Carey McWilliams

From Philosopedia

McWilliams, Subject of a Biography by Peter Richardson

Carey McWilliams (13 December 1905 - 27 June 1980)

McWilliams for twenty years was editor of Nation. That independent journal of radical opinion was having problems in the spring of 1951 and became known for being "soft on communism." Publisher-editor Freda Kirchwey (1937-1955) invited McWilliams to come to New York to edit an emergency civil liberties issue and help with fundraising. It was a time, according to Mike Davis, when the magazine "was almost on the ropes":

While Joe McCarthy hunted subversion on the banks of the Potomac, Congress for Cultural Freedom types - including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Sidney Hook, Elliot Cohen and Irving Kristol - circled around The Nation like so many hungry sharks. In a typical attack, Harvard historian Schlesinger accused Kirchwey of "betraying [the magazine's] finest traditions" by publishing "week after week, these wretched apologies for Soviet despotism."

A mere subscription to The Nation raised suspicion of being "soft on communism," and in at least one case, buying the magazine was enough to get you blacklisted. The magazine was banned from New York City schools, fundraising appeals brought dismal results, longtime donors refused to return Kirchwey's phone calls, veteran contributing editors deserted the masthead and its former art critic, Clement Greenberg, viciously libeled its foreign editor, Spanish Republican exile Julio Álvarez del Vayo, as a Stalinist agent. Sensing The Nation's vulnerability, the magazine's arch-foes, Commentary and Encounter (the beneficiary of covert CIA funding) moved in for the kill with sustained campaigns of innuendo and allegations of disloyalty.

A lawyer known for his fights on behalf of progressive causes, McWilliams was born in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. McWilliams took his law degree at the University of Southern California, then practiced law at Black, Hammack and Black, where he became known for defending the rights of striking Mexican citrus laborers.

His first book was a 1929 biography of Ambrose Bierce, followed by

• Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1929).

Revised edition: Archon Books, 1967.

• Louis Adamic and Shadow-America (Los Angeles: A. Whipple, 1935).
• Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939).
• Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1942).
• Brothers Under the Skin: African-Americans and Other Minorities. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1943.
• Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944).
• What About Our Japanese-Americans?' (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1944).
• Race Discrimination - and the Law (New York: National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, 1945).
• Small Farm and Big Farm (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1945).
• Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946).

Also published as Southern California: An Island on the Land (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1973).

• A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).
• California: The Great Exception (New York: Current Books, 1949).
• North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the US (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949).
• Witch Hunt: The Revival of Heresy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).
• Politics of Personality: California, The Nation, October 27, 1962.
• (Edited by McWilliams) The California Revolution (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968).
• The Mexicans in America: A Students’ Guide to Localized History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968).
• The Education of Carey McWilliams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

In 1953, he was asked to go on record concerning humanism - he was known by his close friends as being a freethinker - and he responded:

At the age of 71, McWilliams died of a heart attack at his home in Flemington, New Jersey. The New York Times obituary mentioned that he was survived by his wife of 38 years, Dr. Nancy Riley McWilliams; two daughters, Susan Jane, of Princeton, N.J., and Helen Elizabeth, of Boston; and his stepmother, Iris McWilliams of Manhattan.