Editor’s Note
History often survives in fragments: a remembered phrase, a missing document, a question asked too late. A life can endure in memory while the reasons behind its turns vanish into silence.
In "My Grandfather and His McCarthy Period," John Whalen-Bridge approaches the past through what stays incomplete. His grandfather, a classics professor whose career ended during the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s, left traces rather than explanations. Family anecdotes, scattered records, a heavy black telephone, the lost microcassettes of an interview never transcribed: these become the materials of the essay. What emerges is less a reconstruction of events than a measure of the distance between what happened and what can still be known.
Erasure is rarely total. Records disappear and testimony stays unfinished, yet something persists: a gesture, a refusal, "I think not" to an apology offered thirty years late. The archive is never complete; neither is it empty.
As this issue considers those who have been disappeared, silenced, or forgotten, Whalen-Bridge attends to the quieter disappearances that happen inside families and institutions. He offers no certainty. He offers the harder discipline of listening.
Jorge R. G. Sagastume
My Grandfather and His McCarthy Period
By John Whalen-Bridge john.whalenbridge@gmail.com
The neighbor’s children were always very respectful, always calling him “Dr Bridge” and “Professor Bridge,” which was confusing to me because he was a book-dealer. I was a child then. Wasn’t America rabidly anti-communist? My grandfather had lost his job in 1954, I didn’t know why exactly. I can’t remember when I first heard about it, but I remember “Dr Bridge” sounding strangely formal.
When I was in high school, working on a book report about The Goebbels Diary for my tenth grade history class, I became curious about Grandpa John. “Grandpa John, you were in Rome when the Fascists came in? What was it like?” He said, in his habitually understated way, “Oh, it was all very peaceful. The fascists just came into town and killed the mayor. Everything went smoothly after that.” He was a congenial gentleman. I almost never saw him angry. My aunt told me once that he had quite a temper when he was younger.
There’s a set of people who don’t talk about it more than they have to. Not talking about it at all brings unwanted attention, so the trick is to turn the faucet just enough, to simulate a normal amount of flow. I think this is what Grandpa John was doing. When I asked my friend Kathy S___ about her Japanese-American parents and the camps during World War II, it sounded like the same strategy. Acknowledgement without excessive complaint. Open the faucet all the way, and you might not be able to close it. The younger generations’ ability to take offense at the fall of a sparrow must seem quite a luxury.
In college I read biographies of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler. I became very interested in Norman Mailer, not as a masculine supremacist but rather as a writer who warned about incipient totalitarianism in America. My father told me some things, for example that my grandfather was in marches during the Depression. There had been a photograph of my portly grandfather carrying a sign that said “Don’t let us starve!” My father thought that was funny and got a poem out of it. I wrote letters with specific questions to my grandfather when I was in college. Sometimes he wrote back. He said, “I’ll answer any questions you ask.” I wish I’d known better questions to ask, such as “How did you get involved with Italian radicals in Italy?”
I wrote letters to my grandfather, and he answered every question I asked, but in the early 1980s when I was in my 20s, I didn’t know the right questions. Exactly what did you do that got you in trouble? What did it mean to you at age 54 to have your career ripped from you—is it just what one would guess? What would I guess from your behavior? I saw him express anger just once, when, as a child, I wouldn’t stop playing with the phone. His telephone was solid, heavy, not like the lighter plastic sets we grew up with. “LEAVE THE PHONE ALONE!” That really scared me, because I’d never seen him express more than a very mild emotion before. I did not touch the phone again.
Before I knew anything about his troubles, he struck me as an essentially dispassionate man. He didn’t really make jokes. I wonder now whether the man with the temper suffered a lifelong depression because of what had befallen him. I searched the internet for clues and found the name of the man who reported my grandfather’s name. I found a communist newspaper account of a May Day march in which a policeman on a horse trotted up to a professor at the head of the march, my grandfather, but it was to greet a former professor, not to discipline a Leftist. Some genealogical information, some census reports. He was on the defense committee of Morris Schappes (born, Moishe Shapshilevich), his Marxist colleague at City College.
In 1983, City College representatives wrote to him to ask if he’d sit on the dais for graduation and receive their apology. I thought that would be cool, but he scowled when he said, “I think not!” Apology not accepted.
He died in 1984, a major stroke after a series of minor strokes. I became more interested in politics. When I was in graduate school, planning to write about American political fiction, I thought I should encounter politics in some real way. For a while I became an activist. I think about my activity in Clinic Defense Alliance in the 1990s, how we protested against David Souter and construed him as a puppet of the evil George Bush. In a bit of street theater, I wore a giant paper mache head of George Bush the Elder, with fellow performers wearing the heads of Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. I think it was a Pride parade—Clinic Defense and ACT UP supported each other’s events. Today, we’re nostalgic for David Souter-style Republicans, now that the species has pretty much been wiped out.
My father told me: “Your grandfather says youcanfight City Hall. But there’s a price.” My father said he had written a poem that went something like, “This world will never make a slave of me/ because I have dappled in the wine-dark sea.” I might have made that
line slightly more Homeric in memory, but the idea is right. My father told me that my grandfather had told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he would “tell you anything you want to know about myself, but I will not talk about anyone else.” That, in short, is why he became a book dealer. Antiquarian books. I think he had a second edition of Paradise Lost in the especially-valuable books section. The home was the bookstore. He did a lot through the mail.
Now the whole world is on the internet--everything that ever happened--and, if Don DeLillo is right in his Underworld, it is the afterlife. After we die, we go to the internet. I could go bodily to City College in New York where my grandfather had been a classics professor and look at their records. I could find out that he worked there until 1954. My internet searches have told me that the repression we now call “the McCarthy Period” was a continuation of earlier repressions through the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. In 1954 the note came due for my grandfather. Transcripts around the same time showed that other targets besides obviously Leftist professors included the Frederick Douglass Societies, which were service organizations helping young black students. Maybe they were communist, I don’t know. I couldn’t find the transcripts of my grandfather’s testimony, not yet—the afterlife is growing. The main activity was naming names. As we know, if you named someone else you could get off the hook. It was like the movie Ringu, in which your child won’t die if you can make someone watch the cursed video, in which case his or her child gets it. Not everyone did this.
E.L. Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel is fictional imagining of the children of the Rosenbergs. Daniel is a bit screwed up and tortures his girlfriend, at least in the early part of the novel. The novel ends, very postmodern, with three possibilities, and Daniel doesn’t quite get to know, at the end of his search, what really happened. I want to know: Grandfather, did you know the Rosenberg’s when you were a Communist and taught at City College? (After my grandfather died, Grandmother Ivy started to say he was never a card-carrying member. I think he got radicalized in Rome.) Or did you get fired because of petty collegial grievance? Or were you, as has been said, the treasurer of the teacher’s union, and was this the way union-busting worked in 1954? Or maybe it was just because you were on the Morris Schappes Defense Committee—a more famous communist of some sort who had been fired from City College. Not really sure. There’s no reason it couldn’t have been all of the above, but I won’t know until I see the transcripts.
When my father died, I didn’t want to fly across the world to go to the funeral. That’s another story. I went to help my brothers clean the apartment. My two missions were 1)
to make sure the brothers didn’t chuck our father’s library into a dumpster and 2) to try and find the micro-cassette tapes in which my father interviewed his father about, well, all of the above. I got the books boxed and donated to a school library. We never found the microcassettes. So I have some knowledge—he didn’t name names—and I have some silence. And I have some silence—I rarely sign online petitions—but I have some speech: I post memes about this, neo-McCarthy Period. Yay, ra, ra. I attended a No King’s Day march in Oakland. In my grandfather’s McCarthy Period, the perpetrators could attack anyone until they attacked the Army, the “greatest generation.” Now they can attack anyone, specializing in immigrants, professors and college presidents, and talk show hosts.
My grandfather never talked about what must have been a monumental source of shame and humiliation more than he had to, but he answered the questions I knew enough to ask. So far as I know, he went into the meeting with the cruelest bastards of his time—was Roy Cohn there in the room?—and didn’t give them what they wanted.
Artists & Writers in This Issue
| Velibor Baćo | Alexis Krasilovsky | Nathaniel Lachenmeyer | Jeff Larason | Lisa Suhair Majaj | Liliana Mercau | Susanna Fiona Murray | Laura Ann Reed | Michael Roberts | John Whalen-Bridge | Hilmi M. Zawati |
