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The highways that reshaped America moved goods as well as passengers.
Experimentation with car bases followed the initial mass production of autos, but trucks gained special impetus with First World War mobilization. Trucks were produced by the Big Three automakers as well as specialists like Mack Trucks. In the 1930s they extended their reach through urban and rural areas, forcing government regulations (although the situation remained chaotic through the Second World War). As the Interstate Highway System expanded, trucks became a major force in national transportation, challenging trains with their flexibility and connections. Smaller trucks adapted to the urban landscape—from deliveries to ice-cream vendors whose music evokes summer days and cold popsicles—or rural work, where pick-ups have replaced horses. Over decades, moreover, trucks and truckers have changed American geography with truck stops and motels and have created an American folklore of the freedom of the road in songs, language (on CB radios) and activities of the Teamsters Union that represents many drivers.
Trucks may be owned by companies (private carriers) or leased from for-hire carriers.
Roughly 100,000 independent truckers own and operate their own vehicles, although often within permanent lease arrangements. The 1973 oil crisis and later deregulation, in fact, increased some aspects of dependency and lessened government protection. These truckers, nonetheless, sometimes depicted as modern cowboys, have captivated American media in representations of class, independence and generally male stereotypes (in the female road movie Thelma and Louise (1991), blowing up a man’s truck declares independence). Convoy (1978) and Over the Top (1987) offer more standard visions of men grappling with social challenges. Trucker music—“Six Days on the Road and I’m Gonna See my Baby Tonight”—has also defined road folklore, alongside “urban legends” of vanishing hitchhikers and media representations of killer trucks.
Another characteristic adaptation to life on the road is the truck stop, which offers fuel, food, relaxation, showers, even occasional religious services. Like gas stations, truck stops have sometimes been templates to play with modernist design, but more often they are functional service and food clusters near major highways. Nearby motels may offer lodging, but many large trucks are designed with living and sleeping quarters for long hauls.
This is not to say that trucks are without enemies. Concerns over congestion and safety in urban areas as well as highway dangers are often spurred by media reports on speeding, fatigue and accidents. Damage to roadways through overloads and environmental deterioration are also concerns of a truck-reliant society.
Most of these concerns are aimed at multipleaxle, large vehicles. Other trucks in common commercial use include vans and pick-ups. In fact, in the 1990s, small pick-up trucks have moved beyond the workplace to become mass recreational vehicles.
Industry:Culture
The most serious scandal in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the affair involved two linked, arguably illegal, covert US government operations that became public knowledge in November 1986. In the first operation, the government sold arms to Iran in an effort to secure the release of seven hostages who had been held in Lebanon since 1984 by terrorists allied with Iran. The arms sales contradicted the stated government policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, and of isolating Iran, and at least some of the sales may have violated federal law. In the second operation, the government used the proceeds from the arms sales to supply arms to a group of rebels, known as the contras, who were trying to overthrow the left-wing government in Nicaragua, known as the Sandinistas. The operation violated a federal law that had banned US aid to the contras. The scandal led to investigations by both Congress and an independent special counsel, but only a few relatively minor figures were convicted of any crimes, and in 1992 President George Bush pardoned all those charged or convicted because of the scandal.
Industry:Culture
While the US has often portrayed itself as the champion of democracy and freedom in the Western Hemisphere, protector against outsiders and even a partner in Pan-American development, its neighbors have not always shared this image. Instead, the “Colossus of the North” has, in their eyes, made unilateral declarations of policy, intervened to protect murky interests and acted as a domineering patriarch. These images, and the experiences and actions that underpin them, often have made US relations with its American neighbors conflictive, even though goods, citizens and ideas cross borders. Moreover, experiences have varied among nations: while Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America have been constant foci of American activity nations to the south have sometimes negotiated alternate ties with each other and with Europe.
US values have been embodied in statements that betray perceptions of Latin American weakness. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine of President James Monroe warned Europeans (without any ratification) not to intervene further in the Western Hemisphere.
This vision later gained more force when used to justify US appropriation of territory in the west and claims of hemispheric interests. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary allowing the US to intervene in problem nations of the hemisphere, turned protector into policeman. While Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy (1935–45) sought a new appearance of partnership, including concessions to Latin American sovereignty, relations of power scarcely changed. US concerns expanded even more as the Cold War raised the specter of communism in Latin America.
Twentieth century US actions have betrayed deep ambivalence. Intervention to restructure debt or establish order, for example, also meant the US dictated terms by which Haiti, Cuba, Panama or Nicaragua might regain their autonomy. During the Cold War, professed ideals of freedom were sacrificed for stability of US political and economic interests. Bloody dictators were supported and popular movements suppressed with massive US aid, military support and CIA assistance. Leftist movements were destabilized by diplomacy and covert operations. Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua, perhaps, best illustrate this pattern of intimate conflict, but the scenario extended as far south as the Allende regime in Chile.
US individuals and corporations have also made investments in Latin America (again, especially in nearby states), and have encouraged trade and “development.” Loans and foreign aid have facilitated development programs, but have also insisted on neo-colonial dependencies and have created crushing debts. Medical, religious, scientific, agricultural, academic and even revolutionary assistance from the north each have created solutions and problems. Controlling disease or bolstering production, for example, raises new dilemmas if the US prevents population control or land reform.
Many US citizens, meanwhile, view Latin America through ignorance or stereotypes of laziness, instability or carefree abandon—combining Disney’s Three Caballeros (1945), noir nostalgia (Gilda, 1946; Havana, 1990), Carmen Miranda and news of seemingly endless war and poverty Despite serious Latin American voices in scholarship, the arts and media (Univision, Telemundo), stereotypes remain strong.
Perhaps the most tragic dimension of this misunderstanding and pain has been the experiences and interests that the United States and Latin America actually share—their creation within patterns of global migration and exchange in the early modern period, their experiences as post-colonial republics, links to Europe, Africa and Asia, pre-contact American cultures and ongoing hybridization, even their landscapes. Latin Americans have watched Hollywood movies (including condescending stereotypes); visited, immigrated and even sought refuge in the US; competed in resources, production and sports; shared art, food and literature; and faced common problems of environmental degradation, the growth and distribution of drugs or the spread of AIDS. Exchanges among Latin Americans and debates over the rainforest, efficient development or preferred media products provide alternative discourses the US often fails to hear.
Through all this, the powerfully ambivalent US position as insistent leader has often betrayed the very freedom the US proclaims. The cry “Yankee go home,” from decade to decade, nation to nation, reminds us that despite interventions that may resolve problems locally for many intervention itself—and the presumption of a right to do so—remains the problem.
Industry:Culture
The Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 left unresolved the methods by which desegregation should be carried out. Schooling presented especially difficult problems.
Since students have generally been assigned to the school nearest their homes, even if deliberate segregation is not practiced by school boards it may still reflect residential patterns. These patterns may be a legacy of segregation as black neighborhoods often clustered around black schools and white neighborhoods did likewise. But it could also follow from residential practices like restrictive covenants, common in northern cities, which kept African Americans out of certain neighborhoods and so, de facto, kept schools segregated. In a series of decisions (for example, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, 1971, and Keyes v. School District No. 1, 1972), the Supreme Court determined that students needed to be moved from one school to another in order to desegregate them. Busing became the basis for accomplishing this goal.
The decision to bus children away from their local schools, not merely in the South, caused great anger and led to violent demonstrations, most notably in Boston. It became one of the key elements in the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, provoking the swing of the white ethnic urban vote to the Republican Party and Nixon (who appointed anti-integrationists to the Supreme Court). Often overlooked in discussions of busing is the pivotal case of Milliken v. Bradley, in which the Nixon appointees kept the process of desegregation from extending from the local district to the state level, refusing to acknowledge that suburbs had developed through “white flight” to establish de facto segregation of inner-city residents. Not including the suburbs in the process of integration, the federal courts left the poorest whites and blacks to fight over limited city resources. Busing failed and segregation haunts both urban and suburban public schools.
Industry:Culture
Under the studio system, producers were generally employees who “ran” the movie, although some created a more personal set of choices and films. Since the end of the studio era, executive producers have played an ever-more important role in envisioning and assembling the production of film or television, especially its financing. Together with the directors, they overlook the budgeting of production and post-production of the project while line-producers oversee shoots. Independent film producers are often brokers between the filmmakers and the distributors. The Producers Guild of America emerged in 1966 from the Screen Producers Guild (founded 1950) and the Television Producers Guild. In 2000 it has more than 1,500 members worldwide.
Certain producers have emerged as more distinctive figures in New Hollywood, especially blockbuster film-makers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron. Others, like James Schamus and Ted Hope (Ice Storm, 1997; Happiness, 1998) or Oliver Stone, who also writes and directs, are associated primarily with idependent films. Male and female actors also appear as producers in film and television series.
The image of producers in media is often negative, as in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). Dustin Hoffman satirized government and media as a film producer asked to produce a “war” in the satirical Wag the Dog (1997).
Yet money is a real issue for films. While in many European countries, the government promotes some form of national cinema and television, in the US, government funding hardly exists for feature films. Producers must assemble a complex package of backing from studios and financial sources. Cable networks like HBO and Showtime have become major producers in the 1990s.
Industry:Culture
The Greek Orthodox Christian Church in the United States is under the spiritual and administrative jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate with headquarters in old Byzantion, Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, Turkey. The term “Greek,” used to describe the church, is applied in a cultural and historical sense. Even though early Christianity was born in Hellenistic Judaism, it was nurtured by and blossomed through the Greek language, the thought-world and missionary activity of the Greek-speaking people under Roman rule for at least the first four centuries of our era. Today Greek Orthodox is synonymous with Eastern Orthodox, and is used by several churches of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Doctrinally the Greek Orthodox Church subscribes to the faith of early Christianity as it developed on the basis of the holy scriptures, and the understanding and interpretation by important church elders, local councils and ecumenical synods, and the living experience of the church in history. Maintaining continuity with the past, without remaining static in its interpretation, is a major concern of the Greek Orthodox Church.
The earliest Greek Orthodox community in the United States was founded in 1864 in New Orleans, LA. It served the needs of Orthodox Christians of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Between 1864 and 1900, there were but a few thousand Greek Orthodox Christians. By 1922 there were 139 Greek Orthodox communities throughout the United States, but there was no administrative unity—no coordinating head—and they resembled Greek city-states in the American continent.
The real history of the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States starts in 1922 when the Greek Orthodox archdiocese was chartered and began to bring under its aegis all Greek Orthodox communities in the Americas. There are no official statistics about the number of active members in the church. At the end of 1997, there were 525 organized church communities served by 586 pastors, 35 priests with lay professions and several retired clergymen. The archdiocese is under one archbishop, five metropolitans and three auxiliary bishops.
Most of the church’s members between the early 1900s and 1945 were immigrants who came either from Greece or as refugees from Asia Minor, present-day Turkey Egypt and other Near-Eastern countries and Eastern Europe. A new wave of Greek immigrants in the 1960s contributed to the establishment of new communities and educational institutions. At present, the archdiocese supports a liberal arts college, a theological school, an institution for the training of Greek language teachers and church workers, several homes for the aged, a mission center, several day and many afternoon Greek language and culture schools.
The Greek Orthodox Church in the United States is presently going through a transition. While for many years the leadership of the church was in the hands of immigrant parents and grandparents, today it has passed to second- and third-generation Greek Americans. Furthermore, Greek, as the official liturgical language of the church, is slowly but steadily yielding to the use of English, especially in communities of Midwestern and Pacific states. The transition has not been conducted without some tension between the founders and the inheritors of the churches. But no schisms or conflicts have impeded the growth and influence of the church, whose membership today includes many who have joined it either through intermarriage or through personal spiritual quest.
The Greek Orthodox Church in the United States views their faith (doctrine, ethos and liturgical life) as old wine put into new wineskins (cf. Matthew 9.17).
Industry:Culture
Variant on a American Indian staple, popcorn (with butter and salt) has become intertwined with American fun—state fairs, the circus, sports and movies as well as family spectatorship. The latter includes holiday traditions like making caramel popcorn balls for Halloween (disappearing with concerns for the security of homemade goods) and stringing popcorn to decorate Christmas trees. Microwave popcorn has also been added as a snack in video chains and offices. Popcorn has been touted as a low-calorie, high-fiber food; reports on movie-theater popcorn’s fat and cholesterol in the 1990s, however, forced a change in preparation if not eating.
Industry:Culture
The NAS traces its roots to the 1880s, when it began as an organization to promote the protection and appreciation of birds. Although the NAS began expanding its activities into broader environmental concerns during the 1970s and 1980s, it remains identified primarily with the naturalist and bird artist John James Audubon. Hence, NAS is considered a non-threatening wildlife advocate, supported by weekend birders and moderate environmentalists who enjoy taking walks through NAS sanctuaries. Though nationally known, its controversial stances are few and far between.
Industry:Culture
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the primary federal agency responsible for enforcing environmental laws, including those governing air and water quality and the disposal of hazardous wastes. Created by an executive order issued by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, it consolidated disparate environmental programs previously distributed among several agencies. The EPA both issues the regulations to carry out the nation’s environmental laws and, in conjunction with the states, enforces those regulations. The EPA has been a lightning rod for criticism from conservatives, who have charged that the agency’s regulations are not based on science, are too expensive and stifle business. In 1995 one conservative member of Congress went so far as to compare the EPA with the Gestapo. Despite such attacks, the agency’s programs have remained intact. For example, attempts by President Ronald Reagan’s EPA administrator to weaken the agency resulted in her resignation.
Industry:Culture
The Greek chorus of American athletic events, cheerleading developed at the end of the nineteenth century in the Northeast and Midwest as an extra-curricular school leadership activity to help motivate and inspire class loyalty and good citizenship. Primarily for males, after the First World War and the growth of co-educational institutes it became predominantly female, although in the 1960s and 1970s up to 40 percent of cheerleaders were male. Cheerleaders are usually selected for their social and leadership qualities, physical skills and popularity Acolytes usually begin as mascots working with older cheerleaders.
In the last thirty years cheerleading—influenced by the popularity of gymnastics—has become more of an athletic event, developing under the auspices of several national associations which sponsor clinics, camps, workshops and nationally televised competitions since 1984. In 1999 there were an estimated 3,300,000 cheerleaders nationwide, half between the ages of twelve and seventeen (another 1.2 million under the age of twelve). The South and Midwest dominate, as they often do in competitions. In 1972 the Dallas Cowboys originated the first professional cheerleading squad.
Cheerleading is big business—supporting a star cheerleader can cost $5,000 per year, and supply companies reap millions. It is also big media—both the wholesome sensuality of students and more suggestive professional squads gain sports media attention, while stories of athlete—cheerleader romance, squad jealousies and even murderous mothers have been the stuff of teen movies for decades.
Industry:Culture
