Covering 1968

A while back I was asked to help behind the scenes (way behind the scenes!) with an upcoming museum exhibition on the year 1968. The Oakland Museum of California is a partner, and I spent a day there offering thoughts on the game plan, which sounds very cool.

The working title is the 1968 Project, and Brian Horrigan has created a weblog to get the ball rolling. I bring it up now because Brian posted this week about Ramparts and its coverage of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago.

When reflecting on 1968, it's easy to focus on the political turbulence and miss a wealth of other cultural material. The risk there, perhaps, is to view the politics as unmoored from its social context. My sense is that the Project 1968 team is working hard to see that year steadily and whole--no small task.

One of the serendipitous outcomes of my day at the museum was meeting David Gans, the musician who hosts KPFA's show on the Grateful Dead. Since then, I've visited with David more, read quite a lot about the Dead, and even visited the new archive at UC Santa Cruz (Nicholas Meriwether, proprietor). David also appeared at my California culture class to discuss the Dead and play a song he wrote about Jerry Garcia. Which was a lot more fun than anything in my undergraduate education. (The classroom part, anyway.)

By coincidence, I'll be at the Oakland Museum today on California Studies Association business. The museum has been a good partner over the years, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about their plans.

Baron Wolman

This week I had the pleasure of hearing from Baron Wolman, who contributed many key photographs to Ramparts. He took the Oakland 7 photo I discuss in the Ramparts book as well as two others, of Jann Wenner and Carol Doda, that actually appear (uncredited) in that book. Let this post be my first step toward full penance.

In his email, Baron writes, "I shot photos/covers for the magazine (and for Stermer) without ever much knowing of its origins and deliberately staying away from the theater you so well described."

In addition to forgiving my oversight, Baron told me he was Rolling Stone's first chief photographer. He also offered this valuable historical footnote.

At my urging Jann started a Rolling Stone look-alike paper called Earth Times. It was as close to environmental muckraking as Jann ever got but immediately suffered from advertisers, both potential and existing, becoming worried about the paper’s willingness to speak uncomfortable truths. Seeing the difficulty in keeping both papers going (we still had regular cash crises at the Stone), he handed it over to the staff, which tried valiantly to keep it going, but, well, you can imagine the rest. Earth Times drew from Ramparts in that I think it had some of the writers but equally in that it tried to educate the readers (and the People) about what could lie ahead if we didn’t start caring about the environment.

When Jann moved Rolling Stone from Brannan St. to Fourth Street, I took over the Rolling Stone editorial offices above Garret Press for the fashion magazine I helped start called Rags. We hired away many of Rolling Stone’s staff (including Jon Carroll and John Burks), borrowed some of Stone’s/Stermer’s design elements, and also printed on newsprint on Garret Press’ machines downstairs from the offices. We described Rags as “the Rolling Stone of fashion.”

Here's Baron's website. I hope it's OK that I cribbed one more photo for this post. Note his tasty photographs of the Grateful Dead. Could come in handy--this time with appropriate credit.

Many thanks, Baron.

The Great American Stickup

I attended a Berkeley Arts & Letters event last week featuring Robert Scheer, whose new book is The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.

This book and Bob's previous one, on military spending, have something very important in common; both show that the two major parties really do cooperate. Unfortunately, it's on all the wrong things.

Bob makes a very strong case that the Republicans (starting with Reagan) and the Democrats (especially under Clinton) enabled an enormous financial disaster that ruined millions of households in the form of foreclosures, unemployment, and diminished home equity and retirement savings. As if that weren't enough, the same people who engineered the disaster vilified public servants who tried to avert it and then, under Obama, mismanaged the effort to limit the damage. Really appalling.

The heroes are few and far between, but one is certainly Brooksley Born, who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Clinton. She pushed to regulate derivatives trading and was scorned by the so-called Committee to Save the World--Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers--as well as the holy zealots of deregulation, most notably Wendy and Phil Gramm.

Wendy Gramm preceded Born as chair of the CFTC, and both she and her husband profited nicely from efforts to "modernize" (that is, gut) oversight of the financial markets. Having secured a regulatory exemption for Enron, she became a board member there and served on its audit committee. Former Texas senator Phil Gramm took a position at UBS, the bank that was later bailed out by the Swiss and U.S. governments. He later served as economic advisor (!) to John McCain.

Rubin also made out like a bandit, encouraging Clinton to eviscerate oversight and then accepting a position at CitiGroup, where he earned $15 million a year until that company had to be bailed out, big-time, by U.S. taxpayers. Summers also received millions from Wall Street firms for his wisdom before heading up Obama's economic team.

And what to say about people like Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson? Greenspan was another Born adversary. As Fed chair, he was supposed to regulate the banks, but as an Ayn Rand-style libertarian, he didn't even believe in regulation. The markets would take care of everything. Paulson made sure Goldman Sachs, which he left to become Treasury secretary under President Bush, got everything it needed, most notably full payment of the bad bets AIG had insured but couldn't cover. And then Paulson decided to let Lehman Brothers, a Goldman competitor, go down in flames.

I've worked on two Dean Baker books (Plunder and Blunder and False Profits) that cover some of the same territory, but Bob is more focused on the political side of the story--and especially the people responsible for the fiasco. Highly recommended.

Green New Deal on CommonDreams

Peter Seidman's piece on the Green New Deal for the North Bay got picked up by CommonDreams (and other sites) this week. The piece originally appeared in the Pacific Sun, the alternative weekly in Marin County.

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Norman Solomon recruited me to the Green New Deal commission last year. We issued our report last week, and Norman has been supervising the media outreach.

As a result of the CommonDreams piece, a Richmond office holder contacted me yesterday. He's interested in launching a similar project here.

Farewell to Manzanar

I should have read this a long time ago, but I finally got to Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. (Turns out I interviewed Jim for the McWilliams bio; he was a big fan of C-Mac.) What a delightful book. It certainly brings out the injustice of the Japanese internment during World War II, but its simplicity, understated elegance, and humanity go far beyond lamentation.

Farewell is on the reading list for one of my classes at San Francisco State (Values in American Life). I've worried at times that the materials for this course, which focuses on migration and immigration, are too bleak. (I had to pull them together on very short notice, courtesy of California's budget problems.) But although this book focuses on a sad chapter in American history, its main subject is a family under extraordinary pressure. The portrait is very specific, but I suspect that anyone with a family can relate to it at some level.

We read The Grapes of Wrath before this. The books have a lot in common, but Grapes is longer and more relentless. Farewell was a tonic by comparison.

The Campaign of the Century

PoliPointPress is launching a new series called P3 Classics. The idea is to revive fantastic books on politics that, for one reason or another, are out of print.

The first title is a personal favorite of mine–-Greg Mitchell’s The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor and the Birth of Media Politics. It recounts the landmark 1934 campaign by checking in with a wide range of public figures–Sinclair, FDR, Hearst, Huey Long, Chaplin, L.B. Mayer, Herbert Hoover, Mencken, Ty Cobb, etc.–on a day-by-day basis, starting with Sinclair’s nomination and ending with the general election. Amazing.

Greg’s claim is that this race’s impact far outstripped its statewide significance. In fact, the techniques brought to bear on this race revolutionized the use of mass media in U.S. politics.

Earlier this year I attended an event at the Swiss consulate in San Francisco and chatted with a member of the Swiss parliament in town to discuss direct democracy. I mentioned that I was trying to reissue a book about Upton Sinclair. “Mitchell?” he asked hopefully.

Greg is making lots of appearances to discuss the book, including segments on GRITtv and NPR’s “On the Media” this weekend. He also has a related article in The Nation.

P3 is selling the book from the website; the print book is available now and the e-book is scheduled for Monday.

Check it out, I say.

Michael Rossman's Posters

Many Bay Area residents of a certain age will remember Michael Rossman, a student activist at Berkeley who died of leukemia in 2008. Others may recognize him from Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), a documentary I always include in my California Culture course at San Francisco State.

It turns out Rossman was also a collector of poster art from the the sixties, and Lincoln Cushing, my colleague at the California Studies Association, has recently processed, photographed, and transmitted the collection of over 23,000 posters to the Oakland Museum of California. Kristin Bender's piece in the newspaper today has all the details.

The Politics of Cool Redux

I have a piece on AlterNet today about the reception of Markos Moulitsas's American Taliban.

This isn't a straightforward comment on California culture (though Markos and Daily Kos work out of Berkeley). I mention it here because many Californians may not realize that what counts as rhetorical success in liberal circles can be a resounding defeat in socially conservative ones.

I learned this while teaching in Texas, where I first heard that intellectuals were people "educated beyond their intelligence." That's why the whole pass-the-biscuits thing is so popular in Texas politics; any sign of sophistication is grounds for immediate suspicion.

This cultural difference is laid out nicely by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner in Clear and Simple as the Truth (Princeton U.P., 1996). They contrast classic style and plain style, whose model scene is a congregation, not a debating society. Totally different language games.

I know that many liberals dislike polemics like American Taliban--they test the classic liberal virtues of tolerance, sympathy, and good temper. But as I argue in the piece, if we renounce polemic, and conservatives reject reasoned debate and regard political compromise as a spiritual sell-out, we're pretty much left with satire--not the greatest bulwark against passionate (but poorly informed) moral crusaders.

Another option is to cast our politics in religious terms. Let's call this the Jim Wallis strategy. I don't have a problem with that, but I think many liberals do.

California Crackup

I just finished reading Joe Mathews and Mark Paul's California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It.

I'm not a policy expert, but I spent five years editing reports and briefings at the Public Policy Institute of California, so I've read more than my share of material on the state's economy, population, and governance. I can tell you that this book does a superb job of laying out the state's current political problems, explaining how they became so critical, and offering ideas for what they call a Great Unwinding.

Their argument, in a nutshell, is that we voters (with timely help from various quarters) have done it to ourselves--all in the name of reform. Quoting Carey McWilliams on the state's "perilous remedies for present evils," Joe and Mark show how the use of statewide initiatives in particular has turned California governance into a Rube Goldberg contraption that not only doesn't work, but also can't work.

In some cases, even our elected officials don't know how to operate the contraption. Describing the absurdly complicated mechanisms of Prop 98, whose goal was to fortify K-12 school finances, Joe and Mark note, "The legislature simply could not govern what it could not understand."

And we voters, quite naturally, don't trust what we don't understand.
Angered by the complexities as well as the poor results of state government, we repeatedly try to solve budget problems (for example) with ballot initiatives. Almost inevitably, the unintended consequences make matters worse. Enshrining budget priorities in the state constitution is a prescription for failure, yet we try it time after time, expecting different results.

Many of the reforms (e.g., Prop 13) were supposed to establish budget "discipline." Joe and Mark explore the metaphor, comparing voters to dominatrices in an elaborate game of fiscal bondage. We flog our elected officials for failing to satisfy a score of criss-crossing, overlapping, and inconsistent mandates as well as make sensible policy decisions. And in addition to burdening the system with more complexity and myriad unintended consequences, these reforms frequently don't solve the narrow problems they were designed to address.

The remedies for getting out of this hole? First, stop digging. Give Sacramento the tools to do its job and then hold the parties responsible if they fail to deliver. Second, improve the representativeness of state government by shrinking districts and implementing proportional representation and instant-runoff voting. Third, make sure the tasks of government are handled at the appropriate level. One of the unintended consequences of previous reform efforts has been to concentrate control in Sacramento, which is often too far away from problems to solve them well.

I've followed Joe's and Mark's work for some time now. They're shrewd and witty observers of state politics, and both are extraordinarily adept at explaining California's problems clearly. But even their discussion requires a fair amount of focus and acumen to follow. This isn't a criticism of their book, but rather more support for their claim that the sheer complexity of our political problems far outstrips the average citizen's ability to grasp (much less solve) them. So maybe we should stop with the silver-bullet nonsense and get on with the Great Unwinding.

American Taliban and the Politics of Cool

I just heard from Nancy McWilliams, Carey McWilliams's daughter-in-law. She was kind enough to send me two of Carey's books (Ill Fares the Land and Louis Adamic & Shadow America) from Iris McWilliams's library. That means a lot to me.

I've been thinking about Carey McWilliams for other reasons as well. Much of that has to do with the reception of Markos Moulitsas's American Taliban, which compares some American conservatives to their Islamist counterparts. (I acquired the book for PoliPointPress.) Jamelle Bouie, a young reviewer at the American Prospect, rejected the premise of the book, claiming that a) American liberals should leave hyperbole to conservatives, and b) that conservatives haven't gained politically from their rhetorical tactics.

Digby and Hunter refudiated those claims, and I cited a Robert Kuttner article in the American Prospect that made some of the same points as Markos while reviewing Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah. (In fact, Kuttner's article is titled "American Taliban.") Evidently, it's OK for Bob Kuttner to deploy that term in the American Prospect, but when Markos explores it, he gets a lecture.

Naturally, conservative critics (and some liberal ones) have touted the review in an effort to dismiss the book, but the online commentators overwhelmingly support Markos and make some interesting points of their own.

What to do about tone, especially when political passions are running high? When I gave the Bonnie Cashin lecture at UCLA, I spoke admiringly about McWilliams's style and "the politics of cool." I said he was a classic stylist in the sense described by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner in Clear and Simple as the Truth. "Hyperbole is useful in some situations," I noted, "but the classic stylist renounces it. The readers he imagines don't need it, and resorting to tricks would only diminish his hard-earned credibility."

I then asked: "Is there an audience for this style in the age of sound-byte politics, overheated talk radio and blogs, and hyper-theorized scholarship?" The answer is yes, but that audience is a small, elite one. Probably very much like the American Prospect's. "Elite" here doesn't mean you can't join that group; anyone who subscribes to the tenets of critical analysis is welcome. But that community in America, Carey once told Victor Navasky, consists of about 250,000 souls.

The politics of cool, I continued, often holds up well over time but isn't very responsive to the passions of the day, and this limits its intellectual reach as well as its appeal. McWilliams didn't feel in his guts what other Americans did--for example, the fear and resentment of those who voted for Nixon twice. And that meant he couldn't quite fathom the political implications of those emotions. At first he thought Nixon had fooled voters. Later in life, he realized that Americans had understood Nixon perfectly. The times called for a bastard, and Nixon fit the specifications. That's the scarier thought, and I think Bob Kuttner understands its applications today.

Two of McWilliams's books were more polemical: Factories in the Field and Witch Hunt. The first took on farm labor in California and remains one of his classics. It appeared in 1939, during the Great Depression and while European fascism was expanding in force. McWilliams had already traced the links between what he called "farm fascism" and its continental counterpart. Witch Hunt: The Revival of Heresy, which examined the onset of McCarthyism, appeared in 1950, too soon for most Americans to see the links between the persecution of Communists and earlier heresy trials. Arthur Miller's The Crucible came later (1953) and has been the touchstone ever since. Carey later admitted that he got carried away with the historical parallels, and the book never caught on. But in both books, Carey linked an American political vice (labor exploitation, McCarthyism) to something creepy and obviously un-American (fascism, hysterical persecutions).

I'm not sure there are any hard-and-fast rules here, but I agree with Kenneth Burke's point that tolerance, a classic liberal virtue, is an inadequate response to rabid intolerance. And as I've aged, I've been struck by the limits of logical argumentation alone in American public life. I wish that kind of high-minded exchange mattered more, but in this culture, overshooting the mark is sometimes the best way to hit it. Hyperbole is a matter of raising the subject excessively, and we often need it to start or reframe a particular conversation. The American right, by the way, understands this idea very well and has been using it to advantage at every turn.

The UC Loyalty Oath

I just finished reading Bob Blauner's Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California's Loyalty Oath. It's a solid and insightful addition to the literature on that divisive time.

The characters include two of my former professors, Joseph Tussman (philosophy) and Charles Muscatine (English) as well as Earl Warren, Robert Sproul, Clark Kerr, and regent John Francis Neylan, the Hearst adviser and university regent who plays the role of villain. Neylan, a wealthy investor, had been a leading Progressive in the 1920s; indeed, Blauner considers him "the single most powerful politician in California" by the end of that decade.

Here's a sample of Neylan's style during the loyalty oath crisis. After one faculty member raised the issue in his class, Neylan wrote an editorial for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner: "We wonder who, if anyone, gave [him] permission to use his class room as a forum to present a one-sided argument and a vicious attack on the Regents?" Consider the diction. Evidently, professors needed permission to discuss the trauma that Neylan, perhaps more than anyone else, was inflicting on the university and its faculty. And of course, Neylan had no compunctions about launching one-sided arguments and attacks on professors and administrators--in the mass media, to which he had privileged access.

By coincidence, I'm also reading Dave Zirin's Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love, and yesterday, I heard Jane Mayer on Fresh Air discussing the Koch brothers' lavish support for right-wing causes. So I'm feeling more fed up than usual with the disproportionate influence right-wing rich folks exercise in public life.

Mars Arizona

I was browsing at Down Home Music in El Cerrito and came upon an album called High Desert by Mars Arizona. I've been listening to it more or less nonstop since. OK, I've started skipping a few of the cuts (as usual), but I really like a lot of the original songs, including "Jesus Ain't Coming Back (That Way)," "High Desert," and "Alabama Bound." Covers of the Grateful Dead ("It Must Have Been the Roses"), Neil Young ("For the Turnstiles"), and the Rolling Stones ("Sweet Virginia") are icing on the proverbial cake.

I went online and learned more about the musicians and producers who helped Berkeley-based Paul Knowles and Nicole Storto make this record. They include folks who play or work with Wilco, Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, Lucinda Williams, and I See Hawks in L.A. I also learned that Mars Arizona is playing the Red Devil Lounge on Polk Street this Wednesday night. (Tickets are $3.) People, this is exactly why Al Gore invented the World Wide Internet.

Farm City

I just finished reading Novella Carpenter's Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, which is now out in paperback. I don't think for a second that this very successful book needs my endorsement, but I'm happy to add my voice to the choir.

I relished Novella's account of establishing a little farm on an empty lot in Oakland's "Ghost Town" (28th Street). Her story focuses less on veggies and more on bees and critters, which I didn't realize until I dug into the book. Bay Area folks will recognize many landmarks, including Eccolo on 4th Street in Berkeley, which figures prominently in the story. (I've had many enjoyable lunches there, but my computer tells me it's closed now.)

As someone who teaches a class on California culture, I'm especially interested in the tension between two proximate but incompatible approaches to food production and consumption. In the Bay Area, we hear a lot about Michael Pollan's critique of the industrial food system, the Slow Food movement, flourishing organic and farmers' markets, etc. An hour's drive away, UC Davis researchers are pushing back the frontiers of Frankenfood. (I just read on the Food Science & Technology department's website that one faculty member was honored by the Frozen Food Foundation.) Both represent different aspects of the California Dream: one that reveres nature and the environment, the other high-tech.

I had the pleasure of meeting Novella briefly at a Berkeley Library Foundation event earlier this year, and a Bay Area News Group Q & A with her graced my daily newspaper, the West County Times, yesterday.

Novella has been keeping a blog about her experiences, too. She seems to be on hiatus now, but it sounds like she'll be back soon.

Ramparts Review in California History

I somehow missed this review of A Bomb in Every Issue. It appeared in California History and was written by W.J. Rorabaugh, who wrote Berkeley at War: The 1960s. That was a useful source for the Ramparts book.

Hinckle World

I just came across this piece on Warren Hinckle ... sounds like a fun conversation.

I wonder a bit about the comments on A Bomb in Every Issue, but it comes with the territory, I guess. Whether Warren likes it or not, David Horowitz was also an important part of Ramparts magazine's history. (Not to mention Peter Collier and Sol Stern, who thought I was too enamored with Hink/Scheer.) Maybe this conversation would have taken a different turn if Betty Van Patter's name had come up.

For the record, the Hefner foldout Warren mentions in this interview appeared in the September 1965 issue. Dugald Stermer joined the magazine as art director in late 1964.

RIP, Iris Dornfeld McWilliams

Iris Dornfeld McWilliams, Carey's widow and the author of two young adult novels, died on July 7. She was 97.

Steve Cooper, who interviewed Iris for his John Fante biography, was the first to contact me about her passing. This morning I also heard from Katrina vanden Heuvel, who met Iris as a Nation intern. Katrina has since become the magazine's publisher, but one of her first jobs was organizing Carey's papers for the Bancroft and UCLA libraries. Katrina will say a few words at a small ceremony for Iris in New York City tomorrow.

Iris was ailing when I met her at the apartment near Columbia University in the summer of 2003. We had a telephone conversation before that, too, and she was very helpful. Her conversation was bold and insightful, and I can see why Patty Limerick was impressed by her outspokenness. When I visited Iris in the apartment, her main concern was that I was having fun with the biography of her husband. Very sweet.

One thing I learned by reading Carey's diaries: he was very devoted to her. When he was first diagnosed with cancer, his first thoughts were for her. "I came back by way of the Y--stunned: hating to report this to Iris. And dear God I do worry about her! The whole situation in Los Angeles in a mess. Her mother to watch. And her own health--her eyes. I'm beside myself with concern" (Jan. 17, 1978). And she returned that devotion.

They went through a lot together. Their courtship began while he was serving in California state government. She grew up with Joyce Fante, wife of novelist and screenwriter John Fante, one of Carey's close friends. Joyce and John spent lots of family time in the Sacramento area and arranged the first date. (Iris was living in Susanville at that time.) Iris and Carey hit it off right away, and they married in Yuma, Arizona, in the fall of 1941. Their son Jerry was born in October 1942.

Those years were productive for him but also tough in other ways. The Committee on Un-American Activities in California (a.k.a. the Tenney Committee) was pestering him--I have an unreleased transcript of an amazing closed-session exchange--and some legislators even managed to zero out his department's budget because of his politics. (Governor Olson pocket-vetoed the bill.) But he and Iris got through it and, despite his attachment to Los Angeles, they decided to move to NYC so he could work full-time for The Nation. That was 1951.

After some initial resistance, she embraced the city, and they enjoyed their lives there. Bernard Nossiter said their apartment "was a wonderful oasis in those days. The intelligent and decent civil liberties types all drifted in, and as discouraging as the country seemed, the possibilities of an open and sane society seemed alive there."

In the 1970s, after Carey retired as editor, they contemplated a return to Los Angeles, where they still owned a home on North Alvarado. He taught for a semester at UCLA, but in the end, they decided to stay in NYC. (Two words: rent control.)

They raised Jerry in NYC and frequently hosted Carey's son from his first marriage--Wilson Carey McWilliams, also known as Carey, who finished his career teaching political science at Rutgers. After Carey Sr. died in 1980, and Jerry died of AIDS in 1990, Carey Jr. looked after Iris until his own recent death.

Iris and Carey had come a long way from their origins. She started out in rural Northern California, the daughter of a railroad worker and music teacher, then studied music at Mills College in Oakland. She taught music at Lassen Union High School, more than 150 miles north of Sacramento. He started out in the Rocky Mountains, riding to school on horseback past the saloons and such. So ending up in NYC--"vertical living," as Carey called it--surrounded by writers, labor activists, intellectuals, artists and such was quite a journey for both of them.

RIP, Iris.

Summer Reading

Gustavo Arellano appeared on Marketplace yesterday and offered a choice summer reading recommendation: Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island on the Land. Gustavo describes it as "the best guidebook to our twisted, mysterious paradise." Amen.

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that McWilliams's classic also inspired Robert Towne's original screenplay for Chinatown. Need I go on? I didn't think so.

Rolling Stone and General McChrystal

AlterNet ran a quick-hitter I wrote this week on the General McChrystal story. That gave me a chance to consider Rolling Stone's kinship with Ramparts. I didn't include the fact that RS's cover design (see photo) still retains elements borrowed from Mother Ramparts.

Strange Bedfellows

Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, asked me to contribute a piece to his magazine. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall his smart review of the Ramparts book, so perhaps not a huge shock, but certainly unexpected.

The topic was Sydney Schanberg's piece in The Nation a couple years ago--or rather, the mainstream media's refusal to explore its implications, especially as they pertain to John McCain. Daniel collected contributions from Schanberg, Andrew Bacevich, Alexander Cockburn, publisher Ron Unz, and others.

My piece offers some historical parallels, drawn from the McWilliams bio and Ramparts book. In fact, the mainstream outfits often miss or garble big stories for a variety of reasons, and I argue for creating and maintaining a media ecology that includes savvy fringe players that can play the big news organizations off each other. Without big outfits, most stories will never reach large audiences. Without the small ones, many important stories won't be covered at all.

Few oppose that idea in principle, but many reflexively think that the true test of worthiness is the marketplace. If political mags, left or right, can't survive under current conditions, they should perish. But there are plenty of examples of indirect subsidies--both here (in previous eras) and abroad--that have created better conditions for lively political discourse. Like Bob McChesney and John Nichols, I think we need a fresh review of those options--especially if we think that political journalism is a public good.

California Watch

I should have done this a while back, but I'm including a link to the California Watch website on your starboard as well as here. Former Chronicle writer (and former Ramparts contributor!) Louis Freedberg has been serving as founding director, but I just received an email from him announcing that he will now become a senior reporter.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which was co-founded in the 1970s by David Weir, Dan Noyes, and Lowell Bergman--all of whom I've met, one way or another, through the Ramparts project.

Dan is the only one I haven't met personally, but we exchanged email about Angus Mackenzie's book, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, which appeared in 1998. In addition to writing a superb book, which Dan helped see the light of day, Mackenzie worked for the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Although I mention Mackenzie and cite Secrets in the Ramparts book, Dan thought I could have been more generous with my credit. A trade book needs to keep the story hurtling forward, and there's little opportunity to praise one's sources, no matter how valuable, along the way. But let the record show that I learned a lot from the book and recommend it highly to everyone.

Ramparts Interview on KALW

KALW will repeat the Ramparts interview on "Your Call" tomorrow at 10 a.m. Sweet.

It was a pleasure talking to Rose Aguilar for almost an hour about the book. Rose published her book with PoliPointPress, so I've come to know her a little bit--and like her a lot.

The Zocalo Event

Yep, that's me in a necktie, carrying on. Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation asked me to participate in a discussion about California: specifically, whether it would be better off as a separate country (!) That's Joe on the right, and Abe Lowenthal (far left), David Dayen, and Darry Sragow.

I wasn't sure what my contribution would be, but Joe encouraged me to focus on what Carey McWilliams might have said about that question. Which I did, but as my earlier post indicated, I also added a few comments about the key issue where California has acted like a sovereign state: namely, marijuana use.

As I told the Zocalo people, I really like the way they run their business. They're well organized but keep it fun at the same time--a rare combination.

Paris Review

I was pleased to see Karl Whitney's review of the Ramparts book in 3:AM Magazine, a literary magazine based in Paris. Happily, it also has articles on John Fante, Carey McWilliams's good friend and Charles Bukowski's hero. Check it out, I say.

P.S. Don't be misled by my title. Karl Whitney is based in Dublin.

This Just In

Lots to report since the last post.

I attended the cannabis expo this weekend at the Cow Palace with PoliPointPress author John Geluardi. John is writing a book on medical marijuana (Cannabiz) for PoliPointPress, due out this fall.

If you haven't been following the cannabis saga, you may be missing one of the most important political and business stories of our generation. At the very least, it's the latest example of what Carey McWilliams described as California's peculiar ability to act as "a nation demanding what it had the power to take." Ironically, California was the first state to ban marijuana (in 1913) as well as the first state to re-permit its medical use. And as everyone knows by now, the full legalization of marijuana is on the ballot this November. Even if that measure doesn't pass (this time), many observers think that the cannabis industry is the state's Next Big Thing.

The day before my trip to the Cow Palace, I attended a California studies conference at UC Davis. The California Studies Association, which I chair, was a co-sponsor. This was our first chance to partner with Boom, the new California studies journal published by UC Press, and the New America Foundation. I really enjoyed it, especially the chance to give CSA's Carey McWilliams Award to Peter Schrag. Peter's accomplishments made him a natural recipient, but it meant a lot to me personally because Peter was one of the first people to tell me about the importance of McWilliams and his work. (Former PPIC president David Lyon was another.)

One of the participants at Davis was New America fellow Joe Mathews, who invited me to participate in a Zocalo Public Square event in Los Angeles this week. The topic is "Would California Be Better Off as Its Own Country?" My role, I gather, is to channel Carey McWilliams on California as a nation-state. Should be interesting. I plan to mention medical marijuana as Exhibit A in support of McWilliams's 1949 argument that California demands what it has the power to take.

The Grateful Dead

I guess it was inevitable. I teach a class that focuses on utopian and dystopian representations of California, so how could I avoid the Grateful Dead?

A while back I met David Gans, host of "The Grateful Dead Hour" (syndicated) and "Dead to the World" (KPFA). That started me pondering the band and its story. Since then, I've been reading the books, listening to the CDs, watching the films, visiting the website, and generally immersing myself in that world.

One of the attractions, I think, is the sheer volume of material and its multi-sensory appeal. You can read, watch, and listen forever. When the Grateful Dead archive opens at UC Santa Cruz (scheduled for next year), I may find myself on its doorstep. Maybe people will bring their sleeping bags and line up outside.

Both Ramparts and the Dead emerged from the same Palo Alto-San Francisco axis, so the points of contact are certainly there. But the Grateful Dead saga is an even fuller articulation of the utopian-dystopian aspect of California culture.

If you'd like a little taste of that, check out Festival Express (2004). It's a documentary about a Canadian tour in 1970 that included the Dead, Janis Joplin, and The Band. A private train, the Festival Express, transported them from gig to gig. As the Amazon description puts it, "In five days' time, the festival played in three Canadian cities with the entire conglomeration traveling, playing, and getting smashed together the whole way."

The screen grab above is from one of my favorite scenes. It shows a very wasted Rick Danko, Janis, and Jerry singing "Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos." Given what I've read about Garcia, he probably couldn't have been happier traveling, playing, and partying with other musicians around the clock. Every once in a while they got off the train to do a concert.

New Ramparts Book Review

Elbert Ventura has written a very good review of A Bomb in Every Issue for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. By very good, I don't mean it was (only) positive; I mean I learned something about Ramparts. Very insightful.

For those of you keeping score at home, Ventura is managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute. Before joining PPI, he was a research fellow at Media Matters for America. The review indicates a fairly detailed knowledge of the lefty organs of the 1960s, but my little Internet search suggests that he's a young man. Here's a brief bio.

Richmond, Ken Alder, and The White Bus

Looks like I'll be moving back to the East Bay soon--Richmond, to be precise, a couple of miles away from where I grew up. Which puts me in mind of a novel by Ken Alder, a friend from elementary school.

Ken is perhaps best known now as a historian of science and the author of The Measure of All Things, which considers the history of the meter. The book inspired a long article in The New Yorker that year.

But well before Ken became a historian, he wrote a young adult novel called The White Bus (1987). Here's the review from Publishers Weekly:

San Francisco's Martin Luther King Jr. High School is a windowless prison attended predominantly by black students. Ira Allen decides to enroll there, along with his black friend Marc. His parents, who expect Ira to attend a prestigious prep school, are infuriated, which seems to be part of Ira's intention. Deriving its title from the nickname the kids at King give Ira's bus (because it transports kids from the overwhelmingly white suburbs), this promising first novel is the story of Ira's first year at King. Predictably, Ira learns a lot about different kinds of "smarts"; falls in love with a black girl; learns to "talk black." Alder's humor and genuine insights save the book from its stereotypical characters, from the doctrine-spouting Marxist "bloods" who regularly shake down their classmates, to the hip English teacher who sleeps with his students. Wavering between an account of a teenage rite de passage and an earnest statement on integration, the narrative displays a lively intensity that helps to compensate for its flaws.

But those who know Ken's history will recognize the autobiographical element. We lived in the El Cerrito hills. Kids from Richmond were bussed to our elementary school; for high school, the hill kids were bussed to John F. Kennedy High School on Cutting Blvd. in Richmond. So don't let the San Francisco setting fool you. It's all about life in the EC--and Richmond.

Berkeley Public Library Foundation Author's Dinner

Yes, they threw ANOTHER house out the window, this time in Berkeley. The Berkeley Public Library Foundation hosted what can only be described as a gala, and I was lucky enough to receive an invitation. The official title was the 8th Annual Authors Dinner, held on Feb. 6.

Attendees included Michael Chabon, Michael Lewis, Novella Carpenter, Mollie Katzen, Joyce Goldstein, Abraham Verghese, Ernest Callenbach, Frances Dinkelspiel, Geoffery Nunberg, and other accomplished authors. Malcolm Margolin received the Pat & Fred Cody award (above). Also in attendance was Mal Burnstein, former attorney for Ramparts and a former board member of the library foundation.

Awesome.

As it turned out, my table was populated by the staff of the Berkeley Patients Group, a medical cannabis collective. We were joined by Berkeley City Council member Darryl Moore.

SF Public Library Event

Man, that was fun for me. Jonathan Hall of the San Francisco Public Library threw the house out the window (as my students in Texas used to say) for the Ramparts event on Jan. 23. Jonathan and his staff put together four posters with Ramparts clippings, covers, and memorabilia--you can see one of them in Michael Sexton's photograph.

Jonathan also made the shrewdest observation of the day, noting that if Ramparts had been a New York magazine, there would have been a Broadway musical about it long ago.

I was gratified to see lots of Ramparts folks at the event, including the Hinckle family (Warren, Denise, Pia, and Hilary) as well as Gretta Mitchell, Steve Keating, Reese Erlich, Jeff Blankfort, Fred Gardner, and Guy Stilson. David Weir and Cherilyn Parsons of the Center for Investigative Reporting were also there, as was PoliPointPress author Lisa Maldonado. Also some family and friends. A nice culmination.

Robert Fulford on Ramparts

This just in: Robert Fulford of the Canadian National Post weighed in on the Ramparts book in this opinion piece. He describes the magazine as "the most exuberant, effective, foolish and hysterical expression of New Left feelings." Further evidence, if any were needed, that the magazine continues to function as a kind of Rorschach test.

More on Sol Stern and Ramparts

Sol Stern's piece on Ramparts was quickly picked up by Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media and David Horowitz's staff at FrontPage. I responded to Radosh's post, Sol replied to my comment, and I answered Sol's.

I can't be sure any minds were changed, but at least I wasn't preaching to the choir. I don't think Ron Radosh had read my book, but Sol's personal experience at Ramparts and familiarity with my account forced me to defend my claims about the magazine and its legacy.

The truth is I'd much rather argue with someone like Sol than rehearse my points with an uninformed sympathizer.

Sol Stern on Ramparts

Sol Stern, one of Ramparts magazine's key staff writers, just published a piece in City Journal on the magazine and its legacy. Sol either wrote or contributed to some of Ramparts' most important articles, including two on the CIA's involvement with Michigan State University and the National Student Association (NSA). He also wrote the first big piece on the Black Panthers for the New York Times Magazine. In short, his perspective on Ramparts and its achievement is a very valuable one.

In this new article, Sol argues that Ramparts' legacy "was not a positive one for the country." He recalls Warren Hinckle's improvidence and appetite for conspiracy theories, and he regrets his own role in creating "the myth of the Black Panthers as righteous rebels fighting off brutal police oppression." Sol also laments the turn the magazine took after David Horowitz and Peter Collier took over. For him, Exhibit A is the May 1970 cover, which showed the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America in flames, the culmination of student protests at UC Santa Barbara. The caption declared that the incineration of the bank "may have done more for the environment than all the teach-ins put together."

Sol makes a number of other points, but you get the idea. He also maintains that whatever good the magazine did was for the wrong reasons. After questioning the claim in my subtitle--that Ramparts magazine changed America--Sol concedes the point but characterizes that change as "baleful."

Sol's article suggests that my book is unclear about the nature of that change, but I spell it out clearly in the final chapter. Ramparts magazine changed America by reviving the muckraking tradition, by triggering the first attempts to rein in the CIA, and by promoting the civil rights, anti-war, and Black Power movements.

I agree with Sol (and Bob Scheer) that the left's contempt for Cold War liberals was, on balance, counterproductive. Many Ramparts folks I interviewed were ambivalent at best about the Panthers, and most agreed that the Ho-Coll years, when the Bank of America cover appeared, were not the magazine's heyday. But even if we grant Sol's misgivings about the magazine's specific contributions and motives, I think the scale still tilts toward a positive effect on the nation's media, governance, and society.

Consider, for example, the case of Dr. Martin Luther King. While Ronald Reagan was receiving standing ovations for his opposition to fair housing legislation, Ramparts was a staunch ally of Dr. King. When King decided to oppose the war after reading "The Children of Vietnam" in Ramparts, he submitted the text of his famous Riverside Church speech to the magazine, which ran it the next month. Predictably, the mainstream media criticized King for coming out against the war, which even LBJ knew was unwinnable. As Ramparts staffer Bill Turner asked me rhetorically, "When you look back on it, where else would those articles appear? The Saturday Evening Post?"

Consider, too, the case of the CIA. When Ramparts exposed the agency's links to Michigan State University and the NSA, readers were shocked, but that indicates how little Americans knew about the agency's more nefarious activities. The CIA responded by launching an illicit investigation of the magazine and then widening that investigation to include other publications. When Sy Hersh exposed that surveillance in the New York Times, Congress set up its first oversight committees. We soon learned about a wide range of CIA and FBI mischief, including COINTELPRO (to investigate Dr. King and others) and the CIA's recruitment of American mobsters to whack Castro.

i would argue that Ramparts was on the right side of history in both cases. Or would we rather live in a country where the government illegally spies on its civic leaders and journalists, allows landlords to rent only to whites, and decimates countries like Vietnam when that serves some geopolitical purpose?

If those questions hit a little too close to home, maybe that's because they aren't merely academic.

This has become a long post, so I'll leave it here for now. But I encourage you to read Sol's piece and see what you think.

Alice McGrath's Memorial in Ventura

I missed Alice McGrath's memorial party in Ventura, but my daughter Ashley, who met Alice last year, said it was very inspiring. The turnout was predictably great, with heavy representation from the legal community, which held her in great respect for her work dating back to the Sleepy Lagoon trial in the 1940s. That's when she met Carey McWilliams, who changed her life.

I met Alice while working on the McWilliams bio, and I saw her often after that. What a pistol. I'm so glad I met her, and though I'm sad she's gone, I'm thrilled that her life was celebrated by (many of) the people whose lives she touched.

Ramparts Chat on KALW's "Your Call"

I'm listening to my interview with Rose Aguilar on KALW's "Your Call." We taped it last month before Rose left for a long vacation in New Zealand. I never caught the air date, but several friends let me know they heard it on Thursday.

What a pleasure to have a long talk with someone as prepared and receptive as Rose. She does a fantastic job on that show, which introduced me to many other fine programs on KALW, including "Left, Right, and Center," "Counterspin," and "Le Show." I hope her batteries are fully recharged when she returns.

Full disclosure: I acquired and edited Rose's book, Red Highways, for PoliPointPress.

Socialist Review on Ramparts Book

Patrick Ward offers an assessment of A Bomb in Every Issue in the January issue of Socialist Review. Ward has his criticisms, but the overall judgment is very gratifying--especially in light of other favorable reviews from conservative periodicals. In that sense, the Ramparts story seems to transcend the blunt categories we usually bandy about in political discussions.

The Nation and the FBI

I've been talking a lot about Ramparts and its CIA saga, but I'm glad Richard Lingeman has returned our attention to an earlier row between the FBI and The Nation. Lingeman's article, "The File's Tale," shows how the FBI responded to Fred Cook's investigation of the bureau in 1958. Not pretty.

In fact, The Nation under Carey McWilliams shared many of Ramparts' virtues, but their styles were quite different. If Ramparts was a thoroughbred, The Nation was a workhorse, churning out its weekly on a modest budget to a smaller audience. McWilliams was incapable of Warren Hinckle's extravagance, but he turned a journal of opinion into a forum for investigative journalism and shepherded the magazine through the McCarthy era, its most difficult period.

Peter Collier Review in The New Criterion

I was delighted to see Peter Collier's review of the Ramparts book in The New Criterion. Few people were in a better position to see the magazine steadily and whole. Peter started as an editor after working for Bob Scheer's 1966 congressional campaign and stayed on through 1972, when he and David Horowitz were running Ramparts.

Like David, Peter has repudiated the magazine and its politics. Actually, he has flayed them energetically for decades now. So it was no surprise that he thought I was too sympathetic to Ramparts' principals and achievements. To make that charge stick, he had to flatten out my perspective a bit--perhaps knowingly, since he cites material from the book that would disturb even a hardcore leftist.

Peter gave the book good marks on accuracy, but I had to laugh when he mentioned a Ramparts hoax I was unaware of. And this after I mocked the flatfooted media types who fell for the magazine's Warren Commission send-up. More evidence that humility is often the best intellectual posture.

You'll also find some fine phrase-making in Peter's review, including a reference to Warren Hinkle's "heroic Irish liver."

MoJo Book Picks

Another good day for the Ramparts book: Mother Jones picked it as a top book of 2009, and "CounterSpin" rebroadcast our interview, this time with D.D. Guttenplan's discussion of I.F. Stone.