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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
The pharmaceutical company Pfizer hit the big time with Viagra (sildenafil citrate), finding what it proclaimed to be the cure for erectile dysfunction, a problem which may affect as many as 30 million Americans. The drug, administered in tablet form, essentially increases blood flow to the penis enabling a man to have an erection. By 2000, the drug had been prescribed to over 5 million men in the United States, and its use had spread worldwide. Part of its fame resulted from its stint as a staple for late-night comedy and also from former presidential candidate Robert Dole’s declaration that he benefited from the drug.
Industry:Culture
Under various designations, American urban cores long have been centers of interaction, consumption and power. Since the 1960s, the positive “down-town” has overlapped with the problematic inner city divorced from affluent outward expansion. Other related terms (Central Business District, or specific usages like the Loop, Center City Midtown, etc.) have taken on varied political and social meanings.
Since colonial times, the city has been a place where people of diverse social and cultural backgrounds have come together. Despite differences in status and wealth, neat separations often proved impossible until innovations in transportation allowed cities to expand in the nineteenth century re-mapping wealth, culture and race. By the 1920s, social scientists of the Chicago School recognized different urban functional zones. Park and Burgess’ studies, for example, identified a central business district containing political, economic and cultural services for the city (although limited residence). Around this stood factories and working-class immigrant homes in a transitional zone of abandoned wealthy residences. This model suggested that the inner city was constantly renewed by new immigrants, while those who assimilated moved outward.
Relations between groups living and working at the urban core were not always friendly As groups moved out, tensions could erupt between those who shared neither heritage, language, nor skin color. In other cases, the mingling at the urban center alarmed those who governed the city. Hence Los Angeles’ downtown, where Asian Americans, African Americans and Latino/as met, was dismantled over time, separating ethnic enclaves and precluding joint political action.
Many aspects of the “inner city” as a problem were exacerbated by urban renewal and upheavals of social movements of the 1960s. Here, government and private interventions often worked at cross-purposes. Highways as routes to communicate between central areas and suburbs, for example, often dissected vibrant areas around the business district.
Destruction of decaying houses and factories in the core also created open scars in the tightly knit fabric of the city In this chaos, riots broke out from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, often laying waste to whole sections and driving out businesses, employers and residents.
In the 1970s and 1980s, gentrification brought predominantly white suburbanites in to restore the older homes at the center which previous generations had abandoned.
Unfortunately this often forced the eviction of other ethnic populations who found no housing near the center nor opportunities to move further out. Still, “success stories” like Philadelphia, PA’s Society Hill or Savannah, GA’s Historic District enriched the “inner city” alongside corporate towers and public buildings.
Modern theorists increasingly argue that post-industrial cities, defined by services and information rather than heavy production, no longer require the same spatial concentrations of the past. Government offices, corporate headquarters and even sports teams have left behind aging infrastructures in order to be closer to a larger group of suburban consumers in suburbs and edge cities. Downtowns may be defined in terms of “special” places like museums, cinemas, restaurants and markets. Yet the inner city has become associated with danger, poverty and homelessness for those who avoid it, and with waste and with rage for those who inhabit it.
As a human center where diverse Americans have met and established their claims, the inner city has been the cradle of a multicultural experience. Yet, as television and cinematic representations from the Detroit, MI of Robocop (1987) and the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982) suggest, these areas can also be identified with the ex-urbanites’ worst nightmares.
Industry:Culture
The western occupies a permanent place in American literature, as it does in other media.
The individualism of the American culture seems nowhere better captured than in stories of the cowboy—the ultimate American hero—and in rugged individualists who populated the landscape of the West. The western appeals to the need for freedom, wide open spaces and frontiers, self-sufficiency, triumphing over adversaries and survival against the elements. Westerners’ corrals, groups of collectors, writers and historians all write about the history way of life and heroes of the West, past and present.
Westerns are nonetheless interpretations and ideologies. Stereotyped plots, overly romantic dialogue and misuse of dialect characterize one popular form of western. As Diana Herald writes in Genreflecting: “the stereotypic western can be recognized on the first page: a lone rider is crossing a valley or desert and a shot knocks off his hat or hits a rock, startling his horse, and a range war begins” (1995:18). Other themes and types of westerns include plots about wagon trains moving west, mule trains and stage lines, mining and lost mines, captivities, cattle ranching and cattle drives, range wars, boys becoming men, romance, picaresque heroes and parodies of cowboys. Texas and Mexico and American Indian territories provide settings and issues. Characters include mountain men, buffalo runners, black cowboys, Mormons, marshals, strong women, doctors, preachers and celebrity characters.
Popular series have been written by Louis L’Amour and Hank Mitchem, among many others, providing a seeming masculine counterpart to female-oriented romances.
Contemporary westerns, such as those by Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Abbey and William Eastlake, set in the twentieth century keep the themes of the cowboy wide open spaces, wild adventures and Indian-Anglo relations, although they may add on more environmental sensitivity or an Indian viewpoint (e.g. Tony Hillerman’s Southwestern mysteries). Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy have also added new literary dimensions to classic scenarios.
Other contemporary trends include “adult” westerns of heroic, sexual adventures that started with Playboy Press in 1975. The western, as a genre, has been the subject of numerous parodies as well. Even these underscore its place in the myth-making of all America.
Industry:Culture
Widely known to be a term coined by Douglas Copeland’s 1991 book Generation X, the term carries cultural meanings and targets a market. Generation X generally refers to people who grew up after the Civil Rights Movement and up to the early 1980s, after (and offspring of) the baby boomers. More importantly Generation X is a state of mind—cynical, ironic and sarcastic—the slacker type. As a marketing ploy Generation X aims for a mostly white middle class with a pretty carefree lifestyle.
Industry:Culture
The United States Constitution grants the power to declare war to Congress (Article 1: Section 8; clause 11) and given this definition, the United States has not been to war since the Second World War. However, employing an alternative definition (such as that of von Clausewitz) in which war is described as an act of violence by a state intended to compel its opponents to fulfill its will, the United States has been in an almost constant state of warfare since 1945. That both accurately apply to the United States characterizes the nation’s equivocal approach to war in the last half of the twentieth century.
One aspect of the country’s ambivalence was the proliferation of conflicts that stopped short of being full-fledged wars. The overarching framework for the first forty years of the US after the Second World War was the “Cold War,” a term used to designate the prolonged struggle with the Soviet Union and to a lesser degree the People’s Republic of China. Although this “war” shaped and structured American politics, economics, social institutions and, especially military policy the US and the Soviet Union never sent troops against each other and the US and Chinese only fought against each other in the Korean War. There were also a series of “covert” or “surrogate” wars, such as those against the governments of Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, Cuba in the 1960s and Nicaragua in the 1980s. These were armed conflicts sanctioned by the US and often conducted by US intelligence agencies (CIA). Although not publicly involved, US personnel performed assassinations, mined harbors, engaged in psychological operations, as well as supplying arms, training, logistical support and intelligence to groups engaged in overt hostilities against US enemies. A second feature was the increasing power of the presidents to unilaterally decide whether to engage in a conflict and how exactly that conflict would be conducted. Harry Truman’s decision to lead the country to war in Korea under UN auspices, rather than seek a formal declaration from Congress, provided a blueprint that both George Bush in the Gulf War (1990) and Bill Clinton in Bosnia (1996) and Kosovo (1999) followed. In each case the president chose when to start and when to conclude hostilities and left Congress to cast largely symbolic votes whether to support or denounce the policy Although the Vietnam War was not a UN operation, both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon also followed Truman’s example of ignoring Congress, arguing that the Constitution gave the president war-making powers in his role as commander in chief. There was an attempt to undercut this tactic by passage of the War Powers Act (1973), which held that the president could send troops into battle for sixty days, but then had to seek congressional approval. However, this proved largely ineffectual.
A third effect, related to the second, was the use of euphemisms, like “police action” in Korea (1950–3) and Vietnam (1962–74), “peacekeeping mission” in the Dominican Republic (1965) and Bosnia (1991–3) and “rescue operations” in Grenada (1984) to describe events that were, for all intents and purposes, wars. These often grew out of the Cold War and were situations where the two superpowers would actively involve themselves on opposing sides of a regional conflict, but did not wish to take the final step of declaring war. On the other hand, the government began to increasingly characterize non-military social-policy initiatives in explicitly military terms. From the 1960s to the 1980s there were a number of “wars” declared by the government on such things as poverty drugs, crime, AIDS and cancer.
A fourth feature of this ambivalence was the way it contributed to the rise of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex; a relationship that grew to include the cooperation of the government, scientific community higher education and organized labor. According to the congressional Budget Office, the Pentagon budget for military spending, if measured in real terms, continued to remain at the same level of the height of the Cold War of the early 1960s. As a result, 10 percent of all US business was derived from military-related production. The argument given in support of such enormous expenditures was that it was only through continued strength and readiness that the US could avoid the horrors of the wars of the first half of the century.
The ambivalence about war was also reflected in other ways in post-Second World War popular culture. While the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and both world wars produced a number of highly popular songs that promoted the cause, this was virtually non-existent for any of the conflicts after 1945. Only Vietnam produced any significant number of songs, directed mostly against the war, and none of them achieved the status of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” or “Over There.” Representations of war on television were relatively scarce with only two successful series using war as their backdrop, Combat (1962–7) and M*A*S*H (1972–83). There was an interesting contrast in the film industry between the popularity of sciencefiction war films versus those about real wars. The most successful reality-based war films tended to present complex and highly critical views of war, while the science-fiction films were marked by a stark contrast between good and evil and glorified war while ignoring its costs. However, despite the large number of movies explicitly about real wars made since the Second World War, only a handful gained any widespread popularity: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); M*A*S*H (1970); Platoon (1986); and Saving Private Ryan (1998). When adjusted for inflation only The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), about the aftermath of war, is in the top sixty most successful films. This is in stark contrast to the immense popularity of fantasy war films such as the Star Wars Anthology (1977; 1980; 1983; 1999) and Independence Day (1996), which are among the thirtytwo most popular films of all time.
Industry:Culture
The Democratic Party’s origins are in the party created by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in response to the pro-British, active government strategy of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. It was later more fully democratized by Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s. This new democracy was a states’ rights, pro-Southern coalition of state parties which maintained its identity through the crisis of the Civil War and Reconstruction at the cost of its predominance at the national level.
From 1861 to 1929, the Democrats were subordinate to the pro-business strategies of the Republican Party and suffered from contradictions between what, in the 1920s, became its “wet” and “dry” city and country wings. There was little cohesion in a party whose leadership had included Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan and Grover Cleveland. However, by 1928, the Democrats had fashioned a new, urban constituency made up of turn-of-the-century immigrants and their children, mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans, Roman Catholics and Jews, who rallied to the nation’s first Catholic candidate for president, Al Smith from New York.
Smith’s defeat, with the important intrusion of the Great Depression, spawned the New Deal coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which dominated the nation until 1968. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats, building on the Progressive legacy constructed a distinctively American version of the welfare state: Social Security, the rights of labor, regulation, moderate social planning, Keynesian economics, healthcare, unemployment, disability and modest welfare provisions. What the New Deal marginalized African Americans and other minorities, and women—the Fair Deal, New Frontier and “Great Society” addressed.
The Democrats successfully claimed the mantle of “The Common Man,” and excoriated the GOP as the party of Hoover, the Depression and “economic royalists” until the volcanic explosions of the 1960s subverted their mandate. Republican conservatives, sparked by the demagogic, populist appeal of George Wallace, which Richard Nixon parlayed into his “Silent Majority” were able to take advantage of the decade’s dislocations (e.g. the Vietnam War, race riots, campus disorders and rising crime rates). The Democrats lost support among “ethnics,” the descendants of turn-ofthe-nineteenth-century immigrants and white Southerners.
Aside from the anomaly of the 1976 postWatergate victory of Jimmy Carter, the Democrats floundered, holding on to their congressional domination, but losing, especially in the new suburbs, to more conservative Republicans. Between Reagan’s 1980 triumph and the Newt Gingrich-engineered congressional wins of 1994, the Democrats, perceived as a “tax and spend” and dovish party seemed divided between a liberal wing, devoted to both New Deal and social movement-based policies (ranging from universal healthcare to gay rights), and a more conservative to moderate wing, organized by the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing for a more prodefense, modified welfare state, pro-suburban strategy. Bill Clinton in both his 1992 and 1996 victories marked the seeming victory of the latter approach.
The Democratic Party remains the party of trade unionists, most minorities, liberal professionals and what critics called “identity politics,” but under Clinton, who declared that “the era of Big Government is over,” it sought to become a “new” Democratic Party committed to inclusion, modified racial policies, tougher approaches to crime and foreign policy The federal government, albeit smaller and smarter, remained an article of faith and policy for the Democrats in the twentieth century.
Industry:Culture
This urban strategy pits newly mobile African American families—as buyers—against entrenched white and often ethnic neighborhoods. These neighborhoods sometimes received new black families without incident, but realtors profited from both fear of civil rights and the need of blacks to escape urban ghettos, while mass media hyped the drama of destroying community. Blockbusting as a practice of purposely unsettling residents and exacerbating racial tensions was made illegal by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, although few enough ever admitted doing it. Osser’s Blockbusting in Baltimore (UK Press 1995) provides a detailed study of one such movement.
Industry:Culture
The symbolic weight of this bird crashes onto American dinner tables every Thanksgiving. Although a New World species, the Pilgrims probably knew it in England before any mythic dinners of peace with Indians. Still, custom patterns a “traditional” Thanksgiving menu replete with stuffing, cranberries, potatoes and pies. Regional and ethnic variations in stuffing (cornbread versus white bread or oysters) and cooking abound, as do cynical responses in popular media to dry meat and endless leftovers.
Benjamin Franklin proposed the turkey as a national bird instead of the eagle, but it is also renowned for stupidity, especially as a domestic fowl. While marketed for other large meals and as a healthy alternative to other kinds of meat, turkey remains bound to the holiday as a cultural symbol.
Industry:Culture
The most far-reaching of federal educational laws, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any program or activity at a private or public educational institution receiving federal funds. Title IX regulations forbid sex discrimination in financial assistance, discriminatory course assignments and sexual harassment. They also mandate equal athletic opportunities for both sexes.
Industry:Culture
The world’s largest feminist organization; the nation’s foremost women’s advocacy group. Founded in 1966 by twenty-eight women, including Betty Friedan and African American feminist and Episcopalian minister Pauli Murray, it was originally conceived as a corollary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NOW’s statement of purpose was “to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society” NOW’s five specific priorities became the passing of an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, opposing racism, advocating for abortion and reproductive rights, supporting lesbian and gay rights and ending violence against women.
Industry:Culture
