When I was in kindergarten and Hubert Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon, my mother told me that my grandfather had run for president too, on the Communist Party ticket. That surprised me, since I knew him as a mostly silent, pipe-smoking man whom we visited at Thanksgiving. I became fascinated by my grandfather’s life, which took him from Kansas to Moscow, where he met my grandmother, to Shanghai and back to New York.
But by the time I wrote a book on the radical 1930s, I knew enough to take my family’s concerns about privacy seriously. I immediately dismissed my editor’s suggestion that I write an autobiographical preface. My grandfather’s journey from the center of the American left to pariah status, his stints in prison, and his battles with McCarthy had left wounds in my family that I did not want to probe.
Earl Browder was the head of the Communist Party USA during its most influential period, the Great Depression. He coined the slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” He ran for president twice against Franklin Roosevelt and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938. In 1946, on Stalin’s orders, he was expelled from the Communist Party for revisionism. During those years, he was tracked by both the FBI and the KGB, and in the mid-1990s, the Venona project was published—a series of KGB cables that identified my grandfather as a Soviet spy.
I know these facts mainly from my reading. My father didn’t like to talk much about his past, though occasionally, seemingly out of the blue, he would allude to an episode I knew nothing about, like the time when he was in college and the government jailed his mother, who was dying of cancer, and threatened to deport her back to the Soviet Union. His father had been imprisoned as well, and the couple had to spend a week in jail before the family could raise bail.
My knowledge was incomplete, and sometimes this ate at me, but I was afraid I could never really understand my grandfather’s life, afraid that if I tried to tell it, I would get the story wrong.
And then I couldn’t wait anymore. I was finishing a documentary for PBS, The Reconstruction of Asa Carter, and had enough money from a new job to begin a new project, and all the people who had known my grandfather were now in their 70s or 80s. I needed to talk to them. But before I did, I had to visit upstate New York.