Ray Ginger - Education

Education

Despite his troubled childhood, and the equally troubled personality it engendered, his incisive intelligence and great verbal gifts were rewarded by acceptance to both Harvard College and the University of Chicago before his 17th birthday. In another frequently-told tale, he chose Chicago in the belief that it would be easier to augment his scholarship with part-time employment "in a big city like Chicago than in a small town like Cambridge." He didn't think to look at a map, and wouldn't have dreamed of asking for advice. At Chicago he soon took a step towards fulfilling his supreme ambition at that time — to become a sportswriter — by landing a post as a copyboy at the Chicago Tribune — "the only time my father was ever really proud of me." This job turned into something more than menial when the United States entered World War II shortly thereafter, most of the reporters became foreign correspondents, and Ginger was promoted to a writing job in the city room.

His journalistic career was ended permanently by the military draft, but the interruption to his academic education proved only temporary. Soon after basic training, Military Intelligence plucked him out of the swarming pool of draftees and sent him for special training in the Japanese language at the University of Michigan, where he met his first wife, now the nationally-known civil-liberties lawyer Ann Fagan Ginger. At the end of this course Ginger was assigned to work as a code-breaker near Washington — work for which an education in statistical analysis would have been more appropriate than linguistic studies. It was while serving in this capacity in the closing days of the war that he joined the Communist Party, with the expectation that the revolution was just around the corner.

His interest in Eugene Debs had already begun to crystallize into a determination to write a definitive biography, drawing on both archival sources and interviews with some of the many individuals then living who had known Debs well. Fortunately the recently enacted GI Bill provided an easy means of support for this enterprise. Ann Arbor, which was close to his wife's family home and where he had already accumulated academic credits while studying Japanese, seemed the obvious place to begin; he completed his bachelors degree there, and then (the book not being finished) stayed for a masters degree in economics. Still drawing on GI benefits in the cause of literature, he then entered a Ph.D program in American Studies at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (now Case Western Reserve University), where he completed The Bending Cross (Rutgers University Press, 1949). This classic biography met great critical acclaim, including an assessment by the eminent American historian Henry Steele Commager as "the best biography of Debs." It has almost never been out of print in the intervening years; Haymarket Books issued the most recent edition in 2006.