A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  These second thoughts were germinating in Potter’s mind in the mid-1950s, though it would take another decade, when Days of Shame was published, for him to go public with them. In the mid-1950s, after the televised Army-McCarthy hearings and the senator from Wisconsin’s censure, the fervor of the McCarthy era had diminished, but it was not yet gone. That would take a few years more.

  * * *

  JOHN STEPHENS WOOD had been home in Canton, Georgia, and largely out of sight for two years when President Eisenhower thrust him back into the news. On March 4, 1955, the former congressman was nominated by the White House for a seat on the Subversive Activities Control Board. This was the federal panel that served as another cog in the government’s anticommunist machine, supplementing the work of the House and Senate committees and the FBI. It is where Bereniece Baldwin first came in from the cold in 1952 by testifying just days before she took a star role at the HUAC hearings in Detroit.

  Wood had chosen not to run for reelection in 1952, in part due to his uncertain health. He had collapsed during an executive session of the committee that year and had to go home to Georgia to recuperate for a few weeks. He was tired and already past retirement age. Another election surely would have meant another pounding from his Washington nemesis, the columnist Drew Pearson, who for years had included Wood in his collection of nefarious pols in his Washington Merry-Go-Round. The SACB job seemed less taxing than being a congressman; it was only part-time, came with a $15,000 salary, and involved a subject with which he was familiar. If Ike knew little about Wood, there was one important connection: Wood was the uncle through marriage of Bobby Jones, the famed golfer and close golfing pal of the president. Ike stayed at Jones’s private quarters, the Jones Cabin, during his frequent escapes from the White House for golfing vacations at the Augusta National Golf Club, and in return Eisenhower, an amateur artist, gave Jones a color portrait he had painted of the golfer in his prime.

  The Wood nomination was referred to a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At first, it looked like a done deal. The subcommittee received a telegram from the current members of HUAC unanimously endorsing the former chairman of their committee. Wood’s successor in the House, Phil Landrum, told the subcommittee that he had never known a public figure who, as a judge, lawyer, and congressman, had gone to greater lengths than Wood “to see that an individual received his rights.” The Republican Party chairman in Georgia said that when he heard about Wood’s nomination he paid a visit to Robert T. Jones Jr. and the immortal Bobby gave Wood “the highest recommendation that a man could give another man.”

  Then Pearson went to work. In two columns that May, he revived all the charges he had made against Wood a decade earlier, when Wood was first chairing HUAC. In one column he brought up the mysterious “payoff fee” that Wood’s aide had received for getting damages from the federal government paid to a Georgia boy who had been struck by a U.S. Army truck, the sort of constituent work that is to be done for free. And he returned to the story of how Wood kept a family handyman on the committee payroll as a janitor.

  Pearson’s second column was intended to weaken Wood’s reputation as an anticommunist. “The Democrats have had their noses so relentlessly rubbed in the charge of being soft to communism that it will be interesting to see what they do about Ike’s recent error in the same direction,” Pearson wrote. The gist of Pearson’s story was that Wood as chairman of HUAC had backed away from investigating communist influence in Hollywood, and it was only when the Republicans briefly took control that the committee began hearings on the film industry. Pearson alluded to a mysterious middleman, a lawyer in Wood’s Georgia district named Edgar Dunlap, who received a $25,000 fee from studio head Louis B. Mayer during the period Wood was chairman. When Pearson first interviewed Dunlap, whom he described as “a big, bluff, prosperous looking gentleman,” Dunlap denied knowing Mayer “except to say that he met him casually on the MGM lot in 1946.” When presented evidence of the $25,000 fee, Dunlap said it was to handle an interstate commerce problem with the shipment of horses. Pearson wondered why Mayer would turn to Dunlap for that rather than any of his “battery of high-priced lawyers in Washington,” implying that the payment was to keep the committee at bay.

  “Wood’s appointment was so unusual that capital observers were flabbergasted at his appointment,” Pearson concluded. “One explanation is that Wood is the uncle of Ike’s golfing friend—Bobby Jones—which is a fact, though Jones has kept aloof from politics in the past.”

  Along with the attacks from Pearson in columns that always had more dots than lines connecting them, Wood’s nomination became the subject of an intense letter-writing campaign from civil rights groups and leftist organizations. William Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress and Royal W. France of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee testified in person against Wood, and Clarence Mitchell, Washington director of the NAACP, submitted a statement. They charged that Wood was a racist who had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Wood appeared before the committee to defend himself against these charges, and at one point got into a revealing dialogue with Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri.

  Senator Hennings: In respect to the charge that you are a racist, Mr. Wood, I understand that you deny that and say that you never lost a Negro vote in your home town.

  Mr. Wood: I stated it but in my last election they voted separately, and I carried every vote. Some of my best friends that I have are colored.

  The senators seemed especially concerned with Wood’s Klan involvement. It was in response to their questions that he said he was a joiner, had joined many organizations at the start of his career, and that as part of that effort he went to one Klan meeting and paid the fifteen-dollar initiation fee. But he insisted he had dropped out when he learned that he would have to wear a white hood and “administer such punishment” as Klan leaders required to people the Klan thought undesirable. “Count me out,” Wood recalled saying, “and they kept my fifteen dollars.”

  The committee had difficulty figuring out what to do with the Wood nomination and eventually reached a decision by default. When Congress went into recess that August, the nomination was dropped. One story from his past never came up: his role as the wheelman in 1915 carrying the corpse of Atlanta industrialist Leo Frank to the undertaker after he was lynched at Frey’s Gin near Marietta.

  * * *

  FRANK TAVENNER STILL maintained his rural domain of apple orchards in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during that period. A Virginia newspaper noted that “the man whose job when he is in Washington is to fight subversive activities” had found a new type of infestation closer to home. A parasite had threatened to destroy his crops, and Tavenner came up with an effective if expensive new weapon to fight it: a helicopter. “Tavenner is the first to employ the helicopter method of spraying to rout the bug which causes the fruit to drop from the trees,” the Daily News-Record reported. “The previous method was to use a tank sprayer, but the process was so slow there was a great loss of apples. The helicopter will be hovering over a tree and spray about 170 acres in about three hours.”

  Saving good apples, rooting out rotten ones: that is what Tavenner thought his life was all about. Apples, symbolic and real, connected his life in Washington to his life in Woodstock. But there was more to it than that, as I learned one December day when my exploration of what it meant to be American or un-American took me out on Interstate 66 from Washington to walk the streets of Woodstock, his hometown in the cradle of the valley.

  The charter for Woodstock dates to 1761 and was sponsored in the House of Burgesses by none other than George Washington. That is about as old-school American as it can get. Its most famous citizen in the early years was John Peter Muhlenberg, a Protestant minister who was dispatched from Pennsylvania to serve a congregation in the little log church at the corner of Court and Main. Muhlenberg later became immortalized as a preacher-patriot, and there is a statue of him on the town square not far from what is considered t
he oldest courthouse west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There are also statues of him in the U.S. Capitol Building and in a small park off Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington, but the one in Woodstock is the most stirring, capturing the mythmaking moment of this original American man.

  The story later conveyed by Muhlenberg’s descendants tells of a January Sunday in 1776 when he was in the middle of a sermon drawn from Ecclesiastes 3. Those unfamiliar with the Old Testament might know this as the scripture transformed by Pete Seeger into a folk song popularized by the Byrds in the 1960s as “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” When Muhlenberg reached chapter 3, verse 8, about a time for war and a time for peace, he shed his clerical robe and strode from the pulpit in the uniform of a Continental Army colonel, marching out into the street to the pounding of war drums, ready to take on the Redcoats with his 8th Virginia Regiment. That seems the stuff to incite purple prose, and the poet Thomas Buchanan did not disappoint. American schoolchildren once memorized these lines from the fifth edition of McGuffey’s Reader:

  When suddenly his mantle wide

  His hands impatient flung aside

  And lo! He met their wandering eyes

  Complete in all a warrior’s guise

  If Muhlenberg evoked the American patriotic myth at its creation, Tavenner devoted his life to protecting and perpetuating it nearly two centuries later in the middle decades of the twentieth century. And here it all connected in an unexpected way, from Muhlenberg to Tavenner to Seeger. Muhlenberg the soldier-preacher used Ecclesiastes 3 to march off to war. Seeger the folk singer reconfigured it as a hymn to peace (the key line in his version is “a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late”). And Tavenner the lawyer brought Seeger into a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American activities to determine if his musical activities were sufficiently American.

  The date was August 18, 1955. The place happened to be the same courthouse at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan where George Crockett was cited for contempt of court during the Smith Act trial of communist leaders. John Stephens Wood was long gone from the committee by then. The chairman was Francis E. Walter, a conservative, anti-immigration Democrat from Pennsylvania. But Tavenner ran the interrogation. Their opening exchange set the stage for all that was to come.

  Mr. Tavenner: When and where were you born, Mr. Seeger?

  Mr. Seeger: I was born in New York in 1919.

  Mr. Tavenner: What is your profession or occupation?

  Mr. Seeger: Well, I have worked at many things, and my main profession is a student of American folklore, and I make my living as a banjo picker—sort of damning, in some people’s opinion.

  Tavenner calmly and persistently tried to connect Seeger to specific concerts and actions that involved communists, and Seeger consistently refused to be pinned down or categorized or tainted by association, while never invoking his Fifth Amendment rights. He wanted to talk to the committee about the meaning of his songs. He said he would not answer any questions about his associations, or his philosophical or religious beliefs, or how he voted, calling them improper questions to ask any American.

  In one exchange with Chairman Walter, Seeger said, “I feel that my whole life I have never done anything of a conspiratorial nature and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this Committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours . . . that I am any less of an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir.”

  “Why don’t you make a little contribution toward preserving its institutions?” Walter asked.

  “I feel that my whole life is a contribution,” Seeger responded. “That is why I would like to tell you about it.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Walter said.

  Tavenner took over again from there. Did Seeger perform at a concert sponsored by the Communist Party on May Day? Did he sing at the Unity summer camp for socialist and communist youths at Wingdale Lodge in New York State? Did he first sing his song “If I Had a Hammer” at a fund-raiser for the Foley Square defendants at St. Nicholas Arena? Did he know about Elia Kazan’s testimony that the Communist Party used entertainers for Communist Party functions, that it was all part of their propaganda effort?

  “I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life,” Seeger testified. “I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.”

  Turning to Chairman Walter, whose district included the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania, Seeger added that his songs cut across social and cultural divides and spoke to basic humanity. “And that is why I would love to be able to tell you about these songs, because I feel that you would agree with me more, sir. I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon and Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of miners.”

  Tavenner did not like that answer. All he wanted to know was whether Seeger ever sang at functions of the Communist Party. The exchanges grew testier.

  Mr. Tavenner: I hand you a photograph which was taken of the May Day parade in New York City in 1952, which shows the front rank of a group of individuals, and one is in a uniform with military cap and insignia, and carrying a placard entitled CENSORED. Will you examine it please and state whether or not that is a photograph of you?

  Mr. Seeger: It is like Jesus Christ when asked by Pontius Pilate, “Are you king of the Jews?”

  Chairman Walter: Stop that!

  The banjo-picker came out of the hearing unscathed, but not for long. The committee in due time cited him for contempt of Congress. He faced the possibility of time in jail before the conviction was overturned.

  Pete Seeger was not quite up there with Paul Robeson or Beethoven in my mother’s pantheon of musicians, but he seemed part of the same extended family. He and his fellow singers in the Weavers—Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman—had been active in the Henry Wallace presidential campaign in 1948, as had my parents, and were known for their embrace of songs from around the world about unions, working people, and justice. In 1949 Seeger and Robeson had performed at the concert to raise funds for the Civil Rights Congress and the Foley Square defendants near Peekskill, New York, where they were pelted with rocks and stones by an angry crowd of local citizens roiling with anticommunist fervor. Seeger had also recorded songs from the Spanish Civil War, including “Viva La Quince Brigada” and “Si Me Quieres Escribir,” both of which had deep resonance in my family. “Viva La Quince Brigada” means “Long live the 15th Brigade,” or International Brigade, whose thousands of volunteers included Uncle Bob. “Si Me Quieres Escribir” is a song that reflects what Bob and his comrades in the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion experienced during the war. “If you want to write me, you know where I am posted”: the lyrics evoke the battle of the Ebro River, the pontoon bridges across it, the enemy near Gandesa inviting soldiers to eat shrapnel shells and fragmentation grenades, the hatred for that son-of-a-bitch Francisco Franco (“que el hijo de puto Franco”).

  And the words echoed through the generations. At a Cummins family reunion in 2017, my brother, Jim, and cousin Peggy, both teachers of Spanish, sang “Si Me Quieres Escribir” with great feeling, just as Bob once had and just as Seeger had.

  * * *

  BY THE SUMMER of 1955 we had been back in Detroit for six months, and it felt like home, especially since we had a new little sister in the family. Her name was Wendy, born at Women’s Hospital on June 27 while we other kids were shipped over to Ann Arbor to be with our grandparents and a crew of cousins. “They had a very hectic two weeks of it, but things are settling back to normal now,” my mother wrote to her brother Phil in a letter in which she alerted him to “baby number 4.” Wendy had red hair and blue eyes, and I felt especially proud of her name because I had suggested it. We had returned from Cleveland in time for m
e to go to school the previous spring semester at Angell Elementary, and there was a girl in my kindergarten class that I had a crush on whose name was Wendy. Dad always thought of my sister Wendy as the family’s good luck charm, an omen of better times to come. She was far more than that, but it was one way for him to sustain his optimism through all his ordeals.

  We spent that summer in a second-story flat at 9015 Dexter. The flat was long and dark, and to a boy of almost six it seemed the back windows looked out on hell while the view from the deck in front was of heaven. The phobia I have about rats started then, when I would look out a rear window at dusk and see a swirl of rats scurrying in and out of the garage. At least once a rat jumped out of a garbage can. There were rat holes in what passed for a backyard. As our father would say, it could have been worse—none of us got bit by a rat. The upper porch facing Dexter was our hangout. Mom was out there almost every day sunbathing Wendy, and Jim and Jean and I spent hours there observing the passing scene. In Detroit that meant one thing above all else: the newest models of cars from GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nash, and Studebaker. Before the summer was over, we could identify them all as they drove up and down the street below, from the two-tone DeSoto Fireflite and Plymouth Belvedere to my favorite, the Nash Metropolitan, a cute little pudge-on-wheels in pastel pink or blue-green that looked as if it had floated happily out of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

  We were Detroiters. We swam at the Rouge Pool, took swimming lessons at the Fisher Y, drank Vernors ginger ale, rooted for the Tigers and Lions, shopped at Hudson’s department store, watched Lunch with Soupy Sales on WXYZ-TV, rode the magical trains at the Detroit Zoo, and took the Bob-Lo boat out to the amusement park on the Ontario side of the Detroit River. Jim learned the leg-slapping rhythms of “Hambone” from his black friends. Jeannie heard “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” on the jukebox at a diner and was told by Peggy, the oldest and hippest of the cousins, that this was a new kind of music called “rock and roll.”