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Comprehending the American West is a Herculean task. This essay will take the West to include the tier of Great Plains states from Texas to the Dakotas and everything westward, including Alaska and Hawai’i. This categorization easily makes the West the largest of America’s regions, comprising nineteen states and well over half the nation’s territory. This enormous and diverse area is in some views not a region at all, but a conglomeration of very different regions: the desert Southwest; the Pacific Northwest; the Great Plains; and the mountain interior. But the West offers unity as well as diversity.
What are the unifying characteristics of this vast region? Aridity is one widespread feature of a generally difficult, inhospitable climate. Most of the West is also relatively empty; the landscape is imposing, both in its grandeur and its harshness. The West is home to America’s oldest, largest and best-known national parks, and is the center of the nation’s tourism and recreation industries. The federal government owns and controls a large portion of Western land.
It is the most multicultural part of the country with the largest concentrations of Hispanic, Asian and Native Americans. Virtually all of America’s Indian reservations are located in the West. Surprisingly it is also the most urban region, with the highest percentage of its people living in cities.
A large part of what makes the West cohere is its history. For most Americans the West is defined primarily by its frontier heritage. The West is the land of explorers and fur trading “mountain men,” gold rushes and Indian conflicts, cowboys, overland trails and hardy pioneers. This “West of the imagination” became the focal point for an immense popular-culture industry incessantly portrayed in art and music, a vast literature and above all in movies and on television.
The contemporary West, then, combines mythological popular-culture nostalgia and modern reality. Nonetheless, change has come to the West in a particularly dramatic way in the past half century. For most of its history the West was in a subaltern position— politically economically and culturally dominated by the East. The Second World War was its watershed. With the growing importance of Asia and the Pacific Rim, the West became a central, and often even pace-setting region.
The growth, maturity and influence of the West in contemporary American culture can be traced in many areas. Politically the New Right, the main development in American politics since the decline of New Deal liberalism, is a Western phenomenon. Barry Goldwater, who began the movement, is from Arizona; Ronald Reagan, from California, was its culmination. Richard Nixon, a pivotal figure of recent American politics, was another Californian. Prior to the Second World War no American president had been from the West. Since the Second World War, only Kennedy, Carter and Clinton have not had western affiliations (and Kennedy ran with Lyndon Johnson).
The tilting of American political power westward was propelled by population shifts.
The West has been the most rapidly growing region in America for decades. California surpassed New York as the nation’s most populous state in the 1960s. Texas will soon rank second. Los Angeles recently overtook Chicago as the nation’s second-largest city and San Diego, San Antonio and Phoenix continue to push upwards.
Economically since the Second World War, the West has left behind its colonial status as a plundered province. Three Pacific wars—the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam—promoted westward shifts in military spending and the defense industry. A highly symbiotic relationship exists between the West, the military and America’s emergence as a global superpower, as San Diego and Seattle attest.
Moreover, America’s military might was closely tied to “big science.” Again the West played a prominent role: from Berkeley to Los Alamos and Alamagordo to Silicon Valley, it has been a twentieth-century laboratory. In addition, the West is America’s main energy producer. During energy shortages in the 1970s and 1980s, energy-oriented cities like Denver and Houston boomed.
The West is now arguably the nation’s cultural leader. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood was a major shaper and exporter of American culture, and California was already pioneering lifestyles that would become standard nationwide after the Second World War. Disneyland is an American and global cultural icon, as is Las Vegas. The counterculture of the 1960s originated in the San Francisco Bay area, and influential American rock music, from the Beach Boys to the Doors to acid rock, came from California. In the 1990s, Seattle has been the home of alternative rock and grunge lifestyles. From the popularity of sun tanning and outdoor barbequing to the television programs Dallas and Baywatch, from Pacific Northwest or “cowboy chic” influences in fashion to California, Tex-Mex and Southwest cuisine, the West has set the standards for American popular culture in recent decades.
At the same time, America’s growing environmentalism also has Western roots.
Environmental symbols, including the wolf, the buffalo, the grizzly bear, the redwood and the spotted owl, are mostly Western. America’s leading environmental advocates have come from the West and crucial environmental battles have taken place there.
The West has been one of the most dynamic regions of the country in the past half century. Its vitality is reflected in a lively and widely varied Western regionalism.
Examples include the flourishing of Western literature, especially Hispanic, Native and Asian American variations; the New West History; a resurgent popularity of country and western music; influential Southwestern and postmodern architecture and interior design; and Western art and photography. All of these factors make the West arguably the most intriguing and important of the nation’s regions. Americans have always been fascinated with the historic West. Now the contemporary West is at the center of attention too.
Industry:Culture
Concerts constitute a crucial part of American postwar cultural life; much be can learned from the choices of the viewer. In most larger American cities, there are distinct venues for classical music, jazz and rock ’n’ roll music. Increasingly touring artists who don’t fit neatly into these categories have also ventured into these spaces. Ranging from individual performers or pianists playing just one night to a symphony doing a season, concert halls are a center for cultural activity (and social organization by class, age, race and gender). Unlike clubs, customers sit in assigned seating, with a traditional proscenium stage in a hall designed with acoustics in mind. It is a more formal way to hear music and hence, even in the casual twentieth century people tended to dress up and make an appearance.
Many attempts have been made to reach out to non-traditional or younger audiences.
One of the ways in which city agencies have done this is by sponsoring free out-of-door concerts in the summertime. In New York, for example, such luminaries as Luciano Pavarotti and Diana Ross have performed concerts outdoors, as have many other lesserknown singers and musicians. In smaller towns, churches and meeting halls are often used as spaces for concerts—for local performers as well as performers on tours. On college campuses, concert halls are an important part of campus life, as artistic directors try to bring in acts that will serve both the students and the local residents. Touring agencies and agents have helped to make this aspect of the music industry a large part of commerce that helps to sells albums.
Industry:Culture
Consumer research and flexible media have allowed manufacturers and service-delivery firms to target mass marketing towards especially receptive groups, generally divided in terms of age, gender, class and race.
Age remains the most noticeable division, as producers seek to appeal to demographics known for high disposable income, for example teenagers for movies, music and clothes, adults for automobiles and household goods, or older ages for retirement, travel, insurance and pharmaceuticals. Families also constitute an advertising target for minivans and vacations in Disneyworld. These strategies, however, entail both advertising and placement—CBS draws an older audience, for example, while Reader’s Digest reaches the same group.
This identification of buyers implies divisions of class as well: advertisements in the elite New Yorker or Forbes differ from those in tabloid newspapers. Similarly information on television and movie appeal allow for both commercial sponsorship and product placement that associates brand names with lifestyles. Catalog delivery in elite postal zones provides a constant measure of status differences in consumption.
Niches are also defined by gender, evident in ads that posit women as domestic decision-makers (i.e. food, laundry and appliances, etc.). By contrast, advertisements for trucks, alcohol and cigars evoke masculine images of ruggedness, independence or sophistication. Gay marketing is relatively recent, but gay periodicals have begun to package their clients in terms of both sexuality and disposable income, as well as offering “gay voyeur” ads open to multiple interpretations.
Race has proven more controversial: while television shows and magazines allow African American companies to target black consumers, neighborhood groups have also decried billboards and advertisements pushing cigarettes and alcohol within inner-city neighborhoods, spurring grassroots opposition in cities Baltimore. Ethnic marketing has not been so clearly defined within American assimilationism, although catalogs and travel agencies evoke nostalgic identification for Irish, Germans, Italians, etc. New immigrants who constitute distinct language or transnational communities, however, are reached through mass media like Spanish newspapers, cable stations and mail solicitations like those that offer special phone rates for calls to Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Niche marketing is perceived as a threat not only because of its general divisiveness, but because of the way it links mass media products to ever narrower segments of the population. Hence, “family” films or teen flicks replace movies of interest to diverse populations. Electronic printing and Internet sales, however, have permitted websites that adapt to individual shopping patterns or catalogs tailored to previous purchases— mass marketing for individuals.
Industry:Culture
Consumer research began in 1926 with F.J. Schlink after a series of articles in the New Republic underscored concerns with reliability and value. Schlink promoted scientific testing and published rankings for a wide range of products; his employees left after labor disputes in 1936 to found the Consumer’s Union and the magazine Consumer Reports, published monthly for 4.5 million subscribers. Consumer Reports accepts no advertising and promises rigorous objective testing of automobiles, appliances and other products.
Their dominance has been challenged since 1971 by J.D. Powers and Associates, a private firm that bases ranking on user surveys and also has closer ties with corporations who may buy their data for advertising. Issues of consumer safety as well as perceptions of unreliable manufacturing have made both sources important to educated consumers beyond everyday evaluations based on personal knowledge or brand name loyalty. This competition also suggests American cultural divisions between elite scientific observation and popular choice, as well as the complexities of a consumerism that promotes its own commercial self-evaluation.
Industry:Culture
Contemporary photography can be traced to the 1930s and 1940s with a burgeoning documentary style exemplified by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans’ Great Depression photographs of rural Americans. The work of Ansel Adams too, though not strictly documentary, allowed Americans to view their country through a new lens that saw detail and beauty in the American landscape and photography itself.
The American cityscape was also important. In New York, photographers like Helen Levitt documented neighborhood life, Berenice Abbot photographed the city view-byview and Margaret Bourke-White chose to focus on the art-deco architecture of the city.
Crime photographers like Weegee (Arthur Fellig) exposed a more lurid side of the city Robert Capa, meanwhile, became known as a photographer of the human faces of war until he himself was killed by a landmine in Vietnam in 1954.
Beginning in the 1940s, the combination of photographic and textual material was popularized with Life magazine and photo-essayists like W. Eugene Smith, the photo agency Magnum Photos, fashion photographers like Irving Penn and the publication of many author/photographer collaborations, such as James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In the 1990s, this combination of image and text has been adopted by photographers Carrie Mae Weems, Duane Michals and Martha Rosler to create vastly differing political and personal statements.
In the 1950s, beat-generation photographers saw a country poised on the edge of the civil-rights struggles and the social upheaval of the 1960s. In reaction, photographer Robert Frank published The Americans (1969), a series of images that subverted the comfortable, politically promoted vision of the USA. While Frank’s work attracted criticism, his contemporaries, Roy De Carava and Lee Friedlander, further developed this photographic commentary on the social landscape. In the 1960s, photographer Diane Arbus continued this work with an eye for the peculiar. She and others, like William Eggleston and Garry Wino-grand, photographed with irony and cultural criticism.
Moving into the 1970s and 1980s, a highly staged and newly controversial photography emerged. Richard Avedon brought celebrity and fashion into the equation.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s male nudes attracted acclaim and criticism. His critics, including several congresspersons, lambasted the work for being “pornographic,” and questioned the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding policies. Not quite as politically controversial, Cindy Sherman’s work takes a feminist look at roles and disguises.
Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1990) cast her as the main character in imagined filmstrips.
In the 1990s, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann departed from the staged image, returning to photography’s documentary aspect. Goldin’s color images of her friends, many of them showgirls and drag queens, contrast with Mann’s black-and-white images of her nude children. Both Goldin and Mann explore issues of gender and sexuality while expressing an understanding of the construction of familial and community relationships.
There are many important image-makers who cannot be included in this narrow overview, and the medium of photography incorporating video, digital, installation and photo-collage work is in a state of continuous redefinition.
Industry:Culture
Continuing drought brought widespread famine to the Horn of Africa during the early 1990s, leading the United Nations to send humanitarian aid. By December 1992, however, warring Somali factions were diverting UN sanctioned food-relief shipments to black markets, so President Bush dispatched 30,000 American troops to Somalia to protect food deliveries.
The deployment of troops became controversial as tensions arose between UN and US officials in Somalia, while Somali factions began to fight back. It became clearer that American officials did not know enough about the region and its peoples to make the mission work smoothly These problems were exacerbated when President Clinton expanded the American military’s mandate to restoring order and state building. When eighteen marines were killed fighting the forces of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and television cameras recorded a mob dragging an American body down the street, public support for the mission deteriorated. Clinton withdrew all troops in 1994, and remained wary of using American force in Africa, something that would have dire consequences when genocide began in Rwanda.
Industry:Culture
Controversial 1973 decision of the US Supreme Court announcing women’s constitutional right to an abortion based on the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy.
Adopting a much-criticized trimester analysis, the court struck down Texas’ at criminal abortion legislation (and, by inference, those of other states) outlawing all abortions except those necessary to save the mother’s life. The decision denounced as unconstitutional laws that restricted a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, but permitted states limited regulatory rights in the second trimester and allowed complete proscription of abortions in the third trimester, after the fetus reached viability.
Industry:Culture
Conventional wisdom defines androgyny as a combination of traditionally feminine and masculine elements. While androgyny is conceived of most often in terms of clothing, it also may extend to include mannerisms and behavior. Mainstream America, in general, which tends towards biological determinism, understands androgyny in terms of fashion and does not recognize it as a legitimate gender identity. Conversely many feminist and queer theorists who do not view gender as necessarily dichotomous give androgyny a place on the spectrum of gender possibilities.
Androgyny as a contemporary fashion grew out of the 1950s bohemian and workingclass youth styles to become most notably embodied in the male hippie of the 1960s, who rebelliously grew out his hair in girlish locks. In the 1970s, lesbian feminists rejected established gender categories and adopted a “unisex” uniform, which consisted of short hair, slacks and an absence of make-up. In the 1980s, lesbian commentators, favoring a revival of gender categories, exposed the lesbian “androgyny” of the 1970s as an imitation of working-class men’s attire.
As fashion codes gradually relaxed over the twentieth century androgyny has become increasingly acceptable as a style for American women today. However, while conventional symbols of masculinity, such as suits, short hair and pants, have become fair game for women, men still risk persecution for wearing conventional signs of femininity, such as skirts, high heels and barrettes.
Industry:Culture
Conventionally defined as individuals who have undergone a sex change operation in order to become a member of the opposite sex. Yet, this definition is imposed upon transexuals from the largely hostile American mainstream; many transexuals themselves disagree with it.
First, there are many degrees of transexuality which some transexuals feel are obscured by the conventional definition. Certain individuals who identify themselves as transexual do not desire medical intervention. Others have undergone some medical procedures, such as hormone treatments, yet do not wish to undergo surgical procedures. Finally, some have undergone an entire sex-change operation.
Second, the conventional definition assumes that a transexual changes from one sex to another. This idea is based on a sex dichotomy which only concedes of two possibilities: male and female. Some scientists, such as Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, have argued that there are more than two sexes.
Mainstream American culture generally considers transexuality to be indicative of abnormal or poorly adjusted individuals. Owing to their deviant status, transexuals continually face the threat of brutality from those who hate and fear them. Also, the medical establishment requires transexuals to undergo psychological testing before treatment is given. It is considered in the best interests of transexuals to be thoroughly screened before they are allowed to obtain the medical help that they desire.
Unfortunately this process is often experienced as difficult and demeaning by transexual people themselves.
Industry:Culture
Corporation that pioneered the use of background music to encourage efficiency in the workplace (and later to create a soothing atmosphere in stores). In the early 1920s, General Squier merged “music” with his favorite “high-tech” company Kodak, to name his new company which first supplied music for elevators. This music, characterized by re-recordings of popular hits at soothing volumes, using strings in muted tones, barely noticeable at one moment and omnipresent at another, came to be known as muzak.
Ironically Muzak’s articulation of background music has influenced avant-garde rock artist Brian Eno and Ambient music.
Industry:Culture
