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.It was Joyce Fante s impression,however, that women admired McWilliams not for his listening but for hisability to command the attention of an entire room.She also noted that,given his hard-drinking ways with Fante and Wills, McWilliams was thekind of man sometimes wives don t want their husbands to associate withtoo much. 3Often a fresh face would appear in the McWilliams household, as whenFante and Wills brought William Faulkner to the apartment. Faulkner isa very interesting man slight, neat, quiet, very much the Southern gen-tleman, only with a nice, frosty irony, McWilliams observed (Jan.27,1943).They drank and exchanged stories until 3:00 a.m., when Fante, deepin his cups, left an un9 nished drink Unheard of, McWilliams noteddryly.Two nights later, novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg came bywith Wills in the evening, telling a long story about Fitzgerald. Otherguests and companions during this time included journalist Herb Klein,architect Richard Neutra, Orson Welles, FDR labor advisor Sidney Hill-man, state attorney general Robert Kenny, actor Albert Dekker, WallaceStegner, F.O.Matthiessen, Stanley Mosk, and Alice McGrath.As chair ofthe Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, McWilliams alsomet with and occasionally entertained guest speakers, including San Fran-cisco attorney Bartley Crum, a Republican and Wendell Willkie advisor,The Great Exception 139 who visited Los Angeles in January 1945 to discuss the ongoing saga ofHarry Bridges s deportation case.Later that year, McWilliams mentionedCrum as a possible U.S.Senate candidate in a piece for the Nation.AN I SLAND ON THE LANDNone of McWilliams s social activities impeded his progress on his nextbook, a work on Southern California for the American Folkways seriesedited by Erskine Caldwell, author of God s Little Acre and Tobacco Road.McWilliams considered Caldwell a rather strange guy quiet, reservedand never exhibiting so much as a vague sense of humor.And not veryif at all of the earth, like his stories and characters (Jan.25, 1943).Theseries was an extension of Caldwell s project of looking for America at itswhistle-stops, which had already produced Some American People in 1935.The excessive consistency of the titles in his series Buckeye Country,High Border Country, Piney Woods Country, Lower Piedmont Country, andso on was slightly at odds with the diversity he sought to document, butCaldwell managed to recruit Gertrude Atherton, who contributed GoldenGate Country, and Wallace Stegner, who wrote Mormon Country.As earlyas 1943, Caldwell began applying gentle pressure on McWilliams to con-tribute a book on Los Angeles, and McWilliams ultimately accepted theopportunity and wrote Southern California Country: An Island on theLand.The book s title turned out to be rather : uid.As late as 1945, a seriesannouncement referred to it as Mission Country, and later reprintsdropped the Country part of the title.For McWilliams, the project was a return to his regional interests and aself-described labor of love. I really enjoyed writing that book very muchbecause it gave me a chance to really unload, so to speak, he laughinglytold an interviewer in the 1970s (HAT, 209).McWilliams drew on the lorehe had acquired for his Westways column as well as his extensive knowl-edge of California literature.He culled his book s subtitle, for example,from the writings of Helen Hunt Jackson, whose Ramona was the 9 rstnovel written about Southern California.Although McWilliams held Jack-son s work in low regard, he made extensive use of her island imagethroughout the book.Southern California Country is not an overtly political work, but140 A MERI CA N P ROP HET McWilliams s political sympathies are easily detected below the clear sur-face of his prose.The 9 rst indication of his stance is the book s dedicationto Robert Walker Kenny, Native Son. A former newspaperman, judge,cofounder of the National Lawyers Guild, and friend of McWilliams,Kenny had managed the Olson campaign s 9 nances in 1938.The sameyear, he won the state senate seat Olson vacated and supported Earl War-ren for state attorney general.In his 9 rst term, he announced that he wouldrun for governor if a petition to recall Olson quali9 ed for the ballot.WhenWarren became governor in 1942, Kenny replaced him as state attorneygeneral and worked with McWilliams during and after the Zoot Suit Riotsin 1943.In 1946, the same year Southern California Country appeared, hereluctantly agreed to run for governor against Warren.That McWilliamswould dedicate a book to his friend and colleague is no surprise, but theform and timing of the dedication suggest that his gesture had anotherlayer of signi9 cance.In dubbing Kenny Native Son, McWilliams effec-tively co-opted the appellation of the Native Sons of the Golden West, anorganization that McWilliams had been skewering since the 1930s.The all-white group, which Earl Warren had joined in the 1920s, was to anti-Ori-ental agitation in California what the KKK was to Southern racism, albeitin a somewhat more decorous form, McWilliams later claimed (ECM,107).The election-year dedication touted Kenny at the expense of Warren,another native son, even as it attempted to reclaim that term from its reac-tionary connotations.McWilliams signals early on in Southern California Country that hisreaders should not expect pleasant local color.In the foreword, heannounces his plan to dispense with romance and to examine, with adegree of realism, the actual structure of social classes in Alta California (vii).After offering a superb description of the area s terrain and climate, hesets about demolishing the legendary history of Southern California fromthe mission period to statehood, a supposedly idyllic period when theregion s Spanish residents, all members of one big happy guitar-twangingfamily, danced the fandango and lived out days of beautiful indolence inlands of the sun that expand the soul (22). Before explaining how this leg-end came into existence, McWilliams notes coolly, it might be well totake a look at the facts (22).Drawing heavily on the work of S.F.Cook ofthe University of California, McWilliams sketches a less uplifting history inwhich heterogeneous Indian tribes succumbed to the unyielding demandsThe Great Exception 141 of the Spanish mission system. With the best theological intentions in theworld, McWilliams writes, the Franciscan padres eliminated Indianswith the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps (29).An even more aggressive Anglo assault after the gold rush decimated theregion s Indian cultures. The Spanish policy was to regard the Indian as apotential economic asset, McWilliams writes, but, under American rule,he was regarded as a liability to be liquidated as rapidly as possible (42).The Anglo domination extended to the aristocratic gente de razon as well.After the passage of the Land Act of 1851, at least 40 percent of the landowned under Mexican grants was sold to meet the costs of compliance.Asmore Anglos began arriving in Southern California, especially in the 1880s,these landholders began to be called Mexicans rather than Californios ornative Californians, and the region s pre-Anglo past was obscured, dis-torted, and commodi9 ed to suit the interests of the new elite.By docu-menting that process and bringing it to the attention of general audiences,author Gray Brechin has claimed, McWilliams peeled back the giddy andgaudy orange-crate label of of9 cial state history (Stewart and Gendar 2001,xix)
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