A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

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  JOHN STEPHENS WOOD was a man of second chances, with Congress and with the committee. He served two separate stretches in the House. The first had been brief, lasting only two terms, curtailed by the 1934 primary, when he was defeated by Frank Whelchel, a judge from Gainesville. Wood won the popular vote, but Georgia primaries then operated on a unit system somewhat comparable to the Electoral College for presidential elections. Each county was treated as a unit, and the candidate who won the most counties in the district was declared the winner. Whelchel won by carrying two more counties than Wood, one by only a few votes. That might seem undemocratic and un-American, but every aspect of Georgia voting then was undemocratic at a deeper level, when black citizens could not even participate in the White Primary. Wood went home to Canton and practiced law for a decade until Whelchel retired, then ran for his old seat in 1944 and won in a three-way primary, which in one-party Georgia meant he was back.

  He returned to Washington, nearing age sixty, just in time to help resuscitate HUAC. It had been a temporary committee since its inception, but Wood voted with the majority to establish it as a permanent House body in 1945. By July of that year he had been made chairman in “Rankin’s Coup,” so called because when a northern Democrat stepped down from the chairmanship due to ill health, Rankin orchestrated a coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans to put Wood, a fellow southerner, in charge. When the GOP gained control of the House in 1947, Wood was out of the chair for two years, before returning in 1949.

  One of his first hires in his second ascension was a new chief counsel, Frank S. Tavenner, the Virginia lawyer, apple grower, beneficiary of the commonwealth’s conservative Byrd machine, former federal prosecutor, and counsel at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Tavenner arrived with a reputation for being organized and imperturbable. One committee watcher, otherwise critical of HUAC, called him “perhaps the best-qualified and most dispassionate assistant it ever had.”

  When Tavenner took the job in May 1949, one of his first tasks was to examine how witnesses cited their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions about their past. Committee members and staffers believed taking the Fifth was a dodge, that it implied guilt in fact if not in law. At Wood’s direction, Tavenner tried to figure out ways the committee could hold witnesses in contempt for citing the Fifth as they were able to do for those, like the Hollywood Ten, who refused to testify by citing their First Amendment rights to free speech and association.

  The merits of Fifth Amendment protections and what they meant became a debate topic for editorial boards around the nation. Among the more thoughtful perspectives came from the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger in Indiana under the headline “Does Silence in the Face of an Accusation Indicate Guilt?” It was human nature to assume that it does, the editorial stated. “Probably human nature is only finding expression, then, when Congressman John S. Wood of Georgia, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, says that committee witnesses who refuse to say whether they are communists will be presumed to be such. This is the conclusion which most outside observers probably draw about any witness who refuses to answer the question, ‘Are you now or were you ever a communist?’ on the grounds of self-incrimination. As an individual conclusion it is a natural one. It is a conclusion which is not permitted in a court of law, however. The committee members are entitled to be human in their own thinking, but should be careful of the basis for public condemnation.”

  During Wood’s brief first run as chairman, as America was adjusting to the postwar era, HUAC was relatively quiet, but the second go-round was different, as the committee went looking for un-Americans around the country. With investigators doing the groundwork and Tavenner preparing the questioning, the committee held 108 hearings that filled up thirty-five volumes of testimony during the Eighty-first Congress in 1949 and 1950, and picked up even more intensity during the following two years of the Eighty-second Congress, which was played out against the backdrop of American troops being killed by Korean and Chinese communist forces in the Korean War. During that time the committee also issued several substantial reports, including a study of Soviet espionage in the U.S. titled The Shameful Years and a voluminous Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications.

  The committee’s work supplemented a network of federal programs designed to identify and track American communists and suspicious organizations. The FBI maintained a security index of individuals to be rounded up in case of a national emergency. Since President Truman signed Executive Order 9835 in March 1947, the Justice Department maintained its own list of subversive groups, a list that was often used to isolate political organizations. Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War were targeted twice; both the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and one of its outgrowths, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, were labeled subversive. Among other things, the groups were required to register as foreign agents and submit membership lists to the government.

  Truman’s Executive Order also set in motion a requirement that all federal workers take loyalty oaths, with background checks for those suspected of having communist sympathies. Year by year thereafter, state and local governments and educational institutions added their own versions of loyalty oaths as the fear of communist subversion intensified. In Birmingham, Alabama, the town fathers ordered all communists to get out of town. In Jacksonville, Florida, it became a crime to confer with a Red or former Red. In part because of all that, but for a host of other reasons—disillusionment with the Soviet Union, the fighting in Korea, weariness, political transformation—the estimated number of CPUSA members diminished, by 1950 down to 31,609 out of a national population of slightly more than 150 million.

  When Dies and Rankin were on the committee, many congressmen might rather have served anywhere else, but that changed once the bigoted rabble-rousers departed. The committee seemed less of an embarrassing backwater, and the fight against communism felt more relevant and politically prestigious. When an opening was created at the start of 1951, twenty Republican members of the House were considered for the post. It went to Charles E. Potter.

  For Potter, it had been a long road back from the near-fatal injuries he suffered fighting against Nazi troops in France’s Colmar Pocket. After a doctor at an army field hospital at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges removed his left leg at the hip bone and sawed off his right leg above the ankle, Potter had been evacuated on the U.S. Hospital Ship Thistle, a converted troop carrier, across the Atlantic to the port of Charleston, South Carolina, and transported by train from there for recuperation at McCloskey General Hospital in Temple, Texas. Soon he was shipped up to Percy Jones General Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he underwent an orchidectomy to remove a damaged testicle and a more precise amputation, his right leg removed to within a few inches of the knee. The hospital in Battle Creek was overloaded with men suffering from grievous limb wounds. Among them were several who later made their way to Washington and called themselves the Percy Jones Alumni Club: Bob Dole of Kansas, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, and Phil Hart of Michigan, a Democrat who thirteen years later effectively ended Potter’s political career by defeating him in a U.S. Senate race.

  Potter was fitted with an artificial left leg at Percy Jones and went home to Cheboygan on crutches, but his recovery was not over. Finding the most effective artificial right leg proved much more difficult, and for that he was sent to Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, where he stayed for more than a year. While at Walter Reed, he began working as a vocational training rehabilitation adviser at the Department of Labor, helping state and local agencies respond to the needs of handicapped veterans and other disabled persons. He was still in the hospital in 1947 when he coauthored a booklet on the subject, A Community Program for the Rehabilitation of the Severely Disabled.

  Two months later, with two artificial legs in place, Potter began his own program of a different sort. When the incumbent congressman in his Michigan
district died, Potter resigned from his federal job and went home to run in the special election for the vacant House seat. He campaigned on an “Americanism” platform opposing communism and calling for better benefits for war veterans. Newspaper headlines called him the “legless GI.” His campaign ads listed his honors: Silver Star, French Croix de Guerre, Purple Heart with two clusters, five major battle stars. His campaign slogan: “This man gave two legs for his country. Won’t you give him one vote?”

  Potter won the election in a landslide and returned to Washington. Leadership gave him an office in the Capitol Building to make it easier for him to reach the House floor. “There wasn’t any use protesting that I could make better speed than many of them, even with my store-bought legs and canes,” he once said. With his receding hairline cut into a curlicue businessman’s mohawk, his translucent-framed glasses, and midwestern nasal drone, Potter came across as the quintessential Main Street Republican, cautious in foreign affairs but not isolationist, anti-union and pro-business, a habitual smoker and joiner if not the backroom sort. Along with Richard Nixon and Don Jackson from California and Michigan colleague Gerald Ford, he was a founding member of one of Capitol Hill’s most exclusive informal political fraternities, the Chowder and Marching Club, composed of young Republican lawmakers who had served in the war. They started meeting at five on Wednesday afternoons to talk and drink and plot legislation protecting veterans and fighting communism, and on special occasions wore hale-fellow outfits of striped aprons and poufy chef’s hats.

  By the time Potter gained appointment to HUAC, Nixon had left the committee and entered the Senate, but his Chowder pal Jackson, a former marine, was a member, and together the two young Republicans pushed Chairman Wood to embark on a vigorous traveling show in pursuit of American communists. They gained notice for reopening the hearings in Hollywood in 1951 and pressuring dozens of actors, directors, and screenwriters in the film industry to name names. Friends turned on friends, reputations were ruined on both sides, squealers and subversives, blacklists were compiled, jobs lost. As Red Scare historian Victor Navasky notes, the entertainment industry “posed the smallest threat to the security of the republic—either in theory or fact, yet yielded the greatest per capita number of citizen informers.” With every hearing, the committee gained status as American patriots.

  It was typical of newspapers to promote the comings and goings of HUAC as if it were a visiting big league ball club. In California, “Anti-Subversives Will Dine Here Sept. 18,” read a headline in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, boasting of a visit by Wood, Potter, Jackson, Tavenner, and company during a break in the second round of Hollywood hearings. The group was to be feted at a banquet in the Marine Room of the Wilton Hotel by chairmen of the local banks and fifty other prominent Long Beach businessmen. As a special tribute to Potter, arrangements were made for twenty patients from the local VA hospital to attend the banquet in wheelchairs.

  Potter called his campaign against the “diabolical philosophy” of communism the “greatest fight” of his lifetime, exceeding even his horribly costly battle against the Germans. He expressed frustration whenever a witness invoked the Fifth Amendment. As far as he was concerned, anyone who refused to answer whether he was a communist “by his very refusal admits he is one.” How any man or woman who loved this country could be a communist was beyond his understanding. It amazed him, he said, to discover that some of them came from “good American families.”

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  A Good American Family

  THE WINTER OF 1950, only a few days into the new year, midpoint of the twentieth century. Our family assembles for a photograph on the front steps of the house on Henry Street in the Burns Park neighborhood of Ann Arbor. The house number, 1402, is visible above our heads, a number that to me evokes time, place, history, sensibility. I look at this photograph and think about Representative Potter’s puzzlement that even people from “good American families” could be lured into something considered un-American.

  The Cummins family is a good American family. Andrew and Grace Cummins are surrounded by their five children, four in-laws, and ten grandchildren. Grandfather Cummins stares straight into the camera from middle right, the erect and pensive civil engineer. I’m the infant, barely four months old, protected in a bonnet, cradled one-handed by my southpaw father, who stands in the upper left, dark hair, deep-set eyes, tan trench coat, collar up. My mother, blond, smiling, wholesome, is center stage, warmed in fur. My parents are eleven years into their marriage and have three kids, ages five and under. My big brother, Jim, and big sister, Jean, are in the middle of the little rascal scrum on the snowy walk. Jim poses openmouthed; Jean looks with concern toward a nearby drama as Grandmother Cummins bends to console an unhappy cousin.

  Four of the men in the picture, my father and three uncles, served in World War II. Their wives worked on the home front. Only Uncle Phil, positioned next to my father in the back row, missed the war. His hospitalization for schizophrenia preceded it, and now, five years after its end, he is still living in a sanitarium in faraway Asheville, North Carolina. He must have come home for a holiday visit. My uncle Bob is in the back row, on the right, holding my cousin Sarah. His wife, Susan, is in the dark coat, head down, left hand to mouth, coughing. She would be dead from polio before year’s end, leaving Bob a widower with two little girls.

  All families are bent by burdens. The mental illness of Phil, the shocking death of Susan, various levels of depression in several relatives from grandfather on down—these wounds of life misshape ours. A. A. Cummins, born inside an earthen dugout cut into a hillside amid the wheat fields of north-central Kansas, has worked his way to success in his engineering business and drives a Cadillac, but his children and their spouses are not winning much bread. Their cars are run-down or borrowed or broken. They live in apartment flats and public housing and drink powdered milk and eat tongue and liver and chipped beef on toast.

  Hard times, but not miserable. The Cummins clan in this 1950 photograph is not torn by irreparable jealousies or misunderstandings. The in-laws feel lucky to be in the family embrace. Their intelligence and good manners have not changed since the three oldest Cummins siblings were honored as Best Citizens in the Evansville schools in 1928. There are no financial cheats or backstabbers. No one has been in jail. Bob broke a federal law as an idealistic college graduate when he misstated his intentions on his passport and went off to fight in Spain, but he did it for noble reasons. The adults are imperfect but peaceful, free of bigotry, pained by the misfortune of others. They believe in the Golden Rule. The children feel different from their peers and cling to each other, bound by blood and circumstance.

  It will be that way forever, just as it is that way in 1950, even as the Federal Bureau of Investigation shadows Bob and my father and confidential informants pass along their every move.

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  GO BACK THREE and a half years before the Henry Street family photograph, to May 14, 1946. It had been four months since Elliott received his honorable discharge from the army at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, having earned the rank of captain after four-plus years of service. In a letter from Korea, after the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender and after determining that he could be a leader, Elliott promised that he would go all out for the rest of his life for the things he believed and the people he loved. Now he was in Detroit again, at work on this day in mid-May, picking up where he had left off after Pearl Harbor, an ace rewrite man at the Detroit Times.

  He and Mary and Jimmy, their redheaded one-year-old, lived in a two-room apartment at 2023 Pingree Street. Apartment No. 23, on the third floor. The crib for Jimmy—“Squeezy,” Mary called him—was in the dinette beside the kitchen. Mary was at home on that May afternoon, writing a letter to her brother at the mental hospital. “The main disadvantage is it leaves Jimmy with no yard or lawn of his own to play in, and I have to get up and down to take him outside,” she wrote. “We’re hoping that a friend of Elliott’s on
the Times may be able to get us in at Herman Gardens [a public housing project on Joy Road on Detroit’s West Side]. That would be ideal. Elliott’s job at the Times continues, though he doesn’t like it because it’s a Hearst paper and he works on the financial page. He’s quite active in the Newspaper Guild here, which had needed transforming into a real CIO union.” Squeezy, she said, kept them home more than ever, but he was certainly worth it. As a matter of fact, “bitten by the baby bug,” they were expecting another child that fall, making the move to larger quarters more urgent.

  They did get out of the house twice recently, Mary added. The previous Saturday, they went to see Dark Is the Night, a 1945 Soviet movie directed by the Anglo-Russian filmmaker Boris Barnet. She provided her brother with a capsule review: “It depicted the aid the Soviet people gave the Red Air Force and army despite German terror. Like all Soviet pictures I have seen, the sincerity and truthfulness of the acting makes up for the inferior film techniques—or rather equipment. I think the actual filming is much more effective than the average film.” The day after watching the movie, they rode up to St. Clair Shores, “to the house of a fellow in my club. We roasted wienies, ate potato salad, etc. and had a pretty good time.”