The California Dream's Great Explorer
Accompanied by state Librarian Kevin Starr, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently unveiled the state's new commemorative quarter. It is a beautiful coin, graced by three icons of California history and culture: John Muir stands before Yosemite's Half Dome; a California condor soars overhead.
On the same day the governor displayed the new quarter, Starr announced his retirement. It was a fitting moment to do so. Like Muir before him, Starr is utterly fascinated by California, what it means and how it has evolved. But where Muir's fascination turned inexorably toward natural history and Earth science, Starr has plumbed California's human and cultural past. Muir studied geological time and its patterns. Starr studies the errors and triumphs of Californians.
It began 35 years ago with a doctoral thesis in the American Civilization program at Harvard. Tutored by Alan Heimert, Harvard's young scholar of 18th century American religion, Starr set out to write on a Great Awakening of a different sort: California's imaginative hold on the American psyche.
The thesis became the book "Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915." And the book, in turn, became a much, much longer intellectual expedition based on a deceptively simple, even formulaic, question: What is the meaning -- and what is the condition -- of the "California dream" through time?
Each of Starr's half-dozen sequels has illuminated the history of California. But the whole is far more significant than its parts. Homeric in ambition, Starr's "California dream" series is the most important scholarly investigation of California ever produced.
Each successive book has tackled a particular period in California's past by evaluating the well-being of the dream: "Inventing the Dream"; "Material Dreams"; "Endangered Dreams"; "The Dream Endures"; "Embattled Dreams," etc. (Starr jokes that his volume on the 1960s will be called "Smoking the Dream.")
Incautious readers, judging from the titles, may expect this "dream" to be constant in either meaning or vitality. But that is not the case; the story, in fact, is anything but static. And in the process of telling it, Starr himself appears to have changed as well.
