Eminentoes: He Ain't Worth a Lick
Schwartz, Stephen
EMINENTOES by Stephen Schwartz He Ain't Worth a Lick T he past year has seen a national campaign to turn a man generally and deservedly forgotten into an African American hero. According to his...
...According to his advocates, the singer Paul Robeson, who would have turned loo this year, deserves to join the ranks of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Issuing a commemorative postage stamp is one way we can honor this great man...
...vigorous opponent of racism and champion of human rights...best known for his grand baritone singing voice and his political activism...
...Robeson later canceled concerts in Copenhagen because they were sponsored by a daily newspaper supporting the North Atlantic Treaty, which created NATO...
...Then in April of this year, some sixty members of Congress signed a letter calling on the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee to reconsider...
...I repeat it ciful obscurity...
...One of dozens of Robeson centennial websites has listed events around the country and the world, ranging from "films, forum, celebration" at the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles (March) to an event in the International Labor Chorus Festival in Vaasa, Finland (May...
...His most notable performances were in plays and musicals that today tend to be condemned as racist: Shakespeare's Othello, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Showboat (where he sang "01' Man River...
...and Stalin," he babbled...
...His gifts were widely appreciated...
...In December 1997, the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee denied a request for a Robeson stamp, despite having received nearly 90,000 letters and signatures in support of it...
...ness on a U.S...
...Robeson's greatest notoriety came after the war, when America had to face the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe and Asia...
...Yet nobody would make such a claim on behalf of the poet Ezra Pound, whose allegiance to the Axis during World War II led to years of confinement in an insane asylum as an alternative to a treason trial...
...In a printed statement, Pallone added, "There is no question that Paul Robeson deserves this long overdue recognition...
...64 July 1998 • The American Spectator February high school students in San Leandro, a working-class suburb of San Francisco, heard a lecture by a self-anointed "historian" of Robeson's career, which was soon repeated to students at nearby Cal State Hayward...
...At the annual Grammy Awards in March, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented a posthumous lifetime achievement award to the singer...
...military just as North Korea's Kim II The American Spectator • July 1998 65 Sung was receiving final Soviet go-ahead double standard: Fascist enemies of the Soviet people more than any other to launch the Korean war...
...The hoopla on Robeson's behalf has been especially vigorous in the San Francisco Bay Area, this country's last redoubt of Soviet nostalgia...
...Forever will his name able that the Negro people of America or the "rest of America" made its decision, be honored and beloved in all lands...
...in the way that I deeply and himself completely bereft of his vaunted On return to the U.S., in June 1949, Paul intensely love the Soviet people...
...and W.E.B...
...Russia, he said, was "a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind...
...The Committee refused to explain its decision...
...Paul Robeson's contributions to American society and his personal accomplishments are to be extolled," the congressional letter read...
...For example, in The talented Paul Robeson doesn't rate postal honors...
...Worshippers at the shrine of anti-anti-Communism apparently believe that losses due to immoral political decisions should be compensated for by public apology if not financial reparations...
...The next year, White went further: "Paul Robeson is wrong in giving consent by silence to a political way of life whose strategy is amoral and subject to reversal whenever it suits the whims or fears of a tiny group of men in the Kremlin ...Russia's eloquent and perfervid denunciations of colonialism and race prejudice have been singularly meaningless to me ever since she sold oil to Italy to crush Ethiopia [in 19351...
...R obeson, who was born in Princeton, New Jersey, a century ago, and died in Philadelphia in 1976, first became famous as an all-American football player at Rutgers, then gained renown as an actor and singer...
...Robeson voiced the opinion of the overwhelming majority of the 14,000,000 Negro Americans...
...EMINENTOES by Stephen Schwartz He Ain't Worth a Lick T he past year has seen a national campaign to turn a man generally and deservedly forgotten into an African American hero...
...But Frankenstein also had this to say about Robeson's concert program: "I leave it to the oracles to figure out the political place of Communist fellow travelers and fellow-traveler music in the present scheme of things...
...Yet there is much about this putative hero that his apologists typically fail to mention...
...Negroes are Americans...
...They will not...
...Much of the propaganda produced by thecelebration committees is specifically tailored to classroom use...
...In other words, even Africa was more racist than Mother Russia...
...He continued singing in this key through World War II, when his public appearances were typically on behalf of Russian War Relief...
...spring...
...San Francisco Chronicle critic Alfred Frankenstein, who was no sucker, wrote in December 1941 that Robeson had "the greatest bass voice in the world" and praised "the splendor of his tone and his commanding individuality...
...While the Post Office has so far disappointed Robeson's supporters, other organizations have been more obliging...
...Both audiences were treated to the saga of how the Cold War "blighted" the great man's life...
...Frank Pallone joined Black Panther veteran Bobby Rush, his Illinois colleague and fellow Democrat, in a House resolution urging the stamp issue...
...The man is being rehabilitated for his politics rather than his artistry...
...Pallone's staff representative, Ted Loud, averred that his boss was mainly motivated by the coincidence of Robeson having graduated from Rutgers University, in Pallone's district...
...Pound's propaganda for Hitler and Mussolini nearly sent him to the gallows, even though he mainly delivered it toward the end of the war, when the Axis represented no direct threat to his country...
...During the 1930's and 40's, Robeson made a series of statements seemingly calculated to outrage ordinary Americans...
...After a 1934 visit to the Soviet Union, where he was welcomed as an honored guest and his son attended school with Stalin's daughter, Robeson claimed that he felt freer there than in the United States...
...On April 20,1949, speaking before the "World Peace Congress" in Paris, he declared that American blacks would not fight for the American flag, least of all against Moscow...
...anywhere else in the world could be drawn consigning him (until recently) to a merThe suggestion that Robeson betrayed into a war with the Soviet Union...
...The man has no more busihis country would provoke howls of rage with hundredfold emphasis...
...Thus, Paul Robeson voluntarily gave up the career which it is claimed he lost to "McCarthyism...
...Rush predictably praised Robeson as "an advocate for the rights of African-Americans and other oppressed people" who STEPHEN SCHWARTZ is the author most recently of From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (Free Press...
...It's interesting to note that the recent surge of publicity about Robeson as a political figure has caused renewed interest in his music and films, rather than the other way around...
...The New York Times reports that Robeson enthusiasts include such establishment figures as David Rockefeller and Brooke Astor...
...In the same month the New-York Historical Society announced an exhibition, "Paul Robeson: Bearer of a Culture," to kick off the work of over loo local memorial celebration committees...
...New Jersey Rep...
...A melee erupted and many of the concert-goers stormed out...
...We contend for full and equal rights and we accept full and equal responsibilities...
...I am sorry...
...American intellectuals observe a On the same occasion he declared: "I love Arnold or John Wilkes Booth...
...Protests against Robeson were not limited to the American blacks whose patriotism he had impugned...
...At another press conference, he said he considered American democracy the same as "Hitler fascism...
...It is unthinkable," he insisted, that his race "would go to war on behalf of those who oppressed us for generations...
...but Communists love the Negro people from whom I expressing a grief in which Robeson found were democracy's best friends...
...Czechoslovakia had fallen in 1948, Berlin was blockaded, and Stalin was prepared to invade dissenting Yugoslavia...
...It is not widely known that the Kremlin's strategy toward American blacks was a central element in Stalin's plan to turn the cold war into a hot one...
...Hanns Eisler's `Peat Bog Soldiers,' which is, or once was, an official Communist song, deals with the same rousing elements of rhythm and melody that may be found in any crowd music whether its shirt be red, brown, black, or khaki....The Municipal Chorus...had a grand time delivering the occasional spoken lines in dat good ol' down Souf tawk day lunned from deir good ol' Mammy in Alabam...
...DuBois as the subject of a United States postage stamp...
...Then he dropped the real bomb...
...More importantly, Robeson was publicly encouraging American blacks to refuse service in the U.S...
...There weren't many more "African Russians" then than there are now, but the uproar that followed Robeson's Paris declaration had nothing to do with the status of Slavic blacks and everything to do with the attitudes of ordinary black Americans...
...By contrast, Robeson made his remarks when America's security was by no means assured...
...The pro-Robeson campaign represents the latest attempt to sell the American people a falsified, anti-anti-Communist, upside-down version of their history...
...66 July 1998 • The American Spectator...
...Slava—slava—Stalin, Glory to Robeson again insisted that it was "unthink- Paul Robeson made his choice...
...But Loud himself—in a breathtaking distortion of the facts — described Robeson as "a pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement...
...Walter White, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the press: "We do not feel that Mr...
...Reiterating his claim that in Russia he had "walked the earth for the first time with complete dignity," he added such fanciful assertions as that Peoria, Illinois, had been taken over by fascists, and that "fascist Greece" and Franco's Spain were more of a threat than Russia to the American people...
...He] is perhaps the only true Renaissance man the 20th century has known...a scholar...lawyer...All-American athlete ...classical musical and Broadway actor...
...Robeson then told a hastily called press conference that democracy did not exist in the U.S., and that "only in the Soviet Union can we Negroes walk in the streets just as everybody else can...
...This is not simply another demand for belated recognition of a talented black...
...sacrificed his career as a world-renowned singer and actor...
...In April, the Bravo cable television channel broadcast "Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist," a 30-minute documentary...
...eloquence...
...The day after his Paris statement, an audience in Stockholmwhistled and booed when it realized he was singing the Soviet national anthem, the first verse in Russian and the second in English...
...democracy, such as Pound, the philoso- nation....It's up to the rest ofAmerica when Robeson received the Stalin Prize the pher Martin Heidegger, or the critic Paul I shall love it with the same intensity that I year the dictator died, and signed a eulogy de Man, were criminals...
...In Oslo in 1949, he followed the example of other intellectuals captured by the Stalinists—men like the novelist Henry Roth, who at the Party's behest silenced himself for thirty years—when he declared that henceforth he would perform only for political ends: "I have no time in the political struggle of today to entertain people...
...postage stamp than Benedict today...
Vol. 31 • July 1998 • No. 7
