In this episode, David talks about researching the formative years of his father, Elliott Maraniss, whose ordeal before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and time in the crucible of the Red Scare are the subject of his latest book, A Good American Family. In Elliott’s old Boy Scout newsletter, high school yearbooks and articles in the University of Michigan student paper, David found the paper trail that revealed the shaping of his father’s life and political beliefs during the great depression and run-up to World War II. In the New York Public Library and the digital archive of the Michigan Daily, David came upon influential moments and people: the brilliant Jewish teachers at Abraham Lincoln High, kept from university jobs by quotas, who told Elliott’s class ‘they could not afford to be another lost generation,” as well as Elliott’s cohort at the Michigan Daily that included a young Arthur Miller and the poet John Malcom Brinnin. The newspaper was first-class, cultivating, as all good student newspaper do, a generation of writers and space for questioning authority. But the biggest revelation was the article he found confirming a family tale about how his parents met: A banquet on campus for Bob Cummins, home from the Spanish Civil War; his younger sister, Mary Cummins in attendance. And covering the event for The Michigan Daily was Elliott Maraniss.
