JESSICA MITFORD, THE GREAT TROUBLEMAKER (w/Carla Kaplan)
Muckraking journalist and unlikely anti-fascist hero
Hello, all—
I spoke with biographer Carla Kaplan about her new book, Troublemaker: The Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, which details “Decca” Mitford’s transformation from British aristocrat to communist, muckraking journalist, instinctual feminist, and lifelong anti-fascist. I had the great honor and pleasure of meeting Decca in the early 1970s through a close friend, bandmate, and housemate whose family had been close to Decca’s for many years. For a while there she fed us from time to time, invited us to her gatherings, and made us feel interesting and important (at a time when I, at least, was neither).
In this conversation, Carla talked about Decca’s role in reviving muckracking journalism, especially with the publication of The American Way of Death, a book that made a big impact on my when I read it in my mid-teens. I had no idea you could expose injustice and be mordantly funny. It made me want to try my hand at doing the same, something it took me another quarter-century to try my hand at (with middling success, at best). To meet her a few years later was a special pleasure for me.
Carla explores the ways in which Decca’s humor and authenticity made her a uniquely effective political actor, and how her life embodied rebellion not as a pose but as an ethical obligation. We discussed her idiosyncratic feminism, her dedication to class analysis, and her remarkable ability to remain principled, funny, and humane through war, repression, and personal loss. All in all, it’s a model of engaged resistance which feels especially relevant now.
I highly recommend the book. (and, of course, the conversation in this video!) The transcript is below.
For more information: www.jessicamitford.com
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TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)
Richard Eskow: We’re back on The Zero Hour. I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow, and I’m very much looking forward to speaking with my next guest.
I was aware of her book through reviews, and I got to meet her through the Roots Action Book Club, a terrific group you can find at teachinnetwork.org/bookclubs/. It’s a large but eminently readable tome entitled Troublemaker: The Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.
Its author and my guest today is Carla Kaplan—award-winning professor and writer, and author of several other books, including Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance.
She joins us now. Carla, welcome to the program.
Carla Kaplan: Thank you so much for having me.
Richard Eskow: It’s my pleasure. I was really looking forward to continuing our conversation.
Let’s start with the obvious question. You’ve written about Zora Neale Hurston, a major figure, and about white women in the Harlem Renaissance—a fascinating and complicated historical corner. What drew you to Jessica Mitford, or “Decca,” as she was known?
Carla Kaplan: Let’s go ahead and call her Decca—she always did, and everyone who knew her did.
What drew me to her was actually my previous book, Miss Anne in Harlem, which was a group biography of white women in the 1920s ad ’30s who looked at the Left Bank, looked at Greenwich Village, and said, “No, we want something more interesting.” They wanted to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.
It was an unlikely idea and not always welcome. Some came with resources and tried to help; some came with exoticizing fascination; others came with serious civil-rights credentials, including Mary White Ovington, a founder of the NAACP.
I had been working on Zora Neale Hurston for decades, and she had many white women friends. I kept looking for a book about these women, and there wasn’t one. So I wrote the book I wanted to read.
That project became a study of what happens when good intentions go awry. Many of the women I focused on were failed allies. They meant well but lacked cultural understanding.
After finishing that book, I knew I couldn’t do another study of failed allies. I wanted to write about a successful ally. I also wanted to write about a white woman left activist who was genuinely funny—because there’s a stereotype that female activists are grim, humorless, and over-earnest.
Jessica Mitford shattered that stereotype. She was probably the funniest activist in American history. Her humor was irrepressible.
She was also remarkable because she came from the British aristocracy—about as far from her eventual politics as one could imagine. She was, in that sense, a dream subject.
She landed in my lap while I was working on Miss Anne in Harlem. I discovered there was a massive archive—about 600 bankers’ boxes. I didn’t realize how large it was at first, but that’s how the book began.
Richard Eskow: So how long did it take you to go through 600 boxes?
Carla Kaplan: I’m of the Robert Caro “turn every page” school. The book took ten years—almost twice as long as I expected—because there was so much material.
I also wanted to contextualize her life. If she was working on incarceration and prison abolition in the 1970s, I wanted to understand who else was doing that work and what the broader conversation looked like. That kind of research takes time.
Richard Eskow: I encourage people—especially those who may not know Jessica Mitford—to read your book and also her writing, particularly The American Way of Death. That book changed my life when I read it at about fifteen.
I had no idea you could be politically right-on and genuinely funny. It took me about thirty years, but I thought, “That’s something I’d like to try.”
That book came out in 1963. To me, it feels like a forerunner of so-called New Journalism.
Carla Kaplan: Absolutely.
When she took on the funeral industry, she deliberately revived the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair—at a moment when that tradition was essentially dormant.
What’s remarkable is that The American Way of Death came out the same year as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But Mitford’s book topped the bestseller lists week after week.
Together, Mitford and Carson revived investigative journalism and paved the way for figures like Ralph Nader and Barbara Ehrenreich. Without Jessica Mitford, there is no modern muckraking tradition.
She initially thought of the book strictly as investigative journalism. It wasn’t until Time magazine dubbed her “the Queen of the Muckrakers” that she embraced the term—and she loved the irony, given that she’d walked away from nobility and delighted in mocking royalty.
Richard Eskow: It’s also striking that the two figures who revived muckraking at that moment—Mitford and Carson—were both women.
It makes me wonder whether male journalists felt constrained by professional norms in ways women did not.
Carla Kaplan: That makes complete sense.
In Mitford’s case, gender mattered deeply. The people she was defending were mostly widows—working-class women being exploited by the funeral industry.
The project came through her husband, Bob Treuhaft, a progressive lawyer working with the Bay Area Memorial Society. Funeral directors somehow always knew exactly how much a union death benefit was and managed to extract every cent.
One story in particular set Mitford off: a widow who asked for a simple wooden coffin was told her husband’s feet would have to be cut off to fit him in.
That was the moment the light went on for Mitford. This wasn’t just consumer protection—it was a defense of working-class women.
She never expected the book to become a phenomenon. She thought it would sell a few thousand copies to left intellectuals and, as she put it, “the Unitarians.”
Richard Eskow: My impression of Decca—having known her slightly—was that she was an instinctive feminist, not a didactic one.
She treated everyone the same. Her living room might have Black Panthers, professors, communists, and hungry kids all sitting together. There was no sense of cultural tourism—just genuine curiosity and respect.
Carla Kaplan: That’s exactly right.
She lived a deeply feminist life. Bob handled domestic responsibilities. Decca pursued a self-directed career as a journalist and activist.
But she was skeptical of American feminism, particularly consciousness-raising and “the personal is political.” Her politics were rooted in class analysis. She had little patience for what she called “grubbing about” in one’s feelings.
She lived as a feminist but resisted feminism as a movement. That tension explains both her power and her blind spots.
Richard Eskow: And yet she endured extraordinary tragedy—war, loss, repression—and rarely spoke about it.
Carla Kaplan: She believed authenticity worked. She never hid who she was, including her aristocratic background. She understood you could come from one world, leave it, and still use parts of it.
Over fifty interviews, people always said the same thing: “Decca was Decca.” She brought together unlikely elements of the twentieth century and expected everyone else to do the same.
She was also a lifelong anti-fascist who never stopped laughing. She survived HUAC because she made them laugh so hard they forgot why she was there.
That spirit—the ability to fight authoritarianism without losing joy—is something we desperately need now.
Richard Eskow: I couldn’t agree more.
Her rebellion wasn’t a posture—it was an ethical duty. And as a journalist, she taught us something essential: objectivity was never the goal. Accuracy was.
Carla, thank you for writing this book and for joining us today.
Carla Kaplan: Thank you so much for having me.