Paul Robeson (144 page)

35.
Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982. Sept. 28, 1984. Unless otherwise cited, the quotations in the account that follows are from these interviews.

36.
Perhaps adding to PR's concern, the following exchange took place at just this time during the House Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry:

Richard Nixon: “Have you any other tests which you would apply which would indicate to you that people acted like Communists?”

Adolphe Menjou: “Well, I think attending any meetings at which Mr. Paul Robeson appeared and applauding or listening to his Communist songs in America, I would be ashamed to be seen in an audience doing a thing of that kind” (
Hearings
, Oct. 1946, p. 104).

PR, Jr., is the source for the information about the relationship between Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson and his father (see also note 17, p. 695). For more on Bumpy Johnson, see Helen Lawrenson,
Stranger at the Party
(Random House, 1972), ch. 9. Tension in the CP over relationships between black men and white women went back at least to the thirties (see Naison,
Heyday
, pp. 136–37; George Charney,
A Long Journey
[Quadrangle, 1968], p. 102). Freda Diamond has told me (multiple interviews) that, at one point in the mid-forties, Ben Davis, Jr., came to her on behalf of the CP and asked that she pointedly let Paul know that his relationship with Uta was causing a lot of talk. She refused.

37.
“The Midnight Raid of José Ferrer,”
Confidential
, Sept. 1955.

38.
Several members of Robeson's inner circle share a version of one aspect of the breakup at odds with Hagen's (and which they say Paul himself told them). According to this version, Hagen was so distraught at Paul's attempt to disentangle himself that she swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills. Sensing something was wrong, this version continues, Robeson hastened to her apartment, found her comatose, walked her around, got her medical treatment, “saved her life.” Hagen hooted with derision when I ran that version by her. “I've never been in a coma. I took eight sleeping pills when my mother died in 1939, about five years before I met Paul, and I was walked around a room in St. James Hotel in Philadelphia by my brother and Joe Ferrer.… It sounds like a combination of two stories.… I'm sure I told Paul about what I did in Philadelphia when my mother died.” (A not-incidental reason for taking the pills in 1939, she added, was to get out of going on tour with the Lunts.) What a shame, she said—“The relationship was so phenomenal all by itself, there's nothing to lie about.” I should add that I believe Hagen's version, on the grounds that in all other ways I found her candid and forthcoming. Hagen last saw Robeson sometime in the fifties; he was coming out of the Astor Theater surrounded by bodyguards, and she had the impulse to run and embrace him but resisted it (interviews with Hagen).

39.
RA contains itineraries for Essie's extensive lecture tours plus a number of letters extolling her abilities on the platform (e.g., A. Ritchie Low to PR, April 11, 1947: “I heard Mrs. Robeson give a wonderfully fine lecture in San Francisco”). She applied to the Carnegie Corporation for funding on yet a third book—“a comprehensive
SURVEY OF BLACK AFRICA
”—but was turned down with the explanation that Carnegie was already funding Lord Hailey “to look at the scene with European eyes” (ER to Devereux C. Josephs, Nov. 22, 1946; Whitney H. Shepardson to ER, Dec. 23,
1946, RA). Essie wrote a pamphlet that the Council on African Affairs published in 1946 in which she was critical of U.S. policy on Africa, and predicted that the continent would soon be in the forefront of international politics. For further discussion of ER's views on Africa, see Barbara Ransby, “Eslanda Goode Robeson, Pan-Africanist,”
Sage
, 3:2 (Fall 1986). Essie described her African trip to the Van Vechtens as “fabulous” (ER to CVV and FM, postcard, Sept. 12, 1946, Yale: Van Vechten). The background on Paul, Jr.'s finances is in ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, RA.

Essie's lecture dates are partly detailed in a brief diary she kept for Feb. 1946, which also records some interesting encounters she had. In St. Louis, her “old beau from Indiana U,” Elmer Mosee, came to see her. In 1946 Mosee was the superintendent of the People's Hospital in St. Louis (in Jan. 1947 Robeson sang in St. Louis under the hospital's sponsorship), and Essie described him as the “closest Negro to Truman”; as such he gave her “all the low down,” describing Truman as “loyal, stubborn, devoted to his mother, honest, conservative, grass roots, cautious, firm. Says he removed a secretary on Elmer's complaint” (ER Diary, Feb. 4, 1946, RA). In Pennsylvania she had a talk with Congressman Francis E. Walter, a “wonderful man, liberal, interesting, friendly, sound. Tells me Rankin is really mental case. Bilbo just a career politician with one item to sell—discrimination” (ER Diary, Feb. 15, 1946, RA). This same Francis Walter was later co-author of the infamous McCarran-Walter Act and a tormentor of Robeson—see pp. 440–42. In Philadelphia Essie saw the play
Jeb
and disliked it but thought Ossie Davis “gave a beautiful performance” (ER Diary, Feb. 16, 1946, RA). Back in New York, between lectures, she saw Bess Eitingon for dinner (the two had decided to write a play together on the atom bomb), along with Clifford Odets and his wife and Marc Blitzstein. She found Odets “insufferable. We got into a terrific row over [the play]
Deep Are the Roots
. I was so furious at his pompous stupid criticism I could have killed him. Marc is nice” (ER Diary, Feb. 19, 1946, RA). In the dining car of a train outside of Columbus, Ohio, she talked “with a white passenger at table who is opposite me in the sleeper. After he left I told the waiter—Negro of course—It's some job educating these white folks. He said dont waste your time. You cant educate them. Why a guy came in the diner for breakfast this morning—white man—and asked one of the boys—Say why dont you smile? The waiter said—dead pan—Did you come in here to eat or to see me smile. He was so angry. The white man was furious. All the waiters froze up on him and he didn't know what to do. Said he'd report the waiter. So all the waiters gave him bad service. White folks!! It never occurs to them we do double shift, long hours, what have we got to smile about?” (ER Diary, Feb. 25, 1946, RA.)

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).