History Lessons: A Memoir of Growing Up
in an American Communist Family
by Dan Lynn Watt
349 pages; Xlibris, 2017
ISBN 978-1-5434-29879
Reviewed by David P. Miller
In History Lessons, Dan Lynn
Watt has given us an engaging memoir, weaving his family narrative
with some of the great historic events of the United States during
the 20th century. Although he claims early on that he is “not a
historian” (p. xii), this work illuminates history at the grand
level, rooted in intimate individual stories. Informed by years of
interviews and archival research, backed by fifteen pages of
references, this is scholarship fluently melded with autobiography.
The book’s subtitle immediately lets
us know what the stakes are. Watt’s father, George Watt (born
Israel Kwatt), fought with the International Brigades against Franco
during the Spanish Civil War. In World War II, he again fought
fascism in the US Army Air Corps. In both cases, he escaped after
being caught behind enemy lines. During the entire time, and for long
afterwards, George and Margie (Dan’s stepmother) were dedicated
members of the Communist Party. For them, there was no inherent
contradiction among these commitments, even if the United States
government was at first hesitant to allow Spanish Civil War veterans
to serve, labeling them “premature anti-fascists” (p. 8). With
the rise of McCarthyism, threatened with prison, George went
underground for three years, almost entirely out of contact with his
family. Dan and his brother Stevie had no idea what had happened to
him. It was 1990 before father and son had an open conversation about
the underground years.
This memoir explores the deep family
background and rippling ramifications of these and other connections
with historic milestones. Dan Watt also writes about his formative
contacts with figures such as Paul Robeson, whose double 78-rpm
album, Ballad for Americans was inspiring to the young boy and
was “one of [his] parents’ proudest possessions” (p. 28). Years
later, in May 1956, he chanced to witness Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., preaching at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York
City. This riveting experience stimulated what became Watt’s deep
commitment to the Civil Rights Movement. Always in the background
are this nation’s sustained struggles over “Americanness” and
the competing – no, opposing – belief systems which stake claim
to patriotism and national identity.
Interwoven with these stories are those
of private difficulties. Beside the decades of quiet about George’s
three-year disappearance is the story of Dan’s birth mother, who
died when he was an infant. His father and stepmother never discussed
this with him as a child; he learned the story thanks to a violent
outburst from his boorish birth grandmother. That event was so
alienating it rolled back into family silence. He tells about his
famous uncle, A.M. Rosenthal of The New York Times, who was
both affectionate and distant. “Uncle Abe” rarely spent personal
time with his nephew, at least in part because of the Watts’
Communist affiliations. Dan Watt’s own complex relationship with
his family’s politics led eventually to his sense of having three
lives, a phrase borrowed from the mid-1950s TV show, I Led Three
Lives. He writes that when his father was underground, “my
social life began to fragment into three distinct groups: my
political friends from camp [left-wing oriented summer camps] and
family connections who were becoming more and more important in my
life; my school friends, bright kids who took advanced classes; and
my neighborhood friends with whom I played and talked sports, watched
TV, swapped comics and baseball cards” (p. 154). In large part, it
seems that he took on this memoir project as a means of more fully
understanding, and coming to terms with, a complex, conflicted
personal history, now lucidly shared with readers.
We are treated to tales of public
events, less frequently told. Among these is the blatant racism
deliberately embedded in the founding of Levittown, Pennsylvania, the
second town by that name after the better-known Long Island suburb.
Although the town was eventually desegregated, that happened only
after the expected misery of white terror and violence. One telling
detail is the worthless expression of regret by the developer William
Levitt, who claimed that while he personally abhorred race prejudice,
“I know … [from experience] … that if we sell one house to a
Negro family, then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white
customers will not buy into this community” (p. 231). Dan Watt also
devotes two later chapters to his direct involvement in the 1964
Freedom Summer in Fayette County, Tennessee, “a footnote in most
histories of the period” (p. 275) as compared with the Mississippi
Freedom Summer that same year. His work in Tennessee deepened his
commitment to social justice and challenged him to confront his
personal fears.
Throughout, History Lessons is a
vivid, compassionate portrait of a family’s deeply-lived American
convictions, which threatened their security and even, potentially,
their lives. It is also, more broadly, a story of American Communism
in the mid-20th century. The belief in the Soviet Union by
American Communists during this period, and their credulity regarding
Stalin, is well-known. George Watt came, much later, to doubt the
value of his years underground, a commitment which was caused such
hardship to himself and his family. All this must be part of the
memoir, but as is characteristic of Dan Watt’s approach, his
emphasis is on the costs to real, close, and loved human beings. The
pain of gradually realizing misguided trust, of being forced to
change beliefs, is here, without mockery or easy retrospective
cynicism. And importantly, the political/social story doesn’t end
there. Watt’s idealism, at first with no clear outlet given his
uneasy pull away from Communism, develops its arc as he finds his
place in the Civil Rights Movement (where he met his future wife,
Molly Lynn Watt) and as a progressive educator in the 1960s and
after.
The book is
well-produced, nicely bound and attractive to read and hold, further
enlivened by a generous selection of personal and archival
photographs.
History Lessons is a fine, absorbing achievement.
