The Martin Duberman Reader (19 page)

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 comparative inaction of the CP and the CIO 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 never sanctioned a backseat 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 African 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 CP 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 culture. 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.

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 National Negro Congress [NNC] as co-sponsor) dramatizing major events in African 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.”

Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet pact that followed soon after, created an international realignment that abruptly brought Robeson's views into greater consonance with mainstream patriotism. The Soviet Union was now hailed among the Western democracies—as Robeson had hailed it all along—as the front line of defense in the struggle against fascism. The image of the bullying Russian bear bent on aggression quickly gave way in the West to the image of a heroic homeland battling to preserve the integrity of its borders against fascist incursion. The communists and their pro-Soviet allies in the NNC
and the left-wing CIO unions were no slower in repainting their political canvases. A year before the Nazi invasion, CP leader William Z. Foster had branded the British Empire “the main enemy of everything progressive,” but after the invasion the main enemy rapidly became Hitler's Germany—so much so that, out of its concern for a unified war effort, the CP would support a “no-strike” pledge by labor and dilute its protest against racism in the armed forces, thereby partly compromising the vanguard position in the civil rights struggle that it had earlier staked out for itself.

Robeson, too, shifted his advocacy from nonintervention to massive aid for the Soviet Union. He urged the Roosevelt administration to help arm the now combined forces of antifascism—to support the Allies against the Axis (as the struggle soon came to be called, once the Japanese completed the diametric symmetry by bombing Pearl Harbor at the end of the year). He freely lent his voice in concerts and his presence at rallies in support of an all-out effort to assist the Soviet Union, Britain, and China, alternately joining fellow artists like Benny Goodman in presenting an evening of Soviet music, or co-signing a letter that deplored the “strikingly inadequate” information available in America about the Soviet Union and offering to make up the deficiency with free copies of
The Soviet Power
, a book by Reverend Hewlett Johnson (the “Red” Dean of Canterbury). At a time when Soviet military fortunes were at a low ebb and predictions of the Soviet Union's collapse widespread, Robeson insisted in statements to the press that the Russian masses, convinced they had a government that offered them hope, would never succumb to the Nazis.

With the Soviet Union now a wartime ally, the cause of Russian war relief became so entirely respectable by 1942 that, in a rally at Madison Square Garden on June 22, Robeson was joined on the podium by a full panoply of American life—Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, William Green (president of the AFL), Harry Hopkins, Soviet Ambassador to the United States Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish leader Dr. Stephen S. Wise, the opera star Jan Peerce, and the eminent
pianist Artur Rubinstein. The shift in public opinion from antagonism to approval of the “heroic” Russian ally became dramatically complete over the next few years, with the mass-circulation magazines illustrating—and fostering—the changing image.
Collier's
in December 1943 concluded that Russia was neither socialist nor communist but, rather, represented a “modified capitalist set-up” moving “toward something resembling our own and Great Britain's democracy,” while a 1943 issue of
Life
was entirely devoted to a paean to Soviet-American cooperation. Wendell Willkie's enormously popular
One World
contained glowing praise of Soviet Russia—and Walter Lippmann, widely considered the preeminent political analyst, in turn, praised the astuteness of Willkie's analysis. A nationwide poll in September 1944 asking whether the Russian people had “as good” a government “as she could have for her people” found only 28 percent replying in the negative. By 1945, no less a figure than General Dwight D. Eisenhower told a House committee that “nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.”

None of this diluted the suspicion of Bolshevik intentions harbored by the right wing—and notably by its chief champion in the federal bureaucracy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—or its rising conviction that Robeson was playing a sinister role in Soviet councils. As early as January 1941, special agents were reporting to FBI headquarters in Washington that Robeson was “reputedly a member of the Communist Party” (which he was not, and never would be). Three months later, a zealous agent in Los Angeles sent a brown notebook to Hoover, “apparently belonging” to Robeson, that “contains Chinese characters”; the Bureau's translation section examined the notebook and concluded it was “clearly of significance to no one other than its owner.” In the summer of 1942, an agent was present when Robeson visited Wo-Chi-Ca, the interracial camp for workers' children, and portentously reported that Robeson had signed “Fraternally” to a message of greeting and that “tears had rolled down his cheeks” when a young camper presented him with a scroll.

As Robeson stepped up his activities on behalf of the Allied war effort, Hoover stepped up surveillance of him. By the end of 1942, the Bureau had taken to describing Robeson as a communist functionary: “It would be difficult to establish membership in his case but his activities in behalf of the Communist Party are too numerous to be recorded.” The FBI began to tap his phone conversations and to bug apartments where he was known to visit. Special agents were assigned to trail him and to file regular reports on his activities. By January 1943, Hoover was recommending that Robeson be considered for custodial detention (that is, subject to immediate arrest in the case of a national emergency); such a card was issued on him on April 30, 1943—the same month that he was being hailed in the press for a triumphal concert tour and just before he starred in a giant Labor for Victory rally in Yankee Stadium. By August 1943, “reputedly” was being dropped in special-agent reports to Hoover, with Robeson now being straightforwardly labeled “a leading figure in the Communist Party . . . actively attempting to influence the Negroes of America to communism.” From this point on, the FBI fattened Robeson's file with “evidence” to support its view that he was in fact a dangerous subversive. During the war years, Robeson's secret dossier and his national popularity grew apace; their collision was still half a dozen years off.

For the time being, national and personal priorities coalesced. Roosevelt's reaffirmation of democratic values on the home front, in tandem with the country's joining hands internationally with a Russian ally Robeson believed free of racial and colonialist bias, meant that national purpose coincided with his own special vision more fully than he had ever imagined would be possible in his lifetime. The juncture galvanized him, releasing in him a torrent of energy and resolve. Over the next three years—until the death of Roosevelt in April 1945—Robeson operated at the summit of his powers, in an escalating spiral of activity and acclaim, and in the glow of a political optimism that would be as brutally shattered as it had been briefly, unexpectedly plausible.

Even at its height, Robeson's optimism was not unblinkered.
Roosevelt might now speak kindly of his “heroic” Russian ally, but Robeson hardly took that to mean the president had converted to socialism. In the same way, he didn't regard New Deal domestic policies, promising though he found them, as signifying the imminent attainment of social justice. The Roosevelt administration did much to excite the hopes of black Americans: it opened itself to the counsel of such notable black figures as Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, William H. Hastie, and Walter White; it issued the president's Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) order in 1941; it included blacks in the voting on cotton-control referendums sponsored by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Yet, as Robeson well knew, the Democratic Party remained tied to its racially unreconstructed Southern wing, and the actual execution of policy had produced only marginal changes in the oppressive pattern of daily life for the black masses. In the mid-forties, Robeson told a friend that he thought Roosevelt's reformism would have as its chief result the guarantee that capitalism would exist for another fifty years.

As Robeson crisscrossed the country in a whirlwind of rallies, concert appearances, meetings, dinners, and testimonials, he tempered his enthusiasm for the nation's wartime mission to defeat fascism with reminders about its obligation to combat oppression at home. The CP opted for primary attention to the war overseas, downplaying the black struggle in the U.S.; Robeson did not. He encouraged blacks to support the war effort, warning that the victory of fascism would “make slaves of us all”—but he simultaneously called on the administration to make the war effort worth supporting for blacks by destroying discriminatory practices in defense industries and the armed forces. “Racial and religious prejudices continue to cast an ugly shadow on the principles for which we are fighting,” he told a commencement audience at Morehouse College in 1943. At the prestigious and widely broadcast annual Herald Tribune Forum that same year, he devoted most of his speech to warning that continuing economic insecurity, poll-tax discrimination, and armed forces segregation were arousing “the bitterest
resentment among black Americans”; they recognized that under Roosevelt some progress was being made but rightly felt that the gains thus far had been “pitifully small” and that their own struggle for improved conditions was intimately bound up with “the struggle against anti-Semitism and against injustices to all minority groups.”

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 naiveté 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 naïveté 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 Communist Party USA leader), was “not so much naïve as trusting.” He deeply believed in human nature, even though he'd learned deeply to distrust human beings—his faith was in the potential, not in current distortions of it. He'd 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.