Their habitat was the second floor of the Publications Building, a redbrick and white stone structure that opened in 1932, which in the long tradition of newspaper offices almost immediately devolved into a raucous mess of stray paper, inkpots, broken chairs, cigarette butts, clacking typewriters, clanging phones, throbbing teletype machines, stale food, discarded clothes, and constant arguments. Most of the disputes were some combination of personal and political, Miller recalled. “In the thirties the building was home to every disputatious radical splinter group, along with the liberals and conservatives shouting back at them, since all political groups inevitably wanted to dominate Daily editorial policy on the issues of the day.” Those on the left usually prevailed, but there was a communal bond among them despite ideological differences, a sense that they were all partaking in something exhilarating and important.
Life in America seemed to be changing day by day, new ideas and possibilities emerging. It was a time, Miller remembered, “when the nation, like its soil, was being blown by crazy winds.” Not long before, the Michigan campus had seemed preoccupied with fraternity parties and winning football teams. “Instead, my generation thirsted for another kind of action.” Labor organizing, peace actions, experimental theater, civil rights. “We . . . saw a new world coming every third morning, and some of the old residents thought we had gone stark raving mad.”
For Miller, the Michigan experience had begun in the fall of 1934, when he reached Ann Arbor by bus, wobbly from the long ride from New York yet feeling reborn. He had been out of Abraham Lincoln High for more than a year, his college career delayed until he could persuade the dean of students at Michigan to let him in despite mediocre grades and an inability to pass algebra. By then he had moved beyond a teenage preoccupation with sports to other interests, mostly literature, a transition inspired during the post–high school interregnum when he lived at home and commuted by subway to a dreary warehouse job, one hand clinging to the pole, the other holding an open copy of War and Peace. His escape to Ann Arbor was liberating. He found the college town beautiful and comforting, just as Elliott would when he followed that same path from Abraham Lincoln High to Michigan a few years later.
To help with tuition, Miller held various jobs at school, including one that understandably haunted him. The assignment: late in the afternoon, trudge out to the ice-cube-shaped Laboratory of Vertebrate Genetics on the far edge of campus, where university scientists housed a jittering colony of mice stacked in cages up to the ceiling, and feed them rotten vegetables. What for many might already be a squeamish task was made even more unsettling, Miller later wrote, by the Pavlovian response of the tiny creatures. “Wired to each cage was an identification tag, and when the thousands of mice heard us entering the silent, tree-shrouded building, they would rush around, and the jangling of the cages would send chills up my spine.” For that he was paid fifteen dollars a month.
Another job, a more typical form of college drudgery, was to wash dishes three times a day in the kitchen of the Wolverine, the cooperative restaurant for students. One of the exotic things about Miller’s life in Michigan, he admitted, was that he encountered types of Americans he had not met during his youth in New York. One of his new friends came from a potato farm in the Upper Peninsula. Another was the son of an Arkansas banker. And then there was Ralph Neafus, a forestry student and varsity wrestler who grew up on a ranch near Newkirk, New Mexico, and was now standing next to Miller day after day in the Wolverine kitchen, washing dishes. Earnest and soft-spoken, wearing octagonal glasses atop a snub nose, his hair combed with a middle part, Neafus presented what Miller thought of as “a rather stolid Dutch look.” He was also a budding young communist, and another link, in addition to their work at the Daily, between Miller and Bob Cummins.
With every passing month, these young men were turning more toward politics as themes emerged that would shape their careers: dissent, patriotism, fear, loyalty, equality, repression, and what it meant to be American. For several days in April 1935, the Daily editors sent Miller to the state capitol in Lansing to write about measures that would keep the Communist Party off the ballot in Michigan and make it a felony to advocate “in any way” the overthrow of the government. Similar bills were being considered around the nation and were seen by civil liberties advocates as a way for authorities to intimidate and arrest communists, student radicals, and labor organizers, depriving them of their First Amendment rights. The United Auto Workers at the time was organizing the car industry, centered in Detroit, and conservative politicians and corporate executives were fighting against unionization and trying to label the movement socialist, communist, and unpatriotic. Miller sat in the gallery among hundreds of protesters when the Michigan House debated the measures. He described how the assemblage fell silent as one opponent called the legislation “un-American” and warned that “when you suppress, you condense, and like gasoline, when it is condensed, it explodes.” Miller also observed that the daily gaggle of American Legion delegates was absent from the balcony that day—a sure sign their side had the votes.
Bob Cummins had become a prominent figure in the student activist ranks by then. His father was much more moderate politically, yet stories Bob had heard about Andrew’s early experiences in Kansas and around the Midwest influenced his thinking even as he rebelled against him on campus. Bob saw virtue in the working-class people of America, farmers and plant workers and small businessmen, that the system frustrated and repressed. His leftist political sentiments had emerged late in his freshman year, when he joined the Michigan Vanguard Club, composed mostly of young Marxists. The club believed that students should self-govern, that all wars were economic and should be condemned, and that “the present politico-economic system being inadequate to prevent the decline of civilization, planned worker-societies are necessary in which the real producer of goods shall be returned the real value of the goods produced.”
Over the next year his grades deteriorated from A’s and B’s to mostly C’s. He was consumed by other things as night editor at the Daily, a new recruit in the Young Communist League, and a leader of the Vanguard Club. That group, which later morphed into the Progressive Club, was a local affiliate of the American Student Union, the same student league that on a national level organized the Peace Day school walkout that included protesters at Abraham Lincoln High in Brooklyn, awakening students like Elliott Maraniss. On the Michigan campus, among Bob’s close allies in that movement were an anthropology student named Elman Service, the Michigan-bred son of a classical violinist, and Arthur Miller’s dishwashing compatriot, Ralph Neafus. They were quiet, determined young men impassioned by calls to action all around them, local and global, involving labor and peace and antifascism, a cause that soon bonded them forever.
During the summer of 1936, between Bob’s junior and senior years, his attention turned to Spain, where on July 17 a band of right-wing generals led by Francisco Franco began a rebellion to overthrow the democratically elected left-leaning Republican government. The civil war that ensued drew lines that delineated the politics of the midcentury world. On Franco’s Nationalist side were Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, along with most of Spain’s upper class and Catholic Church hierarchy. On the Republican side, the Loyalists were an uneasy coalition of government bureaucrats, peasants, workers, liberals, anarchists, and communists, bolstered by support from the Soviet Union and a diverse international brigade of young leftists. Three powerful democratic nations—France, England, and the United States—could have sided against Franco and the fascists but instead adhered to a Neutrality Pact that Germany and Italy ignored.
Arthur Miller, Bob Cummins, Ralph Neafus, Elman Service, and many of their like-minded friends were among the Michigan students who felt deeply that Franco had to be stopped. “We had been certain that if Franco could only be defeated a new world war might be averted,” Miller wrote, “since a democratic Spain on Hitler’s flank would act as a brake upon him, while a fascist
ally would surely bring on a general European war.” By that fall, with the start of the new school year, the Daily was running reports on Spain on its front page nearly every issue, though Miller recalled that for one brilliant Marxist student named Joe Feldman, their coverage was inadequate. Wearing a fine tweed jacket over his pajama top, the bushy-haired Feldman stormed into the Daily offices one night, clambered onto a tabletop, and implored the young journalists to quit hiding behind what he called false objectivity. “What is this about planes allegedly flying for Franco? Are you trying to become the New York Times for Christ’s sake?” Feldman bellowed, according to Miller’s recollection. “Do we not have photographs with Nazi Germany identification on the engines? Rouse yourself from this pro-Fascist funk you’re in, stop playing with yourself, and turn this into a newspaper!”
Closer to their Ann Arbor environment, in the first days of 1937 the union representing autoworkers, seeking to standardize contracts and working conditions around the country, orchestrated an ingenious sit-down strike at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant No. 2 in Flint. Two thousand workers refused to leave the factory, establishing an internal government that set down rules of behavior and made sure the strikers were fed and entertained and kept in contact with friends and supporters on the outside. The sit-down tactic, in place of outside-the-plant picketing, was conceived as a means of preventing management from bringing in strikebreakers to continue car production. Instead of scabs, on January 11 the authorities sent in the police, who, despite using tear gas and bullets, were thwarted by workers fighting back with volleys of bottles and stray car parts in what they called “the Battle of the Running Bulls.” There were a few dozen injuries but no deaths, and the strike ended after forty-four days when the owners finally granted the United Auto Workers legitimacy as the exclusive bargaining agent for all General Motors plants.
During that period, Miller was getting ready to stage his first student play, They Too Arise, a Hopwood Prize–winning work that evoked the trying experiences of a Jewish family in New York. The father runs a small cloak factory where the workers go on strike. Professor Kenneth T. Rowe, one of the Hopwood judges, said the play had a dramatic power that went beyond its politics, revealing “a marked depth of character creation and development, particularly in the mature characters, which is unusual in the drama of so young a writer.” Miller later called it the most autobiographical of his plays. As They Too Arise was being produced on campus, Miller was writing another play, Honors at Dawn, that was not produced. It was about students who organized workers in a factory and faced expulsion by the university administration, a drama that drew material from the labor organizing in Michigan and featured a character loosely resembling Ralph Neafus.
* * *
ELLIOTT WAS IN Ann Arbor by then. He had arrived for the start of the fall semester in 1936, following Miller’s path from Brooklyn, though not before hitchhiking from Coney Island across the continent and halfway back. He found quarters at Wilma Nye’s rooming house on Thompson Street, within easy walking distance of classes he would take at Angell Hall. Like Miller, he felt liberated by the college atmosphere. He thought he might play baseball at Michigan, but one glance at a bona fide varsity Big Ten athlete, Elmer Gedeon, who would have a brief major league career before being killed in World War II, dissuaded him, and he moved on to the more serious pursuits of journalism and politics. Along with Stan Swinton, he was among the freshmen tryouts in the basement of Hagen’s on that Friday night during their second semester on campus when Bob Cummins and his comrades belted out “Solidarity Forever,” their brotherly warbling no doubt inspired by the events in Flint and faraway Spain. Elliott knew of Bob as a respected old-timer on the Daily but was closer with his younger brother, Phil Cummins, who was the same age and in a few of the same classes.
In the days after the Flint sit-down strike, Phil joined his older brother and Neafus in the cause of establishing worker rights for Michigan students who were employed by restaurants and other establishments in town or who had found jobs through the New Deal’s National Youth Administration. Neafus had recently returned to Ann Arbor after working briefly as a foreman at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin. They formed a Student Workers Federation and elected Neafus to serve as its chairman, the Cummins brothers helping with publicity. The federation started with 150 members but hoped to represent some three thousand working students in Ann Arbor. They set up a strike fund and launched their first project, a test case of sorts, involving a strike by the pin boys who worked at the Ann Arbor Recreation Center, a bowling alley on Huron Street. The pin setters were paid sixteen cents an hour and claimed that management broke an agreement to pay them four cents more.
The drama that followed took up most of a month that spring semester. When the strikers and their supporters set up a picket line outside the rec center, the police came to break it up and arrested Neafus on disorderly conduct charges. Their first justification was that demonstrators were blocking the sidewalk, making it impassable. Several witnesses, including Phil Cummins, testified in court to refute this claim, insisting that pedestrians were walking past with no trouble. The officers then said Neafus had been arrested because he did not have a permit to speak and he was drawing an unruly crowd. A six-man jury deliberated only twelve minutes before finding Neafus guilty. He was sent off to spend the night in jail. An editorial in the Daily the next day took note of what it characterized as the “magniloquent” closing address by the city attorney, who had argued that in the halcyon days when he was on campus, they “used to give vent to their enthusiasm by overturning trolley cars. Now instead they hold mass meetings and make all this disturbance.”
Neafus was not long for Ann Arbor in any case. Nor were Bob Cummins and Elman Service. They felt an unstoppable impulse to go to Spain. While serving as Michigan delegates to the Eighth National Conference of the Young Communist League in New York that May, Bob and Neafus were recruited by two acquaintances, George Watt of Brooklyn and Danny Cohen of Trenton, New Jersey, to join the International Brigade in the fight against Franco. Service, who had been active in supporting the Spanish cause on campus, decided to join them. “It was the discovery of fascism, the discovery that freedom and democracy might be a fragile thing,” Service explained later. “People just didn’t believe that World War II was coming and Hitler was likely to win it. A lot of people woke up at that time. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
Bob and Elman left together for New York by bus. Elman still had a year to go in school; Bob missed his own graduation. He told friends at the Daily what he was doing but asked them not to report it because he had told his mother that he was taking a pleasure trip to France and England. What they were doing was not only dangerous; it was against the law. The United States had not joined the fight, and Americans were banned from taking up arms if not for their country. As Stan Swinton watched Bob leave, he thought back to that evening in the basement when he had listened to the inebriated senior belt out the verses of “Solidarity Forever.” It made sense now; Bob must have known what was coming next.
“There was much for Bob to leave behind. His family, friends, work in Ann Arbor’s radical societies and labor movement, journalistic ambitions: these were important yet at the same time insignificant once he had seen his way,” Swinton later wrote in an essay for a history class at Michigan. “Perhaps it was easier because four years of The Daily were over and those lusty companionships so close to his heart would have soon been terminated. That only Bob knows. A great decision must be made, one that necessitated rational thinking when rational thinking was extremely difficult. I do not know to what degree external factors affected Bob’s conclusion. I do know that idealism was victorious. . . . Youth, royally bold despite its insecurity of mind, finds no jewel more intriguing than the diamond of idealism. Its gleam makes sacrifice less difficult.”
Arthur Miller considered joining his pal Neafus but could not abide the idea of �
��not living to write a great play.” He was also afraid of telling his mother in Brooklyn that he was going off to die. It never occurred to him, he acknowledged later, that he might survive. Nor did it occur to him that Neafus would leave Spain alive. Miller ended up as a driver instead, taking Neafus from Ann Arbor to catch the ship in New York that would carry him across the Atlantic. They rumbled through Ohio and New York State in Miller’s cramped 1927 Model T coupe, two suitcases tied to the running board on the passenger side. The entire way, Miller was haunted by a sensation that the friend next to him, the New Mexican with the eight-sided glasses and middle-parted hair and laconic demeanor, was a dead man. At one point, on Route 17 near Buffalo, the rain was so unforgiving that Miller stopped the car by the side of the road. He decided to ask Neafus a few logistical questions. Neafus replied that he had an address to report to in the city, that the Communist Party would give him papers, and that he was pretty good with a rifle.
When they reached New York, Neafus stayed with the Millers for three days, waiting for his ship to leave. On the fourth morning, the two young men walked three blocks to the Culver Line station, where Neafus would take the subway to his meeting point. “At the turnstile Ralph glanced back and gave me a dry, silent wave and was gone into the rickety train, his heavy valise packed with all he owned in the world banging against his leg,” Miller wrote. “So wrapped up in his mission was he that I wondered for that instant if he would mind dying.” When Neafus disappeared, Miller turned and sprinted home, his heart pounding wildly.
A Good American Family Page 9
