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C O N C L U S I O N AN Y A T T E M P T T O A S S E S S Carey McWilliams’s legacy must confront at least one hard fact: Almost no one born after 1960 has heard of him. To be sure, McWilliams is revered by a small group of journalists, academics, and a‹cionados. This is especially true in California, where he is still cited regularly and the California Studies Association issues a Carey McWilliams Award. A certain cachet also attaches to his name at the national level. The American Political Science Association awards an annual journalism prize in his honor, and the Nation has named a senior fellowship and an internship program after him. Even so, Carey McWilliams remains a well-kept secret to general readers, not to mention the culture at large. He has never been the subject of a sustained portrait, a fact made all the more curious by the attention lavished on less consequential writers and intellectuals over the years. Under these circumstances, the task of assessing McWilliams’s in›uence requires some excavation, for the bulk of his legacy lies just below the surface of American public consciousness. It can be found in the political formation of César Chávez; behind Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown; shot through Kevin Starr’s multivolume history of California; embedded in Mike Davis’s study of Los Angeles; buried in the back matter of Otto Friedrich’s history of Hollywood in the 1940s; and scattered over countless newspapers, magazines, books, and scholarly journals on topics ranging from city planning to farm labor to witch hunts. That excavation, however, reveals many durable links between today’s headlines—about racial and ethnic inequality, immigration and border security, environmental degradation, and civil liberties—and the issues McWilliams took on decades ago. In an essay on McWilliams and his legacy, Gray Brechin offers a striking simile for this realization, which he pitches to one end of 287 the political spectrum: “For those of us who lean unapologetically to the left as it ›ows ever farther to the right, encountering the writings of Carey McWilliams is like running into an old friend in a foreign city” (Stewart and Gendar 2001, xx). Brechin’s trope of unexpected recognition captures an important aspect of McWilliams’s legacy, which we encounter only if we travel to the foreign city of the past. It also attests to McWilliams’s undervalued status in the tradition of dissent he documented, shaped, and exempli‹ed. Our visit to Brechin’s city is not a pilgrimage; we do not seek out McWilliams but rather come upon him in the course of our explorations . The encounter is unplanned, serendipitous, contingent. We easily could have missed him. If McWilliams is an old friend in Brechin’s foreign city, he is also a much older friend who arrived there long before we did. This sort of discovery can be a provocation as well as a pleasure, especially for anyone wishing to write originally about the topics that mattered to him. In one area after another, McWilliams mapped the social and political territory, raised the main issues, distilled the key facts, and proposed the most practical remedies. Unlike many authors of his generation, he offers his readers today few opportunities to condescend to outdated ideas or attitudes. Indeed, he typically relegates us to the far humbler task of testing, re‹ning, or simply appreciating his insights. His clarity and accessibility, too, leave almost no work for those who would demystify his prose. In short, McWilliams’s work raises the possibility articulated by literary critic Harold Bloom—that a dead man’s voice is outrageously more alive than our own.1 It was not always so. At the time of his death in 1980, McWilliams’s reputation was well established but not magisterial. When Ronald Reagan became president, McWilliams was known on the East Coast as a muckraking editor who had been right on the big issues, especially McCarthyism and Vietnam. In the West, he was a respectable but almost forgotten writer in exile. (In a 1978 Los Angeles Times pro‹le, for example, William Overend noted, “His name doesn’t mean much to some people, but the books he wrote about California and its people are regarded as classics.”) Since then, his status as a writer and public intellectual has risen slowly but appreciably. Indeed, Berkeley historian Kerwin Klein has observed that McWilliams’s...

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