Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (review)

In the previous volume of his California Dream cycle, Kevin Starr went out of sequence, vaulting ahead to the 1990s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. That work, Coast of Dreams (2004), was apparently intended to mark the terminus of the series. It was by far the darkest of the California Dream books, the dream turning toward nightmare, and was the only one not published by Oxford. Now, with Golden Dreams, Starr returns to his original publisher, to the regular sequence of decades, and to what is for him a more congenial era. Picking up the tale from Embattled Dreams (2002), the history of the war and its aftermath, Starr now tells the story of the 1950s, which (as many will agree) did not end until 1963. Describing this extended decade, Starr often loops back into the past to remind us of, for example, the literary culture of San Francisco in the time of Frank Norris or of earlier plans or education, highways, and water development that preceded the great works of the ’50s. These backward glances are always useful and welcome, as is the reappearance of Ishi, last of his tribe, who in this volume is seen as prophetic of environmentalists of the ’50s, like David Brower.

The 1950s were of special significance to California, as in this decade it became the first state of the nation in population and size of its economy. California, moreover, came to define the style and mythology of the ’50s so that we now recall the era in terms of ranch house, suburbs, surfing, hot rods, drive-in restaurants and movies, and other typical California images and products. In this era, a generation, the Silent Generation, Starr’s own, grew to maturity: a small generation, overshadowed by the GI Generation before, and destined to be overshadowed by the Baby Boomers, yet by the end of the decade no longer silent. The apparent conformity of the time would be belied by the great tectonic shifts soon to be felt, and Starr calls the roll of ’50s California high school students who would shape politics and arts of coming decades: Joan Baez, Jerry Brown, Joan Didion, Dianne Goldman (later Feinstein), Anthony Kennedy, Richard Rodriguez, Carolyn See, Richard Serra, Susan Sontag, James Q. Wilson, and many others. (He misses Frank Zappa, Antelope Valley ’58).

The 1950s also represented the last flowering of the Progressive Movement in California. Earl Warren, Godwin Knight, and Edmund (Pat) Brown, though of different parties, shared the Progressive vision, and the vast social and physical constructions of the era—the multi-campus UC and CSU systems, California’s network of freeways and aqueducts—are the last great works of Progressivism. Yet by the early 1960s, the Progressive agenda had been defeated by a strange combination of environmental activism and a newly energized and highly partisan political right, represented here by Richard Nixon, which would elect Ronald Reagan governor in 1966—a story doubtless to be part of Starr’s next volume.

Kevin Starr’s ability to synthesize libraries of material and range over the scale of culture, to produce a compelling narrative from hot rods to the Civil Rights Movement, from city planning to surfing, from Caryl Chessman to the Beach Boys, is without parallel. Each volume in the series demonstrates again that this is one of the commanding achievements of American letters, and of the state he celebrates.