THIS BOOK EXAMINES the life, work, and influence of Carey McWilliams: author, attorney, activist, and editor of the Nation from 1955 to 1975. It defines his work broadly to include his many books and articles; his stint in California state government; his efforts on behalf of social, political, and legal causes; and his stewardship of a national magazine. It also considers his personal and professional development, the fierce and sometimes unreckoning resistance to his work, and the remarkable range of friends, associates, and adversaries he accrued over his long career. Finally, it assesses his prodigious literary output, the scope and depth of his influence, and the reasons for his growing reputation in the academy. This assessment leads to a surprising conclusion: that McWilliams—who remains unknown to most readers today, not to mention the culture at large—was one of the most versatile, productive, and consequential American public intellectuals of the twentieth century.
With a dozen books and hundreds of essays and articles to his credit, McWilliams was an astonishingly productive writer. His biography of Ambrose Bierce appeared when he was twenty-four and a full-time attorney. He composed his first best-seller, Factories in the Field (1939), between court dates and by writing nights, weekends, and holidays. In the 1940s alone, he produced seven books, two while heading California's Division of Immigration and Housing (DIH). Half of his books are still in print, and most continue to attract the highest critical praise. Author and California state librarian emeritus Kevin Starr has called McWilliams the state's most astute political observer and “the single finest non-fiction writer on California—ever.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., no friend of McWilliams, considered the Bierce biography excellent and three other books (Factories in the Field, Brothers Under the Skin, and North from Mexico) first-rate. Historian Gerald Nash has called California: The Great Exception (1949) a minor classic, and Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) is still regarded as the best interpretive history of the Los Angeles area.
McWilliams was as influential as he was productive. César Chávez credited much of his understanding of California agribusiness to McWilliams. Southern California Country inspired Robert Towne's original screenplay for Chinatown (1974), perhaps the most widely admired Hollywood film of its generation, and Luis Valdez's play Zoot Suit (1979) was drawn directly from North from Mexico (1948). When Prejudice appeared in 1944, a Supreme Court dissenting opinion cited it four times in the landmark Korematsu v. United States case, which upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese-American internment during the Second World War. McWilliams's influence can also be seen in the work of Kevin Starr, urban critic Mike Davis, writer John Gregory Dunne, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, and countless journalists who continue to cite him extensively. In the academy, too, McWilliams's presence registers in such diverse fields as ethnic studies, labor history, and urban planning. In 1993, Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading historian of the American West, observed that her field was still catching up to McWilliams's work of forty years earlier.
At least some of McWilliams's influence can be traced to his impressive network. Although he began writing as an alienated outsider, he eventually became one of the best-connected writers and editors in the country. Over his fifty-year career, he came to know such diverse figures as H. L. Mencken and Martin Luther King Jr., Mary Austin and Jerry Brown, Robinson Jeffers and Orson Welles, Edmund Wilson and Harry Bridges, Arthur Miller and Alger Hiss, and Upton Sinclair and Eugene McCarthy. At the Nation, he also published talented younger writers who would go on to reach even larger audiences, including Ralph Nader, Hunter S. Thompson, counterculture observer Theodore Roszak, and social historian Howard Zinn. At every stage of his career, McWilliams showed a remarkable knack for identifying and working productively with talented writers, editors, and public figures.
Most of McWilliams's appeal now, however, can be traced to his authorial strengths, especially his lucidity, range, and powers of observation. His ability to see social patterns steadily and whole led him to topics that other writers would neglect until their significance was more obvious. As Michael Teitz observed recently about California: The Great Exception, McWilliams was immensely perceptive about agriculture and social relations around immigration; he understood the multicultural nature of California's population long before the word was invented; and he appreciated California's remarkable ability to remake itself both as a society and as an engine of economic development. For these reasons, his observations still pertain to a state that has experienced dramatic changes since the 1940s, when he wrote most of his books. Indeed, few have done more than McWilliams to change the way people write, think, and make films about California. At the national level, too, he probed issues that others could not see or would not explore. As journalist Nicholas von Hoffman observed, McWilliams didn't cash in on trends; he made them.
Another source of McWilliams's continuing appeal is the sanity of his judgments. He condemned the exploitation of migratory farmworkers in the 1930s and helped reverse the unjust murder convictions of Latino youths following their sensational (and patently biased) Los Angeles trial in the 1940s. He challenged the evacuation and internment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War and pointed out Congressman Richard Nixon's “astonishing capacity for petty malice” in 1950. He called for federal protections against racial discrimination throughout the 1940s, helped defend the Hollywood Ten, stoutly resisted McCarthy-ism, and was an early critic of the Vietnam War. Most Americans would eventually come around to his positions, which he supported with measured reviews of the key facts. The Supreme Court, too, would eventually accept his arguments about the Japanese-American internment, the Hollywood Ten's First Amendment rights, and federal protections against discrimination. In this sense, he earned the title of American prophet many times over.
When first offered, however, McWilliams's judgments earned him powerful enemies. In 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) identified him as a radical for his role in organizing the Western Writers Congress. Following the publication of Factories in the Field, the Associated Farmers in California labeled him “Agricultural Pest No. 1, worse than pear blight or boll weevil.” In 1942, Earl Warren announced that his first official act as governor of California would be to fire McWilliams as chief of the DIH. (Ironically, McWilliams would later receive the Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award from the California American Civil Liberties Union.) A more ominous adversary was J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1941 urged that McWilliams, who was heading the DIH at the time, be considered for detention in case of national emergency. The same year, an Office of Naval Intelligence memo recommended that McWilliams be prevented from traveling to Hawaii to conduct Guggenheim-funded research on plantation labor. From 1943 to 1949, McWilliams was smeared mercilessly, if artlessly, by the Committee on Un-American Activities in California (CUAC), which also suspected anyone who approved of his books. Later, McWilliams became a target for many East Coast neoconservative and liberal anti-Communists, and in 1962 Congressman John Rousselot rehearsed the claim, this time in the Congressional Record, that McWilliams was a member of the Communist Party. The graver charge, it would seem, was that McWilliams had been a member of the national committee of the ACLU, the immediate object of Rousselot's outrage. The surveillance, smears, and attacks are perhaps best seen as the price McWilliams paid for his principled stands on the most divisive issues of his lifetime: labor relations in the 1930s, racial prejudice in the 1940s, civil liberties in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and impeachment in the 1970s. He lost several friends and associates to suicide during the McCarthy period, but even as the wages of dissent rose, he displayed cool resolve and unshakeable moral courage. As Studs Terkel observed, McWilliams was impressive not only for his prescience but for his guts.
Although McWilliams wore many hats—critic, attorney, journalist, activist, bureaucrat, author, editor, and teacher—this book focuses on his development as a writer and public intellectual. It benefits greatly from previous accounts of his life and work, including his own “personal political memoir,” The Education of Carey McWilliams (1979). In many ways, however, that book is curiously impersonal, concerned as it is with the external events that informed his political education. Greg Critser, Lee Ann Meyer, and Donald Christopher Gantner have traced McWilliams's early development as a writer in their excellent journal articles and dissertations, but Critser and Meyer end their studies with the appearance of Factories in the Field, and Gantner's concludes with the Second World War. A handful of books—including Kevin Starr's multivolume history of California, Mike Davis's City of Quartz, and Anne Loftis's Witnesses to the Struggle—treat McWilliams briefly and effectively, as does Stephen Cooper's biography of John Fante, which relies heavily on McWilliams's diaries. To date, however, there has been no book-length study of his extraordinary life or achievement.
This book addresses that lack by considering McWilliams's life, work, and legacy together. It reads his enormous literary output in the company of his diaries, letters, reports, speeches, and testimony, as well as the newspaper stories, magazine articles, book reviews, oral histories, and government documents that feature him and his work. The chapters roughly track the five “worlds” McWilliams came to know: Colorado in the early twentieth century, where McWilliams witnessed his father's financial and psychological collapse; Los Angeles in the 1920s, when McWilliams fashioned himself a cultural rebel; the turbulent 1930s, which shifted his sights to political subjects; the 1940s, his most productive period as an author; and his years at the Nation, which began with the onset of McCarthyism and ended shortly after Nixon's resignation. The discussion then turns to McWilliams's critical fortunes in the two decades since his death and considers the source of his appeal to today's intellectuals.
I have not attempted an exhaustive account of McWilliams's busy and productive life. Rather, I have sought to provide enough biographical material to understand his work and its reception. Although many academics, journalists, and activists have referred to, built on, and honored that work over the years, it typically receives reflexive admiration rather than careful scrutiny. As a result, a tendency toward hagiography is now a major obstacle to an accurate assessment of McWilliams's accomplishments. A life of Saint Carey may be useful to some, but it would be an absurd defeat for criticism. Thus, one of my goals has been to take McWilliams seriously as a writer by becoming a fit reader of his work. Given his staggering range and output, this goal is by no means a modest one. Having made the effort, however, I know that much remains to be said about McWilliams's writing as well as his life and times. My hope, therefore, is that this contribution leads to others.
If hagiography and hero worship are risks in the critical enterprise, neglect is lethal. Carey McWilliams is virtually unknown to educated readers today, especially those born after 1960. He deserves better, but so does a nation concerned about civil liberties during wartime, immigration, the environment, inequality, racial and ethnic diversity, and declining civic participation. Despite its historical remove, McWilliams's work speaks more directly to those concerns than does much of what passes for expert analysis today. In reviewing his life, work, and legacy, my overriding feeling resembles the one McWilliams had about California farm labor in the 1930s: This is a story that needs to be told. By telling it as clearly as I can, I hope to focus attention on a vastly underrated writer, public intellectual, and patriot who used his prodigious energy and talent to address America's deepest flaws and toughest challenges.