I first met Ed Yellin toward the end of 2016, and was fortunate to enjoy a couple of conversations with him at a time when he and his wife Jean were working on a memoir.
Ed spoke of growing up in New York City with parents who had emigrated from Belarus. With wry intelligence he spoke of his upbringing as a “red diaper baby,” and the curious trajectory that led him from work in the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, to years of persecution in the 1950s from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). It seemed somehow biblical — the young man sent into exile, laboring for a vision of labor that his masters didn’t wish to hear. Eight years of the mills led to HUAC, and a trial going all the way to the US Supreme Court; then to a second trial.
I remember Ed saying he’d begun college before heading to the mills. After years of unfruitful organizing efforts in Gary, he entered graduate school for engineering. Quite possibly it was this uncommon combination — a man of obvious intellectual abilities who chose industrial millwork — that flagged him as a “person of interest” to the McCarthyites. A communist is one thing — but an educated man of promise working in steel mills to change labor itself — how very Un-American. McCarthy’s minions couldn’t let this Yellin fellow go.
Meanwhile Ed marries Jean, they’re raising a family, he’s getting his graduate degree. Even within his own field, Ed’s an anomaly. While his colleagues excitedly worked to send rockets to the moon, Ed said he had no interest in that direction. Instead, he’d begun to think about how cardiology might apply mechanical engineering to biological processes — a field that didn’t yet exist.
HUAC targeted Ed and others in a trial that climbs to the Supreme Court. Ed’s case leads to a second SCOTUS trial, and he’s finally acquitted. Now he’s working at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, not far from his old Bronx neighborhood. He and Jean have three kids, and Jean is pursuing research leading to groundbreaking work on Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave who went on to found schools for fugitive slaves. Meanwhile her husband develops a groundbreaking bioengineering lab at Einstein. Though he’s been acquitted, he’s still pursued. HUAC tries to bar him from obtaining government research grants.
Bitterness didn’t shade Ed’s voice while talking of this. In 2016, at the age of 89, HUAC resided on the far side of years of teaching and research at Einstein. He beamed as he spoke of students in his lab who were recognized for contributions to the biomechanics of the mitral valve.
I hope my recollection is faithful to what he shared. The trajectory of his life has a kind of allegorical power, admonishing us to take a closer look at the fury he evoked. What danger did he pose to these United States?
Just now we have a President whose moment in the sun is indebted to the same German bank that financed Hitler’s regime. Remembering Ed Yellin, his prescience, his trials, and the against-all-odds legacy of his work brings welcome respite from the current odium, as well as wonder at his triumph in the workings of the human heart.
In Contempt, Ed and Jean’s memoir, is available through Alte.
Tom Matrullo
Sarasota, 2.23.20
