Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  40. ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, RA.

  41. ER to PR, Dec. 1, 1946, RA. Essie angrily threatened never again to communicate directly with Paul if he passed on to Rockmore the contents of her letter. Yet Essie herself made it all but certain Rockmore would learn of her angry discontent. When H. Lee Lurie, a partner in Rockmore’s law firm, was assigned to do Essie’s taxes and sent her a query about her checkbook stubs, she replied, “Honey, where would I get a checkbook, and for what? I havent had a checkbook since I arrived in this country, in 1939, and Bobby took over our personal affairs. Not only have I not had a checkbook, but I haven’t had an adequate housekeeping allowance since then.… I realize that I have had to live down a reputation for extravagance. I am still trying to figure out how I have been extravagant.… Paul has been living at the regular rate he used to, but I have been living on the rock bottom level.… Before then, abroad, Paul and I lived on the same level and hence, I daresay, I was considered extravagant” (Lurie to ER, Dec. 21, 1946; ER to Lurie, Jan. 3, 1947, RA).

  42. ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, Jan. 28, 1947, RA.

  43. ER to Revels Cayton, Jan. 6, 1947, NYPL/Schm: NNC. Essie made the comment about not being told anything specifically in reference to Cayton’s efforts, with Robeson’s support, to launch a national trade-union department in the NNC, but it seems to me to have broader applicability. Information on establishing the Labor Department is in Cayton’s correspondence for this period in NYPL/Schm; one letter particularly refers to “an extremely successful banquet for Paul Robeson” for that purpose, held in Detroit (Cayton to Max Perlow, secretary-treasurer of the Furniture Workers of America, Jan. 21, 1947, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

  CHAPTER 16 THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY (1947–1948)

  1. For background information on the inception of the Progressive Party, I’ve found three works of special value: Curtis D. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army (Marzani & Munsell, 1965), 3 vols.; Allen Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives (University of California Press, 1974); and Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century (The Free Press, 1973). The two groups that sponsored Wallace’s Sept. 1946 speech were the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICC-ASP) and the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NC-PAC). As early as Feb. 1946 Robeson spoke for the Minnesota ICC (Samuel A. Cordon to PR, Feb. 4, 1946, RA), and the month before that the nominating committee of ICC-ASP unanimously chose him to stand for election as a vice-chairman (Jo Davidson, national chairman, to PR, Jan. 17, 1946, RA; minutes of the We Want Wallace Committee of Harlem, Feb. 10, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

  2. For information on the Win the Peace bannings, I’m grateful to Abbott Simon and Freda Diamond for a memo on the subject. The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1947 (St. Louis); FBI Main 100-12304-52, Jan. 29, 1947 (St. Louis); Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1947 (“sing what I please”); Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 1, 1947. The car was being driven by Elmer Mosee, superintendent of the People’s Hospital of St. Louis; his son Elmer Mosee, Jr., and Larry Brown were the other passengers. Mosee had known the Robesons a long time (ER Diary, Feb. 4, 1946, RA). For more on Mosee, see note 39, p. 677. Hearing about PR’s announcement that he was leaving the concert stage, Bob Rockmore expressed annoyance at not having been consulted (Rockmore to PR, April 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

  3. FBI Main 100-12304-50 (Hoover); Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1947 (Hopper); San Francisco Progress, April 4, 1947. At the same time, the FBI withdrew the Security Card Index on Essie, having decided “there is no evidence that Mrs. Robeson is presently active in Communist Party affairs” (FBI Main 100-12304-60 and 61, April 10, 1947).

  4. Strong to Lawrence J. Campbell, April 22, 1947, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

  5. I’ve drawn this account of the Peoria incident from a large number of sources. The most significant have been: PM, April 20, 1947; Hartford Courant, April 18, 1947; Chicago Sun, April 20, 1947; FBI Main 123405–65 and 72 (Patterson), with a number of enclosures including the important five-page “The People’s Side of the Robeson Incident” (which is also in the NYPL/Schm: CRC). Yergan, who had accompanied Robeson to Peoria, wrote Essie: “It was a nasty situation and is the clearest evidence of fascist tyranny dominating an entire city” (Yergan to ER, April 22, 1947, RA). Ferdinand C. Smith, secretary of the CIO National Maritime Union, wired a protest to the Peoria City Council against the ban on Robeson, and Frank Kingdon and Jo Davidson, cochairs of the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), spoke out against it. The Cultural Division of the NNC also took an active role in protesting the ban (Vivian L. Cadden to “Dear Friend,” April 23, 1947, NYPL/Schm: NNC). The FBI agent in Springfield, Illinois, reported that Mayor Triebel “was deluged with correspondence from all over the United States censuring him and requesting that Paul Robeson be permitted to appear” (FBI New York 100-25857-468). Roy Wilkins, on behalf of the NAACP, was among those who protested abrogating “the cherished American right of freedom of speech” (Wilkins telegram to Triebel, May 1, 1947, LC: NAACP). Thomas J. Fitzpatrick, president of District Six, United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, wrote Mayor Triebel (May 2, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC), “Robeson is a threat, it is true, to the Thomas-Rankin Committee on Un-American Activities—a threat to all reactionary thought in America.” Milton Kaufman of the NNC wrote to Interior Secretary Ickes (April 30, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC) charging that “the industrial interests representing the Caterpillar Tractor plant” had worked behind the scenes to prevent Robeson’s appearance, a charge corroborated by Mary Sweat of the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers of America (to Milton Kaufman, April 26, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC), who reported that, although some FE-CIO locals had passed resolutions condemning the mayor’s action in Peoria, “the large Caterpillar Tractor Local 105-FE-CIO has yet to take action.” She reported, too, that “we were unable to buy space in the newspapers” for an ad they had taken out protesting Robeson’s barring, “and were refused time on the air.”

  6. The two clippings from the local press in RA are dated 1947 but are otherwise without identifying headings; Chicago Sun, April 20, 1947; Hartford Courant, April 18, 1947 (“fight”). The Ministerial Association in Peoria did issue PR an invitation “at some future date” to return, guaranteeing the use of a church (FBI Main 100-12304-65).

  7. FBI Main 100-12304-77 (includes the Legion resolutions and the Dirksen correspondence). Hazelwood’s name has been inked out of all the FBI documents, but I have been able to deduce it from corollary accounts in the Peoria press about his public statements and his Legion/NAACP affiliations.

  8. Chicago Sun, April 20, 1947.

  9. PM, May 4, 1947; New York Tribune, April 25, 26, May 7 (Bookstein), May 11 (concert); Army Intelligence (War Department) to FBI, May 13, 1947, 100-25857-2891. Hazel Ericson (Dodge), Robeson’s friend from Somerville school, days, was among those in the audience, she and her husband attending “as a gesture of support”—for which she was subsequently followed by the FBI (interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; see ch. 1 for more on her). A number of individuals and groups outside Albany joined the protest, including the National Lawyers Guild and the Civil Rights Congress (PM, April 29, 1947; telegram from George Marshall, chairman of CRC, to PR, April 25, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC). Norman Corwin wrote Essie, “A dozen more fighters like Paul in this country, and reaction would not be winning so many bouts” (Corwin to ER, May 10, 1947).

  10. Toronto Daily Star, May 19, 20, 1947; in an editorial on May 19, the Star reported that, “to enforce its order, the police commission had sent police to his concert—police with notebooks. Such is freedom of speech in Toronto.” PR’s typed CAA speech, dated April 25, 1947, is in RA. Edward Rettenberg, who had been in law school with Robeson, told me (phone interview, Dec. 10, 1982) that around this same time PR stopped calling on him, explaining that he “would be introuble” if known to be a friend; FBI agents did subsequently visit Rettenberg.

  11. Newsweek, May 12, 1947; Times Herald, May 22, 1947 (Sokolsky); FBI Main 100-12304-76 (Hoover). By then Ro
beson had further inflamed opinion against himself by appearing on May 8 at a V-E Day Encampment rally of Communist veterans of World War II (Washington Post, May 9, 1947). First Army Headquarters reported to the War Department (which passed the information along to the FBI) that Robeson and Howard Fast “are expected to announce at the Encampment conference their intentions of joining the Communist Party” (FBI New York 100-25857-287). An FBI report dated March 10, 1947, quotes black Party leader Henry Winston telling Roy Hudson, the District 5 Party leader, “… It is time that a lot of people begin to speak out.… Thus the ball can be started rolling again by getting Paul Robeson and Howard Fast to publicly join the Party.… This will burn up the wires.…” They did not, but the Encampment may have marked the first public appearance Robeson made at an avowedly Communist-sponsored event, and, in the retroactive opinion of the ex–CPUSA leader John Gates, “The embrace was too tight” (interview with Gates, June 8, 1982). Reading the Sokolsky-like attacks in England, Joseph Andrews (“Andy”), Robeson’s valet and friend from his London days, expressed fear that “you may be fouled” (Andrews to PR, Aug. 29, 1947, RA). He expressed much the same sentiments to Larry Brown (May 27, 1947, NYPL/Schm: Brown). In another letter to Brown, Andy also expressed some resentment toward Robeson: “I was hoping to go home for the Sun this winter, and asked Paul to help toward this, but have heard not a word, so shall have to hold on here” (Jan. 8, 1948, NYPL/Schm: Brown). Since Robeson was never accused of a lack of generosity—except by Essie, who alternately accused him of extravagance toward others—the problem here was almost certainly Paul’s familiar failure as a correspondent and not as a friend. Harold Holt had offered Robeson an English tour, but Robeson turned it down (Rockmore to Holt, April 10, 1946, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

  12. FBI Main 100-12304-69, 70, 73, 75, 77 (Canal Zone). PR’s Miami speech is summarized in an ANP release dated June 9, 1947 (CHS: Barnett). Apparently U.S. officials General F. T. Hines, General McSherry, and others initially promised to attend the Robeson concert (Edward Cheresh, UPWA-CIO, to Tom Richardson, April 28, 1947, NYPL/Schm: PR). FBI New York 100-25857-382(7?) (scholarship fund). The letter from PR, Du Bois, Bass, and Howard soliciting support for the Committee to End the Jim Crow “Silver-Gold” System in the Panama Canal Zone, dated Aug. 31, 1948, is in U.Mass.: Du Bois. Several letters from Panama in NYPL/Schm: Brown comment (in the words of one) “on the good your party has done for our community” (Sydney C. Fuller [a jeweler] to LB, June 30, 1947). In undated (1947) handwritten notes in RA, PR accounted it a “privilege” to have visited his “brothers and sisters” in Panama and the West Indies. “Your struggle is our struggle,” he wrote. Ewart Guinier has made reference (in “The Paul Robeson That I Knew,” The Black Scholar, March 1978, p. 45) to working with Robeson on “organizing non-white workers on the Panama Canal Zone and in Hawaii” (where Robeson went in 1948) while he, Guinier, was international secretary-treasurer of the United Public Workers (1946–53). More of this relationship and the organizing work the two men did together will become known once the Ewart Guinier Papers, currently held privately by Mrs. Guinier, are made available to scholars.

  13. Look, June 24, 1947 (Gallup); Boston Chronicle, June 28, 1947; PM, July 20, 1947 (Lewisohn); FBI New York 100-25857-337, 341, 345; MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, p. 199 (Wallace). The FBI recorded a phone conversation between two members of JAFRC in which one argued that Robeson was being misused by progressive organizations because they were failing to coordinate their efforts, thereby scattering Robeson’s energies (FBI New York 100-25857-346, Oct. 29, 1947). Among other notable events to which Robeson lent his presence were the Madison Square Garden rally celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order and the sixth biennial convention of the NMU (New York Fraternal Outlook, Aug.-Sept. 1947; Tribune, Sept. 30, 1947).

  14. Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, pp. 17–24; MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, chs. 7, 9; Markowitz, Rise and Fall, chs. 7–8. Late in March 1947 Truman had is sued Executive Order 9385, requiring a loyalty oath of all civil-service employees (it was later extended to all workers in defense industries); the oath had contributed to the alienation of organized labor.

  15. Starobin, Crisis, ch. 7; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War, ch. 12; Markowitz, Rise and Fall, ch. 6.

  16. Essie’s transcribed notes from the Oct. 6 and Nov. 8 meetings, along with the form letter of invitation and a list (of more than one hundred names) of those invited, are all in RA. Essie asked Walter White to join in sending out the invitation to the Nov. 8 meeting, but he did not sign the call, even though Essie again stressed in writing to him that the plan was “to bring together a powerful group of Negro leaders … without creating any new organization” (ER to White, Oct. 16, 1947, LC: NAACP). Initially, Hubert Delany, Channing Tobias, and Mary McLeod Bethune had told Essie they would attend the Oct. 6 meeting (ER to Du Bois, Oct. 1, 1947, U.Mass.: Du Bois). Du Bois told her he would have attended had not another meeting held him up, and he advised her that one stumbling block to unification would be the difficulty of weighing how much influence to parcel out to participating organizations (Du Bois to ER, Oct. 8, 1947, U.Mass.: Du Bois); to which Essie replied that the focus was on uniting powerful individuals, not organizations (ER to Du Bois, Oct. 16, 1949, U.Mass.: Du Bois).

  17. Richard Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution,” in Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War (Quadrangle, 1969).

  18. White to ER, Oct. 22, 1947, LC: NAACP. White suggested Essie show his letter to Paul and offered apologies for having “missed his telephone calls at the office and at the house.”

  19. Quotes are from ER’s notes on Oct. 6 and Nov. 8 meetings, RA. All the participants felt that a promising base on which to place their demands was the progressive recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (“To Secure These Rights”) and the NNC initiated petition to the UN to investigate racism in the United States. Du Bois believed Walter White had dragged his feet in giving NAACP support to the petition (Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 [State University of New York Press, 1986]).

  20. The flier for the June 2, 1948, event, along with a statement of purpose and a list of cosponsors, is in RA. Walter White to Comm. Adm., Jan. 24, 1948; WW to NAACP staff, Feb. 25, 1948, March 13, 1948, LC: NAACP. When the NAACP, in coordination with other national organizations, organized a National Civil Rights Mobilization to be held in Washington, D.C., in Feb. 1950, William L. Patterson, executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, requested that the CRC be allowed to participate. Roy Wilkins turned Patterson down (Wilson Record, Race and Radicalism, pp. 154–55).

  21. Springfield Republican, Jan. 18, 1948 (Chicago); MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, pp. 301, 512. The other cochairs elected with Robeson were the sculptor Jo Davidson, the New Deal “brain truster” Rex Tugwell, the Progressive Party financial angel Anita McCormick Blaine, and Albert J. Fitzgerald, president of the CIO-UE union. During the campaign James Barfoot, the Progressive candidate for governor of Georgia, publicly stated that he “would like to see Paul Robeson secretary of state. No two nations of the world would go to war if he were” (New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 16, 1948). Again relating to public office, an FBI agent reported that the “Communist Party has given serious consideration to the possibility of running Paul Robeson for Congress against Adam Clayton Powell Jr.” (FBI New York 100-25857-368). In 1949 the Amsterdam News (Sept. 17, 1949) printed a rumor that the American Labor Party might run Robeson as its candidate for the U.S. Senate, and the Baltimore Afro-American reported that he was eying a run for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s seat in Congress (Nov. 22, 1949).

  Essie served on the platform committee of the Progressive Party’s national convention, and campaigned widely for the ticket in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, though feeling ill much of the time. The FBI kept tabs on her activities. Quoting the Stamford Advocate for July 30, 1949, the FBI cited her as having sa
id that Truman’s order concerning the armed forces “does not abolish Jim Crow—all it does is set up another committee.” It further quoted her as saying, “I am not a Communist.… It’s really not important anyway. If we lynched all the Communists in this country or sent them to Moscow, that would not solve the major problem of inflation or the housing shortage. The only way to solve them is to build for peace and not for war” (FBI Main 100-12304-182, Dec. 28, 1949). The day after the election, Essie went to Washington, D.C., for a full checkup. Dean Joseph Johnson of the Howard University Medical School—a strong supporter of the Progressive Party who had worked with Essie on the platform committee—arranged for her to be seen by Dr. Kelly Brown, who kept her in the hospital for three weeks, then diagnosed her as “suffering from prolonged chronic exhaustion.” He related her spastic colitis to amoebic dysentery contracted in Africa, but found her free of amoebic infection. He warned that a stellate tear of the cervix made when Paul, Jr., was born was often a precancerous condition and advised her to have it attended to. Paul, Jr., in his senior year at Cornell, came down to Washington to bring her home from the hospital (ER Diary, Sept. 18, Oct. 31, Nov. 2, 28, 1949, RA).

  22. Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, ch. 3 (Clifford), 6 (ADA). Red-baiting the Progressive Party has continued well into the present, and among “objective” scholars as well as more consciously committed ideologues. As one example, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, in their 1957 study, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Da Capo Press, 1974), pp. 475,478, refer to the Communists’ being “in full organizational command” of the Progressive Party’s founding convention and, in the arch, dismissive tone characteristic of their entire discussion of the Progressives, say of its final disintegration, “and still another Stalinist adventure had come to an end.” In the same vein, Michael Straight, who was centrally involved in the Progressive campaign but whose politics subsequently took a different course, has written in his memoirs, without qualification, that the Progressive Party “was created by the Communist Party” and that, when Wallace asked Straight in 1947 if Robeson was a Communist, Straight had replied, “I’m afraid so” (Michael Straight, After Long Silence [W. W. Norton, 1983], pp. 220, 222). When I interviewed Straight (April 3, 1985), I asked him what evidence he had for calling Robeson a Communist. He offered none.