On Martin Bauml Duberman's Paul Robeson
Stein, Judith
PAUL ROBESON, by Martin Bauml Duberman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. 804 pp. $24.95 Martin Duberman's excellent biography supplies a great deal of new information and insight about a man...
...Initially, Robeson stressed the opportunities, not the obstacles in black life...
...But together they register the impact of the changes in the political culture of the late 1940s on one man of notable distinction...
...It could not keep up with the growing black activism, especially as it attempted to defend itself during the McCarthy period...
...He overcame bigotry through self control, charm, talent, and support from friends and family...
...And the society symbolically defined its limits in 1932 when a white English actress, Yolande Jackson, with whom Robeson had fallen in love, broke off their plans to marry because she was not prepared to oppose her family and culture...
...Robeson's predicament was enhanced by his firsthand knowledge of Stalinist repression, which troubled him, even though he apparently never discussed it with friends...
...Robeson was allied with the party leftists, especially those who wanted more emphasis on racial politics...
...The celebrity world helped his stage career, but ultimately could not share Robeson's racial agenda...
...but a career in the theater was not a good choice for a black man...
...Duberman's book benefits from but shares the limits of recent revisionist work on the Communist party (CP...
...The electric responses to his performances were deserved, but one suspects—and there are hints that Robeson sensed this too—that part of his magic for liberal white audiences was his color...
...Davis, a Harvard law school graduate and son of the leading black Republican in Georgia, had become a Communist when there was some truth in that judgment...
...It broke the party's links to others on the left, making the CP more vulnerable to government repression...
...574 • DISSENT This growing black activism had its effect on the CP...
...Like the new history, this biography shies away from a serious discussion of the CP's or Robeson's politics after World War II...
...One major breakthrough was Randolph's March on Washington Movement in 1941...
...It was also a solution to many of the problems he had faced in his theatrical career...
...Although Robeson was not a CP member, communism for him was more than the pragmatic choice it was for many blacks...
...The CP could not transform itself from a programmatically united party into one providing space for pluralism on the race issue...
...And perhaps the heated party rhetoric provided an outlet for his internal rage, which he had always kept contained...
...Then, in 1948, the party plunged into the Progressive campaign to elect Henry Wallace...
...His sectarian polemics — announcing, for example, that Trotskyists did not merit civil liberties—suggest that he had assimilated the CP outlook...
...These liberal and socialist blacks had a long and legitimate history of disagreement with the party...
...FALL • 1989 • 575...
...Robeson had few roles to play, and he became increasingly frustrated with his work on the stage and then, during the 1930s, in the movies...
...Like his close friend Benjamin Davis, Jr., a member of the CP's ruling body, Robeson attributed the prominence of the black issue in the party to Stalin and the Soviet Union...
...The impact on Robeson was devastating...
...Ultraleftism and the decidedly nonrevolutionary Wallace campaign formed a disastrous combination...
...His catholic friendships indicate that he endorsed both party and independent black activism, while implicitly continuing to uphold the party's leading role on black issues...
...After leading roles in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings, he wrote, in conventional American fashion: "I honestly feel that my future depends mostly upon myself...
...After the Wallace defeat, the party went through its own internal witchhunt...
...As his wife observed, Robeson had a stubborn streak, which precluded giving his enemies satisfaction, especially when they assumed the form of reactionary congressmen like James Eastland and Francis Walter...
...This mean-spirited retaliation struck at the vulnerability of an artist dependent upon his audiences...
...Robeson had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the Wallace campaign...
...Changing Communist politics after the war, which Duberman does not discuss adequately, are crucial to an understanding of Robeson's course...
...The party's sharp turn to the left, the replacement of Earl Browder as leader by William Foster, the decision to attack the NAACP and CIO, heralded a new orientation...
...Like other blacks, Robeson was impressed by the Soviet respect for the culture of dark-skinned peoples...
...As success failed to remove racial barriers, Robeson exchanged the chimera of elite achievement for the uncorrupted virtues of the folk...
...How each affliction relates to another remains unanswered by Duberman's biography...
...After a warm welcome from soldiers on the Spanish battlefront, Robeson concluded that communist politics were aiding oppressed peoples throughout the world...
...Most of his friends were now Communists, party sympathizers, and family members...
...But Duberman's sympathetic portrait of the public man facilitates interpretation...
...24.95 Martin Duberman's excellent biography supplies a great deal of new information and insight about a man previously shrouded in myth...
...His attempted suicides and his illness were the outward signs of deep trouble...
...In the real world, previous commitments and current enemies constrain...
...In the 1920s artistic achievement as a solvent for racism was a common notion among black intellectuals...
...International communism in its Popular Front form suddenly seemed to resolve the dilemmas confronting Robeson—culture, racism, imperialism, and his own career...
...As a result of a speech he gave in Paris in defense of the Soviet Union, the Justice Department removed his passport in 1949, and soon after he became the victim of a domestic blacklist...
...Robeson paid a huge price in the aftermath of the Wallace defeat...
...In 1925 he abandoned the law for the stage...
...Now, in 1933, rejecting both American and Afro-American culture, he began to study African languages and culture, seeking new anchor in his battle for racial dignity...
...But his loyalty was formed in response to the Soviet Union's role at home and anti-imperialism in Africa...
...The international platform the party provided Robeson was not easily replaced...
...But here Doberman's book falters by portraying Robeson's black critics, such as A. Philip Randolph and Walter White, as mere government hounds chasing a besieged hare...
...During World War II Popular Front groups, apparently merging with mainstream American culture, offered Robeson acclaim, an audience, and an opportunity to link his political beliefs to his artistic work...
...What Paul Robeson thought is still elusive—he wrote very little and maintained a "protective secretiveness" that not even his friends could penetrate...
...Robeson continued to support both the CP and independent black activism...
...But while Robeson shared Davis's broad worldview, if not his dogmatic mentality, there was more to his loyalty...
...Pettis had promoted the party's "white chauvinism" campaign, an internal purge for alleged insults to blacks, which quickly became a weapon used by both blacks and white to obtain power within the party...
...Soviet acquaintances whose relatives were jailed asked for his help...
...As the cold war developed, anticommunism might constrict their own agendas, but their opposition to Robeson cannot be written off simply as accommodation to government pressure...
...He himself experienced bouts of gloom and fear when in the Soviet Union...
...By now, men like Robeson could scarcely disengage publicly from the Soviet Union and retain their dignity and friends...
...By 1948 Truman, pushed by progressive forces, became the first president in the twentieth century to endorse a civil rights program...
...A year later, he traveled to the Soviet Union...
...A black actor or singer, more than a writer or painter, inevitably clashed with the racism embedded in American culture...
...Robeson's attachment to the Soviet Union was rooted in a growing alienation from the West, a harrowing stop in Nazi Germany, and then a tumultuous welcome in the Soviet Union...
...This position was given a theoretical certification in 1949 when the CP designated the blacks to replace the working class as the "revolutionary vanguard...
...Robeson was friendly with Revels Cayton and Perry Pettis, black CP leaders who represented the new position, but also with blacks who left the CP to pursue identical politics...
...Without some record of Robeson's thinking we cannot know how he evaluated these issues, especially the CP's "white chauvinism" campaign...
...Perhaps the instant acclaim he won delayed Robeson's perception of these limits and encouraged him to act and sing without much formal training...
...The pressures of government harassment, the knowledge of Stalinist purges, the heated party atmosphere, the ruined career, and perhaps a faltering voice all took a toll on his life...
...In the abstract, all men have choices...
...After the war, he exploited this past in defense of orthodoxy...
...After the war, black politics had many more outlets than during the early 1930s...
...This history has revealed important truths about the party's American roots—except that in these treatments communism itself tends to FALL • 1989 • 573 disappear...
...He had pioneered in the singing of authentic versions of Negro spirituals in the 1920s...
...The inner costs became visible only later...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
