Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  Comrades were coming and going from coast to coast. Nowhere felt particularly safe. One friend who turned up around that time was Marge Gelders Frantz. She and Decca had first met at one of Virginia Durr’s dinners during the war, when Marge had just started at Radcliffe. She quit soon thereafter to marry Laurent Frantz, a brilliant law student. Both Marge and Laurent were party organizers. When Laurent had returned from service overseas, they had settled in Raleigh, North Carolina, which had originally struck the Frantzes as an oasis of tolerance. They realized their mistake when Laurent was refused the opportunity to take the state bar exam. They were followed around by thugs and harassed on the street. Sick at heart, they loaded everything into their car and drove west, a family of educated, persecuted Joads.

  Marge’s parents had found an inexpensive apartment in the federal housing complex of Codornices Village in Berkeley. The complex had been built during the war to house ten thousand migrant shipyard workers. By a great majority, its occupants were left-wingers, and the area was known for years as an outpost of successful radical organizing. Marge and Laurent had gone to bed that first night in Berkeley exhausted and discouraged. In the morning, they were awoken by trucks with amplified megaphones announcing upcoming meetings for the Independent Progressive Party and the Civil Rights Congress. To Marge, it was simply unimaginable to have found such a secure harbor.

  IN FEBRUARY 1952, Decca’s sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, arrived in California. Decca was thrilled to see Debo, although naturally a bit apprehensive. She hadn’t much time to be reflective. Her sister would have to take her as she found her, particularly busy with campaigns to defend the Smith Act victims, integrate veterans housing, and free Jerry Newson. She had been organizing fund-raisers—a picnic for the People’s Daily World and a benefit Paul Robeson concert.

  The sisters, companions in their childhood-invented “Hons” society, had once been very close. They had kept in contact, but missed each other’s weddings, the births of their children, and assorted sorrows, including—not to understate the case—a world war. When they were children, Decca had wished to run away to join the Communists and Debo had wished to marry a duke. Early in the visit, the two sisters, with so little of their grown-up life in common, relied on their reminiscences. Decca said she and Debo saw themselves “back in the Hons’ cupboard, our secret meeting place at Swinbrook, talking our secret language.” Over the succeeding days, although Decca was always very busy, she was excited to show off the world in which she now moved. Debo—judging from the first letters she wrote from California—seemed stunned by Decca’s new world.

  Decca and friends shared a “fortress mentality,” made necessary, they believed, by the way the citizens of that other, parallel America treated them. They felt their community was threatened with annihilation. It was a harsh time, and the political landscape impossible to explain to those not subject to it.

  Dukes and duchesses are the top tier of British nobility. Their formal title of address is “Your Grace.” The Dukedom of Devonshire holds huge estates in England and Ireland, and the family’s possessions include some of the world’s great art treasures, homes, and paintings. Debo, though well traveled and sophisticated, knew very little of the kind of carefully budgeted life that her sister was then living. Duchesses rarely cleaned their mansions themselves (which Decca agreed was one of the title’s great benefits); their food was typically prepared by others; their own and their children’s clothes were washed and ironed for them. Children had nannies and governesses and sometimes tutors and traditionally were sent away to school. They were not, as Debo found her niece and nephews, zigzagging with dogs and companions through their “little suburban house,” cheek by jowl with toys and books and papers and ephemera. Among Decca’s set, babysitting was a community endeavor, and there was usually some drop-in company at meals—the kids’ friends or some visiting comrades. Every space was usually occupied, every surface covered. At the time of the duchess’s visit, there was another family camping out in the Treuhafts’ basement while they house-hunted in the neighborhood.

  February is the rainy season in Northern California, but on fine days, people often will leave their doors open to the street, and children will run barefoot in the front yards and gardens. On rainy days, a small house can feel cozy or claustrophobic. The Treuhaft home sometimes smelled of wet dog fur, a pastiche of burned pots, children’s unwashed laundry, and bustling activists in close proximity. Its odor was particularly irksome to Debo, who wrote of it to Diana, the one person who would surely have lent a sympathetic ear to the subject of Decca’s decline. Decca’s beautiful complexion had faded; their sister’s American accent was as shocking as the slang she used. Debo didn’t quite know what to think of Bob. And although her nephew Nicky was “rather sweet,” he resembled the urchins in American movies. Only Dinky seemed salvageable—“she is heaven.” These impressions Debo later admitted were all at first sight.

  Over the course of Debo’s visit, both sisters adapted and even enjoyed themselves to some extent. Amused at times by the gap between their worlds, Decca wrote to Muv that she loved having her sister around, and introduced her to many friends, “although they couldn’t quite make each other out.” The Treuhafts hosted a feast (the ticket of that social season) at which the Duchess of Devonshire was guest of honor. At each table, the guests rose one by one to be introduced. They did it “CP fashion,” Decca wrote later, “in which one indicates the area of a person’s political work: ‘This is Andy Johnson, he’s active in the Youth Movement. Phyllis Mander, active in the Peace Committee. Dr. Pierson, active in the CRC.’” The duchess was beautiful and charmed the assembled company (who’d had no idea what to expect) by her curiosity and surprising lack of pretentiousness. Debo could be as funny as her sister and, on Christmas, sent the Treuhafts a formal photo of “herself and Andrew, dressed in ducal robes . . . staring stonily ahead. Under the photo she had written: ‘Andrew & me being active.’”

  AFTER DEBO LEFT in early March, Decca and the CRC joined a pivotal battle to integrate the suburbs. Northern California had absorbed a huge population during the war, but much of its temporary war housing had become dilapidated. Despite a housing boom, most communities remained segregated, enforced by custom and the malevolent legal clause known as a restrictive covenant, which promised the white home-buyer that his or her new neighborhood would remain exclusively Caucasian.

  To Decca, this was the kind of situation for which she’d been training. It wasn’t Mississippi, and here on her home field, she was perfectly prepared. When she heard about the Gary family under threat for moving into a white neighborhood in the nearby town of Richmond, she mobilized her telephone trees, her committees, and her publicity. Within an hour, a dozen carloads of black and white volunteers arrived to help protect the Gary family and protest against segregation in California.

  Wilbur Gary was a black U.S. Navy veteran. He and his wife, Borece, lived with their seven children in an apartment built to house war workers. They looked for a new home, and when a navy friend offered his house in Rollingwood, the Garys made their move into what had previously been an all-white community. The Board of Directors of Rollingwood immediately issued a letter asserting their right to exclude whomever they wished from their neighborhood and offered to purchase the Garys’ home at an inflated price. Their offer was quickly refused.

  On the day the Gary family moved to Rollingwood, a few white neighbors joined Wilbur and his two oldest sons inside their new house. They barricaded the doors and prepared for a siege. Outside, an angry crowd gathered to shout and taunt. Decca and Buddy Green walked through the mob, past a few cops who “stood idly by watching the scene.” Buddy saw an improvised paper cross burning in the front yard and bystanders “throwing garbage and other things.” A reporter on the scene described Borece Gary’s response when someone in the crowd shouted, “‘Get out nigger or we’ll burn your house down.’ Facing the mob, she declared, ‘If you do, then as soon as the ashes coo
l, my family and I will come back and live on the empty lot.’”

  By that evening, over four hundred people came to Rollingwood in caravans from the CRC, the labor unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, local churches, PTAs, and civic organizations; they came with petitions to the governor, to the mayor, asking the board of supervisors to provide around-the-clock protection for the Gary family and their home. Constance Gary, who was nine years old at the time, remembered a troop of brave high school students who joined the vigil, friends of her older brother and sister.

  Two days after the protests began, a leader in the Rollingwood Improvement Association arrived at the Garys’ house “with a petition signed by him and twenty-one other neighbors welcoming the Negro family to their new home.” The opposition never had a prayer. What a rare victory it must have been! The thrill was mitigated only by the impossibility of claiming victory for the party’s role. Any hint of affiliation with the Communist Party could lose Gary his job. Still, Decca wrote, “we wanted to take credit.”

  CHAPTER 18

  IN 1953, DECCA was often engaged in some project or another to raise money or raise awareness for different causes: a concert to protest unfair deportations; a fund drive for the “Let Citizens Travel” campaign (on behalf of those whose passports had been confiscated or denied); a picnic or a dance for the always-financially-strapped People’s Daily World. These causes were crucial, but among Decca’s friends, the most urgent work that year by far was to stop the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. For the Treuhafts and other party members, the international campaign to save the Rosenbergs was a family affair.

  In 1950, Ethel Rosenberg’s younger brother David Greenglass, a low-level employee at the nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico—confessed to the FBI that he had passed secret documents to his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg. Julius and Ethel were arrested and accused of conspiracy to commit espionage. The case against Ethel was slight, but the federal prosecutor’s strategy was to hold her as a political hostage until Julius would make a deal: either to confess and name bigger fish in the conspiracy, or provide enough information to ransom his wife. At their 1951 trial, both Rosenbergs said they were innocent, and would not cooperate. Meanwhile, Ruth Greenglass (David’s wife) testified that Ethel had typed the notes containing the state secrets that David had stolen. This putative connection was all the government needed to declare Ethel an active conspirator, as guilty as her husband.

  Ethel, it has been generally acknowledged by even avid Commie-hunters, committed a mysterious kind of suttee. She might have saved herself, but would not repudiate her husband or allow others to say she had. She and Julius understood that their crime was not that of treason, but of being Communists in America in 1953.

  In 2008, after Ruth’s death, David Greenglass admitted that during his sister’s trial, he and his wife had lied under oath. Ethel Rosenberg had not typed any top-secret documents. (In the fall of 2008, Morton Sobol, age ninety-two and an associate of Julius Rosenberg’s who had served nineteen years for espionage, admitted that he and Julius had passed on some non-nuclear information to the Soviets. They had done so, he said, before the cold war, when the Soviet Union and the United States had been allies.) Ethel had not participated.

  FROM OAKLAND, TWELVE-YEAR-OLD Dinky wrote to Winston Churchill to ask her great-uncle to stop the executions, but he never answered. The catastrophic outcome of the campaign was, for many of the “red diaper” children engaged in it, a traumatic lesson in the raw exercise of power. Many of the Rosenbergs’ young defenders felt like the traumatized refugees of a sacked army. For some, the experience laid bare the obvious imbalance of power between their parents and the great, threatening, adversarial world in which they made their home, went to high school, and listened to Billie Holiday, Bobby Darin, and Howlin’ Wolf. The secrets of the persecuted both terrorized and mobilized them.

  On the day of the execution, June 19, 1953, Carl Bernstein, the future journalist, was nine years old. He stood with his family in front of the White House, amongthousands and thousands of people, the crowd overflowing into Lafayette Square . . . Pictures of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and of their sons, solemnly held aloft. A sense of helplessness and doom mitigated only by faith, by some desperate belief that nothing as terrible as this would be permitted to happen, that some law of humanity or the universe would intervene, that clemency would be granted at the last moment . . . If the phone rang before eight o’clock, it meant that Eisenhower had granted clemency. A radio played. Eight o’clock came and went. Then the phone rang. They were dead. At first people wept quietly. Then everyone in the room was sobbing, wailing, and some people got sick. I remember the man on the radio said that all the lights around Ossining had dimmed when they threw the switch.

  Pele deLappe was with her new husband, Steve Murdock; her nine-year-old son, Pete; and Decca and Bob’s nine-year-old son, Nicky, when they heard the news in the public campgrounds at Yellowstone National Park. Pele described the emotional disconnect: “After a cold two weeks sleeping outside within sight and sounds of bears and the odd moose, we emerged half frozen from the woods in June to face the shocking headline: Rosenbergs executed. How to explain such a horror to two little boys, both of them Jewish? In shock and despair ourselves, we did our inadequate best.”

  Shortly after the Rosenbergs’ execution, Albert Einstein urged “every intellectual called before the committee to refuse to testify, [to] be prepared for jail or economic ruin, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the country’s cultural welfare.” Witnesses and lawyers tried in various ways to speak or read statements that questioned the hearing process, but the powers vested in the committee meant that few defiant words could be heard above the chairman’s gavel.

  IN 1953, WHEN Decca was thirty-six, she and Bob received subpoenas to appear before the federal HUAC hearings in San Francisco. Bob had the idea to build his defense around the proposition that in the atmosphere of fear and shame, few lawyers were willing to sacrifice their own practice and livelihood to defend people accused of subversion. In the weeks leading up to his court appearance, he embarked on a case study to prove the point.

  Instead of engaging a National Lawyers Guild colleague, he made a list of seven prospective defense counselors. His visits to these men recall the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. One attorney demurred on the grounds that he hadn’t enough gravitas. Another, silver-haired and dignified, thought he hadn’t the stamina. A third, energetic, mature, and confident man said yes, he would indeed take on Bob’s case and would relish the opportunity. Several days before the hearing, however, he phoned Bob in distress. His law partner, he said, had threatened to jump out the window if their firm represented Bob in the HUAC hearings. It wasn’t Bob’s politics; it was the scrutiny their firm would receive thereafter by the Internal Revenue Service. There was always a man from the Treasury sitting in all these hearings, taking notes. The law partner would jump, Bob’s would-be attorney said, so fearful was he of a tax audit.

  Decca trekked back to her children’s school to explain their situation. She and Bob would be testifying before HUAC again. They had no idea what consequences there might be. The teachers she met were sympathetic and assured her that they would “give the kids extra care & attention while the hearings were on.”

  In their parents’ absence, Dinky would cope with the assistance of various neighbors and friends. She was a star student in junior high. “The most strongminded and determined child I ever saw once she makes her mind up, she’s just exactly like Esmond,” Decca wrote to Muv. Nicholas was also coming into his own. He was the kind of youngster who went into raptures over gadgets, an experimenter. He was quick and quieter than little Benjy, who when his parents were otherwise occupied, feasted on mustard and jam sandwiches.

  Decca wasn’t called to testify this time, but her subpoena required that she attend all five days of the hearings: a disgraceful spectacle, during which the f
riendly witnesses “served up more than 300 names.”

  The committee counsel’s first question to Bob was, “Are you accompanied by counsel?” Bob replied that he would answer (as opposed to taking the Fifth) and began to read a three-page statement. Statements were typically gaveled down, and a committee member interrupted with, “You’ll have to submit that.”

  “I am answering the question,” Bob pointed out. “I was asked whether I had counsel?” The committee conferred and, to everyone’s surprise, allowed Bob to explain what prevented him from securing the counsel of his choice. “What a shameful thing it was that I, a lawyer, was unable to get counsel, and how much worse,” he went on, for the unfortunate with even fewer connections and expertise. Bob was, Decca wrote, “determined to reveal through his testimony the full extent to which the Committee had succeeded in terrorizing the bar.”

  “Everyone was breathless,” as Bob read his indictment of the committee and its methods. Afterward, “there was terrific cheering & applause,” Decca told Aranka. Her son’s testimony had been heroic, and also historic—a rare triumph for any witness to make it all the way through a prepared statement. There would be only a few times, over the course of a great many hearings nationwide, when an unfriendly witness would get the chance to speak honestly, in effect to disprove the perception that he or she was a hostile demon. Outside the courtroom, Bob’s friends congratulated him. They hoped this day’s work opened a crack in the power of the inquisition. Then they waited like the actors in an opening show to see how the mainstream press would review the performance. Headlines pronounced Bob’s testimony “The Day’s Stormiest.”