A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

16 George W. Crockett Jr. represented Elliott at the hearings in Room 740. Earlier he had served as a defense lawyer in the Foley Square trial of eleven leading American communists who were tried and convicted solely because of their politics. The judge in that trial cited Crockett for contempt of court, and he served a six-month prison term shortly after the Detroit hearings.

  17 Frank S. Tavenner Jr. led the questioning of Elliott and others at the HUAC hearings in Room 740 of the Federal Building in Detroit. A lawyer and apple grower who came out of the Byrd political machine in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Tavenner served as committee counsel under Chairman Wood.

  18 Charles E. Potter lost both legs and a testicle leading troops into battle in the Colmar Pocket during WWII, then returned to Michigan for a life in politics. He built his reputation as a strong anticommunist while serving on HUAC but came to regret the excesses of the McCarthy era, writing a book titled Days of Shame.

  19 The Maraniss family on a ferry near the Statue of Liberty in the summer of 1952 after Elliott was fired from the Detroit Times when he was named by an informant at the HUAC hearings in Detroit. The first refuge was Elliott’s parents’ house on Coney Island.

  20 The family had returned to Detroit, with Elliott working at a party supplies store, when Wendy was born in 1955, the youngest of four children. Elliott thought of her as the family’s good luck charm. She was far more than that, but it was one way for him to sustain his optimism through his ordeals.

  21 The Capital Times in Madison, staunch foe of Joe McCarthy, hired Elliott in 1957, righting his career and saving the family after five years of wandering. The FBI followed Elliott to Madison, but his file was soon closed, and he rose to eventually become executive editor of the paper. This is the last report of his thick FBI file.

  22 Elliott was a natural editor with an electric presence in the newsroom. He taught me to be skeptical but not cynical, to root for underdogs but be wary of rigid ideologies of any sort, to search for the messy truth wherever it took me.

  23 Mary and Elliott in winter. They emerged from hard times bonded by love and open to the world.

  Acknowledgments

  Librarians and archivists are underrecognized angels for authors researching nonfiction books. This time, I am deeply indebted to these people and more: Mike Smith, Terrence McDonald, and Brian Williams at the Bentley Historical Library, and Karen Hutchens at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan. Katherine Mollan at the National Archives in Washington and Tim Nenninger at the National Archives at College Park, along with Mary Kay Schmidt, who expedited my FOIA request for FBI files. Matthew Boylan at the New York Public Library. Maira Liriano at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Lynette Stout at the Georgia Historical Society. Luther Hanson at the Fort Lee Quartermaster Museum. Sarah J. Logue at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton. Timothy Johnson and staff at the Tamiment Library at New York University. And William Fliss at Marquette University Special Collections.

  Katherine Ward, one of my political biography students at Vanderbilt University, spent a summer as my research intern and could not have been more helpful finding people and information. Julie Tate and Margot Williams, among the world’s most proficient researchers, also helped at key points along the way. Steve Oney’s illuminating And the Dead Shall Rise was my bible for writing about the Leo Frank case and its connection to HUAC chairman John Stephens Wood, and he pointed me toward important files at the Georgia Historical Society. My longtime colleague and friend Glenn Frankel helped guide me through the Red Scare era, and I learned much from his book High Noon, an insightful study of Hollywood and HUAC. If there is an indispensable book on the interplay of witnesses and informants, it is Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, which I turned to countless times. Robbie Cohen and his When the Old Left Was Young served the same role in my understanding of the student left of the 1930s. Alan Warren, with the look and sensibility of a modern-day Orwell, was an effervescent and encyclopedic guide through Spain as my wife and I traced my uncle’s path in the Spanish Civil War. I am also indebted to Steve Fainaru and John U. Bacon.

  Blaine Harden, Glenn Frankel, Pat Toomay, Mike Kail, Whitney Gould, and Michael Weisskopf were generous with their thoughts in reading the manuscript. At Vanderbilt, my teaching partners, Robert Barsky and Bruce Oppenheimer, were always supportive and insightful; thanks also to Dean John Geer, David Lewis, Alan Wiseman, and everyone in the Political Science Department. At the Washington Post, the anchor of my professional career for four decades, Marty Baron and Steven Ginsberg have helped me maintain the connection while I write books. I’m inspired by my writing pals Anne Hull, Rick Atkinson, and Paul Hendrickson. Thanks also to Bob Woodward and Elsa Walsh, Jim Warren and Cornelia Grumman, John Feinstein, Tom Kail, Andy Cohn and Kim Vergeront, Michael Feldman, Chip Brown, Neil Henry, Mark Schmitz’s terrific crew at Zebradog, Michael and Beth Norman, and Ben and Judy Sidran.

  This is my twelfth book with the incomparable Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster, and her unwavering belief in this story kept me going. Thanks also to her astute deputy, Stuart Roberts, as well as Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Julia Prosser, Jackie Seow, Jonathan Evans, Amar Deol, and Richard Rhorer. Copyeditor Judith Hoover once again provided eagle-eyed care for my manuscript. Rafe Sagalyn, my literary agent, has also been with me through twelve books, helping me think my way through each of them, and for that I am deeply grateful, despite the fact that his Free Agents rotisserie baseball club has too often shellacked my Momen’s Hombres.

  At its core, this is a book about family, and in that realm I feel blessed. Cousins Eileen Thomas, Rachel Cummins, Mary Higgins, and Peggy Datz all provided papers and information that enriched this book. Thanks also for the support from Linda’s side of the family—Dick and M. A. Porter, and Carol and Ty Garner—along with Gigi Kaeser and Michael Alexander, the spouses of my brother and sister. I’ve always been in awe of Jim and Jean, the smartest people I’ve ever known, and though their perspectives on our family unavoidably differ from mine in some respects, the meaning of our family history is deeply shared. The fact that they offered insight and information all along the way, and then gave careful readings of the manuscript at the end, means the world to me.

  There is a point in the book where I write about being surprised to find a letter by my father in which he uses the exact phrase I’ve always used to explain my career, that writing is in my blood and I love it. I guess it is in the blood of my two wonderful children as well. Both Andrew and Sarah started down different paths and then came back to writing, continuing the tradition for another generation. As powerful as their writing is, I am more grateful for the larger loving “good American family” they have provided, Andrew with Alison and their kids, Eliza and Charlie, and Sarah with Tom and the redheads Heidi and Ava. Writing is in their blood, too. Linda is the center of everything in my life. From Ann Arbor to Detroit and from New York to Spain, she traced the arc of this book with me, taking pictures, combing through albums, books, and archives, making friends, reading first drafts. She is my Maria Penguina, as she called herself in Spain, my quirky saint, still and forever, amen.

  More from the Author

  Once in a Great City

  Clemente

  Barack Obama

  Into the Story

  Rome 1960

  They Marched Into…

  About the Author

  © LINDA MARANISS

  David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book.

  SimonandSchuster.com


  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/David-Maraniss

  @simonbooks

  ALSO BY DAVID MARANISS

  * * *

  Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

  Barack Obama: The Story

  Into the Story: A Writer’s Journey through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss

  Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World

  Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero

  They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967

  When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

  The Clinton Enigma: A Four-and-a-Half-Minute Speech Reveals This President’s Entire Life

  First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton

  The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate (with Ellen Nakashima)

  “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” (with Michael Weisskopf)

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  Notes

  The narrative of this book was constructed primarily from letters, papers, oral histories, and other documents from the following archival sources:

  Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive, Tamiment Library, New York University

  Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)

  Cherokee County Historical Society, Canton, Georgia

  Jean and Mary Chulak Family Papers, privately held

  Robert Cummins and Eileen Thomas Family Papers, privately held

  Detroit Free Press

  Detroit News

  Detroit Times

  FBI File, George Crockett

  FBI File, Elliott Maraniss

  Georgia Historical Society, Savannah

  Hatcher Graduate Library Special Collections, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  Library of Congress Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, Washington, DC

  Maraniss Family Papers, privately held

  Marquette University Special Collections

  Maund Family Papers, privately held

  Michigan Daily Digital Archives

  Arthur J. Morris Law Library, University of Virginia

  Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University

  National Archives, College Park, Maryland

  National Archives, Washington, DC

  National Military Personnel Records, St. Louis, Missouri

  New York Public Library

  Quint-City Special (Bettendorf, Iowa)

  Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas

  Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

  Sephardic Museum of Seville

  Spanish Civil War Interpretation Center, Corbera

  Spanish Civil War Interpretation Center, La Fatarella

  U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, Archives, Fort Lee, Virginia

  Chapter 1: The Imperfect S

  My father . . . sat at the witness table: Communism in the Detroit Area, Part 2, Mar. 10–12, 1952 (testimony of Elliott Maraniss), 3179–83.

  But the moment came alive to me: The personal file of my father was in Series 3, Box 32, of the HUAC files at the National Archives. When I started researching this book, I knew from the transcript that he had written a statement but had no expectation that it was still around or that I could find it. Katherine Mollan, a dedicated government archivist, first told me the statement indeed existed.

  He was messy and noisy: Although I sometimes saw my father working at the old Capital Times offices on S. Carroll Street in Madison, just off the Capital Square, my deepest memories are of him typing at our house on Regent Street, where he supplemented his salary from the paper by writing a state politics and farm policy column for an agricultural journal.

  the delight he took in teaching us silly tunes from his New York childhood: Is it human nature that I can forget what I did yesterday yet remember most of the lyrics from a nonsensical song my father taught us when we were kids? “There was a little man and he had a little can and he tried to rush the growler / He went into a saloon on a Sunday afternoon and you should have heard the old man holler / No beer today, no beer today, no beer today is Sunday / No beer today, no beer today, you’ll have to come around on Monday / For the only girl that he ever loved had a face like a horse and a buggy / She leaned against the middle of the lake, ‘Oh, fireman, save my child’ / But the child was bigger than the fireman / Go easy on the monkey wrench, your father was a nut.”

  His favorite essayist was George Orwell: My father’s affinity for Orwell was mostly because of Orwell’s clear-eyed view of the world, but it also had to do with writing style. Like Orwell, my father was allergic to pretentious writing and preferred simple Anglo-Saxon words to fancier ones with Latin roots.

  and dismissed as “premature anti-fascists”: “Clarence Kailin: Premature Antifascist—and Proudly So,” article on Lincoln Brigade survivor Clarence Kailin, John Nichols, Capital Times, Oct. 26, 2009.

  “I must sell my home”: From Statement of Elliott Maraniss, Mar. 12, 1952. The entire statement is reproduced as chapter 24.

  Chapter 2: In from the Cold

  Until the moment Bereniece Baldwin testified: This account of Bereniece (Toby) Baldwin’s testimony in Washington and Detroit—and her secret life before that—was drawn from Investigative Name file, Series 1, Baldwin, Bereniece, RG233, National Archives; transcript of Baldwin testimony before HUAC in Detroit, Feb. 29, 1952; along with interviews with her grandchildren Susan Vella and Michael Wiethoff and reports in the Detroit Times, Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Associated Press, and United Press from Feb. 12 to Mar. 2, 1952.

  She was working for money: Estimated payments to Baldwin in Babson et al., The Color of Law, 259–60.

  As Victor Navasky aptly described it: Navasky, Naming Names, xxiii. “These people . . . contributed to the growing myth of the informer as folk hero—through the publication in newspapers and books, serialization on radio, on television, and in movies, of their tales.”

  In the first weeks of 1952: Account of Ford Motor Co. interaction with HUAC investigators drawn from Charles E. Potter Papers, Box 4, Miscellaneous re: Communist Party members in Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, John E. Bugas Memorandum for the File, Jan. 23, Jan. 28, Gordon L. Walker Memorandum for the File, Feb. 19, Feb. 22. It was Robert A. Caro, the prodigious biographer of LBJ, who once said his research motto was “Turn every page.” Easier said than done, but I try to remind myself of that admonition every time I’m working an archive. In this case, I was looking for biographical material on Charles E. Potter, and at the end of a long day decided to look at one last folder, and there, unexpectedly, I found the Ford memos on HUAC.

  Chapter 3: Outside the Gate

  Coney Island was a fantasyland: Jeffrey Stanton, “Coney Island—Nickel Empire (1920’s–1930’s),” Westland Network, 1997, https://www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/nickelempire.htm; Kurt Hollander, “Dreamland: Coney Island and the 20th Century Avant-Garde,” Brooklyn Rail, Feb. 5, 2015, https://brooklynrail.org/2015/02/art/dreamland-coney-island-and-the-20th-century-avant-garde; Louis J. Parascandola and John Parascandola, eds., A Coney Island Reader: Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 25; Federico García Lorca, “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude,” in Poet in New York (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2008).

  The living quarters were crowded and tense: Elliott Maraniss (hereafter EM) letter to Mary Maraniss (MM), June 1945.

  The Boy Scouts ke
pt him busy: Description of EM’s scouting days based on letter from Irving Schneider to David Maraniss (hereafter DM), Apr. 21, 1995; copies of Boy Scout Troop 162, Barker, Dec. 25, 1932; Mar. 31, 1933; Apr. 28, 1933; May 12, 1933; Nov. 24, 1933; Jan. 12, 1934; provided by Schneider. In his Personalities column of that last issue, EM wrote about fellow Scout Joe Rudolph: “The possessor of a husky, booming bass voice, Rudy amuses himself by imitating a conductor shouting out the stations. His short but muscular body serves him well in his favorite sport, wrestling. Before the amazed eyes of this scribbler, he proved that he could rip a telephone book in half, without breaking the binding.”

  During a trip to Spain: The Sephardic Museum in Seville was only two blocks from Las Casas de la Juderia, our hotel amid the winding, narrow streets of the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter of the Andalusian city. Ferrand Martínez, archdeacon of Écija, blamed the Jews for all misfortune and launched the first pogroms in March 1391 in Seville. By that summer it was estimated that 80 percent of the city’s Jews were slaughtered.

  My family’s branch of the Marranos: U.S. Census data, Boston, 1900 and 1910. Maraniss Descendant Chart (compiled by Marjory Yamins Hyman, EM’s cousin, one of his aunt Celia’s children). According to these charts, Esocher and Fanny Spergol married in Russia circa 1885, and Esocher died in Palestine sometime between 1932 and 1935, while EM was in high school. As far as I can tell, my father never met his grandfather. He never talked about him.

  Herman . . . had a successful career: Herman was the subject of a Los Angeles Times article on May 28, 1929, “Tin Pan Alley Denizens Live in Hollywood Now”: “Tin Pan Alley, that small, and once-densely populated New York area where songwriters, publishers and pluggers went to gather, has ‘gone Hollywood,’ according to H. S. Maraniss, Victor Talking Machine Company official, now at the Ambassador Hotel. ‘Tin Pan Alley has moved to Los Angeles since the advent of the talking picture,’ Mr. Maraniss declared yesterday in explaining his presence here. ‘For years the hundreds of song hits which my company recorded were creations of that famous area in New York. There we found the composers and publishers, and there, quite frequently, we found the singers. But all that has changed. Nowadays the Victor company looks to Southern California for many of its best recordings. Since motion pictures want theme songs and producers are paying so well for songs to fit in with their pictures, New York songwriters have come west and we have followed.’ ”