Travails of a radical patriot

“Think of this story as a wheel,” David Maraniss writes in an author’s note at the beginning of his new book, A Good American Family.  “The hearing in Room 740 is the hub where all the spokes connect.”
 

Room 740 in Detroit’s Federal Building was where Maraniss’s father, Elliott, was summoned to appear before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) one day in 1952, to answer charges that he was a member of the Communist Party. Simply being subpoenaed to appear had already cost Elliott his job, and his refusal to cooperate with the committee’s questions would force him into years of desperate struggle to keep his family afloat.
 

Elliott Maraniss was no atomic spy or government mole. He was a rewrite man at The Detroit Times, a World War II vet with a wife and three kids. HUAC had come to Detroit hoping to find communists in the United Auto Workers, a powerful liberal institution; people such as Elliott and his wife’s brother, Bob Cummins, were just “collateral damage,” expected to make “a few acts of repentance and contrition” — bow their heads and name names of old friends and comrades in the ongoing theatre of the Red scare. If they didn’t, they were dismissed after a brief interrogation with their lives in tatters. Elliott was not even permitted to read a prepared statement, though he was allowed to file it with the committee.
 

Now, David Maraniss, in his “long overdue attempt to understand what had happened to my father and our family and the country during what has come to be known as the McCarthy era,” has unearthed that statement, and that moment. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and one of our most talented biographers and historians, Mr Maraniss has used his prodigious research skills to produce a story that leaves one aching with its poignancy, its finely wrought sense of what was lost, both in his home and in our nation.
 

David’s father was “a liberal but undogmatic optimist,” whose mantra was “It could be worse.” He loved baseball and literature and funny songs; he once wrote a column under the moniker “the Ol’ Railbird”; and he had an abiding passion for nearly everything to do with the American heartland. So how does such a man end up writing Soviet propaganda under a fake name for The Michigan Worker? “I can appreciate his motivations, but I am confounded by his reasoning and his choices,” Mr Maraniss confesses.
 

Elliott was the son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa and Latvia, a Boy Scout who grew up in Coney Island, an outstanding student and editor of the school paper at Abraham Lincoln High School — a place almost painful to behold in its glowing idealism and dedication to learning, even in the midst of the Depression.
 

He also encountered a key influence on his political development: 17-year-old Mary Cummins, a wisp of a girl with strawberry blond hair and deeply held radical convictions. The Cumminses were another remarkable American family, originally dirt-poor Kansas homesteaders living in a one-room dugout cut out of a hillside. Mary’s father was a civil engineer who couldn’t afford to finish his degree, but made enough money to drive a Cadillac and send his five children to college.
 

By 1939, as editorial director of The Michigan Daily, Elliott was defending the monstrous Stalin-Hitler pact that triggered World War II — a stance that outraged and mystified many of his readers and friends, as well as his son, who calls it one of Elliott’s “indefensible positions.” When the war reached the United States, Stalin was back on the side of the Allies and both Maranisses threw themselves into the struggle. Elliott enlisted, while Mary helped build B-17s, and advocated for civil rights at her plant.
 

Rising to the rank of captain, Elliott was put in charge of a black salvage-and-repair company in the still segregated Army, arriving in Okinawa in July 1945, just after the terrible battle there. He excelled in his position, and the experience seemed to fill him with patriotic ardour. He wrote passionately to his wife about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General MacArthur and especially Dwight Eisenhower, whom he would later admit to having voted for in 1952.
 

Unbeknown to Elliott, though, his assignment to command black troops was the end result of a desire by military intelligence, wary of his “communistic” tendencies, to exclude him from sensitive work while in the Army. Before his file was finally sealed, some 14 FBI agents would interview 39 “confidential informants” about him. Their investigation would culminate in Room 740, but it would not end there. Even after HUAC had finished with him, the FBI sent agents to interview Elliott’s employers whenever he got a job, knowing it would likely cost him the position.
 

For all of Mr Maraniss’s research, a mystery remains at the heart of “A Good American Family”: Just what were his parents, and especially his father, doing in the Communist Party in the first place? This is a question Maraniss cannot answer, because his parents, for one reason or another rarely spoke of it. About the furthest his father would go was to admit that he had been “stubborn in his ignorance about the horrors of the Soviet Union.” But this gives us little insight into how this great American spirit ended up stuffing himself into a closet of dreary Russian dogma.
 

In the end, even in the best of families, some things remain secret.

©2019 The New York TimesNews Service

A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY 

The Red Scare and My Father

David Maraniss 

Simon & Schuster; $28; 416 pages