he argues that it would have been foolhardy for the big agricultural interests to attract such a potentially revolutionary army of indigents to California for a short-term windfall profit. He claims that the influx of “Okies” from Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas in some cases caused taxes to double in order to pay for such services as public health, policing, welfare, and education.

Starr’s story of the Great Depression in California is far more complicated than Steinbeck’s. Starr also tries harder to remain impartial, although his sympathies are more with the forces of free enterprise than with those of organized labor and paternalistic government. He is a member of the elitist Bohemian Club of San Francisco and has been active in the business world as both a consultant and an entrepreneur. Steinbeck’s novel had a large cast of characters and the action covered much of the state; but Starr’s history has a much larger cast of characters (the index itself runs to eighteen pages), a longer time span, and a setting that includes California’s two great metropolitan centers as well as the Central Valley.

The first two chapters of Endangered Dreams serve as a prelude to the Crash of 1929 and the pivotal decade that followed. The Communist Party USA, under the direction of the Soviet Union, was heavily involved in the radicalism of the period. This involvement had good and bad features for both labor and the monied interests Starr persistently refers to as “the oligarchy.” Communist agitators gave the labor movement direction and rhetoric but also offered the oligarchy plenty of opportunities to frighten small farmers, lower-middle class business and professional people, and California’s many conservative retirees with the specter of revolution and dictatorship.

Chapter 3 deals with strikes in rural California involving Mexican, Filipino, and Dust Bowl migrants and organized by young Communists. In 1935, however, the Communist Party USA dissolved its unions under orders from Moscow.

Chapter 4 covers the famous San Francisco Waterfront and General Strike of 1934 in which the ascetic, resourceful Australian immigrant Harry Bridges emerged as a powerful spokesman for organized labor.

Chapter 5 describes the 1934 gubernatorial campaign of eccentric, idealistic, brilliant Upton Sinclair, who might easily have become governor of California and initiated his program to End Poverty in California (EPIC) if he had not been sabotaged by the unscrupulous tactics of the oligarchy.

In chapter 6, Starr tells how the oligarchy, frightened by Sinclair’s near victory and the growing strength of organized labor, counterattacked with legal, paralegal, and strictly illegal violence in what Starr calls “the fascist alternative.”

Chapters 7 and 8 describe California’s efforts at recovery under the New Deal. Of particular interest are the Townsendites and Ham and Eggers, both of whom promised pensions for any Californian over the age of fifty. Chapter 8 discusses conditions in migrant camps. Between 1930 and 1934 some 683,000 migrants flooded California in jalopies, creating problems for federal, state, county, city, and private agencies.

In chapter 9, “Documenting the Crisis,” Starr discusses The Grapes of Wrath as one of the important works to come out of California during the Great Depression. He also recommends many other important works which are not so well known, including Factories in the Field (1939) by Carey McWilliams and An American Exodus (1939) by Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange. Starr devotes many pages to praising the artistry and dedication of photographer Dorothea Lange, whose Migrant Mother is “one of the best known photographs in history.” Several of Lange’s photographs are included in the section of illustrations.

Chapter 10 narrates the history of the Hetch Hetchy Project which brought a bountiful supply of Sierra Nevada water to San Francisco and made it possible for the Bay Area to grow into one of the major metropolitan areas of the world.

Chapter 11 discusses the water problems of Southern California and describes the construction of Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Project which made Los Angeles the premier city of the entire American Southwest.

In chapter 12, titled “Completing California: The Therapy of Public Works,” Starr describes California’s other major public works, crediting them for alleviating the unemployment problem.

Chapter 13 tells how the Great Depression ended with the billions of dollars being pumped into national defense by the Roosevelt Administration and then became a subject of history when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The conscription of millions of men into the military and the enormous demand for labor in the shipyards, aircraft factories, and other California war industries quickly solved the unemployment problem and squelched labor unrest.

Endangered Dreams contains twenty-eight pages of endnotes and annotated bibliography, making it a rich reference source. Starr seems to have read virtually everything available on his subject, including such characteristically weighty and detailed government reports as the six-volume Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, House of Representatives, Seventy-Sixth Congress (1941), known as the Tolan Report.

Starr quotes Congressman John Tolan as asking the committee members: “Well, it all comes down to the question again as to whether the Federal Government owes a duty to people who are hungry or naked or on account of circumstances over which they have no control, are in need. Do we owe that duty or do we not?” The Great Depression in California brought that controversial question into the forefront of American politics. It still remains unanswered. Does any government have the right to take property from the haves and give it to the have-nots? If so, what is the philosophical basis of that right? Does such government intervention discourage enterprise? Does it encourage a welfare mentality? Essentially the same question had brought Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin into power in their respective countries and had led to World War II.

Starr presents his story of California in the 1930’s as a struggle between the haves and the have-nots, the left and the right. Although this is an effective way of marshaling facts and making a nonfiction work dramatic, it has been criticized as an oversimplification. William H. Chafe, a professor of history and dean of the faculty at Duke University, charges in a review published in The New York Times Book Review, that “the contending forces are written too large. It is as if every significant figure carried the burden of representing Good versus Evil.”

Starr does indeed have a tendency to color and dramatize his history. This touch of the New Journalism may annoy specialists but has made him popular with the general public. He often uses striking and surprising figures of speech, as in the following examples: “That such a Darth Vader figure [as Philip Bancroft] could win the senatorial nomination in the Republican primary only testified to the strength of the Right by 1938.” He borrows audaciously from the fantastical science-fiction Star Wars film trilogy to title one of his chapters “The Empire Strikes Back.” He calls the 1916 conviction and death sentence of Tom Mooney and Warren Knox Billings for the bombing of a Preparedness Day parade “the Dreyfus case of mid-twentieth-century California.” He refers to a consortium of California business organizations and financial interests as “the usual suspects.”

It would seem that Starr’s newspaper experience has taught him the value of featuring personalities and anecdotes in his histories. The reader may occasionally feel overwhelmed by the relentless stream of factual detail but will be entertained and amused by the thumbnail profiles of such characters as the irrepressible Utopian Socialist Upton Sinclair and the intrepid union leader Harry Bridges in this cavalcade of individualists. The diligent reader of Endangered Dreams will definitely come away with a good grasp of the dynamics of California history during this troubled decade.

In all of his books on California history, Starr has depicted the state as a land of dreamers. Hollywood was built on celluloid dreams. The television industry, centered in Southern California, broadcasts prefabricated dreams to the rest of the United States and other parts of the world. More than a billion viewers watch the Academy Award presentations each year, a motion picture/television spectacular event about the fulfillment of the dreams of some of Hollywood’s most successful dreamers.

There were many different kinds of dreams in Depression-era California, and they often brought the dreamers into conflict. The 1930’s California microcosm mirrored the troubled globe on the brink of war. Socialists dreamed of creating a cooperative society. The state’s many retirees dreamed of finding peace and security in an idyllic climate. California’s writers and artists had their dreams of fame and fortune or of a Thoreauvian life of independence and creative freedom. The “Okies”—those pathetic dispossessed subsistence farmers immortalized by John Steinbeck—dreamed of owning a piece of rich farmland and putting down new roots. Factory workers, merchant seamen, stevedores, and teamsters dreamed of dignity, decent wages, and humane working conditions. The lower-middle class dreamed of enrichment and upward social mobility in a land of opportunities. Politicians of leftist and rightist sympathies dreamed of becoming mayors, senators, governors, and presidents.

The oligarchy had grandiose dreams and the power to get them fulfilled in such modern wonders as Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, the All-American Canal, the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, Shasta Dam, Rainbow Bridge, and the network of freeways that eventually transformed California into a unique civilization dependent upon cars and trucks.

Starr concludes his book with a description of the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, for which an entire four-hundred- acre island was created in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island was intended to become an international airport after the fair ended, but the eruption of World War II changed the strategically situated island into the most important naval base on the West Coast. San Francisco’s World’s Fair was officially held to commemorate the completion of the Bay Area’s great bridges; according to Starr, however, it symbolized the end of the Great Depression, the beginning of California’s emergence from an agricultural province into international prominence, and the assertion of its leadership role among the newly developing markets of the Pacific Rim.

Endangered Dreams is the fourth in a series of scholarly books on California history with the omnibus title of Americans and the California Dream. The previous volumes were Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (1973); Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (1985); and Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920’s (1990). The author is state librarian of California, a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California.

The book is illustrated with many black-and-white photographs, including a shot of Pan America Airways’ luxurious state-of- the-art four-engine China Clipper, which began regular service in 1935 and was expected to facilitate business relations between the United States and the Far East.

Sources for Further Study

Bookwatch. XVII, February, 1996, p. 6.

Choice. XXXIII, May, 1996, p. 1546.

Civilization. III, January, 1996, p. 76.

Kirkus Reviews. LXIII, October 1, 1995, p. 1413.

Library Journal. CXX, October 15, 1995, p. 74.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 21, 1996, p. 1.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, February 18, 1996, p. 19.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLII, November 20, 1995, p. 63.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, February 11, 1996, p. 6.