Peter Richardson

Orange Sunshine

2011-12-31T09:41:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading Nicholas Schou's Orange Sunshine, which tells the fantastical story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a hippie drug ring centered in Orange County ca. 1970. It's a shaggy one all right: lots of characters, not an especially neat story line, but some riveting episodes.

I first read about this outfit in Peter Conners's White Hand Society, which focuses on Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. (Leary is a key figure in the Brotherhood story.) What I learned from this book is that the Brotherhood's members were street-fighting jerks and petty criminals before they turned on. Then they went cosmic, formed a secret organization, and hatched a plan to sell enough drugs to buy an island in the South Pacific.

That didn't quite work out. Instead of retreating to an island, leader John Griggs purchased a ranch in the desert mountains near Idyllwild, only a couple of hours away from Laguna Beach, the center of their operation. That proved to be a mistake. Instead of eluding law enforcement, the move may have helped police get a bead on the operation. Also, Griggs died there after taking a huge dose of synthetic psilocybin. But the book recounts a fair amount of island time. Several members spent years in Hawaii and helped develop Maui Wowie, the strain of weed that was the rage during my high school years. They also packed a boat full of Mexican pot and sailed it to Hawaii without any navigational instruments. That was another wild ride, well narrated by Schou.

Although the title stresses the Brotherhood's signature brand of mind-melting LSD, their hashish business was the most interesting part of the book. Members trekked to Kandahar when that was an even more remote location than it is now. The first trip took several weeks and was full of twists and turns; in fact, the original destination was Turkey, but some fellow travelers convinced them that Afghanistan had the best stuff. Once there, they scored primo hash from Afghans who would have been at home in the Hebrew Bible. The Brotherhood smuggled it back to the states, often in hollowed out surfboards. The LSD, it turns out, was practically given away, all in an effort to enlighten the world, Leary style. When Leary was sent to prison, the Brotherhood paid the Weathermen to bust him out.

Yeah. Pretty wild.

Organized crime is one of my favorite genres, and there's plenty of that here. But what comes through most vividly to me is the utopian impulse behind the operation. Mostly these guys wanted to surf, drop acid, smoke hash, meditate, and get back to the land. The drugs were in many ways more sacramental than recreational. There was plenty of sex, but Griggs tried to emphasize family life, hippie style, especially on the ranch. (At first, the ranch community excluded unmarried members of the Brotherhood.)

On the edge of the operation was Mike Hynson, best known for his role in Endless Summer, which is nothing if not utopian. For you youngsters, Endless Summer was the 1966 film about two youthful surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave.

The Brotherhood's operation came crashing down in 1972, when law enforcement rounded up members in a multi-state raid. But several remained at large for years, and some went on to lead interesting post-Brotherhood lives.

Hats off to Nick Schou for his research on this amazing story.

On the Ground

2011-12-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

Last week I heard from Sean Stewart, the editor of a new book on the sixties underground press called On the Ground. It joins John McMillian's recent Smoking Typewriters and its precursor, Abe Peck's Uncovering the Sixties, in reviewing the rise and fall of the underground press.

On the Ground complements those books superbly and succeeds on its own as well. Unlike them, it's studded with clips, ads, photographs, and spreads from the Berkeley Barb, San Francisco Oracle, The Black Panther, the San Francisco Express Times, and many other publications. (I've picked the California-based ones, but Sean's focus is national.)

The text features direct testimony from those who founded, contributed to, read, and otherwise helped keep these newspapers alive. We hear from John Sinclair (White Panthers), Paul Krassner (The Realist), Art Kunkin (LA Free Press), Abe Peck, Judy Gumbo Stewart (Berkeley Barb), Bill Ayers, Emory Douglas (The Black Panther), and many others.

The artists include R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), and Bruce Conner, who produced a cover for the San Francisco Oracle. As part of my Grateful Dead research, I'm learning more about both Conner and the Oracle, but I didn't know they were connected.

Sean gives us a minimal structure: ten chapters that a) describe how the work got done and b) track the fortunes of the genre. The headline version is that they got a lot of free stuff from sympathizers, sold a lot of sex ads, used photo-offset printing, worked with the goodfellas who ran (still run?) newsstand distribution, coped with various forms of internal and external strife, got a little carried away toward the end, and finally moved on to other forms of activism and professional life. (Sean concludes with a helpful "where are they now?" section.)

Between the art and the first-person accounts, On the Ground is above all immediate. It allows you to sample the publications, read the insiders' anecdotes, and make up your own mind about these publications.

If you've had your snout in Ramparts for the last few years, you'll see many familiar names. Paul Krassner, of course, was that magazine's "society editor." Jeffrey Blankfort's photographs accompanied its coverage of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and several of his photos appear in my book. Judy Albert got her nickname from Eldridge Cleaver when he was on the Ramparts masthead. Ron Turner of Last Gasp will publish Warren Hinckle's forthcoming book on Hunter Thompson.

(Of course, fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I don't regard Ramparts as an underground publication. The whole point was that it invited comparison with Time, Esquire, Playboy, etc. Let's call this the Garner Thesis--named after the New York Times critic who thought I scanted the underground press in A Bomb in Every Issue.)

I came upon other familiar names, too. One of Norman Solomon's co-authors, Harvey Wasserman, describes how the FBI's infiltration of his underground newspaper indirectly led his collective to begin the anti-nuclear movement in Massachusetts. Jeffrey Blankfort recounts meeting David Fenton, the youngest photographer to place a photo in Life. (He was 17.) Fenton went on to work for Rolling Stone and then founded Fenton Communications, one of the big rainmakers in political communications today.

Sean avoids big conclusions, though the preface by Paul Buhle tries out a few. For example, he calls the underground press "one of the great wonders of modern cultural politics" (ix). Whatever you make of this wonder, Buhle is certainly right that this volume's unique contribution is its combination of oral history and evocative images, a combination that can be absorbed and enjoyed in a single day or savored slowly.

Dugald Stermer RIP

2011-12-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Dugald Stermer, path-breaking art director of Ramparts magazine, died yesterday after a long illness. He was 74.

I got the call last night from Bob Scheer, who heard about it from John Burton. Sad news indeed. I came to know Dugald while I was working on the Ramparts book. He was hugely gifted, highly respected, even beloved. He deserved all the credit he received--and more--for his work at the magazine, and he was also revered for his teaching and art.

He started at Ramparts in 1964, when it was a two-year-old Catholic literary quarterly that resembled “the poetry annual of a midwestern girls school.” But as Ramparts began running more controversial content, Dugald transformed its look and earned the respect of Warren Hinckle and Bob. Between 1966 and 1968, the trio produced a magazine that, according to the New York Times, restored the lapsed institution of muckraking, put showmanship back into journalism, and gave radicalism a commercial megaphone.

Dugald’s art direction was a critical part of that achievement. Ramparts became the first “radical slick” by combining blockbuster investigative stories with high production values, including color, photographs, and glossy paper. That combination supercharged the magazine’s circulation and heightened its impact. When Dr. Martin Luther King came upon a 1967 Ramparts photo-essay called “The Children of Vietnam,” which documented the effects of U.S. bombing on Vietnamese civilians, he immediately decided to come out against the war. King wasn’t the only one affected by that piece; Dugald told me that laying it out was “just about the nastiest job I’ve ever had.”

Dugald left Ramparts in 1970, and the magazine folded for good in 1975, but his influence in the magazine world lives on—most obviously at Rolling Stone, which was founded by Ramparts alumni Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason in 1967. With Dugald’s blessing, Jann lifted design elements from Ramparts, and some still appear prominently on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Born in 1936, Dugald grew up in Los Angeles. “I was a beach boy, your basic forties and fifties kid,” he later said. “I liked playing cowboys and drawing pictures.” In his youth, he was something of a hood. “My image was surly, leather-jacketed, the white t-shirt with rolled up sleeves, the Levi’s hanging low. A nasty little teenager. Who worked in a gas station, so I was greasy on top of all this.” But a high school teacher noticed his talent as a cartoonist and encouraged him to attend college. He studied art at UCLA and worked for two years in a Los Angeles design shop before joining a Houston firm.

In Texas, Dugald met San Francisco advertising guru Howard Gossage, who was helping Hinckle juice up Ramparts. Dugald had no magazine experience, but Gossage arranged for an interview. Dugald learned that founding publisher Edward Keating had enough credit for two more issues. But Dugald didn’t want to design corporate reports forever, so he packed his young family into his Volkswagen bus and headed for the Bay Area. He soon became a key player at the magazine. “I was pretty intransigent about what I did, a ‘my way or the highway’ sort of thing,” he recalled. “I learned early that the person who gets there earliest and leaves latest makes all the decisions. Any territory you could defend was yours.” His easygoing manner and workhorse habits tempered Warren’s extravagance and short attention span. Like Warren, Dugald was a rebel, not a radical, and that quality helped keep the magazine from descending into the doctrinaire.

For Dugald, the fact that Ramparts was located in California was crucial. Because the magazine wasn’t based in New York, it was never expected to succeed. For this reason, Gossage said later, the Ramparts staff was like a troupe of dancing bears; their technique was less important than the fact that they could dance at all. But those low expectations allowed Dugald to innovate, and he made the most of his liberty.

Dugald didn’t read magazines or the alternative press, so he had no preconceived notion of what Ramparts should look like. Mostly he was guided by his UCLA professor’s dictum that the best design is never noticed. To emphasize the magazine’s message rather than its look, Dugald set every line of type—the captions as well as the text—in Times Roman. Drawing on local styles, especially those developed by San Francisco printers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, he produced an elegant design that grounded the magazine’s explosive stories and irreverent tone. “It was a conscious choice to just use one typeface, and make the design very simple,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “It had nothing to do with budgets, although we never had any money … I wanted the magazine, page-to-page, issue-to-issue, to feel like chapters of a book, and, considering our content, to look credible.”

At its peak, Ramparts received the prestigious George Polk Award for excellence in magazine reporting. More established magazines began to emulate Dugald’s approach, and Esquire tried to hire him. But he declined the offer, which would have matched his salary but diminished his artistic control.

Dugald left Ramparts when its new editors, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, engineered Bob Scheer’s ouster. (Warren had already left to found Scanlan’s magazine, where he first matched Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman.) Dugald pursued a freelance career, first as a magazine designer and then as an illustrator. He drew a wildlife series for the Los Angeles Times; worked on campaigns for Levi’s, the Iams Company, the San Diego Zoo, Jaguar Cars, BMW, and Nike; and created editorial illustrations for Time, Esquire, the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Rolling Stone. He designed the Olympic medals for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, and the State Department commissioned him to design the 2009 Earth Day poster. In 1986, he was the subject of a solo exhibition and retrospective at the California Academy of Sciences, and he gave the keynote addresses at the International Conference of Natural Science Illustrators in 2000 and the International Conference of Medical Illustrators in 2001.

Dugald taught illustration for many years at the California College of the Arts, where he was a Distinguished Professor and chaired his department. He was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1997 and served on the Delancey Street Board of Advisors for over 30 years. (The foundation is a residential self-help organization for former substance abusers, ex-convicts, and the homeless.) He is the author of four books: The Art of Revolution (1970) with Susan Sontag, Vanishing Creatures (1981), Vanishing Flora (1995), and Birds & Bees (1995).

In a 2010 interview, Dugald was asked about his career. “As Howard Gossage used to say, ‘The only fit work for an adult is to change the world.’ He said it straight-faced, and while other people might laugh, I always have that in the back of my mind. I don’t walk around with my heart on my sleeve, but I do feel that using our abilities to make things better is a pretty good way of spending a life.”

Update: Stephanie Lee's obituary ran in the San Francisco Chronicle today. She corrected Dugald's age, included family information, specified the cause of death, and got a quote from Bob Scheer. See also Leah Garchik's item in the Chronicle; she knew him for 40 years.

Update redux: Steven Heller's obituary appeared in the New York Times on December 7. Very fitting. Mr. Heller interviewed Dugald for Imprint. (That's the 2010 interview link above.)

One more time: I attended Dugald's memorial at Delancey Street yesterday. Mimi Silbert hosted, there were touching tributes from family members and friends, and John Burton added some earthy humor. Tim Luddy, creative director at Mother Jones, offered this homage. The Los Angeles Times added this obituary and article on Dugald and his work.

Trampling Out the Vintage

2011-11-08T06:38:00.000-08:00

I attended an event at Heyday Books on Sunday and was treated to an unusually interesting couple of hours. About fifty of us squeezed into Malcolm Margolin's parlor to hear Frank Bardacke talk about his new book, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso).

I know a little bit about the UFW from Randy Shaw's book, several documentary films, and my research on Carey McWilliams. But Frank's presentation offered a different and valuable take on the organization and its history. Most of it assorted well with what I thought I knew, but Frank grounded that story differently--and very convincingly. I was impressed with his ability to move from big picture stuff to illustrative detail and back again. And he made it look easy, which is even tougher.

I've known about Frank for a while now. He's featured in a film I always show in my California Culture class called Berkeley in the Sixties. (In fact, I showed it last night.) But I also interviewed him on the telephone for my Ramparts book. This was the first time we've met in person, and I was impressed with him and his presentation, which was personable and forthright. (In his introduction, Jeff Lustig noted that Frank is probably the only person to be kicked out of both Harvard and the UFW.)

As it turned out, I also met Saul Landau at the event. I interviewed him for the Ramparts book but had never met him in person. Saul is another guy with an amazing story, which I'll save for another post. Anne Weills, Bob Scheer's ex and another important figure in the Ramparts story, was also in the house.

Congratulations to Frank and thanks to Malcolm for hosting the event.

The Grateful Dead: Captains of Industry

2011-11-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of meeting Barry Barnes at the American Culture Association meeting in San Antonio this year. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I attended a dozen or so academic panels devoted to the Grateful Dead, and Barry was one of the speakers. He's a business professor, and he has a new book out: Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead. Check out the Boston Globe article here.

This book wasn't an easy road for Barry. After he presented his book idea at a previous meeting, two marketing guys rushed out a similar title, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. That book received some attention at the Atlantic and elsewhere. But Barry's good standing in the Deadhead community helped him land a deal at Grand Central Publishing, a very respectable division of the Hachette Book Group that's helping him get the word out. Kudos to Barry!

7 Walkers and Friends: Well, That Was Fun

2011-10-31T07:32:00.000-07:00

I got a little lucky last night. I knew I wanted to see 7 Walkers, Bill Kreutzmann's band featuring Papa Mali, at the Great American Music Hall. And I heard there might be special guests from Kreutzmann's old band.

So I was delighted to see Mickey Hart come out for the first set along with talking drum virtuoso Sikiru Adepoju. As far as I'm concerned, watching Kreutzmann and Hart drum together is proof positive that I've wasted my life. Utterly. Getting into that groove and staying there for 50 years sounds (and looks) pretty good to me. And guest bassist Reed Mathis from Tea Leaf Green looked like he was having fun, too.

But there was also the extra microphone in the middle of the stage. Could that be for another special guest? The answer came when Bob Weir shambled out a few numbers into the first set. And then Maria Muldaur. It was the first time since 2009 that the three former Dead members appeared together. The first set included "Mister Charlie," "New Speedway Boogie," "Big Railroad Blues," "Bird Song," "Wang Dang Doodle," "Deal," "Sugaree," and a cover of "Fever."

It was an embarrassment of riches for the average fan, who could stroll up to the window, plunk down $25, and amble up to the front of the stage.

I really dug Papa Mali, by the way. No need or desire to compare him to Garcia, but his gator-bait sound crosses very well with the Dead songbook.

My back was killing me, the lingering result of an auto collision two months ago, so I had to decamp after the first set, but I'm looking forward to hearing about the second.

Patrick Atwater: California Dreaming

2011-10-16T05:37:00.000-07:00

Patrick Atwater's A New California Dream: Reconciling the Paradoxes of America's Golden State feels custom-made for my Humanities 450 course at San Francisco State University. (Catalog description: "California Culture. Dynamics of California society and culture in recent times; world oasis, flawed paradise, lifestyle crucible, and creative milieu; function in American culture and Pacific relations.")

In this wide-ranging book, Atwater recounts the state's unique record of hatching economic opportunity and innovation. He's alert to the state's remarkable physical geography and what Carey McWilliams called the authority of the land. And although Atwater's identification with California is strong--there's a boosterish quality to his portrait--he also considers the less uplifting aspects of the state's history and its present governance crisis.

Like all dreams, the California one resists precise definition. Perhaps necessarily, it remains a little beneath or beyond consciousness. In some ways, though, the personal history of Arnold Schwarzenegger captures its key points: the immigrant who makes it big through bodybuilding at the beach (cf. McWilliams's "cult of the body"), then Hollywood movies, and then electoral politics. We even know Arnold's modes of transportation--the Hummer and the Harley--which no doubt reflect the state's obsession with mobility. When it comes to self-fashioning, California style, Schwarzenegger is a parade example.

But many of the state's most intractable problems can be framed as conflicts between two or more aspects of the dream. Consider, for example, land-use showdowns. On the one hand, we believe in economic opportunity, and nothing has provided more of that than real estate development. But we've also inherited John Muir's preservationist ethic, which reveres wilderness. Or food: the organic, slow food culture of the North Bay (for example) exists cheek-by-jowl with the latest Frankenfood advances coming out of UC Davis, about 30 minutes east. Paradoxical, indeed.

Atwater gets this as well as anybody. A fourth-generation Californian, he blends his personal experiences and observations with an armchair survey of the state's history and key themes. Along the way, he cites some of California's shrewdest observers, including Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr, Mike Davis, Richard Walker, Luis Valdez, Joan Didion, Wallace Stegner, Josiah Royce, Jeff Lustig, Henry George, John Muir, James Houston, and Richard Rodriguez.

Atwater never actually delivers on his promise to reconcile paradoxes and dream anew. And despite the book's reading line, this isn't a blueprint. It's a smart, deeply felt, and frankly hortatory essay, but it feels more like a warm-up for a still inchoate project that will make the most of his passion and erudition. May this first effort lead to many more.

Lunch Bucket Paradise

2011-10-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

The good folks at Heyday Books sent along Fred Setterberg's Lunch Bucket Paradise, which I finished reading today. As the title implies, this "true-life novel" and coming-of-age story depicts a particular kind of hog heaven: the East Bay suburbs between World War II and Vietnam.

Some of this ground has been covered (though quite differently) by San Lorenzo native Curtis White in his first novel The Idea of Home. Here our first-person narrator is the son of a Scandinavian mechanic at the Alameda Naval Air Station and an Italian (and very Catholic) housewife. The boy's rites of passage are queued up and handled in order: friends (and their scraps), catechism, yard work, Boy Scouts, gigs, girls, warehouse work, more girls, and finally the prospect of conscription.

I'm a little belated--maybe ten years younger than Setterberg's hero--and raised a few miles north in El Cerrito, but I found the world of this novel familiar territory. If you remember Juan Marichal, Doughboy swimming pools, Archie comic books, Brylcreem, Rice-a-Roni, Rainier ale, and the pleasures of discovering James Brown (for me it was also Tower of Power), you'll probably relate to this fictive world, too.

The novel isn't tightly plotted--several chapters were published in serial form, and it reads more like s series of connected but self-contained sketches. Its pleasures are hitched to the coming-of-age theme, first in the shadow of World War II and then in dread of Vietnam. There's also the specific and unmistakable sense of place. Finally, there's the post-war, California version of unterrified Jeffersonianism, perhaps best embodied by the boy's father, a self-educated, free-thinking family man who wants better for his son. It's not exactly the myth of the happy yeoman, but it's pretty close, and for me it has the ring of truth.

Theodore Roszak, RIP

2011-07-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

We lost another important California writer this week: Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture. He was 77.

As his obituary notes, that book began as a series of articles for The Nation. It doesn't mention his editor, Carey McWilliams, who helped him develop the work. Professor Roszak, who met McWilliams only once in 1964, told me that he considered McWilliams a gentle, friendly, avuncular, and remarkably generous older man who listened carefully and astutely assessed his strengths and weaknesses.

Like many Nation contributors, Professor Roszak was grateful for McWilliams's hands-off editorial style. "He didn't intervene, interfere, or climb all over the work," Roszak recalled. Instead, McWilliams supported him and let him develop his thesis in a four-part series. "It was exactly what I needed at the time," Roszak told me. The series formed the core of his 1969 landmark book, which coined the term counterculture.

I'm sorry to say I never met Professor Roszak in person, even though he lived in Berkeley and taught at Cal State East Bay. But I was grateful for his time when I interviewed him on the telephone for the McWilliams biography. And I'm even more grateful for his important contribution to our understanding of the Bay Area in the 1960s.

The Docks

2011-07-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

The good folks at UC Press sent me Bill Sharpsteen's The Docks, an in-depth look at the Port of Los Angeles.

I've been fascinated with the California ports for years. I suppose it started with my oldest brother and his work. More than three decades ago, he got on as a clerk in the Southern Pacific railroad yard in Oakland, which serves the third busiest U.S. port on the west coast. He moved up through the ranks swiftly, and over the years, I've heard a lot about the longshoremen, railroaders, and Teamsters who make their living there. At one point, too, I interviewed for a communications position with the ILWU, which, as my brother likes to say, still has it locked up. And I've also been attracted to what Sharpsteen calls "the rough beauty the port exudes in all its gritty, complicated glory."

So I was pleased to learn more about the action in Los Angeles-Long Beach, by far the biggest port complex in these parts. Sharpsteen offers a series of snapshots, interviewing and hanging out with captains, pilots, shippers, longshoremen, chandlers, truckers, clerks, environmental activists, port security--just about every type of person with an interest in what goes on there. And as the book makes clear, a lot goes on there. The volume of container traffic coming through the port is staggering, as are the logistics. The economic and environmental impacts of the ports are, I think, woefully underestimated. And having ingested Sharpsteen's chapter on the Diesel Death Zone, I'm especially glad I didn't buy that loft in Emeryville.

I use the term snapshot advisedly. Sharpsteen is also an award-winning documentary producer, and his approach is to let the reader see and hear what he encounters. Remarkably, most of the book is in the present tense, presumably to lend immediacy to his account. (The most notable exception is an excursus on the ILWU and its history, which lives in the middle of the book.) Perhaps for this reason, The Docks feels like an exceptionally long magazine article.

My first reaction was that this approach somehow diminished the book's authority. Having stuck with the slide show, however, and made it to the history section, I would recommend the book to anyone who shares my interest in this unique subculture.

Larry McMurtry and Literary Life

2011-07-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

I came upon the second volume of Larry McMurtry's Literary Life: A Second Memoir yesterday at Mrs. Dalloway's in Berkeley. This morning I inhaled all 175 pages and relished them all.

My interest in McMurtry has two basic sources. First, I met him in Denton, Texas, where he studied as an undergraduate. He returned to give a talk at the University of North Texas while I was a faculty member there. (His brother was in the English department's graduate program at the time.) We ate at Ranchman's Cafe, his favorite steakhouse in nearby Ponder. This was after his heart surgery, which he discussed that evening as well as in this book.

The second link is McMurtry's stint at Stanford University's writing program, where his fellow students included Ken Kesey and many other talented authors. The writing program figures in Philip Fradkin's biography of Wallace Stegner, which I wrote about for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, as well as in my Grateful Dead research. (The Dead were closely connected to Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.) Without dwelling on the program, Stegner, or Kesey, McMurtry conveys a way of understanding all three that I found instructive and appealing. I also learned that McMurtry (like Kesey and the Dead) was and is a big fan of Kerouac's On the Road, especially the scroll version that was released in 2007.

About his own work, McMurtry is modest. "I was a midlist novelist who had gotten lucky with the movies, that's all," he writes at one point, although in this particular passage he may have been trying to capture how his New York colleagues regarded him. At another point, he notes that he aspired to, and finally did, become "a man of letters."

Between his long list of books, essays for The New York Review of Books, screenwriting credits (including an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain), bookselling and collecting, and his stint as American PEN president, McMurtry really has led an admirable and unique literary life. What a great pleasure to spin through this slender volume and learn more about that life. "The commonwealth of literature is complex," he writes toward the end, "but a sense of belonging to it is an important feeling for a writer to have and to keep."

Catherine Mulholland, RIP

2011-07-09T12:19:00.000-07:00

Catherine Mullholland passed away this week. Her grandfather, William Mulholland, built the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was the subject of her 2000 biography, published by UC Press. She was 88.

Carey McWilliams figures in her obituary, which requires a quick clarification. McWilliams doesn't say or suggest that William Mulholland was in cahoots with the business syndicate behind the Owens Valley water caper. McWilliams does, however, call Mulholland "the engineer responsible for the Owens Valley fiasco" (Southern California, p. 191).

I can see why Catherine Mulholland was "sobered and perplexed" by McWilliams's account, which one of her teachers recommended to her. And though I can also see why she objected to Chinatown, which was based on McWilliams's work, the obituary is slightly misleading on this point as well. In the film, the character of Hollis Mulwray essentially plays her grandfather. But Mulwray is by no means a villain or unsympathetic character. To the contrary, he's one of the chief victims of his father-in-law's ruthlessness.

Catherine Mulholland spent most of her final years discussing her grandfather's work and legacy. I'm certainly not the only person who welcomed the publication of William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. It received favorable notices in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which also named it the best nonfiction book of the year.

Secret Exhibition

2011-07-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

I came upon Rebecca Solnit's Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era this week. Turns out this was her first book, published by City Lights.

I'd heard about some of the artists through the Grateful Dead research; one of them, Wally Hedrick (photo), was Jerry Garcia's mentor. But this was my most substantive introduction to the folks who came to the Bay Area to study and teach at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute).

Solnit's discussion helped me understand how these artists set the stage for the Beat and hippie scenes in San Francisco. Garcia was 15 years old when he began studying at the art school. That was the same year he got his first guitar and discovered marijuana. It was also the year the San Francisco art scene received national attention via an Evergreen Review cover story. It's easy to see how this scene would shape Garcia's attitudes about art and life.

John Geluardi: Reppin' the 510

2011-05-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I edited Cannabiz, John Geluardi's book on the medical marijuana business. That snappy little read was an eye-opener for me, largely because I was so accustomed to the policy and law enforcement angles on the weed meme. John convinced me that the big story belonged in Forbes and Fortune. Not unlike Indian gaming 15 years ago, medical marijuana is on the glide path to big bucks and mainstream acceptance.

John's back with the cover story in the current issue of the East Bay Express, the alternative weekly based in Oakland. It features my adopted city of Richmond--by coincidence, perhaps, the opening setting in Cannabiz. I moved here a year ago, and my little house stands a couple miles from the El Cerrito neighborhood of my misspent youth.

John's article, "The Man Behind Richmond's Renaissance," is a nice turn of events for this often overlooked city. As the article notes, what little media attention Richmond has attracted is usually related to its violent crime. And now that I think about it, the only bit of popular-culture status Richmond has secured for itself is the (largely negative) portrait in "Coach Carter," the Hollywood film starring Samuel L. Jackson as Richmond High basketball coach Ken Carter. (I played with Kenny on the 1977 Contra Costa County All-Stars; another teammate was Stan Van Gundy, now head coach of the Orlando Magic.)

John's piece indicates that Richmond's fortunes are beginning to improve, and much of the credit is going to city manager Bill Lindsay. Check it out, I say.

David Gans at SF State

2011-05-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, David Gans graciously agreed to visit our California Culture class at San Francisco State and talk about the Grateful Dead. David hosts at least three radio programs on the Dead (Sirius XM, KPFA, and his syndicated show) and has been writing about the band for decades.

The course materials and discussions prepared us well for his remarks. We had already covered Kerouac, Kesey, and the San Francisco counterculture generally. But our Q & A followed by David's performance of his original song, "Who Killed Uncle John?" was especially successful this time. You just can't beat live conversation and music, and the student reception was gratifying. Here are some excerpts from their informal responses:

"I felt like David Gans was the best guest speaker ever. He had such a genuine passion for what he was talking about, and he was a true authority."

"David Gans' presentation last week was a lot of fun ... It was satisfying to me to see his success in pursuing a career in an area that he truly felt passionate about."

"I really enjoyed David Gans' visit to our class ... You should definitely continue to invite him to your classes. His song at the end, 'Who Killed Uncle John?' was the perfect way to end the class!"

"That was awesome hearing what David had to say about the band. I really enjoyed it."

"Plus he brought his guitar! Awesome!"

"I thought he was a wonderful guest speaker. It seemed to me he was really connected with music in such a deep way ... He explained how people used to get together and just listen. It made [music] a shared experience instead of an individual one."

"Man, what a really great experience. Having absolutely zero knowledge or interest in the Grateful Dead, Gans' eloquent and insightful expanse of knowledge of the Grateful Dead and the culture and circumstances surrounding them truly opened my eyes to a margin of music history that I never thought I'd be able to relate to or care about."

"I enjoyed hearing about the Grateful Dead, but my favorite thing that happened while he was there was his song. It was so amazing! Thanks for bringing him. :)"

"His discussion was incredibly interesting ... Even David's own music was extremely motivating, and I cannot wait to listen to his radio show on KPFA. Thanks again for having him come speak."

"Meeting David last week was as engaging as it was enthralling. He is literally a link to a very unique and integral part of California history."

"'I served the man who served his art' was a very powerful line in David Gans' song. I enjoyed the sentiment of the line as it symbolized his loyalty to the artist. This loyalty was contradicted by the notion of all the other individuals in Garcia's life who seemed to slowly drain the life out of him."

"David's song, 'Who Killed Uncle John?' was such a great experience. Before last class, I had no idea who David Gans was, but as I told my friends about him, many knew just who he was. He was even on iTunes!"

Grateful Dead Scholarship

2011-04-27T20:31:00.001-07:00

I traveled to San Antonio for a popular culture conference last week, but the only sessions I saw were on the Grateful Dead--more than a dozen in all, plus extracurricular activities. We heard presentations from a wide variety of fields: philosophy, psychology, sociology, literary studies, business, and musicology. Extraordinary.

Nick Meriwether, who heads up the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz, invited me to submit an abstract when I visited campus last year. I began with Warren Hinckle's 1967 Ramparts article on the hippies, then segued to the utopian impulses that I think help account for the Dead's success, then brought it back to Warren and Rolling Stone. I don't think anyone at the conference was surprised by my utopian stuff, but I suspect they were less familiar with the Ramparts back story.

But what makes such conferences successful are the informal exchanges during and between the presentations, and this conference was very productive in that department. I discovered that Jay Williams of Critical Inquiry had offered a similar analysis but with a bohemian (not utopian) focus last year. Helpful, especially when our conversations turned up many other points of contact.

Nick distributed Dead Studies, which included a transcript of Ralph Gleason's 1967 private communication with historian and musician Frank Kofsky. (The communication is from the Dead archive.) Gleason resigned from Ramparts after the Hinckle article appeared, and later that year he launched Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner. His communication discusses the San Francisco music scene and the differences between the hippies and politicos. He talks at some length about Bob Scheer, who was the managing editor at Ramparts and had almost captured the Democratic nomination in his East Bay congressional district the previous year. (Bob was also a friend of Bill Graham.) That communication was invaluable to me; it grounded my ideas in the firsthand, contemporary observations of a key player.

The musicologists at the conference were awesome. Among other things, they offered guided listenings to some classic Dead jams. And on top of everything else, the Grateful Dead scholars as a whole are a fun group. Not unprecedented in the annals of academia, but very welcome.

Update: John Swansburg of Slate posted a piece on the conference. It looks like he appreciated the possibilities here. I've never been a big believer in reading the comments section, but the presumptions in the batch I saw were striking. I caught several whiffs of what my dissertation director called an intellectual sin: contempt prior to investigation.

Earth Day: The One That Got Away

2011-04-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

After the Ramparts book came out, I developed a list of high-profile ways that the magazine changed America, as per my subtitle. The best example is probably the Martin Luther King story; he came out against the Vietnam War for the first time after flipping through Ramparts at an airport. On the radio, you don't want to spend a lot of time on set-up or explanation, so that one's a keeper. Everyone gets it.

The one that got away was Earth Day. I didn't get this story into the book, but as Tim Redmond's piece reminds us, Senator Gaylord Nelson, a liberal Republican from Wisconsin, got the idea for a national teach-in on the environment after reading Ramparts on a flight from Santa Barbara to Oakland. The beaches of Santa Barbara had been soaked by a massive oil spill the year before, so the moment was right. The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970, and 20 million people participated.

The Ramparts editors couldn't quite accept the compliment. Their May 1970 cover showed the Isla Vista Bank of America in flames as a result of student anti-war protests. The caption declared that the incineration of the bank "may have done more for the environment than all the teach-ins put together." That one alienated even some longtime supporters.

The Information Age!

2011-04-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

As my little bio says, I teach California Culture at San Francisco State University, and I'm currently reading student essays. It's not as fun as it sounds, especially since the enrollment is sizable (about 70 students), I teach two other courses, and I have no teaching assistants or graders for any of them. In short, almost 2,000 pages of student writing per semester plus other prep, and you don't want to hear about the money.

But the purpose of this post is to report a shift in student norms when it comes to reading and writing. The unspoken assumption seems to be that books are yesterday's news, even in humanities classes. Everything you need is at your fingertips, so why read anything else?

The way this plays out in the essays is instructive. I typically ask students to come up with their own paper topics so they can decide what matters to them. Several chose to focus on Chester Himes's novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go. The protagonist's name is Bob Jones, but two of the essays I read yesterday called him William Clinton. Curious, I googled the book title with that name and found that the Wikipedia page for this novel does indeed list William Jefferson Clinton, our 42nd president, as the novel's hero. Which means that at least two students wrote entire essays about this book without reading or even consulting it.

I'm not in the mood to scold or draw sweeping generalizations from this little sample, but three things come immediately to mind. First, not everything reduces to its information value, and novels are an obvious reminder of this. The whole point is to enter an imaginary world and see what happens in it--and to you. No reading means no reading experience.

Second, attending a state university is like a trip to Yosemite. Both places are public resources that offer potentially rich experiences, but everyone has the right to a shallow one. Taking a humanities class and refusing to read any books--I can only imagine how glancingly these students regarded the books they DIDN'T write about--is a little like going to Yosemite and hanging out by the snack shack.

Third, of course, is the lesson provided by the gag itself. Someone thought it would be funny, I suppose, to place President Clinton's name in that slot, and Wikipedia's editors haven't corrected it yet. I'm sure they will, but there's a larger cultural issue here. Having decided to privilege information over imagination, we also neglect to check the quality of the information. This isn't a shot at Wikipedia, which I often use and have contributed to, but rather a comment on the bargain we've made as a culture.

When the emphasis falls on free, fast, and easy, we often get cheap. Lots of people I know understand this concept when it comes to food, but their digital utopianism is as unexamined as ever. Maybe we should all read You Are Not a Gadget, which considers this question in more depth. I think the author's name is Chester Alan Arthur. (I just used Wikipedia to check the correct spelling.)

Jonathan Rowe, 1946-2011

2011-03-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

My colleagues and I at the California Studies Association were shocked and saddened to hear that Jonathan Rowe passed away suddenly last week. He was 65.

I met Jon on the CSA steering committee. Our 2007 conference on the crisis of the California commons intersected with his work at the Tomales Bay Institute in Point Reyes, where he also hosted a public affairs program on KWMR.

Over the next few years, I appeared on the program twice to discuss my books. I also guest-hosted when Jon was out of town, joined his local pick-up basketball game, and visited him and his family at their home. He was damn good company.

I'm not familiar with every aspect of Jon's work, but he was extraordinarily productive and versatile. He grew up in Boston, was trained as a lawyer, and worked for Ralph Nader early on. He also served as a congressional staffer and wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, American Prospect, Washington Monthly, and many other publications.

Jon did all of his own thinking, wrote beautifully, and was a shrewd observer of people and politics. "The Language of Strangers," his 2008 piece on community journalism in West Marin, is a minor masterpiece.

You can also see Jon's genius and originality in the Senate testimony he gave a few years ago; some of it appeared in the June 2008 issue of Harper's magazine under the title, "Our Phony Economy."

Jon's friends are putting together a website with more of his work--190 articles now and counting.

Last weekend, Jon went to the gym and came home feeling bad. That night, he had a high fever and went to the hospital. He died the next morning. Frankly, it's hard for me to fathom, but I wanted to make sure I honored Jon by calling attention to his life and work.

87 Harrington

2011-03-18T13:10:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the efforts of Nicholas Meriwether, Grateful Dead archivist at UC Santa Cruz, I'm scheduled to deliver a paper on the Dead next month in San Antonio. In addition to working the keyboard, that means reviewing the literature I ingested last year and taking a few informal field trips on the side. This week I visited one of Jerry Garcia's boyhood homes in the Excelsior, a working-class (formerly Irish-Catholic, now largely Asian and Latino) neighborhood that I pass several times a week on my way to San Francisco State University.

Harrington Street is one block long and connects Alemany and Mission on the south side of I-280, which links downtown San Francisco and Daly City. 87 Harrington, which sold for $60,000 in 1994, will never be mistaken for a national historical landmark. But visiting it helps me understand the comment often attributed to Garcia: "San Francisco is San Francisco, the rest of the country is Daly City."

California Women and Politics

2011-03-17T07:27:00.000-07:00

I attended the California Studies dinner last night in Berkeley and was treated to the perfect blend of expertise and conviviality that I associate with these monthly events. Bob Cherny and Mary Ann Irwin discussed their new book, California Women and Politics (University of Nebraska), and as usual, I learned a lot in the most pleasant way possible.

The book, a compilation of essays, covers various aspects of women's activism and political participation from the Gold Rush through the 1920s. But many of the essays focus on the Progressive Era, when California women won the right to vote, and the talk last night paid special attention to the ways women put that right to immediate use. The chapters cover, among other topics, the temperance movement, Phoebe Apperson Hearst's philanthropy, settlement work, environmental activism, women's clubs, and trade unionism.

Bob and Mary Ann's presentations were followed by questions and discussion, and this is where these dinners really stand out. Those on hand last night included Bob's colleagues at San Francisco State, Charles Postel and Bill Issel; host and Berkeley City College historian Chuck Wollenberg; author and Berkeley blogger Frances Dinkelspiel; UC Berkeley historian Mark Brilliant; UC Berkeley oral historian Lisa Rubens; and Jewish historian Ava Kahn. Most have presented their own latest work at these dinners, and just listening to their exchanges is a form of higher education.

Kudos to Matt Bokovoy, this book's editor at the University of Nebraska Press. He originally signed the project during his tenure at the University of Oklahoma Press. When he moved to Nebraska, his successors at Oklahoma wavered in their commitment to the book, and he was able to pick it up again.

Ironically, attending the dinner last night meant that I missed two episodes of Saving the Bay, an excellent documentary (narrated by Robert Redford) on Bay Area history. It includes comments from many regulars at these dinners, including Bob, Chuck, Dick Walker, Malcolm Margolin, and Gray Brechin.

Figures of Speech

2011-03-05T14:26:00.001-08:00

I just returned from a book event in Oakland for William Bennett Turner's Figures of Speech: First Amendment Heroes and Villains. Superb book, important topic, and an author who blends deep expertise with a clear, personal prose style. Bill not only teaches this material at UC Berkeley, but he also has argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court. (Believe me, I'm only scratching the surface of his credentials.)

Bill's event brought out a remarkable cross-section of supporters, including Elizabeth Farnsworth, Carl Pope, Peter Sussman, Wendy Lesser, and Leah Garchik. And probably a dozen more notables that I didn't even know about. Which is one of the reasons I like living in the Bay Area.

Full disclosure: I acquired this book for PoliPointPress, but I didn't do much editing on it. Bill had most of the book ready to go before we even met for coffee across the street from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall.

Southern California

2011-02-28T07:17:00.001-08:00

This morning I came upon an adroit piece in the Los Angeles Times on Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island on the Land. The article, by Christopher Hawthorne, is part of a Reading L.A. project that began with books by Morrow Mayo and Louis Adamic. (McWilliams knew both men and was especially close to Adamic.)

I left a comment on the L.A. Times' website, but I forgot to add my favorite point about this book, which is that it directly inspired Robert Townes's Oscar-winning original screenplay for Chinatown.

Ramparts Book Review in "The Sixties"

2011-01-14T08:56:00.000-08:00

I just read a review of A Bomb in Every Issue published in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. The reviewer, a graduate student in journalism named William Gillis, credits the book on many fronts but also found shortcomings. This feels like a teachable moment, so here goes.

Mr. Gillis's first criticism is that I "failed to exhaustively comb the documentary record." He then lists two articles absent from the bibliography. One is by Adam Hochschild, who specifically asked me not to cite the article Gillis mentions because it wasn't edited to his liking. (Adam asked me instead to cite a related article that does appear in the bibliography.)

But there's a larger point here about audience: specifically, a trade versus an academic audience. I included citations only when I quoted written sources. Otherwise the notes section would have exceeded what my publisher wanted for a trade book. That doesn't mean I neglected other material. And if I quote Jann Wenner, and you can see from the back matter that I interviewed him, it's not hard to infer that the quote comes from the interview.

"The incomplete nature of the author's research," Mr. Gillis claims, "is evident in the account of the CIA's investigation of the magazine." Specifically, I didn't mention that "the CIA also had the Internal Revenue Service investigate (and sometimes audit) the tax records of the magazine's staff and contributors." Mr. Gillis seems to have missed the relevant passage in my book: "The day after Hinckle's ads appeared [CIA officer Richard] Ober received the magazine's tax returns from the IRS. It audited them along with [Ramparts publisher Ed] Keating's personal returns from 1960 to 1964" (p. 78).

Mr. Gillis also argues that I failed to make good on the book's ambitious subtitle, which claims that Ramparts magazine changed America. The problem, he claims, is that I rely on "the oral testimony of two men who were college students during that period." One of the two men (I think) is Jeff Cohen, who later founded Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which today publishes Extra! and produces "CounterSpin," a syndicated radio program about media bias. (Later, Jeff appeared on CNN's "Crossfire" and became Phil Donahue's producer at MSNBC.) The other man I quote is a former Black Panther. For some reason, Mr. Gillis omits any mention of the very next passage in the book, which shows that a Ramparts article directly caused Dr. Martin Luther King to speak out against the Vietnam War for the first time.

This material is in the middle of the book, but the final chapter is specifically devoted to the question of how Ramparts changed America. I won't rehearse the arguments here; the main point is that readers of this review won't know that these arguments exist. Throughout the book, but especially in the final chapter, there is ample testimony and evidence--from people like Jann Wenner, Adam Hochschild, Lowell Bergman, David Weir, Peniel Joseph, Tim Weiner, etc.--that Ramparts helped change American media, society, and governance. Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that Mr. Gillis could write that sentence about the two college students.

Mr. Gillis concludes that my arguments for Ramparts' influence "might also explain the book's most glaring flaw: the author's overemphasis on Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party." Mr. Gillis immediately concedes that the connection between the magazine and the party was important and quotes Peniel Joseph to that effect. (I do, too.) The problem is that I devote too many pages to Cleaver and the Panthers.

Again, I think the review ignores an important part of the book's coverage. Mr. Gillis doesn't mention Betty Van Patter, the Ramparts bookkeeper who many suspect was murdered by the Panthers. Her death was an important turning point for several major figures at Ramparts, including David Horowitz and Peter Collier. You can't understand the full Ramparts story and legacy if you ignore Betty Van Patter, and that means telling some parts of the Panthers story.

You get the idea. I appreciate Mr. Gillis's compliments about the worthiness of the topic, the book's readability, and some of my major claims. And he's entitled to wish for a more academic version with different proportions. But most reviewers try harder to get their facts straight and to measure a book against its own aspirations.

Citizen Journalism Night at The Booksmith

2011-01-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

Rose Aguilar and I will appear at The Booksmith on Tuesday, Feb. 1, at 7:30 p.m. The topic is citizen journalism--or rather, lame journalism and what to do about it. There will probably be references to Ramparts along the way, but I mostly want to talk about what's ailing the media ecology today.

Rose brings a lot of experience and expertise to this topic. She hosts "Your Call" on KALW, of course, and her media roundups on Friday keep her attuned to the overall performances of reporters, authors, analysts, pundits, etc. She's incredibly well informed, versatile, and indefatigable. I can't wait to hear her thoughts on this.

This is a Melissa Mytinger production, so hats off to her. But I also want to give it up for The Booksmith more generally as one of my favorite bookstores. Lots of cool titles and superb events plus a piquant location.

Covering 1968

2010-12-15T09:34:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-13T13:15:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-19T07:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-18T11:46:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-08T08:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-19T15:33:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-15T14:25:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-12T10:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-29T17:03:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-12T07:40:00.001-08:00

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

2010-03-11T06:09:00.001-08:00

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

2010-03-09T08:56:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-26T08:38:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-01T08:09:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

This just in: Robert Fulford of the Canadian National Post weighed in on the Rampart 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

2010-01-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T06:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-11T08:53:00.000-08:00

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"

2010-01-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-01T06:47:00.000-08:00

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.

OLLI Course on Bay Area Journalism

2009-12-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

I'm looking forward to teaching a course, starting in late January, for UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). It's called "The Rest of the Story: Radical and Alternative Journalism in California, 1939-2009."

The idea is to survey California's key outlets for political journalism--including KPFA, Ramparts, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Daily Kos, and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR)--to better understand our niche in the national media ecology.

To help us do that, I've invited Peter Schrag, Larry Bensky, Adam Hochschild, David Weir, and Susan Gardner (executive editor of Daily Kos) to join me in a conversation with OLLI's members.

It's an exciting prospect to speak with people who have made such huge contributions over the years. And many of these folks were involved with two or more key organizations. Adam wrote for Ramparts before he started Mother Jones. Larry was also with Ramparts before he landed at KPFA. David wrote for Rolling Stone (see image above) before he co-founded CIR. Peter has written for The Nation for decades, including during the McWilliams Era, in addition to editing the editorial page of the Sacramento Bee. So I imagine we'll get some interestingly layered perspectives.

To sign up for the course, click here.

Ramparts News

2009-12-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a good day for A Bomb in Every Issue.

Rose Aguilar interviewed me for KALW's "Your Call." The program should air in January.

Tom Gallagher posted a favorable review on his blog, Demockracy.

I learned that the WELL, the birthplace of the online community movement, will feature the book for two weeks in February.

I received a message from Ellen Adler, publisher of The New Press, who said orders for the book were strong.

And, to top it off, the San Francisco Chronicle named the book one of the 50 notable Bay Area books of the year.

Daniel McCarthy on Ramparts

2009-12-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

I just read Daniel McCarthy's review of A Bomb in Every Issue. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but this is one of the most careful and appreciative readings I've come across.

I certainly wasn't expecting lines like this, on the early days of the New Left: "Richardson doesn’t waste words moralizing. He draws a picture and leaves the reader to draw conclusions—one of which might be that you could hardly blame a young man for wanting to take a blowtorch to the entire puking establishment."

McCarthy's conclusion: "Somebody should have listened to Thomas Merton." Writing for Ramparts, the Trappist monk and bestselling author urged (white) liberals to support the civil rights movement, warned of “an eventual civil war that might wreck the fabric of American society,” and feared “there might be a danger of Marxist elements ‘capturing’ the revolution."

Consider, too, McCarthy's description of Ramparts' editorial line--or, at least, one of its elements. Borrowing a term from Benjamin Tucker, McCarthy detects an "unterrified Jeffersonianism." Perfect.

The cover image above is from a past issue, but it conveys a bit more of the magazine's iconoclasm.

The 1968 Project

2009-12-12T09:47:00.001-08:00

I spent yesterday at the Oakland Museum (now closed for renovations) discussing a forthcoming museum exhibition. The working title is "The 1968 Project," and its website is here. The Oakland Museum of California is a partner, and the curators wanted to go over the plans with a group of locals. I was lucky enough to be selected.

I won't rehearse the details of our discussion here, but I found it very stimulating. It's almost impossible not to plunge directly into the politics of that momentous year, and that's exactly what I did at first. I suppose we're still struggling over who gets to tell that story and how. But the worlds of science, sports, religion, literature, film, music, art, television, fashion and so on were clicking along, and though none of those realms was untouched by politics, I was glad to see some balances struck in the presentation.

Full disclosure: I'm not really a visual or spatial thinker. As a Skando Lutheran (raised that way, I mean), it's all about the word for me. So when I think about all the different considerations in putting together an exhibit like this, I marvel at the talent of those who can pull it off. So many choices to make! Not just on the "content," but on the presentation. My god, where do you start? Happily, this project is well on its way and should be fascinating.

Ramparts: History and Design

2009-12-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

One of the best outcomes of the Ramparts book has been a renewed interest in the magazine's design. Several pieces have appeared, mostly online, and mostly focused on Dugald Stermer, the magazine's art director from 1964 to 1969. As I stress in the book, Dugald's contribution was an indispensable part of the magazine's success.

The most recent article comes from Steven Heller of the School of Visual Arts. An art director at the New York Times for over three decades, Heller interviewed Dugald and offers his own take on the magazine's successes and challenges.

It's always interesting to hear the experts discuss the magazine's look. My work as editorial director at PoliPointPress has taught me a few things about design, but I wish I knew more about it. A lot more. So I'm especially grateful for pieces like Heller's.

I already knew from my interview with Dugald that his son was the model for the April 1969 cover (above). What I didn't know was that his son's name was Chris, and that his reward for helping out with the cover was a trip to IHOP. That little bit of information came out in Jim Welte's piece for the Marin Independent-Journal.

Ramparts To Be Available Online!

2009-12-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

This just in: Alexander Street Press has secured the rights to publish the full line of Ramparts magazine online. It will be available by subscription as part of The Sixties!, which includes primary documents and personal narratives that date from 1960 to 1974.

This will be a boon to researchers and aficionados everywhere. I heard about Alexander Street Press from Elliot Kanter, former editorial board member at Ramparts and now a librarian at UC San Diego. He suggested it to me when I interviewed him, I mentioned it to Guy Stilson (whose family owns the copyrights), and it turned out to be a good match.

Lo-Cal Swing

2009-12-02T07:50:00.001-08:00

I'm off to Southern California this weekend for three events. I'll join Bob Scheer at all three, and Bob and I will appear with Scott Ritter and Iraq veteran Georg-Andreas Pogany at two of those.

The first event is in Venice on Saturday, Dec. 5. It's called "War, Media, and the Plight of the Veterans." We'll do it again on Sunday afternoon in Pasadena. Here's the link with more info: http://www.theveteransproject.org/?page_id=15.

The third event is also in Pasadena on Sunday. Bob and I will appear at All Saints Episcopal Church at 10 a.m. to talk about Ramparts magazine and A Bomb in Every Issue. More info here: http://www.allsaints-pas.org/site/PageServer?pagename=new_worship_splash.

Ramparts Story in Marin I-J

2009-11-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

I was in Palm Desert with family when the Marin Independent-Journal ran a front-page (!) article on Ramparts magazine. The Contra Costa Times ran the same piece.

Jim Welte interviewed me but also came up with new material by checking with art director Dugald Stermer (who used to live in Mill Valley) and Marin resident Bill Turner, the former FBI agent and Ramparts staff writer.

The photograph was Jeff Vendsel's idea. He had me lie on the floor in my entry way with magazines scattered on the floor around me.

Pamuk and McWilliams

2009-11-23T07:53:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Lewis MacAdams's piece on Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk's stroll through downtown Los Angeles. Evidently, Pamuk relished Carey McWilliams's inscription in Pershing Square. "This is the only city I've been in," he laughed delightedly, "where a guy writes horrible things about the town and the town is so proud of him they put his quote in the park!"

Gustavo on C-Mac--and Orange County

2009-11-05T13:09:00.000-08:00

Carey McWilliams has many fans, but few are more ardent--and productive--than Gustavo Arellano.

Gustavo's latest contribution to Gunkist Memories notes that McWilliams continues to outperform Orange County historians, especially when it comes to the 1936 citrus strike and the even more consequential Mendez vs. Westminster decision, which McWilliams said might "sound the death knell of Jim Crow in education."

I See Hawks in L.A.

2009-10-27T06:46:00.000-07:00

As usual, my Lo-Cal swing produced some unexpected benefits. One was appearing in Marina Del Rey with I See Hawks in L.A.

Dave Alvin (whom my daughters and I saw at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this year) describes the band as "a talented, literate bunch of soulful musicians" creating "honest and wise roots music for the ages."

Before Bob Scheer and I went on with Jay Levin, founder of LA Weekly, we had a chance to visit with Paul Lacques. In the pic, he's second from the left. Later, I swapped a copy of the Ramparts book and an undisclosed sum of cash for four CDs. Then I listened to them on the drive up I-5. Good driving music, and many superb tunes.

I especially like "Good and Foolish Times" from the "Hallowed Ground" CD. First rate, as fine as anything I've heard recently. (It moved me off my obsession with Neil Young's "Down by the River.") But there are other catchy ones, too, including "Carbon Dated Love," "Hallowed Ground," "Raised by Hippies," etc.

Bonnie Simmons, are you listening? Please consider giving these guys some KPFA air time and inviting them to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass next year.

The New Dust Bowl?

2009-10-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen these signs, too. My father told me about them after a drive up I-5 months ago. I saw them more recently while returning from Los Angeles.

Congress created a dust bowl? My father accepted the claim on its face. I figured it had something to do with the attempt to balance the health of the Delta with agribusiness's insatiable thirst for cheap water.

According to Josh Harkinson's piece in the current issue of Mother Jones, the situation is a bit more complicated. (Sorry, can't seem to link to the story.) Yes, the feds have cut water deliveries and are trying to protect the delta smelt. But the valley is suffering for other reasons as well. The economy has been decimated by the housing bust and the recession more generally. Bankruptcy filings are double the national average. And there's a prolonged drought in progress: thus, less water to go around. Since agribusiness consumes something like 80 percent of California's water, it was bound to feel the effects. It takes a little doing to pin a drought on Congress, but there you have it.

CSA's own Dick Walker is quoted in the piece on the farmers' refusal to acknowledge the long-term water supply problems. "The dollar signs overwhelmed the warning signs," Dick said. He knows a little bit about the subject; his book, The Conquest of Bread, surveys 150 years of agribusiness in California.

While you're visiting the Mother Jones website, don't forget the Ramparts book excerpts.

Trumbo: The Movie

2009-10-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

I rented Trumbo last night. Yes, I realize I'm a bit late to this party. I didn't see the play, which might have prepared me better for this film. In particular, I didn't realize how much of it would consist of dramatic readings of Trumbo's writings, especially his correspondence.

That approach certainly features the power of his prose. A withering letter to his daughter's school principal, for example, is a tour de force. (Apparently Mitzi was ostracized for her father's political views.) The film also includes a poem composed to his son Christopher on his tenth birthday, which Trumbo evidently spent in federal prison for contempt of Congress. (He did indeed have contempt for that Congress.)

But I admit to some slight disappointment that the film didn't hew to the conventions of straight documentary filmmaking. The dramatic readings by Hollywood celebrities probably raised the project's profile, but they make the film less useful for me and my purposes at San Francisco State. I've been looking for a film to replace Hollywood on Trial, which also contains remarkable footage of Trumbo but is in poor condition and expensive to replace. This one offers far less historical detail about HUAC, Hollywood, McCarthyism, etc.

I doubt the filmmaker's will be crestfallen by this verdict. Just as well.

Not surprisingly, the film passes over a remarkable detail in the Trumbo family history: namely, that Mitzi dated Steve Martin while they were in college. Martin's exposure to the family was something of an eye-opener for him. Check out Born Standing Up and consider the serendipities of American popular culture.

David Kipen, now at the National Endowment for the Arts, alerted me to another remarkable detail this week. Trumbo, John Fante, and Carey McWilliams all left Colorado at approximately the same time, bound for Los Angeles to cut a swath. There were giants in the earth in those days.

Time Magazine: The Dream Endures

2009-10-23T06:05:00.000-07:00

Time magazine takes a bit of a drubbing in the Ramparts book, but at least it has the good sense to quote Carey McWilliams in its current piece, "The End of California: Dream On!"

Michael Grunwald's article falls back on the (seemingly) ancient tension between utopian and dystopian representations of the state. In the popular imagination, California is either heaven on earth or an apocalyptic mess.

Sometimes the reality is more prosaic: for example, the predictable volatility that results from relying on sales and income taxes to fund public services. (Texas, which doesn't tax income but manages to collect sensible property taxes, seems to be doing better.)

Sorry, did I kill your buzz?

I'll probably get plenty of the prosaic version today when I attend a UC Berkeley event called "What Ails California?" It's a mini-conference hosted by the Institute of Governmental Studies and Department of Political Science.

Ramparts Dispatch

2009-10-01T07:16:00.001-07:00

Many thanks to everyone who came out for the Los Angeles and Bay Area events. Special thanks to Bob Scheer, who went out of his way to recommend the book to various live and radio audiences. All props to Michael Sexton, who shot this photograph of Warren Hinckle at Vesuvio Cafe.

Here's an incomplete roundup of the lit, media, events, etc.

Reviews:

*Jack Shafer's New York Times piece
*Dwight Garner's New York Times article
*Erik Himmelsbach's review in the Los Angeles Times
*Peter Collier's take in the New Criterion
*Sol Stern's piece in City Journal
*Daniel McCarthy's essay in the American Conservative
*Elbert Ventura's insightful review in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
*Robert Fulford's denunciation of the magazine and its legacy in the National Post
*Patrick Ward's generous assessment in Socialist Review
*Frances Dinkelspiel's SFGate (and Ghost Word) piece
*Randy Shaw's review on Beyond Chron
*Ron Jacobs's take on CounterPunch
*Rick Kleffel's piece (and podcast) for "The Agony Column" on bookotron.com
*Jonah Raskin's article for the San Francisco Chronicle
*Randy Michael Signor's review, Chicago Sun-Times
*John Lombardi's freewheeling essay in Las Vegas Weekly
*Jane Isay's endorsement on Huffington Post
*Clint Hendler's take in the Columbia Journalism Review
*Karl Whitney's review in 3:AM Magazine, based in Paris
*Tom Gallagher's review on his blog, Demockracy
*Bill Castanier's essay in City Pulse
*Treehugger pulled together a cross-section of related articles and selected quotes about Ramparts and the book.

Interviews:

*Andy Ross for Ask the Agent
*Asawin Suebsaeng for College Reporter
*Jamie Glazov for FrontPage
*Marty Flynn on Hunter S. Thompson Books
*Robert Newman on Dugald Stermer for the Society of Publication Designers
*Aaron Leonard for History News Network
*Jim Welte for the Marin Independent-Journal.

Excerpts and Related Articles:

*Chapter 1 is on the New York Times website
*An adaptation of Chapter 3 appeared in California History
*Truthdig posted an essay adapted from Chapter 5
*An essay based on Chapter 6 appears on ColdType
*Mother Jones assembled some key passage for its website
*California magazine has a piece in the Fall issue called "Radical Slick."

Media Appearances:

July 29, "Politics with Norman Solomon," KWMR.
Aug. 19, "This Is America" with Jon Elliott, San Diego 1700 AM.
Aug. 23, "Sunday Sedition" with Andrea Lewis, KPFA.
Sept. 15, "America Offline," KWMR, 90.5 FM.
Sept. 15, "The John Rothmann Show", KGO AM 810.
Sept. 26, "Edge of Sports" with Dave Zirin. XM Channel 167.
Oct. 11, "The Agony Column" with Rick Kleffel, KUSP (Santa Cruz).
Oct. 12, "A Public Affair" with Norman Stockwell, WORT (Madison).
Oct. 12, "Connect the Dots" with Lila Garrett, KPFK.
Oct. 13, "Uprising" with Sonali Kolhatkar, KPFK.
Oct. 14, "Four O'Clock with Jon Wiener," KPFK.
Oct. 16-22, "CounterSpin," 150 stations nationally.
Oct. 22, Truthdig interview (video) with Kasia Anderson and Robert Scheer.
Nov. 10, "The Politics of Culture" with Will Lewis, KCRW.
Nov. 29, "Media Matters with Bob McChesney," WILL-AM 580.
Dec. 9, "No Alibis" with Elizabeth Robertson, KCSB.
Jan. 7, "Your Call" with Rose Aguilar, KALW.

Bay Area Events:

Sept. 16, California Studies Dinner Seminar, 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley, 7 p.m.
Sept. 21,Peninsula Peace and Justice Center with Steve Keating, First Presbyterian Church, 1140 Cowper St., Palo Alto, noon and 7:30 p.m.
Sept. 23, City Lights book party with Warren Hinckle and Larry Bensky, Vesuvio Cafe, 255 Columbus, San Francisco, 7 p.m.
Sept. 24, Berkeley Arts & Letters with Robert Scheer, introduction by Susan Griffin, First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley, 7:30 p.m.
Sept. 25, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, with Robert Scheer, at Lowell Bergman's master's project seminar.
Sept. 25, Book Passage with Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, 7 p.m.
Sept. 29, Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st Avenue, Capitola, 7:30 p.m.
Oct. 22, San Francisco State University (Yumi Wilson's journalism class, Humanities 312), 12:30 p.m.
Nov. 3, Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, Berkeley, 7 p.m.
Jan. 23, San Francisco Main Public Library, 100 Larkin St., Latino/Hispanic Meeting Rooms A+B, Lower level, San Francisco, 11 a.m.

Los Angeles Events:

Oct. 5, Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., W. Hollywood, 7 p.m.
Oct. 6, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, noon.
Oct. 6, USC with Robert Scheer's class
Oct. 7, USC with Robert Scheer's class
Oct. 9, Village Books with Derek Shearer, 1049 Swarthmore Avenue, Pacific Palisades, 7:30 p.m.
Oct. 10, "The State and Future of Journalism in America" with Robert Scheer and Jay Levin, founder of LA Weekly. Music by I See Hawks in L.A. Hosted by Jeff Norman, The Warehouse, 4499 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, 5 p.m.
Dec. 5, "War, Media, and the Plight of Veterans," with Scott Ritter, Robert Scheer, and Georg-Andreas Pogany. Venice United Methodist Church, 2210 Lincoln Blvd, Venice, 2 p.m. Also Dec. 6 at the Woman's Club of South Pasadena, 1424 Fremont Avenue, South Pasadena, 2 p.m.
Dec. 6, Rector's Forum with Robert Scheer, All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 N. Euclid, Pasadena, 10 a.m.

I'll use this space to keep the calendar and article news up to date. If you have ideas for events--campus and bookstore talks, etc.--please pass them along.

My New Passion

2009-06-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

In my never-ending quest for new and unremunerative activities, I filled in as guest host on "Politics with Norman Solomon" at KWMR last Wednesday and again yesterday. What can I say? I love public radio, and I was honored that Norman asked. My reward was two drives to Point Reyes Station, the pleasure of meeting the station's staff, and the chance to visit with Dan Weintraub about the California state budget.

Dan is a real pro, by the way; not only a shrewd observer of the state political scene, but also a lucid, interesting, and polished speaker on a broad range of topics. After he explained the budget debacle and discussed the recent special election, we spoke a bit about his book, Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter.

As far as on-air mechanics, let's just say that I'm a work in progress. I'll get a little more practice later this month when I fill in for Jon Rowe on KWMR's "America Offline," which airs Tuesdays from 5:30 to 6:30. It looks like I'll have Sasha Abramsky, author of Breadline USA on June 23. I hope to have Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, on June 30. Marjorie is the author of two PoliPointPress books, Cowboy Republic and Rules of Disengagement.

David Ulin on Frances Kroll Ring

2009-06-09T13:43:00.001-07:00

I'm not going to lie to you; I'd love to keep the Ramparts blurbs front and center for as long as possible. But today a David Ulin piece on Frances Kroll Ring swam into my ken, and I can't resist.

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall my telephone conversation with Frances, her book (Against the Current), and the film based on her experience (Last Call), where she was played memorably by Neve Campbell.

What? You don't recall? Frances was F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary and later edited Carey McWilliams for Westways. Good God, people, pull it together. Maybe these links will jog your memory.

http://peterrichardson.blogspot.com/2006/08/f-scott-fitzgerald-and-frances-ring.html
http://peterrichardson.blogspot.com/2006/08/against-current.html
http://peterrichardson.blogspot.com/2006/12/last-call.html

More Ramparts blurbs

2009-06-07T08:45:00.001-07:00

More blurbs for A Bomb in Every Issue:

“It’s a great delight to see this key chapter in the history of American journalism at last get the readable, judicious history it deserves. Ramparts touched the lives of far more people than its readers by paving the way for the rich universe of alternative media now open to us. Peter Richardson has told an important story, and told it well.”

— Adam Hochschild, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, and author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

“America’s muckraking tradition stretches back to the 1690s—but no publication better represented it than Ramparts. In the 1960s, it helped set a generation on fire, tore away a veil of hypocrisy in public life, and set new standards in editorial and design quality. Richardson’s tale brings the dead to life, and gives us a new understanding of how journalism changes the way we are and will be.”

— Richard Parker, Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University, and author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics

“Peter Richardson captures the extravagant idealism, brilliance, and shortcomings of the radical magazine Ramparts, whose hard-edged challenges to mainstream American politics and culture still resonate today. Entertaining and thought-provoking.”

— Eve Pell, award-winning investigative reporter and author of We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante

“Peter Richardson does a fine job fairly recreating the brilliant and crazy atmosphere—the ingenuity and bravado, farce and tragedy—that resulted when the mad geniuses, talented radicals, hustlers, hucksters, and charlatans of Ramparts dived together into the Sixties’ white water cascade. It’s as if Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Doris Lessing had decided to collaborate on a true life story.”

— Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology, Columbia University, and author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

New Ramparts Blurbs

2009-05-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

The New Press alerted me to two new blurbs for the Ramparts book yesterday. One is from Douglas Brinkley, whose publications include edited volumes of Hunter Thompson's correspondence and a recent piece on Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone. Yep, that's Sean Penn in the background.

The other blurb is from Lowell Bergman. You've seen his work on Frontline, he teaches journalism at Berkeley, and he was played by Al Pacino in The Insider. For another look at The Speech from that film, click here.

***

"What an incredible story Peter Richardson has told! Ramparts magazine turned the Sixties on its head with a high-octane combination of avant-garde satire and gumshoe investigative reporting. A Bomb in Every Issue is an excellent history that shouldn't be ignored. I can't recommend it enough."

—Douglas Brinkley

“Peter Richardson has done a brilliant job bringing to life the incredible story of Ramparts, a publication that changed journalism and the world it reported on. This book will become required reading for all those concerned about the current crisis in the world of news. The legacy of Ramparts, as Richardson tells it, is that you can always lose money and produce dynamite journalism. In fact, reporting, editing and promoting a truly important story in the public interest may require it!

"A Bomb in Every Issue makes clear that Ramparts in its prime was a vortex of flamboyance and critical intelligence. Out of that maelstrom came reporting that truly changed America. It’s a story that, I trust, will soon be repeated. My bet is that when it happens, this now defunct child of the ‘60s as presented here will be a guiding light for its progeny.

"What makes this book even better is that it has not ignored or downplayed the foibles of Ramparts’ founders and chief architects. It is a cautionary tale told with economy that will be a touchstone for the new journalism, the new Ramparts of the 21st century.”

—Lowell Bergman

My Chronicle

2009-05-13T14:46:00.001-07:00

When I was growing up, my family read the San Francisco Chronicle. We chuckled over Art Hoppe's column and breezed through Herb Caen's. My mom liked Stanton Delaplane, and Charles McCabe was like an honorary weird uncle. My brothers and I delivered the Oakland Tribune in the El Cerrito hills, but the Chronicle was our paper of record.

Bay Area residents like to complain about the Chronicle--this is our birthright. But when I returned to the Bay Area in 1999, I probably read the Contra Costa Times more often. I even picked up the Examiner for a while, since it was free and included the New York Times crossword puzzle.

But I knew the Chronicle was struggling, and I wanted vaguely to help, so when a guy outside Safeway offered me a trial subscription, I went for it. Three days a week for two months, $16. I paid cash.

The delivery was spotty--three times I plied my driveway in vain--but more important, I found little I wanted to read. I already get a lot of news from other sources, and I don't care to read about food, restaurants, cars, parties, or the opera. I glanced at the opinion, sports, and real estate sections, but I actively resented the scant attention to books. I realize most dailies don't even have a Sunday book review, but God almighty, give us something to read already.

The trial period elapsed, but the paper kept coming. I received a bill and ignored it; I was paid up, and I didn't want to renew at more than twice the introductory rate. More papers. I went online and learned that subscriptions continue until you cancel them. Naturally, it was impossible to do that online. Two more bills arrived, and I sent them back marked "cancel." More papers.

Finally I got a telephone call from a guy who wanted to sell me a subscription. I told him the whole story, and he offered to cancel the outstanding balance and set me up with a Sunday-only subscription. OK. Then he asked me: are you getting the paper now? Well, yeah. He couldn't sell me a subscription until I canceled my old one. He gave me an 800 number to call.

Which I did for some reason. I spoke to a helpful young woman with a Filipino accent. She told me that my subscription was canceled and offered to erase the outstanding balance. Wonderful. I asked if she was in the Philippines. Yes, Manila.

Have your irony flares fired yet? Maybe it's me, but it seems odd to call halfway around the world to help save your local newspaper.

May 2009 update: I got the paper today, about three months after my subscription expired. I look forward to reading it.

Louise Dyble on the Golden Gate Bridge

2009-05-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

Don't take this title literally. Louise isn't on the Golden Gate Bridge, but she was on Jon Rowe's KWMR show last night talking about Paying the Toll, her history of the bridge. And, more specifically, the special district created to manage it.

I was in Point Reyes Station last night and heard a bit of the show. I also saw Jon, who mentioned some of the big stories Louise is sitting on.

One is that the bridge district killed the extension of BART into Marin County. I'd always thought that anti-growth forces were responsible for that.

What's ironic, of course, is that the bridge was constructed precisely to foster growth and development. That's why Ansel Adams and other Sierra Clubbers opposed it.

I see that Louise is blogging actively again, so I'm reposting that link on your starboard.

Green New Deal Redux

2009-05-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

So we started our work last night in San Rafael. Norman Solomon and Lisa Maldonado, executive director of the North Bay Labor Council, co-chaired the first public hearing on the Green New Deal for the North Bay.

Harvey Smith kicked it off by discussing the connection between California's Living New Deal Project and our mission. Then we heard from local residents, small business people, and activists about a range of issues, especially the need to review Marin County's approach to waste, recycling, and water treatment.

IMHO, we're off to a good start.

Green New Deal for the North Bay

2009-05-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

I start my career as a commissar--er, commissioner--this week. I agreed to serve on a grassroots initiative called the Green New Deal for the North Bay.

Norman Solomon describes the initiative in a Marin Independent-Journal piece today. One of the key goals is to integrate the labor and environmental agendas in Marin and Sonoma Counties.

Toward that end, we'll hold eight public hearings this month to hear from residents. The first hearing is in San Rafael on Friday.

In the fall, we'll hear from experts on water, housing, transportation, agriculture, and other areas. Then we'll write a report and launch a public dialogue on the findings.

L.A. Times Festival of Books

2009-04-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to return from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. That's not as easy as it sounds. My Sunday night flight was delayed several hours, so I decided to bunk in Burbank last night.

But the festival is hard to leave for another reason. It's glorious to see so many readers and writers strolling the UCLA campus. Plus the panels are great, and the weather was gorgeous.

I also ran into a lot of friends: Malcolm Margolin, Sasha Abramsky, Frances Dinkelspiel, Cherilyn Parsons, Adrian Maher, etc. And I connected, in some cases for the first time, with some fellow authors. That includes Gustavo Arellano and Ernie Freeberg, whose Gene Debs bio I reviewed for the L.A. Times. That book, Democracy's Prisoner, was a finalist for the festival's book award in biography.

I also saw Randy Shaw, editor of Beyond Chron and author of Beyond the Fields, the UC Press book on the UFW organizers and their lasting influence. Randy and Ernie were on the same panel.

On Saturday night, Sasha and I attended a Truthdig panel and fundraiser. The featured guests were Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges, both of whom had plenty to say about American media and politics. Bob Scheer hosted the panel. Stanley Sheinbaum, Zuade Kaufman, and Peter Scheer were also there, and afterwards we repaired to Bob's digs for the post-panel wingding.

Unfortunately, I missed Frances's panel with Bill Deverell. I really wanted to make that--it also included D.J. Waldie, whom I've never met--but I ended up battling traffic to the Truthdig event downtown. It took me well over an hour (on Saturday afternoon) to get there. I arrived 30 minutes late, but I didn't miss anything, since Amy and Chris were caught in the same traffic. But I was riding good in my rented Mustang, so what the hell.

Silicon Valley--The Place

2009-04-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valleys' staggering success, which depends on a new technological innovation every decade or so, fits a longstanding and powerful story about California that stretches back to gold rush. That story used to figure California as the Great Exception. Now it also seems more like the Great Template. What's happening here, we tell the rest of the world, will be happening near you soon.

But the Silicon Valley story tends to obscure at least as much as it reveals. Mostly it conceals the history (let's call it the people's history) and the everyday quality of life on the ground here. That part of the story is the focus of the California Studies Association conference I'm attending today at De Anza College.

I won't try to summarize the fine presentations I've heard here, but here's a little factoid for you. We usually talk about the San Francisco Bay Area. Makes sense, right? But the Census folks talk about the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area. Yep, Santa Clara County is by far the most populous one in the nine-county Bay Area. It's also a huge economic engine. But I wouldn't dream of telling anyone I was from the San Jose area.

Hemingway on Lee, Part II

2009-04-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

Mark Hemingway replied yesterday on National Review Online to the Barbara Lee post. I really do want to let the Ramparts book do the talking on this point, because the context is important. But he's probably right that my main beef, at least in this instance, is with Barbara Lee's comment on the death of Betty Van Patter.

Did I make too big a deal out of the mistake in Hemingway's review? Probably. After all, the piece was a book review, and the mistake was in Lee's book. In fact, I tried to correct that error last year, when I saw the book in galleys at Book Expo America. I pointed it out to the fellow in the publisher's booth, and he took down the info, etc. Then the book appeared with the same mistake.

After I saw the galleys, I mentioned this passage to Tamara Baltar, Betty's daughter, who also worked for Ramparts (and later, Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting). It was a difficult conversation for me; I can't imagine what it was like for Tamara. That made it easier for me to assign a lot of significance to the mistake--both in Lee's book and in Hemingway's review.

The more important point is what Lee writes about the Panthers and Betty. Lee implies that the government may have committed the murder and then blamed it on the Panthers: "This kind of tactic had been seen before and was known to have been used by the government’s anti-Panther COINTELPRO group." I'm not convinced that's what happened here, and neither are Betty's former colleagues at Ramparts. But COINTELPRO's legacy makes that kind of comment more or less predictable.

And it wasn't just the FBI. The CIA was also keeping an eye on domestic groups, including Ramparts after the magazine exposed some of the agency's covert operations in Vietnam. When a CIA agent briefed his boss on his plans for screwing up the magazine, the boss reportedly replied, "Eddie, you have a spot of blood on your pinafore." Much of this illegality was exposed later by former Ramparts contributor Sy Hersh in the New York Times.

I don't think either end of the ideological spectrum has a monopoly on virtue here, but in the meantime, I'd like to do my small part to keep the facts straight. Sometimes that's hard enough, and I appreciate Hemingway's prompt correction to his review.

National Review on Barbara Lee

2009-04-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

Mark Hemingway of National Review Online posted a book review of Barbara Lee's Renegade for Peace & Justice with predictable results. Hemingway asks: "What exactly is wrong with her?"

Certainly Lee's recent visit to Cuba and her erstwhile connection to the Black Panthers are perfect grist for the right-wing mill. The review's title, "Comrade Barbara," is drawn from Bobby Seale's moniker for Lee after she became involved with the Black Students Union at Mills College.

Lee's book also figures in my Ramparts research, and on one of the points that Hemingway raises: her halfhearted defense of the Black Panthers in the murder of Betty Van Patter, the magazine's former bookkeeper. I won't rehearse the details here--that's what the book is for--but I don't think Lee's cursory discussion enhances her honor.

But let's not get too carried with Hemingway's argument, either. For one thing, he gets Betty's name wrong. He calls her Betty Van Tanner, thereby repeating Lee's mistake in the book. This despite the fact that Hemingway mentions David Horowitz's account of this brutal episode in Radical Son, which at least gets the names right.

I don't think I can credit anyone, left or right, whose control of the facts is that loose.

Speaking of National Review and its founder, William F. Buckley, some of us recall his television program, Firing Line. But did you know that Robert Scheer appeared on it? The title of that episode was "Is Ramparts Magazine Un-American?" If you know anything about the participants, you can imagine the tone of the exchange.

The Firing Line tapes are hard to find now--I had to visit the Hoover Institution to watch the Scheer episode--but I discuss that exchange in the book, whose publication date is September 8.

Secondhand Sounds Redux

2009-04-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Secondhand Sounds, which airs on KCSB, is pushing back the frontiers of indie, R&B, and roots music broadcasting. What's less well known, perhaps, is that the show has moved to a new time slot: Wednesday from 6 to 8 a.m.

I know what you're thinking. Will this move dilute the fierce independence that helped the program dominate the airwaves every other Saturday between 4 and 6 a.m.? All I can say is, tune in and find out. You can catch the webcast at the KCSB link above. For those of you who are still fumbling around, trying to find out where the real action is, check the other link to see what you've missed. Just do it. Now.

We Used to Own the Bronx

2009-04-17T06:46:00.000-07:00

Don't let the title fool you: Eve Pell's memoir, which features her privileged upbringing on the east coast, is also a fascinating portrait of San Francisco radical journalism during the 60s and 70s.

Eve traces her U.S. roots to the mid-17th century, when Thomas Pell received enormous parcels of land from the British crown and local Indians. When she says they used to own the Bronx, she really means it. Remember the book The Taking of Pelham 123 about the hijacked subway train? (If not, you'll get another shot at it with the John Travolta and Denzel Washington film this year.) Pelham is named after them, and they still have the right to claim a fat calf annually from the city of New Rochelle.

Over the years, the Pells have sold the land, married well, and lived very comfortably in WASPy bastions like Tuxedo Park. The family's public face, I suppose, has been U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, and their name still graces the student grants he cooked up in the Higher Education Act of 1965.

The California part of the story unfolds when Eve marries an architect based in San Francisco. There she begins working for Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, who figure heavily in the development of Ramparts magazine. Her marriage dissolves when she begins to question many of the social and political conventions her family supported reflexively.

She goes on to work in the prison movement, meets George Jackson, and is brought face-to-face with a world that couldn't be less like the one she grew up in. Later, she crosses paths with former Ramparts editor David Horowitz, who, unbeknownst to her, is tacking hard right in his political voyage. That becomes a problem when Horowitz uses her as a source to discredit the movement she labored in for years.

I don't want to give away the whole story, which Eve tells briskly, honestly, and with a great knack for selection and emphasis. But in one up-tempo book, you get an ethnography of East Coast privilege and an insider's account of San Francisco movement journalism. That's good value, people.

Full disclosure: I interviewed Eve over the telephone for the Ramparts book. Though we've never met in person, she visited my home with her husband, who was my mother's boss at the Department of Labor in San Francisco.

Silicon Valley Event

2009-04-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Save the date: Friday, April 24. The California Studies Association is hosting an all-day conference called "Debugging the Silicon Dream: Real Life in a Virtual World" at De Anza College in Cupertino. Here's the description:

The Internet floats in the popular imagination like a disembodied utopia; the mecca of Silicon Valley rises out of nowhere, built by technological genius and entrepreneurial drive. In real life, however, these stories obscure more than they reveal. This conference aims to "ground" public discussion about the Internet, Silicon Valley, and high-tech California. The event will bring together scholars, artists, community leaders, and the broader public to explore both the real-world forces that shape these developments and their consequences for people and place.

Click here for more information: panels, speakers, schedule, etc. If you're a student in my San Francisco State class, you will receive extravagant credit toward your course participation grade for attending this. Free for students, but please register for food planning purposes.

Tom Braden ... and Ramparts Magazine

2009-04-06T06:18:00.001-07:00

Tom Braden died this week. According to the Washington Post, he was head of the CIA's International Organizations Division, which secretly funded U.S. cultural, labor, and educational groups in an effort to thwart the spread of communism during the Cold War.

Ramparts exposed that funding in a 1967 article about the CIA's connection to the National Students Association. Braden defended the secret program, which he said was his idea, in an article for the Saturday Evening Post. The title of that article was "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral.'"

Braden went on to write Eight is Enough, which became a long-running situation comedy. He also appeared on "Crossfire," where he was the designated liberal. He was later replaced by Michael Kinsley.

Fante's 100th Birthday

2009-04-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

Zocalo will host an event at the Hammer Museum this Tuesday to celebrate the 100th birthday of Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter John Fante. David Kipen will moderate a panel that includes Fante biographer Stephen Cooper. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall how highly I regard Steve and his work.

Fante was a close friend of Carey McWilliams, who claimed that he kept his companion "reasonably sober, away from the race tracks, draw poker sessions, opium dens and other low dives, properly confined to home and hearth and study and in regular attendance at mass."

Ramparts Piece in California History

2009-04-05T07:19:00.001-07:00

I should be receiving page proofs soon for a piece that will run in California History. I was delighted to hear from editor Janet Fireman, who suggested I submit something from the Ramparts book. The essay is adapted from Chapter 3, "The Perilous Fight," which covers the 1964-67 period. That's when art director Dugald Stermer and Robert Scheer, who would eventually become editor-in-chief, signed on to the magazine.

Another boon: Shelly Kale, managing editor of California History, decided to feature the cover art from the July 1966 issue of Ramparts. It's Edward Sorel's "The Aviary [Hawkus Caucus Americanus]," which is really something. It looks like that will run on the cover of California History, too.

The Ramparts book is now in production, by the way. The publication date is September 8.

Latino Like Me

2009-03-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

This seems like the right time to mention a blog produced by Tomas Summers Sandoval, whom I've come to know through the California Studies Association. The blog is called Latino Like Me, and I've put a live link on the honor roll to your right.

Tomas's blog is devoted to Chicano critical humanism, but you're liable to see just about anything there. I especially appreciated the point he made after Kellogg's Corn Flakes removed Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps from its cereal boxes; the problem, it seemed, was that Phelps was photographed smoking pot and therefore made a poor role model. Tomas posed a simple question: If it weren't for pot, who would eat Corn Flakes? I also like Tomas's theory that Lent is a vast conspiracy to get Catholics ready for swimsuit season.

Tomas's blog title plays on John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, the 1961 bestseller. Shortly after its publication, Griffin became involved in a new Catholic literary quarterly published in Menlo Park. It was called Ramparts, and within five years, it moved to San Francisco and became the nation's premier muckraker. (You may be hearing more about this soon.)

Heyday Books

2009-03-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Heyday Books, which Malcolm Margolin started 35 years ago, so I'm pleased that they launched a blog this week. I'll put a link on the blogroll to your starboard, too.

Heyday publishes on a wide range of California topics, and many of their books are gorgeous. I first started tracking them when I came across Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader. Since then, I've gotten to know their staff and some of their authors well. Check them out, I say.

Black Bear, Coyote, Humboldt County

2009-02-12T16:50:00.000-08:00

Without really thinking about it, I started exploring a new aspect of the main theme in my San Francisco State class--the utopian impulse in California culture. The new wrinkle is the form that impulse takes in the northernmost part of the state.

My exploration started with the film "Humboldt County," which I finally saw on DVD a few weeks ago. It's about an emotionally shut-down medical student in Los Angeles who reconnects with the world after he stumbles upon an alternative (read: pot-growing) scene in Northern California. No need to rehearse the plot details here, but the people he meets are deeply ambivalent about the utopian--or is it dystopian?--community they've created.

Fast forward to a PoliPointPress book event here at Book Passage a couple of weeks ago. Peter Coyote joined some of us for dinner before Norman Solomon interviewed Reese Erlich about his new book. Turns out Book Passage had a copy of Peter's memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, which I've wanted to read for a while. I bought it, Peter signed it, and I recently read the passage about his experiences at Black Bear Ranch, a commune founded during the 1960s in Siskiyou County. Fascinating.

Today I discovered a related documentary, "Commune," which is devoted to the Black Bear Ranch story. It includes Peter and features the folks in his book. Again, the utopian impulse behind the commune produced deeply mixed results. I won't ruin it for any fanatical readers of this blog, but it's worth a look if you're interested in the California counterculture of this period.

Joe Mathews on Carey McWilliams

2009-01-24T05:46:00.000-08:00

It's a double serving of McWilliams today in the Los Angeles Times. I touch on him in my review of the Mary Austin bio, and an article by Joe Mathews--New America Foundation fellow and former Times scribe--puts the state's current fiscal crisis in historical perspective by reading it against McWilliams's California: The Great Exception (1949). Very nicely done.