WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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We open the show with “The Purest Kind of Guy,” performed by Paul Robeson, a song from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 opera No For An Answer which concerns the life and fate of members of a social club of Greek-American waiters, hotel-workers, restaurant-workers, chefs, laundresses, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, who are out-of-work. In 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and in a closed session, admitted he once belonged to the Communist Party but then challenged the right of HUAC to question him at all and refused to name names or cooperate any further.
Paul Robeson was possibly the most widely known singer in the world at the height of his fame, and then the US Government systematically targeted him for reputation assassination and economic impoverishment.
Today we’ll hear an edited excerpt of Robeson as he testifies before a Senate committee in 1948 as regards the Subversive Activities Control Act co-sponsored by Richard Nixon and aimed at criminalizing membership in the Communist Party. It’s a kind of preview of Robeson’s appearance before HUAC in 1956. The committee insisted Robeson define the American Communist. He does just that and contrasts it with American Fascism.
We’ll highlight Robeson singing “Ballad for Americans,” originally titled “The Ballad for Uncle Sam.” It was written for Sing for Your Supper, a Federal Theatre Project production that opened on April 24, 1939. The House Un-American Activities Committee claimed the content of the FTP’s productions were supporting racial integration between black and white Americans while also perpetuating an anti-capitalist communist agenda and cancelled funding for the project on June 30, 1939. The “Ballad of Uncle Sam” had been performed 60 times. On Sunday, November 5, 1939, on the 4:30 pm CBS radio show The Pursuit of Happiness, Paul Robeson sang “Ballad for Americans.”
We’ll also revisit our 2016 interview with scholar and author Gerald Horne who had just published a book with Pluto Press called Paul Robeson: the Artist as Revolutionary.
And we’ll end the program with a Paul Robeson anecdote from the great filmmaker Charles Burnett about his own American experience in a Watts barbershop in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
But we begin today with graphic artist Sharon Rudahl whose new book is a graphic biography of Paul Robeson called Ballad of an American co-edited by Paul Buhle and Law Ware. It’s published by Rutgers University Press. Rudahl has worked often with Buhle, the great historian of the Left in America, on such edited compilations as The Wobblies, Bohemians, a Studs Terkel anthology Working, a graphic biography of Emma Goldman called Dangerous Woman, and a kind of hybrid biography of our 16th President called Lincoln for Beginners.
RELATED
Drawing lines between the past and present: An interview with Sharon Rudahl
When Paul Robeson Became a Star: From the First-Ever Graphic Biography of the American Icon
Paul Robeson’s May 31, 1948 Senate testimony on the Mundt-Nixon Bill (YouTube)
The Mundt–Nixon Bill, formally the Subversive Activities Control Act
Interchange – Paul Robeson: The Most Dangerous Man In America (Gerald Horne)
Interchange – Who Gets To Tell Our Stories? Charles Burnett and the Responsibility of the Artist (Charles Burnett)
MUSIC – Songs by Paul Robeson
“The Purest Kind of Guy”
“Ballad for Americans”
“Scandalize My Name”
“It Ain’t Necessarily So”
“The House I Live In”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
