“I Liked That They Were Courageous”: Two 1950s Red Diaper Babies Speak
Part One: Pride, Loneliness and Fear
These are firsthand remembrances of two Americans: Activist and celebrated labor union educator Toby Emmer, who died May 15 at the age of 78 in New York after a brief illness; and 79 year old former organizer, social worker and retired nonprofit executive (and my father) David Strauss. Born to Communist parents in the 1940s, they grew up together in one of the secular Jewish communist enclaves that grew in US cities in the early to mid-20th century. Theirs happened to be in Cleveland, Ohio. The community presented them with an alternative vision of the future of American society, one based on mutual support and shared assets such as child care, health care, secular Jewish day schools, arts organizations and social clubs. The group’s members became targets of the McCarthyist wave of anti-communist persecutions, and both Emmer’s and Strauss’ families were surveilled for many years by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. In 2018, David obtained a copy of my grandfather Abe’s FBI file. It is 912 pages long and covers three decades, from 1939 to 1967.
I was able to interview them together in March 2022 for a series of taped conversations (over Zoom) about the unique set of lenses their parents’ lives gave them, the choices they made in response to their parents’ insights, and how they felt about all of it. Although much has been written about the accomplishments and legacies of the so-called Red Diaper Babies, until recently little has been written about the emotional impacts their unusual upbringings, with their visits from besuited FBI agents and their estrangements from neighbors, peers, and ultimately, in some cases, the Party itself, had on them. My hope is that as these elders draw out and reckon with their submerged emotions from that period, readers can gain a new appreciation for the complicatedness of life in the CPUSA. It is a story of two childhoods shot through with mystery, and shaped by interlocking pressures, moments of bravery, and terrible loss and fear. To have been children and young adults under the gaze of law enforcement and a hostile broader public during the McCarthy era seems to have been an especially intense experience for both David and Toby.
Full disclosure: David is my father. Toby has been an auntie to me all my life, though we are not related by blood. Toby’s death in May 2022 left the world with a gaping hole, but it has left me bereft. My last question to them in this interview was one about their political identities and their parents’ legacies; Toby responded by asking if we could continue the discussion later. Sadly, we did not get another chance to continue. This series is dedicated to her memory.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I have written in footnote form a glossary of terms at the end for readers who may need some of the subjects’ words defined.
Mariya: You’re both Red Diaper babies1 from Cleveland (and in your case, Dad, also Pittsburgh, which is where you were born). Can you say your full names, the year you were born, and the names of your parents?
Toby: Evelyn Toby Emmer, 1943. My parents names are Ruth Bayer Emmer. and Jack Emmer.
David: David Albert Strauss, 1942. My parents were Abraham and Sylvia Schlesinger Strauss.
What is your earliest memory of one another?
D: I was sitting on the porch of our house on East 149th Street in Cleveland and this car pulled up and 3 or 4 people got out. It was Toby's parents and Toby. It was an introduction to us. I think I was 13. Toby looked put upon, like any kid of that age. Like, what the hell am I having to do this for?
T: We lived at 153rd near Kinsman. The only way we were able to get it was that it had been foreclosed on another family. My grandfather got the house but at the expense of someone else that had fallen on hard times.
The FBI had followed my parents so much that they didn’t even have the money to pay rent to my grandparents at 153rd St. The FBI had followed them so much that my mother couldn’t find work, my father as a social worker had been told he could stay on.
My father (Jack) grew up in the Hebrew orphanage-- the Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA) at Washington Heights (in New York). When Daddy graduated high school and he lived at the HOA, he had a communist social worker, Adele Lithauer. The director of the home had mandated that the kids graduating high school go to trade school. And Adele went to him and said, “This kid needs to go to college. CCNY (City College of New York) is free. You give him a job. He needs to go to college.” To thank the legacy of her, he became a social worker.
So, Daddy graduated CCNY tired, because he had a full time job and he hardly slept at night. And got accepted on scholarship to Western Reserve School of Applied Social Science. SASS. So he got a job, and room and board in Belfair, which was “a home for emotionally disturbed children” in Cleveland.
Then we moved back in with my grandparents.
D: And that’s when I met you.
T: Right.
What precipitated the move back in with the grandparents?
T: My father felt guilty that we were limited as kids living in that home. I remember he really wanted us back in the community.
My mother became a daycare teacher.
What were your parents’ relationships to one another?
D: Toby’s parents were a lot younger than my parents. So they were friends, even though I was Toby’s age my brother was older, anyway. It wasn’t real close, but they were friends.
T: No but I want to add, My grandparents were very close to your parents.
D: That’s right. I knew her grandmother pretty well. Dora Bayer.
T: I’m going to get emotional. My grandpa was a garment worker who went blind. He was a member of the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union). And my grandpa and my grandma resented that women -- that the politics was through the union. She told me that it was traditional that when a young Jewish immigrant woman got married she stayed home. She didn’t work outside the home. My father called her cooking a work of art. I think David remembers Dora’s cooking. Cream cheese cookies and stuffed cabbage. I can do her stuffed cabbage by the way if you ever want it.
D: I do and I wouldn’t mind having some! You’re a couple of hundred miles away.
T: Maybe for your big (80th) birthday. Who knows.
So, Grandma was like the original Jewish mother in that way, but more. Because when I was in high school and I was dating she would be, “Does he want to change the world?” (Laughs)
My grandparents in Cleveland were wonderful. Every which way. Politically, providers, stable, sense of humor. Spoke Yiddish. Taught us a great deal. Loved us. And Grandpa started a candy store in the basement for what he called “slack time” when he would be laid off. The garment workers never had secure work. And he had the cash and carry candy and tobacco business that he ran out of our basement.
I’d run down to the basement and sneak malted milk balls, Hersheys candy.
My grandpa went blind from diabetes and he couldn’t thread the needle anymore in his sewing machine. My grandpa also, by the way, historically did a really big thing. You know about Sacco and Vanzetti2?
Yes.
T: When their execution was impending the shop was told that if anybody left their job to go to the demonstration they would lose their job. My grandpa went.
When he came back to the shop his sewing machine had been dismantled from its pedestal. And the whole shop went out. And got him his job back. That’s a different era. Grandpa was a wonderful rank and file member in the ILGWU. And he kept his job until he couldn’t see anymore.
D: My mother worked at a couple of places. A place that bought stuff from trains that crashed. There would be all these goods that were damaged. Some kind of salvage company.
Sometimes she would bring home some cool stuff that fell off a train. Then at some point she got a job with the law firm and stayed with that for years. Out-earned my father always.
How did you feel about your parents’ work with the Party once you became aware of it? What age do you think you became aware of it? How did you find out?
T: I know exactly. I was 5, I was in bed. That same period, Daddy told me if two men in suits come to the door--we didn’t know anyone who wore suits--don’t let them in. (That would be the FBI.) I was in bed pretending to fall asleep. And I heard my mother say -- My mother was obviously having a cell meeting3 in the kitchen and she said “I as an American communist”.
I don’t know what it was about me but I was proud. I always was proud. I liked that they were courageous. That they talked to us about justice and politics. And we had records when I was a kid like this record the Churkendoose. It was about how you don’t have to be one thing. Everything isn’t one thing. You can be mixed and it’s OK. They talked to us a lot about that. Not in theoretical or heavy sectarian terms. But just about what was right and wrong. They talked to us about race. They made Hanukkah and Passover have meaning in terms of justice. Grandpa used to sing the Marseillaise and show us the scar where he was shot.
He was arrested when he was 16 or so in an armed robbery in Poland with the Bund4 from a bank. He was a lookout. He was shot in the back and saved by a progressive doctor nearby and taken to jail. He used to tell us that story. So I had an association with standing up and being principled and being proud.
D: I had a very different situation. In my memory it was a rolling awareness. I share the same sense in that they transmitted a huge amount to us of justice questions without being directly in your face. We would have over for dinner Black people, refugees, officials of the party. Gus Hall5came over to dinner a few times. And we always lived in integrated communities. Because [my parents] were poor, they were always moving into communities that were historically Jewish as all the Jews were moving out and being replaced by Black families. I always tell people the most segregated school I ever went to was the University of Michigan.
He (Abe) never left the Party. My mother had left. She didn’t care to talk about it much. And he didn’t have a good understanding of how little information we got about what it meant to be a communist. We just knew that he liked the Soviet Union and was pro union. And I was taken on picket lines when I was a little kid. But to really understand what was going on -- maybe I was just obtuse. I didn’t have a sense of what was really the goal of the communist movement. Which was totally on the defense by the time I became aware. They were doing nothing but having defense dinners, raising money for defense. The Rosenberg trial6 was huge. And served the purpose that it was intended to serve, which was to cause the majority of Jews to be terrified of anything that was left of center. And it worked. And his world continued to shrink. His universe of people.
After the Rosenbergs they lost a lot of people. After Hungary7, a lot of people. After Khrushchev's speech outing the Stalinist horrors, huge numbers. So there weren’t that many left. And it started to impact how the Freiheit8 worked.
I never had a full understanding of what participation in the party really meant. There were just obscure things that were signals. But strong signals! When I delivered newspapers, the Plain Dealer, I always opened the paper and looked at the headlines before I delivered them. And one day I open the headline and there’s Frieda Katz, Dave Katz, three other people under arrest for Smith Act9 violations. I get home and my mother calls my father who is in Detroit and says, “Don’t come home.” I thought that was pretty funny, because the FBI can’t find you if you are in Detroit?
So they just did whatever they could. And he never did get arrested for that. And those people eventually got off. But it was quite amazing to have them on the front page. They were among my parents’ best friends. At least 3 of the defendants were good friends.
There was just a lot of discussion of how, if there was a union action, how important that was. My father would throw a book in my direction once in a while. They weren’t especially good literature. A book about “the wonderful UAW and how it formed.”
So, Dad, you still haven’t really answered the question which is when did you become fully aware in your own judgment. You said a rolling awareness.
D: I knew they were communists but I had no idea what the big deal was. But I did become aware of how contra the society my parents were. How oppositional. That was easy because the kids would -- I swear this is true -- each block had an FBI informant on it. On our block it happened to be this guy who if you hit a ball in his yard he wouldn’t give it back. Because he was such an asshole. If they wanted to let it be known that our household was a communist household, they would let it be known. And all of a sudden people you knew would just look right past you when you walked past them.
We lived in a house on 147th St. We rented the upper part. It was nice. It had this nice yard. The people downstairs were friends of the movement10, good close friends. We called them progressives. So we were real friendly with them. Then one day I walked downstairs and I started to say, “Hi”, and they closed the door. So I told my parents and they said, “That’s because he has agreed to testify. Or cooperate.”
That was a big deal. Anybody who agreed to cooperate was suddenly out. Because that's what happened. They might start giving information. And that’s what this family did. It was because this guy had a job with a chemical factory or something. As a chemical engineer. They said, “You are going to lose your job unless you cooperate”, so he had to cooperate.That meant that family was cut off from us.
Then we got evicted. And my parents said it's because the owner needed the flat for his kids. I never bought that. I knew it was bullshit. So I was probably about 10 or 11 when I started to realize. This is more serious than being part of an organization to go to meetings about.
It really actually wasn’t!
D: That’s true! (Laughs) It actually wasn’t more than a group to go to meetings about, but It was treated more serious.
There were a couple of other strange incidents. Around 1958 or ‘59 we moved to Cleveland Heights. And my father and I were walking down the street to this deli, a really good deli. There was a deli in every neighborhood in those days. We were walking to this deli and this guy intercepts us and says, “Abe, I want to talk to you.” He was a little bit drunk. But he started talking about, he had apparently been tried by the CP. They would try their own people! Somebody was seen as heretical, they’d get tried. And he was bitter about it. My father handled it okay. Just smiling and patting the guy on the back. That was his way. But, I thought, that couldn’t have been true! My God. They would actually try somebody?
The other interesting thing was when my folks moved to New York. In ‘62. I was feeling all progressive and liberal. And I said to him, So are you still a member of the CP? He said “You cannot ask me that question. You can not ask me that question and I will not answer.” Because It was still illegal. To say you were a member of the CP was an illegal act.The Smith Act was still on the books?
T: No, but a lot of people lost their jobs because they had to sign loyalty oaths. Teachers had to sign loyalty oaths.
‘62. That was the same year they were called before HUAC.
D: It was probably just a couple months after they had been before HUAC. So maybe that was my curiosity. They took the Fifth. So I asked them.
Sylvia (David’s mother) took the Fifth and the First Amendments. Was that the ACLU lawyers’ influence?
T: Mom said her ACLU lawyer didn’t know anything. She had to tell him everything to do.
They must have been among only a few CPers who got representation from ACLU.
T: Yeah. Mom did not want to talk about her lawyer. Mom told me that she took the First Amendment so that I would be proud of her. Because at the time I was working on, you know, abolishing HUAC. And she wanted me to be proud of her. Plus Pete Seeger had taken the First. And she wanted to be like Pete.
T: Mom was called. They and her brother were listed that morning in the Plain Dealer. April ‘62, right? Over 50 communists were named publicly in the paper. They woke up to reading this in the morning paper. And who was called. And by noon that day they had both lost their jobs.
D: Wow. And you were in college.
T: I was at Ohio State in the free speech movement about the banning of a panel on HUAC. Pretty amazing.
HUAC was pretty old news at that point. It was sort of weird that it was still going, right?
T: No.
D: I always tell people that the 1950s really extended until around ‘63. The start of the serious Civil Rights movement, when it got really intense, that is what flipped everything.
Part of the McCarthy era was to accuse anybody trying to make any kind of change but particularly anything regarding the Negro -- which was what it was called then -- the Negro movement as communist. That was (J.Edgar) Hoover. Anything that was something he didn't like was communist. But that did change in the 60s.
Do you remember hearing your parents talk openly with you about their work with the Party?
D: This'll be short. I don’t remember any direct discussion from them with us about what they did in the Party. I remember they would go to meetings and that’s all I knew. I’m going to a meeting. It was never talked about what the substance of the meeting was. I pretty much was in the dark. If somebody had said to me at any point, “What does the CP do?” I would’ve said “I have no idea.”
T: Actually that’s true of me too.
D: Maybe that was part of the agreement of members of the Party to never talk about it with their kids?
T: I don’t know. One of the things mom was asked about before HUAC was did the CP order her to infiltrate--remember? It was a community called Mount Pleasant community.
D: Yes, I remember.
T: Was she sent to infiltrate it? I tend to think that it wasn’t like that, the way the FBI read it, as much as they were people who were getting involved in community organizations especially around community empowerment and civil rights. That was what brought them to the Party in the first place. So I see it as more integrated. That they weren’t sent to infiltrate organizations, but they were part of organizations.
D: Well, they may have been sent to infiltrate! But anybody who is doing organizing work they think is cutting edge-- that’s what you do. That’s what we did in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)! We went to other organizations to try to get them into it. It’s not an order from Moscow.
T: One way is negative and one is positive. What we knew is that our parents went to picket lines, they went to peace demonstrations. What we knew at the time is they were involved in the committee against the execution of Ethel and Julius (Rosenberg).
D: That’s right.
T: That was what they were really into. I was ten, you were eleven when they were executed.
D: Right.
T: I do remember worrying that they could come for my parents. That I do remember. Mom was also asked before HUAC did you pick up Helen Sobel. Mort Sobel was the co-defendant of the Rosenbergs, Helen was his wife. And Mom was asked “Did you use Milt T’s car to pick up Helen Sobel?”
D: Wow. Boy, is that specific.
T: I think they clearly wanted them to know how closely they were being watched. It was an intimidation tactic. Mom also said to me years later, when we were looking at the transcript, “Why would I borrow Milt’s car? We had a car.” (Laughs)
All that is, is trying to do guilt by association. That’s what the Committee was trying to do. And make people afraid to associate with each other. And to be frank, In our circles that didn’t work. They were not intimidated against staying together. It was quite the opposite. I found out many years later, (a former neighbor) wrote to me asking if Mom would do an obituary for their mom Lillian Levine. Mom told me when she wrote the obituary that Lill used to have rent parties for them. Because after she was called before HUAC and they didn’t have income, I guess keeping the house was a big issue.
D: I didn’t know that.
T: I didn’t either. I was at Ohio State, (Toby’s younger brother) Howie was in high school, they didn’t have work and Mom went to work for Kelly Girl. It was rough. I had no idea that Lill did that. Organized rent parties for my folks. In hindsight that’s a huge, beautiful thing.
D: I was sheltered from all that because my dad’s job (as a journalist for a Communist Party-owned Yiddish newspaper, the Morgn Freiheit) was 100% safe. My mother was working for this law firm that was sort of liberal and they didn’t care what HUAC was doing.
T: My dad was working for an insurance firm that was “liberal”. They fired him. They closed down the whole firm. It was a tax writeoff. That morning, Mom was working for a parent run co-op home daycare and they fired her.
D: That was 1962. That’s what I mean about the 50s still roaring. For someone to get fired like that with no due process.
T: I do remember my father being very depressed when he lost his job. I came home one day and he didn’t know I was walking in the front door and he had his arms on the table and his head was in his hands. And I’ll never forget that because they wouldn’t show that to us. They were always so dignified.
Did either of your parents go to jail?
D: So far as I know, my mother never did. My father was arrested and tried and convicted in Pittsburgh, in I think 1939 or 1940. I believe -- I looked at it and the (FBI) file was a little contradictory. But he served three days short of six months.
This was something my parents never talked about. In a way the FBI file was the only place to find a record of this. It was a strange crime. He had run to be a delegate to be an elector for the Communist Party in the election of whatever year it was, ‘38 or something. There was this law in PA that made it a crime to run for office outside the Democratic or Republican parties. And he did anyway, and so did a lot of other people. And the state went after them. And obtained that conviction.
To my knowledge it was not appealed, which I thought strange when I looked at the file because it seemed to me that the conviction could not withstand an appeal. That’s basic freedom of association. So he did serve that term.
The only thing I ever heard about it is my mother once told me that she told him if that ever happened again she was gone. That she would not allow that to happen again.
T: Gone like she was going to leave him?
D: Yes, or she wouldn’t put up with it. I took that to mean she would leave. I don’t know. Because she had a little baby. In 1940 my brother was a baby. So. Anyway, it was no playing around. That’s all I know about it. Your turn, Toby.
T: My parents were neither of them jailed. But they were followed for years. And then of course my brother and I were followed.
Red Diaper Baby is a child of parents who were members of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), or who were affiliated somehow with the Party.
Anarchists tried and executed in Massachusetts in 1921. https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/sacco-and-vanzetti/
Cells were neighborhood based groups of Communists tasked with growing, developing leaders for, and supporting the broader Party.
Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), known simply as the Bund, was founded in Vilna in October 1897 by a small group of Jews who were profoundly influenced by Marxism. Led by Aleksandr (Arkadii) Kremer (1865–1935), their goal was to attract East European Jews to the emergent Russian revolutionary movement.
— YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/bund
Gus Hall was General Secretary of the CPUSA from 1959 until his death in 2000.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged and convicted of espionage and were executed in 1953. More here: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/julius-and-ethel-rosenberg-are-convicted
The USSR sent tanks and troops to invade Hungary in November 1956 and violently crush a democratic uprising there. Thousands were killed and injured, and hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled. More here: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/soviets-put-brutal-end-to-hungarian-revolution
The Morgn Freiheit was the Yiddish-language newspaper of the CPUSA. Abe Strauss worked there as a writer and editor from the 1930s until his death in 1967. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84007392/
The Smith Act, or Alien Registration Act of 1940, was used to prosecute hundreds of labor leaders and Left activists for alleged membership in the CPUSA and other groups, and to deport some of them. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/alien-registration-act
“Friends of the movement” is a euphemism for fellow travelers or other Leftists.