Paul Robeson (50 page)

He then went on to ask about Pauli: “… How's my boy. Everyone, everywhere asks about him and I tell them how sweet, intelligent and
thoughtful he is, what an athlete—and a few other things. They conclude I like him enormously and am very proud of him. I think they are perhaps right about that.” He ended the letter with as sweetly tender a message as any he ever sent her: “I love you very, very much and miss you until it hurts. I do like my place so much both in Conn. and in your heart—and I feel I'm camping out until I get back to both.” Although Paul was capable of dissembling, this does not seem such an instance. More likely, this complicated man was having a genuine spell of nostalgic affection for Essie. On her side—never one to indulge introspection or wallow in self-pity—Essie plunged into the maelstrom of painters, plumbers, and pipe fitters with renewed zest (Freda Diamond visited her frequently and helped her choose furnishings), establishing a home in which she knew she would, for the most part, live without Paul.
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The years from 1935 to 1939 had been the heyday of the Popular Front, a time when a substantial consensus was reached internationally on the left. The Communist Party/USA (CPUSA) refocused its sights away from revolutionary bellicosity and toward cooperation with mainstream liberalism in a combined effort to resist the rise of fascism abroad and to work at home in behalf of trade-unionism and racial equality. CP leader Earl Browder's declaration in 1936 that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” plausibly affirmed this solidarity—and also signaled the marked influence Communism had come to have in American life: CP membership rolls dramatically lengthened, hundreds of new Party units formed, and Communists were welcomed to affiliate in large-scale coalitions with “radical democrats.” The Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 effectively ended this antifascist unity.

In the two-year period following that pact, and until Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Robeson took his position on the CP side of the sundered left-wing coalition. He sounded the themes and advocated the policies simultaneously being endorsed through the linked voices of the Communist Party, the newly powerful National Negro Congress (NNC), and some of the left-wing unions in the recently emergent Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The particular fortunes of the National Negro Congress illustrate the shifting general pattern of left-wing alliance and Robeson's own role within it.
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The Communist Party had played a prominent but not a controlling role in the creation of the NNC, joining forces with a diverse spectrum of black-activist organizations and leaders. At the first NNC convention, in 1936, eight hundred delegates representing a wide range of civil-rights organizations, church groups, fraternities, and trade unions gathered to form a broad coalition dedicated to struggling against fascism and for civil rights and unionism. John P. Davis, a black economist and Harvard Law School graduate (and possibly a secret CP member), was the leading figure
in the NNC from the beginning, but its notable supporters initially included Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Lester Granger of the Urban League, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. This pluralistic combination held at the NNC's second convention, in 1937, but strains had already appeared. The affiliated mainstream liberals were beginning to be unnerved by the fact that increased funding for the NNC was coming from the Communist Party and from the left-wing unions. When John P. Davis launched an antilynching drive in 1938, the coalition was further rent: the leadership of the NAACP had been working for years on securing federal antilynching legislation and deeply resented this “encroachment” on its territory. The Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 drove off additional legions, and by the time of the NNC's third convention, in April 1940 (it had held no national meeting either in 1938 or 1939), numerous non-Communists had drifted away. After a blistering speech to the 1940 convention, in which he equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, A. Philip Randolph resigned the presidency and was succeeded by a rising figure in left-wing circles, Max Yergan.
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Still, over five hundred delegates from twenty-nine states did show up for the third convention—a concert engagement prevented Robeson from attending—to hear NNC speakers emphasize, as had Robeson in his own recent public appearances, that the current European conflict was a struggle between rival imperialist powers—and to call upon American blacks to focus their energies instead on the struggle for rights within the United States. That message made sense to many blacks. World War I, they remembered, had also been fought with noble slogans about making the world safe for democracy—and had resulted in the colonial powers' extending their control over people of color; more recently, protestations of democratic fervor had not extended to concern over Mussolini's rape of Ethiopia. As Robeson had been arguing for a year, dark-skinned people could not be expected to believe the British claim that they were “fighting for freedom” when they continued contemptuously to deny it to the people of India.
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Following the Nazi-Soviet pact, the CPUSA, too, reversed its call for collective security against fascism and revived its historic insistence that the working class of the world refuse participation in an “imperialist” war. Using that same line of argument, Robeson spoke out continually against American involvement in a European conflict ultimately aimed, in his opinion, at destroying the threat of Soviet-inspired peoples' revolutions. He also played an energetic public role in protesting the American government's 1940 sentencing of Earl Browder, the Party leader, to four years in prison on the pretext of having violated passport regulations. Claiming that the real animus against Browder related to his antifascism, Robeson in March 1941 joined the labor hero Warren K. Billings, New York Labor
Party Congressman Vito Marcantonio, the Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Max Yergan, and the Spanish Civil War veteran Conrad Kaye (now of the American Federation of Labor) in a rally in Madison Square Garden to “Free Earl Browder.” Gurley Flynn announced at another public meeting that Robeson had contributed more money to help free Browder than had any other single individual. When Robeson was introduced at an antifascist fund-raising dinner in March 1942 as “America's leading anti-fascist,” he declined that title to bestow it on Browder (who was finally released from prison in May 1942).
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In regard to trade-union issues, Robeson typically advised black workers to defy their employers and to join the CIO, declaring his belief—one shared by the NNC and the CPUSA—in a biracial trade-union movement as the most promising vehicle for extending American democracy to blacks. In May 1941 Robeson put in a dramatic appearance in Detroit in behalf of the United Automobile Workers' CIO organizing drive, just days before its successful showdown with Henry Ford. Three months later he told reporters, “The future of America depends largely upon the progressive program of the CIO,” and he claimed that “the Negro people, for the most part, understand that the CIO program is working for all laboring groups, including their own minority.”
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In making this hopeful assertion, Robeson chose to minimize some disfiguring realities. In the mid-thirties, the CP had abandoned “revolutionary unionism” based on proletarian rule in order to cooperate, under a Popular Front banner, with trade-unionism. By the late thirties, the logic of that decision had forced the CP to make some accommodation to the racism that characterized even such left-leaning CIO unions as the Transport Workers or the Hotel and Restaurant Workers (though these unions were light-years ahead of most AFL affiliates in accepting blacks for membership). Mike Quill of the TWU never made any substantial effort to fight for expanded job opportunities for black workers, placing priority instead on issues of union recognition and the protection of the rights of those already enlisted in its ranks. Other left-wing labor leaders did have strong convictions about the need to change patterns of racial discrimination within industry, but were sometimes reluctant to push their more conservative memberships in a direction that might split their unions and jeopardize their own positions of leadership. And the CP did not exert much pressure in that direction on labor leaders sympathetic to its ideology. Preoccupied with the international crisis, the CP by the late thirties placed more emphasis on maintaining its alliances than on pushing aggressively for the kind of action against job discrimination that might shake those alliances. In choosing to “Americanize” the Party, in other words, the CP's leaders had inescapably become enmeshed in the contradictions of American life: to maintain its influence within the labor movement, it had to
compromise somewhat on its vanguard position regarding black rights. The CP and CIO's comparative inaction against racial discrimination during and after World War II (when measured against their earlier clarion calls) would lead black militants, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to press for “black caucuses” within each union. Robeson's friend Revels Cayton would play a central role in that movement—and Robeson, who would never sanction a back-seat role for blacks for long, would also become involved.

The dilution of the CP's mission to press the issue of job rights for the economically depressed black working class, in combination with the CP's aggressively secular scorn for Christian institutions and values so central to the culture of Afro-Americans, seriously constricted its appeal to the black masses. But if Communism failed to ignite the enthusiasm of any significant segment of the black working class—the agency on which it theoretically relied for producing social change—it did turn out to have a broad appeal for black artists and intellectuals. When emphasizing the class struggle in the years before the Popular Front, the Party as a corollary had downplayed the specialness of black culture. But during the Popular Front years, with the centrality of class struggle deemphasized, the Party threw itself into pronounced support for black arts, helping to sponsor a variety of efforts to encourage black theater, history, and music. Robeson was hardly alone among black artists in welcoming this uniquely respectful attitude toward black aesthetics. Here was an “Americanism” that exemplified
real
respect for “differentness” rather than attempting, as did official mainstream liberalism, to disparage and destroy ethnic variations under the guise of championing the superior virtue of the “melting pot”—which in practice had tended to mean assimilation to the values of white middle-class Protestants.
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Symbolizing this appreciation of black culture, the fraternal organization International Workers Order sponsored a pageant on “The Negro in American Life” (with the Manhattan Council of the NNC as cosponsor) dramatizing major events in Afro-American history. Robeson enthusiastically offered his services. The pageant, written by the black playwright Carlton Moss, proved weak in its dramaturgy but strong in its emotional appeal. Its dedication “to the Negro People and to Fraternal Brotherhood Among All” roused a racially mixed audience of five thousand to an ovation—and then to an ecumenical frenzy of cheering when Robeson called for all minorities to unite in making “America a real land of freedom and democracy.”
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Another event cosponsored by the NNC led—for the very reason of its sponsorship—to a major controversy. Robeson had already given his support on several occasions in 1941 to benefits for Chinese war relief when the Washington Committee for Aid to China put together a gala
“Night of Stars” and asked him to headline it. He quickly agreed—but the Daughters of the American Revolution did not. Approached by the China Committee with a request to lease Constitution Hall, the DAR flatly refused, reiterating its policy of barring the hall to black artists, despite the uproar that had attended its denial of the hall two years earlier to Marian Anderson (which had led Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her DAR membership and personally to welcome Anderson to a huge alternative concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial).
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The China Committee appealed to Cornelia Bryce Pinchot for help. A friend of Mrs. Roosevelt and wife to Gifford Pinchot, the former governor of Pennsylvania, the patrician Mrs. Pinchot was nationally known as an activist supporter of human rights (Marian Anderson had stayed at her house while in Washington for the Lincoln Memorial concert). She responded to the committee's appeal by taking on the concert chairmanship herself and organizing an illustrious sponsorship committee that included Mrs. Roosevelt, the Chinese Ambassador Hu Shih, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald MacLeish, Senator Arthur Capper, Oscar L. Chapman, and the wives of Francis Biddle, Hugo L. Black, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas—the “left wing” of the New Deal establishment. The DAR's ban created additional publicity for the concert and, due to the heightened demand for tickets, Mrs. Pinchot rented the seven-thousand-seat Uline Arena.
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At that point she discovered that the NNC was cosponsor of the concert and that it had made an agreement to provide money and services in advance of the event in exchange for 50 percent of its proceeds—a proportion initiated by the China Committee, not the NNC. Mrs. Pinchot protested the “diversion” of funds to the NNC and notified the committee that she could not sanction any arrangement that did not call for the entire proceeds from the concert to go to the advertised cause of aid to China. John P. Davis, the leading figure in the NNC, offered to terminate his organization's contract with the committee if two conditions were met: reimbursement for the NNC's expenses, and a guarantee that the Uline auditorium, which had agreed to suspend its Jim Crow policy for the single night of the Robeson concert, not discriminate in the future. The Uline management refused to provide such a guarantee, and since that meant the NNC would not retract its cosponsorship, Mrs. Pinchot announced that she—along with Mrs. Roosevelt and Ambassador Hu Shih—were withdrawing support, saying that “the ramifications from the original errors have spread too far to be corrected.”
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