Max Yergan
Page 31
We may therefore explode once and for all the ridiculous thesis of the communists that Negroes are so pathetic, bedeviled and oppressed that they must be considered as a special case—indeed as a special people. It is this communist nonsense which has sought to establish the idea of a “Negro nation” in America and has tried to give special meaning to the term the “Negro people.”
Negroes in America have regarded this effort to separate them from the body of the American people as the insidious Communist device that it is. They have completely rejected it, for they know that it is the poison which Communists have sought to spread everywhere. Negroes in America know, accept and wish to be a part of but one nation—the American nation.19
In November Schuyler and Yergan were again together at a CCF Brussels meeting of its international committee, where Max stressed the importance of Africa.20 Asking the audience to note those in Eastern countries seeking the bounties of Western “liberty and who are also struggling for these,” he said it would be a “grave error to consider Africa differently from other areas of the world,” adding that “Africans believe in cultural freedom no less than the peoples of the West.”21
Yergan closely linked his ICFTU work with that of the CCF, and his Berlin CCF address was printed in ICFTU News. Though the two constituencies differed, one consisting of working-class American unionists and the other of European intellectuals, they were connected by their anticommunism, though this varied considerably between Yankee hard-liners and more pliable continentals. Max also kept close contact with Anson Phelps Stokes, sending him a copy of his Berlin CCF address,22 and Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, lauding him on winning the Nobel Peace Prize and telling him about the CCF.23
By year’s end, Max and his spouse Lena Halpern were among the subjects of an Ebony feature on interracial couples. The article pictured him in a nonthreatening setting, smiling and quietly sitting in his garden, one of his private passions.24 The next year would not seem so idyllic as Cold War storm clouds continued to gather.
In mid-January 1951 Yergan attended a testimonial dinner honoring Ralph Bunche.25 By March he was en route to India for a Congress of Cultural Freedom conference.26 Joining such foreign guests as Stephen Spender, Norman Thomas, W. H. Auden, and James Burnham, he shared the stage with local luminary and CCF chair Jaya Prakash Narayan. In two appearances, Yergan opened and closed the conference. His contributions, like his much earlier CCF presentations at Berlin and Brussels, revolved around familiar themes: America, while a slightly flawed republic hampered by a “lawless element” that persisted in using discriminatory measures and lynch terror, had made great strides in democratization, particularly where persons of African descent were concerned. Whatever its shortcomings, for Yergan there was no comparison between life in the United States and conditions behind the iron curtain. During his closing remarks, Max presented “American Racial Policy and the Situation of American Negroes,” arguing that “culture and freedom involve people, the forces affecting their lives and their ability to create.”27 His address stressed that the highest expression of American cultural, economic, and social power lay in recent juridical decisions affecting the lives of Negroes: the prohibition of racial segregation in higher education and railway dining cars and a presidential executive order eliminating structural segregation in the U.S. armed forces.28
His concluding point was that in the final analysis the rule of law would prevail for Blacks. By contrast, the Cold War opposition would appear to have little to offer and few takers:
It is this reasonable certainty of the realisation of full democracy that has played an important part in the ideological choice of American Negro[e]s. It is important to point out that amongst these fifteen millions of American citizens, the communist appeal has met with little success, for the communists can count not more than one thousand Negro[e]s amongst the forty or fifty thousand members whom they claim in the United States. This is striking evidence of the power of democracy as a means towards the solution of present problems and is further evidence of the rejection of the totalitarian concept and practice.29
While India’s CCF got scant U.S. coverage,30 Yergan sent Eleanor Roosevelt an offprint and other material.31
Home from India, with AFL official Jay Lovestone interceding, Max met Internal Security Committee counsel Bob Morris and Benjamin Mandel on Friday, June 1. Morris wrote that while twelve months earlier Yergan had pledged to cooperate anonymously and privately, he would now go public, adding, “However, like all communists, he is still not as direct as you or I would be.”32 By Monday, June 4, Morris, more confident that Yergan would testify as desired, opined after a second chat, “It should be noted that he is characteristic of a breaking Communist. It takes them a long time and the process calls for a great deal of patience.”33
Yergan went on the offensive in 1952. On May 4 he was one of several African-Americans named by ex-NNC staffer Dorothy K. Funn as a Communist. On May 13 he testified before a Senate Internal Security subcommittee, claiming to have been duped and “used” by Communists for a decade.34 A partial script written by Yergan in advance of his later appearance before HUAC vigorously denied this willing association with communism. Referring HUAC members to his Senate Internal Security committee testimony, Yergan claimed that he “stated under oath that [he] was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party.” He then further pointed out that “I am now and have always been unalterably opposed to the Communist conspiracy.”35
On June 5, a year to the day after Bob Morris’s lengthy interview memo, Max wrote Jay Lovestone concerning a Ford Foundation proposal jointly prepared with “mutual friend” Albert E. (“Bert”) Jolis preceding an imminent “fact-finding mission” to Europe and Africa.36 They planned a four-month trip across Africa “to warn and advise against communist activities” there. Jolis, a diamond financier and one-time OSS operative had been deeply involved in African mining for decades.37
By June Yergan was in England, planning to visit Paris, Brussels, and Geneva to meet with government “officials and African leaders.” Later in June Max would fly “from Lisbon down West coast of Africa,” for “Dakar, Monrovia, Accra, Lagos, Brazzaville and Leopoldville,” with “motor trips to the interior.” From Congo he would go to South Africa for a month, then Salisbury and Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nairobi (Kenya), then spend another month in Eastern Africa (Uganda, Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika, Mombasa in Kenya, then Ethiopia and Cairo) and then return to the United States.38 A few days after writing Lovestone, he tried contacting Richard Wright in Paris.39 By June 9 he heard from Jay Lovestone, who expressed interest in three subjects: “the specific imperialist conduct of Britain, France or any other colonial power; Communist penetration and influence and exploitation of imperialist policy”; and any help that he could provide. If his synopsis proved interesting, Lovestone would recommend compensation.40
With Lovestone, whose brief was the AFL’s international arm, which was tethered to the CIA, as well as ex-agent Bert Jolis and Internal Security Committee counsel Bob Morris, Max had entered a new milieu. From now on there would be no turning back. Late in 1951 Jolis had conferred with Allen Dulles prior to the latter’s nomination as CIA director, when he was still prominent in the intelligence community. Jolis, asked by Dulles for his views, wrote a memorandum on Black Africa, to which Yergan added a statement and proposal of his own. Jolis later excerpted part of Max’s section in his autobiography, repeating this observation:
The most important recent victory for Communism in Africa has been its capture of the African National Congress, the organization now leading the passive resistance campaign against the Malan government in South Africa. The known Communist leaders of the African National Congress are John Marks of Capetown, David Bopape of Johannesburg and Moses Kotane, also of Johannesburg. These men have all been to Europe, and in the case of Bopape and Kotane, also to Russia. From knowing them personally, I can report they are highly capable, ruthless and hardworking leader
s, who are largely responsible for organizing and carrying out the campaign against Apartheid in South Africa.41
Yergan’s contribution identified “an anti-Communist secondary leadership in the ANC” that he felt “is gradually being pushed aside and will soon be eliminated.” Among the anti-Communists Max mentioned were A. B. Xuma and L. D. Ncwana. Jolis maintained that Yergan’s report was presented to Allen Dulles for review.42 Yergan’s itinerary for his 1952 Africa tour named Dr. Xuma as his contact person. Ncwana and Yergan went back to the latter’s Student Christian Association days. By 1952 these veterans, firebrands in their day, would have become the old guard. There was bitterness in the fact that they had been displaced by the “young lions.” But there was also the question of how Yergan knew Bopape,43 Marks, and Kotane. On May 13, 1952, in the appearance before the Senate Internal Security Committee referred to above, Yergan asserted that Communists were “interested in exploiting undesirable conditions and in preventing a solution of racial problems.”44 News of his testimony was picked up by both the establishment and Negro press.45 The testimony itself focused on the Institute of Pacific Relations, whose director, Edward Clark Carter, had been a Yergan YMCA mentor. Ned Carter had taken him to India in 1916 and had remained in contact with him for at least two decades thereafter, occasionally helping to facilitate contacts between Yergan and critical foundation representatives. Now Carter and the Institute personnel, including Fred Field, a Council on African Affairs member with whom Yergan had been on very good terms prior to the 1948 split, were seen by Max as implacable foes. Questioning was done by subcommittee counsel Morris.
Responding to the queries of Morris, Yergan outlined his background, his YMCA work in India and Eastern and Southern Africa, and his involvement with the National Negro Congress. Morris asked if the NNC was a communist organization; Max replied negatively, at the beginning. Pressed on what Communists he had known and when, Yergan indicated,
I came back from Africa in 1937. I left the work of the YMCA because I felt that a new committee at that time was needed which could deal much more directly with the issues then developing in Africa. They were political and economic. I thought that the American public needed to be informed in a way which I could not do too well under the YMCA. Now, the Communists made a strong plea for me when I came back. I knew James Ford. I had known him as a student. I think he may have been one of the Communist leaders who was told to make a strong plea for me. I was invited to speak at meetings which ostensibly had the interests of Africa as their purpose.46
At this point Yergan said Communists had no interest in changing conditions. From then onward he named names, told of his new anti-communist philosophy, and proffered extensive testimony on the subject of the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, a group of keen interest to the China Lobby for its opposition to Chiang Kai-shek. Then Max spoke of 1937 and a nascent International Committee on African Affairs, reconstructing this history as follows:
The only individual that I now recall who was definitely associated with a communist outfit who was on the committee is Paul Robeson, as I recall. However, Communists were brought into the organization. They were proposed by Robeson. I think I must have proposed some. Certainly I didn’t object to those who were brought in, so that I take some responsibility for their presence. This organization had one or two main purposes: One, to inform American opinion about the changes that were taking place in a more or less unknown great colonial area of the world. During the war we sought to involve Africans as fighters on the allied side through correspondence with governments in Europe and the South African governments. We didn’t succeed too much in that. We were interested also in developing a helpful interest, not only from a humanitarian point of view, but in terms of developing the democratic idea and winning Africans who would be coming into positions of leadership to the side of the democratic cause. Now, the Communists saw that and they saw that here was an organization that appealed to Negroes and to non-Negroes in this country, because Africa was then becoming of great interest. By 1945, by the end of the war, the Communists’ strength in the organization was considerable. They didn’t have a majority of the people, but it was considerable. Robeson was chairman and I was executive head. By the end of the war, actually in 1946, in the organizations to which I belonged, the National Negro Congress, the Civil Rights Congress, I began to see clearly the issues on which and the procedure on which I could not agree with the Communists.47
The fuller story was far more complicated, and less clear cut in terms of culpability; this version, however, suited the purposes of both a repentant Yergan and the McCarran Act.
It is also significant that the Yergan statement submitted to Allen Dulles by Albert Jolis contained a proposal that he would tout before a number of foundations for an Institute of International African Affairs. In his memoir Jolis argued that “the proposed organization would do for the West in Africa, what… the Institute of Pacific Relations did for the Soviet Union in Asia.”48 Yergan had in mind a vehicle through which to garner aid for anticommunist African leaders, by means of conferences, publications, and grants. In other words, it would be a combination of the institutional approaches with which he had previously been involved: the global conference movement of the YMCA and its allies, the think tank approach mastered by the IPR, the plan laid out in his Fort Hare training scheme, and the contacts and methods of publicity painstakingly nurtured in the NNC and CAA.
Soon after testifying, Yergan left on a “fact-finding mission” designed to dissuade Africans from being led astray by close cooperation with Communists. His June itinerary placed him in London, Brussels, Paris, and Lisbon for a few weeks, prior to journeys to Dakar, Monrovia, Accra, Lagos, Brazzaville, Leopoldville, Bulawayo, Salisbury, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, and Cairo. On the eve of the European leg of his whirlwind transcontinental tour, Yergan paused to tell the media that the trip was being made largely at his own expense. His press briefing characterized his chief aim this way:
One of my purposes will be to warn Africans against the snare and delusion of Communist propaganda and to point out specifically that among Negroes in America as well as among so-called underprivileged peoples elsewhere, particularly the Colonial peoples of Africa, Communists mean no good but to hypocritically and irresponsibly exploit the conditions of the people altogether in the interest of the Communist overlords in the Kremlin and their stooges elsewhere.49
The pace of his trip was dizzying. He reached Paris on June 9. Spending the next few weeks in Europe, he arrived in Monrovia later that month. Yet from June 26 to 28, South Africa was experiencing a momentous upsurge of opposition to apartheid. This “Defiance Campaign” was a nationwide series of acts of civil disobedience protesting its unjust laws. One of the landmarks of the modern anti-apartheid struggle, the Defiance Campaign had depended upon the mass mobilization of all of the major organizations fighting against the pass laws and other restrictive legislative acts and promoting broader democratic rights.
While the African National Congress, the Indian National Congress, and their allies were strategizing to apply popular pressure to the apartheid government, Yergan appeared, organizing meetings of his own with carefully chosen colleagues from long ago. Led by R. V. Selope Thema, they formed a cabal of disaffected “nationalists” critical of Congress leaders Dr. J. S. Moroka, R. T. Bokwe, W. M. Sisulu, Z. K. Matthews, and J. B. Marks.50 Early in August he and his spouse were guests of Ray Phillips, American Board of Foreign Commissioners missionary, who had continued Max’s Y work, in his Johannesburg home.51
From August 14 to 21 he was in Nairobi. A year earlier he had been a guest of Indian commissioner Apa B. Pant; now, however, he suggested that he had been “high pressured” into the meeting, and feared he had been “used” by Pant, at which point he was advised not to associate too closely with him this time. The next day, Yergan was the subject of queries directed at the U.S. consulate general by representatives of Kenya’s Criminal Investigation
Division, who were seeking to determine the purposes of his visit. This interest in Max’s activities also dated from Max’s prior visit in 1951 and hints at the sensitive climate at the time he returned during the Mau Mau Emergency—the Kikuyu resistance to British rule in Kenya:
In the course of the conversation it was ascertained that the interest of the police in his activities was due to an incident which had occurred on his previous visit. At that time he had gone on a motor trip with Mr. Pant and their car had broken down near the residence of Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenya African Union leader. They then spent some time in Kenyatta’s home and remarks which Yergan made were translated to Africans present by Kenyatta. According to the CID informant, the mistranslation of Kenyatta was such that the statements of Dr. Yergan, when rendered into Kikuyu, were subversive. Dr. Yergan’s statements as to the purpose of his visit to Kenya were passed to the CID representative, who indicated that they were not concerned over the good intentions of Dr Yergan and expressed the hope that he would not allow himself to be misquoted on this visit. The interest of the CID in his activities was not reported to Dr. Yergan.52
The commentator added ironically, “In view of all this, it came as somewhat of a surprise to learn through the press that Dr. Yergan was to speak on August 20 on the subject of ‘Developments in Africa Today’ for the Kenya League, presided over by Mr. Pant.”53