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One million dollars has long seemed the threshold of American plutocracy even if John D. Rockefeller passed the billion dollar mark in 1913. Yet Forbes magazine noted that in 1996 more than 110,000 families reported incomes of over 1 million, while the number of millionaire families topped 5 million at the end of the century and is expected to quadruple by 2010. Reflecting both prosperity and inflation, this benchmark now regularly figures in multimillion dollar contracts for sports figures, Hollywood stars, executives and the “young self-made millionaire” entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. Yet it is also portrayed as an accessible goal for a typical American person in coverage of lotteries as well as television programs that promise wealth through game shows or televised marriage. Meanwhile, Forbes also noted that their list of billionaires had skyrocketed from 13 in 1982 to 267 Americans in 1999, led by Bill Gates (roughly $100 billion), whose personal charitable foundation alone has assets of over $21 billion. While affirming the American myth of rags to riches, these plateaus also raise questions about equality class and opportunity for many Americans.
Industry:Culture
One of the emblems of college life in America, whether in cinema or admissions literature, has been the tree-shaded campus on whose broad lawns social life, sports and commencement foster community. The conjunction of buildings and open space may take different forms depending on age, prestige or context. Stanford University, for example, developed a Mediterranean style, while the University of Virginia, with the famous influence of Thomas Jefferson, and the Johns Hopkins University favor federalist styles. Perhaps the most common model is collegiate gothic, imitating the halls and cloisters of Europe.
After the Second World War, colleges become architectural proving grounds in individual building (Louis Kahn’s work at Bryn Mawr and Yale, I.M. Pei’s campus for New College, etc.). Yet rapid growth, especially at public institutions like large, state schools, has often submerged early plans within a sea of vaguely modern and postmodern buildings and endless parking lots.
The urban campus adapts this pastoral ideal through enclosure and security when they have resources (University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Columbia, Yale). Some special schools, like medical schools and other urban institutions, however, have integrated into the streetscapes around them (CUNY, Georgia State, etc). Yet even community colleges and business colleges may attempt to create this social space or take some distinction from historic preservation of older cityscapes. These campuses may also lack the sports facilities or residential buildings of wealthier or ex-urban universities.
The idea of the campus has strongly positive associations; even schools without cohesive development may favor it in promotional literature. The term also has been taken up by business and research consortia like those in Silicon Valley, although the “business campus” provides the form without the academic life or goals of the original.
Industry:Culture
One of the fastest growing sports in the United States, both in terms of participation and spectatorship, largely owing to its appeal among women and girls who have been shut out of other professional team sports. Such appeal was manifest at the 1999 Women’s World Cup Final, played between the United States and China at the Rose Bowl in front of 90,000 plus spectators—the largest-ever audience for a women’s sporting event. The images of Briana Scurry making the crucial penalty save, and Brandi Chastain pulling off her shirt after slotting home the final penalty will be remembered in the minds of many American girls for as long as English boys remember events at Wembley in 1966.
Soccer in the United States developed slowly due to the strength of American football in colleges and the strength of baseball among working-class Americans. Immigrants from countries associated with Association Football—Germany Italy and Ireland, for example—left their homelands before soccer was firmly established and so readily adopted a game that was being promoted as the “American game.” Soccer’s popularity increased at the end of the 1960s with coverage of the 1966 World Cup because of a continued identification among many Americans with England. In 1967 the North American Soccer League was established, using the formula of attracting big names from European and South American soccer. Only the New York Cosmos thrived under this system, signing Pele, George Best and Franz Beckenbauer, and the league suffered due to the lack of talent and the limited availability of native-born players with whom crowds could identify By the end of the 1970s the league was all but moribund.
The situation in the 1990s has been very different. Soccer now has very strong roots in communities around the country It ranks as the fastest-growing team sport in terms of levels of participation, dwarfing little-league baseball, with between 4 and 6 million children participating in organized leagues. Soccer has also established very strong roots in colleges, particularly among women players, whose sporting facilities have improved in response to Title IX.
The international soccer federation (FIFA) tried to enter the lucrative American market for many years, but this remained difficult until the emergence of cable television, as the major networks catered to exceedingly profitable football, basketball and baseball leagues. The rise of ESPN, the cable sports channel, provided a new outlet for small sporting markets and growing markets like that for soccer.
The World Cup in 1994, held in the United States, set attendance records for the competition and helped cement the position of soccer in the United States. Large crowds witnessed a respectable American national team led by Alexi Lalas, Eric Wynalda and John Harkin, stars from the fledgling major-league soccer. This league has avoided the pitfalls of the NASL, and, by limiting each team to four foreign players, has given the league a more American flavor and ensured considerable corporate sponsorship.
Continued success for soccer in the United States is likely to depend on the blending of two traditions, similar to that occurring earlier in the rise of basketball. One is the suburban sporting tradition, undergoing a shift as parents turn away from basketball, associated with the inner city and football, seen by many as being too violent for their children. The strength of soccer in suburban communities is seen in the political significance attached to the “soccer mom” as a constituency in recent political elections.
The other tradition is that of the new immigrants coming into the country New arrivals following the easing of immigration quotas in the 1960s have left places where soccer is firmly established as the leading spectator sport. Instead of identifying with baseball, which has been losing its hold as the American game, many of these immigrants enter communities where ethnic soccer teams and leagues are commonplace.
And the success of the game has been amply demonstrated by the Women’s World Cup of 1999, which, building on the USA’s leading position in the women’s game, has produced record-breaking crowds and widespread attention from bastions of male dominance. The Gatorade commercial pitting Mia Hamm, the superstar of the women’s game, against Micheal Jordan highlights the newfound commercial appeal of the game and its players.
Industry:Culture
One of the great “silences” in US history. Haiti sent volunteers to fight in the American Revolution, while the slaves’ defeat of Napoleon’s forces there allowed the United States to purchase the massive Louisiana territory. During the twentieth century this small Caribbean nation became more dependent on the US, including military occupation from 1915 to 1934. The US later kept a watchful eye, provided aid and purchased most exports (largely coffee). The strongly anti-communist Duvalier regimes were kept in place by American government support.
Once the Cold War ended, possibilities opened up for democratic change. Opposition to the Duvaliers formed around Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the Americans began to discourage attempts by the Tonton Macoute (Duvalier’s secret police) to put down protests. In September 1994, after Aristide’s election and almost immediate overthrow, President Clinton ordered American troops to invade Haiti again in “Operation Restore Democracy” Nonetheless, Haiti remains an impoverished nation and many Haitians seek to enter the United States as refugees (boat people) and immigrants.
Industry:Culture
One of the largest Caribbean islands between Florida and South America, Puerto Rico is still only 100 miles long and 33 miles wide, with a total area of 3,515 square miles. It contains extraordinary beaches, one of the world’s largest river cave systems and the United States park systems’ only tropical rainforest. Its tropical climate makes it a favorite vacation destination.
Sponsored by the Spanish Crown, Columbus reached the shores of this beautiful, mountainous island on his second voyage in 1493. The approximately 30,000 Arawak (Taino) who inhabited the island continued their way of life until 1508, when the island began to be settled by the Spanish and they were enslaved to work in mines and later in agriculture. By 1550 the American Indian population had been decimated by European diseases and maltreatment, as well as by flight and failed rebellions. Slaves from West Africa replaced the native population, their numbers increasing sharply in the first half of the nineteenth century as Puerto Rico moved to largescale sugar production.
Today’s population of almost 4 million reflects this historical background in its racial and cultural characteristics in an extremely densely populated and predominantly urban environment. Racially, the population consists of the progeny of white and African American families, but it is a largely mulatto mixture of whites, blacks and Arawaks.
Some coastal towns are inhabited by a majority of blacks, attesting to a past of plantation slavery in these areas. Puerto Rico’s Spanish language and the dominance of Catholicism are derivatives of Spain.
Puerto Rico has never been a free and independent nation. After three centuries of absolute and often oppressive Spanish rule, Spain ceded it to the United States in 1898, after its military occupation in the Spanish American War. For more than one hundred years, this relationship with the US has been defined through a web of often tense and ambivalent political, economic, social and cultural ties. In 1917, as the US prepared to enter the First World War, for example, Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship and the right to elect their entire legislature. Nevertheless, the appointed governor maintained the power to veto legislation and to select judicial and executive officers, and Congress could annul legislation.
It was not until 1948 that Puerto Ricans elected their own governor. The result was a mandate for Muñoz Marín, the architect of the island’s economic development program, Operation Bootstrap, and a proponent of turning Puerto Rico into an Estado Libre Asociado—an associated free state. On July 25, 1952, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was created with its own constitution. Education, health, justice and welfare are under Puerto Rican control. The United States retains control over trade, defense, immigration, the postal system, the currency and international relations.
For decades, the organization of political parties focused on the options for the political status of the island: independence, statehood or continuation of semi-autonomous Commonwealth status. When the Popular Democratic Party was formed in 1938, its program focused on improving the stagnant economy and poor living conditions. As it launched Operation Bootstrap, it was forced to take a proCommonwealth position to attract corporations that were hesitant to invest resources in an independent Puerto Rico.
The economy of the island has evolved from agricultural to industrial since the 1940s.
In 1955, for the first time, manufacturing contributed more to the economy than agriculture. The transition displaced workers and families from rural areas, where twothirds of the population lived in 1940, to towns and urban centers where two-thirds of Puerto Ricans live now, including the capital, San Juan (437,745 in 1990), Bayamon, Ponce, Carolina and Caguas. Manufacturing provides about 40 percent of the gross domestic product, with more than one hundred pharmaceutical companies, the main industry, accounting for one-quarter of that total.
Operation Bootstrap emphasized industry, tourism and the production of rum. Local tax exemptions were provided for industrial and tourism development, and promotional campaigns were initiated in the United States to attract investors and visitors. Congress also sanctioned federal corporate tax exemptions on profits earned on the island. These stimulated growth, but budget cuts pressured Congress to phase them out over ten years, beginning in 1996, exacerbating Puerto Rico’s high unemployment rate.
In politics, Puerto Ricans hold US passports and vote in state and national elections when residing in the (continental) United States. They do not vote for the president or have voting representatives in Congress when living on the island.
Throughout the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans have struggled to maintain their identity under the process of acculturation that started in 1898. Although, officially Puerto Rico has two languages, Spanish and English, Puerto Ricans have always considered Spanish to be their mother tongue. It reflects the diversity of Puerto Rico’s heritage—many towns have maintained their preColumbian names and many other pre-Columbian and African words are part of everyday speech. The intrusion of English was first felt through imported consumer products; adults asked for Singers, not sewing machines. English also became a mandated subject in public schools. It became the second language of millions of largely working-class Puerto Ricans in the continental United States, who maintain a migratory circle between the island and mainland cities.
Music and food are bastions of cultural resistance. Salsa is heard from home and car radios. American fast food is found throughout the island, but traditional food remains the staple in most households and restaurants. Rice and small pink or kidney beans, whole roast suckling pig, prepared for the holidays and large family reunions, and fresh ham, seasoned with adobo, a thick paste of garlic, olive oil, vinegar, peppercorns, salt and oregano, remain favorites of the Puerto Rican table. Love of the homeland, culture and strong family ties also prove evident in the joyful cheers that spontaneously erupt among planeloads of returning Puerto Ricans as they land on their island.
Industry:Culture
One of the leading cities of the New South, noted for its moderation on racial issues, Little Rock seemed likely to desegregate after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. In 1957, however, Governor Orval Faubus, previously considered a moderate, who was facing a difficult bid for a third term, used the race card to help win re-election. In a televised address, Faubus announced that integration at Central High School could not proceed because it would precipitate violence and sent in the national guard to enforce this decision. The insistence of the children, in the face of virtual lynch mobs, forced the issue, leading President Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in the 101st Airborne Division.
Industry:Culture
One of the most influential, profitable and popular genres in American cinema. Although influenced by films and film-makers in the silent and early talking picture eras, war films as a Hollywood genre came of age during and after the Second World War. From the 1940s to the 1990s these Second World War films, and related movies about Korea and Vietnam, both reflected and effected changes in American cinema and society.
Initial Second World War movies mobilized the American people for the war effort, usually through patriotic tales of bravery and defiance in defeat (Wake Island, 1942), martyrdom (The Purple Heart, 1944), resistance to fascism (The North Star, 1943), family sacrifice (The Sullivans, 1944), women in war (So Proudly We Hail, 1943) and the home front (Mrs Miniver, 1942). Because many of these films were either subsidized or supported by various government agencies, there was little cinematic criticism of the armed services and of war policy and strategy.
Propaganda gave way to realism and social commentary in many postwar films, which explored the plight of returning veterans (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946), the toll on those who fought and commanded (Twelve O’Clock High, 1949), racism (Home of the Brave, 1949) and the conditions of physical and mental misery which faced the common soldier (Battleground, 1949).
Mixed messages of patriotism, sacrifice and uncertainty about the necessity of war continued through the Korean and Cold War eras of the 1950s and 1960s, up to the early years of the Vietnam War. Yet, such films did little to advance the structure of the genre, established in the 1940s. Since that decade a number of common themes in plot, dialogue and direction have resulted in distinct subgenres of war movies. “Platoon” films portray a cross-section of American society who find themselves thrown together to face unknown and savage perils (Bataan, 1943; Platoon, 1986). The emotional and physical difficulties in ordering men to their deaths shape “Commander” movies (The Dawn Patrol, 1938; Command Decision, 1948). Those who wait and serve the war effort in non-combatant roles are the focus of “Home Front” films (Since You Went Away, 1944; Coming Home, 1978). “Epics” provide semi-documentary accounts of campaigns, battles, or heroes’ accomplishments (The Longest Day, 1962; A Bridge Too Far, 1977). While antiwar sentiments are part of every war movie, some, like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) clearly convey pacifist messages. Some of the best of these have been black comedies that satirized war and the politicians and generals who started and continued them (M*A*S*H, 1970; Catch-22, 1970).
The evolution of war movies can be seen in the works of two directors, Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930; A Walk in the Sun, 1946; The Halls of Montezuma, 1950; Pork Chop Hill, 1959) and Sam Fuller (The Steel Helmet, 1951; Fixed Bayonets, 1951; The Big Red One, 1980). Their influential films encompass a number of the subgenres and have been benchmarks in the changing images of American war and society. Since 1998, new attention has been paid to war movies due to the critical and popular success of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Industry:Culture
One of the most ubiquitous and generic features of the contemporary American landscape, highways are also key symbols of contemporary American culture and a social institution in their own right. Together with cheap fuel and mass ownership of automobiles, highways facilitated the transformation of dense, central cities into sprawling metropolitan regions and allowed for decentralization of residential, commercial and industrial functions amongst a diffuse network of suburbs and edge cities.
Although imagined in Europe, the idea of paved, grade-separated, limited-access thoroughfare for the exclusive, high-speed use of trucks and automobiles was first realized in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1920s, the network of paved inter-urban thoroughfares was virtually non-existent. By the Second World War, the United States was linked by an extensive network of “national roads,” financed by an excise tax on gasoline. Highway construction received even greater support after the war. State and federal governments subsidized the construction of multi-lane highways to relieve urban traffic congestion and to link the growing suburban frontier with central cities. In 1956 under President Dwight Eisenhower the Interstate Highway Act committed the federal government to paying 90 percent of the cost for the construction of 42,000 miles of high-speed multilane highways linking major urban centers. Of greater scale and capacity than their pre-war predecessors, these thoroughfares became known as “expressways.” Expressways radically restructured the built environment. In virtually every major American city these new highways ran through and/or completely demolished poor minority neighborhoods. Together with urban renewal, highway construction displaced millions of Americans in the late 1950s and 1960s, and helped spur disinvestment in urban real estate. Although designed to facilitate the commutating of suburban residents to urban centers during the 1970s and 1980s, highways helped to siphon off factories, shopping malls and office space to the suburban fringes of metropolitan areas. By the late 1980s, the perimeter or beltway highways that had been originally designed to redirect through traffic around central cities had emerged as America’s new Main Street. Yet, despite the continual augmentation of highway capacity traffic volume and congestion expanded to fill, and exceed, the available space.
The energy crisis of the 1970s did little to reduce highway use. Indeed, in the twentyfive years following the oil embargo of 1973–4, highway congestion, suburban sprawl and pollution reached new levels. Despite various control devices, auto emissions remained the nation’s leading cause of air pollution. Environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act would seemingly require alternatives to the unlimited low-density vision of growth of the previous six decades, yet little consensus emerged on how to wean the United States from its unwholesome addiction to automobile use and highway construction. Instead, they are part of American culture—from James Dean to Bladerunner—as well as a threat to American life.
Industry:Culture
Opera is the most opulent and expensive of the performing arts and has historically been the province of social elites in America. In the first decades following the Second World War, opera continued to appeal to wealthy artistic patrons in the large urban centers, but, by the century’s end, it achieved a level of popularity and broad-based appeal few could have predicted in the early 1960s.
At mid-century, opera in America was dominated by a handful of companies: first and foremost of which was the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York City (the Met), followed by the San Francisco Opera Company (CA) and the New York City Opera.
Other companies of note in the early postwar era included the Lyric Opera of Chicago, IL, the Houston, Grand Opera (TX) and the Greater Miami Opera (FL). The repertoire of these companies was conservative, emphasizing the Italian, German and French canon, though new works by American composers were occasionally commissioned.
Predictably, the American contributions to the operatic repertoire during this period mimicked the canon in tone, if not always in subject. Samuel Barber, perhaps the most favored of American composers of his generation, received prestigious Met performances, including Vanessa (1957) and Antony and Cleopatra (1958). The latter, a Met commission, had a lavish production directed by Franco Zefferelli, but was a critical and popular failure. However, composers who sought to emphasize American themes achieved somewhat greater success. Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land (1954), Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah (1956) and Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe (1966) received numerous productions by major American companies, yet none found a secure place in the repertoire of European companies.
If the principal opera companies of America proved inhospitable to new and experimental currents in music, there were alternative venues. Two professional companies that regularly featured modernist repertoire were the Santa Fe Opera Company (New Mexico) and the Boston Opera Company (Massachusetts). The latter, under the direction of Sarah Caldwell, performed such demanding works as Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza (1961), Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1965) and Roger Session’s monumental Montezuma (American premiere, 1976). The opera programs at universities and conservatories such as the Juilliard School and Indiana University also provided alternative support for composers and helped to build audiences, furthering the careers of composers such as Dominick Argento and John Eaton.
The turning point in contemporary American opera can perhaps be traced to the New York premiere of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass (1976). Created in collaboration with director Robert Wilson, the work broke new ground in several ways. First, in keeping with Wilson’s emphasis on theater as spectacle, the work was not based on a conventional narrative. Instead, it took the form of a pageant in which loose references to Einstein were clearly subordinated to abstract structures of music and dance. Second, the work was the first full-length opera composed using minimalist procedures: the music substituted extensive repetition and subtle variation for tonal hierarchy and thus reinforced the opera’s lack of narrative structure. Third, the score called for electronic instruments, especially synthesizers, and largely eschewed solo vocal writing in favor of a chorus. (Ironically this performance was not sponsored by the Met; the House had been rented for the occasion.) Einstein on the Beach enjoyed international success, and was followed by Satya-graha (1980), Akhnaten (1983) and The Civil Wars: A Tree is Best Measured when it is Down (1985). Glass’ stature as an operatic composer was confirmed by a Met commission on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World (The Voyage, 1992).
Glass was not the only composer associated with minimalism who achieved success in opera. John Adams achieved international acclaim for Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), proving that the art form of opera could not only accommodate a radically new musical style, but also could address contemporary political issues at the same time. By attracting a new, younger audience to opera, Glass and Adams created a more positive climate in American opera houses for young American composers. In recent years, new operas have achieved surprising popularity Among the most significant are Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcom X (1986), John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), Tobias Picker’s Emmeline (1996) and Tan Dun’s Marco Polo (1996). Dun’s work is especially notable for seamlessly blending contemporary Western vocabulary with music of Dun’s native China.
The renewed popularity of opera in America has been stimulated by other factors besides the additions of new works. First, the repertoire has been expanded by the revival of Baroque operas (most notably works of Monteverdi and Handel) at most major houses.
Second, the use of supertitles (the display of running translation above the proscenium), has made opera accessible to a much larger audience. Finally, the artistic quality of regional opera companies has improved dramatically thus spreading the operatic experience far beyond traditional centers on the American coasts. Among the most important of these companies are the Seattle Opera (Washington), the Minnesota Opera Company and the Sarasota Opera Association (Florida).
Industry:Culture
Organized in 1871 to promote training and marksmanship, the NRA has become a vocal lobbyist for the Bill of Rights 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Its journals (American Rifleman, American Hunter, American Guardian), public spokesmen like Charlton Heston and members defend guns as a means of self-defense as well as for recreational hunting. Due to the rise in violent crime involving guns in recent decades, however, they also find themselves engaged in a highly passionate and polarized debate in which the NRA is viewed as a right wing/conservative group, while those who support gun control are often considered left wing or liberal. The latter may believe the 2nd Amendment anachronistic or challenge NRA interpretations. As a result of widely publicized mass shootings as well as liberal efforts, gun control has gained currency in American politics.
To combat even this limited trend, the NRA lobbies politicians (typically Republicans) for their support against gun-control legislation. It is, by all accounts, the largest obstacle to the gun-control cause.
Industry:Culture
