Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California by Kevin Starr (review)

Reviews 181 loosely connected collection of character sketches, vignettes, meditations, and aphorisms that reveal the horror and humor, the violence and tenderness, and the passion and pity in the daily life the author experienced behind prison w alls. The cast of characters is full of hopeless and hopeful men, a few quirky oddballs, con artists, bullies, murderers, and cellblock lawyers and philoso­ phers . . . all trying to survive. There is Orangutan Jones, a man driven insane by a woman who breaks off all contact with him; Lobo, a M ississippian who kills another inmate and, explaining that “there ain’t no place to run” in prison, calm ly awaits the guards; Old Man Henry Carter, who came to prison “before rules were rules”; the practical and vicious guard, Captain Boss; the spiritual Jomo, the jailhouse mystic who teaches Washington how to escape into his own imagination; and dozens more. Some are colorful, many evoke sympathy, and others talk jive and walk the razor’s edge. Much to Jerome W ashington’s credit, this is not a preachy book. However, it does offer a strong, usually even-handed indictment of this country’s prison system , as w ell as an indictment of people— and not simply convicts— who prey on the weak, who rob, steal, lie, cheat, rape, murder. Finally, Iron House: Stories from the Yard is a tribute to the author’s triumph over seem ingly im pos­ sible odds. ROBERT HEADLEY Southern State Community College, Ohio Endangered Dreams: The G reat D epression in California. By Kevin Starr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 402 pages, $35.00.) This is volum e four in Starr’s “Americans and the California Dream” saga. With each new history, Starr’s achievem ent becomes more apparent and com ­ pelling. Perhaps not since Francis Parkman has there been an American histo­ rian with such an epic ambition and narrative skill. The story he tells has the aesthetic pleasures of a great novel; its vision of the 1930s w ill please some readers and anger others. Starr’s im m ediate predecessor, however, is not Parkman but Carey M cW illiams. The alert reader already has seen Starr measuring him self against McW illiams: the panorama of Southern California at the beginning of Inventing the Dream for example, challenges the opening of Southern California: An Island on the Land. The present volum e takes Starr into M cW illiam s’s own time, when he flourished as a social activist and wrote F actories in the Field. It was a time, Starr tells us, when “Right battled Left in a struggle that acted out on behalf of the rest of the nation a scenario of possible fascism and Communism in these United States.” As background, Starr reviews the history of organized labor and strikes in nineteenth-century California, then brings the story into the brutal farm conflicts of the 1930s. Other chapters explore reform 182 Western American Literature m ovem ents brewed from the combination o f the Depression and the state’s huge population of old people: the EPIC campaign for the governorship by Upton Sinclair, and the “Ham and E ggs” movem ent— both uneasy and unsuc­ cessful California variations on New Deal themes. Starr balances these disturbing or zany events of the ’30s with what are to him the era’s overbalancing successes in the arts, and in public works: the bridges and dams which, he writes with heady optimism, w ill last for a thou­ sand years. These monuments have evoked Starr’s most poetic writing through­ out the series; som e, like Hetch Hetchy, appear and reappear in different per­ spectives. At the same time, these monuments of steel and stone and concrete were matched by artists of word and image; by John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange, by H ollyw ood’s best film s, and by the histories o f Carey M cW illiams. Thus is M cW illiams evaluated and subsumed into Starr’s own evolving narra­ tive. This vision of the Depression is unlikely to appease historians of the Left, such as Mike D avis, who considers him self the true heir to M cW illiams. From...