A Good American Family

Starred review from February 11, 2019
Communism was as American as apple pie, according to this searching account of a family’s Cold War ideological journey. Pulitzer-winning Washington Post editor Maraniss (Barack Obama) recounts his father Elliott’s 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth to duck questions about his past membership in the Communist Party but offered an impassioned defense of his constitutional rights; he was fired from his job at a Detroit newspaper and blacklisted for several years. Drawing on Elliott’s essays, letters, and FBI files, Maraniss explores his family history—his uncle, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and mother were also Communists—to show how politics molded individual lives as his father evolved from a left-wing student journalist, idealistic but subservient to the Stalinist party line, to an officer who fought racism in the army in WWII, to a rueful ex-communist liberal who voted for Eisenhower. Maraniss also weaves in insightful studies of other figures in the post-war Red Scare, including his father’s African-American attorney George Crockett, who defended communists as allies against Jim Crow, and the grandmotherly FBI informant who denounced Elliott. Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas.

February 15, 2019
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist places his father at the center of an absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and '50s.Elliott Maraniss was a journalist and newspaper editor from the time he was a student stringer for the New York Times to his last executive position at Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. Famed Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee called him "a great editor." Maraniss (Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, 2015, etc.), an associate editor at the Washington Post, praises his father as "inspirational, level-headed, and instinctive about a good story." His long career, though, was derailed and undermined by the Red Scare. In 1952, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after an informant named him as a communist. Elliott attested to his patriotism: He had enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor and rose to become a captain, leading an all-black company--the military was segregated--and receiving an honorable discharge. Nevertheless, HUAC's accusations were not unfounded: Elliott, along with his wife and brother-in-law, had been members of the Communist Party, dissenters, the author writes, "who believed the nation had not lived up to its founding ideals in terms of race and equality." Frustrated, "they latched onto a false promise and for too long blinded themselves to the repressive totalitarian reality of communism in the Soviet Union." Drawing on considerable archival sources, family letters, and his father's articles, essays, and editorials, Maraniss creates a sensitive portrait of a man who was "young and brilliant and searching for meaning"; whose leftist political perspective was never at odds with his patriotism; and whose optimism never failed him as he confronted considerable professional obstacles. FBI investigations led to his being fired repeatedly. He uprooted his family to five different cities in the five years after his HUAC appearance until he landed a job in Madison and, with a changing political climate, finally was free of persecution.A cleareyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.

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April 15, 2019
Maraniss (Once in a Great City, 2015) paints an affecting if somewhat scattershot portrait of his father, Elliott, a dedicated journalist and political liberal who ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee despite upstanding middle-class bona fides and a stellar war record. The younger Maraniss' affection and admiration for his father are palpable, though tinged with queasiness over what he perceives as na�vet� regarding the Soviet system. Elliott comes across as a decent man woefully unprepared for the hysteria of Senator McCarthy and the Red Scare, who stubbornly believed that the American system would vindicate him. It did, after years of spotty employment, constant family moves, and a shattered reputation. Maraniss falls into a common trap of family biographers. He both over- and underestimates his father. It would also have been good to learn more about how Maraniss' mother coped with raising a family despite constant upheaval. Overall, this is a beautifully realized account of an ordinary family in extraordinary circumstances and of how easily normal life can be disrupted by a powerful megalomaniac with a dangerous political agenda.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019

Elliott Maraniss (1918-2004) had writing in his blood, says son and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist David Maraniss (Once in a Great City) in this absorbing account of Elliot's life and the lives of his family. Readers will be fascinated by their successes, failures, and tragedies. Elliott had been a member of the Communist Party for a short time, which led to his blacklisting by the House Committee on Un-American Affairs (HUAC) in 1952. Although HUAC didn't find Maraniss guilty, he was summarily fired from his job at the Detroit Times and spent the next five years working for five papers: two that fired him and three that went bankrupt, until he was hired by the Madison, WI-based Capital Times, where he rose to executive editor during his 25-year term. Most notable is the author's commentary on Elliot's lifelong commitment to racial justice, notably his service in World War II as a captain of an all African American company, and his hiring of African American attorney George Crockett to defend him at his HUAC trial. VERDICT Audiences interested in the domestic implications of the Cold War will be captivated by this journalist whose patriotism was measured by actions and not exaggerated by words. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/18.]--Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

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