IN NOVEMBER 1938, nine months before Factories in the Field appeared, McWilliams, Fante, and Ross Wills had a fresh reason to celebrate at Stevens Nik-a-Bob at Ninth and Western in Los Angeles. Culbert L. Olson, a state senator from Los Angeles, had been elected governor of California, the first Democrat to hold that office in the twentieth century. The day after the inaugural ball in Sacramento, McWilliams noted in his diary that Olson had already fulfilled one campaign pledge: “Tom Mooney was granted full pardon by Governor Olson, as per schedule, at 10:30 this morning. A great day, this, in California” (Jan. 7, 1939). Mooney, a radical labor leader, was imprisoned following a deadly bomb blast at the 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. Evidence of perjury and false testimony mounted over the years, and Mooney's case had become a leftist cause célèbre. After reviewing the case in a packed assembly chamber, Olson issued Mooney a full pardon and offered him a chance to “say something to the general public.” In his ten-minute speech, which was broadcast over the radio, Mooney pledged his support to the labor movement and denounced fascism. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes applauded the pardon, but the Sacramento Bee, which favored Olson's record as a legislator, protested it bitterly (Burke 1953, 52–57).
After a busy and controversial first week in office, Olson landed in the hospital, suffering from “nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork,” and his administration got off to a slow start (Burke 1953, 60). Even so, he appointed McWilliams chief of the state's Division of Immigration and Housing the same month. Created during the Progressive Era as a commission to Americanize newly arrived immigrants, the DIH was by that time part of the California Department of Industrial Relations, and its duties had been expanded to include oversight of migrant worker housing. A series of Republican governors had neglected the division, leaving it almost completely without resources, but the incoming administration saw its broad powers to inspect labor camps, hold hearings, and subpoena witnesses as an excellent way to highlight the farm labor issues Olson had stressed during the campaign. When the Olson team offered the position to McWilliams, he accepted the opportunity to “do something about farm labor” (ECM, 77), and on January 19, he traveled to Sacramento to be sworn in. His appointment furnished yet another occasion to celebrate. Fante and Wills collected him in Sacramento and proceeded to San Francisco for some revelry. There they met writer William Saroyan at the Empire Hotel, which later became a location for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The group worked its way through a series of nightspots until 4:00 a.m. and reassembled the next day for a vertiginous lunch.
McWilliams then went to work. Operating out of the State Building in downtown Los Angeles, he opened a new field office in Fresno, added staff, tripled the number of farm inspections, and revived the division's work on immigrant aid. He also maintained his law practice and busy schedule in Los Angeles. A typical day found him working at his law office in the morning; conducting state business in the afternoon; and attending meetings, forums, parties, and informal gatherings in the evening. Some of these gatherings brought him into contact with writers and Hollywood figures, including Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos, and Charlie Chaplin. Others were devoted to specific causes, such as an effort to raise funds for children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War. For that cause, McWilliams joined with Janet Gaynor, George Balanchine, Ernst Lubitsch, and Bette Davis to organize a showing of Picasso's “Guernica” at the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles, an event that was covered by the Daily Worker (Aug. 19, 1939).
During this time, McWilliams also took on leadership roles in the local ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Washington-based American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. The last group included a wide array of progressive thinkers and activists, including anthropologist Franz Boas, novelist John Dos Passos, labor leader Sidney Hillman, philosopher John Dewey, and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. McWilliams's extensive network helped him generate publicity and focus public attention on farm labor issues, but anti-Communists would later use these affiliations against him. By one count, only Langston Hughes and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo belonged to more Popular Front organizations (Gantner 2001, 191).
In May 1939, McWilliams persuaded Olson to send him to the Central Valley town of Madera to hold public hearings on cotton-chopping wages. McWilliams chaired the meeting, the first of its type, before “a packed house—at least 500 or 600 people” (May 9, 1939). As McWilliams and Klein had claimed in their Pacific Weekly series, workers in these towns were at a substantial disadvantage. When agribusiness needed casual labor, local relief rolls were cut and workers were offered substandard wages. This collaboration between the state government and agribusiness was widely recognized; indeed, the previous head of the State Relief Administration, Harold Pomeroy, resigned in 1938 to become the executive secretary of the Associated Farmers (Burke 1953, 79). Although the state could not impose a market wage, it could allow adults to stay on relief if they declined to work for less. After the hearings, McWilliams recommended a wage of 27.5¢ per hour, a substantial raise over the prevailing wage of 20¢ an hour. “The growers screamed like banshees,” McWilliams recalled later, but such actions, along with the appearance of Factories in the Field, consolidated his reputation as a friend to farmworkers (ECM, 78).
Elizabeth Eudley, a UCAPAWA organizer from 1938 to 1940, later summarized McWilliams's impact during that time.
He had a very left-wing staff. In the cotton strike Carey would hold hearings for us to establish a “prevailing wage” … His findings weren't binding, but we found we could use them to carry on the strike, and we'd settle with individual growers if they'd put this wage into effect. It was a very different atmosphere from before. It was a Culbert Olson atmosphere. It was a Carey McWilliams atmosphere. (Healey and Isserman 1990, 69)
McWilliams also testified before various legislative committees and subcommittees and used those occasions to push for reforms on behalf of immigrants and migrant workers. He worked especially closely with Senator Robert La Follette Jr.'s Committee on Civil Liberties and Oakland congressman John Tolan's House Committee on Inter-State Migration, which was formed in May 1940.
McWilliams pushed his own division's work away from Americanizing immigrants and focused instead on helping them cope with the bureaucratic mazes and hurdles erected by the federal government. His public comments took special aim at the Alien Registration Act of 1940, also known as the Smith Act. In addition to making it illegal for anyone to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the U.S. government, that law required adult alien residents to file a statement of their occupational status and political beliefs. Within four months, almost five million aliens had been registered. Broadly interpreted, the Smith Act provided for the deportation of noncitizens who distributed a range of political materials; more specifically, it included a provision targeting Harry Bridges for deportation. McWilliams had come to know and admire Bridges, whose difficulties with the U.S. government would drag on for years.
As division chief, McWilliams toured the state, inspecting labor camps and delivering speeches. Fante accompanied him occasionally and recorded his impressions. Visiting Fresno in January 1940, he noted in his diary:
Amazing degradation among migratories to be seen along the highway. Bitter, barren country, uninspired and Faulkneresque. Drab lowland San Joaquin Valley. Cotton fields, orchards, winter brown and hostile. The migrant workers live in tents and shacks. My own callousness toward them surprises me. I am satisfied to say their condition is miserable. Beyond that I feel nothing and frankly can do little. To hell with the whole question of migratory workers. It has had enuf publicity since Grapes of Wrath. There is even greater misery in the cities but it has not been publicized. (Fante 1991, 321)
Sizing up McWilliams as an orator and potential candidate, Fante wrote, “Yes sir, Carey has INTEGRITY. But he is also a bad speaker, a not too forceful personality, though an infinitely wise and shrewd man. He lacks leadership qualifications” (323).
As division chief, however, McWilliams became a more practiced speaker and participated in several spirited debates with Philip Bancroft, who was vice president of the Associated Farmers, the son of California's most prominent historian, and the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in 1938 and 1944. One debate took place on the Town Meeting of the Air program broadcast from New York City and focused on the question “What Should America Do for the Joads?”1 Later, McWilliams noted privately, “Bancroft and I had it hot and heavy, but the crowd was anti-Bancroft and hissed him” (Mar. 8, 1940). Afterward, McWilliams met Rex Tugwell, the Columbia University economics professor who had led FDR's Resettlement Administration, and the two spent the evening drinking and “laughing at poor old provincial Bancroft.”
He debated Bancroft two more times at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and at the Friday Morning Club in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, the debate was again framed in Steinbeckian terms; the speakers were asked “Is Grapes of Wrath Justified by California Farm Conditions?” McWilliams compared Steinbeck's novel to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was not intended to be “a faithful account of slave conditions on every southern plantation,” but served an important historical purpose by condemning the evil of slavery (Commonwealth, Apr. 9, 1940, 70). After citing census statistics about the increasing number of small farms, Bancroft presented his argument in personal terms.
My pear orchard was planted by my father over 50 years ago. I was brought up on it and my children have been brought up on it. Messrs. Steinbeck and McWilliams object to this kind of farm. They want to establish great collective farms … The first step, [McWilliams] says, is for agricultural workers to organize so they can regulate employment through hiring halls similar to those used on the waterfront with such great success. Success for whom? Certainly not for the people of San Francisco and their vacant docks. We farmers are not ready to have [Harry] Bridges run our farms. (71)
Five days later, a newspaper near Bancroft's home in Contra Costa County ran a story quoting a Madera County health officer who called McWilliams “the most dangerous man in the state for his support of the migrant worker camps.” Such camps were “hotbeds of radicalism,” the health officer continued, and though “most of the workers were fine people, there is a group that has become amoral. It is in this group that the cases of incest are found” (Brentwood News, Apr. 14, 1940).
McWilliams's public appearances did not always advance his political goals. The month before the San Francisco debate, for example, McWilliams caused a ruckus when he addressed a group of federal relief officials in Washington, D.C. With Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in attendance, he described the California legislature's crackdown on relief and predicted a backlash among California workers. “Hell is going to start popping in California,” he said, adding that “workers are not going to take it lying down.” What was ostensibly offered as a prediction in Washington was quickly interpreted back in California as rabble-rousing. The Los Angeles Times was especially indignant. Under the headline “Incitement to Riot,” the Times described McWilliams as “the pink head of the California State Division of Immigration and Housing” who had come “extremely close to incitement to riot and rebellion.” His language “would be understandable coming from the mouth of a Communist or fellow traveler trying to bring on a Red revolution here. If McWilliams is neither, he is a dangerous ass” (Mar. 10, 1940). Similarly negative coverage appeared in newspapers throughout the state. A headline in the Hearst-owned San Francisco Call-Bulletin blared “Dangerous! Unrestrained Talk by Public Official Stirs Up Ill Will, Unrest.” The rural Santa Maria Times struck a similar note: “State Officer Rages and Threatens.” The Oakland Tribune reported that McWilliams was “on record as favoring the Russian system of collectivist farming in California” (Gantner 2001, 187).
Calls for his ouster began to swell, and McWilliams offered his resignation to Governor Olson, not for the first time. In March 1940, while Olson was struggling with Williams Gibbs McAdoo for control of the California effort to reelect Roosevelt, McWilliams had written to Olson that he and others had “serious doubts” that Roosevelt was “the most logical leader” to carry out the New Deal reforms. McWilliams then pledged his support to a left-wing slate with thirty-nine-year-old California lieutenant governor Ellis Patterson at the top of the ticket. He submitted his resignation to Olson, but George Kidwell, McWilliams's superior in the Department of Industrial Relations, persuaded Olson to leave McWilliams in his post until after the election. In the California primary, Roosevelt crushed his Democratic opponents, including Patterson, who finished fourth with forty-eight thousand votes (Burke 1953, 140–43). When McWilliams later drew political fire from growers and anti-Communists, Olson again refused McWilliams's resignation. In the end, McWilliams served a full term and omitted any mention of Patterson's candidacy in his memoir.
THE WRITER AS BUREAUCRAT
McWilliams later called the achievements of the Olson administration “disappointing” (ECM, 80). Olson looked every inch the governor, but he “didn't know very much about California” (HAT, 95). Furthermore, the New Deal was waning by 1939, and the prospect of war soon dominated the state government's efforts. Halfway through his term, McWilliams's division was called upon to cooperate with federal efforts to mobilize for war, register aliens, and investigate defense employment and production bottlenecks. In 1942, Olson became what would soon be a rarity in California politics: a one-term governor.
If the Olson administration did not change California as much as McWilliams had hoped, his own stint in government appeared to change him subtly. Although he remained outspoken and attracted more than his share of criticism, McWilliams no longer called for a revolution in landownership or elegized utopian experiments undone by the state. Replacing these appeals, especially in his official reports and testimony, was the rhetoric of sober practicality and caution, even when his proposals and actions were unprecedented. In a conference address in October 1939 on migratory labor, for example, McWilliams claimed, “I think that basically it is safe to say that the fundamental approach of the state government of California to this problem is to stabilize farm labor.” Factories in the Field had included a similar formulation, but this time the rhetoric of caution played out at two levels: After identifying what could be said safely, McWilliams advocated reforms that “favor the organization of farm workers in their own democratic groups” for the sake of stability rather than revolution.
Gone, too, were the constant references to domestic fascism, though notable exceptions cropped up early in his term. In an April 1939 speech to the First National Congress of the Mexican and Spanish American Peoples in the United States, McWilliams was in rare form as he lambasted federal efforts to target aliens.
I think I am well justified in saying that the present anti-alien campaign is a conscious effort on the part of certain forces in American life to lay the governmental framework for the introduction of fascist methods of political control.
Throughout his term, he also continued to criticize the Associated Farmers, which he accused of intimidating social workers and inspiring a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. He also berated the legislature for its complicity with agribusiness. A March 1940 piece in the New Republic argued, “Today vigilantism, which used to be practiced in the fields, is being practiced in the legislative hall at Sacramento … [A] majority in both houses of the legislature belong to the Associated Farmers.” Compared to his work in the 1930s, however, McWilliams's tone was less inflammatory. Both in his speeches and in print, for example, he came to prefer the term reactionaries to fascists when describing his ideological adversaries. In his diary, he was more likely to call them bastards.
The shift in tone reflected the changing facts on the ground. As the threat posed by Nazi Germany became graver, McWilliams called for a more careful, precise public discourse. In The Liberal and the War Crisis, a speech published by the Southern California branch of the ACLU in July 1940, he confided that he had uncharacteristically written out his remarks and reminded his audience that “we must weigh our words with the utmost care. Irreparable damage can be done the cause in America by unthinking, brash, and ill-considered rhetoric.” He also called for sober rationality in the face of Nazi aggression. “Now—if ever—is the time to think hard; to avoid hasty assumptions; to maintain, if it is at all possible to do so, some semblance of sanity in a world that has gone mad” (3). In a later version of the speech, however, he also mentioned his appearance before a legislative committee investigating Communist influence, casting himself as a “victim of psychic rape” (Geary 2003, 14). That characterization did not match his later recollections, which dismissed those probes as “a kind of outdoor political spectator sport” (ECM, 146).
An even more significant reason for recalibrating his tone was the U.S. entry into the Second World War. That development easily eclipsed the farm labor issues McWilliams had signed on to address, and he soon realized that his reforms would not come to pass. As he recalled in the foreword to the 1971 edition of Factories in the Field,
But for all the excitement of those years, the great confrontation that had been anticipated did not take place … What some of us had thought would be a climactic phase of the farm labor story turned out to be merely another chapter.
Even so, McWilliams followed through with his book-in-progress, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (1942), which extended his analysis of migratory labor to the nation as a whole. The book's temper is far from docile. In his discussion of the Associated Farmers' strikebreaking techniques, for example, McWilliams refers to “the doglike subservience of law-enforcement officials to private interests” (16). He also maintains that the advent of large-scale cotton development in Arizona had turned once prosperous small-farming communities into “desert sweatshops” (73). After describing the inhumane employment practices of the Great Western Sugar Company in Colorado, McWilliams skewers that company's public relations counsel.
To thousands of Mexican workers in Denver, Larimer Street, their main thoroughfare, is known as “Hunger Street.” I mention this detail for the benefit of Mr. Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “poet laureate of Colorado,” in the hope that he may fashion a lyric out of it. To the Mexicans on Larimer Street, Mr. Ferril, public-relations counsel for the company, is known as the “Poet Laureate of the Great Western.” (121–22)
On balance, however, Ill Fares the Land is more modulated than Factories in the Field. It was also a less notable publishing event. Although the reviews were positive and McWilliams regarded it as one of his better efforts, Ill Fares the Land did not enjoy its predecessor's excellent timing. Its calls for agricultural labor standards, rural public works, government-owned cooperative farms, land-use planning, state-administered welfare programs with federal standards, and a democratization of “industrial dominion” were almost completely overshadowed by America's entry into the Second World War. As John Chamberlain noted in his New York Times review, the book's thesis—that farm mechanization was displacing farm labor and creating subsidiary social ills—might very well be valid: “But the book is already dated, at least temporarily, by the overwhelming fact of the war, which will consume all our man power before we are through.” In fact, defense-related industries were expanding rapidly, especially in California. That expansion helped absorb an influx of migrants much larger than the one McWilliams, Steinbeck, and others had documented in the late 1930s. By 1942, the Joads were out of the fields and working for Northrop Aircraft.
PRELUDE TO AN INQUISITION
As his public commitments increased during this busy period, McWilliams managed to maintain his writing schedule and private life. Weekends in Los Angeles were devoted to composing books and articles, but he reserved time on Sundays to visit with Bill Carey, who was sometimes accompanied by Dorothy. He also visited the Fantes at their home in Manhattan Beach, where the entire gang drank and played ping-pong. When McWilliams was in Sacramento and the Fantes were visiting their parents in nearby Roseville, they skipped the ping-pong. On more than one occasion, McWilliams chided himself for drinking with the Fantes on Friday night, thereby jeopardizing the next day's literary output. After he “took a beating” during a hearing with the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, for example, McWilliams noted in his diary that he drank with the Fantes from noon until 4:00 a.m.—“and was not ready then to call it quits” (Feb. 24, 1941).
The same diary entry includes an obscure reference: “Toyed for a time with notion of placing a long distance call to Susanville; but finally abandoned … idea. A bad, hard, tiring, trying day.” Susanville was the home of Iris Dornfeld, who had grown up with Joyce Fante in Roseville. The daughter of a railroad worker and music teacher, Iris studied music at Mills College in Oakland and began teaching at Lassen Union High School, about 150 miles north of Roseville. In 1940, the Fantes agreed that Iris—a beautiful, petite, dynamic brunette—was a suitable match for McWilliams, and they arranged an introduction. The two hit it off, and their courtship continued through the fall of 1941, when they married in Yuma, Arizona. News of the marriage came as a disappointment to Beatrice Griffith, whose 1948 book, American Me, would explore many of the same themes of race and ethnicity in Los Angeles that preoccupied McWilliams during this time. According to McWilliams's friends, Griffith was under the impression that McWilliams would marry her. Some family members, too, were displeased. Divorce was bad enough, but remarriage was beyond the pale.2 Within months of the wedding, however, Iris was pregnant, and she gave birth to their only child, Jerry Ross McWilliams, in October 1942.
During this time, McWilliams maintained his literary productivity by driving himself hard, writing at all hours. A diary entry in June 1942 shows that he worked all day on a piece for Harper's but finally quit because of a worsening stomachache. He dragged himself to the doctor and had his appendix removed the next day. Even so, he noted, “Finished Harper's piece propped up in bed” (June 29, 1942). Later that year, he submitted his manuscript for Brothers Under the Skin and celebrated his achievement in his diary: “I got manuscript off on November 19th—which is really something—110,000 words in less than four months, plus Harper's article and a 20,000 word report on the Japanese for the Institute of Pacific Relations” (Dec. 2, 1942). This determination earned him a reputation for what Rutgers sociologist Irving Horowitz later called a “one-man intensive labor system.”3
In 1941, McWilliams unexpectedly received a Guggenheim fellowship to study plantation labor in the Hawaiian Islands. He recorded his surprise in his diary: “I was stunned and amazed, and promptly began to worry about how in hell I could accept it” (Mar. 14, 1941). It was an attractive option, especially given his dismal experience in state government. In February of that year, he admitted that his legislative efforts “won't do much good. The tide is all in the other direction. Everyone has forgotten about the migrants” (Feb. 26, 1941). He also despised the political culture in the capital. Only days after receiving the Guggenheim, he complained, “Sacramento is an awful place with these self-appointed Gestapo men, the legislators, around. I hate it and shudder upon entering its portals” (Mar. 25, 1941).
One of those legislators, Sam Yorty, had denounced McWilliams in the Los Angeles Times as a radical propagandist whom Olson should fire. That denunciation reflected the dramatic turn Yorty's politics had taken since the mid-1930s. As a first-term assemblyman, he had been helpful in organizing the walnut workers McWilliams addressed on behalf of the ACLU. As labor organizer and Communist Party member Dorothy Healey recalled, “Yorty would come to our labor union meetings and tell the workers why they should join the union … The women just adored him. I even went out with him a couple of times” (Healey and Isserman 1990, 70). A few years later, however, Yorty chaired the Assembly Relief Investigating Committee, which was probing an earlier charge that Communists were using the State Relief Administration to develop their program. When McWilliams encountered Yorty in the lobby of the Sacramento Hotel, he found that Yorty's “affability was positively disgusting. Anyone witnessing his greeting would have thought him my oldest and dearest friend. Damned little treacherous rat—and I had to shake his hand for fear of arousing still further ‘furies’ in the legislature” (Mar. 10, 1941).
The gesture did little to soothe those furies. The next month, McWilliams was hauled before an assembly committee and questioned about his “social philosophy.” At the same time, a bill to abolish his division was sailing through the assembly and state senate only to be pocket vetoed by Olson. McWilliams recorded the unpleasantness in his diary: “Then on to the Assembly committee hearing at which I took a terrific and sorrowful beating. A miserable affair, in which nearly every witness capsized under pressure … I, of course, had a knock-down session with the bastards” (Apr. 9, 1941). Despite this effort, McWilliams's inquisitors won the public relations war by putting him on the defensive. The next day's San Francisco Chronicle headline read, “McWilliams: ‘I Never Was A Communist’.”
In the end, the Guggenheim award would not save him from his Sacramento travails. Indeed, he would have found the award more difficult to accept than he imagined. In May 1941, an Office of Naval Intelligence memo compiled a long list of McWilliams's political associations and activities before adding a recommendation: “Necessary steps be taken to insure that the subject does not go to Hawaii.” The same month, a memo from J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI's Honolulu office “to appropriately cover in a discreet manner the arrival of McWilliams in Hawaii and thereafter through appropriate arrangements keep advised as to his activities and contacts while in Hawaii.”4 FBI agents monitored steamship bookings throughout the summer, searching in vain for McWilliams's reservation.
In October 1941, Hoover raised the stakes when he recommended that McWilliams “be considered for custodial detention in the event of a national emergency.” McWilliams landed on the Custodial Detention List, which Hoover had begun compiling in 1939 without advising his superiors in the Justice Department. When the next national emergency occurred on December 7, 1941, McWilliams was not detained, but he quickly realized that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor scotched his Guggenheim project. On December 8, he wrote in his diary, “Everyone is slowly beginning to realize that the war changes everything … My Hawaiian project, for example, is now out the window.” McWilliams's name remained on the FBI's list for years, even though U.S. attorney general Francis Biddle ordered Hoover to discontinue it in July 1943. As Biddle wrote Hoover, there was no “statutory authorization or present justification for keeping a ‘custodial detention’ list of citizens.” Moreover, “the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances is impractical, unwise, and dangerous.” By way of response, and without notifying the Justice Department, Hoover changed the name of his list to the Security Index and continued to maintain it (Schrecker 1998, 106–7). He also ignored Biddle's directive not to investigate the National Lawyers Guild, in which McWilliams had been active since its inception.
THE WAR AND JAPANESE INTERNMENT
Almost immediately after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, political pressure began to build for the evacuation of Japanese residents, aliens and citizens alike, from the Pacific Coast. By that time, McWilliams was well acquainted with anti-Japanese sentiment in California. His 1935 essay in the Nation, “Once Again the ‘Yellow Peril’,” claimed that Japanese-bashing “has been part of the stock in trade of every California politician for the last two decades.” Linking that “older chauvinism” to Senator Hiram Johnson, the Hearst press, and the McClatchy family, which owned the Sacramento Bee, McWilliams left no doubt about his views on the matter. “Anti-Japanese propaganda,” he wrote, “has always been characterized by its offensive stupidity.” The same piece also predicted recurrences of anti-Japanese feeling: “Unlike other alien groups the Japanese are members of a race which is, by popular legend, the future enemy of the United States.”
Six years later, that popular legend became fact, and many of the same parties were urging the federal government to evacuate California's Japanese and Japanese-American residents. Within two months, Senator Johnson delivered a letter to President Roosevelt on behalf of the three West Coast congressional delegations calling for the “immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage” to avoid the imposition of martial law. Governor Olson and California attorney general Earl Warren also favored evacuation. So did General John L. DeWitt, who, after Roosevelt authorized the evacuation in February 1942, became responsible for defining the relevant military zones, prohibiting Japanese and Japanese Americans from leaving them, and then moving those residents first to assembly centers and on to relocation centers. The fate of the policy was sealed when, four days after Roosevelt signed the executive order, a submarine (presumably Japanese) shelled a coastal oil facility near Santa Barbara, causing only light damage but heightening security concerns among the general public.
McWilliams, who had joined the Olson administration to do something about farm labor, found himself in the middle of what he later described as “a tragic mistake, shameful and unnecessary” and “certainly the most serious violation of civil liberties in this century” (ECM, 101; HAT, 187). He instinctively doubted both the necessity and the wisdom of a full evacuation. In January, he noted privately, “This local Japanese situation seems to be getting completely out of hand. Proposals multiplying to evacuate all Japanese, citizens and aliens alike, from the coast” (Jan. 27, 1942). The next month found him composing an essay on the evacuation, but he had trouble finishing the piece. He noted in his diary, “But the whole problem, as you think about it, becomes increasingly complicated” (Feb. 8, 1942).
These complications did not prevent McWilliams from acting. He induced the Tolan Committee to hold hearings in California on the evacuation, but not before Roosevelt signed his executive order. When the hearings finally came off, they did nothing to impede the evacuation itself. “Tolan Committee hearings opened today,” he wrote in his diary. “I arranged to get the state building auditorium for the hearings … The mess that is being made of this Japanese situation simply beggars description” (Mar. 6, 1942). The hearings “were dominated by politically potent elements demanding mass evacuation.” Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler had called for such an evacuation immediately after Pearl Harbor, and Walter Lippmann added two influential articles to the same effect. HUAC, at that time chaired by Texas congressman Martin Dies, also issued a lengthy report that, according to McWilliams, “repeated every false charge ever made against the resident Japanese” (ECM, 104).
McWilliams quickly realized that opposing internment openly was an uphill climb to the bottom. In his memoir, he described the powers in favor of evacuation.
These elements were vociferous, well organized, and numerous, and their presentations were strongly backed by the press. Most state and local officials, including Governor Olson and Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles, testified in favor of removing the Japanese. Ill-informed and biased, Earl Warren's testimony received wide media coverage and was quite influential. So, too, was the testimony of Tom Clark, chief spokesman for the Roosevelt Administration on the issue. Years later, both Warren, then Chief Justice, and Clark, then an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, expressed regret for the position they had taken at the hearings. (ECM, 104)
In fact, McWilliams did not publicly oppose Japanese internment while in office. Although some in his immediate personal circle—including his former father-in-law, Earle Hedrick, then provost at UCLA—shared his misgivings about the evacuation, McWilliams would later say that the number of public figures who opposed it could be counted on one hand. “From the outset,” he wrote in his memoir, “I was drawn into the controversy that raged around the issue; in fact, I became an active participant. It was not a matter of choice; I was co-opted” (ECM, 101).
In his testimony before the Tolan Committee on March 7, 1942, McWilliams focused on issues surrounding the evacuation, such as reestablishing public confidence, preventing unnecessary confusion and economic dislocation, and conserving alien property to facilitate the ultimate rehabilitation of the evacuees. His position on Japanese loyalty differed significantly from the testimony and statements of other public officials. In a radio address on February 4, 1942, Governor Olson said it was much easier to determine the loyalty of Italian and German aliens than that of Japanese and Japanese Americans. “All Japanese people, I believe, will recognize this fact,” Olson asserted (Cray 1997, 117). In testimony before the Tolan Committee, Attorney General Warren, who privately had misgivings about the evacuation of Japanese citizens, concurred with Olson on this point. When asked whether there was any way of determining which Japanese were loyal, Warren responded that, with “the Caucasian race,” they could “arrive at some fairly sound conclusions … But when we deal with Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound” (Cray 1997, 121).
In McWilliams's view, this assumption impugned the efficacy and values of American institutions, and his testimony before the Tolan Committee took exception to it.
Although many people doubt whether there are any loyal Japanese, a doubt to which I do not subscribe, I am confident that large numbers of citizens of Japanese descent are loyal to the United States, despite the fact that it might be difficult and perhaps even impossible to differentiate between the loyal and the disloyal. I believe that they, and certainly the citizens among them, are entitled to full protection until such time as there appears a reasonable doubt about their individual loyalty.
McWilliams then made an immediate but unsuccessful appeal to both security and practicality: “Indiscriminate evacuation may seriously and needlessly affect our food supply, from which our civil and military population will suffer without in any way affecting our security. This can and should be avoided through an appropriate system of licensing.” At the time, Japanese Americans in California controlled three-quarters of the distribution of agricultural foodstuffs. Only weeks before, Warren had ruled against a Department of Agriculture revocation of state licenses issued to first- and second-generation Japanese-American produce dealers (Cray 1997, 119).
With Roosevelt and Olson behind the evacuation, however, resistance to it became increasingly pointless. On Aliens in Our Midst, an NBC radio program aired on May 10, 1942, McWilliams gently questioned some aspects of the policy and mentioned the loss of manpower entailed by the evacuation of Japanese-American citizens. He also regretted California's official response to the evacuation.
I have been somewhat alarmed to note a tendency in California to lock the door behind the departing Japanese. We are tightening the loopholes of the Alien Land Act of that state, and ordinances are being passed which might make it very difficult for the Japanese as a group to return to the state of California.5
Here as elsewhere, McWilliams looked ahead to victory and the rehabilitation of the evacuees. He also commended the army and the Japanese Americans themselves for their “splendid behavior.”
By the summer of 1942, McWilliams had accepted the internment of all Japanese Americans as a fact and began putting the best face on the policy. His piece in Common Ground, the magazine edited by Louis Adamic, maintained that the “herculean and utterly novel project” of relocating 117,000 Japanese was “a task which can be handled democratically and fairly for the attainment of highly desirable social objectives, or mishandled and botched in a manner that will gravely reflect upon the ideals and standards which now, as never before, we are proudly emblazoning to the world.” He further claimed that the evacuation was “not only an immediate problem of great moment, but it can be utilized, properly handled, as extremely important propaganda. It can become an outstanding example of how democracy can convert a military necessity into a program for the achievement of democratic objectives. It is the perfect propaganda foil for the treatment of the Jews in Germany.” Noting that he found it “extremely difficult to imagine that the Japanese will eventually resettle again in large numbers on the West Coast,” McWilliams proposed planned resettlements along the lines of Greenbelt, Maryland, which was created as a planned community under the Resettlement Administration in 1935. As McWilliams described it, “The idea is resettlement plus evacuation, conceived of as an integrated plan … The resettlement of resident Japanese offers an opportunity to experiment with the original Greenbelt idea on a greatly expanded scale … and with much better prospects of success.”
McWilliams was not simply being a loyal Democrat. Throughout his life, he strongly supported social and economic planning. That support reflected his faith in rationality, his contact with proplanning architects in Los Angeles, and the experience of the New Deal and the war itself, which showed what could be done when the nation was mobilized. In this case, his resettlement proposal included compensation for the seventy-one thousand Japanese-American citizens whose property rights were being lost or destroyed without due process of law. He also conceded, however, that “Because the evacuation program is being carried out as a military measure, it will not be possible to realize all that might be hoped for out of it in the way of sound social planning … Nevertheless, the WRA [War Relocation Authority] has indicated that it does appreciate what can and should be accomplished in the field of resettlement.” McWilliams remained upbeat about the possibilities of resettlement. “I emphasize again that the evacuation program can be made to serve an important social end and need not necessarily be regarded as something inherently baneful and undesirable.”
Just before leaving office in December 1942, McWilliams clarified his position on the evacuation in a paper delivered at the Institute of Pacific Relations. That document, “Japanese Evacuation: Interim Report,” chronicled the domestic and international incidents, press furors, and official actions that negatively affected the Japanese Americans in California and elsewhere. He noted that virtually everyone who had testified before the Tolan Committee agreed that the decision to evacuate was a military one.
The arguments for and against mass evacuation, therefore, really entered into the problem only in the sense of possibly affecting the decision as to which groups were to be removed, the procedure by which they were to be removed, and the manner and methods by which relocation was to be effected. As to the larger question itself, those arguments were pointless once there had been a determination that evacuation must be ordered as a matter of military necessity.
He then explained the rationale behind the evacuation of Japanese-American citizens and aliens alike.
No one has doubted, and least of all the second generation themselves, that there were disloyal elements among the resident Japanese. Those individuals known to be dangerous were, of course, seized at the outset and are now in internment camps in Montana, North Dakota, and New Mexico … To have evacuated the aliens alone would have been tantamount to saying that none of the second generation were suspect. If the citizens had been left behind and the west coast were to be bombed, there was always the danger of mob violence, which might have affected other oriental groups, since, in a moment of hysteria, people would not have distinguished between Japanese, for example, and Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos. It was deemed essential, therefore, that the general population receive emphatic assurance that all Japanese had been removed, so that they might then know that any remaining orientals were non-Japanese.
McWilliams's artful use of the passive voice obscured the federal government's authority and agency as well as his own complicity in the evacuation. Still justifying the policy, he complimented the WRA personnel—“their spirit, their loyalty to the program, their patience, and their efficiency”—and closed with a quotation from a related piece that he had written for Harper's: “There is no reason why the relocation projects cannot be successful, cannot in fact reflect great credit upon us as a nation—provided a majority of the American people will insist upon fair treatment of the Japanese and not succumb to demagogues and race-baiters.” The piece was not meant to challenge the military or civilian authorities responsible for the evacuation; indeed, in his 1943 testimony before the Committee on Un-American Activities in California, McWilliams volunteered that the Harper's piece had been “approved and cleared by Major Norman Beasley and by the civilian control.”
On that note, McWilliams ended his only stint in government. In November 1942, Earl Warren dashed Olson's reelection bid and became California's new governor. During the campaign, Warren had pledged that his first act as governor would be to fire McWilliams as chief of DIH. The pledge was as gratuitous as it was popular among the state's growers; any incoming governor would be expected to install his own appointees in such positions. But the division chief whom Warren replaced was not the same man who had railed against fascism in the mid-1930s, much less the young attorney and literary tastemaker who hoped to write the Los Angeles equivalent of Joyce's Dubliners. Proud of his work on farm labor, housing, and immigrant welfare, McWilliams was disappointed by the Olson administration's overall record and the Japanese-American evacuation—an issue to which he would return two years later.
BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN
As the evacuation unfolded and the 1942 elections approached, McWilliams was hard at work on his latest manuscript. Strapped for cash, he asked Maxim Lieber to pitch a new book to Little, Brown and Company and was delighted to receive a one-thousand-dollar advance. Later, when he delivered the manuscript to his editor, Angus Cameron, he claimed that writing the entire book from scratch in four months was “a killer of a job.” The contract called for 75,000 to 90,000 words on “the colored minority in the United States,” and Cameron told McWilliams he wanted something in the pamphleteering tradition, “compact and hard-hitting.” In the end, McWilliams delivered 110,000 words. “I realize that again I overshot the mark,” he wrote Cameron. “But the material, I think, is good throughout.” The two men traded title ideas throughout the summer and fall. Cameron proposed The Colored Peoples: In America and the Post-War World. McWilliams countered with The Last Front, which he drew from a Carl Sandburg poem, along with Those Other Americans, All These Americans, Of Every Hue and Cast, and The Color of Victory. When none of these titles was accepted, McWilliams strained to produce alternatives, including The Color of America Is Changing, We've Got to Live Together, and No Time for Promises. An executive vice president at Little, Brown mercifully settled the matter when he proposed Brothers Under the Skin in December 1942.
For Cameron, ripeness was all. McWilliams's earlier books could expect steady sales for years, but this work would be something quite different: “With this book we shall have to get the sale at once or else,” he wrote. McWilliams had long been interested in the racial and ethnic minorities that shaped California's farm labor story, but the war effort had magnified the significance of their experience and the prejudice they faced. He was convinced that the nation could no longer afford the reflexive, institutionalized, and pervasive discrimination of the prewar years, and he saw the war as the best opportunity to dislodge that discrimination. “Sartre is right,” McWilliams maintained in his memoir, “catastrophe initiates social change; it was the war that set the racial revolution in motion” (ECM, 115).
Tapping the talents and energies of Shadow America, however, also meant bringing deep social tensions to the surface. Because of its role in the war effort, California became a prime location for this process. Even as the army evacuated over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans from the West Coast, thousands of African Americans were arriving in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas to work in the rapidly expanding aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Many were working alongside whites for the first time at Kaiser Shipbuilding in Richmond, Lockheed Aircraft in Los Angeles, and other defense-related production sites. They joined California's Latino, Asian, and white populations to construct what McWilliams believed was a kind of national laboratory for racial and ethnic relations. What made the state unique, McWilliams soon realized, was the speed with which its demographic landscape had been formed and altered. He later recalled, “In a relatively brief span of time the state's population had grown so rapidly, communities had formed so swiftly, that the ‘history’ of social relations was visible, so to speak, to the naked eye; time had not blurred the record” (ECM, 100).
Although much of McWilliams's earlier work had focused on racism, Brothers Under the Skin was his first book-length work to treat the topic explicitly, and several of his subsequent books can be read as continuations of its project. First published in April 1943, it devoted one chapter each to the American experiences of Indians, Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans and other islanders, Filipinos, and blacks. (The 1951 and subsequent versions also included a chapter on American Jews.) That structure posed two risks. First, a serial treatment of minority groups suggested that their histories were hermetically sealed from one another— literally separate chapters in the story of American prejudice. McWilliams addressed that potential problem, however, by frequently comparing and contrasting group histories to make larger points. He notes, for example, that the forced assimilation of the Indians coincided with the failure of reconstruction in the South, and he maintains that the 1870s marked the beginnings of a savage assault upon democratic values. Although this idea drives the first edition of Brothers Under the Skin, it finds its most forceful expression in the 1951 revision.
The real test did not come until the 1870's for until then we had never seriously considered the acceptability of the Negro and the Indian as citizens. The moment they were considered and rejected, a strange dualism developed in the American tradition. For the truth is that we have since had two American traditions: one generous, and liberal, inclusive and democratic; the other narrow, bigoted, exclusive and authoritarian. (79)
In a later chapter, McWilliams argues that this narrower tradition enabled anti-Chinese measures in California, for the prejudice directed at Indians and blacks had created a set of conditioned reflexes that the Californians soon discovered were responsive to racial propaganda.
A related risk posed by the book's structure was that of settling into a rehearsal of indignities, grievances, and atrocities. McWilliams solved that problem, especially in later editions, by setting the experiences of individual groups against larger political and historical backdrops. For example, in the 1951 edition, he maintains that anti-Chinese sentiment was complicated by the competition between the Republicans in the North and the Democrats in the South for Western votes (97–98). “Since it was useless for the South to campaign in the North, and vice-versa,” he observes, “both regions campaigned in the West” (101). That dynamic compelled both parties to accept California's anti-Chinese line, which was shaped by the economic distress afflicting California after the gold rush boom. Initially welcomed by California employers as a cheap source of labor, the Chinese were soon blamed for a range of social ills.
What with the completion of the Central Pacific, the decline of placer mining, and the generally undeveloped economy of the state, there were simply not enough jobs. The rapidity with which the argument against the Chinese shifted from the economic to the biological, from “unfair competitor” to “incapable of assimilation,” exposed the delusion on which it rested. (101–2)
He also adds that “the Negro and the Chinese issue fused with a larger national capital-labor conflict,” again setting racial problems against a larger historical backdrop and touching on the socialist principles that guided his work for five decades (ECM, 321).
Brothers Under the Skin concludes with a call for an expanded role for the federal government in fighting discrimination. In particular, it recommends what would soon become the Truman administration's Committee on Civil Rights. Many reviewers considered this proposal unrealistic or even harebrained. “One cannot always ‘pass a law’ and get exactly what one wants,” huffed R. L. Duffus in the New York Times Book Review. For McWilliams, however, the federal action was only a first step toward equality. “Certainly I never thought that civil rights would, per se, settle the issue,” McWilliams observed in a later interview. “It would make it possible to cope with the issue in an entirely new way” (HAT, 183). In his view, prejudice was not always or necessarily a natural outgrowth of mores; rather, “a lot of racial discrimination has been induced by legislation and sanctioned by legislation” (HAT, 238). Given the subsequent history of American race relations, it is difficult to imagine substantial progress toward racial equality without federal action. In this sense, McWilliams was once again ahead of his time.
Later editions of Brothers Under the Skin foreshadowed other important intellectual trends as well. For example, the 1951 edition contends that racial prejudice “is not a by-product of racial or cultural differences as such; it stems rather from conflict or competition and is essentially a social phenomenon” (65). It also maintains that such prejudice is not a peculiarly American phenomenon; instead, it is “a special version of the world colonial problem, which, in the last analysis, is a problem involving the exploitation of labor” (339). As one scholar noted recently, McWilliams's emphasis on the social construction of race, colonialism, and global economic systems presaged academic research carried out decades later (Robinson 2000).
Although Brothers Under the Skin was popular as well as precocious— McWilliams later remarked that it sold more copies over its lifetime than Factories in the Field— it would be easy to overlook now as the literature on race and ethnicity continues to burgeon. The circumstances of its composition practically ensured that it would have little or nothing in the way of original research. Moreover, many of its insights—about matters ranging from border enforcement to South Africa—have since become commonplaces. Yet the book's relevance, honesty, and courage were immediately recognized in publications ranging from Time to the American Journal of Sociology. It should also be noted that the book barely postdated a period in which many American politicians and some social scientists accepted racial hierarchies as either self-evident or scientifically based. These attitudes were changing quickly, as McWilliams observed in his introduction to the 1951 revision. “Even those who advocate white supremacy,” he maintained, “are today aware of the fact that they speak as poets of hatred and not as scientists” (13). But such poetry was in the air in 1943, and once again, McWilliams had written a book that seemed to be ripped from the headlines. As he later recalled, “No book of mine coincided more precisely with maximum national interest in the subject than Brothers Under the Skin” (ECM, 114).
SLEEPY LAGOON
Less than two months after Brothers Under the Skin appeared, a high-profile murder case in Los Angeles dramatized the city's ethnic tensions. On the night of August 1, 1942, Henry “Hank” Leyvas, his girlfriend, and friends from their 38th Street neighborhood visited a reservoir on the Williams ranch in southeast Los Angeles. The reservoir, which was nicknamed Sleepy Lagoon after a popular song, was used as a swimming hole by day and as a lovers' lane at night. Hank and his girlfriend remained in the car while the others dispersed to more secluded spots around the reservoir. Soon a group of young men from a rival gang in Downey pulled alongside their parked car.6 A shouting match ensued, and the Downey boys began beating Hank and his girlfriend. After the incident, Hank and his friends returned to their neighborhood, recruited more friends, and went back to the reservoir to confront the assailants. The reservoir was deserted, but they could hear a party in the distance and decided to crash it. They missed the members of the Downey gang, who had already been asked to leave, but their arrival at Eleanor Delgadillo Coronado's birthday party sparked a ten-minute brawl. José Díaz, a twenty-two-year-old farmworker on the Williams ranch, left the party some ten to twenty minutes before Leyvas and company arrived. The next day, he was found unconscious on a road near the house. He later died in the hospital without regaining consciousness. He had knife wounds, bruises on his hands and face, and a fractured skull.
A police dragnet ensued in which hundreds of youths, most of them Latinos, were detained and questioned. Eventually, twenty-two young men were charged. Five asked for separate trials, and the other seventeen stood trial in People of the State of California v. Zammora et al., the largest such murder trial in California history.7 Led by Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner, the press coverage was sensational, and the trial was later found to be biased. Superior Court judge Charles W. Fricke prevented the defendants from sitting with their defense attorneys on the grounds that their conferences would be disruptive. He also forbade them from changing their hairstyles or even cutting their hair during the three-month trial on the grounds that their distinctive ducktails were alleged to be gang characteristics that helped witnesses identify them. Moreover, the prosecution instructed the bailiff and guards to intercept packages of clean clothes sent to the defendants. As a result, the youths appeared increasingly unkempt as the trial wore on. There was also testimony that the police had beaten the defendants, making them even less presentable. On January 12, 1943, Leyvas and two other defendants were convicted by an all-white jury of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in San Quentin. Nine others were convicted of second-degree murder and given five years to life, also at San Quentin. Five were convicted of assault and sent to county jail, and the remaining five defendants, who were tried individually, were acquitted.
Soon after the indictments were handed down, La Rue McCormick, a labor activist and Communist Party member, formed the Citizens' Committee for the Defense of Mexican American Youth, which was organized on behalf of the defendants. Meanwhile, McWilliams was focusing on a special committee of the Los Angeles County grand jury appointed to investigate the problem of Mexican juvenile delinquency. The committee had already received a report by Captain Edward Duran Ayres, chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles sheriff's office, on the problem. After describing the discrimination and segregation faced by native and immigrant Latinos, Ayres turned his attention to the root causes of juvenile delinquency.
The Caucasian, especially the Anglo-Saxon, when engaged in fighting, particularly among youths, resort [sic] to fisticuffs and may at times kick each other, which is considered unsportive: but the Mexican element considers all that to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows and feels is a desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon. In other words, his desire is to kill, or at least let blood. That is why it is difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to understand the psychology of the Indian or even the Latin, and it is just as difficult for the Indian or Latin to understand the psychology of the Anglo-Saxon or those from northern Europe. When there is added to this inborn characteristic that has come down through the ages, the use of liquor, then we certainly have crimes of violence.8
In short, Captain Ayres's testimony was that Latino juvenile delinquency was primarily caused by a racial predisposition to lethal violence: “In fact, as mentioned above, economics, as well as some of the other features are contributing factors, but basically it is biological—one cannot change the spots of a leopard.”
To offset the effects of Ayres's report, Harry Braverman, a grand jury member and friend of McWilliams, arranged to have McWilliams appear before the special committee along with a University of California professor, a Mexican diplomat, a labor leader, and two other officials. McWilliams began his remarks by quoting Vice President Henry Wallace's speech in Los Angeles the previous month: “The present offers a unique case here in California of what might have been a sore spot, but which actually has become instead a fusion ground of two cultures.”9 Despite his admiration for Wallace, McWilliams's impression was that, in this case, the wish was father to the thought. The problem in Los Angeles County was cultural conflict, which McWilliams distinguished sharply from Ayres's biological account. Specifically, it was largely a second-generation problem created by social conditions and attitudes that emphasized a sense of cultural difference. Mexican-American youths were “victimized by their degree of visibility, or physical difference” as well as by the fact that their parents came from a culture that differed from that of the United States. Furthermore, social conditions in typical neighborhoods were deplorable, a claim that McWilliams backed up with DIH reports. Segregation compounded the conflict by narrowing the range of employment opportunities, reducing opportunities for cultural adjustment, and creating ample room for discrimination. “It would be folly indeed,” McWilliams concluded, “to deny that Mexicans are victimized by race prejudice in Los Angeles County, and, for that matter, in many other areas.”
When guilty verdicts were returned in the Sleepy Lagoon case, several members of the defense committee approached McWilliams and asked him to chair it during the appeal. McWilliams agreed on three conditions: that the committee's financial records be audited after the appeal and deposited at the UCLA Library, that the committee be broadened, and that it hire new counsel and staff. The audit, McWilliams later explained, was meant to disable the charge that the committee's fund-raising efforts would benefit the Communist Party. Given La Rue McCormick's membership in the Party, McWilliams regarded that charge as inevitable.
The second condition arose from McWilliams's perception that the committee would have to appeal to fair-minded people who probably did not agree with leftist activists on other issues. This view reflected McWilliams's long-standing conviction that the ad hoc committee, whose members dedicate themselves to a particular cause despite disagreements over other issues, was a chief source of democratic action in the United States. This conviction allowed McWilliams to work with a wide variety of figures whose politics he did not necessarily share. In the Sleepy Lagoon affair, McWilliams felt that a broad committee of high-profile members could best carry out the committee's two chief tasks, fund-raising and publicity. The reorganized Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee included celebrities Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, and Anthony Quinn as well as well-known civic, business, and labor leaders.
The third condition arose from McWilliams's view that the original defense, led by the Long Beach labor lawyer George Shibley, was “spirited, and vigorous, but not maybe as tactful as it should have been—that is, in terms of winning a verdict, winning a jury over” (HAT, 158). Others thought that Judge Fricke's obvious antipathy for Shibley aided the defense's argument that the trial was biased. In the end, Ben Margolis Jr. was selected to lead the legal appeal. Margolis, whom McWilliams knew from the National Lawyers Guild, was the law partner of Charles Katz, McWilliams's neighbor and law school classmate. McWilliams was not involved in the legal work and had no personal contact with the defendants before, during, or after the trial.
In discussing the committee's work retrospectively, McWilliams was quick to credit Alice Greenfield (later McGrath) for her efforts. McGrath, age twenty-five, was a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) associate who had been summarizing the trial transcript, running the mimeograph machine, and stuffing envelopes until McWilliams offered her the position of executive secretary. “I've never done anything like that before,” she told McWilliams when he outlined her new job duties. “And now you will,” he replied (Sotomayor 2002). He considered her a brilliant organizer, and her opinion of him was nothing short of reverential. In later interviews, she frequently said that he influenced her conduct more than any other person she had known. “He was not a teacher-preacher. It's just that his example was so marvelous and his attitudes were so incredibly good” (242). She was especially struck by his ability to focus on the key issue in any situation. When one defendant casually informed her that he paid for his impressive wardrobe by rolling drunks, she reported the information to McWilliams. He laughed and assured her, “It's not the issue” (242). The same habit of mind frequently prevented McWilliams from defending himself against political and personal attacks. In his view, responding to such attacks might divert attention from the issue at hand.
McGrath respected McWilliams for other reasons as well. For one thing, he did not need to have everything his way. Although he disliked some of the pamphlets put out by the committee, he felt no need to squelch them. She also admired his personal manner. He was “very funny and very fun-loving and loved small talk and switched from small talk to, you know, big talk without any difficulty at all” (182). In addition to asking about mutual friends and acquaintances, McWilliams quizzed his interlocutors about their views on issues and attended carefully to their answers. Although he was capable of holding forth on political subjects, heated political arguments were not his style. McGrath recalled that the only time she had ever seen him upset was after Arthur Schlesinger Jr. panned The Education of Carey McWilliams in the New York Times Book Review: “He made a little comment about it” (182). Otherwise she considered his comportment impeccable. Several years after McWilliams's death, McGrath told an interviewer that she continued to make difficult decisions by asking herself what Carey would have done.
McWilliams's friend Harry Braverman served as the reorganized committee's treasurer, and the fund-raising effort consisted mostly of house parties, especially in the Jewish community and Hollywood, and three benefit concerts. McWilliams attended many of the parties, including one at the home of Orson Welles. The first benefit was at the Mocambo and featured Anthony Quinn, Gene Kelly, John Garfield, and Lena Horne. The second was an evening of jazz at the Philharmonic Auditorium featuring Benny Carter, Buddy Rich, and Nat King Cole. The third event featured Latin American music and included Eudice Shapiro and Rita Hayworth. Between October 1943 and May 1944, the committee showed revenues of almost nineteen thousand dollars and slightly higher expenditures. Early on, it made a difficult decision to use the funds to pay for expenses related to the appeal rather than to support the defendants' families.
In October 1944, the Second District Court of Appeal heard the Sleepy Lagoon case. McWilliams was present for Margolis's argument, which he considered first-rate. The judges unanimously threw out the guilty verdict, and prosecutors decided not to retry the case. McWilliams later described the legal victory as a historic breakthrough and, for him, the inception of the Chicano movement (ECM, 109). McGrath was pleased but also surprised that the court found no evidence of racism in the trial. When she asked McWilliams about this finding, he explained that there were sufficient grounds to throw out the decision without citing racism, which was always a touchy matter. Unable to post bail during the appeal, the defendants in San Quentin had already served two years. Leyvas, who had been involved in a knife fight at San Quentin and was considered a difficult prisoner, had been transferred to Folsom but was returned to San Quentin for release.
Díaz's murder was never solved. Shortly before her death in 1991, Lorena Encinas, a resident of the 38th Street neighborhood, reportedly told her children that her brother Louie and his friends had beaten Díaz minutes before Leyvas and the others had arrived at the party.10 Lorena was questioned by the police in 1942 and sent to the Ventura School for Girls after refusing to testify during the trial. Louie Encinas was also questioned but released. In 1972, he committed suicide while robbing a bank in Los Angeles.
THE ZOOT SUIT RIOTS
As the Sleepy Lagoon appeal ran its course, ethnic tensions in Los Angeles took other forms as well. Perhaps the most spectacular were the so-called Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, which began after a small cohort of sailors and soldiers scuffled with a group of young Latinos on a downtown street. On the evening of June 3, about fifty sailors, some armed with makeshift weapons, swept through downtown Los Angeles in search of Latinos in distinctively cut zoot suits. When the sailors found their targets, they beat them and stripped off their clothes, sometimes to the cheers of onlookers. The next night, some two hundred servicemen hired taxis to cruise Whittier Boulevard, where they harassed and beat Latinos. Some Latinos retaliated, and for the next several days, servicemen continued their sweeps through downtown, East Los Angeles, and Boyle Heights, occasionally storming into bars, cafés, and theaters. Later, the aggression was directed at other minorities, whether or not they were wearing zoot suits.
The press coverage was sensational. Headlines blared: “Sailor Task Force Hits L.A. Zooters,” “Zoot Suit Chiefs Girding for War on Navy,” and “Zooters Planning to Attack More Servicemen.” The coverage drew thousands of sailors, marines, and civilian onlookers downtown. The Los Angeles Police Department did little to stop the mayhem, which lasted almost a week. When the police did intervene, it was usually at the expense of Latinos. For example, seventeen-year-old Enrico Herrera was sitting in a movie theater with a girl when sailors dragged him into the street, stripped him, and broke his jaw to the cheers of bystanders. When the police finally moved in, they arrested Herrera. In another incident, a policeman beat a Latino youth with a nightstick and kicked him in the face when he refused to enter a police vehicle without an explanation for his arrest. After the pummeling, the officers had difficulty loading the young man into the vehicle because of his prosthetic leg. Later, McWilliams offered a possible reason for the police department's inaction. According to his sources, a Hollywood police captain told a movie producer that the disturbance drew attention away from the trial of Compton Dixon, a police officer who had been accused of kicking a Central Jail detainee to death (North from Mexico, 248). The charges against Dixon were dismissed a few weeks after the conflict erupted.
Although not as lethal as other urban riots in America that summer—in fact, the Zoot Suit Riots resulted in no fatalities and only slight property damage—the turmoil did little to improve the city's image. Time blamed the LAPD and the local press for contributing to the violence, which Eleanor Roosevelt referred to as “in the nature of race riots.” McWilliams later noted that both the Los Angeles Times and the city's Chamber of Commerce objected to the remark. An editorial ran under the headline “Mrs. Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord,” and the Chamber of Commerce's president stated, “These so-called ‘zoot-suit’ riots have never been and are not now in the nature of race riots … At no time has the issue of race entered into consideration … Instead of discriminating against Mexicans, California has always treated them with the utmost consideration” (North from Mexico, 256). The city council responded to the violence by voting to make wearing a zoot suit a crime punishable by thirty days in jail. State senator Jack Tenney decided to investigate links between the juvenile gangsters and Axis agents. Mayor Fletcher Bowron and Police Chief C. B. Horrall were slow to intervene, and the national coverage was embarrassing to Governor Warren, who was already considering a bid for the presidency.
McWilliams's response was three-pronged: journalistic, civic, and legal. In addition to reporting on the disturbances for the New Republic and PM, a liberal national newspaper based in New York, McWilliams chaired an emergency meeting of several hundred residents following the second night of mayhem “to see what might be done to ‘cool’ the situation” (ECM, 113). After that meeting, McWilliams called his friend Robert Kenny, the state attorney general, and asked him to urge Governor Warren to appoint a committee to investigate the events. Kenny agreed, and Warren appointed a five-member committee. McWilliams later claimed that he suggested four of the five members to Kenny, while Warren's fifth choice for the committee was actor Leo Carrillo, best known for playing Sancho, sidekick to the Cisco Kid of motion picture fame. McWilliams described Carrillo, a Democrat and old army friend of Warren, as “one of those ‘early Californians’ who don sombreros and serapes for the annual Fifth of May celebration and then forget about their Mexican-American heritage for the rest of the year” (ECM, 114). The next day, McWilliams met Kenny for breakfast in the exclusive California Club in downtown Los Angeles. They went over plans for the proposed hearing and discussed a draft report that McWilliams had already prepared. The report was modified slightly and released the following day. It called for more restrained press coverage and evenhanded treatment on the part of the police. It also called for the navy to declare Los Angeles off-limits for its personnel. At Kenny's request, McWilliams later drafted a manual for police officers for dealing with racial disturbances, which Kenny's office published in milder form in December of that year.
McWilliams later said that his committee's “prompt action in issuing the report had the desired effect: a measure of calm was restored, the press took a more temperate line, and some of the recommendations were heeded by local authorities” (ECM, 114). Beatrice Griffith concluded that the committee “was the determining factor in the riots' end” (1948, 27). The decisive act came on June 9, when Rear Admiral D. W. Bagley declared Los Angeles off-limits to naval personnel, effectively quelling the disturbance. In his subsequent reflections on the episode, McWilliams hinted that the committee itself was an end run around the governor: “Warren, of course, did not know that the idea for the committee was mine or that I had prepared the draft report” (ECM, 114). The suggestion is that Warren might have balked if he had known, but the final documents, which focus on “race riots” rather than rogue military personnel, presented no challenge to Warren's views, authority, or political interests.
The third prong, the legal response to the mayhem and the role of the police, was more pointed. As president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, McWilliams wrote a short report for the Guild Lawyer in the summer of 1943. There he recommended that “the Department of Justice prosecute Los Angeles police officials for alleged violations of the federal civil rights statutes for detaining Mexican-American youths without preferring charges.” He also reported the charge that “the Hearst papers in Los Angeles were jeopardizing the war effort through a distorted and unfair presentation of the situation.” Under the headline “Police Culpable,” his report continued:
The evidence clearly indicates that the police stood by laughing and kidding while the mob beat, insulted, and humiliated every Mexican they could lay their hands on (including also Negro youngsters). The newspaper stories about Zoot-Suit Gangsters are nonsense. Not more than one-third of the persons seized by the mobs were even wearing “zoot-suits.” It was Mexicans they were after. The evidence also indicates that the military police, when they did take soldiers and sailors into custody, patted them on the back and laughed and joked with them.
His report also included the text of his telegram to Attorney General Francis Biddle requesting immediate action. The telegram concluded, “Feel full federal investigation essential to prevent occurrence of similar disgraceful manifestations of race prejudice in the future. Your prompt attention to this wire is imperative” (Ginger and Tobin 1988, 48–49). If McWilliams's telegram received that prompt attention, he never mentioned it in his memoir, oral history, or other accounts of his life.
THE TENNEY COMMITTEE
Two weeks after the Zoot Suit Riots, McWilliams appeared before the Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (CUAC). Formed in 1941, the committee was chaired by state senator Jack Tenney, a former songwriter and bandleader whose most famous composition was “Mexicali Rose.” Tenney had earned a law degree at night in 1935 and joined the California State Assembly as a Democrat in 1936. The following year, he was elected president of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. According to McWilliams, Tenney “was then as red as a Mexicali or any other kind of red rose” (ECM, 146). He supported numerous left-wing causes, including the dissolution of HUAC, which had collected affidavits to the effect that Tenney was a member of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1937. With Sam Yorty, Tenney coauthored a bill to repeal the state's criminal syndicalism act, which had been used against labor organizers such as Caroline Decker. He coauthored another bill that would have prohibited school boards from inquiring into the “political, religious or economic beliefs of schoolteachers” and yet another in 1939 that would have entitled political candidates to damages if they were falsely accused of being Communists.
Tenney's politics pivoted quickly, however, after he was defeated for reelection as president of Local 47, an outcome he attributed to the work of Communists. He subsequently served with Yorty on the Assembly Relief Investigating Committee, established in 1940 to investigate Communist influence in the State Relief Administration. In 1941, Tenney became chair of the newly formed CUAC. The following year, he was elected to the state senate as a Republican. In addition to questioning witnesses about his defeat in the Local 47 election, Tenney began investigating such groups as the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, and other organizations to which McWilliams belonged. In its early years, the Tenney Committee also held hearings on the Ku Klux Klan and profascist groups, but as time went on, it increasingly targeted left-wing organizations.
Tenney and the committee's chief investigator, R. E. Combs, conducted most of the questioning, and Tenney either wrote or supervised the composition of the committee's reports. Their method was straightforward. Using the final publication of the Dies Committee as their starting point, they collected names of suspected subversives and gathered information from People's Daily World. Using over fourteen thousand index cards, they then cataloged and cross-referenced the names of residents belonging to organizations they deemed to be subversive, sometimes supplementing that information with details from the subject's private life. If a particular index card listed enough subversive groups, the committee was prone to conclude that the person was trying to subvert the U.S. government.
The hearings blended workaday questioning with reactionary speeches and overblown accusations. Edward Barrett Jr., a University of California law professor, concluded that the hearings “were not conducted in a manner calculated to permit rational findings of fact. A general view suggests that prosecution rather than investigation was the theme” (Barrett 1951, 44). Much of the questioning was devoted to confirming membership in the suspected groups, but Tenney encouraged “friendly” witnesses to testify freely while frequently cutting off “unfriendly” witnesses or those who tried to explain their views and associations. At public hearings, he habitually accused spectators of being Communist sympathizers if they responded favorably to an unfriendly witness's ripostes, and he occasionally removed audience members who laughed or applauded. He was also quick to label the attorneys of unfriendly witnesses as Communists, and he ejected them for protesting the committee's methods too strenuously.
By the time McWilliams was called before the Tenney Committee, it had already accepted testimony and a lengthy affidavit from Rena Vale, a writer who maintained that she and McWilliams had met as fellow Communist Party members. Vale also claimed that the Party had received legal services from “Comrade Carey McWilliams,” that she had been given McWilliams's name as an organizer of the Communist Party's Lawyers Unit, and that McWilliams was one of seventeen Olson appointees that she “knew to be Communists or fellow travelers.” It was not the first time Vale had implicated McWilliams. In 1940, she described McWilliams in the American Mercury as “a liberal attorney and author, who during the Popular Front era consistently advanced the Muscovite line.” She added that McWilliams had chosen Margaret Kalisch, secretary of the Los Angeles local of the CIO Office Workers' Union and wife of a Newspaper Guild official, as his executive secretary. Later reports would suggest that Kalisch was a Communist.
McWilliams was the last witness called before the Tenney Committee on June 22, 1943.11 Over half the questions put to him came from Combs, who probed McWilliams about his affiliations and acquaintances. McWilliams's longest answers came in response to questions about the basic causes of the Zoot Suit outbreak, which McWilliams ascribed to a number of social handicaps afflicting second-generation Mexican Americans: inadequate housing, residential segregation, job discrimination, and poor English skills. He also mentioned various forms of social discrimination and cited an attempt to provide Mexican-American youngsters in Pomona equal access to the community pool. Combs then asked about the police, press, and Communist Party during the Zoot Suit Riots, giving McWilliams ample opportunity to air his views. Assemblyman Nelson Dilworth asked if McWilliams did not believe that “some racial segregation is necessary in a community of different nationalities” (4362). McWilliams said he did not, maintaining that “segregation of that type is fundamentally at variance with the American constitutional law, in violation to [sic] the spirit and letter of the 14 [sic] amendment, and productive of a great deal of harm and mischief” (4364).
Tenney then began questioning McWilliams about interracial marriage, which McWilliams had mentioned in passing in Brothers Under the Skin. The transcript reads as follows:
Q: I would like to ask you what you think of miscegenation?
A: I think miscegenation statutes are a reflection of prejudice in the community.
Q: You think they should be abolished?
A: I do.
Q: You think there should be free intermarriage?
A: I don't think there should be a legal prohibition against intermarriage, and I'll tell you why: In the Southern States they have had miscegenation statutes for years, it hasn't stopped inter-racial sexual intercourse; on the contrary, the effect of it has been to increase that very practice by reason of the fact that the white man who has sexual relations with a negro woman is not held accountable, he can't contract a legal marriage, and sociologists who have gone into this subject at great length and who are very distinguished have said that the miscegenation statutes have had the opposite effect of what it was intended to produce.
Q: Well, with the repeal of those statutes then, of course, marriage between various races would be permissible and legal, and would you advocate that?
A: Mr. Tenney, it would be presumptious [sic] to advocate those marriages. I am not advocating anyone marry; I'm saying that these miscegenation statutes do not accomplish the purpose for which they were passed in the first instance. I think they should be repealed; I think they are symbolic of existing prejudice in the communities, and I feel this to the very degree, and I might say there is a considerable weight of opinion to sustain this judgment, to the very degree the negro race in the United States raises in the social statute [sic] in education and so forth, to that very extent you will have less interracial mixture than you have now, when they are, remember, at a disadvantage as a racial minority group in the United States.
Q: I don't think you have answered my question.
A: You can repeat it. I think I have.
Q: I say, do you favor intermarriage?
A: I say it is presumptious [sic] upon me to say that “A” should marry “B.”
Q: I understand. I am not talking about “A” and “B.” I am talking about the negroes and the whites.
A: I am not advocating. I think the prohibition should be removed. (4364–66)
Like Bertolt Brecht's appearance before HUAC several years later, the colloquy seemed to resemble a zoologist being interrogated by apes (Friedrich 1986, 330). Tenney's questions demonstrated the urgency of Los Angeles's racial and ethnic problems even as they pointed to a chilling effort to enforce social and political orthodoxy. The exchange also illustrated McWilliams's blend of firm principle and flexible tactics. Asked about miscegenation, McWilliams declared his opposition to those statutes and to the racial prejudice that gave rise to them. To support this liberal position, however, he employed a rhetorical strategy long favored by conservatives: He claimed that the statutes produced a perverse consequence. If Tenney truly wished to prevent interracial marriage, McWilliams argued, he should oppose the statutes and raise the social status of African Americans. McWilliams was probably aware that these statutes, especially in the South, were designed as much to preserve white property as to prevent interracial intercourse. If so, his argument that the statutes failed to produce their intended effect was a sophistry—one that Tenney impatiently dismissed.
Toward the end of his testimony, McWilliams brought up Vale's affidavit and maintained that her statement that he was a Communist Party member was “totally and maliciously false.” He also denied knowing or talking to Vale and coolly corrected one committee member's impression that he generally subscribed to the principles of the Communist Party. “My political thinking,” McWilliams testified, “is that of a liberal New Deal Democrat. I subscribe to all the reforms of the New Deal Administration” (4370). His testimony was reasonably accurate, though McWilliams often distinguished himself from liberals, and his support for Patterson in 1940 showed that he was to the left of President Roosevelt. Indeed, that support was based on the belief that Patterson would carry out the New Deal reforms more effectively than Roosevelt.
Tenney did not accept the self-characterization. “McWilliams' views on racial intermarriage,” his committee's 1945 report maintained, “are identical with Communist Party ideology” (CUAC 1945, 194). The report also attempted to discredit both McWilliams and his work.
Carey McWilliams has a long record of Communist “front” affiliations. He has written a number of books from the Communist Party ideological viewpoint, notable mostly for inaccuracies and misinformation. In testifying before a Senate Committee in Sacramento in 1941 he was compelled to admit that many of the assertions in his book “Factories in the Field” were without factual basis … As a Communist “front” propagandist he specializes in agricultural labor agitation and racial problems. (193)
After accurately characterizing McWilliams's testimony on the Zoot Suit Riots, the report outlined Tenney's very different view of the same events. The mayhem in Los Angeles could be traced to Communists, who “hide behind the shield of housing, food and all that sort of thing in the advocacy of overthrowing the Government by force and violence.”
Vicious agitation, subtle conspiratorial intrigue, adroit manipulation of human relationships, skillful play upon prejudices and antagonisms— that is the devilish pattern woven by revolutionary Marxists as revealed by the Committee's “zoot-suit” investigations.
Over the next two decades, CUAC reports would list 161 entries for McWilliams. Most named him as a member of a suspected group; others rehearsed, with slight variation, the charge that he was “an individual belonging to an outstanding number of satellites in Stalin's solar system” (CUAC 1947, 47). In public hearings, Tenney could be blunter, as when he claimed in passing that McWilliams was “one of California's outstanding Communists.” The reports also documented the committee's automatic suspicion of anyone who approved of McWilliams's published work. The 1947 report, for example, accused a teacher at Canoga Park High School of placing “her stamp of approval on the books written by Carey McWilliams” because the school library contained his works (116).
Perhaps the most bizarre accusation directed at McWilliams concerned an appearance he made before the adult education program in Chico, a small town in northern California. At the time, Chico's high schools were introducing a new sex education unit, “Basic 12,” along with a textbook entitled Marriage and Family Relationships. Tenney asked a member of the Chico Board of Education if the books used in the classroom showed any indication of Communist doctrine. The board member replied that he would not say so, but that one could find plenty of suggestions that it was possible “to take our youngsters away from the home and give them to other people to teach them their philosophies of life, even opposed to that of their parents.” Tenney responded:
That is why Carey McWilliams is going up and down the State speaking to school districts, of course. He is advocating the intermarriage of races, Negroes and whites, which is part of the Communist philosophy of breaking down the races.
McWilliams had addressed the adult education program, not the school district, and he had not advocated interracial marriage. Yet Tenney did not allow these facts to interfere with his dark conclusion.
The Chico incident is not an isolated one. The committee is in possession of sufficient facts to indicate an over-all pattern. The presence of Carey McWilliams in Chico at or about the time of the inception of “Basic 12” is a fact that the committee is not overlooking. The Chico affair, taken into consideration with the use of “Land of the Soviets” and the Canoga Park High School teachers, indicates a carefully laid Communist Plan for the corruption of America's coming generation. (CUAC 1947, 354)
Eventually, Tenney's suspicions would be matched only by his own sense of victimization. His committee's 1949 report claimed that its members had suffered unconscionably at the hands of its critics.
No group of men in California history have been subjected to the systematic, scientific, concentrated, vicious abuse and vituperation that have been heaped on the members—past and present—of the California Legislature's Committee on Un-American Activities, to all of which your committee is the direct lineal successor. (CUAC 1949, 687)
The report then listed over three hundred of the committee's “most notorious critics,” including McWilliams and such familiar figures as anthropologist Franz Boas (who had died seven years earlier), Pearl Buck, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Gahagan Douglas, John Garfield, Katherine Hepburn, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Robert Kenny, Burgess Meredith, Gregory Peck, Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra, former vice president Henry Wallace, and Orson Welles (688–89). A supplement to that report listed those who “publicly protested or denounced the mention of their names in the 1949 (Fifth) Report.” Again, the list included McWilliams, whose “record of Communist activity is so well known that we cite only the page numbers of references to his activity from recent reports by the California Senate Committee” (2987).
By this time, however, Tenney had dug his own political grave by smearing scores of fellow legislators, prominent citizens, and important Democrats across the state, including San Francisco district attorney and future governor Edmund “Pat” Brown. Tenney had also alienated key newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Daily News as well as legendary lobbyist Artie Samish, who had recruited Tenney into politics in the first place. Even Yorty distanced himself from Tenney as his charges became more desperate. Shortly after the publication of the 1949 report, Tenney was removed as chair of CUAC. That year, he finished fifth in the Los Angeles mayoral election. In 1950, he defeated Glenn Anderson and Robert Kenny to retain his seat in the state senate but ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1952 on the Christian National ticket. He subsequently wrote a series of anti-Semitic books, including Anti-Gentile Activity in America. By 1959, he was practicing law in the desert town of Banning.
In July 1949, McWilliams wrote in the Nation that Tenney's chief mistake had been to interrogate too many prominent citizens who were not actually Communists.
Once witnesses of this kind are brought before the Inquisition, two concurrent developments are usually noted: the opposition is strengthened, and the position of the Committee is undermined, for it begins to look ridiculous even in the eyes of the less progressive elements of the community.
Describing Tenney as a “supreme opportunist but potentially mischievous,” McWilliams later claimed that he had difficulty taking him seriously (HAT, 229; ECM, 147). Yet Tenney and others were not quite beneath his contempt. “By and large,” he recalled in his memoirs, “the West Coast red-baiters were an even crummier lot than those in the East” (ECM, 146).
Some of those red-baiters were thickening McWilliams's FBI file. Entries from 1943 included negative newspaper editorials going back to 1940, excerpts from Tenney Committee transcripts, and items from the Assembly Relief Investigating Committee, which claimed that McWilliams's secretaries were Communists. Another letter to the FBI dated August 5, 1943, one month after the Zoot Suit Riots, also raised suspicions.
[S]ome of us here on the Pacific coast fear that your office underestimates his ability and his intelligence. We have good reason to believe that he has received money from Moscow for a long time and that he is now receiving money from the Japanese … Besides these activities, he has been taking an active part in stirring up the Negroes, the Mexicans, and the Jews … The Negroes have always been happy good citizens, until he and his co-workers started their propaganda.
The file also showed that, in 1945, Louis Budenz, former managing editor of the Daily Worker and a professional anti-Communist witness, was reportedly told that McWilliams “was under Communist discipline” and that he was “supposedly making a Communist of STEINBECK.” McWilliams may have been unaware of these specific accusations, but his experience with California anti-Communists prepared him well for similar investigations at the national level, where the personal and political stakes would be higher.
ONCE MORE THE JAPANESE EVACUATION
As the Zoot Suit Riots, Sleepy Lagoon case, and Tenney Committee dramas were running their course, McWilliams was developing his next book project, Prejudice: Japanese-Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (1944). In Brothers Under the Skin, McWilliams had been forthright about the problems created by the Japanese evacuation and internment, but he was unwilling to assign ultimate responsibility for them to President Roosevelt. Rather, he maintained that it would “serve no purpose” to retrace the steps leading to the decision to evacuate Japanese residents or to “debate the question of whether or not total mass evacuation should or should not have been ordered.”
The fact is that the decision was made by the military and it is to be presumed that it was dictated by good and sufficient reasons. The decision, however, has created an enormous problem. The civil liberties of upward of 71,000 American citizens have been suspended without due process of law; property losses running into the millions of dollars have been sustained; and the government, at an initial cost of $70,000,000, is now attempting to resettle these evacués. (172)
No longer bound by official duty or party loyalty, McWilliams was free to assess the mistreatment of residents and citizens based solely on their ancestry. Pulling together his previous work on the subject, Prejudice traces the history of that mistreatment and documents its consequences.
In effect, McWilliams plays the role of defense attorney for the Japanese-American community. He grants that it was close-knit and maintained ties with the Japanese consulate, but he argues that its second generation was otherwise as assimilated as any other. He admits that immigrant parents wanted their children to learn Japanese, but he maintains that their goal was not to split their children's political loyalties, much less to facilitate espionage, but rather to ensure that their children maintained a modicum of continuity with Japanese culture. Besides, McWilliams points out, U.S. recruiting efforts had revealed that a very low percentage of the second generation could actually speak or write in Japanese—another sign that the Nisei were assimilating quickly. He concedes that Japanese Americans owned a good deal of land near military-industrial plants along the coast, but he also observes that only they could farm that expensive land intensively enough to turn a profit. He admits that espionage and sabotage were not unknown on the West Coast, but he asks why the Japanese, and not the Germans or Italians, were singled out for internment. He also points to Hawaii, where there were much higher concentrations of Japanese but no calls for evacuation.
Proceeding in this way, McWilliams refutes every argument offered to justify the evacuation and internment. He also offers a bouquet of racist comments from public figures to indicate that prejudice inflected by hysteria and self-interest, not military necessity, prompted the federal action. He describes the process by which the internment was undertaken, the court decisions that assessed its constitutionality, the conditions and notable incidents in the camps, and the social and psychological consequences of relocation. Finally, he demonstrates the full humanity of the relocated population by offering quotations from the evacuees' correspondence and documents gathered by the War Relocation Authority. The patient, methodical exposition constructs a rational argument even as it points to the limits of such rationality during times of crisis.
Perhaps the spookiest section of Prejudice describes the organized and irrefutably racist efforts to prevent the return of Japanese Americans to California. One such effort was aided by the Tenney Committee, whose 1943 report, McWilliams comments, “is chiefly remarkable for the illiteracies that are embalmed in its turgid pages” (243). Another was subsidized by C. M. Goethe, a Sacramento millionaire who had directed the Eugenics Society of Northern California and chaired the Immigration Committee of the Commonwealth Club, an organization founded during the Progressive Era. Yet another effort was undertaken by HUAC, which traveled to California to smear the WRA and interfere with the release program. This part of Prejudice features testimony from what McWilliams describes as the “usual parade of special-interest groups … all merrily grinding the same axes” (257). By way of example, McWilliams presents the following colloquy from a state senate hearing:
Mrs. Benaphfl [sic], representing the Gold Star Mothers: We want to
keep the Japs out of California.
Senator Slater: For the duration?
A: No, for all times.
Senator Slater: That's the stuff!
He also includes an unnerving exchange between Assemblyman Chester Gannon and Mrs. Maynard Thayer of the Committee on American Principles and Fair Play, whose members included Robert Gordon Sproul of the University of California and Robert Millikan of the California Institute of Technology. When Mrs. Thayer remarked, “It is of the greatest importance that in time of war we do not get off into race hatred,” Gannon replied, “Are you a Communist? That sounds like Communist doctrine.” Later, Gannon asked rhetorically, “Do you want to champion the rights of a people where different sexes do nude bathing together? You don't know anything about the habits and morals of Japs in California. Mrs. Thayer, have you smelled the odor of a Jap home?” (260).
In recounting the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Prejudice focuses mostly on such figures as Senator Hiram Johnson, General DeWitt, and California attorney general Earl Warren. President Roosevelt and Governor Olson are effectively given a pass for their critical roles in the evacuation and internment. McWilliams later maintained that internment “was simply a practical decision on Roosevelt's part: that he couldn't be bothered endlessly with agitation about this issue” (HAT, 190). McWilliams also plays an insignificant role in his own narrative. Only on page 265 does the reader discover that McWilliams was a government official during the evacuation and internment. Although the book downplays his complicity and Roosevelt's final responsibility for the action, it should be noted that Prejudice appeared during wartime and while the internment was still in effect. In this sense, it reads as a slightly belated act of conscience as well as a powerful argument. It would be decades before Earl Warren would admit, even privately, that he regretted his actions during this period (Cray 1997, 520).
But Prejudice was more than a defense of Japanese Americans or an act of atonement. It was also a call to action. Once again, McWilliams proposed federal action to forbid discrimination based on race, color, creed, or national origin as well as a federal agency that would eliminate racist statutes and policies and manage race relations. He also called for a more serious orientation to the Pacific Rim, noting that language and cultural barriers were hindering the pursuit of significant economic opportunities. Finally, he called for a speedy end to the relocation program, which was officially terminated on January 2, 1945. (“There endeth another chapter,” he wrote in his diary.) McWilliams later noted that Governor Warren opposed the termination but deserved credit for helping Japanese Americans resume their lives in California with few incidents.
The notices for Prejudice were excellent. Newsweek, the New Yorker, Saturday Review of Literature, and Survey Graphic ran favorable reviews, and the academic journals praised the historical overview of anti-Japanese sentiment in particular. Writing for the American Historical Review, however, Donald Young cautioned his readers that the book was essentially a legal brief and maintained it would be unfair to judge McWilliams's work by academic standards. By way of example, Young offered two conclusions that seemed unwarranted by the evidence. First, the notion that anti-Japanese sentiment was largely manufactured by individual persons and groups “seems grossly to underestimate the importance of basic social factors which have made it possible for a comparatively few individuals to stir up race conflict.” Second, “the strong plea that Federal action is the main and practically the only hope for improving the lot of racial minorities in the United States is one-sidedly unrealistic in terms of the known socio-psychological factors in group tensions and conflict.”
One-sidedly unrealistic or not, McWilliams's argument resonated immediately with Justice Frank Murphy of the U.S. Supreme Court. A New Deal Democrat who had joined the Court in 1940, Murphy disagreed with the Court's 1944 decision to uphold the constitutionality of Korematsu v. United States, the landmark case prompted by a San Leandro resident's refusal to evacuate in May 1942. Arguing that the evacuation “goes over ‘the very brink of constitutional power’ and falls into the ugly abyss of racism,” Murphy's dissenting opinion cited Prejudice on four separate points. Murphy also cited a pamphlet, “What About Our Japanese-Americans?” which McWilliams had written as a prelude to Prejudice.
Not content to let his book make his case, McWilliams entered the hurly burly of the public arena, where he blended statistics, logic, and emotional appeals to carry his arguments. In two broadcasts of Town Meeting of the Air, he debated the possibility of Japanese assimilation and whether the evacuation should continue for the duration of the war. On the question of assimilation, a member of the California Joint Immigration Committee asked whether McWilliams or members of his family were willing to marry a Japanese. McWilliams did not take the bait. Rather, he argued, “Race as a clue to character, capacity, or conduct is a myth—one of Hitler's vital lies.”12 On another broadcast, McWilliams was more pugnacious. When asked about HUAC chair Martin Dies's opposition to the return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast, he replied: “I think that the chairman of the committee believes—the only kind of democracy in which he believes is the rotten poll-tax democracy in his own constituency. [Applause and boos.] I think he's an antidemocrat.”13 The comment had extra force insofar as one of the program's other guests, Los Angeles congressman John M. Costello, was a member of HUAC at the time.
By the end of 1944, McWilliams was one of America's most productive, versatile, and consequential writers. His articles appeared in the most influential political magazines, and his books, which dealt with current and controversial topics, were well received in legal and academic circles as well as the popular press. He lectured extensively, testified regularly and forcefully, and was an effective debater both in person and over the airwaves. Although he had begun to accrue powerful enemies, he was also becoming, in today's parlance, a public intellectual of considerable stature and promise. As the war ran its course, McWilliams looked forward to its conclusion and what he hoped would be a period of unprecedented social progress.