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Americans have been avid colonizers. Given the United States’ history as a postcolonial nation, this statement may seem perplexing. But Americans have been deeply embroiled in colonial projects in establishing their place in the global order, whether in dominating Latin America and the Caribbean or annexing Hawai’i and the Philippines. This led to especially ambiguous politics in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the nation endeavored to come to grips with the break up of major empires and the increase of nationalism worldwide, while supporting its own interests of business and consumption.
Even thirteen colonies breaking away from British rule did not abandon the idea of controlling further land and even peoples. A century of expansionism on the American mainland followed, although technical niceties allowed Americans to claim they were never colonizers. The Louisiana Purchase, for example, opening up vast tracts of land to the United States, nonetheless transferred an area and its people from one colonial rule (French) to another (American). That this area was divided into territories later to be incorporated into the American federal system just made this colonialism one more akin to the French model than to the British model. The expansion of plantation slavery into the Southwest, wars against American Indians and Mexico and the purchase of Alaska all had colonial overtones. That these were wrapped up in the mystical language of “manifest destiny,” suggesting that white Americans were destined to govern the whole North American mainland, should not distract from recognizing this colonizing mission.
Americans, as Walt Whitman pointed out as the nation’s second century was opening, were forging their own “passage to India.” That second century would witness an immediate commitment to the expansionist impulse as the US competed with other major industrial nations. Wars with Americans Indians continued opening up new territories to largely European settlers. Then the US expanded to the Pacific, “opening the door” to Japan and acquiring Hawai’i and the Philippines (the latter in the Spanish-American War of 1898). In the Caribbean, meanwhile, the US took Cuba and Puerto Rico (also in the 1898 conflict), and established control over the Panama isthmus, while intervening regularly in other countries under its self-proclaimed rights under the Monroe doctrine.
The complex legacy of direct colonialism would also affect American relations around the world. Woodrow Wilson’s support for self-determination applied only to European peoples, not those over whom they ruled in Africa and Asia (to the ire of W.E.B. Du Bois). Later, anti-communism translated into support for European masters against nationalists, who received moral and military support from the Soviet Union.
The Second World War brought a short-lived change in the American position on colonialism. Alliance with the Soviet Union weakened the negative association between communism and nationalism. Many Americans fighting against Nazism saw connections among fascism, colonialism and segregation at home. As the Japanese dislodged Europeans from much of East Asia, people questioned whether European colonialism had ended in the region; the British were beginning to lose their stranglehold on India, with Gandhi gaining a lot of support among Americans. Meanwhile, Americans appreciated nationalists and communists who, unlike their collaborating colonial masters, seemed willing to join them in the fight against Japan. Further, when the US lost the Philippines to the Japanese, American officials made strong promises about independence that would follow liberation from Japan. Nevertheless, while the US began to loosen its grip over Cuba and the Philippines, it made sure that the position of American businesses was secure, while language, culture and tourism continued to promote American hegemony.
While President Roosevelt had wondered about the advisability of allowing bankrupt European nations to re-establish control over their colonies, Truman decided that not supporting the French in Indo-China against America’s erstwhile nationalist allies would run counter to the intentions of the Marshall Plan. Loss of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, his administration reasoned, would lead to a further French collapse in Algeria and then in France itself. Even when the French realized that the cost of retaining Southeast Asia was too great, they passed on the baton to the Americans who learned their lessons, not from the nationalists’ victory at Dien-bien-phu, but from the bloody and successful British assaults on Malaysian nationalists.
Moreover, by this time, an anti-communist Cold War mentality had become firmly established in the United States. The “loss” of China to the communists had so shaken the American government that officials began to re-associate nationalism and communism. Once this took hold, the reaction to nationalist-inspired uprisings from Vietnam to Iran to Congo to Cuba to Guyana was to send in American forces (either military or CIA counter-insurgency) to oppose them. With the world divided neatly into those aligned with the Soviet Union and those loyal to the US, the latter had become a major neo-colonial power.
Defeat in Vietnam shook American anti-nationalist resolve for a few years, but Reagan’s destabilization of Grenada and continued tolerance of apartheid in South Africa showed that the connections were still largely in place. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa, however, opened up new possibilities.
Anti-communists like Marcos in the Philippines were no longer indispensable, while military bases could no longer be imposed on an independent country.
The language of neo-colonialism and imperialism shifted in the 1990s to a more valuefree language of globalization. Yet, many legacies of colonialism and American support for other colonizers remain. Capital, largely in the form of multinational corporations, can now move more freely between nations, and those who profit from them are not exclusively Americans, but those who do the labor cannot move about so freely Wealthier nations retain barriers to entry, ensuring that large exploitable pools of labor are available outside their borders to be used as migrants within the US when desirable, or as cheap laborers for a plant that has relocated outside the country Profiting from cheap labor remains as important now as it was in the heyday of colonialism. As the “Made in USA” label has become a valuable asset for an article of clothing sold in America, it has become clear, however, that some of the best department stores are selling goods produced by the sweatshop labor of immigrants in the US, or by such laborers in places like Guam, Saipan, or other American territories.
The policies of US drug-enforcement agencies from Colombia to Panama and relations with Castro’s Cuba (for example, the Helms-Burton Act) provide a barometer of the level of American postcolonial policies. Anti-colonialism can still be a useful banner—as in American complaints about Chinese rule in Tibet—yet it represents a strategic interest to be balanced against others, as American silence on East Timorese bloodletting reaffirmed.
Finally, both media and business underpin a cultural hegemony that is read as a neocolonial strategy by many who oppose the new American colossus and its values, even as their nations may acquire or emulate them. The processes and terms of colonialism have changed over time, but their silent and deadly entanglement with the American dream remains problematic and compelling.
Industry:Culture
Americans have long been committed to the ideal of religious diversity. Though several of the early European settlements in their beginnings experimented with theocracy— Massachusetts with Congregationalism, Pennsylvania with Quakerism, Maryland and Louisiana with Roman Catholicism—by the end of the seventeenth century the energy for religious uniformity had all but drained away. Many European settlers (e.g. the Puritans and Quakers), who had relocated across an ocean specifically to escape theological conformity were already in a mindset of religious rebellion, and the atmosphere of theological independence inspired new communities (e.g. Rhode Island and Delaware) to break away from original settlements, partly in pursuit of this ideal of consummate religious freedom. White settlers who drifted off to Native American settlements, or who dabbled in the religious beliefs and practices introduced by Africans, also contributed to the widely diverse mixture of religious cultures that had taken root by the time the American Revolution set the United States off on its own course, defined by a 1791 constitutional amendment requiring that the government “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first century of American religion In the decades following the Revolution, the development of religious institutions increasingly followed—and created—social cleavages, along lines of culture, class, region and ethnicity. Though various versions of Christianity were—and remain—the dominant religion in the United States, important Jewish communities developed, and a few Americans, particularly those of North African origin, worshipped in the Islamic tradition as well. Hence, early on, the United States became unique in its conscious and constitutionalized commitment to segregate church from state, to de-politicize religion, to de-religionize politics and to provide “tolerance” for a wide range of religious expression.
Yet, of the diverse traditions which settlers brought to America, almost all have been shaped by just the opposite commitment—by a powerful and prescriptive relationship between religion and the everyday lives of the populace. From Catholic, Anglican, Greek Orthodox, Jewish and, recently Buddhist and Hindu cultures, and numerous smaller groupings, the United States became a merging-point, and a flashpoint, for divergent religious traditions. Religious values therefore remain a persistent, if somewhat ambivalent and subterranean, part of American life in informal as well as formal intersections with politics, education, economics and life choices. As one observer phrased it, “freedom of religion is not freedom from religion.” Over the course of the century following the Revolution, American religions became fragmented as local cultural norms intertwined with religious values and as Americans raised on Puritan traditions worried that religion was dying out in the United States. Early nineteenth-century attempts to reinvigorate what some saw as fading religious energies resulted in what became known as the Second Great Awakening, accompanied by “camp meetings” or “revival meetings” in rural areas, by a phenomenal growth in evangelical and vigorously participatory Protestant religious services and by an increasing alignment between religious affiliations and social, political and/or regional positions. For example, the Southern Baptist denomination, separated from its Northern counterpart by its predominantly rural population and its vigorous support of slavery became the backbone of American slave society. By contrast, Unitarianism and Quakerism came to be distinguished by their small numbers, their concentration in the Northern states and the Ohio Valley and by their devotion to the abolitionist cause. Over time, other denominations became associated with particular political and/or social causes. Northern Baptists were strong in the temperance movement, Catholics sent missionaries among Native Americans, Afri-can Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches supported black schools, Jewish synagogues underwrote urban-settlement houses for new immigrants and Northern Methodists encouraged the Young Men’s Christian Association movement to encourage young men to remain strong in Christian faith. Episcopalianism, with its strong roots in the Anglican church, maintained tradition for the dwindling number of Americans of British ancestry.
Religious practice in modern America American national rituals are almost always nominally religious, broadened in recent years from a vaguely “Christian” tradition to an equally ill-defined “Judaeo-Christian” tradition. Politicians almost always profess a belief in a “higher power,” but are careful not to sound too fundamentalist, too metaphysical, or too extreme. Political officials are installed with a prayer and a Bible as part of the ceremonies, but in the most democratic of institutions—the school—prayer is prohibited lest it appear that there is official proselytizing of any particular religious practice.
Instead of a shared religion, the United States is greatly influenced by what some observers have called “civil religion”—a widespread acceptance of a unifying set of values that bind Americans to a shared code of behavior. While trying to maintain a posture of separation between church and state, Americans have attempted to balance that posture with using amorphous religious rhetoric to legitimize certain standards of ethics and behavior. One observer describes this balancing act as “an effort to find a faith sufficiently encompassing and inspiring to envelop all of ‘God’s New Israel’ under one snugly religious quilt.” Certainly a largely patriarchal Protestant and Puritan set of values has shaped the American religious mainstream, informing everything from marriage, child-rearing and social relationships to politics and marketplace ethics. But Native American influences can be seen in some of the religious-political framework of the Constitution, and Jews, African Americans and women have successfully invoked religious rhetoric to highlight social injustice.
The American openness to religious diversity has had mixed results. There has been plenty of opportunity for new denominations to flourish, such as the AME Church, which was born in Philadelphia in the 1790s, but there has also been plenty of opportunity for conflict and dissension. Despite the fact that unconventional forms of religious behavior have brought angry and sometimes violent responses, Americans have, to date, not been dislodged from the conviction that freedom of worship is important, even when this conviction has sparked violence. In the 1830s, Illinois residents attacked Mormon settlers over their practice of polyandry and drove them from the state; in the 1980s the Branch Davidian group, which preached that David Koresh was the modern incarnation of Jesus Christ, became involved in a shooting match with federal government officials.
Yet the Mormons, who eventually found a home—and legal protection for their practices—in Utah, are now hosts to one of the most respected genealogy centers and religious choirs. The Branch Davidians have largely disbanded, but similar groups prepared to launch violent resistance in pursuit of extreme forms of religious freedom continue to flourish. One such group, the World Church of the Creator, which advocates deportation of non-whites, was brought to public attention when a former member, Benjamin Smith, went on a shooting spree in the suburbs surrounding Chicago, IL.
Since the Second World War, as Americans have grown increasingly sensitive to curbing any form of intolerance, the widespread recognition of rituals such as Jewish Chanukah, African American Kwanzaa and Muslim Ramadan has challenged everything from traditional bank holidays to national foodways to school curricula. As one observer phrased it: “the growing diversity of religious and ethnic populations in the United States (has) drawn our attention to the need to accommodate pluralism everywhere.” Such postwar tolerance, however, has not staunched Americans’ anxiety that excessive commitment to particular religious beliefs will lead to behaviors and loyalties that are at odds with mainstream American civil norms (e.g. Catholic loyalties to the Pope, Quaker commitments to pacifism, Muslim adherence to abstinence from alcohol, Christian Science resistance to modern medicine, shamanic invocations of other-worldly spirits, Wicca celebrations of feminist religions, etc.). The delicate boundary between religious freedom and civil authority continues to occasion dozens of legal confrontations each year. As immigration restrictions have been relaxed, Buddhist, Hindu and various smaller groupings of Old-World religions also have taken a significant place in the modern religious landscape, and these, too, sometimes are accompanied by rites and traditions that are disturbing to their neighbors.
In twenty-first century America it seems likely that the tightrope comprising civil religious impulses, commitment to religious freedom, increasing diversity among the population and tensions between conflicting religious requirements and rites will continue a dynamic relationship that defines Americans’ religious experience.
Industry:Culture
Americans have seldom challenged Alpine skiers’ dominance in skiing. Skiing is a very expensive sport that Americans have taken to as a recreation, but very few have been brought up in the kind of skiing environment necessary to compete. Even Americans living in the Rocky Mountain region treat skiing as a vacation sport, compared to Alpine communities that depend on skiing for transportation and communication. Victories, like the Picabo Street in the 1998 Nagano Olympics, are rare exceptions.
Snowboarding, by contrast, has been developed and dominated largely by Americans.
The first snowboard was built in Sherman Poppen’s garage in 1967. Many early designs borrowed from surfing and, until 1985, metal edges were included on all snowboards. By 1993 there were over fifty different snowboard manufacturers.
Generally cheaper than skiing, snowboarding was first viewed as low-class and countercultural, and many American resorts banned it. Gradually the Snowboarding Outreach Society began to gain acceptance for the sport and for the competitive racing begun in 1981. After Stratton Mountain in Vermont offered the first snowboarding instruction in 1986, the sport gained respect and widespread popularity.
Women also established themselves as athletes in the sport competing against men.
The emphasis on jumps and spins as opposed to speed has given women equal chances.
The sport has become increasingly professionalized in the 1990s, sponsored by manufacturers and covered since 1993 on ESPN. With its emphasis on daredevil antics, snowboarding has also been a mainstay of X-games.
Industry:Culture
Americans love chocolate. They eat almost twelve pounds per person each year in products made using cocoa, baking chocolate, milk chocolate, and sweet and semi-sweet chocolate, ranking tenth among the world’s consumers of chocolate. The first chocolate factory was established in New England in 1765; names like Hershey and Mars are now synonymous with American chocolate, despite elite brands (Godiva) and local favorites.
Chocolate played a role in nourishing American soldiers in the Second World War; US army D-rations still include three four-ounce chocolate bars.
Industry:Culture
Americans take their humor seriously. Although vaudeville, film and radio had embraced comedy as a sure-fire way to attract an audience, the postSecond World War comedian often takes on the role of the cultural commentator. The audience expects comics to “pattern their comic material close to everyday reality, making obvious behavioral patterns explicit and tacit operating knowledge and other insights about American society objects of conscious reflection” (Koziski 1984:57). In humor, the audience seeks both an explanation of and a rebellion against the incongruities of the social order.
In the politically repressive 1950s, stand-up comedian Mort Sahl and cartoonists Walt Kelly and Herb Block obliquely commented on the terror generated by Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunts for communists. After a blustering politician commands Kelly’s swamp animals to look for communists, the opossum “Pogo” famously declared, “We have met the enemy and they is Us.” In the late 1950s and early 1960s, stand-up comic Lenny Bruce crashed through society’s norms on discourse and taste, while Mike Nichols and Elaine May, in a more sophisticated fashion, eviscerated conventional manners.
Mathematics professor Tom Lehrer joked in his satirical songs about the nation’s fear of atomic annihilation, sentiments which presaged the film Dr Strangelove (1962) in their attack on the absurd logic of nuclear warfare. Starting in 1952, MAD magazine mocked social conventions, as well as spoofing the decade’s Cold War mentality in the cartoon feature Spy versus Spy. In 1958 Paul Krassner, who had worked for MAD and for Lenny Bruce, began the magazine The Realist, which became the progenitor of media satire for the next several decades. The Realist influenced National Lampoon and Spy magazines, the comic strip Doonesbury and the television series Laugh-In (Boskin 1997:73).
Starting in 1960, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory became the first black stand-up comedian to address race issues with predominantly white audiences. Unlike black political activists, black humorists, like Gregory Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge and Flip Wilson, were welcomed into mainstream media venues, including television. Traditionally humor on television has been tamer than humor on the comedy club circuit. From the 1950s through the 1970s, prime-time television had to be acceptable for the youngest, most impressionable audiences. Humor often pushes social boundaries, and, in the late 1960s, Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers provided the prime-time audience with irreverent, sexy skits and jokes. In 1970, however, network executives canceled The Smothers Brothers because the show’s jibes against tobacco advertisers and the Vietnam War irritated conservatives and the Nixon administration (Boskin 1997:103).
In the confusing 1970s, Steve Martin engaged in anarchic behaviors which mocked people’s selfabsorbed seriousness. Like other successful comedians, Martin’s humor translated to other media, including records, television and film. Joan Rivers, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase, Roseanne, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Bill Cosby and a host of other comedians moved from successful stand-up careers into other entertainment fields. Since 1975, NBC’s Saturday Nïght Live, which airs after prime-time hours, has often used a dark-humored skit comedy to address social issues. The program has also offered a showcase for young comedians, like Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Julia LouisDreyfus. Ironically, comedy clubs, the traditional breeding ground for new comics, have suffered in recent years because of the success of television programs devoted to showing stand-up routines.
Although American standup comedy films and television programs have gingerly and unevenly approached political humor in the past, in 1996 Comedy Central successfully launched a satiric news show, The Daily Show, which humorously covered politics, the media and religion. Unlike The Smothers Brothers, The Daily Show and late-night talkshow hosts, Jay Leno and David Letterman have not faced censure or censorship for their increasingly pointed remarks on the president and other authority figures. Indeed, the boundaries of appropriate commentary on public figures have been stretched most vigorously by radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who leavens his bombastic political views with satires targeting liberals, women and democratic political figures.
“Shock jocks” like Don Imus and Howard Stern have used their radio shows to push the limits of humorous free speech in their jokes about people and institutions. In turn, candidates for political office have sought the power of the witty riposte in response to political attacks. Candidate John Kennedy diffused the public’s concerns about his wealth by reading aloud to audiences a fake telegram from his powerful father declaring that the senior Kennedy “will not buy one more vote for Jack than is necessary to win the election.” In 1968 candidate Richard Nixon tried to improve his public image by appearing on Laugh-In, where he uncomfortably recited one of the show’s signature joke lines, “Sock it to Me.” Throughout the past five decades, Americans created jokes about the incongruities inherent in a democratic system. Minorities point out their struggles to achieve full American citizenship while members of the white majority somewhat nervously poke fun at their seeming imperfections, particularly those of new immigrants. As women gain more political and social power, comedians like Andrew Dice Clay build careers on denigrating them. Although America promises freedom, progress and equality the social system invariably fails to create this promised world. Disasters, like the Exxon Valdez collision and the NASA space ship Challenger explosion, and bizarre criminal behavior, such as the murders by Jeffrey Dahmer and the marital problems of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, quickly become fodder for jokes. Interestingly the seemingly bland, family-oriented 1950s spawned a series of sick “dead-baby” jokes. Humor in various ages, therefore, “frequently serves as a warning system of emerging social issues. Society is vastly informed and enlivened by (humor’s) prodding presence, spontaneous refraction of events and issues, criss-crossing within and between classes and ethnic groups and its notable resilience” (Boskin 1997:204).
Industry:Culture
Americans, despite their individualism, are often described as a nation of “joiners.” For many organizations, this produces a relatively passive pool of members who offer economic support in lobbying issues of the environment, ethnic heritage issues, or community organization. Others focus on service—volunteers in troubled areas or with special populations. Still others represent professional identities—doctors, veterans, or teachers—whose national assemblies may shape policy issues for the group and influence national policy. College alumni associations are important in fundraising and recruitment, while other educational institutions may also promote sociability and support. Still other clubs are more loosely defined civic or interest groups, which may nonetheless, sponsor important initiatives. Some of these, as well as other groups, offer social and recreational spaces—whether middle-class country clubs or local ethnic and religious groups. Joining thus also divides Americans according to race, class, gender, ethnicity and locale, even as it may bring them together with cross-cutting identities.
Among the most widespread associations are those that offer broad civic and fraternal appeal. Of these, some are clearly offspring of older European Masonic movements or similar ritualized organizations—the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners stressed the importance of lodge meetings, which was echoed in the later Flintstones and even The Simpsons. Ritual elements are also important in religiously affiliated associations like the Catholic Knights of Columbus and the Jewish Hadassah.
The Rotary Club, Kiwanis, Optimists and other groups foster civic involvement in schools, reform and international connections, while also offering regular social functions for urban movers. Many of these have been adult and male-dominated, although offering female auxiliaries and high-school affiliates; this division has been challenged since the 1960s.
Women’s organizations, however, have also played important organizational roles. The League of Women Voters, for example, has been active in sponsoring political debates and voter information. Garden clubs—traditionally but not exclusively a woman’s domain—have been involved in civic beautification. Book clubs, service clubs, and religious and charitable organizations have channeled generations of women’s involvement in public life. In some cases, however, this has been marked by class exclusion based on history—Daughters of the American Revolution or Daughters of the Confederacy for example.
Many of these clubs, female and male, have been organized around divisions of race and class. African American clubs, including Colored Women’s Clubs, fraternities and sororities and religious associations also exercised strong parapolitical functions in eras of segregation, while they have delineated the associations of a distinctive black middle class. New immigrants have also formed new associations around religious and family organizations.
Such a list of American associations might stretch to include fan clubs, hobby and interest groups, pet owners, amateur athletics, motoring, institutional support and a myriad of other reasons Americans find to come together and be different. In literature and mass media, moreover, these associations map out other meanings of class, sociability and interest—from the bored housewife to the person on the move in politics, reinforcing the complex geography of American identities.
Industry:Culture
Among American resources, those lying underground—oil and gas as well as minerals and water—have been critical elements in the economic and social transformation of the landscape. While mining may first evoke gold strikes that spurred settlement of California in 1849, longer-term development has also been associated with exploitation of lead, zinc, iron and coal. This exploitation, however, has gone beyond minerals themselves to include the men and women who worked them and the environment left behind. Hence, mining often has been a symbol of the promise and failure of organized labor in the US (as it has been worldwide).
Mines brought together immigrants from many races and backgrounds. Whites and blacks worked together in the South. Women, while not active in the mines as workers until the 1970s, sustained mining families and provided vital support for worker solidarity. Towns from Leadville, Colorado to Anthracite, Pennsylvania were organized around the mine, the company the church and school—and little else.
Coal mining was associated with the Appalachians, especially as trains and roads opened access to Southern coal fields. Here, communities lived and died by the mines— through both fluctuating prices and fatal disasters. These communities also suffered from mechanization in the 1940s, which laid off many workers, and from later drives towards cleaner fuels. At the same time, working conditions decimated miners with black lung and other medical conditions. Meanwhile, strip mining, which took off top layers in order to gouge out useful coal, despoiled the landscape and waterways of the region.
The United Mine Workers of America united coal miners in 1890; it later split from the AFL in the 1930s under John L. Lewis (rejoining in 1989). Labor organization faced continuing problems, nonetheless, of racial division and owner opposition erupting into violence. Moreover, the union itself has faced charges of corruption and mismanagement—most notably in the 1970s when president Tony Boyle was implicated in the murder of reformist opponent Joseph Yablonski.
Television generally has portrayed mining only in news items about unions or environmental degradation. Mines have provided rich movie themes, however, generally viewed from the Left. These include Barbara Koppel’s Harlan County, USA (1976), a documentary about a 1972 strike, and John Sayle’s Matewan (1987), which recreated issues of 1920s West Virginia unrest.
Industry:Culture
Among the concerns of those demanding harsher punishments throughout American history has been the demand for labor as recompense or reeducation for those imprisoned.
Convict leasing, in the post-Civil War South, in which prisoners were passed to private bosses at minimal costs, often functioned as an extension of slavery before it ended in the 1930s. “Chain gangs,” in which workers under public guards work on highways and other projects, have continued and are even cited as a deterrent because of the public humiliation involved. Within prisons, convicts have been employed in many day-to-day functions of the prison—laundry food, etc.; in the 1990s, prisons also became areas for telephone services nationwide. Prisoners receive some or all of this money although it may be taken from them for supplies or privileges within the system.
Industry:Culture
Among the most discussed immigrants of the postwar period are those many believe have never actually arrived—aliens from other worlds. For many these stories are the stuff of science fiction—where an alien threat has remained big box office from The Thing (1952; 1982) and War of the Worlds (Orson Welles’ radio version 1938; film 1953) through Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982) to Independence Day (1997) and Men in Black (1998). American scientists, military and government agencies have generally concurred in rejecting any such possibilities. Yet, other Americans assemble sightings, photographs, personal testimonies, reinterpretations of historical texts and material evidence to prove alien contact, covered up by a vast government conspiracy (as in television’s The X-Files). Indeed, whether to treat such evidence as incitement to further research or signs of mass hysteria continues to divide analysts.
Despite many earlier science-fiction accounts of extra-terrestrial life and alien arrivals, clear changes arrived in the Cold War era. Pilot Kenneth Arnold’s report of a formation of incredibly fast blue-white objects over Washington’s Cascade mountains on June 24, 1947 is generally taken as inaugurating the modern UFO era (Unidentified Flying Objects; more popularly, “flying saucers”). This incident was followed on July 2 by reports of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, later dismissed by the government as a weather balloon; skepticism here makes Roswell critical for later ufologists. Thousands of reports followed, forcing an air force investigation, Project Blue Book, from 1948 to 1969. By 1953, the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel concluded that UFOs did not exist, but that stories about them threatened national security; after August 1953, reports became classified. Yet, in a few months, Donald Keyhoe’s bestselling Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953) restated these claims and debate has never disappeared since.
Intense sightings in 1957 and 1973, for example, showed the liveliness of saucers and watchers.
Various genres of UFO narratives complicate evaluations of evidence. Reports (and photographs) of bright lights and unusual movements have tended to be explained as other airborne objects or reflections or weather phenomena, without convincing skeptical audiences. Contact has been more problematic. The type case for alien abduction was Betty and Barney Hill’s hypnosis-induced narrative of a 1961 abduction. Examination of abduction narratives as factual evidence by professors David Jacobs (Temple) and John Mack (Harvard Medical School) has created subsequent firestorms in academic communities (see Secret Life, 1992). T. Matheson, by contrast, in Alien Abductions (1998) reads these stories as the emergence of a new mythology. Others have related such narratives to anxieties of changing roles of Americans and whites in a global economy.
Analysis of UFOs diverges from a scientific search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), spurred on in the 1970s by Carl Sagan and distinguished researchers. Whether or not Earth has been visited, this project assumes, others may still be there. Space flights have included materials to establish contact with such beings.
It is tempting to read extra-terrestrial beings as symbols of race, class and change (developed by the film Alien Nation, 1988, which depicted massive extra-terrestrial arrivals through analogies with African Americans and recent refugees). Yet, other Americans read them as truth, personal experiences or symbols of conspiracy, a theme of vocal debate on the Internet.
Industry:Culture
Among the most pervasive “vehicles” of cultural change in twenty-first-century America is the gasoline-driven, individualized surface road transportation shell first massmarketed by Henry Ford in 1908. While automobiles have become a global phenomenon, they intersected with an American nation growing in wealth, with space to expand, and valuing the freedom, individualism and equality that cars seem to embody. This proved especially true with a car-friendly government that has provided unlimited highways and limited fuel taxes while undercutting mass transit. Cars have altered the American landscape, changed social and family relations, and permeated popular culture from road movies to drive-ins to soccer moms. Since the Second World War, this pervasive presence has also faced critics decrying environmental costs, social changes and dehumanization associated with the centaurial symbiosis of person and car. Any rethinking of this dependency however, faces its sheer normality in a nation where a driver’s license is the most widespread national identity card and where cars are a necessity for all but the most urban (and marginal) of the nation’s citizens.
Mass production (see automakers) rapidly made cars central to the American family.
Registrations increased from 8,000 in 1900 to 8 million in 1920 (and 143 million by 1995). This demanded further changes, including improved roadways and services, urban regulations (and space for parking) and garages and other accommodations in residential areas. While some later critics have seen this as a period of villainous, conspiratorial destruction of mass transit alternatives and face-to-face community, cars also brought together outlying regions and isolated families and housewives on farms and ranches, allowing new explorations of the America glimpsed through mass media. Cars provided privacy for courtship and sex, which have remained important images in American life for decades. Movies, songs and literature celebrate America’s love affair with the car in stories of adventure, glamour, crime and love. Yet, the ambivalence of dependence remains vivid in heart-rending images of impoverished Depression-era families, all their belongings piled into a car, seeking new opportunities in California.
While automobile production and travel were restricted by the Second World War mobilization, cars became fundamental elements of postwar suburban home-ownership, shopping and commut-ing to work. Here, the promise of automotive freedom faced the realities of longer commutes and multiple trips that have plagued sprawling metropolitan development ever since. Acres of parking surrounding shopping malls, churches, schools and other institutions placed competitive demands on urban centers, where garages and parking lots gouged holes in the fabric of urban life. Cars themselves, through the 1950s and 1960s, celebrated an exuberance of display in features including giant tail fins, bright and bi-colored paint jobs, larger motors and new handling. New comfort appeared— bucket seats, air-conditioning, sound and increased vision. In addition, the new car— traded in every year or every other year—was a symbol of American success.
While cars united America, they also divided it. Access to cars depended on money which differentiated basic service vehicles and the luxurious Cadillacs, Lincolns and imported cars. In the twenty-first century, expensive sports utility vehicles, Lamborghini convertibles and third-hand junkers make statements about class (and, for some, about masculinity) every second on streets and highways. Cars also have provided a language of protest—the hot-rod of male teenagers in the 1950s, the multi-colored hippie vans of the 1960s, Cadillacs and other automotive status symbols in African American communities and the Chicano low riders of the 1980s and 1990s all have used massproduced items to express individualism and difference.
In 1973–4 Arab states and other oil-producing countries cut back production and raised prices, which quadrupled gasoline prices at the pump and led to lines and restricted sales.
This oil crisis underscored the vulnerability of American automobile dependence, challenged the nation’s unbounded faith in cars and exploded markets for smaller, fuelefficient and innovative foreign cars. Meanwhile, environmentalists were decrying hydrocarbons and other wastes that created dense clouds of smog over Los Angeles, CA and other cities and befouled waterways, while cars chewed up land for highways and associated development. In the US, motor vehicles are responsible for roughly 70 percent of all carbon monoxide emissions. Almost eclipsed in these concerns are 2 million disabling injuries and 40,000–50,000 deaths each year; cars are the single greatest killer of young people.
Federal regulations on fuel efficiency and emissions controls changed automotive styles, allowing the triumph of imported, more fuelefficient smaller cars. Education, insurance and licensing restrictions, increased penalties (especially on drunk drivers) and collision features, including air bags and child restraints, have worked to make cars safer.
Yet alternative mass transit or transitoriented development faces generations for whom a car is a birthright and whose lives and homes are built around multiple, distant obligations and constant movement. In fact, as more women entered the workplace, juggling family obligations, their mileage quadrupled between 1983 and 1993.
Cars have become homes as well as symbols of the American family—for dating, sex, vacations and community participation (sports, school, church). Hence, in the 1980s and 1990s, many American cars have again become larger (with the popularization of minivans and sports utility vehicles), while adding residential comforts like telephones and VCRs. Continuing costly highway construction and raised speed limits have made more daily trips seem possible, if not desirable, creating trip-chains averaging six trips per household. The “carless,” meanwhile, fall outside this family model. Some are trapped in ghettos far from jobs, while old age (post-driving) brings new dependency on mass transit and social networks.
The car remains central to American mass media. Radio, for example, while still part of home and office, has become a major medium of music and information for drivers (with competing tapes and CDs). Commercial television has been sustained by incessant advertising by automakers jockeying for name recognition and related services like gasoline, insurance and tires. Cars also underpin dramatic and sitcom narratives, including stereotypes of coming of age, gender (women as distracted drivers or nagging passengers) and problematic older drivers. Autos have even taken on character roles in the admittedly awful NBC sitcom My Mother the Car (1965–6), where a car was possessed by the spirit of the hero’s mother or the slicker Knight Rider with its intelligent car. Police series like Highway Patrol (1955–9) and Car 54 Where are You? (NBC, 1961–3) put vehicular references in the title, while Route 66 (CBS, 1960–4; NBC, 1993) made two guys in a ’61 Corvette an American quest. Only westerns and science fiction seemed a respite, although the prehistoric Flintstones (ABC, 1960–6) and the futuristic Jetsons (ABC, 1962–3) adapted family cars to their universes.
Movies have also developed in symbiosis with the car—drawing patrons from ever further ranges and accommodating them with the drive-in in the 1950s and 1960s.
Onscreen, cars may become monstrous—Stephen King’s Christine (1983) explored the passions of a 1953 Plymouth Fury possessed by the devil. Cars have more often become symbols of speed and freedom (Rebel without a Cause, 1955; Thelma and Louise, 1991), family (National Lampoon’s Vacation, 1983), romance and sex (notably in No Way Out, 1987) and class. Whether the fantasy of the Batmobile, the child-like assistance of the Love Bug or dramas of races and chases, cars are ubiquitous.
Many urbanists and planners decry America’s dependence on the automobile and attendant consumption, seeking ways to re-orient cities, families and individuals. Yet, despite public campaigns for new designs, mass transit, car-pooling and even reduced use, cars are built into the fabric of American social life and culture in ways that cannot be altered without fundamental changes. These need to work with rather than against the automobile.
Industry:Culture
