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On Absecon Island, Atlantic City became a popular playground for the Victorian rich from nearby New York City, NY and Philadelphia. It was also famous in the early twentieth century for the boardwalk and amusement piers, and since 1921 has hosted the Miss America pageant. The city went into decline after the Second World War owing to the westward shift in population and growing access to air travel.
In part to stem this decline, the city turned to gambling. A year after the passage of the Casino Gambling Referendum in 1976, casinos modeled on those in Las Vegas opened along the waterfront. Debate continues about the value of this scheme. Some argue that the casinos have brought new employment and business to a declining city Others maintain they have accelerated the displacement of poorer city residents, especially the long-established Northside African American community. This ambivalence is captured in the movie Atlantic City (1981), although without the racial dimensions.
In spite of opposition, casinos and gambling are firmly established. The leading casino owner, New York real-estate mogul Donald Trump, has persuaded the city to build a new highway tunnel to facilitate access to the newest of his four casinos. This will bring further displacement of residents and small businesses.
The city also hosted the 1964 Democratic Party Convention, at which the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tried unsuccess fully to force the party to seat the black delegates from Mississippi instead of the white-only delegates.
Industry:Culture
On August 1, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked an American destroyer as it conducted espionage in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam. Two nights later, two vessels reported another attack. Though no firm evidence of an attack by North Vietnam surfaced, President Lyndon Johnson used the reports to justify a retaliation against the North Vietnamese for repeated acts of violence. Johnson requested and received from Congress blanket authorization to respond as he chose to any future aggression by the North Vietnamese. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution became the legislative foundation for the Vietnam War, as the United States never actually declared war upon North Vietnam.
Industry:Culture
On June 17, 1972 Washington, DC police arrested five burglars at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate apartment complex. These men, employees of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), had broken in to tap phones and photograph documents. Their arrest was the first of many revelations of misconduct within the Nixon administration, culminating in one of the most serious abuses of presidential power in the nation’s history.
Though the Nixon administration denied any White House involvement in the burglary and dismissed it as a bungled attempt engineered by overzealous minions, the FBI eventually traced the burglary to sources within the administration. A few weeks later the Washington Post revealed that Attorney-General John Mitchell had managed secret funds to undermine Nixon’s political enemies by gathering damaging information, planting spies, forging letters, stealing campaign plans and feeding false information to the media.
The trial of the Watergate burglars and planners began in January of 1973, with Judge John Sirica presiding. Five pleaded guilty and two were convicted, upon which one of the burglars sent a letter to Sirica confirming that the White House had in fact been involved with the original break in. When Sirica called for further investigation, Watergate became a national story.
The Senate also began investigating Nixon’s campaign practices, creating a Special Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The committee’s televised hearings began in May 1973, and for six months the nation watched a parade of witnesses uncover the crimes and plots of the administration, including burglary bugging, perjury, dirty tricks, tampering with judicial proceedings, political surveillance, shredding evidence, blackmail and granting executive clemency to those who stay silent. All of these were hatched in the Nixon White House, and the circle of corruption came ever closer to the president himself.
In October of 1973, Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned after being found guilty of cheating on his taxes and accepting bribes as both governor of Maryland and vicepresident.
As Nixon’s approval ratings continued to sink, the House Judiciary Committee began to gather evidence of presidential wrongdoing, a first step towards impeachment.
In March 1974, Judge Sirica’s grand jury indicted Nixon aides Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and four others for conspiracy to obstruct justice. White House Counsel John Dean pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge, and cooperated with the grand jury The grand jury’s sealed report named Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator, and in May 1974 the Senate Judiciary Committee began formal impeachment hearings.
Crucial to the committee’s investigations was the discovery that Nixon had recorded all conversations in the Oval Office, but it took the Supreme Court to force Nixon to submit these tapes. These provided the smoking gun that proved Nixon had ordered the cover-up of the Watergate burglary just six days after it had occurred, meaning that he had been lying to the public ever since. Faced with this evidence, Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974. One month later he was given a full pardon by President Ford.
Industry:Culture
On March 16, 1968, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., led twenty-five American soldiers into a small hamlet in South Vietnam on a routine search-and-destroy mission. There the platoon forced hundreds of Vietnamese villagers into a common ditch and shot them. The My Lai Massacre did not come to light until later, but, in March of 1971, all were acquitted except Calley who was first sentenced to life, then to three year’s house arrest.
My Lai has come to symbolize the terrible brutality of the Vietnam War and the degree to which soldiers could be convinced that such an action was acceptable, even under the conditions of war.
Industry:Culture
On New Year’s Eve, New York City, NY’s Times Square becomes the focus of thousands gathered in the cold and of a televisual nation that marks the countdown as an illuminated ball descends atop the former Times Building. Times Square, at the heart of New York’s theater district, with a giant subway exchange below and a variegated neon canopy above, has become a global emblem of the city The “crossroads of Broadway” has also sheltered talent agencies, souvenir stands, adult entertainment and prostitution, a seediness that preoccupied city administrators and tourists in the 1970s. Subsequent clean-up campaigns include a Times Square Business Improvement District (that taxes local merchants to provide extra cleaning and security) and promotion of national franchises and high-rise development. The new, clean Times Square represents both the Americanization of Manhattan and the dual city where public space is appropriated by urban elites.
Industry:Culture
On the evening of June 27, 1969 a routine police raid on a homosexual bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York City, NY’s Greenwich Village turned into what the New York Mattachine Society newsletter called “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World.” The gay liberationist movement, officially organized by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), now had an historical marker for its birthplace. According to John D’Emilio, “(w)ord of the Stonewall riot and GLF spread rapidly among the networks of young radicals scattered across the country, and within a year gay liberation groups had sprung into existence on college campuses and in cities around the world” (1983:233).
Industry:Culture
Once a thriving multi-ethnic manufacturing and transportation center on Lake Erie, suburban flight and aging industries have reduced its population to 300,000 (metro 1,184,000) at the end of the century. Nearby Niagara Falls, a natural wonder shared with Canada, is a major tourist attraction especially associated with honeymoons. The Niagara also produces power for the region. While eclipsed by Sunbelt growth, Buffalo retains important sport teams (the Bills, football, and Sabers, hockey), the suburban campus of SUNY-Buffalo and the Albright-Knox Gallery. Mark Goldman’s High Hopes analyzes the city’s rise and decline.
Industry:Culture
Once derided as a flash in the pan, rap emerged as the dominant popular musical style at the end of the twentieth century. Many people call it rap, but the later coinage “hip hop” better catches its essence—the beat. Possibly the most amazing thing about rap is the ability of new practitioners constantly to refashion and revitalize the genre by incorporating new musical influences and inspirations. While the basics have remained— a strippeddown funk beat with talky vocals—rap has fused with rock, jazz, reggae and every other contemporary popular music form.
Rap developed in the 1970s on the streets of New York City, where DJ Kool Here, DJ Hollywood and others set up turntables, sound systems and speakers on a corner and blasted out a sound collage, starting with a big, fat, booming bass, overlaying samples and scratches, topped off by a call-and-response chant. Indebted to the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Jamaican reggae toasters and James Brown, as well as deeper rooted African American rhythmic and lyrical traditions, rap brought black popular culture back to the street.
Since the first recorded rap song, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), which many critics dismissed as a novelty, rap has continued to rejuvenate itself just when it seemed to have reached a dead end. When the boastful rappings of early MCs like Kurtis Blow began to sound tired, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five brought a social conscience with their astounding 1982 single, “The Message.” Run DMC added hard rock guitar for 1984’s “Rock Box” and the crossover hit “Walk This Way” a 1986 remake of an Aerosmith tune. The Beastie Boys began to fuse punk, metal and rap beginning in the mid-1980s. Their License to Ill (1986) was the first no. 1 hip-hop album and the bestselling rap album of the 1980s.
At the same time “gangsta rap” was emerging on the West Coast. NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) and Ice-T rapped and rocked hard, spewing incendiary lyrics, mostly about hurting and killing people, particularly women and cops. Their first-person narratives about the harsh and violent realities of ghetto life shot them to the top of the hip-hop charts and excited much social comment and media-driven controversy. In New York, Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy took a more directly political stance. Led by Queen Latifah, female rappers began to combat the rampant misogyny of much gangsta rap, with women emerging as more than novelties for the first time on the hiphop scene.
By the 1990s, rap was part of mainstream American culture, from the streets of the ghettos to sitcom theme songs and advertising jingles. Still, hip-hop culture continued to assemble and deconstruct new forms of popular and unpopular music.
Industry:Culture
Once largely the preserve of white upper-class men and women, tennis has become popularized in the years following the Second World War, influenced by patterns of suburbanization, immigration and technological change.
At the beginning of the 1940s, tennis was still dominated by its country club and amateur image. Leading players like “Big” Bill Tilden, from an elite Philadelphia, PA family, Donald Budge, Jack Kramer and Helen Wills Moody epitomized the “old-stock” immigrant backgrounds of most players. By the early 1950s, many players were being drawn into the professional tournaments dominated by Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez, leaving the Grand Slam tournaments like Wimbledon and Forest Hills dominated by Australian amateurs.
The film Pat and Mike (1952) highlighted some of the changes occurring in American society that would influence the development of tennis. Pat, a women’s college physicaleducation teacher, played by Katharine Hepburn, is snatched up by a sports promoter, Mike (Spencer Tracy), who turns her into a professional sportsperson. The film evokes the transformation occurring from amateurism to commercialism, the increasing marketability of women athletes and the increasing access to tennis available for many Americans at this time that would dramatically increase the popularity of the sport.
Suburbanization accounted for much of this transformation. The migration out of the cities following the world war brought middle-class Americans into close proximity with tennis facilities, which were incorporated into the planning of many of the suburban developments and public school building projects. Elite lawn tennis clubs remained, but their influence declined as more communities played on hard court surfaces.
From the 1960s onwards, therefore, shifts in tennis demography began to occur. More tennis players began to emerge from “ethnic” groups, such as Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe (Irish), Vitas Gerulaitus (Greek)—Stan Smith being the obvious exception to this rule. They no longer graduated only from elite Ivy League universities, but instead were gaining their college playing experience from the large land-grant state universities. They were not merely growing up in Northeastern elite urban communities, but were instead coming from the new Sunbelt states, particularly Florida, where the climate allowed for more professional tennis tournaments and intensive camps, like that of Nick Bollitieri which produced such leading players as Andre Agassi and Aaron Krickstein.
Tennis was slow to have a significant impact on African Americans. Excluded from the United States Lawn Tennis Association, African Americans created their own American Tennis Association. Two products of this development were Althea Gibson, the first African American to compete and win at Wimbledon in 1957, and Arthur Ashe.
But the exclusion of African Americans from much of the process of suburbanization occurring at this time meant that these two players were not followed by others until changing demographic patterns (and Ashe’s efforts to bring tennis to inner-city communities) began to alter these things. In recent years the success of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, has increased the visibility of the game among African Americans, including their triumphs at the 1999 US Open and 2000 Wimbledon.
The game has made a lasting impression on gender relations. The leading American women’s player of the early 1970s, Billy Jean King, helped transform the game both through her court performances and her campaigns off the court for reform away from the amateur elitism of the game and for greater gender equity. King was instrumental in bringing World Team Tennis to fruition, encouraging promoters and sponsors, like Texan Lamar Hunt, to pump money into the game, and in challenging the stereotypes regarding women. She also defeated Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973 at the Houston Astrodome before a worldwide television audience of nearly 50 million and the largest audience ever for a tennis match. King’s straight-sets victory silenced Riggs’ claims of sexual superiority and brought further attention to the women’s game (which now draws more fans than, but still not equal prize-money to, the men’s game).
The late 1970s was notable mostly for the emergence of the naturalized American Martina Navratilova. Czech-born Navratilova developed a game more akin to the men (serve and volley), forcing American baseline players like Chris Evert and Tracey Austin either to improve the power and accuracy of their baseline shots or increase the range of their games. As a result the men’s and women’s games are now closer to each other in style and power than was the case prior to Navratilova’s ascendancy.
The introduction of new rackets in the 1980s and 1990s has radically altered both the women’s and men’s games. Gone are the old wooden rackets, which produced power in proportion to their weight. The new graphite composite rackets are light and powerful, and allow for much greater spin with a flick of the wrist. In part this accounts for the lessening appeal of the men’s game (dominated by Pete Sampras’ power game) as compared with the women’s. The injection of power into the women’s game has broadened its appeal; it is fast killing the men’s as the importance of the serve has increased.
Industry:Culture
One generation above all others has felt it “owned” the American century. A legendary demographic blip that emerged with new suburban families after the Second World War has come to encompass those born between the mid-1940s and 1960. Boomers experienced and participated in civil rights, gendered and sexual revolutions, as well as the national traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. Later, they personified the yuppie successes/ excesses of the 1980s, although many were left behind. At the end of the twentieth century aging boomers focused more on childcare and health issues, ranging from hair loss and Viagra to cancer, heart disease and AIDS. They also threaten Social Security as the wave surfs into old age in 2010.
Despite the youthful Kennedy imagery that shaped their coming of age, boomers did not gain control of the White House until Clinton’s election. His presidency epitomized the uneasy changes of the generation, from gays to war to adultery. Still, as boomer taste and dollars have dominated mass media, subsequent generations were defined as children or alternatives (Generation X). In the 1990s, baby-boom culture was recycled (sometimes ironically) by mass media in Hollywood, popular music and fashion.
Industry:Culture
