"Walking on two feet": Two 1950s Red Diaper Babies Speak
Part 3: Getting straight and Choosing Careers
Dear Reader,
This is the final installment of the firsthand remembrances of two Americans: Activist and celebrated labor union educator Toby Emmer, who died May 15, 2022 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. For a more complete introduction and explainer on this series, see Part 1. For those unfamiliar with some of the insider-baseball terms regarding the Left, I’ve included a glossary of terms in the footnotes. I hope you enjoy reading this small bit of Leftist history, and that you will reach out and share your reactions, responses, and your own remembrances if you have them! —Mariya
You both chose adult professional lives and careers centered around justice and liberation. What is the connection between those choices and your early lives as CP kids?
D: Good question. My time after SDS1 in Cleveland and with AFSC in Dayton2, well much after that. After I met Lynn3 and we started getting serious and my career as an auto mechanic4 clearly had reached its limit (Laughs). I decided to use my hard earned BA degree. You remember there was a movie called Getting Straight. That’s what I decided; I had to get straight. Elliott Gould was playing somebody who had been a radical in college and at a certain point, decided. And I did.
Ironically my first job was one I could get just by taking a civil service test. And I became a caseworker for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. Ironic because
the most effective organizing I’d done in Cleveland was organizing welfare recipients. But it is a soul destroying job. A friend called me because he had gotten involved with the Dan Walker campaign, who was a Democratic candidate for governor. He got elected, and he hired a phenomenal guy as the head of the department of Public Aid, and this guy started a community organizing project in Joliet and Kankakee. That’s how we got down there. That job lasted a short time because this wonderful guy got fired pretty quickly as director of this department. The new guy said to all of us, you guys have 8 months and then you have to either get out or get within the bureaucracy.
So that’s when I started a non-leftist career. I guess all my jobs were somewhat aimed at social change ideas. I felt Toby always worked more directly in activities that were related to our upbringing than I did.
These weren’t private company jobs, but they weren’t cutting edge “change” jobs. Even my last one, which was fantastic5. It was good! But it wasn’t the farmworkers union. People would say “Oh you are working with Cesar Chavez”-- no! It had nothing to do with that. It was great work, and I felt very relevant. That was the closest, probably, to what my parents had espoused and believed.
I've always had dual issues from the time I decided to get straight, which was to earn enough money —since we wanted to have kids, and wound up having four kids—having enough money to get them through college. And also being true to what my belief system and Lynn’s were. I felt it was a direct line of values from my work to my parents’ values. I was different from my brother.
T: Did you know he worked at the Army Math Research Center that was bombed?6
D: Sure. I knew that. [Ed. Note: They are discussing my uncle Ron, who was a mathematician and educator who died in 1978.] And I knew that he also voluntarily went into the FBI office. He had to get security clearance for it and he said, “I want to tell you all about my family.” And he did.
T: Right.
D: He had a very different view of his background and the questions of loyalty that you asked earlier.
T: Did your parents know? Were they alive?
D: They were alive and they were upset. My father was pretty interesting about all this. When I was in my last year in Cleveland-- do you remember Sanford Saferstein? He had a furniture store.
T: We had our first color tv from there!
D: My father asked me to go to lunch with him and Sanford. And the whole purpose of it was for Sanford to explain to me why I had to stop this nonsense of creating a working class revolution or whatever I thought I was doing.
T: How old were you?
D: Pretty old! Twenty four. My father saw that I was sort of dead-ended at that point. But it was funny that he didn’t do it himself. He had his friend talk to me. He said, “In 1935 it could be done! We had a possibility. I don’t see that now, do you?” I ignored it. This was way before the [SDS’] horrible split with the Weathermen. The other thing he did: I was, as were all Red Diaper babies, being recruited by the WEB DuBois Clubs7. And there was an organizer in Cleveland, and he tried to recruit me. I didn’t like the guy, so that was a strike against them. But I talked to my father and he said, “Stay away from them. What you’re doing is fine. Just stay away from them.” And It was good advice because Toby’s cousin got arrested for murder. An unjust arrest. It was totally trumped up. But he was sitting in jail being charged with murder because of his membership in the DuBois Club.
T: My cousin?!
D: That arrest only lasted a couple of days. So my father just advised me against it without going into great detail, and said it’s not useful if you're going to do the work you want to do.
That’s interesting.
D: I think it was because he just didn’t think there would be a way to do effective work when you in fact are a communist. It’s just very difficult. It still is.
Was this around the same time, Dad, that your uncle Hymen Schlesinger offered to put you through law school?
D: Probably. Were you recruited by the Du Bois clubs, Toby?
T: I am trying to think. Yes. I was recruited to go to a conference in Finland with the DuBois club.
D: FINLAND? In Scandinavia?
T: Yeah.
D: Holy shit! Were they going to pay for it? I’d have gone if they said they would pay for it.
T: No. I was identified as New Left.
That’s funny. OK.
T: Mariya, this leads to why my mother left the party. It’s not Hungary. It’s not the Hitler-Stalin pact, or a lot of reasons a lot of other people did. Or Israel. It was because she believed that they didn't -- the CP did not give enough support to the folks like us who were in the anti-war movement. She thought that they were too narrowly class-based. And that they were missing standing up for liberation in the world. Around anti-imperialism. That’s why she left the Party.
That’s what she told you?
T: Yeah. By then we were in the anti-war movement.
That’s fascinating because the part of that that she didn’t say is that the Party was helping to fight the Cold War. Like the actual Cold War.
T: What?
Just that the Party was part of what was really a war position of the Soviet Union.
T: A war position. With whom?
By the early 60s. What I’m saying is they were following the Soviet line so closely.
D: Yes they were.
T: They were good on Vietnam. Vietnam had a lot of help from the Soviet Union.
That’s true.
D: But it is true the CPUSA followed the Soviet line to the hilt. That’s what my father was going nuts about when he died. They thought Israel shouldn’t exist. And that the Arab countries were totally right.
Ruth (Toby’s mother) was very astute to say that.
T: I give her a lot of credit. Thank you.
Do you consider yourselves to be part of any specific movements on the Left? Do you have political labels for yourselves?
D: That’s a tough one. I guess I consider myself a progressive person. I vote Democratic now. But I don’t consider any loyalty to that political party. I wish there were another party that I could align myself with politically. I guess the movement of change that I am in is through Unitarianism. I’m in the UUSC. That’s where I put my energy these days especially with respect to immigration.
T: I don’t have a particular identity with a particular Left party. But I’m very proud of being a Red Diaper baby and of the courage and commitment to justice that we were raised with. As you know I have chosen a kind of double -- like I say, walking on two feet. My job involved a lot of working with undocumented workers who I still often help or communicate with. And the work around political prisoners that I got involved with when my friend Sylvia [Baraldini] from Madison was sentenced to 43 years for helping in the escape of Assata Shakur8. Forty-four, I actually found out when I was in Rome. She had 4 years added to her 40 year sentence for refusing to talk to a grand jury about the FALN9. She incurred in me the love of everybody in jail who was affiliated with the FALN. Which is sweet for me later because I got a lot of trust in the movement through her. But I continue that work as you know.
I think that the good part of what was transmitted to both David and me was the essential ethical approach to life. Becoming more and more anti-capitalist and pro- the future of the world in terms of choices around energy and around equitable, all-of-us-or-none kind of approaches. And against the level of imprisonment and thereby the renewal of slavery. And anti-racism. We were raised in a very antiracist community. Obviously everything has its limitations and critiques. I feel honored that I was raised in that milieu.
Where in your lives today do you see your parents reflected or present in some way? Can you share one anecdote or story that is recent that shows how this is true?
D: I will give an example. I am not going to be beating the drum for the Ukraine in this struggle. I don’t like war. I think it’s terrible what Putin unleashed. But it’s not my fight, not my loyalty, not my set of issues. I kind of admire this Zelensky guy. But I can see a gathering storm that could be as bad as anything we saw in the ‘50s. I am getting notices every day: Here is how you can donate. Here are the letters you can write. All this stuff. I am kind of worried about it.
How are your parents reflected in that position?
D: (Laughs) Simply put, my father left the Ukraine (I refuse to call it Ukraine) because it was life threatening for Jews to be there. It is that simple. Sadly many of the guards at Auschwitz were Ukrainians. There were many collaborators in WWII. I am sorry but I was raised with an intense understanding of what it meant to be Jewish in WWII. So, I buy that’s it’s way different and better. And I am sure it is.
But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that I will always carry with me a strong desire to see concrete steps toward peace and unity. That’s how I was raised. And we are far from it. Every time there ‘s one of these, “Let’s get on the bandwagon and fight physically with our military for this group or that group,” that makes it worse for you and your children as far as I am concerned.
The legacies I wanted to leave for all of you included a certain amount of socialized activity that isn’t happening. I have always felt - my mother always had this strong reaction when I would say “Why aren’t we contributing to this charity or that one?” She would say, “The government ought to be doing this stuff! We shouldn’t be having to pay money to a private organization!” So child care for example. You guys shouldn’t have to worry about child care.
T: I got in trouble in junior high because they were talking about the USSR, and I said that there was free child care in the Soviet Union. That’s how naive I was.
D: Same with healthcare. It’s just a standard idea for any country that wants to have a decent society. The socialization of goods and services stopped in this country way back when. That’s a legacy that will always be with me, that these are services we should provide for each other as part of the common good. Whether it’s healthcare, or street paving or whatever it is. Instead, society has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. They don’t want to be a communist society. I get that. They don’t want to be called socialist. I get that. But to not provide for people’s basic needs? The homeless population here is pretty severe.
T: And it's going to get worse.
D: So I feel a strong link to the legacy I got from them, my parents. That’s all I remember.
NOTE TO READERS: If you’ve come this far with me, you know there is more to come. I’ve got a lot of material, only a fraction of which is in these dispatches. But I’m doing this research and writing as a labor of love, on my own dime. I’m lucky and grateful to be able to do it! Shout out to Claudia, our newest Creative Aid Society paid subscriber! If you’d like to pay for a subscription to this newsletter as a means of supporting this work, I’ve switched on the paid version. Please go for it!
Students for a Democratic Society.
David worked for a year in 1966-67 for the American Friends Service Committee, providing resources and counseling to men who had been drafted about becoming conscientious objectors.
Rev. Lynn Thomas Strauss.
David was a co-founding member of the Revolutionary Auto Co-op, or RAC, a cooperative of auto mechanics in Chicago who fixed cars for the movement for peace and justice, including the Black Panther Party.
Before his retirement, David spent 12 years as Executive Director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs.
https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/the-blast-that-changed-everything/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.E.B._Du_Bois_Clubs_of_America
https://www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Documentary-recalls-time-of-radical-activism-868552.php
“The FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) is a clandestine organization committed to the political independence of Puerto Rico from the United States.” http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/489.html