On July 21, 1947, Walter S. Steele, addressing the House Un-American Activities Committee, named scores of Communists and communist sympathizers, calling Yergan a “Negro Communist from New York,” citing him fully seventy-eight times in communist and front affiliations.189 That month its board, with Max’s assent, fired People’s Voice editor Doxey Wilkerson. Wilkerson had never concealed his Party membership. He had been active in both the NNC and the CAA, and his dismissal had both immediate and long-range implications for Yergan in the U.S. Left. He seemed to be scrambling to placate both progressives and government, an impossible stretch yet one not wholly out of keeping with previous precedent for Max.
By autumn word came that A. A. Zhdanov had established a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in Poland. On November 7, Oetje John Rogge, ex–U.S. assistant attorney general, “leaked” Justice Department plans to round up dozens of communist leaders and alleged fellow travelers on or about November 17. Two days prior to the deadline, the People’s Voice revealed that Yergan had followed Dorothy K. Funn’s lead, having resigned from the National Negro Congress. Citing a need to devote more time and energy to CAA work, he claimed,
The increasing volume and importance of the work of the Council on African Affairs requires all of the time that I can give to it. This, I am sure you will understand in the light of the new level of the struggle for African freedom as reflected, for example, in the UNO—a struggle in which we Negroes have a real stake.190
By November 22, the People’s Voice printed a statement of nonpartisanship. A fortnight later, in a letter released to Loyalty Review Boards, Attorney General Tom Clark cited several alleged “front” organizations, including the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs, as “subversive and communist.” Late in December, the Daily Worker published an attack on the People’s Voice, written by ex-editor Doxey Wilkerson. Wilkerson criticized his dismissal by the People’s Voice board of directors and the recent nonpartisan statement. By January 1948, the People’s Voice heralded a “new” directorial board, with Yergan as president, Deton J. Brooks Jr. as general manager, Leonard Lowe as advertising manager, and Mac C. Davies as circulation manager.191 Later that month, Max marshaled troops in the CAA, aiming at a policy change there. Yergan sought a neutrality statement for the Council like that now in force at the People’s Voice.
Leftist members of the organization like Robeson and Hunton refused to be drawn in by what they saw as red-baiting efforts at thought control by the Truman administration. Tactically, they felt they had to fight these unjust attempts to limit freedom of expression by systematic noncooperation—not unlike M. K. Gandhi’s policy in India. In their eyes Yergan’s retreat, as evinced by the actions of the People’s Voice board, played into the hands of enemies of the First and Fifth Amendments. Soon, Max would have to choose between the politesse of expediency and the principle of independence of thought, action, and association. Robeson and Hunton had fought the deportation of Claudia Jones. They had also resisted the threats to outlaw the Communist Party, and reflexive anti-Sovietism. Yergan had stood with them on those issues but had suffered a change of heart. For him it may just have seemed a progression; for them it was breaking ranks or, worse, betrayal.
In the January People’s Voice Paul Robeson, reviewing his relationship to PV, wrote,
When I first joined the staff of People’s Voice, my convictions and those of the management were in general agreement. This situation no longer obtains, although there has been no change in my convictions. The continuance of my column in People’s Voice under the circumstances can only lead to confusion. I regret therefore that I must discontinue my column as of this date.192
For all practical purposes we can date the end of the broader perception of Yergan as a progressive leader from this point in 1948. Few could have predicted what 1948 would bring, but some insisted they knew what was in the offing. Since 1947, Max had been backpedaling on his formerly hard-line, uncompromisingly militant political stance. Until the loyalty oaths and then the advent of listings of subversive organizations such as the National Negro Congress, the Council on African Affairs, and a score more on whose letterhead Max’s name had been prominent, he had been one of the stalwarts, his identity inseparable from that of peoples’ struggles. Since hindsight is always twenty-twenty, it is difficult to take some claims at face value, and yet it did seem that there may have been murmurings about Max among the legions of the Left, and he was not alone in retreating.
6
About Face, 1948–1975
The retreat from a prominent position within the Left that had characterized Yergan’s behavior during 1947 intensified during 1948, becoming increasingly public as his attempt to offer a less critical face to the fierce Cold Warriors now ruling postwar Washington met opposition inside the Council on African Affairs. In the People’s Voice Max’s solution was to eject left-wing elements while issuing a series of statements establishing the tabloid’s “non-partisan” credentials.1 Between February and August this sparked an outright schism between pro- and anti-Yergan factions. The media combat turned ugly, eventually involving police, lawsuits, and extreme embarrassment for the organization Max and Robeson had started.2 In a protracted battle mirroring the world situation, Yergan was separated from the executive directorship, divested of the platform that had anchored his publicist persona since 1937.
The Council, like the National Negro Congress and Max’s former CUNY post, had fallen hostage to a severe intolerance for left-wing ideas, now approaching incendiary levels. An equivalent paranoia within the Soviet Union and its allies during this of atomic diplomacy claimed hundreds of victims in purges, disappearances, trials, and assassinations. In the shadow of Smith Act deportations and prosecutions, Yergan contemplated the future. In part seeking relief, in part to remake himself, during October 1948 Max took a European trip to codify his opposition to communism. Traveling to Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, he renewed old acquaintances in missionary and governmental circles of Europe’s colonial capitals while working the press coverage of his exculpatory initiative.3
On December 23, 1948, and January 4, 1949, Yergan testified before the grand jury in the Alger Hiss case.4 Although he was only tangentially involved with contributing evidence concerning Hiss, his very private appearance was paradoxically closed to the majority of the American populace yet reported extensively by the local and national press. The substance of Max’s Hiss testimony revolved around his own personal history in the Council and the NNC, told from the perspective of his present stance as he sought to further distance himself from the individuals and organizations with which he had been closely identified for the prior decade. His testimony had less to do with Hiss as such than with Yergan’s own endeavor to reposition himself. Now widely available to the general public, the transcript was restricted for half a century.
Within the Hiss hearing Max revisited his transition from South African missionary to American activist, maintaining that he had been sought after and cultivated by the Left. Questioned by a surprisingly gentle prosecutor, Max underwent a cross-examination that seems to have been intended to authenticate his version of events in case such a legal record might later become necessary. Since federal government personnel, especially those involved in investigations or attorneys who petitioned for the right to do so, were the only persons potentially eligible to view this text, this seems the most credible explanation for the court having issued him a subpoena. Nothing said hurt or helped Hiss; taking the stand made Yergan a witness in his own behalf.5
On March 30, 1949, Yergan conveyed a memorandum to the South African embassy reviewing (somewhat inaccurately) his prior residence in the country and his Council on African Affairs activities (revised with a rightist slant), alleging communist manipulation, and red-baiting Hunton, Robeson, and Wilkerson. The text recalled the Middledrift drought-relief campaign of 1945–1947, citing what at present he contended was the “grave menace” communism posed a
nd the urgency of Christian state action. This language, laying emphasis upon Christianity and state-based anticommunist policies, played into the hands of the framers of apartheid.6
A month later, on April 23, he had a letter printed in the Herald Tribune. A week after it appeared Phelps Stokes wrote Max about the Herald Tribune letter. “Negroes overstate the Soviet lack of racism; in a recent talk with the Liberian ambassador he stated not more than 5000 Negroes in all of Russia.” Phelps Stokes argued that in the USSR there was “nothing corresponding to interracial problem in this country.” He concluded by saying, “People are beginning to realize that with all the defects our achievements in behalf of interracial understanding and Negro progress in this country are very substantial, and that the situation is encouraging.”7 Phelps Stokes also articulated a fear that “our old friend Du Bois is apparently being misled by Soviet propaganda.”8 Neither the demographic argument Phelps Stokes made nor the question of whether an octogenarian Du Bois had been “taken in” was as significant as the fact that Yergan had managed to reenlist him as a powerful ally.
Four days later Max replied to Phelps Stokes, thanking him for providing “sympathetic encouragement” when his “inner resources have been considerably drawn upon to do what” his “better self and” his “convictions have led” him to do:
In leaving the CAA I realized that it was an organization which I had brought into existence. I had also to take some of the responsibility for the fact that communists had found their way into the organization and had rendered it useless in the service of the African people. I may state, however, that I had no hesitancy whatever in severing my connection completely because I came to realize the evil character of communism and its effect upon all who submitted themselves to its control, its discipline and purposes. I can rejoice in the fact that I am again led by that light which I saw so clearly during the early years of my work in Africa. I derive great satisfaction also from my deep conviction that it is that light and its reflection of great spiritual and civic principles that is today in Africa, as elsewhere, the one factor that will meet man’s needs.9
In mid-May 1949 Max wrote Phelps Stokes stressing the necessity of strengthening and augmenting “good relations between Western Europe and America on one hand and the African people on the other.” Improving these contacts “and the consequent blocking of communist advances in Africa must be based on a genuine and expanding program of democratic development in Africa.” European travels and the talks in which he participated then and afterwards convinced Yergan that he needed a new organization that he described to Phelps Stokes as an “American Committee for Cooperation with Africa.” The group’s aim should be “keeping before governments and the large industrial concerns that do business with Africa, the ever important need for a policy of progress—economic, political and spiritual,—in their official and business relations with that continent.”10
By June Yergan had tried to gain a five-month visa to travel to South Africa.11 Later that month, the Robeson-Yergan split in the CAA reached Ilanga Lase Natal.12 In early August Dean Acheson wrote the American Embassy in Pretoria that while Yergan had appeared, on the basis of his own utterances and the fact that he had been attacked in the Daily Worker, to have changed his mind about communism, said in fact a confidential informant said “that no information had been received to indicate that subject has in any way changed his anti-communist attitude.” Secretary of State Acheson urged extreme discretion in divulging this belief to the South African government.13
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
In the spring of 1950, Yergan began an intimate association with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the overseas arm of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In May an article of his ran in its printed organ, ICFTU News. Entitled “ICFTU’s Opportunity in Africa,” the piece allowed Max to reach a new audience, mainstream trade unionists, as he aimed at building bridges with African labor.14 Not since his presidency of the National Negro Congress ended in 1947 had he made such direct appeals to labor; then his focus had been on the AFL’s leftist rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Becoming involved with the Confederation was also a tactical move to regain access to an internationalist constituency. This one was supervised by the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee, led by Irving Brown and Richard Deverall, architects of the AFL overseas strategy of containment of communism. Yergan thus connected himself to the AFLCIO leadership’s anticommunist crusade and the CIA.
Before Yergan joined the Confederation it was concerned primarily with Europe and Asia, where it concentrated on checking communist influence in the workers’ movements of those continents. Africa was beyond their gaze. Seizing upon this oversight, Yergan used an approach first mooted earlier with Phelps Stokes:
One of the urgent tasks confronting the forces of democratic progress in European countries related to Africa is that of applying to Africa the lessons which Europe was not wise enough to use in her experience with the colonial areas of the East. Can Europe recognize, with regard to Africa, that the era of the old imperialism has ended and that an altogether new approach must be made to the problems which cry out for redress and which will not be denied? The answer to this question will determine the effectiveness with which this newly organized force in world labor will utilize its truly unprecedented opportunities in Africa.15
Yergan highlighted the rapidly altered pace of development evident across Africa, from north to south and west to east. This movement needed ICFTU recognition:
Africans, too, want an improved standard of living and they are demanding the wages necessary to provide it. They want adequate educational, social and health facilities and they want— and are strongly demanding—an effective voice in their political life. These demands are reasonable. They reflect age-old irrepressible human aspirations. They would exist even if the character of Africa’s past relations with the rest of the world had been different. However, it becomes at once a more complex and a more urgent task to realize the present reasonable demands of Africans because of the character of past European rule in Africa.16
For Yergan world labor needed to know about European rule within Africa whereby foreign powers had “produced a colonial system with which Africans are not satisfied and against which they are struggling.” Materially, to Max Africa was potentially wealthy, and its “rich deposits of gold, copper and other minerals as well as extensive agricultural developments in cocoa, rubber, vegetable oils, and far greater agricultural, industrial and commercial possibilities are the foundations for the new life which must be built.” The Soviet-directed World Federation of Trade Unions could not be entrusted with this responsibility, Yergan argued, because it was “divisive” and “totalitarian.” But the ICFTU, coinciding with UN trusteeship (which he now vigorously backed) and Truman’s “Point Four” program and built on the foundation of the Marshall Plan, could provide such aid for Africa. “This,” he foresaw, “may well prove to be one of the greatest services by the ICFTU for Africa and Europe, as well as for world peace and prosperity.”17
By 1950 Max had befriended Pittsburgh Courier columnist, essayist, and sometime novelist George Schuyler. Earlier, Schuyler had unsparingly pilloried Yergan as a communist dupe. Now, however, he accepted him as a fellow anticommunist crusader. For two decades the two would appear almost inseparable, black beacons on an otherwise white beach, addressing international conferences, sharing space on mast-heads of right-wing organizations, and occasionally traveling together on “fact-finding missions” for this or that conservative cause. Together the two integrated the Congress of Cultural Freedom, an attempt to forge an intellectual phalanx to counter the influence exerted by left-leaning littérateurs in the Cold War. A transatlantic movement, this had two components, one European, one American.
Congress of Cultural Freedom
Started in 1938 as a Committee on Cultural Freedom, by the late forties the Congress on Cultural Freedom had attracted
an impressive array of high-profile ex-communists and repentant socialists on both sides of the Atlantic. Capitalizing on the successes of well-marketed memoirs by Sidney Hook, Ignazio Silone, Richard Crossman, and Arthur Koestler, who disavowed radical pasts, and given further impetus by heightened Cold War tensions from 1948 onward, the CCF seemed made to order for professional publicist Yergan and a newfound friend, his former foe, the iconoclastic career anticommunist and seasoned scrapper George Schuyler.
Schuyler’s autobiography relates his recruitment into the CCF, which he was invited to join in 1950 by Der Monat editor Mel Lasky, on Sidney Hook’s insistence.18 Though Schuyler and Yergan shared CCF stages, Max’s relation to the trend was subtle and complex. The Congress might help rekindle his flagging career. CCF plenaries in Paris, Brussels, Rome, and Berlin held appeal, letting him push both African and African-American agendas, thereby infusing racial and colonial issues into its debates.
Sharing similar emphases with Schuyler, Max’s pronouncements could complement or differ from those of his colleague. In their first CCF meeting, the June 26–30, 1950, Berlin round, Schuyler spoke on “The Negro Question without Propaganda” at Amerika Haus on June 29. Addressing the assembly on the issues facing Black America, Yergan spoke in a timely and triumphalist tone. Using as his point of departure the Supreme Court decisions of June 5, 1950, which linked the Henderson, Sweatt, and McLaurin cases challenging the principle of equal but separate accommodations and educational facilities, Yergan cited the ongoing struggle of minorities for democratic rights while staking out a hard line against communism. His arguments were quasi-legalistic, intended to drive a wedge between Black aspirations and the aims of left-wing intellectuals and activists. Conceding that fighting for civil rights had been an uphill battle for Blacks, Max vehemently contradicted a stance he had resolutely defended only a few years before:
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