Carey McWilliams (13 de diciembre de 1905-27 de junio de 1980) fue un autor, editor y abogado estadounidense. Es mejor conocido por sus escritos sobre la política y la cultura de California, incluida la condición de los trabajadores agrícolas migrantes y el internamiento de los estadounidenses de origen japonés durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial . De 1955 a 1975, editó la revista The Nation .
Carey McWilliams | |
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Nació | Steamboat Springs, Colorado, EE. UU. | 13 de diciembre de 1905
Fallecido | 27 de junio de 1980 Nueva York, EE. UU. | (74 años)
Ocupación | Periodista de investigación , autor, editor |
alma mater | Universidad del Sur de California, Facultad de Derecho |
Primeros años
McWilliams nació el 13 de diciembre de 1905 en Steamboat Springs, Colorado . Llegó por primera vez a California en 1922, después de que un colapso en el mercado de ganado arruinara la salud de su padre y las finanzas de su familia.
McWilliams asistió a la Universidad del Sur de California, de la cual obtuvo el título de abogado en 1927. [1]
De 1927 a 1938, McWilliams ejerció la abogacía en Los Ángeles [1] en Black, Hammock & Black. Algunos de sus casos, incluida su defensa de los trabajadores cítricos mexicanos en huelga, prefiguraron sus escritos posteriores.
Durante la década de 1920 y principios de la de 1930, McWilliams se unió a una red flexible de escritores en su mayoría del sur de California que incluía a Robinson Jeffers , John Fante , Louis Adamic y Upton Sinclair . Su carrera literaria también se benefició enormemente de sus relaciones con Mary Austin y HL Mencken . Mencken proporcionó una salida para el periodismo temprano de McWilliams y planteó la idea de su primer libro, una biografía de 1929 del popular escritor y en algún momento californiano Ambrose Bierce .
Actividad política
La Depresión y el ascenso del fascismo europeo en la década de 1930 radicalizaron a McWilliams. Comenzó a trabajar con organizaciones políticas y legales de izquierda, incluida la Unión Estadounidense de Libertades Civiles y el Gremio Nacional de Abogados . También escribió para Pacific Weekly, Controversy, The Nation y otras revistas progresistas. Continuó representando a los trabajadores en Los Ángeles y sus alrededores, ayudó a organizar sindicatos y gremios, y se desempeñó como examinador de juicios para la nueva Junta Nacional de Relaciones Laborales .
Su primer éxito de ventas, Factories in the Field , apareció en 1939 y se encuentra entre sus obras más perdurables. Publicaron los pocos meses de John Steinbeck 's Las uvas de la ira , que examina las vidas de los trabajadores agrícolas migrantes en California y condena la política y las consecuencias de California monopolio de la tierra agrícola a gran escala y la agroindustria . Poco antes de su publicación, McWilliams aceptó una oferta del gobernador entrante Culbert Olson para dirigir la División de Inmigración y Vivienda de California . Durante su mandato de cuatro años (1938-1942), se centró en mejorar las condiciones de trabajo y los salarios agrícolas, pero sus esperanzas de una reforma importante se deterioraron con el advenimiento de la Segunda Guerra Mundial .
During the 1940s, McWilliams lived in Echo Park, California, a neighborhood[2] of Los Angeles. He owned his home at 2041 Alvarado Street until the 1970s, well after he moved to New York in 1951.[3]
McWilliams left his government post in 1942, when incoming Governor Earl Warren promised campaign audiences that his first official act would be to fire him. McWilliams was a sharp critic of Warren, whom he described as "the personification of Smart Reaction," but he became an enthusiastic admirer after Warren joined the US Supreme Court the following decade. No such conversion occurred in his attitude toward another California politician, Richard Nixon, whom McWilliams described in 1950 as "a dapper little man with an astonishing capacity for petty malice."
After leaving the state government, McWilliams continued to write prolifically. He turned his attention to issues of racial and ethnic equality, writing a series of important books (including Brothers Under the Skin, Prejudice, North from Mexico, and A Mask for Privilege) that dealt with the treatment of immigrant and minority groups. He also produced two regional portraits, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946, American Folkways series) and California: The Great Exception (1949), which many aficionados still regard as the finest interpretive histories of those areas. Decades after its publication, Southern California Country inspired Robert Towne's Oscar-winning original screenplay for Chinatown (1974).[4]
Acusaciones de simpatías comunistas
Witch Hunt (1950) was an early attempt to combat McCarthyism, which McWilliams considered a grave threat to civil liberties and healthy politics. Although he was never a member of the Communist Party, he was a frequent target of anticommunist attacks. In the 1940s, he was called before the Committee on Un-American Activities in California. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover placed him on the Custodial Detention List, making him a candidate for detention in case of national emergency even though McWilliams was serving in the state government at the time.
His activism took many forms. In the early 1940s, he helped overturn the convictions of mostly Latino youths following the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. He also helped cool the city's temperature during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, when scuffles between servicemen and Latino youths spun out of control.
Once out of government, he became an outspoken critic of the removal and internment of Japanese American citizens and almost immediately began writing an exposé on the topic. Published in 1944, Prejudice: Japanese-Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance was cited by Justice Frank Murphy in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion.[5]
Several years later, a group of Los Angeles screenwriters, directors, and producers known as the Hollywood Ten was cited for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer a House committee's questions about Communist Party membership. McWilliams drafted a Supreme Court amicus brief for two of them, John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. (The Court declined to hear their appeal.)
In 1951, McWilliams moved to New York City to work at The Nation under editor Freda Kirchwey. For the next decade, he helped shepherd the magazine through its most difficult period. Taking over as editor in 1955, he stayed until 1975 and is credited with strengthening the magazine's investigative reporting. He also published the early work of Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Theodore Roszak, and Hunter S. Thompson, who credited McWilliams with the idea for his first bestselling book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966).
Historia de McWilliams y Bahía de Cochinos
McWilliams was the first American reporter to reveal that the CIA was training a group of Cuban exiles in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[6] His article for The Nation, "Are We Training Cuban Guerrillas?", was published in November 1960, five months before the invasion occurred, during the Eisenhower Administration.[7]
The story was largely ignored by major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.[8] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., an aide to President John F. Kennedy, pressured The New Republic not to run a story about the guerrilla force.[9] Following the failure of the invasion, Kennedy expressed regret that more information about the invasion plan was not published by telling Times reporter Turner Catledge, "If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake."[10]
Muerte y legado
He died in New York City on June 27, 1980, at 74.[11] Since his death, his critical fortunes have risen steadily. The American Political Science Association gives an annual Carey McWilliams Award "to honor a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics." In Embattled Dreams (2002), California historian Kevin Starr calls McWilliams "the single finest nonfiction on California–ever," and biographer Peter Richardson maintains that McWilliams might be the most versatile American public intellectual of the twentieth century.[12]
His first son, Wilson Carey McWilliams, was a noted political scientist who taught at Rutgers University. His second son, Jerry McWilliams, was an expert on vinyl disc records preservation. McWilliams had two grandchildren: Susan McWilliams Barndt, a professor of politics at Pomona College, and Helen McWilliams, the lead singer of VAGIANT Boston.
His papers are housed in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and at Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Obras
- Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1929). Revised edition: Archon Books, 1967.
- America Is In the Heart, A Personal History, by Carlos Bulosan: Introduction by Carey McWilliams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973; reissue 2014 with addition of New Introduction by Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi)
- Brothers Under the Skin: African-Americans and Other Minorities. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1943).
- California: The Great Exception (New York: Current Books, 1949).
- (Edited by McWilliams) The California Revolution, (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968).
- The Education of Carey McWilliams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
- 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).
- Louis Adamic and Shadow-America (Los Angeles: A. Whipple, 1935).
- A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).
- The Mexicans in America: A Students’ Guide to Localized History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968).
- North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the US (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949).
- Politics of Personality: California, The Nation, October 27, 1962.
- Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 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 (American Folkways series, New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946). Also published as Southern California: An Island on the Land (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1973).
- What About Our Japanese-Americans? (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1944).
- Witch Hunt: The Revival of Heresy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).
Referencias
- ^ a b Francis X. Gannon, Biographical Dictionary of the Left: Volume 1. Boston: Western Islands Publishers, 1969; pp. 452–454.
- ^ http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/region/central-la/
- ^ Richardson, Peter. "Carey McWilliams: Local Hero, American Prophet". Echo Park Historical Society. Retrieved August 27, 2015.
- ^ Richardson, Peter (2005). American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 144. ISBN 978-0472115242.
- ^ Richardson, Peter. "Carey McWilliams". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 28, 2014.
- ^ Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWilliams 228 (Simon & Schuster 1978).
- ^ Are We Training Cuban Guerrillas?, 191 The Nation 378 (November 19, 1960).
- ^ Montague Kern et al., The Kennedy Crises: The Press, The Presidency and Foreign Policy 105-06 (Univ. of N.C. Press 1983).
- ^ Id.
- ^ Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWilliams 229 (Simon & Schuster 1978).
- ^ Online Archive of California
- ^ Richardson, Peter (2005). American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 297. ISBN 978-0472115242.
Otras lecturas
- Corman, Catherine A. "Teaching – and Learning from – Carey McWilliams," California History December 22, 2001.
- Critser, Greg. "The Political Rebellion of Carey McWilliams," UCLA Historical Journal 4 (1983: 34–65.
- Critser, Greg. "The Making of a Cultural Rebel: Carey McWilliams, 1924–1930," Pacific Historical Review 55 (1986): 226–55.
- Davis, Mike. "Optimism of the Will", The Nation, September 19, 2005.
- Geary, Daniel. "Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934–1943," Journal of American History Vol. 90, No. 3, December 2003, 912–934.
- Richardson, Peter. American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
- Richardson, Peter. "Carey McWilliams: The California Years", UCLA Library, May 2005.
- Stewart, Dean & Jeannine Gendar (eds.). Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader (Santa Clara, California: Santa Clara University Press, 2001).
enlaces externos
- Carey McWilliams Quotes
- Co-written Letters to the Editor of the New York Review of Books entitled The "Excelsior" Affair, Ford's Better Idea, Violence in Oakland, and Protest
- Interview of Carey McWilliams[permanent dead link], Center for Oral History Research, UCLA Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
- List of winners of the APSA's Carey McWilliams award
- NewsScan "Honorary Subscriber" Page on McWilliams
- Guide to the Carey McWilliams Papers at The Bancroft Library
- 1965 talk at UCLA on the anticipated impact of computers YouTube, Retrieved 30 August 2015