A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  The wienie-roasting club she referred to was made up of communists. She had remained active in the Young Communist League during the war, and Elliott joined her when he got home, as the group was changing its name to American Youth for Democracy. The Detroit chairman of AYD was her brother Bob. It was Elliott’s choice to belong, of course, and he was no innocent; he had been deep into radical politics at the University of Michigan long before she was, but after reading his letters from Camp Lee and aboard the Cape Canso and from Okinawa and Korea, I wonder whether he might have gone in another direction in the aftermath of the war had it not been for his devotion to my mother. Maybe, maybe not. I say that without trying to criticize my mother. He just loved her that much, and I understand why.

  The Detroit Field Office of the FBI knew about the hot dog picnic. They knew Elliott’s every move. Special agents Watson, Lynch, Sullivan, Fletcher, Kast, Cook, Coghlan, Paxton, Heystek, Hyble, Kraus, Rose, Anderson, and Stewart had been watching Elliott since his return, as they would for the next six years, taking down addresses and license plate numbers, snooping outside offices, snapping photos, checking signatures, keeping notes, compiling lists, filing reports. They worked with thirty-nine confidential informants and the Detroit police Red Squad and other information gatherers who were identified in files by code as T-1 through T-39. Elliott Maraniss was File No. 100-14520. Character of Case: Security Matter—C. The C stood for “communist.”

  Following Elliott all of that first postwar May, the agents knew that he attended the Michigan CP May Day celebration in the ballroom of the Hotel Fort Wayne on Cass Avenue. An informant was there and reported that the guest speaker, Eugene Dennis, a member of the party’s national board, had spoken of the need to “liquefy existing injustices.” Such an explosive word, not quite as intimidating as “liquidate,” but still evoking violence. On May 17, three days after Mary wrote the letter to her brother, an informant reported that Elliott had “offered his services” to Billy Allan, the Detroit correspondent for the Daily Worker who intended to run for the Detroit City Council. A week later another informant saw Elliott working on a special edition of the Daily Worker that promoted Allan’s campaign. And on May 31 an FBI agent took note of a brief article in a leftist labor pamphlet, Wage Earner, stating that Elliott was at a meeting of a committee that talked about asking Marshall Field III, heir to the department store fortune, founder of what became the Chicago Sun-Times, and financial backer of Saul Alinsky, the radical organizer, to establish a liberal daily newspaper in Detroit.

  Newspapering, the written word, framing a story or argument, laying out a page or pamphlet—that was what Elliott knew best, did best, and seemed to care about most. In June a confidential informant told FBI agents that local party leaders wanted Elliott to take over as chairman of a youth chapter, but he rebuffed them, saying he would be more valuable “in the journalistic field.” In early August informants reported his presence at a meeting at the Twelve Horsemen Civic Center, a banquet hall at Erskine and John R Streets, where the subject again was launching a leftist newspaper, this time a weekly. By fall, plans for the paper were being finalized. It was to be called the Michigan Herald and would be published by the People’s Educational and Publishing Association. Billy Allan and Hugo Beiswenger, a top CP official in Detroit, would be on the masthead. Subscription rates would be three dollars for a year, with an introductory rate of only one dollar for six months. Elliott would take a leave from the Times to help the launch. He would serve as chief rewrite man, in essence writing much of the copy, either without a byline or under someone else’s byline, and do much of the editing, though he would not be responsible for assigning stories.

  Volume 1, number 1, of the Herald came out on January 12, 1947. Beiswenger wrote a story criticizing Republican Kim Sigler, just sworn in as Michigan’s new governor, for focusing his inaugural address on the dangers of communism, saying Sigler might better have talked about affordable housing. An editorial noted that Walter Reuther and other leading liberals, including Joseph Lash and Reinhold Niebuhr, had just founded Americans for Democratic Action as a means of countering communist influence on the left. The paper lamented what it called “red-baiting” by “those who claim to be part of the progressive camp.” What America needed most was a united progressive coalition that included labor, farmers, blacks, women, veterans, the middle class, and young people, and “naturally, any such combination which is democratically organized will have communists in it.”

  The most compelling feature in that first edition was the unveiling of a sports column. “Forgive me if we bust a few buttons on our vest,” the editor’s note said. The columnist was Eddie Tolan, a world-renowned track star who had won gold medals in the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where Damon Runyan called him the world’s fastest human. Tolan, whose nickname was the Midnight Express, graduated from Cass Tech in Detroit and the University of Michigan, but his luck ran out almost immediately after his Olympic success, and by the time the Herald commissioned him as a columnist he had struggled through a dreary slog of low-paying jobs and had soured on the American Dream. In his inaugural column, he said he had become convinced that athletics revealed “the policy of a nation . . . towards a given people.” In this case, black people.

  It is common for athletes, politicians, and other celebrities to put their names on columns for which they offer general subjects and a few anecdotes but which they do not write. My father never told me that he ghostwrote Eddie Tolan’s On the Mark column, but he never told me he did not. He never told me anything about the Michigan Herald. Safe to put it this way: Eddie Tolan seemed to write a lot like Elliott Maraniss, whose newspaper stories I read and studied over many decades. I could feel his presence in the sentences, whether he was being clear and analytical or sentimental and colloquial. Many of the columns focused on the racial pioneering of the first black player in organized baseball. The greatest sporting achievement of 1946, Tolan said in his first column, “belonged to Jackie Robinson, the second-sacker for the Montreal Royals of the International League. . . . It would not be stretching the point to say it was the most notable achievement of life in general in 1946.”

  The opening of the 1947 season marked the historic moment when Robinson, playing first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the color barrier in the major leagues. Tolan was there, and the story that he—and my father, I presume—put together afterward for the Herald began like this:

  EBBETS FIELD, BROOKLYN, NY. APRIL 14—History was made here in old Ebbets Field today. It will always be one of the grandest memories of my life that I was on the scene when Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first Negro player in the major leagues.

  Not only sports fans but every friend of democracy in the United States felt that a great and significant victory of the people was achieved when Jackie trotted out to first sack today. He was greeted with a tremendous roar from the crowd which had come to see his debut and to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers open the season against the Boston Braves.

  I was interested in watching the reaction to him of his teammates and coaches. They paid no special attention to him on the field, and treated him and accepted him as one of the team. Here’s one example: Ed Stanky, Brooklyn’s peppery second baseman, on a hard-hit ball down between second and first, seeing that Jackie was in a better position to field the ball, signaled for Robinson to take it, which he did easily.

  Tolan met Robinson after the game, and his next column was about that locker room interview: “When Jackie had finished his shower, he pulled two chairs aside, and I interviewed him while he dressed. Jackie said it felt great to be a Dodger. ‘It is the greatest thrill of my life.’ First base was new to him, but he would adjust. His teammates were a great bunch of guys. He said he felt loose, that [Roy] Campanella might join him soon. He asked if I knew his brother, Mack Robinson, an Olympic sprinter. I told him of the campaign of the Michigan Herald to break down discrimination o
n the Tigers.” (As it turned out, another eleven seasons would go by before Ozzie Virgil broke the color line in Detroit.) When Tolan left the stadium, he was swarmed by fans who mistook him for the ballplayer.

  Jackie Robinson was a significant figure in our family history. My father had rooted for the Dodgers—dem Bums!—since childhood and was proud that his team became the first in baseball to integrate. Although he and my mother related few memories of their lives in Detroit in the years immediately after the war, one story they would tell us over and again was about when they drove from Detroit to Chicago to watch Robinson’s Dodgers play for the first time against the Cubs, and how the sellout crowd included thousands of black citizens who had never before attended a major league game. The game was on Sunday, May 18. Jackie went hitless in four at-bats.

  That same week, the Herald published a guest column by Coleman Young, five years before his contentious appearance in Room 740. He and Elliott would be represented then by the same lawyer, George Crockett, but their connection went back to this period in 1947, when Young was an organizer for the CIO and a national leader of black veterans disillusioned by the treatment they received after coming home. As the sympathetic white commander of a black company during the war, Elliott shared Young’s perspective on the debilitating nature of race relations in America. In his guest column, Young announced a convention of black veterans to be held in New York at the end of May under the rallying cry “Veterans of the war for freedom have freedom yet to win.” “Negro veterans should be able to walk without fear throughout the length and breadth of this great, dynamic country,” Young wrote. “But a shadow falls over America. It is the shadow of Congress seeking to smash organized labor [a reference to the Taft-Hartley Act] and hysterically hunting progressives while turning its back on the Ku Klux Klan and other fascist groups.”

  The Michigan Herald lasted barely a year, publishing its final issue in February 1948. A remnant of it was folded into the Daily Worker and became known as the Michigan Worker. By then, an informant had advised the FBI that Elliott was a member of District 7, Communist Party USA, and had registration number 71945. This informant was Bereniece Baldwin. She reported to FBI agents that James E. Jackson, a high-ranking CP official, had told her that “Maraniss was very adept in popular newspaper journalism and would have specific duties in the field of general counter-propaganda.” Much of that work involved supporting the newly formed Progressive Party and its presidential candidate that year, Henry Wallace, a former agriculture secretary in the Roosevelt administration who was challenging Truman from the left.

  Baldwin was one of several confidential informants supplying information to the FBI about Elliott’s comings and goings. She cited twenty instances where she saw him writing and editing for the Michigan Herald and then the Michigan Worker. It was during that period, she said, that he insisted on being called not by his name but only his nickname, Ace. Another informant, identified as T-9, reported in June 1948 that Elliott was seen participating in the first advanced class of the Michigan School of Social Science, operated by the party in a building on Michigan Avenue. The school had been classified as a communist organization under President Truman’s Executive Order 9835. It was a sister school of the CP’s leading educational institution in New York, the Jefferson School of Social Science, known as “the Jeff.” According to the informant, the advanced class in Detroit “covered the teachings of Marx and Lenin by the following points: 1) The party as the vanguard of the working class. 2) The party as the organized detachment of the working class. 3) The party as the highest form of class organization of the proletariat. 4) The party as the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 5) Unity within the party.”

  Over the coming months, the FBI took note as Elliott moved his family from Herman Gardens to a small house at 7735 Beaverland; as he interviewed Henry Wallace when the Progressive Party candidate campaigned in Detroit; as he went to an anniversary party for the Michigan Worker at Schiller Hall; as he flew to Pittsburgh with Billy Allan; as he was seen “busily typing and receiving calls” at the Auto Section headquarters of the party on Grand River; as he took part in a party meeting at the Jewish Cultural Center where Saul Wellman, a Spanish Civil War veteran, emphasized the need to “raise the level of worker from trade union consciousness to class consciousness”; as he attended a rally where Maurice Sugar, the leftist lawyer and mentor to George Crockett, railed against the “unjust trial” taking place at the Foley Square Courthouse in Manhattan, where federal prosecutors were seeking to convict and imprison the top eleven leaders of the CP as conspirators advocating the violent overthrow of the government.

  * * *

  THE GOOD AMERICAN family was dealt another blow in early 1949. After seven lonely years at the sanitarium in Asheville, Phil Cummins was diagnosed by the staff doctors at Highland Hospital as deteriorating rather than improving, suffering from two different disorders. One disorder they called hebephrenia, characterized by delusions and inappropriate laughing; the other was obsessive-compulsive behavior. The doctors suggested to my grandparents that Phil might benefit from a prefrontal lobotomy. Dr. R. Burke Suitt, a brain surgeon at Duke, examined him and determined that rather than a lobotomy, a more effective operation would be a topectomy, involving the removal of “a small amount of tissue on either side of the front part of the brain surface.” The operation was performed by Dr. J. Lawrence Pool at the Neurological Institute of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. It took three hours, and a week later Phil was back in Asheville, where doctors reported that his “repetitious and philosophical examination[s] of his own thoughts were definitely lessening.”

  Phil’s siblings in Detroit were eager for news of his recovery. From her new house on Beaverland, my mother wrote a letter to her troubled brother on the afternoon of March 30. “We’re hoping to hear from you soon to find out how you feel after your operation. Quite a bit of surgery!” She had two children at home with her: Jim had just turned four, and Jean was two and a half. I was on the way. “Has anyone told you that we are going to have another little baby in August? Does that seem rash? Three isn’t that much more than two. And a little more fun sometimes. We haven’t given it too much thought.”

  Phil’s older brother soon followed with a letter of his own, reporting on his work and home life. Bob was watching the children, while Sue and Mary went shopping. One daughter, Rachel, was two, and the other, Sarah (Sally), was almost one. They finally got a car, an old Hudson club coupe. “I am still working at DeSoto,” Bob wrote. “We have a new model, and I tighten the nuts which hold the tail lights on. There are ten to each car, and we run 464 cars a day—at least that is all we are supposed to do, but often there are more as a result of speed-up. Speed-up is a big issue in the auto industry, and as you have probably read, the Ford workers are on strike in an attempt to stop it.” Car sales were declining, Bob told his brother, meaning that he was likely to get laid off at some point soon.

  My father’s job at the Times also seemed uncertain. His active role in the Newspaper Guild put him at odds with management when he defended several union members who were laid off by the company, but his talents as a copy editor and rewrite man kept him in good stead with his immediate superiors. Although I often witnessed those considerable skills decades later, it is impossible for me to measure what he did at the Detroit paper in the late 1940s, since rewrite men left little or no forensic evidence of what they had taken as raw material and transformed into something clear and polished. But there is a story from those days at the Times that he loved to tell for the rest of his life, and that I never tired of hearing. It was about the day he channeled Louella Parsons.

  Louella Parsons was a titan of Hollywood gossip. From her home base at Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, her syndicated columns went out to six hundred newspapers and more than twenty million readers worldwide. She and Hedda Hopper, who wrote a gossip column for the Los Angeles Times, competed as the “Queens of Hollywood”—and they hated eac
h other. So it was a major coup for Parsons when she won the favor of Rita Hayworth and gained exclusive rights to the glamorous movie star’s May 1949 wedding to Prince Aly Khan, a wealthy Pakistani playboy of Persian royal descent. The wedding was to take place in Cannes in the south of France, where Aly Khan kept one of many homes. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Parsons wrote a long series about Hayworth, and Hopper was so jealous that she suggested her nemesis was faking it and in fact would “not get within a mile of the wedding.” As it turned out, Parsons did get into the wedding, but there was a hitch. The mayor of Cannes was a member of the Communist Party and demanded that the marriage ceremony take place not at Aly Khan’s chateau but at City Hall. Parsons later noted that the mayor was the first communist she had ever talked with, but he let her use a phone after she greased his palm with a small bribe. She did not plan to file her story until after the reception back at the chateau. Alas, no one was allowed to use the phones there, and by the time Parsons concocted a trick to get one, it was approaching deadline back in the States for many evening papers like the Detroit Times that were hoping to splash her story on the front page. This is where my father takes up the story.

  As he would tell it to his children and anyone who would listen decades later, the editors were gathered near the wire machine in the sixth-floor newsroom waiting anxiously for the Parsons file, but it was not coming. Where the hell is she? Finally, one of my father’s bosses turned to him and shouted, “Elliott, you’re Louella Parsons!” Dad dutifully gathered earlier stories about the famous couple and the scene in Cannes, sat down at his typewriter, and banged out what he imagined Parsons would be writing. This was an easy and enjoyable task for him; he had been rewriting reporters of various sorts for years. It was only as he was finishing the column that a subeditor announced that the Parsons dispatch was finally clickety-clacking on the wire. “The Arabian nights wedding of Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan glittered to its storybook ending tonight.”