Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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