A Red Family: Junius, Gladys, and Barbara Scales (review)

Mickey Friedman weaves together three oral narratives into a story of one family’s mid-twentieth-century journey through and beyond the U.S. Communist Party in this slim volume. The book is based on extensive interviews conducted in the early 1970s with Junius Scales, an important North Carolina–born Southern Communist Party (CPUSA) organizer and regional Party leader, his Brooklyn-born Jewish wife Gladys, and their daughter, Barbara. Scales, the son of a wealthy and established North Carolina lawyer, became one of the most prominent public Communists in the South (he “came out” in 1947). He started his career in the Party at the age of nineteen, in 1939, ironically just when the decade of the Party’s greatest national impact was coming to an end. Nonetheless, Scales’ years in the Party were distinguished by his active involvement in important regional economic and social justice struggles: he organized students at various black and white universities in the South; assisted CPUSA organizers active among textile, furniture, and tobacco workers throughout the upper South; and battled racial discrimination through strategic alliances with liberal organizations (like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare).

In the 1950s, toward the end of his years of Party activism, Scales waged an unsuccessful battle against a government bent on incarcerating him. Afraid for his freedom and his life, Scales, like many other Party leaders and activists in that decade, became “unavailable”; he went underground, leaving his wife and young daughter. In 1954, however, betrayed by an informant, he was arrested and brought to trial for violation of the membership clause of the Smith Act (for belonging to “an organization advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government”). Following years of legal machinations and a final unsuccessful appeal to the Supreme Court, Scales was sent to prison in 1961 to serve out a six-year sentence. Ironically, he had left the Party four years earlier, in 1957, having grown disenchanted and frustrated with the increasing sectarianism, infighting, and isolation of the CPUSA and by the Party’s refusal to reform after Khrushchev’s twentieth Soviet Party Congress condemnation of the excesses of Stalinism. Through the intervention of several prominent figures, including Robert Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy commuted his sentence in 1962 after Scales had served fifteen months in prison.

Completed originally in 1973, A Red Family was blocked from publication by Gladys Scales, who hesitated to face another round of national publicity at a time when the Cold War still raged. Friedman’s aim to “bridge the political divide and move past a large backlog of ignorance and bias about the Left,” his hope to “make Communists real” and to tell a story “from the inside out,” was thus frustrated (xi). He worked on other projects until 2005, when Barbara Scales encouraged him to publish the book. By then, her parents were both gone (Gladys died in 1981 and Junius in 2002); “the time had come to publish the book,” she felt (xiii). Unfortunately, because it was belatedly published after Scales’ 1987 autobiography, Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, re-published in 2005), there is little in A Red Family that adds much to our knowledge of Scales’ organizational work in the South. But that was not Friedman’s intention anyway. Friedman’s book seeks less to document Scales’ activism and the work of the Communist Party in the South than the family dynamics influenced by them. Friedman, a red-diaper baby himself, brings to this work a great deal of knowledge about the social and psychological costs of living in a household with a father heavily invested in radical politics: the constant surveillance, the isolation from mainstream society, and the anxieties over job security in a country that defined one or more of your parents as an enemy of the state.

Consistent with Friedman’s goal of producing an...