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Review
| American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, by Peter Richardson. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. 334 pages. $35.00, cloth.
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| Peter Richardson offers the first broad examination in print of the life of Carey McWilliams, California lawyer, activist, commentator and historian in the 1930s and 1940s and editor of the Nation magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. A self-sufficient, emotionally protected, yet broadly engaged man, McWilliams compiled an extraordinary record of productivity and purpose during the first phase of his career. His work combined perceptive emphasis on issues of systemic injustice, sustained analysis that few contemporaries matched, and timeliness that made his work a part of public discourse, not simply a response to it. He took on California's agricultural barons and the exploitation of farm labor in Factories in the Field (1939); the issue of race in the early days of World War II in Brothers Under the Skin (1943); the Zoot Suit Riots in articles and reports that helped ease immediate tensions; the issue of Japanese internment in Prejudice (1944); race and ethnicity as a continuing topic in A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (1948) and North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948); and the postwar anti-Communist campaign in Witch Hunt (1950). Richardson notes both McWilliams's capacity for analytical dissection and compelling argument and the times when his arguments become strident, unbalanced, and flawed, usually when political preconceptions gained the upper hand. |
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Yet these works were not McWilliams's whole corpus, nor indeed are they the books that have most invigorated a recent wavelet of positive scholarly attention. McWilliams also published two books on the history of California in the 1940s that have come to serve as touchstones for characterizations of the state: Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and California: The Great Exception (1949). In the first, McWilliams took apart any idyllic notion of the early California mission period, examined the increased destruction of Indian cultures with the dominance of Anglos, challenged fictional and cultural representations that seemed to him ahistorical and misleading, insisted on attention to multiple racial and cultural groups, and defined the power driven politics of water in Los Angeles through a memorable account that eventually inspired the script for the movie Chinatown. His second book on the state pursued the theme of its title by defining the ways in which California's history was unlike that of any other state and it explored the resource problem California's pattern of growth presented for an entire region. These works in particular led Kevin Starr to label McWilliams "the single finest nonfiction writer on California—ever" (p. vii) and led other historians to find in McWilliams one source of orientation for a new Western history. |
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Richardson structures his narrative not as one continuous, strictly chronological account, but as a series of shorter segments with clear topical identities that may overlap in time. Although occasionally this produces some roughness, it also allows a discussion that treats particular episodes or issues in a unified way, making the book more useful for those who might wish to consult it on specific questions. Richardson deserves enormous credit for his evenhandedness in praising McWilliams's accomplishments while facing squarely his moments of shrillness, unfairness, or avoidance. Such balancing is especially imperative in evaluating McWilliams's political stances and his second career as editor of the Nation. He shared with others before and during his tenure as editor at the Nation an inability to apply common principles of judgment to left and to right—to those he branded fascists and those he branded communists—and this led to inconsistency and evasion. Unwilling, perhaps, to think very much about Stalin, he avoided discussion of international affairs even while editing a prominent magazine of political commentary during the Cold War. Richardson may fall a little short of capturing the rich historical contexts surrounding these choices, but he does not shy away from naming the issues and offering judgments that are reasonable and fair. His training in literature shows in his attention to McWilliams's sponsorship and encouragement of young journalists. |
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This book could be used with upper-division college students who have a particular interest in cultural and intellectual history or California. Sections could also be used to good effect as a model of careful scholarly assessment and judgment in training young scholars. More commonly, the book will serve as a resource for those who come to it because of an interest in the issues central to McWilliams's work. Who other than McWilliams draws students of agriculture, the Zoot Suit Riots, cultural conflict, California history, politics, and water? Richardson's commendable work on McWilliams has no rival. |
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| Towson University |
Terry A. Cooney |
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