The Decade the Dream Took a Beating : ENDANGERED DREAMS: The Great Depression in California, By Kevin Starr<i> (Oxford University Press: $35; 402 pp.)</i>

Until 1978, when the juggernaut of development picked it up and moved it across the Embarcadero to the cheap-jack tourist maze called Pier 39, the Eagle Cafe in San Francisco had stood at the foot of Jefferson Street for nearly 70 years. A simple, square, brown-shingled little building with a dull green roof, the old saloon gave no hint that it once had been crowded with rank-and-file soldiers in the waterfront strike of 1934, one of the bloodiest of the many bloody labor battles that punctuated the dirty ‘30s.

When I knew the Eagle in the 1960s and 1970s, however, there were plenty of men still around who remembered those violent days with the clarity and proud bitterness of veterans. Among them was Lou Andreotti, who had inherited the Eagle from his father. If you knew him well enough, Andreotti would pull an old manila folder out from behind the bar and show you one of the free meal tickets the Eagle had honored during the 1934 strike--and then, his eyes luminous with pride, a letter from strike leader Harry Bridges thanking Lou’s father for feeding his men during hard times.

Andreotti understood that his father and the men who came to be fed at the Eagle had taken part in one of the central events in the history of the American labor movement. The strike that paralyzed most West Coast ports between May 9 and July 19, 1934, and the Bay Area general strike that climaxed it produced one of the few identifiable victories the movement had enjoyed since World War I. While I think it is too much to say, as Kevin Starr does, that the longshoremen’s battle “galvanized organized labor across the United States” (equally dramatic, if less successful, skirmishes were being fought in places like Toledo and Minneapolis quite independent of events on the West Coast), there is no question that the waterfront strike stood as a particularly telling demonstration of what labor might accomplish in an age that combined hope and anguish in about equal portions.

Nowhere was that combination expressed with more exuberance and wrath than in California, and in no book has it been captured with as much panache as in “Endangered Dreams,” the fourth volume in Starr’s resolute march through the state’s American history. The first three volumes--”Americans and the California Dream,” “Inventing the Dream” and “Material Dreams”--brought the story from the Gold Rush to the Crash of ’29. “Endangered Dreams” carries it through the years of the Great Depression, and for my money, it is the best of the series (so far; it will be fun to see what the author is able to do with World War II and the boom years of the 1950s, when the state’s traditional saraband of growth became a kind of St. Vitus’ Dance).

Starr, the former city librarian of San Francisco and now the California state librarian in Sacramento, has mined primary and secondary sources with admirable diligence. Like those in the earlier volumes, the bibliographic essay in “Endangered Dreams” is a marvel of useful pedagogy, and he is generous in acknowledging his debt to the work of others. Nor is he bashful about studied interpretation; his continuing analysis of the extraordinary tension between an often violent radicalism and an always rigid conservatism, which runs through the book like a subtext, is especially good.

But make no mistake: “Endangered Dreams” is narrative history in the grand tradition, and what Starr is giving us is stories. Not many historians these days seem to take any joy in their craft; most prefer to assume the stance of a stolid (if necessarily spurious) objectivity that drowns passion in a sea of explication. Not Starr; he is, to put it plainly, having fun. In California, most of the themes of the Great Depression were writ large and Starr makes the most of them, seizing the threads of history with such whole-souled fervor that you can almost see him sweating gleefully as he spins them into an elaborate tapestry of the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Here is the story of California’s industrial labor movement, with suitable attention paid to the ambiguous character of New Deal policy emanating from Washington; generally labor-friendly, the New Dealers nevertheless were irritated by militantly independent local workers and aghast at the general strike that shut down most businesses in the Bay Area for four days in July 1934--an action that struck at the base of the sedate progressivism that undergird most of the reformers in FDR’s administration. Less familiar, but more superbly rendered here, is the story of the great communist-led agricultural strikes in the Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin Valley, each crushed with a brutality that the New Dealers, distancing themselves from radical excess, generally ignored.

Even more unsettling to Washington was Upton Sinclair’s uproarious End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, the wave of Utopian-socialist reaction that very nearly carried the radical novelist into the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, and the even more fringe-like eruptions of the Townsend and Ham-and-Eggs movements that gave most of the New Dealers the galloping fantods, all of which Starr explores with an eye for the splendidly ludicrous. Here too is the story of the grapes of wrath refugees whom wind, drought and the cruel vagaries of a crippled economic system had driven from the homes of their ancestry in the Dust Bowl states and of the desperately noble efforts by such reformers as journalist Carey McWilliams, economist Paul Schuster Taylor, photographer Dorothea Lange, novelist John Steinbeck and others to give them shelter in the golden valleys of California--in spite of the opposition of farmers, state and local law enforcement officials, civic authorities, the press and the judiciary, whose collusion came as close to undiluted fascism as anything in our history.

Finally, giving them their due as defiant contradictions of the theme of despair that runs like a threnody through so much of the 1930s, Starr celebrates the great public works projects of the era--Boulder Dam, the Central Valley Project, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc.--though with appropriate reservations regarding their environmental and social impacts.

I miss some things: I miss any discussion of the self-help movement, a phenomenon that at its height may have included as many as 300,000 Californians, many of whose cooperatives became the foundation of the EPIC clubs that sprouted in 1934. And, as noted earlier, Starr doesn’t get everything right. Helen Hosmer, the editor of the radical Rural Observer in 1938 (I knew her well 30 years later), went through life perpetually broke and would have burst into gravelly laughter to see herself described as a “philanthropist.” There are a few similar shortcomings, but the hell with them. You can’t have everything, and such concerns become picayune in the extreme when put against the triumph of narration and understanding that Starr has given us in the crowded, surpassingly lively pages of “Endangered Dreams”--the defining portrait of a state in which the bravery, cowardice, nobility and greed of hard times mixed in a brew of unmatched power.