CHAPTER 1
1. Although her parents were Catholic, Harriet became an Episcopalian as an adult (Wilson Carey McWilliams, personal communication). In his memoir, McWilliams is concerned to dramatize what he called his “hybrid heritage” and therefore emphasizes her Catholic roots.
2. Private collection of Wilson Carey McWilliams. Regarding this journal, see the note in the bibliography under “Archival Material.”
3. Casley McWilliams's recollections were recorded in “Memories of My Youth,” undated, private collection of Wilson Carey McWilliams.
4. “Growing Up in Steamboat,” address delivered to The Writer and the West conference, Sun Valley Center Institute for the American West, July 8, 1978.
5. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, May 29, 2002.
6. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, May 29, 2002.
CHAPTER 2
1. The year McWilliams arrived in Los Angeles, the colorful Chauncey C. Julian raised eleven million dollars in four months from forty thousand investors to drill for oil. After an FBI investigation of his accounting and stock practices, Julian moved to Oklahoma and then to Shanghai, where he committed suicide in 1934 (Starr 1990, 88). For more on the Julian scandal, see Tygiel 1994.
2. Jules Tygiel interview.
3. Cited in Teachout 2000, 342.
4. McWilliams assembled his USC articles and editorials in what is now Scrapbook 17 in the Carey McWilliams Collection at UCLA Library.
5. Interview notes, Dec. 18, 1979, private collection of Kay Mills.
6. H. L. Mencken Papers, New York Public Library.
7. H. L. Mencken to Carey McWilliams, May 5, 1925, Bierce Collection, no. 277, UCLA Library Special Collections.
8. Sterling's letters to McWilliams are part of the George Sterling Collection, no. 276, UCLA Library Special Collections. They also appear in Dunbar 1967.
9. “California's Lost Radiance,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 4, 1927.
10. Wilson met McWilliams while he was in Southern California researching The American Jitters (1932). In their subsequent correspondence, Wilson wrote that McWilliams had written the first article devoted to his work (Wilson 1957, 176).
11. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, May 29, 2002.
12. This and other O'Sullivan citations are from the Vincent O'Sullivan Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Mencken had just rejected an O'Sullivan story.
13. Ambrose Bierce Collection, no. 277, UCLA, June 17, 1929.
14. McWilliams maintained a high opinion of O'Sullivan. In 1951, he wrote to the bookseller Jake Zeitlin about handling the sale of his O'Sullivan collection, which had cost him “a pretty penny.” In 1973, he offered to sell his collection of O'Sullivan's work to Yale, but the collection ended up at Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
15. This citation and those that follow in the text are to McWilliams's Ambrose Bierce, A Biography (1929).
16. Gorman 1929, 5.
CHAPTER 3
1. Virginia Blaisdell interview.
2. Lee Ann Meyer possesses what correspondence remains. The cited passages are from Meyer 1996.
3. Virginia Blaisdell interview.
4. The son of a successful Pasadena orange grower, Powell would make his reputation as an author, book collector, and UCLA librarian from 1944 to 1961. The undergraduate library at UCLA is named after him.
5. Ironically, economic historian Paul Rhode would later claim that McWilliams is best regarded as “a Great Intuiter rather than as a Great Thinker,” maintaining that he “cannot be counted on to provide facts or for hard analysis but rather for his acute perceptions, his ability to capture that ‘California feeling’” (2000, 891).
6. Joseph Aidlin interview, Dec. 18, 2003.
7. The dates of their correspondence quoted in this paragraph are Oct. 3, Oct. 8, and Dec. 26, 1937.
8. In 1943 testimony before California legislators, McWilliams was asked for his definition of a fascist. He replied, “My definition of a Fascist is Benito Mussolini.” Pressed for a more general answer, he replied, “A Fascist is a confirmed anti-democrat, who hates the very idea of democracy” (transcripts of the Joint Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, vol. 18, 4336). For analysis of McWilliams's antifascism and its larger discursive context, see Geary 2003.
9. The Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics was established at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1930 to promote and support agricultural research and rural development relevant to California. It was named after A. P. Giannini, president of Bank of America.
10. Francis Carney interview.
11. For more discussion of the Bioff case, see Friedrich 1986, Rappleye and Becker 1991, and Russo 2002.
12. After Lieber turned down what Fante called an “ironically pro-Catholic” story, Fante fumed to Mencken, “I am burning up at the thought of an agent, a mere agent, a goddamn Marxist, a goddamn dabbler in Marxism, rejecting the story because it displeased his current whim…. I am finished with that man; moreover, I'm going to get him at the first opportunity. What do I care for Communism? They can put me against the wall and shoot me before I'll subscribe to the parlor Marxism of a stupid gang of Harvard graduates who—because they have nothing in their hearts—must swallow and defend principles they know nothing about. Today every Bohemian and lesbian and fairy is a Communist. I am sick of them!” Mencken replied, “So far as I know, Lieber is the best agent in New York. If he fails, then all the rest are likely to fail” (Moreau 1989, 75–77).
13. Weinstein's work has been controversial. See, for example, Navasky 1997.
14. By the time Factories in the Field appeared, McWilliams had been appointed chief of the state Division of Immigration and Housing.
15. Responding for the governor, M. Stanley Mosk replied, “We appreciate your interest in the matter but cannot agree with your point of view.” Sending a copy of his letter to McWilliams, Mosk wrote, “Congratulations, Carey, on a great work on a vital problem.” Mosk later became state attorney general and served on the California Supreme Court for thirty-seven years.
16. A private exchange between Brandt and McWilliams led to some factual corrections in subsequent printings.
CHAPTER 4
1. Town Meeting: Bulletin of America's Town Meeting of the Air, Mar. 11, 1940, 3–29.
2. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, July 19, 2004.
3. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, Aug. 5, 2003.
4. McWilliams requested his FBI file in the 1970s. All citations are from that file, which is part of the Carey McWilliams collection at UCLA Library.
5. From the transcript of the program, p. 14, in the Carey McWilliams Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
6. Both McWilliams and Alice Greenfield McGrath, executive secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, occasionally used the word gang, sometimes in scare quotes, when referring to the defendants. Interviewed in the 1980s, McGrath explained that the term in its later sense was misleading when applied to the defendants (McGrath 1987, 123).
7. The lead defendant's last name, Zamora, was misspelled in the official documents.
8. Portions of the Ayres Report appear in McWilliams's North from Mexico, including this passage (1949, 234).
9. McWilliams's remarks to the grand jury appear in Nava 1973.
10. “Zoot Suit Riots,” American Experience, PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/zoot/eng_peopleevents/p_encinas.html. Alice McGrath, who came to know the families well, has expressed grave doubts about the authenticity of this revelation.
11. McWilliams's testimony, which is included in volume 18 of the CUAC transcripts, is restricted. In 1999, the Sacramento Superior Court ordered the State Senate Rules Committee to release transcripts of CUAC's public hearings, but McWilliams's testimony was given in executive session and is therefore excluded from the order. However, excerpts appear in CUAC reports, McWilliams's FBI file, and Barrett 1951, which benefited from the author's access to CUAC transcripts for several days.
12. Town Meeting: Bulletin of America's Town Meeting of the Air, Aug. 3, 1944.
13. Town Meeting: Bulletin of America's Town Meeting of the Air, July 15, 1943.
CHAPTER 5
1. McWilliams's diary contains his impressions of New York (Apr. 23, 1943) and Chicago (May 4, 1943).
2. Joseph Aidlin interview, Aug. 8, 2003.
3. Joyce Fante interview.
4. The syndicate included Otis's son-in-law Harry Chandler, who succeeded him at the Times in 1914; Edwin T. Earl, publisher of the Los Angeles Express; Moses Hazeltine Sherman, who cofounded the electric Los Angeles Railway Company and sat on the Los Angeles Water Commission; Henry E. Huntington, nephew of Southern Pacific's Collis P. Huntington and founder of the Pacific Electric Railway; Edward H. Harriman, chairman of Union Pacific Railroad; bankers Joseph Sartori and L. C. Brand; and lumberyard and utilities magnate William G. Kerckhoff (McDougal 2001, 37–38).
5. For recent examples of the book's intellectual influence, see Deverell 2004 on the remaking of the city's Mexican past; Sitton and Deverell 2001 on the development of Los Angeles; Garcia 2001 on labor relations in the region's citrus industry; and Leonard 1999 on race relations.
6. “The California Derby,” Nation, Nov. 2, 1946; Joseph Aidlin interview, Aug. 8, 2003.
7. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, May 29, 2002.
8. These works include, but are not limited to, Kevin Starr's multivolume history of California; Pitt 1968; and, indirectly, Acuña 1972. For more discussion, see Larralde and del Castillo (n.d.).
9. Fred Ross Jr. interview.
10. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, July 19, 2004.
11. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, May 29, 2002.
12. See, for example, Rhode 2001 as well as Rhode 2000.
13. For more discussion of the Hollywood Ten, see Navasky 1980, which McWilliams reviewed in full before its publication.
14. The four columns for the Nation were written between November 1949 and December 1950.
15. This forum is from http://www.harvard.edu/students/orgs/forum/ Academic.html (accessed Feb. 24, 2004).
16. “Bungling in California,” Nation, Nov. 4, 1950.
CHAPTER 6
1. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, July 19, 2004.
2. Joseph Aidlin interview, Dec. 18, 2003.
3. Interview notes, Dec. 18, 1979, private collection of Kay Mills.
4. Schlesinger's letter appeared in the Sept. 8, 1951 issue.
5. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, July 19, 2004.
6. See http://foia.fbi.gov/owenlatt/owenlatt1a.pdf, p. 2 (accessed Apr. 11, 2004).
7. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, Aug. 5, 2003.
8. Twelve years after being ousted from the ACLU board of directors, Flynn was jailed for contempt after refusing to answer a prosecutor's questions about two suspected Communists. She died in 1964 but was reinstated by the ACLU in 1976.
9. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. interview.
10. McWilliams, “Images of California Culture” seminar (Dec. 5, 1979).
11. The material in that essay also appeared in Lasch 1969.
12. John Patrick Diggins interview.
13. Ed Cray interview.
14. Gene Marine interview.
15. Howard Zinn interview.
16. Dan Wakefield interview.
17. Stanley Meisler interview.
18. Dan Wakefield interview.
19. See http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/cookcn.brief.html (accessed April 11, 2005). This Web site, entitled “The Alger Hiss Story: Search for the Truth,” is funded in part by the Alger Hiss Research and Publication Project of the Nation Institute.
CHAPTER 7
1. Personal communication, Wilson Carey McWilliams, Dec. 19, 2004.
2. Robert Sherrill interview. In his review of The Education of Carey McWilliams, Sherrill noted that he had met with McWilliams on four occasions.
3. Jack Newfield interview.
4. Dan Wakefield interview.
5. Dan Wakefield interview.
6. Stanley Meisler interview.
7. Gene Marine interview.
8. Robert Scheer interview.
9. Theodore Roszak interview.
10. Lou Cannon interview.
11. According to Cameron, “Alfred [Knopf] said to me, ‘I don't want to know anything about your past.’” During two luncheons with Knopf's wife, Blanche, however, she said, “I want to know everything about you” (Shanahan 2001). Hiring Cameron in 1959 was a significant gesture on the publisher's part. “Knopf was uncharacteristically courageous about that,” former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein observed recently (Jason Epstein interview).
12. Derek Shearer interview.
13. Carey McWilliams Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
14. Interview with Carey McWilliams, private collection of Alice McGrath.
15. According to SDS activist and sociologist Richard Flacks, the League for Industrial Democracy considered the Nation “Stalinoid” (Richard Flacks interview).
16. Todd Gitlin interview, Jan. 18, 2004; Tom Hayden, personal communication, Apr. 10, 2004.
17. Burner (1996, 219–20) draws a similar conclusion about the New Left.
18. See www.warbirdforum.com/tear.htm (viewed Oct. 4, 2004).
19. Frank and Donna Wilkinson interview.
20. Patricia Nelson Limerick interview.
21. That is, the families of Joyce and Iris.
22. Towne has recalled his introduction to the book in two slightly different versions. In a 1994 article, he noted that he saw Southern California Country in the public library of Eugene, Oregon (Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 29, 1994). In the preface to his screenplay, however, he writes, “My wife, Julie, returned to the hotel one afternoon with two quilts and a public library copy of Carey McWilliams' Southern California Country, an Island on the Land—and with it the crime that formed the basis of Chinatown” (Ebert 2000).
23. As of this writing, Towne is preparing to release the film version, with Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, and Donald Sutherland in the leading roles.
CHAPTER 8
1. Virginia Blaisdell interview.
2. Jeffrey Limerick interview.
3. Victor Navasky interview, July 24, 2004.
4. Gerald Haslam interview.
5. James Houston interview. Both Haslam and Houston would later be awarded the Carey McWilliams Award from the California Studies Association. Houston and his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, were recognized for Farewell to Manzanar (1973), their book about the Japanese-American internment.
6. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, July 19, 2004.
7. Victor Navasky interview, July 24, 2004.
8. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, Mar. 1, 2004.
9. Carey McWilliams Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
10. Jonathan Segal interview.
11. Lou Cannon interview.
12. Rene Rodriguez interview.
13. Adrian Maher interview.
14. Wilson Carey McWilliams interview, Mar. 1, 2004.
CONCLUSION
1. Bloom's theory of literary influence, detailed in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), helps explain the treatment McWilliams has received from some of his successors. A few are even conscious of that pattern; Patricia Nelson Limerick, for example, mentioned Bloom's theory in an interview for this book.
2. Kerwin Klein, personal communication, Oct. 19, 2001.
3. Mike Davis interview.
4. Patricia Nelson Limerick interview.
5. Lockyer and Wilson Carey McWilliams became friends at Berkeley. In 1998, Lockyer became state attorney general.
6. David Vaught interview.