California Awakenings

In 1946, Carey McWilliams published Southern California: An Island on the Land, in which he described California as a state awkwardly set apart. Twenty years later, in 1967, he announced that the nation had been witness to a "revolution." Once cut off as an anomaly—an "island on the land"—California was now "the America to come."¹ Kevin Starr masterfully explains just how it is that the Golden State transitioned from an exception to a pacesetter in the nation's development. The latest installment in his Americans and the California Dream series, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 is more daring in scope than anything that has come before. The exigencies of California's postwar emergence give Starr license to expand his purview, and he does, drawing out vast connections between state and nation. Virtually all of the large-scale changes that affected the United States in this time, he asserts—suburbanization, consumerism, militarization, avant-gardism, civil rights—owed their vigor to the California experiment. Golden Dreams' organization is different from previous volumes too. Unlike Starr's Embattled Dreams, whose chapter-by-chapter account of the 1940s progresses year-by-year, Golden Dreams virtually suspends time so that the reader can take in its fourteen-year span in one panoramic "mosaic of narrative." By the time its seventeenth chapter closes, Golden Dreams has carefully guided the reader from the mundane to the exotic, the middle to the margins, La Jolla to Palo Alto, and Watts to Big Sur (p. x).

Part one of Starr's book is about the fundamental socioeconomic reality of Cold War California: the suburb. At first, Starr tells the familiar tale of how once-pristine ranchlands and dairy farms surrounding Los Angeles morphed into techno-burbs reliant on the defense industry and all the amenities of an affluent society: ultramodern houses, hospitals, and shopping centers. Into the midst of indistinguishable ranch houses dotting the unremarkable streets of these satellites moved middling folk who sought "a place [to] live, reproduce, succeed, fail, live, and die in American circumstances enlivened by day-to-day hope and the immemorial pleasures, struggles, questions, and rhythms of daily life" (p. 27). Predictability, however, was not suburbia's only operative term. Shifting to an unconventional story line, Starr underscores the innovations that made California suburbia dynamic, not static. Architects, he notes, used blank slates of undeveloped land to test new home designs, such as the steel-framed Streamline Modernes commissioned by the Case Study House (CSH) project. It is no coincidence, he avers, that Pierre Koenig's L-shaped prototype (CSH #22) helped define the new California lifestyle as "urbane, urban, and humane" (p. 45). Other innovators pursued these same ideals. There was Thomas Church, for example, whose residential landscaping blurred the lines between indoor and outdoor, and Cliff May, whose ranch houses melded contemporary American desires and traditional Spanish architecture. In San Francisco, meanwhile, restaurateurs (notably Victor Bergeron of Trader Vic's) adopted Polynesian Revival to spice up the middle-class dining experience. "Tiki," Starr offers, created a "myth and identity for ordinary Americans: a design and style that contained within itself a strong note—at least on the level of fantasy—of sexual liberation, of escaping the Puritan restraints of American life" (p. 51).

As vibrant as Starr makes California suburban life out to be, he is never so bold as to say it outpaced life in the city, the organizing theme for Golden Dreams' second section. Here Starr uses four chapters to trace the transformations of three cities. San Diego, he begins, used its burgeoning defense sector to "leverage itself" into a metropolis and spread its "mesa-top residential communities" deep into the desert lands to the east (p. 71–73). Wanting to add color to a town often called bland, he next describes the ways this giant military installation complemented its conservatism with forward thinking. While the Scripps Institute and University of California campuses became epicenters of...