Kevin Starr
The USC historian on the global reach of the California Dream and the importance of Disneyland
In the heat of the news cycle, issues like immigration or the latest economic reports are scrutinized like tea leaves. Or, you can take the long view and talk to Kevin Starr. For a decade, Starr was California's state librarian, but he's better known as the chronicler of the California Dream. He brought the state library department through a time "when the state was in the grips of its perennial fiscal crisis ... and he helped a lot of people who felt discouraged by sharing with us his goodwill and generosity of spirit," says current deputy state librarian Cameron Robertson, who worked with Starr. He's on a first-name basis with the last three governors. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And he was recently listed by West magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in Los Angeles.
Yet, Starr's recently completed six-volume series on California's history and culture, Americans and the California Dream, is how history will remember him. Within its million-plus words, Starr comes out as die-hard believer in that dream, in Los Angeles, and in the diversity that exists within our borders. Where others see despair, Starr sees hope and progress. And it will be hard for future generations to ignore that vision, as portions of his history are now being used in many public schools throughout the state.
-David Davin
CityBeat: West's list of the 100 most influential Angelenos identifies you as the quintessential voice for California history. Do you agree?
Kevin Starr: Well, I think that I am one of a number of people. The fact is that Southern California has, over the last 20 years or so, become increasingly aware of itself, culturally and historically. We don't think of ourselves anymore as just a footnote to American history. We think of California and Southern California as a very important part of the American experience. I think they wanted somebody to symbolize that on their list.
What is your vision of California?
I've tried to chronicle - in architecture, in politics, in design, in social life - California as a place in which there is a confluence of social self-actualization and personal self-actualization. I've tried to chronicle the invention of California, how it was put together culturally, intellectually, imaginatively on a social scale and in the scale of personal lives. I've always tried to pay special attention to that intersection point of personal and social experience.
Do you think that there is a "California Dream" that is separate from the "American Dream"?
No. I've never written California history as anything other than a branch or an instance of American history. I did my doctorate at Harvard, which is a national institution. California is not an alternative to the rest of the United States; far from it. It's one of the important ways there is of being an American, of pursuing American goals.
In your latest book, Coast of Dreams, you explore contemporary history. What is the current theme of our age, here in California?
Right now we're struggling to come up with a redefinition of California as a global culture - a 21st century, modernist, globalist culture. That's been the great drama of the last 30 years or so. Nowhere is this more true than in Southern California. I talk about California in 1990-2003, and across those 13 years there was an extraordinary cycle of breakdown - governmental, tax, economic breakdown, rebuilding, retransformations - it has been an extraordinary period. We're still in the midst of trying to restructure ourselves, readapt ourselves, to our global condition.
You say that the state seems to have a sense of its own purpose. Do you think California has a destiny of sorts?
Inasmuch as it is linked up with American destiny. There is something about California that, in the total complex of American regions, challenges us to be cutting-edge. Now, we can be cutting-edge in terms of positive things that we achieve, or we can be cutting-edge in terms of catastrophes, or mismanagements. It's a bellwether state, it's an experimental state.
How much do you think that California's future is wrapped up in the past of "Manifest Destiny"?
It's extremely important. The Manifest Destiny of the prairie schooner, crossing the continent in 1846 and 1847, 1850, has its parallels with any young person moving to California seeking a better life, any immigrant coming to California. The first phase of Manifest Destiny was very much tied up with Anglo America; it was tied up with the acquisition of California from Mexico, the rise to statehood, etc. But today, Manifest Destiny is global.
For so many people, California is a place where you come to reinvent yourself. What does it mean, as a historian, to study a place in which so many people come to undo the past, to forget it?
It makes for great history. It makes for a very vital population. People come here committed to a better life. That gives an edge to California. However, if they don't have a better life, then there's a kind of compounded disappointment.
Any estimate of California's total economy puts it within the top 10 world economies. What is California's future role on the world stage?
California will continue to be an arena of international encounter, global investment, and a kind of creativity that comes from the global perspective. That's why it's been so hospitable to immigrants over the last number of years. We shouldn't let the crisis about illegal immigration obscure the fact that we've had an extraordinarily successful, legal immigration from literally the whole planet. You can argue the most successful global culture on the planet today is California. When we look at the world abroad and the civilizations that are clashing, and then we turn and look to ourselves in California, and sure, there are tensions, but certainly there's an example of an ecumenical civilization that has a message for the rest of the world.
Do you think that California, as a whole, can properly govern itself?
California will never split itself up. Never. On the other hand, as you suggest, there have been more than 200 debates about dividing California. Those debates are a way of thinking about California. Far from just a question of culture and identity - the whole infrastructure, especially the water infrastructure - is communal. In fact, the attempts to build the high-speed train down the center of the state, uniting Southern California and Northern California; these types of things are not lending themselves to dividing California further, but rather to integrating it even further and more successfully.
What do you think of the attempted San Fernando Valley secession?
Los Angeles is headed toward a borough system. Most of the great cities of the size of Los Angeles around the world have kinds of regional governments within them. I don't think that Los Angeles can be broken up as a city and I don't think that that ultimately is the will of the people, but I do think that Los Angeles will always struggle with how to localize government in a city that's so vast.
You recently wrote, for Disneyland's 50th anniversary, how it has become an archetype for Southern Californian communities.
Disneyland was established 50 years ago. By definition, a theme park is a utopian statement about what people want from society. You can decode Disneyland as a statement by society, Southern Californian society specifically, that was taking into itself, over the period from WWII to the present, millions and millions of new people, and establishing hundreds and hundreds of new communities.
Do Angelenos have any sense of their own history, or is that even important?
If you lived in Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, you'd have a sense of where those cities have been across time. You'd have some sense that you were at an important epicenter of human aspiration and achievement, and Los Angeles is such an important epicenter.
Published: 09/28/2006
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