Kevin Starr and Westways

We have a new entry in the McWilliams sweepstakes: Kevin Starr, who contributed a piece on C-Mac to the current issue of Westways, the AAA magazine of Southern California, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Kevin describes McWilliams's monthly column, "Tides West," which ran in Westways during the 1930s.

All nicely done, of course, though Kevin tactfully omits the fact that Westways fired McWilliams after Ruth Comfort Mitchell, the wife of a Republican state senator, objected to his politics. McWilliams applauded John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in the pages of Westways, while Mitchell responded to it by writing Of Human Kindness, a novel that depicted virtuous family farmers and depraved labor union organizers.

I drew heavily from Kevin's books to produce my McWilliams bio. He, in turn, wrote a short (and humorous) foreword for my pamphlet, based on my Bonnie Cashin lecture at UCLA, on Carey McWilliams and the politics of cool.

The Waldie Factor

Just as I was gearing up to deal with the Arellano Challenge, I discovered that D.J. Waldie is touting Carey McWilliams and Southern California Country.

Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, winner of the California Book Award and one of my favorites.

Gustavo Otra Vez

Evidently, Gustavo Arellano has his eye on my position as head cheerleader for Carey McWilliams. His syndicated column, "Ask a Mexican" (insert appropriate exclamation points here), is touting North from Mexico as a Christmas gift for the Mexican who has everything.

Time to pick up my game.

Gonzo: The Book

Between the research for the McWilliams and Ramparts books, I've spent a lot of time learning about Hunter Thompson. Toward the end of his life, I also spent some time trying to get him on the telephone to comment on Carey McWilliams, who helped put Thompson on the literary map. I even received instructions from Juan Thompson about how to entice his father to pick up the phone. (The method involved calling the fortified compound every hour starting at midnight.)

But it wasn't until I read Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson that I realized what those final months were like. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I admired William McKeen's bio as well as Alex Gibney's recent documentary film. But this oral history, pulled together by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour, manages to be even more revealing, especially about the details of HST's life in Woody Creek. Lots of humor, high jinks, and high audacity here, but also a good deal of nuance and pathos. Highly recommended, even for Thompson aficionados.

I see that many Amazon.com reviewers regard this book as a hatchet job engineered by Jann Wenner. In that sense, it resembles one of my favorite books of the last decade, Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, a memoir of Theroux's multi-decade friendship with V.S. Naipaul. Some of that book's reviewers saw only treachery and betrayal there, but I saw an extraordinary portrait which, evidently, has been elaborated in Patrick French's new Naipaul biography, The World Is What It Is. In that case, Naipaul cooperated with French in what appears to be an effort to tell the truth--an intellectual's first obligation.

None of the Gonzo reviews I read faulted the book's accuracy. If some HST intimates see disloyalty here, I get that. I also understand why fans wouldn't want their HST fantasies challenged. But loyalty and fantasy, as important as they are, aren't terribly helpful when it comes to telling the truth--something HST valued.

Not So Fast, Harry

Seems that the King family wasn't crazy about Harry Belafonte's idea to auction, among other things, the notes for Dr. King's first antiwar speech. Check out the story in the New York Times.

The story includes a comment from David Garrow, whose book I cited for King's reaction to "The Children of Vietnam" piece in Ramparts magazine.

King Vietnam Speech

Harry Belafonte will auction off the handwritten draft of Martin Luther King's first anti-Vietnam speech. The CBC story notes that the speech was King's response to reading "The Children of Vietnam" in Ramparts magazine. That article included pictures of Vietnam kids injured by U.S. bombs, including napalm.

The story also says that King left the notes in Belafonte's apartment before leaving for Los Angeles to deliver the speech. What it doesn't mention is that Carey McWilliams and The Nation put together the Los Angeles event and had been urging Dr. King to come out against the war.

King was widely criticized for doing so, but he was buoyant after delivering the speech. He said he had finally relieved his conscience, which had been afflicted ever since he saw the Ramparts story. Ramparts ran the speech the following month.

There will be details in the Ramparts book, of course.

Power Book

I attended a book event last night with Nancy Pelosi at the California Historical Society on Mission Street in San Francisco. Turns out the same building served as her campaign headquarters in 1987, when she first ran for Congress.

The book is called Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters. Publishers Weekly calls it a "graceful personal and political history ... A gentle account from a tough politician."

It was a very worthwhile event. Her stories were great, and the whole thing was well paced and organized. (I don't think it's related, but this was the first book event I've attended that featured Secret Service personnel.) It was also well attended--maybe 200 people, not counting the protestors hollering at the top of their lungs outside. When I tried to talk with them afterward, they shouted at me. So it goes.

Moscone and Milk

This isn't the most upbeat anniversary in the annals of California, but it's an important one in many ways. Between the George Moscone/Harvey Milk murders and the Jonestown massacre--traumatic events separated by only nine days--California utopianism took a terrific beating exactly 30 years ago.

As it turns out, the reporter who covered the Moscone/Milk shooting for the San Francisco Chronicle has a special piece in the Chronicle today. What's more, that reporter (Duffy Jennings) is in my class at San Francisco State this semester. Check it out, I say.

Gustavo, Carey, and Orange County

A couple of weeks ago, I heard Gustavo Arellano on KPFA talking about his new book, Orange County: A Personal History. I'm a fan, so I put that on my list of books to read after I finished my Ramparts research.

But today I received a McWilliams alert from Frank Barajas, my friend in the history department at Cal State Channel Islands. He told me that Gustavo's new book had some material on Carey McWilliams and even a quote from me. Extraordinary.

I already knew that Gustavo wrote a piece about McWilliams and Orange County's citrus strikes in the 1930s. That story, which appeared in the OC Weekly in 2006, was about how thoroughly the county's labor strife had been scrubbed out of its official history. Back in the day, McWilliams defended some of the striking workers and quickly realized how screwed they were. Their plight was all the more striking to him because it clashed with the county's idyllic image.

After hearing from Frank, I decided to swing into action--without leaving my desk, of course. I was able to pinpoint the relevant passage, courtesy of our friends at Google. It runs a full six paragraphs and mentions American Prophet as well as an interview Gustavo conducted with me two years ago.

On behalf of McWilliams aficionados everywhere, I say muchas gracias, Gustavo. And thanks to Frank for pointing it out.

Towers of Gold

I heard Frances Dinkelspiel talk about her new book, Towers of Gold, in Berkeley last night. It's the story of I.W. Hellman, the West Coast banker and longtime UC regent who seemed to have a hand in virtually every major business development in California from the late nineteenth century to 1920.

The title refers to an incident during the financial collapse of 1893, when bank failures threatened to paralyze the credit markets. (Sound familiar?) Hellman transported his own money--bags of gold coins--by train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The bags were stacked up in his bank, and the throng saw that Hellman's towers of gold could cover his bank's deposits. Another testament to the power of ocular proof.

I first heard about Frances's book a year or so ago. I knew Hellman was her great-great-grandfather, but until recently I didn't know she had two decades of newspaper experience, a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia, and a terrific story on her hands.

Her presentation last night was an adroit combination of personal narrative and complete control over the historical material. And who knew that the book would drop while the media spotlight is shining brightly on the world of high finance? (In one of many tantalizing asides, Frances noted Hellman's connection to the Lehman brothers, his in-laws.)

Can't wait to read it.

Pegler and McWilliams

Writing from Tokyo, Mark Ettlin asks, "So how does Carey McWilliams intersect with Westbrook Pegler? They must have mixed it up a few times... With the Palin-Pegler appropriation hot off the presses, it would be timely for you to blog some Mac remark on the man."

I missed the fact that Sarah Palin cribbed a quote from Pegler, a Hearst columnist, in her RNC speech. Here it is: "A writer observed: 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.' I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman."

So what's the big deal? Well, consider Pegler's other notable quotes, some of which are gathered by David Neiwert on his blog.

It was "regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara hit the wrong man when he shot at Roosevelt in Miami."

It is "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry." (November 1963)

About his proposal for a state takeover of the major labor unions: "Yes, that would be fascism. But I, who detest fascism, see advantages in such fascism."

In a column defending a lynching in California: "I am a member of the rabble in good standing."

Here's a 1965 quote that Dave missed. Writing about Robert F. Kennedy, Pegler wished that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

Turns out McWilliams and Pegler did have a couple of encounters. One of the first involved Chicago gangster Willie Bioff, who headed out to Hollywood in the 1930s for some labor racketeering. At the time, McWilliams was representing some rank-and-file union members who had been muscled out of IATSE. After Pegler identified Bioff and his criminal past in Chicago, McWilliams took behind-the-scenes action to expose Bioff in Los Angeles.

But more often than not, Pegler and McWilliams were on opposite sides of any given issue. Very soon after Pearl Harbor, Pegler called for the evacuation of all Japanese from the West Coast. McWilliams thought that was crazy, but a Democratic president and governor also called for a massive internment, and McWilliams went along with it--while he was serving in state office, anyway. As soon as he was out, he wrote Prejudice (1944), which destroyed every argument for that action. It was also cited that year by a Supreme Court dissenting opinion in the case that upheld the constitutionality of the evacuation and internment.

In 1951, when McWilliams was wondering whether or not to move east to become editor of The Nation, he wrote to publisher Frieda Kirchwey about his politics--and his critics.

Politically, I consider myself a radical democrat who might better be called a socialist, with both "democrat" and "socialist" being written without caps. I mention this only because I want to remind you that Pegler, Tenney, Lewis, and the others, can be relied on to charge that I am a red, a fellow-traveller (real news to my Communist friends!) and one who has given aid-and-comfort to "public enemies" like Harry Bridges.

That pretty much sums up Pegler's reputation at the time, I think. He went on to write for the John Birch Society, which, according to his Wikipedia entry, "invited him to leave for his extreme views." Yikes.

Hitchens's Review of Outlaw Journalist

I just read Christopher Hitchens's review of Outlaw Journalist in the Sunday Times today. I like the way he highlights Hunter Thompson's San Francisco heyday. Most of HST's best work was rooted in the Bay Area, though he's usually associated with the fortified compound in Colorado.

The first Bay Area benchmark was the Hell's Angels piece, commissioned by Carey McWilliams for The Nation when HST was living in the Haight. (Kudos to Hitch for mentioning McWilliams; I just noticed that Jonathan Yardley's review in the Washington Post skipped that critical connection.) Then there was the Kentucky Derby piece for Warren Hinckle's Scanlan's Monthly, also mentioned in this review. And of course Rolling Stone, which published his most famous work, was a San Francisco magazine with close connections to Ramparts. Those three magazines (Ramparts, Scanlan's, and Rolling Stone) produced some impressive fireworks in those years.

Fanatical readers of this blog already know that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner worked for Ramparts' spinoff newspaper, that HST wrote for Scanlan's after editor Warren Hinckle left Ramparts, and that HST was a big Ramparts fan and appeared on the masthead for a while. But did you know that one of the first Americans Christopher Hitchens met upon his arrival in the USA was Carey McWilliams? And that Hitchens wrote for Ramparts under the name Matthew Blaire?

I learned that by visiting with Hitchens in Marin last year, and you can read all about that (and everything else) in my forthcoming book on Ramparts. Soon, I hope.

Jann Wenner

I spoke with Jann Wenner about Ramparts magazine last week. Jann wrote for the spinoff newspaper, The Sunday Ramparts, before starting Rolling Stone with his mentor, Ralph Gleason, in 1967. Gleason was the Chronicle's jazz critic and a contributing editor at Ramparts before quitting in a fury. The problem was Warren Hinckle's depiction of San Francisco's hippies in the magazine's first major article on the subject.

In our conversation, I learned a lot more about the relationship between Ramparts and Rolling Stone, which Jann described as one of "overlapping trajectories." I already knew that Jann borrowed his design from Ramparts and pasted up the first issue of Rolling Stone (see photo) in a spare room at the magazine's office at 301 Broadway. But I also learned that he met his wife, Jane Schindelheim, at Ramparts. And that Bob Scheer tried to get him to fetch coffee. And lots of other stuff that will be in the book.

Richard Rodriquez

I met Richard Rodriguez Monday afternoon at a party for Kerry Tremain, who's stepping down as editor California magazine. Kerry has done a fantastic job there. Among his many accomplishments was recruiting writers like Richard Rodriguez.

We read Hunger of Memory in my California Culture class at San Francisco State, so meeting Richard was a special pleasure. That course is organized around utopian and dystopian images of California, so Richard emerges as a key skeptic (along with Joan Didion) of 1960s-style social optimism. In Hunger of Memory, that skepticism seems to be rooted in Richard's Catholicism. Although he doesn't say so, the political projects of the 1960s and 1970s come off as modern forms of the Pelagian heresy.

But skepticism is only part of Richard's project. Language is even more important. As a boy, his two languages apply to radically different worlds--the public (English) and private (Spanish). That split is at the center of the book.

Hunger of Memory is also very concerned with education. As Richard embraces his identity as a model student, he becomes separated from his family, or at least his parents. But then he also renounces an academic career and becomes a solitary writer. Each round of renunciation and alienation is another step on his writerly journey.

That journey leads him to oppose both bilingual education and affirmative action. But the grounds of his opposition are deeply personal--as we would expect from a writer, who must find his individuality and voice not through big, blunt, unchosen categories of identity (race, class, gender), but in his relationship to language.

Hunger of Memory isn't a treatise on public policy. To read it that way is to misunderstand its value. I think it belongs to another literary tradition that stretches back to Augustine's Confessions. You heard it here first.

During our brief chat, Richard brought up Carey McWilliams, more or less out of the blue. You can believe that I walked through that door.

The Living New Deal

I heard Gray Brechin speak last night in Berkeley about California's Living New Deal Project. He's attempting no less than a complete inventory (and photographic record) of FDR's public works projects in California.

What's really impressive about Gray's project, aside from his visually polished description of it, is the sheer weight of his examples. In fact, the government built a staggering number of California schools, hospitals, parks, museums, theaters, courthouses, post offices, golf courses, roads, bridges, culverts, etc. during the 1930s.

We use these facilities every day, whether or not we know their provenance. This fact, and their frequently stunning beauty, is the most effective reply to those who cast the government as an incompetent nuisance.

The event was hosted for the first time by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment--Clark Kerr's old outfit--and was very successful. Until last night, these talks happened at the Cal faculty club, which was cool in its own way, but the IRLE support is a very welcome development.

Review of Obscene in the Extreme

I just read Jonathan Yardley's Washington Post review of Rick Wartzman's Obscene in the Extreme. To each his own, of course, but I wondered about some of the major points.

Rick's book is about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and its reception, especially in Kern County, where there was a movement to ban it. Yardley notes that the novel deals with the Dust Bowl migration and hopes of starting fresh in California. Then he makes an extremely misleading claim. "The issues this [migration] raised have long since been resolved," Yardley maintains, "and many descendants of the Okies now live in comfort in a state whose economy is larger than those of all but a handful of the world's countries, but the book continues to move readers."

Long since resolved? Well, yes, many Dust Bowl families and their descendants ended up doing fine. But how about the people working those same jobs now? Is it possible that the novel still resonates not only because the book is easier to teach than more demanding novels, as Yardley supposes, but also because the underlying labor issues it documents persist in spades?

As Carey McWilliams observed at the time, the Joads' problems weren't exactly new. What distinguished them from what came before and after was the fact that the Joads were white, English-speaking citizens who could vote. In fact, California agribusiness continues to rely on a low-wage, disenfranchised, and easily exploited labor pool. And farm labor isn't the only forum for those issues, as T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain showed in 1995. (That novel owes something to Steinbeck as well as Voltaire.)

Yardley mentions McWilliams in passing but suggests that his appearance in the book, along with other "endless dollops of information," is a form of padding. I think that misunderstands Rick's goal. The book offers a snapshot of Kern County in 1939 and then places that snapshot in history. So I can't knock the book for mentioning McWilliams, the Wobblies, or other relevant players. I'm not sure I would have been interested in the snapshot if Rick hadn't added that historical context.

Yardley ends his review as follows: "A further difficulty is that Wartzman seems to have little if any literary judgment and fails to subject The Grapes of Wrath to careful scrutiny. No doubt it is an important novel, but whether it is a good one is another matter altogether, and this question Wartzman simply avoids."

I'm baffled by this. Again, it seems to misunderstand the book's goal, which isn't to critique the novel but to depict its reception in a particular time, place, and cultural context. Besides, we're not exactly short on critical readings of this or any other major American novel. The woods are full of them.

Deep Clean

I tracked down one of my favorite articles on Los Angeles: "Deep Clean" by Edward Zuckerman. I'm not sure why this essay, which appeared in the May 1993 issue of Harper's Magazine, isn't widely anthologized.

Zuckerman, a New York writer transplanted to Los Angeles, contrasts his new home's penchant for producing entertainment schlock with the fastidious professionalism of the city's top car detailers. The juxtapositions are comical. One paragraph describes a new film about a dog in a witness-protection program. The next one shows the detailer rubbing three layers of wax from the Brazilian carnauba palm into the body paint of a car. To do so, he employs a soft fabric used in sanitary napkins, since diaper cloth is too harsh. Then back to a vapid story meeting, and so on.

It's a nice piece of work, but it also captures an important truth about the American combination of high technology and low culture.

Lowell Bergman and Ramparts

I talked to Lowell Bergman about Ramparts this week. He told me some great stories about the magazine and its staff, but he also made some important points about media technology and finance in the 1960s and 1970s.

The conversation sent me back to my favorite scene from The Insider, where Lowell is played by Al Pacino. Check this out if you haven't seen it lately--classic Pacino.

I just realized that The Insider's focus on a whistleblower links it to another Pacino movie, Serpico. That was one of my favorites as a kid in the 1970s. Pacino's beard in that film deserves a lifetime achievement award.

Bo and Steve--Patrons of the Arts

I've been poring over issues of Ramparts at my leisure this week, courtesy of former managing editor Bo Burlingham. When I interviewed him in Oakland a while back, he said he had some back issues he could lend me. As it turned out, his collection kicked in just when Steve Keating's petered out. (Steve, the son of founding publisher Ed Keating, offered a box of early issues when I visited with him last year.) So I now have a nice run of the issues, separated into annual piles, spread out in my office. This is a huge boon for my project and will save me many trips to the Cal library.

Speaking of Steve, I met him through an interesting coincidence. He attended a book event in Palo Alto with PoliPointPress author Norman Solomon. When he introduced himself, Norman directed him to me. Lucky! This week, Steve passed along an even more unlikely serendipity. He was installing cabinets in an Atherton home and happened to mention that his father published a magazine. When his clients asked which one, he told them about Ramparts. It turns out they knew a little bit about it, since his client's father was former editor (now conservative polemicist) David Horowitz.

David Weir

I had a long and illuminating conversation with David Weir today. His name has come up several times during my Ramparts research, but I didn't realize until today how much I could learn from him. I won't rehearse the details here, but the sheer number of overlaps (Rolling Stone, Center for Investigative Reporting, Mother Jones, etc.) could fill a lot of space.

Here's a link to his blog for the curious among you.

Scheer on the Defense Hawks

Earlier this summer, I hung out a bit with Robert Scheer and his wife, Narda Zacchino. We talked about Ramparts, mostly, and had a few dinners, including a tasty one at Chez Panisse. (As it turns out, Alice Waters worked on his remarkable 1966 run for Congress.) That same week, I attended two talks about his new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

Before I say anything about the book itself, let's consider Scheer's decision to focus on this topic. I don't hear many other people calling attention to the military budget right now. For this year alone, that's $506.9 billion, plus the two "supplementary" appropriations for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those came to $197 billion. So we're looking at $700 billion plus for 2008. That's a lot of hot dogs, people. In fact, it's most of our discretionary hot dogs. For every ten dollars the federal government spends on non-mandatory items, six go to the military.

The result? We spend as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. But when Congress proposed a $7 billion expansion for children's health insurance, President Bush vetoed it, saying it was too expensive. (He wanted a $1 billion expansion of the program.)

One could make a lot of partisan hay out of this issue. Mean old President Bush! Why does he hate the babies? That may be as close as we'll get to a critical debate about our national priorities. But as Scheer points out in the book, the runaway military budget is a bipartisan creature. Even Bush's staunchest critics (e.g., Barbara Boxer) fight to retain programs for stuff nobody needs--in Boxer's case, cargo planes produced in Long Beach. The "defense" budget has been disconnected from any rational discussion of our actual defense needs. Now it's almost exclusively about bringing home the bacon.

Well, you say, don't we want a strong defense? It's dangerous out there! Yeah, I want a strong defense, especially one that has something to do with actual and potential threats. But I also want roads, schools, hospitals, and all the other stuff we've been trained not to expect anymore because, like health insurance for poor kids, it's too expensive.

This little home truth doesn't really count as news anymore, but Scheer makes a strong case that it's disfiguring our national politics anyway. "War doesn't pay," he concludes, "nor does imperial ambition." He dedicates the book to two great Americans--Dwight Eisenhower and George McGovern--who shared that view.

Having just returned from Washington DC, I wonder why this view doesn't cut more ice there. Is it because its causes are so blindingly obvious and seemingly irresistible? If so, does it help to be a little farther away from it, a little less inured to business as usual in DC?

With this book, one could argue, Scheer is reprising a role he played during the Vietnam era, when he challenged the lies and nonsense that led us into that regrettable conflict. His reporting helped propel the success of Ramparts, but many experienced people could have told that story.

This summer, I asked Warren Hinckle why he thought Ramparts was so successful. "Probably because the other places were so shitty," he replied. As I watch the presidential campaign coverage this season, with its breathless discussion of lapel pins and fist bumps, I think of Hinckle--and Scheer.

The Fake Angeleno

Just arrived in Los Angeles? Check out The Fake Angeleno. (I've also added the link to your starboard.) TFA is documenting the situation on the ground in Lo-Cal. As for the fake part: well, sometimes you have to solve the problem of artifice with more artifice.

Gonzo Redux

Turns out Gonzo was playing in San Rafael, so my daughters and I watched it last night. It's the best film I've seen, feature or doc, on Hunter Thompson.

Two scenes gave me chills. One showed the Chicago police flaying demonstrators at the Democratic convention in 1968 to Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." According to Thompson's wife, Chicago was one of two experiences that caused him to weep in her presence.

Another moving scene shows an aged George McGovern, a Thompson favorite, lashing out against old men in air-conditioned offices in DC planning the next war. Doesn't sound like Spielberg stuff, I realize, but it got to me. As you might imagine, there are a few laughs, too. Many cluster around Thompson's run for sheriff in Aspen.

Although Thompson was from Kentucky and spent most of his adult life in Colorado, the film identifies San Francisco in the 1960s as his true place and time.

Check it out, I say.

Obscene in the Extreme

I just finished reading Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman. It's about the furor that followed the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.

Rick focuses on the way that dust-up played out in Kern County, where the board of supervisors considered the merits of banning the book. Along the way, he weaves in the stories of major players in California agribusiness, labor, media, and government. That cast includes Carey McWilliams, whom Rick treats perceptively and at some length. But Rick is also very attuned to the stories of particular Kern County residents and families touched by the controversy. Highly recommended.

I have lots more to say, including many adjectives, but I'm leaving it here for now just in case some shrewd editor asks me to review the book. (By the way, check The Nation, July 14, p. 39, for the latest news in this department.)

Obscene in the Extreme isn't out yet--I threw around my ever increasing weight to get an advance copy--but I noticed that the publisher, PublicAffairs, used the jacket as the basis for its Fall catalog cover. That's a good sign, don't you think? We're hoping Rick will talk about the book this fall in Berkeley. More on that soon.

Jules Tygiel

I just learned about the death of Jules Tygiel, the San Francisco State historian.

I interviewed Jules about Carey McWilliams, whose work he taught and understood very well. I also had the good fortune to meet him at a series of SF State lectures devoted to California politics. Jules's work, which focuses on California and baseball, is first-rate.

Here's an article from the Los Angeles Times on him and his work. Jules was only 59.

Gonzo

I haven't seen Gonzo, the Hunter Thompson doc from Alex Gibney, but here's A.O. Scott's review in the International Herald Tribune.

Very happy to see mention of Carey McWilliams, of course, who first suggested that Thompson write about the Hell's Angels. That was a game changer, as Thompson always acknowledged. Throughout his career, he consistently admired and respected only one editor--Carey McWilliams. This according to Douglas Brinkley in Proud Highways, Thompson's edited letters.

And let's not forget the Ramparts connection. Thompson was living on Parnassus Street in San Francisco during the magazine's heyday. After Peter Collier reviewed Hell's Angels, he brought Thompson by the office at 301 Broadway for lunch with Warren Hinckle. Let's just say that the result wasn't healthy for Hinckle's pet monkey, Henry Luce.

Later Thompson hung with the Ramparts cohort at the Democratic convention in Chicago. He also borrowed the magazine's wall poster idea for later use in Aspen. And he eventually wrote the first generally recognized piece of Gonzo journalism, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," for Hinckle's subsequent magazine, Scanlan's Monthly.

The photograph above is one of my favorites. I wanted to use it in American Prophet, but I couldn't track down a quality image or the rights holder.

The Debs Factor--Option the Screen Rights Now!

Got another book review assignment from the Los Angeles Times, this one for Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent. The author is Ernest Freeberg, a historian at the University of Tennessee. Great story, well told. Debs was an extraordinary figure, more than I realized, and the historical parallels with the present are striking. Check it out--or at least read the review and see what you think. The piece runs on Sunday in the book review section.

For those seeking a complete Debs bio, Haymarket Books recently reissued a paperback edition of Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross (1947) with a new introduction by Mike Davis.

Outstanding in the Field

This blog is devoted to California culture, but aside from a few references to farm labor, I've pretty much ignored agri-culture. Mostly I like to eat food, not talk about it, but I recently attended an event that fanatical readers of this blog will want to know about.

The event is called Outstanding in the Field. Jim Denevan, whose cookbook of the same name was recently lauded by the New York Times, convened the event at Route 1 Farms. That's an organic farm run by Jeff Larkey just off Waddell Creek, which is surrounded by state parkland and drains into the Pacific Ocean just south of Pescadero. Jim barnstorms the country in a refurbished 1953 bus to raise awareness about food, sell a few cookbooks, and serve a square meal right there in the fields.

Mission accomplished. We drank some wine and listened to Jeff talk about his land and the challenges of organic farming. One of the things we learned is that wild pigs roam the area. They got into his potatoes one year, so Jeff and his friends decided to stake them out one night. He saw the alpha male first, a 600-pounder that in the darkness he mistook for a pony.

After our little seminar, we settled into a tasty multi-course meal prepared right there: turnip soup, beet salad, sardines, roasted chicken and green beans and squash, and an orange-almond pie with creme fraiche.

It was dark and chilly when we left, the sky was clear, and the stars were out. As Woody Guthrie might say, they hung like grapes on vines that shine, and warmed a lover's glass like a friendly wine.

Book Expo America

Just back from Los Angeles, where I attended Book Expo America. As usual, I assumed it would be an empty experience and then had several serendipitous encounters that redeemed the effort.

One such encounter was with Warren Hinckle, who was there to promote a new book, Who Killed Hunter Thompson? I haven't had much luck cornering him here in the Bay Area to talk about Ramparts, but there he was, big as you please, in the bar of the Los Angeles Convention Center. He's not that keen on rehashing the whole Ramparts experience for posterity, but he was very forthcoming and helpful and good company in every way.

I also met Tom Hayden for the first time. (We've spoken over the telephone about Ramparts). He and Elaine Katzenberger, his editor at City Lights, said hello while I was chatting with Ellen Adler from The New Press.

My only inadvertent celebrity sighting was Alec Baldwin. Unless Vincent Bugliosi counts. And Arianna Huffington. And the guy who plays the Microsoft nerd in the Apple commercials.

Navasky on Buckley

This one goes to my two major preoccupations: Carey McWilliams and Ramparts magazine.

In a recent New York Times book review, Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation, mentions McWilliams in his remarks on books by or about William F. Buckley. Navasky's book, A Matter of Opinion, also noted the similarity between the two men. Somewhere on this blog I passed along the fact that Lou Cannon, Reagan's biographer, once sent out 40 letters trying to interest people in his first book, on Reagan and Jesse Unruh. He got exactly two replies, from McWilliams and Buckley.

But Buckley had a Ramparts connection, too. On Firing Line, he debated Robert Scheer during the magazine's heyday. In my forthcoming book, I argue that Buckley had at least two reasons for being interested in the San Francisco muckraker. First, it started as a Catholic magazine, and Buckley was a lifelong and very vocal Catholic. Its transition to radical muckraking must have been a source of concern. Second, Ramparts exposed the CIA, for which Buckley had been an agent before starting National Review.

I tried to interview Buckley in what I didn't realize was the last month of his life. His note said he was so far behind on other work that he couldn't spare the time.

Boyarsky on McWilliams and Kerby

Bill Boyarsky's Truthdig article today on citizen journalists gave kudos to Carey McWilliams and Phil Kerby, editor of Frontier, which was finally folded into The Nation. Boyarsky has seen a lot of changes since that era, and I appreciate the historical perspective he brings to old school figures like McWilliams. If you didn't know any better, you might think that bloggers and citizen journalists are the only ones who have escaped the dominion of the dreaded MSM (mainstream media).

Boyarsky is also the author of Big Daddy, the Jess Unruh bio. But you already knew that. You also knew that Truthdig is produced by Robert Scheer, the former editor of Ramparts. Boyarsky and Scheer both teach at USC, as does Marc Cooper, whom Boyarsky mentions in his article. Cooper also writes for The Nation, where Scheer is still a contributing editor. Starting to get it?

Madam Speaker

I flew through Marc Sandalow's Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power. It was built for speed; short paragraphs, newspaper style, probably the result of Sandalow's former day job at the Chronicle.

Readers expecting a full-blown, soup-to-nuts critical biography won't find it here. Also, the "Times" part of the subtitle isn't quite apt. This is Pelosi's life story, told quickly and effectively, but without the benefit of much retrospection or even cooperation from the subject or her staff. (Pelosi is planning to write a memoir.) For this more replete kind of biography of a San Francisco politician, the gold standard is still John Jacobs's Rage for Justice, which features Phil Burton, one of Pelosi's mentors.

Still, I enjoyed Madam Speaker and learned a lot from it. In fact, one of the things I learned is that Pelosi wasn't Burton's creature, though Burton's widow essentially bequeathed her House seat to Pelosi on her death bed. According to Sandalow, Pelosi said that Phil Burton might not have supported that move. Interesting.

The other thing I learned is how much political savvy Pelosi picked up from her family in Baltimore. Her father was elected both to the House and as mayor, and he did retail politics the old-fashioned way--right in the neighborhood. In fact, he did a lot of it in the house, which was frequently full of constituents seeking favors and whatnot. Pelosi's father also provides a good deal of the book's color. Her messaging is very disciplined, which is necessary these days. He was more willing to open up his game, and Sandalow records some of his zingers, at least two of which I found hilarious.

The picture that emerges from Sandalow's biography is that of an organized, hardworking, business-like leader. She's sure of her convictions but focused on results, self-respecting but more than willing to share the credit. Most of her peers describe her as a tough Italian grandmother--which happens to match her self-description. "I'm not taking complaints today," she used to tell her five young children when the lamentations began. But like all good legislative leaders, she knows what motivates her colleagues, tracks every detail, and takes no mess.

Very worthwhile. (Full disclosure: I edit Pelosi's daughter, Christine.)

Big Daddy

Just finished reading Bill Boyarsky's Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics. A man of huge appetites--for power, food, drink, and women--Unruh shaped a political culture that was rough around the edges but got a lot of work done for the people of California.

As an AP and LA Times reporter, Boyarsky covered Unruh in Sacramento and brings a valuable, first-person perspective to the story. He resisted the temptation to produce a tome; this nifty little book (265 pages) can be read in a few sittings. As a significant political figure in a fascinating era, Unruh could support a longer work, but I like Boyarsky's decision to keep it relatively brief and moving quickly.

Boyarsky's portrait jibes well with a growing list of books on California politicians of that period. These include John Jacobs's bio of Phil Burton, Lou Cannon on Ronald Reagan, James Richardson on Willie Brown, and Ethan Rarick on Pat Brown. Naomi Schneider at UC Press has edited almost all of these books. We've never met, but my hat is off to her. She deserves a great deal of credit for sponsoring an impressive collective portrait of mid-century California politics.

This photograph doesn't feature Unruh very well--that's him falling out of the right frame--but it's the best photo I could find that shows Unruh, Brown, and Burton together. That's Bobby Kennedy with his back to us.

BookFest

I may have died and gone to book heaven last weekend.

I attended my first Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA. The experience worked at a lot of different levels for me--as an editor, author, teacher, and reader.

On the Carey McWilliams front, I was definitely in the heartland. Many of his fans were there, and the biography came up twice: once in my question to Jim Newton, the LA Times editor and Earl Warren biographer, and again when Philip Fradkin picked me out of the crowd and mentioned the book. Both moments were televised on C-SPAN that day, I later learned.

It was also a good visit on the Ramparts front. I met and interviewed Robert Scheer and one of his early co-authors, Maurice Zeitlin. That deserves its own treatment, so more on that later.

If that weren't enough, I also had a chance to visit with Judith Freeman (author of The Long Embrace, her book about Raymond and Cissy Chandler) and Anthony Arthur, Upton Sinclair's biographer. Judith gave the 2006 Bonnie Cashin lecture, so we also had that in common.

I'm skipping some very energizing contacts I had with other attendees, but you get the idea. The place was lousy with people who like to read and write about California. I think I found my tribe.

White/Milk

The CSA conference came off this weekend and produced various pleasures--some predictable, others less so. I met some email and telephone correspondents face-to-face for the first time (Rick Wartzman, Frances Dinkelspiel, John Scott, David Bacon, etc.) and had a good chance to visit with others I don't see often enough (Susan McWilliams, Peter Schrag, Louis Freedberg, Rose Aguilar, Yumi Wilson, Sasha Abramsky, Mary Moreno-Richardson, and many others). Splendid that way.

One of the less predictable benefits was meeting John Geluardi of SF Weekly. He came to the conference to hear about the environmental impacts of ports, but he also mentioned a piece that he wrote on Dan White, whose story will resurface with the release of Milk, the Sean Penn film about the gay San Francisco county supervisor Harvey Milk. (Josh Brolin will play Dan White.)

John suggests that White's personality and motives for murdering Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone have been more or less systematically misunderstood. Check out John's article--very worthwhile.

The Real McCain

One of Carey McWilliams's biggest achievements at The Nation was turning a journal of opinion into a forum for investigative journalism. Ramparts, of course, pushed that even further. Not only did the San Francisco muckraker break big stories, but its staff also had the publicity savvy to make the mainstream media pick them up.

That seems to be happening with a new PoliPointPress book called The Real McCain, which is charging to the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list. Cliff Schecter's profile of the GOP presidential candidate has given the mainstream media permission to talk about McCain's nasty temper, which insiders have known about for some time.

I highly recommend the FoxNews interview in which McCain claims, after a false start or two, that the reports are "false or exaggerated." He then bridges quickly to his talking points about what really makes him angry: bloated budgets, corruption, etc. Not very convincing. Other news sites and blogs haven't been as accommodating as Fox.

As PoliPointPress's editorial director, I'm not exactly a neutral observer. But there should be a place in our political discourse for frank assessments of a major candidate's temperament.

BTW, the book is an original trade paperback; on Amazon.com, it costs $10--about the same price as a beer in New York or a bank-owned house in Stockton.

Cal Studeez Stunna!!!!

It's happening. Mark your calendars. The 18th annual conference of the California Studies Association is coming to Berkeley, April 11-13. Check out Changing Climates: Class, Culture, and Politics in an Era of Global Warming.

Boatloads of talent. Matt Gonzalez will give the keynote Friday night at Berkeley City College. The next two days will feature many of my faves: Philip Fradkin, Rick Wartzman, Rose Aguilar, Dick Walker, Peter Schrag, Peter Laufer, Sasha Abramsky, David Bacon, Jon Rowe, etc. Susan McWilliams and Yumi Wilson will chair panels, and Mary Moreno Richardson is coming from San Diego to tell us how she made the Minutemen enemy's list.

The panels will be on the environmental impacts of ports, coping with climate change, working in the green economy, green media, California lit, immigration and the border, and more. Former Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg will give the lunch address on Saturday.

This is going to be good, people. Free and open to the public (donations requested), 2050 Center St. in Berkeley.

Stegnorama Redux

OK, one last post on the Stegnorama in Point Reyes. It received even more attention than I thought. The New York Times ran a piece on it last week. This is the photo of Page and Lynn Stegner that ran with the piece.

In slightly less exalted news, the West Marin Citizen will run my review of the Fradkin bio. Also, I noticed a large ad for that bio in the current issue of Harper's, complete with blurbs. One, it turns out, was from some perceptive reviewer at the Los Angeles Times.

Small World

Another great day at the Stegner conference. Met many interesting people and discovered that Margaretta Mitchell took the cover photograph for the Stegner bio I reviewed. (See that photo a few posts down.)

As we discussed the photo shoot, I realized she had captured Stegner's winning nonchalance, a quality I emphasized in my review. As with McWilliams, that nonchalance masked a very developed work ethic. When this subject came up at lunch, Lynn Stegner noted that the motto at the Stanford creative writing program was that hard writing makes for easy reading.

Stegnorama

I caught the opening panel of the Stegner conference last night in Point Reyes. Super duper. First was a lasagna dinner at Toby's Feed Barn, where I ran into Jeff Lustig. Then we strolled over to the West Marin School gymnasium for the first panel.

When we got there, Robert Hass spoke, Michael Witt read a fine poem, and Mark Dowie presided over a panel of Stegner students and friends. In addition to fleshing out Philip Fradkin's storyline in Wallace Stegner and the American West, those recollections introduced me to the contrasting styles, interests, and life trajectories of the panelists. The only name I knew well before I arrived was William Kittredge, and I'd never seen or heard him speak before. Robert Stone was supposed to attend but had to cancel. Too bad, but the panel was superb anyway.

By utter coincidence, I met Margaretta Mitchell, whose husband Fred was once publisher of Ramparts. I also visited with Melody Graulich of Utah State University and the Western Literature Association, who will speak today.

By no coincidence at all, the Marin alternative weekly has a cover story on how West Marin became a literary mecca--the story is tied to the Stegner conference--and the Chronicle ran a big story this week, too. These guys know how to work it. And I checked the Bookscan numbers yesterday--Philip's book is off to a strong start.

The Cannons on Bush

Lou and Carl Cannon have a new book, Reagan's Disciple, that compares Reagan and George W. Bush at the latter's expense. Jacob Heilbrunn's review ran this week in the New York Times.

Lou covered Governor Reagan for the San Jose Mercury and was senior White House correspondent for The Washington Post during Reagan's presidency. His son Carl is White House correspondent for the National Journal.

As it turns out, Lou is also a Carey McWilliams fan. Their friendship stretched back to the 1960s, when Lou was writing a book (his first) on Reagan and Jesse Unruh. Lou told me he had mentioned McWilliams in every book he has written since then. Not sure yet if that applies to this new one.

When I was researching American Prophet, Lou was very supportive. I interviewed him at his home near Santa Barbara, he reviewed the manuscript for the University of Michigan Press, and he ran my article on McWilliams in California Journal.

I've read two of Lou's previous books: Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power and Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. Both first-rate.

Ralph and Carey

Ralph Nader is running for president again. Didn't you hear? It was in all the papers.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote an open letter asking him not to. In the first sentence of his response to her, Nader evoked the legacy of Carey McWilliams, the magazine's editor when Nader wrote his landmark piece on automobile safety.

Katrina's request is a practical one. Nader's response is more about principle. Who better, then, to evoke in your first sentence than Carey McWilliams? But since Carey stepped down at The Nation more than three decades ago, Nader's response has a giants-in-the-earth quality.

By coincidence, the keynote speaker for the next California Studies Association conference, which I'm helping to organize, will be Matt Gonzalez, Nader's running mate. I asked Matt before the nomination was announced. That conference will run April 11-13 at Berkeley City College; Matt will speak Friday night, April 11. Details to come.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Nader picked a PoliPointPress book (Building the Green Economy) as one of his top picks for the 2007 holiday season.

Granted, It Ain't California ...

...but I can still link it to Carey McWilliams.

Last summer, Matt Bokovoy of the University of Oklahoma Press asked me to write a report on McWilliams's Prejudice (1944) with the idea that the press might reissue it. In return, I received a credit for some of their books.

I chose four:

George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains
Elizabeth Custer, Boots and Saddles
Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own
J.S. Holliday, The World Rushed In

I started reading My Life on the Plains and am still making my way through it. Yesterday I came home to find my issue of The New York Review of Books. It included a piece on Custer by Larry McMurtry. Slightly uncanny. McMurtry recommended Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star, one of my favorites. Also a coincidence since McMurtry and Connell appeared in my review of Philip Fradkin's Stegner bio. (Not sure if Connell made it through the final trim.) Also, McMurtry will make a cameo appearance in the Ramparts book.

This clustering reignited a desire from the mid-1980s to visit Little Bighorn. And maybe that will happen. But in the meantime, I'm tripping on the simple fact that Libbie Custer and my parents were walking the planet at the same time. Actually, my mother might have been crawling the planet when Libbie Custer died in New York City.

Carey on HuffPo and AlterNet

Scott Kurashige kicked off a widely circulated article yesterday with a reference to Carey McWilliams. Fitting. The article looks at the role of race and ethnicity in the Democratic campaign: specifically, how California "flipped the script" when it comes to multiracial coalitions.

Kurashige is an associate professor at the University of Michigan. His new book is called The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton UP, 2007).

Philip Fradkin on Wallace Stegner

Today the Los Angeles Times ran my review of Philip Fradkin's Wallace Stegner and the American West. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the literature of the American West--especially fiction, history, and environmental writing. I learned a lot from it.

While visiting with Alice McGrath in Ventura yesterday, I discovered that she met Stegner in the 1940s. Stegner was writing a book called One Nation, his version of Carey McWilliams's Brothers Under the Skin, which appeared a couple of years earlier. Both men had contributed to the American Folkways series edited by Erskine Caldwell, and they may have met that way. (Stegner wrote Mormon Country, and McWilliams wrote Southern California Country, later simplified to Southern California.) Stegner asked McWilliams for help on the Latino chapter in One Nation. McWilliams referred him to Alice, who introduced Stegner to some folks in Los Angeles.

When I asked Alice what Stegner was like, she mostly remembered how handsome he was.

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that the Times doesn't keep their online material posted for very long. After a few days, you have to pay for it. So if you're going to get it, get it early.

More Ramparts

Another book review of Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America put Ramparts back in the paper today--this time the New York Sun. The book's title plays on the CIA's name for its own propaganda machine. Wurlitzers, the old theater organs that accompanied silent movies, let audiences know how they should feel at any given moment.

Unlike the Wall Street Journal review, this one (by the Hudson Institute's Ronald Radosh) doesn't suggest that Ramparts' investigative work on CIA activities aided communism.

Note to self: Look at The Mighty Wurlitzer.

The Jasmine Trade

I finished Denise Hamilton's The Jasmine Trade and am ready to rule: Check it out.

Denise is a former Los Angeles Times reporter, and this is the first of several Eve Diamond mysteries. Her protagonist, it turns out, is also an LA Times reporter, and we end up learning a lot about the city as we follow her through her sleuthing. The Jasmine Trade is about "parachute kids," Asian teenagers living on their own and attending school in Los Angeles while their parents run their affairs from the old country.

Turns out Eve lives in Silverlake, Carey McWilliams's old neighborhood. Did you think for a second that I wouldn't tie that in somehow?

Next up: Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise. This is part of the series from Akashic Books.

New Links to Your Starboard

I've added three blogs to the honor roll. Each is worth frequent visits by any self-respecting California aficionado.

Craig Hodgkins blogs from Lo-Cal on the media, movies, and literature. He has been researching Frank Fenton, FOC*: mostly straightening out the facts of his life and work, which have been garbled repeatedly.

Frances Dinkelspiel is writing a book about West Coast financier and UC Regent Isaias Hellman. That's scheduled for publication this fall by St. Martin's Press. She attended Chuck Wollenberg's book talk and blogged on it, too.

Steven Rubio is my main man from graduate school at Cal. He taught California Culture at SF State and turned me on to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, among other things.

* Friend of Carey

Bonnie Cashin Lecture

This week I received page proofs for the Bonnie Cashin lecture, delivered last year at UCLA Library. Bonnie Cashin was a fashion designer, and the booklet's title is Always in Fashion? Carey McWilliams, California Radicalism, and the Politics of Cool. Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA, got Kevin Starr to write the preface. Both men are former California state librarians. Kevin also figures--somewhat surrealistically--in the lecture itself.

Patrick Reagh, the book designer and letterpress printer in Sebastopol, did a great job on the cover and interior. Pat will print 1,000 copies, which the library will distribute.

Ramparts Project--Green Light

The Ramparts project is under way--I haven't signed the contract but have accepted the terms--so my next book will be on the history and influence of the San Francisco muckraker.

Just in time, the Wall Street Journal is helping out. A book review today mentions the 1967 Ramparts article that exposed the CIA's covert funding for anticommunist organizations and "set off (in the words of one CIA veteran) 'a drumfire of editorial denunciation.'" The article goes on to say that the Ramparts article "arguably harmed the cause of anticommunism."

Well, yes. That can happen when an agency designed to collect intelligence abroad decides to fund student organizations at home. And things get stickier when it illegally spies on the Americans who exposed its illegal activities abroad.

The Best Berkeley Story Ever?

I went to the Cal faculty club last night to hear Chuck Wollenberg talk about his new book, Berkeley: A City in History. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I was born in Berkeley and received some formal education there. So I was ready for Chuck's talk. Great turnout, both in numbers and wattage.

After dinner, Chuck read several passages from the book, but one anecdote must be recorded immediately. Some of Chuck's relatives on the Wollenberg side of the family grew up near the home of Bernard Maybeck, the famous architect of the early twentieth century. In a burst of progressive thinking, Maybeck and his wife decided not to name their son; instead, they called him "boy" until he was old enough to choose his own name. When that fateful day arrived, Boy delivered his verdict: His name would be Wollenberg. This was too much, even for the Maybecks. Eventually they settled on Wallen.

This little story says a lot about Berkeley, I think. Also human nature.