He would have been 108 December 13, 2013. Attorney, writer, liberal, target of Un-American Activities committees, editor of The Nation for 20 years, you'd think he'd be a household word. Reasons why not? 1) California, and identified as a Californian throughout his public life even when he spent the last 20 years in New York; 2) Never held public office. Why do I know about him? Despite the fact that I was writing a dissertation about the bookseller Jake Zeitlin, Carey McWilliams is the second most important person in it and there are some chapters that he threatened to take over. He probably would have if his handwriting had been legible.
Bear with me, but this is going to be a LONG diary. What we have here is a writer who became politically engaged during the course of his writing and a man who would have made a TERRIFIC Kossack. As I indicated, he played a really significant part in my dissertation, but what he did for Jake is really tangential to the political writing he should have become more famous for than he did. So I'll try not to get too carried away with what I wrote about McWilliams ten years ago and keep the stuff that augments the body of work about him. This was already a serious "diary me" commitment, but I was reminded by a terrific article Catherine Corman wrote for California History around the time I was writing my dissertation with the objective of extending, as she puts it, his shelf-life, exactly HOW important he is for the progressive community.
A brief biography, from the finding aid to the collection of his papers in the Special Collections Department at the Young Research Library at UCLA:
Carey McWilliams was born December 13, 1905 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He completed his Juris Doctorate from the University of Southern California in 1927. From 1927-1938, McWilliams was an attorney at the law firm Black, Hammack in Los Angeles. In 1938, he was appointed as chief of Division of Immigration and Housing of the State of California, a position he kept until 1942. During the period from 1945-1955, he began his long association with The Nation, becoming successively contributing editor, associate editor, and then editorial director. From 1955-1975, he was The Nation's editor. In addition to his editorial duties, McWilliams was a prolific lecturer and writer, speaking on many subjects and contributing articles and essays to numerous publications. After his retirement from The Nation, he continued to write a regular column for that publication. His monographs include Ambrose Bierce, a biography (1929); Louis Adamic and shadow America (1935); Factories in the field: the story of migratory farm labor in California (1939); Ill fares the land: migrants and migratory labor in the United States (1942); Brothers under the skin (1943); Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, symbol of racial intolerance (1944); Southern California country: an island on the land (1946); A mask for privilege: anti-Semitism in America (1948); North from Mexico: the Spanish-speaking people of the United States (1949); California: the great exception (1949); Witch hunt: the revival of heresy (1950); and his autobiography The education of Carey McWilliams (1979). In the late 1970s, McWilliams was briefly a Regents Lecturer at the University of California Riverside and then taught one quarter at the University of California Los Angeles in the History Department. He died of cancer at the age of 74 on June 27, 1980 in New York, New York.
And this is how McWilliams first enters my dissertation:
The publication of [Zeitlin's first book of poems] For Whispers and Chants alerted Carey McWilliams, a young newly-minted lawyer with a literary bent who was in the process of writing a series on Los Angeles writers, that there was another Los Angeles writer for him to contact. The series, for Samuel Clover’s Saturday Night, a weekly magazine that covered the social and cultural life of Los Angeles during most of the 1920s, allowed him to challenge his own belief that there was nothing to write about in Southern California. McWilliams remembered that Zeitlin “looked like a poet, he spoke like a poet, he lived like a poet – on a hilltop near Elysian Park – and, mirabile dictu! He was a poet.” He described him as “a painstaking laborious workman” who warranted inclusion among several poets he considered “redolent of the American milieu.” During the interview, they discovered that they had many common interests, one of which was fine printing, and McWilliams became part of the widening Zeitlin circle. McWilliams eventually became Zeitlin’s attorney, and he was instrumental in the creation and ongoing affairs of Zeitlin’s Primavera Press, which operated as a corporation from 1933 until 1938.
How he got into writing? This is from Chapter VI, and it's at the beginning of the section about the little magazine the Zeitlin circle wrote and published,
Opinion.
Carey McWilliams illustrates the type of writer who would most likely be attracted to the “little magazine” format. He began to write for publication while he was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, where he wrote editorials for the Daily Trojan and occasional pieces for Wampus, the college humor magazine. McWilliams was also on the founding editorial board, and eventually became editor, of the college literary magazine, The Wooden Horse (1924), which had as its mission a critique of American literary culture from a Western vantage point, and he contributed to Lyric West, a little magazine intended originally to become the Poetry of the West Coast, edited by USC English professor Roy Thompson. While McWilliams was in law school, he contributed pieces that discussed the “essences” of Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco to Overland Monthly, a literary publication founded by Bret Harte in 1868, which had been merged with Charles Lummis’s Land of Sunshine/Out West magazine. His work was also published in The Bookman, the national literary magazine Saturday Review and H.L. Mencken’s topical journal American Mercury.
McWilliams was at work on his first book, Ambrose Bierce: a Biography, while he wrote for Saturday Night; the book was published in 1929. This was also a collaborative project insofar as McWilliams made use of the several trunks of Bierce papers that the book collector Estelle Getz bought from Helen Bierce Isrigg, the daughter and only living child of the author, in a sale that Jake Zeitlin brokered with the help of Katherine White, the head saleswoman at Dawson’s Book Store. The sale was made with the proviso that Mrs. Isrigg or McWilliams, who was her attorney and who acted as her trustee in this transaction, should have access to the material for publication. McWilliams wrote the Bierce biography to dispel the myths that had developed concerning Bierce for a generation in rebellion under the leadership of The American Mercury and H. L. Mencken, who, with George Sterling, had renewed interest in Bierce. This biography brought McWilliams securely into contact with both the literary and the political networks that would support his ambitions during the 1930s, and may have foreshadowed the approach he would bring to serious political problems later in his career. During this period, he even considered starting his own magazine.
Yes, he wrote for
Opinion. That's for another diary WAY down the road.
He might even have been the first premature anti-fascist, when he shone a VERY bright light on antisemitism in Southern California:
as Carey McWilliams wrote, “up to 1933 the exclusion of Jews from clubs, hotels, summer resorts, and residential districts was neither as obvious nor as deep-seated in Germany as in the United States.” McWilliams, in fact, produced a pamphlet, It CAN Happen Here: Active Anti-Semitism in Los Angeles, which detailed how Los Angeles was blanketed with a violently anti-Semitic proclamation 29 and 30 September 1935; the proclamation was pasted to lampposts, left on street corners, slid under doors, and copies were even delivered neatly folded into home editions of the Los Angeles Times.
The rest will be from sources other than myself. From Corman's article:
Dropping the guise of disinterested, bohemian cultural critic, McWilliams immersed himself in politics. A mounting number of disgruntled workers were filing labor suits in southern California. The courts needed attorneys to try the cases. Despite his lack of experience in employment law, McWilliams took advantage of the trend and embarked on what he considered a decidedly more interesting legal career, representing unions and employees in civil court. In 1935, he accepted work as a trial examiner for the southern California branch of the National Labor Relations Board. When more than fifty thousand farm workers initiated a rash of violent agricultural strikes that summer, McWilliams undertook a twelve-day road trip to learn what had sparked the trouble. His observations became the seed that would bear fruit in the form of a series of gripping articles and a book, Factories in the Field.
No, he and Steinbeck DIDN'T know each other, which people suspected because
Factories might as well have been the non-fiction companion to
The Grapes of Wrath.
From the obituary of Alice McGrath, an activist who gained fame as a defender of the wrongly accused Chicanos in the Sleepy Lagoon murders of 1942, in the Los Angeles Times:
The defendants, dubbed "zoot suit gangsters" by a xenophobic press after the long coats and pegged pants that were popular among Mexican Americans, were being tried en masse. Portrayed as members of the "38th Street Gang," they were not allowed to consult with their lawyers during the 13-week trial. And in a tactic that made them look disreputable, they were not permitted to have their hair cut and were denied a change of clothes for the first month of the trial.
The judge was openly contemptuous of the defendants and their lawyers, and the all-white jury was allowed to go home at night, with access to sensationalist media coverage that focused on Mexican American delinquency. Twelve were convicted of murder and the rest of lesser charges.
McGrath, who attended the trial . . . was outraged, and began to volunteer with the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which lobbied for an appeal. Committee head and renowned author Carey McWilliams was impressed with her passion and named her executive director.
- snip -
In 1944, an appeals court overturned the convictions, finding there was no evidence that any of the young men had been involved in the killing. This is the type of cause McWilliams was willing to devote himself to.
From Corman again, explaining how McWilliams became involved with
The Nation:
Shortly after the publication of the last in this river of books [North from Mexico], in 1951, McWilliams accepted Freda Kerchway’s offer to serve as managing editor of The Nation. This took place when Kerchway, The Nation’s sitting editor, recruited McWilliams as a West Coast correspondent and lured him to New York for what was supposed to have been a brief sojourn as he assembled a special civil rights issue for the magazine. What was to be a temporary arrangement turned into a twenty-five-year institution. McWilliams’s last book before he became editor-in-chief at The Nation was Witch-Hunt: The Revival of Heresy. Released just as Joseph McCarthy began his campaign to smoke out supposed Communists, Witch-Hunt was McWilliams’s exploration of Americans’ fear of the Soviet Union. He did not write another book until 1979, when he published his autobiography, The Education of Carey McWilliams. During the intervening years, McWilliams led The Nation on an unswerving crusade against McCarthyism and the federal government’s Cold War policies. Ever unwilling to accept the necessity of red-baiting or blacklisting, McWilliams steadfastly defended Americans’ rights to choose their own political affiliations. He died in June 1980, barely a year after the publication of his autobiography, and just five years after the conclusion of his twenty-five-year stint at The Nation.
I was REALLY tempted to assign
Southern California country: an island on the land to my History of California students, but I didn't find a good complementary book on the rest of the state. I did the next best thing, though. Some enterprising people have put together a reader,
Fool's Paradise
that gives you McWilliams on quite a few subjects from his books and from the articles he wrote for
The Nation and several of the magazines he wrote for before 1950. Beside everything else, he's a VERY engaging writer. It's good he had people who would publish him, because his handwriting is really terrible; I found a passage I thought really crystallized his attitude toward Los Angeles in the 1930s in one of his notebooks, but I couldn't make out a couple of words and neither could the librarians in Special Collections! After about 15 minutes, we gave up.
This really just scratches the surface on this fascinating man. There are some good sources on him, and the Corman article is a very good place to start. You could do QUITE a bit worse than to learn about him from himself, in his last book, The Education of Carey McWilliams (1979). IF you have access to an academic library, this article by Greg Critser, “The Making of a Cultural Rebel: Carey McWilliams, 1924-1930,” Pacific Historical Review 55, no. 2 (May 1986) is a great source for his early years as a writer and a progressive [Critser is best known for his writing about medicine, science, food and health]. There's a biography: Peter Richardson, American Prophet (2005), but I haven't read it so I can't speak to it very well.
We'll see him again later when I write about California's own home-grown anticommunist efforts. I have a copy of the file the Tenney Commission put together on McWilliams with his rebuttals, and I'm planning to share a lot of it with you probably in mid-to-late April.