Hinckle World

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

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

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

RIP, Iris Dornfeld McWilliams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIP, Iris.

Summer Reading

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

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

Rolling Stone and General McChrystal

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

Strange Bedfellows

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

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

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

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

California Watch

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

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

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

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

Ramparts Interview on KALW

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

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

The Zocalo Event

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

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

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

Paris Review

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

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

This Just In

Lots to report since the last post.

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

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

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

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