Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism

[...] I remember - if vaguely - a comic book that was floating around in the Fifties; the name of it escapes me although I remember that the villains were all fat and ugly, called each other "comrade" and had highly suggestive names like Poison Ivan. I don't remember who the heroes were who routinely defeated these sabotaging commies. On radio, we were treated every week to a gripping drama starring Dana Andrews as Matt Cvetic, FBI special agent. The drama was called, I was a Communist for the FBI. In the Fifties, the Allies had defeated Hitler and could once again turn their attention to their number 1 enemy, the hated and feared followers of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Those of us whose history goes back to the beginnings of the cold war well remember the propaganda that effectively painted organizations like the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP) and their adherents as enemies of the state. In fact, the LPP was the renamed Communist Party of Canada, re-titled because the War Measures Act passed in 1940 banned it in Canada. For many years, Tim Buck was the leader of the LPP and was probably the best-known Communist personality in Canada. James Laxer's father was for many years an organizer for the same organization. His mother was also an LPP member and both were staunch workers in the cause of enlightening their fellow Canadians about the evils of capitalism and the imminent freeing of the masses when the great Soviet revolution would finally spread around the world. In Red Diaper Baby, James Laxer describes his life in a family vilified for their membership in the hated Communist Party. Even in Grade One, it meant lying when the teacher asked him what his father did for a living. It meant dumping the flyers he was asked to take door to door in the garbage bin so that he could avoid the rude comments and the general stigma that attached to anyone associated with the "red scourge." Life could be hard for the Laxer children, and it wasn't made any easier by the fact that their relatives on their father's side were Jewish, and on their mother's side, Protestant. But there were good times too. One of the photographs shows the Laxer family happily enjoying a lunch at an LPP picnic; others show them in the fold of their extended family where they would be impossible to pick out as different from Canadian families generally. Apparently James and his siblings grew up in a happy home with loving and fun-loving parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Red Diaper Baby is not just about the Communist "thing," however. Laxer invokes memories of childhood in all of us sixty-plus Canadians with his accounts of growing up generally: his school days, the summers at the lake, the beloved hockey games on the ice and in the street, childhood games of cowboys and Indians, Christmases with trees, presents and Santa Clause. What emerges is a portrait of a family making their way through difficult times the best way they know how. Their culture was distinct