Carey Alive and Well at the LA Times

Gustavo Arellano, best known as the author of Ask a Mexican!, has a piece today in the Los Angeles Times on day laborers in Orange County. The story could have been taken out of T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain, which we finished reading last night at San Francisco State.

That alone would have been grounds for inclusion on this blog, but there's more. Turns out Gustavo has become a McWilliams aficionado, and he drops a reference in the middle of his piece.

Orange County's approach to troublesome immigrants is so notorious that no less an authority than labor historian Carey McWilliams became radicalized here. In a 1940 interview, the writer who went on to edit the Nation magazine said: "I hadn't believed stories of such wholesale violation of civil rights until I went down to Orange County to defend a number of farm workers held in jail for 'conspiracy.' When I announced my purpose, the judge said, 'It's no use; I'll find them guilty anyway.' "

I think Gustavo might have come across this reference in American Prophet. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that he interviewed me for an OC Weekly story he wrote on the citrus strikes of the 1930s.

Steve Martin's Born Standing Up

I'm reading Steve Martin's memoir, which has already produced two points of contact with this blog's fixations. The first is Martin's youthful encounter with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whose Hollywood Ten experience figures in the Carey McWilliams bio and California Culture class. Martin dated Trumbo's daughter Mitzi, it turns out. I didn't know that Trumbo smoked pot in an effort to cut down on his drinking, or that he smoked it like a cigar, puffing more than inhaling, and therefore never got high. Duly noted.

I was aware of the Martin-Trumbo connection from the recent New Yorker excerpt, but I had no idea that Martin also knew Victoria Dailey, lead author of LA's Early Moderns (see my Amazon.com review on your starboard). Here's the relevant passage from Born Standing Up.

Victoria was a young rare-book-and-print dealer in Los Angeles whom I had stumbled upon in my collecting quests ... and over the next few years we cemented an enduring relationship that has been complex and rewarding. We have been connected over the past thirty years intellectually, aesthetically, and seemingly, gravitationally. In my latest conversation with her, I complimented her recent essay on early Southern California history. I said, "Do you realize you're going to be studied one day?" She replied, "Only one day?" (158-59).

As it turns out, I was at the UCLA Library when Victoria and her co-authors discussed LA's Early Moderns. One of her co-authors was Michael Dawson, who graciously invited me to speak about McWilliams at his cool Los Angeles bookstore/gallery.

I'm No Rube

This blog's focus on California culture risks a serious misunderstanding: namely, that I'm not a man of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. By way of evidence, I offer the following fact; I just returned from my fourth trip this year to Tennessee. Need I go on? Didn't think so.

On this trip to Nashville, I made it to two clubs--the Station Inn for bluegrass and 3rd & Lindsley for funk. I've now hit the Station Inn twice, both on weeknights. "Straight-up bluegrass" is the proprietor's terse description of the house band on Tuesdays, a loose-knit group of gifted sidemen having fun. The cover is $5, pitchers cost the same. The band usually plays "Devil in Disguise" by the Flying Burrito Brothers and asks if anyone remembers them. Last time our host hollered, "We knew them before they could fly!" Decent-sized audience, good energy, not crowded. Hog heaven.

We also saw The Wooten Brothers & Friends, who play at 3rd & Lindsley on Wednesday nights. At one point, Regi Wooten's solo took him out to a front table, where he laid his guitar down flat and transformed it into a percussion instrument, much to the crowd's delight. The power cut out twice during their show, leaving us completely in the dark for a few moments, but nobody left, and the second time the audience kept the song ("Papa Was a Rolling Stone") going during the blackout. Again, $5 cover; not sure what the drinks cost because my host picked up the check. He also filled me in on the Wooten brothers generally; evidently, Victor Wooten was voted best bass player of the year three times running by Bass Player Magazine. (No one else had ever won it twice.) He plays with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and has his own group, too.

I also spent an hour or so downtown looking for a decent hat. In Nevada City last summer, I saw a great photograph of Buffalo Bill Cody, who was looking good. His hat was especially fly, so I figured this was my big chance to find one like his. No dice, but when I left the last store, I noticed the very same photograph of Buffalo Bill in the display window. When I mentioned that to the salesman, he gave me the story: It was a standard Tom Mix with a pencil-rolled brim. The crown, he said, looked like Bill sat on it by mistake. And the rakish angle, I'm sure, was a matter of superior personal style. The salesman didn't offer to pencil roll a brim for me; evidently, it takes two hours of painstaking work. To be fair, they didn't have my size anyway.

House of Prime Rib

After cranking out my Willie Brown post, I realized I had to stop by the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness. It's like a time capsule, the San Francisco equivalent of the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. It's easy to imagine old-school politicians in the back room plotting their next move against House speaker Jim Wright.

Naturally, I ordered a bourbon Manhattan, which is part of my literary patrimony now. Carey McWilliams drank it because H.L. Mencken did. I adopted it after Wilson Carey McWilliams told me that little fact at the Rutgers faculty club. For our first round at lunch (speaking of old school), I ordered a vodka tonic. Then he told me the story, and when the waiter returned for round two, I made mine a bourbon Manhattan. "H.L. Mencken thanks you," he said.

My critics will say that these two acts of commemoration--drinking a bourbon Manhattan while sitting at the House of Prime Rib--hopelessly confounds the Los Angeles of Carey McWilliams and the San Francisco of Phil Burton. To those critics, I offer the Walt Whitman defense: I am vast, I contain multitudes.

Ulin on Bukowski

David Ulin, book review editor of the Los Angeles Times, takes a hard look at Charles Bukowski's poetry and legacy today. His critical review of the latest posthumously published volume, The Pleasures of the Damned, also touches on John Fante, one of Bukowski's heroes and author of Ask the Dust, which David calls a superlative novel. By contrast, Bukowksi is "a hit-or-miss talent, capable of his own brand of small epiphany but often stultifyingly banal."

In his view, Bukowski's current sacred-cow status in Los Angeles's literary scene is built on his generosity to young writers and a garrison mentality born of uncertainty and feelings of insignificance among local writers. David believes that the city has outgrown that mentality--and Bukowski.

I share David's assessment of Bukowksi's talent but am happy I included Post Office (and Fante's Full of Life) in my course on Los Angeles this semester. As David notes, both men were "trying to articulate a vision of Los Angeles as an urban landscape, not exotic but mundane, where we not so much reinvent ourselves as remain unreconciled." For our purposes, it makes sense to acknowledge that effort, even if the results were uneven.

Christine Pelosi's Campaign Boot Camp

I attended a book party last night for Christine Pelosi's Campaign Boot Camp at The Crossroads Cafe, the Delancey Street Foundation bookstore and cafe in San Francisco. Wonderful time. Among the celebrants were Paul Pelosi (pere), Chronicle columnist Phil Matier, and Neil MacFarquhar, a New York Times national correspondent and author of The Sand Cafe.

I visited with Christine's fiance, film producer Peter Kaufman, whom I met last summer at a North Beach restaurant with our children. But until last night, I didn't realize that Peter had worked on such films as Henry and June, Rising Sun, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Nor did I realize that his father is Philip Kaufman, whose credits also include The Right Stuff, The Outlaw Josey Wales, etc. Glad I asked.

Did I mention that Campaign Boot Camp is a PoliPointPress book?

Willie Brown and SF State

I came upon this news item in the San Francisco Chronicle: Willie Brown is setting up a leadership center at San Francisco State University, his alma mater and my current (part-time) employer. According to the story, the center's focus on local politics will make it virtually unique.

Most of what I know about Willie Brown I learned from the James Richardson (no relation) bio, which the University of California Press published in 1996. The year before, UC Press also published one of my favorite political biographies, Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton. That one made a big impression on me. It must have been tough to write because Burton's character never really develops over the course of the book; he always was who he was, a ferocious political battler. As a character, he's a bit like Achilles, if you can imagine Achilles drinking tumblers of vodka and yelling at people at the House of Prime Rib.

Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall my earlier mentions of Judith Freeman's new book about Raymond and Cissy Chandler. I bring it up again because a review ran in the San Francisco Chronicle today. A more positive review also appeared in the Los Angeles Times ; check this one quickly before the LA Times pulls it down, as per their practice.

I have two reasons to be especially interested: We routinely read The Big Sleep in my SF State courses, and Freeman gave the Bonnie Cashin Lecture at UCLA Library, now published as "The Real Long Goodbye" (2006). My McWilliams lecture will appear in that same series.

The Doors

We watched Oliver Stone's The Doors in class this week--an excessive movie about excess. The first part of the movie corresponds to Carey McWilliams's famous (and much earlier) description of Los Angeles: "Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano."

The best scene might be The Doors' performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Morrison flagrantly defies the producer's instruction to sanitize the lyrics of "Light My Fire." Whereupon the producer flips out and swears that The Doors will never do the Ed Sullivan Show again. In real life, Morrison reportedly responded, "Hey, we just did the Ed Sullivan Show."

Fante's Full of Life

My class at San Francisco State finished reading John Fante's Full of Life last week. The students seemed to like it a lot--a better response, really, than the reaction to Ask the Dust, usually regarded as his masterpiece, which I taught a couple of years ago. Full of Life is funny, it's about family (so most people can relate to it), and it's short. I realized, too, that it broke the tension that carried over from Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go. Could be a keeper.

This week we watched The Endless Summer and took the midterm. While the students worked on the exam, I read ahead in Charles Bukowski's Post Office. I tried not to laugh out loud, but it was tough. The juxtaposition of The Endless Summer and the casually dystopian Post Office could create some interesting effects.

Heirlooms

I attended a Heyday Books event last night for David Mas Masumoto's Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer. My first visit to Heyday's Berkeley office. It was a cool event, well attended (and catered!)--a pleasant and effective way to roll out a new book. Mas and his daughter Nikiko, a recent Cal grad, read selections from the book that were intermittently wry and heartfelt. She has decided to return to the family farm in Del Rey, 20 miles south of Fresno. See the link above for book details.

The History Teacher Review of American Prophet

Just saw this review of American Prophet by Terry A. Cooney, dean of the college of liberal arts at Towson University.

My sense is that Dean Cooney is very attuned to fairness and evenhandedness; I even get some praise in that department. But I wonder about his conclusion that McWilliams displayed "an inability to apply common principles of judgment to left and to right," and that this led to "inconsistency and evasion." I don't think those qualities characterized McWilliams's work as a whole, but I interviewed several people who shared Cooney's concerns, particularly when it came to The Nation's posture toward the Soviet Union.

By the way, Dean Cooney is the author of two related titles: The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945 and Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s. His online review of American Prophet is presented in association with the History Cooperative.

WAL Review of American Prophet

Yesterday I received a new review of American Prophet, this one by Forrest G. Robinson for Western American Literature. Very gratifying. He calls it an important new biography, says it's a fitting capstone to numerous recent tributes, and offers a practical suggestion: "Do yourself a favor, Dear Reader: buy this book."

I like Professor Robinson's quick sketch of McWilliams: "To my eye, he was a model citizen: informed, independent, lucid, tirelessly active, a political realistic (sic), supportive of others, disarmingly modest, and ever hopeful for the future." Then he offers a nice compliment for our humble scribe: "Richardson has earned our gratitude for restoring McWilliams to his proper eminence."

I'm grateful for the appreciative review, but I hope the book isn't a capstone so much as the beginning of something bigger and better when it comes to McWilliams criticism. There's a lot more to be done. The collection at UCLA still has many buried treasures, I suspect, and I've learned a few details since the book appeared--that McWilliams's father did in fact commit suicide, that Luis Valdez picked up his idea for Zoot Suit after reading North from Mexico in 1959, that McWilliams saw a psychoanalyst in Los Angeles, etc. (The analyst's daughter came to my talk at the Huntington Library; apparently her father was one of the few analysts in Los Angeles that the left-wing community trusted not to reveal damaging information to the FBI.) And then of course there's McWilliams's enormous body of work, which so far has received relatively light critical attention.

Full disclosure: Professor Robinson thinks I give inordinate attention, especially in the early going, to McWilliams's small sins. Fair enough. But I'm glad he connects that flaw to what he calls my scrupulous refusal to go hagiographical. I should also note that the book cites Professor Robinson's article, "Remembering Carey McWilliams," which ran in WAL in 2000.

As far as I can tell, there's no online version of the review. The journal is published by the Western Literature Association at Utah State University.

Zoot Suit in San Jose

Alice McGrath asked me to join her last night in San Jose for a production of Zoot Suit, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Wow.



First we met playwright Luis Valdez and his wife Lupe for a drink at the hotel. I had never met Luis before and relished the conversation with him and Lupe. Despite several efforts, I wasn't able to interview Luis for American Prophet, so I was grateful for the chance to hear more about his life, work, and relationship with Carey McWilliams. Alice was the model for the character Alice Bloomfield. Luis met Alice after he interviewed Carey in his New York apartment; the rest is theatrical history.

After our drink, a long train of period cars pulled in to escort us and the cast to the dinner and performance. Alice and I rode in a cherry red 1953 Chevy Bel Air convertible. We drove low and slow over to the Center for Employment Training and got a lot of approving looks from pedestrians and motorists. The car's owner, Tony, and his wife told us that they're often asked to provide this kind of service. They were part of the halftime show at the 49ers game last week, and their car club sponsors a toy drive every year in addition to helping out with other events. This isn't our ride, but you get the idea.



When we arrived, a big crowd was on hand, including media. Lots of photographs (Alice was asked to pose dozens of times over the course of the evening), including a crew from Telemundo. Mariachis were playing, and neighborhood kids gathered to watch zoot-suited players step out of their rides.

After we settled in, the CET folks explained their mission and handed out awards during dinner, which was prepared by the CET culinary arts students. Many local politicians were on hand, including San Jose's mayor, Chuck Reed. Luis gave the keynote address, a brief but rousing talk about the continuing struggle for social justice on the immigration question. Alice said a few words and got a standing ovation from the 500 or so people on hand.

We moved over to the auditorium for the performance, directed by Luis and Lupe's son, Kinan, the resident associate artistic director at El Teatro Campesino, the theater company founded by his father in San Juan Batista. Cesar Chavez's nephew, Rudy, introduced himself to Alice and said he was looking forward to the show, which he had never seen.

It was a splendid performance. I had seen the film version, but it was nice to be front and center at a live performance. Lots of energy, cool costumes (of course), and the action and sets matched the script's creativity. As we left, the cast gave Alice a round of applause. Sweet.

By the way, the photo above is from another production. I'll get one from the San Jose performance asap.

Reese Erlich Day

After the CSA committee meeting at Cal on Sunday, I wandered over to Barrows Hall for a book event with Reese Erlich, who wrote The Iran Agenda for PoliPointPress. Reese has been everywhere lately. He was on Peter Laufer's KPFA show earlier that day, I heard his NPR piece on Joni Mitchell last week, and he visited Google headquarters last Tuesday to talk about the book. That's a fraction of what he has already done and has planned over the next month. Go Reese.

Believe it or not, I'm about to head out to Oakland to celebrate Reese Erlich Day. The City Council will honor him with a resolution, and a reception and dinner will follow. Reese was a member of the so-called Oakland 7 back in the day, and the irony isn't lost on him. He was a staffer at Ramparts magazine, too.

CSA Annual Conference and Wilson Carey McWilliams

On Sunday, the steering committee of the California Studies Association (CSA) met on the Cal campus. In addition to knocking off some other business, we had a good discussion about the kind of conference CSA wants to host in the Spring.

I've always liked these conferences. I attended one in Oakland where I heard Wilson Carey McWilliams speak about the Progressive Era. I didn't know then that I would write about his father's life and work, but that's how it turned out, and his cooperation was crucial.

That conference took place during the electricity crisis, if I recall correctly. One panelist that year, Lenny Goldberg, had a great quote about the critical role of electricity in the California economy: "Electricity is just another commodity like oxygen is just another gas."

Cal State Channel Islands and Global Exchange

I spoke about Carey McWilliams at Cal State Channel Islands yesterday. I was really impressed with the campus and delighted by the faculty I met there.

On the drive down, I saw workers out in force picking lettuce in the Salinas Valley. Not much has changed since I began doing that drive over 30 years ago, and I wonder if McWilliams and John Steinbeck would notice any big changes since 1939.

I stayed at Alice McGrath's house in Ventura. She came to the talk, and I dropped her off on the way back to the Bay Area. I pulled into the Mission (San Francisco, that is) just in time for a book party at Global Exchange for Building the Green Economy by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. Also a blast.

The Country in the City

I just finished reading Richard Walker's The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. It really helped me understand the world I was born into--Berkeley in the late 1950s. As Dick points out, that world reflected the work of countless Bay Area activists reaching back to John Muir. Many were civic-minded and dedicated women, and some started or built environmental organizations with national impact. This book describes it all: the people, the organizations, the issues, the victories (always temporary), the challenges, and the movement's shortcomings and unintended consequences.

Always attuned to class issues, Dick acknowledges that these movements were mostly led by upper class folks and ultimately turned parts of the Bay Area (e.g., Marin and Napa) into lightly populated enclaves for the well off. Working families in the Bay Area have had great access to public parks and the coast, but activists so far have done little to impede the siting of toxic nastiness in low-income neighborhoods. Dick questions the link between efforts to slow or stop growth and the region's high housing prices, but he notes that the growth that has occurred--in the eastern part of Contra Costa County and the San Joaquin Valley, for example--isn't very smart and may be linked to the inner Bay Area's aversion to virtually any growth at all. At the end of the day, though, it's hard to resist Dick's conclusion that Bay Area residents have plenty to be thankful for.

Bill Issel on Sylvester Andriano

Last night I heard Bill Issel give a talk on the travails of Sylvester Andriano, a San Francisco attorney who was grilled and surveilled during World War II by some of the same people (e.g., Jack Tenney, J. Edgar Hoover) that went after Carey McWilliams. Some differences: Andriano was suspected of being pro-fascist, not a premature anti-fascist. Also, he had to leave the West Coast for the duration of the war, eventually settling in Chicago. And here's the capper: San Francisco leftists, including Harry Bridges, testified against him. I knew the early inquistions targeted right-wingers as well as lefties, but I didn't realize the firing squad was quite so circular.

Bill is professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University. His talk was part of the California Studies Dinners, sponsored by the Department of Geography and the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley. The title was “A Desecration of My Rights as an American Citizen: J. Edgar Hoover’s Investigation of Sylvester Andriano”

From Z to A and The Real Long Goodbye

Pat Reagh, a designer and printer in Sebastopol, just sent me two letterpress editions of Victoria Dailey's From Z to A: Jake Zeitlin, Merle Armitage and Los Angeles' Early Moderns and Judith Freeman's The Real Long Goodbye: The Unconventional Marriage of Raymond and Cissy Chandler. They're both beautiful works, sponsored by the UCLA Library. I can't wait to read them.

Pat will design and print the Bonnie Cashin lecture I gave last year at UCLA, so I'm eager to see how it comes out. The lecture was called "Always in Fashion? Carey McWilliams, California Radicalism, and the Politics of Cool."

Victoria Dailey is the lead author of LA's Early Moderns, for which I wrote an Amazon review (see the link to your starboard). My SF State class finishes reading Chandler's The Big Sleep tomorrow night, so I want to have a look at the Freeman piece today. Her book on Chandler and the women in his life, The Long Embrace, has just been published by Pantheon.

Prejudice Redux?

I'm in Chicago at the American Political Science Association meeting. I'm here on PoliPointPress business, but at least one other benefit may flow from it. Yesterday I visited with Susan McWilliams, an assistant professor at Pomona College, and Matt Bokovoy, an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, about reissuing Prejudice, one of Carey McWilliams's most notable books. First published in 1944, it demolished every argument for the evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. It was also cited repeatedly that same year in a Supreme Court dissenting opinion to Korematsu, which upheld the constitutionality of the internment.

This book should be in print, not only for its historical value, but also for its durability and compelling backstory. McWilliams didn't oppose the internment publicly, presumably because he was serving in state government under a Democratic governor and a Democratic president. But as soon as he left his post in late 1942--incoming governor Earl Warren had already said that his first official act would be to fire him--McWilliams turned his attention to that massive injustice. The result was a brave, commanding, and sometimes disturbing work, published while the camps were still operating.

I'm pleased that Susan is on board and that Matt is interested. Oklahoma specializes in books on the American West, especially race and ethnicity, so it looks like a good fit.

New Links

Two new links on my blog roll: California Studies Association and Frank Barajas .

The California Studies Association sponsors an annual conference, which I attended this year in Berkeley. (I joined the steering committee for next year's conference, too.) CSA also bestows its own Carey McWilliams Award; recipients have included Mike Davis, Kevin Starr, Luis Valdez, Gerald Haslam, and James Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.

The organization has been guided over the years by Jeff Lustig and Richard Walker. I'm eagerly awaiting my copy of Dick Walker's latest book, The Country in the City, which tells the story of environmental activism in the Bay Area.

I gather the CSA website will be redesigned soon, so it's worth checking on occasionally.

As my last entry noted, Frank is an associate professor of history at Cal State Channel Islands. He's now researching community responses to civil gang injunctions in Oxnard.

Cal State Channel Islands Talk

Looks like my next talk on Carey McWilliams will happen next month at Cal State Channel Islands. Frank Barajas, a historian there, asked me to talk about McWilliams's civic engagement and public scholarship. He posted some info on the talk on his blog.

Frank's work is on Southern California history and especially Latino activism, so he has been a McWilliams aficionado for a while. Alice McGrath introduced us in May 2005, and we've been in touch since, most recently this summer at Stanford, where he was doing some archival work.

Heyday Books

Heyday Books just sent me Under the Dragon: California's New Culture by Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg. The Oakland Museum of California co-produced it, and it has the high finish I associate with that kind of publication.

Most of the book is made up of colorful photos and verbal snapshots of the Bay Area's diverse population and hybrid culture. The foreword by Andrew Lam, author of another Heyday book (Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora), offers some helpful tropes for conceptualizing social identity in the region's rich racial and ethnic melange. A list of recommended readings, including an entire section of Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) publications, appears in the back matter. If I recall correctly, I worked on most of those PPIC reports during my years there.

I really like Heyday's operation, which is based in Berkeley. Anyone serious about California studies probably has a shelf of their books. Their McWilliams anthology, Fool's Paradise, is especially good.

Heyday was also kind enough to send along another 2007 title, Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports from the Rez, by Gordon Johnson. It's an original trade paperback, co-published by BayTree Books, that collects the author's columns from the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

KWMR Show Will Stream Tomorrow

...at 11 a.m., not 10 a.m., as I reported earlier. Easiest thing is to go to www.kwmr.org and click the On Air button at the top.

America Offline with Jonathan Rowe

I'll be on KWMR tonight at 5:30 to talk about Carey McWilliams, American Prophet, and whatever else might come up. The host is Jon Rowe, a freelance journalist and a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute. I met Jon at the most recent California Studies Association meeting in Berkeley. KWMR serves West Marin from Point Reyes Station (90.5) and Bolinas (89.3). Here's their link:

http://www.kwmr.org/

McWilliams Tribute on KPCC

I came upon a radio tribute to Carey McWilliams on KPCC (89.3 FM) in Pasadena. It aired last October in a segment called "Off-Ramps." Short and solid. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Patt Morrison also interviewed me last year about McWilliams on her KPCC show.

The KPCC website also has a great picture of him. It's a Will Connell photograph, evidently from the same session that produced the cover photo for American Prophet, but it's a little cooler than that one. McWilliams is looking directly at the camera, the dark tones are more saturated, and you can see the smoke coming off of his cigarette, all of which adds up to a noir-like image. I wish I'd seen this one earlier.



Here's the link. To listen to the segment, click on it and scroll down to "SoCal Visionary." There's also a link to McWilliams's Wikipedia page, which I've worked over pretty hard.

www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/shows/2006/10/14/index.html

Alice McGrath in VC Reporter

The VC Reporter, the alternative weekly for Ventura County, has a cover story on Alice McGrath this week. Alice was the executive secretary for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which McWilliams chaired in the early 1940s. It helped free a group of mostly Latino youths in Los Angeles after a biased murder trial.

A picture of Alice and McWilliams (taken while he was teaching at UCLA) is on the cover; the link above is to the story.

McWilliams Oral History

The transcript of Honorable in All Things, Carey McWilliams's oral history, is now available online. When I was writing American Prophet, I had to travel to Berkeley or UCLA to read this, so it's a huge convenience to have it at our fingertips now. The title comes from a line in Jerry McWilliams's will encouraging Carey and his brother to live a good life.

More Rosselli

I'm not quite ready to let the Johnny Rosselli thing go. Charles Rappleye recently told me he thought his book on Rosselli would make for a strong television mini-series. Yes, and certainly a great documentary. Rosselli didn't just coordinate the Chicago mob's takeover of the Hollywood unions, or help create Las Vegas, or work with the Kennedy administration to assassinate Castro. He was also the man who supposedly persuaded studio mogul Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in "From Here to Eternity," a legend Mario Puzo later fictionalized in "The Godfather." Seems like grist for the cinematic mill to me.

Colonial America--Echo Park Version

I just finished reading Charles Rappleye's Sons of Providence. It's about the Brown brothers, Moses and John, who founded Brown University and butted heads over the issue of slavery in colonial Rhode Island. Moses was a Quaker abolitionist, John a hardheaded businessman and slaver. In addition to tracing their lives in full and fascinating detail, Charles presents them as two American archetypes--social reformer and robber baron.

With the vast searching power at your fingertips, you can look up this book's favorable reviews at your leisure. You might start with the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Allow me to scale the magnitude of this critical success for you. According to David Ulin, the L.A. Times receives 200 books per day for review; they actually review about 12 per week in the Sunday supplement. So the odds of receiving a review are long; to run the table at the nation's top papers is huge. If you've mastered the Google search, you will also learn that Sons of Providence received the George Washington book prize and the $50k cash award that goes with it. That's folding money, people.

To which the fanatical reader of this blog might respond: All very well, but what does any of this have to do with Carey McWilliams and California culture? Well, let's start with the basics. First, Charles was for many years a fixture at the LA Weekly. Who among you expected an award-winning book on colonial America to emerge from the offices of an alternative weekly in Los Angeles? Full disclosure: Charles is originally from Rhode Island. But still.

Second, Charles's first book, a portrait of racketeer Johnny Rosselli, overlapped with the McWilliams story. Specifically, Rosselli was involved with the Chicago mob's takeover of Hollywood unions in the 1930s, a takeover McWilliams tried to resist. By coincidence, Rosselli was back in the news this week when the CIA released its so-called Family Jewels. Those documents show that Rosselli was involved with the agency's attempt to assassinate Castro. Charles gave me that book at a party he hosted at his Echo Park home some years ago, and I put it to good use on the McWilliams bio.

Fall Book List

OK, the book lineup for the Fall course on Los Angeles is set. In order, the books are:

Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go
John Fante, Full of Life
Charles Bukowski, Post Office: A Novel
Joan Didion, The White Album
T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

This was a tough list to assemble. Other candidates included Fante's Ask the Dust, Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, Bugliosi and Gentry's Helter Skelter, Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Walter Mosley's A Red Death, D.J. Waldie's Holy Land, and many others. I would love to teach Greg Mitchell's Campaign of the Century, Otto Friedrich's City of Nets, and Mike Davis's City of Quartz, but I didn't think they would work in this course. I tried to get some historical coverage here, something from every decade or so, but I would have been happy to teach a course just on Los Angeles in 1939.

The feature films I've penciled in are:

Sunset Boulevard
Devil in a Blue Dress
Endless Summer
Shampoo
Chinatown
Colors
Real Women Have Curves
Laurel Canyon
Crash

There will be documentaries, too:

Zoot Suit Riots
Hollywood on Trial
The Doors

The idea is to pick some evocative works, but also to get some resonances between and among them: Zoot Suit Riots dramatizes McWilliams, Bukowski picks up on Fante, Chinatown comments on The Big Sleep (and McWilliams), Devil in a Blue Dress looks back on Himes, etc. So we'll see how that goes.

McWilliams and Orange County's Secret History

Gustavo Arellano has a piece in the Los Angeles Times on Orange County's amnesia when it comes to its Latino past. That includes the Mendez v. Westminster decision that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education. As Gustavo notes, McWilliams wrote the counter-history that fills in many of these gaps.

Here's the link:

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-arellano21jun21,1,830485.story?coll=la-news-comment

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Gustavo interviewed me for a piece on the citrus strike of 1936 and McWilliams's role in it. He also has a book out, doing well last time I checked, called Ask a Mexican! (For purposes of accuracy, insert an upside down exclamation mark before Ask.) It's based on his column in the OC Weekly. I haven't seen it, but I've read some excerpts and heard him on NPR--sounds funny and edifying.

Fante Tour of Los Angeles

This just in--a Los Angeles Times story about a downtown tour as seen through the eyes of John Fante: novelist, screenwriter, and FOC (Friend Of Carey).

Here's the link:http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-wk-books14jun14,0,1894240.story?coll=cl-home-more-channels

Recall that the link will work only for a few days. (That's why there's no link here to the LA Times review of American Prophet.)

In other news, I'm putting together the reading list for the Fall course on Los Angeles. Fante's Ask the Dust will probably make the cut.

The Tortilla Curtain and Crash

We finished the California Culture class with T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain. It seemed to be a good way to conclude. To create dramatic conflict, Boyle pits different aspects of the California Dream against one another. For example, the illegal immigrant's dream of economic opportunity threatens the Anglo nature writer's dream of suburban comfort with easy access to "wilderness."

Along the way we hear echoes of earlier California writers, especially Muir and Steinbeck. Boyle throws in some Continental references for good measure; the illegal immigrant is named Candido, and his ordeals easily match those of Voltaire's hero. I'm glad we also watched Real Women Have Curves, if only to balance the depiction of the immigrant experience. Because we also read Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, I don't think anyone will leave the class thinking that this complex social phenomenon can be represented simply, but some interesting patterns emerged from those three works.

Our last film was Paul Haggis's Crash. It's an adroit film, and I was moved (again) by one scene, but many have challenged its depiction of race relations in Los Angeles. I wonder if that response isn't partly due to the film's high Hollywood finish. Crash is about collisions, but the plot is very tidy, and each character receives a carefully rationed moment of epiphany or redemption. Still, I think it might be a keeper for this class.

EPHS Tonight

I'm talking to the Echo Park Historical Society tonight about Carey McWilliams, one of their notable residents. He really loved his house there, perched on a high, narrow ridge on North Alvarado Street. He lived in it for five years or so, then rented it for decades. He considered moving back after he retired from The Nation, but by that time Iris wasn't driving, and they had a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. He rented an apartment when he taught at UCLA in the late 70s.

The talk is at Barlow Hospital library at 7:00. Here's the link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/EphsNews

Sam Quinones at Huntington-USC

I attended a talk by the LA Times' Sam Quinones today at the Huntington Library. He spoke with great enthusiasm and candor about the stories he has discovered in Mexico and on "the border," which he treats more as a state of mind than a geographical fact. Completely fresh and unpredictable. My favorite story today involved his being run out of a Mexican town by a community of Mennonite drug dealers.

When I called my friend Adrian Maher, I discovered that he and my good friend Mark Ettlin were Sam's compatriots in the Berkeley co-op scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Now it all comes together.

Here's the link for Sam's latest book:

http://www.amazon.com/Antonios-Gun-Delfinos-Dream-Migration/dp/082634254X/ref=sr_1_1/102-6100122-2414529?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178762307&sr=1-1

I also saw Bill Deverell, whose Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West does a great job with these events.

Paying the Toll

I'm reading the manuscript for Louise Dyble's Paying the Toll: Power, Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge, 1923-1971. Louise is especially concerned with the creation, administration, and survival of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District. Like many special districts, it was supposed to transcend the clamor of special interests and "politics." I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I can already appreciate Louise's claim that the district was, from the moment of its conception, always already political--often in unhelpful ways.

I'll have more to say when I finish reading the manuscript, but her description of an early encounter with the district indicates her skill as an author:

[When] I explained my interest in the bridge's history and asked to view a selection of early records and files, the full-time public relations officer met my request with prohibitive insurance requirements, claiming that the district could not accept the liability for my presence at their offices. I was informed that the bridge's history had already been written, and it was available at the toll plaza gift shop.

Imagine how many dissertations could have been averted by a well-stocked gift shop!

I've added Louise's new blog, Paying the Toll, over there on your starboard. The book will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press--soon, I hope.

The Warriors

The Warriors are doing well against the Dallas Mavericks, and everyone is psyched about their playoff prospects. But fanatical readers of this blog may not realize that this outcome was foreshadowed a couple of years ago when I planted myself near Chris Mullin on a flight to Los Angeles.

He was reluctant at first to talk about the Warriors, even after I praised the Baron Davis trade. For an executive v.p. of basketball operations, it probably looked like another boring conversation with someone who didn't know the business--a bit like my encounters with strangers who tell me their great book ideas. But he lit up when I asked him about his playing days with Don Nelson, and we ended up talking about even more interesting topics.

I didn't realize at the time that his response prefigured his decision to bring Nellie back. The Warriors haven't made it to the playoffs since the last time he was here. So let's give it up to Chris for making that happen.

By the way, when the camera picked up Chris at the team's moment of triumph, he was comforting his sleepy daughter. You don't see that often, and I found it refreshing.

California Graffiti

So we watched American Graffiti last night in the California Culture class. Glad I added it. I mostly wanted to get at the nostalgia that looked so attractive in the 1970s. I also wanted to get back to the Central Valley, which we hadn't visited since we left the Joads there in dire straits. But I soon realized that American Graffiti also gives full expression to a key aspect of the California Dream.

I'm not proposing a specific definition of the California Dream, by the way. For one thing, dreams are always a little beneath or beyond consciousness. And as Beth Tudor once noted, the California Dream may just be the American Dream with better weather. But any discussion of the California version has to include the opportunity for self-invention (economic, physical, and spiritual), mobility, technology, the landscape, etc.

Under the mobility category, cars loom large. In many ways, California invented car culture, including the drive-in. Do you think it's an accident that McDonalds started in Southern California? I didn't think so.

No major American film is more devoted to the automobile than American Graffiti. Yes, there are humans in this film, but cars play the leading roles. They're literally the vehicles for significant action. The characters eat, talk, fight, party, compete, rebel, make out, and grow up in them. For the guys, cars make a public identity possible. Cars drive the plot, too; in scene after scene, they are groomed, critiqued, ticketed, defaced, bequeathed, sabotaged, scrapped, stolen, totaled, etc. And the drag race at the end provides the climax. Harrison Ford--or rather, his Chevy--gets its comeuppance. It was black and had a skull hanging from the rearview mirror, so it's just as well.

By the way, when my daughters and I saw George Lucas at the bookstore a few weeks ago, we also saw him pull out of the parking lot. Fanatical readers of this blog will want to know, so I'm here to tell you ... Yes, he's riding good.

Alice McGrath's 90th Birthday Bash

I drove to Camarillo this weekend to celebrate Alice McGrath's 90th birthday with hundreds of her closest friends. Among other things, Alice was the executive secretary for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in the 1940s (Carey McWilliams was the national chair.) In that case, 12 youths, mostly Latinos, were convicted of homicide after a biased trial. The conviction was overturned on appeal in what became a landmark case. That success was the first major victory for the Latino community in Los Angeles, and McWilliams later regarded it as the beginning of the Chicano movement.

As for the wingding itself, we met at the UFCW local, and the co-sponsors were the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) and the Center for Constitutional Rights. There were a dozen or so speakers, I would guess, including Warren Olney and many prominent judges, lawyers, and politicians. The speeches were very moving, none more so than Alice's. She compared her kind of activism to housework--something that must be done continually if we expect good results, not something that leads to a one-time "victory." Thinking of it that way prevents illusions, she said, and therefore disillusionment. What a great event--a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.

Many books, including American Prophet, discuss the Sleepy Lagoon case and Alice's work. But there's also an American Experience documentary called Zoot Suit Riots that I show in the California Culture class at San Francisco State. Alice doesn't like it because it purports to finally solve the murder, but it covers both Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots pretty well in one hour.

American Graffiti

My daughters and I saw George Lucas at Border's this weekend, and I realized that I should probably add American Graffiti to the California Culture course. Before we get to it, we'll take on Didion's The White Album, Chinatown, and Dirty Harry, all pretty downbeat, and that movie's nostalgia--a kind of backward-looking utopia--was very welcome at the time of its release. It projected a simpler, happier time (pre-Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.) in the Central Valley, which we haven't paid much attention to since watching The Grapes of Wrath.

Danner Receives Carey McWilliams Award

The American Political Science Association gave Mark Danner, who teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, the Carey McWilliams Award for 2006. The award honors excellence in political writing.

The APSA selection committee cited Danner's work on torture and the Downing Street memo, which I followed with interest in The New York Review of Books. Some of that work, and responses to it, is collected in The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. Here's the link:

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=5411

IRE Journal Review of American Prophet

Steve Weinberg, who reviewed American Prophet for the San Francisco Chronicle, also published a review in The IRE Journal, which is devoted to investigative reporting and editing. It's a positive review, "splendid" being the operative adjective.

It Can Happen Here

I saw Joe Conason at Book Passage in Corte Madera yesterday. He has a new book out called It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, which builds on the uncanny resemblance between contemporary American politics and the bestselling Sinclair Lewis novel, It Can't Happen Here (1935).

Joe is a real pro--great control over the facts, a talent for selection and emphasis, and a trenchant style. I'm not alone in my admiration. He's a New York Times bestselling author, director of investigative reporting at the Nation Institute, a columnist at Salon and the New York Observer, and a PoliPointPress author and advisor. Did I mention his great pipes? Perfect for radio and public speaking.

This is all very well, fanatical readers of this blog will say, but where's the Carey McWilliams connection? Ah, here we go again. Have you forgotten that McWilliams wrote a pamphlet in 1935 called It Can Happen Here: Active Anti-Semitism in Los Angeles? Also, he ran one of Joe's first pieces back in the day. Now stop doubting me and go buy Joe's new book and The Raw Deal.

I'm adding a link to Joe's blog--highly recommended.

History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

Lewis Lapham called my attention to this Mark Twain line. But is it true? Consider these quotes in The Nation about a misguided use of American military power:

"The dirty war may not be lost by the United States, but neither will it be won. At the expense of mounting American casualties, it will drag on."

"Despite our arsenal of weapons we do not have the power to 'win' this war."

These comments, offered in 1961 and 1963 respectively, refer to Vietnam. In September 1963, the magazine observed, "The odds are that the Communists will eventually win in South Vietnam, their patience is more durable than America's enthusiasm for an expensive, futile war."

If we switched out a couple of proper nouns in this sentence, would it not apply to Iraq today?

Carey's Name Uttered on C-SPAN

I have a very crappy cable package. In some parts of the country, it's called "lifeline cable," and the cable company won't tell you about it unless you ask. Which means I watch a lot of C-SPAN.

This morning, while my coffee was brewing, I tuned in to see Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, introduce author, photographer, and labor reporter David Bacon, who happens to live in Berkeley.

In the middle of her introduction, Katrina suddenly launched into a fairly detailed account of Carey McWilliams's early career, including his labor writing and appointment to the California Division of Immigration and Housing. I almost did a spit-take with my coffee. I think it's the first time I've ever heard Carey's name uttered on television.

I managed to keep the coffee in my mouth, but I regret that I never interviewed Katrina for American Prophet. (Others I missed were Ralph Nader, Studs Terkel, and Hunter S. Thompson.) I understand she helped organize his papers for the UCLA Library, and The Nation ran a favorable review by Mike Davis a month before the book came out. (See the link to the right.)

Many of Carey's fans back east are only vaguely aware of his pre-Nation accomplishments, so I'm glad to see that Katrina is acknowledging them publicly.

Ronald Hilton

He passed away this week, too. He was the Stanford scholar who told Carey McWilliams in 1960 that the CIA was training a guerrilla force in Guatemala to invade Cuba. (The story had appeared in La Hora at the time.) McWilliams wrote an editorial for The Nation calling for more reporting on the matter. The New York Times confirmed the existence of the base, but Kennedy went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion anyway. Afterwards, Kennedy blamed the Times (not La Hora or The Nation) for spilling the beans on the invasion. He then admitted that more reporting by the Times might have prevented a colossal mistake.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. died yesterday. He graciously answered my questions about Carey McWilliams, with whom he had his differences over the years. At one point in the 1950s, for example, he described McWilliams as a Typhoid Mary of the left--meaning McWilliams carried the disease of Communism even though he wasn't stricken by it. McWilliams replied that Schlesinger spoke the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent--a barb Schlesinger remembered verbatim over 50 years later.

Schlesinger was McWilliams's toughest critic, if not his most formidable adversary. But even he agreed that McWilliams--and The Nation under his guidance--produced a great deal of first-rate work.

I'm grateful for Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s cooperation on my book--and for his own staggering body of work.

Stewart Brand

File this under serendipity.

My recent post on Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture mentioned the Stewart Brand story--also the fact that Brand occasionally frequents my favorite Sausalito diner. Today I was there with two colleagues, and guess who should sit down at the table two feet from me? The man himself, perfectly positioned to receive my introductory handshake.

Are you still here? Alert the media, for God's sake!

Grrr...eeley

I was a little exasperated this morning by a missed opportunity. American Prophet opens with a short history of the Colorado region where Carey McWilliams was born. A small party of settlers, led by Nathan Meeker, arrived there in the nineteenth century and was subsequently killed by Indians in what became known as the Meeker Massacre.

What I didn't include, because I only learned it this morning, is that Nathan Meeker was the agricultural editor for the New York Herald Tribune. When his boss, Horace Greeley, said "Go west, young man," Meeker hit the bricks. His purpose was to start a utopian farming colony--with irrigation!--now known as Greeley, Colorado. Get it? Horace Greeley?

So I missed the chance to close that narrative loop. The Colorado native would eventually become the New York City editor--but not before he popularized the Great Irrigation Caper immortalized (fictitiously) in Chinatown. It all comes together!

By the way, The Nation's cover story last week was "Lockdown in Greeley: How Immigration Raids Terrorized a Colorado Town."

Gustavus Myers Award

American Prophet received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Here's the link:

http://www.myerscenter.org/pages/06honment.htm

The Anxiety of Influence

I borrowed this term from Harold Bloom to describe the effect Carey McWilliams has had on some California writers, academics, and pundits. I just saw a clear expression of that anxiety in this week's issue of The Nation. After reading Gogol, Isaac B. Singer asked, "How is it possible that this man who lived a hundred years before me has stolen so many of my ideas?"

Gene Marine

Last night I heard Gene Marine speak about his years at KPFA and KPFK. Very interesting. Gene started at KPFA, the first listener-sponsored radio station, only two years after its inception in 1949. At that time, he said, they had no intention of advancing a lefty agenda. Yes, most of the founders were pacifists, but the goal was to present thoughtful, balanced, professional programming without the advertising. But a series of events, starting with the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, led the station to its current niche in the media ecology.

Someday I'd like to hear more about Gene's career in print journalism. He was the West Coast contributing editor for The Nation after Carey McWilliams decamped for New York, and he was a senior editor at Ramparts until its first collapse in 1969. It turns out Ed Cray, who now teaches journalism at USC and attended my Bonnie Cashin lecture at UCLA, worked for Gene at KPFK. I interviewed both fellows for American Prophet.

All of which leads me to today's recommendations:

Jeff Land, Active Radio: Pacifica's Brash Experiment (University of Minnesota, 1999).

Ed Cray, Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren (Simon & Schuster, 1997)

Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (W.W. Norton, 2004)

The Big Sleep

We're reading Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) now--one of the great hardboiled novels set in Los Angeles. It shares that "trouble in paradise" quality with other major California books of that year, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, John Fante's Ask the Dust, and Carey McWilliams's (nonfiction) Factories in the Field.

The Big Sleep is long on LA corruption. Just months before the book appeared, cops were bombing the homes and cars of local reformers, and voters recalled Mayor Shaw. Also, some juicy labor racketeering in Hollywood was coming to light during this time--partly due to McWilliams's efforts.

"This is a big city now," a cop tells Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe. Yes, indeed. And its problems no longer reduced to a single social conflict--for example, big business versus small landowners (The Octopus) or workers (The Grapes of Wrath), complete with good guys and bad guys. Chandler's Los Angeles is more about a constellation of vices--gambling, drugs, pornography, homosexuality, etc.--but the intricate plot mirrors the increased moral complexity Marlowe struggles with.

Chandler associates these vices with the Orient--lots of Asian art, clothes, etc. ornamenting the decadence Marlowe comes upon. This lays the groundwork for the Vietnam-era Chinatown, which turns those stereotypes inside out. But unless I miss my guess, students will be more alive to the similarities between The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski.

Thanks to Steve Rubio, who turned me on to The Big Sleep when we were graduate students at Berkeley.

Counterculture/Cyberculture

I'm reading Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Must figure out a way to include this story in the California Culture class--perfect fit with the utopian theme and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is already on the syllabus.

Brand was a Merry Prankster before launching the Whole Earth Catalog; he later played a key role in developing the WELL, the first online social network he developed in 1985 with Larry Brilliant, now the executive director at Google.org. By coincidence (?), I attended a World Affairs Council event last week honoring Brilliant (and two others), and I occasionally see Brand at my favorite diner in Sausalito. Also, my friend Mark Ettlin told me years ago about the Global Business Network, which Brand helped found and which plays a big role in Turner's story. But I didn't know how these pieces came together until I found this book. Highly recommended.

Fanatical readers of this blog will wonder: Is there a Carey McWilliams connection here? Yes, an indirect one. McWilliams commissioned the Theodore Roszak essays that eventually became The Making of a Counter Culture (1969). That influential book coined the popular neologism in Turner's title and became Roszak's signature work.

Ansel Adams

So last week in class we watched an American Experience documentary on Ansel Adams. It seemed like a good follow-up to the Muir reading and very relevant to the course's main theme--the tension between utopian and dystopian representations of California. There are similar tensions in other parts of Adams's life: between his urban San Francisco scene and his more rustic one in Yosemite, between his family life and his intense feelings for his assistant, and between the natural landscapes he photographed so famously and the decidedly artificial technique he perfected for doing so.

Let me pull the curtain of charity before the mass-marketing of Adams's photographs. But I have to note that they were on display at the Bellagio in Las Vegas when I was there last month. Is any single venue more antithetical to the spirit of those photos?

This is a pretty good documentary, but I thought it would have been stronger at two-thirds the length, and I noticed an unresolved tension in the presentation itself. The talking heads, especially Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, speak at length about wilderness, its unpredictability, and how important it is to the American spirit. But the documentary itself, including the score, is solemn, predictable, pious ... in a word, tame. It seems to accept the idea that whatever is sacred or sublime (in this case, wilderness) must be sublimated. But maybe that's closer to Adams's overall effect on American culture, if not his intention.

Carey's L.A. House--A Historical Site?

Yesterday I received an email from Jesus Sanchez of the Echo Park Historical Society. They want to designate Carey McWilliams's house at 2041 North Alvarado "a city cultural historic monument." Carey really liked that house, which he and Iris bought after World War II and rented out while they lived in New York. After he retired as editor of The Nation, he fantasized about living in it again, but by that time they had a nice rent-controlled apartment across from Columbia University, and Iris wasn't driving.

At this point, the inscription at Pershing Square (a long quotation from Southern California Country) is the city's main tribute to McWilliams. This would be another very fitting one.

Sound Familiar?

I came across this quote in Josiah Royce's California: A Study of American Character (1886). Royce, a native Californian who taught moral philosophy at Harvard, was reflecting on the events leading up to statehood. After concluding that General John C. Fremont hadn't covered himself in glory during that time, Royce offered the following thought.

The American as conqueror is unwilling to appear in public as a pure aggressor ... The American wants to persuade not only the world but himself that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently takes what he is determined to get (p. 119).

Ouch.

My First Summer in the Sierra

My California Culture class started last week, and tomorrow we'll start talking about John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra. This is the work of an ecstatic poet--many raptures on plants, trees, squirrels, bears, ants, etc. The only creatures Muir seems to disdain are people and sheep. (He was accompanying a flock headed for high pastures.)

When Muir observes people, the results are remarkable. Consider the passage describing Billy, the shepherd.

Following the sheep he carries a heavy six-shooter swung from his belt on one side and his luncheon on the other. The ancient cloth in which the meat, fresh from the frying-pan, is tied serves as a filter through which the clear fat and gravy juices drip down on his right hip and leg in clustering stalactites. This oleaginous formation is soon broken up, however, and diffused and rubbed evenly into his scanty apparel, by sitting down, rolling over, crossing his legs while resting on logs, etc., making shirts and trousers water-tight and shiny. His trousers, in particular, have become so adhesive with the mixed fat and resin that pine needles, thin flakes and fibres of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc., feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antennae of innumerable insects, or even whole insects such as the small beetles, moths, and mosquitoes, with flower petals, pollen dust and indeed of all plants, animals, and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely imbedded, so that though far from being a naturalist he collects fragmentary specimens of everything and becomes richer than he knows ... Man is a microcosm, at least our shepherd is, or rather his trousers.

Come on, people, give it up for John Muir. That's restaurant-quality stuff.

More Supermob

The topics of the last several posts probably seem very disparate--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bobby Kennedy, Sidney Korshak, etc. I've stopped trying to tie everything explicitly to Carey McWilliams, but it's easy to show how he and his work connect the dots.

Take Supermob, Gus Russo's book about Sidney (The Fixer) Korshak and his network. One small but critical piece of Russo's book concerns Korshak's introduction to Hollywood. The Chicago syndidate had been active in the Hollywood labor unions in the early 1930s, when Johnny Rosselli helped the studios resist rising union power. But when Willie Bioff and George Browne took over IATSE in 1934 and began skimming dues and extorting the major studios, the Chicago outfit really consolidated its power.

McWilliams represented some union members who fought the racketeering. He learned about Bioff's criminal past, passed that information to California officials, and thereby helped expose the corruption. Later, a Chicago mobster introduced Korshak to Bioff in Chicago, telling Bioff, "Willie, meet Sidney Korshak. He is our man. I want you to do what he tells you. He is not just another lawyer. He knows our gang and figures our best interest. Pay attention to him, and remember, any message you get is a message from us." By that time, McWilliams had already removed himself from the case to serve in state government, but as Russo's book shows, Korshak was just getting started.

Supermob has many flaws--sprawling structure, inexpert selection and emphasis, questionable assertions, and careless writing. It would have been a better book at 400 well-edited pages. But it's full of interesting information, and I have to commend its ambition: to tell the story of a large, complex network of shadowy figures whose enterprises blurred the lines between legitimate and underworld activity. You can't read the book without wondering how different America would look today if these characters hadn't left their mark. I write these lines from Las Vegas, where that mark is most obvious.

Supermob, Part I

For Christmas this year, Alison Richardson gave me Gus Russo's Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. I'm still working my way through it--it's a little like trying to drink from a fire hydrant--but it traces the myriad connections between the Chicago underworld and mid-century Southern California business, politics, and organized crime. Lots of material, too, about Las Vegas, labor racketeering, and just about anything else Russo could cram in there. More on this unwieldy but absorbing book in a later post.