Red Diapers
My childhood home was sunny with ideals inside, murky with LA smog outside. While acrid air enveloped our modest house, within its walls dreams of a better world brightened the atmosphere. The pollution gave me a bronchial tickle, foreshadowing respiratory complaints to come; the ambient hope indoors seeded my later quests for bluer skies. Back then, I fixated on the quotidian challenges of growing up, while my parents’ lives were buoyed by visions of a socialist tomorrow—until sordid news from Russia punctured the dream and darkened the mood.
Jack Raskin and Marian Kanat came of age in a time and place tailor-made for radicalizing any young adult with a beating heart and idealistic spirit. The Great Depression hit Detroit hard, upending lives and revealing the callous indifference and structural dysfunction of 1930s industrial capitalism. The Motor City became an epicenter of a class conflict that pitted the captains of industry and their political allies against labor unions and fellow travelers. When workers’ demands for jobs and relief were ignored, peaceful protests segued to militant mass strikes, harsh suppression, and further escalation.
Young Jack and Marian, attuned to the plight of the downtrodden, joined the struggle. They picketed, sat in, organized rent strikes, and, like many of their generation, enrolled in the Communist Party USA. In those confusing and alarming days, the Party offered a framework for understanding the crisis and an organization for doing something about it. With the capitalist system reeling, the Party’s strategy of building a unified working-class movement capable of driving a transition to socialism seemed possible.
More than a vehicle for political action, the Party offered cultural space where members could cultivate friendships, develop skills, and find meaning and collective purpose. Lucky for me, since my parents met at a meeting of the Pen and Hammer Club, a weekly gathering to discuss literature from a Marxist perspective. The Club’s allure for my mother, an aspiring writer and avid reader, was intellectual stimulation and literary exploration. The allure for my father was, he recounted, “The beautiful firebrand, Marian Kanat.”
My mother was already a dynamo at age two when her family emigrated from Berezhnytsya, a small village in Poland at the time, which later border-shifted to western Ukraine. Meshuggeneh Mialeh (Crazy Molly, her family nickname) launched her protest career upon arrival at Ellis Island by biting the hand of the immigration agent who reached out to inspect her. This oft-retold tale of a toddler’s defiance was a source of great pride for my mother. After stints in New York’s Lower East Side and Washington, DC, the family settled in Detroit, where my Yiddish-speaking grandparents opened a corner grocery store and raised my mother and her four US-born siblings. My grandfather Peretz, who later lived with us in LA, was sweet, unassuming, and passive. My forceful grandmother Yetta, who died when I was two, was the family’s anchor and attractor of Old Country friends and relatives who swelled the ranks of immigrant Detroit.
My father was born in Detroit. According to family lore, his parents, Abe and Sadie, had been active in the anti-tsarist movement in their native Russia, then fled to the United States after the failed revolution of 1905. My grandfather became a metallurgist for the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, outside of Detroit, later establishing a foundry for the company. In 1931, he eagerly accepted Ford’s invitation to supervise the construction of a tractor factory in Soviet Russia. For his contribution, his name was added to the Stalingrad Red Banner Honour Roll, awarded in tribute to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the notorious head of the Cheka (the Soviet secret police). Abe, Sadie, and their youngest, my Aunt Eleanor, returned to Russia two years later to set up a factory in Chelyabinsk, a city located a thousand miles east of Moscow. Fulfilled in the Soviet Union, Grandpa would have happily made Russia their home, but Grandma insisted on returning to Detroit. In the late 1940s, they moved to LA to be near their family. Abe remained a lifelong socialist, but he left his heart in Russia and never recovered a lust for life.
I was born in Chicago, where my father, a chemical engineer, was assigned to a war-related project. After a few months, our family returned to Detroit. I retain vivid two-year-old memory snapshots of that time, especially scrubbing two dirty metal chairs on our front porch with a bucket of soapy water. In 1945, we moved to Los Angeles, where Dad had taken an executive position at a new branch of the L. H. Butcher Company, the Detroit-based metal plating firm where he had steadily advanced. On my third birthday, my mother, older sister Judy, and I boarded a train for the trek west to join my father, who had gone ahead to find us a house. The thrill of that rumbling train ride—the vibrating seats, the pastoral scenes of the rural heartland and rugged views of the rocky West, and the white tablecloths in the elegant dining car—still lingers in my romantic imagination and abiding love for train songs.
After a few years in a tiny house in Burbank, we moved to a newly built tract house in North Hollywood. My parents had very different temperaments—my mother was intense and opinionated; my father was easygoing and accommodating—but they shared a strong devotion to each other, their children, and The Cause. Guided by the old Party slogan, “Communism is twentieth century Americanism,” they set about creating an ideal American family displaying strong values, community spirit, and, most important, high-performing, well-rounded children. These law-abiding rank-and-filers were more Ozzie and Harriet than the sinister caricatures then depicted on TV in I Led Three Lives and, more recently, The Americans.
Good Americans that they tried to be, my parents could not shield their children from the menace of the McCarthy era. The harassment was not subtle: sometimes coming home from school, I’d encounter FBI agents sitting in a black sedan parked in front of our house. Once, my father took me along to pass out leaflets in Pacoima for a Black candidate running for local office, and a burly brute grabbed the leaflets screaming “Go back to Russia!” And “What kind of father would bring his child!” Astonishingly, Dad knocked him back with a punch to the chin, leaving me both proud and terrified. As the big oaf grumbled off, we continued our work.
A few years later, my Cub Scout troop was staging a minstrel show starring us scouts in blackface. When my parents got wind of it, they sat me down and patiently explained that participating would condone racial bigotry. I willingly dropped out, but then felt the sting of a bitter pack of betrayed eleven-year-olds.
Most ominously, my parents and their comrades feared fascism in America was imminent. Friends in leadership positions vanished to the Party’s underground, leaving their children orphaned, at least temporarily. Would I, too, be temporarily orphaned, or even permanently so like my contemporaries, the Rosenberg boys? The sense of foreboding deepened when my parents, as a contingency, had my sister and me make a trial flight to Detroit, where my mother’s apolitical relatives would take us in, if necessary.
For my stoical parents, enduring the red-baiting and persecution was the price to be paid for standing on the right side of history. Then, in February 1956, everything changed, and the ground shifted under our family. In his momentous speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Josef Stalin in no uncertain terms, including details on the dictator’s long resume of heinous crimes.
The Party had long written off accusations of malfeasance behind the Iron Curtain as Western disinformation or the distortions of God-that-failed anti-communists (my father quipped that he could handle being wrong, but not them being right). Still, coming from the lips of Secretary General Khrushchev, the ugly truth could not be denied. The speech left my parents, like many other members, shaken, feeling betrayed by the Party propaganda machine and abashed by their own credulity. The time had come to resign and lick some deep wounds.
Although devastating for them, Khrushchev’s revelations were great for me—I got a swimming pool out of the geopolitical kerfuffle. During the Party years, our family had been living well below its means (my father was a well-paid senior executive). We abjured bourgeois ostentation (except for the biannual Buick), while donating substantial sums to various causes, especially the left-wing newspaper The Peoples World. When the world turned upside down, the stream of money that had been flowing to the Party’s coffers was diverted, as a liquid asset you might say, to the hole in my backyard. I christened it The Nikita Khrushchev Memorial Swimming Pool.
Although my parents lost their political identity and ideological certainty, they kept their humanistic values and abhorrence of bigotry, militarism, and dog-eat-dog capitalism. Freed from incessant meetings, my father and former comrades fished, golfed, and played poker, yet still found time to canvass for progressive politicians and join protest marches. My mother’s long hair gave way to a chic coif, and her previously unadorned neck for a time sported a string of pearls. But the inner radical with no penchant for jewelry persisted, often erupting in a world teeming with provocations.
In the 1960s, my father’s small plating firm was acquired by Occidental Petroleum, a behemoth that required all its executives to sign a “loyalty oath.” He was prepared to resign when Armand Hammer, head of the company, and legendary uber-capitalist, art collector, and confidant of Vladimir Lenin, personally intervened to find a work-around for keeping Raskin on board. So began an unlikely friendship. Later, my father pulled back to a consultancy role, rented a large studio near my parents’ home in Santa Monica, and turned to long-deferred artistic and scientific passions, especially creating whimsical, beautifully crafted metal sculptures and conducting elaborate hydroponics experiments, his studio a tangle of tubes carrying nutrients to soilless tomatoes.
My mother’s rabble-rousing spirit found expression in March of 1962 when she happened to be visiting me in Berkeley the week JFK came to town to give a major address. Enthusiastically, she joined a meeting to plan a protest march to the Greek Theater, where Kennedy was to give his speech. In New Left style, our list of issues was all over the map: “End Mandatory ROTC,” “Ban the Bomb,” “Hands Off Cuba,” “Free Speech,” etc. Aghast at the proliferating slogans, my Old Leftie mother pointedly asked the roomful of student activists, “What’s the line?” Her plea for a unified message disregarded, she opted to satirize the mish-mash politics of her fellow protesters. On the day of the march, her sign read “Free Tom Mooney,” a wry reference to the political prisoner who had been a cause célèbre in her own youth decades earlier.
On a Saturday afternoon in May 1964, by then a seasoned protester myself, I joined a huge demonstration at the Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco to challenge the company’s racist hiring practices. For hours, we marched around the building singing and chanting. At the appointed time, we took positions in the hotel’s doorways, joining arms to block passage in or out. Gradually, the police began peeling off protesters by the hundreds, ushering them unceremoniously into waiting vans to be transported to local precincts for booking. When the men in blue finally reached my location, our lawyers ran up to announce that we were out of bail money, so no more arrests. We, the sadly unarrested, resumed circling the Sheraton through the night. At dawn, I motorcycled back to Berkeley, pulled up to my apartment, and opened the door to a ringing phone. It was my mortified mother, lamenting, “Joey Shields got arrested. Patsy Kovner got arrested. Where the hell were you?” Her old comrades the Shields and the Kovners got the bragging rights that time.
Much later, in 1987, I urged my widowed mother, who kept her savings under the proverbial mattress, to diversify her portfolio, as financial experts advised. But with capitalism perennially on the brink of collapse, she wouldn’t hear of it. I persisted, and, I believe to please me, she eventually relented. So it was that on Thursday, October 15, she invested the bulk of her assets in a mutual fund. Four days later, her prophecy of doom was fulfilled. On Black Monday, the stock market suffered its largest one-day loss ever. That evening, my mother had one word for me: “See!” Never again would she play their rigged game, so the lost money stayed lost. But the vindication was significant compensation.
My octogenarian mother’s last battle was fought against the powers-that-be of Claremont House, an elder living facility in Oakland where she had moved to be near my sister in Berkeley. The issue was literally a matter of life and death: the quality of food served to elderly, frail residents. Three times daily, Claremont offered them bland fare laced with salt and preservatives. Meshuggeneh Mialeh went to work organizing the aggrieved and the able into a protest campaign demanding nutritious meals rich in fresh fruits and vegetables. A few months on, the rebels gathered in the dining hall to celebrate their victory, clinking cups of herbal tea and enjoying a wholesome meal.