Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism

One: Black Performances and the Stagecraft of Statecraft

ONE | Black Performances and the Stagecraft of Statecraft THE STAGECRAFT OF STATECRAFT AND THE MANUFACTURED CRISIS In the decades since the height of their power in the late 1940s and 1950s, the hearings held by the House Committee on UnAmerican activities (HUAC) have become widely seen as spectacles that operated at nexus of ritual and theater. Victor Navasky, for example, calls the hearings a “ritual of naming names” performed in the “degradation ceremonies” of a “surrealistic morality play.”1 Historians have similarly considered the “HUAC Performance” to have been a “traveling road show” that was “highly stylized and largely ceremonial in nature. Roles were carefully predetermined , with testimony normally rehearsed.”2 The hearings developed from “frenzied improvisations” into “increasingly stylized rituals” where loyalty could be performed.3 The hearings that so infamously claimed to search for the authentic “truth,” loyalty and treason, were themselves highly artificial pageants with intense ritual efficacy: HUAC carefully dramatized the act of informing for purposes of waging political warfare: to intimidate some, to encourage others, and so on. It was theater or, if you like, ritual: a rite of purification that would also put the fear of God (HUAC’s man in heaven) in the as yet unpurified.4 While antitheatricality was a key trope in anticommunist rhetoric, performance was also an important weapon in the federal government’s Cold War arsenal. U.S. “statecraft” manufactured a dramaturgy of crisis, which sought to discipline and order bodies as well as voices of dissent. These practices have a lengthy history, extending from the pathologizing of “emancipation utterances” by black Americans who revealed the perpetuation of the legacy of slavery at home and contested America’s imperial practices abroad.5 33 When Paul Robeson appeared before HUAC under subpoena in 1956, this conjunction of antitheatrical discourse, highly theatrical displays of power, and coerced performances of the accused were marshaled to regulate and contain Robeson’s activist performances. The discourse that articulated Communism, blackness, madness, and acting figured Robeson as a mad black traitor—who concealed his treason and mental instability with the red mask of sanity. However, as the Cold War performance complex simultaneously and spectacularly condemned theatricality and coerced performances, it created the occasion and means of its own undoing . Since HUAC produced the field of performance as both the symptom of Communism and the logic of the hearings, Robeson was able to enact performance as a mode of rupture that challenged the logics upon which HUAC depended, the performance practices that theatrically enabled it, and the political and economic interests that constituted it. The HUAC hearings exemplified the U.S. government’s practice of stagecraft as an element of a high elaborated Cold War performance complex that functioned as a mode of consolidating power. For President Eisenhower, for example, many policy decisions were to be made for their theatrical efficacy. Statecraft for him was indeed a form of stagecraft. In anticipation of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he explained to his Cabinet that preventing the execution (and as he would later similarly proclaim about the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas) would only be justified when “statecraft dictated in the interests of the American public opinion or of the reputation of the United States Government in the eyes of the world.”6 As enactments of the stagecraft of statecraft, domestic political acts were theatrical expressions for the consumption of both Americans and the rest of the world. As James Scott describes , such performances of power are meant to mask dissent: By controlling the public stage, the dominant can create an appearance that approximates what, ideally, they would want subordinates to see. The deception—or propaganda—they devise may add padding to their stature but it will also hide whatever might detract from their grandeur and authority.7 The hearings staged both the authority of the committee and the acquiescence of witnesses, producing a “dramatization of power relations.”8 Thus, the propagandistic value of the stagecraft of statecraft was a theatricalization of power more than a hunt for “truth” or an enactment of justice. 34 PAUL ROBESON AND THE COLD WAR PERFORMANCE COMPLEX The HUAC hearings were a form of “Congressional Theatre.”9 According to Brenda Murphy, The Committee hearings became a scapegoating ritual by which “Communists” . . . could be assigned blame for the country’s anxiety and division, then effectively purged and punished, and welcomed back only when they had undergone...