"A Better Place for Ordinary People"

"From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country’s dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. Thanks to wartime and Cold War defense spending, a flourishing consumer economy, and a seemingly ever-expanding tax base, the state was at the forefront of the single greatest rise in prosperity in American history. In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles’s working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states. This affluence ushered in an era of exhilarating if headlong growth and free spending. The state’s public schools—the new, modernist elementary schools with their flat roofs, gleaming clerestory windows, and outdoor lockers; the grand comprehensive high schools (Sacramento, Lowell in San Francisco, and Hollywood and Fairfax in Los Angeles)—were the envy of the nation. Berkeley, the flagship campus in the UC system, emerged as the best university in the country, probably the world. It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and—thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine—were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost."

In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reviews Kevin Starr's Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963.


"For all the blessings of California life, however, many of them rested on rickety foundations. Much of the prosperity could be traced directly to Washington, which was briskly arming up for the Cold War. Thanks to Pentagon largesse, fully 400,000 Californians found desirable jobs at companies such as Douglas Aircraft and Lockheed. By 1963, nearly 30 percent of the Los Angeles County–Orange County economy depended on defense spending. Many Californians recognized the hazards of relying so heavily on the business of armaments, but few had the heart to do anything about it. As Starr writes, signs of thaws in U.S.-Soviet relations, such as Nikita Khrushchev’s visit in 1959, tended to throw the region into 'economic panic.'"

As does T. A. Frank in Washington Monthly.