A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  It was the American Dream, shared by a member of the Young Communist League and her leftist reporter boyfriend, who also shared the socialist dream, what Malcolm Cowley later called the “Dream of the Golden Mountains.” That was Mary and Ace that fall, a reminder of the universality of basic hopes and desires and frustrations. They loved the promise of America, were disoriented by the economic collapse of the U.S. economy during the Depression, were seeking answers to the chaos of the world, and at the same time wanted to believe in a virtuous, peace-seeking, equality-minded Soviet Union. They thought they were working toward a true and open American democracy even as they were rationalizing the actions of what was in fact a ruthlessly totalitarian foreign power. Two opposing ideas, one noble, the other false and naïve, coexisted in their minds.

  Late that summer, before the new school year began, the geopolitical map flipped again, and with it the opinions of some American leftists like Elliott and Mary. On August 23 the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany shifted from bitter ideological foes who seemed headed toward military confrontation to conspiring partners of convenience. This happened with the signing of what was called the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, so named because of the foreign ministers who worked it out, Vyacheslav Molotov for the Soviet Union and Joachim von Ribbentrop for Germany. The pact was not only a commitment to neutrality between the two nations; it also secretly allowed them to divide territory in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic nations into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Within two weeks of the agreement, both countries had invaded Poland, the Nazis from the west, the Soviets from the east. Hitler’s invasion broke the Munich Agreement and drew Great Britain and France into war with Germany. The Gestapo and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, began sharing intelligence, leading to the capture and execution of scores of German and Austrian antifascists betrayed by the manipulative Soviets. The two nations also exchanged goods, minerals, and armaments that one had and the other needed.

  It was a stunning turn of events, difficult for many Western leftists to comprehend and explain. For some it was a breaking point; for all it was a dividing line. There were those who could not accept Stalin’s embrace of Hitler and turned away from communism in bitter despair. This group included many hundreds of Jewish members of the CPUSA and some of the “premature anti-fascists” who had risked their lives and seen comrades die in the fight against Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler in Spain. “Bitter mutual recriminations erupted between those who left and those who stayed; sometimes men who had fought together in Spain stopped speaking to each other,” wrote Adam Hochschild in Spain in Our Hearts. Those who stayed, asserting that there were sound reasons for the unholy alliance, ranged from singer-activist Paul Robeson to British historian Eric Hobsbawm. By the end of September, a series of explanations and rationalizations were passed along through the Comintern, the international arm of Soviet communism: the pact was necessary for the defense of the Soviet Union; the rallying cry was no longer “Kill the fascists”; war served only imperialists and greedy corporations. For Elliott and Mary, “peace” became the watchword again, just as it had been before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

  So much for Mary’s earlier campaign platform stating that “isolation meant selling out to the fascists” and Elliott’s earlier assessment that the West had to prepare for war against the “totalitarian heresy.” In a front-page editorial Elliott cowrote with managing editor Carl Petersen on September 26, the Daily officially took the side of neutrality and a form of isolationism. The “sands of peace ran out in Europe” when Hitler invaded Poland, drawing Great Britain and France into war, they said. “The editors of the Michigan Daily, like the great majority of Americans, are of the opinion that there is no more urgent problem confronting the people of this country than that of devising effective methods of keeping the United States out of war.” They were in full accord “with the contention of the English and French that for decent, democratic folk there is no living on this earth with the barbaric credo of Nazism,” but maintained that this particular war was not the answer. Instead they called the current situation “a clash of rival imperialisms” propelled by an effort by “certain groups to . . . protect the profits they derive” from world conflict.

  The Daily soon started receiving angry letters, many from students and professors who ranged from conservative to liberal to leftist, none fond of this iteration of the peace argument. Robert Rosa, a PhD candidate and leading member of the American Student Union at Michigan, noted with astonishment that Maraniss and Petersen seemed to outdo the reactionary America First movement. “Not even such influential supporters as Henry Ford, Lindbergh and the Bund have dared propose complete non-intercourse (as the editors did).” Rosa’s comments marked a split in the ASU between communists and noncommunists that would widen over the coming months and lead to the student movement’s eventual rupture and collapse. The strongest voice on Rosa’s side was Joseph P. Lash, the national ASU’s executive secretary, who considered the Nazi-Soviet Pact a sellout to Hitler, causing him to lose all faith in the Communist Party as an ally in the fight against fascism.

  Another letter lambasting the editorial arrived from Professor Slosson of the History Department, who knew Elliott from class. Slosson said it was contradictory for Maraniss and Petersen to say they hated and feared fascism and yet argue that the U.S. should not align with the nations fighting fascism. Isolationism would not lead to peace because it divided the world rather than uniting it, the professor warned. And he labeled it hypocritical and “dishonorable” for the editors to condemn Neville Chamberlain for abandoning Spain and then Czechoslovakia, but then turn around and claim indifference to the fates of England, France, and Poland.

  Elliott gave Slosson’s letter prominent display, then wrote in response, “This is not a war against fascism, it is not a people’s war and does not attack the vital causes of war.” He concluded, “We absolutely abhor the idea of a Europe controlled by Hitler and fascism. But we also doubt very sincerely the value of supporting a war that will not, as a matter of fact could not, do anything to prevent another Hitler from arising.” As Elliott once said in retrospect, he was stubborn in his ignorance.

  Time magazine ran an item in its press section shortly after that, citing the views of various student newspapers on the issue of the war and American neutrality. The newspapers of Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Vassar, North Carolina, Louisiana State University, Texas, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Illinois, and Southern Cal were all mentioned, but not the Michigan Daily. The feeling at the Daily was they had been snubbed because Time did not like their position. “Time has apparently forgotten that the Daily has been rated the outstanding collegiate publication in the nation [winner of the Pacemaker Award] for the past four years straight,” wrote associate editor Morton Linder in his “Morty Q.” column. “The fact that Time didn’t even mention the Daily’s firm stand on neutrality as expressed in the front-page editorial makes it seem as if they purposely passed them up—possibly because they may have objected to the side the Daily took.” Linder stood up for his roommate. “Speaking of brilliant or astute editors, Mr. Q. will stack Elliott Maraniss against any collegiate analyst in the country.”

  That same week the university’s chapter of the American Student Union held its annual membership meeting at the Michigan Union. The gathering opened with the singing of the ASU’s national song, “Academic Epidemic,” followed by a reading of poems from Dead Reckoning by Kenneth Fearing, who was known as “the proletarian poet” of the 1930s. Robert Rosa was elected president, and Mary Cummins was chosen as recording secretary, reflecting the divergence of opinions within the organization.

  The debate over the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the proper response to Hitler’s aggression dominated the political discussion on the Michigan campus and in the pages of the Daily throughout the fall semester. In his editorials, Elliott argued that the Soviet goal was to buy time to construct “a great defensive
barrier from the Baltic to the Black Sea” that would hold off Nazi aggression. He called the European conflict “a robber’s war” that America should avoid. He decried the existence of a new congressional committee, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas, that had started to investigate peace activists on the American left as subversives for exercising their constitutional right to free speech. And he kept publishing letters from students and professors who thought he was utterly wrong. Robert Anderson, a graduate student, wrote a long letter asking whether “Mr. Maraniss was acting as an American intent on defending the rights of Americans to enjoy the Bill of Rights or as a communist following the party line.”

  “My motives in this regard,” Elliott responded, “are actuated only by a conviction that America must remain at peace, that the American people have nothing to gain from entrance into a bloody conflict in Europe. My motives, my interests, and my allegiances are entirely American.”

  * * *

  Elliott and Mary were married on December 16, 1939. He was twenty-one, she eighteen. It was a small wedding, officiated by Reverend Marley and witnessed by Mary’s family and many of Elliott’s colleagues at the Daily. Mary later said that they asked Marley to perform the ceremony mostly as a way to “pass some money to a needy cause,” the cause being the minister and his threadbare church. Elliott called him “a campus hero.” Harvey Swados stood up as best man, and the couple’s most cherished wedding gift was a volume of William Blake signed by the poet John Malcolm Brinnin, who brought it from the bookshop where he worked. His inscription read:

  For Elliott and Mary

  Not pyramids nor carillons with bells

  May say your special wisdom to the earth

  Who are its fabulous inheritors.

  “Swados and Brinnin were just two of an unusually talented group of writers at Michigan in our years there, attracted by the Hopwood cash awards for creative writing and an outstanding English department,” Elliott wrote later. “Among them were Arthur Miller, whose first play was produced on campus, Maritta Wolff, whose first novel was also published while she was a student [Whistle Stop, later turned into a movie starring Ava Gardner and George Raft], and the poets John Ciardi, Kiman Friar, Chad Walsh, and Ed Burrows, all of whose work already was gaining critical attention. My colleagues on the Daily included Dennis Flanagan, Stan Swinton, Harry L. Sonneborn, Norm Schorr, Morty Linder, and Carl Petersen and Mel Fineberg. . . . Almost all of them knew Mary, the youngest among us. Most of them attended our modest, austere wedding, and lined up to kiss the bride, but had to go somewhere else for their beer.”

  Not long after the wedding, at the semester break, Elliott and Mary headed off for their honeymoon, a national convention of the American Student Union at the University of Wisconsin. Mary was a delegate from Michigan; Elliott covered it for the Daily. They hitchhiked in freezing weather down to Chicago and around Lake Michigan and up to Madison. “Hitch-hiking was our only mode of transportation for two or three years,” Elliott recalled. “If I was a poor stand-in for Clark Gable, Mary certainly filled in for Claudette Colbert. We never had to wait long for a ride, although most of the drivers grumbled about having to take me along.” (In the movie It Happened One Night, Gable plays a newspaper reporter and Colbert shows off a shapely leg to get cars to stop when they hitchhike together.)

  The rift within the ASU was deeper than ever by the time Elliott and Mary reached Madison. An internal dispute that began with the Nazi-Soviet Pact in late summer intensified after November 30, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland, its democratic neighbor, and started what became known as the Winter War. In that 105-day conflict, the greatly outnumbered Finns, fighting fearlessly on skis against Soviet tanks, battled the invaders to a near draw. The Soviets argued that they had been trying for months to reach an accommodation with Finland that would provide a protective barrier from German attack into Petrograd and sent in its million-man army only in self-defense after diplomatic efforts failed. The League of Nations considered this a sham and expelled the Soviets from the organization. Sentiment in the United States was overwhelmingly in favor of the underdog Finns. The young communists and Soviet sympathizers in the ASU now had two problematic issues to explain and defend.

  But Joseph Lash and his liberal allies within the organization were vastly outnumbered in Madison. In the decisive vote, a resolution opposing the Soviet invasion of Finland was defeated 322 to 49, and an effort to send the issue to a membership-wide referendum was also rejected. Lash was out as executive secretary, replaced by a leader of the Young Communist League, Bert Witt. Delegate Mary Cummins voted with the dominant bloc on all these issues, a winning side that was careening toward a larger defeat. As the Old Left historian Robert Cohen explained, “Though the communists won all the key votes in Madison, this quickly proved to be a hollow victory. The convention’s refusal to criticize the invasion of Finland did irreparable harm to the ASU’s reputation. Former admirers now felt that the organization had been converted into a puppet of the Communist Party. The Nation termed the ASU vote on Finland ‘a precious gift to Martin Dies.’ The New Republic fretted: “What has happened to the American Student Union?” The headline in Madison’s Capital Times, the progressive paper where my father would find salvation seventeen years later, the paper that in many ways saved our family, was “THE STUDENT UNION SIMPLY A COMMUNIST ALIAS.”

  Honeymoon over, Elliott and Mary hitchhiked back to Ann Arbor and began married life in a one-room basement apartment they rented on East Washington across the street from the new Rackham auditorium. Mary took part-time work as a nurse’s aide at the university hospitals, a job that had the bonus of allowing them to eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria for twenty-five cents. They spoke at meetings at the Unitarian Church and Michigan Union to explain their version of what happened in Madison. As the global situation grew more perilous, Elliott’s editorials in the Daily did not waver from the argument that peace and national prosperity were more important than participation in what he called “the second imperialist war in Europe.”

  In February, Elliott hitchhiked to Washington, DC, to cover the annual convention of the American Youth Congress, a broad-based coalition of leftist and liberal college students. The platform discussed at the gathering called for strict neutrality in the European war, the formation of a peace commission, full employment and education for American youth, and protection of civil liberties. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt expressed sympathy for the group, which recently had come under attack as a communist front, some of its leaders subpoenaed to testify before the Red-hunting Dies Committee. Her husband was less accommodating. Speaking from the South Portico to an assembly on the White House lawn, FDR urged the youth delegates to reject dictatorships of the left and right and called their position on the Soviet invasion of Finland “unadulterated twaddle.” The comment elicited some boos from the crowd.

  From his editorial perch at the Daily, Elliott took issue with Roosevelt. “If the President thinks we are capable of nothing but ‘unadulterated twaddle’ he has greatly misjudged the sentiments and capabilities of American youth,” he wrote at the end of an essay describing what was “deep in the hearts and minds” of the delegates.

  As usual, Elliott devoted much of the space on his page to those who disagreed with him. Louis P. Nadeau wrote in a letter to the editor, “It is nothing less than an insult to the young people of this country to say that their aspirations are identical with the selfish purposes for which the American Youth Congress was assembled. Most of us hate and fear war and want to retain our civil liberties and increase prospects for a life of greater opportunity and security. All this is true. But we do not allow our dislike of war to stifle our sympathy with the Finnish people in their struggle against the world’s most despicable tyranny. Nor do we desire a permanent NYA [National Youth Administration] to continue its paternalistic subsidization of American higher education.”

  Elliott had been a B or B-plus student during his first three years at Michigan, but during the fina
l semester of his senior year he was so preoccupied with the newspaper, politics, and married life that his grades plummeted. He remained deeply immersed in the intellectual life of the campus, if not the classroom. In April he wrote an essay for Perspectives on Native Son, the bold new novel by Richard Wright: “The best way to indicate the importance of this book is to compare it to The Grapes of Wrath. What Steinbeck did for the Okies, Wright does for the Negroes in America. Both men deal with a dislocation of life so vast as to stagger the imagination. Both deal with impulses, emotions, and attitudes of plain people. Both have a revolutionary insight into the realities of the problems that affect nearly two-thirds of the nation. And both books are sweeping men and women toward a new conception of the way things are and the way they ought to be. Yet Native Son is more than a first novel; it is also the first work in American fiction to deal intelligently and profoundly with the life, mind and emotions of the American Negro in action under the stress of unrelenting economic, racial, and social and spiritual oppression.”

  In its spring 1940 edition, published at the end of the school year, Gargoyle, the student literary magazine, published an illustration of all the Daily editors in various satiric poses. The caption for the illustration is “PREPOSTEROUS PERSONS.” Elliott, with his brush of black hair, is in the upper right corner holding a bomb with a lit fuse, papers scattered across his desk. “The swarthy, bomb-slinging gent on the right is YCL’s Maraniss. He’s been affiliated with every liberal organization on campus since Samuel Gompers was a little boy. He smells the bourgeois motive in anything he finds distasteful.”

  The 1940 Michigansian yearbook features photos and verses about the Big People on Campus. They include Fielding Yost, the athletic director; Tom Harmon, the football star; and Elliott Maraniss: