Irrepressible (25 page)

By June 1951, Decca and Bob had heard through the grapevine that the Committee on Un-American Activities—the California state version, otherwise known as the Little HUAC—was coming to San Francisco’s City Hall. This committee had been active from the early 1940s and, under the chairmanship of John B. Tenney, had supervised the publication of “The Fifth Report,” which asserted the Communist infiltration of California’s universities, media, and entertainment industries. Tenney himself, straight from central casting, as historian Kevin Starr describes, was “hard-drinking, paranoid, dyspeptic.” A touring musician through the 1920s, Tenney had later become president of the musicians’ union and earned a night-school law degree. Then he had won a seat in the State Senate. He had begun his political career on the Left and made a radical turn to become “the grand inquisitor of California: an ominous figure in a pinstriped double-breasted suit.” Tenney had a particularly Californian distinction as the composer and lyricist of the popular tune “Mexicali Rose,” for which the mothers of beginning ukulele players worldwide would curse him. By the time Decca’s subpoena arrived, Tenney’s overreaching behavior, particularly his habit of wildly accusing so many popular, respected, and wealthy Californians, had sufficiently embarrassed his fellow senators. They replaced him as head of the committee, but the inquisition proceeded, as it would for another twelve or so years.

Since at least one Treuhaft was going to have to stick around to look after ten-year-old Dinky, seven-year-old Nicky, and four-year-old Benjy, Bob went into hiding and managed to dodge the sheriff’s deputies. Decca’s summons required her to appear on September 11 with the membership list, the names of all contributors, and the financial books of the CRC. Decca had no intention of providing any records to anyone. She originally had a plan to try to bluff her way through, to outsmart the committee with witty rejoinders, but her lawyer persuaded her to take the Fifth:
I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.
No other strategy
worked to keep witnesses out of jail. Decca knew that once you spoke, you conceded your rights and were required to answer to related facts or to risk an accusation of perjury, the consequences of which might range from a contempt citation to a jail term. A recent Supreme Court decision made even taking the Fifth an unreliable defense, since “the privilege could not be invoked to prevent the
records
of an organization from being subpoenaed.” At any rate, there was nothing the committee didn’t already know about the CRC’s membership list. The FBI had been watching Decca at work, watching their family house, tapping their phone. The committee had duplicate copies of all the records they needed and a list of all the names.

September 11, 1951, was Decca’s thirty-fourth birthday. What better way to celebrate than to appear before the committee in a lovely Aranka hat. The public was encouraged to attend. In San Francisco, the hearing room was sectioned off, with its greater part designated for local conservative groups. The supporters of unfriendly witnesses like Decca typically filled the balcony.

She and Bob had decided that this was an important event for Dinky to attend. “Should I end up behind bars as a consequence of refusing to testify, [Dinky] would at least have witnessed my crime with her own eyes.” Decca didn’t fear her court appearance, but by all reports, she positively dreaded having to go meet her daughter’s grade school principal in order to request her absence. “She was absolutely terrified,” her daughter Dinky would remember. (The one time her children would recall her being more frightened was when she saw fire coming from the propeller of a plane they were on.) To Decca’s great relief, the principal cast proper opprobrium on HUAC for its disgraceful behavior and sent mother and daughter off with her support.

On the day of her testimony, the prosecutor started with, “Have you ever heard of or read the
People’s World
? Have you been director of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress since May 1950? Do you maintain a bank account for the Civil Rights Congress in the Wells Fargo Bank? Is your husband, Robert Treuhaft, legal counsel for the Civil Rights Congress?”

The marquee question was, of course, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” To this and all the other questions, Decca took the Fifth. Between committee members and witnesses, there was what by then had become a ritual ceremony of polyphonic call and response, leading to an extended state of restlessness. It was banal and boring or, as Decca said, “irksome” to resist making a witty rejoinder. The committee on its podium was all so dull and self-important. After a while, even Decca grew accustomed to the slow and tedious show. When the committee counselor (perhaps wishing to wake things up) asked her, “Are you a member of the Berkeley Tennis Club?” she replied automatically, “I refuse to answer on the ground that my answer might tend to incriminate me.” At first, she hadn’t understood the laughter rippling across the chamber. She had thought he’d asked, “Are you a member of the Berkeley
Tenants
Club?” which was a renters union—what was so funny about that? But the image of red Decca lobbing balls in a “bastion of posh conservatism” had awoken the audience and angered the committee. “This witness is totally uncooperative!” the chairman shouted. “We won’t have any more of her nonsense! She is dismissed from the stand!”

Her lawyer hurried Decca out of the courtroom, saying, “You got them so rattled they forgot to ask for the CRC records—now get lost, before they come to their senses.”

For weeks after, there remained the possibility of Decca’s recall. One of the letters she wrote to Muv around that time shows what a lot she was juggling: the CRC’s decline, the terrible news about Willie McGee’s execution, another Jerry Newson retrial. She wanted to make all this clear to her mother, because also on the horizon was the very real possibility of a visit by sister Debo. “Do tell her to come,” Decca wrote. “I’ll try to get a few days off.”

The only thing was, Decca wasn’t sure she would still be home. “We haven’t been cited yet for contempt,” she told Muv in a letter, “so maybe they will forget about it, but if they can prove it on you it is 6 months [in jail] for each separate refusal-to-answer, and they must have asked me 50 questions which I wouldn’t answer.”

IN THE CHINESE calendar, 1952 was the Year of the Dragon, and by geopolitical measurements, it was monstrous. Both the Eastern and Western blocs in the cold war conducted themselves like outraged, outsized, vicious lovers, willing to trample anything to get the last word. Paranoid and manic, Stalin would initiate another great purge in 1952. Prisoner numbers in the Soviet Gulag would rise to their historic peak of about 2.5 million. The social cataclysm and psychic terror, the sweeping accusations and petty tattling, the fear of conspiracies and punishments for secret injuries all coming so soon after the war meant, for so many, a peace like a numbing, unstable bog.

In the United States, more people were coming under investigation by HUAC for subversive activities. The majority of citizens in the great state of Wisconsin reelected Joseph McCarthy to the Senate. The hunt for American Communists escalated. Not only were enrolled Communists tracked and investigated, but anyone else who had ever publicly or privately espoused socialism, signed a petition, or attended a left-wing meeting—no matter how long ago—was suspect. Anyone refusing to name the names of others who had attended a meeting or signed a petition risked a prison term on a contempt charge.

The U.S. Department of State officially withheld passports from anyone associated with the attorney general’s secret list of subversive organizations. Both Decca in her position at the CRC and Bob as a member of the National Lawyers Guild made the list. In June 1951, the Treuhafts were battling on several fronts. Everyone was under surveillance, even the children. Decca wrote to her mother: “Poor Nicholas got arrested the other day for selling tickets door to door for a Jerry Newson Defense benefit.” Decca sailed down to the police station and gave them hell. “The only trouble was Benjamin kept having to go to the loo which rather ruined the delegation.”

The Communist Party USA, fearful of the detention clause in the McCarran Act, did “what it was always accused of doing—set up a clandestine apparatus.” According to its apocalyptic scenario (with the title
“Five Minutes to Midnight”), select members would go underground to build a resistance movement. Adam Lapin was one of the editors of the
People’s Daily World
, and once Al Richmond, its chief editor, was arrested, Lapin assumed the paper’s leadership. In the belief that they had to keep the presses running in the face of intimidation and persecution, Lapin went underground. For the next few years, he would edit the newspaper from secret locations, living under a false name, apart from his family. The severed families of these revolutionaries were less confident of the plan’s strategic value. Eva, Lapin’s wife, might not have believed the country was becoming fascist, but she stood by her husband: “If Adam felt he had to go I had to support him.” She and her children moved back to New York, where family and friends could help them. Those would be hard years.

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.