Legacy of a False Promise: A Daughter’s Reckoning

by Margaret Fuchs Singer

My story begins in the early summer of 1955. I’m 13 years old, living in Washington, D.C. with my mother, a special education teacher, my father, a professor of law at American University and my 16-year-old brother Peter. Washington, at that time, is a conservative, southern town, typical in many ways of a small city in the U.S. in the 1950s. Life is peaceful and plentiful; our family, like the families of our neighbors and friends, pursues the American dream with confidence and hope for the future.

I am in many ways a typical teenager. Though extremely anxious (hyper vigilant I would say), I have friends, go to parties and obsess over boys and relationships – just like the other girls in my crowd. But even though my schoolmates like and accept me, I never feel I quite fit in. Maybe it’s that I’m a Jew in a very Christian, somewhat anti-Semitic environment; maybe it’s that my parents, intense, New York intellectuals, are so different from the parents of my friends and classmates. My mother and father are preoccupied, lost in their own thoughts and concerns, deeply involved in a world of books and ideas.

One evening, my mother tells me that my father needs to speak to my brother and me during dinner. It’s a warm June evening, the forsythia bushes are in bloom and the neighborhood children are still outside jumping rope and playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. As my mother speaks, I can hear my father pacing back and forth across the floor of his bedroom. Something is terribly wrong.

We sit down for dinner at the old pine table, hand-made by Dad when he and Mom were first married. My father begins to speak. Slowly and patiently, he tells us that he and my mother, while working for the United States government in the 1930s and early ‘40s (he as an attorney at the NLRB, she as an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics), had been members of the American Communist Party. They had joined, he explains, because Communism held the promise of a better life: improved working conditions for all Americans, civil rights for Negroes, an end to Fascism.

My father tells us that he and my mother left the party in 1946, disillusioned, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union ceased to be allies and when it became increasingly clear that the American Communist Party was beholden to the government of the Soviet Union.

Now, he tells us, my father’s been called to testify the next day before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Dad has learned that HUAC and the FBI know all about his past membership in the Party. While at first refusing to cooperate at all, he has now decided to testify but only about his own activities as a former Communist; he is unwilling to discuss his Communist friends and colleagues with whom he shared a personal and/or professional relationship. His refusal to testify about others may result in his being cited for contempt of Congress, he says anxiously, even in the possibility of a prison sentence. My father warns my brother and me “not to discuss this with anyone.”

I push my food away, feel my stomach in a knot; I am in shock. It is as if my father is telling me that he and my mother have committed a serious crime. In the 1950s conservative environment in which I live and go to school, being a Communist is the worst thing a child can imagine.