CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Jessica Mitford and Me

Jessica Mitford on After Dark, August, 1998.

I did not know Jessica Mitford— who was dubbed “the Queen of the Muckrakers”– for long, but I knew her well. In the 1990s, shortly before my biography of Abbie Hoffman was published I decided that I wanted to write a biography of “Decca,” as she was known. I had met her in 1984 when I invited her to speak in a lecture series at Sonoma State University (SSU) devoted to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. I remember that she talked in a large classroom to the students and a few faculty members about the time that she was hired to teach at San Jose State University SJSU, a part of the California State University (CSU) system. She was required by the administration to provide her fingerprint to the campus police and swear to uphold the Constitution.

(At SSU, she also held a seminar and shared some of the tips necessary for a muckraker. What was essential, she said, was to create a blueprint that would show the author how the story would be written, the main sources, the audience and the style or tone. All the above before the writer wrote the lead or even provided a working title for the piece. Good advice!)

The whole rigmarole with the SJSU administration reminded Decca, she explained, of McCarthyism, which she knew all too well, along with the loyalty oaths and the kind of police state envisioned by Orwell in his novel, which American liberals insisted offered a portrait of the kind of totalitarian state that existed in the USSR. Decca wasn’t as sure as they were. She thought, as I did, that the world of Big Brother also applied to England and the US. Orwell hedged, though his experiences at the BBC provided him with ammunition when he sat down to write his novel. As Decca knew, the so-called “Free World” could be as totalitarian as the world behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1984, I was teaching in the English Department at Sonoma State University (SSU). When I was hired, I was required, as Decca was, to surrender my fingerprints and pledge my allegiance. If I did not do so the university president told me I would not be paid. So I gave my fingerprints to the campus police and swore allegiance. This was immediately after I was interviewed for a teaching position as a lecturer and was asked what I hoped the students would learn. “A sense of dignity,” I told the committee. I was no doubt thinking of myself as well as the students and felt that the obligation to provide fingerprints stripped me of some, albeit not all, of my dignity.

Decca wanted to protect her fingerprints and preserve her First and Fifth Amendment rights. As she explained to the 1984 audience, she battled the president of SJSU, but then gave in and cooperated, as far as her fingerprints were concerned, though she was not proud of her acquiescence. McCarthyism wasn’t dead and buried, she insisted. Indeed, it could return at any moment.

To persuade Decca that I was a suitable candidate to write her biography, I drove to her home in Oakland on a warm morning, met her husband Bob Treuhaft, a lefty lawyer, and handed her a copy of the manuscript of my Abbie biography, which had not yet been published. Decca announced that she was........

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