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Archibald Cox, appointed special prosecutor in 1973 by Richard Nixon’s Attorney-General to investigate White House involvement in the Watergate break-in, ordered the president to turn over Oval Office tapes and was fired for refusing to back down. After Nixon’s resignation, therefore, Congress passed the Independent Counsel Act to safeguard the investigative powers of the special prosecutor. Since 1973, twenty-three independent counsels have been appointed to investigate alleged abuses of power by presidents and other government officials. The most significant of these was Ken Starr, appointed by Attorney-General Janet Reno to investigate Bill Clinton and Whitewater.
Starr’s subsequent focus on the president’s affair with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, resulting in impeachment proceedings, led many to believe that the position had been tainted by the special prosecutor’s partisan politics. After this investigation, the law was allowed to lapse.
Industry:Culture
Area of northern Manhattan to the Harlem River, variously defined—depending on the shifting racial and ethnic composition, and the resulting perception of desirability—as having boundaries of 110th Street or 96th Street, 5th Avenue or the East River on the east, and Morningside Drive or the Hudson River on the west. Although home to early Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century Irish squatters in the nineteenth, and Jewish and Italian migrants from the Lower East Side in the early twentieth, Harlem has been most powerfully identified as the heart of New York City’s African American community. It is best known as the center of the renaissance of African American culture and politics in the 1920s and 1930s, to which it gave its name. In the postwar period, Harlem became firmly entrenched as a predominantly poor African American neighborhood, which has nonetheless produced important political figures such as Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Malcolm X and David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City. East or Spanish Harlem has also become a Latino center of culture and political power.
Industry:Culture
Areas of especially vigorous enforcement of highway speed limits, often involving marked cars or abrupt changes of posted velocities. While argued as legitimate controls on speeding, these traps, which may endure for decades, are viewed by motorists as harassment or money-makers for local sheriffs. They also figure prominently in road movies.
Industry:Culture
Armenians began arriving in the US in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were driven out of historical homelands by the Ottoman Turks. The largest diasporan community is in the US, where there are over 1 million Americans of Armenian descent. The greatest concentration is in California, where in 1983 an Armenian American, George Deukmejian, was elected governor. Since the Second World War, Armenians have emigrated to the US from diasporan communities in Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Soviet Union, as well as Armenia itself.
The earliest immigrants to the US organized themselves for mutual support, building a network of churches, schools, social clubs, political parties and philanthropic organizations. These still form the backbone of Armenian American community life.
Each wave of Armenian immigrants has joined these institutions in search of fellowship and assistance. As a result they have been both sites of conflict between American-born and foreignborn Armenians, who differ due to decades of separation and culture change, and places where accommodation and innovation have been creating new forms of Armenian American culture. Perhaps the most influential institution has been the Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) church, to which most Armenian Americans have ties if not direct affiliations.
Armenian Americans have joined the US mainstream. While they have been changed by it, they have also altered US society in significant ways. Influenced by the white “ethnic pride” movement of the 1960s, which led white Americans to rediscover their “roots,” Armenian Americans established Armenian studies programs at such universities as Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and Michigan. The US diet has been affected by the production and marketing of foods favored by Armenians, such as yogurt, string cheese, raisins, figs and melons. Of the many Armenian Americans who have contributed to technology and industry, perhaps the most successful is Alex Manoogian, whose company developed the single-handled faucet. In the arts, literature and entertainment among those best known are actor/singer Cher (Cherilyn Sarkissian), painter Arshile Gorky, composer Alan Hovhaness, film director Rouben Mamoulian, journalist Ben Bagdikian and Pulitzer Prize winning author William Saroyan (The Time of Your Life, The Human Comedy).
Each year on April 24 Armenian Americans commemorate the “Armenian Genocide,” marking events immediately preceding and during the First World War when between 800,000 and 2 million Armenians died in massacres and deportations at the hands of the Turks. The individual and collective tragedies of this period have taken on profound historical and political meaning for Armenian people everywhere, many of whom see this historical policy as one of genocide.
An independent Armenia was established in 1991 on the dissolution of the former Soviet Republic. This has been a source of joy and pride for Armenian Americans, whose moral and financial support for the new Republic of Armenia has been substantial.
Industry:Culture
As a “nation of immigrants,” the United States has demanded that newcomers (and existing Native American populations) learn social and cultural citizenship, blending into the “melting-pot” in acceptable ways, whether in sports, military service or the preoccupations of life in the suburbs. Given public norms of freedom and democracy, however, negotiating acceptance and use of perceived values creates paradoxes.
Not all features are equal. For example, shared political economic goals of advancement within a liberal capitalist state have been primary, and those perceived as “outside political agitators” have met the limits of freedom, whether Scandinavian socialists or Latino Marxists. This entails patriotism as well: Japanese American males proved their loyalties in the Second World War by volunteering to fight while their families were interned in camps. The American dream is to make it, not to change it (when one’s assimilation might be called into question). For early immigrants, postwar movement from ethnic enclaves into new suburbs provided a homogenous “Americanness.” The stereotype of Asian Americans as a “model minority” because of their work, educational success and acquisition of middle-class goods reaffirms these goals.
Language also has been a primary but contested issue, especially with new immigrants who have used the discourse of civil rights and ethnic identity to maintain language and media. Most, like their nineteenth-century forebears, still learn English rapidly by the second generation: schools are a major force in teaching language and social mores. Yet tensions may arise between bilinguals and English monolinguals, threatened by prerequisites associated with bilingual status (see English Only). Mass media, since the turn of the century, have been seen as potent vehicles to teach immigrants language and customs. Hollywood studios, at the same time, often hid the ethnic origins of stars and producers in putting this American dream on screen.
Religion, by contrast, was a major assimilation issue in the nineteenth century when Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants were perceived to threaten Protestant hegemony. This has faded over generations, but growing immigrant religions like Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism have “Americanized” some public activities to establish their status. Indeed, religion has become an “acceptable” form of diversity which immigrants might display—like food, fashion (on ritual or festive occasions), parades, dance and music. Often, these features can create a dual identity over generations as teenagers cast off everyday jeans and T-shirts (a global assimilation) and don unfamiliar costumes for school events celebrating multiculturalism. Transnational ties, in which beliefs and practices move between different worlds, further complicate the assimilation of some new immigrants.
Yet an ethos of potential assimilation and permissible diversity cannot mask the central historic dilemma of assimilation—one may vote, earn, talk, eat and dance like an “American,” yet fail to “look” like one. This is especially true for African Americans, with centuries of participation in American society shaped by continual exclusion.
Programs since the Civil Rights era have fostered, within limits, integration in schools, residences and workplaces. Yet middle-class blacks may complain that they cannot get a taxi, or face police harassment because of race, ignoring other American traits and commitments that constitute successful assimilation. The issue has also divided blacks from the debates of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century, through the Black Power movement of the 1960s and its heirs. Assimilation here can be seen as giving up traits and values as well as taking on a shared culture, and must also confront the differences that remain after centuries of being in America and shaping American culture. Moreover, this is an internal debate as well: middle-class African Americans may be called “whites” or “Oreos” by other blacks (black on the outside, white on the inside, like “Bananas” for Asian Americans); “passing”—pretending to be white—is an extreme case that has nonetheless gained media and literary attention.
Hence race remains the test—and failure—of the melting-pot.
Industry:Culture
As currently understood, “polls” refer to techniques that combine some form of questionnaire with advanced statistical techniques to produce measurements of public opinion. Although informal straw polls were already used to give rough measures of political support in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they did not gain widespread use until the twentieth century. Political writers such as Walter Lippmann, and social scientists such as Floyd Allport, dissatisfied with subjective descriptions of public opinion, began to look for more rigorous methods of measuring what the public thought of an issue. Social scientists and journalists began to look upon polls, which could be standardized and which also allowed for a more or less accurate measure of public opinion, as a way to solve the need for objectivity in discussions of public opinion.
Despite some notable failures—including an infamous poll run by the Literary Digest for the 1936 presidential election, which seriously misread the level of support for the incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt—the poll became a nearubiquitous element in public discourse. Although the Gallup organization is still probably the most famous polling group, numerous other firms have developed reputations for their expertise. The Nielsen company’s polls on television viewing patterns, for example, provided perhaps the single most important measurement for most of the American advertising industry in the second half of the twentieth century.
At the same time, the increasing use of the polling data has provoked criticism. Critics of modern political journalism argue that news reporters rely too much on “poll-driven” stories, especially during elections. Political news thus is reduced to stories about which candidate is ahead in the polls, and the strategies used either to get the lead or retain it; discussion of actual policy proposals is pushed aside. Others argue that as a measure of public opinion, polls are essentially misguided, since what they are measuring is in fact an aggregate of various private opinions. More critical theorists point out that polls offer only a limited number of responses to questions, effectively ignoring—and thereby marginalizing—opinions that are too radical or that cannot be standardized. Even social scientists who use polls extensively admit that they present measurement problems, especially the under-reporting of socially deviant behavior and the over-reporting of sociallysanctioned actions.
These criticisms have provoked changes to polling procedures in recent years.
Although polls are still essential to election-year coverage, many news organizations have become more circumspect in their use of polls to drive political news. Among social scientists there is a move to supplement polling with the use of focus groups and interviews, or through the development of “deliberative polls,” in which the polling questionnaire is supplemented by in-depth interviews and interaction between members of the subject population. It remains an open question, however, whether polls as such “measure” or in fact “create” public opinion.
Industry:Culture
As in other countries, the union movement grew in the United States in tandem with industrialization, artisans and craft laborers combining to protect their positions in the labor market from capitalists’ attempts both to de-skill certain occupations and to replace native-born workers with cheaper immigrant laborers. Despite scattered local organizations prior to the Civil War, attempts at national organization like the National Labor Union (1866–72), and even the resort to terrorist methods by the Irish Molly Maguires in the mid-1870s (inspiring the exceptional 1970 movie of that name), unionization remained stymied throughout much of the nineteenth century. Capitalists used private force (e.g. the Pinkertons) and the power of the state to crush strikes like that in 1892 at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Mill (near Pittsburgh, PA). In doing so, they were bolstered by Supreme Court decisions that interpreted the 14th Amendment so as to protect corporation rights rather than those of workers. Moreover, union organization and action were also complicated by the concealed issues of class and mobility in the United States that shaped the history and consciousness of the working and middle classes.
Nevertheless, Samuel Gompers managed to establish the American Federation of Labor during the 1890s by stressing “pure and simple unionism,” concentrating on organizing only skilled laborers and eschewing political action (unlike unions outside the US, thereby remaining apart from labor and socialist parties). Consequently, Gompers endeavored to isolate the more politically oriented unionists connected to organizations like the Knights of Labor and, later, the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies).
In the process, the union movement became associated with attempts to exclude Chinese in the West and generally remained antagonistic to African Americans in the Northeast. Further, made up primarily of craft organizations, the AFL remained relatively weak in the face of the consolidation of corporate capitalism. By the turn of the nineteenth century, more than 2 million workers belonged to unions.
Advances during the First World War, with Gompers and other labor leaders being brought into the War Industries Board, were followed by an assault on unionism in 1919 and attempts by businesses to establish their own labor organizations, captured nicely in John Sayles’ Matewan (1987). The 1920s, therefore, saw a union movement at a low ebb, though the immigration restrictions of 1924 can be seen as partly a concession to labor.
African Americans began to push for their own unions, A. Philip Randolph forcing both the Pullman Company to recognize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and labor leaders to accept the Brotherhood as a member organization within the AFL.
Union fortunes shifted dramatically in the 1930s, the Depression provoking growing labor unrest. President Franklin D. Roosevelt endeavored to appeal for labor support and instituted some protections for unions in the Wagner Act of 1935, which established the National Labor Relations Board. In addition, the labor movement became more inclusive, a new breakaway organization known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations forming under the leadership of John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW).
Formed around industries rather than crafts, these unions were able to take on the major automobile and steel companies and win—state and federal authorities for the first time not supporting the companies with military assistance. With union membership expanding to 14 million by 1945, organized labor was able to establish itself as an accepted part of the Democratic Party coalition, though it never achieved the position attained by unions in the British Labour Party.
The radicalism of the New Deal spread from the industrial Northeast, and, after the Second World War, attempted to organize black and white laborers in the South, as part of Operation Dixie. The success of this movement was curtailed by the period of McCarthyism, which saw the purge from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of labor radicals accused of being communists, and by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which overturned many of the gains of the previous decade (including outlawing the closed shop and secondary picketing). Operation Dixie faltered and the laborers in the South divided once again along racial lines, leading African Americans to move down the path towards the more respectable Civil Rights movement as opposed to labor activism.
With the more radical unionists purged, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and CIO were in a position to combine under Geroge Meany’s leadership (1955–79). The AFL-CIO remained distinctly conservative in orientation through the early 1970s, concentrating on securing better wages and working conditions, making only half-hearted attempts to organize the so-called “unorganizable”—women, African Americans and the newest immigrants (often Latinos; see Chavez, Cesar). It remained detached from the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. It was also associated in many people’s minds with corruption, particularly the splinter Teamsters under Jimmy Hoffa, the Longshoremen, whose corruption was highlighted in On the Waterfront (1954), and the United Mine Workers, whose internal corruption was a background for the vivid strike documentary Harlan County, USA (1977).
The 1970s witnessed a concerted effort by the AFL-CIO both to reform and to expand the tradeunion movement. The latter impulse was nicely captured on screen in Norma Rae (1979), based on the efforts of a Southern woman textile worker and a Northeastern Jewish labor organizer to organize a mill whose owners had successfully resisted unionization for decades. Any momentum in this direction was halted by the election of Reagan to the presidency (partly due to the support of working-class Democrats) and the ensuing efforts of the Republican Party to once again weaken the labor movement. This assault on unionism was most evident in the air-traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, during which Reagan laid off 11,000 PATCO workers, replacing them with strike breakers.
During the 1980s and 1990s, particular unions remained strong, especially those serving the more skilled, professional “middle-class” workers, such as teachers and airline pilots, as well as those in public-sector organizing. Nonetheless, the overall movement as a whole has continued to decline and now fewer than 20 percent of all workers belong to unions. The Democratic Party has retained the support of the union movement, especially the leadership, although workers still have rallied to Republican issues. Yet, the decline in union membership, the movement of many industries abroad (to countries where the union movement is weaker still) and the loss of majority status for Democrats in Congress has diminished the union movement’s political influence dramatically. This was witnessed in the passage of NAFTA in spite of vociferous opposition from trade unionists, as well as the concessions on salary and other issues that have become a constant part of contract negotiations. This malaise permeates a more recent documentary on a union city, Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989).
The future of the union movement in the US and its ability to reverse the decline in its fortunes over the last twenty years will be determined by its ability to adjust to the rapidly changing economic environment. The continuing influx of immigrant labor, increasingly rapid changes in the workplace (with larger proportions of Americans now working outside factories and employed in the service sector), the movement of capital to offshore sites, as well as the growing influence of trade organizations like the World Trade Organization, present problems and opportunities for a trade-union movement that has seen reverses before only to re-emerge as a major force in American politics and society.
Industry:Culture
As in other nations, variable speed limits “zone” roads and highways according to local norms and contexts, from 15 mph in active school zones to accelerated speeds for limited access expressways (which, in some western states, had no limits). The energy crisis in 1974 allowed the federal government to fix 55 mph as a national maximum, raised to 65 mph in some areas in 1987. Yet, both individual drivers and advocates of states’ rights chafed under these limits, which soon became justified on the basis of safety as much as energy (given the growing popularity of large fuel-eating automobiles). Speed connotes freedom, whether in advertising, driving or western states’ attempts to get around these laws. In 1995 federal rules were repealed, allowing most states to adjust some highways to 70 or 75mph.
Industry:Culture
As proverbial measures of wealth in American society the Rockefeller family have cut a broad swath through American business, politics and philanthropy for more than a century. The family’s wealth emerged with John D. Rockefeller, Sr (1839–1937), stern founder of Standard Oil (1870) who came to monopolize oil refining and marketing, becoming the enemy of unions and antitrust legislation. Nonetheless, Rockefeller established a health research institute (1901) that grew into the graduate science Rockefeller University and the massive foundation that bears the family name (1913).
He donated over $500 million to education, medicine and religious projects. His son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960), in addition to his business interests, distributed another $1 billion between 1917 and 1960, often to advance a Christian America. He also built Rockefeller Center (1930–9), an art-deco New York City, NY landmark, patronized historic preservation of colonial Williamsburg and provided the land for the UN headquarters in Manhattan.
The family’s third generation turned to politics and public service, including the liberal Republican leader Nelson (1912–73). Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York from 1953 to 1973, but his hesitation as well as liberal politics (and an unprecendented divorce) cost him the presidential nomination repeatedly. He was appointed vicepresident in 1974 when Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon. John D. Rockefeller III focused on philanthropy, Winthrop (1912–73) became Republican governor of Arkansas (1967–71) and David became president of Chase Manhattan Bank.
The fourth generation of Rockefellers includes the liberal Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV, who went to West Virginia as a VISTA volunteer but stayed to become governor (1976–84) and senator (1985–). Other Rockefeller cousins have become scientists, artists and philanthropists while dealing with the legacy of their name and position. Unlike the more flamboyant and newer Kennedy family, the Rockefellers have established an institutional structure in philanthropy, public service and education that belies the celebrity of the wealthy while underscoring the discreet continuity of American upper classes.
Industry:Culture
As Robert Dole proclaimed in his 1996 campaign, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act identified rights of America’s largest minority group: some 60 million with physical or mental conditions demanding accommodation in school, workplace and leisure. This act marked the triumph of a quiet civil rights revolution that has nonetheless changed the face of the US—from access ramps in buildings or transport to an inclusiveness of the disabled as agents as well as victims in mass media. This recognition entails a new concept of citizenship, whether confronting the “perfection” of Hollywood stars or athletes or challenging cultural stereotypes of incompleteness or inadequacy. Still, this revolution has faced criticism from those who fear the costs of accommodations, while some disabled have feared the loss of distinctive institutions and cultures as well as new inequalities.
Various categories of physical and mental difference have been identified and stigmatized in American life since their inception. Public institutions have been created at the state and local level to deal with those who are blind, deaf, mentally challenged or suffering with long-term conditions. Many were fearful and depressing places that forced those who could do so to opt for private facilities or family care. Few institutions provided any framework for a positive, collective identity, although Gallaudet University (founded in 1864 for those who are deaf) would later be the site of important 1988 student actions rejecting the perceived paternalism of a non-deaf president. Other institutions, however, forced minorities into erroneous or deficient treatments; the “deaf community,” for example, has been divided for decades over rights to American Sign Language (ASL) versus assimilative oral techniques. While disabled heroes emerged— Hellen Keller, veterans of war and labor, and even Franklin Roosevelt, confined to his wheelchair by polio—many preferred to exclude them from mainstream American life, economics and politics, or to meet their needs with paternalistic service. Indeed, Hollywood stars claimed Oscars for “acting” blind, deaf, or disabled when those living with these conditions found no work on screen. Notable and powerful exceptions include double amputee/ veteran Harold Russell as a returning sailor in Best Years of Our Lives (Best Supporting Actor, 1946) and, decades later, deaf actor Marlee Matlin’s Oscar for Children of a Lesser God (1986). It has taken even longer for media, from advertisements to narrative programs and news, to incorporate the disabled without focusing the story on them.
Various issues and movements, apart from the civil-rights model, slowly changed attitudes in the postwar period. The National Federation for the Blind, founded in 1940, marked an initial effort for socio-economic advancement organized around a shared disability. The spread of polio and the successful campaign against it brought disabilities into families and communities, and at the same time offered the possibility of a solution through concerted action. De-institutionalization and mainstreaming in the 1960s and 1970s also introduced those who had been locked away into classrooms and other social milieus.
Yet these students, workers and citizens encoun tered difficulties in both prejudice and physical access to buildings and resources. Hence Ed Roberts, who founded the Center for Independent Living in 1972 after working to change Berkeley, drew explicit parallels between the disabled and challenges facing African Americans. Meanwhile, Judy Heumann, who founded Disabled in Action in 1970, adopted protest marches and sitins to draw attention to multiple discriminations.
These movements gained real impact with provisions of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which barred discrimination against the handicapped in federal programs, whether by design or prejudice. Still, accommodations were often slow and ill-conceived: wooden ramps attached to back doors were symbols of difference as well as adaptation.
Moreover, while changing technologies might help some—in home-based communication for the immobilized, for example, or new extensions of materials adapted to other senses or limbs—they limited others. Those who are blind in America, for example, face 70 percent unemployment, which is exacerbated by visual dependencies in new technology like the computer screen.
Mental issues are among the most difficult categories of disability in terms of complexity and compensation. Depression, learning disabilities and syndromes like Attention Deficit Disorder, as well as classifications of alcohol and drug dependencies as disabilities have all sparked debate.
The AIDS epidemic also entailed another extension of the concept of disability in terrain fraught with moral issues for many. The recognition of new causes, syndromes and relations to genetics, environment and ergonomic patterns of work also make the category of “disabled” a perennial challenge for policy-makers.
The 1990 ADA, then, gave formal charter to a movement towards incorporative citizenship that goes beyond the publically and historically recognized categories of race, class, gender and ethnicity. In the early twenty-first century policy and accommodations are still taking shape, turning to the Supreme Court, government offices and institutional experts, as well as members of increasingly organized disabled networks to understand conditions, experience and accommodations. Only through this process will the US constitute a new and inclusive equality as well as recognize the unique potential of individuals and groups.
Industry:Culture
