The conscience of California

With that book, McWilliams entered a decadelong period of intense productivity. While continuing to write, he took on numerous public activities, heading the state's Division of Immigration and Housing and, among other things, helping to diffuse the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. His books from this period include "Prejudice," the first account of Japanese internment, referenced repeatedly in the dissent to the Supreme Court's decision in Korematsu vs. United States upholding the internment's constitutionality; "Brothers Under the Skin," a bestselling analysis of American race relations; "North From Mexico," a history of Mexican Americans (years later, Richardson tells us, McWilliams started encountering young men with names like "Carey McWilliams Garcia" and "Carey McWilliams Lopez"); and "Southern California Country: An Island on the Land" and "California: The Great Exception," two much-quoted books that come closest to summarizing McWilliams' work on the state.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, a prominent historian of the American West, remarked in 1993 that Western historiography had "finally caught up to where McWilliams had been forty years before." It's not an exaggeration. McWilliams recognized so much in California that has since passed into the realm of conventional wisdom that it is hard to know where to start the recounting. He saw the strong undercurrents of racism and ethnic strife, the centrality of the struggle over water (his account of the Owens Valley water deal inspired Robert Towne's screenplay for "Chinatown"), the state's predilection for ballot propositions and boosterism, and much more.

If McWilliams' insights about California have proved durable, it is doubtless because he took what went on here seriously. The New York-based media have historically tended either to ignore this most populous state or condescend to it, with coverage heavy on car chases and kookiness. Considering the dearth of good writing about the state, McWilliams argued in a 1930 essay titled "Young Man, Stay West" that the habit of Western writers to gravitate eastward was at least partly responsible for California's anemic literary scene.

And so, as Richardson notes, there is no shortage of irony in the fact that McWilliams' own success eventually took him to New York, first as a contributing editor to the Nation and then as its editor in chief. McWilliams did not make the move without trepidation -- he at first pleaded with the Nation to open an L.A. office -- but his finances were shaky and the promise of a steady salary was persuasive. Still, if he had initially been hard on California, the move to New York rankled even more: "A vile place to live," he complained. "Costly, vulgar, crowded ... and essentially provincial."