Golden dreams : California in an age of abundance, 1950 - 1963

601 Pages·2011·5.92 MB·English

by  Kevin Starr

GOLDEN DREAMS
AMERICANS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM
Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915
Inventing the Dream
California Through the Progressive Era
Material Dreams
Southern California Through the 1920s
Endangered Dreams
The Great Depression in California
The Dream Endures
California Enters the 1940s
Embattled Dreams
California in War and Peace, 1940–1950
Golden Dreams
California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963
Coast of Dreams
California on the Edge, 1990–2003
GOLDEN DREAMS
California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963
KEVIN STARR
1
2009
1
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Copyright © 2009 by Kevin Starr
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Starr, Kevin.
Golden dreams : California in an age of abundance, 1950–1963 / Kevin Starr.
p. cm. — (Americans and the California dream)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-19-515377-4
1. California—History—1950–
2. California—Social conditions—20th century.
3. California—Economic conditions—20th century. I. Title.
F866.2.S7332009
979.4'053–dc22 2008050359
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Sheila Starr
—we met in this time and
began our life together.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface ix
I SUBURBAN ASSUMPTIONS
1 San Fernando: Homes and Happiness in Residential Subdivisions 3
2 Designs for the Good Life: Modernism, Tiki, Ranch 28
II URBAN PERSPECTIVES
3 Urban Expectations: San Diego Leverages Itself into Big-City Status 57
4 Baghdad by the Bay: Herb Caen’s San Francisco 88
5 The Cardinal, the Chief, Walter O’Malley, and Buff Chandler:
Redefi ning the City of Angels 131
6 Downsides and Dividends: Los Angeles as Supercity 164
III POLITICS AND PUBLIC WORKS
7 Warren, Nixon, Knight, Knowland: The Demise of Republican Centrism 191
8 Cold War Campus: The University of California and Other Secret Places 217
9 Freeways to the Future: An Epic of Construction on Behalf of the
Automobile 245
10 Mare Nostrum: The State Water Project 267
viii contents
IV ART AND LIFE
11 Provincials, Baghdaders, and Beats: Literary San Francisco in the 1950s 285
12 Big Sur: The Search for Alternative Value 314
13 Silent Generation: Coming of Age on the Coast of Dreams 352
14 Brubeck! Jazz Goes to College 381
V DISSENTING OPINIONS
15 Largest State in the Nation: A Rebellion Against Growth and the
Destruction of Environment 413
16 People of Color: The Beginning of the End for Jim Crow California 436
17 Cool, Not Cool: Headlines and Transitions 466
Notes 481
Bibliographical Essay 487
Acknowledgments 537
Index 539
Preface
AS far as the understanding of history is concerned, decades can be arbitrary.
Mere numbers on the calendar do not erect impassable fi rewalls. Forces set
in motion in one decade can often take one, two, three, or more decades,
even half centuries, to work themselves through to conclusion. And yet the moment
such a truism is affi rmed, an equally compelling paradox surfaces. Calendar decades
have a way of asserting coherence, texture, even personality, upon the years they
delineate. Surveying the fi rst half of the American twentieth century, for example,
we can conveniently and with a certain sense of accuracy distinguish the expansion-
ist fi rst decade of the twentieth century from the Progressive decade that followed,
ending in a war that no one seemed to have won. From this war emerged the creative
edginess of the 1920s, followed by the grainy black-and-white decade of the Great
Depression, followed by the World War II years and the transitions and opaque
resentments of the late 1940s. None of these characterizations is fully true, as con-
temporary historical interpretation has proven; yet the texture and signifi cance of
each of these decades remain in popular memory and, paradoxically, in the research
and writing of history, if only as paradigms to be challenged and rejected.
Golden Dreams, the most recent installment in the Americans and the California
Dream series, is centered on a decade, the 1950s, that survives in popular Ameri-
can imagination as a stable landscape resting atop tectonic plates that would soon
result in the earthquakes and fi ssures of the mid- and late 1960s. From this perspec-
tive, the 1950s can be extended through the Camelot years, 1960–63, during which
the assumptions of the 1950s began to be challenged but remained by and large in
force. Thus the year 1963, up until the Kennedy assassination in November, feels
and looks much like the late 1950s, albeit more intensifi ed, while the year 1964 is
redolent with the emergent energies and transformations of the Age of Aquarius. In
California terms, the Free Speech Movement erupting on the UC Berkeley campus