Critic and Crusader

More than a half century ago, the late Carey McWilliams described the rough going that awaited those who would attempt to interpret his adopted state: “The analyst of California is like a navigator who is trying to chart a course in a storm: the instruments will not work; the landmarks are lost; and the maps make little sense.”

For the last decade, I’ve been that navigator envisioned by McWilliams, traveling about the state in an effort to, as the editor who launched me on the assignment put it, “explain California to Californians.” It always seemed a bit outlandish, this premise that California--volatile, ever-changing, enormous--can be explained in any lasting way, twice a week, 800 words a pop.

I do, however, have one advantage over McWilliams, who set out in the 1940s to explain California, not only to California but also to the rest of the country. When the landmarks are lost and the maps make little sense, I need not fly completely blind: I can follow the still reliable charts mapped out by McWilliams half a century ago.

Whatever the issue of the moment in California--be it cult lunacy, water politics or the racial divide--it is always helpful to revisit McWilliams’ interpretive histories, “California: The Great Exception” and “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land.” Along with his landmark “Factories in the Field,” these books nailed the essence of California in a way that has never been duplicated. To a remarkable degree they remain as relevant today as when he wrote them.

Here, for example, is McWilliams in “Southern California Country,” exploring Los Angeles’ physical and psychological relationships with water: “It is the odd combination of almost perpetual sunshine with a lush, but not indigenous, vegetation that produces this impression of impermanence. Even newcomers are vaguely aware that the region is semi-arid, that the desert is near, and that all the throbbing, bustling life of Southern California is based on a single shaky premise, namely that the aqueduct life-lines will continue to bring an adequate supply of water to the region .... Facing the ocean, Southern California is inclined to forget the desert, but the desert is always there, and it haunts the imagination of the region.”

This passage is included in “Fool’s Paradise,” a sampler of McWilliams’ writings on California. Most of the 27 magazine essays and book excerpts that Dean Stewart and Jeannine Gendar have gathered here were written in the 1940s, although some later political pieces from McWilliams’ 20-year tenure as editor of The Nation are presented as well.

McWilliams’ topics in this collection run from earthquake folklore to agricultural violence, from the fall of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson to the rise of Ronald Reagan, from the false notes of Mission lore to the relocation of Japanese Americans in World War II. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the climate of suspicion that some Arab Americans are encountering, McWilliams’ exploration of the internment of Japanese Americans seems especially pertinent.

The piece, “Exodus From the West Coast,” is excerpted from a 1944 book, “Prejudice.” In it, McWilliams methodically explores--and demolishes--each of the many arguments for the unprecedented mass evacuation. In the course of this lengthy, well-documented essay, he makes a powerful case that the relocation of Japanese Americans was not driven by military necessity or even by the oft-stated desire to protect the evacuees from hostile fellow citizens. Rather, he concludes, it was rooted in prejudice and political expediency. And the cost, he argues, was greater than many Americans at the time realized:

“There was virtually no realization, among the generality of citizens, that they were witnessing a unique departure from American tradition; for those long proclamations ordering removal that appeared in the newspapers

Anative of Colorado and a self-described political radical, McWilliams came to Los Angeles as a young man in the 1920s. He hated it. “To say that my first reactions to Los Angeles were negative,” he wrote, “would be a gross understatement. I loathed the place. It lacked for an identity; there was no center.”

This loathing would not last. Late in his life, McWilliams would sum up his relationship with California as a whole, and Los Angeles in particular, this way: “For my part I have written of California out of a boundless enthusiasm and interest and affection that existed almost from the start and has grown with years.” It was this love of California, I would argue, that gave his criticism its enduring power.

And yet, McWilliams certainly was no booster. He did not belong to the tawny hills and golden sunsets school. Rare in his work are descriptions of California scenery. He was capable of exposing California’s ugliest secrets, of exploding its gilded mythology.

Just as he was not a booster, he also was not one more jaded assayer out to chuckle at the lotus eaters or lament Eden’s loss. He was a social critic who cared enough for California and its people to prod them to do better: He did this prodding not with shrill polemics but with careful, measured prose.

“The Politics of Utopia,” another piece excerpted from “Southern California Country,” offers a good example of McWilliams’ ability to strike a balance between his fondness for California and his outrage over social injustice. He begins by adopting an us-against-the-world stance: “Since the abuse of Los Angeles has become a national pastime, no phase of its social life has attracted more attention than its utopian politics, its flair for the new and the untried--a tendency dismissed by all observers as ‘crackpotism,’ still another vagary of the climate, a by-product of the eternal sunshine ....”

He then moves on to make the case--with a patient retelling of forgotten histories of real estate booms gone bust, of bitter anti-union campaigns and police brutality and so forth--that movements such as Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign and the $30 Every Tuesday crusade were not lunacy. Rather, they were “the inevitable reaction to twenty-five years of irresponsible boosterism. When the Depression swelled the ranks of the dispossessed, with the numberless victims of land-swindles and business frauds, the situation was ripe for demagogic political movements ....

“Los Angeles,” he goes on, “itself is a kind of utopia: a vast metropolitan community built in a semi-arid region, a city based upon improvisation, words, propaganda, boosterism. If a city could be created by such methods, it did not seem incredible to these hordes of the dispossessed that a new society might be evoked, by a process of incantation--a society in which the benefits of the machine age would be shared by all alike, old and young, rich and poor. However naive the expression of this belief may have been ... it cannot be dismissed as mere crackpotism.”

And here he drops his hammer: “The real crackpots of Los Angeles in the thirties,” he concludes, “were the individuals who ordered tons of oranges and vegetables dumped in the bed of the Los Angeles River while thousands of people were unemployed, hungry, and homeless.”

McWilliams left California in the 1950s, moving to New York to edit The Nation. In the late 1970s, however, he was making plans for one last reportorial swing through the state. “I would like to pick up where my knowledge leaves off,” he told a friend who was to serve as his escort, “and bring it up to date.” Sadly, before he could set out, McWilliams was diagnosed with cancer and in 1980 died at age 74. One wonders now what the artful navigator would have made of the California of Jerry Brown and Proposition 13, of silicon chips, Medflies and murderous happenings at San Francisco’s City Hall. I suspect he would have found it completely changed and also--in the fundamental ways he so lastingly charted in the 1940s--a place not changed at all.