A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  “So, the editor grabs my copy and the Parsons copy,” Dad would say, usually choking with laughter as he recounted the moment. “He looked at my copy. He looked at Louella’s copy. He looked again at my column and looked again at hers.” Dad would be pantomiming a sober-looking editor holding two pieces of paper, his eyes moving back and forth. “And then he said, ‘Ah, hell. Elliott’s is better’!”

  Of that, I have no doubt.

  That summer, a few weeks before I was born, my father returned to Coney Island for a vacation, taking along Jimmy, Jeannie, and Peggy, the daughter of Aunt Barbara and the oldest of the cousins. My mother, more than eight months pregnant with me, stayed home. In a letter to Phil, she reported that my father and his young charges “had a wonderful time, despite the polio epidemic, which kept them off the beach most of the time.” The abundant praise my father got from sympathetic mothers, she added dryly, “was more than enough to make up for his difficulties.”

  I came along on August 6. “Hi Phil,” my mother wrote the next day. “I’m in a hospital bed writing out announcements, watching women go home with their babies and hearing funny stories about how women having babies acted under ether. “The baby is fine, very cute. He looks a little like you, but no one else that we can think of. Doesn’t do much but sleep & eat. I’ll take him home in 2 days, and then Elliott and I will be home alone with him.” My older siblings must have been sent off to Ann Arbor. But my father was not exactly on paternity leave. He was a busy man, at the Times and elsewhere. Five days later, an informant told the FBI that Elliott Maraniss planned to write a story for the Michigan Worker about “the so-called inhuman treatment of Henry Winston,” one of the defendants in the Foley Square trial taking place then in the New York courtroom of Judge Harold Medina. Later that month, before I was a month old, my father was seen attending a banquet at the Jewish Cultural Center honoring Winston and his Foley Square codefendants, and a few weeks after that he composed a leaflet in support of another of those defendants, Carl Winter of Detroit, who was represented by George Crockett.

  My father was at work on Labor Day but found time to write a letter to his parents back in Coney Island. He described how my sister Jeannie would slip into my room when I was sleeping and make just enough noise to wake me up, then come running out yelling, “Davey’s awake, mommy, can I go in and see him?” He said that Jeannie was “the smartest little girl we know” and that Jimmy had “an intelligence and maturity that sometimes surprises us. He knows everything that is going on and asks questions about everything.” That is the big brother I would come to know. Many decades later he would tell me that one of the things he knew was going on—and that he would ask questions about—involved our father’s visits to the Michigan Worker. Dad would take him to the office sometimes, he said, and Billy Allan was a frequent visitor to our house.

  * * *

  THE YEAR 1950 began with that photograph of the Cummins family posing on the steps of 1402 Henry Street. Things went downhill from there.

  In February, Joe McCarthy delivered the speech in West Virginia that came to define the era. “I have here in my hand,” he said. A list of names: 205 names of known Communist Party members who worked for the Department of State. This was not the first time McCarthy had done this; it was a variation on a theme he tried out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a few months earlier, but now he was determined to stake his political rise to his anticommunist fervor, using a mix of truth, sloppiness, and exaggeration. As decryptions of secret Soviet documents later showed, the Soviets did in truth have a network of agents and helpers inside the government, and the Truman administration had been less than vigorous in dealing with the infiltration. But in spreading his message, McCarthy was less interested in being precise and correct than dramatic and bellicose. Within two months his name would be attached to a campaign that overwhelmed whatever truth there was behind his efforts; the word “McCarthyism” was first used in a Herblock cartoon in the Washington Post that March depicting a Republican elephant being pushed by sentators to balance on a wobbly tower built from buckets of tar.

  The House committee had been ferreting out citizens they considered un-American for more than a decade by then, but McCarthy made more noise. Then came the war in Korea, starting late that June, with Americans fighting and dying against communists on the other side of the world, and branding a scarlet letter on the forehead of anyone associated with the American version of the party became a matter of patriotic duty. One month after the war started, the gathering storm had direct and physical consequences for my uncle Bob. “CHRYSLER WORKERS THROW OUT PRO-RED” was the headline over an AP brief: “An employee, thrown out of Chrysler’s DeSoto plant by fellow workers yesterday, did not return to his job today. The employee, Robert A. Cummins, was accused by his fellow workers of distributing pro-communist literature. Police identified Cummins as chairman of the Michigan branch of Youth for Democracy. If Cummins returned, workers declared yesterday, they would strike.” The FBI recorded the action in a file that later went to HUAC investigators: “July 25, 1950. On this date Robert Cummins was ‘walked out’ of the DeSoto plant by his fellow workers, due to his Communist Party beliefs, which he was expressing in the plant to his fellow workers.”

  Bob had predicted in an earlier letter to his brother that he might soon be out of work at DeSoto, but this was not the way he thought it would happen. He told family members later that the experience complicated his notions about the American working class, disabusing him of proletariat romanticism. Now he was out of work, with a family of four to feed, and much worse was yet to come.

  Susan, Bob’s wife, had been one of three Goodman sisters. One, Barbara, died of ulcerative colitis in 1944, when Susan was working in Detroit and Bob was serving with the Army Air Corps in England. Now, only weeks after Bob was thrown out of the DeSoto plant, came news that Susan’s other sister, Peggy, had committed suicide in Philadelphia. And in the final week of September 1950, Susan was struck with poliomyelitis, one of thirty-three thousand Americans who came down with polio that year. The Salk vaccine would not be available for another three years. Nine days after falling ill, Susan died. Her oldest daughter, my cousin Rachel Cummins, would speculate decades later that her mother’s sister’s suicide left Susan “pretty depressed, maybe guilty, and vulnerable.” Susan also smoked and was very thin. Her body worn down and defenseless, she died three days before her thirty-second birthday, leaving Bob alone with his two “little ragamuffins.”

  “I don’t know if anyone wrote you the sad news,” Bob wrote to Phil later that month. “Susan died October 5 of polio. Rachel and Sally are staying with mother in Ann Arbor. Perhaps we will move in with John and Barbara if I can find a place large enough to hold us all. Now the future seems bleak in many ways, but I am still an optimist and have confidence in the future.” For the rest of the letter, Bob did something that became a family trait passed down through the generations. He turned to sports and the arts as a means of easing his pain, blocking out, surviving.

  “Say, do you get television down there? Maybe you saw the Notre Dame–Michigan State game yesterday? I saw it with Bob Purdy at his father’s house, where there is a big 19-inch set. It was the best game I ever saw on television, or perhaps any other way. Elliott and I saw a pro game a few weeks ago. Detroit Lions vs. Los Angeles Rams. (They’re playing again today, but out in L.A.) That was a good game, too. 30–28 was the score.” That game was on October 15, ten days after Susan died. That same week, Bob also took his niece Peggy to see the Ballet Russe. The themes, he told Phil, were on a childish level, “but the dancing was very good.”

  By early 1951, Bob and his girls were sharing a house with his twin sister, Barbara, and her husband, John, and daughter, Peggy, at 3026 Pingree Street in Detroit. Rachel, who was four, would remember that time as being “very dark.” Her father was at a loss, she said, and “didn’t know how to take care of us.” The extended family was their lifeline: Barbara took them to a day care center, cousin Peggy was a
responsible ten-year-old, Grandmother Cummins was within reach in Ann Arbor, and the Maraniss family lived nearby in Detroit. In Peggy’s memory, the Pingree Street house was big and dark. Soon after the two families moved in, she noticed a cache of empty soda bottles in the garage, and for months this became her source of income. She would sneak into the garage and surreptitiously smuggle a six-pack of bottles to the corner grocery, trading them in for pocket cash, with which she would buy chocolate drops and sticky paper candy. The return racket came to an end one day when her mother accompanied her to the store and the proprietor ratted her out, bewildering her mother with a query about why the girl came in bottle-less.

  Peggy had one other strong memory from that period, a more frightening one. It was of her uncle Bob telling her that some bad men in dark suits might come to the house, and when and if they did, under no circumstances was she to open the door to them.

  On the afternoon of May 12, Bob was at home, listening to a ball game on the radio. His girls were in Ann Arbor with their grandmother. In a letter to Phil, Bob confessed that he was jobless again. “I have been working selling paint around the state, but have given it up because the job is too lonesome. I didn’t do a bad job as a salesman. Monday, I’m going out to get some other job. I’ve seen several Tigers games so far this year. They looked pretty bad to begin with, but some of them are doing better now. No pennant in sight, however.”

  Again, the obsession with baseball. No matter what else was going on in their lives, Bob and Elliott could fall back on baseball. The national pastime, invented in America and claimed by some as a symbol of Americanism. Baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. Eddie Stanky, the Dodger who played second base when Jackie Robinson broke in at first base, once said the Russians could never master baseball because it was a game of free people that required sportsmanship and teamwork, attributes the Soviets lacked. Herman Welker, a Republican senator from Idaho, seconded that opinion by claiming that he “never saw a ballplayer who was a communist.” The American Legion embraced baseball and started sponsoring youth leagues in the early 1950s as a means of combating communism by teaching young men love of country, selflessness, and good citizenship. But all of this was mythology; baseball had nothing to do with ideology. Geography mattered. Hometown mattered. Nicknames mattered. Loyalty mattered. Pleasure mattered. Numbers mattered. Rooting for something that in a sense didn’t matter mattered. But a certain definition of Americanism did not matter at all.

  There were few places my father and uncle Bob would rather be than a ballpark, and if they could not get to a game they loved listening to it on the radio, and if they missed the broadcast they loved to read the box scores and talk baseball. If Dad came home with mustard on his shirt, Mom knew that he had slipped off to a Tigers game. Two of the most cherished stories our father told us involved baseball and decisive home runs that went against his teams. One was of him sitting in the outfield bleachers at Briggs Stadium when the Tigers were playing the Boston Red Sox and leading by a few runs as Ted Williams came to the plate with the bases loaded. “Walk him! Walk him!” Elliott yelled, even though that meant walking in a run. The Tigers ignored his advice and pitched to Williams, who smacked the ball into my father’s section, and the Red Sox had four runs and the ball game. They shoulda walked him. The other baseball story involved the decisive playoff game between Dad’s beloved Dodgers and the New York Giants at the end of the 1951 season. As we heard the story, he was listening to the game on the radio with all of us in the room, and probably Bob and his family too, and when the Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit the three-run homer off Ralph Branca to win the game and the pennant, Dad reacted to the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” by swearing and throwing crackers across the room. Another version of that story was that he was holding me at the time and was so upset he dropped me. I prefer the version with the crackers.

  * * *

  BEAVERLAND. ALL I remember is the name. To me, it didn’t mean a street or a house, but a mystical place, like Disneyland, but for beavers. How could a name so funny connote anything sinister? I was too young for anything to be deposited in my long-term memory bank, perhaps luckily. It was when we lived on Beaverland that I had my first traumatic asthma attack, after being exposed to some sheep wool at a fair. And it was on Beaverland, as my brother often told the story, where I rode my tricycle into the street. There was a screech of tires, Jimmy ran home screaming, “Davey got hit by a car!,” and my father—who was supposed to be watching the kids—came dashing out in a panic. It turned out the car had stopped just in time. It was also when we lived on Beaverland that my brother and sister first walked to school. They went to Ann Arbor Trail elementary, modern and new, and were precocious students then and for the rest of their student days, wherever we were, however uncertain our existence. And it was while we lived on Beaverland that I appeared in the FBI’s file on Elliott Maraniss for the one and only time.

  The following description of the Subject was obtained from Confidential Informant Detroit T-1:

  Race: White

  Sex: Male

  Age: 34

  Born: February 23, 1918 at Boston, Massachusetts

  Height: 5'10"

  Weight: 180

  Build: Heavy

  Complexion: Very dark

  Hair: Black, bushy

  Eyes: Brown

  Features: Flat, heavy face

  Marital status: Married

  Wife: Mary Jane Maraniss

  Children: Jimmy Maraniss, age 6;

  Jean Maraniss, age 4;

  David Maraniss, age 11/2

  Occupation: Newspaperman

  * * *

  MARY HAD THREE small children and a husband who was gone much of the time doing one job or another, so it was no surprise that she expressed joy one morning in the spring of 1951 when even a hospital operation brought her a bit of relief, an escape from the everyday routine of Beaverland. “It’s sometime in the post-breakfast morning, and I’m in the hospital for a little rest,” she reported to Phil. “Yesterday I had a cyst taken out from the base of my spine. The anesthesia was good and the operation short, so now I can settle down and have a little vacation here. The hospitals are quite crowded, though. The three kids are with Mother. Jimmy had his tonsils out, squeaky voice, Jeannie is quite the bossy type right now and has a memory like an elephant. . . . Davey is little and tough and part of anything the family is doing. He’ll always have a smile for you, and has two front teeth both showing like Bugs Bunny.”

  There was a fifty-nine-day bus and streetcar strike in Detroit that spring and early summer. Bob decided to go to school to learn how to become a television repairman while also finding a part-time job selling paint at Montgomery Ward on Thursday and Friday nights and all day Saturday. Elliott worked the early shift at the newspaper. Based on the FBI reports, he was busy most nights, attending leftist functions and organizing for the Progressive Party. Since the establishment of the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1950, he had turned to the Progressive Party as the vehicle for expressing his political beliefs. This was to some extent a means of going underground. Communist organizations and known communists were required to register with the government, and more party members were being prosecuted on Smith Act charges in the aftermath of the Foley Square trial. The essence of the civil liberties debate among American intellectuals then was whether the CPUSA represented heresy or conspiracy. If it was heresy, it was protected by the First Amendment; if it was a conspiracy, it was not. The legal reasoning used against communists followed a formula devised by Learned Hand, a widely respected federal judge and judicial philosopher, who said the government could curtail free speech on the basis of the gravity of the evil discounted by its improbability. The worse the evil and the greater the probability, the more free speech could be curtailed.

  In midsummer, on July 22, FBI Informant T-6 reported that Elliott attended the annual Civil Rights Congress picnic at Welcome Park at 151/2 Mile Road and Livernois. The main speaker was George Crocke
tt, who, according to the informant, “warned those in attendance about talking to FBI agents or signing any statements.”

  Two days later informant Bereniece Baldwin told her FBI handler that Ace Maraniss was at a meeting of personnel of the Michigan Worker, where he was singled out as “the nucleus” of the paper. In October she reported that Ace was receiving compliments in the office for his work. In late November, Informant T-22, working for the Detroit Police Department Red Squad, reported that a car belonging to Elliott and Mary Maraniss was “seen in the immediate vicinity of the Jewish Cultural Center on three different occasions when the Michigan Freedom of the Press Club held their cultural festival.” The informant said the club was a communist front.

  Over the holiday season, many members of the family gathered again with Andrew and Grace Cummins at 1402 Henry Street. By early January, investigators for the House Committee on un-American Activities were in Detroit doing legwork in preparation for the hearings. One day that month, a man in a dark suit rang the front bell at 3026 Pingree Street. Reflexively, ten-year-old Peggy answered the door. She had forgotten her uncle’s instructions. The well-dressed stranger was there to deliver a subpoena to Robert Cummins, summoned by HUAC to appear as a witness. Several weeks later, that same man in a dark suit entered the marble and granite atrium of the Times Square Building downtown and rode the walnut-paneled elevators up to the sixth-floor newsroom. In his coat pocket he carried a subpoena instructing Elliott Maraniss to appear before the committee at 10:00 on the morning of March 12 in Room 740.