A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  They were in the hot season, Bob told his father. The sun beat down on them from nine in the morning to six at night. “On top of that, the kitchen had to serve hot rice for dinner this noon.” He’d been able to bum a few cigarettes, but none had been issued for several days. They received iron rations just before heading out, but he had already consumed his chocolate and a can of sardines. And he hadn’t seen any American newspapers in several days. “I noticed that the National League beat the American in the all-star game and that Menow beat War Admiral at Suffolk. Please send me sport and racing pages when you write. My ear is healing up all right.”

  A few days later, Service and Lardner were in a group leading a company of captured Nationalist soldiers back across the river to a detention camp. As they moved through an apple orchard, Lardner was wounded. So much for the naïve boast that good soldiers don’t get hit. One piece of shrapnel hit him in the inside of his thigh, another in his lower back. In a letter informing Lardner’s mother of the incident, Vincent Sheean softened the news: “If you are going to get shrapnel, these are good, harmless places. It has the further advantage (from your point of view, not his) that it removes him from the front lines, where the fighting just now is pretty terrific, with constant bombardments from the air.” Lardner was taken to the hospital at Villafranca. The next day, during a dawn skirmish in a vineyard near Gandesa, Service was shot through the left lung. He was stuck on the battlefield for hours, bleeding, drifting in and out of consciousness, weakened by the blinding sun. His wound was bound with paper, no bandages being available, until finally he too was carted off on a stretcher and taken to the hospital, where he would remain for several months.

  * * *

  STAN SWINTON, NOW a rising junior at Michigan, spent much of that summer of 1938 in Europe. When he sailed across the Atlantic on the SS Roosevelt, the Queen Mary passed in the night going the other way, huge and brilliantly lit. As much as Swinton admired Cummins, Neafus, and Service, he did not intend to fight in Spain or try to visit the country. But he felt the reverberations of the Spanish war all around as he and a few college friends traveled through France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and England. In Geneva he visited the headquarters of the League of Nations and was struck by the diversity of the woodwork and stonework in the new building. “Here is Swiss oak, Danish walnut, South African stinkwood,” he said in a letter to his parents. “Best of all, though, the council room with tremendous paintings on its walls which represent humanity’s tremendous progress. They are surrounded by gilt and ironically enough, were presented by the Spanish government.”

  In France, much of the talk Swinton heard was about Spain and the prospects of a larger war. “Europe knows war is coming, knows it and is resigned,” he wrote. But still the mood could be summarized in two words: not yet. “Sentiment in France favors the Loyalists—but it’s a different sentiment than found in the States. The last war is not forgotten. The people know they will have to fight again, but they will not hasten the day. Support is verbal or limited to buying the Standard Packets on sale in Paris or Marseilles. These cost 30, 40, or 70 francs and include such staples as sugar, soap, corned beef, and condensed milk. Rumors, too, of wounds bound in newspapers and the absence of hospital facilities discourage volunteers. The French are too near, they see and hear too much of what distance keeps from America, to volunteer. They sympathize—rarely do they do more.”

  * * *

  ON SEPTEMBER 21, as the battle of the Ebro wore on, Juan Negrín, the prime minister of the Spanish Republic, announced to the League of Nations in Geneva that his government would unilaterally withdraw all foreign volunteers from the battlefield. The naïve hope was that this move would compel Germany and Italy to withdraw from the war as well. The Mac-Paps and Lincolns and all the other international fighters were going to be sent home. Jim Lardner was out of the hospital by then and back with the Lincolns. The day after Negrín’s announcement he went on patrol to the rear of his battalion in the Sierra de Pándols, the contested mountains west of the Ebro and south of Gandesa. There was heavy enemy fire, and Lardner did not return. His body was never recovered; on the battlefield later, searchers found only his press credentials. He had left a suitcase of belongings back at the Majestic Hotel in Barcelona, and Vincent Sheean instructed the hotel manager to open it. Inside were clothes (later distributed to Jim’s friends in the battalion), letters to his mother, a telegram from one of his brothers, Ring Lardner Jr., several telegrams from the Herald Tribune’s Paris office, tickets for the Berlitz school where he had studied Spanish, a notebook of his observations on the war, and three passport photographs.

  Elman Service was still in the hospital when he learned of his friend’s death. “I’ll not try to tell you in this letter how I personally felt about Jim’s loss, or how sorry I am for you,” Service wrote to Lardner’s mother. “I am writing this only to introduce myself and to tell you I am coming to see you.”

  Bob Cummins had just returned from the front lines when he heard all the news, good and bad. “We just came out of two months in action,” he wrote to his father. “And in action you don’t feel much like writing, nor do you for a few days afterwards, so I’ve fallen behind. I suppose you’ve read about Negrin’s speech at Geneva, so I’ll be coming home.”

  It took Bob and Elman and their American compatriots longer to withdraw from Spain than they expected. The logistics of leaving were complicated by the Soviets, who had taken most of the passports and wanted to evaluate all departing soldiers for their future value to the Communist Party. The Mac-Paps and Lincolns reestablished the camp near Marçà and stayed there for several weeks, with one trip up to Barcelona for a grand farewell parade, where hundreds of thousands of people cheered as the foreign units, proud if beleaguered, marched through the streets. It had all the markings of a victory parade, yet many who marched and many who watched knew that it was probably the opposite. From there the departing troops went up to Ripoll, in the mountains near the French border, which would be their point of embarkation. Service was still in the hospital, but walked out on his own and made his way to Ripoll when he heard his comrades were about to leave. He did not want to be left behind.

  He and Bob were among the 327 Americans who left Ripoll on November 23. They were seen off by a saluting crowd, fists pushed high into the air. One Spanish officer had tears in his eyes. The trip to the French border was short and harrowing. They had to reach France before German Junkers spotted them from the sky. “The train was chugging along, and I was thinking, God, let me get there,” Service recalled. They did, barely, crossing into France just as bombs from five Junkers demolished the tracks behind them. At Latour-de-Carol station on the French side of the border, as Eby described the scene, the Americans “trooped through the station whooping like school boys on holiday. They gorged on a simple meal of butter, bread and ham (too rich, many threw up). They chain smoked through packs of French cigarettes. The Republic gave each a cheap pinstriped suit, but no overcoats, so they shivered in the chill.”

  They rode through France in sealed compartments, tired and crowded but proud of what they had done and happy that they had survived it, singing and drinking through the night, greeted at each stop by Frenchmen saluting with clenched fists. When they finally reached their destination, the port of Le Havre, they were met by police and shipping officials who bore bad news: the seamen were on strike. The Americans did not want to break the strike, and the strikers were sympathetic to the Americans; they thought of one another as brothers of the left. But the situation was delicate and took two weeks to resolve. Finally, the troops were shipped by train over to Cherbourg, where their conveyance home, the SS Paris, was ready to depart. The Paris was a luxury liner, with a sleek Art Deco interior design, none of which mattered to the returning soldiers. Nor did the stormy weather that followed them across the Atlantic. There is a photograph of seventeen men belowdecks, with Bob and Elman on the left side, back row, smiling. Bob is wearing a beret and an o
vercoat that appears to be several sizes too big.

  “LOYALIST VETERANS GET WELCOME HERE” was the headline in the New York Times on December 16. “149 Who Return on Paris Are Hailed by 1200 in Ceremony in Madison Square Park. Group Parades from Pier. 200 Police There to Hold Crowd Back—Wreath Is Placed Near the Eternal Light.”

  That was part of the story. After the SS Paris docked at the French Line pier at West 48th Street and 12th Avenue, the Spanish war veterans were held aboard ship until all other passengers were ashore. Officials made them prove their citizenship. They were fingerprinted and interrogated. Finally, they marched down the plank and past a large welcoming party to the accompaniment of patriotic music played by the Brighton Beach Community Center Drum and Bugle Corp. With flagbearers leading the way—carrying the American flag, the Spanish Republic flag, and the banner of the Lincoln battalion—the returning vets marched east on 48th to 8th Avenue, turned south to 24th Street and east to Madison Square. There were shouts of “Lift, lift the embargo on Spain!” along the way, and once they reached the park there were speeches and a wreath was laid, though not at the base of the Eternal Light flagstaff honoring soldiers and sailors of World War I. The police prevented that, saying the marchers did not have the proper permit. Then Taps, and it was over.

  On that same day and night, the Statue of Liberty reopened after twenty months of repair work. President Roosevelt led groundbreaking ceremonies at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. A German Exposition and Christmas Market was held at Grand Central Terminal, where anti-Semitic literature was on display along with bicycles and beer. And six thousand people attended a rally at the Manhattan Center protesting radio stations for banning the anti-Semitic rantings of Father Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic priest hatemonger from Detroit.

  * * *

  THREE WEEKS LATER in Ann Arbor, as a new semester in the new year of 1939 began on the Michigan campus, Robert Cummins and Elman Service were greeted as returning heroes. They spoke to a crowd of six hundred on January 6 and were honored at a banquet at the student union two nights later. Among those in attendance were Bob’s little sister, Mary Cummins, and Elliott Maraniss, who was covering the events for the Daily. And that is how my parents met.

  10

  * * *

  Named

  IT WAS LEAP Day, February 29, 1952. A Friday. The fifth day of testimony at the Communism in the Detroit Area hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. There was only one witness all day, “the committee’s clean-up hitter,” as the press described her. Bereniece Baldwin entered Room 740 with a protective cordon of bodyguards, ready to recite all the names she had compiled during nine years inside the local Communist Party.

  The hearing convened at 10:45, and for the next two hours, until the committee took an hour-and-a-half recess for lunch, Baldwin and Frank Tavenner engaged in a carefully scripted dialogue as he took her step-by-step through the chronology of her involvement with the party and the names of people she encountered along the way. Chairman Wood and Representatives Potter and Jackson were also there, but spoke little.

  Wood interrupted once to ask, “How do you spell that?” As it happens, his spelling question came at the mention of a communist club in Ann Arbor named in honor of Ralph Neafus, the Michigan graduate who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War. “R-a-l-p-h N-e-a-f-u-s,” Baldwin responded.

  Potter perked up when Baldwin cited a communist club in the Upper Peninsula, part of his congressional district. He asked her to name the leaders there.

  An hour into the session, Jackson sought to be recognized with a polite “May I ask a question at that point, Mr. Chairman?” When Wood acknowledged him, Jackson asked Baldwin, “To what extent does a communist fear exposure, if at all?”

  Mrs. Baldwin: Well, I am glad you added that [if at all]. They don’t fear exposure as long as they are working in the open. But they would fear exposure underground.

  Mr. Jackson: If they had been up to that time concealed?

  Mrs. Baldwin: That is correct.

  Mr. Jackson: He is no longer useful, once exposed?

  Mrs. Baldwin: That is correct.

  Potter joined the conversation to sum up: “So by that statement, Mrs. Baldwin, we will say in Detroit there are many persons who have never been identified as members of the party, but once the identity has been made, the Communist Party has lost a useful worker for them; is that true?

  Mrs. Baldwin: That is too true.

  By 12:45, when Chairman Wood called for a lunch recess, Baldwin had cited seventy Communist Party clubs in Michigan and named eighty people. During the break, she strolled over to the press table and pulled up a chair.

  “You know you are sitting in Billy Allan’s chair,” said Kenneth McCormick of the Free Press. Allan covered the hearings for the Daily Worker. Baldwin had known Billy and his wife, Stephanie, for years. Until recently they had thought of her as a friend and comrade. She had attended a baby shower for Stephanie.

  “Yes, I know it is,” Baldwin responded. “Where is Billy?”

  Allan was not at the press table that day, perhaps because he knew that Baldwin would name him. Her “Where is Billy?” is telling on a few levels. It reveals Baldwin’s familiarity with many of the people on whom she was informing. It makes apparent the contradictions inherent in a job whose purpose was to deceive and then expose supposed friends. And it shows the comfort level she had reached in undertaking this difficult mission. What motivated her to do this? Most likely it was not one thing but a combination of factors. This was a job, to be sure. The FBI had been paying her for her work. And it seems from her testimony that she found some thrills in the cloak-and-dagger life. Finally, there was the patriotic impulse. “People will ask why my mother went into this dangerous work,” said her daughter. “I can only answer that she was one hundred percent American, through and through.”

  Courtroom observers were struck by how tiny Baldwin was, barely five feet tall. She wore no makeup, and her face was pale, with “deep, dark hollows around her eyes.” E. A. Batchelor Jr., covering the hearings for the Detroit Times, was particularly taken by those eyes. “They are dark and flashing and they meet one squarely,” he wrote. “They bored right into chief counsel Frank Tavenner as Mrs. Baldwin unfolded her amazing evidence. Her eyes recalled the statement of a neighbor woman when Mrs. Baldwin’s role was first revealed. The neighbor had said, ‘You would think she was just a run of the [mill] person until you took a second look at her eyes. They seemed to go right through you.’ ” With her penetrating eyes and confident manner, Batchelor added, “Mrs. Baldwin cast something of a spell over the courtroom.”

  * * *

  THE DETROIT TIMES was an evening newspaper. Early editions hit the newsstands in midafternoon and late city editions were delivered by paperboys in time to be read before supper. Evening papers were on the decline by the early 1950s, with the rise of television, but they still had some advantages, one being that they could publish stories on the same day as the events they were covering instead of the next morning. With tight deadlines, reporters in the field often dictated rough drafts or scribbles from their notebooks back to the newsroom, where rewrite men—in that era they were almost always men—turned them into polished stories.

  One of the top rewrite men on the copydesk at the Times was Elliott Maraniss, who was at work on the day Bereniece Baldwin testified in Room 740. At 1:20 that afternoon, during the lunch recess of the hearings, W. Jackson Jones, a HUAC investigator, walked into the Times newsroom in the Times Square Building at 1370 Cass Avenue with a subpoena that had been signed earlier in the day by Chairman Wood. Jones said he was looking for Maraniss. I presume that Jones conferred with the editors, explaining the purpose of his visit. I can only presume because all the journalists are dead, there are no records aside from the subpoena, and my father never talked about it. The only detail documented is the result: as soon as the subpoena was served, my father was fired. He told my brother later that his boss on the copydesk
did not want to fire him, but the brass insisted.

  I came across the original subpoena in Series 3, Box 32, of the HUAC files at the National Archives, the same folder where I first saw the imperfect S in my father’s unread statement to the committee. Holding the subpoena in my hands had a similar effect. It put me in the moment and made me sense—with remorse for my previous obliviousness—the fear and anguish my father might have felt at that difficult time. The language of the subpoena was archaic and intimidating. He was ordered to appear at the Federal Building at 10:00 a.m. on March 12. “Then and there to testify touching matters of inquiry committed to said Committee; and he is not to depart without leave of said Committee.” Jones, the server, was instructed, “Herein fail not, and make return of this summons.”

  * * *

  About a half hour into the afternoon testimony, the reason for the subpoena became public. Tavenner was asking Baldwin about certain names in a section of the local party that included members of the intelligentsia who had not been exposed.

  Mr. Tavenner: Are you acquainted with a person by the name of Eliot Marioniss?

  Based on the official transcript, Tavenner must have used a visual aid in his presentation, because Baldwin told him the name was spelled wrong.

  Mr. Tavenner: Is that an improper spelling?

  Mrs. Baldwin: Yes.

  Mr. Tavenner: What is the proper spelling?

  Mrs. Baldwin: M-a-r-a-n-i-s-s.

  Mr. Tavenner: Were you acquainted with him?