In February 1952, Wilbur and Borece Gary purchased a small home in San Pablo, California, a little north of Richmond. When the young couple and their children moved in the next month, they were greeted by a mob of more than one hundred of their new neighbors. Shouting epithets, throwing rocks, and burning a cross on the Garys’ front lawn, these white locals were incensed by the prospect of declining property values they believed would result from the arrival of a black family in their suburban development. The sheriff of San Pablo took it all in with bemused indifference.
Not Decca Treuhaft, as the thirty-four-year-old English expatriate Jessica Mitford was then known. Mitford—a mother of three young children and executive secretary of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress, a Communist Party front organization—“got wind of what was going on and almost single-handedly organized about 400 people” to defend the Garys’ home the next evening, as Buddy Green, an African American reporter for the People’s World newspaper, later recalled. With Green at her side, Mitford dashed straight through the crowd to the Garys’ front door. The protective buffer of longshoremen, warehouse workers, and progressive-minded citizens that arrived soon thereafter kept the mob at bay that evening and for several nights to come.
The Garys’ resolve, bolstered by this show of support, finally compelled the San Pablo political establishment to take the family’s plight seriously. Not only did the rock throwing end, but the local governing body also vowed to guarantee the Garys’ safety, began formal inquiries into housing segregation, and established a community-relations committee. The edifice of Jim Crow in that part of California began to crack.
In addition to being an example of the noblest cause embraced by the American Communist Party, the Gary episode was a dramatic and characteristic demonstration of Jessica Mitford’s mettle. Raised to assume her title as an English aristocrat, Mitford, who died in 1996 at the age of seventy-eight, chose instead to become a radical activist and crusading journalist on behalf of the public interest in her adopted United States.
As it happens, we now find ourselves in another “season of the Mitfords,” in the fine phrase of the longtime San Francisco Chronicle editor Peter Y. Sussman. In addition to Outrageous, a new British television series about the Mitford family before World War II, Carla Kaplan’s biography Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford and a new paperback edition of Sussman’s own edited collection of her letters are both appearing this fall. Like cicadas, the Mitford brood seem to reemerge every fifteen or so years to engage and captivate a new generation of readers.
Mitford seasons were regular occurrences in the 1930s, when the doings of Lord and Lady Redesdale and their six girls—Jessica being the second youngest—were followed breathlessly by the Fleet Street papers. Sister Unity was off to Berlin to enjoy the high life of the Third Reich in the company of Hitler and close friends. Lovely Diana was wed to Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists, as the bride’s appeasement-minded parents looked on approvingly. Then, in her defiantly independent way, Jessica resolved to become a Communist, eloping to the Spanish Civil War with Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s dashing “Red Nephew,” who was also her second cousin. Decca was nineteen years old and in love, and she never spoke to her parents again.
So extraordinary was Mitford’s young adulthood and the attention it drew from the press that she might have spent the rest of her life talking about nothing else. Her first book was a memoir of those years called Hons and Rebels, sold as Daughters and Rebels in the United States (where, legend has it, it was regularly mis-shelved in shops beside Gone With the Wind and other Confederate titles). Its publication, in 1960, was cause for another Mitford season, but by then she was living a very different version of the life she had claimed for herself at nineteen.
With the disappearance of Romilly’s fighter plane over the English Channel in 1941, Jessica was left the single mother of an infant daughter, Constancia (or “Dinky”). Soon after, she married a left-wing lawyer named Robert Treuhaft—a Hungarian Jew from Manhattan—and they settled in blue-collar Oakland, California. During the war, the influx of black and white workers from Mississippi and other parts of Dixie gave Oakland “the quality of a Southern town, in a way,” she remembered. “You’d hear Southern accents.… The white Southerners joined the police force and the black Southerners, after the war, joined the ranks of unemployed.”
Housewifery did not suit Decca, as she admitted with good humor. A transcribed bit of Lenin on the “Woman Question” could be found tacked above the family’s kitchen sink like a “God Bless This Home” plaque. In the “June Cleaver” fifties, she wrote in her memoir of this period, a “perennial complaint of some wives we knew was that their husbands kept them tied to unproductive, barbarous, arduous, petty housework.” Bob Treuhaft was no such patriarch. He encouraged his wife’s entry into formal work with the Communist Party, as well as her turn to writing.
Christopher Hitchens once said that Hons and Rebels taught him it was “possible to write as a radical and as a committed person without ever being dull, or boring, or condescending.” Mitford carried over her lively personal style to her work as a self-taught, latter-day muckraker. Her articles, collected in 1979 under the title Poison Penmanship, are merciless and still delightfully funny. Her ear for inane American adspeak, especially, was wicked. Of the language on diner menus she encountered during a road trip for LIFE in 1961, she observed, “You will soon learn that ‘garden fresh’ too often is synonymous with ‘canned’ (first cousin to ‘frozen fresh’) and that the adjectives ‘young,’ ‘hot,’ ‘juicy,’ ‘crisp’ and even ‘chef’s’ are apt to be in the realm of poetic license.” Among other swindles, she exposed the “Famous Writers School” correspondence-course racket (with a sharp appraisal of its brochure: “Here is Bennett Cerf, most famous of them all, his kindly, humorous face aglow with sincerity.… And Faith Baldwin, looking up from her typewriter with an expression of ardent concern for that vast, unfulfilled sisterhood of nonwriters”); Elizabeth Arden’s “health and beauty resort” for women at Maine Chance Farm in Arizona, where the regimen consisted mostly of starvation; and the sector that is now known, in language that would surely tickle her, as the “death care industry.”
This last project became The American Way of Death, the unsparing detail of which astounded the public and made her arch-villainess to the often-oleaginous fraternity of undertakers and funeral-parlor directors. (“Positioning the lips is a problem that recurrently challenges the ingenuity of the embalmer,” goes one typical passage.) Another inquiry led to Kind and Usual Punishment, about prisons. Published in 1973, in the shadow of the Attica revolt and the death of inmate activist George Jackson (whom she once interviewed), the book concludes with an empirical, sober argument not for the reform of prisons but for their abolition. While a New York Times reviewer found an “uncharacteristic lapse of clarity and candor” in these final pages, her argument would put Decca in good company with certain young activists today for whom the justness of prison abolition has become something like conventional wisdom.
About the Communist Party, Mitford was never contrite. She carried her card until 1958, through the worst years of Red Scare repression, and still, she wrote in her account of Party life, A Fine Old Conflict (1977), “I can hardly imagine living in America in those days and not being a member.” Reading A Fine Old Conflict, it is easy to see why: The work of an American Communist was dangerous, sometimes exhilarating, righteous in the particular if quixotic in the general. It could also be tedious and near-humorless—an awkward fit for a temperament such as hers.
Mitford was less anguished than many by the news of Stalin’s crimes announced by Khrushchev in 1956, “perhaps,” she wrote, “because I had never been as thoroughly convinced as most comrades of Soviet infallibility.” Nor did the Soviet invasion of Hungary that year concern her all that much: “To me, it seemed that whatever the rights and wrongs of the Hungarian situation, it had little relevance to our efforts within the Party to devise our own home-grown program for radical change.” It happens that each of these statements is more credible than readers may suspect, but their astonishing blitheness (“whatever the rights and wrongs”) is the residue of true believerhood, of critical faculties willfully inhibited. She and Treuhaft had even been to Hungary not long before the invasion, she admitted, and “entirely failed to perceive the widespread discontent that must have seethed below the surface.” The eye of a promising journalist?
She saw the Party’s deformities much clearer in its language—where, as Orwell knew, so much of the rot originated. It is probably not a coincidence that her final contribution before leaving was a satirical usage guide to Party jargon called Lifeitselfmanship (Q: “What must we do soberly?” A: “Evaluate, estimate, assess, anticipate (correct answers); go down to the nearest bar (incorrect answer)”). Lifeitselfmanship proved a surprise hit among Party members in need of a good laugh during this post-’56 period of thaw and re-ossification, but it signaled her drift.
Would it be wrong to suppose the Party simply inhibited Mitford’s development as a writer? It might have done so, but, in the event, she felt that comradeship had equipped her well (and no worse, probably, than Columbia Journalism School). In a letter to an old friend written decades after her departure, she explained, “I guess what I try to do, mostly, is write things that I hope will be useful in the struggle—e.g., the prison book, which I could never have done had it not been for some understanding of the class nature of [the criminal] justice system acquired in the CP.” Her commitment to the Party was best honored in the breach, she decided.
Of all Mitford’s letters, the most affecting may be the ones she sent to her teenage grandsons, Chaka and James Jr.—Constancia’s boys, whose father was the civil rights leader James Forman. She was eager for news of their studies, their travels, their girlfriends. She urged them to consider the big questions: the legacy of the civil rights movement; apartheid in South Africa; the end of the Cold War. What was to be done? “Do ponder these matters, when you have time,” she encouraged James Forman Jr. in 1985. In 2018, Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School, won the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant historical investigation of racial politics and mass incarceration, Locking Up Our Own. Not a Mitford season, exactly, but an El Niño year.
Amid the dismal expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and as the style and techniques of McCarthyism enjoy a revival in American life, it is a shame that neither Kind and Usual Punishment nor A Fine Old Conflict is any longer in print. Sales in snake oil, too, are at record highs, what with our wellness influencers, social-media shills, fascist teens with talk shows, and fitness quacks who think eating raw meat is a good idea. The public could use a few more Deccas on its side. Whether the blend of doggedness, wit, and class analysis that formed Mitford’s repertoire are taught in journalism schools these days is irrelevant. Anyone can study her articles as open-source guides to outfoxing the most predatory sort of entrepreneurs.
Mitford’s life was one of those twentieth-century lives that transgressed convention and propriety in ways that her parents’ generation could never have imagined, and it seems extraordinary even today. Her choices as a “political person,” as they liked to say in the thirties, affirm a reliable precept that continues to confound the fortunate classes: Taking pains to diminish one’s own inherited privilege tends to increase one’s nobility. It is a route that requires sacrifice, of course, but Mitford would have chosen the near-riot of the Garys’ front lawn in San Pablo over the tranquil back garden of a manor house in Oxfordshire any day. No proper lady could have been so honorable.