There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

36 Mommy Was a Commie

Mommy Was a Commie 159 The Parkers, father and son, lost their appeals, and in June 1939 started their terms in the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Parker’s Burlington County friends tried to get him pardoned, and eight thousand county residents signed a petition for his release. But Parker became ill with what was diagnosed as a brain tumor. He died in the prison hospital on February 4, 1940, at age sixty-eight, with his sorrowing son at his bedside. When Ellis Parker was sentenced, the judge said to him, “I have the impression that your life as a law-enforcement officer and your position in the community have given you the feeling that you are above the law, and that is the cause of your making a mockery of the processes of justice in New Jersey.” After Parker died, an obituary writer at a New York newspaper said much the same thing in a simpler way: the press had turned Ellis Parker into a legend, and“in time Ellis Parker came to believe the Ellis Parker legend.” 36 Mommy Was a Commie A lot of celebrities got divorced in the 1930s, like Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Jean Harlow. But not all the famous marital breakups occurred in Hollywood. One of the best-known splits of the 1930s took place in an obscure home at 38 Lakewood Terrace in Bloomfield, New Jersey. The household consisted of a wool salesman named Warren Eaton, his wife, Mabel, and their two children, ten-year-old Mabel and five-year-old Warren Jr. (Why doesn’t a female child named after her mother get to use a “junior” after her name?) The case went to trial in January 1936 before Robert Grosman, a master in chancery court, the equivalent of a divorce court judge. In her testimony , wife Mabel claimed that during the ten years of their marriage she had been abused by husband Warren. On one occasion, she said, he had 160 There’s More to New Jersey . . . pushed her down in the street. Warren shot back that it was Mabel who had committed the violence. He said that on one occasion she kicked him in the groin, causing it to rupture, then threw talcum powder in his face to blind him, and then jumped on him, ripped off his shirt, and bit him on the arm. Another time, claimed Warren, she kicked him while he was setting up toys under the family tree on Christmas Eve. Charming couple, those Eatons. But there was more. Warren claimed that Mabel had tried to inflict bizarre beliefs on the family. He said that she was a Communist and an atheist, that she despised religion, and that she refused to allow the children to be raised in his Methodist faith. Warren said that Mabel had brought radical literature into the house, including the “Communist Manifesto” and a leftist songbook, and that she was out four nights a week attending radical lectures. According to Warren, Mabel told him that under Communism, the sexes were equal and children were raised outside of the home: “She said that housework was only foolishness, that a woman should be the same as a man.” Questioned sharply by her husband ’s attorney and by Judge Grosman, Mrs. Eaton admitted at the trial that she studied the works of Karl Marx and did not believe in God. Judge Grosman decided the case in favor of husband Warren and granted him custody of the children. In his decision, the judge said that Mabel’s acts of violence against her husband were attested to by witnesses, while Warren’s acts against his wife were mostly unproved. Grosman probably should have let it go at that, but he decided to go one step further. He said he was also ruling against Mabel because of her political beliefs. “It is common knowledge,” intoned the judge in his decision, “that the principles of Communism are the antithesis of those generally held by most Americans.” Communists, said Grosman, “scoff at the belief in the Supreme Being, in the brotherhood of man, in the virtue of women, the marriage institution, as well as the personal relation between parent and child.” Grosman conceded that Mrs. Eaton had the right to her own opinion, but “she is not privileged to instill into the minds of these young children, against the will of their father, these doctrines which she, herself , has embraced...