A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  * * *

  THERE WERE SECRETS in the life of Chairman Wood, as in all lives. One was the role he played as the wheelman for Newt Morris in the lynching of Leo Frank. Another was less damning but interested me just as much in a different way, revealing an odd contradiction. This was a secret that involved his relationship with his second wife, Louise Jones Wood. It was a secret known to the family, including John Gollner, one of their grandsons. Gollner had problems with his grandmother Louise. He said she was a proper southern lady who was also an alcoholic who “stayed buzzed most of the time.” He thought she was a racist who never saw a need to pay her black maid and driver as long as they were provided food and shelter and who became agitated when her daughter Bobbie, John’s mother, “began to express her beliefs that blacks were treated unfairly.” Beyond all that, John noticed the way she treated her husband, his grandfather. It was a cold relationship, he thought. They seemed to lead separate lives, even as they stayed married.

  Once, as a boy, John asked his grandfather, “Why aren’t you and Grandma close?”

  As he recalled, his grandfather responded, “She found out about my background and didn’t like it.”

  What she found out about his background was that his mother was mostly Cherokee Indian. “I got the impression that he was very happy with their marriage until she found out that he had Indian blood, and she was very upset. She told him she’d never have married him had she known that and was angry at him for not telling her. In her eyes, he had shamed her in front of her friends and her family.”

  The chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities apparently was not American enough for his own wife. Or he was the wrong kind of American.

  6

  * * *

  “Negro, Not Niggra”

  ON THE FOURTH day of testimony, the hearings in Room 740 took a dramatic turn. What started that Monday as an investigation into communism in the Detroit area, with a focus mostly on radicals inside Local 600 of the United Auto Workers union, had turned into a profound debate about race in America. The committee itself, through its lineup of witnesses, seemed to choose this course, perhaps seeking to mitigate the fact that Jim Crow segregation in the South and inequality in all aspects of American life revealed a glaring weakness in the nation’s cold war claim as the beacon of liberty.

  As a northern city with a vibrant black population in the middle of America, Detroit seemed like the right place to take on this subject in 1952. With the calm, relentless questioning of Chief Counsel Tavenner, the patriotic summations from Representatives Potter and Jackson, and the powerful anticommunist testimony of the first witness in this debate, Edward N. Turner, it seemed that the committee’s rhetoric and logic might prevail. By day four, after the testimony of Coleman Young, that prospect was less certain. The HUAC hearings had been turned upside down.

  Turner was brought in to testify in the manner of Jackie Robinson a few years earlier, as a respected figure in the black community who had broken barriers and believed in the American system, despite all its flaws. His credentials were impeccable: undergraduate degree from Michigan, law degree from the Detroit College of Law, president of the state and local branches of the NAACP, and membership on the Mayor’s Interracial Committee for the City of Detroit. He came to the hearing without a lawyer, as a friendly witness, and was permitted to say whatever he pleased, since the staff had already interviewed him and knew his message. Tavenner, who throughout the hearings served as chief inquisitor, felt obliged to go through the ritual of allegiance, asking Turner whether he was then or ever had been a member of the Communist Party. No and never, Turner responded, and with that he began his story.

  Democracy in America was a work in progress, and a slow one at that, he said, noting that in Detroit, far from the Jim Crow South, blacks faced job and housing discrimination, inadequate medical and hospital services, de facto segregation in the schools, and “flagrant denial of service” in public accommodations. “I would say, frankly, that this is not a pretty picture, and it certainly does not speak well for democracy,” Turner testified. “These are the unsavory parts of the American scene with which we must live daily. Mind you, they are the unfinished business—they constitute the unfinished business of democracy in this country, and they should be corrected, not just because the communists seize upon these situations to exploit them, but they should be corrected because they are morally wrong.”

  Then, following a script laid out for him by the committee’s questions, Turner made the turn, pointing out what was right about America and wrong with communism. He testified that groups like the NAACP, along with the Urban League, Catholic Interracial Council, Jewish Community Council, Michigan Committee on Civil Rights, and Council of Churches, were able to agitate for change within the democratic system in the United States. He asserted that elected officials and the courts in response were slowly but surely advancing the cause of racial equality. And he dismissed American communists as ineffective, manipulative, and only feigning interest in the problems of minority groups, making them able to attract “only a very insignificant number of Negroes” to their cause. “It would seem to me that to associate or even to attempt to associate communism with the struggle for civil rights in America is the most dangerous mistake that could be made.”

  Representative Potter agreed. The only objective of the Communist Party, he said, was “to gain their ultimate objective, namely, gaining large groups for an effort to eventually overthrow our Government.”

  Representative Jackson concluded his questioning with a powerful statement juxtaposing the differing paths toward freedom being followed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Jackson was a former marine and public relations man who had replaced fellow Californian Richard Nixon on the committee after Nixon rose to the Senate. Progress in America might be slow, he said, “but I think that anyone who stops to realize that within the memory of living man, slaves were sold from the auction block of this country, will realize that we are moving away from the auction block, and that the Soviet Union is moving toward it. The latest figures on total camp population, penal camp population of the Soviet Union, is set between three million and perhaps as high as fifteen million. Those are men and women who have lost their liberties and lost them forever. I would certainly recommend to you, if you have not seen this, Mr. Turner, ‘Slave Labor in the Soviet World’ published by the free trade committee of the American Federation of Labor. It should be read, I think, by every American who wants to know what goes on behind the barbed wire.”

  The AFL document citied by Jackson was published in 1951 and became one of the most compelling and publicized informational weapons in the cold war struggle with the Soviet Union. In cartographic detail, it located 175 forced labor camps in the vast Soviet Gulag network and accompanied the maps with photographs and depictions of the repression in the camps. (“Gulag” is an acronym in Russian for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.) The work of the free trade committee prefigured more gruesome revelations to come, year after year, though it would be another twenty-one years before the publication of Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a dark and depressing trilogy that chronicled the daily sufferings of those consigned to Soviet labor camps.

  Chairman Wood dismissed the friendly witness with a brief expression of gratitude: “The committee feels a very deep appreciation for your taking your time to come here and give us your expression of your views, and the benefit of your observations in this area.” During his career, Wood had supported every form of racial segregation that Edward Turner and the NAACP condemned.

  * * *

  THE COMMITTEE’S INTERACTION with the first witness the next morning was decidedly less friendly. The Rev. Charles A. Hill did not appear voluntarily in Room 740, and he came accompanied by my dad’s lawyer, George W. Crockett Jr. Hill was among Detroit’s most renowned black preachers, a pastor in the city for thirty-five years, now leading the flock at the thousand
-member Hartford Memorial Baptist Church. His story reflected the complicated nature of the American melting pot. His mother was a German American immigrant, and his father was African American, a dentist who left the family to practice in Chicago. Much of Hill’s youth was spent in orphanages as his mother was unable to support him. In his early days as a preacher, he was an assistant at the famed Second Baptist Church in downtown Detroit, but he left there for political reasons, disturbed that the church had a cozy relationship with the Ford Motor Company that encouraged the hiring of black citizens as nonunion scabs. This marked the beginning of Hill’s affiliation with labor and civil rights causes.

  The Detroit Police Department’s Red Squad and the FBI had been following Hill for years, keeping track of his activities, and though they had no proof that he belonged to the Communist Party, no document showing his party number, they had accumulated reams of evidence that he had worked on causes with known communists and communist front organizations. The goal on the morning of February 28 was to try to shame him into acknowledging his missteps and naming names. Hill was not inclined to do so, and he had the bulldog Crockett at his side to put the committee on the defensive.

  Crockett started by pointing out that Turner, the previous day’s friendly witness, was permitted to consult note cards in providing his testimony. This in effect meant that the committee had granted Turner the right to deliver a statement, so Hill should be afforded the same privilege, the attorney asserted. Wood shut him down, declaring that statements were not allowed. When Tavenner then asked the “Are you now or have you ever been” question, Crockett tried to argue that the question was immaterial since the committee had acknowledged that it had no evidence of Hill’s belonging to the Communist Party. Again, Wood cut him short, stating that Crockett could consult privately with his client but was not allowed to make direct arguments to the committee. Eventually Hill declined to answer the question, citing his Fifth Amendment privileges.

  “I am rather disappointed that that is your position. It was my purpose—” Tavenner responded. He got only that far into the sentence when Crockett interrupted. If he was prevented from making political statements as counsel to the witness, why wasn’t Tavenner, as the committee’s counsel, held to the same standard?

  Chairman Wood had had enough. Crockett had a well-known history of disputatious behavior in responding to authorities he believed were trying to silence him or who were questioning the Americanism of his clients. At the very time of the Detroit hearings, remember, Crockett was facing the prospect of going to prison for contempt of court in another case in which he had defended communists.

  “One more address from you to this committee will result in your expulsion from the committee room,” Wood admonished. “This committee will not have its rules constantly violated in this flagrant manner, as you are undertaking to do.”

  Exhibit No. 1 in Tavenner’s case that Hill associated with communists was the program for a testimonial dinner in Detroit honoring two top party officials. The back of the program listed Hill as a sponsor of the event.

  “I have before me the program, the printed program,” Tavenner said to Hill. “I hand it to you and ask you if you will identify it.”

  The official transcript of the hearing, published later by the U.S. Government Printing Office, notes in brackets, “[Whereupon, Mr. Crockett attempted to take the exhibit].” Reporter Fred Tew, covering the session for the Free Press, offered a more colorful description: “At one point in the testimony, a committee aide and Hill’s attorney, George Crockett, nearly came to blows. Each held one corner of an exhibit that was being handed to Hill. They glared at each other as Chairman Wood rapped his gavel time and again for order.”

  For the next hour Tavenner continued his effort to connect Hill to one Communist Party activity after another while acknowledging that Hill himself was not a party member. He got nowhere, as Hill consistently and tersely refused to answer each carefully laid out question on Fifth Amendment grounds.

  Near the end, it was left to Representative Jackson to denounce Hill while making the case for why a churchman should choose American democracy over communism. “Men who have the high calling of the ministry, men who are dedicated to God and to his works are today rotting in prison cells in every country in the communist orbit,” Jackson said. “Their Bibles are rotting beside them. It is bad enough in these days when we are waging a war against communism, when men are dying by the thousands, that any man can commit the treason of membership in the Communist Party or of lending aid, or comfort or assistance to the Communist Party. To do so stamps them as enemies of the United States of America. For a minister, a man of the cloth, to aid and comfort or endorse or lend his assistance to communists or the Communist Party, is to compound the offense by including God Almighty in his treason.”

  Hill remained calm in response to this assault on his faith and loyalty. “If I might say, Mr. Chairman: What I have done, if I have violated any law, then I am willing to go into any court, meet my accuser, and be cross-examined. I have been interested in primarily one thing, and that is discrimination, segregation, the second-class citizenship that my people suffer, and as long as I live, until it is eradicated from this American society, I will accept the cooperation of anybody who wants to make America the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  Mr. Jackson: I would suggest that you accept the help and assistance of some good, loyal Americans for a change. You will have a chance to meet your greatest accuser on some other plane.

  Mr. Hill: I do it all the time.

  * * *

  IN HIS TOWN Crier column on Thursday morning, Free Press writer Mark Beltaire confessed that he had a difficult time understanding something: “Whenever folks talk about the Communist hearings, the same note of puzzlement comes up: ‘How does a person born in America get to be a Communist? He must be nuts!’ Inelegant perhaps, but not so far off the beam. Not as far, anyway, as the person who thinks he prefers Russia’s way of life to ours. A psychiatrist who prefers anonymity diagnosed the underlying factor as ‘rebellion against the parental figure.’ In this case the Government. That’s oversimplification, of course, but there’s a sickening quirk, a hidden frustration among most of these characters that makes them dangerous.”

  Coleman Young was subpoenaed to testify that day and proved to be the most rebellious witness of all. He brought Crockett as his lawyer, just as Hill had, but never needed him. Twenty-two years later Young would be elected mayor of Detroit, the first African American to run the city, and it could be said that the reputation he carried into the mayor’s office, as a fearless fighter against the white power structure, was ignited on the morning of February 28, 1952, inside Room 740.

  Young was not quite thirty-four then, born the same year as my father. He arrived in Detroit from Alabama at age two, his family part of the great migration of southern blacks seeking to escape Jim Crow segregation and find work in the industrial cities of the North. As a teenager, he was tutored in Marxist politics by his neighborhood barber, Heywood Mayben. After high school he worked a variety of jobs: at Ford Motor Company, the post office, a dry-cleaning plant. He was fired from Ford’s, as the auto company was known in Detroit, for coldcocking a company thug with an iron pipe. He was fired from the post office for leading an organizing drive. He had served as a Negro officer in the Army Air Corps during World War II, where he bristled at the military’s discriminatory policies and wrote articles criticizing army segregation under the pen name “Captain Midnight.” At war’s end Young went to work as an organizer in Detroit for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and by 1952 had become executive secretary of the National Negro Labor Council.

  Just as he did with Reverend Hill, Tavenner felt obliged at the start to say that the committee’s investigators had not uncovered evidence that Young was a member of the Communist Party. Nonetheless he had to ask, and that is when Young made it clear he was not going to follow an accommodating script.

  “I r
efuse to answer that question, relying upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment, and, in light of the fact that an answer to such a question, before such a committee, would be in my opinion a violation of my rights under the First Amendment, which provides for freedom of speech, sanctity and privacy of political beliefs and associates,” Young asserted. “And further, since I have no purpose of being here as a stool pigeon, I am not prepared to give any information on any of my associates or political thoughts.”

  Tavenner persisted. The committee counsel was known for being direct and hard to fluster. He came from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, from the segregated South, and spoke with a southern drawl. The next exchange resounded in Detroit’s African American community for years and decades thereafter:

  Mr. Tavenner: You told us you were the executive secretary of the National Negro Congress . . .

  Mr. Young: That word is Negro, not Niggra.

  Mr. Tavenner: I said Negro. I think you are mistaken.

  Mr. Young: I hope I am. Speak more clearly.

  Mr. Wood: I will appreciate it if you will not argue with counsel.

  Mr. Young: It isn’t my purpose to argue. As a Negro, I resent the slurring of the name of my race.

  Mr. Wood: You are here for the purpose of answering questions.

  Mr. Young: In some sections of the country, they slur . . .

  Mr. Tavenner: I am sorry. I did not mean to slur it.