A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  This is the kind of picture people want to see.

  Good in spots, except for the too, too obvious propaganda and I am NOT a Commie.

  One wonders about the future of this country when this sort of tripe passes for Americanism.

  Witches or traitors. John Wayne’s Big Jim McLain was a limited commercial success, costing less than a million dollars and earning almost three times that amount; then it disappeared, a period piece more interesting for its travelogue snippets of exotic Hawaii than for its sensationalized message.

  Arthur Miller’s The Crucible became an American classic.

  — PART FOUR —

  Five Years

  26

  * * *

  American Wanderers

  BY THE SUMMER of 1952, we were out of Detroit, seeking shelter in New York. My father had gone ahead, scrambling to find a job as a reporter on the Daily Compass, a liberal newspaper that had inherited some of its staff and much of its politics from the defunct evening paper PM. The rest of us followed once my older brother and sister finished the school year at Ann Arbor Trail. We left friends, relatives, and furniture behind and migrated east, our mother driving. She took the northern route through Canada, and somewhere in Ontario she struck a boy whose bicycle had scooted in front of our car. I was almost three, and I think that was one of my first memories, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes you hear stories about childhood events so often you think you remember them. My vague memory was of landing on the floor between the front seat and the glove compartment, and that the boy died. But that was wrong; he didn’t die, no more than I died when I rode my bicycle into the street on Beaverland and Jim ran home saying that I had. The boy wasn’t even seriously hurt, but it rattled Mom very much even though it was not her fault. That is all according to Jean, who was almost six and whose memory I trust.

  There is a photograph taken of the five of us soon after we rejoined Dad in the big city. We are posing at the stern of a ferry carrying visitors to the Statue of Liberty out in New York Harbor. The black-and-white picture is framed so perfectly it looks like a postcard. Mom is smiling, her arms gently touching Jeannie, whose auburn hair is in pigtails. Dad is next to her, his left arm drooped protectively over redheaded Jimmy. I am tucked in the middle front, wearing shorts and goofy striped socks, blinking in the sunlight. On the back rail to our side is a white life buoy marked “STATUE OF LIBERTY N.Y.,” and looming behind that is the real thing, Miss Liberty rising high with her crown and her torch.

  No photo could have had more levels of meaning for our family. The Statue of Liberty is an American totem my parents deeply believed in, even now that they had been identified by a congressional committee as un-American, or perhaps more now than ever. My father’s parents were among the multitude of Eastern European immigrants who were welcomed symbolically by the torch, Joe at age two from Odessa, Ida as a teenager from Latvia. My father had spent much of his youth only twenty miles away, in the new American stew of Brooklyn. The Statue of Liberty represented the best of the American story he was taught at Abraham Lincoln High School, an expansive generosity evoked by Emerson and Whitman. The inclusiveness of “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus’s memorial poem on the base of the statue, powerfully evokes the idealized humanism that inspired both of my parents in their politics. The words and phrases seemed to speak to them. Sea-washed, sunset gates. Mother of Exiles. Mild eyes. Tired. Poor. Yearning to breathe free. Wretched refuse. Homeless. Tempest-tossed. Golden door.

  Any American who belonged to the Communist Party after World War II should be considered a traitor, proclaimed Frank Tavenner. That was the message he wanted John Wayne to convey in his movie role as Big Jim McLain, the commie hunter working for the committee. But my parents’ politics and their blindness to the horrors of the Soviet Union did not diminish their patriotism; it defined them less than the photo of the family posing in Lady Liberty’s benevolent shadow. They were no innocents, but nor did the fact that they had been communists make them traitors. They never betrayed America and loved it no less than the officials who rendered judgment on them in Room 740 of the Federal Building in Detroit. They were dissenters who believed the nation had not lived up to its founding ideals in terms of race and equality, largely because of the reactionary attitudes of self-righteous attackers on the American right. In response, they latched on to a false promise and for too long blinded themselves to the repressive totalitarian reality of communism in the Soviet Union. And now they were paying the price.

  It had been two and a half years since the entire Cummins clan assembled for a photograph on the front steps of 1402 Henry Street in Ann Arbor: the grandparents, their five children, four in-laws, and ten grandchildren. The good American family. Andrew and Grace, the patriarch and matriarch, had more to worry about now than ever. One of their sons, Phil, was still suffering at the mental hospital in North Carolina. Bob, their oldest son, was not only a widower with two young girls, but faced bleak job prospects after being named at the HUAC hearings and called to testify. Now Elliott, their son-in-law, was in a similar position, uprooted from Michigan. But among Elliott’s many qualities, one of the strongest was his survival instinct, and he brought his family to New York with a will to survive.

  We moved into the small apartment of our Brooklyn grandparents, Poppy and Bubby. Tight quarters for seven people, including three rambunctious children, but Coney Island was a children’s paradise. “We kids spent all day and part of the night playing in the streets,” Jean recalled. “We played with hard pink rubber balls, jacks. There were gangs of kids from all over, so it was easy to fit in. Trucks used to come around with a Tilt-a-Whirl on the back, and there were street-cleaning trucks that spewed refreshing water.” The boardwalk. Splinters. Foot-burning sand. The sting of ocean salt. People everywhere. Kids everywhere. Baby boom. Before white flight. Rooming houses, bathhouses. Avenues with enchanting names: Surf, Mermaid, Neptune. The joyous crunch of a Nathan’s Famous hot dog. Chocolate soda. Bagels. Salami. Dad would eat anything, but Jim and Jean avoided the gefilte fish and chopped liver. When summer ended, they attended P.S. 188 on Mermaid Avenue. Jim skipped a grade and went into third. Jean took an aptitude test that placed her in an advanced class for first grade. She remembered “a lot of crowding and congestion” in the school and “filling little booklets with pennies and dimes” and needing milk money.

  * * *

  THE DAILY COMPASS, a morning tabloid with a circulation of only thirty thousand, was barely two years old when Elliott arrived, but there was a sense of desperation to the place already. It inherited one star, I. F. Stone, the iconoclastic columnist, but few thought it could last. The city editor, Tom O’Connor, had been called before HUAC that May and had refused to name names. Two months later, on July 24, O’Connor dropped dead in the office while watching the Democratic National Convention on television.

  At least here, unlike at the Detroit Times, Elliott could report stories and write them under his own byline. His most dramatic assignment involved a mysterious murder in New York that seemed to lead back to the underworld henchmen of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The victim was Andres F. Requena, a Dominican native who edited Patria, an anti-Trujillo newspaper in New York. On October 2, Requena was shot and killed in the hallway of a tenement house in Manhattan. It so happened that only hours earlier he had delivered a sensational story to his printer charging that Trujillo’s general counsel in New York had threatened his life.

  “This newspaper has learned how Requena was lured to his death last week in the dark hallway of a tenement at 243 Madison on the Lower East Side,” Elliott wrote in a front-page article. “The bait was a stunningly beautiful woman.” He also reported that a close friend of Requena’s, Pedro A. Bobadilla, then a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, had received a death threat four days later, warning that he would be next. An article by Bobadilla critical of Trujillo had been published recently in Requena’s newspaper, and according to Elliott
’s account, Bobadilla had received the death threat from Trujillo’s assassins in Puerto Rico.

  In follow-up stories, my father acquired and summarized a copy of the article Requena had dropped off at his printer’s before his murder, and he updated the police investigation several times. The Trujillo story became part of our family lore, not so much for the articles my father wrote but for a story that he told about it afterward. We all heard variations of it over the years. He said he was getting on an elevator one day during the time he was covering the Requena murder and a woman got on, a Trujillo relative, perhaps his sister; she stood next to him and told him that he was a good reporter and it would be a shame if anything happened to him. “I remember Dad being proud of this, not scared at all,” my brother recalled. A shame if anything happened to him—but of course, short of death, something already had.

  The Daily Compass folded on November 4. It was in hock so deep they had to sell the presses and fixtures to pay the mortgage. The next day was Election Day, Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson. Decades later my father confessed that he had voted for Eisenhower. After reading the letters he wrote home from the war, many of which extolled Ike’s virtues, that no longer surprised me.

  Our family was cut adrift again, and soon we moved from one set of grandparents to the other, from Coney Island to Ann Arbor, up the steps and into 1402 Henry Street. Again, a tight fit, Jean recalled, “but not quite as tight.” As soon as we got there, Mom enrolled Jean and Jim at Burns Park Elementary, their third school in six months. Jim’s teacher had once taught our aunt Jean, Mom’s younger sister, “and remembered her and loved her,” Jim recalled. Jim loved the Wolverines football team. His favorite player was Tony Branoff, a running back. The Burns Park neighborhood was comfortably middle class, and so was the school, but it was not a happy time for Jean. “I had to catch up in school since I don’t think I learned anything at P.S. 188,” she recalled. And after experiencing the big-city life, Ann Arbor seemed too tame and predictable for her. On top of that, it all seemed so temporary, a way station until our jobless father found somewhere else to work.

  * * *

  GEORGE CROCKETT WAS out of prison. Six months earlier, on April 24, he and the other four lawyers who had been cited for contempt of court in the Foley Square trial surrendered to authorities at the same courthouse in Lower Manhattan after their appeals had been exhausted. On the final appeal, their convictions had been upheld by the Supreme Court on a 5 to 3 vote, with Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Felix Frankfurter dissenting. The liberal Douglas and conservative Frankfurter wrote, “One who reads the record of this case will have difficulty determining whether members of the bar conspired to drive a judge from the bench or whether the judge used the authority of the bench to whipsaw the lawyers, to taunt and tempt them, and to create for himself the role of the persecuted.” In the majority opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson said that the court would defend the vigorous advocacy of trial lawyers but would not “equate contempt with courage, or insults with independence.”

  On the day of reckoning, Crockett and the other sentenced lawyers asked the U.S. marshal not to put them in handcuffs as they were being taken from the courthouse to a federal detention center on West Street. The request was ignored. Crockett, the only African American in the group, asked to be sent to a penitentiary in the North, but that request too was denied, and he was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky, a segregated facility. But his resolve was strengthened behind bars, he said; the four months there were not wasted.

  “I actually felt relieved when I realized that I could withstand the worst that the establishment could dish out in the way of punishment,” he said later. “And my fellow prisoners in that segregated prison treated me with special care. I was somewhat of a hero to them and their understanding of my efforts was an unexpected bright spot.” He had always considered himself a champion of the underdog, and the prison experience only confirmed that position. From then on, he understood the reality behind telling clients that they would be spending months or years in jail.

  Soon after Crockett was released from Ashland, the Civil Rights Congress and the Michigan Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born hosted a welcome home party for him at the Jewish Cultural Center in Detroit. He was greeted by more than three hundred friends and admirers who gave him a long and loud standing ovation. But his difficulties were far from over. The Michigan Bar began disciplinary proceedings against him for unprofessional conduct, leading to a public reprimand, and the FBI continued watching his every move, taking note even when Helen Winter, the wife of his Foley Square client, Carl Winter, “kissed George Crockett” at the homecoming banquet. He came to think of himself as even more of an outsider. He thought his phones were tapped, that his neighbors looked at him differently and would not mind if the Crockett family lived elsewhere than on American Street. There were times when he would be walking down Woodward Avenue downtown and see approaching from the other direction someone he knew, who ignored him or veered left or right to avoid him.

  One place he felt comfortable was at work, as a partner now in one of the few interracial law firms in the country, Goodman, Crockett, Eden and Robb. His law partner, Ernie Goodman, had essentially picked up where Crockett left off, defending more members of the CPUSA against Smith Act charges. When the Supreme Court upheld the first Smith Act convictions, prosecutors around the country were encouraged to bring more cases against Communist Party leaders, and one of the first of many such cases was in Michigan. The Michigan Six, as they became known, were indicted a few weeks after Crockett returned to Detroit. They included Helen Winter; Billy Allan, the Daily Worker journalist; and Saul Wellman, a local CPUSA official, who had fought twice against fascism, first in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigade and then with the U.S. Army, where he was in the Battle of the Bulge. Goodman represented all three.

  The government case against the Michigan Six would rely in part on the testimony of Bereniece Baldwin. After coming in from the cold to testify in February and March, Baldwin had been hot on the banquet and hearings circuits. She testified before a Detroit grand jury and at a HUAC hearing in Cleveland and was the guest of honor at a state convention of nurses in Grand Rapids and a homeowner association banquet in the Burbank neighborhood. On the same week that Crockett was incarcerated in Kentucky, she was honored with a testimonial dinner at the Veterans Memorial Building sponsored by the American Legion. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was invited but did not attend, but the hall was filled with local politicians, business leaders, and members of civic and fraternal groups who felt that “Mrs. Baldwin’s devotion to her country merits recognition.” The main speaker was Representative Charles E. Potter, who had just formally entered the race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. Potter won that election on the day after Elliott lost his job in New York. He took office in the first month of 1953.

  * * *

  With the new year came the Broadway premiere of The Crucible at the Martin Beck Theatre on January 22, 1953. It starred Arthur Kennedy as John Proctor, the flawed but heroic protagonist who goes to the gallows rather than confess to false accusations; Madeleine Sherwood as Abigail Williams, the manipulative young maid who spreads malicious gossip to start the witch hunt frenzy in Salem as a means of protecting herself; and E. G. Marshall as Reverend Hale, the tortured minister who moves from righteousness to doubt. Although it would win the Tony for best play of the year, the audience reaction at first was mixed, as were reviews from critics. Arthur Miller himself thought the production was too austere, but he also worried it came at the wrong time, “when the gale from the Right was blowing at its fullest fury.”

  There was something beneath the rise of McCarthyism, Miller later wrote, that seemed “much more weird and mysterious.” The reactionary campaign had created “not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance. . . . There was a new religiosity in the air,
not merely the kind expressed by the spurt in church construction and church attendance, but an official piety which my reading of American history could not reconcile with the free-wheeling iconoclasm of the country’s past.”

  A few months later, Holiday magazine sent Miller to his alma mater to chronicle the atmosphere at Michigan during the Red Scare and compare it to his days there in the 1930s. A member of the student council told him that many of her classmates thought she must be a communist for living in a cooperative rooming house instead of a dormitory. Miller’s favorite old English professor, now a dean, lamented that the FBI was asking students and teachers to inform on one another. Members of the school’s Socialist Club said they no longer came to meetings by car because an agent would be lingering outside the meeting place taking down license plate numbers. Then Miller paid a visit to his old haunt, the Michigan Daily.

  The newspaper office seemed diminished from its former self, he thought. In his years there, it was a messy, loud, disputatious, crowded, energized place overflowing with talented writers elbowing each other for top spots on the masthead. “But now the building seemed deserted at two in the afternoon, and I soon learned that the paper, incredibly, was forced to advertise for applicants to the staff.” Miller decided to examine issues of the paper from his student days. While leafing through the “musty pages,” he was approached by a student who said he had recently written a four-part series on communists on campus that exposed a few student radicals. Nearby sat a middle-aged man who was taking notes while studying recent editions of the Daily. It turned out this man was from the state police; he was looking for any mentions of leftists whose names would go into a master file of people to watch for un-American activities.