The conscience of California

Nor was the transition to the Nation easy. McWilliams' writing had focused on the domestic front, yet he came to the Nation as Cold War tensions prompted one of the more serious crises in the magazine's history. Not long after McWilliams' arrival, the editor, Freda Kirchwey, fired the magazine's anti-Stalinist literary editor, causing a schism among its contributors and provoking charges that the Nation was soft on communism. After McWilliams took over the editorship in 1955, the magazine continued to face criticism on this count. McWilliams had written an amicus brief on behalf of the Hollywood 10 and a book on anticommunism called "Witch Hunt," and he was courageous in his efforts to battle McCarthyism; moreover, as Richardson points out, he never firmly condemned the Soviet Union. This reticence, combined with his support for accused communists, including Alger Hiss, earned the lasting suspicion of certain Cold War liberals. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed him a "Typhoid Mary of the left." Although allowing that McWilliams was not a card-carrying communist, Schlesinger felt sure he was contributing to communism's spread.

The chaos and friction of Cold War-era life at the Nation more or less brought McWilliams' literary output to a halt, but his legacy as an editor proved substantial in its own right. Well before the New Journalism and the Watergate-era renaissance in investigative reporting, McWilliams' Nation provided a forum for the sort of muckraking journalism that had few outlets, publishing a piece on automobile safety by Ralph Nader, who was then a Harvard Law student, and a report on California's motorcycle gangs by the unknown San Francisco writer Hunter S. Thompson.

Richardson has covered a lot of ground here, with impressive economy. Having promised to avoid "a life of Saint Carey," he maintains a critical, deliberately unsentimental stance. But although it manages to steer clear of hagiography, the book ultimately feels like a plain-spoken elegy for an endangered class of morally engaged, old-fashioned public intellectuals who were comfortable inhabiting multiple spheres. "[I]magine H.L. Mencken writing a Supreme Court brief, Cornel West heading a state agency, Noam Chomsky editing a national magazine, Edmund Wilson writing campaign speeches, or Alan Dershowitz assessing the work of a major poet," Richardson writes. "By devoting himself exclusively to the magazine and its affairs for twenty-five years, McWilliams helped others find their voices but gradually lost his own. In this sense, the Nation's gain was the country's loss." *