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

The story is part new and old, but mostly refreshingly retold in unfamiliar ways. It is about how California faced post-WWII problems in a unique, almost born-again fervor that allowed this bourgeoning nation-state to redefine and re-imagine itself, at least according to the individuals who created islands of newly blended iconic communities made up of presumptions and symbols of the past with the malleable new of everything. Golden Dreams is exquisite; a masterpiece of sequences portrayed with captivating imagery, entertaining anecdotes, and rational, insightful analysis about layers of American social, cultural, political, economic, and psychological life on a Californian scale. High School yearbooks and popular magazines are among the rich sources used to paint portraits of intangible meanings, from “the Silent Generation,” to the architects who fueled the “renegotiated” physical universe of the affluent and their private gardens and “Case Study” edifices. It surveys the melancholic explorations of elite academic literati, and Zen and/or drug enlightened science fiction writers, philosophers, cult leaders, and musicians, iconoclasts all. He finesses the rise of organized gay politics within a larger urban moral and cultural shift. Fascinating morsels sprinkle throughout, such as answering my lingering curiosity about “Paisano Productions” at the end of Perry Mason reruns. Mason’s creator Erle Stanley Gardner owned the vast Rancho del Paisano just south of Temecula, and he was an extended member of the writers’ conclave in nearby La Jolla, which contributed the region’s exotic milieu.

This is a synthesis of epic proportions, and however delicate in the details, at times it loses its coherent narrative and becomes an interpretive encyclopedia. Either way, it works. Distinctive sub-themes, filled with vignettes of psychosocially idiosyncratic personalities, are drawn into group portraits of the builders of foundational institutions that turned maturing cities into culturally thriving super-cities of the late twentieth century. Post-war California thus appears the result of an organic confluence, almost a conspiracy, by an elite, icon-making band of self-conscious visionaries and local colorful characters. In Los Angeles for example, it was a Cardinal, a police chief, a sports mogul, and an unfulfilled wife of a newspaper magnate who made the city’s magic while overcoming territorial tensions between east and west side Jews and gentiles, and the competition and direction of public works and private philanthropy. In foggy shrouded San Francisco, formerly dubbed the Paris of the West, columnist Herb Caen redefined the new Baghdad. As a unifying structure to frame the city’s exponential growth and transforming complexity, Starr’s use of Caen fails to convince, and merely opens and closes a hodge-podge of anecdotes and statistics to create a semblance of cohesion. Elsewhere, Starr draws a haunting portrait of Cold War California, appropriately borrowed from historian Roger Lotchin. While answering the hopes of industrialists, a peace-time war economy created a symbiosis between the University of California and later Stanford, but fostered a process whereby the arms race recast the state into one vast Cold War campus, with the newly established suburbs serving as dormitories. Equally successful is Starr’s integration of a sequence of personalities and policies of political regimes, in particular how Governor Pat Brown’s vision harnessed modernity to oversee a revolution in higher education and water resources. Starr’s analysis of a rising politicized right wing, however, minimizes the pervasiveness of the John Birch Society that propelled ferocious bi-partisan rhetoric and called for the head of the former Governor, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Similarly, Starr dismisses the “nuttiness” of anti-fluoridationists, but as I write, it is clear they are long-lived ideologues. It was more than a little eerie to read Starr’s dramatic portrayal of the Santa Barbara oil rig disaster and the frustrated efforts to ebb the flow of black gold, while deep down in the earthquake prone seabed volcanic fissures spewed muck devouring the pristine coastline and coast life, which created a defining moment for environmental reformers...