Left-Wing Political Activist and Progressive Leader in the Berkeley Co-op
V. Political Activities in Alameda County; Deportation from Portugal; House Un-American Activities Committee Investigation
Conflict with Alameda County District Attorney's Office
LarsenWe'll go on to some other things. Let's talk about kicking in the door of the D.A.'s office.
Treuhaft
As a result of the Cold War, the anti-Communist atmosphere, of the '50s, my law practice, which had been dependent entirely in the past on representing labor organizations, labor unions, began to lose those clients because the left-wing unions had been expelled from the CIO, and we had been representing only the left-wing unions. Left-wing unions were Cold War victims like many other progressive institutions. As a result, the financial base on which our law firm operated was dwindling.
Now the same situation back East destroyed many lawyers and drove them out of practice. And here, we were saved from that fate by the fact that in the early '50s, I had become rather well-known in the Black community as a result of representing Jerry Newson in the murder case I talked about some time ago. Surprisingly well-known, always surprising to me was how well-known I was in the Black community. And the result was that the gaps in our practice that had been left by the attrition of losing some of the labor union work were filled by a very large number of Black clients coming in as individuals. So that, by 1960 or so, at least three-quarters of our clients were Black. And there was no Black lawyer or law firm in the area that had nearly the number of Black clients that we had.
Also, during the '50s and '60s, my partner, Bertram Edises, and I, and whoever was associated with us — we always had five, six, seven people in the law firm — became enemies of the Oakland Police Department. I think I mentioned before all that — the campaign against police brutality. We were disliked by the police department. Also, the '50s, before the Warren Court came along,
So it was a struggle even to get in to see a client who was charged with a felony; you had to go through all sorts of absurd requirements. Now this was especially true in Alameda County because we had this extremely right-wing district attorney, J. Frank Coakley, who had a lot of control over the police and police procedures and over the judges in the courts. So I was asked one day by the mother of a young man, an eighteen-year-old, who had been arrested for rape, to represent him. Well, the newspaper carried the story about five boys, Black youths, having attacked the occupants of a car that was parked up in the Oakland hills, and they were accused of raping a white girl who was in the car. The girl was the daughter of the owner of a big laundry chain, and she was there with her boyfriend. The boyfriend had his pants down, and these five young Blacks came along, and they found them in the car in that condition. They pulled the man off, and sent him down the road with his pants off, and were accused, at least, of finishing the job, of having intercourse with the girl.
Now I knew nothing about it except what I read in the paper, so I went down to the City Hall to see my client. I was told by the police inspector, "You can't see him. He's not in jail now." So I said, "Well, if he's not in jail, he should be home." "Well, no." "Well, where is he?" "He's in the district attorney's office." I said, "Well, that's where I want to be. I've got a right to be there." "No, you can't do that. You have to wait until they're through with him."
While he was telling me this, there was an old-time Irish lawyer from San Francisco, who was waiting to see one of the other boys in the same group. He'd been waiting there for hours. We both were waiting in the police inspector's office. You had to get permission from the inspectors, and it was very hard at that time to see a client. And the jail, at that time, was in the City Hall, at 14th and Washington streets.
So I went out into the hallway to cool off a bit. It was about six o'clock, and I met a lawyer out there, a criminal lawyer whom I knew, and he says, "What are you doing around here?" And I said, "Well, I'm trying to see those kids, to see my client."
I went to the door of the D.A.'s office, and I knocked. The upper half of the door was glass reinforced with metal, so I knocked on it and kept banging on it for five minutes. Finally, I heard people in there, somebody opened the door just a crack, and I put my foot in the door and said I wanted to see my client. I could see him in there. He was talking to the D.A. Somebody grabbed me and shoved me across the hallway so that I slid on the floor, bounced up against a railing, and he slammed the door. So I got up and pushed my foot through the glass door and made a hole in it. And I looked in there, and I could see my client. And a few minutes later, everybody was gone from that room.
And a reporter came by a few minutes later, and he said, "I think you can see your client now. He's back up in the jail." So that made the newspapers, and of course that brought a whole flood of new clients in because, you know, the Black clients especially loved to hear the story of somebody kicking in the door of the D.A.'s office. So it kept us going for some time. They never even sent me a bill for the door. They knew they were in such a bad position. A lot of illegal activity was going on in the police department. It wasn't until the Warren Court came along that they had to establish some decency and the enforcement of constitutional law rights for criminal defendants.
Deportation from Portugal
LarsenDo you want to tell about your experience in Portugal?
Treuhaft
Let's see. 1964. Nineteen sixty-four was a busy year for me because that was the year of the Free Speech Movement.
Earlier, in April, 1964, I was in Portugal, as one of four lawyers who had gone as representatives of the I.A.D.L., the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which was actually a left, really Communist lawyers' international association. In other words, the Soviet Union was very important in it, but the National Lawyers Guild had a delegation affiliated with it, and English lawyers that I knew were affiliated with it. So we were at a convention of the I.A.D.L. in Budapest in April. There were some Portuguese lawyers
So, I volunteered, and also Bob Kenny [Robert W. Kenny], who had been Attorney General of California. When Earl Warren was governor, two terms, or three terms,23 Earl Warren always had a Republican slate elected with him, but the only Democrat who was elected was Bob Kenny. And Bob Kenny was a very brilliant lawyer. He had been a judge. He was Attorney General of the State of California for at least four years,24 and later, in the '60s, was chief counsel for the Hollywood Ten. So he and I volunteered. We were the only U.S. lawyers on the delegation, and there was one Canadian lawyer and one Brazilian.
The four of us met in Paris with the emigreé Portuguese lawyers, and they briefed us, and arranged for us to go to Portugal, and we got there. They briefed us to try to visit, first, the families of prisoners. We did that the first day. Then the next day, they said, "Try to visit some of the government authorities, try to see the Minister of Prisons and the Minister of Justice, to see whether you can visit some of the political prisoners in jail. You probably won't be able to, but then you'll meet some other people, historians, and whatnot, and press people there, and you'll meet the lawyers. And then on Saturday, you should have a press conference. You just call a press conference at your hotel, and invite the international press and the Portuguese press and you tell them about your findings."
So, we went through all this. It was very much a police state at the time. We met with the families of the prisoners, and we heard some heart-rending stories, and we met with the lawyers, all of whom had been in jail at one time or another. The Minister of Justice was out of town for the weekend, but the Minister of Prisons was happy to show us all the prison building that was going on. And we said that we wanted to visit some of the prisoners, political prisoners. He said, "Well, we don't have any in my Department. The political prisoners are held in special jails
Tape 6, Side A
LarsenSo Bob Kenny said, "You haven't learned anything. It's ridiculous."
Treuhaft
Yes, and I agreed. And the Canadian lawyer agreed also. The Brazilian lawyer was a sort of much more stolid person, and you couldn't really explain it to him. But anyway, we made the decision. We thought the best way not to have the press conference was to have the secret police stop us from having it.
So, while the others went out to a nightclub — we were staying at a large hotel — I got the staff of the hotel first to type up invitations to all of the foreign and domestic press and do the translation, and deliver them by hand to the various newspapers. Well, we knew that this would have to get to the secret police. "We are going to have a press conference tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock. Be at the Tivoli Hotel, in the lobby. We will have explosive and interesting things to tell you about what we've learned about the treatment of political prisoners." So, the others had gone out to a nightclub, as I say, and I was feeling sort of under the weather. I stayed home. And around midnight, great pounding on my door. Bob Kenny and [Norman] Endicott, the Canadian attorney, showed up elated because attached to each door, their doors and mine, as well, was a note saying, "You are not permitted to have your press conference tomorrow." Signed, P.I.D.E, secret police.
The following morning, we assembled at eleven o'clock in the lobby of our hotel and none of the Portuguese press showed up. But the New York Times, the United Press, Reuters, and international press people did show up. Bob Kenny was the spokesman, and he said, "Well, here are the notices we received from the secret police, forbidding us to have a press conference. However, we intend to go ahead. . ." And just at that point these figures in dark, tight-fitting suits emerged from the shadows, put the arm on each of us, and said, "Upstairs. You're leaving right now. You're leaving Portugal."
So, I went up to my room accompanied by a young soldier, and I called the American Embassy. There was an English-speaking operator who got the Embassy for me.
My wife had a call that night from the U.P. [United Press]. They woke her up in the middle of the night, and said, "Do you know what's happened to your husband?" And she was absolutely horrified. She thought, what could have happened to me? "No, what happened?" she swallowed hard. And they said, "He's been arrested and expelled from Portugal." And she said, "Oh, thank God!" [Laughter] So, as we expected, our arrest made the story because when I got to New York, there was somebody from the New York Times waiting to interview me, and I gave them the story. It made the national press and it made the local papers, and it made a much better story to be kicked out than to tell — we were able to do both that way — we were able to tell about the treatment we had heard about of the prisoners, but the main story was the expulsion. It made, you know, the front page of the Oakland Tribune.
The Robert Condon Campaign for Congress
Interview 6: January 10, 1989
Tape 6, Side A (continued)
You mentioned some time ago that you had been a law partner of Robert Condon. Is there a story there?
Treuhaft
Well, actually, there's an interesting political story. Immediately after the war, it must have been '47 or '48, when Bob Condon, whom I hadn't known, of course, because I came here only during the war, had lived in this area, in Lafayette. Bob was in the armed services, and he came out and back to California about 1947, thereabouts. It was right after the unfortunate Wallace Progressive party campaign for president.
At that time, I was practicing law in Oakland in partnership with Bertram Edises, and we remained partners for many years afterwards. Edises, one of my great mentors, had been an important figure in labor law. He had been in Washington in the National Labor Relations Board, one of the early attorneys for the board. When he came to California, he moved in with the other labor lawyers, left-wing lawyers, all of them members of the Communist party. And when I joined up, we represented all of the CIO unions in the State of California. Bob Condon had also worked for the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, so that he and Bert Edises had gotten to know each other.
When Bob came out of the service, we happily took him in as a partner. He was an extremely attractive, brilliant lawyer, an able man, prematurely white haired, a war hero, a perfect candidate to run for political office. And he was being pushed by Progressive party people to run for something. He was resisting that. He wanted to get into something more mainstream.
Well, at that time, all of the congressmen in this area were Republicans — Alameda County and Contra Costa County also. He lived in Contra Costa County. The Democrats used to run either nobody or run somebody just as a matter of form. Never did any campaigning because there was such a strong Republican seat. So, Bob had no trouble being persuaded to accept the Democratic nomination for State Assembly. I don't think he even had to run in a primary. Nobody ran against him. He was going to put up a campaign, but he knew that he had no chance of winning.
Just at that time, the Oil Workers Union went on strike in California; they struck all of the refineries in California. We represented them. That had been one of Bob's assignments. We sort of parceled out the unions, and Bob was representing the oil workers through the negotiations, which broke down and then went into a strike situation. It was late summer, and Bob said, "Well, that's the end of my chance for running for Assembly because I'm going to spend all my time in court on these damned injunction cases."
There were a number of refineries in Contra Costa County, as you probably know. There was Standard Oil and there was Union Oil and Tidewater Oil, Texaco. All of them had refineries there. Well, of course, his prediction was all wrong because he was in court every day, it was true, fighting injunctions; but he was fighting against the oil companies on behalf of labor, and he became a labor hero and very well-known in the press of Contra Costa County.
Now upon his election, he had been living in Saranap, just outside of Lafayette. That's where his parents had lived. The family home was there, a very nice place, and he was living there with his wife and daughter. He decided that he had to have a Contra Costa County base if he was going to be in politics there. So he, after being in partnership with us for less than a year, not more than a year anyway, set up his own office in Martinez, and practiced there for many years afterwards. At that time, the State Assembly wasn't very taxing. You didn't have to be there more than a couple of months a year as I recall, maybe three or four months. And you could handle your law practice very well. Also, it never hurt a law practice to be elected to office. So he was doing pretty well.
But shortly after his election, a photographer came around when we hadn't removed his name from the door yet, and he took a picture of the door which had Edises, Treuhaft, and Condon on it. We didn't notice anything outstanding about red-baiting while he was an assemblyman. He was very successful as a legislator. He was in for about two terms. Then the Democratic party pushed him to run for Congress. Well, again, it was a safe Republican seat. They did run a very good campaign. He had Democratic party backing, and he won. So for the first time in maybe twenty years, there was a Democrat representing the district.
He did brilliantly in Congress. He was President of the Freshmen Congress club, he won favor with the house leadership; Sam Rayburn, who was Speaker of the House, put him on the Labor Committee, and complimented him on the work he was doing on it. Everything was going swimmingly. He had gone into debt, as everyone does, to get elected to his first term; but once you're elected, it's almost a guarantee that you'll be re-elected. I think there's less than 1 percent, certainly less than 5 percent, loss of incumbency in Congress and the House of Representatives.
So he was a cinch to win a second term. But toward the end of his first term, he accepted an invitation to go to Nevada to witness the atomic bomb testing. And having done that, when he was preparing to go, J. Edgar Hoover issued a public blast against
House Un-American Activities Committee Investigation
LarsenDoes the FBI have a dossier on you?
Treuhaft
Oh, yes. I have it, just about 270 pages. But it's not very revealing. It consists largely of things like this [gestures to book on coffee table]. This is from the FBI files, what a field of information file looks like. This is by an ex-Communist. The book I'm showing you is by Junious Scales, who was the only person ever to go to jail under the membership clause of the Smith Act. At any rate, I do have my FBI file. As I say, it has things in there like "In 1943 married ———," so my wife's name is stricken out in order to protect her privacy, you see. And a number of pages, everything is stricken out except, "Seen entering Berkeley Co-op," — very subversive [Laughter]. The trouble is, as Communists, we were never really terribly subversive. We were awfully law-abiding people.
Larsen
John Dos Passos made it in there.
Treuhaft
In where?
Larsen
Into one of the FBI files.
Treuhaft
Oh, sure, he would, because he was a socialist. He was an anti-Communist socialist, but he was a socialist for a long time.
Larsen
How did this lead into the House Un-American Activities [HUAC] investigation?
Well, I'd represented HUAC witnesses, and I had the thing out the other day, as to what year I was subpoenaed — about 1956, I think, something like that.
Larsen
How did you first learn that you were being called before the committee?
Treuhaft
There was a State committee before that, called the Tenney Committee, a little Smith Act committee. They subpoenaed my wife, and she tells in her book about the hilarious experience she had testifying before them. (That was a year or two before I was called before HUAC.) I'd learned that there was a subpoena out for me, and I just didn't stay at home for a week until the committee left, so I was not subpoenaed for the State hearing. For the HUAC hearings, we had rather short notice that the committee was coming, and I was just handed a subpoena, that was all. After that happened, my law partner also was subpoenaed, Bert Edises. We had represented numerous witnesses in other hearings before the committee. So when I was subpoenaed, we were building a law practice, and I wanted to maintain my position with other lawyers in town. It was generally suspected that I was a Communist but that didn't seem to frighten anybody terribly, although I know there was some animosity on the part of some judges.
At any rate, I wanted to put on as good a showing as possible. Most people who were subpoenaed in those days had a hard time getting lawyers. The result was they usually had members of the National Lawyers Guild, who usually were Communists, representing them. I wanted to broaden out a bit and to get some rather respectable lawyer to represent me.
So I made a list of ten distinguished lawyers in the area, all of whom I knew personally, and went to them one after another. All of them, each of them, expressed a desire to represent me, but each of them had a pretty good excuse. One of them was Monroe Friedman, who had been a superior court judge, and for a short time was a federal court judge. He was appointed, but his appointment expired before a new Republican president came in, before he could be confirmed. But he was an elder statesman, and he was somebody I could go to. There was another man who had been President of the American Bar Association. His name was [Charles] Beardsley, one of the old firms, and I went to him because he had some reputation in civil rights. He had been involved in a couple of civil rights cases. I went to see him at the Claremont Country Club, and he said, "Oh, you want somebody younger. I'm too old for this." He was retired, and safe, and he wouldn't do it.
So, I went to Monroe Friedman, who was not too old and who was mature and safe. He was practicing law. He had been a judge. He had no more political ambitions. And he said, "Oh, absolutely, Bob. I do want to represent you and I will represent you." I went up with my wife also. She had been subpoenaed. "I'll represent both of you, absolutely." And I said, "Well, Monroe, I want to pay a fee. So I want you to tell me what the fee is." and he said, "Absolutely not, I won't accept a fee." So the arrange- ments were all made. We had a couple of sessions with him discussing the approach. He knew that we were not going to be friendly witnesses, that we would when the point came, take the First or the Fifth, or whatever amendments we thought necessary, and he was thoroughly in agreement and in sympathy with us.
Five days before the hearings, I get a telegram from him, saying, "Regret will not be able to represent you or Decca at hearings." Well, getting a telegram from him was pretty strange because his office was only about two blocks away from mine. So I stormed over there. I was just furious, and said, "What's up?" And I sat down with him. Before the session was over, he was in tears. He said, "Bob, I just feel like an awful shit. I don't know what . . ." He wouldn't use a word like that, he wouldn't use that word. He said, "I feel just terrible about it, letting you down, but my partner who was away in Hawaii when you were in here, when I agreed to this, just came back the other day. And when I told him I was going to be representing you and Decca, he said, "If you do that, I'm going to jump right out of that window. Don't you know that the Internal Revenue [Service] is going to be on top of us? And if the Internal Revenue looks through my books, I'm going to have to jump out of that window. What are you trying to do to me?" He was crying by this time. He said, "I really have no choice. If there's anything I can do to make up for it." "Well, there's nothing you can do."
So, having been turned down by ten lawyers, I prepared a statement explaining why I was representing myself. I decided to go without counsel. So when I did go, the meetings were heavily attended in San Francisco, and the committee was very tough in those days; the law was very tough. You couldn't make a statement. You could just answer questions. So when I sat down, the Committee Counsel quoting the rules says, "Mr. Treuhaft, are you represented by counsel?" I said, "I will answer that question."
And then I quoted Harry Truman. The committee was trying to subpoena him, you know, at that time, also to show what a "Red" he was. He issued a statement, a rather ringing statement, denouncing the committee and supporting the First Amendment. This was right after his term of presidency was over. And so I quoted from his statement, and there was applause. Well, you are not supposed to be applauding witnesses, and upon the applause, the hearing was cleared.
Well, I thought I had done all right, but the following day, the Tribune had a front page headline saying, "Lawyer Creates a Disturbance in Hearing." I was really rather badly put out by that because it gave the impression that I was acting like a clown, and actually I tried to behave with great dignity, and I didn't know what effect it would have on my practice, and whatnot.
It turned out that, in time, we did lose all of our labor union clients. The national CIO and the State CIO had expelled the left-wing unions. Well, we didn't lose all our clients. We retained some of them who had been expelled like the ILWU. But the others were under heavy pressure not to have any connection with us. There was a strong anti-Communist feeling, a cold-war feeling in the labor movement at the time. And also, of course, there was the McCarran Act, which made membership in the Communist party by union officers a crime, and a number of union officers went to jail on the allegation that they were members of the Communist party. So, our practice suffered to some extent there. I think we made up for a lot because of the fact that most of our clients at that time were already Blacks, Negroes, and they weren't too much impressed by the HUAC and Communist connections.
The one thing, that I remember out of that . . . I don't know whether I mentioned this before, but one of my law partners at that time, Ed Grogan, was down at City Hall, and he heard two cops talking. It was the day that headline appeared. We had been on terrible terms with the police. We had been suing the police.
Larsen
Did they ask you anything you couldn't field?
Treuhaft
No, all they asked was, "Are you a member of the Communist party?"
Tape 6, Side B
Treuhaft"Aren't you aware that so and so testified and so and so testified?" Well, I just took the Fifth Amendment on all of those.
Larsen
Is that what you would have done if Friedman had represented you?
Treuhaft
Oh, yes, I would have. That was 1956. Well, that was probably my last year in the Communist party anyway, I think. I dropped out about that time, I might even have been out of the Party. It wouldn't have made any difference to me. I was just not answering as a matter of principle. I knew I was in no danger if I testified that I was a member. Like other people who were in the Party, I mentioned before, about being terribly law-abiding. I never cheated on income tax, one of the few lawyers I know who didn't; and the reason was I just didn't feel that I wanted to go to jail, and if I did go to jail, I wanted to go on something principled and not on something like income tax.
And the thing is, like that lawyer who said, if Internal Revenue comes around, he's going to jump. He was perfectly right because at the HUAC hearings there was always a section on the side, right near the committee, where there would be seated local law enforcement people, representatives of the Immigration Department, representatives of the Internal Revenue. They would be there at the invitation and request of the committee, and whenever there was a witness who refused to testify, they would say, "Now look, you people in Internal Revenue, I want you to pay attention to this. Look into what this fellow's doing." They did it openly like that so that we knew that we were vulnerable, and this lawyer was quite right. There was a good chance that they would have gone through his books and found something there that he didn't want exposed.
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt4x0nb0bf&brand=calisphere
Title: Left-Wing Political Activist and Progressive Leader in the Berkeley Co-op
By: Robert E. Treuhaft, Creator, Robert G. Larsen, Interviewer
Date: 1988-1989
Contributing Institution: University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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