Irrepressible (34 page)

At one authors’ luncheon in San Francisco, Decca was seated beside a well-heeled woman, her hostess for the occasion and a fan of her work. She had read
Daughters and Rebels
with such pleasure, her new fan gushed. Perhaps, since Decca lived across the bay, they might know some of the same people. The Coakleys, for instance? Decca would have relied on all her early training not to snort at the mention of Bob’s bête noir. By dessert and coffee, Decca had told her hostess of the time she had helped a Negro family buy a house on the Coakleys’ block, and how the Coakleys, refusing to
accept integration in their own neighborhood, had quickly sold their home and moved away. Was that, Decca inquired, how a district attorney, elected to serve all the people, ought to behave?

“But my dear, don’t you think it’s more Kitty’s side of the family, than Frank’s?” her hostess asked.

“We are hardly on Kitty and Frank terms with them,” said Decca.

IT WAS
SAN Francisco Chronicle
Columnist Herb Caen who gave a suitable name to the influx of young fellow travelers following in the wake of the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl
. To the common Beat nomenclature, he added the latest popular suffix: Space had its
Sputnik
;
Mad
magazine had its nudniks; now San Francisco had beatniks, with their apparent political apathy and general “wiggly nihilism” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s term). In 1959, after the San Francisco police began staging “beatnik raids” in North Beach, the interests and attitudes of young rebels turned toward resistance and protest. Writing in
Frontier Magazine
, Ralph Tyler linked the raids in which “beards, sandals and interracial friendship were all treated as equal threats to the social fabric” to the radicalization of bohemians and beatniks previously apolitical.

That spring the House Committee on Un-American Activities announced that it would hold hearings again in San Francisco. The city had excellent food, beautiful scenery, and freewheeling mores—in all ways, the conventioneer’s ideal. For committee members and their supporters, the city also held a sufficiency of hospitable spectators to pack the courtroom seats, indignant Communists (and non-Communist unfriendlies) to parade and interrogate, and, perhaps most important, hungrily competitive newspapers and broadcasters. It was universally acknowledged that the committee had succeeded in doing what it had set out to do—destroy the American Communist party. Perhaps such triumph should have ensured HUAC’s
position, but the members were realists and knew that to maintain funding and position, they had to keep Commie-hunting as front-page news.

Maybe it was timing, maybe people thought they had better ways to spend their money, or maybe it was boredom. But whatever it was, the increasing number of editorials, political cartoons, and satires in the once unquestioning media proved that the value of the committee’s service had been supplanted by its unsavory reputation as outdated and self-serving. (One Herblock political cartoon lampooned an unnamed committee member at a fancy restaurant, plying a blonde with champagne, expense account notebook flapping from his pocket, and “Committee on Un-American Activities” stamped on the hem of his soiled jacket. In the caption, he slurs drunkenly to the reporter interrupting his tryst, “You trying to underm’ne the American way of life?”) Abolish the Committee organizations had sprung up around the country, including in Oakland, where Decca and her old friends on the left were joining young people in a new coalition for civil rights. On Saturdays, Decca walked a picket line to protest segregated lunch counters at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s. Her companions were “Old Lefties” and kids in SLATE, a nascent political party formed on the University of California’s Berkeley campus to provide “a meaningful alternative to the status quo.” SLATE’s engagement in “matters of national and international policy—housing discrimination, the H-bomb threat, apartheid in Africa . . . actively repudiated the apathetic-conformist-silent tag associated with their generation.” Decca credited the group’s emergence with “a new tolerance for unorthodoxy” on campus.

HUAC sent subpoenas to forty-eight people, including schoolteachers, librarians, and union members. Decca’s friend Laurent Frantz was subpoenaed, as was labor leader Archie Brown and Douglas Wachter, an eighteen-year-old Berkeley student and SLATE member. Wachter’s outraged friends formed an ad hoc committee to defend his civil liberties, starting with a petition and leafleting campaign around campus. This particular group of students was not going to let the dead hand of the past determine their future or destroy their momentum as they had seen it do to
the “Old Left.” They were informed, indignant, and unafraid. Even faculty members on campuses were beginning to speak publicly again after years of intimidating loyalty oaths. The university’s newspaper, the
Daily Californian
, published transcripts of past HUAC hearings, the contents of which seemed straight out of some square medieval kangaroo court. In a matter of days, over a thousand people signed the petition to support Wachter and to oppose HUAC.

It was Decca’s habit to bring her kids along to the hearings. This time, she took her goddaughter Kathy Kahn. They set out that morning without the white cards that functioned as seat reservations and entrance tickets to the courtroom. All witnesses and members of the court always received a few extra white cards for their friends and family, and there were usually a few of these circulating. Decca expected to sail inside as she always had. She was as surprised as anyone that first morning of the hearings, May 11, to discover that the courtroom was already full to capacity. Students from the University of California Berkeley and San Francisco State College had begun lining up outside the City Hall at around 7:00 A.M. to sit in the courtroom area designated for the public. By 9:00 A.M., when the hearings were set to begin, there were at least two hundred people in a line that snaked through the corridor, down the building’s steep steps.

The Frantzes arrived early, expecting to walk through nearly empty halls and meet a few friends in the gallery. Instead, Marge was amazed by the presence of all the young college women dressed neatly in skirts and sweaters, the young men in ties. Even the beatniks were neatniks for the occasion. Writing about the constituency of the crowd for a later article, Decca mentioned the presence of some “children of radicals,” but most of the student participants came from households they described as “pro-Roosevelt.” It was a heterodox mix, which held “by no means uniform hostility toward the committee, or uniform sympathy for the subpoenaed witnesses.” Some among the crowd were surely there to “express opposition. But, many others came out of curiosity, attracted by the considerable publicity on campus and in the newspapers. Some were covering the event
for the school paper; several British graduate students came as observers of the American way of life and political institutions.”

Eventually, a few students were permitted to sit in the unoccupied seats or stand in the back of the courtroom. The committee’s chief prosecutor, Richard Arens, started things off by calling a couple of friendly witnesses. His current hobgoblin was that Communist propaganda was being sent through the U.S. mail, and he lectured the jury on its widespread and pernicious influence. He then called Douglas Wachter, whom he planned to portray as the very picture of a young Communist dupe. Arens tried to associate Wachter’s poor judgment with postal propaganda, but he couldn’t get much traction. In his defense, the poised eighteen-year-old claimed both the First and Fifth Amendments.

From the start, the customary power balance was out of whack, and Arens, a typically agile prosecutor for whom hectoring tripped off the tongue, never hit his stride. From inside, Marge heard those still in line outside the courtroom chanting, “Let us in! Open the doors! Open the doors!” Labor organizer Archie Brown, slated to testify as an unfriendly, agitated from inside: “Let them in to see this travesty! What are you afraid of?” Brown demanded to know why the room had been packed with spectators sympathetic to the committee: “You gave all those people cards—why didn’t you give me some for
my
friends?” The students who had succeeded in gaining seats in the courtroom stood and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Outside in the corridor voices in the crowd joined in a rousing chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Committee Chairman Francis Walter, stunned by the patriotic hootenanny, gaveled for silence, but the singers persevered. Then Walter ordered federal marshals to eject twelve of the singing students, and the courtroom exploded in partisan crosstalk. Inside the hearing room, it must have felt a little as if the ice floes had broken and spring come to Narnia. At various moments, the old threats seemed to dissolve like dandelion fluff.

Eventually, Arens stopped the proceedings, associating the protests outside with the Communist influence of the very propaganda they had come
to investigate. It was all one grand conspiracy to Arens, and the Reds were behind it. When he went out on a balcony overlooking the demonstrations below, there began a chant that he had never heard before in all his years as a distinguished inquisitor: “Jump, jump,” the crowds admonished him. “Jump!”

 

ON FRIDAY MORNING, the Frantzes arrived early again. The previous day had been so unpredictable. After all the excitement, it had been all Marge could do to get the kids dinner and make a few phone calls before collapsing into bed herself. Laurent was scheduled to testify, and he’d stayed up perfecting his speech, which he fully expected to be gaveled down. From the top of the San Francisco City Hall steps, Marge looked out over Van Ness, San Francisco’s widest boulevard, and all the radiating streets that converged at City Center, and willed those students to return. She heard them say they’d come back again and bring their friends. But she knew from her own experience that it wasn’t easy to sustain a protest. On how many cold days in the past—at rallies and through telephone trees—had she tried to muster the veterans and new recruits? A successful protest was a living, breathing thing, dependent on a web of circumstances: the weather, health, communication. The weather today was perfect, those students robust; they were never off the telephone. She’d try not to feel disappointment. Still, looking down at the empty boulevard, she hoped they would come back. She didn’t want to go inside yet and waited another moment, though it seemed longer, when up the quiet boulevard, she saw a few pedestrians loping along the sidewalks. Then came a cluster, with their arms around one another. Then, as if out of Marge’s best dream, cresting the hill came what looked like a hundred people, and behind them, filling the road, contesting with the cars, at least a thousand more, marching toward City Hall.

Meanwhile, the committee, delusionally believing it was to their benefit, had allowed loudspeakers to be set up outdoors. As Laurent Frantz’s name was called, he was applauded by the audience in the hearing room, by the people in the rotunda and mezzanine, and by the overflow crowd on
the thirty wide marble steps to the street. This was now national news, and television crews were setting up their cameras just outside the courtroom as Laurent began to speak and the chairman gaveled him down. Outside the courtroom, the noisy, pumped-up crowd chanted, “Stop the committee,” “Go back to the South,” “How many lynchings have you investigated?” and “I like freedom—so sue me!” On the other floors of the courthouse, the protest was so noisy that at least one trial had to be postponed.

Again, the police ordered the students sitting on the floor of the rotunda and massed on the stairs to disperse, and this time when they refused, the police aimed their huge, high-powered fire hoses on the protesters. The TV cameras caught the faces of police officers in a kind of battle ecstasy. “You want this?” one cop bellowed as he aimed his water cannon. Anyone still standing was flushed down the stairs by the hoses. Those who could get a grip clung to the banisters. Others were lifted by the cascade and rode the plume of water to the street. Some knocked their heads, and a few lost consciousness. After the water attack, one hundred policemen and an added phalanx of steel-helmeted motorcycle police clubbed, kicked, and dragged the remaining protesters down the marble steps. One news camera caught a cop dragging a student down the stairs by her ponytail. Some students kept their balance for moments before sliding down the steep fall of water; some pulled police down with them. Photos and clips of the day show how high-schooler Danny Grossman, son of Decca’s friend Aubrey (slim as a wand in a neat white shirt and black pants) grasped a banister until two immense cops pried his hands off. He dragged both burly officers downstairs with him. That year, on Danny’s birthday, Decca paid him this tribute in verse:

The committee called it a Communist-inspired student riot. Some newspapers dubbed it Black Friday, for the black eye it gave San Francisco; but to the Frantzes and their friends, including Decca, it was the Battle of City Hall.