Heirlooms

I attended a Heyday Books event last night for David Mas Masumoto's Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer. My first visit to Heyday's Berkeley office. It was a cool event, well attended (and catered!)--a pleasant and effective way to roll out a new book. Mas and his daughter Nikiko, a recent Cal grad, read selections from the book that were intermittently wry and heartfelt. She has decided to return to the family farm in Del Rey, 20 miles south of Fresno. See the link above for book details.

The History Teacher Review of American Prophet

Just saw this review of American Prophet by Terry A. Cooney, dean of the college of liberal arts at Towson University.

My sense is that Dean Cooney is very attuned to fairness and evenhandedness; I even get some praise in that department. But I wonder about his conclusion that McWilliams displayed "an inability to apply common principles of judgment to left and to right," and that this led to "inconsistency and evasion." I don't think those qualities characterized McWilliams's work as a whole, but I interviewed several people who shared Cooney's concerns, particularly when it came to The Nation's posture toward the Soviet Union.

By the way, Dean Cooney is the author of two related titles: The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945 and Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s. His online review of American Prophet is presented in association with the History Cooperative.

WAL Review of American Prophet

Yesterday I received a new review of American Prophet, this one by Forrest G. Robinson for Western American Literature. Very gratifying. He calls it an important new biography, says it's a fitting capstone to numerous recent tributes, and offers a practical suggestion: "Do yourself a favor, Dear Reader: buy this book."

I like Professor Robinson's quick sketch of McWilliams: "To my eye, he was a model citizen: informed, independent, lucid, tirelessly active, a political realistic (sic), supportive of others, disarmingly modest, and ever hopeful for the future." Then he offers a nice compliment for our humble scribe: "Richardson has earned our gratitude for restoring McWilliams to his proper eminence."

I'm grateful for the appreciative review, but I hope the book isn't a capstone so much as the beginning of something bigger and better when it comes to McWilliams criticism. There's a lot more to be done. The collection at UCLA still has many buried treasures, I suspect, and I've learned a few details since the book appeared--that McWilliams's father did in fact commit suicide, that Luis Valdez picked up his idea for Zoot Suit after reading North from Mexico in 1959, that McWilliams saw a psychoanalyst in Los Angeles, etc. (The analyst's daughter came to my talk at the Huntington Library; apparently her father was one of the few analysts in Los Angeles that the left-wing community trusted not to reveal damaging information to the FBI.) And then of course there's McWilliams's enormous body of work, which so far has received relatively light critical attention.

Full disclosure: Professor Robinson thinks I give inordinate attention, especially in the early going, to McWilliams's small sins. Fair enough. But I'm glad he connects that flaw to what he calls my scrupulous refusal to go hagiographical. I should also note that the book cites Professor Robinson's article, "Remembering Carey McWilliams," which ran in WAL in 2000.

As far as I can tell, there's no online version of the review. The journal is published by the Western Literature Association at Utah State University.

Zoot Suit in San Jose

Alice McGrath asked me to join her last night in San Jose for a production of Zoot Suit, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Wow.



First we met playwright Luis Valdez and his wife Lupe for a drink at the hotel. I had never met Luis before and relished the conversation with him and Lupe. Despite several efforts, I wasn't able to interview Luis for American Prophet, so I was grateful for the chance to hear more about his life, work, and relationship with Carey McWilliams. Alice was the model for the character Alice Bloomfield. Luis met Alice after he interviewed Carey in his New York apartment; the rest is theatrical history.

After our drink, a long train of period cars pulled in to escort us and the cast to the dinner and performance. Alice and I rode in a cherry red 1953 Chevy Bel Air convertible. We drove low and slow over to the Center for Employment Training and got a lot of approving looks from pedestrians and motorists. The car's owner, Tony, and his wife told us that they're often asked to provide this kind of service. They were part of the halftime show at the 49ers game last week, and their car club sponsors a toy drive every year in addition to helping out with other events. This isn't our ride, but you get the idea.



When we arrived, a big crowd was on hand, including media. Lots of photographs (Alice was asked to pose dozens of times over the course of the evening), including a crew from Telemundo. Mariachis were playing, and neighborhood kids gathered to watch zoot-suited players step out of their rides.

After we settled in, the CET folks explained their mission and handed out awards during dinner, which was prepared by the CET culinary arts students. Many local politicians were on hand, including San Jose's mayor, Chuck Reed. Luis gave the keynote address, a brief but rousing talk about the continuing struggle for social justice on the immigration question. Alice said a few words and got a standing ovation from the 500 or so people on hand.

We moved over to the auditorium for the performance, directed by Luis and Lupe's son, Kinan, the resident associate artistic director at El Teatro Campesino, the theater company founded by his father in San Juan Batista. Cesar Chavez's nephew, Rudy, introduced himself to Alice and said he was looking forward to the show, which he had never seen.

It was a splendid performance. I had seen the film version, but it was nice to be front and center at a live performance. Lots of energy, cool costumes (of course), and the action and sets matched the script's creativity. As we left, the cast gave Alice a round of applause. Sweet.

By the way, the photo above is from another production. I'll get one from the San Jose performance asap.

Reese Erlich Day

After the CSA committee meeting at Cal on Sunday, I wandered over to Barrows Hall for a book event with Reese Erlich, who wrote The Iran Agenda for PoliPointPress. Reese has been everywhere lately. He was on Peter Laufer's KPFA show earlier that day, I heard his NPR piece on Joni Mitchell last week, and he visited Google headquarters last Tuesday to talk about the book. That's a fraction of what he has already done and has planned over the next month. Go Reese.

Believe it or not, I'm about to head out to Oakland to celebrate Reese Erlich Day. The City Council will honor him with a resolution, and a reception and dinner will follow. Reese was a member of the so-called Oakland 7 back in the day, and the irony isn't lost on him. He was a staffer at Ramparts magazine, too.

CSA Annual Conference and Wilson Carey McWilliams

On Sunday, the steering committee of the California Studies Association (CSA) met on the Cal campus. In addition to knocking off some other business, we had a good discussion about the kind of conference CSA wants to host in the Spring.

I've always liked these conferences. I attended one in Oakland where I heard Wilson Carey McWilliams speak about the Progressive Era. I didn't know then that I would write about his father's life and work, but that's how it turned out, and his cooperation was crucial.

That conference took place during the electricity crisis, if I recall correctly. One panelist that year, Lenny Goldberg, had a great quote about the critical role of electricity in the California economy: "Electricity is just another commodity like oxygen is just another gas."

Cal State Channel Islands and Global Exchange

I spoke about Carey McWilliams at Cal State Channel Islands yesterday. I was really impressed with the campus and delighted by the faculty I met there.

On the drive down, I saw workers out in force picking lettuce in the Salinas Valley. Not much has changed since I began doing that drive over 30 years ago, and I wonder if McWilliams and John Steinbeck would notice any big changes since 1939.

I stayed at Alice McGrath's house in Ventura. She came to the talk, and I dropped her off on the way back to the Bay Area. I pulled into the Mission (San Francisco, that is) just in time for a book party at Global Exchange for Building the Green Economy by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. Also a blast.

The Country in the City

I just finished reading Richard Walker's The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. It really helped me understand the world I was born into--Berkeley in the late 1950s. As Dick points out, that world reflected the work of countless Bay Area activists reaching back to John Muir. Many were civic-minded and dedicated women, and some started or built environmental organizations with national impact. This book describes it all: the people, the organizations, the issues, the victories (always temporary), the challenges, and the movement's shortcomings and unintended consequences.

Always attuned to class issues, Dick acknowledges that these movements were mostly led by upper class folks and ultimately turned parts of the Bay Area (e.g., Marin and Napa) into lightly populated enclaves for the well off. Working families in the Bay Area have had great access to public parks and the coast, but activists so far have done little to impede the siting of toxic nastiness in low-income neighborhoods. Dick questions the link between efforts to slow or stop growth and the region's high housing prices, but he notes that the growth that has occurred--in the eastern part of Contra Costa County and the San Joaquin Valley, for example--isn't very smart and may be linked to the inner Bay Area's aversion to virtually any growth at all. At the end of the day, though, it's hard to resist Dick's conclusion that Bay Area residents have plenty to be thankful for.

Bill Issel on Sylvester Andriano

Last night I heard Bill Issel give a talk on the travails of Sylvester Andriano, a San Francisco attorney who was grilled and surveilled during World War II by some of the same people (e.g., Jack Tenney, J. Edgar Hoover) that went after Carey McWilliams. Some differences: Andriano was suspected of being pro-fascist, not a premature anti-fascist. Also, he had to leave the West Coast for the duration of the war, eventually settling in Chicago. And here's the capper: San Francisco leftists, including Harry Bridges, testified against him. I knew the early inquistions targeted right-wingers as well as lefties, but I didn't realize the firing squad was quite so circular.

Bill is professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University. His talk was part of the California Studies Dinners, sponsored by the Department of Geography and the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley. The title was “A Desecration of My Rights as an American Citizen: J. Edgar Hoover’s Investigation of Sylvester Andriano”

From Z to A and The Real Long Goodbye

Pat Reagh, a designer and printer in Sebastopol, just sent me two letterpress editions of Victoria Dailey's From Z to A: Jake Zeitlin, Merle Armitage and Los Angeles' Early Moderns and Judith Freeman's The Real Long Goodbye: The Unconventional Marriage of Raymond and Cissy Chandler. They're both beautiful works, sponsored by the UCLA Library. I can't wait to read them.

Pat will design and print the Bonnie Cashin lecture I gave last year at UCLA, so I'm eager to see how it comes out. The lecture was called "Always in Fashion? Carey McWilliams, California Radicalism, and the Politics of Cool."

Victoria Dailey is the lead author of LA's Early Moderns, for which I wrote an Amazon review (see the link to your starboard). My SF State class finishes reading Chandler's The Big Sleep tomorrow night, so I want to have a look at the Freeman piece today. Her book on Chandler and the women in his life, The Long Embrace, has just been published by Pantheon.