One pleasant day in May 1957, my father received two unwelcome visitors to his tool and die factory. They were FBI agents acting on years of tips from informants that my father was a member of the Communist Party. The agents intended to use this information as leverage to also turn my father into an informer.
I learned about this meeting earlier this year thanks to my son, Aaron, a history graduate student. Having grown up hearing family stories about my father’s radical politics, Aaron filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI file on David Freedman of Highland Park, NJ, birth date March 22, 1921.
This archive is a reminder of what I inherited from him – not just his policies, but the convictions on which they were built. And it revealed to me and my brothers, Carol and Ken, details of my father’s actions under intense pressure that were more impressive than anything we had anticipated.
The existence of the file was no surprise. We knew and were proud of our father’s upbringing in the anarchist colony in the Stelton area of Piscataway, NJ. We reveled in the subversive glory reflected 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 quite logical target of scrutiny by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI
Nor were we surprised when my father confirmed to FBI agents that he had indeed been a member of the Communist Party from 1946 to 1950. I would sometimes chide him for being “the last Stalinist,” regaling us children with stories of heroism. Soviet. in Stalingrad, convinced, almost until his death in 2010, that the Rosenbergs had been falsely accused of being Russian spies.
Dad first appeared on the FBI’s radar through a tip from a local police chief, according to the file, and five different informants subsequently provided information to federal agents. The names of two were redacted, but the other three appeared in the report and I did my own research on all of them. One of them, the Stelton postmaster, an amateur boxer and war veteran, provided the agency with a series of names of Stelton residents, including my father, who received mail from communist front groups as well as non-communist pacifist organizations. .
The other two informants, a married couple, may well have known my father personally. One was a mathematics graduate student at Rutgers and the other was a child psychologist. Both ran 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 presidential candidate in 1948.
Maybe this couple ratted out Dad to avoid arrest or exposure. Maybe they had been FBI plants all along. Regardless, informants told the agency that my father had been a member of one of the remaining chapters of the John Reed Club of the Communist Party.
When those two FBI agents confronted my father, he was in a precarious position to resist being blackmailed. The most terrible period of the Red Scare may have ended in the spring of 1957, but the political climate was hardly safe. Playwright Arthur Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress in late May for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee held hearings in 1957 on alleged communist subversion in the Newark area. And it was the local FBI office in Newark that put pressure on my father.
On a personal level, my father then had two children, Carol and I, under 19 months old. He was deeply mortgaged on both our home and the factory of his company, New Brunswick Tool and Die.
The company, which began as a machine shop, had been advancing microbiology equipment, most of it designed by my father, a completely self-taught inventor whose formal education had ended in high school. For everything from sheet metal to trucking services to bank loans to Rutgers scientist contracts, my father’s livelihood depended on people who might as well have cut ties with an exposed Communist.
In interrogations by FBI agents – first on May 8, then on July 1 – Dad stood by his principles. He readily admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party until 1950. He then explained that, far from being “the last Stalinist” of my mockery, he had left the party. As the FBI report states, “He became disillusioned with the CP from an ideological standpoint” and concluded that “socialist reforms could not be secured by blindly supporting CP causes.”
This version of events corresponded entirely to a written submission to the FBI from an unidentified informant who reported about my father: “Not active – ideological problems – refuses to pay debts.”
It is very important to me and my brothers that my father saw communism as it was in 1950. Stalin was still revered 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—destroyed the romance of communism for many other American followers.
However, my father did not become a Whittaker Chambers either, dedicating the rest of his life to renunciation. He did not even become, like one of his Stelton friends, a neoconservative. He voted Democrat until he died, and his biggest insult was calling someone “so [expletive] bourgeois.”
After the May 8 session with the father, an agent wrote: “The subject has voluntarily stated that he still believes in some socialist reforms that he thinks would benefit the majority of people in the United States.” On July 1, an agent noted in his report, my father “advised that an individual’s political thinking was his business.” In the final paragraph of the process, the agent has to admit: “It is not believed that the subject offered any potential as a security informant.”
Reading the archive was like receiving a paternal message from beyond the grave. The father to whom I dedicated one of my first books as “the guardian of conscience” reincarnated. My father could be critical of his children if he ever realized that we had fallen into his cardinal sins of being “materialistic” and “sectarian.” For me, that could mean buying some suits for my job or becoming a practicing Jew.
But faced with a real threat, Dad struck a difficult and commendable balance. He resisted being doctrinaire, being tribal, when facts and events contradicted dogma. He remained true to his fundamental beliefs about seeking a more equal society.
I was grateful that my father didn’t live to see Donald Trump and MAGA, with all their miserable echoes of McCarthyism and fascism. But from the FBI, of all places, I received the most valuable gift for this Father’s Day: a reinforcement of the values that my father would have lived in these terrible days and that he would like his children and grandchildren to share, most especially at this time when democracy itself is in danger.
