Jessica Mitford and Me

I did not know Jessica Mitford— who was dubbed “the Queen of the Muckrakers”– for long, but I knew her well. In the 1990s, shortly before my biography of Abbie Hoffman was published I decided that I wanted to write a biography of “Decca,” as she was known. I had met her in 1984 when I invited her to speak in a lecture series at Sonoma State University (SSU) devoted to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. I remember that she talked in a large classroom to the students and a few faculty members about the time that she was hired to teach at San Jose State University SJSU, a part of the California State University (CSU) system. She was required by the administration to provide her fingerprint to the campus police and swear to uphold the Constitution.

(At SSU, she also held a seminar and shared some of the tips necessary for a muckraker. What was essential, she said, was to create a blueprint that would show the author how the story would be written, the main sources, the audience and the style or tone. All the above before the writer wrote the lead or even provided a working title for the piece. Good advice!)

The whole rigmarole with the SJSU administration reminded Decca, she explained, of McCarthyism, which she knew all too well, along with the loyalty oaths and the kind of police state envisioned by Orwell in his novel, which American liberals insisted offered a portrait of the kind of totalitarian state that existed in the USSR. Decca wasn’t as sure as they were. She thought, as I did, that the world of Big Brother also applied to England and the US. Orwell hedged, though his experiences at the BBC provided him with ammunition when he sat down to write his novel. As Decca knew, the so-called “Free World” could be as totalitarian as the world behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1984, I was teaching in the English Department at Sonoma State University (SSU). When I was hired, I was required, as Decca was, to surrender my fingerprints and pledge my allegiance. If I did not do so the university president told me I would not be paid. So I gave my fingerprints to the campus police and swore allegiance. This was immediately after I was interviewed for a teaching position as a lecturer and was asked what I hoped the students would learn. “A sense of dignity,” I told the committee. I was no doubt thinking of myself as well as the students and felt that the obligation to provide fingerprints stripped me of some, albeit not all, of my dignity.

Decca wanted to protect her fingerprints and preserve her First and Fifth Amendment rights. As she explained to the 1984 audience, she battled the president of SJSU, but then gave in and cooperated, as far as her fingerprints were concerned, though she was not proud of her acquiescence. McCarthyism wasn’t dead and buried, she insisted. Indeed, it could return at any moment.

To persuade Decca that I was a suitable candidate to write her biography, I drove to her home in Oakland on a warm morning, met her husband Bob Treuhaft, a lefty lawyer, and handed her a copy of the manuscript of my Abbie biography, which had not yet been published. Decca announced that she was taking me to lunch at Oliveto, an upscale restaurant close by. Soft shell crabs were in season and she was eager to order them from the menu. So was I. Then she waved a check in front of my face. It was from a funeral director’s organization in New Jersey and to the best of my recollection, it was made out to Jessica Mitford for $15,000.

There was a back story. An underling at the New Jersey funeral directors association had invited Decca to speak at the annual convention, not realizing that her best-selling book, The American Way of Death, was a take-down of the whole funeral industry. When a superior learned about the invitation, he fumed and fussed and canceled the invitation. Decca swung into action, which was what she loved to do. She didn’t “steal this funeral,” but she did something that the author of Steal This Book might have done. She enlisted the help of her husband, who brought a lawsuit against the funeral directors and pointed out that they had signed a contract with Jessica and that she was entitled to a percentage of the fee she was to be paid.

A check soon arrived in the mail. Once it was cashed, Decca and I headed to Oliveto and feasted on soft shell crabs and drank a bottle of chilled white wine. Then events happened fast and furious. I was hired to teach full-time in the communication studies department at SSU. Soon afterward, when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, I called Decca to check in with her. My Abbie Hoffman book still had not yet appeared in print.

A long-time supporter of the Soviet Union, Decca insisted that its collapse was one of the great tragedies of the second half of the 20^th century. She was a communist to the bitter end. I knew old lefties who felt the same way she did. For them, the demise of the Soviet Union was the end of an era and the culmination of history that started in 1917 with the Russian Revolution.

Decca died in 1996. I was too busy teaching and revising my Abbie biography to consult with her on the book about her that I wanted to write. When I read about her death, I contacted Bob Treuhaft, who told me that Decca had read my Abbie manuscript and on the last page wrote, “I do not want Jonah Raskin to write my biography.” It was like a voice from the grave. At the time, I didn’t really understand why she came to that conclusion.

Now, having read Carla Kaplan’s comprehensive biography, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper; $40), I have a much better idea. I think that Decca did not want me to do to her what I did to Abbie Hoffman and what she did to many of the people she wrote about, which was to hold them up to scrutiny and view them through the lens of satire and with a sense of humor.  She certainly didn’t want me to mock her or to reveal some of the contradictions in her life as the daughter of wealthy right-wing Brits who didn’t really reject her class privileges but who supported the cause of the poor, the exploited and the oppressed, and along the way denounced the American penal system. The US version of the Gulags.

What Decca didn’t want me to do, Carla Kaplan has done in Troublemaker. It’s true that Kaplan’s book veers on hagiography, but it also exposes the rough patches in Decca’s marriage to Treuhaft, her dramatic mood swings, alcoholism, attraction to fame and fortune, her fierce attachments to her beloved fans and her breakups with long time lefty friends like Marge Franz, a union and working class organizer with a belief in feminism, a cause that had little if any appeal for Decca.

In the chapter “Writing About the Dead,” Kaplan notes, “Decca was a loyal person, and not very sexual.” What the hell does that mean? And why do we have to know anything at all about the role that sex did or didn’t play in her life? Beats me.

According to Kaplan, Franz thought that Decca had sold out. The evidence suggests that she frittered away her talents by writing travel pieces, book reviews and fluff for which she was well paid. After all, a writer has to live. One becomes addicted to seeing one’s name in print. That was true for Decca.

Kaplan gets a lot that right in Troublemaker, but she gets a lot that’s just plain wrong. In the chapter titled “The Making of a Muckraker,” Kaplan writes, “as much as Decca loved being admired, she thrived on being attacked.” In fact, as Troublemaker makes abundantly clear, she loved to go on the offensive and to attack, attack, attack, whether it was against the funeral industry, the US penal system or institutions and organizations that deceived and bilked the public.

She thought that many young reporters didn’t go for the jugular, as she did. There’s some truth in that view. Some magazines, including Mother Jones, wanted to capitalize on Decca’s fame and urged her to “make more of herself” in her articles. She couldn’t replicate herself or improve on the book that made her famous.  

Indeed, The American Way of Death was and still is a masterpiece of reporting. It not only exposed the funeral industry. It also revealed the American fascination with death and dying, just as American soldiers and the Vietnamese began to die on battlefields and Pentagon body counts lied.

I have not had much sympathy for the three Weathermen who blew themselves up in March 1970, but Decca’s reactions to that event and later specifically to Kathy Boudin’s role in the attempted robbery of a Brinks Armored Vehicle in 1981 were over the top and totally lacking in empathy.

To Black author, Maya Angelou, Decca wrote, “Kathy has managed in one deft moment to rehabilitate the discredited FBI, possibly ensure passage of the ‘terrorist’ bill which would re-establish HUAC in a new and more palatable form, plus senseless murdering of the three people.” Kaplan quotes from that letter on page 396 and provides a footnote. Decca added that Boudin’s actions were “WICKED and STUPID.” “Stupid,” yes, but “wicked?” Probably not. “Wicked” sounds very British and upper-class.

In some ways, Decca’s reaction to the Brinks’ job was typical of some, though not all, Old Leftists who saw agent provocateurs under every bed and around every corner and were eager to denounce what they called, after Lenin, “Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.”

As Kaplan shows, Decca was sympathetic to Dr. Benjamin Spock and the anti-war activists known as the “Boston Five” who were on trial for conspiracy, but she doesn’t seem to have been sympathetic to the New Left and the women’s liberation movement. In curious ways, she was stuck in the past; her politics had been formed in the 1930s, and especially by the Spanish Civil War, when for a time the only two meaningful choices in the political world seemed to be between Communism and Stalin on the one hand, and Fascism and Hitler on the other hand.

Some of Decca’s own family members were pro-Hitler. Her mother was devoted to the Führer. “Nazism is from every point of view preferable to Communism,” she wrote. Sister Unity Mitford adored Hitler and became part of his inner circle. As Kaplan rightly points out, “Many British aristocrats had fascist sympathies.” Churchill wanted Hitler and Stalin to destroy one another and for the British Empire to reap global rewards.

Mitford saw through that horrendous British upper-class identification with the Nazis; she was a lifelong anti-fascist and not only premature but right on time. For that stance, I admire her greatly. I also admire her doggedness as a reporter, her willingness to do most anything to get the story, even if it meant going underground and adopting “unethical” practices. To fight corporations, one had to be down and dirty, she insisted. That’s what she told me again and again. I agreed with her and still do.

Decca rejected the cult of so-called “objectivity” and joked, “I’ve always had an objective.” In that way, she was part Yippie. And Abbie Hoffman was part Decca, especially in the essays he wrote when he was a fugitive and that he published in Square Dancing in the Ice Age.

(Two Yippie friends, Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert, named their daughter after Mitford; their Jessica carries on her legacy. Decca lives!)

My favorite black-and-white photo in Kaplan’s book shows Decca holding an elegant “Muckrake” which is totally appropriate given her role as the “Queen of the Muckrakers.”

Still, Kaplan might have placed Decca in the lineage of the two queens of muckraking who preceded her: Ida Tarbell, who exposed Rockefeller and Standard Oil; and Ida Wells, the African-American journalist who told the much-needed, long-buried story of the lynching of Black men in America. Decca stood on their shoulders. Is there anyone who has taken up her mantle today? I hope so. In hindsight, I’m glad I never did write Decca’s biography.

Kaplan has done a far better job than I ever would have done. She mentions the project, “Senda Piana to Havana,” launched by Decca’s son, Benjy, meant to defy the embargo and ship pianos to Cuba. Decca told me that she was exceedingly proud of Benj’s campaign and that she aided and abetted him. The role of the apolitical journalist was not for her.

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