Golden erring: once the embodiment of America's possibilities, California has become the embodiment of the country's delusions.

• Author: Frank, T.A.
• Position: Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 - Book review

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (Americans and the California Dream)

by Kevin Starr

Oxford University Press, 576 pp.

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How did we manage to have it all in the years after the Second World War--car, house, health care, affordable education, Social Security, rising wages, leisure--and where did it go? If anyone knows, please tell California. Things seemed to be going so well here a half century ago: unemployment rates just above 3 percent, swimming pools in every backyard, baseball teams poached from Brooklyn, matchless public schools and universities, and swift new highways. Good jobs were available to nearly anyone who came, and nearly everyone did.

It all seems awfully remote. Today's California--reckless spender in the booms, feckless cutter in the busts, thoughtless booster of every bubble, mindless indulger of spoiled interest groups, and senseless elector of weak public officials--looks wan and sickly. Its schools are shabby, its traffic relentless, its social services overwhelmed, its prisons disgraceful, and its bond rating comical. Once the embodiment of American possibilities, California has become the embodiment of American delusions. Only with a great recession and a budget deficit of over $24 billion has it been forced to an economic reckoning, one that will be brutal for the poor and the elderly. There's talk of a federal bailout, which, in light of far greater sums received by AIG, seems almost defensible, especially to those of us who live here. But it's a long shot.

Under such grim circumstances, one must welcome a book on California at its pinnacle of wealth and self-assurance, when healthier habits of living and governance prevailed. In a well-timed effort, Kevin Starr, peerless historian of the Golden State, has published a 538-page volume entitled Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. Starr's book, his eighth in the California Dream series, is painstaking and comprehensive, thorough in chronicling the names and ideas of the age. It's an affectionate look back at the good times and a helpful reminder of the bad ones. If much was sweet about those years, much also was not.

But let's start with what was sweet. Starr offers a 1940s snapshot of the Loeffler family--fire department engineer Leroy, his wife Joyce, and their two young daughters--who lived on Leroy's salary of $3,000 a year, the rough equivalent of $36,000 in today's money. Such an income...