Warren J. Hinckle III, 1938-2016

On Wednesday, August 24, I learned that Warren Hinckle's death was imminent. The former editor of Ramparts magazine had been ailing for some time. Occasionally I was asked how he might be contacted. (He was notorious for not returning telephone calls or opening his mail.) One of those queries led to his oral history at the University of California, Berkeley, but more often than not he wasn't well enough to be interviewed. So I wasn't surprised by the news of Warren's demise. I shared that information with one other person, Bob Scheer. Within hours, David Talbot wrote a Facebook post that essentially served as an obituary. Warren died the next day.

In my Truthdig article and when speaking to the press, I tried to put across how extraordinary Ramparts magazine was under Warren's direction. And I made sure to note that Warren made American journalistic history at least twice: once for leading Ramparts, and then again for pairing Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman, thereby birthing Gonzo journalism. Warren published their article on the Kentucky Derby in 1970; after Scanlan's tanked, Jann Wenner recruited the two for Rolling Stone, which was founded by Jann and Ralph J. Gleason, both Ramparts alumni.

I learned a lot about Warren's post-Ramparts life by reading the coverage and going to his vigil and rosary. But as colorful as that life was, his work at Ramparts was his most significant professional contribution. His showmanship, combined with Bob Scheer's political smarts and Dugald Stermer's flair for design, was the key to Ramparts' success. Bob went on to a long career at the Los Angeles Times and now Truthdig, and Dugald taught and continued to produce important work. But that combination (Hinckle, Scheer, and Stermer) was greater than the sum of its parts.

Review of Gleason Books

The book reviews continue. This week my thoughts on the two Ralph J. Gleason volumes from Yale University Press appeared on Beyond Chron, the alternative news site based in San Francisco. I have only one more review in progress, and that's for an academic journal. Then I'll turn to writing an article on Hunter Thompson's literary formation in San Francisco, 1960-67.

Something Witchy

I noodled out two books reviews connected to what David Talbot calls San Francisco's "season of the witch." The first review appeared on Truthdig and considers Jeffrey Toobin's American Heiress, the Patty Hearst story. The second review is of Joel Selvin's Altamont. It will run in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday. It's my first review for the Chronicle, which my family read during my misspent youth. (This despite the fact that my brothers and I delivered the Oakland Tribune in the afternoon.)

Both books slow walk readers through iconic stories that seem to reveal the failure of Bay Area utopianism, 1960s style. It's true that Altamont and the Hearst affair demonstrate a great deal of fecklessness in the counterculture and contemporary revolutionary politics. And when taken together with the Zebra killings, Jonestown, and other atrocities, there's no denying the witchiness. But still, it's a little too easy to link the utopianism with the witchiness and then reject both of them. Or at any rate, I'd like to hear that argument before jumping to that conclusion. And that argument would have to consider what mainstream American politics was up to during that period. I won't rehearse the details here, but it wasn't a pretty picture.

Ralph J. Gleason

The second Bay Area Book Festival has me reflecting on my little spot in the publishing world. Since the early 1980s, I've sold, acquired, taught, edited, written, reviewed, and otherwise sponsored books on topics ranging from computer engineering to the Grateful Dead. I started with a sales territory in West Texas and New Mexico; now it's mostly writing, reviewing, and events, but I also help prospective authors place their books with the right publisher.

Two of those books--both on Ralph J. Gleason--just came out. That ball started rolling after I realized that Toby Gleason and I shared a Facebook friend. I asked Toby if he had ever considered producing an anthology of his father's key work. Long story short, that book (and a companion) just came out from Yale University Press.

The New Yorker was on the case. It posted a complimentary piece by Richard Brody and used the photograph above.

Baron Wolman, whom I interviewed for my book on the Grateful Dead, made the photograph. Today he told me he took it at a Mills College conference on rock and roll in 1967. That very day, Jann Wenner asked him to work at a new (and as yet unnamed) magazine. That magazine, of course, was Rolling Stone.

Update: My friend Michael Kramer tells me that Phil Spector and Tom Donahue were at that conference, too. Also that he's writing an article about it.

Kepler's Books

I had the honor of appearing at Kepler's Books last week. That's the Menlo Park store that Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and David Nelson haunted during their misspent youths. If memory serves, it's also where Jerry met his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal.

The staff and I were pleased that nearly 100 people attended the talk. I invited my students at San Francisco State University, so the audience ranged from newbies to savvy veterans.

Before the event, Paul Freeman interviewed me for the San Jose Mercury News. His article no doubt boosted the turnout at Kepler's. Paul also posted the transcript on his website, PopCultureClassics.com. I liked the article very much, but the full transcript gave me extra room to rave.

For more on Kepler's and its history, make sure you watch Paperback Dreams, which also features Cody's Books of Berkeley. That was an important bookstore for me. Its erstwhile owner, Andy Ross, is now my agent.

Kathy Olmsted's "Right Out of California"

I just finished reading Kathryn Olmsted's Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. I first learned about it from Gabriel Thompson's enthusiastic Truthdig review. A few quick thoughts on this crisp and expert account.

First, there's the primacy of California agribusiness, which Kathy casts as the state's political crucible. We all know about John Steinbeck, and some of us know about Carey McWilliams, but Kathy argues that the farm labor conflicts of that period actually led to the formation of modern conservatism. Specifically, those conflicts gave rise to the Associated Farmers, a powerful player in state politics. The AF's anticommunist activities, in turn, reached far beyond the fields and eventually touched Hollywood, the University of California, and other key institutions. Along the way, Kathy links the farm labor story to the LAPD Red Squads, Upton Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial bid, the criminal syndicalism trials of Caroline Decker and Pat Chambers, and the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

For me, the real pleasure of this book is watching California conservatism come into sharp focus. I already knew a fair amount about the key episodes, but I hadn't seen the larger pattern they formed. Much of this patterning hinges on Kathy's cast of characters. I learned a lot about Caroline Decker, for example, and Kathy is keen to point out the contributions other women made to the labor struggles of that decade. That Decker's Sacramento prosecutors benefited from AF funding and Red Squad testimony pulls together several important threads.

Kathy also has a lot to say about race. For example, she discusses John Steinbeck's decision to substitute white men for minorities (and women) when fictionalizing the actual events behind In Dubious Battle. Steinbeck's tremendous success reflected a painful truth: Americans cared about California farm labor abuses only when white Americans became its victims. Steinbeck probably understood that very well; either way, his decision is an important one to acknowledge in the classroom. Likewise, I appreciated Kathy's account of Langston Hughes's sojourn in Carmel. The local press reports of his visit display the racial hysteria that the Associated Farmers stoked at every turn.

If you don't believe Kathy's account on this score, I'd be happy to share the transcript of Carey McWilliams's closed-door testimony before the Committee on Un-American Activities in California. Much of that colloquy consisted of Jack Tenney quizzing McWilliams about his views on miscegenation. (McWilliams had recently written Brothers Under the Skin.) The committee never published McWilliams's testimony, but it did publish a characterization of it: his views on miscegenation, it turns out, were consistent with the Communist Party line. California legalized interracial marriage a few years later.

This has turned into a long post, so let me give you the short version: I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in California history or modern conservatism.