A Good American Family

A Good American Family, by David Maraniss

(book review)

David Maraniss wrote about more than Vince Lombardi. This year he wrote about another Wisconsin writer who was involved with communism in Detroit. He did it well.

Many of us who lived in the last century can relate to this book because Wisconsin once had Senator Joe McCarthy. It’s a book called A Good American Family, and it’s a lot more than that. David Maraniss wrote a history of the communist “red” scare of the 1940s and 1950s and its impact on his father, Elliott Maraniss, who called himself a newspaperman. Elliott Maraniss worked for newspapers in Detroit and other cities, and later spent much of his life in Wisconsin after the red scare died down, where he worked for the liberal Capital times in Madison.

The first half of the book is about paranoia involving suspected communism. It gives names of people (including Elliott Maraniss) who were believed to be communists and pursued by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. It isn’t about McCarthy himself but is about the anti-communist fervor that he unleashed on the American population. Much of it was about presumed communist activity in Detroit.

The second half focuses mostly on the Maraniss family, including David. They moved a lot after Elliott was blacklisted and had difficulty keeping newspaper work. After McCarthyism died down, the family came to Madison where they stayed for a long time. The children didn’t know much about what was happening. David says he was three years old when his father was subpoenaed to testify in the investigation. Much later, he did research about his father and uncle and uncovered a fascinating story that became this book.

I remember the red scare.  I was a child and teenager when it was happening in the United States. The Army-McCarthy hearings about communists were broadcast in local media, including WDOR in Sturgeon Bay where I grew up.  Wisconsin’s Senator Joe McCarthy was in Wisconsin news a lot.

A book about the paranoia of the last century reminds me that people in government can incite fear, and it can speak to some of the political unrest that is happening today.