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The domestic intrusion of television in postwar America included children in the television experience, often via anodyne programming entertaining anyone between the ages of three and eighty. Whether including a chimpanzee in morning television news or avoiding sexuality in prime time, television admitted children to “family viewing” even as it defined them as specific audiences. At the same time, non-children’s television has been viewed with suspicion in terms of its impact on the innocent young whom it “pushes” towards crime, drugs or sex. Yet, apart from such general relationships between children and television, which continue to produce widespread outcry and inconclusive studies, programming, both local and national, also has specifically targeted children.
Here, a profound duality of learning versus consumption has been contentious even while the spectrum of shows available on networks, public stations and cable channels like Nickelodeon or FOX Family has expanded continually Together, both cultural issues and programming have influenced what children are in contemporary America.
Early children’s shows on television used live actors, puppets and cartoons to capture their audience. Network shows included Howdy Doody (NBC, 1947–60), with fanciful, long-running characters and a child-filled peanut gallery and Captain Kangaroo (CBS, 1955–84) and his familiar friends. Local shows featuring “T-Bar-V” ranch (in Louisville), “Mayor Art” (San Francisco, CA) or comedian Soupy Sales (New York City) showcased children as real participants as well; the ambience of these shows is captured ironically in Krusty the Clown in The Simpsons. Elements like warm, longrunning characters in a home-like setting, multiple stories and forms of narrative and live children have continued in shows as diverse as Peewee’s Playhouse, Barney and Mr Roger’s Neighborhood.
Disney represents a special early and continuing chapter in children’s television, from Disneyland (ABC, 1954–8) to The Wonderful World of Disney on the same network that it now owns at the end of the century As David Bianculli observes, this essentially makes it not only the longest running weekly series in history but also the longest running infomercial. The show has invariably highlighted Disney theme parks, trademark characters, massmedia products or some other aspect of corporate development. Here, the child is less consumer than pawn. In the 1960s, Disney’s Wonderful World of Color pushed color television for NBC’s parent company General Electric. In the 1990s, Disney also created its own premium channel as well as its merger/return to ABC.
Despite Disney’s domination of animation, others also produced and packaged cartoon shows for children. Warner Brothers, for example, built anthologies around their theatrical, animated characters like Daffy Duck or Road Runner. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera produced Huckleberry Hound (1958–61) and QuickDraw McGraw (1950–61) which translated sitcom plots and movie scenarios like westerns into children’s vaudeville, embodied in quick-talking bears (Yogi), plodding lawmen (Huckleberry Hound and Quickdraw McGraw) and less elaborate drawing. These cartoons roamed local stations for years in syndicated releases. Other animated shows appeared in evening hours, like the Flintstones (ABC, 1960–6), which aped the adult Honeymooners.
Saturday morning as a cartoon kingdom began to emerge in the 1960s as series by Hanna-Barbera, Sid and Marty Krofft and others glued children to the set between eight and noon. As Timothy and Kevin Burke (1999) note, Saturday morning became a magnet, drawing animated series out of prime time as well as fostering new opportunities for decades, ranging from talented animals to superheroes and varying in plot and quality of animation. The 1960s also spawned ironic forebears of later hip animated comedy like Jay Ward’s Rocky and His Friends (ABC, 1959–61 and sequels) or George of the Jungle.
While leavened with limp network educational series, Saturday morning also became a stronghold for targeted programming and advertising that provided product placements and vocabularies of life for Generation X. Shows and commercials sold millions of toys and boxes of breakfast cereals, while transmitting ideas ranging from victories of good and sharing over evil, or masculine domination where superheroes were invariably white.
While rules controlling such commercials were in place in the late 1960s, these were totally eliminated in 1983.
Because of commercialism as much as quality Saturday morning galvanized attacks on consumerist television. Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minow—famed for his description of television as a “vast wasteland”—and the later Action for Children’s Television, begun in 1968, sought to control both content and relationships between advertising and programming (e.g. Flintstones’ vitamins or other spin-offs).
ACT’s strategies, however, faced shifting regulation—while Jimmy Carter was interventionist to the point of considering a ban on advertisements, Ronald Reagan eliminated controls instead. Debate over the impact of violence also ensued, although network censors generally monitored content for children’s shows.
In 1991 the Children’s Television Act required broadcasters to certify educational content. Meanwhile, the V-chip promises home regulatory control over what children see (within the limits of what is offered). At the same time, alternative home programming has been cultivated with video sales and rentals.
Unlike these commercial offerings, educational television on PBS offered a vision of the child ready to learn. They attracted children not with dull lessons, but with the incredible invention of Sesame Street (PBS, 1969–) and spin-offs through Jane Cooney and the Children’s Television Workshop. After thirty years, Sesame Street has become American folk culture as well as mass culture. It is also the most widely viewed children’s television show worldwide. Other PBS landmarks include Reading Rainbow, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (combining game show and geography), Mr Roger’s Neighborhood (whose white neighborliness was satirized by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Nïght Live) and Electric Company. PBS later expanded its offerings to younger children with Barney—a giant dinosaur more annoying to many adults than the cynical Muppets—and the imported Teletubbies, targeting very young children.
The educational philosophy of PBS has been challenged by critics who decry the short attention span demanded by Sesame Street and the association of education and fun that may undercut expectations for school. More recently concerns have been voiced that these learners are also being asked to consume. Sesame Street, Arthur, Teletubbies, Barney and other series offer games, toys, traveling shows and even theme parks that go beyond any formative/ educational mission. While royalties replace government cutbacks in public media financing, these blur lines between learners and consumers.
In the 1990s, relations between children and television have intensified via multiple new options, including cable channels aimed at children (Disney, Nickelodeon) and/or inclusive of kids (FOX Family: Nick at Night). Video series allow home libraries and constant reviewing of treasured stories or episodes that change viewing patterns but also create new dependencies as children memorize scripts as well as characters. Television also crosses over into classrooms, especially preschool, where video screenings seem more acceptable. Commercial channels have also sought entry to the classroom as learning tools with paid advertisements to the alarm of parents and teachers.
Through this complicated history conflicting images of children have emerged. Are they simply to be entertained passively (television as babysitter)? If educable, should the lessons be generally social (sharing is good), disciplinary (counting and spelling) or more complex (multiculturalism or Spanish on Sesame Street)? Are children innocent—to be spared complications of crime, family dysfunction, consumption or other problems facing them in the real world? Or should children’s television talk about death and loss? These questions, writ large in children’s exposure to adult television, prove complicated even within children’s self-help programs like Mr Roger’s Neighborhood.
Moreover, how can we conceive of children as active, even resistant viewers, skating on the ironic edge of cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle through South Park and The Simpsons (which some families will not let children watch)? M. Davis’ Fake, Fact and Fantasy (1997) explores children’s abilities to distinguish between television violence and real life as learning skills. As with other mass media, series and audiences are elements in the process of the formation of American culture rather than simple lessons or symbols.
Industry:Culture
When Captain John Smith voyaged to the region in 1614 he mapped the coast and named the area in his A Description of New England. Eventually, New England came to include the six states that form the northeastern corner of the United States: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Its people, unified to a large extent by a shared geography, climate and history, are known for their conservative dress and mannerisms and their taciturn behavior—one of the most clearly defined of American regional identities.
Carved by glaciers during the Ice Age, New England is in the paths of three major weather systems moving from Canada, the Great Lakes and up the eastern seaboard. Its weather, therefore, is extreme, variable and somewhat unpredictable.
When Europeans explored and traded with the American Indians the latter were decimated by diseases from abroad, leaving much of the coast unpopulated. Settlements of English Puritans in the 1620s spread rapidly as thousands of families cultivated the fertile coastal area. By the late 1700s they had destroyed or absorbed almost all of the local tribes.
The English settlements established the pattern for the area’s culture. Like much of rural New England today, a typical village consisted of several families with the same religion. Most people fished, farmed or harvested timber for a living and gathered weekly at the meeting house for religious service, town business and militia drills on the town green. They held an annual town meeting to discuss and vote on each item in the budget and elect officers. These meetings remain an important tradition today.
Throughout the nineteenth century, farming continued and cities grew. Waves of European immigrants filled the factory and day-laborer jobs, and were joined by southern African Americans after Reconstruction failed. Second- and third-generation white New Englanders moved into management and other white-collar professions.
Twentieth-century New England experienced major social, demographic and economic changes. Farming declined and then never recovered from the 1930s Depression. General manufacturing, fishing and forestry also lost ground while new businesses, such as hightech manufacturing, service and tourism, gained rapidly in the last half of the century.
Economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s brought urban-renewal projects to replace poor downtown neighborhoods with parks and businesses, and moved lower-income families to government-subsidized public housing. When manufacturing jobs headed south for lower labor costs, local factory closings created acute unemployment in most cities in the 1960s and 1970s, increasing inner-city decay, crime, family abuse, racial problems and white flight to the suburbs.
As the economy improved, interest rates lowered and unemployment rates declined at the end of the twentieth century. Some of the new urban middle class gentrified formerly decaying neighborhoods, and many New England cities conducted beautification programs to invigorate their centers.
Better incomes for other work and high prices for land lured most farm families to sell; by the end of the century few of New England’s farms were active. Rural New England became mostly bedroom towns and new woodlands, evidenced by former farmers’ stone walls lacing the forests. Suburbia grew from cities onto the farmland. Housing developments, shopping centers, malls, chain convenience stores and retail strips became part of the landscape.
Tourism throughout New England is substantial. Avid outdoor sports enthusiasts and other tourists find their way to New England’s picturesque towns, mountains, pastoral vistas of rolling hills and farmlands, forests with brilliant autumn colors, coastlines of sandy beaches, estuaries lined with cattails and marsh grasses, and miles of craggy granite. The states’ many glacially formed lakes and coast attract millions escaping summer’s heat.
A deeply rooted maritime history imbues the coast with mystique and romance. Small coastal villages and towns, first established as fishing communities, later became summer havens for the wealthy and artists, and then vacation destinations for the middle class and tourists. While able to absorb many summer dwellers, some villages changed their character when tourist businesses took control. Nonetheless, many coastal communities from western Connecticut to eastern Maine retain their maritime culture.
The significance of local history is evident in the landmarks and historic sites that abound throughout the region. A renewed interest in many Americans’ genealogy has helped maintain historic buildings and archival information through local and national historic preservation groups. It has also helped local Native Americans re-establish themselves after centuries of almost invisible existence.
The presence of many educational institutions of higher learning in New England is an important force in its culture and economy Boston, MA, “The Hub” of New England, has the highest concentration of college students in the world. It attracts some of the best intellects who have stayed in the region to create new technology and service industries.
Originally they concentrated on the Route 128 beltway around Boston (Silicon Alley), but then spread to the fringes of New England in the 1980s and 1990s with advanced telecommunications.
New Englanders’ politics are hard to define. Conservative in much of their thinking, they are liberal about human and individual rights. While many New Englanders voted Republican in the twentieth century regional politics also include many registered independent voters, women in high offices and the Democratic Party’s powerful Kennedy dynasty. The New Hampshire primary first presidential contest, brings national attention to these political currents every four years.
The extreme climate and geography of New England, which hardened the early settlers and their ensuing generations, helped define the “Yankee Character.” Although the image has eased over time due to the influences of mass media, mobility and the gradual introduction of other cultures into New England’s populace, practicality self-reliance, a strong work ethic and a stoic acceptance of life’s difficulties have continued to be facets of this traditional people.
Industry:Culture
These bestselling, serially produced novels of love and happiness target female readers who may devour dozens per month, purchased in drugstores and supermarket check-out lines as well as bookstores. While often scorned for formulaic plots and patriarchal ideologies, they inspire intense readcr loyalty while working out fundamental questions of gender and sexuality. This has led to reevaluations of the genre in cultural studies and feminist readings like Janice Radway’s (1992) Reading the Romance.
The romance has its roots in fictions of love and fantasy that have been staples of American book and magazine publishing as well as Hollywood. The romance also derives its accessibility from paperback production and mass marketing (even libraries buy paperback romances to keep up with reader demand). Romances have also created alternative modes of circulation and discussion through clubs and book trading and stores that buy and sell used copies in bulk.
While similar genres cater to readers in other cultures, this has become a major phenomenon in American publishing for imprints like Harlequin, Avon, Fawcett and Pinnacle who create multiple lines to facilitate niche marketing; they have also moved into cable television. BET and others have produced series for African Americans; Hispanic and Asian consumers draw on materials produced outside the US as well.
Among the different romance series available are those that promote varying degrees of sexual intimacy from chastity to explicit involvement. Others use special historical settings (Victorian America, the West, Regency England) or exotic locales. Still other series deal with family issues like engagement, pregnancy, divorce and paternal responsibility. Some may also intersect with Gothic horror and mysteries. In general, however, all offer a satisfying solution to travails and setbacks, generally enshrining heterosexual marriage and family as ideals.
Among authors especially associated with the romance are Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Lowell, Catherine Coulter and Kathleen Eagle (names are invariably WASPish albeit sometimes pseudonymous). Others slide over into wider mass marketing, like Danielle Steele. Elements of the romance as literature have also been explored in more innovative works by Joyce Carol Oates, among others.
Mass-market romances are also known for their distinctive cover art, usually showing a couple in an embrace in which the young, lovely yet vulnerable heroine perhaps struggles to escape the strong arms and piercing gaze of the dark, mysterious hero. The model Fabio, in fact, constructed his celebrity from his appearance on bodice-ripper covers.
Industry:Culture
Two contradictory trends affected the impact of natural disasters on the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, thanks to advances in science and technology the ability to predict and prepare for natural disasters has greatly increased. On the other hand, more and more Americans have moved to areas that are prone to natural disaster and, largely for that reason, natural disasters cause more damage than ever.
Hurricanes illustrate both trends. Weather satellites, combined with new research insights, have greatly increased the ability to track hurricanes and determine their intensity although they may still take unpredictable paths. The National Hurricane Center, established by the federal government in 1974 to bring additional focus to its ongoing hurricane forecasting activities, constantly monitors the storms. In addition, advances in communication have made it far easier to alert people about approaching storms and to evacuate communities.
But more Americans than ever have moved to the portions of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the US where hurricanes are most likely to strike. Florida counties along the Atlantic Coast saw their populations double to 5.6 million between 1960 and 1980. That was one reason that Hurricane Andrew, which struck south Florida in 1992, was the most expensive storm on record, causing $26 billion in damage and twenty-six deaths.
Population density has exacerbated the ecological impact of storms as well. Scientists believe that developed barrier islands, for example, take longer to recover from storms than do pristine ones because human structures hinder the natural processes—such as the shifting of sands—that help the islands cope with the winds, waves and rains that accompany hurricanes. In addition, human activities can add pollution in the wake of hurricanes. The impact of Hurricane Floyd, which hit North Carolina in 1999, was increased because its rains caused holding tanks for pig manure from massive hog farming operations to overflow, dumping wastes into sensitive estuaries.
Many experts believe the federal government has unintentionally encouraged Americans to move to the most sensitive areas, particularly since 1968 when it began offering flood insurance. In addition, federal disaster aid often helps people rebuild homes and businesses in areas that are susceptible to future damage. “Acts of God” (as many insurance policies refer to natural disasters) seem to be followed inevitably by acts of Congress appropriating emergency funds in response. Since the 1974 passage of the Stafford Act, which set up a system of presidential emergency declarations, the federal government has spent between 1200,000 (1975) and $5 million (1994) on emergency appropriations to the Disaster Relief Fund for all types of natural disasters (tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.).
Earthquakes, which are more likely to affect the West Coast of the US—although virtually every state contains some earthquake-prone region—are similar. While scientists have made little headway in predicting precisely when an earthquake may strike, they have made great strides in understanding where earthquakes are most likely, and engineers have become adept at designing structures that can withstand most temblors. Since 1977 the federal interagency National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program has worked to improve earthquake science, engineering and preparedness.
Building codes, which are set by state and local governments, have become stricter since the 1960s to try to limit the damage from earthquakes. Yet little has been done to encourage owners of buildings that were constructed before the new codes were in place to “retrofit” their property. Privately sold earthquake insurance has contributed to the problem. On the West Coast, too, population trends have increased the risks. Los Angeles, CA, for example, grew by about 1 million people between 1960 and 1990, when its population reached 3.5 million.
The nation may face more weather-related catastrophes in coming years if, as many scientists believe, human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, are gradually changing the Earth’s climate. The warmer climate that is expected to result would also be more volatile with a greater occurrence of severe storms.
Industry:Culture
Term coined in the 1980s to refer to the emergence of a significant women’s vote on specific issues and candidates. The 1980 election marked the first time that more women than men favored Democratic over Republican candidates, and it was also the first time in which a substantial feminist vote surfaced. The gender gap widened as the decade progressed and, correspondingly women’s power to sway elections grew. The women who made up this voting bloc largely supported, and fostered in candidates, a feminist agenda of progressive social policies, including pay equity social equality passage of an Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive rights.
Industry:Culture
When Lance Armstrong won the Your de France with the US Postal Service team in 1999 and 2000, American media focused on the personal odds he had overcome in beating cancer. For most Americans, competitive bicycle racing remains a foreign sport, even though American Greg Lemond won the tour in 1986, 1988 and 1989 (overcoming his own hardships); such triumphs probably annoy Europeans more than they elate Americans. In Breaking Away (1979), in fact, the best American cycling movie, the Midwestern hero pretends to be an Italian exchange student to explain his affiliation. The narrative of suffering also dominates Olympic bicycling coverage, where human interest stories deal with America’s failure to win medals. Bikes, then, form part of American life rather than a specialized sport. As such they are both ubiquitous and, at times, dangerously invisible to drivers and policy-makers.
Automobiles ended the bicycle’s turn of the twentieth century golden age as a primary vehicle. In the postwar period, though, bikes remain fundamental features of growing up, as well as of adult recreation. While sales peaked in 1973 at a postwar high of 15 million, they have remained steadily above 10 million per year. Tricycles, training wheels (and their removal) and multi-speed bikes track maturing independence for many American children. Schwinn’s banana-seat Sting-Ray dominated suburban childhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, later giving way to the sportier MBX, with motocross features. Adult tricycles have also been promoted for exercise and independence in old age.
For teenagers, bikes compete with cars in enlarging social worlds or as a convenience on a college campus. For them, as for adults, increasingly expensive bicycles offer recreation alternatives and, occasionally, a commuter choice. This popularity has been shaped by innovations that include the rise of ten-speed touring bikes in the 1960s, followed by trail bikes with balloon tires and stronger frames (pioneered in Northern California in the late 1970s). Sophisticated multi-gear hybrid bikes dominate the market, along with mountain bikes, in the 1990s. Meanwhile, bicycles have entered professional worlds via bike messengers who specialize in artful movements through dense, congested cities; these messengers became the heroes of the 1995 sitcom, Double Rush.
For many years, these bicyclists would have ridden American bikes like Schwinn (founded 1895) and Huffy While Americans design racing and innovative bicycles, production often concentrates overseas, sometimes with American assembly. Americans have also been innovators in recumbent bikes since the 1980s. Both cheap and prestigious foreign models absorb 30 percent of the American market.
In many areas, urban streets and suburban roads have been lobbied for bicycle lanes in an effort to decrease automobile congestion and pollution while protecting bicyclists from collisions. Meanwhile, many parks and beaches are transformed at weekends into cyclists’ worlds, while off-trail areas may sustain serious damage from the growth of mountain biking. Workplaces, schools and homes also accommodate security concerns, while twenty magazines emerged between the 1970s and 1990s dealing with bike interests. Nonetheless, bikes account for only 10 percent of daily trips, in comparison with 30–40 percent in Europe.
Industry:Culture
The development of a mass society based on mass consumption depends on introducing the consumers to the product; this is done most effectively through advertising. Mass advertising made possible the development of mass newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. During the same time, advertising agencies formed first to serve as brokers between the newspaper and the client, and later to help the client in devising ways of reaching the reader/ consumer. This interaction also consolidated the position of the advertisers who became major players in all subsequent commercial media in America.
In 1999, $17 billion was projected to be spent on advertising, something over $399.40 per person.
Some products advertised in America during the mid-nineteenth century remain dominant in the advertisement world today. Brand names, thus name recognition, became important through advertising. Consumers began to demand Campbell’s soup (1869), Levi Strauss’s overalls (1873) and Procter & Gamble’s Ivory soap (1879). Another product, patent medicine, commanded half of advertising space in the late nineteenth century. In the 1990s, prescription drugs were once again allowed to be advertised, changing both pharmaceutical development and the etiology of disease. Patent medicine advertising was also important because it created a crisis with its exaggerated false claims, and brought in the government to regulate the truthfulness of advertisements, alongside self-regulation by the industries themselves.
When radio came along in the early twentieth century, advertisers found a new venue to push their products. Because of the large revenue already visibly generated through advertising, Americans chose to adopt commercialism rather than other financial means, like tax collection, to support the broadcasting industries. By the early 1920s, many radio shows, like the soap operas, were sponsored by particular products. Advertising firms, such as Young and Rubicam, produced popular radio shows with Jack Benny for their clients. Early television shows also carried sponsors’ names, for instance Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater. Today, Procter & Gamble still own television soaps like As The World Turns.
Postwar Americans live in a world permeated by commercial images. Yet, while advertising does not guarantee more sales, it does promote name recognition: the absence of advertising is perceived as a detriment to sales. At the same time, advertising does not simply sell a product, it promotes consumerism and produces consumers. This has enabled consumerism to become the American way of life.
The industry also refined its tools in order to understand and reach the consumer, as well as to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements. George Gallup began polling of public opinion, while A.C. Nielsen sold indices of food and drug sales. Advertisers found out that women made most of the decisions about what to buy for the household, so many advertisements were created with a female audience in mind. While soap operas were major poles for women listeners and viewers in both radio and television, Hollywood has used its glamorous stars to sell particular images for women. By the 1940s, it used product placement to sell Bette Davis’ transformed look in Now Voyager through press releases urging women to buy the cosmetics Bette used.
Advertising does not exist in an unconstrained marketplace, however. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and later the FCC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other government agencies have all regulated advertising in one form or another.
Consumer Reports, consumers’ union and other private groups examine whether advertising claims are truthful or not; Ralph Nader and other public interest researchers have also challenged corporate claims. The industry trade group, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, established in 1917, also has regulated its practice to protect the credibility of the industry. However, the government, in general, favors the advertising industries. While blatantly false claims are not tolerated, in the era of deregulation, the Supreme Court extended 1st Amendment protection to advertisement (1976), and Congress removed the FTC’s power to stop “unfair” advertising (1980).
Furthermore, added financial incentives are given to advertisers where advertisement expenses are tax write-offs.
Advertising does not simply create brand names and sell products, but it also helps define culture. One of the most successful advertising icons is the Marlboro Man, the archetypal cowboy created in 1955 to change Marlboro from a woman’s cigarette to a man’s cigarette. The sales of Marlboro soared 3.241 percent within one year. The Marlboro man, though controversial, has become a global emblem of American masculinity, rugged, individualistic and tough. The Aunt Jemima icon, an 1893 image of an African American woman who served happily was attacked in the 1950s for its portrayal of the black mammy stereotype. Yet it has not disappeared, but has undergone various modernization schemes to represent changing sensitivity towards race while maintaining brand identity. Automobiles, the quintessential American symbol, are the most advertised items in the country, urging Americans to have more than one car and new cars every few years.
In the 1990s, with ever more sophisticated rating systems, advertisers do not simply want to reach as many people as possible, but also want to target, through niche marketing, particular groups of people who are prone to spending more money. At the same time, since the mass media is totally dependent on advertising, media content has been affected by the changing input of advertisers. Fortune, for example, reported that Forbes magazine “systematically allows its advertising executives to see stories and command changes before they are run.” In 1999, many major advertisers, like Procter & Gamble, General Motors, IBM, are once again providing financial support for the WB network to develop family friendly television shows. Other niche appeals to teenagers or minorities may define television or cinema products so as to exclude dialogue about shared/public values. In the early twenty-first century, the Internet has become an ever expanding medium for advertising.
Advertising not only sells products, but also sells the Government too. During the Second World War, the War Advertising Council was formed to promote voluntary advertisement campaigns. This unit was later renamed the Ad Council. It specializes in making advertisements for non-profit and social issues, which radio and television stations are required to play as public service requirements in their licensing.
Politicians and lobbyists also use advertising. In the wars on drugs of the 1980s, comprehensive advertisement campaigns were launched in different media to push for behavioral change accompanying legislation. In the 1990s, debates over healthcare have been fought through intensive advertising inside the Beltway, regardless of how effective messages or coverage may have been nationwide. Political campaigns are also big spenders for advertising. In 1999, George Bush, the favored candidate for the Republican Party for the 2000 presidential election, raised so much money for his campaign that he foreswore the federal money for the primaries which would restrict his spending. For others, this proves a final dilemma of product and image that advertising has fostered within American mass society.
Advertising, in fact, brings together the economic and political success of the American century with more troubling themes—massification (versus ideals of individualism), manipulation instead of freedom, image instead of truth. These contradictions, juxtaposed to the pervasive power of advertising not only in commerce but in politics, literature, education and healthcare, suggest dilemmas the nation has yet to resolve.
Industry:Culture
The settling of the North American frontier led to a shift in the meaning of wilderness.
While early accounts of the wilderness depicted it as dangerous and evil, the closing of the frontier led to a vision of the wilderness as an American Eden. Beginning after the Civil War, elite Americans began to make recreational visits to the wilderness, beginning at sites like Niagara Falls, the Catskills and the Adirondacks and moving west until Yellowstone was made the first true national park in 1872. The late nineteenth century saw the development of summer camps and wilderness vacations as a means to get in touch with particularly American values. The Boy Scouts, for example, with their emphasis on wilderness were designed to inculcate civic values and individualism through back-woods experience.
The American automobile industry allowed increased visits to the “wilderness,” and, after the Second World War, many Americans took advantage of greater prosperity to tour America and camp in its campgrounds which developed in and around wilderness areas. Over time, camping developed as a way for urban, laboring Americans to get in touch with not only the values embodied in non-productive nature, but the peculiarly American nostalgia for the frontier. The association between camping and correct values has continued in outdoor programs, like Outward Bound, for troubled teens. While camping is often associated with the rustic experience of campfires, cowboy cooking and tents, more recently there has been a trend towards convenience. Recreational vehicles have replaced tents, and private campgrounds have developed alongside those operated by the National Park Service.
Summer camps focused on children and adolescents may also recall the wilderness in pseudo-Indian names, sports, crafts and facilities. In a prosperous and competitive market, however, these camps may also specialize in language learning, competitive sports, arts, computers and weight loss. These camps, whether day-oriented or distant from cities, also meet the needs of two-career families who cannot provide safe and organized home activities during school vacations.
Industry:Culture
Since the early days of the Republic, yeoman farmers and farm families have been seen as repositories of American values and traditions, as well as backbones of economics and politics. To foreign observers like De Toqueville or Crevecouer, or the philosopherpresident Thomas Jefferson, such farmers epitomized American ideals of freedom, hard work and individualism in a new nation, 86 percent of whose inhabitants were rural.
Generations of literature, art, political discourse and, in the twentieth century, movies have contrasted rural virtue and urban decay (even though America’s great “sin,” slavery, was essentially rural). Contemporary “country style” decor and crafts and weekend farmers affirm this ideological presence even in an urbanizing nation in which farm life has declined radically in both economic value and numbers of citizens living on the family farm.
Government policies, technology, corporate expansion and globalization since the Second World War have vastly changed the function and meaning of the family farm.
Hence a modern novel/movie like Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres resituates Kïng Lear as a tragedy of a farm family destroyed by ambitious expansion and modernization. FARM AID concerts, which began in 1985, have allowed artists like Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp to call attention to rural debt and loss of lands to agribusiness and urban sprawl. These concerts have distributed $14.5 million in direct aid and more in research on long-term solutions for family farms and communities.
Farms in the US are generally defined as lands that produce or are capable of producing 11,000 in sales. Most such farms are still family owned (90 percent), although these include family corporations that hire outside labor (for instance, migrant workers are the norm in California). Yet, their involvement in American economic and social life has also changed in important ways in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
First, the diversified and self-sufficient farm, with notable exceptions like the Amish, is a relic of the past. Where in the 1950s, for example, the average dairy holding was 5.8 cows—suitable for family and local needs—by the 1990s it had risen to 61, reflecting a move towards more efficient specialized production. Farmers specialize in one crop oriented to national and global markets—grains like wheat and corn, meat, fruit, tobacco, even specialized truck or organic produce for urban markets. Agricultural sciences have dramatically increased productivity per farm laborer in all of these since the 1940s, making the US the precursor to a global green revolution.
Production is linked to wider networks of support and consumption. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the collapse of the Dust Bowl, government policies have sought to control prices and a regular supply of food to consumers, while also supporting farmers—an incipient conflict met by conflicting regulations. Sometimes, for example, farmers were subsidized to retire land from production, leading to charges of huge subsidies for growing nothing. Since 1992, these policies have changed to even out and limit support without forcing land to be vacant.
Railroads and trucking have tied farmers as well to wide national markets for decades.
Hence, fruit from California, Texas and Florida appears year-round in New York City and Chicago, IL, while production of beef, sugar and chicken has also been regionally concentrated. Transportation has allowed exports of American surplus in grains and other agricultural goods, but has also opened markets to agricultural goods from other nations that are competitive in terms of price, variety or quality Again, the intertwining of family farms and global markets produces both expanded possibilities and new vulnerability.
In the twentieth century, farmers also increased cultural links to wider American populations as automobiles, radios, televisions and computers have ended enforced isolation that once deeply constrained women and families. Indeed, some farms are now linked to rural-suburban combinations (“ruburbs”), where big-box stores like Walmart, technology supplies and urbane conveniences have eclipsed small-town values once associated with, and reinforcing, farm life. New technologies of farming, whether fertilizers and insecticides, newly bred or engineered crops, or expanded production, also demand more expertise—state universities support large agricultural teaching and research establishments—and yet also create dependence on corporate supplies, capital flow and markets.
These changing connections and values of the family farm reached a crisis in the 1970s, when downward prices and the energy crisis hit many farms, especially those that had expanded under younger and more educated owners. While the family farm may continue as a cultural icon, in fact, numbers have decreased from 6 million in the 1940s to roughly 2 million in the 1990s, while the percentage of Americans living on farms slipped from 23 percent in 1940 to under 2 percent. The consolidation of larger corporate agribusiness, the increasing competition of foreign producers and the spread of urban land uses also threaten both this image and reality of the American dream.
Industry:Culture
The practice of Buddhism in the United States arrived with various Asian immigrant groups, from Chinese to Japanese and, later, Koreans and Thais, Cambodians and the various Burmese ethnic groups. Current congregations, or sanghas, tend to be located on the Pacific Coast, including metropolitan Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, and some major cities in the East, such as Boston and New York. While the major groups practicing Buddhism in the US are Asian in descent, increasing numbers of non-Asian people find themselves attracted to the philosophical aspects of the religion and to meditation styles of Vipassana, Zen, etc. Buddhism’s treatment of the concept of transience appeals to many people in the postmodern age. Many adherents find it useful as a means to grapple with the existential aspects of the times. Estimates of the number of adherents in the US range anywhere between 750,000 and 5 million people.
Industry:Culture
