Mrs. Baldwin: I was.
Mr. Tavenner: Will you state the circumstances?
Mrs. Baldwin: I was very well acquainted with him when the Michigan Herald, a publication of the Communist Party, printed in Detroit, began their subscription drive the latter part of 1946. I was assigned as secretary of that paper. The building that we occupied was at 1310 Broadway. Elliott Maraniss, I understand, worked for the Times paper.
Mr. Tavenner: What do you mean the Times paper?
Mrs. Baldwin: The Detroit Times. And he did not wish his identity to be known. He gave me and others in there strict orders not to call him by his name, either given or last, but to use the name “Ace.”
Baldwin said my father was active at the Herald from the time it was launched until it was dissolved and folded into the Michigan Worker. She said she saw him there as late as April or May 1950.
Then the counsel brought up my mother, but used a name I had never heard.
Mr. Tavenner: Did you become acquainted with Mary Morrison?
Mrs. Baldwin: Mary Morrison Maraniss—Mary Morrison is Elliott Maraniss’ wife. Prior to her marriage she was an officer of the YCL. That would be approximately 1944, 1945. They had an office on Broadway near Grand Circus Park. I made it my business to go there. I wanted to make a direct connection between the YCL and the CP.
Mr. Tavenner: By “YCL” you are referring to the Young Communist League?
Mrs. Baldwin: I am. At that time, Bridget Polson and Mary Morrison were in charge of the office. I purchased a YCL bond from them and upon questioning and inquiries they denied any connection with the Communist Party. However, within a short period, when I was working in the district office, Bridget Polson put in an appearance and then embarrassedly tried to explain her situation. She shortly thereafter made a trip to Europe, to England, and has not returned to my knowledge.
Morrison was not my mother’s middle name, nor her maiden name. It could have been an alias, since my father wanted to keep a low profile and have people refer to him only as “Ace.” Why Baldwin thought my mother was single until 1944 or 1945 I have no idea. My parents met at the University of Michigan in January 1939, and by Christmas of that year they were married.
Baldwin continued naming names, dates, and places for another hour, and near the end, before the committee finished its work for the day and wrapped up the week, not to start up again until March 10, the congressmen bathed their star witness in praise, one by one.
Representative Potter said that men in combat received decorations for gallant service, and he could think of no person “more worthy of a decoration for gallantry than you, Mrs. Baldwin.” Representative Jackson noted that in joining the Communist Party as an informant, she had been shut off from friends and associates for years. “The American people have no way of expressing directly to you their thanks,” he said. “You will receive abuse and vilification from those who are part and parcel of the international conspiracy. I should like to say, as one representative of the American people, that I feel you have rendered a tremendous service to human freedom and to our country.” Chairman Wood thanked her for her contribution “to the cause of democratic government everywhere throughout the world.” He also thanked the state police, the federal judges, the Detroit Police Department, the Detroit Loyalty Board, and all Detroit citizens “who have evidenced such widespread interest in the work of the committee, and who have contributed so warmly and generously to the pleasure of our stay here.”
By the time Wood gaveled the day’s proceedings to an end at 4:30, my father had straggled back to the family, which had gathered at our aunt’s house on Pingree Street. “Well, I got fired,” he announced.
11
* * *
Ace and Mary
ANOTHER MEMORABLE EVENING took place at Hagen’s Recess Tavern, this one exactly two years after Stan Swinton, as a freshman, watched Bob Cummins, a senior, drink and sing wistfully with his Daily colleagues in the lead-up to his leaving Ann Arbor to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Swinton now was nearing the end of his junior year. He and my father had risen in the college newspaper’s ranks semester by semester, and this marked the culmination of their efforts. Late on that May night, word reached their basement hangout that the Daily board had selected the top editors for the 1939–40 school year. Elliott Maraniss was named editorial director, Stan Swinton city editor, Carl Petersen managing editor, and Mel Fineberg sports editor. Recalling the scene years later, Swinton wrote about the night “when Carl Petersen and Ace Maraniss and I celebrated the board verdict by drinking flagons of beer and walking Ann Arbor streets until dawn in excited discussion of our plans.” Their mission, they decided, was to dedicate the paper to “the objective pursuit of truth.”
The news of Elliott’s ascension to the paper’s lead editorial position was announced in his hometown Brooklyn Daily Eagle along with the Detroit papers and the Daily. Ace Maraniss was the quintessential big man on campus. He wrote and edited for the Daily and Perspectives, its current events supplement; organized and cochaired the American Culture panel at the Spring Parley; had been inducted into Sphinx, a junior honor society, and Quadrangle, a literary club; and was about to be initiated into Michigamua, a prestigious society of senior men whose past members included Gerald Ford, athletic legends Fritz Crisler and Fielding Yost, university president Alexander Ruthven, and Roosevelt’s attorney general Frank Murphy. A lanky left-hander with thick black hair and penetrating brown eyes, he patrolled the environs around the school’s central Diag with a bounce in his step, zigzagging from one gathering to the next, from Angell Hall to Hill Auditorium, the Michigan Union, and on to the Publications Building.
Ace had known Mary Cummins for a few months by then, and they were already attracted to each other. Mary thought Ace had “a certain magic” unlike any young man she had known before. He was from the East Coast, already an adult at twenty-one, a confident and outspoken upperclassman. Mary was only seventeen and in her first year at Michigan, a thoroughly midwestern townie, intelligent and socially minded yet introverted and introspective. Standing barely five two, with strawberry-blond hair, a smooth-soft complexion, and rosy cheeks, she was the fourth Cummins sibling at the university, retracing the steps of her older brothers, Bob and Phil, and Bob’s twin sister, Barbara.
She had followed them not only to Michigan but also into leftist politics. By her second semester on campus, Mary was running for student senate as a member of the American Student Union, the only woman on the ticket. The party platform included setting up courses on Negro culture and problems of war and racism, exposing groups on campus that fomented anti-Semitism, and recognizing that fascist aggression was “the real war danger today and that appeasement and isolation meant selling out to the fascists.” At the time of the student vote on March 31, 1939, the world seemed at its most vulnerable. Her brother’s cause defending the Spanish Republic had been lost irretrievably three days earlier, when Franco’s troops marched into Madrid. In three years of civil war, at least a half million people had been killed in Spain, a countrywide internecine slaughter in which most of the victims were civilians, along with 110,000 Loyalist and 90,000 Nationalist troops. And the bloodletting was not over; many thousands more now faced Franco’s murderous retribution even as the new pope, Pius XII, and the U.S. government moved to recognize the generalissimo’s ascension. Nationalist police had already begun rounding up Franco opponents whose names were listed on voluminous index card files.
Two weeks earlier, Nazi troops had thundered into Prague as Hitler declared that Czechoslovakia no longer existed, an aggression obliterating the Munich Pact that Western powers had signed with Germany months earlier. In an article in the Daily, Ace took note of Hitler’s alarming moves toward world domination: “Hitler had already merged most of the old empires of the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, acquired three times the territory lost at Versailles, and commanded an empire which comprised 269,000 square miles with a total population of 88 million. The German dream of
political and economic sovereignty over Central and Eastern Europe, a dream characterized by the German term Mitteleuropa, is now an inescapable reality.”
After a day of voting on the 31st, the university ballot counting began at 7:00 p.m. in the Publications Building and dragged on late into the night. It was a convoluted election process in which students could vote 1 for their first choice, 2 for their second, and on down as many slots as they wished. A candidate needed to reach a certain threshold to be declared a winner, and lagging candidates could transfer their votes to others after each count. Ace was among the Daily journalists observing the process; Mary was there with the other candidates. She made it through fourteen rounds before giving up and transferring her votes to Joseph Gies, another ASU candidate and a friend of Ace’s from the paper. The loss did not deter her. She would run again in the next election, risking herself in front of her peers in a way that seemed unlikely given her sensitivity.
Throughout her early life, Mary customarily had been the youngest person in her group. She jumped a grade in elementary school because of her facility with reading and writing and from then on was at least a year younger than most of her classmates. At home and in the neighborhood, she tried to tag along with her older siblings. She was self-conscious about being called “Four Eyes” because of her glasses and “Carrot Top” because of her hair. She yearned for more affection. Looking back on her childhood in a self-reflective psychological history, she described a “need for that early fondling, kissing, emotion, talking, hugging, sentiment that was not part of Scots-Irish families.” She bristled at traditional gender roles set by her Kansas-bred parents, finding it “demeaning to be expected to wait on the males, do the dishes, make the beds, while the boys did the yard work. The old farm division of labor.”
Her perspective on life was shaped by anxious images of growing up in Middle America. Evansville, Indiana: the drowsy ennui of a summer Sunday and church. “Boredom, strangers, sun, dust, dryness of unwashed streets on the way, an empty afternoon.” Newago, Michigan: living near the Hardy Dam as her engineer father helped with its construction; workers falling to their deaths, her father diving in to save a man from drowning; young Mary being spooked by the evangelist tent and the traveling wrestling shows attended by “men who had been lucky enough to latch onto this job after the depression hit.” Ann Arbor: the pocket notebook in which her father jotted down all household expenses in the neat block lettering of a draftsman; her mother’s careful shopping “and simple lunches like milk toast—buttered toast broken up with warm milk poured over it and an extra dab of butter”—and dinners of stuffed beef heart and veal stew made from the cheapest cuts.
Her older brother left for Spain while she was at Ann Arbor High School. Unlike her mother, who was kept in the dark for months, Mary seemed to know from the start where he had gone, and why. One of Bob’s friends, Bill Rohr, had been like another big brother to her from the time the family moved to Ann Arbor. Rohr eventually fell in love with her, and though the romantic attraction was not reciprocated (she had a high school boyfriend named Eddie Weinstein), she enjoyed hanging around with Rohr. Decades later she wrote about being drawn into “some of his left-wing contacts, creative, arty, bohemian people on the fringes of the university that he was involved with as a socialist and active supporter of the Loyalists.” Mary thought of Rohr as “a Pete Seeger” type. As she followed him on rounds for the cause, going door-to-door in Ann Arbor collecting food and clothing for the Spanish Republic, one image stuck in her memory: visiting “an eccentric donor to good causes, an old woman, secluded in a smelly old frame house on the edge of town, with fifteen or twenty cats.”
In her final year in high school, Mary belonged to a current events group that met near campus in the parlor of the Unitarian Church at the corner of State and Huron. She felt comfortable there, with “a group of high school kids who were not ‘in’ and were interested in what was happening in the world.” They played pool and talked about Spain and the labor movement and the New Deal and other issues of the day, their conversations encouraged by the minister, Rev. Harold Marley. Although the church was bleeding financially, its congregation down to a mere seventy-nine members by 1937, and the old stone Romanesque church building was falling into disrepair, Marley remained a significant liberal figure in Ann Arbor. He was an ACLU member, a peace and labor activist who gave physical and spiritual support to the United Auto Workers during their sit-down strike in Flint, helped organize the local Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and opened his meetinghouse doors to radical groups at the university, including the American Student Union. An editorial in the Daily called Marley’s church “a center of activity in behalf of true democracy—and a genuine force in our social thinking.”
The activist minister was a connection between Mary and Ace when they first met, and he would connect them officially a year later.
* * *
WHEN I FIRST thought about writing this book, my brother, Jim, challenged me with two essential and related questions: How could I ever presume to know what our parents were thinking? How could I do more than scratch the surface? Jim is five years older than me. He went to Harvard and got a PhD at Princeton and spent his career teaching Spanish and Spanish literature at Amherst. When HUAC came to Detroit in 1952, he was a precocious six-year-old, soon to turn seven, and he knew what was going on, unlike me, who at age two had no idea. We loved our father equally but approached the family history from unavoidably different perspectives. What happened in Room 740 affected him immediately and directly. To me it was a dim and distant shadow.
Jim’s questions had a personal resonance, but they also raised a larger issue that I had faced many times as a biographer: How can you presume to know what any other human being is thinking? The only answer: most of the time you can’t. Most of the thoughts that go through our heads remain there, never expressed, not in what we say out loud, not even necessarily in letters or journals or anything else we write. I accept that I will never know my father’s internal thoughts during that period of his life. I can only work with what he left behind. Since he talked very little about it, what he left behind consists of what he wrote. That does not explain everything, certainly, but in reading his articles, essays, editorials, and letters, I often felt that he was lighting a path for me to follow below the surface.
Anyone who read the Daily between 1937 and 1940 became familiar with Ace Maraniss’s rhetorical style. He had been writing editorials, book reviews, and news analysis pieces since his sophomore year, more than 150 pieces in all. While his politics evolved during that time, or devolved, his motivations seemed not to change. Distraught over the injustices and horrors of the twentieth-century world, he reached for a systematic explanation of what happened and the best way to create something better. He wrote with confidence, in a voice ranging from sardonic to scholarly to didactic, his approach alternating between a newspaperman’s keen realism and a romantic idealist’s yearning for perfection. Yet at the core, always, was a deep belief in America and an American ideal.
Even when propounding ideas in the newspaper that followed the party line or had “the tinct of popular front dogma,” as my brother once described it, my father did not shut out arguments with which he disagreed. He had diverse tastes, and an affinity for literature and newspapering and baseball that seemed as essential to his self-identity as his political beliefs. His favorite teacher, he later wrote, was a young English instructor named Fred Cassidy, who infused in him a deep appreciation of language. “I loved listening to his soft, melodious voice, with its Jamaican rhythms, its Elizabethan cadences, and the underlying, unmistakable, infectious love for the English language in all its glorious variations, accents, dialects and literature.”
Cassidy, who would have an illustrious career as creator and editor of The Dictionary of American Regional English, was one of many professors Ace admired at Michigan because of their intellectual gravitas more than their politics. “Michigan then was in one of its o
wn golden periods. Its faculty roster was crowded with the names of great scholars, all of whom also taught undergraduates,” he recalled. “It didn’t seem unusual at the time that among my teachers were Marckwardt, Seager, Williams and Davis in English; Dumond, Slosson, and Boak in history; Shepard in psychology, White in anthropology, Haber in economics, and Henle in philosophy.” To take just one example from that list: Preston W. Slosson, who taught popular survey courses on European history, was constantly warning the young student radicals about totalitarianism from the left as well as the right.
The first front-page story Ace wrote for the Daily was an interview with Ford Madox Ford, the British novelist. In the fall semester of 1937, Ford was teaching a comparative literature course at nearby Olivet College, and he came to Ann Arbor on November 9 to attend a concert by the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. In an interview with Ace beforehand, Ford was dismissive of most young American writers. He admired Hemingway but had little good to say about the rest. To write a decent novel, he said, one must have “experienced danger, despair, anxiety, hunger, and bankruptcy.” Ace’s first editorial, appearing two days later, looked a few years ahead toward potential Republican candidates for president in 1940, with kind words for Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, as “a man who will not resort to extremist methods to accomplish his ends.” He ended that month with a series on the Tennessee Valley Authority, presenting arguments for and against the New Deal project and concluding that it would be left to the Supreme Court and the electorate to decide “how far the government may compete with and replace private enterprise.”
By the spring semester of his sophomore year, Ace’s name was on the masthead as night editor, a job that did not curtail his writing. His political perspective was on the left side of the New Deal, which was common among Daily editorialists. The paper had conducted an internal analysis and found that of 195 editorials written in the previous year, “135, or about two thirds, have been written by a group of editors who align themselves with leftist or so-called liberal points of view on campus.” One of Ace’s early editorials examined New Deal accomplishments and frustrations and the changing American psyche: “When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his inauguration on March 4, 1933, imminent catastrophe seemed about to overwhelm the entire American economic and social structure. Unemployment and its inevitable concomitants—destitution, frustration, and decadence—swept over the land, a modern Black Plague, leaving a permanent army of 15 million victims in the ranks of the disinherited. The inexorable concentration of wealth and power threatened to annihilate the small business unit and the farm, and together with them the political structure of democracy, the constitutional safeguards of liberty and justice, and the Jeffersonian principle of ‘men enjoying in ease and security the fruits of their own industry.’ Although Americans still felt psychologically and politically classless, economic discontent was for the first time in the country’s history taking on the European class aspect.”
A Good American Family Page 14