Paul Robeson (145 page)

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 Robeson 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 said 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.

23.
Starobin,
Crisis
, ch. 7; David A. Shannon,
The Decline of American Communism
(Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 175.

24.
Yarnell,
Democrats and Progressives
, ch. 5, and the books previously cited by Gaddis, Gardner, Patterson and Freedland. As a corrective to the view of Truman's deliberately inciting an anti-Soviet policy, see Alonzo Hamby,
Beyond the New Deal
(Columbia University Press, 1973).

25.
MacDougall,
Gideon's Army
, pp. 652–83.

26.
Robeson's account of his trips south on behalf of the Progressive Party, including the episodes described in the next two paragraphs, is on a tape in RA. The typed mss. of several of his speeches during the campaign are also in RA, along with many newspaper accounts of his appearances. The West Virginia Library Commission removed Shirley Graham Du Bois's
Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World
(aimed at young adults) from its list of books recommended for children, leading her to protest the action to the book's publisher, Julian Messner (Shirley Graham Du Bois to Kathryn Messner, n.d., U.Mass.: Du Bois). Annette Rubinstein passed on to me (interview, Dec. 5, 1983) the anecdote about Robeson's travels in the South, as told to her by George Murphy. Theodora Peck, who headed the Progressive Party's speakers' bureau, told me (interview, April 8, 1982) that she had had few reports of hostility toward Robeson during his speaking engagements. According to MacDougall (
Gideon's Army
, pp. 671, 676–77), Robeson, “a deeply sentimental person” with an “emotional nature,” was so “elated over his Memphis triumph” that “he hired a cab and drove, first into Mississippi and then into Arkansas, in order to set foot in two states where he knew his public appearances would be unwelcome.”

27.
Detroit
Free Press
, April 10, 1948 (“known Communist”); FBI Main 100-12304, three reports dated March 18, April 10, 13, 1948, but only one file number (108 for March 18) is legible. Interview with Theodora Peck, April 8, 1982 (St. Louis); phone interview with Mrs.
Harry White (her husband headed the Wallace campaign in Indiana), May 21, 1983 (Indianapolis). Robeson did speak just off the Ohio State campus to a gathering of some one thousand students and that evening addressed twenty-five hundred people in Columbus (FBI New York 100-25857-436).