by Leslie Brody
Among the guests whom Decca especially looked forward to seeing was Pele deLappe, editor of the People’s Daily World Women’s Pages and creator of “Vicky Says,” a daily illustrated column. Pele described Vicky (“Vicky,” for victory) as “a leggy female who with limericks, exhorted readers to speed the war effort.” This featherweight diversion was then under attack by the Communist Party’s local Women’s Commission, which denounced it to party leadership. Vicky (the curvaceous cartoon sexpot who liked to philosophize from atop her office desk) was “cheesecake,” they complained, and ought to be replaced with articles treating women’s issues “with more seriousness and concern.” Decca considered the Women’s Commission a bunch of pious persecutors and vociferously defended “Vicky Says” and its author against their censorious campaign.
Pele deLappe was married to the lawyer Bert Edises, whose firm Bob would soon join. Both women had small children and shared an abiding interest in becoming serious journalists. Pele’s first impression of Decca was of a pretty, jolly woman in a one-piece corduroy coverall, which young Londoners called siren suits (since they were easy to slip into on your way to the underground shelters). They discovered a mutual delight in rowdy wordplay and bawdy songs. Guessing that Decca’s debut fund-raiser would get raucous, Pele was looking forward to it, too.
Pele was a talented artist in the social realist grain. The daughter of socialists and a native San Franciscan, Pele had been arrested for the first time when she was fifteen, during the San Francisco general strike. Her father, a locally celebrated intellectual and newspaper cartoonist, had turned Marxist before World War I.
Pele’s mother was a “New Woman” from the Midwest whose travels in the South Seas gave her daughter that Polynesian first name. As dedicated modernists, the whole family had trooped off to Paris to meet James Joyce. Pele went to study at the Art Students League of New York with Raphael Soyer, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera and, while in New York, fell hard for jazz and the blues. She spent one summer in a Woodstock retreat among artists, mystics, and politicos. These composite adventures led Decca to say that Pele “had the luckiest childhood that I could dream of.”
It was a lovely night for a party, as Decca stood at her door ushering in her guests. Welcome, delighted you’ve come. Give what you can to the People’s Daily World. The inestimable Mrs. Betts is on hand to help watch the little ones . . . Dance wherever you like. Guests had hardly said hello before their debts mounted. It’s crowded in here, shall I take your coat? That’ll be a quarter. A drink? Typically five cents, but tonight it’s fifty cents, for the cause. Come in, come in, standing still will cost you. Better move around. Five cents a dance. Music too loud? Turn it up? Ten cents, turn it down—no, then how ’bout . . . a dollar! Decca improvised: A second drink costs fifty-five cents. Twenty-five cents to refuse a drink; ten cents for use of the lavatory, five cents extra for toilet paper; a seventy-five cents exit fee if you want to leave the lavatory. What’ll you give me for soap, for a towel? Extra tax for those leaving before one A.M. Come taste this delicious goulash, it’s Bob’s mother’s recipe! One price for the whole plateful. Comrade darling, one more drink? Just five cents. Hah, made you laugh . . . Laughs a penny each.
They earned upward of five hundred dollars. Pele had a grand time, but it did “raise hackles,” she noted, and some comrades reacted poorly to Decca’s “lighthearted view.” There was no denying a subterranean current of “prejudice against her background,” a reaction to the full press “Lady Redesdale syndrome,” as some people called it. Sometimes, even Pele imagined Decca “could always fall back on the old family, on the mansion,” though doubted she ever would. The last thing Decca wanted was a reputation for being grandiose or prepossessing or as someone with retreat rights to a ruling-class background—even from people who couldn’t take a joke. She wanted it known that invoking such elite privilege was out of the question for her.
Her wonderful and terrible party was the talk of the town. The upshot, once word reached the county leadership, was another promotion for Decca, this time as full-time county financial director. The job required her to learn about long-range budget design as well as party planning for the Communist Party membership of the entire city. Anything educational was serious business to Decca, and she bent herself to it, increasing her skills in math and accounting. The hustling and schmoozing came naturally. She rejected the previous generation’s techniques as old-fangled and inefficient. For instance, those handwritten notes her predecessor had favored were time-consuming and expensive (form letters were the wave of the future). She also sought new money in unexpected places: Comrades might sell blood or participate in medical trials to test how much pain they could endure. Travelers to a Communist Party convention might even volunteer to escort corpses in coffins. For every corpse, the funeral parlor would pay for the fare of its escort. “Marvelous,” Decca said, “if we could line up a few bodies for the delegates.”
Decca reveled in being “busy, busy, busy.” For a banquet to welcome home Communist Party veterans from the war, she organized a hundred threads at once: “ticket sales . . . publicity, decorations committee, waitresses committee . . . cooking committee.” For supplies, she turned to one elder habitué of the county office, a man in whom a life of hard knocks and understandable paranoia had produced “a general air of mystery.” Invited to weigh in on the menu, this venerable man silently and economically printed the word Petaluma on a piece of paper. Decca understood that “comrades in Petaluma, chicken farmers all, might supply gratis the main course of the banquet,” and with all due secrecy, she scratched out her question to him, “broiled or fried?” If only he hadn’t egged her on.
IN MAY 1944, Decca gave birth to Nicholas Tito Treuhaft. The accoutrements of an infant added another layer of clutter to the books and clippings in piles, the table covered with leaflets-in-process, carbon paper strewn, toys and clothes and groceries stored across their crowded flat. Bob and Decca decided it was time to find a bigger place.
Bob and she brainstormed a theory of child care that would see them through the next few years. Their situation with Mrs. Betts had inspired them to look for live-in help, a baby nurse for Nicky since Dinky was by then in nursery school. Their new home on Clayton Street had three bedrooms. Nicky’s new nurse and her husband would take one room, while their three school-age children would share a room with Dinky. It was just the kind of Communist lifestyle that gave Aranka the shivers.
Muv sent her congratulations on Nicky’s birth, and surprised Decca with a sweet note enclosed from Farve, even though they continued to live apart. Decca hadn’t written to, or spoken with, her father for eight years. His note was affectionate:Just to send you my love and every good wish for him and his future. Some day, when things are in a more settled state, I greatly hope to see you all, and judging from all news and the look of things it seems to me there is some prospect that I may last that long—I should much like to.
Why did he write to Decca after all this time? Muv may still have had some influence, passing on their daughter’s words of sympathy when Farve had suffered some eye problems leading to cataracts. Or perhaps Nancy had—he’d stayed with her intermittently during much of the war, which was at last turning in favor of the Allies. Farve had always been a powerful man, stubborn and self-regarding. Perhaps his brush with infirmity had made him nostalgic. If Decca replied to his note, she did not keep a copy.
In San Francisco, Decca was living in the center of the vortex. She had new friends and a new house and, one month after Nicky’s birth, began a new job as staff fund-raiser at the Oakland branch of the Tom Mooney Memorial California Labor School. This was an adult education center of the kind pioneered by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. It offered courses like History of the Labor Movement, Documentary Photography, and Dance Theatre, as well as free lunches for children. Pele taught a “life drawing class for retired longshoremen and seamen on the beach.”
In August, Paris was liberated. September bro
ught Decca’s twenty-seventh birthday. She felt fit, but even she had to concede that the twice-daily two-hour commute to Oakland on trains and buses was a bit much. Meanwhile, Aranka had been getting herself in trouble. After a whirlwind romance, she had married a man named Al Kliot, whom she later discovered was still regularly seeing his previous girlfriend. Decca and Bob had been sympathetic when she said she had kicked Al out, but when she took him back, Bob wrote to her and told her that he was puzzled: “We’re very much worried that if you don’t break with him completely he will do you great harm.” Ever in organizing mode, in the same letter Decca wanted to know if Aranka could send her some of her lovely hats as a donation for a benefit at the California Labor School?
When the hats arrived, Bob thanked his mother: “Decca loves them . . . the black one is especially super.” He had finally achieved his ambition of joining the law offices of Gladstein, Grossman, Sawyer and Edises. His new firm, he told Aranka, has an “attorney in Reno and can get you a bargain [divorce] about $150.”
IN MAY 1944, Earl Browder, at that time the leader of the Communist Party USA, dissolved and then re-formed the organization as the Communist Political Association, a kind of lobbying special-interest group attuned to the needs of Americans who were also Communists, and distancing its U.S. constituency from its origins and international associations. Browder, a Kansan, had a strategy to promote American Communism as an unthreatening political option, an alternate choice on the ballot. In this vision, the social stigma associated with Communist opposition to the capitalist economic system would subside and eventually become unremarkable. While Browder tried to emphasize the links between Communism and American Revolutionary ideals, there was little evidence in the contemporary landscape that Americans would accept any form of socialism.
In Washington, the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1945 became the first congressional entity established to investigate “subversive” and “un-American propaganda and activities.” Over the next decade, the committee and its FBI partners would cultivate fear of a mythic Red Tide that threatened to overthrow the celebrated American way of life—that of unrestricted markets, individuality, and the pursuit of happiness—to impose a cold, collective, and totalitarian regime as in the Soviet Union.
Browder’s policy was imaginative, but it couldn’t withstand attacks from old enemies outside or a stroppy membership from within. Decca and her friends thought Browder was shelving “the goal of socialism for the foreseeable future.” She agreed with his all-out win-the-war goal, but regarding the new Communist policy, she was “secretly disappointed that its revolutionary goals seemed to have faded away.”
Then in April 1945, Jacques DuClos, hard-line leader of the French Communist Party, denounced Browder as an “Enemy of the People.” As the DuClos letter circulated, some members felt relief; some rolled their eyes. “The DuClos letter” meant stronger ties to Stalin and occasioned very few actual changes in daily life. Decca and Bob saw Stalin as the strong-armed leader of the Red Army, whose main preoccupation would be to rebuild the Soviet Union after a devastating war. Over the coming months, Stalin would begin another bout of purging, and expand the prison gulags. Most people in the West, including Decca, Bob, and their comrades, remained ignorant of these secret, vicious realities. The extent of the persecution would not become common knowledge for several more years. There is some early proof of the Treuhafts’ ambivalence toward the Soviet leadership in the middle name they gave son Nicholas. In 1944 “Tito” was the independent Communist leader of Yugoslavia and a thorn in Stalin’s side. After the American Communist leadership replaced Browder with the hard-line Stalin loyalist William Z. Foster, Decca noted that for members in outlying chapters, the emphasis was renewed commitment:Did I feel we were automatons, blind followers of the Line as handed down from on high? There was an element of that, but it is not the whole picture. Throughout the Party there were intensive discussions preceding these changes; we held meetings that lasted far into the night to study and dissect draft resolutions from the national office, to scrutinize papers submitted by club members, all of which gave me a strong sense of personal involvement in the Party’s national decisions.
San Francisco with its balmy breezes, golden mountains, and bountiful tables was an outpost far, far away from Russia, far from France, and far enough from New York. The newly re-formed Communist Party USA, California branch, would retain its own Western sensibility. Though the members were passionate and principled, their community was smaller, their meetings and cultural activities generally more casual and low-key. Among their membership were doctors, lawyers, teachers, scholars, and merchants. Decca could rely on her comrades for child care. They often shared meals. Though families lived separately and members’ homes were separated—sometimes by many miles—theirs was an intentional community, and they were committed to it.
JUST A FEW days before the DuClos bombshell, Decca heard that her only brother, Tom, had been killed in Burma. Tom had been good-natured, curious, and a remarkably balanced young man. His natural diplomacy had been by necessity sharpened as the one male sibling to six opinionated and energetic sisters. Since her elopement to Spain, Decca and Tom hadn’t exchanged many letters, though the few he had sent had expressed affection. After his death, Diana maintained that Tom had been a member of Mosley’s British fascist party. Decca rejected the claim as slanderous. (In later years, when Oswald Mosley publically returned to the subject of Tom Mitford’s political affiliations, Nancy wrote Decca to commiserate: “Have you noted all the carry-on about Sir Os? . . . I’m very cross with him for saying Tud [Tom] was a fascist which is untrue though of course Tud was a fearful old twister & probably was a fascist when with Diana. When with me he used to mock [Oswald Mosley] & he hated Sir Os no doubt about that.”)
By May 1, 1945, Hitler was dead and World War II virtually over. To paraphrase Uncle Winston, there had been an end to the beginning and a beginning to the end. The end of the hot war arrived with fanfare and confetti, drunken soldiers covering drunken nurses in wet kisses. In Union Square, San Francisco strangers embraced; there was hilarity, euphoria, reunions, parades, and one more push to pulverize Japan. The cold war was beginning. Along with her friends, Decca moved forward. She didn’t like to look back.
ON HIS TOUR of the Inner Hebrides in the 1780s, Samuel Johnson was delighted to find Inch Kenneth “a pretty little island about a mile long and about half a mile broad, all good land.” Over the course of his day trip, he walked the gentle hills, prayed in an ancient ruined chapel, and ceremoniously buried some scattered bones.
In 1938, around 150 years after Johnson visited the island, Decca’s parents, David and Sydney Redesdale, purchased Inch Kenneth and renovated its single Victorian house of a “vaguely castle-like architecture.” They found the island’s microclimate hospitable to vegetables and flower gardens and installed some goats, chickens, and sheep. They kept a boat and an old car to drive between the dock and home. Sydney loved the ocean and boats and was unfazed by the island’s isolation and its frequent dark and rainy weather. She walked everywhere across its compact terrain, enjoying things in their place—all dainty and far from the chaos of world politics.
It had been a blow when she had been denied this harbor for the first few years of the war. It must have been harder still, once she and Farve separated, to see that he could come and go to the island and that he stayed there with Margaret Wright, who had once been the parlourmaid in the house Sydney and her husband shared. When Farve’s cataracts grew worse, he and Margaret left the island for London. As the war wound down, Sydney and Unity were allowed to return to Inch Kenneth, the best place for them to live comfortably and economically. Lord Redesdale had given his son the island sometime earlier, and when Tom died, under Scottish law the property reverted to his sisters. Decca now owned one-sixth of Inch Kenneth.
In May 1945, around the time she first heard of her inheritance, journalists from around the world were in San Francisco to cover the newl
y emergent United Nations. The international movement for peace, historically pushed to the margins of powerful societies, found a home in the fragile new institution. Decca and her friends saw their own platform reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which every member of the new body had voted to accept: The document called for a fair standard of living, medical care, and social justice for all people—“universal and unalienable rights for all members of the human family . . . friendship among nations, racial or religious groups, and the maintenance of peace.”
Over the next decade, a gathering peace movement’s efforts to ban the bomb would be belittled as naive, crackpot, and dangerously red. But in this potent, nearly utopian moment, San Francisco was as close to a garden of peace as it would ever be, its denizens shouldering the pleasant duty of hosting diplomats and reporters from everywhere.
