A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  In assessing how the Roosevelt administration responded to this crisis, Ace believed that while New Deal policies successfully averted a complete economic collapse, the administration’s efforts to rein in corporate monopoly through regulation were doomed to fail because they prevented “the evolution of modern capitalism from taking its natural course.” Here he was making a Marxist argument. Monopoly, he said, could not be regulated out of existence. “If Mr. Roosevelt could by some magic halt the process of monopoly, if he could roll back the wheels of history, his efforts to restore freedom of competition would have profound significance. But with large scale production units, concentration, and monopoly forming the most dominant factors in present day society, his efforts to return to the economy of an earlier day” were outmoded. “The problem is not one of bigness, but of control.”

  People tend to see what they want to see and not see what they don’t want to see. One of the lessons I learned from my father decades later, after he had put the trauma and mistakes of his earlier life behind him, was to try to look beyond my own biases and be open to evidence that contradicted my assumptions. And so, more than his essay on monopoly, there was another story in the Daily that same week in March 1938 that left me wondering what he was thinking. It was an Associated Press dispatch from Moscow reporting on the summation of a show trial in the Soviet Union, a chilling demonstration of one of many ways Stalin ruled as a lethal despot, using trumped-up charges to execute former comrades deemed threats to his control.

  “Death for 19 of the 21 defendants in Russia’s greatest blood purge trial was demanded today by Prosecutor Andrei Y. Vishinsky at the climax of a furious summation of treason and murder charges,” the AP article began. “For five and a half hours, in the glare of floodlights, the prosecutor packed in details of the prisoners’ confessed plots, calling them human scum and unscrupulous tools of foreign intelligence services. . . . Most of Vishinsky’s fury was heaped on Nikolai Bukharin, chronicler of the Red revolution, on whom fell most of the blame for the confessed Rightist-Trotskyist plots. He also demanded the head of Genrikh G. Yagoda, once the chief of the secret police and the most feared man in Russia, whom he compared to Al Capone. ‘We cannot leave such people alive,’ he said. ‘They can do so in America with Al Capones who kill and kidnap people they want to get out of the way. But Russia, thank God, is not America.’ ”

  The story was impossible to ignore, and my father undoubtedly read it and talked about it. I have a hard time imagining how he could absorb the facts and still ascribe positive intentions to the Soviet version of communism. I know he admired the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but I struggle with the notion that his reasoning could have followed along the lines of Shaw, who once wrote that the evils of the show trials had been exaggerated and that some old revolutionists had no idea how to administrate and had to be “pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks.” Such cold-blooded thinking was utterly unlike my father as I understood him, at least the “push off the ladder” part. Decades later he broached the subject of his mind-set during that period without being specific, describing himself at Michigan as “stubborn in my ignorance and aggressive in my prejudices.” An honest yet gentle self-appraisal.

  One of his favorite subjects was how words were manipulated for political purposes. The fact that he did not apply this to the Soviet Union shows an inconsistency in his thinking but does not fully negate the strength of his argument. In one essay, he discussed how the word “tolerance” was being misused as a subterfuge for the repression of other virtues and an excuse for inaction.

  What seemed most pressing on his mind was the U.S. government’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. At the time of this essay, the three Michigan students who had left Ann Arbor to join the International Brigade in Spain—Cummins, Service, and Neafus—were engaged in brutal fighting near Teruel. “The Spanish people may be fighting for the same principles that have animated mankind in all ages,” my father wrote, “but to be truly tolerant we must haughtily proclaim that the Spanish people have a right to work out their own destiny, without the intrusion of foreigners. We may protest in our individual consciences, but it must never become concerted or official. It is this last provision which exposes these ardent exponents of tolerance as mere opportunists who have pounced upon what is in essence a fine practice and transformed it into a diplomatic and political expedient. . . . A true interpretation of tolerance is one that links it inextricably with freedom, liberty and other natural rights of man which supersede government and politics. And for us who sit in comparative freedom to openly refuse to uphold the cause of those who suffer is to betray our heritage and our hope for the future.”

  Spain was the dominant issue on campus in 1938 and became all-consuming during the weeks when the fate of Neafus was uncertain beyond reports that he had been seen captive inside the dank cathedral in Alcañiz. My father helped organize the letters and telegrams to officials in Washington seeking to secure Neafus’s release, all to no avail. His position then, which would lurch back and forth over the next two years, was that standing up forcefully, and even militarily, to the totalitarians in Germany, Italy, and Spain was vital, overtaking the left’s earlier peace movement. On May 17, after Neafus was presumed dead and as Cummins and Service were regrouping on the safe side of the Ebro River, my father wrote an editorial decrying Western complacency: “While the democracies of the world were continuing in their futile attempts to fashion realistic foreign policies by watchful waiting, non-intervention and power politics, Mussolini took occasion in the course of a speech Saturday in Genoa to remind them, with all the subtlety of a battleship, that the totalitarian states will present a united international front in case of a world crisis. Now there is no doubt that the American people feel only distaste and disgust for the fascist dictatorships, but there is no indication that they are consciously preparing for a war against the totalitarian heresy. Individual citizens are ready to fight the fascists on ideological grounds.”

  * * *

  BETWEEN HIS SOPHOMORE and junior years, Elliott remained in Ann Arbor. He took a room at a boardinghouse on Division Street and kept writing. His landlady, Mrs. A. C. Miller, thought he was quiet and bright, but she was suspicious of him. “Mrs. Miller was of the opinion that subject was Jewish,” a government intelligence report stated years later, “because he was always with a group of about eight or ten Jewish boys, his appearance was decidedly Jewish, and his people frequently sent him some hard tack (Matzos) from home.” This report, revealing in its latent prejudice, was not entirely accurate. His orbit did include several Jewish classmates, including Harvey Swados, who went on to become a novelist, and Mel Fineberg, who covered sports for the Daily and was later killed in World War II. But another of Elliott’s close friends was Dennis Flanagan, a classmate and Daily colleague who later would run Scientific American for four decades. Another was John Malcolm Brinnin, a poet in the class a year behind him, who worked at a bookstore Elliott frequented and who accompanied Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, on a tour of America. Carl Petersen was of Finnish heritage; Phil Cummins was Scots-Irish. Perhaps my father liked matzo in college; by the time I knew his eating habits he preferred saltines.

  According to university records, Elliott’s father was incapacitated by illness at this time and on a two-year hiatus from the printshop. Elliott paid his tuition and room and board through a forty-cents-an-hour National Youth Administration job doing clerical work at the university registrar’s office, and also received continued financial assistance from his aunt Celia, with whom he regularly corresponded. “For an aunt and nephew who saw each other rarely, and knew each other mainly through letters, we were pretty close,” he recalled years later in a letter to Mary. “I’ve always had an instinctive liking for her; and she in turn treated me like an adult and wrote me frankly about herself and family. For a time, I felt, although there was nothing but impressions to substantiate the feeling, that she was grateful for the opportunity to confide in
me—anybody, in fact, even a young nephew who lived in another world.”

  Aunt Celia’s world was one of wealth. Elliott later compared her situation to the dissatisfied characters in H. M. Pulham Esq., a novel about the confining conventions of Boston high society. She and her husband, Nat, whom Elliott called “so rich he could not be ignored,” had penetrated the social and business inner circles of Boston’s Back Bay, at least on the surface, overcoming a prevalent upper-class prejudice against Jews. They had residences in West Newton, Bretton Woods, and Florida and sent their daughters to Vassar. In letters to her nephew, Celia wrote in a way that led the young Elliott to believe that she felt trapped, having chosen material comfort over an earlier commitment to social activism. “Aunt Celia was a sensitive and intelligent and ambitious young woman. She worked her way through Radcliffe on scholarships. She was a tireless social worker in the Boston slums. She then became an executive in the Massachusetts State Department of Welfare. Then she was the personal secretary of the governor. Then she met and married Uncle Nat. You know the rest.”

  It was during that summer that Elliott became preoccupied with the meaning of America and his generation’s role in the American story. This was captured first in a long essay he wrote on July 3 published in the Daily under the headline “Need Seen for Spiritual Renewal of Declaration of Independence.” The piece had an earnestness of purpose that seemed more revealing than whatever political theory lay behind it. The language was dense and at times overwrought, nothing unusual for a college student. He wanted to speak for his generation: what it had learned, what it had endured, what it had rejected, and what it would do.

  “Pessimism could very easily take hold of us as it did the generation preceding,” he wrote. “We could, with easy justification, indulge in the same low-grade rationalizations of the F. Scott Fitzgeraldian youths who condemned the earth and man as insatiably malicious demons incapable of anything but bestiality, helplessness and greed, then proceeded to drink themselves merrily to hell.” But his generation, coming of age during the Depression, was different, he insisted. “However much the provocation, ours is not the neurotic revolt of the ‘lost generation’ of the twenties. No generation is ever lost; it loses itself. Ours is, on the contrary, a powerful desire to affirm once more the intrinsic majesty of man, to refuse to shrink away in disgust and despair from the realities, confusion, and squalor of the contemporary scene, to probe it, diagnose it, until we find the principles that are essential in the realization of the most humanly ethical ideal; the full development of the capacities of the individual.”

  Elliott did not want his generation to reject the past but to draw inspiration from the best and most optimistic poets of American promise. Here it was clear that he had been influenced by the philosophy of his principal at Abraham Lincoln High in Coney Island, Gabriel Mason, who carried an edition of Emerson in his back pocket as he strolled the hallways. “Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, the trumpeters of the Golden Day, were all possessed of the vision of a spiritually beautiful and materially secure America and, if for no other reason, they are the men to whom democratic America is now turning for the literary manifestation of its own dream. It is of course impossible to return to the past, even to Whitman and Emerson. But they are essential links; from them and from the entire epic through the last two centuries, we can make our own departure. The American scene is still as much of a challenge as it was in 1776. Thoreau’s dream of what it is to live a full life, and Emerson’s vision of a society that shall be oriented completely towards life, must still be our philosophical guides.”

  At Lincoln High and again at Michigan, Elliott and his classmates constantly heard the refrain from their elders that they carried the hopes of the nation. He embraced that expectation without irony or sarcasm: “We believe and intend to fulfill that admonition. There are many factors in the America of today that we cherish and would like to see perpetuated. America is still the land of opportunity, but those opportunities must be open to all, not confined to a few lucky individuals.”

  * * *

  WHAT DOES IT mean to love America? Elliott asked that question again and again in various ways from different angles. In a review of My America, a book by Louis Adamic, a leftist Slovenian immigrant writer, he praised the author for appreciating the country’s complexity. “His mind is still fluid enough to refuse to put America into a nutshell, to squeeze America into a tight definition, to hang America on some ‘ism,’ to tie America to some program. America is a continent, a thing in process, elemental, ever changing, calling for further exploration.”

  During his junior year, Elliott continued his own exploration of the meaning of America in essays he wrote after the death of the author Thomas Wolfe and the retirement five months later of Justice Louis Brandeis from the U.S. Supreme Court. He identified with Wolfe for his evocation of America’s youthful aspirations and admired Brandeis for his strengthening of American liberalism.

  In a long appreciation published in Perspectives, the Daily’s current events supplement, Elliott wrote that Wolfe’s death at age thirty-seven signified more than the loss of a major literary figure. He saw Wolfe’s hunger as his generation’s hunger. “He stood for us, spoke for us. . . . He was the bard of our democratic aspirations. Through him our values, our yearnings and our attempts at comprehension were embodied in imperishable words. America’s first Gargantua since Whitman, he stalked through the land like a modern Quixote, searching for manifestations of the democratic spirit, and when he found them he raised his voice in loud and long songs so that we who also searched could rejoice with him. . . . Deeply conscious of the vastness of America, he was in turn disturbed and exalted by it.”

  When Brandeis, the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, retired at age eighty-two, Elliott praised him as a believer in “the living law” who committed his legal career to social betterment and represented the spirit of America. Born in Louisville, the son of Czech immigrants, Brandeis was trained at Harvard and gained prominence in Boston as “the people’s lawyer.” He challenged the railroad monopolies and public corruption; helped shape the legal concept of a right to privacy; pushed for workers’ rights, including a minimum wage; and popularized the idea of pro bono legal work, refusing to be paid when it was for a cause he thought important. “Brandeis is the pioneer in the development of a jurisprudence built about social change,” Elliott wrote. “His method of adjusting a body of legal rules to the changing needs of changing conditions and social experiences, and the humanitarian and ethical motivation of his judgments place him in the front ranks of the body of men who have contributed to the preservation and extension of American democracy.”

  The Brandeis essay was popular on campus. Erich Walter, a dean and professor of English, thought so highly of it that he considered it for his well-regarded Essay Annual, featuring the work of a who’s who of American letters, including E. B. White, James Thurber, Pearl Buck, Malcolm Cowley, and Ida Tarbell. But Elliott Maraniss got cut from the table of contents before Scott, Foresman and Co. published the book. He did break out of the college market once, when an essay on American agriculture was reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

  * * *

  ELLIOTT SPENT ANOTHER summer in Michigan before his senior year. He worked as a research supervisor at the Michigan Historical Records Survey, a New Deal initiative sponsored by the Works Progress Administration that served two purposes at once. It gathered unpublished government documents down to the county level, classified them, and made them available for public access. Equally important, it provided Depression-era jobs for unemployed white-collar workers. Before the start of classes, Elliott moved into the Wolverine Co-op at 209 State Street, in the same building where Arthur Miller and Ralph Neafus had washed dishes side by side. It was adjacent to the State Theatre and three blocks from the Publications Building. His roommates were two Daily colleagues, Mel Fineberg and Morton Linder. By then he was dating Mary Cummins.

  Autumn was his favorite season,
going back to his teenage years on Coney Island, but especially in Ann Arbor, and especially that autumn of 1939. Mary lived at home with her parents and younger sister, and at the end of many days, Elliott walked with her down State and turned left at Packard and south twelve blocks to the Cummins house at 1402 Henry Street. From there, on Saturday afternoons, they would head west on Stadium Boulevard to watch the Wolverines, led by All-American halfback Tom Harmon and quarterback Forest Evashevski. It was such a gentle scene, Elliott later recalled. He and Mary “loved the big trees and the green lawns and the flowers and the neat, well-built houses, especially a little blue house on Stadium Boulevard” they thought was just the sort they would want to live in someday.