Queen of muckrakers kept the red flag flying

While her sisters fell for Hitler and Oswald Mosley, Jessica Mitford’s letters reveal a lifelong commitment to justice and equality, writes Illtyd Harrington

Decca, The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y Sussman. Orion Books £25

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DAVID Mitford, the second Lord Redesdale produced six daughters, one son, and married a woman with one foot in Victorian England and the other in the Edwardian decade.
What a self-advertising tribe he created.
Unity was besotted by Hitler and that monster was in turn fascinated by her. On the day war broke out, September 3, 1939, she tried to blow her brains out in the English Garden in Munich.
Diana fell into the arms of Sir Oswald Mosley the bullfrog leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Nancy wrote some of the best satirical novels of the 20th century. Love in a Cold Climate in which the Mitfords star, is hilarious.
Pam thought she was a horse, and Deborah the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire is still with us – even grander than her friend the Queen.
But Jessica sailed in stormier waters and remained a resolute communist as these letters prove.
To a friend in 1963, she wrote: “I am a Red.” A cousin of wartime prime minister Churchill, she ran away to the Spanish Civil War in 1937 with her cousin and husband Esmond Romilly and his brother Giles, provoking a national scandal.
Society was shocked. Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force after they went to the States but died in action in 1941.
Eventually she married Robert Treuhaft, a communist and civil rights union lawyer. They set up home in Oakland, San Francisco and remained there.
From there and for the next 50 years she refused to bow to anti-communist hysteria, or make the slightest concession to intimidation from white supremacists, religious fanatics and the whingeing of former communist party members anxious to denounce former friends to the witchhunters.
These letters go from infancy in 1923 to her death in 1996. They are not only a rich source of post-war American history but a fascinating insight into the mind of a witty, passionate and original woman.
She took on single-handedly the most revered American institutions and generally won.
Her book, The American Way of Death in 1963, shook a country to the core – undaunted by anti-communist smears from the funeral industry that she wanted to introduce grim Russian-style funerals, presumably with a statue of Stalin.
Evelyn Waugh in his novel the Loved One laughed at Forest Lawn and its embalmers putting smiles on the faces of the dead. She made a full frontal attack on the exorbitant prices and exploitations of grief but she was never without wit.
After a visit to the slumber room in Forest Lawn she wrote: “It was so pleasant I almost took a nap myself.”
Characterised as the ‘Queen of Muckrakers’ she turned her barbed tongue and sharp pen on Elizabeth Arden’s Fat Farms where rich, overweight ladies went to be slim.
The bogus and lucrative claims of the Famous Writers School excited her attention and by sheer logic and persistence she made them mend their ways.
She must have had a resounding laugh when murmurs of her persistent communist beliefs were said to have influenced her friend, Catherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post.
It was the Post that blew the Watergate scandal and forced Richard Nixon’s exit from the White House.
Friendship did not stand in the way when she rebuked Maya Angelou, a saintly black poet because of Angelou’s endorsement of the unpleasant black candidate for the US Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas.
Yet she approved of Hillary Rodham Clinton who did a sort of “gap year” in Treuhaft’s legal office.
In the 1980s she enjoyed coming to stay and live in the burgeoning literati area of Kentish Town.
Jon Snow even did some of her packing. She met and disliked Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. The letters have an aristocratic arrogance, but reckless bravery, unbreakable loyalty and passionate love.
As late as 1963, the repressive nature of United States government put Doctor Benjamin Spock, the worldwide expert on young children, on trial for opposing the Vietnam War.
Jessica was in front of the counter-attack and it succeeded.
For a while, sanity seemed to creep back into American politics.
I loved her own funeral instruction: “Brevity, followed by levity”. What a woman. One of her books Hons and Rebels says it all. She chose the Red Flag as one of her Desert Island Discs.
Few in Blair’s party now know the words: “When cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here.”
She did.