Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

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

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

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

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

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

  Man in white skin can never be free

  While his black brother is in slavery

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

  Our Country’s strong, our Country’s young

  And her greatest songs are still unsung.8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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