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Joseph Kennedy (1888–1969), a self-made man who had accumulated one of the largest fortunes in the United States from Wall Street and Hollywood movies, became the American Ambassador to Britain in 1938. Descended from Irish Catholic immigrants, Kennedy’s success embodied the ragsto-riches myth of American immigration and assimilation. His appointment to the Court of St. James, which owed much to his friendship with President Roosevelt, was only a step in the Kennedy’s dramatic rise to the status of American royalty and tragic mythology.
Nonetheless, Kennedy’s isolationism and anti-Semitism during the Second World War meant the architect of Camelot was unable to gain the presidency and instead turned to his nine children by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy The eldest, Joe Jr., the father’s first choice for president, died on a flying mission during the War. After the second son, John Fitzgerald (1917–63), survived his ordeal as commander of a torpedo boat PT 109 in the Pacific, his father orchestrated his attempt to run for the House of Representatives for Boston, MA, using his wartime heroism and the family’s Boston connections to sell him in an unfamiliar constituency In 1946 Kennedy entered Congress as one of the few successful Democrats in a year of Republican dominance and the head of a new generation of Democrats. In 1952 when Republican Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson in the presidential race, Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts’ Senate race, and soon thereafter married Jacqueline Bouvier, an elegant young journalist with intellectual and social credentials as well as her own features of the Kennedy legend.
Meanwhile, John’s younger brother, Robert (1925–68), made a name for himself as an assistant to Joseph McCarthy in the attempt to purge communists from all branches of the government. Robert’s connection with McCarthy would later seem anomalous in light of his much-touted radical credentials. Yet his father had tended to see Roosevelt’s internationalism though the prism of communist or Jewish conspiracy.
After a less than distinguished period in the Senate, John Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960, where the Kennedy machine defeated consummate parliamentarian and Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson for the nomination and barely defeated Richard Nixon in the general elections. With help from friends, John Kennedy also had become the celebrated author of Profiles in Courage (1954), for which he earned a Pulitzer Prize. At the same time, Robert matched Nixon in campaign strategy including helping to get Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. released from jail in the week before the election, swinging many African American votes to Kennedy (with a poor civil-rights record) and providing the slim margin of victory.
JFK created a special moment for the Kennedy myth, epitomized in the epithet “Camelot,” linking his regime to the mythical age of King Arthur. The president’s reliance on his family, especially his father’s advice, and his younger brother continued with Robert as an activist Attorney-General in civil rights and a key role in Cuban interventions. Following JFK’s assassination—again a defining moment for the nation— Robert continued serving Lyndon Johnson, although his contempt for the Texan made this short-lived, and he seized the opportunity of a vacant New York Senate seat.
In 1968, following Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary “Bobby” Kennedy joined the race for the presidency After winning the California primary in June, however, he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.
This left Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy as the remaining son (the daughters had public but less political and sometimes tragic lives). “Inheriting” the Massachusetts Senate seat, he had developed a strong reputation as a good legislator without the charisma of John or the political savvy of Robert. Nevertheless, the Kennedy mystique might have gained him the White House but for a July 1969 incident at Chappaquiddick, in which Edward drove off a bridge, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy’s failure to report the accident immediately to police led to the widespread suspicion that he had been drunk. When he later tried to wrest the Democratic Party nomination from Jimmy Carter in 1980, the incident and other rumors haunted him. As the third most senior senator, Edward has remained a powerful liberal voice in the Democratic Party.
In the next generation, while Kennedy “cousins”—including member of Congress Joseph P. Kennedy II (Massachusetts), Patrick Kennedy (Rhode Island) and Maryland Lieutenant-Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—have been visible in politics and media, John F. Kennedy Jr., became the focus of the family mystique. Since his birth to the charismatic first family and the photograph of him saluting his father’s cortege in 1963, he has been treated by media and the public as a prince whose time on the throne would come. His legal career and political magazine George were followed in detail, as were his dating with and marriage to Carolyn Bessette. When, in July 1999, he crashed his single-engine plane at Martha’s Vineyard en route to a Kennedy clan wedding in Hyannisport (although he was not qualified for the flight), the incident was treated as a national tragedy by media and government—and a tragic myth of the rise and fall of royalty brought full circle.
Industry:Culture
Judicial activism connotes the extent to which judges substitute their interpretations of constitutional provisions for those of other branches of government and their willingness to impose affirmative duties upon governmental bodies. Although applicable to judges of all federal and state courts, it is most often used in reference to the justices of the Supreme Court. The term is ordinarily used in an accusatory manner to ascribe to justices, whose decisions one opposes, an inclination to make law through policyoriented judicial decisions rather than following the literal language of the constitution and showing deference to the constitutional interpretations underlying legislative enactments.
Judicial activism is inevitably contrasted with judicial restraint. While activism is usually attributed to courts labeled “liberal,” most notably the Warren Court, it has also been an instrument of conservative courts. The Rehnquist Court is seen as pursuing a conservative political agenda through a result-oriented decision-making process that disregards precedents and diverges from clear constitutional language. Both courts are viewed as having moved from a judicial ideal of reaching decisions by attempting to discern the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, determined largely through historical sources and narrow readings of precedents, to a process that has expanded the power of judicial review and emphasizes the spirit of the Constitution, often in terms of contemporary social needs. This practice opens justices to the accusation that they have reached out to accept groundbreaking cases that they then decide in a partisan manner by arriving at conclusions imbued with political preference.
Judicial activism is predominantly a post-Second World War phenomenon. The Court shifted its focus from narrow economic issues to questions of civil-rights and liberties, the protection of criminal defendants and the application for the provisions of almost all of the Bill of Rights to the states through the process of incorporating them in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. This is not solely a constitutional trend. Judicial decisions have also broadly extended tort law, especially products liability as precedents holding gun and tobacco manufacturers liable for their products illustrate.
It is hardly surprising that the judicial activism debate flourishes; Americans feel no constraints in second-guessing judges. Numerous provisions of the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment, which form the very foundations for constitutional protections of civil liberties, were intentionally written in open-ended language. Terms such as “due process” and “equal protection” invite varying interpretations and subjective, value-laden readings from both judges and lay persons which underpin both activism and criticism of it.
Industry:Culture
Just as Los Angeles celebrated the completion of Richard Meier’s lavish travertine marble Getty Center in 1997, an art compound generously endowed by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City unveiled its plan to commission Yoshio Taniguchi for its own expansion and renovation. Emblematic of the late twentieth-century boom in museum planning and building, their insistently modernist design at once reveals its origins in modernism and modernization, and belies its place in, and reliance on, a resolutely postmodern present.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the transfer of cultural wealth from Europe to America, coupled with burgeoning industrial fortunes, allowed for the founding of America’s own art museums in its major capital cities—from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
During the course of the twentieth century, modernization and modernism saw their messianic destinies intertwined in the founding of such institutions as the MOMA in 1929. There, the fortunes of American capitalist enterprise, the clean lines of Bauhaus design and the secularized modernist teleology of Alfred J. Barr came together to form the premier institution of modern art in America. Yet these founding visions of modernist utopia quickly gave way to the forces of cultural ossification. In its pursuit of originality and the relentlessly new, in its avowedly progressive vision, the museum refused to acknowledge the degree to which it conferred upon the present the very mantle of tradition which that present had sought so desperately to escape.
The cutting edge issues and exhibits of museums in the Northeast and California are refracted in other smaller art museums across the country. Some, like the Chicago Institute of Art, Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery, the Albright-Knox Collection in Buffalo and the Menil Museum in Houston, constitute important collections and buildings. Others recur in circuits of major travelling expositions—Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta or Cincinnati. Still others have revealed interesting facets of their city and collector—the idiosyncratic Barnes Collection, near Philadelphia, or New Orleans Museum of Arts’ exploration of the links between Degas and his New Orleans relatives.
In the early twenty-first century we witness not the museum’s ruins but, instead, its triumphantly vigorous presence. In an age of blockbuster exhibitions and expansion, the museum has become entrenched as a cherished cultural icon unto itself. In a postmodern present marked by the accelerated pace of planned obsolescence, the museum has emerged as that institution which might save society from the ravages of modernization, from the relentless pursuit of the new, its processes of ossification, of memorialization, coming to function as a potent antidote to the logic of late capitalist culture.
Industry:Culture
Known for publicity-attracting acts of “eco-tage” or “monkey-wrenching,” Earth First! takes direct action, under the credo “no compromise in defense of mother Earth!,” against destructive environmental practices. Earth First! attracts not only hippies, who are drawn to its deep ecology message of biocentric equality and personal selfrealization, but also western rednecks who wish to recapture cowboy mythology in the face of rapid western industrial development. Although most Americans disapprove of monkey-wrenching— especially when humans are injured—the radical positions of Earth First! make mainstream environmental groups appear very moderate and reasonable.
Industry:Culture
Labor organizations of employees who work for government agencies have grown and proliferated since World War II. After 1970, as the private economy shifted its orientation from industrial to white-collar and service sector employment, and non-union and foreign competition erupted, traditional union membership plummeted, while public employment and public sector unions grew rapidly. By the end of the 1980s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, yet in some cities, 90 percent of public workers were represented by unions. Some are conventional unions, while others are professional organizations that have evolved from civil service associations or police fraternal organizations. They have substantial African American and Latino membership, many of whom are employed as teachers in public schools and nurses in public health.
Although the right to organize for federal and almost all state and local employees is protected by law, public sector unions and employees are often precluded from striking by federal and state laws. Punishments include fines levied against unions and individual strikers, dismissal of strikers and imprisonment of union leaders. Restrictions on public employee strikes have been justified under legal theories that emphasize state sovereignty and the governmental duty to protect the general welfare, public health and safety, and by the essential nature of transit, health, sanitation, fire fighting and police services.
Demands continue for selective limitations on strikes, since employees performing similar functions in private industry may strike and many public employees, for example, librarians, and workers in state and national parks are not essential to health and safety.
Unlike in some European countries, there is little tolerance in America for strikes, especially by public employees. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 discharge of striking government-employed air-traffic controllers crystallized a resurgence of anti-unionism.
Because of sanctions and the lack of public support, tactics of temporary slowdowns, sickouts and the threat of strikes have generally replaced actual strikes. Strike threats ensure enormous mass media coverage and are usually effective in imposing pressure to bargain effectively and to reach contract settlements before deadlines.
Public sector unions have learned that they can succeed by exercising political power and applying their resources to influence public opinion. Most were strong supporters of the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike. More recently, teachers unions have led the opposition to school vouchers. Generally favoring liberal Democratic Party positions, they use lobbyists, research publications, political contributions, members as campaign workers, and members voting power to influence elections and the decisions of politicians who control the appropriations and budgets on which public employee salaries and benefits depend. Adversaries, in turn, brand them as special interest groups seeking narrow gains incompatible with the welfare of the public their members serve.
Industry:Culture
Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, five interconnected freshwater lakes, make up one of the largest surface freshwater reservoirs on Earth. (The polar ice caps and Russia’s Lake Balaika are larger.) The 10,900 mile coastline touches eight US states (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York) and two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec. The 295,000 square mile Great Lakes watershed, including five rivers linking the lakes to each other and to the Atlantic Ocean, provides 95 percent of the United States’ fresh-water supply Unsurpassed water transportation routes and the region’s seemingly limitless supply of lumber, iron and other metallic ores sustained the Great Lakes area from the 1820s to 1960 as the United States’ premier center of industrial production. Well-paid union labor, making wood products, steel and later railroad equipment and cars, built the ethnically diverse industrial cities of Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI and Cleveland, OH. Milwaukee grew famous brewing beer from Great Lakes’ water, while rivals Green Bay Wisconsin and Kalamazoo, Michigan tapped the waters for their paper industries. Buffalo, New York prospered first by moving cargo around Niagara Falls and later as the headquarters of massive hydroelectric power systems utilizing Niagara itself.
The general decline of heavy industry in the urban Northeast after 1960 impoverished the region, which has tried to encourage tourism, leisure and summer-home development to replace good jobs lost in industry and shipping. Leisure had long contributed a share to the regional economy especially at Mackinac Island in Michigan, Door County in Wisconsin and the area around Niagara Falls. Since 1960, fishing, boating, cruising and sightseeing have grown in proportionate importance as industry has declined. Sportfishing mushroomed in Lake Michigan after the introduction of Coho salmon to the lake in the early 1960s. Old industrial waterfronts in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and elsewhere were reclaimed in the 1970s for leisure use. Since the 1980s, shipwreckhunting cruises, restored historic lighthouse facilities and collections of Great Lakes shipping history and lore have fed new tourist interest in the more romantic aspects of the region’s industrial past.
The continuing importance of the Great Lakes’ water both for consumption and leisure has generated numerous interstate and international cooperative efforts to control water quality detoxify sediments, clean beaches and rebuild the damaged ecology of the whole region. Modern environmentalism has even given surviving Native American tribes new voices in regional deliberations, almost 180 years after they were defeated in the international scramble for control of the Great Lakes. Though its troubles are compounded by unexpected economic decline, the Great Lakes area really continues to struggle with the same age-old problem of balancing the claims of competing jurisdictions and contradictory uses for the region’s great natural assets.
Industry:Culture
Land and air military unit of the American military since the Revolutionary War; its undergraduate institution, the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, was opened in 1802. Despite worries about the obsolescence of ground war, the army has experienced continuing peacetime strength since the Second World War in weapons, budget and staff, and has seen action in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War. It also produced a postwar military president in Dwight Eisenhower. In addition to the standing army, its service pool includes the Army Reserves and the National Guards (state and federal). US army personnel in 1998 stood at 491,707, including 67,048 officers and over 65,000 women.
Industry:Culture
Language primarily used by deaf Americans, based on hand shape, location, movement and expression augmented by finger spelling. Adapted from French models in the nineteenth century (and completely distinct from British signing), sign language was also repressed by institutions which denigrated it as broken communication and sought to force the deaf to read lips and vocalize. Since the 1980s, it has been increasingly recognized as a complex language, the structure and expressiveness of which differs from English. It has become a sign of community for the deaf; hearing speakers study it as a recognized foreign language in universities and community programs. Estimates of signers in the US vary widely from several hundred thousand to 2 million.
Industry:Culture
Launched in 1981, at a time when the record industry was foundering, MTV (music television) injected new life into the popular music scene by hooking young people on its high-energy diet of music videos (short films set to the music of popular songs). The cable network’s influence reached beyond music however. MTV’s rise sparked the continued spread of cable television generally and the quick-cutting, symbol-laden and visually driven style of video-making had an impact on directors in both television and the movies. A number of music-video directors went on to successful careers in other formats, while several prominent filmmakers took their turns as video directors.
Industry:Culture
Lavish, traditional coming-of-age celebration or a young woman’s fifteenth birthday, practiced in Hispanic countries and Latino diaspora communities. Quinceaños parties in upper-class families are similar to debutante balls. They take place in private clubs or fancy hotels, and groups of wealthy women dressed in elegant designer gowns are formally presented to society. Middle-class celebrations are usually less ostentatious and often take place in family homes. The inclusion of a Catholic Mass as part of the festivities is losing popularity. For some assimilated families it has been replaced by a sweet-sixteen party.
Industry:Culture
