CREDIT: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives
THANKS TO his book Factories in the Field, in which he named and shamed California’s worst corporate abusers of migrant labor, and his role as head of California’s Division of Immigration and Housing, Associated Farmers, the powerful growers’ lobby, once called Carey McWilliams “the Agricultural Pest No. 1 in California, outranking pear blight and boll weevil.” Republican Earl Warren, during his campaign for California governor in 1942, pledged that if elected his first official act would be to fire McWilliams from his government position.
For the next four decades, as an attorney, author, activist, editor, and government official, McWilliams was one of the country’s most effective advocates for workers’ rights, civil rights, immigrants’ rights, and civil liberties. McWilliams wrote nine books and hundreds of articles that helped awaken public opinion and catalyzed crusades for reform. From 1951 to 1975 he edited The Nation magazine, transforming the magazine into a voice for muckraking investigative journalism.
McWilliams grew up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the son of a prosperous rancher and state legislator. After his father lost his fortune and committed suicide, the seventeen-year-old McWilliams moved to Los Angeles in 1922. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree and took a job with a prestigious downtown law firm, but he was not happy practicing business law. He quickly became a man-about-town, hanging out with writers at night while tending to his dull legal career during the day. In his spare time, he wrote book reviews, profiles of literary figures, and articles about Southern California culture for local and national magazines.
McWilliams was radicalized by the Depression and left his literary and bohemian life behind to focus his talents on social justice. His exposure to the miserable conditions of migrant farm workers—and to the efforts of powerful growers, police, judges, and right-wing vigilantes to thwart their efforts to unionize—was the main impetus for his transformation from apolitical lawyer and literary critic to radical writer-activist.
In the early 1930s the radical Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union had been organizing migrant farm laborers, and it engaged in a series of strikes across California to better their conditions. The strikes involved Filipinos, Mexicans, and white Okies and Arkies (migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas) who picked cotton, pears, oranges, and other crops. Associated Farmers was the key front group for the growers, funded by San Francisco and Los Angeles business groups. They hired vigilantes to break the heads of strikers and to throw tear gas canisters into crowds of striking workers, while local cops (and judges) looked the other way. Local police departments had “red squads” to infiltrate the unions and break up strikes. They arrested and jailed hundreds of union organizers and leaders for allegedly being members of the Communist Party.
McWilliams came face-to-face with what he called this “rural civil war” as a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Southern California branch enlisted attorneys to monitor these violations of civil liberties and to defend the strikers in court. McWilliams not only volunteered his legal talents to the cause but also began writing about the growing menace of “farm fascism.” In a 1934 article for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, McWilliams described a lynching in San Jose—by a mob seeking vengeance on two men who had kidnapped and killed a local boy—that was supported by California governor Jim Rolph and the powerful Hearst newspapers. He feared that the growing discontent over Depression conditions could strengthen right-wing movements in the United States, as was taking place in Europe.
In May 1935 McWilliams and his journalist friend Herb Klein began a nine-day journey throughout California. They interviewed growers, contractors, workers, state employees, the head of Associated Farmers in Fresno, and several union organizers jailed in San Quentin State Prison. They dug into public records to see who owned the largest farms and to uncover the interconnections among the business groups, the growers, and politicians. The first account of their findings appeared in The Nation that July. “Terror has broken out into the open again in California,” McWilliams and Klein warned. “The period is one of transition from sporadic vigilante activity to controlled fascism, from the clumsy violence of drunken farmers to the calculated actions of an economic militaristic machine.”
They documented that the same “financial oligarchy” of business interests that had used vigilantes against workers in the San Francisco general strike the year before (see the profile of Harry Bridges) were doing battle with the thousands of hungry field workers trying to unionize. They exposed the Associated Farmers’ connections to shippers, oil companies, manufacturers, bankers, and newspapers. They reported that the state police used the Associated Farmers’ list of 1,000 labor radicals to harass and arrest union activists.
McWilliams’s subsequent book Factories in the Field quickly became a national best seller. He combined his journalistic flair for telling vivid stories about real people with history, economics, and sociology to reveal the conditions under which farmworkers toiled providing food for America’s tables. He traced how a handful of oligarchs had come to own so much of the good farmland, how they pitted a succession of different racial and ethnic groups—Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and whites—against each other to intensify competition for jobs, and how they had perfected a system of exploitation using cheap, mobile, and temporary workers. McWilliams paid particular attention to terror imposed on the workers by the growers, the police, and the right-wing vigilantes.
By the time Factories in the Field came out in July 1939, McWilliams had already been appointed head of the state Division of Immigration and Housing by Governor Culbert Olson, a progressive Democrat elected in 1938. Over his four-year term, McWilliams focused on improving housing and raising wages for farmworkers. He hired investigators and lawyers who were sympathetic to the workers and held public hearings throughout the state to expose the conditions and force growers to explain their abuses.
The growers and their political allies fought back. State legislators such as Sam Yorty (who was later mayor of Los Angeles) forced McWilliams to testify before their committees and grilled him, hoping to persuade the public that he was a Communist. The FBI spied on him, and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, put McWilliams on his Security Index, which meant that he could be sent to a detention camp in case of a national emergency.
The attacks on McWilliams, plus the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that same year, not only drew more attention to growers’ abuses of farmworkers but also increased sales of Factories in the Field. The controversy over these two books brought the issue to the attention of Senator Robert La Follette Jr. (son of Robert M. La Follette, a former senator and governor from Wisconsin), who held hearings in California in December 1939 and invited McWilliams to testify.
McWilliams’s campaign to improve farmworker conditions had made inroads, but by 1940 other issues, including the pending world war, were attracting more attention. For progressives, one of those issues was the growing assaults on civil liberties and on immigrants. Congress passed the Alien Registration Act (Smith Act), which made advocating “subversive” political ideas a crime, required “aliens” (noncitizens) to register with the government, and mandated the deportation of any alien considered “disloyal” to the United States, as defined by the whim of Congress or the attorney general.
In 1940 McWilliams was elected chairman of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which worked to mobilize public opposition to alien registration while also educating resident aliens about their rights and obligations under the law. Its members included philosopher John Dewey and labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, Vito Marcantonio, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson.
During and after the war, Los Angeles was caught in a frenzy of racist hysteria against Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans. McWilliams wrote a series of books that established him as the country’s most influential analyst of racial intolerance and injustice. He also played a pivotal role in two high-profile campaigns to defend Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans against attacks on their civil rights. In February 1942, 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of them US citizens) were detained and put into internment camps. McWilliams later observed that “in Los Angeles, where fantasy is a way of life, it was a foregone conclusion that Mexicans would be substituted as the major scapegoat group once the Japanese were removed.” Once out of government, he wrote Prejudice in 1944, undermining every argument used to justify detaining Japanese Americans. The book was cited repeatedly that year in the dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States, the US Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the internment.
On August 1, 1942, two groups of Mexican Americans brawled by a reservoir near Los Angeles that the media called Sleepy Lagoon. The next morning police found the body of Jose Diaz. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) rounded up more than 600 youths—mostly Mexican Americans known as “zoot-suiters” for the ballooned pants and long coats they wore, a favorite style then with young Mexicans—on a variety of trumped-up charges. Twenty-two of them were indicted for Diaz’s murder. The racist press coverage inflamed the city’s racial climate and guaranteed that the defendants would not get a fair trial. The local papers blamed Diaz’s death on a “crime wave” led by “zoot-suiters.”
At the request of the district attorney, the judge did not allow the defendants to change their clothes during the trial so the jury could see them in their zoot suits. The judge also allowed a staffer for the Los Angeles sheriff’s office to testify as an “expert witness” that Mexicans had a “blood thirst” and a “biological predisposition” to crime and killing, citing the human sacrifices of their Aztec ancestors. In January 1943 the all-white jury convicted seventeen of the defendants. Three were given life sentences for first-degree murder.
Soon after the convictions, Los Angeles erupted in racial violence. For almost a week in late May and early June, sailors and other servicemen assaulted Mexican Americans, turning East Los Angeles into a racial war zone. McWilliams described a mob of several thousand beating up every zoot-suiter they could find. “Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy.”
The LAPD was ordered not to arrest any of the servicemen, but more than 500 Mexican Americans were arrested on phony charges ranging from “rioting” to “vagrancy.” Some local newspapers praised the attacks as a way of cleansing Los Angeles of a dangerous element. The city council adopted an ordinance banning zoot suits. McWilliams used his behind-the-scenes influence with the state attorney general to recommend a gubernatorial commission to calm the city. Governor Warren, no ally of McWilliams, recognized the wisdom of his idea and formed the commission, and the navy suspended shore leave to avoid further riots.
Due to the efforts of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which McWilliams chaired, the state court of appeal reversed the convictions in October 1944. Although eight of the defendants had spent two years in San Quentin, the case represented a major organizing victory in the city’s Mexican American community.
McWilliams’s book Witch Hunt, published in 1950, was one of the first attacks on the intensifying anticommunist panic that would soon be labeled McCarthyism.
In 1951 McWilliams moved to New York to work for The Nation, assuming the role of editor in 1955. At the time, simply having a subscription to the magazine could be viewed, by congressional witch-hunters, as evidence of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer and thus a potential victim of the blacklist. During this period, many donors to The Nation stopped contributing. It was banned from New York City schools.
McWilliams stood firm. The magazine became a source for investigative reporting and criticism of McCarthyism, the Cold War, the military industrial complex, and the arms race. Editorially, the magazine was an outspoken defender of free speech and civil liberties. McWilliams recruited some of the country’s best foreign correspondents to inform readers about events around the world and opened its pages to such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, to academics Howard Zinn, C. Wright Mills, and William Appleman Williams, and to activists Ralph Nader and Tom Hayden.
The magazine provided excellent eyewitness reporting of the growing civil rights movement and later the United Farm Workers struggles in California. (Cesar Chavez said he learned most of what he knew about California agribusiness from McWilliams’s writings.) McWilliams oversaw The Nation’s coverage of the growing antiwar movement, the consumer movement, and the early activities of the women’s liberation movement.
McWilliams’s November 1960 article “Are We Training Cuban Guerillas?” was the first to reveal the CIA’s role in training Cuban exiles in Guatemala to overthrow Fidel Castro. “Public pressure should be brought to bear upon the administration to abandon this dangerous and hare-brained project,” McWilliams wrote. The mainstream press failed to follow McWilliams’s lead. In April 1961 the new president, John F. Kennedy, was embarrassed by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Long after McWilliams left Hollywood, he continued to influence the film culture. Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning original screenplay for the movie Chinatown (1974) was inspired by McWilliams’s 1946 book Southern California: An Island on the Land. Luis Valdez’s 1981 film Zoot Suit, based on events surrounding the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, drew much of its story from McWilliams’s writings. McWilliams recruited, trained, and influenced many writers and activists who shaped American politics and journalism into the late 20th and early 21st centuries.