ABSTRACT
Born in the 1940s to parents who had been active in the radical social movements of the 1930s, I was a “red-diaper baby.” Both parents had been labor organizers, and continued their activism during my youth. In the mid-1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy called my father to Washington, D.C., on charges that he had been a member of the Communist Party almost twenty years before. The president of the elite university where my father was by then a tenured faculty member stepped in, and McCarthy desisted, but had my father’s passport revoked.
