Of Red-Hot Reds and Redemption

My grandmother's FBI file is keeping me up nights. In 1941, I read, she was elected to the gas-rationing committee in her large Midwestern city. "I wonder what they will do," she remarked to an informant, "when they find out that I am a red-hot red." (In 1942, sadly, the national higher-ups asked the agents in charge of surveilling my grandmother to stop including so much detail, so the next few years report only on her activities, not on her bons mots.)

I remember when the first conservative I dated -- not that long ago, relatively speaking -- told me that he was raised "to fear the red menace." My heart sank when I realized that my family was the red menace. According to what I've learned from both my family and from her dossier, Grandma really believed in the promise -- false, as the world would learn -- of communism to create a sort of heaven on earth. Communism was her religion. According to her FBI informants, she believed that young people in the Soviet Union were paid to attend school. She believed they all excelled at sports. She believed that their army was powerful because it conscripted eighteen-year-olds, and she therefore agitated for the U.S. draft age to be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. She attempted to organize all the different Slavic cultural groups in her multiethnic city to support Russian war relief (prior to the US's entrance into World War II). When Stalin and Hitler signed the Anti-Aggression pact, she was an isolationist; but when the Nazis reneged and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, she was for total, all-out war. Sometimes I suspect that my husband, also a conservative, would never have married me if he had known these things about my family. Where does this leave me? What does this mean for me as a Catholic, and as an American? What does it mean for me as this remarkable woman's granddaughter?

Tertium Quid writes, in response to my earlier post, "If we were Manicheans, we would have to hate ourselves. We are not. We are the children of Adam and Eve. We are the children of an Incarnate God. We are the spiritual children of the Blessed Virgin Mother, Ss. Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, Mary & Martha, Thomas, Simon of Cyrene, Augustine, and many others. Venerate your grandmother. Thank God for her, what she taught you, and what she taught you not to do."

Reading her FBI file has had me really rooting for my grandmother at times. There weren't many like her. Was she tragically misguided, and did she thus allow herself to be led into error, and possibly even evil? Yes, and yes. But I can certainly say the same for myself when I review my own history. I do thank God for Grandma, and I don't fear the red menace.

I Married a Communist

Readers of this blog will know that I don’t usually address politics, preferring to focus on topics that are more interesting to me, like music and faith. Insofar, however (as the feminists used to say) as the personal is the political, I will be writing occasionally about a political issue that has had a direct impact on my life. The reason that I knew how to pronounce “HUAC” correctly, even as a young soprano, is that my grandmother had been subpoenaed before that body (she went underground rather than testify); she was a member of the American Communist Party. According to family history, she had joined because of her distress over the plight of blacks in the 1930s (it’s true that she later left the CP and devoted her energies to the civil rights movement).

Shortly before my son was born two years ago, at the recommendation of a priest who was giving me spiritual direction, I started reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Not more than a few pages into the book, my heart sank when I recognized the name of a man whom I knew to have been a close friend of my grandmother’s and a frequent guest at her home in a large Midwestern city; Chambers named him as the Comintern’s representative to the United States. I decided to request my grandmother’s FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act to try to find out who she really had been.

The first 500 pages (roughly a third of the file) arrived yesterday. The packet starts off with a 1941 letter from J. Edgar Hoover advising that, in case of a national emergency, Grandma be detained. A very cursory glance at a few of the documents shows that she was spied upon by informants, neighbors, and probably also agents provocateurs. I read things about Grandma, her activities, and her beliefs that I never knew, and that run counter to family lore. But it is almost impossible for me to determine at this point what in all of it -- family legend and FBI dossier both -- is true. It will take me a while to go through the documents. In the meantime, I have the uncanny sense of someone walking over my own grave.

The Voices That Have Gone, Part 4: Burl Ives

When I was little, I had a beloved LP, “Burl Ives Sings The Little White Duck.” There was one song on it that I particularly loved, “Buckeye Jim,” a beautiful, tuneful, gently-strummed song that in Ives’s high, light tenor sounded like the sweetest melody ever. This is one of the few favorite LPs from my childhood that have been released on CD, and I got it for my son. He listens to it as if mesmerized, and also loves “Buckeye Jim.”

The only things I knew about Burl Ives growing up were that he was the singing snowman in “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which came on TV every Christmas, and, more importantly, that he had “named names” before HUAC, which trumped everything else if you grew up in my family. But I was allowed to have that LP anyway, so perhaps this was a rare instance in which parenting took precedence over politics.

Much later, I found out that the most famous name he had named when he was subpoenaed was that of Pete Seeger (we had some of his children’s records too, of course). Evidently Seeger forgave him; they appeared together onstage in 1993 at a benefit concert, before Ives succumbed to cancer a couple of years later.

John Rockwell, the former chief arts critic of the New York Times, said of Burl Ives's voice that “[it] had the sheen and finesse of opera without its latter-day Puccinian vulgarities and without the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel in expressive impact without being genteel in social conformity. And it moved people.”

I’m about to post a really dated and corny but also interesting and nice clip of Ives singing a white gospel song.

Incidentally, the star of one of my other favorite childhood recordings, Jack Gilford, who narrated “Songs and Hums of Winnie-the-Pooh” (strictly pre-Disney), was also blacklisted in the Red Scare of the 1950s.