I was a volunteer in that campaign, and got to see firsthand how the campaign, and its aftermath, would influence Starr’s career—and by extension Californians’ understanding of themselves.

Starr came to the 1984 race with a decade-long involvement in city government and journalism. He was born in San Francisco and spent part of his early life in a Catholic orphanage in Ukiah, after his parents divorced and his mother had a nervous breakdown. He served in the U.S. Army after graduating from the University of San Francisco in 1962, and then received a doctorate in American literature from Harvard in 1969. He became an aide to San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto in 1973, and over the next 10 years his career advanced rapidly, first as the appointed city librarian, and later as a popular columnist with the San Francisco Examiner, and university faculty member. The initial volume of his now famous multi-volume history of California, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, was published in 1973, followed by his only novel, Land’s End, in 1979.

In 1983, he was approached by people active in San Francisco’s business community, Catholic community, and neighborhood organizations to run for supervisor. It was not a tough sell. As his wife Sheila has noted, “He had thought about running for office for some time, and all that he could accomplish as an elected official.” 

He got off to a fast start. Within a few months he had received the endorsements of former mayors Alioto and George Christopher, and state legislative leaders Leo McCarthy and Lou Papan, and had raised $40,000. On January 4, 1984 Examiner columnist Bruce Pettit published a positive column, “Why Starr Seeks S.F. seat,” in which Starr’s role as a centrist was emphasized. “People do not want to live in a city where there is constant conflict,” Starr was quoted as saying. “Elected officials have the duty to harmonize, but lately they have pitted left against right, the neighborhoods against downtown, and labor against management.”

Starr also opposed the proposal to make the salary for Supervisors, then part-time at $23,924, into a full-time position and stated: “There should be no full-time living out of what should be a deed of public service.”

The official campaign kickoff was held at the Gift Center Pavilion at 8th and Brannan streets on March 15, 1984 before an overflow crowd of more than 250 people paying $150 per ticket. Starr followed this up with an immersion into the retail politics of the city, enthusiastically passing out leaflets on street corners and at Muni bus stops, attending the nightly bingo games, and appearing at neighborhood “meet and greets” hosted in the homes of supporters. Readers of the Jewish Bulletin were greeted by an ad at the Passover holiday, “Passover Greetings from Kevin Starr,” in which Kevin was identified as an “Honorary member of Congregation Magain David Sephardim,” a synagogue in the Richmond district.

But as the campaign progressed into the summer, it became clear the city was becoming a different place from the familiar one that Starr grew up in, and even from the San Francisco to which he had returned from academia in 1973. Identity politics had long been part of the civic culture of San Francisco, as it was in other major cities. But by 1984, identity politics had come to assume a central role.

More than 20 different Democratic clubs that were largely based on ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation had come into existence. There were good reasons for this. The city’s gay and lesbian community had been shut out of most elected and appointed offices for years (Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official had only been elected in 1978). The first Asian American Supervisor, Gordon Lau, had won office only in 1977. In this new political universe, Starr had no natural politically active base. Only the Wallenberg Jewish Democratic Club, among the major clubs, endorsed his candidacy. 

The power of identity politics was just one piece of a shifting political culture with which Starr had to contend. Despite the city’s influential bohemia, local politics previously had been rooted in a middle class, centrist orientation. The emerging political culture in 1984 was one increasingly unmoored from the middle class or taxpayers or private businesses.  No one embraced this new culture more cleverly than a young assemblyman, Art Agnos. With his eyes on higher office, Agnos went around the city denouncing amorphous “downtown interests,” or “the wealthy,” and promising new government programs and spending for each group.

Throughout his campaign, Starr was both mystified and angered by what he considered to be a pandering attempt to divide the city by race, gender, or economic status. When the various Democratic clubs sent out questionnaires asking for support for their advocacy or projects, campaign volunteers would urge Starr to play ball. But Starr always refused to tell these groups what they wanted to hear. He saw San Francisco through the lens of a “civic culture” by which race, gender, and economic status were secondary to San Francisco as a greater entity.

In the fall, after the Democratic Club endorsement season, Starr’s campaign seemed to regain its balance due to two dynamics: endorsements from the city’s two largest newspapers, and an active street presence from volunteers who had come to the campaign since Starr announced. On election day, Starr and his advisors thought he had a good chance to finish in the top six; six of the 11 Supervisor seats were up for election in 1984. But it was not to be. By the time most of the votes were counted the following morning, Starr had finished in seventh place, just out of the running. He would receive more than 90,000 votes, but fell well behind the sixth-place finisher, Carole Ruth Silver who had more than 125,000 votes.

In a letter to supporters following the election, Starr wrote, “I worked hard, raised sufficient funds, attracted a large group of committed volunteers … The voters, however, had other ideas.” 

Starr did not immediately withdraw from local politics and government. In 1989 he became active in a campaign to oppose a new city-funded ballpark, being pushed by Agnos, who in 1987 was elected mayor. Starr believed that city funds should not be used for sports facilities, and authored a pamphlet arguing that such funds could be put to better uses. On November 6, 1989, the day before the election (which saw the ballpark proposal defeated), Agnos and his campaign operatives struck back. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a front-page story in which Starr was accused of taking funds from a Sacramento developer for the pamphlet, without proper disclosure. The District Attorney became involved. The grand jury found no basis for indictment. But the incident ended Starr’s local political participation.

It also launched Starr into a different career, no longer tied to San Francisco. In 1989, he became Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California (USC). He and his wife Sheila kept their apartment in San Francisco, but increasingly spent time in Los Angeles, and later in Sacramento, when Starr was appointed California State Librarian in 1994.

Starr served as State Librarian through 2004. For a decade in this position he traveled throughout the state lecturing and holding town meetings at public libraries. He would go to small branch libraries in Shasta, Merced, Oceanside, and Glendale. At each he would greet patrons, extol the role of the public library in a democracy, and urge local investment and support for library upkeep and development. He found a political role—in meeting Californians, inspiring them, achieving important library improvement projects—initially denied him in San Francisco. In the end, he accomplished far more in this role than if he had been elected Supervisor in 1984.

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But one of the paradoxes of the Golden State is that the greatest historian of California, someone who absorbed the writing of previous scholars and scribes, found a way to render this state of far left and extreme right, of ocean and desert, of triumphant and shameful, almost right down the middle. One of the many things we might mourn with the passing of historian Kevin Starr, last January, was that the USC professor and longtime state librarian was able to frame this contradictory place in a way that earned respect from almost all corners.

Even the best attempts to document the state—at least since Hubert Howe Bancroft’s work in the 1880s—took a specific point of view or subject within the California experience. Mike Davis wrote powerfully of Los Angeles as a betrayal of democracy and civic life, a harbinger of a dystopian future. Joan Didion captured the despair of the poor, the ennui of the privileged and the soul-death of the counterculture: Much of her best work is about leaving California and looking back in anger, as in her devastating book Where I Was From. Walter Mosley writes novels about the black experience in what was once called South Central. Before all of them, Helen Hunt Jackson conjured the romance of the mission years with her novel, Ramona, a fantasy the state’s boosters would sell to those yearning for a prelapsarian Mediterranean paradise.

Starr, by contrast, did something radical: He let the state’s intense drama and tendency to extremes tell itself. His books—in the series called Americans and the California Dream—documented the triumphs and the betrayals. Through this method, he showed California to be not merely a state but a kind of civilization unto itself, like medieval Venice perhaps, or ancient Babylon.

Rather than writing, as some charged, from a complacent and conservative Chamber of Commerce point of view, Starr wrote from a position that was roughly and intelligently centrist, but indebted to strains of Cold War and Catholic liberalism. His ardor for the Golden State meant he held it to extremely high standards. And his generosity and openness led him to have the unlikely honor of being friends with everyone from left-wing polemicists to the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. His books even inspired a (very fine) symphonic work by left-of-center California composer John Adams. It’s hard to imagine any other intellectual, before or after, filling all of those roles.

The closest antecedent to Starr is probably Carey McWilliams, the friend of Mencken and John Fante and author of California the Great Exception. But while McWilliams took a broad view of the state, and wrote better than anyone in his time on subjects like Japanese internment and the treatment of migrant workers, his works seems—compared to Starr’s multi-volume, era-by-era California Dream series—like the product of a very gifted and ambitious journalist-author, not a professional historian in the Kevin Starr mode.

“Starr comported himself as if he’d been born in 1920s Oxford rather than 1940s San Francisco. He was a bow-tied, suit-wearing hail-fellow-well-met who mixed heart and angst with an occasionally defensive bluster.” Photo courtesy of Google Images.

Starr himself began his career as an unconventional hybrid: He started reading California as a graduate student in Harvard’s August American Civilization program. But he was also a seventh-generation Californian. Born and raised among poor Irish Catholics in San Francisco, he never lost his love for the Church or the city despite what was clearly a tough upbringing, including a stint in an orphanage, an extended stay in a housing project, living on welfare, and his mother’s nervous breakdown following his folks’ youthful divorce. But after schooling on both coasts and a brief term in the U.S. Army overseas, Starr returned to California in the early ’70s and made his native state his life’s work.

In describing a state known for larger-than-life figures in culture and politics, Starr went right to California’s vast middle. While he wrote eloquently about novelists, architects, and governors, he was often best in chronicling its people—its poor and middle-class—rather than its outliers.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he recalled scanning the shelves of at Harvard’s Widener Library. “I thought, ‘There’s all kinds of wonderful books on California, but they don’t seem to have the point of view we’re encouraged to look at—the social drama of the imagination.” For all the impersonal forces and outlandish characters Starr describes, his books are largely social histories, though they lack the hard edge or ideological bent of, say, A People’s History of the United States author Howard Zinn, or of Britain’s “history from below” school led by Marxist Eric Hobsbawn.

Starr framed the state as both part of the American West and distinct from it. His extension of Wallace Stegner’s notion that California was like the rest of the United States, only more so, was only one of the motifs that he would borrow from a great novelist.

One irony is that Starr did something that seemed impossible: He wrote about the state out of deep love—his books were, after all, about the California “dream,” a word that appeared in the title of every volume of his monumental history of the state. But Starr also broke through the myths that boosters had used to market the place to the world, with their sales pitches of endless natural bounty, idyllic suburban real estate, and limitless possibilities for self-reinvention.

Starr’s nuanced approach comes across quite clearly in Endangered Dream: The Great Depression in California, which shows the state struggling with economic and social collapse. You can feel Starr’s optimism being challenged too: This was a period in which the Communist left and the fascist-friendly right—both marked by naked racism, especially against the Chinese—burgeoned, and poverty, including child poverty, was breathtaking. Starr describes it all with color and artful detail, but he could also write, in this same volume, insightfully about documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, the stirring sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge and the novels of John Steinbeck.

In other books, Starr used popular culture to illustrate telling aspects of California’s evolution: writing about the importance of outdoor fountains to a water-starved state, or about the dark luminosity of noir fiction, or the tradition of American auto travel and the romance of the road that had its origins in Southern California.

It’s not so much the subject matter that defines Starr’s work—he could write about cuisine, engineering, labor struggles, and everything in between—but what he calls a literary approach in the preface of his first book, Americans and the California Dream, 1850 to 1915: “It seeks to integrate fact and the imagination in the belief that the record of their interchange through a symbolic statement is our most precious legacy from the past. I would like, in short, to suggest the poetry and the moral drama of social experience.”

This method might not work for every country or region, but for California—which would become the world’s leading exporter of imagery, visual and narrative and musical, and which entered the American mind as a kind of fantasy of freedom and wealth—it’s both apt and effective.

Starr the man was marked by contradictions, or at least tensions and ironies. At times, he comported himself as if he’d been born in 1920s Oxford rather than 1940s San Francisco. In his last few decades, especially, he was a bow-tied, suit-wearing hail-fellow-well-met—he mixed heart and angst with an occasionally defensive bluster. But those who knew him as a young man described him as often being courtly and old-school even then.

While Starr wrote memorably about the rough and raw period after the Gold Rush, or the turn-of-the-century Arroyo Culture that incubated the Arts and Crafts movement, or the exiled European artists and intellectuals who migrated to California in the 1930s and ‘40s, he barely touched the era of his own adult life. In the course of eight books, spanning the state’s founding to the early George W. Bush years, there’s an enormous hole, from 1964 to 1989, and he didn’t wrestle with the years after 1950 until he was nearly 70.

It may be that no matter how long we waited, no matter how long he lived, Starr would never have come to terms with the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, which included the emergence of California as the capital of the nation’s counterculture, bohemia’s curdling into Altamont and the Manson murders, several major economic shocks, the development and spread of second-wave feminism, the maturing of Hollywood and the L.A.-based music industry, devastating civic uprisings, the high-tech upheaval of Silicon Valley and the ascent of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as major national figures. These were also the decades when—owing to a major shift in U.S. federal immigration policies in 1965—the Golden State became significantly less Caucasian, and, in part as consequence, began to move from a mostly red to what would become a deep blue state. What would have been in those books, we’ll never know.

This ’64-’89 period may have been too personally close to Starr. And real history is hard to do without serious distance. Coast of Dreams, covering 1990 to 2003, has some great bits, but it’s the one book of his that feels inessential, with brief dispatches on surfers, “Gang Chic,” rich New Agers taking over Big Sur, and Burning Man. (“A liberal application of food coloring,” he writes in a caption, “can bring one to another place.”) Starr was not the only member of the Silent Generation who lost his step trying to interpret the culture of the young or the darker turn that California took: His confession in the preface that “California had gone seriously awry” was shared by others taking stock of gang murders, the Los Angeles riots, and the Northridge earthquake.

It’s likely that Starr’s persistent optimism led him into a dead end. His observation, in the same preface, that, “It would be seductively easy, I realized, to join the naysayers … and I would be considered a deep thinker,” has an almost Nixonian ring. But more broadly, with the rise of the ‘60s counterculture, the hardening of suburban reaction, and the polarization of coastal enclaves to the left and the state’s interior to the political right, Starr simply could not be Starr any more. As the middle class fled because of high prices, a state increasingly defined by rich and poor, and the political center destroyed in battles over immigration and crime and taxes, an ecumenical centrism became as hard a position intellectually as it was politically.

They weren’t the first pitched arguments or flight to extremes that the state had seen: All of them had antecedents that Starr himself had chronicled before. But it may be that in the ‘60s, half a century after Yeats wrote “the center cannot hold,” being California’s man in the middle was no longer possible even for the great chronicler of the continent’s edge.

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