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“My mother was devastated that I never became the radical she dreamed I’d be.”
–Peter Andreas, “My Mom, The Marxist,” New York Times, May 14, 2017
As a left-wing labor activist and father of two (now adult) daughters, I once grappled with the challenges of “progressive parenting.” It was hard enough, I soon discovered, to avoid screwing up the basics of old fashioned child rearing (ie keeping kids safe, healthy, reasonably happy and well-adjusted). Insuring conformity with parental views and values was an additional heavy lift—and an effort that could easily backfire.
I tried to learn from the experience of lefty parents who made their own politics a mandatory (rather than elective) subject, turning any related praxis into a grim family duty. Dragging kids to meetings, lectures, rallies, and picket lines, against their will—and telling them what to think—has been known to produce offspring who are resentful, apolitical, and even conservative in their views.
For radical parents, who are still alive when their children stray far from their preferred party line, such reaction formations can be embarrassing. Imagine the discomfort of David Horowitz’s parents, who were public school teachers and Communist Party members in Queens, N.Y. when their darling red diaper baby embraced the New, rather than Old, Left.
Of course, that 1960’s heresy paled in comparison to David’s middle-aged romance with Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement. Fortunately, his Marxist mom and dad were long gone before their son, now a self-made right-wing icon, reached his final stage of parental rejection by embracing Donald Trump, a billionaire from his native borough. (Ironically, Horowitz’s own son Ben, a wealthy venture capitalist, has, in turn, rejected David’s political views, including his rabid Islamophobia, as reported recently by The NY Times– https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/technology/one-family-many-revolutions-from-black-panthers-to-silicon-valley-to-trump.html)
So, with the Horowitz family saga (in its earlier stages) in mind, I treaded lightly with my own offspring, carefully waiting for “teachable moments.” One involved their own embattled Arlington, Mass. educators, when my daughters were in the 4th and 6th grade respectively. Wouldn’t it be fun, I suggested one winter evening in 1995, if we all made some signs, took them down to a local school board meeting, and walked around in a circle to support their favorite teachers’ request for a pay increase?
The informational picketing that night, organized by Jobs with Justice, took place in bone-chilling New England weather. Yet the fringe benefits of labor solidarity soon became apparent to our two grade school pupils.
A picture of our smiling daughters, bundled up in ski apparel with sandwich board signs demanding a fair contract, appeared in our local newspaper several days later. After that media exposure, as Alexandra and Jessica walked the halls of their elementary school, they were showered with praise and congratulations from the teaching staff,. Even the principal (a union member himself) complimented them on their civic engagement.
Apparently, this non-parental positive reinforcement didn’t hurt. Today, one daughter helps California nursing home workers picket for union contracts; the other later became a JWJ volunteer and now campaigns for healthcare reform in Vermont.
Two Red Diaper Babies
For anyone still navigating the shoals of progressive parenting, there is much to be learned from two recently published “red diaper baby” memoirs. Born more than a generation apart, Richard March, author of A Great Vision: A Militant Family’s Journey through the 20th Century (Hardball Press) and Peter Andreas, author of Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution, (Simon and Schuster) were both children of the left, but grew up in very different family settings.
March was raised, in fairly stable and traditional fashion, by two well-known labor and community organizers in Chicago, who belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s and 40s. Now seventy-one and a retired folklorist, March joined the New Left in college, becoming a third generation political activist in his family, with whom he remained close. Andreas’ experience with Sixties-inspired parenting was far more colorful, chaotic, and counter-cultural. When he was seven, his mother, a former “1950s housewife” who had become radicalized,” spirited him off to South America during a custody battle with his father, a straight-laced, professional staff member of the United Auto Workers in Detroit.
In Chile, Carol Andreas left Peter in the care of peasant family while she went briefly missing during the military coup that over-threw President Salvador Allende’s socialist government in 1973. Although re-united with his mother, Peter remained terrified that she, like Allende would end up dead. So they fled next to Argentina and then Peru, which Carol believed “had the greatest promise for revolutionary ferment.” In the Peruvian highlands, they had to overcome the myriad hardships of voluntary poverty and the suspicion, harbored by some local activists, that Carol was a “hippie CIA agent.” To improve her street cred, she married the leader of a street theatre company, which performed anti-imperialist skits, one step ahead of the local police. Peter got cast “as the bad guy—the Rockefeller, the boss, the landlord, or some other hated gringo authority figure.”
Now a professor of international studies at Brown, Andreas expresses considerable ambivalence about this unconventional upbringing. Between the ages of five and eleven, it landed him in more than a dozen different homes and schools, in three states and five countries, often longing for greater comfort, protection, and security.
The author did not emerge unscathed, personally or politically, from being raised by a “stubborn whirlwind of a mother.” But he does credit Carol Andreas with sparing him “a more narrow insular life, less aware of other peoples and cultures and less concerned about the world’s great injustices and inequalities.”
The McCarthy Era Revisited
A Great Vision provides a timely reminder of what the McCarthy era was like for progressives who had been building major unions and winning fights against injustice just ten or fifteen years before. In the 1950s, political witch-hunts and purges forced Communist Party leaders underground, sent other radicals into exile, cost many their jobs, and landed some in jail. Herb March’s leadership in the Packinghouse Workers Union and open membership in the CP led to “FBI surveillance that became intense,” according to Richard.
Federal agents even made “an attempt to recruit his brother “to spy on his own parents,” he reports. In 1952, his father Herb was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Meanwhile, the Smith Act cases that ensnared top party leaders “were particularly terrifying” to Jane March who worried that her husband could be indicted at any moment.
“Mom’s fears had a strong effect on me as a child,” Richard March recalls. A child psychologist confirmed that his “regression to more infantile behavior” was the result of “sensing and reacting to her fears.” Due to the anti-communist oath taking requirement of the Taft-Hartley Act, Herb March was forced to step down as an elected leader of the Packinghouse Workers (although he remained involved a local union staffer for a several more years). He also suffered the indignity of being expelled from the CP for “white chauvinism” after a secret trial to which he was not invited. It was a fate certainly not deserved by a veteran ant-racist and civil rights crusader, who had helped organize a successful multi-racial union.
In 1955, the March family relocated to southern California, where Herb went “from the pinnacle of success to being exiled from his calling at the age of only 42, at loose ends and forced to start a new life in a new city.” As his son recalls a much changed-domestic scene, after the move:
“Pa and I sat together in the living room watching cartoons on TV. Even as a third grader, I knew it was strange. In Chicago, it had been my duty, as Pa was leaving in the morning, to shout down the stairway from the third floor, ‘Will you be home for supper?’ The usual answer was “No!” He was a busy man, his life filled with meetings and people to see. Now, he was watching Bugs Bunny. I enjoyed his company, but my father seemed moody. Today, I would say depressed.”
Fortunately, for his wife and family, Herb March bounced back. He first re-tooled as a sheet metal worker and then completed law school at night, finishing up his labor career as a lawyer for AFSCME and the UFCW (where the UPWA eventually ended up as well, after a series of mergers with more conservative AFL unions).
A Unitarian Haven
Richard found refuge among like-minded teenagers in a multi-racial youth group, run by a Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. This exposed him to an “eclectic mix of progressive viewpoints” that “contrasted sharply with the narrow party line of the 1930s Communist Party,” and its Young Communist League that his father had joined at the same age. From high school activism on behalf of civil rights and banning the bomb, Richard graduated to campus radicalism within the UC system. There, his own “red diaper experience” led him to question fellow New Leftists who believed that political repression, by California Governor Ronald Reagan or President Richard Nixon, would increase popular dissatisfaction, heighten “the contradictions,” and thus hasten “the revolution.”
“In the 1950s, our families felt the visceral effects of repression. The blacklists ruined careers and lives; the many jailed comrades led to a decimation of the leftist and trade union movements in America.”
Believing in the imminence of revolutionary change was “our parents’ mistaken idea in the 1930s,” March concluded. In the 1960s, it was an even more “far-fetched notion” despite encouraging pockets of militancy on campus and among the urban black poor, native-Americans, farm laborers, and unionized factory workers.
During the same period, Carol Andreas, Peter’s mother, decided to cast her lot with Latin American workers and peasants because Berkeley commune dwelling was becoming too tame and radical change in the U.S. was not occurring fast enough.
Raised as a pacifist Mennonite, she went from leading a local campaign against war toys to letting her 12-year old son to keep a loaded pistol in his Denver bedroom, , less than a decade later, because, as she told him, “learning to handle a gun will prove handy for when the revolution comes.” As the author notes, he was forced, as a teenager, “to defy his mother’s ideological insistence that he attend a bad high school because it was more “working class.’” Plus, he had to “bear the weight of her suicidal thoughts,” on top of “nightly political screaming matches and marital passions” with all the difficult men in her life, in the U.S. and abroad.
A Painful Betrayal?
Despite such turmoil in her personal life, accompanied by inappropriate boundary-crossing and bad judgment as a parent, Carol Andreas was finally able to achieve greater stability in her professional career. She completed a sympathetic study of Sendero Luminoso, a Marxist-Leninist insurgent group known for its brutality, dogmatism, and personality cult leadership. Entitled When Women Rebel: The Rise of Popular Feminism in Peru, the book was “controversial” but landed her tenure track job at the University of Northern Colorado.
Her final academic work exposed unsafe conditions in a Greeley, Colorado slaughterhouse, which she studied as a local sociologist. Yet, by then, it became clear—to Peter at least—that he and Carol “should avoid talking about politics together.” After her death, he discovered a diary in which she confided that “Peter’s betrayal of the class struggle” was making her sleepless at night.
Carol’s diary, which Peter heavily mined for his memoir of their life together, contains many similar expressions of parental disapproval or dismay. The fact that she had succeeded in raising a son who was strong and independent, but sensitive, socially concerned, and accomplished in his own life, gave Carol little personal joy. Instead, she mourned Peter’s failure to conform to her own rigid political expectations.
Throughout her career as a mother, Professor Andreas would have been a good (if unreceptive) candidate for advice dispensed by clinical psychologist Ava Siegler. In her practice, Dr. Siegler has counseled adults from New York activist families who felt their own needs, as children, were neglected when their “parents became so involved in a cause.” In a new book entitled How Do I Explain This To My Kids—a New Press guide to parenting in the Trump era–Siegler recommends keeping “the balance of your child’s life (and your own) in mind as you encourage social activism…” She warns that “too much commitment can backfire, and cause teenagers to exhaust their dedication to justice…There is life beyond politics; be sure to make room for it.”
When Peter Andreas finally escaped his “lifelong allegiance” to his peripatetic Marxist mom, he attended Swarthmore College, where all kinds of anti-Reagan protests were underway in the early 1980s. “Despite my upbringing, I attended only one demonstration,” he confesses.
“I was burned out on activism…I had overdosed on a childhood full of marches and heated late-night arguments about Lenin and the ‘correct party line;” college was my detox…At Swarthmore, it was more about asking probing questions than having all the answers. And the more questions I asked, the more I began to question my mother’s politics.”
As Rebel Mother confirms, when parents turn childhood into a left-wing boot camp, their kids are not likely to remain on the shining path of their own politics for long. In fact, when the personal gets too political (as it did for Peter Andreas), parent-child relationships can be poisoned with resentment, anger, and recriminations. Far better to make changing the world a voluntary childhood pursuit so that the experience of cross-generational solidarity (and any resulting shared ideals) become the basis for enduring connections, rather than painful estrangement.
(Steve Early has been a labor activist since 1972. He is a former national staff member of the Communications Workers of America and the author, most recently, of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and The Remaking of an American City (Beacon Press). A version of this article was posted originally by Jacobin He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com)