{"id":10747,"date":"2007-11-25T07:57:05","date_gmt":"2007-11-25T12:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/25\/10747.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:43","slug":"book-report-decca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/25\/book-report-decca\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Decca"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I would like to write at great length about Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford<\/a>, because I enjoyed it a lot<\/i>, and there’s a lot to it. I hadn’t really been familiar with Jessica Mitford and the Mitford Sisters (I’m not sure I knew that Jessica Mitford was a different person from Nancy Mitford), but it turns out that Ms. Mitford was hip-deep in lots of stuff I find interesting about the twentieth century. There is the once-famous story about how she ran off to fight the Fascists in Spain at around the same time that her sister Unity ran off to live in Berlin with Adolf Hitler and her other sister Diana married the British Fascist Oswald Mosley (with Herr Hitler present at the ceremony). Then she goes to America, where she and her second husband join the Communist Party, fight civil rights battles, and generally hobnob with the American Left. Then a career as a muckraking journalist.\n

Here’s something about Ms. Mitford: In the Library of Congress cataloguing system, she has books starting with CT, GT, HV, HX, KF, PN and PR. Five letters is pretty impressive. In the Dewey, it looks less impressive, as her books are all in the 300s, 800s and 920, but then the whole business of shoving all the biographies into 920 is wacky, anyway. Well, no, it isn’t wacky, it’s a perfectly good way to shelve for a browsing library, but it doesn’t give a sense of what the book is about.\n

Anyway, I think the thing to do is to read the books of memoirs, and then talk about her life that way.\n

Oh, I can’t resist. Her husband, Bob Treuhaft, was a lawyer dealing with lefty stuff, labor, civil rights and so on. Ms. Mitford was very heavily involved in civil rights struggles, and they would get particularly involved in cases where black people would get unjustly imprisoned, convicted of crimes they didn’t commit but essentially jailed for being black and uppity. As so often happened. Anyway. A fellow named James Dean Walker was imprisoned for life in Arkansas after being shot by a police officer in 1963; he escaped in 1975 and lived in California for five years. He was caught on a drug offense in 1980, and Arkansas wanted him back. Now, the prisons in Arkansas were notoriously awful—all the bad things you can imagine about racist, sadistic guards given full license by a racist state to do whatever they wanted to the black prisoners. It was considered likely that if Mr. Walker were to be returned to the Arkansas prison system, he would be beaten to death. The Governor of California (Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown) signed the man over to Arkansas, but he appealed to the courts for asylum. The courts turned him down.\n

Anyway, as it happened, Ms. Mitford (who was involved in the campaign to keep Mr. Walker out of Alabama) remembered a young attorney who had, fresh from Yale Law School in the 1970s, been a law clerk in Mr. Treuhaft’s office, and helped with the defense of the Black Panthers (among others). That young attorney was now (in 1980) married to the governor of Arkansas. So there was a possibility of some help there. Sadly, Governor Clinton’s re-election bid was defeated, so there was no help there. It doesn’t seem as if Ms. Mitford ever quite forgave Ms. Rodham (as was), but then she was one to hold a grudge. She never forgave Jerry Brown, either.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which names are dropped, including Jessica Mitford’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18177,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747\/revisions\/18177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}