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Dreams and Realities
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17036 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1990 |
2,764 Words |
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John Braeman
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MATERIAL DREAMS
Southern California Through the 1920s
Kevin Starr
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990
453 pp., $24.95
Kevin Starr's Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s is the third volume in his ongoing account of the emergence of California as a regional society.
Material Dreams carries the story of Southern California up to the onset of the Great Depression. "In the 1920s," Starr informs his readers, "nearly two million people chose to become Californians, Southern Californians especially, and citizens of Los Angeles most noticeably. The society they materialized established a suburban identity which became the matrix of the California Dream for the rest of the century." His primary focus is "the process through which Americans in Southern California materialized or acted out in material forms their individual and collective aspirations."
The book begins with an account of the massive water engineering projects that made possible the transformation of a semiarid land into the suburban mega polis that twentieth-century southern California became. Starr then proceeds to examine the rise of Los Angeles, the rapid population growth, the spatial expansion, and the emergent institutions of "the premier hydro-polis of the Southland" - with his "underlying theme" its "deliberately fashioned identity in this era as an Anglo-American colony on the Pacific Rim.” Part Three "deals with history and the employment of historical myths and identities." One chapter looks at how Southern California architecture exploited "history as an arsenal of ready-made metaphors for self-definition"; the following two chapters explore how Santa Barbara adopted the historical myths of the rancho era of Hispanic California as an alternative model to Los Angeles' pursuit of growth. The last segment surveys the Southern California literary scene, "conceived broadly over a range of activities-reading, writing, book selling and collecting."
A tone of triumphal progress runs through Material Dreams. That note is solidly fixed in the opening chapters telling of the massive water engineering projects that laid the foundation for modern Southern California: the bringing of the Colorado River to transform the desert of the Imperial Valley into a garden and, of even more long-term significance, the capture of the Owens River water and the subsequent opportunity this afforded by Los Angeles to expand mightily its population and geographical boundaries. Starr is aware of the seamier aspects of the story-the damage to the natural environment; the role played by a labyrinthine mix of civic ambition and personal self-interest; the actions of a private elite, who exploited public resources for its own gain through manipulation of the mechanisms of government from the local to the national level. Instead of the utopia of family farmers envisaged by the prophets of irrigation, the Imperial Valley became, and rapidly so, the domain of the giant landowner and corporate agribusiness. The Owens River water and the hydroelectric power that was its by product was municipally owned; but authority was lodged in an appointed board allied with and responsive to the Los Angeles business establishment. And control over that water by the "oligarchy" made its real estate speculations pay off in wealth and power beyond imaging. But those
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