Jessica
Mitford, the daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale,
was born in Burford, Oxfordshire, in 1917. The sister
of Diana
Mitford, Nancy
Mitford and Unity Mitford, she was
educated at home by her mother.
Mitford's
parents held right-wing political views and supported the British
Union of Fascists and in 1936 their daughter, Diana Mitford, married
its leader, Oswald Mosley. Another daughter,
Unity Mitford, went to Nazi
Germany and became a close friend of Adolf
Hitler.
Unlike
the rest of her family, Jessica developed left-wing political opinions.
At the age of fourteen she was converted to pacifism
and later, like her sister, Nancy Mitford,
became a socialist. Jessica even considered
the possibility of visiting Germany with
her sister and murdering Hitler. She later wrote: "Unfortunately,
my will to live was too strong for me actually to carry
out this scheme, which would have been fully practical and might have
changed the course of history. Years later, when the horrifying history
of Hitler and his regime had been completely unfolded, leaving Europe
half-destroyed, I often bitterly regretted my lack of courage."
In
1937 Mitford met Esmond Romilly, the nephew
of Winston Churchill, who had just
returned to England after fighting for the International
Brigades in the Spanish
Civil War. He was now working as a journalist for the News
Chronicle and
was about to go back to Spain to report
on the war. Jessica went
with him
and they married in June 1937. While on honeymoon he wrote Boadilla,
an account of his experiences in Spain.
When
the couple returned to England Esmond Romilly
found work as a copywriter for a small advertising agency in London,
whereas Jessica was employed in market research. Along with her husband
she became involved in the struggle against the British
Union of Fascists.
In
1939 Mitford and Romilly went to the United States.
On the outbreak of the Second World War Romilly
joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but was killed in 1941 during
a bombing raid over Nazi Germany.
Mitford
went to work for Office of Price Administration (OPA) where she met
the radical lawyer, Robert Treuhaft,
who she married in 1943. They both joined the American
Communist Party and were active in the Civil
Rights movement.
In
1948 they moved to Oakland and Treuhaft joined the legal firm of Oakland,
Grossman, Sawyer & Edises. The company specialized in trade
union and civil rights cases.
This included the
Willie McGee case. McGee, a 36-year-old black truck driver from Laurel,
Mississippi, was convicted of raping a white woman despite evidence
that the couple had been having a relationship for four years. The
trial lasted less than a day and the jury took under three minutes
to reach a verdict and the judge sentenced McGee to be executed. McGee's
defenders argued that no white man had ever been condemned to death
for rape in the deep South, while over the last forty years 51 blacks
had been executed for this offence.
Jessica
Mitford during the Willie McGee campaign.
Mitford
travelled to Mississippi to organize a campaign against the sentence.
While there she reported on the case for The
Peoples World. This included an interview with William
Faulkner who
spoke out against the decision to execute McGee. Despite a nationwide
campaign led by Bella
Abzug
and William
Patterson,
McGee was executed on 8th May 1951.
Mitford's
involvement in the Willie McGee case resulted in her being subpoenaed
by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities. Mitford
and her husband, Robert Treuhaft, took
the 1st
Amendment and
refused to answer questions about their involvement in left-wing political
groups. Two years later they were called before the Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC). Once again they refused to give evidence
and later Treuhaft was described by Joseph
McCarthy
as one if the most subversive lawyers in the country.
Over
the next few years Mitford became increasingly disillusioned with
the form of communism being developed in the Soviet
Union. This despair grew with the revelations about Joseph
Stalin by Nikita
Khrushchev and
the Red Army invasion of Hungary.
Treuhaft and Mitford finally left the American
Communist Party in 1958 after John Gates
was
ousted as editor of the Daily Worker.
As
a trade union lawyer Treuhaft became aware of the financial problems
that deaths caused in working class families. In an attempt to reduce
the high costs of funerals he established the Bay Area Funeral Society,
a non-profit undertaking service. In 1963 Treuhaft and Mitford
published
the best-selling book,
The American Way of Death (1963).
However, only Mitford's name appeared on the book cover as the publisher
argued that "co-signed books never sell as well as those with
one author."
Other
books by Mitford included the autobiography, Hons
and Rebels (1960), The Trial of
Dr. Spock (1970), an account of her time in the American
Communist Party, A Fine Old Conflict
(1977) and The Making of a Muckraker
(1979). Jessica
Mitford died
in 1996.
(1)
Jessica Mitford wrote about her parents' political activities in her
autobiography, Hons and Rebels (1960)
Participation in public life at Swinbrook revolved
around the the church, the Conservative Party and the House of Lords.
My parents took a benevolent if erratic interest in all three, and
they tried from time to time to involve us children in such civic
responsibilities as might be suitable to our age.
My mother
was a staunch supporter of Conservative Party activities. At election
time, sporting blue rosettes, symbol of the Party, we often accompanied
Muv to do canvassing. Our car was decorated with Tory blue ribbons,
and if we should pass a car flaunting the red badge of Socialism,
we were allowed to lean out of the window and shout at the occupants:
"Down with the horrible Counter-Honnish Labour Party!"
The canvassing
consisted of visiting the villagers in Swinbrook and neighbouring
communities, and, after exacting a promise from each one to vote Conservative,
arranging to have them driven to the polls by our chauffeur. Labour
Party supporters were virtually unknown in Swinbrook. Only once was
a red rosette seen in the village. It was worn by our gamekeeper's
son - to the bitter shame and humiliation of his family, who banished
him from their house for this act of disloyalty. It was rumoured that
he went to work in a factory in Glasgow, and there became mixed up
with the trade unions.
(2)
Jessica Mitford developed pacifist
views during her youth. She explained why in her autobiography,
Hons and Rebels (1960).
Major storms were brewing beyond the confines of
the fortress. Unemployment was rising alarmingly throughout England.
Hunger marches, at first small demonstrations, later involving populations
of whole areas, were reported in the papers. Police and strikers fought
in the streets from London to Birmingham, from Glasgow to Leeds. Great
population centres were designated "distressed areas" by
the Government - which meant areas where there was no prospect of
improvement in the employment situation. The Family Means Test, under
which the dole could be denied any unemployed worker whose relatives
still held jobs, was the subject of violent protest by the Communists,
who gradually succeeded in swinging most of the labour movement into
the fight.
The younger
generation was highly political. They accused the elder statesmen
of the Allied countries of sowing the seeds of a new and more horrible
world war through the Versailles Treaty, the systematic crushing of
Germany, the demands made on the defeated enemy for impossible war
reparations.
Old concepts
of patriotism, flag-waving, jingoism were under violent attack by
the younger writers. The creed of pacifism, born of a determination
to escape the horrors of a new world war, swept the youth.
I responded,
like many another of my generation, by becoming first a convinced
pacifist, then quickly graduating to socialist ideas. I felt as though
I had suddenly stumbled on the solution to a vast puzzle which I had
been clumsily trying to solve for years. Like many another suddenly
confronted for the first time with a rational explanation of society,
I was bursting with excitement about it. I longed to meet some flesh-and-blood
exponents of this new philosophy.
(3)
Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (1977)
In 1937 I met for the first time Esmond Romilly, a second
cousin of ours whom I had long admired from afar. Esmond had been
in the news for some years, ever since he had run away from Wellington,
his public school, at the age of fifteen to work in a Communist bookshop
where with other runaways he plotted the editing, production and distribution
of a magazine designed to foment rebellion in all the public schools.
He and his brother Giles had written a book. Out of Bounds,
describing their education and their conversion to radicalism, which
had stirred considerable controversy in the press when it was published
in 1935.
I had
followed Esmond's fortunes with deep interest in the newspapers and
through family gossip; shortly before arriving at Cousin Dorothy's
I had read a dispatch in the News Chronicle: "Esmond Romilly,
eighteen-year-old nephew of Mr Winston Churchill, is winning laurels
for his gallantry under fire while serving in the International Brigade,
which is fighting for the Spanish Government in defence of Madrid.'
In a disastrous encounter with the enemy at Boadilla, on the Madrid
front, in which scores of volunteers were killed, Esmond and one other
member of his unit had been the only survivors. Suffering from a severe
case of dysentery, Esmond had been invalided out of the International
Brigade and sent to England to recuperate, which is how he came to
be staying at Cousin Dorothy's.
That weekend,
Esmond agreed to take me with him back to Spain, where he had a commission
as a reporter for the pro-Loyalist News Chronicle. The following
Sunday we fled, having devised an elaborate stratagem to deceive my
parents into believing I was going to stay in Dieppe with some 'suitable'
girls of my age. By the time they discovered
my defection, Esmond and I were living in Bilbao, capital of the Basque
province, and were engaged to be married. In an effort to prevent
our marriage, Farve made me a Ward in Chancery and his solicitors
sent Esmond a telegram saying, 'Miss Jessica Mitford is a ward of
the court. If you marry her without leave of judge you will be liable
to imprisonment.' We took this as a declaration of total war. Eventually
the British Consul in Bilbao blackmailed us into leaving by threatening
to withhold British aid in the evacuation of Basque women and children
from the war zone unless we obeyed his instruction to return to England.
This shabby piece of bargaining brought home to me the strength and
ruthlessness of the forces ranged against us.
(4)
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (1960)
In many ways, this was a far from ideal honeymoon. Esmond
was tormented by practical worries, and I felt completely inadequate
to help solve them. But we got to know each other faster than would
have been possible under more normal circumstances. Esmond had an
infallible nose for the cheapest possible accommodation, and we stayed
in Bayonne in a small hotel, crowded with Basque refugee families
from the northern part of Spain. Every day we checked at the Basque
Consulate for my authorization to travel and for possible news of
transportation. We went for long walks in the town, during which Esmond
told of his experiences on the Madrid front.
Within
a few weeks of the first news of the Fascist rebellion, he had set
out for Spain on his own, without telling any of his friends, fearful
that he might be rejected and sent back because of lack of military
training. For once in his life, he regretted his refusal to join the
O.T.C. at Wellington. Knowing nothing of the organization of the International
Brigade, he had simply bicycled to Marseilles in hopes of boarding
some cargo ship bound for Spain. There he learned that young men from
all countries were already flocking to the Spanish front, and he fell
in with a miscellaneous group of volunteers - French, Germans, Italians,
Yugoslavs, Belgians, Poles - sailed with them to Valencia, and was
sent to the training camp at Albacete.
There
was as yet no English battalion, so Esmond and fifteen other Englishmen
were attached to the German Thaelmann Brigade. He was relieved to
learn that most of these were also completely lacking in military
training; they came from every conceivable walk of life - car-workers,
farmers, restaurant-owners, university students. The training at Albacete
was extremely brief, and within a few days the battalion was sent
to the Madrid front. There they were in almost
continuous action, living the muddy, bloody, confused life of foot
soldiers. A week before Christmas, in a single disastrous battle,
all but two of the English group were wiped out. Esmond and the other
survivor, ill with dysentery and battle fatigue, were sent back to
England, entrusted with the heartbreaking task of visiting the relatives
of the dead.
(5)
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (1960)
On May Day the entire community turned out, men,
women and children, home-made banners proclaiming slogans of the "United
Front against Fascism" waving alongside the official ones. The
long march to Hyde Park started early in the morning, contingents
of the Labour Party, the Co-ops, the Communist Party, the Independent
Labour Party marching through the long day to join other thousands
from all parts of London in the traditional May Day labour festival.
Everyone
took lunch in a paper bag, and there was much good-natured jostling
and shouting of orders, and last-minute rounding up of children who
had darted away in the crowd.
We had
been warned that the Blackshirts might try to disrupt the parade,
and sure enough there were groups of them lying in wait at several
points along the way. Armed with rubber truncheons and knuckle-dusters,
they leaped out from behind buildings; there were several brief battles
in which the Blackshirts were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of
the Bermondsey men. Once I caught sight of two familiar, tall blonde
figures: Boud (Unity Mitford) and Diana (Mitford), waving Swastika
flags. I shook my fist at them in the Red Front salute, and was barely
dissuaded by Esmond (Romilly) and Philip (Toynbee), who reminded me
of my now pregnant condition, from joining the fray.
(6)
In 1938 Jessica Mitford continued
to be involved in the campaign to raise money for the International
Brigades fighting in Spain.
Although mass meetings and fund-raising parties for
the Loyalist cause attracted as much support as ever, the atmosphere
had changed. The victorious feeling of the early days of the war had
seeped away for ever. Even the magnificent Ebro offensive of that
July, into which the Loyalists threw all their resources, did not
basically change the desperate situation. Franco remained in control
of three-fourths of the country.
As the
offensive simmered down into a series of indecisive battles it was
clear that slowly, day by day, the war was being lost, and that slowly,
one by one. Loyalist supporters in England were beginning to give
up hope.
In the
draughty meeting-halls from Bermondsey to Hampstead Heath where they
gathered to raise money for Spanish relief, the mood of the huge,
grave audiences seemed out of step with the ever more strained optimism
of platform speakers.
At the
same time, the Spanish war was driven off the front pages by events
in central Europe, where lines were being drawn for the last, bitter
battle for collective security against the Axis. A million Germans
were massed along the Czechoslovak frontier. Newspapers quoted Goering
as saying he had definite information that if the German Army marched
into Czechoslovakia the British would not lift a finger.
(7)
Robert Treuhaft
was interviewed in 1934 about meeting Jessica Mitford.
In the Office of Price Administration (OPA) I met
a fantastically beautiful woman who attracted me not only by her charm
and wit, but by her frugality. I watched with fascination as she moved
down the line of the block-long counter of the cafeteria in the huge
OPA temporary building. As she passed the beverage section, she would
pick up a glass of tomato juice, down it, and set the empty glass
down on a handy little shelf below the counter. Next she would scoop
up a salad and dispose of the plate in the same way. Then a sandwich.
When she reached the cashier, she had nothing on her tray but a cup
of coffee - cost of lunch, five cents. This, I decided, was the girl
for me.
(8)
Jessica Mitford, letter to San Francisco
Chronicle (November, 1943)
Like millions of others in the United Nations and the occupied countries,
I have all my life been an opponent of the fascist ideology in whatever
form it appears. Because I do not believe that family ties should
be allowed to influence a person's convictions I long ago ceased to
have any contact with those members of my family who have supported
the fascist cause. The release of Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley is a
slap in the face of anti-fascists in every country and a direct betrayal
of those who have died for the cause of anti- fascism. They should
be kept in jail, where they belong.
(9)
Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict
(1977)
We had already overstayed our time in Mississippi. The four weeks
allotted for the trip stretched
into five, as we did not wish it to appear we had been chased out
by the Jackson Daily News. But we decided we could not leave
the state without attempting to see Mississippi's most - in fact its
only - illustrious resident, William Faulkner. The reserves having
drifted back to their respective homes, it was the original four of
us who drove down to Oxford. We asked a gangling, snaggle-toothed
white boy for directions to Faulkner's house. "Down the road
apiece, past the weepin' willa tree," was his response, which
I took as augury of our arrival in authentic Faulkner country. We
turned through a cast-iron gate into a long avenue of desiccated trees
leading to a large, run-down plantation-style house, its ante-bellum
pillars covered with greyish moss. Through the window we saw Faulkner,
a small man in a brown velvet smoking jacket, pacing up and down,
apparently dictating to a secretary.
We gingerly approached
and rang the front-door bell. Faulkner himself came to the door, and
when we explained the reason for our visit, greeted us most cordially,
invited us in, and held forth on the McGee case for a good two hours.
Faulkner spoke,
much as he wrote, in convoluted paragraphs with a sort of murky eloquence.
I was desperately trying to take down everything he said in my notebook,
and frequently got lost as he expatiated on his favourite themes:
sex, race and violence. The Willie McGee case, compounded of all three,
was a subject he seemed to savour with much relish; it could have
been the central episode in one of his short stories.
Later, it was my job to
edit down his rambling monologue as a brief press release to be issued
by our national office: He said the McGee case was an outrage and
it was good we had come. He cautioned us that many people down here
don't pay much attention to law and justice, don't go by the facts.
He said in this case they are giving obeisance to a fetish of long
standing. He expressed fear for McGee's
safety in jail. When we left he wished us good luck.
(10)
Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict
(1977)
The soil for the noxious growth of McCarthyism had been well prepared
by the Truman administration, and the anti-Communist crusade was well
under way, long before the junior senator from Wisconsin himself appeared
on the scene. Joseph McCarthy was virtually unknown outside his home
state until 9 February 1950, when he made his celebrated speech alleging
that the State Department was in the hands of Communists, which catapulted
him into the national limelight he enjoyed for the next five years.
Some signposts
on the road to McCarthyism: 1947, Truman establishes the federal loyalty
oath, barring alleged subversives from government employment. States
and universities follow suit. The Attorney General, under authority
of a Presidential executive order, publishes a list of subversive,
proscribed organizations. 1948: Ten Hollywood screenwriters sentenced
to a year's imprisonment for refusing to testify before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities about alleged subversion in the
film industry. Mundt-Nixon bill introduced in Senate, requiring registration
of Communists and members of 'Communist fronts'. Henry Wallace's campaign
for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, into which the
CP had thrown all its energy and forces, ends in disastrous defeat.
1949: Twelve top Communist leaders found guilty under the Smith Act
of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the Government by force
and violence. Alger Hiss tried and convicted of perjury. Several of
the largest left-led unions expelled from CIO.
Four months
after McCarthy's opening salvo, the Korean War broke out, bringing
Truman's foreign policy into harmony with his domestic drive against
the Left and furnishing McCarthy with more ammunition for his anti-Communist
crusade. In this climate most liberals turned tail. Senator Hubert
Humphrey proposed establishing concentration camps for subversives,
and declared on the floor of Congress: "I want them (Communists)
removed from the normal scene of American life, and taken into custody."
The American Civil Liberties Union, supposed guardian of First Amendment
rights, instituted its own loyalty purge excluding from membership
those suspected of harbouring subversive ideas.
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