Jessica Mitford
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The Honourable Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford, known to friends and family as Decca (September 11, 1917 – July 22, 1996), self-described muckraker and political radical, was the "red sheep" of the noted Mitford sisters, daughters of David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the 2nd Baron Redesdale.
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[edit] Childhood and adolescence
Jessica and her siblings grew up in an aristocratic country house set-up not unusual for its time, with a tradition of noblesse oblige, emotionally distant parents, a large household with many servants, and a disregard for formal education. Girls were expected to marry young and well. Though her sisters Unity and Diana were well-known British supporters of Hitler and her father was described as being "one of nature's fascists," Jessica renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of communism. Evelyn Waugh, a long-time friend of her sister Nancy, is believed to have based some of the details and atmosphere of his best-selling novel Brideshead Revisited on the household in which Jessica Mitford grew up.
At age 19, Mitford met someone she had long known and admired from afar: her second cousin Esmond Romilly, the "red nephew" of Winston Churchill, who was recuperating from dysentery caught during a stint with the International Brigades defending Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. They immediately fell in love and decided to elope to Spain, where he picked up work as a reporter for the News Chronicle covering the conflict. After some legal difficulties caused by their relatives' opposition, they married. They moved to London and lived in the East End, then mostly an industrial slum area. She gave birth to a daughter, Julia, on 20 December 1937, in a home birth attended by doctor and nurse. (Her American births were in hospital and less pleasant.) All went well until the baby died in a measles epidemic the following May. Mitford rarely spoke of Julia in later life.
[edit] Life in America and Motherhood
In 1939, Romilly and Mitford emigrated to the United States of America. They travelled around, working odd jobs, perpetually short of cash. At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force; Mitford was living in Washington D.C. and considered joining him once he was posted to England. After miscarriages, she gave birth to another daughter, Constancia ("Donk") Romilly on 9 February 1941. Her husband went missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a successful bombing raid over Nazi Germany. She took months to accept that he was dead.
Mitford threw herself into war work. Through this, she met and married the American civil rights lawyer Robert Edward Treuhaft in 1943 and eventually settled in Oakland, California. There the couple had two sons, the older of whom, Nicholas, was killed when hit by a bus while he was riding his bicycle in 1955. Jessica approached her motherhood in a spirit of "benign neglect", described by her children as "matter-of-fact" and "not touchy-feely". [1] She became closer to her own mother by letter over the decades.
Mitford spent much of the early 1950s working as executive secretary of the local Civil Rights Congress chapter. Through this and her husband's legal practice, she was involved in a number of civil rights campaigns, notably the failed attempt to stop the execution of Willie McGee, an African-American in the Deep South accused of raping a white woman.
Mitford's surviving daughter grew up to become an emergency room nurse, a counterpoint to her mother's self-declared uselessness at any practical occupation, and continued the activist tradition by marrying James Forman, the African American director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Mitford's surviving son, Benjamin, was estranged from his family for some time and developed bipolar disorder (manic depression), but later became a piano tuner and uses his skills to ship pianos to Cuba.
[edit] Communism
Mitford and Treuhaft also became active members of the Communist Party and, in 1953, they were both summoned to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both refused to testify about their participation in radical groups. Feeling that in the current political climate they could do more for social justice outside the party and disillusioned by the development of Communism in the Soviet Union, Mitford and Treuhaft resigned from the Communist Party in late 1958. Evidently Jessica had to become a United States citizen or she would have been unceremoniously deported, regardless of her husband's citizenship.
In 1960 Mitford published her first book Hons and Rebels (American title: Daughters and Rebels), a memoir covering her youth in the Redesdale household.
[edit] Civil Rights activism
In May 1961 she travelled to Montgomery, Alabama while working on an article about Southern attitudes for Esquire. While there, she and a friend went to meet the arrival of the Freedom Riders and became caught up in a riot when a mob lead by the Ku Klux Klan attacked the civil rights activists. After the riot, Mitford proceeded on to a rally at a church led by Martin Luther King, Jr.. This too was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and Mitford spent the night barricaded inside the church with the group until the violence was ended by the National Guard.
[edit] Investigative journalism
Through his work with unions and death benefits, Treuhaft became interested in the funeral industry and persuaded Mitford to write an investigative article on the subject. Though the article, "Saint Peter Don't You Call Me" published in Frontier magazine, was not widely disseminated, it caught considerable local attention when Mitford appeared on a local television broadcast with two industry representatives. Convinced of public interest, Mitford wrote The American Way of Death, which was published in 1963. In the book Mitford harshly criticized the industry for using unscrupulous business practices to take advantage of grieving families. The book became a major bestseller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry, and suggested to some that Evelyn Waugh's 1947 novel The Loved One might not be a satire.
After The American Way of Death Mitford developed a name for her investigative journalism. She published The Trial of Dr. Spock, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchel Goodman, and Marcus Raskin, an account of the five men's 1970 trial on charges of conspiracy to violate the draft laws, followed by a harsh critique of the American prison system entitled Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business in 1973. Her next book, A Fine Old Conflict, was a second memoir, published in 1977. She died of lung cancer at age 78.
[edit] Quotations
- "You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty."
(Compare this with the traditional justification of journalism, originated by Finley Peter Dunne: "To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.")
- "Objectivity? I've always had an objective."
- (On seeing the Pyramids) "Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control."
- When Evelyn Waugh wrote in a review of The American Way of Death that Mitford did not have "a plainly stated attitude to death," Mitford asked her sister Deborah to tell Waugh, "Of course I'm against it."
[edit] Trivia
- Author J. K. Rowling has indicated that Jessica Mitford is a heroine of hers, and that her daughter Jessica Rowling Arantes is named after Mitford. She reviewed Mitford's recently released book of letters, Decca, in the Sunday Telegraph.
- In addition to writing and activism, Mitford also tried her hand at music as singer for "Decca and the Dectones," a cowbell and kazoo orchestra. She performed at numerous benefits, opened for Cyndi Lauper on the roof of the Virgin Records store in San Francisco, and recorded two short albums. One album contains her rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Grace Darling," the other consisting of two duets with close friend and poet Maya Angelou.[2]
[edit] Bibliography
- Hons and Rebels aka Daughters and Rebels (1960)
- The American Way of Death (1963)
- The Trial of Dr. Spock, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchel Goodman, and Marcus Raskin (1970)
- Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973)
- A Fine Old Conflict (1977)
- The Making of a Muckraker (1979)
- Poison Penmanship: The Art of Muckraking (1979)
- Grace Had an English Heart: The Story of Grace Darling, Heroine and Victorian Superstar (1998) ISBN 052524672X
- The American Way of Birth (1992)
- The American Way of Death Revisited (1998)
- Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by journalist Peter Y. Sussman (2006) (ISBN 0-375-41032-5)
[edit] Dramatization
- Extracts from Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford were dramatized for Book of the Week, BBC Radio 4, five 15-minute programmes broadcast in November 2006. The readers were Rosamund Pike and Tom Chadbon; the producer was Chris Wallis.
