Honorable in All ThingsCarey McWilliamsInterviewed
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This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the University Library of the University of California at Los Angeles. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the University Librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles.
Acknowledgments
THIS INTERVIEW WAS MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY A GRANT TO THE UCLA ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM FROM THE JOHN AND LAREE CAUGHEY FUND.
Introduction
Carey McWilliams would have disappointed Horatio Alger. The first years of his life, after all, seemed the fulfillment of the American Dream as conceived by that nineteenth-century writer: financial reversal and the death of his father forced the young man to move to the big city, where he worked his way through law school, then rose in reputation, esteem, and earnings.
But then the life of Carey McWilliams changed course because of an emotion unknown to those heroes of Alger: compassion. McWilliams discovered the underprivileged, discovered that many in American society were forced by race, religion, or circumstance to live on its fringes. At his memorial last year, he was eulogized not as a wealthy, successful attorney, which he was no longer, but as the successor to Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair as a journalist whose principal concern was the betterment of society.
Carey McWilliams was born December 13, 1905, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to Jeremiah Newby and Harriet Casley McWilliams. He was born with what passed in the West for a silver spoon; his father had accumulated a fortune in land and cattle and was known throughout the state. His mother, who had journeyed to Steamboat Springs to teach school, had been quickly courted and wed
The reversal was abrupt. At the end of World War I, cheap Argentine beef flooded the market, and the American cattle industry collapsed. Jerry McWilliams was ruined, and he died a short time afterwards. In his will, he wrote to his sons, "Do not speculate or seek to get rich too quickly. Be patient, be morally right, keep a clear conscience and good company, although you may die a pauper be honorable in all things."
Three months after his father's death in 1921, Carey McWilliams was graduated from Wolfe Hall. He was not yet ready to heed his father's advice; less than a year later, he was excused from the University of Denver at the school's request.
He arrived in California to join his mother and brother in the spring of 1922 and enrolled in the University of Southern California. While working in the business office of the Los Angeles Times, he studied seriously and won his Juris Doctor in 1927. He passed the California bar and joined the law firm of Black and Hammack, which became, by the time he left it, Black, Hammack, and McWilliams.
If his law career was successful, his entry into the intellectual and cultural life of Southern California was even more so. He was part of a group that circled around Jake Zeitlin's various bookstores, a group that included Paul Jordan Smith, literary editor of the Times; Arthur Millier, the paper's art critic; Phil Townsend Hanna, editor of Touring Topics (now Westways; )photographer Will Connell; artist Merle Armitage; and architect Lloyd Wright. Together they participated in the shortlived but ambitious magazine Opinion; with Ward Ritchie, they contributed to the Primavera Press.
McWilliams corresponded with H. L. Mencken and published an article on Ambrose Bierce in the American Mercury. Publisher Albert Boni read the piece and invited him to expand the topic to book length, and the biography appeared in 1929. The following year, the University of Washington Bookstore released The New Regionalism in American Literature, in which McWilliams examined particularly western influences.
He was friendly, too, with the Yugoslavian American writer Louis Adamic, who was a radical champion of America's immigrants. In 1935, McWilliams paid homage to his friend and mentor in Louis Adamic and Shadow-America.
By that time, his world was beginning to change. He was affected by Upton Sinclair, whose EPIC movement fell short of the governorship but launched a New Deal Democratic
His world changed, also because of his travels in the agricultural valleys of California, upon which he reported to various eastern magazines. He was stunned by the living conditions of migrant workers and by their treatment when they tried to organize labor unions. He became the enemy of the Associated Farmers; for his concern Olson named him chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing. He resigned from his law firm and, through the division, undertook to improve the lot of the workers, at least to make ther plight better known.
McWilliams assembled his accumulated notes and numbers to write a book, and in 1939 he published Factories in the Field. The book remains complementary to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, fact to fiction; both contributed to an outpouring of sympathy for the so-called "Okies," the refugees from the blighted Dust Bowl states.
In Ill Fares the Land, published in 1942, he turned his attention to the national patterns of migratory labor and its exploitation by farm enterprises in such unexpected locales as Michigan and New Jersey. That year, Earl Warren defeated Olson and assumed the governorship, immediately fulfilling his pledge to his friends in the Associated
Forty years later, it seems ironic that those migrant workers who so moved the prosperous young attorney left the agricultural fields for battlefields during World War II and returned to a California that was flush with the boom of new industries. Today, many of those former migrant workers are part of the new conservative coalition, apparently blind to the conditions of those who suffer today under the same yoke that once bound them.
It is ironic, too, that Earl Warren, self-admitted enemy of McWilliams, a leading figure in the internment of California's Japanese, developed into one of this century's leading civil libertarians after he became chief justice of the US Supreme Court little more than a decade later.
If his professional life was changing abruptly during this period, McWilliams was undergoing equal change in his personal life. In 1930, he had married Dorothy Hedrick, daughter of an eminent mathematician and UCLA administrator. In 1941, they were divorced, and McWilliams married Iris Dornfeld, the author. Parenthetically, each marriage produced a distinguished offspring: Wilson Carey McWilliams, born to Dorothy Hedrick, is a noted professor of political science; Jerry McWilliams,
When he left state government, McWilliams dedicated himself to his social and political commitments. Primarily he was a writer and journalist, but he lent his legal skills where he felt them appropriate. He was active with the Committee for the Foreign-Born to protect the rights of "aliens" during wartime, and when racial turmoil burst loose against the Chicano in the Zoot Suit Riots of 1942 and 1943 in Los Angeles, he was active in the fight to free convicted teenagers in the Sleepy Lagoon case.
Writing was his occupation, injustice his preoccupation. In Brothers under the Skin (1943), he described the history of prejudice and racism in America, detailing the tribulations of yellow, brown, and black minorities. Prejudice: the Japanese American, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (1944) appeared while most Japanese Americans were still in internment camps. Their cause, espoused by McWilliams and by Los Angeles ACLU attorney A. L. Wirin, was eventually won in the courts, and rights of citizenship were restored to Orientals.
McWilliams explored anti-Semitism in America in the prize-winning and best-selling A Mask for Privilege (1948). He concluded that prejudice against the upwardly mobile, mercantile minority or ethnic group--the Jews, the Quakers
In North from Mexico (1949), he described the patterns of migration of Mexicans in the United States, their exploitation by growers and employers throughout the nation, and the stumbling blocks they face when they attempt to assimilate into the American mainstream. North from Mexico was reprinted with a new introduction in 1968 and has become a standard text in Chicano-studies classrooms nationwide.
Witch Hunt: the Revival of Heresy (1950) sounded the alarm against incipient McCarthyism and identified a recurrent strain of intolerance and nativism in America. McWilliams was to be scarred in this era, his wounds from the liberal left were even deeper than those inflicted from the right.
He paused from social comment twice during this period, first in the classic Southern California Country (1946), the most entertaining history ever written on this region. McWilliams elsewhere wrote that his feeling on arrival in Los Angeles was "like having a ringside seat at a year-round circus," and in Southern California Country he portrayed the big top, that panorama of eccentrics and charlatans who seem more comfortable in the hills and
McWilliams met Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, in 1945, and their friendship grew along with their professional affiliation through the postwar years. She appointed him contributing editor to the Nation in 1948 and in 1951 asked him to come to New York to edit a special issue of the magazine on the threat to civil liberties posed by McCarthyism. He never left, and he wrote only two more books (The California Revolution, 1968, and The Education of Carey McWilliams, 1979). After a year as associate editor and three years as editorial director, he assumed the editorship of the magazine in 1955 and retained the post until his retirement in 1975.
In New York, his vision turned outward. Los Angeles was for McWilliams a rich source for his writing talents; New York was a backdrop. For thirty years, he attended to national and international issues in the pages of the Nation, and he thrived. He encouraged young writers and was never disappointed when they moved on to higher-paying publications.
And yet these were years of turmoil for the magazine. As an ardent defender of civil liberties even for communists, the Nationbecame a target of the anticommunist liberal
Liberalism, to many, is in ruins today, and it is hard to believe that the movement was once sufficiently large that it had factions, and that they were in steadfast opposition to one another. The so-called Old Left lay scorned and abused in the early seventies, but today many SDS members have crossed back into the mainstream, and no Carey McWilliams has risen from the ranks of the New Left. Carey McWilliams warned in our last interview that demagoguery enters where a political vacuum exists. How close are we to the fulfillment of this terrifying prophecy?
In his retirement, McWilliams continued to write, continued to speak out against injustice, continued to live happily with Iris Dornfeld. He spoke wistfully of returning to Los Angeles, but it was so large and unwieldly, and he hated driving. And then there was the cancer.
I last saw Carey McWilliams in December 1979 in Santa Monica. He had spent four months in Southern California that year, and we had shared a platform for the Friends of the UCLA Library. After he reviewed the edited transcript of this interview, I visited him with my father, whose own operation had required no follow-up chemotherapy. We all spoke in bright, optimistic, but troubled terms, talked about America, about California, about books. At the farewell, we agreed to meet again in New York.
I happened to travel to New York the following June, and a call to Carey and Iris was high on my agenda. After our fifteen hours in interview, I felt a certain closeness to him and I looked forward to the reunion. I arrived the night of the twenty-eighth; had I seen that morning's New York Times, I would have read his obituary.
I attended the memorial service at the Ethical Culture Society the following week, and sitting in those hallowed, nonsectarian halls, pondering especially other memorials, other eulogies, I thought of the nature of the relationship between an interviewer and a narrator. We touch the lives of many human beings, lives that are as fragile and transitory as our own. All we can hope is that we might transmit that to others who will never share our experience. Carey McWilliams offered much for me to
In the end, Carey McWilliams fulfilled his father's last wishes. He dedicated his life to that in which he believed, to those who most needed his dedication. In the end, there was no speculation. He died as he had lived, honorable in all things.
Interview History
Interviewer
Joel Gardner, senior editor, Oral History Program, UCLA. B.A., M.A., French, Tulane University; M.A., Journalism, UCLA.
Time and Setting of Interview
Place: Home of Joseph Aidlin, Hollywood, where McWilliams resided while visiting Los Angeles, and Room 134A Powell Library, UCLA (video session).
Dates: July 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19 (video), 1978.
Time of day, length of sessions, and total number of recording hours: Sessions lasted all afternoon, beginning immediately after lunch and continuing through completion. Sessions averaged four hours in length. A total of twelve and a half hours of conversation was recorded.
Persons present during interview: Gardner and McWilliams. Rebecca Andrade, assistant editor, Oral History Program, operated equipment during the video session.
Conduct of the Interview
The interviewer spent hours in the Department of Special Collections and the Public Affairs Service analyzing archival materials, including those of the Haynes Foundation, pertaining to the life of McWilliams and to the Zoot Suit Riots. He also read McWilliams's works and reviewed twenty-five volumes of the Nation magazine.
The interview followed a biographical format. The respondent was asked to discuss his early years, his arrival in Los Angeles, and his first political involvements. His change of career from attorney to journalist was then pursued, and his years as editor of the Nation were discussed in detail.
Editing
Editing was done by Andrade. She checked the verbatim transcript of the interview against the original tape recordings and edited for
McWilliams reviewed and approved the edited transcript.
The index and table of contents were prepared by Oral History Program staff.
Table of Contents
- TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (July 10, 1978)
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Birth--Family background--Father's move west in 1886--Steamboat Springs, Colorado--Caret' family in Wyoming--Gary family in Colorado--Open-range cattle industry in the west--Family's religious background--Childhood in Steamboat Springs- Ethnic and religious makeup of Steamboat Springs --Mother's education--Father's election to Colorado state senate--High school education-Early literary influences: Fitzgerald, Mencken --Cowhands' respect for father--University of Denver--Move to Los Angeles after father's death.
- TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (July 10, 1978
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Job at the Los Angeles Times credit office-Enrollment at University of California, Southern Branch--Transfer to University of Southern California--Ambrose Bierce biography--Friendship with Helen Bierce--Friendship with George Sterling--Sale of Ambrose Bierce collection-Meeting Jake Zeitlin--Sam Clover and Saturday Night--Clover's criticism of Owens Valley project--Opinion magazine--Los Angeles's first group of modern intelligentsia--S. MacDonald-Wright--Articles and pamphlets written in the thirties--Interest in regional and western literature--Friendship with Mary Austin-Graduation from law school, 1927--Black, Hammack and Black law firm--Interest in labor law--The literary radicals of the twenties become the political radicals of the thirties.
- TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (July 10, 1978)
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Friendship with Louis Adamic--Adamic's insight into "shadow America"--Upton Sinclair and labor in Southern California--Dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times--Marriage to Dorothy Hedrick, 1930--Discontent as a lawyer--Increasing political awareness and activism--Involvement with labor law--First attorney for the Newspaper Guild--Hollywood Citizen-News strike--The Labor for-Bowron Committee--Representing miscellaneous unions--Speaking on new labor legislation-Interest in Imperial Valley labor relations-Research into migratory farm labor in California-ACLU: Al Wirin, John Beardsley--Upton Sinclair and the EPIC campaign of 1934--Growth of Democratic party--Sinclair's loss of interest in his race for governor--Raymond Haight's involvement in the campaign--1934 San Francisco general strike --Role of Harry Bridges in strike--Increased labor membership in California.
- TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (July 12, 1978)
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Shaping of political philosophy--The twenties boom in Southern California--Los Angeles Times management--The Chandlers--Adamic's political attitude in the thirties--The Left's role in the thirties--Anti-Semitism in Los Angeles-International situation in the thirties--End of the New Deal--Public reaction to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia--Mass meeting in support of Loyalist Spain--Impact of Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939--Writing feature articles for Westways--Culbert L. Olson's campaign for governor, 1938 --Appointment as commissioner of the Division of Immigration and Housing--Simon J. Lubin's work in farm labor, migratory labor, rural housing--Formation of the Division of Immigration and Housing--The La Follette Committee and farm labor in California--Reasons for accepting appointment to the Division--Reviving the Division's former activities--Reactions of organized farm groups--Charges of conspiring with John Steinbeck--Commission hearings on minimum wage for farm laborers.
- TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (July 12, 1978)
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Bill of attainder to abolish the Division of Immigration and Housing--La Follette Committee --Migratory labor in California--Factories in the Field--Ill Fares the Land, an analysis of migratory labor nationally--Lecture tour--The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born--The Alien Registration Act, 1940--Role of liberals in the war--Roosevelt's considerations against a pro-Loyalist attitude --Tolan Committee--The evacuation of the Japanese from California in 1942--Marriage to Iris Dornfeld, 1941--Earl Warren's administration: farm labor, California Supreme Court appointments, evacuation of JapaneseAmericans--Warren's liberal tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1959.
- TAPE NUMBER: III, Side Two (July 12, 1978)
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Friendship with Robert and Sara Kenny--Kenny's campaign for governor against Warren, 1946-Writing speeches for "Pat" Brown and Will Rogers, Jr.--Reasons for the defeat of Brown, Kenny, and Rogers--Kenny's flair for efficient administration and his political expertise-Arthur Samish: skill in handling the legislature--Stanley Rose and his bookstore.
- [Second Part] (July 13, 1978)
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Sleepy Lagoon murder trial--Defense Committee and its broad base of support--Role of Hollywood personalities in Defense Committee--Zoot-suit riots, 1943--Fund-raising activities for Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee--Committee's financial records--Circumstances of Sleepy Lagoon murder --Commission of inquiry to calm the press and law enforcement officials--Sympathetic newspapers --Amusing sidelights of Sleepy Lagoon.
- TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (July 13, 1978)
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Zoot-suit riots--Fund-raising benefits for Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee--Alice Greenfield McGrath--Involvement of unions in Defense Committee--Defense lawyers George Shibley and Ben Margolis--PM magazine--The New Republic--Brothers Under the Skin--Recommendation for a civil rights commission--Civil rights legislation in the sixties--Change in attitudes toward minorities--Prejudice and the Japanese-American relocation program--End of the internment of Japanese-Americans.
- TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side Two (July 13, 1978)
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Smooth operation of relocation program--Southern California Country: An Island on the Land: its continuing success--C.C. Julian case--Chinatown --The California State Water Project.
- [Second Part] (July 14, 1978)
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The Associated Farmers and State Senator John Phillips--State Relief Administration--Liberal background of Tenney committee members--Committee hearings--The International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees and the movie industry strike of 1933--Indictment and conviction of George Browne and Willie Bioff.
- TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (July 13, 1978)
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Indictment of Frank Nitti and company--Bioff accuses Louis Mayer of initiating IATSE hearings--The Conference of Studio Unions strike--Confrontations with the Tenney committee --The role of ad hoc committees in American democracy--Report on Japanese-American relocation centers--Radio debate on Japanese-American assimilation--Tenure as contributing editor for the Nation, 1945--Writing schedule--The Education of Carey McWilliams--Passive and active segregation--The Chicago Jewish Forum --Misjudgments of the Communist party in the United States--America's long-standing bias against socialism--Situation leading to the McCarthy phenomenon and the Cold War--The Hollywood Ten hearings and implications of the Fifth Amendment.
- TAPE NUMBER: V, Side Two (July 14, 1978)
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Hollywood Ten trials--Interest in Los Angeles cults--Formation of the Progressive party and the Progressive Citizens of America--A political diary--Americans for Democratic Action-Democrats-for-Wallace movement--Efforts to defeat Truman at the Democratic convention--Resignation from PCA--The Nation conference on liberal politics, 1946--Anti-Semitism in America; A Mask for Privilege--Minority groups in America--Lecture tours across the country-Loren Miller--California: The Great Exception, 1949.
- TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side One (July 14, 1978)
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North from Mexico--Witch Hunt--University loyalty oaths--Truman's lack of sensitivity-Oath mania--Left's inaction during crisis-Formation of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.
- [Second Part] (July 17, 1978)
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First contact with the Nation; Freda Kirchwey-Family's adjustment to New York City--Editorial and fund-raising responsibilities--the Nation's financial straits--Circulation of the Nation; comparisons with the New Republic.
- TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side Two (July 17, 1978)
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The Nation's book club--Uniqueness of the Nation's readership--The Reporter and its pro-Cold-War policy--Freda Kirchwey: background and editorial policies--George Kirstein--Charges of conspiracy to undermine the informer system: Paul Hughes, Harvey Matusow--Relationship with the Nation's publishers: George Kirstein, James J. Storrow, Jr., Gifford Phillips.
- TAPE NUMBER: VII, Side One (July 17, 1978)
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The Nation conference on "Reordering National Priorities"--Opposition to the Vietnam War-Martin Luther King, Jr.--Eugene McCarthy's primary campaign--The 1968 Democratic Convention --McCarthy's attitude--Frontier magazine-Gifford Phillips--The Nation's coverage of civil liberties issues--Information sources and contacts--Alger Hiss case--Fred Cook's investigative reporting--Contributions by former FBI and CIA agents--Coverage of civil rights movement in the South: Dan Wakefield, Martin Luther King, Jr.--The Nation's relationship with black leaders and writers--Coverage of events in Vietnam, China, and the Middle East.
- TAPE NUMBER: VII, Side Two (July 17, 1978)
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The Nation's foreign correspondents: Anne Tuckerman Alexanccer Werth, Jane Stolle, Raymond Williams, Geoffrey Barraclough, Jacob Bronowski, Claude Bourdet, C. Amery--Coverage of Cuban revolution and Bay of Pigs invasion--Henrique Galvao's reports on the Portuguese situation--Contacts in Africa--Vietnam war correspondents--China sources: Edgar Snow--Alvarez Del Vayo--Robert Sherrill.
- TAPE NUMBER: VIII, Side One (July 18, 1978)
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The Nation's contributors: Ralph Nader, Hunter Thompson, John Lindsay--Articles on the Pentagon and militarism--Crusade to revive the peace movement; supporting peace candidates--Young people's disillusionment with politics in the sixties--Liberal Republicans' opposition to Vietnam War--The need for a national political movement today--The Nation's articles on youth in the fifties--Men in gray flannel suits and "Life in the Crystal Palace"--Temper of the sixties-Lyndon B. Johnson and a shift of priorities in 1965--Escalation of Vietnam War--The Nation's disillusionment with Hubert H. Humphrey--The New Society's lack of determination--Enthusiasm of the New Deal in the thirties--WPA and Harry Hopkins--Endorsement for Stevenson--Differences with Robert F. Kennedy--Kennedy administration's stand on civil rights--Political impact of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.--Stevenson's 1956 campaign.
- TAPE NUMBER: VIII, Side Two (July 18, 1978)
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Richard M. Nixon--The 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco--Casualties of liberal Republicanism--The two-party system--Continuation of McCarthyism--The radical Right's exertion of pressure on the Republican party--The need for a Leftist coalition--Labor as a potential for good leadership--The lack of national politics in the U.S. today--The Nation's editors and reviewers.
- TAPE NUMBER: IX, Side One (July 18, 1978)
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The Nation's staff and contributors--The Nation's centennial, 1965--More contributors to the Nation: Christopher Lasch, Theodore Roszak--Lack of time for reading--Accomplishments at the Nation; major stories--Magazine's eastern-seaboard orientation-Resignation in 1975--Editorship of Victor Navasky-Role, function, and problems of small independent magazines.
- TAPE NUMBER: X [video session] (July 19, 1978)
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ACLU: board members of the national and Southern California chapters--The National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee--Roger Baldwin--Activities since resignation from the Nation--The Education of Carey McWilliams as a means of relieving ignorance--USC years--Ties with UCLA--Continuing success of McWilliams's books--Giving interviews-Future books--Impressions of changes in Southern California--Potential relationship between Australia and California--Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown --A cyclical theory of national politics.
Tape Number: I, Side One
(July 10, 1978)
Gardner
Now, as I mentioned, we standardly begin by talking about the date of your birth, the place of your birth. And then I'd like to hear something about your family background.
McWilliams
Sure, certainly. Well, I was born on a cattle ranch near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and the date was December 13, 1905. My father [Jeremiah (Jerry) Newby McWilliams] started out life as a clerk in a retail men's clothing store in Kansas City. He had been quite successful at it. But he contracted what was in those days known as lung trouble. And in those days there was only one sovereign remedy: that was to go west for the climate. He was twenty-one years old, and he borrowed some money from relatives--some rich relatives--in Kansas City and went out to Denver. In those days you went from Denver on the Denver-Rio Grande to Wolcott, and you took the stagecoach from Wolcott eighty miles to Steamboat Springs. And this is a very interesting part of the West. It's a big diagonal stretch of country that extends from the Continental Divide to the Utah border, and is bounded on the north by sort of a transverse range of the Rockies and on the south by the flattop wilderness area.
The year that he went out there was 1886, and he had heard of a townsite that was going to be developed at Steamboat Springs. The townsite was founded by a man by the name of Colonel James Crawford, who had crossed the Continental Divide in 1876 by wagon train and whatnot, and had drifted down the Yampa. The Yampa River flows into the Bear River, and oddly enough it starts flowing north. He followed it down to Steamboat Springs, where it makes a sharp turn, heads west, goes into the Green, which flows into the Colorado. And at that point where it makes a turn, there's always been a collection of warm water springs and mineral springs. And he, Colonel Crawford, thought it would be an ideal place to establish a townsite, so he laid it out as a townsite. But there were no people there to speak of, and when my father arrived, the town consisted of three saloons, and a blacksmith shop, and a livery stable, a stagecoach inn. And there he proceeded to build a big barn of a building for a clothing store, general dry goods, with a big, huge, false front. And I think the name was the New York Emporium. [laughter] And of course with no customers--and even the people there had no money, you know--he went broke in three or four months' time.
So the question arose: what to do? He went over to Wyoming, where the Carey family had a big cattle dynasty. The Careys are the subject of a lot of writing about
Gardner
Just amazing.
McWilliams
Just as casually as that. So that's how he got into the cattle business. It's an interesting kind of story because there was another Carey family down by Craig, Colorado--great, big cattle operation. Not as big as the Wyoming Careys, but very large. And they spelled their name Cary: C-A-R-Y. And they were very close friends of my father's. And my father succeeded Senator [John] Cary in the state senate from that part of Colorado. So when I was born, my father was in a quandary. He wanted to name me Cary, because that was the family with which he was closest, but he thought it would be confusing to have the spelling C-A-R-Y. There were quite a number of them about and so forth, so he didn't want that confusion. And the logic of it escapes me; I don't quite understand the logic of it. But in any case, he made it Carey:
My father was, oh, I suppose we would say an eighth-grade-educated person. He was not intellectual. [He] had a very sharp, shrewd intelligence, but he was not in any sense an intellectual. He was not interested in books or anything of this sort. The family were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, so-called prerevolutionary stock: you know, made the traditional western route through the Cumberland Pass, and they were in North Carolina, and they came through the Cumberland Pass to Kentucky. There is still the original farm near Berea, Kentucky: 160 acres. It's still farmed by McWilliamses.
Gardner
Is that so?
McWilliams
Yes. All this period of time. But in my grandfather's time, there were eight children, I think. And it was obvious that all of them couldn't make a living on 160 acres. So my grandfather [Samuel McWilliams] lit out for Missouri and established a farm near Plattsburg, Missouri, which is about, oh, thirty miles from Kansas City, something like that. And at about that time, the Civil War came along. He enlisted in the Confederate army, was a captain in the Confederate army. He was taken prisoner by the Union army and served some eight or nine months in a federal prison camp, and then he was released and went back to his farm. He was a Calvinist,
Oddly enough this religious background--or not so oddly--disappeared when my father went west. He just sort of cast it aside. It was--you know, the West was the West. So he was not a churchman. He didn't go to church except rarely, and he supported all of the churches in Steamboat Springs, including the small Catholic church, same amount of money each year. But he didn't show really much interest. It was not a religious household. He wanted my brother [Casley McWilliams] and I to go to Sunday School, thought it wouldn't do us any harm. That was his attitude, but he did not insist upon it.
Gardner
Were you raised Presbyterian or Baptist?
No. We just were raised nothing.
Gardner
You were raised nothing.
McWilliams
Yes. I've gotten used to filling out all kinds of questionnaires as nonchurch, unaffiliated, you know, that sort of thing.
My mother's [Harriet Casley McWilliams] family--this is even more bizarre because her parents were Catholics. Her father [Paul Casley] was a French-Canadian; the family lived in Wisconsin. And he ran away at age sixteen to enlist in the Union army as a drummer boy, and was taken prisoner and all that sort of thing, and had a very rough time of it in the Civil War. Her mother was a German-Catholic from Hamburg who came here at the age of eleven as a German servant girl. Didn't speak a word of English: had her name and destination on a label on her coat. As they took the course of migrating west from Wisconsin to Kansas, and from Kansas to Denver, they had shed the religious background pretty largely. And my mother had no religious affiliations of any kind.
She came over to Steamboat Springs. It was her first teaching assignment, and she didn't complete the first term in this school because she got married. Because pretty, young schoolteachers didn't survive very long single, you know, in that kind of situation. So they were married at the end of her first term in Steamboat Springs.
What was the date of that? Do you know?
McWilliams
I don't know what that date would be [February 3, 1895]. My father died, I know, twenty-five years to the day, I think it was, that they were married. They had just the two of us--my brother, who lives here in Manhattan Beach, and he's three years older than I am--just the two of us. [My father] became--as I indicated in that Los Angeles Times interview, he really was the chief political-economic individual, so to speak, in northwestern Colorado for many years. Everything sort of revolved around him.
Gardner
Was it through the cattle business that he obtained this . . .
McWilliams
Yes, cattle business. He got into the cattle business in a big way. And you see, the cattle empires--open-range cattle industry--moved north from Texas, to Oklahoma, to Kansas, Wyoming, Montana. But it stayed on the east side of the Rockies because there was no rail line. So this development in northwestern Colorado was deferred.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
But not entirely, because they raised a lot of cattle, and they would drive them to Rawlins for shipment to Denver, or they would drive them right across the Continental Divide, as my father did on many occasions.
But then David Moffat comes into the story. Moffat
But as soon as the railroad was completed, the cattle industry, which had been growing pretty rapidly, suddently began to boom there, because this was the last reenactment of the open-range cattle industry, the whole saga, the whole thing: the cow towns, the cattle rustlers, the
And then, you see, when the rail line was completed in 1908, it was easy to ship cattle to Denver, and [it] saved a lot of time. World War I was coming along, so the cattle industry began to boom, really to boom. Up to this point it had been a situation of simply raising cattle and shipping beef to Denver and so forth, but when it began to boom in this way, my father went, for example, to Arizona and New Mexico, where drought conditions had created a buyer's market--thousands of heads of steers--and shipped them north to northwestern Colorado, ran them one season and shipped them to Denver, sold them on a rising market, as these other cattle empires did. And of course they all got rich. There was a fantastic development, but when the Armistice came, they had not anticipated what the effect the lifting of the German naval blockade on Argentine beef might have; you see, all during the war years, Argentine beef had been kept out of American markets because of the German naval blockade. Once that blockade was lifted, all that accumulated beef began to flow into American markets,
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
You couldn't even sell cattle. And all these big-time operators went broke, all of them, my father included, his operation included. And they just hadn't anticipated this disaster. And of course during the war years the demand was great, and it seemed to be endless. Prices were constantly going up, but it all came to a real crashing finale in 1919.
Gardner
Were you aware of this as you were growing up? It's hard, because it's the years of, say, about seven to fifteen.
McWilliams
Yes. I was not aware of the scale. I didn't appreciate just what was going on. My father had this home ranch, main ranch, where we lived. But he owned a lot of other ranches, too, and it was a big operation. One year, I recall, we ran something like 17,000 head of cattle on the range.
My parents were ideal parents in an ideal setting in a way because they were both very busy, no-nonsense types. They had to be busy. They had a great deal to do. And they let us roam pretty wild, do what we wanted to. After all, what the hell? What could we do to harm ourselves? We might break a leg or something, you know, but there
And then, you see, it was so ironic in a way that the history comes on tiptoe occasionally. In 1912 a man by the name of [Carl] Howelsen arrived at Steamboat with some skis; he was a Norwegian. And as kids we didn't
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
So, it is not now called Storm Mountain; it's called Mt. Werner, after Bud Werner, the first American to win international acclaim as a ski jumper, who was killed in Switzerland. And the Werners, in the meantime, had bought my father's ranch. So it's now called Mt. Werner, and there's a big development there, of course connected with skiing.
But he couldn't imagine that that hill--that mountain--would ever be used for anything. He'd turn over in his grave three times, you know, if he could . . .
Gardner
. . . if he could see it today.
McWilliams
. . . if he could see it in its present development.
Were there many kids in that area when you were growing up?
McWilliams
Quite a number. But it was--you know, the town itself, the townsite that Colonel Crawford had in mind, didn't develop, really, because by the turn of the century there were only 300 people in the town. But with the railroad coming in, they began to get eastern summer people, and the town began to show some development. The springs are delightful, wonderful. And they had a public bathhouse and all the rest of it, and then it began to grow. And I suppose when I was going to school, there may have been 1,600 people, maybe; I'm not sure there were that many. And in view of all the chatter that we hear nowadays about "roots," it was very interesting, because the Utes, after the so-called Meeker Massacre--I think it was in the late seventies--the Utes had all been removed and placed on a reservation in Utah. So we were not aware of anything even resembling an Indian presence. It had just completely gone. There were three blacks that I knew, but I didn't really know them as blacks. They were just individuals, really. My father had a chuck wagon cook, who, of course, as you might suspect or anticipate, was known as Nigger Jim. But he was a tyrant and a despot. My father was afraid to talk to him, almost, and my mother was, too, because he just ran that chuck wagon as though
Gardner
All the other 1,595 were . . .
McWilliams
. . . mixed, a wild mix. And you didn't know where they came from, really; and you didn't ask where they came from. But many of them, quite a number of them, had come from the South.
Gardner
After the war.
McWilliams
After the war. But you didn't really--you never got into this somehow. And there were two coal camps, coal mining camps--Oak Creek and Mount Harris. The miners were south Europeans, by and largely--Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Italians, and whatnot. But those towns kept to themselves. They had their own activities, and we had very little contact with them. They would show up on the Fourth of July to witness the bucking-bronco contests and
Gardner
. . . was very wide.
McWilliams
They came from the ends of the earth, so to speak. For example, there was a colony--this accounts for the fact that there was a small Catholic church--of Swiss who'd heard about this Switzerland of America, which it really is. And they had come from Switzerland. They had some ranches, small ranches, in the north end of the valley. My father did business with them for years. They were so isolated there that the kids were as wild as rabbits. If they saw people coming, they'd start running. But there were these Swiss, and there were some Germans, German people; it was quite a mix, but it was all white.
Gardner
Your mother, you mentioned, was German-Catholic. Did she also not observe religion once she. . . ?
McWilliams
Both of her parents had shed their Catholicism by the time the family got to Denver. They had made a series of moves and went from Wisconsin to Kansas; Kansas to Denver. By the time they got to Denver, they had shed this. They probably thought of themselves as being Catholic, but they were not churchgoing Catholics.
Gardner
She was a schoolteacher, so she must have had an education.
McWilliams
She had a high-school education, high school.
Gardner
And that was adequate to school teaching?
McWilliams
Oh, yes, yes, indeed. She had a small library at the ranch, consisted of some sets of books: Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and a few other sets of that kind, and some popular novels of the period, such as The Rosary, by Florence Barclay; and novels by Irving Bacheller; Rider Haggard, the American Winston Churchill; and some cowboy novels. And she usually subscribed to at least one magazine like the Ladies Home Journal or Saturday Evening Post. And she did like to read when she had any time to read, but she didn't have much time. I don't know to this day where and how I became an omnivorous reader. I just don't know how this happened, but it did. [tape recorder turned off]
Gardner
You were talking about your reading habits.
McWilliams
Yes. I recall that my first published work was a letter written to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News calling his attention to the fact that they had published a poem, an English Victorian poem, and they had the name of the poet wrong. And I took great delight in calling their attention to this fact. That was the first
Gardner
How old were you then?
McWilliams
Well, I was still in grade school. I know that, because most of my high school was in a school in Denver--most of it. Well, when my father was elected to the state senate, he of course was a member of the Denver Club and all that sort of thing. And his colleagues, the people that he associated with in business, you know, in Denver--he had a seat, incidentally, on the Denver Stock Exchange and all that sort of thing. And his friends, his associates, convinced him that my brother and I shouldn't go to a public high school. This wasn't quite the right thing to do--the more so since we had gone to quite a different kind of school. They recommended a school called the Wolfe Hall Military Academy in Denver. It was right near Miss Wolcott's School for Girls and right near the Lawrence Phipps mansion on Colfax Avenue. They had day students (and we were day students), and then they had regular boarding students. It was a military academy, and it was run by Episcopalians. It was grotesque. So far as the boarding pupils were concerned, you might refer to it as a quite expensive, high-class reformatory, [laughter] because these were kids who were from Wyoming and New Mexico and all around whose parents had apparently had
Gardner
This was for high school.
McWilliams
For high school. Although during the last year of high school, when all this debacle began, my father was quite ill. He was dying, and he wanted to go back to the ranch, wanted to go back to the ranch. So we took him back there in the depths of the winter. We could do it because the train made a stop right at the ranch. This stop was known on the railroad schedule as Newby, Colorado-- and his name was Jeremiah Newby McWilliams--so that he had a station, so to speak, right at the ranch where the train stopped. Because we had taken him back there in the middle of the winter, I actually graduated from Steamboat Springs High School. But most of my high school was spent at Wolfe Hall Military Academy.
Gardner
I see. Well, tell me something just briefly about your grammar school education and so on. Do you recall anything about it? Do you recall inspiration of any kind from it and so on?
No, I can't say that I do. It had some; I remember one or two teachers that were quite good, quite good. But it was, just as you would expect it to be, a fairly good public school for a community of that kind. I didn't have any particular inspiration there. In this Wolfe Hall Military Academy, there was a professor there from Bowdoin who was quite a literary kind of guy, and I enjoyed my work with him. I enjoyed that.
Then, when I graduated from Steamboat Springs High School, I had a scholarship to the University of Denver. I think I was sixteen when I enrolled at the University of Denver. By that time I was very much interested in books and had scribbled notes for a kind of a novel about that part of the West. Of course I never wrote it. But I was interested in writing and books. And I read [F.] Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise the year before I enrolled in the University of Denver. It made a great impression on me; I thought this was a wonderful book. And then when I was in the University of Denver, I worked on the paper, the school paper, and so forth. I had discovered [H.L.] Mencken in the meantime, and I bought every copy of the Smart Set as soon as it appeared. I would race down to the newsstand for the latest copy and read all the books Mencken commended.
Gardner
Your background in this circumstance--growing
McWilliams
That is quite true.
Gardner
And then especially when you mentioned the Fitzgerald and the Mencken and so forth and so on . . .
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
. . . as the first books. Were you aware of that sort of thing growing up? Did you have a feeling that, you know, your father was probably the richest guy in the territory, and there you were in school?
McWilliams
I was aware of the fact that he was universally respected, and that he was a man of very considerable prominence, and was a character: you know, everyone knew him. It was very interesting. He never got over being this clerk in the men's clothing store in Kansas City. For example, we grew up with cowhands. It was a big cattle operation; we always had a lot of cowhands around, and they were our mentors. I don't know whether you know this or not, but cowhands are enormously style-conscious.
Gardner
No, I wasn't aware of that.
McWilliams
Beyond belief. I mean, reins have got to be just so thin. If a stirrup is too wide, it's gauche, kind of vulgar. If a rowel on a spur's too big, they didn't like it, and all that sort of thing. How you trim a
But he commanded their total respect for, I think, essentially one reason: he was an absolutely, astonishingly phenomenal judge of livestock. Where he had acquired this, I don't know. But cattle and horses, age, weight, you know, absolutely uncanny. This deeply impressed them.
He was a teetotaler. He wouldn't allow liquor on the ranch, any of his ranches. And if they had guns, as they did, they had to check the guns, [or he] wouldn't let them in. In other words, when they were out riding on the range, he wouldn't permit them to carry guns. And yet, for all of that, they had very considerable respect for him, very great respect. And we assimilated some of their attitude towards him. To them he was a kind of a comic figure, you know. It was odd to see a man of this kind out on
And he was highly respected in the town itself, I was aware of this, and of course [also when I was] going to school in Denver. I spent a lot of my time in Denver, not in Wolfe Hall, but in riding around on a bicycle, or reading in the state library of the state capitol, or listening in on the senate debates, and that sort of thing. But he was not ostentatious We didn't live in anything that you would call affluence or anything like this. It was a western ranch-style living, you know. But we were well aware of the fact that he was a person of some considerable substance and standing.
Gardner
Right. Did your brother go on to college before you?
McWilliams
He had to stay because of my father's illness, in this debacle and whatnot. He had to leave college to help out at the ranch. And he was much more, I would say, adept at it than I was. He was much more geared to it. If circumstances had turned out differently he would probably have turned out to be a big dealer or cattle operator himself. He liked that sort of thing. He was not particularly good in school; he didn't get good grades. He got passing grades but not good grades, and as a result of this interruption he didn't graduate from college.
Gardner
I see.
Yes.
Gardner
Well, there you are at the University of Denver, then, at sixteen. What sort of course of study did you embark upon?
McWilliams
Absolutely so irrelevant and eccentric you wouldn't believe it. I was, you know, very naive about that sort of life. I joined a social fraternity, and I had another freshman who pledged at the same time I did. He was an Italian-American, and we were great friends. He was a football player; I was not. So he told me I should enroll with him in the Italian course, take Italian as a foreign language because it would be a cinch: he could take care of any problems that came up, and so forth and so on. I took a course in Italian, a course in art appreciation, an English class, and a class in economics, and a class in economic history, I think it was. So it was really nonsense in terms of. . . .
Gardner
Well, economics and economic history. . . .
McWilliams
Well, yes. There might have been something to have been said for that. But it was at that break, in that period, the postwar thing was just coming along, you know.
Gardner
Right. Did you have a goal in mind, an educational goal? You ended up with a Juris Doctor [degree]. Did you plan to be an attorney?
No, I didn't at all; I didn't. I never had that in mind. My father had a brother [Edmond] who was for years and years and years the editor-publisher of a small paper in Missouri. I sort of thought that it would be fun to--in fact, I told my father that I sort of thought I'd like to be a newspaper person. He didn't regard this with any favor. He thought newspaper people were sort of transients, who floated in and out. He had a real estate and insurance office in Steamboat in addition to his ranches, and so he thought that maybe I should take over that side of the business. My brother would attend to the ranch side of operations. I didn't find anything disillusioning about that, but I didn't have any interest in that at all. When I was a freshman, I didn't really have any specific aim in mind. I worked on the school paper, a cub reporter, so-called, and that was about it.
Gardner
Now, you weren't at Denver very long, though, were you, before the family moved?
McWilliams
No, my father's health kept getting worse and worse. And when he died, my mother came to--she had a brother [Vernon Casley] who was living here in Los Angeles, and she came west to be with her brother and his family. Our plans were very uncertain because this whole [cattle] empire was being liquidated by then. It was a long, drawn-out, very involved business. My brother was
Tape Number: I, Side Two
(July 10, 1978)
Gardner
You're on Hollywood and Normandie.
McWilliams
Hollywood and Normandie. Well, the only skill that I had was I knew how to operate a typewriter and could type. My uncle had heard that if you looked at the bulletin board at the YMCA, you could spot jobs. So I did that, and I held a number of miscellaneous jobs, just for a few weeks here, there, and elsewhere. And then one day there was a notice posted on the board that the Los Angeles Times credit manager wanted an assistant. So I applied, and it was a very odd and very funny situation. The credit manager of the Times was a fixture of the institution. He'd been there for years and years, and he was a total despot.
Gardner
Who was that? What was his name?
McWilliams
His name was M.E. Hillis. And he couldn't keep an assistant for any length of time at all. So I was interviewed by his assistant, the assistant credit manager, and to my astonishment he said, "Yes, you're hired," because they were just anxious to get anyone. The first ten days or two weeks I was there, I had a very rough time of it, because about twice a day Hillis would fire me. He would turn to the assistant credit manager and say, "Get this boy out of here. He's no
Gardner
How come?
McWilliams
Well, I just didn't like the atmosphere. It was a two-year [college].
Gardner
Right. Oh, it was still . . .
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
. . . a normal school.
McWilliams
It was sort of a normal school, and I didn't really like it. So I decided I would go to USC. So I transferred to USC. And Hillis made it possible for me to arrange my work schedule, so I held the equivalent of a full-time job.
Gardner
And that would pay the cost at USC.
Yes, paid the cost. For example, we worked Sundays. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. Sundays we had a crew that counted classified lineage in the Times. We did it by hand, counting, at that time. Norman and Ralph Chandler, who were then learning the whole routine of a business, they worked on that crew. And incidentally, we got very, very adept at it. We got so good that we could count that Sunday classified in less time than it takes to tell. And we would be out of there.
Gardner
Got a knack for it.
McWilliams
Yes. We were paid a quite good wage for the time. I think it was maybe twenty dollars for the Sunday, you see. We'd be out of there by noon. We became very adept and adroit. And the Times were very, very--this chap Hillis was very, very good to me in this respect. He made it possible for me to--I would come in the afternoons and work into the evening, and then work Saturdays and Sundays; and it was the equivalent of a full-time job. Then suddenly it occurred to me one day that--I had an old rattletrap Ford roadster; I would drive down to the campus, [go to] classes, drive back to the Times, then drive back to Hollywood--it occurred to me one day that this was kind of nonsensical, because the law school was right across the street from the Times in the old Tahoe building, see, and this was the last year in which with three years
Gardner
Save some gas.
McWilliams
Save all that wear and tear. And for no better reason, I enrolled in the law school. Well, I had another [reason]: it would have helped me in my work at the Times, in the business office. So I enrolled in the law school. Then, of course, by the time I was a senior, I think it was, the law school moved back to the campus. So in the senior year I was back once again on the campus, traveling around in that Ford.
Gardner
So by that time you were a senior. So it was not . . .
McWilliams
Yes. By that time I was a senior, so it didn't matter.
Gardner
Mind if I open the door?
McWilliams
No, not at all. Not at all. [tape recorder turned off]
Gardner
Okay. Well, let's see. Now, you graduated from law school in '27.
McWilliams
That's right, that's right.
Gardner
So that means 1925 was about the time you were turning from liberal arts to law.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
And that's when we come across "Bierce as Poet"
McWilliams
Well, at USC I worked on the school paper, the Trojan.
Gardner
Daily Trojan.
McWilliams
I wrote editorials on the Trojan. And I edited the college literary magazine, The Wooden Horse, and also worked on the so-called college humor magazine [Wampus]. And I was still very much interested in writing books and so forth, and doing tremendous amounts of that kind of reading. I had known for a long time that Mencken admired Bierce, but I had never really gotten into Bierce very much. And one day I was in the old Los Angeles Public Library, which was housed in a building there, you know, between Broadway and Spring on Fifth Street. And you could just wander around through the stacks, you know, with the greatest of ease. Nobody paid you any attention. I came across this collected works of Ambrose Bierce, and I thought, Jesus, I didn't realize Bierce had--these were like twelve volumes. So I began reading them and was delighted with The Devil's Dictionary and some of the other things that I read. Then it occurred to me that Bierce had lived for years in California, and there must be a lot of people around who knew him, who had known him, and why didn't I try to do something about Bierce. So I set to
The Dumbook, I think, was edited by David Warren Ryder in San Francisco. It was obviously a little magazine. Ryder was a publicist for the lumber industry, a public relations man, and sort of a bon vivant and man about town in San Francisco, all that sort of thing. I got to know him fairly well. Very ironic this particular footnote: that when World War II came along, and all the Japanese excitement and furor was created, you know, there were only three--I think three--Americans who were arrested for having represented the Japanese government somewhere in connection with intelligence and so forth. One was on the night desk of the New York Daily News, one was a businessman by the name of Townsend, and one was David Warren Ryder. This same David Warren Ryder.
Gardner
How bizarre.
McWilliams
Yes. Very. Anyway, I started out on this
Gardner
The piece, was that the one called "Mystery of Ambrose Bierce"? Is that an earlier one?
McWilliams
I think that was an earlier one. I think it was an earlier one.
Gardner
I never found it. I'll have to track it down.
McWilliams
And Mencken had, incidentally, been very,
Gardner
Was this after you were out of law school by this time, or were you still in law school?
McWilliams
No, I was going to school. I was going to school. The last year and a half, two years of his life, I knew Sterling very well. His letters to me were published by the California Historical Society--the one that issues the quarterly--kind of interesting letters [California Historical Society Quarterly, September, 1967]. I got to know him very well. This was just shortly the year before he died. Mencken came out to see him, to pay him a visit, and Mencken dropped me a note that he'd be at the Ambassador Hotel for a few days en route to San Francisco. So I went over to the hotel and had a chat with him (which was the high point in my year), and then he went on to San Francisco. Sterling, I think, was unable to meet him at the train, and he went to the Bohemian Club where Sterling lived, saw him briefly that day. The next day he came back, and he couldn't see him because Sterling was ill. And the third day they found Sterling dead. He had taken poison, apparently. The idea was that he had been saving up a stock of booze for Mencken, for Mencken's arrival--this was during Prohibition days,
And so Mencken wrote a very, very nice piece about him. Mencken attended the funeral services in San Francisco and wrote a very wonderful piece about him for the San Francisco papers and then returned to the East. So in many ways Mencken gave me quite a number of important leads. Then it was so exasperating, because after my book [Ambrose Bierce: A Biography] came out, then all kinds of people began to write me--of course, they had known Bierce and so forth--that I had no knowledge of at all. So I did quite a number of magazine pieces after the book came out, in which some of this material was subsumed.
Gardner
So that's when something like the later piece, "The Mystery of Ambrose Bierce," really tried to sift through all the . . .
McWilliams
And I discovered his childhood sweetheart in Indiana. She sent me an old photograph and letters; and I did a piece about that which appeared in the Bookman. Then I discovered some collections of his letters which
Then in the meantime, to get back to the daughter, the daughter had had a second divorce. Her second husband was a chap by the name of Francis Isgrigg, who was a lawyer in Los Angeles. And she was broke, down and out. And she was helping to manage an apartment. I induced her to sell things that she had of her father's which I had not seen, because she was a little wary about this. She kept them under lock and key. But I did go through them, and I could see it was a very interesting collection. So I got Jake [Zeitlin] interested in this project, and Jake negotiated a sale whereby she sold the collection to Mrs. [Milton] Getz for something like $5,000. I arranged to have Mrs. Getz pay the money to me as trustee, because I wanted to dole it out to her, because I knew by that time how totally irresponsible she was about her own affairs. It was orally agreed that I would have access to the material in Mrs. Getz's possession. But that turned out to be a most unsatisfactory kind of commitment because I only had a limited period of time to look at the collection. I discovered that Mrs. Getz had plans about it. She had an English librarian who was going through it, cataloging it and so forth. I had only a period of a couple of weeks to look at it, which was totally inadequate. But I had
Then the daughter lived on for a time. She was always in trouble. She was accident prone: she was always breaking a leg or something. She'd become quite dependent by then. I tried to help her as much as I could. And she died eventually in the Los Angeles County Hospital.
Gardner
Sad.
McWilliams
Sad, sad story. Yes.
Gardner
Since you mentioned Jake. . . . You first met Jake, the way I hear it--well, I should have you say how you first met Jake. But you would have been in law school then, too.
McWilliams
Well, I was in the latter part of liberal arts or in law school, and I was doing these pieces for Sam Clover. I had gotten to know him--incidentally, a very kindly, nice gentleman, a real gentleman, snow-white hair. [His] little office I think was in the Bryson Building in downtown Los Angeles--very nice gentleman. He encouraged me to write whatever I wanted to write, mostly literary pieces, so-called.
Gardner
For Saturday Night.
McWilliams
For Saturday Night, for which I was paid ten dollars apiece. And I had heard about Jake, who somehow--I don't know who told me about this, but I know that I went out [break in tape] . . . Jake had published
Gardner
For over fifty years.
McWilliams
Yes, a long period of time, long period of time. And then later on I helped him with the bookstores; from the legal point of view, I did the work for him.
Gardner
Well, first why don't you talk a little more about Sam Clover and about Saturday Night magazine and what its role was in Los Angeles.
McWilliams
Well, I tell you, after this defeat that had taken place at the time of the Owens Valley . . .
Gardner
Well, tell about that again, because that was before we turned on the tape recorder that you told that story.
McWilliams
Well, he was the editor of this Los Angeles Evening News, and it was supported by private power interests--at least that was the scuttlebutt--and they were opposed to the Owens Valley project because it was a municipal--light and power and water. So they let him take a pretty free hand with respect to--and he was quite critical of the project, the unfairness of it and so
Gardner
I think it was 1920.
McWilliams
It may well [have been]. He had a nice old home, very nice old home, in the Echo Park area overlooking Echo Park. I used to visit with him there on several occasions. He started Saturday Night, and there was society news, people, and that sort of thing. It discussed civic affairs to some extent, but not much.
Gardner
And your dealings with it were to do profiles of--were they mostly poets that you wrote about?
McWilliams
No, I wrote about people like Mary Austin, and I did a piece about Clarkson Crane, and Louis Adamic, younger writers in particular that were coming along, some Hollywood people, Jim Tully, and interviews, and that sort of thing. And it was optional. You know, I didn't have any assignment or anything like that. If I saw something I wanted to do, he was generally glad to get it.
Gardner
This is still while you were a college student. That's very interesting. Did you find him, or did he find you?
I sent a piece to him. He accepted it, and then I sent another piece, and then somewhere along the line I went down to see him and met him and talked to him. But I wish somebody would do a dissertation based upon his life. It would be very interesting.
Gardner
It would be interesting to track down. Now, later on--and this is jumping ahead a little bit but still has to do with this--you were involved with Jake on Opinion magazine.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
You were the attorney for it. I think you also did some writing for it.
McWilliams
I did some writing for it.
Gardner
At that time Jake was involved with a number of people: Lloyd Wright, Phil Townsend Hanna, and so on. You mentioned that Phil Townsend Hanna became one of your close friends. Did you fall into the crowd about the same time, or was it a. . . ?
McWilliams
Yes, it was more or less. This was, in many respects, an incredibly small community despite its size. But in intellectual terms it was a very small community. If you knew some of these people, you knew the others, see. And Will Connell, the photographer, was a very close friend of mine. Will was part of this, and Phil Hanna, José Rodriguez, Merle Armitage, Jake [Zeitlin], Kem Weber,
Gardner
Jake has a wonderful phrase about the fact that it died out because no one really had an opinion.
McWilliams
I think there's a good deal to be said for that. It was published for about eight or nine months, I think, something like that, seven or eight months.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
It was kind of interesting.
Gardner
Why don't you tell about some of the people who are involved with that, what Jake was like fifty years ago. Tell about Phil Townsend Hanna and so on.
McWilliams
Well, Jake was really sort of the center of it, in a way, as you would expect, because you'd meet in his downtown bookstore, then go to René and Jean's, a French restaurant on Sixth Street, to plan the next issue, which we never got around to doing; we'd be gabbing about everything under the sun. It was a very delightful experience. We got to know each other and became good friends. From time to time somebody would breeze into the community, and we would take them out to dinner and so forth. I helped Jake with the Primavera Press; I don't know how long that lasted, but it published some pretty good works.
Gardner
Right. Of course, there you were only involved legally.
Oh, that's right. Then I introduced him to some people that I knew who became part of this same group, like John Hodgdon Bradley, who was a geologist at USC. There were quite a number of people just sort of around at that time. There were quite a number of other small magazines here--not small magazines in the literary sense, but sort of city magazines that didn't last very long. They would come and go; they'd start up and then they'd vanish. Sports and Vanities, I think, was one.
Gardner
Never heard of it.
McWilliams
There were a number of those, and other small magazines that appeared. So in a sense I think we were, as I say in that introduction to the new edition of Southern California Country [: An Island on the Land], I think this was the first group of modern intelligentsia that got together in Los Angeles. S. MacDonald-Wright was part of this group--not very active, but he was part of the group. I used to go around to his studio on Spring Street and chat with him, talk with him. He once put on a Japanese play [The Infidelity of Madame Lun] at a Fullerton high school, costumes and all the rest of it; and I helped him set this thing up. He was a very interesting man. And I often wish--again, this is like Sam Clover--often wish that I had had the wit to sit down with Wright and get his story (he would have been very
Gardner
That could be. I don't know.
McWilliams
I think they were; I'm not sure about it. But I often wish that I'd gotten that story together, because MacDonald-Wright would have been glad to tell me all about it.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
But I didn't do it.
Gardner
Well, that's an affliction that oral history deals with a great deal.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
He was prominent on our list to be interviewed all along, and he kept postponing it because he remained active. And of course he died.
He died.
Gardner
That's unfortunate. In 1930 there's a whole flush of articles and little pamphlets and so forth and so on that you're involved with. There may be many more, but these are the ones that I ran across. One was called "Swell Letters in California."
McWilliams
Yes, that was in . . .
Gardner
American Mercury.
McWilliams
. . . American Mercury.
Gardner
Another was called "Writers of California."
McWilliams
Yes. That was, I think, in The Bookman.
Gardner
And the other was a little pamphlet--booklet I guess would be the best word for it--put out by the University of Washington Bookstore called The New Regionalism in American Literature.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
This is expanding your horizons in some way.
McWilliams
Well, I got interested in this regional thing in part through Mary Austin. We became quite good friends, and I have quite a lot of letters from her. The Southern Agrarians were around and making noises at that time. And this was not quite like that, but it was the feeling that there should be some more attention paid to western history, western writing, that there should be some magazines and publications, and so forth and so forth.
Gardner
Well, of course one of the things that you point out in the University of Washington pamphlet--oh, your piece was in opposition to the "sentimentalism" that seemed to pervade an awful lot of regional literature as such.
McWilliams
That's right, that's right.
Gardner
A contrasting of that to, say, Robinson Jeffers, for example.
McWilliams
That's right. The piece I did for the Mercury about "Swell Letters in California," a lot of people
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And I knew the Jefferses in several different connections. My law partner, Dan Hammack [, Jr.], had gone to Occidental, and then from Occidental to Princeton. He and Jeffers were classmates at Occidental. They'd gone on long hiking trips in the Sierra Madre mountains, and they had remained good friends and so forth. I had that connection, and Sterling of course.
Gardner
Well, since you've mentioned Dan Hammack, I suppose we could back up a little bit back to 1927. You get out of law school, and there's a law firm called Black, Hammack, and McWilliams. Was that right away . . .
McWilliams
No.
Gardner
. . . or did it take a while for you to become. . . .
McWilliams
No, it was Black, Hammack and Black. And it was a unique law firm, you might say, in Los Angeles
It was an incredible office. It was in the old American Bank Building at Second and Spring. Huge library, most of it obsolete, dusty. And, as I say, [the firm was] somewhat Dickensian, and really bizarre, because Dan Hammack, Jr. was a marvelous man, wonderful person, but very shy, kind of shy. He didn't like to go into court, didn't like to try cases, that sort of thing. And Alfred Black, Jr., was just the opposite. He was a very good lawyer, very good, but unbelievably lazy. And he would snarl if the secretary announced that a client was out there to see him, really didn't even want to talk to them.
Gardner
Uh-huh, right.
McWilliams
And there was that connection between Occidental, Presbyterianism, and fairly well-to-do families who had settled initially in Highland Park, San Marino, South Pasadena, Pasadena--all sort of vaguely tied in with Occidental one way or another. Dan Hammack, Jr., was there with the California historian Robert Cleland. He was a great friend of his, and they were all part of this sort of network of families.
When I joined the firm, their business was growing. They had a tremendous backlog of untried cases and that sort of thing. And you know how young lawyers are: they're very gung ho. So I started to try cases that I should never had been permitted to try, [laughter] well beyond my capabilities and experience and so forth. But they just thought it was marvelous that I would take the initiative and often set these cases up for trial. So I became a partner in a relatively brief period of time.
Gardner
These were mostly civil cases?
Oh, yes, yes, yes. And I got them out of that building, which was incredible you wouldn't believe it-- long, high-ceilinged offices and corridors, and really bizarre Dickensian--and got them down in the Spring Arcade building, and it became Black, Hammack, and McWilliams.
Gardner
I see. About what year was that?
McWilliams
I just don't know what year that would be. Not too long after I got out of law school.
Gardner
So still late twenties--'28, '29.
McWilliams
And they were both very wonderful. They were very, very good friends. We were very good friends. And when I began to get interested in labor law and social issues and things of this kind, I was aware of the fact that they didn't approve. This was a most unrewarding kind of practice, to put it mildly. [laughter] And besides, they didn't have any interest in this direction; their interests were quite in the opposite direction, and all of their clients took a different point of view. But never once did either one of those gentlemen ever call me in and say, "Look, this is getting to be a little out of line." They never did. I was aware that they didn't approve. But they never raised the issue, never said anything about it, which is rather remarkable.
Gardner
Right, it is. You left them in '38 when you became commissioner [of the Division of Immigration
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Well, we'll get on to that, I suppose, at a later date. We'll also deal a little bit more later on with your growing interest in labor law. Where were you politically in the late twenties? It seems to me that your interests are so much more literary than political at this time.
McWilliams
I think the twenties have taken a bad rap as being decadent and politically disinterested and so forth. Now, that's true to a very considerable extent. So many of the people were totally disillusioned by the aftermath of the war, as they had every reason to be. They became expatriates, and they went to live in Paris, many of my good friends, Matty [Matthew] Josephson and others. Yet when they came back, their European experience was, in a way, very helpful. It was kind of an eye-opening experience. So when they came back, they began to see things that they probably wouldn't have seen or paid much attention to if they had stayed here. So it was the literary radicals of the twenties [who] became the political radicals of the 1930s.
And I have always had a great admiration for Mencken, particularly as a journalist. I have some marvelous letters from him. He made it very, very clear to me in these letters that he didn't think of himself as a literary
So you think that sort of literary radicalism prepared the way for the . . .
McWilliams
Yes, I do. Now, for example, I was not interested in politics, except that I was, of course, like everybody else, very much interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I interviewed Upton Sinclair down in Long Beach on the day they were executed. And instead of interviewing him, we just sat there. (Of course it would be an interview in a cafeteria, Upton being Upton.) So we sat there well into the afternoon just talking about [Nicola] Sacco and [Bartolomeo] Vanzetti. And I was convinced--I never had any doubt--about their innocence. I was quite sure of that. I got interested, sort of peripherally at first, in that case.
But I was not directly involved in politics. I had very scanty political interest. I was a registered Democrat from the time I became of voting age, and I remained a registered Democrat and only voted that ticket. But I was not directly interested in politics as politics. My friends were mostly different people, like Louis Adamic and some of the early journalists I knew in Los Angeles, Don Ryan, people of this sort. We were not really politically partisan.
Gardner
And yet you were, as you say, radicals on the Left.
Yes, that's quite true.
Gardner
Because your perspective on the thrust of American life was a different one.
McWilliams
That's right. We were quite critical and very wary of the prosperity and the phoniness of the twenties.
Tape Number: II, Side One
(July 10, 1978)
Gardner
Now, you mentioned Louis Adamic. I guess we should talk about how you got to know him.
McWilliams
I got to know him through George Sterling, who sent him to see me thinking that we would have a good deal in common, as indeed we did; and he became one of my very closest friends. He was at that time working in the pilot stationer's office in the outer harbor at San Pedro, an ideal job for a young writer, because he had the night shift out there, and there was nothing much to do except sit there and watch the ships come in and out, flash signals and all that sort of thing.
Gardner
He was Yugoslav by birth, wasn't he?
McWilliams
I beg your pardon?
Gardner
Was he Yugoslav by birth?
McWilliams
Yugoslav. Yes, Yugoslav background. He had served in the war, and at the end of the war he had been mustered out here in San Pedro. There was a Yugoslav fishing colony of sorts.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
That's how he happened to stay on in San Pedro. We became very, very good friends. We wrote for the same magazines. We had the same fascination with
He had some real insights into what he called "shadow America." I did a book about it, a long essay [Louis Adamic and Shadow America] that Arthur Whipple published here in book form about this, a very interesting concept about all the thousands and thousands of Americans who
Gardner
That's something that remains clear even today.
McWilliams
Yes. Oh, yes.
Gardner
Questionable American identity, the transience and so on.
McWilliams
That is right. He had the same standoffish attitude towards the American society of the period that I did. And again it was part of this skepticism of the twenties: not wanting to be too closely identified with the America of that time, the American society of that time. Both of us had reasons, had serious misgivings about it. Then after 1929 our misgivings intensified.
Gardner
Right. Now, you mentioned--well, off tape I cited the section in Southern California Country about Upton Sinclair and the San Pedro longshoremen's strike. You said that it was Adamic who had brought you down there.
McWilliams
Well, that's not quite accurate. Adamic was very much interested in that whole longshore situation in San Pedro. He knew quite a lot about it, and it's one of the means or ways he got interested in labor in Southern California. The dynamiting of the Times [1910] and all
Upton I got to know by interviewing two or three times. I would see him from time to time, and we became good friends. We had differences of opinion from time to time, but they never were very serious. They were just kind of spats about this, that, and the other thing.
Gardner
Well, I'd be interested in hearing a little more about that San Pedro speech of Sinclair's with Hugh Hardyman and Prince Hopkins.
McWilliams
Well, you know there was a . . .
Gardner
Let me ask this first: Was that before or after you interviewed him?
McWilliams
This was before.
Gardner
This was before. This would have been the first time you'd seen Sinclair?
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. As you know, there'd been a fairly strong socialist movement in Los Angeles headed by Job Harriman. That movement was eclipsed with the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times--not so much by the dynamiting of the Times as by the fact that Clarence Darrow pleaded [J.B. and J.J.] McNamara guilty.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
That was a terrible shock to a lot of true believers, followers, and so forth; it really destroyed
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And by the time you got to the post-World War I period, this was an open-shop community, advertised as an open-shop community. And that flare-up at San Pedro was part of those post-World War I Palmer raids, witch-hunts, and the rest of it. The episode at San Pedro, which was dramatic and very important--free speech kind of situation--it didn't last very long. I mean, the flare-up didn't last very long. We were well into the twenties, and from there on out it was something else until you got to 1929.
Gardner
That moment, too, is really the founding of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union].
McWilliams
Yes. John Beardsley.
Gardner
Were you involved with that at all?
McWilliams
No, I was not involved in the founding of it. I was an early member; I served at different times on the board. I did some pieces for the Open Forum, and Louis Adamic did some pieces for the Open Forum. I was not really an active member of the ACLU at that time.
Gardner
Until the thirties.
McWilliams
That's right. Then I did get more interested in it later on.
Gardner
Perhaps now we should move ahead. I think we've gotten pretty much to the thirties. To inject a personal
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
For the first time.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Do you care to talk about that at all?
McWilliams
Oh, sure.
Gardner
To a famous name in UCLA history.
McWilliams
To one of the daughters of Dr. E. [Earle] R. Hedrick, Dorothy Hedrick. I had great affection and admiration for him and for his wife. He was a marvelous man. The thing that was wrong with the marriage, so to speak, is that we didn't have the same interests. At the time of the marriage, I suppose I fancied that I would continue to be as I was at that time; a reasonably successful young lawyer. But it didn't work out that way. My interests began to change very rapidly, and I soon got bored with the practice of the law. It was particularly after 1929 that it seemed to me that I was spending most of my time trying to salvage something for the Highland Park widow who had been taken by these con men. Either that or I was trying to keep some firm from going bankrupt, working at issues of this sort. And I really had no taste for it; I had no interest in it. It was beginning to be a bore, a real bore, and most of my real good friends were not in the legal profession. I had lots of friends in the legal
Gardner
Well, along with your discontent as a lawyer comes this increasing political awareness, activism, and so on. You mentioned before that you found yourself interested in labor law. How did that come about?
McWilliams
Well, in part because of the fact that Los Angeles was an open-shop community. You could count the labor lawyers on the fingers of one hand, [lawyers] who knew anything about labor law. Then when the National Labor Relations Act was passed, suddenly there was a tremendous interest, and who did they go to? Since I had written some pieces for the bar association about
Gardner
Is that so?
McWilliams
Here in Los Angeles. Represented them in negotiations with the Herald Express, which were very tense, to put it mildly, and represented them during the Hollywood Citizen-News strike [in May, 1938] which was very, very interesting. It was interesting from many points of view because there was a recall campaign [against Mayor Frank Shaw] on that year. It was the year in which Fletcher Bowron was elected for the first time. Bowron and Harlan Palmer, the publisher of the Hollywood Citizen-News, and I were friends. We had been involved in various minor political enterprises and so forth. And yet here, when this strike occurred, it suddenly--to me it was an eye-opening
Gardner
Why?
McWilliams
Well, Palmer was just adamant, you know. So the strike went on and on, and it became a very colorful kind of strike--because it was in Hollywood, and the actresses and stars would parade on the picket line, had a fashion show on the picket line, all this sort of thing--lots of contempt citations. And then we finally did get it settled, but it went on for, oh, three months or more.
Gardner
It was one of the major newspaper strikes?
McWilliams
It was one of the major newspaper strikes, and we were fortunate that the Guild could get it settled as effectively as it did. And one of the reasons for the strike was, of course, this long-standing dichotomy between downtown labor and anything that had to do with Hollywood. The central labor council was of very little help in connection with this strike, and they didn't respond to it very much.
Then I got interested in the trade union situation in Hollywood in connection with the gangsters' infiltration of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees. That's a long story in itself, but it had ramifications that extended way down beyond the forties and the fifties, that situation.
Gardner
Shall we wait and do that when we get up to it?
McWilliams
Yes, I suppose that's better. Then I represented all kinds of miscellaneous unions that were coming along at that time that didn't have counsel and wanted advice about how to organize. As I say, I found it very interesting and very, very exciting.
Gardner
But not particularly remunerative.
McWilliams
No. It was not, definitely not, remunerative. But, for example, one night I was asked to come out to speak to a meeting that had been organized on the east side of Los Angeles by the women that worked in the walnut operation. It was all sort of hand labor at that time; they cracked walnuts with hammers [demonstrates] and shelled them. It was a big meeting. It was late August; it was humid and hot. This hall was packed, absolutely packed, with these women (I was the only male there), I would say twelve, fifteen hundred. And they had the front row reserved for these Russian Molokan ladies with their quaint costumes and so forth. They were Mexicans,
Gardner
In 1934 there were a couple of events that . . .
McWilliams
Yes, indeed.
Gardner
. . . you wrote about and, I'm sure, participated in as well. First, let me ask you about the Imperial Valley.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
That was in 1934 with Al Wirin, Grover Johnson, and so on down there. What was your involvement with that? I know you did write a piece--was it for Nation, r the New Republic?
McWilliams
Well, I did a piece for the Mercury about the repatriation of Mexicans, which was beginning just--they began to do that during the Depression years. I got interested in it just by reading the press. I had no legal involvement with this situation in the Imperial Valley, but I got very much interested. As I have said many times to people, if anyone had said to me in 1929 when the Bierce book was published that a few years later I would be writing a book about farm labor in California, I would have thought they were just off their rockers, you know.
But it all changed so fast. It all changed so rapidly.
I began reading the farm journals of California,
So I said to myself, this is a helluva story. If you look at Factories in the Field you'll see that its subtitle is The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California]. That's what I was out to do. It was really not so much a book about migratory farm labor from a sociological point of view as the whole story of this thing, how it developed over a period of time, and these different groups that were recruited and used, and all the rest of it. So I was soon caught up in it, and it became a major interest. I worked on weekends and vacations, whenever I could find the time, to pull the story together.
Gardner
You must have been working on it for years, too, because the accumulation of information really started in the early thirties . . .
McWilliams
That is right.
Gardner
. . . and works its way up through the publication
McWilliams
Thirty-nine.
Gardner
Thirty-nine.
McWilliams
Yes. That's right.
Gardner
Did you know Al Wirin at the time you went out there?
McWilliams
Oh, yes, yes. I knew Al very well over a period of many years. I was on the [ACLU] board at different times when we were dealing with Al. It was sometimes very amusing, at least in retrospect, because the board would meet, and Wirin didn't get along too well with Dr. Clinton J. Taft--and I didn't either, for that matter. [laughter] The board would meet, and the counsel would not be there. Taft would report to us with very considerable exasperation that, dammit, word had come in earlier that week that there was a strike in Gallup, New Mexico, and that Al had just gone off on his own to Gallup to represent those strikers without any authorization from him or from the board, and it was just a damned outrage, you know. These flare-ups would inevitably quiet down after a bit, and Al would come back. He would give us a very glowing report about what had happened at the time of the strike, and it was very important that he get there as quickly as he could. I knew him very well.
Gardner
What about some of the other early ACLU people?
McWilliams
Yes, John Beardsley I had great admiration and respect for, and his wife, Helen Marston. And some of the other early ones I just don't know offhand. But the red flag salute case that Beardsley handled--I found all that very interesting; but that case was in the twenties. And then when they got me involved in labor, I was so caught up in the labor law that the ACLU became sort of a minor interest and pushed into the background, because I didn't have any time for it. And it was after 1934, after the EPIC [End Poverty in California] campaign of `34 and the general strike in San Francisco; those two things really were of enormous importance in changing the atmosphere.
Gardner
Well, let's talk about them. Let's talk first about the EPIC campaign.
McWilliams
Well, you know what the situation was. This state had a peculiar, exceptional political tradition because the Republican party had an old-guard wing and a sort of liberal wing. Then there was the Democratic party, and the Democratic party hadn't amounted to anything in California. It was run as a kind of fiefdom by families like the Dockweilers in Southern California and other similar families in the north. They seemed to be easily satisfied, because if there was a Democratic administration nationally, they would always get the patronage in California, such as
Gardner
Were you involved in the campaign very much?
McWilliams
No, I was not directly involved in the campaign; I was reporting it. I had reported these early social protest movements in Southern California, like the Utopian Society, and then of course into EPIC. For the Utopians that was a phenomenal thing, but they didn't know really how they were going to do what they talked about. Then here comes Sinclair, who has a plan; "This is the plan." I didn't think, if he were elected, that he could get the plan adopted, or that it would work if he could get it adopted. But nevertheless, as a tremendous protest, it was of major interest and importance. And I reported it.
I had a couple of spats with him during the course
But the EPIC campaign was an astonishing success in the sense that it brought a Democratic party into existence; 300,000 people registered in the Democratic party in the course of that campaign. So after 1934 you had a Democratic party; previously you had not had a real Democratic party. I interviewed Upton the final week of the campaign. He and Craig, his wife, were living in a rich friend's home in Beverly Hills. This previous interview, where we
Gardner
And it was over.
McWilliams
And you know it was all--I'm sure he was bored by then. [laughter] He didn't seem to be really much interested in the campaign, and he seemed to realize that he wasn't going to be elected, you know. But of course
Gardner
Well, let me get back to the EPIC campaign before you go on to the general strike. I'll try not to keep you too long, but we might as well finish this tape. It's only a couple of more minutes.
McWilliams
Sure.
Gardner
Rube Borough was someone who was very active in the EPIC campaign.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Were you friendly with him at that time? Did you know him through the newspaper?
McWilliams
Oh, yes. We were very close friends all along for years and years and years. Oliver Thornton was very important. So was Richard Olte. He was very active. Now, these were good organizers, Thornton and company; they really organized. They were responsible for this grass-roots kind of thing that developed. And there were some people in Northern California also that were very good. And it was a phenomenal success as an organizational effort.
Gardner
What about [Raymond] Haight getting into the campaign? Who was responsible?
Some of these Hiram Johnson-type progressives had gotten to Haight to convince him that if he ran in between Merriam and Sinclair, he would win. I think that was part of it, and I also think it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage Sinclair.
Gardner
That's what one would think.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Third party always ends up taking away from the . . .
McWilliams
That's right. I knew Ray Haight, and I had talked to him in the course of the campaign. He would actually have been a very good governor, as a matter of fact, but I think that was the idea: to knock Sinclair down, so to speak. But he probably wouldn't have made it in any case.
But the alarm. . . . The public relations counsel at that time for Floyd H. Odlum--you know, that big tycoon, magnate--flew out from New York with a letter of introduction to me (we also became great friends later) because Odlum was very much afraid of the economic consequences in California if Sinclair were elected. He was going to sell certain enterprises and do this, that, and the other thing. So I told this PR guy, Alex Gumberg, I said, "Go back and assure Mr. Odlum he's got nothing to worry about. He can sue me if I'm wrong, but Sinclair is not going to be
Gardner
He should have sent you a handsome commission afterwards.
McWilliams
Yes, indeed he should. But he didn't.
Gardner
Now the [1934] general strike.
McWilliams
The general strike was one of the very important events of the 1930s. There's just no doubt about it. And the key to the success of the general strike was the quick action and reflexes of George Kidwell, who was the key guy in the Central Labor Council in San Francisco, who became my boss when I joined the state government. Now, Kidwell had been in the IWW [International Workers of the World] as a young man; there was a residual redicalism in Kidwell. And when the general strike was called, Kidwell knew that labor would have to support the general strike. He just knew it in his bones. And he had enough influence and prestige with the Central Labor Council to put them into the thing in support of [Harry] Bridges, and almost instantly. So there wasn't any delay; they just went right in there behind the longshoremen, and they won the strike. And it completely transformed the situation. The number of organized workers and organized labor in California skyrocketed after the general strike. The Democratic
Now, I didn't think then, and I do not think now, that Bridges was ever a member of the Communist party. He unquestionably accepted support from them and that sort of thing, but he was much too smart for that. He was an alien, for God's sake. Besides, in all of the conferences that I sat in with him at various times and so forth, if he was a Marxist he didn't show it in his vocabulary or his dialogue. He was a very pragmatic guy! He was looking at the immediate issue always, and was a great tactician in the sense that he could beat a retreat without appearing to be retreating--on the contrary, appearing to be advancing, you know. He had a genius for keeping the other side off balance. You could watch him operate. You couldn't help but admire the tactical sense that the man had. And it was a combination of Bridges and George Kidwell that was reponsible for the success of the general strike.
Gardner
What would you say the results of that were?
McWilliams
It transformed labor, was one of the galvanizing
Gardner
Right. Well, should we break now, let you get your exercise?
McWilliams
Sure.
Tape Number: II, Side Two
(July 12, 1978)
Gardner
The first question that I come to is a reflective one based on our discussions last time. I was wondering if in any way your political philosophy was shaped or influenced by what happened to your father, the circumstance of the large cattleman.
McWilliams
Yes. I would say that very definitely it was, in the sense that it left me with a distrust of the system. I never could take it completely seriously. I don't mean that exactly: I mean I had no confidence in it. What happened after 1929 just confirmed my earlier feeling. See, we were victims of an earlier depression, this depression that came in 1919 when the cattle market collapsed.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
When the 1929 Depression came, that was sort of old hat to us; we'd been through this. But what happened to my father left me with a deep-seated feeling that it was not all as it appeared to be. I was left with a great deal of residual distrust of it. I didn't want to become too intimately involved in it. I wanted to maintain a certain amount of distance.
Gardner
It's interesting because he was so clearly a member of the establishment . . .
Oh, yes.
Gardner
. . . before the demise.
McWilliams
That is right.
Gardner
So had that not happened, it might have been that you would have been encouraged to follow in his footsteps.
McWilliams
It might well have been. It might well have been.
Gardner
That's very interesting. I should add that you showed me Where the Old West Stayed Young by John Rolfe Burroughs, which includes a couple of pages on Steamboat Springs and on your father, and has some photos from your collection.
McWilliams
Not only did his experience influence my attitude, but the work that I did for the Los Angeles Times was very much an influence, because it gave me an extraordinary insight into the underside, the seamy side, of the boom in Southern California.
Gardner
How So?
McWilliams
Well, because the Times and the Examiner were engaged in a tremendous competition to see which paper could have the most classified advertising of any paper in the country, and they would run any classified advertising and take a chance on collecting, you see, because of this competition. And we had to deal with as fine a collection of con men, crooks, bums as you could imagine,
Gardner
No, right. Now, what was the year of the C.C. Julian [case]? That was before?
McWilliams
It came a little later.
Gardner
Oh, it was later?
McWilliams
A little later, yes. [May 1927] But I've forgotten the exact years of the Julian business.
Gardner
I'll try and recall.
McWilliams
But we played cops and robbers with these advertisers; it was a kind of an intelligence game. We became very adroit at it in terms of the fact, for example, that we could tell from a piece of advertising copy--you could pretty much identify the person that submitted it even if the name was not on it. They would try to put new names on and shift addresses and telephone numbers and so forth to continue to get advertising without paying for it, because advertising was just like water--[laughter] they had to have it. And we became very adroit, very clever at reading copy and spotting what it was. So it was a kind
Gardner
Did you have any ties to the cityside people, whereby they would have some idea of what frauds were going on, to be used in reporting?
McWilliams
No, I don't think we did. I don't recall that we did.
Gardner
Because it's interesting that it influenced you with its angle. Yet I'm sure the Times itself--or I don't know what the Times itself sort of felt about this.
McWilliams
Well, they were committed to this policy, and one or two years they ran--I've forgotten the exact years--but they ran more classified advertising than any paper in the United States. And this was the policy: take the copy and then worry about it later. As a result of it, it was an ongoing, never-ending pursuit of these creepy characters.
Gardner
Did you get to know Harry Chandler during the time you were there?
McWilliams
I knew him very slightly in the sense that on one occasion his secretary was away or something, and he asked to have some assistance. They sent me up, and I did some letters and things for him. Also, when I got out of law school, the business manager of the Times went to Mr. Chandler and got a letter of introduction for me
Gardner
What about later on when you were writing things about the . . . [laughter]
McWilliams
Ah. I don't know. I can assume they didn't appreciate it. But in the meantime, to show you their attitude, about two, maybe two years (I've forgotten), maybe three years after I had arrived here, my brother finally extricated himself from the responsibilities of liquidating my father's affairs. He came out here, and I introduced him to the people in the business office of the Times , and they employed him. And he stayed there. He's retired now, lives in Manhattan Beach. But he was there until he came to the mandatory retirement age. He was a fixture of the business office.
Gardner
Is that so? And they didn't have any retributions against him after Southern California Country came out?
McWilliams
Not the slightest. I don't think they ever discussed it with him.
Gardner
Did they ever put it together? Were they aware that he was . . .
Oh, yes, yes, yes. They certainly knew that. And they never raised any issue of that kind with him, so far as I know. So, you know, they were quite decent about it.
Gardner
That's nice. The other question I had that was reflective based on our discussions before . . .
McWilliams
Oh, before I forget. . . . After I got out of law school and began practicing law, the relationship continued, because I represented Marian Otis Chandler, Mrs. Harry Chandler, in a couple of legal matters that were referred to me. And also, I represented Norman Chandler in a couple of legal cases. So the relationship continued. It's interesting in view of my views.
Gardner
It is. So how long did it continue? I suppose until you started moving into labor law.
McWilliams
That's right. That's right. That's right.
Gardner
Anyway, the next question that I had, pertaining to our discussions last time, had to do with your book on Adamic [Louis Adamic and Shadow America], in which you quote an exchange that he has with a conference, as I recall, in New York with some Marxists. It's fairly derisive of the Marxists.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Now, this was 1935. I was wondering how you relate that to where your political philosophy was at
McWilliams
I plead vagueness on that at this time. I just don't remember. I know that Adamic's attitude was like my attitude in the twenties. We were rather standoffish about the politics and skeptical about the course of events and the course of the economy. We didn't want to become too involved in any of it. Adamic thought that this country was the "land of laughs" and so forth and so forth. Then after the Depression hit, he very rapidly began to take a more serious view, and he became more involved in the whole situation, but I would say not from a Marxist point of view, because he really wasn't a systematic thinker. He was a very good reporter and writer, and he reacted to events and people. He was fascinated with the United States, and every individual he met was a story to him. But he was not anything like a systematic thinker. While he may have read some Marxist things, it certainly had very little influence on him.
Gardner
And how about yourself?
McWilliams
Same way, same thing. I was interested, very much interested, in the whole ferment that was going on at that time. I read a bit and tried to read, but so help me, I never finished Das Kapital. I never read it. My attitude was much the same as Adamic's. This was not my dish of tea. But I was grateful to the Left in a way,
Gardner
One of the first little books that I ran across that's political and social in content was something that you did called It Can Happen Here. Do you remember that, on anti-Semitism in Los Angeles?
McWilliams
Yes. I remember that.
Gardner
What was the origin of that? How did you happen to do that?
McWilliams
Well, it was--you know, it seems hard to believe but there were headquarters here in Los Angeles the time for Nazi propaganda: a bookstore, [with] all the stuff that was coming out. They were avowedly Brownshirts, you know. I mean, I don't know how much of an organization there was, but the bookstore itself was very much this way. At one point somebody printed a statement, anti-Semitic statement, and got it distributed with the Los Angeles Times . I don't know how they got it into the pages of the Times , but it was in the edition that went
Gardner
There is apparently a person named Ingram Hughes?
McWilliams
Yes, that vaguely rings a bell.
Gardner
He was the leader, according to the pamphlet, of the neo-Nazis. I was very surprised myself to find out the extent of it, the newspaper being published and so on. What sort of reaction did your book have? Was it widely read?
McWilliams
I think it was pretty widely distributed by a lot of groups in Los Angeles. In retrospect I just don't know how large a printing it had, but it was pretty widely distributed.
You see, the thirties, from my point of view, started out with this involvement with social protest groups in Southern California, Utopian Society, EPIC, and so forth. That was the early part of the 1930s in Southern California. But in the meantime the international situation began to disintegrate, with Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, the rest. As the decade advanced, the clouds of the international situation began to dominate, and the zest began to go out of the New Deal. So that when you got to 1939, and if
Gardner
Is that because it exposed the . . .
McWilliams
All of the ferment and the excitement and all the rest of it came to real climactic statement in The Grapes of Wrath. But this intersection between the foreign and the domestic that I was referring to is very interesting in retrospect, because even a situation like Ethiopia, for example, aroused a lot of interest--a surprising amount of interest--because it was such a clearcut case of outright aggression against a defenseless people actually encouraged by France and England. They thought that if they could divert Mussolini in that direction, it would be a good idea. So they actually encouraged them to do this. And there was no Ethiopian constituency
Then, of course, when Spain came along, it was a much broader, deeper, more important kind of issue. And here the connection with Spain--I think the first public mass meeting held in the United States in support of Loyalist Spain was held in Hollywood at the Hollywood Women's Club shortly after the fighting started. This mass meeting was not organized by the Left at all. It was organized by--the moving force in it was a chap by the name of David Grokowski, who edited a local Jewish weekly and who was quite anticommunist in his attitude and point of view. But he thought there ought to be a protest about this. He organized this mass meeting. The speakers at that mass meeting were the author Lewis Browne, Manchester Boddy, Lionel Stander; I spoke. I think that was it.
Gardner
Now, by the time of the Sleepy Lagoon and so on, there's a great mobilization of Hollywood talent available. Was that true even at that point? Were there lots of stars that participated? Or was that too early for that?
McWilliams
It was too early for that. They didn't show up. Stander was there, and there were quite a lot of people in Hollywood who were interested at this early phase. But then, you see, we went through that disastrous period in August 1939 [with] the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This had a tremendous impact; it ruptured friendships. People weren't speaking to other people, the Left was in the doghouse, and [it was a] very bad time, very, very bad time. I think the foundations were laid then for the subsequent witch-hunting that came along later. It was a very, very bleak period. I was in the middle of this because my position was that I could understand why the Soviet Union had done what it did from the point of view of national self-interest. They had tried and tried and tried to get France and England to unite with them in some kind of stand against the Nazis, and they had had no luck whatever. On the contrary, the last straw, so to speak, was when they didn't come to the defense of Czechoslovakia,
And then of course, providentially, the war came along, and these issues were papered over, but never really disposed of. [My wife] Iris and I were driving down the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and we stopped--this was the day after Hitler had invaded the Soviet
Gardner
Because he could then enter the war.
McWilliams
He could then enter the war, and this unity came into being overnight. But it was sort of a papered-over unity. It was never really--this [was] finally resolved. And in the postwar period it began to come back again.
Interesting analysis. To return to the thirties . . .
McWilliams
Sure.
Gardner
I'd like to pursue that, but I'm not sure in which direction. I guess we'll get to more of that later on. This was also the era in which you were writing for Westways.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
How did that come about?
McWilliams
I don't quite know how it began, but I would just assume that Phil Hanna asked me just to do a page of this kind. I was delighted to do it because it was right down my alley, so to speak. They sent me a lot of California papers, miscellaneous California papers, and I would go out once a month and pick up bales of these papers and then just thumb through them to see what I could cull out of them that might be of interest. It was fun to do and interesting to do. I picked up a lot of miscellaneous information about California by just doing this. And then occasionally, if I saw a name that interested me, I'd pursue it and then do a little research about it. The [feature] page went on from, I think, `35 to `38, `39, somewhere in there, three years or so [1933-1939]. Then it culminated in the way I explained to you the other day.
Gardner
Right, as a result of your connection with
McWilliams
Well, yes. The fact that when Factories in the Field came out it created a great rumpus in California. Ruth Comfort Mitchell, who I explained to you was a sister of Standish Mitchell of the Automobile Club--and she was married to a big grower in the San Joaquin Valley--was outraged by the book. And through Standish Mitchell she brought pressure on poor Phil Townsend Hanna, who took me to lunch one day and said, "Well, it is just one of those things." So I understood; I never blamed him in any way for it. So that's what terminated the page.
Gardner
You said you had access to all sorts of California newspapers. Since I've just spent some time looking through the archives you put together on the basis of Factories in the Field were you also looking through the California papers for items of interest and value for the research you were doing then?
McWilliams
Yes, I did. But I did a lot of that research independently. These papers that were sent to Westways, or Tides West--I think the magazine was first called Tides West . . .
Gardner
First called Touring Topics.
McWilliams
I'm sorry. My column was called "Tides West" [formerly "California Curiosa"].
Gardner
Oh!
I think that's it. And the Auto Club would get a big collection of papers from small-town communities in California. And on exchange, I guess, or in some connection--I don't really remember--they would bundle them up. I'd pick them up, as I say, once a month and go through them. That's how I started doing the page.
Gardner
It sounds like an interesting one. I'll have to go back and look through them. The next major period is begun by the Olson campaign. Were you involved in the campaign?
McWilliams
I was involved in the campaign.
Gardner
In what way?
McWilliams
Of course, it was the EPIC campaign that set the stage for Olson.
Gardner
As you said on Monday, that really created a Democratic party in California.
McWilliams
It created the Democratic party. Olson was very photogenic. He was the image of a governor, you might say: tall, and snow-white hair, piercing blue eyes, and pink cheeks. He was the whole image of a governor. But one of Olson's problems was, he didn't know very much about California. He was a fairly recent migrant. He'd been a state senator in Utah and then had come to Los Angeles. He'd been elected state senator on the EPIC ticket in 1934, and he decided to run for governor in
Gardner
And you also did a lot of articles for publication.
McWilliams
Yes. "What about him? He knows something. He's interested in farm labor." "Okay," said Olson. "That sounds like a good idea." First of all, I had
Gardner
What was the campaign for governor like? Was it an easy one considering the new Democratic majority at that time, or was it. . . ?
McWilliams
It was pretty rough, and several things helped Olson a good deal. One was that the Simon J. Lubin Society had put together a pamphlet, an extended pamphlet on the Associated Farmers of California. They issued it, and it had an enormous pick-up. It was very widely read; about 100,000 copies or more were distributed. Olson made something of an issue of it; labor was thoroughly aroused and organizing by 1938 as a result of the San Francisco general strike . . .
Gardner
Right, which we talked about last time.
McWilliams
. . . in '34. The state was overdue for a
Gardner
You mentioned the Simon Lubin Society. Could you tell me something about Simon Lubin and this society?
McWilliams
Yes. I knew him; I admired him very much, indeed. This Division of Immigration and Housing was his idea.
Gardner
Oh, good. So it dovetails to my next question, then.
McWilliams
Yes. He was a son of the Lubin who had founded the Weinstock-Lubin store in Sacramento, a very famous department store. They were very progressive German-Jewish people. Lubin had gone east to college and university. He decided he wanted to get into social work, which was then kind of a new field. He had spent some time in settlement houses in New York as part of his education. He came back to California convinced that California should prepare for a big wave of immigration,
Then the Wheatland hop pickers' riot [1913] occurred, and this was a galvanizing factor, because Johnson asked Lubin to investigate the Wheatland hop pickers' riot, and Lubin did a very good job in doing it. As a result of this--Panama Canal, labor unrest in agriculture that seemed to be related somehow to immigrant groups--they set up this division, set up under Hiram Johnson. And Lubin was a prime factor in it. He, I think, was either the first chairman of the commission or executive officer; I've forgotten which. John Collier, who was later the commissioner of Indian Affairs, worked with the Immigration and Housing Commission. Carleton Parker, who wrote a book called The Casual Laborer [1920], worked with the division. Also, Lubin made a very fine report of labor conditions in the Imperial Valley in the early 1930s. As I say, I knew him quite well and interviewed him in connection with Factories in the Field and so forth. The Simon J. Lubin Society was set up in his honor, so to speak, to carry on investigations into the field of farm labor, migratory labor, rural
Gardner
He died in the thirties?
McWilliams
Yes, in the late thirties, maybe early forties. And Helen Hosmer was the longtime executive director of the Simon J. Lubin Society. Steinbeck was connected with it; I was connected with it. Steinbeck's first pamphlet about farm labor in California ["Their Blood Is Strong"] was based on a series of articles that he did for the San Francisco News, I think, and they were reprinted as a pamphlet by the Simon J. Lubin Society.
Gardner
So it was a very active organization.
McWilliams
It was a very active organization. It did some very fine works and very fine lobbying and investigation about the background--it was very helpful at the time the La Follette Committee came out.
Gardner
How long was it . . .
McWilliams
I can't remember when it ceased to function, but it existed for quite some time. Helen Hosmer now lives up near Santa Barbara someplace. She's retired, of course. She would be a very interesting oral history subject.
Gardner
Probably so.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
I know that I read some of the copies of the
McWilliams
Very interesting.
Gardner
And put out by the society.
McWilliams
Yes, it was very good. You see, in the fall of '38, we tried to get the La Follette Committee to come out, thinking it would help Olson--that is, when I say "we": Dewey Anderson, myself, and other friends. They were not interested particularly. Robert La Follette seemed to think, well, that's political trouble somehow. He wasn't too interested in doing this. Then we continued to pressure them to do it, and when we got into 1939, then they decided they would come out. I worked very closely with them all the time they were here. They did a superb job, really marvelous job. And it's one of the tragedies of the time that in their thirty-nine, forty volumes--it's one of, I think, the very finest of congressional investigations. They covered every phase of this farm labor situation in depth. By the time they issued their report, when Senator La Follette presented it to the Senate of the United States, I think it carried a date of October 1942. So in a way it was effort wasted because we were in the war, see, and nobody paid any attention to the recommendations. The recommendations would have had very farranging, important implications in connection with rural
Gardner
What were your first duties? Let me ask first, did you have any questions about accepting the appointment in this commission? You were in the middle of writing a book.
McWilliams
I was in the middle of writing a book. I had some doubts about it. From a practical point of view, it was a foolish thing to do. I mean, from my own point of view, my own self-interest, it was a foolish thing to do. But I knew Lubin, I knew Lubin quite well, and I knew the background of this. You see, the division had done a very excellent bit of work when it was first established. Then after Johnson, the life had gone out of it, of course. It had faded, and it had been moribund until Olson gave me the appointment. So I felt that this was a chance not only to do something for farm labor, or about farm labor, but to revive the division. So it was, from that point of view, very tempting. And it was such a unique agency, because here's a state agency that had a commission of five members and a commissioner; I was the commissioner. It had statutory power to hold public hearings, to subpoena witnesses--that is, to inquire into the condition of aliens resident in the state of California, into labor
Gardner
Had they not been used before, or had they been used just to. . . ?
McWilliams
They had originally . . .
Gardner
. . . under Lubin.
McWilliams
Yes, under Lubin. But they had not been used for years. Then, you see, a big hassle develops because not only was the La Follette [Committee] out here, but Grapes of Wrath was published, and some time later Factories in the Field was published. Then earlier that same year, I had been named the head of the Division of Immigration and Housing. So the organized farm groups of the state put all this together, see, and they said that this was a conspiracy: this is a conspiracy to undermine, besmirch farm labor, the farm industry in California. They linked my name with Steinbeck's, and Steinbeck's with mine, and linked the books together. Factories in the Field was supposed to be just--the fact that the book had provided the factual information to back up the fiction that was in Grapes of Wrath. They screamed and yelled. And of course, the ironic fact is that I never met Steinbeck. We never met. We were on the same committees; we corresponded.
You still have never met him?
McWilliams
No, I never did meet him. So the idea that we were conspiring to do all this was, you know, truly bizarre! But they thought this was awful, and they launched this campaign against both books. The two of us should be very grateful to them. [laughter]
Gardner
For publicizing them.
McWilliams
Because they certainly stimulated the sales enormously. And then, you see, a further thing happened that contributed to the excitement. I called a hearing of the commission. At that time the problem, the key problem, was that when the spring season arrived--the agricultural cycle began--they would force people off relief because they would contend that there were jobs in the field. So they would deny them relief. I held a public hearing in Madera, the idea being to determine a fair rate below which people would not be compelled--you couldn't cut them off from relief rolls, in effect, an effort to determine a kind of minimum wage. The first agricultural labor operation of the season was cut-and-chopping, that sort of weeding cotton. I held that hearing in my own name as chief of the Division of Immigration and [Housing]. Correct what I just said, because the commission was not involved in this hearing; I held this hearing. And I made a recommendation, after hearing the
Then that fall, when it became cotton-picking time, I went to Olson and said, "You should authorize me to call the commission together and let them make the same kind of recommendation." So he said, "Okay, go ahead." We called the commission together and held the hearing in Fresno in the city auditorium. It was attended by about 2,500 to 3,000 people. This was a special commission to hear this particular evidence and make a recommendation. We had a representative from the farm bureau, the Grange, organized labor, people representing public interests, Mrs. Erdman (who was the wife of Professor Erdman at the University of California), people of this kind. And we made a recommendation. There was a majority and a minority report, and I was in the minority. I felt they should make a higher recommendation. But the majority recommendation was arbitrarily thrust aside by the growers, and of course they had a big cotton strike on their hands. The historians of agricultural labor say that these hearings were the first attempts of their kind to hold a hearing, make a formal
Gardner
Anywhere in the country?
McWilliams
That's right. So the growers went to the legislature and got very excited about all this. They introduced what was in effect a bill of attainder, described as a bill of attainder; the first and only bill of attainder, I think, in the history of the legislature.
Tape Number: III, Side One
(July 12, 1978)
Gardner
Now, the bill of attainder.
McWilliams
The bill of attainder was a bill to abolish the Division of Immigration and Housing. But the sponsors in the senate and the assembly made no bones of the fact that it was aimed at me. They in effect said to Olson, "Remove him, and we'll withdraw the bill." But he said he had no reason to do it. He didn't think I had been incompetent, or he didn't have any grounds for doing this. And there was quite a bit of support from the church groups, and organized labor, some of the papers in the state, and so forth. So they proceeded with their bill of attainder, so-called, and it passed. It passed in the senate, it passed in the assembly, and it went to Olson. He pocketvetoed it; he wouldn't sign it.
I want to cut back to something else. At the time of the second hearing to determine a wage rate for cotton picking, by that time the investigators from the La Follette Committee were here in the state. So when the big cotton strike broke that year, the investigators were right there on the scene. They could see the violence; they saw exactly what happened. So it turned out to be a very important source of evidence for the La Follette
Gardner
But they didn't cease to be.
McWilliams
No, they didn't cease to be. But it took a lot of the steam out of the situation. And incidentally, in connection with all this, [Earl] Warren was attorney general. And I will say this: he was anything but co-operative with the La Follette Committee. He was supporting the sheriffs right down the line, and they were resisting the subpoenaes of the La Follette Committee and so forth and so forth. So it was not the Warren of the Supreme Court.
Gardner
Well, we'll talk about that more later on when it comes to 1942 and his running for governor.
McWilliams
Right, right.
Gardner
His bedfellows were different, it appears. Well, in 1939 Factories in the Field comes out, as you said.
What were the circumstances of your publishing that? How did you make contact with the publisher? Which publisher was it?
I had an agent in New York, and he sent it to Little-Brown. It was the first book that Angus Cameron--Angus Cameron had just come with Little-Brown. He had been with Bobbs-Merrill and had become the editor at Little-Brown. It was the first manuscript that he accepted for publication at Little-Brown. And of course it turned out to be a best seller, as you know. So this was the beginning of my friendship with him.
Gardner
And a good choice for him for his first manuscript.
McWilliams
Yes, it turned out to be.
Gardner
You mentioned, and it was also mentioned in the review in the New York Times, when Factories in the Field came out, that the nonfiction version really helped substantiate and put over The Grapes of Wrath.
McWilliams
Well, I think it did. I think it did in the sense that it did provide the story, the background of this problem. The timing of all of this was very fortuitous because The Grapes of Wrath was produced as a movie. It was an excellent movie, and it generated enormous interest, you see, in the whole problem. The stage was set for action for the first time in behalf of migratory farm labor. The principal groups were white. They were [of] Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, Protestants, not Mexicans, not Japanese. These books had aroused all of this interest.
Gardner
Of course, in Factories in the Field you don't deal simply with the Protestant population.
McWilliams
Oh, no.
Gardner
Factories in the Field is an analysis of migratory workers in the state of California, period, and the dealing with all of the minority groups . . .
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
. . . as they were dealt with. We know basically what the response was from different organizations, the Associated Farmers, for example. What kind of response did you get from some of the, for example, Chinese minority, Japanese minority, Filipino minority?
McWilliams
They were interested, and they were friendly, and I spoke at some of their meetings, and so forth. Actually the Filipinos were more actively interested than any of those other minorities. I just happened to have some rather close ties with some of the Filipinos, just by pure chance. They were very much interested. But of course none of these groups--they were all lacking in spokesmen, in a sense. They were all lacking in--the Japanese were better organized than any of the others, but they were not organized to do very much. The Mexicans
Gardner
On the other hand, the Associated Farmers were very outspoken. I have a quote from one named Watson who called you the "agricultural pest, number one."
McWilliams
That's right. They were screaming; they wanted my hide from the very beginning. Because of the excitement that was generated, it became a matter of national interest. I had debated Phil Bancroft on "Town Meeting of the Air" in New York, and we had a debate before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Friday Morning Club in Los Angeles, all kinds of excitement.
Gardner
Tell me about those.
McWilliams
Well, you know, Bancroft was the son of the Bancroft. He was the Republican nominee for U.S. senator. We had, you know, a real go at it.
Gardner
What kind of reaction did you have, say, to the "Town Meeting of the Air"?
McWilliams
Oh, very interesting reaction. There was a lot of press coverage, big press coverage, and it stimulated a lot of interest, and the same with respect to the Commonwealth Club debate and the Friday Morning Club. Arthur Eggleston, who was the labor editor of the Chronicle, later wrote that as a result of all of this agitation in 1939--including the debates, and the discussions,
Gardner
When you look back on Factories in the Field do you have any thoughts about it? Is there anything you would have done differently?
McWilliams
Oh, if I were to write it today, I wouldn't write it necessarily in any different way. But I would write a different book, if you know what I mean.
Gardner
Well . . .
McWilliams
It's almost an impossible question to answer because there's been so much written.
Gardner
Oh, right, right. I don't mean in terms of "if you were writing it again in 1978."
McWilliams
Because there's been so much more information available.
Gardner
Of course, of course,
McWilliams
And there was very little at that time. It was to me a phenomenal point that no one had put this material together.
Gardner
Well, you gathered an awful lot of it from a lot of different sources. In dealing with the archive (that,
McWilliams
That's true.
Gardner
So it was not an easy task to pull them together.
McWilliams
No. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. Even more so since I was very busy, as you know; I was practicing law at that time.
Gardner
Practicing law and also involved in free-lance writing of other kinds.
McWilliams
That is right. That's right. The format of the book, I think, was sound. There was a need to tell a story of migratory labor, and that's what I set out to do.
Gardner
Now, did you immediately have in mind putting together Ill Fares the Land? How did that work?
McWilliams
Well, when Factories in the Field enjoyed the success that it did, Angus Cameron wanted me to do another book. I said, well, the thing to do was to extend the analysis nationally, because the La Follette Committee had held a lot of hearings, and there was a lot of material available. So he agreed. Then I set out, as time would permit, looking at these other situations. I had some very good luck in connection with it because, for example, in the early forties I was invited to speak at a conference
Gardner
That's an amazing part of the story.
McWilliams
It's an incredible story on migratory labor on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and so forth. So it was a logical follow-up. And I think it's one of my better books.
It also fills a gap in general American information . . . still today.
McWilliams
Yes, it's still in print. It's been reissued; this is the second time it's been reissued.
Gardner
Yes. Because when one thinks of migratory workers, one always thinks of California braceros. One thinks of the thirties with Oklahoma, Arkansas. One rarely thinks in terms of that run that goes up from Florida, New Jersey, or the sugar beet, Detroit.
McWilliams
That's right. It was reprinted in Great Britain and had an introduction by the Earl of Portsmouth. It got very good notices in the British magazines and newspapers. As I say, it got me interested in the Spanish-speaking, very definitely.
Gardner
Which will come up very strongly later on.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
To get back chronologically--again back to 1940--I have some of these things that are just [noted] down under dates because they seem to come up then. One of them is the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Now, you were chairman of that?
McWilliams
I was national chairman of it in the year . . .
Gardner
I have it for '40; that may or may not be true.
McWilliams
I think '40 is correct, because I remember it
Gardner
How did it start out? You said "a long history." Did it date back to the Palmer raids?
McWilliams
I don't know just when that would be. I don't know when it was actually organized, but it had a considerable history prior to 1940.
Gardner
How long did you remain?
McWilliams
Just that one year.
Gardner
What sort of things did it do during the year you were there? What sort of things did you do?
McWilliams
The main thing it did was that this unique
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
Arbitrarily. The reason I accepted this presidency of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born was largely because of this cloud on the horizon that began to show up in connection with the Alien Registration Act. You could see trouble was brewing. I think we did a quite remarkable job in registering aliens and bringing this act to their attention. Then the county, of course, wanted to get in on the act and have its registration system. I talked the board of supervisors out of doing that. I told them that I thought it was totally unnecessary and would cause trouble, and explained why. It was in the air; the people were becoming very concerned about the war by then, you see, and the aliens were beginning to be the brunt of this concern.
Gardner
Right, there needed to be a target.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
You mentioned that you can gear the date by the year that France fell.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
You wrote a piece for the ACLU, or that was distributed as a pamphlet by the ACLU, called Liberals in the War Crisis. Do you recall that?
Yes, I do.
Gardner
It's interesting to me because of its implications, not simply for that [specific] war in terms of what America's role was vis-à-vis France, but also the role of liberals in general as pertains to war.
McWilliams
That's right; that is right.
Gardner
Could you comment on that a little bit, what the situation was in France?
McWilliams
Well, there was all this excitement about--see, this was before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it was after this Nazi-Soviet Pact. And in [September] 1941 the New Republic did a symposium. They solicited the views of a lot of people about what should be done. And there were liberals in the United States who were clamoring for the United States to enter the war, get into the actual fighting. I was opposed to this, and that's one of the reasons that pamphlet was written. In this New Republic symposium which was published about a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, I said I was opposed to the U.S. intervention in the war. I thought that Roosevelt was pursuing a correct policy. He was very careful not to get too far ahead of public opinion. He was letting the facts seep into the public consciousness. He was doing what he could to aid France and England. I was in favor of that, but no direct intervention. I thought he was
I was in favor, however, of very stern measures so far as the Japanese were concerned, the embargo or economic pressures of any kind, because I thought that was a real danger, but not to have the United States actually enter the war. One of the reasons for that, of course, was by that time I lacked confidence in the French and British leadership. I thought they were quite capable of selling out at almost any time to the Nazis, making a deal, as I think they were, actually, until the big turnover when Churchill came in and the war became very desperate. But up to that time I think they were quite prepared to have made a deal. That's why I didn't want to see the United States actively involved in the war while that state of affairs existed. I was against direct U.S. involvement, but [was] for all kinds of aid, as I said in that piece for the New Republic. I thought Roosevelt was doing a very astute job.
In retrospect I'm even more convinced of this. I think it was an amazingly sensitive kind of reading. He knew the mood in Congress, he knew the mood in the country, and he spoke out against aggression, quarantining the aggressors and all that. But he was very careful to walk a very narrow kind of tightrope. It was a very astute operation.
Of course, there is criticism now for his dealings vis-à-vis Spain, for example.
McWilliams
Oh, yes, yes.
Gardner
That he permitted particularly the Germans to get away with an awful lot.
McWilliams
It was a very serious mistake. Now, I mentioned that I spoke of this first mass meeting for the Loyalists. I also spoke at the last mass meeting on behalf of the Loyalists that was held in Los Angeles. It was held in Trinity Auditorium. I spoke at that meeting--I was chairman of that meeting--and Theodore Dreiser was the main speaker. It was a fascinating meeting because Dreiser had conferred with Roosevelt recently. He was rather advanced in years at the time of this meeting. He walked around on the stage at the Trinity Auditorium, and he muttered to himself, and there were long pauses. He'd just stand there; he wouldn't say anything. "And I said to Roosevelt . . . and Roosevelt said to me . . . and dammit, I don't understand why he doesn't see . . ." you know, it was that kind of talk. But it was very, very interesting. And it is true that lots of people who saw Roosevelt at that time--he was really quite aware of the danger about Spain. But in his judgment, the overriding considerations made it impossible to really take a stronger attitude, pro-Loyalist attitude. I think it was
Gardner
How is it phrased, that it was sort of the practice run?
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
The German battalions got to try out all their weaponry.
McWilliams
And it's worth noting that--particularly in connection with this first mass meeting that was held here--there was very little pro-Loyalist sentiment. I mean, the Left and other groups were pro-Loyalist, but the Catholics were very much opposed to the Loyalists. But by the time you got down to 1939, 1940, and if you look at the public opinion polls of that time, it is remarkable that the pro-Loyalist sentiment had come up, oh, conspicuously. So gradually the American public was understanding what was involved in this.
Gardner
But not in time.
McWilliams
But not in time.
Gardner
And that, too, you mention Roosevelt's political sense.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
That may have been part of it.
McWilliams
I think that was part of it. I think that was part of it.
And there are other issues that really aren't part of our discussion that come into play and other influences on it that don't have to do with Southern California history.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Any rate, I was interested in the pamphlet [Liberals in the War Crisis] because of your description of the fall of France and the way in which the industrialists there sort of helped the fall of the [Léon] Blum government along and . . .
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
. . . maintained the crisis in order to allow the Germans to move in more easily. Also in 1940 are the Tolan Committee hearings.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Can you talk about what they were?
McWilliams
Well, the Tolan Committee was, in a sense, the successor to the La Follette Committee, in that [John H.] Tolan was a California congressman from the Oakland area. But the executive director--and the executive director is one of the key people on the committee, as you know--the executive director of the Tolan Committee was Dr. Robert Lamb, a dear friend of mine who had been the staff director for the La Follette Committee. He moved over into the Tolan Committee and took quite a number of the staff with
Gardner
So that's later on. That's `42, then.
McWilliams
Yes, that would be in `42. By then, of course, the die was cast. And the Tolan Committee hearings were used not for the purpose that I had thought they might
Gardner
Ironic.
McWilliams
Yes, very ironic. Bob Lamb didn't want this to happen; the staff didn't want it to happen. But by that time it was very difficult to get people who opposed evacuation to testify publicly. They were afraid of the implications of the war. The Japanese were supposed to have done some bombing from submarines up near Santa Barbara, an oil field. The newspapers were full of big scare headlines, so that Bowron--Mayor Bowron--and Culbert Olson, Earl Warren, all these people, testified on the necessity for evacuation and keeping them out of the state of California. We couldn't get good spokesmen.
Gardner
Even Olson?
McWilliams
Even Olson, yes. Well, Olson's--I spoke to him about it, and his rationale was, "Well, this was Roosevelt's . . . Roosevelt did this. Roosevelt thinks this is necessary. I'm a Democrat; he's a Democrat. We have to back the administration."
I met with Thomas Mann and others because they were concerned about the German nationals. We did get a statement from them which I got into the record and had arranged for them to make the presentation. It did have some good effects, but the hearings were taken away from us. That's
Gardner
Well, while we're on that subject, you were still commissioner of Immigration and Housing at the time that all that was taking place.
McWilliams
That is right.
Gardner
What were your observations of what was going on? Did you have any participation in any of this? I mean, obviously, not collusion, but in the sense of your own involvement.
McWilliams
I was very much involved in it because the moment of the--even before the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese here were beginning to become apprehensive. Suddenly they began to beat a trail to my office in the State Building, in part because I knew some of them as individuals. I had some good friends in the community. They came to me, and I tried to do what I could to get the Tolan Committee out here as a moderating influence, and then got more and more involved in the whole Japanese situation. And we know in retrospect that--and I knew then that it was not--there was no national security hazard here at all. The naval intelligence people had been investigating the Japanese communities on the West Coast for years. They knew all that you needed to know about them, and they weren't in favor of mass evacuation. Ironically, J. Edgar Hoover was not in favor of mass evacuation. He thought it was
Gardner
And probably easier to keep up with what they were looking for, whatever surveillance that they were doing.
McWilliams
Whatever surveillance they were doing, it would be much easier. I didn't know then, but we know now, that the State Department had sent a man out here by the name of [Curtis B.] Munson; he had studied the situation here and in Hawaii and had filed a report with the administration saying they presented no threat at all from the national security point of view. "You should let them alone."
But the problem, as I see it, with Roosevelt, and I don't think this has ever been really understood: I don't think that Roosevelt wanted to do this. Francis Biddle was attorney general, and I don't think that Francis Biddle wanted to do this. He was a liberal, as you know. But the problem was that the congressional delegations of the three West Coast states had organized under the chairmanship of Senator Hiram Johnson of California who was a diehard anti-Orientalist. He had been active in the anti-Oriental movement in California from way back.
Gardner
A California progressive.
McWilliams
That's right, a California progressive. They had gone to Roosevelt with a unanimous resolution demanding
Gardner
Shut them up.
McWilliams
To shut them up. And not because he thought it was necessary, and not because he had been told that it was necessary. I don't think he had been told that it was necessary, but that's what happened.
Gardner
And you, of course, portray a different sort of Earl Warren anyway.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
It's interesting that Earl Warren never spoke about his role afterwards and later on in the sort of post-midfifties era. He never spoke about his role in the Japanese internment.
McWilliams
Before his death he made a couple of statements to the effect that he was sorry, that he made a mistake about this. He apologized, in effect, to the Japanese, as did Tom Clark, Justice Tom Clark, who was very bad at
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
He doesn't talk about the Native Sons of the Golden West. He was very active in the Native Sons of the Golden West; they were a big factor in this agitation. He doesn't talk about the church loyalty oath and other issues of this kind. He's rather selective.
Gardner
True. Maybe the time now is apt to talk about his campaign. Before we do that, though (since that's moving up to 1942), besides Pearl Harbor there's another significant event that's placed in 1941, which is your marriage to Iris [Dornfeld].
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Would you like to talk about that a little bit? How you met? How it came about?
McWilliams
John Fante, the novelist and short-story writer, is a very dear friend of mine and very close personal friend. John was from Roseville, California, originally, and he married a girl who was from Roseville. His wife had gone to high school with Iris in Roseville, and so John and Joyce Fante introduced me to Iris. That's how I met Iris. We were married shortly, a year or so
Gardner
Oh, a worthy profession.
McWilliams
A worthy profession. And a son by the first marriage.
Gardner
Right, Wilson Carey.
McWilliams
A political scientist. So that's how I met her. She's a novelist. Iris has written a couple of very excellent novels, and she's done some other things. One of them has been dramatized for television.
Gardner
What was that?
McWilliams
A novel called Jeeny Ray. She's done some very good work.
Gardner
Stayed married a long time.
McWilliams
Yes, stayed married a long time. Very, very--well, gosh, a long time. [tape recorder turned off]
Gardner
Okay. Anything else about Iris?
McWilliams
She's a native daughter of the state of California. She went to Sacramento Junior College, and then she went to Mills [College]. She was very much interested in theater and in the dance when she was at Mills.
Gardner
Okay. Well, now that we have 1941 concluded, let's talk about the [Earl] Warren campaign. One of the interesting things about it is that one of his campaign promises was to get rid of you. [laughter]
That's right. That was one of his campaign promises. The interesting thing about Warren is that when he ran for attorney general he gave Bob Kenny a handwritten letter, which Kenny showed me. The effect of it was, "Dear Bob, I want to reassure you of my interest and dedication, et cetera, to civil liberties" and so forth and so forth. So Bob, as a matter of fact, supported him when he ran for attorney general. But then by the time he ran for governor, it was apparent that he hadn't really lived up to that guarantee in many respects. And Olson was a pushover, really, because the New Deal was itself over.
Gardner
As you said.
McWilliams
The New Deal was over. The Olson administration was anticlamactic in a way. It came in too late. It hadn't been able to get its roots established. And so Warren was an easy kind of winner. It was interesting to me. I became fortuitously, a very good friend of Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker of Whitaker-Baxter--the first big professional political management outfit--and got to know them both very well. Warren had retained them to handle his campaign, and they largely changed his image in state politics. I still remember the kind of shock that I had to pick up the papers one morning, and here were photographs of a scene at the beach with bonfires. There had been a big grunion hunt at the beach, and here were the Warrens running up and down
Gardner
That was particularly later, wasn't it? Wasn't he very closely linked with the Associated Farmers?
McWilliams
He was, in that `42 campaign; he certainly was. He said that his first official act was removing me from state office. The truth of the matter is, of course, that all of Olson's term appointments expired automatically, as of the end of the year. By the time he came in I was out. But, you know, it was just something he wanted to say, I guess. I think the liberals of the state made a great miscalculation about where the political issues were in `46, so he had an easy time of being reelected. And he didn't have any problems. I mean, the war was going on, and the economy was booming, you know. So what was there to worry about?
Gardner
Right. Did you ever have any positive relations
McWilliams
Never did. Never did. Some aspects of this relationship are very ironic, because one of the things I did when I first was named chief of the division was to call a conference of local, state, and federal agencies concerned with migratory farm labor. We met in Fresno for a two-day conference to try and get these agencies to coordinate their activities, to work out a program about migratory farm labor. We did, and we had some very good things come out of that, very good things. We got hardly any cooperation from him [Warren] in connection with that conference. In fact, he took quite a dim view of it. But one of the first things he did after he became governor, when the farm labor situation began to heat up again, he called exactly the same kind of conference in Fresno: state, local, federal agencies. [laughter]
Of course, we were on opposite sides of all kinds of things. I mean, the [Harry] Bridges case, and the Ship Murder Case. and Max Radin's appointment, he blocked. It was a commission of three that had to approve nominees to the [California] Supreme Court. He was one of the members of that commission, and it was his vote that blocked Max Radin. Olson had appointed Max Radin, and it was the vote of this commission that blocked it. I was very annoyed about that. And then the Japanese
Gardner
What about later on when you were in New York, and he was the progressive . . .
McWilliams
Governor?
Gardner
. . . chief justice of the Supreme Court?
McWilliams
Well, when he was appointed chief justice--we now know a great deal about that appointment, of course. On Warren's own authority we know that Eisenhower later said that that was the worst damn fool thing he'd ever done, when he appointed Warren. And it was a kind of commitment to Warren as his compensation, psychological and political compensation, for the fact that they had passed him over for the vice-presidency.
Gardner
In favor of Nixon.
McWilliams
In favor of Nixon. We also know, of course, how Nixon maneuvered to get ahead of Warren. So that was the reason for the appointment. If [Herbert] Brownell and Eisenhower had known or suspected that Warren would turn out to be the kind of chief justice that he did, they never would have appointed him, I'm sure. But on the basis of his California record they had no reason to think this, had no reason to think this. When he was nominated, I wrote an editorial for the Nation about it and said that it was disappointing. It was not the best appointment in the world, but that you should wait and see how it might
Gardner
You think by `59?
McWilliams
Around `59. Because in some of those cases you will notice, that came out about `59, they began to blur the issues a bit. Up to this point, they had been going consistently in a liberal direction. Maybe even a little earlier than `59, they began to fluff the issues a bit.
Gardner
Of course, one or two of Kennedy's appointments helped.
McWilliams
Yes, definitely, definitely helped in that regard.
Gardner
Helped it shift.
Tape Number: III, Side Two
(July 12, 1978)
Gardner
Since we've been talking about Earl Warren, you mentioned Bob Kenny. As I said to you off tape, I'd like you to talk a little about him, how you got to know him, and something about your friendship.
McWilliams
Well, he'd had some newspaper background and experience before he became municipal judge, and I had gotten to know him in that connection. We became very, very close friends and remained close friends until he died. I knew his wife [Sara McCann Kenny] very well, and we had the same circle of friends. He was an extraordinarily perceptive, intelligent person with very warm feelings about people. He was kind of instinctively friendly, wanted to help the underdog element in the society. He was that very rare person who had acute political instincts and could have gone even much further, I think, than he did in politics, if it had not been for the fact that he was also an intellectual, you know; the combination doesn't work too well.
Gardner
Uh-huh.
McWilliams
He was an extraordinary manager, for example, of somebody else's campaign; not too effective as a candidate himself. That was one of the limitations. His
Gardner
Why don't you go into detail on that?
McWilliams
For example, I remember a dinner in his honor that was given at the University Club, where Judge Edward Bishop introduced or extolled Kenny in the course of this dinner. One of the things that Judge Bishop said--and it
Now, I know there are a lot of people in the community that you could speak to who would say that Bob got pushed into that campaign by his liberal friends, and they really sort of forced his hand on the thing and sort of got him into it. I don't think that's entirely true. Strange as it may seem, he really thought that there was a possibility, with a strong ticket and unity and so forth, that they could beat Warren in '46. It was a serious mistake in judgment, although that ticket in '46, you could hardly have done better: Will Rogers[, Jr.], for U.S. Senator, Pat
I was very active in that campaign. I wrote speeches for Pat Brown and helped Kenny whenever I could. But Kenny had a fairly well organized campaign, so I didn't need to do too much in his behalf. I had a lot to do with Rogers's campaign and wrote speeches for him and so forth and so forth. Rogers was a superb candidate, marvelous candidate, twirling that rope at county fairs and all the rest of it, and ran a very good race, all things considered. But the times changed, and the liberals didn't know it--they just thought that this was a postwar period, and there was going to be renewed New Deal social developments of all kinds.
Gardner
That all the people who had been supporters in the thirties would have come back from the war and be still backing them.
McWilliams
Still backing them. The truth of the matter is (at least this is my theory) we never had a postwar period. We moved from the war directly into the cold war. This was a mistake in judgment on their part, and of course they all went down to defeat. That was a disaster for us so far as Kenny was concerned, a real disaster. But he went right along with the same groups that supported him. He continued to work with them--represented the Hollywood
He got along well with the legislature and with the lobbyist guys. He was an expert on the lobbyists. He knew exactly how they reasoned, and how they thought, and how they reacted. He would give me all kinds of insights as to his thinking about lobbyists and political issues. For example, he told me about the kinds of lobbies that you could cooperate with, because they would never make a demand on you that you couldn't reasonably honor. They would confine their interest in you to that one issue, so you could support them and support their interests with some assurance that you weren't going to get in trouble. And he had them all cataloged this way. He knew his way around in that maze in Sacramento as well as anyone ever did. And he got along well with the professional politicians, the Artie Samishes, and these people, you know. He would have been a very interesting governor.
And despite the fact that he was defeated by Warren, they remained pretty good friends, I think, always. They had been before the '46 campaign.
Gardner
And probably were again after Warren became chief justice.
McWilliams
I think that's true. I always had a question in my mind as to what Bob really wanted to be or what he might have been best
at. In a way, oddly enough, I think he would have been a superb editor, let's say, of the Los
Gardner
It's an odd combination.
McWilliams
It's an odd combination. It didn't really work in politics. I thought he was one of the most talented and potentially had one of the strongest futures of any of the people I knew in California politics. But in retrospect, I can see that there were weaknesses there. It really wasn't his dish of tea somehow.
Gardner
Of course, the Democratic party in California died throughout the forties and fifties. It wasn't until '58 that there's any revitalization at all.
McWilliams
All true.
Gardner
But it had its effect. You mentioned Artie [Arthur] Samish.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
As long as you brought him up, did you know him?
McWilliams
Yes, I knew him.
Gardner
I know you did some articles on him.
McWilliams
I did the first piece about him to appear in the national press.
Gardner
New Republic, wasn't it?
McWilliams
It was in the Nation, and it was called "The
Gardner
Right. That's what your article is . . .
McWilliams
. . . or the other members of the legislature. As a matter of fact, he had elements of decency about him in a way. I remember
at one time, one night, there had been a committee hearing in Sacramento, and they had been working me over for this, that,
and the other thing about farm labor. It had gotten pretty lively, this session had. After it was over, I was walking down
the corridor, and I happened to bump into him. He slapped me on the back and said, "Oh, Carey, don't let that business that
went on in the hearing room bother you. That's just par for the course. You have to learn to accept that. Don't let that bother
you." And when Bob Thomas did this book about him [The Secret Boss of California: The Life and
Gardner
Fascinating. It's a fascinating bit of history.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
One other thing I'd like you to do, and then we'll quit for the day, is tell on tape some of the stories you were telling about Stanley Rose before we started.
McWilliams
Well, he was a Texas farm boy who had volunteered to be a machine gunner. He told the recruiting officer, "I want to be a machine gunner," and he had served in France. He had been wounded. At the end of the war, he and another soldier friend of his got themselves assigned to a facility near Stanford University, kind of a psychiatric facility, in which they lived the life of Riley. They were there for about a year and a half, and they had a marvelous time! There was never really any psychological problem about Stanley. They had finessed this. And Stanley began to read a lot of books, and he got interested in books. They were just staying there. It was a country club kind of life. Finally the authorities caught up with them and said, "Out you go!" So Stanley came to Los Angeles and began peddling books--some slightly pornographic, some
Gardner
Which was the way it was done in those days.
McWilliams
That's right. That was the way it was done. And then he had this first bookshop, and then he went into business at the Satyr Book Store with a chap by the name of [Nicholas McDowell "Mac"] Gordon and another fellow. They incorporated the Satyr Book Store. Charlie Katz was attorney for the corporation. They had published and sold a pornographic item in which they had technically violated the copyright. So the authorities got after them. And Stanley's associates convinced him that he should take the rap for this because they were married and had families and children and he didn't and so forth. But they [the partners] said there would be no [jail sentence]; there would be just a nominal fine. He pleaded guilty and was given either a sixty- or ninety-day jail sentence. He sent for me, and I went up to interview him in the Hall of Justice. He wasn't enjoying that Hall of Justice a bit! So I brought a suit to dissolve the corporation on the grounds that they had taken advantage of him, and also got his sentence reduced. So he was out in a few days.
Then I incorporated his bookstore, and he had it right across the street from his old bookstore. [It was a] very attractive bookstore, and it became the hangout, the club, for all the Hollywood writers. Intellectuals would drift
He was, of course, a disastrous businessman. He had no sense of business at all, but he did love books. Uneducated as he was, he had a feeling about books. He had a feeling about authors. He helped a great many authors, Bill Saroyan and others. Many of them took advantage of him in one way or another, and many of the actors and directors certainly did, no doubt about that. That bookstore failed. Then he moved on Hollywood Boulevard, right near Musso's, a bigger store. It had an art room. He used to exhibit the works of people like Fletcher Martin, Lorser Feitelson, other artists. That seemed to be going quite well. But again it was the same problem. Stanley couldn't seem to manage. He needed a manager.
We were very close friends, and I spent many hours with him. He was a delight to be with. He was great fun. He had a marvelous sense of humor, canny sense of
As I say, I had the same experience with him that I had with Jake. I handled the legal work for Jake's first ventures, as I did for Stanley's. Stanley had a great sense of humor and was a superb entertainer. He kept those bookstore audiences in stitches, laughing at him. It was great fun for them to go in there. He liked to entertain them, and he did. They bought a certain number of books and that sort of thing. But they would take him on incredible junkets upstate in Northern California on hunting expeditions, or he would go fishing off the Channel Islands with Bill Faulkner and others. And Stanley would always go along because he thought it
Gardner
Terrific. On that note. . . .
July 13, 1978
GardnerAs I mentioned, today we'll talk about Sleepy Lagoon, and the zoot-suit riots [1943], and so on, a matter of great topical interest because of the play [Zoot Suit] that's been around this past year. First, I'd like to get your comments, your own personal recollections and point of view on the background of the case. Describe what the case was about and so forth and so on. Then I'll ask some more specific questions.
McWilliams
Well, there was trouble in the community--that is, trouble with regard to Mexican-American young people--before the Sleepy Lagoon case. There was quite a bit of it; there was the beginning of a buildup in the press about Mexican-Americans. Then, of course, the Sleepy Lagoon case was timed in such a way that it was immediately caught up in this tension. There was a great fuss in the press, and a lot of arrests were made. They were rousting around Mexican-American young people. The trial itself, of course, was a long, drawn-out affair,
The trial was a travesty. I mean, Charles Fricke had a reputation as being a tough prosecution judge, the worst possible judge for this kind of case. And the defense group that came to their aid headed by--I guess the executive at that time was La Rue McCormick--was Left-influenced, Left-dominated, you might say. But the people on the committee at that time were entitled to great credit because they were the only ones who came forward to offer a defense, and they did the best they could under the circumstances. They didn't have any resources, and they put up as good a fight as they could in the courts, but inadequate in terms of the issues. There were a lot of defendants. I've forgotten how many, but it was a very big . . .
Gardner
I think it started out with twenty-two, and then seventeen were eventually jailed.
McWilliams
And George Shibley. . . . And there was a woman lawyer whose name I can't remember. The trial had taken place in a poisonous atmosphere. Then when they were convicted, this defense group realized they had to do something else. They were at the end of their non-existent resources. So they came to me and wanted to know if I would take over the chairmanship of the committee
Then Ben Margolis and his firm came into the case,
I think I would date the so-called Chicano rebellion from the time of that case--or you could go forward to the middle sixties, and it might be more logical to pick that date as the date when Chicano rebellion began to get underway. But this was the first--so far as my knowledge goes--it was the first major victory in the courts of this kind that the Mexican-American community had ever won. While it is true that they didn't win it on their own steam, so to speak (they had outside help), nevertheless they were involved in the case.
The late Harry Braverman, who was a very dear friend of mine, is entitled to great credit for it. He was invaluable in connection with fund raising for the defense. We raised a substantial sum of money for that time, quite
Gardner
Well, I'll just ask questions as they occur to me. How did you interest people like Orson Welles, for example? Did he come to you? Did one of your fund raisers contact him? Do you recall?
McWilliams
I just don't recall specifically. He was, of course, fairly active in public issues at that time. It would have been a logical thing to do to ask Welles to join in this, and Quinn because of his background, of course; and how Cotten got into it, I really don't know. It may well have been, you see, that Josephina Bright was responsible for these motion picture people. She was then the wife of John Bright, the screenwriter; they were still married at that time, and they had Hollywood contacts. They may well have been the people who got the motion picture people into it. Josephina Bright was of Mexican-American background herself, so it was very easy to get her to participate in this.
Gardner
How many Chicano--well, they weren't Chicano then--Mexican-American sponsors did you have involved in your organization?
McWilliams
I would have to check the letterheads, but
Gardner
Close to two years.
McWilliams
Close to two years, because they had not been able to make bail; they couldn't raise the bail. It was a very dramatic case, very interesting case. And one could tell in the wake of that case, from what had happened, that there was going to be more trouble. Harry Braverman just happened to be on the grand jury. I talked to him at great length about it and about the possibility of more trouble, future trouble. He got the grand jury to hold an open hearing, public hearing, on the whole question of tensions, this, that, and the other thing. I testified at that hearing and said, "Look, if certain things aren't done, there's going to be more trouble here in the community. It's perfectly obvious, and for these reasons." I cited the reasons. Guy T. Nunn, who was the representative of Nelson Rockefeller's organization, [Office of the Coordinator of] Inter-American Affairs, also testified. I think he testified. In any case Rockefeller had a representative
Then we got into '43, and the whole thing exploded. All those riots of 1943, which was a very important year in the war, all of them I think were triggered--I won't say they were triggered, but the first major disturbance was here with the so-called zoot-suit riots. Then there were, as you know, other disturbances in Beaumont, Texas, Harlem.
Gardner
Detroit.
McWilliams
Detroit--a big disturbance in Detroit and so forth. And they all came within a period of a couple of weeks.
Gardner
Right. What occurs to me is that the time that you were fund-raising for the defense committee is exactly the time that this was going on.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Because the defense committee was in operation for something like a year or more afterwards until a final appeal was going on. I'll ask more about the zoot-suit
McWilliams
I think we had established a pretty good pattern of fund-raising operations. Well, it may have been influenced to some extent by what was going on. It probably was. But there were some very fine people in this community, many of them in the Jewish community, who had held house parties one after another, and all the way from sort of lower-middle-class people up to and including people in Beverly Hills. Orson Welles threw a party at his home, I remember; I was there for that one. There was a lot of grassroots fund raising. It was not so much a question of great big checks from individuals as it was an organized effort. I have been disturbed to have learned that these financial records are no longer available at UCLA. I don't know what happened to them!
Gardner
That's not true, as far as I know, because I think I saw them.
McWilliams
Did you?
Gardner
Well, I'll tell you what I saw (so you've got it on the tape). In going through the Sleepy Lagoon file--was it Alice [Greenfield McGrath] or you who gave that eleven boxes of Sleepy Lagoon material to UCLA?
Well, she did.
Gardner
Well, in there is a checkbook and the notebook, the audited notebook.
McWilliams
Well, that's good; that relieves me, because I was very concerned that in this particular instance, for once, we would be able to scotch this kind of talk that always comes up in these public-cause trials. And I didn't want that to happen in this case.
The court victory had repercussions in Mexico. It received a lot of publicity in the Mexican press, and very favorably in terms of U.S.-Mexican relations. We got an extraordinary response from servicemen who had heard about the case and sent in nickels, pennies, dimes, quarters, dollars, showed a great interest in the case.
Gardner
Let me go back to the beginning. I know that a lot of it is available in other places, but since it's not really well known, you were the first to write it up in any detailed way in several publications and then in North From Mexico. Do you recall the circumstances of the case: what happened that night of the murder and so forth and so on?
McWilliams
Oh, I would know in a general way, but I've forgotten the detail of it. I reported it in North from Mexico, and I did some newspaper pieces about it. But it was a case of this gravel pit in East Los Angeles being a
Gardner
Crashed I think is the . . .
McWilliams
. . . gate-crashed this party that was going on. The next morning the body of this young Mexican-American [José Díaz] was found near there in the area. He had left the party in the company of a friend (who apparently was never called as a witness, very odd circumstances; he never was called), and he had been apparently drinking pretty heavily. It was on the basis of this they indicted Leyvas and members of his group that were there. It was a very weak case so far as the evidence was concerned.
Gardner
Do you remember any of the other oddities and weaknesses of the trial?
McWilliams
Well, the thing that was so terrible about it is they wouldn't let these defendants have a chance to get prepared for the trial, really. Their attorneys would probably have told them to get a haircut, or get their hair trimmed a bit, and a few things like this, but none of this was possible. They looked like a criminal bunch,
Gardner
What about press reaction at the time?
McWilliams
In the wake of the riots, it was a lot of excitement. And the second night of the riots there was an emergency mass meeting called. I chaired this emergency mass meeting, and a hundred or so people showed up. They decided something would have to be done. Various suggestions were made, and opposed, and so forth. As a matter of fact, out of that meeting came what was known as the Council for Civic Unity. I don't know how long it survived; it survived for quite some time. It did some first-rate work in the community.
But I phoned Bob Kenny, who was attorney general at the time, in Sacramento, and I said this was a very bad situation and something should be done about it immediately. He said he would speak to [Earl] Warren and see if the governor would consent to the appointment of a commission of inquiry to quiet it down, particularly to quiet the
Gardner
Was there any press that was sympathetic? Not just perhaps locally, but even nationally, internationally, besides, say, People's World?
McWilliams
Well, PM and the liberal weeklies were sympathetic to it. I don't know just how the New York Times, for example, treated it or what it had to say about it, as a matter of fact. And then there were some papers here, like there was a Jewish community paper on the east side--pretty good circulation--at that time. It was quite good, quite good. They gave it a fair treatment; and more than fair, they were very favorable so far as the commission report was concerned.
Then later, when there were signs that there would be more trouble of this sort, Kenny asked me to prepare a manual for police officers: what to do in case of a riot. And I prepared a manual, which again was watered down considerably and edited, but it was issued officially by the attorney general's office.
Gardner
That's after the first riots.
Yes. They distributed it to police officers all over the state.
Well, there were some funny aspects of Sleepy Lagoon. There was a very nice chap--I can't think of his name; I think his name may have been Jack Berman--who was very helpful to us in many ways. He was the manager of the Grauman's downtown motion picture theater. He had had trouble with young Mexican-Americans who would come in there and sit there and sort of carve up the backs of the seats in front of them, you know, just do it. He spoke to Alice--spoke to me, too--"Couldn't something be done?" So Alice called some of these people together, and Berman was there, and he told them the problem. He said, "I'm helping this committee, this Sleepy Lagoon Committee. I want to continue to help it, but you're making it difficult for me." So they sat there, wise as owls; didn't say a word, just listened. And they were stopped; they stopped it. Things like that were sort of amusing sidelights on what happened.
Tape Number: IV, Side One
(July 13, 1978)
Gardner
One question that occurs to me in relation to it all, and is not even on my two-page list of questions, is the relationshipl among the racial communities. In other words, the zoot-suit riots were a Chicano riot particularly, although some blacks were involved.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
Yet, everywhere else the riots were white and black . . .
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
. . . during that time. Is there any reason why blacks were not included, didn't include themselves or weren't included by the mobs during the zoot-suit riots?
McWilliams
Well, I think blacks were doing relatively better, of course, at that period of time than the Mexican-Americans were doing. Jobs were plentiful and so forth. Mexican-Americans had a lot of grievances, because a large number were drafted because the number that had draftdeferral jobs was minimal. So more were drafted proportionately. The removal of the Japanese-Americans had created further problems so far as manpower was concerned. As a matter of fact, the railroads had begun to recruit blacks from Louisiana; they brought in quite a number.
Gardner
Despite the fact that in many cases the neighborhoods were contingent.
McWilliams
That is right.
Gardner
Nor, on the other hand, were there problems between them. There were just no relations at all.
McWilliams
I think it was more a question of their just never having established any kind of working relationship. I think that would be my impression.
Gardner
Do you want to describe just offhand something [of] what the riots were, how they came about and so forth?
McWilliams
Of course, there were a lot of soldiers and sailors moving in and out of Los Angeles. And there was a problem about housing; there were shortages. Shortages were all over the place in connection with rental units and you name it. These sailors began to mill around and were looking, I guess, for trouble or excitement, as sailors have a habit of doing. They began to go into some of these areas, and one thing led to another. There were some scuffling and some fighting. Then the next night the sailors came back in bigger force in taxicabs,
Gardner
And no one did anything about it.
McWilliams
Not very much. The police were sort of looking the other way when this was going on. They didn't do much of anything about it. And the tone of the press was very bad, very bad. Even after the governor's report was issued, the tone didn't improve too much. They had begun using words like pachuco to describe them, rather than Mexican-Americans. It wasn't very much of an improvement.
Gardner
The two major instruments of the press at that time would have been the Hearst papers and . . .
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
. . . the Times .
McWilliams
That's right. And there was little to choose between them. One was about as bad as the other.
Gardner
I'll come back to Sleepy Lagoon now and go through my list of questions. You talked about some of the stars and how they got involved. There were three major benefits that I could find. One was at the Mocambo and featured
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Another was a jazz concert at the Philharmonic. It wasn't called that, but it was a jazz evening at the Philharmonic Auditorium. The third was Pan-Americana, that had a range from Mexican music to Eudice Shapiro to Rita Hayworth.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
How did you go about organizing those benefits? Did you appoint people to do that, or were you on the phone talking back and forth?
McWilliams
We had a pretty good and pretty active committee. Certain individuals on that committee were quite active and quite good. They'd had organizational experience. And Alice was very effective. She knew how to get these people into action. There were those larger meetings, but I think perhaps the most important part of it were the house meetings. I attended any number of those, and they were effective. They were effective in raising money and creating interest in the case, and so forth.
Gardner
What in the world was Rita Hayworth doing there?
McWilliams
Well, I guess she was active at that time.
Gardner
Was she? I wasn't aware of that.
McWilliams
I think she was, in connection with Welles.
Gardner
Oh, right.
I think she was.
Gardner
As long as we talked about Alice, what exactly was her role in the whole thing? Do you know how she got involved?
McWilliams
She was on the reorganizing committee. She was the secretary, executive director, or whatever you want to call it; and she really ran the committee. How her first interest developed in the case, if I ever knew, I've forgotten. I just couldn't tell you.
Gardner
How closely did you two work together.
McWilliams
Very closely. We worked very closely, indeed; we had no problems at all.
Gardner
What was she like at age twenty-five?
McWilliams
Well, she was very much like she is today. She was very dynamic, energetic, and she was sympathetic. She understood what the issues were. She understood these defendants; she had carried on correspondence with them. She knew their families and their relatives. She was a very, very excellent, brilliant secretary, I would say, or executive director. Very, very good.
Gardner
Another person who worked there was Bella Joseph.
McWilliams
Yes. Well, there were a lot of people. There were a lot of people that were in and out of the committee offices.
Could you tell me about some of them? Well, those you remember.
McWilliams
Well, Alice would be a better person, but I remember any number of people that would be there at times and who were planning meetings, planning parties in their homes--as I say, many Jewish middle-class people who had gotten interested in the case, and then, of course, Harry Braverman's friends out in Beverly Hills and elsewhere.
Gardner
There were a number of different areas to pursue. Labor, of course, was very helpful . . .
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
. . . was involved in many ways, and the CIO as a whole.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
And then among other unions that I found participating were things like the ILO, the IWO (which wasn't really a union), and the UE.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Could you talk about that a little bit, how the unions were involved, what connections there were?
McWilliams
I know that the CIO was helpful. I don't recall that the Central Labor Council people were very responsive; that's not my recollection.
Gardner
Slim Connelly was on one or another board.
McWilliams
Slim Connelly would have, of course, been
Gardner
Right. Talk about some of the lawyers who were involved. First of all, George Shibley--can you tell me about him, who he was?
McWilliams
Well, he is very good. He was a labor lawyer; he was sort of left [-wing] persuasion, I guess. He was a Long Beach lawyer; I think his offices were in Long Beach. He was very good; he did his best on this case. And as I say, there was a woman lawyer that was in the case. I can't think of her name.
Gardner
How did he come to the case, do you know?
McWilliams
I think through this International Labor Defense; he had handled cases for them before, and they would naturally turn to him.
Gardner
I see.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
And then when it came time for appeal, I think he'd been drafted.
I think that's probably true.
Gardner
So Ben Margolis took over. Now, Ben Margolis you can certainly talk about at some length.
McWilliams
Yes. Ben is a very able lawyer. He was active in labor law, had a lot of experience in labor law and had a lot of trial experience, and had represented cases of this kind where there were public-issue cases he had been active in. He did an enormous amount of work on this appeal. It was a major undertaking to sort out the evidence from a 6,000-page transcript and present it properly. He did a brilliant job, very fine job. He had help, I assume, with others in his firm. But he was the lawyer so far as the appeal was concerned.
Gardner
Tell me something about him, about how you first knew him, what he was like, and so forth.
McWilliams
Oh, I had known him for quite a long time. I don't remember when--well, I guess, the National Lawyers Guild was formed in the late thirties, and we were both members of the National Lawyers Guild. He and Charlie Katz, who lives next door here, had a law firm together, and there were other members of that firm whose names escape me at the moment. They were very active in representing CIO unions and various committees. They were a well-known firm for this kind of representation in Los Angeles. Charlie Katz had been a classmate of mine at
Gardner
A number of friend-of-the-court briefs were filed. The most prominent would be the ACLU, but there were a number of others. How does something like that work in a case like Sleepy Lagoon? Do they file all their own briefs and so on?
McWilliams
Well, in most cases amicus curiae briefs are filed on the suggestion of someone--that is, you go to an organization or group and say, "Won't you file an a.c. brief?" I don't know in this case. I couldn't even tell you who filed. Who filed briefs?
Gardner
Oh, there were a number of them. The ACLU is the only one I wrote down. There were eight or ten.
McWilliams
I don't remember anything about these people.
Gardner
You were not on the legal side at all, then, were you?
McWilliams
No, I had nothing to do with arguing the case, or preparing the case, or anything of that kind. I was very busy with other matters at the time. I gave as much time to the defense as I could, of course.
Gardner
Guy Endore wrote a piece called The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery. . .
McWilliams
Yes, yes.
. . . that was used as a fund-raiser.
McWilliams
That's right, that's right.
Gardner
What do you think about that?
McWilliams
Well, it was a good pamphlet; it served its purpose. And Guy was very helpful. He was active in many ways in connection with the defense; he and his wife Henrietta were quite active. There were many people in the Hollywood area that were active in it. There was a large interest in the case on the part of liberals in the community. It was not a left-centered kind of activity; it really wasn't. And there were a lot of people in the community who just felt that this was going a bit too far.
Gardner
Right. Was the Endore piece his own idea, or is it something that was . . .
McWilliams
That was his own idea; it was his own idea. As I recall--and you can check this with Alice--as I recall, he was very much interested in the case, and it seemed a logical thing to have him do it. We did get quite a bit of publicity for the case in one way or another, in the national press, and I think I did some pieces for PM, and one or two maybe for the New Republic, I'm not sure.
Gardner
I think so. Did you send out a lot of releases across the [country, to] newspapers?
McWilliams
Yes, we sent out quite a lot of press
Gardner
Right. The one interesting aspect of the foreign policy connection--well, of course, there's the part about the involvement of Mexico in the war--but there's also the sinarquismo, which apparently played some small role in the community itself.
McWilliams
Yes, they were kind of a troublesome element in the--they weren't particularly numerous, but they were a troublesome element in the community. They were not in favor of the war. They had their own point of view, which I never quite understood. But while they were troublesome I don't think they were much of a factor in retrospect. They did attract some attention. I think Jack Tenney's [California] Committee [on Un-American Activities] had some hearings that referred to what they had been doing, but I don't think they were a major factor. That's my best recollection.
Gardner
One of the things that Alice put out was a publication called the Appeal News.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did that just go to the boys in prison, or was that sent out pretty generally?
I think it was sent out pretty generally to various lists that we were able to get, and to the donors, and to the committee, and to other people in the community.
Gardner
Was that your idea or hers?
McWilliams
Couldn't tell you, don't remember. Just don't remember.
Gardner
It's an interesting piece of--well, journalism is not quite the word--but it was a very nice touch, I thought, in going through them, very personal. We talked about the appeal and the fact that the case was dropped.
McWilliams
Guy Endore was active in the thing; he may have helped on it. I think Herbert Klein was active; he may have helped on it. We had some pretty good talent to tap. So any number of people might have had a hand in connection with it.
Gardner
Have you had any contact with any of the defendants before, during, or after?
McWilliams
No, I haven't. The people have written to me from time to time about the case. You know, these people are writing dissertations and theses and so forth. Then Luis Valdez came to see me in New York, as I said, and wanted to talk about the case. We spent an evening talking about it. I put him in touch, as I said to you, with Alice (he didn't know about Alice) and also with Ben Margolis. And I was very much impressed with him as a
Gardner
Did you know his work before?
McWilliams
No, I don't think I did.
Gardner
Surely there was a piece in the Nation on El Teatro Campesino at some point.
McWilliams
It may well have been. If so, I've forgotten about it. But this was the first time I'd met him.
Gardner
You haven't seen the play, have you?
McWilliams
No, I haven't seen the play.
Gardner
Are you going to get to see a rehearsal while you're here?
McWilliams
Yes. I hope to get to see a rehearsal; I'd like to.
Gardner
You mentioned PM, and while that's 3,000 miles away from our area, still, if that's a publication you were writing for, I think it's one that would be interesting to talk about.
McWilliams
Yes. Well, you know, it was Ralph Ingersoll who had this idea of a national newspaper that would not take advertising and would be truly a national newspaper in scope. That was the concept behind PM. He had very substantial backing for it when he started out. I have always thought that if the timing had been better it just might have worked as an idea, but it was an idea ahead
Now, that was one problem, and the other problem was the war. When the war came along, of course, the interest in this kind of journalism was subordinated to other considerations. And then Ingersoll himself went off to the war, was very active. He was a rather high-ranking officer, and he was very active in a strategic sense. He was attached to the commands of ranking generals and all that sort of thing, so it suffered from a lack of leadership.
Then they tried to remedy it by beginning at one point to take advertising. That helped for a time; then it ceased to be of much help. Then it became, of course, the Star under Joseph Barnes and Bartley Crum for a time. When that ceased, the Compass came along. I don't think it was a direct connection between the Star and the Compass, but the Compass did sort of take over; they tried to fill that gap.
Gardner
Did they continue to maintain this no-advertising policy, or had that been dropped?
McWilliams
No, towards the end they dropped that policy. They began to take ads, but it didn't help too much. I think if it had been started at a later point in time, it might well have succeeded.
Gardner
Would a liberal newspaper have succeeded in the forties?
Not in the forties. You would have had to project it maybe as far in advance as the sixties, about two decades ahead of us. But it would have had to be projected at a time when certain issues were truly nationalized, had become truly nationalized. That didn't happen until later.
Gardner
Did PM seek a national audience?
McWilliams
Oh, yes. It consciously sought the national audience. It tried to reach out across the country. Tom O'Connor, who had worked on the Los Angeles Record and Daily News (another old friend of mine), was on the staff of PM. He later went to the Compass. I had other friends on PM: Leo Huberman, I.F. Stone. Izzy Stone was a contributor and an important figure on PM. I reported on the IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees] troubles in Hollywood, and this zoot-suit situation, and a lot of issues for PM.
Gardner
Were you sort of a local [correspondent], or one of several?
McWilliams
Well, in a way, but not officially, never officially. But I did quite a bit of writing for them. Most of it--when they saw something they were interested in, they'd get in touch with me.
Gardner
You also did some writing on this for the New Republic.
Yes.
Gardner
Who was around the New Republic at that time? Who was your contact? Was it Bruce Bliven?
McWilliams
Well, when I first started to write for the New Republic--I had written for them before--I think it was Bruce; I think it was Bruce. Of course, I knew most of the people on the paper and had met them in New York and met them in other connections. I knew, oh, Otis Ferguson, and Malcolm Cowley, and the others. They were all people I had met and gotten to know. I'm trying to think of some of the managing editors at that time. I just don't think of names at the moment. But I'd written for the New Republic off and on.
Gardner
Right, since the middle thirties.
McWilliams
Yes. I reported the EPIC movement for them.
Gardner
Right, right. At the time of the zoot-suit riots, one of the things that's in the microfilm collection that's based on the material at the Public Affairs Service is an editorial that was in Script, Rob Wagner's magazine. Was that unusual for a publication like that? Weren't they more oriented towards the arts?
McWilliams
Yes, I would say that was quite unusual. They didn't usually get into issues of this sort.
Gardner
Were you involved with them in any way?
McWilliams
I think I did a piece or two for them. But I wasn't involved with them in any other way. I knew
Gardner
By the way, the bishop is [Joseph Thomas] McGucken.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. [laughter]
Gardner
I've got him down here on the [Sleepy Lagoon] citizens committee.
McWilliams
He was very good, very good.
Gardner
I think we've covered everything about Sleepy Lagoon and zoot suit. Is there anything you'd like to add, or can we move on to some other things?
McWilliams
No, I can't think of anything.
Gardner
Well, if you do we can pick it up later. To get chronological again, about the same time all this is going on, you're working on and publishing a book called Brothers Under the Skin.
McWilliams
Yes, that's true. As a matter of fact, Brothers Under the Skin was published right in the midst of these `43 race riots.
Gardner
In 1943.
McWilliams
That's right. It was accidentally timed, but it was brilliantly timed. And it became a best-seller right away. It remained on the best-seller list for a long time. Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma was published the following year, and I think these two books had an influence of a sort in that they took a new point of view about race and minorities in the United States. Up to
In Brothers Under the Skin, I recommended creation of what became in effect the Civil Rights Commission, that kind of approach. I was convinced that you could prevent discrimination by legislation. And one of the reasons I was convinced is because California was such a marvelous laboratory for the study of ethnic and race relations. It all happened so soon; you could just see it. You could see, for example, that legislation had helped create bias against the Chinese and the Japanese in particular. For example, a school ordinance in San Francisco created a great deal of trouble and excitement aimed at Japanese children in the San Francisco schools at a time when there were just a handful of Japanese students involved.' It couldn't have been any kind of issue, you know. And the real reason for it, of course, was that this was when
Gardner
Jews and blacks.
McWilliams
Yes. And you could put them all together in a way that would be much easier than if you attempted to do it nationally.
Gardner
At the same time you could put them all together, and each one was discriminated against in a different way.
McWilliams
That's right. So it worked out all right
Gardner
One of the most interesting sections to me--well, several of them were interesting--one that interested me the most was the Filipino.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Because persecution of Filipinos is something that's not generally known about in California.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
What sort of sources did you use for your research for something like this?
McWilliams
Well, I knew many of the leaders--well, I won't say many because there weren't many. But I knew quite a number of the people who were prominent in the Filipino community, if you could call it a community. Chris Mansolvas, for example, and at a later date, Carlos Bulosan, the writer. I knew them both quite well, and I knew quite a number of others who I'd met through Mansolvas. I used to attend some of their meetings in Los Angeles and got interested; it was a very interesting kind of situation. Of course, the situation has been greatly transformed since then, because it looked as though at one time the Filipino was just a question of their dying out. They were single men. The Repatriation Act tried to induce them to go back so that we could sort of close the whole chapter. Some went back, of course; most of them
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
So they have not died out at all as a group in the state.
Gardner
But they've become more middle-class.
McWilliams
Yes, they have tended to.
Gardner
Plus it's a different makeup.
McWilliams
We have many in New York who are interns in the hospitals, nurses, and so forth. So there's been a reverse movement, a new movement, into the United States from the Philippines.
Gardner
Now, as you say, your conclusion in the book was the creation of a civil rights commission.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Since then an awful lot of things have happened in civil rights, including a commission or two.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Will you still conclude pretty much the same things today that you did then?
McWilliams
Well, I think the first thing that had to happen in the whole racial minority situation in the
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
But the economic side of the problem was still there, which of course it still is. They have a long, slow, uphill fight to win full equality of opportunity and status in the United States, but they have made enormous progress.
Gardner
You think there's a top of the hill?
McWilliams
Well, I think they have made enormous progress, in the sense that in hardly any part of the United States today there's any legalized discrimination, legally
Gardner
. . . but it was obscured.
McWilliams
. . . it was obscured by the escalation of the war.
Gardner
And hasn't picked up steam again.
McWilliams
No, it hasn't. But of course many of the objectives had been achieved.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
I think Johnson's ardent advocacy of civil rights legislation was his major achievement and was in part motivated by a desire to quiet some of the criticism of the war. But whatever the motivation, it made a big difference.
Of course now what a lot of the minorities face is the same sort of discrimination that the Jews faced at the time that you wrote Brothers Under the Skin and, later on, A Mask for Privilege, which is the opening of only certain places in the economy.
McWilliams
That's right--token.
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
But there's been a great change; it's been a great change culturally. If you had looked at television in the early fifties, all through the fifties, well into the sixties, you wouldn't have seen a black face. And now they're all through. Not only are they cast in the soap operas and all that, but they're in the commercials. There's been a great change in attitudes culturally, an enormous change in attitude. Blacks and whites associate in a way that would have been most exceptional not so many years ago.
And then, of course, after Brothers Under the Skin I wrote Prejudice about the Japanese-Americans, which was another book that was--most of my books have been part of the action. They've grown out of what was actually happening at the time. This was certainly true of Prejudice, because I was deeply involved in what was going on there. It was the first book about the relocation program, and it was actually published before the program was terminated.
Gardner
That was written during the war.
McWilliams
It was written during the war; that's right.
Gardner
Well, you said you were very involved in it. In what way were you involved?
McWilliams
I was involved first of all in this--as I explained to you the other day--in this abortive effort to try and prevent the evacuation, to try and convince the administration it was not necessary to do this, and would be a lasting injustice to these people and a great mistake tactically, tactically a great mistake; and of course that turned out to be true. But there's an irony in that because the racial overtones of the war were, of course, very definite, because of Hitler and Hitler's attitude about Jews, concentration camps, all the rest of it. Before the war was over, the Japanese situation became an acute embarrassment to the administration, and they began to try and do things that would remove this element. And as you know, the Alien Land Act was knocked out, and other steps of this kind were taken. So that, actually, Oriental, or Americans of Oriental background, were the beneficiaries in a way of what happened in connection with this.
Then, of course, most recently President [Gerald] Ford officially apologized for the great mistake that had been made. And other statements of this kind have been made to reflect the fact that there was belated recognition that it was a terrible mistake and the most serious denial of civil liberties, I think, in American history in a way--I mean, apart from slavery, but certainly the most serious violation of civil liberties in this century.
Gardner
I was very impressed to see in your collection of--I don't think you'd call it a publication so much as a little sketchbook, from a group of people who were at Santa Anita.
McWilliams
Oh, yes.
Gardner
It was done in 1942 and signed by about ten or twelve of the . . . .
McWilliams
As I say, I had many friends of the Japanese community, some of them artists and intellectuals of one sort or another. I went out to visit them at Santa Anita. It was an extraordinary experience to see your friends with their families housed in stable stalls in a racetrack. Then, when they were removed to various centers, I visited most of the centers at one time or another and had an excellent relationship with the people who were directing--the war relocation authority. Dillon Myer was very friendly and very cooperative. They made it possible for me to
Gardner
It must have been. I'll get back to Prejudice in a minute. You mentioned that Brothers Under the Skin sold very well. Was it a better seller than Factories in the Field?
McWilliams
Yes, it sold more copies than Factories in the Field. Factories in the Field is still in print. Brothers Under the Skin has been in print for years and years and years. There's been one edition after the other, and it had a long, long good selling record.
Gardner
What was the reaction to Prejudice?
McWilliams
I think the reaction was on the whole quite favorable. It got excellent reviews; Brothers Under the Skin got fine reviews, too. Prejudice got excellent reviews, and it generated a lot of interest. Again, there were nationwide radio debates. I participated in three or four of them. It roused a great deal of interest.
Then the big issue came, you see, as to when they should be permitted to return--that is, the Japanese-Americans should be permitted to return. Tactically, of us who were on the Japanese-American side of the situation felt that they should be returned before the war was over. The all-Japanese-American battalion had made
Gardner
Really?
McWilliams
Yes, very much opposed. When the ban was lifted and some of them began to return, he became reconciled to the fact. And under the prompting of Bob Kenny, who was entitled to a great, great deal of credit, the two of them--that is, Kenny and Warren, with Kenny as the motivating moving force--they let all the law enforcement officials of the state know that the governor and the attorney general were not going to tolerate any looking the other way. When these people came back, they would have to be protected and so forth. So they did a very good job. Warren is entitled to credit for that after the decision had been made, so that when they did come back, only a few incidents took place. I did a piece for PM sometime after the ban had been lifted, and I reported
It's interesting: I spoke at Clearwater High School, saying this ban is going to be lifted, these people are going to come back, they must be treated fairly, and so forth. And there were some hoodlum elements, who threw bricks through the window of the school and banged glass around, and so forth and so forth. But in general the returning evacuees were well received; there was less trouble than might have been anticipated. And of course this was not surprising because they were pretty well regarded before they were evacuated. I mean, they were accepted as--there wasn't any great. . . . I never thought that evacuation was ordered because there was mass sentiment against the Japanese; I don't think that was true. As I said to you the other day, it was simply a practical decision on Roosevelt's part: that he couldn't be bothered endlessly with agitation about this issue.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
I really think that's the situation. Another issue that came up was that once it was decided that they were going to be evacuated--now, mind you, they were evacuated without notice, hearing, a chance to be heard, no due process at all; the sole criterion was race. But at the
Tape Number: IV, Side Two
(July 13, 1978)
McWilliams
I was saying that the big issue was whether the army could be eased out, if this program could be turned over to the War Relocation Authority, because the War Relocation Authority was in part staffed to a considerable extent by many top officials who came from the State Relief Administration, because the State Relief Administration was sort of phased out by this time, you see. There was no unemployment problem in California with the war, you see. So these were pretty good people. They were of liberal outlook, and many of them social workers. So we felt it was much better to have the War Relocation Authority handle this program than for the army to handle it, although the army, to its credit, did a good job in the initial business of getting these people from the assembly centers into the relocation centers; they were very proper and correct about this. Even so, it would have been a total disaster if it hadn't been for the people themselves. The Japanese were well organized, self-disciplined largely; they were very correct and proper. They, you know, didn't like this; it was an outrageous thing. But I don't think you could have taken another group and done this. They would have
Gardner
Why didn't they fight it?
McWilliams
Some of them did, of course, but they were at a great disadvantage. They felt that it was a very disastrous thing and an unfortunate thing. But they had to go along with it--they were in no position to fight it--and the better record they made, the sooner it would be terminated and so forth. So they behaved very well indeed.
Gardner
Who were some of the prominent Japanese--well, prominent is not the right word. Who were some of the Japanese with whom you were [friends] during that time, some of your better friends?
McWilliams
Well, there were some artists here in Los Angeles that I knew: Mary Oyama, for example; her sister, and her brother, Wesley; and the very, very nice young chap who was the secretary of the Japanese-American Citizens League, an old friend of mine; and quite a number of others that I had met in connection with the work of the Division of Immigration and Housing or had met in some other connection. They immediately came to the division for help when they began the program; this whole excitement began to get under way. Of course, there were groups in California that wanted them out, wanted them out--their
Gardner
I have two different questions. I'll try and decide whether I should ask them one at a time; I might as well since we're having an outspoken discussion. Given the fact that the racism, by the standard that you've applied in your writing, is based on economics (to sort of tie Brothers Under the Skin and Prejudice together), doesn't the economic situation still exist that at any time another scapegoat group would come up despite civil rights and so forth?
McWilliams
It's quite possible. But you see, you have a disastrous situation in a way, because the United States Supreme Court upheld this, and the decision was written by some--I've forgotten whether [Hugo] Black wrote the decision in the main case, but he certainly concurred in it. And that precedent is there as a rather haunting kind of precedent to have, and it could be the source of a great deal of trouble.
Gardner
In putting together Prejudice, did you work at all with Al Wirin? Later on, Prejudice was cited as having
McWilliams
Yes, it was cited in footnotes of the Supreme Court's decision.
Gardner
Korematsu [case], was it?
McWilliams
Yes, but I didn't work with Al on this particularly at all.
Gardner
Because that's what was preoccupying him during those years.
McWilliams
Yes, he was certainly very much then preoccupied. But, you see, later when we got into this domestic witch-hunt and this whole question came up about detention camps for possible subversives, the idea was to use some of these same centers, you see. So that was a very dangerous precedent, and we may not have heard the last of it.
Gardner
The centers are still there, aren't they? Or have they been dismantled?
McWilliams
I think some of them are still there. I'm not sure; I really don't know.
Gardner
Did many of the Japanese who were resettled remain in the places that they went--Arkansas, Illinois?
McWilliams
Some. No, this Oyama family that I knew quite well when they got out of the centers, one branch of the family decided not to return to California. They'd had it. They settled across the river from Cincinnati, but
Gardner
The next book on the list that I have is Southern California Country. Why don't we talk about that now. While there are lots of things in lots of your books that I enjoy, Southern California Country is the one, for me, that stands out because it's, I think, by far the best book written on Southern California and its idiosyncracies. (And as an oral historian I'm not supposed to express that bias, but that's okay.) What was the background of that? How'd you come to write that?
McWilliams
Well, I knew Erskine Caldwell, and he had been asked to edit a regional series about different parts of the United States, sort of patterned on what the WPA Writers' Project had done, only in a different context. And he asked me if I would do the book on Southern California, and of course I responded with alacrity; I was delighted to do it. And I really enjoyed writing that book very much because I'd been thinking about aspects of this for a long time, and this gave me a chance to really unload, so to speak. [laughter] Here again, the timing is important, because that book pretty much had to be written and published when it was. It couldn't have been written, really, at a later date because, you know, so much had changed that you would have had to change the perspective of the book entirely.
Right.
McWilliams
So it was providentially timed, and I think the reason it has continued to do as well as it has is because it was, again, a product of my experience. I had been a part of the local scene from the 1920s to the time the book was written.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And also the experience that I had had with Phil Townsend Hanna, the once-a-month page that I had done about California folkways and all the rest of it, had been a big help. I learned a lot of things about California. I had been encouraged to think about it, and I had written a lot about it for newspapers, and magazines, and so forth. So I really enjoyed writing Southern California.
Gardner
What were some of the other books in that series? Do you know? Did any of them have anywhere near the lasting power?
McWilliams
I don't think they did, and I'm ashamed to say I can't think of too many of the other titles. There were quite a number of books.
Gardner
There were. It was an enlightening series.
McWilliams
The book had an interesting history because the initial edition sold quite well. But when it was sold out, it wasn't reissued for quite some time, and then it was reissued, first in a limited hardcover edition, and
Gardner
And the subtitle has slowly taken over as what most people know it by: An Island on the Land.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
The paperback was that way. How did you accumulate the information for this? I have a specific question about that later.
McWilliams
Well, just endless reading, and the California press, and I got very interested in California. I wanted to find out some of the answers to aspects of California life that had intrigued me. My law practice was helpful in a way; it taught me a lot about Southern California. My association with people like Louis Adamic and other friends was important. More or less, when I got started on it, it was an easy book to write, actually. It was so much a product of my own personal experience. Robert Towne, who did Chinatown, I think said something that pleased me very much about the book. He said it opened his eyes to aspects of Southern California life that he had not been aware of. And he was a native of the region; if not a native, he had lived here a long time. And he got the idea for Chinatown, of course, from what I had to say in the book about Owens Valley.
Gardner
Right. That's just such an interesting thought
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Maybe we can figure out something to do with Ill Fares the Land.
McWilliams
That's right; that's right.
Gardner
It [Southern California Country] covers such a vast range. One thing I ran across in your own archive and in Special Collections--in a couple of boxes that are there--was an interesting exchange of letters with the attorney--Robinson, was that his name? At any rate, there was one talking about the C.C. Julian case, the pools . . .
McWilliams
Yes, yes.
Gardner
You know the story?
McWilliams
I vaguely remember it.
Gardner
You care to talk about it?
McWilliams
I don't remember it well enough.
Gardner
Well, what I recall from the exchange of letters is that the attorney for one of the people you had mentioned wrote in and said, "As a matter of fact, the person whose estate I'm in charge of had nothing whatsoever to do with this."
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
You wrote back a letter saying you were sorry, but that you were basing it on primary and secondary
McWilliams
Yes, yes.
Gardner
And supposedly there was a note. I don't know. I have a first edition myself, so I don't know if the footnote got through.
McWilliams
I should be able to answer that, but I don't . . .
Gardner
. . . don't recall.
McWilliams
I just don't recall. I don't recall.
Gardner
What were some of your primary and secondary sources in putting it together? I mean, like for instance, let's use the C.C. Julian. What did you use in putting that section together on C.C. Julian?
McWilliams
Well, I had a lot of experience with the C.C. Julian episode because some of it I knew from working on the Times .
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And I had friends who had been involved in aspects of the Julian case and knew the press of the community--and [through the] process of osmosis, I guess you'd say. [laughter] James Hart up at the Bancroft [Library] wants some of these bibliographies, notes that I used. I don't know whether I gave them the notebook on Southern California or not, but I have a notebook full of
Gardner
Right. Well, as methodical as you are, and this was obvious in looking through some of your collections, it would have surprised me if you didn't have something like that.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
What did you think of Chinatown?
McWilliams
Well, I just came from this conference in Sun Valley, and they devoted a couple of sessions to Chinatown. I gave a keynote talk on Owens Valley because it was part of a session about water in the West and so forth. I think Chinatown is a brilliant film, and I think symbolically it's got the situation about right. The character who is named Mulgrave or something is obviously not anything like the kind of person that Bill Mulholland was, but that doesn't make any difference really. The whole episode about land and the getting water to the land for irrigation purposes in the San Fernando Valley is all authentic and true. The creating of an artificial water
Here again, there's been some latter-day research that I would like to have had a chance to look at when I wrote Southern California Country that confirms in great detail a lot of what I said in the book. But if I'd had access to that material, I could have elaborated on certain sections, certain parts of that story.
Gardner
Right. Is that true of a lot of the other stories in the. . . ?
McWilliams
It's true of quite a number of them, because there has been, as you well know, a great upsurge of writing about Southern California. There has been some pretty good scholarly research that has come out that was not available then.
Gardner
Interestingly, [the UCLA] Oral History [Program] did a series on water resources that I suppose would be best said to be the other side of the story since it was the MWD [Metropolitan Water District] people and so forth and so on that we interviewed. Now, the California [State] Water Project is in a lot of ways one of the man-made wonders of the world.
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
It was sighted by one of the astronauts as he circled the earth, or went up to the moon. One of the things he could see was the California Water Project.
McWilliams
Of course. And you know it's a fantastic project, no doubt about it. And the aqueduct was, from an engineering point of view, a tremendous undertaking. But it didn't need to have been carried out the way it was. It was carried out by unfortunate tactics, to put it mildly: deception and misrepresentation and so forth.
Gardner
Right. Does Southern California Country still sell well today?
McWilliams
Yes, it still sells well.
Gardner
Still does. It must be used in a lot of history classes and so on around the state.
McWilliams
I assume that it is, because the company that reissued it as a paperback doesn't have a very good sales force. People are constantly complaining to me that they can't find it in particular bookstores, but it sells very well. So I assume that a lot of that must be for schools, libraries, and so forth.
Gardner
Well, should we stop here and pick up tomorrow?
McWilliams
All right.
July 14, 1978
GardnerTo backtrack a bit from where we ended up yesterday, there were a couple of things I'd like to ask about. The first of them has to do with a fellow named John Phillips.
McWilliams
Oh, yes.
Gardner
John Phillips popped up a lot in your early writings and then in the clippings you had in your archives.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did you have any contact with him at all? What were the circumstances? Who was Phillips, and what role did he play?
McWilliams
If my recollection is correct, this must have been the John Phillips who was a state senator from down near Beaumont, Banning, that area. He had been, before and during the time that he was senator, and I guess afterwards--he had been a kind of spokesman for the farm organizations and particularly for the Associated Farmers, which of course brought us into a kind of collision on a number of occasions. He was very active in this agitation in the senate to get me out of the Division of Immigration and Housing. And that's the John Phillips that I'm sure is referred to in the clippings.
Gardner
Right. Now, at one point in one of the books--
McWilliams
That's right. Well, he did say those things. He probably didn't intend to say them in quite the way in which he did. But he was quite a right-wing kind of character in California politics as of that period.
Gardner
Was he prominent, was he important, or was he just sort of another state senator of. . . ?
McWilliams
No, I think in the context of the times he was a pretty well known statewide figure as a spokesman for these groups, primarily as a spokesman. He was a rather articulate person, and he was better known than most state senators, particularly from rural areas or nonurban areas.
Gardner
Another thing from that period that I'd like to hear some comments about is relief. Now, the State Relief Administration was set up pretty much about the same time that you were getting involved in government.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
And there were lots of arguments, pro and con, at the time. What were some of them?
McWilliams
Well, it was supposed to be a boondoggle, and a political thing, and so forth and so forth. But there
I think it's important to keep in mind that California agriculture has always been, from an employer point of view, extremely well organized, so that what they had up until this time (and to some extent this is still the situation) was a unilateral collective bargaining--that is, the employers collectively got together and determined [what] they would do on a regional basis or on a crop basis. The
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
It kept wage rates low and uniform. This is why I've always felt that there should be some kind of instrumentality such as you now have with a wage hearing board that could do something about this in order to inject an element of really real collective bargaining. And this was a very big factor in relief because the growers would meet and would fix a rate and then bring pressure to bear on the State Relief Administration to force people off the rolls in order to take the jobs at these predetermined rates. And it created a lot of controversy.
Gardner
In addition, one of the other things you cite is that the rules then would say that because the person took a job they were not eligible for relief when the crop picking was over with.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
It was also a means. Well, the history of the State Relief Administration can be told elsewhere.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
It's not really your area. Okay, the next one,
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
You started to tell me off tape something about your relationship with it. So why don't you start retelling that story now, and I'll ask questions and so forth.
McWilliams
Well, I knew [Jack] Tenney. I knew something about his background before he became an assemblyman and later state senator. And I knew Sam Yorty, of course, when he was in the state assembly. The truth of the matter is that both of them were redder than a rose as of that period. At least the rhetoric of what they said and the positions that they took--for example, in the first session of the legislature after Olson had been elected (and they were elected to the legislature at the same time), they introduced a resolution urging the Congress of the United States to lift the embargo against the Loyalist government of Spain. This would be in January 1939. And so fast did the situation change that by March that same year they had broken with Olson.
Gardner
Oh, that quickly.
McWilliams
That quickly. And each of them had started on his respective right-wing career. So from then on out, they were very much opposed to the Olson administration and also to the people that they had known or associated
Gardner
To what do you ascribe that?
McWilliams
Well, I think to the changing temper of the times. I don't know just what motivated these gentlemen, but they did switch; they made a very sudden switch, and they were consistently to the right after that and very vehement critics of the Olson administration. Tenney, of course, became president of this quite powerful Musicians Union in Los Angeles, because it seemed to be in the pattern of the times after the--well, even before the war he had started on this career which accelerated after the war as being a Red-hunter. I had great difficulty always in taking him seriously, you know, because I did know the background. I knew about his background. I had a lawyer friend in Imperial Valley in Calexico, who had known him when he was playing a piano in a honky-tonk in Mexicali. As a matter of fact, he had asked me to--I'm quite certain about this--to sign his application to take the bar examination in California. So I knew the background. I knew from whence he came and all the rest of it, and I couldn't take him seriously as a character, really. He started these hearings, and they called me before the committee on this occasion that I refer to, and they asked me about these various listings, et cetera. I think one thing
And Tenney had a venomous dislike of me, in part because of my attitude towards him; and he was really quite malicious about it. And at the time when he was state senator, and the time he was doing this sort of thing, I used to talk to friends in various organizations in Los Angeles, including spokesmen for the Jewish committees, various Jewish communities here, and I said to some of them, "You're going to have trouble with this fellow one of these days. You're going to have very serious trouble with him." Well, you know, they didn't think this was really true and so forth and so forth. But later he broke with the Democratic party, became a Republican; and then he broke with the Republican party and became an ally of Gerald L.K. Smith.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And when Smith ran for president on some screwball independent ticket, there was Jack Tenney as the vice-presidential nominee. And you could have predicted this from his early beginnings; you could have seen how opportunistic he was, and how motivated by
Gardner
Right. So ultimately it was his destruction, however.
McWilliams
Oh, yes.
Gardner
Because it took him to a corner of philosophy that was self-defeating.
McWilliams
Oh, yes. I had played a role in connection with the exposure of gangsters in the industry.
Gardner
Film industry.
McWilliams
Yes, in the film industry. And later on, if you want to get to that I can tell you about it because he figured in that, too.
Gardner
Okay. Well, you want to get into it now?
McWilliams
Well, in essence it was this kind of situation: the motion picture industry is a bizarre industry in terms of crafts, jurisdictions; it always has been. At the same time there's always been one union that was--actually, it was organized before the American Federation of Labor came into being. It's the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, the IATSE. And the IATSE, by its constitution, had a grant of jurisdiction
Then they came to--well, first of all, the thing that happened is that Willie Bioff and George Browne, who were Chicago gangsters, took over a couple of projectionist locals and were making a lot of money. They were shaking down the theater owners, and the Capone people saw this, and Frank Nitti and the others, and they went to Browne and Bioff, and they said, "Now, look, you boys need some help and guidance here. You work with us. We will see that you, George Browne, are elected president of the IATSE. But there's got to be a division of the spoils here," you see. So this is what happened. Through their control of the projectionists, they had the votes; and at the convention at which Browne was elected president of
Now, at this meeting in New York, Browne and Bioff said, "We want all that jurisdiction back. And in addition to this we're going to levy a 2 percent assessment on these workers; and in addition to this we as individuals want some money." So they screamed; the executives screamed and yowled, and then capitulated, as you might expect.
So this was the deal that was worked out. So here
Well, some workers in the industry, they knew that I was interested in labor, that I had written about the imminent National Labor Relations Act and so forth, so they came to me. First of all they asked me to speak at a meeting in Hollywood, which I did. And then they came to me and said, "Is there anything that can be done about this?" And I said, "Yes, I think there is something to be done." So I brought a class-action suit in the name of some of these workers, reciting this set of facts, asking for an injunction against the 2 percent assessment, and also asking that this contract be set aside as being totally illegal. Well, the industry and the IATSE tried to get the suit dismissed. They failed. The motions
But I realized that the trial would drag on interminably, just for ever and ever; and in the meantime these guys were suffering, really suffering. So I have a very good friend [Elmer Gertz]--a lawyer friend--in Chicago, and I got in touch with him, and I said, "Can you find out from the Chicago Crime Commission something about the background of these characters?" So he went to the Chicago Crime Commission, and he got a lot of information for me, including the fact that Bioff had been arrested and convicted of pimping at an early time but had never served a sentence. The sentence was still pending over him. The speaker of the assembly at that time had been a classmate of mine in law school, William Mosley Jones. I went to Bill Jones and said, "You have this legislative Committee on Labor and Capital"--I think it was called--"and there's a great possibility here from publicity point of view and otherwise. If you will get that committee to investigate this situation-- because here are the records; this is the background of these people." And he said, no, he didn't think they could do it. It didn't seem feasible, et cetera. And then about two or three days later, he got me on the phone, and he said, "I've been thinking about this. And I think it is; I think you're right. I think it is a good issue for the committee to
He was at that time in the office of Senator William Gibbs McAdoo and Colonel William Neblett. And they began to function as kind of unofficial counsel for the committee. I gave them the information and told them who to subpoena, what to do; and they scheduled a legislative meeting in the auditorium of the State Building here in Los Angeles. (I should say also that among the members of this legislative committee was Jack Tenney. He was a member of this committee, and he was very much interested in all of this. He claimed not to know about this background.) So the legislative committee opened to an immense crowd; there was great interest in the industry in this. The counsel for the committee called some of my clients, who told how, when they had tried to protest this takeover, they had been beaten up and harassed and lost their jobs and so forth and so forth. And then they called Willie Bioff to the stand. They asked Bioff a few questions, just a few questions: you're from Chicago and this, this, this. And then the hearings adjourned. It was towards the end of the week, and the hearings adjourned, and they were never resumed! And I couldn't find out what the reason was, although later I had my own thoughts about the matter.
Sometime later there just happened to be this Howard
Gardner
Aha.
McWilliams
I said, "Absolutely nothing doing. You're out of luck." I should say that the IATSE was represented by a law firm that I knew very well, and they were a good law firm; members of the law firm were friends of mine.
Gardner
Which ones were they?
McWilliams
Pacht, Pelton and Warne. I knew them very well. Anyway, after this hearing things began to move very fast, because the United States government then began to get interested in this because of the income tax possibilities and so forth. They got into it, and they discovered,
In any case Browne and Bioff were convicted. And there were some very, very funny aspects about that trial. Bioff had an acute sense of humor, you know. He was being cross-examined, and he was asked, "Do you mean to sit there in the witness stand and tell us that you perjured yourself when you said this and this and this? How can you account for that?"
Tape Number: V, Side One
(July 14, 1978)
McWilliams
Well, after Browne and Bioff were convicted and sentenced to federal penitentiary, the government then discovered that in the background was the Capone syndicate.
Gardner
Well, you've got to tell the punch line of the story you started.
McWilliams
Oh, yes, the punch line of the story. [laughter] They asked him about how he could account for having perjured himself so often. He said, "Well, Mr. So-and-so" (whatever the prosecutor's name was), "I guess you just have to say that I'm a kind of uncouth guy." [laughter]
Gardner
Great.
McWilliams
After they had convicted them, they went after the real big shots--Nitti and company. They indicted them, because Browne and Bioff had agreed to testify by now as government witnesses.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And the day that indictment was returned, Frank Nitti committed suicide. They went ahead with that trial, and they used Browne and Bioff as witnesses, and they convicted these people of various crimes--income tax violation and whatnot. It looked for a time as though we were going to be successful in getting Browne and Bioff out of this
Then it was all right until Bioff began to be consulted by some of the Las Vegas people. The Chicago crew didn't like that a bit; they had not forgotten his behavior in connection with Nitti and company. So one day Bioff waves goodbye to his wife, who is in the back of the house, and he gets in the car, and he steps on the starter to start the ignition, and the whole thing blows up--a tremendous blast!
Gardner
Oh.
McWilliams
That's the last of . . .
Gardner
Well, literally.
McWilliams
That's literally the last of Bioff. But one thing: after this legislative hearing, over the weekend between the time the hearing was called and the time they failed to resume it, there was a big conference called
And at the time of this hearing in the State Building, Jack Tenney was quite friendly. I had known him for a long time before that. He was quite friendly; he had not yet turned sour on this thing. But the hearings which we had initiated had these tremendous far-ranging consequences, and it's all documented in various books, and so forth. But it was an extraordinary business, and it had a profound effect. I don't think you can understand what happened subsequently in the industry unless you understand this background. Because Herb Sorrell and company--he was probably an oral interview.
Gardner
Yes, he was.
McWilliams
Herb Sorrell and company organized this Conference of Studio Unions to get some local democracy into this trade-union setup in Hollywood. They were, of course, bucking the IATSE; they had to. They were in that position. And that Conference of Studio Unions strike, which went on in one form or another for nearly a decade--it was called a strike; it was really a lockout.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
It led, I think, indirectly to the investigations and to the case of the Hollywood Ten.
Gardner
Very interesting.
McWilliams
I think that's the background that has to
Gardner
Would you pursue that two sentences farther?
McWilliams
Well, in the sense that the Conference of Studio Unions strike or lockout, however you would like to regard it, was a real rank-and-file thing. It had a lot of steam behind it, and Herb was directing it with great vigor. Actually this was exactly what the industry did not want. It wanted those negotiations to continue in New York City at the high level where you could make deals, things of that sort. So it felt it had to oppose a Conference of Studio Unions. Of course this split a lot of people in Hollywood, and groups in Hollywood; it created great divisions. I've always thought that it was quite logical for the industry to have looked with some favor on the congressional investigations when they started because this could be a means of undercutting the unions, because the Conference of Studio Unions had the tacit support of many of the people in the Screen Writers Guild and Directors [Guild] and so forth.
Gardner
The Hollywood Left.
McWilliams
Yes, the Hollywood Left. That's right.
Gardner
Okay. Now, this whole story started by means of introducing your relationship with Tenney.
McWilliams
Right.
Gardner
Tenney was more or less on your side at that point.
Oh, yes. Yes, he was.
Gardner
So where does the first antagonism come in?
McWilliams
Well, it began of course after he was elected to the state legislature and after he made the switch, the turnaround with [Sam] Yorty.
Gardner
Which is `39.
McWilliams
In the spring of `39. After that he began to move increasingly in that direction. His whole career is a progression to the right, so to speak, after that.
Gardner
Now, your own relationship with his committee: you started to tell me that before we turned the tape on.
McWilliams
I was called before them and was questioned about my wicked political past and all the rest of it. And I told them what some of my views were. They wanted to bring out as evidence of my political inclinations the fact that I was not opposed to mixed marriages. [laughter] So you can imagine. I testified under oath I was not a member of the Communist party--never had been. But it's odd that they never made anything of this denial. They never challenged it. And they continued to list me as having been involved in all these front committees. I was identified with many front committees. I took the position then, and I take the position to this day, that I'm not going to sort out or sift out the people who want to--if there's an issue that comes up, and it's an important issue, and there are
Gardner
Well, it was interesting to me that while your own testimony and denial is not included in the brief record, the digest, that was put out, the accusations of one Rena Vale are included.
McWilliams
Oh, yes.
Gardner
Who's Rena Vale, and why was she worthy of so many pages?
McWilliams
She was with the local Federal Writers' Project, and many of the people on that Federal Writers' Project were people that I knew. There was an effort made, I think, to get them to join, to form a union, or to do something, and she was quite opposed to that. I don't remember meeting the woman except on one occasion. But the point I want to make is that somewhat later--I think in 1940--she wrote a piece for the American Mercury after it was, I think, in Lawrence Spivak's hands, not Mencken. She wrote a piece for the American Mercury about Reds in California. She went into all the background about Reds in California. But in that piece in the Mercury, she mentioned me; but she made it quite clear that she did not think that I was or ever had been a member of the Communist party. That was in 1940. Then later, of
Gardner
Well, she claimed in her testimony to have seen you at party meetings.
McWilliams
Oh, ridiculous; yes, ridiculous.
Gardner
And what amused me, I think, was in one of the connections that Tenney made, in the light of our discussion yesterday of the Sleepy Lagoon, was to your connection with La Rue McCormick on the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee and so on.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. Well, it's quite true. In North from Mexico, in the section I devote to Sleepy Lagoon, I mention this whole business about La Rue McCormick
Gardner
Another thing that was mentioned was your being an instructor at a field workers' school in Chino that was sponsored by UCAPAWA.
McWilliams
I certainly was not an instructor at any school. I may have gone out to talk about the legal aspects or the socio-political aspects of organizing or something like that, but was never an instructor.
Gardner
Yes. Now two more things about Tenney: First of all, I think it's very interesting that he doesn't appear very much in your writing. Did you not consider him worth recording?
McWilliams
I didn't consider him worth recording or saying anything about, really, because I couldn't take the man seriously. As I said before, I knew the whole background very well. I always thought of him not only as a supreme opportunist but potentially mischievous.
Gardner
Which he turned out to be.
McWilliams
Which he turned out to be.
Gardner
Did you have any contact with him later on?
McWilliams
No, never did.
Gardner
Okay, enough about that. I'm going to make some more chronological zigzags, go to some of the things that I had in my notes that we didn't talk about yesterday.
McWilliams
As a prelude to writing Prejudice, the Institute of Pacific Relations wanted me to do a report about these relocation centers. I had made my first visit to the centers in connection with that, and I gave them a report about my findings and observations, which they mimeographed. I don't think it was ever published. Then they wanted me to do a pamphlet sort of based on that, which is what I did.
Gardner
This is all before Prejudice came out?
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did it help sort of inspire you to do the book?
McWilliams
Yes, it did. It was a factor because it gave me a chance to visit all these centers, or most of them, and I had free run of the centers. I had met a lot of people in the centers: some I had known, and some I had not known, who as a matter of fact became great friends, like Mine Okubo, who was a very distinguished Japanese artist. I first met her in the Wyoming center in the middle of the winter. She was sloshing around in the rain and the snow. She's done a couple of very good books about her impressions of the centers--drawings
Gardner
What sort of distribution did the pamphlet have?
McWilliams
It had very good distribution. And of course Prejudice sold very well, too.
Gardner
We talked about that.
McWilliams
It's been reissued, and it's still in print.
Gardner
On "Town Meeting of the Air" that same year, 1944, you participated in a debate. The transcript happened to be in your archive, so I thought I'd bring it up. It was called "Can the Japanese be Assimilated into the American Way of Life?"
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Do you recall it?
McWilliams
Yes, I recall.
Gardner
Your colleague on the "yes" side was Tully Knoles of College of the Pacific.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
And the "no" side were Robert Faulk and Wayne Millington.
McWilliams
Yes. I also debated it from Santa Barbara when Max Radin and I were on one side of the situation, and Congressman [John M.] Costello and someone else from one of these superpatriotic organizations was on the opposition.
Gardner
Oh, from the way it sounded the "no" people would probably not have participated, with their outlook towards the Japanese.
McWilliams
Probably would not have.
Gardner
What was the organization that Faulk was from? I had it written down, but I forgot to put it on this sheet. It was an organization that was sort of a coordinating council of different groups. Do you recall that at all? He was on the "no" side. Millington was from the Native Sons [of the Golden West].
McWilliams
Oh, yes, Native Sons.
Gardner
Faulk, I thought, was from another; well, I should have written it down.
McWilliams
I just don't remember.
Gardner
In 1945 you became contributing editor for the Nation.
That's right.
Gardner
What did that mean? Did you do more than contribute?
McWilliams
Yes, it did. My understanding with them was--I had been back in New York--I always saw them generally when I was in New York--and they asked me if I would become a contributing editor with the responsibility for the West Coast. The responsibility consisted of submitting one or more unsigned editorials for each issue, and at least one article a month. So that's how I happened to become a. . . . If I had known, I would have probably hesitated about this, because this was in January 1945. We were just on the threshold of the end of the war; people were talking very excitedly about the postwar prospects. The politics of the country, including the politics of the West, had been in a state of freeze, you might say, during the war years. The war had dominated every other consideration, and people had been talking about what would happen once the war was over. So everybody was keenly attuned to this so-called postwar situation, which never really developed, as I suggested the other day. And the politics of the whole West was beginning to bubble. When they announced that I was their West Coast editor, all these groups began to converge. I got all kinds of people sending in materials and letters, wanting me to investigate this, or write
Gardner
Was it the entire West that you got involved with?
McWilliams
Yes, yes; it did.
Gardner
Rocky Mountains?
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
Well, you were also in the middle of much of your writing at that time.
McWilliams
That is correct.
Gardner
From `44, `45, `46, `47, `48: it's almost a book a year.
McWilliams
That is right.
Gardner
How did you handle the writing schedule? What was your procedure for writing in those days, timewise?
McWilliams
I worked very hard. I just slaved away at it as I had, and I tried to fend off these outside activities as much as I could. But I also went on lecture trips, usually twice a year.
Gardner
Yes, that's true.
McWilliams
It was a very active, very energetic, very busy period in my life. My wife, Iris, is entitled to a lot of the credit. She urged me to go ahead with my
Gardner
What kind of schedule did you follow? I don't mean week by week or anything like that, but in the day. Are you a morning writer, an afternoon writer, all-day writer?
McWilliams
Morning, noon, and night--when I had the time. [laughter]
Gardner
That's interesting.
McWilliams
Well, I've always been a hard worker and self-disciplined. I've never had any problems about this.
Gardner
Your writing style is a very easy one; it's been called that a number of different places. It has the readability of good journalism, and yet it presents historical facts. Does it come easy to you? How many pages a day would you turn out in those days?
McWilliams
My experience is you have to write something three times before it's--you have to do a draft, and you have to do a redraft, and then you have to rewrite it. And in that period I could do eight to ten pages a day.
Gardner
Three drafts. No wonder you can turn out 300 pages of book a year. [laughter]
McWilliams
I won't say I averaged that, because there
Gardner
Right. What about on this most recent book that you've done [The Education of Carey McWilliams]. It was really returning to writing a book for the first time in twenty-five years.
McWilliams
First time in many years. I had a great deal of trouble with it in the process of doing that because after twenty-five or thirty years largely devoted to writing editorials, it's a hard act to step out of that stance and start thinking about a book. It's a different thing; it's a different kind of writing.
Gardner
Yes, completely.
McWilliams
Yes. And it was difficult for me to get into the groove of it.
Gardner
But once you did, you were . . .
McWilliams
Yes, once I did, I was reasonably well satisfied with what I turned out. Not entirely. [laughter]
Gardner
I'll look forward to seeing it. Okay, to return to my chronology and notes: In 1945 you did a piece for Science and Society called "Race Discrimination in the Law."
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
It was reprinted. One thing that I found very interesting that reflects on some of our discussions in
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
The connection I see, I suppose, is in light of what we've been talking about: about the many improvements that have gone on over the last thirty-five years, where segregation, when it exists, is no longer necessarily legalized; it just exists.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
What were circumstances of that? Was that also the sort of thing where you were putting together the. . . ?
McWilliams
Well, I'd been thinking about some of the theoretical aspects of race discrimination. And as I mentioned to you the other day, I was convinced that up to a point the American social sciences had been on the wrong track, that they continued to see racial discrimination as just more or less a natural outgrowth of the mores: that people of different backgrounds and language and color, when they had their contacts, didn't get along. This sort of feeling was engendered, and it got structured in the culture. So it just went on and on, and you couldn't do anything about it.
And this was not the way I read the record. The contacts of groups, for example, in California was to the contrary. Their initial contacts in many instances were
And so this piece--which was circulated very widely, as a matter of fact--was a piece in which I tried to set down some of my thinking, based on my experience about issues of this sort. And it does that. It makes the point that a lot of racial discrimination has been induced by legislation and sanctioned by legislation. Therefore, you can get rid of some of the legally sanctioned part by using the law in another way.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And it grew out of my California experience, and I think I would agree with the conclusions today. I think so--most of them.
Gardner
Yes. It's a shame to me that something like that isn't more readily accessible.
McWilliams
Yes, it should be. Because it's been quite influential in a way. It's been quoted here, there, and elsewhere by people whose judgment I respect. It continues to be commended for the point of view it attempts to articulate.
Gardner
In running through your many archives, for a
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
How did that come about?
McWilliams
Well, the editor of that paper was a friend of Louis Adamic's and also a great friend of my lawyer friend in Chicago, Elmer Gertz, who was the lawyer who helped me on the IATSE thing. And he just asked me to do pieces for him, which I did from time to time.
Gardner
How frequently?
McWilliams
Oh, I think it was a quarterly, as a matter of fact. I've forgotten even the subjects of most of them. There was one that I think I would like to see reprinted or something done with sometime; it was really about this issue of the Communist party, and why I never could see it in the context or the terms that it was seen in this country.
During the McCarthy period, the witch-hunt was at its worst. The whole party was regarded as, and indicted as, a conspiracy of some kind. I would say it was one of the least conspiratorial organizations that I ever observed. It had an obsession for mimeograph machines! They had publications at every level: propaganda, organizational, ideological, theoretical, and they would spell the whole thing out week after week, month after month, year after year. Anyone that could read could see what the line was
For example, the way it completely misjudged and failed to do anything with the racial situation in the South: it was far less influential in the South in relation to Negroes and race than the Negro church. It didn't begin to compare with the Negro church, and in the few issues it got into in the South--Herndon case and one or two others--it really didn't get anywhere. It was active at one point in the Scottsboro case, which was a landmark case, but generally it completely missed its opportunities.
Gardner
Well, even its activities in Scottsboro have been criticized.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. It completely missed the opportunity that existed in the South. It missed, or miscalculated, with regard to many of its trade-union activities. All of this is spelled out in this piece in the Chicago Jewish Forum where I explained why I could never take it seriously as any kind of national threat.
Gardner
Well, to preview Witch Hunt a little bit
McWilliams
Well, I have my own theories about this. One of them is that we've always had in this country a mind set about socialism. The emphasis here is on private, individual capitalism: each man for himself and so forth. And the issue of communal approach to things was raised in the 1840s and sort of defeated in the debate and discussion of that time. From that time on, socialism has been a very marginal consideration.
Under the leadership of [Eugene V.] Debs, there was a phase when socialism seemed to be getting rooted in American society, and the American kind of socialism began to develop. But that was terminated by World War I. It never revived after that, with the exception of that Debs movement. Socialism has been excluded as any kind of viable alternative or even discussable alternative, with the result that we are the one big industrial nation in the world today without anything, really, that you could call a socialist movement.
And I think this is most unfortunate. It has been most unfortunate because capitalism has had a free ride in the United States. We do not discuss capitalism, because socialism isn't there to raise the issues. We discuss the market; we discuss business; we discuss the
I think this is jumping too far ahead, but to understand the McCarthy phenomenon, I think you need to look at the situation at the time of World War I and immediately after World War I, because then, by the wildest stretch of anyone's imagination, Russia was no kind of threat. The government had just been barely established. It was shaky and so forth, so the membership of the Communist, Left, party here was minimal. And yet you could trigger a very strenuous witch-hunt, and it was very effective. I want to tell you the membership in the American trade-union movement dropped by about a million as a result of that post-1919 witch-hunt. And they discovered that they
And of course some of the early members of the Communist party in the United States did have foreign backgrounds, were from Russia, or had immigrant backgrounds and so forth. This contributed to this feeling that it was totally un-American.
Gardner
Right. Very interesting. So when we came out of World War II with that--well, let me phrase it this way: I suppose the confusion in American thought came about because we had been allied with the Soviet Union for several years, and those people who had kept quiet before the war felt that they were able to speak and then suddenly found that they were not.
McWilliams
Suddenly found that they were not. It's very interesting to note that before the war was over in January 1945, a motion was introduced to make HUAC a permanent standing committee of the House. It caught the liberals in the Congress off guard. They weren't prepared for it;
Gardner
That was during the war.
McWilliams
Yes, the war was still on. It was a warning to me--and I wrote about it in these terms at the time: "Look out, it's going to be resumed." The Red-hunting that had gone on in 1939 was now about to be resumed, and it was as a result of this whole situation in Hollywood that I've been talking about. It's interesting to note that the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was formed in 1944. It had as its avowed purpose the cutting down of the influence of the Left in the industry. It was really designed as an attack on the unions and guilds, and so forth. That was set up in 1944. So, as I say, to my thinking we never had a postwar period. The Cold War got started almost immediately. And from then on it was, I would say, the dominant national consideration until the debacle in Vietnam. So that would be from `45 to `75, a thirty-year period, where the cold war was the prime consideration.
That's a long time.
McWilliams
Long time.
Gardner
Were you involved at all with the Hollywood Ten?
McWilliams
Yes, yes, indeed. Some of them were friends of mine. I knew them all, of course, and some of them were friends of mine. I wrote about the case at the time. Then when it got into the Supreme Court of the United States, Alexander Meiklejohn and I wrote an amicus curiae brief which got a lot of signatures to it, which was submitted to the Supreme Court. And that brief is an interesting thing because some of the people who signed that amicus brief as sponsors of it--one was William Shirer. Bill Shirer was blacklisted on no ground other than the fact that he had signed that amicus brief.
And in retrospect it's extremely interesting because the position that the Hollywood Ten took was an understandable position. The only way they could raise what they thought was the key issue was by reliance on the First Amendment. If they had pleaded the Fifth Amendment, they wouldn't have gone to jail; but they probably would have been blacklisted in the industry anyway. But if they pleaded the Fifth Amendment, they couldn't talk. You couldn't argue the issue, and they wanted to argue the issue, and they wanted to invoke the First Amendment. Now, in the excitement and the turmoil of the hearings--
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
"What's going on here?" That, I think, cost them; they did not get their position across to the public, and the press didn't help them any. So that's what we were trying to address in this amicus brief. And Meiklejohn, of course, was a brilliant, brilliant political thinker. I went up to Berkeley, and we spent a week or so talking it out, and then I did the work on the brief. He went over it, and it was filed.
I think it raised a very, very important point, because a year or so ago, a case arose in New Hampshire. [Wooley v. Maynard (April 1977)] This case got hardly any notice at all. But this present United States Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment does in fact protect a right of silence. If you want to discuss your political beliefs, you can discuss them. But if you're called before a legislative committee where there's implicit in it the potential of punishment or damage or injury to you, you can't be compelled to discuss your political beliefs. They decided this as casually as anything in the world and apparently
Gardner
We're just about at the end of the tape. So I think I'll turn it over and then ask you the next question that I have.
McWilliams
Sure.
Tape Number: V, Side Two
(July 14, 1978)
Gardner
Whose idea was it to use the First Amendment of the [Hollywood] Ten?
McWilliams
I don't know exactly. As I said, the Hollywood Ten were represented by brilliant lawyers: Bob Kenny and Bartley Crum and Charles Katz. They certainly explained to them, I'm sure, that they could plead the Fifth Amendment. But they didn't want to. They didn't want to. They were a notably independent group of people; and I would say in some cases more than independent: stubborn!--like John Howard Lawson, who was a hard man to push around. They were determined to take this position, and it was a correct position to take. The problem was that they did not succeed, in my judgment, in getting across what their real position was. It wasn't their fault that they couldn't get it across. There was shouting, and the hearings were confused, and all the rest of it. But they had a sound position.
Gardner
Also in 1947, on a slightly more frivolous note, you wrote a piece called "Cults in Los Angeles" for Holiday.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
It was in an issue put together by John Steinbeck, I think.
I don't remember whether it was or not.
Gardner
Do you recall anything about that?
McWilliams
I remember doing the piece, but I don't remember . . .
Gardner
You don't recall how come. I just thought that was interesting.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
It covers such a thing as John Steinbeck's California, and then yours is one of the prominent articles.
McWilliams
I was always interested in cults out here. I did a lot of research about them.
Gardner
And you were just on Southern California Country, which had dealt with a lot of the same material.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
In 1948 you wrote an introduction to Guy Endore's pamphlet Justice for Salcido.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
While I don't think we need to go into too much detail on the Salcido case, it's one that seems to get replayed about once a year in Southern California; somebody's shot by the police.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
There were some interesting things that you talked about in the introduction. Do you recall them at all?
McWilliams
I don't have any recollection on that.
They were, again, things like race discrimination and the law: something more theoretical than your normal thing, dealing with social repression.
McWilliams
Okay.
Gardner
Now, also that year you were on "Town Meeting [of the Air]" dealing with military preparedness, Does Military Preparedness Mean Security?
McWilliams
Yes, I was.
Gardner
That doesn't ring a lot of bells.
McWilliams
That doesn't ring a lot of bells. [laughter]
Gardner
I'm going to try one that will.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
1948 is the year of the Progressive party.
McWilliams
Yes. Well, I think the background of the Progressive party is the '46 campaign in this state, where I mentioned to you the other day, a fine set of Democratic nominees went down to defeat. And in the meantime, of course, the Cold War was heating up. But to cut back to '46 again: the key to what happened in '46, of course, was the abysmal performance of [Harry] Truman. He was a dreadful president in that early phase, and understandably so. He was suddenly put into this position with all of these responsibilities--a courthouse politician from Missouri, and, I'm sure, a very likable, decent, nice man--but a terrible president. Certainly in this period,
Gardner
Your political diary?
McWilliams
Yes, I sort of, from time to time . . . it's not systematic.
Gardner
Just something you keep?
McWilliams
Yes, from time to time, I jot down my ideas. I have some passages in there where I said this at the time. And then we had a lot of debates and discussions in this thing about this question: what should we do? what would happen? My friend Harry Girvetz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was very active in the
Then when the Wallace people, for many reasons--and quite a number of reasons--decided they were going to run an independent candidacy, I resigned from PCA because I thought that an independent candidacy would be a disaster, because Wallace didn't seem to understand the old New Deal forces, how devoted they were to the Democratic party. You couldn't do this. Besides, the Wallace movement in this state was a Democrats for Wallace movement. It had
Now, at the Democratic convention in which Truman was nominated, it's very ironic but it's true that ADA was doing their best to dump him at that convention. There were all kinds of midnight meetings here, who shouldn't be and who should be gotten to oppose Truman within the Democratic party. Even talked about trying to draft Dwight Eisenhower, William O. Douglas, all kinds of possibilities. So this was the measure of the low state that Truman's candidacy had fallen into at that time. And then,
Gardner
Did you participate in the Wallace campaign at all?
McWilliams
No. I issued a statement--as a matter of fact this will interest you. At the time I resigned from PCA, Jake Zeitlin and Albert Dekker, the actor--we were very close friends, the three of us--we had sat down and
Gardner
Oh.
McWilliams
I took no active part in the Wallace campaign. I will say this: I voted for him; I could vote for him with a clear conscience. But I thought the campaign was a mistake; I think it was. J. Raymond Walsh, who had been one of the first activists in PCA, did a piece for the Nation at the time, in which he said this candidacy of Wallace would set the liberal-progressive movement in the United States back by decades. And I think there is a great deal to it. And that was the position of the Nation; that is to say, Freda Kirchwey was quite friendly with Wallace and quite pro-Wallace in the early stages. Then as it became clear that it was going to take this form of an independent party and breaking with the Democratic party, she wouldn't go that route. I agreed with both Walsh and Freda, but I had this additional reason that in California it was a very serious mistake because a lot of people here felt deceived. If they had run Wallace as the Democratic nominee in this state, they might have captured the delegation; it's possible. You know, you can always say things are possible and everything. . . . [laughter] But assuming they had carried the state, they could have taken a delegation to the Democratic convention
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And if you looked ahead to 1968, it's interesting to note that the real fight took place within the Democratic party. If Eugene McCarthy had started out as an independent candidate, he wouldn't have gotten very far. But running in the Democratic primaries, he really broke this political logjam about Vietnam. And this is why I think that Wallace's independent candidacy was a mistake, although I admired him in a great many ways. I thought his foreign policy speeches were very good; they stand up very well in retrospect. I was in the early phases of the Wallace movement; before this decision was made, I was active. I spoke at a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire [Hotel] for Wallace where there was a great enthusiasm--a dinner meeting. I went out to the airport with some other people and picked him up, brought him into the city at that time. Also, another thing that's interesting about that: I have always thought that it was very, very unfortunate that Sidney Hillman died when he did, because he had been out here in the early phases. I had been active in connection with his visit here; I was chairman of a
Gardner
Wasn't that also the year that Helen Douglas ran against Nixon? Was that '46 or '50?
McWilliams
Helen Douglas ran against Nixon in, I think, '50.
Gardner
Oh, '50; that's getting ahead of the story. Because I know Jake was active in working for Helen Douglas. That's something we can talk about.
McWilliams
That's right. In '46 I had been after the Nation--and you get penalized for your gabbiness; people take you seriously--[laughter] I'd been after them to hold a meeting in Los Angeles: "You're too centered in New York," and all that sort of thing. So they said, "Go ahead and organize a meeting in Los Angeles." And Lillie Shultz from New York came out, and we worked; we set up this meeting in the Ambassador Hotel--first time the Nation had ever done anything of this sort: daylong sessions, big banquet in the evenings, and so forth. I edited a special issue--special supplement--for the Nation about
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And Oscar Chapman, from the Department of Interior, Will Rogers, and others spoke--a very successful meeting. But you could sense at that meeting, which was in September '46, that there was a real business developing between Truman and anti-Truman people. There was an under-current all through these sessions, very disturbing and also very significant.
Gardner
Well, wouldn't it date back also to '44 and the moving-out of Wallace as Roosevelt's vice-president?
McWilliams
Yes, it would date back as far as that. And of course it had to do with Truman's unfortunate decisions about the bombs and all the rest of it. I think the Cold War started from the dropping of the bombs; right at that instant, I think, is when it really began, because we know now that the bombs were not dropped in Japan for military reasons. Truman later said it was a hammer on those boys--meaning the Russians--and they wanted to send a signal to the Russians. Well, they sent the signal, and it was
Gardner
That's very interesting.
McWilliams
Yes, very unfortunate. But I think that's the way the [Cold] War began. That's where it happened, what set it in motion. There would have been trouble in any event, because World War II was a world war, and the collapse of powers like Japan and Germany would create vacuums and dangerous situations. There would have been trouble with Russia under any circumstances.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
But it need not, in my judgment, have taken the form that it did if we'd wanted to really continue the wartime relationship; but we didn't want to do it.
Gardner
It could be the subject of volumes.
McWilliams
Oh, absolutely; indeed, indeed.
Gardner
And also in 1948 you wrote A Mask for Privilege: [ Anti-Semitism in America].
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
There are so many things to talk about there that I suppose we could begin with what prompted you to do it. You had begun to do some of that with Brothers Under the Skin.
McWilliams
Yes. Except in the first edition of Brothers
Gardner
There weren't aware of it.
McWilliams
They really were not aware of the extent of
And in 1976 the local Minneapolis magazine had a retrospect on all this. It said that after this article appeared and after all this activity had taken place, Minneapolis today was totally free of these particular kinds of barriers; and the Jews occupy executive positions in all these companies that had previously excluded them. Now, just the doing of this article got me interested. And I thought, well, just as California was the ideal state to study race relations, so the United States was the ideal place to study anti-Semitism, because you didn't have the medieval heritage.
Gardner
Exactly, as you point out in the book.
Yes. And therefore you could take a different kind of look at this thing. That's what prompted me to do it. And my theories that I developed about race relations have included this kind--I was convinced that there were two kinds of stereotypes, two kinds of minority groups. One is the working-class kind of stereotype; it's the group that comes in and lacks the skills, the education, the background to get up. So you exclude them; you give them the undesirable jobs, and you sort them out--residentially and otherwise. And of course, you fashion a stereotype to justify what you've done to perpetuate it. So you say of this group that they are lazy, shiftless; they have too many children; their sexual morals are terrible, et cetera, et cetera.
And then there is another kind of stereotype; it involves another kind of minority. It affects the overseas Chinese, and the Indians from India in East Africa, and other groups of this kind.
Gardner
The Ibos of Nigeria.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right, and Jews, of course. And you say of this kind of minority, "They're too smart. They're too clever. They're too resourceful. They're too clannish." It's a stereotype, but it's quite a different kind of stereotype because it has to rationalize a different kind of situation. They're both rationalizations,
So one of the reasons I was glad I did A Mask for Privilege was that it gave me a chance to develop this kind of an argument, this difference, and also the very significant fact that you didn't get any manifestation of modern anti-Semitism in the United States really until about 1876. It was an aspect of the Gilded Age and the nouveau riche that were coming along: new people that were making money and wanted to preserve their status, and so forth. They used social discrimination as one of the means to do it, and it worked very well for a time.
Gardner
Right, sure. Fascinating book: it was a selection of the Book Find Club.
That's right.
Gardner
How did that work? Was that done by the publisher?
McWilliams
Yes. The Book Find people got in touch with the publisher. It won a Newspaper Guild award and other awards at the time.
Gardner
Thomas Jefferson Prize, Fifty Notable Books [award] from American Library Association.
McWilliams
The day I received notification of the Thomas Jefferson award--and incidentally Governor Thomas Dewey was on this committee, the award section--I was scheduled to speak at Teachers Institute of Riverside, and the subject was racial discrimination. The American Legion raised a great rumpus about it, and they had been forced to cancel the meeting. I thought this was really, really funny. But it's interesting that there were church groups and other groups in Riverside that stood up on their hind legs and said, "We're not going to put up with this," and the meeting was rescheduled. The Legion still was objecting and making noises and so forth, but I went out and spoke in Riverside, California.
Gardner
Did that ever happen to you at any other time? Was that the only time that you were [canceled]?
McWilliams
Oh, no. I had meetings canceled. I had trouble at meetings, particularly in the McCarthy phase.
Gardner
Well, the Riverside [incident] got all kinds of press.
McWilliams
Yes, I guess it did.
Gardner
Even a Glendora paper wrote an article that was obviously sympathetic to you. And there was an editorial by V. V. McNitt in the Westwood Hills Press that defended your right to speak. I found that very interesting. But then Dewey denied knowing anything about it.
McWilliams
That's quite true; Dewey denied knowing anything about it. It was also ironic because just at that period, I had done a series of recordings for the State Department, which were for use overseas in connection with their overseas program. So I was speaking on behalf and under the sponsorship of the State Department but having trouble speaking in Riverside, California.
Gardner
It's another country. There were lots of reviews, and I guess about 98 percent of them were not simply positive, but glowing. As a result of A Mask for Privilege you appeared to have done a lot of work with the American Jewish Congress. Or did that start before that?
McWilliams
It started before that. I had some very good
Gardner
Do any of the reviews come back to you now? You got front page in the Herald Tribune book section, and second page in the New York Times.
McWilliams
I knew it was well received; I mean, I remember it was well received. It got good notices and reviews and so forth. I'm pleased and satisfied with it in retrospect in a way, and yet not in another respect. It was written under tremendous tension because of the times; the times were beginning to change, and the pressures on me were enormous. And it wasn't--in my judgment--as well written as it should have been. There were certain phases of it that I'd like to redo. So it's not one of my favorite books. But the argument and the concept, I'm very well satisfied with.
Gardner
You did get into hot water with one publication--you talked about that the other day--called the Menorah
McWilliams
Yes. Yes.
Gardner
And that in a way presages what's going to be happening over the next twenty years, as you said, the whole Cold War where you were attacked because your solutions to the race problem, which included social change and economic change, were attacked as communist.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right; that's right.
Gardner
What was the circumstance of that? Did you know the person who did this before?
McWilliams
No. But, you see, that was a trend in Jewish intellectual thought. It was represented in the Menorah Journal. It's interesting: for example, Elliot Cohen started out--I don't know whether he was the editor for the Menorah Journal. He wrote for the Menorah Journal, but he became the editor of Commentary and was then succeeded by Norman Podhoretz. And that clique was always very, very (quote) "anticommunist," although I've written for Commentary over the years. Nevertheless, they have always had this stance; they have been critical of various things that I've written and said and done
Gardner
The virulence was surprising more than anything else.
McWilliams
And on this case, for example, these people were for the most part on the opposite side of the issue,
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
We get into that later.
Gardner
My favorite statistic about A Mask for Privilege is that it rose to number three in Los Angeles in one week and number one at the time of the Kinsey report. [laughter] So you were in startling company.
McWilliams
You were asking whether being a West Coast editor included the entire West, and it did. A book that pleases me quite a bit is a book that I edited for [W.W.] Norton; it's called Rocky Mountain Cities.
Gardner
And that's coming right up; that's fine. Talk about it now.
McWilliams
I'm pleased with that and the introduction to it because I think it focused attention on aspects of western history and western politics that had been neglected. These contributors that I lined up were first-rate. They really knew these cities, and so you got a picture. My introduction, I think, sets the stage for it pretty well. When I was at Sun Valley recently for this conference on writers in the West, I was interested to note that so many of these issues, in one form or another, are still in these communities.
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
It's a book that didn't get much attention,
Gardner
It got some good reviews.
McWilliams
Yes, it did.
Gardner
Your introduction was widely quoted for trying to bring it all together.
McWilliams
I was trying to bring it together, right.
Gardner
I wasn't aware that you had spawned that whole project. How did that work?
McWilliams
I spawned it because for about two years, I had an agreement with Norton's to line up books for them, particularly from the West. I'm very happy to say I got them to publish John Collier's The Indians of The Americas, among the other books that I lined up. That book still sells to this day; it sold down through time. Of course it's a classic; it's an indispensable book about Indians in America. And I got some other good books for them. But then I got so busy with other things I had to terminate this relation with Norton's--which I really enjoyed; I enjoyed that very much.
Gardner
But in the meantime you put this book [Rocky Mountain Cities] together, really.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
You solicited the articles.
McWilliams
Yes, yes.
Gardner
Did you edit it as well?
Yes, I did. Of course, they edited it, too, in New York.
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
But some of those contributors were close friends: Charles Graham, who did the chapter on Denver; Duncan Aikman, who did El Paso; and Joseph Kinsey Howard, who did a chapter [on the Coeur d'Alene]. I think it was an interesting approach.
Gardner
Who did the Tucson one?
McWilliams
June Caldwell.
Gardner
Right. There was some controversy--Erskine Caldwell's . . .
McWilliams
Erskine's wife at that time.
Gardner
There was some controversy over that: Tucson wasn't very pleased with that.
McWilliams
I know they weren't quite pleased. [laughter]
Gardner
One of the things that seems to be prominent in those years for you were speaking tours.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
You did an awful lot of speaking.
McWilliams
Yes, a dreadful amount.
Gardner
How were those lined up, usually? Did you have an agent?
McWilliams
Yes, through W. Colson Leigh Agency in New York. I have files of the lecture engagements, a couple
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
I would stagger from one meeting to the next, you know. They just lined them up one right after the other. But it was also very helpful in a way, because it gave me a real kind of a feel about other parts of the country--oh, many parts of the country. If you spoke on race relations in some of the towns that I spoke in, in those years, you got a real unvarnished impression of what the American people think. It was very lively, very strenuous, and exhausting, and at the same time a rewarding kind of experience.
Gardner
Did you share podiums often, or was it usually you as featured speaker?
McWilliams
Usually as a featured speaker at college campuses--all over. Except in the Deep South--I did very little speaking in the Deep South. I was disappointed; I would have liked to have had a chance to.
Gardner
Was that because they didn't set them up there?
McWilliams
No, they couldn't. It was just they didn't want me. They weren't interested in what I had to say. But in the West, and Midwest, Northwest--lots in the
Gardner
And all kinds of speeches, I imagine.
McWilliams
Yes, in a limited range, things that I felt competent to talk about: race relations, and the importance of dissent, witch-hunting, and things of that sort.
Gardner
You are also interested in history, though, throughout, as we've made plain.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did you talk about history also? Or were you generally a more social. . . ?
McWilliams
These were mostly social issues, important social issues of the times.
Gardner
One speech that you made that got written up (and I found in your archives) was to the NAACP in Los Angeles in 1949. I don't know that that's any different from any other speech, but if you recall anything about it . . .
McWilliams
I just remember the occasion; I have no idea of what I said. I remember the occasion. Loren Miller was, of course, a dear personal friend. Thurgood Marshall, whom I knew, was counsel for the NAACP. I knew most of
Gardner
You might say a few words about Loren Miller, as long as he's come up.
McWilliams
That is a beautiful, beautiful person and an extraordinarily sensitive, perceptive, intelligent man--frustrated because of the way in which he was sort of boxed in. He was brilliant. He should have had a much bigger national career than he did. His book The Petitioners is a very fine book. He was gifted. He could have done lots of good books, but he was caught in a kind of situation; he couldn't really get out of it. And this was unfortunate because he had an extraordinary background and experience. He was one of the brilliant people that I've known. And I was devoted to him, I loved him--wonderful guy. Iris and I were both devoted to Loren and his wife.
Gardner
That's wonderful. Did you ever do any legal work with him?
McWilliams
We may have worked together on certain cases. He was active. I know that we tried to get him admitted to the Los Angeles Bar Association once upon a time and had a real rumpus about that. I've even forgotten how it turned out.
Gardner
I think it was successful, wasn't it?
I think eventually it was successful, but the first time around I think we lost. He was a very fine person and a very fine influence. The black community at that time hadn't sufficiently grounded itself so that it could develop elements that would support a man of Loren's caliber. This was a great disappointment to him and to everybody else. They did support him in a way, to a degree, but he was too much of an intellectual. I think today he would have been an extraordinary figure.
Gardner
Another thing that you did during that year, apparently, were book reviews for the Herald Tribune. Was that just sort of odds-and-ends kind of work?
McWilliams
Odds and ends.
Gardner
Okay, now we have three more books to go through. How are you doing? Up for more tape?
McWilliams
I'm fine; sure.
Gardner
Good. All right, next we come to California: The Great Exception, 1949. Now, that was written for Current Books. How come you did that one?
McWilliams
Well, they wanted me to do a book--something about California. I wanted to, and my regular publishers weren't interested.
Gardner
Why is that?
McWilliams
Well, they wanted me to do something else. [laughter] I wanted very much to do it because I wanted
Gardner
How do you like it?
McWilliams
I like it. I'm satisfied with it. For that time I think it was an interesting presentation. Increasingly you hear this--and a note was struck in California--"This is an exceptional state," that things start here, and all the rest of it. So I enjoyed doing it, and I think it's had a very wide reading. It's been widely read and commented on. I had a lot of fun doing it.
Gardner
And so much of it is still appropriate, as the smog quote that I gave you when you walked in.
McWilliams
Oh, yes, yes.
Gardner
One thing that I found interesting about it was that it seemed to have two different strains. The first strain is the chatty, amusing history that it goes through, with serious events and light events. And then suddenly the last two or three chapters are devoted to the very serious problem of water in California.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
And the book takes a much more serious turn.
McWilliams
That's right.
Was there any intentionality in that--sort of grabbing up the reader and then holding him?
McWilliams
I think that it just developed that way. Of course, water is one of the great problems of the West; there's no doubt about that.
Gardner
And continues to be.
McWilliams
Continues to be. And, again, at this Sun Valley conference--two or three big sessions were devoted to water in the West, and it had a familiar ring to me. Because, you know, it's all there. We haven't heard the end of it by any means.
Gardner
No, no.
McWilliams
It's a great theme. I'd like to reexamine certain aspects of it if I had the time.
Gardner
For example.
McWilliams
Well, the whole problem of Colorado River and what happens, and the kind of problems you run into when you move water out of one watershed into another watershed, and all that sort of thing. Oh, and the problem of Owens Valley is still very much--we still haven't gotten that out of the way. So I enjoyed doing California: The Great Exception. It didn't sell very well at the time. It got fairly good notices, but it was not a best seller.
Gardner
It's a very nice history, though. It's selective, but it covers a lot of ground.
Yes, it does.
Gardner
I'm going to stop the tape because we're almost at the end, and I'll start a new one.
McWilliams
Okay.
Tape Number: VI, Side One
(July 14, 1978)
Gardner
The next book that you published is one that has turned out to be one of your most important in many ways, and that's North from Mexico. Now, there are all sorts of origins to that, because you've been dealing with the problems of Mexican-Americans in many different ways.
McWilliams
The real story of the book is that Louis Adamic had been commissioned to edit a series for [J.P.] Lippincott's called "Peoples of America." As a matter of fact, I helped him line up authors for certain of those volumes. I got J. Saunders Redding to do the book on blacks, and D'Arcy McNickle to do the book on Indians, and then Louis couldn't find anyone he thought could or should do the book about Mexicans. He asked me if I would do it, and so I said I would; I'd been thinking about it for a long time. Again, this was a product of my experience. It got less attention when it was first published than any book I've ever written.
Gardner
That's surprising; it got good notices.
McWilliams
Fairly good notices, but not very. Lewis Garnett spoke well of it, and a few other people. But it sold slowly . . . slowly. Then when the edition was exhausted, Lippincott's didn't want to reissue it. They
Gardner
Twenty years later.
McWilliams
Twenty years after it was issued. Greenwood did a documentary film [North from Mexico: Exploration and Heritage] based on it that is shown in colleges and universities. And that's done fairly well, quite well. Then there's now a hardback and paperback edition of the book, and it continues to sell.
Gardner
I imagine it would.
McWilliams
And I did a new introduction for it. Arthur Corwin, in a book that I have, refers to me as a Lone Ranger: here was this situation and nobody had written about it, really--nationally--and along comes, he says,
Gardner
Of course as it comes out, or it has come out, you had worked with the Mexican-American population of Los Angeles and did know something about that.
McWilliams
That's right. And I had done a lot of research. I have a big volume of bibliographic notes. I had researched it for years; I had run down aspects of it. I enjoyed writing it very much. I liked writing that book. It does have a wide influence, I think. If you're interested in this subject, this is the book that you start with.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And it's amazing that it hadn't been written up to this point. But no one had really put it together.
Gardner
It's the book I started with on the subject. It's probably ten years ago. One attack upon the book was that it was anti-Catholic. The Catholic press wasn't too happy with it.
McWilliams
No. I'm sure. I think they would be more favorable--or less critical--today.
Gardner
Or ten years ago.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. But it is a fact--or was a fact--that the church didn't do very well by these
Gardner
The book was also the first real publicity for the Mexican-American ghettos in Los Angeles and parts of Texas, and so forth, and of things like the Sleepy Lagoon trial. Was there reaction of any kind to that when it first came out? On lecture tours, for example, did people start asking questions?
McWilliams
Not very much. But you see by the time this book came out, we were well into the Cold War. The big freeze had set in, the exciting, or excitable, issues had shifted.
Gardner
Yes, which comes to the next book, I suppose. But I have two further questions.
McWilliams
Sure.
Gardner
Robert Joseph originally got the film rights for North from Mexico.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
What did he intend to do with them?
He wanted to make a film about it. It had certain possibilities, as shown by the fact that Greenwood's did this documentary. But he never succeeded in doing anything with it.
Gardner
It was going to be a documentary, though?
McWilliams
I think it was; I think that was the idea.
Gardner
As an aside: in reading through your archives, I ran across a gossip column in which someone named Craig Rice was about to write a book called The Defense Never Rests that was inspired on a train ride with you. Do you know anything about that at all? That sounded absolutely fascinating to me.
McWilliams
It sounds interesting to me, but I don't remember.
Gardner
I haven't tried to track down the book yet; I don't even know if it was written. It was well planted, anyway, by some PR person, and it got you mentioned.
McWilliams
I don't remember anything about that.
Gardner
You don't recall what that was. Okay. Well, on a more serious note, your next book is Witch Hunt.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
My first question about Witch Hunt is, were you the first to use that metaphor?
McWilliams
No, I'm sure I wasn't. But the origin of the book is that on these lecture trips, I had sensed
Witch Hunt is a book that I think quite well of in one sense, but it was premature. It was one of the cases where my timing was off, and yet you would have thought the timing was perfect. What I mean is this: McCarthy's Wheeling, West Virginia, speech of 1950--the book was really written before that speech. I had to refer to the speech in the introduction to get any kind of reference or mention of it into the book. The Korean War started in 1950. The Hollywood Ten went off to jail; their appeals and all that had been exhausted. The witch-hunt was really just getting under way when the book was published. Now, you would have thought that because of that, it would be well timed and would have been widely read and discussed, and so forth. But it wasn't. I think one of the reasons is that the freeze was so great, people didn't want to. They didn't want to look at this thing.
It's a flawed book in the sense that it deals with
Gardner
You think there's too much of that in there?
McWilliams
Maybe a bit too much of that, yes. It would have been better if I had waited, and then I could have taken a--but on the other hand, I'm glad in a way I did it when I did, because as it happened, I wouldn't have had the time for it. It was really the last book I wrote.
Gardner
Because when you went to the Nation, you no longer had the time.
McWilliams
No longer had any time for the writing of books. That's right.
Gardner
Well, did it ever cross your mind [that] even though you had no time to write books anymore--say, four
McWilliams
It occurred to me. But, again, there was no time for it. I just didn't; I had no time for it. I became intrigued with the concept of heresy and what prompts it, how it happens, and the whole history of witch-hunting, particularly in this country, and the fact that it does surface at certain times when there are certain kinds of tensions, that it usually takes very much the same form. So I'm glad I wrote it. But, as I say, I think it's a flawed book in some respects.
Gardner
A lot of the early part of the book, particularly, has to do with the university loyalty oath.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
A great deal of it has to do with the University of Washington. Was a lot of that personally gleaned information? Did you go up to Seattle?
McWilliams
Yes, because on lecture trips I had learned of this situation and knew about the Canwell committee in the state of Washington, which was the counterpart of the Tenney committee. (Incidentally, Canwell had a history very analogous to Jack Tenney's history.) I knew about
Gardner
That's what I'd like to talk about.
McWilliams
Yes, sure.
Gardner
What are your personal experiences having to do with the situation at UC [University of California]?
McWilliams
I was involved in the sense--you know, there were all kinds of meetings that raised a great hue and cry. I don't know how many times I spoke about the loyalty oath, and the loyalty oath in general, and the history of test oaths and how abominable they were, and what the consequences were, because people couldn't see this; they couldn't understand this and couldn't see that if you establish this kind of precedent, how easy it was to expand it and to extend it, and how rapidly it would spread to the professions and everywhere else--as it did.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
As it did, indeed. So I spoke quite a bit about it up and down California and in the Northwest. I
Gardner
You must have known quite a few of the participants.
McWilliams
Oh, yes, yes, indeed I did. And people like John Caughey I very much admired for the outstanding way in which they bucked this. I had occasion to discuss this with Eric Erickson when he was at Cal in those years. He just left the university. He didn't want to get involved in all this controversy, apparently, but he was very much opposed to the oath. And I knew other people that were involved. You know, there were a series of mass meetings in San Francisco, Oakland; I think I did some radio debates on it, too. I think so. As you know, it was an ongoing controversy. It went on and on and on.
I think of it in retrospect: I remember a big meeting at UCLA when Harold Laski was here on a visit, and there was a cocktail party and reception for him--or cocktail party and dinner before he spoke--and it was a very interesting group. There were all kinds of people there, and [Robert G.] Sproul was there. He was so amiable and pleasant. Everything was under such genteel auspices, and genuinely so! He enjoyed Laski; Laski made a very brilliant speech. Yet in just a short time, the whole atmosphere had frozen, changed. They wouldn't have had
Gardner
Sproul's role was an interesting one, too.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
He originally proposed the oath and then ended up voting against it later on.
McWilliams
That's right. Well, so many people got trapped. I think Truman may really have thought that his loyalty program would head off the worst of this, but it never works this way.
Gardner
It works in the opposite way.
McWilliams
Always works in the opposite way. And what Truman did greatly stimulated--he must bear a very large measure of the responsibility for what happened, because, you may recall, the day before or the day after he signed the loyalty oath, he was talking to former governor George Earle of Pennsylvania. He was telling Earle that all this talk about Reds in government and all that, "It's a bunch of baloney; there's nothing to it," and so forth. Yet he signs the loyalty oath. And Dean Acheson, to his credit, says in his book that it was the worst mistake the Truman administration made--was their whole handling of the loyalty, civil liberties issue. And I think it was; I think it was irresponsible. Truman was responsible for much of the damage that was done.
Do you think he was ever aware of it?
McWilliams
Well, if he was, he would never admit it, you know. He was that kind of man. He was not exactly a very sensitive man. Years later the townspeople of Hiroshima sent him a very politely worded resolution that they had passed; they had said they were kind of appalled by his public statement that he had never had any compunction about his decision to drop the bomb. They said to him in a very polite way, "Mr. President, do you really mean this?" He very abruptly said that he certainly did and never had the slightest qualm about it. But I don't know how anyone could say that, you know: when you think a decision of yours could cause a loss of life of that magnitude, and you never had any qualms about it--unbelievable.
Gardner
I know.
McWilliams
For all of the good qualities that he had, he was, I think, a disaster as a president.
Gardner
Did you ever get to meet him?
McWilliams
Just on one occasion, and that was just a perfunctory occasion. Robert Donovan's book [Crisis and Conflict: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-1948],incidentally, I think is quite good. But it was a very cleverly projected book, because to carry the Truman story just through the surprise upset victory in 1948 was
Gardner
To get back to UCLA--it seems so trivial after talking about Hiroshima and Truman--what was the role of Edward Dickson in the whole thing?
McWilliams
I don't know too much about the background of the thing. I really don't. I mean specifically with respect to him, I just wouldn't want to comment because I don't know.
Gardner
You don't know what role he played or what role any of the other regents might have played?
McWilliams
No. I think Sproul had sort of intended to put a stop to all agitation about individuals: to get rid of this individual or get rid of that one by just going and adopting this loyalty oath, thinking that this would end it. Of course, it just gave it impetus.
Gardner
And, of course, many other oaths were adopted here.
McWilliams
Oh, yes, every which group. There was an oath mania, including the church, you know, to maintain their tax deductability. And how--in retrospect--how the Jewish groups and the Protestant groups and the others, knowing of the whole history of this kind of oath, could have gone along with this baffles me, because that kind
Gardner
Steve Fritchman.
McWilliams
And actually won the battle, as a matter of fact, but with so little support, hardly any support, from the very people that you would think would be the most active.
Gardner
How about ACLU?
McWilliams
Well . . . too. It was astonishing that there wasn't more perception of how oaths of that kind had been used in the past. You know, if it had been really upheld and adopted, these witch-hunters could have closed churches, and [there would have been] all kinds of trouble. It would have imposed a kind of censorship on the kind of speakers they could have invited because they would always be afraid of the tax exemption.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
Sure.
Gardner
Witch Hunt didn't enjoy the sale of some of the others.
McWilliams
No. For this odd reason: I think people were sort of afraid of the issue. As a matter of fact,
Gardner
I think you talked about that off the tape. I think I'll save the talk about your ACLU role for the video tape [Tape X]. That might be interesting, because you were a board member, and so on. But it is true how many organizations went through that.
McWilliams
And at that time, Stringfellow Barr, Thomas Emerson of the Yale Law School, and myself--the three of us--signed an open letter calling attention to the fact that there were individuals who needed legal representation and couldn't get it, and that there were these political pariahs; and since there seemed to be no organization willing to take their cases and defend them, that something would have to be done about it, including, if necessary, the formation of a new civil liberties group. Now, this was issued and printed in the press and had quite a bit to do with the formation of the Emergency
Gardner
But only after the air cleared.
McWilliams
Yes, only after the air had cleared. And, I think, only in part because the ECLC had then come into existence, and they felt a bit embarrassed by the fact that another group had to be formed in order to meet this need.
Gardner
To what do you attribute--well, of course you attribute it to a lot of things in Witch Hunt--the abdication of the Left during that period?
McWilliams
It is a very remarkable thing, very remarkable
Gardner
And the fear was there.
McWilliams
The fear was there, right.
Gardner
Well, shall we break for today?
McWilliams
Okay.
July 17, 1978
GardnerAs I mentioned last time, we'll start talking about the Nation now. I think the first thing that should be discussed will probably be your first contact with the Nation, which would have come, I suppose, in the thirties.
McWilliams
Yes, I contributed to the magazine in the thirties from time to time, and then sometimes they would write me about things that they were interested in. I got to know some of the people in New York, but rather casually, in the 1930s. I didn't get to know them well. Then they asked me to become a contributing editor in January of
Gardner
And you took it.
McWilliams
I took it, and I went back, and of course one thing led to another. As a matter of fact, I stayed for virtually thirty years because the magazine was in a critical state, and it was quite apparent that she did need help. When I first went back there, I was very active in trying to raise money for the magazine, get new people interested in it, and so forth. It was a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month kind of emergency, and I just got locked into a situation. I had no thought of staying; I had thought of staying maybe just for a month
Gardner
Really?
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. I never really talked to her about it. I don't know what was in the back of her-- that is, Freda's--mind. But when I went back, I'm sure it never occurred to her that I might ultimately be her successor. I don't think she had that in mind.
Gardner
You really don't?
McWilliams
I don't think she did. It's possible that she did. But anyway, when I got back there, I got locked into this situation; I just stayed on.
Gardner
What did your family think about the move at the time?
McWilliams
Well, it was rough, very difficult for them. Iris had never lived in the East, and as a matter of fact, I had never lived in the East; but I was much more familiar with New York than she was. And it was very rough for our son to adjust from a California-type school to New York City schools. It was very difficult for them, very difficult.
Gardner
Did you move right away to 115th Street?
McWilliams
No, we lived in the [Greenwich] Village.
Gardner
That's right--the Nation's offices.
McWilliams
The Nation's offices were in the Village. Well, at first they were at the lower end of the island
Gardner
Did your family adjust, though, after a while? I assume they did. Or did they always maintain a yearning to return?
McWilliams
I think there was always a problem in connection--I think Iris had continuing difficulties in adjusting, because it is a very different way of life, particularly apartment life. We had our own home here and spent a lot of time outdoors, and that sort of thing. It's much easier: if you want a brief vacation, you get in your car and go to the mountains, the beach, or whatever; it's not that easy in New York. We decided that we would stay right in Manhattan because I was so busy most of the time--not every night, of course, but three or four nights a week--with conferences and meetings, and that sort of thing. We realized it would be better
Gardner
What did your work load consist of at first?
McWilliams
Shortly after I arrived in New York, Hal [Harold] Field, who was the managing editor, resigned. His resignation, I might say, had nothing whatever to do with my being back there; it was just one of those things.
Gardner
Glad to hear that.
McWilliams
He got an offer of a much better paying job, and he felt he had to take it. We were great friends then and have since remained very good friends. I had to begin to take over some of his responsibilities because there was no one else there. Freda was so preoccupied and busy with various things that she couldn't look around for a successor for Hal Field. I'd never done editorial work of this kind before--getting out a magazine. I had no credentials for it, no experience, no training. But, you know, you adjust to the situation. So I had to take over his load as well as helping her on her fund-raising activities, and also carrying a large part of the editorial load--writing editorials and that sort of thing. And I became more and more involved in the whole editorial side of the magazine.
Gardner
What made you decide--once you were in the
McWilliams
That would have been my preference. But when I got there I saw what dire straits the magazine was in; and I had such a great appreciation for the magazine and its importance that I thought this was the thing that I should do by all means. And I kept thinking that, well, after six months or a year the situation would change. But it didn't change, essentially didn't change. So we just stayed on, and we found ourselves more or less anchored in New York, although we did not have the intention really of staying there. It's an odd thing. If we had thought that we would stay there, we probably would have gotten a place in the suburbs; it would have been easier for our son going to school, and so forth. But we just never did.
Gardner
And once you were there you stayed. You say dire straits--is that financially?
McWilliams
Yes, yes. The magazine--from 1865, when it was founded, on, it had been a deficit publication. And it's very interesting; the early financial history is very interesting. Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the founders, one of the sponsors originally. There's very interesting correspondence between Olmsted and [E.L.]
Gardner
Why is that?
McWilliams
Well, I think in those years it found itself moving sort of in the mainstream for the first time. Then as the Cold War began to emerge, it was of course again on the outside; it was again critical, and its troubles began. And when I say "its troubles," it had always had troubles, but they had been pretty easily resolved. Except that in this postwar period it found itself the target of a section of the intellectual community--the section that turned sort of in favor of the Cold War; there was a division there. It is quite interesting that during all of the
The routine thing that they did was to throw a couple of big functions a year and raise enough money to cover the deficit. It had been relatively easy to do this until about 1950; then it became very difficult. You wouldn't believe this, but they threw a function at the Waldorf on, of all subjects, "Arab-Israel Peace [: Key to Stability] in the Middle East." Now, you wouldn't think in 1950 there
Gardner
As was the Nation.
McWilliams
As was the Nation, because the Nation played a key role in the whole partition business. But they tried to disrupt that meeting. They Red-baited the sponsors and the other people that were there, and it got picked up by Frederick Woltman of the New York World-Telegram and Sun, who was the chief needler of that time, you know; and it became very difficult, very nasty. Freda found it difficult to cope with this kind of situation, and it continued. It got worse during McCarthy.
Now, when I say it would have been better if we had been the direct target, I think there's no doubt about this. [Oswald Garrison] Villard in his autobiography [Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor] tells that when he took it over, the circulation was at a very low point, one of the lowest points in its history. The magazine was the target of some very vicious attacks by all of the elements that were involved in the Palmer Raids, and all that sort of thing--very vicious attacks. Its circulation jumped, and it rose to one of the highest points in its history. Then once that particular witchhunt was over, it declined to about its average. So we
Gardner
Rather than a simply internecine sort of battle.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right. It was very much that, but very vicious, very vicious.
Gardner
What was the circulation at that time?
McWilliams
It was around 28-29,000; it would be up to 30-33,000. It hovered right in that . . .
Gardner
What had it been in the '38-'42 period?
McWilliams
In the '38-'42 period it got up to around 40,000, something like that. The costs at that time were not what they became, and it was because it had very low production costs, very low editorial costs, relatively speaking. It had a very good chance of survival--it could be self-sufficient with a doubling of the subscription; the paid subscription at any time would have put it in the black. It was that close to being self-sufficient. The problem is with magazines of this kind, they have to grow by kind of a natural creation process to be successful, because you can go out and double your circulation very easily if you have lots of money to spend. It's just a question of willing to spend x amount of dollars to get x number of new readers. But of course it doesn't do you much good because you can't hold them.
The New Republic under Gil Harrison spent a huge sum of money to promote the New Republic. The naive readers would be very much impressed with those figures showing they had a great deal larger circulation than the Nation, but it really didn't mean anything. Because if they had also looked at the list of expires--subscriptions that were constantly expiring--they would have seen what the problem was: the New Republic was having to repeat the same process, and it was very expensive; so it's really not the way to promote magazines of this kind.
Gardner
Well, the New Republic through the years did use a method of having a sort of benevolent ownership that paid the deficit.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Was there any thought of doing that with the Nation at any time?
McWilliams
Oh, yes, yes. We looked for sponsors. We tried to find--the New Republic was a special case because Mrs. Harrison had access to a lot of money.
Gardner
But before that, the Straights, also; they were very wealthy.
McWilliams
The Straights also. And under Gil Harrison they bought various subsidiary enterprises which in turn fed money to the New Republic. So at times it appeared to have a much larger circulation than the Nation. But
Gardner
What about advertising within the journal itself? This is more at the time you first got there than anything else, but . . .
McWilliams
Its traditional sources of advertising were largely the book-publishing industry, of course. And it's very interesting to note that at times various people tried to give us some assistance on advertising. One was George Braziller, and George had the idea that he could get some book-club advertising for the Nation.
Tape Number: VI, Side Two
(July 17, 1978)
Gardner
You were in the middle of a thought about advertising.
McWilliams
Yes. As I was saying, George Braziller thought he could get some more book-club advertising. I said to him that I didn't think it would work, because our readers were not the kind of readers who wanted book-club books. They selected their own titles--"Thank you," you know. So he made a great effort to get book-club advertising, and the results were as I had anticipated: the book clubs were not getting the returns, sufficient returns. So then I organized a book club for the Nation--informally, you know--and it did very well indeed because we were very careful to select titles that we knew would be of special interest to Nation readers, like Earl Jowitt's book on the Hiss case, for example. And it began to grow and to burgeon, so much so that we had so much extra added paperwork and that sort of thing, it became very difficult with a small staff. And a chap who had a whole number of book clubs made us an offer to take over the book club that we had organized, and we entered into an arrangement for him to do that. It was a grave mistake, because after a very short period of time, he began to make selections that
Gardner
There's a special sensitivity that is essential.
McWilliams
Very definitely so. As a matter of fact, that is one of the key problems about magazines of this kind: everything about the Nation is special. I mean, rules that apply for magazines in general and principles and management practices that would be very good for other magazines don't work for the Nation. It's highly specialized and its readership is very special. The readership has a very special relationship to the magazine. And all of this has to be understood in connection with the Nation.
Gardner
How did the circulation go through the years? Between the time you got there and the time you left, were there peaks and valleys?
McWilliams
Peaks and valleys. But it held its own very well. It did reasonably well all during the fifties and into the sixties. It never varied a great deal, because after Kirstein and I had made this basic decision, from then on we did very little in the way of large-scale mass mailings. If we had a special issue or something, we would promote it a bit. But we decided not to spend money that way.
Gardner
And just stick to your basic readership.
McWilliams
And stick to our basic readership. By and
Gardner
Of course, the New Republic is one, but what were some of the other magazines that would have been in the same, oh, say, classification as the Nation back when you first started out?
McWilliams
Well, there would be the New Leader, which was a social-democratic publication; the New Republic; Christian Century, which was Protestant, as you know; Commonweal, which was the liberal Catholic. Essentially those, and then of course later the National Review came along, and the Progressive.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
William Buckley's National Review.
Gardner
And the Reporter for a little while.
McWilliams
And the Reporter.
Gardner
Not really in the same category.
McWilliams
Not really in the same category. I've done a review of a book about [Max] Ascoli that will appear shortly in the Columbia Journalism Review. I was very interested in the book because [when] the Reporter came out, its first issue coincided with, you might say, the beginning of the worst phase of the Cold War, and its termination coincided with the escalation of the war in Vietnam. So it really was carved--it filled a niche, a very special kind of niche there. And it did some very
Gardner
Who? Ascoli or. . . ?
McWilliams
Yes, Ascoli. Oh, yes, very definitely so.
Gardner
Well, that's an interesting pair.
McWilliams
Yes. The only major difference from a technical point of view between the Reporter and these other magazines [was that] it had more money to spend. They spent a very large sum of money on the Reporter. The deficit was very large every year, but it had the format of a slick magazine, and in that sense was somewhat different.
Gardner
Right. Tell me about Freda Kirchwey.
McWilliams
Well, Freda was a beautiful, radiant,
And Freda grew up in that kind of atmosphere in New York. The family had lots of intellectual friends, lots of faculty friends, at Columbia, and she grew up in a very privileged and very special kind of environment. She went to Barnard and was president of her class, and almost immediately she went to work for the Nation. And she did everything at the Nation. She was a copy editor; she did a special department about women's affairs. As a matter of fact, she was responsible for getting some pieces by important American women about their life experiences, which were published anonymously and will very shortly be reissued by the Feminist Press with their names, and all the rest of it. She was always a feminist, well ahead of the time. She was also extremely interested in foreign affairs, because she did a kind of roundup of
Gardner
Which is why, I suppose, you had more contributions to the New Republic than the Nation in the 1930s.
McWilliams
I think that's probably true. And she was a splendid human being, extraordinary human being, [and an] unflappable, wonderful working colleague. You know, I don't think there's any relationship which is more fraught with a potential for disagreement than the role of a publisher and the role of an editor on a magazine. You can get into endless arguments about everything under the sun. We had plenty of disagreements, but we never had a serious major argument. And I was devoted to Freda. I had the greatest respect for her and the greatest affection for her. She was very kind to us--to my family, to my wife, our son--and really a great human being. When I say unflappable, she could take all of this kind of pressure and tension and still maintain her good nature. Her attitude toward her colleagues was impeccable, and she was very--I won't say carefree, but she never permitted
She became, over a period of time, a public personage in her own right. She was quite a figure in the liberal progressive movement, particularly in New York. She was that for a great many years, and she was very actively interested in the UN--from the very beginning. She played a key role at the UN; she was very widely known at the UN, very widely respected. And in connection with the partition of Palestine and keeping Franco's Spain out of the UN, the Nation played a critically important role in both of those fights. And she was very actively interested in it, as was Lillie Shultz, who was the head of Nation Associates. Their emphasis was largely in this field: the United Nations, foreign affairs, foreign policy, et cetera.
Gardner
What was the Nation Associates?
McWilliams
It was just a device by which a certain number of people paid more than their normal subscription, which was regarded as a contribution.
Gardner
I see.
McWilliams
And Lillie Shultz was in charge of the business arrangements for these functions.
Gardner
Who was she?
McWilliams
She had originally been in Philadelphia
Gardner
I see. Was it Freda Kirchwey who brought her in?
McWilliams
Yes, Freda brought her in.
Gardner
Then in 1955 comes the major change. First, in 1954 you become editorial director.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
What did your job consist of then in relation to the rest of the. . . ?
McWilliams
The fact of the matter is that in terms of actually getting the magazine out, I was in effect the editor from the middle of 1951 on, because she was so pre-occupied with other things. So the designation of editorial director didn't mean very much. Actually, what I did didn't change to any great extent at all. I was really responsible for getting the magazine out and all that. When she left, of course, I had considerably more freedom of decision, in a sense, about policy and manuscripts and that sort of thing, although I was not hampered to any great extent while she was there.
But she had certain preferences: she had certain issues she thought should be emphasized; she had certain theories about the magazine; she was more inclined than I was, for example, to rely upon regular staff contributors--that is, people in certain subject areas would be constantly
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
It's just another column or it's another page, and so forth. So I was really quite strongly inclined to a different kind of editorial policy in dealing with contributors.
Gardner
Right. In other words the change to editorial director and then to editor is really more one of formality in title.
That's quite right. She came to me fairly early in 1955 and said she had been. . . . I should explain: she had been trying to find a successor who would assume the role of publisher--more a successor as a publisher than as an editor, because she had the title of publisher and editor. She was trying to find someone who would assume the role of publisher and take over the responsibilities and the burdens and the debts which the magazine had assumed. She came to me in the early spring of 1955 and said that she just hadn't been able to do it. Well, of course I knew this because I was involved in most of these negotiations. But in any case she said, "Will you see what you can do?"
So I set about looking for a successor publisher. I had just about given up on it because it was really asking quite a bit of someone to come in under those circumstances. Then a friend of mine told me that George Kirstein was at the moment at loose ends. He had been head of the Health Insurance Plan of [Greater] New York for quite some years. He had resigned, and he didn't know quite what he wanted to do next. I had met him just once--a social occasion. But I sought him out, and he expressed some interest, and we had a long series of negotiations with the two of us and then with Freda. He finally agreed to take it over, to assume the responsibilities. He's the brother of
There were other reasons for the transition at that time. We had gotten involved in a--I go into this in some length in the book [The Education of Carey McWilliams] that I've been working on, and I will only say this briefly because we can go on on this for two days. The Nation got caught in one of the oddest situations in connection with the Cold War that you wouldn't believe, just wouldn't believe! It was a situation for which we had no responsibility. We didn't even know the source of the trouble! What happened in essence--to make it very, very brief--is that a man by the name of Paul Hughes, who had worked with McCarthy on McCarthy's committee, was suddenly terminated by McCarthy. He was dropped. He apparently didn't like this too much, and he went to Joseph Rauh [, Jr.].
Now, of course, what had happened was that Hughes--the minute they made this arrangement with him and began to pay him this money--he had doubled back to McCarthy and told McCarthy about all this, you see, so he was kind of a . . .
Gardner
. . . double agent.
McWilliams
He was kind of double agenting. [Hughes] in turn had gotten in touch with [Herbert] Brownell to get Brownell interested in [investigating] a great campaign to smear Joe McCarthy, and so forth that Brownell
And on one occasion Matusow went to Siegel's office and Siegel wasn't there. He inquired where he was, and he was told he was at a restaurant with a client. And Matusow, who was anything but a shy person, barged in to the restaurant and went up to the table. And here was Larry having dinner with a very famous client, Gloria Swanson. So he introduced Matusow to Swanson, and Matusow sat down and began to entertain them with some of his fancy stories of his life in the political underground, and so forth. Of course the FBI by this time had a tail on Matusow. So when they saw Matusow having dinner with Gloria Swanson, you see, this began to assume very interesting dimensions to them. Incidentally, the matter that Swanson was consulting Siegel about was strictly private matter; it had no political importance whatsoever--none, none! But when the FBI saw all this, they got very suspicious. So when this grand jury began its inquiry. . . . Well, first of all, I should cut back and say that by this time Matusow had decided to recant, and he did a book--I've forgotten the title of it [False Witness], but it was published by Carl Marzani and Angus Cameron--and when they announced they were going to publish the book, this grand jury tried to subpoena the original manuscript, and also tried to subpoena it from the printers. They wanted to stop it because they knew
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
So this was all in the background of this grand jury hearing. When the grand jury hearing opened they subpoenaed Freda, and I was subpoenaed, and neither one of us could tell them anything. We didn't know anything about this fund raising in connection with Paul Hughes. We had no knowledge of this at all. We had never run anything by Matusow, and so forth and so forth.
Then they subpoenaed the lawyer--Siegel. And Siegel said he had no knowledge of any of this fund raising, et cetera. As a matter of fact, he said he had minutes; he kept notes and minutes of all of his meetings with Matusow. So they said, "All of that's very splendid; you produce them, please." So when he began to go through these notes, he came across this meeting with Swanson. He thought that would be very embarrassing to her, and it had nothing to do with the general subject of the inquiry, so he decided to omit those portions of the notes. Well, it got him into some very neat trouble because they knew of the meeting with Swanson. It got him into some very deep trouble. He was convicted of violating some section
Incidentally, it's very interesting to note that Matusow really was one of the heroes of that whole operation. Because after he recanted his testimony, he was indicted for perjury, and convicted, and given a three-year sentence. Mind you, he was indicted for perjury because he had finally told the truth--great irony in the situation. He was given a three-year jail sentence because he had finally decided to tell what actually happened, knowing that he was under very considerable hazard! So it took a lot of courage on his part to do it. He was the only--I think the only--major informer that the government ever proceeded against. [Louis] Budenz, [Elizabeth] Bentley, and all the others--they ignored their manifold perjuries, but in this case they indicted
Gardner
Because he recanted.
McWilliams
Because he recanted. [laughter]
Gardner
That's an interesting sidelight into your witchhunt theory.
McWilliams
Oh, yes. And there's a lot more to it than this, but this will give you some idea of the wild zaniness, because this had nothing to do with anything. It was just as though we had been standing on a street corner and a truck had come by and run over us. It was as accidental as that.
Gardner
Was this during the time that Kirstein was there?
McWilliams
It was just before Kirstein came in. When Kirstein and I took it over, it was with the distinct understanding that this was at Freda's request in both cases. And in the issue of the magazine in which we announced the change, this was made quite clear. So Kirstein came in and was publisher for a decade.
Gardner
What was the function of the publisher? Obviously, it was largely a troubleshooter, sort of, person in charge of finances. Did the two of you overlap quite a bit?
McWilliams
Not greatly. One of the problems, of course, with a magazine like the Nation is if you are relying on a publisher to meet a substantial part of the deficit,
But Storrow and Kirstein were great; they were very generous. When I spoke to Kirstein about this, his lawyer had prepared an elaborate kind of agreement. I said, "George, this is all right, and I'll be glad to sign it, but it's no good, because this relationship will either work or it won't work. No amount of fine print will do any good at all. We will either make it work or we won't."
Gardner
He lasted, as you say, for a decade.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
During that time--the first decade of your editorship--there were a number of changes in style, logo--I mean, the way it looked, not the writing style. The writing style remained fairly consistent.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Were those sorts of decisions yours?
McWilliams
Well, in a way they were, and in a way they weren't. When it became apparent that I was going to have the responsibility for it, I recruited Robert Hatch, really, as managing editor; and he is a very, very fine editor. I think he's one of the finest editors in New York magazine journalism. He's been at it all of his
Gardner
Yes, I want to get to all of those people a little later on, when we get to the staff. One problem that was brought up in the course of your stay was at the time of the Kennedy assassination, when deadlines and odd dating methods led to the magazine coming out dated something like three weeks after the assassination. Do you recall that?
McWilliams
I don't recall that.
Gardner
Because there was a note in the magazine at the time that said because of the long time that it took to mail to the West Coast, it had been decided to have a layback of seven days--something like that--and you were cutting it down back to five.
McWilliams
That's probably true.
Gardner
If you don't recall that, I suppose it's not worth going into. Well, let me go through the publishers
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Who was Storrow? Why did Kirstein leave, and so on?
McWilliams
Well, Kirstein left because I had--from time to time at luncheon conversations, and not taking it too seriously--I had said, "George, you really ought to write a book about the American rich, because you have the ideal credentials." Namely, that he was a rich man but not too rich, and he was of Jewish background and yet not of the Jewish community, and he stood outside the situation just sufficiently. Although he had inherited a lot of money and it was inherited wealth, he did have a point of view about the rich. It did sort of intrigue him, and over a period of time he began to think more and more about it. He finally decided he did want to do this. So he told me that he was going to look around for a successor because he did want to do this book about the American rich. As a matter of fact, he did do it. It's a book called The Rich: Are They Different? It was published by Houghton-Mifflin.
In the course of looking around for a publisher successor, he met Storrow. The Storrows had been Boston
And also in reform movement, when [Edward] Filene and the others gave Lincoln Steffens $10,000 or $15,000 to conduct an investigation of corruption in Boston--Steffens was assisted by Walter Lippmann, who was, I guess, a graduate student or student at Harvard, and others--and they got out this report about corruption in Boston, the Filenes decided they would run a reform candidate to clear up this situation. They turned to James Jackson Storrow, the grandfather of the publisher. And the opposition were very smart indeed: they turned to Honey Fitz, Jack Kennedy's grandfather [John F. Fitzgerald], who had been forced to retire from Boston politics for a time but now had come back. The contrast couldn't have been greater, because Honey Fitz was an amiable kind of person, convivial, and Irish, and Catholic, and part of the setup. Storrow was a Boston Brahmin of impeccable rectitude,
So this reform tradition was part of the Storrow background; they had been active in all kinds of civic affairs. And Storrow, the grandfather, had sort of called the turn on Calvin Coolidge at the time of the Boston police strike. Villard had praised him for his role in making it clear that it didn't happen quite the way that Coolidge tried to make it appear that it happened. Incidentally, John F. Kennedy and James Jackson Storrow [, Jr.], who was the publisher, were classmates at Harvard.
Gardner
Oh, at Harvard?
McWilliams
Along with Blair Clark, who succeeded me as editor. They were all members of the same class at Harvard. So the Storrows had a long-standing traditional interest in the magazine. And it was a logical choice, as Storrow had a lithograph and a photocopying plant in Boston, and he was very much interested in the magazine. So Kirstein had made arrangements for him to take over the magazine. I met Storrow just as I had with Kirstein. I met him just once before this arrangement was concluded. He asked me if I would stay on if he did decide to take over the magazine,
Gardner
And you had suggested that he write the book.
McWilliams
And I had suggested that he write the book. [laughter] So I felt that I should, and that's how the transition was effected.
Gardner
Was your relationship with Storrow as good as your relationship with Kirstein?
McWilliams
Yes, it was. I never had a serious argument with him. He's a very generous, kindly, decent person. He was not cut out for the business role of the publisher any more than Kirstein was. To make that clear, I should say what, from my point of view, I think a publisher of a magazine like the Nation should do: a publisher of a magazine like the Nation should be visible, should have lots of contacts in Washington, attend these dreary three-hour luncheons and dinner parties and cause-meetings, and call on senators and representatives, and go to meetings out around the country, and be an external kind of voice and figure for the magazine.
Now, neither Kirstein nor Storrow were interested in doing this. It just wasn't their dish of tea. It wasn't anything that they wanted to do. Kirstein had excellent business judgment, and he straightened out
Gardner
In 1967 Gifford Phillips became associate publisher.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Was that part of the Frontier deal? How did that work?
Well, I had known Giff Phillips even before he became publisher. Phil Kerby and Giff Phillips were Coloradoans. I was from Colorado, and I had known Giff in Denver. We had a mutual friend in Denver, Charles Graham, and I had met him through Charlie Graham even before he came out here, even before he decided to live here. He and some associates were getting out a little magazine in Denver, the Rocky Mountain--something-or-other [Rocky Mountain Life]. When he decided to move out here, they stopped that, and he decided to start Frontier. I did a piece for the Nation about Gifford--about him, his interests, and the fact that he was starting this new magazine. And I had very close relations with Frontier during the time that it existed; it existed for about nineteen years.
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
Surprisingly enough. I think if it had been sustained a bit longer, it would have come into this new phase of communications, and it just might have succeeded. But Giff had put a lot of money into Frontier and just felt he couldn't sustain it any longer. He was anxious to work out some arrangement so that some publication would take over the burden of servicing the unexpired subscriptions and also providing a position for the time being for Phil Kerby. So we named Kerby
Tape Number: VII, Side One
(July 17, 1978)
Gardner
You were about to describe the conference.
McWilliams
It was held out here in `67. For example, I got speakers. . . . I personally recruited George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Mark Hatfield, Ernest Gruening, who of course was an old Nation hand himself. We got Malcolm Browne, who was just back from Vietnam; Seymour Melman, who was a contributor and friend from Columbia; and others. Quite a number of others staged this conference here in Los Angeles, and it was extremely interesting. Oh, yes--Martin Luther King [, Jr.] was one of the speakers at this affair.
Gardner
That's amazing!
McWilliams
The timing was very interesting because we had structured it in terms--I had given it the title of "Reordering National Priorities," but the way it was set up it was definitely in opposition to the war in Vietnam, because how could you do anything with priorities until you did something about the war? And it was apparent almost from the opening gun, so to speak, that the audience here was, if anything, urging these speakers to be even a little more emphatic than they were, although they made excellent speeches about the war--
It was at this meeting also that Martin Luther King, Jr., made his first emphatic statement against the war in I think one of the most eloquent speeches he ever made. You will find that he had, in print, said certain things against the war, but this was the first time [he took] a very emphatic position, clear-cut, square-cut position against the war. And this meeting here was in February. He later spoke at the UN Plaza at the big rally in New York, and that meeting has gotten into the books and the histories as being the first time he came out against the war. But actually it followed our meeting by a full month or six weeks; this meeting was the first one.
Gardner
Is it transcribed anywhere or written down? Did you publish the speeches?
McWilliams
I have a copy of the text. I don't know
Gardner
Starting in '61, I think.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Very early on.
McWilliams
Very early on. So we had a very good relationship with him. Even before this conference, I had come to the conclusion that you could have rallies and demonstrations and marches galore, but until you actually made a political issue of this, you were never going to get anywhere. They could afford to ignore you, you know. They had the power, and they were proponents of the war, but they could ignore it. But the minute you made a political issue of it, this is something very different. And I don't think there's any doubt but what McCarthy broke the logjam on this issue, because, as you know, Robert Kennedy had made a speech or two about the war, but he had said he would not be a candidate; he was not going to be a candidate. And the the minute the returns came in from New Hampshire, even before they were fully counted, he decided he would
Gardner
Right. But, again, as you say, the disappointment with McCarthy, I think, was that once there was an opportunity really for him to pursue the nomination after Robert Kennedy was shot, he seemed to back off.
McWilliams
He seemed to back off. He impressed me at the Chicago convention. He impressed me as being pretty cool about the whole thing, even a little bored with the whole business. One of the most impressive things about that convention from my point of view was the meeting of the California delegation. There, at that meeting, Humphrey said what you'd expect Humphrey to say. McGovern made one
And then of course what happened, as you know, is that he waited until the zero hour before endorsing Humphrey, too late so that the McCarthy constituency couldn't be too much annoyed by it, because it came so late, but yet in time so that McCarthy could retain his status as a Democrat. But it wasn't calculated to do Humphrey any good.
Gardner
And it was also too late to carry the election for Humphrey.
McWilliams
And it was too late to carry the election for Humphrey. So I was kind of disappointed in McCarthy's general attitude after the first big victory in the primaries.
Gardner
Right. Well, to return to what started this discussion, you then absorbed Frontier.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did Frontier add any sizable subscriptions to your list?
McWilliams
Not substantially, because the subscription list of Frontier by that time was way down.
What was Gifford Phillips's role as associate publisher? Did he come in and perform an active function?
McWilliams
No, I couldn't say he performed an active function. When he was in New York, he would come in and we would meet with him and go over things relating to the magazine. And we'd consult him by phone from time to time, particularly about California politics, and so forth. But it was not a--actually, it was designed to relieve him of the problem of Frontier.
Gardner
Right. And Phil Kerby contributed to the Nation intermittently for a couple of years.
I don't think we have to talk about James Storrow's wife becoming associate publisher. I don't know if there's anything out of the ordinary in that. The only other thing on the publishing page has to do with the advertising, and Mary Simon who was advertising manager for years and years.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Any comments about her?
McWilliams
Oh, she had been with Survey Graphic before she came with the Nation. She was one of the oldest in terms of service of any of the Nation employees. She'd been there for a long, long time. And, as I say, these magazines have a limited appeal to advertising. If a magazine has a circulation of less than, let's say,
Gardner
Liberals don't necessarily buy tennis shoes.
McWilliams
That's correct; that is correct.
Gardner
Well, now I'll turn to my sheets of topics. I'll mention a topic and talk about it, and we can discuss it. I'd like you, if possible where you can recall, to go into the different articles that you can remember about it, different writers that may have contributed. The first one is the blacklist. My first page is civil liberties and civil rights. You yourself did a lot of work on that.
McWilliams
Yes, we did a special issue called "How Free is Free?"--a book-length issue, came out right in the depth of McCarthyism, so to speak. It was a pretty good issue when you read it in retrospect, and it has some distinguished contributors: Ben Shahn gave us a handsome cover design for the magazine. And it was very good. Then we did a follow-up civil-liberties issue a year or so later. And we did this issue on the informers, and we covered almost every aspect of McCarthyism one way or another because it was a major preoccupation.
You did a number of pieces yourself.
McWilliams
Yes. I did a number of pieces and wrote an endless number of editorials, and so forth. I did a great portion of the editorials. Up to the time when Freda was still there, she did many of the foreign-policy editorials--not all of them but many of them. I did a great many of the domestic ones.
Gardner
Who were some of the other contributors on blacklist? I know Elizabeth Poe did one piece.
McWilliams
Yes. Dalton Trumbo did a piece about the blacklist and, oh, Matthew Josephson did one about the problem of the blacklisting of artists, and we did a number about problems that were arising in connection with publishing. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes activity going on at that time where books were not being published, largely for this reason. And attempts were being made to suppress the books that had been published. Max Lowenthal, who I knew very well, did a book on the FBI that was published in 1950. It was the first good book about the FBI, and that book was suppressed on publication. I mean, the publisher honored the obligation to bring it out in book form, but the bureau had brought such pressure to bear that there weren't any copies. It was just suppressed on publication. There were incidents of this kind going on, and we coped with this in various ways.
But there was a group in New York called "The Observers." It was just an informal group; it had been meeting for some time, a few weeks or so before I got back there. I became the liaison between that group and the Nation because I knew many of the people who were in The Observer group--Arthur Miller, Matthew Josephson, Gerard Piel of Scientific American, Millard Lampell, Edgar Snow--maybe two dozen in all, and they would meet from time to time. They all had stories about what was going on in the media world: about this radio program or this television program that had been forced off the air, things of this kind that had been happening. We fed a lot of this back into the magazine because some of these people had very good sources. So we were able to get a lot of first-rate information about what was really going on behind the scenes. It was very distressing, of course. I mean, it was very bad. It's hard to believe in retrospect what was going on, what actually happened.
Gardner
This sort of follows into it: a case that you started working on early that the Nation has continued to follow through the years is the [Alger] Hiss case.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
You were talking the other day about the reaction to the latest work. But in 1957 Fred Cook did a special issue--a special study--on the Hiss case.
McWilliams
Yes. Well, I had always thought that Hiss
I think that Fred's book was one of the books that really started the whole reexamination of the Hiss case. Earl Jowitt's book, the distinguished British jurist's book, was very good, but it was strictly from a legal angle and confined to just certain issues. Fred's was a different kind of book, and the issue he did for us sold remarkably well, had a very fine sale. He promptly got a contract to do this book, and it was done as a
Victor Navasky has focused the spotlight on this Allen Weinstein book [Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case]. This is interesting because Weinstein had come to the office when I was still editor. He said he was thinking of doing a book about Hiss, and we all had the impression that he was pretty much of the opinion that Hiss was innocent. I introduced him to some people who could help him in connection with his research, and he did a book review or two for us and other things. Then he phoned me--I've forgotten the date, whether it was a meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington--and he asked if I would take part in a discussion of the Hiss case and the witch-hunt with him.
Gardner
It would be interesting for you to talk to him and find out.
McWilliams
Yes. To show you how these things operate: he was asked to do a review for the New York Review of John Smith's book about the Hiss case. It was a long, long piece and really a kind of hatchet job on Smith's book. I thought, from the point of view of a scholar, it was most unfortunate.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And the New York Review [ of Books] sent
I've always had my mind set on the case. I've never, never felt that Hiss was guilty, for several major reasons, one being that I just couldn't believe Chambers about anything. Not only did he perjure himself, but he perjured himself repeatedly and admitted it. But if you read Witness carefully and you read certain sections of it aloud, I don't see how you can fail to be impressed with the phoniness of it. It just rings false. And that's one reason. Another reason is that I think most of the people who have written about the case have not seen the importance of the November 1948 election--which was a
Gardner
Unfortunately, many other people did.
McWilliams
Many people did. I guess many people still do, because the case goes on. The reason it goes on is because there's a clique of New York intellectuals (literary figures and so forth) that have a big vested interest in Hiss's conviction, in the sense that they came out against Hiss. They unquestionably feel that if it were ever demonstrated that he was in fact innocent, then they are put in a very undesirable role. The role that they played certainly would reflect on them. So they always band together, and they always rally round anytime there's any question raised about Hiss's guilt.
[Richard] Rovere is a classic example. Rovere had a left-wing background, and then he switched completely over. He became a strenuous anticommunist. He was on the executive board of the American Committee for
Gardner
Fascinating case.
McWilliams
Yes, it is.
Gardner
In looking over the Nation, I felt that Fred
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Can you talk about how he came to the Nation and how he came to write for you?
McWilliams
Yes. He had been on the staff of the World-Telegram as a rewrite man--and a very adroit, very skillful rewrite man. Bernard Nossiter, who was an old friend of mine, was on the World-Telegram and had come to admire Fred very much. He told me; he said, "This man is a genius when it comes to organizing materials and doing a rewrite job." For example, he had been working on a case as a rewrite man involving a murder in Brooklyn. Just in going over the copy and looking at it and from studying the reports, he had come across a fatal discrepancy in the case that had been presented. The World-Telegram called it to the attention of the authorities, they reinvestigated, and they saved this man from the gallows! And it was just on the basis of Fred's very careful reading of what had actually happened. You can imagine it had to be a pretty conclusive kind of situation for the police themselves to reverse themselves. Anyway, I got in touch with Fred and got him to do some pieces for us. And in connection with the big issues that he did for us--the Hiss case, the FBI, the CIA,
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
Yes, very talented man.
Gardner
Nicholas Von Hoffman did a piece on you and the Nation back in `72, and he mentioned two of the Cook pieces, especially [the one] Cook did on the CIA in 1961 which was remarkably early for that. And went on to "Juggernaut: The Military-Industrial Complex," which, I think, was the following year.
McWilliams
That's right. If you look at the one he did on the special issue on the FBI and the one he did on the CIA, up to that time the only critical thing that had been really written of any consequence about the FBI was Max Lowenthal's book, which had been suppressed on publication.
And then as a result of it we had some very
Then Arthur Murtagh, a former FBI agent, and William J. Turner, a former FBI agent--they all came to initially because we had done the FBI exposé. This was true
Gardner
Very definitely. The other that I have down under civil liberties and civil rights is the obvious one: the black revolution.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
You picked up on Montgomery very early, and as you mentioned before, you had Martin Luther King writing annual summaries as early as 1961. How did that come about? Did you contact him?
McWilliams
Well, when I went east, I was convinced that I had followed this situation very closely, because in my judgment and experience, the civil rights movement really started during World War II. That's when it began. It then lapsed because of the inception of the Cold War. So from 1945 to 1955 it's kind of a hiatus. It didn't entirely cease, but it was not active. And with the Montgomery bus boycott it suddenly comes back. But when I went east in `51, I was convinced that the whole movement had come to a turn in the road, that the key problem was the South, that until something began to happen in the South this would not be a national movement and you
Gardner
Right. But did you contact King, then, in the sixties, or did he contact you?
McWilliams
I got in touch with him. First of all, a young man came to see me one day. He had just graduated from Columbia, and he had been a student of C. Wright Mills, who was one of our contributors and friends, and he wanted to go south to cover the Emmett Till case. He said he would go down there and cover that trial for us if I would give him round-trip bus fare. [laughter] So I didn't see how we could lose on that kind of proposition, and I gave him the round-trip bus fare. We did better than that by. . . . This was Dan Wakefield.
Gardner
Oh, right.
McWilliams
This is how we first got in touch with Dan,
Gardner
What about some of the other black leaders? Who were you close to? Who were you not close to?
McWilliams
We had excellent relations because, of course, the Nation had been founded really to cope with the problem of blacks in the South after the Civil War. That was really what it was all about, so we've had this historic relation. Villard was one of the founders of the NAACP, and so we had these excellent relationships. Henry Lee Moon of the NAACP and Rayford Logan and J. Saunders Redding, and all of the people of this kind, we had excellent relationships with. They wrote for the Nation, reviewed books for the Nation. We ran the first published
Gardner
What about later on, when the going got rough with the black community, when black power began?
McWilliams
Well, we had difficulty then because you couldn't in all conscience really--at least we didn't think that we could--support some of the things, the tactics, that they were pursuing, and so forth. But we tried; we kept the spotlight focused on what was going on and tried to be as understanding and sympathetic to the situation as we could but at the same time maintaining a certain kind of critical distance. Same thing happened with the protests against the war in Vietnam. We were into this early, but then there came a time when we began to think that a lot of the things they were doing were counterproductive. But we still reported all the major incidences--the marches, the political trials, all the
This happened in so many cases. For example, Vietnam: we ran marvelous pieces about Vietnam very early, very early in the game. Before the French had left, we ran pieces by Alexander Werth and . . .
Gardner
. . . Bernard Fall.
McWilliams
Yes, and others that said it all, as a matter of fact. And we continued this right down through the years. So that by the time the war began to be escalated in '65, it was an old, old story so far as the Nation was concerned--many-times-told story. In the late fifties we discovered some marvelous talent with respect to the Vietnam war. I can't think of this guy's name that wrote--young scholar who was killed in the war stepping on a land mine. He did a couple of excellent books about Vietnam. I'll think of his name in a moment. We published his first writings, and he became sort of a major resource for the American press about Vietnam because this was at a time when the general press was not paying too much attention to it and didn't know much about it, as a matter of fact.
Gardner
That was Bernard Fall, wasn't it?
McWilliams
Yes, Bernard Fall--I just couldn't think of his name. We discovered him. I was tipped off that this young scholar had just gotten back from a recent trip there and might have something interesting to say. I got in touch with him, and sure enough he did. But that was a problem. We had exactly the same problem with China. We were so involved in the folly of American policy toward China that we ran so many editorials, so many articles. And there's a limit. You bore your readers after a while if you just harp constantly. We had really no alternative but to continue harping. We ran superb pieces on China by Edgar Snow, and O.E. Clubb, and [W.] Macmahon Ball, and many others. We just kept hammering away at the thing.
Gardner
Since we've gotten onto foreign affairs, I guess I'll turn to my foreign affairs page. Another area in which you covered lots of ground and were committed all along was the Middle East.
McWilliams
Yes. The Nation had this historic relationship with the old Palestine issue with the leaders of the American Jewish community and was very much propartition and pro-Israel down to fairly recent times. Then the magazine began to take a somewhat different stance, which we felt we had to--not so much critical but pointing
Gardner
For example?
McWilliams
Well, in not really seeing that sooner or later some understanding would have to be reached, that the Palestinians had a point, and you really were going to have to do something about this. The longer you put it off and postponed it, the more aggravated it became. The loyalty of the Jewish readership and the Jewish community to the Nation and of the Nation to them was so well established I don't think they ever really took a grave offense at anything we said, but we lost some of our enthusiastic support--some, some. But that was an issue that we had a long-standing--we usually had a correspondent in Israel that we managed to find one way or another and to keep there by one means or another. We devoted a lot of attention to the Middle East--a lot.
Tape Number: VII, Side Two
(July 17, 1978)
Gardner
Well, the Middle East. There were correspondents there--I remember noticing that. The UN, of course, is another. You mentioned the long commitment of Freda Kirchwey, for example.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
And of the Nation with the UN. You had a UN correspondent for a long time.
McWilliams
That is correct. I recruited Anne Tuckerman, who represented us there. We had others, too, at different times. We tried to focus as much attention on the UN as we could. I think it's one of the tragedies of the situation that the UN has never really captured the attention of the American press to the extent that it should, you know; you'd think that it would. But something about it--the scope, the size, and the way in which issues tend to be protracted--it's hard to cover in one sense, and so forth. It never really has gotten the press that it should have.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
It never has--very unfortunate.
Gardner
Who was Anne Tuckerman?
McWilliams
Well, Anne Tuckerman represented the French press. She still does. She's been at the UN since it
Gardner
As long as you brought them up, you might as well go through them, starting with Alexander Werth. I have down that he was first on the masthead in `59. What was his background?
McWilliams
He had a very interesting background. As a matter of fact, he started writing for the Nation much earlier than that--from the early thirties on. He was born in the Soviet Union--a Scotch father and a Russian mother. The mother died, I think, when he was quite young. He was raised by his father and went to school in Russia. He became very fluent in four or five languages and was there at the time of the revolution. As he wrote in a letter to a friend of his, he said at the time it was all very exciting. [laughter] His father was quite a well-to-do businessman. He was ruined, of course; his business was ruined. He went back to Scotland, and Alex was educated in the University of Glasgow and worked on the
He was probably, of this whole period of the Cold War, the most experienced journalist that we had any contact with. For example, he had covered the Reichstag trials. He had been in Spain. Well, he was in France at the time of the fall of France; he did a very good book about this. France, incidentally, was his real specialization as a reporter; he knew French politics inside and out. Then he had fled to England and had done very fine reports for the BBC and a book about the fall of France, and then had gone to Russia after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union. I think his finest book is Russia at War. He and Henry Shapiro were the two reporters--I think they were--[whom] the Russians let into Leningrad at the time of the seige of Leningrad. And he knew Russia; he was excellent because he knew the language. And he had other insights into it. He was a very good musicologist. He knew [Sergei] Prokofiev very well.
When some of the heresy trials began, he became very disturbed and uneasy about this. The purges started and all the rest of it, and they didn't like what he was writing, of course. Eventually, he decided that he couldn't take it anymore. So he left the Soviet Union,
It's interesting that we got him an invitation from of all places, of all universities, Ohio State through Harvey Goldberg, who was one of our contributors. Harvey was on the faculty there, and we said, "Why don't you invite Alex to spend a year at Ohio State?" So Harvey arranged it, and Werth spent a year there and wrote a book. It was published in Britain. It never was published here, but it should have been. It's called America in Doubt, and it's a marvelous example of how a more or less complete outsider with a certain kind of sensitivity could capture the mood of another country at a certain
Gardner
The first person you had reporting from the United Nations was Jane Stolle.
McWilliams
Yes, Jane Stolle. She had been married at one time to Edward Morgan. Then she and Morgan were divorced, and she married Kirstein. But through the Morgan connection, she had been at the UN a great deal and covered it. So for a few years we used her as our correspondent to the UN.
Gardner
You mentioned Raymond Williams from London. You said you recruited him.
McWilliams
Yes. I've admired his work for years and had admired his work for a long time. I got in touch with him and asked him if we could put his name on the masthead, if he wouldn't do pieces for us whenever he felt like it more or less, and he agreed. He did quite a lot of work for us--very good, too. It was excellent.
I recruited Geoffrey Barraclough when he was still at Chatham House in London and before he had developed a big American reputation. We were the first American publication to publish him. Then he, of course, has developed quite a big following as a journalist here--excellent, very good on the Middle East, for example,
Gardner
Did you have lots of personal contact with these people, or was it mostly by letter?
McWilliams
Both, by letter and in person. For example, Jay [Jacob] Bronowski I got to know very well. This was one of our real services as a publication. I had admired his work for a long time and had gotten him to do a couple of pieces for us. Some years before, I read in Universities Quarterly, I think it is--there I came across "Science and Human Values." I was enchanted with it. I thought it was an absolutely brilliant and wonderful piece. I couldn't believe it had never been published here; they were lectures that he had given at MIT. So I got in touch with him immediately and said, "Can we have the rights to the American publication?" He said sure. So we published it as a special issue at the end of the year. We had to devote an entire issue; the manuscript is quite long. It was a great success, caught on immediately, and we sold thousands of copies. And then it was published here in a hardback edition, published in Harper's Torch Book series and was a great success. Finally, it was reprinted as a book in Britain--years after the lectures were first delivered at MIT and quite some years after we had first published it. And of course the publication of "Science
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
From then on we did other things--special things--and he was always very, very grateful to the magazine and to me. He did all kinds of things for us, and we had a very fine relationship with him. We were responsible, really, for his coming to this country, because when one of the men [Leo Szilard] who was active in the [Salk Institute for Biological Studies] at La Jolla read "Science and Human Values," he said, "That's the man we need to direct our scientific research at La Jolla. He's got a sense of the sciences' responsibilities," and so forth. So it was on the basis of that that they extended this invitation to Bronowski to come to this country. He was interviewed, and they liked him, and he was taken on there and remained there until his death. So we had an excellent relationship with him.
We had very good relations with C.P. Snow, who would come to see us at the office when he was in New York. And Bronowski always did. Any number of writers of that caliber, we had very cordial relations with. Bronowski was a special case because we had a lot to do with his American reputation.
Gardner
You mentioned Claude Bourdet in Paris.
McWilliams
Yes. Claude was a brilliant journalist.
Gardner
Who was C. Amery?
McWilliams
C. Amery was--it was interesting. It was a conference of West German scholars, and I think there may have been some East Germans. It was held at Princeton, and the discussions seemed to be very pertinent and lively and relevant. I got in touch with the people at Princeton, and they said Amery was the man that was primarily responsible for it. So I got in touch with him and invited him to New York and got him to do a piece for us about the conference and that established the relationship.
Gardner
What was his first name?
McWilliams
Damned if I know. [laughter] But he did quite a few things for us over a period of time--was excellent and a very good source of information, and so forth. Then he became the librarian at Munich, and his professional duties were such that he just couldn't seem to find the time to do much writing for us.
We had good people in the Far East. C.P. Fitzgerald.
Gardner
Of Canberra, of all places.
McWilliams
Yes, of Canberra, and W. MacMahon Ball, who had been the Australian ambassador in Tokyo during the war--a very shrewd man who did any number of fine pieces for us and did a book about nationalism and communism in Asia. And if anybody had read it--strictly, any State Department higher-ups had read it--and had pondered it, it would have saved us a lot of trouble in Asia.
Gardner
Well, those State Department members that did probably got fired from the State Department anyway.
McWilliams
Probably got fired anyway. But it was a very perceptive book.
Gardner
An area that was covered quite a bit during the years that I read through was Latin America, and particularly, of course, Cuba, because the whole revolution succeeded during the early years, and then different crises under Kennedy. Do you recall much of the Nation writing on that?
McWilliams
Yes. Here again we had a great advantage because our old contact, Carleton Beals. . . . For example, Villard had at one time given Carleton $100 to go into Nicaragua by burro at the time of the Sandino revolt. Carl went through the back door, so to speak, and found Sandino and got an international scoop! It was a big
Carleton wanted to go to Cuba. This was just about at the time of the transition and also after the transition. So I raised it; I did scare up enough money so that we could pay his expenses to go there. And he did some very perceptive pieces about it in terms of what was likely to happen and why, and so forth.
Then Paul Baran, the economist at Stanford who was an intimate personal friend of mine, phoned me one day and said, "You should get in touch with Ronald Hilton here at Stanford, who's just gotten back from Guatemala and who says that there's a secret base--so-called secret base--down there where the CIA is training men for an invasion of Cuba. So of course I phoned Hilton immediately, and he told me what he had observed, what he had seen in the papers, what he had heard, actually been reported in the papers in Guatemala. I said, "Can I quote you as saying all this?" He said, "Absolutely. Go right ahead." So I did a piece--a long sort of unsigned editorial--about this and said that if this is true, and it does seem to be true, it ought to be investigated immediately because this is a piece of prime folly, you know. This was
Later President Kennedy told the editor of the New York Times, Turner Catledge, "It would have been much better if you guys had published the whole story." And Catledge said, "Well, it was published. It was published in the Nation." [laughter] Kennedy said, "Well, but you know, Turner, it's not news until it's published in the New York Times." But he, I think, really felt that it would have been much better if he had been warned off this thing.
Gardner
And the pressure would have been taken off him, too, because if it had been published widely, then he could have heeded the reaction instead of having to deal with the military invasion.
McWilliams
I let Hilton have the last word, so to speak, by doing a piece called "The Cuban Trap" in which he said that the trouble was that the press had not discharged its adversary role with the exception of the Nation--not discharged its adversary role. It would have been much better
Gardner
Right. [laughter] That was exactly right.
McWilliams
Almost exactly right.
Gardner
Any particular correspondents in foreign policy other than that that you have in mind, or writers?
McWilliams
There were so many things that happened that were interesting.
Gardner
I know. That's why I didn't bother to write down everyone who did it: there were just so many important figures.
McWilliams
For example, Del Vayo once told me that I should get in touch with a Portuguese refugee by the name of Henrique Galvao. So I did, and he did a piece for us about Portugal and the situation in Portugal. And then a year or so later, I was astounded to see this story in the papers where he and his comrades had seized the Santa Maria.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
It was cruising around out on the South Atlantic with British and American warships all hovering around, and so forth. So I sent him a message by way of the radio transmission asking him to do a piece for us. I thought, well, this is just a one-in-100 chance that, first, he would
It's very interesting because when he was still cruising around on this boat, the insurrectionary group in Angola thought that he was probably going to bring the boat to Angola. They staged an uprising. This was their first uprising of the MPLA [People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola], I think it's called, in Angola. (Also the gentleman who is the present head of the Angolan regime [Cuino Agostinho Neto], you know, is an intellectual and a poet. We did a couple of pages of his poetry once upon a time. He's now the head of the regime.) So there was just an endless series of adventures about articles and things of this sort that had happened.
Gardner
Anything else on Africa like that?
McWilliams
Well, we had a lot of stuff about it. We had very good ties and contacts in the Union of South
At the time of the Suez bit, there was all this talk about the Egyptians not having the know-how to take ships through the canal--it's very treacherous and difficult, and it required a great sophistication, and so forth. We got a manuscript from a captain--a sea captain--who had worked out of the Port of San Francisco for years, and he'd also had experience in the canal. He sent us this piece, and he said, "This is a lot of rubbish. Don't believe a word of this. It's not all that difficult at all. They won't have any major difficulties." And he was so convincing-- so totally convincing--in what he said that we decided to run the piece. It was really a ground-breaking kind of piece, because he was right. He knew what he was talking about.
We ran all kinds of pieces that have stories backing them, including pieces by prisoners and convicts who later became pretty well known, like Eddie Bunker, for example. We sort of gave him a boost on his way to fame and fortune, and any number of others.
And a lot of good reporting, as I said, from Vietnam--a lot of good reporting. I discovered that you can finesse a lot in situations of this kind. For example, the networks would send people there who would form their own opinions about what was going on but couldn't really get it across in the networks. They were actually grateful for a chance to do pieces. So we ran pieces by Mike Wallace and Desmond Smith, who was with CBS, and a chap [who] was with ABC--I can't think of his name offhand [Ted Koppel]. We would get pieces from people like this, and then we got foundation grants for people who wanted to go--like William Eastlake, the novelist, who I happen to know. He wanted to go, so we arranged this for him through a foundation. We couldn't have sent him there; we didn't have the money. We got a foundation grant, and he went there. He did some brilliant pieces for us out there, collected in a book called The Bamboo Bed--I think probably the most savage satirical writing about the war in Vietnam--really, really sharp and savage. I found that if you manipulated these sort of things--foundation grants, parlaying what they did for you and selling it to somebody else, using network personnel--you could do a very good job of covering a situation like the war in Vietnam without having a regular correspondent there.
Gardner
And having everybody's correspondents covering.
Your having everybody's correspondents: that was the trick.
Gardner
You mentioned Edgar Snow in China.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Now, of course, he's probably the most important writer on China there was. Did you know him well?
McWilliams
Very well, very well. I knew him in California before I went to New York, and we were great friends from then on. As a matter of fact, I think it's one of the great tragedies of American diplomacy and of American journalism that a man with Ed Snow's background and experience should have been kept in a kind of unofficial blacklist category. The reason that I think this is Ed was not an idealogue. He was just a good reporter! He had been an associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He knew Roosevelt fairly well, and he had excellent contacts in Washington. He was listened to by a very wide audience that had come to respect him as a journalist, and so forth. Then suddenly [he was] put in the doghouse, so he couldn't get anything published. It was outrageous. Here was probably the finest single journalistic resource on China in the country. He knew the leaders of the Chinese revolution personally; he had this personal relationship with them. And not to use this kind of talent, or make his insights available, was outrageous. So we did everything we could
Gardner
Right. To finish up foreign affairs: the foreign editor when you got there and for some time afterwards was, as you mentioned, the person you sublet the house from, J. Alvarez Del Vayo.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Who was he?
McWilliams
Well, Del Vayo was a Spanish socialist who had been a newspaper correspondent for many years. Then he became the representative of the Spanish government at the League of Nations, where he played a brilliant role in connection with the whole fight about Spain, and whatnot. Then he became the foreign minister of the Loyalist government. When the Loyalists were finally defeated, he came to this country. Freda met him, and became very attached to him, and liked him very much indeed, and had him as a kind of foreign editor. He was very helpful to the Nation when they were putting up this fight to keep Franco out of the UN, of course; he was enormously helpful about this. And he had served as a representative in Mexico, and he had had journalistic experience in many South American countries. He knew South America very well, and [he was a] great man of international reputation as a journalist
When Kirstein and I took over the paper, I told Freda that one of the things I would want to do would be to make some kind of new arrangement with Del Vayo because he was not really the person who should have been foreign editor of the Nation--for very practical reasons. He didn't know anything, really, about Washington politics or American politics, and the whole focus of foreign policy was what was happening in this country, how it affected foreign policy. That was one tremendous limitation. The other was he did speak English, but you had one helluva time trying to understand him. And he wrote in Spanish and it had to be translated; the copy had to be translated from Spanish into English, and it was just incredibly, awfully difficult in a weekly where you have short deadlines, and all that sort of thing.
Gardner
So he wasn't really a foreign editor.
McWilliams
No.
Gardner
He was a contributor.
McWilliams
He was really a contributor. So I went out, and when we took over, I raised the sum of money that would be equivalent to the amount that he would be paid if he had been a member of the guild. He continued as a contributor, but not as a foreign editor.
Gardner
I see.
Very gallant man, very intrepid character. He was the subject of a big controversy between the New Leader and the Nation about whether or not he was an agent of the Soviet Union, as the New Leader charged. And this is so humorous to anyone who knew this man because he wasn't anybody's agent. He was a very proud, aristocratic Spaniard, [laughter] and enormously indiscreet--even about his own safety. I mean, the Russians would have had to have been out of their minds to even think of using this man! Not only that, he didn't agree with them to that extent anyway; he was a left-socialist [with an] internationally well-defined, recognized position and reputation. A tremendously interesting man, very interesting. Knowing him was a real privilege. He was great on the issues that he understood, particularly Spain. He was an absolutely marvelous source. He was the best. We had the best kinds of insight into the whole Spanish situation through him, and this continued to be the case.
Galvao died before the regime had fallen in Portugal. Incidentally, Galvao--after this Santa Maria episode--he and some of his colleagues hijacked a plane, flew it over Lisbon, dropped leaflets, [laughter] took the plane back. He did a piece for us about this. But anyway, Galvao died before this Salazar regime was overthrown, and Del Vayo died before the situation had changed in Spain, which
Gardner
When did he die?
McWilliams
Well, I can't give you the date offhand. I did an editorial about it at the time. It was about a year before the situation turned over. But he would have so thoroughly relished the opportunity to go back to Spain.
Gardner
Right. Well, we have a few more minutes on the tape, so I'll just keep going through these. Robert Sherrill was your Washington correspondent for a long time.
McWilliams
Yes. I take credit for having discovered and recruited Sherrill as a correspondent. He had worked for Texas papers, and he worked in Florida for a couple of Florida papers. I got in touch with him and got some quite good pieces from him. He did a very fine piece for us about H.L. Hunt, the Texas tycoon.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
I said to him finally, "Instead of trying to free-lance from Tallahassee or Austin, why don't you go to Washington? And we will designate you as our Washington correspondent. See if you can make a go of it in Washington as a free lance." He said he would try it; he liked the idea, and he went there, and of course he's been a great success. I think in a certain range of subject matter, he's probably the finest American political reporter that
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
He's a splendid correspondent. And the issues--when I say the issues that he understands, [I mean] he knows a great deal about oil and gas, and about Texas politics, about Southern politics--not so much about West Coast politics or Midwest politics. But in the areas that he really knows, he's certainly one of the very best.
Tape Number: VIII, Side One
(July 18, 1978)
Gardner
We finished off a lot of our discussion on the Nation yesterday. I thought we'd finish it up today for the rest.
McWilliams
There was one detail I forgot to mention about the contributors, a special case, and I should mention him--that's Ralph Nader.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
We discovered him when he was still a student in college.
Gardner
Where was he?
McWilliams
He was at--I think it's Harvard. We got him to do some pieces. He was still in college when he did his first piece for us; I remember that.
Gardner
How did you discover him?
McWilliams
We had word about this interest that he had in the automobile, you know. So we got in touch with him, and he did a piece for us. Then down the years he did a lot of pieces for us, and he's been very close to the magazine from that day to the present time.
Hunter Thompson was another. There were, oh, so many, I couldn't start to name them.
Gardner
Right. The Von Hoffman article said that you
McWilliams
That's right. I sent him a report of the attorney general's office in California about motorcycle gangs. As a matter of fact, I had been interested in them before I left California. They were beginning to develop even then. And on a trip to the University of Chicago--or to Chicago when I visited with David Reisman in Chicago--I told him about it. He was very much interested. I sent him the file that I had at that time on motorcycle gangs. So I had a long-standing interest in it. And I knew Hunter in New York slightly.
Gardner
How did you know him?
McWilliams
As a free-lance writer, just happened to know him. And when he moved to San Francisco, I thought he would be just the person for this. I asked him and sent him the report of the attorney general's office, and [he said], yes, he'd do a piece about it for which I would pay him $100. He tells about this in an interview in Playboy and says that at that time he was so broke he would have done anything for $100. [laughter] It turned out to be quite an adventure for him because he got beaten up by one of the gang. I think he got a broken arm or something.
Gardner
Something like that.
But he enjoyed it very much. And as soon as the piece came out--he tells in the interview how he was inundated with offers for book contracts and magazine assignments, and so forth and so on. It was really the thing that escalated him into a free-lance writer's position.
Gardner
Right. And the book, of course.
McWilliams
And the book. That's a very good book, very interesting book. It was one of the nonfiction best-sellers of the year and I think a very good book, very good book.
Gardner
What was he like in his youth?
McWilliams
Well, he was just like he is at the present time. Even before I left the Nation, he used to come in and visit with me from time to time, carrying a six pack of beer, you know, [laughter] clunking it down and just starting to talk about everything under the sun. So we've been friends for a long time.
Gardner
That's curious because I had wondered whether that was an evolved state or one that he was born with.
McWilliams
But he very soon got out of our price range. Of course, this happened again and again and again. It's nothing that you can blame writers for. They want to write where they can make the most money, or most of them do. And so it's a natural kind of process. They move out of
Gardner
Right. Right. Of course a lot of them would continue to write for you, regardless.
McWilliams
Oh, yes; yes, indeed--people like Nader and others who always continue to write for the Nation
Gardner
Who were some of the others? Are there any others?
McWilliams
There are so many I could pick names out of the . . .
Gardner
Well, there was one young writer I discovered who ties into the next subject, which is going to be domestic affairs, named John Lindsay.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Was Lindsay a congressman when he first wrote for you?
McWilliams
Well, there were two John Lindsays who wrote for us. One had been with the Washington office of Newsweek--that John Lindsay. The John Lindsay, the mayor, we knew from the time he was a congressman. I got Fred Cook interested in the case of a Captain Kauffman who had gotten a very bad rap in a court-martial proceeding, and it was entirely undeserved. It was one of those bizarre miscarriages of justice. His brother was in the real estate business in the Village. He came in and got us
Gardner
But he did do some articles for you later on.
McWilliams
Yes, he did.
Gardner
On the city, and so on. The first one on my list--and I guess since you mentioned Fred Cook, it's a good place to start--is the Pentagon and militarism, which is a theme discussed often by the Nation throughout.
McWilliams
Oh, yes. I think the first major piece that we did was a two-part feature called The Big Guns by Matthew Josephson, published as a pamphlet and very widely distributed. Then we did Fred Cook's special issue called "Juggernaut: The Warfare State." Then down the years we did pieces on, I think, every aspect of it: the public relations aspect of the Pentagon (the way they promote themselves), and the retired officer bit, and pieces by
So it was with C. Wright Mills. C. Wright Mills, when I first went east, had his bias against the Nation. He had been influenced by that coterie of New York social democrats who had this bias against the Nation, and he had been some-what influenced by them. I sought him out one time and said, "Look, what's this all about? Whatever feeling you had is really not justified," and so forth and so forth. And I succeeded in convincing him that it wasn't. He did some very fine pieces for us. They had a big influence at the time, and they were just right in tone and manner at that time. And it was a very good relationship. He did a piece for us, for example, called "A Pagan Sermon for the Christian Clergy." It was a very savage piece about their attitude towards military appropriations in the war, and so forth. It was reprinted by church groups all over the country for a long period of time. He did other pieces that had exactly the same response. So we got to know him very well, and his death was really a great tragedy for everyone who knew him. Most remarkable man--I think a better polemicist than a sociologist, but he was just right for us.
What about reaction on the part of the U.S. Pentagon, and so on?
McWilliams
We never had any particular trouble with them. We were aware of the fact that they didn't like these pieces, but they didn't cause us any particular trouble. We got very healthy response to the things that we did about the Pentagon--very healthy--from all kinds of people, ranging from Cyrus Eaton clear across the board to local peace groups. And we did, I think, a very good job, if I do say so, on the peace movement--the early phases. See, the peace movement was virtually obliterated by, say, 1950. I mean, there was nothing much left of it except the old-line, traditional groups, and they had been pushed to one side. Their influence was minimal. Then beginning in the middle fifties, we began to try to help revive it. We had very good historic relations with the traditional peace groups like the War Resisters, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, groups of that kind, Quakers--Quakers were very good friends of ours, traditionally.
But then when we went beyond that in the late fifties, when the whole question about testing in the atmosphere, and so forth, there was a couple of years there when we were carrying on, you might say, a crusade to try and revive the peace movement--to get it going. And it did revive. It became a real force. And some of the articles
Gardner
Did anybody have a broad program?
McWilliams
Not at that time; it was very difficult. We kept insisting in two pieces--excellent pieces by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and others--that it had to have an
Gardner
Would you say that this was the case also in the sixties?
McWilliams
Yes, I would, because by the time you got into the sixties, there was such a disillusionment with politics as politics, it was very difficult to get these young people to see that in the last analysis, you would have to be political, have to assume a political expression. As I said earlier, say what you will about Gene
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
It's also very odd that the liberal Republicans never seemed to get their act together. We had a lot to say about that editorially and in articles, and I was in fairly close touch with some of the liberal Republicans. I talked to them quite freely about what
And this is what happened in connection with Nixon. First, they started with George Romney because Nelson Rockefeller said he was not going to be a candidate. It started with George Romney, and the Romney campaign was terribly bungled--oh, grossly mishandled. Romney realized he was through, so he bowed out very quickly. Nelson Rockefeller bowed out two or three weeks later, and there was Nixon with the nomination in the palm of his hand, just took it by default.
Anyway, that's what we tried to do in connection with the war issue, with militarism, and also with the peace issue. We devoted an inordinate amount of attention to the peace movement as such, because we were not specifically a pacifist publication, even though we were always
Gardner
Where would you say the peace movement is today? Did it pretty well disintegrate after Vietnam?
McWilliams
Pretty much so, pretty much so. Again, I think until they have a political movement--a broad coalition of forces of sufficient potency so that you can propose within all seriousness an alternative program with priorities: "This is what we are going to do; these are our national objectives; we're going to do them and arrange them in this order," and so forth, which would include alternative modes of employment--until you do that, they'il continue to vote for these appropriations, that is, for military procurement in one form or another.
Gardner
Well, since we've gotten into `68 a little bit--it's such a critical time, and I have a note about it. One of the things that you were very close to throughout the years was the posture of youth, not just in America, but abroad as well. There were periodic issues devoted to what's our youth like. There's one in the fifties in which many leading educators give up on youth in general.
That's right. I thought it would be an interesting idea because there was so much talk about. . . . It's so ironic that there should have been so much preoccupation in the late fifties with the question of apathy and conformity, and so forth. So to sort of test this out, in the late fifties I projected this first issue--special issue--and I think a very good one, called "The Careful Young Men [: Tomorrow's Leaders Analyzed by Today's Teachers"]. I think it was good for several reasons. First, instead of going to the faculty people that you might normally expect us to go to, we went to the best writers who were on various faculties, who were primarily literary people.
Gardner
Right. Karl Shapiro.
McWilliams
And Carlos Baker, and people of this sort because they were good writers, and we thought we could get more out of them. We sent them a kind of a letter that I dictated, explaining the nature of the issue and asking them a series of questions: "What do you think about this oncoming generation?" and so forth. The replies were very interesting. None of the contributors had seen any of the others' responses; they sent them directly to us. But there was a surprising kind of unanimity about it. While there were some undercurrents of dissatisfaction--what they seemed on the face of things--the
1. The 1961 issue was entitled "Rebels With a Hundred Causes." The "indignant generation" was contributor Jessica Mitford Truehaft's description used in her article.--ed.
Gardner
Why do you think so?
McWilliams
Well, I think it was the impact of events. But I also think that during that period in the late fifties, they were thinking a lot; there was more going on there than met the eye. I think the apathy was in some respects an illusion. It wasn't quite a fair characterization of what was going on. But there was that intense preoccupation, as there was in the
Gardner
Well, it built up enough until, I suppose, the climax comes in the period from about `67 to `70, probably, with the introduction of the drug culture and then with the Chicago riots.
McWilliams
That's right. I think a critical date, of course, in the sixties is 1965, when Johnson decided to escalate the war. And that marked, really, the terminal date of the civil rights movement--not literally, but that was a high-water mark, because from then on out it was a different kind of situation. And all the money
It's interesting about Johnson because I always had a feeling (we've had some interesting contacts with him) that it was just an outside chance that Gulf of Tonkin and the rest of it to the contrary notwithstanding, that once he had won a spectacular victory over Goldwater--which clearly he was going to win--once he had done that, then he would reverse his field and begin to cut the war back and try and seek an agreement, and so forth and so forth. But the fact is he had laid the plans to escalate the war shortly after he had been sworn in as president. So he never really had any intention of cutting back on the war. And that was a great tragedy because he had some capacities for doing certain things or getting certain things done. When Kennedy ran against Eisenhower, we said we gave two cheers for Kennedy.
Against Nixon.
McWilliams
Well, yes, that's right--Nixon. We said two cheers for Kennedy. We couldn't get really enthusiastic about Kennedy. We never were enthusiastic about Kennedy, and we couldn't get enthusiastic about Johnson, but we thought that Johnson was a better bet surely than Gold-water and that there was a chance that he might have done something; and I think maybe he was slightly preferable on some counts--even that's debatable. So it went, you know.
And Humphrey-Nixon, we didn't make any endorsement. By that time we were quite disillusioned with Humphrey. He'd always been very friendly, and I'd known him personally, and all that. He was a special case in many ways because I don't think he really remembered on Tuesday what he'd said on Monday. I think he quite literally forgot what he said, because he talked endlessly and he just kept this, you know, going-going-going-going. You could fault him on gross inconsistencies in positions that he had taken. Very good on civil rights, very good on labor, but not so good on other issues.
And there, again, was this whole Cold War reflex of some of the people like Humphrey, who'd been overly influenced by their feuds with the Communists, their dislike of Communists, and had overreacted. It put them into a
I read a recent book by Henry Adams about Harry Hopkins; and it had quite an emotional impact on me. Here this man is an ill man--Hopkins--getting his salary as head of WPA of $12,500 a year, and his enemies in Congress wanting to rebuke him cut it by $2,500. He's getting $10,000 a year, and he's directing a billion-dollar WPA program.
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
And that program--say what you will--of course, he was able to do it outside the normal bureaucracies, which made it possible to do it (it would be very difficult to do it today because the bureaucracy would be
Gardner
Staffing, of course, does make a tremendous amount of difference. The 1950s and up through the nomination of Kennedy you were very, very pro-Stevenson.
McWilliams
We were pro-Stevenson, and more so than I think that we should have been. Well, before Stevenson was nominated the first time, we had tried to ignite a movement for W. [William] O. Douglas.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And we did our best to get that moving off the ground, but it didn't catch on. It just never worked, because Truman had indicated that Adlai Stevenson was his favored successor; so that Truman was going to support Stevenson, and Douglas never had a chance. And so we supported Stevenson the first time around. Then after the election in '52, I went out to Illinois and had an
And then I was also quite surprised to discover that he thought that so far as the civil rights issue was concerned that there wasn't very much that needed to be done if you had--he mentioned a couple of things about the poll tax and one or two other things, but that was as far as you needed to go. And this seemed to me to be quite unrealistic. Then on the subject of foreign policy, he also surprised me by a general kind of conservatism. He talked about John Foster Dulles, and he always referred to him as Foster in the course of this conversation:
And then in '56, the thing that influenced us in '56--by '56 we were quite disillusioned with Stevenson. But the thing that influenced us then was Eisenhower's illness, I guess, and the fact that Nixon was right there. If anything happened to Eisenhower, Nixon is president, and this was very disturbing to us. So, again, we endorsed Stevenson, but with less enthusiasm, and I think that the '56 campaign was a disgrace from the point of view of the Democrats. This includes both Stevenson and, I'm sorry to say, Mrs. Roosevelt, because they were so afraid of that Dixiecrat revolt and the consequences of it. They were sort of craven in their attitudes, from my personal point of view, towards the Dixiecrats and towards the whole; they should have been much more in favor of the civil rights movement than they were. And I think Mrs. Roosevelt--I'm not sure
Gardner
Yes, the Nation maintained a fair level of enthusiasm for Stevenson.
McWilliams
We did because of this. We admired his personal qualities.
Gardner
Yes.
McWilliams
You couldn't help but admire his personal qualities, and you couldn't help but deplore many aspects of the Eisenhower administration. But we were very much disturbed by this business that Nixon just might sneak in to the presidency. It was a major consideration. And then, of course, in the '60 campaign we were sort of pro- Stevenson in the sense that we still thought he would be a better nominee than some of the others who were proposed, including Humphrey and Kennedy. And when Kennedy was nominated, we said, "Well, two cheers for Kennedy," but we had our fingers crossed.
We never liked Bobby Kennedy. We always had serious differences with him over, oh, many issues. His behavior as attorney general and the conduct of the prosecution for Jimmy Hoffa--Hoffa was certainly no plaster saint, but those methods were intolerable. You plant an informer in his defense setup--a very corrupt informer, incidentally--and do things of this kind. Outrageous--no--for an
And then we had a quarrel with Bobby Kennedy because he came barging into New York State when he was really a resident of Massachusetts by any fair test--as Pat Moynihan was, as a matter of fact--came barging into New York and in effect forced Robert Wagner, Jr., out of the race. Well, we weren't wildly enthusiastic about Robert Wagner, Jr., but he would have made a good senator in the tradition of his father, and it would have been much better. But if Kennedy had lost . . .
Gardner
Oh, he might not have won.
McWilliams
Well, I think he would have. I think he would have, and we thought this was very unfortunate. As a matter of fact, we endorsed Kenneth Keating, the Republican, which didn't make us any friends in the attorney general's office. Kennedy never had much enthusiasm for the Nation
Gardner
Yet there was one piece that you wrote when Robert Kennedy went to South Africa, I think, the following year.
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
That was very hopeful about Robert Kennedy, that he had reacted very well.
He did. And he reacted very well on some other issues when the Kennedys thought that they could get by that first administration without doing very much about the civil rights issue. They were trying to finesse it. In truth and in fact, they didn't do very much about it. Even when the sit-ins first started and the rest of it began, they were very cool and standoffish. If it hadn't been for the way in which they were pressed by circumstances, they wouldn't have taken the stand that they did, in my opinion. But once they were pressed, to their credit, then they reacted in a creditable way.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And I think, incidentally, that the assassination of Robert Kennedy had a big political impact, because you hook it up with the assassination of King and it was utterly demoralizing in its impact. It just made politics suddenly seem irrelevant to a lot of people, to thousands and thousands of people. I thought at the time of the assassination of John Kennedy, I thought this marked the beginning of a major change in American life in politics, a kind of revolution, but a revolution of a very strange character; I could never actually define it to my own satisfaction. That's why I didn't write more about it than I did, but I had a very profound feeling that this was a major turning point.
In what sense?
McWilliams
For a lot of reasons. It came as such a shock to the American people. And suddenly some of the violence, for example in Vietnam which was beginning to heat up then, you know--violence had come home to roost here. It was such a shock to people--they were so dismayed by it, and so forth--it seemed to me that this was a real turning point in American politics. I think it has proven to be that in a way because we've had pretty much one-term presidents--Nixon, of course, being the exception, but not very much of an exception. [laughter]
Gardner
Before we return to Nixon (we just have a little bit more on this tape side), you ran a poll before the 1956 election among your readers that showed great enthusiasm for Stevenson-Kefauver. I was a little bemused by the conclusions that you drew: that because the Nation represented the liberal segment, this could indicate a greater strength for Stevenson.
McWilliams
I guess we were just whistling in the dark because, of course, Stevenson never had a chance in '56. And because he didn't have a chance, he should have run a different kind of campaign. He would have lost in any case, but if he had run a stronger kind of campaign, it would have been much better for the Democratic party and for the country. As a matter of fact, if he had run a
But then some things began to happen in the international arena and elsewhere. On his first tour of the country, by the time he had gotten to California--it was down in Arizona--he made a speech in Arizona in support of the Smith Act, the Smith Act prosecutions. Shortly after that he approved the discharge of teachers, and so forth. This was totally unnecessary and improper, from my point of view and from a political point of view--most unfortunate. It didn't win him any votes. That vote was going to go to Eisenhower in any case. And if he had run a stronger campaign in those two years, it would have had a better effect on the future. I think that although Douglas would have been beaten in '52 if he had been the nominee, Douglas would have run an entirely different kind of campaign--on these issues--and would have had a much
But on the other hand you could say that Stevenson did hold the Democratic party together in '52 and '56. That may have been his most significant achievement, but he paid quite a price, in my judgment, to hold it together.
Tape Number: VIII, Side Two
(July 18, 1978)
Gardner
Okay, what about Nixon?
McWilliams
Well, I had always been, in a manner of speaking, a student of Richard Nixon, from the time he ran against Jerry Voorhis and from then on. For example, I knew quite a bit--from my former legal practice, and so forth--about the background of the Chotiners, Murray Chotiner and his brother and their activities in the bail-bond business in Los Angeles and the clients that they represented. This was also a factor in my attitude about Nixon. So I watched his career with microscopic care and interest because of his California background. I knew the kind of milieu that he'd come from, and I knew also that--I wasn't surprised that he defeated Jerry Voorhis because Jerry Voorhis was living on borrowed time in that district; that was basically a conservative district. But Voorhis had such a fine reputation as a Christian family, respected for their good deeds and their good work, and so forth, that they were content for a time to make an exception in the case of Jerry Voorhis. But sooner or later he would have been defeated in that district. And at this time, the time had come because it was basically . . .
Gardner
It was the postwar era.
Yes, postwar era and basically a conservative district. After all, Jerry had been in the EPIC campaign, and so forth. So I think his time had come politically. And then of course I had followed Nixon's campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was an old friend. I thought I understood Nixon from the very beginning.
Gardner
What? [laughter]
McWilliams
I think I understood there was really nothing there. Somebody tried to convince me once that those Watergate trials were political prosecutions; and I said they were not political prosecutions, because the fact is that Nixon wouldn't know a political value if it came up and bit him. [laughter] He's not interested in political values; he's interested in power. And there was a most remarkable book [Man in the Modern Age] written by Karl Jaspers, the German philosopher, and published first in Germany in 1931 and then not published here until somewhat later in translation. But it's a book about modern man and society. Jaspers makes the point that with the development of these big bureaucractic organizations-- governmental and private--and the spread of technology, that man becomes lost in the function. If there was anything human about him, it tends to be shorn away or ground up in this meat-grinder process. And I always thought that Nixon was a classic example of it. There was nothing
Gardner
Did you ever meet him?
McWilliams
Actually, and ironically, I never met him. I say "ironically" because we were juxtaposed on a number of occasions, but it just never happened. So I never met him. And Pat Buchanan, who was one of his aides, I had known as a journalist in St. Louis. As a matter of fact, he once did quite a good piece for us about a prison scandal in Missouri. In the '68 campaign I got in touch with Pat and said, "I wish you could set up an interview for me with Nixon. I know he would not be inclined to grant it, but tell him I just want to interview him to get his ideas about California politics, the extent to which it is or isn't different, and so forth." And Pat called me back and said, "Well, he's too busy with the campaign. He thinks it's an interesting idea. Sometime later," and, you know, so forth and so forth. But we never had the interview. It would have been interesting to see what you could get him to say on the subject, because I knew he had some ideas about it.
Gardner
Did you have anybody do firsthand pieces on him throughout this--I know there was a lot of opinion.
McWilliams
We did, well, one by Gene Marine that was,
Gardner
In '62?
McWilliams
Yes, for Life, I think, as a matter of fact. And he'd interviewed Nixon a couple of times, went up to his home in Bel Air, and so forth. That was a very good piece. And down the years we ran some very good pieces about Nixon; you can make an anthology of things that we've said about Nixon. When the Watergate thing started, I felt it was such an ongoing affair and so difficult to project pieces, because you never knew what the next week's headline would be, that I began to do rather long, signed editorials, which continued all during that period in an effort to keep our readers abreast of what was really going on in those hearings. I agree with William Buckley about this: that Nixon was the most important American politician of the thirty years from 1945 to 1975, from the inception
I once asked Leone Baxter of Whittaker and Baxter, the firm--they were very canny people--and I said,
So he is a very strange man.
Gardner
He certainly is. Do you think that it's that emptiness you speak of that enables him to be so resilient?
McWilliams
Yes. And also he has a canny mind about American politics and certain standard ploys and moves--like a quarterback, a professional football . . .
Gardner
His favorite sport.
McWilliams
His favorite sport--things that you do. For example, he has always known that if you come from the right or the conservative section of politics and you are elected to office, the standard ploy is for you to move a little bit to the left of center because you've got your constituency; you've got them in a captive role, and you then can do some of the things that maybe a liberal couldn't do in the same circumstances. He knew this; this
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And begun to make gestures towards the liberal Republicans.
Gardner
Because he had with the Right.
McWilliams
And instead of doing that he cheered the right wing on! He became more vocal and rhetorically more extreme than he had been before the convention. He didn't understand
Gardner
Fascinating. Well, there were six presidents during the time that you were editor or affiliated with the Nation. Did you ever meet any of them personally, interview them?
McWilliams
No. Well, I met Kennedy; I met Truman. I never interviewed them, really, just met them. Well, six presidents--it's interesting to me that six presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats, all felt locked into this war in Vietnam. This is an astonishing commentary on the Cold War pressures, and so forth; that not one of them. . . . And when asked, you know, that one question they would always refer to them as commitments. Well, who had made the commitment? They hadn't made it. Their predecessor. Well, had their predecessor made the commitment? No, he hadn't really made the commitment. See? Here we were in a terrible war for reasons that no one could really spell out. Incredible.
Gardner
Get back to the '68 very briefly. That was sort of the culmination of a lot of different things. We talked about the way it was the culmination of the '65 boundary that you put up. Who covered Chicago for you? Do you remember that?
McWilliams
I covered the Chicago.
Gardner
Did you?
Yes, I was out there. I covered most of the conventions in that period, Democratic conventions. I think I covered all of them. I covered the `64 Republican in San Francisco, which was extremely interesting. And I think I did some pretty good reporting of the `64 convention, the Republican convention in San Francisco, because I said this is a case of a new class, a new kind of class that's emerging in the sun-belt areas that is taking over. They've got the drive and the energy, and they have really targeted this New York, eastern-seaboard Republican elite. If they could push them into the ocean, get rid of them entirely and have control over the Republican party, that would really satisfy them perhaps as much as electing a Republican president. Their primary aim was to get control of that party. And I learned early on that when you cover a national presidential convention, there's not much point in listening to what goes on in the floor of the convention; you have to lock yourself in with certain delegations and see it from the delegates' point of view, to see what's really going on.
And in the Cow Palace convention, I spent a great deal of time with the delegations from South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and particularly South Carolina. And it was very illuminating to me because I did not meet many old-boy southern types. These were hustlers. New kinds
Gardner
What do you think now?
McWilliams
And I think very much the same thing now, because they changed the rule of delegate selection at the Cow Palace convention so that the states that would go Republican in the election would have more delegates the next time. So they had perpetuated this control. And they're going to be very difficult to dislodge. They're going to be very difficult given the fact that the liberal Republicans have a death wish. They don't seem to know how they should move. And they have some very fine talent: Senator [Charles] Mathias, I respect
Gardner
That's very interesting. The radical Right is something that you covered very intensely throughout.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Does this tie in? Do you think that the radical Right is really the group that's there? Or do you think it's a slightly softened version?
McWilliams
I think our politics has been thrown completely out of balance. The two-party system in the
Now, in this kind of atmosphere the radical Right comes along, and it's interesting to note that it came along almost simultaneously with the demise of McCarthy. McCarthy was censured in `54; he died in `57. But in `54 Bill Buckley started, I think, the National Review; this so-called new radical Right developed right in connection with McCarthy's death, so there was a real continuity. There wasn't any break in McCarthyism.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
There wasn't any break. And the radical Right, so-called, was very much a different kind of movement than McCarthyism, although [it was] an outgrowth of McCarthyism because McCarthyism--no one ever accused Joe of being an intellectual. And it didn't attract intellectuals to any great extent. The radical Right is a very
Gardner
Well, there were some congressmen and so on elected that are almost there.
McWilliams
Yes, they're almost there and . . .
Gardner
People like Gary Hart.
McWilliams
And the potential is there. I've seen figures: an estimated 2 million people took part in the Vietnam protests, and so forth, mostly young people.
Gardner
Well, that's something I might debate with you, but that's
McWilliams
I think there's a residual something there, you see.
Gardner
I suspect so.
McWilliams
And there's a potential in the labor movement, if you could ever get--as will happen in due course-- get Meany out of there, because Meany was one of the figures that came in with the Cold War.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
He has played a role of great strategic importance in connection with the Cold War by keeping labor in line and making it an active partner, if you please, in the Cold War.
Gardner
And his coherent opposition--Reuther, for example--died off.
McWilliams
They died off, and so forth. But there are potentials in the labor movement today. There is some quite good leadership. Sooner or later I think it will come to the surface and invest the labor movement with what it lacks so much today. They should realize this now, particularly with Proposition 13 and measures of this kind. They at one time were the beneficiaries of
Gardner
But why did he do it?
McWilliams
For several reasons. First, because there was a Catholic tie, I think. Secondly, because he thought it was kind of good for the labor movement to have one movement of this kind that it was supporting: better this than anything else that seemed to be on the horizon. And for these, and maybe reasons that I don't understand, he has tolerated it and to some extent supported it. But with the exception of this, [there has been] very little in the way of any kind of civic-action movement, where the labor movement could have been so helpful just by lifting its little finger.
Gardner
Of course, labor's opposition to the antiwar movement was one of the great negative forces, great frustrating forces, for the youth.
McWilliams
That is right.
Gardner
The hard-hat attacks in New York, and so forth.
McWilliams
You see, the residue from Vietnam, the
Gardner
. . . and the minorities.
McWilliams
. . . and the minorities--if you could ever pull them together you might have a force there.
Gardner
Think you could?
McWilliams
And I think maybe it could happen.
Gardner
The last time that any sort of coalition like that came together was in the 1930s, and it was mostly because there was such an overwhelming economic problem.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Do you think it would take something like that again to bring them together?
McWilliams
Well, I think there's a great sense on the part of a great many people that we are at a big crossroads, so to speak, in industrial societies all over the world, and that there is a need for new thinking, fresh thinking, new models of what the economy is really like, and so forth. I think there's a receptivity there that could be appealed to. And some of these social action groups that have come along, not Nader so much as some of the others that have been trying to do some new thinking like the one that is headed by Gar Alperovitz, who's an old Nation contributor; we were the first to publish him--movements of that kind that feed ideas, new ideas.
Gardner
Nationally.
McWilliams
Nationally, I just do not see any politics.
Gardner
I wish I could disagree with you, but it's awfully difficult. [laughter]
McWilliams
Yes, I don't see any politics. It's lobbying and public relations and television, and you apparently influence a candidate by leaking stories to the newspaper, and then the other side leaks other stories, and all this is what passes for politics, but this is not politics.
Gardner
Do you see a brightening on the horizon?
McWilliams
I think there will have to be sooner or later. It has to be.
Gardner
I hope so. I think that covers domestic issues, and I think that's a wonderful place to stop discussing that. So I'll move on to the staff that I have listed here.
McWilliams
Sure.
Gardner
We've talked about Del Vayo.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did we talk about Victor Bernstein?
No. Vic Bernstein was a marvelous managing editor, very good. He'd had a lot of journalistic experience, and [he was an] ideal working colleague. He retired, and then we got him to come back and help finish the editing of the special issue that we did for the centennial [September 20, 1965].
Gardner
Ah, that's something else we have to talk about.
McWilliams
And Victor is a dear, dear friend of mine. We couldn't have asked for a finer working colleague than Vic. Marvelous.
Gardner
Where was he from?
McWilliams
New York.
Gardner
A local journalist?
McWilliams
Yes, he worked on a lot of papers around the country. He worked in California at one time. Then he covered the Nuremburg trials, had a lot of experience in connection with Europe, lived in Paris and Berlin for quite a time, knew Europe very well, European politics--very good, very useful.
Gardner
The rest I think are--well, I'll mention names and see how much you want to say about each one. Marion Hess was an assistant editor and then a copy editor?
McWilliams
Yes. She's been there a long time. She's a jewel, a jewel beyond price, a marvelous copy editor, faithful, loyal, devoted worker, dear friend of Freda
Bob Hatch, Robert Hatch, I recruited; I think that's one of the better things I did for the Nation because he's awfully good.
Gardner
Ned Polsky was a managing editor.
McWilliams
Yes. That didn't work out at all. That was quite unsatisfactory. And we had a rotation of back-of-the-book editors, some better than others. We had problems with getting a good back-of-the-book editor.
Gardner
Is that what the managing editor's job really was?
McWilliams
Well, Bob Hatch had charge of the back-of-the-book section, including the columns. But also having the books is such a business in itself; we always tried to have a book editor. We had Warren Miller at one time until his death, and we had Helen Yglesias.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And we had Beverly Gross, who was, I thought, quite good, and Elizabeth Sutherland, who was quite good. But they left. Because in the case of Beverly Gross: she was teaching at Queens College, and I read a piece that she had written for the Antioch Review about the small magazines, so-called, and the handling of books.
Gardner
Pulled her away.
McWilliams
They pulled her away. And we've had that kind of experience. You mentioned poetry. I always strongly favored the policy which we established (I helped establish it) of rotating the poetry editorship. But of recent years--and I think it's unfortunate; Grace Schulman is an excellent poetry editor (this is no reflection on her; she, too, is a personal friend)--but they haven't rotated. They've sort of abandoned this rotation idea, and I think it's unfortunate because you get far more unsolicited poems than any other type of manuscript, far more. And if you are not careful, any poet is going to have certain preferences. Then all the other poets think that they're excluded by categories. You can, I think, get a better effect and get better poetry by rotating it. We've had some excellent poetry editors.
Yes, you have.
McWilliams
Denise Levertov and many others, first-rate.
Gardner
Right. Well, one thing that's interesting to me is that you brought a special sensitivity to the back-of-the-book [section] that an ordinary editor might not have had because you had started out in literary criticism. Did you pay a lot of attention to the back-of-the-book? Did you keep up with what was going on there?
McWilliams
Well, the genesis of the problem about the back-of-the-book was Margaret Marshal's leaving in 1953. Now, she had for years--twenty years or more--been the back-of-the-book editor, and she and Freda had been intimate friends, and all that sort of thing. Then the Cold War came along, and Margaret Marshal tended to identify with the Cold War intellectuals.
Gardner
Really?
McWilliams
Yes, she did. And people accused--this is a completely phony charge--they accused Freda of easing Margaret Marshal out because of her views. And nothing could be further from the truth; nothing could be further. Freda was so imbued with this Nation tradition that the back-of-the-book should have almost autonomy. And I don't agree with this: I think it has to be supervised like any other section of the magazine. But she was so impressed with this that she would never have dreamed of suggesting
Gardner
Very interesting.
McWilliams
Not a word. And then after that there was a period when we didn't have a book editor, and I think some of the best work we've done with books was done during that period because we relied on people in certain categories. For example, history, William Appleman Williams: sent him all the books on history, had him sort them out, tell us which ones should be reviewed, deserved to be reviewed, which ones didn't, suggest possible reviewers, do some himself and do listings of the ones that he thought deserved the least mention. Same way with sociology, and so forth and so forth. Now, for two years, I think it was, this worked very well. I think it's not a bad way to handle the back-of-the-book section. But I do think the back-of-the-book section of a magazine like the Nation has to be supervised, because no one person, particularly a person with strong literary feelings, is going to be able to pick out all of the books that should be reviewed in a magazine like the Nation. There is that important economic book of the year that comes along, and how is
Gardner
Right. Oh, we talked about Robert Hatch yesterday, didn't we?
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
He came originally as a film reviewer.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Which I thought was very interesting.
McWilliams
He's always been very much interested in films. He still does the film column. As I said, he was originally with the New Republic, and when New Republic moved to Washington, he didn't go with them. He couldn't leave New York.
Gardner
He found another home.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
The drama critic when you arrived was Joseph Wood Krutch.
McWilliams
That's right. And he had left on his own steam, so to speak, because he had retired from--he was in the process of retiring from Columbia, and also ill health in part. [He] moved to Arizona. He was the first
Gardner
Harold Clurman came in there.
McWilliams
Well, anyway, I got Clurman to come in--an excellent choice. You couldn't improve on Clurman.
Gardner
How did you get him to do it?
McWilliams
Well, he just happened not to have an outlet at the time. He'd been producing plays . . .
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
. . . and so forth, but we just happened to catch him at the right time.
Gardner
You only had a few music critics. I think that's true, music and art.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
The first one was B. H. Haggin.
McWilliams
That's right. And the Haggin story would be a small novel because Haggin is quite good in a way. But he is idolatrous. Toscanini is one thing, and the second thing is that--this tends to be true of music critics--they're interested in records. And we began to be sort of irritated by Haggin because if they show an interest in records and review records, then the people that make records will send them what they want,
Gardner
What happened to him afterwards?
McWilliams
Well, he did music reviews for a number of publications. I think he still does.
Gardner
And still continues to collect records.
McWilliams
And still continues to collect records. So I didn't think that that was a very good choice. I didn't know anything about music, but just from a--well, for example, this is a B. H. Haggin story: he brought in two long pieces about Olin Downes, the music critic for the New York Times. [It was a] venomous, personal attack on Olin Downes. I showed them to Bob Hatch, who was not yet a member of the staff, whose judgment I respected. I went over the whole situation with Kirstein, and I said, "These I'm going to have to reject. I think there's trouble in it, probably libelous. In any case this kind of personal attack is inappropriate for a magazine; there's
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
We had a problem with art and architecture, and I think we've had some very good people. Maurice Grosser, I think, was one of the best we ever had as an art critic, simply because Grosser is a fine artist himself, and he has a remarkable talent for explaining to a person that doesn't understand painting why this is a good painting. He just doesn't say that it's a good painting, but it's a good painting for these reasons. So if you read Grosser and then went to a show you could see more than. . . .
Gardner
Understand.
McWilliams
You could understand more, and you could see more. I thought he was excellent.
Let me finish up the music people first . . .
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
. . . since there are only four, and then move to art. Lester Trimble succeeded Haggin.
McWilliams
Lester Trimble was very, very nice, very good. I would think not the greatest music critic of the world, but very good, knowledgeable, good.
Gardner
His successor, Benjamin Boretz, was a professor of my sister's at NYU.
McWilliams
Yes, Ben Boretz was a much better critic.
Gardner
And he lasted a long time, too. He was there from `62 to `70.
McWilliams
That's right. He was much better.
Gardner
Had you solicited him?
McWilliams
No, I think Hatch was responsible for that.
Gardner
Oh. How come he left?
McWilliams
At this date, I just don't remember.
Gardner
Then David Hamilton is the most recent.
McWilliams
Yes, David Hamilton is the most recent.
Gardner
Okay, under art, Max Kosloff was . . .
McWilliams
Max Kosloff was there, and Max Kosloff was, I thought, very good. Some of the things he first did for us resulted in his getting a contract for his first book of art criticism; it's a good book. And Max is a very nice guy. I like him. I like him very much. I
Gardner
Hilton Kramer also did art criticism for you.
McWilliams
Yes. I'm not too pleased with that. I think Hilton Kramer--I don't know how that ever happened, really, probably through Hatch, because by then Hatch was in charge of the columns. But Hilton Kramer has a strong political bias. He is a "Cold Warrior," vehement, "anti-Communist"--put it in quotes--and he can't resist getting into these feuds. I think it's unfortunate. Apart from his being an art critic--as I was leaving for a trip to Europe, he phoned up and he wanted to review Ella Winter's book. It sounded like a reasonably good idea, and I hadn't quite learned all the things you need to know as an editor, so I said all right. I told people in the office to send him Ella's book. The only reason he wanted to review that book was to zero in on some of her ideas about art in her personal collections, and he made it a kind of a personal hatchet job. And Ella's an old friend of mine, so it was kind of embarrassing. But I was away at the time the review appeared, so I couldn't do anything about it. But I learned then to regard with great hesitation any request from anyone to review a book: either they want to do a hatchet job on it, or the author
Gardner
The last art critic that I have listed is Laurence Alloway.
McWilliams
Yes. Alloway has been there for quite some time.
Gardner
Since 1970.
McWilliams
Yes. I think he's quite good. Art is not my field; I'm not in a real position to say, but I think he's quite good.
I think Hatch is very good on movies, although I have a quarrel with him--not a quarrel but an argument I've never been able to resolve. Hatch only wants to review the film that interests him. And I've said to him again and again, "Bob, it doesn't make any difference. This film has got great social and political overtones; it's a cultural phenomenon. It's a dog of a movie, but we should pay attention to it." But he has very little interest--for all of his great merits--very little interest in any movie that doesn't interest him. So he tends to review the artistic, very good movies. Well, that's all right, but it isn't broad enough perspective, in my judgment, for a motion-picture critic.
Tape Number: IX, Side One
(July 18, 1978)
Gardner
I'm running out of names, but there are some more that I wanted to go through. In the poetry section you mentioned a couple, and I'd like you to talk about some of them in greater detail, and so on. But first of all, M.L. Rosenthal was your first poetry person . . .
McWilliams
Yes, excellent.
Gardner
. . . for a long time.
McWilliams
Long time, very, very good, excellent.
Gardner
Your relations were good, I suppose. . . .
McWilliams
Oh, yes, still to this day, very good, very good.
Gardner
Then David--I can't pronounce his name--Ignatow . . .
McWilliams
Ignatow.
Gardner
. . . took over for a year.
McWilliams
Yes, he was good. And there were a couple of other people in there.
Gardner
Maybe so. They may have done the poetry, but weren't on the masthead; I just took [the names] off the masthead.
McWilliams
That's right. I don't know whether Bill Merwin was ever poetry editor or not.
Gardner
No, he just contributed.
He was helpful to us in bringing poetry that he thought well of. We had a very close relationship with W. S. Merwin.
Gardner
When you say "we," does that mean you personally as well?
McWilliams
Well, it means me, but he was also a personal friend of George Kirstein.
Gardner
I see. Now, of course, you were very interested in poetry. Your first works had to do with poetry.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Did you follow the poetry section closely?
McWilliams
I just kept an eye on it, you know, to see what was going on. There were certain arguments I could never win at the Nation. [laughter] And I just gave up. I couldn't get them interested in--couldn't get Hatch, in my judgment, sufficiently interested in popular culture--an awful time about television.
Gardner
You had a TV reviewer for a while, Ann Langman.
McWilliams
Ann Langman. We had others. Now we have a chap who, I think, is quite good. But it was very difficult to get any attention focused on television despite its enormous impact and influence. And another thing I had trouble about: I was always opposed to the idea in general of reviewing a book of poems unless it was something very, very important and special. I much preferred to look at
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
This argument I had great difficulty in winning, and I lost it repeatedly, and the same thing with respect to other areas of book reviewing. I like the idea that the British do so well, the sort of survey piece.
Gardner
New York Review of Books.
McWilliams
Yes, and the New York Review of Books to some extent. It was very difficult to get, for reasons I don't understand. But it was always difficult to get this idea across at the Nation.
Gardner
Could you, as editor, put your hand down and say this was what you were going to do?
McWilliams
I could have, but I didn't. I was so busy with other things that we would discuss it, then forget about it.
Gardner
Right. Some of the other poetry people--John Logan was there for three years.
McWilliams
Yes. Yes.
Gardner
Allen Planz.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Anything particular to say about any of those people, feel free.
McWilliams
No.
How did Denise Levertov come to the Nation?
McWilliams
I don't know, but she was a jewel. I thought she did a splendid job, and she's a beautiful person. I'm just enchanted with her as a person. She's a very delightful human being and was very nice to work with. And she had very interesting political ideas; she was very aware of what was going on in the world.
Gardner
Right. She and her husband were both involved very strongly in the antiwar movement.
McWilliams
Yes, very much so.
Gardner
Let's see. Talk about some of the book editors. You mentioned Elizabeth Sutherland very briefly.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
She was only there a short time.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
And Grandin Conover also a very short time.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Warren Miller was there, though, for three or four years, I think.
McWilliams
Last years of his life. Last years of his life. He did, I think, a respectable job, but he was ill even during that time. He was not quite up to snuff.
Gardner
How did you happen to bring him in?
McWilliams
This was another case when I was away on a European vacation. I've forgotten the circumstances, but
Gardner
Is that why there was an assistant literary editor?
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
Helen Yglesias.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Helen Yglesias, of course, comes from a fascinating family.
McWilliams
That's right. [Her husband] Jose--and their son [Rafael] writes too, yes.
Gardner
Four or five novels. Emile Capouya was there from `71 at least until the time you left.
McWilliams
Yes. Yes.
Gardner
How did you bring him in?
McWilliams
I had known him for a long time and liked him very much. He's a very nice, very nice person; I'm
Gardner
Now let's talk about that hundredth anniversary.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
Because it occasioned both a huge issue in the Nation and a book [One Hundred Years of The Nation], a retrospect, for which you did an introduction.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
How did you go about putting it together?
McWilliams
Well, we were approaching the centennial, and also Kirstein was in the process--he had announced that he wanted to be relieved of his publisher's responsibilities. His wife knew James Storrow, or she knew Mrs. Storrow--that's the way it was. So he met Storrow
And I think they put together a very good centennial issue. And we couldn't bring it out right on the centennial date, because it would have been in the middle of the summer--July 5 was the actual date--so we brought it out in the fall [September 20, 1965]. We thought this would sort of wind out that decade. I mean, more than the centennial, it was a good time to do it because things were changing. Kirstein had been there a decade, and Storrow was coming in as publisher, anyway. So that's the way it happened.
Gardner
Is there anything in that issue that stands out in your mind?
McWilliams
There's quite a good history of the publication up to a point--he didn't bring it down to date--by
Gardner
You wrote an introduction for the anthology . . .
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
. . . that I found to be a very modest introduction, in that you really only dealt with the period up until and partly through Freda Kirchwey.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
It was mostly historical background. Is there any reason you left your own fourteen years out?
McWilliams
Well, it would seem kind of self-serving to get into it, and so forth. But mentioning that centennial issue reminds me of another contributor that I was very proud of, and that's Christopher Lasch. I think he did excellent things for us. My habit was to put together bales of papers about a subject that intrigued me, you
And the same technique worked very well with Ted Roszak, Theodore Roszak, because I had this pile of material, and I said to him, "You look at this." He had just gotten back from a year in England, which is interesting. He was the only American secretary of this big peace movement in England, and he'd gotten it by running an ad in the Nation magazine. [laughter] So he'd spent a year in England, and I just gave him this batch of material. I selected him deliberately because he is a very interesting guy. He is very curious, very curious mind, and is not put out at all by the most outlandish kind of idea or suggestion. He just regards it as coolly as you please. "Let's take a look at it," you know, that kind of mind. I thought he would be ideal for it because he'd done some excellent pieces for us. So he examined it, and four of the eight chapters of The [Making of a] Counter Culture, his book on the counterculture, appeared in the Nation and were based on the materials that I had given him; they were the same subject. When I gave it
Gardner
Is that a method that you use yourself a lot, accumulation of materials?
McWilliams
Quite a lot.
Gardner
Where would you gather them from?
McWilliams
Oh, well, all kinds of sources. I'm a tremendous clipper of newspapers, and building files. Ted's book on the counterculture, incidentally, was a huge success, as you know. It sold well over 100,000 copies. He had the curiosity and the interest, and he saw it as something new; and he looked at it kind of sympathetically but critically, too. So it was a good combination of material and author.
Gardner
Right. As a clipper of papers, what papers do you regularly read?
McWilliams
Well, we got a tremendous volume of publications in the Nation, mostly on an exchange basis. And then papers we subscribed to: I always saw the Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle, a Boston newspaper (varied them a bit), the Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Washington Star.
Gardner
New York Times.
New York Times, of course, St. Louis Post Dispatch. And on the magazines we got on exchange, Business Week and all the others, Wall Street Journal. And British publications--the Manchester Guardian, and the Observer.
Gardner
No wonder you hadn't the time to write books.
McWilliams
No wonder, of course. I not only had no time to write books, but Philip Rahv once used the phrase cultural amnesia that overtakes editors. I know exactly what he had in mind because I had suffered from it after coming to the Nation. I used to have a very good memory, an exceptionally good memory, for titles of books, authors, and what it was about, and so forth. And then during the years at the Nation I read very few books--no time to read books. And it's amazing just what--reading the manuscripts and sending them back and rejecting; working on manuscripts, and editing; and then seeing it in galley proof, and then reading it in page proofs; and going through this kind of routine week after week after week: It will drive almost everything out of your mind. I discovered that I had forgotten a lot. You ask me what the plot of such and such novel was, and I would have to scratch my head about this, because I hadn't thought about it in a long time. And so many other thoughts had been going through my mind in the meantime.
Gardner
And you were dealing with such a wide variety
McWilliams
Oh, yes. Yes, punishing variety of subjects.
Gardner
What books did you read when you had the time to read books? What sorts of things?
McWilliams
Well, I liked to read biography, I liked to read social histories, and I liked to read sort of realistic novels. But my judgment of fiction is pretty erratic. I'm not the best judge of fiction.
Gardner
Who do you like these days?
McWilliams
Well, I don't read enough modern fiction to have an informed judgment, largely for the reason I've just indicated. But it is odd. It is disturbing what [happens] getting involved in routines like this over an extended period of time. I used to look forward to a vacation period because then I could maybe take a couple of books along of my own choice that I wanted to read with no ulterior thought in mind, just read for the pleasure of reading. And I could do that very rarely because I took stuff home almost every night to read, and weekends the same thing.
Gardner
Right. Looking back over your years at the Nation, what do you consider to have been your high spots, your greatest accomplishments?
McWilliams
Well, such as they were, just keeping the magazine alive was certainly the most important one. I
Leonard Downie, in his book on muckraking [The New Muckrakers,] says we kept the muckraking tradition alive--says that I did, being more specific--and I think that's true. I think that in the fifties it had sort of gone over the hill, so to speak. There wasn't much journalism of this kind. And we, I think, certainly revived it with some of the things that we did, the special issues, and so forth, and the subject matter we brought into the arena of public discussion, we removed the taboos from. I think that was reviving the muckraking tradition and certainly would be on that list of things we accomplished.
Then after we'd done this, the movement went ahead of us. First Newsday set up an investigative-reporters team. Then the Associated Press set up a team of investigative reporters, and one of the Philadelphia papers had an excellent team of reporters. Other papers began to do it. They could sort of take the ball away from us because they could spend a lot of money; it's a very
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And we did it. We did it not through direct investigations so much as pulling materials together as Cook could do, organizing them, making sense of them, and so forth. And incidentally, this was one of the things that the original muckrakers understood: that it wasn't enough just to investigate a subject, but you had to do it in a way that made sense to the reader, that he could grasp what it was really about. They were very good at this. Muckraking had fallen to disfavor, and we brought it back to high favor, so to speak. And then it suddenly had these investigative-reporter teams. You had the alternative press, and you had a lot of things happening. And at one point in time--as the Nixonites would say--[laughter] there were some very good and some hopeful signs of documentaries. There were some very good documentary television filmmakers at one time, and then that went out of the picture. Documentaries now are few and far between, the good ones.
Gardner
Oh, there still are some.
McWilliams
There are some; there are some, indeed. And those two things, and also the consistent attack of what we did with regard to the defense of civil liberties and civil rights, civil rights in particular--I think we did
One of the very significant things that happened was the pay-as-you-go tax plan, and the payroll deduction. Because very shortly after all of this was set in motion, the average American salaried worker, you ask him, "How much do you make at such and such plant?" he would give
Gardner
In looking back, are there any things you would have done differently? I'm sure there are.
McWilliams
Oh, yes.
Gardner
Any major issues you would have dealt with differently, any points of view you might have taken?
McWilliams
Well, I'm sure I could pinpoint a lot of things that we would have done differently. I think we would have perhaps been more inclined to be indifferent to the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaigns. I think we went a little bit overboard for Stevenson, for reasons that I've indicated.
Right.
McWilliams
There are other things where the political emphasis was bungled. I think we should have been more critical about Johnson at the outset and should have realized that the chances of his not going ahead with the war were minimal. But we did sort of feel--for a bit--that he intended to do what I've suggested, but there was no basis for it. I don't know.
Incidentally, I think we did a very good job with labor all through this period. We had excellent copy; we had some very good labor people who wrote for us. I think that was a first-rate accomplishment. I think we could have done better with the economy somehow, to make people realize the connection between overseas aid programs, Marshall Plans, and all the rest of it, and the way it fed back into the economy here. This was kind of an unreal prosperity that was being generated. And the neglect. . . . You talk about the crisis of New York City--well, most of the major cities have been in crises in a sense since World War II, you know. They couldn't do certain things during World War II; they had to hold back. The idea was, "Wait a bit, the shortages will be eliminated, the prices will come down, then we can do this and that," and they kept postponing doing things. There's a long neglect of major urban problems in the United States, and we could
Gardner
Did you have special handling for New York since it was your location? Did you go out of your way to do more pieces about it, or did you try to retain a national perspective?
McWilliams
I tried very consciously to get more of a national perspective into the magazine. We ran for a time a page called "Around the USA." I tried to get local pieces from clear across the country, the most remote unlikely places interested me the most. You have to put a great deal of effort into that because the New York media scene tends to be compulsive, and you tend to get caught up in it and to write about what seems there to be the big thing of the week or at the moment, and so forth. And it very seldom is all that important, really. So I did try to put a great deal more emphasis on developments out across the country than my predecessors had done.
Gardner
On the other hand, as a California historian and a great fan of Californiana, did you find yourself leaning toward California as a subject?
McWilliams
Yes, I did; I did, indeed. It was so easy;
Gardner
You had some good correspondents out here, too, and I don't think we've really--we've mentioned Gene Marine. He also did a lot of writing for Frontier.
McWilliams
And Phil Kerby and Hannah Bloom, and in labor, Harry Bernstein.
Gardner
Now with the Times .
McWilliams
Now with the Times and, oh, lots of people.
Gardner
Kenneth Rexroth did a . . .
McWilliams
Oh, Kenneth Rexroth did a lot of things for us. He's a great friend of mine--long, long-standing ties and relationship with Kenneth.
Gardner
Is that so?
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
How? Dating to where?
McWilliams
Oh, way back. Almost from the time I went
And from the campus trips, I developed lots of contributors I thought were very good, people like Allan Seager, the novelist.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
A whole host of people. The tradition of the magazine, as I said previously, tended to be eastern seaboard. Godkin thought that was sort of the center of the universe, and Freda had some of the same idea. They were primarily interested in things that were centered there--perfectly natural given their respective backgrounds, just as it would be natural given my background to be more interested in the rest of the country.
Gardner
Well, when you left the magazine you left it in the hands of the Boston Brahmins.
McWilliams
Yes, I did.
Gardner
Have you found any change in the emphasis?
McWilliams
A bit. The point I would like to make is that I resigned as editor of the Nation. As editor I was never a member of the Newspaper Guild, so there was no severence pay situation involved here. And I had a very profound intuition that the time had come when I
Gardner
And the chapter ended. Well, what do you think about what's happened to the Nation since you left?
McWilliams
Well, I think it's been quite good in some respects. I think what [Victor] Navasky has done about the Hiss case is excellent. I think they've done some excellent pieces. I've urged them to be more interested in the rest of the country. It's very difficult because they're reorganizing, and they're so preoccupied. They're
I think the editorial part--I don't quite agree with the way they do editorials and the way they handle editorials. I was always a great admirer of Walter Lippmann's editorial style: Keep it as simple and as plain, and make it as forceful as you can; avoid quotations if you possibly can, or references; keep it confined to a subject--a subject--and don't try to write it. Don't try to make it, you know, "written." I think they tend to want to write too much--know what I mean?--with flourishes and cadenzas, and so forth. I think that's all right in its own place, but I don't think it has anything to do with an editorial section.
Gardner
Particularly with the Nation.
McWilliams
And particularly with the Nation, that's right. So I don't quite agree with the way they do editorials.
You still do pieces.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
I suppose you'll continue to.
McWilliams
For the time being I will, yes. And if I can help them in any way, they know all they have to do is phone. I try not to interfere with them in the slightest degree. People want me to submit manuscripts, and so forth. I tell them, "No, you just go ahead and submit them." I don't want to try and make them think I'm pressuring them in any way, accept a piece or do this or do that or the other.
Gardner
What do you think about the future of the small independent magazine?
McWilliams
Well, it's got very, very serious problems, these small circulation magazines. Yet the survival potential for some of them, particularly for the Nation, is, I think, quite good because the Nation has this solid base of libraries and institutional readership and other newspapers, and so forth. It's got a real base to build on. It is relatively low, very low in terms of its editorial costs, its overhead costs. So it's got a good chance of survival. And I think the role and function of these small magazines of opinion is more important than ever in this big mass-media world and all the rest of it. I think they are more needed and more necessary and they
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And actually, the whole relationship has changed, so that the magazine pays the supermarket for the display slot that it has. Developments of this kind--and television, too, of course--are making it very, very difficult. And I think the subscription price on the Nation is too high. I would greatly favor reducing it, taking a chance on it, because a lot of people that would like to subscribe to the magazine feel that they can't, young people in particular.
Gardner
Right, which is the important constituency.
McWilliams
Very important constituency--young assistant instructors, and so forth, and students. But they can't. The Newspaper Guild contract is there; they have to meet the guild requirements. And every cost has gone up, as
Gardner
We talked very briefly about what the field was when you first came into it, what some of the other publications were. What are they today? Pretty much the same ones?
McWilliams
Pretty much the same ones.
Gardner
I remember we talked about New Leader.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
Commonweal, New Republic.
McWilliams
Christian Century and New Republic, the Progressive--same group of publications. The Reporter has dropped out, but there's basically--but of course you have Rolling Stone, and you have other publications of this kind. But I don't see that they really fit into this category.
Gardner
Of course Rolling Stone has outstanding
McWilliams
It does indeed. Yet I don't have the feeling it's read the way people read these other publications.
Gardner
Not the same way they read the Nation.
McWilliams
That's right.
Gardner
The Nation doesn't tend to have as many ads for guitars.
McWilliams
That's right. I think these magazines, as I say, have very, very tough problems. The people don't understand the importance of supporting magazines of this kind. Once upon a time I did a survey of quite a considerable number of contributors who had written for the magazine. And the whole point of the survey was to find out, "Are you a subscriber? Have you ever been a subscriber to the Nation? If not, why don't you subscribe to the Nation? What have been your reasons for not subscribing?" Well, the answers were predictable: a great many of them were not subscribers. They were obviously reading it in the university library. These were people who would almost knock your door down to get a piece published in the magazine, but feel no responsibility to see that there were some outlets for the kind of thinking that they practiced. They don't seem to sense this as any kind of responsibility of theirs.
Gardner
Right. Buy a copy of Writers Market rather
McWilliams
Yes, that's right; that's right. That was in general the kind of attitude reflected. If all of the people that submitted manuscripts to the Nation were subscribers, they wouldn't have a problem in the world.
Gardner
Do you think that's true of the other magazines as well, or do you think the Nation had. . . ?
McWilliams
I think it's true of them, but I think it's particularly true of the Nation because it's so well known.
Gardner
And its long tradition.
McWilliams
And its long tradition. But there's a tremendous flow of manuscript material. And I sympathize with them; there are limited outlets, you know. But this is all the more reason why they ought to do what they can to support it. And even though the subscription price has gone up, they spend money for all kinds of other purposes not as sensible as subscribing to the Nation. You know? [laughter]
Gardner
Right. Well, let's end our session for today on that note.
McWilliams
Okay.
Tape Number: X [video session]
(July 19, 1978)
Gardner
First of all, as I mentioned to you, the first subject that I wanted to discuss today was the ACLU of Southern California, and then nationally as well, because we do have a very strong archive on that downstairs and because I've done some interviewing in the area. We talked briefly about your seeing Upton Sinclair at the beginning in the 1920s. When did you first get involved with ACLU and in what way?
McWilliams
Well, I don't exactly remember, but it would be in the early thirties. I can't remember the years in which I served on the local board, but I did serve for some time on the local board, and I did handle a few cases for them, not many. They asked me to defend some Mexican citrus strikers out near Whittier--I remember doing that and one or two other issues that I handled, but I wasn't active as a counsel for the ACLU.
I knew Dr. Clinton J. Taft very well, and the late Al Wirin was a close friend. I knew him and the other board members, of course. Then I would go with Dr. Taft on his annual fund solicitation meetings in San Diego and other communities. I remember this with some amusement because he had saved a big box full of pencils which
Gardner
Did you alter your pitch according to what the responses were?
McWilliams
No, no. There was no point in trying to do that, because most of the people that turned out for those meetings were old friends of the ACLU anyway.
Gardner
What was your function as a board member, or what were your functions?
McWilliams
Well, we met from time to time to discuss policies and whether we should get into particular cases, and that sort of thing. But as it usually worked out, Al Wirin was a jump or two ahead of us. [laughter] He would get into cases before the board had authorized it or had known much about it. And I think it was good that he did. I remember one case that made Dr. Taft very annoyed was Al's racing off to Gallup, New Mexico, to defend some strikers. But actually he did exactly the right thing. He acted very quickly to get down there; it was a case
Gardner
Were there any conflicts on the board that you participated in and battled over?
McWilliams
Well, there were a number of issues that we discussed at some length. And most of our controversies were with the national board or, more specifically, with Roger Baldwin, who I think was disturbed by the presence on the board of Leo Gallagher. He wasn't originally, but he became disturbed with the presence of Leo, who had a reputation for being--and I think was perhaps--a member of the Communist party. But the point about Leo was that he was really dedicated to civil liberties, and you couldn't fault his conduct as a board member. He hadn't done anything on the board that any of us could take exception to, so we continued to defend him and to defend his presence on the board, and I think this annoyed Roger a bit.
Gardner
During what period would this be?
McWilliams
I can't quite remember the years in which this was true. But the finale to the story is that some years after this particular controversy, Leo broke with the Communist party with a resounding thud, and this had reverberations all through the Left community. And it
And there were other issues of that kind that came up, and we had our disagreements, but it was fun serving on the board. I enjoyed it; I always enjoyed those meetings. Clore Warne was a board member and was a very dear friend of mine, and I can't recall offhand some of the other board members. Then, of course, when Eason Monroe came down, I--it just so happens that I had known about Eason's difficulties in San Francisco and the fact that he was looking for a position of some kind. I reported back to the board here in Los Angeles, because just at that time they needed a new director. I said this person I think would be admirable, and that's really how they came to consider Eason's application.
Gardner
Was he aware of this?
McWilliams
Yes, yes; he was. I think he was a very good director, excellent director. That's my impression, certainly.
Gardner
Did you get to follow his years out here closely? Because after all, those were the years that you were in the East.
McWilliams
No, no; I didn't. I would see him from time to time when I was out here, because I've been out here
Gardner
Why don't you give some of your own perspective on some of these people? I'll start with Eason as long as he's the most recently mentioned.
McWilliams
Well, he was admirable. He had sensitivity, he had understanding, and he had energy, and he had presence, good speaker, and all that sort of thing. And I think, if I may say so, [he was] a better director than Dr. Clinton Taft. Dr. Taft was a very old-fashioned kind--and limited civil libertarian. As it developed, he wasn't exactly a partisan of Gerald L.K. Smith's but he came very close to being; there was that kind of element in his background. So he really was, let's say, a rather primitive civil libertarian and limited in his perspective of civil liberties. So I think Eason was a better director.
Gardner
You mentioned Clore Warne.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
I've been wanting you to talk a little bit about him. I had a note about that the other day.
McWilliams
Well, Clore was a very dear friend of mine and a wonderful person, wonderful person. And he had had--I think fortunately--he had had an involvement with the socialist movement in St. Louis just preceding World War I. I think this was very good for him because it
Gardner
Over the Los Angeles Times ?
McWilliams
I beg your pardon?
Gardner
While reading the Los Angeles Times ?
McWilliams
Yes, while reading the Los Angeles Times , right.
Gardner
Isaac Pacht is another one I think might be interesting for you to comment on.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
He and Clore Warne were . . .
The firm when I knew it was Pacht, Pelton, and Warne. And Clore was the--law firms, in my experience, successful law firms, tend to have a front man, a spokesman, sort of, for the firm, who is usually referred to as the business getter. Then they have a good trial lawyer. And then they have a workhorse, who runs the office, does the research, and all that sort of thing. Clore was the workhorse for that firm; [laughter] and Judge Pacht was the trial lawyer--very good one, too, I might add; and Pelton was one of the prime business getters for the firm. I knew the members of the firm very well, had many dealings with them. They were all good friends of mine.
Gardner
What sort of emphasis was their law?
McWilliams
They represented a wide diversity of interests here. At one time they represented the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees in the motion-picture industry at a time when I represented some of the dissidents of that union. We were involved in this law-suit, which had some far-ranging kind of developments and implications. But they represented a lot of diversified interests, all the way from commercial interests and banking interests and companies of one kind and another, and also Las Vegas interests. At one time they represented Bugsy Siegel.
Gardner
Is that so?
Yes. But it was a very good law firm. They were very astute and had an excellent reputation.
Gardner
Since you've mentioned Leo Gallagher, perhaps you could talk about him for a moment or two.
McWilliams
Well, I was always fascinated by Leo because of his background, his training as a Jesuit, and his combination of rather devout Catholicism, which he and his sister and his family had, with his radicalism. He was a fascinating man to watch. In the trial of a court action he wasn't the most tactful trial lawyer in the world, because his temper usually got out of hand. But he was always willing to defend people, all kinds of people. And he did, I think, by and large a pretty good job of it. And I knew him very well and was always very friendly with him.
Gardner
Were you involved with the national ACLU at all?
McWilliams
Yes. There was a period when I was on the national board. Here again, I think Roger looked askance at Nathan Greene, who was a New York lawyer, a friend of mine. He regarded the two of us with some degree of--I won't say suspicion, but dubiety, because we took the position that people like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn should be left--she had been elected to the board, she had served a term, and she had been recently reelected. And it was at this stage that Roger thought that she should be
But Roger resigned about that time, and it was his successor, Patrick Malin, who was in that position, who was there in the four or five years when they seemed to retreat from their defense of political pariahs. Then of course they corrected that situation, and they swung back to their original position, but not until after the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee had come into being--and not as a rival organization in any sense, but as an organization that was willing to defend some of these people who couldn't find a good defense counsel.
Gardner
Were you involved with the ECLC?
McWilliams
Yes, I was one of the organizers of ECLC.
Gardner
Along with . . . ?
McWilliams
Along with Clark Foreman, and I.F. Stone,
Gardner
And it exists still?
McWilliams
Oh, yes. It's now called the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and is very active in a lot of major issues at the present time. I haven't been active in it for some years, so I'm not fully apprised of its current agenda, but it does a good job.
Gardner
Corliss Lamont became quite a pariah of ACLU after ECLC . . .
McWilliams
Yes, that's right.
Gardner
Did the same thing happen to you?
McWilliams
No, it never really did. The relations were always as friendly on a personal basis as ever; I've never had a personal quarrel of any kind with Roger. We were very good friends then; we are very good friends today. But there was a certain coolness in the relationship for a time because they were a little afraid of involvement with people like the people who had organized the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. They regarded
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
Corliss is a very stouthearted, consistent person in the defense of civil liberties.
Gardner
Tell me about Roger Baldwin. When did you first meet him? Was it through ACLU?
McWilliams
Through ACLU. I don't remember just when it was, but it was fairly early on. I know that he reviewed my book Prejudice and thought very highly of it. We had quite a number of contacts in re the Japanese-American situation. But I had known him before that. Just when I met him for the first time, I couldn't tell you; I just don't remember.
Gardner
But you remained on good terms through your Nation years.
McWilliams
Oh, yes. And a couple of times when we were on vacation, we would meet Roger and spend quite a bit of time with him at Martha's Vineyard.
Gardner
When you got to New York, did you continue your relationship with ACLU?
McWilliams
Not actively, because I was so very busy, preoccupied, with the Nation, I didn't have time for
Gardner
Well, that covers all the questions I have, I think, about ACLU. Let's talk now about the things you've done since you left the Nation. You left in the end of '75.
McWilliams
That's right. I resigned as editor. I stressed the fact that I resigned, because the word retirement has--I don't know why--it has certain connotations that I regard as unfortunate. You're a retiree. And I wasn't retiring in that sense. I was resigning. I felt that [with] the political situation in the country, a chapter had been concluded, a thirty-year chapter had been concluded with the culmination of Watergate and the removal of the last troops from Vietnam; and regardless of what happened in the future, it would be a different kind of story. So I felt that the time had come when I should resign on my own initiative. I was asked to stay on by the publisher--and urged to stay on by him, I might add--but I didn't think that I should. And since then I've been very, very busy. I'm busy with a lot of miscellaneous journalism, book reviews, and articles, and quite a bit of
Gardner
Supposed to, or do?
McWilliams
Do, have been doing. And also I finished a draft of a book, so I have been very preoccupied and very busy.
Gardner
What are some of your lecture topics these days?
McWilliams
About politics and a retrospective view of the whole period from 1945 to 1975. I sometimes talk about what's happened to the civil rights movement, and things of that kind, generally I would say, however, in the area of politics and journalism, about the role of the journal with small circulation, muckraking in the past and muckraking at the present time, and issues of this kind.
Gardner
And when you do book reviews--as you say, you did them for the Nation--who are some of your other outlets?
McWilliams
The Chicago Sun-Times. I do quite a number [of] editorials--not editorials, but signed pieces [that] appear on the editorial page of the Baltimore Sun and other outlets of this kind that I write for. Occasionally, a
Gardner
And the book you have coming out [The Education of Carey McWilliams] is autobiographical?
McWilliams
Well, I wouldn't say "autobiographical," because I'm much too discreet to write an autobiography. [laughter] But it's a personal political memoir; it's personal history, sort of in the vein of Vincent Sheehan's personal history, and only autobiographical in the sense that I have to explain how I got involved in certain movements and political affairs, and so forth, but not autobiographical, really. It's more history, although I should immediately qualify that, because I make it very clear in the introduction that I'm not a historian. I don't fancy myself as a historian, and this shouldn't be read as history, because it would be too limited a point of view. It's just my point of view about certain things that happened in my lifetime that had had some national repercussions and importance.
Gardner
Do you cover your whole lifetime?
McWilliams
Well, yes, because I found it necessary to key the reader in, so that he would know my background. He would have some basis to judge whether I inherited my views, whether this was representative of a family bias, or something of this sort, and also what my formal
Also, my family background was interesting. It no doubt had its impact and effect, but I didn't come from an intellectual family--that is to say, there was very little discussion of books or anything of that sort in our household. It was a western cattle-ranch kind of background. My parents were very, very busy with their activities and what they had to do on the ranch. So I still don't know where and how I became such a devoted reader of books and began to acquire literary interests. I just don't know how this happened, and it happened quite early on. But certainly my family, as nearly as I can determine, had no influence on my political views at all, none whatever. As a matter of fact, both my father and my mother were quite conservative, quite conservative people. She came from a Republican family background, my father from a traditionally Democratic family background, but they were both equally conservative.
Gardner
We talked about the fact that you're a great collector and personal archivist.
McWilliams
That's right.
Did you draw on your vast archives to put this autobiography together, or was it more a think piece?
McWilliams
I started out thinking that there were certain areas that I should research and go over to refresh my recollections, and so forth. And after spending months at this, I finally abandoned it because it was too vast, too big an undertaking. For example, the bound volumes of the Nation--two a year during the period that I was editor and also during the period that I was a kind of de facto editor--would fill a big shelf in a library.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
And you start going through those bound volumes--sixty or more--and you get lost. I found I was being led down all kinds of byways. Just turning the pages would recall to me how I got this particular piece, and what the point was about this article, and who this contributor was, and all this sort of thing.
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
I just realized suddenly that I'd have to stop it because it was leading me too far astray. So sometime I may do a book about the Nation as a publication, but this manuscript that I just completed deals with the Nation only peripherally. I describe how I got involved and my experience under three publishers, and so forth, but I don't go into the details of the magazine
Gardner
Right. Maybe you could use some of our material when you put it together.
McWilliams
Probably. Well, I've always collected material on subjects that I've been interested in. I've said again and again that books that I've written were largely written to relieve my ignorance on certain subjects. [laughter] When I was in liberal-arts college, the social sciences were really--all they just did essentially was to rationalize the existing racial status quo. And at USC in particular, they were preoccupied microscopically with measuring social distance between certain racial groups and the majority in certain relationships. I spent a lot of time in researching dozens of theses on this kind of business of social distance, but they never really got into the question of what created the distance in the first place. So my exposure to that kind of sociology was not helpful at all, nor was my exposure to political science and theory at USC of any help to me, although my professors in that field became very good friends, and I liked them very much and had continuing relations with them. But it didn't help very much to take textbook courses in political theory when you could see what was happening in Southern California at that time; it was far more interesting.
Gardner
Right. You know, one thing that just occurred to me in listening to you just now is realizing that though you're a USC alumnus, you're really not very involved with the university in many ways, are you?
McWilliams
No. They were kind enough to give me an honorary degree some years back. But when I was there I wrote editorials on the [Daily] Trojan that caused all kinds of trouble for the editor about every other issue. I wrote editorials for the Trojan; I edited the college literary magazine, the Wooden Horse; and I also wrote for the college humor magazine [Wampus]. So I was involved in those kind of activities on the campus.
Gardner
But afterwards?
McWilliams
But not really afterwards, because at that time USC was not the kind of institution that I would have picked if I had been at total liberty to decide where I wanted to go to school. Football emphasis was very great. I was interested in football, and I was a loyal Trojan fan, but not obsessively so, not obsessively so. But I had formed many, many close friendships while I was there, and I have nothing but fond recollections of the years that I spent at USC. But it was not the kind of institution
Gardner
Did you have much of a relationship with [Rufus] von KleinSmid or Norman Topping?
McWilliams
With von KleinSmid, I think. One of my contributions to the college humor magazine was to just print without any comment at all the biographical information about Dr. von KleinSmid that appeared in Who's Who. It filled column after column after column in Who's Who, and it was all really trivia, listed every petty distinction that had ever come his way, you know: man of the year by the Rotary Club of Merced County or of whatever. [laughter] And when you sat down and read it out of its context in Who's Who, it was, I thought, very funny. But that was the extent of it.
Of course, I didn't like compulsory chapel, and I wrote an editorial against compulsory chapel that caused a great deal of trouble--for my editor, not for me. But he was a gallant man, "Teet" Carle, who later became head of the public relations department for Paramount Pictures. But he was very gallant; he wouldn't do any backstepping on the thing. But I did resent compulsory chapel.
Gardner
What about relations with UCLA later on? As you told me, there'd been several gifts that you've given, for example.
McWilliams
Yes.
Were your relations with Larry Powell, Ernest Carroll Moore, with--well, we talked about Sproul, so we can skip that.
McWilliams
Well, my relations with UCLA were always very good, in a sense that I knew Larry Powell. [He] was a personal friend of many years, and Jake Zeitlin was a personal friend of many years, and he has had close relations with the library here and some of the faculty people. Dean McHenry and others who were here were very good friends. Leonard Bloom and others, I knew very well. And then I was at one time married to Dorothy Hedrick, who was the daughter of Dr. E.R. Hedrick, the distinguished mathematician who was vice-president and provost of UCLA. So I had ties with the institution.
Gardner
Over the last few years, there's been, of course, a great Carey McWilliams revival, partly I suppose because of the liberalizing of philosophy--or the apparent liberalizing--partly also because of the film Chinatown, and the play Zoot Suit. How has this affected you?
McWilliams
Well, I've been, you know, naturally pleased that interest in some of my books has carried through. As a matter of fact, I'm very pleased, and I take considerable satisfaction in the fact that virtually all of them--I think with two exceptions--are still in print, including the Bierce book, which was published in 1929.
Gardner
Right. You say that as though this is a foreign country.
McWilliams
Yes. [laughter] So it is, in a way.
Gardner
Also, a lot more people have been beating paths to your door doing interviews.
McWilliams
Yes.
Gardner
There are graduate students and professors and journalists. Has this disrupted your schedule in any way?
McWilliams
Yes, it has to a considerable degree. I feel if a graduate student wants to talk to me about something, I feel sort of a compulsion to go along with the suggestion because it seems churlish not to. But it does take time, and they come with their recorders, and they are working on various subjects that they think I might be able to help them with. They want suggestions, and so forth, and it does take quite a bit of time. But I do it; I haven't declined any of them, because I think I should [do it].
Gardner
Right. What about your plans for the future?
McWilliams
Well, there's some books that I would like to find time to write that I would still like to get into. I would like to write another book about California, or two books about California, as a matter of fact. I would like to do a book with some such title as "California Political Tintypes," with chapters about all kinds of politicians that I've known in this state--some of them are rather deviant characters--because I found them very fascinating, very interesting personalities. And I just happened to have had some insight into the careers of some of them. I would like to do a chapter on Ellis Paterson, Sheridan Downey, Kent Parrott, William Bonelli, Arthur Samish, people of this kind, and give the impression that I had of them at the time, and the insights that I was able to acquire about their backgrounds and their interests, and so forth. That's one I would relish doing because some of them were very colorful characters and very interesting. I'd like to do that. Then there are a couple of other books about California that I would like to do. And I have other projects in mind.
Since you mentioned California, you get out here--what? about once a year now, once every couple of years?
McWilliams
Well, I've averaged at least once a year. And sometimes a couple of times a year.
Gardner
What are your impressions of California now? It's over fifty years since the first time you set foot in the golden valley.
McWilliams
That is right. I think it's changed--of course it has changed, obviously. It's changed a great deal, and I think in no part of the state more than Southern California. I'm amazed at the transformation of, for example, San Diego, because the San Diego that I knew when I first came to live in California--I used to go down there for meetings and to speak occasionally, and that sort of thing--that San Diego was Republican, extreme Protestant, and very, very conservative. Now this modern San Diego is quite a different community, and I think a very interesting and very fascinating community.
There've been great changes in Los Angeles in terms of racial composition, population, and that sort of thing. And the whole influx--the relative position of the Spanish-speaking has changed a great deal. California as the first third-world state, the concept of your
And there's been all kinds of changes. Of course, there are aspects of the changes here that I don't like. I think it's a less charming community than the community I first knew, in terms of atmosphere and all the rest of it, and the traffic and the things that have happened: the freeways, high-rises. I don't like high-rises anywhere, whether in New York or in Los Angeles. That kind of development here rather appalls me. But it still retains basically its essential character. It still is an exceptional state. And it's reacting to its problems in an exceptional manner, and in the course of doing this it really is providing an example for the rest of the country. The innovations that spring up here are extremely interesting. That, too, is in the pattern of its exceptional background as a state. I wouldn't be surprised, of course, if there are numerous Southern Californias [that] come into being via California all the way down the peninsula. So one of these days it probably will be possible to start in Santa Barbara and drive all the way down to the lower end of the peninsula, with all communities that are really all linked together in one way or another, or with very little open space between them.
Gardner
Right. Well, that's on its way.
McWilliams
And that's sort of an appalling thing to
Gardner
Right.
McWilliams
We have been torn--my wife and I--as to where to reside because we have ties; we've lived in New York since 1951. We have lots of friends we know; it's very congenial for us to live there. At the same time, we have lived in Los Angeles, and we have many, many personal friends in Los Angeles, and that creates quite a constant tension. After all, we reversed the pattern of migration in the United States: we went from West to East, and the trend, of course, is the other way and continues to be the other way. So where we will end up, I don't know. I don't think it will be midway between. [laughter]
Gardner
Kansas City. Well, one of the themes that you deal with in a couple of your works is the idea of the Pacific as the--well, say, that the nineteenth century was the Atlantic century, the twentieth century being the Pacific century. Do you see that reflected in California today?
McWilliams
I'd say [it's] beginning to be reflected. It's very odd that it has been so slow for the Pacific to have its full impact here. You know, there were people like William Seward and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner who wrote about the Pacific in all its mystery
I've been obsessed for years, and I've written quite a bit about this--the relationship between Australia and California and why one is the logical supplement of the other. They are very much alike. If you think of California and then if you think of a big circle around the West, that circle around in the West would be the equivalent of the outback in Australia, you know. And they're complementary in terms of seasons, and so forth. They have many of the same interests in the potentiality of solar energy and things of this kind. And yet there has been very little, relatively little, contact between that great continent and California. And one of these days it's going to begin to happen. When it does happen, it will have astonishing repercussions. The Australians, of course, were involved
Gardner
That's very interesting. Our governor now is an old California Democrat. Have you known Jerry Brown for any length of time?
McWilliams
No, I didn't. Well, on one occasion, when his father was running against Nixon for governor. Pat Brown was in New York and phoned me and had wanted to see me at breakfast. So I met him at the Waldorf, and, as I recall, Jerry was along.
Gardner
Had you known Pat?
McWilliams
Oh, yes. I had known him for years and had written political speeches for him when he ran for attorney general and all that sort of thing, and had had contacts with him down the years. So I knew him quite well. But I don't know the son, except I think I just had this
Gardner
That's very interesting. [I'm] surprised that you didn't see him growing up, playing in the yard, while you were writing the speeches.
McWilliams
That's right. As a matter of fact, speaking of Australia, I sent Pat Brown a memo once upon a time suggesting that he get in touch with some journalistic interests, contacts, that I had in Australia, and try to get them to work with him in setting up two commissions: a group of Australians that would come and be shown California throughout the state, and a group of Californians that would go to Australia and be shown all around Australia, so that these two entities would have a better understanding, each of the other, and of the potentialities for trade and cultural exchange and scientific exchange, and so forth, because they're so alike in many respects. He was very much interested, but of course it got bogged down in other more urgent issues at the time.
Gardner
Right. What about Pat Brown? I hadn't realized that there was that close association early on.
McWilliams
I think he was an admirable--that he is an admirable person, that he was a first-rate governor. One thing I regret: that at the time of the [Caryl] Chessman case, I had an impulse at the time to fly out here so I could set up an appointment with him and sit down and
But he's an extraordinarily humane and decent person. Well, as a matter of fact, the former wife of George Kirstein, one of the publishers of the Nation, was returning from a trip to Italy on the Andrea Doria, and her husband was lost in that disaster. And an Italian seaman was extraordinarily gallant in helping rescue her and one of her daughters. Some years later he was arrested in California and given a prison sentence--I don't remember what the offense was--and he wanted very much to be able to return to Italy and to leave the country. He had family problems in Italy and so forth, and Jane Kirstein spoke to me about it. I said, "I think this can be arranged." I said, "You write out in some detail exactly how gallant this man was in this disaster, what he did. Just write it out in detail and let me have it." She did that, and I sent it to Pat Brown. I said, "Can you do anything to help this man? He did a great service and rescued some people when he acted a bit beyond the call of duty." So within a couple of weeks I heard from him and the chap--the man--was paroled from prison, or released, on condition that he would leave the country. Of course he wanted
Gardner
He got in some trouble with CDC [California Democratic Council], too, later on.
McWilliams
Yes, he did.
Gardner
It had a little split-off. Were you involved in any of that? Did you know CDC?
McWilliams
Yes, I knew those people in CDC very well. But editorially, we said that they should support Brown, and that they should keep in the background some of their personal preferences on issues and so forth because he was so obviously, in my judgment, a superior candidate than Nixon. But I think they expected too much of him. They were rather unfair to him. But of course the war in Vietnam was a major underlying cause.
Gardner
Right. Well, as a last note, why don't I solicit from you your opinion, as an observer of American politics for half a century, on the situation now as you see it happening over the next few years?
McWilliams
Well, I think this is a very strange period that we're in at the present time. I have said, and I think I may have mentioned to you the other day, that as I see it we have no politics at the present time--that
Now, there are two scripts that could be written about this situation: one is that the kind of coalition that McGovern put together in the primaries in '72 could be reinstituted with the right kind of candidate, and they could begin to bring pressure to bear on the Democratic administration and to sort of straighten out some of its problems. But that would only be on the condition that you could get a candidate who would run with what I call a campaign for the future--not so much to win, but to run a campaign that really made sense, and even to the point of taking positions that would be clearly not in the immediate political advantage of such a coalition. For example, I think that especially in the absence of national politics of a significant character, these special single-issue constituencies have developed--and they are having, I think--a very unfortunate effect on American politics. They're diverting attention from the real issues. And worse than that, these are issues that involve people emotionally to a very large extent. The people who oppose abortion, any kind of abortion, under the real brink of the "right to life"--oddly enough, not one percent of these people oppose capital punishment. As a matter of fact, most of them favor it--capital punishment. So it isn't life that is so sacred in their judgment. And they're also, most of
And in the course of heating up these issues, this leads to a possible scenario number two. I think I may have suggested to you the other day that we could, you know, get a Jarvis plan nationally that would not be addressed to taxes or to government. But somebody might come along and say, "Look, this drift has got to end. These are things that have to be done, that must be done," and inject an authoritarian tone and outlook. Given the disillusionment of representative government at the national level, and the cynicism, the remarkably low turnout in national elections, the emergence of such a figure or such a movement is not to be written off as impossible or not likely to happen. It could well happen. Besides, I have a cyclical theory of national politics. I think it does move from periods of turnover and turmoil, and that sort of thing, to these long periods where
Gardner
Well, I guess we'll hope for the first.
McWilliams
Yes. Yes, indeed.
Gardner
Mr. McWilliams, thank you very much.
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Index of Carey McWilliams Works
Books
Articles
Miscellaneous
Courtesy of Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library, 405 Hilgard Ave, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575; http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft2m3nb08v&brand=oac4
Title: Honorable in all things oral history transcript : the memoirs of Carey McWilliams
By: McWilliams, Carey, 1905-, Interviewee, Gardner, Joel,, Interviewer
Date: 1978
Contributing Institution: Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library, 405 Hilgard Ave, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575; http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/
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Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, U.C. Los Angeles