Paul Robeson (47 page)

He also emerged into a full-scale European war. The news in August 1939 that Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler proved shattering to some believers in the revolutionary purity of Soviet ideology, but Robeson publicly stated that the pact “in no way whatsoever” “weakened or changed” his convictions. He saw the Nazi-Soviet agreement as having been forced on Russia by the unwillingness of the British and French
governments “to collaborate with the Soviet Union in a real policy of collective security”—in his notes he recorded his certainty that an Anglo-Russian pact “would have stopped Nazi aggression”—leaving the U.S.S.R. with no alternative way of protecting its borders from a German attack. But if the pact provided the Soviets with some security, it provided the Nazis with more. On September 1, 1939, Hitler's battalions moved into Poland, plunging Europe into war.
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Essie, with typical efficiency, had been stocking up on supplies for a year. Now, with the sky full of barrage balloons, civilian police manning clogged traffic points, anti-aircraft guns going up on building tops, sandbags against windows, the Robesons decided it was time to return home. They delayed passage only until the shooting on
The Proud Valley
could be completed. Essie drove Paul out to the studio early each morning, and he came home in the dark every evening by underground. The routine was exhausting, tension compounded because of air-raid precautions and blackouts, and because Paul, between takes, had to squeeze in recording sessions for His Master's Voice. Even so, he pulled no star turn on the set, indulged in no histrionics. On the contrary, his fellow actors found him (in the words of one of them, Rachel Thomas) “so easy to work with, so easy to get on with. No temperament at all.” In the view of another cast member, Roderick Jones, Robeson's concern centered on his fellow actors, not himself: when his stand-in was kept hanging around for hours under hot lights while the technical people made their adjustments, Robeson—without raising his voice or losing his temper—told them, “Now look, this has got to stop. You can't keep these people waiting around like this all the time.”
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On September 25 the film was completed; on September 28 Robeson saw a rough cut and was delighted with it; on September 29 Essie sent off twenty-four pieces of luggage to the boat train; and on the morning of September 30, Pauli in tow, the family bid goodbye to London.
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CHAPTER 12

The World at War

(1940–1942)

When the Robesons docked in New York in mid-October 1939, their old friends Minnie Sumner, Bob Rockmore, and Bert McGhee were waiting for them. So was a small battalion of reporters. Robeson had prepared a written statement—suggesting his high level of concern for being quoted accurately—but the statement itself was anything but cautious. He referred contemptuously in it to “those Munich men” (Chamberlain and Daladier) whose supineness had served to abet fascist aggression in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Ethiopia; still in power, they were prosecuting a war,
in the name of democracy
, that was in fact aimed at saving Germany from her own leadership, in order ultimately to secure her support for a crusade against the Soviet Union. (“The gentlemen of Munich,” Robeson wrote in his private notes, “are seeking to preserve … a Nazi Germany with one exception—without Hitler.… It is interesting in this connection to note the campaign in the pro-Munich conservative press, to build up Goering by pointing out that he is a gentleman—not a proletarian sign painter like Hitler, that he hunts … that a Germany headed by Goering could get peace terms.”) A Western triumph in a subsequent conflict with the Soviet Union would, in Robeson's opinion, mean the continuing dominion of a colonial spirit scornful of Asians and Africans and devoted to maintaining oppressive foreign control over their countries. He could see no reason, therefore, for blacks anywhere, or for the United States as a nation, to take part in a dispute that was lining up as fascist versus communist.
¹

Robeson's remarks were reprinted in the British press and infuriated, among others, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Though an acquaintance of the Robesons, Beaverbrook let it be known that his newspapers
would refuse to advertise or review Robeson's forthcoming picture,
The Proud Valley
. The London columnist Hannen Swaffer, also a Robeson acquaintance, joined in the denunciation of him, prophesying that his ill-timed remarks—“after all, this country is now fighting for its existence”—would mean the end of his career in Britain. Undaunted, Robeson in the next few months repeated and expanded his views to reporters. In his opinion, the massing of Western imperialists (calling themselves “democracies”) for a showdown against the Soviets warranted Russia's decision to march into Poland and Finland. He characterized the Soviet moves as “defensive,” a response to the “reactionary” influence Britain had been exerting in Scandinavia and to the pending alignment of Western Europe—including the “purified” new regimes expected to replace Hitler and Mussolini in Germany and Italy—against the “threat” of Bolshevism. The Soviet Union's subsequent peace treaty with Finland, Robeson insisted, proved that the Russians had been interested only in securing strategic border points. Robeson was not alone in holding “the men of Munich” in contempt. English socialists with whom he said he had “discussed causes and conditions of the European conflict,” such as Harold Laski, J. B. Priestley, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, shared that estimate. Robeson's views were also shared by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace, who in a speech at the Engineer's Club made exactly the same prediction Robeson had about the pending political realignment in Europe—though, unlike Robeson, he applauded the coming crusade against Communism.
²

Robeson insisted that in making his remarks he was speaking neither as a Communist nor even as a fellow traveler, but, rather, as someone who subscribed to the philosophy of “real democracy” and spoke “from the point of view of the son of a slave,” aware and concerned about issues affecting the fate of millions of subject black people in the world. But his views did parallel those of the Soviet leadership, and one black reader wrote to the New York
Amsterdam News
in protest: “No, Paul old boy, you can't expect right thinking people whether they be black or white to denounce Hitler and Mussolini for their sordid deeds, and acclaim Joe Stalin for his depredatory acts.” Claude McKay also rebuked him. McKay had been to the Soviet Union ten years before Robeson and, like him, had, as a black man, been fêted and acclaimed; unlike him, McKay had become rapidly disenchanted. He now took to print to chastise Robeson publicly for not seeing “beyond the pleasantries with which the Soviets deluge a much wanted guest,” for his uncritical approach toward a Soviet state grown “mindlessly cruel and powerful,” persecuting its own peasantry, suppressing its trade unions, sentencing “its intellectual minorities to a death purge”—and setting out to destroy “the cooperative and semi-social democratic regime of its little neighbor Finland.”
It was nonsense, McKay claimed, for Robeson to defend Russia because it was “a land free of prejudice against Negroes.” There had never been any such prejudice, McKay argued, not even under the czarist regimes—“Before the Revolution an American Negro was the popular proprietor of the most fashionable cabaret in Moscow.” The true “minority parallel,” McKay insisted, was between the American treatment of blacks and the Russian treatment of Finns: “Stalin's attack upon Finland is as vicious as Crackers lynching Negroes under the assumption that they are all rapists.” Hailing Finland as “a valiant fighting minority nation,” McKay called upon the Afro-American minority to lend its support to the Finnish cause.
³

Robeson would not budge. In follow-up interviews he reiterated his conviction that the Soviet Union was fighting a “defensive war,” and he refused to participate in theatrical benefits to raise money for the Finns. “According to my reasoning,” he said, “aid to the Finns is aid to reactionary forces”; the Chamberlain and Daladier governments, and Mannerheim's in Finland, did not represent “the progressive” segment of public opinion in their own countries. He could not see, he added, why blacks—“millions of whom are victims of a British Empire” that maintained its oppressive rule in South Africa and of a British government that continued to refuse independence to India and Jamaica—could possibly believe that Chamberlain was fighting in any sense for them. Anyone genuinely interested in freedom for colonial minorities, Robeson insisted, would do better to applaud “the Soviet action in freeing the Western Ukrainians and White Russians” by moving their armies into those regions. Van Vechten, still brooding over Robeson's neglect, relished the opportunity to assail his politics. “I see Paul has come out in favor of Russia against Finland,” Carlo wrote Walter White. “This is very bad business, indeed.” To another correspondent Carlo waxed philosophical about how “One-third of America may be enslaved, but everybody in Russia is a slave, with no hope of ever climbing out of it. Here there is that possible chance for any one.…” To Robeson's old acting friend Dorothy Peterson, Van Vechten was more succinct: “I spit on Russian sympathizers.”
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Within six weeks of their arrival home, the Robesons had settled into a five-room apartment in the Roger Morris, a fashionable Harlem building at 555 Edgecombe Avenue. Ma Goode and Pauli were installed in a separate three-room penthouse in the same building. Initially Pauli had been interested in the Soviet school in Brooklyn, but after Essie “went back and back” to the Russian Consul, she “finally realized it was no go, but they didn't want to say so,” and Pauli was enrolled in Fieldston, the Ethical Culture school. Robeson himself, within three weeks of landing in New York, participated—almost inadvertently—in a radio broadcast that
reaped him nationwide acclaim, erasing (or at least neutralizing) whatever distaste his initial remarks to the press had created.
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The composer Earl Robinson had written music for a number of WPA-sponsored shows during the Depression, including a revue called
Sing for Your Supper
with the poet John LaTouche that had featured as its finale “The Ballad of Uncle Sam.” After the revue closed, Robinson suggested the ballad to his friend Norman Corwin at CBS for his new series of half-hour programs called “The Pursuit of Happiness,” an upbeat salute to democracy that had already featured Ray Middleton singing Maxwell Anderson's “How Can You Tell an American” and Raymond Massey reciting from
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
. Robinson sang his ballad at the piano for Corwin, who liked it and had him perform for the CBS brass—Vice-President Bill Lewis's reaction was “Wouldn't Robeson knock the Hell out of this!”
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“Pursuit of Happiness” had already approached Robeson to appear on the series, but his asking fee of a thousand dollars had been considered too high. Corwin now decided to pay the fee, and in late October—just weeks after Robeson's arrival in New York—Robeson and Robinson set to work. Commenting on the rehearsal experience years later, Earl Robinson said, “I have never had such a cooperative person to work with—
never!
There was nothing of the prima donna about him, nothing of arrogance. We had only one argument—about pitch.” Robeson's voice was richer in the lower keys, and when recording he could use a microphone to avoid having to reach for the extra volume needed to produce the low tones—volume that he sometimes had trouble creating in a concert hall. He “would insist,” according to Robinson, “on moving pitch down, three, four, five keys down. And I argued with him. I said, ‘Paul, you've got those notes up there. It's no problem for you.' And he said, ‘Yes, but I don't like them. I'm a folk singer. And I sing in my key.'” Then he added, with a twinkle, “The Russians transposed Boris Godunov down for me.” Robinson gave in. “It was a wrench, especially since I knew he could sing it in E if he wanted to.”
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During rehearsals, Norman Corwin rechristened the piece “Ballad for Americans,” and the broadcast took place on November 5, 1939. It created an instant sensation. The six hundred people in the studio audience stamped, shouted, and bravoed for two minutes while the show was still on the air, and for fifteen minutes after. The switchboards were jammed for two hours with phone calls, and within the next few days hundreds of letters arrived. Robeson repeated the broadcast again on New Year's Day, then recorded “Ballad” for Victor and watched it soar to the top of the charts. Norman Corwin congratulated him on “making radio history.” Brooks Atkinson, the
Times
theater critic, wrote him directly to say what a “deep impression” “Ballad” had made on him and to thank him “for
your voice, which God gave you, and especially … for the fortitude and honesty of your character, which are qualities for which you are responsible yourself.” More unpredictably, Robeson's friend Robert Minor, the Texas Communist he had met in Spain in 1938, wrote to say that he had heard the broadcast “with wet eyes and wonder,” hearing in it the death knell of “an age old slave system” and rejoicing that it had been sung by one “whose inner fire is generated by the fight to overthrow it.” Minor—and Robeson—had been stirred by those LaTouche lyrics which acknowledged the dark side of the American dream (“the murders and lynchings … the patriotic spoutings”), and proclaimed

Man in white skin can never be free

While his black brother is in slavery

Other Americans, coming in on their own terms, thrilled to the rapturous patriotism of

Our Country's strong, our Country's young