As noted here previously, writer and journalist Carey McWilliams gave the citrus towns of Riverside, Redlands, Claremont and Ontario a generous amount of space in “Southern California: An Island on the Land,” his postwar study that’s still cited as essential reading about Greater Los Angeles.
McWilliams, unlike most L.A. thinkers past and present, treated the Inland Empire as an essential piece of Southern California, not as a dull hinterland of rubes and rustics.
In writing here Oct. 29 about McWilliams, I promised a follow-up that would focus on his visits here for speaking engagements. They were lively and sometimes controversial.
I only thought to look into those public appearances because of a stray comment in “Island.”
“Not so long ago, I spoke in Riverside on the subject of civil liberties,” McWilliams wrote in his 1946 book. A Los Angeles minister, Dr. E.P. Ryland, was on the platform with him, he said. Hijinx ensued.
Intrigued, I approached the Riverside Main Library’s archivist to see if we could nail down the details. Ruth McCormick came back with the date and place, as cited in newspaper notices and stories: Nov. 7, 1939, at All Souls Church.
All Souls is the little red sandstone building, opened in 1892, that’s still in use today as the Universalist Unitarian Church. It’s a block east of the Mission Inn and in the same block as The Cheech. I walk past it frequently.
Carey McWilliams spoke there? History suddenly came to life.
In McWilliams’ account, people had been warned to stay away from the event by the Associated Farmers of Riverside County, which in his wry words hinted “at various forms of reprisal that might be visited on those venturesome enough to attend.”
The meeting’s purpose was to consider founding a Riverside chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. McWilliams was the draw.
In 1939 he was known for “Factories in the Field,” considered the nonfiction counterpart to John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” of the same year. And wrath was what the Associated Farmers of California felt.
The organization was founded in 1934 to block labor reforms and put down strikes, often violently. Steinbeck’s novel lightly camouflaged the group as the Farmers’ Association. McWilliams in “Factories” derisively referred to them as “the Farm Fascists.”
The Riverside chapter and its allies were not amused.
Carey McWilliams, later the writer of the acclaimed “Southern California: An Island on the Land,” was the headline speaker at a Riverside church in 1939 at which a local chapter of the ACLU was launched. All Souls Church is today’s Universalist Unitarian Church. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)Intimidatingly, the sheriff himself was in the audience. Members of Associated Farmers tried to identify others in attendance, dictating their names to a stenographer hired for the occasion, McWilliams wrote in “Island.”
“130 Attend Initial Meeting of ACLU” was the Riverside Enterprise’s headline. In his address, the paper wrote, McWilliams “indicated the danger of ‘mass movements wherein democratic methods will be given up in exchange for a promise of security.’”
(Yes, 1939, not 2025. I double-checked.)
McWilliams, according to the news story, also criticized Associated Farmers as “the spear-head of the anti-labor forces using the farmer as a front.” I hope the stenographer took that down.
This was the writer’s second known appearance in Riverside. He’d spoken on Feb. 17, 1936, at Riverside’s Tetley Hotel, then at University Avenue and Lime Street.
More importantly, and controversially, he returned in 1949, after writing books on Black people, antisemitism and Japanese internment.
The Riverside County Schools Department hired him to speak to teachers on Feb. 24 about racial issues. He was scheduled for the afternoon in Riverside (at Lincoln Grammar School) and the evening in Indio (at Roosevelt Grammar School).
American Legion Post 79 objected, saying McWilliams’ name had appeared 47 times — but who’s counting? — in a state Un-American Activities Committee report.
The county Grand Jury went into special session, emerging to denounce McWilliams. State Sen. Nelson Dilworth of Hemet weighed in, calling McWilliams “a propagandist” and “professional scold and critic of the United States and more particularly of California.”
Carey McWilliams is seen here in his office in 1978, one year before his final Riverside speaking engagement, which unlike the others passed without controversy. (Wikimedia Commons)County schools caved, canceling the twin appearances the day they were to happen. Saying he’d made a mistake in hiring McWilliams, Superintendent E.E. Smith defended his own patriotism, which he said had never before been in question.
“Certainly no one detests communism more than I,” Smith asserted to the Riverside Daily Press. “May I also add that Riverside County schools are as free from communistic influences, I believe, as any in the nation.”
For his part, McWilliams, who was not a communist, told the Press that he was “a little surprised and amused by all the ruckus.” He learned of the cancellation the same day he was notified he would receive the Thomas Jefferson Award from the Council Against Intolerance in America.
That wasn’t the end of it.
Six Riverside ministers — yes, ministers — protested the cancellation, said teachers should be trusted to hear what McWilliams had to tell them and proposed to host him themselves at Central Junior High. The school board granted permission.
That was reported in the Riverside Enterprise under the headline “Carey McWilliams Will Give Cancelled Speech,” with a photo of the author above this colorful caption: “Storm center back in the news.”
The storm center’s May 16 speech was attended by 500, almost four times the number who’d heard him in 1939. They were “attentive and applauded frequently” as he said all racial groups should get “a meaningful equal opportunity,” according to a next-day account in the Enterprise.
In 1951, McWilliams left L.A. for New York City, where he had been hired to edit The Nation on a temporary basis that became permanent.
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Topic: “Muckraking: Then and Now.”
P-E staff writer Dan Bernstein – yes, the paper’s future columnist – wrote in advance that Riverside had received flattering attention in “Island” but “hasn’t always been so kind” in return, before recounting the 1946 controversy.
“So far,” Bernstein’s story began, “nobody has canceled Carey McWilliams’ speech — this time around.”
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, until someone cancels him. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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