For the time being, that public image continued to shine brightly, the luster further enhanced in 1945 by two additional honors: Howard University conferred on him an honorary degree, and the NAACP awarded him its prestigious Spingarn Medal. Established in 1914 by the late Joel Spingam, then chairman of the NAACP board, the medal was presented annually “to the man or woman of African descent and American citizenship, who shall have made the highest achievement during the preceding year or years in any honorable field of human endeavor.” The Spingarn Medal carried more prestige in the black community than any other award, and in winning it in 1945 Robeson edged out Channing H. Tobias (New Deal official and member of the NAACP board of trustees) and Joe Louis. The participating members of the nominating committee—A. Philip Randolph, Dr. John Haynes Holmes, and Judge William H. Hastie—had split in a close vote: two first places and one second to Robeson, one first and two seconds to Tobias, and three third places to Joe Louis. Because of the near-tie, the absent members of the nominating committee were polled, and Robeson emerged the winner. When his name was presented to the full board, it was approved—though, in the memory of one of its members, the record producer John H. Hammond, there was some expression of dissent. Because of Robeson’s commitment to Othello—the tour ended late in May 1945, but the show had then reopened in New York for a three-week run at the City Center—he would be unable to accept the Spingarn Medal until October. That occasion would prove a political milestone for him.28
CHAPTER 15
Postwar Politics
(1945–1946)
In the closing days of World War II, Robeson had continued to feel broadly optimistic, as he told several interviewers, that “the forces of progress are winning,” that Jim Crow in the United States was on the run, that the days of colonial rule in Africa were numbered, and that international acceptance of the Soviet Union’s right to exist was assured. But within months of Truman’s accession to the presidency in April 1945, and the shifts in policy that his administration inaugurated, Robeson’s optimism was shaken, and his mood gradually darkened.1
The first major setback to his hopes came at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in April-May 1945, when the Western powers adopted a set of resolutions on the colonial issue that, from Robeson’s perspective, raised the specter of continuing exploitation of Africa and other parts of the world. He had been hopeful that the United States would lead the way in establishing the principle that all colonial possessions—not merely those wrested from the defeated Axis powers—would be placed under United Nations trusteeship as a guaranteed route to effective independence. Robeson, and the Council on African Affairs he headed (which by the mid-forties was the most important American organization dealing with Africa) considered the trusteeship issue of crucial importance for the postwar world.
Instead, the United States introduced a set of proposals at San Francisco for a trusteeship system that fell woefully short of what the CAA had desired: no firm limits set on the length of supervision, no insistence that the Allied powers put their own territorial possessions on the path to self-government, no provision for the representation of colonial peoples themselves in trusteeship administrations—and no guarantee that the Soviet Union would have a voice on the Trusteeship Council. With the call of American naval authorities in the summer of 1945 for permanent U.S. control of strategic Pacific islands like the Marshalls and the Carolines, the future of the underdeveloped world seemed once more thrown into doubt—and white-supremacist imperialism once more thrust to the fore. Robeson began to fear that the United States would throw its weight not behind freedom for dependent peoples but for maintaining the prewar colonial systems of France and Great Britain—a move concealed behind politics of confrontation with the Soviet Union. The columns and editorials in New Africa, the influential monthly bulletin of the CAA, measure the gradual decline in expectations: from enthusiastic congratulations to President Roosevelt for refusing to postpone the UN conference (Roosevelt died just before the San Francisco sessions convened), to sadness and anger over the actual trusteeship proposals and resolutions that emerged from there. By the close of the UN conference, New Africa was writing, “The hope and faith which the people of Africa and Asia had in America when Roosevelt was alive is now at low ebb.”2
In his capacity as chairman of the CAA (which the FBI had already begun to brand a “Communist” organization), Robeson wired President Truman and Edward R. Stettinius, chairman of the U.S. delegation to San Francisco (and soon to become its chief delegate to the UN), urging more clear-cut “expression to and support [for] the principle of full freedom within [a] specified time for all colonial peoples.” Stettinius replied belatedly and evasively; John Foster Dulles, also a member of the U.S. delegation, wrote to Robeson the following year on the specific issue of incorporating South-West Africa into the Union of South Africa, declaring, “I did not feel that the United States, in view of its own record, was justified in adopting a holier-than-thou attitude toward the Union of South Africa.” To Robeson, the UN conference in San Francisco, and the subsequent defense of its decisions by U.S. officials, signaled a dangerous revival of imperialist ardor both at home and abroad.3
A USO overseas tour that Robeson undertook in August 1945 heightened his uneasiness. He had planned to take Othello to Europe immediately following the close of its American tour to perform before black troops, but when it proved impossible to clear in time all the necessary channels—diplomatic and theatrical—he and Larry Brown decided to accept the USO offer as an alternative arrangement, especially since they would be part of the first interracial unit to be sent overseas (it included as well the violinist Miriam Solovieff and the pianist Eugene List). The month-long trip involved thirty-two appearances, taking Robeson to Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France, and the black paper the Chicago Defender reported that his presence overseas proved “a boost to the colored troops’ morale who needed it badly.” He did bring the black troops an essentially optimistic message about the increased economic opportunities they would find on returning home, but in other regards he warned them that they would “find an America not greatly altered in terms of their position.”4
But he did not share with the troops the full extent of his concern. In fact, what he saw and heard overseas profoundly disturbed him. The “unwillingness” of American authorities to proceed with de-Nazification seemed to Robeson a deliberate strategy for restoring German power as rapidly as possible, to serve as a counterweight to the influence of the Soviet Union. This interpretation was confirmed in his mind on hearing American army officers in Germany—in particular, officers in Patton’s Third Army, in Bavaria—talk glibly and ferociously of “pushing straight on to Moscow and destroying the Bolshies while they’re weak.” In Czechoslovakia, Robeson’s observations persuaded him that the American military would support only those Czechs who had been “collaborationists and Sudeten soldiers” (the Sudetenland, a part of western Czechoslovakia on the German border, had been strongly pro-Nazi).5
As soon as he got home, Robeson asked Max Yergan to arrange through the auspices of the CAA a private meeting of seventy-five to a hundred people in which he could “unburden himself” about his experiences in Europe and, he hoped, raise ten thousand dollars to go on the air for one or two national hookups so he could get his message of concern across to a large audience. The meeting took place on October 21, 1945, at the home of Frederick V. Field, the wealthy white left-wing sympathizer whose wife, Edith Field, served as CAA treasurer. A somewhat disappointing forty or fifty people showed up. The FBI had bugged preparatory phone conversations between the organizers, and the reports reveal that the effort to gather people to hear Robeson may have been hampered by a growing distrust of Yergan among progressives—a distrust that would erupt into bitter confrontation on the Council of African Affairs within two years.6
Disappointing though the turnout was—only four thousand dollars was raised, not enough to put Robeson on the air—he delivered a strong m
essage to the people gathered in the Fieldses’ living room. He stressed two points: the continuing, even flourishing existence of the Nazi spirit and leadership in Germany; and the determination among the traditional European power elite to maintain colonialism in Africa and the Far East. He specifically connected these developments with Truman’s assumption of the presidency, his appointment of Southern segregationists to his cabinet, and the immediate falling away thereafter from Roosevelt’s concern with the plight of the underclass around the globe. Among Truman’s advisers, Robeson held Edward L. Stettinius, Jr., and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes particularly responsible for the shift in policy emphasis. And overseas he held Winston Churchill predominantly accountable for resurgent imperialism.7
Robeson and the Council on African Affairs had distrusted Churchill’s intentions while the war was still on. They had hailed the statement on colonies that had issued from the opposition Labour Party’s 1943 conference on postwar policy as “a serious and detailed document” notable, despite its weaknesses, for demanding that the “color bar” be immediately abolished in all territories subject to Parliament. When the British Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, won a sweeping election victory over Churchill and the Tories in July 1945, Robeson cabled Attlee his congratulations, choosing to see in the results a defeat for imperialism which would open the way to positive action on independence for colonial peoples.8
But within months Robeson had to revise that estimate, as evidence quickly mounted that the new British government was adhering to the same old Tory policies in regard to Java, India, and Africa. The CAA published in New Africa a series of articles decrying the “indecent haste and anxiety” of Attlee to “re-establish British authority in Hong Kong and other possessions liberated from Japan”—“exactly what might have been expected of a Churchill government”—and expressed its grief in an editorial at the “revolting and base” spectacle of American troops being used to assist the British, French, and Dutch in their “coercive restoration of the colonial system” in Indonesia.9
At just this time, the fall of 1945, the postponed Spingarn award ceremony took place, and Robeson decided to use the occasion to express his mounting concern over world developments. The NAACP, on the other hand, had expected to use the occasion for its own purposes. When planning for the event had begun the preceding spring, Roy Wilkins had telegraphed Walter White that the presentation ceremony “offers chance to place Association before many persons attracted by Robeson but unaware of our work.” Since Wilkins believed that the “downtown audience will follow Robeson anywhere,” he suggested the affair be held in either of Harlem’s three-thousand-seat auditoriums—the Golden Gate or the A.M.E. Zion Church, where Robeson’s brother Ben was pastor. (Ultimately the Hotel Biltmore was decided upon, the seven hundred guests straining its ballroom to capacity). Wilkins suggested Helen Gahagan Douglas, Fredric March, or John Mason Brown to make the presentation to Robeson. Walter White was attracted to the possibility of Lawrence Tibbett, but that name was scratched when Clara Rockmore, among others, let it be known that Tibbett’s selection would “rankle” Paul because of Tibbett’s “envy and resentment of Paul’s success” in the past. Bob Rockmore suggested to Walter White that Robeson’s own preference would be either Mayor La Guardia, Marshall Field, Henry A. Wallace, or Henry Morgenthau. The name of Harold Ickes was later thrown in, and Orson Welles was briefly considered—until word arrived that he would ask the NAACP to pay his expenses from Hollywood (“I don’t think it worth that,” was White’s comment). Scheduling conflicts finally took most of the contenders out of consideration, and the NAACP settled on Marshall Field, publisher of the Chicago Sun, to make the presentation.10
Walter White officiated at the gala ceremony. Marian Anderson, Louis T. Wright (Robeson’s old friend and himself a Spingarn Medalist), J. J. Singh (president of the India League of America), playwright Marc Connelly, Arthur B. Spingarn (president of the NAACP), and Essie were among those seated on the dais; and Mrs. Roosevelt, Judge William Hastie, and Henry Wallace were among those who sent congratulatory telegrams. In his presentation, Marshall Field settled for rather bland and sonorous phrases, citing Robeson’s “broad human sympathies.”11
But in his response Robeson struck a far more overtly political note than was traditionally associated with the august Spingarn event, and in the process “shocked” (according to a headline in the Pittsburgh Courier) many of the notables in attendance. Venting his concern over the drift of events in the six months since Roosevelt’s death, and what he perceived as a shift in emphasis away from civil-rights reform on the domestic scene and toward renewed colonialism on the international one, Robeson warned against abandoning the ideals for which the recent war had purportedly been fought. “The people of Asia, China and India want to realize promises made to them,” he said, and black Americans, too, expected the “fight for democracy” to be realized at home. Further, Robeson denounced renewed signs of hostility from the United States and Britain toward the Soviet Union as symptomatic of a resurgent fascism (leading the FBI in its report on the dinner to note ominously that Robeson had said “full employment in Russia is a fact, and not a myth, and discrimination is non-existent. The Soviet Union can’t help it as a nation and a people if it is in the main stream of change”).12
Six years later, at the height of the Cold War, when Walter White and Robeson had become estranged, White wrote a bitter account of Robeson’s performance at the Spingarn dinner. The NAACP’s initial intention, White claimed, had been to present the medal at Town Hall, with admission free, but Rockmore—despite Robeson’s strenuous “espousal of the ‘little man’”—had insisted on a “‘good downtown hotel,’” thereby excluding all but the reasonably affluent (no evidence in the NAACP papers or elsewhere supports White’s claim). After faithfully promising to be prompt for a photographing session at 6:30 p.m., Robeson, according to White, arrived at 7:45—at the conclusion of the reception and after the platform party had moved to the dais (this part of White’s charge, given Robeson’s tendency to be late, is credible). Robeson refused to submit the text of his speech in advance for the press, claiming that he planned to speak from notes, but, as White told it, just before Robeson started, Max Yergan purportedly came to the speakers’ table and began to “whisper earnestly” to him—in a voice loud enough to be overheard—that “They say” and “they want you to say” such-and-such in the speech (“they” being, in White’s view, the CPUSA). White described the speech Robeson did give as “a lengthy and vehement attack upon all things American and indiscriminate laudation of all things Russian,” thereby missing a “magnificent opportunity to make converts,” “stunning” the audience and producing only scattered, tepid applause—an overstatement more heated in its choice of words than Robeson’s speech had been.13
The Spingarn Medal marked both the apex of Robeson’s public acclaim and the onset of his fall from official grace. Henceforth his own disillusion with the promise of American life would proceed in tandem with his ejection from it.
A few weeks after the Spingarn event, at a World Freedom Rally in Madison Square Garden on November 14, 1945, Robeson reiterated his fears about postwar developments. He forcefully assailed the role of the American government “in helping British, French and Chiang Kai-shek governments to crush the peoples’ struggles toward democracy, freedom and independence,” reminding the audience that while “millions of Africans faced unnecessary starvation” and “the tragic plight of Europe’s anguished Jewish people has still to be solved,” it was premature to talk of “world peace and security”—a goal that would not be advanced by “reliance upon mighty armaments, military bases and atomic bombs.” At the end of November, at a two-day “institute on Judaism and race relations” convened by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Robeson again spoke out bluntly against the “active counter-revolution” that had abruptly arisen, calling upon American public opinion “to bring to task our State Department and President Truman for their
part on the side of reaction” and specifically warning that blacks are “not only miserable, but … determined not to continue miserable.” Six months earlier an FBI report had hawked the false rumor that Robeson had joined the Communist Party; a Bureau agent now insisted that, although “his Communist Party membership book number is not known”—for a time the FBI believed he had become a member under the name of John Thomas—“his actions, connections and statements definitely classify him as a Communist.”14
Simultaneous with Robeson’s developing distress over Western policies came the disarray within the American Communist Party following the release of the “Duclos Letter.” Published in the April 1945 issue of Cahiers du communisme (the organ of Communist Party theory in France), the article by Jacques Duclos, a leading French Communist, denounced Earl Browder for having made the unorthodox suggestion that the time had come for capitalism and socialism to coexist peacefully and to collaborate in the United States. Browder had first presented those views, the culmination of his long-standing Popular Front efforts to “Americanize” the Party, to the national committee of the CPUSA in January 1944. He had recommended the dissolution of the Party and its replacement with a new organization, the Communist Political Association; with only William Z. Foster among the leadership dissenting, Browder’s views had been adopted. But Duclos now took Foster’s position, denouncing Browder for “a notorious revision of Marxism, an acceptance of the possibility of class peace in the postwar period which was tantamount to nothing less than a rejection of the inherent disharmony in the struggle between labor and capital.” Browder for a time tried to sustain the notion that Duclos’s viewpoint was peculiar to the French Communists and had not emanated from Moscow. But that proved not to be the case, and when the National Committee of the CPUSA met from June 18 to 20, 1945, “Browderism” was routed and William Z. Foster emerged as the Party’s new head.15
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