Red Diaper Babies
We were red diaper babies.
Siblings spanning fifteen years: four boys and one girl. Our parents, once active communists, were not what others imagined, where not what cold-war hysteria dictated. We were red diaper babies. My parents told the stories from their once radical twenties: the auto plant wildcat strike led by my father, the interracial party they held in their Flint, MI home, and the KKK cross-burning on their lawn. My father believed we were FBI-wiretapped. He knew he must have a dossier. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
Dad felt the Cold War harassment of the McCarthy era. It intimidated, and it contaminated due process. Innuendo silenced democracy. Dad was blacklisted from jobs; Mom feared we could lose our first home. My parents left the Communist Party USA, but they continued to be hounded and haunted for decades. In our younger years, we didn’t grasp it. Yet, the chemistry of their terror polluted our childhoods. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies. Chapter I
Because of the age gap between us, my siblings and I experienced our parents in two distinct chapters. My older brother and I experienced chapter one. It was raw and deliberative in Marxist rhetoric and Party-line arguments. My parents came from working-class homes. Their convictions were borne out of the class struggle and their memories of the Great Depression. Their affiliation with the Party granted them deep insights about the important role of organized labor. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red Diaper Babies.
My parents offered us frank observations about American racism and the inequality of women under capitalism. They lauded the U.S. Constitution. Yet argued that the U.S.S.R. Constitution was superior. Dad’s dinner table soapboxing combined American patriotism with a defense of the Soviet Union. His old left sermons exalted Paine and Jefferson along with Stalin and Lenin. So my birthname became Thomas Jefferson, and the American Revolution foreshadowed the Russian Revolution, the Ten Days That Shook the World. The American Declaration of Independence was one of the most important documents in human history. These men were fearless revolutionaries and patriots. Dad maintained that women were guaranteed much more freedom in the Soviet Constitution. He monopolized these discussions, granting my mother just a few words here or there. And she always concurred. Like sacred whispered gospel, my older brother and I understood these family conversations must be kept secret. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
As I grew older and read more, I didn’t always accept these lectures without question. The frank discussions about racism and inequality opened my mind; it must have done so for my older brother as well. My dad left the Michigan blacklists and found better-paying sales work. We made our home in Missouri in 1959. I remember the day the FBI immediately visited us there, and my father kicked them out of our house. The FBI never pestered us after that. But this intimidation tactic worked. The fear haunted my parents for decades. It was during this time that one of my brothers died suddenly. He was only two years old, and he died from a case of pneumonia that raged through his body in twenty-four hours. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
My mother broke down, blaming herself for his death. As atheists, they rejected all the major religions. Yet, during this time, my mother needed the support of a fellowship. Someone told them about the Unitarian Church. Their early impressions were positive. The church's liberalism provided both comfort and freedom to express their values, though they never mentioned their activism in the Communist Party USA. The church was their refuge politically and psychologically. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
My older brother and I reacted differently to my father’s long-winded lectures about socialism, Marxism, class consciousness, and the labor struggle. My older brother never read anything written by Marx. He attacked it tirelessly, and he obtained his PhD in the New York Times. I became a finger painter smearing my convictions everywhere. I first read The Communist Manifesto when I was 16. I was left with more questions than answers. But the notion of an international working class uniting to bring an end to capitalism seemed compelling. I questioned whether Russians were truly free in their dictatorship of the proletariat. When I raised my doubts, my father dismissed them, arguing that we lived in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Our two-party democracy was really a one-party government of the capitalist class. The one-party state in the Soviet Union turned that equation upside down. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
The more I read about the Soviet Union, the less I liked it. The year was 1967. My father continued his support of the Soviet Union and defended the peasant revolution led by Mao Zedong in China. The ground rules underlying any of these lectures were that I must never discuss the radical ideology anywhere outside the home. I started protesting against the war in Vietnam through the St. Louis Peace Center. Student antiwar protests began spreading across the country. By this time, Dad had started his own business, and he warned me not to have discussions with protestors by phone and that no political bumper stickers were allowed on the family car. He knew we were wiretapped, and it haunted him. I don’t think I fully understood the terror behind those warnings. His successful small business emerged as a growing paradox with his ideology and his working-class roots. We were upwardly mobile, and we left the working-class neighborhoods to live in bigger houses where all our neighbors were white and conservative. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies. Chapter II
We had a collection of the Great Books of the Western World in our home, I had just turned twenty, and I discovered Capital by Karl Marx. There was much in my first reading that I did not understand, but I understood that labor was a commodity under capitalism and that the surplus value created by workers was robbed by the capitalist. It was then that I concluded that I was a socialist at least in principle. However, I rejected all communist models I had read about around the world. I told my father I had decided I was a socialist, and he just laughed at me. I didn’t qualify as a true socialist because I was not a part of the working class. I was a phony in his eyes. Dad liked to make fun of the socialism of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Their socialism was not revolutionary. And like theirs, my socialism surely was not revolutionary either. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
My older brother acquired a passion for philosophy and the great Western thinkers. He was drawn first into the Unitarian ministry, and later he obtained a PhD in philosophy. Notably absent from his reading was anything written by Marx. As dad’s business blossomed, my brother became an important part of the sales team. The engineering knowledge of my father left a profound impression on my brother. He kept his liberal politics buried in right-wing business circles he frequented. But in his eyes, capitalism had triumphed over socialism, and he could not imagine a world without capitalism. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
In 1972, the push to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) began, and Mom became active in supporting it. The Amendment was first introduced in Congress by Representative Martha Griffiths in 1971. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971, and the U.S. Senate in 1972, officially sending it to the state legislatures for ratification. However, intense opposition from conservative and religious groups, led by figures such as Phyllis Schlafly, resulted in the ERA being ratified in only 35 of the 38 states required for it to become part of the Constitution. My mother also bravely campaigned for George McGovern for president in 1972. Needless to say, McGovern was beaten in a landslide, carrying only the state of Massachusetts in the Electoral College. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
By this time, Dad’s attachment to the U.S.S.R. had begun to drift away. He was a small businessman and an inventor holding numerous patents. However, privately, he held onto his Marxist analysis of history, and he would espouse it at dinnertime after a few drinks. He became something of a rogue Marxist, quietly analyzing the historical conditions in the world through his own Marxist lens. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
In many ways, my younger siblings encountered a different set of parents. These new parents learned to couch their politics in the vocabulary of liberalism. One of my brothers took up country music. He seldom discussed politics unless he was cracking a joke. My other brother was more politically engaged. He graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism. He became disgusted with the Democratic Party, and he believed a third party on the left could defeat candidates running as Republicans or Democrats. I don’t know if he ever studied or read Karl Marx. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
Finally, there was my sister. Her political values seemed to be picked up from my parents. She believed in equality and justice, and condemned sexism and racism. She also advocated strongly for the environment and could not understand why our parents were critical of environmentalists. The home she grew up in was affluent. She lacked any connection to the way in which workers were so often displaced from their jobs because of well-intentioned environmental policies. And for a time, she seemed to adopt a “both sides” critique of cable TV news. She argued that neither left- nor right-leaning cable news could be trusted. I believed that all corporate news severely limited public understanding of the facts. However, her view seemed to be that it was impossible to know the facts, since both sides were aiming to sensationalize the news. Sadly, this perspective meant she was granting truth and falsehoods equal status in cable news content. She rightly criticized the sensational manner in which news was often presented. But she ignored the fact that Fox News, News One, and other right-wing cable outlets lied. They intentionally presented falsehoods as facts. And while MSNBC and CNN are guilty of sensationalizing the news, they do not intentionally present false information. Her third marriage to a British socialist seemed to tilt her perspective further to the left. His fame as a satirist may have helped. Unfortunately, that marriage ended when he died from cancer. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
My dad and mother never abandoned their social justice moral convictions. They were sometimes slow to come around to accepting gay rights and environmental justice. This resistance was a product of their working-class life experiences. Being gay was taboo and rarely discussed in their homes. The old left did not openly accept homosexuality. It wasn’t discussed. Liberal environmentalists too often proposed programs that placed more importance on the environment than on working-class jobs. My parents didn’t trust those environmentalists. The Green New Deal, now supported by many democratic socialists, is aimed at addressing climate change while creating many jobs in alternative energy. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
From the time I was fourteen, I knew I was attracted to boys as well as girls. The year was 1965. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association labeled homosexuality a mental disorder. My father always cited this to defend his prejudice against gays. I remained closeted with my parents until after my father died in 1988. My older brother and I also found twelve-step recovery. I went back to school and completed my doctorate. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
Though his inventions of industrial and commercial ovens built his small business into a factory of about twenty employees, my father was never truly a happy man. As an alcoholic, he drank heavily until he found sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA program gave even an atheist like Dad a spiritual path through recovery. He sold his business to Pet Milk for three million dollars. The scrappy union rebel and Communist Party member was all but a distant memory. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
We were red diaper babies.
In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street Movement was organized. Like many on the left, my mother instinctively hoped for a new class consciousness attracting a broad base of support. If she were alive today, I am sure she would be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Life’s machinery rumbled on. Our survival was our careful battle.
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