A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Now, he wrote, “I must sell my home, uproot my family and upset the tranquility and security of my three small children in the happy, formative years of their childhood. But I would rather have my children miss a meal or two now than have them grow up in the gruesome, fear-ridden future for America projected by the members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I don’t like to talk about these personal things. But my Americanism has been questioned and to properly measure a man’s Americanism you must know the whole pattern of his life.”

  As a biographer and chronicler of social history, I’ve spent my career trying to understand the forces that shape America and to measure individuals by the whole pattern of their lives. Before now, I had always done this by researching the lives of strangers until they became familiar to me. I would do that with some people again this time, but with a twist. One of the figures was intimately familiar to me at the start. I wondered—and worried—whether by the end my father would be more of a stranger to me. But something else happened instead. I emerged with a clearer appreciation of the contradictions and imperfections of the American story—and with a better understanding of my father, of our family and its secrets, and of myself.

  2

  * * *

  In from the Cold

  UNTIL THE MOMENT Bereniece Baldwin testified before the Subversive Activities Control Board in Washington on February 12, 1952, only a handful of people knew the secret life she had been living for the previous nine years. One former husband, Harvey Baldwin, knew, as did two of her adult children and one son-in-law and several special agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the world at large had not a clue. Why was this seemingly ordinary woman testifying against communists?

  Bereniece Baldwin was forty-nine years old, a grandmother with gray hair and deep circles under her eyes. Born in 1902 in Mount Pleasant, in the dead center of Michigan, she had been a Detroiter most of her life. She had quit high school before graduating, and her various jobs since then had included restaurant manager, industrial diamond cutter, teletype operator, secretary at Michigan Central Depot, bookkeeper, and licensed practical nurse. Baldwin was her third surname. Her maiden name was Bamber. Husband number one was Burnett Ashley, with whom she had three children. Number two was Baldwin. Now twice divorced, she lived inconspicuously in a modest one-story brick bungalow at 16272 East State Fair Road on the working-class East Side between Seven Mile and Eight Mile. Her neighbors considered her unremarkable. She was described as pleasant, mild-mannered, plump, and matronly, standing barely five feet, with high cheekbones that relatives attributed to her maternal grandfather’s side, where the heritage was French Canadian and Cree Indian. She liked to tend her garden and care for stray cats.

  When she came in from the cold on that winter morning in the nation’s capital, the realization of what she had been up to caused a sensation, especially back in her home state. Her main job for nearly a decade, it turned out, had been as a paid confidential government informant infiltrating the Detroit branch of the Communist Party USA.

  The Subversive Activities Control Board was one front in a vast government effort to combat communism in America during the cold war. It had been established by the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, a variation of legislation first drafted by Richard Nixon in the House two years earlier, and its purpose was to identify what were known as communist action organizations or communist front organizations and require them to register as foreign agents with the Department of Justice.

  Bereniece Baldwin was called as a witness for the government, considered an expert on the inner workings of the party in the middle of America. She told the board that members of the Communist Party USA were trained in Marxist dogma and were expected to know and recite the “right answers” to all major economic and political issues. They learned these answers, she said, from club discussions, party schools, a bookstore, and a series of pamphlets from the state and national organizations that even the lowest-echelon party members were required to read, including Background of the Berlin Crisis and The World Significance of Events in China and A Discussion Outline of the Marxist Position toward War. She testified that she had attended classes over the years at the Michigan School of Social Science in Detroit, an institution established by the party to teach Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Stalinist social doctrine, and often visited the Detroit Book Store, which later changed its name to the Progressive Book Store, located across from the party headquarters on Grand River Avenue.

  When Frank DeNunzio, the deputy attorney general, who served as the government’s lawyer at the Washington hearing, asked her to establish her bona fides, Baldwin presented her party membership cards and records showing her dues payments. She also recited more than twenty-five names of key leaders in the CP in Detroit and said she had hundreds more in her files from her years as party bookkeeper and dues collector.

  All of this was banner headline news in the Detroit papers.

  REDS IN DETROIT NAMED BY NURSE

  RED ACTIVITIES IN CITY BARED

  FBI SPY DESCRIBES THOUGHT CONTROL

  GRANDMA’S SPY ROLE AMAZES NEIGHBORS

  For the press and public in Detroit and for people who belonged to or were connected to the Communist Party in Detroit, the revelation of Baldwin’s secret life served as a foretaste of what was to come. Her Washington appearance was her public debut, but her starring role as the grandma commie informer was booked for two weeks later back home, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities would arrive for two weeks of hearings on the subject “communism in the Detroit area.”

  Depending on one’s vantage point, the prospect of her testimony in Detroit was tantalizing, exciting, or chilling. One of the hundreds of names in Baldwin’s files was the name of Elliott Maraniss, who then worked on the rewrite desk of the Detroit Times, a Hearst-owned newspaper known for its fervent anticommunism. One can only imagine the wave of adrenalized fear that he felt when the report of her testimony came across the teletype. I can picture him standing there, perhaps hearing a conversation among colleagues about how juicy the story would be when Baldwin started ratting out all the Reds in Detroit.

  * * *

  IT WAS HARVEY Baldwin, her fiancé at the time, who nudged Bereniece into the confidential informant business in late November 1942. What prompted him to direct his soon-to-be wife into that unlikely line of work has never been clear. By the time she talked about her past, he was long gone; they were divorced in 1950, and soon after that she lost track of him. Her children and grandchildren, all the products of her first marriage, knew little about Harvey. Two of her grandchildren said they had been told that Bereniece divorced him because he was an abusive alcoholic. What is known from her own testimony is that during the early years of World War II she was working at a restaurant in Detroit frequented by local left-wing activists with whom she had a superficial acquaintance. One day Harvey suggested to her that the government could use her, that she might be valuable because of her secretarial skills. He persuaded her to accompany him to the FBI’s Detroit Field Office, where he introduced her to an agent. Not quite the usual date for a courting couple.

  After a brief conversation, the agent told them to talk to him again after they got married. The wedding took place on February 13, 1943, and in April they paid another call. This time the agent broached the subject: the FBI wanted to place an informant inside the local Communist Party. Would she be interested? At the time, Bereniece did not know “exactly what the Communist Party was.” The agent suggested that she attend the next party function so that both she and the FBI could get a sense of whether being an informant was something she could handle. On May 7 the agent called to say that later that week there would be a rally in Detroit for Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party USA, who was traveling the country promoting cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

  The Baldwins attended the rally, and when it was over, they joined the party. Two weeks later, Bereniec
e received her membership card in the mail along with a notice of the next meeting of Section 3, Branch 157, at an address on Michigan Avenue. That marked the beginning of her nine-year involvement with the local CP, a journey that took her from group steward to city dues collector to out-state membership secretary, and eventually custodian of all Michigan membership lists and financial records. During that time, she dropped her old-fashioned first name and went by her preferred nickname, Toby.

  Baldwin’s role as a paid confidential informant differed from the world of informants who joined the party out of conviction or peer pressure and then, disillusioned, fearful, weak, or angry, decided to reveal to authorities the communist affiliations or pinko taints of former friends and associates. If there was a sense of duty in what Baldwin did, it was not prompted by ideological misgivings; hers was a predetermined assignment. She was working for money—$16,717, documents would later show. As Victor Navasky aptly described it in his book Naming Names, this was “less a matter of betraying a friend than doing a job—dirty work though it may have been.” To perform her mission, Baldwin had to be trusted as a comrade and at times an intimate friend. The line between duty and human connection inevitably blurred. She later acknowledged that she liked many of the people she was spying on. She attended the baby shower for Stephanie Allan, wife of Billy Allan, editor of the local edition of the Daily Worker, at a club member’s home on the West Side, and made the arrangements for a fellow member’s wedding at the home of Saul Wellman, a local Communist Party leader who had served with the Abraham Lincoln battalion in the Spanish Civil War. At the ceremony, she kissed the bride, whose name she later reported to the FBI.

  Toby Baldwin’s name and face were familiar to most Michigan communists. She attended state party conventions, New Year’s Eve parties, and testimonial dinners, and she picketed outside the Federal Building to protest the deportation of Nat Ganley, a local party leader. She had contacts in virtually every club and cell. Frederick Douglass Community Group, Nat Turner Club, Whitman Club, 14th Congressional Group, Ford Section, Briggs Section, Automobile Miscellaneous, Downtown Club, Midtown Club, Delray Club, Dave White Club, Ralph Neafus Club in Ann Arbor, Iron River Club in the Upper Peninsula, the bookstore, the Michigan office of the Daily Worker—Baldwin was familiar with the entire network, which in trying to avoid government harassment was constantly renaming, reforming, reshaping, submerging, resurfacing, and occasionally purging.

  Membership in the Communist Party USA and in the Michigan district had dropped year by year since the end of the wartime U.S.-Soviet alliance and the onset of the cold war. In a population of about 6.4 million Michiganders, there were 1,332 dues-paying CP members by the late 1940s. They were a variegated collection of outcasts and outliers, hardline ideologues and naïve dreamers who believed that communism might succeed where capitalism had failed in securing economic and racial equality and world peace. They never posed a serious threat to the American capitalist system, yet they became the objects of fear and the cause of hysteria, tracked and prosecuted as dangerous revolutionaries. For their part, many still thought of themselves as members of a transformative political vanguard, leading to a mix of inflated self-importance and intermittent paranoia.

  The more responsibility Baldwin was given, the more she was put to the party loyalty test. Before she was placed in charge of membership cards in 1948, a party official called and told her that a woman she had never met would be arriving at her home and staying for the night. It appeared that this austere stranger, who would not give her name, was a party functionary who also taught at a nearby college and was sent in to check on Baldwin’s reliability. Later that same year, two men from the party burst into her house and demanded to see all the records. She directed them to a filing cabinet in her bedroom, hoping they would not discover papers detailing her contacts with the FBI that were hidden in a clothes bureau nearby. As Baldwin later remembered it, one of the men interrogated her about the luxuries in her home—how could she afford that television set?—while the other took some of the records to her basement and threw them into the furnace. “Gotta be careful about old records, ya know,” she recalled his telling her before the men left.

  In 1951 the organizational secretary for Detroit’s East Side clubs, a man named Oscar Rhodes, pulled up outside her house with a large cardboard box in the backseat of his car. He told her that the box contained important CP material that was too sensitive to keep in his office. Did she have a safe place to store it? When she suggested the attic, he agreed and went out to his car to fetch the box. But he returned empty-handed, saying that two men in a black car drove by and he was certain he was being watched by the feds. More than he knew.

  * * *

  IN THE FIRST weeks of 1952, staff investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who had been in Detroit on and off for several months, began the final stage of preparations for the hearings. They set up shop first at the high-rise Whittier Hotel, overlooking Belle Isle and the Detroit River, and later at the Book-Cadillac Hotel downtown. W. J. (Jackson) Jones drove around the city serving subpoenas to friendly witnesses. One of his first trips was to East State Fair, where he delivered a subpoena to Bereniece Baldwin. His colleague, Donald T. Appell, conducted most of the prehearing interviews with Baldwin and other informants. Appell was a veteran at this, having recently spent several months doing legwork for the committee’s headline-grabbing spectacle out in Hollywood looking for communist influence in the film industry. Hollywood was a particular HUAC obsession, as was Broadway to a lesser degree, not because leftist artists in either place presented a serious threat to national security, but because they offered an easy means of gaining publicity and intensifying public concern and fear over the Red Menace.

  Detroit was another inviting target. Here was the city that had helped win World War II when its automotive industry was transformed into an airplane and armaments factory, “the Arsenal of Democracy,” as it was called. Detroit was also the heart of the American labor movement, headquarters for the United Auto Workers. While Walter Reuther, the UAW president, was a liberal anticommunist, one wing of the UAW seemed notably pink and red: its massive Local 600, representing nearly sixty thousand workers at Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant. It was the promise of exposing communists in Local 600 that brought the committee to Detroit. Whether this was intended to strengthen or weaken the American labor movement was open to legitimate debate, a variation of the debate that continued in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party between anticommunists and the double-negative-bearing anti-anticommunists. But there was no doubt that the committee was depending on Bereniece Baldwin and other informants to name names inside the Local, and that miscellaneous party members named as a result were essentially collateral damage. This other group included my father and uncle.

  In looking for dope on Local 600, Appell turned not only to the informant network but also to the Ford hierarchy, especially company executive John S. Bugas, who before joining the automaker had run the FBI’s Detroit Field Office. It might be assumed that someone with Bugas’s history would be eager to share with the committee the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and work schedules of suspect Ford employees. So it says something about HUAC—its tactics and problematic status within the anticommunist network—that Bugas and his colleagues were a hard sell, according to internal Ford documents.

  Appell paid his first visit to Bugas at Ford headquarters in Dearborn on the Tuesday afternoon of January 22. The committee, he said, understood that Ford “possessed considerable information and records regarding subversive activities, particularly within Local 600 of the UAW,” and was puzzled as to why the company was not fully cooperating with the congressional inquiry. The first part of that assessment was, if anything, an understatement. Since the days of founder Henry Ford and his union-busting goon squad, led by the notorious Harry Bennett, Ford Motors had compiled voluminous files on radical union members. But Bugas remained noncommittal. He wrote in a
memorandum to the file that he was “very sympathetic with the HUAC objective” but thought the committee’s hunger for publicity might be counterproductive. “To expose communists usually is to drive them and their plans and manipulations deeper under-cover,” he suggested. “It is my strong feeling that it is much more desirable, particularly in this ‘twilight’ period, which is neither peace nor war, to assist the FBI in maintaining a close watch on such bad security risks than it is to assist HUAC in sensational exposures which will serve a publicity objective but not add to the long-range security of the Ford Motor Company and its properties.”

  For the rest of the week, Appell kept pushing. On Friday afternoon, before catching a flight back to Washington, he placed a call from his room at the Book-Cadillac to Ford’s general counsel, Gordon Walker, and persuaded Walker to meet with him early that evening. When Walker reiterated what Bugas had been saying, “Appell indicated considerable irritation,” Walker wrote in a memorandum. “He stated that he could not understand the policy which we have adopted, that we had ‘dug deep’ to ‘come up’ with such reasoning and that he was sure the committee, upon learning of our attitude, would ‘keenly resent’ our lack of cooperation and would construe our action as an insult to a congressional committee.” The committee might go so far as to publicly condemn Ford and subpoena its records, Appell said. He urged Ford to consider the consequences of that threat.