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The term “Black Panthers” was used first in Lowndes County Alabama, during SNCC’s registration drives of 1963. Influenced by Malcolm X and SNCC’s shift to Black Power, many former civil-rights activists began to move away from the non-violent message associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. In a society where, according to H. Rap Brown (1969), “Violence is as American as apple pie,” non-violence seemed inappropriate.
Instead, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale followed the admonition of Mao Tse Tung that “political power comes through the barrel of a gun.” In many respects, these were rhetorical stances. In cities like Oakland and Philadelphia the Black Panthers were noted more for their community organizing (around demands for better jobs and housing, truly integrated schools and increased political power), than any actual use of military fire power. Law enforcement agencies, led by the FBI, endeavored to crush the movement leading to stand-offs and the arrest of many Black Panther leaders.
Debates about the impact of nationalist organizations like the Panthers continue. White liberals and some former civil-rights leaders tend to blame the Panthers and nationalism for destroying the civil-rights coalition. Those more sympathetic to the Panthers focus on the community organizing, and on the fact that the fear that the Panthers instilled in white Americans made the latter more willing to negotiate with civil-rights leaders.
Industry:Culture
The paramount court in the federal judiciary and the final arbiter of constitutional matters emanating from the parallel systems of state courts. Soon after its inception in 1789, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court legitimized its own constitutional authority through a series of decisions which still constitute the foundation of its power. In Marbuty v. Madison (1803) the Court enunciated and justified its power of judicial review and held a congressional statute unconstitutional. Fletcher v. Peck (1810) concluded that the federal courts could test the constitutionality of state laws.
Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) recognized the Court’s power to review the constitutionality of decisions made by state courts and the supremacy of such Supreme-Court decisions. Finally, in McCuiloch v. Maryland (1819), the Court validated Congress’ use of enumerated and implied legislative powers and the supremacy of the exercise of such national authority over conflicting state actions. As a result of these decisions the Court established its role as the constitutional monitor of actions by other branches of the national government and the delineator of federalism, determining the balance and interrelationship between national power and that of state governments.
Using the mechanism of deciding specific cases, the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution and shapes public policy. Most of its decisions do not engage the general public. But it still reaches enough politically charged rulings with broad impact to result in an institution tinged with controversy. Recurring contentious themes have involved federalism, the limits of legislative economic and social regulation, construing civil rights and liberties, protecting the expression of unpopular political viewpoints and preserving the rights of racial and religious minorities and of criminal defendants.
The Court supported the institution of slavery in a decision that eroded public confidence in its judicial integrity. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) ruled that slaveowners’ property rights enabled them to retain ownership of slaves taken into free states, upholding a Missouri law over Congress’ attempt to prohibit the spread of slavery into territories.
After the beginning of the twentieth century, the Court, usingconstitutional theories stressing freedom to contract and narrow the scope of the federal power to regulate interstate commerce, curtailed economic and social legislation passed by Congress and the states to ameliorate child labor, harsh working conditions and union organizing. This approach generally prevailed into the Great Depression of the 1930s which Congress attempted to alleviate with emergency social and economic programs. In a dramatic shift, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failed threat to “pack” the Court with sympathetic justices, the Court suddenly changed course and granted constitutional leeway to federal and state corrective New Deal programs.
The post-Second World War constitutional era is marked by continued latitude for legislative control of economic matters and a switch to a focus on questions of individual rights. Its rulings ushered in the Civil Rights movement. It struck down racially restrictive covenants in real property transactions, outlawed racially segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and desegregated other public places.
The Warren Court, attaining the high-water mark of progressive constitutional judicial activism, struggled with questions involving prayer in the public schools, taxpayer funding of religious schools, revolutionizing the rights of criminal defendants, gender discrimination, reapportionment, the death penalty and, in Roe v. Wade (1973), recognizing a privacy right for women to choose an abortion.
The Court has been able to maintain its credibility even though eventually it becomes immersed in all society’s political and moral controversies. It is the most highly respected and trusted by the general public of all government bodies. It accomplishes this despite a limited power to enforce its judgments and the secretive nature of its internal functioning.
Oral arguments, usually interrupted by piercing questions from the justices, are open to the public, as is access to the records of cases and printed briefs—written arguments—but Court proceedings are never televised. The entire process of considering and selecting cases for full review, discussing and voting on cases after oral argument and circulating drafts of opinions takes place in a strictly closed environment. The Court lacks tools to carry out directly many of its most significant rulings, especially those with broad impact.
It commands no army or police to force a resistant executive branch or state officials to implement its orders. It cannot levy taxes and appropriate money to fund change as legislatures can. It must rely on government officials to effectuate and assure compliance, prodded by the public, which acquiesces in the Court’s rulings and respects the rule of law.
The Court also preserves its credibility by using self-protective devices to avoid extremely contentious cases. It has almost total discretion in choosing cases. For example, for years it refused to accept any case that directly questioned the constitutionality of the Vietnam War; yet it acted quickly to rule that the government could not restrain the press from publishing the “Pentagon Papers”, which were critical of the war. Despite about 7,500 requests for review each term, the Court accepts about 90 for argument.
Many constitutional terms, such as “due process” and “speech,” are couched in vague, valueladen language. This provides justices with flexibility to reinterpret subjective constitutional language and enables successor Courts to overrule prior decisions and adjust constitutional doctrine to meet current social and economic needs. The practice of writing detailed, dissenting opinions allows justices to voice opposition to the majority, spurs legal debate and encourages optimism in discontented groups that, as society’s views or the composition of the Court changes, minority positions will prevail. The Court’s direction remains constantly intertwined in the current of history, but at times, courageously, it moves to the forefront and shapes history.
Industry:Culture
The sprawling of many postwar American cities has made the movement of massive numbers of people from home to work, school and other places an everyday planning nightmare, especially when done by car. Nevertheless, while mass commuting is constantly proposed as a solution to resultant dilemmas of cost, time and pollution, it is not an effective reality in most cities.
Some metropolitan areas, in fact, have inherited infrastructures of subways, trains and streetcars that, with buses, underpin extensive and viable systems in New York City, Boston, MA, Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA—although the latter is continually losing ridership. Other cities have invested in subway—bus combinations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century including Atlanta, GA, San Francisco, CA, Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD and Los Angeles, CA; some of these systems are only skeletal. Light-rail systems have also gained popularity as investments in Miami, FL and Portland, OR.
Yet, much of mass commuting in the end seeks to ameliorate the impact of the automobile through car-pooling, high-occupancy lanes on highways and incentives/disincentives for employers. Transportation-oriented development, in the longer run, may systematize connections to reduce automotive dependence, but American lifestyles and choices make effective mass commuting a tough sell politically and economically.
Industry:Culture
Stocks and bonds are the primary instruments for financing large corporations in the United States. In contrast to many European companies which depend primarily on bank loans for capital, American corporations rely heavily on public issuance of debt (bonds) and equity (stocks).
Bonds are IOUs of a company or government body. They typically pay a fixed (sometimes floating) rate of interest for a stated period of time. They may be backed by specific revenues or the credit quality of the entity. At maturity, the initial investment, or principal, is due to the investor. Stocks, on the other hand, represent a share of ownership in a company. Stockholders are entitled to a portion of any distributions and proceeds from a liquidation. Bonds are generally safer than stocks because interest on bonds must be paid before stockholders may receive any distributions. If a firm goes bankrupt, bondholders are paid before stockholders.
With added risk goes reward and thus stockholders stand to benefit more from success of the issuing company. A successful bond investment will provide little more than the stated interest and return of principal, while a stock investment’s return is only limited by the growth prospects of the company. Historically stocks have produced after-inflation returns of 7.2 percent, while bonds have earned just 3.7 percent (Henwood 1997:326).
Although stocks and bonds initially serve to finance an enterprise, there is an active secondary market for these financial instruments. The NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) and NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation) dominate the market for stock trading, while a network of institutional dealers dominate bond-market trading. The NYSE is an example of an organized exchange. In this environment, orders are transmitted to a central floor where brokers negotiate prices for their customers using an auction process. The NYSE dominates trading in the largest American companies. However, its conservative nature caused it to miss much of the explosive growth of computerized trading. The NASDAQ market is an example of an over-the-counter (OTC) trading environment. Here, brokers still represent customers, but trades are negotiated by phone or computer. The NASDAQ market includes technology firms such as Intel and Microsoft, as well as thousands of smaller firms that do not meet NYSE requirements.
The concept of “making a market” also defines exchanges. On the NYSE, “specialists” are charged with keeping an orderly market by providing liquidity, but most activity is between two customers. In the over-the-counter market, “market makers” hold themselves out as willing to buy and sell a security at almost any time. Thus, transactions take place between a customer and a market maker. The latter earns a spread—the difference between the price at which he or she will sell and that at which he or she will buy. While there are numerous regional exchanges, the NYSE and NASDAQ dominate US trading.
In the US, bonds are traded over-the-counter. Trading is led by financial institutions specializing in government debt. The yield on the thirty-year US Treasury Bond or “Long Bond” is a benchmark upon which numerous other rates such as savings-account and loan rates are set. Annual trading volume exceeds $100 trillion per year (Henwood 1997:25), but is primarily the domain of institutions using the market to manage their interest-rate exposure.
Investments in stocks and bonds were traditionally dominated by large institutions which managed pension plans, endowments and foundations. An acclaimed book, Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? (Schwed 1940), highlighted the fact that individuals faced an uphill battle in achieving investment success. The investing industry has seen broad changes since 1980. Greater tax incentives for investing, the growth of deep-discount (“do-it-yourself”) stockbrokers and the advent of the 401k retirement savings plan spurred heightened interest in investing and fueled the great bull market of the 1980s and 1990s. By 1983, 19 percent of households owned stock and over one-third owned mutual funds. This explosive growth has come on the heels of a decades-long bull market, meaning most new investors have never weathered a downturn in financial fortunes.
The tremendous growth of mutual funds has contributed to the democratization of investment. A mutual fund is an investment company that pools money in order to invest in a diversified portfolio of securities. This arrangement allows for professional management, economies of scale and exposure to a wide variety of investments, reducing overall risk (diversification). From its infancy in the 1970s, US mutual-fund assets have mushroomed from less than $100 billion to $4.5 trillion in 1997. Mutual funds hold 19 percent of all US stocks and a similar percentage of US bonds. They have become the primary vehicle for individual investment through the growth of defined-contribution (401k) plans.
Further investment democratization is coming in the form of Internet access to trading markets and greater individual control over pension assets (perhaps negatively affecting mutual funds). Brokerage commissions have plummeted as fullservice stockbrokers are threatened by deepdiscount brokerages that offer limited investment advice, but rockbottom commissions. Do-it-yourselfers have embraced Internet trading as an inexpensive way to gain exposure to surging equity markets (some firms even offer commission-free trades).
At the same time, traditionally defined benefit pensions managed by corporations are being replaced with defined-contribution plans that put the investment decision-making in individuals’ hands. While these developments have meant increasing control by investors over their savings, experts are concerned with the individual’s ability to remain calm during extended market downturns, the likes of which investors haven’t seen since the early 1970s.
Industry:Culture
When the Cuyahoga river caught fire and burned on June 22, 1969, it seemed a nadir for this industrial port on the Great Lakes. Yet Cleveland has also shown resilience in cleaning up its environment and rebuilding identities around downtown sports and cultural attractions, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while reexamining its complex ethnic heritages and relations to surrounding suburbs. Metropolitan population has grown again, to reach 2,911,683 in 1999. The Drew Carey Show (ABC, 1995–) has made it a weekly setting for a sitcom about work and neighborhoods that asserts Cleveland’s identity as a working-class city.
Industry:Culture
The Caribbean region comprises not only the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, but the nations that border the Caribbean Sea on the west and south. In the 1980s, this combination of mainland and insular territories was referred to by American policymakers as the “Caribbean Basin.” Whatever label is used, the history of US relations with the region has been characterized by an oscillation between benign neglect and all-tooactive intervention.
The Caribbean region was a prime venue for US imperial ambition during the first third of the twentieth century Between 1898 and 1933, the United States acquired Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal zone, and occupied Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. From 1933 to the end of the Second World War, the US eschewed military intervention in favor of supporting a series of client-states amenable to the free play of US economic interests.
The Cold War marked the advent of a new era of interventionism. During the 1950s and 1960s, the US put down nationalist ferment in Puerto Rico, helped overthrow a popularly elected leftist government in Guatemala and struggled to cope with the socialist regime brought to power by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Following the failure of covert military efforts to overthrow Castro’s regime, most notably at the Bay of Pigs, and the confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis, subsequent US policy aimed at the political and economic isolation of Cuba and the containment of revolutionary tendencies in other Caribbean societies. The Alliance for Progress program distributed considerable economic assistance to the former British colonies of the Lesser Antilles. In 1965 the United States invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent “another Cuba in the Caribbean.” A stabilized Caribbean emerged as a prime destination for North American tourists.
The United States’ informal Caribbean empire began to unravel in the 1970s. The Carter administration negotiated a treaty that would eventually return the Panama Canal to Panamanian sovereignty by the end of the century. Leftist regimes emerged in Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Panama and, towards the end of the decade, in Nicaragua and Grenada. Together with leftist insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, the US viewed these developments as the result of external machinations rather than internal processes.
During the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations succeeded in overthrowing these regimes through military invasion (see Grenada and Panama) and by supporting internal rebels (the Nicaraguan contras), in addition to providing assistance to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments. Renewed military intervention was accompanied by the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which provided economic assistance in return for increased receptivity to investment by US-based corporations.
The end of the Cold War resulted in deep cuts in economic aid and a new era of benign neglect in US-Caribbean relations, save for an intensified economic embargo on Cuba.
Even so, the Caribbean is more closely tied to the United States than ever before, as millions of immigrants from the Caribbean region now reside in the United States, where they add to the complex socio-cultural diversity of the contemporary American landscape.
Industry:Culture
The search for the origins of rock ’n’ roll leads into the thickets of American history including tangles of race relations, population movements, class politics and regionalisms. This much is clear: rock ’n’ roll developed from the mixing of African Americans and white rural folk musics in American cities after the Second World War.
Who deserves credit—and blame—remains disputed. The single indisputable fact about the roots of rock ’n’ roll is the influence of African American musical forms, from Africa through Southern churches to the blues to electrified rhythm and blues. Throw in the crosspollination of white folk and country musics, and jazz, especially its swing and jump-blues variations.
Dating the origins of rock ’n’ roll is no less difficult. Were Charlie Christian and TBone Walker playing rock ’n’ roll guitar in 1940? Was “Rocket ’88” (1951) the first rock ’n’ roll record? Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (1947)? Listen to 1940s recordings by Lionel Hampton or Hank Williams and you will hear at least hints of rock ’n’ roll, if not the real deal.
Part of the confusion comes from the fact that from the start (whenever that was) rock ’n’ roll already varied, especially by region, although with wartime and postwar mass migration and mass media, no region remained self-contained for long. This crossfertilization, in fact, defined rock ’n’ roll. While Elvis Presley revered the bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Howlin’ Wolf listened to country yodeler Jimmie Rodgers.
Rather than focusing on rock ’n’ roll solely as a musical form, it is more productive to see it as a social phenomenon created when white teenagers in cities and expanding suburbs began to listen to black music in large numbers. The signal moment for this development came when disc jockey Alan Freed titled his Cleveland radio show the Moondog Rock ’n’ Roll House Party (1952). Thereafter, racially mixed bands and audiences gathered—not without controversy—in northern cities for gala performances.
Rock ’n’ roll, more than any other single cultural phenomenon, defined the new $10 billion a year teen market amid postwar affluence.
Rock ’n’ roll is also a business. Most early rock ’n’ roll was recorded and distributed by small independent labels like Sun in Memphis and Chess in Chicago. Soon major record labels, seeing the profits to be made, began to buy up artists’ contracts. Most famously in 1956, RCA paid a then-staggering $35,000 to bring Elvis Presley into their fold. Thereafter, Elvis was the King of rock ’n’ roll; his controversial performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (where cameras only recorded his movement above the waist) signaled, as the song goes, “Rock ’n’ roll is here to stay” Within the business, racial exploitation and segregation abounded. Alan Freed’s name appeared on the songwriting credits for Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline,” assuring radio play and Freed’s share in the profits. Even more egregious were the lame, tame versions recorded by white “artists,” most notoriously Pat Boone’s insipid cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” The arrival of England’s Beatles on American shores in 1964 rescued rock ’n’ roll from the oblivion into which white crooners and corporate executives had been steering it. Paying explicit homage to rock’s African American pioneers, the Beatles placed rock ’n’ roll back on the American creative and social landscapes. Woodstock (1969) signaled that rock ’n’ roll was central to a generation, an entertainment industry and, indeed, American life. Since then the fusion of musical forms which created rock ’n’ roll has proceeded apace, as every possible transmogrification creative artists could come up with has continued constantly to revitalize rock ’n’ roll, often when it seems most stagnant, and even when the purpose of rock ’n’ roll seems increasingly to be no more than selling beer and cars.
Industry:Culture
William Hubbs Rehnquist (1924–) was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court by President Nixon in 1972, largely because of his impeccable conservative record. He used his years in the Court before he was elevated to chief justice by President Reagan in 1986 to demonstrate his conservative views, extraordinary intellect and collegiality. Throughout his tenure at the Court he has maintained his commitment to supporting state sovereignty over federal power, interpreting state authority to regulate individuals expansively constraining the power of the federal courts to review state criminal-law convictions, curtailing the constitutional protections granted criminal defendants by the Warren Court, limiting affirmative action and eliminating the privacy right of women to choose abortion.
Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy took hold on the Court in the 1980s, when a conservative majority emerged following Reagan and Bush appointments. Rather than exercising judicial restraint, as many conservative justices profess, the Rehnquist Court has practiced a conservative-oriented judicial activism that has successfully continued the process, begun in the Court under Warren Burger, of limiting the impact of precedents from the more liberal era of the Warren Court while not explicitly overruling most of them. The Rehnquist Court welcomes cases brought by groups seeking to promote conservative agendas, such as the Washington Legal Foundation, while those pursuing progressive causes are increasingly relegated to state courts where they often find more receptive judicial audiences.
Industry:Culture
Whether John Wayne fighting the Indians or the Marlboro Man hawking tobacco, the cowboy has been a consummate symbol of American individualism and freedom worldwide. The legend was shaped by generations of penny novels, western movies and television shows (which contemporary cowboys have also watched). “Cowboy” conjures up a rugged white male on horseback, tanned by wind and work, drinking, smoking and fighting when he comes to town. Unfortunately this imagery—and the slick boots, dance music and dude ranches that commercialize it—overlook the diversity and problems of past and present. “Cowboys” in the past included African Americans and Latinos, as well as white loners, in work that was often brutal, ill-rewarded and led not to ownership, but to continual labor and loneliness in a world especially hard on women and wives. As rail and trucks have replaced cattle drives and agro-business has favored fodderfattened beef, being a cowboy remains an underpaid job and a demanding lifestyle, requiring organization, mechanical skills, endurance and knowledge of nature (horses, cows, weather). This way of life, even while changing, is celebrated in rodeos, the arts and museums. Meanwhile, students of the West allow us to understand how complicated cowboy life actually has been. The dilemmas of late twentieth-century cowboys have been poignantly chronicled in Jane Kramer’s (1977) The Last Cowboy and novelist Larry McMurtry’s In a Narrow Grave (1968).
Industry:Culture
State capital and home of the University of Texas, Austin combines old Texas history and politics with a cosmopolitan and independent flavor. Austin’s relaxed ambience has made it into a “hot” city for youth and music culture, as well as metropolitan expansion (the metropolitan area is predicted to soar from 999,936 to 1,656,298 by 2020). Growth restrictions and environmental issues have become major local concerns in the early twenty-first century.
Industry:Culture
