Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  10. A description of the India rally is in the Daily Worker, Aug. 29, 1942, and The Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1942; the transcript of PR’s speech is in RA. Apparently his speech was recorded in a somewhat sketchy fashion (Diane Sommers, Yergan’s secretary at the CAA, to ER, Nov. 23, 1942, RA). New Masses, Oct. 20, 1942; Lin Liang-mo, Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 19, Nov. 7, 1942; FBI 100-25857-1875, Referral Doc #16.

  11. People’s World, Sept. 10, 17, 19, 1942; Labor Herald, Sept. 17, 1942; Daily Worker, July 28, Sept. 19, 20, 1942; transcript of Oct. 19, 1942, New Orleans speech, RA.

  12. Robeson’s itineraries and date-books are in RA. Throughout the tour he shared the platform with the pianist William Schatzkammer. Mansfield Times, April 6, 1942; the many other reviews of the tour are in RA and are too numerous to cite. Robeson had to cancel his March 17 recital in Tacoma because of illness (Tacoma News Tribune, April 9, 1943). Apparently he was also ill in Nov. 1942, seriously enough to prompt a letter from Earl Browder: “Reports of your health give me much concern. May I urge you not to overexert yourself, nor assume too many responsibilities” (Browder to PR, Dec. 1, 1942, RA). The FBI agent who attended the Detroit concert reported that “Communist literature in the form of pamphlets and leaflets was distributed following the conclusion of the concert” (Detroit Report, 4/14/43, 100-9292-211A, p. 3).

  Robeson occasionally interrupted the concert tour to attend political rallies of special importance to him (e.g., Daily Worker, April 19, May 20, 1943; North to Marcantonio, Jan. 18, 1943, NYPL Ms. Div.: Marcantonio). In Nov. 1942 he returned to New York to appear at a mass rally in Madison Square Garden, “Salute to Our Russian Ally,” where, according to the FBI agent who covered the gathering, “Robeson received the greatest ovation of the afternoon when he read a letter of a Soviet soldier and sang Russian war songs in English and Russian” (FBI New York 100-39062-17). For his continuing work with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, a group that had attracted the support of innumerable non-Communist liberals, Robeson was denounced by an FBI informant as “undoubtedly 100% Communist.” As proof, the informant adduced the further information of having “seen him in company with Madame LITVINOFF [sic] alone in a theatre” (FBI New York, 10/15/42, 62-7713-4, p. 2). He was again linked with Ivy Litvinov the following year when misquoted as saying, “America gives her minority groups more of a chance than just about any country on earth.” Robeson immediately issued a statement denying that he had been quoted accurately, and Mrs. Litvinov wrote a letter to PM asserting the U.S.S.R.’s total lack of segregated facilities. The Robesons had been entertained by the Litvinovs in the U.S.S.R. in 1934 (see p. 186) and in denying the quotation PR added that on his visits to the U.S.S.R. from 1934 to 1938 he had “found the real solution of the minority and racial problem, a very simple solution—complete equality” (Chicago Defender, Sept. 25, 1943).

  13. Daily Worker, April 24, 28, May 4, 1943; Atlanta Daily World, June 2, 1943; Chicago Defender, June 5, 1943; The Chronicle, June 12, 1943; the Morehouse program is in RA. In February 1943 Robeson had received another distinguished award. The Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature (NYPL) named him among the twelve black and six white individuals, organizations, or institutions that had done the most to improve race relations in the preceding year (The New York Times, Feb. 7, 1943). Among the others named were Wendell L. Willkie, Dr. Franz Boas, Lillian Smith, Duke Ellington, Dr. George Washington Carver, Judge William H. Hastie, Dr. Channing Tobias, Margaret Walker, and Dr. Alain Locke.

  14. PM, July 1, 2, 1943 (Lewisohn); The New York Times, July 2, 1943 (Lewisohn); Chicago Defender, July 31, 1943 (Apex); Apex Allayer, Aug. 1943; Daily Worker, Aug. 28, 1943 (CIO speech). Robeson’s speech in Chicago on July 24, 1943, is printed in “The Metal and Human Engineering Magazine,” the Apex Alloyer, Aug. 1943. The FBI kept PR under surveillance during his California trip, its agents dutifully reporting his activities, including his visit with the actor Clarence Muse, a car ride with Louise Bransten (“a wealthy woman, extremely active in Communist Party Front organizations and a heavy contributor to the JAFRC”), and a party attended by local left-wingers, such as Harry Bridges of the CIO and Revels Cayton. The FBI was again in close attendance when Robeson flew back out to Chicago in mid-Sept. to address a rally dedicated to “winning the war and peace.” He did so on the direct appeal of Vice-President Henry A. Wallace. Although by then in rehearsal for Othello, he let himself be persuaded and, along with giving a speech to the rally, attended various functions in honor of Wallace—with whom he would soon be closely associated in the Progressive Party (FBI New York 100-25857-1875; 100-47315-1053, 2459; 100-4931-3645, 3645, 3677). Already an admirer of Wallace, Robeson wrote to congratulate him on his “great speech … Everyone is still excited and grateful for your clear and beautiful exposition of the practical working plan for the World of the Common Man” (PR to Wallace, Nov. 12, 1942, RA).

  15. MW to May Whitty, Aug. 1943, LC: Webster. Additional details are in Spector, “Hagen,” and Webster, Daughter. The prestigious Theatre Guild was led by Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn. The Guild agreed to raise the money, manage the business affairs, and serve as the official producer of Othello—but artistic control remained with Webster, Robeson, and their stage manager, John Haggott. In her interview with Sterner, Langner’s wife, Armina Marshall, says that the directors of the Guild “were around the rehearsal all the time,” but she, too, portrays their role as essentially a back-seat one, recalling their care in giving their “notes” to Webster rather than directly to members of the cast or crew. The Robesons had been frequent guests in the Marshall-Langner household during the 1920s. For PR’s help with Ferrer’s draft status, see note 5, p. 707.

  16. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond.

  17. References to the original contract are made in MW’s Feb. 28, 1944, contract with the Guild (RA); MW to May Whitty, Aug. 25, 1943, LC: Webster; Janet Barton Carroll, “A Promptbook Study of Margaret Webster’s Production of Othello,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, LSU, 1977, as quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 207 (Schnabel contract); MW to May Whitty, Feb. 17, 1944, LC: Webster, for the later dispute over billing for the tour—when MW did resign her role, Edith King (who had been playing Bianca) replaced her; MW, Daughter, p. 116 (“sweet, unassuming”; “Svengali”).

  18. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

  19. John K. Hutchens, “Paul Robeson,” Theatre Arts, Oct. 1944.

  20. As early as 1924, Essie recorded in her diary Paul’s frequent acting lessons from Koiransky, the Russian critic and Stanislavski’s collaborator: “They will go over ‘Othello’ together, Koiransky suggesting and Paul learning the part” (ER Diary, Aug. 27, 1924). Similarly, she recorded frequent vocal coaching from the great teacher Proschowsky in 1926 (e.g.: “Found him absolutely marvelous. Showed him all his faults and showed him how to correct them and how to sing right” [March 16, 1926]; “Paul’s progress is remarkable.… We are confident now” [March 17, 1926]). In his own diary for 1929 Paul enthusiastically recorded working on his “soft-voice problem” with Miss Armitage, whom he found a “really wonderful” help (Nov. 11, 1929, RA). On Uta Hagen’s suggestion, Robeson consulted with her own singing coach, Jerry Swinford, and off and on studied with him for nearly three years (interviews with Hagen).

  21. The fellow director, Edgar Reynolds, is quoted in Silverman, “Margaret Webster’s Shakespearean Production,” p. 161. “What the old boy meant” is in a New Yorker profile of MW by Barbara Heggie (May 20, 1944). MW took pained exception to that profile in her book Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, p. 87.

  22. Webster, Daughter, pp. 109–11.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982. Sept. 28, 1984. A very different version is in an effusive exchange of letters between Essie and Dame May Whitty. Initially, during the 1942 rehearsals, Robeson was enthusiastic about Webster’s directorial skills: “We had a couple of swell rehearsals Webster & I,” he wrote to Essie. “She’s going to
be wonderful, exactly what I had hoped.… She’s going to get me to do plenty—and she’ll fill in the gaps. I’m really excited and encouraged” (PR to ER, n.d. [1942], RA). Twenty years later Webster told an interviewer that Robeson’s “innate dignity” and “sweetness” could not compensate for the fact that he “was not an experienced actor,” with the result that in a few scenes she had “to construct a cradle around him, a production structure that would sustain him and mask his weaknesses” (Ely Silverman interview with Margaret Webster, Jan. 26, 1962, printed as “Appendix C” in Silverman’s “Margaret Webster’s Shakespearean Production”). Another cast member, James Monks, the young actor playing Cassio, in retrospect puts a far higher estimate on Webster’s directorial skills—though Monks’s recollections of everyone tend to be uniformly beneficent (Sterner interview with Monks). Flora Robson, writing to Webster’s parents, decidedly gilded the lily: “They [PR and ER] are tremendously grateful to Peggy and Paul believes in her implicitly” (Robson to Webster and Whitty, Aug. 15, 1943, LC: Webster). According to PR, Jr., his father never—either publicly or privately—had an unkind word for Webster. A sample of PR’s public praise for her is in an interview with the Princetonian, Aug. 17, 1943. At the end of the Othello tour, Webster wrote PR, “… since we started to work … there have been a lot of ups & downs—way ups & way downs … but let’s remember only the heights” (June 11, 1945, RA).

  25. Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; phone interview with Sanford Meisner, April 12, 1985. Meisner, unlike Hagen, feels that enough good teachers were then available to have helped Robeson. Meisner saw the Broadway Othello and in his view Robeson was “no actor,” but he “could have been helped.” Though he had a “singer’s voice,” it was a “beautiful” one and he could have been shown “how to use it better, so as not to sound too amateurish.”

  26. Sterner interview with John Gerstadt.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Sterner interviews with Monks and Gerstadt.

  29. Sterner interview with Gerstadt; phone interview with Joseph Gould, March 17, 1985 (“powerfully cool”). Gould met PR in 1947 when they worked together on a film version—ultimately aborted—of Howard Fast’s Free dom Road.

  30. P. L. Prattis’s column, “The Horizon,” Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 18, 1944 (for similar statements, see Jerome Beatty’s quotes from an interview with PR, “America’s No. 1 Negro,” The American, May 1944); interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

  31. “Negro warrior” is in Beatty, “America’s No. 1 Negro”; PR, “Some Reflections on Othello and the Nature of Our Time,” The American Scholar, Autumn 1945. Robeson’s views on the importance of putting Othello’s jealousy on a cultural basis are from an interview with Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1943.

  32. Beatty, “America’s No. l Negro.”

  33. John Lovell, Jr., “Shakespeare’s American Play,” Theatre Arts, June 1944. My discussion of the historical background to Othello is also indebted to Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors (Harvard University Press, 1948); Margaret Webster’s program notes, “The Black Othello” (and her Tears and Daughter); William Babula, Shakespeare in Production (Garland, 1981); and Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). The Maryland woman, Mary Preston, is as quoted in Webster, Daughter, p. 112.

  In the decade immediately preceding Robeson’s Othello, serious black actors, when able to secure work at all, had been allowed to appear on Broadway in stereotypical roles only, and plays by black writers were nonexistent (except for the 1935 production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto, in a production heavily doctored—without Hughes’s consent—so as to emphasize the lurid and underplay the social commentary). For more on the history of Mulatto, see Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (Lawrence Hill and Co., 1983), pp. 241–43, and Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford, 1986), vol. I, pp. 311–16. More common were casual references to “niggers” in several first-run plays of the period. Gerald Weales, “Popular Theatre of the Thirties” (Tulane Drama Review, summer 1967), is the best summary of black theater in the period; his conclusion is that”… the Negro exists in the popular plays of the 1930’s—if at all—as a background figure who gets no special comment.” To some limited extent, the decade of the thirties contrasts unfavorably with the preceding decade of the twenties and the comparatively greater platform it offered for the “black voice” to be heard (e.g., see Johnson, Black Manhattan, chs. xv-xvii in the 1968 Atheneum reprint).

  34. In “Shakespeare’s American Play,” Theatre Arts, June 1944, John Lovell, Jr., lists several professional stage productions with a black Othello—including the B. J. Ford Company in the 1880s, the Fine Arts Club of Denver in 1938, and the Lafayette Players in 1916 (Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United Stales [Duffield and Co., 1930], p. 130, refers to this performance as having been given by the Edward Sterling Wright Players—and having “made a favorable impression”). Howard Barnes (New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 31, 1943) refers to “a dozen or more correspondents” who wrote in correcting his early statement that Robeson was the first black to play Othello, citing productions that went back to the nineteenth century. Errol Hill, in Shakespeare in Sable, has documented a considerable number of black Othellos, dating back at least to 1880 (see especially pp. 38–39, 45–47, 53–57, 82, 101–2, 110). Among Robeson’s predecessors was Wayland Rudd, hired by Jasper Deeter to play Othello at the Hedgerow Theatre in 1930. Rudd later became a Soviet citizen and was part of the welcoming committee when Robeson arrived for his first visit to Moscow in 1934 (see note 3, p. 629). Robeson also knew William Marshall, the black actor who performed Othello in 1953 at Mother Zion A.M.E. (brother Ben’s church). Marshall played the role again in 1955 for the Brattle Street Players, and when PR’s passport problems temporarily cast doubt on his ability to fill a Stratford, England, engagement, director Glen Byam Shaw hired Marshall as a replacement; he gracefully bowed out after Robeson’s passport difficulties cleared up. For PR’s acquaintance with Ira Aldridge’s daughter, Amanda Ira Aldridge, in London during the twenties, see p. 91.

  35. Webster, Tears, pp. 236–37. See also her article—appearing in The New York Times on the day the play opened on Broadway—“Pertinent Words on His Moorship’s Ancient,” The New York Times, Oct. 19, 1943. The black writer J. A. Rogers (in his Pittsburgh Courier column, “Rogers Says,” for Nov. 13, 1943) provides a learned and persuasive case for believing Shakespeare precisely meant to portray Othello as a Negro—and chides Margaret Webster for muddying the issue by saying in the New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 31, 1943) that “Othello was a black man, a blackamoor. Oh, we know the Moors aren’t Negroes, but Shakespeare either didn’t know or didn’t care.” On the contrary, Rogers argues, Shakespeare did know—Negroes in his day were called “Moors.”

  36. PR interviews in The American (May 1944), the Philadelphia Record (Oct. 5, 1943), and the Rochester Times-Union (Oct. 3, 1944). Laurence Olivier also felt Othello was the most difficult role Shakespeare ever wrote (Webster, Daughter, pp. 87, 109).

  37. Pearl Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire,” 1944, twelve-page ms., RA (interview for Bradley’s M.A. thesis). Margaret Webster’s own exhausting schedule is recounted in an undated letter to Essie (RA): “I have been in the theatre from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. without any break for the past three days!”

  38. Uta Hagen as quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 210. The superlatives were “F. R. J.” in the New Haven Journal-Courier; Paul Daniel Davis in the Chicago Defender, Oct. 9, 1943; Helen Eager in the Boston Traveler, Sept. 21, 1943; Jerry Gaghan in the Philadelphia Daily News, Oct. 5, 1943; Robert Sensenderfer in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Oct. 5, 1943. Only two years before Robeson appeared in Philadelphia, Langston Hughes’s Mulatto had been prevented from opening when the commissioner of licenses rejected it as an “incitement to riot” (The People’s Voice, Oct. 23, 1943).<
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  39. Elinor Hughes, Boston Herald, Sept. 22, 26, 1943; Elliot Norton, Boston Sunday Post, Sept. 26, 1943; Spector, “Hagen,” p. 210 (“thumbs”). Leo Gaffney’s review in the Boston Daily Record (Sept. 22, 1943) also came down hard on Robeson, giving the acting palm to Ferrer, and revealing something of a racist bias: “… his Moor is too black.… The tragedy of miscegenation comes into disquieting prominence.…” Judging from one newspaper account, the opening-night audience in Boston sided with Elinor Hughes: “Hundreds cheered and the curtain kept doing a St. Vitus dance to accommodate the curtain-calls” (Boston Evening American, Sept. 21, 1943). The Philadelphia reviews were also mixed: Philadelphia Record (Oct. 5, 1943), Philadelphia Inquirer (Oct. 5, 1943).

  Offstage, Robeson was widely interviewed and hailed during the tryout. In Boston he was fêted at the Ritz Hotel, was presented by Mayor Maurice Tobin with the first key to the city since the outbreak of World War II, and received a letter of apology from Governor Leverett Salton-stall for having had to depart early from a luncheon held in Robeson’s honor at the Tavern (The Afro-American, Oct. 2, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 9, 1943; Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 2, 1943; The Worker, Oct. 3, 1943; Saltonstall to Robeson, Oct. 4, 1943, RA).

  40. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; Webster, “Paul Robeson and Othello,” Our Time, June 1944. Mrs. Roosevelt, too, caught the excitement; on Oct. 16 she sent a note to the Shubert management in advance of her intended visit to the theater on November 4 to make sure PR would be performing that night (note dated Oct. 16, 1943, RA).