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I V. P U B L I C S E R V I C E IN N O V E M B E R 1 9 3 8 , nine months before Factories in the Field appeared, McWilliams, Fante, and Ross Wills had a fresh reason to celebrate at Stevens Nik-a-Bob at Ninth and Western in Los Angeles. Culbert L. Olson, a state senator from Los Angeles, had been elected governor of California, the ‹rst Democrat to hold that of‹ce in the twentieth century. The day after the inaugural ball in Sacramento, McWilliams noted in his diary that Olson had already ful‹lled one campaign pledge: “Tom Mooney was granted full pardon by Governor Olson, as per schedule, at 10:30 this morning. A great day, this, in California” (Jan. 7, 1939). Mooney, a radical labor leader, was imprisoned following a deadly bomb blast at the 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. Evidence of perjury and false testimony mounted over the years, and Mooney’s case had become a leftist cause célèbre. After reviewing the case in a packed assembly chamber, Olson issued Mooney a full pardon and offered him a chance to “say something to the general public.” In his ten-minute speech, which was broadcast over the radio, Mooney pledged his support to the labor movement and denounced fascism. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes applauded the pardon, but the Sacramento Bee, which favored Olson’s record as a legislator, protested it bitterly (Burke 1953, 52–57). After a busy and controversial ‹rst week in of‹ce, Olson landed in the hospital, suffering from “nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork,” and his administration got off to a slow start (Burke 1953, 60). Even so, he appointed McWilliams chief of the state’s Division of Immigration and Housing the same month. Created during the Progressive Era as a commission to Americanize newly arrived immigrants, the DIH was by that time part of the California Department of Industrial Relations, and its duties had been expanded to include oversight of migrant worker housing. 93 A series of Republican governors had neglected the division, leaving it almost completely without resources, but the incoming administration saw its broad powers to inspect labor camps, hold hearings, and subpoena witnesses as an excellent way to highlight the farm labor issues Olson had stressed during the campaign. When the Olson team offered the position to McWilliams, he accepted the opportunity to “do something about farm labor” (ECM, 77), and on January 19, he traveled to Sacramento to be sworn in. His appointment furnished yet another occasion to celebrate. Fante and Wills collected him in Sacramento and proceeded to San Francisco for some revelry. There they met writer William Saroyan at the Empire Hotel, which later became a location for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo . The group worked its way through a series of nightspots until 4:00 a.m. and reassembled the next day for a vertiginous lunch. McWilliams then went to work. Operating out of the State Building in downtown Los Angeles, he opened a new ‹eld of‹ce in Fresno, added staff, tripled the number of farm inspections, and revived the division’s work on immigrant aid. He also maintained his law practice and busy schedule in Los Angeles. A typical day found him working at his law of‹ce in the morning ; conducting state business in the afternoon; and attending meetings, forums, parties, and informal gatherings in the evening. Some of these gatherings brought him into contact with writers and Hollywood ‹gures, including Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos, and Charlie Chaplin. Others were devoted to speci‹c causes, such as an effort to raise funds for children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War. For that cause, McWilliams joined with Janet Gaynor, George Balanchine, Ernst Lubitsch, and Bette Davis to organize a showing of Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles, an event that was covered by the Daily Worker (Aug. 19, 1939). During this time, McWilliams also took on leadership roles in the local ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Washington-based American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. The last group included a wide array of progressive thinkers and activists, including anthropologist Franz Boas, novelist John Dos Passos, labor leader Sidney Hillman, philosopher John Dewey, and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. McWilliams’s extensive network helped him generate publicity and focus public attention on farm labor issues, but anti-Communists would later use...

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