David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and has authored over a dozen non-fiction books that include highly acclaimed biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, and Roberto Clemente. Other books have focused on a particular battle in the Viet Nam War and the 1960 Rome Olympics. In his newest book, "A Good American Family", he writes a more personal story. The story of how one of the more shameful episodes in American history, the "Red Scare" of the post-war 1940's and 1950's affected his father, newspaperman Elliott Maraniss and his entire family, including himself.
Like many students in the 1930's, Elliott was taken by progressive, liberal ideas, and flirted with the idea of communism. He was disturbed by the racial inequities that existed in America at the time, and advocated such positions in his role as a reporter and editor of the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan, where he was a student. He became friends with a young man named Bob Cummins, who upon graduation from Michigan, left for Spain to fight for the loyalists against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. While at Michigan, Elliott met and eventually married Bob Cummins' younger sister, Mary.
All of these activities brought Elliott to the attention of the FBI and, later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US's entry into WW II, Elliott enlisted in the Army, rose to the rank of Captain, commanded one of the Army's all-black battalions and served and fought on Okinawa. He was honorably discharged in 1946. While serving in the war, Elliott quickly became disabused of the notion of communism as it was being practiced in the USSR, but he never lost his ideals as they applied to racial inequity and organized labor, and he never lost his pride and love for America. He returned from the service upon discharge, began working at a Detroit newspaper, and began raising a family.
However, in 1952, when the HUAC held hearings in Detroit, an FBI informer named names, both Bob Cummins and Elliott were subpoenaed to testify, and lost their jobs. This began a five year period of exile for the Maraniss family, certainly a "good American family", that involved him losing three newspaper jobs and moving his young family seven times. In 1957, he landed a job at a paper in Madison, WI where he stayed for over twenty-five years, rose to the rank of executive editor and even taught journalism classes at the University of Wisconsin. It proved to be a wonderful life for the Maraniss family. He never talked of his ordeal before the HUAC and what it cost him. David Maraniss, who was only two at the time of the 1952 hearings, knew very little of his father's past until he began the research for this book.
David not only tells the story of his father and his family on this book, but he also tells the stories of many of the other players in the drama, including John Stephens Wood (a staunch segregationist, a one time member of the KKK, and a man who had some involvement in a lynching in the state of Georgia in his youth) and Charles Potter (a certified war hero who later in life came to regret his role in the Red Scare days during his time on the Committee), two influential members of HUAC, and Frank Tavenner, the chief counsel of the committee, and Bereniece Baldwin, an unassuming Detroit area grandmother who worked undercover in the Detroit area Communist Party as a paid informant for the FBI. It was the unassuming Grandma who named the names that changed the lives of so many people, including Elliott Maraniss and Bob Cummins and their families.
"A Good American Family" is a terrific story - and ultimately an uplifting one - of how one man endured the unfair (to put the kindest face on it) charges against him and endured. He was a man who had every reason to be bitter and NOT love his country, but he rose above it all and endured. It is also a story about a terrifying time in America, and the big lesson here is that there is no guarantee that such times could not come again in America. The name most associated with his era is that of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, and his name is even given to what this era embodied: McCarthyism. Elliott Maraniss never encountered Joe McCarthy. McCarthy never mentioned his name, and, in fact, McCarthy may not have even known who he was. The witch-hunting tactics of the HUAC preceded McCarthy, and was still doing it's dirty work after McCarthy was disgraced and later died.
However, consider this description of Joe McCarthy offered by David Maraniss:
"An insecure publicity hound posing as the ultimate patriot, McCarthy began his campaign of reckless charges used on flimsy evidence with a relatively obscure but soon-to-be-notorious speech...."
And then this one. Following what became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings that unmasked McCarthy for the charlatan that he was, Republican Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont "utter(ed) a line that came to define McCarthy's bullying tactics: 'He emits war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist.'"
Sound familiar?
Anyway, the tale of "A Good American Family" could serve as Exhibit A for the Santayana quote that "He who ignores history is condemned to repeat it." It is a terrific book and an important one. It is one you should read.
It gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.
Oh, and as a companion piece, I can also recommend he podcast "Ink In Our Blood" with David Maraniss and his daughter, Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff, who is also a writer of some distinction. It's good listening.
