “and solid enough to be weighed on scales.…” Where, the Courier wondered, was any comparable expression of concern for the victims of the savage bombings of Port Said and Cairo? And where was the comparable outrage at the mob violence against the young black student Autherine Lucy as she tried to attend classes at the lily-white University of Alabama? “How can America, in good faith,” chimed in the San Francisco Sun Reporter, “blow such loud horns about the freedom of the Hungarians, when such a large portion of her own population is deprived of freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States?”35
A few days after the American-Soviet Friendship rally, Robeson elaborated his views on current affairs in an interview with The Afro-American. Commenting on the results of the recent presidential election, in which Eisenhower had again swamped Adlai Stevenson, Robeson said he found them both “pretty lax” on civil rights and expressed the hope that Eisenhower would use his mandate “to be much firmer on the question of carrying out the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision.” He also took the occasion to deplore the invasion of Egypt (though not of Hungary) as proof of Western reluctance to accept a changed status for third-world people. He saw the action as a particular affront to the Bandung Pact nations of Asia and Africa, crediting the Soviet Union’s defense of their rights to independent nationhood as the chief counterweight on the international scene to Western efforts at maintaining the old colonial system.36
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, announced its refusal to hear arguments appealing the Appellate Court decision on Robeson’s passport—even though it granted, on the very same day, a new trial in Pittsburgh to five defendants convicted under the Smith Act. The decision further isolated Robeson, seeming to confirm his status (in William Patterson’s indignant words) as “the only living American against whom an order has been issued directing immigration authorities not to permit him to leave the continental confines of the United States,” not even to go to Mexico, the West Indies, Hawaii, or other areas that “demand only proof of American citizenship as a means of entry.” In public, Robeson tried to put the best face on it. He told The Afro-American that since the Supreme Court claimed he had not exhausted all “administrative remedies” available, his lawyers would once again request an administrative hearing from the State Department—though he would continue to refuse, he emphasized, to sign the kind of “non-Communist” affidavit the State Department had previously insisted would be necessary before they would consider any such hearing. If the government stuck by that policy, Robeson said, he would then ask for a rehearing in the Court of Appeals on the grounds that he had “exhausted all administrative remedies” currently open to him. Since a rehearing on those grounds was unlikely, Robeson was in fact acknowledging a stalemate. His personal Cold War had not eased.37