The.Golden.State

...Across the long years of California's existence in modern times under the jurisdictions of Spain, of Mexico, and of the United States—there have been cruelties, injustices and mistakes aplenty...

...There, already on page seven of Starr's 370-page book, you have it: Two words that come so naturally to Califor-nians have already slipped out, "bold" and "heroic...

...While Northern California was an early seat of the union movement, Southern California, where the Los Angeles Times and its friends raised a bulwark against labor, kept it effectively out until the 1930s...

...Across a hundred million years, the grinding and regrinding of these plates against each other, their sudden detachments, their thrusts above or below each other—together with the lava flow of volcanoes, the bull-dozing action of glaciers, and, later, the flow of water and the depositing of alluvial soil—created a region almost abstract in its distinct arrangements of mountain, valley, canyon, coastline, plain, and desert...

...California itself resulted from a collision of the North American and Pacific plates...

...The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education was still in effect, and as in the case of its social programs, few states could point to such a comprehensive state-supported education program...

...Yes, he writes, [T]he New Deal came late to California, but social democratic New Deal thinking remained characteristic of the state for the next sixty years...

...The worry was unfounded...

...Californians wear these concepts of themselves and their state, their kingdom, their empire, easily, as if born to them...

...He concludes: "California, Royce noted, was a promise, but it was also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure...

...The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces...

...The cause of this political orientation, Starr implies, is less the virtue of the state's citizens than the demands of their situation...

...The former state librarian and now university professor at the University of Southern California, Starr is the author of six volumes of his state's history in the Americans and the California Dream series...

...Starr closes his brisk survey with his own forecast about the future of the largest and—may one say so?—"the fairest part" of the Union, and "the most civilized portion" of its inhabitants...

...Gibbon's opening chords of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are justly celebrated for their elegiac salute to human achievement...

...Those books were so interwoven with thick knots of digressions on California history that illuminated the main and sometimes hidden lines of his subject that, picking up this short summary, one had to wonder if, in it, the reader had lost more than he could have possibly gained...

...California sprang full-bodied from a bestselling Spanish romance in 1510, and has flourished in the cerebral imagination of its inhabitants as in the prodigious work of their hands and arms...

...Starr points out that, until the 1960s, California was essentially a Republican state...

...Few, if any, states in the nation were sustaining by the 1990s such a full range of state-supported health and social welfare programs as was California...

...Starr takes from Royce the main idea from which he hangs his complex, but lucid, tale...

...As Starr points out over and over again, that something has not been done before is, in California, an incentive to, by all means, try it...

...But there has been an equally sustained persistence of what Josiah Royce called "the Hope of the Great Community, a place, a society in which the best possibilities of the American experiment can be struggled for and sometimes achieved...

...Now, that is a true Californian speaking...

...As the California-born philosopher and historian Josiah Royce observed, there is nothing subtle about the landforms and landscapes of California...

...He acknowledges and explores the dark patches in the California story, some of which persist untamed and untended to this day: the treatment, for example, of Native Americans and blacks and some others of color...

...Kevin Starr's comprehensive short history: On a clear day, photographed from a satellite, California appears as a serene palette of blue, green, brown, white, and red...

...Yet as California becomes triumphantly a majority state of many colors, even those stains are fading...

...At any rate, in the changeable history of California, Schwarzenegger is just another eccentric chameleon on the stage, not the portent of a major earthquake...

...California voters tossed out Governor Gray Davis and installed in his place Arnold Schwarzenegger while Starr was finishing this book, and he, like everyone else, wonders what the election meant...

...It is all laid out, the gold and other mineral wealth, the deep rich soil and its bountiful agriculture, the energetic ambitious immigrants, the openness to new ideas, the limitless ambitions...

...Everything is scaled in bold and heroic arrangements that are easily understood...

...The extent of each empire, though vast, can be summoned up in the broad strokes of a landscape spread upon a large canvas...

...Starr shows how the individualism of which he writes produces crankiness and deep conflict...

...That son of the Gold Rush, born to an emigrant family in Grass Valley in 1855, developed as a professor of philosophy at Berkeley and Harvard his theory of a "Higher Provincialism," in which the American then encountering the "centralizing and alienating tendencies of mass society in the United States" could discover his American identity in a localized context...

...In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind...

...The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour...

...A dynamic and rapidly growing population of 37 million must, in order to continue increasing and functioning well, organize itself as smoothly and efficiently as possible...

...Contemporary California is ruled more by necessity than ideology...

...In Starr's words: The physical context of California, Royce argued, specifically its topography and climate, was in the process of fostering a Higher Provincial version of American civilization that promoted simultaneously an independence of mind, individualism, an open simplicity of manner that might justifiably be described as Homeric, together with a benevolent closeness to nature fostered by a mild and nurturing climate...

...Such factors, among others were making California a distinctive instance of American civilization...

...Look at the movies and the pell-mell creation of mass culture, marvel at aviation and space exploration—there is little that the state has not done or contemplated doing...

...But they also had many advantages to work with: a blessed portion of the Pacific Coast, the freedoms and institutions of the American Republic, a polyglot, diversely talented and ambitious population, and a cumulative aspiration to a better life—a chance of breaking through, of finding a golden dream by the sea—that was continuing to bring people to these Pacific shores...

...Other regions of the country, Starr argues, [Had] long since become used to the idea that nothing was perfect, even the American dream, although, as native daughter Joan Didion was pointing out, they had a long way to go before they fully internalized such a limiting recognition...

...For most of its history the state has ridden on a self-generated thrust of energy, but its development has not always been forward, not always in the political mode that came to be called, a hundred years ago, Progressive...

...Just look at the record, the great picture of swift human achievement painted on that huge natural landscape...

...Great corporations, led by the Southern Pacific Railroad, in the 19th century ruled and raped...

...Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury...

...The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government...

...Starr has devoted his life to telling the story, and in California he has gotten it down very well, both in broad strokes and revealing narrative detail...

...Look at the University of California and the other schools, regard the flowering of science and technology and innovation that began with the hydraulic mining of the Gold Rush and continues through the fantastic flowering of cyberspace and its many-flowering inhabitants...

...Their self-assurance is often an irritation to other Americans, but what is a Californian to care...

...Those stately 18th-century cadences have their distant but audible echo in Anthony Day, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages, is a regular contributor to its Book Review...

...Rome planted its origin firmly in the soil of Troy and its manly virtue in the filial piety of Aeneas...

...Not just distinctive but superior, is the theme that Starr embellished from Royce...

...In its political coloration, California lagged behind the rest of the country...

...This apparent serenity, however, masks a titanic drama occurring beneath the surface, in the clash of the two tectonic plates upon which California rests...

...That Starr's tale has strong echoes of truly Virgilian heroic inevitability is not to say his great canvas comes out without shadows and storms...

...Granting that this book, one of the useful Modern Library Chronicle series of short history narratives, has strong elements of the quick survey college course, it remains thorough, fair, and meaty enough in the idea department to be both instructive and provocative...

...Less than it appeared, events seem to be saying...