A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Four months later, in a column titled “Who Is a Red,” his topic was communism and fear. The country was so gripped by a fear of communists, he wrote, that if they supported or opposed a measure, the safe course of action was to be on the other side. He considered the stigma foolish. “Why, for example, has this fear of being labelled a communist become such an obsession among liberal thinkers that we hesitate to purchase and openly read the communist paper as nonchalantly as we would read a Socialist paper or the Detroit News? Why do we steer clear of books by Karl Marx, or The Communist Manifesto, but have no qualms whatever about openly reading Plato’s Republic or Henry George’s Progress and Poverty or even the New Testament? The one contains about as much communist thinking as the other, except that we do not like to think of the Bible as containing communism—we prefer to say that it is social gospel or socialism.” Crockett himself did not hesitate to purchase and openly read communist publications. Among the documents the FBI amassed as its agents investigated him during the Red Scare were receipts of $5.75 for six-month subscriptions to the Daily Worker.

  The urgency with which anticommunist liberals sought to distance themselves from anything hinting of communism played out within the UAW, and eventually cost Crockett his job. The labor organization was caught in a power struggle between the center left and far left when Walter Reuther sought to clean the union of communists and communist sympathizers. Reuther came from a socialist family and had strong civil rights convictions, but he was a pragmatist who thought the only way the labor movement could flourish was to be strongly anticommunist. Crockett was in the middle for a few months, but ended up on the side that Reuther considered too radical, and when Reuther took full control of the union in 1947, Crockett left the UAW payroll and set up shop in the offices of leftist attorney Maurice Sugar in Cadillac Tower (first known as Barlum Tower) in downtown Detroit.

  To understand the extent of de facto segregation in the northern city of Detroit then, consider: Crockett was the only black professional working in the forty-story building and one of the few in downtown Detroit. Any black clients who visited the tower had to ride the freight elevator with the black janitors. When Crockett and his white friend and future law partner, Ernie Goodman, went out to lunch together, they rarely received welcome service in nearby restaurants and often had to eat in the cafeteria of the predominantly black Lucy Thurman YWCA.

  One night in the summer of 1948, after he had left his office at Cadillac Tower and returned to his home on American Street, Crockett took the call asking if he was interested in being a defense counsel in the Foley Square trial. His mentor, Maurice Sugar, had made the connection.

  * * *

  FORMALLY THE FOLEY Square case was United States v. Dennis et al. Eugene Dennis was general secretary of the CPUSA. One party member ranked above him in the leadership, William Z. Foster, but Foster was ill as the trial began and his case was separated from the others. Along with Dennis and Carl Winter, Crockett’s client, the group included John Gates, a leader of the Young Communist League who had fought in Spain with my uncle in the International Brigade, and eight other members of the party’s national board, including New York councilman Benjamin J. Davis Jr. and Henry Winston, both of whom were black. J. Edgar Hoover had wanted to put all fifty-five members of the party’s national board on trial and was disappointed that a much smaller number had been indicted.

  Although the same grand jury that handed down the indictments had heard testimony earlier concerning a Soviet spy network, none of the defendants was charged with espionage and no evidence was presented at the trial to connect them to spying. Thirteen FBI informants and ex-communists testified at the trial, but the prosecution presented no evidence showing any defendant directly planned or advocated the violent overthrow of the government. Most of the testimony was centered on the way the CPUSA reflexively responded to Soviet dictates and on the classic teachings of Marxist-Leninist thought and literature. The intent was to prove that anyone who spread these thoughts and books was inherently advocating revolution and that the Communist Party was a conspiracy not deserving of First Amendment rights. One thread of the prosecution’s case involved what was called the Aesopian lexicon of American communists: communications through stories with a seemingly innocent but secretly sinister meaning understood by fellow travelers.

  The language of Eugene Dennis was hardly innocent or indirect. One of the pamphlets introduced into evidence was a transcript of his 1946 address to the national committee of the Communist Party USA at its plenary meeting in New York, where he defended the expulsion of former party leader Earl Browder, who had dared to disagree with aspects of the party line as sent down from Moscow. Dennis called Browder “a notorious revisionist” who “deserted the ranks and the cause of communism and has become a servile champion of American monopoly capital.” Then he quoted from a seminal communist text, the History of CPSU (Soviet Union), to explain why it was so essential for the party to eliminate dissent: “Opportunism in our midst is like an ulcer in a healthy organism and must not be tolerated. . . . Sceptics, opportunists, capitulators and traitors cannot be tolerated on the directing staff of the working class if, while it is carrying out a life and death struggle with the bourgeoisie, there are capitulators and traitors on its own staff.”

  This was the terminology of a cult, of blind true believers. Reverse the ideology and it would not differ much from the intolerant lexicon of Joe McCarthy.

  Crockett had not read Marx and Lenin, or any of the foundational works of communism, until he signed up for the defense, whereupon he studied them intently. Reading those books, he said later, did not entice him to join the party. Nor did he find anything in them that made the prosecution’s case; the government argument relied more on fear than reason, he thought. Crockett had a habit of conducting debates with himself, and he concluded this internal debate by deciding it was important to show his “defiance of the fear psychosis” that seemed pervasive in the country.

  Judge Medina, a graduate of Princeton with a law degree from Columbia, had been appointed to the bench by President Truman only eighteen months earlier. Before that he practiced law and taught at his alma mater. Crockett, as the only black attorney on the defense team, sensed at first that Medina was subtly trying to separate him from the other lawyers. As Crockett later described it, Medina pulled him aside and confided that he was of Mexican heritage (his father was from Yucatán), had grown up in Brooklyn, and knew what discrimination was. Crockett responded to this, he recalled, by staring at the judge “with a deadpan expression until he felt uncomfortable.” The relationship between the two men soured from there, reflecting the bitter atmosphere permeating the entire trial.

  Crockett v. Medina, or Medina v. Crockett, was a play within the play. Who goaded whom more depended on one’s perspective, but who suffered the consequences depended solely on who had the power. And Medina having the power, Crockett suffered the consequences.

  Crockett to Medina at various points in the trial:

  • “I think your honor that the defendants, as well as myself and other counsel, began this trial with certain illusions that have been shattered because of the prejudicial actions of the court.”

  • “I suggest that this latest ruling of the court merely confirms all of the prejudicial rulings that have been made in the course of this trial. I suggest that during the course of this trial it has actually been possible, and I have heard spectators making the court’s rulings before the court himself made the ruling.”

  • “I have listened carefully to the proceedings during the whole time this was going on, and what surprises me, frankly, your honor, is the frequency with which Mr. McGohey [chief prosecutor John McGohey] will make an objection and the court will sustain the objection without asking Mr. McGohey to state the reasons for his objections or giving us an opportunity to suggest to the court the reasons why the objection should be overruled.”

  Medina saw the tactics of the defendants and the defense lawyer
s as having less to do with the merits of the case than with trying to disrupt the trial, offer political critiques, create havoc through “willful, deliberate and concerted delay,” and perhaps force him to make a mistake that could help them on appeal. Four months in, Crockett became the first of the defense lawyers to be cited for contempt of court. While all the courtroom behavior of all the defendants and their counsels perturbed the judge, he seemed particularly critical of Crockett, often treating him with sarcasm bordering on condescension.

  Medina to Crockett at various points:

  • “Well, that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, Mr. Crockett. I wish you wouldn’t do that. There is just no sense in that at all.”

  • “Well, how any sane person can think otherwise is difficult for me to see.”

  • “Well, I am afraid that you understand things in a different sense from what they were said.”

  • “Well, that sounds crazy. You always seem to do that.”

  • “Oh my, Mr. Crockett. You have something to add?”

  • “I wonder if it is possible for me to impress upon you . . . Now I beg of you try to absorb that thought.”

  • “Get down to business, Mr. Crockett.”

  The trial went on through the spring and summer and into fall, the atmosphere vacillating between tedium and tension. The battalion of police officers stood daily sentinel around Foley Square, and two officers were assigned to guard Judge Medina’s home on East 75th Street near Madison Avenue, one arriving with Medina after the day’s proceedings and staying until midnight, the other working from midnight until the judge left for Foley Square in the morning. In a letter to a sympathetic friend who had expressed concern about his well-being, Medina called the trial a “terrible experience,” but said he was trying to keep himself in mental and physical trim. “Otherwise I should have folded up long before this. My regime is very strict. It involves massage treatments three times a week and the complete elimination of every sort of social activity even to the extent of eliminating all the members of the family except Eth [his wife]. I really am living like a hermit.”

  Every day for months, scores of letters arrived in Medina’s mail, some from critics, but most offering support. His clerk stored them in brown cardboard files labeled “Commie Trial”—bulging containers that eventually were archived at the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton, Medina’s alma mater.

  Anonymous postcards:

  “Thanks for a God-fearing judge!! Keep those Communists in jail forever!”

  “We millions of Catholics are behind you! Good work! Keep it up—drive out all those Communists. They should be shot!!”

  AND HUNDREDS MORE signed letters, many on the stationery of veterans groups. Typical was one from Leo B. Keltz, Welfare Officer for Father Stedman Post No. 846, Catholic War Veterans Inc., Chaplain for the Chaplains, Brooklyn, New York: “The members of our Post have been following with interest the trial of the Communists at which you are presiding. There are those among us who would prefer less lenient treatment for these enemies of our country. However, we feel confident that your patient forbearance will, in the end, result in a permanent setback for those who would destroy our institutions.”

  On September 20, after the prosecution had elicited the testimony of two black witnesses who accused the Communist Party of “using” and “exploiting the grievances” of Negroes, Crockett called to the stand a defense witness of world renown, Paul Robeson, whose life offered a kaleidoscopic image of what it meant to be American or un-American. Born in Princeton just before the start of the twentieth century, the son of a runaway slave, Robeson first achieved fame as an All-American football player at Rutgers, then as a dynamic actor and singer who strode the Broadway stage in Othello, Porgy and Bess, and Showboat, where his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” transformed the song into a powerful evocation of the historic struggle of black men against white suppression.

  In his rise to stardom, Robeson became disillusioned by the discrimination and segregation he encountered in America and turned to leftist politics. Year by year his admiration grew for the Communist Party, the anticolonial movement in Africa, and the Soviet Union, which he believed was on the side of civil rights and equality. He lived abroad for much of the 1930s, a period during which he made frequent visits to the Soviet Union and traveled to Spain to support and entertain the Americans in the Lincoln Brigade. In the cold war era, he became a target of various anticommunist agencies in the U.S. government. In 1949 he attended a Soviet-sponsored peace conference in Paris, where he said that another world war pitting the U.S. against the Soviet Union was not inevitable and that many black Americans hoped it would not occur. When the speech was interpreted by the American press as implying that black Americans would not fight in a war against the Soviets, editorials denounced him as a traitor. The controversy prompted the U.S. government to strip Robeson of his passport. It is also what prompted HUAC chairman John Stephens Wood to subpoena Jackie Robinson and other prominent black Americans to testify before his committee and denounce Robeson—testimony Wood later cited at the opening of the 1952 hearings in Room 740, where he encountered my father and uncle and George Crockett.

  The anticommunist hostility toward Robeson was never stronger than during the period immediately before he took the stand at the Foley Square trial. Only weeks earlier, he had been the marquee name at two outdoor concerts outside Peekskill, New York, fifty miles north of Manhattan, sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, a leftist organization pushing for racial equality that included many CP members, among them Benjamin Davis and Henry Winston, the trial’s two black defendants. The first concert was aborted at the last minute; the second went on as scheduled. Both were marred by mob violence.

  A few days before the first concert, scheduled for August 27, the Peekskill Evening Star ran an editorial lambasting Robeson for his communist sympathies and declaring that the concert should not only be shunned but met with protest. “Every ticket purchased for the Peekskill concert will drop nickels and dimes into the till basket of an Un-American political organization,” the editorial said, predicting that the concert would “consist of an unsavory mixture of song and political talk by one who has described Russia as his ‘second motherland’ and who has avowed the greatest contempt for the democratic press. The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out.”

  The local chapters of the VFW and American Legion responded by calling on all “loyal Americans” to make it clear that Robeson and his supporters were not welcome. That is an understatement of what happened. Before the concert was canceled an hour before it was to start, protesters attacked Robeson supporters with rocks and fists, and afterward chairs on the concert grounds were burned along with a Klan-style cross. At the second scheduled concert, held over Labor Day weekend at an abandoned golf course nearby, a few thousand people from New York labor unions, led by the leftist International Fur and Leather Workers Union, provided protection for the performers and concertgoers, and the concert went off without interruption. Folk singer Pete Seeger performed along with Robeson, who ended the afternoon with a stirring rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” But as Robeson and Seeger and their thousands of supporters departed, their car caravan was attacked by angry mobs lining both sides of the road. No “silence to signify approval,” but instead a barrage of rocks, windshields broken, dozens wounded from shattered glass, doors dented, cars surrounded and jostled, some overturned. State troopers were there ostensibly to keep the peace, but most did nothing, and Robeson himself said a trooper approached his car and cursed as he clobbered the door with his club.

  When word got out that Robeson would be called as a defense witness at the Foley Square trial, Medina was again besieged with letters. Wrote one admirer, “Anticipating that when Paul Robeson testifies he is going to be as impudent and nasty as possible, I hope you are going to dole out to him the same treatment that you have given others in your court who have been insolent and insulting. The nerve of
Paul Robeson praising Russia as he does always with the worst comments for America.—why doesn’t he stay in Russia?”

  When Robeson did finally testify, or tried to, it could be argued that he was the least insolent person involved. He tried to answer questions from Crockett, but he did not get far with Judge Medina, who knew him from an earlier time; Medina had been Robeson’s professor at Columbia Law School in the early 1920s. Crockett asked Robeson about his own history with racism and his connections to the men on trial, but invariably the questions elicited objections from the prosecution that were sustained by Medina in a pattern that went like this:

  Mr. Crockett: Have you ever shared the platform with Mr. Dennis at any public gathering?

  Mr. McGohey: Objection.

  The Court: Sustained.

  Mr. Crockett: Have you ever shared the platform with any of the other defendants at any public gathering?

  Mr. McGohey: Objection.

  The Court: Sustained.

  Mr. Crockett: I think you shared the platform with Mrs. Roosevelt, have you not?

  Mr. McGohey: Objection.

  The Court: Sustained.

  Medina was especially critical of Crockett for mentioning the former First Lady, saying her connection to Robeson had nothing to do with the case. Soon after that, Crockett relented altogether. “In view of the court’s ruling, I am convinced it will be impossible to bring before the court the testimony I had hoped,” he said. Medina rebuked him, again, saying he never should have called Robeson to testify.