Paul Robeson (136 page)

16.
New York
Sun
, June 26, 1940; New York
Amsterdam News
, July 6, 1940;
Time
, July 8, 1940; ER Diary, June 24, 1940, RA.
Time
reported, “Last week Mrs. Robeson, who chaperones her husband in interviews, shushed him on politics,
said ‘there is a witch hunt on in America now.' Asked if Communism is compatible with the U.S. Constitution, the Robesons declined to reply.”

17.
Chicago
Journal of Commerce
, July 29, 1940 (Cassidy); on Aug. 31 Robeson performed “Ballad” again in Chicago, this time under the baton of the black conductor James A. Mundy (Pittsburgh
Courier
, Sept. 14, 1940); New York
World-Telegram
, Aug. 6, 1940 (
Jones
); Langnerto O'Neill, Aug. 20, 1940, RA; Langner to PR, Aug. 15, Sept. 13, 1940; Rockmore to Langner, Aug. 29, Sept. 11, 16, 1940—all in Yale: Langner. (Langner also tried, unsuccessfully, to interest Robeson in appearing in a new play,
Not on Friday.
) There is a letter from PR to O'Neill, July 31, 1940 (Yale: O'Neill) requesting permission to use a special Hammond Organ for offstage sound effects in the
Jones
production; perhaps O'Neill denied the request, since the reviews don't refer to such effects.

During Aug. PR also found time to sing at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, an interracial camp for the children of workers that had declared Paul Robeson Day (Hackettstown
Gazette
, Aug. 16, 1940)—for more on the camp, see p. 254—and also to sing at a benefit for the monthly journal
Equality
, prompting Lillian Hellman to write him, “It is a fine thing to
hear you sing
, and like all really decent art, it makes you feel sad and happy and good” (Hellman to PR, Aug. 12, 1940, RA).

Robeson had somewhat less than full success in his first indoor New York City concert in nearly five years in Carnegie Hall in early Oct. 1940; it was enthusiastically greeted by the audience, but somewhat less so by the critics (New York
Herald Tribune, Sun, World-Telegram
, and
Times
—all Oct. 7, 1940—expressed varying degrees of reservation). When he returned to sing in New York two months after that Carnegie Hall concert, Robeson was again treated with politeness rather than acclaim by the critics—at least in comparison with the thunderous welcome he got on tour; as in Britain, his provincial receptions were more enthusiastic than his cosmopolitan ones (New York
Herald Tribune, Sun, Times, World-Telegram, PM
—all Dec. 18, 1940; the
Sun
review seems representative: “… Robeson's richly sonorous but somewhat monotonous voice …”). During the war years, Robeson gradually expanded his concert repertoire. He added a number of Russian songs, especially by Mussorgsky (including “The Death Scene” and “Varlaam's Ballad” from
Boris Godunov
), and also a number of popular English ballads (“Oh No, John!” became a great audience favorite, though its trivial, arch nature was hardly well suited either to Robeson's voice or his temperament). The programs for PR's concerts in 1939–45 are in RA.

18.
Chicago
Defender
, Aug. 3, 1940; interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986. Robeson flew to Hollywood; it was his first time on a plane and, according to Essie, he “loved the trip” (ER Diary, June 5, 1940, RA).

19.
Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond.

20.
Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond; ER to Toni Strassman, June 6, 1938; ER to Nan Pandit, Aug. 15, 1951; ER to Nehru, Sept. 17, 1957, RA. Many entries in PR's datebook for 1941 (RA) list appointments with Freda.

21.
The executed documents turning over control to Rockmore are in RA. Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984; ER Diary, June 5 (Columbia), 9, 12, 1940, RA; Frances Taylor Patterson (who taught Essie film at Columbia) to ER, May 20, 1940, RA (
Black Progress
); David Bader to ER, June 1, 7, 1940 (
Uncle Tom
), RA; Nehru to ER, July 10, 1940, RA. In Erik Barnouw's recollection, Essie registered for his class because “She wanted to develop a formula for a series to present her husband on the air” (Shannon Shafly and Mark Langer interview with Barnouw, 1975, Columbia University Oral History Project). ER's trip to Central America is fully documented in her diary for Aug. 1940 and in the several long letters she wrote to Pauli and to her mother (all in RA). No letters were sent directly to Paul, nor do the other letters make any mention of him—which cannot have been an accident. Paul also signed up at Columbia—for nine credits in Russian and Chinese—but there is no record of his attending classes.

In the years immediately preceding their return to the States, tension between Paul and Essie had receded but not disappeared. In 1938, for example, she wrote the Van Vechtens, “Paul actually came out on the tender to meet me at Southampton when I returned. I was so astonished. I never expected anything like that and never even looked. Idly watching the tender arrive, I noted a very big lump of brown, and it was Paul!! Well, well” (ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 17, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten).

22.
Theodore Ward (president, Negro Playwrights) to ER, May 30, 1940; Ward to ER, June 25, 29, 1940, RA;
Daily Worker
, July 27, 1940 (inaugural);
Sunday Worker
, Sept. 15, 1940 (Davis); the Pittsburgh
Courier
(Sept. 14, 1940) and the New York
Amsterdam News
(Sept. 14, 1940) also carried articles about the opening; Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Andy Razaf, Hazel Scott, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Morris Carnovsky (of the Group Theatre) were among the other participating celebrities.

23.
PM
, Sept. 17, 1940 (Spanish songs); Jessica Smith to PR, July 5, 1941, March 26, 1942, MSRC: Jessica Smith Papers. At the same time, a film PR made while in Spain was recovered (William Pickens to PR, Oct. 22, 1940, RA, enclosing a statement from Nancy Cunard about the film); George Gregory to PR, Oct. 12, 1940, RA (Harlem); Madame Sun Yat-sen to PR, Sept. 1940, RA (China); Frederick V. Field to “Brother Robeson,” Sept. 20, 1940 (conscription); Dreiser to PR, May 14, 1940, RA;
Herald
, March 30, 1941;
Daily Province
(Vancouver), Oct. 31, 1940; Jane Swanhuysen to Marcantonio, Nov. 11, 1940, NYPL, Ms. Div.: Marcantonio (Emergency Peace Mobilization).

24.
Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984.

25.
Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984. “Paul's attitude to me is really touching,” Clara Rockmore wrote her husband (n.d. [1940s]); also PR to Bob Rockmore, Nov. 3, 1944—both courtesy of Clara Rockmore.

26.
Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984. PR's popularity with college audiences is amply attested to in the local and campus reviews of his concerts.
Daily Home News
(New Brunswick), Oct. 10, 1940: “tumultuous applause by 3,600”; Hamilton
Republican
, Oct. 17, 1940: “established a record for the largest attendance at a non-athletic event in Colgate history”;
Daily Cardinal
(University of Wisconsin), Oct. 22, 1940: “a tremendous ovation”; Seattle
Times
(University of Washington), Nov. 7, 1940: “turbulent applause.” Clara and Larry Brown were very fond of each other; there's a letter in NYPL/Schm: Brown, Nov. 5, 1940, from Bob Rockmore to Brown expressing his gratitude for “all your kindness and consideration to Clara.”

27.
Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984; follow-up phone interview with Revels Cayton, May 30, 1987 (Vanessi's); the incident at Vanessi's is also described in the San Francisco
People's World
, Nov. 15, 1940,
The New York Times
, Nov. 10, 1940, and the
Sunday Worker
, Nov. 17, 1940; the lawsuit in the Chicago
Defender
, Nov. 30, 1940, which reports that damages in the sum of $22,500 were being sought. In a lighter vein, Leonard Lyons reported in his gossip column, “The Lyons Den” (New York
Post
, Dec. 4, 1940), that, when Robeson was dining on a Chicago-bound train with Oscar Levant and Marc Connelly, a Pullman waiter approached Robeson for an autograph. He obliged, and the pleased waiter left—without asking Levant or Connelly for their autographs. Robeson purportedly smiled and said, “No offense—it's just racial solidarity.”

28.
Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984; multiple interviews with Helen Rosen (rage).

29.
Interviews with Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984. In some of the quotes from Rockmore I have removed ellipses between comments she made at different points in our interviews, combining them to avoid endless diacritical marks. Of course, as Alan Bush, who accompanied PR in the later fifties, pointed out to me: “There's no such thing as natural singing. If there is, it's unbearable to listen to. People who
think they sing by the light of nature, you would never wish to hear them a second time. Now, he was a developed singer, very highly developed technically, but he sounded absolutely natural. And so you would think he was born to sing.… He had relative pitch” (interview with Alan Bush, PR, Jr., participating, Sept. 3, 1982).

Toward the end of the tour, Robeson started to cup a hand behind his ear in order to hear himself better; he retained the habit of ear-cupping thereafter. He also participated, during this same period, in an experiment with an electronic device (“Synthia”) developed by Prof. Harold Burris-Meyer, theater sound-research director at the Stevens Institute of Technology, to enable a singer to hear his own sound without producing acoustical distortions or amplification in the concert hall (papers, newspaper articles, and correspondence surrounding the experiment are in RA).

30.
ER to PR, Nov. 3, 5, 9, 1940, RA; ER to CVV, Nov. 7 (weight), 9 (parents' functions), 1940; ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 15, 1940, Yale: Van Vechten. “We've been hanging around for months, doing nothing, since ‘John Henry' closed, and were beginning to get restless,” Essie wrote John P. Davis, describing her own turmoil more than Paul's (ER to Davis, April 20, 1941, National Negro Congress Papers—hence-forth NYPL/Schm: NNC).

31.
Hartford
Courant
, April 2, 1941 (worker); ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 27, 1941 (“Big Paul”), RA; PR to ER, Aug. 29, 1941, RA; Freda Diamond ms. comment (scaffold). Essie bombarded Bob Rockmore with itemized bills and enthusiastic reports about the detailed adventures of settling in. Various friends—including Minnie Sumner, Hattie Boiling, Bert and Gig McGhee, Sadie Sumner, Essie's brother John Goode, Freda Diamond, and Walter White's son, Pidgy White (to visit Pauli)—came up for a look at the new place, and all expressed enthusiasm (e.g., ER to Rockmore, June 16, July 13, 23, Aug. 10, 25, 1941, RA). Rockmore periodically showed his exasperation with Essie's nest-building expenditures, writing her that until the last of the renovations and improvements were finally finished, there would “be no peace on earth for anybody” (Rockmore to ER, Aug. 12, 1941, RA).

32.
Of special value in understanding the Popular Front years (though it is concerned primarily with the leadership, not the rank and file of the CP) is Harvey Klehr,
The Heyday of American Communism
(Basic Books, 1984).

33.
It's impossible to cite with any thoroughness the large literature on these issues, but I found of special value (along with Klehr,
Heyday
) Raymond Wolters,
Negroes and the Great Depression
(Greenwood, 1970), Bert Cochran,
Labor and Communism
(Princeton, 1977), John B. Kirby,
Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era
(University of Tennessee, 1980), and, above all, Naison's indispensable
Communists in Harlem
.

The Robesons were never more than marginally acquainted with the Ralph Bunches. In 1932 Essie interviewed Bunche for a book she was planning at the time on prominent black figures and found him “attractive and very, very interesting” (ER Diary, Sept. 26, 1932, RA). A telling anecdote about Robeson and Bunche was told to me by Jean Herskovits, daughter of Melville Herskovits: The family had recently returned from Trinidad where Jean (age four) had picked up fluent pidgin English. Robeson was the first black man Jean had seen since Trinidad, and when he swept her up in his arms on arriving at the Herskovits house, she enthusiastically greeted him in pidgin. Robeson and Jean's parents burst out laughing. “Thank God she didn't do that with Ralph [Bunche]!” Paul said. In 1949, when Robeson was under fire from the established black leadership, Bunche is quoted as saying, “I have always admired Mr. Robeson's singing more than his social philosophy” (as quoted in Gilbert Ware,
William Hastie: Grace Under Pressure
[Oxford, 1984], p. 229). Subsequently, Robeson apparently made a disparaging remark about Bunche (Corliss Lamont to PR, Dec. 1, 1950, NYPL/Schm: PR Coll.).

34.
ER to Davis, April 20, 1941, NYPL/Schm: NNC; Rajni [Patel] to ER,
April 26, 1940, RA (India); PR joined Theodore Dreiser in cabling his support of the British People's Convention (Jan. 4, 1941), hailing its struggle against imperialist war aims—both men's statements are in RA. Alphaeus Hunton served as a chairman of the NNC's Labor Committee, and Doxey Wilkerson headed its Civil Affairs Committee. Both men subsequently moved to the Council on African Affairs, and Hunton became a close Robeson associate. John P. Davis resigned from the NNC early in 1943; at that time the national office closed, though the Council continued to function for a while longer in New York before folding into the Civil Rights Congress (Dorothy Hunton,
Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant
[privately printed by Dorothy Hunton, 1986]).

35.
Daily Worker
, Feb. 1, Oct. 1, Dec. 16, 18, 1941 (Browder), March 25, 1942 (“anti-fascist”); Citizen's Letter to Free Earl Browder, 1941–42 (PR was one of the Sponsors of the National Conference to Free Earl Browder), NYPL: Marcantonio. Gurley Flynn's statement about PR's expenditures in Browder's behalf was reported in War Dept., March 15, 1943, FBI 100-26603-1067, p. 2. The March 17, 1941, mass “Free Browder” rally was formally billed as a sixtieth birthday celebration for William Z. Foster, general secretary of the CPUSA. Browder himself appeared at the rally and received an ovation; as did Robeson when introduced by Robert Minor, then acting secretary of the CPUSA. In tribute to Foster, Robeson sang Marc Blitzstein's “The Purest Kind of Guy.” Other speakers included the black Communist leader James W. Ford and Israel Amter, New York State chairman of the Party. Theodore Dreiser sent a telegram.