Carey McWilliams

Mike Davis (who is almost always worth reading) has a great piece on three new books that examine the life of legendary Nation editor Carey McWilliams.

In any event, McWilliams both substantially reinvented the internal culture of The Nation and almost single-handedly revived the muckraking tradition in American journalism. Like a good military strategist, he believed that it was essential to move from defense to offense as quickly as possible, and to this end he brought in crack investigative reporters like Fred Cook, Gene Gleason, B.J. Widick and Matthew Josephson to write famous exposés of the Alger Hiss prosecution, the FBI, CIA-funded intellectuals, the military-industrial complex, consumer culture and much else.

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. . . .

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.

Davis even manages to mix in a little contemporary literature:

By sheer coincidence, I read American Prophet in tandem with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. McCarthy’s new novel, compounded of equal portions of sentimental nostalgia and apocalyptic violence, is a lament for the loss of those chivalric qualities–honor, duty, discretion, courage and, alas, kindness–that once supposedly typified frontier knights like the novel’s Sheriff Bell, now obsolete in a world of insolent punks and robotlike assassins. We tend to think of these public funerals for America’s lost nobility of character–Saving Private Ryan and The Greatest Generation also come to mind–as ceremonies of the right, moral deceits to cover up actual histories of racism and carnage, but there may be other, alternative dimensions to this national nostalgia.

Carey McWilliams, I am sure, would have reminded McCarthy (or Steven Spielberg, for that matter) that the finest embodiments of moral courage in American history were the Abolitionists, the Wobblies, the Abraham Lincoln Brigades and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

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