Paul Robeson
Page 49
The battle lines for the coming presidential election were forming rapidly, and the jockeying for position becoming intense. In June 1947, heeding the advice of the liberal wing of his party, Truman vetoed the antilabor Taft-Hartley Bill—arguably his most important single move in cutting away the support of organized labor from Wallace and assuring his own re-election. In 1946 A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, had vowed to spend his union’s entire treasury to defeat Truman after the President had threatened to draft railway strikers; following Truman’s Taft-Hartley veto, Whitney declared that a third party was “out of the question.” At the same time, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the administration’s commitment to underwriting the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe (the so-called Marshall Plan)—a move that proved popular in the nation but split the progressive ranks. Wallace and Robeson came out vigorously against it. They argued that, in combination with the Truman Doctrine of three months earlier—which had called for aid to Greece and Turkey to prevent those nations from going “communist”—the administration was making a deliberate attempt to circumvent the United Nations and to “hem Russia in.”14
Additionally, the progressives were divided over whether to accept proffered support from the Communist Party. In the first half of 1947 the CPUSA still remained on the sidelines, but its reasons for supporting the new progressive organization were mounting. When Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Bill over Truman’s veto, that bill’s Section 9H, which required all labor unions wishing to use the collective-bargaining procedures of the National Labor Relations Board to file non-Communist affidavits, became the law of the land. Section 9H threatened, alternatively, to destroy the left-wing unions or to lead them to sever all connection—even all signs of friendship—with the CPUSA. Simultaneously, Wallace’s cross-country tour in June 1947 revealed unexpectedly high enthusiasm for the progressive cause, further confirmed by favorable showings in the Gallup Polls. Meeting that same month, the CPUSA’s national committee heard William Z. Foster hail the emerging divisions within the American ruling class, and Eugene Dennis, the Party’s general secretary, warn against the Party’s taking precipitous steps of any kind. That same mood of cautious commitment continued to characterize the Progressive movement itself throughout the summer and fall of 1947, with Wallace still resisting the formation of a third party and any overt declaration of his own candidacy, and with the CIO left wing still flirting with the strategy of trying to revitalize the Democratic Party (while a simultaneous trend was developing toward compliance with the required affidavits of Section 9H).15
In this clouded and volatile atmosphere, Robeson lent his name to a move to coordinate an agenda for outlawing lynching and the poll tax and for restoring the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Essie seems to have played a large role in the effort, possibly stimulated by her earlier attempt with Pearl Buck to come up with a set of propositions for federal action in behalf of blacks. The initial invitation to meet with Essie and Paul in October brought a sparse response; only Louis T. Wright, Dr. Marshall Shepard (the recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C.), and Alphaeus Hunton showed up. The meeting was brief and politic; it stressed that their effort to coordinate a black agenda “would not interfere or compete with the fine work which many organized groups had already accomplished.” The decision was made to invite an additional hundred or so black leaders to gather in November. Essie cast a wide net in trying to enlist support for that meeting, inviting, among others, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lester Granger, A. Philip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.16
Walter White responded to her invitation with a lengthy private letter illustrative of the divisions within the black leadership—current and future. During the war years the NAACP, following the trend in the black community itself, had become militantly anticolonialist (Walter White’s denunciation of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech had been as uncompromising as Robeson’s). The organization had shown a dramatic increase in membership from 1940 to 1946, its branches tripling in number and its rolls going up nearly ten times over. After 1946 the pace of growth slowed, in tandem with the national shift toward Cold War confrontation and away from any willingness to grapple with domestic problems. With the NAACP’s values and organizational fortunes in flux, Walter White was in no mood to broach opposition, to take kindly to a political project that might circumvent established lines of power in the black community—especially not if it emanated from Dr. Du Bois, a longtime personal antagonist of White’s who, on returning to his association with the NAACP in 1944 in the role of director of special research, had already begun to threaten White’s authority.17
Robeson and Walter White were no longer on the terms of personal intimacy they once had been. “Although Paul and I have not seen eye to eye on some points—political and strategic—during recent years,” White began his letter to Essie, “I have had much more respect for him in that he has spoken out frankly about his views instead of wiggling and wobbling as so many other people do who favor Communism but take to cover when the going gets hot. I have the same respect for Ben Davis.” Nevertheless, White continued, he had to “very frankly question that the kind of conference you suggest would do what you want it to do.… I think it would promptly be smeared as being just another ‘united front.’” He believed organizations were already in place to combat the various ills the conference planned to address, and expressed his personal view that no such legislation had a hope of passage “until the Senate rules are amended” to prevent filibustering. He declared his preference for channeling efforts in that direction.18
Only eighteen people convened for the November meeting at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library; except for Du Bois, none of the established black leadership attended. Essie, who chaired the meeting, opened it by declaring that the general idea behind the gathering was to try “to find some kind of basic program behind which all Negroes, organized and unorganized, could unite” in order to exert mass pressure on Congress for some kind of constructive legislation. Paul then spoke of his conviction that “division” was the “greatest weakness” keeping blacks from winning their rights. He had been pleased in his travels around the country, he reported, to find that “the rank and file of the Negro people everywhere, especially in the South, are anxious to see and know and hear their Negro leaders and artists; if they can hear their voices,” he insisted, “they will follow and support these voices.” He suggested that those present form themselves “into a loose, temporary organization to unify the Negro people.” Discussion thereafter was desultory and repetitive. Du Bois argued that “there was already unanimity of opinion among Negroes on such fundamental issues as the poll tax, FEPC and anti-lynching,” to which Essie replied that “unanimity of opinion” now required “unanimity of action.” First Robeson, and then Du Bois, declined nominations to chair future meetings (the nod then went to Reverend John Johnson of New York City). Another gathering was tentatively planned, “to work out a concrete program.”19
Ultimately the group did manage to launch the “National Non-Partisan Mass Delegation to Washington” on June 2, 1948, to demand passage of civil-rights legislation. But it caught on with neither the black masses nor the black leadership. The organizers were able to add to the list of cosponsors a few nationally recognized names—Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Earl B. Dickerson, Ewart Guinier, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, William L. Patterson, Mary Church Terrell, and Coleman Young—but the front-rank black leadership remained aloof. And with Walter White and the NAACP, an uneasy politeness prevailed—for the moment.20
In December 1947 Henry Wallace formally declared his candidacy for the presidency on a third-party ticket. Robeson announced for Wallace immediately, stood on the platform with him in Chicago in mid-January 1948—heard the crowd shout, “Robeson for vice-president!”—and became one of five cochairmen of a national Wallace for President committee. At the Progressive Party nominating convention in July, Robeson took his name
out of consideration early in the planning sessions for any headline role. But he gave himself over entirely to electing the Progressive Party ticket and prepared to appear at rallies ranging from the anonymity of high-school gyms to the hoopla of Madison Square Garden—and in every section of the country.21
In anticipation of Wallace’s candidacy, Clark Clifford, part of the liberal wing in the Truman administration, had presented the President in November with a lengthy confidential memo outlining a strategy for the 1948 campaign. In it, Clifford not only predicted that Wallace would run but laid out a plan for destroying his candidacy, a plan that Truman carefully—and successfully—followed. The strategy was shrewd and prescient. “Every effort must be made,” Clifford wrote, “to identify [Wallace] in the public mind with the Communists,” even though, as Clifford acknowledged, the Progressive Party movement could not legitimately be dismissed as Communist-inspired. As a necessary corollary, Clifford further recommended that Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union be maintained at a taut level of unease. Truman himself should remain above the fray, leaving it to “prominent liberals” to attack Wallace directly—a job that the recently formed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) took on with aggressive zeal. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., led the way with The Vital Center, a book linking liberalism to anticommunism and indulging in an inflamed red-baiting rhetoric that prefigured the McCarthy years.22
The Communists, both at home and abroad, made their own profound contribution to the Progressive Party’s problems when the CPUSA decided formally to declare for Wallace. He honorably refused to disavow their support, though he did suggest in one speech that if the CP would run a separate candidate, his new party would lose ten thousand votes but gain three million; still, he insisted on defending the CP’s right, as a legal political entity, to participate fully in American life. He made it clear that he himself was neither a Communist nor a Marxist, but added that he could find “nothing criminal in the advocacy of differing economic and social ideas, however much I differ with them.”23
International developments, meanwhile, further undermined Wallace’s credibility. The Progressives could mount a strong argument that American belligerence had done much in the crucial 1945–46 period to initiate the Cold War, but by 1948 the Soviet Union had severely compromised its aura of injured innocence. The expulsion of Tito’s Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc, the coup in Czechoslovakia and the death of Masaryk, and the blockade of Berlin followed hard one on another, making the earlier argument for the Soviet Union’s essentially defensive posture in reaction to American bellicosity ever less persuasive. As Soviet policy, in tandem with ADA belligerence, combined to make a shambles of Wallace’s foreign-policy position, Truman himself took the high road, radiating bonhomie and dispensing rhetorical largesse to special-interest groups—particularly to the black community. Though he put little emphasis on civil rights during the campaign, and though he was later to ignore or renege on almost all that he did promise, he made some shrewd and large concessions, issuing one executive order calling for desegregation of the armed forces and another creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee—and made the gesture of choosing Harlem to deliver his one major civil-rights address.24
This end play on civil rights ultimately wooed black voters into Truman’s column—where the only real opportunity for legislative progress resided. But early in the campaign Wallace’s strength among blacks was high (a poll in Minnesota in March showed 54 percent of black voters leaning to Wallace), and even at the end he got a much higher proportion of the black vote than the white (17 percent in Harlem, but only 8 percent of the total vote in New York State). Most of the prominent black leadership—pre-eminently Lester Granger and Walter White—did what they could to foster allegiance to Truman, with only Robeson and Du Bois among the front-rank figures working actively for Wallace.25
The Wallace campaign generated considerable excitement and respect within the black community. The Progressives nominated proportionately more black candidates—including Eslanda Robeson to run for secretary of state in Connecticut—and for a wider variety of offices than did the other two parties. And Wallace called repeatedly for equal justice everywhere he went, South as well as North; in the South he took the unprecedented step of refusing to speak before segregated audiences. His defiance of local Jim Crow ordinances—with attendant cross-burnings and egg-splatterings at his rallies—generated considerable emotion on both sides of the racial divide, stirring black enthusiasm and white racism alike.
Robeson himself campaigned in the Deep South, and at no little risk, especially since he put the chief emphasis in all his speeches on the struggle for black rights, not on a defense of Soviet (or an attack on American) foreign policy. Representing in his person the doubly unpopular image of black and red, he was an open target for the aggression of bigots and superpatriots, and it took considerable courage to invade their territory repeatedly. In Memphis, Boss Crump tried to prevent a planned Progressive Party rally featuring Robeson, but a black minister offered a meeting space, and two to three thousand people, white and black, showed up. Much the same happened in Savannah: after being denied the right to appear by the authorities, Robeson and Clark Foreman (the Party’s treasurer) found a warm welcome in a rally sponsored in the black district of the city. On one occasion, traveling in the club car of a train with George Murphy (the radical member of the family that owned the Afro-American newspaper chain) and Wallace, Robeson was slouched down out of sight when they heard two white men discussing with satisfaction the violence they expected the integrated Wallace campaigners to run into south of the Mason-Dixon line; Robeson “got out of his chair by stages, like a djinn coming out of the bottle, and said in this very deep, soft voice, ‘Something’s likely to happen to other people before we get to the Mason-Dixon line.’” Both men got up and left.26
Robeson was deeply moved by the courage of his own people everywhere in the South. The protective cordon they formed around him gave him “a sense of great safety” but, beyond that, he marveled at their refusal to buckle under to terroristic threats against their own persons. At Tampa he met a black preacher whom the Klan had threatened to kill for openly supporting the Progressives; the preacher announced from a sound truck that he wasn’t going “to get out of a party that is fighting for my people … and if anybody wants to find me my address is 500 such-and-such an avenue.” During a Progressive Party meeting at Columbus, Georgia (as Robeson later described it),
the Klan drove up actually in cars, opposite the building, their lights trained on it, and [James] Barfoot, running for governor, says he didn’t know what was going to happen. He walked up to the building, and he saw about a hundred Negroes around, sort of standing around, smoking and saying hello. He invited them up to the meeting, and they said, “No, we’ll stay down here.” And they stayed there, and it was a very fine meeting, and the Klan didn’t move. Now, Barfoot told me … he found out a little later that there was a very good reason why the Klan didn’t move in: because each one of the boys had a gat in his back pocket. There was going to be no disturbance of that Progressive Party meeting. And it’s extremely interesting that these were not Progressive Party Negroes; they were just Negroes who understood that this party was fighting for them.…
In Georgia, too, Larkin Marshall, the black editor of the Macon World, running as the Progressive candidate for the U.S. Senate, reacted to the Klan’s burning a cross on his lawn by putting an advertisement in the paper asking whoever was responsible to come and get the remains; when no one did, he left the charred cross on his lawn for months. “They won’t run me out,” he told Robeson. “They might carry me out, but they’ll never run me out.” Robeson found this spirit all over the South. It gave him hope for the future, regardless of how the ’48 election itself came out—even as the outright murder of other blacks (including several who merely tried to vote) continued to feed his anger.
Robeson ran into personal hostility outside of the South as well. In St. Lou
is he was denied accommodations at the Statler Hotel. In Indianapolis the state police had to be called out in force to forestall a threatened riot. He was denied the use of a high-school auditorium in Chicago and of university facilities at Ohio State and Michigan State, where the dean of students told reporters that he had checked with the FBI and learned that Robeson “was a known Communist.” Interoffice FBI memos during these months were repeatedly reporting that (in the words of one) Robeson “consistently follows the Communist Party line.” There was apparently frustration at the Bureau at the inability of its agents to turn up “any positive evidence” that Robeson was actually a CP member—but it nonetheless continued to insist that “there is every reason to believe that he may well be.”27
The FBI’s inability to find evidence was not for want of trying. When Robeson made a week-long tour of Hawaii in March 1948 under the auspices of the Longshoremen’s Union, J. Edgar Hoover directed the special agent in Honolulu “to closely follow his activities while he is there to determine if he contacts any Communist Party members or representatives of allied organizations.” Because Larry Brown intensely disliked flying, Earl Robinson, the composer of “Ballad for Americans,” agreed to accompany Robeson on the Hawaiian trip. It was “one of the beautiful times in my life,” Robinson recalls, working and living closely for a week with a man “so loaded with love—the love he gave out, it was beyond belief.” Rapturously received in his concerts, Robeson responded by performing three songs in the language of the islands, having learned them in twenty-four hours, and by telling his union-packed audiences (as Earl Robinson remembers his words), “I stand by you and with you, and as for the Big Five [the companies that controlled sugar production in the islands], I ask you to give them no quarter.” These unabashedly political remarks were not quite what the FBI had been looking for; the special agent had to report back to J. Edgar Hoover that “no information has been developed during the period of his stay that would indicate that Robeson was in Hawaii on a special assignment on behalf of the Communist Party.”28