What kind of threat was I? Was Jack? What the hell could we do?”
—Tillie Olsen to Panthea Reid, 28 October 1997
Traveling about like a tumbleweed, Tillie had almost lost touch with the Dinkin family, but she wrote a poem when she heard of Harry Dinkin’s death, which she read at the funeral on New Year’s Day 1946 in Petaluma. She drove home to find her girls ecstatic because they’d heard from Jack; he had a weekend off. Tillie piled her sexy new nighties in a suitcase, drove the older girls to the Olshanskys, and left Kathie with a housekeeper. On Friday, 3 January, she picked up Jack. Hardly able to keep their hands off each other, they rushed to a nearby coastal resort at Morro Bay, where they spent three days sharing walks by the Pacific, hopes for world peace, and their long-suppressed sexual life. Tillie returned Jack to camp and then drove down the coast, finding her in-laws and two girls peeved with her for keeping Jack to herself.
After their happy weekend with all its “physical beauty,” Tillie wrote Jack to say that she harbored longings that still “struggle in me to be said.” The “trip down, L.A. again” had reminded her of “old old unsatisfied hungers” and ambitions. Jack soon got his final release, and Tillie drove to fetch him home. Julie remembered, “Karla and I made big letters spelling WELCOME HOME DADDY and glued them up the stairwell of the house at 903 Castro where we lived. I remember Kathie being so confused about who this Daddy person was.”1 By 11 January, “Hot Cargo” reported that “it’s all Mellowness at the OLSON [sic] household since JACK is home again—hope he’ll be in circulation soon.”
Friends Ruth Sutherland, who had written the zany letter about Tillie’s Labor Day antics, and Mary Lindsay took a vicarious interest in Tillie’s and Jack’s sex life. Lindsay loaned them her apartment in Sausalito with many innuendos about their disinterest in getting out of bed. She wished them “Happy oneymoon, chillen.” Sutherland wrote, “rumour also has it the Olson [sic] Rendezvous of Joy and Rhythm is running smoothly and without loud shrieks.”2
The country too was back together and running smoothly. Salaries had doubled. The forty-eight-hour week was standard. The “Big Three” were making cars again. Other industries were soon manufacturing rubber tires, building materials, refrigerators, electric stoves, and fur coats. Butchers again sold sirloin steaks and whole hams. Unemployment was almost nonexistent. Wartime scarcities had enforced frugality and saving; even Tillie Olsen bought war bonds. America was ready for a spending spree and a party.
The Olsens’ apartment hosted what seemed a continuous party. Friends and neighbors dropped in to welcome Jack home with food, drinks, and boisterous songs. Led by the Olsen girls, children improvised one performance after another. In all this hubbub and joy, Tillie tried to recall the things that “struggle in me to be said.” She had been a CIO director, a war relief celebrity, a reporter for the Labor Herald, and a teacher at the California Labor School. In the heady postwar atmosphere, she expected to continue such activities, enhance her reputation, and increase her fame.
Women had, as the Daily People’s World proclaimed “Met the Test of War with Brilliant Achievement.” Tillie was chosen to teach a class on welfare benefits at the California Labor School. The DPW reported that “certain bourgeois women’s leaders” proposed that childcare centers “not be made permanent.”3 Tillie figured that only women without children or jobs or with hired help would think child care unnecessary. “Back-to-the-kitchen” pressures now were threatening wartime feminist accomplishments. Her father asked if she were “still on your job. Or home to housekeeping?” He and Ida sounded free of housekeeping pressures, after visiting Jann in D.C. and Lillian in upstate New York and staying in the Hotel Times Square. Sam told Tillie that a British nurse named Clare Schmoclair, decorated for service during the London blitz, was working with Harry in the displaced persons camp.
When former Herald writers returned from the front, they expected to get their old jobs back. Like Rosie the Riveter and other women war-workers, Tillie lost her job, possibly her first experience of gender discrimination. In her YCL work, her sex, as well as her brains, had earned her special treatment. Random House was extraordinarily generous and patient partly because she was a woman writer. She was assigned to recruit in Hollywood in part because she was so vivacious and sexy. She left Hollywood to take up lowly jobs, but she did so at her own choosing. Her femininity helped make her a prominent CIO War Relief hero. Now femininity cost her her job. Tillie did not, however, intend to be among the unemployed who simply went home to housekeeping.
She had applauded concessions made to Stalin at Teheran. Eastern European countries, however, taken from Germany, were becoming Soviet satellites, as was Korea, taken from Japan. That March at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill gave an alarming speech about dangerous Soviet influence upon Iran, Turkey, and “all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” He proclaimed: “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”4 His implication was that a totalitarian USSR sought next to take over the western world. Stalin was said to have spied inside the United States, even during the war. Many Americans believed that communism now threatened American peace and security. Tillie and Jack saw fascism as America’s real enemy. They were impressed that, now married, Harry and Clare Lerner were escorting displaced persons to the Nuremberg trials to testify against the Nazis.5 They were personally shaken by reports of previously unimaginable atrocities but gratified that obeying orders was no longer an excuse for crimes against humanity. At home, HUAC was acting like Germany’s Secret Service in Hitler’s early days. Eleanor Roosevelt protested its “Gestapo tactics.” Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo accused HUAC of “witch hunting.” The Daily People’s World called it the “Un-American Committee.”6 Cancerous paranoia deemed even Marxist idealists like Tillie and Jack as “spies” or “traitors.”
Not only had Tillie lost her Herald post, she soon lost her teaching post at the California Labor School because, under the GI Bill, it needed credentialed teachers or “top-notch” experts.7 Jack felt secure in his old job as “local director of publicity and education,” as the Dispatcher announced on 22 March. Editing the ILWU Bulletin, he worked with American Printing and Lithographics on layouts. He insisted that the 18,000-member Local 6 provide equal employment opportunities for African Americans and open leadership roles to women and minorities. He taught underprivileged workers to read by studying newspapers. He successfully campaigned for Kaiser Permanente to provide health care for union members. Busy doing such good work, Jack did not notice that Teamsters, the AFL, and the FBI were infiltrating the ILWU and the CIO.
After serving in Europe, Al Richmond returned, something of a war hero, to again edit the Daily People’s World. He increased circulation with commentary from such notables as Woody Guthrie, Meridel Le Sueur, and Ring Lardner, Jr. Tillie was eager to convert her anger over being fired into journalism on women’s issues. On 18 April, Richmond added to his list of celebrity columnists with a “series of weekly columns by an old friend of many of our readers—Tillie Olsen.”8 Her first “TILLIE OLSEN SAYS,” subtitled “No Time for Household Hints,” argued that the central issue facing postwar America was making women’s traditional positions as homemakers “consistent with the fullest contribution of women as human beings.”
After the ILWU’s annual ball at the end of April, the Dispatcher’s “Hot Cargo” columnist wrote: “JACK OLSEN escaped the soup and fish by having to run ‘round taking pictures, and naturally TILLIE escaped the flowing gown by having to run around after JACK,” an allusion to Tillie’s revealingly low-cut gown. Her second “weekly” column on feminist issues appeared two weeks after her first. Writing about the “Struggle to maintain women’s wartime gains,” she overstated women’s “real gains” as true job parity, but then said that that progress was being reversed.
Tillie followed that argument a week later with a column on “Wartime Gains of Women in Industry.” She wondered what had happened to “those women who yesterday drove the busses and the cabs and the streetcars; who ran the lift jitneys and were the repairmen and the machinists and the shipbuilders; who’ve been closed down on, or laid off, or canned, or replaced?” She answered that they were waiting in unemployment lines for twenty dollars a week, checks that would run out after six months. She announced provocatively: “There’s a new job for jobless women.” Their “real housecleaning job” was to sweep away discriminatory laws and practices. She invited responses.9
While Tillie was frantically gathering data, working to meet deadlines, trying to lose neither the renewed romance of her marriage nor the glamour of her public persona, Richmond printed a query from a mother torn between being politically active and caring for her baby. Tillie advised the woman to “relax and have fun with your baby.” She saw a “political value to ‘surrendering’ to motherhood” because being “WITH” other mothers enabled a woman to influence them. On 3 June, DPW printed: “AN ANSWER TO TILLIE OLSEN.” This working mother felt Tillie did “not answer the problems of working class women. The bourgeois clichés which she uses have no place in The People’s World.” She said that “Mrs. Olsen” used a capitalist trick, covering her politics with pabulum about “loving your baby.” Women needed to understand their subjugation, not to be told “about staying home and loving it.”
Being called bourgeois felt like being stabbed, but Tillie acted unwounded in her next column, headed “TILLIE OLSEN SAYS: Back to the slave shops?” Women had receded back to “laundry, food processing, textile, and needle trades slave shops where the pay is 65 to 80 cents an hour and the work can’t be matched anywhere for speed up and physical exhaustion.” She blamed such “piecework” jobs for women on the AFL and on California’s “Warren-administered Department of Industrial Welfare.”
Meanwhile, Jack’s brothers Max and Leon were getting job retraining under the GI Bill. Leon became a printer’s apprentice, Max an accountant. Soon he invested in a small trucking company called Global Van. Thinking of vast accumulations of war goods and supplies around the world which needed shipping home, Max patented a new concept—container shipping. Jack had no desire follow his younger brothers and launch out into new fields. The traumas of killing and almost being killed, of discovering death camp atrocities, and of guarding unrepentant Nazi prisoners had taken a toll. He was grateful to be safely home with his wife and daughters and back at his ILWU post.
In her first “TILLIE OLSEN SAYS” column, Tillie had written about making domestic duties consistent with “the fullest contribution of women as human beings.” She had gone on to make a landmark argument for equal pay for equal work. She had undermined her position, though, by first overstating workplace gains and then by telling mothers to stay home. Throughout June, controversy about her raged in DPW’s pages. She never returned to the challenge of women’s full humanity. “TILLIE OLSEN SAYS” did not reappear.10 Her “hop-around-mind” had undercut her polemics as it occasionally had her love letters. Perhaps she wrote too rapidly to think through the implications of her assertions. Or perhaps speech-making had spoiled her for argument-writing.
That June, a Dispatcher cartoon showed Truman much too tiny to fill FDR’s shoes. In the Chinese civil war, Truman’s government endorsed the authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek government, while the USSR aided Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army. President Truman fired former Vice President and current Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace for his leftist sympathies.11 Truman also authorized bomb-building laboratories, which imported former Nazis scientists to develop ever-more-deadly bombs.12 The United States and the USSR were carving the globe into rival spheres of influence. Republicans accused the California Labor School, where Jack was listed as ILWU contact person, of being a tool of the USSR. California’s twelfth district sent Republican Richard M. Nixon to Congress.13
Tillie had written that women’s “real housecleaning job” was to clean up discrimination against women. But feeling pressure from Jack to give up speech-making and traveling about, she gave in. She had seen a “political value to ‘surrendering’ to motherhood,” but her Christmas list suggests little political concern, as it inculcated housewifely values: for Kathie—toy dishes, $1.39, toy stove, $1.79; for Julie—toy washing machine $1.89, tinker toys $2, books 25¢ and up, toy refrigerator $1.59, toy sink $1.49, books $2, doll 75¢. At fourteen, Karla got a finger paint set $2, a pencil set $2, pants and socks $2.14 Tillie had become an ex-GI’s ideally compliant wife and mother. She was launched on her only intentional pregnancy.
In January 1947, Tillie turned thirty-five. She was no longer a fiction writer. She was no longer a public presence. She was no longer a journalist. She no longer had a maid. She was literally a housekeeper. In April she and Jack bought, under the GI Bill, their own home at 70 Laidley Street, on the edge of the Mission District. This funky house built into the rim of a hill had a garage on the bottom level, with an odd room over it, two flights of stairs to the front door, another flight to the main floor, with its living room and kitchen, and another up to the bedrooms. The neighborhood was Hispanic, with Mexican, Samoan, and Hawaiian residents, along with a few Russian, Anglo, and black families. Though the Hawaiians and Samoans bickered constantly, the lively mix of cultures fascinated the Olsen girls. They enjoyed a superb view of San Francisco and were high enough to escape most fogs. Julie felt she at last had a “real childhood home.”
In March, while HUAC collected names of more than a million suspected Communists, President Truman signed a bill calling for a loyalty check on all government employees. In June, he did object to a “slave-labor bill,” but Congress overrode his veto and passed the antilabor and anti-Communist Taft-Hartley Act, a betrayal, the Dispatcher said, of labor veterans who had fought fascism abroad, only to be victimized by it at home.15
Tillie read in DPW that Woody Guthrie and his wife were also about to have a baby, a little musician who would play the people’s music. Her own baby should be born after the Guthries’ in late July or early August.16 HUAC now turned against Hollywood for creating people’s heroes, like Little Orphan Annie and Ma and Tom Joad. It objected to James Cagney’s plans to film Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar Johnny Got His Gun.17 HUAC deemed portraying ordinary folk as heroic and war as brutal as un-American.
Expecting another ten-month pregnancy, Tillie was surprised when her labor began on time. Back in 1945, on the battlefield, Jack had imagined naming their triplets “Ike, Mac and Joe.” After her hardest labor, on the fourth of July, Tillie brought forth a girl. She joked that the on-time baby was her “premie” who should be called “Glorious Fourth Olsen,” or “Glory” for short. Neither she nor Jack, though, was feeling patriotic about American glory in 1947. Karla and Julie wanted to name the baby from Little Women so Tillie settled on the name of its most appealing young man, Laurie.18 Union men teased Jack about having “nothing but girls,” but her daughters congratulated themselves for being now four “little women.”19 The entire American postwar culture endorsed Tillie’s decision to be a stay-at-home mother. The bigger girls were thrilled—Julie even thought of Laurie as “my baby.” Secure as a union officer, Jack could support the family.20 A patronizing zeitgeist decreed that GI’s wives owed devotion and gratitude to their husbands, and Tillie followed the decree: “To Jack—with love . . . to be with you every minute of the day—every hour—as my heart is, your wife.”21
Nursing, bathing, and changing a baby, while cleaning and cooking for a family of six, drained her energies, however, as did innumerable visitors. Whitey Gleason took the Olsen house as his personal port in a storm; Leroy King, a black youth, “one of Jack’s kids,” stayed longer and learned to read under Jack’s guidance.22 A typical list of chores was “soak diapers; wash a day’s supply; straighten house and upstairs; cabbage soup in morning; soak beans; and 2 hours in linen closet.” Tillie tried to study “election Material—issues, background,” but she could campaign only sporadically against Taft-Hartley or for the only woman running for San Francisco Board of Supervisors.23
She was appalled to see the ideals of peace and brotherhood in the Declaration of Universal Human Rights being “done in” by paranoia.24 As Stalin cracked down against dissidents and democracy in Eastern Europe, Truman launched a “Cold War” against the USSR. The State Department fired anyone even accused of being a security risk.25 Under Taft-Hartley, union members who did not sign loyalty oaths lost their jobs. To Henry Wallace the “Century of the Common Man” had become the “Century of Fear.”
After Representative Richard Nixon claimed that Communists were taking over America through Hollywood, the government censored more and more movies, including Charlie Chaplin’s satire on modern corruption, Monsieur Verdoux.26 In late October, a contingent of Hollywood personalities chartered a plane to D.C. to protest HUAC’s “un-American investigation.” Some actors, including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Gregory Peck, protested; others, including Ronald Reagan, wanted communism outlawed in Hollywood. In an absurd distortion of the legal system, HUAC prohibited ten writers and directors from testifying, then cited them for contempt, and finally sentenced them to the penitentiary.27 Tillie clipped out photographs of the “Hollywood Ten” and of protestors urging “Save the Bill of Rights.” She kept articles about this inquisition, including Samuel Ornitz’s assertion that “entombing” such creative people was a desecration of human rights.28 When they listened to HUAC hearings over the Mutual Broadcasting Company, Tillie and Jack trembled, lest they hear their own names.
The Olsens’ mood lightened some when Ida and Sam traveled west to see the new baby. Sam proved his usefulness by telling riddles and jokes to the older girls and repainting much of the Laidley Street house. Ida proved hers by washing, cooking, caring for the baby, and telling Tillie and the older girls of her dreams for them. The girls had green jumpers with embroidered flowers, which they wore for pictures taken by Al Addy, then, thanks to Jack, a photographer for the ILWU paper. In a revealingly low-cut dress, Tillie snuggles happily against Jack.29
Tillie’s mood darkened, however, when she looked beyond her family. By the end of 1947, Republicans and southern Democrats had colluded to undermine New Deal economic reforms. The Nuremberg trials had revealed experimentation on and extermination of human beings. Lynchings in the American South, mass killings in Africa, inquisitions in America, and a race for a superdestructive hydrogen bomb were almost as horrific. World peace seemed a false dream in a nightmarish world.
Wartime movies had featured strong women as reporters and professionals, even as bosses. Movies in 1948, like June Bride, suggested that women were happiest marrying and staying at home with children.30 Turning thirty-six on 14 January 1948, Tillie felt victimized by an antifeminist zeitgeist. Now fifteen, Karla was so busy with school, dancing, girlfriends, and boyfriends she was no longer a reliable mother’s helper. At nine and four, Julie and Kathie loved to play with six-month-old Laurie, but they were hardly reliable help. Plagued with serious asthma attacks, Kathie sometimes needed more care than the baby.31 Tillie did all the cooking and cleaning. The girls wore heavy cotton dresses with petticoats, which took hours to dry and iron. Tillie hand-washed wool clothes because dry cleaning was too expensive. However ravishing the view from Laidley Street, getting groceries and other purchases up the steep hill and steps was an ordeal. However aware Jack was of the rights of minorities and women, he did not share many household chores. However much scriptwriters for radio’s Father Knows Best? meant for the show’s title to be a question, audiences took the program as a prescription for women’s subservience to their wiser spouses. Tillie yearned for the days when she was a bigwig, had a housekeeper, and lived as she pleased. In 1945, she had promised she couldn’t “have enuf” of Jack when he came home, but the excitement of their reunion was being replaced by the drudgery of being his wife.
Tillie’s typewriter sat on a table in the living room by the stairs going up to the bedrooms. The girls used the table too, so it was always piled with books, papers, and homework assignments. Pictures of Virginia Woolf, clipped from book jacket covers and taped to the wall, presided over that table and another desk in her bedroom. Depressed over her endless chores and the country’s paranoid suspicions, she tried to find consolation in rereading favorite authors like Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Willa Cather, and Katherine Mansfield. She also read less well-known women: Olive Schreiner, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Genevieve Taggard, and Agnes Smedley. On “copy-outs,” she jotted down favorite passages. She thought of talented Jews, like Einstein and Freud, who had escaped the concentration camps and wept for the millions who had not. She felt ambivalent about the founding of Israel, but she was certain that far too many talents were lost to the world through extermination, discrimination, poverty, and toil. With GIs returning, Tillie had lost her jobs and hence her prominence because she was a woman. Though she had used a bevy of excuses for not writing, had called it quits on her novel, and had not tried creative writing in years, Tillie now blamed her failure to write on domesticity and discrimination. She wondered “how many women writers’ lives” had been reduced to “that same mass, wad of notes beguns scrawls unfinisheds” that were in her notebook of story ideas. She called it a “death notebook” because she could not resurrect those story ideas.
Unable to write, Tillie began following the rest of her own DPW advice. She made friends with Hispanics and African-American women and counseled them about child care, education, benefits, and job opportunities.32 When she attended a Conference on Child Welfare, however, she heard an infuriating argument that American women made poor mothers because “the United States mother is all too likely to find preparing a formula, washing diapers and getting meals a poor substitute for her previous participation in the business or professional world.”33
When progressives and labor formed a third party, the ILWU voted to support the Independent Progressive Party and its presidential nominee Henry Wallace. Tillie advised neighboring women and Kate Kennedy PTA members to join the IPP, though the Mindt-Nixon Bill violated the Bill of Rights by threatening Wallace supporters and IPP members with jail. In October 1948 telephone polls predicted that Republicans Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren would easily win the presidency and vice presidency. Instead, Harry Truman and Alben Barkley won the November election, and Democrats gained a majority in both houses of Congress. Wallace carried no state, while the racist “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond carried four. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggested to Truman that he defend himself against charges of being soft on communism by using the 1940 Smith Act “to outlaw the Communist Party and, by extension, any publication presumed to be published under the party’s aegis.”34
Tillie, eager to see carols as expressions of “the people’s culture,” took the girls to a Christmas carol program at the California Labor School.35 She and Karla planned a family Christmas performance; baby Laurie was baby Jesus, and the older girls portrayed a mix of secular and religious figures. Neither religion nor family, however, seemed capable of lifting Tillie’s spirits. Her imagination now seemed the “graveyard of the unwritten.”36 She stared out “the window my face transparent with the city thru it” and wondered if she was any more substantial than her reflection.
After being such a war-relief dynamo, such an outspoken women’s rights journalist, such an enthusiastic G.I. wife, and such a devoted, but exhausted mother, Tillie determined that her substantial self was actually her writing self. Her powerful 1930s novel was lost and out of date. It occurred to Tillie that she might write again not about a universal mother, nor about horny widows, Marxist preachers, militant wives, or abusive priests, but about her own personal experience. She set about practicing “accurate chronicling; how it was it was said; the look on the face and the set of the body.” She told herself to have “no illusion” but “batter it out.” She wrote an anguished beginning about a neighborhood Hispanic boy who got a “life sentence” in kindergarten when a teacher labeled him “incorrigible.” She wanted to comfort Karla, an “insecure, groping, tremendously self-focused adolescent daughter,” whose dark straight hair marked her difference from the blond curly-haired Olsen girls. However, “all the necessities of daily living, the clamor of what is alive and dear and has claims on me,” kept Tillie from time with Karla. Her subsequent guilt, she realized, was a motherly emotion that not even her favorite women authors had written about.37
In January 1949 the FBI recorded data on Tillie, her parents, and siblings. It asserted that Tillie’s father, “SAMUEL LERNER, [was] alleged to have been banished to Siberia from Czarist Russia for operating a secret radical press.”38 The FBI turned even school children into informants who reported that sixteen-year-old Karla “continuously makes pro-Communist statements.” On 28 February 1949, J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the chief San Francisco Special Agent about “OLSHANSKY, TILLIE, NATIVE BORN, COMMUNIST. Aliases: Mrs. Jacob Olshansky, Tilly Olsen, Tillie Olson, Tillie Lerner Olsen, Mrs. John P. Olsen, nee: Tillie Lerner.”39 Among the accusations in her updated file was that she had publicized “gains women were making in industry.”
After her thirty-seventh birthday, Tillie tried to turn practice descriptions into salable stories. In one tale, two little girls stay in the bathroom so long two big girls accuse them of being “bad.” Neither little girl understands what was “bad,” but one (based on Kathie) confesses to her sympathetic mother. In another story, based on Pauline’s loss of her husband, Tillie revived a line from twenty years before: “don’t die, why did you die?” Then she added a salacious twist—burning with desire, a widow considers advertising: “wanted, by 32 year old widow, horny man, does not even have to be good in bed, will teach.” The widow plans to seduce her boss, but he fires her, and the story ends anticlimactically. Another story depicted a mother’s exhaustion from tending to a retarded son. Under the name “Emily Hulot Olsen,” Tillie submitted one or more story to the high-paying Ladies’ Home Journal, whose motto was “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman.” Because these stories ran completely counter to the postwar image of women’s power as homebodies, the editors apparently did not even reply.40
Tillie made herself an authority on free cultural opportunities for her girls, including museums, galleries, libraries, outdoor concerts, and movies. (They saw Disney’s 1940 Fantasia at the California Labor School.) The older daughters also attended the Peters Wright School of Music and Dance, where tuition was based on income. Still Tillie asked Sam and Ida to help pay for lessons. Her impecunious state contrasted with three siblings’ successes. Having helped rehabilitate and relocate thousands of displaced persons, Harry and Clare were treated as saints or deliverers.41 Gene had made, Sam exclaimed, “$800.00!” writing a radio series “This is Europe,” which was broadcast every Saturday evening. As a Merchant Marine, Gene now was bringing food to wartorn Italy. Lillian’s husband Joseph Davis had established a medical practice near Poughkeepsie, New York, and the Davises lived on Apple Blossom Farm, in Duchess County. Pleased that Tillie’s girls were “so exceptional talented in various fields,” Sam regretted that he could not help. That April, he and Ida moved into a cottage behind the Davises’ Dutch colonial, with a view of rolling hills, ponds, and rare trees cultivated there. Ida started a flower garden and imagined living out her days on the farm.42 They had hardly gotten settled, however, before Sam decided they were too dependent on Lillian’s family and too isolated. He campaigned to move to a Workmen’s Circle home for the elderly, but Ida wanted to stay in Duchess County. After almost five months of squabbling over leaving or staying in upstate New York, Sam sent Tillie a postcard: “we bought a house at 1227 Randolph Street N.W.” Near Jann and also Sam’s sisters Rose and Chaika, the D.C. rowhouse was a compromise between Ida’s isolated farm and Sam’s communal haven.43
Inundated by suspicion, states began forming their own HUAC committees. In 1949, the California Committee on Un-American Activities labeled “the (Independent) Progressive Party as the above-ground organization of the Communist party.” The Teamsters Union infiltrated the ILWU. According to Tillie, the ILWU had held free elections from “rank and file union” members. Thanks especially to Jack, it was remarkably free of racism and sexism.44 The Teamsters, though, represented top-down thuggery that thrived on keeping its members ignorant and claimed to be anti-Communist.45
Probably in fall 1949, Tillie argued in a speech for the PTA that fascist countries “try to teach children simple blind obedience,” but democracies should teach them “to think for themselves, to search for facts, to weigh conflicting viewpoints, to face problems, to make sound solutions, and to act on them.” She urged parents and teachers to provide a “strong sense of the brotherhood of man,” regardless of race, color, or creed. She did not mention gender equality, perhaps because “women” were assumed to be part of “mankind” or perhaps women’s rights were too controversial in 1949. She ended on a surprisingly Christian note: “Tell them, yes, truth was crucified once, and put in the tomb; but on the third day it arose and lived; survived those that scourged and mocked it.” The Inquisition was meant to curb the Renaissance, “to prevent the spread of these terrible ideas of science and democracy; but it failed.” Then she spoke of a new inquisition in which un-Americans suppressed freedom in the name of patriotism.
At the beginning of 1950, Sam sent a letter that made Tillie feel superior to Jann, who was in such financial straits that she might have to open a boarding house. Her brothers, however, were enjoying enormous success. Harry was moving to Bethesda, Maryland, as an attorney for the Veterans Administration. Sam exclaimed that “Eugene!” was “now in Paris France.” In the competitive Lerner family dynamic, Tillie quickly sent a newspaper article and photograph of her as an especially attractive, prosperous-looking matron. The article about “Mrs. Jack Olsen, PTA President, Kate Kennedy School” described achievements remarkable in 1950: PTA membership doubled under her leadership; 80 percent of mothers participated in school affairs; a free neighborhood playground opened; class size was reduced to twenty-five students; a kids’ galosh exchange was set up before the rainy season. In addition, Tillie organized an evening session so working parents could meet the superintendent of schools.46 The PTA selected her, with three others, to attend a six-week workshop at San Francisco State University, ostensibly on human relations. The real focus was freedom of thought, especially when Senator Joseph McCarthy was defaming anyone who thought differently from him. (He thought the entire Democratic Party was infiltrated by Communists and brandished a list of 205 supposedly “card-carrying Communists” working in the State Department.47)
Sam and Ida were impressed by the photo of Tillie, but Sam worried how she was making “ends meet when Jack is not working.” HUAC and McCarthy had spread the rumor that Commie dockworkers might smuggle in guns to launch an insurrection. Knuckling under to the FBI, the Smith Act, the Taft-Hartley Act, and the Teamsters, the ILWU had thrown Jack Olsen, former union officer, former decorated soldier, and former Commie, to the wolves.48 Tillie later protested: “what kind of threat was I? was Jack? What the hell could we do?”49 Nevertheless, an anti-Communist Zeitgeist condemned them. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda warned of a “hangman” working like the Gestapo in the former haven of democracy. Tillie and Jack felt the noose tightening around their necks.50
Gene Lerner’s pacifism, war exemption, and homosexuality also made him vulnerable to HUAC so he returned to the states only briefly to see the family in the East. The liberation of Rome in 1944 had begun an Italian-American romance of both real and vicarious Roman holidays. With America so hostile and Italy so friendly to Hollywood and the dollar, Gene capitalized on his show-biz and Italian experiences to launch an Italian-American film agency with Hank Kaufman. On 10 April 1950, Lerner and Kaufman invited the Davis and Lerner families to celebrate their departure on the SS Liberté. Ida feared that she would never see Gene again, but, after seeing “what a palace you were sailing on,” she returned to D.C. somewhat reassured.51 She and Sam promised Karla that her Uncle Gene would help her pursue her surprising new ambition: called “funny-face” as a child, she now wanted to be a clown.52
Tillie identified not with Gene’s “fantasy life” but with Agnes Smedley’s ruined one. After Mao Tse-tung’s Communists took Peking in 1949, General MacArthur accused her of being a Soviet spy. Hounded by accusations, she died in May 1950, just before North Korea invaded South Korea. Tillie clipped out Smedley’s obituary and copied her on male fascism: “I would rather be a prostitute than a married woman. I could then protect, feed, and respect myself, and maintain some right over my own body.”53
One evening in June, Tillie was ironing clothes for her daughters, looking out the kitchen window at a purple sunset, singing a Woody Guthrie ballad to herself, when the phone rang. Upon answering, she heard her friend Jean Wortheimer talking about a radio commentator named Tarantino, who had named Tillie Olsen as a “dangerous communist operating in the Kate Kennedy District.” As the phone kept ringing, Tillie began a letter to the superintendent about being dubbed “dangerous” (she used red ink for that word). She wrote that “after ransacking my recent past the best I could come up with were the following activities,” which included a lunch for teachers, a library project, a newsletter, neighborhood playgrounds, PTA growth, and an inoculation program. Of course, the 1941 Communist state plenum had named the PTA as “one outfit we got to work in.” For Tillie, at least by 1950, such work did not mean fomenting revolution. She still considered improving the lives of children and their families as a humane and basically Communist enterprise.54
She did not expect one “reaction to Tarantino”: the PTA silently took her name off its citywide executive board. It did send her, without fanfare, to the Human Relations Workshop that summer. Though the San Francisco State University was south of the city, with ordinary architecture and raw landscaping, Tillie was “thrilled to be on a college campus.” With three-year-old Laurie in tow, on the bus Tillie pointed out the busy people walking dogs, the beautiful clouds, and the hills dotted with scrub oaks. She could bring Laurie because SFSU had a campus child-care center. Laurie’s pleasure in new little friends and a caring staff reminded Tillie how outside help makes child-raising easier and more fun. The workshop offered a “different relationship to people than I had ever had before in my life.”55 Shocked in one session to hear colleagues talk about “lower class” people, Tillie asked, “Why not say ‘working class’?” She recovered “a sense of how much I had to contribute.”56
With Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on trial that summer for sharing atomic secrets with the Soviets, public employees were forced take loyalty oaths verifying, not only that they supported the Constitution, but also that they were not and had never been members of the Communist Party. Civil servants were fired for not signing.57 Richard Nixon resigned his congressional seat to fill an unexpired Senate term.58 His name appeared more and more in California papers. The names JACK OLSEN and TILLIE OLSEN disappeared.
The ILWU could not expel Jack, but it could send him back to the waterfront. Every morning, he had to appear in a hiring hall and wait for a warehouse job. Knowing that Jack would insist on enforcing contracts, his former employer at Merchants Ice and Cold Storage refused to hire him. Labeled a commie, Jack kept getting laid off from the jobs he briefly held.59 Tillie’s “ever modest Jack” had always fought for others better than for himself. The war experience, which he still would not discuss, had drained his resiliency. Against a national intolerant, anti-Communist crusade, he could not make a living. Knowing that “the kids were calling ‘food, daddy, food,’” Jack felt like a failure. And so did Tillie. In October 1950, for Jack’s father’s seventieth birthday, she gave a talk asserting that ordinary “people will win against the ruling class.”60 Her optimism rang hollow, given the growing capitalist success of Jack’s brother Max, the capitalist and artistic success of Tillie’s brother Gene, and the socialist failures of Tillie and Jack. She picked up odd jobs and tried to fend off “economic wolves” demanding payment on the mortgage, loans, and bills. She paid a personal toll, lamenting “how much it uses up of me the morning running from place to place to cash checks to put in the bank to cover the checks I cashed to cover the checks I cashed.”61 Money juggling brought more fines, fees, and ever higher interest rates, sliding the Olsens into an economic downspout.
Then Paul Cline reentered Tillie’s life. Still handsome and witty, he had left his wife to marry a woman named Helen Oprian, who sold advertising for the DPW. Cline prospered selling Johns Mansfield asbestos siding to cover (and save) the weathered frame exteriors of San Francisco’s Victorian houses. His charm and success, not to mention his house with a turret on Lower Terrace, down from the tops of Twin Peaks, seem to have resurrected Tillie’s feelings: “from the other place I could see the tower under which you lived—here I have not that torture.” Such sentiments violated the image of the GI’s ideal wife. She felt a “traitor” to Jack.62
America’s postwar shopping spree had inflated prices and left citizens awash in personal debt. Currents of fear had eroded postwar euphoria. Debates about putting the A-bomb genie back in the bottle when Truman asked Congress for a billion dollars to develop a hydrogen bomb. Wide-circulation magazines like Colliers and U.S. News and World Report advised readers to prepare for an atom bomb attack by building basement bomb shelters and hoarding supplies; schools conducted air raid drills and gave children metal name tags so their dead bodies could be identified after the bomb.63 In his Nobel Prize address, William Faulkner regretted that “There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” When she looked out her window onto Laidley Street, Tillie saw people newly suspicious of each other and frightened for their futures. Her ability to write what she wanted seemed broken under the dual zeitgeist of antifeminism and anticommunism. She had jotted down “whatever is worthy of recording—for half an hour a day—[only] to be destroyed afterwards,” but she feared that her jotting “says nothing and re-says nothing [despite the] shaping of twenty years.” With an empty bank account, only pick-up jobs, and a family of six to feed on meager woman’s wages, however, she could not make much of her “beguns” and “unfinished,” though her old talents and ambitions had begun “flexing and groping again.”64
A virtual tsunami of fear and suspicion had washed away American freedoms and almost submerged Tillie and Jack Olsen. The happy prospects they enjoyed after he returned from war and the postwar ambitions she had struggled to voice now seemed like treasure lost on the floor of the sea. Tillie recalled “1950, that’s when it all ended.”65 Her ambiguous “it” referred to dreams for an America of freedom and tolerance and joy. It also seems to have referred to her vision of writing stories about the lives women actually live.