A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  We left Detroit around December 1, Mom and four children under age twelve. Jeannie didn’t want to leave Detroit for a small town, Jim was sick of moving, Wendy was a baby, and I had no strong feelings either way. We traveled west across the bottom of Michigan by train, through Dearborn, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Battle Creek, and Kalamazoo, before dipping toward the Indiana line. Shards of memory stick in the brain for inexplicable reasons. I remember hearing at the stop in Niles that Floyd Patterson had won the heavyweight championship in a bout with Archie Moore. I felt crushed. Only seven years old, yet the ageless Archie somehow was my man. Once we reached Davenport, we reconnected with Dad and stayed downtown at the Hotel Blackhawk for a few nights. We had stopped at roadside motels before, but this was my first time in a multistory hotel with an elevator. We ate most of our meals nearby at Bishop’s cafeteria, another exotic experience, before moving into a rented house on Grant Street in Bettendorf, a few blocks up the hill from the muddy Mississippi River.

  If this was a new start for my father, it was a quixotic one. The newspaper he joined was the Quint-City Labor’s Daily, the local version of the national Labor’s Daily published by the International Typographical Union. “Quint” stood for the five tightly bunched cities of Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa and Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline across the river in Illinois. The paper was a five-days-a-week morning daily that grew out of a strike by ITU local 107 against the Daily Times and Morning Democrat of Davenport, the Rock Island Argus, and the Moline Daily Dispatch. The strike began when the papers introduced a form of automation that allowed wire service copy to be set automatically without being touched by human Linotype operators. There were similar strikes during that era all around the country, early battles in a lopsided war between newspaper back shops and owners that would drag on for the next twenty-five years as advances made more and more jobs obsolete. But unions were still strong then, at their peak numerically, and the future is harder to see when people are fighting for their livelihoods.

  By the time my father arrived in Bettendorf, the Quint-City Labor’s Daily had become a sanctuary for a ragtag collection of iconoclasts, outsiders, and blacklisted leftists looking for a second chance. He fit in. After spending nearly two years involuntarily away from the profession he loved, he was thirsting to get back into a newsroom. He heard about the job through old connections from his past life. In search of talent, the editor, Al Maund, contacted Carl Haessler, the founder of Federated Press, a leftist news service, who had heard about my father from his Detroit friends. Dad and Maund talked for an hour over the phone, feeling each other out, and when Maund said he could offer a salary of a hundred dollars a week, Dad was in. If this paper had uncertain prospects for survival, at least he would not have to worry about getting fired because of what had happened in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In this crowd, that would more likely be viewed as a badge of honor than a reason for dismissal. “I knew it was a shaky proposition, that it wasn’t going to last very long, but I wanted to start fresh, shake the old place, pull up stakes,” he told me later. “I just left. I didn’t think I was deserting Detroit.”

  Alfred Maund was a maverick from New Orleans who had bounced around the South. He wrote editorials briefly for the New Orleans Item, worked at the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky, and taught at Livingston State Teachers College, a white institution in the heart of Alabama’s black belt. He had devoted his life to fighting southern racism and had joined with communists and socialists in that effort. Unlike my father, Maund did not think of himself as a professional newspaperman, but as a novelist. He had just completed the manuscript of his first novel, The Big Boxcar, when he and his wife, Dorothy, a social worker, and their twelve-year-old son, Steve, arrived in Bettendorf a few months before my father. It was their first time living in the North. The Big Boxcar, with its six vivid black characters, including a rape victim, a murderer, and a drug addict, riding the rails through Jim Crow Alabama, would receive positive reviews in the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Times, which described Maund’s southern landscape as “a world of impoverishment, brutality, segregation, and sordidness, made the more compelling by reason of an occasional gesture of charity or protest by sympathetic whites.” Jeannie read it later and was “quite excited about the racy language and sex.”

  The newspaper offices were in an old fire station—newsroom and advertising in front, divided by a rail, and printshop and press in back. In the division of labor within the newsroom, Maund wrote the editorials, worked with the ITU on financing the operation, and served as the public face of the newspaper, while my father ran the daily operation as a combination city editor, news editor, and one-man copydesk. He also wrote a sports column for the national edition of Labor’s Daily under the pseudonym Jimmy Moran, and had two nicknames around the office: his old standby, Ace, and now also the Ol’ Railbird, which he used when writing about horse racing, a subject about which he knew next to nothing.

  My father’s politics were still liberal—his sentiments then and always were with the underdog—but he had long since turned away from his past attachments to the Communist Party and viewed the Soviet Union, which had recently crushed a freedom movement in Hungary, as an oppressive force. He did not write about this directly, but it came out obliquely in a sports column about the violence of football, of all unlikely places. “A suffering world, grieving over man’s inhumanity to man in Hungary,” his column began, before working its way to arguing that the National Football League was rife with hypocrisy and violence.

  The staff included Nigel Hampton, a jazz-loving hip southerner who had been Maund’s student at Livingston; Guy Lewis, a lanky Iowan from Cedar Rapids who covered Davenport City Hall and cops and courts; and Eugene Feldman, a shy, bespectacled, lisping, young communist from Montgomery, Alabama, who subsisted on sardines and crackers in his darkened room and had been followed around the country by Red-seeking hounds from the American Legion. Along with covering news and features in the river towns, Hampton wrote a column called This I Can’t Believe, a sarcastic take on Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio broadcast This I Believe. Feldman, along with working the switchboard, wrote a column called Fables and Foibles, gentle prose with about-town ruminations and fictional tales that often ended with the admonition “Feed the birds.” Uncle Eugene, as we knew him, was very popular with old women readers who had no notion of his radical politics. Bob Meloon, a printer with a flair for page composition, worked with my father on the layouts, and the two also took turns writing a television column.

  It did not take long for the reporters to learn why my father was called Ace. He performed with skill and professionalism every job he was assigned at the newspaper. While Maund described himself as having a “terrorist personality,” meaning he cared more about making a point than being balanced, he thought Dad had an underlying decency that permeated his work. “Your father would show mercy,” he once told me. But he was also no-nonsense, as Nigel Hampton quickly learned. “In my first week or so on the job I had written a news story that had a ‘punch’ ending,” Hampton wrote in a letter to me decades later. “When the paper came out, my last few paragraphs were missing (filled by an ad, of course). I went to Elliott to complain, and without even looking up from some copy he was editing, he barked, ‘No goddamn prima donnas on this newspaper!’ Had it not been for your mother’s warmth, I might never have got close enough to the crusty ol’ Railbird to learn to love him.”

  Unable to afford the wire services for national and world news, the M and M boys, Maund and Maraniss, improvised. They started work around noon and lived close enough to the office to walk home for dinner, take notes while listening to the evening news on television and radio, and return to write up accounts of what they heard. My father, a fast if messy two-fingered typist, would also transcribe the evening broadcast of Edward P. Morgan and the News on the ABC radio network. Maund, with his southern connections, conscripted a civil rights activist in Mont
gomery to write about the bus boycott and its aftermath. The stories ran under the byline Shubel Morgan, which keen students of American racial history knew was the alias of abolitionist John Brown. They also published an edited version of the weekly radio address “Hello, Wisconsin” delivered by William T. Evjue, owner and publisher of the Capital Times in Madison. My father wrote a box next to each column describing Evjue as “a nationally known liberal newspaperman who wages a constant campaign against corruption in government and forces which threaten to undermine the inherent freedoms of the people.”

  They printed fifty thousand copies of the paper in the back room and charged five cents a copy, while also giving away bundles for free to railroad workers and porters to distribute up and down the lines all the way to St. Louis. The strike newspaper was popular with the railroad men, as the Maunds learned when they put their son, Steve, on the train for New Orleans to visit his grandparents at Christmastime. It was ferocious winter weather, and Dorothy Maund was worried about her boy traveling alone, but as soon as the conductors learned that he was the son of the editor of Quint-City Labor’s Daily they treated him like family, handing him off by hand all the way south.

  * * *

  JEANNIE CONSIDERED BETTENDORF a backward move for everyone in the family but our father. “Our house was mean and cramped, there was no cultural life to speak of, [and the] schools were pretty bad,” she recalled. “As always, we were good little stoics who never complained, but made the best of the meager opportunities on offer, such as a traveling carnival, a local cafeteria, a small library that seemed to carry nothing but Nancy Drew, of which Mom disapproved.” There was also an Iowana Ice Cream dairy down the street, a good pizza place in Moline, and the riverbank as a playground, but not much else. The poverty was different from Detroit’s, more southern and rural. A boy with a lame leg who lived in a trailer down by the river would stop by our house most mornings to walk Jeannie to Washington Elementary School. There was also a girl in her class who “always dressed in dungarees, with greasy, dirty hair.” On the other side of town lived the golden girls and boys who had nice, modern ranch houses and new cars and better clothes. We were the outsiders and clung to each other. I spent a lot of time reading Pogo comic books. The Okefenokee Swamp full of talking critters seemed no more fantastic than anything else I had encountered in my young life. Albert Alligator was my favorite.

  Our loneliness eased some in early 1957, when Uncle Bob and his wife, Kay, moved to Bettendorf with their daughters, Rachel and Sarah. Uncle Bob had been working as a television repairman in Detroit for the past few years and seized the chance to get back into newspapers when our father recommended him for an open reporting job. But not long after the Cummins family arrived and Bob started at the paper, Maund announced to the staff that they were bleeding losses and had run out of money to continue as a daily. The ITU’s national office in Indianapolis offered to give them $10,000 in seed money to turn the paper into a weekly, but Maund was ready to give up the project entirely. No one else was. That night Dad and the reporters took Maund out to a nightclub on the edge of town. “They buttered me up, buttered me up, buttered me up. And, of course, the buttering up didn’t impress me one whit,” Maund recalled. “It was the fact that I recognized that all these people were trying, had to, make a living. . . . I felt responsible, so I said okay.”

  The last edition of the daily came out on Friday, February 15. “So Long—For a While” was the headline in the box on the upper left of the front page. “With this issue the Quint-City edition of Labor’s Daily is ending publication as a daily newspaper. But Labor’s Daily is not dead.” During the hiatus, Maund and my father studied the operations of successful weeklies in Oklahoma and suburban Chicago. They came away with plans to focus on feature stories, columns, occasional investigations, television listings, and inexpensive ad rates for local advertisers. The staff, including Dad and Uncle Bob, would double as advertising salesmen. Although this was meant to keep the paper alive and boost salaries at the same time (an extra fifteen dollars a week), Maund later called it “the worst idea in the history of journalism. It was like hitching thoroughbreds to plows.” My brother, Jim, and Steve Maund were enlisted among the fleet of paperboys who distributed copies to households around the quint-cities and made a penny for every nickel they collected. A want ad seeking carriers said that boys could be eleven or older, but girls, according to Iowa law, had to be at least eighteen.

  The first edition of the Quint-City Special came out on March 22. Among the few special moments in its existence was an investigative article by Bob Cummins about a subject close to his heart. His first wife had died of polio, and the deadly disease was still around in early 1957, though in the process of being eradicated due to lifesaving vaccines. The incidence of polio in America the previous year had been at the lowest level since 1947, but the largest national outbreak had been in the Midwest, and its epicenter was Chicago. With what was then known as the summer polio season approaching, Bob discovered that the Rock Island County Medical Society in Illinois had ignored an offer by the local polio chapter to provide $3,000 for an inoculation program. The medical society, he wrote, decided to turn down a program of mass injection in favor of individual shots through family physicians. In a companion editorial, Maund reported that neighboring clinics in Illinois and Iowa had set up public clinics and dispensed thousands of shots, in contrast to the Rock Island County Medical Society’s selfish “determination to keep ironclad control over the Salk serum, administering it only on a paid, private-patient basis.”

  But the newspaper’s end was near. Going from a daily to a weekly was a losing proposition. “Our funds shrank remorselessly,” Maund recalled. “Finally I wrote a letter to [ITU president] Woodruff Randolph telling him of the attrition and didn’t predict a turnaround—nor did I ask for more money.” When my father saw the letter, he told Maund, “You are asking him to shut us down!” And that is what Randolph did. Maund said it came as a relief. “Everybody was so beat from their dual roles that there was no shock, no wrath, no grief. All our tears had been spent on the demise of the Quint-City Labor’s Daily.” The Quint-City Special was dead before Memorial Day.

  * * *

  THE MCCARTHY ERA had come to an end by then, at least the part that included Joe McCarthy himself. He had entered Bethesda Naval Hospital on April 28 for what his wife said was knee surgery, but in fact his liver had given out after a life of hard drinking, and he died at 6:02 p.m. on May 2.

  There were never any witches, some said; others said that communists were witches. But in our cramped little house on Grant Street a few blocks up from the muddy Mississippi in a small town in Iowa, it was “Ding, dong, the Witch is dead!” McCarthy in the grave at age forty-eight. He’d gone where the goblins go, below, below, below.

  Three days later, the same U.S. Senate that had censured him now allowed his flower-shrouded casket into the well of the Chamber, as members of the Washington tribe, love him or hate him, paid their respects. Vice President Nixon was there, along with Joe’s consigliere, Roy Cohn, and the FBI’s Hoover, and Senator Charles E. Potter, the former HUAC member. Then the casket was carried down the Capitol steps and driven to the airport for the flight back to Wisconsin, the state McCarthy had called home.

  * * *

  IOWA TURNED OUT to be a vital decompression chamber for men and families who had been submerged for years and might now rise to the surface. The Lerner newspapers in suburban Chicago offered jobs to Maund and my father, but they demurred, and instead helped land Bob a job there at the Life of Niles Township, covering Skokie, Morton Grove, Niles, and Lincolnwood. He and Kay had three daughters now and a fourth on the way. He left them behind briefly in Bettendorf and stayed in a small hotel in Skokie until they could all get settled. Maund took a job with the chemical workers union, where he continued writing novels. Guy Lewis caught on at a paper in Peoria; Nigel Hampton had been drafted into the army; and Eugene Feldman found a teaching job at a Jewish school in Chic
ago.

  It had been five years since my father was identified as an un-American American in Room 740. Five years, five cities, four kids, eight homes, two papers that fired him, three papers that folded. Now, one more move. He wrote a letter to William T. Evjue, the publisher of the newspaper in Madison that for years had challenged McCarthy’s Red-baiting—the Capital Times. The white-haired Norwegian progressive whose Hello, Wisconsin column ran in the Quint-City Labor’s Daily called and invited my father up to Madison for an interview. He brought along Bob Meloon, the former printer who had been part of the ITU strike since its inception. The meeting at the newspaper office on South Carroll Street down the hill from the Wisconsin State Capitol was one my father would never forget. Copies of Quint-City Labor’s Daily were spread across the old man’s desk. The pages looked so clean, neatly laid out, the writing sharp, even the television page was clear and easy to read. Evjue turned to his city editor and asked, “Why can’t we put out a paper like this?”—and our lives were changed forever.

  My father was hired on the spot, at $114 a week. As usual, he went ahead, staying in an apartment until he found a house for the family. It was on Chandler Street in a good neighborhood near the Henry Vilas Park Zoo. My first concern was whether I would be eaten by a lion or tiger. But at least the FBI was no longer following us.

  To: Director, FBI

  From: SAC [Subversive Activities Control], Milwaukee