Sunday, December 17, 2006

Last Call

I found Last Call: The Final Chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the local video stores and watched it last night. I loved Neve Campbell, and I now think Jeremy Irons stands alone in playing odd (sometimes very odd) characters. This performance should be set alongside his better known ones in Reversal of Fortune, Dead Ringers, Damage, etc. As for his American accent--well, let's just draw the curtain of charity before that scene, if only because his natural speaking voice is so cool.

Last Call isn't a great movie. It's about an alcoholic trying to write a novel, so the opportunities for visual fireworks are limited. That's probably why writer/director Henry Bromell added some scenes with Zelda Fitzgerald (Sissy Spacek) as an apparition haunting Scott in his more deranged moments. The ghost story angle didn't work for me, but there are several worthy scenes with Campbell and Irons--tender, awkward, frequently funny. Watching Scott apologize to Frances after his drunken misbehavior is especially rich.

When I say I loved Neve Campbell, I mean I admired her performance, felt deeply for her character, and developed a rare crush on her by the time the movie was over.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

The Last Tycoon--and Jed Clampett

A few months ago, I mentioned my telephone conversation with Frances Kroll Ring, who knew Carey McWilliams and served as F. Scott Fitgerald's secretary when he was trying to finish The Last Tycoon. Speaking with Frances made me want to know more about that unfinished novel, and I just finished reading Matthew Bruccoli's edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.

I will not try to assess Fitzgerald's achievement here. But I will say that I respect any major American novelist whose work makes room for Buddy Ebsen, best known as Jed Clampett from "The Beverly Hillbillies." I will go further: That reference makes me proud to be an American.

What's that? You don't believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald can be connected, even indirectly, to a sit-com character who routinely referred to his swimming pool as "the cement pond"? (Extra points if you remember the Appalachian pronunciation Ebsen brought to bear on that phrase.) Well, look for yourself on page 101. And don't forget: When it comes to the American culture, you either like the circus or you don't.

Next up, still: Last Call, the DVD with Jeremy Irons, Sissy Spacek, and Neve Campbell, which is based on Frances's memoir, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Fante's Sad Flower?

Last night PBS aired "A Sad Flower in the Sand," a documentary about John Fante and Ask the Dust. What a pleasure to come upon. It includes interviews with family members (including Fante's late wife Joyce), Robert Towne, and Fante biographer Stephen Cooper, whose book I've praised here and elsewhere. Steve alerted me to this documentary some time ago--it was made in 2001--but I'd never seen it until last night.

As the title indicates, the film emphasizes the bleak aspects of Ask the Dust, but I think it underplays the comic effects Fante produced by juxtaposing that bleakness and squalor with his protagonist's soaring literary, financial, and sexual aspirations. But those comic effects are perfectly reflected in Charles Bukowski's 1979 preface to the Black Sparrow Press edition, which is included in the film.

The film also includes several references to Carey McWilliams, Fante's best friend. Steve even reads Fante's evocative book inscriptions to Esther Blaisdell, McWilliams's girlfriend during that time. I was happy to see that connection, since Fante is a big part of my McWilliams bio--almost a kind of foil.

Very highly recommended. Here's the link:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/sadflowerinthesand/

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Jeff Cohen and Cable News Confidential

A few months ago, PoliPointPress published Jeff Cohen's Cable News Confidential, which describes Jeff's years at CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Jeff was a longtime media critic before he secured a front row seat at the cable news circus. (Many will also recognize him as a key expert in Robert Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed.) This is a very funny book, but it delivers a serious message about the corporate media's failure to cover the most urgent issues of the day.

As soon as I heard Jeff's book idea, I realized it was perfect for P3, and he did a great job with it. And because of his years in the media biz, both in front of and behind the camera, he's an excellent spokesperson and guest. In fact, I'm listening to him now on KQED Forum with Michael Krasny. Here's the link:

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R612071000

For more information on the book, see the PoliPointPress link on this site. I'm especially proud of this one.

Jeff will be appearing with Scott Ritter tomorrow at College of Marin (2:00) and in Oakland (7:00, 2501 Harrison St.).

Thursday, December 07, 2006

The Third Jake?

Just heard an NPR piece about the City of Los Angeles returning water rights to the Owens Valley--only one century after the Great Water Caper. That story became part of Carey McWilliams's legacy after he heard it from Mary Austin, wrote about it in Southern California Country (1946), and then watched it go Hollywood in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).

It's more than a little ironic that this piece should run on December 7, especially since Manzanar, the site of a major internment camp for the Japanese during World War II, is right there in the valley.

Here's the link:

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6590362

Pearl Harbor--and Infamy

Today is the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack--the day President Roosevelt said would live in infamy. But another infamy followed that attack, too--namely, the internment of over 100,000 Japanese on the West Coast.

Carey McWilliams was serving in state government during that time, and although he worked behind the scenes to forestall the evacuation and internment, he didn't publicly oppose it while he was chief of California's Division of Immigration and Housing. After all, his Democratic governor supported it, and a Democratic president ordered it.

But soon after the 1942 election turned him out of office, he spoke out against the internment and wrote Prejudice in 1944. It's an extraordinary book that demolished every argument for the evacuation and internment. The same year, it was cited four times in a Supreme Court dissenting opinion, when the court upheld the constitutionality of the internment--a position it later reversed for the reasons laid out by McWilliams.

Unfortunately, Prejudice is out of print now, even though it's one of McWilliams's most amazing books. I hope the McWilliams family will work with a publisher to get that remarkable title back into print.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

The People's Machine

I just finished reading The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy by Joe Mathews. It's a solid piece of work, but it closes just after Schwarzenegger's initiatives went down to defeat in November 2005. As a result, it doesn't include the scene in which Schwarzenegger, almost alone among bigtime Republicans, surfs the Blue Wave of 2006. Even more remarkable is the fact that he did it in one of the bluest nations in the state, and only one year after he got bageled on his initiatives. As one Sacramento insider put it recently, "Schwarzenegger crashed his Hummer into a tree at 100 miles an hour and walked away without a scratch."

Like many chroniclers of California politics, Mathews cites Carey McWilliams in his prologue--in this case, McWilliams's observation that California "has not grown or evolved so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions." Mathews plays off the quote nicely when he adds, "The whole damn place was a special effect."

If McWilliams were around today, he would see Schwarzenegger as fresh evidence for his claim that California is the Great Exception. Certainly most of Schwarzenegger's success can be traced to three factors McWilliams stressed in his description of California's political culture-- the extraordinary power of media handlers, independent voters, and direct democracy. To see how little that culture has changed since McWilliams nailed it in 1949, check out "The State that Swings and Sways"--Chapter 11 in California: The Great Exception.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Bobby and Carey

My daughters and I saw Bobby yesterday here in Palm Desert. It has a few things going for it, including a kind of Altmanesque structure and an ending that sneaks up on you emotionally. Of course, the film leaves out everything that doesn't mesh with the Kennedy myth, and some of that omitted stuff helps explain why Carey McWilliams wasn't a Robert Kennedy fan.

First, there was the fact that Bobby served briefly as counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Second was Bobby's efforts to "get Hoffa," which worked against McWilliams's labor sympathies. Then there was JFK's plan to invade Cuba, which McWilliams exposed and decried in The Nation well before the invasion failed miserably. Let's not forget, too, that JFK speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had called McWilliams a Typhoid Mary of the left in the early 1950s, when that kind of accusation could do a lot of damage. For these and other reasons, McWilliams was pulling for Eugene McCarthy, not Bobby Kennedy, in 1968.

But aside from McWilliams's misgivings about the Kennedys, there's no denying that Bobby's 1968 campaign touched a lot of people, or that his assassination was a searing experience for the nation. Much of Bobby doesn't work all that well, but I recommend it anyway because it successfully captures--or rather, surrounds--those two big points.

And now it's time for a family plug: My uncle (Dr. Roderick Richardson) gave Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, a battery of psychological tests and testified at his trial.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Warren, Nixon, McWilliams

You can learn a lot about American political history by studying three Californians who hit the national scene at about the same time: Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, and Carey McWilliams. I was reminded of this yesterday when I saw Jim Newton's new bio of Warren, Justice for All.

There was no love lost between Nixon and the other two men, but the Warren-McWilliams relationship was more complicated. McWilliams saw Warren as a right-wing, anti-labor opportunist beholden to the state's major business leaders, especially the owners of the Los Angeles Times and Oakland Tribune. He continued to regard Governor Warren as "the personification of Smart Reaction"--even after Warren fought for a variety of progressive programs and followed McWilliams's suggestion to investigate the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles.

Why the continued animosity? Well, he certainly didn't respect Attorney General Warren's role in the Japanese-American evacuation and internment. Also, Warren told Central Valley audiences in 1942 that his first official act as governor would be to fire McWilliams as head of the Division of Immigration and Housing. (Much to the annoyance of growers, McWilliams had held hearings to raise wages and improve housing for farm workers.)

Is that why McWilliams had difficulty explaining the record of Chief Justice Warren, perhaps the most important progressive jurist of the twentieth century? In the end, McWilliams subscribed to the "he-grew-in-office" school of thought, but Warren was one of the few figures that McWilliams didn't read clearly from the get-go. It appears that, for once, McWilliams may have let his personal feelings cloud his political judgment.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Hunter S. Thompson: Carey's Creature


I heard Ralph Steadman on "Fresh Air" last night; his illustrations famously appeared with Hunter S. Thompson's writings. But how many HST fans know who made him famous? If you guessed Carey McWilliams, you get a happy face next to your name.

As editor of The Nation, McWilliams suggested that Thompson write a story on the Hell's Angels. HST was living in San Francisco and needed the $100. He replied to McWilliams, "Your cycle idea came this morning & was a pleasant surprise ... I'm surprised anybody in an editorial slot would be interested in a long look at this action."

That story--"The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders"--came out in 1965. Then McWilliams introduced Thompson to his editor friends in New York, and HST got the book deal for Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, his first bestseller.

Thompson famously abused his editors as well as drugs and alcohol, but when it came to McWilliams, he was a marshmallow. In 1966, he wrote to a friend, "Writing for Carey McWilliams is an honor ... So what if he doesn't pay much ... When your article appears in The Nation you feel clean." And in the 1999 Modern Library reprint of his first big book, Thompson was even more explicit about his debt to McWilliams: "More than any other person, Carey was responsible for the success of Hell's Angels."

Pretty rare sentiments, really, which is why Douglas Brinkley concluded that "throughout his long literary career there was one editor whom Thompson unhesitatingly admired: Carey McWilliams of The Nation."

I rest my case.

You can check out HST's correspondence with and about McWilliams in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, edited by Brinkley. Highly recommended.

Friday, November 17, 2006

McWilliams and Chinatown

Fanatical readers of this blog already know that Carey McWilliams inspired Robert Towne's original screenplay for Chinatown, the neo-noir classic set in pre-war Los Angeles. But you may not know that Towne confided to McWilliams that Southern California Country (1946) "really changed my life. It taught me to look at the place where I was born, and convinced me that it was worth writing about." Funny to think now that an L.A. native, even 30 years ago, would need convincing that his hometown was a worthy subject, but there you have it.

At the time, Towne was a well-paid script doctor; when he was hatching Chinatown on spec--he eventually received $25,000 for it from Paramount--he was also earning $175,000 to salvage Truman Capote's script for The Great Gatsby. His passion for the undervalued project paid off for him and film fans everywhere. For more details, see David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. The relevant passage is excerpted on the Random House website:

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375701542&view=excerpt

Like many movie-lovers, McWilliams thought the film was brilliant, but it also worked for him at the autobiographical level by dramatizing the scope of his own life and career. In effect, McWilliams was the bridge between writer Mary Austin, who personally witnessed the Owens Valley water swindle in the early 1900s, and Towne, the A-list Hollywood screenwriter of the 1970s who really made that swindle famous.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Link for Patt Morrison KPCC Interview

My friend Cammie Morin told me that she found (and listened to) the interview I did with Patt Morrison in the KPCC archive. That was news to me, so I put the link over to the right. Click on it, scroll down to Friday, June 16, find the blurb for American Prophet, and have a listen. You need RealPlayer to do that, but you can load that for free from the same page. Even I was able to manage that.

I just listened to the segment and was struck by Patt's easy command of the Lo-Cal material. I also like her bilabial stops, especially her p's.

1958 Redux?

Here's my theory of GOP governance and its 12-year life cycle. It was prompted by my study of Carey McWilliams, who watched with disappointment as Republicans took over Congress in 1946. They immediately went after their enemies and ruined many lives. Within six years, a Republican occupied the White House, too, partly because the Dems decided to run a candidate who came off like a brainy stiff--twice. The GOP continued to scare the bejeezus out of everyone for another six years and then folded under the weight of its own accusations and do-nothingness in 1958.

Sound familiar? Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and began persecuting their enemies, including a sitting Democratic president. Six years later, they installed their own guy in the White House, but he was no Eisenhower, and the truly crazy stuff started in earnest. Now, six years later, most of us have had enough. If the historical analogy holds, the Democrats will win the White House narrowly in 2008 by running a liberal who believes in a strong defense. And in his parting speech, Bush will warn us about the military-industrial complex.

Why do the wheels fall off for the Republicans after 12 years? I think it's because they don't really believe in governing, if by that we mean running programs to promote the general welfare. And at a certain point, most taxpayers notice that they're not getting anything in exchange for the money they send to Washington. It's the old John Burton maxim of politics: I give you a dollar, you give me a hot dog. But the GOP has mostly delivered a steady diet of fear--along with sermons about why we shouldn't want any hot dogs. So when we hear that the federal government is sending 250 million hot dogs a day to Iraq, and that the CEO of Halliburton took home 47 million hot dogs in 2004, we start to wonder.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

New York Law Journal review

I just received another review of American Prophet, this one by Eleanor J. Bader, who stresses McWilliams's prescience, versatility, brilliant writing, cool head, and fighting spirit. For her, McWilliams is nothing less than "a lost American hero." Couldn't agree more.

According to Bader, my portrait of McWilliams is "admirable--but somewhat spotty": spotty because it says nothing about feminism, the lesbian and gay rights movement, or The Nation's relationship to The National Guardian or The Progressive. (In his vast corpus, McWilliams was very quiet about these issues.) "These gaps notwithstanding," Bader concludes, "Richardson has written a compelling biography of Carey McWilliams introducing, or for some readers re-introducing, a man who deserves to be remembered and lauded."

Thanks to Marjorie Cohn, PoliPointPress author and president of the National Lawyers Guild, for forwarding the review to me. It's posted at http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=ind0611b&L=portside&T=0&P=271. It appeared just above a piece co-authored by Steven Hill, another PoliPointPress author (10 Steps to Repair American Democracy).

Monday, November 06, 2006

Choice Review of American Prophet

Choice weighed in with a positive review of American Prophet. Here's a quote: "This volume goes deep below the surface, admirably describing and analyzing the man, the times, and the tensions. As the first full-length biography of the journalist, this book sets a high standard for McWilliams study." Whoo hoo.

Choice helps libraries figure out which books they want to acquire. The reviewer was S. W. Whyte.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Gray Brechin and Imperial San Francisco

Gray Brechin and Richard Walker will talk about Gray's book, Imperial San Francisco, at UC Berkeley on Sunday. It was reissued this year by UC Press, and it's a bit like the San Francisco version of Mike Davis's City of Quartz. But that comparison only goes so far. Gray would say that his main point--that San Francisco's growth has spelled economic and environmental woes for the rest of the region--applies to many cities around the world.

By the way, Gray wrote a fine introduction to Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader. (See my Amazon.com review in the links to your right). In an email to me yesterday, Gray said he thought Carey would like this talk.

The talk is part of a lecture series celebrating the Bancroft Library's 100th year on the Berkeley campus. Gray's book made heavy use of the library's holdings, and his presentations usually include remarkable images. (He studied art history before taking a Ph.D. in geography from Berkeley.) The talk is scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 5, 3:00, in the Museum Theater. Very worthwhile, I bet.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Dissed?

My brother called me this morning to tell me that I'd been dissed in the Los Angeles Times. In a review of the recent I.F. Stone bio, media critic Tim Rutten wrote:

As a young editor, I had the privilege of working with three authentic heroes of American journalism: One was Phil Kerby, a champion of civil liberties who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials against government secrecy and judicial censorship; another was Carey McWilliams, the radical journalist and historian who edited the Nation for so many years; the third was I.F. Stone. Of the three, his contribution was the widest and most consequential. McWilliams and Kerby still await the biographies they deserve, but Myra MacPherson's All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone is a work equal to its subject — carefully and thoroughly reported, keenly thought out, by turns judicious and appropriately sympathetic (emphasis added).


Ouch! Had he missed my McWilliams bio, or had he decided that McWilliams deserved a better one? (This despite a positive review in his paper's Sunday book review a few months ago?) Not good either way, but I offered to send him a copy of American Prophet if he hadn't already made that judgment.

By the way, I wonder about the claim that Stone's contribution was "the widest and most consequential" of the three men he mentions. I'm especially dubious about the "widest" part. Stone was a famous and first-class muckraker, but he wasn't as versatile as McWilliams. McWilliams served in state government, drafted Supreme Court briefs, critiqued modern literature, and edited a major journal of opinion. His bibliography is comparable to Stone's, despite the fact that he released only one book in the last 30 years of his life. McWilliams's work is still highly regarded in academic circles in a wide variety of disciplines, including labor history, city planning, California studies, Chicano studies, etc., and he inspired the screenplay for what may be the finest Hollywood movie of its generation, namely, Chinatown. Need I go on? I didn't think so.

But comparisons are odious. Stone reviewed McWilliams's Factories in the Field favorably when it appeared in 1939, and I suspect that their relationship was based on mutual admiration and shared politics. And so it goes.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Nicholas Lemann on "Paranoid Style"

Nicholas Lemann's piece in this week's New Yorker discusses recent documentary films about Iraq (especially Why We Fight, Uncovered, and Hijacking Catastrophe) against a backdrop of what historian Richard Hofstadter once called the paranoid style in American politics.

There's an odd tension in the piece that arises from Lemann's standards of evidence. I wonder what would persuade him at this point that neoconservatives and certain corporate interests helped push this administration toward a disastrous policy in Iraq. He suggests that the films should choose whether the neoconservatives or the corporations pushed the war. (To conclude that both groups did so is to risk incongruency.)

But then he says that the bigger problem with these films is that the political world is "not so neatly explicable"; sometimes tragedy can be traced not to malignancy but to "people screwing up." Here he suggests that the films are pursuing a false precision that disallows the possibility of profound tragedy. But if malignancy and human error can blend to create bad outcomes, why not neoconservative ideology and corporate interests? Come to think of it, why can't all four things cooperate to create those bad outcomes?

There are other tensions as well. For example, he worries that documentaries don't lend themselves to clear, rational argumentation but instead depend on associative leaps and logical shortcuts. He acknowledges that there's already "a substantial shelf of well-documented books covering the same sort of subject matter," but he still wants to see the films as paranoid, not just popular versions of the more replete and analytical books on the same subject. Hey, I like books, and I wish more people read them--or at least bought them! But I also know most people prefer a 90-minute film to a shelf of serious books.

And here's where I go philosophical. If we substitute "poems" for "documentaries," we have a rehearsal of Plato's decision to banish poets from his ideal Republic because they weren't truthful and logical enough. The real problem for Plato, of course, was that more people listened to poets than to philosophers because it was easier and more fun. Could it be that Plato was a little paranoid himself?

I know there are lots of kooky theories and films out there, but I've seen a couple of these documentaries and thought they were pretty good.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Lewis Lapham in Berkeley

I went to hear Lewis Lapham in Berkeley last weekend--big turnout, very interesting. Lewis, whom I met in New York City last month, wrote the foreword to the UC Press reprint of Carey McWilliams's California: The Great Exception. The book first appeared in 1949--the state's 100th birthday--and it holds up remarkably well. In fact, many of its insights and predictions are uncanny, and even professional historians regard it as a minor classic.

Lewis was in Berkeley to discuss his new book, Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration, and the event was a fundraiser for KPFA and Global Exchange. By the way, Lewis was born in San Francisco, where his grandfather was mayor.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Review in California History

I tracked down the review of American Prophet in the current issue of California History. Robert Cherny, a historian at San Francisco State, did the honors. By coincidence, he was also scheduled to address the SF State course I've been babbling about, but his duties as undergraduate dean intervened. There's no online version that I know of, so please share the print copies amicably.

Monday, October 02, 2006

California Dream--Wednesday Night

I'll be part of a panel on Wednesday night at San Francisco State University (Humanities 133, 7:15). It's open to the public. The topic is the California Dream as a backdrop to this fall's state elections. My piece will be on the California Dream from 1939 to the present--the state's expansion after World War II, the Pat Brown era, the 1960s and the Reagan backlash, Proposition 13, all the way to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Along the way, I'll touch on Hollywood, Disneyland, the Beach Boys, Haight-Ashbury, the Free Speech Movement, Charles Manson, Silicon Valley, Rodney King, etc. The other speakers on the panel are Maxine Chernoff and Harriet Rafter.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

More California Dream

So I learned a little more about the SF State class on the California election--I think I might have to sign up for this one! Starts on Wednesday. Check it out:

http://polaris.sfsu.edu/~news/prsrelea/fy06/006.htm

This Just In

We're now receiving reports that a review of American Prophet has appeared in California History. We will update you on this story as it unfolds.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Against the Current

I mentioned Frances Kroll Ring in a previous post; she knew Carey McWilliams, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary in Los Angeles, and wrote Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald (Figueroa Press, 2005). Highly recommended. Where else can you read about a major American writer bringing a briefcase full of Cokes to a Hollywood studio to get him through the day?

Or this exchange: When Fitzgerald worked on the screenplay for Gone With the Wind, his daughter Scottie, then at Vassar, said she thought the novel was one of the great masterpieces of all time. Her father replied that it was "interesting, surprisingly honest, consistent and workman-like throughout and I felt no contempt for it but only a certain pity for those who considered it the supreme achievement of the human mind." Can you imagine getting that letter from your father? Me neither.

Next up: Last Call, with Jeremy Irons, Sissy Spacek, and Neve Campbell as Frances.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Q&A the Media Didn't Want You to See!

Some time ago, my publisher asked me to respond to some questions about Carey McWilliams. I labored over my answers, thinking that the Q&A would appear on the publisher's website. Then I found out the marketing people were only going to use it as a teaser for media outlets. So I decided to break the story myself!

1. Who was Carey McWilliams? Can you give us a brief outline of the highlights of his life and work? He was certainly an intense and prolific writer.

Carey McWilliams is probably the most important American intellectual you've never heard of, especially if you were born after 1960. He was a Los Angeles attorney and activist who wrote a dozen important books and hundreds of articles before moving to New York to edit The Nation in the 1950s.

During the 1930s, McWilliams was best known for Factories in the Field, essentially the nonfiction version of The Grapes of Wrath. In the 1940s, he served in state government, wrote a book that inspired the screenplay for Chinatown, argued against the Japanese-American internment, and participated in several high-profile legal cases, including the Hollywood 10 spectacle and the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. At The Nation, he muckraked relentlessly, opposed McCarthyism, Jim Crow, and Vietnam, and identified a truckload of new talent, including Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, and Hunter S. Thompson.

In New York, McWilliams is now seen as a gutsy editor who was right on the big issues. In California, he’s regarded as the state’s preeminent public intellectual. Both characterizations are accurate, but I also argue that he’s one of the most versatile American public intellectuals of the 20th century.

2. Why Carey McWilliams? What was your inspiration for writing about him?

In 1999, I started working at a California think tank, and I asked author and journalist Peter Schrag what I should read by way of background. He said everything by Carey McWilliams, whom I'd barely heard of. McWilliams's achievement amazed me—he seemed to be everywhere, know everyone, and churn out an enormous amount of high-quality work. When I wanted to learn more about him, I realized there was no book about his life and work. At about that time, Kevin Starr, a true California aficionado, encouraged me to write that book.

3. What is it about McWilliams that makes him not only relevant today, but worth reintroducing to a new audience, whether progressive or conservative?

McWilliams was way ahead of his time on labor issues, civil rights, immigration, the environment—you name it. A McWilliams article from 1975 on the U.S.-Mexico border could run in any magazine today, practically without change. In 1950, he described a young Richard Nixon as “a dapper little man with an astonishing capacity for petty malice,” which became painfully clear to most Americans much later. His arguments about the Japanese-American internment and the Hollywood 10 were eventually adopted by the Supreme Court. So in my view, McWilliams earned the title of American prophet many times over. His work should humble most of today’s pundits, whose opinions and predictions have an expiration date of about ten days.

His prose was also built to last—lucid, supple, and attentive to facts. He took apart opposing arguments the way most people untie their shoelaces. There are some exceptions, but his mature style is refreshingly free of self-righteous zeal.

His writing and advocacy earned him some powerful enemies, including J. Edgar Hoover, who considered him for detention in the event of a national emergency—even though McWilliams was heading a state agency at the time. In the book, I also discuss McWilliams’s appearance before the Committee on Un-American Activities in California. The transcript has never been published or even released, but it's a little like watching apes cross-examining a zoologist.

4. Is it true H.L. Mencken was McWilliams’ mentor? What was it about Mencken that appealed to McWilliams?

Yes, Mencken was a huge influence on McWilliams, who was originally attracted to Mencken’s irreverence, prose style, and willingness to challenge bourgeois orthodoxies. He also followed Mencken by focusing almost exclusively on the American scene. In the 1930s, he shed his idol’s anti-democratic views and began to find his own voice, but later on, he adopted Mencken’s editorial practices—quick responses, light editing, and a real openness to new voices and talents.

5. Are there parallels to some of the issues McWilliams devoted himself to and what is going on right now in our own government?

Yes, very strong parallels. McWilliams would have a lot to say today about race and ethnicity, Latino politics, the labor movement, immigration and border security, growing income inequality, and living conditions among the poor. I think he would also have plenty to say about the USA PATRIOT act, the Supreme Court, the religious right, crony capitalism, militarism, and the blind faith many people seem to have in market forces. Most of McWilliams’s best stuff was on domestic politics, but I think he would have a field day on Iraq war, too.

6. What are some of McWilliams’ greatest legacies in terms of ideas or theories? Is the McWilliams influence still being felt?

McWilliams aficionados in New York would say, correctly, that his legacy at The Nation is very significant, but I think his reputation now is mostly based on his books, almost all of which he wrote while living in Los Angeles. Their influence still registers in Chicano studies, urban planning, and labor history, for example, but his general approach to California and its history, especially his exceptionalist account of the state and its development, has probably left the deepest impression.

He influenced a long list of writers and scholars. Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading historian of the American West, has acknowledged his influence on her work. He’s also an indispensable source for California writers like Kevin Starr, Mike Davis, Peter Schrag, and Lou Cannon. During the 1990s, McWilliams’s critical fortunes began to improve after Starr, Limerick, and Davis pointed out his achievements. He also influenced a generation of activists, including Cesar Chavez. But I’ve found that the fastest way to get McWilliams onto someone’s cultural radar is to mention that his work inspired Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown.

7. McWilliams was editor of The Nation for over twenty years. What was his greatest influence there? How did he change or affect what the magazine had to say?

Probably his chief contribution was to make The Nation a forum for investigative journalism as well as a journal of opinion. In the 1950s, he was keeping the muckraking tradition alive almost single-handedly. McWilliams also shepherded the magazine though the McCarthy period, when it came under attack from neoconservatives and anti-Communist liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Several of his friends committed suicide during that time, but McWilliams showed a lot of cool resolve. As Studs Terkel said later, you had to credit McWilliams not only for his prescience, but also for his guts.

8. McWilliams loved California. What was it about that state that he found particularly inspiring or worth writing about?

As a young man, McWilliams hated Los Angeles, which he regarded as a shapeless blob, “hopelessly vulgar,” promoted relentlessly by a class of swindling boosters. All true, of course, but in the end, Southern California worked its charms on him. He admired its energy, its freewheeling quality, its diversity, and its ability to reinvent itself. He later attributed those qualities to the state as a whole and traced most of them to a Gold Rush mentality.

Another thing he appreciated about California was its position on the Pacific Rim. He recognized the enormous importance of that single physical fact and its implications for world trade. He was a big believer in “the authority of the land,” and he understood the full value of natural resources, especially water. He was a kind of proto-environmentalist in that way.

9. What are some of the ways California has changed that McWilliams would find either provoking or worth writing about today?

I think he would see the Schwarzenegger phenomenon as fresh evidence of good old California exceptionalism. The electricity crisis a few years back would have confirmed his suspicions about market forces run amok. And he would find ample evidence for his prediction that Latinos would reclaim California without firing a shot.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The California Dream

Got a call yesterday from Kathy Johnson at San Francisco State University. She asked if I would participate in a Fall course called "California: The Promise vs. the Reality in the 2006 Election." My mission, should I decide to accept it, is to offer a 20-25 minute presentation on The California Dream. I said count me in. My SF State class last semester (California Culture) filled my head with thoughts and images on that topic. I'm not sure how many Gidget movies I can cover in 20 minutes, but I accept the challenge.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

F. Scott Fitzgerald--and Frances Ring


Carey McWilliams was a huge F. Scott Fitzgerald fan. Only Mencken had more influence over the young McWilliams's imagination.

So it was with some pleasure that I visited with Frances Kroll Ring this morning over the telephone. As editor of Westways, Frances persuaded McWilliams to contribute some pieces in the late 1970s--McWilliams had written a regular column in the 1930s--but Frances was also F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary in the last year of his life. I'm looking forward to reading her book, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, which tells that story. The book was reissued last year by Figueroa Press and inspired the film Last Call with Jeremy Irons, Sissy Spacek, and Neve Campbell (as Frances).

By the way, I got Frances's name from Doug Dutton, of Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, whom I met at the Bonnie Cashin lecture at UCLA. Thanks, Doug!

The NLG Connection

I had lunch with Marjorie Cohn last week in Escondido. Marjorie is a law professor, online columnist, and regular guest on Pacifica radio. She's also the President Elect of the National Lawyers Guild, which was founded in 1937 as a progressive alternative to the American Bar Association. Carey McWilliams was an active member of the Guild from its inception. In fact, he was president of the Los Angeles chapter in 1943, when the Zoot Suit Riots and Sleepy Lagoon trial were making headlines.

The Guild had a tough time during the McCarthy era. Morris Ernst, who had been counsel for the ACLU during the 1940s, led a controversial (and unsuccessful) attempt to purge the Guild of its Communist members. It later came out that Ernst was an FBI informant. The Guild was also a factor when McCarthy began to investigate the army. Army counsel Joseph Welch represented a young colleague at his law firm who was also a member of the Guild, which McCarthy regarded as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party. Welch had made a deal with Roy Cohn, McCarthy's counsel, to remain silent on Cohn's draft status if Cohn didn't mention the Guild. When McCarthy unknowingly broke the deal, Welch issued his famous riposte: "Have you no decency, sir, at long last?" See American Prophet, pp. 205-09, for more.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

The Lamont Family and Carey McWillams

It's amazing how American political genealogies work. Today Ned Lamont will press Joe Lieberman for his Senate seat in Connecticut. But yesterday I learned that Lamont is related to an FOC (Friend of Carey)--namely, Corliss Lamont, who co-founded the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee with McWilliams during the McCarthy era. Ned's great uncle was a longstanding board member of the ACLU but resigned when it didn't support him during an encounter with McCarthy's Senate committee. Another ECLC co-founder was Yale law professor Thomas Emerson, Hillary Clinton's mentor. For more, see American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, pp. 198-200.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Manzanar--and Johnny Rosselli

I just returned from a long California loop--east to Yosemite and Tioga Pass, then south to Lone Pine, Big Bear, and San Diego, then north to Los Angeles and up the Central Valley to the Bay Area. My daughters and I stopped in Manzanar and took in the historical site dedicated to the evacuation and internment of the Japanese during the Second World War. Carey McWilliams demolished all the arguments for the internment in Prejudice (1944), but he was serving in state government (as chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing) when the order was carried out.

In Los Angeles, I had dinner with Charles Rappleye, author of All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story (Doubleday, 1991). In the late 1930s, McWilliams helped bring down Willie Bioff, the labor racketeer who, like Rosselli, represented the Chicago mob. Charles's new book is Sons of Providence (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which tells the story of the two brothers who founded Brown University. Charles and I dined at Union Station, where McWilliams was feted by KPFK toward the end of his career.

Friday, August 04, 2006

SCQ Review

I just received a thoughtful review of American Prophet by Volker Janssen, a historian at Cal State Fullerton. Writing for Southern California Quarterly, Dr. Janssen calls the book "a comprehensive, highly readable profile of literary skill and political courage." (I read this to mean McWilliams's skill and courage, not the book's!) Very gratifying. Dr. Janssen specializes in the social, economic, and institutional history of California. For more on him and his work, see http://hss.fullerton.edu/history/facultystaff_files/Janssen.html.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Good Vibrations

Just returned from McWilliams country--always a pleasure. Victoria Steele said the UCLA event on Thursday was the best-attended Bonnie Cashin lecture they've had yet (!)

The KPCC interview also went well, I thought, but my brother Scott had some useful pointers for me afterward. He has plenty of media experience, so I listened carefully. Patt Morrison was as impressive in person as I expected--very astute, of course, and with her trademark chapeau, but also a great radio voice.

Rusty Harding at All Saints Pasadena organized an informal book talk on Friday night that I thoroughly enjoyed, and Michael Dawson pulled together a great group at his bookstore on Saturday. I could do that sort of circuit indefinitely--so many interesting people in their own right, and so many receptive to McWilliams and his achievement.

Another trippy part of the L.A. trip was an impromptu dinner with Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, on the boardwalk in Venice. Jeff Norman, who works for P3 but is also organizing events for Ritter and others, put it together.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Local Color

A local blog, Sausalito by the Bay, picked up on the piece in San Francisco State's Campus Memo. (Sausalito is home to PoliPointPress, where I'm editorial director.) Here's the link:

http://sausalitobythebay.com/blog/the-single-finest-nonfiction

Monday, June 12, 2006

Lo-Cal Swing Redux

Here's the L.A. flapjaw schedule for American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams. Amaze and impress your friends with your knowledge of McWilliams and his achievement!

Thursday, June 15--Bonnie Cashin lecture, UCLA, 4 p.m. Open to public.
www.library.ucla.edu/special/scweb/cashin/lecture.htmSaturday.

Friday, June 16--Patt Morrison, KPCC, 89.3 FM, 2-3 p.m.

Friday, June 16--All Saints Church, Pasadena, 7:30 p.m.

June 17--Dawson's Book Shop, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, 2:30 p.m. Open to public. www.dawsonbooks.com

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Gunkist Oranges

Just read Gustavo Arellano's piece in the OC Weekly on the 1936 naranjero strike in Orange County. In the introduction to Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader, Gray Brechin notes that McWilliams "peeled back the giddy and gaudy orange-crate label of official state history to reveal the disturbing reality of what California is and has been." Citing McWilliams but also offering a fuller picture of the strike and its suppression, Gustavo does a little peeling himself.

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/news/gunkist-oranges/25266/

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Multicultural Review

Multicultural Review ran a short and favorable notice on American Prophet in their April issue. Dennis E. Showalter of Colorado College describes Carey McWilliams as "one of America's major public intellectuals, whose roots in the American cultural and historic experience enabled him to sidestep involvement with the ideology and policy of the Soviet Union that took so many of his liberal contemporaries down dead ends." The last sentence is the least expected: "Richardson's strong case for McWilliams's legacy of public involvement as a counterweight to the solipistic theorizing of today's academic Left is controversial but defensible and merits careful consideration."

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Citric McWilliams

Heard from Gustavo Arellano, a reporter at OC Weekly, a few days ago. He's writing a piece on McWilliams and the 1936 citrus worker strike in Orange County. It was a turning point for McWilliams, who saw firsthand how the deck was stacked against the workers. Looking forward to Gustavo's piece.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Go SF State!

Got a little love from the public affairs office at San Francisco State University. Matt Itel wrote a piece for Campus Memo, an online newsletter for the campus community. Mostly we talked about Carey McWilliams and American Prophet. Then they put the link on the university's home page:

http://www.sfsu.edu/~news/cmemo/spring06/may22people.htm

Monday, May 15, 2006

The Bonnie Cashin Lecture

I'm working hard on the Bonnie Cashin lecture, which I'll deliver at UCLA on June 15. I'm trying to answer a basic question. If Kevin Starr is right that Carey McWilliams is "the single finest nonfiction writer on California--ever," how come so few Californians know about him? Even after thinking about McWilliams and his work for years, I haven't quite figured that out, so I'm curious about where that question will take me.

Here's a link with lecture info:

www.library.ucla.edu/special/scweb/cashin/lecture.htm

From Left Field

Had a chat yesterday with Barry Gordon on "From Left Field" on KCAA in Los Angeles. Carol Pott and I spoke about PoliPointPress and The Blue Pages: A Directory of Companies Rated by Their Politics and Practices. Carol has been working hard and intelligently on the promotion front, and the book is getting a great reception. It shows how much and to which political party hundreds of corporations contribute their money. Which means that consumers can use the directory to support companies that share their values. As Norman Solomon puts it, let the seller beware.

For those of you taking notes, Barry Gordon used to be president of the Screen Actors Guild--longest tenure of any president, it turns out, one year longer than Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston--and now plays the rabbi on Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

L.A. Times Review

The Los Angeles Times removed its review of American Prophet from its website, so I removed the link from this page. Please contact me at peter.richardson@sbcglobal.net if you'd like an electronic version of that review.

Bush Style vs. McWilliams Style

One of my favorite books on writing style is Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner's Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Thomas and Turner discuss and contrast various styles, including plain style, which they describe as follows.

"Plain style is communal, its model scene a congregation in which speakers reaffirm for each other common truths that are the property of all. In the theology behind plain style, truth is always simple, and it is a common human possession. Individual revisions of this communal possession distort and dilute it. The wisdom of children can be the wisdom of adults, because knowing truth requires no special experience and no critical analysis. Sophisticated thought and conceptual refinement pervert truth. Any language that reaches beyond the simplest level is suspicious as the probable symptom of such a perversion" (76-77).

For my money, this is the best description of President Bush's conception of the truth. Plain style is very popular in Texas, where intellectuals are defined as people "educated beyond their intelligence." I heard Henry Hyde describe some academics that way when they informed his committee that it was torturing the Constitution during the Clinton impeachment.

Carey McWilliams's style was more like what Thomas and Turner call classic style. For the classic stylist, common wisdom is often self-serving. Without critical testing, such common wisdom can become "an anthology of a community's complacent errors." Classic style remedies that deficiency by requiring critical analysis. "In classic style, truth is available to all who are willing to work to achieve it, but truth is certainly not commonly possessed by all and is no one's birthright. In the classic view, truth is the possession of individuals who have validated common wisdom; for them, truth has been achieved, and such achievement requires both experience and a critical intelligence beyond the range of babes" (77).

In short, classic style values simplicity but doesn't reject nuance or sophistication on principle. Today's headlines suggest we could use more classic style and less plain style in American politics.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Patt Morrison and All Saints Church

I'm making another Lo-Cal swing in June, and I'm pleased to add two more events to that trip: a conversation with Patt Morrison (KPCC, 89.3) and a talk at All Saints Church in Pasadena, both on June 16. Patt Morrison and All Saints Pasadena are two very impressive Southern California institutions. (See www.pattmorrison.com and www.allsaints-pas.org for details on their efforts and achievements.)

Rothmann Show Tonight

I'll appear on John Rothmann's show tonight on KGO (810 AM) at 1:00 a.m. to discuss Carey McWilliams and American Prophet. We should have a lot to talk about. Rothmann worked on Nixon's 1968 campaign, and McWilliams followed Nixon's career closely if unsympathetically. Rothmann is also interested in the Jewish experience in America, which McWilliams treated in Brothers Under the Skin and A Mask for Privilege.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Gigs Update

Here's the flapjaw schedule (and past events) for American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams.

Saturday, June 17--Dawson's Book Shop, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, 2:30 p.m. Open to public.

Friday, June 16--All Saints Church, Pasadena, 7:00 p.m.

Friday, June 16--Talk of the City with Patt Morrison, KPCC, 89.3 FM, 2-3 p.m.

Thursday, June 15--Bonnie Cashin lecture, UCLA, 4 p.m. Open to public.

Sunday, April 30--The John Rothmann Show, KGO, 810 AM, 1:00 a.m.

March 30--Black Oak Books, Berkeley.

March 1--Morning Review with Gabriel Gutierrez, KPFK, Los Angeles.

February 28--Huntington Library, San Marino. Sponsored by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

February 27--Oxnard Public Library.

February 27--Cal State Northridge. Sponsored by the Chicana/o Studies Department.

October 3, 2005--Public Policy Institute of California, San Francisco.

September 21, 2005--California Studies Lecture, UC Berkeley.

May 21, 2005--The Sleepy Lagoon Case, Constitional Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy: A Commemorative Symposium, UCLA. Sponsored by the Chicano Studies Research Center, the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

April 6, 2003--All Saints Church, Pasadena.

Friday, April 07, 2006

Next Radio Gig

Just received an invitation to appear on KGO's John Rothmann show to talk about Carey McWilliams and American Prophet. The show is scheduled for Sunday, April 30, at 1:00 a.m. That's cutting pretty deep into the cocktail hour, but duty calls. If you're up late that Saturday night, give it a shot at 810 on the AM dial.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Black Oak Books Tonight

I'll be at Black Oak Books tonight (1491 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley) at 7:30 along with Peter Schrag and Ethan Rarick. Peter has a new book out, California: America's High-Stakes Experiment, and Ethan's bio of Pat Brown, California Rising, is out in paperback. Both books are from UC Press. We'll each offer some brief remarks on California and its history and then have some Q&A.

Peter turned me on to McWilliams in 1999, and I'm looking forward to meeting Ethan, who now works at Berkeley's Institute for Governmental Studies. I have a soft spot for this bookstore, too. I lived around the corner throughout graduate school and was a regular customer.

A gigs update: I'll be at Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 17. This is another venerable institution. I met its proprietor, Michael Dawson, at a book signing for LA's Early Moderns (Balcony Press, 2003), which he co-authored.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Horowitz Review

Irving Louis Horowitz, professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers, has weighed in on American Prophet and Victor Navasky's A Matter of Opinion in the Sewanee Review. McWilliams is described as a "solid native American radical" who "remained his own man," and I am credited for telling his story "earnestly and honestly" and handling McWilliams's stance on communism with appropriate nuance. Victor, his book, and The Nation under his guidance don't come off quite so well, though he is credited with treating the magazines's editorial lineage with more depth and detail than I did. (True.)

I received the review as a paper copy from my publisher, so I don't have a link or even a citation to pass along.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Norman Solomon

I'm pretty sure Carey McWilliams would be speaking out against the Iraq war, among other things, and the constellation of deceptions and atrocities surrounding it. And right now I'm listening to Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy, on KPFA--he's speaking at an anti-war rally in Walnut Creek tomorrow. It looks as if Norman will be a P3 author, so I'm especially glad to hear him speaking out on this issue.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

More Fante--and Steve Cooper

The L.A. Times review drew an email from Stephen Cooper, who wrote Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (North Point Press, 2000)--highly recommended. I met Steve while working on the McWilliams book; we had dinner at Musso-Frank's on Hollywood and Vine just to complete the retro L.A. effect. He teaches English at Cal State Long Beach--great guy. Robert Towne's film version of Ask the Dust is getting some press now--big write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook section, for example--so I'm hoping the movie will drive readers to the novel and Steve's superb bio.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Very Impressed ...

...with Kate Julian's review of American Prophet in the Los Angeles Times. She really put her finger on McWilliams's unique gift and contribution, I think--great selection and emphasis. David Ulin wrote an excellent piece on John Fante's Ask the Dust this week, too, so I hope these critical efforts will direct readers to these two Los Angeles writers, who happened to be close friends. Certainly the Times is doing its part.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Los Angeles Times review

So the big news this week is that the Los Angeles Times will review American Prophet on Sunday, March 12. That's fitting for all kinds of reasons. McWilliams worked for the Times, he has many fans there still, and Fante was right, I think, that Los Angeles (not New York) was McWilliams's real home.

This isn't to discount the admirable work McWilliams did as editor of The Nation, but he left an important part of himself in Los Angeles when he moved east in April 1951. In the book, I even wonder if The Nation's gain was the country's loss. When he took over at The Nation, McWilliams helped others find their voices but gradually lowered his own, so we'll never know what he would have accomplished had he stayed in Los Angeles.

Anyway, I welcome that review. I hope it helps the book, but I'd also like to see the prophet honored in his own country.

Friday, March 03, 2006

The P3 Connection

PoliPointPress is having a two-day retreat this week to talk about our goals. When I started at P3 as editorial director almost a year ago, I wanted to do McWilliams-type books--smart, lively, progressive, fact-based, and pitched to general audiences. I think the authors we've signed (Joe Conason, Steven Hill, Yvonne Latty, Jeff Cohen, Nomi Prins, Phil Longman, etc.) are working in that tradition. I'm also contemplating a series of classic reprints to make that connection more explicit. Maybe a series called P3 Classics that would make some great older titles available to readers.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Fante

I took a couple of hours out of the mini-book tour to take in a movie (Match Point) in Santa Monica with Adrian Maher. Adrian hosted me when I was working on the book in Los Angeles, took a class from Carey McWilliams in the late 1970s, and now makes television documentaries.

The trailer we saw was for Ask the Dust, the Robert Towne movie based on John Fante's 1939 novel. Fante was one of McWilliams's best friends. I taught Ask the Dust this week in my California Culture class at San Francisco State. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Lo-Cal Swing

I leave tomorrow for Los Angeles and the All Things McWilliams book tour. Monday I'll be at Cal State Northridge, courtesy of Rudy Acuna, author of Occupied America . (My first job out of college was selling this book, and others, for Harper & Row, Publishers.) Sounds like there will be a KPFK interview with his colleague, Gabriel Gutierrez, too. That night I'll be at Oxnard Public Library.

The next day it's off to the Huntington Library for a conversation with Bill Deverell, who directs the Huntington-USC Institute for California and the West. Bill is the author of Whitewashed Adobe , which the University of California Press published in 2004. All of this was arranged by the indefatigable Alice McGrath, who worked with Carey on the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in the early 1940s. (For event details, see Gigs.)

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Sleepy Lagoon Exhibit

Last May I participated in a great conference at UCLA on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. If these events don't ring any bells, or even if they do, check out the online exhibit, curated by Genie Guerard of the UCLA Library. Here's the address:

www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/slexhibit.htm.

Highly recommended.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

The Politics of Cool

I've been thinking more about the role of passion in American politics. Although it's encouraged now, passion isn't the word that comes to mind when I think of Carey McWilliams. Committed? Absolutely. Unflinching? Yep. But especially as he matured, his style was cool, smart, and pulled together. He could be sharp when he felt like it; he described a young Richard Nixon as "a dapper little man with an astonishing capacity for petty malice," and Governor Earl Warren as "the personification of Smart Reaction." But in general, he didn't rely on polemics, name-calling, or appeals to passion.

The same can't be said for his adversaries, who called him lots of names over the years: liar, ass, dupe, pinko, Agricultural Pest Number One, and dough-faced Typhoid Mary of the left (my personal favorite). But instead of responding in kind, he returned his readers again and again to the key issues. Dry? Not at all. He could slice and dice with the best of them. But his respect for the facts--and his audience's ability to grasp them--helps explain why his writing holds up so well half a century later.

Is there a place for the politics of cool today? Are its assumptions, especially about audience, realistic?

Sunday, February 19, 2006

On Discovering McWilliams

Gray Brechin has a great sentence about discovering Carey McWilliams:

"For those of us who lean unapologetically to the left as it flows ever farther to the right, encountering the writings of Carey McWilliams is liking running into an old friend in a foreign city."

Among other things, Gray captures the underrated pleasure of discovering an underrated writer.

For those of you taking notes, this quote is from his introduction to Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader (2001).

Friday, February 17, 2006

Who Was Carey McWilliams?

Good question. He's the most important American writer you've probably never heard of, especially if you were born after 1960. (If you were born before then, you might remember that he edited The Nation from 1955-1975.) He was also the most versatile American public intellectual of the twentieth century. And Kevin Starr says he's "the single finest non-fiction writer on California--ever." Movie buffs might know that one of his books inspired Robert Towne's Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown.

But there's a lot more to be said about this man and his achievements. If you'd like to help answer the question above, I hope you'll join the conversation. The links to the right provide some background information. Several have to do with my book, American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, and the UCLA talk will give you the headline version of McWilliams's years in California.

Gigs

Here's where I'll be talking about Carey McWilliams in the coming weeks and months.

Saturday, June 17--Dawson's Book Shop, Los Angeles, 2:30 p.m.

Thursday, June 15--Bonnie Cashin lecture, 4 p.m., UCLA.

Sunday, April 30, 1:00 a.m.--The John Rothmann Show, KGO radio, 810 AM.

Thursday, March 30--With Ethan Rarick and Peter Schrag, 7:30 p.m., Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, www.blackoakbooks.com/soon.html.

Tuesday, February 28--In Conversation with William Deverell, noon to 1:30, Munger Building, Huntington Library, San Marino. Sponsored by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, www.usc.edu/schools/college/huntington/icw_events/
upcoming_events.html
.

Monday, February 27--Oxnard Public Library, 6:30 p.m., Meeting Room B, 251 South A Street, Oxnard, www.ci.oxnard.ca.us/pressrelease/2006/060126.html.

Monday, February 27--Cal State Northridge, noon to 1:00, Whitsett Room, 451 Sierra Hall. Sponsored by the Chicana/o Studies Department.

Moving Forward

I had to relaunch the blog due to technical trouble. I'd like to take a moment to mourn those penetrating but unsaved insights ...

Okay, let's move on.