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The culture wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century have their roots in earlier conflicts within the intellectual elite. These, in turn, are framed by a wider tradition of populist anti-intellectualism, whose advocates associated the intellectual elite with a European, “un-American” culture.
Within the intellectual elite at the turn of the twentieth century—men like John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Croly and W.E.B. Du Bois (all of whom drew on ideas from either Germany or Britain)—divisions arose about the extent to which an intellectual tradition should be forged that was more responsive to the experiences of Americans living in a society shaped by large influxes of immigrants and the presence of African Americans amidst a majority European population. For the first half of the twentieth century New York City remained the bastion of intellectuals with satellites in Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy League colleges.
Both the progressive era and the New Deal witnessed the collaboration between government and intellectuals, and the rise of government and foundation-supported think tanks for developing public policy. The late 1930s witnessed the coming to the US of many European intellectuals escaping the Nazis, many of whom were Jewish, as well as some Marxists. The intellectual milieu was shaped also by the arrival of leftist thinkers like C.L.R. James and other African and Caribbean immigrants who saw the United States as reinvigorated by the Popular Front and by its potential as a worldwide anticolonial power. These intellectuals had significant influence, especially in universities and colleges, but this would be more than matched in American culture by the antiintellectualism embodied by the emerging McCarthyism in the 1940s.
During the early years of the Cold War, many left-leaning intellectuals like Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson veered away from Marxism and socialism, endorsing purges of communists and Popular Front leftists. Into the vacuum rushed resurgent liberal optimism, embodied in modernization theory One of the standard bearers of this theory was W.W. Rostow, whose “non-communist manifesto” (Stages of Economic Growth, 1960) was endorsed within the Kennedy administration and by the foundationsupported development agencies. Other sociologists, like E. Franklin Frazier and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and urban analysts like Lewis Mumford, who developed modernization-inflected social theories, also proved very influential among policy-makers.
The 1960s saw the beginnings of the culture wars with significant fragmentation occurring within the intellectual elite. First came the rise of the New Left critique (for example, Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky) of the militaryindustrial complex, the countercultural, beatinspired critiques of suburbia and the “organization man,” along with the SDS-led assault on the university as a tool of the establishment. Then African American intellectuals (for example, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka and Ralph Ellison began to receive more widespread attention in tandem with the growing Black Power impulse and the campaigns for black-studies programs on college campuses around the country. Feminist intellectuals, likewise, emerged out of the women’s movement, invigorated by Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), but also reacting to the misogyny they witnessed within the New Left. Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology of the women’s liberation movement, Sisterhood is Powerful, pointed towards a radical feminism that gained strength during the 1970s.
Simultaneously conservative intellectuals began to coalesce around the John Birch Society and William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, infusing the Republican Party with new energy especially the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater and the California gubernatorial campaigns of Ronald Reagan. These new Republicans, seeing themselves as part of a “silent” or “moral” majority drew strength from backlash against the Civil Rights movement, busing, legalization of abortion and what they saw as the lack of patriotism of the left, spawning neo-conservatives within the women’s movement, like Phyllis Schlafly, and black conservatives, like Thomas Sowell.
Further shifts away from class to identity politics occurred in the 1980s with the demise of the Soviet Union. Francis Fukayama announced, prematurely “the end of history” and the triumph of capitalism, the proof of which ought to have been found in the success of Harvard economists in bringing Russia into the world economy At the same time, cultural politics continued, animated by Afrocentrism, and the emergence of new immigrant populations, Asian Americans and Hispanics, who began to organize politically to combat discrimination and exclusion. Calls were made for the development of ethnic and multicultural studies, along with new Latino/a and Asian American studies programs matching the firmly established African American studies programs.
In the 1990s, new layers were added to these cultural wars. Divisions began to emerge between advocates of traditional methodologies and disciplines (such as Arthur Schlesinger, Joyce Appleby, etc.) and those taking the Foucauldian turn to poststructuralism and postmodernism (for example, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha). The political positions taken by intellectuals on either side of this divide have varied from the conservative to the class-based intellectuals of the more traditional school, and from the politically quiescent and academy-focused to the left leaning and politically engaged among postmodernists.
During the 1990s, also, the term “public intellectual” gained widespread currency.
With its echoes of the Gramscian organic intellectual this has been an attractive concept for American intellectuals, who, since the progressive era, have been more politically engaged than their European counterparts. Unlike the largely white sociologists of the 1950s, however, many of the new public intellectuals have emerged within the ethnic and African American studies programs, and have been very visible in centrist magazines from the New Republic to Vanity Fair. Some public intellectuals have received withering criticism for being celebrity intellectuals, pulling down salaries sometimes more than double those of their peers, and for helping to establish a veritable free-agency system within universities that are prepared to negotiate huge contracts to secure the latest talent.
While the complaints have been widespread, they have been most bitter in response to the newfound prominence of African American intellectuals, who, until the 1950s, had been largely excluded from the leading universities in the country But the success of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks and Cornel West has not been greeted with approval even from all African Americans. In the Village Voice, for example, Adolph Reed (also a black public intellectual) has accused such intellectuals of being the progeny of Booker T. Washington. But, with the publication of his similarly conceived assault on W.E.B. Du Bois (1997), Washington’s main political opponent, Reed has left the fin-de-siècle intellectual with that old dilemma: what is to be done?
Industry:Culture
Sport popularized in the 1930s by the Olympic championships and performances in ice shows and films of Norwegian Sonja Henie, who deviated from the staid dress and mannered skating style of her predecessors. Tenley Albright became the first American Olympic gold medal winner in 1956; her achievement increased the popularity of the sport in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first American skater to gain national attention (both in the rink and in the world of advertising), Dorothy Hamill, combined athletic prowess with the grace and musicality of a dancer. Hamill challenged assumptions about women’s athleticism in her 1976 Olympic triumph and created the spin known as the “Hamill Camel”—now standard in women’s competitions. But, while able to perform triple jumps in practice, Hamill was the last woman to win an Olympic gold medal without triple jumps.
Men’s figure skating, marked until recently for its accentuation of athleticism over grace, has never matched the popularity of women’s skating. In the 1980s, however, the ascendancy of Olympic medallists Scott Hamilton and Brian Boitano on a tide of patriotic fervor brought attention to the sport. Pairs figure skating and ice dancing have been dominated until recently by Russian skaters, and the best American skaters, perhaps lacking enthusiasm for the ballroom style of dancing, have steered clear.
The growth of commercialism in the sport has been very noticeable in the 1990s, with multimillion dollar advertising and professional contracts offered to those who win major amateur competitions. Quite strict divisions between amateurs and professionals remain in the sport (so that only the former are eligible to perform in the Olympics), while sports like soccer, basketball and hockey have eased up in this regard. Skaters generally therefore, use the amateur competition as a stepping stone to riches to be gained from a professional contract, which includes traveling competitions as well as more thematic ice shows—Disney on Ice, Grease on Ice, Icecapades, etc. In 1991 and 1992, Kristi Yamaguchi won the World Championship and the Olympics and then turned professional, while the notorious assault on Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 was prompted by the desire of Tonya Harding’s handlers to benefit from the possibility that she might win a medal at the upcoming Olympics. Michelle Kwan is one American skater who has held back from turning professional. Losing out on a gold medal at the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998, she has waited for 2002. Meanwhile, Tara Lipinski, the fifteenyear-old star who surpassed Kwan, immediately turned professional.
Industry:Culture
This region includes the former slave-holding states of the Confederacy during the Civil War—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Nearby “border” states of Missouri, Kentucky Maryland and West Virginia also share many traits and connections. The South’s defining historical features include social polarization around race and class, intense political campaigns defending these interests, a stratified rural agricultural base and torturous cultural debates over these features, in the South and in confrontation with the rest of the nation. The South remains paradoxical in the very salience of its positive and negative images—friendly yet embittered, or genteel but ignorant and provincial. Such stereotypes permeated coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as they had in the civil rights campaigns, which fundamentally changed the Solid South.
Change is a fundamental feature of modern Southern contradictions. In the 1930s, this area, and its black and white population, was labeled the number one economic problem in America, even while romanticized in movies like Gone With the Wind (1939), which continued to shape visions of Southern history worldwide. Abandoned by many African Americans as a hell of slavery and segregation, its whites expressed both guilt and defiance in dealing with the rest of the nation. After the Second World War, the South was segregated, fundamentalist, rural, Democrat and poor, yet it also held an aura of mystery aristocratic culture and verdant passions. By the 1990s, the South was generally and visibly integrated, marked by Sunbelt development, diverse and Republican— without totally belying or erasing its earlier lives and reputation.
Economic development had already begun to change the South in the 1930s and 1940s, with the work of the WPA and the Tennessee Valley Authority, controlling flooding and generating power throughout the upper South. Other stimuli to growth came from manufacturers moving production to non-union and cheap-wage states, a pattern still present in exploitative industries like poultry and clothing. Military development also generated continuing investment in the South, whose Congress members and citizens stayed committed to the armed forces even in periods of American doubt like the Vietnam War. The South remains covered by military bases and suppliers to this day.
Agriculture, forced into modernization by the exodus of cheap, controllable labor, continued as an economic base. While King Cotton never recovered its pre-eminence after turn of the nineteenth century boll weevil infestations, tobacco, sugar, fruits and vegetables, meats and fish have all contributed to state and local economies.
In the 1950s, however, the issues were less economic than social and political, as disfranchised blacks across the South demanded equal rights of participation within their societies. Segregation, for decades, had denied citizens the vote, job opportunities, schools and even access to stores, restaurants and bathrooms on the basis of race. Bloody campaigns to gain these rights tore across rural areas, small towns and the cities of the South. Figures such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lillian Smith emerged as consciences not only for the region but for the nation which had accommodated to the oppression of so many citizens. Meanwhile, segregationist politicians like George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond charted a course which broke the South from the New Deal Democrats towards a conservative union with Republicans which became evident in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 triumphs there against Lyndon Johnson, a Texan identified with civil rights.
Slow resolutions of decades of injustice came with development as well as constitutional revindication. In the 1970s, as protest tore across America’s industrial cities, a new South beckoned with investment opportunities and images of leisure in a lush climate (aided by widespread air-conditioning). Florida, already a tourism center, boomed into the fourth-largest state in the country with retirees and coastal development; all Southern states except Arkansas and Tennessee have coasts which saw massive development into the 1990s. Yet the gaps between plutocratic Palm Beach and Florida’s inland agricultural towns like Belle Glade still speak of both human and environmental exploitation. Texas, whose trajectory also differs from the rest of the South, burgeoned with oil and gas in boom-and-bust metropoles like Houston and Dallas, while facing deep divisions between Latino populations, old and new, and Anglo settlers and immigrants. Meanwhile, the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi Delta remained mired in poverty as mines closed and small farms failed to compete—even when new resort developments would later spring up nearby By the 1980s, new capitals had emerged. Atlanta took command of air, government offices and ultimately media with Ted Turner. Charlotte, NC, however, challenged Atlanta’s control of finance through the aggressive national mergers of many North Carolina banks, while Miami and Houston evoked a more global South with ties to Latin America and the Caribbean. Nashville, in music, Orlando, with Disneyworld development, and New Orleans, in everything, also blend old and new South, where tourists come to experience, buy and even resettle in areas scorned only decades before.
Development has not erased divisions, as blacks continue to fight for equal funding and access as well as political representation across the South. Conservative national politicians and judges may often seem to be more of an enemy than local leaders.
Meanwhile, the area that produced almost all modern Democratic presidents—Johnson (who balanced Massachusett’s young, liberal JFK), Carter (Georgia) and both Clinton (Arkansas) and his VP Gore (Tennessee)—has increasingly voted Republican in Congress and the statehouse. In 1996 the Democratic president and vicepresident and the Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, of Georgia, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi, were all Southerners, yet polarized by party and, to some extent, ideology. The 2000 elections has seen Southerners heading the tickets for both parties. Ironically inroads by blacks, women and other minorities have been more notable in urban politics and local elections.
Other cultural features of the South are also in flux. The isolation of underdevelopment has given way to national and international migrations. Yuppies and “twentysomethings” are as much a feature of the North Carolina research triangle as the Houston suburbs. In cities, new Asian and Caribbean communities have also appeared, often in the suburbs.
The religious panorama of the South, identified with Bible belt preachers in both white and black evangelical traditions, was always more complex, including elite Episcopalians and urban Catholics and Jews. Buddhism, Islam and Santería have complicated this vision, but 1990s Southern spiritualities also encompass large, secular populations for whom the gods and guilt of the South no longer have the same meanings.
Education has also changed. Centuries of segregated education gave way to whiteflight academies and de facto divisions, which the South now shares with public education nationwide. Although the College of William and Mary in Virginia, is one of the country’s oldest schools, Southern universities were once more known for sports and gentlemanly finishing than academics. While the Southeastern Conference remains a powerhouse in football and basketball—highly integrated sports—other schools like Duke, University of North Carolina, Vanderbilt, Tulane, Georgia Tech and Emory have increased national prestige as well.
The culture of the South, through all of these changes, has also demanded reflection— the drive, as a Faulkner character put it, to “tell about the South.” Authors including Faulkner, Eudora Welty Maya Angelou, Reynolds Price, James Agee, Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams and Ralph McGill have found inspiration and dilemmas in their region. John Grisham and Anne Rice have dominated popular fiction, exploring the darkness of the South as well as its changes. Southern musical traditions—blues, Cajun, countrywestern, gospel, jazz, ragtime and tejana—have infused American culture in voices from Mahalia Jackson to Elvis Presley.
In movies and television, however, images produced outside the South have changed much more slowly The “guilty” South has haunted classic movies like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Alternate visions of tortured struggle (Wise Blood, 1979, based on Flannery O’Connor’s religious novel; or the labor panorama of Harlan County, USA, 1976) and complicated corruption (Robert Altman’s Nashville, 1975) exist alongside creative communities of minorities and women (Julie Dash’s exquisite Daughters of the Dust, 1989; Hollywood’s The Color Purple, 1985). Television has changed even more slowly finally abandoning the bucolic comedy of the Andy Griffith Show for sophisticated and sardonic women in Designing Women.
Facing the twenty-first century the South and its inhabitants still constitute one of the most strongly marked regions of the United States. Yet, rapid changes in the area in the last five decades and its complexity today also mark the South as quintessentially American. The South shares the same dilemmas, development and population in a manner scarcely imaginable before the Second World War. Images and realities, division and identity are continually reshaped against a history perhaps more distant yet hardly escaped.
Industry:Culture
The United States marks its creation to the day when colonial leaders signed the “Declaration of Independence,” a document which outlined the reasons for the thirteen colonies to terminate formally their relationship with Great Britain. On July 4, 1776 the nation’s founders affirmed the “inalienable rights” of the individual as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Although these rights were based on the assumption that “all people are created equal,” the nation’s founders, and its subsequent leaders, did not end race-based slavery until 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality, America’s minorities were denied full equality of citizenship. The two decades prior to the 1976 US Bicentennial included citizens’ most open questioning of the government’s guarantees of liberty and equality. Not only did the nation’s minority groups, including African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, protest non-violently and violently for their rights, but many young people defied the government’s authority to send them to Vietnam to fight a war they considered immoral.
National planning for the Bicentennial was further challenged by the Nixon administration’s lack of credibility The administration’s planning committee was accused of being overly politicized and organized only to serve the political interests of Nixon. In August 1974, following two years of investigation into his administration’s misdeeds, President Nixon resigned, leaving the US with its first non-elected president, Gerald R. Ford. While the US had officially ended its military involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973, the nation and the world were horrified by the images of the fall of Saigon in April and May 1975, when the US Embassy was overwhelmed by communist forces.
Created in 1974, the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA) had the difficult task of organizing Bicentennial commemorative events within this vexing political environment. The ARBA, led by the former Secretary of the navy and future US Senator John W. Warner, was further challenged by a competing, private organization, the People’s Bicentennial Commission, which attempted to turn the Bicentennial into a critique of the nation’s institutional powers. Moreover, civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson called for blacks to boycott the official celebration. However, Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, and Alex Haley served as active advisors on the ARBA. Other minority leaders requested a voice within the ARBA, which Warner granted. This group, the Bicentennial Ethnic Racial Coalition, sought to merge the Bicentennial efforts with urban renewal and recognition of America’s cultural diversity. By 1976 the ARBA had created a national symbol for the Bicentennial and planned televised events in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY. More importantly the ARBA fostered local commemorations that were tied to people’s personal histories and identities. Instead of focusing on national institutions of power such as the military or the presidency, the ARBA used the Bicentennial to forge a new image of America strengthened by its multicultural diversity.
Industry:Culture
The Religious Society of Friends of the Truth (Quakers) was introduced into the United States by groups of religious mystics arriving from England in the mid-1700s. Centered in New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Quakers became known for several aspects of their theology: commitment to non-violence; wide-ranging public service (e.g. hospitals, orphanages, anti-slavery advocacy and service to the poor); an emphasis on strict religious integrity in daily life (e.g. economic transactions); worship service which lacked paid or “hireling” ministers, but instead was “unprogrammed,” based upon silent waiting for Divine inspiration; and social insularity that sought to protect their communities from corruption by “the world’s people.” Often, these communities were marked by idiosyncratic language and dress.
The third-largest American denomination in 1750, their proportion had declined to ninth-largest by 1820. Nevertheless, during the next century Quakers spread across the United States, holding leadership roles—both as individuals and congregations—in various reform movements (notably African American, Native American and women’s rights and prison reform) and sending vigorous missionary envoys to establish schools and hospitals in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. As Quakers moved west from the US east coast, worship styles changed also, and in many locations Quakerism now includes paid professional ministers and “programmed” services that include a prepared sermon and music. In 1990 there were about 300,000 Quakers in the world, of whom about onethird were in the United States. Most modern Friends have abandoned specialized communities, language and dress. However, Quakers remain active in a wide range of social reform, educational and quasi-political organizations, which promote the peace and justice testimonies that are central to their theology.
Industry:Culture
The first phase of Eastern-European immigration is generally accepted to have begun in the 1880s, although small numbers from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had arrived before this time. This first wave lasted until 1914, by which time nearly 7 million Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Romanians had arrived in the US from Eastern Europe.
Following the two world wars, there was a further smaller wave of immigrants, refugees from the postwar chaos, and more political refugees arrived in subsequent decades.
The immigrants of the first wave were motivated by both push factors and pull factors.
Between 1880 and 1914, the Austro-Hungarian empire was in a state of economic turmoil as changes in landownership structure and collapsing agricultural prices, coupled with population increases, meant a surplus of population in rural areas in particular. Many young men were also anxious to be conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Russia was embroiled in many of the same problems, and, additionally a series of persecutions known as “pogroms” killed or drove out many thousands of Jews.
At least 90 percent of those who left Eastern Europe during this period went to the US.
The pull factor here was the reputation of the US as a “promised land.” Freedom to worship, for Jews, Doukhobors and other religious groups, was part of the appeal; there was also the idealized vision of America as a land of opportunity where it was possible to rise “from rags to riches.” This last was reinforced by the activities of recruiting agents, who were active in the Austro-Hungarian empire in particular, and who painted a glowing picture of opportunities in America.
Settlement patterns of Eastern-European immigrants varied. Many of the Jewish refugees settled in New York City, first on the Lower East Side and later in Brooklyn and other districts. Other groups, however, though they arrived initially in New York, moved on relatively quickly. Large numbers found their way to the rapidly growing industrial centers of the Midwest, where unskilled labor was urgently needed. Today large proportions of the populations of states from Pennsylvania west to Ohio and Illinois are of Eastern-European descent.
Eastern-European immigrants have added much to the character of the US today.
Individual immigrant communities, such as the Jews of New York and the Poles of Chicago, IL, remain culturally vibrant. More generally the view of the US as a land of opportunity where poor and oppressed peoples can find freedom and riches, has become part of America’s general view of itself. The fact that many of the immigrants found the hard work, poverty and nativism little better than what they had left behind did not color this vision.
In the late twentieth century there has been a resurgence of interest in the cultural identities of many of these groups. In the wake of the success of the Black Power movement, many groups such as the Poles and Ukrainians began espousing a more heightened sense of identity. In this they are also following the example of the Eastern-European Jews, who, from their arrival, had a history of involvement in political movements, including socialism and Zionism.
Industry:Culture
The geographic and cultural diversity of the United States, coupled with comprehensive transportation and refrigeration, insured a cornucopia of foods distributed through central markets to both neighborhood stores and daily buyers from the nineteenth century onwards. Yet suburban sprawl and automobiles favored multi-service megastores (supermarkets) connected by corporate chains like A&P or Acme, surrounded by acres of parking, where groceries, household goods, pharmaceuticals and other needs may be met for the week (or months in the case of bulk-sales warehouses). Meanwhile, neighborhood stores have adapted or disappeared, while urban markets themselves have altered drastically In the 1960s, urban renewal often saw city markets as antiquated, unhygienic, congested and ugly Lands were cleared for center city developments and distribution processes to aseptic warehouses accessible to trucking and highways. In hindsight, however, many cities realized the character of these markets and their value for tourism.
Hence, Lexington Market in Baltimore, MD, the Italian Market and Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, PA and other centers have been modernized with a retail orientation—adding cafes, souvenirs and prepared foods, for example. Moreover, regional growers and craftspeople learned to transform buildings (including movie theaters, banks and storefronts), public squares and parking lots into “farmer’s markets” offering fresh produce and prepared goods to middle-class consumers. Such suppliers still presume the existence of supermarkets for basic sundries. Here, specialty stands within supermarkets often mirror market stands and shops, especially with regard to prepared foods.
Squeezed in this consumer evolution have been smaller stores—butchers, greengrocers, etc.—unless they serve the needs of poor communities where national supermarket chains have refused to move to “risky” neighborhoods. Some have also become expensive boutiques delivering to or catering for upper-class neighborhoods.
Ethnic specialty shops also survive, although the consolidation of Asian American and Latino supermarkets has become noticeable in suburban enclaves where space is available and cars allow mega-stores to serve more dispersed and varied populations.
Organic and health-food stores also have carved out specialty niches. Convenience stores, open 24-hours, offer emergency items, junk foods and, depending on local codes and setting, alcohol, tobacco and gasoline.
Time as well as taste continues to shape food buying in the early twenty-first century Internet shopping and television purchases have been discussed as alternatives for the two-career family Most striking is the quantity of “prepared” foods, beyond the canned food of the 1950s and the frozen specialties of the 1960s, which promise fresh gourmet treats.
All these markets have cultural meanings, ranging from nostalgia to alienation, within American cultural representations. Traditional urban markets convey a sense of ethnic time and place in movies like Godfather II (1974). The supermarkets, as hallmarks of suburban domesticity and anonymity also become public social spaces (urban markets may in fact, sponsor singles’ nights). The mom-and-pop store often surfaces in urban crime stories. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) showcases not only an Italian family pizzeria at odds with a black neighborhood, but also a Korean greengrocer, an immigrant specialization that has become widespread in New York City and other cities.
The transition from smaller local stores to convenience stores is also apparent in crime and road movies, in which the latter have tended to replace the former as sites of dramatic action.
Industry:Culture
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church, or the LDS Church, has over 10 million members. Mormons are found in 155 countries and territories throughout the world in more than 22,000 congregations and there are currently over 50,000 missionaries preaching worldwide. Over half of the members live outside of the United States. The largest nonUS Mormon populations are in South America and Mexico, followed by Asia, Europe, Central America, the South Pacific, Canada, Africa and the Caribbean. The church has a male lay priesthood and, except for an extremely small number of general authorities, no paid clergy Church members, both men and women, assist in the administration and spiritual sustenance of the congregations. Members are voluntarily tithed at 10 percent of their income. Participation in congregations, community service and missionary work extend well beyond Sabbath worship.
Joseph Smith, Jr., founder and first prophet, organized the church in 1830 at Fayette, New York. Persecution drove the Mormons from New York to Ohio, Missouri and Illinois where Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred in 1844. Following his death, Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, led the main body of the church west in the Mormon pioneer exodus that ended in the building of the Mormon Zion in Utah. Large numbers of European converts migrated west. Mormons were important colonizers of the western United States and, despite disputes over the economic structuring of Mormon society (strongly communitarian) and the practice of plural marriage among some church members (discontinued in 1890), Utah was granted statehood in 1896. Despite difficulties with the federal government and anti-Mormon sentiment nationally the Mormon Church exemplified nineteenth-century American idealism. Mormonism can be seen as the embodiment of manifest destiny and the American dream.
In the post-Second World War period, the LDS Church has experienced a period of rapid growth, organizational consolidation and financial security Currently it is undergoing the transition from an American to a global religion. Doctrinally the church relies on the Bible and The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, as well as two smaller volumes, The Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price.
Latter-day Saints believe the book is a record of God’s dealings with his children in the Western Hemisphere from 600 BC to AD 421, culminating in the visitation and ministry of Jesus Christ in the Americas after his crucifixion.
The doctrine of continuing revelation (on an individual basis for all members of the church and through the president, sustained as prophet, seer and revelator, of the church for church matters) is central. Distinctive tenets include: belief in a premortal and postmortal life; sacred ordinances for deceased ancestors; moral and health codes; individual progression; the eternal nature of the family; family history and genealogy In 1978 the priesthood was extended to all worthy male members of the church. Women are not ordained to the priesthood, and the church has drawn criticism from some Mormons and many non-Mormons concerning public stances against the Equal Rights Amendment, anti-abortion legislation and full-time employment for mothers of young children.
However, Mormon women are active participants in congregations, auxiliary organizations and temple worship.
Industry:Culture
While American politicians have always relied on advisors, the visibility of political consultants increased in the late 1960s, particularly as television became a crucial part of American politics. In The Selling of the President (1968), Joe McGinniss chronicled how Richard Nixon’s campaign staff promoted the Republican presidential candidate like a consumer product to appeal to voters.
By the late 1980s, political consultants became nearly as prominent as the candidates for whom they worked. Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater were successful in transforming the image of Republican nominee and Vice-President George Bush, helping him win the 1988 presidential election.
James Carville and others were credited with overcoming the controversies surrounding Democratic presidential candidate and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to win the 1992 presidential election. Their efforts were portrayed in the documentary film, The War Room (1993). Carville and his wife, Republican Party consultant Mary Matalin, co-authored a book, All’s Fair (1994), a memoir of their role in the campaign.
Consultants have also produced election controversies. After Republican nominee Christine Todd Whitman won the New Jersey gubernatorial election, Whitman’s strategist, Ed Rollins, said he paid African American clergymen to discourage black voters, likely supporters of incumbent Jim Florio, from going to the polls. Rollins later retracted his claim.
Hollywood has featured political consultants in movies of fictional campaigns. The Candidate (1972) and Bob Roberts (1992) were accounts of Senate contestants who lacked experience but whose appearance and charisma, combined with consultants’ packaging, charmed the electorate.
Industry:Culture
While immigration has been a central theme of American life, some Americans also choose to emigrate, becoming Americans abroad or in exile. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this expatriate population has increased and diversified.
According to government statistics, approximately 1,590,000 US citizens lived abroad in 1959. Two-thirds of this group were members and dependents of the US armed forces. In 1997 the numbers had increased to approximately 3.3 million civilians, including only 200,000 military personnel. These figures, in fact, only represent expatriates who are officially registered at US embassies and consulates globally. It is estimated that an additional 1.5–2 million citizens live outside of the US.
The majority of US expatriates are employees and dependents of US companies or multi-national corporations with strong ties to North America. The expatriate population also includes teachers, students, research scholars, missionaries and writers. Retirees, either returning to their homelands or seeking cheaper living (which has created gated American colonies in Mexico), also become de facto expatriates. In the Vietnam era, Canada and Scandinavia were seen as havens for protestors or those avoiding the draft; the Soviet Union, China and Cuba have all appealed to small groups on ideological grounds. For protestors, and for some very wealthy citizens, renunciation of citizenship has been a part of this movement; others retain their ties whether or not they return to the US with any consistency.
Despite reductions in benefits packages during the past few decades, the expatriate life is in many respects a privileged existence. Housing and education allowances, tax exemptions, travel opportunities and the chance to learn about a different culture hold significant appeal for many. Despite global communication and transportation and a trend towards localization in hiring practices, American expatriates continue to be a significant presence in such places as London, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Tokyo, Paris and Toronto.
Literary and historical representations of expatriates are sparse, although they may figure more in movies set in foreign locales—either as hero/ heroines or “interpreter” of local customs. Early expatriates such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne nonetheless recorded their experiences in Europe, and American students studied at European universities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Missionaries and merchants were the most common nineteenth-century expatriates living in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The best-known American expatriates are the self-exiled artists and writers in Paris between the First World War and the Second World War. Ernest Hemingway Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller wrote about the tensions inherent in the expatriate existence; Josephine Baker and James Baldwin saw Paris from a different racial perspective. Questions of identity, disillusionment with one’s home environment and the search for an intellectual, spiritual and geographical home are recurrent themes in later quests further afield based on religious search (South Asia), racial identity (Africa as a “homeland” for African Americans) or identification with “nature” and the primitive.
Although these seekers seem to share little common ground with late twentieth century traders, language instructors, exchange students and consular employees, all share an experience of dislocation that has been examined in postcolonial and women’s history, sociology, anthropology and human-resources management. By being outside the US, they test the limits and interpretations of American society—whether its global reach or the possibility of escaping it altogether.
Industry:Culture
