by Leslie Brody
What must Bob have thought? Before her mother’s arrival, Decca had worried that Muv’s anti-Semitism would become an issue. It wasn’t. She was courteous and cordial to her daughter’s new husband. For his part, Bob couldn’t get over the “non-Jewish-motherishness” of his mother-in-law. When he mentioned that the Nixon-Mundt bill then under consideration in Congress would threaten Communist Party members with long stays in concentration camps, she replied, “What a pity. But of course I’m quite accustomed to my children going to prison.” Aranka faced with the prospect had said, “How can you do this to me?”
From the pages of The Loved One, Muv had gleaned that a funeral parlor was the American oddity no tourist should miss. She and Decca made plans to visit one together, an excursion that would have a powerful influence on Decca’s later career. Muv also wished to tour a supermarket. Decca had a refrigerator now, large enough for a small cow. California’s hamburgers were like steaks, and its steaks like heifers. Every tomato was as big as the prize-winners in the church fete. To Muv, shopping in the brightly lit and colorful supermarket was like entering some American folk-tale. Twenty years later, Decca would have a walk-on role as a supermarket shopper in the Herbert Ross movie Play It Again, Sam with Woody Allen. In her character’s curiosity and wonder at the overbright, overlarge shelves of merchandise, a viewer can imagine Sydney’s delight, even the inchoate stir-rings of a letter to the Times, which Sydney would send upon her return—heartily recommending that this self-service style be encouraged throughout England.
In May, after a month’s stay with Decca’s family, Muv stopped in New York, where she had dinner with Aranka, an encounter Decca only wished to attend as a fly on the wall. It had seemed so unlikely that those two worlds would ever collide, but now they had and with agreeable results. Aranka admired Sydney as she had Nancy, whom she looked forward to meeting again in Paris.
Soon after Muv arrived home, she and Unity set off for Inch Kenneth. There they resumed old customs. Muv saw to the farm; Unity went fishing. They spent hours sewing and updating their scrapbooks. There were plenty of new newspaper articles to include. Sydney recounted her visit to Decca in detail. One of the things she’d found odd was that in America, people thought it was more important to spend money on a car than on household help.
UNITY WAS HAPPIEST talking about her youth before the war and about her affection for Decca. It was impossible to say when the sisters might meet again. In the United States, there was trouble on the horizon for people of Decca’s political beliefs. The party organization was not yet outlawed, but the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required all union officers to sign loyalty oaths and swear they were not Communists or Communist sympathizers. Nationally, there was a coordinated effort to cleanse the country of its residual Communist menace. The film industry came under much public chastisement for harboring intellectuals of a presumed pink persuasion. In October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities sentenced ten screenwriters (in what came to be known as the Hollywood Ten court case) to jail sentences for refusing to adequately answer the question “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”
Around the same time, eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA were arrested under the Smith Act of 1940 and charged as conspirators. The Smith Act allowed government agents the flexibility to round up dissenters who assembled to protest, or who published antigovernment matter or whom the agents perceived to be in any way advocating or teaching the “desirability, of overthrowing the government” (this extended to the theoretical support of a socialist system of government). The penalties were ten years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. The U.S. Justice Department intended to crush the U.S. Communist Party by rounding up its leaders and subjecting them to long and expensive trials. In the Smith Act trial, the government’s case revealed little evidence of any actual violence or talk of violence, and the case turned on the group’s leadership and organizational influence. These were the men who in 1945 had expelled Earl Browder and dissolved the Communist Political Association to reconstitute it as the Communist Party USA. That series of events was at the heart of the government’s charge of a revolutionary conspiracy. One of the senior partners in Bob’s firm, Richard Gladstein, was a lawyer for the Smith Act defendants and was himself sentenced to six months for contempt of court. Decca organized a rally to support him.
MUV KNEW FROM deep experience how quick and wide the pendulum of politics could swing. She suggested that in a different political season, Decca might come to Inch Kenneth with her children and new husband. (After all, she owned part of the island.) Unity thought she and Decca would probably never meet again. But in any case, her love for Decca “was quite unchanged.” When they had said good-bye in California, Decca asked Muv to give her Boud her love. (In the language Unity and Decca invented when they were children, Boud meant “pal.”)
Not long after Muv and Unity had returned to Inch Kenneth, Unity fell ill with a fever. Because of their isolation and the bad weather, it took a few days before their physician could treat her. He arranged to move her by special chartered boat to West Highland Cottage Hospital in Oban, where she died on May 28, 1948, ten years to the day after Decca’s daughter Julia died. She was thirty-three years old. The cause of death as it appears on Unity’s death certificate is “Purulent Meningitis, Cerebral Abscess, Old gun-shot wound” to the head.
A decade after her sister’s death, Decca recognized that understanding her sister’s actions might not be possible: “It is perhaps futile to try to interpret the actions of another—one may be so completely wrong.” And if this observation seems to dismiss the efforts of most early-twentieth-century art and social science, it also rings true in the wake of grief. Decca nevertheless goes on, as people do, to try to explain: “But it always seemed to me that this last really conscious act of [Unity’s] life, the attempt at self-destruction, was a sort of recognition of the extraordinary contradictions in which she found herself, that the declaration of war merely served as the occasion for her action, which would in any case have been inevitable sooner or later.”
CHAPTER 15
SOON AFTER OPENING his own East Bay law practice, Bob had a full schedule of cases defending black youths against police brutality. In those first postwar years, all the Oakland Police were white. A lot of police officers and prison guards had migrated from the rural South during the war, and many of them held the mind-set that no matter who or why, a white man was always superior. Oakland gained a reputation for being a Western interpretation of a Jim Crow town. Bob’s work gave him a front-row seat witnessing the abuse of power.
Common occurrence on a Friday night was for cops to grab a black man who had cashed his paycheck in a bar and gotten drunk. “Two policemen would get the drunk into a patrol car, clean out his wallet . . . throw him into the slammer,” Bob said. There were never any witnesses—at least none who would come forward, and he represented a “sickening number” of similar cases. Uprooting such corruption in the police department would have required the commitment of a district attorney willing to investigate and eventually bring charges. On that front, Bob was politically contravened and personally challenged for years to come. Playing out a microversion of right-versus-left national politics, there began a long vendetta between Bob and the Alameda County district attorney, J. Frank Coakley. Bob’s law practice would bring cases of civil rights violations and police brutality, which Coakley would invariably oppose. Coakley’s was an elected position (a sinecure, it seemed to political opponents), which he held for approximately twenty-two years. He was a dedicated conservative with a large support base and the reliable endorsement of the Oakland Tribune.
Around this time, it occurred to Bob and Decca that the financial and emotional expense of her staying home far outweighed the cost of child care. (The family couldn’t rely as it once had on trading accommodation for day care. As the children grew, their babysitters became more conventional and expensive.) The party’s policy encouraged members to find emplo
yment in a nearby “mass” organization and become a part of its decision-making process, in schools, hospitals, factories, or stores—wherever labor organizing might be done. Decca had this in mind as she considered how to approach her next job. With the indefatigable energy and the tough hide of a natural reporter, she hadn’t given up on becoming a journalist. She could make cold calls with insouciance, engage strangers to open up, get the inside scoop in a trice. When offered a trial on the Women’s Pages of the People’s Daily World, she chose to decline. Higher-ups with clout might have applied pressure on her behalf if they’d wanted her on the paper’s news reporting or editorial staff, but local leaders had her in mind for a different job. They thought her talents in organizing, fund-raising, and writing better suited to the local office of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC).
The national CRC organization was originally formed to protest the persecution of Communists and to defend the victims of white supremacists. The East Bay chapter (for which Bob was also volunteer counsel) was dedicated to opposing police brutality. Its defense of the subjects of segregation and prejudice ran from protesting blackface minstrel shows at an Elks club to defending youths accused of capital crimes. It also actively opposed housing covenants and protected families moving into previously all-white communities. To do that, it often relied on an integrated bodyguard of young black activists, inner-city ministers and churchwomen, white professionals, suburban homemakers, and a corps of volunteer muscle.
Decca couldn’t deny the pleasure of being recognized for her talents in schmoozing, recruiting, and fund-raising. “Nobody made Decca do anything she didn’t want to do,” Dobby said. “If she hadn’t liked it, she could have left and looked for newspaper work elsewhere.” But the CRC and Decca were made for each other, and she would stay with them for almost a decade.
Decca joined the CRC as assistant to Executive Director Hursel Alexander, a black veteran organizer who impressed her with his “mesmeric ability to wring the last ounce of effort from those within his orbit.” Their office was a pulsar with Decca at her organizational zenith, and according to the artistic Pele, her skill was in “grinding down on people, intimidating, to coax you into doing what she thinks ought to be done.”
Alexander’s primary focus was to compile evidence of Oakland’s police brutality sufficient to persuade a state commission to investigate. He shared Bob’s observation “that there was nobody in the [police] department to put any kind of stop at all to the unbridled brutality, hatred really, on the part of the police, toward the Black citizenry here.” As Alexander’s assistant, Decca was to gather testimonies from victims and witnesses. She was quick and curious and a good listener, going wherever someone would talk and trying to get them to do so on the record. She visited people’s homes, met them in churches, pool halls, taverns, diners, jails, and hospitals, and waited in her car outside their places of work. Her investigations took her to the run-down, dingy waterfront of dollar-a-night motels and whorehouses and into the kinds of bars where people went when they didn’t want to be found. This could be hard, and it was certainly risky for her and for witnesses who had so much at stake.
To find her witnesses, she would post leaflets around town with attention-getting summaries of the events she wanted confirmed (“Thugs in Uniform”; “Defenseless Negro Victims of Police Brutality”; “It Can Happen Here”). As she went along, she taught herself the art of the interview. Eventually, she would memorize her questions, so she would rarely have to look down at her notes and break the flow. She heard tales of assaults, unjustified arrests, and various other humiliations, after which she found it “hard to describe adequately the monstrous beastliness, authority clothed in nightmare garb that our investigations disclosed.”
Buddy Green, a young reporter for the People’s Daily World and CRC board member, would occasionally help Decca set up interviews and often accompanied her. They made an odd couple—the thoughtful newsman from rural Mississippi, who was black, and the funny, energetic English lady, who some people assumed was a war bride. The combination was effectively disarming, like a BBC mystery set in a West Oakland bar. Both Buddy and Decca were autodidacts, and in the hours spent waiting in hope for a witness, each learned a great deal about the contrasting world from which the other had fled. She was a curiosity in the bars, tolerated for her persistence by men who didn’t have a lot of energy for humoring white ladies. Maybe she didn’t know that getting involved was just the same as painting a target on your back. She did understand, and she commiserated, but this had to stop somewhere. Won’t you be the one? she would ask. Once, Decca tried to track down an alibi witnesses by the name T-Bone. Trolling the portside outposts of lost men, she sang her plaintive refrain: “Do you know T-Bone? Anybody here seen ol’ T-Bone?”
Decca and Alexander would periodically present their mounting evidence files to the chief of police, a man named Divine, “a singularly glib, smooth-tongued individual” whose behavior was discordant with his name. Alexander kept up the pressure, petitioning Sacramento until finally a state commissioner came to town. Decca wrote that this investigation was, significantly, “the first time in the history of the nation that a specific probe [was] conducted into the overall practices of a major police department toward minority groups.” The commission examined the files and heard testimonials from alleged victims, witnesses, ministers, and lawyers, many of whom Decca had wrangled and assembled.
The commission members eventually issued a report that they found only “some degree of truth,” a finding that Decca, Bob, and Alexander all considered a grave underestimation. It was also a personal disappointment that they had to carry back to the many others who had shown up and testified. In the red-baiting years ahead, as the presumed link between civil rights and subversion would be hammered home, the Oakland Police’s and the CRC’s positions would become further entrenched and antagonistic. The Civil Rights Congress would be labeled a Communist front organization, added to the U.S. attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. And in the milieu that assured that no good deed went unpunished, the state committee’s chief investigator on the Oakland investigation would lose his job for having “cooperated with the CRC.”
IN 1949 THE campaign against Oakland’s police brutality found its marquee case in Jerry Newson, an eighteen-year-old black shoeshine worker accused of murdering a pharmacist and his assistant. By this time, Alexander had left the Bay Area and Decca was the CRC’s East Bay executive secretary. The way Bob told it, one morning over breakfast, they saw the news of Newson’s arrest:Decca scooted down to the address that the paper gave . . . and found the place surrounded by police. The boy was in jail but the aunt and uncle were there. Decca got in, got through the police, and talked to the aunt and uncle. Police were searching the place for guns and whatnot. She talked to the Newsons and she offered legal help. She didn’t know anything about the case, but these people wanted help.
Bob took on Newson’s case. The young man’s first conviction was overturned on appeal, and two further trials ended in hung juries. In Newson’s defense, Bob argued that not only had his client been elsewhere at the time of the murder, but Newson’s confession had been forced, and the ballistic evidence offered by the police faked. District Attorney Frank Coakley, with the editorial backing of the Oakland Tribune (for whom this case represented a bonanza in sales), pressed for a guilty verdict. When a ballistics expert testified that the prosecution’s trumped-up case had no real evidence, Coakley had to dismiss the murder charges.
Bob’s law practice was one of the few still willing to defend loyalty cases. Successful outcomes were “few and far between.” Once impugned in the public eye as a lawyer who defends Communists or a red lawyer, Bob found his opportunities to defend those accused of nonpolitical offenses (at more competitive rates) radically reduced. In that red-baiting atmosphere, his cases’ frequent losses, huge expenses, and short rewards made his law firm a losing proposition.
Despite Bob’s limited income, Decca—who had
started working part-time for the CRC at a small salary—soon stopped taking one at all. This renunciation seemed proof to suspicious comrades that there was Mitford money available to her, but that wasn’t the case. Decca had looked at the books and made an austerity program. If she and Bob lived frugally, they could stretch one salary to cover child care and household expenses.
The family never had a new car, and they had to budget carefully, but the blacklist was ruining others in far worse ways. Decca and Bob were Marxists, and fair pay for work was a central theme. Decca was a vigilant saver, proud budgeter, and smart shopper. As a family, she and Bob took pride in eschewing and ridiculing the must-have materialist possessions advertised. They had more in common with the rationers and budgeteers of postwar Britain. But they weren’t made of stone. During the CRC years, Decca’s inability to contribute more to the household budget was “a source of nagging irritation” for her. “Bob didn’t mind, but I did,” she said.
When Aranka first visited the newlywed Treuhafts’ home in San Francisco, she had sought to advise her daughter-in-law on a great many practical matters. Bobby needed to be pushed, to set high goals, to make his fortune if Decca was ever to get a fur coat, jewelry, a big house for the children, or a swimming pool. At first, Decca, on her best behavior, listened avidly. But one morning, she’d had enough, and as Bob left for his office, Decca leaned out the window and (to Aranka’s horror) yelled after him, “Get to work, you lazy good-for-nothing bum! How do you think you’ll ever amount to anything? I want a new coat! I want a car! Off with you!”
