Paul Robeson (60 page)

Disappointing though the turnout was—only four thousand dollars was raised, not enough to put Robeson on the air—he delivered a strong message to the people gathered in the Fieldses' living room. He stressed two points: the continuing, even flourishing existence of the Nazi spirit and leadership in Germany; and the determination among the traditional European power elite to maintain colonialism in Africa and the Far East. He specifically connected these developments with Truman's assumption of the presidency, his appointment of Southern segregationists to his cabinet, and the immediate falling away thereafter from Roosevelt's concern with the plight of the underclass around the globe. Among Truman's advisers, Robeson held Edward L. Stettinius, Jr., and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes particularly responsible for the shift in policy emphasis. And overseas
he held Winston Churchill predominantly accountable for resurgent imperialism.
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Robeson and the Council on African Affairs had distrusted Churchill's intentions while the war was still on. They had hailed the statement on colonies that had issued from the opposition Labour Party's 1943 conference on postwar policy as “a serious and detailed document” notable, despite its weaknesses, for demanding that the “color bar” be immediately abolished in all territories subject to Parliament. When the British Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, won a sweeping election victory over Churchill and the Tories in July 1945, Robeson cabled Attlee his congratulations, choosing to see in the results a defeat for imperialism which would open the way to positive action on independence for colonial peoples.
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But within months Robeson had to revise that estimate, as evidence quickly mounted that the new British government was adhering to the same old Tory policies in regard to Java, India, and Africa. The CAA published in
New Africa
a series of articles decrying the “indecent haste and anxiety” of Attlee to “re-establish British authority in Hong Kong and other possessions liberated from Japan”—“exactly what might have been expected of a Churchill government”—and expressed its grief in an editorial at the “revolting and base” spectacle of American troops being used to assist the British, French, and Dutch in their “coercive restoration of the colonial system” in Indonesia.
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At just this time, the fall of 1945, the postponed Spingarn award ceremony took place, and Robeson decided to use the occasion to express his mounting concern over world developments. The NAACP, on the other hand, had expected to use the occasion for its own purposes. When planning for the event had begun the preceding spring, Roy Wilkins had telegraphed Walter White that the presentation ceremony “offers chance to place Association before many persons attracted by Robeson but unaware of our work.” Since Wilkins believed that the “downtown audience will follow Robeson anywhere,” he suggested the affair be held in either of Harlem's three-thousand-seat auditoriums—the Golden Gate or the A.M.E. Zion Church, where Robeson's brother Ben was pastor. (Ultimately the Hotel Biltmore was decided upon, the seven hundred guests straining its ballroom to capacity). Wilkins suggested Helen Gahagan Douglas, Fredric March, or John Mason Brown to make the presentation to Robeson. Walter White was attracted to the possibility of Lawrence Tibbett, but that name was scratched when Clara Rockmore, among others, let it be known that Tibbett's selection would “rankle” Paul because of Tibbett's “envy and resentment of Paul's success” in the past. Bob Rockmore suggested to Walter White that Robeson's own preference would be either Mayor La Guardia, Marshall Field, Henry A. Wallace, or Henry Morgenthau. The name of Harold Ickes was later thrown in, and Orson Welles was
briefly considered—until word arrived that he would ask the NAACP to pay his expenses from Hollywood (“I don't think it worth that,” was White's comment). Scheduling conflicts finally took most of the contenders out of consideration, and the NAACP settled on Marshall Field, publisher of the Chicago
Sun
, to make the presentation.
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Walter White officiated at the gala ceremony. Marian Anderson, Louis T. Wright (Robeson's old friend and himself a Spingarn Medalist), J. J. Singh (president of the India League of America), playwright Marc Connelly, Arthur B. Spingarn (president of the NAACP), and Essie were among those seated on the dais; and Mrs. Roosevelt, Judge William Hastie, and Henry Wallace were among those who sent congratulatory telegrams. In his presentation, Marshall Field settled for rather bland and sonorous phrases, citing Robeson's “broad human sympathies.”
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But in his response Robeson struck a far more overtly political note than was traditionally associated with the august Spingarn event, and in the process “shocked” (according to a headline in the Pittsburgh
Courier
) many of the notables in attendance. Venting his concern over the drift of events in the six months since Roosevelt's death, and what he perceived as a shift in emphasis away from civil-rights reform on the domestic scene and toward renewed colonialism on the international one, Robeson warned against abandoning the ideals for which the recent war had purportedly been fought. “The people of Asia, China and India want to realize promises made to them,” he said, and black Americans, too, expected the “fight for democracy” to be realized at home. Further, Robeson denounced renewed signs of hostility from the United States and Britain toward the Soviet Union as symptomatic of a resurgent fascism (leading the FBI in its report on the dinner to note ominously that Robeson had said “full employment in Russia is a fact, and not a myth, and discrimination is non-existent. The Soviet Union can't help it as a nation and a people if it is in the main stream of change”).
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Six years later, at the height of the Cold War, when Walter White and Robeson had become estranged, White wrote a bitter account of Robeson's performance at the Spingarn dinner. The NAACP's initial intention, White claimed, had been to present the medal at Town Hall, with admission free, but Rockmore—despite Robeson's strenuous “espousal of the ‘little man'”—had insisted on a “‘good downtown hotel,'” thereby excluding all but the reasonably affluent (no evidence in the NAACP papers or elsewhere supports White's claim). After faithfully promising to be prompt for a photographing session at 6:30 p.m., Robeson, according to White, arrived at 7:45—at the conclusion of the reception and after the platform party had moved to the dais (this part of White's charge, given Robeson's tendency to be late, is credible). Robeson refused to submit the text of his speech in advance for the press, claiming that he planned to speak from notes, but, as White told it, just before Robeson started, Max
Yergan purportedly came to the speakers' table and began to “whisper earnestly” to him—in a voice loud enough to be overheard—that “They say” and “they want you to say” such-and-such in the speech (“they” being, in White's view, the CPUSA). White described the speech Robeson did give as “a lengthy and vehement attack upon all things American and indiscriminate laudation of all things Russian,” thereby missing a “magnificent opportunity to make converts,” “stunning” the audience and producing only scattered, tepid applause—an overstatement more heated in its choice of words than Robeson's speech had been.
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The Spingarn Medal marked both the apex of Robeson's public acclaim and the onset of his fall from official grace. Henceforth his own disillusion with the promise of American life would proceed in tandem with his ejection from it.

A few weeks after the Spingarn event, at a World Freedom Rally in Madison Square Garden on November 14, 1945, Robeson reiterated his fears about postwar developments. He forcefully assailed the role of the American government “in helping British, French and Chiang Kai-shek governments to crush the peoples' struggles toward democracy, freedom and independence,” reminding the audience that while “millions of Africans faced unnecessary starvation” and “the tragic plight of Europe's anguished Jewish people has still to be solved,” it was premature to talk of “world peace and security”—a goal that would not be advanced by “reliance upon mighty armaments, military bases and atomic bombs.” At the end of November, at a two-day “institute on Judaism and race relations” convened by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Robeson again spoke out bluntly against the “active counter-revolution” that had abruptly arisen, calling upon American public opinion “to bring to task our State Department and President Truman for their part on the side of reaction” and specifically warning that blacks are “not only miserable, but … determined not to continue miserable.” Six months earlier an FBI report had hawked the false rumor that Robeson had joined the Communist Party; a Bureau agent now insisted that, although “his Communist Party membership book number is not known”—for a time the FBI believed he had become a member under the name of John Thomas—“his actions, connections and statements definitely classify him as a Communist.”
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Simultaneous with Robeson's developing distress over Western policies came the disarray within the American Communist Party following the release of the “Duclos Letter.” Published in the April 1945 issue of
Cahiers du communisme
(the organ of Communist Party theory in France), the article by Jacques Duclos, a leading French Communist, denounced Earl Browder for having made the unorthodox suggestion that the time had come for capitalism and socialism to coexist peacefully and to collaborate in the United States. Browder had first presented those views, the culmination of
his long-standing Popular Front efforts to “Americanize” the Party, to the national committee of the CPUSA in January 1944. He had recommended the dissolution of the Party and its replacement with a new organization, the Communist Political Association; with only William Z. Foster among the leadership dissenting, Browder's views had been adopted. But Duclos now took Foster's position, denouncing Browder for “a notorious revision of Marxism, an acceptance of the possibility of class peace in the postwar period which was tantamount to nothing less than a rejection of the inherent disharmony in the struggle between labor and capital.” Browder for a time tried to sustain the notion that Duclos's viewpoint was peculiar to the French Communists and had not emanated from Moscow. But that proved not to be the case, and when the National Committee of the CPUSA met from June 18 to 20, 1945, “Browderism” was routed and William Z. Foster emerged as the Party's new head.
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Despite his personal friendship with Browder, Robeson agreed that Browder had been moving the CP in the wrong direction. The FBI monitored a phone conversation between two unidentified parties immediately before the meeting of the National Committee in which one of them reported having had an extended discussion with Robeson that same day; during it Robeson purportedly said he hadn't paid much attention in the past to Browder's new strategy, thinking of it “as purely something tactical,” figuring that at some later time the CP would regroup under the old banner. He had been surprised in reading Duclos's article to learn how far the Party had gone in Browder's direction—“too far,” he now believed, given the resurgence of imperialism and of anti-Soviet animus. He credited William Z. Foster with having foreseen these developments, which Browder had not. He said he was going to try to get in touch with Browder.
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These political developments further dampened Robeson's mood as he set off on an extensive concert tour with Larry Brown late in September 1945. What he saw and heard on the tour concerning the deteriorating circumstances of black Americans put him into a worse humor still—the sight of wretched housing and declining job opportunities, the tales of police brutality and a sharp increase in the number of lynchings in the South. The tour was the longest Robeson and Brown had ever made, lasting seven months (with a brief break for Christmas), covering thousands of miles, including 115 engagements and, according to the Pittsburgh
Courier
, grossing two hundred thousand dollars. In Brown's opinion, Robeson was at the peak of his power as a singer and, as the tumultuous reception proved, still very much a popular favorite. And yet Brown reported that Robeson was in a foul mood for much of the tour, and “more difficult to work with than during all the years before.” His energy depleted by the round of concert commitments, Robeson nonetheless made frequent political appearances (or, as the FBI agents who reported
on his activities preferred to put it, he continued to lend “his presence and influence to various meetings sponsored by known [Communist] front groups”). Among the “subversive activities” the FBI agents noted was Robeson's defense of the right of actors to appear at rallies sponsored by the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, his endorsement of the “known pro-Communist” Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union, in his race for re-election to the New York City Council, and his appearance while in Toronto at a gathering of the Labour Progressive Party (“similar to the Communist Party in the United States”), at which he “sang the American Left Wing Song, ‘Joe Hill,'” and “made a
MARXIST
speech”—namely, reporting that on his recent USO trip to Germany he had found many American army men anti-Russian and pro-German and alarmingly willing to place ex-Nazi leaders back into positions of influence.
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Winston Churchill's speech on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, did nothing to improve Robeson's state of mind—nor did his public response to it improve his reputation with the FBI. After being voted out of office in 1945, Churchill had come to the United States to lobby for support of British intervention in Greece on behalf of the monarchy. Churchill and Truman conferred together in the White House and then journeyed to Fulton, where the President introduced Churchill and sat on the dais while the former Prime Minister delivered a searing indictment of the Soviet Union—his celebrated “Iron Curtain” speech—warning that “the Dark Ages may return” if Communist expansionist policies were not firmly resisted.
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