One joyous day in May 1957, my father’s tool and die shop received two unwelcome visitors: FBI agents who were acting on a tip from a longtime informant that my father had been a Communist Party member. The agents were using the information to try to frame my father as an informant, too.
I learned about this encounter earlier this year thanks to his son, Aaron, a history graduate student who grew up hearing family stories about his father’s lifelong radical political activism, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI file on David Friedman, a Highland Park, New Jersey, native born March 22, 1921.
The files have served as a reminder of what I inherited from my father — not just his politics but the beliefs on which they were founded — and they have provided me and my siblings, Carol and Ken, with details about what he did under difficult circumstances that are more impressive than we ever expected.
The existence of the file was not a surprise. We knew and were proud that my father had grown up in an anarchist colony in the Stelton section of Piscataway, New Jersey. We had basked in rebellious glory when Paul Avrich, the noted historian of American anarchism, wrote about Stelton and our relatives who lived there in his book. It was only natural that my father would become a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigation.
We weren’t surprised when my father admitted to FBI agents that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1946 to about 1950. Until his death in 2010, he believed the Rosenbergs had been falsely accused of being Russian spies, and while regaling us kids with tales of Soviet heroism at Stalingrad, he sometimes chided me as “the last Stalinist.”
According to the files, my father first came under FBI surveillance after a tip from the local police chief, and then five other informants provided information to federal agents. Two of the names were withheld, but the other three are in the report, and I have independently investigated all of them. One of them, Stelton’s postmaster, was an amateur boxer and military veteran who provided the FBI with a string of names of Stelton residents, including my father, who received mail from Communist front groups and non-Communist pacifist groups.
The other two informants were husband and wife couples who likely knew my father personally. One was a graduate student in mathematics at Rutgers University, the other a child psychologist. Both had run for office in the late 1940s as candidates for the left-leaning Progressive Party; one of my father’s heroes, Henry Wallace, had been the party’s presidential candidate in 1948.
Perhaps the couple had tipped off my father to avoid arrest or prosecution, or perhaps they had been FBI agents all along, but in any case, the informant told the FBI that my father was a member of one of the remaining chapters of the John Reed Club of the Communist Party.
When two FBI agents confronted my father, he was in a dangerous position, resisting intimidation. The darkest days of the Red Scare may have been over by the spring of 1957, but the political climate was far from safe. Playwright Arthur Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress in late May for refusing to give his name before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was holding hearings on alleged Communist subversive activity in the Newark area in 1957. And it was the Newark field office of the FBI that was pressuring my father.
On the personal side, my father had two children, Carol and me, who were not even 19 months old at the time, and he had taken out a large mortgage on both our home and the factory of his company, New Brunswick Tool and Die.
What began as a machine shop had branched out into microbiology equipment, most of it designed by my father, a completely self-taught inventor whose formal education ended in high school. From sheet metal to trucking services to bank loans to contracts with scientists at Rutgers University, my father’s livelihood depended on people who would cut ties with him as an exposed Communist.
During questioning by FBI agents (first on May 8, then on July 1), my father stuck to his guns. He freely admitted that he had been a member of the Communist Party until 1950. He explained that, far from being “the last Stalinist,” as I mocked him, he had left the party. The FBI report stated that “my father became disillusioned with the Communist Party from an ideological point of view” and concluded that “socialist reform could not be achieved by blindly supporting the Communist Party’s cause.”
The account of the incident matched exactly with a description given to the FBI by an unnamed informant who reported that the father was “inactive, had ideological issues, didn’t pay dues.”
It is very important to my siblings and me that my father saw the true nature of Communism as early as 1950, when Stalin was still revered by many on the left as a harbinger of world peace. Six years passed before two events – the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” which exposed Stalin’s tyranny – would quell the romanticism of Communism for many of its other American followers.
But my father never became a Whittaker Chambers, and he devoted the rest of his life to renunciation. He never became a neo-con, like one of Stelton’s friends. He voted Democrat until the day he died, and he would call someone “very, very naive.” [expletive] bourgeois.”
After a May 8 interview with the father, agents wrote, “Subject volunteered that he still believed in socialist reforms that he believed would benefit the majority of the people in the United States.” On July 1, agents wrote in a report, the father “advised that an individual’s political beliefs were his own business.” In the file’s final paragraph, agents were forced to admit, “Subject is not considered a potential security informant.”
Reading the files felt like receiving a fatherly message from the afterlife. It brought to life my father, to whom I dedicated one of my early books as my “guardian of conscience.” He might harshly criticize his children if he felt we were falling into his deadly sins of “materialism” and “sectarianism.” For me, that might mean buying a second suit for work or becoming a more observant Judaic religious sect.
But in the face of real threats, my father struck an admirable balance: He resisted dogmatism and tribalism, even when facts and events contradicted them. He stuck to his beliefs for a more just society.
I am grateful that my father never lived to see Donald Trump, MAGA, and all the terrible overtones of McCarthyism and fascism, but from the FBI, of all places, I received the most valuable gift of all this Father’s Day: a reinforcement of the values ​​he would have wanted his children and grandchildren to share in these frightening times, especially at this moment when democracy itself is at risk.
