Paul Robeson (62 page)

But had not the Soviet government purged some of its own intellectuals and officials? Counsel Combs asked. Was not that “evil”? Were the purges not comparable to lynchings in the United States? No, Robeson answered, they were not. Russia had been living for a long time under a state of siege—England “has been determined to destroy the Soviet Union since 1917”—and also under conditions of “civil strife,” beset by internal enemies at odds with the government's goal of “giving life to the common people.” Disliking the Soviet system, having “no faith in the potentiality of the Russian people,” these dissenters “ought to get out of there or get shot.” Did not the democracies of the West shoot traitors during wartime? Had not even the Norwegians—those “nice people”—shot Quisling?

It was important to understand, Robeson emphasized, that ordinary Russians backed their government, felt it represented “their leadership.” He likened the situation to his experience as a football player—“The coach tells you what to do and we do it”; it was not a question of being under a “dictatorship” but of agreeing to work for a common goal believed to be in the interest of all. If you wanted to talk about such matters as “freedom of speech,” Robeson suggested, you might better turn to the American South, where blacks were being “shot down” for speaking their minds, for asserting their right to the supposed guarantees of American citizenship (“The Negro people,” he added, “are no longer willing to be shot down”).

“You don't find that sort of thing in California, do you?” Chairman Tenney asked. “Yes, in California,” Robeson replied, and recounted a recent experience in Fresno. He had gone into a restaurant with friends and been told they were not serving. “But you are serving,” Robeson said, seeing people sitting around eating. He was asked what he meant by “coming in here with your hat on with white folks.” “I started for the guy,” Robeson said, but a friend saw the man reach for a gun and warned Robeson to hold back. “I could have been dead” in Fresno, California, he said, “exactly like I would have been dead in Georgia. I am not saying the state of California wouldn't have done more [about] it, but I would have been good and dead.” Plenty of white workers were “just as bad off” in California, Robeson added; moreover, he'd gone into the fields and seen the abominable conditions under which Mexican laborers suffered. The
struggle against inequality, he believed, was a “unified struggle [of] … Negro and white workers, both divided because the fellows at the top keep them divided; but their essential interests are the same.” Still, in his view, neither this internal struggle at home nor the worldwide struggle between competing American and Soviet systems necessitated violence. He himself believed that “the only way people can get back on their feet is to nationalize the means of production,” but he also believed “there is still plenty of room for private enterprise” in the world—“we shouldn't have to go to war with Russia because they haven't got free enterprise.” Revels Cayton, the black union leader, who had accompanied Robeson on a series of political appearances in California just preceding the Tenney hearing, reported to Max Yergan that “This red-baiting outfit took the shellacking of their life. Paul made a tremendous talk … extremely timely and to the point.”
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Cayton and Robeson had known each other earlier but had drawn close together after Cayton's arrival in New York City in the summer of 1945 to become executive secretary of the National Negro Congress. An exuberant, earthy, outspoken man, Cayton was the grandson of Hiram Revels, the black Senator from Mississippi during Reconstruction, and the brother of the distinguished sociologist Horace Cayton. A veteran trade-unionist (he had for years been chairman of the California CIO's state committee on minorities), Revels Cayton was also a CP stalwart who was rambunctiously independent of the Party when it came to black issues.
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In 1946 Cayton was intent on orienting the work of the NNC around the needs of the black working class and the trade unions, challenging the domination of “the NAACP and the other conservative organizations.” That much was fine with the Party. But when, in the late forties, Cayton came to argue for the necessity of forming separate black caucuses within the industrial unions, part of the CP leadership would balk—even though these early attempts, in Cayton's own view, never amounted to more than “a quiet gathering of blacks to talk things over.” Nonetheless, Cayton would continue to insist that the caucuses were needed in order to push for more job opportunities for blacks, an effort that, by the early fifties, even the left-wing unions had become reluctant to undertake—and the Party became reluctant to press them for fear of jeopardizing its influence. By the fifties, the Party leadership came to distrust, in varying degrees, what it viewed as a resurgence of black nationalism and of dual unionism—divisive threats to its continuing and overriding concern for black-white unity based on shared class interests. It was the character of the unity—integration without equality—that Cayton would challenge in the early fifties. In practice, he argued, “unity” had meant whites leading blacks and putting the interests of whites first. In the United States, Cayton understood, divisions based on race were often a more important determinant of behavior than commonalities based on class. Like any good Marxist, Cayton believed that class unity would
ultimately
be the instrument of
liberation—but in the interim, he insisted, injustices based on race could best be attended to by the unification of blacks.
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Cayton came to have an important influence on Robeson. Increasingly in the postwar years, they shared political platforms, and Paul would often stay over at Revels and Lee Cayton's apartment, sharing meals, crooning their baby to sleep, arguing political points into the night. He came to agree with Cayton that the black working class had become the central agency in the struggle for black rights. The black trade-unionists who had gotten a toehold in industry during World War II were (like Robeson) strongly connected to the black churches and strongly identified with black culture—but otherwise had scant patience with any form of black nationalism (whether it be Marcus Garvey or the Nation of Islam) that called for a separatist political solution. In the early thirties especially, Robeson had stressed the importance of preserving a black cultural identity, but he had never sought to preserve its integrity through political separation. He remained committed all his life to a strategy of political coalition and, after his exposure to socialism in the late thirties, had vigorously supported alliance with the white oppressed.

Robeson believed the Party emphasis on “Black and White Together” represented a genuine commitment to the ideal of brotherhood, but by the late forties he recognized, too, that this could serve some of the less racially enlightened whites in the Party with a rationale for ignoring black aspirations and for maintaining their own control. As early as 1946 Robeson brought Ben Davis, Jr., over to Cayton's house one night, “just to see,” according to Cayton, “if Ben and I would get into an argument.” Cayton and Davis never got along more than passably well; Ben represented Party orthodoxy, Cayton represented the mavericks. That night, running true to form, Davis accused Cayton of “petit-bourgeois nationalism” in pushing for black power within the unions, of forgetting that the Party, not a separate group of black trade-unionists, was the vanguard of struggle. As Cayton recalls it, he told Davis to “just look at the facts: the white working class is supposed to be leading us, and where the hell are they going?! God help us if we follow their lead. They're not doing a goddamn thing for blacks! When are they going to start leading, Ben? Our folks are really moving, and if I have to decide between the two, I'm going to go with my people.” Robeson had brought the two men together to let them argue it out, and for most of the evening he simply sat quietly and listened. Then he took off the month of October 1946 to stump with Cayton on the West Coast in behalf of the National Negro Congress.
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Cayton reported back to the NNC staff in New York that he and Paul were “pounding away on the need of building” that organization, speaking on the radio, at community meetings, in churches and to a variety of union gatherings: to striking maritime workers on the San Francisco waterfront,
to a luncheon gathering “of practically every ranking official of the CIO in San Francisco,” to Dishwashers Local 110, to Cayton's own local union (the Shipscalers and Painters Local 10 in Seattle), to the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in Los Angeles, and in that same city to Harry Bridges's International Longshoremen and Warehousemen union. They met everywhere with “tremendous good will and enthusiasm,” but also, in Cayton's view, “the circle of followers was growing smaller, due in part to the deepening of the Cold War; not only was there a basic lack of understanding of the Congress' program,” but the black working class was preoccupied with pending “economic annihilation” due to the closing down of wartime industry. Indeed, the heralded “rebirth” of the NNC never materialized. In Cayton's words, “We didn't have a base, we didn't have any credentials in the black community.” With no significant growth in membership, the NNC, in less than two years, folded into the newly formed Civil Rights Congress—for which another Robeson friend, William Patterson, would become the chief spokesman. Patterson was more of a doctrinaire Party man than Cayton, who over the years would become estranged from the CP and would eventually leave it.
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At several times during the fall of 1946, Uta Hagen had flown out to be with Paul as he crisscrossed the country filling political and concert engagements. By Christmastime he was back in New York briefly, and Uta planned a festive holiday. She and Joe Ferrer had recently separated—he went to stay at their country place in Ossining, she kept the New York town house—but had remained on friendly terms. On Christmas Eve, Uta went to Joe's dressing room (he was performing
Cyrano
), put up a German Christmas tree complete with candles and a little music box, left gifts from herself and their daughter, Letty, and told the cast seamstress to light the candles just before Joe came in. Then she went home to wait for Paul's arrival at her house for their planned Christmas Eve dinner together.
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It was a cozy evening. Paul and Uta exchanged gifts, had dinner, and curled up—Paul in an armchair, Uta on the sofa—to talk (sex was out: “I was having a bladder attack and was in pain,” Uta later said; “The Lord was with me—we weren't doin' nuthin'”). Uta suddenly thought she felt a draft. At the door to the room, she had put a high screen which stood about six inches off the floor. Glancing over to see where the draft was coming from, her eyes fixed on a man's feet showing under the screen. She jumped up, went to the door, found Joe there, and impulsively threw her arms around him—“Oh! You came to wish me a Merry Christmas!” As she hugged him, she found herself face to face with two men standing in the doorway. One was a lawyer, the other a detective. Joe strode into the living room. “I'll never forget it,” Uta recalls. “Joe looked so little and Paul so big. He looked up at Paul and said something like ‘You son-of-a-bitch!' All
Paul said, in a quiet, sorrowful voice, was ‘Oh, Joe, no.' It was just awful. Finally Joe got embarrassed, and the lawyer got very embarrassed,” and the detective just stood there—and then all three walked out.

Paul, in Uta's view, “had a most peculiar reaction, and got very paranoid. He panicked. He called all his friends. He had them come—I forget who they all were—they came in a limo, they came with guns.… One of them was a pale black man with light white hair. I remember him vividly. And I'd never seen any of them before. They went off in a big limo. It was like a Chicago gangster movie.” Indeed it was. “They” may well have been members of the “Black Mafia,” lieutenants of the famed Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a friend—and devoted protector—of Robeson's. The “panic” can only be guessed at, assuming in the first place that Uta read it right, that Paul was not to some significant degree consciously embellishing his distress for secondary gains (such as perhaps wanting to disentangle himself from Uta anyway). Yet, if Hagen's further details are reliable, panic is what it certainly sounds like: while awaiting his friends—they didn't arrive until two o'clock in the morning—Paul paced up and down the room “in a sweat,” “talking himself into more and more fear,” mumbling that if Joe would raid them he was capable of anything, that he might even then be waiting outside with a gun. “I still think it was
unreal
,” Uta said some thirty-five years later, “to assume Joe was going to do him bodily harm, that he needed an escort to get out of my house.… It was
paranoid
. What would they shoot him for?”—though she does agree that in those years a black man found with a white woman could easily be accused of rape, especially a famous black man who had recently defied the President of the United States and was a plausible target for an FBI setup.
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Ferrer's behavior was grounds enough for shock; the affair between Uta and Paul was, after all, two years old, and Ferrer seems up to then to have treated it with exemplary understanding—indifference, even. He had never done or said anything to suggest outrage, or even shown any diminution of his affection for Paul. To this day Uta finds Joe's motives for the raid puzzling. They probably hinged, she thinks, on the fact that divorce proceedings were in progress and Joe wanted to avoid paying alimony. But, beyond the shock at Joe's behavior, Paul must have been reacting to the certain knowledge that publicity about being “caught with a white woman” could be used to ruinous effect—to his career, to his credibility as a political spokesman, to his standing with the black community. The raid did become common gossip, and some accounts did appear in the press; but the only overtly sensationalistic—and wholly garbled—version appeared in
Confidential
, and then not until 1955.
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