Bereniece Baldwin kept testifying at HUAC hearings and Smith Act trials into the late 1950s, then lived out the remainder of her long life in retirement and anonymity, dying in suburban Detroit in 1991 at age eighty-nine. She had three children and nine grandchildren. Her children—Burton, Violet, and Bill—are dead, and the grandchildren are of my generation, mostly in their sixties. The oldest, Susan Vella, is a retired nurse who lives in St. Clair Shores north of Detroit. She was an infant when HUAC held its hearings in Room 740 in 1952; her birth made it possible for the press to call Baldwin “the grandmother spy.” When I interviewed her, I was struck by the points connecting our stories from different sides of the naming names divide. Both the Cummins family and her family carried burdens. One of Baldwin’s sons, Burton, suffered a mental breakdown during World War II and lived with his mother or in a hospital for the rest of his life, not unlike my uncle Phil. “When I was in my thirties she told me one day, ‘You know, your uncle Burton is schizo,’ ” Vella recalled. Baldwin’s other son had polio as a child. Unlike my aunt Sue, Vella’s uncle Bill did not die from polio, but one of his legs was malformed and he lost function in one of his arms.
Susan said that her grandmother’s role as an FBI informant was never discussed in the family. She was extremely close to her grandmother and as a young adult talked to her “for hours at a time.” But never a word about pretending to be a communist. Nor did Susan hear about it from her mother, Violet. She was an adult when she stumbled upon the truth. She and her younger brother, Michael Wiethoff, were rummaging through one of their mother’s closets looking for old photos when they found a box of old newspaper clippings. “That’s when we figured it out,” she said. “I had no idea when I was a kid.” Her first thought when she learned about her grandmother’s past was about how daring and dangerous it must have been. “I’m surprised my grandmother didn’t get killed,” she said. “That was my first response. I couldn’t believe it after I’d read all this stuff.”
When Baldwin died, one of the speakers at her memorial service, the son of one of her close friends, made some oblique references to her secret past, telling stories of how she would slip into their house from a back alley to the rear door after parking a block away because of fears that she was being followed. But beyond that, all the grandchildren knew was what they read in those old clippings. In their family, unlike ours, politics was never discussed. The only time Susan heard her grandmother utter anything political was when she said she did not like Coleman Young. “But it’s kind of funny, because the dad of my best friend when I was growing up worked as a policeman for Coleman Young when he was mayor, and he saw a different person, he really liked him. It all depends on your perspective, I guess.” Michael described “Grandma Baldwin” as a caring but strong-willed dynamo who drove around Detroit in a 1970 gold Pontiac Catalina, her head barely visible over the steering wheel, the dashboard darkened by smoke from a cigarette fire started by her schizophrenic son. Once, he recalled, he was in his work van with a colleague, driving down Eight Mile Road, when “this car comes flying out of a side street and cuts us off, and I had to sit there real quiet because it was my grandmother.”
Near the end of my conversation with Susan Vella, she asked me about my father’s experience as a witness called before the committee. I said that he never talked about it. “It’s too bad,” she said sympathetically. “And my grandmother didn’t either. And what a history, eh? What a different era. So freaking bizarre.”
* * *
LIKE HER FATHER, Andrew Cummins, before her, who had moved to Ann Arbor so that his children could get the best possible public education, my mother chose our neighborhood in Madison because of the excellent public schools nearby, Randall and West. Jim was class orator for his West High class of 1962, and Jean was one of two Wisconsin students selected in the first group of Presidential Scholars in 1964, an honor that took her to the White House to meet President Lyndon B. Johnson, and from there to Swarthmore. We were all warmed by Madison’s embrace. As Dad had written in that hopeful letter to Jimmy soon after he was born, our house on Regent Street filled up with music and books. Our mother, who had sacrificed so much to keep the family afloat, went back to school and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wisconsin the same spring that Jim graduated from Harvard, then became a book editor at the University of Wisconsin Press. Her occasional depression was masked by her combination of gentleness and intellect. She sang in the choir at the Unitarian Church, played the piano and recorder, filled our house with the sounds of Beethoven, Mozart, Harry Belafonte, Miriam Makeba, Ella Fitzgerald, and Paul Robeson, studied Chinese, and constantly welcomed relatives and wayfaring friends for extended stays. She was the very definition of a bleeding-heart liberal, in the positive, not cynical, sense of the phrase. No one in Madison could have guessed that in her early adulthood she was known as Mary the Red.
Her brother Bob finally moved back to Ann Arbor. A writing career that began at the Michigan Daily ended with a twelve-year stint at the Ann Arbor News, where he worked as wire editor, feature writer, and higher education reporter, covering his alma mater. He and Kay raised five girls and infused them with their fascination with books and baseball. There was a time when the younger three, at their father’s instruction, could recite the starting lineup for the Toledo Mud Hens, then a minor league farm club for his beloved Detroit Tigers. Those three daughters, Eileen, Laurel, and Sheila, knew very little about his past, unlike the older daughters, Rachel and Sarah, who had lost their mother to polio when they were very young.
At the Ann Arbor News, Bob developed a reputation for clever headline writing, which he compared to the right chess move. (He played chess by mail with expert players from around the world.) When he retired in 1978, the News published a feature story about his career without mentioning that he and Ralph Neafus and Elman Service had gone off to fight against fascism in Spain, and that Neafus had been killed by Franco’s troops while he and Service survived, and that Service had gone on to become a world-class anthropologist even though both he and Bob had been investigated in their past. The focus in Bob’s retirement story was on his love of newspapers and his reputation for being precise and fair. “While the papers are private businesses, they have a public responsibility,” the story quoted him saying. “They must provide the readers with accurate, trustworthy information about what’s going on in their community so those readers can form their own opinions on issues. Without good, conscientious newspapers, no democracy can survive.”
Bob had long since become disillusioned by any ideology that tried to impose group thinking. In 1984 the extended Cummins family, by then more than fifty strong, held a reunion, the first of what would become an every-three-years tradition that continues today. Bob found the first site for it, a former WPA village near Fontana Dam in the Smoky Mountains that had been turned into a resort, but though he loved his family, something about the gatherings reminded him too much of a cult.
The organizer of the reunions was my mother’s younger sister, Jean Chulak. One of many traditions at these gatherings was for Aunt Jean to give a lecture on the family genealogy and the newest connections she had found tracing the roots of the Cumminses and Devers and other mostly Scots-Irish ancestors as she visited courthouse archives in Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Virginia. There were stories of success and failure and mobility, and it never occurred to me until I began this book that part of what Aunt Jean was doing, consciously or unconsciously, without ever saying so, was establishing the all-American bona fides of this family in which her brothers and sisters had once been called un-American. But her genealogical reports reinforced something even more important: the beneficent communal role that the Cummins family played in holding us all together.
Why it took my parents and uncle so long to reject the false promise of communism is a question my siblings and I have thought about but can only offer theories for, not certainties. A summation from Jean comes closest to capturing our conclusions: “Loyalty, frie
ndship, pride, continuity with past beliefs, the fact that Russia had helped win the war and been our ally and was suddenly the enemy (talk about abrupt shifts), groupthink, confirmation bias, investment in a belief that they had sacrificed for (this applies to Bob especially), the persistence of colonialism, racial injustice and economic hardship even after the war, understanding that communists in Europe and other parts of the world were taken seriously and not considered weirdos, and maybe a feeling that they didn’t really care that much about the U.S.S.R. but weren’t going to attack it. The repressive atmosphere made it impossible for people to discuss their beliefs openly.”
Jim and I both theorized that at the core of their reasoning was a profound dislike for right-wing anticommunists. “What they were sore about was the exploitation, the witch hunting, of right-wing politicians,” Jim said in a note to me while reading the manuscript of this book. “And, of course, the threat to their, and everyone’s constitutional rights. They thought they were more loyal to what they loved about America, the real America. This is . . . not earth-shaking at this point, I don’t think. Nobody but the crazies thinks anymore that internal security was ever threatened. And Dad was not about to inform on anyone. He used to say, ‘Don’t be a stool pigeon’ to Jeannie and me if we would tell on each other.”
That generation is gone now. After Bob died at home in August 1995 at seventy-nine, a comrade from his days in Spain was among the speakers at his memorial service. Mourners were encouraged to make contributions in his honor to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
My father died nine years later, in 2004, at eighty-six, and my mother in January 2006 at eighty-four. They are buried side by side along with Bob and Phil and Grace and Andrew and Barbara in a Cummins family plot at a cemetery on Whitmore Lake Road, in Ann Arbor, not far from where it all began at the University of Michigan. My father had become a permanent midwesterner.
There was a tragedy near the end of my parents’ lives that cut deeper on a personal level than any of their political travails. It involved the youngest of their four children, Dad’s good luck charm, the redhead who came along just as he was starting to turn his life around. Wendy, the most talented among us, a thrilling classical pianist trained at Wisconsin and Yale, as well as a wife and mother of two young sons, was killed in a car crash on an icy November Sunday in 1997 as she was driving from her home in Ithaca, New York, to Geneva to accompany a musician at Hobart College. Her loss created an ache for my parents that Dad’s lifelong motto—“It could be worse”—could never soothe.
My research for this book took me back to Ann Arbor many times, and during one visit I went to my cousin Eileen’s house to look through a box of artifacts from her father’s life. There, alongside documents Bob kept from his time in Spain, was a letter that my brother sent him in 1981. Jim was a professor at Amherst then, where he taught Spanish and Spanish literature and would later teach a course on the Spanish Civil War. He was also intensely interested in labor history and the ideas and forces that drew young people in the 1930s and 1940s to the Communist Party. It was while reading about labor history that he first came upon a reference to the record of the 1952 HUAC hearings in Detroit, a discovery that inspired him to look for a transcript of the hearings, which he found in the Amherst College library.
Until then he did not know the full story. “I guess I don’t need to tell you that I never knew that you and Elliott testified, or that Mary was also informed on. But there it was,” Jim wrote in his letter to Bob. “You falsified a passport application [to go fight fascists in Spain]. And Elliott went and read the Guild Constitution to the committee, figuring I guess that they wouldn’t let him enter any other kind of statement. It seems to me now, simplifying, that Elliott has more or less remained faithful to the civil libertarian doctrine he gave to the committee. . . . I don’t know whether he ever was a revolutionary or whether he was on the liberal side of the popular front. I don’t know how he, and you, felt sitting there before the committee. I can imagine. But you all were pretty articulate. I wonder endlessly about those things.”
It took me another thirty-plus years to wonder what Jim was wondering. I lacked my brother’s uncommon intellect and was absorbed with other things, but like so many stories that I’ve pursued over the decades, when I got to this one I felt that I was doing it with Jim and for him and Jean and Wendy and all of our family, my way of expressing gratitude. My parents were not perfect, but they created a good American family. They emerged from hard times bonded by love and open to the world. And though Jim never knew it, it was one small gesture of his that got me thinking in a way that led me down this road. It was in the summer of 2006 when we gathered at the cemetery in Ann Arbor for the first time after the ashes of our parents were buried together there. Jim insisted that our father’s gravestone carry his nickname: Elliott (Ace) Maraniss. Why “Ace”? I knew that long ago some people called him that, but why put it on his grave marker? It took me all the way through the writing of this book to appreciate what that really signified, going back to the day in the late winter of 1952 when not just his name but his nickname was spoken in Room 740 of the Federal Building in Detroit.
1 Elliott Maraniss, my father, was intimately familiar to me, but I wondered whether he would seem like a stranger by the end of my research. Instead, I emerged with a clearer appreciation of the imperfections of the American story—and with a better understanding of my father, our family, and its secrets.
2 By the time Bereniece Baldwin testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Detroit in 1952, she had been a longtime FBI informant inside the Michigan branch of the Communist Party USA. The hundreds of names she provided the committee included Elliott Maraniss.
3 Baldwin (right on couch) was called “the grandmother spy” in the Detroit newspapers. Her neighbors considered her unremarkable—pleasant, mild-mannered, and matronly, standing barely five feet, with high cheekbones, gray hair, and deep circles under her eyes.
4 The HUAC chairman in 1952 was John Stephens Wood of Georgia. A southern Democrat who supported Jim Crow segregation, briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan as a young man, and had another dark secret in his past, Wood ran the congressional panel that decided who and what was un-American.
5 Wood’s mentor was Judge Newt Morris, the behind-the-scenes mastermind of the lynching of Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, who had been falsely accused of murdering a young woman at his Atlanta factory. Wood drove the car that carried Frank’s body from the lynching grounds.
6 Ace Maraniss, as he was known, was editorial director of the Michigan Daily at the time he married townie Mary Cummins on December 16, 1939. He was twenty-one, she was eighteen. They hitchhiked from Ann Arbor to Madison on their honeymoon to attend a heated convention of the leftist American Student Union.
7 Elliott (third from left, top row) enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor. He was highly regarded by superiors even as he was investigated by military intelligence for his radical past. The army isolated him at remote posts in the southwest before finally giving him a chance to show leadership skills beyond the Quartermaster Corps and baseball diamond.
8 Elliott on home leave in Ann Arbor with Mary in 1944 before heading to Camp Lee, Virginia, to command an all-black salvage and repair unit in the still-segregated U.S. Army.
9 “The men are beginning to develop a group spirit that could come only from deep conviction that they are getting a square shake,” Elliott wrote to Mary soon before his unit embarked for Okinawa. At the war’s end, he was honorably discharged at the rank of captain.
10 Bob Cummins, Mary’s older brother, was at the University of Michigan three years ahead of Elliott. The week he graduated, he and classmates Elman Service and Ralph Neafus left for Europe to fight with the Loyalists against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
11 Bob and his Michigan compatriots took a ship to France, then climbed over the Pyrenees into Spain to join the fight. They trained with the McKenzie-Papineau battalion of the Inte
rnational Brigade and carried red passports issued by the Spanish communists.
12 Neafus, who was also a close college friend of the playwright Arthur Miller, was captured by Franco’s troops and imprisoned at a cathedral in Alcañiz, where he and others were executed. When I visited the church eighty years later, it still felt like a gloomy dungeon of death.
13 Cummins (second from left, top row) and Service (to Cummins’s left) survived the war and returned to the U.S. on the S.S. Paris in December 1939. When they reached Ann Arbor, hundreds of students filled the Michigan Union to honor them. Mary was there to see her older brother; Elliott covered the event for the Daily. That is where my parents met.
14 The good American family in 1950, a few days into the new year, assembled at the house of Andrew and Grace Cummins. Elliott stands upper left, the southpaw cradling infant David. Mary is center stage, warmed in fur. Jim and Jeannie Maraniss are in the scrum of kids up front, Jim with his mouth open, Jeannie looking with concern as Grandmother comforts a distraught cousin.
15 Ace Maraniss was a busy man after the war, working on the copydesk of the Detroit Times and as an editor of the Michigan Herald, the Detroit affiliate of the Daily Worker, where among other things he ghostwrote a sports column for Olympic dash champion Eddie Tolan.
A Good American Family Page 39