The Making of L. A

MATERIAL DREAMS: Southern California Through the 1920s by Kevin Starr. Oxford University Press, $24.95.

KEVIN STARR’S California Dream series, which started with one thick volume published seventeen years ago, has evolved into something much richer and more significant than Starr could reasonably have expected when he began. The first book, Americans and the California Dream: 1850—1915, was a seemingly self-contained study of how the idea of a rich, Edenic California affected the popular imagination in the rest of America, much as the idea of a virgin North American continent had earlier affected Europe. This new book is the third in the series (Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era was published in 1985), and Starr announces in the preface that a fourth, about California during the Great Depression, is in store.

Starr’s purpose is obviously not mere boosterism. He is an honest scholar and a skillful storyteller, and many of his stories are necessarily about scoundrels or buffoons (for instance, the public-relations man who in the 1920s came up with the slogan “If Jesus Christ were on earth today, he’d be a Shriner!”). But his books may fulfill the healthy function of persuading people to take California more seriously.

This very concept may sound strange. California is the most populous state, with more political, economic, and technological power than any other. How could anyone not take it seriously? But California is still condescended to by the eastern edge of the country, in much the way that America as a whole has been by Europeans. The condescension concerns not the importance of California (or America), which is conceded, but rather its sophistication as a culture. The standard European complaint about America, expressed with more confidence in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth but hardly unvoiced today, is that despite its influence it lacks the tradition, taste, and gravitas that entitle a civilization to be taken seriously. Honestly, now—if you’re not from California, don’t you feel the same way about it, especially the southern half of the state? When I went east from California to college and first ran into people who had grown up in old Salem or in the Virginia tidewater country or, God help us, in London or Rome, I kept hearing about the long, dense histories of those places, as if whatever Cotton Mather or Thomas Jefferson or Julius Caesar had done in the past automatically made my fellow eighteen-year-olds more refined than me. What appeal to tradition was I supposed to offer in my defense? That I used to have lunch at the original McDonald’s restaurant, in San Bernardino, before its name was sold to Ray Kroc?

The very trait the traditionalists have been sneering at, of course, is the one that has made California (and America) most distinctive. It is the idea that anything is possible, and that people can invent new roles and lives for themselves if they don’t like the ones they have. Sometimes the belief in wide-open possibility sets Californians up for disappointment—Nathanael West’s original title for The Day of the Locust was The Cheated. Sometimes the results are ludicrous. When people rebel against tradition, they usually forget about moderation and good taste at the same time. This book contains a deft set piece about Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the first Tarzan novels while living in the suburbs of Chicago but then (anticipating the later migration of Hugh Hefner) set out for Los Angeles to create a lifestyle befitting the world he had invented in print. Burroughs bought 550 acres in the San Fernando Valley and created a kind of jungle preserve, which he called the Tarzana Ranch. The expenses of maintaining the ranch used up Burroughs’s book and movie royalties, and he had to carve his land into small housing lots, now the suburb of Tarzana. “Banished from the canyons and rolling hills of Tarzana, the Ape Man re-emerged as an intense local Southern Californian cult,”Starr says. “Numerous foods and products bore the Tarzan logo. A chain of stations sold Tarzan gasoline.”

But besides illustrating the comedy and pathos of this nontraditional culture, Starr’s three books demonstrate that it is a culture, as dense and fascinating in its way as a traditional mannered society might be, and that its success is based on the same rejection of limits that can make it seem ridiculous.

Starr’s focus in this book is on the practical and logistical side of southern California’s growth. In particular, he asks why the nation’s second-largest city should have emerged on a parched inland basin that does not naturally invite human settlement—and that lagged well behind the San Francisco Bay area in development through the end of the nineteenth century. “Los Angeles did not just happen or arise out of existing circumstances, a harbor, a river, a railroad terminus,”Starr says. “Los Angeles envisioned itself, then materialized that vision through sheer force of will.” The same is often said of Dallas and Atlanta, but Los Angeles has ended up with more economic and cultural breadth than any other American city except New York. Starr argues that there was a close connection between the city’s ability to invent itself and the anything-is-possible dream that still draws migrants there.

BEFORE STEPS COULD be taken toward southern California’s development, water had to be brought in from somewhere else, since there is almost none naturally on hand. The Los Angeles “River" is a kind of joke that trickles down a concrete ditch among the freeways. Even now land that is not irrigated supports nothing except thorns and brush. The struggle for water rights is the primal drama of the region, like the war between sheepherders and cattlemen in the Great Plains states, and it has been the theme of a number of books and of Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown.

Starr retells the water saga in a gripping, vivid way, clearly showing the different moral visions that lay behind different irrigation schemes. In the early, innocent days a number of idealists (including a party of Mormons sent over the mountains from Salt Lake City) thought that the need for irrigation would make California a wonderfully cooperative, harmonious place. The rice-growing cultures of East Asia often claim that the need to manage water collectively has been the basis of their social order. (If one farmer neglects his dikes, the water pours out and ruins everyone else’s paddies.) The idealists thought that something similar might happen in California.

They were wrong. Their plans were bulldozed under by a more typically American approach. Speculators brought in water, or pressured the government to bring it in, which then became the basis of great private wealth.

The first heroic-scale water project, undertaken at about the time the Panama Canal was built and with the same bravado, involved diverting the mighty Colorado River so that it would flow into a canal, rather than wasting itself in the Gulf of California. Most of the water could then be used to irrigate a blasted desert area known as the Salton Sink, “It is my earnest desire to worship at our own altar and to receive the blessing from the shrine of our own government,” said Anthony Heber, the leader of a canal-development consortium, when asking for a government ruling that would permit him to continue diverting Colorado River water into a canal his company had built. (Heber was speaking, Starr tells us in the book’s best phrase, with “weaseline fury.”) “But if such permission is not given, of necessity I will be compelled to worship elsewhere.”“Elsewhere" meant Mexico, where Heber was indeed compelled to go for water. Along the southern side of the border he built a new canal, which turned into an engineering disaster. The Colorado was supposed to follow its prescribed course toward the fields, but at flood stage it surged through the diversion cut and for the next two years dumped its entire contents into the Salton Sink, creating the vast body of water now known as the Salton Sea. But the canal-builders’ work meant that irrigation water had come to inland California, and the parts of the Salton Sink not submerged would

be called the Imperial Valley: imperial as in empire . . . not a kingdom inherited, but an empire seized from inhospitable nature through engineering and water.

The other aqua-Promethean drama, closer to the contours of Chinatown, concerned the bringing of water to the thirsty people of Los Angeles. The nearest available supply was the Owens River, which began in a glacier and flowed along the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, hundreds of miles from the city. Here entered southern California’s counterpart to New York’s Robert Moses: William Mulholland, the chief engineer of the municipal water company. Starr says that Mulholland moved beyond engineering details to a vision of what Owens River water might mean to all of southern California. He devoted himself to the legal, technical, political, and financial efforts required to bring the water down from the mountains and across the Mojave Desert. “The success of the aqueduct,” Starr says, “would transform Mulholland, an obscure selftaught Irish immigrant, into the one universally acknowledged Founder of Los Angeles.” Starr concludes the Owens Valley story with a marvelous scene set in November of 1913. Nearly a decade of nonstop negotiation, lobbying, electioneering, and construction has come to an end. Mulholland’s aqueduct stretches 235 miles from the snowy Sierras to the great city. A crowd of more than 30,000 has gathered to witness the momentous event of the water’s arrival and to drink from the newly opened spillway. Mulholland, his wife lying gravely ill in the hospital, points to the gushing flow and says simply: “There it is. Take it.”

STARR GOES ON to describe the many other kinds of development that became possible once the water was flowing. Southern California soon established an industrial base that was surprisingly diversified and robust, considering the area’s reputation as entertainment-land. Show business was big business, but so were other, more practical enterprises: oil wells and refineries, tire factories, the nation’s greatest concentration of aircraft companies. Local banks financed most of the expansion. Growth itself became a huge industry, and construction and land development established many local fortunes.

The communities that grew up on the newly irrigated plain looked strange to most outsiders, before the rest of America came to resemble California. Starr offers long, detailed explanations for why southern California looks the way it does. The first suburban sprawl grew around an electric-rail network that brought commuters into downtown Los Angeles.

Like rhe roads leading to Rome, the entire system converged in a ninestory central downtown terminal . . . , the Charing Cross of Los Angeles, where the ambience of departing and arriving streetcars, newsstands, coffee shops, and rushing passengers gave Los Angeles the feel of big cities such as London, New York, and Chicago.

Starr argues that the rail system succumbed to cars and freeways not because of a plot by the oil and auto industries, as southern California folklore holds, but because of a crucial political decision not to modernize the rail system in the 1920s, when it needed to be moved onto elevated platforms if the trolleys were not to be strangled in surface-level traffic. (One reason the bond vote failed, Starr says, is that elevated trains reminded too many voters of the cities they had left behind.) The distinctive appearance of suburban southern California also reflects the impulse to invent a new way of life. The “typical” California trees were brought in from other parts of the world—eucalyptus from Australia, palm from Central America and other points in the tropics, even the orange from Spain—and the architecture emerged not simply from building-bybuilding decisions but from vigorous debates about how the region as a whole should look. The three major contending schools affect southern California’s appearance even now: “Spanish Revival,” which gave us Santa Barbara and thousands of houses with red-tile roofs; “Mediterranean— Beaux Arts,” epitomized by the Stanford campus in northern California and those of Pomona, Occidental, and Cal Tech in the south; and “Craftsman Bungalow,” an elegant style of wooden house-building that combined Asian and classic European influences. Some of the most celebrated Craftsman homes, by the architects Bernard Maybeck and the Greene brothers, are found in Berkeley in northern California and Pasadena in the south.

Starr populates the physical landscape he has sketched, describing the motives that drew migrants to Los Angeles and the ways they changed after they arrived. He concentrates on a group he calls “The Folks"—the middle-class-and-below ordinary people, typically from the Midwest, who thought they could get a new start in the sunshine. Most writers either sentimentalize this group, as John Steinbeck did, or ridicule it, as Joan Didion has often done, Starr avoids doing either and argues instead that the traits that make The Folks seem embarrassing and vulgar—for example, their enthusiasm for the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson when she dressed in a USC football uniform and urged them to “carry the ball for Christ”— were connected to their liberating belief that they had escaped the confines of tradition and class by moving west.

THERE IS MUCH more in this book than I can indicate here, nearly all of it absorbing. The book’s only noticeable defect is that Starr, who was a junior professor at Harvard when he began the series, lapses occasionally into lit-crit jargon when summing up his points. He seems to have forgotten that outside the English department, people don’t “decode" building styles or political speeches; they merely analyze or interpret them. Most of the time, however, Starr tells his story in strong, clear prose.

In all three of his books Starr suggests that California has been a mirror. People look at it and see not the state itself but a reflection of their pre-existing beliefs and concerns. In that spirit, let me offer a California-based conclusion about how America should deal with its economic problems, including its competition with Japan.

Despite its obvious problems, southern California has been a case study in effective economic development. Indeed, its pollution, overpopulation, and ugly overbuilding mainly reflect its success in expanding its economic base. Southern California also interacts with East Asian economies more successfully than most other parts of America do—it buys a tremendous amount from Asia, but also sells. It is in that sense a model for America, and Starr’s analysis suggests that southern California is strong because it mixes what we would now call Americanstyle and Japanese-style techniques.

In the internal texture of its society southern California has been individualistic, untraditional, fluid, ethnically and socially open—that is, completely un-Japanese. But the framework that surrounds this culture, the vat containing the fermenting brew, if you will, was built by people with a Japaneselike belief in deliberate industrial development. Mulholland and the other civic fathers did not wait around for the invisible hand to bring in water, lay out a transportation system, and expand the docks. They intervened deliberately, to create an environment in which an unplanned, freewheeling economy could grow. Theirs is an accomplishment to reflect on, while waiting for Starr’s next book. □