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Undisputed queens of the girl-group scene and one of Motown’s leading acts, with their sweet harmonies, choreographed dances and chic visual styles. Originally formed as the Primettes in Detroit in 1959, they signed to Motown in 1960 with original members Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard (replaced by Cindy Birdsong in 1967) and Barbara Martin (who left in 1961). Beginning with “Where Did Our Love Go” and ending with “Someday We’ll Be Together,” the Supremes launched twelve number-one singles between 1964 and 1969. After their split-up, Diana Ross went on to fame as a solo artist and film actor. A purported reunion with Ross and substitutes failed to attract audiences in 2000.
Industry:Culture
The concept of “family” is complex. Diverse experiences of family depend on age, gender, ethnicity socio-economic status, sexual orientation and religious affiliation.
Throughout American history competing interest groups have tried to provide the definitive explanation of the concept of family and influence social policy.
The US Census Bureau defines family as two or more people living together, related by blood, marriage, or adoption. What this statistical concept fails to convey is the complex ways people join together to support each other through the raising of children, the division of economic resources, and the love and nurturing that are key to family life.
Thus, both the structure and function of what constitutes a family are aspects of debate.
Politicians often invoke the concept of family to advance political agendas. A “familyvalues” platform is conservative, envisioning two parents with children—a nuclear family The husband is the wage-earner and the wife a full-time homemaker. “Family values” often presuppose the Christian Right ideology and opposition to abortion. A more liberal perspective focuses on the affective ties between members, their commitment to each other, and planning parenthood. Either concept relies on an ideal type of family that rarely matches the reality of individual experience.
The US Census statistics indicate changes in family structure over time. Since 1970, delays in marriage and an increase in divorce rates have contributed to reducing the number of people living in family households. Divorce is common, with 50 percent of all marriages ending in divorce. The number of single women raising children has doubled.
“Blended” families due to remarriage create complex step-parenting relationships.
Women are also joining the workforce at an unprecedented rate.
The degree of autonomy families exercise in disciplining and educating their children is also changing. Stricter definitions of child abuse sometimes necessitate outside intervention. The surge of interest in home schooling represents a move away from outside influences.
Many options for affinity-based family relationships exist. Spouses or partners, despite raising children, may live apart due to job demands. Others live in committed relationships without children and still consider themselves “family.” Members of religious groups, especially within the African American culture, often refer to each other using familial terms such as “mother,” “sister,” or “brother” when no blood or marriage relationship exists, but where there is a supportive relationship.
“Are you family?” can be asked by a gay or lesbian person to inquire about sexual orientation. Homosexuals, when rejected by their family of origin, often turn to a chosen social network to act as family members. Efforts are under way in many states to recognize same-sex marriages. Some municipalities and businesses recognize partnership relationships through the provision of domesticpartner benefits. Religious organizations are divided about supporting such unions.
The concept of family is a complex, multilayered construction. A person may hold different working definitions of the concept depending on the context.
Industry:Culture
State capital and Sunbelt success story The largest metropole of the Southwest, Phoenix literally bloomed from the desert after the Second World War—so much so that new landscapes have forced pollen and allergies on those who once escaped there for their health. The urban population increased twelvefold from 1950 to 1999 (1,198,064 census estimate)–20 percent in the 1990s alone.
The area has been especially popular for retirees—the retirement complex, Sun City, developed nearby—and those escaping perceived urban crises in the East and California.
Politically, it was the home of conservative thinker and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Later, sports (basketball’s Suns), cultural facilities and resorts have expanded in the city and nearby Scottsdale and Tempe. Yet, in the 1990s, growth confronted the conservative, casual city with critical issues of sprawl, automobile dependency and maintenance of open spaces, recreation and agriculture.
Industry:Culture
Use of phenotypical characteristics to determine police intervention, loosely based on potential associations with likely criminal behavior. The overwhelming tendency of state troopers in New Jersey and other areas to stop African American motorists in disproportionate numbers for questioning in the 1990s led to nationwide reform of this systematic discrimination. Such abuse has given rise to the ironic label DWB (Driving While Black) to protest such stops.
Industry:Culture
Sport developed in Canada during the nineteenth century The name of its most prestigious prize, the Stanley Cup, derives from the governor-general who donated the bowl to the hockey league. Hockey spread below the border in the early twentieth century; the National Hockey League, built primarily around Canadian teams, was formed in 1917. Interest in the United States grew with the bringing of franchises to Boston, MA, New York City, Chicago, IL, Detroit and Pittsburgh, and then in the 1970s to Philadelphia, PA and Hartford among other cities.
Since 1980, the sport’s base has shifted to the United States, a development symbolized in the trading of Wayne Gretzky, “the Great One,” from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles, CA Kings in 1988. Two years later the NHL created its first expansion team in Florida. Once dominated by Canadian teams, at the end of the 1996–7 season the NHL had twenty-six teams, only six of which were in Canada.
Part of this growth in the US has been owing to the sport’s profitability (until recent fears that it may have overextended itself). As in other sports, hockey teams are owned by corporate giants such as Disney and by major mass media and cable companies.
These teams hold cities to ransom, bargaining for new leases on their arenas or for more funding from taxpayer dollars, threatening to move if their demands are not met. They are able to do so because city mayors and governors are constantly battling to win expansion teams or attract a team willing to relocate. Hockey, associated with white suburbanites who flock to the city for every game, brings in revenue. The game has never attempted to appeal to inner-city populations. There have been almost no African Americans in the league, and there are very few black and minority fans in the bleachers.
Another significant development of recent years has been the internationalization of NHL players. The game had long been an Olympic sport and northern European teams did very well (the Olympics were one reason for hockey’s hold in colleges, since until the 1990s American Olympians were generally drawn from college ranks). Some of these athletes, beginning with the Swedes in the 1970s, came to the United States drawn by the high salaries. With the end of the Cold War, a large number of Russians and Czechs made use of their new freedom to emigrate. During the 1995–6 season, of the 640 players in the league, 389 were Canadian, only 108 were American, while there were 42 Russians, 34 Swedes and 26 Czechs.
This has resulted in a change in the way the game is played. The Canadian game was noted for its extremely physical aspect, Gretzky’s agility and grace being the exception.
Players wear padding and helmets, not only to protect themselves from the inevitable contact (particularly since the game is played with a stick, and the hard rubber puck can travel at high speeds), but also because the game is marked by brawling, believed to stimulate fan interest. The joke: “I went to a boxing bout and a hockey game broke out,” is often repeated as nightly sportscasts feature fist fights between players which are calmly observed by referees who have no power to intervene. When the Philadelphia Flyers’ Broad Street Bullies won in 1974 and 1975, led by Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent, many assumed that physical play would always win championships.
However, European players have tended to be quicker skaters and more skillful with the stick, able to embarrass teams that rely on the body check. This has happened to Bobby Clarke’s handpicked Flyers’ “Legion of Doom,” led by Eric Lindros, which has failed to win a Stanley Cup and has consistently been outperformed by playoff opponents.
Women have begun to play the game in larger numbers, in part inspired by the success of the US hockey team in the new-medal sport in the 1998 Winter Olympics. The women’s game emphasizes skill over brute force (stricter penalties are given for infringements), though the intense rivalry between the Canadian and American women led to an Olympic showdown noted for the frequency of its body checking.
The spread of the game around the United States has been facilitated by the development of in-line skating, enabling people to play a version of hockey on parking lots and playgrounds around the country This in turn has led to the emergence of a new semi-professional league of roller hockey fast growing among the nation’s children, serving the dual function of a sport to train youngsters who want to make their way towards NHL, and as a new commercial sport in its own right.
Hockey has been used in mass media—both news and fiction—to explore male destructiveness (Slap Shot, 1977). The growing appeal (and changing image) of hockey in the 1990s can be seen in its Disneyfication in Mighty Ducks (1992) and its sequel, as well as Disney’s acquisition of an Anaheim franchise with the same name.
Industry:Culture
While the United States is an English-speaking nation, no official government pronouncement confirmed this—at least until the English-Only campaigns of the 1980s forced this upon state legislatures. Nonetheless, generations of those absorbed by American expansion and immigrants have acceded to the domination of English in education, public life, media and everyday life just as the nation’s projection abroad has gone through English channels. Older inhabitants—including American Indians, Hispanic and French residents and Hawai’ians—as well as generations of immigrants, have held onto their own languages for literary ceremonial and family uses, despite transgenerational pressures to assimilate. Newer immigrants, while adding the variegated presence of more than 300 languages (and variable government support) to an American melting-pot, show similar patterns of change over time. Hence, in the 1990 census, 80 percent of the population spoke only English, while half of the remainder spoke English as well as another language. After more than two centuries, American English— distinguished from its British mother tongue and other colonial developments— represents a unifying feature of American national identity discourse and media.
The unification of this distinctive language, however, has also recognized diversity and challenges as well as changes over time. By the early nineteenth century works such as Webster’s Dictionary and the McGuffey Reader distinguished American English from British counterparts. Distinctions have included forms and usages (often informal) and a rich vocabulary constantly supplemented by encounters with other speakers—Native American place names, diverse food names and basic vocabulary derived from multiple languages, including “buckaroo” (Spanish vaquero “cowboy”), “kibitz” (Yiddish and German words for being a busybody), “moccasin” (used by Virginians from 1612, from the Powhatan or Micmac), “shanty” (from the Irish sean tig “old house” or the French chantier “log hut”), “boss” (Dutch baas), “gung ho” (Chinese kung ho) and “juke” (Wolof dzug).
In the twentieth century while assimilation to English with some bilingualism remained the norm, mass media like the Spanish-language television Telemundo and Univision underscored new transnational support for other languages with large communities of speakers in the US—with 20 million Spanish speakers, for example, the United States ranks sixth among world nations in this language. Yiddish, although limited in speakers (200,000+), survived as a medium of expression in the US after Hitler’s devastation of Central European Jewry. Other important bilingual competencies in the US include French, German, Italian, various forms of Chinese, Tagalog, Polish and Korean, although many others have contributed to the expressiveness and vocabulary of American English. Meanwhile, Native American languages have been revived as expressions of national identity just as Hawai’ian and Hawai’ian pidgin have claimed renewed emphasis. ASL (American Sign Language) has also received recognition as a distinct (“foreign”) language.
Perhaps the most controversial language variant of the United States is Black English (“Ebonics”). African slaves, forcibly imported into the United States, combined the vocabularies, structures and rhythms of African languages and speech of the slave trade with English. In isolation, these became strongly marked dialects like Gullah of the Southern coast. In other cases, Black English occupies a post-creole continuum, in which distinctive forms of tense and pronoun use, dual negatives and other features may be used in certain circumstances, but “corrected” in others, especially by speakers who switch fluently to Standard English. The role of Black English as a separate language has been debated by educators and linguists. Moreover, language structure shades over into distinctive styles of rhetoric, expressivity wordplay and music that also define an African American tradition of English used by public figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. or authors like James Baldwin and Ntozake Shange.
Other variations in American English reflect historical differences of region, immigration, class and education. American accents may be identified with cities (Brooklyn, New York City NY, Chicago, etc.), although migration also means that newer areas may lack any identifiable accent—one rarely speaks of a Phoenix or Seattle accent. Sunbelt development, however, has intersected with a strong regional accent— the Southern “drawl,” involving lengthened vowels, weaker final consonants and melodious intonation. A distinctive New England accent includes a highly rounded “o” and back “a,” as well as an extended final “r”—“Hahhvahhd” (for Harvard). The Brooklyn accent, by contrast, reflects the impact of immigrant Irish, German and Yiddish speakers in the shift from “th” to “d,” or other marked traits. The normative accent of the US, reaffirmed by mass-media announcers, tends to be the flatter and nasal English of the Midwest and West. Regional accents, in turn, tend to reflect associations of regional culture—identification of a New England accent with powerful history and Yankee harshness, or of a Southern accent with ease but a lack of development. Ironically the latter remained important in presidential politics for Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Gore and George Bush, Jr. (versus his father’s Northeastern speech).
Accents also refer to class, though not as markedly as in the British system. Class, moreover, is mediated by region and, above all, by education—correctness of speech and vocabulary are taken as primary indicators. William Labov, in his studies of New York City speech, showed that speakers of various class backgrounds try to correct towards what they perceive as an educated norm in careful speech (indeed, he identified middleclass speakers who showed a tendency to overcorrect with linguistic insecurity). Etiquette books also warn about proper phrases and topics as well as usages to be avoided. Class is also read into “foreign accents”: British and French accents in the US are taken generally to be indicators of higher status, while Asian and Hispanic accents suggest recent arrival or lower-class status.
Yet, all these indicators of class are challenged by language as a site of creativity and rebellion. Slang and jargons associated with particular groups have been vital parts of the reinvention of English from generation to generation. Some inventions have endured— from the ubiquitous “OK,” which may have African roots, to more recent ephemera.
Professional jargons circulate rapidly through mass media, despite those critics who decry their obfuscation or lack of creativity. Slang, as a creation of those outside the mainstream, occupies an even more confusing position as the slang of youth becomes the home language of new generations. One notes shifts, for example, not only in individual words but in the vocabularies of profanity and sexuality that baby boomers use fluently in contrast to their parents (and perhaps to children who are ingrained in proper speech as they develop their own rebellions).
Language is also about style and American values of individualism, “popular culture” and consumerism. Again, culturally constructed divisions like the fluidity of black preaching, the supposedly hard-nosed criticism of big-city speech or the politeness of women represent both ideological constructs and language practices. Multiple media represent and participate in a continual recreation of American language and language practices. Hence, the phrase “Make my day” (from Clint Eastwood’s hard-edged cop in Dirty Harry) was recycled by Ronald Reagan as president, while the advertising slogan “Where’s the beef?” also appeared in political debates. Indeed, the ubiquity of English among 250 million speakers (as well as those who speak or “listen to” American products in other countries) has sustained music, literature, advertising, television and films as channels in which American English is continually reinvented and shared.
Industry:Culture
The educational reforms of the 1990s allowed for community design within public schools. Parents, teachers and others (including corporate consultants) applied for special, independent but publicly funded charters to operate their institutions. Spreading especially through troubled urban school systems, this innovation allows for increased community commitment, program innovation and special needs of schools and neighborhoods, but also facilitates corporate involvement in planning and management.
Industry:Culture
Termed coined by William Whyte, in a 1956 book of that name, which suggested that business culture and the attempt to make people work for the profit of the corporation affected people’s social lives. Americans, Whyte argued, acted like cogs in a machine, conforming to group values at the office and home. This lifestyle was represented in many movies of the 1950s and early 1960s (e.g. The Apartment, 1960, in which Jack Lemmon lends his apartment to his bosses for their sexual liaisons), though Whyte believed the organization man’s natural habitat was the suburb. The sameness and impotence associated with the organization man is captured nicely in the character of Mr Arnold in The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988–93). The organization man also resented his wife for pushing him to succeed in this corporate world, resentment described in Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man (1974). The beats resisted the siren call of the corporation, and juvenile delinquents, like James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), resented their fathers for their emasculation.
Industry:Culture
Transvestites challenge the established norm for gender behavior. While the most visible transvestites are the male drag queens, whether politicized or in show business, others have adopted crossdressing as a more private behavior. Adoption of clothing, hair and facial preparation and other attributes appropriate to another sex has deep roots in American folklore and history.
For women, this allowed more freedom to take on roles of power and independence in wars and immigration (as fictionalized by Barbra Streisand in Yentl, 1983). As women’s clothing has become casual and functional, cross-dressing is more complex. Few women who dress in men’s clothes would call themselves transvestites.
Males have also taken on female clothing for ritualized occasions, including mock weddings and mock cheerleading in the South, rites of initiation for male fraternities and vaudeville humor, whether Milton Berle in early television or New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Saturday Night Live. Like many others perceived to be engaged in alternative sexuality, transvestites tended to keep their interests private until liberation movements in the 1960s opened a wider discussion and range of public behavior. Transvestite males, in particular, are often taken to be gay although their use of women’s clothing may be based on other aesthetic or tactile features.
The most flamboyant modern exposure of transvestite life has been the “drag show,” with male and female celebrity impersonators, following lip-synched song and dance routines and attracting diverse audiences. Drag shows, as urbane entertainment, have also broken through in Hollywood and Broadway with comedies like Victor/Victoria (1982) or To Wong Fu Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), and the celebrity status accorded to RuPaul. Director Ed Woods, who treated transvestisim as a clinical condition in his own terrible (now cult) films, was treated as a sympathetic closet transvestite in Tim Burton’s 1994 bio-pic. Dennis Rodman, the NBA star, has made cross-dressing a more confrontational issue of masculinity and choice in his public demeanor.
This is an area fraught with multiple and contradictory meanings as well as reactions.
Industry:Culture
The National Security Act of 1947, establishing the president’s overriding responsibility for both defense and foreign policy, created the Secretary of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, centralizing the armed forces in the Pentagon. The Act aimed to end the rivalry among the military services by combining them under one power, which, theoretically at least, would be able to subordinate parochial interests and economize by ending duplication. Over time, the massive fivesided building in Northern Virginia, with miles of corridors and offices, has become symbolic of the strengths and weaknesses of American military force and planning.
With the president constitutionally enthroned as commander-in-chief, civilian control of the armed forces was secure. But the growth of forces during the Second World War, the prospect of conflicts arising with the Soviet Union and a perceived need to balance political concerns with military strategy led Truman to bolster his position with the establishment of a Cabinet-level Secretary of Defense to oversee all the military.
Korea firmly established the Pentagon within the American political system. While still dominated by military men, the Pentagon began to move towards civilian politics, embodied in the conflict between Secretary of Defense George Marshall (supported by Truman) and General MacArthur in Korea, which led to the latter’s dismissal. By the time President Eisenhower retired from office, a system, which he termed the “militaryindustrial complex,” was firmly entrenched. While this term suggested a threat to a democratic society, it also denoted a system in which the three elements (economic, political and military) of C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite (1956) collaborated in a loose balance.
A more sinister Pentagon emerged in the 1960s under President Kennedy and Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense. Kennedy had made the “missile gap” central to his political campaign against Nixon in 1960 and so, following his victory, he emphasized military build-up, unrestrained by economic and political advisability. In addition, McNamara brought to the Department of Defense his experience as the CEO of Ford.
Hence, he promoted approaches that had seemed to be working in the Big Three Automakers and other corporations (many of which produced goods for the Pentagon).
These would soon be shown to be woefully inadequate for a changing political and economic landscape.
McNamara instituted industrial management in the federal government with the Secretary of Defense in control of a huge network of enterprises. As in multi-division firms, a Central Management Office was established to administer the “militaryindustrial empire.” Now the federal government began to direct production of over $44 billion in goods and services aimed for military use, instead of merely contracting out projects. In other words, the federal government did not merely regulate; it actually took over the business.
Moreover, what workers at the Pentagon called “missile-gap madness” legitimized almost any expenditure to complete a project. Cost overruns, malfunctioning parts and basic tools and supplies bought at exorbitant rates became common. The C-5A transport plane came in with a $2 billion cost overrun. Forty percent of Minuteman II missiles were found to be defective after test failures had been covered up. Finally, an electronics unit for the F-III fighter (McNamara’s pet project), budgeted at $750,000 per plane, ended up costing $4.1 million per plane. McNamara had encouraged centralization partly to cut back on waste, but he created the exact opposite.
Civilian control under Kennedy and Johnson also established the number-crunching mentality of McNamara and his technocrats. This mindset even influenced the way engagements were carried out, especially Vietnam. Rather than achieving strategic objectives, securing particular pieces of land or gaining other tactical advantages, American sol-diers were trained to fight wars of attrition. In the language of the industrial world, this meant producing maximum bodies among the enemy at a minimum of cost in bodies for Americans. This gave rise, as Philip Caputo recounted in Rumor of War (1977), to the infamous “body counts.” Monthly goals were set, a ratio calculated that would secure victory (believed to be twelve Vietnamese for every one American) and operations were even designed to ascertain numbers of dead on each side. That this was the period of lowest morale in the history of the American armed forces is not surprising.
Moreover, since the Pentagon was being run as a business, public relations were needed. What Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairperson of the Committee on Foreign Relations, called the Pentagon Propaganda Machine was an extremely elaborate advertising agency selling what the Pentagon was doing to the public. Disaster came not so much on the battle field as in the war of images waged on television. The Pentagon’s campaign was shown to be seriously flawed when slogans like “The Light at the End of the Tunnel” were followed by setbacks like the Tet Offensive, or when General Westmoreland’s roseate news briefings were disturbed by nearby shelling.
The war resulted in the “Vietnam Syndrome,” or the belief that American governments would be reluctant to undertake military engagements in the future. This was not simply due to lack of public support or the media overstepping their bounds. The McNamara-designed Pentagon proved unable to reach even its own distorted objectives, let alone other strategic objectives a president might set. President Carter’s 1980 disaster attempting to rescue the American hostages in Teheran looked worse against the crisp efficiency of the Israelis flying into Entebbe (1976) to rescue their hostages. Hollywood decided to make movies of the Israelis, not the Americans! Reagan attempted to refashion the Pentagon, partly by “throwing money at the problem” in another military build-up. His Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, believing that the problem lay in the extent of civilian control at the Pentagon itself, attempted to diminish this element. In the eyes of many, however, this left a vacuum in place. The armed forces merely continued to think in terms of old foes, like the Soviet Union, rather than reorienting themselves towards new conflicts worldwide.
Engagements in Grenada under Reagan, and then Panama under Bush, re-established a sense of the American armed forces as a viable fighting force. Newer, sophisticated weapons and machines seemed vastly superior to what the Soviets had available, while Soviet forces became mired in their own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. The long-held belief that the Red Army had western Europe at its mercy was shown to be entirely erroneous.
Towards the end of Reagan’s administration, changes began to occur at the Pentagon.
Frank Carlucci replaced Weinberger as Secretary of Defense and General Colin Powell, a relative military visionary was appointed to head the National Security Council. Carlucci suggested a more conciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union, which was beginning to collapse, while Powell began to plan for what he saw as the likely conflicts of the future, particularly those focusing on resources like oil.
This culminated in the Gulf War in 1991, one of the first military engagements for which American military strategists were actually prepared in advance. In the process, Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf re-established the superiority of US armed forces. It was not merely the fact that the Americans defeated Saddam Hussein’s forces, it was the manner in which they did so, leaving an army of tanks utterly devastated.
Under President Bill Clinton the Pentagon has once again been subordinated to political considerations. While there were at first hopes of reorienting the economy in the aftermath of the Cold War, the perceived need to intervene abroad militarily has kept the military budget growing, and defense contractors, albeit less in the heavyindustry sector and more in high technologies, have remained producing. In addition, such military intervention, like Clinton’s, has been undertaken with one eye on public reaction, evidenced by the polls. Somalia was a necessary humanitarian intervention until a few American lives were lost; the Rwandan genocide had to be overlooked because of the disaster in Somalia. Similarly intervention in Kosovo was necessary because of the failure to act in Rwanda. All the while, actions against Iraq seemed to occur based on a schedule set by the Independent Counsel Starr, rather than global strategic considerations.
But such politicization is almost inevitable in a world where the old Cold-War certainties no longer remain. Indeed, Powell’s visionary approach to shaping the Pentagon was not simply to prepare for a new kind of war against a new enemy in the Middle East; it was rather to prepare for all kinds of wars against many potential enemies.
As such, the message has not been to diminish civilian control, since this is required of a democracy; rather it is that McNamara’s approach, where everything is subordinated to the bottom line of efficiency or a Clinton approach, where there is no bottom line (as in the debate over gays in the military), are no longer acceptable in a world where allegiances are shifting, people are migrating across boundaries and new kinds of globalization are taking place.
Industry:Culture
