Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966

Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966 (2002)
By Kirse Granat May

Synopsis: This book examines popular culture representations of California from 1955-1965, especially as focused on white, middle-class suburban teenagers full of wholesome "good clean fun." Focuses on the rise of the CA postwar suburban ideal/CA as land of youth and promise; launch of Disneyland and Disney TV shows such as Davey Crockett and the Mickey Mouse Club; Rebel Without a Cause as showing suburban rebellion and Gidget as showing middle class cuteness; rise of the surf craze with its middle class, white leisured youth lifestyle; rise of the CA aesthetic in fashion; Berkeley and Watts turmoil as complicating the CA image; Reagan for CA governor as way to "restore" wholesome, golden land CA image. Argues that CA created a very sunny, youth-obsessed, wholesome, white, middle-class, leisured, problem-free fantasy image which served to obscure the real racial, class-based, and political tensions and struggles going on in the state. Though events of the 1960s occasionally snapped people out of it, the persistence of this "golden" image continues to shape memories of the past and ideas of the present.

Interesting Specifics:

"California was America's tomorrowland" (5).

"Promoting the virtues of the California teenager suburbanized popular culture" (6).

The CA youth image "represented CA trends and middle class America to the extreme: mobile, capitalistic, outdoorsy, consumer-oriented, involved in harmless, well-meaning fun" (26).

Calls "California Girls" am "aryan anthem" (113).

Interacts With:

To me this book seems almost like a top-down approach - doesn't take a very radical view of popular culture. Seems to imply that pop culture here was used as an escape, that consumers were happily taking what producers wanted them to have and using it as a means of obscuring the painful tensions of the time. So, is that radical or conservative? Seems conservative to me. This book is not about creating one's own meaning, or about multiplicity.