Paul Robeson (82 page)

While in Seattle as part of his tour, Robeson took the occasion (duly noted by FBI agents) to put in a public appearance at the U.S. Federal Court. Six defendants—including Terry Pettus, the editor of
People's World
, who had helped to arrange Robeson's tour the previous year—were on trial under the Smith Act for conspiracy; during recess, Robeson made a point of talking with the defendants, and because one of them was under a contempt citation and not permitted to leave the courtroom, Robeson met with him in the U.S. marshal's office. It was hardly the first time, of course, that Robeson had insisted on publicly identifying himself with those under federal indictment. From the first round of Smith Act arrests back in 1949, he had played an active role on committees and at rallies to defend the victims and their families. At one point the FBI had even speculated that Essie and Paul had turned their house at Enfield into a secret hideout for CPUSA leaders who had gone underground. An over-zealous neighbor had excited the Justice Department with tales about an unfamiliar Dodge parked near the Robeson home; in the retrospective opinion of the Enfield chief of police, the mystery vehicle more likely belonged to FBI agents themselves; their presence around the Robeson house had become a commonplace.
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The Enfield property was put on the market. Bob Rockmore's careful management had allowed Robeson to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, but as his income shrank and his legal fees mounted, some belt-tightening did become necessary. For two years Rockmore had been exerting pressure on Essie to put the house up for sale; as he saw the financial picture worsening, he wrote her that “something” had to be done “to get Enfield off Paul's back.” She dragged her feet for a while: she had loved the house, and it had also served—even if rarely—as the one domestic meeting ground she still shared with Paul. But as his relationship with Helen Rosen deepened in the early fifties, any real domestic life he had was with the Rosens, and he had stopped coming to Enfield altogether. In New York City he based himself at the McGhees' apartment (where he paid a regular monthly rent)
and sometimes stayed at his brother Ben's parsonage in Harlem. Even after Essie came around to the idea of selling Enfield, it became difficult to get a buyer. It wasn't until the spring of 1953, after dropping the asking price from thirty-five to twenty-two thousand—with only six thousand down—that Rockmore was able to dispose of the property. Essie tried hard to persuade Paul that they should build a small house in Norwalk, but he gladly deferred to Rockmore's insistence that such a project would be beyond his means. Just at this time, Ma Goode died, after many years in a Massachusetts rest home. Essie, bereaved and uprooted, reluctantly took up hotel life in New York, while Paul continued to stay with the McGhees and to spend much of his time at the Rosens'.
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Essie's mind was temporarily taken off her displacement by a summons to appear before McCarthy's Senate Investigating Committee on July 7, 1953. The Senator had recently “discovered” that the Voice of America and the Overseas Library Program were hotbeds of sedition, and while trampling through those vineyards a McCarthy staff member's eyes lit upon this statement in Essie's 1945 book,
African Journey:
“… the one hopeful light on the horizon … [is] the exciting and encouraging conditions in Soviet Russia, where for the first time in history our race problem has been squarely faced and solved.…” Eslanda Robeson was summoned to Washington to explain, if she could, her traitorous words. Short of bagging Robeson himself—and the lack of government evidence had thus far made that impossible—this seemed a delicious prospect for the redbaiters.

But Essie denied them the triumph. Accompanied by her lawyer, Milton H. Friedman, she gave a feisty account of herself, turning the session, if not into the rout she later claimed, nonetheless into an impressive draw. She set a tone of charming belligerence with her very first response on the stand: “You are Mrs. Paul Robeson, is that correct?” counselor Roy Cohn asked her. “Yes,” she answered, “and very proud of it, too.” She then surprised the committee by pleading the Fifteenth as well as the First Amendment in refusing to answer whether she was a member of the Communist Party. Witnesses had routinely been citing the First Amendment (and after 1950, the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination), but no one before Essie had called upon the Fifteenth. “The Fifteenth Amendment?” the surprised McCarthy asked. “This solely deals with your right to vote. You cannot refuse to answer questions about a conspiracy to destroy this nation because you have the right to vote.… Before this committee we do not have Negroes or whites.… We have American citizens. They all have the same rights.…” He repeated his standard warning that witnesses would be cited for contempt if they based their refusal to answer a question on any grounds other than selfincrimination.
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Essie was not intimidated. “I don't quite understand your statement,”
she said, “that we are all American citizens.… I am a second class citizen now, as a Negro. That is the reason I claim this fifteenth amendment. I would be very happy if we didn't have to discuss race, and I hope we will at some point get to a place where we don't have to. But in the meantime you are white and I am Negro and this is a very white committee and I feel I must protect myself. I am sorry it is necessary.” “The only person who has been discussing race today is yourself,” McCarthy shot back. Senator Symington tried to inject a conciliatory note: “Would you be more willing to answer questions with respect to Communism and the possibility of your being a Communist, if you were more satisfied with your position in this country as a Negro?” Essie did not bend: “The reason I refuse to answer the question is because I think that … my opinions are my private personal affair.…” But did not the government, Symington persisted, “have a right to ask you whether you are dedicated to an organization which in turn is dedicated to overthrowing the American government by force and violence?” Essie refused to bite: “I don't know anybody that is dedicated to overthrowing the government by force and violence. The only force and violence I know is what I have experienced and seen in this country, and it has not been by Communists.”

McCarthy then defended his all-white committee on the grounds that the people had not chosen to elect any black senators, a sloppy argument that Essie punctured by pointing out that most blacks lived in the South, where they were commonly denied the right to vote. When he tried to trap her into telling whether she had ever attended Communist cell meetings, Essie insouciantly asked him to define what a cell was; when he shifted to the word “unit,” she professed not to know what a unit was either. McCarthy remained polite, perhaps even impressed. He pronounced Essie “very charming” and “intelligent.” “I am not going to order you to answer those questions and cite you for contempt.… You are getting special consideration today.… I do not propose to argue with a lady.” Essie thanked him, announced she was “a very, very loyal American,” and stepped down from the stand. It was “hilarious,” she wrote Marie Seton, “all sweetness and light, very clear, very respectful and reasonable.” “Paul is
VERY
pleased, the Children are very proud, and all our friends are simply delighted. So.”
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Paul's pleasure in Essie's performance was momentary. As the number of rebuffs continued to mount and as government surveillance intensified, the cracks in his public good spirits, and even in his health, became more discernible. It's “tough sledding,” he wrote Helen Rosen's daughter Judy from the road. “Whole weight is thrown against us—in every city, town & hamlet.” He added, though, that when in St. Louis he had gone to the last session of the NAACP convention “and the whole audience recognized me (I also was in the audience) and I was hour & half getting away—signing autographs etc.—Gave top brass (White & Co) a fit.…” To Helen Rosen
he wrote, “I miss you terribly. Miss the quiet and sweet-warm response of chatting about this & that—of reading as a kind of lovely communion—of philosophizing—and the ever recurrent theme of life and being.… I have grown to love you ever so deeply.… I have almost no defenses where you are concerned.”
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By late 1953 rejections and disappointments were arriving in bunches. Invitations from England to perform
Othello
and from Wales to sing at the Eisteddfod festival—as well as a host of additional requests for overseas appearances at peace conferences and political events—had to be turned down for lack of a passport. At home, the governing board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music refused to honor its contract with ASP (National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions) for a cultural festival when it learned that Robeson would be participating—his presence would create a “danger of disorder.” At Hartford, Connecticut, he was belatedly allowed to appear onstage—protected by a police detachment of 250 men—only after the local Board of Education had successfully resisted the demand of the City Council to bar the concert. Baited by reporters afterward for “hurting your cause by allying yourself with Communists,” Robeson lashed out in anger: “Is this what you want?” he asked them, pretending to bend at the waist. “For me to bend and bow and shuffle along and be a nice, kindly colored man and say please when I ask for better treatment for my people?—Well, it doesn't work.”
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The government was determined to scotch the notion that militancy would work, either. The Attorney General put the Council on African Affairs on its list of “Communist-front” organizations and ordered it to appear for a hearing before the Subversive Activities Control Board in Washington. The CAA categorically denied the allegation that it was Communist-controlled but acknowledged that in the current climate, where parallelism of ideas was considered a sufficient basis for establishing guilt, it was powerless to exonerate itself: “the only defense we have is to
get rid of McCarthyism and the McCarran Act!
” That, the Council stressed, was “the prime task of the hour.” But the hour was not at hand.
Freedom
magazine also began to feel the heat. With subscriptions and revenues declining, Robeson had to extend a personal loan—which his straitened finances could ill afford—to keep the publication going. (For the first three months of 1954, Robeson took only three hundred dollars in artist's fees from Freedom Associates, even as the
Amsterdam News
was reporting, “Don't go feeling sorry for Paul Robeson, he still makes $600 at each left-wing rally he appears at.”) The prolonged, accumulated stress on him began to show. FBI headquarters in Washington received a report from a field agent that Robeson was “suffering from heart trouble.” That specific rumor was unfounded, but Robeson did have to enter a strictly supervised diet program for several weeks in Washington, D.C., to control his ballooning weight. “It's been really restful,” he wrote Helen Rosen. “I've taken off
some 18–20 lbs.… I was around 278 when I arrived here. I had no idea.”
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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.”
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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?”
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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.
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