FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION of Ambrose Bierce, McWilliams continued to build his credentials as an attorney and writer. Only a few years out of law school, he was already a junior partner in his firm and its chief litigator. He was also writing prodigiously, mostly on California and Western writers; in 1930 alone, he published twelve more pieces, including another essay for the American Mercury. He was laying the groundwork for two promising careers, but privately he was restless. In a 1931 letter to Mary Austin, he confided that splitting his energies between law and writing was unsatisfactory.
You are quite right in thinking that my law work will interfere with what writing I do. The clash between the two is becoming very difficult to manage. I fear that I shall soon write like a lawyer and argue like a writer. I'm thinking about giving up my practice, but you know how difficult these things are, particularly when one needs an income. (Oct. 3, 193l)
There were other sources of dissatisfaction, too. Earlier he had noted privately that he felt “horribly marooned in Los Angeles” (Mar. 9, 1928). Moreover, he considered the city's politics “God-awful … Not a single colorful or dynamic figure. Not an intelligent liberal on the scene … politics are so abject that they can't be discussed without blasphemy” (May 11, 1929). His friendships were also a concern. At the age of twenty-one, he had observed, “Boozing becomes a more and more ingratiating pastime as the years fall away. There is a world of solace in its charms. When I've had a drink, I feel better, I talk better, and I actually am better. Things take on a bewitching glamour” (WJ, March 1927). Later, however, he felt that he had “to shun old friends, as they are all potential drunkards, and I don't drink anymore.” But abstinence did not suit him either, even during Prohibition. In February 1930, the same month the Nation praised the Bierce biography, he was arrested for drunk driving and given a thirty-day suspended sentence. Despite his restlessness, or perhaps because of it, he married Dorothy Hedrick in July of that year. After a civil ceremony in Santa Ana, the couple honeymooned in the Pacific Northwest, where they could drink legally in British Columbia.
During this time, the University of Washington Bookstore was preparing McWilliams's chapbook, The New Regionalism in American Literature (1930). Dedicated to Mary Austin, the essay was an extension of McWilliams's earlier work on Bierce and other Western writers, but it also reflects larger movements in American intellectual life. The stock market crash and Depression reduced the temptation to lampoon Main Street, and as the nation's social, political, and economic problems worsened, many writers and intellectuals turned their attention to the common man's experience. When it came to literary expression, however, McWilliams was not inclined to glorify that experience automatically. Surveying American regional literature and its quality, he quotes without comment an excerpt from An Anthology of South Dakota Poetry:
Bad Lands? Glad Lands!
Clay Lands? Gay Lands!
Sand Lands? Grand Lands!
Drear Lands? Dear Lands!
If this was the common man's experience, McWilliams suggests, it was too common for his taste (13). He was also reluctant to equate regionalism with provincialism. He scorned one Midwestern literary magazine, which, “during the period of its existence, bawled for ‘an Iowa Literature’ with humorless insistence” (10).
After comparing the so-called new regionalism to the efforts of Yeats and others to create a new Irish literature, McWilliams mentions the movement's “attempt to escape from the tumultuous present into a glamorous past.” He does not celebrate that attempt.
In times so strenuous as ours, it is rather annoying to discover intelligent men devoting their talents to such tasks as listing the animals and plants in Oklahoma folk-cures and noting, with infantile delight, the eroticisms in the folk-speech of taxi-drivers. (23)
He also links the movement's sentimentality to its aversion to social, theological, political, and economic problems, which the new regionalists shunned “with even greater dexterity” than did the local colorists. At the same time, he credits regional literature for its urge to break with irreconcilable and conflicting cultural traditions, its attempt to produce a literary vocabulary adequate to an utterly new and sometimes hostile environment, and its desire for a sense of community.
The following year, McWilliams began to demythologize the West as he had Bierce's life. His “Myths of the West,” which appeared in North American Review, noted the existence and variety of Western cultures but also a persistent interest in defining the entire region's character. This project led to an imaginary West “of mood and manner,” which was promptly consumed by the region's inhabitants. He underscored the point by referring to his own experience in Steamboat Springs.
In cold fact it would be quite possible to demonstrate that a great deal of Western spirit, so-called, has been made up of mimicry and imitation. Legend reacts on its subject. My father had no end of difficulty, as a pioneer cattleman in north-western Colorado, in keeping his cowboys from playing the role of Cowboy. They spent long hours in the bunkhouse on dull days devouring cheap romances of the West and insisted on dressing and acting and talking like the characters in their favorite romances. Many of their “pranks” were, I am sure, of purely literary origin.
In real life, such mimicry may have been harmless enough, but the Western myths obscured a far more important historical process by which residents of these new cities reproduced the distinctions of race, class, gender, and religion that they had learned elsewhere. Moreover, these distinctions were “actually intensified in being transplanted to the west, at least during the initial period after their arrival.” By focusing on the myths and insisting on the West's distinctiveness, historians had overlooked the continuities between Western cities and their antecedents.
In 1932, McWilliams met a writer who was exploring these distinctions from a less intellectual angle. Like McWilliams, John Fante left Colorado for Los Angeles, enrolled in college, began to write, and struck up a correspondence with Mencken, who suggested that his two West Coast disciples meet. Unlike McWilliams, Fante came from a working-class and floridly dysfunctional Catholic family, which he featured, sometimes comically, in his fiction. In December 1932, the two men met for lunch and began a lifelong friendship. McWilliams later described Fante as “a young Italian-American, quite short, with wicked rolling black Italian eyes and a glorious sense of humor.” Fante regarded McWilliams as a man who could get things done, and Fante wanted to do a lot. “He seems to be a very fine man,” Fante wrote to his mother the next day. “I have a feeling something good may come of this” (Fante 1991, 36). The fact that McWilliams picked up the check also suited Fante, who was scraping along on odd jobs and occasional checks for short stories—a way of life Fante would later depict in his novel Ask the Dust. McWilliams soon introduced Fante to Ross Wills, the sports editor at the USC Daily Trojan during McWilliams's tenure as associate editor. Wills, who had lost his hearing following a bout of spinal meningitis in the service, headed the story department at MGM and helped Fante launch his career as a screenwriter.
McWilliams and Fante had another common interest—drinking. In one month, for example, they spent a long afternoon drinking at the Hotel Savoy bar in Hollywood; tippling in McWilliams's car on the way to Santa Barbara, where they met Adamic for more drinking; and polishing off rounds of Bacardi cocktails on Olvera Street after Fante and Wills appeared at McWilliams's office and declared the end of his workday. Fante would eventually dedicate a book to McWilliams, describing him as “good friend, evil companion.” McWilliams countered jocularly that Fante was “a more deplorable influence on me than I ever was on him.” He struck a similarly playful note in a 1972 letter to a graduate student seeking information on Fante.
I left California in 1951 and was thus no longer able to work at the task of keeping my friend reasonably sober, away from race tracks, draw poker sessions, opium dens and other low dives, properly confined to home and hearth and study and in fairly regular attendance at mass. During the years that we were constant associates I managed to set for him—he will deny it vehemently of course—a splendid example of clean living, high thinking, and safe driving. (Fante 1991, 293)
In between his legal chores and misadventures with Fante and Wills, McWilliams was finding new outlets for his writing. In 1933, Phil Townsend Hanna offered him a monthly column in Touring Topics, the magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California. McWilliams accepted the assignment, which was vacated by a friend leaving Los Angeles, and began a six-year stint with the magazine. Writing the feature—which was “about anything and everything related to California—writers, folklore, climate, history, cults, politics”—usually occupied McWilliams for one to two days per month. For a time, the column ran under the title “California Curiosa.” When the magazine was renamed Westways in January 1934, his column became “Tides West” and ran on the back page under the heading “Current foibles and frailties of Californians—great, near-great, and far from it—revealed by its alert press.” In 1935, his column moved to the front of the magazine and was given more space.
The Westways articles were lively and surprisingly substantial. Their primary significance for McWilliams's career, however, lay in their mode of production. He pored over piles of newspapers and magazines looking for choice stories and anecdotes, which he clipped and used to develop story ideas for himself and others. The reading he did for his column also helped to inform his 1946 book, Southern California Country, which is still widely regarded as the best interpretive history of the region (ECM, 119).
His arrangement with Westways ended in 1939, when Ruth Comfort Mitchell, the sister of an Automobile Club officer and wife of a prominent California grower and state senator, pressed for his termination following the publication of Factories in the Field, an exposé of labor conditions on California's farms (HAT, 94). McWilliams returned the favor in 1940 by panning Mitchell's novel, Of Human Kindness, which depicted a California family coping with a farm strike and was meant to counteract the effects of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and McWilliams's book. McWilliams lambasted the novel again in Ill Fares the Land (1942), calling it “a performance so feeble that it will probably stand as the perfect vindication of Mr. Steinbeck's point of view” (44).
THE SEEDS OF ACTIVISM
In 1933, McWilliams's authorial range expanded to include social and political issues. As national and international problems worsened, McWilliams found the posture of the amused, cynical observer increasingly difficult to maintain. Unlike Mencken, who largely ignored the effects of the Depression and railed instead against Roosevelt and the spread of big government, McWilliams registered the economic devastation he witnessed every day at work. As he later recalled:
I had, in fact, a prime view of the ravages of the Depression and its human consequences. I seemed to be endlessly involved with foreclosures and evictions (either bringing them or staving them off), bankruptcies, receiverships, savings-and-loan failures, collapsed business ventures, investigating real estate swindles, tracing lost equities, salvaging something for widows from shrunken estates—the whole range of legal tangles that resulted when the bottom fell out of the Coolidge-Hoover “boom.” (ECM, 66)
Over time, these hardships made his literary interests seem irrelevant or even frivolous. Instead of abandoning these interests, however, he began to focus more on literature that featured the hardships. His friendships with Fante and especially Adamic also altered his sense of literary and intellectual possibility. He became increasingly interested in what Adamic called “Shadow America,” which consisted of America's large—and largely excluded—immigrant, minority, and working-class populations.
As an attorney, McWilliams also began to seek out and challenge the inequities he witnessed. He joined the Southern California chapter of the ACLU, which was working to prevent extralegal strikebreaking measures against agricultural workers. With every report of rising European fascism—including those in Adamic's 1932 letters to him from Italy—McWilliams immersed himself in labor and civil rights issues. Never a stronghold of organized labor, and with a large population of dispossessed and disenfranchised immigrants, Los Angeles produced more than its share of political, economic, and legal injustices. In a 1940 interview, McWilliams recounted one formative experience from his first labor case. At the request of the ACLU, he represented several Mexican-American workers in a 1934 citrus strike and learned a lasting lesson. “I hadn't believed stories of such wholesale violation of civil rights until I went down to Orange County to defend a number of farm workers held in jail for ‘conspiracy,’” he recalled. “When I announced my purpose, the judge said, ‘It's no use; I'll find them guilty anyway.’”
These violations touched a deep chord in McWilliams. His father's experience had imbued him with a thorough distrust of “the system,” and the corruption of the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s only deepened that skepticism and fueled his rebellion. His journalism gradually shifted away from literary topics and toward legal and political ones. His first political piece, published in 1933, targeted one of the California economy's most persistent features—its demand for low-wage, immigrant labor. “Getting Rid of the Mexican,” which appeared in the American Mercury in 1933, criticized policymakers, social workers, sociologists, “and other subsidized sympathizers” in Los Angeles for assisting a program that identified Mexican citizens on relief and offered to pay for their return to Mexico.
For McWilliams, the repatriation program exemplified society's contempt for the immigrants it relied upon for its prosperity, and he made no effort to conceal his disdain.
Social workers reported that many of the Mexicans who were receiving charity had signified their “willingness” to return to Mexico. Negotiations were at once opened with the social-minded officials of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was discovered that, in wholesale lots, the Mexicans could be shipped to Mexico City for $14.70 per capita.
McWilliams implied but nowhere demonstrated that the repatriation program was, in fact, compulsory. Elsewhere in the piece, he cast doubt on the local industrialists' prediction that Mexican workers could be lured back when the economy picked up. He also chastised the sociologists—”the do-gooders” who “subjected the Mexican population to a relentless barrage of surveys, investigations, and clinical conferences”—for not anticipating such an “abrupt severance of the Americanization programme.” The shift to political topics had done nothing to blunt McWilliams's edge; rather, it ushered in a sharper, more polemical tone in his journalism.
In 1934, an election year, McWilliams waded deeper into politics. The New Republic published his article on the Utopian Society, a Southern California organization that supported full employment, a safety net for the sick and aged, and Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial bid. Sinclair, who had run as a Socialist in the 1930 race, received the Democratic nomination in 1934 and began a campaign based on his End Poverty in California (EPIC) manifesto. The race was an excellent subject for McWilliams, for it allowed him to develop his political journalism while trading on his acquaintance with Sinclair. After interviewing the author in the 1920s, McWilliams frequently escorted out-of-town writers to Sinclair's home in Monrovia. One such visitor was Edmund Wilson, who spent an afternoon with Sinclair and McWilliams discussing socialism. Sinclair, a teetotaler, did not offer his guests a drink, and when the three men went out to dinner that evening, Wilson asked Sinclair how he “had endured capitalism for so many years without benefit of alcohol” (ECM, 69).
Sinclair's campaign became the subject of another McWilliams article for the New Republic. Appearing in August, just before Sinclair secured the Democratic nomination, the piece described the Democratic Party as a “stalking horse for a few greedy politicians,” the most important of whom were feuding with one another. Sinclair had positioned himself for the nomination while “the Democratic tribesmen continued merrily whetting their knives and oiling guns.” Sinclair's EPIC plan, McWilliams wrote, was essentially “the ‘colony’ idea with which he has been obsessed these many years: the little island of socialistic rectitude and plenty within a sea of capitalistic iniquity and scarcity.” These communities were to be “exemplary social units with churches, playgrounds and theatres—with, perhaps, something to drink, a generous concession from Sinclair.” By McWilliams's lights, Sinclair's candidacy had “efficiently scotched his reputation as a radical.” He lacked the support of the Communists, who described him as a “social fascist,” and McWilliams was openly dissatisied with Sinclair's position on the San Francisco general strike of 1934. The piece concluded with one observer's assessment of the long-term effect of Sinclair's campaign. If elected, Sinclair's plan would “so disgust everybody with pseudo-radical remedies that probably for a long time to come it will be difficult for a real radical to get a hearing.”
Fante was unimpressed with McWilliams's effort—”Ross and I both feel you went hog-wild in your Upton Sinclair stuff for the New Republic” (Fante 1991, 87)—but Mencken disagreed.
Just a line to congratulate you on your magnificent article about Upton Sinclair in the New Republic for August 22nd. It is one of the best things you have ever done, and I have been reading it with the greatest pleasure. In particular, I am delighted with your list of the wizards who are supporting Sinclair. (Aug. 23, 1934)
Mencken persuaded the Baltimore Sun to run a three-part series by McWilliams on the campaign, for which McWilliams received twenty dollars per story. In it, McWilliams described Republican candidate Frank Merriam as “in some indescribable sense … a caricature of Republicanism at its worst,” while Sinclair had “become increasingly pious and conservative and self-righteous.” The entire campaign was a “laughable pageant of absurdities.”
McWilliams was pleased with his analysis. In a letter to twenty-two-year old Esther Blaisdell, whom he had met while covering the campaign, he reported that he had “hit that Sinclair-Merriam affair almost dead-center; and I hit it squarely, not obliquely, and I hit it hard” (Meyer 1996, 239). Mencken also appreciated McWilliams's handiwork and its effects.
Every moron in the State will be for [Sinclair] before he finishes his whooping. It doesn't surprise me that your article offended him. He is an extraordinarily vain fellow, and quarrelsome. It is practically impossible to write anything about him without setting him to bellowing. (Sept.11, 1934)
When the election began to turn toward Merriam, Mencken claimed to be disappointed by the foregone entertainment value of a Sinclair victory: “It would be a circus to see him in office,” he wrote. McWilliams's coverage courted that response; the headline for the October 14 Baltimore Sun piece, for example, was “California Campaign Is Held Comical.”
Encouraged by Mencken's praise, McWilliams wrote a third piece for the New Republic that appeared the day after the November election. The gubernatorial race was less a campaign than a Sinclair manhunt, McWilliams reported. For his part, Sinclair was “the type of candidate who would make himself the sole issue in any campaign: consequently, he dramatizes, Messiah-like, the opposition.” Aided by the regular Democratic machine, the personal attacks diverted attention from Sinclair's shaky economic plan. Merriam's campaign, meanwhile, was “poorly coordinated, stupidly directed, dangerously confined to a narrow negative issue.” Both candidates had “generously tried to elect the other,” but the Republicans enjoyed the support of Hollywood's studio heads, who had produced news-reels depicting “the draggled hitchhikers hurrying to Sinclair's promised utopia.” These newsreels, McWilliams noted, were proving effective, and later observers would identify their use in the Sinclair-Merriam race as the birth of media politics (Mitchell 1992).
The critic had turned his gaze to electoral politics and found it absurd. Pleased with that finding, Mencken continued to praise McWilliams's work well after the election. “The stuff you sent the Sun about Sinclair was the best printed in the East, and by far,” wrote Mencken in 1935, about the same time that he hosted McWilliams and Adamic for lunch at his Baltimore home. Later that year, Mencken supported McWilliams's application for a Guggenheim Foundation award. The two men's political views later diverged dramatically, and their correspondence waned. Yet McWilliams maintained a lifelong respect for Mencken's editorial practices and his independence of mind.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
As McWilliams's political journalism flourished, his emotional life was foundering. As early as 1932, he noted in his personal journal,
I'm quite discouraged about everything. I so need six months of rest—just to get the knots out of my nervous system and to reflect. We can actually suffer from lack of reflection. Then, too, I'm not pleased with my life, prospects, or achievements. (WJ, Aug. 31, 1932)
McWilliams later admitted that his prospects and achievements at that time were respectable, but that he did not like the life he had created for himself. Still in his twenties, he found himself “programmed as a reasonably successful young lawyer with a conventional practice, a promising future, and sobering responsibilities” (ECM, 65). When Dorothy gave birth to a son in September 1933, those responsibilities included fatherhood. Recording the birth in his diary, McWilliams noted wryly that Wilson Carey McWilliams, nicknamed Bill Carey, had “few visible traits resembling his father, with the exception of his general charm and austerity of manner” (Sept. 2, 1933).
The reasons for McWilliams's professional dissatisfaction are clear. His relations with his law partners were reasonably amicable, but the work itself, which focused on corporate clients and wealthy families in the Pasadena area, bored him. In the mid-1930s, McWilliams began to accept more labor work and served as a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board. Already active in the ACLU, he later joined the National Lawyers Guild, which was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the more conservative American Bar Association (ABA). Over time, tension developed not only between his writing and his legal work but also between his firm's traditional practice and the more interesting but less remunerative cases he took on behalf of migrant laborers and rank-and-file workers in and around Los Angeles.
The sources of McWilliams's personal dissatisfaction are less obvious, but his aversion to the more conventional aspects of family life was probably a factor. As Lee Ann Meyer has noted, some of this aversion crops up in his unpublished novel-in-progress, Flags in the Sunset. The protagonist, Blair Ryan, is surrounded by family members who, according to the third-person narrator, “do not move or change or grow. They live amiably preserved in the amber of middleclass stability. What makes them unreal is the circumstance that they cannot see their world.” As Blair watches his mother, brother, sister-in-law, and wife playing bridge, the narrator observes:
Blair could never remember having discovered in any of them, after these years of searching and interrogation, a troubling uncertainty, an unallayed doubt, a loose-end of speculation. Without thought and wholly instinctively, they believed in loving the people you love; in fulfilling obligations; in thrift and social obedience; in accumulation for the future … To that group, … Blair did not belong.
Viewing his wife and family from the outside, McWilliams's protagonist sees a group of static, stunted, blinkered, and unreal lives. He stands apart from them, literally and figuratively. Although it is risky to read such passages as straight autobiography, even in a first novel, family life clearly occupied a central and problematic place in McWilliams's imagination during this period.
McWilliams's diary entries also described a descending weather system of depression during this time. In December 1933, he noted, “For weeks past, or months, even longer, I have been cursed with a spell of mental befuddlement. It is a cross between paralysis and confusion, with a considerable measure of just plain stagnation.” Given his father's breakdown, McWilliams likely found this mental state especially difficult to endure. Moreover, his cure of first resort, intensive literary production, was failing him.
I looked at old & unfinished manuscripts and they all seem ludicrously dull and uninteresting. I tried to think of some ideas I've been wanting to develop,—but I had lost them or, when recaptured, they seemed stupid. Then I tried thinking just for the pleasure of thinking, but could not come to grip with the simplest thought. And I've seldom been in this condition, so seldom, in fact, that I'm startled and just a bit dismayed. (Dec.17, 1933)
By the next month, McWilliams's surprise and dismay had given way to a stoical propriety. “To the person of reasonably acute sensibilities,” he noted in his diary, “misery must be his or her constant state, even if they deny this, by an indoctrinated sense of good breeding and mannerliness.”
After the 1934 election, McWilliams's diary entries indicate a more specific conflict, but he remained oblique about its nature.
November 24: Here it is November 24th, and this troubled experience persists, persists with all variety of complication and aggravation. I'm between the most unpleasant alternatives and, at the moment, so damned weary that really it doesn't seem to matter much, one way or the other. Does anything matter? I know, of course, that this does matter. I am capable of feeling intensely about it, if that's a token.
December 10: And still it lasts … Everything began to go to pieces for me during the now-forgotten Merriam-Sinclair campaign. The excitement, late hours, conferences,—the craziness of it all,—seemed to be such a crystallization of nearly every misgiving and doubt that I had ever entertained about the reality of what I was doing,—of the kind of life I was leading. Now it seems impossible: I just don't think it possible to go on this way much longer.
December 18: And last night, I closed not an eye and was tortured for hours with misgivings and regrets—
December 25: Last night at brother's was bad, really bad. I tried to read Rabelais while the others played bridge—but this did not work. I felt restless and slightly morose and determined to get away. I think that, right at the moment, my dominant desire is to live alone. I think the fact that I have not lived alone, these last years, accounts for many things. Tomorrow I shall look about.
Lee Ann Meyer has argued that McWilliams's “troubled experience” was activated by his encounter with Esther Blaisdell, whom McWilliams had met in late September while covering the Sinclair campaign. Tall, slim, and beautiful, Blaisdell had grown up in the Imperial Valley border town of Calexico, where her mother taught piano and her father had a law practice. Known locally as “El Tigre,” Blaisdell's father was an early proponent of the insanity defense and an unreliable husband and parent. Equipped with a .22-caliber firearm and a badge, he frequently disappeared across the border for months at a time, leading some family members to speculate that he had a mistress or perhaps even another family in Mexico. Although Esther was a bright student and a talented writer, her family did not encourage her education. Instead, she helped out in her father's law office while her brother received financial support for his college education.1
McWilliams's letters to Blaisdell indicate that the two became close very quickly.2 In October 1934, for example, McWilliams wrote:
Study things you don't care about, work at occupations that are hateful, tolerate as friends people you do not like, accept as ideas the straw words of others,—do all this, and the mutilation is so nearly complete that you have unconsciously accepted it as final. (Meyer 1996, 188)
That McWilliams would share this confidence is especially notable given that he had known Blaisdell less than a month. Only his use of the second person, which allows this passage to be read as a form of cautionary advice, distinguishes it from straight confession. Their subsequent correspondence suggests an even more intimate relationship. According to Blaisdell's niece, who discovered McWilliams's letters after her aunt's death, McWilliams proposed a trip to Las Vegas, where he would obtain a divorce and marry Blaisdell.
Meyer claims that the relationship between McWilliams and Blaisdell found its fictional counterpart in Flags in the Sunset, in which Blair Ryan's encounter with Miss Sampson leads Blair to reject the comforts of his inauthentic life. Given McWilliams's literary sensibility and aspirations, the precise form of Ryan's epiphany may owe as much to James Joyce as to Esther Blaisdell. Yet McWilliams's diary leaves no doubt that he was shaken by the events of the fall and winter of 1934–35—presumably an affair with Blaisdell—and what he called “the wild beauty of the experience.” He also felt powerless to change or correct the situation: “And yet every incident tightened the hold of that person upon me … I felt that I could do or say nothing, but continue,—hold on steadfastly as long as I could” (Mar. 12, 1935). The experience electrified him but also left him feeling out of control emotionally and therefore intensely uncomfortable. On the strength of the correspondence, diary entries, and novel-in-progress, Meyer concludes that McWilliams's relationship with Blaisdell prompted him to question—and eventually to shed—much of the personal and professional identity he had constructed for himself.
Whatever his precise motive, McWilliams chose to remove himself from the perceived constraints of home and family. Although he and Dorothy did not divorce until just before he married Iris Dornfeld in 1941, they separated amicably. McWilliams took an apartment in Hollywood, and Dorothy and Bill Carey remained in the Los Angeles area until 1943, when she accepted a teaching position in Merced, a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. McWilliams's family took a dim view of the divorce, and Harriet stayed in close touch with Dorothy; indeed, she lived with Dorothy and Bill Carey for several years in Merced. McWilliams and Blaisdell remained intimate for several years. A 1936 letter from Fante to McWilliams referred to an article “by your red protegee Esther” (Fante 1991, 133). In a letter to Adamic the following year, McWilliams reported that Blaisdell was with her mother in Calexico recovering from an operation, and that he was planning to visit there the following week. Two years later, Adamic closed a letter to McWilliams by sending his best regards to Esther. By the 1940s, however, McWilliams and Blaisdell had lost touch. Originally thrilled by McWilliams's attention, Blaisdell was hurt and later embarrassed by their relationship, in part because her politics became more conservative over the years. She never married, and her interlude with McWilliams became a family secret.3
LOUIS ADAMIC & SHADOW-AMERICA
As McWilliams's private crisis ran its course, his public profile was on the rise. Several pieces about him appeared in Los Angeles newspapers and magazines, most of them stressing his versatility, intelligence, and seriousness. According to one newspaper article, “He is dark, studious looking. He gives the impression of stored-up energy and lots of brains working smoothly.” That description meshes with another from a 1935 magazine article by Lawrence Clark Powell, a fellow member of the Jake Zeitlin circle.4
[McWilliams] is a man of considerable reserve, and he is a good listener; which last quality makes him something of a rarity. He appears to be taking life rather seriously and is apparently thinking about things all the time you are with him. And his books show him to be a clear thinker—that makes him almost unique.
Powell's piece noted that McWilliams was planning a book on Colorado, another on William Butler Yeats, and a series of articles for the Nation on prominent California Communists. That series did not develop as planned, but its subjects were to include Harry Bridges, leader of the International Longshoremen's Association, whom McWilliams admired for his “shrewd, practical approach”; Caroline Decker, the young organizer of the fledgling Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, who was convicted that year of criminal syndicalism; and author and activist Ella Winter, who was living and working in Carmel with her husband, the legendary muckraker Lincoln Steffens. One piece that did appear in the Nation featured Leo Gallagher, the radical attorney who had served as counsel in several criminal syndicalism trials.
McWilliams's immediate project, however, was Louis Adamic & Shadow-America, a profile of his good friend. Designed by another member of the Zeitlin circle, Ward Ritchie, the book appeared in 1935. Despite McWilliams's familiarity with his subject, his introduction seems uncharacteristically strained. He first reports that he is asked with increasing frequency what sort of person Adamic is. He then cites with approval a long passage from Otto Rank's Art and Artist, which explains that “the average man has great difficulty in dealing with ideologies” and that these difficulties account for the curiosity about the artist's life among the “hero-worshipping public.” McWilliams proposes a better reason for writing about Adamic.
It happens not infrequently that an individual cuts across the current of his time at such a tangent that he necessarily sees the movement of events with exceptional clarity. Because of his relation to events he himself becomes a phenomenon of contemporary interest. In this manner Louis Adamic is a person who will interest a constantly increasing number of Americans … [Adamic] sees events with a clarity which, apparently, is denied to most native Americans. Hence the curiosity that infects other people about him is not only legitimate in itself, but indicative of the fact that his significance as a person is widely sensed. I have discussed Louis Adamic and his work with many persons and on a wide variety of occasions, but I have yet to be told that he is uninteresting. (10–11)
This introduction is notable for its condescension to “the average man's” curiosity about Adamic. By this account, Adamic's extraordinary vision redeems the pedestrian interest in him. Once redeemed, that interest is used to support the claim that Adamic's “significance as a person is widely sensed.” The best reason for writing about Adamic, it seems, is that none of McWilliams's interlocutors had found him uninteresting—a view that the book's readers might already share. Also noteworthy is the extent to which this passage can be read as self-portrait. It would later be said of McWilliams that he saw the movement of events with exceptional, almost prescient clarity. Indeed, he claims a minor version of this prescience when he writes that Adamic's “subsequent development has aroused no emotions of surprise in me; in fact, I can immodestly claim some prevision of the event” (11). The clairvoyance falters, however, when McWilliams predicts that Adamic's next book “will probably do for contemporary America what Alexis de Toqueville's tome did for the America of a century ago” (13).
McWilliams then sketches his friend's personality. He is especially concerned to defend Adamic from the charge of holding a “middle-class point of view.” “Since I have known Adamic,” McWilliams writes, “he has been instinctively hostile to typically middle-class concepts” (23). Moreover, he “has never taken American middle-class existence seriously. By a sort of defense mechanism, in fact, he has steeled himself against it.” McWilliams continues:
I know with what aversion he has always stood back instinctively from conduct that might seem to imply even complicity in the vagaries of middle-class existence. Two qualities about his nature quickly impressed me: his keenly sensed antipathy to the point of view of the middle class, which he viewed with curiosity and interest, it is true, but towards which he was never anything but hostile; and the extent to which he had escaped the ravages of post-war romanticism. (24)
By McWilliams's later standards, the tone is defensive, the claims disjointed and unmeasured. Adamic was curious about, but instinctively hostile to, the middle-class existence that he declined to take seriously but felt the need to defend himself against. The reader might reasonably conclude that Adamic's attitude toward middle-class life was extraordinarily complex. At least part of this complexity may arise from McWilliams's own unsettled feelings about that life. The urge to acquit Adamic of “conduct that might seem to imply even complicity in the vagaries of middle-class existence” has about it the air of self-defense.
McWilliams goes on to discuss his friend's conception of America—and of Los Angeles, which Adamic equated with America—by stressing his “instinctive awareness of the gross discrepancy between the advertised virtues of American life and its swindling realities” (25). Adamic's initial response to that discrepancy was detached amusement, which his own autobiography traced to the influence of Mencken. McWilliams quotes Adamic on that point.
For several years I agreed with Mencken that the sensible thing to do for a sensitive and intelligent person who could not help being interested in the American scene was to look upon it—upon the whole, “gross, glittering, excessively dynamic, infinitely grotesque drama of American life”—with detachment, as a “circus show.” (28–29)
But McWilliams, who shared Adamic's standoffish attitude toward many aspects of American culture, maintains that his friend “never did think that America was quite that funny” (30). Rather, he was “intensely indignant at any manifestation of injustice” (30–31).
McWilliams then surveys Adamic's specific strengths and weaknesses as a thinker and artist. Adamic is “astute in observation and rather feeble in power of abstract thought” (49).5 Claiming that Adamic was essentially a propagandist, McWilliams offers a lengthy excursus on the relationship between art and propaganda. If the contemporary novel “no longer satisfies our minds,” it was because it had come to express “the decadence of a particular type of individualism” (73). McWilliams then credits Marxist critics for explaining why “the artist of today is being driven into closer contact with life,” noting that their explanation is “not dissimilar” to Otto Rank's. He concludes that Adamic was “exactly the type of person who, in his experience and in his work, illustrates the tendencies noted in this section” (74). By matching Adamic to a set of Marxist and psychoanalytical ideas, however, McWilliams risks the perception that these ideas, and not his subject, shape his portrait.
McWilliams takes other rhetorical risks as well. Linking Adamic's insight about America to his immigrant status, McWilliams cannot resist another swipe at the typical American.
[The immigrant] is conscious of America: he actually looks at us and our institutions. He tries to formulate a concept—America. The typical native American would doubtless read Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life with a lazy and stupid inattention; seriously, I doubt if he would finish the book—and this apart from the fact that it really is a dull affair. (77)
If the reader accepts McWilliams's implicit claim—that Croly's 1909 book might remedy the typical native's inability to see America for what it is—then the laziness and stupidity McWilliams casually attributes to natives are lamentable. By describing Croly's book as “a dull affair,” however, he undermines his own argument for that book's significance and purported benefits.
One leaves Louis Adamic & Shadow-America with questions about its achievement. Its claim that Adamic is “a great social propagandist” is neither persuasive nor inspiring, and nothing in the book warrants the conclusion that Adamic might be the next Toqueville. When measured against McWilliams's other works, it seems minor in its choice of topic and execution. It is perhaps best seen as a transitional work undertaken while McWilliams was shifting his sights from literature to politics. In this sense, McWilliams's claim that Adamic is “the type, par excellence, of the artist in a period in transition” is another remarkable projection. Yet the book also reflects the evolution of McWilliams's style. Intelligent, mannered, dismissive, and indignant, the voice of Louis Adamic & Shadow-America would undergo more changes before McWilliams's signature style would emerge in the 1940s.
Adamic moved to New York in 1935, and the two friends continued to correspond. However, their letters indicate that their relationship was never quite as intimate or easygoing as some of McWilliams's recollections suggest. After McWilliams called on Adamic in New York in 1935, a letter from Adamic alluded to some friction during the visit.
As I say, possibly it was nothing at all, except my own weariness and nervousness, coupled with the realization which came to me soon after you arrived, that you and I have maitained [sic] our friendship on a curious impersonal plane, 'way above our personal, emotional problems. I would like you to know, though, that if there is ever anything I can do for you, you must let me know. It has occured [sic] to me that you've never made any demand on me, that I've never done anything for you, while I have made demands on you and you have done many things for me. I wanted to say this because in some ways you're a funny guy, very restrained, and you might not let me know if you need something. You might not, anyhow, even after I've gotten this off my chest. (April 11, 935)
The letter reveals a good deal about both men. It mentions Adamic's own characteristic weariness and nervousness, but it also identifies two features of McWilliams's character—his reserve and self-sufficiency—that thwarted the formation of intimate relationships throughout his life. Even his closest friends acknowledged that he rarely asked for even the smallest favors. “He wouldn't even ask for a glass of water,” one longtime friend recounted. “He would go get it.”6 Adamic's urge to reciprocate was authentic, however. Later that year, he checked up on McWilliams's application for a Guggenheim Foundation award while lunching with a foundation officer in New York.
In 1937, their correspondence became testier. Responding to Adamic's The House in Antigue, McWilliams wrote that Adamic had been “rather romantic about the whole episode.” Adamic returned a four-page letter in which he asked, “Are you afraid of romance generally?” He also added, “Your letter manifests a great confusion in you, which is complicated by a great desperation to get out of it; but I'm very grateful for it—I mean for your letter.” More than two months later, McWilliams sent a five-page, point-by-point response to Adamic's letter. “I've no objection to romance; who has?” he asked rhetorically. “Your resentment is uncalled for. Read my letter again.”7 The sharpness of the exchange did not prompt a break, however, and the two maintained their friendship into the 1950s.
THE “ANTI-FASCIST PHASE”
McWilliams surrounded his book on Adamic with a stream of magazine pieces that blended concerns about the law, local politics, and the rise of authoritarian ideologies abroad. In 1934, he began to publish pieces on fascism, California style. Appearing in the American Mercury, “Fascism in American Law” argued that the “powerful, concerted, nation-wide drive for a summary criminal procedure points to the appearance of an unmistakably Fascist sentiment in this country.” The occasion for the piece was a lynching in San Jose, which McWilliams analyzed along with its coverage in the state's newspapers. “The cry for summary criminal justice,” he concluded, “generally uttered by those still hoarse from shouting at a lynching, is unquestionably the voice of Fascism.” Relying heavily on the adverbial touch (unmistakably, unquestionably) to link American vigilantism to European totalitarianism, McWilliams also called Governor James Rolph “the cheapest groveller for mob approval that ever disgraced high executive office in the United States.” In a related piece, “Law and the Future,” McWilliams extended his criticism to the state's newspaper publishers and journalists. By demonizing lawyers, he maintained, “irresponsible journalists, Mr. Hearst foremost among them, are paving the road to fascism.”
McWilliams applied the fascist label again in “Hollywood Plays with Fascism,” a 1935 piece in the Nation based on a series of columns by Stephen O'Donnell in the Los Angeles Post-Record. McWilliams's usage indicates that, for him, fascism did not necessarily denote a nationalist, totalitarian system led by a dictator but rather any form of “flamboyant militarism.”8 That definition was satisfied by the activities of three organizations—founded by actors Victor McLaglen, Gary Cooper, and George Brent—whose members drilled in uniform one night a week with veteran officers or received flying lessons. According to McWilliams, these “successful fascist units” were “designed to advertise the charms of fascist organizations to the American public.” He noted that two Superior Court judges were listed in the ranks of one group: “Both of these men, of course, have occasion to pass upon the rights of workers and organizers charged with violating California's numerous laws for the maintenance of the status quo.” Taken together, the three groups constituted “a threat and a warning.” Although ludicrous, McWilliams concluded, they were organized and armed.
In a reply cited in O'Donnell's column, the leader of one such group defended his organization.
The Hollywood Hussars are in no way opposed to organized labor. In fact, many of our members carry union cards. It is in our bylaws that we turn out to serve the community in all emergencies, other than labor disputes … Making ours a Fascist movement is farthest from our intent, or desire.
Even if the Hussars were harmless, however, McWilliams was not alone in detecting a fascist threat in Los Angeles. In 1933, an increasingly conservative William Randolph Hearst noted privately, “In Los Angeles lately there have been fascist organizations created apparently with no opposition or objection on the part of local government. But communistic demonstrations have been rigidly suppressed” (Nasaw 2000, 483).
The Hollywood Hussars piece, together with the columns it was based on, had an immediate effect. In a letter to the Nation dated May 29—the official date of the essay's publication—McWilliams wrote:
Mr. Cooper told me that the character of the Hollywood Hussars was grossly misrepresented to him at the time that he consented to be a “founder.” Upon investigation into the real purposes and function of the organization he immediately withdrew his membership and support.
McWilliams's letter appeared in the June 26 issue, which included a large subscription advertisement with the headline, “The Nation Exposes Fascism—Mr. Gary Cooper Resigns from Hollywood Hussars.”
McWilliams's concerns about fascism also framed his interest in religious and ethnic prejudice. As he explained in the introduction to his 1935 pamphlet, It Can Happen Here: Active Anti-Semitism in Los Angeles, his motives were more political than they were social or cultural.
I undertook the investigation for two reasons: first, I am convinced that fascism impends in America today; and second, because I have come to believe that California is the state of the union which has advanced farthest toward an integrated fascist set-up. (3)
Anticipating skepticism from his readers, McWilliams maintained that the proclamations of a local Nazi sympathizer were “further evidence that fascism is approaching in America. Absurd, you will say. But that attitude,—amused incredulity,—is the attitude which Sinclair Lewis has so ably exposed” (25).
That McWilliams's pamphlet responded to fascism rather than to anti-Semitism as such was corroborated by another piece he wrote that year for the Carmel-based Pacific Weekly, a magazine coedited by William K. Bassett, Lincoln Steffens, and Ella Winter. First published in January 1935, the magazine was intended, as Bassett announced in its premier issue, to “offset the flood of capitalist and fascist propaganda.” McWilliams's article, “Jewish Fascism,” condemned Jews who failed to appreciate the horrors of capitalism.
The Jews in California, following a carefully defined national policy, have worked out a clever technique for the salvation of their souls and the promotion of fascism … the elder statesmen of the race have adopted a policy whereby anti-nazi sentiment may be used to fortify the status quo … How is it possible to attack communism today without supporting fascism? The middle ground upon which the American Jews have so cowardly elected to stand is not neutral ground—it is safe capitalistic territory. And they may yet come to regret that they entrusted their precious Semitism to the protection and sponsorship of William Randolph Hearst and his powerful new capitalist allies, Messrs. Harry and Jack Warner.
Lumping together all Jewish Americans and mocking their “precious Semitism,” McWilliams scorned their cowardice and sought to make any middle ground between capitalism and communism uninhabitable. Ironically, a similar tactic would be used against him in the 1950s, when anti-Communists argued that criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy was tantamount to supporting Stalin.
A similar stridency also characterized McWilliams's other contributions to Pacific Weekly, which McWilliams joined as a contributing editor after Bassett left in June 1936. (When Steffens died shortly thereafter, McWilliams joined the board of directors, and Steffens's widow, Ella Winter, ran the magazine until it folded later that year.) Even Upton Sinclair, who ran for governor on the Socialist ticket in 1930, did not escape the sting of McWilliams's ideological lash. In 1936, McWilliams denounced Sinclair's latest play on ideological grounds.
For, to put it mildly, Love in Arms is viciously reactionary … a gross, impardonable slander on the working-class in this country … likely to do serious injury to the militant radical movement now coming into existence in this country.
Sinclair defended himself in a subsequent issue, noting the review's inaccuracies and correctly predicting that the play would be far less damaging—or even consequential—than McWilliams indicated. Radical journalist Anna Louise Strong joined the exchange, accusing Sinclair of betraying the ideals of his EPIC program by running for governor as a Democrat. Sinclair responded, “My advice to the American people will be to stick to democracy and make it work.” Sinclair also maintained that McWilliams's review followed the Communist Party line, but nothing in McWilliams's corpus from the 1930s on is inconsistent with Sinclair's advice about democracy. The exchange marked a low point in their nine-year relationship, which had already suffered as a result of McWilliams's 1934 campaign reportage, but it did not prevent McWilliams from recruiting Sinclair as a sponsor and keynote speaker at the Western Writers Congress later that year.
McWilliams leveled the charge of fascism most emphatically, however, in a flurry of articles on California agribusiness. In “The Farmers Get Tough,” a 1934 piece for the American Mercury, McWilliams maintained, “The most striking illustration of farmer-Fascism in California has been the revolt in Imperial Valley. For the Imperial Valley farmers have not protested: they have ‘revolted,’ in the Fascist sense.” The article summarized the region's labor conflicts and the Associated Farmers’ political agenda, which McWilliams described as the deportation of radical aliens, the dismissal of “Communistically inclined school teachers,” and the establishment of a local anti-Communist organization. It also detailed the use of strong-arm tactics to crush union organizing efforts. Several of McWilliams's acquaintances had been intimidated, including a labor attorney and fellow ACLU member who, McWilliams reported, had been removed from his hotel room, beaten, and escorted to San Diego, where his car was dumped over a cliff.
McWilliams closed the piece with a description of the typical Imperial Valley grower.
[T]he old-fashioned farmer has been supplanted by a type to which the term can no longer be applied with accuracy. The new farmer is a grower. He is only semi-rural. Often he regards his farm as a business and has it incorporated. He belongs to a number of wealthy produce exchanges; he is the director of several “protective associations.” Moreover, he has a hand in state politics. He employs a bookkeeper, and, in sober truth, he looks rather like a banker. He dabbles in publicity and has learned the trick of mob-baiting. He will never be an ally of labor.
Every part of this description targeted the myth of the happy yeoman. The grower was corporate, political, demagogical, neither rural nor urban. He was not particularly serious—he dabbled and performed tricks—but he was powerful, connected, and dangerous. Although the description applied to a type, McWilliams lent it physical specificity. His claim that the grower resembled a banker—a loaded comparison in the middle of the Depression—was perhaps the most subjective part of the description, but McWilliams reinforced it with the assurance that it was the “sober truth.”
“The Farmers Get Tough” marked the high point of McWilliams's political journalism to that time. It highlighted an important issue and treated it seriously. There was no talk of comedy or circuses, no Olympian perspective on the absurdity of American life. It included some passing hyperbole—for example, the claim that the Imperial Valley had “virtually seceded from the union”—but it was concise and cogent, and its brief description of the valley's landscape and history was a minor tour de force.
This strenuous country has no settled way of life. Social antagonisms stand forth, in sculptural simplicity, against a barren, harshly illuminated, background. Life is a hard business in the valley. Difficulties that might be appeased by the celebrated amenities of rural life elsewhere, break out as the clamor of class-warfare—ugly and tense—in Imperial Valley. Wealth has been wrung from the land at the price of unending, bitter conflict. Violence is what one somehow expects from the place.
Fante applauded the piece in the same letter that criticized the election coverage in the New Republic: “A fine thing, your Mercury piece on Imperial Valley—I marvel at your ability to make facts interesting; to say nothing of your great talent at selection” (Fante 1991, 87).
By 1935, McWilliams was eager to investigate the farm strikes and labor clashes that had led to several convictions on charges of criminal syndicalism in Sacramento. Along with Herbert Klein, McWilliams decided to tour the state by interviewing growers, contractors, labor leaders, detectives, and state officials. He and Klein, a freelance journalist, had met through Jake Zeitlin in the late 1920s, when Klein was contemplating a graduate thesis at Occidental College on Robinson Jeffers. Abandoning his studies, Klein traveled to Berlin in the early 1930s and returned to Los Angeles with an eye pealed for all forms of domestic fascism. In Sacramento, McWilliams and Klein reviewed trial transcripts and spoke with defense counsel Leo Gallagher. They also visited the San Quentin penitentiary to interview two of the convicted defendants, Pat Chambers and Norman Mini. In Fresno, they met with members of the American Workers Party and S. Parker Friselle of the Associated Farmers. They also stopped in Carmel, where Bassett agreed to run their coauthored articles on farm labor and ownership in Pacific Weekly. Klein decided to use a pen name, Clive Belmont, to better preserve his chances of becoming a teacher.
Ten months later, the first of the six articles appeared in Pacific Weekly. It described the large growers' demand for “fluid, casual” labor and the social effects of that labor market. The second piece, “Farm Fascism,” argued that “the development has been from unorganized farmer violence—vigilantism proper—to highly organized and skillfully manipulated terror.” The third essay claimed that farming in California “is more completely capitalistic in its method … than the farming of any other comparable section.” It also maintained that “the analytic methods of Marx and Lenin reveal more to us of the real social consequences of capitalistic agriculture than all the hush-hushery of the Giannini-dominated College of Agriculture at Berkeley, or its counterparts elsewhere.”9 The fourth piece claimed that agricultural labor must be organized “to hold ground against the wage cuts and fascist aims of organized financial reaction,” while the fifth credited the International Workers of the World (IWW) for what gains had been achieved for agricultural workers in California. The sixth and final piece assessed the prospects for farm labor, concluding that only consistent unionism and political militancy could “enable the farm workers of California to terminate slavery, starvation, and bloodshed in the factories in the fields of California.” The following year, Pacific Weekly also published McWilliams's “Gunkist Oranges,” which described a labor conflict between growers and citrus pickers in Orange County.
Throughout this period, McWilliams's advocacy led to memberships in several Popular Front organizations and brought him into contact with a number of Communists. In a diary entry from January 1938, he mentioned repeated invitations to join the Communist Party: “I've been asked several times lately to join the Communist Party,—the lawyers section (they have one now), but I've objections: the state of affairs in Russia; I'm sick unto death of committees and discussions, and so forth” (Jan. 28, 1938). These objections seem valid enough, though the latter complaint certainly did not prevent McWilliams from joining many other organizations and spending countless hours in meetings. The state of affairs in Russia was another matter, and many who did join the Communist Party would later leave after the Soviet-Nazi pact and reports of Stalinist repression. A letter to Adamic, too, makes it clear that McWilliams was averse to the prospect of Party discipline.
Don't think that I am a “convert” or “revolutionist.” I am not a CP member. I have worked fairly closely with them locally because they seemed to be the only people who were doing any work … I have never joined the Party because I have known that I could not work satisfactorily within its requirements, and because I have been in disagreement on many points. (Dec. 26, 1937)
This was a more substantial objection, but there was probably another more personal source of resistance to Party membership and Marxism more generally. In a recent interview, longtime friend and political science professor Francis Carney maintained, “Carey couldn't become a full-fledged Marxist because he could never accept the idea of his father as a kulak.”10 McWilliams never connected his views about Marxist orthodoxy to his feelings about his father, but he frequently stressed the native roots of his politics, and his lack of enthusiasm for the foundational texts of Marxism was one reason he considered himself a homegrown American radical.
Despite his reservations about joining the Communist Party, McWilliams subscribed and submitted his work to its publications. In 1938, he considered sending his manuscript on migratory farm labor, Factories in the Field, to a San Francisco Communist newspaper. He noted in his diary:
Back here and have worked all day on a chapter in that farm labor mss. which, I fear, is dull as hell. But I'm going to finish it by May 1st,—if it bores me to death! I can always print it, I suppose in the People's World—the revised Western Worker. (Jan. 16, 1938)
In the end, Little, Brown and Company published the book, but People's World also ran it in eleven installments between December 1938 and February 1939.
As far as the House Committee on Un-American Activities was concerned, however, McWilliams was as good as Red. Well aware of his Popular Front affiliations, the committee identified him in 1938 as a radical for his role in organizing the Western Writers Congress in San Francisco in November 1936. For that event, McWilliams was the Southern California point man for soliciting sponsors, compiling addresses, and planning the conference, which was meant to raise funds for Pacific Weekly. Its sessions included “Censorship, Suppression, and Fascist Trends” and “Writing and Propaganda,” along with seminars on the novel, poetry, and drama. Nathanael West, Kenneth Rexroth, and Clifford Odets participated, and the organization's auxiliary finance committee included Irving Stone, McWilliams's former economics professor at USC. Upton Sinclair gave the keynote address, and Harry Bridges, whose longshoremen's union had prompted the 1934 General Strike in San Francisco, delivered the final speech. In “The Writer and Civil Liberties,” McWilliams argued that the work of writers and artists was to “make real, to make palpable, the social actualities of the day.” The speech was printed in the Southern California ACLU magazine, The Open Forum, in two successive issues.
Not all of McWilliams's colleagues endorsed the conference. Robinson Jeffers declined to attend, telling a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that he doubted that “culture can be maintained by conventions and committees.” Not coincidentally, perhaps, a panelist at the conference placed Jeffers's name on the list of “sentimental writers” who “committed the sin of failing to write about things as they are.” The article also quoted McWilliams, who said it was the “right of writers to take an interest in the preservation of civil liberties” (Nov. 16, 1936). Fante also attended the conference, but it did little to alter his priorities. “If America went Soviet tomorrow,” he wrote to McWilliams, “I'd still read Nietzsche, long for beauty, seek the turmoil of women, and dream of the greatest novel ever written” (Fante 1991, 133). Fante hated poverty, at least for himself, for a simple reason—“I can't fuck enough.” This insight served as the basis for his political philosophy: “I am not in favor of Capitalism or Communism, but Clitorism” (134). Although he enjoyed talking with Harry Bridges and congratulated McWilliams on his organizing efforts, Fante also remarked on the preponderance of “frauds and soap-boxers” at the conference. He was more scathing in a letter to Mencken, listing and describing the phonies, hacks, hypocrites, and sermonizers he had come across. After arriving in a fur coat, Fante wrote, Dorothy Parker “managed a sobby delivery and asked the comrades to sympathize with the poor scenarists; she admitted they made big money, but there was nothing that could be done about it” (Moreau 1989, 106).
By Fante's reckoning, McWilliams turned out to be the conference's chief victim. His letter to Mencken described his friend's plight.
Poor Carey McWilliams was the sucker. I stayed with him in San Francisco and got a pretty good idea of what the Reds will do to an agreeable and curious man. Carey is more pink than Red and after three days of slavery for those longhairs they made him editor of a dozen different pamphlets, programs, brochures, magazines and papers. Not only that, but chairman of fifty different committees. He has enough work—without pay—to keep him busier for a full year than Lenin during the Ten Days. When he left to catch the Los Angeles train he was sweating beneath the weight of a portfolio that might have been a bale of hay. I think they made a Fascist out of him. (Moreau 1989, 107)
Fante also reported an exchange between McWilliams and Bridges, whom he described as “hawk-faced, sharp, intelligent and terrifically conceited.” McWilliams “threw a lot of questions at him which he answered with insolent finality.” The result was that “McWilliams tripped him up a couple of times and [Bridges] promptly put on a Hitler scowl and turned on the sneer” (107).
Despite Fante's negative impressions of the conference, McWilliams had found his métier. The Western Writers Congress folded a few months later, but he continued his leftist work in several related organizations. In 1937, he attended the conference of the League of American Writers and eventually became an associate editor of its magazine, Black and White. He also worked closely with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy (HANL) and wrote a weekly column for their newsletter (Geary 2003). Later, he chaired the Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers and was succeeded by the former actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was also active in HANL. In addition, he chaired the last mass meeting in Los Angeles on behalf of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Held at the Trinity Auditorium in December 1938, the meeting featured Theodore Dreiser, whose stalking, growling, and muttering on the platform struck McWilliams as odd but also “strangely eloquent and impressive” (ECM, 93).
McWilliams's “anti-fascist phase,” as he put it in his memoir, ended with the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939. He described the period between that historic event and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 as “a nightmarish season” characterized by savage feuding and infighting within the antifascist coalition (ECM, 93–94). During that time, McWilliams did not favor direct American intervention in the war, a position he later justified summarily and unconvincingly. In his view, Adolf Hitler “signed his death warrant” when he invaded the Soviet Union: “For me, this was the turning point in the war. Later I was convinced that the Japanese would never have struck at Pearl Harbor in December had it not been for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June” (ECM, 95). In a September 1941 symposium in the New Republic, he claimed that President Roosevelt's tactics “are well calculated to drive the Nazis crazy. The uncertainty of our policy is more exasperating to them than a forthright declaration of war … May I add, however, with respect to Japan, that I strongly favor a hard-boiled aggressive policy—an absolute embargo, enforced if necessary by blockade” (ECM, 95). McWilliams's critics would later maintain that driving Hitler crazy was unnecessary; what was truly needed was active, direct, and resolute opposition to Nazi aggression, but McWilliams did not call for it.
On the whole, McWilliams's output during this phase was more bombastic than at any other time during his career. Reviewing the farm labor pieces, for example, Greg Critser claimed, “Farmers themselves, in McWilliams's descriptions, become caricatured as pistol-brandishing, Bible-thumping, witch-hunting Neanderthals” (Critser 1983, 47). McWilliams's hyperbole might be construed as an attempt to raise the subject of fascism excessively so that a clear, balanced picture could eventually emerge. Yet McWilliams neither advanced nor endorsed this interpretation of his aims. Rather, he later attributed his tone to a sense of urgency, obsession, and apocalypse (ECM, 76).
LABOR ORGANIZING
McWilliams's most strident journalism coincided with a growing emphasis in his law practice on labor organizing and union representation. Most of this work focused on newspaper unions, the fledgling Hollywood guilds, and agricultural workers. This last group made an especially deep impression on him. In the mid-1930s, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) began a campaign to organize walnut pickers, most of them women, in Los Angeles. UCAPAWA charged that walnut growers had fired union organizers and set up a company union in violation of the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, of 1935 (Healey and Isserman 1990, 71). Representing the ACLU, McWilliams addressed the walnut workers in East Los Angeles to explain their rights under the new law. He described the meeting in an October 1937 letter to Louis Adamic.
A few nights ago I spoke to 1,500 women—women who were picking walnuts out of shells. It was one of the most amazing meetings I've ever attended. The remarks of the speakers were translated into five languages. There were Russians, Armenians, Slavs, Mexicans, etc. All ages of women, from young girls to old women … This was the first meeting these people had ever attended—that is, their first union meeting. You should have been there to feel the thing: the excitement, the tension. And you should have watched some of these women as they got up to their feet and tried to tell about their experiences … But the profound meaning they conveyed!
This profound meaning had less to do with federal law than with the immediate problems of the workers. The working conditions were poor; many had to crack shells with their hands and had the bruises and swelling to show for it. Others complained that they slipped on the discarded shells on the unswept floors. By way of demonstration, McWilliams later recalled, “A pretty young blonde suddenly jumped up laughing, raced down the center aisle, bent over, and lifted her skirt high to show me the large black-and-blue mark which was right where you would expect it to be. The audience howled with laughter” (ECM, 84).
As McWilliams reported in his memoir, “The spirit that animated that meeting was the spirit of the New Deal” (ECM, 84). Yet his immediate reaction to the meeting was a feeling of inadequacy. He confided to Adamic that he felt “very weak, meaningless, and ineffectual” (Oct. 3, 1937). In a letter to Esther Blaisdell, he went further. “They are … the real people of America … I felt like a white-faced anaemic flunkey of the upper classes, or something of the sort” (Meyer 1996, 265). Nothing in his earlier writings, public or private, indicated that addressing a group of female immigrant workers would make him feel less vital, potent, or American. Indeed, his private writings occasionally fell back on stereotypes that favored white, American men. Now the tables were turned; it was he who felt diminished by the high spirits of the women. If the experience temporarily deprived him of his self-respect, his work on their behalf offered him a chance to regain it.
He felt energized by the prospect, but it required a series of personal and professional adjustments. The labor law he wished to practice was time-consuming, poorly paid, and off-putting to better-paying clients. His law partners, too, “took a rather bleak view of labor unions” (ECM, 85). Yet these cases struck him as infinitely more interesting and socially significant than his other legal work, and they squared better with his political interests and literary aspirations. One diary entry from 1938 captures the breakneck pace of his schedule.
All day before the Labor Board with a case for the Textile Workers' Organizing Committee against Mission Hosiery Co.—was excused for a time in the afternoon to rush to court about an injunction against the Newspaper Guild. Then this evening I had to attend a dinner of the Screen Publicists Guild … and then later I spoke at a meeting of Office and Professional Workers downtown. (June 6, 1938)
Finding time to write was another problem. Between 1937 and 1939, McWilliams published little aside from his Westways and HANL columns, partly because he was spending whole days in court, but also because he was working on the book-length manuscript that grew out of his Pacific Weekly series on farm labor.
Perhaps the most notable labor case McWilliams took during this time involved Willie Bioff, a Chicago hoodlum who, with the help of Frank Nitti and the Capone crime organization, had taken over the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) and extorted several major Hollywood studios. McWilliams represented several rank-and-file studio workers (the self-named “White Rats of '37”) who opposed IATSE's closed-shop agreement and assessment. When McWilliams discovered that Bioff had underworld ties in Chicago and that he had never served a sentence for pandering, he passed that information on to his former law school classmate, William Mosley Jones, who was speaker of the assembly. Jones was also associated with the law firm of William Gibbs McAdoo, a U.S. senator from California until 1938, when he was defeated in the Democratic primary by the more liberal Sheridan Downey. Acting on McWilliams's lead, the Assembly Labor Committee investigated the Bioff matter briefly but took no action.
McWilliams left the IATSE case in 1939, when he was appointed to state office. It later became known, however, that McAdoo's firm, which had never before represented IATSE, received a five-thousand-dollar retainer from the union while simultaneously acting as counsel for the assembly committee. Later testimony also showed that Bioff had threatened to kill studio head Louis Mayer, whom Bioff had mistakenly suspected of tipping off the authorities to his activities. In fact, it was McWilliams who notified the authorities. In 1941, Bioff was convicted of extortion, and McWilliams wrote about his case in the New Republic. Bioff was paroled after agreeing to cooperate with the federal prosecution of Nitti and others. Upon his release, Bioff changed his name, moved to Arizona, and became a supporter of Barry Goldwater. When he accepted a job in Las Vegas, however, his former colleagues recognized him, and in 1955, Bioff was blown up while starting his car in the driveway of his Phoenix home.11 “Thus did Willie Bioff depart this world,” McWilliams recalled in his memoir, “not with a whimper but with a bang” (ECM, 91).
FACTORIES IN THE FIELD
McWilliams's hectic schedule forced him to complete his farm labor manuscript by working nights, weekends, and holidays and by playing hooky from his law practice. Despite these exertions, McWilliams's New York agent, Maxim Lieber, had difficulty placing the book immediately. It was not for lack of experience. Mencken considered Lieber—whose clients included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, and Langston Hughes—the best agent in New York. Lieber also represented John Fante for a time but later incurred his wrath, which Fante expressed in a 1934 letter to Mencken attacking Lieber and his radical politics. Mencken's response stressed Lieber's ability as an agent, but Fante's overheated anti-Marxist rhetoric was not completely amiss.12 According to historian Allen Weinstein, Lieber and Whittaker Chambers worked together in the Communist underground during the 1930s (Weinstein 1978, 127–30).13
In September 1938, Harcourt Brace wrote a letter to Lieber rejecting McWilliams's farm labor manuscript.
The narrative seriously lacks organization, and even though the powerful first chapter completely captures your attention, it is with the greatest difficulty that you can go on with the book … As it stands, the manuscript might conceivably be of interest to some publisher, but I'd be unhappy to see it appear, for it would take the edge off the real book on the subject that may be coming along some day.
Two months later, Houghton Mifflin passed on the project for different reasons. The manuscript was “lacking in the sort of individual human interest material which would catch the public eye.” Furthermore, “it is pretty well restricted to California.” The book's prospects would improve quickly, however. In early 1939, incoming Democratic governor Culbert L. Olson appointed McWilliams chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing. Shortly thereafter, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath appeared and quickly found a huge audience. By May, McWilliams had a book contract with Little, Brown and Company.
Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California appeared in July 1939. Its introduction notes that the book was based on new research, but it carries over the intensity and rhetoric of the Pacific Weekly series. It begins by asserting that labor unrest in the state's agricultural sector must be set against the backdrop of California's social history, which is “in many respects, a melodramatic history, a story of theft, fraud, violence and exploitation” (7). As the book's subtitle signals, narration is its dominant mode. McWilliams later recalled, “There was a need to tell a story of migratory labor, and that's what I set out to do” (HAT, 113). But Factories in the Field is not a unified story told sequentially. Rather, it is a constellation of narratives preceded by an introductory overview, which lays out the case against industrial agriculture and argues for a revolutionary response to it.
Today some 200,000 migratory workers, trapped in the State, eke out a miserable existence, intimidated by their employers, homeless, starving, destitute. Today they are restless but quiet; tomorrow they may be rebellious. Before these workers can achieve a solution of the problems facing them, they will have to work a revolution in California land ownership and in the methods of agricultural operations which now prevail. (9–10)
McWilliams's narratives begin with a chapter on land monopolization after the gold rush and case studies of the Miller & Lux land empire and the ill-fated Kaweah Co-operative Colony. The focus then shifts to the farm laborers, beginning with the Chinese. McWilliams reviews the consequences of the Alien Exclusion Act of 1882, the Geary Act of 1893, and the racist agitation that finally drove the Chinese from the fields in the mid-1890s. He also shows how the pattern of labor exploitation was repeated with the Japanese, Hindus, Armenians, Filipinos, and Mexicans. He then moves to the social consequences of the shift to industrial agriculture, beginning with vigilantism, race riots, and “social maladjustment”—a term that includes “race neurosis” and crime, much of which McWilliams describes as misdirected social protest. The next chapters narrate farm labor history from the Wheatland Riot of 1913 to the organizing activities and strikes of the 1930s. After documenting the disgraceful treatment of farmworkers in various rural towns, the final chapter argues that the “real solution involves the substitution of collective agriculture for the present monopolistically owned and controlled system” (324). Many measures could ameliorate the dreadful conditions, McWilliams maintains.
But the final solution will come only when the present wasteful, vicious, undemocratic, and thoroughly antisocial system of agricultural ownership in California is abolished. The abolition of this system involves at most merely a change in ownership. (325)
As I. F. Stone commented in his review for the Nation, “There is dynamite in the adverb.”
If one works back from McWilliams's call for collective agriculture, the book's rhetorical strategies become clear. In his early chapter on “land monopolization,” for example, McWilliams employs an antique definition of that term, popular among nineteenth-century radicals such as Henry George, which denoted a political arrangement in which businesses enjoyed special political privileges, concessions, and access (Lustig 1982). However, the concentration of land ownership in California never fit today's definition of monopoly. It was high because of the state's vast livestock and wheat ranches, but census statistics indicate that the average California farm was declining in size during the early part of the twentieth century. In 1910, about 25 percent of the state's farms were 175 acres or larger; the other 75 percent were more or less evenly distributed among farms ranging from less than 20 acres up to 175 acres (Vaught 1997, 165–66).
McWilliams's other rhetorical choices suggest that ideological ardor was a factor in his presentation. He occasionally stretches limited evidence to fit desired conclusions, as when he describes the influence of nineteenth-century Chinese laborers. Forced out of the California mines by racist laws and attitudes, the Chinese began working in the fields, from which they were eventually driven as well. This much is undisputed historical fact, but McWilliams also wants to claim that the Chinese taught the landowners how to grow fruit.
At this date it is difficult to get the full facts, for not only were these facts imperfectly reported at the time, but a mist of prejudice intervenes and obscures the truth. But, by and large, it is correct to state that, in many particulars, the Chinese actually taught their overlords how to plan, cultivate, and harvest orchard and garden crops. Their skill in this work is acknowledged and it is difficult to believe that they became experts overnight. Most of their employers, moreover, were novices. With the Japanese at a later date it is possible to point out the specific contributions which they made to California agriculture. Unfortunately, with the Chinese, one can only guess at the facts. (71–72)
Twice noting the absence of reliable facts, McWilliams nevertheless advances his claim, qualifying it heavily even as he fortifies it with the modifier actually.
The two case studies reflect McWilliams's lifelong distrust of the system. He prefaces the story of the Miller & Lux land empire with a dramatic characterization of land ownership in California.
In the course of a few years, it became apparent that ownership of this vast domain had become concentrated in the hands of a few large speculators. In the whole sickening history of land fraud in the United States there is no more sordid chapter than the methods by which, in less than a decade, California and its settlers were robbed of millions of acres of valuable land, land intended for individual settlement, for homes and farms. (19)
The story is deftly staged and animated by McWilliams's outrage. The main character, Henry Miller, “belongs in the saga of the Robber Barons” and the “great brotherhood of buccaneers” (28). An immigrant butcher living in San Francisco, Miller began buying Central Valley ranching land at advantageous prices. He then used political connections and shrewd legal maneuvering to claim the all-important water rights attached to the land. By the turn of the century, McWilliams notes, Miller & Lux owned one million acres and one million head of cattle.
In the course of his narration, McWilliams adroitly distinguishes the doctrine of riparian water rights—“the idea of water being attached to the land through which it runs”—from the doctrine of appropriation, which entails that “the ownership of water should be influenced by considerations of its use” (33). He then describes how Miller, having successfully claimed his riparian rights in California, asserted his appropriation rights to water from California streams that ran through his holdings in Nevada. “If one looks at the substance, rather than the form, of these transactions,” McWilliams concludes, “it is apparent that if Miller had used a shotgun instead of the courts, his methods could not have been more ruthless, more essentially illegal, than they were” (34–35). Part of McWilliams's indignation, it seems, arises from the fact that Miller's maneuver was entirely legal. McWilliams acknowledges this fact by adding essentially to the charge of illegality, thereby shifting the discussion from legal to moral grounds.
The rhetorical strategy behind the Miller & Lux section is a familiar one. By focusing on a single extreme case, McWilliams can argue that land ownership in California was grossly distorted and ripe for reform. The second case study, however, presents a more difficult rhetorical challenge. Kaweah Co-operative Colony was a short-lived utopian community with roots in the labor movement set in the northwest corner of Tulare County. By 1890, the colony owned six hundred acres and included anywhere from fifty to three hundred people. In that year, a federal bill created Sequoia National Park, which included lands from the colony, and the colonists were eventually evicted without receiving compensation for their improvements to the land. After tracing the outlines of the land dispute, McWilliams concludes his story with a coda about the colony's principals; one “died in absolute poverty in San Francisco,” while another went to Tasmania, where another utopian experiment collapsed.
Now eighty-four years of age, Mr. Martin lives at San Luis Obispo, California, and is still vocal in his belief in socialism and in his effort to keep the injustice done the Kaweah colonists alive. On August 11, 1935, Mr. Burns Mantle, the dramatic critic, visited Sequoia, “and found many of the traditions of the original Kaweah Colony, which was both socialistic and co-operative, still obtaining.” (47)
The chapter ends on this uncharacteristically weak note. This is the first and last mention of Mr. Burns Mantle, and the occasion for his visit to Sequoia remains as mysterious as McWilliams's decision to include its exact date. Yet the moral of these case studies, articulated earlier in the chapter, is clear enough: “The creation of the Miller and Lux empire was furthered at every step in its development by the State and the agencies of the State; the Kaweah experiment was consistently opposed and, finally, stabbed in the back by the State” (39).
Despite its rhetorical shortcuts and occasional false notes, Factories in the Field was a powerful indictment of California's farm labor practices. It showcased McWilliams's fluency, range, persuasive powers, legal acumen, and knowledge of the region. It also benefited enormously from the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath, which focused national attention on the Dust Bowl migrants. McWilliams traced this national interest not to changing farm conditions but to the fact that most of the new farm laborers were, for the first time, white citizens with Anglo-Saxon Protestant backgrounds. Unlike previous farmworkers, they remained in California's farming communities, often in makeshift housing, after the crops were harvested. Moreover, they were eligible for public relief.
The national controversy over these migrants propelled the sales of Factories in the Field. When California's growers denounced the book in various public forums, its sales climbed even higher; in one three-month period, it was reprinted four times. Two Associated Farmers vice presidents maintained that McWilliams had “proposed a Communistic solution to agricultural problems” and that “The farmers are faced with administrators who do not even believe in our form of government.” M. W. Jorz, the financial editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, also denounced the book: “Hon. Carey McWilliams, ensconced safely in economic security as Gov. Culbert Olson's commissioner of immigration and housing, has written a highly inflammatory book attacking California farmers and providing a bible for radical labor agitators.”14 Henry Miller's grandson informed McWilliams that he was “an unmitigated liar.” A Modesto attorney wrote to Governor Olson claiming that “the book is Communistic from cover to cover … Holding the position [McWilliams] holds, he has no business to circulate among the people of the State a publication that can and will result in creating class hatred.”15 The controversy surrounding The Grapes of Wrath and its nonfiction companion quickly brought the attention of Senator Robert La Follette's Civil Liberties Committee, which McWilliams both briefed and testified before in December 1939. When John Ford's screen version of The Grapes of Wrath appeared shortly thereafter, the plight of California's migratory farmworkers became common knowledge.
The official notices for Factories in the Field ran the gamut from solid endorsement to accusations of sedition. Ella Winter's review in the New Republic noted, “McWilliams shows how the great growers … have utilized California vigilantism to foment race riots, to play one race against the other, to lower wages; and finally to lay the basis for farm fascism.” The Pacific Rural Press took up a slightly different line: “Perhaps this is the first time an official of our government, sworn to defend that government, has advocated the destruction of democracy and the substitution of communism.” Karl Brandt of Stanford University panned the book in the Journal of Farm Economics, calling it “a most amazingly lopsided, highly emotional story … The author's scanty appeals to numbers, moreover, display a remarkable contempt for accuracy.”16 Although Brandt conceded that farm labor conditions were “admittedly most unsatisfactory,” he maintained, “There is no reason why the migratory farm labor problem should not be solved by administrative measures based on coolheaded legislation. It certainly does not require a utopian revolution.” Ralph Thompson's review in the New York Times anticipated Brandt's reaction but nevertheless credited the book.
Unfortunately, [the book] is belligerent as well as excellent—”unfortunately” if for no other reason than that the author's opponents are sure to point out certain militant overstatements in an effort to discredit the book as a whole—but granted that it is easier to advocate than to maintain an Olympian calm under the circumstances.
Factories in the Field and its reception marked a turning point in McWilliams's life. For most practical purposes, his career as an attorney was over. His work as a writer and activist, however, was moving to a new and intensely productive level.