You want fraught? Try the 1950s!
Finished reading over this Independence Day weekend a book that explores the meaning of patriotism: A Good American Family; The Red Scare and My Father. David Maraniss wrote his 12th book about his parents, especially his father Elliott, our own editor back in the day.
A Good American Family is an easy read, sprinkled with familiar names, Madison WI references, and guest appearances by the likes of Arthur Miller, Gerald Ford, and John Wayne. The cover photograph of Elliott and Mary with the first three of their four children in New York Harbor, the Statute of Liberty looming over them, was taken soon after Elliott was blacklisted in 1952 for having been a Communist. The Red Scare was at fever pitch.
Elliott was back in his old home town, New York, seeking employment. He had been fired from the Detroit Free Press on the very day he was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. An unassuming, grandmotherly mole for the FBI ratted him out. The FBI was diligent; when Elliott landed a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the agency advised managers of their mistake.
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 five years, Elliott’s young family wandered like Moses in the desert. Five cities, four kids, eight homes, two papers that fired him, three papers that folded. The last was a strike paper in Davenport/Moline, formed by typographers protesting new technology. The same Luddites would later strike The Capital Times here in Madison. This time, Elliott was on the inside of the picket line, trying to save a failing afternoon newspaper.
A refuge for wretched refuse
As in that Emma Lazarus poem, The Capital Times was the golden lamp that gave refuge to the homeless, tempest-tossed family. The strike newspaper carried Bill Evjue’s column. The old man hired Elliott in 1957 — same year his nemesis Joe McCarthy died of whiskey and shame. Democrats began their national ascendance with the election of Bill Proxmire, a former Capital Times and union labor news reporter.
Elliott Maraniss was editor in chief early in our own tenure at The Capital Times. We never knew his Communist history. He never talked about it, his biographer writes. Nor did we know that Elliott volunteered for service in World War 2 and emerged a captain in charge of an all-black company — surely the bonafides of a patriot.
In Madison, the Maraniss family lived on comfortable Regent Street between the UW Fieldhouse and Randall elementary school, just four blocks from West high school. David still writes from Madison in summer.
‘He was a newspaperman’
The son tries to understand his father’s fling with communism without excusing it:
I can appreciate his motivations … he was driven by a quest for racial and economic equality … but I am confounded by his reasoning and his choices. … How could he buy the Soviet line after the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany?
That Joe McCarthy couldn’t shoot straight never meant there were no squirrels in the woods. Actual Soviet agents like Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs were embedded among bien pensants who thought with their hearts, not their heads, like Elliott and Mary. (Her brother fought with the Commies against Franco’s Spain.) Stalin had the bomb.
Our recollection is that Elliott never ranted about politics; Dane County was safely Democrat by the 1980s. He was always “Elliott,” never “Mr. Maraniss.” He exuded quiet authority during his newspaper’s crisis of survival in its own labor strike. As a good American family, he and Mary raised four high achievers. His Pulitzer Prize-winning son writes:
There was no sourness or orthodoxy in him. His favorite essayist was George Orwell, whose leftist polities were accompanied by a clear-eyed assessment of the totalitarian horror of the Left as well as the Right. He was a newspaperman, first and foremost.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Maybe Elliott reinforced some of that objectivity in this aging scribbler but we credit our own father. “Nobody tells me what to read,” Jerome Blaska told his obedient Catholic school son.
Some may attempt to equate the present round-up of illegal immigrants with the Red Scare. Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times frets, “Americans are at one another’s throats.” Not like the 1950s, m’dear. Not even close.
Are Dreamers good American families?
How much tolerance can a patriot tolerate?
12 responses to “A Good American family was communist!”
Fortunate to have befriended him.
There are no communist good American families on stolen land.
David Maraniss asks an honest question…”Can a good man remain a Communist?” and especially during the Stalin era.
Read “The Haunted Wood” for extensive reading of the Americans on the KGB payroll.
I must take exception to a minor point you make about “bien pensants” who “thought with their hearts, not with their heads,” among whom you include those who fought against Franco’s forces in Spain. (Madison, naturally, has a memorial to these folks.) It needs to be said that, besides taking their orders from a maniacal mass murderer in Moscow, these “good thinkers” burned churches, murdered priests and raped nuns–activities conveniently not mentioned on Madison’s memorial.
Indeed, Gary.
People demonize Francisco Franco but they may not know that he was instrumental in lifting Spain from the worldwide economic depression beginning in 1936, the year he rose to power. He was not a totalitarian, but more of an authoritarian, in that his regime did not control all aspects of the lives of Spanish citizens, as did Stalin in the Soviet Union.
General Franco was essentially a soldier born into an upper-class military family. He steered Spain through turbulent waters. His death in 1975 heralded the start of democratic governance under Juan Carlos.
And apparently people don’t know that Franco invited Hitler to practice his nascent tactic of blitzkrieg on the Basque town of Guernica. Only in the new America has it become fashionable to celebrate the rise of Nazism.
Some historians estimate that 6800 members of the Catholic clergy were slaughtered by left-wing anarchists during the Spanish civil war. Franco fought to keep Spain intact as a country and for the rights of Catholics to practice their religion, but he was not a Nazi. He was part of the Axis coalition during WW2.
Exactly who in “the new America” is celebrating the rise of Nazi hate? Anyone we know?
The history is worth knowing because history often repeats. Today, they may soon elect a Muslim for Mayor of New York which would then become a beacon and destination for Muslims everywhere. New York could go the same way as London if everyone just sits back and watches. Include on that list Dearborn, MI and a new Islamic community being built in Austin, TX. Islam is not much different than communism. Islam is a intolerant totalitarian ideology bent on world domination, imperialism, masquerading as a religion. The communists were easier to work with because they still appreciated their life. Islamic supremacists worship death. That’s their ticket to heaven. So the question becomes, how many American cities have to fall to Sharia Law before people wake up and realize that Islam and Western civilization are fundamentally incompatible– like communism?
You just dont get it, we are USA, we will finally a socialist paradise better than all other nations. Tax more. Take more, spend more, control all levers until it is equal misery for all. Look up the recent Palantir contracts with the feds, if you go down a rabbit hole could lead to a quite a scary place.
And we have the required masked armed unidentified military grabbing people off the street. Due process is gone. Voting rights are next. Every day is more corruption, lies. propaganda. The news media selling us out cannot be denied.
people forget how ruthless the communist were, not just the Russians, but the Chinese, North Koreans, North Vietnamese and the Cubans.
c
Thank you, Jesus. We can all rest easy now that the Epstein case has been solved once and for all. Bondi; you most stable genius.