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Advisors to the president, nominated by him and confirmed by the Senate, and executives for federal agencies. Although not strictly established in the Constitution, some Cabinet positions, including Secretary of State, Attorney-General, Secretary of Treasury Secretary of War (later consolidated into Secretary of Defense), have existed since the George Washington administration. Others have been added subsequently to deal with issues of the interior, agriculture, commerce, labor, health and human services, housing and urban development, transportation, energy education and veterans affairs.
One original post, Postmaster-General, has been downgraded.
These officers may succeed to the presidency in order of seniority of their office, beginning with the Secretary of State, if they meet qualifications of age and birth. In addition, other officials hold Cabinet-level rank, recognizing their importance as presidential advisors. In the Clinton administration, these include the CIA Director, EPA Administrator, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Director of the Office of National drug Control Policy Ambassador to the United Nations and US Trade Representative.
Cabinet members tend to reflect their party and president: such positions may recognize excellence and add diversity to a white male executive structure, but also may reward political cronyism. Cabinet members have also become political targets, being investigated with increasing frequency over issues of influence peddling and political operations (allegations which have also proved true in some cases). Since the Nixon era, confirmation debates in Congress have also grown acrimonious as nominees have become lightning rods for many political issues beyond their qualifications. In general, they lack the power to oppose the president or survive changes in regime, unlike many European ministers. Some, like Elizabeth Dole and Dick Cheney, have sought higher office later.
Industry:Culture
Aerial military divisions that emerged under the aegis of the army in the early twentieth century and separated as a department in 1947. The army navy and marines also have aviation divisions, responding to technological possibilities of air flight as well as changing warfare. The air force has become central to modern military action from Vietnam to the Gulf War; its pilots have a glamour among military personnel— President George Bush and Senator/Presidential candidate John McCain were both pilots, albeit for the navy. The Air Force academy outside Colorado Springs, was founded in 1954. Personnel on active duty numbered 363,479 in 1998, 18 percent of whom were women. See Pentagon.
Industry:Culture
African American basketball team formed by Jewish American Abe Sapperstein in 1927. The Globetrotters began as a serious team but gradually moved into the entertainment business, touring with an “opposition” team, but actually showcasing moves, which included, for example, Marques Haynes’ dribbling and Meadowlark Lemon’s half-court hook, seldom seen in the National Basketball Association. Wider audience interest grew following a 1951 film about the team’s early days, and a 1970s cartoon show. Now over seventy years old, under African American ownership, and with a completely new roster of players and opponents, the Globetrotters bring their unique style of basketball to all parts of the world.
Industry:Culture
African American literatures encompass a wide geographic territory which includes the United States, the Caribbean and Central and South America. The time frame also extends from the emigration and dispersal of peoples of African descent throughout the diaspora. In his comparative studies of international as well as trans-Atlantic slavery sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death (1982), dates the contact of Africans with the Atlantic world, beginning in the late Middle Ages with the slave trade in the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canary Islands. Traditionally African American literature was associated with the imaginative cultural products of US bondsmen and bondswomen, including those manumitted by law or by eseape, and the freeborn. The almost exclusive focus of those literary studies was the written word. The genre preferences, moreover, were poetry fiction and drama with the understanding that songs, folktales, sermons, essays and life stories were outside the realm of belles lettres.
The preoccupation with the written word also excluded the voices and cultural legacies of at least 4 million Southern slaves in the early 1800s who had no access to literacy as a result of violent repression, proscriptive legislation or the lack of opportunity Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) offered a significant caution to scholars whose foundation for constructing an African American literary tradition depended almost entirely on written texts. In Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) Jones/ Baraka insisted that tracing the line linking the spirituals to blues and jazz would help provide a more comprehensive understanding of African American historical and literary traditions, in part, because it would necessarily include practitioners and commentators from several economic classes, social communities and mentalities.
Since the critical and theoretical reconceptualizations of the 1960s regarding what constitutes the “literary” or what qualifies as “text,” African American literatures are now recognized as embracing a continuum stretching from ancient African oral tradition to contemporary avatars of hip hop. The elements of that oral culture (praisesongs, epics, proverbs, riddles, folktales, etc.) serve as underpinnings for traditions transported, transmitted and reinvented for the specific locales of seventeenth through nineteenth century Cuba, Brazil, Surinam, Barbados, Richmond or Boston. The arbitrary distinctions between “literature” and the bio-mythographies known as autobiography have also faded. Slave narratives, the earliest of which appear in the 1750s, are no longer case histories as much as carefully crafted verbal portraits which share, with so-called fictive texts, as historian Hayden White affirmed, a concern with plotting, voice, narration, point of view and more. In Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) Avey Johnson, an upper-middle-class Westchester matron who has undergone a kind of cultural amnesia is reminded by her deceased Great Aunt Cuney, in the middle of a Caribbean cruise aboard the Bianca Pride, of the importance of telling and transmitting the stories of the ancestors to successive generations. In undergoing an allegorical Vodoun initiation, Avey returns to her given name, Avatara, and accepts responsibility for singing the ancient praisesongs of the would-be slaves who chose to walk home to Africa after their middle-passage transport to a place now known as Ibo Landing. She also rejects the experiential divides, dramatically alluded to in the Versailles Room which serves as the cruise ship’s formal dining room, that reinforce apartheid notions of disciplinary generic and cultural boundaries. That border crossing, a thematic and methodological pivot of African American literatures, surfaces powerfully in representative works that defy genre categorization: Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Toni Morrison’s oeuvre and Toni Cade Bambara’s Mama Day (1993).
Contemporary scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., building on the Harlem Renaissance-era work of earlier folklorist-narrators, such as Zora Neale Hurston, trace lineage lines which connect, for example, West African insult poetry to tales such as “The Signifying Monkey” or the verbal duels of Caribbean calypso. There is an even shorter distance, moreover, between that cultural amalgam and the African American insult contests known as “playing the dozens.” In African American literatures, the word is a powerful tool of creation, destruction and transformation. Fiction-writer Toni Cade Bambara, among others, attests to a preoccupation with the potency of logos (word/language) as a key characteristic of an oral and written literature created by the muted and the unlettered. When that word is written, the cultural legacy of African American literatures usually begins with Lucy Terry’s 1746 poem, “Bars Fight,” or with the 1773 publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects. In that volume, a young teenage and sickly Boston slave creates verbal portraits, which are praisesongs in their own right, celebrating English and American aristocrats. Writing in the poetic meter with much of the classic allusions of Dryden and Pope, Wheatley suffered for more than two centuries from the calumny that she had not used her privileged status or education as a slave-poet to combat slavery directly In the last quarter century however, there has been a revival of interest in the, perhaps, too subtle code by which Wheatley offers a stinging condemnation of slavery by assuring General Washington that the eyes of the world are fixed on its newest democratic experiment. Her self-deprecation in the midst of a poetic address to the students of what we now know as Harvard University is part of a pattern of a deliberate use of code to render opaque to masters and mistresses the subversion that hides behind the grin and the smile. Wheatley helps to establish a tradition of writing with invisible ink as a way of offering a scathing critique and parody of institutions that are and were incongruous in a new democratic Republic which uses “freedom” as a way of describing and defining its charisma. The immediate legatees of her consciously crafted dissimulation include writers such as William Wells Brown (Clotel, 1853), Charles Chesnutt (Marrow of Tradition, 1901), Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces, 1900), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1947) and Charles R. Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990).
This use of double voicing functions simultaneously as a defensive and offensive weapon and as a re-appropriation of the dual consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois named in Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the albatross of African American experience. Nobel prizewinning novelist, Toni Morrison, a beneficiary of both oral and written traditions, also refers to such duality in her collection of 1990 Massey Lectures in the history of American civilization compiled in a volume entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). Morrison asserts that the canon of American literature has its roots in the construction of blackness as a foil against which to define whiteness.
She insists that American literature is inconceivable without the omnipresence of this largely invisible other who helps provide a sense of national identity and cohesion.
Industry:Culture
African Americans developed rhythm and blues in the early 1940s as a hybrid of country blues and big-band swing. In the coming decades R&B evolved in one direction into rock ’n’ roll, and in another direction into soul.
While “race” records sold well in the 1920s (Mamie Smith recorded the first blues record in 1920), their sales plummeted during the Great Depression. The major labels lost interest in black-oriented music, but after the Second World War small, independent labels began to take advantage of the lower cost of recording technology and the untapped market. At the same time, black music began to change as big bands were forced to pare down for lack of work and rural blues artists moved to cities. Possibly the best way to describe R&B in the early era is as a hybrid of the blues with bigband swing—a typical R&B song of the period mixing swinging horn riffs with a rolling boogie rhythm—what Louis Jordan called the Jump Blues. By the 1950s Billboard’s Jerry Wexler had renamed “race” music “rhythm and blues.” In Southern California, artists like Lowell Fulson, T-Bone Walker and Johnny Otis played to packed houses at the Barrel House in the Watts section of Los Angeles, while their music reached larger audiences through local labels like Aladdin, Excelsior and Specialty. In New York, the Erteguns started Atlantic Records, and the Chess brothers opened Aristocrat and then Chess Records (recording the transplanted Delta blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf). New Orleans R&B took its boogie rhythm from the piano, with honking saxes laid over the top. Producer Dave Bartholomew was responsible for many classic early R&B sessions, including those by Fats Domino and Little Richard.
Always a melange, R&B became difficult to distinguish from rock ’n’ roll by the mid-1950s, and in many ways there was no difference—the term “rock ’n’ roll” gaining prevalence only when white performers and audiences took over. Still, while Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry may have moved seamlessly into rock ’n’ roll, other important black artists of the 1950s continued in a distinctly R&B vein—Big Mama Thornton, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Ike Turner only occasionally crossed over.
R&B also developed into what came to be called soul music in the 1960s with the additional influence of the church. Artists such as Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson and James Brown effected a transformation in black music from R&B to soul when they began to add the emotional expressiveness of gospel music. R&B survives today as a general category of black music, though without any formal accuracy. The influence of R&B, however, can be felt in nearly all popular music forms, from rock ’n’ roll to disco to rap.
Industry:Culture
After education, public safety is the most expensive service provided by local government in the United States. Much of the growth in the size and political power of American police agencies since the Second World War has been fueled by public anxiety about major social and demographic changes. The migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities, the explosion of teenage culture in the 1960s, the mainstream use of illegal drugs and the sharp increase in violent crime perpetrated by young offenders have all been raised as justifications for expanding the size and power of local police agencies.
In response to public demands for action President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which made the federal government a factor in local crime control for the first time. The Act expanded the ability of lawenforcement officials at all levels to detect criminal behavior by broadening the legal use of wiretaps and by funding special units for the enforcement of drug laws. The new Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in the United States Department of Justice provided funds for equipment and personnel in police departments in nearly every jurisdiction in the country). The establishment of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) squads in even the smallest, rural police departments was often funded by the LEAA.
At the same time, federal and local officials became concerned about the image of the police. As an adjunct of the political machines that dominated city and state governments earlier in the century (and continued to dominate Chicago, IL, Newark, NJ and Albany NY, into the 1970s), the police were viewed by many citizens as either “town clowns” in smaller jurisdictions or corrupt enforcers of the status quo in larger cities. Most of the race riots of the 1960s were reactions to encounters between white police officers and African American residents. The recruitment, training and demographic composition of police departments became a major issue in the planning and budgeting for law enforcement.
The idea of police professionalism runs through the modern history of American policing. In order to improve the image of the police and justify the rapid increase in public-safety budgets, states reviewed and updated training curricula. The Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy also began training local police officers, and a number of departments introduced educational requirements, not only for new officers, but for promotion as well.
The idea that a college education was either necessary or desirable for the cop on the beat was hotly debated as the police infiltrated public consciousness through the media.
Long a staple of news, police dramas have become the mainstay of prime-time television programming (see crime, television). Beginning with Dragnet (NBC, 1952–9; 1967–70), a celebration of the new, business-like orientation to policing taken by the Los Angeles Police Department, the depiction of attractive, articulate law-enforcement figures became popular with the public, although it was inevitably satirized in the later Police Academy movies (1984–9). But Steven Bochco’s television productions from the late 1970s to the 1990s conveyed growing ambivalence about a powerful public agency with increasingly little contact with the public. Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–7) explored an urban environment saturated with crime confronted by a group of quirky fallible police officers who were often thrown off balance by the chaos on the street. The more benign Barney Miller (ABC, 1975–82), a comedy set in New York’s Greenwich Village, told much the same story: the police as the last line of defense in a society slipping out of control.
During the same period that the entertainment industry was exploring the quandary of modern policing, prosecutors around the country were building a body of law on the limits of police conduct under federal civil-rights guarantees and state statutes. Police brutality was increasingly challenged in minority communities where it had always been present as well as in gay communities in several cities. The 1969 Stonewall Riot was touched off by a routine raid by the New York City Police on a gay bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan.
Suits by federal prosecutors against local police departments in several cities, in particular Philadelphia, PA and Houston, Texas, lead to a study by the United States Civil Rights Commission entitled Who is Guarding the Guardians? (1981). The recommendations of the commission summarized the conflict over police professionalization, finding that even in departments with high levels of education and intensive training, a separate, defensive police culture had evolved that saw citizens and particularly citizens from groups not well represented in the department as the enemy.
Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni found that patrol officers in the New York Police Department were caught between what they considered a hostile and dangerous external environment and a professionalized, but remote administrative culture in the upper-ranks of the department. The “two cultures of policing” cut street cops loose to do whatever was necessary to keep order: a strategy that further alienated the public in many jurisdictions, but which insulated the top brass from legal responsibility when inevitable misconduct suits were filed.
The Knapp Commission investigations into corruption in the New York Police Department in the 1970s reinforced the reform impulse built by public attention to brutality and police handling of civil disorder, and led to a series of experiments in the structure and function of American policing in the 1980s and 1990s. Team policing and walking beats, patrol strategies that had been jettisoned during professionalization, were revived by reform commissioners like Patrick Murphy in New York City. Films like Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981) followed in the wake of corruption revelations in New York and elsewhere.
The acquittal by a suburban jury of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the taped and televised beating of motorist Rodney King touched off riots in Los Angeles, CA that caused another round of self-examination among police administrators and scholars. Reforms in the 1990s centered around “community policing,” an attempt to reconnect the police and the public through the broader involvement of police officers— sometimes called community patrol officers—in a variety of neighborhood activities.
Industry:Culture
After the 1969 Stonewall riots, the call for an active gay and lesbian political agenda became paramount. Through often spirited activism and persistent grassroots politics, a gay and lesbian movement cavalierly came into being. As this coalition gained momentum, important social changes occurred not only at state level, but in areas such as psychology, education, religion and media representation. At its best, the gay and lesbian movement has forged a powerful visibility in the political arena. At its worst and most banal, the movement has served to create a new demographic for commercial advertising. In any case, these changes were not always agreed upon by either the popular heterosexual culture or gay and lesbian activists themselves.
As the gay and lesbian movement quickly learned, the constituency of any radical movement is unequivocally diverse. The difficulty inherent to any coalition-building is the sometimes obstreperous struggle to proactively engage these differences for a unified cause. What became apparent to many post-Stonewall gay and lesbian activists was that the “lifestyle” did not simply occupy a univocal position. While there was much political agreement that “liberation” was a good and important thing to have, the very definition of liberation took on multiple and complex meanings.
At the outset, the very terms used to describe the movement began to fragment. Was a drag queen a gay man? Did the S&M leather dyke share the same political desire as the lesbian who thrived on a life in the country? Should bisexuals be included in the gay and lesbian political caucus? Can there be such a thing as a gay Republican? Where does the transgender (pre-operative, post-operative, non-operative) fit into the “gay and lesbian” schema? How “out” is out? Does one only tell one’s friends? family? co-workers? fellow students? Needless to say there has been much contention within the movement. It is no wonder that as diversity superseded the original intention of gay and lesbian organizations the question was asked: how can a gay and lesbian movement continually expand its cultural base in order to encapsulate the vicissitudes of sexual identity? Sensitivity to difference among many gays and lesbians has led to an ever-evolving nomenclature that takes into consideration the variance of social categories. One need only peruse, for example, the pages of the Gayellow Pages whose objective in 1973 was to “(inform) the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.” In 1998 the new sexual identities that struggle for cultural position were laundry-listed on the front page of the phone book.
Inclusion serves in the marketing of difference. Hence, the Gayellow Pages now informs a consumer that is referred to as the “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community” There will, of course, be additions.
Indeed, gay and lesbian (bisexual, transgender, etc.) life is besotted with consumer goods that purportedly support our irreducible needs, wants and pleasures. Books, movies, television programs, clothing manufacturers, furniture stores, realtors, restaurants and other traditional commercial establishments rigorously vie for gay and lesbian customers. Even non-traditional commercial venues such as sex-toy shops, leather bars and sex clubs, and their exotic wares, have strategized effective advertising campaigns that appeal to their niche audiences.
Political organizations such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) have kept their names, but have over the years changed their mission statements to embrace and include transgender people, as well as other progressive sexual and non-sexual movements. The pendular side of these politics is the Washingtonbased lobbyists such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the Republican Log Cabins who seek to diversify gay and lesbian initiatives through beltway politics. While HRC seeks to negotiate the political terrain of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the Log Cabins ideologically place all their stock in the Republican agenda. Most recently both groups have been accused of conservative initiatives that are perceived as being out of political step with many gays, lesbians and transgenders.
Marriage, AIDS, homophobia, public sex, abortion and racism continue to be (as the movement itself) some of the highly debatable issues that homosexuals wrangle over.
The stakes are certainly high in the ongoing adjustments of the political landscape. The dynamics of power in the now historical movement rapidly shift between gay white stock brokers and radical activists. What is striking, however, is also the rapidity with which these glaring differences can and do unify Whether it has been at an AIDS demonstration or a memorial march for Matthew Shepard (a twentyone-year-old Wyoming student who was a victim of deadly homophobia in 1998), gays, lesbians, transgenders, queers, dykes on bikes, stockbrokers, students, poets, painters, theorists, historians and clerics have rallied together to flag the insidiousness of heterosexism and homophobia.
In the twenty-first century the arguments over difference in what was once known as the “gay and lesbian movement” will undoubtedly continue. In fact, the debate will probably become more contentious as more people identify themselves as not heterosexual. Not only are there more voices added to the cacophony of sexual politics, but the geographical dispersion of this population is growing larger. While the urban gay “ghetto” of the Stonewall era has clearly thrived, many homosexuals have chosen to find permanent dwellings on rural farms, in small towns and in the suburbs. The political and cultural implications of these population shifts remain to be seen. Add to these demographic changes the “gay and lesbian” workers who constitute an economy of many different ethnicities, moralities and financial strata, and one will find that the sexuality of everyday life in America is certain to trigger a politically raucous twenty-first century.
Industry:Culture
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, many Vietnamese fled their homeland. Over 900,000 refugees arrived in the US from Southeast Asia between 1975 and 1989, most of them from Vietnam, although many had passed through refugee camps and horrifying voyages as boat people. When they first arrived, most Vietnamese refugees were received warmly by different religious and social agencies, although this often isolated them from their country people. More than 30 percent settled in California, with other substantial numbers in Texas, Washington, New York, Minnesota and Massachusetts. Because of their recent arrival, Vietnamese Americans have the largest (90 percent) foreign-born population in the country Many Vietnamese Americans are ethnic minorities in Vietnam, including the Cham, the Khmer, the Montagnards and the Chinese. While the first three groups did not already have significant presence in America, the Chinese Vietnamese could immerse themselves in the established Chinese American communities. With the influx of this population, many Chinatown businesses are now owned by Vietnamese Chinese immigrants.
Despite the cultural impact of Vietnamese Americans, such as Maya Lin, who designed the once-controversial Vietnam War Memorial on the Washington mall, and film-maker Trin T. MinHa, who explored Vietnamese and American women’s identities in her Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), others have struggled to make sense of the rapid and painful adjustments of their displacement. Gang activity portrayed in the 1994 film Bui Dai and in less sympathetic media, is one image of difficulties within the generally “model immigrant” Asian American community The shadow of the Vietnam War also hangs over relations between the US and the changing homeland of Vietnamese Americans, as well as disputes occurring between Vietnamese Americans from historically different regions that became the North and the South. In 1999, for example, when an Orange County (California) Vietnamese videostore-owner put up a picture of Ho Chi Minh in the store, widespread demonstrations and boycotts followed.
Industry:Culture
After the fall of Saigon in May 1975, most Americans wanted to forget the Vietnam War and the servicemen who had fought there for sixteen years. Inspired by the film The Deerhunter (1978), Jan Scruggs formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which sponsored a design search for a memorial for this difficult war. Maya Lin, an architecture student at Yale, submitted the winning design: a black granite V-shaped wall nestled in the ground below the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, which both bears the names of over 58,000 American dead and reflects the faces of those who look at “the Wall.” Although some veterans and administration officials considered the memorial insufficiently heroic, after its 1982 consecration “the Wall” quickly became a place of remembrance and catharsis for civilians and veterans, with people leaving gifts and letters for lost comrades and family members.
Industry:Culture
After the Second World War ended in Europe, Germany was divided into four zones controlled by the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the United States, as was its capital in the Soviet zone. Thereafter, Berlin became a symbol and proving ground of the Cold War. Hence in June 1948, when Soviets blockaded the city the western Allies created an air-bridge or airlift which carried food, medicines and supplies to the city and built up a year’s reserve to show determined support. Later, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, where John Kennedy had said “Ich bin ein Berliner,” symbolized victory in the Cold War to many Americans.
Industry:Culture
