Blacklist

David Maraniss on his book about his blacklisted father

Via New York magazine's "Intelligencer," an interview: David Maraniss On His Book About His Blacklisted Father. Excerpt:

Over the course of 11 books, including biographies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Washington Post editor David Maraniss has mastered the craft of tracking political and intellectual history through private lives. In his latest, A Good American Family, the author turns to the story of his own father: Elliott Maraniss, longtime editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, and onetime card-carrying Communist, who died in 2004. When David was a small child, Elliott was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee about his involvement in the Communist Party and subsequently blacklisted from newspapers. Maraniss pieces together his father’s radical past in the context of the Depression, the labor movement, and the McCarthy era. 

Intelligencer spoke recently with Maraniss about Elliott’s legacy, his political influences, the abiding patriotism of both father and son, and the era when the Midwest was rife with communists and government spies.  

The book centers on your father’s hearing before the House committee in Detroit in 1952. You tell readers to think of the hearing as the hub of a wheel, and the other events like spokes. What do you mean? 

I meant that it’s not a traditional memoir or biography of my father. I was trying to put his experience into the context of those times, through the stories of many of the people who were in the hearing room that day, including members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, his lawyer, and the FBI informants who named him. I wanted to explore what it means to be American through all of those stories — not just my dad’s.  

What happened earlier in his life that led him to that room? 

My father was born in Boston, but he grew up mostly in Brooklyn, a couple blocks from the Coney Island beach. He was a student at Abraham Lincoln High School in the early 1930s. He was taught by fairly progressive teachers, including a principal who carried a pocket edition of Emerson in his back pocket. At that time, between the wars, there was a peace movement going on in high schools and on college campuses around the country.

A grudgingly positive review of Ceplair & Trumbo's biography of Dalton Trumbo

From last January, a charmingly hostile review in The American Spectator of Larry Ceplair and Chris Trumbo's biography: Who Was Dalton Trumbo, Screenwriter and Stalinist? The reviewer thinks the left is loosening up; the review suggests it's happening much more on the right. Excerpt:

For an anti-anti-communist, Ceplair does condemn Trumbo playing fast and loose with the fascist label. He asserts that being an anti-communist did not necessarily translate into “an antilabor, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, antidemocratic stance.” 

In other instances, Ceplair wanders back to anti-anti-communism. He supports Trumbo’s stance in calling the anti-communist movement a “fraud.” Like Trumbo, he engages in blanket generalizations about the movement, which was peopled with McCarthyites but also with liberals who were as anti-McCarthyite as Trumbo while still retaining a respectable anti-communism. 

By and large, though, this is a good and surprising biography. When he has a handle on his bias, Ceplair soars. He is particularly good on Trumbo’s guerrilla warfare against the blacklist. Ceplair’s attempts at fair-mindedness and condemnation of Trumbo’s blinkered political thinking suggest that a form of perestroika is occurring on the Left.