ANY ATTEMPT TO ASSESS Carey McWilliams's legacy must confront at least one hard fact: Almost no one born after 1960 has heard of him. To be sure, McWilliams is revered by a small group of journalists, academics, and aficionados. This is especially true in California, where he is still cited regularly and the California Studies Association issues a Carey McWilliams Award. A certain cachet also attaches to his name at the national level. The American Political Science Association awards an annual journalism prize in his honor, and the Nation has named a senior fellowship and an internship program after him. Even so, Carey McWilliams remains a well-kept secret to general readers, not to mention the culture at large. He has never been the subject of a sustained portrait, a fact made all the more curious by the attention lavished on less consequential writers and intellectuals over the years.
Under these circumstances, the task of assessing McWilliams's influence requires some excavation, for the bulk of his legacy lies just below the surface of American public consciousness. It can be found in the political formation of César Chávez; behind Robert Towne's screenplay for Chinatown; shot through Kevin Starr's multivolume history of California; embedded in Mike Davis's study of Los Angeles; buried in the back matter of Otto Friedrich's history of Hollywood in the 1940s; and scattered over countless newspapers, magazines, books, and scholarly journals on topics ranging from city planning to farm labor to witch hunts. That excavation, however, reveals many durable links between today's headlines—about racial and ethnic inequality, immigration and border security, environmental degradation, and civil liberties—and the issues McWilliams took on decades ago. In an essay on McWilliams and his legacy, Gray Brechin offers a striking simile for this realization, which he pitches to one end of the political spectrum: “For those of us who lean unapologetically to the left as it flows ever farther to the right, encountering the writings of Carey McWilliams is like running into an old friend in a foreign city” (Stewart and Gendar 2001, xx). Brechin's trope of unexpected recognition captures an important aspect of McWilliams's legacy, which we encounter only if we travel to the foreign city of the past. It also attests to McWilliams's undervalued status in the tradition of dissent he documented, shaped, and exemplified. Our visit to Brechin's city is not a pilgrimage; we do not seek out McWilliams but rather come upon him in the course of our explorations. The encounter is unplanned, serendipitous, contingent. We easily could have missed him.
If McWilliams is an old friend in Brechin's foreign city, he is also a much older friend who arrived there long before we did. This sort of discovery can be a provocation as well as a pleasure, especially for anyone wishing to write originally about the topics that mattered to him. In one area after another, McWilliams mapped the social and political territory, raised the main issues, distilled the key facts, and proposed the most practical remedies. Unlike many authors of his generation, he offers his readers today few opportunities to condescend to outdated ideas or attitudes. Indeed, he typically relegates us to the far humbler task of testing, refining, or simply appreciating his insights. His clarity and accessibility, too, leave almost no work for those who would demystify his prose. In short, McWilliams's work raises the possibility articulated by literary critic Harold Bloom—that a dead man's voice is outrageously more alive than our own.1
It was not always so. At the time of his death in 1980, McWilliams's reputation was well established but not magisterial. When Ronald Reagan became president, McWilliams was known on the East Coast as a muckraking editor who had been right on the big issues, especially McCarthyism and Vietnam. In the West, he was a respectable but almost forgotten writer in exile. (In a 1978 Los Angeles Times profile, for example, William Overend noted, “His name doesn't mean much to some people, but the books he wrote about California and its people are regarded as classics.”) Since then, his status as a writer and public intellectual has risen slowly but appreciably. Indeed, Berkeley historian Kerwin Klein has observed that McWilliams's reputation is still growing and may be stronger now than it was during his lifetime.2
That growth began in 1981, when historian Gerald Nash wrote that California: The Great Exception was, at the time of its publication, “perhaps the most provocative and stimulating work yet written about California,” adding that each of McWilliams's other books on California represented “a strikingly original contribution” (405). Even in the mid-1980s, however, it was still possible to dismiss McWilliams and his work without much ado. In Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985), Donald Worster charged McWilliams with flawed vision, confused analysis, and naïveté in his discussion of water manipulation in the West. Focusing on Factories in the Field, which is not primarily concerned with water, Worster neglected the rest of McWilliams's vast output, including his earlier journalism on the Imperial Valley, his treatment of the Owens Valley affair in Southern California Country, and his discussion of groundwater overdrafting in California: The Great Exception. Worster's misprision did little damage to McWilliams's reputation, but its cavalier quality suggests that McWilliams had become important enough to target but not to read carefully.
McWilliams's critical reputation improved significantly following the 1990 publication of two works: Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and Kevin Starr's Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s. Although City of Quartz maintains that McWilliams left no progeny, Davis clearly regards McWilliams as a precursor. His own discovery of McWilliams was almost comically fortuitous. Having quit his job as a truck driver to enter college in his late twenties, Davis took a part-time job conducting bus tours of Hollywood. Faced with the prospect of purchasing the standard tour information from the other drivers, he decided to do his own research and came upon Southern California Country. Intrigued, he read everything by McWilliams except Prejudice, which he now regards as one of McWilliams's major works. A member of the Communist Party in the late 1960s, Davis also learned about McWilliams from Los Angeles activist and Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey. Two years after the publication of City of Quartz, the Los Angeles riots fulfilled Davis's hellish prophecies, and the book became a publishing phenomenon. Davis received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, the same year that his apocalyptic Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster appeared. The two books established Davis as the foremost critic of Los Angeles, and his exceptionalist view of the city linked him to McWilliams. (The same year, however, Greg Critser argued in Salon that Davis's work claimed only “the bitterest edge of the McWilliams legacy.”) In a recent interview, Davis showed less interest in his literary genealogy than in what he considered to be McWilliams's three most significant intellectual contributions: linking California's problems with democracy to farm labor exploitation, focusing on inequality in its various forms, and disabling the crude opposition between Southern California as either paradise or noir-inflected dystopia. In the course of making these contributions, Davis maintained, McWilliams provided a theory of California and set it in history.3
Although Davis disqualifies himself as McWilliams's chief successor, he has nominated Starr, California state librarian emeritus and professor at USC, for that position. Certainly no one has done more than the indefatigable California historian to raise McWilliams's profile. Following the publication of Material Dreams in 1990, Starr featured McWilliams in three subsequent volumes, and in Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–50 (2002), he maintains that McWilliams was both “the state's most astute political observer” (257) and “the single finest non-fiction writer on California—ever” (103). Taken together, Starr's works establish McWilliams as an indispensable source for—and high-profile commentator on—California history and politics from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Adding to McWilliams's cachet was Patricia Nelson Limerick's 1993 tribute, which preceded her own MacArthur Fellowship by two years. In a speech to the California Studies Association that year, Limerick called McWilliams “California's preeminent public intellectual” and one of the “truly ethical leaders of the American West.” She also noted that he “fit all the specifications that, I imagined as a child and as an adult, would characterize a real hero.” After describing her social contacts with McWilliams, which began with a fan letter in 1974, her speech went on to describe the torrent of work he produced between 1939 and 1949 as unparalleled— “nine books that made sense when they were published, and that still make sense today.” She also admitted that she had inadvertently scanted McWilliams and other important precursors in her 1987 work on the history of the West, The Legacy of Conquest. In her view, opening that book with an academic survey would have forfeited the larger readership that she wished to address, yet the urge to reach that larger audience was itself an example of McWilliams's influence on her. Later, she compensated for the slight by honoring McWilliams in a collection of essays—the first to appear under the banner of “New Western History”—that she co-edited in 1991. Trails: Toward a New Western History is dedicated “To the memory of Carey McWilliams, western public intellectual of impeccable compassion and courage.” Her 1993 speech described that dedication as a belated acknowledgment that Western historiography had “finally caught up to where McWilliams had been forty years before.” More recently, Limerick identified three areas in which McWilliams influenced her work. First, McWilliams exemplified the public intellectual. Second, he stimulated her interest in the Spanish-speaking presence in the American West, a topic that had been neglected or treated dully before the publication of North from Mexico. Third, his example encouraged her to recognize and tell stories about the West that some might find unsettling. Even as his work afflicted the intellectually comfortable, however, Limerick noted that McWilliams himself remained a “gentle soul.”4
On the strength of such endorsements, McWilliams's stock rose noticeably, especially among historians. Jules Tygiel called Southern California Country “unquestionably the most influential work on Los Angeles history” (Tygiel 1994, 328), and Lee Ann Meyer's 1996 dissertation documented McWilliams's life and work up to the publication of Factories in the Field. The Center for California Studies sponsored a plenary session that included Carey Jr., Kevin Starr, Alice McGrath, Francis Carney, Lee Ann Meyer, and state senator Bill Lockyer, who claimed that “those of us who have set the Democratic agenda in California today were nurtured directly or indirectly [by] the works of Carey McWilliams.”5 Michael Denning paid extended tribute to McWilliams in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996), which appeared in a series co-edited by Mike Davis. UC Berkeley historian Kerwin Klein argued that McWilliams “probably did as much as any author to shape historical discourse about California” (Klein 1997, 7), and historian Anne Loftis's Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement (1998) devoted a chapter to McWilliams and his work on migratory farm labor. In 1999, interest in McWilliams was such that the University of California Press reprinted both California: The Great Exception and Factories in the Field. Two years later, Donald Christopher Gantner completed his dissertation on McWilliams, an intellectual biography covering the years 1923 to 1945, and Heyday Books published Fool's Paradise, an anthology of McWilliams's work, to excellent reviews.
If McWilliams's place in California studies was secured in the 1990s, his status in Chicano studies is still being negotiated. Edward J. Escobar's Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity (1999), for example, reveals a deep ambivalence about McWilliams's relation to the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles during the 1940s. Although Escobar praises McWilliams and the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee—indeed, he maintains that McWilliams underestimated the committee's achievement—he faults McWilliams's understanding of Mexican-American juvenile delinquency in Los Angeles. The cohort of liberals to which McWilliams belonged, Escobar argues, “accepted the notion that the zoot suit was synonymous with delinquency and as such constituted a grave social problem, and that the root cause of this problem was discrimination” (218). In North from Mexico, however, McWilliams mocked the local newspapers for seizing upon the zoot suit as a “badge of crime” (243). Escobar is correct, that McWilliams believed that many social problems in Los Angeles's Mexican-American community were related to discrimination and its effects. But for Escobar, this belief counts as a “deterministic analysis” that “in fact supported law enforcement's repressive measures” (Escobar 1999, 219)—despite McWilliams's explicit repudiation of “a more severe police policy—in other words, repression.”
Eduardo Obregón Pagán's Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (2003) is similarly ambivalent about McWilliams. Like Escobar, Pagán credits McWilliams for “working tirelessly on behalf of the predominantly black and Mexican American communities” in the 1940s. Yet his portrait of McWilliams betrays an anxiety of influence of Bloomian proportions. This much is clear from several passages in the introductory chapter.
The dominant explanation for why the trial and riot occurred draws from the basic premise argued by Carey McWilliams and Guy Endore in the 1940s, that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst intentionally used his Los Angeles newspapers, the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express and the Los Angeles Examiner to promote “anti-Mexican hysteria” … Progressive activists of the period such as Endore and McWilliams viewed the trial and riot through the lens of conspiracy and corruption, discovering in the sequence of events the machinations of wealth and power unfettered. (8)
Only a generation later, Pagán argues, did Chicano scholars correct the oversimplifications of this leftist morality play.
But rather than locate the origins of hysteria in the manipulations of corporate interests, Chicano scholars saw anti-Mexican hysteria deriving from the pathology of American society. The appeal of this interpretation was that it moved away from Guy Endore's Hollywood view of sinister men controlling the puppet strings of society and highlighted the pervasiveness of racism and the propensity toward violence in American society. (9)
Pagán's contribution is to further debunk these simplistic accounts.
Through my exploration of popular culture, I shift the origins of the trial and riot away from a monocausal explanation toward a multivalent theory that looks at competing social tensions deriving from demographic pressures, city planning, racism, segregation, and an incipient street-level insurgency against what Tomás Almaguer called “the master narrative of white supremacy.” (10)
As these citations indicate, Pagán's argument proceeds by folding McWilliams's analysis into Endore's more simplistic account and then dismissing both. It is true that McWilliams considered the role of the media in heightening the city's racial and ethnic tensions, but he nowhere suggested that newspapers were the sole cause of the Sleepy Lagoon case or the Zoot Suit Riots. Nor did he favor a conspiracy theory. Instead, he stressed the very factors that Pagán lists as the elements of his own theory: demographic pressures, racism, segregation, and the responses to those problems by second-generation Latino youths. He also drew attention to an overwhelmingly non-Latino police force, a credulous white population, and hundreds of bored servicemen whose attitudes about Los Angeles were shaped by the city's overheated local press. Although Pagán's subsequent references are more attuned to the complexity of McWilliams's analysis, his initial simplification and dismissal clear the stage for his own argument.
Other recent works in a variety of fields have also used McWilliams's work as their baseline. These include, but are not limited to, William Deverell's Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004); Jules Tygiel's introduction to Tom Sitton and Deverell's Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001); Matt Garcia's A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (2001); and David Vaught's Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920 (2002). Of the four books, Vaught's is the most critical of McWilliams's analysis. In a recent interview, Vaught maintained that McWilliams “got only half the story right” on the subject of California agribusiness; in particular, Vaught questioned the accuracy of McWilliams's account of the 1913 Wheatland Riot. Yet Vaught was most critical of fellow historians, not McWilliams, whom he regards as a brilliant and powerful writer. “My beef isn't with McWilliams,” Vaught said, “but with the continuing influence of those who have accepted uncritically every word that he ever wrote.” He also noted that in composing his own history of California agribusiness, “I had McWilliams next to me the entire time, and not only as a foil.”6
Vaught's comments demonstrate McWilliams's continuing power to influence specialized debates, but they do not fully explain his resurgence in the academy. That development can be traced to three other factors. The first is McWilliams's style, self-presentation, and rhetorical control. Although his advocacy on behalf of labor, civil liberties, and racial equality was unswerving, most of his books resist the charms of polemic and jeremiad, and they are refreshingly free of self-righteous zeal. Indeed, McWilliams's conceptual stand, especially in his later works, is that of the classic stylist (Thomas and Turner 1994). He assumes that the truth can be known, that readers can recognize it, that abstractions can be clear and exact, and that overshooting the mark is rarely the condition for hitting it. The lucidity, precision, and sense of proportion that follow from these assumptions enhance McWilliams's authority even as they widen his appeal. With few exceptions, he maintains a jurist's regard for the facts as he submits opposing accounts to cool appraisal. The effects are far from clinical, however, in part because his intellectual work is done offstage, as it were, and presented to the reader as a spontaneous and complete performance whose outcome seems inevitable. His fluency, irony, and seemingly effortless control over the key facts exemplify a twentieth-century sprezzatura that resonates particularly well with California audiences. That this style would lead him to the editorship of the Nation is a minor regional triumph; that it would attract a committed readership two generations later is a significant literary achievement.
The second reason for the resurgence of McWilliams's reputation has as much to do with today's audiences as with his style. Since the late 1980s, there has been a growing interest in—and perceived need for—public intellectuals who can write clearly, critically, and consequentially on a range of pressing topics. As Russell Jacoby argues in The Last Intellectuals (1987), the shortage of such intellectuals can be traced to their loss of habitat. Since the 1950s, writers and thinkers have abandoned bohemia for the universities, where they are encouraged to write for other specialists, not general audiences. As a result, Jacoby maintains, intellectuals who once wrote for broader audiences have been replaced by “high-tech intellectuals, consultants, and professors—anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life” (x).
These academic intellectuals have developed a taste for theory—a predictable consequence given the university's mission and comparative advantage. As liberal philosopher Richard Rorty has written, however, the urge to theorize politics has produced a few very good books and many thousands of bad ones. He argues that this urge now represents a form of withdrawal from political action, and his comments echo and extend Jacoby's: “These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country” (1998, 94). Rorty also argues that this retreat plays into the hands of the American right. In discussing the influence of French philosopher Michel Foucault, for example, Rorty sees little to celebrate. “The Foucauldian academic left in America is exactly the sort of left that the oligarchy dreams of: a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future” (139).
Whatever one thinks of Jacoby's and Rorty's claims, McWilliams clearly represents another kind of leftist intellectual—one who could litigate a case, serve in state government, write campaign speeches, critique fiction, edit a national journal of news and opinion, and reach general audiences without catering to them. In an age of increasing specialization, McWilliams's ability to move easily between the worlds of literature, law, journalism, politics, and academia is not lost on his newest readers. Gray Brechin puts the matter plainly: “It is as a public intellectual that I most admire McWilliams” (Stewart and Gendar 2001, xxii). A prolific, popular, and consequential author who was also a radical, he exemplifies the preferred half of Rorty's distinction between an activist left and a spectatorial one whose natural home is the university and whose chief concern is theory. He also embodies an ideal that seems increasingly remote to a younger generation of academics. The persistent urge to fulfill this ideal helps account for McWilliams's rising critical fortunes over the last decade.
The third reason follows closely on the second. If academic leftists have retreated from the public square, they have had plenty of company. As Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) and other works have shown, American life over the last two decades has been characterized by declining levels of social capital, political participation, and volunteerism. In recent years, many academics have studied that decline, debated its causes, and proposed various remedies. McWilliams, of course, had his own views on this topic. For him, the forms of community that had flourished on the political left did not die naturally; rather, they perished under the heat of McCarthyism. But however we understand those generational changes and their causes, few public figures today could match McWilliams's ubiquity during his prime. In addition to producing a torrent of books and articles in the 1940s, McWilliams seemed to be everywhere: serving in state government, debating farm labor issues on the radio, coordinating the appeal of the Sleepy Lagoon convictions, calming Los Angeles during the Zoot Suit Riots, protesting the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans, writing Robert Kenny's campaign speeches, crisscrossing the country on lecture tours, drafting an amicus brief for the Hollywood Ten, challenging the University of California's loyalty oath, and serving on countless committees for the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and other organizations. He also managed to maintain a marriage, spend time with his sons, and enjoy the company of his friends. Self-sufficient but by no means isolated, McWilliams personifies a lost ethic of civic participation to a new generation of academics.
These three factors have helped consolidate McWilliams's reputation within the academy, but they have done little to raise his profile in the culture at large. Forrest G. Robinson begins a recent homage by asking, “How can it be that a historian and social critic of such distinction, who once spoke with authority to a vast national audience on topics as pressing today as they were in 1939, can have slipped so precipitously from view?” Robinson points the finger at today's revisionist historians, arguing that “the hegemony of the so-called New Western Historians has been achieved at the price of obscuring a long and proud tradition of dissent among western writers.” In neglecting McWilliams, Robinson maintains, these historians have overlooked an important precursor whose work anticipated and surpasses their own. (Robinson's article makes no mention of Limerick's 1991 dedication or 1993 tribute to McWilliams.) In her recent article on teaching McWilliams, Catherine A. Corman agrees with much of Robinson's analysis, adding that when McWilliams is recognized, the conversation tends to “enter into a pure love-fest, ending with a blanket endorsement.” Corman's purpose, however, is not to interrupt the festivities but rather to “extend McWilliams's shelf life” by suggesting new ways to teach his work. If implemented, Corman's suggestions would transform McWilliams from cult hero to canonical author.
Does McWilliams deserve that status? Certainly much of his prodigious output has held up well over the years. Southern California Country can still be read with pleasure, and Prejudice is a brave, commanding, and sometimes disturbing work. Although today's readers may be reluctant to plow through a popular history written in 1949, California: The Great Exception repays that effort and deserves its status as a minor classic. Following the California gubernatorial recall and election of 2003, San Francisco journalist John King recommended the book to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as “the most perceptive book ever written about his new domain.” Factories in the Field and Brothers Under the Skin also retain their power, and North from Mexico is uneven but superb on the events McWilliams documented in Los Angeles. By McWilliams's own admission, Witch Hunt is flawed, but it represents an early and courageous intervention on a critical national issue, and its portrait of the red-baiter remains vivid and memorable. His other books (A Mask for Privilege, Ill Fares the Land, Louis Adamic & Shadow-America, and Ambrose Bierce) are worthy but probably less compelling to most readers today.
McWilliams's most notable achievement, however, may lie in the sheer range, quantity, and excellence of his work defined more broadly. At the very least, he must be judged as one of the most versatile American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. One way to test this claim is to imagine H. L. Mencken writing a Supreme Court brief, Cornel West heading a state agency, Noam Chomsky editing a national magazine, Edmund Wilson writing campaign speeches, or Alan Dershowitz assessing the work of a major poet. Ironically, McWilliams's move to the national stage may have delayed this judgment. Although he never regretted his long tenure at the Nation, his most appreciative readers today wonder what he would have produced had he continued to dedicate his energies to his own writing. By devoting himself exclusively to the magazine and its affairs for twenty-five years, McWilliams helped others find their voices but gradually lost his own. In this sense, the Nation's gain was the country's loss.
Another way to assess McWilliams's achievement is to consider the literary genealogy he composed for himself. By modeling his career on the examples of Bierce and Mencken, he also invited comparisons to them. McWilliams admired Bierce but argued that his importance lay in his influence on younger writers, who realized from his example that they could live in and write about the West. McWilliams also inspired younger writers to focus on the West, and he gave many others their start by publishing their work in the Nation. Although there is no McWilliams school comparable to the one he documented for Bierce and his successors, McWilliams's influence has been significant and wide-ranging, and his own output has already proven more substantial and durable than Bierce's.
Mencken was by far the more direct influence on McWilliams, and both men focused on the American scene, mixed journalism and book writing, spent much of their time on editorial tasks, and produced large bodies of work. Like McWilliams, Mencken ranged over political and cultural topics; indeed, he supposed that his ultimate significance would be political (Teachout 2002, 341). Although many of Mencken's views have aged poorly, others have remained remarkably resilient. Pro-German and anti-New Deal, Mencken was on the wrong side of history on the largest issues of his day, but he correctly perceived the staying power of Protestant fundamentalism when others dismissed it as a relic. Unlike Bierce, Mencken rarely took on a truly powerful adversary directly, and some observers have regarded him as a bully. Yet many of the forces he contended with were powerful enough during his day, and he had no qualms about attacking a sitting president, Franklin Roosevelt, in print. Mencken's most lasting contribution, however, was his invigoration of American literary and cultural criticism. The Nation's muckraking was timely and gutsy, but McWilliams's work as an editor has not received the same recognition as his hero's. Mencken's celebrity and influence were vast, his output was even more impressive than McWilliams's, he went to greater lengths to ensure its survival, and he has been studied far more extensively. On these measures, Mencken puts McWilliams in the shade.
There may be other measures to consider, however, before concluding the comparison to Mencken. McWilliams became the more perceptive observer of and active participant in American politics, especially after he shrugged off Mencken's political views. He was a better judge of people and movements, his efforts were directed at more formidable opponents, and those efforts were immeasurably more constructive than Mencken's. Where Bierce blasted individual public figures and Mencken railed away at the middle class, fundamentalists, and FDR, McWilliams took on deep social problems and proposed specific reforms to address them. Both Mencken and McWilliams had grave misgivings about many aspects of American life—indeed, McWilliams inherited many of his from Mencken—but McWilliams also believed that something could be done to improve America besides ridiculing its more preposterous qualities. Already past his prime by the 1930s and ailing by the early 1940s, Mencken had fewer opportunities to weigh in on McWilliams's signature issues, but it is difficult to imagine him using his influence to fight exploitative farm labor practices, Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese-American citizens, or the Red Scare. When these comparisons are drawn, the scales begin to tip in McWilliams's favor, and one is more likely to conclude that Mencken's greater renown lows not from the superior substance or durability of his work but rather from its high spirits and rebellious temper—the very qualities that attracted McWilliams to Mencken in the first place. By comparison, McWilliams's mature work is cool, insightful, pointed, but less spectacular. His star has not burned as brightly as Mencken's, but it sheds a more even light on the American scene.
In the preface to his memoir, McWilliams noted that he, like Henry Adams, felt a deep urge to “remove the tension between experience and idealism” (ECM, 14). That tension took a variety of forms throughout McWilliams's life, most obviously in the early split between his law practice and his writing. It also produced considerable discomfort as McWilliams moved fitfully toward his life's work, forfeited the material benefits of his legal career, and learned the wages of dissent in American life. The ultimate product of that tension was not a conflicted or spectatorial mind but rather an alert, supple, and productive intelligence that moved easily between the world as it was and the way it might be. An idealist with few illusions, McWilliams maintained a healthy respect for facts and effective action, and he steered clear of theories that did not. Where Adams sought “to come to terms with a world whose logic escaped him,” McWilliams seemed to understand America's cultural logic well enough, even when he did not accept it as absolute. If the tension between experience and idealism animated McWilliams's best work, we should be thankful he never quite resolved it.