A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Elman and Bob were waiting for Neafus at the dock. The RMS Aquitania, an old ship from the Cunard Line, would take them to France, sailing out of New York Harbor on June 16, 1937. Her nickname was “Ship Beautiful.” Robert Adair Cummins, age twenty, carried an American passport in his pocket. It was Number 433504 and was stamped “Not Valid in Spain.”

  8

  * * *

  A Brief Spanish Inquisition

  FRANK TAVENNER, THE chief inquisitor in Room 740, was portrayed in the local press as an unassuming protagonist in the unfolding drama. A tall, heavyset, bespectacled lawyer of fifty-seven who spoke with the soft drawl of a southern gentleman, Tavenner was a World War I veteran and former prosecutor from the western district of Virginia who pursued Appalachian bootleggers and Hollywood communists with equal persistence. He had followed his father into the law profession and the family apple business, operating orchards in the Shenandoah Valley “on soil he hopes to keep American,” as one enraptured journalist wrote. Since 1949, when Tavenner took the committee counsel position, HUAC had held more than one hundred hearings, published nearly forty volumes of testimony, and issued a dozen reports under his supervision, including Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications.

  His style was understated and professional, in contrast to the bombast and recklessness that so often defined the committee in its earlier years. He never raised his voice but tried to maintain a deadpan demeanor even when under attack from a recalcitrant witness. To a reporter for the Detroit News, the way to read Tavenner was by watching his manipulation of his glasses. “He peers over the top of his glasses in showing skepticism,” wrote William W. Lutz. “He takes them off and folds them slowly in showing a willingness to listen to a witness’s explanation. He quickly puts them on to show he is tired of a harangue and anxious to continue the questioning.”

  When Bob Cummins was subpoenaed to testify before the committee, Tavenner conducted the interrogation. Bob testified that he was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on July 28, 1916, that he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1937, and that by the time of the hearing he had lived in Detroit for ten or eleven years. He said his last job had been selling paint at Montgomery Ward & Co. during the Christmas season.

  Then Tavenner went through the routine with his glasses as he began asking Bob about his time in Spain.

  Mr. Tavenner: Mr. Cummins, I show you an application for a passport which was issued on June 4, 1937. It is a photostatic copy of a passport. Would you examine it please and state whether or not you executed it?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Will you examine the passport and read what it says as to the country in which travel was sought to be engaged? Now will you read what it says?

  Mr. Cummins: I think it is your job to read the document into the record.

  Mr. Tavenner: I will read it for you then. At the top of the second page of the application there appears the following language: “I intend to visit the following countries for the purposes indicated: Great Britain, study and travel.”

  Did you travel to Great Britain in 1937?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: You stated earlier that you were at the University of Michigan in 1937, correct?

  Mr. Cummins: That is right.

  Mr. Tavenner: When did you leave that institution?

  Mr. Cummins: I graduated in June 1937.

  Mr. Tavenner: This application bears the date of June 4, 1937. Will you examine the photograph appearing on the application and state whether or not it is a photograph of you?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Cummins, that you did not intend to go to Great Britain for the purpose of study and travel, but you actually intended to go to Spain to fight as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: If you are concerned about any possible criminal prosecution for the preparation of a false application for passport, the statute of limitations would have long since elapsed and if that is true on the ground as far as a false application is concerned, it has been held many times that the provision of the Fifth Amendment would afford no immunity.

  You may consult with counsel and obtain his advice on that subject if you desire. So far as any danger of criminal prosecution from the making of a false application for a passport is concerned, there could be no fear of criminal prosecution as the statute of limitations has run. So I would like to ask you again whether or not you did state in your application to travel to Great Britain that the trip was for the purpose of study and travel whereas in fact you desired to travel to Spain to fight as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish War?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Did anyone solicit your participation in the fighting in Spain?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Do you know of any person at the University of Michigan other than yourself who made an application for passport to go to Spain for the purpose of fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Did you go to Spain for the purpose of fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Will you inform the committee how persons who accepted the enlistment for fighting in Spain received their transportation or the money for their transportation abroad and who made the arrangements for the transportation, if you know?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: Do you recall the exact date of your graduation from the University of Michigan?

  Mr. Cummins: I do not.

  Mr. Tavenner: Was it about the date of June 4 or later of the year 1937? Would it have been a day later than June 4, 1937?

  Mr. Cummins: I don’t know.

  Mr. Tavenner: Was there in existence on the campus of the University of Michigan at the end of the term year of 1937 and during the term a Young Communist League chapter?

  Mr. Cummins: I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.

  Mr. Tavenner: I desire to offer a photostatic copy of the passport in evidence, Mr. Chairman, and ask that it be marked “Cummins Exhibit No. 1.”

  And that was that when it came to Spain. Tavenner never asked my uncle why he chose to fight—what he was fighting for and what he was fighting against. If he had been interested in those questions, he might have kept his glasses off, listening, for quite some time.

  9

  * * *

  The Runner

  AFTER SEVEN DAYS at sea in mid-June 1937, the RMS Aquitania reached Cherbourg, where Bob Cummins and his two Michigan comrades disembarked and were met by a representative of the U.S. consul’s office. Their intentions were apparent, and ostensibly against American law, but no effort was made to detain them. The usual routine in dealing with young men obviously bound for Spain was to record their names and ages and urge them to go no farther, a warning invariably ignored. Soon they were on the train to Paris, and from there aboard another train for the overnight journey south to Perpignan, near the Mediterranean coast. That was the easy part; making their way into Spain was more daunting. The border was sealed by French patrols enforcing the nation’s nonintervention policy.

  Foreigners who wanted to join the fight had two choices, both dangerous. They could e
nter by sea, but that route had proved deadly only weeks before, on May 30, when the Ciudad de Barcelona, a merchant ship carrying Scottish, English, and Canadian volunteers from the port in Marseilles, had been sunk by torpedoes from one of Mussolini’s submarines, with at least sixty-five anti-Franco recruits among the dead. Earlier that year a band of volunteer stowaways aboard the Sans Pareil, a small fishing craft that failed to live up to its name, had been discovered and seized by a French patrol in the Gulf of Lion. Eighteen Americans and Canadians, clothes spattered with bilge muck and oil, were arrested and returned to Perpignan, jailed, tried, and convicted on charges of breaking the nonintervention act.

  The other option, more arduous but more commonly used, was to hike up and over the Pyrenees, and that is what the three young Michigan men did. They joined a group of fifty volunteers who were taken through the mountains by guide-smugglers known as passeurs. There were three passes through the Pyrenees, all equally demanding and seemingly unending, trudging up six thousand feet and short-stepping down the other side, day into night, hauling heavy valises and packs, knees growing sore, dodging border patrols, until finally there were no more ridges, just Spain at last in its sun-splashed ocher vastness, the sky high and dazzling, a deeper shade of blue than the Americans had ever seen. The route from there was well-worn: from the old fort at Figueras to Barcelona and then onward via train and truck to the training base in the impoverished village of Tarazona de la Mancha, one hundred miles inland from Valencia and twenty miles north of Albacete.

  Ralph Neafus was twenty-three, Elman Service twenty-one, and Bob Cummins still a month shy of his twenty-first birthday. They were not mercenaries; their pay, never certain to be forthcoming, would be thirty pesetas a month. They were not drafted; their country was not at war, not being invaded. No one forced them to put their lives in danger. As the historian Peter Carroll wrote about the American soldiers in that civil war, “They went to Spain as political people. Very few admitted any other interest.” Whatever else they were, they were uncommonly brave just to go. Neafus, from America’s western ranchlands, had some experience with guns, but Service and Cummins were much more comfortable in the classroom than on the range. They knew nothing of war beyond what they read in books and newspapers. The Daily Worker, journal of the Communist Party, was full of glorified accounts that made it seem that Franco was soon to lose and the people prevail. Reports from the Michigan Daily and New York Times made the prospects seem less clear. Without armaments or other aid from the U.S., Great Britain, and France, the Spanish government might be outmatched by Franco and his fascist benefactors.

  What could be more ominous than the fate of Guernica, a market town in Spain’s Basque Country that had been bombed into oblivion that April by Hitler’s Condor Legion, a wing of the Luftwaffe? Soon to be memorialized forever in Picasso’s haunting mural, what had happened at Guernica was a war crime that accomplished two purposes at once: it tested Germany’s devastating airpower for future use while also demonstrating that Franco’s side held an overwhelming advantage in firepower. But after a year of fighting, Madrid had held; Spain’s two other largest cities, Barcelona and Valencia, remained strongholds of the Republic; and optimistic young international fighters still washed into Tarazona in recurring waves.

  There was no typical American among the more than three thousand who came to Spain, but statistical studies later showed some tendencies. The volunteers were from every state except Delaware and Wyoming. The preponderance, about 80 percent, were from America’s largest cities. The youngest were eighteen, the oldest sixty, and two-thirds were under thirty. Few were married. About a third were Jewish and two-thirds had some affiliation with the Communist Party, which paid the way to Spain for many of them. Few had connections to the nation’s political elite, but among the exceptions was David McKelvy White, the son of George White, a former Ohio governor. (When I saw that name, it resonated from the larger story of Room 740. At the meeting of the Detroit Communist Party attended by FBI informant Bereniece Baldwin when she was deciding whether to take the undercover assignment, the first person she encountered, at a table outside the assembly hall, was this same David McKelvy White.) Most of the volunteers, unlike the Michigan trio, did not have a college education and came from the working class, but there were also PhDs, novelists, screenwriters, and journalists in the mix.

  The common assumption is that these Americans came to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but that is a romanticized simplification. There was no Abraham Lincoln brigade, ever, though a support group called Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had been set up during the war, and returning veterans preferred that appellation after the fact. The Americans belonged to the International Brigade, numerically the XV Brigade. Within that, there was an Abraham Lincoln battalion and a George Washington battalion, which merged into the Lincoln after both were thinned by casualties at the battles of Jarama and Brunete on the eastern and western rims of Madrid. Then came a third battalion composed of Americans and Canadians called the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion, so named because a thousand-plus Canadians fighting in Spain felt neglected and wanted their own heroes recognized. William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau were nineteenth-century leaders of Canada’s independence movement.

  This battalion of about five hundred men was just being formed when my uncle and his two Michigan comrades arrived in Tarazona in early July, and it was to the Mac-Paps, as the unit was known, that they were assigned. They slept in cramped barracks with stone floors in a village of peasants, donkeys, dry olives, rationed food, spookily blacked-out nights, and narrow streets of packed dirt bustling in daylight with children who trailed the soldiers begging for bread. Alvah Bessie, an American writer who had trained there, could never forget the faces of these children. He called them “singularly beautiful.” The trainees spent their days studying map reading, fortifications, first aid, Spanish history, and political indoctrination. With little ammunition to spare, they had no grenade practice and scant work on the firing range. Most of their rifles were dregs from the Soviet Union’s aging stockpile. They learned to march in formation, a drill of no use to them later.

  The two top officers of the Mac-Paps during their training period in Tarazona were both Americans—college educated, married, around thirty years old, with divergent reputations. Robert Hale Merriman, their first military commander, had ventured into Spain in the first days of 1937 from Moscow, where he had been living after finishing his graduate work in economics at Berkeley. He already had fought with the Lincoln battalion in February at Jarama, where he was wounded, and was now spending the summer preparing to get back into the action. Merriman was tall, charismatic, admired by his men, and well known to the international correspondents who covered the war, including Ernest Hemingway, who by most accounts drew on him as the prototype for Robert Jordan, the tragic hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  The political commissar was Joe Dallet, a graduate of Dartmouth from a conservative upper-class background who abandoned that life to work as a labor organizer in Chicago and in Youngstown, Ohio, and was now affecting a persona that seemed some combination of steelworker ruffian and strutting big shot. Dallet had been the leader of the group of foreigners arrested aboard the Sans Pareil. He had made a demonstrative name for himself during the trial, and after serving a brief time in jail arrived in Spain through the Pyrenees with a sense of destiny. The all-for-one, one-for-all brotherhood and sisterhood cherished by the most idealistic of the antifascists, especially anarchists centered in Barcelona, was not Dallet’s way. He was more comfortable with the unsparing, unsentimental discipline of the Soviet apparatchik, a style he embraced at the Soviet-run officer training school in nearby Pozorrubio. He strapped a Belgian Browning 9mm semiautomatic handgun to his belt, smoked a Stalin pipe, and insisted that officers eat and sleep apart from their men. His troops, according to historian Cecil Eby, responded with “a daily chorus” of complaints against him, calling him “cocksure, dictatorial, megalomaniac, boy-s
coutish—and no end of unprintable.”

  Dallet showed a more paternalistic side in letters to his wife, Kitty, during that summer training period. “The battalion gets better every day (I guess I sound like a proud father),” he wrote to her on July 9, a week after Cummins, Neafus, and Service arrived. “I am sure they will conduct themselves well at the front.”

  Two weeks later he expounded on how he trained the Mac-Paps. “Training a battalion is very much like training a football team in some ways. You know you have a certain minimum period in which to prepare the men. Into that period, if you have worked as we have, you are set to go, and what is more, the boys are set to go. That period ended with the ending of our four-day maneuver. Now the boys are set, they are waiting for the word, and the danger exists that, lacking the word, with the suspense naturally accumulating, they will go stale. We are alert to the danger, and taking a whole series of steps to avoid it.” He and Merriman cut back on heavy work under the midday sun and drilled the battalion in the early morning and at night. They also started tournaments in volleyball, softball, and soccer and staged a picnic near a swimming hole. “Spain is a funny place,” Dallet wrote. “Some of the best people at home crack up badly here and some of the least significant ones from home come through with flying colors. You can see men changing before your eyes.”