He wrote additional books, seven of which are held in the Harvard libraries. But he is best known for Bending Cross.

"I had read as a really young man his biography of Debs, and it was a very powerful influence on my political development," says Howard Zinn, the famed leftist historian. "It is a wonderful book. He was a very meticulous scholar and very, very much respected in the profession."

A labor historian. A scholar of Eugene Debs. But was Ray Ginger a Communist?

"Was he a Communist? Was Eugene Debs a member of the Communist Party?" says Ann Ginger. "These things are fluid. They're not a simple thing, like a card-carrying member of the KKK. People were in and around the Socialist party, the Communist party, the CIO."

Ann Ginger says she does not know whether her husband was a member of the Communist Party, though she says both of them were active in left-wing causes and attended Marxist study groups and, occasionally, Communist Party meetings.

At the time, the Gingers were friends with some of Massachusetts' best-known members of the left. Ann Ginger took piano lessons from the wife of Otis Hood, who was the head of the Communist Party of Massachusetts. Ann Ginger says she attended many more political meetings than her husband but still cannot say whether her involvement reached to a level that could be termed "membership" in the Party.

But she emphasizes that it was scholarship, not activism, that most interested her husband. His friends agree.