Taking Off

For ambition, narrative drive and breadth of research across the disciplines from culture through politics and demography to agronomy and water management, no recent project of American historical writing comes close to Kevin Starr’s mammoth, multi-volume “Americans and the California Dream.” For three decades, Starr has been anatomizing the rise of California from marginal frontier society in the 1850s to its present economic and social centrality on the American scene. It is a magnificent accomplishment. Today, it is no more possible to think intelligently about California without having read Starr than it would have been, a generation earlier, to have done so without having read Carey McWilliams. “Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950,” the latest installment of Starr’s great project, is particularly resonant because the period described in these pages is the one in which the California of today was shaped.

Starr writes with extraordinary authority, and yet the definitive quality of his work paradoxically serves to conceal the eccentricity of his approach. For Starr is not writing history in the classical sense of the term. Not for him the cold distance of a great European historian like Fernand Braudel, for whom the facts were everything and whose approach was to think in centuries. Nor is Starr motivated by political commitments and social idealism, as was McWilliams. Rather, Starr is a cultural historian obsessed with one big idea: the making and remaking of California’s identity. For him, material reality is principally shaped and directed by a people’s and societies’ deepest aspirations, rather than, as both Marxists and neo-liberal globalizers have customarily believed, the other way around. “One can follow the process of materialization,” he wrote in an earlier volume of the series, “forward from vision or metaphor to physical fact or decode a physical object back to its original metaphor. In each case my emphasis remains on the social and the symbolic context of the dreams which were materialized.”

The reliance here on the language of the literary critic rather than the historian is emblematic of Starr’s approach. His California is a world of will and ideas, and the figures he has focused on, from Gertrude Atherton to the Hollywood Ten, really are the unacknowledged legislators of those ideas. Put another way, Starr’s project all along has been at least as concerned with the California of the imagination as with the California of fact and has assumed that realities do begin in dreams. Indeed, that, for Starr, seems to be one of the principal lessons of the California experience over the last 150 years. It is less a question, as the slogan has it, of California’s needing men to match its mountains and more one of the mountains’ being, at least metaphorically, products of the way Californians interpreted them.

So it is no mere authorial conceit that the word “dream” appears in each of Starr’s titles. Rather, the idea of the dream is the template, the master idea, into which Starr fits all his material. This is not to say that his account of California is triumphalist. To the contrary: Starr is at least as good a narrator of nightmares as he is of the beauties, successes or accomplishments of the California experience. Like McWilliams, Starr is sensitive to California’s long history of race prejudice and writes about it with fierce indignation. And, long before such an observation became the conventional wisdom in California, he was insisting that the ascendancy of what he called an “Anglo-American ideology” in California from the late 19th century through the 1960s was only temporary and that other peoples, above all Mexicans and Mexican Americans, were destined to reassert themselves. Nonetheless, for Starr it is the internal visions that come first, whether for good or for ill, and implicit in his argument has been the conviction that, whatever the injustices and exclusions of the past, the golden California dream could become a reality for all races, equalizing our aspirations with those of Mexican immigrants to Okies.

Nowhere have the strengths and weaknesses of this approach been as visible as in Starr’s latest volume, “Embattled Dreams.” The importance for California of the period between the beginning of World War II and the beginning of the Korean War can hardly be overstated. It was the pivotal moment in the state’s economic development, as Starr is at pains to point out. Although by the 1930s agriculture was no longer the linchpin of the California economy, World War II was the defining moment for industrial California, the time when the California elite no longer saw agriculture as playing the lead role in the future. It was then that the state became, as Starr puts it, America’s “Arsenal of Democracy, training ground, staging area, and port of embarkation” for the war in the Pacific. The federal government spent $35 billion in the state between 1940 and 1946, 1.6 million Americans moved to California to work in defense-related industries, and millions more came to do their Army training. And, as Starr shows, the economic structures that were created to fight World War II provided the basis for another wartime economy in which California would play a lead role and on which it would come to rely: the Cold War.

All of this is recounted by Starr with great verve. And he is even more interesting on the way the war transformed the lives of nonwhite Californians and of women, both white and nonwhite. Despite the cruel tragedy of the internment of Japanese Americans which he narrates with subtlety and compassion, and to which he gives a historical context that is rare in discussions of the subject, Starr largely concludes that for most groups the war was an emancipatory experience. California’s Mexican Americans were, as he puts it, “de-barrio-ized,” while a similar process took place for Chinese Americans. And women who had worked in factories and shipyards would never be able to return to the roles they had played before. In anatomizing these developments, Starr offers powerful support for the view that the groundwork for the vast social transformations that America experienced in the 1960s was actually laid in California during World War II. To be sure, as Starr notes in passing, some of these same processes were taking place elsewhere in the country, but he is not wrong to put California at their center.

In this sense, as in a number of others, this is the first of Starr’s books to deal with a California recognizable to most people. Many of the principal figures and stories Starr evokes in the book--Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, the Zoot Suit riots, the anti-communist investigations in Hollywood--still resonate and, of course, the essentially suburban California of today was born in the era Starr chronicles in “Embattled Dreams.”

And yet for all of the undoubted strengths of Starr’s approach, the book is oddly miscellaneous: a sometimes glorious, sometimes tragic pageant, in which Starr moves from story to story, imposing no particular order on his narrative beyond--or so, at least, it often seems--its own interest. Sections on freeway construction, race relations, Hollywood gossip (the book goes on, at some length about the war service, or lack of it, of well-known stars of the era), industrial development and the careers of political leaders, above all Nixon and Warren, succeed one another at a somewhat dizzying pace.

Starr’s reluctance to impose any more exigent structure on the book is somewhat unsatisfying; the reader looks in vain for some contextualization. To some extent this has been a problem for all of Starr’s books, but it seems particularly acute in this installment. For example, the effects of the anti-communist investigation in Hollywood are described to rich effect, but the larger questions of what that great quarrel was about seem of little interest to Starr. Indeed, only when he discusses racial issues does Starr seem willing to get off his anecdotal plinth and don the motley of the social historian in the full sense of the term. And yet, in fairness, Starr’s approach is of a piece with the argument that he has made since he began his great project: As he put it, “my technique is story, narrative--suggestion rather than explanation, the elusive over the quantifiable.” In the case of California in the 1940s, Starr’s method may also appear to consciously echo his claim that in this period “the inner landscape of California--which is to say, California as a shared social and imaginative identity--had been fast-forwarded into futurity even beyond the state of acceleration brought about by the Gold Rush.”

Obviously, it is much harder for a historian to write with assurance about the present than about the past, and it would be unfair to fault Starr for refusing to be more definitive. But for all its extraordinary qualities, there is something unsatisfying about “Embattled Dreams,” as if the whole of the book were less than the sum of its parts. Again, the problem is not so much with Starr’s interpretation of events or people. It is true that his somewhat hagiographical account of Warren attributes to this complicated and ambiguous figure much of what is admirable about California’s political culture--”a knight of non-partisanship,” Starr calls him, citing the characterization of a contemporary observer. He also associates Warren and his family with all that is seductive about California’s lifestyle, to the point of waxing romantic about Warren’s daughters, whom he describes as “golden California girls, middle-class royalty from a middle-class state.” All of this is certainly open to debate and will doubtless draw the ire of many historians. Rather, this miscellaneous quality, the suspicion that, in the end, all of these stories carry the same weight, that they are, in the end, just stories, makes Starr’s book, for all its myriad virtues, less profound and, in the end, less important than it might otherwise be.

McWilliams comes to mind. Starr is infinitely more learned about California than McWilliams ever was, and his books will certainly be more valuable to both researchers and students. And yet McWilliams’ writings on California are unforgettable. The main reason for that is not that he was always right--it is possible to be a conservative and still admire the leftist McWilliams--but that he was impassioned. There is nothing wrong with dispassion. But in Starr’s case, dispassion is married to a commitment to storytelling, which is passionate or it is nothing. And it is this contradiction that prevents “Embattled Dreams,” which is a very good book, from being a great book.