During the 1920s McWilliams, like so many other unknown young writers in the West and South, had benefited from the editorial patronage and friendship of H.L. Mencken and his American Mercury; now he returned the favor, becoming the champion of such fresh talents as Ralph Nader, Dan Wakefield, Howard Zinn, Richard Cloward, Frances Piven and a broke and desperate soul named Hunter S. Thompson, to whom McWilliams fatefully pitched the idea of a report on California motorcycle gangs.
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Human Ecology
Mike Davis: As human actions change the planet in irreversable ways, will human bonds suffer irreversable damage, too?
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People Burn Here
Mike Davis: Illegal immigrants are the invisible victims of the California wildfires.
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Denial in the Desert
Mike Davis: Abrupt climate change is rapidly turning the American West into a desert. But a culture in denial continues rampant suburbanization, fueled by the delusion that our water supply is inexhaustible.
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Car Bombs: WMDs the Surge Can't Stop
Mike Davis: The favored weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded is the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush Administration has totally ignored.
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Dorothy Healey
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Mike Davis: An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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Dorothy Healey
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Mike Davis: An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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Who Is Killing New Orleans?
Mike Davis: Mayor-appointed commissions and experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city.
The California left's one-man think tank during the New Deal era, McWilliams brought to New York a singular passion for turning journalism into sociological investigation, and vice versa. He opened the magazine's doors to the hugely influential C. Wright Mills--another outlaw from west of the Pecos--and launched a series of ambitious sociological explorations of the heartlands of Eisenhower-era conformity: corporate bureaucracies, consumer culture, suburban families, the fallout shelter hysteria and, yes, college campuses. He also kept the era's greatest foreign correspondents--Alexander Werth, Edgar Snow, Basil Davidson, Isaac Deutscher, Carleton Beals and Claude Bourdet, as well as New Left historians William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko--prominently on the front cover.
McWilliams, in short, not only saved The Nation from the hellhounds of the cold war; he also made it into a bully pulpit where radical academics, muckraking journalists, independent Marxists, trade-union rebels, freedom riders, beatniks and peace protesters found a common voice after the dark age of McCarthyism. Defying the notorious "generation gap," he self-consciously tried to make the magazine an intellectual bridge between the culture of 1930s activism and the emergent New Left of the 1960s. And, perhaps most important, he kept the attention of white progressives focused on the black freedom movement and the farmworkers' revolt in California. The Education of Carey McWilliams, sadly out of print, remains the indispensable history of The Nation's most heroic years as well as a fascinating encyclopedia of its myriad contributors and characters.
But while New Yorkers reaped the benefits of McWilliams's move east, Californians, as Peter Richardson reminds us in his superb new biography of McWilliams, paid a significant price for losing their most brilliant radical critic and social documentarian to the salons of Manhattan. By 1949 McWilliams had written eight books and scores of articles in a single decade, including two classic studies of farm labor (Ill Fares the Land and the aforementioned Factories in the Field); the still-definitive introduction to the LA region (Southern California Country); a stunning, almost Braudelian interpretation of the main contours of California history (California: The Great Exception); the first book-length history of the Chicano experience (North From Mexico); and three landmark studies of racism and discrimination (Brothers Under the Skin; Prejudice: Japanese- Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance; and A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America). Witchhunt: The Revival of Heresy was published on the eve of his move to New York. But thereafter his amazing literary discipline and productivity were largely diverted to editorial chores and the generous shaping of projects carried to completion by other Nation writers.
Richardson's book, with its balanced perspective on his early, middle and late years, comes at a crucial juncture when even hard-core McWilliams fans are in danger of losing sight of the whole man. On the East Coast he is largely a fond but fading memory to veterans of The Nation and its milieus, who tend to know little about his seminal California years. Conversely, although he is again a lodestone in the West, where a major McWilliams revival--thanks to the ceaseless championing of his work by historian Kevin Starr, Sacramento journalist Peter Schrag and "California Studies" instigator Jeff Lustig--has been under way since the early 1990s, contemporary California readers have little appreciation of his Nation tenure or his contributions to national progressive causes.
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