A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Ann Arbor was only forty-two miles away, a soothing retreat where we enjoyed not only the uplift of a university town but also the wonders of a nearby farm that our Cummins grandparents owned. The black walnut trees at the edge of a deep woods enfolding a lily-padded pond with croaking frogs and dragonflies. The creaky old gray wooden barn stacked with hay, the arbor of seeded grapes, the patches of wild blackberries and cultivated rows of Kentucky Wonder beans, the ancient rock and the rolling hills out to the back acres. Our grandparents were planning a move from Henry Street to that farm when we returned to Detroit; the foundation of their new house would soon be laid, a modern split-level of redwood and cherry with a rear picture window overlooking a peach orchard. This house, with its sturdy foundation, represented the emotional foundation for our good American family, making everything feel stable despite tragedy, uncertainty, and upheaval.

  Family was all around. Bob had remarried; Aunt Kay came from Ohio and loved books and sports and brought a sense of order. They still lived in the house on Pingree that Bob had once shared with his sister, Barbara Edmonds, but Barbara and her husband, John, had moved with their children, Peggy and Alan, out to the booming suburb of Warren, where they lived in a ranch house and both eventually found jobs as librarians. Phil was coming home at last; the new house on the farm would have a basement room just for him, down the hall from the freezer where Grandmother kept her prized black walnut cookies. Mom’s younger sister, Jean, and her brood, the Chulaks, the largest and most rambunctious of the extended family, were on the move from one town to another in the Chicago area, where big Uncle Joe Chulak worked as a union organizer. Mom and Aunt Jean were close, and so were all the cousins, gathering whenever possible in Ann Arbor or one of their houses.

  My father, the newspaperman born with ink in his blood, was out of the business for the first time in more than twenty years, going back to his high school days as sports editor of the Lincoln Log, with the exception of his stint in the army during World War II. He had been fired from two big-city dailies in Detroit and Cleveland after Bereniece Baldwin spoke his name in Room 740. He had no interest in returning to his past life in the communist orbit of the Daily Worker, and there was nowhere else in journalism for him to turn. The FBI made it clear that its agents would follow him wherever he went and whenever he applied for a job. They had let the Cleveland Plain Dealer know about his history, and he assumed they would do it again. He was on the blacklist. With a wife and four young children, he needed any job he could get, and he took one as a salesman for a company that provided wholesale picnic supplies, birthday party favors, safety programs, and advertising specialties and other items for trade unions and service organizations.

  Organizational Services Inc. was run by Irving and Betty Richter, who had known our parents from the old days. Richter was a former communist, but there was more to him than that. He had studied economics in the early 1930s at the University of Wisconsin under the famed labor historian Selig Perlman, who was a progressive and sympathetic to the working class but not a radical or communist himself; in fact he argued that strong unions could be a bulwark against communism. In the circular nature of life, Richter went on to become an official with several New Deal projects, including the Works Progress Administration, then joined the United Auto Workers as its legislative lobbyist before losing that post when Walter Reuther, who agreed with Perlman, took over the union in 1947 and pushed out its communist and radical elements. The purge at the UAW included not only Richter but also lawyer Maurice Sugar and his disciple, George Crockett—so there, perhaps, was the connection to my father.

  OSI was not a communist front; it was just what it appeared to be, a capitalist enterprise in the world of sales that specialized in unions. The company had a store on Grand River that we visited a few times. To a six-year-old, it felt like a five-and-dime, with kitchen gadgets and toys and balloons, though I don’t remember seeing any slingshots or squirt guns. If my father was not quite a character out of an Arthur Miller play, if it would be unfair to compare him to Willy Loman, there is no doubt that he was unsuited for this job and unhappy in it. He took it to survive. “We sensed that the job was humiliating for Dad, although this remained unsaid,” Jean recalled. “Cummins inhibitions, McCarthy-era discretion, and perhaps a family culture of tact that kept us from alluding to the situation.”

  Jean’s assessment would apply to more than the sales job. The stress and psychological pain our parents felt during those years went largely unexpressed through seven moves, four kids, and the blacklist. The Cummins way, since my grandparents’ childhood in Kansas, was to endure, neither boast nor complain too much, and Dad’s way was to block out the uncomfortable as much as possible to keep going. We saw only a few outward signs of his inner turmoil. He smoked too much, and nervously, often putting out a cigarette and then plucking the butt out of the ashtray and relighting it, and he had what seemed to me to be a low rumbling murmur of nerves that sounded like a motor idling deep in his throat, a disconcerting noise I noticed especially when we were seated at the dinner table. We were by no means perfect kids, often teasing or defying our mother, and Dad tended to overreact when he came home and heard about it. Those were the few times I saw his anger, but it seemed just a show meant to demonstrate concern for his wife, who took up most of the child-rearing burden. Now and then he took off his belt and threatened to use it as a punishment strap, but he never caught me, or maybe never wanted to catch me.

  The FBI visited the OSI office on what the Bureau called a “pretext” and determined that my father worked there. They had nothing more to say about it yet kept following his movements. They recorded our address on Dexter in their files, and when after several months we moved to a house on Cortland Avenue, less than a mile away but in a more middle-class neighborhood, they recorded that as well. “Elliott Maraniss resides at 4511 Cortland Ave., Detroit, and is employed by Organizational Services, Inc., 10200 Grand River Blvd, Detroit. Informant identified Subject as being active in Progressive Party of Michigan, 1949–1950. [Blank] advised that Subject was affiliated with Michigan Herald in 1947. Informants report no known recent CP or related activity on part of the Subject.”

  Buying the house was our mother’s idea; when possible, she wanted us to have our own place rather than rent, wherever we lived, to make our lives feel less transient. And this was a real house, painted green, with two full floors, three bedrooms, and a yard covered with lilies of the valley. The major selling point was that it was a block from Winterhalter, one of the finest elementary schools in Detroit. The neighborhood was historically Jewish but in transition as more African Americans moved in; the school was integrated, though majority white. I went to first grade there, and even in that early grade we had homeroom and separate classes in civics, science, reading, art, music, and other subjects. Jeannie won a contest to take home a class snake, which she named Adlai, in honor of Adlai Stevenson, who was running for president again. Before the summer was out, the snake made its escape, slithering away, and soon enough Stevenson lost again to Eisenhower.

  Jim was in another school, in junior high already. He knew things about the world that I felt I could never know, and, though it would not be true later, he was physically stronger than me and might have resented that my asthma kept him up at night and drew sympathy from our mother. Connected or not, I remember how he would pin me to the ground in the yard near the lilies of the valley and pretend he was a Nazi SS officer interrogating me. “Vere do you live!?” he would ask in a bad German accent, and when I answered he would execute a sharp left-right-left slap across my cheeks and shout, “Oh, you lie!”

  This was just brothers at play, not exactly Frank Tavenner or Chairman Wood interrogating our father.

  * * *

  EVEN AS THE Red-hunting fervor ebbed, a variation of that boyhood slapping game was still being played by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In June 1956, in what seemed like an effort to regain the spotlight, the committee turned its att
ention to Arthur Miller, who was everywhere in the news. Miller had traveled some distance from his days at Abraham Lincoln High and the University of Michigan, not only as a renowned playwright but as a celebrity. He was dating and about to marry the world’s most lustrous movie star, Marilyn Monroe.

  For their central case in a larger probe of the entertainment industry, committee investigators had spent six months digging into Miller’s background. “The most important subject under investigation is Arthur Miller, the playwright,” Donald T. Appell wrote to his colleague William Wheeler on January 13. Operating out of an office in Fullerton, California, Wheeler was the committee’s West Coast gumshoe who had done much of the legwork for the Hollywood hearings. Appell, based in Washington, had already visited Michigan and New York to see what he could find on Miller and was disappointed at first that he had failed to round up cooperative witnesses, meaning no one would name Miller. “This necessitates full and complete investigation” of Miller as a hostile witness, he concluded.

  Life imitating art imitating life: HUAC was writing its own version of The Crucible.

  Wheeler wrote back that he had discussed Miller with the actor Lee J. Cobb but did not get much. “Mr. Cobb has advised that he only vaguely knew Miller, having met him during the rehearsals of the play Death of a Salesman. Mr. Cobb stated that he does not know if Arthur Miller was ever a member of the CP. Also that conversations with Miller only related to the play and had no political overtones.” Wheeler drilled deeper into the Hollywood network, but it was essentially a dry hole.

  Appell had better success in New York. Working with confidential sources, he learned, among other things, that Miller had once applied for membership to the CP’s Stuyvesant Club in New York and in 1947 had attended at least one meeting, and perhaps more, of party writers in Manhattan. Appell also unearthed evidence that Miller had offered scripts of his antiwar play All My Sons for sale to benefit the World Youth Festival held that year in Prague. The U.S. government considered the youth festival a communist-controlled event. In developing a chronology on Miller, Appell could link him to party involvement no later than 1947, nearly a decade earlier, but that was enough to try to call him before the committee. The assertion was that he had received passport number 54857 on May 1, 1947, by fraudulent means by claiming that he was not a member of any subversive organization.

  On June 1, Appell sent Wheeler a package that included a subpoena he was directed to serve on Miller, along with instructions to travel to Nevada, to find the playwright. Miller was at Pyramid Lake outside Reno to obtain a quickie divorce from his first wife so that he could marry Monroe, a romance that prompted Director Hoover to denounce the actress as “the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia.” It took Wheeler several days to find Miller in Reno, but he finally caught up with him on June 8 at a law office across the street from the Mapes Hotel. Miller had been tipped off that Wheeler was looking for him. The name, he noted later, rang a bell: “I had read about this diabolically clever investigator, who had had much success in bringing film people to see the light. I wanted to know what it felt like to be worked over by a talent like that.” After handing Miller the subpoena, Wheeler chatted with him about the weather, then about his friend Lee J. Cobb, who had once played Willy Loman on Broadway but had also named names before the committee. When Wheeler said that perhaps Miller would like to talk to him again, Miller said he would not discuss any of his activities until he consulted his lawyers in New York. He told Wheeler that he had yet to file the divorce papers. Wheeler left without getting much but reported back to Appell that the conversation lasted for about a half hour and that Miller was “exceptionally friendly.”

  Miller’s lawyers delayed his appearance before the committee until the divorce was finalized. On June 20, Miller’s mother and wife-to-be accompanied him to Penn Station in New York, where he would catch the train to Washington. “All I could think of was the waste my trip implied. It was all for absolutely nothing, except that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees,” Miller later wrote. Monroe, he observed, was “trying gallantly not to seem unhappy,” while his mother “actually succeeded in pretending nothing ominous was happening and talked about Marilyn’s clothes.” When he reached the platform stairway and turned around, the two women were arm in arm. That evening in Washington, he visited the home of his lawyer, Joseph Rauh, a noted civil liberties advocate. At one point Rauh excused himself to take a phone call. When he returned he said to Miller, “How would you like to not have to go into the hearing tomorrow?” Miller was puzzled. Rauh explained that he had been talking to an intermediary for the committee chairman, who said the hearing could be canceled “provided Marilyn agreed to be photographed shaking hands with him.” Miller laughed it off.

  The hearing room on Capitol Hill on June 21 was packed. I. F. Stone was there, along with scores of other reporters, including a contingent from the foreign press. This was not some unknown Michigan Daily alumnus like Bob Cummins or Elliott Maraniss being grilled; this was the Arthur Miller. Miller declared that he would willingly answer questions about his past activities but not those of others. He would not invoke the Fifth Amendment, but nor would he name names. The staffer handling the interrogation was Richard Arens, the committee secretary, whom Miller later described as “a short fellow with a shaved head and a square pug face, and he looked as though life had nastily disappointed him in every conceivable way.” Arens, prepped for this task by Frank Tavenner, presented Miller with one document after another intended to show his communist or radical affiliations. If it was anything to do with Miller’s past, he readily acknowledged it, sometimes saying “Yes” before Arens asked the question. “I remember feeling, as I glanced at one after another of the protests he handed me for identification, how fatuous it had all been,” Miller wrote. “I remember thinking that my influence on my own history had been nil.” Yes, he had once believed with passionate moral clarity that Marxism was the hope for mankind, but he had done so before understanding a different reality: the abject terror of a totalitarian Soviet regime that had murdered and starved millions of its own citizens. And he had never advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

  Chairman Walter and the other congressmen sounded like small-minded theater operators who preferred happy musicals to sober dramas. They told Miller how much they wished he would write plays that glorified the American story, apparently not appreciating that he thought HUAC itself was a symbol of the nation’s darker impulses. They questioned how he could claim to be a champion of freedom of speech and yet lambaste one of his fellow writers, Ezra Pound, for Pound’s pro-fascist and anti-Semitic commentaries during World War II, as if, Miller said later, they expected a Jewish citizen to ignore the Holocaust.

  Miller acknowledged to the committee that he had attended five or six meetings of Communist Party writers in Manhattan in 1947. He said that at those meetings he criticized and rejected the dictate that writers in their works should follow the party line. Arens then asked Miller to tell the committee who had been in the room when he entered those meetings, citing a specific writer. Miller did not want to answer. He felt the committee was “trying to break an implicit understanding among human beings that you don’t use their names to bring trouble on them or cooperate in deforming the democratic doctrine of the sanctity of peaceful association.” He asked the committee to suspend the question to a later time, and eventually left the hearing without answering. If he had invoked the Fifth Amendment, his refusal would have been legal. Refusing to name names on personal moral grounds placed him in contempt of Congress.

  * * *

  SOON AFTER THE school year started in September 1956, Dad was missing from our house on Cortland Avenue. He had gone ahead of the rest of us, again, to start yet another new job. The FBI agents knew all about it. Special Agent Clive G. Matthews went to Davenport, Iowa, and talked to Mrs. Lyle Gadient at the Davenport Credit Bureau, who told him she found notes in her files about Elliott Maraniss rooming
at 1106 East Rusholme Street in Davenport and being employed at Labor’s Daily in the neighboring suburb of Bettendorf. On that same day, Matthews contacted Mrs. Bertha Booth at the Rusholme Street address “under a suitable pretext” and learned the following: “For approximately two months . . . Elliott Maraniss occupied a rented room in her home at the above address, he obviously regarded such quarters as fairly temporary at the time he took them and retained them only long enough to find suitable quarters for his wife and family, with a view to moving them to the Davenport area from Detroit.”

  Our mother felt the weight of the move, as usual. We had little money, and Dad had upset her by investing a few thousand dollars in Organizational Services Inc. with funds he had borrowed from his mother in Coney Island. When he went in to tell the Richters that he was leaving for a new job, they persuaded him to let the company keep the money for a few more years, and it was only at Mom’s insistence that he sheepishly returned to the OSI office and retrieved it. Mom was also the one stuck trying to sell the Cortland Avenue house less than a year after buying it. She said later, “The fairly well-off older woman who sold us the house—happily in the first place—now chided me, saying that she wouldn’t have sold me the house if she had known I was going to sell it, to which I instantly and honestly replied that I wouldn’t have bought it if I had known.” The true source of the previous owner’s ill temper was that we had sold the house to a black couple with two young sons, upsetting many white neighbors and leaving the inaccurate perception that we had bought and sold the house quickly as part of a blockbusting scheme perpetrated by bloodsucking real estate companies. Once the house was sold and we were ready to leave, Mom felt the weight had lifted. “It was a chance for Elliott to get back into newspaper work, which really was the most important thing to us both,” she recalled. “It was a new beginning, in a new state, a new town.”