Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  9. ER, “Spain,” RA; Sterner interviews with George Baker and Tommy Adlam. Charlotte Haldane published a series of brief notes in the Daily Worker (London) describing the trip to Spain. In The Worker for Feb. 15, 1938, she paid tribute to Essie as “one of the most gifted women I have had the pleasure of knowing” and made some affectionate fun of her recent obsession—much in evidence during the Spanish trip—of snapping pictures. Essie had taken up photography with her usual enthusiasm; on returning from Spain she took a course for a time with Marcel Sternberger (ER to CVV and FM, April 4, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten). She gave some of the Spanish photographs to William Patterson to publish and was annoyed when he captioned some of them inaccurately (ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm).

  10. ER, “Spain,” RA.

  11. ER, “Spain,” RA; ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1938, RA; Daily Worker, Jan. 29, 1938.

  12. ER, “Spain,” RA. Apparently Robeson also met Hemingway, who was in Spain as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and was undergoing his own political metamorphosis. According to Norberto Fuentes (Hemingway in Cuba [Lyle Stuart, 1984], pp. 148, 187), Hemingway and Robeson were together at least twice (there is no mention of such meetings in Essie’s diary or elsewhere), one time at La Moraleja, the palace of the Loyalist supporter, the Duchess of Aldama, on the outskirts of Madrid, where Hemingway drank too much and fell asleep.

  13. ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1938, RA; Manchester Guardian, Feb. 15, 1938 (Gols).

  14. ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1938, RA; ER, “Spain,” Jan. 1947, RA (“barrier”).

  15. PR, Stand, p. 53; PR, Notes, 1938, “My Impressions of Spain, RA; Worthing Herald, Sept. 23, 1938 (“murdered”); ER, “Spain,” RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 4, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (Cortez; Moscow); Madeleine Braun (Paris) to PR, Feb. 11, 1938, RA; ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson. The importance of the Soviet role in Spain in cementing loyalty to the U.S.S.R. for many others besides Robeson is well documented (see, for example, Steve Nelson, The Volunteers [Masses and Mainstream, 1953], and John Gates, The Story of an American Communist [Chilton, 1961]). There are a half-dozen letters from Castillo in RA. L’Humanité, Feb. 7, 1938; Ce Soir, Feb. 12, 1938. ER to CVV and FM, April 25, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten (Ruiz). In 1947 Castillo and his family were living in exile in Mexico (ER, “Spain,” Jan. 1947, RA). When Rockmore declined his help with the exhibition, Freda said to Paul, “Rockmore may be your lawyer but he’s not your friend”—causing Paul “to roll on the floor with laughter” (multiple interviews with Diamond; ER to Freda Diamond, April 11, 15, 21, 1939, courtesy of Diamond). According to Freda Diamond, Paul showed up at the New York opening of Cristobal’s paintings as a surprise, carrying under his arm a portrait Cristobal had done of Pauli.

  16. ER to Kaye, March 21, 1938, RA (return to States); ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson; ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, NYPL/Schm, PR Coll.

  17. The interview with Ben Davis, Jr., is in the Sunday Worker, May 10, 1936; multiple interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; Hugh Thomas, John Strachey (Harper & Row, 1973), p. 159. According to PR, Jr., his father told him in 1938 “that because he [Paul] had developed a close friendship with Kazakov, Kazakov’s arrest and the absurd charges against him had been an important factor in fueling his [Paul’s] doubts about the charges leveled in the 1937 trials” (PR, Jr.’s written comments on ms.). I have found no evidence in specific support of this claim, but one fragment of general evidence has emerged in Lia Golden’s reminiscences, “Black Americans’ Uzbek Experiment,” Moscow News, Sept. 20–27, 1987. Golden reports that in the summer of 1937 the Robesons vacationed at Kislovodsk with her parents, Oliver John and Bertha Golden, and she, Lia (age four), remembers “the adults discussing some thing and arguing heatedly. During that trip Paul Robeson could not find many of his friends. My father too lost many of his acquaintances.… Later I found out that Paul Robeson had made official inquiries regarding his arrested friends, trying to help them. In reply, one of them was brought from prison.…” The latter statement may be a garbled version of the PR-Feffer incident in 1949 (see pp. 352–53). Robert Robinson believes that PR knew almost nothing of the purges (which to Robinson were familiar from disappearances within his own factory), and ascribes PR’s comparative ignorance to his unwillingness to talk at length with other blacks resident in the U.S.S.R. who might have disabused him of his growing faith in the Soviet system (interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988). On the other hand, PR may have been concerned about Robinson’s already welldeveloped anti-Soviet sentiments (on account of which, apparently, he decided not to help Robinson get permission to leave the U.S.S.R.) and may simply have decided not to discuss the purge trials with him (Robinson, Black on Red, esp. pp. 313–17).

  18. ER to CVV and FM, April 4, May 18, July 16, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten; Ma Goode, ms., “The Education of My Grandson,” RA; Ma Good to the Associated Negro Press, Feb. 20, 1942, CHS: Barnett (“we left Moscow in tears”); News-Chronicle, Jan. 25, 1938 (“Russian children”). There is a letter full of veiled references about the situation in the U.S.S.R. and the inadvisability of keeping Pauli in school there (“I am telling you this strictly privately.… The idea of bringing Pauli up in Russia was originally a good one, but according to reliable information—circumstances have changed”) in RA from Kurt Shafer of the International Relief Association for Victims of Nazism to PR, April 26, 1938. Interviewed after his return to London, Pauli told a reporter he had had many friends in Russia and hoped to go back there to school (Soviets Today [Australia], Oct. 1, 1938). Because of the Spanish and Russian visas on Essie’s passport, the Germans had already confiscated it once (ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm). Not wanting anyone “to believe that we have taken him out,” the Robesons at first explained Pauli’s reappearance in London as merely a holiday visit (ER to Patterson, April 5, 1938, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm).

  19. Philip Noel Baker to PR, Feb. 9, 1938 (IPC); Nancy E. Bell to PR, Feb. 14, 1938 (IPC); E. E. Brooke to ER, April l2, 1938 (Basque); Marian Wilbrahan to PR, May 10, 1938 (BYPA); Trent to ER, April 2, 1938 (music); Walter Starkie to ER, April 26, 1938 (music); Eisenstein to ER, April 9, 1938—all RA; Leyda, Kino, p. 360 (roadblocks). The preliminary draft of a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for an International Theatres Foundation is in RA, along with a letter from Ambrose to PR, Jan. 5, 1938, making reference to earlier discussions.

  20. Holt to PR, June 10, 1938, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 4, 1938 (Albert Hall), Yale: Van Vechten. For the 1937–38 season, Holt, in his advertising, had placed Robeson’s name alone, above all the others, in a star-studded list that included Gigli, Richard Tauber, Kreisler, Yehudi Menuhin, Lawrence Tibbett and Rachmaninoff (placard courtesy of Freda Diamond). The critics of the Albert Hall concert were less ecstatic than the audience (e.g., Evening News and Daily Mail, April 4, 1938). Daily Worker, June 16, 1938 (anthem); Mary Atherton to PR, June 13, 1938; Judith Todd to PR, June 27, 1938, RA. In signing a contract with Roman Freulich of Los Angeles to make a film, PR insisted on a clause guaranteeing him final cut—and when Freulich failed to come up with a script that met his approval, he canceled the deal. However, it was probably not for political reasons but for musical ones—his antipathy to appearing in opera, even one by an old friend—that at this same time Robeson turned down an offer to appear in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, recommending Todd Duncan as a replacement. The contract with Freulich, dated Feb. 1938, is in RA; ER to CVV and FM, May 18, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (film refusal); ER to Mrs. Kaufman, June 9, 1938, RA (Saints).

  21. The Cine Technician, Sept.-Oct. 1938; Daily Record (Chicago), Feb. 28, 1939; Daily Express, June 9, 1938, and PR ms., “The English Theater,” n.d. (1938), RA (“inside turned”; “talented tenth”).

  22. Malcolm Page, “The Early Years at Unity,” Theater Quarterly, Oct.-Dec. 1971, pp. 60–66; Raphael Samuel, Theaters of the Left 1880–1935 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 59–64, 94–95. The Program for Unity
Theatre (RA) contains its statement of purpose; interview with Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985. Robeson also lent his name to Unity Theatre’s fourteen-person General Council, along with (among others) Sean O’Casey, Harold Laski, Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz, Tyrone Guthrie—and Maurice Browne, the producer of the 1930 Othello; but Robeson did not actually attend the council’s meetings (interview with Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985). At the inaugural ceremonies for Unity, on Nov. 25, 1937, Gollancz spoke, Robeson sang, and O’Casey sent a message of support.

  23. Page, “Early Years”; interview with Marshall and Brilliant, July 20, 1985. The program for Plant (RA) does indeed omit the names of the actors, but a contemporary photograph of the Unity Theater (Weekly Illustrated, June 25, 1938) reveals a large placard over the building’s entrance prominently advertising PR’s name immediately underneath the play’s title. Herbert Marshall (interview, July 20, 1985) recalled that Robeson lent him money during the run of Plant but begged Marshall not to let Essie know.

  24. Time and Tide, July 16, 1938; Unity Theater, “Press Statement,” 1938, RA.

  25. Beste’s recollections are in a 1979 letter to Ann Soutter (who had also been a member of Unity), as copied and sent to PR, Jr., May 14, 1985, courtesy of PR, Jr. In her covering letter, Soutter recalled Essie as “a real watchdog, and needed to be, for Paul was very soft hearted. She would send a taxi to pick him up after the performance.… If he wasn’t home in time she would telephone to know the reason why.” Sterner interview with Alfie Bass.

  26. Haemi Scheien, “Paul Robeson Becomes an Amateur,” Drama, July 1938 (“drying up”); Weekly Review, June 23, 1938 (“compact”); Evening Standard, July 25, 1938 (“gentle strength”); Manchester Guardian, June 16, 1938.

  27. The ms. of PR’s speech at the Jamaica meeting (Town Hall, July 17, 1938) is in RA; Marie Seton, Panditji: A Portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru (Taplinger, 1967), pp. 94–97. Seton, who was working on a biography of Krishna Menon before her death, recalled (in our interviews of Aug.-Sept. 1982) that Menon and Robeson had very much liked each other.

  28. Daily Worker, June 29, 1938 (Dutt); two-page typed notes of PR’s welcoming remarks, RA.

  29. Nehru to ER, July 7, 21 (“delight”), Oct. 13, 1938, Jan. 27, 1939; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to ER, Sept. 15, 1938, RA; ER to Richard Wright, April 19, May 31, 1939, Yale: Johnson; ER to CVV, July 16, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (“thrilled to death” with Wright’s Children). Four versions of the introduction Robeson wrote to Uncle Tom’s Children are in RA (all contain the sentence quoted). When Wright’s theatrical adaptation of Native Son, written in collaboration with Paul Green, opened on Broadway two years later, PR telegraphed him, “You have advanced the cause of your people immeasurably and doubly strengthened your place in American letters. Congratulations and thanks!” (March 24, 1941, Yale: Johnson). Contrary to PR, Van Vechten thought Native Son “an overrated book if there ever was one” (CVV to Harold Jackman, Feb. 8, 1941, Bruce Kellner, ed., Letters of CVV, p. 176. When imprisoned in 1941, Nehru asked Essie to send him more books, enclosing a list of thirteen titles, which included Reinhold Niebuhr, Ortega y Gasset, Carl Becker, Admiral Mahan, and Upton Sinclair (Nehru to ER, Aug. 2, 1941, RA). Harold Leventhal, the theatrical agent who served as a GI in India during World War II, recalls meeting Nehru soon after his release from prison; almost his first question was “How is Paul Robeson?” The very next week, according to Leventhal, he met Gandhi—who asked him exactly the same question (phone interview with Leventhal, Oct. 13, 1983).

  30. Nehru’s remarks about Essie are in a letter to “Betty,” Oct. 12, 1943, as published in S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Orient Longman Ltd., 1980), vol. 13, pp. 255–56. For a time in 1938, Robeson was thinking of visiting India as a stopover on his way to Australia—but the tour was canceled. Seton (interview, Aug. 31, 1982) told me she was convinced not just that Nehru was available for an affair with Essie but that she backed off because of the “cultural divide” between them.

  31. Essie’s U.S. trip is most fully reported in the New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 6, 1938. While in New York she saw, as always, a lot of theater, including Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free? Hughes had written her to suggest she read the play, even while doubting it was “anything Paul could do abroad,” since he had written it “expressly for a Negro theater” (i.e., Negro audiences) (Hughes to ER, July 16, 1938, RA). Descriptions of PR’s tour are from: Eastbourne Gazette, Aug. 10, 1938; South Wales Evening Post (Swansea), Aug. 13, 1938; Herald and Express (Torquay), Aug. 22, 1938; The Scotsman, Sept. 2, 1938; Daily Mail, Jan. 14, 1939; Aberdeen Express, Jan. 18, 1939; Express and Star, Jan. 23, 1939. Preparations and arrangements for the tour are recounted in a series of letters from H. M. Horton (of Harold Holt Ltd.) to Larry Brown, May-July 1939, in NYPL/Schm: Brown. At Glasgow, Robeson sang in aid of a food ship’s being sent to Spain, and just before he stepped onto the platform, the mother of two little boys, George and Eric Park, brought them to him in an anteroom to show him an autograph book belonging to their father, which Robeson had signed in Spain—just days before their father was killed. Robeson was deeply moved by the encounter and referred to it “in the quietest of voices” when he took the platform (Glasgow Bulletin, Aug. 19, 1938). In September 1938, Robeson further demonstrated his commitment to the Loyalist cause by taking supper with thirty Manchester members of the International Brigade and singing at a Merseyside meeting to commemorate the Brigade’s fallen members (Manchester Guardian, Sept. 19, 29, 1938). Star, Nov. 16, 1937; Daily Mail, Nov. 24, 1938 (poll).

  32. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (University of Illinois, 1983), pp. 198–99; Barnett to PR, July 19, 1938, Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (hereafter CHS: Barnett). The American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., felt the need to censor part of an article on Robeson that referred to his pro-Soviet sympathies, to avoid having “many readers in this country condemn him” (Charlotte Kett, author of the article, to ER, June 27, 1939, RA).

  33. Daily Telegraph, Nov. 1, 1938; News-Chronicle, Nov. 2, 1938; PR interview with J. Danvers Williams, “Why Robeson Rebelled,” Film Weekly, Oct. 8, 1938. At this time a potential film deal fell through with British National Films Ltd., though the main reason seems to have been financial rather than ideological (John Cornfield to ER, Nov. 14, 1938, RA). Robeson sought legal advice in successfully breaking an earlier contract agreement with Walter Futter, who had produced Jericho, to make another picture with him (Crane to PR, Feb. 14, 1939; the agreement with Futter, dated Feb. 10, 1937, is in RA).

  34. Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 4, 1938 (cinemas); Cambridge Daily News, Dec. 1, 1938; News-Chronicle, Dec. 23, 1938; Daily Herald, Dec. 24, 1938; Answers (London), April 8, 1939 (fees).

  35. Edney to PR and Hannington to PR, both Dec. 29, 1938 (NUWM), RA; Fred Copeman to PR, Jan. 10, 1939 (NMF); Monica Whately to PR, Feb. 17, 1939 (League); J. R. Cox to PR, Feb. 20, 1939 (Coloured), RA; The Times (London), May 1, 1939 (SCR). In these same months, Robeson also adopted a hundred Spanish children for a month, was signatory to a letter urging the American government to lift the embargo against Republican Spain, and was invited to become a vice-president of the Society for Cultural Relations … British Common wealth and the U.S.S.R. (SCR) (Judith Todd to PR, Oct. 13, 1938). When S. I. Hiung solicited a statement from him to be sent to the Chinese people, Robeson replied with this message: “Greetings to the Chinese people who are so heroically defending the liberties of all progressive humanity” (Hiung to PR, Oct. 16, 25, 1938; PR to Hiung, n.d. [1938], RA).

  36. Western Mail, Dec. 8, 1938; Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (Macgibbon & Kee, 1960) (Welsh hunger marches in 1927, 1929); Mark A. Exton, “Paul Robeson and South Wales: A Partial Guide to a Man’s Beliefs,” M.A. thesis, University of Exeter, Oct. 1984; Sterner interviews with Tommy Adlam and William Paynter.

  37. ER to Harold Jackman, April 12, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten (Australia); Seton, Robeson, p. 119 (anti-Nazi); Rockmore to Larr
y Brown, Feb. 21, 1938, RA. The New York Post, June 20, 1939, called the revival of Jones “magnificent,” and the New York World-Telegram, June 22, 1939, thought Robeson “in brilliant form.” Luretta Bagby Martin, a student at Pennsylvania State University, when Robeson gave a concert there in 1939, asked an employee at the Nittany Lion Inn, a college property, whether the college “honored the non-discrimination rule in the dining room. He reported that Robeson took his meals in his room” (Martin to me, June 1, 1985). Robeson was also in contact with the radical labor organizer, Ella Reeve Bloor (“Mother” Bloor) during his stay in the States (the references are in letters from Mother Bloor to her children, in Bloor Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (henceforth SSC: Bloor).

  38. Sunday Worker, June 4, 1939; Woollcott to PR, May 28, 1939, RA; Yergan to PR, June 2, 1939, RA; Walter White to PR, two letters June 15, 1939, one marked Special Delivery (“I have been trying to reach you for several days without success”); Parkinson to White, June 14, 1939; White to Parkinson, June 15, 1939, LC: NAACP; ER to PR, May 31, June 2, 1939, RA; ER to CVV and FM, July 19, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten.

  39. CVV to FM, Aug. 2, 4, 1939, Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, pp. 167–68; FM to CVV, Aug. 3, 1939, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.

  40. The Worker, Sept. 1, 1964 (met in Harlem early twenties); PR to Ben Davis, n.d. (1954–55), courtesy of Nina Goodman (Mrs. Ben Davis); Herndon to “My dear Paul” (suggesting prior acquaintance), June 17, 1939, RA; accompanying Herndon’s letter is a news clipping from the Birmingham World, describing the activities of the Negro Youth Congress. In 1934 Herndon had written his own appeal for justice, You Cannot Kill the Working Class, and then, in 1937, a second book, Let Me Live, which credited the Communists as being the most effective rallying point against white supremacy. For more on Herndon, see Naison, Communists in Harlem.