On an otherwise pleasant day in May 1957, my father received two unwelcome visitors at his tool-and-die factory. They were F.B.I. agents acting on years of informants’ tips that Dad had been a Communist Party member. The agents intended to use that information as leverage to turn my father, too, into a snitch.
I learned of this encounter earlier this year thanks to my son, Aaron, a graduate student in history. Having grown up hearing family stories about my father’s lifelong radical politics, Aaron put through a Freedom of Information Act request for the F.B.I. file on David Freedman of Highland Park, N.J., birth date March 22, 1921.
That file is a reminder of what I inherited from him — not just his politics, but the convictions that they were built on. And it has revealed to me and my siblings, Carol and Ken, details of my father’s actions under severe duress that were more impressive than anything we had anticipated.
The existence of the file came as no surprise. We knew, and were proud of, our father’s upbringing in the anarchist colony in the Stelton section of Piscataway, N.J. We basked in reflected subversive glory when an eminent historian of American anarchism, Paul Avrich, wrote about Stelton and our relatives there in several of his books. Dad would have been a logical enough target of scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I.
Nor were we surprised that Dad confirmed to the F.B.I. agents that he had indeed been a Communist Party member from about 1946 to 1950. At times, I’d chided him for being “the last Stalinist,” regaling us kids with tales of Soviet heroism at Stalingrad, convinced almost until his death in 2010 that the Rosenbergs had been falsely accused of being Russian spies.
Dad had first landed on the F.B.I.’s radar in a tip from a local police chief, according to the file, and subsequently five different informants provided federal agents with intelligence. The names of two were redacted, but the three others showed up in the report, and I did my own research on them all. One, the postmaster in Stelton, an amateur boxer and war veteran, fed the bureau a stream of names of Stelton residents, including Dad, who were receiving mailings from Communist front groups as well as non-Communist pacifist organizations.
The two other informants, a married couple, may well have known Dad personally. One was a graduate student in math at Rutgers and the other was a child psychologist. Both had run for public office in the late 1940s on the left-wing Progressive Party; one of my father’s heroes, Henry Wallace, was the party’s candidate for president in 1948.
Maybe this couple had ratted out Dad to spare themselves arrest or exposure. Maybe they had been F.B.I. plants all along. Regardless, the informants told the bureau that my father had been a member of one of the Communist Party’s remaining John Reed Club chapters.
When those two F.B.I. agents confronted my father, he was in a precarious position to resist being blackmailed. The direst period of the Red Scare may have ended by the spring of 1957, but the political climate was hardly safe. The playwright Arthur Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress in late May for having refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was holding hearings during 1957 about alleged Communist subversion in the Newark area. And it was the Newark field office of the F.B.I. that was pressuring my father.
At a personal level, my father then had two children, Carol and me, younger than 19 months old. He was deeply mortgaged on both our home and the factory for his company, New Brunswick Tool and Die.
The company, begun as a machine shop, had been advancing into microbiology equipment, most of it designed by my father, an entirely self-taught inventor whose formal education had ended at high school. For everything from sheet metal to trucking service to bank loans to contracts from Rutgers scientists, my father’s livelihood depended on people who might well cut ties with an exposed Communist.
In interrogations by F.B.I. agents — first on May 8, then on July 1 — Dad stood up for his principles. He readily admitted having been a member of the Communist Party up until 1950. Then he explained that, far from being “the last Stalinist” of my jibe, he had cut loose from the party. As the F.B.I. report put it, “He became disillusioned with the C.P. from an ideological standpoint” and had concluded that “socialistic reforms could not be secured by blindly supporting C.P. causes.”
That version of events comported entirely with a written submission to the F.B.I. by an unnamed informant who reported of Dad: “Not active — ideological problems — refuses to pay dues.”
It matters a lot to my siblings and me that Dad saw Communism for what it was as early as 1950. Stalin was still being venerated then in many leftist quarters as the herald of world peace. Six years would pass before two events — the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Krushchev’s “secret speech” revealing Stain’s tyranny — sandblasted the romance off Communism for many other American followers.
Yet my father did not become a Whittaker Chambers, either, devoting his remaining life to renunciation. He didn’t even become, as one of his Stelton friends did, a neoconservative. He voted Democratic till his death, and his greatest insult was to call someone “so [expletive] bourgeois.”
After the May 8 session with Dad an agent wrote: “Subject volunteered that he still believes in some socialistic reforms which he feels would benefit the majority of people in the U.S.” On July 1, an agent noted in his report, my father “advised that an individual’s political thinking was his own business.” In the final paragraph of the file, the agent has to admit, “It is not believed the subject offered any potential as a security informant.”
Reading the file has been like receiving a fatherly message from beyond the grave. It reincarnated the father to whom I had dedicated one of my early books as “the guardian of conscience.” My father could be judgmental with his children, if ever he perceived us falling into his cardinal sins of being “materialistic” and “sectarian.” For me, that could mean buying a couple of suits for my job or becoming an observant Jew.
But in the face of a real threat, Dad managed a laudable and difficult balance. He resisted being doctrinaire, being tribal, when facts and events contradicted dogma. He held true to his core beliefs about seeking a more equitable society.
I’ve been grateful that my father didn’t live to see Donald Trump and MAGA, with all of their wretched echoes of McCarthyism and fascism. But from the F.B.I., of all places, I have received the most valuable present for this Father’s Day: a reinforcement of the values that Dad would have been living by in these terrible days and would have wanted his children and grandchildren to share, most especially at this moment when democracy itself is in peril.
