Golden Coast. - "Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950" - book review

National Review, August 12, 2002 by David Klinghoffer

Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950, by Kevin Starr (Oxford, 386 pp., $37.50)

Thomas Mann wrote of California's "serene Egyptian-like sky," a sky that sheltered him from Nazi fascism. Another European of the same era, a Brit, having danced with Governor Earl Warren's daughter Nina "Honey Bear" Warren, swooned at the thought of the tanned, blue-eyed girl from the Golden State. "I still see California through a faint golden haze," he recalled later, "engendered among the pale London faces by the peach-fed Honey-bear from Sacramento."

Of course California excites passions both ways, love and hate and little in between. A character in Chester Himes's 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, a black shipyard worker, rants against Los Angeles, that "most overrated, lousiest, countriest, phoniest city I've ever been in." Many have said more or less this about the whole state.

California and New York City are the two places in America that seem to arouse such definite feelings in visitors and natives alike. Other states and cities may -- let's be candid -- easily be mixed up with one another. A California native, I live in Washington State, a lovely place that I sometimes can't help confusing with Oregon.

No writer or historian who wants to be read would try writing a six- volume-plus history of Oklahoma or Ohio. But you might write one about New York, and Kevin Starr is completing a history of California that's already six volumes and so far he has covered only the 100 years since 1850. (Four years earlier, America had taken the California Republic, as it was known during a 23-day period of independence, from Mexico in a series of "battles" in which Mexican forces mostly declined to fight.) Starr's newest installment keeps up the standard of narrative excellence and all around historiographical enthusiasm that readers of his previous five books have come to expect. He is as much a fan of California as he is a straight academic historian, even getting worked up about topics as mundane as gas stations -- "gas dispensed . . . from shiny and omnipresent Richfield, Texaco, Ethyl, Mohawk, Shell, and Mobil stations by uniformed attendants who wore chauffeur hats and bow ties." There is more than enough fascinating material to keep the series going, at this pace, through to the present day.

First of all, the state's history doesn't stop at the Nevada or coastal borders. It opens out onto the history of the whole country, as California leads the way for better or for worse, whether building the aircraft and ships that won World War II or bringing women into the workforce. By July 1943, men having gone off to the Pacific or Europe, women made up 42.4 percent of the workers in southern California's aviation industry, more than 10 percentage points higher than in the rest of the country. When women today go off each morning to drab "careers" just like men do, by way of demonstrating their equality, they can thank California for pointing the direction.

Starr, who is state librarian and teaches at USC, happens also to be a gifted storyteller with a flair for suspense. He strings you along, instilling curiosity about how a thread of the narrative will turn out, as in the chapter about 1941 (each chapter covers a single year), which is framed by a decision that Kozo Nishino, commander of the Japanese Imperial Navy's submarine I-17, had to make weeks after Pearl Harbor. Nishino hunted cargo ships off Washington and Oregon and proceeded to park off the coast of Santa Barbara. He could have shelled the town itself, killing untold numbers of civilians, but -- as Starr waits till the end of the chapter to tell us -- finally decided to content himself with firing across Pacific Coast Highway and taking out a couple of oil tanks instead.

The most colorful chapter is about 1947. It deals with crime and journalism, including the demise of Bugsy Siegel, the L.A. gangster who built Las Vegas, as well as that of Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia," a 22-year-old would-be movie star whose naked body was found sawed in half on a vacant L.A. lot (this became the crime story of the decade). Starr has an eye for the luminous detail. For instance, on the night of his death Siegel told an associate he smelled flowers and asked if there were fresh ones somewhere about. The associate found none and later commented, "When someone smells flowers and there aren't any in the house, it means they're going to die." Shortly thereafter, a hit man representing mobsters to whom Siegel owed money leaned through the window with a .30/30 carbine.

While he keeps the story going, Starr never lets you get far before pausing for a little diamond of a character sketch of some great, notorious, or picturesque Californian, or someone who achieved celebrity as a result of his experiences there. We meet General Patton, of horsey, aristocratic, old San Marino-Pasadena descent, and Marilyn Monroe, who got her start in 1944 making parachutes for the Van Nuys Radio Plane Company. An Army photographer noticed her and, amid an extramarital affair, paid her $25 a day to pose for publicity stills as a typical assembly-line worker. Earl Warren, governor from 1943 to 1953 and the very essence of "Masonic blandness," gets a surprisingly engaging chapter to himself (1948). Starr's assessment of the man, whose years as chief justice of the United States produced Brown v. Board of Education, is shrewd. "The more one pushes into the Warren mystique, the more one is tempted . . . to detect behind the non- partisanship, behind the lifelong refusal to endorse other candidates, an egotism so great as to be heroic, for all its unpretentiousness."