A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Subject: Elliott Maraniss

  A review of the Milwaukee files shows that the Subject was last reported to be a member of the CP on 11/4/47. He was last reported to have attended a CP meeting on 2/8/52. The files do not contain any record of any activity on his part during the past 5 years. Since this case no longer fits the criteria required for the Security Index, Bureau authority is requested to cancel the SI card on the Subject. Elliott Maraniss is employed as a reporter for The Capital Times, a Madison, Wis., daily newspaper, which is considered unfriendly to the Bureau. For this reason, it is not recommended he be interviewed.

  We drove north to Madison in our old two-tone brown and tan Chevy soon after the Fourth of July, arriving in time to root for our new National League baseball team, the Milwaukee Braves of Henry Aaron and Warren Spahn, as they played their way to a pennant and eventual World Series championship over the hated Yankees. McCarthy was dead. The Supreme Court had essentially overturned the Smith Act, ruling it was unconstitutional to bring charges against American citizens solely because of their political advocacy. The effects of HUAC were still felt by Arthur Miller, who was convicted on contempt of Congress charges for not naming names before the committee, but that conviction would soon be overturned on appeal. The world was opening anew. My father had survived, though not the nickname Ace. Madison reminded him of Ann Arbor, the Big Ten university town where he had met my mother in 1939 and they had dreamed together of filling a little blue house near the stadium with children and books and music. Now all that was possible. As he would say, it could be worse.

  “Well, the wanderers are wandering again,” my mother wrote in a letter to her brother Phil, apprising him of the move. The children seemed happy, she said, “but I think we would all be glad to settle down in Madison for a good long time.”

  We were, and we did.

  Epilogue

  Second Acts

  MADISON IS WHERE one story ends and another begins. The story that ends there is the one I set out to write, but the story that begins there lends meaning to what came before. In Madison we were finally able to come up for air and breathe free. Our parents had shaken off the chains of the past with their idealism and optimism intact. They had found their way to another chance and were determined to make the most of it. Their second act was an affirmation of the strength and resilience of a family—and of the American idea.

  We moved one last time after our first year in Madison, but it was only five blocks away and only because our mother kept to her policy of buying a house whenever possible to provide a sense of stability to our family. This time she found a four-bedroom house on Regent Street on the western edge of the University of Wisconsin campus at the bottom of University Heights, an old neighborhood that evoked security and permanence. There was a creaky wooden porch swing in front and a pocket porch off the dining room where Dad and I could listen to Braves games on the radio. Our perimeter was bounded on one side by the limestone monolith of the UW Field House and the gridiron hulk of Camp Randall Stadium, and on the other side by the sturdy redbrick Tudor glory of Randall Elementary School and on up the hill four blocks to West High. Beyond that we were surrounded by water, three lakes that define the city. We quickly came to know all the public beaches, from Vilas to B. B. Clarke to the Willows, and though we were not particularly religious, Lake Wingra, Lake Monona, and Lake Mendota became our holy waters, protecting us from distant evil and baptizing us in our new lives.

  If we had benefactors, they were the people at the Capital Times, especially old Bill Evjue, the white-haired publisher, friend and disciple of Fighting Bob LaFollette, the original progressive, and Miles McMillin, the square-jawed, gum-smacking, twinkle-eyed editorial editor. They all certainly knew about my father’s history, but they never made a big deal of it. This was not a situation where he had to repent and genuflect and name names. Those days were over. They seemed to appreciate that he had learned from his past and that in any case he was a natural-born newspaperman who could bring a vital ink-in-his-blood ingenuity to their paper. While they were liberal capitalists with no love for communism, they had spent more than a decade fighting the inquisitions of Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and considered those the greatest threats to American values. Many newspapers around the country had been intimidated by McCarthy, but the Capital Times stood out as his fearless home-state nemesis, attacking the hypocrisy of the self-righteous hyper-American long before he was exposed as a reckless zealot during the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings.

  When my father, in his unread statement to HUAC in 1952, wrote about the importance of a press that was defiant and free, he could not know at the time that a model of what he had in mind was the paper that would hire him five years later. “Give the people the truth and the freedom to discuss it and all will go well.” That was the motto of the feisty little afternoon paper. It was a lofty ideal that no one could reach; not the Capital Times, not the public, not the government—but a worthy principle nonetheless. On the Fourth of July 1951, during the heat of the McCarthy era eight months before my father’s Americanism was challenged, the paper had put that public spirit to an extraordinary test. One of its young reporters, John Patrick Hunter, typed up the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and combined it with a petition listing six of the ten amendments to the Bill of Rights, along with the Fifteenth Amendment granting black men the right to vote. Then Hunter roamed Henry Vilas Park, stopping in at picnic celebrations to see if citizens would sign his petition. He gave the people the nation’s foundational truth and it did not go well. Of the 112 people he asked to sign the petition, only one did. Twenty accused him of being a communist.

  That experiment said more about the climate of fear in the early 1950s than about a university town known for its well-educated citizens. Madison by the time we arrived provided the setting my parents needed to survive and thrive. Like Ann Arbor, it was a forgiving and unpressurized midwestern haven that encouraged intelligence, nuance, and freedom of thought. The adage of the Capital Times echoed the university’s defining credo, a declaration of academic freedom invoked in 1894 in defense of a professor’s radical thinking: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

  A circle closes here, rounding back to the depiction of my father with which I started this book while considering the imperfect S in his statement to HUAC. His history shaped the public persona that emerged in Madison, but mostly in positive ways. It left him with a righteous anger that burned far below the surface and did not dominate his personality, which seemed remarkably free of bitterness. In Madison he was open to people of all ideologies unless he thought they were bullies, snobs, or demagogues who claimed to have all the answers and assumed an air of moral superiority. His politics changed, from radical to classic liberal, but not his values or belief in America—a generous spirit that he had carried with him since his days at Abraham Lincoln High and that he expressed so powerfully in his letters to my mother during the war. There was more to his philosophy than the expansive inclusiveness of Emerson and Whitman. He also had a sardonic, contrarian side, captured by his fondness for Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Gore Vidal, and William Hazlitt. And he often talked about the time early in his career at the Madison paper when he walked by Mr. Evjue’s office and was awed to see three white-haired men talking and laughing: Evjue, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Carl Sandburg. The newspaperman, the architect, and the poet, singular, headstrong, iconoclastic representatives of the America my father loved.

  As he rose from reporter to city editor to executive editor of the Capital Times over a quarter-century in our adopted hometown, and for a time taught journalism as a lecturer at the university, he encouraged and trained scores of reporters who came into his orbit. His unwavering commitment to equality led him to bring the f
irst black journalists onto the paper and to promote women, traditionally confined to the society pages, into important news reporting positions. His harrumphing “No goddamn prima donnas on this newspaper!” at Nigel Hampton during the Iowa days would have seemed familiar to anyone who ever worked for him. When my brother spent a college summer writing for the Madison paper, he recoiled at an assignment to interview the parents of a child killed by Winkie the elephant at the Vilas Park Zoo. “Dad, I can’t do that!” he told our father, who responded by telling Jim he would be fired if he refused the order and then barked, “And don’t call me Dad!” In the office he had the vocabulary and instincts of an old-school newspaperman, but this gruff demeanor was softened by his concern for people and his appreciation of the frailties of the human condition.

  It is tempting to consider what-ifs as a way to assess the effects the Red Scare had on one man and his family. What if my father had not been followed for years by the FBI, and Bereniece Baldwin had not named him, and he had not been called to testify at the HUAC hearings, and he had not been fired by the Detroit Times?

  The answers are necessarily unknowable, but I imagine they would be a mixed bag. From what I could determine, his disillusionment with communism began around the time he was called before the committee and was complete long before we reached Madison. But I doubt if we ever would have made it to Madison if not for the chain of events that began with the hearings in Detroit. That does not make what happened to our family any easier or justifiable. I’m not trying to play Professor Pangloss, presenting a “best of all possible worlds” take on misfortune. I see it as nothing more than an objective fact about unintended consequences. Although my father never particularly liked the Hearst newspaper chain, his abundant talents in the newsroom likely would have led him to an editing position at the Detroit Times or at another paper, perhaps even back at the New York Times, where he started his career as the student stringer on Coney Island. In any case, if he had stayed at the Detroit Times, he would have been out of a job by the fall of 1960, when the paper folded. As his son, I am unavoidably biased, but in my own career I have worked for many first-rate editors at the Washington Post, and my father was as inspirational, levelheaded, and instinctive about a good story as any of them. While he took great pleasure in a journalistic fight for what he believed in, he also exuded a likability and sense of fairness. I was standing with my daughter, Sarah, at the time, so did not hear it, but family members recall a scene at her wedding when my father, at age eighty-four, was walking slowly toward his seat as Ben Bradlee, the legendary Post editor, announced in a stage whisper, “There’s Elliott Maraniss, a great editor.” Whatever compelled him to say it, it was true.

  As good as Madison was for Dad, and for all of us, I see in retrospect ways that his life there was circumscribed by his past. Only a handful of the thousands of people he encountered in Madison knew anything about what had happened to him in Detroit, and even those few knew only the hazy outlines of the story. He would make clear his distaste for Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and other politicians who staked their careers on Red-baiting, but he rarely if ever talked about his personal experience. As Jim told me when I started this book, that part of our father’s history “was like another life, one that didn’t belong to him any more at all,” a dead letter that he wanted to keep dead. His desire to keep it dead meant that he could not fully express himself or his story. Late in life he began writing a memoir of sorts, but turned it into a love song to my mother, recounting her history and theirs together without acknowledging their involvement in the Communist Party and scratching out the only reference to the blacklist. I think I understand why he did this.

  He wanted Madison and the world to see him and define him for who he was, who he had become, not who he once had been—and at that he succeeded. I took this Elliott for granted as I was growing up in Madison. Just as I had never deeply thought about what he had gone through in 1952 until I read his unread statement to HUAC, it was not until I undertook this book that I even considered the unexpressed anxiety he might have carried all those years in Madison that his past would be dredged up in public again and used to characterize him as something he was not.

  * * *

  LIFE UNFOLDS IN unexpected ways. Inside Room 740 of the federal courthouse in Detroit during those two weeks in 1952, the world was defined by judgments: who was American and who was un-American, who was good and who was bad, who was a patriot and who was a traitor. For the most part, when it comes to the people in this book, the judged and their defenders survived and went on to productive lives, while those who sat in judgment drifted into obscurity.

  Coleman Young, who had turned the Detroit hearings on their end by attacking what he saw as the racist vocabulary and intentions of the committee, drew strength from the challenge to his Americanism and rode his popularity in the black community to the Michigan legislature and eventually to the mayor’s office in Detroit, where the municipal building is now named in his honor. George Crockett overcame his imprisonment on contempt charges to become a judge in Detroit and later a congressman. Crockett had once called his contempt citation at the Foley Square trial a badge of honor, and for both him and Young, their tribulations during the Red Scare era, and the continued attacks on them by right-wing critics through the decades, seemed to enhance, not impair, their reputations among their constituents. While blacks were as patriotic as any other group, affinity with the Communist Party or leftist politics was not arbitrarily viewed as un-American by people who lived in a country that had brought their ancestors over as slaves and then denied them basic rights generation after generation. If there were a Mount Rushmore of American black leaders, it would include not only Martin Luther King Jr., who was wiretapped by the FBI and refused to disassociate himself from a few advisers who had Communist Party connections, but also W.E.B. Du Bois, who cofounded the NAACP, wrote one of the seminal works of American black existence, The Souls of Black Folk, was trailed by the FBI during the McCarthy era, and moved to Ghana and joined the Communist Party shortly before his death at age ninety-three in 1963.

  John Stephens Wood stayed in Georgia after the Senate refused to confirm his appointment to the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1955. The former HUAC chairman lived out his years as a country lawyer, his health declining, his society wife still distant from him after her discovery that he was part Native American. He died at age eighty-three in 1968 in Marietta, only a few miles from the spot at Frey’s Gin where more than a half-century earlier he had driven the car that carried the corpse of Leo Frank away from the lynching field.

  Charles E. Potter, whose political rise in Washington was fueled by a Red-hunting posture he later came to regret, lasted only one term in the Senate. In 1958 he was defeated in his bid for reelection by Democrat Philip A. Hart, another veteran who had been wounded on D-Day and had recovered in the same Battle Creek hospital as Potter. Hart’s political career was so distinguished that one of the senate office buildings on Capitol Hill is named in his honor. Potter became a lobbyist after his defeat, wrote Days of Shame, which deplored the excesses of the McCarthy era, retreated to a farm near Queenstown on Maryland’s eastern shore, and died at the early age of sixty-three. His grave rests in Section 30 of Arlington National Cemetery.

  Frank S. Tavenner Jr. stayed on as chief counsel for the committee for another twelve years, until he died of a heart attack at his home in Woodstock at age sixty-nine. In 1964, the year of his death, the committee was run by two southern segregationists, Chairman Edwin E. Willis of Louisiana and William M. Tuck of Virginia. Willis was among the leading opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, and Tuck earlier had been a strong proponent of Virginia’s massive resistance against public school integration, a movement led by Tavenner’s first benefactor from the Shenandoah Valley, Senator Harry T. Byrd. In HUAC’s annual report that year, Willis and Tuck took note of recent attempts to “destroy or curb” the committee and asserted that the effort had “Communists at its core.
” They also paid tribute to Tavenner, whose death came in late October as the report was being drafted, recognizing him for his service in World War I, for his role as acting counsel at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and “not only as a legal artisan of rare skills but also for the whole man who enjoyed them.”

  One winter afternoon more than a half-century later, I drove out to the Shenandoah Valley and along Main Street to the edge of Woodstock, turned right at Benchoff Drive, and headed up a hill before angling right again through the stone pillar entranceway into Massanutten Cemetery. As the biblical verse that became part of the folklore of this town says, to everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. This was my time to confront Tavenner, or at least his gravestone. It would be a symbolic confrontation, a one-way conversation, me talking to a marble slab, cold and silent, but that seemed sufficient.

  The winding paths of the old cemetery took me past markers for Painter and Pence, Hite and Hottel, Boyer and Bauserman and Burner, but after an hour of searching, still no Tavenner. I called the cemetery office, told a woman there the site I had been trying to locate, and minutes later she called back. You must have driven right by it, she said. According to her map, Tavenner would be on the right almost immediately after you entered the cemetery through the old stone archway off Benchoff Drive. I went to the spot she suggested. Didawick and Jones, but still no Tavenner. Then, below those, I noticed a row of headstones that seemed unmarked. I walked over and looked on the other side, and there it was, in the family plot, “FRANK S. TAVENNER JR.”

  It all seemed odd, unlikely, and unnerving. American as apple pie? Long ago this orchardist and inquisitor had challenged the Americanism of my father and unsettled my father’s life, and my mother’s life, and the lives of my brother and sisters and me. And now here lay his remains, buried in this craggy field in this remote valley, his headstone turned away from the road, away from all eyes, unlike all the others in the graveyard.