My Father’s Day Gift From the F.B.I.

On an otherwise pleasant day in May 1957, my father received two unwelcome visitors at his tool-and-die factory. They were F.B.I. agents acting on years of informants’ tips that Dad had been a Communist Party member. The agents intended to use that information as leverage to turn my father, too, into a snitch.

I learned of this encounter earlier this year thanks to my son, Aaron, a graduate student in history. Having grown up hearing family stories about my father’s lifelong radical politics, Aaron put through a Freedom of Information Act request for the F.B.I. file on David Freedman of Highland Park, N.J., birth date March 22, 1921.

That file is a reminder of what I inherited from him — not just his politics, but the convictions that they were built on. And it has revealed to me and my siblings, Carol and Ken, details of my father’s actions under severe duress that were more impressive than anything we had anticipated.

The existence of the file came as no surprise. We knew, and were proud of, our father’s upbringing in the anarchist colony in the Stelton section of Piscataway, N.J. We basked in reflected subversive glory when an eminent historian of American anarchism, Paul Avrich, wrote about Stelton and our relatives there in several of his books. Dad would have been a logical enough target of scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I.

Nor were we surprised that Dad confirmed to the F.B.I. agents that he had indeed been a Communist Party member from about 1946 to 1950. At times, I’d chided him for being “the last Stalinist,” regaling us kids with tales of Soviet heroism at Stalingrad, convinced almost until his death in 2010 that the Rosenbergs had been falsely accused of being Russian spies.

Dad had first landed on the F.B.I.’s radar in a tip from a local police chief, according to the file, and subsequently five different informants provided federal agents with intelligence. The names of two were redacted, but the three others showed up in the report, and I did my own research on them all. One, the postmaster in Stelton, an amateur boxer and war veteran, fed the bureau a stream of names of Stelton residents, including Dad, who were receiving mailings from Communist front groups as well as non-Communist pacifist organizations.