Decca, p.27
Decca, page 27
In her memoir, Decca also commented on her Churchill letter from her perspective thirty-four years later: “Rereading this letter today, I find it painfully stuffy and self-righteous—and also, as Nancy later pointed out in her understated fashion, ‘not very sisterly.’” She went on to clarify her rationale at the time but added that “[i]n my case, no doubt, these views—as comes through strongly in my letter—were admixed with deep bitterness over Esmond’s death and a goodly dash of familial spitefulness.”
7. Britain’s famed Mrs. Beeton cookbooks were knockoffs of the original 1861 Mrs. BeetonsBook of Household Management, which was a favorite of Decca’s and figured later in her research and in one of her lawsuits. The book was written by a housewife, Isabella Beeton, married to a publisher who, after her premature death, exploited and later sold his late wife’s brand. The original that so captivated Decca was far more than a cookbook. Its breadth can be gauged by its full original title, The Book of Household Management Comprising Information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, KitchenMaid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort.
8. The family’s cook.
9. Aranka Treuhaft’s new husband was Al Kliot, but Robert Treuhaft has said that she was never known by her married name “except possibly [by] purists like Decca bred to use it as a courtesy title.”
10. Decca’s early nickname for her first son, Nicholas Tito Treuhaft, born on May 16. Further explanations of his name and nickname can be found in letters of June 15, 1944, to Lady Redesdale, and May 1945 to Nancy Mitford.
11. Lady Redesdale appears to have unearthed and sent to Decca the rules of the Society of Hons that she and her sister Deborah had conceived as children.
12. Decca’s mother later replied to this passage in Decca’s letter by saying, “I wish I knew what the ‘Union’ is, to me it means the Union of S. African Republics. You say the Hons rules remind you of a Union meeting. What funny little objects you & Debo were…”
13. The Communist-affiliated school, formerly the Tom Mooney School, was one of a number of such institutions around the country that flourished during the post-Pearl Harbor industrial expansion, changing its name at about the time Decca went to work there to reflect its expanded role and the infusion of financing from corporations, universities, and other establishment organizations. In addition to teaching labor and Marxist issues, it offered an increasingly broad array of classes in psychology, the arts, and other subjects. One of the school’s many celebrated art teachers was Pele de Lappe, Decca’s friend and fellow Communist Party member whose first husband, Bert Edises, was to become a law partner of Robert Treuhaft.
14. The Overall-Wearing Dude Ranch in Southern California’s Apple Valley, also known as Murray’s Ranch, billed itself as “the only Negro dude ranch in the world.”
15. Blues singer Huddie Ledbetter stayed at the Treuhafts’ home during a visit to San Francisco a couple of years later. Decca wrote in A Fine Old Conflict that during that visit “the house would ring with his wonderful music, daily concerts for the children, for whom he improvised special songs.” She also wrote of the unease of Aranka Treuhaft, who came to visit while Leadbelly was staying with them: “He and Aranka were ill-assorted houseguests; they would circle one another warily, with little to say. ‘Oh Decca’—Aranka sighed wistfully—‘I wish I was black like Jerry New-son and Leadbelly. Then you would love me.’” For Decca’s later recollections of their association, see April 13, 1990, letter to John Prime.
16. Decca’s brother, Tom, was leading Indian troops against a contingent of Japanese in Burma when he was hit by machine-gun fire on March 24. He died on March 30 at the age of thirty-six.
17. The founding conference for what became the United Nations opened in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. It has been taken as a sign of the growing mainstream respectability of the California Labor School where Decca had worked that it was chosen by the State Department for the politically sensitive task of hosting Soviet labor delegates at the conference. Called the United Nations Conference on International Organization, it lasted two months. The U.N. Charter was adopted by delegates of the fifty nations in attendance on June 25.
18. A Conservative Member of Parliament and old friend of Oswald Mosley.
19. Editor of Britain’s New Statesman. See letter of July 22, 1964, to Robert Treuhaft.
20. Esmond Romilly’s brother, who had been imprisoned since his capture by the Germans in 1940.
21. A reference to Tom Mitford’s death.
22. Nancy at the time was working on The Pursuit of Love (Hamish Hamilton, 1947), the caricature of her family that was to become one of her most popular novels and an important contributor to the enduring legend of “the crazy Mitfords.”
23. Decca described this game in Daughters and Rebels. She wrote that she and sisters Unity and Deborah “were sure [Tom] led a glamorous life of sin abroad and in his London flat, and needed emphasis on this particular commandment.” “Blither,” she said, was “a Honnish expression for an unwilling or suppressed giggle.”
24. Parents, or, as Decca often referred to them, the Sainted P’s or the Revered P’s.
25. San Francisco’s main downtown thoroughfare.
26. Although Decca had been disowned by her father, she came into partial ownership of the island on the death of her brother, Tom, the legal owner (see next letter). The other sisters decided to let their mother use the island during her lifetime.
27. The radical British journalist was a former foreign correspondent for The Times who founded his own mimeographed antifascist newsletter, The Week, and covered the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Worker at the request of the general secretary of the British Communist Party. He fought with the Republican forces so he could report on the war from a soldier’s perspective. He left the Daily Worker and the Communist Party the year after this letter was written. Decca had met with Cockburn when he was in San Francisco covering the founding of the United Nations, soon after her brother’s death. According to Cockburn’s son, the journalist Alexander Cockburn, Decca and Esmond Romilly had taken refuge in Claud Cockburn’s apartment when they eloped. Claud Cockburn later became a good friend of Decca’s and her host at his Irish home.
28. Gallacher was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an MP from 1935 to 1950.
29. Cockburn never replied and Decca later revoked his power of attorney, but he did follow up on Decca’s mission. He consulted with the Communist Party, where he said he was told, “What the hell does anyone think we can do with a small little bit of a desolate island somewhere off the coast of Scotland?”; Cockburn then met with Lord Redesdale and—depending on whose account you believe—was talked out of accepting the island on the Party’s behalf (Jonathan Guinness, son of Decca’s sister Diana) or “somehow managed to give the island back” (Alexander Cockburn).
30. One-sixth of the island’s appraised value. Having failed in her attempt to donate her share of the island to the Communist Party, Decca was trying to sell it to her sisters.
31. Decca’s sisters were furious at her, and her proposed sale was never completed. Decca kept her share, and Lady Redesdale continued to live on the island with her children’s agreement.
32. Decca’s sister—by now the mother of two—delivered a stillborn infant eight months into another pregnancy.
33. Appended to this letter was the following from Robert Treuhaft: “P.S. He’s been named—Benjamin.”
34. Benjamin J. Davis, the pioneering African American Communist leader. A Harvard-educated lawyer from the South, he edited the Negro Liberator in New York and later the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker. He was the Party’s Harlem representative and a tenacious organizer for black rights and economic advancement. In the mid-1940s he became the second African American to be elected to the New York City Council. He later lost the council seat and was imprisoned after being convicted under the anti-Communist Smith Act; after his release, he resumed his advocacy.
35. Bert Edises, law partner of Robert Treuhaft and the first husband of the Treuhafts’ dear friend Pele de Lappe.
36. Decca’s first cousin Tim Bailey, son of her mother’s sister, Dorothy Bailey (known as Aunt Weenie).
37. Decca once claimed that her daughter, at the age of six, had been “praying for a baby; so when he was born, I said, ‘Here he is, now look after him,’ which she did. I think she taught him his first words: ‘Dinky’s always right, Benjy’s always wrong.’”
38. The Progressive Party (Independent Progressive Party in California) was not yet formally named. It was formed to support the 1948 presidential campaign of former vice president Henry A. Wallace, who ran against Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey. The party also supported local candidates (Virginia Durr was its token candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia). Wallace received more than a million popular votes but no electoral votes, and the candidate, who had split with President Truman over Cold War issues, ultimately split with the Independent Progressive Party over his increasing anti-Communism and his support for intervention in the Korean War. The party was labeled a Communist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and disbanded soon thereafter.
39. The Subversive Activities Control Bill, also known as the Mundt-Nixon bill for its authors, Representatives Karl Mundt of South Dakota and Richard Nixon of California, passed the House by an overwhelming margin several weeks after this letter was written but died in the Senate. The bill would have required that Communist Party members register with the attorney general; it banned Party membership for federal employees and denied passports to Party members. Many of its provisions—along with severe new restrictions such as provision for emergency detention of Communists—were incorporated into the Internal Security Act of 1950 (the McCarran Act), passed over President Truman’s veto. Several of the Treuhafts’ friends were ultimately arrested as suspected subversives.
40. For Lady Redesdale’s response, see letter of November 19, 1976, to the Duchess of Devonshire.
41. Decca was referring here to an incident in her childhood when she was enrolled in a weekly dancing class. “One fateful afternoon,” she related in Daughters and Rebels, “the teacher was an hour late, and I took the opportunity to lead the other children up to the roof, there to impart some delightful information that had just come my way concerning the conception and birth of babies,” adding that she “couldn’t help making up a few embellishments as I went along.” One of the girls, under pressure from her governess, violated her vow of silence. Decca was summoned by her mother, “her face … like thunder.” The upshot: “My participation in the dancing class was abruptly terminated; it was clear to everyone, even to me, that I couldn’t be considered fit company for nice children after that.”
42. Love in a Cold Climate. Nancy Mitford’s novel, another in her series caricaturing her family, was published by Hamish Hamilton in July 1949.
43. Apparently the “built-in sitter” to whom Decca had referred earlier.
44. The notorious Smith Act trials began in 1949, with eleven Communist leaders convicted weeks before this letter was written, after a nine-month trial. They were sentenced to prison. Two years later the Supreme Court refused to overturn the sentences, clearing the way for more such trials. The Smith Act of 1940, formally the Alien Registration Act, made it a crime “to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government.” It was purposely resurrected after World War II to go after the Communist Party for teaching the principles of Marxism-Leninism, despite the fact that those charged had never advocated violence.
45. Richard Gladstein was a partner in the first private law firm Robert Treuhaft worked for in San Francisco after the war. All the partners were members of the Communist Party. Their clients included the longshoremen’s leader Harry Bridges and his union, the ILWU (International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union), as well as other leftist West Coast unions and the West Coast Communist newspaper People’s World.
46. The Devonshires’ daughter and their son, Peregrine Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington (and the current Duke of Devonshire), who was also known at times to family members as Morny and Stoker.
47. Jerry Newson, a “shoeshine boy” charged in October 1949 with murdering a white pharmacist and his assistant in West Oakland. Defending the eighteen-year-old orphan after his arrest and through various trials and appeals was for years a preoccupation of the Treuhafts, the People’s World, and the Civil Rights Congress. He was convicted in April 1950 despite a supposed eyewitness’s admission that he had lied and other exculpatory testimony, and he was sentenced to death. Decca discussed the case and their involvement in numerous letters and in her book A Fine Old Conflict.
48. The family’s nemesis, J. Frank Coakley.
49. Grossman was a well-known labor and civil rights attorney and at times a law partner of Robert Treuhaft. He had also been a colleague of Decca’s in Communist Party headquarters when she was financial director of the San Francisco branch. For a time he was a national official of the Civil Rights Congress.
50. Willie McGee, a thirty-six-year-old truck driver, had been convicted by an all-white jury—in under three minutes of deliberation, after a trial lasting less than a day—of the rape of a white woman with whom he had reportedly been trying to break off a four-year-long affair. The CRC and Communist Party organized an international campaign to overturn his conviction, including the so-called White Women’s Delegation to Mississippi, in which Decca later participated. She was a tireless worker in McGee’s defense and devoted a chapter to the case in her memoir A Fine Old Conflict.
51. Decca was referring to what was to become the Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as the McCarran Act. See footnote to letter of May 3, 1948, to Aranka Treuhaft.
52. Decca wrote in A Fine Old Conflict that their local Party chairman told the Treuhafts that no lawyers could be granted leaves of absence at the time because they “would be needed to deal with the anticipated wave of arrests, prosecutions and general harassment” under the new McCarran Act.
53. Coinciding with the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950, a group of peace activists who had met in Stockholm were circulating a statement declaring that “any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity.”
54. The ranch was an interracial vacation retreat for radicals in the 1940s and ‘50s.
55. Clifford Durr had started a law practice in Washington after leaving government service. He took on loyalty oath cases, for little or no compensation, and continued opposing government “witch hunts” of purported Communist sympathizers. While Durr was serving as president of the National Lawyers Guild, Congressman Richard Nixon attacked the organization for purported Communist ties, and Durr was put under FBI surveillance. Unable to make an adequate living from his practice, he took a position as general counsel of the National Farmers Union in Denver. He was soon forced to resign that position when the Denver Post smeared Virginia Durr for signing what it called a “Red Petition” circulated by Dr. Linus Pauling opposing escalation of the Korean War.
56. As previously noted, the bill passed, with Congress overriding Truman’s veto.
57. Decca’s sister Pam.
58. A prominent left-wing attorney and for years one of Robert Treuhaft’s law partners, Doris Brin Walker was one of the Treuhafts’ closest friends for decades. Decca credited her with inviting her and her husband into the Communist Party.
59. Walker and several dozen other white women from outside the South had driven to Jackson, Mississippi, in a last-minute attempt to appeal for Willie McGee’s life. Their San Francisco friend and colleague Walter (Buddy) Green, a black People’s World reporter who worked with the East Bay Civil Rights Congress, had gone ahead, undercover, to do advance work in the black community. Walker recalls that the white women—dressed in skirts, heels, hose, hats, and white gloves—had gathered on Saturday, May 5, to demonstrate at the Capitol, where the governor’s clemency board was hearing McGee’s final appeal. They were arrested, as were those blacks who managed to breach police lines and reach the Capitol. When they were taken to the hearing room, the white women encountered a number of the arrested blacks, including Green. The demonstration had surprised McGee’s attorneys, including thirty-year-old Bella Abzug (later a member of Congress) and John Coe, who were in town for the appeal. The attorneys rushed to the chambers and negotiated a settlement under which the white women were to be released on condition they got out of town by midnight. The out-of-state white women refused to accept the settlement unless the arrested blacks, who faced severe retribution in the prevailing vigilante atmosphere, were released simultaneously, and the deal was struck. Before driving out of town that night, the white women contributed travel funds for the blacks and escorted Green to the railroad station, waiting until he was safely aboard a train to Memphis.
60. Walker was driving home by way of Dallas.
61. Decca’s hope was misplaced. The conviction was upheld, and McGee was executed in the electric chair the day after this letter was written, as a crowd of hundreds of whites celebrated outside.
62. The main thoroughfare of downtown Oakland.
63. Independent Progressive Party.
64. The California secretary of state’s office identifies the committee’s activities this way: “The Senate Committee focused its attention largely on identifying and exposing communists, and many hearings were held on this subject. In particular, the Committee investigated labor unions, universities and colleges, public employees, liberal churches, and the Hollywood film industry.” The office’s website notes that “California’s attention to un-American activities predates McCarthyism by a decade.… However, there was a close and ongoing relationship between state and federal efforts.” Decca was subpoenaed for hearings at San Francisco’s City Hall on September 11–12, 1951, at which witnesses were questioned about what the state office describes as “alleged Communist front organizations in San Francisco and the East Bay.” In A Fine Old Conflict, Decca discussed at length her appearance before the committee, but this is the only contemporaneous account in her surviving letters.
