The infinite, the eternal, the ineffable.
The fact that a Spinoza scholar would be running a high school in New York was not unusual in that era. With both overt and covert quotas keeping many Jewish academics from attaining positions they deserved in higher education, high schools like Abraham Lincoln were staffed with scores of overqualified teachers and administrators. They also tended to be socially conscious liberals. Bertrand R. Burger, an English teacher who was an expert on Willa Cather and taught a special course in journalism, was a favorite of Irving Schneider and Elliott. Burger died before Elliott graduated, but by then the teacher had inspired him to take the step up from the Barker newspaper of the Boy Scouts to the school paper, the Lincoln Log, where he eventually became sports editor. The notice in the Landmark yearbook of Burger’s early death called him “an assiduous student of a society whose inadequacies he deplored and strove to perfect” and “a student of art, and life, and literature, which he approached with a zest nothing short of contagious.”
The student body was as impressive as the faculty. Arthur Miller’s brilliance would only become evident later, rewarding him with world fame and a Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman. Walking Abraham Lincoln’s halls during his years were two science whizzes who went on to win Nobel Prizes, Jerome Karle in chemistry and Arthur Kornberg in medicine. Teenagers share certain interests in all eras, in dating, sports, music, gossip, clothes, status, and friends, but it was difficult for the students at Abraham Lincoln in the mid-1930s to ignore the larger forces shaping their lives: the Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism in Italy and Germany, the lingering disorienting effects of World War I, the greed and false frivolity of the Roaring Twenties, the yearning for world peace. These sobering themes were passed down to them from their teachers and principal year after year. Nearly two decades later, when Elliott’s Americanism was questioned, he wrote that he was taught in school to do his part in securing peace and economic well-being for the American people. Here was the early context to that statement.
“I rejoice that you do not go out into the world in those mad days we knew five or six years ago,” one of the activist teachers, Florence K. Weisberg, declared to the students in 1934, when Elliott was a sophomore. The excesses of capitalism, the worship of money, she said, had led the nation in the wrong direction. “For all the world knows now, as some knew then, that the things men strove for then were valueless; that the gilt and glamor, the tawdry trifles for which they paid so dearly, often sacrificing love and loyalty and honor, are not everlasting. . . . Bitterly disappointed in the last generation, the gods pin their faith on you.”
The next year, Elliott and his schoolmates heard a bleaker message from Principal Mason. Drawing on his Emersonian ethos, he told them it would take more to right the world situation than President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, whose reach had extended by then into the halls of the school, with its vibrant murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration. “Our body politic is sick,” Mason asserted. “We are suffering from the contagion of war, we are victims of the germs of jealousy, the bacteria of misunderstanding, the convulsions of cutthroat competition. Our little earth is seriously ill and foully diseased. To remedy the situation, we need not a few super-intellectual brain-trusters, but an alert, intelligent, socially-minded, idealistic citizenry. Such I sincerely hope you will all be, for your own good and for the honor of Lincoln.”
Three years into the New Deal, the national unemployment rate still hovered near 20 percent, even higher in Brooklyn. An essential section of the school’s yearbook amounted to a list of various professions that might offer graduates hope of being hired. But what Mason called “the contagion of war” seemed to weigh more heavily on their minds. Even as Hitler and Mussolini militarized the European continent, there was a strong peace movement developing in America, led by the “war babies” born during the first worldwide war who did not want to die in a second one.
This is why, as Robbie Cohen writes in his illuminating book When the Old Left Was Young, “during a time when economic issues were primary for most of Depression America, peace emerged as the hottest issue among college students.” In New York and a few other cities, the movement also filtered down to the high schools. Elliott was a member of the Railsplitters baseball team, sports editor of the Lincoln Log, and a stringer for the New York Times (earning a salary of five dollars a week) in the spring of 1935, when the National Student League and the Student League for Industrial Democracy organized a massive student strike for peace, a walkout that drew about 175,000 participants nationwide, including 26,000 from New York City colleges and high schools, among them Abraham Lincoln.
The strike started at eleven that morning in the East and spread across the nation hour by hour, to North Carolina and Ohio State and Oberlin and Michigan and Wisconsin and Chicago and Northwestern and Minnesota and Texas and Berkeley and Stanford and UCLA and dozens of other schools. Students from several New York schools gathered near Brooklyn College, where young people marched behind large peace banners and carried signs declaring “Schools Not Battleships,” “We Fight War and Fascism,” “Our Lives Are at Stake,” “War Funds or Schools?” Someone carried an American flag with swastikas replacing the stars.
At the high schools, the largest walkout strikes were at New Utrecht and Lincoln. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that student demonstrators at Lincoln, joined by a few dozen mothers, marched up and down the sidewalk outside the main entrance “chanting antiwar slogans and singing strike songs loud enough to disturb classroom work.” Some faculty members were supportive, especially Martha K. Feingold, who was later described in the Landmark yearbook as “an ardent exponent of the antiwar movement, in school and out of it.” But Principal Mason, even though he was fiercely opposed to war, thought the strike was a breach of law and propriety and came out harshly against the action, which was not endorsed by the city school system. This was not the “happy school” he had envisioned. When some mothers tried to enter the building to present a resolution to Mason, he declined to see them and dispatched a detail of police, led by Capt. Henry Bauer, to block their way. In an oral history, Morton Jackson, a Lincoln student who participated in the strike, said he was stunned that Mason, a former conscientious objector to war, “took the lead in repressive actions.” To Mason, it was a matter of following the rules.
This reflected a familiar split between liberals and radicals: caution versus urgency, a general liberal philosophy that relied on civic decency and goodwill versus a well-defined ideology that was more deterministic and structural. It also marked the beginning of a period of misdirection and contradiction involving the American left and the world. With noble intentions, the student peace movement was shaped by lessons from the past that were becoming increasingly irrelevant with every passing year of Hitler’s rise. The movement was born from a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the Great War, a horrifically deadly international dispute involving competing capitalist factions fighting over turf and power and resources, not simply the great struggle to make the world safe for democracy that President Woodrow Wilson declared it to be. With an exception carved out for the Spanish Civil War, the argument that war benefited only capitalist profiteers dominated rhetoric on the left for the next six years and influenced the thinking of Elliott, whose attachment to the peace movement and disillusionment with the course of American capitalism began at Abraham Lincoln High and intensified in college. The thinking was that while fascism and Nazism were unspeakable evils, another worldwide war was not in the interests of the people. Until, ultimately, it was.
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THE COMMENCEMENT CEREMONIES for Elliott’s class were held in January 1936 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He finished 75th in a class of 567 midyear graduates. With excellent scores on the Regents Exam—92 in English, 91 in History, 88 in Algebra—his academic standing was good enough to get him into the University of Michigan, following a well-worn path of Jewish students from the East
Coast out to the land grant universities of the Midwest, especially Michigan and Wisconsin. Arthur Miller, three years older, reached Ann Arbor before him, though Miller’s grades were so mediocre that he had to sit out a year and then persuade a dean to take a chance on him. Two pleading letters finally did the trick.
Among other enticements, both Miller and Elliott were drawn to Michigan by the reputation of the Michigan Daily, the student paper, as well as a highly regarded English Department and the possibility that they might win an esteemed Hopwood Prize for writing that would help with tuition. Joe and Ida had no savings or disposable income to put toward their son’s schooling, so the family turned to the rich relatives, Joe’s brother Herman and sister Celia, to see if they might help. The most Herman would do was buy Elliott a new suit. Celia not only provided some financial assistance; she started a warm letter exchange with her nephew that would continue for his first three years at Michigan.
The final words to the Lincoln graduates came from their principal. It was a plea for liberal moderation and reverence for the American system, despite its failings. “Dear Graduates,” Gabriel Mason wrote them, “because of the havoc, chaos and injustice brought on by the Depression, it is popular today to find fault with our statesmanship and our democratic system of government. To be sure, our democracy is far from perfect, but we are all mindful of the barriers, the obstacles, and the pitfalls that have bestrewn the path of progress of democracy in the age-long and incessant struggle for its ideals. If we regard our democracy as a social institution that is in the process of growth and that will have its fullest efflorescence sometime in the future, only then do our country, our constitution, and our form of government gain added significance, and only then are they entitled to our renewed loyalty and increased devotion.”
It was with a belief in a better future that Elliott left Coney Island behind.
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Red Menace
THE TRAVELING ROAD show of the House Committee on Un-American Activities swept into Detroit on the very weekend that Elliott celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday. This was the Saturday and Sunday of February 23 and 24, 1952. The committee’s hearings on communism in the Detroit region were set to begin on Monday in Judge Arthur A. Koscinski’s borrowed courtroom on the seventh floor of the Federal Building. The hearings would have the trappings of a trial, with committee members posing as judge and jury and the committee counsel in the role of lead prosecuting attorney, but without most of the rights the judicial system provides the accused. No cross-examination, no pretrial discovery, no right to mount a defense. Witnesses could refuse to answer questions citing the Fifth Amendment, but the committee made sure that was interpreted as a confession of guilt.
The purpose of the hearings was to expose people whose political beliefs made them guilty of being un-American. The committee already knew who these people were. The FBI and Detroit Police Department’s “Red Squad,” using surveillance and a network of informants, had been chronicling their activities for years. Dossiers were kept on each of the suspected political outliers. Where they lived, the names and ages of family members, what car they drove, where they worked, what buildings they entered, what parties and functions they attended, with whom they were seen, what they wrote and said—all of it was in the files. As Charles E. Potter, the Republican congressman from northern Michigan, acknowledged, the committee knew everything, “but this will be the public’s first knowledge of what is going on.” It was hoped and expected, Potter said, that public exposure would “break the back” of the local Communist Party.
The House committee had not held hearings in Detroit before, although the presence of communists in their midst would not come as a surprise to the city’s residents. The internal threat of the Red Menace dominated recent headlines, ever since Bereniece Baldwin’s testimony in Washington two weeks earlier, and had been a sensational local story for years. In 1948 the Detroit News ran a series for twenty-nine straight days entitled “Communist Plot Exposed” whose plotline was that “a Communist Fifth Column was at work in the U.S. as part of Russia’s vast plan for world domination.” The following year, a prominent black attorney from Detroit, George Crockett, my father’s lawyer, gained notice by serving on the defense team representing the eleven top leaders of the Communist Party USA, including Carl Winter of Detroit. That tumultuous 1949 trial at the Foley Square federal courthouse in Manhattan was covered day after day for months in the Detroit papers, and appeals in the case were still being heard.
Most Michiganders, like most other Americans, would have a hard time naming their congressman, but they were likely to pay attention when the press reported on communist influence among movie stars. The committee had just completed its second round of attempts to expose communists and communist sympathizers in Hollywood. Its first investigation in 1947 involved the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters who gained national notice by refusing to answer the committee’s questions, citing their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly. For that they were charged and convicted of contempt of Congress and sent to prison. If nothing else, Detroiters could hear all about it from Hedda Hopper, the famed Red-hunting Hollywood gossip whose columns were featured several times a week in the Free Press. The committee’s most recent report, released on February 16, focused on its second Hollywood investigation in late 1951, and also warned that the television industry and universities were vulnerable to “large-scale” communist infiltration.
All of this occurred in the larger context of cold war alarm, real and imagined. The Soviets had the atomic bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in connection with that daunting development and were facing the death penalty. U.S. troops had been in Korea for two years fighting the communist armies of North Korea and Red China in a brutal land war. Several sensational trials revealed that some Americans had in fact worked as Soviet agents. And along came Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin as the town crier of communist infiltration of the U.S. government. An insecure publicity hound posing as the ultimate patriot, McCarthy began his campaign of reckless charges based on flimsy evidence with a relatively obscure but soon-to-be-notorious speech on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was there that he told the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club that he had “here in my hand” a list of 205 people in the State Department who were known to be in a Soviet spy ring. McCarthy had no such list in his hand, but when the press played up the story, “McCarthyism” was born.
Was America winning the cold war? That question seemed urgent when the committee arrived in Detroit to launch its hearings. Eddy Gilmore, the Associated Press correspondent in Moscow, filed a dispatch that weekend asserting that the Soviet press was answering the question with a resounding nyet. “There has hardly been a time when Russia’s newspapers and their leading writers seemed more sure that time is on the side of the U.S.S.R. and the nations allied with her,” Gilmore wrote. The Soviets were taking note of inflation and corruption in the U.S., cracks in the NATO alliance, and the independence movements in Africa, Indochina, Iraq, Iran, Malaysia, and Burma as encouraging signs for world communism.
There was also a complex political context to the anticommunist intensity of that moment. While few Democrats or Republicans wanted to be considered soft on communism, many liberals believed the right wing was using the issue as a means of dismantling the New Deal and two decades of Democratic policymaking through the administrations of FDR and Truman. And this was just the beginning. For the next half-century, Republican politicians would master the political art of appearing more patriotic than their opponents, portraying liberals as leftists and communist sympathizers if not outright Reds. Truman and the Democratic leadership found themselves on the defensive, trying to maneuver the fine line between civil liberties and political survival.
The first dispute in Detroit, as it turned out, involved not the committee and its targets but Democrats and Republicans. As soon as Chairma
n Wood arrived from Washington, he announced that the hearings would not be televised. He said he was acting at the direction of Sam Rayburn, Democratic speaker of the House, who had found an obscure House rule to block TV cameras from the courtroom. This came as a surprise to the national networks and disappointed the three local television stations—WWJ, WXYZ, and WJBK—who had been planning on airing the proceedings live to their three million local viewers. It enraged Republicans, who thought Rayburn’s decision was a political calculation, a way to limit the publicity value the hearings would have for Potter, the Michigan Republican who was on his way to becoming his party’s nominee for the open U.S. Senate seat that year.
Television was still a new medium in 1952. The networks had gone to full prime-time schedules only four years earlier, there was a paucity of daytime content, and more than half the homes in the U.S. were without sets. But Congress had already provided some of the best live entertainment around with the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, a televised real-life drama featuring Mafioso characters like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, revelations of crime syndicates from Manhattan to Chicago and Las Vegas. The protagonist in this drama was Estes Kefauver, a coonskin-cap-wearing Democratic senator from Tennessee, who, as David Halberstam later wrote, came across as a southern version of the actor Jimmy Stewart.
Republicans fought the Rayburn ruling vociferously. The hearings were scheduled to open at 10:30 Monday morning, but at that hour the five committee members in Detroit and their staff were huddled down the hall in the offices of Homer Ferguson, the state’s Republican senator. Behind closed doors, Donald Jackson, a Republican congressman from California, pushed a resolution stating that the committee should not convene until Rayburn proved that shutting down the television coverage was within his powers. Wood, a conservative southern Democrat, not as progressive as Rayburn but still beholden to him, overruled the Jackson motion. The situation was so politically sensitive that Democrat Blair Moody, who was holding the Michigan Senate seat as a temporary appointment by the Democratic governor since the death of longtime Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, placed a call to Rayburn and urged him to relent. Here again was a dilemma for Democrats. Which would be worse: allowing Potter to get all that air time or being portrayed as soft on communism for keeping the full story from the widest public audience? At 11:00 a.m. Frank Tavenner, the committee counsel, emerged from the contentious private huddle and announced to the press that the hearing would not start until 1:30 that afternoon. Crews from the three Detroit stations were there, waiting, with all their equipment ready to go. More debate, more calls to Washington, and in the end, Rayburn prevailed, as usual. He said nothing in the House rules permitted the recording of committee sessions and that his decision would stand unless the House changed its rules: there would be no live coverage.
A Good American Family Page 4
