Irrepressible (23 page)

T
HE 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:

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 Guitons) 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,

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.