The Dream Endures or Ethics and Governance

The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940's

Author: Kevin Starr

What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part of the good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come.
Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals the other side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywood celebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle.
The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded thestudios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and the creative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate their European world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most important achievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone."
Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.

"A penetrating addition to an altogether splendid series, which (thanks to the broad appeal of its subject matter and period) could prove a breakout book."--Kirkus
"In this, more than any other of Starr's monumental California histories, we see the stirrings of uniqueness in the social and cultural evolution of California. Starr's theme is relevant to all of America and the national destiny."--Neil Morgan, Associate Editor, San Diego Union-Tribune, author of Westward Tilt
"Kevin Starr carries his enduring epic of California cultural history into the 1940s with the same eye for exact detail, the same passion for facts, and the same pungency of expression that have characterized his accounts of the preceding stages of California's evolution."--John T. Noonan, Jr.
United States Circuit Judge

Booknews

California State Librarian Starr continues his epic history of the state into a fifth volume, showing how people recovered from the Great Depression depicted in "Endangered Dreams" and lived a good life other Americans only saw on television or in the movies, then shared the experience of World War II. Most of the focus is on southern California. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Kirkus Reviews

The fifth volume in Starr's grand and wide-ranging history of California (Endangered Dreams, 1995, etc.).

Drawing on a wealth of sources, the author offers a panoramic account of the Golden State during the turning-point years before America's entry into WW II. While he first surveys communities (Big Sur, Carmel, Palm Springs, Pasadena, et al.) whose affluent lifestyles not only survived the Depression but also set the pace for the rest of the country, Starr moves on to profile the West Coast's academic enclaves (Berkeley, Palo Alto, Westwood) and great cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco). Covered as well are those who contributed to California's rich cultural heritage in literature (Cain, Chandler, Hammett, and West, to name but a few), painting (notably, the federally subsidized muralists who recorded the past of "the state with a Mexican accent"), and photography (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston). Not too surprisingly, Starr devotes considerable attention to Hollywood and how its studio system marshaled the artistic resources of a generation to help America (and the wider world) through hard times. In an engrossing chapter felicitously titled "Ich Bin ein Sûdkalifornier," he recounts how the rise of the Third Reich induced scores of German actors, composers, writers, and other intellectuals to seek refuge from Nazi oppression in filmdom's capital, where they promptly and thoroughly Europeanized the motion-picture industry. Using this productive context as a departure point, the author closes with a somber assessment of the ways in which California's émigré communities dealt with a global outbreak of anti-Semitism and (with fellow exile Leon Feuchtwanger) pondered whether Jewish civilization could reconstitute itself.

A penetrating addition to an altogether splendid series, which (thanks to the broad appeal of its subject matter and period) could prove a breakout book.

Table of Contents:

1	Good Times on the Coast: Affluence and the Anti-Depression	3
2	Arcadian Shores: College Towns and Other Rusticated Enclaves	28
3	Unto the Stars Themselves: Astronomy and the Pasadena Perspective	61
4	Gibraltar of the Pacific: San Diego Joins the Navy	90
5	One Man's Family: Localism and Well-Being in Pre-War San Francisco	115
6	Pershing Square: Los Angeles Through the 1930s	157
7	An All-Seeing Eye: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the Landscape of California	205
8	Angel's Flight: Social Realism Comes to California Art	226
9	Dreaming Through the Disaster: Hollywood Battles the Depression	244
10	The Boys and Girls in the Back Room: Minimalism and the California Novel	285
11	War and Peace and the Survival of the Species: Californians Contemplate a World on the Verge of Self-Destruction	323
12	Ich Bin ein Sudkalifornier: Life and Art Among the Emigres	342
13	From Catastrophe to Covenant: Jews and Christians in Exile Together	367
	Notes	397
	Bibliographical Essay	403
	Acknowledgments	429
	Index	433

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Ethics and Governance: Business as Mediating Institution

Author: Timothy L Fort

"This book argues that ethical business behavior can be enhanced by taking fuller account of human nature, particularly with respect to the need for creating relatively small communities within the corporation. These mediating institutions are the natural home for the development of moral virtues. The book argues from naturalist, anthropological, and theological perspectives. Because the central theme is the development of small communities within multinational corporations, individuals have more relative power vis-a-vis the norms that govern them. As a result, business as mediating institution (BMI) also interests with autonomy-based ethical theories." "Ethics and Governance is very multidisciplinary. In analyzing traditional business ethics and legal theory, it draws heavily from philosophy. In addition to this, it integrates biological anthropology, theological naturalism, and legal theory. The book does not reject contemporary business ethics, but instead seeks to strengthen each contemporary theory by providing additional reasons for their efficacy, albeit in a modified form."--BOOK JACKET.