Pod Insights Noble Blood The Mitford Communist (With Carla Kaplan) About this episode The glamorous Mitford sisters—six daughters of a Baron—have captivated the public imagination for decades. One became a duchess, one a famous novelist, one retired into a life of privacy, two become fascists, and one became a communist. Jessica "Decca" Mitford is a character larger than life, and the subject of the new book, TROUBLEMAKER, from Carla Kaplan.
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Transcript 7,271 words · 13 speakers
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1:32 Dana Schwartz? Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised. Welcome to a very special episode of Noble Blood. I am so thrilled to be talking today with Carla Kaplan, the historian, writer, professor, author of the incredible new nonfiction book Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford. If you are someone who, like me, has been fascinated with the Mitford sisters, this is absolutely going to be a book you're going to want to read. I feel like I learned so much. I had been circling, you know, information about the Mitford sisters because they're just fascinating, and this book is just so brilliantly, comprehensively done, even though
2:16 Dana Schwartz? it focuses really on Jessica or Decca Mitford. Thank you so much for joining me.
2:22 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure to be here today.
2:27 Dana Schwartz? So just to start, for audience members who maybe aren't familiar with who the Mitford sisters are, who are they? Why do so many people write and talk about them?
2:37 Speaker 04 And why has it been going on for literally one year now? So it has been sometimes called Mitford mania. Jessica Mitford, the sister about whom I write, called it, somewhat derisively, "the Mitford industry." And there have been waves of Mitfordiana, and we are in one. So there is my book, there is Peter Sussman's incredible book of Jessica Mitford's letters, there is Mimi Pons' Do Admit, which is a graphic group biography of all the sisters. There is, in Great Britain now, a biography of their mother, just appropriately, simply called Mov. There was just a play in England, which I unfortunately didn't get to see, called Party Girls.
3:20 Speaker 04 And of course, as some of your listeners may very well know, there was the Britvoc series called Outrageous.
3:26 Dana Schwartz? Yes.
3:27 Speaker 04 Which was based on Mary Levels' group biography and covered all the sisters. And if any of your listeners happen to see Outrageous, they get a picture not only of what beautiful, engaging, charming, brilliant, creative, often snarky, rebellious women the six sisters were, but they also get a sense of a kind of split-screen reality that these sisters were born into the British aristocracy, into a very eccentric and a
4:04 Speaker 04 very isolated family, which in classic aristocratic tradition was very land-rich and somewhat cash-poor. And the parents were really old-school. In fact, they were so old-school that Jessica Mitford, the sister about whom I write, called them Edwardians, you know, which is quite a bit earlier than they were. But they were very old-school when it came to gender roles. They did not believe in any education for these six amazing young women, who were brilliant and creative and full of energy and full of ambition, and denied formal education really of any kind. So what did they do?
4:48 Speaker 04 So these six beautiful girls essentially reach up into the air and they pull imaginary futures out of thin air. And part of why I think we're so fascinated with them is almost all of them achieve exactly the imaginary future they pull down from nowhere. So we have Nancy, who wanted to be a great writer, became a famous novelist. Pamela, who lived most quietly of them all, the country woman known as Woman, who stayed in the country and stayed out of the press, left a very wealthy marriage for a German woman that could have been part of why she stayed out of the press. Then we have the notorious Diana.
5:33 Speaker 04 The beauty of the family. Although they're all beautiful. I mean, every one of them is sort of drive your car into the curb and gape at them, beautiful, you know? But Diana was extraordinary and she looked like a statue and she actually was that way all her life, just stunningly beautiful. And one of the most brilliant of them all and one of the two who made some of the absolute worst choices. So Mary's very, very young, marries Brian Guinness, heir to the Guinness fortune, leaves him for a man named Oswald Mosley, head of the British fascist party. When she leaves Guinness for Mosley, Mosley is married.
6:16 Speaker 04 He is carrying on an affair with two of his wife's sisters. He's really something else. And it's incredibly scandalous thing for a young woman of the aristocracy with two children to do. But she lives all her life with Oswald Mosley as a fascist, never apologizes for her fascism, completely unrepentant. Diana goes to her grave blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. And then, let's see, there is Unity, Deca's very, very favorite sister, who went even further than Diana. So Unity falls from a distance. She's completely enamored of Adolf Hitler. She goes to Germany, she stalks him for months until he finally notices her.
7:00 Speaker 04 Now, she's pretty hard not to notice. She's six feet tall, she's gorgeous, and she's staring at him nonstop.
7:09 Dana Schwartz? And I mean, she's also a member of the aristocracy. Their father is a baron. I imagine that gave them some access.
7:16 Speaker 04 Exactly. Well, it also made her very interesting to Hitler because in his mind, he's thinking, okay, she's the daughter of a baron. I'm going to get some inside information. You know, fortunately for England, unity didn't have much inside information. What she did have was total dedication to Hitler. And when Germany and England declared war, she went into a park, took a tiny pistol out of her handbag, put it up to her temple and pulled the trigger. And she didn't die. The bullet lodged in the back of her brain and at the back of her skull. And she lived for many years with diminished capacities. The youngest sister became the Duchess of Devonshire, the chattelaine of the Chatsworth Estate.
7:59 Speaker 04 If anybody listening is going to England, do not miss the chance to see the 100 plus rooms at Chatsworth. It's an extraordinary place in one of the great, great old aristocratic noble houses of England. And that's Debo's life. So here comes Jessica Mitford, my subject, who doesn't share any of her sisters' politics. All her sisters lean to the right. She leans as far to the left as she can get. And she doesn't really share their values or their protocols. Like them, she is beautiful. She's quite gorgeous. Like them, she could have been a society beauty and spent her life in that way, but she wasn't interested.
8:43 Speaker 04 And so she ran away from home at 19 with her second cousin, with whom she quickly fell in love and got married. They fought in the Spanish Civil War. They made their way to the United States. He died in the war, Second World War. She became an activist and then a famous, famous American muckraking writer who proved that she could carry all the wordplay of her childhood right into muckraking. So she takes a form of writing, of journalism. It's almost dead when she touches it. Nobody's doing muckraking in the 1950s. And she takes it, she fills it full of the Mitford tease, the Mitford humor, and all of a sudden, it's a brand new form.
9:25 Speaker 04 And she's a blockbuster success in 1963 and has a kind of third life as a writer. So she has one life as an aristocrat. She has a life as an American communist and a civil rights activist. And then she has a life as a famous writer. And if you were putting this in a novel, your editor would say it's too much.
9:47 Dana Schwartz? Now, what I find so fascinating about Decca Mitford, and I think listeners might find interesting, is the thought of this beautiful, young aristocrat becoming a communist. But she didn't really dismiss or make excuses for her childhood or her personality. She sort of used her privilege for the benefit of her causes. Can you speak to that sort of interesting contradiction?
10:12 Speaker 04 I think it's a great question, and it's one of the most interesting things about her. It's one of the reasons, actually, I think she's so useful today. Because here is someone who, on the face of it, goes about as far from her background and her family of origin as you could go. She goes from a manor house in the Cotswolds to a middle-class home in Oakland, California. It's pretty hard to go much further than that. And on the face of it, it looks like she leaves everything behind. She certainly leaves behind her rank and her privilege and all of the comforts of the aristocracy. She pays a very high price for the trajectory she chose.
10:57 Speaker 04 But as you say, one of the things that makes her so interesting is even though she throws it all away, she says, I don't want any titles. I don't want that money. I don't want that land. I don't want those aristocratic protocols. I'm setting all of that aside. She takes aristocratic mannerisms and certain aristocratic privileges of risk-taking, and she takes them right into her work as an American communist and right into her work as a muckraker. So she is the aristocratic communist. It's almost a contradiction in terms, and she knows it. And she knows that by being so many different things at once, she becomes even more noticeable
11:41 Speaker 04 than she would have been otherwise. So as you say, she never attempts to hide that she is of a very different background than the people she's organizing. In fact, One of the things I discovered in my research over the ten long years it took me to write this book was that every year that she was an American, working as an activist, working as a writer, being such an American that English, upper crust accent, it got deeper every year.
12:10 Dana Schwartz? Fascinating.
12:12 Speaker 04 Right, where most people worked to lose it, she didn't. She increased it and she used it. So here she is, this former British aristocrat, she's organizing in Black Oakland, California. She's working on labor issues, she's working on housing issues, and she's very much dedicated to working on police brutality issues. So she's interviewing Black Oaklanders who've been beat up by the Oakland police. And she comes into their homes with her English black handbag, with her A-line skirt, with the pumps, you know, with the whole thing, right, and the accent. And they're not put off, for the most part, they're actually
12:52 Speaker 04 quite taken to her. Because what she understands, and it really is useful today, I think, is that authenticity works. That if you're not selling a story, if you just are who you are, people will accept your differences. People will accept, and she understood that in a really profound way. But she also enjoyed tweaking everybody around her. She never lost the Miss Ridford tease. So these girls were notorious teases, all six of them. Deca never gave that up. So she would tease her comrades in the Communist Party, she would tease the very people she was organizing, she would tease her guests at fundraisers.
13:35 Speaker 04 And part of her tease was being a British aristocrat in a room full of commies. And she knew, right, she knew that that was a funny, odd thing, and she loved to play it up. It was part of who she was. She couldn't resist a joke. If there was a joke to be had, including at her own expense, she always made the joke.
13:56 Dana Schwartz? One thing that I also love about Dekka and that I found so striking in your book is just the visual, knowing that if we zoom back to her childhood, she was sharing a bedroom with Unity, the sister who then grew up to be the most fascist. What was their relationship like when they were growing up?
14:16 Speaker 04 Unity was her favorite sister by far. And as far as we can tell, Unity never walked away from a dare, never walked away from a challenge. I think of all the six, as bold and as brave as Dekka was, and she was incredibly brave, Unity may have been even bolder. She didn't get to live out her life, so we don't know what would have happened to her. But she took everything to extreme. Unity was the one who, everybody had an idea and Unity was always the first to actualize it. Unity was apparently a complete card, a total crack up, very, very rebellious, like Dekka, absolutely incapable of bending the knee to anybody
15:01 Speaker 04 or anything. And they were incredibly close in childhood, so that when Unity did what she did, when she not just allied herself or aligned herself with Hitler, but became his intimate and was totally devoted to him, this was heartbreaking for Dekka. This was somebody she loved deeply. And when Unity came back from Germany through Switzerland with a bullet lodged in her brain, with the capacities sort of of an eight-year-old child, but sometimes of a two-year-old child, she had terrible temper tantrums, she didn't always know where she was. Sometimes she was herself, sometimes she drove a car. So
15:43 Speaker 04 they actually let her drive, which is kind of amazing to think about. We wouldn't do that today. But Dekka kept in touch with her. So unlike her sister Diana, who Dekka completely renounced and blamed for her first husband's death, she kept in touch with Unity. In fact, they wrote each other very loving letters. And I think part of what she did was keep Unity alive by remaining a prankster. Dekka kind of remained loyal to the games she and her sister had played with one another. Now, she took them into a different world. She took them out of the nursery and into places like the East Bay Communist Party, not where you expect to find them.
16:24 Speaker 04 But some of her pranks, like the kinds of fundraising parties she would have, where you paid a dollar to get in, but then 50 cents for your drink, but then 25 cents to get rid of your empty glass. And if you went to the bathroom, you had to pay another 10 cents for toilet paper and another 5 cents to come out of the bathroom and another 50 cents if you wanted to leave the party. So that kind of pranking, that is the kind of thing she and Unity would do. And I think she kept her sister alive in her own mind and at her heart by keeping alive a certain playfulness and insisting on it. They couldn't have been closer and Unity, even when she was most brain damaged, the person she wanted to talk to most was not Hitler,
17:09 Speaker 04 although she did phone him. They did have phone conversations after the attempted suicide. There's not a record of them that anybody knows about. There's a lot of fake records of them.
17:19 Dana Schwartz? I'm sure.
17:21 Speaker 04 But the person she wanted most was her sister, Dekka. So, you know, here she was, a devoted Nazi. Dekka was a devoted communist and an anti-fascist and couldn't have been a stronger anti-Nazi, but they longed for one another. And that longing never abated. And even after Unity died, Dekka was very tender about her memory.
17:43 Dana Schwartz? That's very heartbreaking in a way. You know, she sort of lost her sister three times almost.
17:50 Speaker 04 Exactly. Well, in fact, she lost them all. I mean, she kept trying to connect to them, not by pretending to be other than whom she was. She didn't try to connect to them by imitating them or pretending that she, you know, was still pursuing the life they were pursuing. But she went back to England every year at great expense and great trouble. She wrote them constantly. She tried to keep them apprised of her life and they never accepted her. They pretended to sometimes. Sometimes they didn't pretend to at all. Sometimes they're quite mean to her directly. They were almost always mean about her, behind her back. And she kept trying to still have them as her sisters.
18:31 Speaker 04 And for me, that piece of the story was actually the most heartbreaking. The way in which she kept trying to connect to her sisters and the way in which intimate, playful, brilliant, word-loving, story-loving sisterhood marked the rest of her life.
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19:24 Dana Schwartz? You know all those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? You know, the sweater that works with every outfit you try on and the jeans that you know will always fit you just right? Or the bag you carry everywhere? Those are the exact pieces that earn a place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves
20:09 Dana Schwartz? to beautiful 14-karat jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch and might make an excellent holiday present. Quince also doesn't just do clothes. My work bag, my leather bag that I bring every day with me to work is from Quince, and I absolutely love it. It goes with everything I wear, and it's just like a classic that makes me feel sophisticated and grown up. And everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories, cutting out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality and not brand markup. Find the fall pieces you will reach for most at quince.com.
20:50 Dana Schwartz? Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Noble Blood. It is the best way to support this show, honestly, because I just want the Quince sponsorship to continue so I can keep buying Quince clothes and products over and over again.
21:22 Speaker 06 Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. So you're helping Will.i.am write hooks. What made "Ordinary People" become the one song from those sound checks you knew you had to make your own?
21:49 Speaker 07 I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote the hook for "Ordinary People" and I recorded a demo and I'm like, I would rather keep "Ordinary People" for myself. This station in Chicago, WGCI, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself. It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song.
22:19 Speaker 06 Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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22:58 Dana Schwartz? You know all those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? You know, the sweater that works with every outfit you try on and the jeans that you know will always fit you just right? Or the bag you carry everywhere? Those are the exact pieces that earn a place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe. From warm, responsibly sourced down jackets
23:41 Dana Schwartz? and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch and hem might make an excellent holiday present. Quince also doesn't just do clothes. My work bag, my leather bag that I bring every day with me to work is from Quince and I absolutely love it. It goes with everything I wear and it's just like a classic that makes me feel sophisticated and grown up. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories, cutting out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality and not brand markup. Find the fall pieces
24:21 Dana Schwartz? you will reach for most at quince.com. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Noble Blood. It is the best way to support this show. Honestly, because I just want the Quince sponsorship to continue so I can keep buying Quince clothes and products over and over again.
24:56 Speaker 06 Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiro.
25:15 Speaker 09 I love the 60s. I feel really jealous that I wasn't alive for it. I'd be interested, like, knowing what that was like and seeing the way culture and art has progressed today. How do you find it?
25:25 Speaker 06 Wait a minute.
25:26 Speaker 09 I'm sorry, I have so many questions. Sorry.
25:28 Speaker 06 You're not nervous, are you?
25:29 Speaker 09 I am nervous.
25:30 Speaker 06 You are?
25:31 Speaker 09 I am. I feel, like, insecure about my experience. I know I shouldn't, but, you know, I'm 20. I haven't really lived my life yet. And then sitting in front of somebody that has lived an enormous life is intimidating. And sometimes I feel like talking about myself is just not as interesting. So that's why I feel a bit nervous. I'll try and ignore it, though.
25:50 Speaker 06 Please do. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
26:01 Dana Schwartz? Well, fast forwarding a bit after Decca came to America, I want to talk a little bit about the fact that she was summoned to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is a pretty exciting incident in her life. Can you talk a little bit about why she was called and then what she did, or rather, didn't do when she was there?
26:20 Speaker 04 Well put. It was definitely a didn't do. So Decca and her husband, Robert Truheft, Jewish-American, progressive, left-wing lawyer, were both members of the Communist Party. They were deeply involved in the East Bay Communist Party. I don't think Decca, by the way, would have survived in the New York Communist Party, or Chicago, or Minnesota. The East Bay Communist Party was not as rule-bound as others, and it was more playful, and there was more creativity, and it was much less tied to central leadership or the Soviet Union. So she was able to flourish there. And in the East Bay Communist Party, she discovered some of her skills. She discovered there, as well as in the Office of Price Administration for the US government,
27:04 Speaker 04 what an incredible investigator she was. She was indefatigable. You sent Jessica Mitford on a mission, and she is going to get the answers by hook or crook or any means necessary. If she has to hide in bathrooms, if she has to steal files, if she has to pretend to be somebody she's not. She carries all of that, by the way, into her muckraking. It's part of why she succeeds as such a great muckraker. But in the Communist Party, she discovers that she's a great investigator, that she has journalistic skill, and that she's a really, really good organizer. And she is promoted over and over and over again in the Communist Party. Now, for someone like her, who never had a responsible position and no education,
27:48 Speaker 04 those promotions are enormously meaningful. These positions of great responsibility. So she is the acting executive secretary of the East Bay Communist Party. This is a highly important job. She has a lot of responsibility, and it is her job to have all the files and records of the local organization. So of course she is called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She expects to be. She's fully prepared for it. All of their friends have been called up. Some of their friends have flown the country. They're living in Mexico. They're living in South America. Some of their friends unfortunately killed themselves. This is a piece of the Red Scare that sometimes people forget, that the terror of having their
28:31 Speaker 04 lives ruined and losing their jobs and their families and being called up drove people to suicide. So she and Bob were ready. She gets called up, and most of what they want her to do is name names. They want her, as the secretary of the party, she knows everything, to come in with all her files and name names. Now, they don't know Jessica Mitford. There is just no way that Jessica Mitford is going to name a single name. This is never going to happen. So she shows up at the HUAC hearing with no files at all, not a file to be seen. She'd been subpoenaed. And she is in her absolute best outfit. And that entails her best dress bought with her sister Nancy, probably in Paris, because Nancy had the taste.
29:16 Speaker 04 And she's wearing her finest hat. And her finest hat is from her mother-in-law, Aranka Truha, who is a milliner, a very famous, very, very high society milliner in New York City. This is Bob's mother. So she's dressed to the nines. She's got her pearls on. She's got her best handbag. I mean, the whole thing. And she gets into the committee room and they're asking her a million questions and she refuses to answer any of them. I'm sure. And they're getting more and more and more angry at her. And there's quite an audience there to see all of this. Because she's a well-known celebrity locally by the time. And they finally, in frustration, ask her, well, are you a member of the East Bay Tennis Club? And they mean ironically, because the tennis club is very right-wing.
29:59 Speaker 04 And they know that maybe she'll say no to that. Well, she doesn't hear them correctly. He thinks they've just asked her if she's a member of the tenants' club, like the players' association. So she refuses to answer that, too. So the whole room erupts in hysterical laughter because she even refuses to answer that. Now everybody's laughing at the committee chairman and their ridiculous questions. She has the whole room cracking up and they're very frustrated with her and they throw her out of the room and they forget to ask her for her files. So she leaves as quickly as she can. She knows what just happened. She goes into four days of hiding because she knows that when they realize
30:42 Speaker 04 they haven't asked her for the files, they're going to call her back in. She sort of escapes the entire HUAC thing and going to jail. She was prepared. She had no files. She was subpoenaed for the files. She could have been jailed for up to 25 years. She goes to that hearing room expecting that she's going to spend the next few years in prison. I mean, she's ready to do that, but because she's so funny, she escapes it. So her humor, all her life, got her into trouble. And occasionally, her humor got her out of trouble.
31:17 Dana Schwartz? And I think there's also a remarkable power that she had in being able to dress herself that way. I think it was very disarming to people. It was using her privilege to protect herself and her organization.
31:30 Speaker 04 Yes, she made sure that she looked like an aristocrat from the Cotswolds, not a commie from Oakland. She was very warm when she wanted to be. She brought people right in when she wanted to be, but she also knew how to make people uncomfortable and put them on edge and make them not sure of themselves. And she used that very effectively.
31:53 Dana Schwartz? There was also another incident I found fascinating, which involves a riot led by the KKK and a Martin Luther King rally. Would you mind explaining how Deca Mitford found herself in that situation?
32:09 Speaker 04 Jessica Mitford was very close to Virginia and Clifford Durr. And Virginia and Clifford Durr came from the South, spent years and years and years in the Washington DC area. And they were amazing civil rights workers. In fact, Virginia Durr was the person who was really single-handedly, finely responsible for getting rid of the poll tax, which kept poor and people of color from voting. I don't know if you've been following this, but we're looking at new versions of the poll tax coming back around in the attacks on voting rights right now. So Virginia Woolf must be absolutely rolling in her grave in disbelief because she finally got rid of the poll tax and here it is coming again. And Jessica Mitford
32:52 Speaker 04 lived with the Durs for a couple of years and would go back South to visit them. After she moved off to Oakland, she would go often to visit. And she was visiting in Montgomery, Alabama during the period of the incredible famous bus boycotts and during the period of the Freedom Rides. So this is the SNCC Freedom Rides, which follow the bus boycotts. And one of the bloodiest incidents in the history of the Freedom Rides and of the SNCC. Freedom riders who were trying to make a case for integration by riding the buses together throughout the South, black and white, young people, mostly who had left college to do this work in the South.
33:35 Speaker 04 The Freedom Riders were coming into Montgomery, Alabama. And organized by the KKK and other racist groups, the buses were attacked. This was one of the periods where John Lewis was almost killed. This is one of the periods where famously John Lewis was beaten over the head to unconsciousness and others. There was actually a white woman activist who was killed in Montgomery at this demonstration. And there was a, just a horrible race riot, a horrible, not a race riot, but a, a white attack, a horrible mob attack on black people. Just a terrible racist, not race riot, but racist riot. And Jessica Mitford sort of threw herself into the middle of it. She was right there. She was in it.
34:17 Speaker 04 And it was followed that evening by an evening service and meeting at the church. And Martin Luther King was there and all of the Freedom Riders were there. And it was a very important gathering to assess this attack and this riot. And as the community of protesters gathered in the church, a white mob assembled all around it. And the white mob tried to kill everybody in the church. They threw in pipe bombs, they threw in smoke bombs, they threatened, they were armed, they took a car and they turned it upside down and they set it on fire in an attempt to church on fire. Turned out that car was the car Jessica Mitford had been driving.
35:02 Speaker 04 And over 300 people was trapped in this church overnight, including Jessica Mitford and Martin Luther King. They kept calling Bobby Kennedy and they kept saying, please, you've got to send the National Guard. And it wasn't until dawn that they were finally rescued by a cadre of National Guards people who pushed the white mob, the rioters, away and got them out. And Jessica Mitford wrote an essay about it. It ended up never being published. It was not one of her most successful. Everybody always wanted her to be funny, and it was not an evening she wanted to be funny about. There wasn't much funny about that night, so she had a hard time placing that essay.
35:44 Speaker 04 But like her time in Spain, where she saw people volunteer from all around the world and put their lives on the line for democracy and to fight fascism, I think that night you're talking about left an indelible mark on her. I think what she looked at, the risk people were taking just to be able to vote, just for the right to have their voices heard in this country, that left a real mark on her, and it influenced the work she later did.
36:13 Dana Schwartz? Before I let you go, there's one more. Like you said, three different lives she lived. When she was a muckraking journalist, her most, I would say maybe her most famous and influential story was an expose on the funeral industry. Would you mind telling us a little bit how she got into that topic and then what she discovered?
36:33 Speaker 04 And you're absolutely right. The book was a blockbuster. It was the head, it was the top of the bestseller list for nearly a year. It was called The American Way of Death. She published it in 1963. It's never gone out of print. It's still taught in university classrooms across the country. What's remarkable about it, it's an hysterically funny, laugh-out-loud book about death and dying and funerals. So she manages to do two things. She manages to expose the exploitation of the funeral industry. It was preying on poor people who would lose all their death benefits to fancy funerals they didn't need, but which they were talked into.
37:13 Speaker 04 And at the same time, it managed to expose them by just mocking them, using the Mitford tease. The book is sometimes quite gruesome. It was co-written with her husband, Robert Truheft, and it came to her through him. He was a lawyer for the Bay Area Memorial Society, a co-op, designed to help people do essentially DIY funerals and escape all that exploitation. And he would come home with these stories. And for months, she would dismiss them until one day, he came home with a story she couldn't dismiss. He came home with a story about a client, a grieving widow, wanted a cheaper coffin. She was being talked into a coffin she could not afford.
37:55 Speaker 04 You know, one of these fancy caskets with the silk and the gilded and the all of the stuff. And she said, no, I want that simple wooden one. And the undertaker said to this grieving woman who had just lost her husband, "Well, lady, I can give you that wooden one, but I'll have to chop his feet off." And when Jessica Mitford heard that story, she said, "That's it. We have to write a book about these guys. We have to write a book about what they're doing." And it was really her leaping to the defense of grieving widows. And she wrote that book with her husband. And it started her career as a muckraker. And for the rest of her career, she went after people who were exploiting and taking advantage of others. And she did it often with humor.
38:39 Speaker 04 She was remarkably effective.
38:42 Dana Schwartz? And of course, her first husband had died. She could be very empathetic.
38:46 Speaker 04 And she had lost two children. So something she almost never talked about. It's hardly in her books at all. But she had lost an infant daughter and then a son who wasn't even a teenager yet. And she knew a great deal about loss. And she knew a great deal about what felt to her like both the dignity of dying and the dignity of living, that, you know, she thought it shouldn't be something that people made a profit out of.
39:11 Dana Schwartz? Very well said. Before I let you go, one last question. What was her funeral like?
39:17 Speaker 04 Well, she made a joke about her funeral. She always used to joke about it. And the joke was, I want the whole quartage. I want, you know, six horsemen and I want the glass hearse and I want the whole thing. And it was a joke. Well, after she died, when she left very explicit instructions that she wanted the cheapest cremation possible, her friends thought, oh, we can't resist one last joke. We have to have one last piece of fun with Decca. So they did a kind of mock version of the fancy, fancy funeral, including with a New Orleans style band and, you know, the glass hearse and just the whole thing. Unfortunately, some of the American press didn't realize it was a joke. And so some of the American press, after her death, said,
40:01 Speaker 04 well, we don't really understand it. She was against fancy funerals, but then she left instructions to have one. It was a joke. But she did have a sort of mock version of the fancy funeral to enormous memorials. She was a deeply beloved figure and her death was very devastating to people, but she also had the death she chose. She refused a lot of intervention. She wanted to be able to write and think and joke and laugh and sing up until the end. And she died with her friends all around her bed, singing her favorite songs.
40:38 Dana Schwartz? That's beautiful. Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford. Truly Decca Mitford, a character larger than life. Thank you so much for joining me today.
40:52 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for having me.
41:02 Dana Schwartz? Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Hite, and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk with supervising producer, Reema Ilkayali, and executive producers, Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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