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Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, Marshall Fields, NiemanMarcus and other stores emerged in cities across the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as palaces of desire. They not only offered myriad goods, but also created a powerful sense of need within the household, especially for its ideal shopper—the middle-class housewife.
Macy’s filled nine stories with goods, becoming a mythic reference in movies (Miracle on 34th Street, 1947) and a New York City, NY institution through its Thanksgiving parade. It even offered its own bank.
Great stores and their owners became philanthropists and tastemakers. Marshall Fields was not only a store, but also a Chicago, IL philanthropist after whom the city’s natural history museum is named. In smaller cities, families and stores proved just as central— Rich’s in Atlanta, GA, Nieman-Marcus in Dallas, TX, Adler’s in Savannah, GA— many reflecting the vision of pioneering Jewish merchants and their families. Less prestigious stores like J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck extended consumption outside the city through catalogs that offered clothes, tools, household goods and even prefabricated houses.
As suburbs expanded, department stores vaulted from downtown to malls. Suburban stores also had a new style—cleaner, more open and interwoven with other shops. In the 1960s, downtown department stores faced further challenges to urban life—stores in the South were boycotted to end segregation that had meant that an African American woman could not even try on a hat. In the 1970s, Sunday openings pitted the rhythms of downtown shopping against suburban weekends, forcing older stores to adapt amid recessions.
Many institutions have disappeared: Wanama-ker’s in Philadelphia, PA, I. Magnum, B. Altman’s and others, sometimes consolidated into chains but no longer an emblem of urban triumph. Competition has also challenged the experience of shopping—service, comfort and overwhelming goods—which Rowland Macy and Joseph Wanamaker created.
Discount shopping represents a particularly interesting development. In the 1960s and 1970s, new chains offered less service and lower prices: K-Mart, Woolco, Walmart, Target, Zayres. Such stores had won crucial concessions on manufacturers’ rights to control prices that challenged their more expensive competitors. Later, hangar-like warehouse stores like Sam’s, BJs and Costco extended this discount mania, including higher-end goods. Manufacturers’ outlets also offered bargains (seconds, discontinued and specially produced lines) for careful consumers, creating not only malls, but “regions” of outlet centers. Department stores have competed with outlets, even as they used them to dispose of post-sale goods in specialty outlets run by Sak’s, Nieman’s, Nordstrum’s and Penney’s among others.
Department stores also changed in the 1980s and 1990s. New York saw the construction of the extremely expensive new Barney’s (later in receivership), while Japanese stores such as Takashimaya, Yaohan and Mizoguchi appeared in major urban centers. Nieman’s and others expanded nationwide. Yet, other comprehensive chain stores gnawed into individual departments as well—Williams Sonoma for foodware, for example. Meanwhile, new catalogs offer alternatives for two-career families too busy to shop, while targeting specialist consumers rather than the general shoppers of the department store. Internet sales represent an emergent threat as well.
Hence, department stores, once monarchs of the city are now competitors in a fragmented and sometimes placeless world of consumption. Some have tried out cableshopping channels (or worked with established ones like HSC or QVC for special events). Others have highlighted their exclusiveness, historic charms, or convenience.
Macy’s legacy has adapted to both circumstances and imagination.
Industry:Culture
Madison Avenue is a 5.5-mile stretch that bisects Manhattan Island, New York City.
Madison Avenue boasts glamorous hotels (Biltmore, Ritz-Carlton), fashionable shops and upscale residences in the blocks just east of Central Park. It has an international reputation as an advertising and public-relations hotspot. Ironically only a handful of agencies (Young and Rubicam and BBDO) have headquarters here. Regardless, New York City agencies boast $38 billion in annual advertising billings. The name was also linked to the American satirical magazine MAD, as well as many films.
Industry:Culture
Magazine created in the late 1950s, promoting a sophisticated urban bachelor lifestyle.
Others suggested that its then near-nude centerfold endorsed prurient sensibilities that downgraded women. In the 1960s, Playboy clubs emerged, with waitresses clad in revealing bunny costumes; while feminist Gloria Steinem chronicled her life as a bunny some bunnies themselves argued that the job provided money and opportunities before the clubs languished in the 1980s. Playboy’s editor, Hugh Hefner, has attempted to personify the magazine’s ideals as an outspoken philosopher endorsing both pleasure and consumerism, while Playboy interviews with major figures have produced political news, justifying many a man who claimed to read Playboy “only for the articles.”
Industry:Culture
Magazine founded in 1922 by George and Lila Acheson Wallace, offering a steady diet of condensed reprints, life stories, news features, selfimprovement advice and jokes.
Reader’s Digest now reaches over 16 million households and appears in multiple languages in the US and abroad. Nonetheless, it is often satirized for its “good,” conservative values, which let it become associated with doctors’ offices, the elderly and “middle America.” Reader’s Digest’s condensed books, in particular, seemed to some to devalue reading and literature in favor of ease.
Industry:Culture
Major urban monuments of the late twentieth century reflecting public support for the arts and strategies for competitive urban development. Earlier nineteenth and twentiethcentury centers for theater, opera, symphony and ballet often depended on individual philanthropy and the power of collective elite representation evoked by “opening night” at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. By the 1950s, the Met’s move to Lincoln Center resulted in slum clearance and neighborhood revitalization funded by city and federal revenues. Both smaller (Louisville’s Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts) and larger cities (Washington’s Kennedy Center and Philadelphia’s $240 million new center) have used these monuments to promote urban prestige and downtown development, alongside other features of the commoditized metropolis, including stadiums, festival marketplaces and historical theme parks.
Industry:Culture
Managed-care programs, entailing the integration of insurance and care providers with fixed rates for services (and sometimes pharmaceuticals) as well as health incentives (physical fitness programs, etc.) came to dominate American healthcare in the late twentieth century. While praised for controlling costs and sometimes rationalizing care, they have also been criticized for their drive to keep expenses at a minimum and their corporate remodeling of the relationship and autonomy of doctors, nurses and patients.
Industry:Culture
Many American cities took shape around ports that provided outlets for trade and later facilitated the growth of industry as produce and heavy goods were shipped around the world from factories in Philadelphia, PA, Buffalo, NY, Chicago, IL and San Francisco, CA. In the late twentieth century these same cities—and others—rebuilt their waterfronts as new urban recreational and commercial centers.
With the end of the Second World War mobilization, waterfront landscapes became a grimy jumble of warehouses, factories, ships and piers that provided the dark and dangerous ambience of many film noir classics. Indeed, the gritty construction and labor conflicts of these ports remained a hallmark of urban success, epitomized in the classic labor movie On the Waterfront (1954). Deindustrialization, coupled with a shift to container transport that demanded different, centralized facilities articulated by trucking and train, changed this narrative radically by the 1960s. Rust and abandonment eventually claimed many waterfronts, while pollution choked rivers and harbors.
By the 1970s and 1980s, large stretches of centrally located post-industrial land and the recreational and aesthetic potential of reclaimed water began to experience large-scale revitalization across the US. Some projects made use of the functions and buildings of the older port areas. Fishing facilities in smaller ports (and occasional larger ones, like San Francisco) added color and culinary interest. Markets were transformed into festival marketplaces in Boston (Fanieul Hall), New York (South Street Seaport embracing Fulton Fish Market) and Baltimore, MD’s Inner Harbor, juxtaposing local historical themes with placeless tourist franchises and a smorgasbord of restaurants. A smaller city Savannah, GA, refashioned cotton warehouses into shops and services, while Monterey, California, preserved the literary landmark of Cannery Row. Elsewhere, ample pier buildings have been turned into restaurants, dance clubs and recreational zones. Through these facilities, many cities also covet the fame and markets of tourist cruises.
Other developments have reclaimed industrial space for public parks and plazas.
Aquaria, maritime museums and sports stadiums (Pittsburgh, PA, Cleveland, OH, Baltimore) have also emphasized the waterfront as a focal attraction for tourists and local residents alike. In some further cases, reuse of government/military facilities provides opportunities for new urban planning—Governor’s Island in New York City or Alcatraz and the Presidio in San Francisco. Even older recreational complexes that would be anathema to current environmental planning have taken on period charm in the attractions of the Atlantic City, NJ boardwalk (with new casinos) or the amusements of the Santa Monica (Los Angeles) pier (which has figured prominently in movies and television, e.g.
Falling Down, 1993).
Residential development also has transformed older industrial buildings while adding high-rise condominia and luxury hotels that combine convenience and views. The most successful cases create new cities within cities, in which yuppies support urban stores and services that become attractions for outsiders—the hallmark of Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco, among others. Waterfronts also provide strong images of the city for mass media—via both active urban life and dramatically framed skylines. As competition for tourists and investments eclipses past rivalries for shipping itself, other cities have achieved only partial success—an uneasy collage of malls and attractions amid crumbling toxic skeletons of the industrial city Even in successful redevelopments, disconnection from nearby inner-city populations and the socio-economic difficulties of deindustrialization beyond the port remain problems.
Industry:Culture
Many Americans probably believe censorship is not only wrong, but also illegal under the Bill of Rights. Yet, in practice, many are also willing to accept government censorship in times of national crisis or military emergency. Jonathon Green, author of the Encyclopedia of Censorship, labels a second, more controversial censorship as “castration”—the ability of some to determine what may be read or disseminated and who may see it. This may entail protection of “innocents,” especially children, or avoid offending sensibilities of some groups (New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s claim that a 1999 exhibit of British art, “Sensations,” offended Catholics). Censorship tends to focus less on political materials than sexual ones, although hate literature and violence have also become points of debate. The issue of censorship, however, has been highly politicized in government actions, court and legislative actions and citizen response.
Censorship for reasons of security established in the World Wars, was institutionalized when President Truman allowed peacetime agencies to classify materials as “Top Secret,” etc. While this system was subsequently modified, the Defense Department and other government bureaus control massive amounts of information, a position increasingly complicated by computers and telecommunications technology. The 1966 Freedom of Information Act allowed citizens to view much government information on themselves and, with restrictions, on other public figures. In other cases, though, like the 1971 “Pentagon Papers” case, a whistle-blower and news organization exposed secret information on American involvement in Vietnam as a form of civil disobedience that was ultimately upheld in the Supreme Court. Still, news media and citizens accepted restrictions on coverage during the Grenada invasion and the Gulf War.
Censorship with regard to taste and morality proves more divisive. The US lacks formal federal censorship for most domestic media, although federal laws have controlled distribution of obscene materials by mail (under the 1873 Comstock Act), importation of some materials and child pornography. These laws have faced test cases to determine obscenity versus free speech and art. These include the 1933 declaration that Joyce’s Ulysses was art, not subject to the Tariff Act, and the 1957 Roth decision, which established a standard based on the interpretations of “average persons” (tested two year’s later by Grove Press’ distribution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover).
Often, though, obscenity and censorship involve more local actions and standards— whether to display certain magazines, buy library books or locate sexually charged activities in areas against “community standards.” Film censorship has also been the purview of states and cities: the phrase “banned in Boston” could be used to endorse a risqué film elsewhere. Censorship was even applied to newsreels before this was banned by court decisions.
Local schools and libraries have been especially sensitive areas. While sex is frequently an issue, battles over circulation and textbooks have ranged from protests against racial stereotypes to fundamentalist attacks on the wizardy of Harry Potter or evolution. The American Library Association’s 1939 Bill of Rights challenged decades of local censorship of morality taste and politics in local libraries, framing these institutions as open beacons of information and debate. Schools, however, have been subject to powerful lobbying by parents and organized groups in local institutions and statewide adoption of textbooks. Again, censorship arguments play on the special vulnerability of the child. Administrators also manipulate decisions and opportunities: censorship of highschool newspapers has grown since the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlemeier. Before Hazelwood, school-sponsored publications were permitted when “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.” Despite these complex and contested structures of censorship and the Freedom of Speech issues debating both security and cultural claims, institutional self-censorship has also been prominent in American life. These include production codes for Hollywood and comics, media ratings of products and audiences—whether films, video games or music and control devices like the V-chip or various forms of parental control for sale to deal with informational issues of the Internet. Often, these entail debates on deeply divisive issues like sexuality and violence or their impacts.
Debates sometimes overlook subtler and yet troubling questions like those of ABC and Disney, where media conglomerates have created a climate in which news hostile to the corporate culture seldom is broadcast. Political correctness also evokes self-censorship.
Omissions accepted so as not to offend (gay parents in elementary school books) or because of perceptions of audience (lack of minority figures or interracial romance on network television) remind us that self-censorship has a deep toll when significant issues are never discussed This is epitomized in the dramatic AIDS slogan: “Silence=Death.”
Industry:Culture
Many scholars, such as Gail Bederman and Michael Davitt Bell, have noted the ideological, aesthetic and performative variations and inconsistencies underscoring the cultural terms that define American manhood. At the same time, these and many other scholars (including George Chauncey E. Anthony Rotundo, Michael S. Kimmel) recognize a persistent historical anxiety that drives the vigorous activity of the masculine enterprise. As these scholars see it, the anxietyproducing agent that enables the historical concepts of masculinity is the perceived threat of cultural effeminization (see homophobia). The rise of the new woman at the turn of the nineteenth century and her entry into the industrial-age workforce triggered a considerable cause for worry. The rapid development of industrial capitalism spawned paradoxical response since, on the one hand, the industrial age promised a virile and efficient world. On the other hand, the very same notions of progress ushered in quite a few unmanly and thereby undesirable social elements. One might suggest that the hyper-virile antics of American men at this time (weightlifting, sport) served as an activity to contain cultural excess, i.e. the feminine. Thus, the discourse of cultural conditions was often framed along gender lines: “effeminacy” was the sweeping generalization assigned to the cause of any ill-effect attending modern society. Sloth, “neurasthenia,” homosexuality and other purported weaknesses observed in/ on the male body were paradigmatic dysfunctions directly related to the “effeminizing” of American culture.
American artists, statesmen and religious individuals took to the cause of mastering the cultural parameters of masculinity that were apparently put at risk by cultural and corporeal effeminization. Ironically, the rigor with which men engaged the physical and emotional reconfiguration of manhood was often demonstrated with comical if not cartoon-like effect. “Sandow the Strongman” in Edison’s film shorts (c. 1896) or the steel-like men that dominated the 1930s paintings of Thomas Hart Benton highlight the hyperbolic work involved with the presentation of virile American manhood.
Arguably, movies have been most instrumental in the shaping of an American consciousness of a masculine ideal during the twentieth century. Hollywood masculinity, however, is as varied as the cultural conditions that manufacture masculine identity Shifting between the likes of Sandow and Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Fred Astaire, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Leonardo DiCaprio, Hollywood’s representation of masculinity allows multiple, conflictive readings.
One thing remains certain: if the terms of masculinity are varied and are established relative to the contemporary (and mobile) discourse of “femininity” the bête noir of culture is an uncontained effeminacy of masculinity that announces itself as homosexual.
It is no surprise, then, that some American men have practically made a career out of defending their perceived unmasculine dispositions as differential masculinity Politician Theodore Roosevelt’s aristocratic upbringing ushered in charges of dilletanti politics by not a few New York State assemblymen in 1882, who calculatingly called him an “Oscar Wilde”; dancer/choreographer Gene Kelly produced a television program in 1958 entitled Dancing, A Man’s Game to prove that ballet and baseball were really carved out of the same manly tradition; actor Kevin Spacey told the world that he intends to have children in hopes of refuting Esquire Magazine’s claims that he is gay The inability to define a true American masculinity cuts across issues of race as well (although the terms that define American manhood usually find themselves organized around white man’s Judaeo-Christian principles). Black men in particular have been viewed as threats and temptations by whites, while their masculinity has been shaped by economic, political and social repression. A contemporary example of the inter-section of these themes is the emergence of the Christian Conservative Men’s Movement, “The Promise Keepers.” Established in 1990, the group proudly embraces (and is embraced by) Asian American, African American. WASP and Latino men who bond under the auspices of Christian (masculine) brotherhood. Multiculturalism is paradoxically useful in the conservative rhetoric that seeks to homogenize cultural identity. More importantly masculinity is defined here as a sacred promise that defends family and women. Writers such as Eve Sedgwick-Kosofsky and Donna Minkowitz have pointed out the perfidy (i.e.
misogyny and homophobia) that underlies the sentiment of this sort of “kinder, gentler” masculinity.
The contemporary American political arena has also witnessed discomfiting shifts in the ways that masculinity is approached and discussed in relationship to family and homosexuality. In the 2000 Republican presidential primary candidate John McCain found himself awkwardly defending his utterance regarding his “gaydar” that effectively allowed him to detect homosexuals in the military during the Vietnam War. Both the conservative right and gay lobbyists raised issue with McCain’s provocative remarks. In the White House, Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades certainly made him a prime candidate for the Promise Keeper’s “Reconciliation” program of prayer and devotion to family and wife. In the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton’s masculinity presented not the dangers of effeminate manhood as much as he demonstrated too much masculinity; too much heterosexuality. Balancing gender is a central goal of an ideal masculinity The fluctuating yet certainly tightly managed social dicta that seeks balance and defines the cultural “effeminate” (woman, homosexual) as the cultural obverse of the masculine also functions to maintain the necessary binary structures, like heterosexual marriage, so central to a capitalist economy But the ever-changing terms of the “masculine” (which perforce define the “feminine”) put women, in particular, in the most impossible of positions. If one is too feminine (according to a strain of masculine tradition), one embodies the debilitating characteristics of the atrophying state. If one is too masculine, one is suspect of non-normative sexual desire. Yet Judith Butler, Leslie Feinberg and Riki Anne Wilchins have troubled the calm of these masculine waters that seek to keep sexuality and gender under such bifurcated logic. Films such as Boys Don’t Cry (1999) have brought the uncertain state of masculinity (and its often violent resolution) into popular consciousness. American masculinity like much of American culture, is one of the contradictory discourses that simultaneously appears concrete and indefinable.
Industry:Culture
Marriage is a fundamental yet dynamic institution within American culture, shaped by the relationship between larger historical processes and internal marital dynamics. There is no single story of marriage in America because this story is characterized by diversity, and the constant tension between prevailing ideals and actual experiences.
In the early twentieth century the so-called “companionate marriage,” characterized by emotional intimacy yet defined by highly structured roles for “husband” and “wife” was the prevailing cultural model. Following the Second World War, the institution of marriage in mainstream American life was greatly affected by the large numbers of American women who joined the workforce during the War to replace the thousands of men who had joined the military. Less economically privileged women had long been working outside of the home, of course (particularly in African American and immigrant communities), but until this time it had generally been viewed as a last resort rather than as a possibly desirable option. A more “egalitarian” model began to emerge, in which roles for “husband” and “wife” were less differentiated.
The 1950s, generally considered a socially conservative era, was actually a period during which increasing numbers of women in all communities began to work outside of the home. In the 1960s and 1970s this exploded into a radical shift with the women’s liberation movement; undercurrents of change have led many to predict the “end of marriage.” However, marriage continues to thrive, though these changes have entailed reconsideration of work issues, responsibilities, sexuality and legal ramifications from naming spouses and children to ownership of resources. Clinical counseling often focuses on maintaining and developing the marriage bond. At the same time, both divorce and remarriage have become more prevalent and acceptable.
For many, marriage represents the opportunity to express and reinforce a life-long commitment to a loved one. In contemporary America, the marital bond is often characterized by romantic love and emotional intimacy, although many marriages do not conform to this model. For some people, marriage constitutes a practical necessity for childrearing and economic survival. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such developments as blended families, gay relationships, single-parent families, multiple remarriages and new reproductive technologies have challenged rigid conceptions of married life, while often reaffirming the importance of its social and economic support.
Marriages in all forms (good and bad) have been the focus of television sitcoms and Hollywood products. In the former, companionate heterosexual forms dominated for decades, gradually giving way to broken and blended families as dramatic devices; soap operas have developed even more complex relations over decades. Hollywood, too, enshrined traditional models (despite intertexts of celebrity scandal), but has also explored issues of interracial, inter-class and gay unions as well as the breakdown of marriage and family.
Industry:Culture
