More than halfway through David Maraniss’s upcoming book, A Good American Family, appears a photograph, taken in 1950. It pictures exactly what his book’s title evokes, gathered on the front steps of a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There are adults and there are kids. David, who would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post, is a bonnet-wearing infant hoisted by his father.
Four of the men shown in the photo served in World War II. One missed service due to mental illness. “All families are bent by burdens,” Maraniss reflects, citing this illness and the fact that one of the women in the photo, his aunt, would die from polio within a year, as emblematic of the “wounds of life.” But there is one misfortune that would befall this family that, even decades later, remains inexplicable: Maraniss’s father, Elliott, and his uncle Bob Cummins would come under suspicion from the U.S. government for being, of all things, un-American.
A Good American Family is Maraniss’s twelfth book, following biographies he’s written on Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clementi, and Vince Lombardi, and his deep-dive examinations of the 1960 Olympics, the city of Detroit, and a month in the life of the Vietnam War, as it played out both in South East Asia and at the University of Wisconsin. His new book recounts how his father, a one-time communist, and his uncle, who joined the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, were both hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, and spent years under the watchful eye of the the nation’s secret police.
Elliott Maraniss, who died in 2004 at age eighty-six, was a lifelong journalist. “I love everything connected with putting out a paper,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Mary, during the war, “from gathering the news, writing it, editing it, printing it, and watching it roll off the presses.” His professional career began as a copy boy at the New York Post and ended as an editor at The Capital Times, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, after word of the federal government’s concern about the dangerous ideas that might lurk in his head got him booted from other jobs and blacklisted from his profession.
As described by his son, in what feels like an honest account, Elliott Maraniss tried to do his part to bring about a better world. During the war, he trained and proudly commanded an all-black unit in the Pacific. He loved baseball and “showed a deep belief in America and the American promise.” He and Mary, who died in 2006, were married for sixty-four years.
One point of Maraniss’s book is that the desire to police and eradicate certain kinds of thinking is exponentially more dangerous than the targeted ideas.
At no point did Elliott Maraniss or Bob Cummins pose a threat to the national security of the United States. Neither was ever accused nor convicted of any crime or even of plotting against the state. Yet both were summoned to appear, separately, at public HUAC hearings in Detroit in 1952, after being implicated by an undercover informant named Bereniece Baldwin, who finagled her way into the upper echelons of Michigan’s ragtag Communist Party.
“I have no desire to call her a rat or stoolie or any other derogatory characterization,” writes Maraniss. “Maybe I’m channeling my father’s attitude, though he never talked to me about her. He was a forgiving person, above all. He likely would have blamed the feverish times and the hypocritical politicians on the committee . . . and acknowledged his own mistakes and misjudgments before taking aim at a working-class grandmother who was caught up in the maelstrom of larger world events.”
Maraniss takes a discomforted view of his family’s brief and ultimately abandoned affinity for communism, as practiced in the Soviet Union in the 1940s: “They thought they were working toward a true and open American democracy even as they were rationalizing the actions of what was in fact a ruthlessly totalitarian foreign power.”
A Good American Family treats the hysteria that became known as McCarthyism as an aberration, and does not labor to draw parallels to contemporary events. Yet here we are, more than sixty years later, with a President who conjures up McCarthyesque falsehoods on an hourly basis and where conservative commentators still invoke the trope of communism to oppose sensible ideas like the Green New Deal.
One point of Maraniss’s book is that the desire to police and eradicate certain kinds of thinking is exponentially more dangerous than the targeted ideas. He lays this bare in his consideration of the men who served on HUAC at the time.
Committee Chair John Stephens Wood, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia, was a one-time Ku Klux Klan member who championed segregation, backed measures used to keep black people from voting, and played a part in the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory supervisor in Atlanta who was quite likely innocent of the murder for which he was convicted.
This was the man, David Maraniss writes, “who had the authority to question whether Elliott Maraniss was sufficiently American.”
Another committee member was Charles Potter, a Republican Congressman from Michigan who lost both of his legs in World War II. Potter went from being a true believer in the crusade against communism to regretting the excesses of McCarthyism. His 1965 memoir about that era was titled Days of Shame.
Much of Maraniss’s book is based on records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. These show how the FBI tracked his father’s movements for years before ultimately concluding he wasn’t dangerous enough to merit further effort.
In 1942, Maraniss learned, the Military Intelligence Division of the Department of War conducted a background investigation on his father. An agent visiting the offices of the paper where Elliott worked spoke with his colleague Morton Mintz, who went on to become a legendary reporter at The Washington Post and ultimately a member of a reporting team that David Maraniss oversaw. Mintz had mostly disparaging things to say about his colleague Elliott, who, as the agent wrote in his report, “never deviated one iota from the Communist Party line in his ideas and principles” and had a “Red” wife to boot.
David Maraniss
Maraniss tracked down Mintz, now in his midnineties, who admitted reporting Elliott to the authorities, believing it was his duty to do so. “I look back on what I did with shame,” he says. David Maraniss showers him with forgiveness.
When Elliott Maraniss was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC in February 1952, he was immediately fired from his job at The Detroit News. He appeared before the committee the following month.
Elliott, then thirty-four, was represented by George W. Crockett Jr., a black civil rights lawyer who a few years earlier was jailed for several months for having the audacity to defend a group of eleven Communist Party leaders in the Smith Act trials. All were found guilty, and all of their defense lawyers were cited for contempt of court and jailed; the judge accused them of trying to impair his health by conducting an aggressive defense. Crockett went on to himself become a judge and later a U.S. Congressman from Michigan.
Like his brother-in-law Bob Cummins, Elliott mostly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But he did grouse about being “compelled . . . to come here and answer questions about my political beliefs.” And he asked for permission to read a statement, which was denied. But he was allowed to enter it into the record, which is where it remained until his son David, in researching his book, found it in the National Archives.
Elliott’s statement argued that he had always been a loyal citizen—as a military veteran who enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor; as a husband and father; and as a newspaperman who was fired because of the committee’s interest in his thoughts. He laid out for committee members, in words they likely never read, what this meant.
“I must sell my home, uproot my family, and upset the tranquility and security of my three small children in the happy, formative years of their childhood,” he wrote. “But I would rather have my children miss a meal or two now than have them grow up in the gruesome, fear-ridden future for America projected by members of [HUAC].”
He said the committee was “poisoned with bigotry and malice” and resembled in practice the Salem witch trials—an analogy also seized on by Elliott’s former college classmate, the playwright Arthur Miller, in his 1953 play, The Crucible. Elliott laid out why he found the committee dangerous: “Ostensibly designed to protect the government against overthrow by force and violence, it proceeds by force, terror, and threats to overthrow the rights of the American people.”
Then and now, such demagoguery demands disobedience. We are only as free as we are courageous.