A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Along with negotiating his way through delicate staffing issues, Tavenner in Tokyo had his first interaction with Russians, an experience that in various ways might have influenced how he dealt later with the communist threat in the United States. Although the U.S. and Soviet Union ostensibly were allies in the prosecution of the Japanese, their alliance was complicated by the onset of the cold war. It had been only a few weeks before Tavenner arrived in Japan that Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, warning of the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state and its controlling grip on Eastern Europe. During the war crime trials, Tavenner dealt often with his Soviet counterpart, Maj. Gen. A. N. Vasiliev. It was an uneasy relationship.

  Vasiliev expressed unhappiness over the American reluctance to charge the Japanese with resorting to biological warfare in China. The Soviets said they had plenty of witnesses; Tavenner and the American attorneys thought the evidence was insufficient. Tavenner expressed concern about the Russian cross-examination of a crucial witness, Ryukichi Tanaka, a Japanese general who testified on both sides at the trials, three times for the prosecution and twice for the defense. Tanaka was so important, Tavenner told Vasiliev in a memo, that they had to be more careful in questioning him, and perhaps even “stop the cross and just rely on his affidavit so there are no holes the defense can pick at.” Demonstrating his facility with diplomatic politesse, Tavenner concluded, “I have every confidence in your sagacious handling of the matter, but I am sure you will appreciate my concern over the turn the matter could take.”

  As the trials dragged on, interest in them dissipated back in the States. Tavenner was reminded of this in a letter he received from Samuel J. Pritchard, a banking official in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Pritchard’s son, Cpl. B. W. Pritchard of the 770th Bombardment Squadron, on a B-29 bombing mission over Japan, had been shot down and captured in May 1945 and was executed by the Japanese that July, a month before their surrender. “I have followed all of the newspapers and magazines available trying to learn something of the prosecution of criminals in Japan for war crimes and I have found practically none,” the elder Pritchard wrote. “I am afraid the press has lost some of its interest in this subject. However, I am interested beyond words and will have to appeal to you for information.” He hoped Tavenner could tell him the names and addresses of the people responsible for the killing of his son and what penalties they would receive, and when. Tavenner made inquiries and told the father that, although this case and many others were being handled separately from the tribunal, he had heard that a trial involving his son’s execution might begin in a few months. He also provided the father with a list of members of the B-29 crew, including two who were returned alive after the war.

  Tavenner delivered the final summation at the tribunal on April 18, 1948. “These defendants were not mere automatons, they were no replaceable cogwheels in a machine, they were not playthings of fate caught in a maelstrom of destiny from which there was no extraction,” he told the court. “These men were the brains of an empire. They were the leaders of the nation’s destiny, a symbol of evil throughout the world. They made their choice; for this choice they must bear the guilt.”

  In the end, twenty-five defendants were convicted of war crimes. Of the other three, one was found insane and the other two had died in prison. Seven of the guilty, including Tojo, were sentenced to death.

  Tavenner returned to Woodstock to practice law and run his apple orchards for a year. Then he was hired by Chairman John Stephens Wood to serve as chief counsel for the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  20

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  Foley Square

  GEORGE CROCKETT SAT in the federal courthouse at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan on the opening day of one of the seminal free speech trials of twentieth-century American history. This was in 1949, at 10:43 on the morning of January 17. The Detroit lawyer was there as a defense counsel representing Carl Winter, who also came from Detroit and was one of eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA charged with conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. What happened at the Foley Square trial in New York not only provided context for the hearings where Crockett defended my father three years later; it helped define the larger framework of the Red Scare.

  The opening day scene crackled with tension. Thousands of protesters crowded into the nearby square, chanting and waving signs: “Hitler Began by Jailing Communists: Remember What Happened?” and “First Communists, Then Unions, Are You Next?” Inside the courthouse, Room No. 1 was brimming, half the seats taken by a press corps eager to chronicle this legal reckoning for men deemed to be enemies of the state. A phalanx of four hundred New York City policemen ringed the building inside and out. Federal judge Harold R. Medina wanted the police there for protection and to ensure there were no untoward incidents, but when Crockett first addressed the bench as part of a defense motion to have the officers removed, he said they represented an attempt at intimidation.

  There was no difference, he argued, between the atmosphere surrounding this trial and the infamous Scottsboro trial of 1931, when nine young black men in Alabama were falsely accused of raping two white women. “I know exactly what happens when a trial is held under conditions resembling mob conditions,” Crockett said. “I am convinced, and I think the court should be convinced, that a mob is no less a mob merely because it is clothed in uniform and has a pistol on the side.”

  The cops stayed, but the remark revealed Crockett on many levels. It set the tone for the audacious manner in which he would argue for the defense for the nine-month duration of the trial, and it also underscored the reason he took the case in the first place. To Crockett, in one way or another, it came back to the issue of race. He knew from the moment he decided to represent Winter that many people would think he was a communist, which he was not. While he understood that appearing sympathetic to communists could damage his reputation, he had never been overly concerned with his image or popularity. He thought there was a direct connection between the constitutional rights of free speech and the free association of American communists and African Americans, two outsider groups vulnerable to majority repression. He saw American communists consistently supporting the rights of black citizens at a time when many other groups would not, including the key role they played in defense of the Scottsboro Nine. On a personal level, he viewed his involvement in the Foley Square trial as an expression of freedom and possibility; at the time, there were few opportunities for black lawyers to work on national cases beyond the realm of racial discrimination. Even if he was invited onto the defense team largely because of his race, not despite it, he thought his participation would mark another step forward.

  The case began with the indictment of the Communist Party leadership on July 20, 1948, by a grand jury in the southern district of New York on charges based on the Alien Registration Act of 1940. This law was commonly known as the Smith Act, in recognition of its sponsor, Virginia congressman Howard W. Smith, a conservative Democrat who opposed civil rights, organized labor, and much of the New Deal. Along with requiring all noncitizen adults to register with the federal government, the Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government through speech, publication, or association. It was the first American law since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make the spreading of ideas a crime, regardless of whether action followed advocacy.

  The first prosecution under the act came in 1941 and, among other things, revealed the situational hypocrisy of American communists. Leftist labor leaders in Teamsters Local 544 in Minneapolis were charged with advocating the overthrow of capitalism by force and violence if necessary. The communist hierarchy in the U.S. had no problems with this prosecution—heartily supported it, in fact—because the defendants were members of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, who were Stalin’s bitter enemies, and therefore theirs as well. It was only a year earlier that Trotsky had been assassinated, fatally attacked
with an ice axe by one of Stalin’s agents during his exile in Mexico. Other Smith Act trials came in 1942, against racist and anti-Semitic groups, and in 1944, against pro-fascists, but those efforts failed for reasons ranging from weak prosecution arguments to the death of a judge.

  The Foley Square trial was the first time the Smith Act was used against the Communist Party. Dozens of Smith Act trials would follow over the next several years as local and state communist leaders were targeted around the country, one of the many manifestations of the Red Scare. Foley Square was in every respect a product of its time. President Truman, a Democrat, was seeking election when the indictments were handed down and did not want to appear soft on communism, a charge Republicans had been making with increasing political effectiveness since the onset of the cold war. The same grand jury that indicted the communist leaders had been hearing sensational testimony in a separate proceeding from a former Soviet spy, Elizabeth Bentley, who laid out in detail the inner workings of the CPUSA and the manipulative intentions of the totalitarian Soviet Union in its dealings with American leftists, whether they were willing conspirators or unwitting dupes.

  Month by month as the Foley Square trial proceeded, the Red threat seemed more ominous. China went communist. The Soviets exploded a nuclear device. Alger Hiss was tried for perjury down the hall in the same federal building, charges that stemmed from his testimony at a HUAC hearing in Washington where Representative Richard Nixon had pressed him to deny that he had served as a Soviet contact during his years as a top diplomat in the State Department. The mood of the American public was hardening against pinkos and commies and commie lovers. It was in that heated atmosphere that Crockett took to the defense.

  * * *

  THE INDEPENDENT STREAK started with his surname. During slavery, the family name was the same as the Delaware slaveholders who owned them, Blodgett. With emancipation came a self-assigned new name, Crockett. George William Crockett Jr. was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1909. His namesake and father was a carpenter for the Atlantic Coast Line railroad, an ordained Baptist minister, and leader of the Black Elks of Florida. In personal characteristics, the son was more like his mother, Minnie Jenkins Crockett, a diminutive woman who wrote poetry, organized a preschool nursery, and was considered “strong-willed and pugnacious.”

  George was small in stature, eloquent in speech, and determined to follow his own path. He won a Kappa Alpha Psi scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he gained recognition as an outstanding debater, was elected president of his class the first three years and student council president as a senior, wrote for the school newspaper, and served as a varsity cheerleader. When a Morehouse professor asked him what he wanted to be, he answered without hesitation, “A United States congressman.” After graduating, he joined the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union and waited tables aboard ships sailing to South America and back. Then he left the Jim Crow–segregated South for the de facto segregated North as one of only two black students in a class of three hundred admitted to the University of Michigan Law School in 1931. He chose Michigan because tuition was $150 a year, compared to $500 a year at Harvard. Until his law school days in Ann Arbor, he had never been in a courtroom. Unless forced to, he explained, people of his color “didn’t dare intrude in the white sanctuary of law.”

  Copies of the Michigan Daily during the three years Crockett was at law school there show that he was an active participant in student events. He was chairman of the Spring Parley in 1933 that focused on the topic “What is the purpose of education?” He led roundtable discussions among law students that year on the questions “Does the world want trained men?,” “Is democracy dead?,” and “Can there be a planned world society?” Also during that period, along with meeting his future wife, Ethelene Jones of Jackson, Michigan, Crockett befriended Willis Ward, a track and football star from Detroit who became the best-known African American at the university. One night in March 1934, Crockett and Ward visited nearby Ann Arbor High and led a symposium on “a critical survey of the problems confronting the Negro in the following fields: history, social progress, law, literature, public health, and education.” Who attended that symposium is lost to history, but I would not be surprised if some members of the Cummins family were there. The siblings Bob, Barbara, Phil, and Mary, my uncles and aunt and mother, all attended Ann Arbor High and at an early age were interested in issues of racial justice.

  The next fall, Ward experienced a sobering example of “problems confronting the Negro” in sports when the Michigan football team played a home game against Georgia Tech. The athletic director and coach at the school in Atlanta (only three miles from Morehouse, Crockett’s alma mater) made it clear when the game was scheduled that the team would not take the field if Ward played. White Georgia Tech athletes were not allowed to compete against black athletes. The Michigan administration seemed willing to bow to this racist pressure, prompting a vociferous protest on campus, an early marker in the radicalization of the student body during that era.

  There were petition drives, mass meetings, and an editorial in the Daily calling the Athletic Department either “astonishingly forgetful” for not realizing that it had an African American on its team or “extraordinarily stupid” for scheduling the game anyway and allowing Georgia Tech to dictate the terms. Bob Cummins and Arthur Miller were reporting for the Daily then, both covering and participating in the protests. Bob signed a petition along with 1,500 students and as a member of the leftist Vanguard Club was part of the Ward United Front Committee. Miller even tried to mediate the dispute by having one of his friends, a classmate from Arkansas, take him to a meeting with some of the Georgia Tech players. It did not go well, as Miller was told that they were inclined to kill Ward if he played. Ward’s best friend on the team, the center, Jerry Ford, the future president, later said that he threatened to quit unless his teammate played, but relented after talking to his coach and stepfather. In the end Ward, who followed his friend Crockett’s path to become a lawyer and judge, did not play, and carried a measure of disillusionment with him through the rest of his life.

  When he finished law school, Crockett faced a dilemma: Where and how to practice his profession? He knew there would be some opportunities for a black lawyer in the South, representing only black clients, but after a brief return to Florida he determined that he did not want to remain in that suffocating atmosphere. He settled on West Virginia, a border state that seemed to have a growing black awareness and that was recommended by his father-in-law, who had once served as a minister there. He and Ethelene moved to Fairmont, a city along the Monongahela River in the coal country just below the Pennsylvania border. The University of Michigan loaned him $150 so that he could get there, open an office, and survive for a month. He found a mentor in U.S. Senator Matthew M. Neely, who had a law practice in Fairmont and had once been the city’s mayor. Until Crockett reached West Virginia, he had considered himself a Lincoln Republican. Now he evolved into a New Deal Democrat. He also became a civil rights activist, on the local level as the president of the NAACP chapter, and on the national level as a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild, the first racially integrated bar association. With Senator Neely’s help, he eventually made the move to a more influential setting than Fairmont, taking a job with the federal government in Washington.

  In the first of many firsts, he became the first black staff lawyer at the U.S. Department of Labor, helping to pave the way for others. He specialized in employee lawsuits filed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. After rising to senior attorney status there, but hearing that he likely never would be promoted to chief of section because a black man could not oversee so many white lawyers, he switched to a job with more direct impact fighting institutional racism: as a hearing examiner for the Fair Employment Practices Commission. One of his cases took him to Detroit to deal with the employment of blacks in the city’s transportation agency, the Department of Street Railways, and on a train ride back to Washington he fe
ll into a long conversation with a fellow passenger. The other man was white and surprised Crockett by showing great interest in his work dealing with discrimination in the workplace. When the conversation came around to racial difficulties in labor unions, his companion told him who he was: R. J. Thomas, president of the United Auto Workers. Thomas told Crockett how essential black workers had been in organizing at the Ford plant and how concerned he was about growing racial intolerance and tension in working-class Detroit. Racial animosity had spilled into violence during the race riots of 1943 and ensuing “hate strikes” by white defense plant workers who opposed the integration of their workplaces.

  His chance encounter with Thomas on the train led to Crockett’s return to Michigan to head the UAW’s Fair Employment Practices Committee. He and Ethelene and their two children moved into a house on Detroit’s West Side on a street named American.

  While working for the UAW, Crockett also wrote columns for Detroit’s black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle. Two of his columns from 1945 show the contours of his political and sociological thinking. In an essay he wrote on March 17 he denounced the “separate but equal” status that whites imposed in the southern states with the acquiescence of some black leaders and instead championed a universal perspective. “For myself,” he wrote, “I have never regarded race consciousness or race pride as a particular virtue, and I am hopeful that more and more Americans will become less and less race conscious. Hitler and his followers should be an example to these extreme race chauvinists. The sooner we begin to think, act, and react as Americans and not as hyphenated Americans, the sooner we shall find that common basis of understanding and partnership which is a prerequisite for America’s race and color problem. The phrase ‘our people’ had no racial connotation for me. Indeed, all Americans, all humanity, constitute my people.”