A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  For the title of “Most

  Misunderstood Man”

  We nominate Elliott M.

  The Ace has been roast

  Ed and put on the pan

  For more things than we can remem

  Ber. Some say that he gets

  His pay check direct

  From Moscow, all signed in red ink,

  And some would lay bets

  That the rumor’s correct

  That the Ace is the true missing link.

  SOMETHING ODD HAPPENED at the Daily offices one afternoon that semester that was described by Elliott’s former roommate, Morton Linder, in his “Morty Q.” column: “The outside editorial office was fairly busy getting the editorial material ready and the page laid out. Typewriters were clicking and voices were buzzing. . . . In barges some red-faced guy with a tripod and a camera which he proceeds to set up. He looks around the room and wants to know where is Petersen or Maraniss? I’m Maraniss, says the Ace coming out from behind his hair in the corner. The photo-flub looks at him with that watcha-trying-to-hand-me look and says: Gowan, you ain’t Maraniss. Whereupon he is assured by those in the room that if it isn’t Maraniss it’s a damn good imitation. But the guy is sure. So he gathers his stuff and barges out, sneering that he knows Maraniss when he sees him.”

  Was it a ruse? A joke? The FBI? The answer is lost to history. But the phrase “he knows Maraniss when he sees him” is what jumped out at me. Did I know this young Maraniss when I saw him? Did I recognize my father when I studied his actions and writings during that period long before I was born, when he was young and brilliant and searching for meaning?

  Sometimes, yes—in his idealism and his evocation of Emerson and Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Louis Brandeis, and Richard Wright and the yearning for a better America. At other times, I found myself muttering, like the mysterious photo-flub, “Go on!”

  12

  * * *

  Fear and Loathing

  AS THE ACE of the copydesk, my father excelled at rewriting a lead, or lede, as the word came to be spelled in the newspaper business. Now, after Bereniece Baldwin named him at the HUAC hearing, he became not the rewriter of a lede but the subject of one. “The House un-American Activities Committee has left town, but reverberations are still being felt,” began a story in the Detroit Free Press. “Latest to feel the sting of investigations into Communist activities in Detroit was Elliott Maraniss, a copyreader, who was fired by the Detroit Times.” The story included a photograph of him, a tiny headshot that appeared in all three city papers over the weekend.

  At the time this happened, we lived in a brick bungalow at 7735 Beaverland, out near Rouge Park. I was only two and had no idea about my father’s firing. My sister Jean, who was five, does not remember being affected by it. But Jim, the oldest sibling, knew what was going on. He was almost seven and attended Ann Arbor Trail elementary school. “I remember being told by a kid down the block on Beaverland that my dad was a communist,” Jim recalled. “He could scarcely have been accused of anything worse, I knew that. The atmosphere was replete with fear and loathing of communism. When I went home, whimpering, and Dad asked me what the matter was, I replied that someone said my father was a communist. Dad told me he wasn’t. Then he asked me if it would matter if he were. I said no. (What was I going to say?) From that moment, or before that, I felt emotionally allied with my ‘subversive’ parents.”

  I cannot say for certain why our father responded that way to Jim. Did he tell the fib out of shame, or anger, or because he did not want to frighten or alarm his precocious and vulnerable oldest child, whom he loved dearly? Most likely some combination of the three. In any case, I understand it. Every family has secrets, subjects that are difficult to confront head-on, and this was ours. It would reverberate in different ways from then on for all of us.

  * * *

  THERE WAS MORE to come, in ten days, when the committee would return for another round of hearings from March 10 to 12, including the day when Elliott was scheduled to testify. The story of “Reds on Doorstep,” as one headline put it, dominated local news. The only event drawing comparable attention was an upcoming boxing match at Detroit Olympia between Gene Hairston and Jake (Raging Bull) LaMotta, former middleweight champion of the world, a local fan favorite who fought more than twenty times in Detroit over the years, including two bouts against his archrival, Sugar Ray Robinson. The press was clamoring for another knockout against the commies—and lobbying for a wider audience. Front-page editorials accompanied petitions that readers were instructed to cut out and send to Congress urging them to “televise the Red hearings!” “Public hearings of committees of Congress are the business of all the public. The people of Detroit are deeply and understandably concerned over the presence of Communists in their midst,” a Detroit News editorial asserted. “They want to know who the accused Communists are and what they are doing. They want to hear and see these persons for themselves.”

  Elliott was not the only witness who had been identified and punished, if not seen on television. Ten Detroiters named by Baldwin or other informants had been summarily fired already. The Detroit Housing Commission served eviction notices on two tenants identified as communists, including Billy Allan, the Detroit correspondent for the Daily Worker, whose family was uprooted from Herman Gardens, a public housing project where they had lived in a forty-six-dollars-a-month two-bedroom apartment. A young stenographer in the city purchasing department was fired after being named, and a doctor was dropped from a referral list for injured city workers. There seemed to be no love lost between blue-collar factory workers and their Red proletarian colleagues. Refusing to work on the assembly line with communists, workers staged walkouts at Dodge Main, Zenith Carburetor, and Midland Steel.

  Editorials and letters to the editor bemoaned the fact that witnesses at the hearings could cite their Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer the committee’s questions. “Most Detroiters were indignant that witnesses suspected of subversive affiliation could get away with this so blithely,” lamented the Detroit Times. At the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, lawmakers drafted legislation calling for mandatory two-year prison terms for communists who failed to register their affiliation with the state police, and another bill that would kick the party off the state election ballot. In Ann Arbor, University of Michigan officials banned a scheduled appearance before the campus civil liberties committee by Arthur McPhaul, who was described as an “uncooperative witness at last week’s communist probe in Detroit.” It was only the third time in university history that a speaker had been banned.

  Barnes Constable, a reporter at Elliott’s collegiate newspaper, the Michigan Daily, had traveled to Detroit to cover the hearings, and wrote a nuanced summation during the break under the headline “Double Hysteria.” Constable thought the witnesses and groups under attack had utilized tactics similar to the committee itself, “perpetuating hysteria” by using “emotional clichés” in describing the hearings as a smear and a witch hunt. But he concluded, “It takes no emotion to point out that the committee has proved nothing worthwhile to date; that it has, inevitably, failed to corroborate by testimony data compiled by the FBI; that it has provided sensational copy for the slanted accounts of Motor City newspapers; that it has exiled its subpoenaed witnesses from a secure existence; that it has virtually outlawed the Communist Party with no statutory basis. These are the facts. A fair-minded journalist is obliged to point them out—again and again. The average American is not so stupid that he can’t recognize them—unless he is hemmed in by hysterical rantings on both sides of the fence.”

  There was another political angle to the Detroit hearings, a more familiar party dispute between Democrats and Republicans. Michigan’s governor G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams tried to walk a fine line, saying the committee’s exposure of communists was “of great value to the cause of Americanism.” But he was critical of one committee member, Republican Charles Potter, who was hunting down un-Americans at the same time tha
t he was preparing to run for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. According to Williams, Potter was engaging in “political mud-slinging” and “attempting to make political capital for himself out of the work of the committee.” There was no doubt about that latter assessment. Radio stations in Potter’s constituency in northern Michigan carried his weekly broadcast. His reports aired on WMBN in Petoskey on Thursdays and then could be heard in Soo, Escanaba, Alpena, Marinette, Rogers City, and Gaylor at various times over the weekend. In the week between committee sessions, his broadcast was all about the hearings in Detroit.

  Potter said he was “appalled to discover that the communist set up” in Michigan was one of the most extensive HUAC had uncovered. “It is natural to assume that the Communist Party will do everything possible to infiltrate and intensify their efforts in Michigan, Michigan being the arsenal of democracy,” he said. “But even knowing that Michigan was a great prize for the Communist Party, we never realized that they had been as successful as they have been. For example, so far in the investigation we have discovered there are eighty-six communist groups in Michigan. Most of these are in the Detroit area. The groups vary in size, but normally will average around 150 per group. As you can well imagine, their main effort was to infiltrate the defense industry, and most of their activity has been with various labor unions. However, we have also discovered that they have eleven professional groups, made up of editors, lawyers, doctors, and white-collared workers.”

  * * *

  ON THE DAY the hearings resumed, word came from Washington that the U.S. Supreme Court, after three years of appeals through the federal courts, had upheld the convictions on contempt charges of the lawyers who represented the eleven imprisoned Communist Party leaders at the 1949 Foley Square trial. This was unwelcome news for George Crockett. The Supreme Court ruling meant that Elliott’s lawyer soon would be serving time in a federal penitentiary.

  That night, two women arrived in Detroit from Washington to lend moral support to John Stephens Wood. A photograph of them appeared in the Detroit News the next day under the cutline “THE FAMILY OF RED INQUIRY CHAIRMAN. Chatting with Rep. Wood, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, are his wife and his daughter, Mrs. Bobbie Gollner, of Salisbury, Md. Mrs. Gollner, mother of a 10-month old son, was widowed when Navy Lieut. Joseph H. Gollner was shot down over Korea. The women were visitors at the committee hearing in the Federal Building Tuesday.”

  Joe Gollner was twenty-four when he died. His son would never know him, and his wife and in-laws barely did. He and Bobbie Wood had met at a dance at the Naval Academy, where he was a member of the class of 1949 and she was among a group of women visiting from the Delta Delta Delta sorority at the University of Maryland. Joe was a dashing young midshipman known to fraternity mates at Sigma Chi as “the Count.” He competed on the water polo team, loved music and parties, and “could play the drums like Krupa.” He graduated from Annapolis in 1949 and went off to flight school in Pensacola, where he and Bobbie became engaged. They were married in her hometown of Canton, Georgia, on November 11, Armistice Day, and soon he was gone to another war overseas. He flew with the VF-54 fighter squadron based on the USS Essex aircraft carrier plying the waters off Korea’s northeast coast. Another aviator running missions off the Essex then was Neil Armstrong, the future astronaut who eighteen years later would become the first man on the moon. Also aboard for a time was James Michener, gathering string for what would become his Korean war novel, The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

  At 12:35 on the afternoon of January 11, 1951, Gollner roared off the Essex for the last time. Takeoff seemed normal. Everything after that was not. According to an after-action report, he “jettisoned 1 one-thousand bomb then climbed abruptly to about 900 ft., made three shallow turns to the right, the last turn steepened into a nose down diving spiral. The plane sank immediately after striking the water. Two helicopters conducted a fruitless search for the pilot. No radio transmissions were received from the pilot at any time. Cause unknown.”

  Fourteen months later, his widow came to Detroit and posed with her mother for a Detroit News photographer outside Room 740. Wood is wearing a suit and white shirt, a floral tie settling over his protruding belly. He is saying something to his wife, in the middle of the picture, who seems to be holding an unlit cigarette in her right hand. Bobbie, a striking young woman with dark hair and high cheekbones, stands to the side, staring at her father.

  There is nothing extraordinary about the scene, a moment captured and soon forgotten, yet it had a deeper meaning to me when I came across it more than six decades later. The untold story of the couple in that photo is that Wood’s wife was there mostly for show, that she never thought her husband, chairman of the committee hunting for un-Americans, was American enough after she found out about his Cherokee blood. It was Bobbie Gollner’s infant son who many decades later would share the story of his grandparents’ chilly relationship, an estrangement they hid from the rest of the world. The photo became another artifact for me, like the imperfect S in my father’s written statement to the committee, taking me back to an anxious time and place. It provoked a swirl of emotions about lives intersecting in the stream of American history, about family and security and fragility and patriotism and war—and my older brother, Jim, coming home quivering because a kid down the block called our dad a communist.

  — PART TWO —

  In a Time of War

  13

  * * *

  Something in the Wind

  ELLIOTT WAS STATIONED at a military base in the British West Indies when he wrote a letter home to Mary on June 4, 1942, describing the peculiar meteorological patterns of the Caribbean: “Once again the sun is shining brightly—a hot, brilliant, directly overhead sun. How long it will last is another matter. One thing about the rain here that is different from anyplace else: you can see it coming. It starts over in the mountains, which suddenly become gray and dark, then it moves along the ground and sky, kicking up the dust, until it reaches the spot where you are standing.”

  Although Elliott was not aiming for metaphor, the weather report fit his life. Rainstorms distant, but all seemed sunny overhead. Just that week a cherished gift arrived in a letter from Mary: a lock of her strawberry-blond hair. “It was almost as if my sweet Mary herself had fallen out of that envelope,” he wrote. “Right into my lap.”

  He had enlisted in the army two weeks after Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, leaving behind his young wife and a job on the copydesk at the Detroit Times. Service number 0-1585810. After basic training at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, he was shipped to Trinidad, a tropical island off the Venezuelan coast, and assigned to base operations at Edinburgh Field, a bustling new air base handling the overflow of Air Transport Command aircraft headed for nearby Waller Field. He was a private doing the work of a sergeant, learning air traffic regulations and procedures and acquiring a “thorough knowledge of types of aircraft of all nations.” The two sergeants in his unit were on furlough, leaving Elliott on call day and night. “I like the work a great deal and I am continually learning more about it, but it’s a big responsibility and I have to be on the ball all the time,” he confided to Mary. “Perhaps this month another rating will come through. I’m not worried, though, and if the Operations officer thinks I can handle the work, even though I’m only a Pfc, and the job calls for a master sergeant, then it’s OK with me.”

  One of his friends from their days at the University of Michigan, George Mutnick, was also stationed at the Edinburgh base. They had made the sea voyage together, sailing to Trinidad in February from New Orleans, where they had been seen off by their wives, the double-M girls, Mary Maraniss and Margie Mutnick, who shared an apartment on Gladstone Street on Detroit’s West Side. This allowed the husbands to swap letters from home to get more news about their wives. “It is a great comfort to know that I have an additional source of information about you,” Elliott wrote. “Margie wrote Geo to tell me that you look very beautiful in your new haircut
and that you are wearing short skirts that show off your beautiful legs. She says that you are all making an effort to look especially nice, although it seems to me it isn’t very much of an effort for girls like you and Margie to look beautiful. You must spend half your time chasing all the boys away. Just out of curiosity, how do you spend your spare time, anyway?”

  Elliott and George spent what spare time they had wandering over to nearby Port of Spain, the island’s principal city. One night in town they went to the movie house and saw The Invaders. Elliott’s review: “A dandy picture about the adventures of six members of a crew of a U-Boat who land in Canada and try to make their way into the United States. It was a very good portrayal of the psychology of the Nazis, and all-in-all it was very well acted, directed, and written. It had some remarkable shots of the Canadian Arctic, the Northwest, the wheatlands, farmers, soldiers etc.” On the way to and from the cinema, Elliott took note of the ambiance of Port of Spain, reinforcing his affinity for what he called salt-of-the-earth people. “It is a dirty, dingy town, as you might have expected. Like all other tropical cities, the streets are filled with vendors and beggars. The people are very poor. As far as I can determine they feel no resentment against American troops. In fact, they credit the arrival of Americans as the cause of some slight increases in their standard of living recently. They are a keen-witted, social-minded people.”

  Elliott occasionally found time to play baseball, his favorite sport, with a fellow soldier he identified only as Ed in letters home. “Ed and I hauled out a couple of gloves and a baseball and let fly at each other with all our speed from fifteen feet. I get a lot of fun out of that, as does Ed, and we stand there for hours trying to knock each other down. Ed was a crackerjack semi-pro ball player in Chicago, who like me, was out of shape when he joined the army. Some afternoons when we are both off we get a bat and ball and hit long flies to each other. The only trouble is that we both would rather hit than field.”