Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934-1943

Abstract

In 1935, the California magazine Pacific Weekly published Fascism, an article by the young Los Angeles lawyer Carey McWilliams.' Calling the Jewish leaders who tied their opposition to Nazis to a defense of capitalism fascists might have seemed strange even to the readers of that left-wing magazine. Yet to McWilliams, a central figure of the California left of the 1930s and 1940s, fascism was a concept that could be applied broadly. Under the rubric of fascism, McWilliams described such American phenomena as union busting, anti-Semitism, nativism, militarism, capitalist exploitation, scapegoating, lynching, red-baiting, and vigilante justice. Although McWilliams's use of the term fascism lacked theoretical rigor, it allowed him to piece together in a coherent agenda the astonishing range of political activities he actively pursued as a lawyer, journalist, activist, and government official. Antifascism, as a political posture that called for radical reforms toward economic reconstruction and racial equality in a democratic constitutional order, provided McWilliams with a basic continuity of political instinct. Many scholars have viewed left-wing antifascism as a movement that directed its attention solely to international developments, such as the Spanish Civil War, at the expense of domestic concerns. For instance, Richard Pells has argued, As writers and politicians grew more and more preoccupied with the talk of devising a suitable response to the fascist menace, interest in domestic issues correspondingly waned.2 In general, historians have assumed that antifascist rhetoric was too closely connected to Communist party policy to be useful in advancing a vigorous left-wing politics genuinely rooted in the American political situation, but a study of McWilliams from 1934 to 1943 reveals that a broad range of liberals and leftists applied the metaphor of fascism to American society. McWilliams's antifascist language was spoken by the wide range of California organizations with which he was involved from 1934