by Leslie Brody
By early 1950, Aranka had adapted to her son’s unconventional family with some success and periodic lapses. She visited regularly from New York with her suitcases full of food and presents and, as one of their few regular emissaries from the outside world, brought welcome news of Nancy, whom she occasionally saw on her business trips to Paris.
Aranka made a habit of donating to her daughter-in-law’s causes, contributing money and, sometimes, lovely hats, which the CRC would sell at benefit garage sales. Through her New York Park Avenue store, she distributed postcards that advertised a very Bob-like poem:Whatever fashion may decree
Skirts above, below the knee
Topless dress, or dress with bust
Your new Aranka hat’s a must!
She was an adoring grandmother, though she thought the kids a bit wild. She tried not to dwell on Bob’s lost earning potential or to take offense when Decca teased her for her materialism or for babying Bobby. Once, on a visit when the Treuhaft house was full of neighbor children, Aranka lamented, “I sent my son to Harvard he should baby-sit for a longshoreman’s child?” Even Aranka laughed when she realized how snobbish that sounded. She and Bob had a jokey, sweet relationship, but Aranka was never quite sure how to break through to her daughter-in-law: “Oh Decca . . . I wish I was black like Jerry Newson and Leadbelly. Then you would love me.”
CHAPTER 16
THE REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION’S vile accusations of “twenty years of treason” under Roosevelt (associating New Deal policies with left-wing, un-American ideas) put the Democrats on the defensive. The new Truman administration went all out to prove right off the bat that it would not be soft on Communism. To win elections, the Truman campaign would sweet-talk the Southern segregationists, prosecute Alger Hiss, and hire many more special agents for the FBI.
On February 9, 1950, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, gave a speech in West Virginia, claiming there were Communist Party members working in the State Department. McCarthy never felt the need to hold back. Communism was “a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI and McCarthy’s twin in hyperbole, agreed that here was “the most evil, monstrous conspiracy against man since time began.” McCarthy was like a shiny, new forged shield to preserve the status quo. As represented in the media, Communist men were shifty and hairy, women cruel or sexless; both genders brain-washed from childhood to reject God, the blandishments of luxury, and all temptation to be happy. The Communist mind was a sorcerer’s mind with vague, extensive powers that the senator from Wisconsin could only hint at.
The bell for the witch hunt officially rung, the roundup commenced. If Communists had, as McCarthy insisted, insinuated themselves into the corridors of power, they might be anywhere, anytime. They could threaten your dear old mother, let your flag touch the ground, and poison your apple pie. They were to be tracked, hunted, cornered then publically shamed and, when possible, made to recant to the satisfaction of the tribunals before which they were required to appear. The consequence of these hearings was to demonstrate a national conformity of thought. Capitalism was not just the economic system; it was the only mental position acceptable for the American Way of Life. Anyway, that’s how Decca saw it.
To New Deal liberals like Virginia and Clifford Durr, the senator from Wisconsin was “crazy as a bedbug—just a wild-eyed demagogue.” A witch hunt begins in pervasive fear, and as Virginia Durr came to view it, McCarthy “scared the United States out of its wits . . . You couldn’t go to a church meeting or to Sunday school that somebody didn’t get up and denounce godless communism.” Lillian Hellman also weighed in: “You couldn’t possibly have guessed, unless you were mentally disturbed, that there would come into being such a phrase as ‘premature anti-Fascist.’” “Skin-color blindness” was another sure sign of subversion. The connection was officially articulated by Albert Canwell, chairman of the Washington State Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities: “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is inequality of wealth, there is every reason to believe that person is a Communist.”
Cedric Belfrage called the era The American Inquisition. The Time of the Toad was Dalton Trumbo’s name for it. To Hellman, it was Scoundrel Time. Virginia Durr called it a reign of terror, but she also called it ridiculous and went on to say:Here we were blaming Russia for being a totalitarian dictatorship. We had fought Nazism and fascism and the persecution of Jews. Well, we put ourselves on the forked stick. The whole basis of the cold war was that Communism meant dictatorship and capitalism meant democracy. How could anyone say that capitalism was the best system in the world when the whole southern part of the United States was segregated and Negroes had no rights at all?
McCarthy was livid, avid, nonsensical, and running amok. The times were dire and the threats were very real. Liberals like Virginia defended their Communist friends, but not everyone was as willing to go out on a limb. There were journalists like Murray Kempton and I. F. Stone, both of whom were critical but fair, and the editor and writers for the magazine Dissent, who objected to the escalating federal attack on civil liberties in the courtroom and legislatively. There were individuals who spoke out on behalf of the heretics, and many of these defenders were from the same pool as those who objected to the Japanese internment camps during World War II: Quakers and Unitarians and Catholic lay workers and some rabbis who felt unthreatened by deportation.
To people of similar political interests and nonjoiners—who, given some encouragement, might have been natural allies—Communist Party members could seem like stuck-up, impatient, high-handed hacks, unyielding on the righteousness of their position to the point of boring their audience silly (notwithstanding their deadly puritanism). Party members could seem comical in their superauthoritarian approach, a bunch of tin-pot despots. Still, among former members and other kinds of “small c” communists—socialists, Trotskyites, anarchists—had some defenders, on principle.
Party communities varied from place to place, and the Bay Area attracted a noticeably more freewheeling crowd, but they rarely if ever made any institutional effort to mend fences with other lefty factions. An amorphous group of fellow travelers met in San Francisco through classes at the Tom Mooney Memorial California Labor School, at Izzy Gomez’s bar, and the Flor D’Italia restaurant in North Beach. Many of these nonassociated reds (some of them artists and poets) who identified with the American rebel tradition of Wobblies (members of the Industrial Workers of the World) and anarcho-syndicalism, considered the American Communist Party a walking antique.
DECCA SAID OAKLAND provided scope for her “subversive nature.” She wrote that from the “days of the Truman-McCarthy era, when we first moved to Oakland, I personally enjoyed a sense of hand-to-hand combat with our neighbors, the city’s administration, its police department, its monopoly all-powerful newspaper The Oakland Tribune, that could only be possible in a city that is essentially a small town grown big, where vendetta can flourish and become all-absorbing.” The Treuhafts’ “vendetta” with the district attorney, which began with the Newson trial, would become, in Decca’s words, “a mutual enmity that flourished and grew over two decades.” District Attorney Coakley, who had prosecuted Jerry Newson, was seen to be in the pocket of a local media baron. Decca, the daughter of an English baron, found in this petty warlord’s abuse of power a hypocrite made to order. Coakley’s ineptitudes begin with an anecdote that sounds like a comedy routine about two lawyers who meet at an Oakland jail. Discovering a hidden microphone in the area where counselors conferred with clients, one lawyer objected loudly. “That mike wasn’t put there for you,” the second lawyer said. “It was meant for Treuhaft.”
Decca found innovative ways to needle Coakley. One day in the Oakland Tribune, she saw that there was a house for sale on Coakley’s block, an all-white neighborhood. Knowing of a black family (the Gui
tons) who wanted to buy the house, she persuaded a young lawyer in Bob’s firm and his wife (the Saunderses) to front for the Guitons. (This meant that the Saunderses would initially meet with the buyers, but once the sale was in process, the Guitons would purchase the house.) Around that time, Virginia Durr described Decca, when she dressed to impress, as looking like a beautiful, young Queen Mary. Decca went along with the prospective “buyers” to meet the sellers at their home, and in her “best Aranka hat . . . played the part of their English aunt.”
In high aristo camouflage, Decca beguiled the snobbish owner. She complimented her hostess on the delicious tea and quizzed her about the neighborhood. This was a very special community, their hostess crowed, very high-quality people. Our district attorney, Mr. Coakley, chief among them. Decca was delighted to hear it, and after negotiating down the asking price, they closed the deal.
On moving day, Decca couldn’t resist going along to see the previous and real new owners meet for the first time. She recalls how the owner turned,her face contorted with tears of pure rage . . . I had betrayed her trust in me; how could I do such a terrible underhanded thing? I asked why, since she had moved out of the neighborhood, it could conceivably make any difference to her whether her house was now occupied by the Saunderses or the Guitons. Because, she said, the neighbors, such lovely people, would feel she had let them down; she would never be able to hold her head up again in decent society. I coldly replied that she and her lovely neighbors were contemptible bigots, and that if she did not leave immediately, I should be obliged to summon the district attorney from across the street to arrest her for disturbing the peace.
Soon after, Coakley put his house on the market and installed his family in a grander home. In the courthouse, he grumbled to another lawyer, “That pinko Treuhaft outsmarted me this time!”
THROUGH THAT CONTENTIOUS time, absorbed and occupied as she was, she daydreamed about visiting England. She wanted to show her past life to Bob and longed for her family to meet her husband and her children. She even considered patching things up with her father (if he would agree not to aggravate things by insulting Bob or her children). It had been such a long time since she’d been there—“home,” she still called it from time to time. So in the spring, and with Muv’s help, she started to make plans to travel.
“Could you possibly ring up the Daily Worker next time you’re in London & ask them whether they know of any interesting mass meetings or demonstrations in Paris scheduled for late Sept. or early October?” she asked her mother. Muv replied that she thought she could not, although she would be pleased to help with accommodations.
By July 1950, it looked as if their family trip to Europe would have to be postponed. The McCarran Act passed in Congress, over a Truman veto. It imposed a wide set of discriminating restrictions on the civil rights of Communists living in the United States. Under the new regulations, Communists would be required to register as subversives. They would not be allowed to use their passports. Further legal restrictions dictated where they could work and their use of the U.S. postal system. Veterans with Communist affiliations were refused the right to live in public housing. One clause, authorizing presidential powers in the case of invasion, insurrection, or war, established detention camps where subversives, spies, and saboteurs might be detained. The logistics were secret, but Decca and her friends anticipated a system of deportation like that employed against Japanese Americans during World War II to distant concentration camps.
Under these circumstances, Decca wrote to her mother to explain the postponement of the trip: “I believe there is now a very immediate danger of people being rounded up & jailed here, and of course we wouldn’t want to be away if that should happen.”
BOB’S LAW PRACTICE was solvent, thanks to the publicity he had received as counsel to Jerry Newson. A steady stream of civil rights and police brutality cases kept him busy. If Decca and Bob felt stigmatized as Communists or sympathizers by the mainstream white community, their work in the area’s black neighborhoods included supporters who, Decca said, “empathized with us as members of yet another persecuted minority.”
Their work provided them with a special kind of passage across Oakland and the East Bay. Their home was often a fluid, crowded interchange of children and friends of various races and backgrounds. Across the bridge, in San Francisco, such enlightened convergence was more common. Given that connections between blacks and whites were often socially if not legally forbidden, having normal friendship was a tactical and moral triumph.
In January 1951, the Treuhafts moved into a bigger house and bought their first TV. Now, like most of America, they could watch the McCarthy hearings and I Love Lucy. Around this time, Decca found another important friend in Barbara Kahn. Ephraim Kahn was the Treuhafts’ family doctor. His wife, Barb, was a sophisticated Vassar graduate whose intelligent, dry wit made her “a perfect foil for Decc.” Decca called both Barb and Eph “sparkplugs” in the CRC.
Decca had a full, fast, busy life, as characterized by the exclamatories (Rush! Essential! Imperative!) that headed much of her mail. Every day, there were new alerts of leftists under attack, requests for more money needed for defense campaigns, more leaflets to mail, protests to announce, petitions to circulate. She was good at what she did, but she did it all the time and was starting to tire of the routine. It was satisfying to feel competent and useful, but there just wasn’t as much adventure as before. Was it that she was older? She was thirty-three. The party was squarely opposed to adventurism, considering it a manifestation of left-wing infantilism. But left-wing infantilism was the spark that lit her spirit from time to time and gave her joy.
Meanwhile, she wasn’t getting on with the thing she’d hoped to do—write. She rarely found the time to revise what she might scrawl in a rush, although she took care with her personal letters when she could. Even first drafts seemed pretty good to her. Then one day in her mail, she found an imperative to her liking, which would shortly send her off on an adventure and require that she write seriously.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Willie McGee, a black man convicted of raping a white woman, was sentenced to die. Decca had no doubt that McGee’s confession had been forced and his trial unjust and inadequate. When one of Bob’s law partners, Aubrey Grossman, went to Jackson as part of a delegation to support McGee’s appeal, a group of segregationists had attacked Grossman in his hotel room and then harassed him all the way to the hospital (where he had needed sixteen stitches in his head). Grossman carried home firsthand tales of McGee’s case and the brutal mood in Jackson. Mississippi was the new battleground, the center of something magnetic. Decca wanted to be a frontline soldier again, and this was the moment when motive met opportunity. New evidence had come to light: Williametta Hawkins, the accuser, and McGee had had a consensual affair, which she had not wanted to end.
The imperative that Decca received was a request from the CRC’s national leadership that she assemble a quota of four women to participate in a nationwide delegation of white women to travel to Mississippi. She was ready to take a leave from local politics and family concerns, and she went all out to comply.
Decca and her friends recognized that McGee’s story, like the Scottsboro case (in which nine black teen-agers wrongly accused of raping two white women were unjustly imprisoned) had the potential to move people. With enough support, their campaign could influence policy and result in more civil rights protection nationally. Things were changing. Black soldiers fighting in Korea were rejecting the old status quo and demanding equal rights in the armed forces and back home. More than anything, the McGee case was a human tragedy. Decca spoke to Grossman, read the literature, and wrote leaflets and resolutions, but it was really when she heard McGee’s wife, Rosalee, speak that “the realities of Mississippi began to come alive” for her. The CRC set up speaking engagements for Rosalee across the country. In churches, trade union halls, and private homes, her indignation and eloquence moved her audience. Decca thought she was “on
e of the bravest people” she’d ever met.
By the spring of 1951, Willie McGee’s attorneys, Bella Abzug of New York and John Coe of Florida, had tried the case three times, and each trial had concluded with a verdict of guilty. While the defense petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, the campaign rested on a national call for clemency. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions asking for justice, for freedom, for mercy—all of which the governor denied. Decca and her friends believed that by visiting Jackson themselves, they might influence local residents to pressure their governor. They had the optimistic, grand idea that by speaking one-on-one to locals, they might change hearts and minds. The trial had been so tainted, the new evidence so clarifying, that anyone who learned the real facts couldn’t help but join the outcry. At the same time, Decca saw their journey as an opportunity to attack the underlying roots of the maddening system of segregation. They would talk about the dual standard of justice in the courts and, most importantly, “challenge the rape myth that every Negro man is a potential rapist and any act of intercourse between races is rape.” From the contemporaneous reports that Decca filed about her travels to Mississippi, she and her comrades planned to counter this “cornerstone of jim-crow ideology” by relying on another myth: “the sanctity of white womanhood,” which presumed that a respectable white woman was unassailable as long as she played her role and avoided disgrace. The four Communist women intended to disarm their opposition by dressing in distinctly feminine styles (seamed stockings and flowered hats) and acting at first with modesty and discretion.
Even as Hoover’s FBI and other scourges warned the citizenry of reds under beds or demons in the dark, Decca and friends dabbled in the language and imagery of the hero’s journey. There would be challenges and ordeals. The territory was a dangerous one, patrolled by monsters in Klansmen’s sheets. In disguise, Decca and company would stride among an oppressed population terrified by the giants of segregation: Ku Klux Klan dragons and vicious, tabloid trolls. At the time, Decca called Mississippi a “concentration camp of the mind.”
