http://www.forward.com/articles/113279/
Two Decades Before Woodstock, Attacks on Blacks and Jews at a New York Concert
By Jeffrey K. Salkin
September 02, 2009
The last time I was in Peekskill, New York I was desperate for a
Starbucks. Alas, no Starbucks in Peekskill. But that did not prevent
me from driving through its streets, catching glimpses of the Hudson
River, and remembering that L. Frank Baum, the author of "The Wizard
of Oz," apparently spent part of his youth in Peekskill (as did Mel
Gibson, Paul "Pee-wee Herman" Reubens, and former New York governor
George Pataki, who has lived there for essentially his whole life and
who served as its mayor) and knew of a local yellow brick road that
inspired him to write.
Yet, there is something else about Peekskill. There are probably not
many people alive today who remember it; perhaps long-time, aging
residents or scholars of American social or musical history. It is a
story of terror, a cautionary tale for an America in which
vituperation barely tries to pass for civilized discourse.
It happened exactly sixty years ago, at the end of August 1949. The
prominent singer and actor Paul Robeson (described in those days as a
"Negro"), along with other artists such as Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays
and Pete Seeger, was scheduled to give an open-air concert in
Peekskill. This was not to be the first time that Robeson was to
appear in the Peekskill area. Indeed, it was to be the fourth Robeson
concert in as many summers. Mohegan Colony east of Peekskill near
Yorktown, a cooperative community that served as an experiment in
egalitarian living and child rearing, had hosted the concert in 1946.
In 1947, the site was Peekskill Stadium, and in 1948 it was in nearby Crompond.
But 1949's concert was to be different. Guthrie, Seeger and Hays were
all prominent leftists. So, famously, was Robeson. In the years
following World War Two, his politics had moved farther to the left,
as he used his considerable public voice to protest fascism, as well
as the American failure to fully integrate its society in the
aftermath of the war in which so many black servicemen had given
their lives. Two months before the concert, Robeson had said at the
Paris Peace Conference: "It is unthinkable that the Negro people of
America or elsewhere…would be drawn into war with the Soviet Union,"
because it was the only nation in the world to outlaw race
discrimination. As anti-Communist agitation grew in America, so, too,
did the rage against Robeson's perceived Communist loyalties. The
slur was common: Robeson owed allegiance to the Soviet Union.
Apparently, in a contest for thickness and thoroughness, Robeson's
FBI file would have put John Lennon's to shame.
The demography of Peekskill and its neighboring northern Westchester
Hudson River communities was mixed, even schizophrenic. On the one
hand, there were the summer people and weekenders, many of whom were
middle-class Jews with left-of-center leanings. On the other hand,
there were the year-round residents, more working class and
conservative, whose resentment, and even open hostility to the
"summer people" had been steadily growing.
In the event, screaming local mobs blocked the entrance to the
concert area and harassed concertgoers. The veterans' groups paraded
along the highway, automobile horns blared, and patriotic bands
played. Attackers screamed: "We're Hitler's boys here to finish his
job." A crowd of drunken locals attacked the people who were setting
up for the concert. One of their leaders, according to journalist
Howard Fast, was a prominent businessman in Peekskill.
The mob increased to five hundred, then to a thousand. A little after
eight o'clock in the evening, the attackers burned a twelve-foot
cross on the picnic grounds. From burning a cross they progressed to
burning books, sheet music and chairs, while the performers and
concert-goers, arms linked together, sang such songs as "The
Star-Spangled Banner," "God Bless America" and "Solidarity Forever."
The concertgoers, artists and organizers tried to defend the concert
site, but by the time the evening was over, every defender had been injured.
A wave of hatred and panic spread through northern Westchester. Up
and down the Hudson River towns, signs and bumper stickers appeared:
"Wake Up America Peekskill Did!" "Communism Is Treason. Behind
Communism Stands the Jew! Therefore, for my country against the
Jews!" Vacationers and weekend visitors fled many forever,
abandoning the area as a vacation spot because of the outbreak of
"fascist influences." A summer colony in the area organized a
round-the-clock vigil against outside attack. Local Jewish residents
were terrorized; it was, according to some, like living through a pogrom.
Apparently undeterred, the organizers re-scheduled the Robeson
concert for Sunday, September 4. It was to be held at two o'clock in
the afternoon at the Hollow Brook Country Club, about a half-mile
from the earlier concert site, three miles northeast of Peekskill.
Twenty-five thousand people attended. Many of them were trade union
members; about forty percent of the crowd was women, and one local
resident estimate that about eighty percent were Jews.
The program opened with music by Liszt, Mozart, Bach, Verdi and
Chopin. Then, Guthrie, Seeger and Hays appeared, singing American
folk songs and topical songs. Then, Robeson came on, singing a medley
of songs ranging from Spanish Civil War melodies to civil rights
anthems. He performed the last aria from "Boris Godunov," and
finished up with his famous rendition of "Old Man River."
The concert ended at around four o'clock in the afternoon. As cars
and buses started to depart from the concert grounds, police routed
the vehicles through the northern Westchester woods and up a steep,
winding road. There, crowds of men and boys were waiting. As if on
cue, they hurled rocks at the vehicles. More than fifty buses and
countless cars had their windows smashed; at least fifteen cars were
overturned. Bus drivers abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot,
leaving about a thousand of their passengers stranded.
The violence overflowed even to people who had not attended the
concert. Some men and boys noticed a bus of blacks travelling along
the highway, on their way back to New York from a field trip to visit
the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park and attacked it. At least one hundred
and fifty people were injured badly enough to warrant medical attention.
Leslie Matthews, a staff correspondent for the now-defunct black
newspaper New York Age, offered this eyewitness account:
I hear the wails of women, the impassioned screams of children, the
jeers and taunts of wild-eyed youths. I still smell the sickening
odor of blood flowing from freshly opened wounds, gasoline fumes from
autos and buses valiantly trying to carry their loads of human
targets out of the range of bricks, bottles, stones, sticks.
Years later, Pete Seeger would meet a young man folk singer who
admitted to the elder statesman of American folk music that his
father had been a police officer in Peekskill. The young man told
Seeger: "You know, that riot was all arranged by the Ku Klux Klan and
the police…They had walkie-talkies all through the woods. They had
that place surrounded like a battlefield."
The hatred became contagious even entrepreneurial. Bill Hendrix, a
Klan activist in Tallahassee, used the Peekskill opportunity to
extend his newly created empire, the Original Southern Klans, Inc.,
which had split off from the Association of Georgia Klans. The
Associated Press quoted him as saying that the Peekskill violence was
"only the beginning. The crosses will begin to burn north of the
Mason-Dixon Line tonight… as soon as the order gets through." He lost
no time. On the night of the Peekskill concert, six burning crosses
had already appeared in Tallahassee. Each cross had a sign on it: "We
protest Paul Robeson and Communism."
James Edward Smythe, chairman of the Protestant War Veterans of the
United States, Inc., who had been accused of Nazi collaboration in
1944, warned that the "Jewish race has worn out its welcome in this
country" and that "some of your highest officials and big business
executives" in Westchester would join the Klan in its fight against
"Judeo-Communism."
The riots contributed to a small but significant chapter in American
political history. Former vice-president Henry Wallace had run for
president on the leftist Progressive Party ticket in 1948, with
Robeson and Seeger's help. Shaken by the riots, and afraid that the
Progressive Party had drifted too far to the Left, Wallace left the
party, and it soon folded. Moreover, the Peekskill riots would become
the musical prelude to the anti-Communist career of Senator Joseph
McCarthy. Within a few months of the riots, McCarthy would raise the
specter of Communist infiltration into the State Department: a
haunting fear whose repercussions and implications would last for decades.
It's a notable event in American history even if it is mainly
remembered in folk music history. Pete Seeger, who turned ninety
years old this year, along with the late Lee Hays, immortalized the
event in the song "Hold The Line":
Let me tell you the story of a line that was held,
And many brave men and women whose courage we know well,
How we held the line at Peekskill on that long September day!
We will hold the line forever till the people have their way.
Hold the line!
Hold the line!
As we held the line at Peekskill
We will hold it everywhere.
Hold the line!
Hold the line!
We will hold the line forever
Till there's freedom ev'rywhere.
Words by Lee Hays; Music by Pete Seeger (1949)
The concerts at Peekskill happened twenty years, almost to the day,
before Woodstock. Its aftermath was the anti-Woodstock. But is there
any reason for a new generation to care about this sixty year old
event in American history? The words of Leslie Matthews echo in our
ears: "I still hear, smell and feel Peekskill." Is there any reason
why a new generation should hear, smell and feel what happened in Peekskill?
In several significant ways, the memory of Peekskill gives us pause.
It reminds Jews and blacks that we have always had common enemies. It
reminds us of the naïve Communist flirtations, and more, of the old
Left flirtations which led some to embrace Stalin and to only
begrudgingly, if ever, denounce his homicidal policies. On the back
of his 1966 live album "Phil Ochs In Concert," the late troubadour
reproduced the poetry of Mao Tse-Tung poetry which is admittedly
electric in its beauty and asks: "Can this really be the enemy?" In
fact, yes, Mao really could have been the enemy, and he really was.
It turns out that even poets can be mass murderers.
Moreover: the heat and volume of the health care debate in America
today, a debate in which labels like "Communist" and "socialist" are
cast around gratuitously, reminds us that the virus of anti-Communist
hysteria has hardly passed out of the American body politic. It
reminds us that the "Communist" card and the race card are always
available to be played. It reminds us that rage is seductive and that
demagoguery is a perennial temptation.
Finally: As a forebear of the politics of vilification, the Peekskill
event reminds us that words have consequences. And not only on the
wooded back roads of northern Westchester County.
--
Jeffrey K. Salkin is a rabbi, teacher and writer who lives in
Atlanta, Georgia. His most recent book is The Modern Men's Torah
Commentary (Jewish Lights).
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