It was the briefest respite. The new year opened with Jet magazine’s republishing a rumor that columnist Cholly Knickerbocker had originated in the conservative Journal-American that Robeson “would like to break with the Communist Party, but is being hindered by his wife and his son.” A year earlier a “confidential informant” had supplied similar information to the FBI, claiming that Robeson “is still a Marxist, but is disillusioned with Stalinism.… He is primarily a Negro Nationalist and secondarily a Marxist.” The rumor of his disillusion—without any known basis in fact—persisted. From a second source entirely, the FBI received another report several months later that Robeson “is about to make a public break with the Communists,” and on May 2 Drew Pearson, in his regular Sunday-evening broadcast, climaxed the accumulating hearsay with the assertion that Robeson had been meeting with black leaders and becoming persuaded “to change his left-wing views.”25
Robeson categorically and publicly denied all such reports. In a lengthy reply to Jet, he strenuously reasserted his respect for the “many fine, sincere, great-hearted radicals” he knew in this country, as well as his own devotion to the Soviet people and “the building of their new magnificent society.” He reiterated his belief that the “socialistic” countries of Eastern Europe and Asia were actively working to abolish racial discrimination and to help “former colonial peoples to reach full dignity,” and were thereby continuing to highlight the hypocrisy of “the so-called Free Western imperialist nations. Please tell me why I should … attempt to lay hands upon these friends from across the seas? My reason tells me that if I am going to get rough, I know just where the enemy is, close at hand”—Messrs. “Byrnes of South Carolina, Talmadge of Georgia, McCarran, McCarthy and their ilk.” “Am I expected,” he asked in a formal statement issued through Freedom Associates in 1954, “to ignore the continuing massacre of my brothers in Kenya? And here in America, is Jim Crow dead and buried? Has Congress passed the Anti-Lynching Law and the F.E.P.C.? Have my people’s demands for economic, political and social equality been granted? If not, why should Paul Robeson, who has dedicated his life to the struggle for these goals, change his mind about them now?”26
In asserting his “respect and affection” for the people of the Soviet Union, Robeson rarely made any distinction between them and the government that ruled them—an equivalence that was common parlance in the world Communist movement of the time, yet has opened him ever since to alternating charges of naïveté or rigidity. The New Statesman and Nation echoed the view of many in 1955 when it wrote, “Paul is courageous but not sophisticated about politics.… His personal warmth and generosity, his bigness and his kindness, made him everybody’s friend—and many of those friendships have lasted despite the naivete of his political activities in recent years. Even today, when Paul makes some outrageous statement, one which would seem silly or vicious in the mouth of a hard-boiled party official, one feels more embarrassment than anger.” But Robeson, in the words of Stretch Johnson (the entertainer and second-echelon black CPUSA leader), was “not so much naïve as trusting.” He deeply believed in human nature, even though he had learned deeply to distrust human beings—his faith was in the potential, not in current distortions of it. He had seen, and come to expect, the world’s every mean trick—yet in his heart he continued to believe that people were good and that socialism would create an environment that would allow their better natures to emerge. The world has never had much tolerance for those who persist in arguing unseen possibilities against the abundant evidence of their eyes, for the champions of what might be as against what is. The powers that be, bent on inculcating narrow-gauged formulas about the “necessities” of human nature and human society—on the acceptance of which the continuation of their hegemony depends—must always vilify those purveying a more sanguine message. This is not to say that Robeson never dealt in simplicities but, rather, that those making the charge usually did so on the basis not of greater sophistication, but of competing simplicities.27
Robeson did refuse, adamantly, ever to engage in public criticism of the Soviet government for mistaken or malignant policies. Perhaps in reaction, he sometimes overweighed the indictment against the government of the United States. Thus, in presenting his 1951 petition to the UN, Robeson had come close to equating institutional oppression of blacks with a policy of official genocide against them. It was an equation that stuck in the craw—then and since—of some of those who otherwise admired Robeson. Even Essie, who leapt to his political defense in public, confided privately to Marie Seton that “Paul is inclined to be a bit arrogant sometimes when people don’t agree with him, especially politically. Not in any other field, as I think of it now. Only politically.” He always strenuously insisted that his indictment of the American government was not an indictment of the American people, and he constantly reiterated his view that the “real” America was a progressive America, that the American people, good in their hearts, ultimately would set everything to rights. But this faith in the American people, his detractors felt, was as rhetorically overdrawn in the one direction as his indictment of their government was in the other. Besides, they asked, why did Robeson find it possible to distinguish between the American people and its rulers and yet so resolutely refuse to make any comparable separation in regard to the Soviets?28
Even in private, even among intimates, Robeson would not dwell on that distinction. When Khrushchev revealed the full extent of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress, early in 1956, Robeson read the complete text in The New York Times and put down the newspaper without comment. As Paul, Jr., recalls, “He read it, he knew it was true,” but “he never commented on it to my knowledge in public or in private to a single living soul from then to the day he died”—not to Helen Rosen, or to Freda Diamond, or to Revels Cayton. As early as the thirties Robeson had had some knowledge of the purges, and in the late forties some of his friends—Itzik Feffer, for one—had disappeared. He possibly regarded the trials of the thirties, as did many of those who were pro-Soviet, as necessary reprisals against the malignant “intrigues of the Trotskyists,” believing that subsequent reports on the extent of the purges were exaggerations designed to discredit the Revolution. He adopted the standard argument “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” justifying the purges as occasional injustices, as the inevitable excesses inherent in any effort to create a new society, the excesses to be excused, if not justified, on the principle that collective welfare takes precedence over the rights of individuals. Robeson would have approved the analogy offered by André Malraux: though Christianity has had its murderous inquisitions, few have demanded that Christians abandon their religion because of its past depravities. Paul, Jr., says that his father told him and Lloyd Brown that “it was incomprehensible to him that American Communists would leave the Party over what happened in the Soviet Union.” Still, Khrushchev’s revelation of the sheer number of Stalin’s crimes, his policy of systematic murder, shook the faith of many in the eggs-omelet analogy; and it suggested to some that brutality may have been endemic to the centralized authoritarianism that had come to characterize the Soviet system, displacing its earlier, visionary ideals.29
There is no evidence that Robeson either disputed the accuracy of Khrushchev’s revelations or discounted reportage of them in the Western press as exaggerated. His reaction probably—this must remain a “best guess,” given the lack of concrete evidence—fell into the middle ground of disappointed acceptance: disappointment that the socialist experiment in which he believed had been derailed by the acts of an unsound leader, acceptance (and continuing faith) that in the long run the derailment would prove temporary and that socialism, still humanity’s best hope, would triumph. Even this much he could have said had he wanted to clarify his position publicly. But he chose not to, chose silence instead, preferred to be called a stubborn dupe—naïve at best, criminal at worst—rather than join the growing legion of Soviet detractors, rather than become himself (
as he saw it) an obstacle to the eventual triumph of socialism.
However naïve his continuing faith may have appeared to the world at large, it was an accurate reflection of one strain in his complex personality. While he essentially trusted no one, Robeson had, at the same time, a fundamental belief in the decency of most people, and held to the sanguine view that they were potentially as generous, as aware and as concerned about the sufferings of mankind as he was. He expected much of others—as he did of himself. He had never learned as a youngster, as had almost all black Americans, to deal in limited expectations; treated in his own family like a god, he had met in the outside world far fewer institutional humiliations than afflict most blacks attempting to make their way. Ingrained optimism had become a characteristic attitude; he expected every set of hurdles, with the requisite hard work and determination, to be cleared as handily as those of his youth had been.
But Robeson was hardly naïve. Even as a young man he had experienced enough discrimination in his own life, and seen enough desperation everywhere around him in the black world, always to have carried with him the knowledge that society was cruel and individuals frail. When awareness of the brutalities of daily life further deepened in adulthood, however, and disappointments over political attempts to mitigate them continued to mount, Robeson could somehow never entirely digest the world’s bad news. “He was a softie,” the black trade-unionist Sam Parks remembers with reproving admiration. “He never wanted to hurt anybody—it used to make me mad at him.” With time, Robeson came to temper his faith only to the degree of accepting the view that social transformation would be a longer process than he had originally thought—simply because human nature had been more disabled than he had once assumed. But he did remain full of faith—faith that one day humanity would rise to its better nature, that a cooperative social vision would supplant a ruthlessly competitive one, that human beings would somehow turn out better than they ever had, that the principle of brotherhood would hold sway in the world. There was no other attitude—with disappointments on every hand—that would have allowed him to persevere. Nor one, resting as it did on accumulated denial, more likely in the long run to produce an emotional breakdown.30
Robeson’s political identification was primarily with the Soviet Union in its original revolutionary purity, and not with its secondary manifestation, the American Communist Party. On the most obvious level, he was never a member of the CPUSA, never a functionary, never a participant in its daily bureaucratic operations (he told Helen Rosen that its internecine warfare and rigidity made him miserable). He was a figure apart and above, his usefulness to the Party directly proportionate to the fact that his stature did not derive from it. The Party, as Eugene Dennis’s widow, Peggy Dennis, has put it, “was just a small part of Paul’s life.” “I have a hunch,” Dorothy Healey, the ex-Communist leader in California, has added, “that 90% of the inner-C.P. stuff was either unknown to Paul or, if known, considered unimportant.” He had aligned himself with the Soviet Union by the late thirties because it was playing the most visible role in the liberation of American and colonial peoples of color; he had aligned himself with the principles of black liberation and socialism, not with national or organizational ambitions. From his early visits to the Soviet Union, he had taken away the overwhelming impression of a nation devoted to encouraging the independent flowering of the cultures of different peoples—including nonwhite people—within its borders, a policy in basic opposition to the “melting-pot” view for which the United States officially stood. The socialist principle could in practice be sabotaged or misdirected—as it was in the Soviet mistreatment of the Crimean Tatars—but to Robeson the principle remained uniquely attractive.31
Despising American racism and viewing the Soviets as the only promising counterbalancing force to racism, Robeson was inclined to look away when the U.S.S.R. acted against its own stated principles, to look away fixedly as the perversions multiplied over the years, discounting them as temporary aberrations or stupidities ultimately justified by the long view, the overall thrust, the “correct” direction. Explaining Robeson’s view (and her own), Dorothy Healey describes him as “well aware” of the Soviet Union’s “terrible weaknesses” but nonetheless convinced that “it’s going in a direction that you think is a proper direction.… You never settle it once and for all,” but “you’re not going to get caught in the company of the anti-Sovieteers.” In ex-CP leader John Gates’s comparable if more bellicose version, Robeson took “the classic point of view that all of us did.… This is a revolution, and you have to fight all kinds of people in revolutions, and sometimes innocent people get killed. It’s a war.”32
In refusing to vent any public criticism of Soviet or CPUSA policy, Robeson did not always agree with its twists and turns. When in disagreement, he followed his own counsel without stating his disagreement publicly; to do that, in his mind, would have meant giving comfort to conservative-minded bigots, as well as involving him more than he wanted in the temperamentally distasteful daily routine of factional infighting. Instead, he simply went his way. During World War II, when the CP staked everything on the struggle against fascism, downplaying all “secondary” issues such as black demands for a fair employment commission and for the elimination of the poll tax and of segregation in the armed forces, Robeson continued to function with black issues at the center of his activities, calling everywhere in his speeches around the country for a double victory—against fascism abroad and racism at home. When British tanks, late in 1944, crushed Communist-led resistance to the monarchy in Greece, the Soviet Union remained silent, and Browder, for the CPUSA, cautioned against “shallow agitation”—but Robeson spoke out publicly against what he viewed as the suppression of a democratizing impulse. When, in the postwar period, under William Z. Foster’s leadership, the CPUSA emphasized the “imminence” of economic depression, the triumph of fascism in the United States, and a coming World War III, Robeson—though generally sympathetic to the Foster left wing—publicly sounded an optimistic counternote about the possibility of peaceful coexistence between socialism and capitalism far more reminiscent of the discredited Browder, whose removal from CP leadership Robeson agreed had been necessary.33
In 1948, similarly, he threw all his energy into the Wallace movement, not because the CP told him to but because, despite internal dissension within the CP over the wisdom of supporting the Progressive Party, he was convinced that it offered the best current vehicle for championing black rights in the United States. And when, under the tutelage of Revels Cayton, Robeson came to believe in the necessity for black caucuses within the left-wing trade unions, he campaigned widely for them among black workers—even though the CP leadership tended to view the caucuses with uneasy suspicion as representing a resurgence of deviationist black “nationalism” and dual unionism.
In the fifties, according to Stretch Johnson, Robeson believed the Party “could do more in the struggle for Negro rights” than it was doing, and felt that he himself “was not being used enough in the black community”—that being featured as the American figure in the world peace movement had diminished his specific stature as a spokesperson for black and colonial peoples. Rose Perry, the wife of Pettis Perry (the black executive secretary of the Party’s National Negro Commission from 1948 to 1954), recalls that at one point, around 1950, Robeson’s concern with being isolated from his own black constituency became so acute that he would talk far into the night with Pettis Perry about possible ways to solve his public-relations problem with Harlem—a problem partly met by the establishment in 1950 of Freedom magazine, and by Robeson’s increased number of appearances at his brother Ben’s A.M.E. Zion Church and at black gatherings elsewhere.34
But by the fifties Robeson no longer had the luxury of independent maneuver; he felt it was a matter of conscience to declare solidarity with the victims of the Smith Act, voluntarily binding himself to their plight. To the extent that he did still harbor disagreements with CP policies—and
his disagreements had always been marginal—he felt as a matter of principle bound in loyalty to maintain his commitment to the persecuted Party leadership. In 1951 he even offered to join the Party as a public gesture of solidarity, just before its leaders were jailed. The gesture was rejected, out of hand. All four of the leaders (Eugene Dennis, Ben Davis, Jack Stachel, and John Gates) present when Robeson made the offer at a small private meeting refused even to entertain the idea, considering it a personal disservice to Robeson—it would have further reduced his influence in the black community—and thereby a disservice to the Party as well. “Nobody hesitated,” is how John Gates remembers the occasion; “we were smart enough to say no. And without any hesitation. All of us.”35
Robeson functioned in relationship to the CPUSA primarily through the Party leadership—not through participation in rank-and-file activities. The pre-eminent leader of the CPUSA during the early forties, when Robeson initially became a prominent ally, was Earl Browder. Studious, strong-willed, intensely private, he and Robeson had much in common temperamentally, and the two became personal friends, even though Browder, like most of the “right wing” of the Party, was closer to mainstream liberalism on the black question than William Z. Foster and Ben Davis, Jr. In those years Browder and Ben Davis were Robeson’s main contacts with the Party. During World War II, when black issues took a back seat to the struggle against fascism, Robeson privately expressed annoyance—especially to his closest friend in the Party, Ben Davis—over the CP’s quiescence on issues like anti-poll-tax and antilynching legislation or the passage of an FEPC. But Robeson never criticized the Party or Earl Browder in public—nor did the Party ever caution him to tone down his strenuous public advocacy of black issues. Yet, when the Duclos Letter appeared in 1945, Robeson did let it be known within CPUSA leadership circles that he sided with the opposition to Browder, going along with most of the black rank-and-file leadership in support of the Dennis-Foster coalition.
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