In the last few weeks we have heard a good deal about The Statue of Liberty from sources like NPR, The Nation, Fox News, or The Los Angeles Times, for example. Her image also graces the cover of a recent book, A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY by David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize Winner. In his newest non-fiction work, Maraniss tells his own father's story from the 1950s and the Red Scare. In 1952, Elliott Maraniss, a WWII veteran, was named an active member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. When testifying, he invoked the Fifth Amendment, but still lost his newspaper job and spent several years looking for meaningful employment. The author says, "I emerged with a clearer appreciation of the imperfections of the American story -- and with a better understanding of my father, our family, and its secrets."

This is a fascinating look at a tumultuous time in American politics and media --- the HUAC was chaired by a member of the Ku Klux Klan who cited testimony from Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. Also mentioned are names like Louella Parsons, Arthur Miller and George W. Crockett, Jr., the African American civil liberties lawyer. This text contains notes, an index, maps, and several black and white photos. A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY received starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It is a timely work -- reflecting articles in today's New York Times about targeting journalists who investigate the White House and about immigrants coming to the United States where that famous statue still provides inspiration.

Links in live post:
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750726795/immigration-chief-give-me-your-tired-your-poor-who-can-stand-on-their-own-2-feet https://www.thenation.com/article/statue-liberty-lazarus-cuccinelli/
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ken-cuccinelli-is-asked-if-lady-libertys-plaque-should-come-down-amid-immigration-changes
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-15/cuccinelli-wrong-poor-huddled-masses-our-history-statue-liberty
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/trump-allies-news-media.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/opinion/sunday/ivy-league-schools.html

Elliott Maraniss, David Maraniss’s father, was a member of the Communist Party of America and thus found himself caught up in the Red Scare of the 1950s. This book is memoir of his father and a tribute to him, and chronicles his ordeal at the hands of HUAC. It doesn’t pretend to be an unbiased or objective account of these years, or indeed, of his father and his motivations. It’s a personal account and as such I found it an interesting and compelling one.

What a intense story and It's true on all sorts of levels. What it means to really be a American,how his family suffered for the truth,during the 50's when we were in the state of fighting Russia. So many different ways and makes you think of how this family as treated. A really powerful writing of a book,ideas and being scared. Receive this through Net Galley,what a history lesson is to be learned.

In this intriguing story, David Maraniss recounts a disturbing era of American history from a new perspective: one that is at the same time deeply personal and deeply alien. He recounts the story of his father and other relatives caught up in the Red Scare of McCarthyism. Too young to remember many of the events himself, and unborn during most of his father’s more politically active years, he takes the perspective of a reporter to attempt to put together a perspective of what happened and what his parents were thinking during those years. He also debates what being an American really means, and how his father could be patriotic while still being caught up in socialism, and, at times, swayed by more incomprehensible communist leanings, defending the Soviets during times in ways that David struggles to understand.

A Good American Family is biographer David Maraniss’ look at a subject very close to his heart: his father, and the Red Scare and resulting blacklisting that embroiled the family in 1952 because of Elliott Maraniss’ past as a Communist Party of America member. Perhaps because of the lack of distance that the author’s intimacy with his father inevitably leads to, Elliott Maraniss never emerged for me as a fully developed character—his motivations and inner life remained a bit murky throughout. This wasn’t as problematic as it would seem, however, because Elliott’s story is woven into the rich tapestry of American life in the first half of the 20th century—Jim Crow laws, lynchings and civil rights struggles in the South; World War I and the Great Depression; the Spanish Civil War and the idealistic Americans who slipped into Spain to fight Franco; isolationism and then World War II; and finally the Cold War—and threaded through with the stories of many fascinating Americans. (I particularly enjoyed the parts involving Arthur Miller, who was a fellow graduate of Elliott’s NYC high school and went on to become his colleague at the University of Michigan Daily News during the heady political days of the 1930s.) These stories were the lifeblood of the book, giving me background and insight into events I had only a cursory understanding of before (such as American involvement in the Spanish Civil War) and making A Good American Family well worth the read.

Thanks you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a fascinating look back at the time of the Red Scare in the US, when McCarthy and his ilk made up rules as they went along, ordaining how patriotism should be - and Maraniss tells the story compellingly, showing how his family, and many others, was impacted purely by exercising their freedom of thought. Frightening, not least in view of recent political developments...

The only criticism I might have is that the author's prose was sometimes so dense that I had to take a break, and read something light and easy, in order to be able to dive back into this engrossing chunk of recent history.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

In the years between my father's retirement and his recovery of grief over the early loss of my mother, he bought an electric typewriter and wrote his memoirs. Dad took his pages to the office supply store and printed and bound them to distribute among his family and friends. Dad was very proud to know people enjoyed reading about his childhood growing up during the Depression in a changing world, his father's time as a volunteer fireman and building a gas station, his adventures in scouting and camping along the Niagara River, meeting my mother, and running the family business after his father's death until our move to Detroit where he hoped to secure a job in the auto industry.



I shared these memories on my blog and on Facebook, attracting lots of readers from our hometown. But there was much missing between these stories. He wrote little about his marriage and us kids. And stories that he told me that were more personal, or that Mom had shared, were left out.



We show the world who we hope we are, hiding the deepest pain and loss and hurt. The conflicted feelings of guilt and embarrassment of bad choices, the pain we wrecked on others, we leave buried in our own hearts. We carry these things alone. Which of us has truly known our father, or mother, or sibling, or spouse?

"The more I read the letters, the more I thought to myself: Why did he write them like a journal...if not for me to find them and give him a voice again, to show the determination, romanticism, and patriotism of a man who once was called un-American?" from A Good American Family by David Maraniss



David Maraniss had written about other people's stories, from Vince Lombardi and Clemente to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. He decided it was time to look into his own father's life. He had "desensitized" himself to what his father Elliott Maraniss had endured "during those years when he was in the crucible, living through what must have been the most tyring and transformative experience of his life."



In 1952, Elliot Maraniss was brought in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Detroit, Michigan.



He was a newspaperman, a graduate of the University of Michigan where he had worked on the Daily newspaper and found kindred spirits dedicated to progressive values. Elliott married into a family committed to the perceived virtues of communism. He enlisted to serve in WWII right after Pearl Harbor. But the government was tracking communists, and although an exemplary officer, he was deemed untrustworthy. Instead of seeing action, Elliot was relegated to the Quartermaster Corps, and because of his passion for racial justice and equality, put in charge of a segregated African American unit. He put all his energy into growing the men into a stellar unit. He held an American optimism that people can overcome the obstacles of "race and class, education and geography and bias."



In the 1930s, communism seemed to be society's best hope for equality and justice, attracting people of progressive ideas. The attraction waned as Stalin took over Russia. Maraniss shares the stories of men whose high ideals brought them to the Communist Party. Some of his U of M friends went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, which was against American law.

"There are aspects of his thinking during that period that I can't reconcile, and will never reconcile, as hard as I try to figure them out and as much of a trail as he left for me through his writings." from A Good American Family by David Maraniss





A Good American Family is the story of his father and his generation of progressive idealists during the Red Scare. Maraniss plumbed the records to understand his father and reconcile the man he knew with the man who stood in front of the House Un-American Committee--was he a revolutionary or on "the liberal side of the popular front?"



Maraniss draws on his father's letters and newspaper articles and obtained access to government files. He tells the stories of the men behind the hearings and the grandmother who was paid to infiltrated the Michigan Communist Party and gather names. The overarching narrative is the story of how the Red scare was born and grew in power. The House Committee hearing were not legal court procedures and those on the stand had no protections as in court.



What is a 'good American family'? Can we hold and voice personal convictions that some deem threatening and still be considered good citizens? The book is a personal history and a record of the abuse of unbridled power unleashed by fear.



I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Maraniss' voice is compelling. The narrative that he writes introduces a piece of history that becomes personal and relatable as he relates his family's experience.

A great opportunity to read the backstory of one American family in the tentacles of McCarthyism.

Maraniss has given a fine portrait of the era which will serve American History classes well.