New Links

Two new links on my blog roll: California Studies Association and Frank Barajas .

The California Studies Association sponsors an annual conference, which I attended this year in Berkeley. (I joined the steering committee for next year's conference, too.) CSA also bestows its own Carey McWilliams Award; recipients have included Mike Davis, Kevin Starr, Luis Valdez, Gerald Haslam, and James Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.

The organization has been guided over the years by Jeff Lustig and Richard Walker. I'm eagerly awaiting my copy of Dick Walker's latest book, The Country in the City, which tells the story of environmental activism in the Bay Area.

I gather the CSA website will be redesigned soon, so it's worth checking on occasionally.

As my last entry noted, Frank is an associate professor of history at Cal State Channel Islands. He's now researching community responses to civil gang injunctions in Oxnard.

Cal State Channel Islands Talk

Looks like my next talk on Carey McWilliams will happen next month at Cal State Channel Islands. Frank Barajas, a historian there, asked me to talk about McWilliams's civic engagement and public scholarship. He posted some info on the talk on his blog.

Frank's work is on Southern California history and especially Latino activism, so he has been a McWilliams aficionado for a while. Alice McGrath introduced us in May 2005, and we've been in touch since, most recently this summer at Stanford, where he was doing some archival work.

Heyday Books

Heyday Books just sent me Under the Dragon: California's New Culture by Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg. The Oakland Museum of California co-produced it, and it has the high finish I associate with that kind of publication.

Most of the book is made up of colorful photos and verbal snapshots of the Bay Area's diverse population and hybrid culture. The foreword by Andrew Lam, author of another Heyday book (Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora), offers some helpful tropes for conceptualizing social identity in the region's rich racial and ethnic melange. A list of recommended readings, including an entire section of Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) publications, appears in the back matter. If I recall correctly, I worked on most of those PPIC reports during my years there.

I really like Heyday's operation, which is based in Berkeley. Anyone serious about California studies probably has a shelf of their books. Their McWilliams anthology, Fool's Paradise, is especially good.

Heyday was also kind enough to send along another 2007 title, Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports from the Rez, by Gordon Johnson. It's an original trade paperback, co-published by BayTree Books, that collects the author's columns from the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

KWMR Show Will Stream Tomorrow

...at 11 a.m., not 10 a.m., as I reported earlier. Easiest thing is to go to www.kwmr.org and click the On Air button at the top.

America Offline with Jonathan Rowe

I'll be on KWMR tonight at 5:30 to talk about Carey McWilliams, American Prophet, and whatever else might come up. The host is Jon Rowe, a freelance journalist and a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute. I met Jon at the most recent California Studies Association meeting in Berkeley. KWMR serves West Marin from Point Reyes Station (90.5) and Bolinas (89.3). Here's their link:

http://www.kwmr.org/

McWilliams Tribute on KPCC

I came upon a radio tribute to Carey McWilliams on KPCC (89.3 FM) in Pasadena. It aired last October in a segment called "Off-Ramps." Short and solid. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Patt Morrison also interviewed me last year about McWilliams on her KPCC show.

The KPCC website also has a great picture of him. It's a Will Connell photograph, evidently from the same session that produced the cover photo for American Prophet, but it's a little cooler than that one. McWilliams is looking directly at the camera, the dark tones are more saturated, and you can see the smoke coming off of his cigarette, all of which adds up to a noir-like image. I wish I'd seen this one earlier.



Here's the link. To listen to the segment, click on it and scroll down to "SoCal Visionary." There's also a link to McWilliams's Wikipedia page, which I've worked over pretty hard.

www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/shows/2006/10/14/index.html

Alice McGrath in VC Reporter

The VC Reporter, the alternative weekly for Ventura County, has a cover story on Alice McGrath this week. Alice was the executive secretary for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which McWilliams chaired in the early 1940s. It helped free a group of mostly Latino youths in Los Angeles after a biased murder trial.

A picture of Alice and McWilliams (taken while he was teaching at UCLA) is on the cover; the link above is to the story.

McWilliams Oral History

The transcript of Honorable in All Things, Carey McWilliams's oral history, is now available online. When I was writing American Prophet, I had to travel to Berkeley or UCLA to read this, so it's a huge convenience to have it at our fingertips now. The title comes from a line in Jerry McWilliams's will encouraging Carey and his brother to live a good life.

More Rosselli

I'm not quite ready to let the Johnny Rosselli thing go. Charles Rappleye recently told me he thought his book on Rosselli would make for a strong television mini-series. Yes, and certainly a great documentary. Rosselli didn't just coordinate the Chicago mob's takeover of the Hollywood unions, or help create Las Vegas, or work with the Kennedy administration to assassinate Castro. He was also the man who supposedly persuaded studio mogul Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in "From Here to Eternity," a legend Mario Puzo later fictionalized in "The Godfather." Seems like grist for the cinematic mill to me.

Colonial America--Echo Park Version

I just finished reading Charles Rappleye's Sons of Providence. It's about the Brown brothers, Moses and John, who founded Brown University and butted heads over the issue of slavery in colonial Rhode Island. Moses was a Quaker abolitionist, John a hardheaded businessman and slaver. In addition to tracing their lives in full and fascinating detail, Charles presents them as two American archetypes--social reformer and robber baron.

With the vast searching power at your fingertips, you can look up this book's favorable reviews at your leisure. You might start with the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Allow me to scale the magnitude of this critical success for you. According to David Ulin, the L.A. Times receives 200 books per day for review; they actually review about 12 per week in the Sunday supplement. So the odds of receiving a review are long; to run the table at the nation's top papers is huge. If you've mastered the Google search, you will also learn that Sons of Providence received the George Washington book prize and the $50k cash award that goes with it. That's folding money, people.

To which the fanatical reader of this blog might respond: All very well, but what does any of this have to do with Carey McWilliams and California culture? Well, let's start with the basics. First, Charles was for many years a fixture at the LA Weekly. Who among you expected an award-winning book on colonial America to emerge from the offices of an alternative weekly in Los Angeles? Full disclosure: Charles is originally from Rhode Island. But still.

Second, Charles's first book, a portrait of racketeer Johnny Rosselli, overlapped with the McWilliams story. Specifically, Rosselli was involved with the Chicago mob's takeover of Hollywood unions in the 1930s, a takeover McWilliams tried to resist. By coincidence, Rosselli was back in the news this week when the CIA released its so-called Family Jewels. Those documents show that Rosselli was involved with the agency's attempt to assassinate Castro. Charles gave me that book at a party he hosted at his Echo Park home some years ago, and I put it to good use on the McWilliams bio.