A Good American Family
The Red Scare and My Father
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR and The Washington Post.
In a riveting book with powerful resonance today, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Maraniss captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication.
Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.
In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is an unsparing yet moving tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
