A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  By February 12, the day the secret informant came in from the cold to offer her sensational testimony to the Subversive Activities Control Board in Washington, Bugas had finally relented. The auto company, in the end, did not want to be embarrassed by the committee, and word had come down from director J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI was cooperating fully with the hearings. So Ford began providing committee staff with internal information. Appell was told that the U.S. Marshal’s Office should contact Joe Patton, supervisor of security at the River Rouge plant, and he would let them in and help them locate anyone they wanted to question. Subpoenas for Ford workers and other Detroiters identified by informants were served in the following few days. The full effect of Bereniece Baldwin’s secret life would soon be evident.

  * * *

  I CAN MUSTER no hard feelings toward the woman who would name my father to the committee two weeks later. I have no desire to call her a rat or stoolie or any other derogatory characterization. I’ve read the transcript of her testimony at the Detroit hearings over and over without anger or dismay. Maybe I’m channeling my father’s attitude, though he never talked to me about her. He was a forgiving person, above all. He likely would have blamed the feverish times and the hypocritical politicians on the committee, especially the segregationists, and acknowledged his own mistakes and misjudgments before taking aim at a working-class grandmother who was caught up in the maelstrom of larger world events.

  There is another reason I found myself drawn to her story more out of curiosity than anger. In living a secret life for nine years, she might have experienced many of the same feelings as my father did: anxiety, a sense of displacement, of doing something outside the normal lines, of being an outsider—the other—while at the same time wanting to belong, to enjoy a feeling of comfort and commonality. Those seem like competing emotions, yet I know they coexisted in my father, and perhaps they do in all of us.

  3

  * * *

  Outside the Gate

  MY FATHER GREW up on the outside looking in from the other side of the gate. This was in Brooklyn, on the western end of Coney Island. He and his parents, Joe and Ida, and his younger sister, Celia, lived on West 36th Street near Neptune Avenue. Less than a block away was Sea Gate, a middle-class enclave, not overly fancy but a step higher in status and protected from the teeming masses by security guards and fences and high iron bars with spear tips. Many decades later, whenever our family visited Coney Island, we heard stories about how young Elliott and his pals exchanged rocks and insults through the fence with the spoiled Sea Gate boys. Not that he was envious. He was on the side he preferred.

  During the Depression years of his adolescence, Coney Island was a fantasyland, wondrous and grotesque. It was still known as the Nickel Empire, an escape valve of sand and sea and boardwalk, freak show and Wonder Wheel and Nathan’s Famous frankfurter, only a five-cent subway ride from Manhattan and the other boroughs. But just as it reflected the carnival excesses of a yearning populace, Coney Island could also evoke a sense of despair, with streetscapes of boarded-up windows, vacancy signs, and unemployed young men loitering on the stoops. A visit there by Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet, inspired a haunting poem he titled “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude”—Coney Island as a symbol of American decay.

  Although my father loved the nearby ocean, an affinity for bodies of water that he carried throughout his life, he found the summer tourist season as much burden as boon during those trying times. He brought in money for the family by working boardwalk concessions, while Joe ran a small printshop. Ida, often drained from allergies and lung problems, took in itinerant strangers, hoping to charge them room and board, though Joe often insisted that guests stay free.

  The living quarters were crowded and tense. “I never cared much for those summers,” my father recalled later in a letter to my mother. “Boarders, congestion, and endless work and worry for my mother.” This kept him out of the house as much as possible. “I remember when I was a kid—a street urchin if you will—we used to change games every season with the precise regularity of the calendar. Our ‘playing field’ usually remained the same—the street on which we lived—but the games changed from baseball to stickball to touch football to roller-skate hockey back to baseball. When we had a regular game, or ‘challenge’ as we called it, we moved over to another all-purpose playground—the beach. Swimming, by the way, was the only sport that defied the seasons: we’d take our first dip in late March and we wouldn’t quit until sometime in early October.”

  The Boy Scouts kept him busy when he reached his teens. Troop 162 held its meetings at P.S. 80, a four-story brick fortress near 19th and Mermaid, where a janitor nicknamed Slim opened the school at night and provided them with materials that were in short supply. The Coney Island boys excelled in seashore skills, especially knot-tying and semaphore flag signaling, defeating Troop 82 from Kings Bay and Troop 250 from Columbia Heights in borough contests.

  It was a bustling troop that consisted mostly of Jewish and Italian kids from the neighborhood split into three patrols. My father belonged to the Silver Fox patrol and was “dogged”—initiated—into the Ronoh Fraternity—“honor” spelled backward. He was lean and tan, smart and handsome, with jet-black hair and deep eye sockets, and anything but suave; food always found a way to stain his clothes as well as sate his appetite. My dad never was much of a handyman, but the skills he learned as a Scout stayed with him. He was proud of the precise hitch knots he could tie to secure a tarpaulin covering the suitcases atop our Rambler station wagon for the annual summer trip from the Midwest to New York; once we reached the Coney Island beach, where he had first practiced semaphore, he would whip through the hand-movement lettering again for us.

  I took these gestures as small signals of belonging, or trying to belong. To what, I could not say.

  Boy Scout Troop 162 attended the Wali-Ca-Zhu (what an old-fashioned, fun thing to say) Scout gala at Ebbets Field in May, the Camp-O-Ral on Staten Island in June, and Camp Calabough up along the Hudson River during the Thanksgiving break. My father boxed and played baseball for the troop teams, a counterpuncher and lefty-hitting first baseman, and wrote for the troop newspaper, the Barker, launching a lifelong career in journalism (a word he never liked; he thought it sounded too snooty and preferred being called “reporter” or “newspaperman” to “journalist”). He and his friend Irving Schneider formed a Fourth Estate Club that took field trips to the newsrooms and pressrooms of the city’s many newspapers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Times. For my father and his troopmates, children of the Depression, many of them first-generation sons of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, the Boy Scouts experience helped shape their idea of what it meant to be American.

  * * *

  WANTING TO BELONG and feeling apart. Our last name alone starts to take me down that contradictory path. Maraniss is thought to be a variation of Marrano, or derived from it. “Marrano” was a disparaging term applied to Sephardic Jews who converted to Christianity in an effort to survive during the Spanish Inquisition, while secretly trying to maintain their Jewish beliefs and practices. That is a simplification; there were many permutations and conflicting accounts of the lives and times of Marranos, but the essence of their existence is that they were caught between different worlds.

  During a trip to Spain, I found myself absorbed by the accounts of Marranos at a small Sephardic museum in the ancient Jewish quarter of Seville, an Andalusian city that long ago was a vital center of Sephardic culture. “Long ago” in this case means seven centuries ago, back to 1391, when a series of devastating pogroms were incited by the anti-Semitic rants of the region’s archdeacon, a fanatic who accused Seville’s Jews of poisoning wells and causing the plague. This was a full century before all Jews were expelled from Spain or forced to convert. Of those who stayed and underwent conversions, the exhibit label explained, “torn between an imposed belief and an inherited one that would be forgotten, many of
them turned indifferent to religion. They saw the origin of free thought as a refuge in which knowledge, liberty, and survival were the axis of existence.”

  After the expulsion, thousands of Marranos left the Iberian Peninsula, first from Spain and then from Portugal, spreading out to North Africa; Amsterdam and London; Ferrara, Venice, and Pisa in Italy; Salonika in what is now Greece; Aleppo in Syria; and Constantinople and several port cities along the Black Sea. This diaspora included booksellers, binders, scribes, poets, and politicians. Among their descendants were the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in Holland, the publisher Blanco White in England, the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, and the American jurist Benjamin Cardozo.

  My family’s branch of the Marranos apparently ended up at some point in Odessa, or near Odessa, since that is where my grandfather Joseph Maraniss was born in 1888, the oldest child of Esocher and Fanny Maraniss. Once a city known to be tolerant, Odessa had been changing since a violent pogrom took place there seven years before his birth, the first of many government-incited attacks against Jews that continued in parts of Russia for the next four decades, during which at least two million Jews fled the country. Some members of the Maraniss family, with variations on the surname’s spelling, fled to Colombia, others to Canada, while Joseph and his parents came to the United States, arriving at the Port of Boston when he was two. Census documents later stated incorrectly that he was born in America, though his four younger siblings were born in Boston.

  This was not a happy family in the New World, and unhappy in its own, Tolstoyan way. The father was said to be a religious zealot, and the mother struggled with a mental illness that led to her being institutionalized intermittently. The children—Joe, Celia, Hyman (or Herman), Louis, and Hilda—spent parts of their childhoods in an orphanage. Celia (for whom my father’s sister was named) was the rock of stability among the siblings during those difficult years and maintained that role later, after she worked her way through Radcliffe College and eventually married a wealthy Bostonian who owned a chain of theaters. Herman showed academic brilliance as well, was accepted into Harvard at age fifteen, and had a successful career in the sound and music industry, ending up as an executive at the Victor Talking Machine Company and then RCA Victor. Joe was the black sheep. He did not attend college and married Ida Balin, an impoverished young immigrant who had arrived on a boat from Latvia as a teenager. Among other things, politics separated Joe and Herman. Herman grew conservative with success as he worked in the songwriting world of Tin Pan Alley in Manhattan and then the nascent Hollywood music scene in Los Angeles. Joe was a socialist, once a member of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World), and went through several jobs, including as a circus advance man, before moving his family to Coney Island in the late 1920s and opening a printshop. The family story goes that Ida prompted the move, saying the sea breezes and salt air of Coney Island would be healthier for her and the children.

  My grandfather died before I turned ten, and I have only vague memories of him. I remember that we called him Poppy (and our grandmother Bubby) and that he would tell funny stories and teach us New York ditties when we visited. He was slight compared to my father and reminded me of Jimmy Durante. I also remember that he pronounced our last name differently, with the accent on the second syllable, Muh-RAN-iss, which sounded more ethnic than accenting the first syllable, the way my father did. I think that pronunciation change was another small sign of my father’s desire to mix in and belong, to Americanize. He also dropped his middle name, Spergol, the maiden name of his grandmother, Joe’s troubled mother, sometimes telling us that he did not have a middle name and sometimes that, like Harry S. Truman, the S stood for nothing.

  Long after Joe was gone, my father received a letter from Irving Schneider, his Boy Scout friend, who recalled how the two would occasionally perform odd jobs at the printshop, including once sorting and stacking hundreds of masks of comic book characters that needed lettering on the back, meant to be premiums awarded for cereal box tops. “Your father was very kind to me,” Schneider wrote. “He seemed to enjoy my interest in typography and graphic arts, and generously gave me a book he had gotten through an acquaintance in an advertising agency. It was a limited-edition, expensively made-up book.”

  * * *

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN HIGH School was born of hope and necessity in a time of American despair. It opened its doors on Ocean Parkway less than a year after the 1929 stock market crash, when the foundation of the nation’s economic system seemed to collapse. New York was undergoing a public high school building boom just then, as the sons and daughters of the city’s immigrant population inundated the system. Samuel J. Tilden High in East Flatbush and John Adams High in Queens joined Lincoln as a trio of new schools in 1930, with Bayside and Grover Cleveland soon to follow, all relying on the same basic construction blueprint. In its first year Abraham Lincoln alone took in 3,500 students from Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, and up to Midwood; the demand was so great that two cohorts were formed for each class, one graduating in January, the other in June.

  At the school’s first assembly, Gabriel R. Mason, the principal, offered up a dreamlike, ideal vision of his new school, almost daring the Depression to darken his mood. “I would like our school to be an interesting school where not only lessons will be taught and examinations given but where dozens of extracurricular clubs will carry on their specialties in that contagiously invigorating atmosphere that prevails when interested students gather around an enthusiastic leader of personality,” Mason declared. “I would like our school to be a beautiful school. I would like our school to be a democratic school. I would like our school to be a happy school where a spirit of joy and an atmosphere of good cheer will prevail.”

  But American life then could not be that cheery. Among Mason’s first students at Abraham Lincoln was an indifferent scholar named Arthur Miller, the son of a wealthy manufacturer who had hit hard times after the stock market crash. Once, young Miller had been chauffeured to school in Manhattan in the back of a dark sedan; now he was out in Brooklyn walking from Avenue M and 3rd down to Lincoln, past drifting crowds of jobless young men. Miller thought of himself as “neither bright nor especially well read,” more interested in baseball and football (a 125-pound end until he wrecked his knee) than books. But he was then and always keenly observant. Decades later, after he had emerged as a playwright, Miller reflected on the “dusting of guilt” that he saw fall upon so many failed fathers who were traumatized by the Depression and suffered “an endless death in life down to the end”—a bleak theme that would weave through many of his plays. It was only the American tendency for people to blame themselves rather than the system, Miller thought, that kept the United States from revolution during that era.

  Principal Mason was a liberal thinker who belonged to the Socialist Party, but he was far from a revolutionary. He tried to use his optimism and belief in the essential goodness of humankind to overcome the turbulence of the times. He was deeply invested in the American idea as conveyed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom he called “the great American liberal of the nineteenth century.” Roaming the marble floors of his high school, Mason carried an annotated edition of Emerson’s essays in his pocket, inspired by what he called the “courageous, pioneering, upstanding Americanism that seeped into several generations of our citizens from Emerson,” with his “heart-stirring, untraditional, iconoclastic words about initiative, conformity, consistency, truth-telling, prayer, and independence.” To Mason, Emerson’s ideas on slavery, women’s suffrage, and the righteousness of the school’s namesake, Abraham Lincoln, seemed as relevant in the 1930s as when they were written, as was his belief that the state was not superior to the citizen, a concept, Mason said, that “both Fascists and Communists should note.”

  Emerson was the first among many liberal thinkers in Mason’s pantheon, which also included Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Albert Einstein, and two men who hap
pened to be Marranos. One was Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British prime minister who was a Tory and liberal only in the classical sense, and the other was Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch rationalist philosopher. More than the others, even more than Emerson, Spinoza was Mason’s intellectual inspiration. He had come across Spinoza’s writings as a senior at the City College of New York and was so taken by him that he made Spinoza the subject of his PhD thesis at New York University.

  Before dying at age forty-four of a lung ailment perhaps caused by his work grinding glass lenses, Spinoza had been excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue in Amsterdam for rejecting the notion of a material God and replacing it with one rooted in nature and science. This philosophical love of a pantheist’s God appealed to Mason, the son of Russian immigrants, and many other liberal Jewish intellectuals of his generation who thought of themselves as free thinkers and had become disillusioned with the Jewish orthodoxy of their parents. In 1933, when Elliott Maraniss was a sophomore at Abraham Lincoln, Mason wrote a poem about the philosopher that was published in the Spinoza Quarterly. “Impious wretch, vile atheist,” the poem began.

  Why hast thou forsaken the faith of the fathers?

  Busily grinding his lenses

  He heard these imprecations

  But he heeded them not.

  His thoughts were with the One,

  The all-absorbing, the all-inclusive God,