Culture Wars
November 27, 2017 | Author: PrinceNamor | Category: N/A
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Culture
Wars Volume 1
Culture
Wars An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices
Volume 1
Roger Chapman, Editor
M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England
M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 80 Business Park Drive Armonk, NY 10504 © 2010 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.
Cover photos (clockwise from upper left) provided by Getty Images and the following: Katja Heinemann; Terry Ashe/Time & Life Pictures; Mark Leffingwell/AFP; Michael Springer; Karen Bleier/AFP. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Culture wars : an encyclopedia of issues, viewpoints, and voices / Roger Chapman, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7656-1761-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Culture conflict—Encyclopedias. 2. Politics and culture—Encyclopedias. 3. Social problems— Encyclopedias. 4. Social conflict—Encyclopedias. 5. Ethnic conflict—Encyclopedias. I. Chapman, Roger. HM1121.C85 2010 306.0973’03—dc22 2009011925
Printed and bound in the United States The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48.1984. CW (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Publisher: Myron E. Sharpe Vice President and Director of New Product Development: Donna Sanzone Vice President and Production Director: Carmen Chetti Executive Development Editor: Jeff Hacker Project Manager: Angela Piliouras Program Coordinator: Cathleen Prisco Assistant Editor: Alison Morretta Text Design and Cover Design: Jesse Sanchez Typesetter: Nancy Connick
This encyclopedia is dedicated to my wife and daughters, Deborah, Christine, and Liz
Contents Topic Finder......................................................... xv Contributors......................................................xxiii Introduction: Culture Wars— Rhetoric and Reality...................................... xxvii
Barbie Doll.........................................................36 Battle of Seattle..................................................37 Beauty Pageants.................................................38 Behe, Michael J..................................................39 Bell Curve, The....................................................40 Bennett, William J.............................................41 Biafra, Jello........................................................41 Biotech Revolution.............................................42 Birth Control......................................................43 Black Panther Party............................................44 Black Radical Congress.......................................45 Blackface............................................................46 Bob Jones University..........................................47 Bono...................................................................48 Book Banning....................................................49 Boy Scouts of America........................................49 Bradley, Bill.......................................................50 Brock, David......................................................51 Brokaw, Tom......................................................52 Brown, Helen Gurley.........................................52 Brown v. Board of Education (1954).......................53 Bryant, Anita.....................................................55 Buchanan, Pat....................................................56 Buckley, William F., Jr.......................................57 Budenz, Louis F..................................................58 Bullard, Robert D..............................................59 Bunche, Ralph....................................................60 Bush Family.......................................................60 Busing, School....................................................64 Byrd, Robert C...................................................65 Campaign Finance Reform.................................67 Campolo, Anthony “Tony”.................................68 Canada...............................................................69 Capital Punishment............................................69 Carson, Rachel....................................................71 Carter, Jimmy.....................................................72
Volume 1 Abortion...............................................................1 Abu Ghraib and Gitmo........................................3 Academic Bill of Rights.......................................5 Academic Freedom...............................................5 Adler, Mortimer J.................................................7 Affirmative Action................................................8 Afrocentrism......................................................10 Age Discrimination............................................11 Agnew, Spiro T...................................................12 AIDS..................................................................13 Alexander, Jane..................................................14 Ali, Muhammad.................................................15 American Century..............................................16 American Civil Liberties Union..........................17 American Civil Religion.....................................20 American Exceptionalism...................................21 American Indian Movement...............................22 Americans with Disabilities Act.........................24 Androgyny.........................................................24 Angelou, Maya...................................................25 Animal Rights...................................................26 Anti-Intellectualism...........................................27 Anti-Semitism....................................................28 Arnold, Ron.......................................................29 Arrow, Tre..........................................................30 Aryan Nations....................................................31 Atwater, Lee.......................................................31 Automobile Safety..............................................32 Baez, Joan...........................................................34 Bankruptcy Reform............................................34 vii
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Catholic Church.................................................74 Censorship..........................................................76 Central Intelligence Agency...............................77 Chambers, Whittaker.........................................79 Charter Schools...................................................79 Chávez, César.....................................................80 Cheney Family....................................................81 Chicago Seven....................................................83 Chick, Jack.........................................................84 China.................................................................85 Chisholm, Shirley...............................................86 Chomsky, Noam.................................................86 Christian Coalition.............................................88 Christian Radio..................................................89 Christian Reconstructionism..............................90 Christmas...........................................................91 Church and State................................................92 Churchill, Ward.................................................92 Civil Rights Movement......................................93 Clinton, Bill.......................................................96 Clinton, Hillary..................................................97 Clinton Impeachment.........................................99 Cold War..........................................................100 Colson, Chuck..................................................104 Columbus Day..................................................105 Comic Books....................................................106 Comic Strips.....................................................107 Commager, Henry Steele..................................108 Common Cause................................................109 Commoner, Barry.............................................109 Communists and Communism.........................110 Comparable Worth...........................................113 Compassionate Conservatism............................113 Confederate Flag...............................................114 Conspiracy Theories..........................................115 Contemporary Christian Music.........................117 Contract with America.....................................118 Corporate Welfare............................................119 Coulter, Ann.....................................................119 Counterculture.................................................120 Country Music..................................................122 Creationism and Intelligent Design..................123 Cronkite, Walter..............................................126 Cuba.................................................................126
Culture Jamming.............................................127 Dean, Howard..................................................129 Dean, James.....................................................130 Dean, John.......................................................130 Deconstructionism...........................................131 DeLay, Tom......................................................132 Deloria, Vine, Jr...............................................133 Demjanjuk, John..............................................134 Democratic Party..............................................135 Diversity Training............................................137 Dobson, James..................................................138 Donahue, Phil..................................................139 Douglas, William O.........................................140 Dr. Phil............................................................140 Drudge Report....................................................141 Drug Testing....................................................142 D’Souza, Dinesh...............................................143 Du Bois, W.E.B................................................144 Dukakis, Michael.............................................145 Duke, David.....................................................145 Dworkin, Andrea..............................................146 Dylan, Bob.......................................................147 Earth Day.........................................................148 Ecoterrorism.....................................................148 Education Reform............................................150 Ehrenreich, Barbara..........................................152 Eisenhower, Dwight D.....................................153 Election of 2000...............................................153 Election of 2008...............................................156 Endangered Species Act....................................159 English as the Official Language.......................160 Enola Gay Exhibit.............................................161 Environmental Movement................................162 Equal Rights Amendment................................164 Evangelicalism.................................................165 Executive Compensation...................................167 Factory Farms...................................................168 Faith-Based Programs.......................................169 Falwell, Jerry....................................................170 Family Values...................................................171 Farrakhan, Louis...............................................172 Federal Budget Deficit......................................173 Federal Communications Commission..............174 Felt, W. Mark...................................................176
Contents
Feminism, Second-Wave...................................177 Feminism, Third-Wave....................................178 Ferraro, Geraldine.............................................179 Flag Desecration...............................................180 Fleiss, Heidi.....................................................181 Flynt, Larry......................................................182 Focus on the Family..........................................183 Fonda, Jane.......................................................184 Food and Drug Administration........................185 Ford, Gerald.....................................................187 Foreman, Dave.................................................188 Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness.......189 Foucault, Michel...............................................191 Founding Fathers..............................................192 France...............................................................194 Frank, Barney...................................................195 Franken, Al......................................................195 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial................196 Freedom of Information Act.............................197 Friedan, Betty...................................................198 Friedman, Milton.............................................199 Fundamentalism, Religious..............................200 Fur...................................................................202 Galbraith, John Kenneth..................................203 Gangs...............................................................203 Gay Capital......................................................204 Gay Rights Movement.....................................205 Gays in Popular Culture...................................207 Gays in the Military.........................................208 Gender-Inclusive Language...............................210 Generations and Generational Conflict..............211 Genetically Modified Foods..............................213 Gibson, Mel.....................................................214 Gilmore, Gary..................................................215 Gingrich, Newt................................................216 Ginsberg, Allen................................................217 Global Warming..............................................218 Globalization....................................................220 Goetz, Bernhard...............................................222 Goldwater, Barry..............................................223 González, Elián................................................224 Gore, Al...........................................................225 Graffiti.............................................................226 Graham, Billy...................................................227
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Great Books......................................................228 Great Society....................................................230 Guardian Angels..............................................231 Gun Control.....................................................231 Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie...................233 Haley, Alex.......................................................235 Hall, Gus.........................................................235 Hargis, Billy.....................................................236 Harrington, Michael.........................................237 Hart, Gary........................................................237 Harvey, Paul.....................................................238 Hate Crimes.....................................................239 Hauerwas, Stanley............................................240 Hay, Harry.......................................................241 Hayden, Tom....................................................242 Health Care......................................................242 Heavy Metal.....................................................245 Hefner, Hugh...................................................246 Heller, Joseph...................................................247 Helms, Jesse.....................................................248 Heritage Foundation........................................249 Hightower, Jim................................................250 Hill, Anita.......................................................251 Hill, Julia “Butterfly”.......................................252 Hillsdale College..............................................253 Hiroshima and Nagasaki..................................253 Hispanic Americans.........................................255 Hiss, Alger.......................................................256 Hoffman, Abbie...............................................257 Hollywood Ten.................................................257 Holocaust.........................................................258 Homeschooling................................................260 hooks, bell........................................................261 Hoover, J. Edgar...............................................262 Horowitz, David...............................................264 Horton, Willie.................................................264 Human Rights.................................................265 Humphrey, Hubert H.......................................266 Hunter, James Davison.....................................268 Huntington, Samuel P......................................269 Hurricane Katrina............................................269 Hutchins, Robert M.........................................271 Illegal Immigrants............................................272 Immigration Policy..........................................273
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Indian Casinos..................................................274 Indian Sport Mascots........................................276 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.....276 Internet............................................................277 Iran-Contra Affair.............................................278 Irvine, Reed......................................................279 Israel................................................................280 Jackson, Jesse...................................................282 Jackson, Michael...............................................283 Japan................................................................284 Jehovah’s Witnesses..........................................284 Jesus People Movement....................................285 John Birch Society............................................286 Johnson, Lyndon B...........................................287 Jorgensen, Christine.........................................288 Judicial Wars....................................................288 Kennedy Family...............................................292 Kerouac, Jack...................................................294 Kerry, John.......................................................295 Kevorkian, Jack................................................297 Keyes, Alan......................................................298 King, Billie Jean..............................................299 King, Martin Luther, Jr....................................299 King, Rodney...................................................301 Kinsey, Alfred..................................................302 Klein, Naomi...................................................303 Koop, C. Everett...............................................304 Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol........................305 Krugman, Paul.................................................306 Kubrick, Stanley...............................................307 Kushner, Tony..................................................307 Kwanzaa...........................................................308 Kyoto Protocol.................................................308 La Follette, Robert, Jr.......................................310 La Raza Unida..................................................310 Labor Unions....................................................311 LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye....................312 Lapin, Daniel....................................................314 LaRouche, Lyndon H., Jr..................................315 Lear, Norman...................................................315 Leary, Timothy.................................................316 Lee, Spike.........................................................317 LeMay, Curtis...................................................318 Leopold, Aldo...................................................319
Lesbians............................................................320 Lewis, Bernard..................................................321 Liddy, G. Gordon.............................................321 Limbaugh, Rush...............................................322 Literature, Film, and Drama.............................324 Lott, Trent........................................................326 Love Canal........................................................328 Loving, Richard, and Mildred Loving...............328 Lynching..........................................................329 Volume 2 MacKinnon, Catharine.....................................332 Madonna..........................................................332 Mailer, Norman................................................334 Malcolm X.......................................................335 Manson, Marilyn..............................................336 Mapplethorpe, Robert......................................336 Marriage Names...............................................337 Marxism...........................................................338 McCain, John...................................................339 McCarthy, Eugene............................................340 McCarthy, Joseph.............................................341 McCarthyism....................................................342 McCloskey, Deirdre..........................................345 McGovern, George...........................................345 McIntire, Carl...................................................347 McLuhan, Marshall...........................................348 McVeigh, Timothy...........................................349 Mead, Margaret................................................350 Media Bias........................................................350 Medical Malpractice.........................................352 Medical Marijuana............................................353 Medved, Michael..............................................354 Men’s Movement..............................................354 Mexico.............................................................356 Microsoft..........................................................357 Migrant Labor..................................................358 Militia Movement............................................359 Milk, Harvey....................................................360 Millett, Kate....................................................361 Million Man March..........................................362 Miranda Rights................................................363 Mondale, Walter...............................................364
Contents
Montana Freemen.............................................365 Moore, Michael.................................................365 Moore, Roy S....................................................366 Moral Majority.................................................367 Morgan, Robin.................................................368 Morrison, Toni..................................................369 Mothers Against Drunk Driving......................369 Motion Picture Association of America.............370 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick.................................371 Ms....................................................................372 Multicultural Conservatism..............................373 Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies................373 Mumford, Lewis...............................................374 Murdoch, Rupert..............................................375 Murrow, Edward R...........................................376 Muslim Americans...........................................377 My Lai Massacre...............................................378 Nader, Ralph....................................................380 Nation, The.......................................................381 Nation of Islam................................................382 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.............................................383 National Endowment for the Arts.....................384 National Endowment for the Humanities.........387 National Organization for Women...................388 National Public Radio......................................389 National Review.................................................390 National Rifle Association................................391 Nelson, Willie..................................................392 Neoconservatism..............................................393 New Age Movement.........................................395 New Deal.........................................................397 New Journalism...............................................398 New Left..........................................................398 New York Times, The..........................................399 Niebuhr, Reinhold...........................................402 Nixon, Richard.................................................403 Norquist, Grover..............................................405 North, Oliver...................................................406 Not Dead Yet...................................................407 Nuclear Age.....................................................408 Obama, Barack.................................................411 Obesity Epidemic.............................................413 Occupational Safety..........................................414
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O’Connor, Sandra Day......................................415 O’Hair, Madalyn Murray..................................416 O.J. Simpson Trial............................................417 Operation Rescue.............................................418 Oppenheimer, J. Robert...................................419 O’Reilly, Bill....................................................420 Outing.............................................................421 Packwood, Bob.................................................422 Paglia, Camille.................................................422 Palin, Sarah......................................................423 Parks, Rosa.......................................................424 Penn, Sean........................................................425 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.....426 Perot, H. Ross..................................................427 Phelps, Fred.....................................................429 Philadelphia, Mississippi..................................429 Pipes, Richard, and Daniel Pipes......................430 Planned Parenthood..........................................431 Podhoretz, Norman..........................................432 Police Abuse.....................................................433 Political Correctness.........................................434 Pornography.....................................................436 Postmodernism.................................................438 Premillennial Dispensationalism......................439 Presidential Pardons.........................................440 Prison Reform..................................................441 Privacy Rights..................................................443 Privatization.....................................................444 Progressive Christians Uniting.........................445 Promise Keepers...............................................446 Public Broadcasting Service..............................447 Punk Rock.......................................................449 Quayle, Dan.....................................................451 Race.................................................................452 Racial Profiling................................................453 Rand, Ayn........................................................454 Rap Music........................................................455 Rather, Dan......................................................456 Reagan, Ronald................................................458 Record Warning Labels....................................459 Red and Blue States..........................................460 Redford, Robert...............................................461 Redneck...........................................................462 Reed, Ralph.....................................................463
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Rehnquist, William H.....................................464 Relativism, Moral.............................................465 Religious Right................................................466 Reparations, Japanese Internment.....................467 Republican Party..............................................468 Revisionist History...........................................470 Right to Counsel..............................................471 Right to Die.....................................................472 Robertson, Pat..................................................474 Rock and Roll..................................................475 Rockwell, George Lincoln................................477 Rockwell, Norman...........................................477 Rodman, Dennis...............................................478 Roe v. Wade (1973)............................................479 Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg...........480 Rove, Karl........................................................480 Ruby Ridge Incident........................................482 Rudolph, Eric...................................................483 Rusher, William A...........................................483 Ryan, George....................................................484 Said, Edward....................................................486 Same-Sex Marriage...........................................486 Sanders, Bernie.................................................488 Saudi Arabia.....................................................488 Schaeffer, Francis..............................................490 Schiavo, Terri....................................................490 Schlafly, Phyllis................................................492 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.................................492 School of the Americas......................................493 School Prayer....................................................494 School Shootings..............................................496 School Vouchers................................................497 Schwarzenegger, Arnold...................................498 Science Wars....................................................499 Secular Humanism...........................................501 Seeger, Pete......................................................502 September 11...................................................502 September 11 Memorial...................................505 Serrano, Andres................................................506 Sex Education...................................................507 Sex Offenders....................................................509 Sexual Assault..................................................510 Sexual Harassment............................................511 Sexual Revolution.............................................512
Sharpton, Al.....................................................513 Sheen, Fulton J.................................................515 Shelley, Martha.................................................515 Shepard, Matthew.............................................516 Shock Jocks......................................................517 Sider, Ron.........................................................518 Silent Majority.................................................518 Simpsons, The.....................................................519 Smoking in Public............................................520 Socarides, Charles.............................................521 Social Security..................................................521 Sodomy Laws....................................................523 Sokal Affair......................................................524 Soros, George...................................................525 Southern Baptist Convention............................525 Soviet Union and Russia...................................526 Sowell, Thomas................................................529 Speech Codes....................................................530 Spock, Benjamin...............................................531 Springsteen, Bruce............................................532 Starr, Kenneth..................................................533 Stay-at-Home Mothers.....................................534 Steinbeck, John................................................535 Steinem, Gloria................................................535 Stem-Cell Research...........................................536 Stern, Howard..................................................538 Stewart, Jon......................................................538 Stone, Oliver....................................................539 Stonewall Rebellion..........................................540 Strategic Defense Initiative...............................540 Strauss, Leo.......................................................541 Structuralism and Post-Structuralism...............542 Student Conservatives.......................................543 Students for a Democratic Society.....................544 Summers, Lawrence..........................................546 Supply-Side Economics.....................................546 Symbionese Liberation Army............................547 Taft, Robert A..................................................549 Talk Radio........................................................549 Tax Reform.......................................................550 Televangelism...................................................552 Teller, Edward..................................................553 Ten Commandments.........................................554 Terkel, Studs....................................................555
Contents
Thanksgiving Day............................................556 Think Tanks.....................................................557 Third Parties....................................................559 Thomas, Clarence.............................................561 Thompson, Hunter S........................................562 Three Mile Island Accident..............................563 Thurmond, Strom.............................................563 Till, Emmett....................................................564 Tobacco Settlements.........................................565 Tort Reform.....................................................566 Transgender Movement....................................567 Truman, Harry S..............................................568 Turner, Ted.......................................................569 Twenty-Second Amendment.............................570 Unabomber......................................................572 United Nations................................................572 USA PATRIOT Act.........................................574 Ventura, Jesse...................................................576 Victimhood......................................................576 Vidal, Gore.......................................................577 Vietnam Veterans Against the War...................578 Vietnam Veterans Memorial.............................579 Vietnam War....................................................580 Vigilantism......................................................582 Voegelin, Eric...................................................583 Voting Rights Act............................................584 Waco Siege.......................................................586 Wall Street Journal, The......................................587 Wallace, George...............................................588 Wallis, Jim.......................................................589 Wal-Mart.........................................................589 Walt Disney Company.....................................591 War on Drugs...................................................592 War on Poverty................................................593 War Powers Act...............................................594 War Protesters..................................................595 War Toys..........................................................597 Warhol, Andy...................................................598
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Warren, Earl.....................................................599 Warren, Rick....................................................601 Washington Times, The........................................601 Watergate.........................................................602 Watt, James.....................................................603 Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992.............................................604 Wayne, John.....................................................605 Wealth Gap......................................................606 Weekly Standard, The.........................................607 Welfare Reform................................................608 Wellstone, Paul................................................609 West, Cornel....................................................610 Weyrich, Paul M..............................................611 Whistleblowers................................................612 White, Reggie..................................................613 White Supremacists..........................................614 Wildmon, Donald............................................616 Will, George....................................................617 Williams, William Appleman..........................618 Wilson, Edmund..............................................618 Winfrey, Oprah................................................619 Wolf, Naomi....................................................620 Wolfe, Tom......................................................621 Women in the Military.....................................622 Women’s Studies..............................................623 Woodward, Bob...............................................624 World................................................................625 World Council of Churches..............................625 World War II Memorial...................................626 Wounded Knee Incident...................................627 Young, Neil......................................................628 Zappa, Frank....................................................629 Zero Tolerance..................................................629 Zinn, Howard...................................................630 Bibliography......................................................633 Index..................................................................I-1
Topic Finder Activists and Advocates Alexander, Jane Ali, Muhammad Arnold, Ron Arrow, Tre Baez, Joan Behe, Michael J. Bono Bryant, Anita Budenz, Louis F. Bullard, Robert D. Carson, Rachel Chávez, César Chicago Seven Churchill, Ward Commoner, Barry Deloria, Vine, Jr. Dworkin, Andrea Farrakhan, Louis Fonda, Jane Foreman, Dave Founding Fathers Friedan, Betty Hay, Harry Hayden, Tom Hill, Julia “Butterfly” Hoffman, Abbie Hollywood Ten hooks, bell Jackson, Jesse Jorgensen, Christine Kerry, John Kevorkian, Jack King, Billie Jean King, Martin Luther, Jr. LaRouche, Lyndon H., Jr. Leary, Timothy Leopold, Aldo
Loving, Richard, and Mildred Loving MacKinnon, Catharine Malcolm X Milk, Harvey Millett, Kate Morgan, Robin Nader, Ralph O’Hair, Madalyn Murray Parks, Rosa Rockwell, George Lincoln Schlafly, Phyllis Sharpton, Al Shelley, Martha Soros, George Steinem, Gloria War Protesters Weyrich, Paul M. Wildmon, Donald Wolf, Naomi Artists, Musicians, Athletes, and Entertainers Alexander, Jane Ali, Muhammad Biafra, Jello Bono Bryant, Anita Dean, James Dylan, Bob Fonda, Jane Franken, Al Gibson, Mel Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie Jackson, Michael King, Billie Jean
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Kubrick, Stanley Kushner, Tony Lear, Norman Lee, Spike Madonna Manson, Marilyn Mapplethorpe, Robert Moore, Michael Nelson, Willie Norquist, Grover Penn, Sean Redford, Robert Rockwell, Norman Rodman, Dennis Schwarzenegger, Arnold Seeger, Pete Serrano, Andres Springsteen, Bruce Stone, Oliver Ventura, Jesse Warhol, Andy Wayne, John White, Reggie Winfrey, Oprah Young, Neil Zappa, Frank
Arts, Music, and Culture Barbie Doll Beauty Pageants Blackface Comic Strips Contemporary Christian Music Counterculture Country Music Culture Jamming
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Topic Finder
Gays in Popular Culture Graffiti Great Books Heavy Metal Hispanic Americans Hollywood Ten Indian Sport Mascots Literature, Film, and Drama Media Bias Multicultural Conservatism Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies New Journalism Pornography Postmodernism Punk Rock Rap Music Record Warning Labels Red and Blue States Redneck Rock and Roll War Toys
Countries and Locations Canada China Cuba France Hiroshima and Nagasaki Israel Japan Love Canal Mexico Philadelphia, Mississippi Red and Blue States Saudi Arabia Soviet Union and Russia Criminals, Accusers, and Victims Chambers, Whittaker Demjanjuk, John Fleiss, Heidi Gilmore, Gary Goetz, Bernhard
González, Elián Hill, Anita Hiss, Alger Horton, Willie Kevorkian, Jack King, Rodney McVeigh, Timothy Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Rudolph, Eric Schiavo, Terri Shepard, Matthew Till, Emmett Unabomber Culture Critics, Social Commentators, and Academics Adler, Mortimer J. Behe, Michael J. Bennett, William J. Buchanan, Pat Buckley, William F., Jr. Bullard, Robert D. Chomsky, Noam Churchill, Ward Commager, Henry Steele Commoner, Barry D’Souza, Dinesh Du Bois, W.E.B. Dworkin, Andrea Foucault, Michel Friedan, Betty Friedman, Milton Galbraith, John Kenneth Harrington, Michael Hart, Gary Hauerwas, Stanley Horowitz, David Hunter, James Davison Huntington, Samuel P. Hutchins, Robert M. Irvine, Reed Kinsey, Alfred Klein, Naomi Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol Krugman, Paul
MacKinnon, Catharine McCloskey, Deirdre McLuhan, Marshall Mead, Margaret Millett, Kate Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Mumford, Lewis Niebuhr, Reinhold Norquist, Grover Paglia, Camille Pipes, Richard, and Daniel Pipes Podhoretz, Norman Said, Edward Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Socarides, Charles Sowell, Thomas Spock, Benjamin Strauss, Leo Summers, Lawrence Voegelin, Eric West, Cornel Weyrich, Paul M. Wildmon, Donald Will, George Williams, William Appleman Wilson, Edmund Wolf, Naomi Zinn, Howard Education and Educational Issues Academic Bill of Rights Academic Freedom Anti-Intellectualism Charter Schools Diversity Training Education Reform Gender-Inclusive Language Great Books Homeschooling Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies Political Correctness Revisionist History School Prayer
Topic Finder
School Shootings School Vouchers Sex Education Speech Codes Student Conservatives
Events, Periods, and Incidents Abu Ghraib and Gitmo Battle of Seattle Christmas Civil Rights Movement Clinton Impeachment Cold War Columbus Day Earth Day Election of 2000 Election of 2008 Hiroshima and Nagasaki Holocaust Hurricane Katrina Iran-Contra Affair Kwanzaa Love Canal Million Man March My Lai Massacre New Deal Nuclear Age O.J. Simpson Trial Ruby Ridge Incident September 11 Sokal Affair Stonewall Rebellion Thanksgiving Day Three Mile Island Accident Vietnam War Waco Siege Watergate Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992 Wounded Knee Incident Government Programs and Policies Affirmative Action Bankruptcy Reform Book Banning
Busing, School Campaign Finance Reform Capital Punishment Censorship Compassionate Conservatism English as the Official Language Faith-Based Programs Federal Budget Deficit Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness Globalization Great Society Gun Control Health Care Human Rights Immigration Policy Kyoto Protocol New Deal Occupational Safety Presidential Pardons Prison Reform Record Warning Labels Reparations, Japanese Internment School Prayer School Vouchers Social Security Strategic Defense Initiative Supply-Side Economics Tax Reform Tobacco Settlements War on Drugs War on Poverty Welfare Reform Holidays and Observances Christmas Earth Day Columbus Day Thanksgiving Day Kwanzaa Ideologies and Movements Afrocentrism American Century American Civil Religion American Exceptionalism
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Anti-Intellectualism Anti-Semitism Christian Reconstructionism Civil Rights Movement Communists and Communism Compassionate Conservatism Conspiracy Theories Creationism and Intelligent Design Deconstructionism Ecoterrorism Environmental Movement Evangelicalism Fundamentalism, Religious Globalization Homeschooling Jesus People Movement Marxism McCarthyism Militia Movement Multicultural Conservatism Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies Neoconservatism New Left Political Correctness Postmodernism Premillennial Dispensationalism Privatization Red and Blue States Relativism, Moral Religious Right Revisionist History Secular Humanism Silent Majority Structuralism and Post Structuralism Transgender Movement Victimhood Journalists, Writers, and Media Figures Adler, Mortimer J. Angelou, Maya Bennett, William J. Brock, David
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Brokaw, Tom Brown, Helen Gurley Buchanan, Pat Buckley, William F., Jr. Chick, Jack Coulter, Ann Cronkite, Walter Donahue, Phil Dr. Phil Ehrenreich, Barbara Falwell, Jerry Flynt, Larry Ginsberg, Allen Haley, Alex Harvey, Paul Hefner, Hugh Heller, Joseph Hightower, Jim hooks, bell Horowitz, David Irvine, Reed Kerouac, Jack Klein, Naomi Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye Lapin, Daniel Lee, Spike Lewis, Bernard Liddy, G. Gordon Limbaugh, Rush Mailer, Norman McIntire, Carl Medved, Michael Moore, Michael Morgan, Robin Morrison, Toni Murdoch, Rupert Murrow, Edward R. O’Reilly, Bill Podhoretz, Norman Rand, Ayn Rather, Dan Robertson, Pat Rusher, William A. Sheen, Fulton J.
Shelley, Martha Steinbeck, John Steinem, Gloria Stern, Howard Stewart, Jon Stone, Oliver Terkel, Studs Thompson, Hunter S. Turner, Ted Vidal, Gore Wallis, Jim Warren, Rick Wildmon, Donald Will, George Winfrey, Oprah Wolfe, Tom Woodward, Bob
Laws, Legal Issues, and Court Rulings Americans with Disabilities Act Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Contract with America Endangered Species Act Equal Rights Amendment Freedom of Information Act Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Judicial Wars Miranda Rights Presidential Pardons Privacy Rights Right to Counsel Right to Die Roe v. Wade (1973) Sodomy Laws Tax Reform Tobacco Settlements Tort Reform Twenty-Second Amendment USA PATRIOT Act Voting Rights Act War Powers Act Zero Tolerance
Media and Publishing Book Banning Censorship Comic Books Comic Strips Culture Jamming Drudge Report Great Books Hollywood Ten Internet Literature, Film, and Drama Media Bias Ms. Nation, The National Review New Journalism New York Times, The Pornography Record Warning Labels Shock Jocks Simpsons, The Talk Radio Televangelism Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, The World
Memorials and Exhibits Enola Gay Exhibit Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial September 11 Memorial Vietnam Veterans Memorial World War II Memorial Organizations and Institutions American Civil Liberties Union American Indian Movement Aryan Nations Black Panther Party Black Radical Congress Bob Jones University Boy Scouts of America Catholic Church
Topic Finder
Central Intelligence Agency Christian Coalition Common Cause Democratic Party Federal Communications Commission Focus on the Family Food and Drug Administration Guardian Angels Heritage Foundation Hillsdale College Jehovah’s Witnesses Jesus People Movement John Birch Society La Raza Unida Labor Unions Microsoft Montana Freemen Moral Majority Mothers Against Drunk Driving Motion Picture Association of America Nation of Islam National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Humanities National Organization for Women National Public Radio National Rifle Association Not Dead Yet Operation Rescue People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Planned Parenthood Progressive Christians Uniting Promise Keepers Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Republican Party School of the Americas
Southern Baptist Convention Students for a Democratic Society Symbionese Liberation Army Think Tanks United Nations Vietnam Veterans Against the War Walt Disney Company World Council of Churches Political and Economic Issues Bankruptcy Reform Campaign Finance Reform Church and State Communists and Communism Compassionate Conservatism Corporate Welfare Executive Compensation Factory Farms Globalization Health Care Hispanic Americans Immigration Policy Marxism McCarthyism Migrant Labor Militia Movement Neoconservatism New Left Occupational Safety Political Correctness Presidential Pardons Privatization Silent Majority Social Security Student Conservatives Supply-Side Economics Tax Reform Think Tanks Third Parties Wal-Mart War on Poverty Wealth Gap Welfare Reform Whistleblowers
Politicians, Government Officials, and Legal Figures Agnew, Spiro T. Atwater, Lee Bradley, Bill Bunche, Ralph Byrd, Robert C. Carter, Jimmy Cheney Family Chisholm, Shirley Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Colson, Chuck Dean, Howard Dean, John DeLay, Tom Douglas, William O. Dukakis, Michael Duke, David Eisenhower, Dwight D. Felt, W. Mark Ferraro, Geraldine Ford, Gerald Founding Fathers Frank, Barney Franken, Al Gingrich, Newt Goldwater, Barry Gore, Al Hall, Gus Hart, Gary Hayden, Tom Helms, Jesse Hoover, J. Edgar Humphrey, Hubert H. Jackson, Jesse Johnson, Lyndon B. Kennedy Family Kerry, John Keyes, Alan Koop, C. Everett La Follete, Robert, Jr. LaRouche, Lyndon H., Jr. LeMay, Curtis Liddy, G. Gordon Lott, Trent McCain, John
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McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, Joseph McGovern, George Milk, Harvey Mondale, Walter Moore, Roy S. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Nader, Ralph Nixon, Richard North, Oliver Obama, Barack O’Connor, Sandra Day Oppenheimer, J. Robert Packwood, Bob Palin, Sarah Perot, H. Ross Quayle, Dan Reagan, Ronald Rehnquist, William H. Rockwell, George Lincoln Rove, Karl Ryan, George Sanders, Bernie Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Schwarzenegger, Arnold Starr, Kenneth Summers, Lawrence Taft, Robert A. Teller, Edward Thomas, Clarence Thurmond, Strom Truman, Harry S. Ventura, Jesse Wallace, George Warren, Earl Watt, James Wellstone, Paul
Religion and Religious Issues Abortion American Civil Religion Anti-Semitism Birth Control Bob Jones University Catholic Church Christian Coalition
Christian Radio Christian Reconstructionism Christmas Church and State Contemporary Christian Music Creationism and Intelligent Design Evangelicalism Faith-Based Programs Family Values Focus on the Family Fundamentalism, Religious Jehovah’s Witnesses Jesus People Movement Kwanzaa Moral Majority Muslim Americans Nation of Islam New Age Movement Premillennial Dispensationalism Progressive Christians Uniting Promise Keepers Religious Right School Prayer Sex Education Southern Baptist Convention Televangelism Ten Commandments World Council of Churches
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Editor Roger Chapman Palm Beach Atlantic University
Advisory Board Paul M. Buhle Brown University
Barbara B. Hines Howard University
Larry Eskridge Wheaton College
Donald McQuarie Bowling Green State University Lauren Rabinovitz University of Iowa
David Roediger University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign John Kenneth White Catholic University of America
Contributors Robert R. Agne Auburn University
Diane Benedic Denis Diderot University
Brian Calfano University of North Texas
Holly Alloway University of Texas, Austin
Chip Berlet Political Research Associates
John Calhoun Palm Beach Atlantic University
Mahesh Ananth Indiana University, South Bend
Bradley Best Buena Vista University
Daniel Callcut University of North Florida
Robin Andersen Fordham University
R. Matthew Beverlin University of Kansas
Charles Carter University of Georgia
Rebecca Bach Duke University
Michael Ian Borer University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Stephanie Chaban San Diego State University
Gary L. Bailey Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Boslaugh Washington University School of Medicine
Evan Charney Duke University
Maria T. Baldwin Bowling Green State University John Balz University of Chicago Kathleen Barr Texas A&M University Margaret Barrett Independent Scholar Robert Bauman Washington State University, Tri-Cities Daniel Béland University of Calgary
Durrell Bowman University of Guelph Timothy Paul Bowman Southern Methodist University Cyndi Boyce Lincoln Trail College Jana Brubaker Northern Illinois University William E. Burns George Washington University Charlotte Cahill Northwestern University xxiii
Karma R. Chávez University of New Mexico David N. Cherney University of Colorado, Boulder David J. Childs Miami University Justin P. Coffey Bradley University Douglas Craig Australian National University Benjamin W. Cramer Pennsylvania State University
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Contributors
Solomon Davidoff Wentworth Institute of Technology
William J. Emerson, III Bowling Green State University
Sue Davis University of Delaware
Corey Fields Northwestern University
Alexandra DeMonte Loyola University, Chicago
Linford D. Fisher Brown University
James I. Deutsch Smithsonian Institution
Patrick Fisher Seton Hall University
Larry W. DeWitt U.S. Social Security Administration
Joshua Fogel Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Michele Dillon University of New Hampshire Rachel Donaldson Vanderbilt University Sven Dubie John Carroll University Mark L. Dubois Duke University Robert H. Duke Western Michigan University Merrit Dukehart University of Colorado, Boulder Quentin Hedges Duroy Denison University Tanya Hedges Duroy Wright State University Margaret Dykes University of Georgia Darius V. Echeverría Rutgers University Mark Edwards Ouachita Baptist University Thomas C. Ellington Wesleyan College, Macon Blake Ellis Rice University Gehrett Ellis Harvard University
Heather Hendershot Queens College, City University of New York Tony L. Hill Massachusetts Institute of Technology Steve G. Hoffman State University of New York, Buffalo Richard Gibbons Holtzman Bryant University Richard L. Hughes Illinois State University
Gill Frank Brown University
T.R.C. Hutton Vanderbilt University
Anthony C. Gabrielli High Point University
Sara Hyde University of Mississippi
Carolyn Gallaher American University
Patrick Jackson Vanderbilt University
Michelle Garvey University of Minnesota
Jordon Johnson New Mexico Highlands University
Joseph Gelfer Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Michael Johnson, Jr. Washington State University
Ryan Gibb University of Kansas Philippe R. Girard McNeese State University Richard C. Goode Lipscomb University Darren E. Grem University of Georgia
J.D. Jordan University of Georgia Elliot L. Judd University of Illinois, Chicago Mary E. Kelly University of Central Missouri Stephanie L. Kent University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Candace Griffith University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Stephen Kershnar State University of New York, Fredonia
Laura Hague Austin Community College
C. Richard King Washington State University
Craig Hanson Palm Beach Atlantic University
Melanie Kirkland Texas Christian University
A.W.R. Hawkins Wayland Baptist University
Peter N. Kirstein Saint Xavier University
Contributors
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Gal Kober Boston University
Angie Maxwell University of Texas, Austin
Holona LeAnne Ochs University of Kansas
Christine Hoff Kraemer Boston University
Gary W. McDonogh Bryn Mawr College
Jacob W. Olmstead Texas Christian University
Tim Lacy University of Illinois, Chicago
Cindy Mediavilla University of California, Los Angeles
Seth Ovadia Bowdoin College
Selina S.L. Lai University of Heidelberg, Germany
Daniel Melendrez University of Texas, El Paso
Valerie Palmer-Mehta Oakland University
Gwendolyn Laird Austin Community College
Jason Mellard University of Texas, Austin
Serena Parekh University of Connecticut
Gary Land Andrews University
Keri Leigh Merritt University of Georgia
Manon Parry University of Maryland, College Park
Tom Lansburg Kansas Wesleyan University
Tom Mertes University of California, Los Angeles
Sean Parson University of Oregon
Rob Latham University of Iowa
Cynthia J. Miller Emerson College
Susan Pearce East Carolina University
Abraham D. Lavender Florida International University
Nicolaas Mink University of Wisconsin, Madison
Mark Pedelty University of Minnesota
Damon Lindler Lazzara York University
Kelly L. Mitchell University of Western Ontario
Joshua E. Perry Indiana University
David J. Leonard Washington State University
Eric J. Morgan University of Colorado, Boulder
Kurt W. Peterson North Park University
Daniel Liechty Illinois State University
Marilyn Morgan Harvard University
Martin J. Plax Cleveland State University
Christopher J. Lyons University of New Mexico
Kevin C. Motl Ouachita Baptist University
Lee S. Polansky Independent Scholar
Mike Males Independent Scholar
Gary Mucciaroni Temple University
Jonah Raskin Sonoma State University
Nick Malinowski Independent Scholar
Andrew R. Murphy Rutgers University
Claire E. Rasmussen University of Delaware
Jeffrey T. Manuel University of Minnesota
J. Robert Myers Loyola University, Chicago
Kirk Richardson Virginia Commonwealth University
Andy Markowitz Independent Scholar
Joane Nagel University of Kansas
Leah Martin Independent Scholar
Traci L. Nelson University of Pittsburgh
Robert L. Richardson University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Elizabeth M. Matelski Loyola University, Chicago
Rebecca Nicholson-Weir Purdue University
George Rising University of Arizona Christopher D. Rodkey Lebanon Valley College
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Contributors
Joseph A. Rodriguez University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Aidan Smith Cornell University
Phil Tiemeyer University of Texas, Austin
Deborah D. Rogers University of Maine
Courtney Smith University of Oregon
Mike Timonin James Madison University
Sergio Romero Boise State University
Robert S. Smith University of North Carolina, Charlotte
John Day Tully Central Connecticut State University
Joseph Rosenblum University of Colorado, Boulder Martha J. Ross-Rodgers Independent Scholar Aaron Safane University of Georgia Sue Salinger European Graduate School C. Heike Schotten University of Massachusetts, Boston Todd Scribner Catholic University of America Erika Seeler Duke University Jeff Shantz Kwantlen University College Greg M. Shaw Illinois Wesleyan University Gregory P. Shealy University of Wisconsin, Madison Neil Shepard Bowling Green State University Matthew C. Sherman Saint Louis University Francis Shor Wayne State University William F. Shughart, II University of Mississippi Jennifer Lyn Simpson University of Colorado, Boulder
Min Song University of Georgia Daniel Spillman Emory University Arlene Stein Rutgers University Karen Sternheimer University of Southern California Bruce E. Stewart Appalachian State University James W. Stoutenborough University of Kansas Drew A. Swanson University of Georgia Aaron Swartz Independent Scholar Omar Swartz University of Colorado, Denver Molly Swiger Baldwin-Wallace College Jessie Swigger University of Texas, Austin Keith Swigger Texas Woman’s University Peter Swirski University of Hong Kong Steven L. Taylor Troy University Robert Teigrob Ryerson University
Glenn H. Utter Lamar University Liam van Beek University of Western Ontario Jon VanWieren Western Michigan University David W. Veenstra University of Illinois, Chicago Michael A. Vieira Bishop Connolly High School Danielle R. Vitale Oakland University Bryan E. Vizzini West Texas A&M University William T. Walker Chestnut Hill College Andrew J. Waskey Dalton State College Robert Weisbrot Colby College Daniel K. Williams University of West Georgia Jed Woodworth University of Wisconsin, Madison E. Michael Young Trinity Valley Community College Steve Young McHenry County College Anna Zuschlag University of Western Ontario
Introduction Culture Wars: Rhetoric and Reality From the end of World War II to the present, many contend, American society has been wracked by social and political polarization—a conflict of values and ideas widely referred to as the “culture wars.” The term is metaphorical, as the divisions have not involved literal war, seldom bloodshed, and certainly nothing close to the calamity of the Civil War or other major national conflagrations. Rather, the skirmishes of the culture wars generally have been contained within a democratic framework, involving public debate, election campaigns, legislative politics, lobbying, legal proceedings and court cases, agenda setting by interest groups and think tanks, religious movements, protests and demonstrations, media events, partisan media commentary, politicized popular culture, and academic discourse. The provenance of the term “culture wars” is European, specifically the German Reich’s Kulturkampf (literally, “culture struggle”) of the 1870s. The Kulturkampf was a political and ideological confrontation between Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a modernist reformer, and the Roman Catholic Church. As Bismarck sought to unite his newly formed empire, comprised primarily of Protestants, he saw the Catholic Church as hindering his political aims. Indeed, the Kulturkampf was precipitated by the formation of a Catholic political party called the Center. With the cooperation of the Reichstag, or national legislature, Bismarck sought to diminish the societal influence of the Catholic Church by placing parochial schools under state control, expelling the Jesuits, forbidding clerics from expressing political views from the pulpit, and mandating civil marriage ceremonies. Such repressive efforts at bringing about cultural unity ultimately backfired, however, as they triggered strong conservative and popular opposition. Finally, after the death of Pope Pius IX in 1878, Bismarck ended his Kulturkampf and enlisted the Center Party to help him oppose the growing menace of socialism.
A World of Binary Constructs By the late 1980s, some in the United States were relating the political and cultural divisiveness of their society to what had occurred in Bismarck’s Germany. Among the controversies that seemed especially analogous, at least to
some, were those pertaining to the relationship between church and state. The comparison greatly appealed to leaders of the Religious Right and social conservatives in general, as it was in harmony with their view that traditional values were under assault. Whatever the extent of similarity between the tensions in American society during the 1980s and those in Germany during the 1870s, the descriptor “culture wars” has stuck. One defining feature of the culture wars is a labeling and classification of issues that suggests a moralistic either/or sensibility. Such binary constructs have a Manichaean aspect, lending legitimacy to the view that the struggle is religious in nature. In most cases, issues and players in the culture wars are presented as pairs of polar opposites and irreconcilable differences. Consequently, the battles are characterized as liberals versus conservatives, red states versus blue states, the left versus the right, theists versus secularists, fundamentalists and evangelicals versus religious progressives, radicals versus moderates, constrained versus unconstrained, relativism versus absolute truth, traditionalists versus modernists, secular-progressives versus traditionalists, urban versus rural, suburban versus urban, metro versus retro, the masses versus the elitists, libertarian individualists versus liberal collectivists, “strict father morality” versus “nurturant parent morality,” textual theists versus nontextual theists, modern values versus Victorian virtues, morality versus permissiveness, loose constructionists versus strict constructionists, postmodernism versus objective reality, patriarchy versus women’s liberation, prochoice versus prolife, neoconservatives versus isolationists, multiculturalists versus universalists, the nuclear family versus the extended family, and so on. While such framing serves as convenient shorthand, perhaps useful to some degree, it tends to oversimplify issues and individuals by failing to acknowledge their nuances and complexities. Indeed, a majority of Americans find themself positioned somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. Take away the binary constructs, however, and it is difficult to find a handle on the culture wars. Moreover, since binary constructs are part of the spoken language of culture warriors, any serious analysis must grapple with such terms and concepts.
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Context and Background Numerous events preceded the onset of the culture wars. While designating any single starting point is arbitrary, one could justifiably point to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal of the 1930s. Republicans were shut out of the White House for two decades (1933–1953), the power of the federal government increased dramatically, and a host of new entitlement programs were created. Democrat presidents following FDR attempted to build on the New Deal, most notably Lyndon B. Johnson with his Great Society. Bill Clinton’s failed attempt to introduce universal health care in the 1990s likewise was part of the Democratic drive to add to the legacy of the New Deal. In reaction against the progressive trends, conservatives campaigned against big government, arguing that it diminishes individual freedom and incentive, constrains free enterprise, and puts the United States at risk of becoming a socialist nation. After President Harry Truman’s upset victory over Thomas Dewey in 1948, the Republican Party made the threat of communism its main concern, using the issue of national security as a cudgel against Democrats (who were in power when the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb and China fell to communism) and going so far as to equate the growing federal power in Washington with communist-style centralization. Concerns related to the Cold War, with excesses leading to the Red Scare of the 1950s (called McCarthyism by its critics), took on a moral tone as conservatives contrasted the Soviet regime’s official atheistic stance with America’s Judeo-Christian tradition. It was in this context that the phrase “under God” was inserted in the American flag pledge and “In God We Trust” inscribed on the nation’s currency. At the same time, however, a number of Supreme Court rulings interpreted the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause as requiring a high wall of separation between church and state (in the process ruling official prayer in public schools as unconstitutional), which outraged many conservatives. The Cold War placed a new emphasis on human rights. In communist countries, individual freedom was greatly restricted, which most Americans considered repugnant. The United Nations, itself the brainchild of FDR, proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, just three years after the institution’s founding. In the United States, succeeding years brought increasing concern about the rights of blacks in the Southern states, where segregation was the law of the land. Critics noted that the United States was a less than perfect model to the rest of the world when blacks were treated as second-class citizens. The civil rights movement, eventually backed by federal courts and new federal laws, became a model for other causes, including feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, and even the Religious Right. At the same time, the expansion of
African American rights triggered Southern white resentment over federal usurpation of states’ rights. Cultural changes in postwar America, including a vibrant economy and the baby boom, led to a growing youth culture backed by television, popular music (including rock and roll), and automobiles. The introduction of the birth-control pill, an effective and convenient oral contraceptive, spurred the sexual revolution. Young people in greater numbers began “shacking up,” and the trend toward no-fault divorce led to the dissolution of more marriages. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that state laws prohibiting the sale of birth-control devices violated individual privacy rights, a decision deplored by strict constructionists as not being based on any direct reading of the Constitution. Later, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the high court ruled that state laws banning abortion also were unconstitutional, again based on the right to privacy. In 1979, the Christian Right became manifest with the formation of the Moral Majority, a pressure group that opposed abortion and other trends seen as threatening family values and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Vietnam War, part of the ongoing U.S. effort to contain the spread of communism, led to domestic unrest, with massive student antiwar protests in the 1960s and early 1970s. One side viewed the war as immoral; the other side viewed opposition to the war as equally immoral. Saigon finally fell to the communists in April 1975, less than a year after Richard Nixon had resigned as president over the Watergate scandal, and the United States was plagued for the rest of the decade by ongoing economic problems, an energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis. During this period, many New Deal Democrats switched party affiliation and voted for conservative Republican Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 signaled a sweeping political realignment. According to some commentators, the economic crisis of the 1970s provided the New Right with an opening to advance its agenda much in the way the Great Depression had given momentum to liberals and progressives. Republicans courted the Religious Right, inserted an anti-abortion plank in their party platform, and gained the enduring allegiance of conservative Christian voters. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992, however, shattered Republican illusions of a permanent reign and prompted some in the party to view their struggle as a culture war. Clinton’s election during an economic downturn, after he worked a campaign strategy based on the premise “It’s the economy, stupid,” put a wrinkle in the culture wars thesis that voters place more importance on cultural issues (values) than on their economic interests. In 1999, in response to the Republican failure to remove Clinton from office over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, Paul Weyrich, a leading Republican conservative
Introduction
and strategist of the Religious Right, lamented, “I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values. . . . I believe that we have probably lost the culture war. That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.”
Hunter’s Culture War The culture wars became a major topic of debate following the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), a book by longtime University of Virginia sociology professor James Davison Hunter. According to Hunter, American society is divided between the “orthodox” and the “progressive,” characterized by “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of understanding.” Accordingly, whereas Americans once shared “a larger biblical culture”—one equated with “moral authority” based on belief in a transcendental supreme being (God) who has handed down revelation (Scripture) that must be followed for all times—the years since World War II have seen a growing segment of the American populace operating on a different worldview, one based on cultural progressivism. The latter group, which includes the nonreligious as well as theistic progressives, has an affinity for Enlightenment ideals, secularism, and modernity, and tends to think rationally as well as subjectively. Consequently, according to Hunter, a division developed between the holdovers of the old culture, comprising conservative Judeo-Christian values, and those who approach the challenges of the day from a more contextual, “spirit of the time” perspective. In the context of historical religious communities, members are divided between the orthodox and progressives—a situation in which denominational doctrine and religious rituals are no longer glue that binds. In other words, the culture wars are seen as taking place within faith communities, between faith communities, and between faith communities and the larger society. It can be noted, for example, that the Religious Right is comprised of conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. In addition, secularists themselves remain divided, with some leaning toward the orthodox rather than the progressive, embracing natural law in the same way that theists subscribe to religious tradition. While acknowledging that political elites are the ones who have been orchestrating the culture wars, Hunter maintains that the general public is nonetheless caught up in the struggle, which he calls “a war of moral visions.” Even though “most Americans occupy a vast middle ground between the polarizing impulses of American culture,” he insists that they, too, are participants in the culture wars because each individual has
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an “impulse” to lean toward either the orthodox or the progressive. The mass media, Hunter further argues, no longer mediate political differences, but instead exacerbate the divisions—in other words, even though the private thoughts of Americans are generally moderate, public discourse is polarizing and results in “the eclipse of the middle.” Continuing his thesis, Hunter argues that America’s cultural cleavage is ultimately about “how we are to order our lives together.” In other words, as reflected in the subtitle of his book, the crux of the conflict is about the future of the nation. In his broad outline of the culture wars, Hunter identifies five “fronts” on which the future will be played out: the family, education, the media, law, and politics. Ultimately, he predicts, the culture wars will decide such contentious family issues as reproduction rights (including abortion), the boundaries of legitimate sexuality, childrearing, feminism, sexual orientation, and even the structure and definition of the family. In the realm of education, the outcome of the culture wars will decide what children are taught and resolve a broad range of related issues, from history standards and multiculturalism to sex education and whether or not the science curriculum should incorporate theistic perspectives concerning the origins of human life. The battle over the media will decide what content is acceptable in popular culture, from television and film to novels, song lyrics, public art, and computer games. In regard to law, the broad issue of rights—human rights, worker rights, consumer rights, civil rights, voter rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, the rights of the unborn, parental rights, the rights of the handicapped, patient rights, the right to die, animal rights, the rights of the accused, gun rights, property rights, speech rights, artist rights, and the like—has taken on paramount importance. Finally, Hunter maintains, the political struggle is ultimately about power and how many issues of the culture wars will be resolved, thereby placing great importance on elections, the voting process, party platforms, campaign financing, lobbying, judicial appointments, and the like.
Buchanan’s Culture War Whereas Hunter presented his thesis primarily to academics (although the book was offered as an alternate Book-of-the-Month Club selection), Patrick Buchanan, a Roman Catholic political conservative and media commentator, is credited with popularizing the concept of the culture wars. On August 17, 1992, at the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, Buchanan gave an address in which he famously (or infamously) declared, “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
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The role of Buchanan in the culture wars goes back to Richard Nixon during the mid-1960s, when the latter was strategizing a political comeback after losing the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy and the 1962 California governor’s race to Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. Buchanan, a former Nixon aide and speechwriter, recalled years after Nixon’s death that the two men during the early 1970s envisioned the creation of a new Republican majority: “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off a huge segment of FDR’s New Deal coalition, which LBJ had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” The so-called Daley-Rizzo Democrats were party constituencies in Chicago (under the control of Mayor Richard J. Daley for more than two decades beginning in 1955) and Philadelphia (under the sway of Francis Lazarro “Frank” Rizzo, a former police commissioner who was elected mayor in 1972). The Chicago and Philadelphia voters whom Nixon wished to win over were mainly white blue-collar workers who did not identify with student antiwar demonstrators or the counterculture movement, and generally believed that society was suffering from a breakdown of law and order. It was this voting bloc that Nixon had in mind when, during a television address on November 3, 1969, he said, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of Americans—I ask for your support.” As for “Wallace Democrats,” Buchanan meant the segregationist supporters of former Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran for president in 1968 as a candidate of the American Independent Party and carried five Southern states. As early as 1966, two years after landmark civil rights legislation was passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon had suggested to Buchanan that the future of the Republican Party lay in the South. Any reaching out to this constituency invariably would invoke “states’ rights,” a term often construed as veiled criticism of the federal dismantling of Jim Crow laws. Invoking states’ rights in this manner, which in effect invoked the issue of race as a way to win white voters, became known as the “Southern strategy.” In his 1992 convention speech, after garnering 3 million votes in a losing nomination battle against GOP incumbent George H.W. Bush, Buchanan touched on the major culture wars issues of the day: abortion, feminism, school choice, homosexual marriage, environmentalism, women in combat, school prayer, pornography, and federal judges “who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution.” Buchanan characterized Democrats, who had held their convention the previous month, as “radicals and liberals” who deceitfully disguised themselves before voters as “moderates and centrists.” After referring to “the failed liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s,” including the “days of malaise” under President Jimmy
Carter, Buchanan spoke glowingly of President Ronald Reagan and the revival of the economy and collapse of the Soviet Union under Republican leadership. Indeed, according to Buchanan, Reagan was responsible for winning the Cold War (even though the Soviet Union ended during Bush’s presidency). The clear implication was that if Republicans were able to win the Cold War, they would also be able to win the culture wars as well. After holding up Bush as “a defender of right-to-life, and lifelong champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built,” Buchanan went on to attack Bill Clinton, the Democratic challenger, for having “a different agenda.” Buchanan suggested that “unrestricted abortion on demand” and “homosexual rights” were Clinton’s priorities. Moreover, according to Buchanan, Clinton’s wife, Hillary, was an agent of “radical feminism” and a person who once described the institution of marriage as “slavery.” The team of “Clinton & Clinton” were offering “not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.” Buchanan further criticized Clinton for having avoided military service during the Vietnam War and faulted Al Gore, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee who did serve in Vietnam, for siding with “environmental extremists who put insects, rats and birds ahead of families, workers and jobs.” Buchanan ended his speech by applying a bit of the Southern strategy, focusing on the recent riots in Los Angeles sparked by the police beating of Rodney King, an African American motorist who had been pulled over for a speeding violation. Buchanan spoke with reverence of “the brave people of Koreatown who took the worst of the L.A. riots, but still live the family values we treasure, and who still believe in the American dream.” In other words, without directly saying so, Buchanan categorized the rioters, who were predominately black, as lacking family values and the drive that makes the American dream a reality. At least some listeners understood this part of the speech as a general indictment of poor urban blacks. Extolling the police and National Guard troops who had been deployed to “rescue the city,” Buchanan told of two soldiers who had gone up “a dark street” to stop a “mob” from attacking a “convalescent home for the aged.” With “force, rooted in justice, backed by courage,” the soldiers (“19-year-old boys,” as he called them) trained their rifles on the cursing crowd members and persuaded them to retreat. The young soldiers, Buchanan explained, bravely put their lives on the line to save others, exemplifying a passage from the Bible: “Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend.” From Buchanan’s perspective, here was a lesson for culture warriors, which is how he ended his speech: “And as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”
Introduction
A Continuing Debate Despite the considerable media attention focused on the culture wars since Buchanan’s speech, many scholars have dismissed the culture wars as a myth. The majority of Americans, these debunkers emphasize, are not so deeply divided. It has been documented, for instance, that evangelicals do not cloister at the extreme end of the political spectrum but vary along its continuum. Moreover, not all evangelicals support the Religious Right, believing that political engagement is corrupting and distracts from the true Christian mission. In short, Hunter’s thesis is disparaged as simplistic, based on generalizations, and unsupported by the facts. What some of Hunter’s critics have argued is what he himself has said all along: most Americans are political moderates. Even so, just as a nation can be at war while a majority of its citizens remain civilians, so the culture wars can be waged by a few partisan actors who control organizations and institutions that are capable of rallying a diehard base of supporters. The fact remains that there are political actors, orthodox as well as progressive, who perceive an ongoing culture war and act accordingly. Even so, some would fault Hunter for historical amnesia, arguing that there is nothing new about the culture wars. For instance, from its early days the American republic was divided between Federalists (who favored a strong national government) and Anti-Federalists (who favored more power to the states). Indeed, the battle over ratification of the U.S. Constitution (to replace the Articles of Confederation) was very heated, and the populace practically split down the middle on whether or not to change the charter of government that would grant more power to central government. Afterward, the presidential cabinet under George Washington was fractious, characterized by a public feud between Alexander Hamilton, the treasury secretary who supported a strong federal government, and Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state who favored more power to the states. Washington ended his tenure by presenting his Farewell Address (1796) in which he implored Americans to be united. Later, beginning in the 1830s, the country was split between the Jacksonians (followers of President Andrew Jackson) and the evangelical revivalists and reformers. Whereas the former idealized the common folk, the latter sought to either redeem or uplift the common folk. The period was marked by the Second Great Awakening, which accented regional differences and different approaches to solving social problems. In the South and lower Midwest, the preachers emphasized personal piety (reform of individuals). In the North, however, emphasis was placed on social reform (reform of institutions), which sparked a revitalized temperance movement (to curb alcohol consumption), the start of the abolition-
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ist movement (with the goal of outlawing slavery), the trend toward universal education, an interest in prison and asylum reform, and first wave feminism (with the demand for women’s suffrage rights). Other cultural battles followed, including the Civil War (1861–1865), the populist revolt of the 1890s, the debate over imperialism (whether or not to take up “the white man’s burden”) following the Spanish-American War (1898), the social reforms of the Progressive Era (1900–1914), the post–World War I nativist movement (characterized by an anti-immigrant backlash and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan with its spread to the Midwest), the antiprogressive “return to normalcy” rule under the Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, the failed experiment of Prohibition (1920–1933), and finally the Great Depression that led to the progressive reforms of the New Deal. Finally, there is the need for the culture wars to be studied and considered from a global perspective, as the United States is not the only country that has been experiencing political and social polarization. Such a research project could possibly shed light on commonalities of culture wars across different lands and at the same time highlight what is unique about what has been occurring in American society. Roger Chapman
Further Reading Abrams, Richard. America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941–2000. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bernstein, Richard. Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Carlson, Allan. The “American Way”: Family and Community in the Shaping of American Identity. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003. DiMaggio, Paul, John Evans, and Bethany Bryan. “Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?” American Journal of Sociology 102:3 (November 1996): 690–755. Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Evans, M. Stanton. The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1994. Fiorina, Morris P., with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope. Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Pearson Education, 2006. Gelman, Andrew. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Gitlin, Todd. The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995.
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Gushee, David P., ed. Christians and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: An Agenda for Engagement. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hunter, James Davison. Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars. New York: Macmillan, 1994. ———. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. McConkey, Dale. “Wither Hunter’s Culture War? Shifts in Evangelical Morality, 1988–1998.” Sociology of Religion 62:2 (Summer 2001): 149–74. Miller, Alan S., and John P. Hoffman. “The Growing Divisiveness: Culture Wars or War of Words?” Social Forces 78:2 (1999): 721–45. Mouw, Ted, and Michael E. Sobel. “Culture Wars and Opinion Polarization: The Case of Abortion.” American Journal of Sociology 106:4 (January 2001): 913–43. Nash, Gary B. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1984. Packer, George. “The Fall of Conservatism.” New Yorker, May 26, 2008. Rabkin, Jeremy. “The Culture War That Isn’t.” Policy Review, August/September 1999. Renshon, Stanley A. America’s Second Civil War: Dispatches from the Political Center. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002. Rodriguez, Joseph A. City Against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an American Metropolis. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.
Scatamburlo, Valerie L. Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Culture War and the Politics of Political Correctness. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Sharp, Elaine B., ed. Culture Wars and Local Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Sine, Thomas. Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1995. Sperling, John, Suzanne Helburn, Samuel George, John Morris, and Carl Hunt. The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America. Sausalito, CA: PoliPoint Press, 2004. Thomas, Cal, and Bob Beckel. Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War That Is Destroying America. New York: William Morrow, 2007. Wattenberg, Martin P. The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1996. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. White, John Kenneth. The Values Divide: American Politics and Culture in Transition. New York: Chatham House, 2003. Williams, Mary E., ed. Culture Wars: Opposing Viewpoints. Farmington Hills, MA: Greenhaven Press, 2003. Williams, Rhys H., ed. Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997. Wolfe, Christopher, and Richard John Neuhaus. The Naked Public Square Reconsidered: Religion and Politics in the Twentyfirst Century. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009. Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Young, Mitchell, ed. Culture Wars. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Zimmerman, Jonathan. Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
troversial from the very beginning. Conservative critics condemned it on several grounds. The most far-reaching was the claim that human life begins at the moment of conception, meaning that any abortion can be seen as murder. Conservatives also argued against legalized abortion on more practical grounds, claiming that it would lead to sexual promiscuity and an erosion of family values. On the other side of the issue, liberal commentators and many women praised the decision, claiming that legalized abortion recognized the right of women to control their own bodies, including their reproduction, without interference by society. They denied that life begins at conception, pointing out that the embryo is not viable outside the womb until much later in a pregnancy. The most common abortion procedure performed in the United States is vacuum aspiration, in which a syringe or electrical pump is used to remove embryonic tissue from the uterus. This procedure is used during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy (the first trimester). The second most common procedure is dilation and curettage, requiring the scraping of the uterine walls, a procedure often used for other gynecological purposes. These two methods account for more than 90 percent of abortions in the United States. Roe v. Wade ruled that abortions performed during the first trimester of pregnancy should be allowed without regulation. Abortions after the first trimester are more difficult. They can be performed by inducing a miscarriage with medication or by dilation of the cervix and removal of the fetus. Roe v. Wade allowed for legal restrictions on these mid- and late-term abortions. Feminist supporters of legal abortion saw reproductive rights as a central part of women’s campaign for equal rights and equal treatment. The most powerful groups both before and after 1973 were the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, later renamed the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Planned Parenthood, which had long advocated for the availability of family planning and birth control information, also endorsed abortion rights. The American Medical Association endorsed legalized abortion in 1967. Medical professionals reported that each year they were treating thousands of women who had obtained illegal abortions and had been injured as a consequence. Believing that abortions were inevitable in American society, they argued that legalizing the practice would allow trained medical staffs to perform safe procedures in medical facilities. Religious leaders in more liberal Christian denominations also became advocates. These included the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopalian Church, and the United Presbyterian Church. The anti-abortion movement also began to grow in the 1960s and became a leading opponent of the Roe v. Wade ruling. The Roman Catholic Church became a powerful voice in opposition to abortion in the 1960s, when
Abortion Abortion that is induced, specifically the willful termination of pregnancy by medical or surgical means, is perhaps the most contentious issue of the culture wars. From earliest times, families or individual women have sought to end certain pregnancies for a variety of reasons. Until modern times, abortions were usually dangerous, threatening permanent injury or death for the pregnant woman. By contrast, modern medical abortions are relatively safe. In the first decade of the 2000s about 1.2 million abortions were being performed annually in the United States, the lowest figure since 1974. The all-time high figure occurred in 1990 with 1.6 million abortions. The effectiveness of contraceptives is cited for the declining rate of abortion. Of all abortions performed worldwide, 4 percent occur in North America. According to a summer 2008 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Americans believe abortion should remain legal, while 41 percent believe it should be outlawed. Of the two major political parties, 63 percent of Democrats in comparison to 41 percent of Republicans believe abortion should remain legal. In that same poll, 62 percent of white evangelicals and 47 percent of Catholics thought abortion should be illegal. Abortion opponents, who designate their cause “prolife,” believe that aborting an embryo or fetus is the murder of an unborn human being. Proponents of abortion rights, who take up the banner “pro-choice,” believe that abortion is about a woman controlling her own body and fertility. For this reason, the argument over abortion has been characterized as the “clash of absolutes.”
Roe v. Wade and the Modern Debate In the United States in the late 1800s, a coalition of women’s rights activists and doctors campaigned to outlaw abortions, most of which were being performed by practitioners without medical training or being attempted by the pregnant woman herself. These “back alley abortions” resulted in many deaths and injuries. By 1900 abortion was banned throughout the United States. By the mid-1900s, however, the medical profession had changed its position on abortion. By that time, private physicians were able to perform safe abortions, and they did so in certain situations, particularly if a pregnancy was caused by rape or incest or if the life of the mother was at risk. Physicians joined with the growing feminist movement to decriminalize abortion. Abortion remained illegal in most U.S. states, however, until the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. The decision proved to be con1
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Abortion
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops organized the Family Life Division (FLD). After 1973, leaders of the FLD formed the National Right to Life Committee, which became the largest anti-abortion organization. Led by John Wilke, the group fought for changes to abortion laws at the legislative level through lobbying and sponsored publication of anti-abortion materials for distribution to voters. The abortion issue led to the creation of a new coalition of Christians. Evangelical and other conservative Protestants rallied to the support of the anti-abortion groups, allying themselves with largely conservative Catholic activists. These groups often agreed on other prominent social issues. They opposed passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment specifying women’s equal rights. They also opposed the growing gay rights movement. By his own account, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a leading television evangelist, was prompted by the Roe v. Wade decision to change his mind about the involvement of conservative Christians in political action. In 1979, he was a founder of the Moral Majority, which united antiabortion supporters with other conservative crusaders and became a central component of a new coalition known as the Religious Right. The latter threw its support behind the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and became an influential force within the Republican Party.
Strategies Pro and Con Even as it joined other related conservative movements, the pro-life faction was adopting multiple strategies in opposing legalized abortion. It sought to overturn Roe in the courts, but also began to frame legislative measures to restrict abortion on several fronts. In 1976, the movement supported the Hyde Amendment, which banned the use of public funds for abortion. It also succeeded in imposing new laws requiring minors to obtain parental permission prior to undergoing an abortion. The movement also highlighted one particular abortion procedure used for late-term abortions. Referred to by doctors as “dilation and intact evacuation,” the procedure was called “partial-birth abortion” by movement leaders and graphically portrayed as a means to kill a fetus that might survive outside the womb. As a result, Congress banned the procedure in 2003. That law, prochoice advocates point out, was mostly symbolic since the procedure had been used in fewer than two out of every 1,000 abortions. The pro-life movement also took action against local providers of abortion. It sponsored changes in zoning laws that made it impossible for abortion clinics to operate in large areas of cities and towns. In some communities, activists demanded criminal investigations of abortion
practitioners and engaged in civil litigation against doctors in order to raise the costs of their services. The most radical of pro-life supporters adopted direct action. They set up picketing and other demonstrations at the entrances of clinics or medical offices that offer abortion procedures. Pro-choice groups, working through the courts and through legislatures, gradually forced legal restrictions on such tactics, leading to the passage in 1994 of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). The law required protesters to maintain a physical distance from the clinics and to allow free entrance and exit from the facilities. The statute was challenged by pro-life groups, which claimed that it was an abridgement of free-speech rights, but was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Other pro-life tactics have included the dissemination of pamphlets, books, videos, and other media material intended to provoke disgust at the “grisly” nature of abortion. The film Silent Scream (1984), produced by Bernard Nathanson, a former NARAL supporter who became a pro-life doctor, shows an ultrasound of an abortion performed at eleven weeks. The narration provided by Nathanson claims to show the fetus experiencing pain and fear in the process, a claim that has been disputed by medical professionals. In a similar tactic, Operation Rescue also staged “Truth Trucks,” or large traveling displays showing photographs of developing and aborted fetuses. Anti-abortion violence rose dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. In a series of related incidents, several abortion clinics in Florida were bombed on Christmas Day 1984. In 1993, Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed in front of his clinic by Michael F. Griffin, an anti-abortion activist, who surrendered to police at the scene and was sentenced to life in prison. In 1998, Dr. Bernard Slepian, a doctor known to provide abortion services, was shot and killed at his home in Amherst, New York, near Buffalo, by a sniper. In 2001, James Kopp, a member of a radical anti-abortion group, was arrested in France for the Slepian murder. Kopp was eventually extradited to New York and convicted of second-degree murder. Incidents of violence against clinics declined after 2000, but abortion clinics still report more than a thousand incidents per year, affecting approximately a third of all such sites. The anti-abortion movement has largely succeeded in restricting the ability of women to obtain abortion services. As of 2008, even though early-term abortion was largely unregulated by law, 88 percent of counties in the United States had no abortion services. In practice, this means that women seeking abortion must travel to large urban areas, where abortion procedures are more readily available. The movement’s success in restricting practical access proves that determined resistance can go far toward nullifying legal rulings that a large, devoted group finds unjust.
A bu Ghraib and Gitmo
The pro-life movement has been less successful in affecting public opinion on abortion. Recent polls by a variety of polling organizations show that a majority of adults continue to believe that abortion should be available to women “all the time” or “most of the time.” A substantial minority believes it should be available only in special cases, but fewer than 10 percent believe it should be outlawed in all cases. The most radical arguments on both sides of the abortion issue have obscured certain beliefs shared by both sides. For example, few contend that abortion is an absolute good, and most people favor reducing the number of abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies. Where the two sides differ is on the specific means used to achieve this end. Conservatives tend to regard the issue in moral or religious terms and concentrate on discouraging sexual relations before marriage. Many liberals concentrate on providing better sex education and offering young unmarried people various birth control methods to prevent conception. Many programs in recent years have emphasized both approaches. Claire E. Rasmussen See also: Birth Control; Planned Parenthood; Roe v. Wade (1973); Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading Baird, Eleanor, and Patricia Baird-Windle. Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2001. Burns, Gene. The Moral Veto: Framing Conception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Colker, Ruth. Abortion & Dialogue: Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and American Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Critchlow, Donald. The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Nossiff, Rosemary. “Abortion Policy Before Roe: Grassroots and Interest-Group Mobilization.” Journal of Policy History (2001): 463–78. Risen, James, and Judy Thomas. Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Rose, Melody. Safe, Legal, and Unavailable? Abortion Politics in the United States. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007. Staggenborg, Suzanne. The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Tatalovich, Raymond. The Politics of Abortion in the United States and Canada: A Comparative Study. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. Tribe, Laurence. Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.
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Abu Ghraib and Gitmo The two major prisons used by American military forces following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001— Abu Ghraib (located on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq) and Gitmo (shorthand for the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba)—were the scenes of prisoner (or detainee) abuse, “robust interrogation,” and even torture. The controversy over Abu Ghraib and Gitmo raised questions about the applicability of the Geneva Convention to terrorist suspects, the legality of eliminating habeas corpus, the boundaries of legal interrogation, and whether the documented cases of abuse represented isolated incidents or systematic and wholesale violations of human rights sanctioned by the highest levels of the U.S. government. The revelations of what occurred at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and elsewhere cast doubt on American ideals. Abu Ghraib was the scene of American GI abuse of Iraqi prisoners that came to light in 2004 when photographs of the incidents were reported by Dan Rather during a CBS 60 Minutes II broadcast. The abuse occurred there in 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and was unwittingly documented by personal digital photographs taken by U.S. Army guards. These images, many obscene and pornographic, featured Iraqi prisoners being forced to pose nude in degrading situations. At least one photograph showed a naked male with a dog leash around his neck being led by an American female guard. Another picture showed a guard dog at the end of a taut leash snarling within inches of the face of a terrified prisoner. The definitive image of the scandal, one that appeared on television and on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, was that of a hooded figure being forced to stand on top of a wooden box while electrical wires were attached to his limbs. Former defense secretary James Schlesinger called Abu Ghraib “Animal House on the night shift,” but in his official report he blamed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for failing to exercise proper oversight. Although some enlisted personnel were prosecuted for what took place at Abu Ghraib—Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II was sentenced to eight years in prison, the stiffest punishment—no officers were court-martialed and no political appointees resigned. Army specialist Joseph Darby, the whistleblower who turned over the incriminating photographs of the Abu Ghraib abuse to the army’s criminal intelligence division, was sent back to the United States early out of concern for his safety. Darby was advised, due to threats against his life, not to return to his home in Cumberland, Maryland, where the commander of the local Veterans of Foreign Affairs later described him on 60 Minutes as a “rat” and a “traitor.” The first terrorist suspects—whom the Bush administration termed “illegal combatants”—arrived at Gitmo in January 2002, most having been captured in
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A bu Ghraib and Gitmo
The Guantánamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, or Gitmo, has been a source of public dispute and legal wrangling over the rights and treatment of “enemy combatants”—those captured in the U.S. War on Terror and detained without formal charges. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Afghanistan. Eventually, over 700 detainees would be transferred to Gitmo. That same year, the Bush administration reasoned that terrorists are not prisoners of war and thus have none of the protections specified by the Geneva Conventions. It would be some time before the Supreme Court would rule that terrorist detainees under American control have some legal protections—for example, in Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Boumediene v. Bush (2008). Soon after detainees started arriving at Gitmo, various kinds of abuse and torture took place, including simulated drowning known as waterboarding. This came to light after the Abu Ghraib reports. It was later learned that prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq the Department of Defense authorized harsher interrogation techniques to be carried out at Gitmo, including the use of dogs. Those practices afterward migrated to Abu Ghraib. According to a bipartisan report of the Senate Armed Services Committee (December 2008), Rumsfeld had approved coercive interrogation in December 2002. Although those orders were soon rescinded, the harsh tactics continued. Revelations of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, and later of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, led to a spirited public debate. According to a Washington Post– ABC News poll of May 2004, 63 percent of Americans said that torture was never acceptable. A higher majority rejected sexual humiliation (84 percent), electric shocks (82 percent), water dunking (78 percent), and kicking or punching (69 percent). However, a majority supported tactics that employed sleep deprivation (66 percent), hoods over heads (57 percent), and loud noise (54 percent). Some observers accused the media of being
more upset by prisoner abuse than terrorist bombings or the May 2004 beheading of American defense contractor Nick Berg by insurgents in Iraq. Although military professionals argued that torture is a less than effective means of gathering intelligence (as people in extreme pain will confess to anything), others thought that roughing up terrorists was necessary for extracting timely information to thwart pending terrorist plots. In December 2005, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who suffered abuse as a POW in Vietnam, won support for an amendment to a Pentagon budget bill to ban torture at American prison camps and detention centers, but afterward it was apparent that the Bush administration’s definition of “torture” was narrow enough to allow certain of its aspects to continue. Amnesty International called Gitmo “the gulag of our times,” referring to the Soviet prisons in Siberia, but in June 2005 Senator Dick Durban (D-IL) was forced to apologize after he referred to the Gitmo interrogators as war criminals similar to the Nazis and Khmer Rouge. While the Web site of conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh made light of “Club G’itmo” (describing it as “Your Tropical Retreat from the Stress of Jihad”) and Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) defended the events at Abu Ghraib by stating, “Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class,” there was expressed indignation by artists, from folk music—2M’s “Our Own Kind” (2004) and Jim Page’s “Head Full of Pictures” (2007)—to classical—John Harbison’s “Abu Ghraib” (2006). A 2008 Coney Island sideshow called “Waterboard Thrill Ride” (billed “It don’t Gitmo better!”) featured robotic figures conducting torture. On January 22, 2009, to the applause of sixteen generals and admirals who were present, President Barack Obama signed executive orders to close the Gitmo facility within one year and to ban harsh interrogation practices. At that time, the detention facility in Cuba was still holding 245 detainees. What to do with the prisoners remained to be resolved before Gitmo could be closed down. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Central Intelligence Agency; Cheney Family; Human Rights; Limbaugh, Rush; Lott, Trent; McCain, John; My Lai Massacre; September 11; Soviet Union and Russia; United Nations; Whistleblowers.
Further Reading Danner, Mark. Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York Review of Books, 2004. Hersh, Seymour M. Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Mayer, Jane. Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Ac ademic Freedom Rose, David. Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights. New York: New Press, 2004. Tsang, Steve. Intelligence and Human Rights in the Era of Global Terrorism. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007. Worthington, Andy. The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007.
Ac a d e m i c B i l l o f R i g h t s The Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR), according to advocate and conservative activist David Horowitz, is a document that calls for “true intellectual diversity” on college campuses and an end to “political indoctrination” in the classroom. From the perspective of Horowitz and others, American college campuses are beset by a pervasive liberal bias, with many professors refusing to present conservative perspectives objectively and in good faith. Horowitz, who has been critical of higher education since at least the 1990s, introduced ABOR in 2003 and began to lobby state legislatures and the federal government to mandate the bill for public colleges and universities. The ensuing debate on academic freedom pitted Horowitz and his followers against the American Association of University Professors and the American Civil Liberties Union. By 2008, no state had adopted the ABOR. ABOR, as drafted by Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture (founded in 1998), later the Students for Academic Freedom (founded in 2003), articulates eight basic principles: (1) faculty selection, tenure, and promotion must be based on expertise and “a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives”; (2) faculty selection, tenure, and promotion must not be denied due to “political or religious beliefs”; (3) students must be graded “solely on their reasoned answers . . . not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs”; (4) required readings must provide “dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate,” and when discussing the material teachers “should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints”; (5) faculty must not “use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or antireligious indoctrination”; (6) funding for campus speakers “will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism”; (7) protesters must not thwart campus speakers; and (8) in regard to the overall scholarly debate, “academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” Although a number of state legislative bodies have shown some receptivity to ABOR, structures and procedures for institutionalizing intellectual freedom are already in place at many colleges and universities. Critics of the
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bill suggest that it is actually an attempt to impose a quota system for ideological purposes, requiring a fixed percentage of professors and campus speakers representing certain political or religious viewpoints, with less consideration paid to academic merit. Thus, for example, if a university were to invite a speaker to speak on the Holocaust, adherence to ABOR might require equal time for a Holocaust denier. In the long run, critics argue, ABOR would create a chilly intellectual climate on campuses, in which academics would be reluctant to openly discuss controversial topics. Proponents of the bill, on the other hand, suggest the real issue is that liberal professors do not wish to be held accountable to the responsibilities that come with academic freedom. Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; Hillsdale College; Horowitz, David; Summers, Lawrence.
Further Reading Aby, Stephen H. The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. “A Chilly Climate on the Campuses.” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005. Giroux, Henry A. “Academic Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy.” College Literature 33:4 (Fall 2006): 1–42. Horowitz, David. Indoctrination U.: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. New York: Encounter Books, 2007. Roy, Sara. “Strategizing Control of the Academy.” Thought & Action 21 (Fall 2005): 147–62. Wilson, John. Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007.
Ac a d e m i c F r e e d o m Although not an absolute right, academic freedom is regarded as essential to higher education in the United States, establishing basic protections for educators and students in the course of their academic work. Under the principle of academic freedom, professors may teach, conduct research, and engage in extramural utterances without fear of censorship or punishment. Students may express views in class, disagree with a professor, form organizations to explore areas of interest, and invite outside speakers to campus. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), established in 1915, has developed widely accepted guidelines defining academic freedom and remains the most prominent, if not always the most effective, vehicle for safeguarding such protections.
Tenure and Free Inquiry The landmark document on academic freedom is the AAUP’s Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and
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Ac ademic Freedom
Tenure (1940). Subsequent AAUP documents, designed to assist institutions of higher learning in developing their own standards and policies, include the Statement on Procedural Standards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings (1958), Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure (1958), and Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments (1989). Academic freedom in America has attained a legal status approaching constitutional protection. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), a case arising from New York State teacher-loyalty laws, Justice William J. Brennan delivered the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court: “Academic freedom . . . is a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” Advocates of academic freedom regard it as essential because the search for truth is facilitated through open inquiry. Society advances, they maintain, when ideas are freely explored and educators are not controlled or manipulated by external political or religious forces that seek to regulate their activities and speech. The development of scientific inquiry in the seventeenth century paved the way for secular alternatives to orthodox theological instruction under the shadow of possible heresy. During the reign of King Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740–1786), academic freedom was institutionalized at the University of Göttingen. European models of academic freedom subsequently influenced higher education in America. In the United States, academic freedom has been enhanced by the institution of tenure, in which university professors are granted permanent appointment following a probationary period of six years. In many venues, secondary school teachers may also achieve tenure. Tenure is considered a bedrock of academic freedom; job security enhances the freedom of educators to conduct independent research and help students learn in a spirit of openness. The economic security of tenure, moreover, is intended to attract highly qualified individuals to academia. Increasing numbers of university appointments, however, are going to adjunct, non-tenure-track faculty who are more vulnerable to self-censorship and arbitrary sanctions. Cary Nelson, elected in 2008 to a two-year term as president of the AAUP, observed that “tenure is dying by a thousand cuts” as tenure-track faculty lines are eliminated or replaced by nontenured appointments. Contingent faculty—an unprotected labor force—have no job security and are vulnerable to pressures both within and outside academia. By 2007, approximately 50 percent of faculty hires were part-time appointments, and 56 percent of all full-time positions were non-tenure-track positions. While financial considerations are frequently cited as the reason for this trend (part-time workers
generally do not receive pension, health care, and other benefits), the impact on academic freedom is regarded as deleterious. Contingent faculty do not have the same job protection or due process guarantees that are generally afforded tenure-track or tenured educators.
Political Pressure Academic freedom has been less secure during periods of international tension as the different levels of government demand greater support and uniformity during wartime. For example, between 1952 and 1954, during the period of McCarthyism, hundreds of academics were fired for resisting congressional inquiries into alleged Communist Party affiliation. The FBI’s Responsibilities Program enabled hundreds of additional dismissals, with dissemination of letters to political authorities alleging subversive activities. In addition, thirty-seven presidents of leading universities issued a statement casting in doubt the “fitness” of any professor unwilling to silence alleged communists or opponents of the Cold War. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, some organizations have been perceived as posing a threat to academic freedom. Conservative groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars have been bipartisan in their support of academic freedom. Some liberal faculty members have been accused of lacking patriotism or promoting a radical social agenda. Organizations such as Students for Academic Freedom, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and NoIndoctrination.org have asserted that some professors are guilty of proselytization through lectures, biased reading lists, and intrusion of controversial extraneous material. The post–September 11 war on terrorism has re energized the culture wars and contributed to considerable stress on academic freedom. For example, beginning in September 2002, Daniel Pipes, a conservative columnist and director of the Middle East Forum, used his online Campus Watch to vilify many Middle East scholars, whom he described as fifth columnists, supporters of “radical Islam,” and apologists for terrorism. Middle East studies professors who did not support Israel in its war with the Palestinians were charged with ideological intolerance, biased scholarship, and denying dissenting students their academic freedom. Pipes’s efforts precipitated a robust counterreaction, in which hundreds of nonspecialists requested that their names be added to the Campus Watch list. Pipes complied by releasing a separate list titled “Solidarity with the Apologists.”
Conservative Challenges to Academe Conservative activists often seize upon controversial ideological statements to arouse public opinion against “radical” professors that may result in demands for
Adler, Mor timer J.
sanctions. Richard Berthold, professor of classical history at the University of New Mexico, was forced into early retirement for stating in the classroom on September 11, 2001, “Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote.” One hundred and four members of Congress called for the dismissal of Nicholas De Genova, assistant professor of anthropology and Latino studies, for comments opposing the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (including expressions of hope for Iraq to defeat the United States) made at a teach-in at Columbia University. Peter N. Kirstein, professor of history at St. Xavier University, was suspended and reprimanded on Veterans Day 2002 for an impassioned antiwar e-mail sent to Cadet Robert Kurpiel of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, came under attack in 2005 for describing the casualties of the September 11 attacks as “little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers”—two years later he was fired. In 2004, the David Project Center for Jewish Leadership produced a provocative film claiming that Columbia University’s Middle East Studies program was biased against Jews and discriminatory against proIsraeli students. In books and articles, Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, has excoriated tenure as insulating a politically radical elite. In Shut Up and Sing (2003), media personality Laura Ingraham equates the “ivory tower” with being “red.” Right-wing activist David Horowitz has waged the most vigorous and well-organized campaign against the academy. Based in California, his Center for the Study of Popular Culture and online FrontPageMagazine.com have issued many critiques against academics, citing anecdotal evidence of ideological student abuse. In 2003, Horowitz’s organization disseminated a document called the Academic Bill of Rights, which its promoters said would enhance “intellectual diversity.” Its presupposition is that social sciences and humanities are dominated by left-wing professors who reject conservative job applicants and fail to present balanced pedagogy. Claiming that conservative students are intimidated and persecuted by radical professors, proponents assert that the Academic Bill of Rights would expand academic freedom for students. While some consider the document consistent with the principles of academic freedom, others believe it could undermine the AAUP Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure. The AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure called the Academic Bill of Rights “improper and dangerous,” believing that it would erode institutional sovereignty with external, legislative review and that, in the name of “intellectual neutrality,” it would force professors to discard the academic principle that not all ideas and opinions are equally valid. Peter N. Kirstein
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See also: Academic Bill of Rights; Anti-Intellectualism; Book Banning; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Censorship; Churchill, Ward; Hillsdale College; Horowitz, David; Israel; McCarthyism; Revisionist History; September 11.
Further Reading American Association of University Professors. Policy Documents and Reports (Redbook). 10th ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Curran, Charles E. Catholic Higher Education, Theology, and Academic Freedom. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Doumani, Beshara, ed. Academic Freedom After September 11. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Hofstadter, Richard, and Walter P. Metzger. The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. Horowitz, David. The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006. Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. Rev. ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998. Schrecker, Ellen. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. 2nd ed. New York: Bedford Books, 2002. Van Alstyne, William W., ed. Freedom and Tenure in the Academy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Ad l e r, M o r t i m e r J . A well-known public intellectual and preeminent “great books” supporter and philosopher, Mortimer Adler opposed radical multiculturalism in both education and American culture during the 1980s and 1990s. Born Mortimer Jerome Adler in New York City on December 28, 1902, he attended Columbia University for undergraduate and graduate work, completing his PhD in psychology in 1929. A longtime professor at the University of Chicago, he was hired in 1930 by the school’s president, Robert M. Hutchins. Both men used the “great books” idea to attempt undergraduate curriculum reform. Before leaving in 1952, Adler gained fame at the university as a Jewish (hence non-Catholic) promoter of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. He was also author of the best-seller How to Read a Book (1940). That work helped Adler and Hutchins spread their ideas beyond the academy through reading groups and the Great Books Foundation in 1947. Adler also served as Hutchins’s associate editor for Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World (1952), focusing on the set’s idea index, the Syntopicon. Prior to that, the two men promoted the notion of world federal government, a subject Adler addressed in How to Think About War and Peace (1944). After a period of somewhat less prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, Adler reengaged the public with vigor
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in the late 1970s. The social and cultural tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the academic turn toward relativist deconstructionism in philosophy, caused in Adler a renewed devotion to communicating the work of earlier philosophers and fighting anti-intellectualism. His efforts began with Aristotle for Everybody (1978) and continued with several books on philosophy in the 1980s. During a period of illness in 1984, Adler, a longtime agnostic and secular humanist, converted to Christianity (Episcopalianism). Around the same time, he promoted a relatively liberal education reform movement called the Paideia Project, which attempted to bring the great books into the public schools. In the 1980s, Adler also appeared frequently on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line television program. At decade’s end, Adler led a revision of the Great Books. Published in 1990, the set was dismissed by critics, in part for failing to consider works published after the mid-1950s or to address race or gender in the set’s Syntopicon. Despite Adler’s moderate politics, religious and cultural conservatives in the Reagan era found common cause with him on religion and education. Three of his books in the period—How to Think About God (1980), The Angels and Us (1982), and Truth in Religion (1990)—buttressed a Christian worldview. While only the last book promotes a conservative, antimulticulturalist agenda, his neo-Aristotelian philosophy proved congenial to traditionalists, as did his promotion of a common rather than multiethnic culture, evident in his Paideia Project. But Adler despised what he termed “elitist” education reformers, such as William Bennett and Allan Bloom, and he supported Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential bid. In late 2000, Adler converted to Roman Catholicism. He died on June 28, 2001. Tim Lacy See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Deconstructionism; Education Reform; Great Books; Hutchins, Robert M.; Literature, Film, and Drama; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Postmodernism; Race; Relativism, Moral; Secular Humanism; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.
Further Reading Adler, Mortimer J. Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography, 1902–1976. New York: Macmillan, 1977. ———. A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
A f f i r m a t i ve Ac t i o n The term “affirmative action” refers to federal and state programs that seek to redress past discrimination in the workplace and higher education by offering special opportunities to racial minorities and women primarily, as well as to the handicapped and the aged.
Americans have debated the fairness and desirability of such programs since the 1960s. Opponents believe that affirmative action programs constitute a system of unfair “preferences” or “quotas,” while proponents argue that such programs open the doors of opportunity for all citizens and help overcome a legacy of social and economic disadvantage created by unequal access to employment and education.
New Deal to Truman Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first American president to address the issue of equal access to occupational opportunity. The New Deal and World War II provided the president with the chance to address employment discrimination between blacks and whites, which became the basis for later affirmative action programs. The Unemployment Relief Act (1933) barred discrimination in federal employment on the basis of race, color, or creed. Yet the president’s attempt to address the inequities was problematic, since many New Deal programs were intended to be temporary. In addition, opposition from southern states proved impossible to overcome as those governments gave out benefits in unequal amounts to their white and black citizens. During World War II, with jobs available in the private sector as companies shifted to wartime production, blacks were shut out of the job market as many companies continued the tradition of hiring only white men. When black labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington, Roosevelt issued an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and government. President Harry S. Truman continued FDR’s attempts to end discrimination against blacks in the workplace, issuing two executive orders addressing racial discrimination. The first mandated the end of hiring and employment discrimination in the government. The second directed the implementation of equal treatment and opportunity in the armed services.
Origins In 1961, John F. Kennedy became the first president to use the words “affirmative action,” when he issued executive order 10925 concerning contractors. If a business had a contract with the federal government, according to the order, it was required to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” President Lyndon B. Johnson took two steps that further tied discrimination to affirmative action. In July 1964, he signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, Title VII of which banned discrimination at companies employing over twenty-five employees. In order to enforce Title VII, Johnson issued an executive order that instructed
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the Department of Labor to end discrimination with regard to all federal contracts. It also directed the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate and end discrimination in private employment. In 1967, President Johnson expanded the order to cover women. Hiring mandates that prevented employers from refusing employment to individuals based on race, creed, national origin, or gender sparked debate. In order to enforce these mandates, the Johnson administration offered special financial inducements for those companies that would seek out and hire African Americans, and many large corporations began their own programs. Johnson directed the Department of Labor to establish some sort of “goals and timetables” to hire minorities on federal contracts; that is, to begin hiring with regard to race. Conservatives opposed the legislation because they believed that employment opportunities should be based solely on merit. Liberals and moderates agreed that employment should be based on merit. Like Johnson, however, they believed that years of Jim Crow segregation had barred African Americans and other minorities from the social and economic opportunities enjoyed by the white majority. Thus it seemed just to extend to them some preferences in the hiring process. Contrary to black expectations, when President Richard Nixon took office in 1969, affirmative action policies continued. With his attention focused on the Vietnam War and other pressing problems, Nixon left employment issues to Secretary of Labor George Shultz, who developed what came to be called the Philadelphia Plan. This was an attempt to address the issue of minority workers in cities with large minority populations. The program required that contractors on governmentfunded building sites integrate their skilled workforces based on numerical goals and timetables. Philadelphia, for example, had a population of about 30 percent African American, while local unions were all white. The Philadelphia Plan forced integration of the unions; if they wanted to keep the contract, they had to hire about 5 percent blacks each year until over 20 percent of the union was black, in keeping with the racial composition of the local population. In 1970, this program was expanded to cover all federally funded hiring and contracting. The Philadelphia Plan was not without critics. Those who opposed the program believed that it violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because it would mean preferential hiring based on race. The issue was further complicated by Order No. 4, signed by Shultz in 1970. The order established proportional hiring as a way to prove compliance with affirmative action. It protected four minority groups, African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and those with Spanish surnames, with regard to hiring by establishing racial goals and timetables for all businesses that accepted a $50,000 federal contract
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and hired more than fifty employees. In December 1971, Revised Order No. 4 expanded the original order by including women in the group of minorities to which affirmative action policies would apply. It would fall to later administrations to answer the critics’ questions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on affirmative action in two cases concerning employment and education during the 1970s. In 1971, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. In that case, the plaintiff argued that hiring and assigning employees into all-black or all-white, higher-paying job classifications violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Griggs further argued that the company’s implementation of aptitude tests subsequent to the passage of Title VII were also discriminatory and did not promote affirmative action. In this case, the Supreme Court validated the Nixon administration’s interpretation of affirmative action to achieve the results mandated by Title VII. In a later case, Allan Bakke, a white male who had been denied admission to the University of California at Davis Medical School, claimed that quotas used by the school to comply with its affirmative action program amounted to reverse discrimination. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the high court ruled that universities may consider race as one of many factors in admission in order to remedy racial disadvantages, but it also held that using strict racial quotas to resolve the situation violated Bakke’s rights by denying the equal protection guaranteed all citizens under the Constitution.
Retreat The gains made by African Americans and other minorities during the 1960s and 1970s came under attack in the 1980s. Middle-class conservatives and blue-collar workers, believing that concessions made to blacks, women, and other minorities were infringing on their own opportunities, increasingly questioned programs designed to achieve affirmative action in employment and education. Using the courts to restrict the definition of affirmative action, the conservative administrations of the decade chipped away at legislation designed to promote equal access to occupational and educational opportunities. The Supreme Court justices, a number of them chosen by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, handed down rulings—as in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Antonio (1989)—that indicated their intent to limit the scope of the affirmative action programs established over the previous four decades. In this case, a group of nonwhite workers filed suit complaining that owners of the Wards Cove Packing Company had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by awarding a large number of skilled non-cannery jobs to whites and unskilled cannery jobs to nonwhites. A lower court ruled in favor of the
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defendants, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District found that, based on statistical evidence, the packing company had discriminated against the nonwhite workers. The case then went to the Supreme Court, where the justices remanded the case back to the Court of Appeals with instructions to use more appropriate evidence. Additionally, the lower court was instructed to show that the company demonstrated evidence of legitimate business justification for their hiring practices. This case ultimately imposed tougher standards on employees trying to prove discrimination. The high court’s decisions collectively made it more difficult for blacks, women, and other minorities to sue if they believed they were victims of discrimination. Federal and state policies in the 1990s indicated that many Americans equated affirmative action with reverse discrimination. One case brought before the federal courts in the 1990s exemplified this belief. In Hopwood v. Texas (1996), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that considering race as grounds for achieving student diversity at the University of Texas was not within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment; the ruling brought the decision in the Bakke case into question. Later that same year, California passed Proposition 209, an initiative that ruled out race, sex, ethnicity, and national origin as criteria for preferring any group for admission to public institutions. Both of these decisions reflected suspicion that reverse discrimination results from affirmative action policies. Affirmative action in college admissions continued to spark debate in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), cases involving admissions at the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court ruled that assigning points based on race amounts to a quota system and is therefore unconstitutional; however, it also reaffirmed the Bakke ruling by declaring that the use of race in a broader context, along with other factors, is indeed constitutional. Another policy that some universities employed to make decisions about applicants, legacy admissions, also generated debate. According to this policy, prospective students have an advantage if they have a family member that is an alumnus of the university. Critics charged that legacy admissions are racist because the applicants tend to be white. Supporters claimed that it is only one factor in evaluating a candidate. As these issues indicate, affirmative action, a source of debate in America since the early twentieth century, continues to provoke strong reactions. Kathleen Barr See also: Bush Family; Civil Rights Movement; Feminism, Second-Wave; Great Society; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Judicial Wars; Kennedy Family; New Deal; Nixon, Richard; Race; Reagan, Ronald; Truman, Harry S.
Further Reading Anderson, Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ball, Howard. The Bakke Case: Race, Education, and Affirmative Action. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Davies, Gareth. From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Graham, Hugh Davis. The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Afrocentrism With the influence of Pan-Africanism in the early twentieth century, black intellectuals argued that African Americans are linked historically as well as culturally with people of color who are of African descent. After World War II, the term “African diaspora” came into fashion, emphasizing a transnational bond between all the descendants of African slaves. Later, the Black Power movement of the late 1960s called for the reclamation of the African and African American past that had been lost due to “cultural terrorism.” During the 1980s, Afrocentrism emerged as an offshoot of Pan-Africanism, advancing the view that African history and culture have not been objectively presented in mainstream Western scholarship because of a Eurocentric bias. This has led to an ongoing debate in the culture wars over revisionist history and black American identity. A term coined by Temple University communication studies professor Molefi Kete Asante (born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr.), Afrocentrism has a range of meanings. At its most basic level, “Afrocentrism” is about presenting history from the perspective of Africans. As Asante explained during a 1991 interview, “It means treating African people as subjects instead of objects, putting them in the middle of their own historical context as active human agents.” In this respect, Afrocentrism shares common ground with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which negatively critiques the Western depiction of Asia and the Middle East. As such, Afrocentrism is part of the larger postcolonial intellectual movement. The stated goal of Afrocentrism is to reclaim the cultural identity of people of color who were impacted by Western colonialism, entailing a reexamination, and in many cases a rejection, of what has been presented in the Western history texts. For conventional scholars, Afrocentrism is suspect because of the philosophical and intellectual trends it draws from, including postmodernism (rejecting the “grand narrative”—Western tradition—and instead offering an African narrative); Marxism (emphasizing the “oppression” by the dominant Western culture and the imposition of a Eurocentric view of the past); and deconstructionism (taking apart the sto-
A ge Disc r imination
ries handed down in Western societies and “retrieving” what was “lost” or “left out”). Perhaps the most controversial development of Afrocentrism is the “Nile Valley” thesis, which locates the cradle of Western civilization in Egypt rather than Mesopotamia; identifies ancient Egypt as a Negro civilization; argues that Greek civilization borrowed heavily from Egyptian culture; and insists that Socrates was black. The foundation of Western civilization, it is thus asserted, is of African and not Aryan origin. The Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, author of The African Origin of Civilization (1974), advanced essential elements of this argument, which was more fully articulated by Martin Bernal, the Cornell University professor of Ancient Eastern Studies and author of the three-volume work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987, 1991, 2006). Bernal, who is white, argues that the “truth” of Western origins was kept out of standard textbooks because of prejudice against blacks; most respected historians reject his findings as examples of political correctness and identity politics. Critics of the “Nile Valley” hypothesis contend that, like the African American holiday of Kwanzaa, it is a romanticized invention of the present rather than an actual discovery of the past. They accuse Afrocentrists of teaching untruths for the purpose of building the self-esteem of African American students, which they find especially misdirected in this case because most blacks in the United States have ancestral links to West Africa and not Egypt. Washington Post reporter Keith Richburg aroused heated public debate on Afrocentrism with the publication of Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997), a memoir of his three years as a foreign correspondent in Africa. In this work, Richburg offers a bleak picture of the Africa of the 1990s, recounting scenes of disease, poverty, famine, filth, corruption, dictatorships, and genocide, and uses it to denounce Afrocentrism. “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of the rotting flesh,” he writes, having witnessed the Rwandan genocide and the violence of Somalia. Out of America accuses Afrocentrists of practicing a double standard: romanticizing Africa while condemning Western culture. Richburg shocked many fellow blacks by declaring that he does not consider himself an “African American” because nothing of Africa remains in the descendants of slaves who were brought to North America. “Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive,” he writes. “Thank God I am an American.” Richburg’s African American critics accused him of wishing he had been born white, suggested that he was suffering from the black man’s “internal inferiorization,” and dismissed his book as writing packaged for a white readership. Out of America blames tribalism on
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Africa’s problems, but critics argue that Richburg failed to consider the imperialistic legacies and economic world systems that have made the continent what it is today. These underlying factors were earlier addressed in the nine-part film documentary The Africans (1986), the Emmy Award–winning production of the International Women’s Project; the documentary was labeled an “antiWestern diatribe” by the National Endowment for the Humanities director Lynne Cheney, who disavowed her agency’s sponsorship of the work. Roger Chapman See also: Cheney Family; Deconstructionism; Kwanzaa; Marxism; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; National Endowment for the Humanities; Political Correctness; Postmodernism; Revisionist History; Said, Edward; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.
Further Reading Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volumes 1–3. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987–2006. Campbell, James T. Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Lefkowitz, Mary. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myths as History. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Richburg, Keith B. Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Walker, Clarence E. We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Age Discrimination Age discrimination, or ageism, refers to bias against individuals or groups based on their age. Such discrimination may be seen in housing, employment, and other areas. One form of ageism is the devaluation of society’s elderly people in favor of youth. Legal cases based on age bias frequently concern acts of discrimination against elderly workers, often regarding forced retirement. Although discriminatory hiring and promotion often occur, it is significantly more difficult to meet the legal standard of proof for these acts of discrimination. Beginning in the 1960s, laws against age discrimination were passed in a stream of antidiscrimination legislation. Most important are the Equal Pay Act (1963), Civil Rights Act (1964), Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1972), Rehabilitation Act (1973), Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), and Older Workers’ Benefit Protection Act (1990). These legislative measures were intended to
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A g new, Spiro T.
protect against general discrimination, especially in the workplace. Polling data show that Americans are solidly against workplace discrimination, especially when the discrimination is based on race or sex. According to some, however, workplace policies that may disfavor older people should not be lumped into the same category as racial and sexual discrimination. Many accept the argument that race and sex do not affect productivity, but it is not as obvious that age does not affect work. Also, older workers are more expensive than younger workers because of health care costs as well as the benefits and higher wages accrued by seniority. While in some industries this may be offset by worker experience, maturity, and reliability, such advantages are often difficult to demonstrate empirically. And in industries strongly affected by fast-changing technologies, worker experience is likely to be less valued than the ability to shift work habits quickly, a characteristic associated with youth. Thus, some employers might argue that they have a strong economic incentive to institute policies that discriminate against older workers. In public debates on age discrimination, moral and economic arguments often are set against each other. Free market advocates argue that government intervention to regulate such discrimination unnecessarily ties the hands of business, lowers economic potential, invites lawsuits, and pushes society toward socialistic mediocrity. Those who view all discrimination as a moral or civil rights issue remain strongly committed to enforcing and even extending protections against discrimination based on age. Daniel Liechty See also: Affirmative Action; Americans with Disabilities Act; Civil Rights Movement.
Further Reading Gregory, Raymond F. Age Discrimination in the American Workplace: Old at a Young Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Lindemann, Barbara. Age Discrimination in Employment Law. Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 2003. Nelson, Todd D., ed. Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice Against Older Persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
A g n e w, S p i r o T. Spiro Theodore Agnew, vice president of the United States during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, participated in the culture wars by harshly denouncing protesters against the Vietnam War, student activists, and the media. But he fell from grace
on October 10, 1973, resigning the vice presidency in order to avoid prison time for income tax evasion relating to the alleged acceptance of kickbacks from government contractors. The son of a Greek immigrant, Agnew was born on November 9, 1918, near Baltimore, Maryland. Service in the U.S. Army during World War II interrupted his college studies, but after completing three years at Johns Hopkins University, he transferred to the University of Baltimore and obtained a law degree (1947). Originally a Democrat, he switched to the Republican Party on the advice of business associates. After losing an electoral bid for associate circuit judge (1960), he served as county executive of Baltimore County (1962–1966), governor of Maryland (1966–1968), and vice president of the United States (1969–1973). A political moderate initially, in Maryland he implemented civil rights reform, added kindergarten to the public schools, and focused on urban development. He came to Nixon’s notice with a speech that attacked African-American leaders for being silent while rioters burned Baltimore. During the 1968 presidential campaign, as Nixon’s running mate, Agnew denounced Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey as “squishy soft on communism.” He also announced that he would not campaign in urban areas because “if you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all.” Following the election, Agnew continued to be a divisive figure, with the help of speechwriters Patrick Buchanan and William Safire. Agnew called political opponents “radiclibs,” administration critics “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and the press corps “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Such rhetoric did little to fulfill Nixon’s promise of unifying the country. Agnew contributed greatly to the culture wars by pitting groups against each other and fostering an attitude that criticizing the government or the military was unpatriotic. As the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973–1974, Agnew’s own alleged political corruption during his tenure as Maryland governor began to catch up with him. Informants even claimed that as vice president he had accepted illegal payments. U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson put pressure on Agnew to resign, paving the way for Gerald Ford’s appointment to the vice presidency. After resigning, Agnew pleaded nolo contendere (“no contest”) to one count of tax evasion; he was sentenced to three years’ probation and a fine of $10,000. He lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity until his death on September 17, 1996. Justin P. Coffey See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Buchanan, Pat; Democratic Party; Ford, Gerald; Humphrey, Hubert H.; Jorgensen, Christine; Media Bias; Nixon, Richard; Republican Party; Vietnam War; War Protesters; Watergate.
A ids
Further Reading Agnew, Spiro. Go Quietly . . . Or Else. New York: Morrow, 1980. Cohen, Richard M., and Jules Witcover. A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. New York: Viking, 1974. Lippman, Theodore, Jr. Spiro Agnew’s America. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972. Safire, William. Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Witcover, Jules. White Knight: The Rise of Spiro Agnew. New York: Random House, 1972.
AIDS The disease that came to be known as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) was first described in the United States in 1981. In the course of the next twentyfive years, more than half a million Americans died from AIDS-related illnesses. Although transmission of the virus that causes AIDS—the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV— can be prevented through personal behavior and public health measures, approximately 40,000 new infections occur every year in the United States. And although the disease can affect any group in society, the most marginalized communities are the hardest hit. In 2006, more than half of new HIV infections occurred among African Americans, even though this group makes up less than 13 percent of the population. Increasingly, people of color and those living in poverty are disproportionately affected by the disease. These populations are also the least likely to have adequate access to quality health care and health insurance. As in the early years of the epidemic, the marginalized status of people facing the challenge of AIDS sharply defines the help they receive in addressing it.
History The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in June and July 1981 published the earliest reports of unusual illnesses (Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia) among gay men in San Francisco and New York. By October of that year, the new syndrome had been officially designated an epidemic. From the outset, the U.S. medical community and media framed the disease in terms of the population in which it was first identified. An article in the medical journal the Lancet described the new illnesses as “gay compromise syndrome,” and it was widely labeled “gay-related immune deficiency” or “gay cancer.” Ideas about the possible causes of the disease were steeped in negative assumptions about the supposed hedonism and promiscuity of the “gay lifestyle.” Conservative figures such as former Reagan speechwriter and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
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and evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell asserted that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexual behavior. By December, when one of the illnesses associated with the new disease was first diagnosed in injecting drug users, there was clear evidence that the emerging epidemic could affect population groups other than gay men. The stigma associated with drug use compounded the judgmental and pejorative associations being made between the disease and the people diagnosed with it. The original framing of the disease in terms of the types of people who were getting it, rather than the ways they were becoming infected, dominated the medical approach in the first years of the epidemic. Even after the name “acquired immune deficiency syndrome” was adopted in 1982, the tendency to focus on specific groups of people remained. In a March 1983 report, the CDC listed Haitian immigrants, hemophiliacs, intravenous drug users, and homosexual or bisexual men and their partners as groups at increased risk of AIDS. Haiti’s tourism industry suffered from the negative publicity, and people began referring to a “4-H Club” of high-risk groups: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians.
Stigma and Discrimination In the culture wars surrounding AIDS, some of the affected began to be identified as either the “innocent” victims of the epidemic or the “guilty” harbingers of disease. The “innocent” included the wives of unfaithful husbands and hemophiliacs infected by blood transfusions. The “guilty” were drug users, sexually promiscuous individuals, and gay men. After a blood test was developed to screen for the virus, gay rights groups expressed concern about the possible misuse of the test results to deny housing, jobs, or employment to people who were HIV positive. Such outcomes seemed within the realm of possibility, given the stigma surrounding AIDS and the calls for such repressive public health measures as quarantine. Conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., recommended obligatory universal screening followed by tattooing the forearms and buttocks of people who tested positive, an idea intended to stop drug users and gay men from infecting others. In the context of growing hysteria, people with HIV or AIDS experienced widespread discrimination and abuse. Ryan White, a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac with AIDS who lived in Kokomo, Indiana, was barred from attending school in 1985 on the grounds that he might transmit HIV to other students. Although his campaign to gain admission brought him national celebrity—White became an activist and peer educator, and appeared on the cover of People magazine twice before his death in 1991—this would not be the only instance of such discrimination. The Rays of Arcadia, Florida, had
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their home burned down in 1987 after winning a legal battle to allow the family’s three HIV-positive children to attend school.
AIDS Education The media frenzy and public anxiety that fueled such events resulted, in part, from the lack of a strong government position on the epidemic. In September 1985, some four years after the disease had appeared, President Reagan mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time. When asked if he would send his own children to school with a child who had AIDS, he replied that although the medical evidence suggested this would not put them at risk, there was no unequivocal proof. U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, the following year, published the government’s first major statement on the epidemic. Koop recommended that schools and parents facilitate frank, candid discussions about sex and HIV as a critical means to slow the spread of the disease. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) had produced sex-education materials to define safe practices and risky behaviors since its launch in 1981. Sometimes featuring explicit illustrations or descriptions of gay sex, such materials were seized upon by conservative commentators. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), said to be particularly outraged by a GMHC cartoon booklet called After the Gym, proposed the so-called Helms Amendment in 1987, banning the use of federal funds for AIDS-education materials that “promote or encourage” homosexual or premarital heterosexual activity. These restrictions formed the cornerstone of abstinence-education programs advocated by conservatives, including President George W. Bush. Abstinence programs, which advise against sex before marriage, have been widely promoted by evangelical groups such as Focus on the Family. In a 2004 review of abstinence-based curricula in American schools, however, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States found that many of these programs depict traditional gender roles that undermine sexual equality and underplay the role of condoms in preventing the transmission of HIV. Two of the most widely used programs, Worth the Wait and Heritage Keepers, faced criticism for relying on fearbased messaging about the repercussions of sexual activity to shame students into abstinence. According to critics, exaggerated claims about the failure rates of condoms have made young people less likely to use them if they do engage in sexual activity. Proponents of abstinencebased education argue that sex education encourages sexual experimentation. Similar struggles over the most appropriate ways to tackle the AIDS epidemic have played out in other ways. Needle-exchange programs, for example, designed to give drug users access to clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV through shared use, have been decried as
tacitly supporting illegal drug use. Condom distribution programs have also faced intense criticism from opponents who see them as encouraging promiscuity. Restrictions on the content of AIDS-education materials extend far beyond the borders of the United States. In 2003, President Bush announced a $15 billion, fiveyear global initiative to combat HIV/AIDS, especially in Africa and the Caribbean. Although the program brought a major increase in support for global AIDS efforts, provisions limiting the way funding can be used may have undermined the efficacy of safe-sex education. While a comprehensive program advocates the “ABC” approach—in which A stands for “abstinence,” B for “be faithful,” and C for “use a condom”—the president’s plan focused on the first two elements at the expense of the third. Critics say this negatively affected programs in some areas, especially where sexual inequality impedes joint decision-making about when to have sex or whether to use condoms. The contentious debates over what works versus what is appropriate have profound consequences for the future of the global AIDS epidemic. AIDS is often seen as one of the defining issues of our time, yet public health practitioners suggest that ideological squabbling may limit society’s ability to respond. Manon Parry See also: Birth Control; Buchanan, Pat; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Catholic Church; Focus on the Family; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in the Military; Hate Crimes; Health Care; Helms, Jesse; Koop, C. Everett; Kushner, Tony; Reagan, Ronald; Science Wars; Sex Education.
Further Reading Antonio, Gene. The AIDS Cover-Up. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. Gostin, Lawrence O. The AIDS Pandemic: Complacency, Injustice, and Unfulfilled Expectations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. McKeever, James. The AIDS Plague. Medford, OR: Omega, 1986. Treichler, Paula. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
A l e xa n d e r, J a n e Jane Alexander, an internationally acclaimed American actress, entered the battlefield of the culture wars when she chaired the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from 1993 to 1997 during President Bill Clinton’s administration. Born Jane Quigly on October 28, 1939, in Boston, she studied at Sarah Lawrence College (1957–1959) and the University of Edinburgh (1959–1960). Her first major performance was in The Great White Hope
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(1968), a Washington, D.C., production sponsored by the NEA. She was cast as the white lover of a black boxer, a role that generated controversy, including hate mail and death threats. The production moved to Broadway the following year and brought her a Tony Award for best performance by a featured actress in a play, the first of many acting awards and nominations she would earn. In the decades since, Alexander has worn a range of hats in the arts, including acting, film producing, and writing. Among her film credits are All the President’s Men (1976), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), and The Cider House Rules (1999). Her television performances have included roles in Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977), Testament (1983), and Law and Order (2000). She has also served on the boards of such organizations as Project Greenhope, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. The first working artist to direct the NEA, Alexander headed an organization that had been on the political defensive since the 1980s. Angry public criticism from conservative groups such as the American Family Association over NEA grants to several avant-garde artists whose work contained controversial content led to budget cuts and campaigns to disband the organization. Under Alexander’s tenure, Congress slashed the NEA’s annual budget from $170 million to $98 million. During her four-year role as chair, Alexander reduced the NEA staff and transformed the agency into a publicly engaged institution with a commitment to local communities, cultural diversity, and education. Despite her efforts to defend and promote public funding for the arts, many artists criticized her for compromising too much with conservative Republicans in Congress. Others credited her political skills, including placating Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), with saving the NEA. Shortly before her resignation in 1997, the NEA published a report titled American Canvas: An Arts Legacy for Our Communities, which advised that artists and art institutions in America need to do more to mitigate the negativity of the mainstream public toward contemporary art. Susan Pearce See also: Censorship; Clinton, Bill; Helms, Jesse; Mapple thorpe, Robert; National Endowment for the Arts; National Endowment for the Humanities; Serrano, Andres.
Further Reading Alexander, Jane. Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.
Ali, Muhammad Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay on January 17, 1942, in
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Louisville, Kentucky, was famous not only for his unparalleled exploits in the ring but also for his outspoken manner and controversial political stands. At the 1960 summer Olympics in Rome, Cassius Clay won the gold medal in the light heavyweight category by defeating Zbigniew Pietrzykowski of Poland. A series of nineteen successive victories then gave him a shot at the world heavyweight title, which he won from defending champion Sonny Liston with a surprising and controversial sixth-round technical knockout in February 1964. He successfully defended his title nine times from 1964 to 1967, but his sporting career was increasingly overshadowed by his flamboyant personality and political activism. After winning the heavyweight crown, Clay changed his name to Cassius X, refusing to bear the name that had been imposed on his slave ancestors. He took the name Muhammad Ali after converting to Islam and joining the Nation of Islam, a radical, separatist group. This made Ali a lightning rod in the decade’s tense racial climate. Young, fit, handsome, and articulate, he also became a symbol of racial pride for the Black Power movement. Ali publicly opposed the Vietnam War on the grounds that fighting communism in Southeast Asia was secondary to fighting racism in the United States. Declaring “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong; ain’t no Vietcong ever called me a nigger,” he petitioned to be exempted from the military draft as a conscientious objector, claiming that as a Muslim minister he could fight only in a jihad (Muslim holy war). He was denounced as a draft dodger, but sports announcer Howard Cosell defended him despite suffering criticism for doing so. In 1967, Ali was found guilty of “willful refusal to submit to the induction of the Armed Forces,” sentenced to five years in jail, fined $10,000, and stripped of his heavyweight title. That conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Clay, aka Ali v. United States (1971). He later recalled, “I was determined to be one nigger the white man didn’t get.” Ali regained the championship belt in an October 1974 bout against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (Congo). Promoted as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the fight was remembered for Ali’s skills and taunts, but also for the political symbolism of two African Americans fighting for a world title in the capital of a newly independent African nation. In two 1978 fights against Leon Spinks, Ali first lost the world title, then regained it for the third time. Ali became a less controversial figure following his 1981 retirement (with a 56–5 record) and the 1984 announcement that he suffered from pugilistic Parkinson’s disease. He made a high-profile appearance as the final torchbearer in the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympics held in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2005, President
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George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Ali is widely regarded as a symbol of the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements as well as the cultural tensions of the time. His daughter Laila became a prominent professional boxer in her own right during the late 1990s. Philippe R. Girard See also: Afrocentrism; Bush Family; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Malcolm X; Muslim Americans; Nation of Islam; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Ali, Muhammad. The Greatest: My Own Story. New York: Random House, 1975. Ali, Muhammad, and Thomas Hauser. Muhammad Ali in Perspective. San Francisco: Collins, 1996. Gorn, Elliott J., ed. Muhammad Ali, the People’s Champ. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Kindred, Dave. Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship. New York: Free Press, 2006. Remnick, David. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. New York: Random House, 1998.
American Centur y Originally articulated in 1941 by Henry Luce, the editor and owner of Time and Life magazines, the American Century is a concept that incorporates long-standing visions of the United States as a redeemer nation while pointing toward its future as the leading hegemon of the “free world.” Appropriating a sense that the future will be defined by American standards in every aspect of life, the American Century worldview informed the desires and designs of policymakers seeking to establish the United States as the indispensable nation for leading the world. On the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, Luce described the American Century as a “duty” and “opportunity” for guaranteeing progress and prosperity throughout the world. He believed that America was the true inheritor of the best that civilization offered. It naturally followed that the inevitable global dominance of the United States would be marked by the superlative qualities of American democracy and culture; thus, spreading that democracy and culture would be the primary mission of the nation. That mission would require a geopolitical strategy built on the economic, military, and cultural preeminence of the United States in the postwar period. Playing off these calls for an American Century, postwar policymakers sought to establish U.S. geopolitical supremacy in the world by overt and covert means. Among the overt designs was development of a host of international and multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, whose role in effectuating U.S. dominance is noted by scholars such as David Harvey, Michael Hunt, Neil Smith, and Immanuel Wallerstein. The covert means focused primarily on the role of a newly created Central Intelligence Agency to foster favorable governments around the world and to underwrite cultural enterprises during the Cold War. Proponents of muscular U.S. intervention found inspiration in the resonant words of President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address: “to bear any burden” and “pay any price” for spreading freedom. That spirit came to an abrupt halt in the Vietnam War, causing a crisis in what had been the “triumphalism” embedded in the American Century concept. While American culture continued to gain footholds everywhere in the world, U.S. political and economic hegemony suffered setbacks throughout the 1970s. In the early 1980s, however, the administration of President Ronald Reagan proclaimed its intention to restore American preeminence in the world, even going beyond mere containment of the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the American Century ideologues confronted a dual challenge: how to sustain and expand the military-industrial complex that was the core of American dominance, and how to convince the American public to support military interventions for strategic purposes. Out of this challenge grew a neoconservative plan called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Formulated in 1997, PNAC defined its mission in a rhetorical question: “Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?” Among the signatories to PNAC’s statement of principles were Republican stalwarts Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom would become key members of President George W. Bush’s administration. The PNAC supporters’ advocacy for “full spectrum dominance” was seen in the Bush Doctrine of unilateral preemptive war, under which the administration launched its military campaign in Iraq. The consequences led many to wonder whether the United States could or should be the sole agent of democratic change in the world. Even previous promoters of muscular intervention, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, and of neoconservative ideology, such as Francis Fukuyama, raised doubts about the viability of Bush’s version of the American Century. Nevertheless, some neoconservatives continued to express confidence in a revised understanding of the American Century, even as critics openly discussed the end of it. While Robert Kagan, in Of Paradise and Power (2003), underscores the deeply rooted belief of American power as the prime mover for progress in the world, Immanuel Wallerstein, in The Decline of American Power (2003), sees the United States as lacking the power to effect global
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dominance. Other critics see the “new imperialism” as a failing strategy of the “endgame of globalization.” These critics contend that the American Century and PNAC projects are doomed to failure because American power has reached its apex and is in the critical phase of imperial overreach. Nevertheless, many liberal as well as conservative policymakers, from Madeleine Albright to Condoleezza Rice, still regard the United States as the indispensable nation. Their ideological division is often over whether the United States should act unilaterally to effect the changes it wants in the world. Academic supporters of an American imperial mission, such as Robert Kagan and Niall Ferguson, argue that the success of such a mission depends on shouldering the economic and political burdens, irrespective of internal and external criticisms and contradictions. Opponents of such an imperial mission note that to continue an imperial course would be a delusion and invite disaster. Beyond the debates over whether the twenty-first century will be a New American Century is a growing international sense of the demise of the American empire. The issue of the rise and fall, and benevolence or malevolence, of the American Century policies no doubt will remain part of the culture wars for some time to come. Francis Shor See also: American Exceptionalism; Bush Family; Cold War; Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol; Neoconservatism; Reagan, Ronald; September 11; United Nations; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Boggs, Carl. Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Fukuyama, Francis. America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Owl Books, 2004. Lieven, Anatol. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Project for the New American Century Web site. www .newamericancentury.org. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 2001. Slater, David, and Peter J. Taylor, eds. The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power. Walden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Steel, Ronald. Pax Americana. New York: Viking, 1967.
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American Civ il Liber ties Union Founded in 1920 as a successor to the National Civil Liberties Bureau, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting individual rights. With chapters in states nationwide and claiming a membership of over 500,000, the ACLU in 2008 was involved in about 6,000 cases. In the culture wars, political conservatives have accused the ACLU of being partisan, liberal, antireligious, and unpatriotic. (The initials, say some, stand for “Atheist Commie Liberal Utopians.”) On occasion, however, the ALCU has disappointed liberals for coming to the defense of Klansmen, Nazi demonstrators, and the Iran-Contra figure Oliver North. The organization has steadfastly proclaimed a commitment to the liberties of all, regardless of political orientation.
Civil Rights for All From its inception, the ACLU promoted labor rights, along the way working with communists. Early board members included progressive reformers such as Jane Addams, as well as socialist Norman Thomas and communists William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. During the 1930s, the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) accused the ACLU of being “closely affiliated with the Communist movement,” asserting that “fully 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of communists.” Critics saw communist taint in that Roger Baldwin, an admirer of the Soviet Union and author of Liberty Under the Soviets (1928), was executive director of the ACLU from its founding in 1920 until 1950. After World War II, the organization turned its attention to civil rights, while the Communist Party of the USA, by then estranged from the ACLU, operated its own front group, the CRC (Civil Rights Congress). As communists came under attack by the federal government, the ACLU responded cautiously. It submitted a timid response to President Harry Truman’s government loyalty program and offered a late amicus (friend-of-thecourt) brief on behalf of the Hollywood Ten. In 1948, as communists were prosecuted under the Smith Act, the ACLU sat on the sidelines. However, the ACLU did issue an amicus brief on behalf of the communist defendants in Yates v. U.S. (1957), the successful appeal of the Smith Act ruling. The ACLU’s response to the McCarran Act (1950), which authorized detention of radicals in times of emergency, was restrained. Although the ACLU did not direct the legal actions associated with the civil rights movement, it worked closely with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on many cases. Earlier, in the Supreme Court case of Hirabayashi v. U.S. (1943), the ACLU submitted an amicus brief on behalf of the Japanese-American internees, categorizing the government action as racially discriminatory. The ACLU also
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The American Civil Liberties Union, dedicated to protecting individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution, is criticized by conservatives for advancing a partisan left-wing agenda. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)
filed an amicus brief in the historic school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The organization went on to defend students who participated in the sit-ins throughout the South (1960s) and provided legal assistance to arrested members of the Black Panther Party (1960s–1970s). In addition, forms of black expression such as Afro hairstyles, which were banned in the military, were defended in court. But the support for black rights did not dissuade the ACLU from defending white supremacists. The African-American ACLU attorney and future District of Columbia delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton defended members of the National States’ Rights Party in a number of cases involving speech rights, culminating in the Supreme Court decision in Carroll v. Princess Anne (1968), which found prior restraint of speech to be unconstitutional. Norton also defended the speech rights of the Ku Klux Klan and handled a case on behalf of segregationist George Wallace, whom some were trying to prevent from staging a political rally at Shea Stadium in New York. Most controversially, the ACLU in 1977–1978 provided legal assistance to the Nationalist Socialist Party of America (a Nazi group), which had been banned from conducting a parade in Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish Chicago suburb.
Church and State Separation Evangelicals and fundamentalists generally view the actions of the ACLU as hostile toward people of faith. This perception dates back to the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, the 1925 Tennessee case in which the ACLU successfully opposed a ban on the teaching of evolution, but it was heightened by the ACLU’s effort at ending
school prayer. With the Supreme Court rulings in Engel v. Vitale (1962), Abington v. Schempp (1963), and Murray v. Curlett (1963), largely the consequence of ACLU efforts, prayer and Bible reading in public schools were rendered unconstitutional. There was further rancor when, in Waltz v. Tax Commission (1970), the ACLU argued against tax exemption for religious groups. However, the ACLU on occasion has defended the rights of religious people—in Minersville School v. Gobitis (1940), a reversal of an earlier decision, the Supreme Court agreed with the ACLU that school authorities do not have the right to impose pledging to the flag on the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who regard such ritual as idolatrous; and in 1965, the ACLU wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission supporting the right of Carl McIntire, a proto–Religious Right activist, to acquire a radio broadcast license, an application liberal groups were opposing. Many church leaders see the ACLU as set on building a high wall of separation between church and state—a wall higher than the nation’s founders, including Thomas Jefferson, ever imagined—by unreasonably arguing that every religious expression in a public context is tantamount to the establishment of a state religion. ACLU opposition to crèches and the posting of the Ten Commandments on government property is regarded by religious conservatives as militant secularism. The ACLU has been successful in forcing municipalities to remove religious symbols from their seals, some designed in the 1800s, prompting wags to wonder if the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, will someday be forced to change its name. In 1990, the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson established the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ),
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a counterpart to the ACLU “dedicated to the ideal that religious freedom and freedom of speech are inalienable, God-given rights.” Religious conservatives also attribute society’s declining morality to ACLU action, viewing its legal work on birth control, abortion, pornography, and sodomy as having cast the nation morally adrift. The ACLU filed an amicus brief in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court case that overturned a state ban on contraceptives and, most significantly, enlarged the concept of privacy rights, paving the way for the overturning of abortion bans (Roe v. Wade, 1973) and sodomy laws (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003). Religious conservatives also believe the ACLU has undercut family values. In the ACLU case King v. Smith (1968), the Supreme Court rescinded an Alabama law denying welfare benefits to those engaging in illicit affairs. In In Re Gault (1967), about a fifteen-year-old accused of making lewd telephone calls, and Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), about high school students demonstrating against the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court, in accord with the ACLU, elevated the rights of minors. In 2001, two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Jerry Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club television program and stated, “The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.” Falwell argued that God allowed the attacks to occur in order “to give us probably what we deserve” as a consequence of secularization. He elaborated: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped make this happen.’” Robertson responded, “I totally concur.”
Vietnam War and Beyond The ACLU was highly active during the Vietnam War, defending war dissenters, including those who claimed conscientious objector status not in opposition to war in general but specifically to the American involvement in Southeast Asia. The ACLU was defeated in 1971, when the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 against selective conscientious objection. In U.S. v. Seeger (1965), however, the high court ruled in favor of the ACLU position that there is no legal requirement for conscientious objection to be based on theistic rationale. The ACLU prompted the high court in Oestereich v. Selection Board No. 11 (1968) to overturn the Selective Service decree allowing local draft boards to revoke the draft deferments of war protesters. In June 1970, the ACLU caused dissension in its own ranks when it formally announced its opposition to the Vietnam War. When the ACLU called for impeaching President Richard Nixon in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times (October 19, 1973), it established a
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precedent for partisanship, such as when it later opposed the appointments of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. During the 1960s and 1970s, the ACLU handled a number of cases pertaining to “flag desecration.” A Long Island woman was successfully defended in 1969 after she was arrested for flying her flag upside down in protest of the Vietnam War. In Street v. New York (1969), the Supreme Court on a technicality reversed a lower court’s ruling against Sidney Street, who burned a flag in protest of the violence unleashed on civil rights activists. This period also underscored ACLU concern for the rights of the accused—in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the landmark case requiring crime suspects to be informed of their rights by the police, the ACLU filed an amicus brief. This period of ACLU activity gave detractors material to argue that the organization represented a permissive, unpatriotic quality out of step with the mainstream. In 1987, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis proclaimed himself “a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.” His Republican opponent in the general election, George H.W. Bush, saw that as a vulnerable statement and used it to argue that Dukakis was far left of the average American voter. That same year, the ACLU came to the defense of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, filing an amicus brief against his indictment in the Iran-Contra scandal, arguing that his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination would be violated since the charges were based on testimony he had been required to provide to an earlier investigatory committee of Congress. Defending North, who was a hero to many political conservatives, enabled the ACLU to argue that it champions civil liberties for people of all political stripes. However, that did not stop Bush from arguing that the ACLU was overly liberal. During the first televised debate of that election contest, Bush said he opposed the ACLU for its positions on film ratings, tax-exemption status for Catholic schools, child pornography laws, and the inscription “In God We Trust” on currency. At the time, the ACLU was on record as stating that parents, not a ratings board, should decide what movies their children can view; that all churches, not just Catholic, should be required to pay taxes; that producers of child pornography should be prosecuted, but pornography in general should not be censored; and that the motto “In God We Trust” should be removed from U.S. currency. Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Church and State; Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Flag Desecration; Miranda Rights; Pornography; Privacy Rights; School Prayer; Sodomy Laws; Ten Commandments; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
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Further Reading American Civil Liberties Union Web site. www.aclu.org. Donohue, William A. Twilight of Liberty: The Legacy of the ACLU. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994. Krannawitter, Thomas L., and Daniel C. Palm. One Nation Under God? The ACLU and Religion in American Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Kutulas, Judy. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Smith, F. LaGard. ACLU—The Devil’s Advocate. Colorado Springs, CO: Marcon, 1996. Strum, Philippa. When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Walker, Samuel. In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Amer ican Civ il Relig ion Civil religion is a sociological and political construct that consists of the intertwining of religion and patriotism and whose expression in the contemporary United States is much related to notions of American exceptionalism. American civil religion became a topic of the culture wars beginning in the late 1960s through the writings of the Harvard sociologist Robert Bellah, who argued that Americanism consists in part of an institutionalized civil religion that “exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches.” The term “civil religion” can be traced to the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who in The Social Contract (1761) defined it as a society’s general, nonsectarian belief in law and order and the existence of a God who rewards good and punishes evil. According to Bellah, the concept of civil religion crossed the Atlantic during the late 1700s and directly influenced the founders of the United States. Thus, the Declaration of Independence, for example, linked the rights of human beings to the “Creator” and not the state. In the first presidential inauguration in 1789, George Washington took the oath of office by placing his hand on the Bible and concluding, “So help me God.” Although this was nowhere prescribed in the U.S. Constitution, it became one of the rituals of American civil religion. Likewise, the inaugural address from its inception became a national sermon with references to God, who has a special interest in the affairs of America. In his historic Farewell Address of 1796, Washington declared that religion should be valued as a tool of “political prosperity,” asserting that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” During the Civil War, the themes of “sacrifice” and “rebirth” became part of American civil religion, as most notably conveyed in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863). In that spirit, Memorial Day was established as
an annual commemoration of Americans who died in military service. Another ritual of American civil religion is the flag pledge, drafted by the socialist minister Francis M. Bellamy in 1892. The original text read, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag, and to the Republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.” The Pledge of Allegiance was intended for recitation in schools to foster a common national bond. Over the years, the words were slightly altered. In 1954, during the Cold War, Congress added the phrase “under God” after “one nation,” to contrast theistic America with atheistic communism. “One nation under God” would become an oft-repeated phrase among religious conservatives. Signing the bill into law on Flag Day (June 14), President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained that adding the phrase was a way of “reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.” Following the same principle, the phrase “In God We Trust” was inscribed on the nation’s currency in 1955. The following year it became the nation’s official motto, replacing “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of many, one). In Rediscovering God in America (2006), a “walking tour” of the national sites in Washington, D.C., former U.S. congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA) offers “a rebuttal to those who seek to write God out of American history.” In citing the inscriptions and dedications of major memorials, Gingrich points out the repeated references to God. At the same time, however, Gingrich stresses that he advocates no particular religion—all in keeping with the concept of American civil religion: connecting nationhood with divinity without specific theology. “There is no attack on American culture more destructive and more historically dishonest,” Gingrich asserts, “than the secular Left’s relentless effort to drive God out of America’s public square.” Proponents of civil religion, including Bellah, argue that it promotes social cohesion and inspires moral courage during times of national testing. Many figures of the Religious Right have linked American civil religion with the Judeo-Christian tradition, predominately Protestantism, and regard any attempt to curb religion in the public sphere as an attack on their belief that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” On the other hand, some people of faith view civil religion as idolatrous. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, rejected the flag pledge as an act of idolatry and took their complaint to federal courts. The case culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which struck down compulsory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. Others, meanwhile, including both secularists and theists, regard
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civil religion as the shell of religiosity without substance. Many critics of civil religion regard the celebratory aspect of nationalism and its link to the divine as dangerous, especially if the United States determines that it must assert its will on other nations. When religion fosters a “prophetic” viewpoint of the nation, say critics, leaders may mask their political ambition as God’s will or, much worse, succumb to the delusion that they are divinely inspired. Roger Chapman See also: American Exceptionalism; Church and State; Cold War; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Founding Fathers; Gingrich, Newt; Jehovah’s Witnesses; Religious Right; School Prayer; September 11.
Further Reading Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” In Religion in America, ed. William G. McLoughlin and Robert N. Bellah, 3–23. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Canipe, Lee. “Under God and Anti-Communist: How the Pledge of Allegiance Got Religion in Cold War America.” Journal of Church and State 45:2 (March 2003): 305–23. Cloud, Matthew W. “‘One Nation, Under God’: Tolerable Acknowledgment of Religion or Unconstitutional Cold War Propaganda Cloaked in American Civil Religion?” Journal of Church and State 46:2 (March 2004): 311–40. Gingrich, Newt. Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future. Nashville, TN: Integrity House, 2006. Zinn, Howard. “The Scourge of Nationalism.” Progressive, June 2005.
A m e r i c a n E xc e p t i o n a l i s m American exceptionalism is the centuries-old idea that the United States is a unique—and superior—entity in the world, in a class separate from other nations and blessed by the divine (or marked by destiny) in an extraordinary way for a special mission. The view dates back to the Puritans, who saw America as the “New Israel” and, specifically, the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city on a hill” for the Old World to look upon as an example. Elements of American exceptionalism are said to include religion, social class, and politics, emphasizing high church attendance compared to other countries with a Christian heritage; the failure of socialism to make major inroads in American culture; and the narrow political spectrum represented by the two national parties. Those who accept the premise of American exceptionalism are more likely to regard the United States as a safeguard for democracy in the world. In the Gettysburg Address (1863), for example, Abraham Lincoln suggested that if the North did not win the Civil War and preserve the Union, then “government of the people, by
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the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth.” In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to join the Great War against Germany to help make the world “safe for democracy.” In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt identified Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear) as basic human rights that should be pursued universally following World War II. That same year, magazine publisher Henry Luce announced the American Century, envisioning the United States as the world’s redeemer nation. Accordingly, during the Cold War, the United States saw its mission of containing communism as essential to preserving freedom in the world. And after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which some argued were carried out because Islamic extremists “hate our way of life” (i.e., the practice of freedom), American neoconservatives promoted their agenda of a “New American Century” in which the United States would use its power to foster progress in the world. Meanwhile, detractors of American exceptionalism argue that the United States is like any other “empire” that exerts its power chiefly to advance its self-interest. Discussing the religiosity of the American people as “proof” of national exceptionalism, commentators have quoted Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835). Religion is “the foremost of the political institutions” of the United States, Tocqueville wrote, and there is “no country in the world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” More recently, however, Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom: The Coming Global Christianity (2002) points to trends showing that, by the middle of the twenty-first century, 80 percent of all Christians will be living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As for the failure of socialism to gain a strong institutional foothold in America—the German socialist Werner Sombart famously suggested in Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) that American class consciousness had wrecked on the “shoals of roast beef and apple pie”— commentators have pointed out that the United States has evolved into a mixed economic system with some aspects of socialism, such as Social Security and other entitlement programs. As for the two-party system in America, it has been pointed out that the “winner takes all” election rules make it difficult for minority parties to gain power, a kind of limitation on democracy that other countries impose in other ways. Regardless of the extent to which American exceptionalism is a valid concept—scholars are divided on this question—many politicians have acted on it as a reality. Presidential inaugural addresses, in particular, have been framed around the idea of American exceptionalism: “Destiny has laid upon our country the responsibility of the free world’s leadership,” declared Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, and the United States
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must “pay any price, bear any burden . . . in order to ensure the survival and success of liberty [in the world],” said John F. Kennedy in 1961. In his 1984 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan recounted his first term as president, stating, “We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a Shining City on a Hill.” Roger Chapman See also: American Century; American Civil Religion; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Founding Fathers; Human Rights; Kennedy Family; Labor Unions; Neoconservatism; Reagan, Ronald; September 11; Social Security.
Further Reading Kammen, Michael. “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration.” American Quarterly 45:1 (March 1993): 1–43. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Gary Marks. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Madsden, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Shafer, Byron E., ed. Is America Different? A Look at American Exceptionalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
A m e r i c a n I n d i a n M ove m e n t In conjunction with the civil rights movement, the youth counterculture, and the emerging emphasis on multiculturalism, a pan-Indian movement began to take shape in America during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The development in the culture wars coincided with the emergence of the first generation of Native American academics, scholars who wrote and spoke eloquently of their people’s plight. The four-hour “occupation” of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in March 1964 by a group of Sioux, claiming the land as Indian territory and demanding that it be made into an Indian university and cultural center, symbolized this awakened identity. The activist American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded four years later in Minneapolis, Minnesota, inspired by Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1968), which outlined the injustices suffered by Native American peoples since the nineteenth century. The founding leaders of AIM were Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Eddie Benton-Banai, and George Mitchell; later, Russell Means emerged as the group’s spokesman. The long-standing reliance of Native Americans on the U.S. federal government began to change in 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act granted them a larger degree of self-government. For the next twenty
years, the government continued to minimize its role on reservations, culminating in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s attempt to cease funding them entirely. Toward that end, Eisenhower favored the relocation of large numbers of Indians to urban areas where they could find education and become self-sufficient. As Native Americans were removed from their homes and separated from their families, tribal leaders began to speak out against their treatment. Between 1958 and 1967, members of numerous tribes met across the United States and in Cuba to discuss their collective grievances, which culminated in the founding of AIM.
Confrontations The first clash between Native American activists and the government came in November 1969, when activist Richard Oakes led a group made up of Indian students and urban Indians from the San Francisco Bay area in a second takeover of Alcatraz Island. This occupation would last until June 1971; over those nineteen months, Indians from many tribes would move onto the island in order to create public awareness of their plight and to obtain the deed to the island in order to proceed with their plans for a university and cultural center. Although the protest did not directly involve AIM, it brought national attention to Indian grievances. President Richard Nixon was unwilling to negotiate with the occupiers at Alcatraz, but he refused to take the island by force because the national news media appeared to be sympathetic with the Indians. Instead, the government sought to pressure them out, cutting off electrical power and removing the island’s fresh water supply. The strain of these conditions caused tension and a sense of desperation among the Indian leadership, and in early 1971 the media turned against the occupiers when three of their ranks were convicted of selling copper tubing stripped from federal buildings on the island. Only then did Nixon plan for a forced removal, though he insisted that it be done with a minimum of violence. His orders were carried out on June 10, 1971, without a shot being fired. Although the incident ended without any accession to the occupiers’ demands, Native Americans had gained the national spotlight. The following summer, a conglomeration of Indian organizations, with AIM at the lead, organized a march on Washington, D.C., that became known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. The protest was an effort to capitalize on increased media coverage associated with the 1972 presidential campaign. AIM leaders developed a list of twenty demands to be presented to the federal government at the nation’s capital. The “Twenty Points,” as they were known, included calls for formal recognition of Indian nations as sovereign political entities; a review of all past and present treaties between the U.S. government and Native Americans; Indian religious
A m e r i c a n I n d i a n M ove m e n t
freedom; and $15 billion to develop reservations. Upon reaching Washington, D.C., on November 3, 1972, the mass of protestors—including representatives of Indian organizations from throughout the United States and Canada—were unable to find sufficient accommodations. This circumstance prompted some 600–800 participants, including all those representing AIM, to forcibly take over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices. After a six-day standoff, President Nixon persuaded them to return home, promising to pay for their travel expenses and give consideration to their demands. Two months later, however, he dismissed the proposal. As in the case of Alcatraz, he refused to concede to their demands even as he avoided military action. A few weeks later, on February 27, 1973, AIM leaders drew attention to their cause again when they forcibly occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, located on the Pine Ridge Reservation, to show their disapproval of the Sioux tribal government (regarded by the demonstrators as a lackey of the federal government). The siege lasted seventy-one days, during which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. marshals negotiated with the occupiers and carried out paramilitary operations against them. When the smoke cleared, two AIM members—Buddy Lamonte, one of the occupation’s leaders, and Frank Clearwater, a sympathizer to the Indian cause who had married an Oglala Sioux—had been killed. In the minds of the AIM leadership, these casualties only served to strengthen their case against a corrupt and oppressive government. Supporters of President Nixon, however, cited his restraint and tolerance in handling the incident, pointing out that he could have been much more aggressive toward the occupiers. Once again, the federal government sought to avoid armed conflict as much as it could but refused to give in to Indian demands. As trials ensued for the leaders of the Wounded Knee occupation, open hostility between AIM members and both federal agents and other Indians increased dramatically. Between July 1973 and March 1977, forty-five AIM members or supporters met violent deaths, three of them at the hands of FBI agents or BIA officers. Among the remaining forty-two victims, there were seventeen confirmed shootings, seven stabbing victims, six deaths associated with automobiles, and fourteen who suffered a variety of other fates. By the end of 1977, there had been thirteen convictions associated with these crimes. AIM members refer to this period as the “Reign of Terror” and believe it was orchestrated by the corrupt tribal government of the Pine Ridge Reservation, condoned by the FBI and BIA. The FBI responded to these allegations with a case-by-case explanation of its actions (or lack of jurisdiction). Another hotly contested event during this violent period involved the deaths of FBI special agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams on June 26, 1975. According to an FBI report, the two agents went onto the Pine
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Ridge Reservation to locate Jimmy Eagle, with a warrant for his arrest. They encountered AIM members Leonard Peltier, Norman Charles, Joe Stuntz, and others, who engaged them in a ten-minute firefight that resulted in the deaths of both agents. During that incident, Coler and Williams fired a combined five rounds from their weapons, while their cars were riddled with 125 bullet holes. By the time BIA officers reached the scene, the Indians had attempted to clear the area of shells and casings, and had used one of the agents’ cars to escape. The FBI version of the story stands in a striking contrast to the account in Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1990), which describes the Native Americans as fending off aggression by Coler, Williams, and two BIA agents. In any event, Peltier was eventually convicted of the two murders and sentenced to two life sentences in federal prison. AIM regarded him as a political prisoner.
Later Activism In the second half of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, AIM’s focus faltered. Key leaders either faced legal charges in federal court or were on the lam. In addition, the federal government began responding to Native American demands with a variety of new legislation, including the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act (1975), the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990). AIM remained minimally active during this period, discouraging racism against Native Americans and supporting foreign indigenous peoples in their own struggles to retain traditional culture. In 1978, AIM conducted the “Longest Walk” march from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to highlight its continuing grievances. It also occupied the Black Hills in 1981 and demanded the holy site there be returned to the Lakota people. Another issue of importance to the organization was the use of Indians as school mascots. By 1993, the movement had divided into two factions—one a nonprofit corporation that began accepting government subsidies, the other retaining the more traditional organization and agenda established at AIM’s 1968 inception. Gwendolyn Laird See also: Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Cuba; Deloria, Vine, Jr.; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Indian Casinos; Indian Sport Mascots; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Revisionist History; Wounded Knee Incident.
Further Reading American Indian Movement Web site. www.aimovement.org. Johnson, Troy, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Long Walk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
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Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., ed. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Means, Russell. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Smith, Paul Chatt, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1996.
A m e r i c a n s w i t h D i s a b i l i t i e s Ac t Landmark legislation that sailed through Congress on a wave of popular support, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990. Modeled after the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the new law extended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibited discrimination based on race, religion, color, sex, or national origin) to people with physical and mental disabilities. Enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the ADA guarantees equal access to employment, public transportation, public accommodations and services, and telecommunications. Under ADA regulations, both privately and publicly owned companies are required to make “reasonable accommodations” for persons with disabilities. For the disability community, economic independence, personal freedom, and responsibility were the desired outcomes. Passage of the ADA represented the culmination of almost two decades of struggle for federal recognition of disability rights. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN) first proposed the amendment to the Civil Rights Act in 1972. Several smaller legislative victories followed in the wake of ADA, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980, and the Fair Housing Amendment Act of 1988. The newly formed American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities continued the struggle into the 1980s and 1990s, pressuring the Ford, Carter, and Bush administrations for more sweeping legislation. With support from groups like the AIDS Action Council, American Civil Liberties Union, National Council on Disability, and National Association of the Deaf, the emerging grassroots disability rights movement slowly gained momentum and media attention. Inspired by the civil rights movements of the 1960s, it united a diverse cross-section of the population to change the way society views disability. As opposed to isolation, dependence, and debilitation, the new emphasis was on integration, independence, and equality with minor accommodations. Although the disability legislation was well received by both Democrats and Republicans who thought they were “doing the right thing,” debate quickly ensued over the actual application of the law. Since there were no clear definitions for terms like “mental disability” and
“reasonable accommodation,” liberals and conservatives squabbled over whether or not particular disabilities should be accommodated and in what ways. While some argued that the ADA promised to promote a more inclusive workforce at minimal cost to the government, others worried that the legislation would bring an end to traditional American-style capitalism and might even result in unfair practices in favor of the disability community. Fearful of the ADA’s implications for greater government intervention in private corporations, staunch conservatives worried about the rights of employers and expressed concerns that the law might create a class of “professional plaintiffs” constantly engaged in costly and time-consuming litigation. Although they remain optimistic, disability rights advocates have been disappointed with the slow pace of change. With limited government resources allotted for the implementation of the ADA, it has been difficult to ensure that employers comply with the regulations. Kelly L. Mitchell See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Civil Rights Movement; Humphrey, Hubert H.; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Further Reading Krieger, Linda Hamilton. Backlash Against the ADA: Reinterpreting Disability Rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Vaughn, Jacqueline. Disabled Rights: American Disability Policy and the Fight for Equality. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. Young, Jonathan M. Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Washington, DC: National Council on Disability, 1997.
A n d r o g y ny A state of being that is neither traditionally masculine nor traditionally feminine but exhibits characteristics of both, androgyny (the term combines the Greek words for male and female) has played a significant part in the culture wars by challenging assumptions about the definition of a man and a woman. For many, the changing understandings of sex and gender are an erosion of traditional values, but others have embraced what they see as a liberation from the constraints and expectations imposed by society. Pop musicians have been some of the most explicit vehicles of androgyny. In the 1960s, the Rolling Stones influenced a whole generation with their makeup, flamboyant clothing, long hair, and sexually ambiguous stage dancing. The trend toward androgyny was extended in the 1970s by “glam” rock artists, epitomized by David
A ngelou , Maya
Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. Perhaps the most famous pop androgyne was British performer Boy George, lead singer of the band Culture Club, who shot to fame in 1984 with the hit single “Karma Chameleon.” Boy George was considered outrageous by many who could not tell whether he was a man or a woman. Although he was often ridiculed in the media, he developed legions of fans and influenced fashion. Androgyny remains a familiar aesthetic in popular music. Singer and songwriter k.d. lang, for example, employs a subtle androgyny that goes almost unnoticed by the cultural mainstream. Others are more sensational, such as Genesis P-Orridge, who not only cross-dresses but has experimented with surgical body modification in pursuit of what the performer calls the “pandrogyne.” In films, androgyny has provoked cultural debates. Michelle Rodriguez’s performance in Girlfight (2000) and Jamie Bell’s in Billy Elliot (2000) gained attention simply by presenting atypical gender characteristics, in particular a girl who wants to box and a boy who wants to dance ballet. Both films highlighted an aspect of androgyny that continues to cause confusion: sexual orientation. People who are disturbed by the challenge to gender posed by androgyny often make the mistake of assuming that androgynous men and women are gay or lesbian. This may sometimes be the case, but androgynous gender characteristics can be freely displayed by heterosexual people. Contemporary fashion in America has taken on an increasingly androgynous flavor, generally with little or no controversy. In the early 2000s, the image of the “metrosexual” man, who pays particular care to his clothes and grooming, was met more with amusement than derision by the cultural mainstream, suggesting that society is becoming more tolerant of new understandings of gender. Nevertheless, androgyny remains a contentious issue for many Americans who adhere to a more traditional idea of what defines a man or a woman. Joseph Gelfer See also: Gays in Popular Culture; Hay, Harry; Jackson, Michael; King, Billie Jean; Lesbians; Manson, Marilyn; Sexual Revolution; Transgender Movement; Warhol, Andy.
Further Reading Hargreaves, Tracy. Androgyny in Modern Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Knopf, 1973. Singer, June. Androgyny: The Opposites Within. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 2000. Weil, Kari. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
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A n g e l o u , M ay a As a best-selling writer, and as a performer, film producer, director, and social activist, Maya Angelou has promoted black equality throughout her career. She became known to millions of Americans when she read an original poem at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in January 1993—a moment regarded as a telling reflection of the culture wars. Born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, during the era of Jim Crow segregation. She later moved to San Francisco with her mother but returned to Stamps as a young teenager. After she revealed that she had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend, which led her uncles to beat the man to death, Angelou did not speak for five years, until the age of thirteen; “the power of words,” she later said, “had led to someone’s death.” Encouraged to pursue her writing talents, Angelou returned to San Francisco, where she struggled to support a baby, became the city’s first African-American streetcar conductor, and began performing with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Later she moved to Cairo, Egypt, where she worked as associate editor of the Arab Observer. At the height of the civil rights movement, she returned to the United States and took a leadership role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Her first book, an autobiography titled I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), received wide critical acclaim and a National Book Award nomination. It was followed by a series of autobiographies, including Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). A prolific poet, Angelou published such verse collections as And Still I Rise (1978), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), and The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994). A personification of the African diaspora, Angelou is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and the West African language Fanti. Her proficiency in languages has enabled her to explore the identity of people of color that transcends political borders. In addition to her accomplishments as a poet and biographer, Angelou has produced, directed, and acted for the stage and screen. She starred as Nyo Boto, the grandmother, in the historic television miniseries Roots (1977), which won her an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a miniseries. Angelou was also Hollywood’s first African-American female director. Her debut feature film was Down in the Delta (1998), a drama chronicling a black family’s ancestry in Mississippi. The second poet in U.S. history invited to read her work at a presidential inauguration (after Robert Frost in 1960), Angelou marked the beginning of President Clinton’s first term with the poem “On the Pulse of Morning”—a kind of response to the campaign theme of
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A nimal R ight s
the Reagan era, “It’s morning in America again.” Reflecting on Clinton’s taking office after the defeat of George H.W. Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice president, Angelou’s poem depicted the transfer of power as a “new day” in which “You may look up and out / And into your sister’s eyes, into your brother’s face, your country / And say simply / Very simply / With hope / Good morning.” A recording of the poem won a Grammy Award for best spoken word album in 1994. Susan Pearce See also: Afrocentrism; Bush Family; Civil Rights Movement; Clinton, Bill; Haley, Alex; Morrison, Toni; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Reagan, R onald.
Further Reading Agins, Donna Brown. Maya Angelou: “Diversity Makes for a Rich Tapestry.” Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2006. Angelou, Maya. On the Pulse of Morning. New York: Random House, 1993. Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. Nadine, Corrine J., and Rose Blue. Maya Angelou. Chicago: Raintree, 2006.
Animal Rights Protecting animals from neglect and cruelty has a long and venerated history in the United States. One landmark was the 1866 establishment of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). The goals of the ASPCA—to stress the caretaker role in the relationship between humans and other species, to reduce cruelty toward animals, and at the local level to act as an adoption agency for pets—have near-universal approval among the American people. Some animal rights activism in the twenty-first century, however, has moved beyond the general philosophy of animal protection by rejecting the idea of a hierarchy of species with human beings at the top. This more recent animal rights philosophy stands against the use of other species as mere means to human ends. Groups associated with this view have staged highly visible protests against the fashion fur industry, the use of animals in cosmetics testing and medical experimentation, the corporate industrial organization of animal farming, and human encroachment on animal habitats through urban sprawl. Especially in highly publicized disputes in the logging industry, based on laws protecting the habitats of endangered species, the animal rights issue has become an aspect of America’s culture wars, pitting advocates of economic development against “anarchist tree-huggers” who would place the welfare of humans and other species on a more equal plane. Here animal rights activism has less widespread public support.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) represents what is sometimes referred to as the animal liberation movement. While rooted in the broader movement against animal cruelty, PETA activism grew directly out of the human rights and anticolonial ideologies of the 1960s. The term “speciesism” (analogous to racism) was coined to refer to assumptions of human superiority. Although it could be argued that existing animal cruelty laws already gave some legal foundation to the idea of animal rights, extreme animal rights activists pushed this concept much further than most of the public was ready to go. The highly public associations of many prominent animal rights activists with peace and environmental organizations also fueled the perception of animal rights as standing on one side of America’s culture wars. However, apart from the sometimes disruptive tactics of some activists, the specific goals of the general animal rights movement have over time clearly entered the cultural mainstream. A central goal of the animal rights movement has been to draw attention to vivisection and the use of animals in medical and industrial research. Although most Americans do not strongly question the basic concept that human beings are of greater value than animals, and would continue to react negatively to such animal liberationist tactics as breaking into laboratories to free caged animals, education programs by animal rights activists have raised public awareness of the conditions under which animals live as a result of this research. Such criticism is strengthened by studies suggesting that use of animals is not highly effective in medical research because of the biological differences between humans and other species. The popularity of “no harm” pledges—which state that no harm to animals occurred in the manufacture of a product—and the obvious preference for such no-harm products in the marketplace attest to the fact that the animal rights philosophy is being echoed in the cultural mainstream. Other examples are the increased market popularity of organic, grass-fed, and free-range meats, as well as the decreasing popularity of fur clothing. An awareness that animals are not simply dumb servants of human whims, but have intrinsic right to life and happiness themselves, has taken hold in the public consciousness. Gary Francione and Peter Singer have been among the most prominent advocates, although they approach animal rights from different perspectives. Singer is credited with coining the term “animal liberation” and has focused on blurring the lines of qualitative distinction between humans and the great apes. Francione has taken the most radical position, rejecting the very notion of a human right of ownership of animals as property. Daniel Liechty
Anti-Intellectualism See also: Ecoterrorism; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Factory Farms; Fur; Human Rights; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Further Reading Francione, Gary L. Animals, Property, and the Law. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Sunstein, Cass R. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Anti-Intellectualism Broadly defined, anti-intellectualism is the distrust of intellectuals and the resentment of intellectual activities. Most champions of anti-intellectualism say they represent the interests of “ordinary” people and claim simply to be fighting against elitism. While intellectuals are widely credited with advances in medicine and technology— such as preventing polio, inventing computers, and launching satellites—anti-intellectuals have tended to minimize their overall social and cultural influence. In the context of the culture wars, anti-intellectualism can be traced to the 1950s and fears relating to the Cold War. By and large, it was believed, intellectuals were the ones who flirted with Marxism, gave the benefit of the doubt to the Soviet Union, questioned the nuclear arms race, and generally advocated a secular society over an overtly religious one. Even with the end of the Cold War, however, the trend continued, as evidenced by George W. Bush’s dismissive “fuzzy math” remark during the 2000 election campaign against the serious “facts and figures” approach of Al Gore. Whether in business, religion, education, or politics, antiintellectualism remains prevalent in American society during the twenty-first century. In the corporate world, many business people consider “real world” experience superior to a formal liberal education. They often view the arts and humanities as a waste of time; if education is not directly related to earning money, it is deemed an unnecessary intellectual pursuit. Theory, the anti-intellectuals claim, is worthless. The university campus is depicted as an “ivory tower,” a world separate from “reality.” A more pragmatic education involves doing, not merely thinking. The media, meanwhile, commonly portray college as an opportunity to attend wild parties, join fraternities and sororities, and perhaps network for future jobs—anything but nurture the intellect. At the same time, professors are accused of “brainwashing” young people with liberal views and moral relativism, leading to political feuds over the meaning of academic freedom.
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Perhaps the most obvious forms of anti-intellectualism have appeared in the political arena. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, American intellectuals—typified by Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his Anglophile manner—came directly under attack. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of academics and specialists in his anticommunist crusade caused many Americans to regard intellectuals as risks to national security. Then, in the 1952 presidential campaign, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, a less than eloquent candidate, beat out Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who was dubbed an “egghead” by vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon. This dichotomy carried over into future elections, with one candidate serving as an “everyman” and the other, often unfairly, cast as an elitist intellectual. In a speech given a few years after becoming president, Eisenhower characterized an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.” Stevenson, meanwhile, continued to revel in his own bookishness, quipping, “Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” Anti-intellectualism pervaded other political contests of the 1950s and 1960s. On the right, several Dixiecrats and segregationist Southern Democrats campaigned with a “down-home” style of populism. Alabama Democrat George Wallace had a lifetime of successful election campaigns, repeatedly turning out a big vote by going after “pointy-headed bureaucrats.” And in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan resorted to anti-intellectualism by castigating student protesters as “riotous decadents.” The left wing has had its own forms of anti-intellectualism as well. In the early 1960s, many civil rights groups became grassroots-based populist movements, especially in the Mississippi Delta. Whether Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, right or left, Americans increasingly invoked aspects of anti-intellectualism in their politics. In the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s over the Vietnam War and youth counterculture, antiintellectualism was reflected in mainstream views of the student-based antiwar movement and the “liberal press” believed to be supporting it. Vice President Spiro Agnew famously referred to the protest leaders and those who supported them as “so-called intellectuals” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs.” In the 2000 presidential election, Democratic nominee Gore was branded a dull “brainiac.” He spoke in a monotonous voice, quoted statistics at length, and was even (falsely) accused of having claimed credit for inventing the Internet. Republican candidate Bush, on the other hand, was identified as the candidate most Americans would “want to have a beer with.” Even so, Bush, like Dan Quayle before him, was the comedian’s favorite target of ridicule and mimic. Terms like “nerd” and “geek” may have replaced
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A nti -Semitism
the archaic “egghead,” but from the early 1950s to the present, anti-intellectualism has remained a prominent strain in American culture and a recurring theme in the culture wars. Keri Leigh Merritt See also: Academic Bill of Rights; Academic Freedom; Bush Family; Censorship; Cold War; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Election of 2000; Gore, Al; Marxism; McCarthy, Joseph; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Relativism, Moral.
Further Reading Claussen, Dane S. Anti-Intellectualism in American Media: Magazines and Higher Education. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Gitlin, Todd. “The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism.” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2000. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage, 1963. Lim, Elvin T. The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism is prejudice against people of Jewish faith or heritage. This prejudice has a long and dark history in the predominantly Christian lands of Europe, marked by expulsions, forced conversions to Christianity, and massacres. It became a central issue of world history in the 1900s, when Germany, under the rule of the Nazi party, sought first to expel Jews from all positions of trust in Germany, and later to exterminate Jews in all the lands it controlled. As a result, as many as six million Jews were killed during World War II in what is known as the Holocaust. Many gypsies and other “undesirables” were also exterminated. In the United States, the first Jewish immigrants arrived during colonial times; others came as refugees during the European revolutions of the mid-1800s. The largest wave, more than two million, arrived between 1880 and 1924, prompted by hard times and growing violence against them in the old Russian empire. Most of the immigrants had lived in what are today Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. During the 1930s and 1940s, because of persecution by German authorities, tens of thousands of new refugees left Europe, settling in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. Some reached the United States, but many others were turned away by the restrictive immigration laws then in effect. After World War II, the United States admitted Jewish refugees from Europe. Today, by different estimates, there are between 4 million and 7 million Jewish Americans. The lower number represents those affiliated with Jewish religious organizations. The larger number includes many others
who are unaffiliated but identify themselves as Jewish based on their ethnic or cultural heritage. American Jews are concentrated in the metropolitan areas surrounding large cities, especially in New York, southern Florida, and Southern California. During the early 1900s, American Jews experienced many forms of discrimination. Jewish high school students were often outstanding academically, but elite universities enforced quotas that excluded many qualified Jewish entrants. In growing suburban areas, homeowners often signed “covenants” agreeing not to sell their homes to Jews. In the 1930s, during the rise of violent anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish American politicians and judges gained prominence in the administration of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, but some prominent conservatives, including aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and industrialist Henry Ford, spoke publicly against “Jewish influence.” At the end of World War II, when the dimensions of the Holocaust in Europe became widely known, the American public became more sympathetic to Jews at home and abroad. At the same time, they began examining examples of their own discrimination against Jews. Courts began overturning real estate covenants excluding Jews. In 1947, a movie about anti-Semitism in America, Gentleman’s Agreement, won the Academy Award for Best Film. During the 1950s, many of the previous quotas and restrictions on Jewish Americans were removed, and Jewish individuals became increasingly prominent in many areas of endeavor. Abraham Ribicoff, first elected to Congress in 1949, served as governor of Connecticut (1955–1961) and later had a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate (1963–1981). Leonard Bernstein, a composer and conductor, gained worldwide fame for his musical West Side Story (1957) and became music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Jewish Americans published many of the most admired and popular novels of the period, and many of the most popular television personalities were also Jewish. After the 1950s, anti-Semitism in America lingered (many country clubs, for instance, continued to bar Jews from joining) but was most overt with the extreme right. The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, published tracts claiming that the United Nations and the international banking system are heavily influenced by Jews and pose a threat to American liberty. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), best known for its virulent attacks on African Americans, also attacked Judaism as detrimental to “white Christianity.” At the farthest end of the spectrum, George Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party (1959), reveled in Nazi symbolism while verbally assaulting Jews and denying that the Holocaust had occurred. During the 1960s and 1970s, attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the United States were complicated by the status and actions of the state of Israel. Granted in-
A r nold , Ron
dependence in 1948, Israel was established in the former territory known as Palestine, and from the beginning was opposed by the neighboring Arab states. Israel itself contained millions of Palestinians as well as Jews who had arrived from many parts of the world. The U.S. government supported the establishment of Israel and eventually formed a strong alliance with the new state, both politically and militarily. Most Jewish Americans strongly support Israel, and influential Jews have pressed Washington to continue its favorable support. Americans voicing criticism of Israel’s policies and actions were often charged with anti-Semitism. In 1979, for example, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson was condemned by Jewish American groups for agreeing to meet with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat, whom many regarded as a terrorist murderer of Israeli civilians. The relationship between Jewish Americans and African Americans was paradoxical. On one hand, many Jews were active in campaigns for black civil rights. Jewish religious leaders were prominent in the civil rights campaigns and marches of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, Mickey Schwerner and Andy Goodman, young Jews who were part of a campaign to boost black voter registration in the South, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Mississippi, along with their African-American partner James Chaney. Their brutal deaths helped set the stage for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to protect the franchise rights of African Americans. As the same time, some African Americans expressed suspicion of or hostility toward Jews. Those living in poverty-stricken areas of big cities asserted that their landlords and local merchants were often Jewish and accused them of oppressing the community. These tensions erupted in 1991 in Brooklyn, New York, where large communities of blacks and orthodox Jews lived in adjoining neighborhoods. When a car driven by a Jewish motorist went out of control and killed a seven-year-old black child, the police let the driver go without formal questioning. Black leaders angrily asserted that there was no penalty for killing a black child. Black rioters invaded the Jewish neighborhood, during which a black man stabbed and killed a Jewish university student, prompting further demonstrations by radical Jewish activists. Most Jewish Americans are moderate to liberal in their political affiliations. They are strong supporters of civil liberties and support clear separation of church and state, perhaps recalling their ancestors’ persecutions at the hands of religious authorities. The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism, continues to monitor and report anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. It also supports civil liberties and a pro-Israeli foreign policy. Gregory P. Shealy
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See also: Aryan Nations; Buchanan, Pat; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Farrakhan, Louis; Gibson, Mel; Hate Crimes; Israel; Jackson, Jesse; School Prayer; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Dinnerstein, Leonard. Antisemitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gerber, David, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Stern, Kenneth. Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different, and How to Fight It. New York: American Jewish Committee, 2006.
Ar nold, Ron Ron Arnold is a founder of the Wise Use movement, which organizes against government regulatory policies promoted by traditional environmentalist groups. As executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) in Bellevue, Washington, Arnold is described by the CDFE as “an effective fighter for individual liberties, property rights and limited government.” Arnold established himself as a national expert on ecoterrorism in the early 1980s, and environmental groups regard him as a leading figure in the anti-environmental movement. He was born Ronald Henri Arnold, in Houston, Texas, on August 8, 1937. He studied business administration at the University of Texas at Austin (1954– 1955) and the University of Washington (1965) but never earned a degree. He was employed by the Boeing Company, first as an illustrator and later in computeraided design (1961–1971). As a hiking enthusiast in the 1960s–1970s, Arnold joined the Sierra Club and worked with other environmental groups to preserve a lakes region in Washington State. Somewhere along the way, however, Arnold became uncomfortable with the liberal politics of fellow hikers. In 1971, he established a business and industry consulting firm, Northwoods Studio, which produced more than 130 films about natural resources and social conflict for clients such as Weyerhaeuser Lumber. Arnold soon gained a reputation as a sharp critic of the environmental movement and was retained by timber interests to block an attempt to protect redwood forests in California. In 1976, he founded the CDFE. The author of seven books, including EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature (1997), Arnold has published hundreds of articles in numerous publications, including USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Reason magazine. His eight-part series “The Environmental Battle” in Logging Management magazine (1979–1980) received an American Business Press Editorial Achievement Award. Arnold also wrote the authorized biography of James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s beleaguered secretary
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A r row, T re
of the interior, entitled At the Eye of the Storm: James Watt and the Environmentalists (1982). The Wise Use movement grew out of the August 1988 national Multiple Use Strategy Conference in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the CDFE. According to Arnold, participants “were representatives of a new balance, of a middle way between extreme environmentalism and extreme industrialism.” Critics have argued that the Wise Use Movement masquerades as a grassroots force when in fact it has been, from its inception, a tool of the commercial mining, logging, and off-road vehicle interests. Environmentalists have further criticized Arnold for resorting to alarmist rhetoric. For example, he once described the National Park Service as “an empire designed to eliminate all private property in the United States.” In Trashing the Economy (1989), Arnold and co-author Alan Gottlieb blame the environmental movement for America’s declining strength. Environmentalists, they argue, have “slipped a monkey wrench into America’s industrial gears and all the teeth are breaking off,” and launched an “economy-trashing campaign” and a “jobkilling program.” Chip Berlet See also: Ecoterrorism; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Foreman, Dave; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Reagan, Ronald; Think Tanks; Watt, James.
Further Reading Arnold, Ron, and Alan Gottlieb. Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America. Bellevue, WA: Free Enterprise Press, 1989, 1993. Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise Web site. www.cdfe .org. Helvarg, David. The War against the Greens: The “Wise-Use” Movement, the New Right, and Anti-Environmental Violence. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997. Ramos, Tarso. “Wise Use in the West.” In Let the People Judge: Wise Use and the Private Property Rights Movement, ed. John Echeverria and Raymond Booth Eby, 82–118. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995.
A r r o w, T r e The radical environmental activist Tre Arrow gained national attention in 2000 and thereafter for his strident protests against logging on public lands in the Pacific Northwest. Although his activism has included peaceful civil disobedience and running for national office, he has also been implicated in sabotage. In the culture wars, Arrow is said to represent a disenchanted sector of the environmental movement that has crossed over from working within the system to resorting to violence. Born Michael James Scarpitti on January 9, 1974, and
raised in Jensen Beach, Florida, he became interested in environmental causes during his second semester at Florida State University. Quitting his studies, he moved to Oregon and joined the Cascadia Forest Alliance (CFA). This group was involved in a protest over a federal timber sale at Eagle Creek in the Mount Hood National Forest. He changed his name to Tre Arrow after becoming an ecowarrior, explaining, “Trees told me to change my name.” On July 7, 2000, a paramilitary operation conducted by the U.S. Forest Service broke up the CFA “resistance camp” that had been preventing loggers from reaching the Eagle Creek site. The dislodged activists then held a protest vigil outside the Forest Service office building in Portland. For eleven days, Arrow conducted a “ledge sit” on the building, drawing media attention and prompting members of Congress to request further review of the timber sale. That November, Arrow ran as a Pacific Green Party candidate in the race for Oregon’s Third Congressional District, but he won only 6 percent of the vote. Becoming increasingly more radical, Arrow reportedly masterminded the April 2001 firebombing of vehicles at a Portland sand and gravel company to stop the construction of a logging road, an incident that caused $200,000 worth of property damage. The Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmentalist group listed by the federal government as a terrorist organization, was also reportedly linked to the Portland sabotage. In October 2001, during a tree sit in God’s Valley on the Oregon coast, Arrow was nearly killed when law enforcement officials mounted a siege that included the use of chain saws, strobe lights, siren blasts, and loud music to cause sleep deprivation. The activist fell from a fir tree and suffered a fractured pelvis, dislocated shoulder, and broken ribs. In the more restrictive political climate that followed the attacks on the United States by Islamic extremists on September 11, 2001, Arrow was branded a terrorist by the federal government. In 2002, he was indicted in connection with the Portland sabotage and was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Arrow was arrested in March 2005 in Victoria, British Columbia, and immediately fought extradition by seeking political asylum in Canada. After a near three-year legal battle, Arrow was extradited to Oregon, where he faced fourteen federal charges and possible life in prison. In June 2008, he pleaded guilty to two counts of arson and was later given a 78-month prison sentence and ordered to pay $154,000 in restitution. He afterwards stated, “I would certainly love to see the government and its prosecutors demonstrate the same tenacity towards greedy corporations as they have directed towards peaceful activists.” Roger Chapman See also: Ecoterrorism; Environmental Movement; Foreman, Dave; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; September 11.
At water, Lee
Further Reading Sullivan, Randall. “The True Flight of Tre Arrow.” Rolling Stone, December 12, 2002.
Ar yan Nations Aryan Nations (AN) was formed in 1974 by the white supremacist Richard Girnt Butler as the political arm of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, the religious wing of the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity was founded in 1946 by former Methodist minister and right-wing extremist Wesley Swift, comprising a system of religious and political concepts focused around a belief in white superiority and racial pride. Serving as a unifying force for diverse white pride organizations—such as the Ku Klux Klan, Posse Comitatus, neo-Nazi groups, and several Christian survivalist factions—Aryan Nations sponsors the International Congress of Aryan Nations and the prisoner outreach suborganization Aryan Brotherhood. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Groups Intelligence Project has listed sixteen groups associated with Aryan Nations as active in the United States. The name Aryan Nations, however, is claimed by no less than three organizations, each proclaiming itself the authentic group. Rather than depend on the inspiration, views, and leadership of any individual, Aryan Nations claims a divine mandate for its philosophy of white racial superiority. While similar associations have redefined themselves in more politically correct terms, Aryan Nations proudly proclaims its hatred and mistrust of Jews and people of color. Aryan Nations has two primary beliefs: (1) for the divinely mandated existence of the white race to continue, a separatist sovereign Aryan nation must be established, and (2) a war between Aryans and the descendants of Satan (their name for Jews) has already begun. In 2000, Butler and Aryan Nations were found liable for more than $6 million in damages following a lawsuit by two people attacked by security guards at the group’s Hayden Lake compound. This judgment cost them the Hayden Lake property and sent Butler into bankruptcy. Since then, the organization has been in flux. Butler fought to maintain control of Aryan Nations and revitalize the group until his death in 2004. He left no commonly accepted successor. The resulting crisis of leadership precipitated the formation of splinter groups, such as those led by August B. Kreis in Lexington, South Carolina; Charles Juba in Kansas City, Kansas (since absorbed by Kreis); and Carl Franklin’s formerly Montanabased Church of Jesus Christ Christian, later ruled by a council of three—Jonathan Williams, Rick Spring, and Laslo Patterson—in Lincoln, Alabama. Kreis decided in 2005 to distance Aryan Nations from the Christian Identity movement, announcing a call for “Aryan jihad” and an offer to ally with Islamic
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groups to pursue a war against the Jewish people. Kreis has stressed that Aryan Nations does not support the principles of any specific religion but will work with any like-minded organization. Solomon Davidoff See also: Anti-Semitism; Conspiracy Theories; Duke, David; Rockwell, George Lincoln; Rudolph, Eric; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Dobratz, Betty A., and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile. “White Power, White Pride!”: The White Separatist Movement in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Ridgeway, James. Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1995. Roberts, Kelly, and Michael Reid. White Supremacy: Behind the Eyes of Hate. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2004.
A ssisted Suicide See Right to Die
At o m i c B o m b See Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Nuclear Age
At w a t e r, L e e Considered the quintessential practitioner of “dirty politics” and a master of the “whisper campaign” and “push polling,” Lee Atwater was a Republican campaign strategist most remembered for his role in orchestrating the racially charged 1988 presidential campaign that enabled Republican George H.W. Bush to defeat Democrat Michael Dukakis. Rising to the level of Beltway insider, Atwater became chair of the Republican National Committee in 1989. Shortly thereafter, however, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor; he died at age forty on March 29, 1991. Harvey Leroy Atwater was born on February 26, 1951, in Atlanta, Georgia. Raised in Columbia, South Carolina, he obtained a degree in history at nearby Newberry College in 1973. During his teenage years, he became a Republican, regarding his decision as an act of counterculture rebellion against a southern establishment controlled by Democrats. While in college, he served as president of the state chapter of the College Republicans and helped Karl Rove (later George W. Bush’s chief political adviser) become chair of the College Republican National Committee. Atwater became affiliated with longtime U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), serving as an intern and later playing a major role in Thurmond’s 1978 reelection campaign.
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At water, Lee Brady, John. Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Au t o m o b i l e S a f e t y
Republican strategist and party organizer Lee Atwater (right) engineered the racially charged presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush (center) and running mate Dan Quayle (left) in 1988. Atwater was known as a master of aggressive campaign tactics. (Cynthia Johnson/Atime & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)
The 1988 Bush presidential campaign exploited white fears of black criminality by calling attention to Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who had raped a white woman and assaulted her fiancé while on furlough during Dukakis’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts. An unofficial Bush television ad featured a mug shot of Horton, while the official campaign spot made it seem as if many dangerous murderers had escaped while on furlough (a program in fact started by a previous governor). Atwater later downplayed Republican use of racial fear in the campaign, pointing out that Horton was never pictured in official Bush campaign spots. He insisted that the real issue was Dukakis’s being soft on crime. Perhaps most revealingly, Atwater explained during a 1981 interview that racial politics must be “coded,” using abstract terminology such as “forced busing,” “states rights,” and “crime.” Prior to his death, Atwater underwent a religious conversion to Catholicism, leading to self-reflection on his past conduct as a political operative. He acknowledged the “naked cruelty” used against Dukakis and lamented the Horton incident. “Like a good general,” he explained, “I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.” Negative political strategies remain the legacy of his relatively short life. Robin Andersen See also: Bush Family; Counterculture; Dukakis, Michael; Horton, Willie; Race; Republican Party; Rove, Karl; Thurmond, Strom.
Further Reading Atwater, Lee, and T. Brewster. “Lee Atwater’s Last Campaign.” Life, February 1991.
Automobile safety is the effort to protect human life on the road through improved vehicle design and manufacture, road and highway design, traffic control, and public and private regulation of cars and drivers. Widespread awareness of auto safety in America began with the anticorporate consumer movement of the 1960s and the subsequent federalization of vehicular safety. Drivers today demand safe cars and highways despite financial costs and personal restrictions, a source of friction aggravated by early-twenty-first-century concerns over fuel efficiency and environmental impact. American automobile manufacturers initially operated with little oversight, even after pioneering crash studies in the 1940s and 1950s by engineer and former aviator Hugh De Haven. When the United Nations (UN) established the progressive World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations in 1958, the United States declined membership, raising questions about auto manufacturers’ influence on government. In 1959, lawyer Ralph Nader began writing about safety problems in American automobiles and published his landmark study Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, in which he accused General Motors (GM) of negligence in car design. Alleging that GM knew its Corvair was prone to rollovers and loss of driver control, Nader simultaneously launched the modern automobile safety and consumer protection movements. Nader’s accusations, and the debates over them, spurred the establishment of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) in 1967 and its subsidiary, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1970. The two federal authorities went on to bolster state and local authorities in the regulation of auto design, highways, signage, and traffic signals, ultimately leading to mandates for driver and passenger seatbelts, air bags, and crashworthiness standards. Privately, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI)—both funded by insurers—test vehicles, collect statistics, and analyze highway design and construction. Insurers, manufacturers, and government rely on IIHS/HLDI findings for loss prevention and actuarial calculations. Meanwhile, Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has independently tested American automobiles, without outside funding, since 1936. Until the 1960s, auto safety experts focused primarily on driver behavior. In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans seeking a driver’s license took driver education classes
Automobile S afe t y
that combined hands-on instruction and graphic films. The poor production value of these films, however, often failed to communicate basic safety principles. Ironically, Hollywood celebrity James Dean appeared in one such film shortly before his death in 1955 in a speeding-related accident. Similar shock tactics have been employed since the 1980s by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD), which advocate education and strict DUI/DWI (driving under the influence/driving while intoxicated) laws. To heighten awareness of highway deaths, MADD and SADD display wrecked autos in public as well as roadside memorials, such as Christian crosses, at accident sites. Civil libertarians protest what they regard as the threat of prohibition and unreasonable definitions of impaired driving on the part of MADD and SADD, but the groups have enjoyed popular support. Since the 1980s, federal, state, and local government have relied heavily on driver regulation to improve automobile safety. States have experimented with restrictions on learner’s permits and driver’s licenses. At the behest of MADD founder Candy Lightner, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill in 1984 raising the national drinking age to twenty-one. DUI/DWI punishments came to include fines, vehicle confiscation, license suspension, and incarceration. Some states require preventive measures for offenders, such as ignition systems equipped with breathalyzers that disable engines at the detection of alcohol. Laws regarding seat belts and motorcycle helmets have created a tension between safety concerns and libertarian values. As enforced by the states, seatbelt laws are mandated for drivers and passengers everywhere in America except New Hampshire. By 2006, twenty-five states enforced “primary” laws, making driving without seatbelts an offense for which police can stop drivers and issue tickets. As of 2008, twenty states required helmets for all motorcycle riders, while Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire were “helmet free” (and all other states required helmets for riders under ages eighteen or twenty-one). State and local governments have also recognized the safety impact of driver cell phone use, aggressive driving, and “road rage,” adopting regulations to punish all three. However, the sometimes difficult balance between
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safety interests and commerce is underscored by debates over higher speed limits allowed by the 1995 National Highway System Designation Act and in the public outcry over deregulation leading to truck driver overwork and foreign truck drivers on U.S. roads under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Contemporary automobile safety in America largely revolves around the size and efficiency of the vehicles themselves. Sport utility vehicles (SUVs), popular since the 1990s, dwarf most standard automobiles in sheer physical size and can inflict significant damage in accidents. SUVs are exempt from certain safety regulations because they are built on truck frames, for which an inordinate number of rollovers—especially in the Ford Explorer—was blamed. Certain brands of tires issued as standard equipment—especially imports from China— were found to carry a high risk of accident-causing blowouts and disintegration. Critics of the automobile industry have remained angry at what they regard as ongoing regulatory deficiencies, recalling Detroit’s past dominance of government. As ever, American automobile safety in the twenty-first century must reconcile a number of competing interests: manufacturers’ profits, effective regulation, safe and cost-effective highways, and the personal freedom drivers have come to expect. Damon Lindler Lazzara See also: Dean, James; Mothers Against Drunk Driving; Nader, Ralph; United Nations.
Further Reading Albaum, Martin. Safety Sells. Arlington, VA: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 2005. Belzer, Michael H. Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Jacobs, James B. Drunk Driving: An American Dilemma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Martin, Justin. Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon. New York: Perseus, 2002. Penenberg, Adam. Tragic Indifference: One Man’s Battle with the Auto Industry over the Dangers of SUVs. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Dylan, Bob; Fonda, Jane; Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie; Human Rights; Vietnam War; Was Protesters.
Further Reading
Baez, Joan
Baez, Joan. And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir. New York: Summit Books, 1987.
Folk singer and political activist Joan Baez has been a prominent and outspoken warrior in the culture wars since the early 1960s, always on the liberal side. Born Joan Chandos Baez on January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York, she grew up in a family of Scottish and Mexican heritage. She was raised as a Quaker, and her commitment to nonviolence has been the legacy of that upbringing. After attending high school in California and a semester at Boston University’s School of Drama (1958), she released her first album in December 1960. Baez started her music career offering interpretations of old folk songs, made distinctive by a strong soprano voice. Later, collaborating with the young folk singer Bob Dylan, she sang protest songs and was propelled into prominence as part of the great social movements of the 1960s and beyond. Her first foray into activism was with the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Accompanying the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., she toured the South to promote desegregation and voter registration. Between 1964 and 1975, Baez worked passionately against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In addition to singing protest songs, she withheld 60 percent of her income taxes to protest military spending, created the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in 1965 in Carmel, California, and visited Hanoi in December 1972 to express solidarity with the Vietnamese people. During the 1970s, Baez explored a broader human rights agenda, establishing a West Coast chapter of Amnesty International in 1973 and founding the Humanitas International Human Rights Committee in 1979. Baez has carried the scars of the culture wars: She was twice jailed for her antiwar activities; the Daughters of the American Revolution organized boycotts of her concerts; and a L’il Abner cartoon series viciously lampooned her as “Joanie the Phoanie.” Baez also maintains that she experienced CIA harassment during her 1967 concert tour in Japan. In addition, Baez has been in conflict with other segments of the counterculture. Feminists objected to her infamous poster proclaiming “Girls say yes to boys who say no” to the Vietnam War. Antiwar leaders, including Jane Fonda, objected to Baez’s open letter in 1979 condemning human rights abuses in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. For more than four decades, however, Baez stuck to what she described in her 1987 autobiography And a Voice to Sing With as “my weapons in battle—my voice and the desire to use it.”
Bank r uptc y Refor m The importance of a national bankruptcy system in the United States was recognized by the founders of the republic, and provisions for one were incorporated in the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress the power to establish “uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States.” Although the initial constitutional provision was adopted with little comment, all subsequent bankruptcy law in America has been the subject of heavy debate. At its core, U.S. bankruptcy law attempts to balance and accommodate a creditor’s interest in being paid with the honest, but unfortunate, debtor’s interest in receiving a “fresh start” and paying its creditors only what it can. The Bankruptcy Code attempts to achieve this uneasy association by balancing the following three principles: first, relieving honest but unfortunate debtors of the burden of insurmountable debt; second, repaying creditors through a prompt and economical liquidation or reorganization and distribution of an insolvent debtor’s assets; and, third, when proper, withholding relief from debtors to discourage fraud and needless waste of assets. Although legislators, courts, attorneys, and bankruptcy advocates differ as to the relative weight each of these principles should be assigned, they agree with the importance of all three to U.S. bankruptcy law generally. The rise in personal bankruptcy filings after World War II, and an especially sharp increase in personal filings from 1996 to 2005, brought the question of how best to balance these principles to the forefront of public discourse, resulting in calls for bankruptcy reform. Similarly, popular mistrust of large corporations filing for bankruptcy and the spate of corporate ethics scandals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, most notably involving Enron and WorldCom, have raised concerns regarding the need for corporate reform. The resurgence of such long-standing debates culminated in passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
History of the Bankruptcy Code U.S. personal bankruptcy law has evolved slowly. Congress passed federal legislation in 1800, 1841, and 1867, all in response to financial crises. However, each was repealed upon the recovery of the economy. The first lasting law was passed in 1898. Unlike its predecessors,
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the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 remained in effect and eventually gave rise to a new group of Americans with a vested interest in bankruptcy law and bankruptcy reform—bankruptcy lawyers. By the 1930s, bankruptcy lawyers were playing a prominent role in lobbying for reform and drafting new legislation. With the passage of the Chandler Act in 1938, modern American bankruptcy law obtained its fundamental features. The Chandler Act provided bankruptcy relief for all types of individuals (personal bankruptcy) and businesses (corporate bankruptcy), enabling debtors to choose liquidation and discharge on the one hand, or some type of readjustment or reorganization of debt on the other. Prompted by a rise in personal bankruptcy filings during the 1960s, Congress initiated an investigation of bankruptcy law that culminated in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, the modern bankruptcy code. The legislation preserved all the options available to debtors embodied in the Chandler Act. Specifically, it provided liquidation for businesses and individuals (Chapter 7), corporate reorganizations (Chapter 11), and adjustment of debts for individuals with regular income to reimburse creditors through a repayment plan (Chapter 13). The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 was also characterized by the increased involvement of consumer lenders, particularly credit card companies. The latter would become perhaps the most powerful proponent of bankruptcy reform in the 1990s and 2000s. Lobbying by credit card companies and other creditor groups, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co. (1984)—which found parts of the Bankruptcy Reform Act unconstitutional—led to the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984, which attempted to roll back some of the pro-debtor provisions of the 1978 law.
debts, made it both too easy and too appealing for individuals to avoid repaying their debts. Such advocates contend that, with bankruptcy in mind, households are motivated to borrow more than they can afford, ultimately allowing them to repay less than they could afford in the event of bankruptcy. Thus, they contend, debtors file under Chapter 7 even though they will have sufficient income or assets in the future to repay a significant portion, if not the entirety, of their debts. Some such advocates also argue that a lessening of the stigma traditionally associated with bankruptcy contributed to the increased rate of filing. Those on the other side of the debate—consumer advocates and many academics and bankruptcy attorneys— see the higher personal filing rate as largely reflecting an increase in financial distress within the household. Such distress, they contend, stems from adverse circumstances that damage a person’s finances, including illness, unemployment, and divorce. Consumer advocates in particular have taken the position that most of the increase in personal filing rates is related to predatory lenders, particularly credit card lenders, who, they say, have overburdened consumers by extending credit recklessly. The continuing debate attests to the difficulty that Congress has in designing a bankruptcy law that promotes the common good and is neither too tough nor too lenient on debtors. The challenge for Congress is to develop a code that catches cheaters without hindering individuals who deserve a fresh start. While more exacting laws might lower borrowing costs, thus increasing the availability of credit, it could also deny a fresh start to worthy individuals. Conversely, more lenient laws expanding the fresh start doctrine and allowing more cheaters to escape their debts might reduce the supply of credit and raise the costs of borrowing.
Ideological Viewpoints
Responding to the increased rate of consumer bankruptcy filings, Congress toughened personal bankruptcy law with passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. The stated intent of the measure was well summarized by President George W. Bush’s signing statement, in which he said that bankruptcy reform was necessary because “too many people have . . . walked away from debts even when they had the ability to repay them.” The legislation was opposed by a wide variety of groups, including consumer advocates, legal academics and practitioners, and the editorial pages of newspapers throughout the nation. Such opponents described the act as responsive only to persistent and increasingly effective lobbying by consumer lenders, particularly credit card companies and automobile lenders. The 2005 act contains numerous notable changes to consumer bankruptcy law. Perhaps the most contro-
In contrast to corporate bankruptcy rates, which remained relatively steady throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, personal bankruptcy filings have climbed progressively upward since the end of World War II, culminating in filings in excess of 1 million annually between 1996 and 2005. This increase defines the question underlying the modern consumer bankruptcy debate in America: Why have consumer bankruptcy filing rates increased, both for the period between World War II and 1996 and, especially, from 1996 to 2005? Advocates on one side of the debate, including consumer lenders and particularly credit card banks, whose unsecured claims against borrowers were to be discharged under Chapter 7, believe that the structures and incentives of the Bankruptcy Code are the cause. They argue that Chapter 7, which generally allows for discharge of
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versial of these is the institution of a “means test,” a complicated mathematical analysis to determine whether a debtor’s filing under Chapter 7 would be considered abusive and therefore subject to dismissal. In the past, this decision was made by a bankruptcy judge, who would evaluate the particular circumstances that led to a filing. Critics of the means test argue that it forces bankruptcy judges to ignore the specific circumstances of a debtor and instead requires adherence to a mechanical formula. Besides the means test, opponents also objected to the other obstacles the act creates for individuals seeking bankruptcy protection. These include mandatory consumer credit counseling, higher fees, and the potential for additional liability on the part of bankruptcy attorneys. Critics argued that such changes would increase attorneys’ fees and possibly shrink the pool of bankruptcy attorneys. A number of bankruptcy judges have become major critics of the act, citing poorly drafted provisions, unfairly burdened debtors, and decreased judicial discretion. The 2005 legislation also contained provisions impacting corporate bankruptcies, most notably limitations on the use of Key Employee Retention Plans—the practice of paying managers retention bonuses to stay with a bankrupt company. In response to perceived abuse by large corporate filers, the 2005 act caps executive retention pay at ten times the average amount offered to the average worker. Furthermore, it allows for retention bonuses for managers only upon proof of a job offer that pays as much as or more than their current compensation. Corporate filers have argued that these limits will prompt managers to leave, damaging the management structure needed to effectively reorganize. The results of the 2005 law remain unclear. After all-time-high filings in the last quarter before the new law became effective, 2006 filings were the lowest since 1989, totaling less than one-third of those filed in 2005. However, filings for the first three quarters of 2007 exceeded filings for 2006. Joseph Rosenblum See also: Corporate Welfare; Tax Reform; Wealth Gap; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Boyes, William J., and Roger L. Faith. “Some Effects of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978.” Journal of Law and Economics 29:1 (1986): 139–49. Carruthers, Bruce G., and Terence C. Halliday. Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Moringiello, Juliet M. “Has Congress Slimmed Down the Hogs? A Look at the BAPCPA Approach to Pre-Bankruptcy Planning.” Widener Law Journal 15 (2006): 615–39.
Porter, Katherine M., and Deborah Thorne. “The Failure of Bankruptcy’s Fresh Start.” Cornell Law Review 92 (2006): 67–127.
Barbie Doll Barbie—the most commercially successful doll in history, with more than 1 billion sold worldwide—has for decades been a topic of debate concerning its socializing function as a toy and the message it communicates to girls. By the early 2000s, many “tweens” were no longer playing with the 11.5-inch- (29.2-centimeter-) tall doll, partly due to a preference for Bratz Girls, but an average of three Barbies were being sold every second nonetheless. A polyvinyl doll in the shape of a woman (including breasts), Barbie was introduced at the American Toy Fair in 1959 by Ruth Handler, a co-founder of Mattel, Inc. Handler named the doll after her daughter, Barbara, but the idea for the product was actually derived from the “Lilli porn doll” then being sold in Europe as a male gag gift. The Lilli doll, 11.5 inches tall and featuring a platinum blonde ponytail, symbolized illicit sex and was based on a cartoon about a voluptuous gold digger. Handler discovered the Lilli doll while vacationing in Switzerland and later bought the patent rights, but Mattel remained mum about Barbie’s sordid origins. In 1961, the Ken doll was introduced, and named after Handler’s son, to give Barbie a male friend. The first Barbie, featuring long blonde hair and a black-and-white zebra bathing suit, seemed to exemplify American postwar femininity. Although there was resentment about the many costly accessories sold separately, the doll’s redeeming value for some mothers was that it inspired good grooming. The doll soon became the subject of media parodies, from art works by Andy Warhol to the adult novel Barbie’s New York Summer (1962) by Cynthia Lawrence. Some regarded the doll as symbolic of the “new woman” then being heralded by Helen Gurley Brown in Sex and the Single Girl (1963). Until 1971, however, Barbie’s eyes remained downcast, suggesting submission. Over the years, feminists have expressed concern about the doll’s measurements—if Barbie stood 5 feet, 7 inches (1.70 meters) tall, she would have a waist of only 16 inches (41 centimeters)—fearing that they communicated unrealistic expectations about the female body. Some have even linked Barbie to female eating disorders. To others, Barbie’s clotheshorse image was the object of ridicule, suggesting empty-headed passivity. Until 1965, with the introduction of bendable legs, Barbie lacked the mobility of the boys’ popular GI Joe action figure. Critics such as the syndicated columnists Ellen Goodman and Anna Quindlen believed that Barbie was less than ideal because of its emphasis on looks.
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cosmetology school. These people are projecting a lot of fears on Barbie.” More controversies followed, such as in 2002 when stores responded to customer complaints by pulling from the shelves Lingerie Barbie (featuring black lingerie and garters) and Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge (featuring a belly from which a curled-up baby popped out). Some were also bothered when Ken was discontinued in 2004, but he returned in 2006 to placate consumer demand. Roger Chapman See also: Beauty Pageants; Brown, Helen Gurley; Catholic Church; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; War Toys; Warhol, Andy; Wolf, Naomi.
Further Reading
Since its introduction in 1959, the Barbie doll—in all its stylistic, professional, and ethnic incarnations—has been the subject of debate over its message to young girls concerning female identity and body type. A version dubbed “yuppie Barbie” appeared in the mid-1980s. (Al Freni/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
At the same time, Barbie was said to exemplify female independence. Researchers have noted, for example, that the average Ken doll, a mere accessory, peripheral figure, and occasional cross-dresser, was surrounded by eight different Barbie characters, all of whom felt in charge and seemingly unaware of patriarchy. In 1977, Handler defended her creation, stating, “Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of the future.” Indeed, over the years, Barbie has changed careers more than seventy-five times, working as a nurse, stewardess, physician, astronaut, and chief executive. She has also served in all branches of the military. In response to criticisms about Barbie’s exclusive whiteness, Mattel in 1979 introduced black and Hispanic versions. (In 1967, Colored Francie was introduced as Barbie’s friend, but low sales forced its discontinuance.) In 1992, controversy followed the release of a talking Barbie, which declared, in the voice of a Valley Girl, “Math class is hard.” The American Association of University Women (AAUW) deplored that message as signaling society’s low expectations for girls in math and science. According to the head of the AAUW, Sharon Schuster, “The message is a negative one for girls, telling them they can’t do well in math, and that perpetuates a stereotype.” M.G. Lord, who went on to write a book about Barbie, disagreed, stating, “Math class is tough, but it doesn’t mean you have to drop out and go to
Brownell, Kelly D., and Melissa A. Napolitano. “Distorting Reality for Children: Body Size Proportions of Barbie and Ken Dolls.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 18:3 (1995): 295–98. Debouzy, Marianne. “The Barbie Doll.” In European Readings of American Popular Culture, ed. John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet, 139–46. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Linn, Susan. Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. New York: The New Press, 2004. Lord, M.J. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: William Morrow, 1994. Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline, and Claudia Mitchell. “‘Just a Doll’? ‘Liberating’ Accounts of Barbie-Play.” Review of Education/ Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 22:2 (2000): 175–90.
Battle of Seattle The “Battle of Seattle” refers to a dramatic antiglobalization protest in Seattle, Washington, in November–December 1999 and, more broadly, to the overall antiglobalization movement. The events in Seattle dramatically demonstrated a radicalization of young protesters reminiscent of the 1960s. Although the passion for antiglobalization remained active for many in the movement, the political climate in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks put a chill on street protesting in America. The Seattle demonstrations marked the third ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held from November 30 to December 3, 1999. The city’s municipal leaders had desired the prestige of an international trade conference, but Seattle’s reputation for liberal politics and activism made it an unlikely location for a WTO summit. The protests began peacefully, but a melee soon ensued between police in riot gear and a small number of protesters. Many streets were road-blocked, and the demonstrators encountered police in high-tech riot gear who subsequently dispersed large amounts of tear gas into the crowd. The Black Bloc
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(radical anarchists) retaliated with acts of vandalism. As clashes between police and protesters continued to escalate, Seattle mayor Paul Schell declared the area a “no protest” zone and imposed a curfew as the city entered a “state of civil emergency.” The mayor’s counter-activist stance proved all the more conspicuous given his history as a 1960s antiwar protester. Protesters have argued that globalization results in a “race to the bottom,” whereby corporations seeking the lowest possible wages exploit workers in underdeveloped countries, while creating unemployment in nations where the jobs had previously existed. The result, they say, is a global lowering of wages and benefits. Antiglobalization advocates argue further that lax environmental regulations in many Third World nations enable products to be made cheaper but at an irresponsible ecological cost. The WTO maintains that its programs create jobs and increase international commerce, arguing that, over time, economic standards across the board will rise. The WTO is an outgrowth of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), founded in 1947 and comprising 153 member nations (as of 2008). WTO policies are said to be predicated on neoliberal free trade, but critics see the organization as an instrument of the powerful nations. Before the Battle of Seattle, protests against the WTO were not treated as major news stories. That changed, certainly, as more than 50,000 protesters, including radical environmentalists, steelworkers, vegan activists, and others demonstrated in opposition to free trade. Detractors criticized a lack of unity on the part of the protesters, but it was precisely this lack of focus that made the protests difficult to undermine ideologically. While police reaction was gratuitously violent in the opinion of some observers, media outlets around the county tended to focus on a group of protesters (mainly young anarchists from Eugene, Oregon) who vandalized a Starbucks coffee shop. Up to that time, Starbucks had served as a symbol of the city’s youth culture; at that moment it became associated with corporate globalism. The event marked the beginning of a series of highly publicized protests against globalization. In the years following the Battle of Seattle, WTO Director-General Michael Moore deplored the protesters: “They make me want to vomit,” he declared. While the Battle of Seattle drew protesters of all ages, it is largely credited with energizing a generation of young people previously accused of political apathy. William J. Emerson III See also: American Century; Genetically Modified Foods; Globalization; Klein, Naomi; Labor Unions; Nader, Ralph; Perot, H. Ross; Privatization; September 11; Wal-Mart; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Wallach, Lori, and Michelle Sforza. The WTO: Five Years of Reasons to Stop Corporate Globalization. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Yeun, Eddie, George Katsiaficas, and Daniel Burton-Rose. Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001.
Beauty Pageants Beauty pageants are competitions in which the contestants, typically young women or girls, are evaluated on the basis of their appearance, and sometimes poise and talent. Winners typically receive some sort of prize, including money, scholarships, trophies, flowers, and tiaras, in addition to being granted a title—such as Miss America, Miss Universe, or Miss International. One of the first beauty competitions in the United States was organized by P.T. Barnum in the 1880s. By the twenty-first century, more than 7,000 annual beauty pageants were held in the United States. Because of their emphasis on outward appearance, beauty contests have been criticized as perpetuating antiquated attitudes about women. The Miss America pageant, the most popular of the beauty contests throughout the twentieth century, was first held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1921, and consisted of a bathing suit competition between eight women. As the judging evolved to include talent, formal wear, and elimination rounds, the program grew in popularity as well as number of contestants. Beauty pageants, especially Miss America, came under attack with the growing feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Feminists argued that the pageants should be discontinued because the grading of women based on a socially constructed beauty ideal rather than intelligence or character objectified all women and sanctioned the sexist values of a patriarchal society. In 1968, the feminist group New York Radical Women drew media attention to their cause when they protested outside the Miss America pageant and mockingly crowned a sheep as the winner. The protesters also accumulated a variety of “sex objects”—such as brassieres, high-heeled shoes, hair curlers, and fashion magazines—threw them in a trash can, and set them on fire, inspiring pundits to refer to feminists as “bra-burners.” In 1970, feminist protestors in London staged a similar demonstration at the Miss World pageant. Such criticism prompted the organizers of mainstream pageants to recast the events as scholarship competitions rather than beauty competitions. Nevertheless, the swimsuit portion of such programs, euphemistically called Lifestyle and Fitness by Miss America, has continued to draw feminist ire. Some contestants have voiced disapproval and anxiety about walking in front of a large, televised audience in their bathing suits and high heels for the purpose of being
Behe, Michael J.
judged. In 1994, the Miss America Organization held a call-in vote, asking viewers to help decide whether or not the swimsuit competition should remain part of the show. Callers overwhelmingly voted to keep the swimsuit component. Lesser-known pageants, responding to complaints from viewers and contestants, have discontinued this part of the program. In those pageants that have kept the swimsuit segment, including Miss America, efforts have been made to present female contestants as beautiful, yet not sexually tempting. Competitors are trained to walk, stand, and smile in a way that minimizes overt sexuality and jiggling flesh. This containment of sexuality became more problematic for Miss America with the allowance of two-piece bathing suits in 1997. Another contentious issue in mainstream pageants is the scant multicultural representation. Typically, pageants have few contestants who are women of color, and seldom are they crowned. The Miss Black America pageant was established in 1968, but a segregated contest was seen as a less than satisfactory solution. In 1983, Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America, but she was forced to give up the crown the following year after nude photos of her were published in Penthouse magazine. The relatively low number of women of color in mainstream competitions is said to reflect a reliance on socially constructed white concepts of beauty. The issue of body type has become another source of concern to critics of the beauty contest ethic. As a thin body has become the beauty ideal for American women in popular culture—not the case when beauty pageants first began—contestants today are under constant pressure to lose weight and remain slim. While in recent times pageant organizers have attempted to downplay the beauty aspect of competitions, arguing that attractiveness is just one criterion of an ideal candidate, weight gain remains anathema to international and national contestants. Cases have even been reported in which reigning beauty queens were warned to maintain slimness or risk forfeiting their crown. And with plastic surgery becoming more affordable, socially acceptable, and widely available, more and more contestants in bikini contests, like Miss Hawaiian Tropic, have had body-altering procedures such as breast implants and collagen lip injections. Yet another controversial aspect of beauty pageants concerns the young age of participants—competitions are even held for infants and toddlers—and the sexualization of non-adult contestants. The murder of six-year-old frequent beauty pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey in 1996 brought the issue to national attention. Many individuals who were unaware of the extent of beauty competitions were disturbed at the thought of pre-pubescent girls wearing visible makeup and bathing suits while parading in front of and being judged by adults, usually men. Alexandra DeMonte
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See also: Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Pornography; Race; Wolf, Naomi.
Further Reading Banet-Weiser, Sarah. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Craig, Maxine Leeds. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Riverol, Armando. Live from Atlantic City: The History of the Miss America Pageant Before, After and in Spite of Television. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992. Watson, Elwood, and Darcy Martin, eds. “Here She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Behe, Michael J. The debate on the teaching of evolution in public schools intensified with the publication of Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996), a highly disputed work that challenges certain aspects of the theory of evolution and argues that biological processes and structures at the molecular level constitute evidence of “intelligent design” in the universe. Born on January 18, 1952, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Behe studied chemistry at Drexel University (BS, 1974) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1978) and did postdoctoral research on the structure of DNA at the National Institutes of Health (1978–1982). Since 1985, after three years of teaching chemistry at Queens College in New York, Behe has taught biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Darwin’s Black Box claims that theories of evolution are misleading because certain molecular structures and mechanisms are too complex to have been the product of evolution. An evolutionary account of development assumes incremental changes and improvements in functionality. However, Behe contends, these biological structures are so intricate that they could not have emerged as gradual improvements over prior stages of evolutionary development; if their structure were any simpler, they would not have functioned at all—thus they are deemed “irreducibly complex.” An analogy he often invokes is that of a mousetrap, which, without any one of its parts, would be completely useless, not just less efficient. And, Behe goes on, since these irreducibly complex mechanisms could not have been the product of evolution but had to have originated whole at their current level of complexity and functionality, there had to have been an intelligent designer. Behe’s argument of irreducible complexity has been rejected by the vast majority of the scientific community.
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Instead of a scientific theory, opponents regard it as a rhetorical claim based on lack of knowledge regarding the structure and workings of the complex mechanisms. In Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board (2005), however, anti-evolutionists in Dover, Pennsylvania, argued that ideas such as irreducible complexity should be taught alongside evolution in the ninth-grade biology curriculum. Behe served as an expert witness in the trial, but during his testimony admitted that there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting his claims and that irreducible complexity does not rule out evolutionary mechanisms. Gal Kober See also: Creationism and Intelligent Design; Fundamentalism, Religious; Religious Right.
Further Reading Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. New York: Harper, 1999. Pennock, Roger T., ed. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Ruse, Michael. Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Ruse, Michael, and William A. Dembski, eds. Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
B e l l Cu r ve , T h e Perhaps the most incendiary social scientific publication of the late twentieth century, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) brought the topics of race and class to the surface of public consciousness. The book quickly became an international best-seller (400,000 copies were sold around the world in the first months of publication), with a large following in the mainstream media, general public, and scientific community who rallied to either support or condemn the work’s conclusions. At the center of the book’s controversy were charges that it provided statistical support for racism. Going well beyond a discussion of racial and economic inequality in American life, Herrnstein (a psychologist) and Murray (a political scientist) offered an array of explanations and justifications for such social disparities based on statistically measured hereditary intelligence levels. The Bell Curve not only connected brainpower to race and class but identified low intelligence as a cause of poverty, unemployment, crime, unwed motherhood, school dropouts, welfare dependency, and the demise of the functional family.
The book, divided into four sections that build Herrnstein and Murray’s argument regarding the predicative capacities of IQ scores, becomes more controversial with each succeeding section. Part 1 introduces differential levels of intelligence across the United States, arguing that the stratification of intelligence grew steadily throughout the twentieth century, resulting in an emergent “cognitive elite.” Part 2 analyzes the populations at the lowest levels of the cognitive strata, suggesting a correlation between social position and intelligence; it deals primarily with whites. Part 3—easily the most discussed, debated, and disparaged section of the book—addresses the role of IQ in determining social and economic differences between races and ethnicities. Given the delicate and complex nature of their comparisons, the authors astutely warn readers of this section to “read carefully.” Many did indeed read carefully, pondering Herrnstein and Murray’s findings, such as the conclusion that differences between “black” and “white” IQ levels are mostly genetic. Readers also questioned, often with vehemence, distrust, and disgust, the authors’ understanding of universal human intelligence measures, the way they use the concept of race, their statistical methods and analyses, and the credibility of their sources. Even more questions arose when critics read Part 4, which outlines Herrnstein and Murray’s suggestions for social policy initiatives to help increase the cognitive ability of those at the bottom levels of society (i.e., blacks). They present a pessimistic summary of failed efforts to raise cognitive ability through existing social programs that resulted in the “dumbing down” of American public education and the shift in educational expenditures away from gifted children. Regarding affirmative action in colleges and the workplace, Herrnstein and Murray claim that many of the government’s prohibitions against using certain tests impair economic productivity and that “racenormed” adjustments of test scores misclassify workers, create racial and ethnic “tokenism” in the workplace, and stigmatize the intended recipients of governmental aid. Like the previous section on racial differences in IQ, Part 4 was attacked as racist in tone and content despite the authors’ advocacy of non-race-based policies (i.e., treating persons as individuals rather than as members of racial groups). The Bell Curve remains a part of the American culture wars, as issues of racial inequality, widening class disparities, education, and prospective plans for redistributing wealth continue to be subjects of public discourse. Michael Ian Borer See also: Affirmative Action; Education Reform; Moynihan, Daniel Patrick; Race; Wealth Gap; Welfare Reform.
B iaf ra , Jello
Further Reading Fischer, Claude S., et al. Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Fraser, Steven, ed. The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press, 1994. Jacoby, Russell, and Naomi Glauberman, eds. The Bell Curve Debate. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995.
Bennett, William J. An outspoken political conservative since the 1980s, William Bennett contributed to the intensification of the culture wars while serving in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, publishing numerous books on education and morality, spearheading the Heritage Foundation’s index of cultural indicators, and hosting a radio talk show. One of his most controversial moments occurred during a September 2005 broadcast of his Morning in America radio program, when he argued, hypothetically, “You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” A native of Brooklyn, New York, William John Bennett was born on July 31, 1943, into a Catholic family. He studied political philosophy at Williams College (BA, 1965) and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, 1970); in 1971 he graduated from Harvard Law School. After a stint as executive director of the National Humanities Center (1976–1981), an independent institute for advanced study, Bennett served as President Reagan’s chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981– 1985) and then as secretary of education (1985–1988). Under President George H.W. Bush, he was the nation’s “drug czar,” directing the national drug control policy (1989–1990). Prior to joining the Reagan administration, Bennett was a registered Democrat who identified with John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. As head of the Department of Education, Bennett championed education reform that focused on the three Cs—content, character, and choice. For content, he advised a return to the “great books,” or Western literary canon, as the core curriculum. To promote character, he advocated a Judeo-Christian worldview and specifically backed Reagan’s call for a constitutional amendment supporting school-sponsored prayer. Arguing that parents should have the right to choose the schools their children attend, he advanced the concept of school vouchers. While defending Reagan’s cuts in federal tuition grants, Bennett caused an uproar by suggesting that young people could fund their college education by “divesting” themselves of expensive stereos, automobiles, and spring vacations to Florida. At Harvard’s 350th anniversary celebration in
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1986, Bennett berated the school for no longer emphasizing Judeo-Christian values and the Western literary canon. That same year, he criticized Stanford University for eliminating its core curriculum course on the great books. In his book The De-Valuing of America (1992), Bennett devotes the first chapter to the culture wars, which he characterizes as a liberal assault on society led by unaccountable academics. As an anecdote to “moral relativism,” he edited The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (1994), a compilation of classic writings that he claims are effective in building character. This was followed by various other collections, which were subsequently made into a PBS children’s cartoon series. Bennett interprets the public’s divided reaction to President Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct and the conflicting interpretations of the causes of the September 11, 2001, attacks as the consequence of moral relativism, which he deplores in The Death of Outrage (1998) and Why We Fight (2002), respectively. In 2003, Bennett’s own moral clarity was called into question when it was reported that in one decade he lost $8 million at gambling casinos. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Catholic Church; Chomsky, Noam; Education Reform; Great Books; Heritage Foundation; Neoconservatism; Reagan, Ronald; Relativism, Moral; Republican Party; School Prayer; School Vouchers; September 11; Talk Radio; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Bennett, William J. The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children. New York: Touchstone, 1992. ———. The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault of American Ideals. New York: Free Press, 1998. ———. Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Biafra, Jello The first American recording artist charged with obscenity as a result of an album release, Jello Biafra is a punk rock singer, record label owner, self-proclaimed anarchist, prankster, and supporter of progressive causes. Biafra was born Eric Reed Boucher on June 17, 1958, in Boulder, Colorado. In 1977, he dropped out of the University of California at Santa Cruz to join in San Francisco’s growing punk rock community. In the late 1970s, he chose his stage name to contrast the commercialized culture of Jello-O advertisements with the war-induced starvation in Biafra. Biafra’s song lyrics and spoken word performances highlighted contrasts between consumer culture and world poverty. In 1978, he formed the Dead Kennedys
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(DK), a punk rock band that quickly became known for its humor, socially charged lyrics, and energetic performances. The group’s name was a reference to the death of the American dream brought on by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, but some viewed it as a poor joke. In 1979, Biafra received mainstream attention when he ran for mayor of San Francisco as a prank; his platform included a requirement that businessmen wear clown suits. Growing public support, however, prompted him to take more serious positions—such as championing legalized squatting for the homeless in buildings kept vacant for tax purposes. He lost the race but ranked fourth in a field of ten. This ultimately led to his nomination by the Green Party of New York State in the 2000 presidential primary. Biafra later dropped out of the race in favor of Ralph Nader. With the release of its 1986 album Frankenchrist, Biafra’s band included a poster of Work 219: Landscape XX—also known as Penis Landscape—by the surrealist artist H.R. Giger. In response, Los Angeles deputy city attorney Michael Gaurino prosecuted Biafra, the band, and Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label for the distribution of harmful matter to minors. Gaurino remarked that the prosecution was a “cost-effective way of sending a message” to the recording industry. The trial ended in a hung jury, and the charges were dropped. In 1997, Gaurino admitted that “about midway through the trial we realized that the lyrics of the album were in many ways socially responsible, very anti-drug and proindividual.” In 2005, he apologized to Biafra on National Public Radio. Solomon Davidoff See also: Censorship; Counterculture; Election of 2000; Family Values; Kennedy Family; Nader, Ralph; Pornography; Punk Rock; Record Warning Labels; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Biafra, Jello. High Priest of Harmful Matter. San Francisco: Alternative Tentacles, 1989. ———. I Blow Minds for a Living. San Francisco: Alternative Tentacles, 1991. ———. Machine Gun in the Clown’s Hand. San Francisco: Alternative Tentacles, 2002.
B i o t e c h Revo l u t i o n The biotechnology revolution entails new techniques and processes across a range of areas in the life sciences, from agriculture and medicine to human genome, stem cell, and cloning research. Biotechnology research offers the potential to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of life, exposing the inner workings of processes as fundamental as aging and disease. On the most basic
level, the biotech revolution represents a method of manipulating the elements of life. Because the stakes are so high, the discussion about the future of biotechnology has naturally become a part of the culture wars. One of the most outspoken proponents of a biotech future is Ray Kurzweil, who in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) defines a future in which the pace of technological change will be so rapid and profound that human life will be irreversibly changed. Kurzweil’s vision of life is one of exponential and limitless transformation. The epoch of “Singularity,” he asserts, will be one in which humans transcend biology and redefine the conceptual basis of life. While critics stress the potential risks associated with emerging genetic technology, nanotechnology, and robotics technology, Kurzweil argues that the most vital aspects of humanity are not lost through these developments, but that future technologies will refine and exceed the best of human traits. While few have come out as strongly in favor of a brave new biotech world as Kurzweil, similar views are widely held throughout the scientific community, particularly among genomic researchers. Francis Fukuyama presents an altogether different vision of the future in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002). For Fukuyama and like-minded critics, the biotech revolution has ushered in an extraordinary moral dilemma. The Catholic Church and conservative Protestant groups have taken a strong stance against many biomedical technologies such as birth control, in-vitro fertilization, abortion, stem cell research, cloning, and prospective forms of genetic engineering. Fukuyama’s straightforward solution to the moral dilemma brought on by the benefits and threats of biotechnology is regulation through state power. While Fukuyama sees the biotech debate as one largely polarized between the scientific and religious communities, he argues that a religious stance is not the only one available to biotech objectors. In place of religious objection, Fukuyama offers one based on human rights, nature, and dignity. Fukuyama argues against the widely held notion of human nature as socially constructed and entirely malleable. Instead, he contends that humans possess innate patterns of behavior. For these reasons, some may view Fukuyama’s response to biotechnology as socially conservative in that it upholds an essentialist view of human nature. Paul Virilio warns of the threat of the “genetic bomb” in his book with Sylvère Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn (2002). Virilio summarizes the history of technology in three revolutions—in transportation, transmissions, and transplants. He does not believe that human beings are capable of existing outside of their territorial, social, or animal bodies. Virilio’s criticisms are overtly political, showing contempt for “extreme sciences” that promote the practices of “absolute eugenics,” “artificial selection,”
B ir th Control
and the creation of superhuman “genetic robots”—all of which he considers part of the “militarization of science,” leading humanity toward the “Total Accident.” Jürgen Habermas has also raised a number of key issues in the debate over the future of biotechnology. In The Future of Human Nature (2003), he raises the primary problem of a secular or nonreligious (“postmetaphysical”) response to the question of biotechnology. For Habermas, the question hovering over the discussion about the biotech revolution is: What is the good life? His concern is the ethical and moral foundation on which secular communities reach consensus about controversial issues such as genetic screening and gene therapy. While such techniques offer the possibility of treating hereditary diseases, they also offer the possibility of gene modification being made based on individual preferences and market forces. Habermas also examines “self-instrumentalization”— human life instrumentalized through practices such as cloning, the harvesting of replacement body parts, and the creation of designer babies. Arthur Kroker has characterized these trends as representative of a “culture of nihilism” and draws on Nietzsche and Heidegger in exploring the seemingly innate drive toward the “will to technology.” Even by the estimations of practical-minded commentators such as Jeremy Rifkin, the prognosis for human life is that it will likely undergo more change in the next several decades than in the previous thousand years. Rifkin is deeply concerned about the prospects of “patenting life” through the mapping of genetic blueprints, going so far as to suggest that genes are the raw resource of the new economic epoch. Despite opposition to corporate efforts to commodify the gene pool, the merger of molecular biology and international commerce may very well transform genetic knowledge into what Rifkin has called “green gold.” Jon VanWieren See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Catholic Church; Fundamentalism, Religious; Genetically Modified Foods; Human Rights; Science Wars; Secular Humanism; Stem-Cell R esearch.
Further Reading Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2003. Kaku, Michio. “Advances in the Field of Biotechnology.” In Biotechnology and the Future of Society: Challenges and Opportunities, ed. Jamal S. Al-Suwaidi, 19–40. South Court, UK: Ithaca Press, 2004. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Human Beings Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005.
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Rifkin, Jeremy. “What Biotechnology Means for the Future of Humanity.” In Biotechnology and the Future of Society: Challenges and Opportunities, ed. Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 41–70. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. Virilio, Paul, and Sylvère Lotringer. Crepuscular Dawn. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002.
Birth Control For most of human history, women of childbearing age had no reliable way of preventing conception when engaging in sexual intercourse. In addition, there was a strong feeling among authorities that information and devices intended to prevent conception were subversive and not to be discussed publicly. In the United States in 1873, the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials, including birth control information or devices. Many states enacted similar statutes, which were known as “Comstock Laws.” Beginning in 1914, Margaret Sanger, a New York feminist and social reformer, was prosecuted repeatedly under the Comstock Laws for mailing information on “family limitation.” Sanger coined the term “birth control” and opened the first family planning clinic in the United States in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York. The clinic was closed by the police after nine days, and Sanger served thirty days in prison. She viewed birth control as an important step in independence for women, allowing them to make their own decisions about reproduction and childbirth. With the help of other birth-control advocates, Sanger appealed her convictions, and the courts eventually ruled that birth-control information should be exempted from the Comstock Laws and could be mailed legally. In 1921 Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood International, still the largest family planning organization in the world. The means of preventing conception (e.g., condoms, diaphragms, and chemicals) promoted by Sanger and her colleagues were not completely reliable. Only in the 1950s did pharmaceutical research produce the first birth-control pill—a medication based on natural hormones that could be taken regularly to prevent conception. The first birth-control pills went on sale in 1961. In succeeding years, the pill was refined in many ways. Today, dosages of the active ingredients are much smaller and have fewer dangers and side effects. In addition, women may choose to receive regular hormone doses from a patch, an intrauterine device, or a small implant in the upper arm, rather than by mouth. Other safe and reliable means of preventing conception have also been perfected. Women now have access to nearly total control over their fertility. In spite of the invention of the pill, many states continued to outlaw the sale of contraceptives, but
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those laws were increasingly challenged in the courts. Finally in 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that forbade the sale of contraceptives to married couples. In that landmark case, Griswold v. Connecticut, the justices ruled that the private decision to become pregnant was a constitutionally protected right. It was the first Supreme Court ruling that recognized a constitutional “right to privacy.” Nevertheless, birth control remained controversial in many quarters. The Roman Catholic Church opposed the distribution and use of contraceptive devices and pills from the beginning and has regularly confirmed that position. In the view of the Vatican, sexual intercourse is intended for procreation only, and frustrating that purpose is contrary to God’s will. Some conservative Protestants held similar views and continue to do so to the present. There were also concerns that birth control leads to sexual promiscuity. Where Griswold concentrated on the behavior of married couples, the new birth-control methods worked equally well for unmarried women of childbearing age. Many doctors and pharmacies faced community pressure to withhold birth-control medications or devices from young unmarried women because they would make it easier to engage in premarital sex by removing the danger of an unwanted pregnancy. Despite these prohibitions and obstacles, the use of birth control has become nearly universal in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that at least 98 percent of all sexually active American women have used at least one form of birth control in their lives. Surveys even suggest that more than 95 percent of married Roman Catholic women have used birth control during their childbearing years. Birth control has contributed to many changes in American society. Control over fertility enabled women to delay childbearing and have greater control over when, and if, they would have children. This allowed them to complete further education or enter the workforce before, or instead of, having children. The pill also played a significant role in the sexual revolution. As conservative Christian groups feared, the connections between getting married, engaging in sex, and getting pregnant became less clear and convincing for many. Yet the debate continues, involving every new generation of young women and those who care for them. Claire E. Rasmussen See also: Abortion; Planned Parenthood; Sex Education.
Further Reading Critchlow, Donald. Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Garrow, David. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the
Making of Roe v. Wade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Choice. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Kennedy, David. Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Marks, Laura V. Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Petchesky, Rosalind. Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990. Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel. On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Black Panther Par ty The Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, was one of the most controversial organizations to emerge from the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. Huey P. Newton and Robert “Bobby” Seale, who met while attending Merritt College in Oakland, organized the party to combat police brutality against African Americans. As Seale explained in 1970, the BPP was inspired “to resist police brutality and the murder of black people in the same manner that the Vietnamese people were resisting U.S. imperialist aggression—by violence if necessary.” Influenced by the ideas of Malcolm X and Karl Marx, Newton and Seale broadened the party’s objectives, drafting a ten-point program, summarized in the final point: “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.” Rejecting the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s integrationist stance and call for nonviolence, the BPP’s ultimate goal was to unite the black urban poor against “white oppression” and overthrow the U.S. government. Although best known for its militancy, the Black Panthers made attempts at addressing the fundamental needs of the black community, sponsoring free health care and breakfast programs. The BBP gained national notoriety in 1967, when Newton was arrested for the alleged murder of a police officer and the shooting of another. In February 1968, the Black Panthers, along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and representatives from other black militant groups, protested Newton’s incarceration by participating in “Free Huey” rallies. While heightening the awareness of police brutality, the “Free Huey” campaign also made Newton a national icon. Newton became lionized by many young people as a man fighting for social justice. The BPP, which prior to 1968 was just one of many local black militant organizations, greatly profited from Huey Newton’s celebrity status. The BBP also gained the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, who declared it “the greatest threat to the
Black Radic al Cong ress
internal security of the country.” In conjunction with local police forces, FBI agents infiltrated the ranks of the BPP and raided local chapters, which often led to violence. Although the BBP emerged as a national organization in 1970, maintaining chapters from San Diego to New Haven and a membership of nearly 5,000, signs of decline soon became evident. The party lost about twenty members in police shootouts the following year, and the organization purged hundreds of members in an attempt to weed out undercover police operatives. To make matters worse, the leadership of the BPP split into two competing groups. While Eldridge Cleaver and other Black Panthers wanted the organization to focus on the oppression of blacks, Newton sought to forge a multiethnic class-based coalition movement against international capitalism. The internal rifts, along with law enforcement efforts, decimated the BPP, which ceased to exist by the late 1970s. Bruce E. Stewart See also: Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Hoover, J. Edgar; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Marxism; Nation of Islam; Police Abuse; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficas. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. New York: Routledge, 2001. Jones, Charles E., ed. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998. Ogbar, Jeffrey O.G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1970.
Black Radical Congress In an effort to fill a perceived lack of leadership in the mainstream African-American community, the Black Radical Congress (BRC) was founded in 1998 in Chicago to bring together individuals of African descent and address the inequalities experienced by many African Americans. Dedicated to grassroots organizing and the advancement of civil and human rights, the BRC quickly established itself as a powerful voice. After convening more than 2,000 activists at its founding conference, the BRC attracted more than 20,000 subscribers to its various causes in its first eight years of existence. As a source of information and a clearinghouse of ideas and opinions, the BRC has regularly provided statements on timely issues for the African-American community, publishing analytical articles and maintaining both a Web site and a listserv. Although it has not had a great impact on the national debates pertaining to race and inequality and has been unable to supplant the
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black mainstream leadership, the BRC has organized local chapters dedicated to grassroots work and supported other organizations committed to social justice. The BRC has organized campaigns on such issues as the No Child Left Behind education policy, the prisonindustrial complex, U.S. militarism, labor exploitation, state terrorism, the death penalty, environmental racism, police brutality, and poverty. Its two biggest campaigns—Education Not Incarceration and Fight Back Against War, Racism, and Repression—embody the BRC’s commitment to human rights and social justice in the United States and throughout the world. Recognizing the failures of past movements and the persistent divisions within the black community, the BRC since its inception has attempted to bypass or avoid the tensions and fissures stemming from charges of sectarianism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Americanism, and antiwhite racism. In its principles of unity, the BRC states that it must embrace “the diverse tendencies within Black radicalism, building upon the traditions of socialism, revolutionary nationalism, and feminism.” Eschewing narrow nationalist approaches and exclusionary practices of past and present black freedom organizations, the BRC opposes “all forms of oppression,” including imperialism and prejudice toward immigrants. Despite such rhetorical pronouncements and the effort to avoid major cultural battles, the BRC has nevertheless struggled with these divisions as well. During its initial conference, feminists in the organization questioned how its caucus and issues were being prioritized, and other members have criticized the BRC for its inability to devise a radical plan that empowers the community, accusing the BRC of simply being a haven for celebrity activists. Still, the BRC has faced little controversy and backlash in its short history, no doubt due to its failure to influence the mainstream, garner national media coverage, and gain support from the increasingly conservative and middle-class black community. Also, by focusing on less sensational issues—such as poverty instead of hip-hop and the use of the N-word—the BRC has attracted little of the spotlight, thereby limiting its exposure, fundraising capability, and stake in the national discourse on race. David J. Leonard See also: Capital Punishment; Civil Rights Movement; Education Reform; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, ThirdWave; Gay Rights Movement; Human Rights; Immigration Policy; Labor Unions; Police Abuse; Prison Reform; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Ards, Angela. “The New Black Radicalism.” Nation, July 27–August 3, 1998, 19–23.
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Black Radical Congress Web site. www.blackradicalcongress.org. Horne, Gerald. “Black Radicals Unite.” Dollars and Sense, September 1, 1998. Lusane, Clarence. “From Crisis to Congress: Assessing the Black Radical Congress.” Social Justice 25:3 (1998): 108–15.
Black face Blackface, a theatrical tradition and cultural stereotype that dates to the eighteenth century, is a style of makeup, costume, and performance used in minstrel shows and similar entertainment, typically involving a white performer who paints his or her face black with burnt cork, greasepaint, or shoe polish to look like an African American. Oversized lips (red, pink, or white) are usually a part of the persona, and the costume varies from the formal (top hat, white gloves, and tails) to the informal (ragged and clownish attire). Depending on the performance and the individual audience member, blackface is viewed as simple comedy, humorous self-parody, low-class buffoonery, or demeaning form of racism. Blackface imagery has been depicted in film, used in commercial advertising, and made into artwork. In the culture wars, debate continues regarding the social meanings of blackface and its many forms and manifestations. By the 1950s, largely as a result of activism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), blackface came under public attack as racist, demeaning to blacks, and a means of perpetuating negative stereotypes. Television programs such as Beulah (1950–1953) and Amos ’n’ Andy (1951–1953) were criticized for having black actors portray stereotypical figures in a manner reminiscent of blackface performers. Mounting public pressure forced these shows off the air, but some historians have suggested that the NAACP was actually demanding that black characters be portrayed as “less colored.” In any event, broadcasters also stopped airing cartoon programs with blackface characters, such as Jungle Jitters (1938), Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943), and Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943). A controversy arose in the late 1970s over the name of a restaurant chain called Sambo’s, widely associated in the public’s mind with the “Little Black Sambo” character. The name actually derived from a combination of the names of the chain’s founders, Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnet, who opened their first restaurant in Berkeley, California, in 1957. They did use a Sambo figure for restaurant décor, but the character had Indian rather than African-American features. The chain gradually expanded to 1,114 locations, but by the early 1980s public pressure compelled a renaming of most of the restaurants in the Northeast to No Place Like Sam’s. Discussion and debate likewise arose over the use of such commercial icons as Aunt Jemima (pancake mix), Rastus (hot cereal), and Uncle Ben (rice)—images that
evoked the days of slavery, when blacks were addressed by whites as “aunt” or “uncle” (never “Mr.” or “Mrs.”). Although these particular name brands have remained in use, the images have been redesigned and modernized. And while Aunt Jemima no longer says “Tempt yo’ appetite,” some blacks remain bothered by the resemblance of the bowtie-sporting Uncle Ben to a Pullman porter. Perhaps inevitably, blackface has also become part of material culture and the collectibles market, including postcards, knickknacks, and cast-iron statues such as lawn jockeys. The latter, sometimes called “Jockos,” are deeply offensive to many African Americans when they are painted with black faces and displayed on the front lawns of white residences. In an attempt to be less offensive to people of color, some owners have painted the statues with white faces. Earl Kroger published a children’s book titled Jocko: A Legend of the American Revolution (1976), in which he maintains that the Jocko figures honor the memory of a twelve-year-old African American who froze to death during a vigil, lamp in hand, keeping watch over General Washington’s horse during the winter attack on the British at Trenton—historians do not corroborate the legend. Others have spread the rumor that statues of the boy were used for designating safe houses on the Underground Railroad—which has also been refuted by historians. Celebrity African Americans, including Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, are known collectors of blackface artifacts, which they put on display to draw inspiration by reflecting on how far blacks have progressed. In 1996, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia was founded on the campus of Ferris State University in Black Rapids, Michigan, to collect and preserve blackface artifacts as object lessons in teaching tolerance. Blackface occasionally still emerges in American culture. In 1993, Ted Danson, a white actor then dating black actress Whoopi Goldberg, appeared at a roast in blackface—to general disapproval. In 2000, the wellknown black director Spike Lee, in the film Bamboozled, portrayed an ambitious assimilated black television executive who reintroduces blackface in live theater. Lee’s film portrays the nervousness of both blacks and whites at its reappearance. In 2001, a white fraternity at Auburn University stirred controversy when photos of its members in blackface appeared on the Internet. Abraham D. Lavender and Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Lee, Spike; Literature, Film, and Drama; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Political Correctness; Winfrey, Oprah.
Further Reading Goings, Kenneth W. Mammy and Uncle Mose: Collectibles and American Stereotyping. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia Web site. www.ferris .edu/jimcrow. Lhamon, W.T., Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Manring, M.M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Sanneh, Kelefa. “Black in the Box.” Transition 10:4 (2001): 38–65. Strausbaugh, John. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture. New York: Penguin, 2006.
B o b J o n e s U n i ve r s i t y In its engagement in the culture wars, Bob Jones Uni versity (BJU) fosters a tradition of Christian fundamentalism. As Bob Jones III said in 1989, we “are proud to be known as fundamentalist . . . we oppose all atheistic, agnostic, and humanistic attacks upon the scripture.” Mirroring the pattern of Christian fundamentalism generally, the university in recent years has become more actively involved in American politics. Evangelist Bob Jones, Sr., founded the school in Bay County, Florida, in 1927. His motivation included a particular concern for the secularization of higher education in the wake of the 1925 Scopes trial. The college relocated to Cleveland, Tennessee (1933), and finally to its present location in Greenville, South Carolina (1947). Not unlike other higher education institutions, the university doubled in size after World War II. In 1947, Bob Jones, Jr., became BJU’s new president and eventually expanded the school’s fine arts program. Bob Jones III became BJU’s president in 1971, and Stephen Jones (his son) succeeded him in 2005. Student enrollment stood at 5,000 in 2006, and the alumni office could boast such prominent graduates as Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind book series, and Asa Hutchinson, who served as a U.S. representative (R-AR, 1997–2002) and in 2003 was appointed by President George W. Bush as undersecretary for border and transportation security. BJU has also actively supported the growing home school movement in America, publishing K–12 textbooks written from a fundamentalist perspective. Early controversies associated with BJU revolved around the split between fundamentalists and evangelicals. Bob Jones, Jr., proved instrumental in advancing the “set apart” mentality in the 1950s by severing ties with moderate and conservative Christians and organizations, including the National Association of Evangelicals (1953), former BJU student Billy Graham (1957), the Moody Bible Institute (1958), and Youth for Christ (1960). At the time, BJU sought what it described as an “ultrafundamentalist” identity, distinct from moderate evangelicalism. Beginning in the 1960s, dissension arose between
A science professor at Bob Jones University teaches creationism at the Christian fundamentalist school in the late 1940s. Minority policies, tax-exempt status, and political involvement have been sources of controversy for the university. (Maude Stout/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
BJU and America’s larger culture over civil rights. Bob Jones, Sr., in his pamphlet Is Segregation Scriptural? (1960), argued that it was morally wrong to “eradicate racial boundaries God had set.” With this in mind, BJU in 1964 awarded an honorary doctorate to Alabama governor George Wallace for his pro-segregation stance. In 1970, the Internal Revenue Service began proceedings against BJU that would lead, after thirteen years of legal wrangling and two cases before the Supreme Court, to the school’s loss of its tax-exempt status due to institutionalized racial discrimination. In the meantime, BJU attempted modest reforms, in 1971 allowing African Americans to enroll as long as they were married. Four years later, BJU admitted unmarried blacks but maintained a campus prohibition on interracial dating. By the early 1990s, Bob Jones III began arguing that “worldly practices” ought not to “separate good Christians from bad ones.” While this indicated less of a separatist mentality, cultural clashes continued. In December 1998, BJU announced that it would arrest all homosexuals who entered its campus. In March 2000, after controversy surrounding a George W. Bush campaign appearance at the university, Bob Jones III dropped the interracial dating ban. In 2008, the university issued a formal apology for its racist policies, stating that such rules were not based on the Bible. Tim Lacy See also: Bush Family; Catholic Church; Church and State; Civil Rights Movement; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Graham, Billy; Hillsdale College; Homeschooling; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; McCain, John; Religious Right; Wallace, George.
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Further Reading Bob Jones University Web site. www.bju.edu. Dalhouse, Mark Taylor. An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University. Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1997.
Bono Bono (Paul Hewson), lead singer and lyricist for the Irish rock band U2, is something of a musical bridge between global popular culture and the American evangelical subculture. Markedly influenced by his adolescent spiritual experiences, the singer has used his jet-set superstardom and ability to communicate to fans, secular elites, and born-again believers to great advantage in touting various social justice causes, including the HIV/AIDS epidemic and Third World debt relief. Born in Dublin on May 10, 1960, Paul David Hewson was the product of a mixed Protestant/Catholic marriage and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School, the first ecumenical school of its kind in the city. At Mount Temple in 1976, he joined the first of a series of groups that eventually became U2. He took the stage name “Bono Vox” from a hearing aid shop. In 1979, Bono and fellow U2 members Dave Evans (“The Edge”) and Larry Mullen, Jr., became involved with the Shalom community, a charismatic Protestant Bible study group that emphasized the “gifts of the Spirit” such as speaking in tongues and prophesying. The association ended when Shalom’s leaders demanded that the band members choose between their budding rock and roll careers and membership in the community. Although he was no longer formally linked to the charismatic movement, biblical imagery and spirituality were a dominant theme of Bono’s lyrics on U2’s early albums, such as October (1981) and War (1983). Thus, as the band moved toward superstardom, it was embraced by many in the American Contemporary Christian Music community. However, the band’s refusal to identify with the conservative moral and political ethos of Americanstyle evangelicalism—compounded by Bono’s fondness for alcohol, earthy language, increasingly antinomian spiritual style, and criticism of U.S. foreign policy in songs like “Bullet the Blue Sky” (1987)—alienated many evangelicals during the mid-1980s and afterward. Nonetheless, he remained an enormously influential figure for a core of dedicated fans as well as aspiring evangelical musicians, even as projects like Achtung Baby (1991) and Zooropa (1993) and Bono’s stage characters—the demonic “Macphisto” and “Mirrorball Man” (a parody of a corrupt televangelist)—caused many evangelical pop culture observers to write him off.
By the mid-1980s, Bono was a ubiquitous presence in various humanitarian efforts supported by popular entertainers. In 1984, he appeared in the Band Aid video “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” on behalf of Ethiopian famine relief; this was followed by a live performance at the Live Aid concert in 1985. U2 was a prominent part of the six-city Conspiracy of Hope tour of America on behalf of Amnesty International in 1986. Bono’s vehement, profane denunciation (included in the film Rattle and Hum) of a bombing by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1987 allegedly earned him a spot on an IRA death list. During the 1990s, Bono became increasingly identified with efforts to address the problem of disease and poverty in the Third World. In 1999, he met with members of the Clinton administration, such as Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and raised the issue of Third World debt relief. The following year, he persuaded Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) to support funding to fight AIDS in Africa, appealing to the conservative legislator by quoting from the Bible. In 2002, Bono established the organization DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa) and sought out links with the Republican administration, meeting with President George W. Bush and escorting Treasury Secretary Paul O’ Neill on a tour of impoverished regions of four African countries. Later that year, he headlined a tour of colleges in the American heartland— including the evangelical Wheaton College, where he praised alumnus Billy Graham—to promote student activism in the battle against AIDS in Africa. As a legitimate artist, popular entertainer, and effective advocate for global causes, Bono has been accepted by both secular and evangelical audiences. His reputation with evangelicals rests on the evident Christian motivation for his tireless humanitarian work. For his part, Bono sees conservative U.S. Protestants as an important moral force that can be harnessed for relief projects and social justice. Larry Eskridge See also: AIDS; Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Contemporary Christian Music; Evangelicalism; Globalization; Graham, Billy; Helms, Jesse; Human Rights; Jackson, Michael; Summers, Lawrence; Televangelism.
Further Reading Assayas, Michka. Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Bordowitz, Hank, ed. The U2 Reader: A Quarter Century of Commentary, Criticism, and Reviews. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2003. Dunphy, Eamon. Unforgettable Fire: The Definitive Biography of U2. New York: Warner, 1987. Vagacs, Robert. Religious Nuts, Political Fanatics: U2 in Theological Perspective. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.
Boy Scout s of A mer ic a
Book Banning Public schools and libraries in the United States have been the primary battleground in efforts over recent years to limit the availability of, or ban outright, books deemed dangerous to children and adolescents. This struggle, which generally pits religious groups and other social conservatives against liberals and progressives, highlights the tension between parental authority and society, but it is ultimately about defining American values. The constituencies on the right demand that young readers be protected from books that contain obscenities or sexually explicit or racist language, promote witchcraft, feature homosexual characters or themes, or are “antifamily.” Generally, the left fiercely defends free speech, citing the First Amendment, and opposes any attempt at censorship. Censorship campaigns have emerged at various times throughout the history of the United States, but by the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the primacy of the First Amendment and its protection of the printed word appeared to be settled. Attempts to control the reading materials available to children and adolescents, however, continued. The effort to remove books from schools and public libraries has taken place almost exclusively at the state and local level, and has primarily come from the Religious Right or members of conservative organizations. In 1995, for example, according to Publishers Weekly, there were a reported 475 attempts in forty-four states to compel librarians to remove titles or accept restrictive acquisitions and access guidelines. In 1988, the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Association of School Administrators published a handbook designed to assist school officials and librarians facing censorship pressures. The ALA has become a major actor in the banned books arena, and its advocacy of unrestricted access to library materials has made it a target of criticism by conservative groups, such as Focus on the Family. The ALA, along with the American Booksellers Association and the Association of American Publishers, sponsors Banned Books Week, designed to raise awareness of censorship and attempts to remove books from libraries or schools. The ALA distinguishes between challenged and banned books. Books are considered challenged when attempts are made to restrict or remove them based on the objections of a person or group; a banned book is one that has been successfully challenged and physically removed. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) documents censorship incidents around the country and releases a list of the most frequently challenged books each year. Conservative groups, such as the American Family Association, take issue with the ALA’s focus on challenged books, but the ALA responds that whether a book is merely challenged or subsequently removed, the effect is nonetheless chilling. Conservative groups, however,
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also charge that librarians censor collections through selective acquisitions of materials. Between 1990 and 2000, 6,364 challenges were reported to the OIF. Books were most frequently challenged because of “sexually explicit” material (1,607 incidents), followed by materials considered to use “offensive language” (1,427 incidents), and materials considered “unsuited to age group” (1,256 incidents). Substantial numbers of books were also challenged because they had an “occult theme” or sympathized with “the occult of Satanism,” were considered “violent,” had a “homosexual theme” or were tolerant of homosexuality, promoted “a religious viewpoint,” or were considered “antifamily.” Other works were challenged because they contained “nudity,” “racism,” or “sex education.” Among the most challenged books in the 1990s were Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite, and Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling. Most challenges came from the right, but some originated on the left because of books believed to be reinforcing sexist stereotypes or portraying ethnic and racial groups in racist ways. For example, some liberals have challenged Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for its use of racist language. Jana Brubaker See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Censorship; Counterculture; Family Values; Focus on the Family; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gays in Popular Culture; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Pornography; Religious Right; Sex Education; Speech Codes; Steinbeck, John; Wildmon, Donald; Wilson, Edmund.
Further Reading Boyer, Paul S. Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Saunders, Kevin W. Saving Our Children from the First Amendment. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
B oy S c o u t s o f A m e r i c a With roots in England dating to 1907, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) was incorporated in 1910 by William D. Boyce, a Chicago publisher. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it had nearly 5 million scouts and volunteers (including Cub Scouts and Webloes as well as Boy Scouts). Because of its strict policy of not allowing girls, gays, or atheists as members, the organization has frequently had to defend its position against civil libertarian groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Although numerous state courts—including those in California, New Jersey, and
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Illinois—have sided with plaintiffs in discrimination claims against the Boy Scouts, the U.S. Supreme Court (and the federal government as a whole) has consistently supported the Boy Scouts and its right to set membership standards of its choosing. To do otherwise, it is held, would go against the First Amendment protections of freedom of expression and association. Since its inauguration by the British war hero Robert S.S. Baden-Powell in 1907, the organization has been geared toward boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. It professes that boys’ needs are different from those of girls and that the two genders learn in different ways. The U.S. Congress reiterated this viewpoint in a charter issued for the Boy Scouts in 1916 and later in one for the Girl Scouts. The Boy Scouts today remains all-male at the scout level, though women have been allowed to serve as scoutmasters since 1988. Girls continue to be denied membership at the scout level, and the U.S. federal courts, in cases such as Mankes v. Boy Scouts of America (1991), have supported this stance by ruling that providing an outlet for boys does not necessarily imply intentional discrimination against girls. According to the Boy Scouts, the best citizens are righteous citizens. Its position on religion and belief in God is woven into the two most important guides for a Boy Scout, the Scout Law and the Scout Oath. Reciting these, a scout promises to be “reverent” and to do his “duty to God.” Every advancement through the ranks of scouting requires the scout to demonstrate, in some way, his adherence to these tenets. Atheists have brought suit against the Boy Scouts, alleging that the requirement to recite these words infringes on their freedom to profess atheism. In Randall v. Orange County Council, Boy Scouts of America (1998), however, the California Supreme Court established that Boy Scouts have legally been granted the right to require theistic affirmation in its law and oath, based on the premise that the Boy Scouts do not force a particular religion on their members, only the concept of a higher power. While there is no professed line in the Scout Oath or Scout Law against homosexuality, the former maintains that a scout must be “morally straight” and the latter requires that he must be “clean.” The BSA maintains that homosexuality is inconsistent with institutional values and does not tolerate open homosexuality. Its position on homosexuality has been challenged a number of times by members and volunteers who are openly homosexual. In the early 1990s, former Eagle Scout James Dale of New Jersey brought suit after he was dismissed from the organization when a newspaper article reported that he was gay. In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the dismissal and refused even to consider Dale’s argument on the merits. The dissenting opinion argued that the precedent of not scrutinizing the Boy Scouts’ policy set up the possibility
of a “gay exception” to civil rights and created a situation in which homosexuals could be treated differently from any other group. An underlying tension, however, is that while advancing a religious ethos, the BSA receives government support, as when Scout Jamborees are held on federal land. In 2002, the Boy Scouts of American Equal Access Act, amended to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, allowed the organization access to public schools to hold meetings. In 2005, the Support Our Scouts Act encouraged government support of the Boy Scouts in general. Opponents contended that such measures violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respective of an establishment of religion”). Kirk Richardson See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Church and State; Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Judicial Wars; Outing.
Further Reading Boy Scouts of America. Fieldbook. Irving, TX: Boy Scouts of America, 2004. Boy Scouts of America Web site. www.scouting.org. Mechling, Jay. On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Zeiger, Hans. Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005.
B r a d l ey, B i l l A former professional basketball player and U.S. senator (D-NJ), Bill Bradley ran against Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary, presenting himself as a candidate of old-fashioned values and smalltown virtues. Of those who supported Bradley over Gore, 70 percent cited character as the chief reason. William Warren “Bill” Bradley was born on July 28, 1943, in Crystal City, Missouri. He studied American history at Princeton University (BA, 1965), where he was an All-American in basketball; captained the U.S. basketball team in winning the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics (1964); and completed his formal education at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (MA, 1968). As a starting forward for the New York Knicks (1967–1977), he was nicknamed “Dollar Bill” by his teammates in tribute to his simple lifestyle. During the same period, he served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves (1967–1978). Upon retiring from the National Basketball Association, Bradley served three terms as a U.S. senator from New Jersey (1979–1997). A pursuer of reform, Senator Bradley was the driving force behind the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was designed to cut taxes and eliminate loopholes for special interests. He backed the Family Leave and Medical
B rock , Dav id
Emergency Act (1993) and Megan’s Law (1996), the latter requiring the registration of sex offenders; he opposed the welfare cutback known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996; and he voted against the Gulf War (1991). When he left the Senate, he declared the political system “broken.” Later, some ridiculed him for seeking the presidency after rendering such a harsh verdict on Washington. As a presidential candidate, Bradley indirectly criticized Gore and Republican George W. Bush, stating that his small-town values enabled him to achieve the American Dream without having “a famous family name or great wealth.” Bradley called for a new national vision to address family problems such as the 2.8 million children in deep poverty, an economic system that requires many parents to work several jobs and have less time for passing on values to their children, and health care that remains unaffordable for millions of people. During the primary campaign, Bradley was endorsed by Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Paul Volcker (former Federal Reserve Board chairman), and Seattle mayor Paul Schell, but he could not compete against Gore’s formidable campaign war chest. Bradley was defeated in every primary, including New Jersey. Five weeks after the New Hampshire primary, he withdrew from the race. In his book The New American Story (2007), Bradley blames special-interest groups, aided by gerrymandered congressional districts and a sensationalist news media, for polarizing the nation by shifting focus away from issues important to people of both red and blue states (e.g., affordable health care, good schools, pensions, a clean environment, and well-paying jobs) to issues of primary concern to culture warriors (e.g., abortion, gay rights, gun control, medical marijuana, and the display of the Ten Commandments). Bradley is also the author of Life on the Run (1976), about his professional basketball experience; The Fair Tax (1982), an argument for tax reform; Time Present, Time Past (1996), a memoir of his Senate experience and nationwide travels; Values of the Game (1998), a collection of essays on basketball and character; and The Journey from Here (2001), a reflection on his failed bid for president. Roger Chapman See also: Democratic Party; Election of 2000; Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Gore, Al; Gun Control; Health Care; Red and Blue States; Sex Offenders; Tax Reform; Ten Commandments; Welfare Reform; Wellstone, Paul.
Further Reading Jaspersohn, William. Senator: A Profile of Bill Bradley in the U.S. Senate. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. White, Kenneth John. The Values Divide: American Politics and Culture in Transition. New York: Chatham House, 2003.
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B r o c k , D av i d A prominent conservative journalist and columnist in the 1990s, David Brock later became disenchanted with Republican Party tactics and conservative politics, professed a feeling of guilt for his unfair and inaccurate reporting, and voiced his opposition to conservative influence in the media. Brock was born in Dallas, Texas, on November 2, 1962. After studying journalism at the University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1985), he interned at the Wall Street Journal. He then worked under Norman Podhoretz at the conservative news magazine Insight (a sister publication of the Washington Times), and eventually joined the staff of the American Spectator. Brock entered the public eye in 1992 with an article criticizing Anita Hill, a law professor and former federal official who had accused Republicanbacked Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; the article included Brock’s famous characterization of Hill as “a bit nutty and a bit slutty.” This was followed by a best-selling book, The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story (1993), which was highly critical of Hill and supportive of Thomas and Republican efforts to appoint conservatives to the judiciary. In a 1994 magazine article, Brock was the first to report on accusations by Paula Jones and the “Troopergate” scandal during Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial term in Arkansas, which began a chain of events that led to an independent counsel investigation and President Clinton’s impeachment. Brock continued to focus on the Clintons in The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (1996), a sympathetic treatment of the first lady. Brock began to feel abandoned by conservative colleagues, who were critical of the book’s lack of scandal. This was a major turning point in his relationship with the Republican establishment. Brock eventually became disillusioned with his party’s attitudes toward homosexuals, came out of the closet as a gay man, and recanted many of his previous right-wing statements. He apologized publicly to Anita Hill and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Brock’s mea culpa was the best-selling memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (2002), a work of both soul searching and investigation into the uses and effects of right-wing propaganda. Still, many critics on both the left and right suspected a self-serving motive behind the confessions. In The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (2005), Brock theorizes about a structured effort by the right wing to instill a conservative bias in the American media, augmented by a strategy of attacking a supposed liberal bias in the same media. These concerns inspired Brock in 2004 to found Media Matters for America, an Internet-based organization dedicated to analyzing and countering conservative bias and misinformation in the media. Benjamin W. Cramer
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B rokaw, Tom
See also: Clinton, Hillary; Clinton Impeachment; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in Popular Culture; Hill, Anita; Judicial Wars; Media Bias; Neoconservatism; Outing; Republican Party; Sexual Harassment; Thomas, Clarence.
Further Reading Brock, David. “The Real Anita Hill.” American Spectator, March 1992. Hitchens, Christopher. “The Real David Brock.” Nation, May 27, 2002. Media Matters Web site. www.mediamatters.org. York, Byron. “David Brock Is Buzzing Again.” National Review, June 14, 2004.
B r o k a w, To m The retirement in 2004 of TV news anchor and bestselling author Tom Brokaw marked the end of the media era in which most Americans got their news from network television. One of the so-called Big Three network anchors, Brokaw served as the face of NBC News’s evening broadcast for more than twenty-one years. His calm demeanor and deep voice of authority lifted NBC to the top of news ratings, while critics saw him as representing style over substance in the delivery of the news. In addition to his broadcasting career, Brokaw is known for coining the term “the Greatest Generation,” the title of his 1998 book heralding the ordinary men and women who came of age during World War II. Born Thomas John Brokaw on February 6, 1940, in Webster, South Dakota, he received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of South Dakota (1962) and married his high school sweetheart. Prior to joining NBC in 1966, he worked for KTIV in Sioux City, Iowa (1960–1962), KMTV in Omaha, Nebraska (1962–1965), and WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia (1965–1966). He was the late-night anchor for KNBC in Los Angeles (1966–1973), NBC White House correspondent (1973–1976), co-host of the morning show Today (1976–1983), and finally the prime-time anchor for NBC Nightly News (1983–2004). In 2005, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute presented Brokaw with the Four Freedoms Medal for contributing to freedom of speech. Since stepping down as anchor, Brokaw has narrated and produced numerous television documentaries, covering topics from global warming to the war in Iraq to religion in America. In January 2007, he delivered a eulogy at the funeral of President Gerald Ford. In June 2008, Brokaw was appointed the interim host of NBC’s Meet the Press, following the unexpected death of the program’s longtime moderator, Tim Russert. Brokaw’s style of journalism has been the subject of some debate. The character Tom Grunik (portrayed by actor William Hurt) in the Hollywood film Broadcast
News (1987) is thought to be a spoof of Brokaw as a figure who reduces the complexities of news events to sound bites and glossy reporting. Yet it is also true that Brokaw was successful at securing exclusive interviews with important world figures, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Vladimir Putin. In the early 1970s, he contributed vital reporting on the Watergate scandal as chief White House correspondent for NBC. Although conservatives often accused him of a liberal bias, Brokaw invited the conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh to appear on NBC Nightly News to offer analysis of the 2002 midterm elections. Brokaw has focused admiring attention on the World War II generation in his books The Greatest Generation (1998), The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections (1999), and An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation (2002). He considers the men and women of that era as “the greatest” because of their humility, courage, service to country, and patriotic spirit. He credits them not only with defeating fascism abroad, but also with expanding civil liberties and social rights in the United States. Brokaw, however, concedes that the generation he admires is to be faulted for mistakes such as McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and acting too slowly to end Jim Crow restrictions in the South. Even so, his positive retrospect stands in contrast to the reflections of some prominent members of the Greatest Generation, such as Norman Mailer, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel, and William Manchester. In Boom! Voices of the Sixties (2007), Brokaw focuses on the baby boomers, but in a less than conclusive manner than he did with the WWII generation. John Balz and Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Cronkite, Walter; Generations and Generational Conflict; Limbaugh, Rush; Mailer, Norman; McCarthyism; Media Bias; Rather, Dan; Terkel, Studs; Vietnam War; Watergate; World War II Memorial; Zinn, Howard.
Further Reading Brokaw, Tom. A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties. New York: Random House, 2003. Goldberg, Robert, and Gerald Jay Goldberg. Anchors: Brokaw, Jennings, Rather, and the Evening News. New York: Birch Lane, 1990.
B r o w n , H e l e n G u r l ey Known for sassy remarks such as “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere” and “A single woman is known by what she does rather than by whom she belongs to,” the author and longtime Cosmopolitan
B ro w n v. B o a rd o f E d u c a t i o n ( 19 5 4 )
magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown sought from the early 1960s to liberate young, unmarried women through sexual empowerment. Her greatest critics were feminists, yet her “Cosmo Girl” proved to be an enduring cultural icon well into the twenty-first century, even inspiring the racy HBO television comedy Sex and the City (1998–2004). Helen Gurley was born on February 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Arkansas, and raised in Little Rock, the daughter of a poor family. After attending Texas State College for Women (1939–1941) and Woodbury Business College (1942), she worked briefly as a secretary at a New York advertising agency. Her writing ability resulted in her rapid rise as a well-paid ad copywriter. In 1959, she married film producer David Brown, who encouraged her to write the memoirs of her years as a single woman. This resulted in the best-seller Sex and the Single Girl (1962). From 1965 to 1997, Brown served as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. She raised circulation from 750,000 to a high of 3 million copies while developing the magazine’s trademark of covers featuring glamorous models and big-breasted women exuding sexuality. Outspoken on the topics of love, sex, money, and women’s liberation, Brown was occasionally booed in public and pelted with tomatoes. In 1983, she published the bestseller Having It All, an older and wiser complement to Sex and the Single Girl. In I’m Wild Again (2000), she boasted of receiving breast implants at age 73. Brown’s strongest critics came from the newly forming feminist movement. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), referred to Cosmopolitan as “quite obscene and quite horrible,” adding, “It embraces the idea that a woman is nothing but a sex object.” Gloria Steinem, however, maintained that it made Brown a feminist “pioneer.” Ultimately, Brown’s views on sexual liberation and freedom for women lost much of their power as she expressed lack of concern about sexual harassment in the workplace. She went so far as to defend Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and U.S. senator Bob Packwood, two public figures accused of sexually harassing women. Her philosophy seemed anachronistic to many of the younger generation living in a world of HIV/AIDS. Stephanie Chaban See also: AIDS; Counterculture; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Hefner, Hugh; Packwood, Bob; Sexual Harassment; Sexual Revolution; Steinem, Gloria; Thomas, Clarence.
Further Reading Berebitsky, Julie. “The Joy of Work: Helen Gurley Brown, Gender and Sexuality in the White Collar Office.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15:1 (2006): 89–127.
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Brown, Helen Gurley. I’m Wild Again: Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Meadows, Susannah. “The Original Cosmo Girl.” Newsweek, June 23, 2003. Scanlon, Jennifer. Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
B ro w n v. B o a rd o f E d u c a t i o n ( 19 5 4 ) With the words “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” school segregation in America was unanimously declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in one of the most famous rulings of the twentieth century, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). For years thereafter, however, the ruling was met with resistance. Prince Edward County in Virginia, one of the plaintiffs in the case, chose to close its school district. Some states sought to give white parents public funds to send their children to private schools. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower, despite enforcing the court’s ruling, never publicly condemned segregation. During his inaugural address, nine years after Brown, Alabama governor George Wallace promised, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
Origins and Arguments The Brown case began in the fall of 1950, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked the Reverend Oliver Brown and a dozen other parents to enroll their children in neighborhood white schools in Topeka, Kansas. As anticipated, local officials denied the requests, citing “separate but equal”—the doctrine that there is no discrimination in separating the races if each group receives the same quality of public service. In 1951, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the local school board, even though the association membership, predominately educators, was divided over legal strategy. Some feared a direct attack on “separate but equal” could jeopardize newly won gains, such as black enrollment in previously all-white colleges. Their worst fear was triggering a decision that would restate the Supreme Court holding in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which set the precedent for “separate but equal” by upholding a Louisiana law requiring the racial segregation of rail passengers. Instead, these NAACP members advised a campaign to improve black schools in the seventeen segregated states. Black teachers, it was further argued, would lose their jobs if schools were desegregated because whites would not want blacks, especially males, teaching their children. The federal district court first heard the Topeka case on June 25, 1951. Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP attorney, argued the case on the grounds that segregation
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Brow n v. Board of Education (1954 )
invalidates the promise of equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Attorneys representing the school officials rebutted Marshall, arguing that there was no violation of the Fourteenth Amendment because black children were “equally protected” by being provided an education comparable to what white children enjoyed. The district court ruled in favor of the school officials, citing Plessy as legal precedent. Undeterred, the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951. Four similar cases then pending with the high court were merged with the Kansas appeal. The cases bundled with Brown were Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia), Briggs v. Elliott (South Carolina), Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe (Washington, D.C.), and Gebhart v. Belton (Delaware). On December 9, 1952, oral arguments in Brown were heard before the Supreme Court, with Marshall representing the plaintiffs and John W. Davies representing South Carolina and the other school systems. To show that school segregation was harming black children, Marshall cited the “Doll Test” that had been conducted by psychologist Kenneth Clark and his wife. In that study, young black children were asked to select their preference of dolls presented before them. A majority chose “Caucasian” dolls over “Negro” ones. The conclusion of the study was that black children, as a consequence of segregation, develop self-loathing and feelings of inferiority. Davies countered that in nonsegregated schools a higher percentage of black children, 72 percent as opposed to 62 percent, chose the Caucasian doll. He also quoted from W.E.B. Du Bois, the renowned black sociologist, who once argued that it was better to place black children in schools where they are wanted than in white schools “where they are ridiculed and hated.”
Ruling and Aftermath The jurists failed to arrive at a decision and, on the advice of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, a second hearing was scheduled for addressing specific questions. Prior to the second round of oral arguments on December 8, 1953, however, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died and President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren, a California politician, as his replacement. Although the case was particularly complex because of the different school districts involved, the justices had to make their decision based solely on whether or not school segregation was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of the matter, at least according to one approach, was the issue of original intent of the writers of that amendment. In interpreting the U.S. Constitution, here was a classic tension between a strict constructionist (literal reading) and loose constructionist (general meaning) approach.
To help the court arrive at a unanimous decision, Chief Justice Warren allowed six months to explore and debate all the issues prior to taking a formal vote. This enabled the justices to reach a unanimous agreement, lending greater weight to their ruling. The Brown decision was handed down on May 17, 1954. The basis of the ruling was that segregation was damaging to blacks because it “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” According to an editorial in the New York Times, “It took no reference to social scientists to know that state-enforced segregation was a calculated device to exalt one group and debase another.” In a follow-up 1955 decision, known as Brown II, the high court addressed the difficult matter of implementing the standard it had established in the original ruling. To do so, it assigned principal authority for supervising desegregation to federal district courts because of their proximity to local conditions—and resistance. The justices left it to the district courts to develop integration procedures and implement them “with all deliberate speed.” Nevertheless, it was not until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which included a provision restricting federal education funding to integrated schools, that the holdout states earnestly begin dismantling school segregation. Subsequent federal cases have limited the means by which states are permitted to implement integration, and shifts in population (including “white flight” from urban areas) and housing patterns have led to resegregation in many locations. By the mid-1990s, blacks represented the majority in 90 percent of public schools in metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. Minorities accounted for 84 percent of students in New York City public schools and 90 percent in Chicago public schools. Martha J. Ross-Rodgers and Roger Chapman See also: Bunche, Ralph; Busing, School; Civil Rights Movement; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Judicial Wars; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Race; Wallace, George; Warren, Earl.
Further Reading Bell, Derrick. Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Clotfelter, Charles. After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Friedman, Leon, ed. Brown v. Board: The Landmark Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court. New York: New Press, 2004.
B r yant , A nita Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Vintage, 2004. Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000.
Br yant, Anita Born on March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, Anita Jane Green Bryant is best known for leading a crusade against gay rights in 1977. Prior to her incursion into the culture wars, this Southern Baptist was crowned Miss Oklahoma (1958), a runner-up in the Miss America pageant (1958), and a successful recording artist. As a singer, she performed on several occasions for President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House and offered the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at his funeral in 1973. In 1969, Bryant became a spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission and began appearing in a series of nationally televised orange juice commercials. That same year, she sang at the Rally for Decency in Miami, organized to protest an alleged act of indecent exposure by Jim Morrison, lead singer of the rock group The Doors. But Bryant is best known for being the figurehead of an antigay organization, Save Our Children from Homosexuality, Inc. (SOC). SOC was founded in January 1977 after commissioners in Dade County, Florida, passed a human rights ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of “sexual or affectional preference” in the areas of housing, employment, and public accommodations. Bryant and SOC protested the ordinance on the grounds that it would “discriminate against children’s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community.” SOC reflected the assumption that gays target children, stating that “recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality—for since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.” By working with activists from conservative churches and Orthodox synagogues, SOC gathered enough signatures to have the ordinance put to a public referendum. SOC was heavily supported by groups that opposed abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. On June 7, 1977, the Metro-Dade gay rights ordinance was repealed by a 69 percent majority of voters; half of all eligible voters cast ballots in the referendum—an unprecedentedly high turnout for a special election. The referendum inspired a series of legislative and electoral backlashes against gay rights. While some states and municipalities banned gay adoption rights and marriages, others drafted legislation to ban gay organizations from college campuses and prohibit gays from holding government jobs. Gay rights bills were defeated in numerous legislatures. Dade County served as the blueprint for similar
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campaigns against gay rights in Kansas, Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota. The efforts perpetuated the notion that gays sought to molest children or convert them into homosexuals. Following her victory in Miami, Bryant’s organization, now called Protect America’s Children, assisted the Briggs Initiative in California, which sought to ban gays and lesbians from being schoolteachers. Bryant’s lucrative entertainment career suffered after the Dade County vote. She lost a number of show contracts and her role as spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission. She had simply become too controversial, and her promotional appearances and musical tours were vigorously protested by gays and lesbians across the United States and Canada. In 1978, Bryant and her husband, Bob Green, founded Anita Bryant Ministries Christian Heritage Institute, which offered religious counseling to gays and lesbians so they could become heterosexual. After the couple divorced in 1980, ending a twenty-year marriage, Green took over leadership of Anita Bryant Ministries and renamed it Crusade for Morality. In the meantime, Bryant was shunned by many of the religious conservatives who had previously supported her. She continued campaigning on behalf of religious conservative causes, though by the mid-1980s her public appearances had become increasingly intermittent. She remarried in 1990 and afterward attempted to resurrect her singing career in small towns in Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee. Bryant’s legacy in the American culture wars is complex. She served as the figurehead for the conservative backlash against gay civil rights. Her campaign crafted the rhetoric of child protection that to this day underpins antigay social movements and legislative campaigns. Yet Bryant’s efforts also reinvigorated the commitment of the gay and lesbian communities to political activism and public visibility. The attempts by her organizations to push homosexuality back into the closet galvanized sexually variant individuals to become politically active. In 1998, Miami-Dade County passed a new ordinance protecting gays from discrimination, and in 2002 the measure withstood a referendum repeal effort. Gill Frank See also: Beauty Pageants; Censorship; Equal Rights Amendment; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Lesbians; Rock and Roll; Sex Offenders; Southern Baptist Convention.
Further Reading Adams, Cheryl. Gay Liberation Today: An Exchange of Views. New York: Pathfinder, 1977. Bryant, Anita. The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality. Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1977. ———. A New Day. Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1992.
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B uchanan, Pat
Buchanan, Pat Journalist, presidential adviser and speechwriter, and three-time presidential candidate, the conservative populist Pat Buchanan is perhaps most noted for his “culture war” speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. In that speech, delivered in support of President George H.W. Bush (who had defeated him in the Republican primaries), Buchanan insisted that “this election is about much more than who gets what,” and that the nation faces a “cultural war . . . religious war . . . as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” Condemned by many as overly pugnacious and mean-spirited, applauded by many others as an effective rallying cry for the Republican faithful, Buchanan’s speech sought to frame the 1992 election in cultural terms and to place the Republican Party on the side of tradition and virtue. Born in Washington, D.C., on November 2, 1938, Patrick Joseph Buchanan was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Catholic high school and Georgetown University (BA, English and philosophy, 1961). After earning his MA from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1962, he began his career as a journalist with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. A supporter of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and a member of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, Buchanan went on to positions in the Nixon administration as an opposition researcher, speechwriter, and political adviser. After a brief stint in the Ford White House, Buchanan returned to journalism as a columnist and television and radio commentator. He became popular as the conservative voice on CNN’s political debate show Crossfire, a position that he would hold, off and on, through the 1990s. Buchanan served as White House communications director during the second Reagan administration, from 1985 to 1987. He is the author of numerous books, including Right from the Beginning (1988); A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (1992); Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (2004); State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and the Conquest of America (2006); and Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart (2007). Buchanan sought the presidency three times, running unsuccessfully in the Republican primaries in 1992 and 1996 and as the Reform Party candidate in the 2000 general election. In 1992, he mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to President George H.W. Bush, garnering nearly 40 percent of the Republican vote in New Hampshire and more than 3 million primary votes in all. That campaign produced the “culture wars” speech, in which Buchanan drew a stark contrast between a mainstream, traditional, religious America represented
Conservative Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan celebrates his showing in the 1992 New Hampshire primary. In a historic speech at the GOP convention that August, he referred to “a culture war [and] religious war . . . for the soul of America.” (Steve Liss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
by Bush, Buchanan himself, and the Republican Party, and a relativistic, secular, unbelieving minority that had insinuated itself at the highest levels of American society, epitomized by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Democratic Party. Buchanan cited a host of political and cultural issues of concern to the Religious Right— anticommunism, abortion, gay rights, feminism, threats to Judeo-Christian values, strict constructionist jurisprudence, and law and order—each time linking the traditionalist position with the Republican Party and Bush. At the end of this list of traditional religious and political virtues, Buchanan offered his famous assessment of the contemporary American scene, referring to the “cultural [and] religious war” for the soul of the nation, in which “Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” Buchanan’s “our side” clearly represented, in his mind, God’s side. Specifically, he distinguished Bush’s Republican conservatism from Clinton’s call for “change,” stating, “[A]bortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat—that’s change, all right. But . . . is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.”
B uck ley, William F. , Jr.
Although many of his positions on culture war issues mirror those of the right wing of the GOP, Buchanan’s relationship with the party has been rocky at best. His strong convictions on isolationism and economic nationalism have led him to sharply criticize U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and to oppose such treaties as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Buchanan has also taken a strong stance against immigration from Mexico, opposing any proposals for guest-worker status or amnesty for illegal immigrants. His objections to immigration policy are rooted in his view of the United States as the product of a white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking cultural heritage that is endangered by a rising tide of immigrants who refuse to learn English and assimilate. Buchanan’s isolationism has put him at odds with many neoconservatives, especially those in the George W. Bush administration who engineered the invasion of Iraq. Also, Jewish conservative intellectuals have been troubled by certain of Buchanan’s statements about Israel, regarding them as anti-Semitic. In 2002, Buchanan founded the American Conservative, a magazine devoted to defense of his brand of “paleo-conservatism” in the face of what he saw as the imperialist ambitions of Bush and his neoconservative allies. Andrew R. Murphy See also: Anti-Semitism; Bush Family; Catholic Church; Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Election of 2000; Gay Rights Movement; Globalization; Illegal Immigrants; Israel; Neoconservatism; Religious Right; Republican Party; Women in the Military.
Further Reading Buchanan, Pat. “The Election is About Who We Are: Taking Back Our Country.” In The New Christian Right: Political and Social Issues, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and Martha May, 26–29. New York: Garland, 1996. Corn, David. “Buchanan Has a Party.” Nation, May 1, 2000. Grant, George. Buchanan: Caught in the Crossfire. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1996. Podhoretz, Norman. “Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup.” Commentary, May 1992. Shapiro, Edward S. “Pat Buchanan and the Jews.” Judaism 45:2 (Spring 1996): 226–35.
B u c k l ey, W i l l i a m F. , J r. Regaled as the catalyst of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr., actively participated in the culture wars with years of political involvement as an author, magazine editor, television host, and public activist. He founded the National Review in the mid1950s to campaign against liberalism, which he saw as undermining the nation’s moral fortitude. Along the way he influenced both Barry Goldwater and Ronald
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Reagan. Buckley’s critics, liberals as well as moderates, often found his conservative ideology hostile to civil liberties. Some on the political right recoiled at his libertarian positions, such as advocating the legalization of drugs and the use of medical marijuana. The son of a wealthy oilman, William Frank “Bill” Buckley, Jr., was born in New York City on November 24, 1925. Raised as a devout Roman Catholic, Buckley would later approach politics with a moral code based on the tenets of that faith—as he explained in Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997). Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1942– 1943); served in World War II as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army (1944–1946); and studied economics, political science, and history at Yale University (BA, 1950). After a brief stint with the Central Intelligence Agency as a covert operative in Mexico (1951–1952), Buckley wrote for the American Mercury (1952–1955) and then founded the National Review, a biweekly conservative magazine he edited for many years (1955–1990). In addition to writing some three dozen nonfiction books, he is the author of the popular spy novel series featuring the character Blackford Oakes. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush awarded Buckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The National Review, with William Rusher as publisher, provided a conservative forum on current events chiefly aimed at opinion makers. It also spurred greater unity within the broad conservative movement, including critics of the New Deal, anticommunist Cold War hawks, free-market purists, and social conservatives. In addition to his role as magazine editor, Buckley hosted a widely viewed television program on current affairs, Firing Line (1966–1999). The longest-running program on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), Firing Line featured prominent guests of all political and social persuasions whom Buckley engaged in debate on events and trends of the day. As moderator, Buckley was able to articulate his conservative ideology to a national audience, just as he had been doing since 1962 with his widely circulated syndicated column “On the Right.” Buckley’s first public controversy followed the publication of God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951), an account of his undergraduate experience that generated a national debate on the ideology of academics. The book castigated Yale for abandoning its Christian roots, turning against capitalism, and hiring faculty with “intellectual drive toward agnosticism and collectivism.” The author recommended the dismissal of professors guilty of advancing “values . . . against the public welfare.” In McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), cowritten with brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, Buckley took a similarly rigid line in defense of McCarthyism, calling it “a movement around which men of goodwill and stern morality can close ranks.” Critics over the years, includ-
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Author, magazine publisher, and public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr., helped raise conservatism to the center of political discourse in America. He has been called the “spiritual father of the movement” as well as “the scourge of American liberalism.” (Truman Moore/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)
ing the novelist Gore Vidal, accused Buckley of having fascist tendencies. Wishing to build a conservative base for the future, as well as to offset the “liberal” atmosphere found on college campuses, Buckley in 1960 helped establish Young Americans for Freedom. This organization, which grew to 55,000 members by the late 1960s, was a kind of training center for young conservatives. In 1961, Buckley helped form the New York Conservative Party, and in 1965 he ran as its candidate for mayor of New York City; he won less than 14 percent of the vote and afterward wrote a book about the adventure, The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966). Buckley’s political strategy also entailed attacks on the extreme right, in particular “Birchism” (Robert Welch and his John Birch Society) and “Randism” (Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy). Buckley saw these fringe groups as bringing discredit on the entire conservative movement and potentially harming the Republican Party. The John Birch Society was, in his estimation, a kooky group of conspiracy theorists with anticommunist positions beyond rational conservatism. In 1957, Buckley published an unfavorable review of Rand’s popular 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged that dismissed Objectivists as antiChristian, anarchistic, and too extreme in their support of capitalism. He also intervened to block Rand’s involvement in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Years later, Buckley published In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992) to warn that anti-Semitism in conservative ranks was a political liability; among those he criticized in this
regard was conservative commentator and three-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. During the Nixon administration, Buckley was an advisory board member of the U.S. Information Agency (1969–1972). He also served a short stint as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly (1972), afterward exposing the organization’s “anti-Americanism” in United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey (1974). With Reagan’s ascendancy the following decade, Buckley found himself an advocate for the establishment. Like Reagan, Buckley was in essence a cold warrior, sharing the view that coexistence with the Soviet Union was not a sustainable option. Just as Buckley came to regard President Richard Nixon as too liberal because of his federal intervention in the economy, he later denounced President George W. Bush as not being a true conservative because of his interventionist foreign policy. Buckley’s criticism of Bush and the Iraq War was in essence a rejection of neoconservatism. A supporter of globalization, Buckley was criticized by populist conservatives who believed that America’s economy was being damaged by unfair international trade agreements. In an early book titled Up from Liberalism (1959), Buckley sided with white southerners who opposed federal intervention in ending segregation—a position he recanted in a 2004 interview. William F. Buckley died at his desk in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008. Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; Anti-Semitism; Buchanan, Pat; Catholic Church; Cold War; Goldwater, Barry; John Birch Society; McCarthyism; National Review; Neoconservatism; Rand, Ayn; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Soviet Union and Russia; Student Conservatives; Vidal, Gore.
Further Reading Bridges, Linda, and John R. Coyne, Jr. Strictly Right: William F. Buckley and the Conservative Movement. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Buckley, William F., Jr., Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches with New Commentary by the Author. Roseville, CA: Forum, 2000. ———. Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004. Judis, John B. William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Winchell, Mark Royden. William F. Buckley, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
B u d e n z , L o u i s F. A former communist who during the McCarthy era testified at about sixty Red Scare trials and hearings, Louis Francis Budenz was regarded as either an opportunist or a prodigal son. Critics accused him of being a stooge who
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enjoyed financial gain while shaping his testimony to suit the needs of federal investigators. Others applauded him for returning to his senses after experiencing the treachery and deceit of the communist underworld. Born into a devoutly Catholic family on July 17, 1891, in Indianapolis, Budenz became a political progressive in harmony with his religion. After obtaining a law degree at Indianapolis Law School in 1912, he became interested in labor and social justice through his work with various Catholic organizations. After marrying a divorced woman, however, he was excommunicated from the church. In 1920, he became publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union. The following year, he served as editor of Labor Age and worked as a strike organizer. In 1934, as national secretary of A.J. Muste’s Conference for Progressive Labor Action, the forerunner of the short-lived American Workers Party, Budenz was a central figure in the violent Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio. The following year, he joined the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), serving as a labor organizer as well as managing editor of the Daily Worker. Seeking to mix leftism with nationalism, Budenz pursued economic justice by developing an “American approach” to revolution. He joined the CPUSA when he thought it was receptive to his ideas. During this period, the Communist Party, desirous of influencing the labor movement, introduced the slogan “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.” Budenz gradually became disillusioned with communism, however, and rejoined the Catholic Church. On October 10, 1945, under the guidance of Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, he left the CPUSA and took teaching positions first at Notre Dame University and then at Fordham University in New York City. Budenz informed the FBI about the CPUSA’s inner workings, eventually identifying nearly 400 individuals he claimed to be communists. In 1948, he joined Whittaker Chambers in testifying against Alger Hiss. He reportedly received thousands of dollars for his activities as a former communist. Louis Budenz died on April 27, 1972, in Newport, Rhode Island. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Catholic Church; Chambers, Whittaker; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Conspiracy Theories; Hiss, Alger; Hoover, J. Edgar; Labor Unions; McCarthyism; Sheen, Fulton J.; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Budenz, Louis F. The Bolshevik Invasion of the West. Linden, NJ: Bookmailer, 1966. ———. This Is My Story. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947.
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Budenz, Margaret. Streets. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1979. Chapman, Roger. “Louis Francis Budenz’s Journey from the Electric Auto-Lite Strike to the Communist Party and Beyond.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 73 (Summer–Fall 2001): 118–41. Packer, Herbert L. Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962.
Bullard, Rober t D. A controversial sociologist and environmental justice activist, Robert D. Bullard has argued that racial inequality and “housing apartheid” in the United States have caused minority communities to be inordinately and adversely affected by industrial pollution. According to his writings, racism, and not economic inequality, is the root cause of environmental injustice. This position has put him at odds not only with political conservatives, but also with many in the environmental movement. Robert Doyle Bullard was born on December 21, 1946, in Elba, Alabama. He studied government at Alabama A&M University (BS, 1968) and sociology at Atlanta (later Clark Atlanta) University (MA, 1972) and Iowa State University (PhD, 1976). He also served a tour with the U.S. Marines (1968–1970). Prior to becoming the Ware Professor of Sociology at Clark Atlanta in 1994, Bullard taught at a number of institutions in the South and on the West Coast. In September 1994, he established the Environmental Justice Resource Center (EJRC) at Clark Atlanta and assumed its directorship. Working closely with activists, the EJRC has served as a clearinghouse for scientific, technical, and legal information on environmental justice issues. Environmental justice became a topic of academic inquiry and an essential component of the contemporary civil rights movement following the publication of Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (1990), which documented locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) in black communities in Houston and Dallas, Texas; Emelle, Alabama; Institute, West Virginia; and Alsen, Louisiana. According to Bullard’s research, black communities are more likely than white neighborhoods to be affected by environmentally unsafe LULUs. Bullard was one of the main organizers of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, held in October 1991 in Washington, D.C. The four-day gathering led to the issuance of “The Principles of the Environmental Justice Movement,” a call for people of color to unite on environmental issues and to join the mainstream environmental movement. Publicity of the summit led President George H.W. Bush to create the Office of Environmental Equity (OEE) in the Environmental Protection Agency. Later, Bullard per-
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suaded President Bill Clinton to expand the OEE and to establish the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC); Bullard served on the NEJAC from 1994 to 1996. Some supporters of environmental justice have criticized Bullard’s claims of environmental racism, arguing that economic inequality rather than race is the root cause of environmental injustice. Beyond that, many environmentalists regard the environmental justice movement as a NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) reaction on behalf of minorities that disregards the broader ecological issues. Conservative critics of the environmental justice movement argue that the examples used to prove environmental racism, such as increased cancer and birthdefect rates in minority communities, may not be directly attributable to industrial pollution but may be a function of dietary habits or even statistical anomalies. Sean Parson See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Environmental Movement; Race.
Further Reading Bullard, Robert D. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press, 1993. ———. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990. ———. The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005. Cole, Luke W., and Sheila R. Foster. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Bunche, Ralph Ralph Bunche, an African-American scholar, teacher, and celebrated United Nations diplomat, documented pervasive discrimination against blacks and became an icon of the movement for racial equality. The son of a barber, Ralph Johnson Bunche was born on August 7, 1904, in Detroit. He later studied international relations at the University of California at Los Angeles (BA, summa cum laude, 1927) and Harvard University (MA, 1928; PhD, 1934). For years he was affiliated with Howard University, as either a professor or an administrator (1928–1950). He also briefly taught at Harvard University (1950–1952). Bunche’s research in Africa shaped his vision of racial problems as global, and he devoted his life to increasing civil rights for African Americans and independence for people under colonial rule. A vocal Marxist during the 1930s, Bunche criticized white liberals for timidity, black leaders for neglecting the masses, and American democracy for failing to address racism and poverty. In 1936, he co-founded the National
Negro Congress to promote an interracial movement of professional, white-collar, and unskilled workers. In 1940, however, he resigned from the organization because it had become communist infiltrated. In 1939 and 1940, Bunche participated in a study of African-American status sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and headed by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. Bunche accompanied Myrdal on field trips through the South, narrowly escaping brushes with racist mobs, and wrote several manuscripts analyzing black life, institutions, and leadership. The resulting book by Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), gave scholarly authority to the rising view that Americans must overcome racism in order to fulfill the country’s democratic ideals. A decade later, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court cited An American Dilemma in outlawing segregation in public schools. During World War II, Bunche was an adviser to the state department and the military as an expert on Africa and helped draft the trusteeship provisions for the United Nations. He went on to serve various capacities in the UN. From 1947 to 1949 he was the secretary of the UN Palestine Commission and was responsible for negotiating a peace settlement between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East following the establishment of Israel. For that endeavor Bunche was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize. Although the FBI investigated Bunche in 1953 and 1954 because of his earlier radicalism, his life was widely extolled as a rags-to-riches tale that discredited prejudice and showed the nation’s progress toward equality. During the 1960s, black militants such as Malcolm X targeted Bunche as a different kind of symbol: an accommodating black under white jurisdiction. Yet Bunche spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, demonstrated for voting rights in Alabama beside Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965, and continued to identify with black freedom struggles until his death on December 9, 1971. Robert Weisbrot See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Israel; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Marxism; Race; United Nations; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Henry, Charles P. Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? New York: New York University Press, 1999. Urquhart, Brian. Ralph Bunche: An American Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
B u s h Fa m i l y The Bush political dynasty, with three generations of electoral success at the state and national levels, is
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sometimes viewed as the Republican counterpart to the Kennedy family. With deep roots in the eastern establishment, the Bushes—stalwart Republicans— have been praised for their strong commitment to public service, and criticized for being too dependent on old money and family connections. The politics of the Bushes have evolved dramatically as the GOP has been transformed by southerners and social conservatives, often placing them in the thick of the culture wars. The Bush political brand traces back to patriarchs Samuel Prescott Bush (1863–1948) and George Herbert Walker (1875–1953), captains of business and industry during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The financial and social capital they accumulated enabled subsequent generations of Bushes to gain access to the top tier of the American society. The families and fortunes merged when Samuel’s son, Prescott, married George’s daughter, Dorothy.
Prescott Bush Prescott Sheldon Bush was born on May 15, 1895, in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from Yale University (BA, 1917), before serving in the U.S. Army during World War I. After amassing considerable wealth working with his father in banking, Bush entered politics. Although he failed in his first bid for a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut (1950), two years later he prevailed in a special election. As a member of the Senate (1952–1963), he maintained a low profile as a moderate Republican. He was pro-business, fiscally conservative, and an advocate of strong national defense. However, he also supported progressive social policies such as civil rights reform and antipoverty programs. Staunchly anticommunist, he nonetheless denounced the red-baiting tactics of fellow senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), voting to censure him—a point notably recalled by Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas in a 1992 presidential debate against Prescott’s son, George H.W. Bush, when the latter’s campaign questioned Clinton’s patriotism.
George H.W. Bush Following Prescott Bush’s retirement from the Senate, son George Herbert Walker Bush launched his own political career. Born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, George was a highly decorated aviator in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he excelled at Yale (BA, 1948) and then headed for Texas, where his family’s wealth and social connections facilitated his entry into the oil industry. By the early 1960s, Bush was on his way to becoming a millionaire and preparing to enter politics. Like his father, George H.W. Bush stumbled in his political debut, losing a U.S. Senate race in Texas (1964) when his opponent successfully branded him as a northeastern carpetbagger. Two years later, however,
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Bush won election to the House of Representatives, where he would serve two terms (1967–1971). As a moderate Republican, Bush supported “open housing” and family planning legislation, positions that would later cause him trouble with the GOP’s conservative wing. In 1970, Bush lost his second bid for the Senate, but as a consolation, President Richard Nixon appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1971–1973). Other appointments followed, including stints as chair of the Republican National Committee (1973–1974), envoy to China (1974–1975), and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1976–1977). Although Bush’s extensive government service positioned him well to run for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan was the star of the emerging conservative majority among Republicans. After defeating Bush in the primary campaign, Reagan chose him as his vice presidential running mate, much to the consternation of the party’s right wing. Bush served loyally for two terms as vice president (1981–1989), but, when he secured his party’s presidential nomination in 1988, conservatives recalled his moderate positions in Congress and his criticisms of Reagan’s economic program during the 1980 primary campaign. To assuage such concerns, Bush selected as his running mate the little-known Indiana senator J. Danforth “Dan” Quayle, whose outspoken conservative views would make him a lightning rod for controversy in the administration. Bush also sought to reposition himself as a strong social conservative, branding his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, as an extreme liberal who, as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” was on the “wrong side” of every issue in the culture wars (such as abortion, flag desecration, and capital punishment). Indeed, the Bush campaign ran a series of highly controversial television spots criticizing Dukakis’s positions on crime, including the notorious Willie Horton ad, successfully creating the impression that Dukakis was soft on law and order. Though the Horton ad provoked a firestorm of debate, it helped Bush soundly defeat Dukakis in the general election. Bush’s presidency (1989–1993) is best remembered for developments in foreign policy. His term coincided with the disintegration of the Eastern bloc, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Ironically, President Reagan received virtually all the credit for these events. Bush also organized and led the international coalition that drove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invading army out of Kuwait during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. Afterward, Bush crowed about ending “the Vietnam Syndrome,” though he was later criticized for failing to finish off Hussein’s regime—a situation notably redressed when his son, George W., became president. At home, Bush stoked considerable debate by continuing the so-called Reagan Revolution with a series
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of controversial domestic policy initiatives, including attempts to impose limits on abortion rights, supporting a constitutional amendment banning desecration of the American flag, and shifting the Supreme Court to the right. In this last regard, Bush’s appointment of Clarence Thomas, a staunch black conservative, to the high court led to explosive Senate confirmation hearings that centered on charges of sexual harassment and racism, providing one of the most dramatic and polarizing chapters of the culture wars. The Thomas nomination was widely seen as an attempt by Bush to redeem his standing among conservatives dismayed by his earlier appointment to the high court of David Souter, who proved to be more liberal than expected. Bush had also provoked the ire of his conservative base by calling for “a kinder, gentler nation,” thereby seeming implicitly to critique some of the more draconian aspects of the Reagan Revolution. He earned conservatives’ eternal enmity after agreeing to a modest tax increase, breaking his famous 1988 “no new taxes” campaign pledge. Accordingly, Bush faced a spirited challenge from his party’s right wing during the 1992 Republican primaries, when Patrick Buchanan tailored a campaign that appealed to cultural conservatives on a host of polarizing issues such as abortion, school prayer, immigration, and homosexuality. Bush prevailed over Buchanan but went on to lose the general election to Democrat Bill Clinton. In one of his last acts as president, Bush pardoned six high-ranking Reagan administration officials for their involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. The action was praised by those who felt the officials were victims of an overzealous special prosecutor, while critics accused Bush of completing a cover-up of the affair, including, possibly, his own role in the episode.
Brother Governors The abrupt termination of the political career of George H.W. Bush shifted the spotlight to two of his sons: George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut; and John “Jeb” Ellis Bush was born on February 11, 1953, in Midland, Texas. Though raised in Texas, both attended private high school in Massachusetts. George followed the family tradition, graduating from Yale (BA, 1968) before attending Harvard Business School (MBA, 1975). Jeb took a different path, graduating from the University of Texas (BA, 1974). George also served a five-year stint with the Texas Air National Guard (1968–1973) but was later accused of using family influence to get an assignment that would keep him out of Vietnam. Some would be troubled by Bush’s lack of combat experience, given the hawkish positions he adopted as president and the extent to which he seemed to relish his role as commander in chief. The latter was famously underscored in May 2003 when, under a large banner proclaiming “Mission
Accomplished,” he landed in a fighter jet aboard an aircraft carrier to announce, prematurely as it turned out, the end of major combat operations in the Iraq War. After graduating from Harvard, George W. Bush relied on family friends to gain entry into the oil business in Texas. He ran for a seat in Congress in 1978 but was defeated after his opponent accused him of trying to ride northeastern dynastic coattails into office. Bush returned to the oil business and spent much of the 1980s struggling to make headway in an industry beset by a collapse in prices. After a timely sale of his interest in a Texas energy company, Bush purchased a minority stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team, solidifying his state connections in advance of his run for governor in 1994. In that election, he defeated the highly popular incumbent Democrat, Ann Richards, surprising many who saw him as something of a privileged ne’er-do-well. He would be reelected in a landslide in 1998. As governor of Texas (1995–2000), Bush advanced a conservative agenda that was unabashedly pro-business, while also prioritizing tort and school reform. However, few issues he dealt with generated more publicity than the controversy surrounding the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker, a woman convicted and sentenced to death for her role in a gruesome double murder in 1983. While in prison, Tucker experienced a religious awakening and become a model inmate as well as an integral member of the prison ministry. As the date of her execution approached, Bush was deluged with appeals for clemency, including from such notable figures as Pope John Paul II, televangelist Pat Robertson, and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Bush allowed the execution to proceed as scheduled, maintaining that Texas law prevented him from doing otherwise. The controversy was revived when, in a magazine interview during the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush appeared to mock Tucker’s appeal for mercy. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, after completing his education, worked for several years as a banker in Texas and Venezuela, and then went into real estate development in Florida. He briefly served as Florida’s secretary of commerce (1987–1988) before making an unsuccessful bid to unseat the popular incumbent Democratic governor, Lawton Chiles, in 1994. Bush ran again in 1998 and this time won easily; he became the state’s first Republican governor elected to a second term when he won in a landslide in 2002. As governor (1999–2007), Bush was a moderate conservative. Several of his initiatives sparked considerable debate, including a statewide school-voucher program and his replacement of affirmative action admissions policies in higher education in favor of a “race neutral” approach. Governor Bush was also at the center of the disputed 2000 presidential election in which the outcome
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of the vote in Florida would determine the victor in the contest between his brother and Al Gore. Although Bush recused himself from the process in light of the obvious conflict of interest, doubts about his role in the recount were inevitable, given that he was the sitting governor. One of the most controversial episodes of Bush’s tenure involved the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman whose husband was locked in a protracted legal battle with her parents over whether to remove her from life support. After the Florida courts affirmed the husband’s right to remove the feeding tube in March 2005, President Bush interrupted a Texas vacation so he could sign an emergency measure passed by the Republican-led U.S. Congress transferring the case to federal court for review. The federal courts declined to get involved, however, and Schiavo passed away several days later. Pro-life advocates approved of the efforts to stop what they regarded as “judicial murder,” but others condemned what was widely perceived as highly politicized governmental meddling in a private family matter.
George W. Bush In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush prevailed over the incumbent vice president, Al Gore, in one of the closest and most controversial presidential contests in U.S. history. Although Bush campaigned as “a uniter, not a divider,” he implemented a series of decidedly conservative policies immediately upon taking office, raising doubts about the sincerity of his promise to mend the nation’s sharp political divisions. As a result, his two terms as president (2001–2009) sharply escalated the culture wars in a variety of ways. Bush put tax cuts and education reform at the top of his domestic agenda and had considerable success in these areas. During his first term, Congress enacted several rounds of broad-based tax cuts, and he won passage of a landmark education bill, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The law tied federal supplemental funding of state education to results on proficiency tests and made it easier for parents to remove their children from underperforming schools. Several years after the law’s enactment, reform supporters pointed to modest improvements in standardized test scores as evidence of the policy’s success. Detractors charged that the reform forced educators to “teach to the test” at the expense of genuine learning. Far more polarizing, however, were initiatives to advance a conservative social policy agenda. For example, in the name of promoting a “culture of life,” Bush (1) restored the Reagan-era ban on federal funds to any nongovernmental aid organization that offers or even mentions abortion services; (2) limited federally funded research on stem cells to existing lines in order to exclude usage of additional human embryonic organisms; (3) signed into law the Partial-Birth Abortion
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Ban Act (2003); (4) ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to undertake a new review of the safety of the FDA-approved drug RU-486, also known as the “morning after” pill; and (5) gave strong support to abstinence-only sex education programs. As part of his program of “compassionate conservatism,” Bush created the White House Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives to promote the work of religiously oriented charitable organizations. He also caused a stir by weighing in on other divisive cultural debates, such as whether the concept of intelligent design ought to be taught alongside evolution in the nation’s schools, a position the president embraced; and on the question of gay marriage, to which he was opposed. Accordingly, he supported the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which would constitutionally define marriage in the United States as a union of one man and one woman. These policies and stances delighted social and religious conservatives. Nevertheless, many others, including some moderate Republicans, saw the initiatives as an attempt to impose the policy preferences of the Religious Right on all Americans and, in some instances, as blurring the line of separation between church and state. Conservatives likewise welcomed the administration’s participation in a pair of pivotal Supreme Court cases—Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)—challenging affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan. Plaintiffs in the cases, backed by the Bush administration, charged that the school’s use of affirmative action in admissions amounted to a quota system and urged the high court to invalidate it. While the justices narrowly upheld the policy of affirmative action, they did order significant modifications to the way in which the university tailored its policies, allowing both supporters and critics of affirmative action to claim a modest victory in the cases. No aspect of George W. Bush’s presidency, however, provoked more contentious debate than his conduct of what the administration called the War on Terror, which began in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The administration sought to define the war as a Manichean cultural struggle, with Bush famously declaring in a speech before a joint session of Congress, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Accordingly, policymakers in the administration insisted that the asymmetrical nature of the War on Terror required that national security strategies be dramatically reconceptualized if the United States was to prevail in the struggle. As a result, many of the antiterror initiatives authorized by Bush raised vexing questions regarding the government’s ability to protect national security without unduly encroaching on core constitutional principles and national ideals. Among these initiatives were: (1) the indefinite detention and harsh treatment—perhaps
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even torture—by American authorities of those whom the administration referred to as “illegal combatants”; (2) reluctance to provide detainees with basic rights of habeas corpus and due process; (3) allegations that some prisoners were subjected to a practice known as “extraordinary rendition,” whereby they had been transferred to another nation and subjected to what some call “torture by proxy”; (4) and questions about how broad the government’s authority to conduct domestic surveillance ought to be. Supporters of the administration praised such measures as tough but necessary given the nature of the terrorist threat. However, many raised concerns that the administration’s basic approach to the War on Terror undermined the very ideals and principles it was fighting to defend. Equally controversial was the Bush Doctrine, the doctrine of preemptive war, which the administration invoked when invading Iraq in 2003 to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. In justifying the war, the administration made a concerted effort to link in the public’s mind memories of the terror attacks of September 11 to what it insisted was the imminent likelihood that the Iraqi dictator would obtain weapons of mass destruction. Defenders of the administration’s actions argued that the lesson of September 11 was that national security interests require going on the offense against possible threats; thus, it was argued, preemptive action against the Iraqi dictator was prudent. However, critics noted that there was no link between the September 11 attacks and the Hussein government; moreover, they argued, Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States, and the administration “cherry-picked” intelligence information to make a fallacious argument that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Preemptive war, critics warned, represented a radical and dangerous departure from the fundamental principles of American foreign policy. The War on Terror opened significant new fronts in the culture wars, as it pitted national security hawks, who demanded no holds barred in the pursuit of terrorists, against those who insisted terrorists can be fought without undermining cherished American principles. As he was nearing the end of his second term in office, the cumulative effects of five years of difficult and inconclusive struggle in Iraq, continued controversy over the handling of enemy combatants, and an economy teetering on the brink of recession saddled Bush with the lowest publicapproval ratings in the history of the modern presidency. It is certain that the legacy of George W. Bush will cast a long shadow over the fortunes of the Bush family dynasty well into the twenty-first century. Sven Dubie See also: Abortion; Affirmative Action; Capital Punishment; Cold War; Compassionate Conservatism; Election of 2000; Faith-Based Programs; Horton, Willie; Judicial Wars; Rea-
gan, Ronald; Republican Party; Schiavo, Terri; September 11; Stem-Cell Research; Tax Reform.
Further Reading Eksterowicz, Anthony J., and Glenn P. Hastedt, eds. The Presidencies of George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush: Like Father Like Son? New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008. Minutaglio, Bill. First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. New York: Times Books, 1999. Parmet, Herbert. George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee. New York: Scribner, 1997. Phillips, Kevin. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Schier, Steven E. Panorama of a Presidency: How George W. Bush Acquired and Spent His Political Capital. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009. Schweizer, Peter, and Rochelle Schweizer. The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Weisberg, Jacob. The Bush Tragedy. New York: Random House, 2008.
Busing , School Busing, often court ordered, represented an attempt to desegregate schools across the nation after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held that separate school systems on account of race are ipso facto unequal and therefore unconstitutional. The courts believed that it was necessary to bus students in order to redistribute them to achieve racial balance and end segregated school systems that reflected segregated housing patterns so common in many communities. Busing proved highly unpopular, leading to heated debates that focused on school quality, taxation, and the time children spent on the buses. In some cases, the anger aroused by busing necessitated that school buses be escorted by police. Among the most poignant illustrations of the culture wars was the 1976 antibusing protest in south Boston in which a white demonstrator used an American flag on a pole as a spear to attack a black man, a scene that was captured in a photograph that won a Pulitzer Prize. Polls over the years have shown that a majority of both whites and blacks oppose busing. School busing began in the late 1960s and was first addressed by the Supreme Court in Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg School District (1971). The case focused on a North Carolina school district where, given segregated housing patterns and the policies of the school system, more than half the African Americans attended schools that were 99 percent black. The ruling specified that it was necessary to end segregation resulting directly from school district policies but did not address discrimination
B y rd , Rober t C .
based on housing patterns in general. In other words, state-imposed segregation (de jure discrimination, or discrimination by law) was distinguished from unintentional discrimination (de facto discrimination, or discrimination from social factors not based on law). In this case, the Supreme Court approved the lower court’s decision to require busing as a means of achieving integration. The Swann decision led many school districts across the nation to begin implementing busing. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court ruled against a regional approach to school desegregation. At issue in this case was the Detroit school district, characterized by predominately black schools in a city surrounded by predominately white schools in the suburbs. The discrepancy between the Detroit school district and the surrounding communities was the result of white flight from the inner city, a national trend in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the migration was a response to the Brown and Swann decisions. In Milliken, the lower court’s decision to require suburban districts to work with urban districts in achieving integration was struck down. The Milliken decision reinforced white flight, as it led many white parents simply to move to predominantly white school districts. As a result, only black children were left in many urban districts. Once settled in a predominantly white district, parents no longer had to worry about their children being bused to black schools. The white flight resulted in lower tax bases for the inner cities, increasing the disparity of wealth between suburban white schools and predominantly black inner-city schools. In cases where school districts were racially mixed and integration was required by law, many white students opted for private school or homeschooling. Many school systems offered magnet schools in order to attract students of a different race to promote voluntary integration. The wealth disparity between school districts resulted in the next phase of litigation. In Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), the Supreme Court ordered equality in spending across school districts within a state to alleviate the effects of discrimination. But because the goal of desegregating predominantly black districts would be impossible in light of the Milliken decision, the debate was transformed from desegregation or integration of the schools to one of equal treatment of students. The lower court also had ordered raising taxes on inner-city residents to increase funding for inner-city schools, but the Supreme Court repealed the tax increase as a violation of the “separation of powers.” The Court upheld equality in per-pupil spending, but left it up to the legislature to work out the funding details. In many respects, the debate over busing to achieve desegregation has come full circle. The courts now accept de facto segregation in housing patterns and hence school
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districts. In lieu of attempting to integrate the schools, the judiciary has focused on ensuring equal resources to all students regardless of race. Anthony C. Gabrielli See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Civil Rights Movement; Homeschooling; Race.
Further Reading Jones, Andrew G. “Busing, ‘White Flight,’ and the Role of Developers in the Continuous Suburbanization of Franklin County, Ohio.” Urban Affairs Review 34:2 (1998): 340–59. Lukas, Anthony. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Knopf, 1985. Riddle, David. “Race and Reaction in Warren, Michigan, 1971 to 1974: Bradley v. Milliken and the Cross-District Busing Controversy.” Michigan Historical Review 26:2 (2000): 1–50. Rossell, Christine. The Carrot or the Stick for School Desegregation Policy: Magnet Schools or Forced Busing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
By rd, Rober t C . Elected nine times to the U.S. Senate, most recently in 2006, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia made his mark as a maverick politician and socially conservative Democrat, often defying categorization in the culture wars. Born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr., in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, on November 20, 1917, he was adopted (and renamed) by maternal relatives in West Virginia after his mother’s death in the 1918 influenza pandemic. The valedictorian of his high school class, Byrd did not first go to college but worked at a series of odd jobs. During World War II, he was a welder in ship construction. After ten years of night classes, Byrd completed law school at American University (JD, 1963), only later obtaining his undergraduate degree from Marshall University (BA, 1994). Famous for fiddle playing while electioneering, Byrd first held public office in West Virginia’s lower house (1946–1950) and later in the state senate (1950–1952). This was followed by three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1952–1958). Since first being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1958, Byrd has served in numerous leadership capacities, including majority whip (1971–1976), majority leader (1977– 1980, 1987–1988), minority leader (1981–1986), and president pro tempore (1989–1994, 2001–2003, 2007–). In February 2007, he became the longestserving senator, surpassing the record set by Strom Thurmond (R-SC).
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Byrd’s first major controversy was accounting for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan during the 1940s, an affiliation revealed during his 1952 congressional bid. Although he claimed to have been attracted to the KKK because of its anticommunism, many remained convinced that there were racist motives. Later, he filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Subsequently, Byrd apologized for both his KKK past and his opposition to the civil rights movement, but critics noted that he is the only senator to have voted against the only two blacks appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court—Thurgood Marshall (1967) and Clarence Thomas (1991). In 2001, he was embroiled in controversy after referring to “white niggers” during an interview on the Fox News channel. For fiscal conservatives, Byrd represents liberal spending. Taking advantage of his many years as a member (often serving as chair) of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Byrd is said to have arranged numerous “pork projects” for his state. During his 2000 reelection campaign, claiming credit for directing $1 billion in federal grants to his state, he said, “West Virginia has always had four friends: God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Carter’s Liver Pills, and Robert C. Byrd.” Known for carrying a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his coat pocket and for regularly quoting passages from it during legislative debates, Byrd in 2004 amended a budget bill to include a provision requiring all colleges receiving federal aid to hold an education program on the U.S. Constitution each September 17 (Constitution Day). Republicans have accused Byrd of ignoring the
Constitution in 1999 when he offered a resolution that would have dismissed the impeachment charges against Bill Clinton, despite his believing that the president had committed crimes. In actuality, Byrd disliked Clinton and several times refused to attend his State of the Union addresses. As he later explained, “His lifestyle and mine were so different I didn’t care about coming to hear him.” But of the dozen presidents holding office during Byrd’s time on Capitol Hill, he disliked George W. Bush the most. In 2002, Byrd opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which he called a “snake” for giving too much power to the executive branch. Byrd also voted against the Iraq War resolution that year, after making an impassioned speech that some would later regard as prophetic. In Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (2004), he castigated President Bush for abuse of power. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Civil Rights Movement; Clinton Impeachment; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. ———. Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2005. U.S. Senate. “Tributes to the Honorable Robert C. Byrd in the Senate.” Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990.
Watergate disclosures, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was established with additional limits set on campaign donations. The major remaining loophole involved what came to be called “soft money” contributions. Although “hard money” contributions (to a specific candidate’s campaign) were limited, contributors were free to make unlimited contributions to the political parties for socalled party-building activities. This shifted the burden of solicitation from the individual candidates to state and national party commissions. Arguably, this constituted an improvement, since it insulated individual politicians from direct obligation to large donors. As soon as the loopholes were figured out, however, the influence of special interests on legislation continued more or less unabated. This led to yet another round of campaign finance reform, especially after the 2000 election. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Bill—after its two Senate sponsors, John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI)— sought to severely limit soft money activities by political parties. Once again, however, before the bill was even passed, articles appeared in both the professional and popular press outlining the loopholes. The issue of campaign finance reform was eclipsed entirely by the so-called “K Street Project” of Republican congressional leaders during the George W. Bush administration. The K Street Project left all subtlety aside and instituted an open policy of mutuality between special interest lobbyists and the Republican Party. The GOP gained in the relationship in the form not only of swelling campaign war chests, but also of well-paid jobs for friends and family, expensive travel, elite dining, and exclusive social gatherings. Washington lobbyists, in exchange, gained all but unfettered access to politicians whose vote directly affected their industries. Bills with complete sections written word-for-word by lobbyists were regularly introduced; in some cases the lobbyists were seen on the House floor making last-minute text changes before the bills were dropped into the hopper. Such unconcealed influence peddling was unprecedented in modern American history and was made possible only because the normal channels of congressional self-regulation were clogged. A strong Republican majority in both houses, combined with a purposeful gutting of the House Ethics Committee’s power to regulate member behavior, left the doors open to the kinds of abuses that subsequently occurred. The failure of campaign finance reform was highlighted by the scandal involving Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist and Bush supporter who in 2006 pled guilty to multiple felony counts pertaining in part to the corruption of public officials. In light of these revelations, campaign finance reform has come to be seen as less important than certain
Campaig n Finance Refor m Among the most enduring features of American politics is a popular suspicion that politicians are more influenced by special interests than by the general welfare of the nation. While bribery, graft, and other forms of overt corruption have long been illegal, the American electoral process leaves the door open to a more covert avenue of influence. Since candidates for public office must amass great sums of money to fund their campaigns, they are vulnerable to influence from large contributors. Campaign finance reform in its many forms and incarnations is in essence the effort to place barriers between those who contribute to campaign war chests and the influence this inevitably exerts over the recipients. Those assigned the task of cultivating and maintaining contributor enthusiasm naturally look for loopholes in reform legislation; that is, they seek new ways for contributors to show their appreciation to politicians willing to bend the system in their favor. As the loopholes are found and exploited, they become the normal way of conducting business, eventually sparking calls for a new round of campaign finance reform legislation. Since the 1950s, the Republican Party has been the main recipient of largesse from the corporate business and managerial class, while the Democratic Party has been the main recipient of largesse from the professional and, through labor unions, working classes. Generally speaking, when a Democratic politician rails against the undue influence of special interests, he or she is pointing a finger at large corporations; the same speech coming from a Republican candidate is likely to point at big labor and trial lawyers as the villains. Proposals for campaign finance reform have focused on how money can be raised, how much donors can give, and how money can be spent—up to and including proposals for 100 percent public financing of political campaigns. The fact that politicians of both parties benefit from the status quo and contributions from special interests leads in no small part to the widespread cynicism regarding reform efforts. Although campaign finance reform dates back to at least the 1860s, the contemporary movement can be traced to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971. This legislation, passed by a Democraticcontrolled Congress and aimed largely at the Nixon administration in light of rumors of sacks full of cash being passed around in closed offices, basically required public disclosure of the sources of campaign contributions and transparency in campaign expenditures. In wake of the 67
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customs of legislative procedure—especially so-called earmarks, whereby substantive measures can be added to bills without vote or publicity. If the larger bill passes, the earmark passes as well. Earmarks can be used to fund special projects, protect specific industries from legal action, or make special exemptions to federal regulations, among other things. It is widely suggested that the smart money from special interests is aimed at earmarking legislation, and real reform to the system must include the curtailment of such practice. Yet, while opposition to earmarking is strong and bipartisan at the grassroots level, politicians of both parties benefit from the practice—making curtailment unlikely. Daniel Liechty See also: Bush Family; DeLay, Tom; Democratic Party; Labor Unions; McCain, John; Nixon, Richard; Republican Party; Watergate.
Further Reading Continetti, Matthew. The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Corrado, Anthony. Campaign Finance Reform: Beyond the Basics. New York: Century Foundation Press, 2002. Smith, Bradley A. Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Urofsky, Melvin I. Money and Free Speech: Campaign Finance Reform and the Courts. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005.
C a m p o l o , A n t h o ny “ To ny ” A Baptist minister representative of the progressive wing of evangelicals, and a popular speaker and author, Anthony “Tony” Campolo has been a vocal opponent of the Religious Right, denouncing it as less than biblical. He shares leanings with the Christian progressives Jim Wallis and Ron Sider. Born Anthony Campolo on February 25, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of a union organizer, he studied at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, where beginning in 1965 he taught sociology. He obtained a PhD at Temple University in 1968 and ran for Congress as a Democratic candidate in 1976. Although subjected to a charge of heresy raised by pastors of the Evangelical Free Church in 1985, he was cleared by the Christian Legal Society. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Campolo was a spiritual counselor to President Bill Clinton. As a participant in the culture wars, Campolo has argued that neither of the two main political parties represents the Christian faith. Like the Religious Right, he is against abortion and same-sex marriage, but he thinks that many evangelicals have been unloving in articulating
those positions and have allowed those issues to define their political views too narrowly. In his writings on the culture wars in evangelical churches, Campolo depicts a struggle between fundamentalists and modernists. He regards the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by theological conservatives during the 1980s as a gain for fundamentalism. According to Campolo, traditional modernists focused attention on the Social Gospel and were less concerned about evangelism; fundamentalists focused on evangelism but, because they regarded the world as “lost,” saw efforts for social justice as equivalent to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Evangelicals, who rejected the antiintellectualism of fundamentalists, were urged by leaders such as Carl Henry, often to no avail, to apply the whole gospel of evangelizing and promoting social justice. Many of today’s evangelicals, laments Campolo, represent a new strain of fundamentalism. Over time, largely in reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), evangelicals became politicized but, like the fundamentalists, harbored pessimism about society. Consequently, many of today’s evangelicals are not interested in social justice and reject political progressivism, instead bolstering the Religious Right and aligning with the Republican Party. Campolo has challenged evangelicals to care more about children already born. “I have three things I’d like to say today,” he began many speeches during the 1980s. “First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worst is that you’re more upset that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” He has complained that the Christian Coalition cares more about tax cuts for the wealthy than the plight of the poor, whom he says the Bible refers to 2,000 times. Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Anti-Intellectualism; Christian Coalition; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Progressive Christians Uniting; Religious Right; Roe v. Wade (1973); Same-Sex Marriage; Sider, Ron; Southern Baptist Convention; Wallis, Jim.
Further Reading Campolo, Tony. Can Mainline Denominations Make a Comeback? Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1995. ———. Is Jesus a Republican or a Democrat? Dallas: World Books, 1995. ———. Speaking My Mind. Nashville, TN: W. Publishing Group, 2004. Mason, John Oliver. “Meet Evangelist Tony Campolo.” Progressive, August 2005. Olsen, Ted. “The Positive Prophet.” Christianity Today, January 2003.
C apital P unishment
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Canada
Capital Punishment
Many Americans perceive few major differences between the United States and Canada. On particular moral and social issues, however, Canada has come to play a significant role in the contemporary culture wars. For example, considering that Canadians tend to be more liberal than Americans on issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and gay rights, it is not surprising that American conservatives may formulate negative comments about Canada. Canada’s refusal to take part in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, as well as its recognition of same-sex marriage and its softer stance on marijuana possession, sparked attacks from conservative advocates, journalists, and politicians in the United States. In April 2004, conservative television host Bill O’Reilly of Fox News called for a boycott on Canadian goods and services after two American military deserters fled to Canada. The desertions were a reminder that thousands of American draft dodgers had sought refuge in Canada during the Vietnam War, which created a significant cultural and political issue for both countries. On the liberal side of America’s ideological divide, views about Canada are generally more positive. In Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine, for example, Canada is depicted as a much safer and more peaceful country than the United States, where gun violence and fear are seen as widespread. And Canada has enacted reforms that many liberal politicians would like to implement in the United States, such as gay rights and universal health care. The conjunction of liberal reforms in Canada and the conservative ideology of the George W. Bush administration in the United States increased the apparent gap between these two countries at the start of the twentyfirst century. It is likely that on specific moral and social issues, Canada will remain a focus of conservatives and liberals involved in America’s culture wars.
Capital punishment, widely referred to as the death penalty, is the supreme act of punishment that over the years has been imposed for major criminal offenses, such as murder, sexual assault, and treason. The most common method of execution in the United States today is lethal injection, but electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging, and the firing squad have also been used since the 1970s. From 1930 to 2008, the United States carried out a total of 4,900 executions (including 36 by federal authorities). Although a vast majority of the cases involved murder, less than 1 percent of homicides in America result in the death penalty.
Daniel Béland See also: Abortion; Capital Punishment; Gay Rights Movement; Gun Control; Health Care; Moore, Michael; O’Reilly, Bill; Same-Sex Marriage; School Shootings; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Banting, Keith, George Hoberg, and Richard Simeon, eds. Degrees of Freedom: Canada and the United States in a Changing World. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Grabb, Edward, and James Curtis, eds. Regions Apart: The Four Societies of Canada and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lipset, Seymour Martin. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge, 1990.
The “Modern Era” In the culture wars, aside from the ages-old philosophical and moral debate, the death penalty has been controversial because of issues pertaining to race, the moral culpability of the mentally handicapped and juveniles, and wrongful convictions. Many of the U.S. Supreme Court cases on capital punishment have been split verdicts, indicative of political polarization that is part of the judicial wars. These cases have focused primarily on the issue of prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment” as guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Supporters of capital punishment, including groups such as the Texas-based Justice For All (founded in 1993), view it as carrying out justice and bringing closure to the victim’s family. They also argue that the death penalty deters crime and costs less than lifetime incarceration. However, criminologists report a lower murder rate in states without the death penalty and note the legal costs of imposing a death sentence as dwarfing what is spent for long-term imprisonment. Those against the death penalty regard it as an archaic practice, rooted in primitive vengeance and out of step with the advances of modern jurisprudence. They further note that, as one of the last industrialized nations still clinging to the death penalty, the United States is in league with China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, which together are responsible for 88 percent of the world’s executions (according to Amnesty International), while 135 other nations, including members of the European Union, have abandoned the practice. It could be argued that the Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008)—a 5–4 ruling that limits the death penalty to crimes involving loss of life, and excluding even the rape of an eight-year-old girl—indicates a subtle shift in American legal philosophy. A majority of Americans favor capital punishment, but the number has been slipping (65 percent in 2006 versus 80 percent in 1994, according to Gallup). As of 2008, thirty-six states plus the federal government (and the armed forces) had laws sanctioning capital punishment.
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Opponents of the death penalty demonstrate against the execution of a prisoner in California in 2005. Capital punishment has remained one of the most contentious and enduring social issues in modern America. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The so-called modern era of capital punishment in the United States began with the 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore, who had robbed and murdered two people the previous year. His death by firing squad, the subject of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Executioner’s Song (1979), was preceded by two landmark Supreme Court cases—Furman v. Georgia (1972) and Gregg v. Georgia (1976). The first decision, a 5–4 vote, overturned the death penalty on the grounds that its implementation was “freakish,” “random,” and therefore a violation of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The second decision, a 7–2 verdict, lifted the moratorium on executions following Furman, as a majority of the justices were convinced that the state of Georgia (along with others) had remedied the earlier constitutional concerns with corrective legislation. The Gregg decision explicitly ruled that capital punishment, if applied fairly, is not cruel and unusual but “an extreme sanction, suitable to the most extreme of crimes.” Some states, in an effort to avoid arbitrariness, automatically mandated the death penalty for certain crimes, an approach overruled by the high court in Woodson v. North Carolina (1976). From Gilmore’s death through February 2009, a total of 1,151 executions were carried out nationwide. A vast majority occurred in “red states,” including Texas (431), Virginia
(103), Oklahoma (89), and Florida (67). Kansas, New Hampshire, and the armed forces did not carry out any executions during this period, despite having the legal authority. Most of the fourteen states that do not have the death penalty are “blue states.”
Questions of Fairness and Decency The anti–death penalty movement has largely been represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the latter of which was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. These organizations have been joined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, which since the 1960s has made race an issue in the debate on capital punishment. Although African Americans constitute about 14 percent of the total U.S. population, they represented some 42 percent of the 3,263 individuals on “death row” in 2007. Of the total executions in the period 1976–2007, 34 percent were black. Supporters of the death penalty argue that race is not an issue if a person has in fact committed a capital crime; critics point to studies showing that blacks tried for murder are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites in the same legal situation. Statistics also
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show that cases involving white murder victims are more likely to result in the death penalty than those of black murder victims. This issue was considered in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), with the plaintiff arguing that capital punishment is a violation of “equal protection under the law” as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. In that 5–4 decision, the majority of the high court determined there was no proof the jury in Georgia had exercised racial discrimination, even though that justice system was reportedly eleven times more likely to seek the death penalty in cases involving blacks. Other controversies have focused on the moral culpability of offenders who are juveniles or mentally handicapped. In Supreme Court cases beginning with Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988) and Stanford v. Kentucky (1989), culminating with Roper v. Simmons (2005), it was ruled that executing a minor for a capital offense (or an adult for a capital offense committed when he or she was a minor) represents cruel and unusual punishment. The question of the mentally handicapped was brought to the fore with the Johnny Penry case, involving an individual who was found to be mentally retarded (mild to moderate) after his arrest for raping and murdering a woman in Texas in 1979. The Supreme Court ruled in Penry v. Lynaugh (1989) and again in Penry v. Johnson (2001) that mental retardation is a mitigating factor that must be taken into consideration in capital cases. Finally, in a similar case involving a 1996 robbery and murder in Virginia, the high court ruled 6–3 in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that the execution of the mentally ill is unconstitutional because it culturally represents cruel and unusual punishment. While all of these cases involved a changing standard for what constitutes “decency,” many supporters of the death penalty believe that any person, whether minor or mentally handicapped, who is able to function well enough to take another person’s life ought to be made to face the full extent of the law.
Lethal Injection and Wrongful Convictions A more recent debate on the topic of cruel and unusual punishment has focused attention on the most common method of carrying out executions: lethal injection. Critics maintain that death by lethal injection—which involves the intravenous administration of a series of toxic chemicals—is cruel because it paralyzes the body while that person is experiencing acute pain. They see this form of execution as on par with the electric chair, which also had originally been intended as a humanitarian and painless solution to carrying out the death penalty. In Bases v. Rees (2008), the Supreme Court ruled, 7–2, that lethal injection does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, declaring that some pain, whether accidental or as part of the death process, is permissible.
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Some people have turned against the death penalty because they have lost confidence in the justice system due to the many reports of wrongful convictions. In February 1997, the American Bar Association passed a resolution calling on states to desist from carrying out death sentences until ensuring that capital cases “are administered fairly and impartially” in order to “minimize the risk that innocent parties may be executed.” From 1973 to 2008, a total of 129 people had been released from death row after being acquitted, having charges against them dropped, or receiving a governor’s pardon based on newly discovered evidence. The average person experiencing a wrongful conviction spent nearly ten years in prison. In sixteen of these cases, DNA evidence brought exoneration. Most dramatically, in 2000, Illinois governor George Ryan cleared the state’s death row of 164 inmates and imposed a moratorium on executions, citing his concern about the state’s thirteen wrongful convictions. Prior to leaving office in 2003, Ryan commuted all the death sentences to life in prison. In the meantime, Congress passed the Justice For All Act of 2004, which contains a provision to expand post-conviction testing of DNA evidence to address the problem of wrongful convictions. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Gilmore, Gary; Judicial Wars; Mailer, Norman; McVeigh, Timothy; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Prison Reform; Red and Blue States; Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Ryan, George.
Further Reading Banner, Stuart. The Death Penalty: An American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Bedau, Hugo Adam, and Paul G. Cassel. Debating the Death Penalty: Should Americans Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Case. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Death Penalty Information Center Web site. www. deathpenaltyinfo.org. Kukathas, Uma. Death Penalty. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Ogletree, Charles J., and Austin Sarat. From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Carson, Rachel A marine biologist and author who helped inspire the postwar environmental movement, Rachel Carson is remembered primarily for her book Silent Spring (1962), a best-seller that documented the negative effects of unregulated chemical pesticides, in particular DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane). During a period
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in which 500 new chemicals were being introduced each year, Carson asserted that these “elixirs of death” and “biocides” were disrupting the balance of nature and responsible for the near extinction of forty species of birds, including the bald eagle and the robin. If the chemical industry was allowed to remain unregulated, she warned, the future might bring a “silent spring,” without songbirds. Thirty years after the publication of Silent Spring, Al Gore in Earth in the Balance (1992) warned of global warming and cited the importance of Carson in shaping his understanding of the natural environment. Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania. She studied biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women (AB, 1929) and Johns Hopkins University (am, 1932). After a stint with the zoology staff at the University of Maryland (1931–1936), Carson worked for the Bureau of Fisheries, later renamed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1936–1952). After publishing two books—Under the Sea (1941) and The Sea Around Us (1951), the latter winning the National Book Award—Carson left public service to write full-time. The final volume of her ocean trilogy, The Edge of the Sea (1956), focused on coastal life and further secured her reputation as a prose stylist. It was Silent Spring, however, that gained Carson enduring influence in modern environmental science and public policy. The work debuted as a series of articles in the New Yorker magazine and appeared in book form in September 1962. Its selection as a Book of the Month Club title helped spread the message. The National Agricultural Chemicals Association spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to discredit the work, unwittingly drawing more attention to Carson’s arguments (which were backed with fifty-four pages of reference material). Critics vilified the author as a spinster who cared more about insects than human beings; right-wing reactionaries warned that the book was a communist plot designed to damage the American economy. For her part, Carson warned that humans, not just insects and birds, were put at risk by exposure to dangerous chemicals. As she wrote in the book, “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons, distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.” Carson died on April 14, 1964, in Silver Spring, Maryland, a victim of breast cancer. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Meanwhile, in 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officially banned DDT, with a number of European countries following suit. Developed nations halted shipments of the insecticide to Third World countries, even though it was beneficial in killing mosquitoes and curbing malaria. Critics called the policy of withholding DDT a case of “eco-
colonialism.” In the first decade of the 2000s, the World Health Organization recommended that DDT be used in Africa to fight the rampant spread of malaria. Political conservatives such as former congressman Tom DeLay (R-TX), along with others hostile to the environmental movement, linked Carson with the death of millions due to the DDT ban. Roger Chapman See also: Carter, Jimmy; DeLay, Tom; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Global Warming; Gore, Al; Nuclear Age; Science Wars.
Further Reading Levine, Ellen. Rachel Carson: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Viking, 2007. Lytle, Mark H. The Gentile Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Matthiessen, Peter, ed. Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Murphy, Priscilla Cort. What a Book Can Do: The Public Reception of Silent Spring. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Quaratiello, Arlene R. Rachel Carson: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
C a r t e r, J i m my A one-term Democratic president (1977–1981), Jimmy Carter occupies the period in American political history between Watergate and the “Reagan Revolution.” The Carter years were beset by economic problems, a gasoline shortage, and the “hostage crisis” in Iran, all of which eroded the president’s popularity. Despite identifying himself as a “born again” Christian, Carter ended up alienating fundamentalists and evangelicals, who turned against him in the 1980 election. The son of a farmer, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr., was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia. After attending Georgia Southwestern College (1941–1942) and Georgia Institute of Technology (1942–1943), he became a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy (BS, 1946). This was followed by active duty in the navy’s nuclear-submarine program (1947–1953). Following the death of his father, Carter returned home to run the family peanut farm and farm-supply business in Plains. He also embarked on a political career, advancing from Georgia state senator (1963–1966) and governor (1971–1975) to chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1972–1974) and finally president of the United States. As a presidential candidate, Carter capitalized on public disgust over Watergate by presenting himself as a Washington outsider. A Southern Baptist from
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a small town in rural America, he touted himself as a common man with traditional values, promising voters “a government as good as its people” and assuring them, “I will never lie to you.” After winning the Democratic primary, he opposed President Gerald Ford in the 1976 general election. The highlights of the campaign were the gaffes committed by both candidates—Ford insisting in a televised debate that there was “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe” (October 6, 1976) and Carter confessing in Playboy magazine that “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” (November 1976). In the end, the peanut farmer won 50.1 percent of the popular vote and 297 of the 537 electoral points, becoming the first president from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor. Conservatives disliked many initiatives of the Carter presidency, namely the pardoning of Vietnam draft dodgers (1977); the cancellation of the production of the B-1 bomber (1977); the treaties for returning the Panama Canal to Panama (narrowly ratified by the Senate in 1978); the expansion of federal bureaucracy that included two new executive departments, energy (1977) and education (1980); and the increase in payroll deductions for Social Security (1977). There was also skepticism about Carter’s tying foreign policy to human rights, as some thought this could undermine ongoing efforts at containing communism. Carter signed the SALT II arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union (1979), but it was never ratified due to Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan six months later. Carter’s major success was facilitating the Camp David Accords of 1978, leading directly to the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty the following year. The Carter years were fraught with an energy crisis and inflation. Early on he placed a high priority on developing an energy program, calling the effort the “moral equivalent of war” and warning that national security was at stake due to America’s growing dependence on foreign oil. For critics, his message of energy conservation conveyed weakness rather than resoluteness. As OPEC hiked the price of petroleum, pushing up the domestic price of a barrel of crude oil from $14.40 (1977) to $25.10 (1979), Americans faced a gasoline shortage and long lines at the pump. At the same time, inflation rose from 6.5 percent (1977) to 11.3 percent (1979). Carter’s attempt to calm the public backfired after he gave a national address that came to be called “the malaise speech” (July 15, 1979). In it, Carter diagnosed Americans as suffering a “crisis of confidence” that legislation alone could not solve. “It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper—deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession,” he said. “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Critics, in particular Ronald Reagan, viewed the president as offering blame instead of leadership.
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The nation’s “crisis of confidence” grew following the Islamic student takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran on November 4, 1979. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage. After months of negotiations reached an impasse with only a few hostages freed, Carter in April 1980 directed Delta Force, the U.S. Army special operations unit, to rescue the hostages. The daring mission was aborted at the infiltration stage after several helicopters developed mechanical failure. While aircraft refueled in the Iranian desert in the middle of the night, in preparation to head back, a helicopter crashed into a parked fuel-tanker aircraft; the resulting explosion killed eight American servicemen. Commentators ridiculed the rescue attempt as foolhardy and cast it as a symbol of Carter’s “inept” presidency. The remaining American hostages were released after 444 days of captivity, on the day of Reagan’s inauguration. Years later, following the IranContra scandal, in which the Reagan administration was accused of bribing Iran with arms for the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, Carter’s handling of his hostage crisis was reevaluated more favorably. Unwittingly, the Carter administration provoked the wrath of conservative Christians, inspiring the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority (1979). This was triggered by the actions of Carter’s Internal Revenue Service, which in 1978 sought to withdraw tax-exempt status from private Christian schools, which were believed to be resisting federal desegregation efforts. Many fundamentalists and evangelicals, previously apolitical, emerged as the unified Religious Right and in 1980 voted for Reagan. Shortly after leaving office, Carter established the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, using it as a base from which to promote international human rights. Time magazine in September 1989 declared Carter “the best ex-president the U.S. has had since Herbert Hoover.” In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The ex-president went on to stir great controversy with the publication of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), which largely blames Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East. Roger Chapman See also: Cold War; Democratic Party; Ford, Gerald; Human Rights; Iran-Contra Affair; Israel; Moral Majority; Presidential Pardons; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; Social Security; Soviet Union and Russia; Watergate.
Further Reading Busch, Andrew H. Reagan’s Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. The Carter Center Web site. www.cartercenter.org.
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Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Jordan, Hamilton. Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982. Kaufman, Burton I. The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993. Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001.
Catholic Church Long before it took a role in the modern culture wars, generally as part of the Religious Right, the Catholic Church in America was the object of suspicion and marginalization by the culturally dominant Protestant establishment. By 2006, however, with the appointment of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, five of the nine justices serving on the high court were Roman Catholic—a sure sign of the political power and social acceptance attained by the church and its members.
Catholic-Protestant Divide Although less pronounced than in times past, a substantive cultural gap between the Catholic Church and American society remains very much a reality in the early twenty-first century. The historical underpinnings of this gap are exacerbated by core social and theological differences in the Catholic versus the Protestant imagination. Historically, the Catholic Church is an outsider institution; it is an immigrant church, home to impoverished ethnic minorities who were subordinated to the economic and political rule of the settled Protestant upper class after arriving in America. Further adding to Protestant suspicion, the U.S. Catholic Church is part of a transnational organization headquartered in the Vatican, a fact challenging American notions of both patriotism and local democracy. The American Catholic Church’s active opposition to communism during the 1940s and 1950s helped strengthen its patriotic credentials, but the belief voiced by many Americans that the John F. Kennedy presidency would make American public policy susceptible to Vatican interference echoed earlier suspicions of attenuated Catholic loyalty. The Catholic Church is also a cultural outsider, absent from the American Puritan-Protestant narrative that has been so critical in articulating America’s founding ideals (equality, democracy, freedom) and in particular its strong ethos of individualism. By contrast, Catholic theology has long articulated a communitarian discourse, emphasizing group responsibility for the fabric of the social good. Such an ethos contradicts the American cultural consensus that individuals—including the poor, the homeless, the uninsured, unmarried teenage mothers, and illegal immigrants—are responsible for their own welfare. The church’s communitarian perspective,
however, is not one that automatically favors a welfare state ideology in response to social problems. Rather, the church strongly defends the principle of “subsidiarity,” the idea that a higher authority such as the state should not intervene in matters that the church considers the privileged domain of the family, which for the church is the fundamental moral unit of society. The nuances in the Catholic Church’s multilayered social doctrine make it a complex political actor. On the one hand, the church articulates a vision of social justice and care for the poor—a vision that frequently sets it at odds with Protestant-infused public policy and public opinion. On the other hand, when the state takes an activist role, the church is frequently its opponent, largely because of what it perceives to be unwarranted state interference in private or family matters. Further, the church is not motivated just by doctrinal and theological concerns. It is also a realpolitik strategic actor, committed to protecting and extending its institutional interests in a competitive democratic environment vis-à-vis other institutional actors, including the state, education, the medical community, and other religious organizations.
Secularization of Education The church’s doctrinal tenets and institutional interests combine to make its public policy stances less predictable than one might assume. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the church opposed the imposition of prayer and Bible education in public schools because it regarded them as efforts to impose a lowest-commondenominator Protestant religion on secular education. At the same time, church officials lobbied for government financial support for Catholic parochial school education, thus seeking to preserve the institutional significance of Catholic schools in the socialization of younger generations. Much later, in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Engel v. Vitale (1962), the church actively opposed compulsory nondenominational prayer in public schools (which the high court declared unconstitutional), again because it saw this as extending the Protestant bias of public education (and of the culture as a whole). Thus, given the competitive denominational environment in the United States, the Catholic Church has a history of opposing state initiatives that observers would see as friendly toward religion, not because the church is an avid proponent of secularism, but because the (Christian) prayers being advocated are Protestant. This stance contrasts with the church’s political activism in countries where it holds a religious monopoly (such as Ireland, Poland, Spain, and Italy) and expects the state to bolster the faith and its institutions.
Contraception and Sex Education The Catholic Church has been a nagging thorn in the side of the American Protestant economic establishment
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since Pope Pius XI issued a landmark encyclical (Quadragesimo Anno) in 1931 in which he outlined the rights of workers to fair wages and humane working conditions. In the years since, successive popes and other church officials (such as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops) have forcefully reiterated these views. The church’s social justice teachings have thus provided an ongoing countercultural voice against the profitoriented, capitalist practices of corporate America. Not surprisingly, the critique of the excesses of capitalism articulated by the church is an ongoing source of tension between church officials and political and economic elites (and among Catholics, too). The tension is further exacerbated by a gulf between the Catholic Church and secular elites in regard to population control, which many Americans regard as a more salient factor than capitalism in the persistence of poverty. This, too, has a long history. Dating to the turn of the twentieth century, the church has opposed social reforms aimed at population control, including both sex education in public schools and the use of artificial contraception. To the present day, the church remains a vocal opponent of these practices. Its opposition stems from the core doctrine that all sex outside of marriage is immoral; that all sexual activity should be open to the natural transmission of human life (thereby barring the use of artificial contraception); that sex education should teach only abstinence or natural-cycle family planning, and that this teaching is the exclusive moral prerogative of parents and not the business of teachers or of the state.
Abortion, Homosexuality, Women’s Equality The moral logic behind the church’s teachings on sexual behavior and artificial contraception extends to its opposition to abortion and same-sex relationships. Its activism in these debates, however, is further accentuated by the additional moral issues raised, respectively, by these phenomena. The legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973) galvanized the church’s public activism in a way that no other issue has, either before or since. The Vatican not only teaches that abortion is a mortal sin, but it also maintains that abortion is not a matter of moral interest just to Catholics, but to all people regardless of faith. Because human life is objectively sacred, the church maintains, no one has, or can claim, the right to take or dispose of a human life. And because the church argues that life begins at the moment of fertilization, the destruction of embryonic life—abortion—is a grave moral wrong, regardless of whether or not one is Catholic. Some critics argue that the church is entitled to articulate an anti-abortion stance to its own members but it is not entitled to address a broader, non-Catholic audience. The church hierarchy counters that it is as entitled as any other citizen’s group or organization to
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express its views in the public sphere, especially on a human rights issue that it sees as transcending religion. It has thus maintained a sustained public program of extensive pro-life activism. The Catholic Church in America has also been vocal in condemning homosexual relations and has increased its activism since 2002 because of the legalization of samesex marriage in Massachusetts and elsewhere. In church teaching, homosexuality represents an “objectively disordered” condition, and homosexual sexual relationships are inherently sinful and immoral (because they cannot be biologically open to the creation of new life). Moreover, the introduction of same-sex marriage fuels church activism because it threatens the stability and exclusivity of what the church regards as the only legitimate form of marriage, lifelong partnership between a man and a woman. At the same time, however, the church teaches that gays should not be discriminated against in housing, employment, and the like. Such views, while regarded by some critics as hypocritical given the church’s condemnation of same-sex relationships and marriage, fit with the broader Catholic teaching that all humans (including the poor, undocumented immigrants, and prisoners) have dignity and should be treated with respect. The church has similarly condemned sexism as a sin and has been vocal in support of women’s equality. Again, however, this is a source of division, especially among Catholics. Many politically and theologically liberal Catholics point to the church’s opposition to contraception, abortion, and divorce, and to its doctrinal teaching that women cannot be priests, as evidence that the church itself is guilty of institutional sexism. These remain ongoing debates within the church, and many faithful, practicing Catholics maintain that the church can only preserve its own avowed commitment to be relevant to the modern world and exemplify its own ideals of equality and social justice by recognizing the full equality of women (both inside and outside the church) as well as the moral autonomy of women and men to make decisions (about sexual behavior, for example) in good conscience. The church’s voice in American politics and society was subdued for a period of years as it dealt with the challenges posed to its pastoral and institutional credibility as a result of persistent sexual abuse of children by priests. From 1950 to 2007, the U.S. Catholic Church listed 13,000 credible accusations of sexual abuse against its priests; by 2008, it had paid some $2 billion in legal settlements and expenses involving these cases. The sexabuse scandals prompted many Catholics who had never been involved in lay activism regarding gender equality and other controversial doctrinal issues to call for greater accountability and transparency in the church’s internal matters. Adding to the culture wars rhetoric, however, some conservative observers argued that pedophilia in the church was evidence of the acceptance of a culture of
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homosexuality within the hierarchy, while some liberals used the scandal to argue that compulsory celibacy is pathological. Regardless of the validity of either of these claims, the crisis prompted church officials to devote attention to its internal affairs, and the fallout certainly cast a dark shadow on the church’s credibility as a publicly engaged and culturally legitimate moral voice. During an April 2008 visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he was “deeply ashamed” by the pedophile scandal, adding, “It is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way their mission to give healing, to give the love of God to these children.” To show his concern he privately met with some victims and prayed over them. Trying to get past the pedophile scandal, the church has been increasingly reclaiming its cultural activism, evident in renewed attention to the ongoing national and state-level debates on abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, and end-of-life issues, and its attempts to hold Catholic politicians accountable for any doctrinal inconsistencies in their views. Catholics, too, have increasingly redirected their attention to political and cultural issues. As suggested by an upturn in financial donations to the church following the drop-off during the sex-abuse scandal, many seem ready to move beyond the crisis. In sum, any analysis of the Catholic Church’s involvement in America’s culture wars must focus on at least two dimensions: first, the relationship of the church to American culture, whereby its institutional history and doctrinal tenets pit it against the Protestant mainstream; and second, the polarization between liberals and conservatives in the ongoing debates about politics and values in American society as it is also reflected and played out among Catholics. These variously interacting dynamics challenge any assessment that suggests an undifferentiated and monolithic Catholic stance in the cultural wars. Michele Dillon See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Church and State; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Ferraro, Geraldine; Gay Rights Movement; Religious Right; Right to Die; Same-Sex Marriage; School Prayer; Sex Education; Sex Offenders; Sheen, Fulton J.
Further Reading Burns, Gene. The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Byrnes, Timothy A. Catholic Bishops in American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Dillon, Michele. Catholic Identity: Balancing Reason, Faith, and Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Greeley, Andrew. The Catholic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Censorship Censorship is the regulation of speech and other forms of expression by an entrenched authority. Intended as a kind of safeguard for society, typically to protect norms and values, censorship suppresses what is considered objectionable from a political, moral, or religious standpoint. Any serious debate on censorship must take into account who is being served by the decision and who is not served, as well as the ethical ramifications and social and political consequences of excluding particular voices, viewpoints, and information from the public discourse. In the culture wars, both the left and the right have at various times promoted and deplored censorship, depending on the material in question. Censorship can occur through a range of formal and informal practices. Some of these are explicit, such as the banning of books, the regulation of language on broadcast media, and the criminalization of particular acts of political expression, such as burning the American flag. Other methods of censorship are implicit, such as ostracism or the threat of the loss of employment. The fear of either explicit or implicit censorship may result in self-censorship, whereby an individual refrains from potentially objectionable forms of expression without direct external pressure to do so. Self-censorship is often seen as the most powerful and insidious form of censorship, as it occurs within the individual or organization and requires only periodic reinforcement from dominant social groups or governmental agencies. One of the most widely recognized examples of self-censorship in the United States occurred during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. In the context of the Cold War, the federal government actively pursued programs to eliminate perceived communist influences in American society. Fear of implication or association with such influences—and the explicit sanctions that might result—led to self-censorship among individuals and organizations. The response was most evident in the motion picture industry, which sought to alleviate government suspicion by self-regulating its personnel and the content of the films it produced. In a similar vein, the Recording Industry Association of America made significant efforts in 1999 to assure the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Justice Department of the music industry’s responsible actions and cooperation in order to avoid implication in studies of media and violence. The exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl led to $550,000 in fines against CBS by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The uproar sent “decency ripples” throughout the American media industry. Clear Channel
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Entertainment dropped controversial radio personality Howard Stern—an act of censorship resulting from the corporation’s newly instituted zero-tolerance policy on decency. Clear Channel was also sanctioned by the FCC for Stern’s on-air remarks, with a fine of $495,000. (In 2008, a federal appeals court struck down the fines for the Jackson incident, declaring the penalty “arbitrary and capricious.”) While censorship is often associated with the suppression of liberal viewpoints, perceptions of censorship are also common among those on the Religious Right. For example, religious conservatives point to the legal disputes over the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property, offering prayer at public school events such as graduation exercises and football games, and teaching “intelligent design” in public schools. Political conservatives in general regard “political correctness” as a tool of censorship to suppress honest debate on important contemporary issues, and many have characterized limits on campaign financing as a form of censorship. America’s youth have been embroiled in ongoing censorship debates as schools seek to control some forms of expression in learning environments. In a highly publicized case in 1965, three students in Des Moines, Iowa, were suspended from school for wearing armbands in protest of the Vietnam War; the U.S. Supreme Court later upheld their First Amendment right to do so. Still, under the pretext of fostering an environment conducive to education, school systems routinely impose dress codes that forbid students from wearing shirts that bear controversial symbols and messages—from antipolitician slogans and statements of gay pride to beer logos, drawings of marijuana leaves, and images of weapons. Schools also restrict students from wearing any apparel deemed “gang related.” Commercial entities that are seen as influencing youth behavior have been targets of censorship. One example is the 1997 campaign to stop the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company from using the cartoon character Joe Camel to market a brand of cigarettes. In 1999, Henry Hyde (R-IL) proposed a bill in the House of Representatives to ban the sale of violent music to minors. The media offer various opportunities for activism and protesting censorship, such as self-publication in print and digital media, Internet file sharing, and culture jamming. Digital media have proven to be a powerful tool for circumventing or responding to censorship. In 2006, for example, the Dixie Chicks country music trio released their new CD on the Internet after radio stations imposed a ban because they had made negative comments about President George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. The Independent Media Center (or Indymedia), an Internet media collective, was established in 1999 as a decentralized grassroots outlet for alternative political
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and activist viewpoints, combating corporate and governmental censorship. An organized file-sharing campaign in 2004, designated “Grey Tuesday,” protested the censorship of the critically acclaimed Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), leading to 100,000 downloads and sending it briefly to the top of the charts. (The album was the subject of a copyright dispute with EMI Music over the use of sample tracks drawn from the Beatles’ White Album and mixed with samples from artist Jay-Z’s Black Album.) Cynthia J. Miller See also: Academic Freedom; Book Banning; Comic Books; Culture Jamming; Federal Communications Commission; Flag Desecration; Hoffman, Abbie; Hollywood Ten; Motion Picture Association of America; Pornography; Record Warning Labels; Religious Right; Speech Codes; Stern, Howard.
Further Reading Atkins, Robert. Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression. New York: New Press, 2006. Bernstein, Matthew. Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Soley, Lawrence. Censorship, Inc: The Corporate Threat to Free Speech in the United States. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. Vaughn, Stephen. Freedom and Entertainment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Central Intelligence Agenc y The primary U.S. intelligence entity, founded in 1947 and headquartered in Langley, Virginia, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which operated during World War II. In the wake of an investigation on the intelligence failure preceding the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Harry Truman determined that a permanent centralized clearinghouse for intelligence was necessary, especially in light of mounting concerns pertaining to the Soviet Union and the onset of the Cold War. The clandestine nature of the CIA has made it a lightning rod in the culture wars, with critics regarding it as an example of sinister and unaccountable government power. Clearly, the most controversial aspect of the CIA is its “dirty tricks,” otherwise known as covert operations. Activity of this nature has included supporting the Christian Democrats in the defeat of the Italian Communist Party (1948); orchestrating coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954); and engaging in paramilitary operations in the Philippines (1950–1954), Southeast Asia (1950s–1970s), Afghanistan (1980s), and Nicaragua
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(1980s). There were also failed attempts to overthrow the governments of Indonesia (1958) and Cuba (1961), the latter incident known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. In addition, the CIA has been linked to assassination plots targeting foreign leaders, namely Fidel Castro of Cuba (early 1960s), Patrice Lumumba of the Congo (1961), Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic (1961), Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam (1963), and Salvador Allende of Chile (1973). Supporters of covert operations argue that they enable the president to have more options in implementing foreign policy, as diplomacy sometimes fails and the costs of going to war are too high. In 1999: Victory without War (1988), former president Richard Nixon reasoned, “Overt economic or military aid is sometimes enough to achieve our goals. Only a direct military intervention can do so in others. But between the two lies a vast area where the United States must be able to undertake covert actions. Without this capability, we will be unable to protect important U.S. interests.” Opponents of covert operations argue that failed missions often lead to disastrous consequences, souring long-term diplomacy. Even when missions are successful, critics note, they often do not remain secret. Or what is initially regarded as a success—such as supplying arms to the mujahedeen to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—sometimes creates “blowback” that leads to worse problems, such as Osama bin Laden and the birth of al-Qaeda. Lastly, it has been argued that dirty tricks divert resources from the more important work of gathering and analyzing intelligence information. However, covert operations can be intertwined with intelligence gathering. For example, shortly after the outbreak of the War on Terror in 2001, the CIA began operating a secret network of detention centers in Eastern Europe and Asia (called “black sites”) where suspected terrorists were subjected to “waterboarding” and other forms of torture during the course of interrogation, all of which came to light in 2005 after the Washington Post broke the story. Even aside from the general consensus among military experts that extreme interrogation techniques tend to yield intelligence information of dubious quality, critics point to the international outrage following the revelation of the secret prisons as an example of the negative consequences of covert operations. Three decades earlier, the CIA came under negative public scrutiny in 1974 following a report in the New York Times of “massive and illegal” domestic spying on Vietnam War protesters. The same report, written by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, also detailed CIA dirty tricks operations overseas, including assassination attempts against foreign leaders. The subsequent brouhaha led to congressional investigations, chiefly by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, otherwise known
as the Church Committee, named after its chair Senator Frank Church (D-IA). In the end, with the establishment of intelligence committees in both houses, the CIA for the first time came under some oversight by the legislative branch. And it became official policy that the CIA would no longer be involved in assassination plots of foreign leaders. Nevertheless, some regarded the work of the Church Committee as less than wise, even treasonous. The May 1976 issue of Reader’s Digest, for example, carried an article titled “Let’s Stop Undermining the CIA.” Beginning in the 1970s, the Committee for Action/ Research on the Intelligence Community (CARIC), a private watchdog organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., worked to expose the activities of the CIA and its agents. CARIC was blamed for the murder of CIA agent Richard Welch in Athens in December 1975 because it had published his name. The murder of Welch prompted the Church Committee to shift its focus from critically assessing the CIA to strengthening the protection of overseas agents. Efforts to further reform the CIA stalled at that point. Liberals and conservatives have been traditionally divided over the CIA, although clearly most members of the two major political parties believe in the necessity of a spy organization. Conservatives blame liberals for hurting the CIA and weakening it to the point that on September 11, 2001, the United States was caught unprepared. Liberals, on the other hand, think the CIA has too often been used as a tool by presidents to avoid congressional scrutiny or to go forward with policies not otherwise permitted (such as the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s and the secret abduction, imprisonment, and torture of suspected terrorists in the 2000s). Liberals further argue that it was covert operations that distracted the agency from focusing on intelligence gathering, failing to forecast not only September 11 but also the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Ironically, it was liberals who cried foul over the White House’s “outing” of CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003 after her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, argued in an op-ed piece in the New York Times that the Bush administration had exaggerated intelligence reports concerning Iraq’s attempt to acquire materials for weapons of mass destruction. Roger Chapman See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Cold War; Cuba; Iran-Contra Affair; New York Times, The; September 11; Soviet Union and Russia; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Central Intelligence Agency Web site. www.cia.gov. Goodman, Allan E., and Bruce D. Berkowitz. The Need to Know: The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Covert
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Action and American Democracy. New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1992. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Theoharis, Athan, with Richard Immerman, Loch Johnson, Kathryn Olmsted, and John Prados, eds. The Central Intelligence Agency: Security Under Scrutiny. Understanding Our Government Series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. “Seymour M. Hersh Reveals Illegal C.I.A. Spying in America.” In Muckraking! The Journalism That Changed America, ed. Judith and William Serrin, 164–68. New York: New Press, 2002.
the 1930s. Hiss could not be charged with espionage, despite extensive circumstantial evidence, because of the statute of limitations. Instead, he was tried and convicted for perjury and served a prison sentence. Although Hiss protested his innocence throughout his life, evidence came to light during the post-Soviet era of the 1990s that supported the accusations levied by Chambers. Morose and isolated, Chambers died of cancer on July 9, 1961, at his home in Westminster, Maryland. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
C h a m b e r s , W h i t t a ke r
See also: Communists and Communism; Hiss, Alger; Marxism; McCarthyism; National Review; Nixon, Richard; Norquist, Grover; Reagan, Ronald; United Nations.
Journalist Whittaker Chambers, an American communist and then a staunch anticommunist, emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s as a hero to the right during the early years of the Cold War. Through his testimony against accused communist spy Alger Hiss in the late 1940s, his autobiography Witness (1952), and his service as an editor of the National Review (1957–1959), Chambers became identified as an awakened anticommunist and dedicated defender of American traditional values. The son of a newspaper artist and an actress, Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia; he changed his name eleven times during his lifetime. After a short stint as a student at Williams College in 1920, Chambers enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied under the poet and noted literary critic Mark Van Doren. In 1925, he joined the Communist Party USA and began writing for its newspaper, the Daily Worker. During the late 1920s, Chambers became disenchanted with Stalinist policies but, because of the impact of the Depression, rededicated himself to communism and served as a Soviet agent in Washington, D.C., for seven years. In 1938, he made a final break with communism and, during the following year, joined Time magazine as a reviewer and special projects editor. It was during his year at Time that Chambers became involved in the culture wars as an outspoken anticommunist. In his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC, 1948–1950), Chambers identified Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent. Hiss had served in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was involved in the establishment of the United Nations. Chambers befriended Representative Richard M. Nixon (R-CA), who took an active part in the hearings, and went on to contribute to the political polarization of the McCarthy era by writing a polemical autobiography, Witness. To a large extent, Chambers’s identity in the culture wars was linked to his accusations against Hiss— specifically, that Hiss had been a Soviet agent during
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Further Reading Swan, Patrick, ed. Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003. Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Random House, 1997. Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Char ter Schools Charter schools, part of the “school choice” movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are public, nonsectarian schools operated by private organizations, either for profit or nonprofit, using public funds. In accordance with a charter (contract) issued by state or education authorities, the charter school is exempted from certain school regulations on the condition that student achievement is improved. If the charter school meets its specified goals by the end of the contract, then the charter most likely will be extended. Advocates of charter schools emphasize the virtues of accountability, competition, and decentralization, believing that a marketplace approach will spur needed education reform and allow for greater parental involvement due to less bureaucratic structure. Critics of charter schools view them as an assault on public education and part of a larger ideological campaign for the increased privatization of society; they resent the fact that, at a time of public-revenue shortfalls, tax dollars are being siphoned away from school systems in order to fund what are in many cases for-profit corporations. The term “charter schools” dates to the 1970s and is credited to a retired Massachusetts schoolteacher named Ray Budde, who got the idea reading about the 1609 charter issued to the explorer Henry Hudson by the East
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India Company. During the late 1980s, in reaction to the federal study on the declining performance of public schools in America, A Nation at Risk (1983), president of the American Federation of Teachers Albert Shanker championed the idea of charter schools. In 1992, Minnesota opened the first charter school, a development influenced by Shanker. By 2008, there were more than 3,700 charter schools in forty states and the District of Columbia, with over half of them operating in California (543), Arizona (501), Florida (342), Texas (319), Ohio (316), and Michigan (264). That same year, about 4 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren were attending charter schools. In the history of American charter schools, perhaps no player has been more controversial than Edison Schools, the largest educational management organization (EMO) in the country. Founded in 1992 by H. Chris Whittle, the former publisher of Esquire magazine and the developer of Channel One (the classroom “news” program with advertising), Edison Schools is a for-profit corporation that opened its first schools in 1995 and went on to control one-fourth of the nation’s schools run by EMOs. But Edison Schools’ overall performance has been called into question—critics argue that this EMO has not produced anticipated results; defenders insist that its students start out at below national standards but do achieve at the same rate as students in public schools. Studies of charter schools in general have led to similar debates. According to a 2006 report issued by the National Center for Education Statistics, based on a 2003 study of charter schools in Michigan, California, and Texas, “[C]harter school mean scores in reading and mathematics were lower, on average, than those for public noncharter schools.” With investors eyeing charter schools as a potential $600 billion market (just behind the health and defense sectors), public school advocates argue that charter schools have failed to raise education standards, while defenders emphasize that many students who attend charter schools have achieved less noticeable gains because they start out at lower levels. Roger Chapman See also: Education Reform; Homeschooling; Privatization; School Vouchers.
Further Reading Bracey, Gerald W. What You Should Know About the War Against America’s Public Schools. Boston: Pearson Education, 2003. Buckley, Jack, and Mark Schneider. Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Carnoy, Martin, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein. The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2005.
Henningfield, Diane Andrews. Charter Schools. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Saltman, Kenneth J. The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education. New York: Routledge, 2005.
C h áve z , C é s a r César Chávez, one of the most important Latino leaders in American history, was a union organizer for farm workers for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Deeply influenced by Gandhi’s social activist commitment to nonviolence, Chávez not only brought national attention to long-standing concerns of migrant workers, but infused a brand of moral leadership to the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, he raised public consciousness about the nature of Mexican-American societal woes and developed successful strategies for effecting meaningful change. Because of his efforts, powerful forces in the agricultural world were compelled to address issues of reasonable wages, humane work and living conditions, and pesticide misuse. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in July 1969, Chávez was characterized as the “Chicano” Martin Luther King, Jr. One of five children, César Estrada Chávez was born on March 31, 1927, in Yuma, Arizona. His parents were farm workers who owned their own land and small store; however, they lost their property during the Great Depression and were forced to live in a number of migrant camps throughout Arizona and California. Eventually, the family moved to California’s Imperial Valley in search of economic stability. Due to his need to work to help his family, Chávez ended his formal education at the seventh grade. Following his service in the navy during World War II, he married and returned to migrant work, settling in San Jose, California. From 1952 to 1962, Chávez, at the influence of a Catholic priest, was an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO) but quit after it refused to support a farm workers’ union. Chávez promptly founded what eventually became the United Farm Workers (UFW), the largest union of agricultural workers in California, with nearly 50,000 members. Committed to organizing farm workers to ensure better working conditions and higher wages, he spearheaded groundbreaking strikes and national boycotts of grapes and lettuce that helped revolutionize farm labor practices and policies. In particular, his efforts to lead the UFW in boycotting the powerful Delano, California, grape growers in 1965 influenced 22 million Americans to refuse to purchase California table grapes for half a decade. In 1970, after losing millions of dollars from the boycott, California grape growers agreed to increase farm worker salaries and safeguard their rights. By the mid-1970s, the movement had achieved
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higher wages, safer working conditions, greater protection from toxic chemicals and pesticides, clean accessible water, and suitable work equipment for farm workers. The latter was especially significant because it banned the short-handled hoe, which caused thousands of debilitating back injuries. Equally important, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed in 1975, which gave farm workers the right to organize and negotiate for better wages and working conditions. At this point, Chávez attained unprecedented popularity and power within the Hispanic community as he continued to lead protests, surrender himself to hunger strikes, and make media appearances. Transcending farm worker grievances, the man and message inspired the larger Hispanic civil rights movement. Chávez died on April 23, 1993. Tens of thousands attended his funeral in La Paz, California, including official representatives of the U.S. and Mexican governments and the Vatican. In subsequent years, eight states and numerous cities designated his birthday an official holiday: César Chávez Day. In 1994, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Darius V. Echeverría See also: Civil Rights Movement; Hispanic Americans; Illegal Immigrants; Immigration Policy; La Raza Unida; Labor Unions; Migrant Labor; Race.
Further Reading Dunne, John Gregory. Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Ferriss, Susan, and Ricardo Sandoval. The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers’ Movement. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcia. César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Matthiessen, Peter. Sal si Puedes (Escape If You Can): César Chávez and the New American Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
C h e n ey Fa m i l y The New York Times once aptly summarized the Cheney family—Republican stalwarts Dick and Lynne Cheney, and daughters Liz Cheney Perry and Mary Cheney—as “a foursome fully immersed in conservative politics and policy.” Dick Cheney was perhaps the most powerful vice president (2001–2009) in U.S. history, orchestrating massive tax cuts, tailoring energy policy to big oil and utility companies, and formulating a neoconservative response to terrorism. As chairperson of the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), Lynne Cheney battled liberal academics of multicultural, feminist, and
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postmodern perspectives. Liz Cheney Perry worked for the U.S. State Department; and Mary Cheney, an open lesbian, was her father’s chief campaign aide. The son of a federal bureaucrat and New Deal Democrat, Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and grew up in Casper, Wyoming. His high school sweetheart and future wife, a native of Casper, was born Lynne Ann Vincent on August 14, 1941. After dropping out of Yale University (1959–1962), Cheney enrolled at Casper Community College (1963), married Lynne (1964), and studied political science at the University of Wyoming (BA, 1965; MA, 1966). She majored in English at Colorado College (BA, 1963) and the University of Colorado (MA, 1964). Depending on the storyteller, Dick’s motivation for resuming studies was to avoid the military draft (he received five deferments during the Vietnam War) or to make himself a compatible marriage partner. The couple enrolled as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she earned a PhD in British literature in 1970; he, in accepting a congressional fellowship, left undone the dissertation necessary for receiving a doctorate in political science. In the meantime, Elizabeth Lynne “Liz” Cheney was born on July 28, 1966, followed by Mary Claire Cheney on March 14, 1969.
Republican Couple On Capitol Hill, Dick Cheney joined the staff of U.S. Representative Donald Rumsfeld (R-IL), who was on his way to becoming director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration. Cheney accompanied his mentor, who ended up working for President Gerald Ford. When Rumsfeld left his position as White House chief of staff to become secretary of defense, Cheney filled the vacancy (1975–1976). That served as Cheney’s springboard to Congress as a representative from Wyoming (1979–1989). After writing for the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting (1982–1983) and editing Washingtonian magazine (1983–1986), Lynne was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and later reappointed by President George H.W. Bush, to chair the NEH (1986–1993). Dick, also appointed by Bush, became secretary of defense (1989– 1993). Following Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, the Cheneys moved to Dallas, Texas, where Dick served as chief executive officer (1995–2000) of Halliburton, the Fortune 500 oil services firm. As a five-term congressman, Dick Cheney opposed abortion and welfare, supported the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and received high ratings from the American Conservative Union. Cheney’s stint as secretary of defense involved overseeing the invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause, 1989) and the Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm, 1990–1991). These military successes, said to overcome the nation’s “Vietnam syndrome,” in-
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spired Cheney in 1997 to endorse (along with Rumsfeld) the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative foreign policy platform calling for furthering American values abroad, by force if necessary. The PNAC blueprint would prove to be influential in the George W. Bush administration. In the meantime, Lynne Cheney was a culture warrior at the NEH, deleting the organization’s name from the credits of the documentary film The Africans (1986) because of its criticism of Western imperialism, denouncing the “political correctness” and “cultural relativism” of academia and the decline in stature of the Western canon (the “great books”), and acting as a gatekeeper to steer grants toward “traditional” (conservative) humanities projects. Upon departing the NEH, she campaigned against the national history standards, deploring the focus on minorities at the expense of figures such as George Washington. In her book Telling the Truth (1995), she asserted that the theories of French philosopher Michel Foucault were destroying Western civilization. She also called for the abolition of the NEH. Later, as an appointee of Governor George W. Bush, she served on a task force to develop the history standards for the Texas school system.
“Imperial Vice Presidency” Most controversial was Dick Cheney’s “imperial vice presidency,” as critics called it. With Bush’s blessings, Cheney had free rein to attend any White House meeting and to pursue any policy initiative. It was Cheney who arranged the $1.35 trillion tax cut during the first term, over the objections of major cabinet officials. The vice president even persuaded legislators to go further than Bush originally intended by including a capital gains cut; the measure passed in the Senate 51–50, with Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. In 2001, Cheney headed a task force to develop a new White House energy policy in close consultation with executives of the energy industry, but to the consternation of environmental watch groups he refused to publicly release the names of the participants on the basis of executive privilege; a 2004 Supreme Court decision upheld this lack of disclosure. Cheney’s support of energy companies brought him into conflict with environmental laws, leading to the 2003 resignation of Christine Todd Whitman, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, in objection to the vice president’s insistence on loosening the pollution-control regulations of power plants. In 2002, Cheney lifted the ban on snowmobiling in national parks. That same year, over the objections of federal biologists, he forced the release of irrigation water from Oregon’s Klamath River to relieve drought-stricken farmers—killing 77,000 salmon in the process. After September 11, 2001, surrounded by former colleagues (including Secretary of State Colin Powell,
Republican vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney appears at the 2000 GOP national convention with members of his family: daughter Mary (left), wife Lynne (right), and daughter Elizabeth (far right). (Tom Mihalek/Stringer/AFP/ Getty Images)
who earlier chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Desert Storm, and Donald Rumsfeld, who was back as secretary of defense) and a cohort of neoconservatives, Cheney pressed for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the lack of evidence of its involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington. Later, Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in the scandal involving the leaked identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in what was apparent retribution for the actions of her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, who publicly disputed the Bush administration’s assertion that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons—specifically the allegation that it had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger. Many were convinced of Cheney’s involvement in the Plame affair, but it stood unproven, and weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq. The record does show, however, that Cheney was the main figure behind the policies of “robust interrogation” (which many call torture) of terrorist suspects and their indefinite detention at sites such as Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Children in the News During the George W. Bush presidency Liz Cheney Perry and her husband, Phillip, were criticized in the press for securing high-level federal jobs. A law graduate of the University of Chicago (JD, 1996), the elder Cheney daughter worked for the state department’s bureau of Near Eastern affairs (2002–2003, 2005–2007), while her husband served as an associate attorney general at the Justice Department (2001–2002) and general counsel at both the Office of Management and Budget
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(2002–2003) and the Department of Homeland Security (2005–2007). Their combined annual federal income of nearly $300,000 was described in one newspaper editorial as “a pure form of nepotism.” The son-in-law came under political scrutiny in November 2001 after the Justice Department announced it would no longer seek to break up Microsoft—as the department’s third-ranking official, Phillip Perry oversaw the antitrust division. Critics emphasized that the CEO of Microsoft had earlier met with the vice president. Looming in the culture wars spotlight was Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation, which Democratic challenger John Kerry injected into the third 2004 presidential debate. When asked if homosexuality is a choice, he responded, “We’re all God’s children. . . . If you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s . . . who she was born as.” Afterward, Lynne Cheney called Kerry’s comments “a cheap and tawdry political trick.” A headline in Time magazine, however, asked, “Who Gets to Talk About Mary Cheney?” In her political memoir, Now It’s My Turn (2006), Mary Cheney accused Kerry of seeking “to drive a wedge between the Republican ticket and evangelical Christian voters.” Many did find her open lesbianism incongruent with the Bush-Cheney position on traditional family values and its support of the Federal Marriage Amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. In early 2004, for example, gay activists founded the DearMary.com Web site to pressure the vice president’s daughter to speak out for gay rights. They placed her photograph on the side of an image of a milk carton, made to look as if she was a missing person, with the accompanying statement: “Silent since her father endorsed antigay constitutional amendment making her and millions of Americans second-class citizens.” In May 2006, Time magazine quoted her claiming to have had “serious reservations” about working for Bush’s reelection, but the threat of terrorism convinced her “I didn’t have the luxury to be a single-issue voter on same-sex marriage.” In 2007, Mary Cheney gave birth to a son, declaring the child “a blessing from God” and not “a political statement.” The evangelical group Focus on the Family earlier editorialized that it was not in a child’s best interest to be conceived outside the context of a female-male relationship. Roger Chapman See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; American Century; Bush Family; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Gay Rights Movement; National Endowment for the Humanities; Neoconservatism; Outing; Privatization; Same-Sex Marriage; September 11; Tax Reform.
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Further Reading Cheney, Mary. Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life. New York: Threshold Editions, 2006. Didion, Joan. “Cheney: The Fatal Touch.” New York Review of Books, October 5, 2006. Dubose, Lou. Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. New York: Random House, 2006. Hayes, Stephen F. Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Levine, Art. “Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-in-Law.” Washington Monthly, March 2007. Wiener, Jon. “Hard to Muzzle: The Return of Lynne Cheney.” Nation, September 27, 2000.
C h i c a g o S eve n The Chicago Seven (originally Eight) was the popular name for a group of anti–Vietnam War protestors and New Left radicals charged and brought to trial on charges of conspiracy, inciting to riot, and resisting arrest stemming from street demonstrations and clashes with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, held from August 24 to 29. On March 20, 1969, a grand jury summoned at the urging of Chicago mayor Richard Daley returned indictments against eight demonstrators: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner. The trial began thirteen months after the Chicago riots, on September 24, 1969, in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman. Defendants Hoffman and Rubin, co-founders of the Youth International Party (Yippies), viewed the trial as an opportunity to make a creative and entertaining appeal to America’s youth to join the movement by turning the courtroom into a theater of the absurd. Hoffman suggested that the judge try LSD and offered to get him some; Rubin and Hoffman showed up in court one day wearing mock judicial robes. Ultimately, the trial came to highlight the clash of cultures and values in 1960s America. Among the notable figures of the American counterculture who testified were folk singers Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, and Phil Ochs; poet Allen Ginsberg; writer Norman Mailer; and LSD guru Timothy Leary. Judge Hoffman, for his part, little indulged the defendants. When Seale’s lawyer Charles Garry took leave to undergo surgery, Judge Hoffman refused Seale’s request for a postponement and would not allow Seale to represent himself. Seale, a Black Panther, let loose a verbal tirade against the judge, accusing him of being a racist and calling him a “fascist dog” and a “pig.” When Seale refused to be silenced, Judge Hoffman ordered him gagged and bound to his chair in the courtroom. Seale’s case was ultimately declared a mistrial and severed from the rest of the trial, transforming the Chicago Eight to
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the Chicago Seven. Judge Hoffman declared Seale in contempt and imposed one of the longest sentences ever handed down in an American court for that offense—four years in prison. The trial closed on February 14, 1970, and with the jury in deliberation, Judge Hoffman cited the seven defendants, along with attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, for contempt of court, passing sentences ranging from two months to four years and thirteen days (for Kunstler). On February 18, 1970, the Chicago Seven were found not guilty of conspiracy; five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to foment riot and sentenced to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines; Froines and Weiner were acquitted of all charges. During jury selection, attorneys Kunstler and Weinglass had sought to expose cultural biases among potential jurors and submitted a list of fifty-four possible questions for prospective deliberators—such as whether or not they knew who Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were, or whether their daughters always wore a bra. Judge Hoffman refused all of the questions except one that asked jurors if they had close friends or family members who worked for any law enforcement agency. In the end, the predominantly middle-class jury of two white men, two black women, and eight white women would prove difficult for the defense to win over. In the aftermath of the trial, jurors made comments suggesting that the defendants should have been convicted merely for their appearance, language, and lifestyle; one suggested that they should have been shot by police. On November 21, 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overturned all convictions in the case, citing Judge Hoffman’s refusal to allow defense inquiries into potential cultural biases among jurors, along with judicial bias. The contempt charges were later retried by a new judge and several of the defendants found guilty, but no sentences were handed down. Jeff Shantz See also: Counterculture; Democratic Party; Ginsberg, Allen; Hayden, Tom; Hoffman, Abbie; Leary, Timothy; Mailer, Norman; Seeger, Pete; Students for a Democratic Society.
Further Reading Babcox, Peter, and Deborah Babcox, eds. The Conspiracy: The Chicago Eight Speak Out! New York: Dell, 1969. Dellinger, David. From Yale to Jail. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Epstein, Jason. The Great Conspiracy Trial: An Essay on Law, Liberty, and the Constitution. New York: Random House, 1970. Hayden, Tom. Reunion: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1988. ———. Trial. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.
Chick , Jack Author-illustrator Jack Thomas Chick has published more than half a billion Christian fundamentalist tracts in more than a hundred languages. His religious comics have reached a wide audience despite lockouts by Christian bookstores and even a brief ban in Canada during the 1980s. Chick tracts attack evolution, homosexuality, paganism, witchcraft, Catholicism, rock music, popular culture, and any other social and cultural trends deemed antithetical to his fundamentalist evangelism. Chick was born on April 13, 1924, in Los Angeles, California. He attended the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theater on scholarship and served three years in the U.S. Army. His conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, fostered by his wife and mother-in-law, is said to have occurred in 1948. Over the course of the 1960s, he went from producing his first book to founding his own publishing company. Although his product line includes comic book series, posters, books, and films, his proselytizing tracts remain his most popular products. A small “J.T.C.” on the cover credits Chick for the text and illustrations, but since 1975 half of the artwork has been produced by Fred Carter. Despite being widely parodied and ridiculed, Chick’s cartoon tracts—which measure about 3” x 5” —have exerted a major influence on diverse fundamentalist campaigns, such as those targeting rock music, homosexuality, and paganism. All of the tracts offer evangelical Protestant-themed lessons that must be followed in order to avoid being sent to hell. The most controversial tracts warn against such specific evils as Christian rock music (“Angels”), evolution (“Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn”), homosexuality (“The Birds and the Bees”), Jehovah’s Witnesses (“The Crisis”), Freemasonry (“The Curse of Baphomet”), role-playing games (“Dark Dungeons”), Catholicism (“The Death Cookie”), Islam (“The Little Bride”), and astrology, drugs, television, spiritualism, and the ecumenical movement (“Bewitched?”). His attacks on the Catholic Church are particularly virulent, promoting a conspiracy theory that the Vatican is a continuation of Babylon and the pope is the Antichrist. Although Chick’s publications decry popular culture, his use of the comic book as a means of mass communication represents an appropriation of the cultural media he criticizes. Comics have enabled Chick to spread his religious worldview and participate in the culture wars by addressing issues of particular concern to Christian fundamentalists. Solomon Davidoff See also: Book Banning; Catholic Church; Censorship; Comic Books; Contemporary Christian Music; Counterculture; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gays in Popular Culture; Jehovah’s Witnesses; New Age Movement; Rock and Roll.
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Further Reading Barnette, Mark. “From the Other Side of the Tracts: Jack T. Chick’s Pyramid Plan.” Comics Journal 145 (October 1991): 89–94. Fowler, Robert. The World of Chick? San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2001. Kuersteiner, Kurt. The Unofficial Guide to the Art of Jack T. Chick: Chick Tracts, Crusader Comics, and Battle Cry Newspapers. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2004.
China China has been an evolving source of controversy for Americans since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. During the Cold War, Americans’ concerns about China were defined largely by their concerns over communism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans wondered if China was a puppet of the Soviet Union. In contrast, during the 1970s and 1980s, the United States regarded China as a special partner against the Soviet Union, despite China’s Marxist regime. Since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, Americans and U.S. policymakers have demonstrated a diversity of opinions on trade, human rights, and security issues regarding China. China fell into communist hands in October 1949 after years of civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party. The Nationalists, who were America’s ally during World War II, fled to Taiwan and established the Republic of China. Despite heavy lobbying by Chiang’s American friends, the Truman administration concluded that the Nationalists would never be able to regain mainland China. In August 1949, the U.S. State Department published the China White Paper, in which it blamed the Nationalists for their own defeat. Republicans seized the issue of the “loss of China” to discredit the Democrats as being soft on communism. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, which pitted a U.S.-led United Nations force and South Korea against a Chinese- and Soviet-backed North Korea, ended any foreseeable possibility for formal relations between Washington and Beijing. The United States maintained its nonrecognition policy for two decades. When the rift between China and the Soviet Union became clear in the 1970s, the United States reached out to Beijing. In February 1972, President Richard M. Nixon made a heavily publicized visit to China. Although the step received an outpouring of praise from the American public, the anticommunist right was furious that Nixon had promised to eventually withdraw U.S. troops from Taiwan and end official relations with the Nationalist government. It was not until December 15, 1978, under President Jimmy Carter, that the United States normalized relations with the People’s Republic of China. Conservative Re-
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publicans, such as Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Robert Dole, however, accused the Carter administration of selling out Taiwan to appease the Chinese communists. In 1979, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which guaranteed future arms sales to the Nationalist government, upheld all previous international obligations, and authorized quasi-diplomatic relations. Between 1979 and 1989, the United States and the People’s Republic developed a close strategic partnership against the Soviet Union, and economic and cultural exchanges increased dramatically. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China began to reform its planned economy and institute limited free-market capitalism, which led many Americans to expect a political opening up as well. However, the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989 underscored to Americans the authoritarian realities of the communist regime. President George H.W. Bush imposed economic sanctions on China and pressured Beijing to release detained dissidents. After 1989, issues pertaining to human rights, which had been kept in the shadows because of strategic concerns, were brought into the open. Organized labor in America accused China of using prison labor to make goods for export. Religious conservatives criticized China’s birth-control policy (one child per family) and called for religious freedom. The independence movements of the Taiwanese and Tibetans gained many sympathizers in the United States as well. Since 1989, Human Rights Watch (Asia) has been publishing yearly reports on human rights in China to pressure the U.S. government to take up the issue with Beijing. During the 1990s, congressional debate regarding China’s most favored nation (MFN) trade status became a battleground for the interests of the business community, labor unions, and human rights activists. The business community supported granting unconditional MFN status; the AFL-CIO lobbied for revocation; human rights activists argued that a conditional MFN status would force China to improve its human rights practices. President Bill Clinton linked China’s MFN status with human rights in 1993, then reversed himself in 1994 and shifted from a punitive China policy to a policy of engagement. In 2000, Congress granted permanent normal trade relations to China, despite a strong conservative opposition led by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). Americans today remain divided over China policy. Supporters of engagement argue that it is the best way of transforming China into a responsible international player and reducing its threat to the Unites States. They believe that extensive ties between China and the Western world expose the Chinese to Western ideas of freedom and democracy and will ultimately transform China into a democratic society. Critics of the engagement policy argue that increased economic ties between the United States and China have
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only reduced the competitive advantages of the United States and strengthened the abusive power of the Chinese Communist Party. With inexpensive, Chinese-made goods filling Wal-Mart and other retail stores, the U.S. trade deficit with China quadrupled within ten years. Americans suspicious of globalization blame China for the loss of jobs in the United States. Conservatives warn that China is using the trade surplus to expand its defense budget and is using espionage to steal vital American technologies to enhance its military capability. Not everyone sees a “China threat.” Many economists point out that China simply replaced other Asian producers from which the United States used to import, and argue that inexpensive cheap goods from China help check inflation. Some point out that a large portion of China’s defense budget simply pays the food costs and stipends of the soldiers, and that its military expenditures are still far behind that of the United States. Min Song See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Carter, Jimmy; Cold War; Fundamentalism, Religious; Goldwater, Barry; Helms, Jesse; Human Rights; Labor Unions; Reagan, Ronald; Wal-Mart.
Further Reading Bernstein, Richard, and Ross H. Munro. China: The Coming Conflict with America. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Christensen, Thomas. Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflicts, 1947–1958. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Lampton, David M. Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.-China Relations, 1989–2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mann, James. About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
C h i s h o l m , S h i r l ey The first African-American woman elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm focused on issues important to her Brooklyn, New York, constituency, including jobs training, education, housing, and day care. In 1972, she became the first black and the first woman to seek a major party’s nomination for president. Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Brooklyn on November 30, 1924. After being raised by her grandmother in Barbados, she attended Brooklyn College (BA, 1946) and Columbia University (MA, 1952). She headed a preschool in Brooklyn for six years and then served as an educational consultant in the New York City government’s day-care division from 1959 to 1964. Launching her career in politics, she won election to the New York State Assembly in 1964 and served until 1968. In the U.S.
Congress, she represented New York’s Twelfth District from 1969 to 1982. Chisholm’s election to the House of Representatives in 1968 was made possible after the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 ordered redistricting to undo previous gerrymandering, which led to the formation of a predominately black district in Brooklyn. In that contest, Chisholm, the Democratic candidate, faced Republican challenger James Farmer, former chair of the Congress of Racial Equality, who turned the campaign into a question of gender. The tactic backfired. Chisholm won 34,885 votes to Farmer’s 13,777. On Capitol Hill, Chisholm made waves by opposing the House seniority system, objecting to her appointment to the Agriculture Committee. She eventually landed her assignment of choice, a seat on the Education and Labor Committee, using that position to advocate liberal economic programs. In 1971 she co-sponsored the Adequate Income Act, which stipulated a guaranteed income level for all families. President Gerald Ford vetoed her legislative initiative to provide federal subsidies for day-care centers. Her record on environmental issues was criticized, but she defended her position as protecting jobs. During her first term, she sponsored legislation to end the draft and opposed spending on the Vietnam War that could have been directed toward domestic programs. In her 1972 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Chisholm failed in her quest to create a coalition of blacks, women activists, and other minorities. She participated in twelve state primaries, however, and at the Democratic National Convention received 152 first-round votes. She saw her candidacy as advancing minority candidates, just as Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, paved the way for John F. Kennedy. Chisholm campaigned for Jesse Jackson when he ran for the presidency in 1984 and 1988. She later retired to Florida, where she died on January 1, 2005, at the age of eighty. Leah Martin and Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Democratic Party; Environmental Movement; Feminism, Second-Wave; Ford, Gerald; Jackson, Jesse; Kennedy Family; Vietnam War; Welfare R eform.
Further Reading Chisholm, Shirley. The Good Fight. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. ———. Unbought and Unbossed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Scheader, Catherine. Shirley Chisholm: Teacher and Congresswoman. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 1990.
C h o m s k y, N o a m A leading linguistic theorist, libertarian socialist, and activist, Noam Chomsky has criticized U.S. foreign
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policy, critiqued American mass media, attacked the policies of Israel, defended the free speech of a Holocaust denier, and suggested after September 11, 2001, that the United States is a leading terrorist state. Critics have portrayed him as a pariah, extremist, conspiracy theorist, and polemicist, but Chomsky has for decades been one of America’s most internationally recognized intellectuals. He is a figure not easily dismissed, though many on the political right have tried. Avram Noam Chomsky, born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. He specialized in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania (BA, 1949; MA, 1951; PhD, 1955). Although well-traveled and a visiting scholar at various academic institutions, Chomsky has been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1955. Published works such as Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) revolutionized the field of linguistics, leading to the hypothesis of an innate, universal grammar, but his opposition to the Vietnam War and his recognition of MIT’s role in the military-industrial complex compelled him in 1964 to become a political activist. More than half of Chomsky’s extensive writings are political, primarily questioning U.S. foreign policy, attributing the causes of the Cold War and terrorism to American imperialism and business interests. These works include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), At
War with Asia (1970), For Reasons of State (1973), Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (1978), Towards a New Cold War (1982), Culture of Terrorism (1988), What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1992), World Orders, Old and New (1994), Hegemony or Survival (2003), and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006). In his analysis of mass media, Chomsky consistently targets the New York Times, arguing that it is an agendasetter largely determining what the overall media report. Not only do some important topics intentionally go unreported, he argues, but the political spectrum of viewpoints is significantly narrowed to the point that anything seemingly “liberal” is actually quite conservative. (This coincides with his assertion that there is little difference between the Democratic and Republican parties.) Such manipulation of information, Chomsky says, limits public debate while “manufacturing the consent” of society’s managerial class. Furthermore, as Chomsky asserts with Edward S. Herman in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), the media are corporate entities that protect corporate interests. Chomsky believes American society is inundated with propaganda from commercial interests with a conservative media bias. The documentary film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) offers a lively overview of Chomsky’s theories of propaganda. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and others have taken Chomsky to task for his critique of Zionism, criticism of Israel’s policies, and support for the Palestinian cause. Chomsky has called for a binational JewishPalestinian state, as opposed to “the sovereign State of the Jewish people.” Chomsky was further criticized in the mid-1990s for his defense—on the grounds of free speech and academic freedom—of Robert Faurisson, a French professor who denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers and raised doubts about the Holocaust. In 9-11 (2001), a compilation of interviews with Chomsky about the cause and context of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States is presented as a less than innocent victim. Whereas Chomsky views Osama bin Laden as a private practitioner of terrorism, he accuses the U.S. government of being a leading perpetrator of state terrorism. America was attacked by al-Qaeda, he argues, because of its imperialistic policies and actions in the Middle East. William J. Bennett, the author of Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (2002), is among those who have publicly clashed with Chomsky over the issue of terrorism and has pointedly asked the professor why he chooses to reside in a country he regards as a terrorist state. Roger Chapman
MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, a longtime political dissident and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, addresses a 2002 symposium on the Iraq War. Chomsky has described himself as a “libertarian socialist.” (William B.
See also: Academic Freedom; Anti-Semitism; Bennett, William J.; Cold War; Conspiracy Theories; Holocaust; Israel; Media Bias; New York Times, The; September 11; Vietnam War; Williams, William Appleman; Zinn, Howard.
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Further Reading Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz, eds. The Anti-Chomsky Reader. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. McGilvray, James, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Christian Coalition The Christian Coalition of America was founded by evangelical leader Pat Robertson in 1989, after his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination the previous year. In light of the crumbling of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the perceived failure of President Ronald Reagan to advocate strongly for the Christian right’s social positions, the Christian Coalition sought to give conservative Christians a new voice in government. Robertson asked the young and charismatic Ralph Reed to serve as the organization’s first executive director, a post he held until 1997. Based in Washington, D.C., the Christian Coalition today boasts more than 2 million members nationwide. Its primary focus is promoting what it describes as a “pro-family” agenda that includes educating voters, protesting anti-Christian bigotry, speaking out to the public, and training future leaders for action. After its first meeting in 1989, the Christian Coalition drew nearly 5,000 members, though some officials at organizations such as Focus on the Family thought the group was simply a front for Robertson’s next bid for president. Despite such speculation, the organization stuck to a grassroots focus and became a household name, largely due to Robertson and Reed’s staunchly conservative politics on issues such as school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality. Further adding to its appeal, after the televangelist scandals of the 1980s, the Christian Coalition operated as a lay-based movement, as opposed to the familiar preacher-led model. The Christian Coalition emerged as a key player on the political scene in 1990 by taking out full-page ads in the Washington Post and USA Today that called for an end to “tax-payer funded pornography” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This attack, a response to the work of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Holly Hughes, earned the Christian Coalition significant credibility among conservatives as a moralistic, pro-family advocate. With momentum from the NEA controversy, the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court placed the Christian Coalition on the national radar. Thomas’s confirmation amid accusations of sexual harassment is touted as one of the organization’s greatest successes. Despite its significant political influence, the Christian Coalition was often a lightning rod because of its
“culture wars” rhetoric. Ralph Reed was an anti-abortion activist who was arrested for harassment at abortion clinics. He also advocated the Christian Coalition’s use of “stealth” politics by comparing politics to guerrilla warfare. Robertson voiced his fair share of inflammatory speech as well. On one occasion, he asserted that the liberal attack on religious freedom was the equivalent of a gang rape. In The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition (1997), Justin Watson cites Robertson’s famous statement of 1992: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, antifamily political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” These and other statements widely viewed as extreme made the organization an easy scapegoat for the failed reelection campaign of President George H.W. Bush in 1992. In the aftermath, the Christian Coalition was forced to rebuild its image and focus on state and local affiliates. It emphasized voter education, handing out hundreds of thousands of voting guides for local, state, and federal elections. These efforts helped in the Republican congressional landslide of 1994. Although it focused primarily on fiscal policy, the Republicans’ 1994 Contract with America was supported by the Christian Coalition, which hoped that congressional Republicans would support the group’s own Contract with the American Family the following year. The Christian Coalition’s contract, however, was criticized by both the right and the left: the right considered it too mainstream, and the left considered it too extreme. Broadening the Christian Coalition’s reach was always a primary focus of Ralph Reed, who continued “mainstreaming” despite the criticism. He reached out to nonwhites and Catholics, called on evangelicals to pray for their racist and anti-Semitic sins, and invited women to be members and leaders of the national organization and its affiliates. The organization was influential in securing Bob Dole’s 1996 Republican presidential nomination, but the mid-1990s brought significant troubles—which have not entirely subsided. It had to fight for its tax-exempt status, which was not resolved until 2005. Reed resigned as executive director in 1997 amid financial turmoil, alleged internal fighting, and stagnant or declining membership. His replacements were soon ousted by Robertson, who took over the helm until 2001. That year, Robertson resigned under pressure after he voiced support for China’s one-child policy in a television interview. Although he insisted otherwise, many conservatives understood his endorsement of the Chinese policy as support for forced abortion. With Robertson’s resignation, Roberta Combs, a former state director from South Carolina, took over the leadership. However, Combs was accused of nepotism for
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hiring her daughter and son-in-law. The organization’s debt was more than $2 million at the end of 2004. In March 2006, one of its most prominent chapters, the Christian Coalition of Iowa, broke ties with the national body. From its inception, the Christian Coalition has sought to promote “Christian values” and demanded political recognition for the conservative Christian community. While their goals were easier to pursue during the 1980s and 1990s, subsequent conservative victories made it difficult for the leadership to sustain membership and political influence. Karma R. Chávez See also: Abortion; Church and State; Contract with America; Family Values; Focus on the Family; Gay Rights Movement; Moral Majority; National Endowment for the Arts; Reed, Ralph; Religious Right; Robertson, Pat; School Prayer; Televangelism.
Further Reading Boston, Robert. The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Right. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996. Christian Coalition of America Web site. www.cc.org. Reed, Ralph. Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics. New York: Free Press, 1996. Watson, Justin. The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Christian Radio Christian radio has become a major force in the contemporary American media scene, with more than a hundred million people tuning in at least once a month. Conceived as an electronic means of bringing evangelism into the home, early programs such as The Lutheran Hour (beginning in 1930) and Radio Bible Class (beginning in 1936) were used to create a nationwide community of faithful listeners. Many of such shows have evolved into a pulpit for criticizing secular society, giving Christian broadcasters political and cultural power. The first radio sermon in America was aired from the Calvary Episcopal Church on station KDKA (Pittsburgh) on January 2, 1921. Within six years, religious groups across the country had licensed sixty radio stations to carry their message into followers’ homes. Faith-based stations included KFSG (Los Angeles), created by Aimee Semple McPherson and her Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and WMBI (Chicago), run by Henry C. Crowell and the Moody Bible Institute. The Golden Hour program of Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, drew millions of listeners over the CBS network from 1926 to 1938, when he was forced off the air for his anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi viewpoints. Other popular radio shows
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of the first half of the twentieth century were Charles E. Fuller’s Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, which broadcast over thirty-eight stations to more than 10 million people in the late 1930s, and Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision, which amassed over 20 million listeners within weeks of its debut in 1950. By the end of World War II, religious broadcasting had become big business. Fueled by the Communications Act of 1934, which required commercial stations to broadcast public-service programming, evangelicals began to produce radio shows that not only attracted listeners but also garnered financial support. Although some stations gave away free air time to fulfill their federal obligations, others preferred to charge, forcing religious broadcasters to become more media savvy. Funded mostly through voluntary donations, the best radio preachers were those who appealed to listeners’ pocketbooks as well as their spiritual needs. In 1947 alone, Charles Fuller solicited $40,000 per week to pay for commercial radio time. The Mutual Broadcasting System, which aired his show, made $3.5 million a year on religious programming. In 2006, some 1,600 Christian organizations were broadcasting in the United States, from single stations to expansive networks that covered vast geographic regions. Broadcasting formats include gospel music, “teach and preach” sermons, talk radio, and contemporary Christian music. Salem Communications, based in Southern California, became the nation’s fastest-growing radio empire, with more than a hundred stations in the nation’s most populated markets and broadcasting to more than 1,900 affiliates. The company dominated the Christian airwaves and boasted that its news division was the only Christianfocused group with fully equipped broadcast facilities at the White House and U.S. Capitol. Despite the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, Christian radio has played an important role in American politics since 1976, when presidential candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both met with leaders of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) association. The acknowledgment of NRB’s political clout prompted the organization to chart a more aggressive media strategy. By the early 1980s, Christian radio entered a second golden age, led by James Dobson, whose Focus on the Family program was syndicated worldwide, and Marlin Maddoux, whose USA Radio Network was the first gospel station completely funded through commercial advertising. In 1994, both men used their programs to encourage listeners to protest a federal bill that would have outlawed homeschooling. Nearly a million callers jammed the House of Representatives telephone lines, resulting in the defeat of the bill. Religious broadcasters continue to flex their political muscle, mobilizing allies in hotly debated causes. Their most vociferous and prolonged battle has been against
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homosexuality. In the early 1990s, born-again Christian deejay Warren Duffy rallied a march on Disney Studios to protest that company’s “Gay Day,” an annual event encouraging homosexuals and their families to visit Disneyland. In 1997, talk show host Rich Agozino stirred controversy in Orange County, California, when he asked his listeners whether homosexuality should be punishable by death. Antigay rhetoric is a frequent theme of many religious talk shows, including the nationally syndicated Janet Parshall’s America, hosted by a member of the rightwing Christian group Concerned Women for America. Former NRB president E. Brandt Gustavson has warned that radio listeners may be “turned off to the real message of hope and encouragement of finding Christ” if programs are too political. In this spirit, Salem Communications has taken as its mission the homespun goal of mending marriages, regaining childhood memories, and restoring faith one broadcast at a time. Still, an undeniable political agenda underlies many Christian radio shows. In a 2004 editorial published in Broadcasting and Cable, Salem chair Stuart Epperson described his company’s vigorous support of limited government, free enterprise, a strong national defense, and traditional moral values. Moreover, Epperson has twice run for Congress. He and business partner Edward Atsinger III have personally contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative causes and political candidates.
Hangen, Tona J. Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Schultze, Quentin J. Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003. Ward, Mark, Sr. Air of Salvation: The Story of Christian Broadcasting. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994.
its laws should be applied to contemporary society, including the death penalty for adultery, sodomy, and blasphemy. As postmillennialists, they believe that there will be a Christian thousand-year reign of the earth, culminating with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Consequently, they dismiss the notion of a secular society that separates church and state. Although Reconstructionists constitute a tiny segment of American Christianity, they have had an inordinate influence on the Religious Right. The Reconstructionist movement can be traced to R.J. Rushdoony, an ordained Presbyterian minister who in 1965 founded the Chalcedon Foundation, located in Vallecito, California, for the purpose of promoting biblical law as an alternative to civil law for governing society. Rushdoony, who died in 2001, authored numerous books and was the founding editor of the Journal of Christian Reconstruction. A staunch advocate of homeschooling, Rushdoony disliked the public school system, which he believed was corrupted by secular humanism (influenced by the philosophies of Horace Mann and John Dewey). Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), a commentary on the Ten Commandments, provides an outline of a program for establishing a Christian theocracy. In 1981, Newsweek magazine described the Chalcedon Foundation as a think tank of the Religious Right, including the Moral Majority. Important members of Rushdoony’s movement over the years have included Gary North (who married one of Rushdoony’s daughters), Gary DeMar, Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, Kenneth Gentry, and Andrew Sandlin. North, who has stated that the biblically correct way to carry out capital punishment is by stoning, defines his politics as Neo-Puritanism. Critics regard Reconstructionism as a dangerous dogma, which, if put into practice, could lead to the Christian equivalent of the Taliban. Such opponents argue that a religious sect exercising dominion over society would pose a threat to democracy as well as individual liberty. Disagreeing, Reconstructionists maintain that individual and social life should be ruled by a godly dominion. True liberty, they add, creates a moral society, not a libertine one. Andrew J. Waskey
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See also: Church and State; Homeschooling; Moral Majority; Religious Right; Secular Humanism; Ten Commandments.
Cindy Mediavilla See also: Anti-Semitism; Carter, Jimmy; Catholic Church; Contemporary Christian Music; Dobson, James; Focus on the Family; Ford, Gerald; Gay Rights Movement; Graham, Billy; Same-Sex Marriage; Schiavo, Terri; Walt Disney Company.
Further Reading
Christian Reconstructionism—also referred to as Dominion Theology or Dominionism (based on Genesis 1:26, a passage stating that human beings are to have dominion over the earth) and Theonomy (from the Greek, meaning “God’s law”)—is a fundamentalist movement that promotes the integration of biblical law into American society. Reconstructionists adopt a literal view of the Old Testament and argue that
Further Reading The Chalcedon Foundation Web site. www.chalcedon.edu. Diamond, Sara. Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. New York: Guilford, 1995. House, H. Wayne, Thomas Ice, and Rodney L. Morris, eds. Dominion Theology: Blessing or Curse? An Analysis of Christian Reconstructionism. Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1988.
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Rushdoony, Rousas J. Roots of Reconstruction. Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1991. ———. The Nature of the American System. Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2002.
Christmas Whether regarded as a midwinter folk festival, a religious holiday, or a combination of the two, Christmas is observed in some form or fashion by 95 percent of Americans. In the culture wars, traditionalists and social conservatives have sounded off against what they construe as an effort by secularists and multiculturalists to impose political correctness by deemphasizing the religious aspect of Christmas as a celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The “defense” of Christmas by culture warriors can be traced back to the early Cold War years. During the late 1950s, the John Birch Society sounded the alarm that communists and supporters of the United Nations were launching an “assault on Christmas” in order to “destroy all religious beliefs and customs.” According to this conspiracy theory, department stores would start using UN symbols for Christmas decorations to begin the process of secularization. The rationale was that centralized forces were scheming to undermine the moral foundations of the United States and weaken it as a superpower. In a different yet similar twist, television and radio talk show host Bill O’Reilly devoted a chapter to “The Battle for Christmas” in his book Culture Warrior (2006), asserting that the “secular-progressive program”—backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—seeks to “marginalize” Christmas as a national holiday as part of an overall strategy to deemphasize religion in order to advance a secular agenda. The ACLU has made enemies of the traditionalists because of its successful campaign over the years in persuading courts, in the name of enforcing the separation of church and state, to order the removal of nativity scenes from municipal properties and other public places. From the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to the American Family Association, the Christian Right has deplored the societal trend to avoid Christmas words, such as using the more generic greeting “Happy Holidays” or renaming the Christmas tree a “holiday tree.” Some religious groups have organized or threatened boycotts against retailers for doing away with Christmas words in their seasonal advertisements and store decorations, prompting Wal-Mart to reverse course. Even President George W. Bush was criticized for sending White House Christmas cards that wished recipients a happy “holiday season.” Feeling the pressure, the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2005 approved a resolution urging “that the symbols and traditions of Christmas be
The legal dispute over public Christmas displays—such as this nativity scene in Florissant, Missouri, in 1997—raises competing First Amendment principles: protecting the “free exercise” of religion and barring government preference of one religion over another. (Bill Greenblatt/Getty Images)
protected” and registered disapproval “of attempts to ban references to Christmas.” Ironically, there are fundamentalist Christians as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses who do not observe Christmas, dismissing it for its pagan roots. Moreover, people of faith have long deplored the commercialization of Christmas, regarding it as not in harmony with Christian values. Some evangelicals have suggested that it is wrong to demand that stores (“palaces of consumerism”) require their employees, many of them not practicing Christians, to greet customers with a religious salutation. In other controversies pertaining to Christmas, John Lennon in his hit single “Happy Christmas” (1971) coopted the holiday to protest against the Vietnam War; antismoking activists have asked that pictures of Santa Claus not show him with a pipe; and feminists have criticized the film Miracle on 34th Street (1947) for suggesting that the greatest Christmas gift a single mother could receive is a husband. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Church and State; Jehovah’s Witnesses; John Birch Society; Kwanzaa; O’Reilly, Bill; Political Correctness; Religious Right; Secular Humanism; Thanksgiving Day.
Further Reading Barnett, James H. The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Hertzberg, Hendrik. “Comment: Bah Humbug.” New Yorker, December 26, 2005, and January 2, 2006. Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas. New York: Knopf, 1996. O’Reilly, Bill. Culture Warrior. New York: Time Warner, 2006.
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Church and State Among the most persistent and contentious issues in the culture wars has been the role of religion in American society and government. The U.S. Constitution contains only two references to religion. According to Article 6, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” meaning that no one otherwise qualified may be prevented from being elected because of his or her religion (or lack thereof). The second and far more controversial reference is found in the First Amendment, which states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Most of the controversies concerning the relationship between church (religion) and state (government) in America revolve around the interpretation of the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), following the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, et al. (1947). In that case, the majority decreed that the Establishment Clause effectively creates a wall of separation between church and state. Prior to Everson, the most noteworthy controversies were over the Free Exercise Clause (“Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting exercise thereof”). Among these was the right of Catholics (and later other “minority” religions) to create parochial schools (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925). The turn toward the Establishment Clause was prepared by two Supreme Court decisions during World War II involving a petition by Jehovah’s Witnesses to be exempted from the American flag pledge, on the grounds that their religion forbids pledging allegiance to anyone or anything but God. In School District v. Gobitis (1941), the justices denied the petition; two years later, the Court reversed itself in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, allowing the exemption on grounds of religious conscience. Justice Felix Frankfurter, in a dissenting opinion in the second case, argued that by granting an exemption to the law on the basis of religious conscience, the Court had, in effect, created an establishment of religion. On the basis of the Everson decision, the Supreme Court subsequently decreed that the practice of releasing students from school for religious instruction is unconstitutional (Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 1948), as is any state-sponsored prayer in school (Engel v. Vitale, 1962). In other decisions, the Court ruled on the legal permissibility of the displaying of crèches on public property, the usage of school vouchers for attending religious schools, the posting of the Ten Commandments in or on public buildings, and the teaching of creationism or intelligent design alongside evolution in science class. Although the Supreme Court sought to encourage toleration of all religious beliefs and practices, including
the freedom from religion, debates continue. Religious organizations like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State argue that any government involvement in religion threatens the free exercise of religion. Secular organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way support that premise but also join with organizations like the Freedom from Religion Foundation in arguing that the wall of separation is necessary to ensure equality for religious skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. Conservatives argue that the Supreme Court has misread the Constitution and the intent of the Establishment Clause. The Heritage Foundation, for example, maintains that a majority of the framers wished to ensure that the government would not take sides and mandate one religion over others. This is not the same, they argue, as ridding the public square of all generic references to theism. Religious conservative organizations, including the Christian Coalition, argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the wall of separation has contributed to a decline in public and private morals. Martin J. Plax See also: American Civil Religion; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Faith-Based Programs; Founding Fathers; Fundamentalism, Religious; Heritage Foundation; Jehovah’s Witnesses; O’Hair, Madalyn Murray; School Prayer; School Vouchers; Secular Humanism; Ten Commandments.
Further Reading Hamilton, Marci A. God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Himmelfarb, Milton. “Church and State: How High a Wall?” Commentary, July 1996. Levy, Leonard. The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Phillips, Kevin. American Theocracy. New York: Viking, 2006. Plax, Martin J. “The Rule of Law and the Establishment Clause.” In Jews and the Public Square, ed. Alan Mittleman and Robert Licht, 87–131. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
C h u r c h i l l , Wa r d A symbol of the national debate on academic freedom, social activist and academic Ward Churchill was fired in July 2007 from his position as professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the wake of controversy surrounding his article on the September 11 attacks, in which he compared some of the victims of the World Trade Center bombings to the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. Ward LeRoy Churchill was born on October 2, 1947, in Urbana, Illinois. A Vietnam veteran who had been drafted
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into the U.S. Army (1966–1968), Churchill went on to attend Illinois Central College (AA, 1972) and Sangamon State University (BA, communications, 1974; MA, crosscultural communication, 1975). After earning his degrees, he was hired to teach commercial arts at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, South Dakota (1976–1977) and then moved on to the University of Colorado, where he filled various staff positions (1978–1991) and served as a faculty member in the communications department (1991–1992) and the ethnic studies department (1992–2007). Churchill is the author of numerous published works, primarily on Native American history and culture. His provocative essay on September 11—“Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” published on the Internet in 2001 and later expanded as a book—argued that certain victims of the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians because, as “technocrats of empire,” including financiers and even some CIA officers, they were acting on behalf of the U.S. military and its mission of world dominance. The article suggested that the terrorist attacks were a “befitting” way to harm “the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers.” A frequent speaker at college campuses, Churchill came under fire in January 2005 after his name appeared on a speakers’ list at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Ironically, he was scheduled to give a presentation on Indian affairs, not his views on September 11. He had been invited by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture, which earlier had sparked controversy by inviting to campus a convicted felon and former member of the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground, Susan Rosenberg. Little Green Footballs, a politically conservative Weblog, was instrumental in publicizing Churchill’s essay, which was picked up by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. On his program The O’Reilly Factor, the host urged viewers to contact Hamilton College and register disapproval of Churchill’s scheduled campus visit. The college received thousands of irate emails and phone calls, some containing threats of violence, prompting campus officials to cancel the event. Republican governors also entered the fray, with George Pataki of New York calling the professor a “bigoted terrorist supporter” and Bill Owens of Colorado urging his resignation. Churchill remained unapologetic but did issue a press statement clarifying his position: “I am not a ‘defender’ of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.” Under political pressure, officials at the University of Colorado launched an investigation into alleged “research misconduct” on Churchill’s part, reviewing all of his publications. In the meantime, outside commentators called into question the professor’s credentials, alleging that he
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had inflated his military record, falsely presented himself as a former activist with the Weather Underground, and made dubious claims of being Native American. Critics also emphasized that Churchill had never earned a doctorate. In May 2006, a campus panel found him guilty of multiple counts of falsifying information, fabricating research, and plagiarism. University officials reported that the findings pertained not to his writings on September 11, but to his publications on Indian history. For instance, he was accused of misrepresenting sources in his assertion that Captain John Smith willfully spread smallpox to a native tribe in colonial Virginia. In July 2007, on the recommendation of the acting chancellor, the University of Colorado board of regents voted 8 to 1 to dismiss Churchill. Supporters of the professor regarded him as the victim of a witch hunt, convinced that his dismissal was retribution for his unpopular stance on the September 11 attacks. In response to his firing, Churchill filed a lawsuit in state court, arguing that his First Amendment rights had been violated. In April 2009, a jury found that he had been wrongfully fired, but only awarded him one dollar in damages. Roger Chapman See also: Academic Bill of Rights; Academic Freedom; O’Reilly, Bill; September 11; Students for a Democratic Society.
Further Reading Churchill, Ward. On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003. Cockburn, Alexander. “Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right.” Nation, February 21, 2005. Gravois, John. “Colo. Regents Vote to Fire Ward Churchill.” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2007. Schrecker, Ellen. “The New McCarthyism in Academe.” Thought & Action 21 (Fall 2005): 103–18. Smallwood, Scott. “Anatomy of a Free-Speech Firestorm: How a Professor’s 3-Year-Old Essay Sparked a National Controversy.” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2005.
C i v i l R i g h t s M ove m e n t The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was an organized campaign to fight racial discrimination. Representing a new approach to “the problem of the color line,” as W.E.B. Du Bois once called it, civil rights activists relied less on lobbying and litigation, as earlier undertaken by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and began employing a strategy of civil disobedience. American society was still beset by four distinct types of racial discrimination. The most widely known was segregation, legitimized by the U.S. Supreme Court
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in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Common forms of racial segregation were seen in education and public accommodations, including restaurants, buses, rest rooms, and drinking fountains. A second form of discrimination was disenfranchisement, which often involved literacy tests and poll taxes to disqualify blacks from voting. The literacy tests, officially administered to make certain that voters could read, typically asked blacks questions that few people (white or black) could answer. A third form of discrimination was economic, such as legal restrictions that denied blacks the opportunity or resources to open a business or buy a home. Violence was the final form of discrimination, often involving vigilantes (such as the Ku Klux Klan) tacitly supported by local government and law enforcement. The NAACP was successful in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), cases that challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine. But by the mid-1950s many African Americans were dissatisfied with the protracted pace of legal and political efforts, and their resistance to the status quo in the South grew to unprecedented levels.
Origins On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a volunteer secretary for the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP, refused to give up her seat on a public bus for a white passenger. Her defiance resulted in arrest because she had violated a city ordinance. Influential black leaders quickly met to discuss strategies to force the city to treat blacks fairly, but her disobedience inspired the larger community and set in motion events that led to the Montgomery bus boycott. Black churches played a significant role in the defiance. A sizable group of black leaders determined that the organizations that had led the charge for reform to that point, the NAACP and CORE, were not suited to coordinating this new form of nonviolent protest. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was founded four days after the Rosa Parks incident, with a relatively unknown minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., designated as its first president. The bus boycott lasted 382 days, until the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal court decision repealing bus segregation laws. The success in Montgomery sparked nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience movements throughout the South. These protests included bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and marches. The activities were primarily coordinated and organized by local churches and grassroots organizations. In 1957, King joined the leaders of several of these organizations to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which represented the first attempt to coordinate actions across the South. Unlike the NAACP, the SCLC never established
local chapters. Instead, it offered training, general assistance, and money to existing groups and organizations. Building from the success of the MIA, the SCLC stressed nonviolent resistance. Also in 1957, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown was finally enforced. The NAACP decided to push the issue in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the school board eventually succumbed to the pressure and agreed to integrate. When Governor Orville Faubus activated the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending school, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas troops and sent them home. Eisenhower then deployed U.S. Army units from the 101st Airborne Division to protect the students, thereby enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Expansion Inspired by CORE’s success of the 1940s, black college students throughout the South conducted sitins during the 1960s. These actions were designed to protest the refusal of local stores to desegregate their lunch counters. Because it was important to present the right image, protestors typically dressed nicely and conducted themselves respectfully. Sit-ins generated media attention because of the violent response of local police attempting to arrest the peaceful protestors. By the end of 1960, sit-ins had spread to every major city in the South and to Ohio, Illinois, and Nevada. Eventually, they spread to museums, theaters, parks, libraries, and other public places. In addition to generating media attention, the sitins became a fiscal burden to cities, counties, and states. When demonstrators were arrested, they generally refused to post bail and remained in jails, which became overcrowded. The arresting jurisdictions had to pay for their food and additional guards. Because of the success of the sit-ins, student organizers formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960 to expand their nonviolent form of protest. The following year, in coordination with CORE, the SNCC conceived a plan to force businesses associated with interstate commerce to desegregate. The plan called for groups of white and black students to travel together by bus from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana, stopping throughout the Deep South. The SNCC called the operation “freedom rides.” Before the freedom rides began, CORE backed out because of fear that the rides would become too dangerous. These fears were realized as freedom riders faced violence along the route. They were often beaten and arrested. In one Alabama town, a bus was firebombed; at a stop in Birmingham, Alabama, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor urged the Ku Klux Klan to attack. In mid-November 1961, taking the protests to a new level, the SNCC encouraged supporters in Albany,
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Georgia, to fight for desegregation of the entire city. By mid-December, more than 500 demonstrators had been jailed. When the movement needed help, King was called in. But unlike the police in many other cities, Albany’s law enforcement decided to follow the same nonviolent tactics that King and his demonstrators preached. Also, in order to keep the jail from overcrowding, the police chief arranged to use the detention facilities in neighboring communities. To cultivate better relations with the black community, the police made a point of freeing King following each arrest. In the end, more than a thousand demonstrators were arrested in the Albany protest. Without the violence usually seen from the police, the news media lost interest. Despite the combined efforts of the SCLC and the SNCC, it was not a particularly successful campaign. Organizers realized that they would have a difficult time prevailing because they could not generate enough participants to fill all the jail space.
Brutality Captured King and the SCLC shifted their attention from Albany to Birmingham, Alabama. Instead of trying to desegregate the whole city, the SCLC decided to focus on downtown merchants. Once again, Bull Connor encouraged brutality when arresting demonstrators. King decided that a march was needed to draw attention to the campaign. On April 12, 1963, King was arrested for parading without a permit and, four days later, wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” By the time King was released on April 19, the Birmingham campaign had started to unravel, as the brutality of the police was defeating the will of the black community to continue. In an unprecedented move, the SCLC appealed to high school students. On May 2, more than a thousand high school students left class to join the demonstrations; more than 600 were peacefully arrested. The next day, another thousand students left school, and this time Connor responded with brutality. He allowed police dogs to attack the demonstrators and turned high-pressure fire hoses at them, events captured by the national media and widely broadcast. Responding to the national public outrage, the John F. Kennedy administration intervened, arranging for the desegregation of lunch counters and other public accommodations downtown. It also brokered a deal to have the demonstrators released and to create a committee to end discriminatory hiring practices. Not all African Americans in the South agreed with the actions of the SNCC and the SCLC. A sizable number, especially of the older generation, believed that the use of demonstrations was having a negative effect. Indeed, there was an increase in violence from the white community, including bombings, assassinations, and random acts of assault on innocent blacks.
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Southern whites had mixed feelings about the movement as well. It was largely felt that the demonstrations had been instigated more by outside agitators and had less to do with the local community. Some, particularly students, sympathized with the black protesters and opposed segregation. Others, however, believed that whites were superior to blacks and that blacks were not entitled to equal treatment. Many politicians, worried about losing power and privilege, formed what became known as the Dixiecrats, a pro-segregation southern contingent in the Democratic Party.
Realization of the “Dream” By 1963, the civil rights movement had reached full stride, culminating in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as organized by a collaboration of civil rights, progressive labor, and liberal groups. Despite Kennedy’s attempt to stop it, the march was held on August 28. Officially, the march had six goals: meaningful civil rights laws, the right to vote, decent housing, a massive federal works program, full and fair employment, and adequate integrated education. The primary focus was passage of a federal civil rights law. Between 200,000 and 500,000 demonstrators participated in the march, gathering in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech and other leaders called for action. John Lewis, chair of the SNCC, caused a great deal of tension with his speech admonishing the Kennedy administration for its inability to protect southern blacks and civil rights workers. In 1964, civil rights activists initiated the Mississippi Freedom Summer, whose goal was to help register black voters throughout the state. Near the town of Philadelphia, three volunteer workers—including two white men from the North—disappeared. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the FBI to investigate. The bodies were soon discovered, and it was determined that members of the Ku Klux Klan were responsible for the murders. Outrage over the incident reverberated for weeks, helping Johnson gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that July. After that legislative triumph, the SNCC decided to focus on voter registration. In 1965, it chose Selma, Alabama, as the starting point for the program, but opposition in the state proved too much for the group. The SCLC was brought in to assist, and King quickly organized peaceful marches. They were met with substantial violence. On March 7, more than 600 civil rights advocates were marching peacefully toward the state capital when state troopers and local police began attacking them with billy clubs, rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire, and tear gas. The national reaction motivated Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson signed on August 6.
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Legacy By 1966, ineffective enforcement of the Civil Rights Act prompted some activists to start the Black Power movement. The Black Panther Party, formed that year, urged a more violent response to racism. These new movements were far more radical than the nonviolent civil rights movement, and the fight for equality lost many white supporters. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and the news of his murder set off riots in more than sixty cities throughout the nation. President Johnson declared a national day of mourning. Following King’s death, civil rights efforts were expanded to include the goals of political and economic self-reliance and self-sufficiency, freedom from white authority, and racial dignity. The movement continued until about 1975. The civil rights movement had far-reaching effects on racial dynamics and social tensions in America, providing the impetus for a wide variety of culture war issues. It exposed social cleavages that had been ignored for decades. It revealed the barbaric ways that humans can treat one another. And it challenged popular conceptions of what it means to be an American. The success of the civil rights movement led other groups—including feminists, Native Americans, Hispanics, and gays—to initiate national campaigns for equality during the course of subsequent decades. James W. Stoutenborough See also: Black Panther Party; Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Equal Rights Amendment; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Parks, Rosa; Philadelphia, Mississippi; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. ———. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. ———. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Burns, Stewart, ed. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Fager, Charles. Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South. Boston: Beacon, 1985. Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Free Press, 1984. Newman, Mark. The Civil Rights Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Penguin, 1988.
Clinton, Bill The forty-second president of the United States (1993– 2001), Bill Clinton was the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve two full terms in the White House. Clinton presided over the longest sustained period of economic prosperity in American history, while simultaneously transforming a federal deficit of $291 billion into the first budget surplus in nearly three decades. Yet despite his efforts to govern as a pragmatic, conciliatory centrist, he became a polarizing figure because of his cultural liberalism, perceived ethical lapses, and sexual improprieties. Misleading statements that he made under oath in connection with a sexual affair led to his impeachment in 1998. Born William Jefferson Blythe IV on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, he later took his stepfather’s last name. Clinton showed a proclivity for academics and politics at an early age. He received a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford after graduating from Georgetown University (1968) and earned a JD at Yale Law School (1973) before returning to his home state of Arkansas to begin a political career. Clinton married Hillary Rodham, a fellow law student, in 1975. Three years later, at age thirty-two, he became the nation’s youngest governor when he won that office in Arkansas. He quickly established a reputation as a political moderate, while remaining sensitive to the concerns of African Americans and promoting education reform. In 1985, he helped create the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist organization that eschewed its party’s traditional faith in social welfare spending. During his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton portrayed himself as a political moderate. Revelations of a past extramarital affair threatened to sink his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he made a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, thus earning the nickname the “Comeback Kid.” Yet social conservatives criticized choices he had made in the late 1960s, including acceptance of a draft deferment to avoid military service in Vietnam, brief experimentation with marijuana while at Oxford, and participation in antiwar protests. The Clinton campaign focused on the economy, a theme that resonated with many Americans during a recession. He downplayed controversial social issues such as abortion and pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” a promise that echoed the rhetoric of political conservatives. At the same time, he reached out to liberals by promoting gay rights. After his election victory over incumbent President George H.W. Bush and independent candidate H. Ross Perot in November 1992, Clinton selected a cabinet that reflected the gender, racial, and ideological diversity that he championed. President Clinton experienced an early setback in his administration when he attempted to fulfill a campaign
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promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. In the face of public opposition from General Colin Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), as well as from social conservatives, Clinton settled for the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The compromise was insufficient in the eyes of many gays and did nothing to appease the Religious Right. In 1993, the first lady headed a health care task force that recommended the creation of a national health insurance program to provide coverage for every American while preserving competition among private insurance providers. The plan failed in Congress amid strong opposition from conservatives, small business owners, and especially the insurance and medical industries. Achievements of Clinton’s first two years in the White House included the passage of gun control legislation, a family leave bill, and a crime control measure. He also began reducing the deficit during his first year in office and convinced the Senate to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), despite opposition from many members of his own party. Even though he was willing to endorse the Republican principles of free trade and fiscal prudence, Republicans denounced him as a liberal because of his support for federally funded health insurance and his willingness to raise taxes. Clinton’s relative unpopularity in 1994 allowed Republicans to regain control of both houses of Congress, leading to a standoff with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA). In December 1995, the failure of Congress and the president to reach an agreement on the federal budget resulted in a three-week government shutdown, for which the public tended to blame the Republicans. Although Clinton opposed some of the proposals in Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” he proved amenable to others, including middle-class tax cuts, a line-item veto, and welfare reform. Scandals dogged Clinton throughout his presidency. Allegations that he and his wife had engaged in financial irregularities in connection with the Whitewater Development Corporation in Arkansas during the late 1970s led U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in 1993 to appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an investigation. The Clintons were eventually cleared of all charges in the case, but the ongoing inquiry led to the appointment of an independent prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, who expanded his investigation to include other matters, chiefly the president’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton at first denied any sexual impropriety, but after proof emerged that he had given misleading testimony, the House of Representatives impeached him in December 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate voted not to convict Clinton, allowing him to complete his presidency with high approval ratings but his reputation tarnished. Clinton’s supporters remember his presidency as a
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time of fiscal prudence, economic prosperity, and centrist policies, while his detractors criticize his personal foibles. Some critics argue that he overlooked the threat of terrorism and left the military unprepared, but his defenders point out that he proposed only modest decreases in military spending and pursued a foreign policy that reflected a bipartisan consensus. The legacy of Clinton is still controversial, and although popular, he remains a polarizing figure. Daniel K. Williams See also: Clinton, Hillary; Clinton Impeachment; Contract with America; Democratic Party; Gays in the Military; Gin grich, Newt; Globalization; Gun Control; Health Care; Perot, H. Ross; Relativism, Moral; Starr, Kenneth; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Berman, William C. From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the Clinton Presidency. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Clinton, Bill. My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Harris, John F. The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. New York: Random House, 2005. Klein, Joe. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Lowry, Richard. Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003. Morris, Dick, and Eileen McGann. Because He Could. New York: Regan Books, 2004.
Clinton, Hillar y The first woman to make a strong showing as a presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton first entered the public spotlight as an activist first lady during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton. Weathering her spouse’s myriad scandals, she emerged to claim the spotlight on her own as the junior senator from New York, a contender for the presidency, and later U.S. secretary of state. Culture warriors of conservative passion have vilified Clinton over the years, portraying her as a left-wing feminist who disavows traditional values.
Early Life Born Hillary Diane Rodham in Chicago on October 26, 1947, she graduated from Wellesley College (BA, 1969) and later Yale Law School (JD, 1973). Following a stint as a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund, she moved to Arkansas, where she taught law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. In 1975 she married Bill Clinton, and two years later was appointed to the board of the United States Legal Services Corporation by President Jimmy Carter.
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Clinton became first lady of Arkansas in 1978 and gave birth to daughter Chelsea in 1980, yet she continued her career as an attorney and children’s advocate. With her husband’s presidential election (1993), she rose to national prominence and was later elected to the U.S. Senate (2001). In 2008, she lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, who afterward appointed her secretary of state.
First Lady Hillary Clinton came to public attention after presidentelect Bill Clinton jokingly referred to his presidency as “two for the price of one.” She indeed went on to play a special role, heading the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. The plan for universal health care, however, was met with fierce opposition and negatively nicknamed “Hillarycare.” In the end, her 1,342-page health-care proposal died on the House floor in 1994. Much of the Clinton presidency was overshadowed by the Whitewater investigation—about a failed real estate deal in Arkansas prior to the Clinton presidency— and the Monica Lewinsky scandal—stemming from the president’s affair with a White House intern. During the course of the Whitewater probe the suicide of Hillary’s former law partner and White House deputy counsel, Vince Foster, added to the political drama. The conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who often referred to Mrs. Clinton as a man and questioned her sexual orientation, went so far as to suggest that Foster’s death had been arranged by the first lady. For her part, she asserted that a “vast right-ring conspiracy” had placed the White House under siege. Hillary was never implicated in any wrongdoing. As first lady she was the honorary chairperson of the U.S. delegation to the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, using the occasion to promote women’s rights as human rights. Yet many were displeased by her attendance and what it implied. Conservatives voiced concern over the “proabortion” stance of Clinton and the other delegates, while Democrats saw her presence at an event hosted by China as ignoring that country’s dismal human rights record. Women’s rights activists from the developing world viewed her featured prominence as confirmation of U.S. hegemony in international affairs. Clinton authored the bestseller It Takes a Village (1996), citing ways in which individuals and institutions outside of the family can help the lives of children. While her book offered positive reflection on the traditional nuclear family, it also focused on extended families, single parenting, and so on. In retort, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) published It Takes a Family (2005), strictly promoting the traditional family headed by a married man and woman, and characterizing Clinton’s work as “masking a radical left agenda.”
The Senate and Beyond In 2000, Clinton ran for a Senate seat as the representative from New York, overcoming attacks of being a carpetbagger. She was originally slated to run against then–New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, but he withdrew after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Clinton faced off against a little-known opponent and became the only first lady of the United States to win public office. She was reelected in 2006 with 62 percent of the vote, but the over $30 million spent on her campaign exceeded every other Senate race that year. As a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and representing a state that suffered the brunt of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton took a favorable position on U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. She also voted in support of the Iraq War Resolution (2002), which came back to dog her during her presidential bid. In 2005, she co-introduced legislation to increase recruits in the U.S. Army, stating that it would be “a big mistake” to withdraw from Iraq. She blamed the Bush administration for mismanaging the war. Outspoken on domestic issues, Clinton in 2003 clashed on the Senate floor with Santorum over so-called partial-birth abortion. She was also the co-sponsor of the Prevention First Act (2005), which aimed to increase access to family planning despite the Bush administration’s approach to abortion and contraception. In 2006, she caused a flap by accusing the Republican Party of running the House of Representatives “like a plantation” to keep Democrats in their place. Hillary supporters were stunned by Obama’s upset victory in the Iowa caucus in January 2008, but their candidate bounced back by winning the New Hampshire primary after a humanizing moment when, expressing her passion to make a difference in public service, she welled up tears. Her backers accused the media of misogyny, and feminist Gloria Steinem, in a New York Times op-ed piece, bitterly complained that the “gender barrier” in politics is taken less seriously than the “racial barrier.” Meanwhile, Bill Clinton’s angry interjections about race during the South Carolina primary led to negative publicity. Hillary herself committed gaffes, such as citing the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as a reason she should stay in the race up until the end. Obama maintained that Clinton was too polarizing of a figure to win the general election, while she argued that he would fail to garner the white, blue-collar vote. Ironically, Obama might have wrapped up the nomination sooner had it not been for Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” which encouraged conservatives to “switch” parties and vote for Hillary in order to weaken Democrats by extending their primary fight. By June, finally conceding defeat, Clinton said her primary-vote tally represented “18 million cracks” in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” women face in
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American society. She suggested that her race paved the way for a woman someday being elected president of the United States. Stephanie Chaban and Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Clinton, Bill; Clinton Impeachment; Democratic Party; Election of 2008; Family Values; Health Care; Human Rights; Limbaugh, Rush; Marriage Names; Obama, Barack; September 11.
Further Reading Bernstein, Carl. A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Clinton, Hillary Rodham. Living History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Morrison, Susan, ed. Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections of Women Writers. New York: Harper, 2008. Noonan, Peggy. The Case Against Hillary Clinton. New York: ReganBooks, 2000. Troy, Gil. Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
Clinton Impeachment The most controversial political event of the 1990s, the impeachment and Senate trial of President Bill Clinton in 1998–1999 prompted debate over the extent to which the private lives of public officials matter, while also heightening political partisanship and once again calling into question the prudence of the Watergateinspired position of independent counsel. The Clinton impeachment resulted from what began as an investigation of Whitewater, a failed 1970s land investment in Arkansas involving then governor Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. An expanded probe also looked into allegations concerning the dismissal of personnel from the White House travel office (dubbed “Travelgate”); the White House mishandling of FBI files (dubbed “Filegate”); and the suicide of Clinton aide Vincent Foster. Kenneth Starr, appointed as independent counsel in August 1994, completed the Whitewater probe, eventually prosecuting the Arkansas governor and the Clintons’ former partners in the land deal. As for the Clintons, they were cleared in the Whitewater matter, as well as Travelgate, Filegate, and Foster’s death. But along the way, beginning on January 16, 1998, Starr was authorized to focus on allegations of sexual misconduct inside the White House. This latter phase of Starr’s investigation related to a lawsuit filed in May 1994 alleging that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, had requested sexual favors from a state employee named Paula Corbin Jones. Jones contended that her career suffered as a consequence of rejecting his demands. In a deposition pertaining to the case, which was bankrolled by the conservative Rutherford
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Institute, Clinton was questioned concerning his relationship with various women, including twenty-one-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In his December 1997 deposition, Clinton denied having had “sexual relations” or a “sexual affair” with Lewinsky. The following month, a friend and confidante of Lewinsky named Linda Tripp contacted Starr about secretly recorded telephone conversations in which Lewinsky detailed her relationship with Clinton. When sex became the central focus of Starr’s investigation, many called into question his motives as well as the merits of the independent-counsel system. Some observers felt that conservative hardliners were using Whitewater as a political dragnet, seeking payback for the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals that had tarnished earlier Republican presidencies. First Lady Hillary Clinton, in a January 1998 interview on NBC’s Today, complained of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband. Those she had in mind likely included the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who had contributed heavily to the Arkansas Project (a series of investigations intended to damage the Clinton presidency); such publications as the American Spectator and the Washington Times; and Paul Weyrich, Rush Limbaugh, and other right-wing media commentators who kept up a steady drumbeat against the Clinton White House. After news of the sex scandal broke on the online Drudge Report (January 17, 1998), Clinton publicly denied having had “sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Six months later, however, Lewinsky, having already turned over a dress stained with the president’s semen, disclosed a different story to Starr’s grand jury. In August, testifying before the same body, Clinton admitted to an “improper physical relationship” with Lewinsky. In a nationally televised address, he confessed that he “misled people” about the relationship but argued that it was a private matter. When the case against Clinton reached Capitol Hill, the focus was exclusively on the Lewinsky scandal, as addressed in the Starr Report (September 1998). According to the special prosecutor, Clinton had committed perjury and obstructed justice with witness tampering. Following the November 1998 election, in which House Republicans lost seats, the GOP leadership began impeachment proceedings during the lame-duck session of the 105th Congress. On December 19, 1998, after a rancorous floor debate, the House voted along partisan lines to impeach Clinton; it was only the second time in American history that such a decision had been reached. In the meantime, the president had launched a surprise attack on Iraq the previous day and faced widespread criticism for attempting to distract the country from the scandal. The Senate refused to hold a trial during the 105th Congress’s little remaining time and opted instead to
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hold it during the next session, a decision that raised constitutional questions in the minds of some observers because of the belief that both impeachment and the trial should be addressed in the same session. In addition, Starr’s ethics adviser, Samuel Dash, resigned because the independent counsel failed to remain impartial on the question of impeachment. (Dash felt that Starr was behaving like a prosecutor instead of an independent counsel, who is supposed to impartially gather evidence and let Congress decide.) The Senate trial lasted from January 7 to February 12, 1999. In the end, the two-thirds majority required for conviction and removal from office was not reached—fifty senators voted that Clinton was guilty of obstructing justice, forty-five that he was guilty of perjury. Again, the vote was largely along partisan lines; not one Senate Democrat voted against Clinton. Two months after the Senate trial, Federal District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright, a former student of Clinton’s, found him guilty of civil contempt for his “willful failure” to testify truthfully in the Jones suit. Specifically, Wright found that Clinton had made intentionally false statements in the deposition about his relationship with Lewinsky. In a deal with the independent counsel to end the case, Clinton agreed to a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license and Jones accepted an $850,000 out-of-court settlement. The depth of emotion surrounding the Clinton impeachment trial was intense, but the president, much to the chagrin of his opponents, enjoyed high approval ratings in the wake of the impeachment—indeed higher than any ratings received during the Reagan administration. At the same time, approval ratings for the GOP plummeted. Many Americans strongly disagreed with the Starr investigation, seeing it as gutter politics calculated to humiliate and degrade Clinton. In addition, the case exposed the marital infidelity of many players in the impeachment drama, lending support to charges of hypocrisy. In particular, it exposed past infidelities by such key House players as Newt Gingrich (R-GA, the Speaker of the house, who pushed for impeachment); Bob Livingston (R-LA, who was to replace Gingrich as Speaker); Henry Hyde (R-IL, the lead House manager in the Clinton impeachment trial); and Bob Barr (R-GA, one of the most outspoken proponents of impeachment). Some of these disclosures came in the wake of an offer by Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt to pay $1 million for information about the sexual affairs of Republican leaders. Stephen Kershnar See also: Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Conspiracy Theories; Coulter, Ann; Drudge Report; Gingrich, Newt; Religious Right; Starr, Kenneth; Thomas, Clarence; Washington Times, The; Watergate; Weyrich, Paul M.
Further Reading Isikoff, Michael. Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story. New York: Random House Press, 1999. Schippers, David. Sellout: The Inside Story of President Clinton’s Impeachment. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000.
C o l d Wa r An ideological and militaristic rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, officially beginning on September 2, 1945, and ending on December 26, 1991, the Cold War had a major impact on American culture and the federal government’s foreign and domestic policies. For most Americans, the Cold War represented a contest of democracy, free enterprise, and individual freedom versus dictatorship, communism, and tyranny of the individual. Although both American political parties were equally invested in the Cold War, each sought to discredit the other as having the least effective approach in dealing with the Soviet challenge. Throughout the ordeal, culture warriors of the American left and right engaged in name calling. Conservatives called liberals “Soviet sympathizers,” “peaceniks,” “appeasers,” and “naive”; condemned negative criticisms of U.S. foreign policy as “blame America first”; and accused leftists of being communists. Liberals, in turn, freely referred to conservatives as “warmongers,” “imperialists,” “fascists,” and “red-baiters”; warned against excessive government secrecy; and portrayed the far right as eager for nuclear Armageddon. Liberals were more inclined to favor “peaceful coexistence” between the two superpowers, while conservative hardliners emphasized an uncompromising stance with phrases such as “Better dead than red.”
Policies of Containment The Cold War began under Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded to the presidency following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Prior to meeting Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that July, Truman had a great mistrust of the Soviet dictator. These feelings intensified as the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe in the months immediately following the defeat of Nazi Germany. On March 5, 1946, at Truman’s arrangement, the British statesman Winston Churchill gave an address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, declaring that Europe was divided between east and west by an “iron curtain,” separating free nations from communist ones. Although Churchill’s message was initially deplored by the American public as extremist, it prepared the way for a bold American response to Soviet expansionism. The same year as Churchill’s controversial address, George F. Kennan, a U.S. diplomat stationed at the American Embassy in Moscow, telegraphed his supe-
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riors in Washington an assessment of Soviet behavior, recommending that the United States commit itself to “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” An abbreviated version of Kennan’s “long telegram” later appeared in Foreign Affairs as well as Life magazine, but liberals and conservatives interpreted the message differently. Kennan, who was moderately conservative, believed that Moscow could be contained by diplomatic, political, and economic measures. Conservative hardliners, but also even Truman, supported a militarized version of containment. Later, liberals who backed the original conception of containment would be denigrated by their opponents as lacking strength of will. By 1950 the militarized form of containment was official policy, formalized in the top secret National Security Council Paper 68, known as NSC 68. Truman first put containment into practice by announcing the Truman Doctrine (1947), pledging U.S. support to any country fighting against a communist takeover. Consequently, $400 million ($3.3 billion in 2007 currency) was provided to Turkey and Greece, to keep them out of the Soviet bloc. That same year, the Marshall Plan began the reconstruction of Western Europe to bolster its economy as a safeguard against communist recruitment, a program that cost $13 billion ($107 billion in 2007 currency). Also, Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to provide intelligence and covert capability in countering communist intrigues. In 1948, in response to the Soviet blockade of Berlin, Truman began what would be a fifteen-month airlift of food and supplies to prevent the western portion of the old German capital from coming under communist control. The next year, Truman established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an anti-Soviet military alliance between Western Europe and the United States. Truman hoped that NATO would not only enforce containment but help reduce U.S. military spending so that he could advance domestic social programs under his Fair Deal. Over the expanse of four decades, the U.S. government conducted numerous foreign interventions against communism, both overtly and covertly. These actions took place in many corners of the globe, including Korea (1950–1953), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Vietnam (early 1960s–1975), Indonesia (1965–1966), Nicaragua (1978–1990), Afghanistan (1980–1988), and Grenada (1983). The costliest implementations of containment were the wars in Korea and Vietnam—$54 billion ($370 billion in 2007 currency) with 34,000 fatalities, and $150 billion ($850 billion in 2007 currency) with 58,000 fatalities, respectively.
Party Politics Truman’s Cold War policies were controversial, initially criticized by both conservatives and liberals for increasing the tension between the superpowers and risking World
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War III. On the right, Truman’s main critic was Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH), who was an isolationist and an opponent of a Pax Americana commitment. The most vocal critic on the left was former vice president Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 presidential election. Truman narrowly won that contest, despite polls predicting a victory for GOP candidate Thomas Dewey. Republicans were deeply embittered by losing the White House for a fifth consecutive time. The following year, with the news of the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb and the communist takeover of China, the GOP began a concerted effort to discredit Democrats as being weak on national security. With the U.S. nuclear monopoly ended, Truman was politically pressured to order the development of the hydrogen bomb. In the meantime, children were instructed by Bert the Turtle in the civil defense film Duck and Cover (1951) on how to dive under their school desks should an atomic flash suddenly light the sky. Beginning in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy (RWI) launched the Red Scare by asserting that communists and communist sympathizers had infiltrated the federal government while Democrats stood idly by. Promoting conspiracy theories, conservatives began asking, “Who lost China?” Red China became all the more an issue with the outbreak of the Korean War and the intervention of Chinese forces. Truman’s popularity rating plummeted to 52 percent. In 1951, General Douglas MacArthur was relieved of command for insubordination after he publicly disagreed with Truman’s decision not to take the fight into China. Afterward, Republicans treated MacArthur as a hero when he delivered his “Old Soldiers Never Die” farewell speech before a joint session of Congress. In 1952, with Dwight Eisenhower becoming the first Republican to win the presidency since Herbert Hoover, the GOP committed itself to the anticommunist agenda and the policy of containment. Significantly, Eisenhower came to the helm of his party by defeating Taft in the primary, consigning isolationism to political oblivion. As a two-term president, the former D-Day commander brought an end to the fighting in Korea and implemented the “New Look” defense strategy, avoiding direct military engagement by relying on covert operations and nuclear deterrence. Democrats went on the political offense by accusing Eisenhower of acquiescing to McCarthy while the party’s hawks such as John F. Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts, raised alarm over the so-called missile gap. With the successful launching of Sputnik, the first manmade satellite, the Soviets in 1957 made Americans feel that they were losing the technological edge, inspiring educators to emphasize math and science.
From Détente to Reagan In his inaugural address, Kennedy pledged that the United States would “pay any price” for promoting
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freedom around the world. He continued Eisenhower’s Cold War policies and even inherited a covert plan to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro, which turned into the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961. The following year, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a dispute over the placement of Soviet missiles with atomic warheads on Cuban soil, brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. In the aftermath, the two sides made efforts to defuse tensions, paving the way for détente, although under President Lyndon B. Johnson the U.S. military would be bogged down in Vietnam. To this day, supporters of Kennedy insist that had he not been assassinated in 1963, the Vietnam War would never have evolved into a quagmire. In 1968, Republicans returned to ascendancy as Richard Nixon won the presidency on the promise of ending the Vietnam War honorably. As efforts toward peace in Southeast Asia dragged on, Nixon in 1972 played the “China card,” establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing in order to throw off balance the Soviets, who greatly mistrusted the Chinese. Controversially, the agreement required the United States to cease recognizing democratic Taiwan as the official China. Also in 1972, Nixon negotiated the first SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) agreement with Moscow. In 1975, the year after Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, South Vietnam fell to the communists. On April 30, President Gerald Ford oversaw the humiliating American retreat from Saigon, with helicopters being pushed off of aircraft carriers into the South China Sea to make room for hordes of refugees. Prior to leaving office, Ford arranged the Helsinki Accord with the Soviet Union, in which the United States acknowledged the boundaries of Eastern Europe as established after World War II and the Soviets agreed that those nations were entitled to human rights and were no longer to be militarily subjugated by the Kremlin. Ronald Reagan, a Republican presidential contender, denounced the agreement as appeasement. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, brought human rights to the forefront of his foreign policy, seeking to “regain the moral stature” of the United States in the wake of Vietnam. Carter, however, came to be regarded as a weak president as a consequence of the Iranian hostage crisis (the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. With a downward economy and a national “malaise,” Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid to Reagan, who campaigned on a platform of regaining American stature and military might. Reagan’s tenure was characterized by a dramatic increase in military spending (from $171 billion in 1981 to $376 billion in 1986); the initial research funding for a prospective space-based missile shield called the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as Star Wars, as first coined by detractors); and interventions against
communism in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Grenada. Reagan suggested that coexistence of the two competing ideologies of the Cold War was intolerable. In what the preeminent historian Henry Steele Commager at the time called the worst speech ever given by an American president, Reagan in a March 1983 address before the National Association of Evangelicals, pronounced the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Many liberals at the time were certain that the president was escalating tensions that could possibly lead to a nuclear holocaust. Some commentators suggested that both countries were “evil empires.” Before leaving office, Reagan had arranged some accords with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, most notably an agreement to eliminate medium-range missiles in Europe (1987). Although the Soviet Union was dissolved during the term of President George H.W. Bush, Republicans generally give Reagan the credit. Reagan’s actions, they insist, brought Moscow to its knees and set in motion the spiraling events that would lead to the regime’s implosion. Others maintain, however, that Reagan’s actions actually prolonged the Cold War by arousing Soviet hardliners, who in turn undermined the reform efforts of Gorbachev. Ford, in an interview published posthumously in 2006, declared, “It makes me very irritated when Reagan’s people pound their chests and say that because we had this big military buildup, the Kremlin collapsed.”
Revisionist History American historians have intensely debated the origins of the Cold War, dividing themselves over the years into three competing perspectives: orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist. The orthodox position, as articulated by Herbert Feis, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and others, dominated the scholarship of the 1940s and 1950s and squarely blamed Soviet aggression as the cause of the conflict. During the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the Vietnam War, the diplomatic historians William A. Williams, Walter LaFerber, and others offered the revisionist position, arguing that Soviet actions were a natural reaction to the American drive for global hegemony. In the 1970s there emerged a synthesis of the first two perspectives, leading to a third position known as post-revisionist. According to Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, whereas the first two positions focus on ideology as the cause of the Cold War, the latter emphasizes a “realist” view of rational actors operating on both sides. In the political arena, conservatives frequently point to the Yalta Conference (February 1945) and blame Roosevelt for agreeing that after the defeat of Hitler all of Eastern Europe would come under a Soviet sphere of influence. Republicans over the years have construed Yalta as a moment when a Democratic administration “sold out” a group of free nations to communist dictatorship.
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Since the State Department official Alger Hiss had been present at the Yalta Conference, some conservatives have suggested that Roosevelt, who was ailing at the time, had been manipulated by a federal employee who was later proved to be working on behalf of Kremlin interests. In May 2006, President George W. Bush publicly apologized for the Yalta agreement, asserting that Roosevelt, as well as Churchill, had been appeasers. That decision, Bush asserted, led to “the captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe” and “will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.” However, highly respected Cold War historians such as Gaddis maintain that the Yalta decision was the best that the overstretched United States and Great Britain could have obtained at that time. Furthermore, the Yalta agreement stipulated temporary Soviet occupation followed by free elections. Over the years Eastern Europe was pointed at and debated by American politicians who sought to cast blame or score political points. Iconic moments were Kennedy’s June 1963 speech next to the newly built Berlin Wall (in which he proclaimed, “All free men . . . are citizens of Berlin”) and Reagan’s June 1987 speech at the same location (in which he demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). Between those two events, during an October 1976 presidential candidates’ debate, Ford lost credibility (and later the election) with the gaffe, “There is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” Years earlier, in October 1957, Kennedy (then a senator) marked the occasion of the failed Hungarian rebellion to deplore any notion that Eastern Europe was a “lost cause.” This was clearly a veiled criticism of Eisenhower for refusing to intervene in that crisis. Later, George W. Bush compared the “liberation” of Iraq with the earlier struggles of Hungary, presenting himself as a leader who conducts foreign policy out of principle and not convenience. In June 2006, Bush visited Hungary to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Hungarian rebellion.
Fred Inglis, writing in 1991, concluded that the Cold War had been a “cruel peace,” a chain of conflicts big and small that led to 16 million deaths worldwide. In The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the Harvard professor and neoconservative Francis Fukuyama declared that the end of the Cold War marked the apex of humanity’s ideological development, the culmination of liberal democracy and a global free-market system. The following year, however, President Bill Clinton half-jokingly stated that he missed the Cold War. “We had an intellectually coherent thing,” Clinton explained. “The American people knew what the rules were.” In a retort to Fukuyama, the Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington warned in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) that ancient disputes about culture and religion would resurface now that two competing superpowers were no longer policing the globe. Following the jihadist terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Huntington’s thesis resonated with many observers, while social critics such as Noam Chomsky argued that the attacks represented blowback of the Cold War. In his promotion of globalization, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, in The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005), used the 11/9 date of the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 11, 1989) as a metaphor for the victory of free enterprise and global communications, writing, “The walls [of closed totalitarian societies] had fallen and the Windows [computer software] had opened . . .”—while urging that 9/11 not be allowed to overshadow 11/9. Roger Chapman
Victory Rituals and Lingering Debate
Further Reading
In 1990, as the Cold War essentially came to a halt, George H.W. Bush heralded the change as a “new world order,” one in which the two superpowers “can work in common cause.” Some observers, however, noted American triumphalism in the pronouncement. Indeed, later at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Bush was running for reelection, a big chunk of the dismantled Berlin Wall was put on display. In the end, presidential libraries made permanent exhibits out of pieces of the old “iron curtain,” while neoconservatives began encouraging a more aggressive American foreign policy, as represented by the Project for a New American Century (founded in 1997). Meanwhile, the British cultural studies professor
See also: China; Communists and Communism; Cuba; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Marxism; McCarthyism; Nixon, Richard; Nuclear Age; Reagan, Ronald; Revisionist History; Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Soviet Union and Russia; Strategic Defense Initiative; Truman, Harry S.; Vietnam War.
Charen, Mona. Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. ———. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Inglis, Fred. The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life in the Cold War. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Kengor, Paul. The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. New York: Regan Books, 2006. Leebaert, Derek. The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
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Levering, Ralph B. The Cold War: A Post–Cold War History. 2nd ed. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2005. May, Ernest R., ed. American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1993.
Colson, Chuck A convicted Watergate conspirator, Chuck Colson became a leading evangelical thinker after a muchpublicized 1973 conversion experience. Shaken by his seven months in prison, he founded the largest evangelical prison ministry in the United States and became an influential author and radio commentator. Although revered in most sectors of the Religious Right, liberals have viewed him with suspicion. Born Charles Wendell Colson on October 16, 1931, in Boston, he was raised in a middle-class Episcopalian family. Educated at Brown University (AB, 1953) and George Washington University (JD, 1959), in between completing a tour in the U.S. Marine Corps (1953–1955), Colson became a member of the Boston law firm of Gadsby and Hannah (1961–1969). Prior to working for Nixon, he obtained public-service experience as an assistant to the assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy (1955–1956) and an administrative assistant to Senator Leverett Saltonstall (R-MA) (1956–1959). Colson was instrumental in gaining the 1966 Massachusetts Republican nomination for Edward Brooke, the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote. Following Richard M. Nixon’s election victory in 1968, Colson was tapped for the position of White House special counsel. He quickly gained a reputation as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and was reported to have said he would “walk over” his “own grandmother if necessary” to assure the reelection of the president. It was Colson who wrote the 1971 memo creating the Nixon “enemies list” and who organized the White House “plumbers unit” that carried out the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and the June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex. As fallout from Watergate engulfed the Nixon administration in early 1973, Colson resigned and sought counseling from an evangelical friend. Impressed by C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952), Colson underwent a conversion experience. The following March, he was indicted on charges related to the Watergate and Ellsberg break-ins. Through a plea bargain, he was fined and sentenced to one to three years at Maxwell Federal Prison in Alabama. Appalled by conditions there and the dehumanizing effect of prison, he looked to his new faith to provide solutions. Released in early 1975, Colson formed Prison Fellowship, a nonprofit organization promoting the evangelization of prisoners and their families and reform of the penal system.
Colson promoted his efforts with the publication of his autobiography Born Again (1976), which sold more than 2 million copies and inspired a 1978 film starring Dean Jones. With the strength of this success along with a follow-up best-seller—Life Sentence (1979)—and the backing of influential evangelical corporate leaders such as Jack Eckerd (of Eckerd Drugs), he distanced himself from politics and concentrated on building his organization. Within just a few years, Prison Fellowship was the largest evangelical prison ministry in America; by 2005 it had an operating budget of more than $37 million and a full-time staff of over 300. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Colson began to address a variety of social, cultural, and political concerns, including abortion, the church’s role in society, American “cultural decline,” postmodernism, and the teaching of evolution in the schools. His books promoting a “biblical worldview,” such as Kingdoms in Conflict (1987), were consistent best-sellers in the nation’s Christian bookstores. At the time, he was also serving as an informal adviser for televangelist Pat Robertson’s presidential bid. In 1991, Colson launched a daily, syndicated radio spot (called BreakPoint) that by 2005 was being carried on more than a thousand (predominantly evangelical) radio stations across the country. In the mid-1990s, Colson supported the growing cooperation between evangelicals and Catholics, serving as co-editor of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (1995), a collection of essays that explored the growing affinity and remaining differences between the two groups. Colson moved from celebrity “trophy convert” to a role as one of evangelicalism’s most respected spokesmen and dominant opinion shapers. His combination of traditional Christian morality, conservative cultural values, vision of limited government, and desire to promote social justice through faith-based efforts could be seen as a template of an evangelical ideology that has evolved from the 1970s onward. Among liberals, including progressive Christians, Colson is remembered for his role as Nixon’s “dirty tricks” maestro, and his mixing of religion and politics is largely regarded as the cloaking of a conservative Republican agenda with pious rhetoric. Larry Eskridge See also: Catholic Church; Compassionate Conservatism; Evangelicalism; Faith-Based Programs; Felt, W. Mark; Liddy, G. Gordon; Nixon, Richard; Religious Right; Republican Party; Robertson, Pat; Televangelism; Watergate.
Further Reading Aitken, Jonathan. Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed. Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook, 2005. Colson, Charles, with Jack Eckerd. Why America Doesn’t Work. Dallas: Word, 1992.
Columbu s Day Colson, Charles, with Richard John Neuhaus, eds. Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1995. Menendez, Albert J. Three Voices of Extremism: Charles Colson, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy. Silver Spring, MD: Americans for Religious Liberty, 1997.
C o l u m b u s D ay Columbus Day has been an autumn celebration in the United States since the early nineteenth century and was declared a national holiday in 1937. Traditionally set for October 12, it has been celebrated since 1971 on the second Monday in October, commemorating the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the American continent in 1492. As public consciousness began to be raised regarding European colonial history, the landing of Columbus came to be seen by many less as a symbol of the noble human spirit of exploration than as the initial step in the European conquest and exploitation of the Americas. It seemed increasingly incongruous to criticize the brutalities of European colonial history while continuing to celebrate the arrival of Columbus on American shores. Resistance to Columbus Day celebrations is often associated with the rise of radical political groups such as the American Indian Movement, which in 1989 pressured South Dakota to designate the second Monday in
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October as Native American Day. However, the resistance is much more broadly based; a number of communities, many of them university towns, have adopted alternative Indigenous People’s Day celebrations. Downplaying the importance of Columbus and European exploration in public celebrations and in the public school curriculum has in turn raised the ire of some Italian American organizations and the broader segment of the population concerned that America’s heroic history is being undermined by “political correctness.” Communities and school boards have struggled to maintain a fine line between public observances that (1) are candid about the past and do not symbolically perpetuate the racism and brutality wrought on native peoples, and (2) do not offend Italian Americans and traditionalists. Daniel Liechty See also: American Indian Movement; Deloria, Vine, Jr.; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Revisionist History; Thanksgiving Day; Victimhood.
Further Reading Churchill, Ward. Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003. Harjo, S.S. “I Won’t Be Celebrating Columbus Day.” Newsweek, September 1, 1991. Penner, Lucille. Celebration: The Story of American Holidays. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
A Native American demonstrator smudges (cleanses) fellow protesters at Denver’s March for Italian Pride on Columbus Day, 2000. American Indian groups joined in blocking the parade and denouncing Columbus as a symbol of “genocide.” (Mark Leffingwell/Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
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Comic Book s Comic books have been a battleground in America’s culture wars from the time of their inception in the 1930s. With children as their target audience, comics immediately aroused the suspicion of activist groups that feared the medium’s pernicious potential. It was not until after World War II, though, that the battle for the hearts and minds of American youth began in earnest. During the war, the government sanctioned comic books that showcased values of patriotism and sacrifice. The alliance was often an uneasy one—in March 1941, before America’s entry into the war, the cover of Marvel’s Captain America depicted the hero punching Adolph Hitler, an image that prompted many politicians to warn against politics creeping into comic books. Such sentiments changed dramatically following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Then, Captain America, along with the characters Sub Mariner and the Human Torch, waged war on the Nazis and the Japanese with full approval. Direct Comics’s Batman and Superman encouraged readers to buy war bonds. More recent comic book creations, such as Uncle Sam, Star Spangled Kid, and the Atom, likewise have battled America’s enemies. After World War II, the issue of juvenile delinquency unified cultural opposition to the comic book. Psychologist Frederick Wertham, in Seduction of the Innocent (1954), linked the reading of comic books to juvenile delinquency, although he was hardly the first to make the connection. In 1947, the Fraternal Order of Police had condemned the increasingly popular genre of “true crime” comic books as conducive to juvenile delinquency. The Daughters of the American Revolution and the Catholic National Organization for Decent Literature called for bans on “crime comics.” In the midst of the criticism, comic book publishers moved in two dramatically different directions. The first involved the publication of romance comics, made popular three years earlier with the debut of Young Romance. These comics used wholesome cautionary tales as a means of promoting conservative values in American women and upholding the gender status quo. Not surprisingly, the ad hoc comic book committees that had formed after the war approved the romance titles. Pushing in the opposite direction, EC Comics’s lurid but popular Tales from the Crypt featured graphic violence and more than a hint of sexuality. That EC titles also contained a fair share of antisegregation and antiwar plots brought even more conservatives into the opposition’s ranks. And EC Comics played a prominent role in the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency. At a time when parents found nearly half of comic book material objectionable, the Senate not surprisingly supported the notion that many comic books, and especially the EC titles, had gone too far. Rather than
push the conflict to the next level, comic book publishers that year chose to form a self-censoring committee—the Comics Magazine Association of America. For the next decade, the pages of American comics were filled with simple escapist fantasies, usually involving superheroes and plots that affirmed rather than challenged gender and political norms. When the United States expanded its war against communism in the early 1960s, comic books dutifully followed suit. In Marvel Comics’s Iron Man, an industrial billionaire named Tony Stark provided the South Vietnamese Army with advanced weaponry to fight the Viet Cong. The Hulk’s deadliest enemy, the Abomination, was an irradiated Soviet agent. Growing opposition to the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration, and authority in general brought profound changes to the comic book industry, which began to challenge the constraints imposed on it during the 1950s. After years of fighting the Cold War on their country’s behalf, Iron Man and Captain America started to question both their own efforts and the foreign policy of the United States. Green Arrow and Green Lantern set out to demonstrate that the world was composed of grays, not the simple blacks and whites that earlier comics had suggested. By the 1980s, a growing emphasis on direct sales, along with a greater tolerance for behavior and sentiments once deemed unacceptable, enabled the comic industry to break free of the 1954 comic code and make a major move to the left. Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen featured antiheroes who engaged in graphic violence and sex, and who personified a dark worldview that would have been banned years earlier. The age of the dark, brooding antihero had arrived. The most popular characters now were Batman, Wolverine, and the Punisher, whose methods and behavior closely resembled those of their enemies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, new comic titles like Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan and The Authority joined old Marvel and DC mainstays the Avengers and the Justice League of America in depicting relations between heroes and their world in increasingly dysfunctional and graphic terms. While comic books have remained a contested cultural battleground, the alarmism of the 1950s has yet to resurface. And market realities suggest that it will not, because the average comic book reader, in his or her late twenties, is demanding far more adult entertainment. Although comic books were once the principal battleground for the hearts and minds of children, they no longer evoke the intensity of fear and passion that characterized them in the past. Bryan E. Vizzini See also: Catholic Church; Censorship; Cold War; Comic Strips; Communists and Communism; Motion Picture Association of America; September 11; Vietnam War.
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Further Reading McAllister, Matthew P., Edward H. Sewell, Jr., and Ian Gordon, eds. Comics and Ideology. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Comic Strips A frequent flashpoint in the modern culture wars, comic strips were relatively uncontroversial for much of their history, serving simply as working-class entertainment. Early examples like The Katzenjammer Kids (1897) and Mutt and Jeff (1907) proved highly popular and paved the way for the post–World War I boom in comic entertainment. Rising wages and shrinking unemployment rates heralded the emergence of the consumer culture in the United States that fueled the production of comic strips. The number of syndicated dailies increased dramatically after World War I, allowing Americans to follow the escapades of Gasoline Alley (1918); Thimble Theater (1919), which in 1929 featured the debut of Popeye the Sailor; Little Orphan Annie (1924); and Buck Rogers (1929). The Depression years witnessed the arrival of other lasting favorites, such as Blondie (1930), Dick Tracy (1931), Flash Gordon and Li’l Abner (1934), Prince Valiant (1937), and Mary Worth (1938). The arrival of both Batman and Superman in the 1940s rounded out a successful half century of comic strip production.
Conservative Values Far from challenging the norms of the day, American comic strips before World War II by and large affirmed them. Blondie, for example, began her career as a flapper but quickly settled into the gender role assigned to her by 1930s’ society. Mary Worth maintained all the socially correct behaviors of a wealthy elderly widow. Dick Tracy battled America’s criminal underworld in stark hues of black and white that any child could recognize. Even strips set in the far future or distant past steered clear of thorny questions and nuance. Despite the differences in time and setting, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Prince Valiant represented a modern America that viewed itself as the pinnacle of civilization and progress. To the extent that comic strips served as political or social commentary, they tended to espouse fairly conservative values with respect to both domestic and international issues. In Little Orphan Annie, Daddy Warbucks personified all the alleged virtues of a capitalist, industrial America, capable of genuine empathy and willing to assist those who were less fortunate. Warbucks had little sympathy for government handouts and opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s
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creation of a modern welfare state. Women and workingclass Americans willingly submitted to Warbucks’s enlightened patriarchal leadership. The Tarzan comic strip affirmed the need for white leadership. The increasingly volatile international arena provided ample fodder for the adventures of Flash Gordon. Ming’s tireless efforts to enslave humanity surely must have resonated with readers whose concerns over imperial Japan escalated rapidly following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China. By the time the Japanese air force bombed the USS Panay in 1937, the threat that Americans (and their proxy, Flash) faced was all too clear. Ming was evil for evil’s sake, much as Americans believed was true of the Japanese and the Nazis.
From Pogo to Doonesbury and Beyond The age of comic strips as an affirmation of American political and social conservatism came to an end in the early 1950s. To be sure, Blondie, Popeye, and the Gasoline Alley gang continued to uphold the status quo and avoid controversy, as did newcomers like Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, and Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. But Walt Kelly’s decision to attack McCarthyism in his daily panels of Pogo forever changed the cultural landscape of comic strips. When conservative viewers complained of his depiction of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a wildcat named Simple J. Malarky, Kelly drew a bag over the character’s head, leading to additional complaints that the notorious senator now resembled a member of the Ku Klux Klan, an image that Kelly apparently found appropriate. From his assault on McCarthy’s excesses to his 1968 lampooning of all that year’s presidential candidates, Kelly consistently aroused the ire of American conservatives, whose protests eventually led many newspapers to move the strip to the editorial pages. Kelly’s Pogo and Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (which frequently lampooned southern politicians) reflected the extent to which the line between escapist comedy and political satire had blurred in the postwar years—no real surprise since both Kelly and Capp had worked formerly as political cartoonists. Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury (1970) soon attracted the full wrath of American conservatives for its relentless attacks on American politics. Shortly after President Richard Nixon announced his “Vietnamization” plan to turn over the fighting in Southeast Asia to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the jingoistic character B.D., who had just enlisted in hopes of seeing some action, assured his friend Mike Doonesbury that he had faith in the president’s ability to get U.S. troops into the line of fire. Once in Vietnam, B.D. became chummy with Phred, an entrepreneurial member of the Viet Cong who would later become a Nike executive in Vietnam. Zonker, the quintessential hippie, shamelessly and openly indulged in drug use and spent his life pursuing the perfect tan.
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From 1973 to 1976, Doonesbury was moved to the editorial pages of many newspapers and was dropped from others, yet it won a Pulitzer Prize, and American liberals loved the strip. Over the next several decades, Trudeau mocked the war on drugs, the war in Panama, the war in Grenada, and the wars in the Persian Gulf. He featured an AIDS-stricken character, depicted President George H.W. Bush as invisible, and showed B.D. losing a leg in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trudeau’s opponents are legion, though his sympathies clearly lie less with the right than with the left.The same held true of the comic strips that followed in Doonesbury’s wake. Berke Breathed’s Bloom County (1980) harkened back to Walt Kelly’s Pogo in its tone and emphasis on animals as characters—the lead character is Opus, a talking penguin. Like Trudeau, Breathed recognized no sacred cows (and especially conservative ones) when commenting on American life and politics. The televangelist boom in the 1980s, perhaps best characterized by Oral Roberts’s campaign to raise money lest God call him back to heaven, led Breathed to transform his omnipresent Bill the Cat into Fundamentally Oral Bill, who promised true believers that the sooner they sent him their money, the sooner God would call home his competitors Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Jim Baker, and Pat Robertson. In another instance, Opus purchased Bolivia with money he received from the Reagan administration under the pretense of constructing a missile defense shield. When called upon to present the results of his research, Opus and computer whiz Oliver Wendell Jones easily bluffed the oversight committee and escaped federal prosecution. Other prominent targets during Bloom County’s nineyear run included conservative favorite Oliver North, politicians in general (like Bloom County’s own Senator Badfellow), the war on drugs (company executives who had ten to twelve alcoholic drinks per day were deemed “clean,” while the cartoonist who consumed a marijuana brownie ten years earlier was slated for immediate termination), and the legal system (Steve Dallas explained why suing the wealthy was the basis of American civilization). Like Doonesbury, Bloom County often served as the foil of conservatives, though its criticisms struck across the spectrum. Breathed eventually discontinued Bloom County, claiming that the fictional setting imposed too many creative constraints. His subsequent Outland took Opus and other cast members into the life of inner-city America. While Outland’s lifespan was shorter than that of its predecessor, the strip provided a bridge of sorts for one of the most provocative comics yet, Boondocks (1997), which featured ten-year-old African-American radical Huey Freeman and provided an uncompromising and unflattering look at lower-class African Americans. Writer Aaron McGruder’s work skewered both the left and right. Comic strips likely will continue to evoke controversy, especially with many cartoonists and readers viewing
political satire and entertainment as one and the same. Moreover, much of what makes the comics humorous is their incisiveness on current events. Yet the ongoing success of strips like Blondie, now over seventy-five years old, speaks volumes about comics’ ability to remain popular and entertaining even when avoiding touchy topics. Bryan E. Vizzini See also: AIDS; Bush Family; Comic Books; Counterculture; Falwell, Jerry; McCarthy, Joseph; Nixon, Richard; North, Oliver; Robertson, Pat; Televangelism; Thompson, Hunter S.; Vietnam War; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
C o m m a g e r, H e n r y S t e e l e Believing that a historian should not retreat into detached research but should join in current debates and find potential solutions to modern problems through knowledge of history, the American historian Henry Steele Commager gained notoriety for his populist politics. He is especially remembered for taking a strong stand for intellectual freedom during the McCarthy era. Commager was born on October 25, 1902, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After completing a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1928, he embarked on a long academic career, teaching at New York University (1926–1938), Columbia University (1939–1956), and Amherst College (1956–1994). He also served as a visiting professor at Cambridge and Oxford in England. He died at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998. Commager’s writings appeared in such popular publications as the New York Times, the New Republic, and Harper’s, and his many submissions usually focused on the historical context of current events and social issues. The Growth of the American Republic (1930), a collaboration by Commager and Samuel Eliot Morrison, was for years the standard textbook on U.S. history. In the 1940s and 1950s, Commager wrote a number of influential works on civil liberties, free speech, and social discourse, including The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950), Freedom, Loyalty, and Dissent (1954), and Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene (1966). His intellectual focus was the influence of free thought and public knowledge on the American national character. During the Cold War, his defense of dissent and dissenters got him branded by some critics as a leftist and communist sympathizer. As an activist scholar, Commager frequently lectured
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to large audiences on political matters. A critic of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the policies of the Reagan administration, he attracted right-wing criticism. He was also tangentially involved in the civil rights movement because he favored liberal pluralism, if not necessarily multiculturalism. This gained Commager criticism from the left of the political spectrum as well. Commager’s lifelong advocacy of intellectual freedom, popular knowledge, and the historical interpretation of contemporary issues has had long-lasting influence on scholars and public advocates, though over the years his politics has been seen as either too liberal or too conservative by various detractors. He is ranked among such other great historians of his time as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Allan Nevins, Richard Hofstadter, and Samuel Eliot Morrison. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Academic Freedom; Anti-Intellectualism; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; McCarthyism; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Reagan, Ronald; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; Secular Humanism; Vietnam War; Watergate.
Further Reading Jumonville, Neil. Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Common Cause Common Cause is a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization founded by John W. Gardner in 1970. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., and with staff in thirty-eight states, the organization is dedicated to political reform at the federal, state, and local levels, serving as a vehicle for citizens to engage in the political process and to hold their elected leaders accountable to the public interest. Gardner, a Republican, served as secretary of health, education, and welfare under Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s. He was later chair of the National Urban Coalition, an advocacy group for minorities and the working poor in urban areas. These experiences, especially his interactions with special interest groups, led Gardner to conclude that in the political arena, “everybody’s organized but the people.” Within a few months of his starting Common Cause, the fledgling organization had more than 100,000 members, many of whom had joined to protest the Vietnam War. Common Cause today operates nationwide with thousands of active volunteers. The group is funded chiefly by dues and donations from individual members. A thirty-member governing board in Washington determines the group’s policies and provides oversight for the organization. Since its formation, Common Cause has
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been best known for its work in campaign finance reform, increasing diversity in the media, removing barriers to voting, encouraging government ethics and accountability, and increasing citizen participation in politics. Important individual victories for Common Cause include advocating for the Twentieth Amendment; lowering the voting age to eighteen (1971); lobbying for the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (1974); generating support for the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990); campaigning for the enactment of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (2002); and alerting the public to inequities in media ownership rules enacted by the Federal Communications Commission (2003). The stated mission of Common Cause is to “strengthen public participation and faith in our institutions of self-government; to ensure that government and political processes serve the general interest, rather than special interests; to curb the excessive influence of money on government decisions and elections; to preserve fair elections and high ethical standards for government officials; and to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans.” This stance has led to bipartisan success in lobbying, grassroots activism, public education, and media outreach. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Americans with Disabilities Act; Campaign Finance Reform; Federal Communications Commission; Freedom of Information Act; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Media Bias; Tort Reform; Vietnam War; Voting Rights Act; War Protesters.
Further Reading Common Cause Web site. www.commoncause.org. McFarland, Andrew S. Common Cause: Lobbying in the Public Interest. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1984. Rothenberg, Lawrence S. Linking Citizens to Government: Interest Group Politics at Common Cause. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
C o m m o n e r, B a r r y Dubbed the “Paul Revere of Ecology” by Time magazine, Barry Commoner helped fashion America’s environmental sensibilities by calling attention to the environmental costs of technological innovation. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 28, 1917, and trained as a cellular biologist at Columbia University (AB, 1937) and Harvard University (MA, 1938; PhD, 1941), Commoner spent most of his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis (1947–1981). In 1981, a year after running for president of the United States on the Citizens Party ticket, he relocated to Queens College in Flushing, New York. In the 1950s, while teaching at Washington University, Commoner became one of the early opponents of
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nuclear energy and especially atmospheric nuclear testing. With the help of the academic community, Commoner founded the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information, which produced data linking nuclear testing with radioactive buildup in the human body. These findings led to the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1963. Of the hundreds of articles and nine books he published, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (1971) remains his most influential work. In this major environmentalist tract, he proposed that the environmental degradation that had occurred since World War II had not been solely the function of affluence and population growth—two of the commonly asserted reasons for environmental problems. Rather, he argued, American society’s adoption of new technology was to blame. These new technologies included such items as plastics, laundry detergent, and synthetic textiles. He went on to propose four laws of ecology: (1) “everything is connected to everything else”; (2) “everything must go somewhere”; (3) “nature knows best”; and (4) “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” These principles became maxims to environmentalists, who used them to support their efforts to protect wilderness and curb pollution. Commoner had his detractors. Many conservatives considered him a radical who only espoused doomsday scenarios. Grouping him with writers such as Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson who trumpeted that environmental Judgment Day was near, conservatives argued that these activists were little more than modern incarnations of Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century philosopher who predicted imminent worldwide famine. Moreover, Commoner seldom published in peer-reviewed journals and did not command the respect of the scientific community. His rejection of Francis Crick and James Watson’s hypotheses about the structure of DNA further harmed his scholarly reputation. Nicolaas Mink See also: Carson, Rachel; Environmental Movement; Love Canal; Nuclear Age; Three Mile Island Accident.
Further Reading Egan, Michael. Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Kriebel, David, ed. Barry Commoner’s Contribution to the Environmental Movement: Science and Social Action. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2002.
Communists and Communism Proponents of communism are committed to the teachings of the nineteenth-century German economist and political philosopher Karl Marx, believing that a worker revolution leading to the overthrow of capitalism,
and the establishment of a planned economy, will usher in an egalitarian society. Traditionally feared and reviled by most Americans, communists have maintained a long and active presence in U.S. society and public affairs. In the modern culture wars, communists have been both participants and victims. Perhaps more telling about American society, however, is how the perceived threat of communism has been either exaggerated (by Republican opportunists, business leaders, Dixiecrat segregationists, and conservative Christians) or flatly denied (by defensive liberals, avowed leftists, “fellow travelers,” romantic progressives, liberal Christians, and humanists). Conservatives, primarily members of the Republican Party, for years portrayed the “red menace” as the consequence of “liberal dupes” and a Democratic Party “soft on communism.” Leftists who refused to publicly admit and denounce Stalinist excesses from the 1920s to the early 1950s were the objects of conservative ridicule. For their part, liberals were prone to classify vocal anticommunist conservatives as “fascist,” while accusing them of “red baiting.” On the other hand, notable liberal Democrats such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and John Kenneth Galbraith in 1947 established Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an anticommunist organization supportive of the Cold War policy of containing Soviet global influence. In academia, debates raged between anticommunists and anti-anticommunists. The post–Cold War era has been characterized by arguments over revisionist history, including the extent to which opened Soviet archives and declassified American documents show that the Kremlin was dictating the operation of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and whether or not that organization posed a threat to the American way of life.
Popular Front and “Browderism” The CPUSA enjoyed its greatest influence from 1930 to 1939, known as the “Red Decade.” This was the period of the so-called united front or popular front, when communists cooperated with socialists and liberals in opposing fascism. There were untold thousands of “fellow travelers,” individuals sympathetic to the ideals of communism and interested in the “experiment” taking place in the Soviet Union but reluctant to formally join the communist movement. CPUSA membership itself peaked at about 100,000 in 1939, with about 70,000 still in the fold toward the end of World War II—and with a high turnover rate. Many members left the party in 1939 after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany and the CPUSA announced the end of the popular front. Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the CPUSA returned to antifascism, but the recruitment of new members never again reached the 1930s levels. Critics noted the zigzag course of CPUSA positions and how they paralleled
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the Moscow viewpoint. With the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, the CPUSA came under attack from both mainstream conservatives and liberals. At the same time, division within the party ranks decimated the CPUSA, marginalizing it even further. By 1958, such wear and tear had reduced the CPUSA membership rolls to about 3,000. The leader of the communist movement during its heyday was Earl Browder, a homegrown radical from Kansas who became general secretary of the CPUSA in January 1930. During his tenure, Browder attempted to Americanize Marxism and coined the slogan, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” On May 20, 1944, he dissolved the party and formed the Communist Political Association (CPA), a decision that ultimately led to his political downfall. Since Americans were “illprepared for socialism,” Browder argued it made strategic sense for American communists to settle for being a leftwing pressure group. In June 1945, on orders from Moscow, Browder was stripped of his position, the CPA dissolved, and the CPUSA reactivated. The ousting was led by longtime party hack William Z. Foster, who denounced Browder as “an unreconstructed revisionist . . . a social imperialist . . . an enemy of the working class . . . a renegade . . . an apologist for American imperialism.” Eight months later, Browder was expelled from the party. In 1946, Eugene Dennis emerged as the CPUSA general secretary, while Foster maintained ideological control. With “Browderism” defeated, the CPUSA turned its attention to recruiting farmers, blacks, and militant labor, striving to build its base while awaiting the soon anticipated depression, which communists predicted would be worse than that of the 1930s.
Cold War and Red Scare In the meantime, the party suffered public hostility due to Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and the fall of China to communism in 1949. With former communists such as Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, and Whittaker Chambers publicly testifying that the CPUSA engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union, the American public largely viewed communists as a sinister fifth column under Kremlin control. In 1947, President Harry Truman established a federal loyalty program for the purpose of keeping communists out of public service and to show that he was not “soft on communism.” That same year, U.S. attorney general Tom Clark drafted a list of “subversive organizations,” of which many were communist “front groups” formed during the popular front or World War II. At the same time, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC) compiled a master index of names of individuals who had joined or lent support to these organizations, such as by signing petitions pertaining
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to liberal causes. These people were publicly exposed as communists, fellow travelers, or liberal “dupes.” With the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), requiring unions to sign noncommunist affidavits or else lose their protections under the National Labor Relations Board, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began purging communists from its leadership ranks, a significant development considering that communists in the early postwar years controlled one-fourth of the CIO unions. When the CPUSA supported Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential race, unionists were outraged because the endorsement had the potential to divide the liberal vote and throw the election to the Republican candidate. Although Truman, the Democratic candidate, emerged victorious, union leaders henceforth largely dismissed the CPUSA as more interested in its ideological agenda than the good of the labor movement. At the same time, communists shifted their focus from labor unions to the civil rights movement. Southern segregationists, in an attempt to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers, argued that the civil rights movement was part of a communist conspiracy to divide and weaken the nation, but King was careful to keep communists at arm’s length. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, forcing school desegregation, was characterized by Congressman James Eastland (D-MS) as the product of “some secret . . . very powerful Communist or pro-Communist influence.” In 1948, twelve CPUSA leaders were prosecuted for conspiracy under the Smith Act (1940), which made it illegal for any group to conspire to overthrow the U.S. government. The 1948 case tipped against the communists after Louis Budenz, an ex-communist turned FBI informant, interpreted communist theoretical writings as conspiratorial. It did not matter that prosecutors were unable to present tangible evidence of an actual CPUSA plot. In 1956, after the damage had already been done to the CPUSA, the U.S. Supreme Court in Yates v. United States ruled that the Smith Act “requires more than the teaching and advocacy of an abstract doctrine that the government should be overthrown by force and violence.” The decade of the 1950s, especially during the Korean War (1950–1953), was perhaps the worst time for the CPUSA. In January 1950, former government official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury after it was determined that, contrary to earlier testimony, he had passed on secret documents to the Soviet Union years earlier, when he worked for the U.S. State Department. Since Hiss had been present at the Yalta Conference near the end of World War II, at which the Allies agreed that Eastern Europe would come under the Soviet sphere of influence after the war, conservatives offered a conspiracy theory that the ailing President Franklin Roosevelt had
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been snookered by a federal employee who was working on behalf of Kremlin interests. In April 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) gave a controversial speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, charging that 205 members of the Communist Party were working at the U.S. State Department. Also in 1950, the German émigré physicist Klaus Fuchs was convicted in Great Britain of having disclosed secrets of the Manhattan Project to the Soviets. Then, in March of the following year, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a husband and wife from New York City and members of the Community Party, were found guilty of having passed on atomic secrets to Soviet agents; they were executed in June 1953. As the outward pressure against the CPUSA continued, internal problems developed as well. Many longtime communists resigned from the party following official Kremlin revelations of the Stalinist purges and death camps in the Soviet Union. This admission was part of the 1956 “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow. The following year, the CPUSA’s newspaper, the Daily Worker, ceased publication. All the while, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sounded the warning against communists and their secret ways, publishing Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (1958). In 1959, Gus Hall emerged as the new general secretary of the CPUSA, a position he held to 2000. It would later be learned that the Kremlin provided secret financing to the CPUSA for years, including about $20 million during the 1980s. Nevertheless, any potential threat posed by communism in America during the 1960s and 1970s was more than offset by the extensive FBI infiltration of the red network.
Reagan and Revisionist History The Hollywood film Reds (1981), about the early twentieth-century American journalist John Reed and his flirtation with the Russian Revolution, was privately watched by President Ronald Reagan, who remarked afterward, “I was hoping it would have a happy ending.” The end Reagan was waiting for began in 1989 with Eastern Europe breaking free of Soviet control. Moscow’s funding of the CPUSA dried up that same year, and when the Soviet Union was finally dissolved in 1991, so died the dreams of American communism. Indeed, communism in the United States had been broadly discredited prior to that moment. In 1990, the University of Rochester’s Marxist historian Eugene Genovese acknowledged this reality, stating, “An awful lot of corpses have been piled up in what we hoped was a good cause. Socialism in the strict and serious sense has failed. And now we have to eat it.” At the same time, the British cultural studies professor Fred Inglis argued in The Cruel Peace (1991) that “socialism, forever
disfigured by the cold war, is still the only rhetoric left with which to berate the delusions and cruelty of horrible old capitalism.” In The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the neoconservative Francis Fukuyama countered that the demise of the Soviet Union was an ideological victory for free enterprise and thus the “end of history.” In the meantime, politically conservative academics, most notably John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress and Harvey Klehr of Emory University, ransacked old Soviet archives and obtained declassified U.S. documents of the Cold War to assess how serious a threat the CPUSA had posed to American internal security. They concluded that, despite the excesses of McCarthyism, the threat had been real. Part of their research was based on the Venona Project, which began in 1946 and involved the U.S. government’s secret deciphering of Soviet diplomatic cables. According to Haynes and Klehr, these cables indicate that the Soviet agents had recruited spies throughout the U.S. government and that some 349 Americans, immigrants, or permanent residents had maintained covert connections with Soviet intelligence. Moreover, of those 349 individuals, some 200 were never fully identified. Haynes and Klehr have expressed frustration that, despite such archival evidence, academics of more liberal persuasions have been reluctant to concede that the anti-anticommunists of the past had been wrong about a lot of things. Such reluctance is at least in part a negative reaction to the triumphal posturing of the old anticommunists. Roger Chapman See also: Budenz, Louis F.; Cold War; Conspiracy Theories; Hargis, Billy; Hiss, Alger; Hoover, J. Edgar; Marxism; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Sheen, Fulton J.; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Haynes, John E. “The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism.” Journal of Cold War Studies 2:1 (Winter 2000): 76–115. ———. Red Scare or Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Lewis, George. The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Ryan, James G. Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997.
Compa ssionate Con ser vatism
C o m p a r a b l e Wo r t h Comparable worth, sometimes referred to as pay equity, became a significant issue among feminist activists beginning in the late 1970s as a method for reducing the gender gap in wages. Supporters of comparable worth such as the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Education Association believe that the best method for reducing the gender gap in wages is to develop a rating scale for occupations based on their skill, effort, risk, responsibilities, and contribution levels and to set wages based on these ratings. Several state governments have undergone comparable worth assessments of their civil service occupations, but the federal government, courts, and private businesses have resisted the comparable worth idea. The concept of comparable worth originated in an early version of the Equal Pay Act proposed by Senators Claude Pepper (D-FL) and Wayne Morse (R-OR) in 1945. The language of “equal pay for comparable work” did not survive in the final version of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which requires equal pay for men and women in the same occupations. Although the Equal Pay Act is considered by many to be landmark legislation for women’s rights in the United States, it made only modest progress in reducing the gender gap in wages. Feminist scholars argue that the segregation of men and women in the labor force is a major source of the gender gap in wages and conclude that the differences in wages for male-dominated and female-dominated occupations are due to discriminatory practices rather than to differences in the amount of skill and training. Paying women less for their work is a long-established tradition in the American labor market. The concept of a family wage, a sum that would adequately provide support for a man, his wife, and two children, which developed during the late nineteenth century, formed a standard for basing wages on gender. Women workers were not considered family breadwinners, so they were generally paid lower wages for their work. Even as late as 1994, nearly two-thirds of all employed women in America were concentrated in six occupational categories: health care workers, teachers, sales workers, clerical workers, service workers, and machine operators. Such female-dominated occupations have lower wages on average than do occupations dominated by men (e.g., truck driver, construction worker, mechanic, engineer). Supporters of comparable worth point out that states that have undergone comparable worth ratings and pay adjustments for their civil service positions have significantly reduced the gender gap in wages among state employees. Opponents of comparable worth insist that wages should be determined by market forces and that the enactment of comparable worth policies would place an undue burden on private businesses. In addition, they
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argue that comparable worth policies will hurt women workers in the long run, by reducing the number of jobs in female-dominated fields. Rebecca Bach See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Equal Rights Amendment; Feminism; Second-Wave; Feminism, ThirdWave; National Organization for Women.
Further Reading Benokraitis, Nijole, and Joe Feagin. Modern Sexism: Blatant, Subtle, and Covert Discrimination. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. England, Paula. “The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation.” Journal of Human Resources 17:3 (1982): 358–70. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, and Greg Lee Carter. Working Women in America: Split Dreams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kessler-Harris, Alice. A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. Rhoads, Steven E. Incomparable Worth: Pay Equity Meets the Market. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Compassionate Conser vatism Compassionate conservatism is an ideology that encourages privatized efforts, often supported with federal grants, to combat poverty. Compassionate conservatives (who call themselves “comcons”) blame traditional welfare programs for creating dependency, undermining personal responsibility, and teaching the poor to regard themselves as victims. Comcons believe that it is the government’s role to protect the free-market system, ensure quality public education, promote family in the context of marriage, and urge local private charities, primarily religious, to recruit volunteers to help neighbors in need. George W. Bush made compassionate conservatism a central theme of his 2000 presidential election campaign. Some recognized the influence of his father, George H.W. Bush, who during his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in 1988 called for “a kinder, gentler nation” and likened volunteer efforts to “a thousand points of light.” The elder Bush, in fact, later established the Office for National Service, promoting the Points-of-Light Initiative. The younger Bush went further and adopted the ideas of Myron Magnet, editor of the neoconservative City Journal magazine, and Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of World, a conservative Christian news magazine. George W. Bush was most influenced by Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992),
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a work that romanticizes the charitable giving of the late nineteenth century. Representative Newt Gin grich (R-GA) hailed Olasky’s findings and wrote the foreword to his second work, Renewing American Compassion (1996). Olasky’s third volume, Compassionate Conservatism (2000), for which Bush wrote the foreword, is a folksy travelogue of the author’s visits to various charities across the nation. Faith-based organizations of a nonliberal stripe, the “tough love” kind, receive the highest marks. Government bureaucrats are castigated for hindering care ministries by refusing to work with them or imposing restrictions on how to provide services. Overall, Olasky depicts poverty as a spiritual problem. Because of its faith-based premise, allowing churches, synagogues, and mosques to compete for federal dollars to provide social services, critics argue that compassionate conservatism blurs the separation between church and state. Some skeptics regard it as a ploy by the Republican Party to galvanize the support of the Religious Right by distributing federal dollars to its supporters like spoils. In addition, some observers have suggested that comcons wish to seize moral authority for political conservatives, to compensate for their earlier opposition to the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, the modifier “compassionate” has insulted some conservatives who think it implies that they are otherwise heartless. Detractors of compassionate conservatism argue that it does not address the structural problems of society that foster poverty. An untamed marketplace, for instance, allows Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest employer, to deny many of its workers a living wage, as has been pointed out by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed (2001). Critics also argue that comcons ignore why the modern welfare state emerged in the first place—the failure of charities to meet the needs of the poor, infirm, handicapped, mentally ill, and elderly. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, many came to regard compassionate conservatism as less than adequate for a First World nation. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Church and State; Ehrenreich, Barbara; Faith-Based Programs; Family Values; Hurricane Katrina; Religious Right; Sex Education; Tax Reform; Wal-Mart; War on Poverty; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Conason, Joe. Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Press, 2004. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Magnet, Myron. The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy of the Underclass. San Francisco: Encounter, 2000.
Olasky, Marvin N. Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America. New York: Free Press, 2000.
Confederate Flag The Confederate flag has a red background and a blue diagonal cross design, adorned with thirteen white stars representing the eleven seceding states plus Missouri and Kentucky. Often misidentified as the Stars and Bars as well as mistakenly called the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederate flag was never officially adopted by the government of the Confederate States of America. It nonetheless has long been a potent and controversial symbol of the American South, and it has become one of the most debated symbols in the culture wars. The controversy over the Confederate flag stems from disagreement over what it symbolizes. Groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) assert that the flag preserves the heritage of the South, honoring the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who fought and died for the Confederacy. Other organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), hold that the flag represents the South’s long history of slavery and racial violence and oppression, which they insist was the cause of the Civil War. To make the “heritage versus hate” debate even more complicated, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups have appropriated the Southern Cross as their own symbol. One of the best-known Civil War historians, Shelby Foote, has spoken out against these white supremacists, calling them “scum” who made the Confederate flag, once a “symbol of honor,” a “banner of shame.” Perhaps the most interesting case of symbol appropriation involved that of Sherman Evans and Angel Quintero, two African-American men from Charleston, South Carolina, who in 1994 started a sportswear line called “Nu South Apparel” that featured the logo of a Confederate flag design with a black cross and green stars, representing the colors of the African liberation movement. To others, however, the Southern Cross is simply a symbol of revolt against conformity. Groups like punks, skateboarders, and bikers all consider displaying the flag a statement of rebellion. According to James C. Cobb in Away Down South (2005), the Confederate flag “had become a signifier not just of racial but of class differences as well, and not simply the economic distance between white and blue collar but the emotional distance between believing the system is there for you and believing it is there for everybody but you.” In recent years, several southern states have changed their policies and practices concerning the Confederate
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On July 1, 2000, as a result of ongoing protests by the African-American community, the state of South Carolina finally removed the Confederate flag from the dome of the statehouse in Columbia. (Stephen Morton/Getty Images)
flag. Georgians and Mississippians had to decide whether to keep the Southern Cross incorporated in their state flags, while South Carolinians had to choose whether to keep the rebel flag flying above their statehouse. In South Carolina, the Southern Cross had been added to the top of the state capitol for the Civil War centennial in 1962. Thirty-six years later, Republican governor David Beasley lost reelection after urging that the flag should be placed instead on a Confederate memorial near the statehouse. Even Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), who once ran for president on a segregationist ticket, spoke out against the Rebel flag, stating that it had outlived its usefulness in paying tribute to men of the state who fought in the Civil War. In 1999, after Governor Jim Hodges refused to revisit the flag issue, the state’s black leaders, aided by the NAACP, called for a tourism boycott of South Carolina. In less than a year, the state lost about $20 million in tourist revenue and legislators finally acquiesced, voting to move the flag to a Confederate monument. In Georgia, the Confederate flag issue proved more complicated. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the staunchly segregationist state legislature attempted to change the old flag, based on the Stars and Bars, to one incorporating the more racially incendiary Southern Cross. The new flag was adopted in 1956 and became a divisive issue. Several groups, mostly centered in the Atlanta metropolitan area, home to many African Americans and non-southerners, began sustained protests against the flag in the late 1980s. By 1992, Governor Zell Miller, a Democrat, declared his support for a bill restoring the pre-1956 flag. While polls consistently showed that 60 percent of Georgians wanted to keep the Rebel flag, the heated situation in South Carolina and the threat of another NAACP-led boycott in Georgia finally
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led to the adoption of a new state flag in 2001. Miller’s successor, Roy Barnes, also a Democrat, signed the bill into law and almost immediately became the target of angry reaction by “flaggers” demanding that the issue be decided by referendum. Governor Barnes lost reelection the following year to Republican Sonny Perdue, who promised a flag referendum. In 2004, however, Georgia legislators adopted yet another flag—one that incorporated the pre-1956 flag’s Stars and Bars—and Georgians voted 3 to 1 in support of that decision. Thus, since 2002, Mississippi has been the only southern state to still have the Rebel symbol as part of its state flag. The Southern Cross, however, is far from invisible elsewhere. From specialty state license plates to Nu South Apparel, the meaning of the flag is constantly being displayed and reinterpreted. Keri Leigh Merritt See also: Blackface; Civil Rights Movement; Flag Desecration; Jackson, Jesse; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Sharpton, Al; Thurmond, Strom; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Bonner, Robert E. Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Cobb, James C. Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
Conspirac y T heories From the end of World War II to the present, the proliferation of conspiracy theories has been a prominent part of American culture, contributing to the polarization of society while undermining confidence in public leaders. Often based on partial truths, conspiracy theories have ranged from suspected communist plots during the Cold War to suggestions that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were carried out by sinister elements within the federal government. While conspiracy theories repeatedly have called into question the official accounts of events, they have also made public monitoring by journalists and watch groups more difficult, because anyone suggesting a political cover-up, for example, risks being branded a “conspiracy theorist.”
Communist and Global Conspiracies The fear that communists wanted to establish a world government dominated conservative conspiracy thinking in the late 1940s and 1950s. Anticommunist literature often argued that the United Nations was the
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forerunner of this communist conspiracy. Theories about the UN also included the notion that UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization) was designed specifically to spread communism. Conspiracy theorists such as Lyle P. Sheen contended that the fluoridation of the nation’s municipal drinking water was not only a health risk but also a communist plot to weaken the minds of the American public to facilitate the socialist revolution. Others linked the civil rights movement with the communist menace. Former communist Kenneth Goff, for example, argued in Reds Promote the Racial War (1955) that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been infiltrated by communists for the purpose of stirring up racial strife in order to overthrow the U.S. government. Over the years, conservative conspiracy theorists have repeatedly tried to raise doubts about who is ruling the country, variously arguing that the United States is controlled by shadowy groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Such organizations, theorists allege, direct the nation’s domestic, foreign, political, and economic policies without the consultation of the American public. This fear is representative of a great cultural and social chasm that has long existed between the elite and the rank and file. In A Choice Not an Echo (1964), conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly asserted that Republican presidential candidates were being chosen by a “secret group of kingmakers,” the Bilderbergers, who would meet once a year to determine the fate of the Republican nomination. Right-wing political commentator Phoebe Courtney charged in The CFR (1968) and Nixon and the CFR (1971) that the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon were under the control of the Council on Foreign Relations. Government secrecy, the growth of a national security state, and a growing public distrust of government were among the factors contributing to the rise of conspiracy theories. One of the most popular and enduring conspiracy theories is the notion that the government has hidden the existence of extraterrestrial life since a July 1947 crash of an alien spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico. U.S. Marine Major Donald Keyhoe in Flying Saucer from Outer Space (1953) and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955) charged that the federal government had engaged in secret programs to hide the truth of flying saucers and aliens from the American public. A more recent accusation leveled by conspiracy theorists is the charge that the six Apollo moon landings were a NASA hoax designed to demoralize the Soviet Union during the space race.
CIA and FBI “Plots” The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories from both
the right and left, most notably the charge that it was responsible for the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963. Mark Lane, in Rush to Judgment (1966) and Plausible Denial (1991), argues that former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, a veteran of the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961, played a critical role in the assassination of the president. CIA operatives, according to Lane, directed Hunt to kill the president after Kennedy indicated that he was determined to end covert activities against Cuba. In 1978, conspiracy theorists linked the CIA to the People’s Temple mass suicide in Guyana. According to these theories, cult leader Jim Jones was a CIA operative trained in the psychic science of coercion. The more than 900 suicides by cult members and the assassination of U.S. Representative Leo Ryan (D-CA) and his delegation sent to investigate the Temple’s activities were said to be an attempt by the CIA to keep hidden a vast program of medical experimentation. According to a conspiracy theory from the liberal side of the political spectrum in the 1980s, the CIA was part of a cocaine-smuggling program for funding the Contras in Nicaragua. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have also been targeted by conspiracy theorists. The FBI is viewed as the agency assigned to falsify evidence and conceal the truth about the Kennedy assassination and the existence of aliens from other planets. The popular television series The X-Files (1993–2002), by following the activities of two FBI agents, furthered the belief that the FBI is integrally tied to government conspiracies. FEMA, meanwhile, has been portrayed by conspiracists as a secret government within the United States. The belief is that in response to a disaster, one likely caused by the federal government, FEMA will be given emergency powers that nullify the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and then go on to establish a dictatorship.
“New World Order” Conspiratorial fears were also the basis for the founding of the modern American militia movement in the 1990s. In the wake of the federal raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992), and Waco, Texas (1993), militiamen saw the coercive powers of the state as a direct threat to their constitutional rights. The undermining of individual freedom and U.S. membership in the United Nations, they argued, were precursors to the establishment of a “New World Order” in which U.S. sovereignty and basic rights would be nonexistent. Invoking the Second Amendment, they formed paramilitary organizations to protect the United States from a vast conspiracy. Some conspiracy theories have centered on the annihilation of people of African descent. In Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (1990), Haki R. Madhubuti
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(Don L. Lee) asserts that acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is caused by a genetically engineered virus specifically created to destroy the black race. The World Health Organization, he contends, purposely introduced AIDS in Africa. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, conspiracy theorists charged that the George W. Bush administration secretly engineered the destruction of levees to preserve the white sections of the city while destroying heavily black neighborhoods.
September 11 Numerous conspiracy theories have been offered in lieu of the official explanations of the September 11 terrorist attacks. While some theories argue that the Bush administration hid certain facts about its failure to stop al-Qaeda from carrying out the plot, others charge that the U.S. government itself, not the terrorists, was behind the attacks. Claremont theology professor David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor (2004), charged that the attacks were committed by the Bush administration to strengthen public opinion to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such theories maintain that planted explosives, not burning jet fuel from planes, caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. This argument has been championed by Brigham Young University physics professor Steven E. Jones and Clemson University engineer Judy Wood. The attack on the Pentagon has elicited related theories. And United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after being hijacked on September 11, is said by some theorists to have been shot down by a U.S. government cruise missile. Although the March 2005 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine showed how the September 11 conspiracy theories are easily refuted, doubt persists in some circles. According to a 2006 survey by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University, one-third of Americans believed that the federal government was responsible for the attacks. Matthew C. Sherman See also: AIDS; Central Intelligence Agency; Communists and Communism; Hurricane Katrina; Iran-Contra Affair; Kennedy Family; Militia Movement; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Schlafly, Phyllis; September 11; Stone, Oliver; United Nations.
Further Reading Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Culture from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Dunbar, David, and Brad Regan, eds. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. New York: Hearst Books, 2006. Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
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Goldberg, Robert Alan. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Knight, Peter, ed. Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
Contemporar y Chr istian Music Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is a hybrid genre that weds rock and other modern musical styles to evangelical Christian themes and imagery. From its obscure beginnings in the 1960s, CCM has evolved into a diverse array of forms and serves an important role within the evangelical subculture as an inspirational musical alternative and a “sanctified” source of entertainment. The roots of CCM lie in the rise of the countercultural Jesus People movement of the late 1960s. The Jesus People incorporated pop, folk, and rock musical styles into their worship and frequently used music as an evangelistic tool. Eventually, solo artists such as Larry Norman and bands like Love Song began to emerge as regional and national favorites. The first major attempt to market “Jesus Music” nationally came with the efforts of Word Records, based in Waco, Texas. Its Myrrh label posted modest sales despite having almost no access to radio airplay or national retail chains. However, the music’s potential was demonstrated by the success of 2nd Chapter of Acts, a brother-sister trio, and its album With Footnotes (1974), which sold nearly 300,000 copies. Jesus Music eventually came to be called Contemporary Christian Music. With Nashville as its center, CCM by 1984 had chalked up annual sales of nearly $75 million. Nashville’s own Amy Grant, the first CCM superstar, would eventually sell more than 25 million albums, becoming the first CCM artist to have a gold record, the first to land a song in the Top 40 (“Find a Way,” 1985), and the first to have a number one single (“Baby Baby,” 1991). While Grant’s brand of upbeat country-pop was CCM’s best-selling offering, it was by no means representative of the entire genre. As the nation’s multiplying youth subcultures adapted and discarded musical styles in the 1980s and 1990s, there were CCM equivalents to be found for all of them, from heavy metal to punk to rap and hip-hop. In the mid-1990s, CCM neared the $900 million mark. In 2005, it comprised over 7 percent of the total American music market, surpassing Latin, jazz, classical, new age, and soundtrack sales. Despite its growth, CCM has not been an unbridled success. Very conservative sectors regard it as worldly or bordering on satanic. Some evangelicals were shocked by Grant’s crossover style, including a romantic video, and frowned on her 1999 divorce. For some, singer Sandi Patti’s 1992 divorce and her confession of an adulterous
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affair also cast CCM in a negative light. Within the CCM industry, the ghost of the penniless Jesus People troubadour hangs heavily over executives and artists alike as they struggle over the conflict between ministry and the gravitational pull of the bottom line. Moreover, with few exceptions, the music has never been well received by secular audiences and critics—even some evangelical youth—who regard it as watered down and imitative. Larry Eskridge See also: Bono; Chick, Jack; Evangelicalism; Heavy Metal; Jesus People Movement; Punk Rock; Rap Music; Rock and Roll.
Further Reading Baker, Paul (Frank Edmondson). Contemporary Christian Music: Where It Came From, What It Is, Where It’s Going. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1985. Hendershot, Heather. Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Howard, Jay R., and John M. Streck. Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Contract with America The Contract with America, released by Republicans in the House of Representatives during the 1994 midterm election campaign, was a document calling for political reform that contributed to the escalation of the culture wars. Written mostly by Representative Dick Armey (R-TX), the contract was signed by all but two Republican members of the House and all of the party’s non-incumbent House candidates. When the Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time since 1952, the Contract with America was given much of the credit. The contract was dedicated to extensive reform of the House of Representatives and the implementation of conservative policies. After the 1994 elections, Newt Gingrich (R-GA) was elected Speaker of the House and used the contract to set the agenda for Congress and the nation. Many of the Republicans taking office for the first time in 1994 wedded their fortunes to the Contract with America, dedicating their energies to dismantling welfare and regulatory programs and reforming Congress. House Republicans demonstrated overwhelming unity throughout the highly publicized first hundred days of the 104th Congress and passed nine of the ten items in their contract. But at the close of the first hundred days, only two items, those applying federal labor laws to Congress and a curb on unfunded mandates to
A political cartoon in 1994 portrays the Contract with America—the conservative Republican legislative agenda— as a death warrant for the policies of the Bill Clinton administration. (A 1994 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation)
the states, had also passed the Senate and been signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Republicans’ efforts were stymied by a political system designed to encourage fragmentation and delay. The designers of the contract sought to elevate the House to parity with the president as an agenda setter but found themselves frustrated in their attempts to do so. For many conservatives, the Contract with America was considered a success because Republicans gained control of the House for the first time since 1953.Yet, although the contract was heavily covered in the media and was a target of Democratic counterattacks, most voters apparently went to the polls unaware of its existence. Patrick Fisher See also: Clinton, Bill; Gingrich, Newt; Republican Party; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
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Further Reading Andersen, Alfred F. Challenging Newt Gingrich. Eugene, OR: Tom Paine Institute, 1996. Drew, Elizabeth. Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Gingrich, Newt, et al. Contract with America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House Republicans to Change the Nation. New York: Times Books, 1994.
C o r p o r a t e We l f a r e “Corporate welfare,” a pejorative term popularized by consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1956, refers to the system of direct government subsidies, grants, tax breaks, tax loopholes, discounted insurance, debt revocations, bailouts, and “special favorable treatment” for corporations. The term implies criticism of government support of private markets, as opposed to welfare payments to the poor. Many contend that corporate welfare is a symptom of government deregulation and the monopolistic tendencies of capitalism. Corporate welfare is not linked to any particular ideology, as both liberals and conservatives are likely to call for government support for different priorities. Critics contend that special treatment for corporations is an unnecessary, inefficient, and even unfair intervention in free markets that gives a competitive advantage to large companies and shifts tax burdens away from large firms to smaller organizations and individuals. A prominent example of corporate welfare in recent history was the savings and loan bailout, which cost American taxpayers an estimated $500 billion. Considered one of the largest corporate welfare expenditures, it began with the deregulation of the savings and loan industry in the early 1980s, a result of efforts by the well-connected savings and loan lobby in Congress. The interconnectedness of lobbying and campaign contributions resulted in the diffusion of risks to taxpayers and subsequently riskier investments. A series of bank failures and government bailouts compounded the costs, and the widening crisis among credit-lending institutions threatened the collapse of an economic system based on credit. The resulting legislation did not include proposed financial consumer associations that would have minimized the cost to taxpayers and allowed consumers to act on their own to prevent similar crises and bailouts in the future. Since that time, federal corporate welfare has increased to more than $125 billion annually, not including tax loopholes, discounted insurance, debt revocations, or state and local programs. Meanwhile, corporate scandals have continued, including the Enron bankruptcy and accounting fraud (2001–2002), procurement irregularities at Boeing that inflated government arms sales by an estimated $810 million (2003–2005), the underpayment of royalties by oil companies for the extraction of oil on
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public lands by an estimated $66 million per year, and allegations of fraud at the Houston-based Halliburton in providing goods and services under government contract to U.S. troops in Iraq. In 2008, following the outbreak of the subprime-loan crisis, Congress appropriated a $700 billion bank bailout package. Corporate welfare is in many ways as complicated as welfare for the elderly and the poor. Subsidies, grants, and tax breaks are often cited as a potential policy solution to market failures. The rise of economic globalization creates increasing competition among cities for the retention of jobs, leading cities to offer incentives such as tax breaks, free land, and infrastructure development to attract businesses. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest employer, is a major recipient of this kind of corporate welfare. Cities that do not offer these incentives may experience job loss, revenue loss, and overall slowed growth as corporations locate elsewhere. Cities that do provide such incentives, however, may find that they have only nominal employment for a labor force that must bear more of the tax burden. Corporate welfare is problematic from various perspectives, making the political process seem more corrupt and undermining the public trust in both government and the free market. At the same time, enterprises that do not take advantage of such incentives lose their competitive advantage. Holona LeAnne Ochs See also: Battle of Seattle; Bush Family; Cheney Family; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Executive Compensation; Globalization; Nader, Ralph; Privatization; Reagan, Ronald; Tax Reform; Wal-Mart; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Bartlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele. America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Neckerman, Kathryn M. Social Inequality. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. Sen, Amartya Kumar. Inequality Reexamined. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992. Whitfield, Dexter. Public Services or Corporate Welfare: Rethinking the Nation State in the Global Economy. Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2001.
C o u l t e r, A n n A politically conservative writer and commentator who uses shock, humor, hyperbole, and mean-spirited discourse, Ann Coulter has emerged as a highly polarizing figure in the culture wars. Her constant target of derision is “liberals.” While critics accuse her of hate speech and distortion, her fans (political conservatives) regard her as refreshingly candid and entertaining in belittling liberals and their arguments. Born on December 8, 1961, in New York City, Ann Hart Coulter was raised in an upper-middle-class fam-
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ily in New Canaan, Connecticut. A graduate of Cornell University (1985) and the University of Michigan Law School (1988), she was politically active during her student years, contributing to the conservative Cornell Review and starting a chapter of the Federalist Society. Later, she clerked for Judge Pasco Bowman II of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Kansas City (1989) and worked as a staffer for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (1994–1996). In 1996, she began appearing on television programs as a political commentator, wearing short skirts and tossing her long blonde hair. Coulter achieved best-seller status with High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998), arguing for President Clinton’s impeachment; Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), charging the media with an overall liberal bias; Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003), accusing liberals of deep-seated anti-Americanism; How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004), belittling liberal thinking; Godless: The Church of the Liberal (2006), depicting liberals as antireligious and immoral; and Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America (2008), arguing that liberals are society’s oppressors. In Slander, directing much of her criticism at the New York Times, Coulter asserts that liberals have “hegemonic control” of the media. However, a 2002 New Yorker cartoon depicts Coulter standing in Times Square with her image on the surrounding billboards and electronic screens, complaining about the liberal media; the caption is a quotation from Slander: “In this universe, the public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda.” Liberal media figure Al Franken devotes two chapters of his book Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) (2003) to Coulter, characterizing her as “the reigning diva of the hysterical right” and a writer of “political pornography.” He also points to factual errors in her work. According to a short content analysis of Coulter’s Slander in the Columbia Journalism Review, of forty specific errors charged by reviewers, nineteen passed muster but twenty-one were found to be fallacious. Coulter’s first job as a TV commentator ended in 1997, when she was fired by MSNBC for criticizing a disabled Vietnam veteran, stating on the air, “People like you caused us to lose the war.” She was also fired from National Review Online, after writing in her September 13, 2001, column, “We should invade their [Islamic] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” In an August 26, 2002, article in the New York Observer, she wrote, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.” And in her book Godless, she calls the widows of men who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks “harpies” and charges that they are “enjoying their husbands’ deaths.” Roger Chapman
See also: Clinton, Hillary; Clinton Impeachment; Cold War; Cronkite, Walter; Franken, Al; Hoffman, Abbie; McVeigh, Timothy; Media Bias; National Review; New York Times, The; Religious Right; September 11; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Carr, David. “Deadly Intent: Ann Coulter, Word Warrior.” New York Times, June 12, 2006. Estrich, Susan. Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Franken, Al. Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. New York: Dutton, 2003. Scherer, Michael, and Sarah Secules. “Books: How Slippery is Slander?” Columbia Journalism Review 41 (November/ December 2002).
Counterculture The general term “counterculture” came into use during a period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s that was characterized by cultural, political, and economic behaviors very different from those of the mainstream. The counterculture, actually a number of loosely connected left-wing or alternative lifestyle movements involving primarily young people, was an attempt at cultural criticism and reinvention that has been a highly contentious flashpoint in the American culture wars. Common to the diverse groups of the counterculture was a search for authenticity in what was perceived as an alienating and corrupt society. Central to this search was a defiant or questioning attitude toward authority and hierarchy, involving a creative or mystic/spiritual resistance to the status quo and its demands and institutions. The backdrop for much of the counterculture was the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement, both of which called into question America’s moral and cultural high ground. Derided by supporters of the establishment as “beatniks,” “hippies,” “freaks,” “troublemakers,” “rebels without a cause,” “drug addicts,” and “communists,” members of the counterculture were criticized for being radical and irresponsible, naive with their visionary egalitarianism, anti-American in the face of Soviet aggression, self-indulgent with sex and drugs, self-righteous, and unappreciative of the many opportunities provided to them in the “land of the free.” The counterculture was expressed in four primary areas—artistic, political, spiritual, and communal. In its artistic dimension, in literature, music, and film, the counterculture provided the grounding for much of the ethos of the era. Writers and poets such as Edward Abbey, Amiri Baraka, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda, Diane Di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Herbert Marcuse, J.D. Salinger, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Susan Sontag, and
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Kurt Vonnegut proposed important themes that animated much of the counterculture. Two paradigmatic books by Kerouac—On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958)—dramatized the young person’s search for authenticity in a culture that worshipped conformity and materialism. Kerouac helped articulate a vision of an America more culturally, artistically, and politically free. Other literary roots of the counterculture include Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), and the poems of Allen Ginsberg. Influential publishers such as Beacon Press, Black Sparrow Books, City Lights Publishers, Grove Press, and Shambhala Publications, and still later South End Press, were created or adapted to service the growing need for alternative knowledge and cultural mores. Periodicals including the Evergreen Review, Ramparts, Rolling Stone, and the Realist became popular. The Village Voice, Los Angeles Free Press, Berkeley Barb, and San Francisco Oracle and other underground papers served as important vehicles of communication, expressing the views of political and cultural dissenters, highlighting antiwar sentiments, cultural reform, ecological issues, civil rights, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Native American rights, and psychedelia. Two of the most enduring texts to come out of the movement for alternative knowledge were the Whole Earth Catalog (1968) and Our Bodies, Ourselves (1969), the latter produced by a collective of women frustrated by the paternalism of the medical profession. In music, the Beatles, Joan Baez, The Doors, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Phil Ochs, and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as concert promoter Bill Graham, were among those contributing to the new cultural ethos. The movement culminated in the chaotic Woodstock Music and Art Fair, in New York’s Catskill Mountains in August 1969, perhaps the most emblematic event of the era. Working in other media, film director Robert Altman, cartoonist Robert Crumb, hippie “clown” Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), and pop artists Peter Max and Andy Warhol played important roles in challenging aesthetic, social, and political norms. Hollywood presented iconic countercultural images in such releases as the film Easy Rider (1969) and the television series The Monkees (1966) and The Mod Squad (1968). On the political front, counterculture leaders included Stokely Carmichael, Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington, Abbie Hoffman, Betty Friedan, Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Mario Savio. Various political groups also emerged, including the Youth International Party (whose members were called “Yippies”), the Weather Underground, the Diggers, Students for a Democratic Society, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and the Black Panther Party. Activism also emerged in the women’s movement and the gay rights
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movement. A lasting legacy was the demand for alternative histories of the United States that rejected a normative “great white men” viewpoint, focusing instead on the minority voices and victims of the dominant culture. Paradigmatic books are Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), and Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding (1980). Along with this shift in examining the past came the willingness of passionate and committed people such as the Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, members of the Plowshares Movement, and the veterans of the civil rights struggle to practice civil disobedience to challenge perceived unjust government policies. The activism of the counterculture contributed to making America more inclusive, expanding the realm of freedom and equal protection in dramatic ways. Lasting institutional political influence can be seen in the Green Party, which remains minuscule in the United States but is significant in western Europe. The counterculture also questioned traditional Christianity and other institutionalized spiritual paths, encouraging the exploration of a range of different religious and spiritual sources such as paganism, Wicca, Transcendental Meditation, Krishna consciousness, Buddhism, Taoism, and Native American religions, all of which served as a precursor to the New Age movement. Many sought to aid this spiritual exploration by using LSD, marijuana, hashish, or other drugs or hallucinogens. Drug use was made popular in part by the antics of dropout professors Timothy Leary and Richard Albert (later Ram Dass), the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, and the rock band the Grateful Dead. An important aspect of the counterculture was the commune movement, which involved tens of thousands of people. During the 1960s hippie communities in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and Manhattan’s Lower East Side emerged and expanded rapidly. Many participants were young people who left conventional life and their families to develop larger networks of relationships, enacting alternative visions of modern living. Particularly attractive were places like Taos, New Mexico, where communes were established exemplifying new ways of communication, caring, intimacy, and social freedom. Some of these communities were sexually or psychologically abusive or became extreme cults, such as the group that followed the mass murderer Charles Manson. Most communes failed within a few years. Since 1972, however, temporary communal experiences called Rainbow Gatherings have occurred yearly. The mainstream media continue to debate the legacy of the counterculture, which, for all of its abuses and excesses, made important strides in helping the United
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States to become more socially, culturally, politically, and legally inclusive. Supporters of the counterculture movement lament what they see as missed opportunities for transforming the nation toward social justice, and they perceived social and political regressions during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Critics such as George Will, David Horowitz, and Roger Kimball, as well as many politicians and religious leaders on the right, maintain that the counterculture was a monstrous mistake, the cause of serious moral decline in America, representing rampant hedonism and the glorification of irrationality. Critics further argue that veterans of the counterculture, now said to be tenured radicals on university campuses, are indoctrinating the young with subversive notions of secularism, multiculturalism, antimilitarism, egalitarianism, feminism, relativism, and gay rights. As a result, the critics continue, the nation is in internal crisis, becoming soft and vulnerable to outside threats such as terrorism. While supporters of the counterculture lament the decline of political involvement among American youth, critics accuse the counterculture of creating an adversarial culture in which inherent social, political, and economic “truths” are denied. Such antitraditionalism and liberationist tendencies cause conservatives to fear something called “cultural dissolution” and “Western collapse.” For their part, people on the left criticize the counterculture for playing a significant role in the ascendance of modern conservatism and religious evangelism, which gained significant power in reaction to the perceived excesses of the counterculture. Moreover, from the early 1990s, aspects of the counterculture have been resurrected, co-opted commercially, and disconnected from their roots in radical or progressive politics—as in the use of classic rock music and counterculture personalities in commercial advertising. More consequently, powerful terms fundamental to popular democratic politics such as “revolution” and “liberation” have become buzzwords for selling products. Yet hope lives in liberal quarters that the excesses of neoconservatism; the power of the religious and political right; attacks on reproductive rights, welfare, and gay rights; and most notably America’s foreign interventions might inspire the emergence of a new, more substantive counterculture to pick up where the old one left off. Omar Swartz See also: American Indian Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Environmental Movement; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Hoffman, Abbie; Leary, Timothy; Literature, Film, and Drama; New Age Movement; New Left; Rock and Roll; Sexual Revolution; War on Drugs; War Protesters.
Further Reading Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz. Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ’60s. New York: Free Press, 1996. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1993. Kimball, Roger. The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. San Francisco: Encounter, 2001. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968. Steinhorn, Leonard. The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Countr y Music A popular genre closely associated with the southern United States and its culture, evangelical Christianity, and conservative politics, country music (also referred to as country and western music) is often used as a vehicle for the expression of conservative beliefs. Emerging from the rural South in the 1920s, country music, more than most other forms of popular music, addresses the everyday concerns of lower- and middle-class Americans. The emphasis on specific daily problems has made country music an important vector of conservative sentiment in the culture wars. Although country musicians had long espoused conservative views on social issues such as gender roles and religion, many artists during the 1960s and 1970s became deeply embroiled in the upheavals of the counterculture. It was in this era that the link between country music and conservative values was cemented. Segregationist politician George Wallace of Alabama, for example, used country music as the soundtrack for his political campaigns throughout the 1960s; well-known country musicians were frequent performers at his rallies. Merle Haggard’s hit song “Okie from Muskogee” (1969) famously celebrated the values of small-town life, such as patriotism, and attacked hippies and draft dodgers. In “Fightin’ Side of Me” (1971), Haggard expressed a “love it or leave it” patriotism amid conflict over the Vietnam War, challenging war protestors who were walking on his “fightin’ side.” Country music achieved mainstream appeal throughout the nation in the last third of the twentieth century, but it retained a close connection to conservative political causes. Responding to events in the Middle East that led to the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s, Hank
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Williams, Jr., sang “Don’t Give Us a Reason” (1990), whose lyrics threatened Iraqi president Saddam Hussein with retaliation. Similarly, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Toby Keith wrote songs that urged retaliation against terrorists. In “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” (2002), he sang, “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A. / We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way.” Although not all country musicians are aggressively conservative, those who voice a different political opinion are often shut out of the genre. Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, publicly stated that she was “ashamed” of George W. Bush during a 2003 London concert. Despite being one of country music’s most popular groups, the Dixie Chicks were immediately dropped from country radio stations. Some fans protested by burning or smashing the group’s albums. The Dixie Chicks went on to new success after the incident, with several hit albums and Grammy awards, but much of their following came from outside the country music community, which still largely shuns the band. Although female performers have always been integral to country music, the genre often emphasizes traditional gender relations and remains one realm of popular culture that largely rejects modern feminism. Perhaps no song better illustrates country music’s traditional message about gender relations than Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” (1968), which urges women to adopt a subordinate position to their husbands. That song became the best-selling single ever recorded by a woman artist. Feminists denounced Wynette, arguing that the song promoted male dominance. At the same time, country music has traditionally featured many female performers and songs that express an independent female perspective, often from the view of working-class women. Female performers have used songs to “talk back” to male artists, such as Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (1952), a response to Hank Thompson’s hit “The Wild Side of Life” (1952)—which declared that male unfaithfulness is the reason that some women resort to “wild living.” Later female country stars such as Loretta Lynn, Shania Twain, and Gretchen Wilson continued the tradition of female country artists who expressed a feisty, working-class female viewpoint without threatening conventional gender arrangements. Country music’s conservatism is due in part to its support for evangelical Protestantism. Along with gospel music, country is one of the most overtly Christian styles of popular music in America. As the music developed out of the plain folk of the South, it tended to filter current events through a religious worldview. During the Cold War, for example, one country song claimed, “Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb” (1951). More recently, star performer Alan Jackson responded to the September 11
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attacks with a poignant song that concludes with a reaffirmation of Christian love. There is little or no discussion of non-Christian faiths in country music. Despite country music’s close association with conservative politics and culture, the music has never spoken with a unified voice. There have always been notable exceptions to country music’s mainstream conservatism. In the 1960s, country musicians were often politically divided, with some expressing support for conservative causes and others advocating more liberal politics. In the 1990s, superstar country musician Garth Brooks, one of the most popular country musicians of all time, recorded songs on such taboo subjects as homosexuality and wife beating. His song “We Shall Be Free,” on the album Chase (1992), raised eyebrows in some circles for its tolerance of homosexuality (“We shall be free / when we’re free to love anyone we choose”) and non-Christian faiths (“When we all can worship from our own kind of pew / Then we shall be free”). Albeit at the fringes of mainstream country music, some “alt-country” performers use their music to support liberal causes. Steve Earle’s “John Walker’s Blues” (2002), for example, is a sympathetic ballad about John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” arrested in Afghanistan after September 11. Although the majority of country songs confront deeply personal, rather than overtly political, subjects, the overall themes and messages of country music are fundamentally and consistently conservative and traditional, making it a form of popular culture closely aligned with conservative causes in the culture wars. Jeffrey T. Manuel See also: Bush Family; Counterculture; Evangelicalism; Nelson, Willie; Red and Blue States; Rock and Roll; September 11; Vietnam War; Wallace, George; War Protesters.
Further Reading Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown, 1993. Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. 2nd rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. ———. Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: New Press, 2005.
Creationism and Intelligent Design One of the most polarizing conflicts in American culture is that between “creationism” and “evolution.” The former is the belief in the divine creation of living beings in their present forms; the latter is the scientific theory that species emerge through a complex process
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of genetic variation and natural selection. The scientific community overwhelmingly supports the theory of evolution, while the majority of Americans believe in creationism (e.g., according to a 2005 CBS poll, 51 percent favor the biblical account; 30 percent some form of theistic evolution; and 15 percent scientific, nontheistic evolution). The conflict between creationists and evolutionists has been played out in America’s public schools and courts, where creationists have faced a series of defeats on issues of teaching perspective and curriculum. A new wrinkle was added to the dispute in the 1990s with the rise of a new position in the creation movement, “intelligent design.” According to this view, the irreducible complexity of living organisms renders evolution untenable.
Darwin Versus the “Young Earth” The conflict between evolutionists and creationists, dormant since the 1920s, began to heat up again in the late 1950s. Concern over the weakness of the American science curriculum after the Soviet launch of the space satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the centennial of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1959 led biologists to attack the omission of evolution from most high-school biology texts. The Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, a group of biologists funded by the National Science Foundation, began revising textbooks to incorporate evolution as a fundamental concept, arousing opposition from conservative religious groups. In 1961, the adherents of the literal biblical account of creationism were bolstered by the publication of John Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris’s The Genesis Flood. Building on the work of early-twentieth-century Canadian creationist George Macready Price, Whitcomb and Morris made a case for “young-earth creationism.” Young-earth creationists see the world as only a few thousand years old, basically accepting the chronology of Archbishop James Ussher, the seventeenth-century theologian who claimed the earth had been created in 4004 b.c.e. Accordingly, the geological strata are believed to have been laid down by the Great Flood as described in Genesis, and most fossils are understood as the remains of animals that drowned in the flood. This theory is sometimes referred to as “deluge geology” or “flood geology.” The term “scientific creationism” is also applied to the work of creationists like Whitcomb and Morris, who tried to establish creationism as a scientific theory rather than one purely resting on the biblical account. Their work quickly became the leading creationist authority. Following The Genesis Flood, the young-earth theory spread through the American fundamentalist community, displacing “old earth” approaches that reconciled the Genesis account with an earth many thousands or even millions of years old. This was propelled by the Creation Science Research Center, founded by Morris in 1970 in
Santee, California. Renamed the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in 1972, it has since become the leading institutional proponent of biblical creationism, with books, a museum, radio programs, speakers, and courses and degree programs in creation science. After Morris’s retirement in 1995, he was succeeded as head of the ICR by his son, John Morris.
“Equal Time” Conflict State statutes forbidding the teaching of evolution in American public schools were voided on Establishment Clause grounds by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Epperson v. Arkansas (1969). Consequently, the legislative and political strategy of creationists in the 1970s shifted from attempting to suppress the teaching of evolution entirely to claiming equal time for “creation science.” Rather than directly attacking evolution in their legal and political arguments, creationists asserted that evolution is “just a theory” and that giving it a monopoly over the question of origins is unfair. “Scientific creationism” fit perfectly with this strategy. Creationists believed that if creationism could be taught in public schools without reference to the Bible, the Establishment Clause issues would be circumvented. During his 1980 presidential campaign, conservative Republican Ronald Reagan called for equal treatment of evolution and creationism in the classroom. The following year, Arkansas and Louisiana passed “equal time” laws. Since there is no constitutional prohibition on teaching bad science, these laws put evolutionists in the legal position of demonstrating that any creationist theory was inherently religious, even without mention of God or the quoting of biblical texts. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has supported the teaching of evolution going back to the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925, represented the proevolution view in challenging the “equal time” laws. The ACLU succeeded in overturning the Arkansas law in the U.S. District Court case of McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982), in which creationism was defined as inherently religious and unscientific. Creationism suffered another defeat at the hands of the Supreme Court, which ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that the Louisiana “equal time” law was a violation of the Establishment Clause. The ACLU’s main concern was church-state separation, rather than educating the public on evolution. The scientific challenge to creationism became more prominent when the scientific community, often in alliance with Catholic, “mainline” Protestant, and Jewish organizations, started to more openly support the teaching of evolution. The Oakland, California–based National Center for Science Education, founded in 1981, concentrated on producing evolutionary arguments for popular consumption and combating grassroots creationists. Its director, anthropologist Eugenie Scott, became
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a prominent public face of anticreationism. Leading scientists, including paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and biologist Richard Dawkins, also denounced creationism and testified against it in court. Scientists argued that “creation science” was not science at all but thinly veiled religious doctrine. Regardless of the statements of scientists or the decisions of courts and state legislatures, grassroots creationist activists continued to work, often with great success, to influence school boards, administrators, and individual teachers. Outside public schools, many Christian private schools and homeschoolers taught biblical creationism. One creationist textbook came out in two editions, one for Christian schools including biblical references and one for public schools without biblical references.
Intelligent Design Controversy A revival of the old “argument from design,” intelligent design (ID) has no necessary link with Christianity, the Bible, or even the concept of a creator God. It was originally proposed, in part, as a way to put aside the acrimonious differences between old- and young-earth creationism. Intelligent design advocates also hoped that the defeat of Darwinian evolution would sweep away “scientific naturalism,” the scientific approach that rejects supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. Scientific naturalism was linked not only to Darwinism, but also to Nazism and homosexuality. Creationists hoped ID would split the foundation of philosophical naturalism and radically change the culture. The early leader of the intelligent design movement was Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, who saw it in part as a way of introducing creationist ideas into the public school curriculum by severing them completely from the biblical narrative. While young-earth creationists spent considerable effort making scientific claims for their theory of “flood geology,” ID supporters have focused nearly exclusively on attacking evolutionary explanations as inadequate to explain the complexity of living things. Many ID proponents, such as mathematician William A. Dembski and biochemists Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells, have serious scientific credentials, although not in the field of evolutionary biology. The central institution promoting intelligent design is the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, founded in 1996 as part of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. The Center and its fellows, including Dembski, Behe, and Wells, maintain an active program of publishing, speaking, and holding conferences. Despite the widespread attention it attracted from secular media, ID has proven no more successful in the courtroom than scientific creationism has. The most important ID case was Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), which centered on the actions of a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania. The board required ninth-grade teachers to read
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The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, features displays of God’s creation of the world as described in the Hebrew Bible. The facility, which opened in 2007, was funded by a Christian ministry called Answers in Genesis. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images)
a statement describing Darwinism as an open question and encouraging students to read an ID textbook, Of Pandas and People (1993). A parent of one of the students, Tammy Kitzmiller, sued with the help of the ACLU and won the case before a U.S. District Court despite the participation of Behe as a witness for the defense. The board members who supported ID were voted out by Dover citizens upset at the cost of the trial and the negative publicity their town had attracted. Although ID advocates are the most prominent creationists in legal and educational disputes, young-earth creationism remains a powerful cultural force among biblical literalists. Australian Ken Ham’s Kentuckybased Answers in Genesis (originally Creation Science Foundation, established in 1979) rivals the Institute for Creation Research as the largest creationist organization and holds to a strict line on such issues as a literal creation in six twenty-four-hour days. Both creationists and anticreationists have brought their fight to the Internet. Answers in Genesis maintains a strong Web presence, while the evolution side is represented by, among others, the group blog The Panda’s Thumb, based in Australia but with much American participation. American creationism has also had a global impact. Small foreign creationist groups have been converted to young-earth creationism by the circulation of tracts from well-funded American creationists, and U.S.-based creationist groups have established foreign affiliates in many countries. A major international victory for ID has been the support it has received from Pope Benedict XVI, support that dismayed liberal American Catholics, particularly scientists and academics. Creation science has even spread into some non-Christian countries, such as Islamic Turkey. American creationists have been ambivalent about this development, some welcoming any
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ally and others arguing that true creationism can only be Christian. William E. Burns See also: Behe, Michael J.; Church and State; Fundamentalism, Religious; Homeschooling; Internet; Science Wars; Secular Humanism.
Further Reading Answers in Genesis Web site. www.answersingenesis.org. Eldredge, Niles. The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism. New York: W.H. Freeman, 2001. Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross. Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Larson, Edward J. Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Morris, Henry M. A History of Modern Creationism. San Diego, CA: Master Books, 1984. Numbers, Ronald. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design. Expanded ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Panda’s Thumb Web site. www.pandasthumb.org.
C r o n k i t e , Wa l t e r A pioneer in television news and once widely referred to as “the most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite was the anchor for the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. His nightly sign-off—“And that’s the way it is”— later came to be regarded as the reflection of a simpler time when Americans accepted news programming at face value. Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., was born on November 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri, and raised in Houston, Texas. After attending the University of Texas (1933– 1935), he worked for the Houston Press and the United Press. Before joining CBS as a correspondent in 1950, he distinguished himself covering World War II, parachuting into Normandy during the D-Day invasion and accompanying bombing missions over Germany. After the war, he covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials and opened news bureaus across Europe, including one in Moscow. Early in his CBS career, Cronkite recognized that television would likely emerge as the primary news source for Americans, and he gladly succeeded Douglas Edwards in April 1962 as the Evening News anchor. In 1967, CBS overtook NBC in the news ratings, largely due to Cronkite’s Main Street decency and humanity. His tears while reporting the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and his genuine enthusiasm when NASA rockets lifted off endeared him to his audience. Cronkite cultivated a reputation for delivering the news “fast, accurate, and unbiased,” to quote a slogan
he adopted from his days as a UP reporter. His style on camera, often described as “avuncular,” was calm and deliberate. Years later, in the documentary Outfoxed (2004), he was presented as a contrast to the sensational and biased approach of Fox News. Yet Cronkite broke from the mainstream in 1968 when, in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, he editorialized on the air, “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate.” President Lyndon B. Johnson lamented, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” and shortly thereafter announced his decision not to seek a second term as president. Cronkite was especially proud of his role in keeping the Watergate story alive by devoting a comprehensive two-part series to the scandal when the general media were starting to lose interest. In 1976, however, after ABC correspondent Sam Jaffe stated that Cronkite was one of a number of reporters who worked for the CIA (an allegation vehemently denied), the anchor’s credibility was briefly called into question. Conservative pundit Mona Charen, a former Reagan speechwriter, dismissed Cronkite’s reputation as being of the political center, arguing that he tilted to the left and represented the “liberal intelligentsia.” Similarly, conservative commentator Ann Coulter has ridiculed his reputation as a voice of the mainstream, dubbing him the president of the “Ho Chi Minh Admiration Society.” Cronkite’s criticism of President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq was, according to Coulter, a throwback to the newscaster’s liberal bias during the Vietnam era. Cronkite died on July 17, 2009. Tom Lansburg and Roger Chapman See also: Brokaw, Tom; Bush Family; Central Intelligence Agency; Coulter, Ann; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Media Bias; Murdoch, Rupert; Rather, Dan; Vietnam War; Watergate.
Further Reading Charen, Mona. Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003. Coulter, Ann. Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. New York: Crown Forum, 2003. Cronkite, Walter. A Reporter’s Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. James, Doug. Cronkite: His Life and Times. Brentwood, TN: J.N. Press, 1991.
Cuba A Caribbean island nation located 90 miles (145 kilometers) south of Florida, Cuba has been a controversial subject in American politics since the Spanish-American War in 1898. U.S. involvement in the country’s internal affairs, largely due to business interests, continued until
Culture Jamming
Fidel Castro’s overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Gradually, political conservatives came to view this Latin American country as a communist dagger pointed at the underbelly of the United States. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Cuba, in the eyes of many Americans, had come to symbolize one of the last vestiges of Marxist tyranny. Ironically, Castro’s revolution was initially welcomed by the United States, as Batista’s regime was known for its corruption. However, nationalization of Americanowned companies, the expulsion of pro-American Cuban conservatives, and Castro’s close relationship with the Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara soon prompted the Eisenhower administration to take a hard stance against Castro. Some critics believe that this pushed Castro into the communist camp, inspiring him to sign trade agreements with the Soviet Union in 1960. By May 1961, Castro began identifying himself as a Marxist-Leninist. Eisenhower, who earlier arranged for the CIA to overthrow the governments of Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), decided to oust Castro from power. By the time John F. Kennedy took office as president in January 1961, the plan was ready to be executed. Three months later, the Kennedy administration launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, carried out by CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The invasion was a miserable failure—news of the attack had leaked out beforehand, and U.S. air support never materialized. The subsequent deployment of Soviet short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba and the tense standoff it caused between Moscow and Washington in October 1962 were a direct consequence of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the Soviet Union and the United States came to a nuclear war. Kennedy’s response—an embargo on shipments to Cuba—led to a peaceful resolution and came to be viewed by many as a perfect example of the victory of diplomacy over military aggression. After the removal of the Soviet missiles, a brief period of calm existed between Washington and Havana. Trade resumed, and the prisoners taken during the Bay of Pigs were released. The period of calm came to an end in 1963, however, as the Cuban government officially became communist and the U.S. government responded with a diplomatic and economic embargo. It was later learned that the CIA attempted to arrange Castro’s assassination. Over the years, U.S. opinion on Cuba has been mixed. During the 1960s and 1970s, radicals of the New Left viewed Castro’s Cuba as a model for a successful revolution, shifting their admiration from the Soviet Union to Cuba. Che Guevara became an icon of popular culture, admired by student activists across college campuses. Black activists, from Malcolm X to the leaders of the Black Panthers, also approved of Castro. The American mainstream, however, regarded Cuba as a totalitarian
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dictatorship, and the thousands of Cubans who fled to Florida on small boats were viewed as tragic figures escaping communist tyranny. Beginning in the 1980s, two primary debates about Cuba emerged. First, segments of both the left and the right called for an end to the economic and diplomatic embargo, which over the years was maintained by Republican and Democratic administrations. Second, the influx of Cuban refugees was greeted with a less than welcoming spirit by many Americans, especially those living in Florida, leading to changes in immigration policy. Beginning in 1995, the U.S. Coast Guard started returning refugees rescued at sea, angering many Cuban Americans. The highly vocal Cuban-American community, largely based in Miami, continues to exert pressure on politicians, especially Republicans, who do not want to lose votes by alienating this constituency. Proponents of normalization argue that sanctions have not worked but, instead, have strengthened the Castro regime while thwarting American business interests. Restoring trade, they argue, will expose Cubans to ideas and culture that will promote freedom. Supporters of the embargo maintain that the normalized relations Cuba enjoys with Mexico and Canada have had little effect on Castro’s actions. Many have concluded that U.S.-Cuban relations will not change dramatically until the death of the elderly Fidel Castro, whose health has been a topic of much speculation on both the right and the left. In February 2008, Castro officially stepped down from power, but his brother Raúl has maintained control of the country. Mike Timonin See also: Black Panther Party; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; González, Elián; Immigration Policy; Kennedy Family; Malcolm X; Marxism; New Left; Nuclear Age; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Gott, Richard. Cuba: A New History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Latell, Brian. After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro’s Regime and Cuba’s Next Leader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Perez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Culture Jamming Culture jamming is the practice of scrambling, inter rupting, or co-opting media in order to communicate a subversive message. Also known as “media jamming” or “media hacking,” culture jamming is particularly associated with alternative and do-it-yourself (DIY) media. Surrealist pranks with a political edge, such as street theater events staged by Billionaires for Bush, and
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acts of politically driven vandalism such as billboard alteration are also examples of culture jamming. The philosophy behind culture jamming owes much to French theorist Guy Debord and his anarchist group, Situationists International. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) asserts that capitalist, corporate-controlled media use pleasure and the promise of a “good life” to control the masses while hoarding resources and profits. Today, the most well-known culture jamming organization is the Vancouver-based Adbusters, which publishes a magazine featuring spoofs of famous ads. According to antiglobalization activist Naomi Klein in No Logo (1999), such activities are one way to combat the economic inequality and political disenfranchisement perpetrated by homogeneous corporate culture. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels (2004), also published as The Rebel Sell, attacks the philosophy behind culture jamming. The authors suggest that counterculture ideals have been repackaged and sold as products to Americans who want to see themselves as individuals and rebels. The counterculture, they argue, is
actually reinforcing the consumer culture it claims to reject, while its emphasis on individualism undermines the capacity for collective political action. Heath and Potter assert that consumer capitalism is not fundamentally at fault for economic inequality. In their view, the solution to inequality is to support legislation that would prevent the exploitation of loopholes in the economic system. Christine Hoff Kraemer See also: Biafra, Jello; Counterculture; Globalization; Klein, Naomi.
Further Reading Adbusters: Culture Jammers Headquarters Web site. www .adbusters.org. Branwyn, Gareth. Jamming the Media. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. New York: HarperBusiness, 2004.
Dean, Howard Howard Dean, the former Democratic governor of Vermont, ran perhaps the most influential losing presidential campaign in modern U.S. political history in 2004. His bid for the Democratic nomination not only galvanized opposition to the Iraq War and the resurgence of what he called “the Democratic wing” of the Democratic Party, but it was also the first true online campaign, using the Internet in unprecedented ways to attract support and contributions. In the aftermath of his campaign, Dean continued his efforts to expand and strengthen the party as chairman of the Democratic National Committee beginning in 2005. His fifty-state strategy is credited with paving the way for Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory. Howard Brush Dean III was born on November 17, 1948, in East Hampton, New York, to a wealthy Republican family. After earning degrees from Yale University (BA, 1971) and the Albert Einstein Medical College in New York City (MD, 1978), he moved to Vermont, married, and established a family medical practice in Burlington. Dean got involved in politics in 1980, working for President Jimmy Carter’s reelection and leading a local fight to stop a condominium project. He was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 1982 and four years later ran successfully for lieutenant governor. The death of Governor Richard Snelling in 1991 elevated Dean to the governorship, where he served for twelve years. Generally viewed as fiscally moderate and socially liberal, he signed the nation’s first “civil union” law granting legal rights to same-sex couples in 2000, sparking an in-state conservative backlash and accelerating the national debate over gay marriage. While the civil-union controversy brought Dean a measure of national attention, he began his presidential run as a relatively obscure and seemingly marginal candidate. With the U.S. invasion of Iraq looming in early 2003, his strong antiwar stance, and his outspoken criticism of President George W. Bush, Dean began winning favor with left-leaning, activist, and Internet-savvy Democrats. His campaign seized on the groundswell and pioneered the use of blogs, networking sites, and other online means to directly engage backers and raise record funds, mostly through small online donations. Dean’s emergence as the front runner made him a target for rivals and the media, particularly over his intemperate comments and bristly personality. Amid intense negative campaigning, he finished a surprising third in the January 2004 Iowa caucuses and gave a
defiant concession speech, climaxing with a shrill interjection that came to be known as the “Dean scream.” The scene was repeated endlessly on television, exemplifying to Dean’s supporters a mainstream-media bias against his insurgent candidacy. The campaign never recovered. Within weeks, Dean withdrew from the race and shortly thereafter endorsed eventual nominee John Kerry. Sudden collapse notwithstanding, Dean was widely credited with framing the Democratic general-election campaign and catalyzing internal debate about the party’s direction. In February 2005, after prospective rivals stepped out of the running, Dean was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over the objections of several party leaders. Through the DNC and Democracy for America, the organization that grew out of his presidential campaign, he continued to promote grassroots, Internet-oriented activism. He got much of the credit for the Democratic win in both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm election. Dean is viewed by many in both major parties as a polarizing figure for his blunt comments on the Iraq War, the Religious Right, and other hot-button topics, but his approach to online politicking has become a model for candidates
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean won early support in the 2004 Democratic primaries on the strength of his antiwar stance and Internet organizing, but he was undone by his own exuberance. He later served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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across the ideological spectrum. In 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Dean resigned as party chairman. The new president did not offer Dean a cabinet position but did praise him as a “visionary and effective leader.” It was reported that Dean and Obama’s political advisers had earlier clashed over campaign strategy. Andy Markowitz See also: Carter, Jimmy; Democratic Party; Internet; Kerry, John; Media Bias; Religious Right; Same-Sex Marriage.
Further Reading Dean, Howard, with Judith Warner. You Have the Power: How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Singer, Mark. “Running on Instinct.” New Yorker, January 12, 2004. Trippi, Joe. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. New York: ReganBooks, 2004. Wolf, Gary. “How the Internet Invented Howard Dean.” Wired, January 2004.
Dean, James A cult icon of rebellious youth, the legendary film actor James Dean epitomized the angst of middle-class American adolescents during the 1950s. Before his untimely death at age twenty-four, Dean made three classic films: East of Eden (1955), directed by Elia Kazan; Rebel Without a Cause (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray; and Giant (1956), directed by George Stevens. James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana, but moved with his family to California as a boy. After his mother’s death in 1940, he returned to Indiana to live on his aunt and uncle’s farm. Although he attended college in California, he dropped out to move to New York, where he studied at the prestigious Actor’s Studio with Lee Strasberg. After limited work in television and theater, Dean began what would become a short if stunning movie career, starring in three major films in a little over a year. He received Academy Award nominations (both of them posthumously) for his roles in East of Eden and Giant. On September 30, 1955, while driving his Porsche 550 Spyder (nicknamed “Little Bastard”) to a race in Salinas, California, Dean was killed in a highway accident. Ironically, several weeks earlier, he had filmed a commercial on automobile safety. Although Dean’s troubled life has been well documented, his sexual orientation remains a matter of debate. In the culture wars, the charismatic young actor struck a chord with the 1950s generation of disaffected youth, symbolizing teenage alienation from a status-conscious,
white, middle-class adult world. Dean’s portrayal of rebellion influenced a generation of adolescents struggling with problems of the postwar era. These included not only fear of nuclear disaster but also such common adolescent issues as self-esteem, gender, conformity, sexuality, and authority. Dean glamorized the wild and self-destructive impulses of teens in a sterile world inhabited by ineffectual, distant parents. Epitomizing the outsider with a poetic sensibility, his characters sought to establish their identity apart from peer pressure and materialistic adult values. Dean’s portrayals made teenage loneliness and alienation “cool.” Embodying hip, estranged youth, James Dean became the Rebel incarnate. Deborah D. Rogers See also: Automobile Safety; Counterculture; Generations and Generational Conflict; Nuclear Age; Steinbeck, John.
Further Reading Alexander, Paul. Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean. New York: Viking, 1994. Bast, William. Surviving James Dean. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2006. Hofstede, David. James Dean: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Spoto, Donald. Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Dean, John One of the central figures in the Watergate scandal, John Dean was both a perpetrator and a witness for the prosecution. His role in the greatest American political scandal of the twentieth century stemmed from his activities as White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon from 1970 to 1973. John Wesley Dean III was born on October 14, 1938, in Akron, Ohio. After earning his LLB from Georgetown University in 1965 and a brief stint with a law firm in Washington, D.C., Dean joined the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives as chief counsel. He later was appointed associate deputy to the attorney general in the Nixon administration and in 1970 was named counsel to the president, replacing John Ehrlichman, who had become Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser. In 1973, FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray implicated Dean in the cover-up surrounding the previous year’s break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex. Nixon requested that Dean prepare a comprehensive report of everything he knew about the Watergate breakin and subsequent events, but Dean refused, suspecting that he was being set up as a scapegoat. Nixon fired Dean on April 30, 1973, and Dean decided to cooperate with Watergate investigators.
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While testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee, Dean was the first to charge that President Nixon was directly involved in the cover-up. Dean also implicated himself and other top administration officials in illegal activities. The infamous White House tapes (audio recordings of Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office), which surfaced later, confirmed Dean’s allegations. Thus, Dean’s testimony was instrumental in starting a chain of events that led to Nixon’s resignation. Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and served several months in prison. After his release, he chronicled his part in the Watergate scandal in the books Blind Ambition: The White House Years (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). Later, while pursuing a career as an investment banker, Dean remained involved in politics as a commentator on government misdeeds and the ongoing American fascination with Watergate. His 2002 book Unmasking Deep Throat unsuccessfully attempted to identify the anonymous source for the momentous Watergate reporting by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. He rose to prominence again in 2004 with the book Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. In it, Dean recommended the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, on grounds that they had lied to Congress in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dean also raised concerns in 2006 about the Bush administration’s antiterrorist wiretapping practices. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Bush Family; Cheney Family; Colson, Chuck; Felt, W. Mark; Liddy, G. Gordon; Nixon, Richard; Republican Party; Watergate; Woodward, Bob.
Further Reading Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. Rothschild, Matthew. “John Dean.” Progressive, October 2006. Sussman, Barry. The Great Coverup: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate. New York: Crowell, 1974. Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein. The Final Days. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
Deconstructionism “Deconstructionism” refers to an academic style of reading and interpreting texts, associated especially with Parisian postmodern philosophy and a general suspicion of authority. An academic style rather than a specific hermeneutic method, deconstructionism simply means taking apart the arguments of an opponent and examining the pieces in detail. Deconstructionism entered the academic scene during the late 1960s and is most closely associated
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with French philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida. He and others labored to undermine the concept of an established or settled meaning to classical texts. By paying especially close attention to the gaps or silences in texts—to what is not said even more than what is said—the established meanings of texts were cast in doubt. Deconstructionists assert that the reader plays as large a role in establishing the meaning of a text as does the original author. Hence, the meaning of every text is indecipherable in any absolute sense. Critics of deconstruction faulted the theory for its radicalism, relativism, anarchism, and nihilism. As deconstructionism spilled over from philosophy and literary criticism into studies of history, theology, politics, and law, academics were split in relation to it, often along generational lines. As young deconstructionists aged into the older, establishment generation, they mostly abandoned their revolutionary pose, along with their deliberately dense, convoluted, nonlinear, but also creative and pun-full prose. It now is possible to look at deconstructionism with the calmer wisdom of hindsight to see what contributions it has made to the understanding of human discourse. One insight from deconstructionist theory is that human discourse (or text, subsuming both speech and writing) contains both accidental and essential features. While the essential features are generally overt and conscious to the author, representing purposeful intent, the accidental features are often not present to consciousness and may contradict or undermine the essential features of the discourse. In oral discourse, body language may undermine or contradict what one is saying. This applies no less to written texts, although the accidental features may be more difficult to make manifest. Making manifest the accidentals of human discourse is the essence of deconstruction. Another insight from deconstruction is that rational thought is logocentric: expressed almost exclusively in words. In the process of learning to speak, we acquire distinguishable oppositions (ideas defined mainly by reference to their opposite, such as good/bad, masculine/ feminine) that are not value neutral; the preference for one over the other is not metaphysically grounded but linguistically grounded only. Thus, in discourse, such categories as “good” do not communicate anything authoritative or substantive but instead call for further investigation and a questioning of the common belief assumed in the text. A deconstructionist reading, for example, would examine whose good or whose bad. Daniel Liechty See also: Academic Freedom; Foucault, Michel; Great Books; Literature, Film, and Drama; Postmodernism.
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Further Reading Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Powell, James, and Joseph Lee. Deconstruction for Beginners. New York: Readers and Writers, 2005.
D e L ay, To m By the time U.S. Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX) resigned his seat on June 9, 2006, Congress bore the distinct imprint of his crusade to mold a legislative body that would pursue an agenda friendly to big business and the Religious Right. DeLay, an arch-conservative and master politician, rose to the heights of political influence in the nation’s capital—serving successively as House majority whip and majority leader—only to come crashing down under the weight of various charges of ethics violations and illegal campaign funding. The son of an oil driller, Thomas Dale “Tom” DeLay was born on April 8, 1947, in Laredo, Texas, and grew up partly in Venezuela (where his father worked in the petroleum industry). Raised a nominal Baptist, he enrolled at Baylor University as a pre-med major, only to be expelled for alcohol violations and vandalism (1967). He completed his education, majoring in biology, at the University of Houston (BS, 1970). As the owner of a pest-control business (1973–1984), DeLay came to resent government regulation, including a ban on the potentially carcinogenic pesticide Mirex; he referred to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “the Gestapo.” With such passionate views, DeLay entered politics, representing a suburban Houston district, first as a member of the Texas House of Representatives (1979–1984) and later as a member of Congress (1985–2006). Following the 1994 national elections, which gave Republicans control of Congress, DeLay was chosen as the House majority whip; in 2002 he became the House majority leader. DeLay claims that during the 1980s he experienced a religious conversion while watching a home video by the evangelical preacher and family-values activist James Dobson. The experience inspired DeLay to give up his heavy drinking and to espouse “absolute truth” in his political discourse; the enemies were feminism, humanism, relativism, and postmodernism. During his first term in Congress, DeLay began earning his conservative stripes with attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts, criticizing the agency for funding “profane” and “obscene” works. In 1990, when President George H.W. Bush broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes, DeLay publicly criticized what he regarded as a moral lapse. In late 1998 and early 1999, as majority whip, the Texas Republican took an active role in orchestrating impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. That spring, in the wake of the Columbine (Colorado)
High School shooting incident, DeLay laid blame on a society in which daycare, birth control, and the teaching of evolution were rampant. DeLay remained outspoken into the Republican administration of President George W. Bush, whose “compassionate conservatism” he criticized as an indulgence in government handouts. In 2005, DeLay led the House in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the court-ordered removal of the feeding tube from Terry Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for over a decade. And in March 2006, at a conference in Washington, D.C., titled “The War on Christians and the Values Voter,” DeLay spoke of the need to confront an American society that offers abortion on demand, degrades the institution of marriage, and regards Christianity as a “second-rate superstition.” DeLay’s confrontational style, adeptness at raising campaign funds for his party, and ability to impose discipline on fellow House Republicans to support the party agenda earned him such appellations as “The Hammer,” “The Exterminator,” and the “Meanest Man in Congress.” Characteristically, his office had on display marble copies of the Ten Commandments alongside a set of bullwhips. By spring 2006, Democrats were beginning a successful campaign to regain control of the House, highlighting the Washington scandal revolving around Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist and friend of DeLay, and the congressman’s September 2005 indictment in Texas on money laundering charges. These and other scandals, according to Democrats, reflected a “culture of corruption” in the GOP. The Abramoff scandal was about corporate influence peddling and was tied to DeLay’s K Street Project, named after the street in Washington where many lobbyists have their offices. DeLay made it clear to lobbying firms that if they wanted access and favorable treatment in his Congress, then it would be necessary for them to hire only Republicans. The scandal also involved expensive golf outings for members of Congress and the raising of campaign funds. Ronnie Earle, Democratic district attorney of Travis County, Texas, charged that DeLay in 2002 arranged to have corporate campaign contributions, which are illegal in Texas, laundered and given to Republican candidates for the Texas legislature. These activities were part of DeLay’s successful strategy for Republicans to gain control of the Texas lower house, with the ultimate aim of having Republicans redraw the state’s congressional district map. Following a fierce redistricting battle in 2003, the Republicans, after picking up six seats in the 2004 election, became the majority party in the Texas congressional delegation. In addition, the House Ethics Committee had on three occasions admonished DeLay for using questionable tactics in pursuing his political objectives. After Abramoff and two associates who previously had worked
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for DeLay pleaded guilty to various criminal charges, including fraud and conspiracy to bribe public officials, DeLay, who had already surrendered his position as majority leader, announced that he would resign from Congress and not seek reelection. In his final speech as a member of Congress, DeLay defended his combative political style and characterized liberals as pursuing “more government, more taxation, more control over people’s lives and decisions and wallets.” In December 2006, DeLay launched his own Web site and blog column in his continuing effort “to push the conservative cause and conservative thought.” Glenn H. Utter See also: Campaign Finance Reform; Carson, Rachel; Clinton Impeachment; Dobson, James; Environmental Movement; National Endowment for the Arts; Religious Right; Republican Party; Schiavo, Terri; School Shootings.
Further Reading Continetti, Matthew. The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine. New York: Doubleday, 2006. DeLay, Tom, with Stephen Mansfield. No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight. New York: Sentinel, 2007. Dubose, Lou, and Jan Reid. The Hammer: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Tom DeLay Web site. www.tomdelay.com. Toobin, Jeffrey. “Drawing the Line.” New Yorker, March 6, 2006.
D e l o r i a , V i n e , J r. The Native American lawyer, academic, and activist Vine Deloria, Jr., emerged as a prominent, sometimes controversial national figure during the 1960s and 1970s for his criticisms of the way in which indigenous peoples have been portrayed in mainstream pop culture, history, and anthropological studies. More significantly, his advocacy of indigenous civil rights and self-determination, as well as his calls on the U.S. government to live up to its responsibilities to native peoples and to deal with them on a “government-to-government” basis, energized panIndian organizers and gave ideological impetus to the budding American Indian Movement (AIM). The son of an Episcopal priest, Vine Victor Deloria, Jr., was born in Martin, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation, on March 26, 1933. One-fourth Sioux Indian, he was a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of South Dakota. Deloria studied science at Iowa State University (BS, 1958), theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois (MTh, 1963), and law at the University of Colorado (JD, 1970). He also served a stint in the U.S. Marines (1954–1956) and held various positions for promoting Native American causes, including associate director of
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the United Scholarship Services in Denver (1963–1964), executive director of the National Congress of American Indians in Washington, D.C. (1964–1967), and chair of the Institute for the Development of Indian Law in Golden, Colorado (1970–1976). Discarding early aspirations for Christian ministry— he would later refer to himself as a “Seventh Day Absentist” while offering a harsh critique of Christianity—Deloria evolved into an activist scholar. The author of more than twenty books, beginning with Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and its sequel, We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (1970), he taught political science at the University of Arizona in Tucson (1978– 1990), where he chaired its program in American Indian studies (1979–1982). He later taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1990–2000). In his writings, Deloria challenged the traditional Euro-American view of history and advised American Indians to return to tribalism and maintain a separate cultural identity. He deplored the violence of American westward expansion carried out in the name of manifest destiny, referring to George Armstrong Custer, the cavalry officer who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, as “the Adolf Eichmann of the Plains.” Deloria extended his argument to suggest that all white Americans harbor an inherent guilt for how their ancestors treated native peoples. His arguments on behalf of Indian self-identity influenced the passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), which requires museums and research institutions to return Indian remains and funerary and sacred artifacts to their respective tribes. Deloria also debunked the stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans as ignorant, drunk, and lazy, blaming that misconception on both popular culture and anthropology. In Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974), Deloria offered a legal justification for AIM’s takeover of Wounded Knee the previous year and at the same time called on the federal government to honor its past treaties. He opposed Indian sports mascots and once orchestrated a losing legal effort to strip the Washington Redskins football team of its name. Deloria also wrote extensively on Native American cosmology—God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973, 1992), Metaphysics of Modern Existence (1979), Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995), Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths (2002), and The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of Medicine Men (2006)—arguing that Indian traditional knowledge offers an alternative and a complement to Judeo-Christianity and Western philosophy and science. He suggested, for example, that Western culture could benefit by adopting an ecological ethic, something that has long been a component of the Native American worldview. Asserting that Christianity has
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been a “curse” wherever it has spread, Deloria endorsed the New Age movement as a spiritual option. In his embrace of indigenous oral tradition, Deloria defended Native American claims that Indians originated in the Western Hemisphere. He thus rejected the mainstream view that the ancestors of the Indian people came from Asia by crossing a land bridge over the Bering Strait. Some regard his view of creationism as being in accord with fundamentalist Christianity, including its rejection of evolution and belief in a young earth (thousands, not millions of years old), a past worldwide flood, and the simultaneous occurrence of humans and dinosaurs. His position on creationism generated much criticism from academic and religious communities. Deloria retired from teaching in 2000 but continued to write and lecture until his death on November 13, 2005, in Golden, Colorado. Roger Chapman See also: American Indian Movement; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Indian Sport Mascots; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; New Age Movement; Political Correctness; Revisionist History; Wounded Knee Incident.
Further Reading Bilosi, Thomas, and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Pavlik, Steve, and Daniel R. Wildcat, eds. Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2006. Tinker, George E. “Walking in the Shadow of Greatness: Vine Deloria Jr. in Retrospect.” Wicazo Sa Review 21:2 (Fall 2006): 167–77.
Demjanjuk , John John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker, was accused in 1978 of being the notorious murderer “Ivan the Terrible” at the Nazi death camp at Treblinka in occupied Poland during World War II. Decades-long legal battles ensued over his U.S. citizenship and alleged crimes against humanity, and public debate over his guilt or innocence exposed, some believe, anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism. Born on April 3, 1920, near Kiev, Ukraine, Demjanjuk was drafted by the Soviet military in 1940 and captured by the Germans in 1942. His whereabouts during his period of capture became the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) after a Holocaust survivor in 1978 identified him as a Nazi guard. In February 1981, he was brought to trial in U.S. federal court and found
guilty of hiding his Nazi past on his 1951 immigration application. He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship, but he steadfastly denied participating in the Holocaust. In February 1986, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. He was convicted on April 25, 1988, and sentenced to death, but in August 1993, Israel’s Supreme Court, ruling on newly available evidence from the former Soviet Union, overturned the conviction. At the center of both trials was controversy over the authenticity of an identity card carrying Demjanjuk’s photo, which indicated his being trained by the SS as a camp guard. Ukrainian Americans, fearing that a link with the Nazis would strengthen Soviet resistance to their appeals for Ukrainian independence, argued that the card was likely a Soviet-produced forgery. Jewish organizations, however, argued that a preponderance of evidence supported the card’s authenticity. Non-Ukrainian critics of the trials turned their politically conservative anti-Soviet conspiracy claims into anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic conspiracy claims. Demjanjuk supporter Jerome Brentar, speaking to the Holocaust-denying Institute of Historical Review, accused OSI officials of seeking only to protect their “lucrative jobs,” and Jews, whom he called “Holocaustians,” of promoting a multimillion-dollar Holocaust industry. After repeating that the identity card was a Soviet forgery, the noted conservative Patrick Buchanan, who has a record of defending other accused Nazis in America, referred to the U.S. Congress as “a parliament of whores” on “Israeli-occupied” Capitol Hill. Upon Demjanjuk’s return to Cleveland from Israel, he was charged by the OSI with having murdered Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. A U.S. circuit court subsequently ruled that he could be stripped of citizenship, and on December 28, 2005, an immigration judge ruled that he be deported to his country of origin, Ukraine. In March 2007, however, the government of Ukraine indicated that it would refuse to accept him. In May 2008, Demjanjuk lost his final appeal at the Supreme Court, but the accused Nazi guard remained in Cleveland because no country was willing to issue him a visa. Ten months later, prosecutors in Munich, Germany, issued a warrant for Demjanjuk’s arrest, charging him with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder. In May 2009, he was deported to Germany. Martin J. Plax See also: Anti-Semitism; Buchanan, Pat; Cold War; Conspiracy Theories; Holocaust; Israel; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Plax, Martin J. “The Holocaust as Moral Instruction.” Society, March/April 2003. Shiftel, Yoram. Defending “Ivan the Terrible”: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk. Washington, DC: Regnery Books, 2005.
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Democratic Par ty The Democratic Party grew out of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans of the 1790s–1820s. In the American political spectrum, Democrats have stood in opposition to the Federalists (1790s–1820s), Whigs (1830s–1850s), and Republicans (1854–present). As one of the major components in America’s two-party system, the Democratic Party has comprised a diverse coalition of regional, ethnocultural, and socioeconomic groups. Since World War II, Democrats have increasingly represented the liberal side in the culture wars.
Nineteenth Century to the Great Depression Until relatively recently, the Democratic Party dominated the politics of the American South. It was the majority party in the antebellum South, enjoying hegemonic status from the Civil War through World War II. Southern Democrats united in white supremacy, although they sometimes split between conservatives and populists on economic issues. Following World War II, national Democrats’ growing cultural liberalism, especially regarding race, lessened the party’s popularity among white southerners: Democrats routinely won 80 percent of the southern congressional vote through the 1940s, but that figure steadily dropped in the postwar era, falling below 50 percent in the mid-1990s. Democrats always comprised a more ethnically and religiously diverse coalition than their Federalist, Whig, or Republican counterparts. In the South, most Democrats were native-born Protestants. Elsewhere, Democrats drew primarily from ethnocultural groups outside the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) mainstream. In the early 1800s, these groups included the Scots-Irish, Irish, Germans, and French. During the mid-nineteenth century, Democrats drew support from Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. This infusion, however, led many Protestants to abandon the party. The phenomenon of national and ethnic groups shifting allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans after assimilating into American culture and rising in socioeconomic status has recurred throughout U.S. history. From the 1880s through the early 1920s, Democrats gained followers among Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Many immigrants settled in Northern cities, making Democrats the more urban party. More recently, other minority groups— African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and gays—have also identified themselves as Democrats. As a diverse coalition, the Democratic Party has tended toward a libertarian cultural ethic. Democrats generally have viewed moral-reform laws as invasive and coercive. Early in their history, they opposed legislation that would have abolished slavery, and later they were
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against alcohol prohibition, “blue laws” (opposing commercial activity on Sundays), Protestant indoctrination in public schools, and immigration restriction. Democrats’ cultural diversity has reinforced their rhetorical embrace of equality. Because their constituents were of the lower and middle classes of small farmers, artisans, small business owners, and workers, Democrats have traditionally advocated equal opportunity for the ordinary individual against the designs of the economically powerful. Before 1900, Democrats distrusted centralized political power, believing that the federal government could be corrupted by conspiring economic elites who sought unfair advantages. Consequently, Democrats advocated small, decentralized government (“states’ rights”) and laissez-faire policies. However, the rise of big business in the late nineteenth century transformed the party’s economic philosophy. Whereas Democrats had previously viewed government as a threat to individual liberty and economic opportunity, they now believed that unfettered industrial capitalism, which led to monopolistic corporate power, also endangered these values. As a result, modern Democrats argue that it is government’s duty to oversee the economy for the benefit of all Americans.
New Deal Through the 1960s The Great Depression of the 1930s prompted most Americans to embrace Democrats’ liberal economic policies. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal pumped federal money into the economy, regulated the market, provided welfare relief, protected labor unions’ rights, raised taxes on the wealthy, provided Social Security pensions, and increased defense spending. Fiscal liberalism united the party’s diverse coalition for years, but the coalition eventually broke down as political attention shifted to cultural matters, especially race, following World War II. In the postwar era, liberal Democrats promoted racial equality, thereby alienating the party’s cultural conservatives. In 1948, President Harry S Truman’s support for mild civil rights measures caused a revolt by a bloc of southerners, who formed the States’ Rights, or “Dixiecrat,” Party. Although the Dixiecrats folded after winning only 2 percent of the presidential vote that year, their rebellion presaged the breakdown of the Democratic coalition. White southerners increasingly supported Republican candidates, beginning at the presidential level. Whereas Roosevelt had won three-fourths of the white southern vote in 1944, Truman won only half in 1948. As cultural liberals’ influence grew within the national Democratic Party, many cultural conservatives—white southerners and acculturated white Catholics, most notably—shifted to the Republican Party. The events of the 1960s cemented the identification of the national Democratic Party with racial and cul-
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tural liberalism. President Lyndon B. Johnson advanced racial equality through his Great Society policies, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, culturally liberal Democrats applauded, and conservatives condemned, rulings made by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Warren Court declared unconstitutional many culturally conservative state laws, including racial segregation in public schools, mandatory public school prayer, and bans on birth control devices. Beginning in the 1960s, liberal Democrats became intertwined with numerous social movements, including civil rights, the counterculture, feminism, youth protest, and the sexual revolution. In addition, the Vietnam War split conservatives from liberals. Party divisions exploded in 1968, when pro-war and antiwar factions clashed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Cultural conservative George Wallace, a former governor of Alabama, abandoned the Democrats to run as a third-party presidential candidate, splitting the Democratic vote, while Republican Richard Nixon skillfully employed a culturally conservative “southern strategy.” As a result, Democrats won no southern electoral votes for the first time in history, allowing Nixon to win the White House.
1970s and 1980s During the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats often had large majorities in Congress, governorships, and state legislatures, but they accomplished little because they were irrevocably split. After the Democrats changed their presidential nominating rules prior to the 1972 convention, cultural liberals grew more powerful within the national party. Consequently, many conservative Democrats backed local conservative Democrats while simultaneously supporting Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Jimmy Carter, the lone Democratic president during this period, was unable to overcome his party’s intractable divisions. As the Democrats floundered, the GOP worked to forge a new majority coalition. The economic dislocations of the post-1973 era diminished the popular appeal of Democrats’ fiscal liberalism. Moreover, the GOP sought to win over culturally conservative Democrats, capture new voters from conservative Democratic backgrounds, and politicize formerly apolitical conservatives, especially white evangelical Christians. Republicans mobilized conservatives by publicizing emotional cultural issues: communism, abortion, school prayer, integration, busing, affirmative action, crime, drugs, gun control, flag burning, pornography, environmentalism, and feminism. Using sophisticated public relations techniques, Republicans portrayed themselves as populists who represented
the “conservative hard-working American” against the “liberal elites.” Meanwhile, Democrats moved to the cultural left, with support for abortion rights becoming a “litmus test” for aspiring presidential candidates. By the late 1980s, the conservative-liberal debate was so polarized that commentators perceived a full-fledged culture war.
Culture Wars of the 1990s and 2000s In the face of conservative Republican ascendancy, a group of centrist “New Democrats” sought to refashion the party. New Democrats usually hailed from southern or border states and gathered around the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). They accepted culturally liberal policies now viewed as mainstream, such as integration, environmental protection, and, more grudg ingly, abortion rights. But they rejected unpopular liberal programs, distanced themselves from liberal “special interests,” favored moderate economic policies, and took a conservative stance on such cultural issues as welfare, crime, public morality, patriotism, and defense. In 1992, Bill Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, both DLC members, won the election. Despite Clinton’s centrism, Republicans portrayed him as a cultural radical. Republicans and conservative organizations attacked Clinton’s character unrelentingly, as well as the administration’s support for culturally liberal policies such as abortion rights, women’s rights, affirmative action, and homosexuals serving openly in the military. GOP criticism drove down Clinton’s approval ratings and mobilized conservatives, helping Republicans capture both houses of Congress in 1994. Once in power, however, the Republicans overreached. Clinton stymied the GOP and won reelection in 1996 by portraying himself as a sensible moderate and his opponents as right-wing extremists. In Clinton’s second term, congressional Republicans investigated the president’s sexual involvement with an intern and his misleading statements about the affair, impeaching him in 1998. Democrats, especially liberals, and many independents were outraged by the Republicans’ actions. The bitterness of the Clinton era widened the gap between the major parties in the culture wars. Several controversial incidents inflamed partisan discord in the early 2000s. Democrats were outraged that the Republican-dominated Supreme Court intervened in the contested 2000 presidential election in support of Republican George W. Bush, a staunch cultural conservative. Democrats, especially liberals, were further angered by what they believed was Bush’s partisan use of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. By the end of the Bush era, the culture war between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats was more pronounced than ever. Yet the Democratic Party had become more active in south-
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ern and western states, supporting more conservative or centrist members of the party there and attracting more independents. In the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress. Diane Benedic and George Rising See also: Civil Rights Movement; Clinton, Bill; Counterculture; Election of 2000; Great Society; Health Care; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; New Deal; New Left; Red and Blue States; Republican Party; Social Security; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Baer, Kenneth S. Reinventing the Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Berman, William C. America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Edsall, Thomas Byrne, and Mary D. Edsall. Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1989. Gillon, Steven. The Democrats’ Dilemma: Walter Mondale and the Liberal Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Kovler, Peter B., ed. Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial Appraisal. Washington, DC: Center for National Policy Press, 1992. Lawrence, David G. The Collapse of the Democratic Presidential Majority: Realignment, Disalignment, and Electoral Change from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996. Milkis, Sidney M., and Jerome M. Mileur. The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Witcover, Jules. Party of the People: A History of the Democrats. New York: Random House, 2003.
D i ve r s i t y T r a i n i n g As social protest movements provoked workplace integration during the 1970s, corporations began to adjust their business policies to handle a more diverse workforce. Although organizations have used various approaches to meet the challenges of multiculturalism, diversity training has been one of the most common strategies. The question of how to conduct diversity training has been a controversy of the culture wars. The implementation of diversity training in the corporate world dramatically increased in 1987 after the U.S. Department of Labor issued Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century, which predicted that, by the turn of the century, 80 percent of the incoming work-
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force would be composed of members of nondominant groups. Researched and written by William Johnston and Arnold H. Packer, Workforce 2000 inspired a number of books that explored changes in the employee profile, impressing the need for organizations to become more sensitive to the differences in the workplace. To remain competitive, it was argued, employers would have to adapt to the fact that women, people with disabilities, people of color, and gays and lesbians are a significant part of the employee population. Workforce 2000 spurred the creation of numerous training and consulting firms, multicultural institutes, and professional programs for trainers and educators. Keeping companies competitive in an increasingly global community has been the ultimate aim of diversity training. Corporate proponents contend that diversity training helps improve the recruitment, retention, and promotion of a talented, diverse workforce. They believe that such training increases communication and cooperation, thereby fostering innovative, multicultural work teams. They also believe that diversity training helps companies to effectively develop, market, and sell products and services to a variety of groups in the global marketplace. Just what diversity training entails is highly variable. Even so, by the late 1990s diversity trainers had undergone a credentialing process as promoted by three major professional associations: the American Society for Training and Development, the Conference Board, and the Society for Human Resource Development. Although corporations agreed on the necessity of diversity training, the question of what such training should include actually reflected a more fundamental confusion in American culture about race, class, gender, ability, and sexual orientation. Several styles of diversity training have emerged, reflecting two points of view about cultural integration in the United States. The “melting pot” proposes that people of different races and ethnicity should blend together and assimilate into a common national culture. The “multicultural society” suggests that persons of different ethnic groups should coexist but retain their respective cultural patterns and traditions. One method of diversity training, designated the “isms” approach, focuses on teaching employees how to both recognize and correct the negative effects of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and heterosexism. Its aim is to right the wrongs of the past and create a more egalitarian and fair corporate organization in the broader context of a multicultural society. The “isms” approach has provoked a backlash from many cultural conservatives, with some dismissing it as “white male bashing.” The University of California at Santa Cruz professor and political activist Angela Davis, in her liberal critique of the “isms” approach, believes that it is actually
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a method of social control of a heterogeneous workforce for the purpose of minimizing conflict. According to this view, society’s power relations based on class, race, ethnicity, and gender go unquestioned. Change is kept at an individual, rather than social, level. Davis argues that diversity training, since it rarely addresses social and economic inequalities, serves to circumvent liberal arguments about the power dynamics of racism, sexism, and heterosexism. A second method of diversity training, the “capital C” culture approach advocated by intercultural communications workshop facilitators Janet M. Bennett and Milton J. Bennett, focuses on the cultural artifacts of diverse peoples and builds on such things as the familiarity of ethnic food. Training is aimed at increasing the visibility of various groups and may include lectures, newsletter articles, costumes, concerts, or a month dedicated to a nondominant group. Critics of the “capital C” approach argue that it reinforces differences between individuals instead of concentrating on their commonalities, helping to further racialize the workplace and create situations in which people tiptoe around issues such as how to relate to those of different cultures. This approach, opponents argue, does nothing to help people communicate with and truly understand each other. Instead, the “capital C” approach relies on broad, superficial generalizations based on vague notions of cultural background. Such generalizations, opponents argue, might create a new era of misunderstanding in which difference is treated as commodity and spectacle. A third method is the “assimilationist” approach, which harmonizes with the “melting pot” view. This training focuses on preparing “outsiders” to internalize mainstream cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors. It is directed at facilitating the newcomers’ assimilation into the culture of the corporation. Critics view the assimilationist type of training as a flawed approach, since the nondominant groups are expected to adapt so that they “fit in”; the burden of making the change falls on them. Those outside the mainstream must assimilate to the organizational norms and are forced to become “bicultural”; they must adopt the norms of the dominant group during work hours, while trying to keep their identity group values intact in off hours. Whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality are implicitly framed as the norm, while other social identities and groups are constituted as “diversity” that is to be “managed.” Molly Swiger See also: Affirmative Action; Americans with Disabilities Act; Gay Rights Movement; Gender-Inclusive Language; Globalization; Lesbians; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Race.
Further Reading Bennett, Janet M., and Milton J. Bennett. “Introduction and Overview.” In Handbook of Intercultural Training, ed. Dan Landis, Janet M. Bennett, and Milton J. Bennett, 13–37. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. Cavanaugh, J. Michael. “(In)corporating the Other? Managing the Politics of Workplace Difference.” In Managing the Organizational Melting Pot: Dilemmas of Workplace Diversity, ed. Pushkala Prasad et al., 31–53. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997. Davis, Angela. “Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism: Rethinking ‘Race’ Politics.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, 40–48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Hemphill, Hellen, and Ray Haines. Discrimination, Harassment, and the Failure of Diversity Training: What to Do Now. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1997. Lynch, Frederick R. The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the “White Male Workplace.” New York: Free Press, 1997.
Dobson, James A best-selling evangelical author, family therapist, and popular radio show host since the late 1970s, James Dobson has been a leading voice of the Christian Right. Born James Clayton Dobson on April 21, 1936, in Shreveport, Louisiana, he grew up in a conservative Nazarene home and maintained a strong evangelical faith, which he applied to his studies of child psychology. After earning a PhD in child development from the University of Southern California (1967), he became a medical researcher at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles while also serving as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at USC’s School of Medicine. Beginning in 1970 with the publication of Dare to Discipline, a conservative parental advice manual that sold over 3 million copies, Dobson became a nationally known Christian psychologist. Seven years later, he established the Focus on the Family daily radio broadcast, his flagship enterprise. By 2002, more than 2,000 American stations as well as hundreds of stations overseas carried the program, enabling Dobson to reach millions of daily listeners—a majority of whom were women—with messages about childrearing, marital difficulties, and a wide range of other family-related subjects covered from a conservative evangelical perspective. Dobson’s initial foray into politics came in 1979, when he served as a delegate to the White House Conference on Families, and continued with the formation of the Family Research Council, a lobbying group, in 1981. Beginning in the 1990s, Dobson’s organizations campaigned against gambling and pornography and advocated legislative bans on partial-birth abortion and same-sex marriage. On some occasions, as many as 1 million listeners have called the Capitol Hill switchboard at
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Dobson’s urging to help defeat bills that threatened to limit the rights of anti-abortion protestors and homeschooling parents. Republican politicians came to realize that they could ignore Dobson only at their peril. The major contenders for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1996, with the exception of Steve Forbes, made it a point to speak with Dobson before the presidential primaries. In the late 1990s, however, Dobson grew increasingly critical of the Republican Party because he thought that Republicans were softening their opposition to abortion, and in 1997 he threatened to leave the GOP if it did not devote greater attention to “moral” issues. Dobson became more conciliatory toward the Republican Party when President George W. Bush restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and signed a ban on what opponents call partial-birth abortion (clinically known as intact dilation and extraction). After the Christian Coalition’s decline in the late 1990s, Dobson has probably been the most influential leader of the Christian Right. He has written more than thirty books on issues of concern to families. He has millions of admirers, but his belief in traditional gender roles, determination to take his moral agenda to the political arena, and unwillingness to brook any compromise in his opposition to abortion and gay rights have made many people outside the Christian Right wary of his influence. In February 2009, Dobson resigned as chairman of Focus on the Family, but continued to play an active role in the organization. Daniel K. Williams See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Christian Radio; Family Values; Focus on the Family; Fundamentalism, Religious; Pornography; Religious Right; Republican Party; Same-Sex Marriage; Stem-Cell Research.
Further Reading Alexander-Moegerle, Gil. James Dobson’s War on America. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997. Buss, Dale. Family Man: The Biography of Dr. James Dobson. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2005. Gerson, Michael J. “A Righteous Indignation: James Dobson— Psychologist, Radio Show Host, Family Values Crusader—Is Set to Topple the Political Establishment.” U.S. News and World Report, May 4, 1998.
Donahue, Phil The Emmy-winning host of The Phil Donahue Show (1967–1996), Phil Donahue invented the daytime television talk show genre in which the studio audience interacts with guests and panelists who discuss hotbutton issues or share the details of personal scandals in their lives. Cultural critics blamed Donahue for lowering
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the decency standards of daytime television—either by airing “inappropriate” subject matter or by addressing sensitive issues in a sensationalized manner. In addition, conservatives objected to his liberal framing of social issues. A showman, Donahue once wore a skirt for a segment on cross-dressing and during a program on contraceptives tossed condoms at the studio audience. He conducted and broadcast interviews with lesbians, transvestites, and victims of incest, all of which was shocking for that time. One of his most infamous shows featured dwarf juggling. During the mid-1980s, the program hosted “A Citizen’s Summit” in the Soviet Union, taping a show before a live Soviet audience for the stated purpose of fostering peace and understanding. In 1994, Donahue lost a court case against North Carolina in an attempt to film a state execution. The son of a furniture salesman, Phillip John “Phil” Donahue was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 21, 1935, and raised in a Catholic family. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame (BA, business administration, 1957), he worked as an announcer at KYW-TV and AM, a college station in Cleveland; a news director at WABJ radio in Michigan; and a newscaster at WHIO radio and TV in Dayton, Ohio, where he became a radio talk show host for the daily Conversation Piece (1963–1967). The Phil Donahue Show first aired on November 6, 1967, at WLWD-TV, also in Dayton. It would later move to Chicago (1974–1984) and then New York (1985–1996). The program’s guests for the first week set the tone—Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist activist (Monday); single men describing what they seek in women (Tuesday); an obstetrician showing a film of childbirth (Wednesday); a funeral director (Thursday); and the sales promoter of an anatomically correct male doll (Friday). The show would gain a reputation for its unflinching focus on the sexual revolution. During the 1970s, for example, the show broadcast films of an abortion procedure and a reverse vasectomy and tubal ligation; interviewed Al Goldstein, the editor of Screw magazine, and the sexologists Masters and Johnson; featured lesbians explaining their fight for child custody; and had parents of gay children share their views. In 1981, the Moral Majority specifically condemned The Phil Donahue Show for its sexual content. Donahue’s program came to an end after its mostly female audience began tuning into the television talk show hosted by Oprah Winfrey. In 2002, MSNBC began airing Donahue, but that program was canceled the following year. Supporters of Donahue believe he was canceled because of his vocal opposition to the Iraq War. Donahue afterward produced Body of War (2007), a critical documentary on that war. Roger Chapman
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See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Capital Punishment; Gay Rights Movement; Lesbians; Media Bias; Moral Majority; O’Hair, Madalyn Murray; Sexual Revolution; Winfrey, Oprah.
Further Reading Abt, Vicki, and Mel Seesholtz. “The Shameless World of Phil, Sally, and Oprah: Television Talk Shows and the Deconstructing of Society.” Journal of Popular Culture 28:1 (Summer 1994): 171–91. Carbaugh, Donald A. Talking American: Cultural Discourses on Donahue. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1988. Donahue, Phil. Donahue: My Own Story. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1981. Timberg, Bernard M. Television Talk: A History of the TV Talk Show. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.
Douglas, William O. William Orville Douglas served on the U.S. Supreme Court for thirty-six years (1939–1975), the longest tenure of any justice and perhaps the most liberal. He is known as a defender of the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment, and for his expansive view of judicial power. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Douglas was born on October 16, 1898, in Maine, Minnesota, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. He graduated from Whitman College (BA, 1920) and Columbia University (LLB, 1925), and then taught law at Yale University (1928–1939). After serving as head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1937–1939), appointed to that position by President Franklin Roosevelt, he was named to the high court in April 1939—also by FDR— upon the retirement of Louis Brandeis. Known for his eloquent and flowery opinions, Douglas was a prolific writer. Relatively few of his opinions have stood the test of time in subsequent court rulings, however, partly because of his lack of meticulousness in tying his opinions to legal precedent. A favorite judge of liberals for his support of individual liberties, civil rights, free speech, and the right of dissent, and for his opposition to government interference in the private sphere, Douglas interpreted the Constitution as a living document that offers general principles. Perhaps his best-known opinion is that in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which inferred a constitutional right to privacy even though the word “privacy” is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. In Griswold, which considered a state statute prohibiting the use of contraceptives, even by married couples, the Supreme court ruled in a 7–2 decision that privacy is one of the inherent rights covered by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. In the majority opinion, Douglas wrote that various elements of the Bill of Rights imply “zones
of privacy” that together provide the foundation for a general right of privacy. His contention that the right of privacy is contained in “penumbras, formed by emanations” of the other amendments has remained jarring for conservatives, who believe the Constitution should be strictly interpreted by what is literally enumerated. The right to privacy established in Griswold was fundamental to the 1973 abortion cases of Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade and the 2003 sodomy case of Lawrence v. Texas, all matters of dispute in the culture wars. Douglas was also controversial for his extracurricular activities and personal life. On a number of occasions, Republicans tried to impeach him. In 1953, for example, he came under scrutiny for granting a stay of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. In 1970, House Republicans led by future president Gerald R. Ford initiated impeachment proceedings against Douglas for nonjudicial sources of income and ties with certain institutions, but an investigation cleared him of wrong doing. Since Douglas was the only Supreme Court justice in history to have been divorced—he was married four times—some felt that he disgraced the dignity of his public office. It was all the more shocking to conservative sensibilities that his last two wives were much younger than he. Almost a year after suffering a stroke, Douglas resigned from the bench on November 12, 1975. Ironically, it was Ford who appointed his successor, John Paul Stevens. Douglas died on January 19, 1980, at his home in Washington, D.C. His books include three autobiographical works: Of Men and Mountains (1950); Go East, Young Man (1974); and The Court Years (1980). Tony L. Hill and Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Ford, Gerald; Hutchins, Robert M.; Judicial Wars; Roe v. Wade (1973); Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Sodomy Laws.
Further Reading Hall, Kermit L., and John J. Patrick. The Pursuit of Justice: Supreme Court Decisions That Shaped America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hoyt, Edwin Palmer. William O. Douglas: A Biography. Middlebury, VT: Eriksson, 1979. Murphy, Bruce Allen. Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 2003.
D r. P h i l A psychologist, self-help author, and popular television personality, Dr. Phil is a self-described outsider in the psychological profession. One of his catchphrases is “Analysis is paralysis.” In stark contrast to many
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popular self-help gurus who emphasize the importance of improving one’s self-esteem, Dr. Phil uses a tougher approach, suggesting that focusing on one’s actions and consequences, developing good decision-making skills, and concentrating on finding solutions leads to a happier, healthier, more successful, and more fulfilling life. His one-liners highlight this perspective: “You’re going to get real about fat, or you’re going to get real fat.” “If you want more, you have to require more from yourself.” “Failure is no accident.” Dr. Phil’s therapeutic approach has resonated with “tough love” social conservatives, who believe that personal responsibility is the answer to most social ills. Dr. Phil was born Philip Calvin McGraw on September 1, 1950, in Vinita, Oklahoma. He graduated from Midwestern State University in Wichita, Texas (1975), and received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of North Texas (1979). Finding private practice frustrating, he co-founded Courtroom Sciences Inc. (CSI) in 1989; CSI uses psychological techniques to prepare witnesses for legal trials. Oprah Winfrey, sued in 1996 by the Texas cattle industry for on-air statements she made about mad cow disease, hired CSI and credits Dr. Phil not only for helping her to win the case, but also for allowing her to maintain a positive attitude throughout the trial. She hired him to appear on her television show in 1998 and soon added “Tuesdays with Dr. Phil” to her weekly line-up. During his years working for Oprah, Dr. Phil published several best-selling self-help books, including Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters (1999) and Relationship Rescue: A Seven-Step Strategy for Reconnecting with Your Partner (2000). In 2002, with the support and help of Winfrey, he started his own spin-off show, Dr. Phil. Political conservatives have found Dr. Phil’s rejection of traditional psychological approaches and tools refreshing; they argue that the focus of so many other psychologists on self-esteem mirrors liberal guilt. Rather than improving people’s lives, they contend, most psychologists simply enable destructive behavior by encouraging individuals to accept, rather than to change, themselves. Further, they appreciate Dr. Phil’s emphasis on the importance of relationships, particularly marriage and family. Some liberals have also aligned themselves with Dr. Phil, among them 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who appeared with Dr. Phil on a show about parenting skills. Kerry and other political moderates have used their support of Dr. Phil as a means of demonstrating that liberal politicians also value marriage and family. Dr. Phil’s style is not without controversy. Several professional psychologists have argued that his “tough love” approach is in fact detrimental in many cases. They suggest, for example, that Dr. Phil is unclear about the difference between his TV shows and professional therapy;
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they contend that psychological distress cannot be alleviated in a five-minute broadcast segment. Scholars across disciplines contend that Dr. Phil’s focus on individual responsibility ignores the ways in which culture and society influence and shape an individual’s views and behavior. His emphasis on individual behavior, they believe, ignores the link between psychological ailments and the larger social, political, and economic structure. Jessie Swigger See also: Family Values; Kerry, John; Obesity Epidemic; Victimhood; Winfrey, Oprah.
Further Reading Cottle, Michelle. “Daddy Knows: The Bad Doctor.” New Republic, December 2004. Dembling, Sophia, and Lisa Gutierrez. The Making of Dr. Phil: The Straight-Talking True Story of Everyone’s Favorite Therapist. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. Moskowitz, Eva S. In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Drudge Report The Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) is a news, commentary, and aggregation Web site operated by Matt Drudge, who has been dubbed the Rush Limbaugh of the Internet. In addition to original reporting, the site features links to breaking news stories and the columns of a number of commentators. The focus of content is U.S. political news, world events, and entertainment, with a predilection for the salacious. The Drudge Report will be remembered in history for breaking the story on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in January 1998. Drudge’s style and prominence on the Internet places him at the nexus of the debate over so-called new media and the unfiltered and often overtly partisan style it typifies. In late 2007, the site claimed more than 400 million logons per month. The Drudge Report first came to national attention in 1997 when it featured a rumor concerning spousal abuse by Sidney Blumenthal, a newly appointed adviser to President Bill Clinton. After Blumenthal and his wife filed a $30 million lawsuit against Drudge, however, the posting was removed. The publicity over the Blumenthal suit was dwarfed early the next year when Drudge broke the story about Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, earning applause from the right and disdain from the left. Because Newsweek had declined to publish the story, the Drudge Report became a noticed example of how the new, Internet-based media was potentially moving to supplant the mainstream press. Drudge’s book The Drudge Manifesto (2001) expounds on that thesis.
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The conservative political Web site Drudge Report, launched in 1994 as a Washington “gossip column” by then-unknown Matt Drudge, emerged as a leading nonmainstream media outlet by being the first to break a series of political scandals. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
Critics point to Drudge’s sensationalistic style (head lines are often set in large fonts with a flashing siren graphic on the site’s nation page) and disregard for traditional journalistic standards (such as multiple confirmation of facts prior to publication). During the 2004 election campaign, for example, Drudge touted a story about an alleged affair by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry that was quickly proven to be false. Between the Blumenthal incident and the breaking of the Lewinsky story, there was little doubt that Drudge’s political loyalties were considered to be on the Republican side of the aisle—a perception reinforced by the circulation of the Kerry rumor. Drudge is known for his disdain of the mainstream press, though he briefly had a television show on the Fox News Channel (1998–1999). He also hosts a syndicated radio show and is often a primary source for such radio talk show hosts as Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh. As such, Drudge is considered a shill for Republican positions by many moderates and liberals. In 1998, he was the subject of a documentary film titled Digital Dirt, by journalists Ted Koppel and Howard Kurtz. Steven L. Taylor See also: Clinton Impeachment; Internet; Kerry, John; Limbaugh, Rush; Media Bias.
Further Reading Drudge, Matt. The Drudge Manifesto. New York: NAL, 2001. Goldstein, Tom. “Journalist or Kangaroo?” Columbia Journalism Review 39 (January/February 2001): 76–77. Sullivan, Andrew. “Scoop.” New Republic, October 30, 2000.
The testing of blood, urine, breath, or hair samples for traces of chemical properties associated with illicit drugs is what is known as “drug testing.” The official rationale for drug testing at the workplace and schools has been public health and safety. In the culture wars, opponents of drug testing have largely failed to convince a majority of the public, or the courts, that the practice represents an invasion of privacy that flouts the tenet of probable cause. The precursor to American drug testing was the drug screening of athletes at the 1968 Olympic Games in Munich. During the late 1960s, members of the armed services returning home from the Vietnam War were screened for heroin use, and by 1981 the U.S. military was conducting a million drug tests each year. On September 15, 1986, President Ronald Reagan, expanding the “War on Drugs,” signed Executive Order No. 12564, mandating random drug testing of select federal employees. Later, the Drug Free Workplace Act of 1988 went into effect, requiring private government contractors to establish policies and procedures to curb employee drug use. Department of Transportation regulations issued in 1988 required random drug testing of airplane pilots, railroad workers, truck and bus drivers, and energy pipeline workers. Drug testing soon spread throughout the private sector, state and local governments, and school systems. In 1985, less than 20 percent of American companies were conducting drug testing, but this figure increased to 50 percent by 1988 and to more than 80 percent by 1996. Traditionally, testing has been restricted to job applicants or employees in situations when there is “probable cause.” Blue-collar workers have more often been screened than white-collar ones, and workers in the South more often than workers in the Northeast. In earlier years, drug testing was primarily restricted to larger firms (such as Wal-Mart), inspiring passage of the Drug Free Workplace Act to federally subsidize the expansion of drug testing to small businesses. In the period 1993–1998, the federal government conducted 250,000 random drug tests, yielding 1,345 positive results, costing taxpayers $23,637 for each federal worker found to have used an illegal substance. American businesses spent about $1.2 billion annually on drug testing. Positive test results from the workplace declined from the late 1980s (13.6 percent) to 1999 (4.7 percent). Most positive readings revealed marijuana use. Proponents of drug testing argue that it identifies people who need help in overcoming drug abuse, deters the casual use of drugs that can lead to addiction, and promotes a safer work and school environment. Businesses argue that they save money by exposing drug users and terminating their employment, because such people have more medical expenses, a higher rate of absence, and a
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greater likelihood of getting hurt and claiming worker’s compensation benefits. In addition, corporate executives believe that since drug testing has become the norm in American workplaces, any company that does not do it will tend to attract drug users. Opponents of drug testing, who regard it as surveillance and social control, argue that the issue is about the right to privacy and protections in the Bill of Rights against unreasonable searches and self-incrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, in Samuel K. Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association et al. (1989) and National Treasury v. Von Raab (1989), upheld government workplace testing for drugs or alcohol, stating that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton (1995), the Court upheld the drug testing of student athletes in junior high school. In Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie County v. Earls (2002), the Court affirmed the testing of students participating in extracurricular activities, arguing that such situations imply a voluntary reduction of privacy. However, in Chandler v. Miller (1997), the Court overturned the state of Georgia’s requirement for drug testing of individuals seeking or holding elected office. Opponents of drug testing argue that estimates of the cost of drug use to society ($160.7 billion in 2000) and of the reduction in corporate productivity ($110.5 billion in 2000) are based on subjective and unsubstantiated analyses. Citing 1979–1992 figures, they argue that when drug testing was introduced in the mid-1980s, drug use was already on the decline. Moreover, they maintain, drug testing sometimes includes testing for other conditions without proper consent, such as pregnancy, sickle-cell anemia, and sexually transmitted diseases. False positives are another problem, both because of flaws in the handling of samples and because over-the-counter medicines can be misread; the cold medication Nyquil, for example, often registers as an opiate. Officers of the New York City Police Department are prohibited from eating muffins with poppy seeds because of the potential for false drug readings. In a 2007 study by the Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research, 12 percent of drug testing was found to be subject to misrepresentation and 21 percent of “positive” tests were found to be attributable to legal over-thecounter medication. Critics question the social and monetary costs of school drug testing. Children, they argue, are being taught to accept violations of their privacy, which contradicts teachings about democracy and freedom. In addition, drug testing is expensive, utilizing funds that could have been spent on textbooks or technology in the classroom. Moreover, a 2003 national study revealed that there was little difference in teen drug use between schools that conduct drug testing and those that do not.
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In 2004, only 200 schools randomly tested their entire student body. In the meantime, foiling drug tests has become a cottage industry. An organization that calls itself Privacy Protection Services provides drug-free urine samples that people can substitute for their own. There are also drug-masking kits, including “Urine Luck,” the brand offered by Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong fame). The 1960s counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman, in collaboration with John Silvers, wrote Steal This Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America (1987), a treatise that includes tips on faking samples. Roger Chapman See also: Bennett, William J.; Counterculture; Hoffman, Abbie; Judicial Wars; O’Connor, Sandra Day; Reagan, Ronald; Vietnam War; Wal-Mart; War on Drugs; Zero Tolerance.
Further Reading Finley, Laura L., and Peter Finley. Piss Off! How Drug Testing and Other Privacy Violations Are Alienating America’s Youth. Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2005. Tunnell, Kenneth D. Pissing on Demand: Workplace Drug Testing and the Rise of the Detox Society. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
D ’S o u z a , D i n e s h Dinesh D’Souza, in his writing and speeches, has not hesitated to confront cherished liberal notions and promote conservative ideas and leaders. He is a noted advocate of “race neutrality,” which his opponents criticize as an endorsement of racism. Born on April 25, 1961, in Bombay, India, D’Souza came to the United States in 1978 as an exchange student. He was accepted at Dartmouth College and, by his senior year, had become the editor of the conservative and controversial Dartmouth Review. After a stint as a freelance writer, he became a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan in 1987–1988. Since that time, D’Souza has worked at various conservative think tanks, including the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His books include Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), The End of Racism (1995), The Virtue of Prosperity (2000), and The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (2007). D’Souza criticizes public universities for “political correctness” and multiculturalism, and he accuses educators of engaging in the “self-esteem hoax,” arguing that affirmation in the classroom has eroded competition and high standards. He charges that universities claim to be paragons of liberal thought, free inquiry, and open debate but instead foster illiberality, conformity, and intolerance. He was especially critical of the short-lived campus speech codes, regarding them as restricting professors
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and students from debating “sensitive topics” such as affirmative action or racial and sex differences. In The End of Racism, D’Souza attacks affirmative action, arguing that it is antithetical to reward based on merit and that it devalues the genuine achievements of blacks. He does not believe racism is the reason for America’s social and economic inequality. He argues that Asian Americans have succeeded despite racial animosity because they, unlike African Americans, have a culture that values hard work, entrepreneurship, academic accomplishment, and intact families. Critics counter that D’Souza, while engaging in class warfare, ignores oppressive structures and legacies of the larger society that adversely affect particular groups. In The Enemy at Home, D’Souza charges that “the cultural left” is responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, because liberal values and decadence are so offensive to Muslims. He suggests that American social conservatives should consider forming a coalition with “traditional Muslims” in order to resist the cultural left. E. Michael Young See also: Affirmative Action; Bell Curve, The; Family Values; Multicultural Conservatism; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Race; Reagan, Ronald; September 11; Speech Codes; Think Tanks; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading MacDonald, Heather. “D’Souza’s Critics: PC Fights Back.” Academic Questions 5 (Summer 1992): 9–22. Maserati, Sarah. “Campus Crusader for Conservatism.” National Review, March 24, 2003. Spencer, Robert. “D’Souza Points Conservatives Toward Disaster.” Human Events, February 5, 2007. Stimpson, Catharine R. “Big Man on Campus.” Nation, September 30, 1991.
D u B o i s , W. E . B . Educator, editor, and equal rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois spent his life working for the principle that the minds and bodies of all people should be freed from bondage. His efforts to liberate America from institutional racism and its effects have made his works frontline weapons in the culture wars. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University (1890), attended the University of Berlin (1892), and became the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University (1896). He served as the U.S. Envoy Extraordinary to Liberia (1924), was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1943), and received the Lenin International Peace Prize (1958). His death on August 27, 1963,
in Ghana, the night before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., firmly tied the end of his life to the most public representation of the legacy he left behind. His best-known work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is regarded by many as no less influential than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on bringing civil rights to the forefront of American consciousness. The fourteen essays combine autobiography, philosophy, sociology, and history in a condemnation of the repression of blacks in American society. Du Bois also commented on the dual nature of the American minority experience, remarking how a black person “ever feels his two-ness”— being “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” These essays, which illustrate both the tormented psyches of minorities in the United States and the subconscious complicity of the American people in the suppression of their fellow citizens, force those who read his words to reconsider deeply entrenched “truths” regarding both civil rights and human potential. Du Bois’s activism marked him as an American hero to some and a traitor to others. He worked with the Niagara Movement (1905–1909), chaired the annual Atlanta University Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems (1898–1914), and was the only black founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving as publicity director and editor of Crisis (1910–1934). These roles provided opportunities for Du Bois to both voice dissent and work for change from within the system. His more extreme activities and views, however, led to the revocation of his passport, shunning by segments of the black community, and criminal indictment as an unregistered agent of a foreign power. For a time, he supported the American Socialist Party but eventually left over their weakness on racial issues. He argued for activism over gradualism, most notably in his critical essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” He opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons and was chair of the Peace Information Center. Du Bois was seen as a radical because of his use of Marxist theory in his writings, his support for socialist dogma, and his formal affiliation with the Communist Party prior to renouncing his U.S. citizenship in 1961. Du Bois’s writings, focusing on issues of ethnicity and personal freedom, have a flair and accessibility that have kept them in print for more than a century. They serve as a monument to the evolution of his political and social beliefs. Solomon Davidoff See also: Afrocentrism; Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Marxism; Mul-
Duke, Dav id ticulturalism and Ethnic Studies; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Race; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Dukak is, Michael Michael Dukakis was the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency in 1988, running against George H.W. Bush in a contest in which Republicans denigrated the word “liberal” as the opposite of traditional American values. The son of Greek immigrants, Michael Stanley Dukakis was born on November 3, 1933, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Between graduating from Swarthmore College (1955) and entering Harvard Law School (1960), he served a stint in the U.S. Army. Dukakis began his formal political career while still a law student, winning a Brookline town-meeting seat in 1959. He served three terms as Massachusetts governor (1974–1978, 1983–1990). Dukakis’s behavior during his first term as governor was widely viewed as inflexible and arrogant; broken promises regarding tax hikes and cuts in social welfare programs burdened Massachusetts with the nickname “Taxachusetts.” Although the fiscal problems had carried over from the previous administration, which neglected to report a $600 million state budget deficit, Dukakis received the blame. Moreover, he angered the political establishment by primarily consulting with Harvard “technocrats” and taking personal credit for statewide accomplishments. After losing his reelection campaign in 1978, Dukakis worked to modify his leadership style and public image, building coalitions and acknowledging the efforts of others, while maintaining closer ties to ordinary citizens. These adaptations helped him return to the governorship for a second and third term. Dukakis is best known for his unsuccessful 1988 presidential bid. As lampooned by Berke Breathed in the Bloom County comic strip, the contest was a choice between “Wimp or Shrimp.” Dukakis was called the “Shrimp” because of his short stature and was criticized for his insistence on fiscal responsibility while simultaneously maintaining social programs. Bush forces depicted Dukakis as a liberal far adrift from the American mainstream and an enemy of family values. He was mocked for being a “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union (an allusion to 1950s’ radicals labeled “card-carrying members of the Communist Party”) and attacked for opposing a ban on burning the American
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flag. It was also underscored that he favored abortion rights and opposed capital punishment. The Bush campaign also convinced voters that Dukakis was soft on crime by focusing on a Massachusetts prison furlough program and the crimes committed by convicted murderer Willie Horton while on leave under the program. It was implied, incorrectly, that Dukakis had established the furlough program as governor. The Dukakis campaign proved unable to reverse the impression created by the ads, which also had overtones of racism. On Election Day, Dukakis won only ten states and the District of Columbia, losing the popular election with 46 percent of the vote, compared with Bush’s 53 percent. Solomon Davidoff See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Anti-Intellectualism; Comic Strips; Democratic Party; Family Values; Flag Desecration; Horton, Willie; McGovern, George; Mondale, Walter; Prison Reform.
Further Reading Gaines, Richard, and Michael Segal. Dukakis: The Man Who Would Be President. New York: Avon, 1988. Lucas, Peter. Luke on Duke: Snapshots in Time. Boston: Quinlan, 1988.
D u ke , D av i d Arguing for the preservation of Anglo cultural heritage, David Duke is known for his controversial commitment to white nationalism and for the racial tension and political conflict it evokes. A former head of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1989 he was elected to the Louisiana State House as a Republican representing Metarie, a suburb of New Orleans. He ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana State Senate, governorship of Louisiana, U.S. Congress, and the presidency. He has run for office as a Republican, Democrat, and Populist. Born David Ernest Duke on July 1, 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he later moved to Louisiana and attended Louisiana State University (1970–1974). In college, he participated in ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) but was expelled from the organization after founding the radical White Youth Alliance, an organization that promoted neo-Nazi ideas. He gained campus-wide notoriety for donning a swastika at Alliance events, including the celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Following his graduation, Duke was elected grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, unusual for one so young. As national director of the organization, which claimed to be the largest Klan group in the country, Duke sought to transform the secretive and ritualistic organization into a modern political party. In 1980, Duke officially severed his Klan ties and estab-
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lished the National Association for the Advancement of White People. In 1991, he reached the height of his popularity during the Louisiana governor’s race. Garnering 32 percent of the open primary vote, Duke pushed out incumbent governor Buddy Roemer but was later defeated by Edwin Edwards in the general election. The majority of white voters (55 percent) supported Duke’s candidacy, even though his earlier activities as a Klansman were well known. Political analysts noted that Duke’s strong stance against affirmative action and welfare tapped into racial anxieties that extended from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Duke continued to promote his ideas in his autobiography, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding (1998). While serving a sixteen-month sentence for tax evasion, Duke wrote Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question (2003), a work that denies that the Holocaust took place and advances the notion of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy. In 2003, he founded the EuropeanAmerican Unity and Right Organization (EURO), which advocates ending non-European, nonwhite immigration to the United States. His anti-Semitic views have proved popular in Eastern Europe and in many Arab countries. In December 2006, he spoke at a Holocaust-denying conference in Iran. Angie Maxwell See also: Affirmative Action; Anti-Semitism; Civil Rights Movement; Holocaust; Immigration Policy; Israel; Race; Welfare Reform; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Bridges, Tyler. The Rise of David Duke. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Kuzenski, John C., Charles S. Bullock III, and Ronald Keith Gaddie, eds. David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. Rose, Douglas D., ed. The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
D wo r k i n , A n d r e a The leading voice in the antipornography campaign of the modern women’s movement, Andrea Dworkin passionately dedicated her life to fighting what she viewed as the violence, degradation, and oppression caused by pornography against women. In the process of combating the evil she saw in porn, Dworkin not only made strange bedfellows with usual opponents of feminism, such as the Religious Right, but she also unintentionally spurred a branch of feminism now known as “sex-positive” feminism, which originated in direct reaction to her antipornography struggle.
Born on September 26, 1946, into a working-class Jewish family in Camden, New Jersey, Andrea Rita Dworkin experienced sexual violence throughout her early years, beginning at age nine when she was molested. At eighteen, after being arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War, she suffered a brutal, invasive internal exam at a Manhattan prison hospital that left her bleeding for days. Seeking to escape the publicity that surrounded her after recounting this story to the media, Dworkin left the United States for Europe. After returning to the States, she graduated from Bennington College in Vermont with a BA in literature in 1969, then traveled to Amsterdam to look into a Dutch counterculture movement called Provo. It was there that she met and married a Dutch anarchist, who beat her repeatedly. Dworkin fled her husband’s violent grasp and, with no money, briefly turned to prostitution to survive. These were the events that set the direction for her later writings and activism. Dworkin published ten books of nonfiction—most notably Woman Hating (1974), Intercourse (1987), and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1989)—as well as several works of poetry and fiction. Provocative ideas about sex and gender relations, along with explicit writings and descriptions of sexual violence, established Dworkin as one of the most outspoken and controversial activists in the women’s movement, by both opponents and supporters of the feminist cause. The essence of sexual intercourse, she wrote, is “physiologically making a woman inferior.” Romance is nothing more than “rape embellished with meaningful looks.” In addition to writing books, articles, and speeches, Dworkin teamed with feminist lawyer and collaborator Catharine MacKinnon in 1983 to draft an antipornography ordinance for the city of Minneapolis. The proposed measure was based on the premise that pornography harms women and therefore constitutes a violation of their civil rights. Although the ordinance was passed twice by the city of Minneapolis, and a few years later by the city of Indianapolis as well, it was deemed unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Andrea Dworkin remained active in the fight against pornography throughout her life, publishing one controversial article after another, working with city and state governments in the United States and Canada to ban pornography, and delivering angry and powerful speeches to various audiences. She died of heart failure on April 9, 2005, at her home in Washington, D.C. Courtney Smith See also: Feminism, Third-Wave; MacKinnon, Catharine; Pornography; Religious Right; Sexual Assault; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
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Further Reading Digby, Tom, ed. Men Doing Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1998. Dworkin, Andrea. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Harer, John B., and Jeanne Harrell. People For and Against Restricted or Unrestricted Expression. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Levy, Ariel. “The Prisoner of Sex.” New York Magazine, June 6, 2005.
Dylan, Bob In a career that began in the early 1960s and continues strong into the twenty-first century, the influential and enigmatic singer, songwriter, and lyricist Bob Dylan has recorded more than thirty studio albums—including The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966), Nashville Skyline (1969), Blood on the Tracks (1975), Time Out of Mind (1997), and Modern Times (2006)—and a number of politically and socially charged hit singles that contributed to his early reputation (which he resisted) as the “bard of the counterculture” or “the voice of his generation.” Combining folk, blues, country, rock, jazz, and gospel styles, often with long, narrative lyrics, Dylan’s cultural resonance has rested in his innovative songwriting and its ability to bridge the gap between mainstream America and the social and political concerns of the 1960s counterculture. He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, into a family of Eastern European Jewish heritage. He was enamored with blues, country, folk, and early rock and roll music as an adolescent, taking up piano and guitar and performing at local venues. After a brief stint at the University of Minnesota, he moved to New York in 1961, where he found success in Greenwich Village’s folk music scene, launching his professional music career. After decades of success, Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. In the culture wars, Dylan became a reluctant leader of the folk protest movement, using his music and lyrics to advance the social and political causes of the 1960s counterculture. He supported the civil rights movement, recording “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (1964), about the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963 and commenting on the roots of American racism. Dylan
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also performed for and brought national attention to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which used music to advocate for desegregation in the South. In 1963, he performed with fellow folk singer Joan Baez at the March on Washington, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Later, Dylan claimed that as a white man he could never understand the black experience and shifted his music away from civil rights issues. Protest songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963), and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964) exemplified Dylan’s antiwar sentiment, and their popularity helped spread the ideals of the protest movement. By the end of the 1960s, the radical phase of Dylan’s career was over. In the 1970s, he converted to Christianity. In 1985, he helped raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia, contributing to the single “We Are the World” and performing at the Live Aid concert. He sparked some controversy and inspired the creation of Farm Aid, following his suggestion that a small portion of the Live Aid money should go toward relieving bank debt for American farmers. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine voted “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) the greatest song of all time. Later albums have included Time Out of Mind (1997), which earned a Grammy, Love and Theft (2001), and Modern Times (2006). In the summer of 1988, Dylan embarked on what many have called the Never Ending Tour, for two decades onward making live appearances internationally. J. Robert Myers See also: Baez, Joan; Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Nelson, Willie; Rock and Roll; Till, Emmett; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Bob Dylan Official Web site. www.bobdylan.com. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. Vol. 1. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Hampton, Wayne. Guerrilla Minstrels: John Lennon, Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
E a r t h D ay Earth Day is an annual event, now celebrated worldwide, to promote ecological awareness and focus attention on the protection of the natural environment. The day is marked by marches, rallies, tree plantings, litter removal, and other outdoor activities. While belittled by the likes of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and other political conservatives, Earth Day has from its inception been intended as a centrist celebration of the natural world. Conceived by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), the first Earth Day was observed on April 22, 1970, and celebrated by 20 million people who gathered at schools, parks, and houses of worship to show their support for environmentalism. Over 1,500 college and university campuses and 10,000 schools participated by holding special events. The first Earth Day is said to have been the largest public demonstration in U.S. history, involving more than 10 percent of the national population. American Heritage magazine called it “one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy.” In the years since, Earth Day has grown into a worldwide observance, celebrated by tens of millions of people. While Nelson deserves much of the credit for initiating Earth Day, its beginnings reflected the growing environmental concerns of the late 1960s. The year preceding the first Earth Day was marked by environmental catastrophes, including a major oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and the industrial effluent floating in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching on fire. This was on top of continuing anxiety about the effects of the carcinogenic pesticide DDT and the Cold War threat of nuclear attack. This context helped raise environmental consciousness in the public at large, which organizers of Earth Day tapped. Earth Day was immensely successful in bridging gaps among peoples of different races, political beliefs, and cultures, as the threat of pollution was recognized as everyone’s problem. Even conservatives in what President Richard M. Nixon had termed the “Silent Majority” took part in Earth Day festivities. After the first celebration in 1970, the New York Times remarked of Earth Day: “Conservatives were for it. Liberals were for it. Democrats, Republicans and independents were for it. So were the ins, the outs, the Executive and Legislative branches of government.” As a consequence of Earth Day, environmentalism during the 1970s became a mass movement that inspired a string of environmental legislation aimed at protecting wild places, curbing pollution, and cleaning up lakes and
rivers. Among the more important initiatives were the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), strengthening of the Clean Air Act (1970) and Clean Water Act (1972), and passage of the Endangered Species Act (1973) and Eastern Wilderness Act (1975). Nelson, a key player in shepherding these measures through the Senate, came to be regarded as America’s strongest environmental advocate in Washington. Most Americans saw Earth Day as a time for consensus, not conflict, but radical environmental groups such as the Animal Liberation Front, Greenpeace, and Earth First! often use April 22 as an occasion for dramatic direct action. On the other side of the political spectrum, the conservative John Birch Society referred to Earth Day as a communist plot, noting that the first celebration fell on the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin. Nicolaas Mink See also: Animal Rights; Conspiracy Theories; Ecoterrorism; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; John Birch Society; Limbaugh, Rush; Silent Majority.
Further Reading Christofferson, Bill. The Man from Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Nash, Roderick Frazier. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Nelson, Gaylord, with Susan Campbell and Paul Wozniak. Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Rothman, Hal. The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998.
Ecoterror ism The politically charged term “ecoterrorism” now commonly refers to sabotage tactics used by radical environmentalists (self-described “ecowarriors”) against activities of the government or private enterprise for the purpose of halting perceived harm to the natural environment or animals. An earlier definition referred to willful ecological destruction for political or military purposes—such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein ordering oil spills in the Persian Gulf and the detonating of 1,250 oil wells during the 1991 Gulf War (actions President George H.W. Bush at the time denounced as “environmental terrorism”) or the U.S. military’s use of the forest defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which shifted the focus in America from harm against the environment to violence committed in the 148
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name of protecting the environment, the FBI defined ecoterrorism as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons. . . .” Since ecowarriors follow a creed to carry out sabotage while avoiding harm to others, some believe that it is disingenuous to put them in the same category as traditional terrorists, who purposely kill and maim innocent bystanders. In recent decades, ecowarriors have committed various forms of property damage, including arson attacks on buildings and construction equipment, tree spiking (the insertion of metal spikes into trees for the purpose of damaging chainsaws), destroying research materials at animal laboratories, releasing animals from labs and fur farms, vandalizing products deemed ecologically harmful such as sports utility vehicles, and sabotaging newly built homes on previously undeveloped land. During the decade of the 1970s, some environmentalists expanded their activities from lobbying to civil disobedience to sabotage and other illegal activities. This trend intensified as more and more environmentalists became disillusioned by the democratic process, concluding that the natural environment cannot be saved by legislative compromise. For example, staunch environmentalists disagreed with legislators who would protect wetland areas by preserving 90 percent and permitting 10 percent to be developed. Hence, “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth” became the motto of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman and other activists who gave up on the political process. The activist group was inspired by Edward Abbey, the author of Desert Solitaire (1968) and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and the coiner of the term “monkeywrenching”—sabotage on behalf of the environment such as destroying billboards, pulling up surveyor stakes, putting dirt in the crankcases of earthmoving equipment, and the like. Even before Earth First!, however, others were already engaged in radical action for the cause of environmentalism. Some Earth Day organizers, for example, in 1971 formed the group Environmental Action, which published Ecotage (1972), a handbook that offered sabotage tips similar to Abbey’s. In the early 1970s, an anonymous activist known as “the Fox” made headlines for his pro-environmental exploits in the Chicago area, which ranged from plugging waste pipes and emission stacks at local manufacturing plants to returning to a company a barrelful of the sewage it had discharged into a river. In Michigan, the “Billboard Bandits” brought down signs, while in Minnesota the “Bolt Weevils” toppled a dozen power-line towers. That same decade, Eco-Commando Force ’70, operating in the Miami area, used yellow dye to prove that sewage was entering nearby waterways and the Atlantic Ocean.
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Many environmentalists became radicalized after Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. Reagan was widely recognized as hostile to environmental concerns, evident by his appointment of James Watt as secretary of the interior and, more symbolically, by his removal of the solar panels President Jimmy Carter had erected on the roof of the White House. Earth First! held its first rally in March 1980 at the Glen Canyon Dam in Utah to campaign against the two-month-old Reagan administration. Later, Foreman published Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (1986), which included “how to” information on spiking old-growth trees to discourage logging companies from clearing timber in wilderness areas. Spiking trees, a tactic initiated by Earth First! in 1984, was especially controversial because the metal spikes could shatter chainsaw blades and put loggers at risk of injury or even death (though the logging companies were warned in advance of cutting the trees). By the late 1980s, the FBI had infiltrated Earth First! and indicted its top five leaders, following the sabotage of a ski resort in Fairfield, Arizona, the downing of powerline towers near the Grand Canyon, and the planning of other such acts. All but one of the five received prison sentences. By this time, dissension within the ranks of Earth First! prompted its most radical members to leave and join the Earth Liberation Front. The remaining members of Earth First! renounced tree spiking and instead focused on civil disobedience, rallies, tree sits, and the blocking of logging roads. In May 1990 in Oakland, California, the new leader of Earth First!, Judi Barr, was injured along with a fellow activist when a nail-bomb under the seat of her car exploded—the two were arrested for possessing explosives but later won a $4.4 million lawsuit for false arrest and other civil rights violations. Activists remain convinced that a logging company or even the federal government planted the bomb. The Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front—founded in England in 1992 and 1972, respectively—have been active in the United States since the 1980s. The two groups melded into one highly decentralized organization, the ELF/ALF, which the FBI blames for more than 600 criminal acts, resulting in $43 million worth of property damage, from 1996 to 2001. In what authorities consider one of the worst acts of ecoterrorism, the ELF on October 18, 1998, set fires at Vail Resorts in Colorado, the largest ski resort in the country, causing $12 million in damage—to protest the proposed expansion of the ski area into a lynx habitat. Roger Chapman See also: Animal Rights; Arnold, Ron; Arrow, Tre; Carter, Jimmy; Earth Day; Environmental Movement; Foreman, Dave; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Fur; Global Warming; Hill, Julia “Butterfly”; September 11; Watt, James.
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Further Reading Chalecki, Elizabeth L. “A New Vigilance: Identifying and Reducing the Risks of Environmental Terrorism.” Global Environmental Politics 2:1 (February 2002): 46–64. Foreman, Dave. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. New York: Harmony Books, 1991. Illegal Incidents Report: A 25-Year History of Illegal Activities by Eco and Animal Extremists. Washington, DC: Foundation for Biomedical Research, February 2006. Long, Douglas. Ecoterrorism. New York: Facts On File, 2004. Schwartz, Daniel M. “Environmental Terrorism: Analyzing the Concept.” Journal of Peace Research 35:4 (July 1998): 483–96.
Education Refor m On January 8, 2002, with leading Democrats such as Senator Ted Kennedy (MA) at his side, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a reauthorization and revision of federal education programs established under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Regarded as evolutionary rather than revolutionary, NCLB was an elaboration and extension of principles and policies embodied in the previous reauthorization of ESEA, the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994. Passage of NCLB represented a bipartisan consensus that the federal government should settle some of the debates as to how public education in America should be conducted. The legislation touched on the major issues relating to education. Those issues center on questions of control, curriculum, pedagogy, quality, assessment, and funding—all of which are intertwined. The fundamental issue is control, determining (1) what level of government, if any, should regulate, evaluate, implement, and finance education; (2) the scope of authority of professionals in control of education; and (3) how should both government officials and professional educators consider the preferences of parents. How the control issue is resolved predicts how the other issues are resolved. Control has three key aspects: authorization and funding, operations, and assessment of performance.
Authorization and Funding The idea of mandatory schooling as a key to civic order and national progress became a recognized American principle in the nineteenth century. Horace Mann and his successors in the Progressive Era succeeded in building a public school system funded at the local level. Federal involvement in education began as a datagathering activity with the creation of the U.S. Bureau of Education in 1867. As the public school movement grew in the nineteenth century and became dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, the National
Education Association (NEA) and others argued that the federal government should play a role in funding schools because the uneven distribution of wealth meant that the availability and quality of schooling was a function of a child’s place of residence. After World War II, supported by organized labor, the NEA, and the National Parent-Teacher Association, Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and their congressional allies attempted to enact legislation for broad federal aid to education. The postwar baby boom children began enrolling in school in 1951. The numbers of students and the demand for new classrooms overwhelmed local resources. The argument for federal aid was simple: local districts could not afford to educate all children equitably. The argument against federal aid rested on the fear that federal aid would lead to federal control not only of schools but also of other local institutions, such as those involving race and class relationships; on objections that religious schools would get aid in violation of the separation of church and state; or on objections that religious schools would not get aid, thus forcing those who sent children there to pay for education twice, through both taxes and tuition. Opponents of federal aid to education were successful in defeating proposals for broad federal assistance to schools. In the Great Society movement led by President Lyndon Johnson, proponents took a new tack, passing legislation that directed federal funds to schools to address particular social problems (categorical aid) rather than for general educational purposes. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided funds to states and public school districts to improve achievement among poor and disadvantaged students, to enhance library resources, and to support research. Instead of giving broad grants to states to support education, Congress regularly amended ESEA to provide federal funds for specific purposes, such as assisting schools with limitedEnglish-proficient (LEP) students, schools with high concentrations of poverty, after-school programs, programs to improve teacher quality, programs to support school technology infrastructure and applications, and programs for Safe and Drug-Free Schools. By defining all of these categories loosely, Congress enabled broad access to federal funds by states and local school districts. Because federal involvement in school funding had grown through implementation and subsequent reauthorization of ESEA, and because he saw education as a major national responsibility, President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education at the cabinet level in 1979. In his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan threatened to abolish the department, but this did not come to pass after he took office. Instead, his secretary of education, Terrell Bell, in 1981 appointed the National Commission on Excellence in Education, whose 1983
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report, A Nation at Risk, detailed the faults of American schooling and made a specific set of proposals for reform. Addressing long-standing questions concerning the issue of control, the report argued that state and local officials have the primary responsibility for financing and governing the schools; that the federal government should help meet the needs of key groups of students such as the gifted and talented, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, minority and language-minority students, and the handicapped; that the federal government’s role includes protecting constitutional and civil rights for students and school personnel, collecting information about education generally, and providing funds to support curriculum improvement, research, and teacher training; and that the federal government has the primary responsibility to identify the national interest in education and should help fund and support efforts to protect and promote that interest.
Management and Operations The second central component of control is management and operations. Like other professions, teaching and school administration became professionalized in the twentieth century, and local government officials ceded management of schools to the experts. In the midtwentieth century, it appeared that America’s schools were under the firm control of professional educators— teachers, principals, superintendents. Professional educators designed curricula and managed schools. These professionals had reached consensus about the purposes and methods of K–12 education under the rubric of “progressive education”: the purpose of schooling was socialization and life adjustment. Progressive education’s methods emphasize experiences and activities rather than reading and study. Particular programs were designed to meet the needs of students who were tracked by vocation and whether they were preparing for jobs or for college. Progressive education had triumphed in the schools and in the colleges of education that prepared teachers. Progressive education had its critics, however, as in two books published in 1953 (Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands and Robert Hutchins’s The Conflict in Education) that argued the schools should be engaged in intellectual training, not teaching life adjustment. These critics and others continued to challenge the schools’ failures to equip American children to compete with other nations technologically (as evidenced by the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957). Some saw the disorderly conduct of youth in the 1960s as evidence of the effects of progressive education. Others, stimulated by such books as Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955), saw a need to move away from the schools’ perceived social focus and back to teaching fundamental skills, coalescing in a loose “Back to Basics” movement in the 1970s.
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Thirty years of complaints about American schools came together in A Nation at Risk in 1983. The report challenged the legacy of progressive education by challenging its consequences. According to A Nation at Risk, professional educators had failed in their responsibility to operate the education system. The report gave impetus to school reform that led to substantial changes in ESEA through reauthorizations in the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994; the Goals 2000: Educate America Act 1994; the School-to-Work Opportunities Act in 1994; and then the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. A Nation at Risk asserted, “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The report found curricula that were homogenized, diluted, and diffused, having no central purpose; standards that focus on the minima rather than maxima; haphazard teaching of study skills; teachers who were drawn from the lowest academic quarters of their classes; and teachers who had been educated in “educational methods” rather than the subjects they were to teach. The commission recommended stronger graduation requirements that require mastery of basic subjects; adoption of higher and measurable standards for academic performance; longer school days; and more rigorous standards for teacher selection and performance. Rather than abandon federal involvement in education, the Reagan administration began the movement to federalize educational reform.
Performance A demand for demonstrable performance—the third element of control—by both teachers and students is the heart of NCLB. After nearly twenty years of discussion, and specific attention to these matters in many states, NCLB required states to show accountability by reporting “adequate yearly progress.” This requirement has led to controversial high-stakes testing of students and requires states to develop specific standards and competencies for K–12 students as well as for those who would be teachers, and requires teachers to address the standards. NCLB calls for implementing educational programs and practices that have been proven effective through scientific research. Competing definitions of what comprises “valid scientific research” led to charges by colleges of education, whose faculty produce many of the studies published, that government now defines what is and what is not accepted as “knowledge.” The enhanced professional performance called for by A Nation at Risk is specifically addressed by NCLB, which requires schools to employ (but does not define) “highly qualified teachers.” The heritage of progressive education still thrives in colleges of education, where, as author Rita Kramer found, “self-esteem has replaced understanding as the goal of education.” Kramer wrote, “Nowhere in
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America today is intellectual life deader than in our schools—unless it is in our schools of education.” These schools for teachers, it is argued, resist what they perceive as federal encroachment on their professional turf. Those who opposed federal aid to education in the 1950s because they saw funding tied to control now could see their fears realized in NCLB, under which states that do not show yearly progress risk losing federal funding. If withdrawal of funds is the stick, there are also carrots in NCLB that address aspects of control. School districts are allowed flexibility in their use of federal funds to improve student achievement; the categorical restrictions are somewhat loosened. NCLB broadens the choices for parents of students attending schools where there is a high percentage of disadvantaged or minority students, through support for charter schools. Those who opposed federal aid in the 1950s because they feared the wall between church and state might be breached now see their fears realized because charter schools that teach particular beliefs or focus on “character education” can be created and publicly supported. The fundamental question of the purpose of education remains at the forefront of discussion about schooling in America. The cultural questions are perennial, as are the choices offered: Is the purpose of schooling to acquire knowledge, to become socialized, or to be acculturated to a specified set of values and beliefs? Is the purpose of schooling to create a cohesive society based on common public school educational experiences, or is it to sharpen differences by education in specialized schools, private schools, or even homeschooling? And should alternative education choices be supported by taxpayers? Keith Swigger See also: Bush Family; Charter Schools; Church and State; Great Society; Homeschooling; Kennedy Family; School Vouchers.
Further Reading Cremin, Lawrence. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. Kramer, Rita. Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers. New York: Free Press, 1991. Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. U.S. Department of Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: A Report to the Nation and the Secretary by the National Commission on Higher Education. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983.
Ehrenreich, Barbara Barbara Alexander Ehrenreich, born on August 26, 1941, in Butte, Montana, is the author of over a dozen books on topics mainly relating to class and gender
issues. She is perhaps best known for Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), which chronicles her attempt to earn a living while working “under cover” at a variety of minimum-wage jobs. This was followed by Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (2003), Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005), and This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (2008). Although a trained scientist with a PhD in biology from Rockefeller University (1968), Ehrenreich is most widely recognized as a political essayist and social critic who frequently targets members of the political and cultural right, but especially the upper echelons of corporate America. In the 1970s, she emerged as one of the country’s most vociferous feminists but was also active in various Marxist or socialist political movements, including the New American Movement (NAM, which emerged out of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS) and the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization she co-chaired with prominent leftist Michael Harrington. Critics accuse Ehrenreich of radically left-wing politics. In the summer of 2003, the Committee for a Better Carolina vociferously objected to the inclusion of Nickel and Dimed on a reading list for incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, denouncing the book as a “classic Marxist rant.” The group took out full-page ads in several North Carolina newspapers. Ehrenreich responded with a scathing article in the September 2003 issue of the Progressive, highlighting the presence of widespread poverty in the state. Ehrenreich’s other works include Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989), Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), a collection of essays entitled The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990), Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1972), For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1978; with Deirdre English), and Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (1986; with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs). Patrick Jackson See also: Academic Freedom; Book Banning; Censorship; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Globalization; Harrington, Michael; Marxism; Students for a Democratic Society; Wal-Mart; Welfare Reform; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Ehrenreich, Barbara. “The Anti-Christ of North Carolina.” Progressive, September 2003. ———. “Class Struggle.” Progressive, November 2003. Sherman, Scott. “Class Warrior: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Singular Crusade.” Columbia Journalism Review 42 (November/ December 2003).
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E i s e n h o we r, D w i g h t D. The 1952 election victory of Republican presidential nominee and World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, popularly known as “Ike,” ended two decades of Democratic control of the White House. Champions of Eisenhower’s political legacy point to the country’s postwar economic boom, eight years of relative peace in a challenging Cold War atmosphere, and the quick cessation of the Korean War. Defenders cite his two terms for the calming influence of an experienced organizational leader, while critics view the period as a “do nothing” era that perpetuated the nation’s civil rights shortcomings. Although detractors have condemned the Eisenhower administration for its heavy reliance on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out covert operations and implement regime change abroad, they applaud his Farewell Address of January 1961, in which he warned of the “military-industrial complex.” Dwight David Eisenhower, the son of a railroad hand, was born on October 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas. Raised in Abilene, Kansas, he attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1915. A distinguished military career culminated in his service as supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. He commanded the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, and the sweep of Allied troops through Europe to the surrender of Germany in May 1945. After the war, he served as president of Columbia University (1948–1953), his tenure interrupted by a leave of absence to serve as the founding commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (1950–1952). Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. Although rarely accused of overt racism, President Eisenhower has been accused of remaining silent about racially motivated crimes, being slow to pursue a fair employment commission, and failing to voice support for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling by the Supreme Court. On the other hand, in 1957 he deployed federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas; ended segregation in the District of Columbia and the armed forces; eradicated racial discrimination in government contracting; and appointed African Americans to federal positions in unprecedented high numbers. In the debate among historians, one side argues that President Eisenhower did what was practical at the time, while the other side points to his failure to prepare the country for a new era in race relations. With regard to McCarthyism and the anticommunist fervor of the times, Eisenhower’s private attitudes and public actions have been characterized as inconsistent. He has been faulted for failing to publicly challenge the excesses of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI). For example, when McCarthy railed against Eisenhower’s close
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friend and mentor General George C. Marshall, suggesting that he was communistic, the president failed to come to Marshall’s defense. Although critics view Eisenhower’s inaction as timid capitulation to his Republican conservative base, others say he exemplified a high-minded and pragmatic style of presidential leadership. In his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961, the former general cautioned of a new force in American public life. “In the councils of government,” he declared, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex.” The last phrase, which has remained part of the country’s antiwar lexicon ever since, serves as an ongoing warning against overly influential military interest groups, particularly given Eisenhower’s long and celebrated military record. Under his watch, however, America was said to have lost its innocence in foreign affairs with the CIA’s role in overthrowing the governments of Guatemala (1953) and Iran (1954). R. Matthew Beverlin See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Central Intelligence Agency; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Broadwater, Jeff. Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Duram, James C. A Moderate Among Extremists. Chicago: NelsonHall, 1981. Fishman, Ethan M. The Prudential Presidency: An Aristotelian Approach to Presidential Leadership. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Larson, Arthur. Eisenhower: The President Nobody Knew. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. Pauley, Garth E. The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001.
Election of 2000 The U.S. presidential election of 2000, pitting Democratic candidate and sitting vice president Al Gore against the Republican nominee and governor of Texas, George W. Bush, was one of the closest and most contentious in American history. Long-term effects of the election have included an increased readiness on the part of candidates from both parties to seek judicial remedies to electoral discrepancies and the cynical sentiment of many voters that an individual’s cast ballot may not necessarily get counted. Bush officially won the election with 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266 (with one abstention, a Gore elector from the District of Columbia). For only the third time
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in U.S. history, however, the winning candidate in the Electoral College actually lost the popular vote. (The previous occurrences were in 1876 and 1888.) Bush totaled 50,456,002 (47.87 percent) popular votes to Gore’s 50,999,897 (48.38 percent), a national differential of 543,895 (1.08 percent). The closeness of the national vote was paralleled by the results in many states as well. Specifically, the election came down to a multiweek legal battle over the balloting in Florida. It eventually culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court determination to halt a limited hand recount that had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court—giving the state’s decisive 25 electoral votes to Bush.
Election Night Controversies The events of election night set the tone for the subsequent battle over Florida (and, in many ways, the political climate of the country for years to come). Indeed, much of the rancor and frustration that developed was no doubt linked to the fact that both sides appeared on the brink of victory at different points that night. Initially, the networks were calling Florida for Gore, which would have made him the victor in the Electoral College. As the night wore on, however, vote totals in the state narrowed, then shifted in Bush’s direction, causing the networks to “take away” Florida’s electors from the Gore column and then to hand the state to Bush (at least briefly). In the early hours of Wednesday, November 8, the networks began calling the election for Bush on the predicate that he would win Florida by roughly 50,000 votes. Vice President Gore called Governor Bush to concede, but before the vice president made his concession speech, the Florida returns showed a far smaller victory margin for the Republican challenger. Gore called back and retracted his concession. According to the Associated Press, he told an exasperated Bush, “You don’t have to get snippy about this.” Bush informed Gore that he had been told by his brother, Jeb (then governor of Florida), that Bush had won in Florida. Gore replied, “Let me explain something— your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this.” From there it went to the courthouse. The fact that Jeb Bush was governor of the state that ended up deciding the election for his brother compounded the concerns of some Democrats that Election Day chicanery had taken place. Nor was the partisan storyline limited to Florida’s governor. Its secretary of state, Katherine Harris, was a Republican and co-chair of George Bush’s Florida campaign. (In addition, Harris was accused prior to the election of zealously purging voter lists of so-called disqualified voters, many of whom were African American and most likely to vote Democratic.) It was Harris who officially certified the results of the Florida balloting in Bush’s favor. The state legislature, a potential arbiter of the state’s electoral vote, was also con-
The election of 2000, the most contentious in modern U.S. history, exposed the deep political and social differences that divided the American people. In mid-December, the two sides converged at the Supreme Court, where the election result was decided. (David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
trolled by Republicans, while the Florida Supreme Court was dominated by Democrats. The ultimate adjudicator of the process was the U.S. Supreme Court, which was controlled by Republican appointees. If these affiliations were insufficient to spur suspicions about the results, the fact that a cousin of Bush’s, John Prescott Ellis, was in charge of making election projections (predicting state-by-state outcomes on the basis of voter polling) at the Fox News Channel raised further concerns. It was Ellis who made the Fox decision to call Florida for Bush—making it the first network to do so that night, though the others eventually followed suit. Some have argued that by making the initial call, Ellis and the Fox Network established the narrative of Bush as winner and Gore as sore loser.
Hanging Chads and Federal Intervention In the wake of the election turmoil, the Gore campaign initiated a strategy of seeking recounts in four heavily Democratic counties of Florida: Palm Beach, Dade, Broward, and Volusia. Machine and hand recounts were undertaken, and a number of lawsuits were filed over issues of recount methods in different counties. Heated discussions as to how to count “chads” (the paper rectangles from punch-card ballots) ensued. It was unclear, for example, whether a chad that was dimpled but not punched out should be counted as a vote for the given candidate. The question of hanging, dimpled, “pregnant,” and other types of chads became a topic of national humor. In any event, the central issue in the recount process was that of “voter intent.” Another controversy arose over the so-called butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County and the unusually high
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number of votes in that county for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan. The ballot was confusing, it was alleged, leading many elderly voters to mistakenly vote for Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Gore. The irony of the situation is that the ballot was designed specifically to make it more readable for elderly voters. Even Buchanan, who over the years had been accused of anti-Semitism, publicly acknowledged that the heavily Jewish precincts he won in Palm Beach County clearly showed a mistake and that those voters had intended to cast ballots for Gore. After nineteen days of court challenges, appeals, and recount arguments, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal by the Bush camp of a Florida Supreme Court order for a limited hand recount in counties with significant numbers of undervotes (ballots that lacked a registered vote for president, but that had votes for other offices). On December 12, 2000—more than a month after the election—the high court ruled in Bush v. Gore that the Florida Supreme Court’s order to recount ballots was unconstitutional—that is, that recounting only in selected counties would be a violation of equal protection guarantees under the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision in effect awarded Florida’s electoral votes to the Bush-Cheney ticket. The official margin of victory in Florida was a mere 537 votes. One irony of the overall legal dispute is that the Republicans, who generally emphasize states’ rights, appealed to the federal courts after the state judiciary ruled against them. In the years since the election, Bush’s detractors have continued to assert that he was “selected” for the presidency rather than “elected” to it. In 2001, a media consortium that initiated its own recount found that Bush would have won the election even if the Supreme Court had not intervened (i.e., had the recount gone forward in the four counties ordered by the Florida Supreme Court). However, the research also indicated that a statewide recount likely would have resulted in a Gore victory. Thus, there were legitimate arguments to be made on behalf of both candidates, and the lack of closure contributed to lasting bitterness and partisanship.
Nader as Spoiler Beyond the traditional Democratic-Republican divide, the election dispute also created conflict on the left. The Green Party and its candidate, Ralph Nader, had used 2000 to pursue partial public funding for the party in the 2004 election, which required at least 5 percent of the national vote in the 2000 contests. As such, many Democrats have criticized Nader supporters (most of whom, it is assumed, would have voted for Gore if they did not have a Green candidate) for helping to elect Bush, a logic that created lasting rancor among some progressives. Nader won 2,882,955 votes nationally (or 2.74 percent—far short of the desired 5 percent).
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More important, Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida, more than enough to have given Gore the edge in that state. Bush’s reelection in 2004 was greeted by Republicans as vindication, as well as a validation that he was the leader the majority wanted. but the stigma that Bush was “selected” by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court continued to linger into his second term. The Iraq War and the influence of neoconservatism on foreign policy, Bush’s appointment of federal judges (including two on the high court), and the undermining of environmental regulations, among other things, all made Gore’s defeat in 2000 especially bitter to Democrats. The 2000 elections also brought into the American political lexicon the idea of red and blue states. While in the past the television networks had alternated colors to represent the two parties in their electoral maps, the 2000 election solidified the association of red with conservative, Republican states and blue with liberal, Democratic states. Among actively partisan segments of the population, the designation of red stater or blue stater came to be considered a badge of honor. Some commentators have represented the division as clear and useful, while others have observed that most states are actually purple (a mixture of red and blue). Despite voting reforms—including the federal Help America Vote Act (2002), which appropriated $4 billion for states to standardize national elections by upgrading voting systems—some subsequent elections have been beset by the disappearance of votes from electronic voting machines. Such machines, it was hoped, would eliminate the ambiguity of hanging chads in punch-card balloting, but many people were—and remain—concerned about any trend that would totally eliminate a paper record of votes cast. And perhaps inevitably, the experience of 2000 renewed calls from some quarters to eliminate the Electoral College and determine the outcome of presidential elections purely on the basis of a national majority vote. Steven L. Taylor See also: Buchanan, Pat; Bush Family; Democratic Party; Gore, Al; Judicial Wars; Nader, Ralph; Neoconservatism; Red and Blue States; Rehnquist, William H.; Republican Party; Thomas, Clarence.
Further Reading Ackerman, Bruce, ed. Bush v. Gore: The Question of Legitimacy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Bugliosi, Vincent. The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001. Caesar, James W., and Andrew E. Busch. The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Presidential Election. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
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Crigler, Ann N., Marion R. Just, and Edward J. McCaffery, eds. Rethinking the Vote: The Politics and Prospects of Election Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Posner, Richard. Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Election of 2008 The national election of 2008 continued the culture wars as Democratic candidate Barack Obama made history in becoming the first African American to be elected president of the United States. The election increased the Democrats’ majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This contest was the latest battle in the culture wars between Republicans and Democrats that had begun in the 1960s and had been further inflamed by widespread disapproval of President George W. Bush’s Republican administration. With Bush increasingly unpopular during the course of his second term, GOP nominee John McCain sought to distance himself from the incumbent president while maintaining the loyalty of the party’s conservative base. Meanwhile, Obama narrowly defeated Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, the former first lady, in a grueling primary battle. Although Obama’s campaign sought to downplay culture war issues, his race, name, and background became the subject of such partisan attack. In the end, Obama’s charisma and the strength of his campaign organization, combined with a faltering economy, enabled him to defeat McCain.
Republican Primaries Even though the GOP held the White House, it began with several disadvantages. The 2008 election was the first since 1928 in which neither an incumbent president nor a present or former vice president sought the nomination. Bush was completing his second term and could not run for a third. Vice President Dick Cheney declined to run, on his age and health concerns. In addition, the Bush-Cheney team was widely unpopular, and no other administration figure sought the nomination. Best positioned to win the wide-open nomination was Senator John McCain of Arizona, but he had to overcome conservative doubts. McCain boasted a heroic biography as a navy aviator who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years, and he had run a strong second to President Bush in the 2000 GOP primaries. Although the media and many independents respected his maverick spirit, which caused him to buck his own party on a few reformist issues, his unpredictability and sometimes moderate stances caused some Republicans to question his conservative convictions. McCain faced opposition for the Republican nomina-
tion from former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who gained national attention in the days following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, D.C. In December 2006, polls showed Giuliani tied with McCain, as the party was split, with 28 percent backing one candidate and another 28 percent the other. Many Republicans remained undecided, while every other announced candidate garnered less than 5 percent of support. Giuliani, a former prosecutor and known for “law and order,” was also on record as a supporter of abortion rights, which raised doubts among religious conservatives. Other contenders included former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a successful business executive and investor who had support in the business community; former senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who had become known as a television actor; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a one-time Baptist minister; and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, an antiwar libertarian. The Republican candidates tended to agree on most issues, calling for lower taxes and a reduction of the size and spending of government. However, their position was undermined by the record of the Bush administration, which had amassed enormous budget deficits, and by indications that the economy was entering a serious recession. As the campaign progressed, GOP candidates downplayed economic issues and emphasized their opposition to abortion, illegal immigration, terrorism, and the prospect of losing the Iraq War. A problem for all GOP candidates was the unpopularity of the president— by 2008 polls showed that only about 25 percent of Americans approved of Bush’s performance as president, while 70 percent disapproved. Most of the excitement in the Republican campaign occurred in 2007, before the primaries began. Twenty-one separate debates and sharp-edged attack advertisements revealed deep splits between party factions. Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson in turn rose high in the polls, then plummeted as Republican voters saw more of them. Evangelical Christian Huckabee and libertarian Paul inspired minority factions but could not win over a majority. This left McCain, who nearly lost the race when his campaign ran out of money in mid-2007 but finally prevailed as the other candidates fell in the polls. Seeking to win the party’s core, McCain emphasized his experiences as a senator and his aggressive patriotism. He stepped back from his earlier disagreements with the Bush administration on tax cuts and extreme interrogation methods. He also muted his earlier lenient position on the treatment of undocumented aliens. The Republican primaries of 2008 proved anti climactic. McCain and Giuliani skipped the Iowa caucuses on January 3, while Huckabee mobilized cultural conservatives to win a surprising victory with 34 percent of the vote, and Romney finished second with 25 percent.
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Republican candidate John McCain (left) and Democratic nominee Barack Obama (right) meet in the first of three presidential debates in September 2008. In what many called the most important election in decades, both candidates offered themselves as agents of change. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)
In the New Hampshire primary on January 8, McCain outpolled Romney 37 percent to 32 percent; Huckabee finished third with 11 percent. McCain then beat Huckabee in the South Carolina primary, 33 percent to 30 percent. In late January, Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney all ended their candidacies and endorsed McCain, leaving only Huckabee and Paul to dog the front runner. McCain won every primary and clinched the nomination on March 4. He then waited as the media focused on the spectacularly close Democratic race.
Democratic Primaries With an unpopular Republican president, discouraging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a faltering economy, Democrats anticipated victory in 2008. The seemingly inevitable favorite was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first woman candidate to seriously pursue the nomination of a major party. At first the former first lady deemphasized her gender, presenting herself as experienced, competent, moderate, and tough, calling for a return to the “glory days” of the Clinton era. Leading the pack behind Clinton was another U.S. senator with a historic candidacy, Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois. The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama was born in Hawaii and
lived for four years as a child in Indonesia with his mother and Muslim stepfather. Young, intelligent, and eloquent, Obama issued an optimistic but vague call for “change” and “hope.” As a campaigner, he avoided the labels of the culture war, but as a black man with a Muslim-sounding middle name and a childhood spent partly in Asia, he was soon a target of cultural conservatives. The other major candidates included establishment Democrats and fringe candidates. Among the establishment candidates were North Carolina senator John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee; Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico; and senators Joe Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. The fringe candidates were Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former senator Mike Gravel of Alaska. The Democrats agreed broadly on the issues, criticizing Bush’s policies on the economy, energy, health care, and foreign relations (particularly Iraq). The Democratic campaign began to take shape in the aftermath of the 2006 midterm elections. In December 2006, a Gallup poll of voters gave Clinton 33 percent, Obama 20 percent, and Edwards 8 percent of the party vote. The main pre-primary action came during twentysix candidate debates. Obama tapped into widespread dissatisfaction, especially about the Iraq War, which Clinton
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had supported. Despite his limited experience, Obama emphasized his early opposition to the intervention and succeeded in creating a cohesive, polished campaign organization. The Clinton organization, by contrast, was torn by personality and strategy conflicts. Obama surprised the party by matching Clinton in fundraising during 2007, each raising more than $100 million, an all-time record. Altogether, Democrats contributed more than twice as much to their candidates as Republicans did to theirs. The 2008 Democratic primaries were unprecedented in voter turnout, media interest, and the closeness of the race. In the Iowa caucuses on January 3, Obama won a surprising victory with 38 percent of the vote, Edwards received 30 percent, and Clinton 29 percent. In New Hampshire, Obama had the lead in early polling, but Clinton won a comeback victory on January 8, with 39 percent of the vote to Obama’s 37 percent. In South Carolina on January 26, Obama mobilized black voters and won 55 percent of the vote, doubling Clinton’s total. The South Carolina results prompted Senator Edward Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late president John F. Kennedy, to endorse Obama. Meanwhile, John Edwards announced his withdrawal from the race. On February 5, “Super Tuesday,” when Democratic primaries were held in twenty-three states, Obama won thirteen of the contests, taking a lead in the delegate count. By mid-February, it was apparent that Democratic voters were splitting along ideological, cultural, and racial lines. Obama won majorities of liberals, professionals, city dwellers, blacks, and young voters; Clinton did best among moderate Democrats, the working class, the less educated, rural voters, women, and older voters. Seeking to capitalize on these strengths, Clinton began to present herself as a populist sympathetic to the working poor, while criticizing Obama as an “elitist.” She also condemned Obama’s friendship with the African-American minister of his church in Chicago, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had been recorded making antiwhite and anti-American statements. The controversy compelled Obama to make a long and serious address on the issue of race and racial attitudes in his life. On June 3, Obama finally won enough delegates to clinch the nomination. A month later, he drew huge crowds while traveling in the Middle East and Europe. The principal question remaining was whether Clinton and her supporters would back him against McCain. In late August, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Hillary and Bill Clinton gave strong speeches supporting Obama’s candidacy. Obama chose Joe Biden, a veteran senator from Delaware, as his running mate. The Republicans held their national convention in Minneapolis–St. Paul the following week, September 1–4. The unpopular President George W. Bush was
conspicuously absent. John McCain gave a measured, positive speech accepting the Republican nomination, but the rest of the convention was typical culture wars with attacks on Obama led by McCain’s vice-presidential choice, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. A right-wing populist, Palin personified the rural, white, workingclass, evangelical-Christian wing of the GOP. Her folksy but hard-hitting speech attacking Obama appealed to part of the Republican base but was criticized by many others. Young and inexperienced on the national stage, Palin fired up social conservatives against Obama, but the hope that she might win over many of Hillary Clinton’s female supporters proved to be unfounded.
General Election Campaign The general election campaign focused the spotlight on McCain and Obama. Minor-party candidates made little impact and combined to win less than 2 percent of the vote. McCain had few winning issues, as voters generally preferred Democratic positions on domestic matters. Even traditional Republican issues—defense, taxes, and the economy—were no longer clear winners for McCain. Stymied, his campaign tried to convert the economic issue into a cultural one by celebrating “Joe the Plumber” (Samuel J. Wurzelbacher), a white Ohio worker who had criticized Obama’s tax plan as “socialistic.” The McCain-Palin campaign focused largely on questioning Obama’s character. One study found that 100 percent of McCain’s commercials in October were attacks on Obama. Palin repeatedly accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists”—a reference to his work in the 1990s with Professor William Ayers, a 1960s radical. McCain tried to differentiate himself from Obama by claiming that he “put country first” and was not “willing to lose a war to win an election.” At rallies, McCain-Palin supporters maligned their Democratic opponent as an un-American terrorist, claimed that he was secretly a Muslim, and shouted violent threats. The McCain-Palin tactics, however, appeared to many to be desperate and ineffective. Palin came to be seen as a flawed messenger for a campaign based on character. Her few media interviews revealed a lack of political knowledge, and she was under investigation in Alaska over her dismissal of a state trooper who was her former brother-in-law. It was also revealed that Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter was pregnant and unmarried, and that the Republican National Committee had spent more than $150,000 on Palin’s clothes during the campaign. In view of these revelations, Palin became a popular subject for television comics. McCain and his advisers received increasing criticism for having chosen her, even among conservatives and Republicans. The U.S. financial crisis, which exploded in September, soon overwhelmed all other campaign issues. Such venerable financial institutions as Fannie Mae, Freddie
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Mac, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch all collapsed, and the stock market plummeted. The situation made McCain’s repeated claim, “The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” seem ridiculous. As Congress discussed a $700 billion bailout bill in late September, McCain temporarily suspended his campaign to fly to Washington to join the talks and threatened to cancel his scheduled debate with Obama. His role in the bailout controversy proved inconsequential, however, and he ended up appearing with Obama in the presidential debate after all. The series of three debates between the candidates did little to change the polls, which showed Obama leading by double digits. The Obama campaign continued to raise record-setting amounts of money, including $150 million in September alone, giving him an additional advantage in the closing days of the campaign. On November 4, Obama won the presidency by a comfortable margin, and Democrats increased their majorities in both houses of Congress. Obama beat McCain by 53–46 percent in the popular vote and by 365–173 in the Electoral College, winning Ohio and Florida and several states that had been dependably Republican. Obama was helped by the worsening economy, as 63 percent of voters chose it as the main issue, compared to less than 10 percent who identified the Iraq War, terrorism, health care, or energy. Nevertheless, cultural identification still appeared to motivate voting behavior, as Obama won blacks by a 95–4 margin, Latinos by 66–31, those aged 18–29 by 66–32, urban residents by 63–35, and women by 56–43. Religious identification remained a key political determinant, as Obama lost among evangelical Christians by 26–73, while winning Jews by 78–21 and the religiously unaffiliated by 75–23. On a broader scale, however, Obama won every major region of the country by at least 10 points, except for the South, which he lost 54–45. Even there, he carried Virginia and North Carolina. In congressional elections, Democrats raised their majority to 256–178 in the House (with one vacancy) and to 56–41 in the Senate. In addition, two seated independents caucused with the Democrats, and one election was still disputed. George Rising See also: Clinton, Hillary; Election of 2000; McCain, John; Obama, Barack; Palin, Sarah.
Further Reading Gibbs, Nancy, et al. “Election 2008.” Time, November 17, 2008. Thomas, Evan. “A Long Time Coming”: The Inspiring, Combative 2008 Campaign and the Historic Election of Barack Obama. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. Todd, Chuck, and Sheldon Gawiser. How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Election. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.
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E n d a n g e r e d S p e c i e s Ac t The Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 is comprehensive federal legislation designed to protect all species in the United States designated as endangered by protecting habitats critical to their survival. Congress passed the ESA with near unanimity in both the House (390–12) and Senate (95–0), and the bill was signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 28, 1973. The ESA was part of an unprecedented period in U.S. environmental policy characterized by a flurry of major legislation. Of the dozens of laws enacted during this period—including the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), Clean Air Act (1970), and Clean Water Act (1977)—the Endangered Species Act proved to be one of the most controversial. Opponents have claimed that ESA is a tool unjustly used to bar commercial access to public lands and deprive private property owners of their rights. Ironically, the legislation is also controversial among some environmentalists, who claim that ESA is ineffective at protecting species, for several reasons: the length of time necessary to get a species added to the endangered list, inadequate protection of habitats once the species is listed, and perverse incentives for private landowners to destroy endangered species’ habitats. Under ESA, a species may be listed as either endangered or threatened, for the purpose of assisting in the recovery of its natural population. The ESA defines an endangered species as one “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” A threatened species is any deemed “likely to become an endangered species through all or a significant portion of its range.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) administers the ESA for all terrestrial and freshwater species, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for all marine species. Once a species is listed, the secretary of the USFWS or NMFS must designate critical habitats—the terrestrial or aquatic area necessary for the existence of the species— and develop a suitable recovery plan. Under the terms of the ESA, the decision to list a species must be based entirely on science; economic factors may not be taken into account. This stipulation has been a major focal point of conflict from the outset. Opponents of the measure have argued that the economic consequences of listing a species as endangered or threatened deserve consideration. Proponents insist that economic concerns should not be taken into account during the listing process—which may determine the survival or extinction of a particular species—but that the development of critical habitat and recovery plans take economic factors into account by allowing the incidental harm of an endangered or threatened species. Two of the most controversial cases involving the listing of a species and the conflict over economic considerations involved the snail darter in Tennessee and the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. In 1973,
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ecologist Michael Johnson discovered the snail darter, a small brown-gray fish, upstream of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s development project for the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River. The species was quickly listed as endangered, resulting in the issuance of an injunction to halt construction of the nearly complete $160 million dam. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the injunction to halt construction on the grounds that economic concerns should not be taken into account, but Congress eventually passed an exception in this case to allow completion of the dam. In the end, the snail darter was transplanted to the nearby Hiwassee River (and later, as it turned out, the fish was found existing in other waterways; in 1984 it was downgraded from endangered to threatened). The case of the spotted owl presented a similar controversy. The northern spotted owl is dependent on old-growth forest, which is highly coveted by the timber industry. The owl was listed as a threatened species in 1990, which promptly halted logging of critical habitat in national forestland. Many timber workers were left without work, causing opponents of the ESA to cite this case as an example of the far-reaching—and, for some, devastating—economic implications of the law. As of the spring 2007, 1,880 species in the United States had been officially listed as threatened or endangered. In the ESA’s thirty-four-year history, only twenty-three species had been dropped from the list. With the recovery of species being the paramount goal of the legislation, some environmentalist critics cite this as evidence that the ESA has failed to live up to its purpose. Moreover, some environmentalists fear that the designation of critical habitats leads certain landowners to destroy habitat on private land prior to the listing of a species, so as to avoid government regulation. At the same time, however, only nine listed species have been removed from the endangered species list due to extinction—which proponents of the ESA point to as evidence of legislative success. One success story is that of the bald eagle, which was removed from the endangered species list in 2007 after four decades of protection, growing in number from about 400 to 10,000. Regardless of one’s perspective, the Endangered Species Act is likely to remain a contentious issue in U.S. environmental policy as long as it remains in effect. David N. Cherney See also: Arnold, Ron; Environmental Movement; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Nixon, Richard; Watt, James.
Further Reading Barker, Rocky. Saving All the Parts: Reconciling Economics and the Endangered Species Act. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993.
National Research Council. Science and the Endangered Species Act. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1995. Goble, Dale D., J. Michael Scott, and Frank W. Davis, eds. The Endangered Species Act at Thirty, Volume 1: Renewing the Conservation Promise. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005.
English as the Official Language Since the 1980s, a movement referred to as “official English” by proponents—and “English-only” by critics—has actively pushed for codifying English as the national language of the United States. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor any federal statutes mandate an official language. In 1983, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) founded the advocacy group U.S. English, Inc., based in Washington, D.C., to lobby for passage of such a measure. Another prominent group in the movement is called ProEnglish, founded in 1994 and based in Arlington, Virginia. The first attempt to legislate English as the national language began in 1981, when U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa (R-CA) introduced a constitutional amendment. “Official English” bills and constitutional amendments have been introduced in every subsequent session of Congress, but none has come close to final enactment. In 1996, the House of Representatives approved such a bill, but it was never voted on by the Senate. Federal reluctance to make English the official language contrasts with sentiment in thirty states and a number of municipalities that have enacted such measures, including Hawaii’s designation of both English and Hawaiian as the state’s official languages. In 2002, the Superior Court of Alaska struck down that state’s English initiative, which had been passed by 68 percent of voters, ruling in favor of Yupik Eskimos, the plaintiffs in the case. Activists for “official English” emphasize the cause of national unity, asserting that the country could split into diverse linguistic communities without an official national language. In support of their argument, they point to countries such as Belgium and Canada, where language diversity has contributed to civil unrest, independence movements, and other forms of societal instability. Not having an official language, they contend, creates little incentive for immigrants to learn English, making assimilation more difficult. They further argue that an informed citizenry depends on command of the English language. The cost of disseminating information in other languages is another focus of “official English” proponents. Taxpayers’ money is wasted, they argue, if matters of society have to be translated and posted in different languages. While proponents concede that materials should be published in other languages for the promotion of public health, safety, tourism, and foreign language
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instruction in school, they believe that non-English publications should be discontinued in other areas. Especially irksome to “official English” advocates are mandates for bilingual education and bilingual ballots. Those who oppose what they call “English-only” argue that a majority of immigrants eventually do learn English. As for the fear of national fragmentation, they note that the United States has always had non-English– speaking populations who have lived as peaceable citizens and there is no reason to believe that this trend will not continue. Moreover, they argue, multilingual countries are not necessarily unstable, citing Switzerland as an example, and monolingual countries are not necessarily more stable. Finally, they maintain, banning the use of other languages violates individual freedom of speech and squelches ethnic pride and cultural diversity, while publishing official information in several languages better informs people of their rights and obligations as citizens. Elliot L. Judd See also: Gender-Inclusive Language; Hispanic Americans; Immigration Policy; Multicultural and Ethnic Studies.
Further Reading Baron, Dennis. The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Crawford, James, ed. Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ProEnglish Web site. www.proenglish.org. U.S. English, Inc., Web site. www.us-english.org.
Enola Gay Exhibit The Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that carried the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, entered the culture wars in 1994 when it was to be exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The controversy, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the two atomic bombings of Japan at the end of World War II, pitted academics and peace groups against conservatives and veterans groups. While the curators of the proposed exhibit argued that they were presenting a balanced view of the event and the context surrounding it, those who opposed it claimed that it reflected “revisionist history.” John T. Correll, editor of the Air Force Association’s (AFA’s) Air Force Magazine, led the charge against the exhibit. Although often described as a veterans organization, the AFA has close ties to the U.S. Air Force and the defense industry and is also closely linked to the National Air and Space Museum. The founder of the AFA, Hap Arnold, successfully lobbied Congress to establish the museum in 1946, and relations between the AFA and
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the museum were good for many years. Largely run by former military personnel, the museum showcased aviation’s technological accomplishments. Tensions between the two organizations began to build in 1986, however, when Cornell University astrophysicist Martin Harwit was chosen over an Air Force general as the new museum director. Harwit viewed the museum’s mission as educational and believed that it should provide context to the exhibits through references to the impact of aviation and space technology on society. When the first draft of the Enola Gay exhibit script was released in 1993, it reflected a scholarly historical interpretation of events and was read by some as a criticism of American actions at the end of World War II. The text included the Japanese perspective and suggested that the atomic bomb attack may not have been necessary. Correll condemned the exhibit as anti-American, and veterans groups such as the American Legion joined in the criticism. The battle heated up when Republicans took over both houses of Congress in the November 1994 election and Newt Gingrich became House Speaker. After a political campaign that consisted largely of attacks on the cultural left and its negative influence on American life and institutions, the Enola Gay exhibit was an obvious target. In August 1994, twenty-four members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Smithsonian secretary Robert McCormick Adams criticizing the proposed exhibit. In May 1995, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee held hearings on the management of the Smithsonian Institution. The committee made clear that what they viewed as “politically correct” exhibits would not be funded by the government. The Enola Gay script was rewritten five times and still failed to satisfy its critics. On January 31, 1995, the Smithsonian announced that it would mount a scaledback exhibit that would exclude interpretive elements. Jana Brubaker See also: American Exceptionalism; Anti-Intellectualism; Censorship; Cold War; Gingrich, Newt; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan; Nuclear Age; Political Correctness; Republican Party; Revisionist History; World War II Memorial.
Further Reading Bird, Kai, and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. Hiroshima’s Shadow. Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998. Kohn, Richard H. “History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition.” Journal of American History 82:3 (December 1995): 1036–63. O’Reilly, Charles T., and William A. Rooney. The Enola Gay and the Smithsonian Institution. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. Otto, Mayr. “The Enola Gay Fiasco: History, Politics, and the Museum.” Technology and Culture 39:3 (July 1998): 462–73.
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Env ironmental Movement
E nv i r o n m e n t a l M ove m e n t Whatever its consequences for the ecological well-being of the nation, the modern environmental movement has polarized popular and political opinion in the United States since its origins in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning as a grassroots movement concerned with issues such as vanishing wilderness, pollution, and human health concerns, the more radical branches of environmentalism came into direct conflict with modern business and industry by the 1980s and 1990s. The conservative backlash accused environmentalists of stifling free enterprise and trammeling personal property rights, going so far in some cases as to label direct-action environmentalism as domestic terrorism.
Origins The roots of the American environmental movement lie in the conservation movement of the first half of the twentieth century. The pioneers of conservationism called for the efficient and professional management of natural resources as commodities. Conservationists fought for reforms because they feared that the rapid destruction of forests, fertile soil, minerals, wildlife, and water resources would lead to their eventual depletion. A combination of private and government action led to the creation of hydroelectric dams, professional forest management, soil conservation programs, and fish and game laws to manage the environment. While these conservation programs were the main focus of the movement, activism also led to measures, such as the creation of the National Park Service (1916), that were less practical and focused more on preserving natural scenic areas. Two books were especially influential in launching the postwar environmental movement, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Leopold criticized the economic motivations of the early conservation movement and encouraged a deeper appreciation of the human place in the ecosystem. In A Sand County Almanac, he called for the development of a land ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Environmentalists in the 1960s adopted Leopold’s land ethic, contending that ecological awareness and preservation of ecosystems are in the best interests of humanity. Carson’s landmark work connected the nation’s declining bird populations with the widespread use of chemical pesticides such as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) and suggested that the use of such agents has especially harmful effects on humans and other apex predators. Attempts to “control nature” by means of synthetic substances, she argued, is an approach based on ignorance. Carson’s work was not without its critics. Chemical companies like Monsanto and American Cyanamid pointed to entomologist J.
Gordon Edward’s conclusion that there was no positive link between DDT use and human health. With support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the chemical companies argued that the benefits of DDT as a malarial mosquito control far outweighed any potential risk to wildlife populations. Nevertheless, Carson’s work prompted many Americans to question the environmental consequences and long-term health effects of certain chemical products. Leopold’s and Carson’s works both coincided with and helped promote social movements of the 1950s and 1960s that questioned conventional standards and norms. Indeed, three prominent New Left intellectuals of the1960s—Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse—were particularly influential in stimulating environmental awareness. Bookchin, a “social ecology” proponent, critiqued postwar U.S. environmental problems and advocated a national shift from the use of fossil fuels to renewable resources like wind, solar, and tidal power. Goodman, a widely read public intellectual, wrote a series of essays criticizing the American ethos of mass consumption as a way of life disconnected from nature. Goodman proposed a series of utopian solutions to industrialization that ranged from banning automobiles in cities to building self-contained garden communities where everyone lives close to sources of production. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse, a radical social philosopher at Brandeis University, asserted that modern society was out of touch with its environmental base. He pointed to nuclear proliferation and a fixation on technology as signs of a society focused on waste and a domination of nature. While Bookchin, Goodman, and Marcuse all were less well known than Leopold or Carson, their work was formative in establishing the early concerns of the environmental movement.
Legislation and Early Activism The first legislative lobbying efforts of the environmental movement focused on bills designed to preserve and protect the last vestiges of the nation’s wild and scenic places. The Land and Water Conservation Act (1964), National Wilderness Preservation System (created by the Wilderness Act of 1964), National Trails System Act (1968), and National Wild and Scenic Rivers System (created by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968) all emphasized wilderness preservation and aesthetics rather than economic value and management. The next wave of environmental legislation dealt with pollution issues. The National Environmental Policy Act (1970), Clean Air Act (1970), and Clean Water Act (1972) created more stringent regulations governing environmental quality standards and health issues. Samuel P. Hays, a prominent historian of U.S. environmental politics, has characterized the wave of legislation as the product of a grassroots movement made possible by an increasingly
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affluent middle class. Popular support for these acts stemmed from public concern over vanishing wild lands, the pollution of ecosystems, and the effects of pollution on human health. Ironically, some of the strongest opposition to many of the new laws came from government agencies, including the Soil Conservation Service and the U.S. Forest Service, which feared a loss of management control over the nation’s natural resources. While federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) wrote and administered most of the environmental legislation, the strength of the movement came largely from private grassroots organizations. Founded in 1892, the Sierra Club originated as a preservationist organization but by the 1970s focused on ending logging in public forests, protecting wilderness areas, and ensuring clean water and air resources. The National Audubon Society is nearly as old (founded in 1916), and by the 1970s its rapidly expanding membership concentrated on bird preservation and research and environmental education programs. Another large private organization with the goal of increasing environmental awareness was the National Wildlife Federation, which emphasized the protection of wildlife habitat, global warming education, and strengthening the Endangered Species Act (1973). All three of these private organizations funded influential political action committees that lobbied for environmental education and reform. The inauguration of Earth Day on April 22, 1970, was another example of the grassroots underpinnings of the movement. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) and Harvard University student Denis Hayes conceived and promoted Earth Day as an environmental teach-in and protest. The initial demonstration involved millions of students and other activists at thousands of colleges and secondary schools across the nation. Earth Day combined public support for an environmental agenda with protest against the Vietnam War, encouraging participants to contact their public officials and become involved in their local communities. The environmental movement also spawned organizations that believed that political advocacy and legislation were either ineffective or inefficient solutions to growing ecological problems. In 1971, American and Canadian activists formed Greenpeace, the most prominent of these direct-action groups, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Greenpeace called for nonviolent action against governments and corporations engaged in environmentally destructive activities. Organization activists protested and interfered with a wide range of American and international activities, from nuclear testing to whaling to old-growth logging. The first Greenpeace mission, in 1971, was an attempt to sail a manned boat to Amchitka Island off the coast of Alaska to draw global attention to
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U.S. nuclear testing. In 1978, the organization launched a refitted trawler and pursued the Icelandic whaling fleet in an attempt to disrupt that nation’s annual catch. Inspired by Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a group of Arizona environmentalists formed Earth First! in 1980. Bringing a new level of radicalism to the movement, Earth First! called for an ecocentric view of the world whereby the preservation of every living being was put on the same plane as human survival. Earth First! activists protested logging, hydroelectric dams, and development projects in California, Oregon, and Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, relying even more on directly confrontational methods than Greenpeace. Its tactics included blockading logging roads, staging tree sittings, and even engaging in industrial sabotage. Earth First! opponents such as Ron Arnold of the conservative Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise criticized such activities as “ecoterrorism” designed to impede the natural operation of the free market. Conservative critics of the environmental movement such as Arnold and Alan Gottlieb characterized it as radical and misguided, limiting individual freedom and liberty for the sake of plants and animals. Opponents were especially critical of government environmental regulations like the Endangered Species Act and Clean Air Act, which they felt compromised private property rights, industry, and the nation’s overall economic growth. Conservatives also challenged scientific evidence supporting fundamental tenets of the environmental movement such as ozone depletion and global warming. They argued that the government should act on undisputed facts rather than unproven theories and produced scientists like J. Gordon Edward, who was willing to testify that certain environmentalists’ conclusions were unfounded. Ostensibly liberal public officials also expressed reservations about the relevance and purpose of the environmental movement. For example, in a 1970 Time magazine article, mayors Carl Stokes of Cleveland, Ohio, and Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, argued that environmentalism diverted the attention of Americans from more pressing social issues like housing shortages and poverty.
The Contemporary Movement and Its Critics Two notable cases involving the Endangered Species Act pitted environmentalists against their conservative critics in the public purview. Southeastern Tennessee activists and local landowners used the act and the discovery of the snail darter, a tiny endangered fish, to challenge construction on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam in the mid-1970s. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978) that the stipulation of the Endangered Species Act dictated a halt to the construction of the dam. Led by Republican senators John Stennis of Mississippi
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and Howard Baker of Tennessee, conservatives argued that it was irrational to waste millions of tax dollars for the sake of one small fish species and called for the congressional implementation of a “balancing test” to weigh the costs and benefits of federal projects that might affect endangered species. Public interest groups like the Environmental Defense Fund countered by arguing that obscure species like the snail darter served as indicators of overall ecosystem health. Stennis and Baker ultimately prevailed on this issue, and in 1978 Congress amended the Endangered Species Act to create a committee with the authority to exempt projects like Tellico from the act’s stipulations. In 1986, a Pacific Northwest environmentalist group petitioned the FWS to add the northern spotted owl to the Endangered Species List. Activists feared that logging of old-growth forests in the coastal ranges of Oregon and Washington was destroying the owl’s habitat and driving the species to extinction. In 1990, the FWS concurred and restricted timbering activity inside a 1.3mile (2.1-kilometer) radius of any known spotted owl nesting or activity site. Environmentalists applauded the owl’s endangered designation, claiming that the preservation of the species was an important first step in saving the Northwest’s remaining old-growth forests. Timber industry officials and many local residents criticized the federal ruling, insisting that the economic costs of lost jobs on timber crews and at sawmills far outweighed the ecological benefits of protecting the owl. One timber industry report claimed that the government restrictions could end up costing more than 28,000 jobs in Oregon and Washington alone, with a detrimental effect on the U.S. wood products industry as a whole. Industry officials also contended that cutting old-growth trees made forest management sense, as secondary-growth trees grow faster and produce usable timber more efficiently. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, critics of the movement have also pointed to the activities of radical environmental groups as examples of the excesses of environmentalism. Organizations such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) promoted their cause by engaging in acts of vandalism and destruction of property. In 1998, the ELF claimed responsibility for an arson attack at a Vail ski resort in Colorado that resulted in an estimated $12 million in damage. In 1999, the group set fire to a plant genetics laboratory at Michigan State University and carried out a similar attack at a University of Washington facility in 2001. In 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated Operation Backfire, a program designed to locate and arrest the leaders of groups like ELF, whom U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales labeled as violent criminals. Environmental issues have remained at the center of American political and social debate into the twenty-
first century. Issues of health and environmental quality continue to concern activists, who work to focus public attention on topics ranging from global climate change to the disposal of hazardous waste. Environmentalists have mounted the strongest opposition to proposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other areas as the price of oil has continued to increase. Some members of the movement pointed to Hurricane Katrina in 2006 as an example of the potential costs of ignoring nature in urban planning, warning that environmental neglect will have even direr consequences in the future. Drew A. Swanson See also: Animal Rights; Arnold, Ron; Carson, Rachel; Earth Day; Ecoterrorism; Endangered Species Act; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Global Warming; Kyoto Protocol; Leopold, Aldo; New Left; Science Wars; Watt, James.
Further Reading Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975. Arnold, Ron, and Alan Gottlieb. Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America. Bellevue, WA: Free Enterprise Press, 1993. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Foreman, Dave. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. New York: Harmony Books, 1991. Gottlieb, Alan M. The Wise Use Agenda: The Citizen’s Policy Guide to Environmental Resource Issues. Bellevue, WA: Free Enterprise Press, 1989. Gottlieb, Robert. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005. Hays, Samuel P. A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.
Equal Rights Amendment The goal of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was to provide constitutional guarantees against gender discrimination. The campaign for its ratification led to intense debates in the 1970s over the amendment’s merits and, more generally, women’s roles. Its defeat was a blow for the feminist movement. Following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which gave women the right to vote, suffragist Alice Paul sought to introduce a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would eliminate all legal forms of gender discrimination. As originally drafted, the ERA stated, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State
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on account of sex.” Paul’s ERA was regularly introduced in Congress beginning in 1923 but was rejected for three decades, despite the support of every president since Harry Truman. Among the ERA’s early opponents was Eleanor Roosevelt, who feared that it would undermine special protections for women. During the late 1960s, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the formation of the National Organization for Women (1966), and the growing influence of the women’s rights movement, the ERA received new impetus. Testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments on May 6, 1970, feminist activist and Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem argued that the proposed amendment was necessary to end the “second-class treatment” of women. Congress approved the amendment in March 1972 (554–24 in the House, 84–8 in the Senate), sending the issue to the states, where final ratification required the approval of a three-fourths majority, a total of thirty-eight states, within a sevenyear period. Twenty-two states approved the proposed amendment in 1972, but the pace of ratification slowed after Roe v. Wade (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding abortion rights. As a backlash against feminism ensued, religious conservatives charged that the ERA would lead to public funding of abortions, legalization of same-sex marriages, and the outlawing of separate public bathrooms for men and women. Others argued that the ERA would lead to further judicial activism in federal courts. A prominent foe of the ERA was Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the pro-family Eagle Forum (1972). Schlafly launched the “STOP the ERA” campaign, selectively targeting states to prevent a three-fourths’ majority. She agreed that some laws and court decisions were sexually discriminatory but argued that women were frequently the beneficiaries rather than the victims of such discrimination. If the ERA passed, she warned, courts might force women to register for the military draft, enter the workforce, pay alimony, and cede child custody rights following divorce. Thirty-four states approved the amendment by the March 1979 deadline, but four reversed their decisions. In eight other states, the ERA had been approved by one but not both houses of the legislature. A three-year extension was granted, but by the final deadline of June 30, 1982, ratification fell three states short. Philippe R. Girard See also: Abortion; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Judicial Wars; Ms.; National Organization for Women; Roe v. Wade (1973); Same-Sex Marriage; Schlafly, Phyllis; Stay-at-Home Mothers; Steinem, Gloria.
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Further Reading Berry, Mary Frances. Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Hoff-Wilson, Joan, ed. Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Mansbridge, Jane J. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Ev a n g e l i c a l i s m Hardly a unified or monolithic form of Christian Protestantism, evangelicalism has informed the beliefs and practices of millions of Americans in the era of the culture wars. As in the past, cleavages between left- and right-wing Christians revolve around which specific ideological, cultural, and political values should define evangelicalism and American identity. The result is a religious impulse that historian Randall Balmer has described as “quintessentially American,” both because of its “variegated texture” and its ability to offer meaningful answers to “a culture that is not yet ready to divest itself entirely of its belief in God.” Popularized after the Revolutionary War by Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian itinerants, evangelical principles emphasized the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross and the necessity of a definite beginning point of religious conversion. Like their contemporary counterparts, most early American evangelicals also averred the importance of sincerity during worship, the authority of the Protestant canon, an individualist approach toward piety and morality, and a suspicion of “high church” polity. Throughout the nineteenth century, evangelical denominations and churches in America grew in number and variety. A distinct African-American evangelicalism emerged in the antebellum period, while sectionalist conflict over slavery divided southern and northern white evangelicals and laid the groundwork for important new denominational bodies, such as the Southern Baptist Convention. After the Civil War, evangelicals wrestled with the coming of urbanization, industrial capitalism, and “modern ideas” in a number of ways. Revivalists such as Dwight L. Moody and later Aimee Semple McPherson used advertising and other trappings of the developing consumer culture to increase the potential for conversion. Fundamentalists rejected any compromise with modern ideas and culture, arguing for creationism, a literal interpretation of the Bible, and nonengagement with secular institutions. Premillennial dispensationalists insisted that Christ would “rapture” his church at any minute, condemning the unfaithful to judgment. Missionary societies sponsored evangelizing crusades as well as humanitarian efforts, both domestically and abroad. Indeed, by the time of the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925 (in which a
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public school teacher in Tennessee faced criminal charges for teaching the theory of evolution) evangelicals were as kaleidoscopic a group as ever. Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical groups, to be sure, were well organized and growing, but evangelicalism itself included voices on the right, left, and everywhere in between. After the Great Depression and World War II, evangelicals in America continued their steady growth, building churches, expanding youth ministries, and sponsoring foreign missions. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, calls for more hard-line defenses against “liberal” influences began to split loyalties. The conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today, first published under revivalist Billy Graham’s direction in 1956 as a counter to the more liberal Christian Century, served as a symbol of these splits. These mid-century schisms, however, were not neatly divided into fundamentalist/conservative versus liberal/mainline camps. For instance, Graham’s acceptance of the mainline Council of Churches’ sponsorship for his 1957 New York City crusade made him a pariah among more fundamentalist evangelical groups and leaders. For evangelicals, the Vietnam War era was one of increasing dissent, both among themselves and with broader changes in American political and popular culture. African-American evangelical bodies gave the civil rights movement some of its most important leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, calls for more sensitive approaches to civil rights, poverty, social justice, and pacifism led to further breakdowns between conservative and liberal groups. In numerous evangelical denominations, these concerns folded into renewed debates over biblical inerrancy. While liberal evangelicals advocated the importance of historical context in interpreting and applying biblical passages, conservatives and fundamentalists defended the Bible as the literal and infallible Word of God that must be read literally. By the end of the 1960s, these social and intellectual debates had fractured the memberships of evangelical churches across the country and, most notably, informed the “fundamentalist takeover” of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1970s and 1980s. Although evangelicals had played an important role in the course of American politics since the Revolutionary period, the 1960s and 1970s inspired a more politically engaged set of evangelicals, particularly from the white right. In order to offset the “liberalizing” trends of that period, conservative evangelicals saw the need for a more active approach toward electoral politics. As such, they served as an important constituency for the “New Right” in American politics. Virginia fundamentalist Jerry Falwell made the most of conservative evangelical disdain for any number of perceived ills, namely feminism, abortion, youth delinquency, “secular humanism,” Hollywood immorality, gay activism, and the culling of school prayer. Believing that these trends needed oppos-
ing, Falwell formed what he termed the “Moral Majority,” a multidenominational coalition of evangelicals (and some Catholics) for the preservation of “traditional” social attitudes and “family values.” Ronald Reagan and other Republican candidates reaped the support of those who agreed with Falwell’s general plan for a more politically engaged evangelicalism. The various roles of evangelicals in engaging the cultural trappings of contemporary America have been no less important than their political role. During the 1970s and 1980s, evangelicals again showed their considerable savvy at using media outlets and marketing techniques to draw attention and adherents. Televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker attracted the donations and devotion of millions during the Reagan era, while any number of “Christian” businesses and publishing industries likewise grew in popularity. Membership in evangelical churches—mostly fundamentalist or conservative leaning—also grew during the 1970s and 1980s, and “big-box” or “full-service” evangelical churches became symbols of evangelicalism’s cultural relevance and its continuing influence among numerous social, economic, and racial groups. Though less visible and well organized, progressive evangelicals from Jimmy Carter to Jesse Jackson to Jim Wallis continued to dissent from rightward turns in evangelical America. Which side will prevail in the struggle to define American evangelicalism is not clear, but, as history reveals, the movement is likely to continue with fervor and close attentiveness to the larger context of American politics and culture. Darren E. Grem See also: Carter, Jimmy; Church and State; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Falwell, Jerry; Fundamentalism, Religious; Moral Majority; Premillennial Dispensationalism; Progressive Christians Uniting; Religious Right; Southern Baptist Convention; Televangelism; World Council of Churches.
Further Reading Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991. Noll, Mark A. American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Smith, Christian, and Michael Emerson. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wuthnow, Robert. The Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1989.
E xec uti ve Compen sation
E xe c u t i ve C o m p e n s a t i o n Though usually lucrative, executive compensation has grown rapidly since the economic boom of the early 1990s. A chief executive officer (CEO) working for a topranked corporation typically receives 300 times what an average worker makes. Between 1993 and 2003, the top five executives at 1,500 American corporations were collectively paid $350 billion. In the culture wars, populists and investors have rallied for greater corporate disclosure about executive pay, a demand imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2007. Executive compensation generally can be broken down into two parts: annual pay and retirement benefits. Both components, particularly for a CEO, have increased at a rate far surpassing growth in the inflation rate, the gross domestic product, the NASDAQ, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The highest-paid American executive in 2005 was Yahoo’s CEO Terry S. Semel, who had a total annual compensation package of more than $230 million. That year, the CEOs of America’s top 500 companies received a 54 percent aggregate pay raise over 2004. While the $400 million retirement package granted in 2006 to outgoing ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond drew the ire of many Americans, such large payments have their champions. When bringing on a new executive or renegotiating the salary of a current one, corporations rely on compensation surveys, which indicate levels of executive pay within an industry. The compensation package is usually targeted between the fiftieth and the seventy-fifth percentiles of those in similar positions, which over the years has led to an upward spiral in toplevel compensation. Other justifications for high executive pay include the increasing demand for talented company leaders, the overall high level of performance of the captains of
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American industry, and the high risk of firing within the top positions of a firm. Companies want the best person to maximize profits, and in order to attract that individual, the firm must offer a pay and benefits package commensurate with the demands of the job and the volatility of an executive position. One complaint about astronomical executive compensation pay is its contribution to the inequality of wealth distribution in America. Many factors contribute to the stratification of society, but executive compensation levels further widen the gap between the rich and the poor. They are also a potent symbol of personal greed at the public’s expense. Executives are compensated not just with a high salary based on increasing company size and overall revenue but also with stock options. The value of stock options rises and falls not with the revenue of the company but with its profits. Such a system is said to lend an air of fairness to the pay process, but it also opens the door to actions of avarice such as selling off stock before a company’s imminent collapse. The misuse of such insider information has been a major focus of a number of court cases, such as those involving top executives of the Enron Corporation, which also focused attention on excessive executive compensation. R. Matthew Beverlin See also: Corporate Welfare; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Balsam, Steven. An Introduction to Executive Compensation. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001. Delves, Donald P. Stock Options and the New Corporate Accountability. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Lehne, Richard. Government and Business. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.
Fa c t o r y Fa r m s Factory farms, also known as megafarms or industrial farms, are large agribusiness corporations that practice confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The industrial approach to farming originated in the 1920s with the advent of adding vitamins A and D to animal feed. This enabled the raising of farm animals indoors year-round because the nutrients provided by vitamins offset the necessity of exercise and sunshine. Since the 1980s, the trend has been toward replacing the traditional family farm with increasing numbers of confined animal feeding operations. Critics of factory farms believe that rural communities suffer socially and economically when family farms are put out of business. In addition, factory farms have been condemned for their environmental impact and treatment of animals. Supporters of factory farms emphasize the competition of the free market and the benefits to consumers. Today, these operations dominate the beef, dairy, pork, poultry, and egg-laying industries. The factory farm is very different from traditional farming. To begin with, industrial farms are owned, managed, and worked by separate entities. Farmers, for example, do not own the animals in the factory farm. Instead, they are laborers who raise the animals according to a formula dictated by the end-processor, whether an egg company, dairy corporation, or meat packer. Megafarms are also vertically integrated; the same corporation often controls all aspects of production, including raising, owning, slaughtering, and marketing the animal products. The most controversial difference between factory farms and the traditional farm is that the corporate owners of factory farms set up industrial sites for raising animals where hundreds or thousands of farm animals are confined at a single location, often inside completely enclosed buildings. Such a compact operation reduces the expense of labor and the amount of land needed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the agricultural industry in general, and even some individual farmers emphasize the value of factory farms. Supporters argue that because the operations benefit from an economy of scale that maximizes efficiency based on mass-production techniques and high volumes of a standardized product, they lower everyone’s grocery bill. This is why, they explain, Americans spend less of their income on food than do people in other countries. Without factory farms, they argue, it would not be possible to meet the worldwide demand for animal products. Supporters also maintain that others in the rural community benefit, such as grain
farmers, who are able to sell their harvest to factory farms at good prices. Opponents claim that factory farms have a negative impact on the animals, communities, and the environment. The Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM) was one of the first groups to oppose factory farms. Since its beginning in 1976 and official formation in 1981, FARM has organized grassroots efforts in rural communities to limit factory farming through land zoning and other local and state ordinances. Also, FARM and other animal rights activists, including In Defense of Animals and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have criticized the inhumane treatment of animals on factory farms. Animal rights activists argue that the animals cease to be treated as individual living creatures. Animals housed on factory farms typically spend their lives chained or caged in extremely cramped quarters, are exposed to little or no sunlight, and are given hormones so they can grow faster. Some animals, such as veal calves and laying chickens, are deliberately malnourished. Veal calves are fed anemia-inducing liquid formula and are deprived of water, roughage, and iron so that their meat maintains a pale color. Laying hens are often starved in order to force molting and boost egg production. Because chickens in such close proximity become very aggressive and attack one another, their beaks are trimmed at a young age. The threat of negative publicity has initiated some change in how animals are treated. In 2002, for example, the McDonald’s Corporation announced that it would no longer buy eggs from producers who give hens less than 72 square inches (465 square centimeters) of cage space each or use starvation to induce molting. In 2004, Kentucky Fried Chicken declared that it would curb its purchasing from one supplier after slaughterhouse workers were shown on videotape throwing live chickens against concrete walls and stomping on them. The extremely tight quarters in which animals live on factory farms have caused a great deal of concern about bacteria. Such conditions make disease more prevalent. Eric Schlosser’s best-seller Fast Food Nation (2002) and Christopher Cook’s Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us (2004) illustrate how, in the 1990s, bacterial strains such as E. coli 0157:H7 and salmonella emerged as public health hazards. Chronic ailments including reactive arthritis, Reiter’s syndrome, and stomach ulcers have been linked to bacterial infections often caused by contaminated foods. To combat such infections, animals raised on factory farms are given high doses of antibiotics, more than animals raised on small farms. Such abundant use of antibiotics has caused concern about antibiotic resistance in animals and the humans who consume them. Also directly affected by factory farms are traditional farmers and rural citizens. Because large companies like Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms contract with farmers to 168
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expand operations and eliminate overhead, traditional family farms are disappearing. This phenomenon has been called the “Wal-Marting” of American agriculture. Like wholesalers to Wal-Mart who are economically squeezed because of the dictates of the near-monopolistic corporation, farmers have no choice but to capitulate to the demands of the agribusiness corporations. The loss of traditional farmers also means a loss of local farm culture and communities, along with local revenue and the businesses that those communities support. As farm size and absentee ownership increase, social conditions in rural America decline. Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council contend that factory farms are large, unchecked pollution sources. Of particular concern is the amount of animal waste, often liquefied and kept in giant cesspools known as lagoons and later dumped or sprayed over fields. These practices create environmental problems, odor nuisances, and health hazards. The runoff of the animal waste into streams has led to fish kills. Pollution from the factory farms has been blamed for respiratory problems, skin infections, nausea, miscarriages, and other serious illnesses. Studies have shown that neighbors of factory farms experience significantly greater physical and mental health problems than the rest of the population. Molly Swiger See also: Animal Rights; Ecoterrorism; Environmental Movement; Food and Drug Administration; Genetically Modified Foods; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; WalMart; Young, Neil.
Further Reading Coats, David. Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm: The Myth of the Traditional Farm and the Shocking Truth About Animal Suffering in Today’s Agribusiness. New York: Continuum, 1991. Fitzgerald, Deborah. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Marks, Robbin. Cesspools of Shame: How Factory Farm Lagoons and Sprayfields Threaten Environmental and Public Health. Washington, DC: Natural Resources Defense Council and the Clean Water Network, 2001. Ricketts, Cliff, and Omri Rawlins. Introduction to Agribusiness. Albany, NY: Delmar Thompson Learning, 2001. Schiffman, S.S. “Livestock Odors: Implications for Human Health and Well-Being.” Journal of Animal Science 76:5 (1998): 1343–55.
Fa i t h - B a s e d P r o g r a m s Soon after taking office in 2001, President George W. Bush put forward an agenda to “enlist, equip, empower, and expand the heroic works of faith-based
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and community groups across America.” As part of his Faith-Based and Community Initiative (FBCI), Bush established by executive order the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and set up FBCI offices in ten agencies, including the departments of Commerce, Education, and Health and Human Services. These offices were given the role of ensuring that faith-based organizations (FBOs) have improved access to the programs operated by their agencies. According to the White House Office of FBCI, in 2005 a total of $2.1 billion in funding for faith-based organizations was provided through 151 federally administered competitive grant programs for domestic social services, representing 10 percent of the total amount spent on such programs. In addition, more than thirty states set up offices for FBCIs. The greater participation of faith-based organizations in the provision of social services was accomplished largely through an extension of “Charitable Choice” rules to most federally supported social service programs. A provision of the welfare reform statute of 1996, Charitable Choice mandated that if a state employs nongovernmental organizations for the provision of welfare-related services, it cannot exclude religious organizations from participating on the basis of their religious character. The faith-based initiative was controversial from the start, provoking extended debate in Congress as to whether to accept the provisions of the executive orders relating to FBCI—a debate that remained unresolved by legislative action. To its advocates, FBCI ends unfair discrimination against religious organizations in the provision of social services and provides an opportunity to employ the resources of religious organizations, organizations that have a long history of charitable social work, for the greater social good. To opponents, FBCI represents a violation of the principle of the separation of church and state, amounting to government support of “inherently” religious activities, as well as religious discrimination, and entails potentially intrusive governmental regulation of religious organizations. One matter of particular controversy has been whether FBOs that receive government funding for the delivery of social services may engage in discriminatory hiring practices. Although Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, religious entities are exempt from the provisions prohibiting hiring discrimination on the basis of religion. For example, when a Catholic Church hires a priest, there is no legal obstacle to the requirement that the position be filled only by a devout Catholic. Such discriminatory practices, however, have in general concerned positions paid for by the organization’s private funds. An expanded Charitable Choice poses the question of whether such discrimination is permissible when it applies to employ-
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ment in social service programs that are directly funded by the government. The Bush administration repeatedly held, through a series of executive orders, that such discrimination is permissible. Supporters of FBCI argue that religious organizations must maintain their autonomy (specifically the “hiring rights”); critics argue that FBCI policies amount to countenancing government-funded religious discrimination. The debate over hiring practices can be seen as part of a larger debate regarding the principle of separation of church and state. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public money can be used for religious instruction or indoctrination, but only when the intended beneficiaries make the choice themselves between religious and secular programs—as when parents decide whether to use tuition vouchers at a religious or secular school. But the high court has also held that the government cannot directly fund “inherently religious activities” such as worship, religious instruction, and proselytizing. Such activities must be separated in time and place from governmentfunded secular services provided by FBOs, and care must be taken that government funds not be redirected to support such activities. Government agencies have been criticized for inadequately monitoring FBOs, and a number of court cases have resulted from charges that governmental funds were being used to support clearly religious activities. For example, in the October 2004 decision Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Montana Office of Rural Health, the U.S. District Court of Montana (Butte Division) held unconstitutional a direct grant to a parish nursing program that mixed community health care with spiritual formation and prayer. Evan Charney See also: Bush Family; Church and State; Compassionate Conservatism; Religious Right; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading “Charitable Choice Rules and Faith-Based Initiatives.” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, January 26, 2006. Dionne, E.J., and Ming Hsu Chen, eds. Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Should Government Help Faith-Based Charity? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001. Wuthnow, Robert. Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Fa l we l l , J e r r y A controversial Baptist minister and televangelist, Jerry Falwell was the founder and head of the Moral Majority, the organization at the forefront of the Religious Right during the 1980s. A leading figure in the culture wars,
As the founder and head of the Moral Majority from 1979 to 1989, televangelist Jerry Falwell stood at the vanguard of the conservative Christian political movement and its “pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral, and pro-American” agenda. (Terry Ashe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Falwell regarded himself as a prophet called by God to denounce the secularization of American society. Jerry Lamon Falwell was born on August 11, 1933, in Lynchburg, Virginia. He began his studies at Lynchburg College (1950–1952) and finished at Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri (BA, 1956). Immediately upon graduation, he founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, a congregation that would evolve into a megachurch of some 20,000 members. Also in 1956, Falwell began the television broadcast The Old-Time Gospel Hour, becoming a pioneer of televangelism and the electronic church. In 1971, Falwell founded Liberty University (originally Liberty Baptist College), also in Lynchburg. From 1979 to 1989, he ran the Moral Majority, describing his pro–Republican Party organization as “pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral, and pro-American.” Falwell wrote and published numerous works intersecting religion and politics, including Listen, America! (1980), The Fundamentalist Phenomenon (1981), and New American Family (1992). He also published Falwell: An Autobiography (1997). Falwell died on May 15, 2007, after suffering bouts of heart disease.
Family Values
When Falwell began his ministry career he was in accord with most fundamentalists, believing that the clergy should not become involved in politics. Consequently, his university, church pulpit, and television program were strictly devoted to promoting the gospel. In 1956, Falwell publicly condemned the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other members of the clergy involved in championing civil rights, arguing that ministers are not to be “politicians” but “soul winners.” Falwell, who at the time favored racial segregation, linked the civil rights movement with communism. Although he would later apologize for resisting civil rights, Falwell during the 1980s opposed activists who demanded economic sanctions against South Africa for its apartheid policies. Falwell became politicized following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion. (He called abortion “America’s national sin” and a “biological holocaust.”) Greatly influenced by Francis Schaeffer, then the intellectual guru of religious fundamentalism, Falwell followed his advice to use ministry broadcasts to address social issues from a moral perspective. The favorable reception of those messages inspired the creation of the Moral Majority, a lobbying group that sought to pressure legislators to vote in socially conservative ways. The Moral Majority was against abortion, gay rights, the women’s liberation movement, pornography, legalized gambling, and “porn rock.” It was for school prayer, free enterprise, fiscal conservatism, a strong military, and the defense of Israel. Falwell claimed that his organization was responsible for sending 3 to 4 million newly registered voters to the polls in 1980, enabling Ronald Reagan’s election as president. The Moral Majority disbanded following the negative public reaction to several televangelism scandals in the 1980s (involving such prominent figures as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart) and was essentially replaced by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. In 2004, Falwell attempted to revive the Moral Majority as the Faith and Values Coalition. Falwell was often in the news over the years. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against the Thomas Road Baptist Church, but they were later dropped. In the late 1980s, Falwell’s reputation suffered from the televangelism scandals, in particular his association with and subsequent takeover of the PTL ministry headed by Jim and Tammy Bakker. In the 1980s, Falwell sued Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt for libel, but lost his case in the Supreme Court. Many remember Falwell for his inflammatory statements. He once said that AIDS was God’s punishment for the “sinful behavior” of homosexuality. He often used the issue of homosexuality as a tool for fundraising—in a 1995 fundraising letter, for example, he wrote that the “radical homosexual onslaught” was “raging.” In 1999,
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he raised eyebrows by charging that the children’s television character Tinky Winky was cast as a homosexual and communicated a gay message, and urged parents to boycott the Teletubbies program on which the character appeared. Perhaps his most controversial comment came in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when, during an appearance on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, he blamed the terrorist attacks on the forces of secularism in America, including the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and lesbians. Although Falwell never changed his view that homosexuality is a sin, in 1999 he went against the recommendations of other evangelical leaders and met with the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organization Soulforce. Founded by Falwell’s former colleague the Reverend Mel White, Soulforce asked Falwell to tone down his antihomosexual rhetoric. Karma R. Chávez See also: Abortion; AIDS; American Civil Liberties Union; Christian Coalition; Civil Rights Movement; Flynt, Larry; Gay Rights Movement; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Moral Majority; Religious Right; Robertson, Pat; Schaeffer, Francis; Televangelism.
Further Reading Boston, Rob. “The Real Legacy of the Reverend Jerry Falwell.” Humanist, September–October 2007. Falwell, Jerry. Falwell: An Autobiography. Lynchburg, VA: Liberty House, 1997. Harding, Susan Friend. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Smolla, Rodney A. Jerry Falwell vs. Larry Flynt: The First Amendment on Trial. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Fa m i l y Va l u e s From an anthropological and sociological perspective, “family values” denotes morals, principles, and ethics that support and strengthen the family system within a given cultural setting. In the modern culture wars, the term began to be invoked in conservative political speech starting in the early 1970s. Although “family values” continues to appear in speeches, sound bites, and headlines, the groups and organizations that give it circulation—such as the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and Family Research Council— have offered no clear definition. “Family values” as a politically rhetorical term began to appear most clearly in material expressing opposition to the emergence of modern feminism (late 1960s and continuing), to the Supreme Court ruling
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in Roe v. Wade (1973), and to the failed Equal Rights Amendment. It is fair to say, then, that while the term is nowhere clearly defined, as a code word in conservative political rhetoric it gained ground as a way of conveying support for the patriarchal two-parent family system and opposition to social forces perceived as likely to dilute or destabilize that particular type of family system. A high point in popular media attention to the issue came in the late 1970s with the appeal to family values by Anita Bryant and others supporting the overturn of an antidiscrimination ordinance in Florida’s Miami-Dade County that specifically extended civil rights to gay and lesbian citizens. Another usage of prominence was by Vice President Dan Quayle in highly publicized 1992 remarks criticizing positive portrayals of single-parent families on television (specifically the title character of the Murphy Brown series). Quayle extended his comments to an expansive and extended commentary on American society, attributing such events as the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to a breakdown in family values. In the culture wars, the term “family values” is also used to convey opposition to abortion, the easing of sexual mores (reflected in teen pregnancy and the prevalence of pornography), a relaxation of laws concerning divorce, and especially the normalization of same-sex relationships. In addition, certain types of home- and parochial-school “family values curricula” stress a philosophy of absolute and objective standards of right and wrong. In practice, both conservatives and liberals invoke family values to promote their agendas. A microcosm of the difference is reflected in usages by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), a liberal, and Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), a conservative. In It Takes a Village (1996), Clinton stresses programs of corporate responsibility to support the nation’s children. In It Takes a Family (2005), Santorum stresses private responsibility. In general, liberals appeal to family values in support of increased social programs and regulations, such as subsidized child day care and paid family medical leave (including maternity leave) at the local, state, and federal levels. Critics argue that the social policy of liberals directly and indirectly undermines individual responsibility and parental authority in the family and community. Conservatives, on the other hand, proclaim attachment to both family values and the free-market system. Critics argue that conservatives overlook or ignore the stresses placed on families by the free-market system, pointing to the rise in the working poor, the need for two incomes to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, and the undermining of local communalism when companies transfer their employees or move their workplaces overseas for cheaper labor. Daniel Liechty
See also: Abortion; Bryant, Anita; Christian Coalition; Clinton, Hillary; Dobson, James; Equal Rights Amendment; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Focus on the Family; Gay Rights Movement; Quayle, Dan; Roe v. Wade (1973); Same-Sex Marriage.
Further Reading Christensen, Bryce J. Utopia Against the Family: Problems and Politics of the American Family. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990. Clinton, Hillary Rodham. It Takes a Village, and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Lewis, Robert. Real Family Values: Leading Your Family into the 21st Century with Clarity and Conviction. Portland, OR: Multnomah, 2000. Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Santorum, Rick. It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005.
Fa r r a k h a n , L o u i s The long-time outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Abdul Farrakhan has stirred controversy for decades over his advocacy of black separatism as well as his often incendiary social commentary and “hate speech.” From the mid-1950s through the mid1970s, Farrakhan served as a minister and spokesperson for the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad. Following the death of Muhammad in 1975, Farrakhan led a dissenting group to organize a new Nation of Islam. In 1995, as organizer of the Million Man March, a male-only event attended by hundreds of thousands of African Americans on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Farrakhan demonstrated the potential of his movement. The son of a schoolteacher and a Baptist preacher, he was born Louis Eugene Walcott on May 11, 1933, in New York City and grew up in the Roxbury section of Boston. After attending the Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina on a track scholarship (1951–1953), he began his career as a calypso singer, dancer, and violinist, performing in nightclubs. In 1955, he joined the Nation of Islam through the ministry of Malcolm X at Temple 11 in Boston and gave up show business at the insistence of Elijah Muhammad, who later surnamed him Farrakhan. He then went on to gain prominence within the Black Muslim movement with his hit song “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell” as well as the writing of two polemical plays that toured nationally. From 1965 to 1975 Farrakhan was based in Harlem. By 1964, relations between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad had deteriorated, leading the former to split from the organization. Farrakhan remained loyal
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Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has invoked sometimes incendiary rhetoric in advocating for black separatism and the Black Muslim movement since the 1950s. His extremist comments have targeted Jews, whites, and homosexuals. (Scott Olson/Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
to Elijah Muhammad and proclaimed Malcolm “worthy of death” in the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. In tumultuous times for the Black Muslim movement, Malcolm was murdered by Nation of Islam assassins in New York City on February 21, 1965. A decade later, upon Elijah Muhammad’s death, his son, Warith Deen Muhammad, was proclaimed Elijah’s successor. The new leader renamed the Nation the World Community of Al-Islam in the West and worked to transform the movement in line with traditional Sunni doctrines, reaching out to all races. Farrakhan, taking exception to that vision, left the organization to recreate the Nation of Islam, maintaining its original antiwhite ideology. The new offshoot under Farrakhan’s control, headquartered in Chicago, appealed to a growing urban black underclass. His fiery rhetoric inspired alienated black youth, including rap and hip-hop artists as well as some gang leaders. Farrakhan’s attitudes and comments regarding Jews, gays, and women have been reported extensively by the national media, arousing widespread protest and indignation. After presidential candidate Jesse Jackson made an anti-Jewish slur during the 1984 Democratic primary campaign, Farrakhan came to the candidate’s defense, publicly threatening the African-American journalist who reported the quote. On other occasions, Farrakhan referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and to Judaism as a “gutter religion.” In 1991, the Nation published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, charging Jews with fostering and profiting from the slave trade, a thesis repudiated by scholars. Over the years, Farrakhan has been equally hostile toward gays,
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condemning the homosexual lifestyle in harsh rhetoric. The Million Man March, held on October 16, 1995, drew criticism from some women’s groups because they felt wives and mothers were purposely excluded. In fact, the focus of Farrakhan’s concern was the mainstream media image of black males, which, he believed, unfairly emphasized drug use and gang membership. In an effort to counter that image, he organized what was billed as a “Holy Day of Atonement, Reconciliation and Responsibility.” In February 2007, plagued by health problems, Farrakhan gave his last public address as the leader of the Nation of Islam, leaving the fate of the organization in the hands of an executive committee. In that two-hour farewell speech, delivered in Detroit at the Nation of Islam’s annual meeting, Farrakhan denounced the Iraq War and called on Congress to impeach President George W. Bush. Steve Young See also: Anti-Semitism; Bush Family; Gangs; Jackson, Jesse; Malcolm X; Million Man March; Muslim Americans; Nation of Islam; Race; Rap Music.
Further Reading Gardell, Mattias. In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Magida, Arthur J. Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and his Nation. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Marsh, Clifton E. From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Resurrection, Transformation, and Change of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America, 1930–1995. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996. Singh, Robert. The Farrakhan Phenomenon: Race, Reaction, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997.
Federal Budget Defic it How to best address chronic deficits, widely regarded as the most conspicuous failure of the American budget process, has been a highly divisive and recurring issue of the culture wars. With the exception of 1998–2001, the U.S. federal government has experienced deficits every year since 1969. By 2008, the federal budget deficit was $438 billion, the largest in history. The previous record of $413 billion occurred in 2004. During the George W. Bush administration the national debt, the sum total of unretired deficit spending, went from $5.7 trillion to $10 trillion. Historically, the belief that the federal government should balance its budget has been a dominant conviction in American politics. From the nation’s founding until the 1930s, the balanced budget rule was usually
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adhered to, with the exception of times of war. Between 1789 and 1930, government expenditures exceeded revenues only about one in every three years. The large and rapidly increasing federal budget deficits after 1970, following about 180 years of balanced budgets (except during periods of war or recession), are thus a relatively recent development in American history. Since the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, arguments about the deficit have proceeded along partisan lines. Republicans tend to insist that deficits are the result of excessive federal spending. Many Democrats see attempts to cut taxes and move the budget toward deficits as a longterm strategy of Republicans to “starve” government programs that benefit Democratic constituencies. In the 1990s, Democrats sought the elimination of the deficit in order to safeguard entitlement programs and restore the government’s credibility. It can be noted, for example, that President Bill Clinton’s strong support for deficit reduction resulted in budget surpluses at the end of his presidency. Yet by the end of President George W. Bush’s first term, the deficit had reached historic proportions. Historically, the Republican Party was regarded as the party that placed greater emphasis on balancing the budget. Conservatives strongly favored balanced budgets, going back to 1798, when Thomas Jefferson proposed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. After Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed the Keynesian concept of short-term deficit spending in order to stimulate the economy after he was elected president in 1932, the Democrats became the party associated with justifying short-term deficits. Until 1981, Republicans largely maintained a belief in balanced budgets. Beginning with the Ronald Reagan presidency, however, the emphasis for many Republicans changed to cutting taxes rather than reducing the deficit. It has been estimated that the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 cost the federal government more than $2 trillion in lost revenue over the period 1982–1991. One rationale for cutting taxes even in the face of large deficits is the supply-side argument that tax cuts will more than pay for themselves by stimulating new economic activity. Another argument, one with an ideological bent, is that smaller government, which is favored by conservatives, requires “starving the beast.” Large deficits increase the pressure for spending cuts. This represents a fundamental change in American politics. Starting with the New Deal, to be “conservative” on fiscal policy meant an aversion to deficits. Since 1981, however, although conservatives still tend to support budgetary balance in the abstract, Republicans are less willing to actually balance the budget. Democrats and liberals, by contrast, increased their support for deficit reduction as an important means in itself. Patrick Fisher
See also: Clinton, Bill; Democratic Party; New Deal; Norquist, Grover; Perot, H. Ross; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Social Security; Supply-Side Economics; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Fisher, Patrick. Congressional Budgeting: A Representational Perspective. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. Ippolito, Dennis S. Why Budgets Matter: Budget Policy and American Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Kettl, Donald F. Deficit Politics. New York: Longman, 2003. Peterson, Peter G. Running on Empty. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Schick, Allen. The Capacity to Budget. Washington, DC: Urban Press, 1990. White, Joseph, and Aaron Wildavsky. The Deficit and the Public Interest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent U.S. agency responsible for regulating radio and television, telephone, cable, and satellite. The FCC is both quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial in that it develops policy, enforces regulations, and issues broadcasting permits and licenses. Since its five commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, the FCC is a political body and thereby subject to partisanship and ideological manipulation. In the culture wars, the FCC has been variously criticized for overregulation and for not regulating enough. The U.S. federal government has long declared the airways public property that must be leased prior to any use. In 1912, the Radio Communications Act required the Department of Commerce and Labor to issue radio licenses. In 1927, at the request of broadcasters, the Radio Act established the Federal Radio Communications (FRC) to bring order to the airwaves for improving the quality of transmissions by reducing the crowded conditions. In 1934, the FRC and relevant offices of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Office of the Postmaster General responsible for telephone and telegraph regulations were consolidated, forming the FCC.
Red Scare Politics As a New Deal creation, the FCC sought to promote competition among broadcasters and foster a free marketplace of ideas by eliminating monopolistic control of the airwaves, reducing chain broadcasting, prohibiting newspaper ownership of stations, preventing broadcasters from using their stations for partisan purposes, and requiring the airing of dissenting views. This led to a
Federal Communic ation s Commission
conservative backlash, with New Deal foes depicting the FCC as a sinister instrument of big government. Some opposed the 1943 breakup of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) into two networks, NBC and the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In addition, conservatives accused the FCC commissioners of purposely awarding broadcasting licenses to liberals, some labeled “red.” At one point, Congressman Martin Dies (D-TX) denigrated the FCC as “the nastiest nest of rats in the country,” implying communist affiliation. Political realignment on the FCC came when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed John Doerfer and Robert Lee as commissioners. Both were allies of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and used their position to target broadcasters deemed too liberal by Republican Party standards. To that end, the FCC developed a cozy relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in order to learn the backgrounds of controversial broadcasters. The stated fear was that a “red network” of the airwaves, especially television, could be used by communists during a national emergency (such as a war between the United States and Soviet Union). In a highly publicized hearing spanning three years, the FCC considered revoking the radio and television licenses of Edward Lamb, a liberal Democrat, businessman, labor attorney, and Soviet sympathizer. Lamb, a resident of Toledo, Ohio, won his case in 1957 after several witnesses for the prosecution recanted their testimony, which they claimed had been “coached” by FCC officials. Some suggested that the FCC joined in the Red Scare as a distraction from the task of regulating the airwaves. During the TV quiz show scandals of the 1950s, for example, the FCC remained largely confined to the sidelines. In March 1960, FCC chairman Doerfer, long regarded as a reluctant regulator, was forced to resign following revelations that he had vacationed on a yacht owned by broadcaster George B. Storer.
Fairness Doctrine One of the most debated FCC regulations was the socalled fairness doctrine (1949–1987), which required broadcasters to devote “equal time” on the air to opposing viewpoints. Many broadcasters argued that “fairness” was an ambiguous standard and that any requirement for equity of opinion was a violation of the First Amendment. In one dramatic instance, the FCC in July 1973 revoked the broadcast license of fundamentalist preacher Carl McIntire (on radio station WXUR in Media, Pennsylvania) because of his refusal to comply with the fairness doctrine. Supporters of the doctrine believed that it fostered democracy and prevented stations from airing only one ideological perspective. Critics countered that the doctrine had a chilling effect by compelling broadcasters to avoid airing controversial ideas. The fairness doctrine also required
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that if air time was granted to a political candidate for campaign advertising, then equal time had to also be offered to the opposing candidate. However, stations were not required to invite lesser-known candidates to participate in televised debates. In 1987, the FCC chose to abolish the fairness doctrine even though the U.S. Supreme Court in Red Lion Broadcasting Company v. Federal Communications Commission (1969) had ruled that the commission was legally authorized to regulate content because of the “scarcity” of available public frequencies. By the second half of the 1980s, the FCC had determined that the scarcity argument had been rendered invalid by the diversity of media options. Congress in 1987 attempted to reinstate the fairness doctrine, but the bill was vetoed by President Ronald Reagan. Although primarily opposed by political conservatives, the fairness doctrine was also criticized by William O. Douglas, one of the most liberal Supreme Court justices, who in 1973 argued, “The Fairness Doctrine . . . puts the head of the camel inside the tent that enables administration after administration to toy with TV or radio in order to serve its sordid or its benevolent ends.”
Telecommunications Act of 1996 In 1984, the U.S. Justice Department broke up AT&T (“Ma Bell”) on the grounds that the telecommunications giant was a monopoly. As a result, local and longdistance phone services, as well as cable television, were separated. Out of this process emerged the seven socalled “Baby Bells,” each granted a regional monopoly. Upon passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, local telephone companies were required to open their markets to competitors but were permitted to offer longdistance service. Then, in a decision critics characterized as a return to monopolistic days, the FCC in December 2006 approved an $85 billion merger between Bell South (one of the Baby Bells) and AT&T. Perhaps most controversial, the 1996 law loosened broadcast ownership restrictions, enabling television corporations to increase their reach of the viewing public from 25 to 35 percent. In addition, radio groups were no longer limited to twenty AM and twenty FM stations. Thus, by 2000, Clear Channel Communications was in possession of 1,200 radio stations, constituting 9 percent of the American market. Critics viewed the corporate consolidation of the airwaves as a dangerous concentration of power. In another decision viewed by critics as too probusiness, the FCC in 1997 chose to assign digital channels without charge. U.S. senators Bob Dole (R-KS) and John McCain (R-AZ), among others, believed that broadcasters should be required to pay $70 billion to the federal government for the assignment of spectrum for digital television.
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Indecency and Fines Beginning with a 1946 report known as the Blue Book (officially titled Public Service Responsibility for Broadcast Licensees), the FCC has reminded broadcasters of their commitment to public service. On May 9, 1961, in an address before the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, FCC chairman Newton N. Minnow denounced the quality of television programming, describing it as “a vast wasteland.” The controversial and often-quoted speech annoyed producer Sherwood Schwartz (among many others in the industry), who christened the castaway ship on the television sitcom Gilligan’s Island (1964–1967) the S.S. Minnow. While “public service” programming as originally defined by the FCC referred to broadcasts with informational content, as entertainment became a greater part of broadcasting, the issue of indecency became central to the debate over broadcaster responsibility. In 1973, the comedian George Carlin tested the FCC by delivering a radio monologue called “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” In the legal battle that ensued, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in FCC v. Pacifica (1978) that the FCC has a right to impose decency standards on broadcasters because of considerations (such as the need to shield children from offensive material) beyond First Amendment protections. The court added, however, that there is a “safe harbor” when indecency standards are not in effect, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., when children should be in bed. By 1987, the FCC expanded its definition of indecency from seven dirty words to include sexual innuendo, a decision largely impacting radio “shock jocks” such as Howard Stern. Indecency fines imposed on broadcasters by the FCC remained relatively small during the 1990s. By 2004, however, with the general public lodging 1.4 million complaints about indecency, the FCC issued fines totaling $7.9 million. That same year, CBS inadvertently televised the singer Janet Jackson exposing her breast during a Super Bowl halftime show, leading to a $550,000 FCC fine. In an ironic legal twist, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in June 2007 that FCC fines for the broadcasting of “fleeting expletives” are unlawful since the same obscene words had been publicly blurted by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. A provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 required cable companies broadcasting “sexually-oriented programming” to either scramble those channels or to limit their transmission during the “safe harbor” hours in order to protect children, but the Supreme Court in United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group (2000) overturned that regulation as too restrictive. Also in 1996, Congress mandated that television sets larger than thirteen inches (33 centimeters) be equipped with the V-chip, a blocking device capable of reading the program ratings in terms
of sexual content and violence as established by the TV Parental Guidelines. Roger Chapman See also: Censorship; Douglas, William O., Eisenhower, Dwight D.; McCarthyism; McIntire, Carl; Media Bias; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Shock Jocks; Stern, Howard.
Further Reading Brainard, Lori A. Television: The Limits of Deregulation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. Brinson, Susan L. The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission, 1941–1960. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Einstein, Mara. Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership, and the FCC. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Federal Communications Commission Web site. www.fcc.gov. Zarkin, Kimberly A., and Michael J. Zarkin. The Federal Communications Commission: Front Line in the Culture and Regulation Wars. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
F e l t , W. M a r k On May 31, 2005, W. Mark Felt, the former number two official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), publicly announced that, despite decades of denial, he was indeed the person known as “Deep Throat,” the confidential source who guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in investigating the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. The identity of Deep Throat—a pseudonym taken from a 1972 pornographic movie of the same name—was confirmed by Woodward after it was disclosed in a Vanity Fair magazine article. A national debate immediately erupted over Felt’s role as Watergate whistleblower, with some calling him a hero and others a villain. William Mark Felt was born on August 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho. He attended the University of Idaho (BA, 1935) and George Washington University Law School (JD, 1940). His career in the FBI, which began in 1942, included posts in Texas, Washington, Virginia, and Nevada. By 1971, he had risen to deputy associate director. Following the death of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in May 1972 and his succession by L. Patrick Gray, Felt was appointed associate director. In 1980, Felt was convicted of authorizing, without first obtaining the necessary search warrants, the 1972 and 1973 FBI break-ins of homes of bombing suspects connected with the Weather Underground; he was later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. From his high-level perch inside the FBI, Felt witnessed the attempt by Nixon administration officials to obstruct the federal investigation of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the
Feminism, Second - Wave
Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C., which occurred on June 17, 1972. Three days later, Woodward phoned Felt, who advised the reporter that the Watergate matter would soon “heat up.” By June 23, President Nixon, citing national security concerns, directed the Central Intelligence Agency to put a halt to or at least limit the FBI investigation on Watergate. Later that summer, Felt began secretly corroborating information Woodward and Bernstein were digging up about the scandal; he would eventually offer direction on different aspects of the complicated case. During the course of 1972 and 1973, the Post investigation—and that of the Senate Watergate Committee chaired by Sam Ervin (D-NC) and Howard Baker (R-TN)—uncovered the involvement of the Committee to Re-elect the President in the burglary and of the Nixon administration itself in the cover-up that followed. A public debate ensued over Felt’s revelation in 2005. Some portrayed him as a patriot, motivated to help Woodward out of respect for the U.S. Constitution and a desire to preserve the integrity of the FBI; others argued that he acted improperly and perhaps out of spite because Nixon did not appoint him FBI director. Former Nixon aides Charles W. Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, and Patrick Buchanan all denounced Felt for taking the information to a reporter rather than to the prosecutor conducting the official investigation; they, in turn, were criticized for being more indignant about the action of a whistleblower than the crimes the whistleblower helped expose. Felt died on December 18, 2008. John D. O’Connor, who co-wrote a book with Felt, said shortly afterwards, “What I saw was a person that went from a divided personality that carried around this heavy secret to a completely integrated and glowing personality over these past few years once he let the secret out.” William T. Walker See also: Buchanan, Pat; Bush Family; Colson, Chuck; Liddy, G. Gordon; Nixon, Richard; Presidential Pardons; Reagan, Ronald; Students for a Democratic Society; Watergate; Whistleblowers; Woodward, Bob.
Further Reading Felt, Mark, and John D. O’Connor. A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, Being “Deep Throat,” and the Struggle for Honor in Washington. Washington, DC: PublicAffairs, 2006. Woodward, Bob. The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein. All the President’s Men. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
F e m i n i s m , S e c o n d - Wave During the 1960s and 1970s, a large sector of American women demanded better pay, more job opportunities,
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reproductive rights, the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and the end of the patriarchal system. This movement is known as “second-wave feminism” (the first wave referring to the battle for women’s suffrage from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century). By the late 1970s, as second-wave feminism suffered dissension between traditionalists and radicals, social conservatives were leading a backlash in the name of family values. A major catalyst of second-wave feminism was the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which articulated female frustration with domesticity and the stultifying expectation of mainstream society that a woman’s complete fulfillment should derive from being a wife and mother. Friedan’s work was liberating in that it showed individual women (at least those of the middle class) that they were not alone in questioning the assumptions imposed upon their gender, and at the same time it helped alleviate the guilt they felt for harboring career interests. In 1966, Friedan helped establish the National Organization for Women (NOW) for the stated purpose of “bring[ing] women into the mainstream of society . . . in truly equal partnership with men,” and in the following year NOW adopted a platform calling for the repeal of abortion laws and the passage of the ERA. The demand for legal, safe, and available abortion was one of the most controversial demands of secondwave feminists. NOW’s official endorsement of abortion made it the first national organization to take such a stance, but it sought to not let that polarizing issue overshadow the struggle for political and economic rights. In 1969, Friedan and others formed a new group to deal exclusively with the abortion issue, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. Abortion had been criminalized in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, yet the procedure had remained common, though hidden. It was possible to obtain a legal abortion performed by a trained physician, yet often at high cost and requiring the woman to claim she could not mentally handle having a child. Otherwise, a woman could seek an illegal, “back alley” abortion performed by an insufficiently trained individual, perhaps traveling a great distance to obtain the procedure, or dangerously attempt to self-abort the fetus. Feminists demanded the legality of all abortions, arguing that criminalization did not stop the practice, but just made it unsafe. Feminists also argued that criminalization of abortion impeded their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court agreed, and with the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision, abortion became legal. A less controversial, but still highly debated position was NOW’s support of the ERA. The amendment (with the wording “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state
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on account of sex”) had first been conceived in 1923, but the issue did not gain traction until NOW became active. Second-wave feminists, realizing that women’s suffrage rights alone were not enough for achieving gender equality, supported ERA because it would provide a constitutional guarantee. After passing the House in 1971 and the Senate in 1972, the ERA seemed headed for ratification but after a decade it fell three states short. Opponents of the ERA, largely social and religious conservatives (spearheaded by the antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly), argued that such an amendment would further disrupt gender relations, mandate unisex bathrooms, outlaw the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, subject women to the military conscription, render unconstitutional state alimony laws, and require gay and lesbian rights (because the wording used in the ERA was “sex” and not “gender”). The defeat of the ERA was in certain respects a mainstream backlash against the feminist movement, specifically its radical turn of the late 1960s. This more radical element, which came to be known as the “women’s liberation movement,” had been actively involved in the civil rights movement and New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) only to be frustrated by what was perceived as blatant sexism on the part of the male leaders heading those organizations. The “women’s libbers,” so denigrated by the media, began challenging feminine beauty standards, gender roles, violence against women, and sexual double standards. To Friedan and other older feminists, the radical activists were overly focused on “frivolous” issues (and nebulous concepts like “sexual liberation”) rather than pragmatic matters such as education and employment. In addition, the traditional feminists (as well as Schlafly and her followers) were disturbed by the women’s liberation negativity toward males, motherhood, heterosexuality, and tradition. Like any social movement, second-wave feminism was not monolithic. While liberal activists and organizations like NOW thought the best approach was working within the political system, radical groups such as the Redstockings (founded in 1969) were distrustful of established institutions due to entrenched patriarchy. Perhaps most radical were adherents of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1968), which urged women to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.” (SCUM stood for Society for Cutting Up Men. Solanas, who in 1968 shot the pop artist Andy Warhol, nearly killing him, later claimed that her manifesto was simply a satire.) Often radical groups splintered over differences in feminist philosophy pertaining to childbearing, men, marriage, and especially sexuality. Some radicals, like The Feminists (founded in the early 1970s), insisted
that a true feminist must choose to be romantically or sexually involved only with another woman; otherwise, she was a collaborator with the male system. Meanwhile, lesbians denounced the radicals for assuming that sexual orientation is a choice and not something you are born with. Mainstream feminists, most notably Friedan, who warned of a “lavender menace” in the movement, saw radical lesbians as harming the larger struggle to eliminate gender discrimination. Friedan’s fears were realized with the social conservative backlash that materialized during the late 1970s and into the 1980s, as Republican politicians and antifeminists pushed for a return to “family values,” usually meaning a desire for women to return to housewifery and remain submissive to men. Alexandra DeMonte See also: Abortion; Equal Rights Amendment; Family Values; Friedan, Betty; Gender-Inclusive Language; Lesbians; Millett, Kate; Morgan, Robin; Ms.; National Organization for Women; New Left; Schlafly, Phyllis; Steinem, Gloria.
Further Reading Davis, Flora. Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960. New York: Touchstone Books, 1991. Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Times Books, 1994. Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
F e m i n i s m , T h i r d - Wave Third-wave feminism (TWF), a social movement led largely by women reared during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, positioned itself as the successor to the political activism of first- and secondwave feminism (SWF). The movement, which emerged in the 1990s and has continued into the twenty-first century, has incited controversy by embracing voices that SWF had previously rejected. Whereas SWF primarily focused on issues pertaining to gender inequality (and, prior to the 1920s, first-wave feminism rallied for voting rights), TWF focused on diversity within the women’s movement. The theoretical roots of TWF lay in the post-structural literary criticism that emerged in academia during the 1980s. TWF drew on diverse rhetorical traditions like ecofeminism, women-of-color consciousness, queer theory, and postcolonial theory to break down bifurcations that SWF had long assumed: male/female, black/ white, bondage/liberation. Diverse thinkers and writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherríe Moraga, and
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Toni Morrison added narrative sophistication to new lines of questioning. The term “TWF” came into public consciousness after feminist and author Rebecca Walker declared herself part of a “Third Wave” in a 1992 article in Ms. Magazine. TWF coalesced around two young editors at Ms., Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. Their manifesto for the new movement, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), sought not so much to repudiate SWF as to rekindle its energy around an expanded set of feminist goals. Like SWF, Manifesta decried sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and the wage gap, but added to them issues of more recent, global concern: HIV/AIDS and STD (sexually transmitted diseases) awareness, child sexual abuse, and equal access to technology. The book argued for the liberation of female individuality—in sexual identity, above all—free from the constraints of SWF politics. Despite their obvious points of commonality, SWF and TWF stood at profound odds with one another. Manifesta embraced the “girlie” culture of the 1990s, refusing to condemn sexualized depictions in the media, which SWF had decried as objectification. SWF bristled at TWF’s casual use of words like slut, bitch, and dyke. In 2004, Richards’s leadership was called into question when fellow feminists condemned her for speaking glibly about her decision to abort two fetuses. To some feminists, TWF appeared morally bankrupt, a cloak for anarchy. Even before Manifesta appeared, the long-term vitality of TWF was very much in question. TWF’s divergence from SWF in matters of sexual politics prevented a wholesale alliance, thus divorcing TWF from powerful connections and potential funding. More disconcerting was the relationship between TWF and society at large. By embracing sexual liberation of all kinds, Manifesta could not speak for feminists with more conservative political views, the very women whose vote swayed elections in the early 2000s. TWF appealed more to well-educated elites than the massive groundswell SWF had attracted, making widespread recruitment difficult. The movement threatened to splinter before it had begun. Nevertheless, TWF remained a vital force for many women in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Richards and Walker helped found the Third Wave Foundation, which raised money for educational programs initiated by young women and transgender activists. An online journal, Feminista! A Journal of Feminist Construction, brought together intellectually inclined feminists. These and other resources, in a digital age, put feminists in touch with one another, allowing them to create activist networks unavailable to feminists of past generations. Jed Woodworth See also: Abortion; AIDS; Feminism, Second-Wave; Morrison, Toni; Ms.
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Further Reading Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Henry, Astrid. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake, eds. Third Wave Agenda. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Walker, Rebecca, ed. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
Fer raro, Geraldine As the first woman to be nominated on a major party ticket, 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro was catapulted into the national spotlight at a time of conservative backlash against women’s rights and advocacy. Her candidacy, advocating the cause of women, the working class, and the poor, was therefore characterized by conservative opponents as an act of ambition. A three-term U.S. representative from New York prior to her vice-presidential bid, Ferraro later ran twice, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Senate. Geraldine Anne Ferraro was born on August 26, 1935, in Newburgh, New York, to an Italian immigrant father, who died when she was eight, and a seamstress mother. She attended Marymount Manhattan College (BA, English, 1956) and Fordham University School of Law (JD, 1960). After practicing law for more than a decade, she served as assistant district attorney in Queens County in the Special Victims Bureau, where she became convinced that abortion was better than child abuse. From 1979 to 1985, she served three terms in the U.S. Congress, representing New York’s Ninth District (Queens), compiling a moderately liberal voting record and gaining a seat on the House Budget Committee. In the run-up to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the presumptive presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, selected Ferraro as his running mate. The historic choice energized the Democratic Party and women’s groups across the country. Ferraro, said Walter Mondale, represented the “classic American Dream.” Yet her selection was not universally popular, given the conservative tenor of the times and Ferraro’s own liberalism, ethnicity, religion (Roman Catholic), and gender. And her candidacy made waves in some unexpected ways. Married to real estate developer John Zaccaro in 1960, she continued to use her maiden name in honor of her mother. As press coverage increased, the New York Times and other publications began referring to Ferraro as “Ms.” rather than “Mrs.,” a unique designation for married women at the time. Her support of the Equal Rights Amendment, her pro-choice stance on abortion (for which she was chided by the archbishop of
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New York), and alleged improprieties—including tax evasion—on the part of Zaccaro, put her at the center of controversy and made her the target of conservative Republican reproach. In a televised debate with Vice President George H.W. Bush, Ferraro endured a series of patronizing attacks against her knowledge of foreign policy. And, despite the agreed-upon honorific of “Congresswoman,” Bush inevitably began referring to her as “Mrs. Ferraro.” After a landslide defeat at the hands of the Reagan-Bush ticket in November, Ferraro sought the New York party nomination for Senate in 1992 and 1998, losing both times. In the interim, she served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (1994–1995). Moving on to a career in law and business, she was an active supporter of another woman Democrat from New York—Hillary Rodham Clinton—in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Ferraro caused controversy at that time by attributing the success of Barack Obama, Clinton’s rival, to his being black. Stephanie Chaban See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Catholic Church; Democratic Party; Equal Rights Amendment; Marriage Names; Mondale, Walter; Ms.; New York Times, The; Obama, Barack; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party.
Further Reading Breslin, Rosemary, and John Hammer. Gerry! A Woman Making History. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1984. Ferraro, Geraldine A., with Linda Bird Francke. Ferraro: My Story. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Ferraro, Geraldine, with Catherine Whitney. Framing a Life: A Family Memoir. New York: Scribner, 1998. Katz, Lee Michael. My Name Is Geraldine Ferraro: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: New American Library, 1984.
Flag Desecration The term “flag desecration” refers to any intentional act of mistreating or dishonoring a flag, including burning; tearing; dirtying; displaying upside down or in places deemed inappropriate; defacing with messages, images, or symbols; and using as clothing, a rag, or other inappropriate purpose. Two important U.S. Supreme Court decisions that struck down flag-desecration laws as violations of the First Amendment—Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990)—set off an emotional national debate as to whether or not to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit such activity. That debate, one of the most polarizing in postwar American history, continues to the present day. Those favoring a constitutional amendment argue passionately for the need to restore the government’s authority to protect
the unique national symbol of the United States. Those opposing such an amendment argue that the flag stands for certain fundamental rights and freedoms, including the freedom to engage in forms of protest and expression that others might find offensive. While the American flag was adopted as the symbol of the United States in 1777, it was not until the Civil War that the Stars and Stripes—the flag of the North— became a popular symbol of patriotism. The earliest concerns about flag desecration came with its increasing use in commercial advertising during the post–Civil War era. In 1890, the House of Representatives passed a bill aimed primarily at curtailing such use. At the same time, there was a growing concern about the possible use of the flag for political protest by “radicals” and “subversives.” The American Flag Association was formed in 1897 to promote antidesecration legislation—a campaign soon joined by groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution. That same year, three states passed flag-desecration laws. Eventually, every other state except Alaska and Wyoming would follow suit. The first challenge to flag-desecration laws considered by the U.S. Supreme Court was Halter v. Nebraska (1907). The plaintiffs were owners of “Stars and Stripes” beer, whose label included pictures of the American flag. The Nebraska law prohibiting depictions of the flag in commercial advertising, they argued, violated their property rights. The high court ruled against the beer owners and upheld the Nebraska law on the grounds that use of the flag in advertising degrades and cheapens it, and that a state can restrict property rights for the purpose of encouraging patriotism. The case was decided purely on due-process (Fifth Amendment) grounds, not in relation to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Nevertheless, the language of the ruling was so sweeping that six decades were to pass before another flag-desecration case came before the high court. In 1968, Congress passed the Federal Flag Desecration Law in response to an event in which peace activists burned American flags in protest against the Vietnam War. The new legislation banned any display that “knowingly casts contempt upon any flag of the United States by publicly mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning or trampling upon it.” In the case of Street v. New York (1969), however, the Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional to the extent that it barred verbal expression of contempt for the flag. Ten years later, in 1979, the high court struck down as unconstitutional all laws banning flag desecration, no matter what form it takes, setting the stage for the national debate that was to follow. During the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, a demonstrator named Gregory Johnson soaked an American flag in kerosene and burned it in
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front of the convention building to protest the polices of President Ronald Reagan. Arrested and convicted under a Texas law against intentionally or knowingly desecrating a state or national flag, Johnson was fined $2,000 and sentenced to one year in jail. Five years later, in Texas v. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, for Johnson. The majority rejected the state’s claim that the law was necessary to protect against breeches of the peace, because “no disturbance to the peace actually occurred or threatened to occur because of Johnson’s burning of the flag.” The justices also rejected Texas’s claim that the law upheld a legitimate state interest in “preserving the flag as a symbol of nationhood and national unity.” Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan argued that since the law stated that desecration is illegal if “the actor knows it will seriously offend one or more persons,” Johnson’s guilt depended “on the likely communicative aspect of his expressive conduct.” This, Brennan continued, violates “a bedrock principle” of the First Amendment: “that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” The principle that “the Government may not prohibit expression because it disagrees with the message is not dependent on the particular mode in which one chooses to express an idea.” In other words, if Johnson were free to protest Reagan’s policies by writing an essay, then he was equally free to protest them by burning a flag. The Johnson ruling unleashed a political firestorm and prompted Congress quickly to pass the Flag Protection Act of 1989, which provided penalties of up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine for anyone who “knowingly mutilates, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States.” After the law took effect, thousands of people around the country burned flags in protest, leading to the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Eichman (1990). Brennan’s majority opinion in that case essentially reaffirmed the Johnson decision, now regarding federal legislation. Congress has made at least seven attempts to overrule the U.S. Supreme Court by considering a constitutional amendment making an exception to the First Amendment that would allow the government to ban flag desecration. In 1990, when the amendment was first brought up for vote, it failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in the House. After the Republicans gained a congressional majority in 1994, the measure consistently passed the House but failed in the Senate. Evan Charney See also: American Civil Liberties Union; American Civil Religion; Confederate Flag; Dukakis, Michael; Reagan, Ronald; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
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Further Reading Goldstein, Robert Justin. Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v. Johnson. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000. Welch, Michael R. Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest. Edison, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2000.
Fleiss, Heidi Known as the “Hollywood Madam” for running a prostitution ring that catered to the rich and famous, Heidi Fleiss was convicted of several criminal charges associated with the operation. Her activities challenged conventional thinking on the legality and morality of prostitution and raised questions about gender mores. Advocates of legalized prostitution cited her operation as a model of equitable pay, humane treatment, and safe working conditions. Heidi Lynne Fleiss was born on December 30, 1965, in Los Feliz, California. Her prostitution ring, which she established as a high-priced call-girl service during the early 1990s, claimed some of the richest men in the world and some of the most prominent figures in the movie industry. Her arrest at her Benedict Canyon home in June 1993 caused a scandal that shook the Hollywood community. Although her client list, allegedly including the names of Hollywood’s top executives and stars as well as members of the international elite, was never made public, speculation regarding its contents continued for years. The call-girl operation was the subject of a 1999 documentary film, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, by Nick Broomfield, and a 2004 made-for-television movie, Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss. Fleiss, twenty-seven at the time of her arrest, was charged with five counts of pandering and one count of possession of narcotics. Her lawyers made a strong case for entrapment, which nearly resulted in a deadlocked jury, but she was ultimately found guilty of three counts of pandering. Her defense attorneys then challenged the jury deliberations and appealed the verdict. While she awaited a retrial, federal charges were also levied against Fleiss. She was indicted on fourteen counts of conspiracy, income tax evasion, and money laundering, and in 1997 she was sentenced to three years in prison and 300 hours of community service. She was released from prison in 1998 after serving twenty months. A more recent chapter in Fleiss’s controversial career centered on her plans to open Heidi’s Stud Farm, the first brothel in America that would employ male prostitutes and cater to female clients, some 80 miles (129 kilometers) outside of Las Vegas. The proposed venture immediately raised resistance from both sides of the liberal-conservative divide. Established brothel owners
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in Nevada feared that Fleiss’s presence might attract unwanted attention to their industry and perhaps renew the battle to outlaw prostitution in the state. Fleiss suggested that the enterprise would present a sexual discrimination challenge to existing legislation, since male prostitution would necessitate a rewording of relevant state statutes, all of which are female specific. Cynthia J. Miller See also: Hefner, Hugh; Relativism, Moral; Sexual R evolution.
Further Reading Fleiss, Heidi. Pandering. Los Angeles: One Hour Entertainment, 2002. Friess, Steve. “Betting on the Studs.” Newsweek, December 12, 2005. Hursley, Timothy. Brothels of Nevada: Candid Views of America’s Legal Sex Industry. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Sheehan, Jack. Skin City: Uncovering the Las Vegas Sex Industry. Las Vegas, NV: Stephens Press, 2004.
Flynt, Larry As the founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt has been a central figure in the culture wars over pornography. Born Larry Claxton Flynt on November 1, 1942, in Salyersville, Kentucky, he was raised in poverty and joined the U.S. Army at age fifteen. After leaving the military in 1964, he opened a strip club in Dayton, Ohio, followed by others that carried the name Hustler. In 1974, he founded Hustler magazine, the flagship product of what would become a multimilliondollar, multimedia adult entertainment enterprise based in Los Angeles, Larry Flynt Publications (LFP). Unlike the upscale Playboy and Penthouse, Hustler aimed low, exploiting graphic sexual pictures of women and including unabashedly sexist, crude, and degrading jokes and cartoons. The formula proved commercially successful, bringing Flynt wealth, notoriety, and legal trouble. In 1977, Flynt was sentenced by a court in Cincinnati to seven to twenty-five years in prison for pandering obscenity and “engaging in organized crime.” Although the conviction was later overturned (Flynt spent only six days in prison), the ordeal woke Flynt to the possibility that a person could be imprisoned in the United States for “tasteless” speech. This realization was pivotal in the formation of Flynt’s public identity as an advocate of free speech. That image was solidified a decade later in the landmark case Hustler v. Falwell (1988), in which Flynt persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that extreme and highly offensive parody is protected by the First Amendment when directed at public officials or public persons. In that case, Flynt had been sued by
Jerry Falwell, the televangelist and leader of the Moral Majority, for an ad parody in Hustler that portrayed the minister as a drunken hypocrite who had sex with his mother in an outhouse. Flynt’s defense against Falwell inspired a successful and controversial film, The People v. Larry Flynt (1996), directed by Milos Forman and co-produced by Oliver Stone. Critics of the film, such as the feminist Gloria Steinem, one of Hustler’s most prominent detractors, argued that it glorified Flynt while downplaying the misogyny and violence associated with his pornography. The defense of pornography as free speech often runs up against degrading and offensive portrayals of women—in Hustler’s case, even the crude glorification or incitement of violence against women and children, as in the magazine’s long-running cartoon Chester the Molester, drawn by a convicted pedophile. By Flynt’s own admission, Hustler does degrade women and is purposefully offensive—part of his editorial policy is to be offensive to as many people as possible and to expose what he considers the hypocrisy of “political correctness.” Perhaps the most offensive issue of Hustler appeared in June 1978, featuring a picture of a woman stuffed into a meat grinder, transformed into hamburger. Beside the image was Flynt’s clearly printed declaration, “We will no longer hang up women like pieces of meat.” At the same time, Flynt has spent a sizable fortune in the defense of the First Amendment. His political activism has gone beyond the protection of pornography. A perennial Democrat, he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1984 against Ronald Reagan. In 1998, Flynt became a celebrated figure during the impeachment proceeding against President Bill Clinton when, in his effort to point out the hypocrisy of congressional Republicans, Flynt offered a million dollars to anyone who could verify his or her “illicit sexual relationship with a U.S. congressman.” This information, published in a special magazine called The Flynt Report, led to the resignation of House Speaker–elect Robert Livingston (R-LA) and helped shore up popular support for the embattled president. An enigmatic personality, Flynt in 1977 announced that he had become a born-again Christian, led to conversion by Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of President Jimmy Carter. In his autobiography, Flynt claims to have had a vision of God while flying on his private jet. He later rejected God after suffering extreme physical pain in the wake of the attempt on his life in March 1978 by a white supremacist (who was offended by Hustler’s interracial photo spreads) that left Flynt partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. In 2003, describing himself as “a smut peddler who cares,” he appeared on the ballot for California governor in the recall of Gray Davis and received 17,458 votes. Omar Swartz
Foc u s on the Family See also: Clinton Impeachment; Falwell, Jerry; Hefner, Hugh; Political Correctness; Pornography; Reagan, Ronald; Sex Offenders; Sexual Revolution; Steinem, Gloria; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Flynt, Larry. Sex, Lies, and Politics: The Naked Truth. New York: Kensington, 2004. ———. An Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast. Los Angeles: Dove Books, 1996. Kipnis, Laura. “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler.” In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Nelson Cary, and Paula A. Treichler, 373–91. New York: Routledge, 1992. Smolla, Rodney A. Jerry Falwell v. Larry Flynt: The First Amendment on Trial. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
F o c u s o n t h e Fa m i l y Concerned about the state of the American family, evangelical Christian and child psychologist James Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1970. A nonprofit organization “dedicated to nurturing and defending families worldwide,” Focus had modest beginnings with a half-hour weekly radio program broadcast locally from Arcadia, California, a film series of Dobson’s seminar tapes, and a part-time secretary. It eventually became one of the largest nonprofit Christian organizations in America, reaching an international audience with daily radio broadcasts, several magazines, and newsletters, books, and videos. As a major player of the Religious Right, Focus has been active in the culture wars for decades. Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since 1991, Focus has more than a thousand employees and annual revenues exceeding $140 million. It is estimated that 220 million people in more than 160 countries regularly listen to its daily radio programs. The message of the organization is further disseminated by ten monthly magazines with a combined circulation of 2.3 million. Additionally, Focus has a network of more than fifteen Web sites that provide information on specific spiritual, social, and political issues. With more than seventy affiliated organizations, Focus communicates its founder’s concerns by offering biblical guidance to help families make a home based on Christian values. Dobson is the author of Dare to Discipline (1970 and 1996), a moral parenting guide for a generation of American parents—fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist alike—that has sold more than 4.5 million copies. Dobson’s work is a Christian counterpart to Benjamin Spock’s more permissive Baby and Child Care (1945). The reputation Dobson garnered from his book gained him access to the White House, first under President Jimmy Carter and then under President Ronald Reagan. In 1979, he served as a delegate to the White House
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Conference on Families. In 1981, he formed the lobbying group Family Research Council. And in 1982, he was appointed to the National Advisory Commission to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Focus has remained politically active into the twentyfirst century, serving as a pressure group aligned with the Republican Party. Dobson’s belief about the family emphasizes sexual and gender identity as essential to establishing healthy self-awareness and communion with God. The efforts of Focus thus emphasize education on sexuality and gender, with specific concern for “saving” and “protecting” children from perceived antifamily social ills, such as feminism, pornography, infidelity, and homosexuality. In January 1989, hours before the execution of serial killer Ted Bundy in Florida, Dobson was granted an interview with the condemned and used the occasion to campaign against pornography (which Bundy blamed for “shaping and molding” his violent compulsion). In addition to its widespread media programs, Focus on the Family works within its network of evangelical churches by holding “Community Impact” seminars. These events focus on political and moral issues and typically end with appeals to the audience members to take a more active role in their churches and communities. Focus also hosts conferences called “Love and Respect Marriage” and “Love Won Out,” which emphasize traditional marriage and heterosexuality. The one-day “Love Won Out” conferences, held across the nation, use the testimony of “experts,” pastors, and former gays to teach that there is a way out of the “bondage” of homosexuality. The rhetoric of Focus on the Family is less overtly political than that of the Religious Right in general, allowing it to avoid wide-scale criticism. Nevertheless, critics attack Focus for its overt reaction to feminism. Dobson’s success at reaching his largely female audience has been his ability to recast feminist ideals in ways that allow women to feel empowered without subverting patriarchal power. At the same time, Focus uses “countermemory” in order to create nostalgia for the 1950s (when America was “good” and women were more “traditional”) and disdain for the 1960s (when America turned “immoral”). In its critique of the 1960s counterculture, Focus lists five “bad” legacies: drugs and rock music, the sexual revolution, feminism, divorce, and “God is dead” theology. Such views offer a distinct alternative to the leftist version of history, which characterizes the 1960s as a time when great strides were made for social and racial equality. Despite its “soft sell” approach, Focus on the Family has faced its share of controversy. In 1992, the organization teamed with Promise Keepers to promote passage of Amendment 2 in Colorado, a referendum to deny homosexual protections at the state and local levels. The measure was passed by voters but struck down as uncon-
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stitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court four years later. And while Dobson was not as overt as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other members of the Religious Right in blaming specific groups in America for the terrorist attacks of September 11, he did emphasize consequences for America’s fall from righteousness, mentioning abortion and other manifestations of “immortality.” In 2002, Dobson urged Christian parents to remove their children from public schools in California, Connecticut, and Minnesota because of their “godless and immoral curriculum.” And in 2006, he joined other political conservatives in objecting to concerns about global warming. Controversy has never hindered the efforts of Focus on the Family, which remains a prominent force in American culture. Although Dobson stepped down as the organization’s president in 2003, for the next five years he remained its central figure, continuing as chairman of its board of directors. Karma R. Chávez See also: Dobson, James; Family Values; Feminism, SecondWave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Pornography; Promise Keepers; Religious Right; Sex Education; Sexual Revolution; Spock, Benjamin; Stay-at-Home Mothers.
Further Reading Burlein, Ann. Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Buss, Dale. Family Man: The Biography of Dr. James Dobson. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2005. Focus on the Family Web site. www.family.org.
Fonda, Jane Film star and political activist Jane Fonda, daughter of Hollywood icon Henry Fonda, grew up in a virulently anticommunist family as a privileged American “princess,” although her childhood was marred by her mother’s suicide. As a young woman, she became a movie icon and multimillionaire in her own right. Married three times—to French film director Roger Vadim, 1960s’ political reformer Tom Hayden, and media mogul Ted Turner—she repeatedly reinvented herself: as sex goddess, Vietnam War protester, and queen of the physical fitness phenomenon. Born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda in New York on December 21, 1937, she attended Vassar College (1956–1958), then studied art in Paris and became a fashion model and cover girl for Vogue (1959). After an apprenticeship with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio, she appeared on Broadway and in films to favorable reviews. Vadim (who had made Bridget Bardot a star) cast Fonda as a seductress in Barbarella (1968), a cartoonlike
film that spawned popular, sexy, comic book heroines in her image. After 1968, Fonda threw herself into radical political activity, defending the beleaguered Black Panthers, joining with Native American protesters, especially during the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, and encouraging GIs to desert. Perhaps the quintessential liberated woman of the age, she lived out her generation’s feminist and feminine fantasies. In 1972 during the Vietnam War, Fonda traveled to North Vietnam and posed for photographs atop Soviet-made anti-aircraft guns. Segments of the radical left applauded her boldness, but supporters of the war denounced her as unpatriotic. Conservatives dubbed her “Hanoi Jane,” and bumper stickers called her a traitor. Fonda’s controversial role in the antiwar movement did not damage her film career, however. Twice she won Oscars for best performance by an actress: for her role as a small-town prostitute living on the edge in New York in Klute (1971) and for her portrayal of the wife of a Vietnam veteran—and the lover of another—in Coming Home (1978). She also appeared in a string of distinctly political movies, from Julia (1977), in which she played the radical 1930s’ playwright Lillian Hellman, to The China Syndrome (1979), which alerted audiences to the risk of a nuclear reactor meltdown. In the 1980s, she produced a series of commercially successful exercise videotapes, beginning with the Jane Fonda Workout (1982), the highest-selling home video in history (more than 17 million copies), and wrote several bestselling exercise books. Fonda’s wealth and fame helped elect husband Tom Hayden to the California State Assembly in 1982. Six years later, in a surprising TV appearance, she apologized for her trip to North Vietnam and her insensitivity to POWs, MIAs, and their families. During the 1990s, married to Ted Turner, she reincarnated herself as corporate wife, though after their divorce she again staked out her own independence, writing My Life So Far (2005), an autobiography that earned her respect as a writer. Her book tour was marked by the kind of confrontation that had become a Jane Fonda trademark. Jonah Raskin See also: American Indian Movement; Baez, Joan; Black Panther Party; Feminism, Second-Wave; Hayden, Tom; Turner, Ted; Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Andersen, Chris. Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda. New York: Henry Holt, 1990. Burke, Carole. Camp All-American: Hanoi Jane and the High and Tight. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Fonda, Jane. My Life So Far. New York: Random House, 2005. Hersberger, Mary. Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an American Icon. New York: New Press, 2005.
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Actress Jane Fonda, meeting with a North Vietnamese government official in 1972, was regarded as a traitor among conservatives for consorting with the enemy. Decades later, many still referred to her as “Hanoi Jane.” (STF/AFP/Getty Images)
F o o d a n d D r u g Ad m i n i s t r a t i o n The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a U.S. federal agency responsible for protecting public health by monitoring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary medicines, medical devices (from tongue suppressors to heart defibrillators to breast implants), biologics (including vaccines, blood supplies, and gene therapy), food (other than meat and poultry), livestock feeds and pet foods, cosmetics, and machines that emit radiation (such as x-ray machines and microwave ovens). For years the FDA has been in the spotlight of political controversy, criticized for overly regulating or for not regulating enough. The FDA began in 1906 after President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Food and Drug Act, prohibiting the sale of mislabeled and adulterated food, beverages, and medicines. Enforcement was initially carried out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), specifically its Bureau of Chemistry, which had been earlier commissioned by President Abraham Lincoln. A reorganization in 1927 led to the creation of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration. Three years later it was renamed the Food and Drug Administration. In
1940, the FDA was transferred from under the USDA to the Federal Security Agency, which became the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953) and still later the Department of Health and Human Services (1980).
Reforms of 1938 and 1962 Following the 107 poisoning deaths of mostly children from a “wonder drug” elixir, Congress passed the Federal Food, Cosmetic, and Drug Act (1938), expanding the FDA’s power to require safety testing prior to the marketing of drugs and therapeutic devices. The law also empowered the agency to inspect pertinent factories. The following year the FDA issued its first food regulations, establishing standards for tomatoes and related products. Concern in the early 1950s over chemical safety in food and cosmetics led Congress to enact the Pesticide Chemical Amendments (1954) for determining acceptable levels of pesticide residue on raw fruit and vegetables. The Food Additives Amendments (1958) required manufacturers to prove the safety of their additives, and one provision of the law (the Delaney Amendment) banned any that cause cancer. This was followed by the Color Additive Amendments
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(1960), requiring proof of safety for color additives in food, drugs, and cosmetics. In 1959 the antitrust subcommittee headed by Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) began holding hearings on the questionable marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry. The result was the passage of the Drug Efficacy Amendment (1962), requiring drug manufacturers to prove not only the safety but the efficacy of their products. In addition, warning labels were required for drugs that produce side effects. From that point forward, pharmaceutical companies were required to back claims of a drug’s curative powers with scientific data rather than testimonials and anecdotes. An earlier draft of Kefauver’s bill had died in committee, but the issue was revived in response to public outrage over birth defects caused by thalidomide, a stomach and sedative drug made in Europe. A subsidiary of the Vick Chemical Company had sought to introduce this medicine to the American market, but the FDA in 1960 blocked the application, citing the need for further safety study. It later became known that fetal exposure to thalidomide leads to birth defects such as the absence of limbs. Since the drug had been limited to the testing stage, there were only 17 known birth defects in the United States. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy presented the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Service to Frances Kelsey, the FDA reviewer who had flagged thalidomide.
“Drug Lag” Controversy In order to comply with the 1962 law, efficacy tests were conducted on the 4,000 drugs that had been approved between 1938 and 1966. Short on staff (only fourteen medical officers oversaw drug screening), the FDA in June 1966 utilized the services of the American Academy of Sciences and its National Research Council, enabling a complete drug review. It led to the Drug Efficacy Study Implementation (1968), which removed worthless drugs from the market. Other reform measures were passed, including the Drug Abuse Control Amendments (1965), to safeguard against the abuse of prescriptions, and the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (1966), to strengthen FDA mandates pertaining to honest and informative labels for food, drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices. During the 1970s some FDA responsibilities were transferred to newly created agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, but this was offset by Congress’s requiring the FDA to regulate machines that emit radiation and to take responsibility for biologics. In 1972, the FDA began reviewing over-the-counter drugs for safety, efficacy, and proper labeling. In 1976, following some failures of heart pacemakers and some sterility incidents caused by the Dalkon Shield (a birth-control device), Congress mandated that all medical devices sold in the country
must meet FDA approval. In 1980, the agency began regulating infant formula. This increase of mandates coincided with a growing conservative backlash, heightened by the frustration of pharmaceutical companies over drug approval. President Richard Nixon sought to remove Democrats from the important positions within the FDA in order to “take political control” and to replace them with personnel who know “the needs of business.” FDA critics complained of a “drug lag” caused by an onerous drug-review process. Conservative pundits, arguing that the public was being denied the latest medical breakthroughs, complained, “Americans are dying of red tape.” Although a 1980 study by the General Accounting Office of Congress concluded that the largely exaggerated drug lag was due to a thinly stretched FDA staff, the agency continued to suffer cutbacks—shrinking from 7,850 staffers to 7,500 under President Jimmy Carter, and from 7,500 to 6,800 under President Ronald Reagan. Complaints about the drug lag eventually led to the passage of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (1992), which enabled the FDA to collect revenue for hiring more reviewers in order to expedite the approval process. Skeptics of the drug lag note that between 1970 and 1992 the United States had a better track record than Europe in terms of shielding the public from unsafe drugs. During that period the FDA pulled from the market nine drugs that turned out to be unsafe (three of which had been approved based on fraudulent information), whereas France had to withdraw thirty-three and Britain thirty. By the mid-1990s new drug approvals were occurring at a faster rate in the United States than in Europe.
AIDS, Birth Control, and Unsafe Imports With the outbreak of AIDS in 1981 the FDA was once again at the center of a crisis. The agency was criticized for waiting until March 1985 to require blood banks to screen for the AIDS virus. The agency was under enormous pressure to expedite the approval of drugs to fight AIDS. One of these was AZT, which underwent human testing beginning in 1985. Two years later it was approved, but the gay activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, known as ACT UP, thought there was foot-dragging. Its members began staging protests along Wall Street as well as in front of FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, hanging or burning effigies of Reagan and FDA commissioner Frank Young. The FDA finally approved parallel marketing and testing to get AIDS drugs to patients quicker. David Kessler’s tenure as FDA commissioner (1990–1997) brought the agency under fire by conservatives, even though he was a Republican and originally appointed by President George H.W. Bush. On health matters, Kessler turned out to be progressive. He cracked down on companies that misled consumers with false
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food labels, such as those marketing concentrated orange juice as “fresh.” In implementing the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act of 1990, he required food labels to list per-serving nutritional information. He began the fourteen-year ban on silicone breast implants, due to health concerns, but in 2006 the FDA ruled the devices safe. Declaring cigarettes “drug delivery devices,” Kessler suggested in 1995 that tobacco, because of its nicotine content, should be regulated as a drug, triggering a public debate on not only tobacco but the FDA itself. After Republicans took control of the House in 1995 the most ideological gave consideration to abolishing the FDA, viewing it as an enemy of economic opportunity and human liberty, but Kessler fought back, warning that such action would be a return to the “dark ages.” The most controversial issue the FDA dealt with in its long history was the approval of Plan B, an emergency contraceptive (often referred to as the “morning-after pill”), as an over-the-counter drug. Plan B was originally available in 1999 with a doctor’s prescription. In 2003, the maker of the contraceptive applied to have the FDA approve it for over-the-counter use. Abortion opponents have long contended that Plan B is a method of abortion. The contraceptive consists of a synthetic hormone in two pills, one taken 72 hours after sexual intercourse and the other 12 hours later. The pills prevent ovulation or fertilization, but may also prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. In 2006, the FDA approved Plan B as an over-the-counter contraceptive, but restricted it to women eighteen years and older. Those critical of the FDA’s tarrying over this issue argue that science was held hostage to politics and religion. By the mid-2000s some 76 million Americans were annually sickened by the food they purchased, leading to 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. Although the portion of the FDA budget for food safety had shrunk from about 50 percent in the early 1970s to 25 percent in 2006, the public wanted more monitoring of the nation’s food supply. In 2008, while Americans were importing 20 percent of food, 80 percent of drugs, and a majority of medical devices, the FDA was visiting few overseas factories. That same year eighty-one Americans died due to contaminated heparin (a blood thinner) that had been manufactured in China. Reports at the time estimated that 10 percent of all drugs manufactured in China were contaminated. As a consequence of the budget squeeze the FDA was working under, it was estimated that it would take fifty years for its inspectors to visit all of China’s pharmaceutical plants and seventy years to visit the ones producing medical equipment. In 2008, it would have cost the FDA $524 million to inspect each of the nation’s 65,500 food facilities at least once and $3.16 billion to inspect the pertinent 189,000 food facilities overseas. Although all agreed that the FDA had poor oversight of the $1 trillion of imported food and drugs sold annually
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in the United States, there was no consensus on what steps should be taken. Roger Chapman See also: AIDS; Birth Control; China; Environmental Movement; Genetically Modified Foods; Health Care; Medical Malpractice; Medical Marijuana; Obesity Epidemic; Science Wars; Smoking in Public.
Further Reading Hawthorne, Fran. Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Hilts, Philip J. Protecting America’s Health: FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pines, Wayne L., ed. FDA: A Century of Consumer Protection. Washington, DC: Food and Drug Law Institute, 2006. U.S. Food and Drug Administration Web site. www.fda.gov.
Ford, Gerald Gerald R. Ford became the thirty-eighth president of the United States (1974–1977) by virtue of the two most controversial national events—and the attendant culture wars—of his time: the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Republican President Richard Nixon had expended the political capital needed to fight communism abroad and students and Congress at home; his secret escalation of the war in Vietnam, campaign appeals to the “Silent Majority,” and impoundment of money from budgets approved by Congress, among other actions, deepened the divisions in American society and on Capitol Hill. After Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 amid charges of bribery and income tax violations, members of Congress insisted that, to fill the vacancy, Nixon appoint someone of integrity and modesty who could work with both parties. Ford, at that time Republican Minority Leader of the House of Representatives and a long-standing representative from Michigan, was their first choice. When Nixon himself resigned on August 9, 1974, as a result of the Watergate scandal, these qualities appeared as Ford’s greatest assets. Gerald Rudolph Ford, born Leslie King, Jr., on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, never won an election outside Michigan’s Fifth Congressional District, but he entered the White House with a promise to be “president of all the people.” Besides his long stint as a moderately conservative congressman (1949–1973), Ford was known for his service on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Before beginning
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his career in politics, he attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (BA, 1935), where he was a star center on the football team; received a law degree at Yale University (1941); served in the U.S. Navy (1942–1946) during World War II; and practiced law in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After assuming the presidency, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller, a favorite of the progressive wing of the GOP, as his vice president—a choice quickly confirmed by both houses of Congress. To distinguish his policies and practices from those of his predecessor, Ford opened the Oval Office to a diversity of government officials and interest groups, such as the Congressional Black Caucus; began holding regular press conferences; and inaugurated a clemency program for Vietnam War draft evaders and deserters—all during his first month in office. To complete the process of establishing a new direction, Ford on September 8, 1974, granted Nixon a full and complete pardon. Far from its intended result, the pardon permanently linked Ford’s presidency with that of Nixon and exacerbated the polarization in American society. Overnight, Ford’s approval rating dropped from 74 to 50 percent. Many Americans believed, as the New York Times editorialized, that “in a time when the nation has been repeatedly dismayed by so many acts of corruption, intrigue and deceit, President Ford has signally failed to provide courageous and impartial moral leadership . . . [and] moved secretly and suddenly to block the normal workings of justice.” Democratic cooperation with the administration suddenly ended, and the conservative wing of the GOP, led by California governor Ronald Reagan, began openly accusing the president of abandoning the party’s traditional principles by continuing policies such as détente with the Soviet Union. Still, the tenor of public life seemed to improve during the Ford presidency. Unlike his predecessor, he did not conduct the presidency as an ongoing political campaign. Indeed, he initiated several changes intended to play down the symbolic significance of the office, such as asking that “Hail to the Chief” occasionally be replaced with the Michigan fight song. More significantly, he did not make his stance on such divisive issues as busing, affirmative action, or abortion the central themes of his presidency. In other words, there was no “southern strategy.” Because he did not make his position on key social issues the main thrust of his administration, Ford in effect had to run for the presidency in 1976 twice: first against Reagan for the Republican nomination, then against the Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter. The race for the GOP nomination proved extremely close. Although Ford ultimately won the party nod, Reagan was able to dictate much of the platform; he insisted on adding planks that called for constitutional amendments banning busing
and abortion. In the general election, Ford lost to Carter by 2 percentage points of the popular vote. Ford later described his presidency as “a time to heal.” Although he did not end the culture wars over Vietnam and Watergate, nor succeed in uniting his own party, Ford did encourage an atmosphere in which the most divisive issues in America were contested less fiercely. He died at age ninety-three on December 26, 2006, and was eulogized in a New York Times editorial for restoring “a measure of respect to the presidency.” David W. Veenstra See also: Abortion; Affirmative Action; Busing, School; Carter, Jimmy; Chisholm, Shirley; Cold War; Equal Rights Amendment; Nixon, Richard; Presidential Pardons; Reagan, Ronald; Silent Majority; Vietnam War; Watergate.
Further Reading Cannon, James M. Time and Chance: Gerald Ford’s Appointment with History. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Ford, Gerald R. A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Greene, John Robert. The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Hartmann, Robert T. Palace Politics: An Inside Account of the Ford Years. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Mieczkowski, Yanek. Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005.
F o r e m a n , D ave As founder of the militant environmental organization Earth First!, Dave Foreman played a major role in shaping America’s environmental consciousness. Known for promoting aggressive action to protect the environment, Foreman and his fellow Earth First!ers often chained themselves to trees, stormed Forest Service buildings, and put spikes in trees to injure loggers. Such tactics made Foreman an iconic figure to radical environmentalists, but a terrorist to many moderates and conservatives. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on February 18, 1946, Foreman had an early life that pointed toward anything but environmental radicalism. The son of a U.S. Air Force officer, he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, campaigned for conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, and supported the war in Vietnam. His interest in the outdoors led him in 1973 to a job as a New Mexico field consultant at the Wilderness Society, a mainstream environmental organization. His views on the environment changed profoundly after reading the work of anarchist environmental writer Edward Abbey. Promoting eco-sabotage to protect nature, Abbey’s writings exalted wilderness ideals and were decidedly hostile toward the establishment. Of Abbey’s
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Desert Solitaire (1968), Foreman said, “It was the first book I’d ever read that I totally agreed with.” With inspiration from (and soon a friendship with) Abbey, Foreman founded Earth First! in 1980. The organization’s slogan reflected its purpose: “No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth.” Foreman’s most famous environmental escapades with Earth First! include a funeral for the Colorado River on Lake Powell during a presentation by Secretary of the Interior James Watt in 1982, and a highly publicized “tree-sit” to save old-growth trees in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest in 1983. After his arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for complicity in an eco-terrorism case in 1987, Foreman toned down his militant stance—though his radical ideas about the importance of wilderness have never ceased. In 2003, he called for the “rewilding” of the American Great Plains with bison, wolves, bears, and even cheetahs and elephants. While admired by some, Foreman and Earth First! were perceived by many as the epitome of environmentalism gone wrong, and that included some of the movement’s own more moderate members. In 1984, the editor of Environmental Ethics characterized Earth First! tactics as “paramilitary operations . . . closer to terrorism than civil disobedience,” while U.S. Representative Pat William (D-MT) stated, “These people are terrorists, plain and simple.” Nicolaas Mink See also: Boy Scouts of America; Earth Day; Ecoterrorism; Environmental Movement; Goldwater, Barry; Hill, Julia “Butterfly”; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Watt, James.
Further Reading Foreman, Dave. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. New York: Harmony Books, 1991. Nash, Roderick Frazier. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Zakin, Susan. Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement. New York: Viking, 1993.
Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness Since their origins, the national forests, parklands, and wilderness areas of the United States have represented highly contested grounds on which the American people have fought deeply rooted cultural, economic, and ideological battles. Far from being landscapes solely for the purpose of harvesting timber or witnessing natural beauty, these areas of the public domain are cultural creations that shed light on how Americans regard the natural environment and how they view the government’s role in such matters.
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Much a part of the contemporary culture wars, the debate concerning the use and control of U.S. forests, parks, and wilderness goes back to the early twentieth century. In 1891, after more than a century of unbridled expansion into the western United States, the federal government began to set aside forest reserves. It was not until 1905, however, that President Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service to manage these new national forests in perpetuity for the good of the greatest number of people. Veteran forester Gifford Pinchot was put in charge, which seemed to be a victory for conservationists. As it turned out, Pinchot believed in managing the forests as an economic resource, whereas John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, believed in preserving them as natural environment. These two views came to head in a seven-year battle in the early 1900s over whether to dam the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. Pinchot urged the creation of a reservoir to provide water to San Francisco; Muir regarded the plan as a betrayal of natural preservation. The environmental interests led by Muir lost the debate. The damming of the Tuolumne, which began in 1913, galvanized those wishing to see part of the public domain preserved for geologic monuments, biological diversity, and natural solitude. In the course of previous decades, the U.S. government had set aside land at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming (1872), Mackinac Island in Michigan (1875), Yosemite National Park in California (1890), and Glacier National Park in Montana (1910), but these merely foreshadowed the expansion of the National Park system following passage of the National Park Service Act in 1916. In harmony with Muir’s preservation philosophy, the federal government was to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same.” Between 1916 and the end of the decade, Congress created Hawaii Volcanoes, Denali, Zion, Grand Canyon, and Acadia national parks, which burgeoning tourism soon transformed into places of recreation more than preservation. At an alarming rate, roads began slicing through the parklands to allow greater access to scenery, and a variety of amenities were built to accommodate the visitors. The environmental preservationists deplored the unintended consequences of this growth.
Wilderness over Tourism In reaction to these developments, a cadre of forwardlooking environmentalists that included Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, and Robert Sterling Yard founded the Wilderness Society in 1935 to protect parts of the public domain from the growing pressures of tourism. This movement provided the institutional foundation for the designation of official wilderness areas in which no roads would be built. After several decades of lobbying, the
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president of the Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser, persuaded Congress to pass the Wilderness Act (1964). This legislation set aside 9 million acres (3,642,170 hectares) of wilderness and provided guidelines to protect more in the future. The physical and cultural distinctions between forests, parklands, and federal wilderness have never been clearly delineated. While they all remain part of the public domain, the designation of a specific land area is a political decision, determining what the government can and cannot do to it. Complicating matters is the fact that many of these landscapes are adjacent to or inside one another; some wilderness areas are inside national parks and forests, and certain national parks have been fashioned out of national forests. Also, forests, wilderness, and parks have been used differently by diverse peoples with contradictory visions of how the lands should be used. The timber industry prefers clear-cutting, but preservationists object to the destruction of old-growth virgin stands (which are diverse in species). Moreover, the federal government is sometimes seen as engaging in corporate welfare when it grants timber, mineral, oil and gas, and grazing rights at bargain prices. “Welfare cowboys” is what the late radical environmentalist Edward Abbey called ranchers who graze cattle on public lands. At the same time, state and local governments often are frustrated by land-use planning that is controlled far away in Washington. Such differing conceptions of land use have led to conflicts over oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the destruction of cultural resources in wilderness areas from Florida to Wisconsin, the loss of habitats for the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, and the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park.
Owls Versus Loggers The small bird known as the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) caused a large commotion in the 1980s when its habitat was threatened by logging. Environmentalists cried foul at the rapid increase in old-growth harvests in national forests from central Washington State to northern California. For environmentalists, old-growth forests represent the peak of biodiversity in North America, providing a home for thousands of species; for the federal government and the commercial logging companies, old-growth forests represent potentially lucrative commodities to be exploited. Landowners in a position to profit from logging typically scoff at the “do-nothing cult” (environmentalists) for acting as if trees live forever. Until the spotted owl became a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists appeared destined to lose the battle to save these stands of ancient trees. In 1987, the Sierra Club legal defense team brought
the first of three lawsuits on behalf of the northern spotted owl, contending that the owl’s rights as a threatened species trumped the rights of loggers who wished to harvest timber in national forests. The Sierra Club and other environmental advocates, in this case comprised largely of wealthy urbanites from California, wanted to suspend all logging near spotted owls and to carve new wilderness areas out of the national forests. The largely blue-collar workforce of local communities contended that this would destroy their livelihoods and towns. As one logger complained, “Try paying your bills with an owl.” When President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed into law the Northwest Forest Plan, which protected the owl’s habitat in 24.5 million acres (9,414,798 hectares) in three states, Democrats and environmentalists praised the move as an important step in protecting the nation’s forestlands from money-hungry loggers. The political right, however, contended that Clinton had exerted federal authority in an egregious way and at the same time drastically altered the original intentionality of national forests. In the tradition of Gifford Pinchot, they argued, the government had the right to log national forests.
The Snowmobile Controversy The snowmobile controversy in Yellowstone National Park also highlights ideological differences regarding wilderness areas in the public domain. Although snowmobiles had been used in Yellowstone since the 1960s, their use increased exponentially during the 1980s as a growing number of recreation enthusiasts discovered the thrill of exploring the back country of the park at speeds of as much as 80 miles (129 kilometers) an hour. By the mid-1990s, nearly 75,000 snowmobiles were traversing the park each winter. The original National Park Service Act, which charged the National Park Service with creating outdoor recreation opportunities for Americans, provided a firm legal standing for those who enjoyed snowmobiling in Yellowstone. But environmentalists began calling for the elimination of snowmobiles from national parks on the grounds that they disturb wildlife and pollute the air and snow pack. Those concerns registered with Clinton, who called for the slow elimination of snowmobiling in Yellowstone, thereby infuriating many political conservatives. As Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA) complained, “If environmental extremists continue to have their way, people will be looking at Yellowstone through a plate glass window.” Upon entering office in 2001, President George W. Bush rolled back the Clinton-era rules, siding with the snowmobilers. Bush’s decision sent the Yellowstone controversy into the judicial system, where new rulings on whether to allow snowmobiles in the park came almost annually. In September 2008, for example, a judge at the
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Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., overturned the Bush administration’s plan to increase daily snowmobile access from 260 to 540 at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, arguing that this would undermine the mandate to protect the public land. Americans have conflicting views about the purpose and use of national forests, parks, and wilderness areas, which are variously seen as resources for industrial use, as places for recreation, or as areas of undisturbed nature. These sites are also drawn into the culture wars because of conflicting philosophies regarding the role of the federal government. Nicolaas Mink See also: Animal Rights; Arrow, Tre; Bush Family; Carson, Rachel; Cheney Family; Clinton, Bill; Corporate Welfare; Earth Day; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Foreman, Dave; Hill, Julia “Butterfly”; Leopold, Aldo; Watt, James.
Further Reading Chase, Alston. Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park. San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1987. Huber, Peter. Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Lewis, Michael L., ed. American Wilderness: A New History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. National Park Service Web site. www.nps.gov. Neely, William E., ed. Public Lands: Use and Misuse. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007. Rothman, Hal. The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Simpson, John Warfield. Dam! Water, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
Foucault, Michel The French philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault, who challenged the received wisdom of Enlightenment humanism and rationality, is noted for his theories on the interrelationship of knowledge and the enforcement of moral norms, resistance to power, the establishment of modern medicine and the social sciences, and the politics of sexuality. His writings on these and related topics have profoundly influenced American scholarship and cultural politics since the 1960s. The son of a doctor, Paul-Michel Foucault was born on June 15, 1926, in Portiers, France. Raised Catholic,
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he attended Jesuit-run schools and was an acolyte and choirboy. Later he studied psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, and Marxism at the Ecole Normale in Paris (PhD, 1961). As a college student, while under the sway of the Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser, Foucault briefly joined the Communist Party. After teaching at various institutions in France, Sweden, Poland, and Tunisia, he taught psychology at the University of ParisNanterre in Vincennes (1968–1970) and the history of systems of thought at the College de France (1970–1984). Foucault died of AIDS in Paris on June 25, 1984. Foucault’s writings span several disciplines, including history, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. Collectively, they examine the nature of power not as a possession of dominant groups but as a constantly shifting set of relationships or discourses that constitute all persons as subjects of power. This approach undermined the presuppositions of radical politics such as Marxism and feminism, which have relied on theories of exploitation or oppression by one group over another. Instead, Foucault’s texts look for power everywhere, including liberation discourses such as those regarding rights. He concluded that power—as well as resistance—is constantly deployed in specific situations, often unconsciously. Foucault elaborated these arguments in such notable works as The History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), and Discipline and Punish (1975), which explore how the discourses of psychiatry, punishment, education, and medicine produce power and resistance. Texts such as The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and The Order of Things (1966) take on the history of Western epistemology, uncovering the ways in which knowledge is affected by relations of power. Scholarship on sexuality was most influenced by Foucault’s unfinished series of texts under the title The History of Sexuality. The discourse of sexuality, he maintained, is one of the most important repositories of power in Western culture. Sex is not only a means of affecting human action via state action but also implicates medical science, psychiatry, education, and religion in the production of power. In the first volume of that work, published in 1976, Foucault rejects the so-called repressive hypothesis, which argued that human culture has frequently repressed natural sexual urges. Instead, he maintains, the various practices that have sought to understand and control sexuality have, in fact, invented new ways of expressing sexuality. Foucault took particular interest in the emergence of the figure of “the homosexual” out of the nineteenth century’s sexual taboos. Subsequent volumes, The Use of Pleasure (1984) and The Care of the Self (1984), examine sexual practices in antiquity. Foucault’s untimely death cut short his intention to complete two more volumes in the series. Foucault’s work has been influential for a variety of scholars interested in power, and he remains widely read
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in the social sciences and humanities. In the United States, he has perhaps been most influential in the development of the academic discipline known as queer theory. Biographer David Halperin, in Saint Foucault (1995), traces Foucault’s influence in shaping the study of the history and politics of sexuality. For instance, despite generally identifying himself as gay, Foucault and his emphasis on the fluidity and historicity of identity influenced queer scholars who sought to understand sexuality as a power relationship rather than as an innate or natural identity. His theory of power has been influential for American queer scholars such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and can be seen in the radical queer politics of groups like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Queer Nation. If Foucault’s work has sparked political action on the far left, it has also been controversial for many on the left, including liberals, Marxists, and feminists, who argue that Foucault’s emphasis on the ubiquity of power does not allow for analyses of structural power and robs political groups of grounds for meaningful action. Among his most vociferous critics have been feminists who argue that Foucault’s theory of power ignores the systematic violence suffered by particular groups such as women. Some point to The History of Sexuality as a paradigmatic example of Foucault’s blindness to relationships of oppression because of his minimal attention to the role of gendered power in shaping human sexuality. The posthumous translation of Foucault’s reflections on the Iranian Revolution, which reflect a somewhat positive view of events in Iran, has sparked interest in some of the weaknesses of Foucault’s actual political analysis. Some have argued that his emphasis on resistance to power without specifying the form that resistance takes or offering a means to analyze normative effects of resistance, makes his work dangerous for activists and scholars on the left. Much attention also has been paid to The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), the biography by James Miller, which explores his personal lifestyle involving drugs and gay sadomasochistic eroticism while relating this aspect of Foucault with his scholarly “epistemological relativism.” Some have vilified Foucault as a corrupter of youth and a willful transmitter of HIV as well as a nihilist and a fascist. Miller suggests that the French intellectual was living out nihilism in a quest for transcendence by practicing Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” to go “beyond good and evil.” Others caution that Foucault’s ideas should endure or fall on their own merits, irrespective of the philosopher’s personal life. Claire E. Rasmussen See also: Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; France; Gay Rights Movement; Marxism; Postmodernism; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.
Further Reading Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hoy, David Couzens, ed. Foucault: A Critical Reader. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Reid, Roddey. “Foucault in America: Biography, ‘Culture War,’ and the New Consensus.” Cultural Critique 35 (Winter 1996–1997): 179–211.
F o u n d i n g Fa t h e r s The conflict over the meaning of American history and public life has been a major part of the culture wars. It is not surprising, then, that the individuals who oversaw the nation’s struggle for independence, drafted its foundational documents, and filled its ruling positions during its early years have been a central focus in the rhetoric on both sides of the contemporary political divide. Although it is true that, in a sense, the United States has not one but several sets of founders—Puritans in New England, Catholic families in the Chesapeake, Anglicans in Virginia, Quakers and Dutch in the Middle Atlantic colonies—the term “Founding Fathers” (or the genderneutral “Founders”) generally refers to those persons involved in establishing the United States as a political entity, especially such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John and Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and John Marshall. The founding period is generally considered to span the 1770s through the first decade of the nineteenth century, including the resistance to British colonial authority; victory in the War of Independence; and rule under the Articles of Confederation followed by the drafting, ratification, and early years of national life under the U.S. Constitution. The competing political agendas into whose service the memories of these Founding Fathers are enlisted, of course, differ sharply. Leaders of the Religious Right and other spokespersons for an orthodox cultural-political view tend to highlight concrete facts about the nation as it existed at its inception: its small central government; the friendly relationship between government and religion, especially evangelical Protestantism; the widespread predominance of traditional family arrangements and gender roles; and so on. Liberals and progressives dismiss the conservative view of the Founding Fathers as being overly simplistic, noting that many of the leading figures of the American Revolution were deists and members of
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the Masons, hardly evangelical Christians. They further note that the U.S. Constitution does not even mention God. Even so, liberals focus less on concrete details of the Founding Fathers as eighteenth-century English Americans and more on the powerful emancipatory potential inherent in America’s founding documents. Religious conservatives promote a worldview that they consider in harmony with that of the Founding Fathers, portraying them as men who promoted religion as essential for the public interest. As Jerry Falwell, the Baptist leader and head of the Moral Majority, wrote in 1979, “America is a Christian nation. Our founding fathers had that in mind when they carved this nation out of the wilderness. . . . America was founded by godly men who had in mind establishing a republic not only Christian in nature, but a republic designed to propagate the Gospel worldwide.” For such conservative activists, from Pentecostal preacher and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson to Secretary of Education William Bennett (under President Ronald Reagan), the founders were moral exemplars who never shrank from the opportunity to link Judeo-Christian piety and American national identity. From this perspective, national moral decline coincides with an abandonment of the founders’ way of looking at the world. As Robertson lamented in 2004, “Where we once worshipped and held in high esteem the God of the Bible and His laws, we now worship another god—that is, the individual.” Such critics often draw on originalist theories of constitutional interpretation to bolster their claims, further cementing their contemporary political agenda with claims about the historical circumstances of the founding period. In contrast, progressives claim that while the Founding Fathers set an important political and philosophical example, one should not expect that the exigencies of their historical era will always remain dispositive. In his First Inaugural Address (1993), President Bill Clinton said that “[w]hen our founders boldly declared America’s independence . . . they knew that America, to endure, would have to change.” This concept was earlier expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech (1963): “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” He added, “This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a check that declared that all men were created equal.” King’s imagery of African Americans coming to Washington to cash this check entails a vision of the founders based not on the details of the era in which the nation was founded, but on the logical implication of the principles the founders set in motion. The historian Robert Bellah’s influential account of American “civil
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religion” relies heavily on the examples of the Founding Fathers, whom he sees as providing Americans with a civic faith that was capable of coexisting alongside traditional Christianity and that gave the nation a moral dimension crucial in times of national trial. Of course, veneration of the Founding Fathers is not universal; a number of figures on the Christian Right take aim at Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” phrase in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. The metaphor was invoked by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark 1947 ruling on the Establishment Clause, Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, et al. and has been used by many to justify a position of governmental neutrality toward religion. But as many critics of that decision, and of the increasing marginalization of religion in the public sphere, note, Jefferson was not a drafter of the Constitution and was not even president when he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association; nowhere does the phrase “wall of separation” appear in any of the nation’s founding documents. More than 200 years after the Constitution’s ratification, the Founding Fathers continue to cast a long shadow over American political and cultural life. The frequency with which they are invoked in cultural conflict and political debate provides testimony of their enduring significance for Americans with widely divergent political views. Andrew R. Murphy See also: American Civil Religion; American Exceptionalism; Bennett, William J.; Church and State; Clinton, Bill; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Moral Majority; Religious Right.
Further Reading Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96:1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Bennett, William J. “Religious Belief and the Constitutional Order.” In Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, ed. Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, 365–75. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center / University Press of America, 1987. Dreisbach, Daniel L. The Founders on God and Government. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Eastland, Terry. “In Defense of Religious America.” Commentary, June 1981. Falwell, Jerry. America Can Be Saved! Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord, 1979. Hamburger, Philip. Separation of Church and State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Kramnick, Isaac, and R. Laurence Moore. The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Whitten, Mark Weldon. The Myth of Christian America: What You Need to Know About the Separation of Church and State. New York: Smith and Helwys, 1999.
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France France and the United States have enjoyed myriad exchanges of people, goods, and culture dating back to the eighteenth century, but deep enmities arose after World War II over competition in the global marketplace, diplomacy, and international status. Lingering antagonisms between the two countries reinforced cultural stereotypes and political and economic confrontations. Even the early mutual admiration of revolutionary societies was tempered by competition. The Marquis de Lafayette brought aid to the American colonial struggle, but the XYZ Affair in 1797, involving attempted bribery, divided the allies. The United States negotiated with Napoleon’s government to acquire the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, doubling U.S. territory. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville published a book praising American democracy, and France donated the Statue of Liberty to celebrate America’s centennial in 1876. French émigrés in the United States wielded authority in cuisine, fashion, and the arts, and Paris defined styles to which new American capitalists might aspire, but some critics labeled them feminine or immoral. During World War I, France and the United States were allies, and France in the interwar period drew Americans such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In Jazz Age Paris, blacks like Josephine Baker found acceptance denied them in segregated America. Wealthy Americans treated Mediterranean France as a playground, but others came to identify France with cultural excesses. The United States and France became allies again in World War II and in European and global reconstruction thereafter through the United Nations Security Council and involvement in NATO. But while the Marshall Plan helped rebuild France, American consumer goods and Hollywood films threatened to inundate French society. Meanwhile, American tourists were exposed to French luxury goods and high culture. Postwar French cinema and literature offered windows onto sex and freedom viewed as thrilling or scandalous, depending on one’s views. Over the years, conservative Americans faulted France for its contributions to modern philosophical and cultural revolutions, including feminism, existentialism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism. In the 1960s, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy charmed the French with her command of their language and culture while introducing elements of French style to the White House and American culture. Yet the very popularity of France as a tourist destination converted irritations of language and custom into stereotypes of rude, dismissive French people and loud, uncultured “Ugly Americans” (as chronicled by columnist Art Buchwald in the International Herald Tribune).
National policies and economies diverged more as France recovered from wartime devastation. French citizens, politicians, and intellectuals, for example, were more open to socialism and communism than Americans. France’s withdrawal from NATO in 1966 greatly displeased U.S. officials. Decolonization in Indochina and Algeria split French society, and although the United States seemed to favor freedom for the colonized, its involvement in Vietnam sent it down the same bloody path of war. Even upheavals such as the May 1968 student protests in France and “the sixties” in the United States had different localized social meanings. As France became a leader in a united Europe and reclaimed its ties of language and heritage worldwide, clashes intensified between France and the United States. Tempers flared in the 1990s over intervention in the former Yugoslavia, and again in 2003, when France’s President Jacques Chirac publicly opposed the U.S. intervention in Iraq. French wines were poured out in protests across the United States. Washington restaurants renamed French fries “freedom fries.” France was castigated as disloyal, cowardly, and immoral by American politicians and humorists on late-night television. Meanwhile, French papers criticized the United States as a bully and ridiculed President George W. Bush. Such controversies, however, evoke the intimacy of American and French involvement. While the French language faces competition from Spanish and other global languages in the United States, Americans have drawn on French cuisine, wines, and fashion to establish competitive positions. The impact of structuralism, postmodernism, social historical concerns, deconstruction, and other French theories have stimulated American academic disciplines. And however critical tourists and politicians in both countries may become, they remain peculiarly fascinated by each other. Gary W. McDonogh See also: Anti-Semitism; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Deconstructionism; Israel; Kennedy Family; Postmodernism; September 11; Sexual Revolution; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism; United Nations; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Buchwald, Art. I’ll Always Have Paris. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1996. Levenstein, Harvey. We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Mathy, Jean-Philippe. French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Ross, Kirsten. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Franken, A l
F r a n k , B a r n ey A Democrat first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District in 1980, Barney Frank is noted for his outspoken support for civil liberties, Bill Clinton’s embattled presidency, and Israel. Frank also gained considerable attention as the nation’s first openly gay member of Congress, and through revelations that a male friend had operated a prostitution ring out of Frank’s Capitol Hill apartment. Although the latter disclosure resulted in a reprimand in the House, Frank won subsequent elections by wide margins to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. Barnett Frank was born to Jewish parents in Bayonne, New Jersey, on March 31, 1940. Prior to becoming a member of Congress, Frank was educated at Harvard University (AB, 1962; JD, 1977), held positions as chief of staff to Boston mayor Kevin White (1968–1971) and as staff assistant to Congressman Michael F. Harrington (D-MA) (1971–1972), and served in the Massachusetts state legislature (1973–1980). Ironically, Frank’s ascendancy to Congress was aided by Pope John Paul II, a noted opponent of gay rights, who demanded that all priests resign from electoral politics in order to rein in leftist activism among the clergy. That order forced the Jesuit priest Robert F. Drinan, then representing Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District, not to seek a sixth term. Since replacing Drinan on the Democratic Party ticket, Frank has faced no serious challenges to his incumbency. Frank’s 1987 disclosure that he was gay became national news, though polls revealed that his own constituents were more concerned that this revelation would hurt his effectiveness as a representative than they were about his sexual orientation in and of itself. The issue reemerged in 1989 when Stephen Gobie, a prostitute with a criminal record, told the Washington Times that he had run a male escort service from Frank’s residence. While the congressman subsequently admitted using his political influence to assist Gobie with legal and financial problems, he denied Gobie’s overall allegation. These claims were accepted by the House Ethics Committee, which called for a reprimand rather than a motion to censure as requested by Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-GA). When the latter became speaker in 1994, Frank emerged as one of Gingrich’s most tenacious critics. In 1998, Frank was a prominent opponent of efforts, again spearheaded by Gingrich, to impeach President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Frank’s legislative agenda is generally associated with the Democratic left. However, he has condemned what he considers the left’s unwarranted harassment of Israel, calling that nation the Middle East’s best representative of the values that progressives claim to defend. He is also a leading critic of Republican intolerance toward gays,
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a chauvinism witnessed firsthand when House Majority leader Dick Armey (R-TX) referred to Frank as “Barney Fag” in a 1995 radio interview. Frank supports the outing of closeted Republicans who use their influence to circumscribe gay rights, a position known as “The Frank Rule.” Robert Teigrob See also: Catholic Church; Clinton, Bill; Clinton Impeachment; Democratic Party; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in Popular Culture; Gingrich, Newt; Israel; Outing; Republican Party; Same-Sex Marriage; Washington Times, The.
Further Reading Bollen, Peter. Frank Talk: The Wit and Wisdom of Barney Frank. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006. Frank, Barney. Speaking Frankly: What’s Wrong with the Democrats and How to Fix It. New York: Crown, 1992. Toobin, Jeffrey. “Barney’s Great Adventure,” New Yorker, January 12, 2009.
F r a n ke n , A l As a comedian and political commentator, Al Franken became one of the best-known liberal personalities in the culture wars. He is particularly noteworthy for his efforts to counter the media tactics of influential conservative politicians and pundits. Born Alan Stuart Franken on May 21, 1951, in New York City, he grew up in Minnesota and graduated from Harvard University (BA, general studies, 1973). As a student, he experimented with political satire and theater, and in 1975 he joined the original team of writers for the television comedy show Saturday Night Live. He was associated with the show on and off for twenty years, winning three Emmy Awards for television writing and production. Leaving Saturday Night Live in 1995, Franken turned to political commentary that reflects his liberal politics and wrote several best-sellers, including Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations (1996), which roasted not just the radio and TV talk show host but other right-wing pundits as well. This made Franken a target of conservatives. In the late 1990s, Franken attempted to bring his love of political commentary and media criticism to television by creating and starring in the NBC program Lateline, a parody of news magazines; the program was cancelled during its second season. His next project was a book, Why Not Me? The Inside Story Behind the Making and the Unmaking of the Franken Presidency (1999), a satire on modern political campaigns. Franken raised conservative hackles again in 2003 with Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, in which he takes aim at right-
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wing pundits such as Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly as well as the Fox News network. Fox sued Franken and his publisher for infringing on its registered trademark, but the lawsuit was unsuccessful—except in enhancing sales of the book and the visibility of its author. Franken entered the talk radio game in early 2004, signing on to host The O’Franken Factor for the fledgling Air America network, itself created as a counterpoint to conservative talk radio. The show’s title was another parody, this time of Bill O’Reilly’s TV show, but this attempt at baiting the conservative commentator was soon dropped, and Franken’s program was retitled The Al Franken Show. He then became the first radio personality to visit U.S. troops in Iraq, and he has joined several USO tours. The documentary film Al Franken: God Spoke (2006) traces two years of the politico-humorist’s endeavors, including his interviews with Coulter and O’Reilly. In 2005, Franken moved his radio show from New York to his home state of Minnesota. He founded a political action committee there called Midwest Values PAC, which he later used to launch his 2008 senatorial campaign under the banner of the Democratic-FarmerLabor Party. That race turned into the closest contest of the 2008 election. Although the initial results showed Franken losing by 215 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast, after the recount he emerged as the winner by 225 votes. The losing incumbent, Norm Coleman, took the dispute to court, leaving the seat unfilled for eight months while lawyers from both sides engaged in legal maneuverings. In July 2009, Al Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes out of 3 million ballots cast. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Coulter, Ann; Democratic Party; Limbaugh, Rush; Media Bias; Neoconservatism; O’Reilly, Bill; Talk Radio; Wellstone, Paul.
Further Reading Green, Joshua. “He’s Not Joking.” Atlantic Monthly, May 2008. Official Al Franken Web site. www.al-franken.com. Nichols, John. “Al Franken Seeks the Wellstone Seat.” Nation, November 5, 2007. Skorsi, Alan. Pants on Fire: How Al Franken Lies, Smears, and Deceives. Nashville, TN: WMD Books, 2005. Thompson, Stephen. “Al Franken.” Progressive, September 2005.
F r a n k l i n D e l a n o R o o s eve l t Memorial The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, honoring the thirty-second president of the United States, is located near the Washington Mall, next to the famous Cherry Tree Walk, in the nation’s capital. The sprawling
A statue depicting Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a wheelchair—here visited by grandson James Roosevelt (right), granddaughter Ann Roosevelt (left), and President Bill Clinton—was added to the FDR Memorial at the behest of disability advocates. (Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images)
monument was designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, incorporating trees, gardens, and waterfalls. The site is divided into four sections by granite walls, each featuring engraved quotes and bronze sculptures depicting aspects of FDR’s four terms as the nation’s chief executive. President Bill Clinton dedicated the monument in a public ceremony on May 2, 1997, and from the very first day it was the subject of controversy. Liberals generally wrote glowingly of the monument honoring the man who led the country through the Great Depression and created the many New Deal programs, including Social Security, that helped alleviate poverty and create the system of social benefits in modern America. Conservatives criticized not only various aspects of the monument but also Roosevelt as the man who ushered in the welfare state. Media commentator Pat Buchanan opined that the “I hate war” quotation displayed in the third chamber typifies FDR’s penchant for deception because it gives the impression that FDR was an eyewitness to the Great War, when in fact he remained in Washington. Some of the controversies concerning the memorial
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had to do with issues of “political correctness.” For example, one of Roosevelt’s most famous quotations, “a day which will live in infamy,” referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was not displayed on the monument because it might offend Japanese tourists. And bowing to animal rights activists, Eleanor Roosevelt’s trademark fox stole was missing from her statue. FDR’s omnipresent cigarette and holder were also removed. The biggest controversy dealt with the president’s disability. Roosevelt, who had contracted polio (or possibly Guillain-Barré Syndrome) in 1921, made use of leg braces and a wheelchair during his presidency, but nothing in the memorial clearly depicted him that way. A number of advocacy groups urged that the president’s disability be clearly shown so as to demonstrate his triumph over physical limitation. Others countered that it would be more truthful to show FDR as he was publicly known during his own time—standing at a podium or sitting in a conventional chair, but never in a wheelchair. President Bill Clinton recommended a bill to Congress to create a new statue depicting FDR in a wheelchair, and one was added to the monument in 2001. E. Michael Young See also: Animal Rights; Buchanan, Pat; Japan; New Deal; Political Correctness; September 11 Memorial; Smoking in Public; Social Security; Twenty-Second Amendment; Vietnam Veterans Memorial; World War II Memorial.
Further Reading Conniff, Ruth. “FDR Scorned.” Progressive, July 1997. Dupré, Judith. Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory. New York: Random House, 2007. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Web site, National Park Service. www.nps.gov/fdrm. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “The FDR Memorial: Who Speaks from the Wheelchair?” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2001. Halprin, Lawrence. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997. Terzian, Philip. “Monumental Ignorance.” American Spectator, July 1997.
F r e e d o m o f I n f o r m a t i o n Ac t The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a federal law allowing public access to government records and documents. Critics of the legislation argue that it burdens the federal bureaucracy with extra work that diverts time and energy from its primary duties. In addition, compliance with the FOIA adds to government expenditures—the processing of the 459,044 FOIA requests in 2006, for example, cost taxpayers $241.6 million. Career civil servants tend to dislike the FOIA
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because it makes them feel like they are in a “fish bowl” as outsiders second-guess policymaking. Supporters of the FOIA emphasize the importance of government transparency in maintaining accountability, arguing that the free flow of information protects against abuse of power and brings to light incompetence and mismanagement. Specifically, the FOIA permits any person (citizen or noncitizen), business entity, or organization to request any information of any department or agency of the federal government. No explanation is necessary for requesting information, representing a shift from the doctrine of “need to know” to “right to know.” As long as the information is considered public, then copies of the material must be released. The FOIA stipulates nine exempted categories in which information must be denied: (1) classified materials pertaining to defense or foreign policy; (2) internal personnel procedures; (3) restricted data as stipulated by a particular law; (4) trade secrets; (5) certain memoranda and letters within and between agencies; (6) personnel and medical records; (7) certain investigatory records pertaining to law enforcement; (8) certain materials related to regulating financial institutions; and (9) geophysical information, data, and maps about wells. All FOIA inquiries are to be responded to in twenty business days, and there is an appeals process when requests are denied. Fees may be charged for sending out materials. The original FOIA was reluctantly signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 4, 1966. Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, later recalled, “LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets; hated them challenging the official view of reality.” The legislation was the culmination of more than a decade of work by Representative John Moss (D-CA), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Government Information. During the Eisenhower years, the first Republican administration since Herbert Hoover, Moss could not find any GOP supporters for his FOIA bill. Later, after Democrats regained the White House, Representative Donald Rumsfeld (RIL) emerged as a major co-sponsor, citing his concern with the Johnson administration’s “managed news” and “suppression of public information that the people are entitled to have.” In the wake of Watergate, Congress in 1974 approved a bill to strengthen the FOIA, but it was vetoed by President Gerald Ford, who claimed that the changes would be “unconstitutional and unworkable.” Ford’s chief of staff was Rumsfeld, who, along with assistant Dick Cheney, advised against the bill, expressing concern about government leaks. Later, both houses overrode Ford’s veto. In 1984, Congress passed the Central Intelligence
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Agency Information Act, exempting the CIA from certain FOIA requirements. Two years later, Congress again amended the FOIA, this time to exempt records pertaining to “sensitive law enforcement activities.” With the passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act (1996), known as E-FOIA, federal agencies were required to put more government information online (with the hope of reducing FOIA caseloads—which it did not do). In 2007, a new law established a government-wide FOIA ombudsman to work at reducing the delays and the backlog of 200,000 FOIA requests. That same law, to remove loopholes caused by privatization, placed government contractors under the purview of the FOIA. Over the years, journalists, academics, public interest groups, and ordinary citizens have fueled the culture wars by using the FOIA to obtain such information as FBI dossiers on political activists and famous individuals, CIA archives pertaining to Cold War–era covert activities, Pentagon documents on the surveillance of civilian groups, environmental inspection reports, recipient lists of agriculture farm subsidies and benefits, automobile safety statistics, e-mail correspondence between department officials and partisan organizations, government research projects on human radiation experiments, consumer affairs reports, and others. In 2006, after twenty-three years of legal wrangling, historian Jon Wiener acquired the ten remaining FBI documents on John Lennon, pertaining to the singer’s involvement in the antiwar movement. However, a majority of FOIA requests are made by commercial interests seeking information about government procurement, contract bids, reports filed by regulatory agencies, and other such materials for gaining a competitive edge or preparing for litigation. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed a declassification order to facilitate the public release of historical documents kept by the National Archives and Records Administration. Documents are now supposed to be declassified after twenty-five years unless there are compelling reasons to continue keeping them secret. This led to misgivings, followed by the decision to reclassify. In 2001, for example, the CIA reclassified a publicly released 1948 memorandum about a mission in which balloons with propaganda pamphlets were floated over communist countries. Researchers denounced the CIA for announcing the reclassification since the information had already been published by the State Department. After the government reclassifies any document, researchers who have such materials in their personal files are legally required to destroy them. Following the resignation of Richard Nixon in August 1974, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act to safeguard all Watergate-related documents (including audio recordings). In addition, all records of the Nixon administra-
tion were ordered to be kept at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA), designating all records and papers of future administrations as U.S. government property and subjected to the FOIA five years after a president leaves office. A provision allowed for sensitive records pertinent to national security to be kept sealed for twelve years. On November 1, 2001, however, as the deadline for the release of all of Reagan’s papers drew near, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13233, allowing for an extension. Critics viewed Bush’s actions as violating the PRA; some speculated that he sought to shield his father, George H.W. Bush, who was vice president under Reagan, from further investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal. On January 21, 2009, one day after becoming president, Barack Obama revoked Bush’s executive order. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Central Intelligence Agency; Cheney Family; Cold War; Ford, Gerald; Iran-Contra Affair; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Nader, Ralph; Nixon, Richard; Obama, Barack; Privatization; Reagan, Ronald; Watergate.
Further Reading Davis, Charles N., and Sigman L. Splichal, eds. Access Denied: Freedom of Information in the Information Age. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000. Nader, Ralph. “Knowledge Helps Citizens, Secrecy Helps Bureaucrats—The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).” New Statesman, January 10, 1986. O’Reilly, James T. Federal Information Disclosure. St. Paul, MN: West Group, 2000. Stuckey, Mary E. “Presidential Secrecy: Keeping Archives Open.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9:1 (Spring 2006): 138–44. Weinstein, Barbara. “Let the Sunshine In: Government Records and Insecurities.” Perspectives: News Magazine of the American Historical Association, April 2007. Wiener, Jon. “The Last Lennon File.” Nation, December 20, 2006.
Friedan, Betty Feminist leader and a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Betty Friedan was the author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), a critique of the confining experience of marriage and motherhood in modern America. The book was widely heralded as a founding text of second-wave feminism. Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan grew up watching her mother, who prior to marriage had been the women’s page editor of the local newspaper, display angry outbursts toward her husband, a Russian immigrant and successful jeweler. Years later, Friedan concluded that her mother was full
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of resentment over giving up her career in order to be a housewife. Friedan studied psychology at Smith College, graduating summa cum laude in 1942. She then became a fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, studying under the famed psychologist Erik Erikson. She married Carl Friedan in 1947, and they moved to Rockland County, New York, had three children, and divorced twenty years later. The Feminine Mystique, which sold over 1 million copies in its first year in print, was based on a survey of college-educated women that Friedan had conducted in 1957. She was unsettled by the general dissatisfaction reported by her respondents. Drawing on her own experiences as a mother, Friedan concluded that educated women were fulfilling less than their full potential in the traditional role of parent and homemaker. Friedan labeled the role imposed on women “the feminine mystique” and wrote that it “has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.” As her book explained, “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’” Some critics saw Friedan’s challenge to the model of middle-class suburban domesticity as an attack on housewives themselves. Others argued that she was simply replacing the pressure to stay at home with an insistence that women go to work. Some feminists took issue with Friedan’s focus on white, middle-class, heterosexual women and her failure to acknowledge the constraints facing working-class women who did not have the option to stay at home with their children. In 1966, Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, and in 1969 she helped launch the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), which is now called Pro-Choice America. As president of NOW from its origin until 1970, she led the organization in support of the doomed Equal Rights Amendment, but her goal of legalized abortion was successfully realized by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (1973). Friedan’s negative view of lesbianism alienated many in the women’s movement. She described lesbian feminists as the “lavender menace” and charged them with undermining feminism by associating it with manhating. Her aggressive stance caused rifts between Friedan and some of her best-known associates, including Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem. In 1981, Friedan published The Second Stage, intending to shift the course of feminism back to an appreciation of traditional family life, but it was not nearly as successful as her first book. Friedan died on February 4, 2006. Manon Parry
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See also: Abortion; Brown, Helen Gurley; Equal Rights Amendment; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; Lesbians; National Organization for Women; Roe v. Wade (1973); Steinem, Gloria.
Further Reading Friedan, Betty. Life So Far. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life. New York: Random House, 1999. Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Oliver, Susan. Betty Freidan: The Personal Is Political. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. Sherman, Janann, ed. Interviews with Betty Friedan. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2002.
Fr iedman, Milton One of America’s most influential economists of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman championed the free-market economy in absolutist terms, affirming the classic laissez-faire doctrine enunciated in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). Friedman led a shift away from prevailing Keynesian theory, which, based on the work of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, stressed the necessity for government to stimulate the economy through fiscal policies. John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economist and Friedman’s ideological rival, once observed with resignation, “The age of John Maynard Keynes gave way to the age of Milton Friedman.” The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Milton Friedman was born on July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. He studied economics at Rutgers University (AB, 1932), the University of Chicago (am, 1933), and Columbia University (PhD, 1946). Other than a stint with the federal government, including a position at the tax research division of the U.S. Treasury Department (1941–1943), Friedman devoted his career to academia, teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1940–1941), the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (1945–1946), and finally the University of Chicago (1946–1982). In the 1970s, with the simultaneous rise of inflation and unemployment in the United States, Friedman gained notoriety for having predicted that certain economic conditions would lead to the phenomenon called “stagflation” (recession combined with inflation). A recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1976) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988), Friedman produced such scholarly works as A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957), A Program for Monetary Stability (1959), and A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (with Anna J. Schwartz, 1963). In 1996, the
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Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation was established to advance education reform and school choice. Friedman died on November 16, 2006. Controversially, Friedman blamed the Great Depression on government intervention and asserted that New Deal policies actually prolonged the economic downturn. He likewise criticized the legacies of the New Deal, including the growth of the federal government, a position that energized conservative Republicans and gave intellectual legitimacy to the views of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, contends that Friedman offered two accounts of the 1930s depression—one, the initial draft for scholars, which was carefully nuanced; and the other, a looser version aimed at a popular audience, which was “intellectually dishonest.” Friedman propagated his views on economics beyond academe by writing a column for Newsweek magazine (1966–1984) and serving on President Reagan’s economic policy advisory board (1981–1988). In addition, he served on the advisory board of the American Enterprise Institute (1956–1979), a think tank devoted to unbridled capitalism. Friedman’s writings for a popular audience, co-authored by his wife, Rose D. Friedman—among them Capitalism and Freedom (1962); Free to Choose (1980), the basis of a PBS television series; and Tyranny of the Status Quo (1983)—established him as a prominent figure in the culture wars. A libertarian and advocate of “economic freedom,” Friedman criticized Social Security and other entitlement programs; emphasized voluntary association, competition, and free trade; called for school choice (voucher programs); urged deregulation of commerce and industry as well as the lifting of environmental protections; and even recommended the legalization of drugs. He maintained that individual freedom is impossible in a society without a free-market system. Governmental regulation, he argued, fosters cultural stagnation, curbs technological innovation, and undermines individual responsibility. Democracy, he insisted, can only be sustained by capitalism. In the preface to Capitalism and Freedom, the Friedmans criticize John F. Kennedy’s famous inauguraladdress statement of 1961, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It was paternalistic in tone, they suggested, implying that the individual citizen is a ward of the state. The vital question, in their view is, “How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?” A monetarist, Friedman argued that the only role government should play in the economic system is controlling the money supply. He applied his monetarist principles in devising the negative income tax, which would have provided cash transfers to the poor, em-
ployed and unemployed alike. His proposal inspired the earned-income tax credit, which gives monetary benefits to low-income workers earning under a certain amount. Friedman believed that it was preferable to give money directly to the poor than have benefits dispensed to them by a highly bureaucratized welfare system. In 2008, brouhaha erupted at the University of Chicago after over 100 professors there signed a petition opposing plans to name a new campus economics research institute after Milton Friedman. Concern was raised that such an honor would imply “massive support for the economic and political doctrines” of the late economist while harming faculty reputation with respect to “intellectual and ideological diversity.” Roger Chapman See also: Galbraith, John Kenneth; Goldwater, Barry; Kennedy Family; Krugman, Paul; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; School Vouchers; Social Security; Supply-Side Economics; War on Drugs; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Ebenstein, Alan O. Milton Friedman: A Biography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Krugman, Paul. “Who Was Milton Friedman?” New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007. Wood, John Cunningham, and Ronald W. Woods, eds. Milton Friedman: A Critical Assessment. New York: Routledge, 1990.
F u n d a m e n t a l i s m , Re l i g i o u s Most often associated in America with right-wing Christian Protestantism, fundamentalist views and sentiments have also been present among Islamic, Mormon, and Jewish groups. In the context of America’s culture wars, Protestant and Islamic fundamentalists have been the most recognizable and public figures. But other fundamentalisms have had, and continue to have, a prominent voice in America’s religious and political discourse. The term “fundamentalist,” which originated in the 1910s and 1920s, initially referred to conservative theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary who objected to “modernist” trends in Protestant intellectual circles. Concerned about the proliferation of liberal theological tenets, fundamentalists summarily rejected Darwinism and German “higher criticism” of the Bible while penning defenses of “traditional” Christian tenets. From 1909 to 1912, a group of conservative theologians published a twelve-volume set of treatises entitled The Fundamentals, which consolidated conservative differences with “liberal”
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theology into a specific list of complaints. The most prominent—and long-standing—of these complaints were against liberal rejections or criticisms of biblical inerrancy, the Virgin Birth, Christ’s redeeming death and bodily resurrection, and the authenticity of miracles. Other scholars, such as B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, and Cyrus Scofield, formulated defenses of fundamentalist principles that, despite the embarrassment of fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925, grew in esteem at seminaries across America; indeed, they served as justifications for the founding of separate schools like Westminster Theological Seminary and Dallas Theological Seminary. Print and radio media also enabled fundamentalists to extend their reach and popularize defenses of what they regarded as “the ole time religion.” After World War II, Christian fundamentalists differentiated themselves from other Protestants by a militant support for biblical inerrancy, creationism, anticommunism, and moral vigilance. Fundamentalist disdain for the Reverend Billy Graham’s acceptance of support from the liberal National Council of Churches for his 1957 New York City evangelist crusade symbolized their increasingly separatist and antagonistic approach toward conservative and mainline Protestants. The social revolutions of the 1960s sparked two decades of fundamentalist calls for political involvement rather than cultural separatism. Grassroots fundamentalists— whose interests were best embodied by figureheads like the Reverend Jerry Falwell—successfully made antifeminist “family values” and “traditional JudeoChristian values” a part of Republican electoral politics. Also, during the 1980s, fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, orchestrated the removal of moderates from denominational leadership and seminary positions. Premillennial dispensationalism, a theology of “end times” that emphasizes the imminent return of Christ and the rapture of the faithful, experienced a steady rise in popularity in evangelical and fundamentalist circles, in part because of the efforts of writers like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. Indeed, at the time of George W. Bush’s election as president in 2000, fundamentalism remained one of the most influential impulses in Protestant America. Although it originated outside the United States, Islamic fundamentalism has shaped the culture wars in America as distinctly as its Protestant counterpart has. In general, Islamic fundamentalists support literalist interpretations of the Koran, along with emphases on political activism, the development and preservation of theocratic states, and the dissolution of Israel’s sovereignty. Most fundamentalist Muslims also view Western nations as irreligious and repressive, sharing suspicion of democracy, moral laxity, secularization, globalization, and women’s
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rights. Fundamentalist terror groups couple these tenets with the concept of jihad (“holy war”) against the West and Israel. Not all fundamentalists, however, necessarily support these groups’ violent means or ends. Anti-Western Islamic polemicists first appeared in the context of European colonialism in the Middle East during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Western economic and political involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War stirred concerns about the effects of secularization and bid’ah (“innovations”) on Islam’s fundamental tenets. In the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalism captured the attention of the American public after the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979, including the hostage-taking of U.S. Embassy personnel in Tehran, and the defeat of the Soviets by mujahedeen during the Afghanistan war. Fundamentalist anger over U.S. sponsorship of the Israeli state gave rise to the Palestinian terror group Hamas in 1987, while American military intervention in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991 served as fodder for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Ten years later, bin Laden’s group orchestrated the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., sparking an American-led war against terror cells in the Middle East and worldwide. A controversial effort, especially after the expansion of the war into Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration’s response to radical Islamic fundamentalism exacerbated ideological and political conflicts already present in America over the nation’s twenty-first-century international identity. Less-well-known fundamentalist movements in America’s past and present can be found among Jewish and Mormon groups. Jewish fundamentalists assert the divine origins of Torah and argue for the adherence to all dietary and customary laws prescribed in it. While in basic agreement on these points, Jewish fundamentalists continue to debate the exact responsibility of adherents to rabbinical authority and Torah law. Unlike Islamic and Protestant fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists typically have little interest in public policy or culture war politics, preferring to observe their various visions of “true” Jewish customs in isolation. Similarly, Mormon fundamentalists tend to pursue classical Mormonism in small, separatist communities. Interested in the preservation of older, nineteenth-century practices and tenets— such as plural marriage, communalist living, and the theological notion of Adam as divine—fundamentalists remain a small and marginal sect in Mormon America. Regardless, both Jewish and Mormon fundamentalist groups betray an important reminder about fundamentalism in America. To be sure, the most preeminent fundamentalists have engaged secular culture head-on and influenced the course of the nation’s politics at home and abroad. Others have elected to withdraw from mainstream America and its culture wars, pursuing their religious
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goals in private rather than in public, continually searching for what all fundamentalists desire: an unapologetic return to the religious “fundamentals” that modernity seems to threaten with extinction. Darren E. Grim See also: Christian Reconstructionism; Church and State; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; Muslim Americans; Premillennial Dispensationalism; Religious Right; Schaeffer, Francis; Secular Humanism; Southern Baptist Convention.
Further Reading Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991. Milton-Edwards, Beverley. Islamic Fundamentalism since 1945. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Fur The controversy surrounding fur is a dispute between animal welfare activists and the fur industry over the trapping, hunting, and farming of animals for fur clothes and accessories. Other groups have been caught in the crossfire, drawing the fashion industry, women’s groups, the U.S. government, and indigenous cultures into this cultural battle. The history of the fur trade in North America dates to the 1500s, when early European explorers exchanged goods with Native Americans for fur pelts. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century, which witnessed the most widespread slaughter of wildlife in recorded history, that the practice of wearing fur became controversial. Since then, animal rights activists and conservationists have worked to expose the harsh reality of the fur trade, from the steel-jaw traps that ensnare wildlife to the brutal conditions animals suffer at fur farms. Responding to the negative portrayal of the fur industry, the Fur Information and Fashion Council in the 1970s launched a multimillion-dollar crusade to combat what it deemed the misinformation and emotionalism promoted by antifur activists. Animal rights activists
were characterized as irrational, radical extremists—a message that effectively boosted fur in both mainstream and high-end fashion. Still, antifur sentiment came to a head in the 1980s, as animal rights groups counteracted the surge in consumption with morally oriented advertising and public relations campaigns of their own. Fur sales in America plummeted to an all-time low. Antifur advocacy groups criticized the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, among other groups, which they said profited from the trapping and killing of predatory animals. More broadly, however, the antifur movement targeted society at large, especially women, the primary consumers in the fur industry. Advertisements typically depicted women who wear fur as vain, immoral, pretentious, and cruel. Some feminists faulted animal liberation groups for failing to address the patriarchy and sexism that underlie the media and fashion industries, which bind women to “oppressive” standards of beauty. Especially deplored by feminists were advertising campaigns by organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which displayed naked and scantily clad women in an effort to raise awareness about the fur industry. Combating the oppression of animals, feminists argued, did not necessitate the oppression of women as well. Arguably, the most severe repercussions of the antifur movement and the decline in fur sales have been suffered by indigenous groups such as the Inuit, who have relied on hunting and trapping animals for fur for hundreds of years. Fur not only provides necessary warmth and protection as clothing, but the fur trade has been an economic mainstay of many tribes for centuries. Those who advocate on behalf of indigenous groups thus label the antifur campaign of some animal liberation groups as imperialistic. Antifur activists counter that indigenous trapping accounts for a mere fraction of the North American fur industry. What they deplore, they say, is mass slaughter on behalf of corporate consumerism rather than subsistence hunting and trading by groups who employ traditional methods. Michelle Garvey See also: Animal Rights; Ecoterrorism; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Factory Farms; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Further Reading Emberley, Julia B. The Cultural Politics of Fur. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
and economists generally regarded him as a popularizer who contributed little to theory and modeling. Gary Land
G a l b r a i t h , J o h n Ke n n e t h From the late 1950s through the 1970s, the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith was a major advocate of government regulation of corporate activity and federal spending for the public good. An adviser to several Democratic leaders, he became a critic of the Vietnam War and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Born on a farm in Ontario, Canada, on October 15, 1908, Galbraith studied agriculture at Ontario Agricultural College (BSci, 1931; MSci, 1933) and agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, 1934). Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard University in 1949 he worked as an administrator in the U.S. Office of Price Administration (1940–1943), served on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine (1943–1948), and conducted an economic assessment of the effects of Allied bombing in Germany for the federal government (1946). In 1947, Galbraith helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal, anticommunist political organization, later serving as its president. He joined the economics faculty at Harvard in 1949 and taught there until his retirement in 1975, except for stints of government service. In addition to advising Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy during their presidential races, he served as U.S. ambassador to India (1961–1963). An influential figure in the development of President Johnson’s Great Society program, he subsequently broke with the president in sharp disagreement over the Vietnam War. Galbraith came to general public notice with The Affluent Society (1958), in which he argued that government should move money from private investment to public projects such as parks, highways, and education and criticized the belief that increased material production signified social health. The book influenced President Kennedy’s War on Poverty. The New Industrial State (1967) asserted that the decisive power in modern society is exercised by the industrial bureaucracy, which ultimately controls consumers and dictates what is understood to be the public interest. Galbraith published over thirty books, including two novels and a memoir, A Life in Our Times (1981). He died on April 29, 2006. Galbraith’s ideas prompted criticism from many directions. Conservatives rejected his preference for government regulation of expenditure over private choice, while members of the 1960s New Left thought that his emphasis on bureaucratic organization underestimated the role of capitalism. Liberal economists frequently disagreed with his concepts of production and consumption,
See also: Democratic Party; Friedman, Milton; Great Society; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; McCarthy, Eugene; New Deal; New Left; Vietnam War; War on Poverty.
Further Reading Galbraith, John Kenneth, and Andrea D. Williams, eds. The Essential Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Hession, Charles H. John Kenneth Galbraith and His Critics. New York: New American Library, 1972. Parker, Richard. John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Stanfield, J. Ron. John Kenneth Galbraith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Gangs Gangs, predominately composed of male youth, have shaped American urban life for centuries. Members generally find social cohesion through shared symbols and territory, ethnic bonds, or marginal social status, and the potential for violence. American examples include New York’s immigrant gangs of the nineteenth century and the Latino “zoot suiters” in 1940s Los Angeles. In postwar America, Puerto Rican youth gangs in New York inspired the hit Broadway musical West Side Story (1956). Other types of gangs have ranged from AfricanAmerican gangsta rappers to Asian-immigrant gangs. Although often associated with the lower socio-economic classes of urban areas, gangs are also found among the middle class and in suburban as well as rural areas. Since the 1990s conflicts among gangs and between gangs and the police have become more violent, as drugs, guns, and economic polarization have intensified illegal activities. More than ever, gangs are seen as threats to social order, property, and life—to be feared, reformed, punished, and eradicated. Youth gangs typically form among those who feel denied the opportunity for prosperity, including Latinos in the Southwest, African Americans in inner cities, and some Asian immigrants since the 1960s. In the 1950s and 1960s, such gangs challenged an optimistic postwar society, spurring the first systematic analysis of gang recruitment, structure, and activities. The pattern has seemed constant over the years. About 80 to 90 percent of gang members are male, ranging from late preteen years to thirty years of age, and tend to form racially or ethnically homogeneous groups that are highly territorial and maintain loose networks of variable commitment. Gangs may last for only a few months or years, although some have endured across generations. 203
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To reformers in the 1950s, young gang members were often considered juvenile delinquents, as parodied in the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” in West Side Story. Analysts recognized the values of socialization, support, and masculine identity built into gang membership and called into question simplistic definitions of gangs and gang activity. Police and other law enforcement authorities, by contrast, traditionally identified gang members by their actions—as criminals. While the Vietnam War and American social struggles shifted attention away from gangs in the late 1960s, violence recaptured headlines thereafter as multinational gangs became associated with smuggling, drug dealing, and turf battles in cities. Gang crimes, however, have most often involved graffiti, vandalism, extortion, and theft. In fact, most gangs lack the organizational expertise for systematic drug distribution. But in Los Angeles, the Crips and Bloods, predominantly African American, created expanding associations of allied gangs. Their battles over drug turf spread across the nation, troubling 123 cities in 1992 alone. Latino, Asian, and Russian immigrant gangs have been involved in vandalism, smuggling, and other illicit activities. Gangs have also participated in large-scale organized crime and transnational drug operations. Since the 1990s, growing gang activities have troubled Native American communities. The Aryan Brotherhood, originating among white inmates in California’s San Quentin Prison in 1967, spread through prisons and to the street. Skinheads and bikers (motorcycle gangs) share some of the characteristics of youth gangs in their marginalization, racialization, gender, and illicit activity. Studies consistently show that victims of gang violence are usually the members of rival gangs—male and of the same race and age as the perpetrators. These same studies indicate that females, comprising about 10 percent of gang membership, identify females as allies more than protagonists. Associations of delinquency, truancy, promiscuity, and violence have spurred special intervention to prevent females from joining gangs. In the 1990s, gangs were increasingly recognized as a problem in suburban and rural areas, places where parents had fled cities and their teenage children experienced alienation while at the same time finding the media images of gangs enticing. The human cost of gang violence—terrorized neighborhoods with accidental or drive-by shootings—is a daily reality in many parts of the nation where gangs operate. Responses remain divided, however, amid ambiguous data regarding what constitutes effective intervention. Many projects focus on direct engagement with gangs, to alter values, offer mediation, and reduce violence. The long-term success of this method has been mixed, largely depending on the extent of active community involvement.
In contrast, the suppression approach identifies gangs as a menace. While task forces typically focus on homicide statistics, law enforcement officials target “street crime” that threatens outsiders—in both cases attention is concentrated on symptoms rather than the underlying causes. Incarceration of gang members invariably leads to gang activities behind bars, and a focus on arrest statistics invariably targets minority youth and contributes to their sense of alienation. Prohibitions of gang activity—termed “civil gang injunctions”—undermine civil liberties and have proven to be less than effective, especially when gangs are categorized as “street terrorists.” Amid these controversies, for decades television, movies, news coverage, and music have presented evolving images of gangs, from the film Public Enemy (1931) to the gangsta rap music of 50 Cent. When gang membership is made to seem exciting or attractive, media outlets and corporate sponsors often face complaints from authorities who work to quell gang activity. For some, gangs can seem a way to channel disillusionment with the American dream and may embody deeply rooted images of masculinity, rebellion, independence, and camaraderie. The myriad sources of attraction to gangs make it difficult to imagine that either social programs or police suppression can bring gangs under control anytime soon. Gary W. McDonogh See also: Dean, James; Graffiti; Gun Control; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Rap Music; War on Drugs; White Supremacists; Zero Tolerance.
Further Reading Donahue, Sean, ed. Gangs: Stories of Life and Death from the Streets. New York: Thunder Mouth, 2002. Esbensen, Finn-Aage, Stephen G. Tibbets, and Larry Gaines, eds. American Youth Gangs at the Millennium. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2004. Klein, Malcolm. American Street Gangs. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997. Klein, Malcolm, and Cheryl Maxson. Street Gangs: Patterns and Processes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.
G ay C a p i t a l The term “gay capital” refers to the growing clout enjoyed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals as a recognized market segment in the U.S. economy. Employers have increasingly courted skilled LGBT workers by committing themselves to corporate nondiscrimination policies and offering domestic partner benefits, including health insurance. And LGBT consumers are increasingly courted as a niche market with more disposable income than the national norm. The concept of gay capital has had wide-
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ranging social and political consequences, especially by increasing the visibility of gays and lesbians in various public spheres since the 1990s. As a means of courting LGBT wealth, corporations have begun sponsoring events such as gay pride marches, even at the risk of alienating social conservatives. Media companies have included gay and lesbian personalities in prime-time television and in films, as in the hit series Ellen (1994–1998) and Will & Grace (1998–2006). Although earlier ignored or vilified in media depictions, gays and lesbians have come to be portrayed often as a well-adjusted, “normal” segment of society. Thus, it can be argued that gay capital has contributed to greater public tolerance of gays and along with that the promotion of gay rights issues, such as same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination laws pertaining to sexual orientation. Moreover, many workplaces offer benefits to same-sex domestic partners. Opposition to these responses to gay capital has been voiced most strongly by the Religious Right. The Southern Baptist Convention and the American Family Association, among others, have challenged media networks courting LGBT audiences and protested against various companies offering domestic partner benefits. Both organizations initiated boycotts of the Walt Disney Company in 1996 and 1997 to protest the company’s domestic partner provisions for employees, controversial films produced by Disney’s Miramax affiliate, and the annual Gay Days hosted at Disney World in Orlando. In 2005, however, both groups ended these boycotts without prompting changes at Disney. Some members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered communities have expressed concern over the concept of gay capital. They argue that embracing norms of respectability and possessing economic clout should not be preconditions to equal treatment for themselves and their families. Phil Tiemeyer See also: Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in Popular Culture; Lesbians; Same-Sex Marriage; Transgender Movement; Walt Disney Company; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Gluckman, Amy, and Betsy Reed. Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Gay Rights Movement The gay rights movement consists of groups and individuals linked by a set of broad political and cultural goals that reflect a shared identity based on their sexual
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orientation or gender identity. The gay rights movement is not monolithic, however, and includes a diverse set of social and political organizations that pursue different goals and tactics. These organizations represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals spanning all economic, racial, ethnic, and religious strata of American society.
Origins and Emergence The modern gay rights movement is rooted in social changes and events that took place over two centuries. Individuals who engage in homosexual behavior have long been regarded in many societies as sinners, criminals, or both. In the late nineteenth century, with the emergence of the field of psychiatry, such individuals were further stigmatized by a formal diagnosis of mental disorder and were viewed as a distinct class of human beings for whom sexual orientation defined identity. Gradually, gays and lesbians internalized their differentiation from mainstream society and developed group identities around it. In big cities, homosexual subcultures could be accommodated, but American society at large felt threatened by anyone who deviated from sexual and gender norms and engaged in nonprocreative sex outside marriage. Governments thus developed regulations to suppress homosexuality. Every state passed sodomy laws that made it a crime to engage in particular sex acts, such as anal intercourse. Although the laws often applied to both heterosexuals and homosexuals, they were enforced disproportionately against the latter. During the twentieth century, the number of men arrested for sodomy and lesser offenses, like loitering, disorderly conduct, and lewd and lascivious conduct, increased dramatically. During World War II, large numbers of men and women were inducted into the armed services and concentrated on army bases and naval ports in or near many large cities. This brought together many young gays and lesbians from around the country in same-sex segregated environments, helping them overcome their former isolation and develop group consciousness and personal relationships. While the Red Scare of the 1950s intensified the persecution of gays and lesbians, who were branded as communist sympathizers and security risks, Alfred Kinsey’s pathbreaking studies of human sexuality revealed that a larger percentage of individuals had engaged in same-sex behavior than previously thought. In subsequent years, the civil rights and women’s movements inspired a generation of gays and lesbians to demand an end to oppression. All these developments laid the foundation for the gay rights movement.
Development and Maturation Historian John D’Emilio describes the gay rights movement as a cycle of “leaps and creeps”—periods of
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relative stability in which the movement made little or no progress, punctuated by occasional bursts of rapid change. Two “homophile” organizations founded in the 1950s—the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles and Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco—provided a place for politically oriented gays and lesbians to meet. These early activists engaged in public education campaigns to encourage tolerance and understanding toward gays and lesbians, and they challenged discrimination in federal employment and sodomy laws. The Stonewall Rebellion marked a watershed in the history of the gay rights movement. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, patrons of a New York City gay nightclub answered police harassment with five nights of civil disobedience and violent disturbances. Although the perception that Stonewall launched the gay rights movement is historically inaccurate, it remains a potent symbol—and historic landmark—of the gay community’s resistance to mistreatment. Reflecting the temper of the times, Stonewall signaled an embrace of cultural and political “liberation” and a more confrontational style of politics. Thereafter, gay liberation rejected assimilation and began using the norms of the heterosexual majority as a standard for the gay community. A wave of activism came on the heels of Stonewall that led the American Psychiatric Association to take homosexuality off its list of mental disorders in 1973 and the federal Civil Service Commission to drop its ban on the employment of homosexuals in 1975. Many states repealed sodomy laws, and antidiscrimination laws were passed in college towns and big cities that covered sexual orientation in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Progress slowed by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Divisions surfaced within the movement, based on race, ethnicity, and gender, as lesbians and people of color complained of a lack of representation in major gay rights organizations, which were dominated by white, middle-class men. Religious and social conservatives mobilized to repeal gay rights laws and won a major victory in 1986 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared state sodomy laws constitutional in Bowers v. Hardwick. Finally, the AIDS crisis taxed the movement’s resources and confirmed stereotypes of gays as sexually promiscuous and irresponsible. Ironically, AIDS also benefited the gay rights movement. Many people realized for the first time that they had gay friends, family members, and co-workers, and the disease “outed” several celebrities. AIDS also led to political mobilization and institution-building in the gay community. As gays and lesbians became much more visible in the media and society generally during the 1990s, they attained favorable legislation and court decisions at the state and local levels. In 1992, the gay community helped elect the first president—Bill Clinton—who appealed to it for votes. New issues like
marriage, domestic partner benefits, adoption, military service, and making schools safer and more tolerant were added to the agenda. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected gays’ demands to participate openly in private organizations like the Boy Scouts (Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 2000) and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade (Hurley v. Irish American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, 1995). But the Court handed them a major victory in 2003 when it declared unconstitutional laws that criminalize homosexual conduct (Lawrence v. Texas).
Assimilation Versus Liberation Throughout the movement’s history, activists and observers have debated whether gays and lesbians should seek to assimilate through normal political activities (litigating, lobbying, donating to campaigns, and mobilizing voters) that focus on obtaining legal rights and protections, or to transform the culture in a more radical direction outside conventional forms of political participation. Efforts to gain protected status in civil rights laws, marriage, and adoption and to lift the ban on serving openly in the military, for example, reflect assimilationist goals. Liberationists, by contrast, reject conforming to heterosexual institutions and lifestyles and view the role of gays and lesbians as breaking down traditional gender roles and reducing class and racial inequalities. Liberationists stress increasing the visibility and positive portrayal of gays and lesbians in the media, the safety and acceptance of gays and lesbian youth in schools, and the acceptance of gays and lesbians in professional and ethnic organizations. The most effective strategy for reducing oppression, they maintain, is for gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet”; when gays and lesbians increase their visibility, it becomes easier for them to gain public policy victories but also makes such laws less necessary. Coming out makes it harder to ignore the demands of the LGBT community, reduces homophobia, and increases positive feelings toward gays and lesbians. A number of studies have shown that individuals who have gay family members, friends, and co-workers are more likely to be tolerant toward gays and support their political aims. The strategies, if not the goals, of the “insider” assimilationists and the “outsider” liberationists are not mutually exclusive. As some organizations work through normal political channels to secure legal rights, others try to change the culture by working at the grassroots level and engaging in unconventional forms of participation. Organizations such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) have employed both outsider and insider tactics—for example, engaging in dramatic street protests and negotiating with government agencies to make drugs more readily available to AIDS patients. The contemporary gay rights movement consists of
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a large variety of national, state, and local organizations that are loosely bound by a broad commitment to reducing homophobia and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Lambda Legal are large national, general-purpose political organizations that lobby, litigate, conduct research, and educate policymakers and citizens about gay rights issues. A number of social and political organizations have more specific agendas. The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) strives to develop respect and acceptance for LGBT students in schools, partly by building gay-straight alliances among students. Parents, Family, and Friends of Gays and Lesbians (PFLAG) promotes understanding and respect for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons by helping those close to them overcome their ignorance and fear and accept their orientation. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) promotes fair, accurate, and inclusive representation of sexual and gender identities in the mass media. The Stonewall Democrats and the Log Cabin Republicans are affiliates of the two major political parties. A number of gay organizations are geared to the special needs of racial and ethnic groups or the specific needs in particular local communities. Gary Mucciaroni See also: AIDS; Frank, Barney; Gay Capital; Gays in Popular Culture; Gays in the Military; Hay, Harry; Lesbians; Milk, Harvey; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Outing; SameSex Marriage; Shepard, Matthew; Socarides, Charles; Sodomy Laws; Stonewall Rebellion; Transgender Movement.
Further Reading Adam, Barry D. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. New York: Twayne, 1995. Button, James W., Barbara A. Rienzo, and Kenneth D. Wald. Private Lives, Public Conflicts: Battles over Gay Rights in American Communities. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997. D’Emilio, John. “Cycles of Change, Questions of Strategy: The Gay and Lesbian Movement After Fifty Years.” In The Politics of Gay Rights, ed. Craig A. Rimmerman, Kenneth D. Wald, and Clyde Wilcox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Rimmerman, Craig. From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Vaid, Urvashi. Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
G ay s i n P o p u l a r C u l t u r e Popular culture has the unique ability to reinforce the status quo as well as challenge traditional society. Given
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this ambiguous role, popular entertainment has historically provided a venue in which queer men and women could test the limits of sexual freedom and visibility. Conversely, the presence of gay individuals and icons in the movies, television, music, sports, and other popular culture genres has brought an outcry from social conservatives. The question of who controls popular culture and what should be censored has created intense controversy in America’s culture wars. A major breakthrough came in April 1997 when the popular comedian and television actress Ellen DeGeneres “came out” as a lesbian. At the time, the former stand-up comic had her own weekly sitcom on the ABC network, called Ellen. DeGeneres made her declaration as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, confirmed by a cover article in Time magazine with the headline, “Yep, I’m Gay.” Blurring the line between reality and television, DeGeneres’s character on the sitcom, Ellen Morgan, came out as well in an episode later that month. The coming-out sparked unprecedented publicity and backlash. Religious and conservative leaders who felt the country was not ready for a homosexual lead character attacked the network’s decision and applauded sponsors who pulled their advertisements from the show. The American Family Association and Jerry Falwell led the charge, which included a boycott of the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns ABC. The coming-out episode ranked number one that week in the Nielsen ratings. In addition to Entertainment Weekly’s Entertainer of the Year award and other professional honors, DeGeneres received civil rights awards from the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. While DeGeneres’s announcement and the response to it led to the cancellation of her show after the following season, it did not prevent the ever-increasing visibility of gay men and lesbians in the media or end the portrayal of gay characters in popular culture. Celebrities continued to come out—by choice or revelation—while straight men and women unabashedly took on gay and lesbian roles on television and in the movies. The decade after DeGeneres’s coming-out saw the production and popularity of such other gay-oriented TV shows as Will & Grace (1998–2006), Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007), The L-Word (2004–2009), and Queer as Folk (2000–2005). Moreover, along with the popularity of reality television, producers often cast members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community in these series. As gayness has become more visible, some cultural critics have bemoaned the stereotypical depiction of sitcom gay characters, arguing that such figures can exist only if they do not threaten the heterosexual status quo. Before DeGeneres, a number of actors, artists, athletes, writers, and singers had identified themselves as
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members of the GLBTQ community. Many of them, however, came out only near the end of their careers, risking minimal professional consequences. In the 1950s, celebrity magazines such as Confidential and Vice Squad thrived on exposing the sexual secrets of Hollywood stars, especially those purportedly involved in same-sex romances. In the political and moral climate of the 1950s, to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual would have been career suicide. The macho Hollywood star Rock Hudson (born Leroy Harold Scherer, Jr.) was quickly married off to his agent’s secretary in 1955 after the magazine Confidential threatened to expose his homosexuality. At the time, Hudson was a contractual agent for Universal Studios, which worried that a disclosure of its budding actor’s homosexuality would ruin his box office potential. In 1985, Hudson finally came out as it became clear that he was dying of AIDS. Initially, he had refused to admit that he was gay and blamed the disease on blood transfusions he had received due to heart bypass surgery late in life. The plight of gays in professional sports has been more problematic than in other areas of popular culture. Conservative groups worry that openly gay athletes could make homosexuality appear more attractive to youth if they are allowed to perform in the professional arena. Athletes from individual noncontact sports such as golf, tennis, swimming, and ice skating have been more likely to come out than athletes who participate in full-contact team sports. A number of gay athletes, coaches, and officials have claimed that their sexuality resulted in firings, trades, or discrimination. In 1988, Major League Baseball umpire Dave Pallone contended that he was fired after he privately came out to then National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti. Other athletes and coaches are vocally opposed to the participation of gays in professional sports. In February 2007, Tim Hardaway, a retired point guard in the National Basketball Association (NBA), made a series of antigay comments on a radio show concerning the coming-out of a former NBA player, John Amaechi. In March 2007, Tony Dungy, the head coach of the National Football League’s Indianapolis Colts accepted an award from the Indiana Family Institute, a right-wing group that works to fight against same-sex marriage. Because of the stigma against gays in professional sports, many athletes come out only after their careers have ended. The visibility of homosexual characters and imagery remains a volatile subject in American society. Popular culture aimed at children has been particularly vulnerable to critics of homosexuality. In February 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell warned parents that one of the characters in the television show Teletubbies (1997–2001), a BBC series aimed at preschool children, contained hidden homosexual symbols. Tinky Winky, one of the four eponymous characters, came under fire because he is purple, a color associated with gay pride; because he
carries a red bag that could be interpreted as a woman’s purse; and because his antenna is shaped like an inverted triangle, another symbol of gay pride. Representatives of the show denied the attacks, insisting that any homosexual imagery was purely coincidental. A similar controversy arose in January 2005 when two Christian conservative groups, the American Family Association and Focus on the Family, accused the creators of the hit cartoon show SpongeBob SquarePants (1999– ) of exposing children to homosexuality. The issue surrounded a music video produced by the nonprofit group We Are Family Foundation, in which the character SpongeBob appeared along with other popular cartoon characters. The organization had been founded, and the video produced, to promote greater tolerance of multiculturalism after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Critics of the cartoon based their accusations on the fact that the main character is inordinately effeminate and occasionally holds hands with his pink starfish friend, Patrick. For the queer community, the proliferation of images of gay men and lesbians in the media provides role models as well as evidence of their existence in society in general. Conservative groups, lamenting the visibility of homosexuality in popular culture, continue to challenge shows and movies that depict gays in a positive or appealing light. For celebrity entertainers and athletes, meanwhile, the decision to come out is not casual or incidental. Whatever the trends in recent years, it poses a serious threat to their professional careers. Elizabeth M. Matelski See also: AIDS; Falwell, Jerry; Focus on the Family; Gay Rights Movement; Lesbians; Outing; Penn, Sean; September 11; Walt Disney Company; White, Reggie; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Berube, Alan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. New York: The Free Press, 2000. Bronski, Michael. The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Gever, Martha. Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Self-Invention. New York: Routledge, 2003. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. All the Rage: the Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
G ay s i n t h e M i l i t a r y In 1992, Bill Clinton pledged that if elected president, he would end the ban on homosexuals in the U.S. military. His plan ended up meeting stiff political resistance, in particular from Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Army
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General Colin Powell, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This led to a policy formulation referred to as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” (1993), a compromise stipulating that recruits would no longer be asked if they are homosexual and that gays and lesbians would be able to serve in the armed forces provided they keep their sexual orientation private. Few culture warriors were pleased: generally, conservatives wanted to continue the ban, and liberals wanted open integration of gays. The debate over military policy concerning sexual orientation raises questions about military readiness, citizenship rights, and ultimately society’s acceptance of homosexuality. Meanwhile, polls indicate growing public support of gays and lesbians openly serving in the military—from 44 percent (1993) to 75 percent (2008). By 2008, some 65,000 homosexuals were serving in the U.S. armed forces. Homosexuality in the military has long been an issue. During World War II, homosexuals were considered inherently unsuited for military service. Following the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), which reported that 37 percent of American males had experienced sexual relations with other men, homosexuality came to be viewed as more widespread than previously thought. The following year, the Department of Defense (DOD) instituted a uniform policy toward gays in all branches of the military that labeled them a security risk due to the possibility of blackmail. Between 1947 and 1950, there were 4,380 homosexuality-related terminations from the military— of those, 470 were dishonorable discharges. At the time, there were three homosexual classifications: Class I, involving sexual assault or coercion; Class II, involving actual or attempted homosexual acts; and Class III, involving exhibited or admitted homosexual tendencies. In 1957, the navy’s Crittenden Report recommended the elimination of Class III and argued that homosexuals were generally not security risks. (This document was not made public until 1976.) By the early 1960s, the rationale against homosexuals emphasized the “corrosive influence” and harm to the military’s “moral fiber.” During the 1970s, with the advent of the gay rights movement (which influenced the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to stop listing homosexuality as a psychiatric abnormality), a number of gays challenged the military ban in federal court—Berg v. Claytor (1977), pertaining to navy; Matlovich v. Secretary of the Air Force (1978); and Ben-Shalom v. Secretary of the Army (1980). Although these legal challenges failed to overturn the ban, the military did acknowledge that gays could be effective service members. In 1981, the DOD defined a homosexual as “a person . . . who engages in, desires to engage in, or intends to engage in homosexual acts.” In 1982, it was officially stated that “homosexuality is incompatible with military
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service.” Between 1980 and 1991, there were a total of 16,919 discharges relating to homosexuality, representing 1.7 percent of all involuntary discharges. The annual monetary cost for replacing discharged personnel was an estimated $39.5 million. One factor in the increased number of gay discharges was the 1985 introduction of HIV testing of military personnel. In the second half of 1980s, for instance, 3,336 individuals were discharged for HIV-positive results. In 1988, Theodore R. Sarbin and Kenneth E. Karols, a sex psychologist and psychiatristsurgeon, wrote a Pentagon-sponsored report on the issue of homosexuals in the military, recommending that gays and lesbians not be excluded from service. Gay Democrats (called “Homocrats”) convinced presidential candidate Clinton to support lifting the military ban on gays, even though the issue was not on the agenda of many in the gay rights movement. Critics within the gay and lesbian community did not regard the military as a suitable venue for advancing citizenship and equality. Many, in fact, were ambivalent or hostile toward the armed forces. Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist, later advised President Clinton to have the military stop asking enlistees about their sexual orientation in order to spare gays and lesbians from having to lie. It was Moskos who went on to draft the Clinton administration’s compromise measure, originally worded as “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t seek, don’t flaunt.”
Gay activists in New York City protest the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding homosexuality in the U.S. armed forces, in effect since 1993. Gays and lesbians are allowed to serve if they keep their sexual orientation private. (Timothy A. Clary/ AFP/Getty Images)
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The argument supporting the integration of gays in the military has largely been framed around civil rights: since the military had earlier abandoned racial segregation in the ranks, it should do the same for homosexuals. Colin Powell, an African American, was criticized for disfavoring gay rights in the service after years of benefiting from the military’s racial equality. It was also argued that people who are willing to put their lives on the line for their country should not have to hide their sexual orientation. Opponents of gays in the military emphasize the privacy rights of heterosexual service members, arguing that they should not have to share close quarters, including communal shower rooms, with those of same-sex orientation. In addition, they warn that unit cohesion of heterosexuals is undermined by the presence of homosexuals. Such sentiments were provocatively made by Tom Wolfe in the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg (1996), a story about Army Rangers who murder a fellow soldier because he is gay. In his book Dereliction of Duty (2003), Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson, the former Air Force White House aide, blames liberals, who he says dislike the military and would never serve in uniform, for using the armed forces to conduct social engineering. Under the Clinton policy, many gays and lesbians have been forced out of the military—from 1994 to 2007 there were 12,342 homosexual-related discharges, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. From the onset the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force argued, “The closet isn’t a compromise.” Many universities and colleges, in particular those affiliated with the Association of American Law Schools, protested the discriminatory nature of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by barring military recruiters from campus job fairs. Congress responded with the Solomon Amendment (1996, 1999, 2001), which cuts off federal funding, including student financial aid, to any institution of higher learning that blocks equal access to recruiters. In the meantime, as the War on Terror placed a strain on military recruitment, pragmatists began arguing that it did not make sense to discharge competent service members simply because they were gay. Proponents of lifting the ban pointed to America’s strong ally, Great Britain, noting that in 2000 it began allowing gays to serve openly in its military. In 2007, retired U.S. Army General John M. Shalikashvili, who had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997, publicly stated that it was time to lift the ban on gays in the military. Roger Chapman See also: Clinton, Bill; Gay Rights Movement; Hay, Harry; Kinsey, Alfred; Lesbians; Milk, Harvey; Socarides, Charles; Sodomy Laws; White, Reggie; Wolfe, Tom; Women in the Military.
Further Reading Belkin, Aaron, and Geoffrey Bateman, eds. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003. Lehring, Gary L. Officially Gay: The Political Construction of Sexuality by the U.S. Military. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Patterson, Robert “Buzz.” Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003. Wolfe, Tom. Ambush at Fort Bragg. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio, 1997. Originally published in Rolling Stone, December 12 and 26, 1996.
G e n d e r - I n c l u s i ve L a n g u a g e Gender-inclusive or gender-neutral language in professional and scholarly writing entails the removal of male reference words that have traditionally been applied in a generic sense and replacing them with gender-neutral ones. Advocates of gender-inclusive language regard it as an attempt to overcome “linguistic sexism” in public discourse. Opponents of such language reform have castigated it as political correctness; some have gone so far as to call it a form of totalitarian speech code. The debate on sexist language began in earnest during the early 1970s as one of the concerns expressed by the women’s liberation movement. Significantly, the debut issue of Ms. Magazine in the spring of 1972 featured an article on gender-biased language. The Modern Language Association (MLA) took up the issue later in the decade, leading to the creation of special programs on language and sex at its 1978 annual convention. The following year, MLA’s delegate assembly recommended that the organization “affirm, in statements of editorial policy, a commitment to the use of nonsexist language in its publications and develop guidelines for the use of nonsexist language.” Some members, unsupportive of that decision, argued that the MLA was capitulating to “fashionable ideologies” at the expense of academic freedom. Other members maintained that educated people could no longer ignore the built-in gender bias of traditional language usage. During the 1980s, the MLA Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession worked at producing guidelines for gender-inclusive language. In 1995, the Association of American University Presses came out with Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing. Some applications of nonsexist language have replaced the word mankind with humankind while changing he to s/he or he/she. Some writers alternate between he and she, using both pronouns in a generic manner. In the late 1970s, Robert Longwell of the University of Northern Colorado recommended new genderless pronouns, such as hesh to replace he or she; hizer instead of his or her; hirm in
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lieu of him or her (and hirmself instead of himself or herself). Some feminists have changed the spelling of woman to womyn to eliminate any perceived lingering maleness. At the same time, there has been a tendency to emphasize the feminine designation for titles, professions, and honorifics such as actress, congresswoman, and heiress. Some prefer strictly neutral formulations, such as actor (for both male and female performers) and chair (as opposed to chairman or chairwoman). Critics of gender-inclusive language, such as Harvard linguistics professor Calvert Watkins, dismiss the concern as symptomatic of “pronoun envy,” a comment people on the other side of the debate regarded as blatant sexism. Traditionalists argue that it has been understood for centuries that the word man (used in reference to mankind or human civilization) is generic, representing both male and female. The awkwardness of writing in a gender-neutral fashion has frustrated some writers. The style manual for the American Psychological Association (APA) recommends rephrasing sentences to avoid the generic he altogether. The APA manual prefers parenting over mothering; chairperson rather than chairman; postal worker instead of mailman. The name of a woman, the APA manual states, should not be preceded by Mrs. when marital status is an irrelevant detail. The historian Jacques Barzun rejects gender-inclusive language in his work From Dawn to Decadence (2000), explaining that man derives from the Sanskrit (man, manu) and strictly denotes human being. The word woman, he writes, literally means “wife–human being.” Genderinclusive language, he suggests, is a “sex-conscious practice” that sidetracks from the substantive discussion and, in the end, does not compel readers to increase their respect toward women if they are undisposed to anyway. Finally, Barzun argues, if writers must avoid the word man in reference to humans generally, fairness dictates that they should also distinguish between adults, teenagers, and children of the opposite sex. The inclusive-language debate has crept into the religious realm as well, causing a split between traditionalists and modernists. At stake is how to translate the Bible and how to address God. Modernists argue that the gender of God is neither male nor female (or perhaps both), and that the only reason the Bible uses male pronouns is because it was written in a patriarchal culture that is vastly different from contemporary society. Traditionalists, on the other hand, insist that how to address God is a matter of divinely inspired doctrine and not culture. Less controversial, but nonetheless part of the debate, is whether or not to change the generic man to human, change brethren to people, and change sons of God to children of God. Thus, Bible translators generally fall into one of two camps: formal equivalency (literal translation) and functional equivalency (dynamic translation). In 1997, a group of evangelicals formed the Council for Biblical
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Manhood and Womanhood in negative reaction to the New International Version Inclusive Language Edition Bible, prompting the publisher, Zondervan, to discontinue its plans for introducing it to the American market. In 2002, the same publisher, supported by biblical scholars favoring gender-inclusive translation of scripture, published Today’s New International Version, a gender-neutral translation of the Bible. Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Marriage Names; Ms.; Political Correctness; Speech Codes.
Further Reading Carson, D.A. The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998. Frank, Francine Wattman, and Paula A. Treichler. Language, Gender, and Professional Writing: Theoretical Approaches and Guidelines for Nonsexist Usage. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989. Miller, Kate, and Casey Swift. “De-Sexing the English Language.” Ms. Magazine, Spring 1972. Osborne, Grant R. “Do Inclusive-Language Bibles Distort Scripture?” Christianity Today, October 27, 1997.
Generations and Generational Conf lict Since the 1960s, many aspects of the American culture wars have been viewed as reflections of generational divisions in the society at large. Commentators on cultural conflict have referred to the “generation gap” and “intergenerational conflict,” even if it is frequently unclear what specifically constitutes a generation and what distinct generations are discernible in American society. The modern concept of generations developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to the “cohort generation” approach, a generation is determined by a distinguishing social phenomenon rather than the age of its members. While a birth cohort may refer to any group of people who are born in the same era, sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that generations form only when individuals who are born during the same time period in the same society also experience “concrete historical problems.” Generations thus develop as a meaningful social unit only when large-scale events forge a group identity among people of the same birth cohort.
Types In their 1991 book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe combine the cohort generation concept with the cyclical interpretation of American history made
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popular by historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., and his son, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In the book, Strauss and Howe recount the story of America as a continuing succession of four generational archetypes: idealists/ prophets, reactives/nomads, civics/heroes, and adaptives/ artists. Each generation type possesses a different dominant worldview, and the character of American society at any point in time reflects the location of each type within the age hierarchy. Implicit in this approach is the idea that generational conflict is inevitable, as different generations are assumed to have fundamentally contrasting value systems. Historians generally recognize five generations born in the United States during the twentieth century: the GI Generation (born 1901–1924), the Silent Generation (1925–1945), the Baby Boom Generation (1946–1964), Generation X (1965–1981), and the Millennial Generation (1982–2003). The spans for each generation are not definitive, but cutoffs generally differ by only a year or two. Some of these generations are clearly recognized as distinct social groupings, such as Baby Boomers, while other have a less distinct identity. This is consistent with Mannheim’s claim that not all birth cohorts form strong social bonds. The GI Generation experienced the formative life experiences of the Great Depression and World War II as young adults. This group has always possessed a strong sense of generational association. Hailed as the “Greatest Generation” by newscaster Tom Brokaw in his 1998 best-selling book, members of this group were active in public and social life through their later years. The Silent Generation, however, lacked such formative historical experiences as children and young adults in the relatively stable era between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Vietnam War. Born in a period of relatively high birth rates in the United States, the Baby Boom Generation is larger than any other in the twentieth century. Its generational identity was formed in the social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. Time magazine in 1966 named the generation its “Man of the Year.” The political and social influence of the Baby Boomers has been rivaled only by that of the GI Generation, against whom the Boomers engaged in the most intergenerational conflict. Generation X, referred to by Strauss and Howe as the “13th generation” because it is the thirteenth in the United States since the nation’s founding, has been somewhat stigmatized. Demographers have referred to the group as the Baby Bust, since the unusually high birth rates of the Baby Boom were followed by unusually low birth rates. Generational identity for this group was most prominent in the early 1990s, but even then resistance was expressed by members of the cohort to the idea of a generational identity. The lack of major world or national events experienced during young adulthood
also calls into question the strength of generational coherence for Gen X. The Millennial Generation—sometimes called Generation Y—is significantly larger than Generation X, in part because it comprises the children of the vast Baby Boom cohort. Hence, they are sometimes referred to as the “Boom Echo” or “Baby Boomlet.” Technological advancements are often cited as the unifying factor in establishing generational identity for this group, but it is too early to conclude whether a strong sense of generational association will develop for this birth cohort. Strauss and Howe have described this group as “the next great generation.”
Conflicts While generational conflict can be documented throughout history, it became especially prominent in American society during the culture wars of the 1960s. The civil rights and antiwar movements were largely inspired and supported by members of the Baby Boom, many of whom at the time were in college or young adults. The “establishment” against which protest activities were directed generally consisted of members of the GI Generation, who were the leaders of most civic, educational, and political institutions. The famous admonition of free-speech activist Jack Weinberg in 1965, “Don’t trust anybody over thirty,” clearly defined generational lines of opposition. The “generation gap” between these two groups was prominent through the 1970s, as the conflict over political issues transformed into moral debate over such issues as abortion. For example, in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade (1973), both “Jane Roe” (Norma McCorvey) and her lawyer (Sarah Weddington) were Baby Boomers, while Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade was a member of the GI Generation. When the core of the Baby Boomers shifted from liberal experimenters to more conservative young, urban professionals (called yuppies) in the 1980s, the cultural friction between the generations became less pronounced. But Leonard Steinhorn’s The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (2006) is a response to the perception, as fostered by Tom Brokaw, that the Baby Boomers have not lived up to the standards set by the GI Generation. Generational conflict was in evidence during the early 1990s when the label “Generation X” was introduced. Portrayals in popular media—both Time and Newsweek magazines had cover stories about the new “twentysomethings” in 1990—claimed that the generation lacked ambition, rejected the ideas of hard work and commitment, and generally were poised for failure. A number of young authors and activists rejected these labels as well as the assumption that the model established by the Baby Boom was worthy of emulation. Others objected to the
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core claim that young adults in the 1990s constituted a meaningful social grouping. Through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, it has been unclear whether cultural conflicts are a reflection of generational conflict between Baby Boomers and Generation X. While there are generational differences in opinion about specific issues, such as Social Security, the national debt, and the environment, the differences are less pronounced than those between the GI and Baby Boom generations in the 1960s and 1970s. One factor that may account for the diminished generational conflict between Baby Boomers and Generation X is the general disinterest in politics expressed by members of Gen X. While the succession of the Millennial Generation into young adulthood during the 2010s may lead to a reemergence of generational conflict, evidence suggests that this cohort is unlikely to have a stronger sense of generational identity than members of Generation X. A sense of collective identity does not seem to have developed for this birth cohort around the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It may also be argued that the high level of racial and ethnic diversity in the Millennial Generation, resulting from increases in immigration and intermarriage since the 1960s, makes it less likely that a common birth period can provide a sufficient basis for group identity for this, or any future, cohort, even in the wake of major historical events. Seth Ovadia See also: Brokaw, Tom; Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Environmental Movement; Roe v. Wade (1973); Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; September 11; Social Security; Speech Codes; Students for a Democratic Society; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House, 1998. Howe, Neil, and William Strauss. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Mannheim, Karl. “The Problem of Generations.” In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti, 276–332. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952. Steinhorn, Leonard. The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. New York: William Morrow, 1991. Wellner, Alison Stein. “Generational Divide.” American Demographics 22:10 (2000): 52–58.
Genetically Modified Foods Genetically modified foods (GMF) are made from the manipulation of DNA in plants or animals. Genetic en-
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gineering has led to the modification of such food crops as corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, tomatoes, and strawberries for the purposes of increasing yield, strengthening resistance to drought or pestilence, and enabling growth with fewer fertilizer applications. Genetically altered animals, which produce more meat or milk, include cows, goats, pigs, sheep, and even salmon. Ninetynine percent of total global GMF are produced by six countries: the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China, and South Africa. In the American culture wars, critics of GMF argue that public and environmental safety warrants greater federal oversight of the biotech agricultural industry. The research underlying GMF dates to the 1950s, when scientists discovered chemical tools that could cut and duplicate pieces of DNA. Later, in 1977, a certain germ was discovered that could transfer short sections of DNA (genes) into the DNA of plant cells. Later, a “gene gun” was invented that is capable of shooting tiny DNA-coated metal bullets into cells. During the 1980s, numerous organisms were genetically modified. The U.S. Patent Office announced in April 1988 that “non-naturally occurring non-human multicellular living organisms, including animals,” are patentable, and by 1990 some 5,000 researchers at seventy-five companies had spent more than $1 billion to develop genetically altered crops and animals. In 1992, the Food and Drug Administration ruled that GMF are safe and equivalent to conventional food (and need no warning labels). Two years later it gave approval to the first GMF product, the Flavr Savr tomato, which was designed for a longer shelf life. By 2002, 70 percent of packaged-food products sold in the United States contained GMF. That same year, Oregon voters rejected a referendum that would have mandated GMF labeling of food products; proponents lost the battle after the food industry mounted a $5.2 million advertising campaign warning that labeling would dramatically increase the price of food. In 2004, GMF constituted 18 percent of the world’s food harvest. Most GMF crops contain bacterium genes that make plants resistant to insects or weed killer. For instance, the Roundup Ready genetically altered soybean plant is resistant to herbicides. The farmer sprays the entire field, killing weeds without harming the soybean plants. Critics point out that this leads to greater residue of toxic chemicals on the plants (not to mention more chemicals in the soil and waterways). The subsequent harvest, containing the herbicide-resistant gene, becomes a part of many processed foods, including bread, enriched flour, pasta, tofu, chips, cheese spread, soy sauce, fried foods, chocolate, and ice cream. Since there are no labeling laws, consumers are unaware of what specific products contain the Roundup Ready soybeans. The agricultural company Monsanto sells both the Roundup Ready seed and the Roundup herbicide, prompting cynics to conclude that
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biotech is being exploited as a handmaiden of the chemical industry. Americans also indirectly consume genetically modified food when they eat meat from pigs or cows that were fed with genetically altered corn, some of which is not allowed to be sold for direct human consumption because of proteins that cannot be readily digested. Moreover, to increase milk productivity, cows are administered the genetically altered growth hormone bovine somatotrophin (BST). Since breast cancer has been linked to women who have taken the female hormone estrogen, there is concern that BST could pose a cancer risk to milk drinkers. For this reason, Europe, in contrast to the United States, bans the sale of milk made with growth hormones. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Vermont state law requiring special labeling of BST milk. Proponents of GMF argue that they hold the promise of alleviating world hunger and helping the environment, producing more for less. In addition, they suggest that GMF provide a healthier diet when crops are designed to have more vitamins or lower levels of saturated fat. In the United States, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, representing companies such as Monsanto and DuPont, has been a big promoter of GMF. Countering this group is the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader, which dubs GMF “frankenfood.” Opponents of GMF argue that tinkering with the blueprint of life in plants and animals could lead to unintended consequences: decreasing biodiversity, disrupting the ecological balance, unleashing virulent organisms, or developing mutant plants such as killer weeds. The Monarch butterfly, some researchers believe, has been harmed by a certain genetically altered corn plant that produces insecticide pollen. Another concern is the violation of “species integrity” by the unnatural combination of DNA, such as when a human growth hormone gene is placed into a pig in order to produce a larger animal for slaughter. Concerns about consumer safety have also been raised, since no studies have been conducted to determine the long-term impact of GMF consumption. In Alliance for Bio-Integrity, et al. v. Donna Shalala, et al. (2000), a U.S. district court sided with the federal government’s policy of not requiring GMF safety testing. In July 2004, however, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the federal government begin conducting GMF trial studies. U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich (DOH) proposed legislation for such testing, but his efforts were tabled. The American public, meanwhile, has been divided on the issue. According to a September 2004 poll, 30 percent of Americans think GMF are safe, and 27 percent think they are unsafe. With the introduction of genetically altered plants, the integrity of the food supply has been occasionally compromised. In September 2000, the environmental
group Friends of the Earth conducted laboratory tests of Kraft Foods taco shells and traced the ingredients to a genetically altered corn, Starlink, which had been approved only for cattle feed. The corn in question contains a protein gene from bacterium that kills corn caterpillars but has the potential of causing allergic reactions in humans. Consequently, some 50 million bushels of contaminated corn in the Midwest had to be destroyed. The concern that GMF pose a risk of introducing allergens in food that would not naturally contain them prompted Congress to pass the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004. Some observers have warned of “Pharmageddon,” a scenario in which genetically altered crops grown for pharmaceutical purposes could accidentally be mixed with the food harvest. Indeed, in 2002 altered corn containing proteins used to treat pigs for diarrhea was mixed with a soybean crop grown for human consumption. The incident took place in Aurora, Nebraska, attracting Green Peace protesters who unfurled a banner on a grain elevator that read, “This Is Your Food On Drugs!” Roger Chapman See also: Food and Drug Administration; Globalization; Nader, Ralph.
Further Reading Fox, Michael W. Superpigs and Wondercorn: The Brave New World of Biotechnology and Where It May Lead. New York: Lyons & Burford, 1992. Nichols, John. “The Three Mile Island of Biotech?” Nation, December 30, 2002. O’Leary, Denyse. “Unholy Harvest?” Christianity Today, May 22, 2000. Pampel, Fred C. Threats to Food Safety. New York: Facts On File, 2006. Toke, Dave. The Politics of GM Food: A Comparative Study of the UK, USA and EU. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Gibson, Mel The Australian-American movie actor, director, and producer Mel Gibson has played leading or supporting roles in more than thirty motion-picture features, often cast as a martyred hero. In 2004, The Passion of the Christ, which Gibson co-wrote, directed, and produced, became one of the most controversial movies of the first decade of the twenty-first century for its realistic depiction of Jesus’s last hours. Press coverage and a massive advertising campaign targeted at conservative Christian churches generated a gross of more than $370 million in the United States and $611 million worldwide for the film, the eighth-highest in movie history and the highest for any R-rated (for violence) film.
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Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson was born on January 3, 1956, in Peekskill, New York. In 1968, the family moved to Australia, both to shield the five sons from the Vietnam War draft and to escape the permissiveness of modern American culture. Gibson began his acting career in Australia, making his breakthrough in Mad Max (1977); the release of that film in the United States as The Road Warrior (1981) established him as an international star. By 1982, with The Year of Living Dangerously, Gibson became a movie sex symbol, and the first of his four Lethal Weapon cop movies in 1987 established him as a superstar. Gibson made his directorial debut in 1993 with The Man Without a Face. He went on to receive Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for Braveheart (1995), a historical drama about the Scottish epic hero Sir William Wallace. Subsequent works have included The Patriot (2000), What Women Want (2000), Signs (2002), and Apocalypto (2007). Recounting the passion of Christ from a traditionalist Catholic point of view, Gibson’s The Passion appealed to conservative Christians, for whom the extreme suffering and blood violence dramatized the love of Jesus for sinners in need of atonement. Many Jews were offended by what they regarded as a strong anti-Semitic theme in the film. Politically conservative Jewish spokesmen such as film critic Michael Medved and Rabbi Daniel Lapin disagreed. Gibson argued that Jews who did not like his film had a dispute with the gospels, not with him. Although violence and bloodshed have been trademarks of Gibson films, many reviewers criticized the quantity and intensity in The Passion. Even William F. Buckley, Jr., like Gibson a traditional Catholic, thought the film “well intentioned . . . but unnecessarily bloated in blood.” Gibson characterized his rise to stardom as stressful because he is a man who prizes his privacy, emphasizes family life (he has ten siblings and seven children), has conservative views on many issues, and tends to speak his mind. He has offended feminists by using offensive terms for females and arguing that feminism was invented by jilted women. He has been accused of being homophobic for portraying gays in negative light and making antigay comments. He is a devout Catholic but opposed to the liberal reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s. Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, has been accused of being a Holocaust denier, and his son has refused to comment on that issue. In 2005, during an arrest for drunk driving, the actor was quoted as making several virulent anti-Semitic remarks, for which he later apologized. Gibson has spoken out strongly against birth control, abortion, judicial opinions regarding Terry Schiavo (a woman patient dependent on a feeding tube for survival whose husband petitioned the courts to remove the tube), and stem-cell research. On the other hand, Gibson opposed U.S. involvement in the Iraq War and praised Michael Moore’s antiwar documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). Abraham D. Lavender
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See also: Abortion; Anti-Semitism; Birth Control; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Catholic Church; Feminism, Second-Wave; Gays in Popular Culture; Lapin, Daniel; Literature, Film, and Drama; Medved, Michael; Moore, Michael; Schiavo, Terri; Stem-Cell Research.
Further Reading Boyer, Peter J. “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession.” New Yorker, September 15, 2003. DeAngelis, Michael. Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Oram, James. Reluctant Star: The Mel Gibson Story. London: Fontana, 1991.
Gilmore, Gar y The execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah in January 1977 marked the first use of capital punishment in the United States after its reinstatement by the Supreme Court the previous year. The death penalty had been challenged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other groups for being applied unfairly to minorities, leading to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972), which ruled capital punishment unconstitutional because of its arbitrary implementation. After legislation addressing the Court’s concerns was adopted in a number of states, the death penalty was reinstated in the case Gregg v. Georgia (1976), preparing the way for Gilmore’s execution. Contributing to the notoriety of the case was the fact that Gilmore expressed his desire to be executed and took no legal action to prevent or postpone it. The second of four sons, Gary Mark Gilmore was born on December 4, 1940, in rural Texas, and the family settled in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1950s. By the age of fifteen, he had dropped out of school and gained the attention of local police in connection with a number of petty thefts. After conviction for car theft, he spent a year in Oregon’s MacLaren Reform School for Boys but, because of poor behavior, was transferred to the Oregon State Correctional Institution. This incarceration, which ended when Gilmore reached age twenty-one, was followed by a series of others, mostly for robbery. Eighteen of his last twenty-one years were spent behind bars. The events leading to Gilmore’s execution began in Orem, Utah, on July 19, 1976, when he robbed a gas station and in the process murdered an employee, shooting him twice in the head. The next day, Gilmore robbed the City Center Motel in Provo, Utah, where he shot and killed the manager, Ben Bushnell. Gilmore was tried and convicted that October for the murder of Bushnell, and the jury recommended the death penalty. Offered a choice
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under state law, he chose death by firing squad rather than by hanging. Preferring death to prison life, Gilmore twice attempted suicide as he awaited execution. After much public debate and legal attempts to stop the execution by both the NAACP and the ACLU, Gilmore was put to death by firing squad on January 17, 1977. His last words were “Let’s do it.” Norman Mailer’s account of Gilmore’s life and death, The Executioner’s Song (1979), won a Pulitzer Prize the following year and took a central place in the national debates pertaining to capital punishment and prison reform. Anthony C. Gabrielli See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Capital Punishment; Mailer, Norman; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Prison Reform; Ryan, George.
Further Reading “The Ballad of Gary Gilmore.” National Review, January 7, 1977. Edmundson, Mark. “Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song.” Contemporary Literature 31:4 (Winter 1990): 434– 47. Gilmore, Mikal. Shot in the Heart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. “Heard Round the World.” National Review, February 4, 1977. Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Ging r ich, New t As speaker of the house during the 1990s, Newt Gingrich (R-GA) was the mastermind of the Contract with America, a conservative political platform credited by some with enabling the Republican Party in 1994 to gain control of Congress for the first time since 1952. The contract was a pledge that the new Congress, if Republicans were in charge, would schedule votes in its first 100 days on specific conservative reform measures. Under Gingrich’s watch Congress passed welfare reform, a balanced budget, and tax cuts. An outspoken culture warrior, Gingrich has asserted that Democrats represent the “Liberal Welfare Society” and Republicans the “Conservative Opportunity Society.” He has also emphasized ethics in government and “traditional values,” but critics point to his alleged violations of House ethics rules and his own admission that he was having an affair with a Capitol Hill staffer while his party was condemning President Bill Clinton’s sexual impropriety. He was born Newton Leroy McPherson on June 17, 1943, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His parents split after only three days of marriage—long enough to conceive a child. Three years later, his mother married an army infantry officer, Robert Gingrich, who adopted
Conservative congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA), being sworn in as speaker of the House in January 1995, led the so-called Republican Revolution in Congress. GOP gains in the 1994 elections ended forty years of Democratic majority in the House. (Terry Ashe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
the boy. Newt grew up on U.S. Army bases in Kansas, France, West Germany, and Georgia, later studying history at Emory University (BA, 1965) and Tulane University (MA, 1968; PhD, 1971). After teaching history and environmental studies at West Georgia College (1970–1978), he was elected as the U.S. representative of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District (1979–1999). He served the last four years as House speaker. At his political peak in 1995, he was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine. Michael Barone of the U.S. News & World Report, meanwhile, has characterized Gingrich as an ironic figure—a critic of government and a staunch advocate of privatization and yet, as former “military brat,” faculty member at a state college, and retired federal official, “a creature of the public sector of the economy.” Since leaving Congress in 1999, Gingrich has established a political consulting firm, appeared as a political analyst on the Fox News Channel, and published (often co-authored) political commentaries and historical novels. Despite his success in Congress, Gingrich did not gain entry into that body until after he had lost two elections (1974 and 1976). When he finally did win his seat in 1978, it was on a platform of lower taxes and opposition to the Panama Canal treaty. He also stopped campaigning on environmental issues, having found that it gained little traction with Georgia voters. Once in office and in life after Congress, Gingrich remained interested in environmentalism, later co-authoring a book on the subject, A Contract with the Earth (2007).
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During the first Ronald Reagan administration in the early 1980s, Gingrich began strategizing ways that the Republicans might gain control of Congress, offering reform ideas in Window of Opportunity: Blueprint for the Future (1985). He and other conservatives inflated their stature by giving “speeches” before C-SPAN television cameras, which provided continual coverage of Capitol Hill; once in 1984 an infuriated House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA) ordered that the cameras pan the room so that viewers would realize that Gingrich was making a passionate appeal to an empty House chamber. In 1989, Gingrich was instrumental in toppling House Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX), who was charged with ethics violations. In 1990, Gingrich rejected President George H.W. Bush’s tax increase, calling it a violation of conservatism and his own promises. For the 1994 campaign, Gingrich persuaded 130 “safe incumbent” House Republicans to help raise funds for a nationalized congressional campaign, building a $6 million war chest. In the election, the Contract with America provided a unifying platform for the GOP as well as a work plan for the early days of the 104th Congress. The seventy-four Republican freshmen were loyal to Gingrich, who also had a strong alliance with the reelected junior members. This enabled him to wield strong party discipline, resulting in Republican unity on 91 percent of the voting. Thus, the first session of the 104th Congress was highly partisan—73 percent of voting was along party lines. Gingrich’s goal was “to make the House co-equal with the White House,” which meant strong opposition to President Clinton. During the winter of 1995–1996, he came into conflict with Bob Dole (R-KS), the Senate Republican leader, for refusing to compromise on the federal budget, which led to a standoff with the Clinton administration and a temporary shutdown of the government. Critics attributed the impasse to a slight Gingrich nursed against Clinton over not getting a good seat on Air Force One during an overseas trip; in his political memoir, Lessons Learned the Hard Way (1998), Gingrich blames the liberal media for distorting his account of that incident. In the meantime, the House Ethics Committee was investigating Gingrich on ethical issues pertaining to the funding of a political action committee and a lucrative book contract. The result was a $300,000 fine for the political use of tax-exempt foundations (1997), for which some in his party tried to oust him as speaker. In the 1998 national elections, House Republicans retained their majority, but lost five seats. Gingrich, who had predicted a GOP gain of twenty to thirty seats, was seen as a liability by many in his party. In December 1998 he announced his resignation from Congress, which retained an eleven-seat Republican majority. Despite his earlier prediction that Republicans would rule the House for a generation, Democrats regained
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control in 2006. Gingrich blamed that setback on Karl Rove, the campaign strategist for George W. Bush, calling him “manically dumb” for reaching out almost exclusively to the Republican conservative base. Since then, Gingrich has offered his party a strategy on voter issues—co-authoring Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works (2008), which builds on his Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America (2005). In addition, he has reached out to the Religious Right with Rediscovering God in America (2006). In 2008, he began promoting a “red, white, and blue platform,” asserting that America is not truly divided between red states and blue states. Gingrich maintains that most Americans support making English the official language, ending illegal immigration, reforming the tax code, allowing for optional privatized Social Security accounts, building more nuclear power plants, allowing religious expressions and symbols in public spaces, and safeguarding the country from terrorism. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Religion; Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Contract with America; English as the Official Language; Environmental Movement; Immigration Policy; Red and Blue States; Republican Party; Rove, Karl; Social Security; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Bernstein, Amy, and Peter W. Bernstein, eds. Quotations from Speaker Newt: The Little Red, White and Blue Book of the Republican Revolution. New York: Workman, 1995. Gingrich, Newt, Vince Haley, and Rick Tyler. Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008. Newt Gingrich Web site. www.newt.org. Steely, Mel. The Gentleman from Georgia: The Biography of Newt Gingrich. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. In the Matter of Representative Newt Gingrich: Report on the Select Committee on Ethics. Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 1997.
Ginsberg, Allen Controversial, charismatic, and deemed by many a poetic genius, Allen Ginsberg was a founder and leading member—with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others—of the Beat Generation literary movement. From the mid1950s until his death in the late 1990s, he took on the persona of the roving bard, defying authorities from New York to Moscow, and became a prominent voice of the counterculture. Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on June 3, 1926. His father was a poet and teacher, and his mother was a teacher and Communist Party mem-
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ber. He attended Columbia University and was published widely in the campus literary magazines. In 1949, when he was arrested as an accessory to burglary, his professors persuaded the Manhattan district attorney to allow him to serve his sentence at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Ginsberg’s eight months as a patient there transformed him from an Ivy League undergraduate to a cool hipster on a poetic mission. Leaving New York in 1954, he traveled to Mexico and then California, where he visited Neal Cassady, his muse and the hero of Kerouac’s On the Road. In San Francisco, after intensive psychoanalysis, Ginsberg began to accept his homosexuality. In a burst of self-liberating creativity, he wrote “Howl” (1956), a long confessional poem about the anxieties of his own generation and the nuclear age that helped set the stage for the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Ferlinghetti, founder of San Francisco’s City Lights, the first all-paperback bookstore in America as well as a publishing company, published Howl and Other Poems in 1956. The municipal district attorney, backed by the Catholic Church, then prosecuted Ferlinghetti for obscenity. At the trial—an early battle in the culture wars—conservatives clashed with liberals. After Judge Clayton Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty and ruled that Howl did have socially redeeming qualities, the poem became an international best-seller, with nearly a million copies in print. Translated into several dozen languages, it inspired youth to rebel against communist regimes in Eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. Media coverage of the Howl trial made Ginsberg world famous. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, helped make him notorious, and academic literary critics lambasted him. In 1968, already an icon, Ginsberg protested at the Democratic National Convention, and in 1969, as a witness for the defense, he testified at the conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven. Meanwhile, Ginsberg continued to develop as a poet, producing such works as Kaddish (1961), an epic about his mother, Naomi, and Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), a surrealistic invective against the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, in response to actions by the Reagan administration, Ginsberg poured out a series of angry, defiant poems. In the last decades of his life, he embarked on an intense spiritual path and helped popularize Buddhism in America. By the time of his death on April 5, 1997, at the age of seventy, he had become widely anthologized, though literary scholars, divided in two nearly equal camps, debated his merits as a poet. Academics such as Yale professor Harold Bloom excluded Ginsberg from the pantheon of American literature, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky hailed him as a genius, and fans of his work debated whether “Howl” was a masterpiece or merely an adolescent rant. Jonah Raskin
See also: Censorship; Chicago Seven; Counterculture; Gay Rights Movement; Kerouac, Jack; New Age Movement; Nuclear Age; Podhoretz, Norman; Reagan, Ronald; Sexual Revolution; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Random House, 1969. Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin, 2000. Podhoretz, Norman. Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. New York: Free Press, 1999. Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
G l o b a l Wa r m i n g “Global warming” is the now commonly used term for the rapid rise in the average temperature of the earth’s surface, including air and ocean, for the past century or more. The increase is widely attributed to the phenomenon known as “the greenhouse effect,” whereby the atmospheric buildup of excess concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide—known as greenhouse gases (GHGs)— prevents infrared energy from escaping and traps heat at the earth’s surface. Although there remains a minority of staunch skeptics, global warming is almost universally regarded as a fact in the scientific community and generally linked to human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels. In the context of the culture wars, the debate over global warming has centered on the extent of the problem and whether or not a proactive federal response, such as strict but costly regulations and programs that subsidize clean-energy technologies over carbon-based ones, is imminently needed. The concern over GHGs accumulating in the atmosphere dates to the 1950s. In 1957, the American climatologist Charles David Keeling presented indisputable proof that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels accumulates in the atmosphere instead of, as originally thought, being absorbed in the oceans and forests. Keeling’s precise method of measurement led to a data set known as the “Keeling Curve.” Decades later, in 1996, Keeling presented data suggesting that the increasing levels of GHGs in the northern hemisphere have led to earlier growing seasons, thus linking global warming with atmospheric carbon dioxide. Prior to his death in 2005, Keeling was paid homage for his research by Vice President Al Gore (1996) and later President George W. Bush (2002). In March 2006, the National Academy of Sci-
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ences issued a report with the following conclusion: “In the judgment of most climate scientists, Earth’s warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases have increased significantly since the Industrial Revolution, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels for energy, industrial processes, and transportation.” The report went on to state, however, that there is a “legitimate debate regarding how large, how fast, and where these effects will be.” Culture warriors on both sides claimed victory by emphasizing key passages of the report—either that scientists agree that global warming is indeed taking place or that the ramifications of the phenomenon are unclear. Many climatologists believe that global warming has led to an increase in erratic weather patterns, including extreme drought, heat waves, and devastating hurricanes, as well as a shrinking of the polar ice caps, the retreat of glaciers, and a rise in sea levels of 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) during the twentieth century. If GHGs continue to accumulate unabated, they warn, the planet could be headed for dire ecocatastrophe. On the other hand, experts agree that the multiple causal factors of weather and climate make projections pertaining to global warming a difficult and unreliable endeavor. Furthermore, projections based on computer models are only as good as the input data, which can be flawed due to erroneous assumptions regarding long-term effects. Thus, forecasts of loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, increase in disease-causing agents, pending economic disasters, and the like are less than certain. For the same reasons, it remains unclear to what extent humans would have to change their behavior in order to reverse the trend of global warming. The debate on global warming has often been accented along ideological lines, between conservatives (often Republican) and moderates to liberals (often Democratic). Usually, the approach of either side has been to take advantage of the lack of scientific consensus by drawing on the findings of select favorite scientific studies in order to justify its particular political or economic viewpoint. Those like Al Gore, who in his Oscar-winning documentary film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) warns of impending catastrophic environmental harm if global warming is left unchecked, are typically dubbed Chicken Littles by their opponents. Those like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who in 2003 characterized warnings about global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people,” are often ridiculed as members of the Flat Earth Society. Increasingly, however, activists fighting global warming like Gore—who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to “disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change”— have outnumbered naysayers both internationally and in
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the United States and have found resistance weakening in the face of mounting evidence. In 2006, Gore called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation requiring the coal, oil, mining, and utility industries to significantly reduce their GHG emissions. Opponents, including the Bush administration, argued that such an approach would put inordinate stress on the economy. Many Democrats and some Republicans have responded to economic concerns by suggesting financial incentives for reducing GHGs, such as a market-based emissions trading system that would spur the development of new technologies and simultaneously stimulate the economy by creating new jobs to meet the demands of “green technologies.” In the meantime, conservatives such as Vice President Dick Cheney used the concern over GHGs to promote the development of a new generation of clean-burning nuclear power plants. One contentious issue of global warming is the need for a global response and how to achieve it. Since Americans have contributed significantly to the problem, producing an estimated 25 percent of total GHGs, staunch environmentalists believe that it is right and fair for the United States to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions in proportion to its contribution to global warming. Others have disagreed with that conclusion if it means that developing nations such as China and India can continue to increase their levels of GHGs. The Kyoto Protocol (1997), which was signed by President Bill Clinton and the leaders of some 180 countries, stipulated a higher reduction of GHGs by the world’s developed nations. The U.S. Senate voted not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, however, and most other conservatives repudiated the accord as unfair because it would require the United States to spend billons of dollars to reduce GHGs and make it more challenging for American companies to compete in the global marketplace. On the other hand, both liberals and conservatives have argued that the U.S. economy would actually prosper if the nation became a leader in the development of eco-technologies. Mahesh Ananth See also: Bush Family; China; Environmental Movement; Globalization; Gore, Al; Kyoto Protocol; Nuclear Age; Science Wars; Warren, Rick.
Further Reading Bate, Roger, and Julian Morris. Global Warming: Apocalypse or Hot Air? Philadelphia: Coronet Books, 1994. Drake, Frances. Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2006.
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Lomborg, Bjørn. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Michaels, Patrick J. Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media. Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 2004. Ruddiman, William. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Singer, S. Fred. Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate. Oakland: Independent Institute, 1998.
Globalization Globalization is the process by which individuals, organizations, and nations throughout the world become increasingly connected and interdependent economically, politically, culturally, socially, and ecologically. The term as currently employed refers specifically to the post–World War II era, especially since the end of the Cold War, which has been marked by a quickening in the pace and a thickening in the density of international communication networks; business transactions; and political, economic, and cultural integration. Arguments about the extent and consequences of globalization are part of a set of larger debates in the culture wars over values and meanings in contemporary societies, including the place of the United States in the global system, the consequences of globalization for American citizens and society, and questions about who benefits and who suffers from globalization.
Culture War Beginnings In his famous “culture wars speech” at the Republican National Convention in 1992, the conservative standard bearer and sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan argued that the United States was endangered on several fronts, including the loss of jobs due to outsourcing and the globalization of the economy. His remarks echoed those of Ross Perot, founder of the Reform Party and its presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996. Perot staunchly opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which reduced economic barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In 1992, Perot famously argued that if NAFTA were ratified (which it was in 1994), Americans would hear a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs flooding south across the border into Mexico. In the years since these opening salvos, researchers and political commentators have continued to debate whether current patterns of globalization are a benefit or a liability for any individual country and for people living in different regions of the world. Since globalization has had a major impact on economics and finance, debates about the trend center on who gains and who loses from
global markets; the movement of jobs from one country to another; and who benefits and who suffers from the global migration of workers, the global spread of culture (lifestyles, consumer goods, fashions, and trends in the arts), and the emergence of global movements (such as human rights, environmental regulation, and religious extremism). Because globalization involves important issues that affect pocketbooks, quality of life, styles of living, and threats of reactionary violence, debates on the issue can become polarized, even leading to violence, with little common ground between proponents and opponents. This is what happened in Seattle, Washington, at the end of November 1999, when arguments about globalization shifted from debate among economists and politicians to civil conflict. The “Battle of Seattle” began when a routine meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which regulates international trade, was interrupted and derailed by thousands of antiglobalization protestors from a variety of countries. The City of Seattle declared a state of emergency, and police responded to protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades, and pepper spray. The protesters were a diverse group, including students, anarchists, environmentalists, labor union members, indigenous rights activists from such countries as Tibet and Mexico, small farmers, small business owners, antidebt campaigners, and members of religious groups and other organizations. They were united in their opposition to the emerging global economic order and shared ideals about the primacy of human rights over the economic bottom line. Two days of confrontations between protesters and the police ended in mass arrests, political controversy over the city’s preparation and handling of the protests, and the resignation of Seattle’s chief of police.
Optimists and Pessimists The Battle of Seattle highlighted two opposing camps—optimists and pessimists—in the debate over globalization. The former look favorably on globalization and see the future of the world as one in which people from all countries will become more integrated and more aware of common interests and shared humanity. Global pessimists look skeptically on globalization and see the future of the world as one in which people from wealthy and powerful countries will control global economic, political, and social institutions that oppress and exploit people from poorer countries—a world in which the rich will get richer and the poor will work harder but never rise out of poverty. Global optimists argue that global markets and the movement of jobs across borders benefit everyone: corporations, workers, and consumers alike. Increased global migration, they contend, means that individuals are free to move where the best jobs are and that globalization of communication allows individuals greater access to
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information and alternative points of view that inform their migration and employment choices. For example, Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling book The World Is Flat (2005), points to the growing number of technical jobs available in India, including technical and service support operators, which has bolstered the middle class in that country while sharpening competition for efficiency and consumer service among businesses around the world. Those in support of economic globalization believe that NAFTA is only the beginning and envision a “NAFTA superhighway” that links all of North, Central, and South America. Global pessimists disagree. In Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), Joseph Stiglitz argues that as international capital moves into developing nations, the rich (countries and classes) get richer and the poor get poorer. Other critics of globalization focus on what author George Ritzer refers to as the “McDonaldization of the world,” a homogenization process through which cultural diversity, local creativity, and national differences are sacrificed in the search for profit, efficiency, and predictability by transnational corporations competing in a relatively unregulated international marketplace. This pessimistic vision likens globalization to a kind of twenty-first-century social Darwinism in which the weak are eliminated and only the strongest will survive. As Perot argued, however, even in strong countries like the United States, there will be losers, such as those whose jobs are exported into the global economy or whose skills do not match available jobs.
Global Migration, Inequality, Environment, and Culture The increased transnational migration of the world’s population, whether for economic or political reasons, sparks debates among global optimists and pessimists. Optimists argue that migration has opened employment opportunities that had never existed for many workers. Women, for example, have been at the forefront of the international movement of labor more so than in previous migrations. Global optimists argue that this empowers women, who can earn their own living and support their families, and that these women improve the gross national product (GNP) of their home countries by sending back portions of their earnings in the form of remittances. Global pessimists emphasize the ways in which this new migration exploits women’s labor and, without commensurate changes in gender ideology, opens women to new forms of exploitation. The result in some cases, they point out, is that the children of migrant women are not as well cared for, that female migrants receive lower wages than male migrants, and that women and children are often misled or coerced into sexually exploitative work. Pessimists argue further that wages are depressed in countries where there are
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large numbers of workers from countries with low wage expectations—a problem exacerbated by the vulnerability of undocumented workers, who have no legal recourse against unfair employment practices. The drivers of globalization generally are identified as the economies of Europe, East Asia, and North America, with newcomers such as India and China vying for membership. Critics of globalization argue that there is a “Global North” and “Global South” divide whereby corporations and businesses located in the Northern Hemisphere are extracting resources and cheap labor from countries in the Southern Hemisphere. In contrast, global optimists argue that the jobs and industries outsourced from the Global North to the South benefit workers in poorer countries and benefit consumers in the more developed world. Global pessimists believe that the spread of cheap consumer goods in both the North and South contribute to waste, an unsustainable global consumer culture, and environmental catastrophe as the climate changes and the earth warms. Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist, author, and political activist, is at the forefront of an antiglobalization movement that questions the benefits of a global consumer culture. Brand-oriented consumer culture, she contends, hurts both consumers and the environment. Global optimists tend to minimize the potential environmental and economic risks of globalization in favor of growth, progress, and a more integrated world community. Klein’s argument about the consequences of the global economy for the environment represents another flashpoint in the culture wars. As evidence of global warming has mounted, culture warriors have taken sides in debates about the very existence of the phenomenon (though scientific evidence for it has been mounting), the environmental costs of economic production and growth, and the nature and extent of policy changes to combat it. In 1997, governments around the world responded to scientific warnings about global warming by negotiating the Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized nations committed to making substantial reductions in their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012. Although 160 countries originally signed the Kyoto Protocol, two of the world’s major per capita emitters of greenhouse gases—Australia and the United States— did not due to objections over the economic costs, the looser restrictions for developing countries such as China and India, and the lingering doubts of some that warming trends do not conclusively point to human causes but may be part of the earth’s climate cycle. Australia finally agreed to sign the protocol in December 2007. Another controversial aspect of globalization centers on advances in communication technologies. Global optimists point out that increased ease of international communication and the rise of the Internet have enhanced the ability of like-minded people to
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band together to address social problems and share perspectives. One example is Jody Williams’s International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Williams was able to reach thousands of others interested in the issue throughout the world via e-mail. Other groups concerned with public health and human rights have employed similar communication strategies. The International Labor Organization, for example, has been able to use global communications technologies to advance its goal of improving the lives of all workers, not just those in the industrialized nations. Global pessimists are skeptical of claims about the results of increased global communication, noting that industrial nations control the production of influential cultural media and materials such as movies, music, books, fashion, and style. The result is an uneven flow of messages and influences from the industrial world to the less developed world and a domination of the Global South by the Global North. Such a pattern of economic, political, and cultural domination, they maintain, weakens local industries and overwhelms local cultures in less developed countries and creates a demand for consumer cultural goods that further impoverishes already poor countries. The marketing of American cigarettes in China and other less developed countries is an oft-cited example of a dangerous export—both the product (tobacco) and the cultural images associated with it. Optimists envision globalization as the erasure of national boundaries and the emergence of a global governing system protecting the interests of all. Global pessimists see the opening of borders as a point of entry for migrants who work for less, speak foreign languages, import alien cultures, and increase the risk of political conflict and terrorism. How can countries protect their borders and national interests without building fences and making their societies inhospitable to others? How much of the energy and creativity fostered by an open society and open borders will be lost by efforts to erect walls against globalization or withdraw from the global system? Such questions may already be moot, however, since globalization is a powerful force for change that is likely to be stopped only by some cataclysm, such as irreversible climate change. Mary E. Kelly and Joane Nagel See also: Battle of Seattle; Buchanan, Pat; Canada; China; Cold War; Global Warming; Immigration Policy; Japan; Klein, Naomi; Kyoto Protocol; Labor Unions; Marxism; Mexico; Perot, H. Ross.
Further Reading Dorgan, Byron L. Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America. New York: Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Eitzen, D. Stanley, and Maxine Baca Zinn. Globalization: The Transformation of Social Worlds. Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth, 2006. Friedman, Thomas. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Ethnicities and Global Multiculture: Pants for an Octopus. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Rapley, John. Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993. Steger, Manfred N. Globalism: The New Market Ideology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.
Goet z, Ber nhard A white, self-employed electronics repairman living in the Greenwich Village section of New York City, Bernhard Goetz triggered intensive debates over crime, gun legislation, race, and vigilantism in December 1984 when he shot four black men who had confronted him for money in a Manhattan subway car. Goetz, dubbed the “Subway Vigilante” by the New York media, became a hero to “tough-on-crime” conservatives; others viewed his actions as opening the door to anarchy and increased racial polarization. Bernhard Hugo Goetz, Jr., was born in Queens, New York, on November 7, 1947, and attended New York University (BS, electrical and nuclear engineering, 1969). After earning his degree, he moved to Florida, was married for a short time, then returned to New York City and established an electronics business out of his apartment. Goetz had been mugged on two separate occasions in New York, the last of which occurred in 1981. After the previous incident, he began to carry a handgun, even though he had been denied a permit to carry a concealed weapon. The incident that propelled Goetz into the culture wars occurred after he entered the Fourteenth Street subway station and boarded a car with roughly twenty passengers, among them four black teens, aged eighteen to nineteen. The young men approached Goetz and demanded five dollars, though at trial questions arose as to whether they intended to rob him or were simply panhandling. Goetz asked them to repeat the request, then rose and fired all five shots from his Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver, hitting each of the four men and leaving one of them, Darrell Cabey, a paraplegic. Goetz fled the scene but finally turned himself in more than a week later to police in Concord, New Hampshire. At the time of the shooting, rates of violent crime
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were on the rise in both New York City and the United States in general, as were perceptions that the rights of criminals superseded those of their victims. As Goetz was put on trial in 1985, analysts, activists, and interest groups from a wide range of political perspectives entered the fray. The Guardian Angels, a citizen policing organization created to patrol New York’s subways, raised money for Goetz’s defense. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization best known for its 1960s activism in support of black rights—but one that had grown increasingly conservative under the leadership of Roy Innis—publicly defended Goetz. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a New York–based Baptist minister and black social activist, became a national figure over the incident, leading protests outside the courthouse and demanding that Goetz be tried for attempted murder. A series of criminal trials and appeals ending in 1987 resulted in Goetz’s conviction for illegal possession of a weapon and acquittal on attempted murder and assault charges. Sharpton, the NAACP, and other black advocacy groups condemned the ruling, but Goetz and his supporters have since claimed the incident contributed to decreasing crime rates in New York City throughout the 1990s. In 1996, a jury in a civil suit awarded Darrell Cabey $43 million for emotional distress, a verdict that led Goetz to file for bankruptcy. Robert Teigrob See also: Civil Rights Movement; Guardian Angels; Gun Control; King, Rodney; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Race; Sharpton, Al; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Fletcher, George. A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lesley, Mark, and Charles Shuttleworth. Subway Gunman: A Juror’s Account of the Bernhard Goetz Trial. Latham, NY: British American, 1988.
G o l d w a t e r, B a r r y Largely credited with spearheading America’s shift toward the political right in the late twentieth century, Barry Goldwater was a five-term U.S. senator (R-AZ) who ran for the presidency against Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Regarded as the most influential conservative figure in American politics after Robert A. Taft and before Ronald Reagan, Goldwater inspired new political acolytes with his best-selling book The Conscience of a Conservative (1960). He is remembered for his hard stance against world communism during the Cold War and for his espousal of a smaller federal government. Often a critic of his own party, Goldwater in his later
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Although he lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide to incumbent Lyndon Johnson, Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona is credited as an ideological forebear of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s. (Nat Farbman/ Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
years castigated fellow Republicans for courting the Religious Right and allowing political moralism to define what is conservative. Born into a wealthy family in Phoenix, Arizona, on January 1, 1909, Barry Morris Goldwater dropped out of the University of Arizona at Tucson in 1928 following the death of his father and began working in his family’s department store business (Goldwater, Inc.). During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps (1941–1945), obtaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. He retired from the Air Force Reserves in 1967 with the rank of major general. Following a stint on the Phoenix city council (1949–1952), he won a race for the U.S. Senate against Ernest W. McFarland, the Democratic incumbent and Senate majority leader, whom Goldwater characterized as a “socialist.” Goldwater was a senator from 1953 to 1987. A staunch Cold Warrior and proponent of limited government, he won a tightly contested race for the GOP presidential nomination in August 1964. His resounding defeat by President Johnson, however, was one of the largest in the history of U.S. presidential elections. During the 1964 campaign, Goldwater attempted to oust Johnson by warning voters of the dangers of a bloated federal bureaucracy, the legacy of the New Deal, which he saw as undermining individual initiative because of entitlement programs. In addition to calling for an elimination of welfare and Social Security, he opposed the minimum wage, urged more restrictions on labor unions, and suggested tax relief for the wealthy by ending the graduated income tax. He also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican national convention defined his candidacy with one statement: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Although it rallied the faithful, moderate voters were alienated. Goldwater billboards stated, “In your heart, you know he’s right.” But opponents spoofed that slogan with: “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” Capitalizing on Goldwater’s statement that the “price of freedom” might necessitate nuclear war, the Johnson campaign aired an anti-Goldwater television spot in which, as a little girl pulls petals from a daisy, her counting turns into a countdown to a nuclear detonation and a mushroom cloud. The message was simple: extremism could have apocalyptic consequences. Johnson won reelection by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent of the popular vote, and 486–52 in the Electoral College. Still, in many respects, the 1964 election was the last hurrah of the New Deal and the beginning of what would emerge as a conservative ascendancy. Credited with being an ideological father of the resurgence of American conservatism during the 1980s, Goldwater was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan. Goldwater died on May 29, 1998. Tom Lansburg and Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Labor Unions; New Deal; Nuclear Age; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; Republican Party; Social Security; Taft, Robert A.; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Edwards, Lee. Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995. Goldwater, Barry. With No Apologies. New York: William Morrow, 1979. Iverson, Peter. Barry Goldwater: Native Arizonian. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.
González, Elián The saga of Elián González—a six-year-old Cuban boy found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida on Thanksgiving Day, 1999—placed in conflict American cultural values that seldom have been at odds: family values, anticommunism, and freedom. The boy was rescued in the Caribbean Sea after surviving a shipwreck in which his mother had died in an attempt to reach U.S. shores and start a new life. In Miami, Elián was welcomed by aunts, uncles, cousins, and the entire Cuban exile community, who sought to honor the wishes of his mother and keep the boy in America. In
Cuba, however, the boy’s father, Juan Miguel González, demanded Elián’s return and petitioned the U.S. government for his release. For five months, the Miami relatives pursued every legal means to keep Elián in America, convinced that the father was acting under the coercion of the Castro regime. In fact, some claimed that days prior to the shipwreck, the father had telephoned relatives in Florida asking them to take care of his ex-wife and son. Lázaro González, the boy’s uncle, applied for asylum on Elián’s behalf, while the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigated the situation. In January 2000, the INS ruled that custody belonged to the boy’s father and that he should be returned to Cuba by mid-month. Lázaro González, meanwhile, had filed for custody in Florida state court. The issue of “father versus freedom”—a return to communist Cuba and life with his father or life in America with relatives— was endlessly debated in the media and political circles. U.S. attorney general Janet Reno (a Florida native) finally announced on January 12 that the INS ruling should stand: Elián’s father had the right of custody and the boy’s relatives should release him. The Miami family disagreed, filed a lawsuit challenging the ruling, and refused to hand over Elián. At 5:15 a.m. on April 22, 2000, armed federal agents forcefully entered a private home in the Little Havana section of Miami and seized the six-year-old Cuban émigré in order to return him to his father in Cuba. Conservative senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) deplored “the grotesque image of Elián González being forcibly taken from the custody of family members in Miami” and declared that the boy “should be given real, tangible hope that he will live free of the shackles of the communist dictatorship created by Fidel Castro.” Political analysts have suggested that the presidential election of 2000, which was narrowly decided in Florida, might well have been tipped toward Republican George W. Bush by the outraged Cuban community of Miami. His Democratic opponent, Al Gore, not only was the vice president during the González raid, but publicly approved of the decision. So did the majority of Americans. In 2000, the house in Miami from which Elián González was abducted by federal agents was converted into a museum called the Unidos en Casa Elián (United in the House of Elián). The boy’s story was dramatized in a television film and a documentary that aired on the Fox News Channel and PBS, respectively, in 2000 and 2001. In 2004, the Federal District Court in Miami dismissed the lawsuit by Elián’s relatives against the federal agents who conducted the raid. Some members of the Cuban community in Miami have come to refer to the González episode as “our September 11.” In retrospect, commentators have characterized the incident as an epilogue of the Cold War. Roger Chapman
Gore, A l See also: Clinton, Bill; Cold War; Cuba; Election of 2000; Family Values; Gore, Al; Helms, Jesse; September 11; Waco Siege.
Further Reading Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “Elian Gonzalez and ‘The Purpose of America’: Nation, Family, and the Child-Citizen.” American Quarterly 55:2 (June 2003): 149–79. Bardach, Ann Louise. Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. New York: Random House, 2002. Schneider, William. “Elian Gonzalez Defeated Al Gore.” National Review, April 28, 2001.
Gore, Al Albert Arnold “Al” Gore, Jr., a former U.S. congressman and senator (D-TN) and the forty-fifth vice president of the United States (1993–2001), has been a primary target of conservatives in the culture wars, most notably over the disputed presidential election of 2000 and his activism on the issue of global warming—for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Gore’s political ambitions were shaped by his early life. He was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., to Pauline LaFon Gore, a Vanderbilt law school graduate, and Albert Gore, Sr., also a Democratic representative and senator from Tennessee. His father, of a modest tobacco-farming background, was a New Deal Democrat who endorsed liberal economic policies, accepted racial desegregation, and opposed the Vietnam War. The latter stance cost him his 1970 Senate reelection bid, teaching his son to avoid being perceived as too liberal. Although the Gores projected an upright image, both father and son received criticism for their dealings with businessman Armand Hammer, a controversial figure for his connections with the Soviet Union. Young “Prince Albert” strove to meet his parents’ demanding expectations. Prone to formality and stuffiness, in the view of some peers, he is also said to have a good sense of humor, artistic sensibility, and an affable personality in private—a dichotomy that Washington observers noted later in his career. Gore grew up primarily in Washington, attending private school, but spent summers working on his father’s tobacco farm in Tennessee. He met his future wife, Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitchenson, in high school. They married in 1970 and eventually had four children. Gore attended Harvard University, graduating cum laude (BA, 1969); Vanderbilt University Graduate School of Religion (1971–1972); and Vanderbilt University Law School (1974–1976). After Harvard, Gore enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a military journalist in Vietnam. Upon returning home, he worked as an investigative reporter for the Nashville Tennessean (1971–1976) while attending divinity school (he was a Southern Baptist with New Age sensibilities). In 1976,
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he surprised his family—and, he said later, himself—by dropping out of law school and running for his father’s old congressional seat in Tennessee’s Fourth District. After narrowly winning the Democratic nomination, he ran unopposed in the November election. Congressman Gore joined the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and portrayed himself as a “raging moderate.” In his four terms in the House (1977–1984) and two terms in the Senate (1985–1992), he was torn between his mostly liberal beliefs and his more conservative instincts, demeanor, and Tennessee constituents. He quietly supported Democrats’ liberal positions, especially on economic issues, but made his mark by focusing on technical, nonideological matters: constituent service, national security, congressional investigations (as of the Love Canal chemical landfill disaster in upstate New York), technology (including the Internet), and environmental science. On abortion, his stance shifted from pro-life to pro-choice, but he denied changing positions. His eagerness to attract support from liberals and conservatives led opponents to criticize him as a flip-flopper. Gore’s presidential ambitions were no secret, and his background, politics, intelligence, drive, upright image, and telegenic looks made him a legitimate contender. In 1988, he ran for the Democratic nomination as a cultural conservative, an image reinforced by his wife Tipper’s public crusade against lurid lyrics in contemporary music. Gore’s loss in 1988 and the serious injuries sustained in an automobile accident by his young son a year later caused him to reexamine his political life. He eschewed the 1992 presidential race and focused on his life’s passion, the environment—he published the best-selling book Earth in the Balance (1992)—but agreed to be the
After his defeat in the disputed 2000 presidential election, Al Gore reentered public life—and the culture wars—with an international campaign against global warming. He is seen here promoting his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). (Samantha Sin/AFP/Getty Images)
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running mate of the Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, another young southern centrist. During the 1992 campaign, Republicans depicted Gore as an environmental zealot, labeling him “Ozone Man.” Conservative Republicans attacked the Clinton-Gore administration despite its generally moderate policies. As vice president, Gore typically avoided liberal causes like the environment, concentrating instead on “reinventing” government to make it more efficient, and advocated centrist or conservative positions on the federal deficit, foreign trade, national defense, welfare, and “values.” Nevertheless, conservatives maligned him as a phony who used a wholesome image to conceal his political ruthlessness, antibusiness environmental radicalism, New Age psychobabble, and countercultural behavior (he had admitted to smoking marijuana in the early 1970s). They also castigated him for his part in the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign scandals and for supporting Clinton despite the latter’s sexual misconduct. Conservative attacks on Gore increased when he ran for president in 2000. The George W. Bush campaign, late-night television talk show hosts, and even the mainstream media made frequent jokes about his wooden image and tendency to exaggerate. On Election Day, Gore narrowly won the popular vote but conceded the election after the U.S. Supreme Court—the majority of whose members were Republican appointees—upheld Bush’s narrow victory in the Florida balloting, assigned him the state’s Electoral College votes, and effectively declared him the winner of the national election. Gore remained a prominent figure in the culture wars during the course of the Bush administration. His politics shifted conspicuously to the left as he publicly denounced Bush’s policies on the Iraq War, civil liberties, and the environment. Gore gained particular prominence for writing and starring in an influential feature film about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2007. And in December of that year, Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Although he declined any specific interest in elective office, citing the crisis of global warming as his overriding concern, politicians and pundits from both major parties and at both ends of the ideological spectrum have speculated that he might run for president again in the future. George Rising See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Democratic Party; Election of 2000; Environmental Movement; Family
Values; Global Warming; Globalization; Internet; Love Canal; New Age Movement; Record Warning Labels; Zappa, Frank.
Further Reading Cockburn, Alexander, and Jeffrey St. Clair. Al Gore: A User’s Manual. New York: Verso, 2000. Maraniss, David, and Ellen Nakashima. The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Milbank, Dana. Smashmouth: Two Years in the Gutter with Al Gore and George W. Bush. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Toobin, Jeffrey. Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election. New York: Random House, 2001. Turque, Bill. Inventing Al Gore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Zelnick, Bob. Gore: A Political Life. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999.
Graffiti “Graffiti” (from the Italian sgraffito, meaning “to scratch”) refers to writing and drawings on walls and other public surfaces, often directed at institutions, monuments, and authority. Postwar technology propelled the phenomenon, as the tools of the graffiti artist included spray paint in cans (invented in 1949) and felt-tip markers in a wide range of vivid colors (available beginning in the 1960s). In the 1970s intense social controversy erupted over graffiti in American cities, pitting its creators—young urbanites, often outsiders—and their artistic defenders against those who viewed it as wanton defacing of property. While American graffiti has influenced artistic expression on the streets and in art galleries worldwide, it has often been considered a hindrance to urban revitalization. Graffiti symbolizes continually shifting frontiers of urban neglect, conflict, and control. The proliferation of American graffiti after the 1970s was a consequence of the social dissent and individual expression of the 1960s’ counterculture movement. In addition to signs and buildings, subway cars as iconic social connectors were favorite targets of graffiti artists. On such surfaces, “tags” (inscriptions) became colorful and elaborate, defining competing artists, themes, and styles, and highlighting artists’ daring in “bombing” particular locations or challenging the police. Content emphasized social confrontation, abstract design, aggressive sexual displays, and ghetto youth culture. Graffiti artists, who gained reknown by nicknames (such as Taki 183, Super Kool 223, Cope 2, Asstro, and Reas), even formed loose associations across cities. While culture critics lionized graffiti as the expression of voiceless youth, graffiti artists like Jean Basquiat became mainstream, exhibiting in museums and galleries. Although the artists typically targeted institutions and their inherent ideologies, neighborhood residents and property owners, rich and poor alike, objected to graffiti
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as vandalism that blighted the environment. Removing graffiti meant tiresome cleaning or repainting. Eventually, police were instructed to treat graffiti as the product of a crime rather than artistic expression, and mayors made it a target in cleaning up their cities. Highlighting this conflict, the video Style Wars (1983) by Tony Silver presents images of graffiti-covered New York and gives voice to a range of perspectives. During the 1980s, some city administrators tried alternative controls. The Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network, for example, channeled such artistic impulses into murals throughout the city. Other municipal leaders, however, continued to regard graffiti as a social problem symptomatic of the community apathy that fosters urban decay. Thus, police in some cities imposed “zero tolerance” policies that increased penalties and quickly eradicated graffiti in target areas. Graffiti tools, however, evolved. Acid etchings, for example, became permanent markings on subway cars. Graffiti continues to represent an ongoing war over space, voice, and presence in the city. Gary W. McDonogh See also: Censorship; Counterculture; Gangs; Zero Tolerance.
Further Reading Boykoff, Julius, and Kaia Sands. Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry and Public Space. Long Beach, CA: Palm Press, 2008. Ganz, Nicholas, and Tristan Manco. Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Golden, Jane, Robin Rice, and Monica Yant Kinney. Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Kelling, George L., and Catherine Coles. Fixing Broken Windows. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Graham, Billy A popular Christian evangelist and spiritual adviser to presidents, the Reverend Billy Graham offered his brand of gospel from tent meetings to televised crusades at outdoor coliseums across the United States and throughout the world. Beginning with a ministry in the 1940s and spanning the next six decades, he preached to more than 210 million people worldwide. Graham’s participation in the American culture wars involved an early split from fundamentalism, Cold War preaching that warned of the threat of atheistic communism, a close association with presidents from Harry S. Truman to the Bushes, and opposition to the Religious Right. The son of a Presbyterian dairy farmer, William Franklin “Billy” Graham, Jr., was born on November 7, 1918, in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1936, he enrolled at Bob Jones College, a fundamentalist school in Cleveland, Tennessee, but left after one term because “I
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disliked being told what to think without being given the opportunity to reason issues through on my own or to look at other viewpoints.” Graham later graduated from the Florida Bible Institute in Tampa (1940) and Wheaton College (AB, anthropology, 1943), marrying Ruth Bell, a Wheaton classmate, in the latter year. Ordained in 1939 by the Southern Baptist Convention, Graham preached at the First Baptist Church in Western Springs, Illinois (1943–1945), then served as first vice president of Youth for Christ International (1945–1948) and president of Northwestern College in Minneapolis (1947–1952). By 1950, he had become a national figure and head of the Billy Graham Evangelism Association (BGEA). As a spokesman of the new evangelicals, a movement that rejected fundamentalism for its failure to engage modernity, Graham eventually embraced an ecumenical perspective while fostering a conservative Bible message. Such theological middle ground led to his rejection by Protestants on the right and the left, most significantly Bob Jones, Sr., the fundamentalist, and Reinhold Niebuhr, the modernist. In 1956, Graham founded the magazine Christianity Today, a counterpart to the liberal Christian Century, with the aim of offering evangelical commentary on current affairs distinct from fundamentalism. Graham became a household name during the 1949 Christ for Greater Los Angeles Crusade. That eight-week revival was held in a large tent and received national media attention after the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, a staunch anticommunist, ordered his reporters to “Puff Graham.” The revival coincided with the news that Russia had obtained the atomic bomb, and Graham wove that into his message, warning listeners that LA was “rampant” with communists and that the city was a major target “on the Soviet’s attack list.” He concluded, “God is giving us a desperate choice . . . either revival or judgment.” In a 1954 essay in Mercury, the Reverend Graham continued his Cold War theme: “Either Communism must die or Christianity must die, because it is actually a battle between Christ and antiChrist.” In a later self-critique, he admitted to preaching “Americanism” during this period. Although Graham throughout his career spoke disapprovingly of mixing religion and politics, he actively sought the company of presidents and often played golf with members of Congress, rationalizing that it provided an “open door” for the gospel. He was especially close to Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon, and he was known to exert influence in more than spiritual ways, recommending campaign strategies and the choice of running mates and Supreme Court appointments. In 1964 he fleetingly considered running for president; that same year he received hundreds of telegrams encouraging him to endorse the Republican standard bearer Barry
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Goldwater, which he never did. Nixon publicly credited Graham for persuading him to run for president in 1968. The subsequent Watergate scandal personally devastated Graham and tarnished his image because of his close association with Nixon. The evangelist seemed to never completely accept Nixon’s guilt, at one point blaming the president’s ethical misjudgment on sleeping pills and demons. As the Religious Right movement got under way during the late 1970s, Graham advised against it, but he himself continued to meet with presidents. Some have criticized Graham, although he was a Democrat, for being a right-wing apologist. He is faulted, among other things, for not participating in the civil rights movement and failing to denounce the Vietnam War. Although as early as 1953 he refused to hold revivals in southern cities that enforced racial segregation at public gatherings, he disagreed with the civil disobedience strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and declined an invitation to speak at the 1963 March on Washington in Washington, D.C. On Vietnam, Graham ambiguously warned, “The stakes are much higher . . . than anybody realizes.” He criticized King’s outcry against the war, saying it was an “affront” to the black soldiers serving in that conflict. In 1972, after being asked by other evangelists to compel Nixon to halt the Christmas bombing campaign in Vietnam, Graham refused, saying he was “a New Testament evangelist, not an Old Testament prophet.” A decade later, during his first visit to Russia, Graham gave the same defense after being criticized for not speaking out against the violations of human rights, including religious restrictions, in the Soviet Union. Graham’s sermons typically addressed individual behavior, not social reform. With the trademark phrase, “The Bible says,” his proposed solution for social ills, whether the dissolution of the family, drug abuse, crime, pornography, racism, or greed, was for each individual to respond to the gospel message and be “born again.” Graham eventually came to regard secular humanism as a greater threat to society than communism. During a 1993 interview with David Frost, he lamented that in America there was “more disregard of God than ever before.” He contrasted the former Soviet Union (where they were “wanting teachers to come and teach the Bible in the schools”) to the United States (where “you can’t even have Christmas carols in schools”). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Graham was striking a gentler pose, an elderly man with hands shaking from the effects of Parkinson’s disease and emphasizing God’s love. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he was compelled by President George W. Bush, who years earlier had been converted by the evangelist, to deliver a message of healing at the National Cathedral in Washington. Graham held what
he said would be his last crusade in Queens, New York, on June 26, 2005. The following March, he appeared with his son, Franklin Graham, at the Festival of Hope in New Orleans. Roger Chapman See also: Bob Jones University; Communists and Communism; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Niebuhr, Reinhold; Nixon, Richard; Nuclear Age; Religious Right; Secular Humanism; Southern Baptist Convention; Televangelism; Watergate.
Further Reading Boyer, Peter J. “The Big Tent.” The New Yorker, August 22, 2005. Frady, Marshall. Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Frost, David. Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man. Colorado Springs, CO: Chariot Victor, 1997. Graham, Billy. Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Martin, William. A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story. New York: William Morrow, 1991.
Great Book s The concept of “great books”—the so-called classics of Western thought and literature, and teaching curricula based on them—have been a source of contentious debate in America’s culture wars since the 1950s. Pitting traditionalists against multiculturalists, the controversies have centered on whether or not cultural critics and educators should uphold a literary canon as representative of Western values and, by extension, American culture. Some have argued that insistence on a list of “must-read” books is an antiquated educational notion, betraying a sense of hierarchy and patriarchy (the dominance of “dead white men”) that is in disharmony with the enlargement of democracy. Others believe that reading great books is essential to the educational process and for stimulating thought on great ideas, including democracy. The great books idea originated in nineteenthcentury England and gained prominence in the United States after Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., published its Great Books of the Western World collection in 1952. Other publishers, such as Modern Library, printed series based on the great books concept, but Britannica’s set— edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler— symbolized more than others an “authoritative Western canon.” Both the idea and the set included fiction and nonfiction books ranging from ancient Greek classics to the works of American writers, including notable texts in science and math. After peaking in the mid-1960s, the sales and
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Members of the editorial and publishing board present the original fifty-four volumes of the Great Books series in 1952. Covering 3,000 years, the collection was deemed the canon of Western civilization and reading them essential to a liberal education. (Ralph Crane/Stringer/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)
popularity of Britannica’s great books declined. Market saturation may have been partially to blame, but larger cultural and philosophical shifts were also at work. By 1970, the emergence of multiculturalism, as well as black, ethnic, and feminist studies, on college campuses displaced traditional and great books–based curricula. The new generation of academics criticized old lists of great books for excluding the works of women, people of color, and non-Western writers. At the same time, new critical philosophies emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, such as literary postmodernism, cultural Marxism, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of capitalist culture and society. Proponents of these perspectives argued that the great books approach perpetuated outdated cultural hierarchies. These academics and their youthful followers regarded the great books as structuring the thought of the power elite, or “the Establishment.” By the end of the 1970s, with these intellectual movements gaining traction, Adler and Hutchins were all but forgotten. In the next decade, however, concerns over declining education standards and lower national test scores led to a renewed interest in the great books. The issue came to head with the landmark 1983 report of the Department of Education, A Nation at Risk. At around the same time, Adler created an education reform circle, called the “Paideia Group,” that brought together liberals, moderates, and conservatives. In 1982, the group issued the Paideia Proposal, a manifesto recommending that educators return
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to the use of great books in some fashion. Public recognition was reflected in brisk sales of the Proposal, favorable reviews in national publications, and an interview with Adler on William F. Buckley’s television show The Firing Line. Adler believed the Paideia concept was radically democratic because of its focus on K–12 education, while A Nation at Risk was elitist in its overriding concern for college-bound students. Adler labeled other conservative education reformers of the Reagan era, including Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, elitists. Great books–related controversies during the 1980s brought other prominent voices into the dialogue. Among these was E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who emphasized “cultural literacy.” Arguing that reading and writing skills are “content bound,” Hirsch contended that “shared, canonical knowledge is inherently necessary to a literate democracy.” He elaborated his thinking in his controversial book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987). Adler remained silent on Hirsch’s efforts, and Hirsch never promoted the use of any list of great books, but opponents of the canon categorized them as conservative “core knowledge” promoters. By the late 1980s, Allan Bloom became the most polarizing figure in great books–related discussions. His best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), promoted the ancient classics (not great books) for college students as an antidote to the closed-mindedness engendered by rampant conformism and intellectual homogenization on American campuses. Bloom argued that these vices arose in the 1960s, particularly with the turn toward “cultural relativism” and multiculturalism. Adler castigated Bloom for believing that the great books necessarily contained “the truth.” In a 1988 Firing Line appearance, Adler stated, “I find more error in the great books than truth.” In Adler’s mind, Bloom and “his master, Leo Strauss” wished only to “indoctrinate” students. Adler and his cohorts, on the other hand, saw themselves as teachers exposing students to the ongoing Western dialectic about the great ideas. Feminists, meanwhile, regarded Bloom’s arguments as an attempt to buttress patriarchal authority. In a 1987 essay in Signs, for example, Margaret Andersen argued that Bloom’s call for a return to the classical “rigor” implied that “women’s studies and black studies [were] . . . intellectually weak and politically biased.” Indeed, Bloom’s book contributed to the overall backlash against feminism that occurred throughout the 1980s. The canon controversy continued with the “Stanford Debate” of 1988, triggered by the decision of Stanford University to revise its standard “Western Culture” undergraduate course into one called “Culture, Ideas, and Values.” The original course was based on a traditional reading list of great books, while the new one allowed for more current and diverse works. The alteration touched off a nationwide discussion about the merits of studying
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Western civilization and the use of great books in such courses. The last major salvo in the great books battles came in 1990 with Britannica’s release of the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World. Criticism of that set represented the final wave of the Stanford debate. After observing that few authors of color were included in the revised series, African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., opined, “Obviously, there’s still a ‘whites only’ sign on what precisely constitutes a great thinker.” He particularly lamented the exclusion of W.E.B. DuBois, calling him “the most important African-American intellectual in history.” Others decried the omission of Toni Morrison’s work, especially the novel Beloved (1987). The issue continued to be debated by academics like Gates and Lawrence Levine for the duration of the 1990s, but the great books concept lost its most vigorous supporter with the death of Adler in 2001. Tim Lacy See also: Adler, Mortimer J.; Bennett, William J.; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Education Reform; Hutchins, Robert M.; Literature, Film, and Drama; Morrison, Toni; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Postmodernism; Revisionist History; Strauss, Leo; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Adler, Mortimer J. A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Andersen, Margaret L. “Changing the Curriculum in Higher Education.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (1987): 222–54. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Levine, Lawrence. The Opening of the American Mind. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
Great Society “The Great Society” is the term used to describe President Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic programs of 1965–1967. An ambitious agenda expanding the federal government to increase opportunity and improve the quality of life for all Americans, the Great Society divided Americans over the issue of the role and scope of the federal government. Liberals look back on the Great Society and view it as an extension of the New Deal that helped those, especially minorities and the poor, who had been left behind in American social, political, and economic life. Conservatives condemn the Great Society as a primary example of government meddling in the lives of ordinary people, a waste of taxpayer money, and a cause of, not a solution to, poverty.
Johnson outlined his vision of the Great Society in a commencement address at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964. In his speech, he called on the wealthiest nation in the world, in its most prosperous times, to adopt the duty of caring for the neediest and providing opportunity to all citizens. Guaranteeing “abundance and liberty for all,” he declared, would improve the life of everyone and thereby create a “great society.” The Great Society comprised an impressive list of initiatives, including a major education bill, a broad housing program, health services to the poor (Medicaid) and elderly (Medicare), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and even a highway beautification program. At its heart was the “War on Poverty,” which included the food stamp program, legal services for the poor, job training, and the Head Start program for underprivileged children. The cabinet-level Department of Transportation and Department of Housing and Urban Development were established, as well as a host of new independent agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting—adding up to a significant expansion of the federal government. These initiatives, in conjunction with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, caused a political and cultural backlash. Conservatives, particularly in the South, opposed federal intervention on such issues as civil rights and voting rights, which they regarded as state matters. The community action and legal services programs, part of the War on Poverty, further antagonized conservatives, who argued that they fomented rebellion and class warfare. In general, conservatives were alarmed by the expansion of government at a time—unlike the New Deal during the Great Depression—of economic prosperity. As spending on the Vietnam War increased in the latter part of the 1960s, the Great Society began to stall. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made its legacies a primary target of his attacks on big government, arguing that federal entitlement programs encourage dependency. Conservatives in the 1990s followed Reagan’s example, especially in their attacks on public funding of the arts and humanities. In contrast, during his first term as president (1993–1997), Bill Clinton attempted to build on Johnson’s initiatives by establishing a program for national health care. The debate continues, however, over programs like those of Johnson’s Great Society and the proper role of the federal government. Robert Bauman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Health Care; Heritage Foundation; Johnson, Lyndon B.; National Endowment for the Arts; National Endowment for the Humanities; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; Vietnam War; Voting Rights Act; War on Poverty; Welfare Reform.
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Further Reading Andrew, John A., III. Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1998. Mileur, Jerome M. The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Murray, Charles. Losing Ground. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Schulman, Bruce J. Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Schwartz, John E. America’s Hidden Success. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.
Guantánamo Bay Detention Center See Abu Ghraib and Gitmo
Guardian Angels A citizens’ crime control organization, the Guardian Angels was founded in 1979 by Curtis Sliwa, a nightshift McDonald’s manager concerned about the crime problem in New York City at a time when fiscal crisis required the city to cut the police force by one-third. With headquarters in the Hell’s Kitchen section of the city, the thirteen founding members began patrolling Times Square and a subway route known as “Muggers’ Express.” In less than three decades, chapters of the Guardian Angels spread to fifteen states, as well as Canada, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Brazil, England, Poland, South Africa, and Japan. Early on, New York City mayor Edward I. Koch dismissed the Guardian Angels as vigilantes; many still do. Liberal critics have argued that the group diverts attention from the root causes of crime: poverty and racism. Others see the organization as promoting safe neighborhoods and empowering citizens to take control of their environments; “Dare to Care” is one of the group’s mottos. Often described as a paramilitary organization, possibly because of the red berets and jackets its members wear while on duty, the Guardian Angels is known for its no-weapons policy. Although members on patrol do carry handcuffs for making citizen’s arrests when necessary, members try to avoid confrontation whenever possible and to resolve conflicts peacefully. Angels are trained in CPR and first aid; self-defense tactics; and local, state, and federal crime laws. The organization takes a grassroots approach to fighting crime by recruiting blacks, Hispanics, and whites, reflecting the racial composition of the neighborhoods patrolled. In the 1990s, with the city’s crime rate down and interest in the group waning, the Guardian Angels formed an Education Academy, offering seminars to schools and youth organizations on violence prevention, antibullying, gang recognition, Internet safety, and cultural diversity. In 1994, Sliwa formed CyberAngels, one of the earliest online groups devoted to combating sex offenders who target children and teenagers.
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Sliwa, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, has been a controversial figure, accused over the years of being a publicity hound while co-hosting a conservative radio talk show program on WABC-AM in New York. He once admitted that he had exaggerated his group’s anticrime accomplishments and even faked his own 1980 kidnapping. Ironically, on June 19, 1992, Sliwa was abducted in a taxicab in the East Village section of New York and shot at point-blank range, suffering wounds in the stomach, bladder, rectum, and both legs. Federal prosecutors argued that John A. Gotti, Jr., an alleged organized crime leader, had ordered the hit after Sliwa called his late father, the convicted Mafia boss John Gotti, a drug dealer on the radio. In September 2006, after three mistrials, Gotti went free. Lee S. Polansky See also: Gangs; Goetz, Bernhard; Sex Offenders; Talk Radio; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Guardian Angels Web site. www.guardianangels.org. Kadetsky, Elizabeth. “Racial Politics in New York.” Nation, November 30, 1992. Pennell, Susan, Christine Curtis, and Joel Henderson. Guardian Angels: An Assessment of Citizen Response to Crime. Vols. 1 and 2. San Diego, CA: San Diego Association of Government, 1985.
Gun Control Passions run deep on the issue of gun control, indicating highly distinct and conflicting attitudes toward firearms in American culture. The term “gun control” refers to any government policy limiting the ownership and use of firearms. Gun control policies can restrict the types of weapons and accessories that private individuals may legally possess or own. Such policies may prohibit firearm ownership to those who are below a minimum age, have been convicted of a felony, or have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. Gun regulations also may restrict ownership of certain types of weapons and ammunition, from machine guns and sawed-off shotguns to armor-piercing rounds and hollow-point bullets. Another form of gun control, involving safety requirements, may include mandating proper storage of guns and trigger safety locks. Gun rights advocates object to almost every form of gun control, believing that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution will otherwise be put at risk. That amendment reads, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Whereas supporters of gun rights emphasize the latter part of the amendment (arguing that it favors guns for
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Gun control activists Jim and Sarah Brady (right) visit the White House in November 1993 for the signing of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. The law required a criminal background check on any prospective purchaser of a firearm. (Dirck Halstead/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
private defense), those on the other side of the debate emphasize the former part about the militia (arguing that it favors guns for public defense). In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess firearms. This case, which overturned part of a District of Columbia’s gun control ordinance, represented the first time the Court made an interpretation on the Second Amendment. (This split decision will undoubtedly remain controversial for years to come, as shortly afterwards two prominent conservative federal judges—Richard A. Posner and J. Harvey Wilkinson III—argued that the ruling was ideologically motivated and represented judicial activism.) Supporters of gun control argue that firearms restrictions are reasonable measures that reduce injury and death. Gun rights advocates view gun control as the objective of extremists who wish to trample upon the Second Amendment. In an April 2006 article in American Rifleman, the magazine of the National Rifle Association (NRA), James O.E. Norell writes that gun control “in all its forms represents a loss of basic human dignity, and in its ultimate form—civil disarmament— it represents the loss of the most fundamental human right of all—self defense.” In contrast, groups such as the Children’s Defense Fund, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Mothers Against Violence view gun control measures as necessary for public safety because of
the 230 million or more firearms in the United States and the more than 30,000 shooting deaths annually. More than 80 percent of child gun fatalities worldwide occur in America. In the twentieth century, the use of firearms in criminal activity presented a major rationale for limiting ownership of firearms. The New York State Legislature passed the Sullivan Dangerous Weapons Act in 1911, making it a felony to carry a concealed weapon in public. In 1934, the U.S. Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which limited the ownership of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, considered uniquely suited for criminal activity. The Federal Firearms Act of 1938 required firearms manufacturers, dealers, and importers to obtain a license, and it prohibited the possession of firearms by fugitives from justice as well as anyone convicted of a felony. However, the law did not require dealers to confirm that purchasers were eligible to own a firearm. Spurred by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968. This law prohibited the interstate shipment of pistols to private individuals and provided for additional punishment for those convicted of using a firearm while violating a federal law. However, firearms dealers still were not required to check purchasers for possible past criminal activity. In the 1990s, James Brady, the former press secretary to Ronald Reagan, who had been seriously wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt on the president, emerged as a strong advocate of gun control, along with his wife, Sarah. Congress in 1993 passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the enforcement mechanism that previous legislation lacked. The new law initially mandated a five-day waiting period to allow local law enforcement agencies to run background checks on potential purchasers of firearms to check for any history of criminality or mental instability. Although the U.S. Supreme Court in Printz v. United States (1997) struck down the law’s requirement that local law enforcement officers conduct background checks, by November 1998, the national government had established a computerized instant check system that bypassed reliance on local law enforcement agencies. Gun rights groups, fearing that the instant-check process would lead to a de facto gun registration system, insisted on a policy mandating that records of checks be destroyed within twenty-four hours. Gun control advocates responded that such a policy threatened national security because it prevented officials from comparing gun sales with terrorist watch lists. In 1994, a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, enacted an assault weapons ban. This legislation prohibited the sale to the public of nineteen types of weapons and several replica
Guthr ie, Woody, and A rlo Guthr ie
models thought to be designed primarily for military and law enforcement use. Gun rights interests thereafter devoted their energies and resources to campaigning for the election of state and national officials friendly to their cause. In 2004, a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican president, George W. Bush, declined to renew the assault weapons ban. In addition, gun rights groups have persuaded many states to enact right-to-carry laws, which limit the authority of government officials to restrict the right of individuals to carry concealed weapons. Concerned about lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, gun rights interests successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (2005), which prohibits lawsuits against firearms manufacturers and retailers consequent to the criminal use of their products. Researchers such as David Hemenway, professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, have focused on firearms as a consumer safety and health issue that public officials must address. Noting the large number of people around the world who are killed and injured every year by firearms, gun control advocates emphasize the dangers of the illegal firearms trade and advocate international limitations. Countering the call for increased control of the international arms trade, Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, calls on gun rights supporters to oppose what he considers the United Nations’ goal of banning private ownership of firearms. The future of gun control policies depends on the persuasiveness of each side in the debate as well as the relative political influence of pro-gun and pro-control groups. Glenn H. Utter See also: Conspiracy Theories; Kennedy Family; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Militia Movement; National Rifle Association; School Shootings; United Nations; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Diaz, Tom. Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America. New York: New Press, 1999. Hemenway, David. Private Guns, Public Health. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. LaPierre, Wayne. The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the U.N. Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006. Posner, Richard. “In Defense of Looseness.” New Republic, August 27, 2008. Rosenthal, Beth, ed. Gun Control. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2007. Wilson, Harry L. Guns, Gun Control, and Elections: The Politics and Policy of Firearms. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
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G u t h r i e , Wo o d y, a n d A r l o Guthrie Singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie, an icon of American folk music, was born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. He is best known for “This Land Is Your Land” (1940), a song he wrote in response to Irving Berlin’s “America the Beautiful” (1938). The final verses are often deleted from school texts and recordings because they condemn private property and disparities of wealth in the United States: In the squares of the city—in the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office—I see my people. And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’ If this land’s still made for you and me. Other popular Guthrie songs are “Union Maid” (1940), “Pastures of Plenty” (1941), “Roll On Columbia, Roll On” (1941), and “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” (1948). During his adult life, Guthrie lived in Texas, California, and New York and spent a great deal of time on the road. While living in New York City, he performed with Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers, and several other musicians who fueled the folk music revival of the 1960s. Guthrie recorded his work with the help of folklorist Alan Lomax, including the classic compilation Dust Bowl Ballads (RCA Victor, 1940). In addition to composing songs—mainly lyrics to existing melodies—Guthrie was also a prolific writer of prose. His “Woody Sez” columns, beginning in 1939, were popular fare in the leftist newspapers the Daily Worker and People’s World. In 1943, he published his autobiography, Bound for Glory. Like many of his songs, his writings reflect the concerns of the working class. Guthrie’s more radical and socialist associations are often glossed over, recasting his image as a less complex, pastoral patriot. By the late 1940s, Guthrie was showing obvious signs of Huntington’s Disease, a degenerative neurological disorder that required him to spend the final eleven years of his life in psychiatric institutions. He died on October 4, 1967, but not before witnessing the counterculture’s folk revival that he helped inspire. His influence extended to performers such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, and countless other musicians of his and subsequent generations. In 1956, Woody wrote a song called “Goodnight, Little Arlo” for his nine-year-old son. Born on July 10, 1947, in New York City, Arlo Guthrie became a popular folk singer in his own right. He is best known for the hit “Alice’s Restaurant” (1967), an eighteen-minute talking blues song satirizing the Vietnam War and the military draft. A movie version, in which Arlo played himself, was released in 1969.
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The younger Guthrie performed at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969, popularized Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans” (1970), and collaborated extensively with Pete Seeger. In 1991, Arlo founded the Guthrie Center, an interfaith meeting center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He continues to compose and perform, occasionally taking the stage with his daughter, Sarah Lee Guthrie. Mark Pedelty See also: Baez, Joan; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Dylan, Bob; Labor Unions; Migrant Labor; Revisionist History; Seeger, Pete; Springsteen, Bruce; Vietnam War; War Protesters; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Cray, Ed. Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Garman, Bryan. A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Jackson, Mark Allan. “Is This Your Song Anymore? Revisioning Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land.’” American Music 20 (2002): 249–76. Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Santelli, Robert, and Emily Davidson, eds. Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.
H a l ey, A l e x African-American writer Alex Haley is best known for his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) and the popular Roots television miniseries (1977 and 1979) that it inspired. Haley focused on black identity in American culture, affirming black pride while communicating to a general audience the legacies, struggles, and hopes of a people whose ancestors were slaves of African origin. His works offered history from a black perspective and stimulated debate on race relations. Alex Palmer Haley was born on August 11, 1921, in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Henning, Tennessee. After graduating from high school at age fifteen and studying briefly at Elizabeth City Teachers College in North Carolina (1937–1939), he served for twenty years in the U.S. Coast Guard (1939–1959), largely as a journalist. After his retirement as chief petty officer, Haley worked as a full-time freelance writer, becoming known for interviews that he conducted for Playboy magazine. His interview with Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam became the basis of the best-selling and broadly influential The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which explained radical black politics in the context of Islam and showed how it contrasted with the tamer Christian civil rights movement. Continuing with his theme of black identity, Haley’s Roots was a novel based on stories about his own family that he had heard as a child and on subsequent research into his mother’s ancestry. The research led him to the village of Juffure in Gambia, West Africa, where an oral historian told him about the tribe of Kunta Kinte, Haley’s ancestor who had been taken into slavery at age sixteen. Haley labeled Roots a work of “faction” for its mix of fact and fiction. Within six months, the book sold more than 1.6 million copies and won a National Book Award (1976) and a Pulitzer Prize (1977). The twelve-hour 1977 television miniseries on ABC captured an audience of 130 million, setting television viewing records. Roots: The Next Generations, a fourteen-hour sequel, aired in 1979. Haley’s work inspired millions of Americans, both black and white, to research their family’s genealogy. It also fostered scholarly interest in the “Middle Passage,” the crossing of slaves from Africa to the Americas, and the preservation of culture in the African diaspora. Haley’s reputation was sullied in 1978 after he admitted that Roots contained some unintentionally plagiarized passages from Harold Courlander’s novel The African (1968). He went on to produce other works of historical fiction, including A Different Kind of Christmas (1988), which chronicled the Underground Railroad, and
Queen: The Story of an American Family (1993), based on the life of Haley’s paternal grandmother. Queen, which was co-authored with David Stevens, also became a television miniseries, airing in 1993. Haley died on February 10, 1992, and is buried at his grandfather’s home site in Henning, Tennessee, now the Alex Haley State Historic Site and Museum. Susan Pearce See also: Afrocentrism; Angelou, Maya; Civil Rights Movement; Lee, Spike; Malcolm X; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Muslim Americans; Nation of Islam; Revisionist History.
Further Reading Ferris, William R. “Alex Haley: Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1989.” Southern Cultures 14:3 (Fall 2008): 6–25. Gonzalez, Doreen. Alex Haley: Author of Roots. Hillside, NJ: Enslow, 1994. Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Shirley, David. Alex Haley. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.
Hall, Gus Gus Hall was general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) from 1959 until his death on October 13, 2000. Eulogies in the mainstream media praised Hall’s idealism and tenacity to a lost and much vilified cause. Born Arvo Kusta Halberg on October 8, 1910, in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, Hall grew up with radical viewpoints instilled in him by his Finnish-immigrant parents. Hall, who at the urging of his father joined the CPUSA in 1927, studied at the Lenin Institute in Moscow (1931–1933), a prestigious institution among leftists at the time, where promising party members from foreign nations, especially developing ones, were trained in Soviet ideology, propaganda, and revolutionary struggle. (Many Vietnamese and Chinese communist leaders, for instance, studied at the Lenin Institute during the first half of the twentieth century.) Neither an inspiring speaker nor an original theorist, Hall was a strong union organizer who helped found the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and led the 1937 “Little Steel” strike in Warren and Youngstown, Ohio, contributing to the formation of the United Steelworkers of America in 1942. But the involvement of American communists like Hall was used by the business sector and the political right to discredit the labor movement. Hall was a machinist in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In 1949, he and other party leaders (including Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster, and Benjamin Davis) were prosecuted under the Alien Registration Act of 1940, popularly known as the Smith Act, which made it illegal 235
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for anyone in the United States to belong to a group advocating the overthrow of the government. The trial resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Dennis v. U.S. (1951), that criminalized mere membership in the Communist Party or any related organization. After briefly fleeing to Mexico, Hall was imprisoned for eight years. Hall helped rebuild the CPUSA after its decimation during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. From 1971 to 1990 he reportedly received $40 million in support from the Soviet Union. He ran for U.S. president as the Communist Party candidate on five occasions (1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984), with the black activist Angela Davis as his running mate in the last two campaigns. His election totals proved dismal, however, peaking in 1976 at 58,992 votes. Ideology notwithstanding, Hall’s candidacies suffered the problem of all third-party candidates, failing to earn a place on the ballot in many states. Dogmatically Stalinist and unwilling to adapt to changing political circumstances—such as the rise of independent revolutionary movements in the developing world and more nuanced attempts to reinvigorate domestic leftist politics by young people disenchanted with the establishment—Hall tried unsuccessfully to build alliances with the New Left during the 1960s. This hurt the credibility of some New Left leaders, leading to upheaval in the CPUSA itself in 1991, when progressive members like Angela Davis and Herbert Aptheker, tired of chafing under the CPUSA’s Stalinist culture and its disreputable reputation, broke ranks to form the Committees of Correspondence, an alternative political party to the CPUSA that emphasized ideological pluralism and multiculturalism. Although he never achieved mainstream acceptance, Hall in the decades prior to his death was a frequent campus speaker and talk show guest. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1959 by the Soviet Union, and in 1981 he was invited to address the party congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His books include Imperialism Today (1972), Karl Marx: Beacon for Our Times (1983), and Fighting Racism (1985). Omar Swartz See also: Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Hoover, J. Edgar; Labor Unions; Marxism; McCarthyism; New Left; Revisionist History; Soviet Union and Russia; Vietnam War.
Further Reading “Gus Hall.” Economist, October 28, 2000. Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005. Navasky, Victor. “Cold War Ghosts.” Nation, July 16, 2001. Nehaus, Richard John. “Amused by Evil.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, January 2001.
Hargis, Billy An archconservative evangelist and outspoken anti communist, Billy James Hargis railed against racial integration and sex education while calling for the return of prayer and Bible studies in public schools. A precursor of televangelism, he helped pioneer the use of electronic media in the 1950s. At the peak of his career, his impassioned attacks against “communism and its godless allies” could be heard over 250 television stations and 500 radio stations. His words reached millions of mostly rural Americans, whom he called “lonely patriots.” Yet his work would be overshadowed by a sex scandal. Born on August 3, 1925, in Texarkana, Texas, Hargis was ordained through the Disciples of Christ at age seventeen and began what would be a flamboyant ministry. Steeped in the Red Scare of the 1950s, Hargis used his pulpit as a political stump. He urged followers to support Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist campaign, and in 1953 he released over communist bloc countries hydrogen balloons inscribed with biblical quotations. Hargis also organized the David Livingstone Missionary Foundation, which built hospitals and orphanages around the world, and created the Christian Crusade, an interdenominational, anticommunist organization. His mixing of politics with religion led the Internal Revenue Service to revoke his tax-exempt status in the early 1960s. Hargis continued to draw controversy, claiming that John F. Kennedy’s assassination had been a communist plot. He also attacked feminists, homosexuals, and rock-and-roll music in his fiery, “bawl and jump” sermons. In 1964, Hargis impugned the credentials of a journalist who had written a piece critical of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The reporter asked the broadcasters for airtime to rebut Hargis but was refused. In Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC (1969), the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the reporter, upholding the equal-time allowance and codifying the Fairness Doctrine. In 1971, Hargis founded the American Christian College (ACC) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then in 1976, two students there, one male and one female, claimed that they had had sexual relations with Hargis. Although he denied the charges, he was forced out as president of the college and receded into relative obscurity. He relocated to Neosho, Missouri, where he continued to preach in person and over the airwaves, publishing a newspaper, the Christian Crusade, and writing several books. The college closed in 1978. Hargis died on November 27, 2004, at a Tulsa nursing home. Daniel Melendrez See also: Christian Radio; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Evangelicalism; Federal Communications Commission; Fundamentalism, Religious; Mc Carthy, Joseph; Religious Right; School Prayer; Sex Education.
Har t , Gar y
Further Reading Andrew, John A., III. Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. “Billy James Hargis.” Economist, December 18, 2004. Jorstad, Erling. The Politics of Doomsday: Fundamentalists of the Far Right. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1970. Redekop, John Harold. The American Far Right: A Case Study of Billy James Hargis and Christian Crusade. Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmans, 1968.
Harr ing ton, Michael The American socialist Michael Harrington took an active role in what became the culture wars on two fronts. On the one hand, he contributed mightily to efforts to bridge the gap in the 1960s and 1970s between the “old left,” who came of age in the depression and World War II era, and the “new left,” made up of younger civil rights and anti–Vietnam War radicals, and to develop a coherent American socialist vision and agenda. On the other hand, beyond his leftist politics, Harrington’s book The Other America (1962) shook American consciousness by calling attention to the depth and breadth of American poverty, and is credited with motivating President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. Born in St. Louis on February 24, 1928, Edward Michael Harrington attended Holy Cross College (AB, 1947), Yale Law School (1947–1948), and the University of Chicago (MA, 1949). He worked for two years editing Dorothy Day’s radical Catholic Worker newspaper (1951–1953), but then left Catholicism and adopted a socialist creed of the stripe advocated by anti-Soviet social democrat Max Shachtman, committed to rigorous Marxist analysis but remaining democratic, reformist, and vigorously anticommunist. Harrington was a researcher and consultant for the Fund for the Republic (1954–1989); editor of New America (1961–1962); and a professor of political science at Queens College of the City University of New York (1972–1989). He died of cancer on July 31, 1989. Harrington fostered the vision that socialists could join liberals to work within the Democratic Party and avoid the notorious ideological fragmentation that characterized old-left politics. Harrington’s negative reaction to the Students for a Democratic Society’s founding Port Huron Statement in 1962 led to bad blood between the two generations of radicals, which Harrington deeply regretted. Additionally, Harrington’s classical socialist focus on class analysis delayed his awareness of the role the antiwar, women’s, and gay rights movements would play in the American political left of the late twentieth century. Nonetheless, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which he founded and chaired from 1973 to 1982, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America
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(DSA), which he co-chaired from 1982 to 1989, played significant roles in Democratic Party politics. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, centrist Democrats, such as the Democratic Leadership Council, sought to move the Democratic Party away from the influence of progressive “special interests” such as those represented by DSA. Despite Harrington’s career as a political speaker and organizer, his visibility among most Americans resulted from the influence of The Other America. The book reminded “the affluent society” that large segments of the nation, rural and urban, had not benefited from the postwar economic boom. Harrington argued that the lot of the poor in America was not a result of laziness or moral failure, but an expression of a “culture of poverty”—a societal, mutually reinforcing “web of disabilities” that made it difficult if not impossible for the poor to lift themselves out of their destitution. During the 1970s, Harrington labeled former leftists such as Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol “neoconservatives” for joining the political right in blaming government programs for undermining individual responsibility necessary for overcoming poverty. Harrington saw capitalism as being only in its developing stages, and cautioned that the inculcation of socialist humanist values in American society was a task for the long haul. His last book, Socialism: Past and Future (1989), encourages commitment to a “visionary gradualism” rather than faith in romantic overnight revolution. Steve Young See also: Democratic Party; Ehrenreich, Barbara; Great Society; Hayden, Tom; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol; Labor Unions; Neoconservatism; New Left; Soviet Union and Russia; Students for a Democratic Society; War on Poverty.
Further Reading Gorman, Robert A. Michael Harrington: Speaking American. New York: Routledge, 1995. Harrington, Michael. The Next Left: The History of a Future. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. ———. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Isserman, Maurice. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.
Hart, Gary A former U.S. senator from Colorado, Gary Hart is perhaps best remembered for the sex scandal that ended his career in elective politics in 1987. Born Gary Warren Hartpence on November 28, 1936, in Ottawa, Kansas, he studied at Bethany Nazarene College (BA, 1958) and Yale University (BD, 1961; JD, 1964), changing his
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last name to Hart in 1961. After working as an attorney at the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior (1964–1967), he entered private law practice in Denver, Colorado. Hart served as campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972, revolutionizing primary election strategy by focusing on the formerly unimportant Iowa caucuses. A successful showing there gave McGovern the momentum to win the Democratic nomination, though he would lose to Richard M. Nixon in the general election that November. Every successful Democratic campaign since 1972 has invested considerable time and money in Iowa. Hart was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974 and reelected in 1980. In February 1983, he announced his intention to run for president of the United States. He began the campaign with little name recognition but became a serious contender behind the Democratic front runner, former vice president Walter Mondale, by using the strategies that he had developed with McGovern. Hart won several important primaries in 1984 but eventually lost the party nomination to Mondale, who in turn was defeated by incumbent President Ronald Reagan. When Hart began his campaign for the next presidential election, he was acknowledged as the Democratic front runner but was beset by rumors of an extramarital affair. Hart denied the allegations and challenged the press to follow him around. Two reporters from the Miami Herald accepted the dare, and in early May 1987 the paper published a story that a young woman had been seen leaving Hart’s Washington residence. The candidate denied wrongdoing, but the paper then reported that he had been seen carousing on a sailboat called Monkey Business with model Donna Rice. Photos of the two together were subsequently published in the National Enquirer. Less than a week after the story surfaced in the press, Hart dropped out of the race. He returned to the campaign trail in December, criticizing the media for its focus on scandal rather than on substantive issues. But after poor showings in the primaries, he dropped out again the following spring. The Democratic nomination eventually went to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Hart resumed his legal practice and remained active in political circles as a policy expert on terrorism and defense. In 1998, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the bipartisan National Committee on Terrorism, commonly referred to as the Hart-Rudman Committee. The body issued a number of important recommendations on homeland security, not taken seriously by policymakers until after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Hart has written numerous books— including The Minuteman: Restoring an Army of the People (1998), Restoration of the Republic: The Jeffersonian Ideal in 21st-Century America (2002), God and Caesar in America: An Essay on Religion and Politics (2005), and The Courage
of Our Convictions: A Manifesto for Democrats (2006)—and late in life completed a doctorate in politics at Oxford University (2001). Since 2006 he has taught at the University of Colorado. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Clinton, Bill; Clinton Impeachment; Democratic Party; Dukakis, Michael; McGovern, George; Media Bias; Mondale; Walter; Reagan, Ronald; September 11.
Further Reading Blake, R. Roy. The Gary Hart Set-Up. Aurora, CO: Laramide, 1992. Buckley, William F., Jr., “Hart’s Problem & Ours.” National Review, June 5, 1987. Hart, Gary. The Good Fight: The Education of an American Reformer. New York: Random House, 1993. ———. Right from the Start: A Chronicle of the McGovern Campaign. New York: Quadrangle, 1973. Von Hoffman, Nicholas. “Should the Press Play Vice Cop?” Nation, June 20, 1987.
H a r vey, P a u l Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, a social conservative, constructed his programs around news commentary, morality tales, history, and a general celebration of the United States. Born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 4, 1918, he described his upbringing as “preponderantly conservative.” Introduced to radio in high school, Harvey spent a year at the University of Tulsa before dropping out. Moving to St. Louis in 1939, Harvey met his future wife, collaborator, and business manager, Lynne “Angel” Cooper, while both worked at KXOK-AM. Married in 1940, they moved in 1944 to Chicago, where, at WENRAM, the couple created Paul Harvey News. With his positive ratings, the American Broadcast Company (ABC) syndicated Harvey in 1951. The show was eventually retitled Paul Harvey News and Comment. Harvey’s son, Paul, joined in 1976 to write The Rest of the Story. In the mid-1970s, the daily morning and midday programs (five and fifteen minutes, respectively) had around 4 million listeners. By 2002, the ABC show numbered 1,100 station affiliates and 18 million listeners and was broadcast on 400 Armed Forces Radio Network stations. Harvey also produced a syndicated column and television program. The column ran from 1955 to 1996 and at its height was printed in 300 newspapers. The Radio Hall of Fame inducted Harvey in 1990, and later his wife (1997) and son (2002). Emphasizing his program’s commentary nature, Harvey once said, “It just seems more honest to me not to pretend objectivity.” The show’s human interest stories
Hate Cr imes
focused on news oddities, social science findings, history, trivia, and health care. Harvey’s opening and sign-off were well known: “Hello America. This is Paul Harvey. Stand by . . . for news” and “Good day,” respectively. Initially, Harvey displayed an interest in far-right issues, identifying with anticommunists like Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. In the early 1950s, he climbed the Argonne National Laboratory’s fence to demonstrate lax security, and he blasted New York City’s immorality and crude media programs. By the early 1970s, however, he had mellowed into a moderate conservative. Although an early Vietnam War hawk, he eventually opposed the war (his son was a conscientious objector). Harvey famously condemned President Richard M. Nixon on Vietnam in 1970, stating, “Mr. President, I love you—but you are wrong!” In the 1980s, Harvey’s moderation included supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and opposing U.S. involvement in El Salvador. But Harvey’s disdain for welfare and suspicion of labor unions correlated with that of Reagan Republicans. In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Harvey the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Paul Harvey died on February 28, 2009. Tim Lacy See also: Cold War; Equal Rights Amendment; Labor Unions; Limbaugh, Rush; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Media Bias; Nixon, Richard; Talk Radio; Vietnam War; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading DiSanto, Joseph. “A Lover’s Quarrel with Ronald Reagan.” National Review, February 24, 1984. Hall, Lee. “The Rest of the Story.” Electronic Media, June 8, 1998. Harvey, Paul, Jr., ed. Paul Harvey’s for What It’s Worth. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Kogan, Rick. “Good Days for Paul Harvey.” Chicago Tribune Magazine, August 4, 2002.
Hate Cr imes In June 1998, a forty-nine-year-old African American named James Byrd, Jr., was dragged to his death behind the truck of three white men in Jasper, Texas. In October of that same year, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-two-yearold gay college student, was brutally murdered by two white young men near Laramie, Wyoming. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reports of antiMuslim and anti-Arab attacks increased dramatically in cities across the United States. These incidents, and countless others like them, are examples of a specific kind of criminal offense called “hate crime.” This special categorization has been a point of contention in the culture wars.
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Hate or bias crimes refer to criminal acts in which the victim is targeted because of his or her affiliation in a particular social group. Although hate crimes often conjure up images of the most highly publicized acts of violence, the vast majority of hate crimes involve common forms of criminal victimization, ranging from vandalism and harassment to more serious forms of assault and battery. The concept of hate crime implies that offenses motivated by bias toward the victim’s social group are qualitatively distinct from nonbias crimes. According to the FBI, in 2007 there were 7,624 hate crimes committed nationwide—of those, 51 percent pertained to race and another 15 percent to sexual orientation. The legal precedent for modern U.S. hate crime laws can be traced to post–Civil War legislative efforts to protect the civil rights of newly freed slaves. Many argued that these laws provided insufficient protection for minorities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, civil rights groups such as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith and the Southern Poverty Law Center lobbied states and the U.S. Congress to enact specific laws to prosecute offenders who engage in bias-motivated crime. A majority of states eventually adopted some form of hate crime legislation. Some laws increase the penalty for crimes—sometimes quite substantially—if a bias motive is established. Others create an additional crime for which an offender can be convicted in conjunction with the underlying criminal offense. The laws mean that offenders face more severe punishment for committing hate crimes than similar nonbias crimes. Although lobbying efforts have been less successful at the federal level, Congress did pass the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990, mandating the attorney general to collect data on crimes motivated by prejudice. Despite the rapid success of state hate crime legislation, few laws have generated such polarized debate. Although individual incidents may stir controversy, most of the disagreement centers on whether there is a need for specific hate crime legislation above and beyond existing criminal law. Compelling arguments have been presented on both sides. Proponents of hate crime legislation argue that hate crimes deserve special distinction from nonbias crimes because they have especially pernicious consequences. Hate crimes, it is argued, cause greater physical and psychological harm to individuals. Furthermore, hate crimes are said to send a message of intolerance to the victim’s social group, thereby targeting whole communities rather than just individual victims. Proponents further argue that such crimes have the potential to exacerbate longstanding intergroup tensions and divisions in society and to provoke retaliatory unrest among groups. They also contend that the harm of hate crime is compounded by historical legacies of violence and discrimination against marginalized groups, sometimes at the hands
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of law enforcement. Supporters hope that hate crime legislation will help deter potential offenders and send a strong message that violence against minority groups is no longer tolerated. Opponents take issue with all of these claims. They argue that distinguishing a hate crime from an otherwise similar crime is a subjective exercise. The very foundations of the concept of hate crime, they contend, are dubious. Furthermore, critics assert that hate crime laws are impractically ambiguous and unnecessary given existing laws. In light of what many view as an already excessively punitive criminal justice system, some question the additional deterrent value of punishing hate crimes more than conventional crimes. Perhaps the most serious challenges to hate crime laws are made on constitutional grounds. Some argue that the laws violate the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of thought, including the freedom to hold and express prejudiced beliefs. Prosecution for most laws requires establishing criminal intent, and hate crime laws require proof of an additional element—a bias motive or prejudice against the victim’s social group. Numerous scholars and at least two state supreme courts have argued that because prejudiced beliefs separate hate crimes from nonbias crimes, punishing the former more severely than the latter amounts to punishing thought, in violation of the Constitution. Others argue that hate crime laws also violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they give special protection to certain groups and not others. Although many critics and judges continue to debate hate crime laws, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 upheld their constitutionality in Wisconsin v. Mitchell, arguing that such laws punish behavior, not thoughts. Like other relatively new legal constructs, the concept of hate crime has become less ambiguous as judges converge around common interpretations and responses to constitutional challenges. Even where hate crime laws are deemed necessary and constitutional, proponents often disagree on which groups should be protected. All hate crime laws enumerate race, ethnicity, and religion as protected constituencies; fewer laws cover groups defined by such variables as sexual orientation, gender, disability, political orientation, and age. Debates surrounding sexual orientation and gender are perhaps the most contentious. For example, when Congress considered hate crime legislation, conservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) warned that including gays and lesbians would put the government on a slippery slope toward “condoning” homosexuality. Others claimed that failure to include some categories in legislation while excluding others sends an implicit message that violence against certain classes of people is tolerable. Christopher J. Lyons
See also: Anti-Semitism; Diversity Training; Helms, Jesse; Human Rights; Judicial Wars; Lynching; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Muslim Americans; Political Correctness; Race; Shepard, Matthew; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Gerstenfeld, Phyllis B. Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls, and Controversies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. Iganski, Paul. The Hate Debate: Should Hate Be Punished as a Crime? London: Profile Books, 2002. Jacobs, James, and Kimberly Potter. Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Jenness, Valerie, and Ryken Grattet. Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. Levin, Brian. “From Slavery to Hate Crime Laws: The Emergence of Race and Status-Based Protection in American Criminal Law.” Journal of Social Issues 58 (2002): 227–45.
H a u e r w a s , S t a n l ey Explaining its choice of Stanley Hauerwas as “America’s Best Theologian” in 2001, Time magazine described the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University as “contemporary theology’s foremost intellectual provocateur.” Indeed, his impolite questions and acerbic arguments have enabled Hauerwas to irritate liberals and conservatives alike on issues ranging from foreign policy, social theory, and medicine to history, sexuality, and literary criticism. Tying these disparate forays together, however, is Hauerwas’s principal query: “How do Christian disciples faithfully practice their scandalous vocation in the midst of unavoidably hostile cultures?” Born on July 24, 1940, into a working-class Methodist family in Dallas, Texas, Stanley Martin Hauerwas as an adolescent learned the bricklaying trade from his father. After religious studies at Southwestern University (BA, 1962) and Yale University (BD, 1965; PhD, 1968), he immediately began his teaching career at Augustana College. In 1970, he joined the ethics faculty of Notre Dame University. Around this time he also encountered the work of the Mennonite biblical scholar and ethicist John Howard Yoder, who challenged Hauerwas to wrestle with the “nonviolent Jesus.” Since 1984, Hauerwas has served on the faculty of Duke University. In 2001, he served as the Gifford Lecturer at Scotland’s St. Andrews University—the first time in forty years that an American theologian held that honor. His essay collections include Visions and Virtue (1974) and A Better Hope (2000). Although the culture wars often pit liberals against conservatives in a two-hued contest, Hauerwas represents a third alternative as a radical. Like members of the
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sixteenth-century Radical Reformation (or Anabaptists), historic radicals seek neither to conserve nor to improve the cultural norm, but to return to the radix, or root, for their exclusive authority. Because cultural standards bear no authority for Christians, Hauerwas argues, disciples commit to lives as “resident aliens” or “pilgrims” informed by a strange (unnatural) reality called “the Gospel.” Their alternative community, the Church, is their polis; it exists as a counterpoint, contrast, or contradiction of all other cultures and nation-states. Not only does Hauerwas denounce patriotism as idolatrous, he urges Christians to avoid the reins of power that would enable them to guide society toward the political “good” of either the right or left. Instead, Christians are to live powerlessly on society’s margins. Christians are to be pacifists not because nonviolence is a useful means to desired political ends, but because pacifism is faithful to the commission and character of discipleship. Far from an escapist withdrawal, this pacifism is an antagonistic resistance to those “principalities and powers” that maintain order through coercion and violence. Such nonviolent subversion requires a community of discernment, support, and accountability, which is the mission of the Church. Richard C. Goode See also: American Civil Religion; Campolo, Anthony “Tony”; Fundamentalism, Religious; Niebuhr, Reinhold; Progressive Christians Uniting; Sider, Ron; Wallis, Jim.
Further Reading Hauerwas, Stanley. The Hauerwas Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. ———. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001. Hauerwas, Stanley, and William Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989. Oppenheimer, Mark. “For God, Not Country.” Lingua Franca, September 2001.
H ay, H a r r y A founder of the gay rights movement in America, Harry Hay was one of the first to argue that homosexuals are “an oppressed cultural minority.” Applying doctrines and organizational skills of the Communist Party, Hay in 1951 helped establish the Mattachine Society, a secret homophile organization originally based in Los Angeles. Throughout his long life, he was frequently at odds with mainstream gay activists, whom he ridiculed as belonging to “the Gay WASP Society.” Henry “Harry” Hay, Jr., was born on April 7, 1912, in Worthing, England. After his father suffered an ac-
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cident at a copper mine in Chile, the family moved to California in 1919. Hay was raised as a Catholic and attended Stanford University (1930–1932) before dropping out due to financial hardship. In the succeeding years, he performed in Hollywood plays; had affairs with several men, including the actor Will Greer; participated in labor strikes and other politically progressive causes; and visited a therapist who advised him to quit his homosexual lifestyle. In 1938, Hay formalized his ties with the Communist Party and married one of its members, Anita Plantky. The following year the couple moved to New York City, where they supported the radical leftist Popular Front. In 1941, then part of a leftist theater group in Chicago, Hay was interviewed by Indiana University researcher Alfred Kinsey, who was conducting a sex survey. Later that year, Hay began a seven-month clandestine affair with a male architect. The publication of Kinsey’s groundbreaking Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), which reported that 10 percent of males were actively engaged in homosexual relations, convinced Hay that there were enough gays in American society to launch a mass movement. By late 1950, Hay and four others in Los Angeles began organizing the Mattachine Society, named after the French Mattachines (“Dance of Fools” actors of the Renaissance era), who wore masks to conceal their identities. The following year, with the secret society formally founded, Hay divorced his wife and quit the Communist Party. The purpose behind the Mattachine Society was to promote the view that gays are normal people. By 1953, when the organization had 100 chapters and reportedly some 5,000 members, it was determined that openness was a better guarantee of its survival during the McCarthy era. The same fears led to the ousting from the organization of former communists and leftists, including Hay. Ironically, Hay was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955. Hay’s dismissal from the Mattachine Society was in part a response to his rejection of gay assimilation, believing that it was futile and less than genuine for gays to try to fit the mold of the nuclear, heterosexual family. He went on to develop theories on gay cultural identity, publishing the gay magazine ONE and helping form the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles (1969) and the Radical Faeries (1978). Most controversially, he was an active defender of NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association), as he did not regard sex between an adult male and a minor boy as being child molestation. Hay died on October 24, 2002. Roger Chapman See also: Communists and Communism; Gay Rights Movement; Kinsey, Alfred; McCarthyism; Milk, Harvey; Same-Sex Marriage; Socarides, Charles; Stonewall Rebellion.
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Further Reading Hay, Harry. Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Timmons, Stuart. The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston: Allyson, 1996.
H ayd e n , To m A leader of the New Left movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, Tom Hayden called for “participatory democracy” in the Port Huron Statement (1962), the manifesto he drafted for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); made controversial visits to Hanoi during the Vietnam War (1965, 1967, 1974); and was one of the Chicago Seven tried for inciting riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Some considered Hayden’s subsequent involvement in California legislative politics as bowing to “the establishment,” but his campaign slogan “The radicalism of the sixties is the common sense of the seventies,” combined with his marriage to the actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda, convinced conservatives otherwise. In 1977, Hayden organized the Campaign for Economic Democracy (renamed Campaign California in the mid-1980s) to advance a mainstream form of participatory democracy, emphasizing tax reform, corporate responsibility, and environmentalism. Thomas Emmett “Tom” Hayden was born into a working-class Irish Catholic family on December 11, 1939, in Royal Oak, Michigan. He later attended the University of Michigan (BA, 1960), where he was the editor of the student newspaper. In 1961, Hayden volunteered for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), registering black voters in Mississippi and Georgia. From 1962 to 1963, he was the founding president of SDS. Until the outbreak of race riots in the summer of 1967, he headed the SDS-affiliated Economic Research and Action Project in Newark, New Jersey (1965–1967), spreading his concept of participatory democracy beyond the campus to address urban poverty and community development. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a leader of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. After the war, Hayden channeled his energies into legislative politics, winning election to the California state assembly (1982–1991) and state senate (1992– 2000), but running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate (1976), the governorship of California (1994), and other offices. Hayden has taught at the University of Southern California, Pitzer College, and Immaculate Heart College. His writings include Vietnam: The Struggle for Peace (1973); The American Future: New Visions Beyond Old Frontiers (1980); The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics (1996); and Rebel: A Personal History of the 1960s (2003).
The Port Huron Statement, from its opening passage—“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to a world we inherit”—to its concluding platform of a “new left” movement inclusive of liberals and socialists, called on students of the middle class to use the resources of the university for creating “participatory democracy.” The SDS was criticized by New Left leader Michael Harrington for refusing to take a firm stand against communism and the Soviet Union. Some blamed Hayden for leadership failings that allowed the SDS to implode and spawn the terrorist splinter group the Weather Underground. The leftist-turned-conservative David Horowitz later vilified the SDS manifesto as totalitarian and Marxist in essence. During the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Hayden insisted that the event was not a communist takeover. Four years later, when between 150,000 and 400,000 political prisoners were being held in concentration camps in Vietnam, Hayden and Fonda refused to join Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and other former peace activists in signing an open letter condemning the Hanoi government for its “brutal disregard of human rights.” By that time, Hayden and Fonda were conducting a nationwide tour to bring attention to the danger of nuclear power, an interest that coincided with the release of Fonda’s film The China Syndrome (1979) about the near meltdown of a nuclear power plant, and an actual accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania. Roger Chapman See also: Chicago Seven; Fonda, Jane; Harrington, Michael; Horowitz, David; Human Rights; New Left; Nuclear Age; Soviet Union and Russia; Students for a Democratic Society; Three Mile Island Accident; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Hayden, Tom. Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader. San Francisco: City Lights, 2008. Hayden, Tom, and Dick Flacks. “The Port Huron Statement at 40.” Nation, August 5, 2002. Horowitz, David. “Port Huron and the War on Terror.” In Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, 376–83. Dallas: Spence, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. “Port Huron to Santa Barbara.” New Republic, September 30, 1977.
Health Care As a recurring issue in the culture wars, health care was originally a struggle between pro– and anti–New Deal factions. Indeed, in the decades since World War II, the issue has epitomized the divide between conservatives and liberals regarding the role of the national govern-
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ment, with the former emphasizing the free market and the latter emphasizing the need for a stronger safety net. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, President Harry S. Truman advocated for a national health care system, but his proposal met vigorous opposition from the American Medical Association (AMA). In the 1960s, Medicare and Medicaid—supported by unions and not as vigorously opposed by the AMA—were enacted to provide government health insurance for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Further attempts for national health care programs were pursued, unsuccessfully, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and President Bill Clinton was unsuccessful in garnering congressional and public support for a national health care system.
Although committee hearings were conducted on Wagner-Murray-Dingell, no formal vote was taken. At President Truman’s request, the legislation was reintroduced during the next session of Congress, but the measure never progressed beyond the hearing stage. With the Cold War under way, it was a political liability for any member of Congress to be viewed as a supporter of “socialized medicine.” Nor did it help that labor unions, responsible for a number of strikes in the years after the war, were strong backers of national health care. In the meantime, leaders in southern states perceived national health insurance as a surreptitious way of promoting desegregation since the benefits would be extended to members of all races.
President Truman vs. the AMA
Medicare and Medicaid
In his Fair Deal domestic policy program of 1949–1953, Truman focused on goals for postwar adjustment in the United States, including an economic bill of rights with health security for all Americans. His call for universal government health insurance became a centerpiece of the Democratic agenda, whereby all American citizens, regardless of social class, would receive equal health care benefits. The proposal led to introduction of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill in 1946, which had the support of labor unions and the Physicians’ Forum, a group of approximately 1,000 doctors who advocated national health insurance. Some supporters of universal government health insurance criticized the final version of Wagner-Murray-Dingell, which had been weakened in legislative drafting for political support in Congress. The revised measure, for example, exempted government employees, religious workers, college students, and unpaid employees from the program. U.S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran and the leaders of the Children’s Bureau vigorously criticized the changes to the bill, arguing that it no longer provided universal health care. Immediately upon the announcement of Truman’s plan, the AMA mounted vehement opposition. In its attack on Wagner-Murray-Dingell and other such proposals, the AMA assessed each of its members $25 to establish the National Education Campaign and hire a professional public relations firm to undermine public support. In addition, officials at the national headquarters of the AMA mobilized state medical societies to organize county societies to campaign against the bill. Doctors not following the AMA party line risked possible expulsion, which could mean loss of hospital access and referrals. In its editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the organization argued that passage of WagnerMurray-Dingell would triple the cost of health care, make doctors subservient to federal bureaucracy, lower the quality of medicine by imposing “assembly line” health care, and jeopardize the patient-doctor relationship.
Although the AMA won the first battle against national health insurance, the tide changed during the 1960s. In the presidential campaign of that year, each candidate offered a health care plan. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, argued against allowing the national government to control health insurance. Instead, he favored a federal subsidy approach administered by the states that would lower insurance premiums for the elderly. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, favored a plan that emphasized federal control, whereby health insurance would be funded by increasing Social Security payroll taxes. Both proposals came for a floor vote in the U.S. Senate on August 23, 1960, and both were defeated—the Republican subsidy approach by a vote of 67–28 along strict party lines, and the Democratic Social Security plan by a 51–44 margin, with several Democrats joining Republicans in opposition. By way of an alternative, senators Robert Kerr (D-OK) and Wilbur Mills (D-AR) introduced a bill that called for a modest increase in federal funding for medical vendor payments for state-run public assistance programs. Passed by wide margins in both the Senate (91–2) and the House (369–17), the Kerr-Mills bill was signed into law in 1960. Many backers of national health insurance, however, did not think the measure went far enough to address the public need. Kennedy promised that, if elected, he would push for a full-fledged government insurance plan for the elderly. It was at this time that the term Medicare was first used in reference to national health insurance. Even Nixon agreed that Kerrs-Mill was not sufficient and promised to take up the issue if elected. Meanwhile, groups such as the National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC) began attacking the AMA for opposing national health insurance. According to the NCSC, the AMA was simply not interested in guaranteeing medical coverage for all Americans. The unions represented by the AFL-CIO joined in the anti-AMA rhetoric, deploring its “cynical campaign with a massive
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onslaught of distortion, misrepresentation and beguiling promises of something better.” An undaunted AMA continued its active opposition to national health care, as it had during the Truman years, but a majority of the general public—an estimated 62 percent by 1962—had decided that Medicare was necessary. At a May 1962 rally of senior citizens at Madison Square Garden in New York City, broadcast by all three national television networks, President Kennedy tried to capitalize on this public support by urging Congress to take action and approve Medicare. Hours later, AMA president Edward R. Annis offered a televised rebuttal from the same location (after the senior citizens had left). Two Medicare proposals soon died in Congress, but the AMA victory would prove short-lived. In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, the cause of Medicare found a new champion and a new wave of support. In 1965, following election in his own right, President Lyndon Johnson urged in his State of the Union address that Medicare be made a legislative priority. “We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens,” he said, to be “financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee’s working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.” Earlier, in 1962, Robert Ball of the Social Security Administration had convinced the American Hospital Association to back Medicare, a significant development in that it represented a defection from one of the AMA’s biggest allies. Also, by this time, many private insurance providers began to support Medicare because the elderly were an unprofitable part of their business, forcing them to raise rates on other paying customers. Thus, in 1965, Congress once again took up proposed Medicare legislation. The AMA responded to the new threat by proposing an alternative bill, Eldercare, which would have only slightly modified Kerrs-Mill by providing extra federal funding to offset the increasing costs of health insurance for the poor elderly. For its part, the insurance company Aetna proposed Bettercare, a federal subsidy program for the elderly to offset the purchase of private health insurance. Senator Mills, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, ultimately fashioned a Medicare bill that incorporated aspects of the original Medicare plan, Eldercare, and Bettercare. The final product consisted of Medicare Part A (paying for hospital care and limited nursing care), Medicare Part B (an optional program paying for physicians’ services), and Medicaid (a program of health insurance for those with low incomes, including the elderly and disabled). Although the AFL-CIO was somewhat disappointed with this modified version, President Johnson was satisfied because it had the active support of the NCSC. The Medicare bill passed the
House (307–116) and Senate (70–24) and, in a special ceremony at the Truman Presidential Library—with Truman present—was signed into law by President Johnson on July 30, 1965. The Medicare program went into effect the following year. The AMA announced that it would support Medicare, but many of its member physicians openly criticized the program and vowed that they would not treat Medicare patients.
Post-Medicare Attempts at National Health Insurance In 1968, Walter Reuther, the president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), spoke before the American Public Health Association to advocate for a full national health insurance plan. Although the major unions through the AFL-CIO were proud of their accomplishments with Medicare, Reuther was unconvinced that collective bargaining was the best way for workers to achieve health care benefits. He preferred a public system with the backing of the federal government. In 1968, Reuther organized the Committee of 100 for National Health Insurance, comprising unionists, social activists, academics, physicians, and elected officials. In 1969, the committee drafted a bill for national health insurance called Health Security, which would provide incentives for physicians to create prepaid group practices. It also sought to require physicians and hospitals to function within a national health budget. To avoid many of the criticisms of national health insurance, committee members were careful to explain that the proposal was not socialized medicine. One of the backers of the bill was Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA). To avoid another defeat after Medicare, the AMA this time proposed its own version, called Medicredit. The plan would provide vouchers to low-income individuals to purchase health insurance, tax credits to middle-income individuals for their paid insurance premiums, and federal grants to states to help with insurance coverage for the extremely poor. However, the AMA was unable to garner support from either the hospital industry (which supported expanding Medicare into a national health insurance plan) or the insurance industry (which proposed its own bill). In the meantime, President Nixon proposed the National Health Insurance Partnership Act, which favored the private insurance industry and included funding and other support for prepaid group practices known as health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Senator Kennedy vehemently opposed Nixon’s plan, and Congress did not vote on any of the proposals. However, an experimental HMO program was passed as part of the Health Maintenance Organization and Resources Development Act of 1973, even though the AMA fought strongly against it; the HMO approach (prepaid group practices) directly competed with the AMA’s Medicredit proposal.
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Clinton and Health Security As part of his 1992 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Bill Clinton championed universal health coverage. Shortly after entering the White House, he proposed a national health insurance plan called Health Security. First Lady Hillary Clinton, an experienced attorney, was appointed to head a task force to flesh out the details of the plan. The Health Security reform proposal incorporated many of the ideas offered by an interdisciplinary group of business leaders and policy experts collectively known as the Jackson Hole group. President Clinton borrowed many of their recommendations but differed from the group in that he also sought a national health board to establish limits on spending and on insurance premiums. The Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) campaigned against the Clinton proposal, focusing its opposition on government involvement in health care rather than the specific merits of the plan itself. Hillary Clinton attacked the health insurance industry for “price gouging, cost shifting, and unconscionable profiteering” while arguing that insurance companies have “brought the nation to the brink of bankruptcy.” The HIAA became more aggressive and hired public relations consultants who created the so-called “Harry and Louise” television commercials, which helped galvanize public opposition to the Clinton proposal. In this series of ads, a middle-class couple worryingly discusses the Clinton plan, questioning its bureaucratic approach while encouraging viewers to register their disapproval with members of Congress. The HIAA also organized the Coalition for Health Insurance Choices to involve local businesses in opposition to the Clinton plan. In addition, the Alliance for Managed Competition, made up of such major insurance companies as Aetna, MetLife, Cigna, Prudential, and Travelers, expressed particular skepticism about the proposed national health board. Pharmaceutical companies opposed the plan because of the possibility of drug price regulation. In a shift from the past, the AMA did not actively oppose the Clinton plan, even initially endorsing it as long as there were not to be strict controls promoting managed care. Physicians were mixed, with some professional groups (such as the American Academy of Pediatrics) supporting the plan and others (including the American College of Surgeons) opposing it. The Center for Public Integrity estimated that 650 organizations spent at least $100 million to oppose Health Security, while supporters raised only about $15 million. In 1994, the Senate Finance Committee voted for a compromise plan that was not even brought up for full consideration on the floor of Congress. The Clintons realized that Health Security was not politically viable. In 2006, during the George W. Bush administration, a reported 54.5 million Americans (18.6 percent of the population) were without health insurance for at least
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part of the year. Still, national health care was firmly opposed by the Republican administration and Congress. Although a group called Physicians for a National Health Program advocated for universal health insurance, it was simply not a topic of interest during the Bush years. Among the health care proposals that were discussed— but not enacted—the focus was on such alternatives as employer mandates, expanded access to Medicaid, and increased tax credits. Calls for universal health care in America were renewed in the Democratic presidential primary campaign of 2008, with the two leading candidates—Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois— proposing similar plans. The chief difference was that Clinton’s plan proposed mandatory participation, while Obama’s proposed optional participation in a program that would be affordable to all Americans. Soon after winning the Democratic nomination Obama criticized the Republican challenger, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), for not having a plan that would enable all Americans to obtain health coverage. Joshua Fogel See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Great Society; Kennedy Family; Labor Unions; New Deal; Nixon, Richard; Social Security; Truman, Harry S.; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Cohn, Jonathan. Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Pay the Price. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Derickson, Alan. Health Security for All: Dreams of Universal Health Care in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Meara, Ellen, Meredith Rosenthal, and Anna Sinaiko. Comparing the Effects of Health Insurance Proposals: Employer Mandates, Medicaid Expansions, and Tax Credits. Washington, DC: Employment Policies Institute, February 2007. Mechanic, David. Policy Challenges in Modern Health Care. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Quadagno, Jill S. One Nation Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
H e av y M e t a l Heavy metal, a form of rock music that originated in the late 1960s and peaked in popularity during the 1980s and early 1990s, has been variously celebrated and condemned for its flagrant violation of social convention, often sexually graphic and violent lyrics, and sometimes satanic and occult imagery. Heavy metal is associated with extremely amplified electric guitars, loud acoustics, barking and hoarse vocals, and often long-haired performers dressed in black leather with
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studs. Wild stage shows may feature strobe lights, smoke bombs, fire, and animal blood. Although heavy metal developed out of the sound of American hard rock and psychedelic rock, and was inspired in part by the guitarist Jimi Hendrix, the first major bands were British, namely Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple. Popular American heavy metal bands over the years have included Blue Oyster Cult, Grand Funk Railroad, Aerosmith, Van Halen, Kiss, Quiet Riot, Metallica, and Guns N’ Roses. While “heavy metal” connotes music with mood (heavy) and strength (metal), the term has been associated with the theme of radioactivity and the character “Uranium Willy, the heavy metal kid” from the novel Nova Express (1964) by the Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Another possible origin is a reference to “heavy metal thunder” in the Steppenwolf hit single “Born to Be Wild” (1968), alluding to the roar of motorcycles. Wherever the name comes from, heavy metal has evolved over the years into distinctive subgenres, defying overall categorization: hard rock (1970s), new wave British (1978–1982), classic metal (1983–1987), power metal (1982–1985), thrash metal (1985–1988), glam metal (1987–1992), death metal (1988–1994), alternative metal and grunge (1989–1993), black metal (1989–1993), and nu metal (1996–). Some black metal underground groups have been controversial for racist and neo-Nazi themes. On the other hand, a pro-Christian message has been advanced by evangelical metal bands such as Vengeance (later Vengeance Rising), Gardian (later Guardian), RECON, Stryken, Stryper, Eternal Ryte, and Holy Soldier. During the mid-1980s, Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, the wives of U.S. senators, formed the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) in reaction to rock groups that “advocate aggressive and hostile rebellion, the abuse of drugs and alcohol, irresponsible sexuality, sexual perversions, violence and involvement in the occult.” Singled out for criticism were some heavy metal bands—labeled “porn rock” by the PMRC—including AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priests, Mötley Crüe, and W.A.S.P. The PMRC argued for a labeling system like the one used for rating movies. On September 19, 1985, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on this proposal in which several musicians, including the heavy metal performer Dee Snider, presented opposing testimony. In the end, the recording industry agreed to implement voluntary labeling. By 1990, Parental Advisory Warning labels were appearing on potentially offensive releases. Wal-Mart, the single largest retailer of recorded music in America, promptly made it a policy not to sell such recordings. In 1988, Ozzy Osbourne (formerly of Black Sabbath) was sued by the parents of a California boy who had committed suicide after listening to Osbourne’s song “Suicide Solution” (1980). Kenneth McKenna, the attorney
of the plaintiffs, argued that the song had a subliminal message—“get the gun and shoot it”—during the guitar solo. In 1991, the same attorney argued in a Nevada court that the album Stained Glass (1978) by Judas Priest had also inspired suicide. The defendants prevailed in both cases, but notions lingered among many fundamentalist Christians that heavy metal music is fraught with hidden spells, subliminal messages, and backmasking (embedded messages recorded backwards). During the 1980s, for example, some conservative Christians argued that Led Zeppelin’s rock classic “Stairway to Heaven” (from the 1971 album Led Zeppelin IV) was infused with subliminal satanic messages (such as references to “sweet Satan” and “666”), despite the song’s antidrug theme. In the 1990s, some social critics blamed heavy metal as a major factor in school shootings. Roger Chapman See also: Biafra, Jello; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gore, Al; Manson, Marilyn; Punk Rock; Record Warning Labels; Rock and Roll; School Shootings; Wal-Mart; White Supremacists; Zappa, Frank.
Further Reading Christe, Ian. Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Luhr, Eileen. “Metal Missionaries to the Nation: Christian Heavy Metal Music, ‘Family Values,’ and Youth Culture, 1984–1994.” American Quarterly 57:1 (March 2005): 103–28. Purcell, Natalie J. Death Metal Music: The Passion and Politics of a Subculture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995. Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Rev. ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000.
H e f n e r, H u g h Beginning in 1953 with his founding of Playboy, a men’s lifestyle magazine featuring photographs of nude women, Hugh Hefner was a catalyst of the sexual revolution and social counterculture. As he later explained, “A great many of the traditional and moral values of our society were changing, and Playboy was the first publication to reflect those changes.” From the outset, he characterized his magazine as liberating and healthy, a counter to religious oppression: “If you had to sum up the idea of Playboy, it is anti-Puritanism.” Over the years, Playboy came to be condemned by social conservatives, religious leaders, and feminists on one hand, and defended by civil libertarians, First Amendment advocates, and male subscribers on the other. The son of an accountant, Hugh Marston Hefner was
Heller, Joseph
born on April 9, 1926, in Chicago. After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II and later graduating from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (BA, psychology, 1949), he worked as a circulation manager for publication companies in Chicago, including the magazine Children’s Activities. Borrowing $600, Hefner launched Playboy in October 1953 from his Chicago apartment, wishing to produce an uncensored version of Esquire magazine aimed at the urban male interested in “the good life” of pleasure and status. The first issue, forty-eight pages in length and featuring a nude color centerfold of the actress Marilyn Monroe, sold 53,991 copies. By December 1955, the magazine was selling 800,000 copies at the newsstand, with 1,000 subscribers being added daily. Circulation peaked at 7 million in 1972. As the magazine evolved, it supplemented the photographs of nude “Playmates of the Month” with original fiction by leading writers, in-depth interviews of important figures, investigative journalism pieces, book and music reviews, risqué cartoons, and features such as the “Playboy Advisor” and “Playboy Forum.” Hefner explained that the Playboy icon of a rabbit in a tuxedo was chosen because “Rabbits are the playboys of the animal world and they have a sexy reputation.” During his many years as publisher and editor-inchief of the magazine (1953–1990), Hefner cast himself in the Playboy image, hosting parties at his mansions and posing for photographs with pipe in hand and wearing silk pajamas while surrounded by attractive women. Between 1962 and 1963, Hefner wrote and published twenty-five installments of a column titled “Playboy Philosophy” (250,000 words in all), setting out his thesis that American society has suffered from the oppression of “healthy heterosexuality.” The treatise covered a number of controversial topics, including censorship, sex laws, divorce, abortion, birth control, sex education, and drugs. In response to feminist critics, Hefner argued that his magazine was helping the cause of women by “undermining the surviving social attitudes that there are only virgins and nonvirgins, good girls and bad girls.” The “girl next door” motif of his Playboy bunnies, he argued, fosters the view that a woman can be simultaneously nice and naughty, not one or the other. He lashed out at the “female emancipators” who were not persuaded by this logic, arguing that “a large number of competitive females . . . are trying to castrate the guys they come in contact with” and are responsible for creating “a hostile war of the sexes.” By 1981, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., which included publications, video, cable, casinos, resort properties, and merchandising, earned $13.7 million on revenues of $221.5 million. In 1988, Christie Hefner, Hefner’s daughter from the first of two marriages, became the company CEO. In 1986, meanwhile, during the conservative ad-
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ministration of President Ronald Reagan, the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography issued a report suggesting a “causal” relationship between pornography and criminal sexual violence against women. This spurred a renewed attack on Playboy, as well as on newer competitors such as Penthouse and Hustler, uniting religious political groups such as the Moral Majority with radical feminists, namely Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. In response to the controversy, 7-11 and other convenience stores quit selling Playboy and other pornography magazines. Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Censorship; Counterculture; Dworkin, Andrea; Flynt, Larry; MacKinnon, Catharine; Moral Majority; Pornography; Sex Education; Sex Offenders; Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading Brady, Frank. Hefner. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Hefner, Hugh M., ed. The New Bedside Playboy: A Half Century of Amusement, Diversion & Entertainment. Chicago: Playboy Press, 2006. Plimpton, George. “Checking in with Hugh Hefner.” Esquire, January 1992.
H e l l e r, J o s e p h The novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist Joseph Heller satirized American society, hypocrisy, and the military establishment in numerous works of fiction. His most notable work was his first novel Catch-22 (1961), which drew on his experiences in the U.S. Air Force during World War II to paint a pessimistic portrait of life and moral choice in the armed forces. A literary darling of the 1960s counterculture generation, Heller also engaged such themes as liberalism, capitalism, class struggle, the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, and the rebelliousness of the Vietnam era. His status as an Air Force veteran offered further intrigue to his controversial outlook on these topics. Other works, while less known than Catch-22, contribute to Heller’s reputation as one of America’s foremost post–World War II authors: the plays We Bombed New Haven (1967) and Clevinger’s Trial (1973); the novels Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), Picture This (1988), Closing Time (1994), and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000); and the short-story collection Catch as Catch Can (2003). Born on May 1, 1923, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, Heller was the son of workingclass Jewish immigrant parents. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, he joined the Air Force and was deployed to Corsica, where he flew sixty combat missions as a B-25 bombardier during World
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War II. Upon returning to the United States, he focused on academic pursuits, earning a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1948 and a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1949; he also spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar studying at Oxford University in England. Although he worked as a magazine and advertising copywriter, Heller’s primary goal was to be a writer; early short stories were published in such leading magazines as Esquire and Atlantic Monthly. Catch-22, which took Heller eight years to write, initially received poor reviews. Primarily on the strength of word-of-mouth recommendations, the novel developed a cult following among young Americans dissatisfied with, among other things, the Cold War and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Catch-22 went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Although it is set in World War II, the novel found an attentive audience among 1960s Vietnam War protesters and became a seminal text of that era’s peace movement. The protagonist, a B-25 bombardier named Captain John Yossarian, is a cowardly antihero who seeks a military discharge by any means necessary. Thus, he feigns insanity by volunteering to go on dangerous flight missions; seeking to avoid combat, he reasons, would prove his sanity. This kind of double-bind situation, exemplified throughout the novel, is called a “Catch-22” (based on a nonsensical military regulation of the same name). “Catch-22” became a universal metaphor not only for the insanity of war, but for double-bind situations in all aspects of life. In subsequent writing, Heller addressed similar lose-lose predicaments in the context of corporate bureaucracies, war, and society at large. During the 1960s, Heller taught English at Yale University and toured college campuses speaking out against the Vietnam War. He died on December 12, 1999. Nick Malinowski See also: Cold War; Counterculture; Kubrick, Stanley; Literature, Film, and Drama; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Heller, Joseph. Conversations with Joseph Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. ———. Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Potts, Stephen W. From Here to Absurdity: The Moral Battlefields of Joseph Heller. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1995. Ruderman, Judith. Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991.
Helms, Jesse A five-term conservative Republican Senator from North Carolina (1973–2003), Jesse Helms is remembered for his
strong stances against affirmative action, gay rights, the United Nations, communism, and “liberal spending.” An outspoken and controversial figure in the culture wars, he once warned that President Bill Clinton would not be safe if he visited North Carolina. According to the Weekly Standard, the man nicknamed “Senator No” was one of the most influential conservative figures since the 1980s and helped shift the national public debate to the right. Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr., was born on October 18, 1921, in Monroe, North Carolina. He attended Wingate Junior College (1938–1939) and Wake Forest University (1939–1940), served in the U.S. Navy during World War II (1942–1945), worked as the administrative assistant to U.S. Senator Willis Smith (D-NC; 1950–1953), and sat on the Raleigh, North Carolina, city council (1957– 1961). Helms’s professional career included newspaper reporting, broadcast journalism, and banking. He was a Democrat until 1970. A harsh opponent of the civil rights movement, Helms characterized the advancement of minority rights as a “new form of bigotry” that undermines the freedom of the majority. He also opposed affirmative action, as was made clear in the infamous “Hands” television commercial run against opponent Harvey Gantt during the 1990 election campaign. The ad, showing a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, stated, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.” Helms was also against establishing a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Helms’s insensitivity toward the AIDS crisis was the consequence of his opposition to homosexuality—he linked the disease with sodomy. Later, after being persuaded by a biblical argument presented by U2 singer Bono, he stopped describing foreign AIDS programs as equivalent to throwing tax dollars down “rat holes.” Even so, he continued to view AIDS as a moral problem and believed that programs aimed at alleviating the suffering from it were helping to spread the disease. A fiscal conservative, though he supported federal subsidies for North Carolina peanut farmers, Helms often used arguments for budgetary restraint to target programs he did not like. After federal money indirectly financed the display of homoerotic works by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in 1989 he proposed that the National Endowment for the Arts be prevented from funding “obscene art.” A critic of the United Nations, in January 2000 he sought guarantees pertaining to U.S. sovereignty in UNsanctioned military operations in exchange for continued payment of U.S. membership dues. That concession by the UN spurred the U.S. Senate to unanimously agree to pay more than $500,000 in back dues. After the Cold War, Helms proposed scaling back America’s involvement in foreign affairs, though he de-
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A political cartoon in 1992 parodies the campaign of ultraconservative senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) to cut federal funding for the Public Broadcasting System and the National Endowment for the Arts. (OLIPHANT ©1992 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.)
nounced China’s human rights record, promoted economic sanctions against Cuba, and opposed the international treaty banning chemical and biological weapons. Helms is the author of “When Free Men Shall Stand”: A Sobering Look at the Supertaxing, Superspending Superbureaucracy in Washington (1976) and Here’s Where I Stand: A Memoir (2005). Helms died on July 4, 2008. Solomon Davidoff See also: Affirmative Action; AIDS; Bono; China; Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Cuba; Gay Rights Movement; National Endowment for the Arts; United Nations.
Further Reading Black, Charlie. “Jesse Helms.” Time, July 21, 2008. Dodd, John, with David Tyson. And the World Came His Way: Jesse Helms’ Contributions to Freedom. Wingate, NC: Jesse Helms Center Foundation, 2002. Furgurson, Ernest B. Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. Helms, Jesse. Here’s Where I Stand: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2005. Link, William A. Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008.
Her itage Foundation The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 with seed money by millionaires with a conservative agenda— namely newspaper publisher and Mellon family heir Richard Mellon Scaife (a donation of $900,000) and beer baron Joseph Coors (a donation of $250,000)—is the premier conservative think tank in America. The Heritage Foundation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., disseminates policy analysis in favor of free-
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market principles, a limited welfare state, individual responsibility, and a strong national defense. Unlike many other established think tanks, it does aggressive fundraising; markets policy ideas in a deliberate, publicrelations manner; works closely with congressional staffers to shape as well as draft policy; and advises the development of state-level think tanks. Often cited as the most visible of all think tanks in print and broadcast media, the organization issues press releases, hosts conferences, funds book research, and issues timely policy briefs on hot-button issues to congressional and state-level politicians. Its 2006 operating budget exceeded $40.5 million and was sustained by individual contributions ($25 million) as well as donations from foundations ($13.1 million) and corporations ($1.5 million). Analysts at the foundation hold titles such as “fellow” and “distinguished scholar” typically reserved for academic settings, although they are not required to have academic credentials or postgraduate degrees, do not have teaching duties, and do not subject their research to peer review. Many of the analysts go on to serve in the federal government or are retired from government service. Former Heritage Foundation staffers Elaine Chao and L. Paul Bremer, for example, worked in the administration of George W. Bush; Edwin Meese, who served as attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, has been a longtime distinguished fellow. In the 1980s, pressured by emerging social conservatives in Washington to adopt a more aggressive approach on cultural issues, the foundation hired staff to comment on the media, family values, churches, and schools, with a broader emphasis on foreign and economic policy. The Heritage Foundation was especially active during the Reagan presidency, issuing more than a thousand policy analyses even before the administration entered office in 1981. Among its recommendations were reduced spending for social services, the implementation of supply-side economics, and military intervention in rogue states. A report one year later found that the administration had implemented 60 percent of the organization’s recommendations. The Heritage Foundation followed a similar course of policy analysis in Reagan’s second term and George H.W. Bush’s administration in 1989. Congressional reforms outlined in Republican Representative from Georgia Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994 appeared two years earlier in a Heritage Foundation study of Congress. Also in 1994, the Heritage Foundation began holding an orientation for new members of Congress to counter the traditional program conducted by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. A frequent commentator on cultural issues, the Heritage Foundation has associated inner-city criminal activities with the development of a welfare state and has argued that the court system is stacked with liberal-
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minded judges who undermine the tenets of the U.S. Constitution. The organization favors a reduction in public school funding and the use of vouchers for private schools. Robert Rector, the domestic policy analyst on such issues as welfare reform, Social Security, Medicare, and immigration, regularly appears before Congress and the media. Regarded as the architect of the 1996 welfare reform law, Rector estimated that a total of $5.4 trillion had been spent on welfare since the advent of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Although the amount was later found to be grossly misleading, it was frequently cited in the media, and Rector used that figure to discredit the effectiveness of welfare programs. He also contended that welfare spending was the primary cause of births to unwed young women. He argued that marriage and a lifetime limit on public assistance would reverse welfare’s negative results. The organization has been instrumental in developing a conservative policy network consisting of private foundations and think tanks. As president since 1977, Edwin J. Feulner has been a trustee of influential foundations that have made the Heritage Foundation a large recipient. As a result, foundations not only have generously funded the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think thanks engaged in similar policy analysis but have instituted a funding practice unlike the traditional support mechanisms of mainstream foundations, which are usually project-specific grants. The new approach has involved large sums of money for general operating expenses, permitting the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks to engage in a wide array of activities and policy analyses that are not contingent on deadlines and reporting features required in projectspecific grants. Sergio Romero See also: Bush Family; Contract with America; Education Reform; Immigration Policy; Judicial Wars; Media Bias; Reagan, Ronald; School Vouchers; Social Security; Think Tanks; War on Poverty; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Berkowitz, Bill. “The Heritage Foundation Soars.” Z Magazine, June 2001. Covington, Sally. Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations. Washington, DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 1997. Heritage Foundation Web site. www.heritage.org. Rendall, Steve, and Jill Steinberg. “Heritage of Extremism: Some of the Think Tank’s Leading Figures—Past and Present.” Extra!, July/August 1996. Solomon, Norman. “The Media’s Favorite Think Tank: How the Heritage Foundation Turns Money into Media.” Extra!, July/August 1996.
Stefancic, Jean, and Richard Delgado. No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
H i g h t o we r, J i m Billed on his book jackets as “America’s most popular populist,” Jim Hightower has employed his folksy wit to comment on globalization, organic agriculture, campaign financing, corporate corruption, fossil-fuel dependency, and the value of grassroots activism to the health of American democracy. As an author, public speaker, and radio personality, he has achieved a high profile as a progressive humorist-activist in the same vein as Michael Moore, Al Franken, and fellow Texan the late Molly Ivins. James Allen Hightower was born on January 11, 1943, in Denison, Texas, and educated at the University of North Texas (BA, government, 1965) and Columbia University (graduate work in international affairs, no degree). He entered politics in the late 1960s as an aide to U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat from Texas. Hightower first ran for office in 1980, with an unsuccessful bid for the Texas Railroad Commission, the regulatory board that oversees the state’s oil industry. Later, he won two terms as the state agricultural commissioner (1983–1991), spending his tenure promoting organic farming, self-marketing strategies for small farmers, alternative crops, and other innovations. Hightower was unseated by Rick Perry, the future governor, in a campaign organized by Karl Rove, who later became the chief political adviser to George W. Bush. Out of office, Hightower rose to prominence as an activist knowledgeable about the various uses of the media. He challenged the dominance of the political right on talk radio through a program of his own, the Chat and Chew, and he published the Hightower Lowdown newsletter, wrote a syndicated column for alternative weeklies, and established his own Web site (www.jimhightower. com). In the 1990s, Hightower accused President Bill Clinton of being too enamored of corporate campaign donations known as “soft money.” His disaffection with the pro-business New Democrats led him to the Green Party in 2000, where he sat on Ralph Nader’s presidential election campaign board. Hightower continued promoting his renegade populism with the Rolling Thunder Down Home Democracy Tour in 2003, which brought together Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Jr., and Molly Ivins in an attempt to promote a twenty-first-century Chautauqua movement. Like Nader, Hightower assailed corporate influence on public policy and called on the Democratic Party to return to its working-class base. He theorizes that America is divided primarily not by left and right, but by top and bottom, the social stratum of class. Like many Democrats who supported Nader in 2000, he endorsed John
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Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Hightower is perhaps best known through his books, including There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos (1997), If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates (2001), Thieves in High Places (2003), Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush (2004), and Swim Against the Current (2008). In these works, he calls for progressives to seek an audience not only with the “bean sprout eaters” but also with the “snuff-dippers.” His voice, with its native Texas accent, is a reproach to conservative claims that the country’s liberals come solely from the East and West coasts. Jason Mellard See also: Campaign Finance Reform; Corporate Welfare; Environmental Movement; Executive Compensation; Factory Farms; Franken, Al; Genetically Modified Foods; Globalization; Moore, Michael; Nader, Ralph; Red and Blue States.
Further Reading Kelly, K. “Jim Hightower: A Farmer’s Friend Who Goes Against the Grain.” Business Week, November 6, 1989. Motavalli, Jim. “Jim Hightower.” E Magazine: the Environmental Magazine, January/February 1995. “Rolling Thunder.” New Internationalist, November 2002. Rothschild, Matthew. “Jim Hightower.” Progressive, November 2003.
Hill, Anita Anita Hill, an African-American professor of law and former government official, entered the tumult of the culture wars in 1991 when she accused Clarence Thomas, a conservative nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court and also an African American, of sexual harassment. Anita Faye Hill was born on July 30, 1956, in Morris, Oklahoma, and raised as a devout Baptist. After attending Oklahoma State University (BS, psychology, 1977) and Yale Law School (JD, 1980), she practiced law at the firm of Ward, Harkrader & Ross in Washington, D.C. (1980–1981). From 1981 to 1983, Hill served as Thomas’s personal assistant, first at the U.S. Department of Education and later at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After leaving federal service—by her account due to Thomas’s harassment—she taught at Oral Roberts University School of Law in Tulsa (1983–1986), the University of Oklahoma School of Law (1986–1996), and Brandeis University (1997–). Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the People for the American Way, and other organizations opposed President George H.W. Bush’s selection of Thomas because of his political
Anita Hill testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had been sexually harassed by former boss Clarence Thomas, who was before the committee as a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Thomas called the 1991 televised hearings a “high-tech lynching.” (Brad Markel/Getty Images)
conservativism, the confirmation process was proceeding in a pro forma fashion until National Public Radio and Newsday broke the story concerning Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment. Leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee initially ignored her charge, but after it was leaked to the press Democrats demanded a public inquiry. This set the stage for the televised hearings beginning on October 11, 1991. In her testimony before the committee, made up entirely of white males, Hill asserted that, as her boss, Thomas had persistently sought a relationship with her, made sexual advances, conversed about pornographic films, and talked in sexually crude terms in her presence. Thomas vigorously denied the accusations and characterized the televised proceedings as “a high-tech lynching.” Without any hard evidence, the hearings thus boiled down to a “he said, she said” situation. Some questioned why Hill did not file a complaint at the time of Thomas’s alleged behavior; others retorted that it was not until 1986 that sexual harassment was legally classified as employment discrimination. The Judiciary Committee sent the nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation, but Thomas narrowly won confirmation, by a 52–48 floor vote, on October 15, 1991. The Hill-Thomas controversy provoked a national
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discussion on sexual harassment. The women’s magazine Glamour designated Hill as its “Woman of the Year” for 1991. Public opinion polls indicated a majority of AfricanAmerican women actually disbelieved Hill, while others felt that the hearing underscored the “double minority” status of black females in American society. Supporters of Thomas and his judicial philosophy believed that the liberal concern about sexual harassment was a hypocritical attempt to derail the appointment to the high court of someone opposed to abortion rights and affirmative action. Cornel West, then a professor of African American Studies at Harvard, wrote in Race Matters (1993) that black leaders displayed “a failure of nerve” for not denouncing both Hill and Thomas as conservative elites guilty of supporting policies detrimental to the welfare of fellow blacks. The lingering stigma of the confirmation hearings angered Thomas and his backers. In The Real Anita Hill (1993), then-conservative journalist David Brock vilified the accuser; later, the same author, in “I Was a Right-Wing Hit Man” (Esquire, July 1997) and Blinded by the Right (2002), dramatically disavowed his damning portrait of her and confessed that he was part of a Republican disinformation campaign. In Strange Justice (1994), the product of a postmortem investigation (including interviews of other women), Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abrahamson concluded that it was Thomas who had lied. Shortly after the hearings, Hill supporters announced plans for endowing a chair in her honor for the study of sexual harassment at the University of Oklahoma. Efforts to appoint Hill to the position were blocked by state representatives, however, some of whom made analogies comparing her to Hitler and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Roger Chapman See also: Affirmative Action; Brock, David; Bush Family; Judicial Wars; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Sexual Harassment; Thomas, Clarence; Victimhood; West, Cornel.
Further Reading Hill, Anita F. Speaking Truth to Power. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Hill, Anita Faye, and Emma Coleman Jordan. Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Mansbridge, Jane, and Katharine Tate. “Race Trumps Gender: The Thomas Nomination in the Black Community.” PS: Political Science & Politics 25:3 (September 1992): 488–92. Mayer, Jane, and Jill Abrahamson. Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Smitherman, Geneva, ed. African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Hill, Julia “Butter f ly ” Environmental activist Julia “Butterfly” Hill became America’s most famous “tree hugger” in the late 1990s, after living for 738 days on a six-by-eight-foot (1.8-by2.4-meter) platform 180 feet (55 meters) high in the branches of a giant California redwood tree, nicknamed Luna, to keep it from being cut down by loggers. Some dubbed her “the Rosa Parks of the environmental movement,” while others criticized her for trespassing on private property and interfering with free enterprise. Hill, the daughter of an evangelical preacher, was born on February 18, 1974, in Mt. Vernon, Missouri. She was nicknamed Butterfly during childhood, though the moniker became appropriate to her high-altitude adventure in environmental civil disobedience from 1997 to 1999. Initially unaffiliated with any environmental organization, she began her crusade during a spiritual journey after a near-fatal car accident in August 1996. During a visit to northern California, she came in contact with radical environmentalists, including members of Earth First!, who were carrying out “tree-sits” in an attempt to thwart logging operations on the last tract of unprotected wilderness redwood forest. The land, located near Stafford, California, and owned by the Pacific Lumber Company, constituted the 60,000-acre (24,000-hectare) Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County. Since its 1985 takeover by the Maxxam Corporation, according to critics, the logging company had nearly tripled its forest cutting. In addition, Pacific Lumber was blamed for forestry mismanagement leading to mud slides. In November 1997, Hill took a brief turn sitting in the 200-foot (60-meter) Luna to keep loggers at bay. Although the lumber camp was breaking up for winter, she decided to climb back up the thousandyear-old tree, fearing that it might otherwise be hastily cut down. Her tree-sit vigil lasted from December 10, 1997, to December 18, 1999, ending only after Pacific Lumber agreed to sell Luna and a surrounding three-acre (1.2-hectare) buffer to Hill and the land trust Sanctuary Forest for $50,000. Hill became a media celebrity by using her cell phone to keep in contact with reporters throughout the tree-sit. Young, idealistic, humorous, and mystical, she fascinated the public. Photographs of her in the tree with a sign that read “RESPECT YOUR ELDERS” appeared in news outlets worldwide. At the end of her protest, she kissed Luna and acknowledged that many would regard her as “a dirty, tree-hugging hippie.” Later, in 2001, unknown individuals cut more than halfway through the trunk of the tree; Pacific Lumber helped brace it with metal brackets and steel cables, enabling it to survive. In the book The Legacy of Luna (2000), an account of her tree-sitting, Hill tells of surviving intimidating tactics on the part of security forces, including napalm smoke and helicopter attacks, as well as storms and
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bitter cold. She also distances herself from Earth First!, perhaps to disassociate herself from ecoterrorism. At her insistence, the book was published on recycled paper and printed with soy-based ink. In 1999, Hill founded Circle of Life, an organization based in Oakland, California, that promotes ecological sustainability and preservation. Her second book, One Makes the Difference (2002), offers everyday advice for the ecologically minded. Roger Chapman See also: Arrow, Tre; Ecoterrorism; Environmental Movement; Foreman, Dave; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness.
Further Reading Circle of Life Web site. www.circleoflifefoundation.org. FitzGerald, Dawn. Julia Butterfly Hill: Saving the Redwoods. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 2002. Hill, Julia Butterfly. The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Woman, a Tree, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. One Makes the Difference: Inspiring Actions That Change Our World. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002.
Hillsdale College Located in Hillsdale, Michigan, two hours west of Detroit, Hillsdale College is a small, private liberal arts school that William F. Buckley once hailed as America’s most conservative college. Founded in 1844 by Freewill Baptists, Hillsdale has been a strident player in the culture wars, spurning all forms of federal funding in order to avoid compliance with antidiscrimination laws in hiring and admissions, offering a curriculum that emphasizes the Western canon, and providing a forum for conservatives. The tenure of George C. Rouche, III, as Hillsdale’s president (1971–1999) increased the school’s reputation as a bastion of politically and socially conservative values, although in 1988 the American Association of University Professors censured the school for violating principles of academic freedom and tenure. Under his watch, the newsletter Imprimis (Latin for “in the first place”) was launched in 1972, publishing for wide dissemination a digest of speeches delivered on campus by conservative speakers. By 1999, Imprimis reportedly had an unpaid circulation of 620,000, promoting JudeoChristian values, the free market, and individual liberty, while criticizing secular humanism, liberal concepts of social justice, political correctness, and multiculturalism. Using Imprimis as a promotional tool, Rouche raised $325 million for the school’s endowment in order to compensate for the loss of federal funds due to the school’s refusal to document its hiring and enrollment practices concerning race and gender.
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In October 1999, the campus was rocked by scandal following the suicide of Rouche’s daughter-in-law, who for many years was the managing editor of Imprimis. Rouche, the fifth-highest paid college president in America, abruptly resigned, and campus officials refused to provide details, citing his privacy. Reports in the mainstream media, as well as the conservative journals Weekly Standard and National Review, indicated that the president and the deceased had been involved in a long-term affair. The lack of candor by the board of trustees was seen as hypocrisy by critics, who noted that it was conservatives who had earlier shined a spotlight on President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Although Buckley urged all “fellow Christians” to stand by Hillsdale during the crisis, former secretary of education William J. Bennett protested the evasiveness of the board by resigning from the committee searching for a new Hillsdale president. Rouche died on May 5, 2006. Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; Affirmative Action; Bennett, William J.; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Clinton Impeachment; Great Books; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; National Review; Neoconservatism; Political Correctness; Weekly Standard, The.
Further Reading Chamberlain, John. Freedom and Independence: The Hillsdale Story. Forewords by William F. Buckley and William E. Simon. Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 1979. “George C. Rouche III.” Imprimis, June 2006. Jeffrey, Douglas A. Educating for Liberty: The Best of Imprimis, 1972–2002. Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 2002. Rouche, George C., III The Fall of the Ivory Tower. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1994. Van Der Werf, Martin. “A Scandal and a Suicide Leave a College Reeling.” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 1999. Wolfe, Alan. “The Hillsdale Tragedy Holds Lessons for Colleges Everywhere.” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 3, 1999.
Hip-Hop See Rap Music
Hiroshima and Nagasak i The United States is the only nation ever to detonate atomic bombs against an enemy in warfare, dropping two on Japan in World War II—the first on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later. The two devices were referred to by innocent-sounding nicknames—“Little Boy” and
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“Fat Man,” respectively, because of their shapes—that belied the destruction they caused and the intensity of the debate that ensued over the decision to end the war in this manner. While no exact figure has been determined regarding the deaths resulting from the explosions, the Avalon Project at Yale University has estimated that 199,000 Japanese were direct casualties—not including people who died later because of radiation sickness. At Hiroshima, some 60 percent of the deaths were believed to be caused by burns, with another 30 percent caused by falling debris. At Nagasaki, an estimated 95 percent of the total deaths resulted from burns. Physicists working for the Manhattan Project under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer completed development of the atomic bomb in early summer 1945, after four years of effort and an estimated $1 billion in cost. The project was based at Los Alamos, New Mexico, near which the first test explosion was conducted on July 16. In private papers, President Harry Truman observed that human morals were trailing technological development. Publicly, Truman showed no qualms about using the weapons to end the war. After the bombing of Hiroshima, he issued a statement warning that if Japan did not surrender, the United States would launch “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Implying that there were many such bombs in the American arsenal (there was only one more), Truman declared that the U.S. armed forces were “prepared to obliterate . . . every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city” in order to “destroy Japan’s power to make war.” With no surrender forthcoming, half the city of Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9. Not until August 31, 1946, with the publication of John Hersey’s essay “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker magazine, did most Americans have an account of the attacks from the victims’ point of view. Hersey’s article, later published as a book, graphically detailed what six survivors experienced in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. The description touched off a wave of national introspection, inducing a new level of moral uncertainty among the American people. Navy Admiral William Halsey, the commander of the Third Fleet, publicly blamed the physicists for a lack of conscience: “They had a toy and they wanted to try it out.” Most Americans, however, accepted Truman’s explanation that atomic bombs were used to end the war as quickly as possible and to save lives by avoiding an invasion of the Japanese homeland. That argument has continued to be invoked to the present day, though the number of spared lives has been put as high as one million—a figure most historians regard as exaggerated. Some critics of U.S. policy have suggested that the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, in which Truman demanded that Japan surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and ut-
ter destruction,” actually forced the Japanese to continue fighting as a matter of honor. The U.S. Military Strategic Bombing Survey, made public in July 1946, concluded that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” The skepticism raised by top military commanders prompted historians such as Gar Alperovitz to argue that the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in order to flex muscle at the Soviet Union, which it recognized as a prospective postwar rival. According to this view, the bombing of Nagasaki, in particular, had little strategic value and was intended to intimidate Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—thus marking the start of the Cold War. More recently, historian Ronald Takaki has offered another perspective on Truman’s decision, emphasizing the role of race; such a weapon, he maintains, would not have been used on white Europeans. Defenders of Truman argue that revisionist historians have forgotten how brutal warfare in the Pacific Theater had been during the “island hopping” campaign and have lost a clear sense of the resolve American forces would have faced in any invasion of Japan. The stiff Japanese resistance at Okinawa in April–June 1945, for example, led to the deaths of some 130,000 Japanese troops, between 70,000 and 160,000 civilians, and more than 12,000 American military personnel; in addition, thirty-six U.S. Navy ships were sunk by kamikaze pilots. According to Truman’s supporters, the Allied firebombings of both Europe and Japan, including the cities of Dresden and Tokyo, indicated a progression of ruthlessness that made the atomic bomb a logical, albeit tragic, solution. Moreover, it is pointed out, some Japanese officials admitted afterward that they, too, would have used the atomic bomb had it been at their disposal. Charles Carter See also: Cold War; Enola Gay Exhibit; Japan; Nuclear Age; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Revisionist History; Soviet Union and Russia; Truman, Harry S.
Further Reading Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. New York: Penguin, 1985. DeGroot, Gerard J. The Atomic Bomb: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. Stimson, Henry. “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” Harper’s, February 1947. Takaki, Ronald. Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.
Hispanic A mer ic an s
Hispanic Americans Perhaps no other group in the United States is as diverse in culture, nationality, phenotype, tradition, political sophistication, ethos, migration trends, acculturation rate, and even language as Hispanics, or Latinos. Yet, as America’s fastest-growing population—numbering 32.8 million in 2000, representing 12 percent of the total U.S. population—they generally share a historical experience that is wrought with patterns of societal exclusion, economic exploitation, and varying degrees of second-class citizenship. Moreover, members of various Hispanic subgroup communities, most of whom are not voluntary immigrants to the United States, are united by unique settlement histories. Mexican Americans, as the largest and oldest of Hispanic subgroups, for instance, entered American society as a subjugated people following the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848). Today, of course, the ethnic Mexican population has not only long-standing residence, but ongoing international migration within the community. Puerto Ricans gained the attention of the United States when their island homeland was established as a U.S. colony after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Under pressure to clarify the relationship between Puerto Rico and America, Congress passed the Jones Act in 1917, defining Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens. Although under a different set of circumstances, ethnic Cubans are not voluntary immigrants, either. Many who have come to the United States since the Cuban Revolution of 1959 are unwilling political exiles. Hispanics of Dominican heritage came to America mostly as refugees during the mid-1960s due to the unresolved conflicts of the April 1965 revolution. Similarly, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, many Hispanics of Ecuadorian ancestry—once intent on returning home to buy land, build new homes, and give their families a better life—decided to remain in the United States. Scores of other Central and South American peoples came to the United States because of political instability, economic hardships, and increasing national violence in their native lands. Whether among Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, or Colombians, large-scale Hispanic immigration settlement patterns have not developed in isolation. They have been forged, at least in part, by U.S. foreign policies that translated into military and financial intervention. In conjunction with Hispanic integration into an American society historically characterized by bipolar racial categories (blacks and whites), identity formation and understanding the qualifications and entitlements to citizenship have posed challenges for Hispanics throughout much of the twentieth century. Undeniably, the binary black-white construction of race has contributed to the marginalization of Hispanics,
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who have existed on the periphery of the national community as a manual labor force consigned to unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. With limited economic freedom, Hispanics historically have been paid less than their Anglo counterparts for the same work, while often being relegated to the most dangerous and difficult jobs. The concentration of Hispanics in both low-paying, working-class jobs and segregated residential neighborhoods created higher rates of poverty, resulting in fewer opportunities for advancement than the general population. Generational injustice in the U.S. labor force, coupled with a southwestern variant of Jim Crow–style segregation impacting both public and private spaces, prompted many Hispanics throughout post–World War II America to oppose unequal access to communal accommodations. This escalating culture war has been complicated by the indeterminate but growing number of Hispanics who attend separate and poorly funded schools, live in less desirable neighborhoods than those of whites, and have little or no formal representation in elected government or the judicial system. In addition, deeply ingrained stereotypes, attitudes, and cultural assumptions about the inherent inferiority of Hispanics not only degrade and dehumanize them, but also serve to justify and foster the system of inequality. The rising levels of de facto, and at times de jure, segregation after World War II were especially unsettling to the Hispanic community in light of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who volunteered their services in the U.S. armed forces; nearly half a million Mexican Americans alone enlisted to fight. Hispanics suffered a higher casualty rate than any other ethnic group during World War II, a pattern that continued in the Vietnam War. The display of patriotism for a country that failed to treat them as full and equal citizens triggered Hispanic leaders to launch organizations such as the American GI Forum, a Mexican-American veterans’ advocacy group. Arguably, Hispanics were most troubled during the middle decades of the twentieth century by inadequate educational institutions. As a result of class bias; racial prejudice; inadequate resources; exclusionary curriculum practices; insensitive administrators, teachers, and counselors; and their overall subordinate status in society, the education provided for Hispanics throughout much of the twentieth century was substandard and unsatisfactory to meet their diverse needs. The first successful constitutional challenge to segregation occurred in Orange County, California, after World War II. With assistance from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a federal class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than 5,000 Hispanic students. In that case, known as Méndez v. Westminster (1946), the U.S. Circuit Court for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the rights
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of Hispanic students were being violated under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. More broadly, the Méndez case laid important groundwork for the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which reversed the long-standing legal justification of segregation known as the “separate but equal” doctrine. In addition to using the legal system to draw attention to repressive conditions, Hispanics sought reform through political participation and social activism. That movement peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, as Hispanics challenged the standard for measuring acceptability and cultural worth, while separating from Anglo-American identity. Members of the Mexican-American community, for example, established organizations such as the United Farm Workers, Crusade for Justice, Federal Alliance of Land Grants, Brown Berets, La Raza Unida Party, and El Movimiento Estudiantíl Chicano de Aztlán (MECHA) to obtain the rights to which they felt entitled. Eventually, other Hispanic subgroups, namely Puerto Ricans, formed organizations like the Young Lord Party and ASPIRA, which championed change as well. Leaders like César Chávez, Reies López Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, José Ángel Gutiérrez, and Felipe Luciano created not only a more pluralistic society, but changed America’s perceptions of Hispanic culture and life. Darius V. Echeverría See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Chávez, César; Cuba; English as the Official Language; González, Elián; Immigration Policy; La Raza Unida; Migrant Labor; Multi culturalism and Ethnic Studies; Race.
Further Reading DeFreitas, Gregory. Inequality at Work: Hispanics in the U.S. Labor Force. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000. Kanellos, Nicolas. Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming the Hispanic Image in American Culture. New York: Fulcrum, 1998. Oboler, Suzanne. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the U.S. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Shorris, Earl. Latinos: A Biography of the People. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
Hiss, Alger New Deal administrator, lawyer, U.S. diplomat, and United Nations official, Alger Hiss emerged as a national figure in the culture wars in 1948 when he was accused by journalist and confessed communist agent Whittaker Chambers of being a former Soviet spy. Hiss was found guilty of perjury in connection with the case in 1950
and served forty-four months in prison. He continued to be a cause célèbre during the decades of the Cold War. For years afterwards, many liberals continued to believe in Hiss’s innocence. The son of a small but prosperous business owner and his wife, Alger Hiss was born on November 11, 1904, in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Maryland Institute of Art (1921–1922), Johns Hopkins University (AB, 1926), and Harvard University Law School (LLB, 1929). At Harvard, Hiss became a friend of Felix Frankfurter, who arranged for Hiss to serve as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1929). Between 1933 and 1936, Hiss worked in the Agriculture and Justice Departments during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936, he began working at the State Department and advanced in responsibility during the remainder of the Roosevelt administration and the first two years of the administration of Harry S. Truman. In 1945, under President Truman, Hiss led the San Francisco Conference at the inauguration of the United Nations, serving as the temporary secretary-general of the UN. Two years later, Hiss left government service to accept the position of president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. His professional career was interrupted in 1948, when Chambers accused him of serving in an “underground cell” of communists who had spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Chambers advanced the charges on a radio program, Meet the Press, and later before Congress. Hiss denied the accusations and appeared voluntarily before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to refute them. He could not be charged with espionage because the statute of limitations had run out, and his first trial on perjury charges ended in a hung jury. In the January 1950 retrial, he was convicted. After his release from prison, Hiss wrote In the Court of Public Opinion (1957), in which he denied all allegations against him. For the rest of his life he maintained his innocence and won the support of many who believed he had been a victim of right-wing hysteria. In his autobiography Recollections of a Life (1988), Hiss argued that the evidence against him had been forged. He died on November 15, 1996. After the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), information found in Moscow’s archives suggested that Hiss had been connected to the Soviet spy system. Many authorities have concluded that he had indeed passed along classified materials to Soviet authorities. William T. Walker See also: Chambers, Whittaker; Cold War; Communists and Communism; McCarthyism; New Deal; Soviet Union and Russia; United Nations.
Holly wood Ten
Further Reading Hiss, Alger. Recollections of a Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Hiss, Tony. The View from Alger’s Window: A Son’s Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Lowenthal, John. “Venona and Alger Hiss.” Intelligence and National Security 15 (Autumn 2000): 98–130. Ruddy, T. Michael. The Alger Hiss Espionage Case. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005. Swan, Patrick, ed. Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003. Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Random House, 1997.
Hoffman, Abbie A master of guerrilla theater, co-founder of the Youth International Party, or “Yippies,” and member of the Chicago Seven, Abbie Hoffman brought irreverence and iconoclasm to the radicalism of the 1960s. At antiwar demonstrations, he invited crowds to laugh and incited them to riot. He was born Abbott Howard Hoffman to a conservative Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, on November 30, 1936, and he attended Brandeis University (BA, 1959) and the University of California, Berkeley (no degree, 1960). In California, he protested capital punishment at San Quentin Prison and called for an end to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigating communism. Back home in Massachusetts, he married in 1960, began a family, and joined the burgeoning civil rights movement. In 1964, he went to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, teaching at a black school for two years. In 1966, settled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Hoffman undertook a campaign to radicalize apolitical hippies. Polarization became his watchword. Armed with bad manners, a foul mouth, and a smile on his face, he provoked nearly everyone: police, publishers, and members of Congress. At the New York Stock Exchange, he tossed dollar bills to the floor and watched brokers scramble madly for the money. At HUAC hearings in Washington, D.C., he wore a shirt made from an American flag and was promptly arrested. Along with sidekick and rival Jerry Rubin, he founded the Yippies in 1967 and staged the “Festival of Life” in Chicago to protest against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Arrested and charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot in Chicago, Hoffman achieved fame and notoriety as the most consistently flamboyant of the eight, later seven, defendants on trial (dubbed the Chicago Seven). In the federal courtroom, he blew kisses to
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the jury and compared Judge Julius Hoffman to Jews who cooperated with Nazis during World War II. In February 1970, a jury acquitted all defendants of the conspiracy charges but found five of them, including Hoffman, guilty of crossing state lines to incite rioting. A federal appeals court overturned the convictions two years later. Hoffman wrote several popular books, including Revolution for the Hell of It (1968), Woodstock Nation (1969), and Steal This Book (1971). His writings often attacked corporate co-optation of the counterculture. In the 1970s, as the counterculture abated, Hoffman became a cocaine smuggler and dealer. Undercover police arrested him in 1973. Skipping bail, he went underground, created an identity as “Barry Freed,” and became an environmental activist. Surrendering to authorities in 1980, he then took on Jerry Rubin, who had gone to Wall Street, in the so-called Yuppie/Yippie debates. Hoffman committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates on April 12, 1989. In death, he became a global icon of cultural revolution. Actor Vincent D’Onofrio portrayed Hoffman in Robert Greenwald’s biopic Steal This Movie! (2000), giving the Yippie legend renewed life at the start of the twenty-first century. Jonah Raskin See also: Capital Punishment; Chicago Seven; Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Drug Testing; Environmental Movement; Flag Desecration; McCarthyism; Vietnam War; War on Drugs; War Protesters.
Further Reading Hoffman, Abbie. The Best of Abbie Hoffman. Ed. Daniel Simon. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989. Raskin, Jonah. For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
H o l l y wo o d Te n The Hollywood Ten were ten members of the film industry called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in October 1947 about their alleged membership in the Communist Party and activities at the beginning of the Cold War era. All ten were called as “unfriendly” witnesses, refused to testify, served prison sentences, and were blacklisted by the film industry. The Hollywood Ten included director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter and director Herbert J. Biberman, and screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. On November 24, 1947, after all ten had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights in declining to testify, Con-
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gress voted overwhelmingly to cite them for contempt. Convicted the following year, they served prison sentences of six months to one year. Most never worked in Hollywood again. Some submitted scripts anonymously or under pseudonyms. Dmytryk returned before the committee to supply information and went on to a successful film career. Shortly after the Hollywood Ten refused to testify, film executives convened a meeting at the WaldorfAstoria Hotel in New York City to design a policy that would allow the industry to police itself, rather than be subject to constant external scrutiny. The Waldorf Statement disavowed the Ten’s actions and ostracized them from the industry until they denied communist affiliation under oath. The document further declared that Hollywood executives “will not knowingly employ a Communist.” Thus began the practice of “blacklisting,” which ultimately put more than 300 actors, writers, directors, and producers out of work. Although there was little evidence to support HUAC allegations that subversive messages were embedded in films being created for mass consumption, producers shied away from making movies about social problems, instead producing some forty anticommunist propaganda films in the next seven years. The Hollywood Ten came to exemplify resistance to government attempts to create a new postwar national unity at a time of fear and uncertainty through the persecution and imprisonment of suspected communists. Political upheaval in China, Czechoslovakia, and Germany made it easy to rally public support for an anticommunist program both at home and abroad. While the government took a multifaceted approach to contain and repel communism abroad through policies such as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the thrust of these activities at home was to diminish the influence of the Communist Party through loyalty oaths, the Internal Security Act of 1950, and McCarthyism. Cynthia J. Miller See also: Censorship; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Literature, Film, and Drama; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Motion Picture Association of America; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Bernstein, Matthew. Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Rouverol, Jean. Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Wagner, David. Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s Guide to the Holly wood Blacklist. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Holocaust The Holocaust refers to the systematic murder of persons deemed undesirable by Nazi Germany during World War II. Known as Hitler’s “Final Solution,” this genocide campaign was responsible for the death of more than 6 million Jews, the single largest targeted group. In the postwar aftermath and to this day, the Holocaust has been a topic of debate that has included discussions of moral and political culpability, the founding of Israel, the prosecution of war criminals, restitution for victims, and revisionist history. Critics of President Franklin D. Roosevelt argue that he failed to respond effectively to the Holocaust and turned a blind eye to the plight of European Jews. They contend that the president should have heeded the advice of some of his advisers, including his wife, Eleanor, to increase the quota for Jewish immigrants to the United States despite anti-Semitism and opposition from the State Department. Others charge that the Allies should have bombed concentration camps and transportation routes to the camps. Defenders of Roosevelt insist that he saw defeating Germany as the best means of stopping the Holocaust. During the final stages of the war and afterward, U.S. intelligence and military services transferred a number of German scientists to the United States to work on aerodynamics and chemical weapons, developing Cold War weapons and technologies. Critics argue that the United States shielded known Nazi criminals from justice. It was revealed that many of NASA’s leading engineers, including the first director, Wernher von Braun, had been members of the Nazi Party during the war. Moreover, some of these men working in Germany during the war had utilized slave labor from the concentration camps.
Jewish Homeland and Restitution Under intense pressure to secure a homeland for Jewish refugees, the United Nations in November 1947 voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into two independent states—one Arab and the other Jewish. Implementation of the partition sparked intense international discussion. As the world community debated, Jewish militias in Palestine waged war for a permanent homeland. On May 14, 1948, the newly constituted provisional government of Israel declared the country’s independence. The following day, the United States gave the new nation formal recognition. To this day, there are critics, in the United States and abroad, who suggest that America’s support for Israel is based largely on a lingering sense of guilt over the Holocaust. The issue of restitution for Holocaust victims, although addressed in the early years after the war, reemerged following the Cold War and new revelations about Swiss bank accounts and corporate collusion
Holoc au s t
with the Nazis. In the early 1950s, following a meeting between Israeli and West German officials and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, it was agreed that remuneration should be based solely on material losses. The claims conference and the World Jewish Restitution Organization began negotiations with the newly reunified Germany in 1990, as well as with German industry, Swiss banks, insurance agencies, and other European countries, for additional reparations and compensation to Jewish victims. In the United States, American companies such as International Business Machines (IBM), General Motors, DaimlerChrysler (acting as Daimler-Benz, and now known simply as Daimler), Siemens, and Ford Corporation were implicated in profiting from the Nazi war machine. It was shown, for example, that IBM punch-card tabulators enabled the brutal efficiency of the Nazi regime in carrying out the Holocaust. Many companies, wishing to minimize the public relations quandary, agreed to out-of-court settlements and in some cases provided large contributions to Holocaustsurvivor organizations.
Holocaust Studies Academic studies of the Holocaust began in earnest during the 1960s, leading to detailed analyses on the origins of anti-Semitism, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the methodical murder of millions of innocent victims in concentration camps. Many accounts of the Holocaust are direct testimonials from survivors. The first scholarly conferences focusing on the Holocaust began in the 1970s. Holocaust scholarship entered a period of intense controversy in the 1980s, as scholars known as “intentionalists” and “functionalists” debated the course of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Intentionalists argued that the Final Solution was a structured plan to kill European Jews; functionalists argued that it arose from no set plan but was the result of an evolving system. In recent decades, anti-Semitic movements have emerged to attempt to deny or minimize the historical validity of the Holocaust. These movements publish editorial-style advertisements in college newspapers and call for an open debate on matters pertaining to the Holocaust. Often referred to as “Holocaust deniers,” these individuals and movements frequently couch their claims as “historical revisionism,” or interpretations of the historical record. They charge that Holocaust survivors are overwhelmingly charlatans who exploit the issue for monetary gain. A 1996 libel suit brought against Holocaust historian Deborah E. Lipstadt by military historian David Irving provided the most publicized confrontation between academic scholarship and Holocaust denial. Irving attended the University of London, but holds no academic
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degree. In contrast, Lipstadt earned her PhD at Brandeis University and for years has served as the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Prior to the suit, Lipstadt called Irving a Holocaust denier because of the apologetic tone regarding Nazi Germany and Hitler in his work, his association with radical groups, and controversial statements he made in public. Irving sued Lipstadt in a British court. Lipstadt and her attorneys were forced to prove not only that her allegations were substantiated but that the Holocaust was a factual event. In 2000, Lipstadt’s attorneys were successful in their efforts, and Holocaust denial suffered a major setback in international circles. The American linguistics scholar and social activist Noam Chomsky drew sharp criticism from the academic community during the 1990s, when he supported, on the grounds of academic freedom, French professor of literature and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Critics charged that Chomsky’s response gave credence to Faurisson’s denial of the Holocaust. In 2006, Iran hosted a revisionist conference on the Holocaust, an event that was attended by Faurisson as well as David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who for years has argued that the Holocaust never occurred. In 1993, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was dedicated to commemorate victims of the Holocaust, foster education, document intolerance, and promote human rights. Supporters of the institution applaud the museum’s poignant documentation of the events, while critics argue that the museum commercializes one of the darkest periods in human history. Melanie Kirkland See also: Anti-Semitism; Aryan Nations; Buchanan, Pat; Chomsky, Noam; Conspiracy Theories; Demjanjuk, John; Duke, David; Human Rights; Israel; Revisionist History; Rudolph, Eric; United Nations.
Further Reading Bazyler, Michael J., ed. Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corp. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. Eisenstat, Stuart E. Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. New York: Perseus, 2003. Guttenplan, D.D. The Holocaust on Trial. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Lipstadt, Deborah E. History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.
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Homeschooling
Homeschooling The homeschool movement, involving approximately 2 percent of America’s school-age children—or about 1.1 million in 2003, according to the Department of Education—is led by parents who for various reasons have rejected public schools as well as private ones. A battlefront of the culture wars, as it pertains to education reform, race and social class, socialization, church and state, and family values, homeschooling is part of a larger debate exposing the ideological rift between the particular (local community and family unit) and the universal (state and national). Advocates of homeschooling tout it as part of an American tradition, emphasizing that this is how George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and other founders of the nation were educated. Such a viewpoint has been criticized as selective romanticism because in the colonial era and early republic there were also private tutors, boarding schools, and apprenticeship training. Not until 1918 was there nationwide compulsory universal education, although many children stopped attending school after the eighth grade. As high school became mandatory, the Amish resisted, taking their complaint to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) that parents, based on religious freedom, have rights involving the education of their children. The modern manifestation of homeschooling originated during the 1960s and was rooted in the anti-establishment sentiments of the counterculture movement. John Holt, the author of How Children Fail (1964), How Children Learn (1967), and Instead of Education (1976), was a leading figure of this contingent, arguing that conventional schooling was a hindrance to the natural learning process. Holt and other such critics were emboldened by the studies of the 1970s that reported declining academic achievement in public schools. In 1977, Holt founded the first magazine for homeschoolers, Growing Without Schooling. Certain white families withdrew from public schools after the federal government imposed school desegregation and along with it forced busing. This “white flight” from integrated public schools contributed to the growth of private religious schools. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a number of parochial schools closed after the Internal Revenue Service revoked their tax exemption status due to their policies of denying admission to blacks. Meanwhile, leaders of the Religious Right began encouraging their followers to homeschool in order to avoid the “secular humanism” and “moral relativism” taught at the public schools. In response, Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist institution, emerged as a major publisher of curriculum material for religious homeschoolers. Generally, there are two categories of homeschoolers: ideologues and pedagogues. The ideologues, ranging from conservative Christians to Jews and Muslims to New
Agers, object to what they call the “values curriculum” of public schools. Many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, for example, oppose the teaching of evolution and do not approve of sex education that presupposes premarital sex. New Agers who homeschool primarily do so to provide their children with a learning environment that is supportive of holistic spirituality and the uniqueness of the individual. The liberal counterculture types negatively view the school system as imposing conformity for indoctrinating young people for the workforce. The pedagogues are not against the concept of public education, but believe homeschooling affords qualitative learning free from bureaucratic and regimented procedures. A popular work offering the pedagogical argument is Family Matters (1992) by David Guterson, a high school English teacher and later novelist whose three children were homeschooled. According to the Department of Education’s National Household Education Survey (2003), a tally of self-reported motivations for homeschooling, 31.2 percent of parents cite the public school environment (issues of safety, drugs, and peer pressure) as their top concern. Due to concerns about the school environment, after the April 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, homeschooling in that state increased by 10 percent. The other top reported reasons for homeschooling are the desire for religion and morals to be part of academic learning (29.8 percent) and dissatisfaction with public school instruction (16.5 percent). Critics of homeschooling suggest that it isolates children by their race and socioeconomic class—the demographic of homeschool families tends to be that of the white, middle class, and of those households, 60 percent have one parent who does not work outside of the home, a situation representative of only 30 percent of the overall population. Although arguments have been made that children who do not have a traditional classroom experience are less socialized, anecdotal evidence indicates no disadvantage. Advocates of public schools argue that homeschoolers miss out on the definitive American experience that fosters citizenship and democracy in a pluralistic society. At its 1988 annual convention, the National Education Association passed a resolution stating that homeschooling fails to offer “a comprehensive education experience.” Over the years, laws regulating homeschooling have generally been loosened or rescinded, chiefly due to the efforts of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), headquartered in Purcellville, Virginia. Founded in 1983 by Michael Farris, an attorney, Baptist minister, and father of ten homeschoolers, the HSLDA has advanced the legal cause of homeschooling on arguments based on the free exercise of religion, equal protection under the law, and privacy rights. Important legal battles in Michigan (1993) and California (2008)
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have thwarted state legislators from requiring parents who homeschool to obtain teacher certification. In 1994, the HSLDA exercised political muscle by successfully orchestrating a lobbying campaign to block an amendment to a federal education bill that would have required all the nation’s teachers, including homeschool parents, to be certified. As of 2008, one out of five states had no oversight laws pertaining to homeschooling—they were Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho, Alaska, and the District of Columbia. Patrick Henry College, established in 2000 and located in Purcellville, Virginia, has emerged as a popular institution of higher learning for homeschoolers of a fundamentalist persuasion. Farris, the founding president, envisioned the school as preparing “Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.” The school has struggled to gain accreditation, and in 2006 nearly one-third of its faculty resigned in a dispute over academic freedom. Patrick Henry students have been successful at obtaining internships in Washington, D.C., working for conservative Republican officials. Roger Chapman See also: Bob Jones University; Busing, School; Church and State; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Education Reform; New Age Movement; Privacy Rights; Religious Right; School Prayer; School Shootings; Secular Humanism; Sex Education.
Further Reading Cooper, Bruce S., ed. Home Schooling in Full View: A Reader. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2005. Farris, Michael. The Future of Homeschooling: A New Direction for Home Education. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997. Guterson, David. Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Knowles, J. Gary, Stacey E. Marlowe, and James A. Muchmore. “From Pedagogy to Ideology: Origins and Phases of Home Education in the United States, 1970–1990.” American Journal of Education 11:2 (February 1992): 195–235. Rosin, Hanna. God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. New York: Harcourt, 2007.
hook s, bell The outspoken African-American social critic, feminist scholar, and poet bell hooks examines the complex nature of racism and sexism in America. Unlike other intellectuals who treat race, class, and gender as distinct components of cultural identity, hooks emphasizes their interrelatedness, suggesting that identifying a group exclusively in those terms perpetuates an oppressive
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social structure. Influenced by postmodernist theories, her writings explore the politics of feminism; the dynamics of power in a patriarchal, white-dominated society; sexism in the black liberation movement; stereotypes in mass media; and power structures in pedagogy. Her works often provoke controversy—as does her name itself, a pseudonym (spelled all in lowercase letters) chosen to honor her maternal great grandmother (“a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind”). The daughter of a janitor, hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She studied English at Stanford University (BA, 1973), the University of Wisconsin–Madison (MA, 1976), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (PhD, 1983). She adopted her pseudonym upon completing her first book-length work of cultural criticism, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), which she had begun writing at age nineteen. While completing her doctorate and the book, she taught English at several universities in Southern California. Ain’t I a Woman challenged assumptions about the experience of black women in terms of race and gender. Criticizing the definition of womanhood presented by feminists such as Kate Millet and Susan Brownmiller, hooks argued that white women are guilty of unconscious racist assumptions. At the same time, she lambasted popular black women writers, such as Michelle Wallace, for not recognizing or asserting a distinctive feminist consciousness. In addition, hooks attacked the black liberation movement—most notably the novelist Richard Wright, whose writings inspired black revolutionaries of the 1960s—arguing that by prioritizing equality for black men, they reaffirmed patriarchal power structures while demeaning and objectifying the women who supported them. The criticism offered by hooks in over thirty books has unsettled some intellectuals but established her as a prominent black feminist theorist. Works such as Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), and Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) explore issues of feminism and female identity. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994), Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995), and Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996) examine paradigms of power in American culture. Still other texts, such as We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004), explore issues of patriarchy and masculinity. A professor of English at several institutions, including the University of Southern California, Oberlin College, Yale University, City College of New York, and Berea College, hooks has also written works committed to reshaping education. Among these are Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003).
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While many of her texts are written for academic audiences, hooks endeavored to reach a general audience with such works as the autobiographical Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), which explores the formation of cultural identity. She has also collaborated on less formal writings, including the dialogue Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (with Amalia Mesa-Bains, 2006), which explores the role of community in shaping cultural stereotypes about race, ethnicity, and gender. Marilyn Morgan See also: Millet, Kate; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Postmodernism; Race.
Further Reading Florence, Namulundah. bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. ———. Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Valdivia, Angharad N. “bell hooks: Ethics from the Margins.” Qualitative Inquiry 8:4 (2002): 429–47.
H o ove r, J . E d g a r The top law enforcement officer of the nation for nearly half a century (1924–1972), J. Edgar Hoover headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), from which he directed the surveillance of communists, civil rights activists, political dissenters, Earth Day celebrants, writers and artists, and even elected officials. Some of this domestic spying was part of the FBI’s five secret counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO), operating between 1956 and 1971 and at times involving illegal wiretaps and searches. Admirers credit Hoover with modernizing the FBI, but detractors look back on his tenure as a sinister abuse of power. In 2002, following the release of documentation indicating that Hoover allowed an innocent man to be wrongfully convicted of murder in order to protect Mafia figures who were also FBI informants, Congressman Dan Burton (R-IN) called for removing Hoover’s name from the FBI headquarters building in Washington, D.C. The son of a low-level federal bureaucrat, John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, D.C., on January 1, 1895. After studying law at George Washington University (LLB, 1916; LLM, 1917) and working at the Library of Congress, Hoover joined the U.S. Department of Justice as a staff attorney in 1917. Later, as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (1919–1921), he maintained files on 450,000 “radicals” and orchestrated the roundup of thousands in the Red Scare known as the
“Palmer Raids.” From 1921 to 1924, Hoover served as assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), as the predecessor of the FBI was called. He was appointed director in 1924 and remained in that position until his death on May 2, 1972. As FBI director, Hoover ended political appointments, recruited college graduates, created a national fingerprint database and a crime laboratory, established an academy for training federal agents, and imposed a conservative code of conduct on all agency personnel. During the Hoover years, the FBI dealt with gangsters and kidnappers in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist radicals and German spies in the 1940s, communists and Klansmen from the 1940s through the 1960s, and student protesters and New Left activists in the the 1960s and 1970s. From his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 to published works such as Masters of Deceit (1958) and The Study of Communism (1962), Hoover largely shaped public opinion on communism in America. Hoover came to link the civil rights movement to communism, a viewpoint that was openly challenged in 1970 by William C. Sullivan, a top-level FBI official. The following year, Sullivan was forced into retirement. In the late 1960s, Sullivan had contradicted Hoover by arguing that the Ku Klux Klan, not the communist movement, was the number one domestic threat. Some accused Hoover of racism, noting that out of the 8,500 FBI special agents in 1971, only 135 were minorities. The FBI chief once called the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “the most notorious liar in the country” because the civil rights leader had remarked that many FBI agents stationed in Albany, Georgia, were products of the white South. (In fact, most were from the North.) With permission from U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, Hoover conducted wiretaps of King in an attempt to establish a communist connection. Instead, Hoover exposed the civil rights leader’s extramarital sex life. Following Hoover’s death, his body lay in the Capitol Rotunda, the first civil servant to be so honored. During the funeral, President Richard Nixon delivered the eulogy. In a true culture wars speech, Nixon praised the late FBI director for helping reverse “the trend of permissiveness.” The president added, “The American people today are tired of disorder, disruption, and disrespect for the law.” In the meantime, Benjamin Spock, the famed pediatrician and antiwar activist, called Hoover’s death “a great relief.” Vilifying Hoover as “a servant of racism, reaction, and repression,” the head of the Communist Party of the USA, Gus Hall, charged that while the FBI director for years persecuted communists, he made no effort to bring “a single lyncher of 5,000 American blacks” to justice. Congress almost at once began investigating how Hoover conducted himself as FBI director. First, there was alarm over the destruction of his personal papers by
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The powerful, longtime FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (center) targeted organized crime, communists, civil rights activists, political dissenters, and even the Kennedys. He is known to have resorted to extralegal means against any and all enemies. (Keystone/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Hoover’s secretary. Later, secret files—dubbed “drawers full of political cancer”—were uncovered, containing derogatory information on public officials and journalists. Among them, for example, were dossiers on John F. Kennedy’s sexual liaisons, allegations pertaining to homosexual conduct by a number of government officials beginning in the 1940s, and files indicating that presidents on occasion had personally directed politically inspired wiretaps. Also, Hoover involved himself in aiding politicians he sided with, such as when he secretly passed information to Thomas Dewey, the Republican challenger who ran against President Harry Truman in the 1948 election. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the files show, sent the FBI on errands to investigate newspapers that published unfavorable reports or negative editorial cartoons. Observers generally conceded that Hoover’s use of government power overstepped official boundaries and that a number of presidents had made improper requests of the director. It is generally believed that presidents never tried replacing Hoover, even after he reached the retirement age of seventy, out of fear he possessed information that could be used against them. At the same time, the secret files contained reports of gossip about Hoover’s own sexual orientation. Many speculated that Hoover was a closet homosexual. A
lifelong bachelor, he had a close relationship with the associate director of the FBI, Clyde A. Tolson, who was also a bachelor. The two men lunched and dined together six days a week, commuted back and forth from work in the same bulletproof car, and accompanied each other on vacation. Hoover bequeathed his entire $551,500 estate to Tolson. The respected historian Richard Gid Powers, in the 1996 film documentary J. Edgar Hoover: Private and Confidential, described the relationship as having “the appearance of being some sort of male marriage.” Critics of Hoover who are convinced that he was gay accuse the former FBI director of hypocrisy, since he often condemned homosexuality as morally reprehensible. Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Earth Day; Felt, W. Mark; Freedom of Information Act; Hall, Gus; Kennedy Family; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; New Left; Nixon, Richard; Outing; Truman, Harry S.
Further Reading Curt, Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
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Kelly, William W. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. O’Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Potter, Claire Bond. “Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and Political History.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15:3 (September 2006): 355–81. Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987.
his Academic Bill of Rights “to end the political abuse” being perpetrated by universities. In Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004), he argues that leftist criticism of U.S. foreign policy constitutes an alliance with terrorism. And in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006), Horowitz identifies professors he believes are leftists guilty of abusing academic freedom. Critics have denounced his attack on academia as a form of McCarthyism.
H o r o w i t z , D av i d
See also: Academic Bill of Rights; Academic Freedom; Black Panther Party; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Marxism; McCarthyism; New Left; S eptember 11.
A leftist turned conservative activist and writer, David Horowitz has been a strident player in the culture wars by publicly condemning 1960s radicalism and “liberal” professors. Critics ridicule him as a political extremist who quit the “Lunatic Left” to join the “Ridiculous Right.” The son of Jewish school teachers and active communists, David Joel Horowitz was born on January 10, 1939, in New York City. He attended Columbia University (AB, 1959), the University of California at Berkeley (MA, English literature, 1961), and the London School of Economics and Political Science (1964), becoming actively involved in the New Left upon his return. Although a Marxist, Horowitz rejected the Communist Party because of its ties to the Soviet Union, which he loathed for the excesses of Stalinism. During this period, Horowitz edited the New Left magazine Ramparts (1969–1974) and wrote liberal works such as Corporations and the Cold War (1970) and The Free World Colossus; A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1971). In accounts of his turn to conservatism, Horowitz points to the murder of a friend who worked as a bookkeeper for the Black Panthers, Betty Van Patter, who disappeared after leaving a San Francisco tavern on December 13, 1974. Horowitz argues that the Black Panthers killed Van Patter to stop her from reporting its mishandling of a federal grant. This led Horowitz to question the moral underpinnings of leftist ideology in general, connecting it with larger atrocities such as Stalinist crimes and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. In 1986, he hosted with Peter Collier “Second Thoughts” conferences for rethinking leftist ideology. Horowitz and Collier went on to write Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (1989). In 1988, Horowitz founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (later renamed the Freedom Center), which publishes the conservative online magazine FrontPageMag.com. With the establishment of Students for Academic Freedom, the center became a venue for opposing liberal academics, who Horowitz claimed were bullying conservative students. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Horowitz began promoting
Andrew J. Waskey and Roger Chapman
Further Reading Freedom Center Web site. www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org. Horowitz, David. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Ivie, Robert L. “Academic Freedom and Antiwar Dissent in a Democratic Idiom.” College Literature 33:4 (Fall 2006): 76–92. Lambrose, R.J. “The Abusable Past.” Radical History Review 96 (Fall 2006): 151–54. Sherman, Scott. “David Horowitz’s Long March.” Nation, July 3, 2000.
Hor ton, Willie Willie Horton was a convicted felon featured in a television campaign ad on behalf of 1988 Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush to criticize his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, for his state’s prison furlough program. Critics of the commercial argued that it exploited racial stereotypes, featuring a menacing Horton, who is black. Defenders of the spot argued that it raised legitimate concerns about problems in the Massachusetts prison system—Horton committed rape and armed robbery while on furlough— and Dukakis’s role in administering it. William Robert Horton, born on August 12, 1951, in Chesterfield, South Carolina, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1974 stabbing death of a gas station attendant in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In June 1986, while serving his sentence at the Northeast Correctional Center in Concord, Massachusetts, Horton escaped during a weekend furlough. Ten months later, he burglarized a house in Oxon Hill, Maryland, taking the residents hostage, assaulting a man, and raping his fiancée. Captured by police shortly afterwards, he was eventually sentenced to consecutive life terms in the Maryland prison system. Horton’s case was featured in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series on the prison furlough program by the Lawrence
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(Mass.) Eagle-Tribune. Shortly after the series ran, activists in Massachusetts succeeded in their campaign to make inmates serving life sentences ineligible for furloughs. It was Al Gore, during a debate before the New York Democratic primary in April 1988, who first made prison furloughs an issue in the presidential campaign. Gore criticized Dukakis for granting furloughs to murderers and others serving life sentences, but he did not mention Horton specifically. Dukakis had not initiated the Massachusetts furlough system but had supported it. Vice President George H.W. Bush, the Republican nominee, began criticizing the furlough program in June 1988. By the end of the month, he began referring to Horton by name. The July issue of Reader’s Digest ran an article on the program that discussed the Horton case. The political attack ad by the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC) aired in September, making Willie Horton a household name. Framed as a comparison of the two candidates’ positions on crime, the thirty-second spot featured Horton’s mug shot and a description of the crimes that he committed after escaping. The commercial concluded with the phrase “Weekend prison passes: Dukakis on crime.” At about the same time, conservative media specialist Roger Ailes (who would later head Fox News) produced a commercial for the Bush campaign showing prisoners walking through a revolving door as a narrator criticized Dukakis for his state’s prison furlough program, without specifically mentioning Horton. While not formally affiliated with the Bush campaign, NSPAC became the subject of controversy because of how closely it had coordinated its activities with the Bush campaign. Later, Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater spoke with satisfaction about his success in linking Dukakis and Horton in the public mind. Thomas C. Ellington See also: Atwater, Lee; Bush Family; Dukakis, Michael; Gore, Al; Prison Reform.
Further Reading Anderson, David C. Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed American Justice. New York: Times Books, 1995. Mendelberg, Tali. “Executing Hortons: Racial Crime in the 1988 Presidential Campaign.” Public Opinion Quarterly 61:1 (Spring 1997): 134–57. Schram, Martin. “The Making of Willie Horton.” New Republic, May 28, 1990.
Human Rights The issue of human rights has been a recurring source of volatility in the culture wars, alternately pertaining to U.S. initiatives in foreign affairs and, in the context
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of civil rights, assertions on the part of the federal government in state and local affairs. Debates have ensued over attempts to expand the definition of human rights to include labor rights, women’s rights, gay rights, abortion rights, the rights of the unborn, children’s rights, universal health care, the right to die, laws against hate crimes, the banning of capital punishment, and habeas corpus for terror suspects, among others. The postwar human rights movement is linked to President Franklin Roosevelt and his announcement of the Four Freedoms in a speech to Congress on January 6, 1941. Offering his vision of the world after World War II, Roosevelt stressed four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The assertion of these freedoms was to put totalitarian regimes and imperialist nations on notice. Accordingly, the American Cold War policy of containment was to stop the spread of communism and promote freedom. Perhaps the single most important human rights document, at least in terms of raising awareness, is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations (UN) on December 10, 1948. The declaration, which has a direct line of descent from the Four Freedoms through the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, asserts that “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Article 2 makes explicit the universality of human rights: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Although national governments may ratify the declaration, there is no mechanism for ensuring that its articles are adhered to. Indeed, the rights to social security (Article 22), to just and favorable remuneration worthy of human dignity (Article 23), and to rest and leisure (Article 23) are largely ignored even by liberal democracies that do not view themselves as “rights violators.” As the herald of universal human rights, the UN has been the target of criticism from both liberals and conservatives. While the left has condemned the UN for its inability to ensure human rights, the right has viewed the body as a mechanism of foreign control and an intrusion on U.S. sovereignty. Since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the concept of rights has become the frame through which individuals understand their relationship to the state as well as to each other. The assertion of rights has provided both the goal of social and political movements as well as the vehicle through which their activism and organizing are pursued. The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s stands as an exemplary case of a social movement effectively appealing to human
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rights as a means of mobilizing support, gaining allies, and affirming the worthiness of their cause. The social movements on behalf of women, gays and lesbians, and indigenous peoples that have emerged since the 1960s have all made effective human rights claims a feature of their organizing strategies. In the early twenty-first century, critics of corporate globalization, rejecting the argument that free trade leads to the expansion of human rights, have appealed to global human rights and justice for improving working conditions and salaries. The critics of globalization argue that there has actually been a decline in human rights wherever trade liberalization has expanded (such as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Russia, and Mexico). At the same time, progressive and antiwar movements have opposed U.S. foreign policy hawks (neoconservatives) who have argued for the use of force as a means to “bring democracy” and human rights to other parts of the globe. Opponents point out that such “democratization” plans have typically targeted countries that stand in the way of American corporate interests (such as Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua) while ignoring oppressive regimes that are friendly to the United States (such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). Debates have also arisen over the very nature of human rights, and there are widely differing views of their ultimate source. are rights properly understood as claims, benefits, privileges, or entitlements? Do they derive from nature, divinity, or a social contract? Some have even suggested that human rights should be extended to potential humans, as in the case of debates over abortion and the status of human fetuses; or to future humans, as in debates over the obligation of current generations to preserve the ecosystem for the survival of future generations. Different perspectives on such expanded notions of rights thus have given rise to heated, sometimes violent, disagreements over deep-seated cultural values or articles of faith. Discussions of rights distinguish between positive freedom and negative freedom. Positive freedom presupposes claims on some other person or organization to provide something, such as the guarantees of “freedom from want,” universal health care, or other entitlements. Negative freedom asserts the right of individuals to operate without external interference, such as freedom from torture, the right to assembly, and the right to free speech. Conservatives generally oppose positive freedom, viewing it as an extension of the state into the private sphere while privileging specific groups over others. Liberals suggest that such a view both overlooks historical and systemic relations of inequality, while serving to perpetuate oppression and hinder genuine equal opportunity. Proponents of human rights as individual rights argue that they have played an important part in challenging a range of abuses from unjust treatment and imprisonment to torture and murder. Worldwide movements,
including civil society organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have made effective use of individual human rights claims. At the same time, critics have suggested that countries like the United States, while claiming to be at the forefront of promoting human rights, often turn a blind eye to the regimes that violate them when it is beneficial to U.S. economic or strategic interests. In the War on Terror, for example, the American government has been accused of violating human rights with its secret trials, detentions, and coercive interrogation of terrorist suspects. Critics have also pointed to the sanctioning of human rights violations against U.S. citizens, including domestic surveillance as authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act (2001). Jeff Shantz See also: Abortion; Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Capital Punishment; China; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Equal Rights Amendment; Gay Rights Movement; Globalization; Racial Profiling; Saudi Arabia; USA PATRIOT Act; Voting Rights Act.
Further Reading Chatterjee, Dean K., ed. Democracy in a Global World: Human Rights and Political Participation in the 21st Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Clapham, Andrew. Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Perry, Michael J. Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
H u m p h r ey, H u b e r t H . The trajectory of Hubert Humphrey’s political career follows the rise and dissolution of a post–World War II center-left coalition that culminated in the avalanche of Great Society legislation during the Lyndon Johnson administration, only to splinter over the issue of the Vietnam War. Humphrey stepped into the national scene at the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, where he challenged the party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights,” triggering the walkout by Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The issue of civil rights would split the Democrats again in 1968, when segregationist leader George Wallace bolted to run as an independent candidate for president against Vice President Humphrey and the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. The son of a small-town pharmacist, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., was born on May 27, 1911, in Wallace, South Dakota. He graduated from the Capitol
Humphrey, Huber t H .
College of Pharmacy in Denver (1933), the University of Minnesota (BA, 1939), and Louisiana State University (MA, 1940). He later taught political science at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1940–1941), worked for the War Production Board and the War Manpower Progress Commission (1942–1943), and taught in the Army Air Force Training Program at Macalester College (1943–1944). He entered politics with the end of World War II, serving as mayor of Minneapolis (1945–1948) and then moving on to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat (1949–1964, 1971–1978). He also served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations (1956–1957) and as vice president of the United States (1965–1968). After his failed presidential bid in 1968, he briefly taught at the University of Minnesota before gaining reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1970. Hubert H. Humphrey died of cancer on January 13, 1978, while still in office. Schooled in the populism of the South Dakota and Minnesota plains, Humphrey became one of the nation’s youngest mayors when elected by Minneapolis voters to the first of two terms in 1945. His strong anticommunist stance united Minnesota’s rival liberal-progressive factions into the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, propelling Humphrey to the U.S. Senate in 1948. Joining him as a freshman senator was Lyndon B. Johnson from Texas, soon to become the fabled majority leader. Despite sharp contrasts in personal style, Johnson found Humphrey to be a man who thrived on political chess as much as the Texan did, and one who offered an indispensable link to midwestern and northeastern liberals. Humphrey enjoyed strong support from organized labor during a time when the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, and other major unions could deliver money and votes. This solid base of support led to Humphrey’s presidential bid in 1960, although he withdrew after losing the crucial West Virginia primary to Massachusetts rival John F. Kennedy. Four years later, when President Johnson needed a running mate, the Minnesota liberal suited his needs perfectly. Satirist Tom Lehrer recorded a song in 1965 called “Whatever Became of Hubert?” mocking the degree to which Johnson overshadowed Humphrey during the four years of their administration. Humphrey’s own stories of the partnership, as told in his autobiography The Education of a Public Man (1976), supplement a ready supply of anecdotes coming out of the notoriously abusive Johnson White House. During the headiest months of the wave of Great Society legislation in 1965 and 1966, however, Humphrey served as a key lieutenant on a host of civil rights, antipoverty, and education bills. As domestic opposition to the Vietnam War forced other priorities aside, longtime congressional allies questioned how Humphrey could be so loyal to Johnson. By the time LBJ withdrew from the presidential
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race in March 1968, the swelling antiwar fervor among Democrats made Humphrey’s hawkish record on Vietnam a barrier to a run for the party’s nomination. Fortunes shifted again following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy in April and June 1968, respectively. Senator Eugene McCarthy’s marginalized campaign could not regroup in the vacuum between June and the Chicago convention in August. By the time of the infamous Chicago police riot, as a national commission dubbed Mayor Richard Daley’s response to peace activists encamped about the city, the transformation of Humphrey’s reputation was complete. Two decades earlier, he represented the insurgent forces of civil rights and triggered a buckling of the party. By August 1968, he personified the failed policies of the establishment. Heated issues facing the country generated ample fodder for pundits and comedians. Humphrey’s staccato tenor and unrelenting cheerfulness provided impersonators like David Frye and Rich Little with material for appearances on television favorites like the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the mainstream Ed Sullivan Show. Laughter still came hard for the antiwar left, and the real power of television resided in the nightly reporting of carnage in Vietnam. Despite the thin margin of Nixon’s plurality in the popular vote, Humphrey found himself isolated and politically damaged as a traumatic political season ended. By January 1971, Humphrey was back in the Senate, allying himself with many who had distanced themselves from him a few years earlier. The Senate operated much differently in the 1970s than in the 1950s. The liberal vision that seemed within reach not so long before now faded in the face of a conservative backlash. The last significant bill he sponsored was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978, a textbook example of watered-down legislation that barely pacified Democratic activists while providing ammunition to conservative critics. A final run for the Democratic nomination in 1976 ended as Jimmy Carter captured the imagination of the vestiges of the populist tradition. Robert H. Duke See also: Americans with Disabilities Act; Chicago Seven; Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Democratic Party; Great Society; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Labor Unions; McCarthy, Eugene; Nixon, Richard; Thurmond, Strom; Vietnam War; Wallace, George.
Further Reading Berman, William C. America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Humphrey, Hubert H. The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1976.
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Thurber, Timothy N. The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. White, Theodore H. The Making of the President, 1968. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
H u n t e r, J a m e s D av i s o n The social theorist and author James Davison Hunter, who has published widely on topics related to American evangelicalism, American public life, and the search for meaning and moral order in times of change, is best known for his prize-winning book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991). Born on May 18, 1955, in Wilmington, Delaware, Hunter studied sociology at Gordon College (BA, 1977) and Rutgers University (MA, 1979; PhD, 1981). A professor of religion, culture, and social theory at the University of Virginia since 1983, Hunter uses the term “culture wars” to refer to societal disputes involving two fundamentally opposing “moral visions.” In the first vision, Americans holding “orthodox” views tend to see truth, morality, and their political and social corollaries in fixed terms. They tend to occupy tightly bounded communities that locate the sources of moral authority in a transcendent (religious) essence, which is regarded as timeless and constant regardless of scientific or technological progress. Thus, moral obligations tend to be regarded as concrete, unchanging, and inflexible. A nexus of positions on social issues— opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, support for public school prayer, and adherence to traditional gender roles—reflects the orthodox perspective. Generally, people who adhere to this moral vision believe that government is obligated to foster a particular type of morally based politics. In the second vision, Americans holding “progressive” views tend to understand moral obligation and commitment as requiring a sensibility to historical or situational context. They view ethical obligations as unfolding and evolutionary in nature. The progressive position also places a high value on maximizing autonomous individual choices—leading to support of abortion rights and same-sex marriage, opposition to public school prayer, and resistance to the traditional view that women should undertake primary roles in childrearing and housework. Generally, people who adhere to this moral vision believe that government is obligated to safeguard individual liberty and to protect against the tyranny of the majority, including a religious one. Cultural conflict—“political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding,” in Hunter’s words—is not new in the United States. What Hunter sees as new and different is the way in which such conflict has exploded within and outside the
dominant “biblical culture” beginning in the latter years of the twentieth century. In Culture Wars, he offers an analysis that extends the findings of Robert Wuthnow’s The Restructuring of American Religion (1988). Wuthnow’s book offers evidence showing the declining importance of denominationalism in the United States, as well as a cultural cleavage between religious conservatives and liberals within the same denominations. Traditionalist Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews, for example, often have more in common with each other than with liberal or progressive members of their own denominations. Consequently, political alliances between culturally conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants (two groups with a history of distrust, to say the least) illustrate the decreasing salience of denominational loyalties and the increasing salience of extra-church and special-agenda (or single-issue) organizations. The same can be said for coalitions of religious progressives fighting the death penalty or on issues of welfare and race. Hunter’s culture wars thesis has proven controversial. Morris Fiorina, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that since the survey data fail to show a significant cultural gap within the American electorate, then it stands to reason that any culture war, if it exists at all, is merely a dispute among elites. Similarly, Alan Wolfe in One Nation After All (1998) has argued that the American people are largely moderate and accept neither the orthodox nor progressive position in toto. With the important exception of homosexuality, he asserts, Americans are basically “one nation, after all.” Since the publication of Culture Wars, Hunter has continued to write on issues of cultural and moral conflict in American society. He followed his 1991 work with Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War (1991); The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (2000); and Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life (2007), co-authored with Alan Wolfe. In addition to his published work, Hunter has served on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities since 2004, and on the advisory board of the Pew Program on Religion and Public Life (2001–2004). Andrew R. Murphy See also: Abortion; Catholic Church; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Progressive Christians Uniting; Religious Right; Same-Sex Marriage; School Prayer; Secular Humanism; Stay-at-Home Mothers.
Further Reading Fiorina, Morris P. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Longman, 2004. Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Hur r ic ane Katr ina Wolfe, Alan. One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other. New York: Viking, 1998. Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion. Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
H u n t i n g t o n , S a m u e l P. A political scientist with research interests in international affairs and comparative politics, Samuel P. Huntington has been a part of the culture wars for his views pertaining to world events as well as American national identity. Following the attacks of September 11, his name became known outside academic circles as pundits and the general public discussed and debated his “clash of civilizations” thesis. This was followed by his argument that immigration trends have the potential to weaken American culture. Born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, Samuel Phillips Huntington was raised in a middle-class family. After attending Yale University (BA, 1946) and serving a hitch in the U.S. Army (1946–1947), Huntington completed his education at the University of Chicago (MA, 1948) and Harvard University (PhD, 1951). He taught at Harvard beginning in 1950, and excluding a short stint at Columbia University (1959–1962) was for years associated with two Harvard-based think tanks: the Center for International Affairs (associate director, 1973–1978; director, 1978–1989) and the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (director, 1989–2000). In 1970, he founded the quarterly journal Foreign Affairs, serving as co-editor its first seven years. As a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (1963–1968), Huntington controversially supported the “forced urbanization and modernization” of rural villagers of South Vietnam. Under President Jimmy Carter he was the White House coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council (1977–1978). Huntington died on December 24, 2008. Huntington wrote some seventeen books. His Soldier and the State (1957), a reflection on the political implications of President Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, triggered criticism from both the left and the right. Probably his most controversial work was The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), an expanded version of a 1993 Foreign Affairs article that refuted Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1993), an optimistic neoconservative treatise interpreting the end of the Cold War as a universal consensus toward western liberal democracy and free-market economics. Huntington instead offered a pessimistic forecast of global instability. Dividing the world into eight civilizations—Western (including the United States and Europe); Chinese/Confucian; Muslim; African; Latin American; Japanese/Buddhist; Indian/
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Hindu; and Russian/Orthodox—he emphasized that not all embrace Western ideology to the degree that Fukuyama imagines and that the “fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” Critics have faulted Huntington’s paradigm for deemphasizing the importance of nation-states and for overlooking the point that cultural civilizations, such as the Muslim world, are diverse and hardly monolithic. Edward Said castigated Huntington’s thesis as “The Clash of Ignorance.” Others believe that the events of September 11 proved Huntington prophetic. In what could be interpreted as a companion piece, Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004) advances a nativist agenda, warning that the influx of Latinos (especially Catholic Mexicans) will adversely alter the cultural landscape of the United States, leading to two languages and two cultures, and ultimately undermine America’s national greatness at a time when it will be challenged by the global “clash of civilizations.” In this work, multiculturalism is deplored for undermining national unity and patriotic resolve. For Huntington, who favored the Anglo-Protestant traditions, cultural assimilation was imperative. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Religion; Buchanan, Pat; Cold War; Hispanic Americans; Immigration Policy; Lewis, Bernard; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Neoconservatism; Said, Edward; September 11.
Further Reading Hunt, Michael H. “In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?” Journal of American History 89:2 (September 2002): 416–25. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. ———. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Kaplan, Robert D. “Looking the World in the Eye.” Atlantic, December 2001. Said, Edward W. “The Clash of Ignorance.” Nation, October 22, 2001.
Hurr icane Katr ina On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, having gathered strength moving westward and northward across the Gulf of Mexico, made landfall on the southern coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi. At one time a Category 5 storm, characterized by sustained winds of more than 156 miles per hour (251 kilometers), Katrina actually decreased in intensity to a Category 3 storm by the time it reached the residential communities of the Gulf Coast. Despite the drop in
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wind speed, however, Katrina’s combination of size (over a hundred miles [161 kilometers] in diameter) and intensity (the third-strongest ever to make landfall) made it the most destructive hurricane in modern American history, killing more than 1,600 people and causing approximately $75 billion in damage. The initial trajectory of Katrina had the eye of the storm passing directly over the city of New Orleans, prompting speculation that this could be the long-feared storm that would decimate the region. In the hours before landfall, however, Katrina shifted course slightly eastward, sparing New Orleans and overwhelming the Mississippi coast. The resulting storm surge caused much of the physical destruction and loss of life in communities such as Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, and Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Despite the apparent good fortune that seemed to spare New Orleans, flooding of the Mississippi River soon caused the second disaster: a breaching of the city’s levees. The century-old structures faltered in several key places, flooding approximately 80 percent of the New Orleans area. The Ninth Ward, the historically lowerclass African-American and Creole section of the city, was destroyed in its entirety, while landmark sites such as the French Quarter and Uptown proved salvageable. Media images of the tragedy sparked passionate debate regarding both the visibility of poor people in the South and racial minorities’ access to government services and assistance. Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, both Democrats, had ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city approximately fortyeight hours before Katrina made landfall. The Superdome, home of the New Orleans Saints professional football franchise, was designated as the shelter of last resort for those who did not have the means or the desire to leave their homes. But many of the city’s most underprivileged citizens remained trapped in their homes, unable to leave behind their pets, medication, or elderly family members. Images of Americans waiting, some for several days, on their rooftops to be rescued by U.S. Coast Guard helicopters caused onlookers to question the nation’s emergency preparedness. Some conservative pundits blamed the victims for not taking personal responsibility and evacuating when the storm warning was first issued. Criticism of President George W. Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) intensified as New Orleans residents continued to wait for aid. The Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center became sites of violence, starvation, and rioting as conditions became unbearable. Lack of food, water, and medicine, combined with the heat and the crowds, made a terrible situation worse. Images of African Americans begging for assistance as children and elderly citizens suffered, in some cases dying, sparked outrage. Many asked how this could happen in America.
Critics of the George W. Bush administration blamed lack of concern for minorities and the poor for the failure of the federal government to provide timely emergency aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in August–September 2005. (Mario Tama/Staff/Getty Images)
After three full days, New Orleans residents finally saw the arrival of military aid and buses for transportation to shelters in cities across the South. Critics argued that the delay would not have occurred if those in peril had not been racial minorities or the socioeconomic lower classes of American society. Policy analysts suggested that the delay had resulted from the increased bureaucratic inefficiency that plagued FEMA since it had been subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security, established after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Local and national charitable organizations donated immeasurable aid to the victims of Katrina. Many people across the country opened their homes to displaced survivors, prompting observers to celebrate the generosity of the American people. In Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, families searched for missing relatives by posting contact information, including shelter locations, on Web sites and message boards created by news organizations and outreach groups such as the Red Cross. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, new debates regarding the effects of global warming also surfaced. Conservation and coastal erosion experts petitioned for greater federal funding of environmental protection programs. U.S. dependence on oil refineries in the Gulf region was questioned. And the director of FEMA, Michael Brown, resigned as criticism of the government rescue and recovery efforts reached unprecedented levels. Months later, most communities in the affected areas were still without adequate shelter and years removed from economic revitalization, while thousands of citizens remained displaced. Angie Maxwell
Hutchin s, Rober t M . See also: Bush Family; Compassionate Conservatism; Environmental Movement; Global Warming; Race; Republican Party; September 11; Springsteen, Bruce; Victimhood.
Further Reading Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: William Morrow, 2006. Brown, D.M. Hurricane Katrina: The First Seven Days of America’s Worst Natural Disaster. Napa, CA: Lulu, 2005. Dyson, Michael Eric. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. New York: Perseus, 2006. Van Heerden, Ivor, and Mike Bryan. The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina. New York: Viking, 2006.
Hutchins, Rober t M . A prominent educator—serving as the longtime president and chancellor of the University of Chicago (1928–1951)—Robert Maynard Hutchins was a political progressive and educational innovator known for advocating a core curriculum of great literary works. In his later years, he headed a think tank that studied democracy and advocated an end to the Cold War. Hutchins was born on January 17, 1899, in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Oberlin College (1915–1917). After serving in World War I, he completed his education at Yale University, earning the AB, MA, and LLB degrees (1921–1925). A short stint as dean of the Yale Law School was followed by his long tenure as president and chancellor of the University of Chicago. Hutchins was also an executive at the Ford Foundation (1951–1959) and chief executive officer of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (1959–1977). He died on May 17, 1977. At the University of Chicago, Hutchins emphasized the cultivation of reason as the primary tool for distinguishing truth from falsity and for reforming society’s institutions. At the same time, he opposed using education to inculcate values or morals. Believing the proper function of a university to be entirely intellectual, he withdrew Chicago from Big Ten sports. Perhaps most
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notably, he implemented undergraduate curriculum reforms that offered a liberal education through study of the “great books” of Western civilization. As chairman of the board of directors of Encyclopedia Britannica (1943–1974), Hutchins collaborated with Mortimer Adler on publication of The Great Books of the Western World series. After taking over the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Republic, Hutchins used the organization to critically assess McCarthyism, gaining the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1959, he reconstituted the Fund for the Republic as the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank that sponsored the international peace convocations Pacem in Terris (1965) and Pacem in Terris II (1967) and promoted ending the Cold War. Hutchins’s confidence in the universal power of reason underlay his belief in democratic institutions and the possibilities for international understanding and world government—ideas that ran counter to the times. His educational views were in opposition to the “relevance” dictum that dominated public education in America by 1950 and swept higher education after 1960. His emphasis on reason and the possibility of truth were questioned by sociological and postmodern approaches to knowledge, while neoconservative intellectuals and cultural elitists challenged Hutchins’s democratic principles. Keith Swigger See also: Alder, Mortimer J.; Cold War; Education Reform; Great Books; McCarthyism; Neoconservatism; Nuclear Age; Postmodernism; Think Tanks.
Further Reading Ashmore, Harry S. Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Hutchins, Robert Maynard. The Higher Learning in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936. McNeil, William H. Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Illegal Immigrants For decades, illegal immigration has been a contentious issue in America’s culture wars. Despite passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, designed to rid the U.S. labor market of undocumented workers, there were an estimated 11–12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States in 2006. Americans have remained divided over how to address this problem. Illegal immigrants are sometimes called “illegal aliens,” a highly contested descriptive, with some arguing that it inappropriately implies criminality. “Undocumented worker,” an alternative term, is viewed by others as a phony euphemism. Simply defined, an illegal immigrant is a noncitizen who resides in a country without a valid visa. This occurs either because the visa has expired or because the person originally entered the country without one. Some would extend the definition of illegal immigrant to any child born in the United States whose mother was at the time “undocumented.” Mexicans comprise the largest group of illegal immigrants in the United States, followed by those from El Salvador and Guatemala. Beginning in 1942, the federal Bracero Program authorized temporary guest workers from Mexico to enter the United States to perform agriculture tasks, but contract violations and other problems prompted Mexico to stop sending guest workers to Texas. Consequently, between 1944 and 1954, there was a 6,000 percent increase in Mexican undocumented workers in the United States. In response to the more than 1 million workers who had illegally crossed the border, the federal government in 1954 launched Operation Wetback, deporting thousands and providing a show of force in the border region to discourage illegal entry. Termination of the Bracero Program in 1964 was followed by a significant spike in illegal immigration. In response, Michelle Dallacroce founded Mothers Against Illegal Aliens in 1968, warning that Hispanics were trying to “reconquer” the Southwest. The wide range of positions on illegal immigration cannot be neatly divided into the usual political categories, such as left-right, liberal-conservative, or Democrat-Republican. Indeed, the issue has sharply divided the Republican Party itself. Some members of the GOP, including President George W. Bush, have been sympathetic to illegal immigrants, while others have not. Because this issue has so many dimensions— legal, economic, and moral—there has been much heated debate. For some, the main issue pertaining to illegal im-
migration has to do with law and order. The emphasis on law argues that “illegal aliens” are precisely what the name implies—people who have done something illegal. Consequently, it is thought that an illegal immigrant should be treated like any other criminal and punished accordingly, through either detention or deportation. People on this side of the debate tend to blame the government for ineffective policing of the border. Thus, in 2004, Chris Simcox and James Gilchrist founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps for citizen volunteers to patrol the Mexican and Canadian borders and enforce immigration laws that the government has been unable to enforce. In response to such political pressure, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act (2006) to construct a 700-mile (1,100-kilometer) fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time, there has been a movement afoot to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. For others, illegal immigration demands a moral response, one emphasizing charity and assistance in order to welcome such people in the communities where they are working. This viewpoint, often shared by liberal religious groups, regards illegal immigrants as economic refugees, people escaping Third World poverty and trying desperately to support their families. This argument was poignantly highlighted in the film El Norte (1983), which portrays the humanity of two Guatemalans who sneak across the border to find work in Los Angeles. In 1994, however, at a time when it was estimated that 10 percent of the state budget was spent on illegal immigrants, California voters approved Proposition 187, which prohibits illegal immigrants from obtaining social services, including public-supported medical care and public schooling. Although Proposition 187 was later overturned in court, the sentiments behind it lingered, especially among conservatives. According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of conservative Republicans were not in favor of providing social services to illegal immigrants. On the other hand, Linda Chavez, a republican and president of the think tank Center for Equal Opportunity (founded in 1995) argued that illegal immigrants should be offered a path to citizenship, a position that was supported by President George W. Bush. Probably the most contested area of the debate has to do with the economic consequences of illegal immigration. The free-market emphasis supports illegal immigrants, arguing that they do the jobs that American workers will not do; contribute to the overall productivity of the American economy; and pay into Social Security even though they will not be able to enjoy its benefits. According to the Pew Hispanic Center in 2006, the occupation sectors with the largest number of illegal immigrants were farming (24 percent), custodial (17 percent), and construction (14 percent). An opposing economic argument points out that il272
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legal immigrants are heavy users of public services while giving too little in return. Even the liberal economist Paul Krugman contends that the net benefit to the U.S. economy from illegal immigration is small. Furthermore, many dispute the claim that illegal aliens take jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. Illegal immigrants are seen as causing a “race to the bottom” by increasing the supply of low-skilled workers and driving down wages, especially for blacks. According to a 2005 study by Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz, from 1980 to 2000 unskilled immigrants were responsible for depressing the wages of unskilled labor by 8 percent. Finally, some charge that there is an undertone of racism in discussions about illegal immigrants. The strongest criticism of illegal immigrants is primarily from communities with significant numbers of foreign nationals. These communities see themselves as being overwhelmed by people who are culturally and linguistically different (primarily Hispanic) and who seem to have no desire to adopt the American way of life and cultural identity. Already states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico have nonwhite majority populations. Conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Samuel P. Huntington argue that the future of America is in peril because of the influx of aliens from non-European lands.
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the late 1800s to the removal of weapons from GermanAmerican homes during World War I and the internment of Japanese-American families during World War II, the nation has struggled with the cultural and social implications of immigration. The immigration debate of the twenty-first century has been complicated by the problem of illegal immigration and concerns about border security, but legal immigration continues to be a divisive issue. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and its amendments, passed in 1965 and 1990, govern current immigration and naturalization procedures. Legal immigrants enter the United States via several different visa categories and, after a probationary period, may be granted permanent residency status, receiving a “green card.” Most legal immigrants enter the country as familysponsored immigrants; this means that they have direct family ties with current U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Legal immigrants may also obtain permanent residency status through employment as qualified workers with needed skills; through the diversity visa lottery program (in which 50,000 visas are awarded through random selection each year to applicants from countries with low immigration rates to the United States); as ce-
Serena Parekh and Roger Chapman See also: Buchanan, Pat; Bush Family; Chávez, César; Globalization; Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie; Hispanic Americans; Huntington, Samuel P.; Immigration Policy; Krugman, Paul; Mexico; Migrant Labor; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies.
Further Reading Becker, Cynthia S. Immigration and Illegal Aliens: Burden or Blessing? Detroit, MI: Gale Group, 2006. Buchanan, Patrick. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002. Garcia, Juan Ramon. Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Haerens, Margaret, ed. Illegal Immigration. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2006. Tancredo, Thomas G. In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security. Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2006.
Immigration Polic y Hailed as a “nation of immigrants,” the United States has long sought a balance of fair and logical immigration laws. The balance has been historically difficult to achieve, prompting impassioned reactions from both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant factions. From the “No Irish Need Apply” signs posted in storefronts in
Supporters of amnesty for illegal immigrants take to the streets of Los Angeles in spring 2006. Immigration policy and the treatment of aliens have been volatile issues in American society for well over a century. (David McNew/Staff/ Getty Images)
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lebrities or wealthy investors; through adoption by U.S. citizens; through applications for asylum, refugee status, or other compassionate requests; and to a lesser extent through country-specific adjustment acts. Legal immigrants who enter the United States with an immigrant visa apply for permanent residency by filling out extensive paperwork and paying fees to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). After a significant amount of time ranging from several months to several years, during which the applicant may be granted work privileges and other temporary rights, the case is reviewed by USCIS officials and the person may be approved for permanent residency. After permanent residency is granted, the immigrant must wait five years before applying for U.S. citizenship. Although many legal immigrants eventually become naturalized citizens, naturalization is not mandatory; having obtained permanent residency, legal immigrants may live their entire lives in the United States without applying for citizenship. Some Americans oppose immigration, for reasons ranging from racism, ethnocentrism, and fear of religious diversity to concerns about overpopulation. Some have argued against the diversity visa lottery because it is based on luck rather than skills-based immigration criteria and because many of the winners are from African, Asian, and predominantly Middle Eastern countries. Some nativist critics, such as the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, claim that the white majority in America will diminish as new immigrants, legal and illegal, enter the country. They are concerned that an inordinate number of legal immigrants may come from nonwhite, impoverished regions of the world, such as Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, and that, having arrived in the United States, they will bring others from these regions through family-sponsored visas. Nativists see this as a threat to the American “way of life,” fearing that immigration will lead to radical changes in American society and that white Protestant culture may lose dominance. Such concerns echo the critiques of nativists during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when there was substantial fear that Chinese, Irish, and south European immigrants posed a threat to the dominant cultural values. Some critics worry that legal immigrants will not fully assimilate into U.S. culture and will not speak fluent English, resulting in ethnic enclaves outside the predominant culture. Their fear is that immigrants who do not mix with the rest of the U.S. population will not share values and mores associated with the larger “American” culture. They worry that language and cultural barriers will lead to higher rates of poverty and a more fragmented American population. Other opponents of immigration rally against employment-based and family-sponsored immigration because they believe that immigrants fill
jobs that American citizens could otherwise do and at the same time pull down wages. Critics are also concerned that legal immigrants may weigh heavily on social welfare programs. But immigrants who are approved to enter because of family connections must have sponsors who maintain financial responsibility for the immigrants if they cannot earn their own income. Immigrants who obtain visas based on work and skills, or those based on celebrity or investor categories, are unlikely to pose a financial risk. Some environmentalists oppose immigration, however, on the grounds that as the U.S. population grows, environmental problems and resource consumption levels increase. Proponents of legal immigration value the diversity in culture and life experience that immigrants bring to America. They believe that, like European immigrants in the 1800s and early 1900s, new legal immigrants, regardless of racial or ethnic background, will make positive contributions to American culture. Although some ethnic enclaves may exist in large cities, most studies on legal immigrants show that, by the second generation, immigrant families have easily assimilated into the dominant American culture, and that children of legal immigrants tend to be more fluent in English than in another language. Some studies show that children of legal immigrants score higher in math and science than children of U.S.-born citizens. Supporters of legal immigration also emphasize that promoting employment-based immigration strengthens America’s standing in technological and scientific fields as well as in academics and literature. They argue further that immigration provides U.S. businesses, universities, and research organizations with unrestricted access to some of the brightest minds in the world. Tanya Hedges Duroy See also: Buchanan, Pat; Civil Rights Movement; English as the Official Language; Hispanic Americans; Huntington, Samuel P.; Illegal Immigrants; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Muslim Americans; Reparations, Japanese Internment; Schaeffer, Francis.
Further Reading Beck, Roy. The Case Against Immigration. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Buchanan, Patrick J. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002. Isbister, John. The Immigration Debate: Remaking America. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian, 1996.
Indian Casinos Indian casinos are legal, multibillion-dollar gambling facilities that operate on the lands of federally recognized,
Indian C a sinos
sovereign, Native American nations. Perhaps few developments among Indian tribes in the past century have so divided the American public as the explosive growth of the estimated 410 casinos in 28 states since the late 1980s. Critics of the casinos argue that the Indian gaming industry is inherently corrupt and the federal legislation that allows it is ineffective at a variety of levels. Revenues, they claim, might line the pockets of a few successful tribes but largely fail to benefit the tens of thousands of American Indians across the country who live below the poverty level. Furthermore, Indian casinos are usually lobbied for and funded by non-Indian corporate financers who spend large amounts of money to woo tribes, hire top lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, and build and manage the casinos, all while conveniently pocketing up to 40 percent of the gambling proceeds—money that should be going to the government. On the other hand, supporters of the casinos argue that, after 400 years of oppression, forced removal, and discrimination by white Americans, native tribes are finally getting what they deserve—recognition of their sovereignty and an opportunity to create a financially secure present and future. The Indian gaming industry, supporters point out, is hardly different from any other corporate, for-profit business enterprise in the non-Indian world with its political dealings and unequal distribution of revenues. Furthermore, Indian casinos have demonstrably bolstered local economies by creating thousands of new jobs and guaranteeing a steady flow of tourism. Some see in the reversal of fortunes a poetic justice. The most recent Indian casino-building trend dates back to 1988, when Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), which effectively opened the door for federally recognized tribes to build and operate gambling casinos on their lands. Long before IGRA, however, many tribes throughout the country operated bingo halls and card rooms on their reservations, most famously the Seminoles in Florida. Although previous bingo halls had provoked local criticism, it is the unprecedented scale and profitability of the post-IGRA Indian gaming industry that has led to widespread opposition. At the core of the controversy are the untaxed billions—perhaps as much as $15 billion nationwide each year—raked in by the successful casinos, and the sizable personal disbursements that trickle down to officially recognized tribal members. The most successful—and most criticized—Indian casino is undoubtedly Foxwoods, the casino of the Mashuntucket Pequot in Connecticut, whose annual revenue exceeds $1.5 billion. Several best-selling investigative exposés have fueled popular debate by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the tribe, the reservation, the casino, and—by implication—other Indian casinos. In many popular versions of the story, the lure of lucrative dis-
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bursements has brought people out of the woodwork who claim to have tribal ancestry, giving rise to phrases such as “casino tribes” and “casino Indians.” Although Indian casinos are not required to pay taxes on gaming earnings, most casinos have negotiated contracts that return a portion of the casino’s revenue to the host state to fund vital programs. The Mohegan Nation, for example, made a deal with Connecticut to return 25 percent of the slot machine proceeds at Mohegan Sun to the state. In 2005, this amounted to more than $250 million donated to Connecticut; since the opening of Mohegan Sun in 1996, Connecticut has received almost $1.5 billion from the facility. Although not all states at present have such a comfortable agreement with Indian casinos, many are trying to increase their “fair share” proceeds. California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, for example, in 2004 tried to negotiate higher shared proceeds with the five largest gaming tribes in the state. Indian casinos have had mixed success. Not every tribe has been granted federal recognition, not every federally recognized tribe can afford to open a casino, and not every casino is operated successfully. Even when casinos do turn a profit, critics maintain that proceeds do not benefit tribal members equally. Tribes often have two groups—the official, federally recognized “in” group that operates the casino, and the “out” group that does not qualify for federal recognition or has been ostracized in some other way through the process of recognition and casino building. Since most tribes cut regular earnings checks to official tribal members, being “in” or “out” can mean the difference between poverty and plenty, with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in casino based annual income. The Table Mountain Indians near Fresno, California, are perhaps the most extreme case of this insider-outsider economic disparity, which often cuts across family lines. Nonetheless, many gaming tribes insist that they spread the wealth around by donating money to nongaming tribes, pouring funding into local and state programs, and sponsoring cultural museums like the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Linford D. Fisher See also: American Indian Movement; Reed, Ralph.
Further Reading Benedict, Jeff. Without Reservation: The Making of America’s Most Powerful Indian Tribe and Foxwoods, the World’s Largest Casino. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Light, Steven Andrew, and Kathryn R.L. Rand. Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Mason, W. Dale. Indian Gaming: Tribal Sovereignty and American Politics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.
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Mullis, Angela, and David Kamper. Indian Gaming: Who Wins? Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000. Valley, David J., and Diana Lindsay. Jackpot Trail: Indian Gaming in Southern California. San Diego, CA: Sunbelt, 2003.
Indian Spor t Mascots With the rise of modern sports in American culture has come the use of nicknames, symbols, and metaphors, including Native American mascots, to represent athletic teams and the perceived masculine values— such as bravery, ferocity, and toughness—at the heart of physical competition. While a source of traditional pride, unity, and identity, Indian mascots have been the subject of acrimonious debate and protest over the issue of racism. Despite complaints of political correctness, hundreds of school Indian sport mascots have been replaced or revised since the 1970s. A number of professional sport franchises have withstood activist complaints, however, and have retained their questionable mascots, in particular the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves baseball teams and the Washington Redskins football team. Beginning in the late 1960s, activists and academics at college campuses started challenging the use of Indian imagery in sports, which led to changes at the University of Oklahoma (Little Red to Sooners), Stanford University (Prince Lightfoot to the Cardinal), and Dartmouth College (Indians to Big Green). Most other schools opted to keep their Native American mascots, prompting the American Indian Movement (AIM) to take up the cause in the 1980s. A second wave of political action arose by the end of the decade and continued through the 1990s, perhaps most prominently at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Charlene Teters, a Spokane Indian graduate student, campaigned against the Chief Illiniwek mascot (the subject of Jay Rosenstein’s 1997 documentary In Whose Honor?). As the national movement gained momentum, a unified argument took shape and gained widespread adherence: (1) mascot imagery generally presents the American Indian as a figure of the past while falsely communicating that there is a singular indigenous culture; (2) the use of sacred symbols such as eagle feathers and paint by mascot performers is sacrilegious and disrespectful; (3) the mascot logos and trademarks are typically racist and demeaning; (4) such appropriation of the Indian image by mainstream society is a form of symbolic violence rooted in the conquest of Native Americans by the U.S. government. Although many sports fans continued to defend Native American mascots as honorable and appropriate, the movement against them won important support from religious groups and professional organizations, includ-
ing the United Methodist Church, the National Education Association, and the American Anthropological Association. In 2001, the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a strongly worded statement against Indian mascots. In August 2005, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) announced a policy prohibiting its member teams from using “‘hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery” at any postseason tournaments, effective in 2008. The announcement identified eighteen teams that were not in compliance with the policy. Some of these schools won appeals to retain their mascot logos because the representative Indian tribe gave its permission—for example, Catawba College (Catawba Indians), Central Michigan University (Chippewa), Florida State University (Seminoles), Mississippi College (Choctaws), and University of Utah (Utes). The University of Illinois lost its appeal to the NCAA, even though the Illini Indians are an extinct tribe. C. Richard King and Roger Chapman See also: American Indian Movement; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Race.
Further Reading King, C. Richard, and Charles Fruehling Springwood. Beyond the Cheers: Race as Spectacle in College Sports. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. ———, eds. Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Spindel, Carol. Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy over American Indian Mascots. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Indiv iduals with Disabilities E d u c a t i o n Ac t Under the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the U.S. government directed that public school systems seek out and educate all children, regardless of any disability. The measure was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) during reauthorization proceedings in 1990. From the outset, the legislation has mandated that children with disabilities be provided with an “appropriate education” in the “least restrictive environment” possible. IDEA proponents view the legislation as part of a continuum of education-related civil rights legislation and court actions since the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in schools. Previously, segregation of schools had been defended by the argument that “separate but equal” public facilities were acceptable. The Brown case demonstrated that separate was frequently not equal.
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Prior to passage of the IDEA, children with disabilities were routinely placed in academically inferior programs or denied an education altogether. In addition, “special education” programs often functioned as a way for newly desegregated schools to establish internal segregation on the basis of race, categorizing minority students as mentally deficient. Several lawsuits in the 1970s drew attention to the improper assessment of children for placement in special education programs. Implementation of the IDEA has proved controversial. Many disability rights advocates emphasize the requirement of “least restrictive setting,” while some opponents argue that “appropriate education” means that spending should be commensurate with a child’s potential productivity. The least restrictive setting stipulation, coupled with the act’s mandate to give each child an appropriate education, gives parents the right to demand mainstreaming of their children in regular classes. The degree of inclusion would be based on a student’s “individual education plan.” Resistant school districts argue that costs are prohibitive and that the needs of disabled students are best met in settings other than the mainstream classes. Parents are generally divided on the issue. Some complain that the presence of disabled children in classrooms is disruptive; others are concerned that school districts look for excuses to retain educational segregation. Because Congress provided no enforcement mechanism other than individual lawsuits, parents have had to turn to the courts to seek redress under the IDEA. Disability rights proponents decry the reliance on individual lawsuits. Many of the cases are narrow in scope, affecting only the child for whom the case is brought. Moreover, only parents with the resources, education, and determination to pursue litigation are able to challenge local administrators. As no class-action suits have been brought, courts have not ordered any changes to the education system. Furthermore, enormous variations in the rulings of the several federal courts have left parents and school districts without clear guidelines. Critics also charge that the IDEA unfairly diverts educational resources from average students to “special needs” children. As more children have been diagnosed with learning and developmental disabilities, charges have been levied that parents have sought out unfounded diagnoses in order to demand special services from the public schools. Opponents of the IDEA also point out that the act is an unfunded federal mandate. Controversy surrounding the IDEA stems in part from the failure of Congress to fully underwrite the costs of implementation. Laura Hague See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Civil Rights Movement.
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Further Reading Bowe, Frank. Equal Rights for Americans with Disabilities. New York: Franklin Watts, 1992. Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Freida Fleischer. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Johnson, Mary. Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and the Case Against Disability Rights. Louisville, KY: Avocado, 2003.
Intelligent Design See Creationism and Intelligent Design
Inter net The Internet is a global system of distributed computer networks that use “packet switch” technologies for information and service exchange. It provides numerous communication services such as e-mail, text and voice chat, bulletin boards, file sharing and transmission, streaming audio and video, and hyperlinked World Wide Web documents. The size, speed, and scalability of the Internet have made it the most important new communication technology of the past several decades. It has also become a major arena of the culture wars. The Internet’s infrastructure was developed by a loose-knit group of American academic and private-sector computer scientists interested in network technology, and it was primarily funded by the U.S. military. The idea for the system appeared in a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider in 1962, which envisioned a “Galactic Network” of interconnected computers that would advance human reasoning through “man-computer symbiosis.” After Licklider became the head of the Defense Department’s computer research program, he was instrumental in securing funds for a team of computer scientists to construct his vision. The first node was installed at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969, split into military and academic sides in 1983, and opened to commercial use in 1991. The Mosaic commercial Web browser gave the general public a user-friendly interface that contributed to the Internet’s ubiquity. By the mid-1990s, “Internet” and “Web” were part of the popular cultural lexicon. In the partisan battles of the 2000 presidential election campaign, right-wing pundits assailed the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, for allegedly claiming to have “invented the Internet.” Gore, whose more ambiguous comment was that he had “taken the initiative in creating the Internet,” was in fact an early supporter of the technology. As a U.S. senator (D-TN) in the 1980s and early 1990s, Gore had sponsored legislation that supported linking universities and libraries through the system, as well as using the Internet for commerce.
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The Internet has also been drawn into the culture wars over the issue of users’ privacy. Legislation has attempted to limit the monitoring of online activity by law enforcement and employers, specify how sensitive personal and financial information can be collected, curtail “spam” or junk mail, and prosecute identity theft. Privacy advocates have become especially worried in the post-9/11 era, particularly after the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the U.S. government’s ability to conduct Internet surveillance and data mining. The Internet has become a focal point of controversies concerning both access and content. As communication technologies have become a central feature of the “information economy,” a “digital divide” separates those who have the access and skills to use the Internet effectively and those who do not, which has exacerbated social inequalities. Other controversies involve attempts to restrict content, particularly material considered obscene or dangerous to national security, such as bomb recipes and terrorist recruitment. Attempts to regulate obscenity have proved contentious and constitutionally problematic. The 1996 Communications Decency Act and the 1998 Child Online Protection Act were mostly dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court because of First Amendment concerns. Only the 2000 Children’s Internet Protection Act survived constitutional challenge; its relatively modest provisions regulate obscenity at federally funded schools and libraries. Internet pornography illustrates why content regulation can be difficult. U.S. law since the Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. California (1973) relies on local or community standards for determining obscenity. Freespeech proponents suggest that it is absurd for the cultural standards of a small, conservative community to determine what is obscene in cities like Las Vegas. Nonetheless, several Internet pornography providers have been convicted for interstate trafficking of obscenity based on the community standards rule. This also raises the difficulty of regulating content distributed across a global network. For example, the age of consent for nude modeling is higher in the United States than in many European countries. The British model Linsey Dawn McKenzie caused a stir when nude photos of her as a minor intermixed with American photos taken of her after she turned eighteen. The Internet has become a nexus for political as well as cultural controversies. In 1998, Matt Drudge, editor of an online muckraking site, reported that Newsweek magazine pulled a story about a twenty-one-year-old White House intern’s affair with President Bill Clinton. The political storm that followed the story resulted in the impeachment of Clinton for perjury. In the 2004 presidential primaries, Howard Dean became an early front runner for the Democratic nomination largely by using the Internet for grassroots fundraising, but it later contributed to his downfall when unflattering video clips of him screaming at a campaign rally spread across cyberspace.
Political campaign managers hire companies to collect information on voters’ political preferences in order to “narrowcast” a candidate’s message on the Web. Grassroots groups use online resources for mobilizing members. Blogs, short for “Web logs,” are online diaries that let citizens express their opinions on the issues of the day. Steve G. Hoffman See also: Censorship; Clinton Impeachment; Culture Jamming; Dean, Howard; Drudge Report; Gore, Al; Pornography; Privacy Rights; September 11.
Further Reading Chadwick, Andrew. Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. DiMaggio, Paul, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robinson. “The Social Implications of the Internet.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 307–36. Howard, Philip. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wallace, Jonathan, and Mark Mangan. Sex, Laws, and Cyberspace. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Iran- Contra Affair Secret U.S. arms shipments to Iran and Central America during the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s led to the political controversy known as the IranContra Affair and acrimonious debate over whether the president willfully ignored federal law. The roots of the scandal lay in a series of U.S. foreign policy setbacks, including the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the Iranian sponsorship of terrorist groups in Lebanon that kidnapped U.S. citizens and held them hostage. Also in 1979, the leftist Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua. Early in Reagan’s presidency, his administration began funding and equipping Nicaraguan antileftist guerrillas known as the Contras. The administration also provided strong support to a right-wing regime in nearby El Salvador against communist insurgents. In 1983, however, human rights abuses committed by U.S. allies in Central America prompted Congress to pass the Boland Amendment, which prohibited federal agencies from funding the Nicaraguan insurgency. Despite the ban, the National Security Council (NSC), first under Robert McFarlane (1983–1985) and then under John Poindexter (1985–1986), devised a complex plan to sell weapons to Iran, to generate the goodwill required for Iran to act on behalf of American hostages held in Lebanon, and in turn divert the profits from the arms sales secretly to the Contras in Nicaragua. The charade was overseen by Oliver North, a U.S. Ma-
Ir v ine, Reed
rines lieutenant colonel working from an office in the White House. The scandal broke when a Lebanese newspaper exposed the secret arms shipments, leading Reagan on November 13, 1986, to appear on national television to confirm the story while denying that he was trading arms for hostages. This was followed twelve days later by a White House statement revealing that proceeds from the sales (between $10 million and $30 million) went to the Contras. On March 4, 1987, Reagan announced, “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.” Apologists for Reagan blamed subordinates and pointed out that the Boland Amendment did not expressly list the NSC. They also emphasized the worthy causes being served: freeing Americans and fighting communism. Critics viewed the incident as worthy of impeachment because of the willful violation of the law. A presidential commission, various congressional committees, and an independent counsel conducted investigations. In the end, McFarlane, Poindexter, North, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger were found complicit in the scheme. Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush were never directly tied to the scandal, though they were blamed for improper oversight. Bush was elected president in 1988 and eventually pardoned Weinberger and five others convicted in the scandal. In 1994, when North ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Virginia, he caused an uproar when he said Reagan “knew everything” from the beginning about the diversion of funds to the Contras. Philippe R. Girard See also: Bush Family; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Conspiracy Theories; Freedom of Information Act; Human Rights; North, Oliver; Presidential Pardons; Reagan, Ronald; Soviet Union and Russia; War Powers Act.
Further Reading Draper, Theodore. A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1991. North, Oliver. Under Fire: An American Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Walsh, Lawrence. Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and CoverUp. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Ir v ine, Reed The founder of the watchdog group Accuracy in Media (AIM) in 1969, former economist Reed Irvine devoted himself to exposing what he claimed was a liberal bias
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in the news media, targeting the New York Times and the Washington Post, the major television networks, National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, among others. “Journalists,” he charged, “are blurring the line between reporting and advocacy.” Reed John Irvine was born into a Mormon family on September 29, 1922, in Salt Lake City, Utah. After graduating from the University of Utah (BS, 1942), serving in the U.S. Marines during World War II, and completing his education at Oxford University (MA, economics, 1951), Irvine worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board (1951–1977). He died on November 16, 2004, in Rockville, Maryland. Irvine founded AIM in reaction to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago (which he felt was covered by journalists who were overtly sympathetic with the war protesters) and the Tet Offensive (which he thought the American media had exaggerated, giving a psychological boost to the Vietcong). A regular attendee of the “McDowell luncheon”—named for Arthur McDowell, the founder of the Council Against Communist Aggression—Irvine was inspired to form AIM after one such meeting in which the group discussed the “problem” of the news media. That discussion was part of a national debate initiated by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who had publicly scorned the press corps as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” In monitoring the press corps and television and radio networks for accuracy and fairness in news programming, Irvine produced a bimonthly newsletter (The AIM Report), a daily radio program (Media Monitor), and a weekly column (syndicated in 100 newspapers). He also wrote letters to the editor and published advertisements in offending newspapers in order to “correct” their news reports. He sought to influence editorial policies by buying shares in media corporations and raising issues during stockholder meetings. Top media executives occasionally met with him to hear his concerns. AIM was at the height of its power and influence during the Reagan era in the 1980s, with reportedly 40,000 paid members and an operating budget of $1.5 million. Irvine and his supporters felt that the mainstream news media were more critical of capitalism than communism and tended to be hostile toward the American military and its national security organizations. With that in mind, Irvine wrote the preface to James L. Tyson’s Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on U.S. Media (1981), a polemical book heavily promoted by AIM. Irvine frequently accused the news media of focusing more attention on human rights abuses in right-wing dictatorships such as Chile than on abuses by communist governments. He was especially critical of reports on the lasting effects of Agent Orange, the chemical herbicide used by the U.S. military during the
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Vietnam War. Irvine also blamed the American media for the communist victory in Vietnam. After charging that the PBS documentary series Vietnam: A Television History (1983) was too sympathetic toward the communists, AIM was permitted to air its own rebuttal on PBS, Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story (1985). In 1985, AIM extended its mission to the college classroom, forming the subgroup Accuracy in Academia (AIA). Utilizing student volunteers to anonymously monitor the lectures and comments of professors, a tactic that detractors likened to McCarthyism, AIA garnered a few headlines arguing that certain professors were imposing political correctness in the classroom. The AIA monthly newsletter, Campus Report, focused critical attention on campus speech codes, diversity training, and women’s studies. Critics of AIM, such as a.m. Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times, accused the organization of resorting to the same “agit prop” tactics as the communists, but for promoting a conservative ideology. In describing AIM, Irvine admitted, “We are ideological,” adding, “We are concerned about defending our free economic system from enemies in this country and abroad.” Ben Bradlee, managing editor of the Washington Post, crudely described Irvine as a “miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante” (a vigilante who urinates backwards, or is cowardly). Activists on both the right and the left followed Irvine’s footsteps in forming media watchdog organizations, including the liberal Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR, founded in 1986) and the conservative Media Research Center (1987). Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; Agnew, Spiro T.; Communists and Communism; Diversity Training; McCarthyism; Media Bias; National Public Radio; New York Times, The; Public Broadcasting Service; Speech Codes; Vietnam War; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading D’Souza, Dinesh. “Accuracy in Media.” National Review, November 2, 1984. Irvine, Reed. Media Mischief and Misdeeds. Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1984. Irvine, Reed, and Cliff Kincaid. How the News Media Are Deceiving the American People. Smithtown, NY: Book Distributors, 1990. Massing, Michael. “The Rise and Decline of Accuracy in Media.” Nation, September 13, 1986. Wolfe, Alan. “The Real Aim Is Ideological.” Nation, September 13, 1986.
Israel The special relationship between the United States and Israel dates back to May 1948, when President Harry
S. Truman extended American diplomatic recognition to the newly declared Jewish state in Palestine. It is estimated that from 1949 to 2008 the United States has given $114 billion to Israel in military and economic aid. Some commentators have called into question the extent to which American foreign policy is truly supportive of Israel, believing that it has contributed to the overall volatility of the Middle East and, thereby, to the ongoing threat to Israel. Others, however, agree with Ronald Reagan, who after serving as U.S. president, stated, “I’ve believed in many things in my life, but no conviction I’ve ever held has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel.” The modern state of Israel declared its independence following the termination of the British Mandate of Palestine and the subsequent United Nations’ landpartitioning resolution of November 1947. This was followed by the Arab-Jewish War (1947–1948), which Israel won against Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq. This set the stage for decades of conflict and warfare between Israel and its neighbors. The new state was considered a place of refuge for Jews from all over the world, especially those who had survived the Holocaust. From the Arab perspective, however, it was less than just that the Western powers and Jews would annex Palestinian land, since the Holocaust had occurred in Europe and not the Middle East. To this day, most Arab countries refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Most Jews in the United States welcomed the establishment of a Jewish homeland and supported it, though there were some vocal anti-Zionists among Ultra-Orthodox Jews. A small group of Christian fundamentalists also welcomed the establishment of Israel because, in their reading of the prophecies in the book of Revelations, the establishment of a Jewish state was a step toward the Second Coming of Christ. The large majority of the population, however, was neither particularly hostile to Israel nor strongly supportive of it. The U.S. government had been divided on a policy toward Israel during its early days, remaining neutral during the early attacks by Arab neighbors. Events during the 1950s, however, helped establish a strong and long-lasting alliance. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was at its height, and when the Soviets began supporting and supplying the Islamic states with war materials in their battle against Israel, the United States came to Israel’s defense. Israel was seen as a like-minded ally in the Middle East, deserving U.S. support, especially in the United Nations. Support for Israel increased as hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews from Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe escaped their countries and sought Israeli citizenship. During the early 1960s, relations between Egypt and Israel frayed once again over control of the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and
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his allies threatened to drive Israel from the Sinai and invade its borders. In response, Israel mounted a powerful preemptive attack in June 1967 under the leadership of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The Israelis drove the Arab states out of all the territories they had occupied previously, including the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Many Americans applauded Israel’s victory, but members of the New Left, a radical movement opposed to the Vietnam War and other “imperialist” actions of the United States, were sympathetic to the cause of displaced Palestinians and their Arab allies. They regarded Israel in much the same way they saw the United States, as an imperialist Western nation. This view persisted among some liberal groups, and even among some American Jews, but had limited influence on U.S. policy. Former president Jimmy Carter stirred considerable controversy when he published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), a work that is largely condemning of Israel’s “colonization” of Palestine. Others opposed to Israel included the growing Arab-American community, some African Americans who saw Palestinians in Israel as oppressed and lacking civil rights, small groups of anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and a few anti-Semitic Christian Identity groups. Support for Israel increased after September 11, 2001, when Americans began to suspect that many Arabs and other Muslims were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Israel itself had been victimized in the late 1980s and the 1990s by attacks of Palestinian terrorists. Through all shifts in public opinion, the U.S. government has remained steadfast in support of Israel. On the Democratic side, Jewish Americans remain an influential pressure group, urging support of the Jewish state. They are assisted by a strong lobbying effort by Israel itself. Among Republicans, support for Israel has more often been based on world and Middle Eastern politics. Conservative groups express admiration for Israel’s army and the country’s emphasis on preparedness against attacks. Some evangelical Christians also strengthened their support of Israel based on a millenarian view of the role of Israel in the Second Coming. Left Behind, a popular series of Christian apocalyptic novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published beginning in the 1990s, helped advance a pro-Israel stance among the Religious Right.
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Nevertheless, there have been moments of diplomatic strain between Washington and Israel. On a number of occasions, Israeli spies have been caught operating in the United States. One incident frequently brought up by conspiracy theorists is the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, a Navy intelligence-gathering ship operating in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats bombed the ship, killing thirty-four Americans. Despite ten official U.S. federal investigations and three Israeli ones, all of which determined that the attack was a case of target misidentification, some continue to argue that there was a cover-up by U.S. government officials, who did not want to be seen criticizing Israel. In more recent times, there has been a vigorous debate over the so-called Israel lobby and its influence of Washington policymakers. This was precipitated by the publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), by University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard professor Stephen M. Walt. References to the “Israel lobby” or “Jewish lobby” are offensive to some because they perpetuate the stereotype of the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text dating back to czarist Russia and purporting a Jewish worldwide conspiracy. Roger Chapman See also: Anti-Semitism; Holocaust; Lapin, Daniel; Premillennial Dispensationalism.
Further Reading Cristol, A. Jay. The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2002. Dershowitz, Alan. The Case for Israel. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Foxman, Abraham H. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Schwartz, Stephen. Is It Good for the Jews? The Crisis of America’s Israel Lobby. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Simon, Merrill. Jerry Falwell and the Jews. New York: Jonathan David, 1984.
Jack son, Jesse A civil rights activist and Baptist preacher, Jesse Jackson twice ran for president of the United States during the 1980s, stating that he wished to introduce the “moral vision” of the civil rights movement into mainstream politics. His “I am somebody” and “Keep hope alive” slogans of black empowerment were then applied to a wider populist cause. After losing the 1984 Democratic nomination as a largely perceived black-interest candidate, the Reverend Jackson two years later regrouped and formed the National Rainbow Coalition, an effort to broaden his constituency to include not just blacks but also working-class families, liberal urbanites, Hispanics, feminists, and peace activists. Jackson described America as “a great quilt” with “different-colored patches” representing urban and rural, made whole by “common threads” of justice and equal opportunity. For those who called him a radical leftist—his program was liberal—he insisted that he represented “the moral center.” Although in 1988 he again fell short of becoming the Democratic presidential standard bearer, coming in second to Michael Dukakis, he garnered 6.9 million votes and one-fourth of party delegates. Until Barack Obama emerged on the political scene two decades later, Jackson was the most successful black candidate to run for the nation’s highest office. The child of an unwed teenage mother, Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns in Greenville, South Carolina, on October 18, 1941, later receiving the surname of his stepfather. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for one year and then transferred to the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, where he played football and studied sociology (BA, 1964). It was there that he had his debut in the civil rights movement, leading marches and sitins to protest the town’s racial segregation. In 1964, he became a field representative for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). On a Rockefeller grant, he attended the Chicago Theological Seminary (1964–1966), but put off graduation for many years (MDiv, 2000) to devote time to political activism. Jackson spent his early Chicago days volunteering for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and became associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) after participating in the 1965 voting-rights march in Selma, Alabama, where he met Martin Luther King, Jr. Jackson soon emerged as King’s representative heading the SCLC’s Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket (1966–1967), later serving as national director (1967–1971). He also coordinated
King’s less than successful 1966 march in Chicago for open housing. As leader of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson organized economic boycotts to pressure businesses operating in African-American communities to hire more blacks. Although some business leaders called him an “extortionist,” Jackson was largely successful in that campaign. While the grocery chain Red Rooster folded because it refused to capitulate to the group’s demands, A&P hired new black store managers and for the first time stocked black-made products such as Joe Louis milk, Staff of Life bread, and Grove Fresh orange juice. In 1968, Jackson was in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was assassinated. Soon after the shooting, Jackson was wearing a bloodstained shirt, making the claim that he cradled the dying figure’s head in his arms. Witnesses disputed this account, and Jackson’s relations with the SCLC deteriorated over a variety of issues. In December 1971, after the SCLC executive committee suspended him for “repeated organizational improprieties,” Jackson quit Operation Breadbasket to found Operation PUSH (for People United to Save [later Serve] Humanity). In 1976, Jackson announced Operation PUSH-Excel, calling on minority youth to “get the dope out of your veins and hope in your brains,” as he promoted a campaign for excellence in education. Following his presidential races and tenure as a “shadow senator” for the District of Columbia (1991–1996), Jackson merged his groups, forming the Rainbow PUSH Action Network (1996). In 1997, President Bill Clinton designated Jackson as special envoy to promote democracy in Africa. That same year, Jackson founded the Wall Street Project to mobilize black stockholders to pressure corporations to increase opportunities for minorities. Prior to leaving office, Clinton presented Jackson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000). Over the years, Jackson has been depicted as semiradical (an amalgamation of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a Black Panther) as well as conservative (a “Booker T. Washington in bellbottoms”). Liberal blacks have been his worst critics, dismissing his efforts as chiefly aiding black elites and promoting a variant of trickledown economics. Jackson was accused of modifying his politics to the conservative winds of change when he joined the war on drugs. The Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko dubbed him “Jesse Jetstream” for his traveling from one public controversy to the next. Jackson caused outrage in 1979 when he visited the Middle East and hugged Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat. On several occasions he has intervened in international affairs to gain the release of captives—persuading Syria to release an American fighter pilot (December 1983), convincing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to allow the evacuation of hundreds of stranded foreign nationals from Kuwait (September 1991), and convincing Serbian president 282
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Slobodan Milosevic to free three American POWs during the Kosovo War (April–May 1999)—but these efforts were typically viewed as self-promotion. When the minister admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock with a staff person in 2001, ribald jokes made light of the fact that Jackson was Bill Clinton’s spiritual counselor during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Jackson has often been in the news for making illconceived statements, such as during his 1984 presidential campaign when he referred to New York City as “Hymie-town” (an anti-Semitic remark) or later in 2008 when a Fox News television microphone picked up his offhand remark, with coarse language, in which he accused presidential candidate Barack Obama of “talking down” to blacks. This last incident ended with Jackson making a public apology, followed by his son, Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., an Obama campaign adviser, issuing his own statement: “I’m deeply outraged and disappointed in Reverend Jackson’s reckless statements. . . . [he] is my dad and I’ll always love him. He should . . . keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.” Roger Chapman See also: Anti-Semitism; Black Panther Party; Civil Rights Movement; Clinton, Bill; Democratic Party; Dukakis, Michael; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Obama, Barack; Sharpton, Al; Supply-Side Economics.
Further Reading Frady, Marshall. The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Hatch, Roger D. “Jesse L. Jackson: More Than an Opportunist.” Journal of Religious Thought 42:2 (Fall 1985/Winter 1986): 73–84. Jackson, Jesse L., Jr., with Frank E. Watkins. A More Perfect Union: Advancing New American Rights. New York: Welcome Rain, 2001. Kopkind, Andrew. “Black Power in the Age of Jackson.” Nation, November 26, 1983. Rainbow PUSH Coalition Web site. www.rainbowpush.org. Timmerman, Kenneth. Shakedown! Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002.
Jack son, Michael Michael Jackson, born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, was the most successful popular music star of the 1980s, as well as one of America’s most controversial figures of the 1990s and early 2000s. Jackson’s fans—of which many referred to him as the “King of Pop”—regarded him as a misunderstood genius and argued that his personal eccentricities (such as his changing appearance) and unusual behavior (often involving children) did not cross ethical lines. Jackson’s
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detractors—dubbing him “Wacko Jacko”—claimed that these characteristics substantially displaced his status as a musician. Jackson began his professional singing career in 1968, recording with the Jackson 5 under the Motown Record label. By late 1970, the group had released four number-one songs. Near the end of the 1970s, Jackson turned mainly solo but continued to follow the strategy of Motown to appeal beyond an African-American audience. From 1972 to 1995, he charted thirteen top hits in the United States, including “Ben” (1972), “Billie Jean” (1983), “Bad” (1987), and “Black or White” (1991). Jackson’s work as a solo artist mainly involved an eclectic combination of pop, funk, ballads, soul, and rock. This led to his first important solo album as an adult, Off the Wall (1979). The most successful album in history, Thriller (1982), sold more than 51 million copies worldwide. His elaborate video and stage performances featured dance, including the “moonwalk,” and wearing a white-sequined glove on one hand. Jackson also broke down MTV’s early resistance to programming African-American artists, and he co-wrote USA for Africa’s charity ballad “We Are the World” (1985). His subsequent two albums, Bad (1987) and Dangerous (1992), largely continued the dance-rock/ ballad/video pattern of Thriller. Jackson’s music often involved calculated collaborations with African-American colleagues and with white performers. After the onslaught of alternative/grunge rock in the early 1990s, Jackson’s popularity waned. Later albums, such as the egomaniacal double-CD HIStory (1995) and Invincible (2001), slumped in sales, paralleling Jackson’s increasingly unusual behavior. In 1993, Pepsi-Cola cancelled a long-standing contract after he admitted an addiction to painkillers. He attributed his gradual loss of skin pigmentation to a disorder called vitiligo, but his various cosmetic surgeries (including a botched nose job) called this into question. Other Jackson eccentricities included his seemingly androgynous personality, a childlike voice rumored to have been affected by hormone treatments, and his childthemed California mansion, Neverland Ranch (named from Peter Pan), which had been the venue for various child-guest “sleepovers.” He also drew attention because of two unsuccessful marriages, the first to Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. He was spotlighted in the media for dangling a child over a hotel balcony railing and for an awards ceremony appearance dressed as a Messiah. Childabuse accusations arose in 1993–1995 and 2003–2005, allegedly involving pornography and alcohol. Although Jackson’s fascination with children and fantasy may pertain to his rise to pop stardom while still a preteen, his public image remained tarnished up until his sudden death from cardiac arrest on June 25, 2009. Durrell Bowman
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See also: Androgyny; Pornography; Rock and Roll; Sex Offenders.
Further Reading Cadman, Chris, and Halstead Craig. Michael Jackson: The Early Years. Hertford, UK: Authors on Line, 2002. Chandler, Raymond. All That Glitters: The Crime and the CoverUp. Las Vegas, NV: Windsong Press, 2004. Dimond, Diane. Be Careful Who You Love: Inside the Michael Jackson Case. New York: Atria, 2005. Jefferson, Margo. On Michael Jackson. New York: Pantheon, 2006.
Japan Despite being America’s enemy during World War II, Japan was an important U.S. ally throughout the Cold War and has remained so. However, Americans have at times resented Japan’s economic success and its impact on the U.S. economy. Postwar planners in Washington sought to create an ally of this former enemy, replacing Japan’s authoritarian government with a democracy that would help contain communism. The goal was complicated, not simply because of Japan’s retention of the emperor, but also because of Americans’ lingering bitterness about Japanese treatment of POWs. Public animosity was partly offset by John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), a chilling account of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of that city in August 1945. U.S. armed forces occupied Japan from the end of World War II through April 1952, putting in place a limited democracy. More than half a century later, neoconservatives would defend President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation by citing Japan as a positive case study of nation building. With its national security protected by American defense spending, Japan by the end of the 1960s had emerged as one of the world’s greatest economic powers, specializing in the export of electronics, automobiles, and steel. But the manner in which Japanese goods were traded on the world market drew the ire of many Americans. The phrase “Made in Japan” was often met with derision, but American consumers, despite bumper stickers advising “Buy American,” continued to purchase products that were lower in price than those made in the United States. The U.S. trade deficit with Japan was sarcastically viewed as Tokyo’s revenge for the atomic bombings. American business leaders complained about unfair trade restrictions that made the export of U.S. goods to Japan overly difficult, criticized the Japanese propensity to build on the innovations of other countries’ research and development, and questioned why the U.S. government was giving Japan a “free ride” on defense (in the early 1980s only 1 percent of Japan’s
GNP was spent on its military) when Tokyo was giving its microchip producers an unfair competitive advantage through government subsidies. In the 1980s, Japanese investors began purchasing American companies and real estate, which led to some negative rhetoric about a “foreign takeover.” As Japan’s industrial and technological expansion coincided with the energy crisis of the 1970s, some American consumers chose to purchase Japan’s smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles over U.S. automobiles. From 1978 to 1981, Japan’s share in the American auto market rose 50 percent. Protectionists bemoaned the loss of American jobs, but others faulted American automakers for failing to compete. In 2006, Toyota was the second top-selling auto company in the United States, surpassing Ford but trailing General Motors. By 2008, during a severe global financial crisis, Toyota become the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, surpassing GM, which was gloomily marking its 100th anniversary while barely staving off bankruptcy. Tension between the two nations was highlighted when Japan asked the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to change its Enola Gay exhibit—organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and including the fuselage of the plane that dropped it—to focus attention on how the Japanese people suffered from the atomic bombings. U.S.-Japanese relations have also been strained because of abuses by U.S. forces stationed in Okinawa. More recently, Americans have criticized Japan’s veneration of the gravesites of its World War II leaders and its history books that leave out Japanese war atrocities. A.W.R. Hawkins and Roger Chapman See also: China; Cold War; Enola Gay Exhibit; Globalization; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Neoconservatism; Nuclear Age; Reparations, Japanese Internment.
Further Reading Hall, Ivan P. Bamboozled! How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and Its Implications for Our Future in Asia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. Schodt, Frederick L. America and the Four Japans: Friend, Foe, Model, Mirror. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, 1994.
J e h ov a h ’s W i t n e s s e s Although Jehovah’s Witnesses identify themselves as comprising a Christian denomination, other groups regard them as a cult that stands outside orthodox Christianity. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’s emphasis on separation from society has frequently brought them into conflict with the government. The origins of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are found in
Jesu s People Movement
the teachings of Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s. A believer in home study of the Bible, which he held to be the true Word of God, Russell rejected doctrines such as the Trinity, natural immortality, and hell, and taught that Armageddon would take place in 1914. After Russell’s death in 1916—and the failure of his apocalyptic vision—Joseph Franklin Rutherford became president of Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society, which Russell had established in 1884 as the nonprofit legal entity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. Arrested and sent to prison for several months for his pacifism and opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, Rutherford thereafter took an oppositional view toward secular government and established a hierarchical governing structure for the organization. Nathan Homer Knorr, who succeeded Rutherford as president in 1942, expanded the evangelizing activity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, from 54 countries in 1942 to 207 in 1971. Knorr oversaw the publication of several doctrinal books and promoted work on the New World Translation of the Bible, completed in 1961. Jehovah’s Witnesses seek to maintain purity by separating themselves from many of the larger society’s activities and practices. They do not observe religious or national holidays and birthdays, and they discourage the pursuit of higher education. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not vote or participate in political pressure groups, and they refuse jury and military service. They oppose sexual activity outside marriage, and they regard homosexuality as a perversion. Since 1945, they have rejected blood transfusion on the grounds that it is morally and physically polluting. Beginning in the 1970s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses experienced some internal conflicts. In 1980, doctrinal disputes resulted in the expulsion of a number of workers, among them Raymond Franz, a member of the governing body, who later wrote a book about his experiences in the faith and its institutions, Crisis of Conscience (1984). Attorneys in child custody cases began using former members to support claims that the faith’s behavioral restrictions were damaging to children’s mental health. In 2001, several individuals filed lawsuits charging that the sect had protected child molesters. Historically, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had come into conflict with legal authorities over such issues as military service and refusal to recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag, but by the 1970s many of their disputes involved blood transfusions. Members sought restraining orders and injunctions against doctors and hospitals to prevent transfusions; they also sued for damages in several cases. The Jehovah’s Witnesses attempted to aid their members through establishment of the Hospital Liaison Committee in 1979 and publicly explained their position in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1981. Some of their positions softened during the 1990s. Jehovah’s Witnesses became more accepting of profes-
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sional or applied higher education and deemed that alternative national service was acceptable in certain circumstances. With their predictions of the end of the world in 1914 and 1975 having failed to come true, they stated in 1995 that there was no definite date for the “last generation.” In response to a slowing rate of membership growth, the society in 2001 reorganized its structure, attempting to become less hierarchical and more flexible. Gary Land See also: American Civil Religion; Church and State; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Sex Offenders.
Further Reading Bowman, Robert M., Jr. Understanding Jehovah’s Witnesses: Why They Read the Bible the Way They Do. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1991. Holden, Andrew. Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement. London: Routledge, 2002. Penton, M. James. Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
J e s u s P e o p l e M ove m e n t The Jesus People movement was a conservative evangelical youth movement that originated within the counterculture in the late 1960s. Adapting rock music and popular culture to a revivalist context and retaining hippie preferences for long hair and casual fashions, the movement garnered widespread coverage during the early 1970s. Although it receded after the mid-1970s, the Jesus People movement nonetheless had a tremendous impact on the direction of conservative Protestant youth culture and a generation of maturing young evangelicals. The first “street Christians” appeared in the midst of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco’s HaightAshbury district. The movement soon spread to Southern California, and, by the end of decade, dozens of communal houses, coffeehouses, and Jesus People–friendly churches dotted the state landscape from Santa Barbara south to San Diego. Meanwhile, the movement cropped up within urban countercultural centers in such far-flung cities as Seattle, Detroit, Buffalo, Atlanta, and Cincinnati. Following a spate of religious-themed pop music hits and the phenomenal success of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (album 1970, Broadway 1971), the Jesus People began to attract national media attention in 1971. Dozens of books about, by, and for the Jesus People began to flood the marketplace, and by summertime the movement was on the cover of Time magazine. Despite some criticism from older evangelicals, the movement was largely hailed by evangelical leaders, including the Reverend Billy Graham, as a sign of impending national
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revival. Its “Jesus Rock” music, styles, and persona were enthusiastically adopted by teenage evangelical churchgoers across the country. Although the movement soon faded and many young Jesus People turned their focus to education, career, and family, it nonetheless made a significant impact on the shape and direction of the larger evangelical movement. Out of its coffeehouses and communes, the “Contemporary Christian Music” industry was born. The two largest evangelical denominational movements of the postwar period—Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard Christian Fellowship—both traced their origins to the Jesus People. More important, in the wake of the movement, the relationship of the larger evangelical subculture with the surrounding youth and popular cultures—two realms previously kept at arm’s length—was revolutionized. Finally, for many baby boomers, the coming of the “Jesus Revolution” proved an important bridge between the allures of teen culture and their conventional religious upbringing. The Jesus People movement arguably held many younger Americans to their evangelical loyalties in the 1970s, thereby strengthening the emerging Religious Right of the 1980s and 1990s. Larry Eskridge See also: Contemporary Christian Music; Counterculture; Evangelicalism; Generations and Generational Conflict; Graham, Billy; Religious Right.
Further Reading Di Sabatino, David. The Jesus People: An Annotated Bibliography and General Resource. 2nd ed. Lake Forest, CA: Jester Media, 2004. Ellwood, Robert S., Jr. One Way: The Jesus People Movement and Its Meaning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Eskridge, Larry. “One Way: Billy Graham, the ‘Jesus Generation’ and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture.” Church History 67:1 (1998): 83–106.
John Birch Society The John Birch Society, founded by Robert W. Welch, Jr., on December 9, 1958, in Indianapolis, Indiana, regarded communism as the single greatest threat to the United States. Welch, a retired candy manufacturer and former board member of the National Association of Manufacturers, named his organization after John Morrison Birch, a Baptist missionary and U.S. intelligence officer who was killed by communist forces in China shortly after V-J Day in 1945. Welch considered Birch the first casualty of the Cold War. The John Birch Society grew rapidly in its early years, from 1,500 members in January 1960 to as many as 100,000 members across the United States by the
end of 1961. The society’s membership and influence peaked around the time of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964. In addition to issue campaigns, it ran a publishing house, a speaker’s bureau, and a chain of bookstores. One of the earliest campaigns undertaken by the society was an effort to get the United States to withdraw from the United Nations, which the group said was part of an effort to subvert American sovereignty and create a socialist, one-world government. Another goal was the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. The organization’s “Support Your Local Police” campaign opposed the use of federal law enforcement officers to enforce civil rights laws. The John Birch Society opposed the civil rights movement more broadly, claiming that the movement was controlled by communists. Critics charged that the group’s conspiratorial worldview amounted to paranoia, a charge that gained increasing acceptance as Welch alleged that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a willing agent of the communist conspiracy and that communists were part of a broader global conspiracy dating back to at least the 1700s, connected to the Bavarian Illuminati and controlled by a group Welch referred to as the “Insiders.” By 1965, William F. Buckley and his National Review were warning that the John Birch Society was a threat to the conservative movement. The group was also criticized for its opposition to the civil rights movement. Ironically, the chair of the John Birch Society, Representative Lawrence P. McDonald (D-GA), was among the passengers who died when Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet fighter planes over Sakhalin Island on September 1, 1983. Welch died some sixteen months later, on January 6, 1985. While the period of its greatest influence has passed, the John Birch Society served as a training ground and inspiration for members of the New Right and Religious Right movements, and its concerns about a global conspiracy to create a tyrannical world government continue to be reflected in the rhetoric of the militia movement. The John Birch Society is still an active group, publishing a biweekly magazine called the New American and continuing its campaign against the United Nations. Thomas C. Ellington See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Conspiracy Theories; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; Militia Movement; Occupational Safety; Religious Right; Soviet Union and Russia; United Nations; Warren, Earl.
Further Reading Bertlet, Chip, and Matthew N. Lyons. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford, 2000.
John son, Ly ndon B . Epstein, Benjamin R., and Arnold Forster. The Radical Right: Report on the John Birch Society and Its Allies. New York: Random House, 1967. John Birch Society Web site. www.jbs.org. Schomp, Gerald. Birchism Was My Business. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Welch, Robert H.W., Jr. The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. Belmont, MA: John Birch Society, 1961. ———. The Life of John Birch. Boston: Western Islands, 1965.
J o h n s o n , Ly n d o n B . The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, from 1963 to 1969, has remained central to the culture wars of the past several decades because of the divisions that it fostered between liberals and conservatives. Liberals have applauded Johnson’s Great Society programs, including civil rights legislation, Medicare, and the War on Poverty as expanding the social, political, and economic opportunities available to racial and ethnic minorities and the poor. Conservatives have attacked Johnson’s domestic programs as a government boondoggle, an overreaching expansion of government interference in American life, and as causing more poverty rather than less. The conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s was in part a backlash against the legacies of the Johnson presidency. His foreign policy, particularly the conduct of the Vietnam War, has been the center of a long political and cultural debate. Liberals deplored his handling of the conflict in Southeast Asia, particularly the U.S. escalation in 1965. Conservatives supported the U.S. response, and many wish he had committed the United States and its military resources even more aggressively. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, near the Pedernales River in central Texas. Although his family was not poor, he grew up in an impoverished area, and that experience influenced his ideology. He attended the Southwest Texas State Teachers College (BS, 1920), and did some graduate study at Georgetown University (1935–1936). An avid supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Johnson served as state director of the National Youth Administration before his election to the House of Representatives in 1937. Johnson believed fundamentally in the beneficent powers of the federal government and as congressman became known as a champion of public works, reclamation, and public power programs. He narrowly won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948, rising to the position of minority leader and then majority leader, until his election as vice president on the Democratic Party ticket with John F. Kennedy in 1960. After Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, Johnson was elevated to the presidency. Johnson’s term in office reflected both his personality and his political ideology. Intending to “out-FDR FDR”
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and claiming to serve the vision of President Kennedy, he launched an impressive series of legislative initiatives early in his administration: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, Medicare, the Child Nutrition Act, the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His liberalism focused on two primary objectives: expanding opportunity for the most needy in America (the elderly, children, and minorities) and improving the quality of life for all citizens. These measures also greatly increased the role of the federal government in American society, leading to much controversy and backlash over the years. While his domestic programs, particularly his civil rights legislation and War on Poverty, exacerbated political and cultural divisions that endured for decades, it was his handling of policy in Vietnam that led to more serious discord at the time. In 1965, with the start of a massive bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder and the decision to vastly increase U.S. troop deployments, Johnson made a fateful national commitment to the war effort. By early 1968, at the peak of U.S. involvement, more than 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. Johnson’s escalation led to a growing antiwar movement at home. When North Vietnamese forces launched the massive Tet Offensive in January 1968, the American public was shocked. The protest movement gained significant momentum as many Americans became convinced that the war was unwinnable. The Vietnam War thus became the central issue of the 1968 presidential election, and the political toll on the president led him to announce on March 31 that he would not run for reelection. His domestic and foreign policy agendas under attack, Johnson left office in 1969. He died four years later, on January 22, 1973, at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. The presidency of Lyndon Johnson has remained controversial. Conservative presidents, particularly Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, have attacked and attempted to dismantle remaining Great Society and War on Poverty programs, while liberals have attempted to defend or expand them. America’s involvement in Vietnam was a divisive topic during the 2004 presidential campaign between John Kerry (a veteran of the war who became a prominent spokesman against it) and George W. Bush (who served in the Texas Air National Guard during the war but neither saw combat nor sided with the protesters). Johnson’s presidency and its legacy remain central to ongoing cultural debates about the role of government in American society and the role of the United States in global affairs. Robert Bauman
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See also: Freedom of Information Act; Great Society; Harrington, Michael; Health Care; Kennedy Family; McCarthy, Eugene; New Deal; Norquist, Grover; Reagan, Ronald; Vietnam War; War on Poverty; War Protesters; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Califano, Joseph A., Jr. The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: Signet, 1976. Schulman, Bruce J. Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Jorgensen, Christine Christine Jorgensen, born a male, became known as the first American to have sex reassignment surgery. The procedure, carried out in Denmark in 1952, was announced in the New York Daily News under a frontpage headline on December 1: “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty.” The story became a media sensation, treated at the time as a pornographic scandal. Critics were harsh toward Jorgensen when it became known that the surgery was not to “correct” a physical abnormality but to alter the body to conform to a psychological disposition. George William Jorgensen, Jr., the son of Danish immigrants, was born in New York City on May 20, 1926. As a “frail, tow-head, introverted” boy, in his own words, he harbored secret feelings of being female. In 1950, after clerking in the U.S. Army and launching his career as a photographer, Jorgensen traveled to Scandinavia to meet with gender-transformation pioneers. The Danish physician Christian Hamburger oversaw Jorgensen’s case, which involved psychiatric consultations, hormone replacement treatments, and reconstructive surgery. In March 1953, after Jorgensen’s return home, the Scandinavian Societies of Greater New York presented her with the “Woman of the Year” award for her “contribution to medical science.” However, when it became clear to the American press that Jorgensen was not born a hermaphrodite but was, as Newsweek reported that May, “a castrated male,” she was looked on as a transvestite and “homosexual deviant.” Criticism continued when she became a Las Vegas nightclub performer, dressing up as Wonder Woman and singing “I Enjoy Being a Woman.” Her road show was banned in Boston as well as on military bases. Among the politically and socially conservative, the name Jorgensen was used to denigrate liberals. Spiro T. Agnew castigated Senator Charles Goodell (R-NY), a leading figure of the liberal wing of the GOP, as “the
Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.” In 1956, the conservative newspaper columnist Walter Winchell suggested that “a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen.” Although twice engaged, Jorgensen never married; on one occasion she was denied a marriage license because she was legally classified as a male. Her autobiography, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (1967), sold nearly 450,000 copies and inspired a film, The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970). She was a frequent speaker on college campuses during the 1970s and early 1980s, championing the rights of transsexuals. The New York play Christine Jorgensen Reveals (2006) presented her views on human sexuality. Her death, from cancer on May 3, 1989, in San Clemente, California, was attributed in part to the female hormones she took. Andrew J. Waskey and Roger Chapman See also: Agnew, Spiro T.; McCloskey, Deirdre; Sexual Revolution; Transgender Movement.
Further Reading Califia, Patrick. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Cleis, 2003. Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Stein, Marc Robert. “Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet.” Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 136–65.
J u d i c i a l Wa r s The so-called judicial wars in postwar America have been characterized by political and ideological battles over the appointment and confirmation of federal judges, especially U.S. Supreme Court justices. At stake in these battles is who will preside as the final arbiters in the polarizing debates over contentious social issues of the culture wars. Underlying these conflicts is an ideological controversy over judicial review—the power of courts to nullify any action of federal and state governments deemed unconstitutional—and, more specifically, how the Constitution is interpreted in court rulings.
Controversial Rulings The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly served as a catalyst of the culture wars by ruling on controversial social issues such as the separation between church and state, school segregation, and privacy rights. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the justices reasoned that the First Amendment implies a “wall of separation” between government and religion. This was followed by Engel v. Vitale (1962), which banned organized school
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es of government and upholding precedents established by previous courts (unless a past ruling is regarded as representing judicial activism).
Selecting Judges
The appointment of conservative legal scholar and U.S. Circuit Court Judge Robert Bork (left) to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 was a flashpoint in the judicial wars. The Senate rejected Bork’s nomination on ideological grounds. (Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)
prayer. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawed racial segregation in schools by overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), by extension nullifying all state laws mandating Jim Crow. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the high court ruled that since the Bill of Rights implies the right to privacy, laws restricting the sale and use of contraceptives are unconstitutional. Similarly, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the justices legalized abortion, extending implied privacy rights to a pregnant woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a fetus to full term. Two decades later, in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court upheld sexual privacy for all individuals by declaring a state antisodomy law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s rolling back of religion in the public square, overturning of state laws pertaining to school segregation, and recognition of constitutional protections for abortion and gay rights served to inflame the culture wars with each major ruling. Equating judicial review on matters concerning controversial social issues to policymaking, conservatives argued that the courts should exercise “judicial restraint.” By using judicial review to trump the power of elected representatives, the Supreme Court was viewed by conservatives as “legislating from the bench” and therefore exercising “judicial activism.” Since no member of a court claims to be a “judicial activist,” the term is simply pejorative, used by social conservatives to suggest that liberal rulings represent a blatant misreading of the Constitution based purely on ideology. By advocating “judicial restraint,” an equally politicized term, conservatives insist that justices restrict the use of judicial review, deferring to the elected branch-
The political significance of the rhetorical debate between judicial activism and judicial restraint is plainly illustrated in the selection of new justices and judges. For example, during the 2004 presidential debates against Democratic challenger John Kerry, Republican incumbent George W. Bush stated, “Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution. . . . And that’s the kind of judge I’m going to put on there. I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law.” In the same debate, Bush also indicated that he “would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.” “Strict interpretation” is a highly charged term that alludes to a nuanced dispute regarding the ways in which Supreme Court justices interpret the meaning of the Constitution. “Strict constructionists” are said to interpret the Constitution strictly according to the words used in the document and to the original intent of the framers. By contrast, advocates of the “living Constitution” approach, also known as “loose constructionist,” argue that the Constitution is a living document and that its interpretation should be flexible enough to consider changes in society. Proponents of this judicial philosophy seek to clarify the principles that underlie the text, rather than limiting interpretations to a literal reading of the text itself. Justices of the living Constitution approach contend that the framers could not possibly have foreseen the future and that the document must be understood within the context in which it is applied. Failure to do that, they maintain, restricts the ability of justices to arrive at fair and just decisions and stands as a roadblock to social progress. For example, advocates claim that only the living Constitution approach allowed the Supreme Court to act as a protector of minority rights in the Brown decision and others. The confrontation over judicial philosophy, pitting strict constructionists against advocates of a living Constitution, was spurred by the aforementioned privacy rights cases. Specifically, the Supreme Court relied on the right to privacy to justify contentious decisions on social issues despite the absence of language in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that explicitly guarantees such a right. Social conservatives who disagreed with the constitutional protection of reproduction, abortion, and gay rights took issue with the loose constructionist approach of the Court, arguing that the justices improperly construed the right to privacy itself. The competing approaches to jurisprudence, and their implications for real cases and real social issues,
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thus have made the decision of who gets to sit on the bench highly charged and often politically polarizing. Supreme Court justices and federal court judges are not elected but appointed for life after being nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The confirmation process is no longer strictly a matter of determining whether or not an individual appointee is professionally qualified to serve. Instead, much time and effort is devoted to ascertaining his or her judicial philosophy. Such was the case in 1987 with the controversial rejection of Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee, the conservative U.S. Circuit Court judge Robert Bork, by a Democratic Senate majority. Bork’s Democratic opponents publicly portrayed him as a dangerous extremist who would not protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people. Waged like a political campaign, the attack on Bork involved television advertisements and the efforts of well-financed special-interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The confirmation hearings of conservative Clarence Thomas, nominated in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush from the same federal appeals court as Bork, were likewise highly politicized. Rather than focus on Thomas’s qualifications, those who opposed his nomination emphasized his judicial philosophy. In addition, much attention was focused on the allegation that he had sexually harassed a former colleague, law school professor Anita Hill. Unlike Bork, Thomas won Senate confirmation, if by one of the narrowest margins in U.S. history.
The “Nuclear Option” The judicial wars heated up again in early 2005 with the recognition that President George W. Bush’s reelection would likely place him in a position to nominate at least one Supreme Court justice. At the time, Bush nominated a handful of controversial judges for federal appeals court positions, which Senate Republicans and Democrats treated as test cases to determine how much ground the other party was willing to give in the anticipated Supreme Court battle. Although the Republicans held a 55–45 majority over Democrats (including one Independent), the minority party effectively used the filibuster to prevent a floor vote on Bush’s nominees. From the Democratic perspective, this was fair recompense for Republicans who had blocked many of President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees. With Bush in the White House, however, Republicans were demanding an up-or-down vote on the president’s nominees, knowing full well that they would win in such a case. To force just such an outcome, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) threatened to use the “nuclear
option,” which would effectively change a 150-year-old rule of the Senate by eliminating the option to filibuster floor votes on judicial nominees. Like previous clashes over the confirmations of Bork and Thomas, the battle over the filibuster and the nuclear option was fought with all the publicity and ferocity of a political campaign. Supported by liberal groups such as the Alliance for Justice, People for the American Way, and MoveOn. org, the Democrats held their ground, arguing that the Republicans sought to change the rules in the middle of the game. The GOP, for its part, used the opportunity to remind socially conservative supporters what was at stake in the contest—it was not just a procedural struggle, they argued, but a moral one. Tony Perkins’s Family Research Council and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family sought to mobilize public support with a series of events called “Justice Sunday,” organized by the Religious Right for the purpose of “stopping the filibuster against people of faith” (i.e., people against abortion). Ultimately, a bipartisan group of moderate senators, the so-called Gang of 14, formed to defuse the situation with a compromise: the Senate would not change its rules, and judicial nominees would not be filibustered, except under “extraordinary circumstances.” This outcome established the ground rules for two impending confirmation battles over Supreme Court nominees, brought about by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (announced on July 1, 2005) and the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist (on September 3, 2005). The judicial wars raged on during the subsequent confirmation hearings of Bush’s nominees for chief justice, John Roberts, and associate justice, Samuel Alito. While both were ultimately confirmed, the former in September 2005 and the latter in January 2006, their hearings were marked by the kind (if not the intensity) of politicization and social polarization witnessed in the cases of Bork and Thomas. NARAL Pro-Choice America financed a controversial television advertisement falsely alleging that Roberts had “filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.” On the other side, Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association gathered signatures for a petition to pressure the Senate into confirming Roberts with an up-or-down vote. Likewise, Alito’s confirmation was passionately and publicly supported by such groups as Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer’s American Values Coalition, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition of America, and other organizations representing the socially conservative Religious Right. The ACLU formally opposed Alito’s confirmation and was joined by liberal groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and People for the American Way. Richard Gibbons Holtzman
Judic ial Wars See also: Abortion; American Civil Liberties Union; Birth Control; Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Christian Coalition; Dobson, James; Douglas, William O.; Gun Control; Hill, Anita; Privacy Rights; Religious Right; Roe v. Wade (1973); School Prayer; Sodomy Laws; Thomas, Clarence; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Bronner, Ethan. Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America. New York: Union Square Press, 2007.
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Epstein, Lee, and Jeffrey Segal. Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Greenburg, Jan Crawford. Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court. New York: Penguin Press, 2007. Wittes, Benjamin. Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
K a c z y n s k i , Te d See Unabomber.
Ke n n e d y Fa m i l y The most prominent, influential, and controversial political family in modern U.S. history, the Kennedys of Massachusetts have been increasingly associated with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party since the end of World War II. The best-known members of the family are the three brothers: John Kennedy, U.S. senator from Massachusetts and president of the United States; Robert, U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from New York; and Edward, longtime U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Revered by some as America’s “royal family” and a quintessential American success story, they have been disparaged by others as imperious, corrupt, and hypocritical. Whatever one thinks of the Kennedys, few can deny that they have left an indelible, albeit polarizing, mark on postwar America. The family’s roots in America go back to the midnineteenth century, but the driving force in the emergence of the Kennedy dynasty in the twentieth century was family patriarch Joseph Patrick “Joe” Kennedy. Born in Boston in 1888, Kennedy possessed a business acumen exceeded only by his desire for a career in politics. After amassing a fortune through hard work, shrewd investments, and aggressive—though at the time, legal— manipulations of equities markets, Kennedy hoped to use his wealth and the network of connections he had forged with the nation’s top power brokers to facilitate an entry into politics. He began well, securing several high-level appointments in the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. His ambitions were thwarted, however, when, as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, he provoked a firestorm of criticism by expressing support for the appeasement of Hitler and then issuing defeatist proclamations about England. His political viability diminished, Kennedy projected his aspirations for higher office onto his sons.
JFK When Kennedy’s oldest son, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., was killed in service during World War II, the mantle of heir apparent was shifted to the next oldest son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917, John graduated from Harvard (BA, government, 1940). During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy (1941–1945), commanding the ill-fated PT-109, which sank after being rammed by a Japanese
destroyer in the South Pacific. Kennedy’s exploits in saving his crew made him a war hero. Returning to Massachusetts after the war, Kennedy began his political career. With Joe Kennedy acting as a strategist and chief financier—producing the first of a litany of accusations that the family was parlaying its fortune to buy political power—JFK was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946. After three undistinguished terms in Congress (1947–1953), Kennedy served two terms in the Senate (1953–1960), where a top priority was elevating his national profile in preparation for a presidential run. Urged on by his father, Kennedy declared his candidacy in 1960 and went on to eke out a razor-thin victory over his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon. The triumph was diminished, however, by whispers of vote buying and fixing funded by Joe Kennedy. Kennedy’s record of accomplishment as president was decidedly mixed. He is credited with securing a substantial tax cut that stimulated economic growth; he avoided nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962; he set the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon; he backed legislation that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and he established the Peace Corps in 1961. However, he also presided over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the failed attempt in April 1961 to topple the Cuban government of Fidel Castro; he deepened America’s involvement in Vietnam; he was slow to respond to the burgeoning civil rights movement; and he did nothing to stop the Soviets from constructing the Berlin Wall. Still, disputes over the Kennedy legacy transcend policy matters. At his inauguration in January 1961, Kennedy delivered what is widely regarded as one of the most eloquent inaugural addresses in American history. A generation of Americans was said to have been inspired to heed the call to public service when Kennedy declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The uplifting idealism of the speech, which set the tone for his administration, was complemented by the carefully cultivated image of a First Family that was simultaneously stylish, urbane, and charming. Such impressions, contrasted with the shocking spectacle of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, helped give rise to an association of the Kennedy era with the legend of Camelot. Given the tenacity of this myth, it is not surprising that, at least in popular polls, JFK consistently ranks among the country’s top presidents. More damning were revelations that emerged after Kennedy’s death that he had conducted numerous extramarital affairs while in office, including occasional trysts in the White House itself. One relationship is said to have involved Judith Campbell Exner, simultaneously linked to Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, inviting speculation 292
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that Kennedy’s promiscuity may have recklessly exposed him to mob blackmail or even led to his death. Plainly, Kennedy’s private life stood in marked contrast to his public image as a family man. Nor did the public know about the health issues that plagued him throughout his presidency, which, like his liaisons, were carefully concealed. This penchant for secrecy and the glaring disparity between the wholesome public image and the tawdry private affairs of John Kennedy have provided significant fodder for critics of the Kennedy family.
RFK Robert Francis Kennedy, best known as Bobby, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on November 20, 1925. After brief service in the U.S. Navy immediately after World War II, he studied at Harvard (BA, government, 1948) and the University of Virginia (LLB, 1951). During the 1950s, he held several minor posts in the federal government, including counsel to the infamous Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Later, as chief counsel of the Senate Labor “Rackets Committee“ (1957–1959), he garnered national attention by investigating ties between organized crime and the labor movement. Kennedy also served as manager of his brother’s 1952 Senate and 1960 presidential campaigns, in which capacity he solidified his reputation as a ruthless competitor. When his brother was elected president, Robert, at his father’s insistence, was named U.S. attorney general. The appointment drew charges of nepotism, but Kennedy proved to be a remarkably adept administrator, earning considerable praise for his stewardship of the Justice Department. In addition, Robert was John’s closest adviser, counseling him on every significant issue. He is regarded as an important restraining influence during the Cuban Missile Crisis and has been praised for having urged his brother, however belatedly, to move more aggressively on the issue of civil rights. At the same time, he has been criticized for scheming to find a way to overthrow Castro (apparently even considering assassination), for authorizing FBI wiretaps of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and for covering his brother’s marital indiscretions. Following John Kennedy’s assassination, Bobby continued as attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson for another year, before running for a seat in the U.S. Senate from New York in 1964. He defeated the Republican incumbent, Kenneth Keating, who famously accused Kennedy of being a carpetbagger. As a senator, Kennedy focused increasingly on the plight of the poor and the marginalized in society, concerns that would form the cornerstone of his brief run for the presidency in 1968. As with his senatorial campaign, however, controversy surrounded Kennedy’s White House bid. He was accused of opportunism for delaying his entry into the race until the New Hampshire primary revealed the vulnerabilities
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of President Johnson. Moments after claiming victory in the California primary, Kennedy was shot by Palestinianborn Sirhan Sirhan, who was unhappy with Kennedy’s support for Israel. He died on June 6, 1968.
Ted The youngest of the three famous brothers, Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy, was born in Boston on February 22, 1932. He attended Harvard but was expelled in 1951 for cheating. He served two years in the U.S. Army (1951–1953) before being readmitted to Harvard, from which he eventually graduated (BA, government, 1956); he went on to earn a law degree from the University of Virginia (LLB, 1959). In 1962, Kennedy ran in a special election to fill the Senate seat his brother John had vacated, winning what would be the first of many landslide victories. He died of brain cancer on August 15, 2009, after being elected to eight full terms. Kennedy was seen by supporters and critics as the great liberal lion of the Senate, advocating stronger government policies in areas such as health care, education, immigration reform, gun control, and civil rights. At the same time, his embrace of strong government involvement in the economy and society earned him the scorn of conservatives. At times, Kennedy was also sharply criticized in Massachusetts, as during the controversy over busing in Boston schools in the 1970s; at one point, he was hounded by a mob because of his support for busing. In 1980, Kennedy challenged the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He ran what was widely seen as an ineffective and lackluster campaign, and he continued to be dogged by a notorious incident that took place in the summer of 1969 at Chappaquiddick Island, on Martha’s Vineyard. A young female aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, who was riding in the car that Kennedy was driving after a party, died after the car went off a bridge and overturned into the water. Kennedy managed to get out of the car; Kopechne did not. Kennedy insisted that he attempted in vain to retrieve Kopechne, but he eventually left the scene and waited until the next morning to report the incident. Questions about Kennedy’s conduct in the matter plagued him thereafter. Kennedy also earned praise and condemnation for his role in the highly contentious confirmation hearings on Robert Bork, who had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. The nomination was widely praised by conservatives, but Kennedy led the liberal charge in opposition, famously warning that if Bork was seated on the high court, the country would revert to the days of segregation, back-alley abortions, and unfettered police powers. Ultimately, Bork was rejected by the Senate, earning Kennedy the enduring enmity of conservatives. Many
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court watchers have traced the increasingly contentious nature of confirmation hearings back to this episode. Despite the controversies, even the critics of Ted Kennedy concede that he was an effective dealmaker. Some of his great legislative triumphs came about as a result of his ability to reach across the aisle and work with ideological adversaries, sometimes to the chagrin of both his allies and his enemies. Significantly, Time magazine in 2006 named Kennedy as one of “America’s Ten Best Senators.” In June 2008, Ted Kennedy underwent surgery to combat an aggressive form of brain cancer (malignant glioma).
Lauded and Criticized As a family, the Kennedys have been lauded for their commitment to public service, their instinctive defense of working-class interests, and their charitable work on behalf of people with disabilities, most notably through the creation of and support for the Special Olympics. Criticism of the Kennedys has centered on the intense clannishness of the family, the perception that family members play according to their own set of rules, and that family money can always be used to skirt the law. Some have also disparaged what they call the Kennedy “political machine” and its ruthless pursuit of power, while others have dismissed the family as “limousine liberals” who are out of touch with those whose interests they champion. While the luster of the Kennedy name may have diminished somewhat in the past quarter century, the family remains a source of fascination and controversy for Americans, as evidenced by the publicity surrounding the 1991 trial and acquittal of one of Ted’s nephews, William Kennedy Smith, for rape; by the outpouring of sympathy at the passing of John’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in 1994; and by the response to the tragic death of their son, John Jr., in the 1999 crash of a plane that he was piloting. Several next-generation Kennedys have served in high levels of government, among them Joseph Kennedy, II, a son of RFK who was elected to six terms in Congress from Massachusetts (1987–1998); Patrick Kennedy, the son of Ted Kennedy, who first won election as a congressman (1995–) from Rhode Island at age twenty-one; and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who served as lieutenant governor of Maryland (1995–2003). The family and its political influence was cast into light again during the 2008 Democratic primary season, when Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and Caroline Kennedy (the daughter of John F. Kennedy) endorsed and campaigned on behalf of Senator Barack Obama; Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and other members of the extended clan voiced support for the nomination of Senator Hillary Clinton. It remained clear that, regardless of differences in the family and regardless of how public sentiment about the family may shift, the Kennedys are likely to retain an active role in American
politics—and remain a source of controversy—for many years to come. Sven Dubie See also: Busing, School; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Conspiracy Theories; Cuba; Democratic Party; Education Reform; Gun Control; Health Care; Hoover, J. Edgar; Israel; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Judicial Wars; Soviet Union and Russia; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Clymer, Adam. Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz. The Kennedys: An American Drama. New York: Summit Books, 1984. Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. Hersh, Seymour M. The Dark Side of Camelot. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. Palermo, Joseph A. Robert F. Kennedy and the Death of American Idealism. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. Schwarz, Ted. Joseph P. Kennedy: The Mogul, the Mob, the Statesman, and the Making of an American Myth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Strauss, Steven D. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Kennedys. Indianapolis, IN: Macmillan USA, 2000.
Ke r o u a c , J a c k Novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, a central figure in the Beat Generation of writers of the 1950s, was a progenitor of the political and social counterculture of the next decade. His spontaneous, confessional writings, many of them composed under the influence of amphetamines, offered an alternative vision to the social conformity of the postwar era, depicting young people purposely living on the margins of society in search of their own sense of authenticity through adventurous travel, sexual freedom, recreational drug usage, self-expression, and spiritual quest. The son of working-class French Canadians, JeanLouis Lebris de Kérouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. After graduating from the Horace Mann Preparatory School (1940) in New York City, he attended Columbia University on a football scholarship (1940–1942). Although a broken leg and a dispute with the coach ended his sports career at Columbia, and boredom with the curriculum compelled him to drop out, Kerouac worked on crafting his writing in fellowship with the budding poet Allen Ginsberg and future novelist William S. Burroughs. During World War II, Kerouac served a stint with the U.S. Merchant Marine (1942–1943). He also joined the U.S. Naval Air Force, but received a psychiatric discharge after only three months of active duty (1943).
Ker r y, John
The author of two dozen books—including The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy: A Love Story (1959), Big Sur (1962), and Desolation Angels (1965)—Kerouac sought to write with the same improvisational energy found in the music of the jazz player Charlie Parker, his artistic hero. The novel that made Kerouac an overnight success was On the Road, which he typed on a roll of teletype paper in April 1951. The novel is a fictionalized travel narrative, with the feel of jazz, of two young men—Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady) and his alter ego, Sal Paradise (based on Kerouac)—who drive across the United States in a speeding sedan in search of “kicks.” A favorable review in the New York Times gave the novel a boost, but most other reviewers were negative. The popular appeal of On the Road coincided with the period’s cinematic portrayals of alienated youth, as by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Kerouac was a shy rebel who valued individual freedom and shared the artistic sensitivities of the poet Walt Whitman and novelist Thomas Wolfe. Although elements of his writings are hedonistic, a strand of otherworldliness also can be found, some of it based on the haunting memory of the death of his older brother, Gerard, when Jack was four years old. Kerouac, while maintaining a nominal Roman Catholic identity, added Buddhist elements into his writings. He is credited with coining the term “Beat,” conjuring the concept of beatitude, the feeling of being beat and empty, and an individual open to new experiences. Herb Caen, the San Francisco Examiner humor columnist, termed the movement “beatnik” because he thought it was as “far out” as Sputnik, the Soviet satellite. In the essay “The White Negro” (1957), Norman Mailer perpetuated the sinister stereotype of the Beat as a violent antihero hipster. Kerouac took offense at this negative imagery, arguing that Beats, seeking joy, peace, and harmony, were “basically a religious generation.” Unconvinced, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1961 rated beatniks and their lifestyle as one of the top three threats to American society. The critics of Kerouac have been legion over the years. Novelist Truman Capote scoffed at On the Road, famously dismissing it as mere “type writing.” Norman Podhoretz, in Doings and Undoings (1964), summarized Kerouac’s overall message as “Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently.” William F. Buckley, Jr., who in 1968 had Kerouac as a guest on his television interview show Firing Line, was simultaneously baffled and disgusted by the author, who voiced opposition to the Vietnam War and regarded hippies as “good kids,” yet expressed support for U.S. troops and said he was against communism. Rock musician Natalie Merchant, when she recorded with the band 10,000 Maniacs, belittled the Beat novelist in the single “Hey, Jack Kerouac” (1987), which depicts Kerouac as a boy who never grew up. Writing disparagingly
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of the town of Lowell for its 1988 dedication of a park in Kerouac’s memory, the columnist George F. Will reported it as “one more sign that America is making a cottage industry out of recycled radicalisms.” Ironically, Kerouac was in some respects politically conservative; he enjoyed reading the National Review. Although never an activist, he once expressed support for the three-time presidential candidate Robert A. Taft, otherwise known as “Mr. Republican.” To the chagrin of his Beat friends, Kerouac also defended McCarthyism. He and the LSD guru Timothy Leary shared a mutual loathing due to ideological differences. And once, during a party, Kerouac took an American flag out of the hands of Allen Ginsberg, who he thought was treating it with disrespect. The novelist-poet did not care to bow before authority, yet was very much a nationalist. Kerouac’s personal life, prominently featured in his writings, was characterized by excessive drinking, drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity, including homosexual liaisons; this, along with his overall nonconformist message, made him an easy target of the right wing. Kerouac died on October 21, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, from a hemorrhage related to his alcoholism. Roger Chapman See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Cold War; Counterculture; Dean, James; Ginsberg, Allen; Hoover, J. Edgar; Leary, Timothy; Mailer, Norman; McCarthyism; National Review; Pod horetz, Norman; Sexual Revolution; Taft, Robert A.; Vietnam War; Will, George.
Further Reading Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Kauffman, Bill. America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. Kerouac, Jack. “The Origins of the Beat Movement.” Playboy, June 1959. Maher, Paul, Jr. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2004. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Ke r r y, J o h n A U.S. Senator from Massachusetts since 1985, Vietnam War veteran, and prominent antiwar activist upon his return home, John Kerry was the 2004 Democratic nominee for president of the United States, losing a close election to incumbent George W. Bush. Although President Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes, to Kerry’s 48 percent and 252 electoral votes, pundits have argued over whether or not “values voters” were the ones who decided the outcome. Some have charged that in Ohio (where Bush won by
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2 percent of the popular vote) election “irregularities” (including faulty electronic voting machines) tipped the election to Bush. John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943, in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in Massachusetts. Raised in a Catholic family—his father a Foreign Service officer and government attorney—Kerry spent part of his youth in Europe and attended prestigious preparatory schools in New England. After graduating from Yale University (BA, 1966), he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy (1966–1970), including two years in Vietnam. Upon his discharge, Kerry twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress (1970 and 1972) and in 1971 helped organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Following graduation from law school at Boston College (JD, 1976), he served as an assistant district attorney of Middlesex County in Massachusetts (1976–1979) and was a partner in a two-man private law firm (1979–1982). He was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 (under Governor Michael Dukakis) and two years later won a U.S. Senate seat in the same state. He won reelection to the Senate in 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry charged Bush with incompetence as commander in chief in the War on Terror, stating that the president had diverted military resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, “outsourced” the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Afghan forces, and thereby enabled the mastermind of the September 11 attacks to bribe his way on the battlefield at Tora Bora and escape a military dragnet. Bush retorted that Senator Kerry had authorized the president to go to war against Iraq. Throughout the contest, Bush presented himself as a leader guided by principles and genuine conviction while contrasting Kerry as a “waffler.” As he attacked Kerry’s “inconsistent” voting record, Bush employed a statement he often used when referring to bin Laden: “He can run, but he cannot hide.” In the course of the campaign, Kerry attempted to showcase his military service in Vietnam and to contrast it with Bush, who some believe joined the Air National Guard to avoid war service. Although personal connections could have kept him out of the war, Kerry volunteered for active duty and even requested an assignment to Vietnam. From November 1968 to March 1969, he was in charge of a swift boat patrolling rivers in enemy territory. He sustained combat injuries and was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. After completing his active duty, Kerry helped organize the VVAW and quickly became a leader of the growing antiwar movement at home. On April 22, 1971, he became the first Vietnam veteran to testify against the war before Congress, arguing that the conflict was a civil war that posed no threat to U.S. national security. Most controversially, he highlighted a study that reported that some American soldiers had committed war crimes.
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry greets crewmates of his Vietnam War swift boat during the party convention in 2004. Political opponents accused Kerry of distorting his war record—a campaign smear tactic that came to be called “swiftboating.” (Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images)
Later, Kerry worked with his Senate colleague and fellow Vietnam veteran John McCain (R-AZ) to investigate missing soldiers in Vietnam and to establish diplomatic relations with that country. During the 2004 campaign, however, Kerry came under attack by a partisan group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that cast aspersions on the senator’s war record and vilified him as unpatriotic because of his past activity with the VVAW. The attack, which consisted of ruthless television ads, reopened the bitterness of the Vietnam War era and was a key factor in Kerry’s defeat for president. From it came the term for a new kind of political smear, called “swiftboating.” The 2004 presidential race was decided in Ohio where so-called values voters came out in great numbers to approve Issue 1, a ballot measure authorizing an amendment to the state constitution that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The issue was triggered by a 2003 Massachusetts court ruling that legalized gay marriage due to the vagueness of that state’s constitution. One particular exit poll in Ohio reported that 22 percent of the voters rated “moral values” as their number one political concern, and voters against same-sex marriage were viewed as far more likely to support Bush over Kerry. Adding to the controversy were reports of several balloting issues in Ohio, including a shortage of voting machines in highly Democratic precincts, malfunctioning machines, and exit polls that were inconsistent with the official tally. Abraham D. Lavender and Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Democratic Party; Dukakis, Michael; McCain, John; Republican Party; Same-Sex Marriage; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam War.
Kevork ian, Jack
Further Reading Freeman, Steven F. Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Kranish, Michael, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton. John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. O’Neill, John E., and Jerome L. Corsi. Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004. Sabato, Larry J., ed. Divided States of America: The Slash and Burn Politics of the 2004 Presidential Election. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
Kevo r k i a n , J a c k A self-described “obitiatrist” (practitioner of medical killing), retired pathologist Jack Kevorkian forced a national debate during the 1990s on the issues of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in general. Offering the terminally ill a “painless, dignified alternative” to drawn-out dying, Kevorkian by his own count helped 130 people commit suicide. In March 1999, a Michigan jury found him guilty of seconddegree murder, and he received a prison sentence of 10–25 years. Kevorkian was paroled in June 2007 after pledging that he would no longer engage in assisted suicide or euthanasia. The son of Armenian refugees from Turkey, Kevorkian was born on May 26, 1928, in Pontiac, Michigan. He later became a pathologist after earning degrees from the University of Michigan (BS, 1949; MD, 1952). During his residency, Kevorkian acquired the nickname “Doctor Death” for his research in photographing the retinas of dying patients. He also stirred controversy by advocating medical experimentation on death-row inmates. Kevorkian served as a U.S. Army medical officer in Korea and Colorado (1953–1955) and later worked at hospitals in Michigan and California. Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991 because of his activities involving assisted suicide, and California followed suit in 1993. Kevorkian is the author of several books, including Medical Research and the Death Penalty (1960) and Prescription-Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death (1991). In 1994, the American Humanist Association presented him with its Hero Award. In 1988, Kevorkian invented a device called the Thantron (later renamed the Mercitron), a “self-execution machine” in which the “patient” pulls a switch to administer fatal drugs. A second machine used carbon monoxide. Kevorkian envisioned a society in which suicide clinics equipped with death machines would be legally sanctioned. Kevorkian’s first case of assisted suicide occurred in June 1991 and involved a fifty-fouryear-old woman from Oregon named Janet Adkins, who had Alzheimer’s disease. The event took place in the
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back of a Volkswagen van at a public park in Michigan. More deaths followed, prompting Michigan in 1992 to pass its first law making assisted suicide a felony offense. Kevorkian was five times tried in court, the first four cases ending in three acquittals and one mistrial. Opponents of physician-assisted suicide argue that the role of the doctor is to relieve the patient’s suffering, not to kill or assist in killing. Critics further argue that physician-assisted suicide goes beyond passive euthanasia (based on the withdrawing or withholding of drugs or technology) to active euthanasia (based on the utilizing of drugs or technology). They argue that hospice care, which helps manage pain, is a humane alternative to euthanasia. Concerns have also been raised that legalizing euthanasia will make the terminally ill feel that it is their duty to hasten their own death. From Kevorkian’s perspective, attorneys and medical professionals have opposed his efforts out of financial motives, fearing that their services could be bypassed. Critics have questioned Kevorkian’s screening process, as he seldom consulted with the patient’s physician or sought a second opinion. A study by the medical examiner of Oakland County in Michigan found that of fifty-three autopsies of people who had died with Kevorkian’s help, only fourteen had been terminally ill or less than eight months away from dying. In a 1992 speech before the National Press Club, Kevorkian vaguely defined terminal illness as “any disease that curtails life even for a day.” In 1993, after rummaging through Kevorkian’s trash, an activist with the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue announced the uncovering of a written document indicating, in at least one instance, that Kevorkian had ignored a patient’s change of mind about committing suicide. In September 1998, Kevorkian presided over the death of fifty-two-year-old Thomas Youk, who had been ailing with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). On November 22, 1998, portions of a videotape of the incident were aired in a CBS 60 Minutes broadcast, which attracted 22 million viewers. Kevorkian had sent the tape to CBS weeks after Michigan voters had overwhelmingly rejected Proposal B, which would have legalized physician-assisted suicide. The measure had been opposed by a coalition comprising the state medical society, hospice workers, the Catholic Church, and rightto-life groups. During the broadcast, Kevorkian taunted Michigan authorities to indict him. This proved to be his undoing because the videotape showed Kevorkian, not the patient, administering a fatal drug—crossing the line from assisted suicide to homicide. (Kevorkian has long argued that people suffering from degenerative muscle and nerve disorders need help in killing themselves because of the inability to swallow or manipulate a switch.) Kevorkian’s last trial attracted supporters and detractors. Serving as his own defense counsel, Kevorkian compared himself to civil rights pioneers Dr. Martin
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Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. The prosecution called him “a medical hit man.” The jury, after twelve hours of deliberation, found him guilty of second-degree murder. “This trial was not about the political or moral correctness of euthanasia,” said the judge at sentencing. “It was about you, sir. It was about lawlessness.” After his release from prison, an editorial in the New York Times (June 5, 2007) castigated the “deluded and unrepentant” Kevorkian for his “cavalier, indeed reckless approach” to euthanasia. “If his antics provided anything of value,” the editorial continued, “it was a reminder of how much terminally ill patients can suffer and of the need for sane and humane laws allowing carefully regulated assisted suicides.” By way of example, the article pointed to Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (1997), which allows terminally ill individuals to obtain prescriptions for lethal drugs for ending their lives. The Oregon law requires two physicians to document that the patient is sane and has only six months to live. From 1998 to 2006, a total of 292 individuals, mostly cancer patients, died under the program. Of the other states, forty-four have criminalized assisted suicide while five others have not. In March 2008, Kevorkian announced his candidacy for Congress as an independent candidate, declaring that if elected he would promote the Ninth Amendment and his view that it allows assisted suicide. In the general election, he placed third in a five-way contest, receiving 3 percent of the vote as an independent. Roger Chapman See also: Catholic Church; New York Times, The; Not Dead Yet; Operation Rescue; Right to Die.
Further Reading Betzold, Michael. Appointment with Doctor Death. Troy, MI: Momentum Books, 1993. Kevorkian, Jack. Prescription-Medicide: The Goodness of a Planned Death. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. Marker, Rita, and Kathi Hamlon. “Prisoner Number 284797.” Human Life Review 25:3 (Summer 1999): 65–76. Nicole, Neal, and Harry Wylie. Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s Life and the Battle to Legalize Euthanasia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press / Terrace Books, 2006. Zucker, Marjorie B., ed. The Right to Die Debate: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.
Keye s , A l a n A politically conservative African-American activist, public speaker, and frequent candidate for public office, Alan Keyes has participated in the American culture wars by championing his brand of “moral populism.”
Identifying himself as pro-life and pro-family, he has attributed a wide array of social ills such as poverty, crime, and out-of-wedlock births to the demise of “the marriage-based, two-parent family.” Alan Lee Keyes was born August 7, 1950, in New York City and raised in a Roman Catholic family headed by a career army sergeant. He attended Harvard University (BA, 1972; PhD, 1979), having left Cornell University over a death threat in response to his criticism of a campus protest led by black students. Along the way, he was mentored by conservative icon Allan Bloom, and at Harvard he befriended fellow graduate student and future neoconservative William Kristol. Keyes worked for the U.S. State Department (1971–1987), including a stint as a U.S. representative to the United Nations Economic and Security Council (1983–1985). During this time, he defended President Ronald Reagan’s refusal to impose economic sanctions against South Africa for its apartheid system. After leaving the federal government, Keyes was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (1987–1989) and hosted the radio program America’s Wake-Up Call: The Alan Keyes Show on WCBM Radio in Baltimore (1994–2000) and the MSNBC television program Alan Keyes is Making Sense (2002). Known for his lively campaign rhetoric as a Republican candidate for various offices, Keyes has lost three U.S. Senate races (in Maryland, 1988 and 1992; and in Illinois, 2004) and two presidential primaries (1996 and 2000). Running for office has provided him with a pulpit for expressing a conservative message, including attacks on abortion, the welfare system, affirmative action, income tax, government-run Social Security, universal health care, same-sex marriage, gun control, judicial activism, the United Nations, and certain global trade agreements. He has publicly decried homosexuality as “selfish hedonism”—an assertion reaffirmed during his 2004 Illinois campaign in reference to Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney. Following the latter statement, Keyes’s daughter Maya announced that she, too, was a lesbian and that this revelation had created a rift between daughter and parents. Keyes’s admirers, especially members of the Religious Right, express appreciation for his directness in linking a religious moral perspective to the nature and duties of the U.S. government. Detractors characterize his opinions as ideologically extreme and ethically questionable. Mark L. Dubois See also: Abortion; Affirmative Action; Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Gun Control; Health Care; Lesbians; Multicultural Conservatism; Outing; Republican Party; SameSex Marriage; Social Security; Tax Reform; United Nations; Welfare Reform.
K ing , Mar tin Luther, Jr.
Further Reading “He’s the Best-Educated Man in the GOP: But Alan Keyes Gets no Respect.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 26 (Winter 1999): 39. “The Higher Education of Alan Keyes: A Lonely Black Man in the Party of Lincoln.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 11 (Spring 1996): 66–67. Keyes, Alan L. Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America. New York: William Morrow, 1995. ———. Our Character, Our Future: Reclaiming America’s Moral Destiny. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996.
King, Billie Jean One of the most successful and popular professional tennis players in the history of the sport—the holder of seventy-one singles titles—Billie Jean King used her celebrity to advocate equality for women and men in earnings and respect, not only in tennis but in other careers as well. Perhaps her most well-known victory in this regard was achieved in 1973 when she defeated Bobby Riggs in their highly publicized “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition match. Born Billie Jean Moffitt on November 22, 1943, in Long Beach, California, she showed early promise as an athlete, participating in a variety of male-dominated sports, including football and baseball. During adolescence, however, she began to focus exclusively on tennis. Her first major tennis success came in 1961, when she teamed up with Karen Hantze to win the doubles championship at Wimbledon. In 1966, she won her first Wimbledon singles title and was ranked first in the world. Also in 1966, she married law student Larry King. She took her husband’s name but, unlike many women in the 1960s, chose not to abandon her career. In 1968, Billie Jean King turned professional, but the transition did not bring instant riches. Female athletes earned much less money than their male counterparts, and King protested the inequality. In 1972, after receiving $15,000 less than her male counterpart for winning the U.S. Open, King demanded that the prize money be made equal by the next year, or she would not play. During the course of the following season, she helped establish the Women’s Tennis Association, a player’s union. And indeed, the U.S. Open became the first major tournament to offer equal prize money to men and women. The “Battle of the Sexes,” held at the Houston Astrodome on September 23, 1973, was perhaps the most famous tennis match of King’s career. She accepted the challenge to play the 1939 Wimbledon men’s singles champion Bobby Riggs, then fifty-four, who openly bragged that he was a “male chauvinist pig” and stated, “Women belong in the bedroom and kitchen, in that order.” Leading up to the best-of-five-sets match, Riggs publicly taunted King, arguing that a female tennis
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player of her stature could never defeat him. In accepting the challenge, King declared it an important battle in the war for women’s equality. The televised match was at the time the most watched tennis event in history, with 90 million viewers. King defeated Riggs 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, taking the $100,000 purse and declaring a momentous victory for gender equality. During that memorable year, King had an extramarital affair with Marilyn Barnett, who eight years later outed the tennis star as a lesbian in an unsuccessful palimony suit. In time, King grew comfortable being identified as a lesbian and spoke of it publicly. In a biographical HBO television documentary, Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer (2006), King and her companion of many years, Ilana Kloss, openly discuss their relationship. In August 2006, the U.S. Tennis Association named its public tennis complex in Flushing, New York, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Margaret Barrett See also: Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Lesbians; Outing.
Further Reading King, Billie Jean, and Frank Deford. Billie Jean. New York: Viking, 1982. Roberts, Selena. A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game. New York: Crown, 2005.
K i n g , M a r t i n L u t h e r, J r. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was the most influential leader of the civil rights movement that culminated in the 1960s with the passage of sweeping federal laws against racial discrimination. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1964) for his insistence on nonviolent protest and his calls for interracial harmony, he was considered by some an increasingly radical activist against racism, poverty, slums, and the war in Vietnam. More militant groups, however, criticized King for not going far enough. Born on January 20, 1929, to middle-class AfricanAmerican parents in Atlanta, King felt both anguish and anger at segregation, realizing that “separate but equal” was a contradiction that undermined human dignity. A brilliant student, he graduated from Morehouse College (BA, 1948), Crozer Seminary (MDiv, 1951), and Boston University (PhD, 1955). His studies nourished a philosophy of social activism that interwove Christian beliefs with advocacy of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. At the heart of King’s values was a desire to topple the racist practices sanctioned by law and flourishing on the margins of the American conscience. In December 1955, while King was pastor of a black
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Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks defied municipal ordinances by refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man. After Parks was arrested, black leaders unanimously chose King to lead a boycott of the offending bus company. The wide support that blacks and northern white liberals gave the successful year-long boycott was in part a tribute to King’s eloquent definition of the campaign as a struggle not against whites, but against injustice. King exerted his greatest influence during the 1960s as a strategist and a symbol of the movement for racial equality in the South. Although he insisted that demonstrators refrain from violence, he believed in the tonic value of confrontation. In May 1963, people recoiled in horror and indignation at televised scenes from Birmingham, where attack dogs loosed by police sank their fangs into fleeing children and officers used fire hoses to blast unarmed demonstrators against buildings and wielded nightsticks indiscriminately. In March 1965, police assaults on peaceful marchers in Selma outraged other Americans and generated crucial support for passage of a strong voting rights bill. King made his greatest contribution to the civil rights movement by conveying with matchless eloquence a dream of interracial harmony in speeches, as at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, and in writings, most notably his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on April 16, 1963. Fusing civil rights with both democratic and patriotic content, he defended AfricanAmerican demands as reflecting a “love for America and the sublime principles of liberty and equality on which she is founded.” He voiced familiar Cold War refrains while imparting an added social challenge: that the way Americans treat the “eternal moral issue” of civil rights “may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with Communism.” And highlighting his role as a minister, he urged prompt civil rights action to guard “the most sacred values of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage.” The passage of civil rights laws, though owing much to King’s leadership, did not exhaust his criticisms of American institutions and values. In 1966, King led marches in Chicago and its white suburbs to demand equal access to housing outside ghetto slums. He also expressed growing doubts about capitalism for permitting a “gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty.” In April 1967, King condemned escalating U.S. military intervention in Vietnam as a brutal diversion from urgently needed domestic reforms. In the days before his assassination on April 4, 1968, King marched in Memphis alongside striking black sanitation workers who were protesting both poverty and racism, and he proposed a Poor People’s March on Washington to focus attention on his call for “the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”
Although King is now widely remembered as an inspiring advocate of interracial brotherhood, in his lifetime he was beset by critics on both the right and the left. Southern white politicians denounced him as an “outside agitator,” police often jailed him, and racist vigilantes were a constant menace. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, seeking to discredit King as a demagogue, charlatan, womanizer, and pawn of communist subversives, fed the press any available fact or fabrication. Some white moderates, including eight prominent southern ministers in 1963, called King’s protests “untimely” and deplored as “extreme” and anarchic his advocacy of selective lawbreaking. He retorted that to peacefully disobey racist laws and lovingly accept the full legal penalty, including prison, showed the highest respect for law while awakening the nation to injustice. (The Baptist-run Bob Jones University disagreed, choosing after his assassination not to lower its flags to half-mast.) King contended, too, with fissures in the civil rights movement. Militant younger groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee mocked King’s Christian piety and adherence to nonviolence, bemoaned his focus on mobilizing marchers rather than on cultivating local leadership, and found him too ready to settle for symbolic victories that garnered national headlines. By 1967, King had also alienated President Lyndon B. Johnson and much of the liberal establishment by dismissing the War on Poverty as inadequate and calling the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In 1983, as the radical edges of King’s leadership faded from public memory, Congress enacted a national holiday to honor him and, by extension, the civil rights movement he symbolized. Americans of all backgrounds and viewpoints celebrate the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., as an icon of brotherhood while minimizing his role as a militant protest leader. Yet the holiday celebrates King’s abiding faith in the possibilities for peaceful democratic reform to ensure dignity and opportunity for all. The circumstance of King’s assassination continues to be debated. Although the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that James Earl Ray was indeed the assassin, perhaps with the help of his brothers, King’s family members and others continued to believe that the slain civil rights leader was the scapegoat of a larger conspiracy. Robert Weisbrot See also: Bunche, Ralph; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Conspiracy Theories; Hoover, J. Edgar; Jackson, Jesse; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Parks, Rosa; Race; Vietnam War; Voting Rights Act; War on Poverty; Wealth Gap.
K ing , Rodney
Further Reading Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. ———. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ———. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: Vintage, 1986. Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Washington, James Melvin, ed. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991.
K i n g , Ro d n ey Rodney Glen King, an African American born in San Francisco on April 4, 1965, was at the center of a highly publicized Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) police brutality case during the early 1990s, an episode that led to rioting in Los Angeles and highlighted the nation’s racial polarization. For many whites, King had put others at risk, committing more than fifteen traffic violations and resisting arrest. For many blacks, King had been beaten by the police because of his race. After serving half of a two-year sentence for the November 1989 robbery of a Monterey Park grocery store and assaulting a clerk with a tire iron, King was freed and placed on parole. Five weeks later, during the evening of March 2, 1991, he was driving over the speed limit on the Foothill Freeway in Los Angeles. When a California Highway Patrol car signaled for him to pull over, King, fearing a return to prison, panicked and tried to escape. Twenty-seven law enforcement officers were involved in the subsequent high-speed chase. When King finally stopped, he and his two male passengers, also black, were ordered out of the vehicle. King, the last to emerge from the car, scuffled with the police. The confrontation ended with King’s suffering a concussion, broken cheekbone, fractured eye socket, and burns from a Taser. King’s arrest was documented on an 81-second videotape filmed by a bystander, George Holliday, and later aired on KTLA-TV in Los Angeles and worldwide by CNN. The shocking film showed white officers, under the glare of a helicopter searchlight, inflicting more than thirty baton blows on the prone King. Many viewers believed that it was an unmistakable case of police brutality. The police maintained that King seemed to be abnormally aggressive that night, as if under the influence of the drug PCP (“angel dust”); subsequent lab tests revealed a high blood-alcohol level and traces of marijuana.
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On March 15, 1991, a grand jury indicted four police officers—Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno, and Timothy Wind—for using excessive force during the arrest. The state trial was moved to the mostly white suburb of Simi Valley. On April 29, 1992, after six weeks of testimony and six hours of deliberation, the jury of ten whites, one Hispanic, and one Filipino American found three of the four officers innocent; Powell was convicted of one count of assault. Defense attorneys, who showed the film and offered a frame-byframe commentary, convinced the jury that the officers had reasonably followed proper arrest procedures. Unlike television viewers, the jury saw the first three seconds of the video footage, in which King lunges at Powell. Although King’s supporters argued that he had simply been trying to shield himself from blows, defense attorneys characterized the jerky movements of King in the film as aggressive. Some defenders of King argued that his “lunge” was actually the imitation of a black minstrel show dance, in a feeble attempt to use humor to diffuse the tension of the moment. In the wake of the verdict, rioting, burning, and looting broke out in south central Los Angeles and eventually spread to others parts of the city. The outrage in the black community was based on the feeling that the justice system operated with a double standard, denying African Americans equal treatment. There was lingering anger over the March 1991 shooting death of Latasha Harlins, a black fifteen-year-old, by Soon Ja Du, the wife of a Korean store owner, who in November 1991, although found guilty, was sentenced only to probation. Harlins, accused of trying to shoplift a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, was shot in the back as she headed to the rear of the convenience store. The store’s videotape of Harlins’s death, like that of the King beating, had been shown repeatedly on the local news. The preexisting black frustration and the verdict in the King case led to five days of violence, resulting in fifty-four deaths, thousands of injuries, more than 7,000 arrests, and $1 billion in property damage. California Governor Pete Wilson called out the National Guard to help restore order. During the riots, a television news team recorded the beating of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was pulled from his truck by four black youths and attacked. The media also aired the moment when Rodney King pleaded for the violence to stop, asking, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation, expressing frustration over the verdict and hinting that there would be a federal prosecution. Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley formed a special commission headed by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher to investigate LAPD misconduct. Police chief Daryl Gates, pressured to retire
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because of the incident, was eventually replaced by Willie Williams, an African American. The same four officers were indicted by a federal grand jury, and the jury in the federal case that followed included two African Americans. On April 17, 1993, after thirty hours of jury deliberation, a split verdict acquitted Briseno and Wind but found Koon and Powell guilty of violating King’s civil rights. The two men received thirty-month sentences and were out on parole by December 1995. Political conservatives helped the two ex-officers raise funds to pay legal fees. Conservative publisher Alfred Regnery, for example, helped Koon raise over $9 million. Koon characterized himself as “the political scapegoat of radicals and self-serving liberal politicians.” On December 7, 1993, Damian Williams, one of Reginald Denny’s assailants, was given the maximum sentence of ten years for one count of assault with a deadly weapon. On April 21, 1994, a Los Angeles jury awarded King $3.8 million in compensatory damages for his arrest Roger Chapman See also: Blackface; Civil Rights Movement; Police Abuse; Race; Racial Profiling; Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992.
Further Reading Cannon, Lou. How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and LAPD. New York: Times Books, 1997. Gibbs, Jewelle Taylor. Race and Justice: Rodney King and O.J. Simpson in a House Divided. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. Koon, Stacey C., with Robert Deitz. Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992.
K i n s ey, A l f r e d The pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey has been simultaneously praised and vilified for his landmark studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). These works reported higher than previously imagined figures for occurrences of premarital and extramarital sexual intercourse and acts of homosexuality in the United States in the immediate postwar period. Supporters of Kinsey credit him with establishing a precedent for rational and morally neutral discussion of human sexuality. They also applaud his courage to debunk the hypocrisy of his day by showing that many Americans were not following the conventional puritanical sex code. Detractors over the years have argued that the Kinsey reports were flawed and biased. Many religious leaders and social conservatives blame him for influencing society to regard immorality as normal and acceptable, thus paving the way for the sexual revolution and all of
its excesses. Critics have also accused Kinsey of being a libertine, a bisexual whose research was motivated by his personal perversity, including a fascination with pedophilia. Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 23, 1894, and raised by strict religious parents. Educated at Stevens Institute of Technology (1912–1914), Bowdoin College (BS, biology and psychology, 1916), and Harvard University (ScD, 1919), Kinsey spent his career as a professor in the Zoology Department at Indiana University in Bloomington (1920–1956). In 1947, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, he established the Institute for Sex Research (later renamed The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction) at the university. In addition to his seminal works on sexuality, Kinsey authored a popular biology textbook for secondary students, a field guide on edible wild plants, and a number of works on his earlier research on gall wasps. By the time of his death on August 26, 1956, in Bloomington, Kinsey had personally conducted 7,985 of the 18,000 sex histories then gathered by his institute. Kinsey’s life was the subject of the 2004 Hollywood film Kinsey, which was condemned by conservative religious groups such as Focus on the Family. In 1938, Kinsey began teaching a marriage and family class at Indiana University but found there was little published material on the topic of human sexuality that was both honest and scientific. To fill the void, he started obtaining the sexual histories of his students and then expanded his research off campus, making trips to Chicago and other urban areas. This work drew criticism from various entities, including members of the clergy. Even some of his own colleagues were critical of him, pointing out his refusal to teach against premarital sex. Finally, Kinsey was advised by the university president either to quit teaching the marriage class or to halt his sex research. With the university’s blessings, he chose to continue his research, but he was asked to release his findings only when the state General Assembly was not in session. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sold 185,000 copies in its first year, becoming a best-seller despite its 800 pages and $6.50 retail price. Based on 5,300 interviews with white men and boys, the book reported that 68 percent of the males surveyed had premarital sex by age eighteen; 50 percent had some extramarital experience; 69 percent had visited a prostitute at least once; 37 percent had engaged in a homosexual activity leading to orgasm; 92 percent had masturbated; 84 percent had been aroused by sexually fantasizing about a female; and nearly 100 percent had experienced nocturnal sex dreams. The results of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, based on interviews of 5,940 white females, indicated that 50 percent of those surveyed had engaged in premarital sex; 26 percent had some
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extramarital experience; 13 percent had experienced a homosexual encounter leading to orgasm; 62 percent had masturbated; 69 percent had been aroused by erotic fantasies; and 37 percent had experienced sex dreams. Kinsey’s research methodology was immediately called into question, as it still is today. The reported figures seemed too high for some observers, who blamed Kinsey for interviewing people who were less representative of the general population. Also, Kinsey was condemned for studying humans as if they were animals because he omitted from his analysis attitudes about love and spirituality. The evangelist Billy Graham and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, among others, deplored Kinsey’s studies, regarding them as socially harmful. Even the anthropologist Margaret Mead criticized Kinsey for removing “a previously guaranteed reticence” and leaving young people “defenseless in just those areas where their desire to conform was protected by a lack of knowledge of the extent of nonconformity.” In 1954, amid pressure from U.S. Representative B. Carroll Reece (R-TN) and other public officials, the Rockefeller Foundation canceled its funding of Kinsey’s research. One continuing debate about Kinsey’s findings is the question of the reported number of homosexuals. Detractors of his work argue that, since he engaged in same-sex liaisons, he was eager to inflate figures on homosexuality. Controversially, Kinsey argued that a typical individual is somewhere in between heterosexuality and homosexuality, not exclusively one or the other. According to the Kinsey reports, 10 percent of males claimed exclusive homosexual relations for a period lasting at least three years, but only 4 percent of that group claimed exclusive homosexual tendencies. To this day, due to incorrect readings of Kinsey, the conventional wisdom is that 10 percent of the U.S. population is homosexual. Subsequent studies by other researchers have reported figures as low as 1 percent. A 1994 study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found 2.8 percent of American males to be homosexual. Perhaps the strongest denunciation of Kinsey’s work and legacy has come from Judith Reisman, president of the Institute for Media Education and author of Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences (1998). Referring to him as a “massive criminal” who committed scientific fraud, Reisman charges that Kinsey sought pedophiles to conduct experiments on children and then report the results. She bases her argument in part on Tables 31–34 of Kinsey’s 1948 book, which records the notes of one anonymous man’s sexual experience with children as well as adults of both sexes. Kinsey has been criticized for not reporting to the police that man and other pedophiles he interviewed. Roger Chapman
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See also: Focus on the Family; Gay Rights Movement; Graham, Billy; Hay, Harry; Mead, Margaret; Niebuhr, Reinhold; Sex Education; Sex Offenders; Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. Sex–The Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Institute for Media Education Web site. www.drjudithreisman .com. Jones, James H. Kinsey: A Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction Web site. www.indiana.edu/~kinsey. Reumann, Miriam G. American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
K lein, Naomi The Canadian activist and author Naomi Klein has emerged as one of the most prominent figures in the con temporary antiglobalization and anticorporate movement. Supporters view her activism as advocacy for social justice; detractors dismiss her negative critique of globalization as evidence of a poor understanding of the business world as well as a biased disregard for the benefits of a vibrant global economy. Born on May 5, 1970, in Montreal, Canada, Naomi Klein is the daughter of American parents. She did not complete her degree program at the University of Toronto, but she gained journalism experience writing for the student newspaper. Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), regarded as a kind of manifesto for the antiglobalization movement; Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002); and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), all dealing with issues surrounding the rise of global capitalism. Klein also writes syndicated columns for the Globe and Mail (Toronto) and the Guardian (United Kingdom), while contributing essays to a number of magazines (such as the Nation, New Statesman, Progressive, Village Voice, and Ms.). Most of her activism has been devoted to tracking the development of the antiglobalization and anticorporate movement. No Logo rolled off the presses only weeks after the dramatic 1999 “Battle of Seattle” protest against the World Trade Organization. The antiglobalization movement’s lack of clear leadership and its decentralized character have led some to identify Klein as one of globalization’s most important critics. She has been a controversial figure for her willingness to serve as a cheerleader for a number of disaffected groups, from radical French farmers to Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas, Mexico. The
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primary criticism leveled by Klein’s detractors is that her condemnation of globalization ignores most, if not all, of its benefits. Klein comes from an activist family—her grandfather was a labor organizer; her father was a Vietnam War draft dodger; her mother is the producer of the antipornography documentary film Not a Love Story (1981); and her brother is the director of the liberal think tank, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. As a teenager, she was, by her own admission, a “mall rat,” fully embracing the consumer brands she now so readily castigates. This familiarity lends an impassioned urgency to her admonishment. Following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Klein increasingly began writing about the ramifications of American foreign policy and the U.S. government’s attempts to spread democracy around the world. She is trenchant in her assertions that the project is doomed to failure so long as America’s leadership maintains close ties to corporate capitalism. Patrick Jackson See also: Battle of Seattle; Canada; Corporate Welfare; Executive Compensation; Factory Farms; Feminism, Third-Wave; Globalization; Labor Unions; Migrant Labor; Nader, Ralph; Nation, The; Wal-Mart.
Further Reading MacFarquhar, Larissa. “Outside Agitator.” The New Yorker, December 8, 2008. NoLogo Web site. www.nologo.org. Segerston, Paul Stephen. Naomi Klein and the Anti-Globalization Movement. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2003. “Why Naomi Klein Needs to Grow Up.” Economist, November 9, 2002.
Ko o p, C . Eve r e t t The well-known pediatric surgeon, Christian fundamentalist, and ardent anti-abortionist C. Everett Koop imbued the position of U.S. surgeon general—which he held for nearly the duration of the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s—with an innovative sense of visibility and influence. Guided by the classic medical principle “First, do no harm,” the Republican appointee held to the belief that health care and politics do not mix and that he worked for all Americans. During his controversial tenure (1981–1989), Koop started a national campaign for a smoke-free society and set medical care standards for handicapped infants. He shocked conservatives and liberals with his pronouncement that AIDS was a medical and social problem, not a moral or political issue. He angered pro-lifers and
Reaganites with his statement that any negative health effects of abortion on women could not be conclusively determined. While staying true to his fundamentalist roots, he was a pragmatist in the “family values” era, becoming the most trusted medical professional in the 1980s. Born on October 14, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York, to a well-to-do Dutch family, Charles “Chick” Everett Koop was an only child. He attended Dartmouth College (BA, 1937), Cornell University Medical College (MD, 1941), and the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (ScD, 1947). Koop married his college sweetheart, with whom he raised four children. For thirty years, he was a pediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a pediatrics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. At CHOP, he created the nation’s first neonatal intensive care unit and separated three sets of Siamese twins. Koop’s candidacy for surgeon general was based on a suggestion from evangelist Billy Graham and on a film series Koop did with theologian Francis Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979). Liberals feared he would politicize the Public Health Service as a member of the anti-abortion Christian Action Council. Conservatives hoped he would be a conduit for their ideology. Despite opposition from the American Public Health Association, Koop was confirmed by a 68-24 vote on November 16, 1981. Liberals were surprised by Koop’s progressive stance on smoking but expected a moral message on sexual behavior in his 1986 AIDS report. Instead, the report came out in favor of sex education and condom use as means of combating the epidemic: “We are fighting a disease, not people,” it said. Koop’s 1988 report on abortion was an opportunity for further research on the issue, but conservatives were disappointed by Koop’s focus on the social causes underlying unwanted pregnancy and his refusal to make a definitively pro-life statement. Ostracized by the George H.W. Bush administration, Koop retired in October 1989. (Earlier a number of Democratic presidential candidates, including Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis, indicated that, if elected, they would appoint Koop to a position.) He went on to chair the National “Safe Kids” Campaign and returned to teaching. Koop’s ability to put himself above politics, and between citizens and policymakers, made him an inadvertent liberal hero and the bane of conservatives. Anna Zuschlag See also: Abortion; AIDS; Birth Control; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Graham, Billy; Health Care; Reagan, Ronald; Schaeffer, Francis; Science Wars; Sex Education; Smoking in Public.
K r is tol , Ir v ing , and B ill K r is tol
Further Reading Bowman, James S. “C. Everett Koop: Integrity—No Matter What.” In Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and Leadership in Government, ed. Terry L. Cooper and N. Dale Wright, 270–303. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992. Koop, C. Everett. Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor. New York: Random House, 1991. ———. The Right to Live, the Right to Die. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1976. Rubin, Eva R. The Abortion Controversy: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Kr istol, Ir v ing , and Bill Kr istol Irving Kristol, one of the leading figures of the neoconservatism movement, was the father of William “Bill” Kristol, who in 1995 founded the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard. Together and independently, the two men have profoundly shaped the American political landscape and been active players in the culture wars. Irving William Kristol, born in New York City on January 22, 1920, has been dubbed the “godfather of neoconservatism,” although he was more of a commentator than a theoretician. He studied history at City College of New York (BA, 1940), where he embraced Marxism, but as a follower of the ideals of Leon Trotsky, he was an antiStalinist. Following army service during World War II, he joined Commentary magazine as managing editor (1947– 1952). During the 1950s, he came under the influence of political philosopher Leo Strauss and turned considerably more conservative, although he remained a Democrat. His article “Civil Liberties 1952: A Study in Confusion,” published in Commentary, defended Senator Joseph McCarthy and condemned liberals for not taking a stronger stance against communism. From 1953 to 1959, he managed the British journal Encounter, a publication funded by the CIA and known for its staunch anticommunism. From his niche as professor of social thought at the New York University Graduate School of Business (1969–1988), Irving Kristol wrote and published widely on politics, economics, education, morality, culture, and foreign affairs. His most important works are On the Democratic Idea in America (1972), Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983), and Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995). He broke with the Democratic Party in 1972, foreshadowing the later political relocation of other neoconservatives, such as Richard Pipes, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Kristol’s move to the Republican Party did not, however, prevent him from criticizing the Nixon administration’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Similarly, during the 1980 campaign, he supported Ronald Reagan for president, only to later criticize Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s attempts to negotiate with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. His
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ideas have been blamed for inspiring the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, leading to a decline in his stature among some political conservatives. Irving Kristol died on September 18, 2009. Bill Kristol was born on December 23, 1952, in New York City, and educated at Harvard (AB, 1973; PhD, 1979). Like his father, he came under the influence of the teachings of Leo Strauss. His mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a cultural historian and conservative scholar. More directly involved in politics than his parents, he served as special assistant to Secretary of Education William Bennett in the Reagan administration (1985–1989), campaign manager for Alan Keyes’s U.S. Senate bid in Maryland (1988), and domestic policy adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle (1989–1993). As editor of the Weekly Standard since 1995, he champions conservative politics based on reason and morality in opposition to cultural relativism. A proponent of the invasion of Iraq—he is the co-author of The War Over Iraq (2003)—he argues that U.S. foreign policy should actively promote, with
William “Bill” Kristol, a prominent media commentator, editor of the Weekly Standard, and founder of influential think tanks, took up the mantle of neoconservatism pioneered by his father, Irving Kristol, beginning in the 1950s. (Alex Wong/ Getty Images)
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the backing of the military, universal human rights. From 2008 to 2009, Kristol was a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times. As adults, both son and father have been more active in practicing Judaism, believing that morality cannot be achieved by reason alone. Robert L. Richardson See also: American Century; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Keyes, Alan; Marxism; McCarthy, Joseph; Neoconservatism; Reagan, Ronald; Soviet Union and Russia; Strauss, Leo; Weekly Standard, The.
Further Reading Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Gerson, Mark. The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997. Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press, 1995.
Krugman, Paul An economist with expertise in international trade, Paul Krugman has participated in the culture wars by challenging conservative economic policies and theories. In articles written for the general public, he has issued warnings about America’s mounting public and private debt, and although once an ardent supporter of globalization, he has become a cautious supporter of free markets and free trade. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Paul Robin Krugman, born on February 28, 1953, on Long Island, New York, was educated at Yale University (BA, 1974) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD, 1977). From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, other than a brief policy stint with the Reagan administration, his work has been mostly academic in nature. Over the years affiliated with various research universities, most recently as a faculty member at Princeton University, Krugman received the John Bates Clark medal in 1991 for his contributions to economics. During the 1990s, he began writing for a nontechnical readership with The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s (1990) and Peddling Prosperity (1994), offering a criticism of conservative economics and particularly supply-side economics. Beginning in October 1999, after writing articles for Fortune and Slate magazines, he became a regular columnist for the New York Times—some of these writings have been compiled in The Great Unraveling (2003). In The Conscience of a Liberal (2007), Krugman offers an economic history and calls for a “new New Deal.”
Krugman explained in How I Work (1993) that he is motivated by a personal interest in and an intellectual curiosity for policy work. He has focused on issues such as the stock market bubble and the Japanese economy after the 1997 Asian economic crisis, and he was a severe critic of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Nicholas Confessore of the Washington Monthly referred to Krugman as the most important political columnist in America; in 2003, however, the Economist noted that Lyinginponds.com ranked Krugman second, behind conservative commentator Ann Coulter, in overall partisan slant. (The same Web site in 2005 ranked him first in partisanship.) Krugman consistently criticized the Bush administration’s handling of the economy, accusing it of misinforming the public and using bogus arithmetic that led to large budget deficits. He also criticized the Federal Reserve Board chair, Alan Greenspan, for a lack of intellectual integrity, and he has assailed multinational companies for crony capitalism. In 2008, with the publication of The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, an update of an earlier work, Krugman blamed the nation’s financial crisis on the failure of federal regulation. Krugman draws fire from many conservative commentators, such as Laurence Kudlow, James Cramer, and Bill O’Reilly, who in 2004 referred to Krugman as a “quasi-socialist.” Yet Krugman also faces criticism from some on the left for his views on globalization and for accusing liberal commentators and other journalists of not doing enough to expose the faults of the Bush administration. Quentin Hedges Duroy See also: Bush Family; Coulter, Ann; Democratic Party; Election of 2000; Federal Budget Deficit; Friedman, Milton; Globalization; New York Times, The; O’Reilly, Bill; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Supply-Side Economics; Tax Reform.
Further Reading Confessore, Nicholas. “Comparative Advantage: How Economist Paul Krugman Became the Most Important Political Columnist in America.” Washington Monthly, December 2002. Klein, Daniel B., with Harika Anna Barlett. “Left Out: A Critique of Paul Krugman Based on a Comprehensive Account of His New York Times Columns, 1997–2006.” Econ Journal Watch 5:1 (January 2008): 109–33. Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. ———. The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Ku K l u x K l a n See White Supremacists.
Ku shner, Tony
Ku b r i c k , S t a n l ey An accomplished and influential American film director, Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, in the Bronx, New York. His films, often technical masterpieces, have contributed to the culture wars by focusing on themes pertaining to war, state power, and sexuality. Kubrick took an interest in filmmaking after a stint as a professional photographer for Look magazine in the late 1940s. His first film was Day of the Fight (1951), a short documentary produced for a newsreel company. Kubrick soon turned to full-length narrative films, starting with the war story Fear and Desire (1953). His first critical and commercial success was Paths of Glory (1957), the story of several World War I soldiers accused of cowardice. The film was a rarity in its time, exploring the less heroic realities of war and military leadership in an era when World War II was still glamorized as a completely noble and just cause. It was also Kubrick’s first foray into anti-establishment themes. His next major project was the big-budget historical epic Spartacus (1960). Trouble on the set of Spartacus, in which Kubrick clashed with star and producer Kirk Douglas over creative control, earned Kubrick a reputation as a disagreeable director. This unleashed an independent streak, and many of Kubrick’s later films would tackle controversial themes or cinematic challenges that few other directors would attempt. Lolita (1962) was based on the hugely controversial Vladimir Nabokov novel about an adult man’s sexual obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The film toned down the story significantly in order to avoid censorship, though it still attracted intense criticism from a public that was not ready for such a frank depiction of sexuality. Kubrick’s most political, controversial, and influential film was Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), based on a littleknown political thriller about an accidental nuclear war caused by faulty communications. Kubrick transformed the story into a dark comedy, poking fun at the nuclear paranoia of the Cold War, then at its height after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Audiences found the film hilarious but also disturbing, as it foreshadowed the anti-establishment ideas that soon erupted in the counterculture and among some intellectual elites. After tackling a challenging cinematic production with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), considered one of the most influential science fiction films of all time, Kubrick returned to controversial subject matter in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Based on an Anthony Burgess novel, it explored the establishment’s use of violence and repression to prevent violence and repression. Kubrick’s subsequent films were less controversial culturally and politically, but he addressed the horrors
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and strategic mistakes of the Vietnam War, just then entering popular discourse, in Full Metal Jacket (1987). His final film was the sexual thriller Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which explored the darker impulses of married people. He died shortly after completing it, on March 7, 1999. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Censorship; Cold War; Counterculture; Holocaust; Kennedy Family; LeMay, Curtis; Nuclear Age; Sexual Revolution; Teller, Edward; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Cocks, Geoffrey. The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Duncan, Paul. Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003. Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Kubrick, Christine. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. New York: Little, Brown, 2002. Phillips, Gene D., ed. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999.
Ku s h n e r, To ny American playwright Tony Kushner is best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning, two-part drama on the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991 and 1992). Born in Manhattan on July 16, 1956, Kushner spent his childhood in Louisiana with his musician parents. He returned to New York in 1974 to study English literature at Columbia University, then completed a degree in directing at New York University’s graduate school in 1984. Kushner’s first major play was A Bright Room Called Day, which premiered in New York in 1985. Set in Germany during the fall of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, the drama follows a group of friends whose personal lives collapse under the pressure of political events. The 1930s’ action is interrupted by the character Zillah, an American living in present-day Berlin who rails against the Reagan administration. Critics of the production reacted strongly to Zillah’s hyperbolic comparisons between Reagan and Hitler. Part 1 of Angels in America premiered in San Francisco in 1991 and Part 2 in 1992. Set in the mid-1980s, the play’s action is shaped by the milieu of the Reagan administration, which is stubbornly indifferent to the AIDS epidemic ravaging the gay community. Significant characters include Louis, a self-hating Jew; Prior, who is struggling with AIDS and experiencing dramatic visitations by angels; Belize, a black ex-drag queen who is Prior’s friend and nurse; Joe, a closeted gay Republican Mormon; Harper, his Valium-addicted wife; Hannah,
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Joe’s practical-minded Mormon mother; and Roy Cohn, a McCarthyite lawyer who is Joe’s mentor. The character Roy Cohn, based on the real-life figure, is often considered Kushner’s most brilliant creation: he delights in having had Ethel and Julius Rosenberg put to death for being Soviet spies, he has sex with men yet persecutes homosexuals, and he possesses a charisma and consistency that invariably charm audiences even as they despise him. Full of memorable dialogue, fantasy, and black comedy, the play examines homosexual-heterosexual dynamics in America. It argues for choosing life in the face of oppression and suffering and for including even one’s worst enemies in the human family. Kushner’s screenplay version of Angels was produced as a well-received HBO miniseries in 2003. Christine Hoff Kraemer
Further Reading
(creativity), and Imani (faith). Each principle relates to Karenga’s stated ideal that “the sevenfold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black.” Reinforcing these principles are seven symbols: Mazao (crops), Mkeka (mat), Kinara (candle holder), Muhindi (corn), Mishumaa Saba (seven candles), Kikombe cha Umoja (unity cup/chalice), and Zawadi (gifts). Many dismiss the holiday as an exercise in political correctness. They criticize the “manufactured” aspect of the holiday and regard its timing as an attempt to undermine Christianity. Supporters note that Thanksgiving was also “manufactured,” citing the efforts of Sarah Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, to promote that holiday. Critics of Kwanzaa also point to the negative past of its creator: Karenga, a former Black Panther, was convicted in 1970 of felony assault and diagnosed with “paranoid and schizophrenic” behaviors. Some conservatives have suggested that Karenga’s adoption of Marxist philosophies proves that Kwanzaa was designed to cause political unrest. Solomon Davidoff
Fisher, James. The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. New York: Routledge, 2001. Vorlicky, Robert, ed. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
See also: Afrocentrism; Black Panther Party; Christmas; Clinton, Bill; Conspiracy Theories; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Thanksgiving Day.
See also: AIDS; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in Popular Culture; Holocaust; McCarthyism; Outing; Reagan, Ronald; Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Sexual Revolution.
Kw a n z a a The seven-day holiday Kwanzaa, whose name derives from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, or “first fruits,” was originated by Ron “Maulana” Karenga (born Ronald McKinley Everett) and first celebrated from December 26, 1966, to January 1, 1967. Inspired by African agricultural festivals and communal rites, the holiday was conceived to revitalize connections among people of African descent. It drew on Karenga’s pan-African values system, the Nguzo Saba, highlighted through the principle of “Kawaida,” an amalgamation of tradition and reason. Swahili terms, used by many African nations, reflect the pan-African roots of Kwanzaa. Family or community-wide Kwanzaa celebrations are characterized by African music, discussions on each day’s principle, a candle-lighting ritual, and a feast. It is not uncommon to find families who observe Kwanzaa combining the celebration with Christmas and New Year observances. Mainstream support outside the AfricanAmerican community is growing. A U.S. postage stamp with a Kwanzaa theme was issued in 1997, and President Bill Clinton began the tradition of issuing an annual Kwanzaa message. The seven days of Kwanzaa are associated with seven interrelated principles: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (selfdetermination), Ujima (collective work/responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba
Further Reading Flores-Peña, Ysamur, and Robin Evanchuk. “Kwanzaa: The Emergence of an African-American Holiday.” Western Folklore 56:3/4 (Summer/Autumn 1997): 281–94. Official Kwanzaa Web site. www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org. Riley, Dorothy Winbush. The Complete Kwanzaa: Celebrating Our Cultural Harvest. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Kyo t o P r o t o c o l The twentieth century’s most prominent international agreement on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, originally signed in December 1997, requires developed countries to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and others—through cleaner fuels, stricter environmental regulations, and other means. Although the United States is the world’s largest creator of greenhouse gases, it is also the world’s only developed country not to ratify the agreement. While some dispute the science that underpins theories of human impact on climate change, further controversy has developed over the potential environmental, economic, and political impact that would result from conforming, or not conforming, to the regulations set forth in the Kyoto Protocol. Because these far-reaching implications would cross all sectors of American life, a vast amount of attention has been paid to these issues by
Kyoto P rotocol
politicians, businesses, industries, the media, lobbyists, policy groups, and other organizations. Drafted in 1997 and put into effect on February 16, 2005, the Kyoto Protocol is an addendum to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which outlined voluntary emissions cataloging and reductions, but was not enforced and had little impact on reducing carbon-based pollution. The Kyoto Protocol aimed to establish environmental standards by assigning mandatory emissions reduction targets to developed nations, to be met before the year 2012. Developing economies such as China and India could ratify the agreement, but would not be required to reduce emissions, because the economic burden for them was deemed too high. Supporters and detractors of the treaty differ in their understanding of human impact on the environment and climate change and in their assessment of the relationship between the economic costs of compliance and the environmental consequences of unchecked emissions. Opponents of the Kyoto Protocol argue that the structure of the agreement places too much of the burden on wealthy countries like the United States, while rapidly developing economies such as China and India, which if present trends continue will likely surpass the United States as the highest emitters of greenhouse gases, are rewarded by gaining competitive leverage in global markets. Others have suggested that by increasing restrictions in the United States, companies would seek to move their operations to countries with less regulation; such a trend, it is said, could cost the United States several million jobs and do little to curb pollution on a global level. Still others suggest that even if the Kyoto Protocol reductions are met with 100 percent compliance, the standards are too lenient to have a noticeable environmental effect, and that the money should be spent instead on the development of cleaner technologies.
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Those who advocate for compliance with the Kyoto Protocol believe that reducing carbon emissions is critical to sustaining a stable climate for the planet. Without regulation, they argue, human impact on the environment through carbon-based emissions will lead to catastrophic environmental change that would render economic concerns moot. Defenders of the agreement refute the argument that current target reductions have little practical impact on the reduction of greenhouse gases, maintaining that the treaty establishes a policy precedent that could lead to further regulation and governance. President George W. Bush was adamant about keeping the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, but some key Democratic senators have been in favor of revisiting talks. Meanwhile, a number of state and city governments have formed coalitions to meet the reductions of the agreement voluntarily. Nick Malinowski See also: Bush Family; China; Environmental Movement; Global Warming; Globalization; Gore, Al; United Nations.
Further Reading Bily, Cynthia A., ed. Global Warming: Opposing Viewpoints. Farmington Hills, MA: Greenhaven Press/Thomson Gale, 2006. Coon, Charli E. “Why President Bush is Right to Abandon the Kyoto Protocol.” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, May 11, 2001. Homer, Christopher C. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007. Victor, David G. The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
In a strange twist, La Follette in 1947 wrote an article averring that communists had infiltrated some committees of Congress, including the La Follette Committee. In the aftermath of his suicide, there was speculation that La Follette had feared McCarthy was about to subpoena him and require an account of why he did not do more about communist subversion in Congress. Ironically, La Follette blamed his election defeat on communists in the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions, claiming they were angry over his criticism of the Soviet Union. In April 1954, Progressive magazine reiterated the point that communists in 1946 were responsible for sending McCarthy to Washington. Roger Chapman
L a F o l l e t t e , R o b e r t , J r. “Young Bob” La Follette, like his father a longtime progressive U.S. senator from Wisconsin (1925–1947), championed unemployment relief and public works, while arguing that the New Deal did not go far enough. A major highlight of his tenure was heading a probe of antilabor practices, which some scholars suggest inspired conservative revenge later during the Red Scare. Ironically, La Follette lost his senate seat to the virulent anticommunist Republican Joseph McCarthy. Born on February 6, 1895, in Madison, Wisconsin, Robert Marion La Follette, Jr., was six years old when his father was elected governor. La Follette studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (1913–1917) but dropped out due to a near-fatal viral infection. In 1918, he became the chief assistant to his father, who since 1905 had served as a U.S. senator. After La Follette, Sr., died in 1925, the son filled his father’s seat by winning a special election as the Progressive candidate; he was reelected in 1928, 1934, and 1940. La Follette switched to the Republican Party in 1946, as the Progressive Party effectively disbanded, but narrowly loss the primary race to McCarthy, 207,935 votes to 202,557. He went on to work as a business consultant and in 1938 served on the Hoover Commission on Executive Reorganization. On February 24, 1953, La Follette shot himself to death in Washington, D.C. As chairman of the Senate Civil Liberties Committee (1936–1940), La Follette gained national prominence by holding a series of hearings designed to “investigate violations of the right of free speech and assembly and undue interference with the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively.” The probe, commonly known as the La Follette Committee, focused on the violence of anti-union tactics employed by industrialists, many of whom were subpoenaed, put under oath, and grilled by La Follette. Some accused the committee of being a communist conspiracy; and conservatives seethed at La Follette for ignoring incidents of unionist violence. In 1938, Congress founded the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), which initially probed fascism in the United States but soon shifted to the “communist menace,” even serving as a forum for critics of the La Follette Committee. Wisconsin Republicans who campaigned against La Follette in 1946 argued that the committee had “promoted the class hatred of the New Deal.” Later, those who felt the “Brown Scare” of the 1930s was a pretense for attacking political conservatives regarded McCarthy’s red-baiting of liberals as justifiable recompense.
See also: Communists and Communism; Labor Unions; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; New Deal; Soviet Union and Russia; Third Parties.
Further Reading Auberbach, Jerold S. Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1996. Haynes, John E. Red Scare or Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press, 2000. La Follette, Robert M., Jr. “Turn the Light on Communism.” Collier’s, February 8, 1947. Maney, Patrick J. “Young Bob” La Follette: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr., 1895–1953. 2nd ed. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003.
La Raza Unida The primary political arm of the Chicano Movement of the 1970s, the Texas-based Partido de La Raza Unida (The Party of the United Race, or United People) called for freedom from Anglo hegemony through Chicano cultural nationalism and cultural democracy. Visionary organizers hoped to reclaim Aztlán, the ancestral homeland of the Chicanos held by the United States since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, by affecting the schools, municipalities, and counties of that region. La Raza’s electoral strategy achieved success in local elections by skillfully organizing slates of candidates and mobilizing voters against incumbents. The movement reflects the influence of a new generation of Chicano intellectuals moving through undergraduate and graduate programs that stimulated interest in issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Inspired by the writings of George I. Sanchez, Saul Alinsky, Stokely Carmichael, and other prominent activists, La Raza leaders employed much of the same rhetoric as other New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s in its calls for “Brown Power.” 310
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Conceived in El Paso, Texas, in October 1967 by Chicano activists attending a national conference on Mexican-American affairs, The Party of the United Race (or People) sought to make the political landscape more accurately reflect the cultural background of the citizenry. A follow-up conference in San Antonio in January 1968 spurred the establishment of La Raza organizations in other centers of Chicano population, including college campuses. On the West Coast, La Raza activists often allied themselves with César Chávez’s United Farm Workers movement. For conservative Mexican Americans, the leftist agenda proved too problematic to be overcome by appeals to ethnic pride. In the heavily agricultural Winter Garden region of south Texas, local organizational efforts by José Angel Gutiérrez proved successful. The first slate of candidates appeared on a ballot in February 1970 in the town of Cotulla, in LaSalle County. Victories in school board elections and various races for local and county offices in south central Texas signaled a new era of political assertiveness by non-Anglo citizens in border communities. The group’s presence on the national political landscape peaked in November 1972, when La Raza Unida candidates appeared on ballots in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. By the late 1970s, the radical agenda lost favor, and the party’s influence within the Mexican-American community faded. La Raza Unida stood apart from established interest groups like the GI Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which La Raza perceived as sellouts. La Raza candidates often ran for offices held by Mexican Americans endorsed by local Democrats or Republicans. Internal debates about the direction of the La Raza’s electoral efforts proved damaging. Some felt that getting statewide slates of candidates was essential to the cause, while others felt the party should concentrate only in those areas where the demographics of the district pointed to success. Meanwhile, the Republican and Democratic parties took increased notice of the mobilization of Mexican-American voters and opened new channels for their involvement in mainstream politics. Robert H. Duke See also: Chávez, César; Civil Rights Movement; Democratic Party; Hispanic Americans; Mexico; Migrant Labor; New Left; Race; Republican Party.
Further Reading Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Fehrenbach, T.R. Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Gutiérrez, José Angel. The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
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Pycior, Julie Leininger. LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Labor Unions American labor unions have drawn the ire of many on both sides of the culture wars. For those on the right, unions are relics of an outdated New Deal system: bloated bureaucracies that protect overpaid workers, hinder free competition in a capitalist economy, and support liberal, if not socialist, politics. Critics on the left fault unions for old-style politics and cultural conservatism, arguing that they bear scant resemblance to the dynamic, socially activist organizations they once were. Union membership and power were at their peak at the close of World War II, largely due to the organizing campaigns of the 1930s and New Deal labor protections. Most union members belonged to one of two competing federations, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), both of which had significant influence with the Democratic Party. Some labor leaders were hopeful that the war victory would usher in an era of social democracy, but already there were contrary tendencies. The electorate had become more conservative during the war. Business leaders regained much of the stature lost during the Great Depression, and many hoped to roll back labor’s gains of the previous decade. It also became clear that unions were politically vulnerable on the issue of communism. The difficult transition to a peacetime economy, unpopular postwar strikes, and unsuccessful efforts to unionize the South reduced labor’s popularity while emboldening its opponents. Above all, the emerging Cold War constrained labor. In an atmosphere of anticommunist hysteria, unions were on the defensive—especially since communists had played a major role in much of the organizing of the 1930s and even held leadership positions in many unions. These difficulties were reflected in the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), which limited the power of unions, hindered their growth, and punished those that tolerated communist influence. Most unions purged communist leaders; the few that refused lost the protection of federal labor law. This discouraged labor from taking controversial political positions. In the early 1950s, unions increasingly eschewed organizing campaigns and social activism, focusing on negotiating favorable contracts and administering benefits programs for their members, who remained concentrated in the nation’s core industries and skilled trades. The differences between the two labor federations became so minor that in 1955 they merged as the AFL-CIO. The era of big labor ended with the decline of employment in the heavily unionized industries, a situation that
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began in the 1950s with technological change, international competition, and the shift of jobs to the Sunbelt and then overseas. White-collar unionism grew in the 1960s as groups like teachers and government employees won the right to organize, but this could not offset declining membership in other sectors. The percentage of American workers belonging to unions declined steadily beginning in the mid-1950s. Meanwhile, the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) expanded Taft-Hartley’s restrictions on unions and encouraged the passage of state right-to-work laws. Greater challenges emerged in the 1960s when unions, composed mostly of white males and allied with the Democratic Party, were seen by some political and cultural activists as part of the establishment. Few unions escaped the divisive effects of issues such as the war in Vietnam, racism, and cultural conflict. By 1968, labor was politically divided, with many workers attracted to the culturally and politically conservative positions of George Wallace and Richard Nixon. Anti-union forces recognized labor’s vulnerability and stepped up their attacks, arguing that by limiting the power of unions, they were defending the rights of individual workers. The language of individual rights, a powerful theme of the 1960s, became a weapon against labor. Unions suffered further shocks during the 1970s and 1980s. The end of sustained postwar prosperity and labor’s declining political fortunes encouraged employers to bargain aggressively. The government-brokered Chrysler bailout of 1979 showed the potential of “concessionary bargaining” in which unions had to surrender some of what they had won through many years of contract negotiations. In 1981, despite gaining the vote of many union members, President Ronald Reagan broke a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) by firing strikers and hiring replacements. The PATCO strike made it clear that federal labor policy had become strongly pro-employer and helped legitimize the use of replacement workers. Throughout the 1980s, unions faced factory closings and relocations, employer demands for givebacks, declining membership, and a hostile political environment. Nonetheless, there were hopeful signs for unions. Membership among white-collar, service, and public employees grew, and some unions in these sectors, notably the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), built memberships that included men and women and workers of all races. Teacher unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association grew. The realization that labor needed to change if it was to survive produced an insurgency that in 1995 forced out the AFL-CIO’s old leadership and led to the election of SEIU president John Sweeney as federation president. Sweeney and his supporters hoped to revive labor by using more confrontational tactics, organizing previously unorganized workers, reaching out to immigrants and
the unskilled, and forging alliances with various groups on the left, including civil rights organizations, college students, and groups opposed to free trade. During the early 2000s, debate over how to rebuild unions continued amid some encouraging signs. In 2008, organized labor gained 428,000 new members, growing from 12.1 percent of the total workforce the previous year to 12.4 percent, marking the largest gain in a quarter century. That year 16.1 million of the labor force were union members, including 11.4 percent of manufacturing workers and 36.8 percent of government workers. However, just 7.6 percent of workers in the private sector belonged to a union. Meanwhile, issues like immigration were internally divisive. Balancing identity politics with unionism’s class-based perspective was difficult, as was finding a common understanding of unionism that could unite such diverse groups as manufacturing employees, agricultural workers, nurses, teachers, and janitors. Earlier, in 2005, several unions dramatically withdrew from the AFL-CIO and formed the Change to Win coalition, expressing their belief that more effort must be devoted to “organizing the unorganized.” Gary L. Bailey See also: Battle of Seattle; Budenz, Louis F.; Chávez, César; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Democratic Party; Globalization; Illegal Immigrants; Migrant Labor; New Deal; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Wallace, George.
Further Reading Buhle, Paul. Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999. Freeman, Joshua B. “Labor During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945.” In A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christopher Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, 192–210. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Geoghegan, Thomas. Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. Lichtenstein, Nelson. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Moody, Kim. Labor in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. New York: Verso, 1997. Nelson, Daniel. Shifting Fortunes: The Rise and Decline of American Labor, from the 1820s to the Present. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997. Yates, Michael D. Why Unions Matter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998.
L a H aye , T i m , a n d B eve r l y L a H aye The Southern California–based husband and wife team of Tim and Beverly LaHaye have had a major, if long un-
L aHaye, T im, and Beverly L aHaye
derestimated, role in the cultural and political evolution of a large segment of America’s Christian evangelical subculture since the 1970s. Through their best-selling books and organizational efforts, the LaHayes have had an impact on the Religious Right that few can rival. Indeed, one can hardly imagine the contemporary contours of the conservative side of the culture wars without the LaHayes’ prescient eye for hot-button issues and political coalition-building. The grandson of French-Canadian immigrants, Timothy F. LaHaye was born in Detroit on April 27, 1926. After a stint with the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II, he studied at Bob Jones University (BA, 1950), where he met his future wife, Beverly Jean Ratcliffe— born on April 30, 1929, also in Detroit. The two were married in July 1947 and went on to have four children. Beverly dropped out of school, but Tim continued his studies while serving as the pastor of a Baptist church in Pickens, South Carolina (1948–1950). They subsequently served a Baptist congregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1950–1956) and then relocated to Scott Memorial Baptist Church in San Diego (1956–1981). In the meantime, he completed his studies at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary (DMin, 1977). Under LaHaye, Scott Memorial grew and flourished, accomplishing major undertakings, such as the establishment of a number of private Christian schools in the San Diego area, Christian Heritage College (1970), and the Institute for Creation Research (1972). Although his first decade of ministry was largely congregational in focus, LaHaye did evidence a penchant for right-wing politics, serving as a regular speaker and seminar leader for the local John Birch Society. LaHaye came to the attention of the larger evangelical community with the publication of The Spirit-Filled Temperament (1966), a psycho-spiritual self-help book. His views were largely a biblically colored rehashing of classical and medieval theories on the body’s four humors as the gateway for understanding personality differences. By the early 1970s, he was promoting his ideas through the Family Life Seminar ministry; often accompanied by his wife, he held workshops on Christian marriage at large evangelical churches across the country. In the early and mid-1970s, the LaHayes ascended to the status of premier evangelical celebrity-experts on relationships, marriage, the family, and child-rearing through a series of Christian best-sellers, including Tim’s How to Be Happy Though Married (1968) and Beverly’s The Spirit-Controlled Woman (1976). But their biggest success came with their jointly authored book, The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (1976), which sold nearly 3 million copies. While understated and discreet compared to other best-selling sex manuals of the period, the volume made the LaHayes the evangelical equivalent
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Tim LaHaye’s series of best-selling Left Behind novels, offering apocalyptic visions of biblical prophecy, have afforded the author a central role in the evangelical movement and right-wing Christian politics. (Urbano Delvalle/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
of famed sex therapists Masters and Johnson. By the late 1970s, the LaHayes were using their status in the evangelical subculture to explore cultural and political issues that concerned their constituency. For example, Tim LaHaye became the first major evangelical figure to squarely address the growing visibility of the gay lifestyle with his book The Unhappy Gays (1978). At the same time, he was also involved in an effort to ban gay teachers from California classrooms. In 1979, he created Californians for Biblical Morality, which inspired Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority, with LaHaye serving on the organization’s board. He continued his role as a culture warrior with a series of “battle” books that became Christian best-sellers—The Battle for the Mind (1980), The Battle for the Family (1982), and The Battle for the Public Schools (1983). In 1981, he created the Council for National Policy (CNP) to coordinate and fundraise for the Religious Right, and in 1983 he founded the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV). With help from prominent evangelical broadcasters, ACTV’s voter registration drives were responsible for turning out as many as 2 million conservative voters in the 1984 presidential election. Meanwhile, Beverly LaHaye also moved into the political trenches. In 1979, after listening to a Betty Friedan interview, she founded Concerned Women for America (CWA) to counter the influence of the National Organization of Women and to fight the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The organization would eventually claim more than half a million members and played a key role with groups like Focus on the Family in a variety of conservative “pro-family” issues, including network television content, Supreme Court nominations, the effort to ban “partial-birth” abortions, and embryonic stem-cell research. In 1990, she began Beverly LaHaye
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Live, a nationally syndicated radio talk show that aired on over one hundred stations. In the mid-1980s, after it was reported that the ACTV had received substantial funding from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, the group disbanded. LaHaye’s reputation was damaged further when revelations of past anti-Catholic comments and activities came up during the 1988 presidential race, causing Republican candidate Jack Kemp to jettison him from his campaign team. Shunned by his peers in the Religious Right, for the next few years CWA and Beverly’s radio show became the LaHayes’ principal platform as Tim was consigned to the margins of conservative evangelical politics. LaHaye’s fortunes changed, however, when he linked up in the early 1990s with Jerry Jenkins in signing a deal with the Wheaton, Illinois–based Tyndale House Publishing for a novel offering his apocalyptic interpretations of Bible prophecy. The resulting book, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (1995), sold more than five million copies in five years. This ultimately led to a thirteen-book series, culminating with Kingdom Come: The Final Victory (2007). The Left Behind series spawned a frequently visited Web site, children’s versions, and film. Sales for the series topped 60 million copies by late 2006. The sales of LaHaye’s novels served to restore his position as a major player in the Religious Right. Indeed, book royalties financed Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University for a LaHaye-run Pre-Trib Research Center, dedicated to keeping a tab on “prophetic developments” and exposing “false prophets” and their agendas both in America and overseas. To many secularists and liberals, the content and success of the Left Behind series served to stoke paranoia over the mass appeal and possible direction of the marriage between conservative politics and apocalypticminded evangelicals. Larry Eskridge See also: Abortion; Equal Rights Amendment; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; Family Values; Focus on the Family; Friedan, Betty; Gay Rights Movement; John Birch Society; National Organization for Women; Premillennial Dispensationalism; Religious Right; Stem-Cell Research.
Further Reading Dreyfuss, Robert. “Reverend Doomsday.” Rolling Stone, January 28, 2004. Eskridge, Larry. “And the Most Influential Evangelical of the Last Twenty-Five Years Is . . .” Evangelical Studies Bulletin 17:4 (Winter 2001): 1–4. Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Standaert, Michael. Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006.
Lapin, Daniel An Orthodox rabbi and an activist for conservative Republican political causes, Daniel Lapin is the bestknown Jewish spokesman for the Religious Right. Born in 1947 in Johannesburg, South Africa, he immigrated to the United States in 1973 and founded and headed a synagogue in Venice, California. In 1991, he moved near Seattle, Washington, and founded the nonprofit JewishChristian organization Toward Tradition, largely funded by conservative non-Jewish foundations. Lapin believes that the United States is the most Jewish-friendly nation in history, that U.S. conservative Christian political power is good for the Jewish community, and that there should be Christian-Jewish alliances based on politically conservative values. He strongly criticizes the liberalism of the U.S. Jewish community, arguing that liberalism is not based on Judaism. He denounced the Anti-Defamation League for publishing The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America (1994). As a culture warrior, Lapin has spoken out on several controversial issues. He defended Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, who in 2003 was removed from the bench for defying a higher court’s ruling that he remove the Ten Commandments monument he had erected in the rotunda of the state Supreme Court building in Montgomery. Lapin defended Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (2004) while accusing Jewish critics of the film of driving a wedge between Jews and Christians. He criticized the judges in the Terri Schiavo case, who in 2005 ordered the disconnecting of the feeding tubes from Schiavo, who for fifteen years had been in a persistent vegetative state—he referred to the situation as a “premeditated murder plot by her husband and the courts.” He has regularly opposed gay rights and feminism. In 2002, Lapin and Gary Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate, founded the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, the purpose being to “unite Christians in support of Israel and work with American Jews and Christians on behalf of traditional values.” The advisory board included James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rabbi Barry Freundel, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and two well-known close Jewish friends of Rabbi Lapin, conservative movie critic Michael Medved and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Lapin also has hosted a weekly radio talk show, and has appeared as a guest on a number of radio and television talk programs, namely Focus on the Family, The Michael Medved Show, and The Mike Reagan Show. He has written several books, including America’s Real War (1999) and Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money (2002). Lapin’s father, two brothers, and a brother-in-law also are rabbis, and most of his family has immigrated to the United States. He and his wife have seven children, whom they have homeschooled. Abraham D. Lavender
Lear, Nor man See also: Christian Radio; Feminism, Second-Wave; Focus on the Family; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Gibson, Mel; Israel; Moore, Roy S.; Moral Majority; Religious Right; Schiavo, Terri; Ten Commandments.
Further Reading Lapin, Daniel. America’s Real War. Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2000. ———. Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. Toward Tradition Web site. www.towardtradition.org. Wallis, Jim. God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
L a Ro u c h e , Ly n d o n H . , J r. A candidate for the U.S. presidency in every campaign from 1976 through 2004 and the founder of several extremist political organizations, Lyndon LaRouche is regarded by critics as a neofascist or simply a political kook. His loyalists energetically distribute flyers warning of impending economic or political cataclysm unless their leader’s advice is followed. Over the years, LaRouche has offered up countless conspiracy theories, warning against the power of the Rockefellers, Zionists, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), among others. His antiSemitic writings and speeches have gained him the ire of the Anti-Defamation League. During the 1980s, his political network fielded thousands of candidates, disguised as conservative Democrats, in local elections. The son of Quaker parents, Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr., was born on September 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire. His studies at Northeastern University in Boston were interrupted in 1942 due to World War II. Briefly returning to Northeastern after his discharge from the U.S. Army, LaRouche dropped out and joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Dispatched to the Lynn, Massachusetts, GE River Works to do support work and recruiting for the party, he adopted the pseudonym Lyn Marcus. Moving to New York City in 1954, LaRouche worked as a management consultant while remaining committed to Trotskyite Marxism. LaRouche’s role as a political leader began in the late 1960s after he was expelled from the SWP. In 1969, after mentoring activists in the labor caucus of the campus-based Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), he led a group in establishing the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). Four years later, the group had more than 600 members in two dozen cities across the United States and published a newspaper called New Solidarity. In 1973, LaRouche escalated a long-simmering feud with the Communist Party of the United States of America through a confrontation dubbed Operation Mop-Up, which led to some violence. After publishing Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political
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Economy (1975), LaRouche reversed course and began leading followers into alliances with the political right. Left-wing critics began calling his group a fascist cult, dubbing members “LaRouchies.” LaRouche, who has often portrayed himself as a dissident Democrat, has been generally rejected and renounced by both major parties. Between 1982 and 1988, his followers ran as Democratic candidates in 4,000 elections in more than thirty states, gathering over 4 million votes. In 1986, two followers of LaRouche won the Democratic primary in Illinois for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, forcing the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson III, to repudiate the official party ticket while calling the LaRouche followers “neo-Nazis.” That same year, LaRouche organizers placed Proposition 64, an AIDS quarantine initiative, on the ballot in California, saying that its stringent measures were required to stop the spread of HIV. The initiative was defeated by gay rights activists, who labeled it authoritarian and homophobic. After several state and federal investigations, LaRouche was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for federal conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax violations. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of LaRouche and six associates, and he served five years in prison before being paroled in 1994. LaRouche supporters claimed that the entire episode was part of an illegal conspiracy by rogue CIA operatives to silence him. Chip Berlet See also: AIDS; Anti-Semitism; Central Intelligence Agency; Conspiracy Theories; Democratic Party; Gay Rights Movement; Marxism; Neoconservatism; Students for a Democratic Society.
Further Reading Berlet, Chip, and Joel Bellman. Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag. Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1989. King, Dennis. Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. New York: Doubleday, 1989. LaRouche, Lyndon H., Jr. The Power of Reason: A Kind of an Autobiography. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1979.
L e a r, N o r m a n Groundbreaking television writer and producer Norman Lear dominated the airwaves, and discussion of television, in the 1970s with his portrayal of bigots, feminists, political activists, and antiwar radicals in a number of primetime situation comedies. Offering viewers an array of iconic characters in topical situations, Lear was the mind behind such wildly popular
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programs as All in the Family (CBS, 1971–1978), Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972–1977), Maude (CBS, 1972–1978), Good Times (CBS, 1974–1979), One Day at a Time (CBS, 1975–1984), and The Jeffersons (CBS, 1975–1985). Lear’s representations of both liberal and conservative ideologies were revolutionary in the medium. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 22, 1922, Norman Milton Lear briefly attended Boston’s Emerson College. He dropped out in 1942 to join the war effort and served in the air force. After his discharge in 1945, he turned his attentions to the entertainment industry, earning his first writing credit in 1950 as a contributor to the Ford Star Revue. He spent the next twenty years as a writer for more than a dozen comedy and variety programs, including the Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the Danny Kaye Show, and the Andy Williams Show. After decades in the genre, in 1971 Lear was given an opportunity to craft his own characters and plotlines with the airing of All in the Family. The show focused on the working-class Bunker family, including conservative patriarch Archie and his wife, Edith. Their daughter Gloria and her husband, Mike, lived in the same crowded house in Queens, New York. The younger couple embodied the liberal spirit of the era in their attitudes toward the feminist and civil rights movements and the Vietnam War. The house was filled with perpetual conflict as Archie and Mike (referred to as “Meathead” by his father-in-law) clashed. Archie spewed racial epithets in his rants with Mike—a kind of language and frank discussion of political issues that was virtually absent from television in this era. Though not well received by fans in its first season, All in the Family went on to secure a place in the top-ten Nielsen ratings for the duration of its eight seasons. Lear extended the realistic portrayal of contemporary political issues to several other situation comedies, most notably Maude, featuring Beatrice Arthur as an affluent liberal feminist. Several times divorced, Maude spoke openly about sexuality and drug use. Perhaps most controversial to audiences, the main character had an abortion in the 1972 season, two months prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal. At least thirty CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the episode and dropped the program from their schedules. In 1972, Lear testified before a Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights: “The American public is the final arbiter anyway, and it tells us very quickly what it likes and does not like. What it will be allowed to see, however, is another matter, and there the writer deserves the right to express life as he sees it.” In 1981, Lear became more directly involved in the culture wars when he co-founded People for the American Way (along with Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas and other civic leaders) in reac-
tion to the growing political ascendancy of conservative televangelists. The organization stood in direct opposition to well-known leaders of the Religious Right such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart. The PFAW proclaims its support of the preservation of constitutional liberties while championing religious pluralism, freedom of expression, and the separation of church and state. Inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984, Norman Lear garnered the Medal of Arts in 1999. He later devoted much of his time to nonprofit organizations, including the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication (2000–), a multidisciplinary research and public policy center dedicated to exploring the convergence of entertainment, commerce, and society. Aidan Smith See also: Feminism, Second-Wave; Religious Right; Roe v. Wade (1973); Vietnam War.
Further Reading Adler, Richard. All in the Family: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Praeger, 1979. Arlen, Michael. “The Media Dramas of Norman Lear.” The New Yorker, May 10, 1975. Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Norman Lear Web site. www.normanlear.com. People for the American Way Web site. www.pfaw.org.
L e a r y, T i m o t hy A psychologist, psychedelics advocate, showman, and entrepreneur, Timothy Leary urged young people to take drugs, reject academia and the corporate “rat race,” and join the ranks of the permanently disaffected. “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” he proclaimed famously, in a catchy slogan that reverberated with the counterculture. A member of the generation that came to be known as “the Greatest,” he turned his back on his contemporaries and urged the young to defy their elders. A handful of his influential peers—including Benjamin Spock, the world-famous pediatrician, and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a former CIA operative—joined him and helped widen the generation gap that divided parents and children during the Vietnam era. At one point, Richard M. Nixon proclaimed him the “most dangerous man in America.” Timothy Francis Leary was born on October 22, 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to a well-off Irish Catholic family. His father was an alcoholic who abandoned him and his mother. After studying at Holy Cross College (1938–1939), Leary attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1940–1941). His career as a
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cadet ended after school officials caught him consuming alcohol, a violation of academy rules, but he went on to serve in the Army Medical Corps. He completed his education at the University of Alabama (AB, 1943), Washington State University (MA, 1946), and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, clinical psychology, 1950). He married, had children, and in 1955 became the director of clinical research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, publishing highly respected articles on behaviorism in scientific journals. Accepting a prestigious lectureship at Harvard University in 1959, Leary seemed bound for respectability. Then, in Mexico in 1960, he began to experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms. From that moment on, he became an apostle for psychedelic drugs, especially LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), which was legal at the time; the CIA considered it an indispensable psychological weapon in the Cold War. Harvard promptly clamped down on Leary’s LSD experiments with undergraduates and fired him in 1963. He pursued his mission at Millbrook, an estate in upstate New York, with the help of his aide, Richard Alpert, and the poet Allen Ginsberg. Leary won converts throughout the 1960s, but he tangled repeatedly with the law and was finally sentenced to prison for possession of marijuana. The Weather Underground, a radical leftist organization, helped him escape, and from 1970 until 1973, Leary lived as a fugitive and exile in Africa and Europe. Arrested in Afghanistan and extradited to the United States, he cooperated with authorities and named names, including the lawyers who had helped him escape from prison. Released in 1976 after serving three years in prison, Leary settled in Los Angeles and recycled himself as a 1960s icon. He teamed up with convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy in some public speaking appearances, then reinvented himself as an apostle and salesman for computers, the Internet, space travel, virtual reality, and video games. Leary died of cancer on May 31, 1996, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were launched into space. To admirers, Leary was a visionary; to skeptics, a kook of the hippie era. Jonah Raskin See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Counterculture; Generations and Generational Conflict; Ginsberg, Allen; Liddy, G. Gordon; Nixon, Richard; Students for a Democratic Society; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Leary, Timothy. Flashbacks. New York: Putnam, 1990. Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shalin. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD. New York: Grove, 1985. Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York: Grove, 1987.
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Torgoff, Martin. Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
L e e , S p i ke Motion picture director, producer, writer, and actor Spike Lee has been one of the most provocative and influential filmmakers in America since the 1980s and the first African American to win broad critical acclaim in the field. Many, if not most, of his more than twenty feature films—including Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), Crooklyn (1994), and the documentary 4 Little Girls (1997)—have made statements about race relations, violence, and other polarizing themes, drawing on the artist’s experiences in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. Lee’s attempts to explore complex social problems have been both acclaimed and denounced, variously labeled provocative, explosive, and even exploitive of the black experience. As an AfricanAmerican director with access to power and media, Lee has brought an awareness of black identity and advocacy of social reform to personal and professional lives. His films explore the complexities of African-American experience, including racial prejudice and stereotyping, adding depth to the ways in which audiences understand and address issues affecting the black community, including the interplay of racism and class conflict. Born on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia, Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Brooklyn. He later returned to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College, where he studied mass communication (BA, 1978). He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (1982). In his first year of graduate film studies, he produced The Answer, a ten-minute critical African-American revision of D.W. Griffith’s racially charged Birth of a Nation (1915). His initial film work was followed by several multifaceted narratives of African-American life, including Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop—We Cut Heads, which won the 1983 Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Student Academy Award; She’s Gotta Have It (1986); and School Daze (1988). The last of these, focusing on what Lee termed “the black caste system,” stirred controversy in the African-American community, with some members commending his unflinching examination of a concealed social problem in the black community while others condemned his airing of “dirty laundry.” This was followed by Do the Right Thing, which explored the web of racial and ethnic tensions on a hot summer day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The film continued Lee’s efforts to address issues of exclusion, solidarity, difference, and similarity, while its depiction of racism and resistance brought Lee significant criticism for promoting racial violence. The
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create films that reflect conditions in inner-city AfricanAmerican communities and the struggles that arise in them. However, those very filmmakers have distanced themselves from Lee’s work, criticizing him for “selling out”—creating films that increasingly resemble the slick, glossy products of Hollywood—and adopting the filmic devices and language of the industry’s historically white producers and directors. Advocates of Lee’s work argue that, whatever his appeal to mainstream audiences, he draws attention to vital issues in the black community and is working within the system to create change. As if responding to his critics, Lee produced When the Levees Broke (2006), a four-hour HBO documentary—and a work of little commercial value—that shames the federal government, in particular President George W. Bush, for its poor response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Most of Lee’s supporters and detractors do agree that his work has opened the door for a new generation of black filmmakers. Cynthia J. Miller See also: Afrocentrism; Anti-Semitism; Hurricane Katrina; Lesbians; Literature, Film, and Drama; Malcolm X; Million Man March; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Race.
Further Reading
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), a tale of racial tension and violence in Brooklyn, New York, epitomizes his focus on the urban black experience, racial prejudice, and ethnic polarization. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 1999. (Library of Congress, POS-MOT.PIC.-1989)
same criticisms would also be aired about his next release, Jungle Fever (1991), a story of interracial love. The highly acclaimed Malcolm X (1992), in which Denzel Washington starred as the Black Muslim firebrand, again created controversy within the AfricanAmerican community. In an open letter in Ebony magazine, the United Front to Preserve the Memory of Malcolm X and the Cultural Revolution, led by poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), publicly objected to Lee producing a film about the martyred activist, believing it would be “exploitive” and promote the worldview of the oppressors. Accusations of commercialism were levied after the film’s release, as promotional merchandise was sold through Lee’s companies, including Spike’s Joint (retail outlets in Brooklyn and Los Angeles) and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks and Musicworks (his production company). Some scholars regard Lee’s work, particularly his early films, as representative of the avant-garde school of radical black filmmakers, whose avowed mission is to
Friedman, Lester D., ed. Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Grizzuti Harrison, Barbara. “Spike Hates Your Cracker Ass.” Esquire, October 1992. Lee, Spike, with Lisa Jones. Do The Right Thing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Reid, Mark A. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. “A Revealing Look at Spike Lee’s Changing Life.” Ebony, May 1994.
L e M ay, C u r t i s A stocky, cigar-chomping U.S. Air Force general responsible for long-range bombing missions in case of war, Curtis LeMay was characterized in the culture wars as a warmonger eager to trigger nuclear Armageddon. His Cold War reputation for championing a military doctrine of overwhelming force, seemingly without moral qualms, was preceded by his service during World War II, which included directing the incendiary bombing campaign of Japanese cities and later the use of atomic bombs. LeMay’s occasional blunt remarks in reference to Cold War strategy made him appear extreme—an effect heightened by facial paralysis, the result of Bell’s palsy, which left him with a permanent frown. As the running mate of independent presidential candidate
Leopold , A ldo
George Wallace in 1968, he stated that the United States should consider the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. The son of an ironworker, Curtis Emerson LeMay was born on November 15, 1906, in Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of Ohio State University (BS, civil engineering, 1932), he began his military career in 1928 in the U.S. Army Air Corps, inspired in part by Charles Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic the previous year. During World War II, LeMay rose from the rank of major (1941) to major general (1944). After the war, he organized and headed the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC; 1948–1957), then served as Air Force vice chief of staff (1957–1961) and chief of staff (1961–1965). In 1968, three years after retiring from the military, he ran for vice president on the American Independent Party ticket with Wallace. His published works include Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), America Is in Danger (1968), and Superfortress (1988). He received twenty medals and decorations from the United States and other governments for his military service. In his first plan for nuclear war, drafted in 1949, LeMay called for dropping 133 atomic bombs on seventyseven Soviet cities. In a speech at the National War College in 1956, he boasted that after a single day of SAC nuclear attacks, the Soviet Union would be “infinitely poorer than China . . . and condemned to an agricultural existence perhaps for generations to come.” LeMay is also remembered for saying of the North Vietnamese in his autobiography, “We’re going to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” although he later denied writing it and shifted the blame to his ghost writer. LeMay’s perceived enthusiasm for nuclear warfare is believed to have inspired the characters Jack D. Ripper and Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). But after the demise of the Soviet Union, some Americans, mostly political conservatives, proclaimed LeMay a hero for organizing a nuclear strike force that they believed helped the United States win the Cold War. LeMay died on October 1, 1990. Roger Chapman See also: Cold War; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Kubrick, Stanley; Nuclear Age; Soviet Union and Russia; Teller, Edward; Vietnam War; Wallace, George.
Further Reading Coffey, Thomas M. Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay. New York: Crown, 1986. Conversino, Mark J. “Back to the Stone Age: The Attack on Curtis E. LeMay.” Strategic Review 25:2 (Spring 1997): 60–68. “Curtis LeMay: The Hedgehog.” U.S. News and World Report, March 16, 1998.
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Leopold, Aldo Aldo Leopold, a leading conservationist and wilderness advocate of the twentieth century, fostered wilderness management in the United States and was instrumental in the creation of the U.S. national wilderness system. His conservation philosophies were a catalyst to the environmental movement. His call for a land ethic based on a moral responsibility to the environment fundamentally changed how the American people look at preservation, land use, and conservation. Born Rand Aldo Leopold on January 11, 1887, in Burlington, Iowa, from his youth he exhibited an interest in nature and outdoor recreation. After studying at Yale’s School of Forestry (BS, 1908; MS, 1909), he joined the U.S. Forest Service and in 1912 rose to supervisor of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. While working in the Southwest, Leopold advocated intensive game management that favored “high-value” species like deer and elk. As part of his official duties, he traveled throughout the region, speaking to various groups about the benefits of stocking game species and eliminating or controlling predators. In 1924, while in New Mexico, Leopold also helped establish the Gila National Forest as the first national wilderness area. That same year, the Forest Service transferred Leopold to Madison, Wisconsin, where he led a series of educational programs emphasizing conservation and game management to local farmers and landowners. Leopold’s devotion and expertise drew the notice of the University of Wisconsin, which in 1933 created for him a chair of game management in its Department of Agricultural Economics. As a professor, he published Game Management (1933), a textbook calling for land management grounded in research and science. This work was instrumental in developing wildlife conservation as an academic as well as a practical discipline, leading the university in 1939 to appoint him chair of its new Department of Wildlife Management, the first of its kind in the nation. In 1935, he helped found the Wilderness Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation of U.S. public lands. Leopold’s most enduring and controversial environmental philosophies are found in A Sand County Almanac (1949), published posthumously following his fatal heart attack on April 21, 1948. The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s was inspired by this work, which envisioned ecosystems giving equal importance to land, plants, animals, and humans. The book also criticized conservative notions of private property rights as too narrow and destructive, and it called for a land ethic based on an ecological consciousness rather than on economic motives alone. Drew A. Swanson See also: Animal Rights; Earth Day; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Foreman, Dave; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness.
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Further Reading Knight, Richard L., and Suzanne Riedel, eds. Aldo Leopold and the Ecological Conscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Meine, Curt. Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Yannuzi, Della A. Aldo Leopold: A Protector of the Wild. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 2002.
Lesbians The label “lesbian”—referring to women who seek out and engage in sexual relationships exclusively with other women—was originally meant to be derogatory but became a source of pride, identification, and revolt for many women involved in the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While many lesbians remained closeted during that period, individuals like Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, and Martha Shelley became actively involved in the women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights movements. Dissatisfied with what they perceived as the sexism inherent in the gay rights movement and the reluctance of the women’s rights movement to recognize issues specific to lesbians, many lesbian feminists split from these two more mainstream groups to search for a more inclusive and radical approach to women’s rights. In 1970, Brown and Shelley founded the Lavender Menace—later renamed the Radicalesbians—in response to a speech made by Betty Friedan, the president of the National Organization of Women (NOW). Fearful that lesbianism might stigmatize the entire movement, Friedan had reaffirmed NOW’s hesitancy to include and promote issues of lesbian sexuality and discrimination. Friedan referred to lesbianism as the “lavender menace” of the women’s movement. In an effort to make their concerns known, Radicalesbians interrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women in May of 1970 wearing shirts emblazoned with the words “Lavender Menace.” In dramatic fashion, Brown read aloud from the group’s manifesto, “The Woman-Identified-Woman,” while other members of the Radicalesbians distributed copies of the manifesto to the audience. “The Woman-Identified-Woman” is widely recognized as the founding document of lesbian feminism. It not only placed lesbianism at the core of feminism, but also made an impassioned appeal for the inclusion of lesbians as well as issues of lesbian sexuality and discrimination in the larger women’s movement. “The Woman-Identified-Woman” expanded and politicized the definition of lesbian by asserting that “a lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” According to the text, “Lesbian is a label invented by the Man to throw at any woman who dares to be equal, who dares to challenge his prerogatives, who dares to assert the primacy of her own needs.” Radicales-
bians called for the rejection of man-made constructions of femininity and patriarchy as well as an end to the objectification of women. By denaturalizing the concept of heterosexuality, Radicalesbians hoped to diminish the guilt and self-hate experienced by many lesbians. More important, “The Woman-Identified-Woman” was one of the first documents to promote a positive image of lesbianism and lesbian sexuality. The Radicalesbians were successful in convincing many women of the primacy of the lesbian experience, and they attracted many new followers. In the early 1970s, NOW recognized the importance of lesbians in the movement; in the mid-1970s, the National Women’s Political Caucus also supported nondiscrimination against lesbians. Although the Radicalesbians disbanded in 1971, the lesbian-feminist movement under the guidance of Brown, Sheila Jeffreys, Jill Johnston, and Adrienne Rich flourished into the 1970s and 1980s. Lesbian feminists tended to be younger women attracted to one of two strands of lesbian feminism: separatism or cultural feminism. Separatists, the more radical of the two, actively promoted the establishment of a distinct women’s culture and founded women’s-only social networks, bookstores, presses, and music festivals. Olivia Records, the Naiad Press, and the Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival are just a few examples of the separatists’ many initiatives to withdraw entirely from male-defined society. Separatists also rejected what they considered man-made labels like “butch” and “femme” and instead advocated a more feminized approach to language. “History” became “herstory,” and “women” became “womyn” or “wimin.” Like the separatists, cultural feminists also emphasized the formation of a distinct women’s culture; however, the latter often adopted a more theoretical approach. Recalling great matriarchies of the past, cultural feminists discussed the establishment of a utopian society in which women’s biological superiority over men as well as their antiviolent and maternal characteristics were celebrated. Although lesbian feminism is often associated with separatism, at times the gay, lesbian, and women’s rights movements worked together to enforce change. Between 1971 and 1973, for instance, these groups rallied together to have “homosexuality” removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses. Lesbian feminism also borrowed elements from the larger women’s movement. “The personal is political” became an important slogan for both movements. Today, there are many prominent lesbians in the popular media. Actress, comedian, and one-time talk show host Rosie O’Donnell and Mary Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, are just two examples. Ellen DeGeneres, a former stand-up comic and popular talk show host, became the first lesbian to come out of the closet on national television when her character Ellen (also the title of the series) admitted that
Liddy, G . Gordon
she was a lesbian in 1997. While the profile of lesbians in the media increased in the 1990s, lesbian feminism as a movement declined. Due to the exclusionary and separatist nature of many of the women-only activities, the movement was often regarded as discriminatory toward heterosexual women, transgender male-females, and gay men. The ideological constraints within lesbian feminism also alienated some working-class and minority lesbians. Lesbian-feminists were often accused of being insensitive to issues of class and race discrimination. Despite these shortcomings, the lesbian-feminist movement offered a radical and potentially revolutionary critique of traditional and patriarchal society and raised consciousness among heterosexual as well as lesbian women. Due to reporting techniques, it is difficult to determine how many lesbians currently live in the United States. According to the 2000 Census, there were 593,391 same-sex unmarried partner couples living in the country, 293,365 of which were female couples. Researchers have estimated that the population of lesbian couples could actually be 25 to 50 percent higher than the recorded census findings. Since the census does not ask any questions about sexual orientation or sexual preference, it is also difficult to ascertain how many single lesbians are currently living in America. Kelly L. Mitchell See also: Cheney Family; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in Popular Culture; National Organization for Women; Outing; Shelley, Martha; Socarides, Charles; Transgender Movement.
Further Reading Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Johnston, Jill. Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Radicalesbians. “The Woman-Identified-Woman.” In Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow, 233–37. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Lew is, Ber nard A British-American scholar of Near Eastern studies, Bernard Lewis has advanced the “Muslim rage” thesis. In his view, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism are reactions based on envy and humiliation as Western culture, power, and prestige have eclipsed once great Muslim societies for over three centuries. Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations” in describing the fourteen centuries of conflict between Christians and Muslims. In the American culture wars, Lewis’s views have been adopted by political conservatives to answer the question “Why do they hate us?” and to dismiss any sug-
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gestion that U.S. foreign policy may have prompted the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In addition, Lewis is known for linking Osama bin Laden to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a view that has since been discredited and that encouraged the Bush administration to launch war against Iraq in 2003 in order to effect “regime change.” Bernard A. Lewis was born in London on May 31, 1916, and raised in a middle-class Jewish family. He studied history at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies (BA, 1936; PhD, 1939) and completed graduate work at the University of Paris (1937). During World War II, he served in British military intelligence. Lewis taught at the University of London (1938, 1949–1974), Princeton University (1974–1986), Cornell University (1984–1990), and has been a visiting professor at numerous prestigious institutions in the United States and abroad. In 1982, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 2007, in order to counter what he regards as a liberal bias in the study of Islamic societies, Lewis cofounded the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Lewis is the author of two dozen books, including The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), Islam and the West (1993), What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002), The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003), and From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (2004). At a May 2006 meeting of the World Affairs Council, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney publicly praised Lewis for his contributions to the study of Islamic societies. In November of the same year, President George W. Bush presented Lewis with the National Humanities Medal. Vocal critics have included Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Roger Chapman See also: Chomsky, Noam; Huntington, Samuel P.; Pipes, Richard, and Daniel Pipes; Said, Edward; September 11.
Further Reading Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library, 2003. ———. “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Atlantic Monthly, September 1990. Lockman, Zachary. “Critique from the Right: The Neoconservative Assault on Middle East Studies.” New Centennial Review 5:1 (Spring 2005): 63–110. Postel, Danny. “Islamic Studies’ Young Turks.” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2002.
L i d d y, G . G o r d o n G. Gordon Liddy, born George Gordon Battle Liddy on November 30, 1930, in Hoboken, New Jersey, was a
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key figure in the Watergate scandal and later became a controversial right-wing commentator. After graduating from Fordham University (BS, 1952), Liddy served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War but did not see combat. Later, he studied law at Fordham University (LLD, 1957). He worked briefly for the FBI (1957–1962) and then had a private law practice in New York (1962–1966). As a district attorney in Poughkeepsie, New York, he first gained public notoriety in 1966 by putting on trial the counterculture drug proponent Timothy Leary, but Liddy lost the case. In 1968, Liddy ran for Congress, losing in the Republican primary against the incumbent Hamilton Fish, Jr. Building on his growing political connections, Liddy served as a local manager for Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. By 1971, he had risen to a key role in Nixon’s reelection campaign, serving on the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP or “CREEP”). As head of the White House Plumbers Unit, a secret operations group, Liddy concocted a number of “dirty tricks” to be carried out against Nixon opponents, from minor press leaks of false information to larger illegal schemes such as breaking into the office of the psychiatrist of Vietnam War critic and former member of the State Department Daniel Ellsberg. (The Nixon administration was after information to discredit Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked to the press the secret government history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers.) Liddy masterminded the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex, setting off a series of events that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Liddy, one of the highest officials in the Nixon administration to be tried for illegal activities in the Watergate affair, was convicted of burglary, wiretapping, and conspiracy. He received a twenty-year prison sentence, commuted after four years by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. After his release from prison, Liddy published a best-selling autobiography, Will (1980), and had supporting roles in several movies. He contends that the Watergate break-in was meant to expose a call-girl ring operated by the Democrats, a theory embraced by rightwing commentators and conspiracy buffs. In 1992, he debuted as a conservative talk radio host. In 1994, President Bill Clinton and former president George H.W. Bush condemned Liddy for advising private property owners to shoot federal agents in the head so as to avoid their bulletproof vests. Liddy moved his radio show to the Radio America network in 2003. He occasionally appears on television talk shows and provides commentary for Fox News. His book When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country (2002) offers a potpourri of right-wing views mixed with some humor. This was followed in 2006 by Fight Back! Tack-
ling Terrorism, Liddy Style, written with his son, James G. Liddy, and J. Michael Barrett and Joel Selanikio. Despite his conservative ideology, Liddy has some friends on the left, including liberal comedian Al Franken and outspoken feminist Camille Paglia. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Colson, Chuck; Conspiracy Theories; Dean, John; Felt, W. Mark; Leary, Timothy; Nixon, Richard; Presidential Pardons; Talk Radio; Vietnam War; Watergate; Woodward, Bob.
Further Reading Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. G. Gordon Liddy’s Official Web site. www.liddyshow .com. Sussman, Barry. The Great Coverup: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate. New York: Crowell, 1974. Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein. The Final Days. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.
Limbaugh, Rush A prominent voice on American talk radio since the late 1980s, Rush Limbaugh has boosted AM radio as a popular communications medium while using populist humor and satire to castigate liberalism and the Democratic Party. With President Ronald Reagan his chief political hero, Limbaugh has defined his conservative principles as supporting individual liberty, limited government, free-market economics, law and order, religious freedom, a color-blind society, and a strong national defense. Specifically, he has spoken out in favor of school choice, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, judicial restraint, and the war on terrorism. Rush Hudson Limbaugh, III, was born on January 12, 1951, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. His family was active in local Republican politics, a grandfather serving as a state representative. In 1983, President Reagan appointed Limbaugh’s father, an attorney and World War II veteran, to a federal judgeship. Limbaugh grew up keenly interested in current events and, while in high school, worked for a local radio station. After three semesters, he dropped out of Southeast Missouri State University in 1971. This was followed by radio jobs in Pennsylvania and Missouri, a stint in public relations for the Kansas City Royals baseball team (1978–1983), and another radio job at KFBK in Sacramento, California (1984–1988). ABC then invited Limbaugh to start his own radio program in New York. The Rush Limbaugh Show began broadcasting in August 1988 from New York City’s WABC-AM station, where it still airs live 12–3 p.m. on weekdays. The
Limbaugh , Ru sh
Rush Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated radio talk show is the most popular in America despite—or because of—his blunt style, arch-conservative views, and personal controversy. Among his legions of admirers, Limbaugh is known as “America’s truth teller.” (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)
ability of stations to air such a long broadcast without diversity of viewpoint was a consequence of the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. Limbaugh’s syndicated program, a call-in show that screens callers for ideological point of view, has been popular with white, male, collegeeducated baby boomers of Republican affiliation. At its peak in the mid-1990s, the broadcast was heard on more than 665 stations, reaching more than 20 million listeners. By 2005, these figures had declined to less than 600 and 13.5 million, respectively. In 1993, Limbaugh was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and in 2002 an industry magazine designated him “the greatest radio talk show host of all time.” During the 1990s, Limbaugh briefly branched out into television, beginning with a controversial 1990 stint as substitute host of CBS’s late-night Pat Sajak Show. Limbaugh’s prior acidic comments on gays and the AIDS crisis inspired the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to pack the studio audience for his television debut. During the broadcast, audience members yelled comments such as “You’re a Nazi!” and “Go home!” The network’s security crew emptied the studio during a commercial break, and Limbaugh finished the show without a live audience. In terms of other media, Limbaugh published the Limbaugh Letter in the 1990s (190,000 monthly subscriptions as of early
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1993), as well as a best-selling book, The Way Things Ought to Be (1992). The appeal of The Rush Limbaugh Show rests on the host’s humor, beginning with a fictional creation called the “Excellence in Broadcasting (EIB) network.” Between political commentaries, the show airs parodies, mock commercials, and skits. The program is noted for such original jargon and catchword phrases as “Ditto” or “Mega Ditto” (greetings from show listeners); “Dittohead” (Limbaugh devotees); “Environmentalist Wackos” (believers in global warming); “Feminazis” (feminists); and “Talent on loan from God” (Limbaugh’s moniker for bombast). Limbaugh’s conservative ideals generally support the Republican Party and always denigrate the Democratic Party. Perhaps with his marriage foibles in mind, he has rarely appropriated the “family values” rhetoric of evangelicals. He has instead focused on the “dangers” of government spending, liberal media bias, feminism, the Clinton family, H. Ross Perot, political correctness, and what he has regarded as environmentalists’ excesses. Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have appeared on the show, as have such other notables as Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Bork, Thomas Sowell, Tony Snow, Walter Williams, and Matt Drudge. During the first year of Clinton’s presidency, Reagan wrote Limbaugh: “You have become the number one voice for conservatism in our country.” After the 1994 congressional election, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) stated, “Rush has made it significantly more expensive to be liberal and significantly easier to be conservative. . . . He does for conservatives what NPR [National Public Radio] does for liberals.” Limbaugh’s opponents have criticized him for distorting and simplifying complex issues. Some have also labeled him a hatemonger. The syndicated columnist Molly Ivins once said of him: “It’s not his humor I object to; it’s his targets [of derision]. Women, children, dead people, the homeless, and animals.” While discussing Limbaugh’s charges of a conspiracy behind the suicide of Vincent Foster (a former White House lawyer under Clinton), New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis concluded, “Limbaugh’s game [is] to throw dirt on government and anyone who believes that society needs government. . . . He is really trying to destroy public faith in our institutions.” On the lighter side, among those turning humor against Limbaugh has been Al Franken, author of the best-selling book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations (1996). According to Franken, “Rush’s show is to punish you for actually knowing anything.” Occasionally Limbaugh’s activities outside of his radio program have become fodder for the culture wars. As a commentator in 2003 for an ESPN television show
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on professional football, Limbaugh asserted that popular media support for an African-American football player, Donovan McNabb, was racially motivated. The public outcry over what was regarded as a racist remark prompted Limbaugh’s resignation from the ESPN program. That same year, authorities in Florida began investigating Limbaugh for improperly obtaining prescription drugs. In 2006, after treatment for addition to painkillers and a lengthy legal battle, he was charged with “doctor shopping” in a settlement with Palm Beach County authorities. Critics accused Limbaugh of hypocrisy for portraying himself as a victim (he claimed the prosecutor was politically motivated), pointing out that the broadcaster for years had advocated prison for drug abusers. Tim Lacy See also: AIDS; Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Democratic Party; Federal Communications Commission; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Global Warming; Media Bias; Political Correctness; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Talk Radio.
Further Reading Barker, David C. “Rushed Decisions: Political Talk Radio and Vote Choice, 1994–1996.” Journal of Politics 61:2 (May 1999): 527–39. Chafets, Zev. “Late Period Limbaugh.” New York Times Magazine, July 6, 2008. Colford, Paul D. The Rush Limbaugh Story: Talent on Loan from God: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Franken, Al. Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. New York: Delacorte Press, 1996. Kelly, Charles M. The Great Limbaugh Con: And Other RightWing Assaults on Common Sense. Santa Barbara, CA: Fithian Press, 1993. Kurtz, Howard. Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time. New York: Times Books, 1996. Limbaugh, Rush H., III. See, I Told You So. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. ———. The Way Things Ought to Be. New York: Pocket Books, 1992.
Literature, Film, and Drama Literature, film, and drama have expressed and shaped postwar America. As cultural products, they have been powerful tools of communication among different and sometimes warring social groups, contributing to and often escalating the culture wars.
Literature Postwar American literature began with a wave of antiwar novels, celebrated in print and as Hollywood motion pictures, that depicted combat with hyperrealism, Cold
War nuclear doom with post-apocalyptic grotesques, and consumerist suburbia with satirical contempt. Grace Metalious shocked America with her Peyton Place (1956), a best-selling account of the sexual goings-on in a New England community. C.P. Snow’s 1959 “Two Cultures” lecture on the chasm between the sciences and the humanities heightened cultural and institutional debates about the value of literature and literary education in the age of increasingly militarized science. Rent by civil rights unrest, the 1950s saw the emergence of black writers and the nonconformist Beats. While Philip Roth deplored the powers of fiction to do justice to a world that was quickly overtaking writers’ imaginations, the 1957 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roth v. United States established that literature could not be banned as obscene unless it was utterly without redeeming social value. The New York Jewish elite congregated around the Partisan Review, giving the East Coast literary establishment its legendary clout and verve. Warning against the closing of the American mind, sociologists identified the mood of the nation amid postwar culture: atomized; conformist; looking for a fix in materialism, existentialism, or even—presaging the hippies—Eastern mysticism. Starting with the 1960s, all literary subdivisions became increasingly jumbled, not to say arbitrary. Styles, influences, and ideologies mixed freely as tens of thousands of book titles appeared annually in multimillion editions, glutting the market. Day-Glo colors masked the culture of black humor, in turn ironic and savagely funny, forged among the Vietnam conflict, political assassinations, drug and sexual revolutions, and race riots spilling from innercity ghettoes. Becoming awash with intertextual and intercultural allusions, at once sophisticated and vernacular, realistic and fantastic, a melting pot of genres, techniques and modes, literature went to fight its own war. Fiction writers invaded the domain of history and reportage, following Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), a nonfiction novel. Award-winning “docufiction” proved that history could be profitably wed to the techniques and appeal of the novel. Media-hip New Journalists, beginning with Tom Wolfe, smashed sales records with their hyped-up, heat-of-the-moment pieces that obscured distinctions between fiction and reportage and between literary and popular culture. A generation of confessional poets, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, stood emotionally naked after casting the innermost aspects of their lives in verse, much as today’s controversial poetry slammers and rappers do. Beginning with the 1970s, theory-laden literature sought refuge in universities, which were funding writers-in-residence and cultivating professional “creative writers.” New Criticism and the art of “close reading” (with exclusive and strict study of texts) were eclipsed by structuralist literary theories, reducing reading to a
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search for the structural “hidden logic” of a text, even though critic Susan Sontag had railed against tedious critical analyses in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). Scholars adopted various theoretical approaches, such as reader response, neo-Marxism, neo-Freudianism, feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. Often compromised by obscure jargon, some of these approaches thrived on campuses while coming under attack for shaky methodology and for usurping the primacy of literature itself. At the center of these interpretive wars, postmodern writers created language-centered, self-reflexive selfparodies, cutting truth and reality loose in fictional and metafictional antinarratives. In response to the postmodern pyrotechnics, the 1980s minimalists, such as Raymond Carver with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), stripped prose of excess. Plots were in abeyance and moral judgments suspended, story after story filled with social “lowlifes” addicted to alcohol or drugs, on welfare, suffering trailer park blues, or intellectual malaise. In the last generation, a splintering mosaic of ethnic and cultural communities gained unprecedented readership and critical applause. Together with women writers, they began to edge out some of the classics (“great books”) as a focus of literary study, precipitating “canon wars” in American universities and cultural institutions. Courses in science fiction were included in university curricula. A new wave of novelists elevated crime fiction to literary heights. Romances and erotica smashed readership records, and Stephen King and his imitators reinvented the horror story. During the 2000s, belles-lettres accounted for less than 3 percent of all literature sold in the United States, and popular literature made gains in prestige and legitimacy, spawning a no-brow culture.
Film The American triumph in World War II was followed by frantic production of war movies as patriotism and propaganda reigned supreme. Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, in Hollywood the Dream Factory (1951), portrayed Hollywood in the late 1940s as totalitarian, a subculture driven by business and mass communication. Under Cold War suspicion and anticommunist crusades, the film industry experienced a major brain drain with the blacklisting of film professionals deemed subversive by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Numerous gifted directors, actors, and writers were in effect exiled. Meanwhile, the birth of television led to bankruptcy for many movie theaters. American cinema in the 1960s and 1970s displayed a highly political flavor. Mirroring the tumultuous sociopolitical context, conspiracy thrillers projected dark and unsettling hints of paranoia, provoking audiences. In tune with the Beat sensibility and cynical attitudes
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about law and justice was the rise of cinematic antiheroes who embraced social marginality and alienation. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) sent shockwaves with their levels of violence and sex. A milder, though no less controversial touch came from Woody Allen, who produced comic social satires and experimented with techniques of the French New Wave. Following Sidney Poitier’s 1963 Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field, blaxploitation movies arose as a form of social protest against racism and injustice (beginning in 1969 with Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song), sparking new culture wars in the film industry. This era of historical correctness was echoed by Marlon Brando’s refusal of his Academy Award for Best Actor in 1972 for The Godfather in order to publicly condemn the American government’s past treatment of Native Americans. Foreign attacks on Hollywood sprang predominately from French nationalists who railed against the monopolization of movie theaters and oppression of independent exhibitors and European films. Similar disdain came from Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, who called for a Latin American “Third Cinema” to protect its own movie industry. Attacks from within the American film industry came from independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes, who inspired a generation of experimental moviemakers with his improvisational camera work and editing. The 1980s were marked by the tremendous growth in studio earnings, multiscreen cinemas, and bankable stars, and were fueled by a rising social consciousness. Many movies spoke against materialism and traditional values. The culture wars were carried to another height when Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) opened amid 25,000 protesters at Universal City, California. The strongest opposition came from the Roman Catholic Church, which later denounced Priest (1995) and Dogma (1999) on similar grounds of being not only pornographic but distorting the image of the Church. Scrutiny and labeling of movie content became the norm. Organizations such as the American Family Association on one side and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation the other represented polemical views on homosexual elements in films. Hollywood blockbusters continued to make money during the 1990s and 2000s with the use of Dolby sound, digital postsynching, special effects, jump cuts, speed editing, and other cinematic technology that surpassed and at times denigrated the domain of art and scriptwriting. Over-the-top excesses enticed mass audiences despite the constant upgrading of film codes on obscenity by the Motion Picture Association of America. In the hands of Michael Moore, Errol Morris, and Morgan Spurlock, the documentary became a major and
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lucrative player in the film industry. Robert Redford and his Sundance Festival increased the chances of wide distribution for independent, experimental, and foreignlanguage movies, while film production and distribution went global.
Drama Mirroring the views of existentialists, postwar American dramas delivered forceful statements about psychological displacement, self-deception, absurdity, and family tensions. Some plays dealt with postwar and Cold War trauma and paranoia. Using expressionist techniques, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller delved into the American psyche and portrayed in characters their inability to cope with the modern mechanical world. Often this took the form of the characters’ perpetual engagement in verbal battles in the desire to make sense of their existence. The 1960s marked an escalation in the culture wars between serious drama and mass entertainment. Just as Miller in 1967 denounced Broadway as “a cripple looking for a crutch,” Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theaters challenged commercial theaters and social conformity. Where the San Francisco Mime Troupe fought a legal battle for the right to stage its political plays in a public park, Living Theater presented the U.S. Army as suppressive and destructive in Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963), and the Performance Group’s production of Makbeth (1969) depicted America as a fascist society. David Rabe, a leading representative of the “uncomfortable theater” of the early 1970s, shocked audiences with his disturbing war plays Sticks and Bones (1973) and Streamers (1977). David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) overwhelmed Off-Broadway with its frank profanity and obscenity. The anti-Broadway impulse was further promulgated with the rise of ethnic dramatists: the founding of the Negro Ensemble Company (1967), for instance, brought black dramatists to the forefront both on and off Broadway. Most ambitious playwrights interviewed in the 1980s and 1990s perceived Broadway as dead, irrelevant, or ridiculous. At the same time, the rise of the women’s movement, gay liberation, and a variety of ethnic communities fostered a revitalization of the American theater. Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979) launched a comedic attack on the principles and structure of the Catholic Church, and gay theaters began to flourish since Charles Ludlam’s founding of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company (1967), which dramatized themes of lust, obscenity, parody, and scatology. Viewing some of the independent production as vile and filthy, the Religious Right railed against the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to protest public funding for
“obscene” plays. Conservative and religious activists demonstrated outside theaters and pressured government and private agencies to cut financial support for “antifamily” productions. Beginning in the 1990s, American drama was characterized by the incorporation of multimedia and multilingual scripts. Turning some of their own plays into movies, modern dramatists like Paddy Chayefsky, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard bridged the gap between cinema and theater. Facing the competitive challenge from films and “reality” TV, Broadway increasingly offered mass entertainment and popular appeal, mounting a number of blockbuster musicals. In the age of the new electronic media and globalization, the distinctions blurred between high aesthetics and popular entertainment. Peter Swirski and Selina S.L. Lai See also: Book Banning; Censorship; Counterculture; Gays in Popular Culture; Great Books; Hollywood Ten; Motion Picture Association of America; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; National Endowment for the Arts; New Journalism; Postmodernism; Religious Right; Structuralism and PostStructuralism.
Further Reading Grey, Richard. A History of American Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Krasner, David, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition. London: Routledge, 1992. Ruland, Richard. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Viking, 1991. Sternlicht, Sanford. A Reader’s Guide to Modern American Drama. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Swirski, Peter. From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005. Toeplitz, Jerzy. Hollywood and After. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974.
Lott, Trent A conservative Republican U.S. representative and senator representing Mississippi from 1973 to 2007, Trent Lott did not author any major piece of legislation but made use of opportunities to direct federal funds to his state. In the culture wars, he was a minor figure of controversy in the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings, but he became best known and most controversial for 2002 remarks in which he praised Strom Thurmond’s earlier run for the White House as a segregationist candidate. The son of a shipyard worker, Chester Trent Lott was born on October 9, 1941, in Grenada, Mississippi.
Lot t , T rent
After spending his formative years on the Gulf Coast in the town of Pascagoula, Lott attended the University of Mississippi, where he studied public administration and law (BPA, 1963; JD, 1967). From 1968 to 1972, he was the top assistant to the pro-segregationist congressman William M. Colmer (D-MS). After Colmer retired, Lott filled that seat as a Republican, vowing to “fight against the ever increasing efforts of the socalled liberals to concentrate more power in Washington.” Lott’s time in the U.S. House of Representatives (1973–1989) was followed by a slightly longer tenure in the Senate (1989–2007). In the former, he served as minority whip (1981–1989) and in the latter as party whip (1995–1996, 2007), majority leader (1996–2001), and minority leader (2001–2003). As a legislator, Lott supported federal farm subsidies and military shipbuilding contracts for his state, voted in 1987 to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of a highway spending bill because it had road projects for Mississippi, arranged special tax breaks for Mississippi’s barge operators and shipbuilders, and facilitated Nissan in locating a minivan and truck plant in Canton, Mississippi. After Hurricane Katrina (2005), which destroyed his oceanfront home in Pascagoula, Lott announced plans to serve another term of office in order to bolster the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and fight for more federal disaster relief for affected homeowners. Lott’s first major task in Congress was sitting on the House Judiciary Committee during the 1974 Watergate hearings. He argued at the time that a president should be removed from office “only for serious misconduct dangerous to the system of government established by the Constitution.” Twenty-four years later, during the Clinton impeachment, Lott suggested that “bad conduct . . . is enough for impeachment.” When Democrats denounced Lott’s inconsistency, it was pointed out that Bill Clinton at the time of Watergate said a president should be impeached if he lies or impedes a government investigation. In December 2002, while giving a toast at the hundredth birthday party of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), Lott said Mississippi was one of the four southern states that supported Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid, adding, “We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Since Thurmond’s “Dixiecrat” campaign was first and foremost about preserving racial segregation, Lott’s words were interpreted by many as a criticism of the civil rights movement. In the subsequent brouhaha, minority groups began calling for Lott’s resignation. President George W. Bush responded, “Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive. . . . Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country.” Lott repeatedly apologized for his remarks and appeared
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on Black Entertainment Television, calling segregation “a stain on our nation’s soul.” Critics dismissed Lott’s apologies as disingenuous, noting that he had made a similar speech praising Thurmond in 1980 during a Reagan rally. In addition, they charged, Lott in 1992 appeared before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group, and assured them that he and they “stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.” More than words, however, was Lott’s record on civil rights: he twice voted against extending the Voting Rights Act (1975 and 1981); opposed establishing a federal holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. (1983); backed a proposed constitutional amendment to ban school busing (1979); often tried to remove affirmative action stipulations in federal bills; and filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court that supported Bob Jones University’s claim for tax-exemption status even though it was in violation of federal antidiscrimination law for banning interracial student dating (1981). In the end, Lott was forced to relinquish his Senate leadership position. He afterward told a group of supporters that he fell into a trap that had been set by those who oppose him because he is a Mississippian, a political conservative, and a Christian. In November 2007, one year after reelection and being voted minority whip, Lott announced his resignation. Observers speculated that he wished to leave office before the effective date of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, which would double from one year to two years the time a former member of Congress must wait before returning to Capitol Hill as a lobbyist. Dramatically, two days after Lott signaled his departure, a federal prosecutor announced the indictment of Lott’s brother-in-law, Richard F. Scruggs, Jr., for attempting to bribe a Mississippi county circuit judge. A witness in the subsequent trial testified that Scruggs had asked Lott to try to arrange for the judge an appointment to the federal bench, but Lott denied any wrongdoing and was not charged with any crime. Scruggs, as well as his son, later went to prison. Meanwhile, Lott indicated that he and former senator John Breaux (D-LA) would open a lobbying office to provide “strategic consulting” to corporations. Roger Chapman See also: Bob Jones University; Civil Rights Movement; Clinton Impeachment; Hurricane Katrina; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Lynching; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Thurmond, Strom; Voting Rights Act; Watergate; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Goodgame, Dan, and Karen Tumulty. “Tripped Up by History.” Time, December 23, 2002. Kuypers, Jim A. Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
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Lott, Trent. Herding Cats: A Life in Politics. New York: ReganBooks, 2005. “Trent Lott’s Wish: Thinking about What the Nation Would Have Been Like under President Strom Thurmond.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 42 (Winter 2003–2004): 24–26. Watts, Rebecca Bridges. Contemporary Southern Identity: Community Through Controversy. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2008.
Love Canal An abandoned canal in Niagara Falls, New York, that fell into use as a chemical dump, Love Canal emerged in the late 1970s as the site of the first hazardous waste disposal case to receive widespread national attention. Evidence of contamination in the surrounding area, along with its environmental and health effects, spurred support for the enactment of the national Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (the “Superfund Act”). Love Canal remains a landmark in environmentalist controversies, with one side viewing it as a symbol of politico-industrial irresponsibility and the other a case study of media hype and environmentalist hysteria. After a decade in which 21,000 tons of chemical waste was dumped by Hooker Plastics and Chemicals (later Occidental Chemical Corporation), including pesticides, dioxin, and chlorobenzenes, the Love Canal site was capped and then purchased for one dollar in 1953 by the Niagara Falls Board of Education, which possibly ignored warnings that contamination would ensue if development breached the site’s protective walls. An elementary school and playground were constructed on the site in 1955, and the remaining parcels of land were sold to a residential developer. Ultimately, more than two hundred residences were built and occupied adjacent to the Love Canal site. As portions of the landfill eroded, evidence of contamination began to appear. Health complaints from neighborhood residents escalated during the 1960s, as toxins leached into groundwater and, ultimately, the Niagara River—a major source of drinking water for over 75,000 people. Tests of the area indicated contamination in air and soil as well, while informal grassroots research pointed to elevated levels of reproductive disorders, birth defects, and cancers in the community. Responding swiftly to public outcry, both the New York State Health commissioner and President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a state of emergency in August 1978. Ultimately, more than 800 residents of Love Canal were relocated. The public and legal controversy surrounding Love Canal grew, with financial and cleanup responsibilities, as well as levels of risk and long-term effects, hotly debated. Meanwhile, panic spread across the country regarding the hazards of other chemical waste sites, referred to as “time
bombs.” Later, after the majority of the Love Canal area was declared habitable by the New York State Department of Health, local residents complained of a cover-up while others deplored the continued testing, cleanup, and compensation as a waste of tax dollars. Local grassroots organizations, including the Love Canal Homeowners Association and the Ecumenical Task Force of the Niagara Frontier, as well as high-profile resident-activists such as Lois Gibbs and Beverly Paigen, were instrumental in battling government and industry to force thorough investigations of the effects of toxicity in their community. Their struggles, in lobbying to have the health concerns of Love Canal addressed and in amending national policies on public access to information about environmental contamination, ultimately altered the face of grassroots environmental activism. Cynthia J. Miller See also: Carter, Jimmy; Environmental Movement; Science Wars.
Further Reading Blum, Elizabeth. Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008. Gibbs, Lois Marie, with Murray Levine. Love Canal: My Story. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. Sherrow, Victoria. Love Canal: Toxic Waste Tragedy. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2001. Wagner, Travis. “Hazardous Waste: Evolution of a National Environmental Problem.” Journal of Public History 16:4 (2004): 306–31.
L ov i n g , R i c h a r d , a n d M i l d r e d L ov i n g Richard and Mildred Loving were plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, a U.S. Supreme Court case. The decision issued on June 12, 1967, ended state restrictions on interracial marriages, based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. More recently, the decision has been referenced by advocates of same-sex marriage, who note similarities between the two historically prohibited types of marriage. Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, has argued that the Loving decision “helps to buttress the case for tolerating same-sex marriages.” In 1924, thirty-eight states had laws against interracial marriages. In 1967, sixteen southern or border states still had such restrictions in place. (The first law against miscegenation had appeared in 1661, in Maryland.) It took 306 years to remove the laws against “mixed marriages.” Ironically, twenty-four years after the historic ruling, in 1991, U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC),
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previously a strong segregationist, successfully supported Clarence Thomas, a fellow conservative, for appointment to the Supreme Court. Thomas, a black man, and his wife, a white woman, lived in Virginia. Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and Mildred Delores Jeter, of mixed African and Cherokee heritage, were both born and raised in the same rural community in Caroline County, Virginia, 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of Richmond. Aware that a mixed-race marriage was illegal in Virginia, the engaged couple went to the District of Columbia in June 1958 to get married. The couple then returned to Virginia and set up a household. Five weeks later, after a predawn police raid at their home, they were arrested, charged with unlawful cohabitation, and indicted for breaking Virginia’s law against interracial marriage. They pled guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail but were given suspended sentences on condition that they leave Virginia and not return for twenty-five years. The Lovings moved to the District of Columbia for five years but were homesick and returned to Virginia. The civil rights movement inspired them to fight for change, and the American Civil Liberties Union, supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, took up the case. A Virginia judge ruled against them, explaining that “Almighty God” separated the races into separate continents, thus showing that races were not meant to mix. On November 6, 1963, the Lovings filed a motion in Virginia to have the judgment vacated because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Virginia court took no action, so on October 28, 1964, the Lovings filed a classaction lawsuit in the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. When this motion was denied, they appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, which in December 1965 upheld that statute banning mixed-race marriage. The matter then went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Richard Perry Loving, Mildred Jeter Loving v. Virginia (1967) that restricting marriage based on race is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision predictably met with strong criticism, especially in, but not limited to, the southern United States. A 1965 Gallup poll, for example, indicated that 42 percent of northern whites and 72 percent of southern whites supported bans on interracial marriage. Regardless of negative attitudes, intermarriage greatly increased in the succeeding decades. U.S. Census data show that black-white marriages increased from 51,000 in 1960 to 422,000 in 2005, or from 1.3 percent to 6.0 percent of all marriages. The increased number of people with mixed-race identity caused the Census Bureau in 2000, for the first time, to allow people to identify themselves by more than one race. Abraham D. Lavender
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Plaintiffs Richard and Mildred Loving meet with an ACLU lawyer during the appeal of their conviction on antimiscegenation charges in 1958. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia (1967) ended state restrictions on interracial marriage. (Grey Villet/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Civil Rights Movement; Family Values; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Race; Same-Sex Marriage; Thomas, Clarence; Thurmond, Strom.
Further Reading Johnson, Kevin R., ed. Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Lubin, Alex. Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Moran, Rachel F. Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Newbeck, Phyl. Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.
Ly n c h i n g Few phenomena in American life and culture stand in starker contrast to the principles upon which the nation was founded than lynching. The practice—defined as unlawful communal punishment, often resulting in the death of the victim—has occurred through much
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of American history and in every region of the country. It is best known, however, as a brutal means of enforcing white supremacy in the post–Civil War South. According to widely cited data by the Tuskegee Institute, some 4,743 persons in America were lynched between 1882 and 1968. Nearly three-quarters of the victims were black and died in the South. Although the practice declined after the 1930s, several high-profile lynchings took place during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, while lynching has all but disappeared from America society, the issue remains divisive, as evidenced by recent controversies over symbolic and rhetorical references to lynching, and from the U.S. Senate’s 2005 apology for never passing antilynching legislation. Tensions stoked by the burgeoning civil rights movement produced a spate of notorious killings intended to intimidate those engaged in the struggle for black equality. Instead, such heinous acts created a groundswell of support for civil rights activists, particularly when justice seemed so elusive. Such was the case with the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. A fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi, Till was savagely killed after he allegedly flirted with a white woman. The two men charged with the crime were acquitted of all charges. Several months later, in a magazine interview, they boasted about punishing Till, reinforcing the perception that blacks could still be lynched in the South with impunity. Despite the confessions, no further charges were brought against the men or anyone else who might have been involved in the incident. In 2004, however, the U.S. Department of Justice reopened its investigation of the case. The FBI eventually turned over nearly 8,000 pages of materials to local prosecutors, but a county grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to issue new indictments, effectively guaranteeing that no one would ever be held accountable for Till’s death. Nearly a decade after Till’s murder, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—became the most famous lynching victims in American history when they were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in an elaborate scheme involving as many as two dozen local officials and Ku Klux Klansmen. Although the ensuing federal district court trial produced the first guilty verdicts ever handed down in a Mississippi civil rights case, only seven of the conspirators were convicted, and no one was sentenced for longer than ten years. The case was reopened decades later when Mississippi belatedly charged one of the masterminds of the triple lynching with murder in early 2005. Following a trial that received national attention, the jury returned a guilty verdict—but only on a lesser charge of manslaughter. Despite the virtual disappearance of lynching in the decades after the civil rights movement, the 1998
lynching-style murder of James Byrd, Jr., an African American dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas, by three white men in a pickup truck, served as a reminder that the custom was not fully extinct in America. Moreover, symbolic, rhetorical, and historical references to lynching have continued to provoke controversy. Some felt, for instance, that reopening the civil rights era lynching cases merely served to stir up trouble between the races. By contrast, advocates of the new proceedings believed they offered the possibility of long delayed, if incomplete, justice. Memories of lynching have also been stirred by the occasional, yet persistent, appearance of nooses to communicate dislike, hatred, or a threat of violence toward an individual. Indeed, as recently as 2007, white students at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, hung nooses from a tree on the school’s grounds after a black student asked whether he could sit beneath the tree, customarily used by whites. Following the Jena incident, several other instances of noose hangings were reported by African Americans. To the targets of such displays, the symbolic reference was an unmistakable and deeply disturbing reminder of how lynching had once been used to maintain white supremacy. Yet there were some who, while not condoning the actions, asserted that however offensive or repugnant a symbol the noose might be, it constitutes a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. The issue of lynching was also unexpectedly injected into the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, a little-known black conservative judge chosen by President George H.W. Bush to take the seat of Thurgood Marshall, one of the great icons of the civil rights struggle and a liberal stalwart on the high court. When Thomas’s nomination was imperiled by allegations of sexual harassment from a former colleague, Thomas accused the Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled by Democrats, of subjecting him to “a hightech lynching” for daring to break with the ideological orthodoxies that most white liberals presumed of African Americans. In 2005, the U.S. Senate waded into the lynching thicket when it overwhelmingly passed a resolution apologizing for its failure ever to enact antilynching legislation. The resolution’s sponsors stated they were inspired to issue the apology after viewing James Allen’s widely discussed book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000). However, critics of the measure, most of whom were conservatives, derided it as a cynical political gesture, given that current senators bore no direct responsibility for failing to pass such legislation, and that it was better to look forward and take action than to dwell on the past. By contrast, liberals noted that while more blacks were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state, neither of its
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Republican senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, joined nearly ninety of their colleagues as co-sponsors of the resolution. Backers of the resolution also noted that all of the senators who failed to support the apology were Republicans. Such partisan bickering is but one reminder of the bitter legacy that the practice of lynching has injected into contemporary society. Sven Dubie
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See also: Civil Rights Movement; Hate Crimes; Hill, Anita; Human Rights; Lott, Trent; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Thomas, Clarence; Till, Emmett.
Further Reading Allen, James, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000. Dray, Phillip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown. New York: Random House, 2002.
Culture
Wars An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices
Volume 2
Roger Chapman, Editor
M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England
M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 80 Business Park Drive Armonk, NY 10504 © 2010 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.
Cover photos (clockwise from upper left) provided by Getty Images and the following: Katja Heinemann; Terry Ashe/Time & Life Pictures; Mark Leffingwell/AFP; Michael Springer; Karen Bleier/AFP. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Culture wars : an encyclopedia of issues, viewpoints, and voices / Roger Chapman, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7656-1761-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Culture conflict—Encyclopedias. 2. Politics and culture—Encyclopedias. 3. Social problems— Encyclopedias. 4. Social conflict—Encyclopedias. 5. Ethnic conflict—Encyclopedias. I. Chapman, Roger. HM1121.C85 2010 306.0973’03—dc22 2009011925
Printed and bound in the United States The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48.1984. CW (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Publisher: Myron E. Sharpe Vice President and Director of New Product Development: Donna Sanzone Vice President and Production Director: Carmen Chetti Executive Development Editor: Jeff Hacker Project Manager: Angela Piliouras Program Coordinator: Cathleen Prisco Assistant Editor: Alison Morretta Text Design and Cover Design: Jesse Sanchez Typesetter: Nancy Connick
Contents Volume 2
Moore, Roy S....................................................366 Moral Majority.................................................367 Morgan, Robin.................................................368 Morrison, Toni..................................................369 Mothers Against Drunk Driving......................369 Motion Picture Association of America.............370 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick.................................371 Ms....................................................................372 Multicultural Conservatism..............................373 Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies................373 Mumford, Lewis...............................................374 Murdoch, Rupert..............................................375 Murrow, Edward R...........................................376 Muslim Americans...........................................377 My Lai Massacre...............................................378 Nader, Ralph....................................................380 Nation, The.......................................................381 Nation of Islam................................................382 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.............................................383 National Endowment for the Arts.....................384 National Endowment for the Humanities.........387 National Organization for Women...................388 National Public Radio......................................389 National Review.................................................390 National Rifle Association................................391 Nelson, Willie..................................................392 Neoconservatism..............................................393 New Age Movement.........................................395 New Deal.........................................................397 New Journalism...............................................398 New Left..........................................................398 New York Times, The..........................................399 Niebuhr, Reinhold...........................................402 Nixon, Richard.................................................403 Norquist, Grover..............................................405
MacKinnon, Catharine.....................................332 Madonna..........................................................332 Mailer, Norman................................................334 Malcolm X.......................................................335 Manson, Marilyn..............................................336 Mapplethorpe, Robert......................................336 Marriage Names...............................................337 Marxism...........................................................338 McCain, John...................................................339 McCarthy, Eugene............................................340 McCarthy, Joseph.............................................341 McCarthyism....................................................342 McCloskey, Deirdre..........................................345 McGovern, George...........................................345 McIntire, Carl...................................................347 McLuhan, Marshall...........................................348 McVeigh, Timothy...........................................349 Mead, Margaret................................................350 Media Bias........................................................350 Medical Malpractice.........................................352 Medical Marijuana............................................353 Medved, Michael..............................................354 Men’s Movement..............................................354 Mexico.............................................................356 Microsoft..........................................................357 Migrant Labor..................................................358 Militia Movement............................................359 Milk, Harvey....................................................360 Millett, Kate....................................................361 Million Man March..........................................362 Miranda Rights................................................363 Mondale, Walter...............................................364 Montana Freemen.............................................365 Moore, Michael.................................................365 iii
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Contents
North, Oliver...................................................406 Not Dead Yet...................................................407 Nuclear Age.....................................................408 Obama, Barack.................................................411 Obesity Epidemic.............................................413 Occupational Safety..........................................414 O’Connor, Sandra Day......................................415 O’Hair, Madalyn Murray..................................416 O.J. Simpson Trial............................................417 Operation Rescue.............................................418 Oppenheimer, J. Robert...................................419 O’Reilly, Bill....................................................420 Outing.............................................................421 Packwood, Bob.................................................422 Paglia, Camille.................................................422 Palin, Sarah......................................................423 Parks, Rosa.......................................................424 Penn, Sean........................................................425 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.....426 Perot, H. Ross..................................................427 Phelps, Fred.....................................................429 Philadelphia, Mississippi..................................429 Pipes, Richard, and Daniel Pipes......................430 Planned Parenthood..........................................431 Podhoretz, Norman..........................................432 Police Abuse.....................................................433 Political Correctness.........................................434 Pornography.....................................................436 Postmodernism.................................................438 Premillennial Dispensationalism......................439 Presidential Pardons.........................................440 Prison Reform..................................................441 Privacy Rights..................................................443 Privatization.....................................................444 Progressive Christians Uniting.........................445 Promise Keepers...............................................446 Public Broadcasting Service..............................447 Punk Rock.......................................................449 Quayle, Dan.....................................................451 Race.................................................................452 Racial Profiling................................................453 Rand, Ayn........................................................454 Rap Music........................................................455 Rather, Dan......................................................456
Reagan, Ronald................................................458 Record Warning Labels....................................459 Red and Blue States..........................................460 Redford, Robert...............................................461 Redneck...........................................................462 Reed, Ralph.....................................................463 Rehnquist, William H.....................................464 Relativism, Moral.............................................465 Religious Right................................................466 Reparations, Japanese Internment.....................467 Republican Party..............................................468 Revisionist History...........................................470 Right to Counsel..............................................471 Right to Die.....................................................472 Robertson, Pat..................................................474 Rock and Roll..................................................475 Rockwell, George Lincoln................................477 Rockwell, Norman...........................................477 Rodman, Dennis...............................................478 Roe v. Wade (1973)............................................479 Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg...........480 Rove, Karl........................................................480 Ruby Ridge Incident........................................482 Rudolph, Eric...................................................483 Rusher, William A...........................................483 Ryan, George....................................................484 Said, Edward....................................................486 Same-Sex Marriage...........................................486 Sanders, Bernie.................................................488 Saudi Arabia.....................................................488 Schaeffer, Francis..............................................490 Schiavo, Terri....................................................490 Schlafly, Phyllis................................................492 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.................................492 School of the Americas......................................493 School Prayer....................................................494 School Shootings..............................................496 School Vouchers................................................497 Schwarzenegger, Arnold...................................498 Science Wars....................................................499 Secular Humanism...........................................501 Seeger, Pete......................................................502 September 11...................................................502 September 11 Memorial...................................505
Contents
Serrano, Andres................................................506 Sex Education...................................................507 Sex Offenders....................................................509 Sexual Assault..................................................510 Sexual Harassment............................................511 Sexual Revolution.............................................512 Sharpton, Al.....................................................513 Sheen, Fulton J.................................................515 Shelley, Martha.................................................515 Shepard, Matthew.............................................516 Shock Jocks......................................................517 Sider, Ron.........................................................518 Silent Majority.................................................518 Simpsons, The.....................................................519 Smoking in Public............................................520 Socarides, Charles.............................................521 Social Security..................................................521 Sodomy Laws....................................................523 Sokal Affair......................................................524 Soros, George...................................................525 Southern Baptist Convention............................525 Soviet Union and Russia...................................526 Sowell, Thomas................................................529 Speech Codes....................................................530 Spock, Benjamin...............................................531 Springsteen, Bruce............................................532 Starr, Kenneth..................................................533 Stay-at-Home Mothers.....................................534 Steinbeck, John................................................535 Steinem, Gloria................................................535 Stem-Cell Research...........................................536 Stern, Howard..................................................538 Stewart, Jon......................................................538 Stone, Oliver....................................................539 Stonewall Rebellion..........................................540 Strategic Defense Initiative...............................540 Strauss, Leo.......................................................541 Structuralism and Post-Structuralism...............542 Student Conservatives.......................................543 Students for a Democratic Society.....................544 Summers, Lawrence..........................................546 Supply-Side Economics.....................................546 Symbionese Liberation Army............................547 Taft, Robert A..................................................549
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Talk Radio........................................................549 Tax Reform.......................................................550 Televangelism...................................................552 Teller, Edward..................................................553 Ten Commandments.........................................554 Terkel, Studs....................................................555 Thanksgiving Day............................................556 Think Tanks.....................................................557 Third Parties....................................................559 Thomas, Clarence.............................................561 Thompson, Hunter S........................................562 Three Mile Island Accident..............................563 Thurmond, Strom.............................................563 Till, Emmett....................................................564 Tobacco Settlements.........................................565 Tort Reform.....................................................566 Transgender Movement....................................567 Truman, Harry S..............................................568 Turner, Ted.......................................................569 Twenty-Second Amendment.............................570 Unabomber......................................................572 United Nations................................................572 USA PATRIOT Act.........................................574 Ventura, Jesse...................................................576 Victimhood......................................................576 Vidal, Gore.......................................................577 Vietnam Veterans Against the War...................578 Vietnam Veterans Memorial.............................579 Vietnam War....................................................580 Vigilantism......................................................582 Voegelin, Eric...................................................583 Voting Rights Act............................................584 Waco Siege.......................................................586 Wall Street Journal, The......................................587 Wallace, George...............................................588 Wallis, Jim.......................................................589 Wal-Mart.........................................................589 Walt Disney Company.....................................591 War on Drugs...................................................592 War on Poverty................................................593 War Powers Act...............................................594 War Protesters..................................................595 War Toys..........................................................597 Warhol, Andy...................................................598
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Warren, Earl.....................................................599 Warren, Rick....................................................601 Washington Times, The........................................601 Watergate.........................................................602 Watt, James.....................................................603 Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992.............................................604 Wayne, John.....................................................605 Wealth Gap......................................................606 Weekly Standard, The.........................................607 Welfare Reform................................................608 Wellstone, Paul................................................609 West, Cornel....................................................610 Weyrich, Paul M..............................................611 Whistleblowers................................................612 White, Reggie..................................................613 White Supremacists..........................................614 Wildmon, Donald............................................616 Will, George....................................................617
Williams, William Appleman..........................618 Wilson, Edmund..............................................618 Winfrey, Oprah................................................619 Wolf, Naomi....................................................620 Wolfe, Tom......................................................621 Women in the Military.....................................622 Women’s Studies..............................................623 Woodward, Bob...............................................624 World................................................................625 World Council of Churches..............................625 World War II Memorial...................................626 Wounded Knee Incident...................................627 Young, Neil......................................................628 Zappa, Frank....................................................629 Zero Tolerance..................................................629 Zinn, Howard...................................................630 Bibliography......................................................633 Index..................................................................I-1
Culture
Wars Volume 2
MacKinnon, Catharine Catharine MacKinnon, feminist legal theorist, attorney, law professor, and author, helped shape American legal theory pertaining to sexual discrimination by broadening the definition to include sexual harassment. She has also campaigned against pornography, linking it to male aggression and dominance toward women. Her positions and active lobbying for changes in American law propelled her into the culture wars, and she has often faced opposition from the left and the right. She was born Catharine Alice MacKinnon on October 7, 1946, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in an upper-middle-class home. Her father, George E. MacKinnon, was a federal judge, U.S. Representative (R-MN), and adviser to the presidential campaigns of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. Educated at Smith College (BA, 1969), Yale Law School (JD, 1977), and Yale University (PhD, political science, 1987), MacKinnon has been a professor at the University of Michigan Law School since 1990. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (1980–1982, 1984–1988). Her books include Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Are Women Human? (1998), and Sex Equality (2001). Best known for her militant antipornography activism, MacKinnon rejects pornography because it exemplifies and reproduces male domination, which she argues is the defining characteristic of American society. She has argued that pornography constitutes a violation of women’s civil rights. She rejects the legal framework of obscenity and community standards in U.S. pornography law, viewing such distinctions as legal disguises for the male viewpoint. Pornography laws, she argues, thus work to ensure the availability of pornography for men, while rendering women’s subordination invisible. Working with the radical feminist and antipornography advocate Andrea Dworkin in 1983, MacKinnon drafted a civil rights ordinance that defined pornography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.” The ordinance was briefly adopted in Minneapolis and Indianapolis but was later ruled unconstitutional. Ever controversial, MacKinnon has faced opposition from every side of the political spectrum. The mainstream left has argued that her antipornography statute violates free speech guarantees under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Like legal scholar Richard Posner and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, many liberals believe that pornography should not be censored.
Conservatives argue that MacKinnon’s assertions regarding male domination are untrue. Where she sees oppression, many conservatives see contentment and social order. They reject her claims of gender hierarchy, describing instead natural sexual differences and the mutual compatibility of complementary gender roles. Like MacKinnon, however, many conservatives reject pornography, albeit on different grounds—they believe it is immoral (often from a religious perspective). MacKinnon has also faced opposition from some feminists who see her views as dangerously aligned with the Religious Right. The problem is not pornography, some of her critics argue, but “sexual oppression,” which stigmatizes not only pornographers and pornography consumers but other “sexual minorities” like prostitutes, sadomasochists, homosexuals, transsexuals, and fetishists. They argue that sex is a realm of potential freedom for women, and that pornography produced by and for women can be an important feminist act. C. Heike Schotten See also: Dworkin, Andrea; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Flynt, Larry; Hefner, Hugh; Pornography; Religious Right.
Further Reading Califia, Pat. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. San Francisco: Cleis, 2000. MacKinnon, Catharine, and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Posner, Richard. Overcoming Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory for the Politics of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance, 267–319. Boston: Routledge, 1984.
Madonna The singer, songwriter, and dancer Madonna, widely known as the “Queen of Pop,” released eighteen albums from 1983 to 2008, selling more than 200 million copies worldwide—believed to be the most ever by any female recording artist. A film actress, producer, and children’s author as well as a pop music icon, Madonna is well known for generating controversy with the sexual, political, and religious imagery in her music and video recordings and her live performances. She was born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone on August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan, and raised in a Catholic family in the suburbs of Detroit. She left college and moved to New York in 1978 to pursue a dancing career and began singing with a rock band 332
Madonna
The Catholic-born pop superstar Madonna has raised the hackles of church groups, cultural conservatives, and parental organizations, among others, with her irreverent lyrics and sexually explicit performances. (Frank Micelotta/ Getty Images)
called the Breakfast Club. Her career took off in the early 1980s after she signed a recording contract. Her debut album, Madonna (1983), produced Top 10 hits that established her as a star. She also began her pioneering work in music videos, appearing in elaborate, often sexually explicit productions that helped make her a multimedia pop-culture star. Her song lyrics, music videos, live performances, and publications all pushed conventional boundaries of decency. At the First Annual MTV Video Music Awards, she performed “Like a Virgin” (1984) wearing a wedding dress while writhing on stage, simulating masturbation, shocking viewers and incensing critics. The Who’s That Girl Tour (1987) featured Madonna in fishnet stockings and a corset with gold-tipped conical breasts. Madonna’s 1986 song “Papa Don’t Preach” raised new issues by addressing teenage pregnancy and abortion. Conservatives interpreted the line “But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby” to mean that Madonna advocated a pro-life stance. Opponents of abortion were
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disappointed, however, when she did not speak out publicly for their cause. Others, including women’s organizations and parents, criticized the singer for promoting teenage pregnancy. With the release of her music video “Like a Prayer” (1989), new controversy erupted because of the mix of Catholic imagery and eroticism. At one point in the video, Madonna appears to be making out with Jesus. The Pope openly condemned this video, and Pepsi canceled its Madonna television commercial. Madonna’s book Sex (1992), an instant best-seller, featured a collection of hardcore sexual fantasies, poems, and photos; Madonna was depicted acting out sexual fantasies, including sadomasochism. She stirred further controversy the following year with the explicit sexual overtones and her irreverent behavior as a dominatrix in The Girlie Show world tour. A marked change in behavior began to be seen with the release of her album Bedtime Stories (1994) and her Golden Globe–winning performance in the film Evita (1996), but Madonna’s calm demeanor proved fleeting. At the MTV Video Music Awards in 1998, Madonna angered Hindus when she sported facial markings considered holy during her performance of “Ray of Light.” Her eighth album, Music (2000), debuted at number one on the Billboard Charts and led to more raised eyebrows. The music video for “What It Feels Like for a Girl” (2000), directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie, contained so much explicit violence that both MTV and VH1 banned the video after only one airing. In the video, Madonna went on a rampage of violence, including ramming a car into a group of people, shooting a water pistol at police, and running the car into a lightpost. In 2003, Madonna released another controversial album, American Life. The video to the title track contained graphic scenes of war and finished with Madonna throwing a grenade in the lap of a George W. Bush lookalike. She pulled the video but still earned a reputation as unpatriotic and anti-American. Later that same year, the singer caused a stir by French kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on stage during the MTM Video Music Awards program. Madonna’s Confessions tour led to another controversy with the Catholic Church. She performed “Live to Tell” (2006) while hanging on a cross with a crown of thorns on her head. The act outraged Catholics, and there were calls for Madonna’s excommunication. The concert also received criticism from the Russian Orthodox Church and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, adding more entries to the list of groups disenchanted with the singer’s use of religious symbolism. In 2008, Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, released the album Hard Candy, signed a $100 million deal with the concert promoter Live Nation, and agreed to provide a divorce settlement
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of between $76 million and $92 million to actor Guy Ritchie (earlier she had divorced actor Sean Penn). Margaret Dykes See also: Abortion; Catholic Church; National Organization for Women; Penn, Sean; Pornography; Race; Rock and Roll; Rodman, Dennis.
Further Reading Bego, Mark. Madonna: Blonde Ambition. New York: Harmony Books, 1992. Benson, Carol, and Allan Metz, eds. The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary. New York: Shirmer Books, 1999. Guilbert, Georges-Claude. Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood, and the American Dream. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Madonna Official Web site. www.madonna.com. Paglia, Camille. “Mercurial Girl.” Rolling Stone, May 18, 2006.
M a i l e r, N o r m a n The author of more than thirty books, Norman Mailer was a social commentator and cultural provocateur as well as one of America’s most prominent literary figures in the latter half of the twentieth century. Remembered for his New Journalism writings, which blended fiction and nonfiction, Mailer chronicled the counterculture and the New Left as a participant observer. Many of his writings are infused with a philosophy of Manichean dualism, a binary construct of reality: good and evil, “hip” and “square,” and the like. A self-described “left conservative,” Mailer regarded American society as a battleground between what is natural and artificial. He was “left” in that he favored “hipsters” and radicals, viewing them as existentialists fighting against conformity and “technological fascism.” He was “conservative” in that he favored primitivism, famously asserting that technology (including birth control), plastic, and cancer all are related to the unnatural and inauthentic modern lifestyle. Mailer’s writings from the 1950s through the 1970s marked his major participation in the culture wars. Norman Kingsley Mailer was born on January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Harvard University (SB, aeronautical engineering, 1943), he was drafted into the army and served in the Pacific theater during World War II. When the war was over, he attended the Sorbonne in Paris and published The Naked and the Dead (1946), a bleak, hyper-real war novel, suggesting that the defeat of fascism came at the price of adopting some of its ways. Mailer became instantly famous and went on to practice a hipster lifestyle. He co-founded the alternative Greenwich Village weekly newspaper the Village Voice (1955) and used it to experiment with essay
writing. He twice ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City (1960 and 1969), the first time shortly after stabbing his second wife while in a drunken state. (He had six marriages.) From 1984 to 1986, he served as the president of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists). Mailer died on November 10, 2007. One of Mailer’s early controversies was the publication of “The White Negro” (1957), an essay in Dissent that romanticized the black male as the prototype of the hipster. Mailer suggested that black Americans are truly liberated, including sexually, because they are not part of mainstream society. The black novelist James Baldwin, in his Esquire essay “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (1961), accused Mailer of reducing the American Negro male to “a kind of walking phallic symbol.” The Beat novelist Jack Kerouac objected to Mailer for linking hipsters with violent psychopaths. Indeed, Mailer connected the bravery of criminals with the counterculture in general. In an infamous passage of “The White Negro”—which Norman Podhoretz deplored as “the most morally gruesome”—Mailer praises hypothetical hoodlums who would be daring enough to “beat in the brains” of a candy-store owner. In the essay collection Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer categorized himself as a major writer with the potential of changing American culture. “The way to save your work and reach many more readers is to advertise yourself,” he wrote, explaining why he sought the public spotlight, which some regarded as a bald rationalization of the author’s egotism. Mailer explained that, in his mind, he had been running for president for the past decade, adding, “I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” By the 1970s, he would have less grandiose ambitions, concluding that novelists had lost their stature in society. In the meantime, he joined in the political clamor of his day. On invitation of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Mailer spoke at the University of California at Berkeley during the spring of 1965. Addressing the student crowd, he ridiculed President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, arguing that rational debate was pointless and that the only way to end the war was to engage in outrageous forms of protest. He later wrote Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), a novel about a manly bear hunt in Alaska that uses the word “Vietnam” only once (on the last page), but serves as an allegory of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia. This was followed by his most acclaimed nonfiction work, the Pulitzer Prize– winning Armies of the Night (1968), an account of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, including his arrest, and a probing study of the New Left. In this work, what he called “history as a novel, the novel as history,” Mailer refers to himself in the third person as “the Novelist,” “the Ruminator,” “the General,” and “the Historian.”
Malcolm X
Also in 1968, he produced Miami and the Siege of Chicago, a work covering the two party conventions but focusing heavily on the antiwar violence in Chicago that year at the Democratic National Convention. That event, in Mailer’s view, represented the Democratic Party turning against its working-class base. In response to feminist attacks against him, Mailer wrote The Prisoner of Sex (1971), in which he specifically targets Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics: A Manifesto of Revolution (1970). Millett, he contends, had taken male authors out of context in deconstructing their “gender bias.” In Mailer’s view, biology constitutes at least half of a woman’s destiny, and feminist ideology has certain totalitarian aspects. Although his retort was strong and mean-spirited, referring to Millet as “Katebaby” and “laboratory assistant Kate,” Mailer is credited with being the first major male writer to seriously address the women’s liberation movement. Mailer ended the 1970s with The Executioner’s Song (1979), about the murder and robbery spree of Gary Gilmore and his subsequent death by firing squad in Utah. This work, billed as “a true-life novel,” won Mailer his second Pulitzer Prize and provoked a national debate on capital punishment. Mailer, however, was more interested in the relativism of good and evil. He explored how each character in the story, which he initially entitled American Virtue, had a different concept of virtue. Mailer regarded Gilmore as “a monster who killed two people, but not totally a monster.” Later, Mailer was blamed for his role in the paroling of Jack Henry Abbott, the author of a collection of prison letters to Mailer entitled In the Belly of the Beast (1981), who, weeks after being released, fatally stabbed a waiter. Roger Chapman See also: Counterculture; Democratic Party; Feminism, ThirdWave; Generations and Generational Conflict; Gilmore, Gary; Kerouac, Jack; Millett, Kate; New Journalism; New Left; Students for a Democratic Society; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Dearborn, Mary V. Mailer: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Lennon, J. Michael. Conversations with Norman Mailer. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. ———. Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987.
Malcolm X The black nationalist Malcolm X shocked mainstream America during the 1950s and 1960s with his angry
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rhetoric against perceived social injustices experienced by African Americans. He also criticized blacks for their self-loathing, which he attributed to “brainwashing” on the part of the “white devils.” A critic of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent resistance against segregation, Malcolm X advocated violent selfdefense. Renewed interest in this controversial figure followed the release of Spike Lee’s biographical film, Malcolm X (1992). The son of a Baptist minister who was an adherent of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1929, the family moved to Lansing, Michigan, where the father died two years later under mysterious circumstances; Malcolm later blamed white supremacists. Following his mother’s admittance to a mental institution, Malcolm and his siblings were placed in foster homes. He moved to Boston at age sixteen, then drifted to Harlem in New York City, and returned to Boston, where he got involved in drug-related activity and ended up incarcerated for burglary (1946–1952). During his imprisonment, Malcolm converted to Islam as a member of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, or Black Muslim movement. Shortly after his release, having taken the name of “X” and discarded the “slave name” Little, he was appointed the assistant minister to Muslim Temple Number One in Detroit. He went on to establish mosques in Boston and Philadelphia, and by 1963 had become the leading spokesman and national minister of the Black Muslim movement. Later that year, however, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he was censured by Elijah Muhammad for comments about “chickens coming home to roost.” In 1964, disenchanted with his mentor, who was embroiled in a sex scandal, Malcolm left the Nation to form the Organization of Afro-American Unity. At this juncture, he changed his name to El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz, believing it more akin to his adopted religion and African ancestry. Following a pilgrimage to Mecca that year, he returned to the United States with a broader vision, one more hopeful of racial harmony. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm was gunned down in Harlem, New York, while giving a speech. (A week earlier his home had been firebombed.) The three assassins were members of the Nation of Islam. What many regard as the quintessential or defining speech by Malcolm X, delivered in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 3, 1964, is titled “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In a call for unity among the 22 million “Africans who are in America,” Malcolm chastised listeners to “wake up” and realize that “it’s got to be the ballot or the bullet.” Referring to the filibuster then taking place in the Senate against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he charged a “segregationist conspiracy” led by Democrats who officially speak in favor of civil rights but do not expel from their
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party the Dixiecrats (the southern Democrats) impeding progress for black rights. If the government cannot provide protection to blacks, he argued, then “it’s time for Negroes to defend themselves.” Roger Chapman See also: Afrocentrism; Civil Rights Movement; Haley, Alex; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Lee, Spike; Muslim Americans; Nation of Islam; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Collins, Rodnell, and Ella Coll. Malcolm X: The Man Behind the Myth. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Conyers, James L., and Andrew P. Smallwood. Malcolm X: A Historical Reader. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine Books, 1965, 1992. Tyner, James A. The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and the Remaking of American Space. New York: Routledge, 2006. Wilson, August. “The Legacy of Malcolm X.” Life, December 1992.
Manson, Marilyn Controversial rock musician Marilyn Manson, born Brian Hugh Warner, legally changed his name to the one that he used in his performing group, combining the names of film star Marilyn Monroe and cult figure Charles Manson to reflect the dark genre of “shock rock.” Conservative, pro-family, and Christian groups have blamed Marilyn Manson’s music and stagecraft for negative youth trends such as teen suicide, drug use, and school shootings. Born in Canton, Ohio, on January 5, 1969, he began attending Heritage Christian School in Canton in 1974 but later transferred to the public school system, taking with him a negative view of the Christian religion that would later be expressed in his music. In 1989, while living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he formed the Goth band Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. He has produced nearly a dozen albums, including Portrait of the American Family (1994), Antichrist Superstar (1996), Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000), and The Golden Age of Grotesque (2003). He has also appeared on television and in films, including Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002). In the tradition of shock rock, Manson has been known to startle audiences by appearing at concerts dressed in knee-high black boots, women’s clothing, black eyeliner and lipstick, white foundation makeup, and bizarre contact lenses. Stage props have included fire, animals, cages, raw chicken parts, and chainsaws—and he has been known to expose himself during performances. In 1994, he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, for
performing naked during the group’s “American Family Tour.” Consistent with another stage antic—tearing apart Bibles—Manson became an honorary ordained reverend in the Church of Satan in 1988. While Manson’s detractors have focused on the pornographic and Satanist themes in his music and performances, others have hailed him as a champion of free speech because he pushes the bounds of the First Amendment. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Music Industry Coalition (Mass MIC), Rock Out Censorship (ROC), and Parents for Rock and Rap have taken up the cause of defending Manson and his right to free expression. Others have dismissed Manson as simply the latest shock rocker in the tradition of early heavy metal bands such as Alice Cooper and Kiss, who used outrageous stage theatrics to sell more albums. Manson’s infamy grew in the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, when it was learned that the two assailants had been influenced by his music. In response, Manson had a letter printed in Rolling Stone magazine, stating that American society and not his music is to be blamed for the killings. Despite the controversy, he has maintained a large cult following, consisting largely of suburban teens who dress in black attire and wear black makeup. David J. Childs See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Censorship; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gun Control; Moore, Michael; Rock and Roll; School Shootings.
Further Reading Marilyn Manson Web site. www.marilynmanson.com. Manson, Marilyn, and Neil Strauss. The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. New York: Regan Books, 1999. Rogers, Kalen. Marilyn Manson: The Unauthorized Biography. New York: Omnibus, 1997.
M a p p l e t h o r p e , Ro b e r t Robert Mapplethorpe was an acclaimed American artist whose provocative black-and-white photographs generated intensive debates over the nature of obscenity and the role of the state in funding and censoring works of art. Though well known in artistic circles before his death in March 1989, Mapplethorpe made national headlines later that year when conservative senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) brought the artist’s photographs to the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to introduce content restrictions on grants provided through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Helms’s campaign resulted in record attendance at Mapplethorpe’s exhibitions, a dramatic increase in the value of the photographer’s work, and reduced budgets and a climate of defensiveness at the NEA.
Marriage Names
Mapplethorpe, born on November 4, 1946, in Floral Park, New York, left home at the age of sixteen to pursue a career in fine arts. After receiving a BFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1970, he began constructing images that combined magazine photographs, painting, and found objects. He later took up photography, producing a number of self-portraits, images of celebrities such as Andy Warhol, Richard Gere, and Deborah Harry, a series of photographs of bodybuilder Lisa Lyons, album covers for New Wave rockers Patti Smith and Television, and floral still lifes. It was Mapplethorpe’s frank depictions of homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes, however, that would garner the most notoriety among political and religious conservatives. He died in Boston of complications from AIDS on March 9, 1989. Mapplethorpe’s work entered the culture wars after the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia received a $30,000 grant from the NEA to organize an exhibition of his photography entitled The Perfect Moment. The exhibit opened without controversy in the fall of 1988, and then traveled to Chicago in February of the following year. However, shortly before it was to have opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in June, Helms obtained a catalog of the exhibit. The senator, already alarmed over NEA support for an exhibit featuring Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (which depicted a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine), convinced the Senate to pass legislation that banned federal funding for works of art considered obscene. Helms’s actions drew praise from conservative organizations such as the American Family Association and Citizens for Community Values, and fierce condemnation from arts groups, liberals, and free-speech advocates. The Corcoran Gallery, meanwhile, canceled its planned showing of The Perfect Moment, a decision that led to widespread protest and an eventual apology from the gallery. When the exhibit opened at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in 1990, gallery officials were indicted for pandering obscenity, though they were later acquitted. Following the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, the NEA suffered a budget reduction of about 40 percent as a result of the Mapplethorpe controversy and associated issues. Robert Teigrob See also: AIDS; Alexander, Jane; Censorship; Gays in Popular Culture; Helms, Jesse; National Endowment for the Arts; National Endowment for the Humanities; Pornography; Serrano, Andres; Warhol, Andy; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Mapplethorpe, Robert. Mapplethorpe. New York: Random House, 1992. McLeod, Douglas, and Jill Mackenzie. “Print Media and Public
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Reaction to the Controversy over NEA Funding for Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘The Perfect Moment’ Exhibit.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75:2 (Summer 1998): 278–91. Morrisroe, Patricia. Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography. New York: Papermac, 1995.
Marriage Names The 1970s brought a change in the custom in which a bride automatically forfeited her maiden name upon marriage and took the surname of her husband. At the time, some businesses refused to issue credit cards to women under their own names, instead issuing cards that read, for example, Mrs. John Smith. After the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, however, a variety of options became more culturally acceptable for marriage names, not only for women but for men as well. Although a seemingly innocuous personal choice, the issue of marriage names sparked considerable debate in America. Many conservatives and religious leaders argued that a woman who does not take her husband’s name is not committed to her role as a wife and that a man who does not insist that his wife take his surname is weak. Women who chose to retain their maiden name, however, argued that adopting their husband’s name would be tantamount to enslaving themselves and forgoing individual rights. Many professional women who had built careers before marriage preferred to keep their names. These same women might choose to take their husband’s name when placed in a public role—as Hillary Rodham did when her husband, Bill Clinton, ran for governor of Arkansas. The practices of retaining one’s maiden name, taking a spouse’s surname, hyphenating both surnames, or combining the two surnames into a new name are all acceptable in American culture today. In fact, the trend for a man to take on his wife’s surname or for both husband and wife to take both surnames is increasing. However, when faced with children’s surnames, many couples continue the tradition of using the husband’s surname in order to avoid confusion with the schools and other social situations. Some women who choose this option argue that there is little difference between carrying their husband’s last name and carrying their father’s. The marriage name issue has been more controversial in the United States than in other countries that have prescribed rules about surnames. In France, for instance, women maintain their birth name for all legal documents but use their husband’s surname in social situations. In Spain, Latin America, and China, women usually maintain their birth name after marriage. In America, couples now have a myriad of choices as to marriage names. Tanya Hedges Duroy
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See also: Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Ferraro, Geraldine; Feminism, Second-Wave; Ms.
Further Reading Forbes, Gordon B., Leah E. Adams-Curtis, Kay B. White, and Nicole R. Hamm. “Perceptions of Married Women and Married Men with Hyphenated Surnames.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research (March 2002): 167–75. Johnson, David R., and Laurie K. Scheuble. “Women’s Marital Naming in Two Generations: A National Study.” Journal of Marriage and Family 57 (1995): 724–32. Scheuble, Laurie K., and David R. Johnson. “Married Women’s Situational Use of Last Names: An Empirical Study.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research (July 2005): 143–51.
Marxism The ghost of Karl Marx continues to hover over arguments between the left and right in America, particularly when the debate focuses on economic disparities. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991, the conflict between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, was generally understood as a contest between communism (or Marxism) and capitalism. Although the end of the Cold War was widely attributed in the democratic West to the inherent weakness of communism, Marx’s criticisms of the effects of capitalism remain potent for many on the left. Marxism is a political and economic theory that originated in the nineteenth century with such writings by Karl Marx as Das Kapital (Capital, 1867–1894) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), written with Friedrich Engels. Focusing on economic relationships, Marx regarded class as the primary political interest motivating human activity and leading to political conflict. According to classic Marxist theory, the system of capitalism inevitably causes exploitation and thereby contains the seeds of its own destruction. Marx argued that capitalism produces alienation; people as workers are forced into a wage system that exploits their labor and robs them of control over their own lives—leading ultimately to worldwide revolution. Although Marx predicted that capitalism would collapse because of its own “internal logic,” communist systems based on Marxism have repeatedly failed. In the United States, Marxism has been primarily an academic theory, with only limited effective political action, while opposition to Marxist ideas is an almost obligatory rallying cry for both major political parties. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Marxism does not pose a serious threat to American power, but it remains a much demonized ideology in the United States, particularly among conservatives, because of conditions in and relations with holdover communist states such as Cuba and North Korea. Marxism has also been part of a
great debate on the left, including feminists, civil rights supporters, and other political activists, as some liberals seek to analyze and resist the forces of globalization. The popular discourse of the Cold War convinced many in the United States that Marxism is the exact opposite of American capitalist democracy. Although the communist movement once had a limited foothold in American society, primarily with the labor movement, by the 1950s there was little or no tolerance for members or sympathizers of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). During the “Red Scare” of that decade, it was dangerous for anyone to maintain any affiliation with the CPUSA or related organizations, known as “communist fronts.” Such individuals, including teachers, government bureaucrats, unionists, writers, and filmmakers, were sniffed out and fired, blacklisted, or imprisoned—whether they were actual members, erstwhile sympathizers, or just opponents of what they regarded as a “witch hunt.” “Red baiting” remained a common political tactic even as the 1960s ushered in a period of radicalism. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s reluctance to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam was motivated in part by a fear of being seen as “soft on communism.” President Richard M. Nixon, only because he for years had garnered a strong anticommunist reputation, was later able to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam and establish ties with communist China. Ronald Reagan, who as a Hollywood actor had testified as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, emphasized his strong anticommunist views on the campaign trail, and as president he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” In other countries, however, and for academics in the United States, Marxism has remained an intellectual and political force. Contemporary Marxist scholars use the perspective of class struggle in considering such phenomena as mass culture and how it masks the effects of capitalism, anticolonial struggles in the Third World, and globalization. Marxist ideas have also been reflected in the antisweatshop movement, global unionization movement, protests against the World Trade Organization, and liberation theology in Latin America. Some international leaders, particularly in the Third World, have turned to Marxist theory in critiquing American hegemony. While Marxism remains a powerful source of ideas for the political left, its emphasis on economic power and class identity has embroiled the theory and its advocates in struggles within the left. Marxists have long criticized what they call the fragmentation caused by various groups on the left, arguing that feminists, civil rights advocates, and gay rights activists have divided the left and distracted it from the primary struggle against capitalism. Claire E. Rasmussen
McC ain , John See also: Battle of Seattle; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Cuba; Feminism, Second-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Globalization; McCarthyism; New Left; Race; Soviet Union and Russia; Vietnam War; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Collier, 1989. Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Joseph, Jonathan. Marxism and Social Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Walker, David M., and Daniel Gray. Historical Dictionary of Marxism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007.
McCain, John A prominent Republican U.S. senator from Arizona, John McCain has stood out as an enigmatic figure during the increasing political polarization of the culture wars. Although a self-avowed conservative, McCain has often held political and social positions that attract moderates and independents while simultaneously putting him at odds with the Religious Right and the base of his own party. He won the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2008 but was defeated by Democrat Barack Obama on Election Day. The son of a high-ranking American naval officer, John Sydney McCain III was born in the Panama Canal Zone on August 29, 1936. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (1958), he became a navy pilot and was shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967. As a prisoner of war in Hanoi (1967–1973), he suffered torture and other violations of human rights. McCain retired from the military in 1981, moved to Arizona, and entered politics, first serving in the House of Representatives (1983–1987) and then succeeding Barry Goldwater in the Senate (1987–present). In Washington, McCain quickly earned a reputation as a maverick, although his political career was jeopardized in 1989 when he was investigated as one of the Keating Five, a group of senators accused of improperly shielding a corrupt savings-and-loan executive. In the end, McCain was cleared of any illegality but criticized for acting with poor judgment. McCain adopted a variety of positions at odds with hardcore conservatives. He urged normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations as he worked on resolving the Vietnam MIA-POW issue. He favored sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime, federal support for fetal tissue research, and a moderate approach to environmental
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issues. He went before conservative antigay groups and spoke about tolerance. He also, however, supported every aspect of the Republican Contract with America and voted to impeach President Bill Clinton. The Republican Party, he maintained, was large enough to include “different voices in honorable disputes.” That belief was tested during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Pushing his reformist agenda and touting the need for the McCainFeingold campaign finance reform bill, opposed by the vast majority of Republican incumbents, McCain said the legislation was needed because trial lawyers control Democrats and the insurance companies Republicans. His campaign bus, christened the Straight Talk Express, symbolized his desire to court moderates. Winning a surprisingly large victory over George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, McCain experienced a bitter contest a few weeks later in South Carolina. Bush started the South Carolina campaign with a speech at ultra-conservative Bob Jones University, prompting religious conservatives like Pat Robertson to quickly line up against McCain. A vicious negative campaign by Bush and a series of semi-official smear campaigns ensured the defeat of McCain, who decried Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.” After losing the majority of the primaries on Super Tuesday, McCain suspended his campaign and eventually gave Bush a half-hearted endorsement. Later, he was more enthusiastic backing Bush’s reelection. During Bush’s second term McCain, thinking about another presidential run, began reaching out to social conservatives while trying to retain the support of moderates. Thus, McCain voted against a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, but worked to stop same-sex marriage bills in Arizona; voted against Bush’s initial tax cuts, but later voted to make them permanent; and put himself at odds with Republicans over some gun control measures and the handling of enemy combatants, but endorsed the teaching of Intelligent Design. McCain’s 2008 primary campaign was a hard-fought affair among Republicans, but it ended much sooner than the drawn-out battle among Democrats that eventually saw Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination. McCain won the GOP nomination in spite of heavy early opposition from many on the right, including influential radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who during the primaries said he would prefer a Democrat over McCain. Many political observers felt that conservative Republican primary voters split their allegiance among other candidates, helping McCain win the nomination. Hoping in part to energize the conservative Republican base and to attract women voters who might have resented Obama not choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate, McCain chose Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and a newcomer to national politics, as his vice
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presidential candidate. Many conservatives applauded the choice, with William Kristol calling her “fantastic.” Others, including a columnist for the conservative and influential National Review, worried about Palin’s record and performance during the campaign, felt that she was “out of her league,” and urged her to bow out. During the campaign, Palin energized many conservative rallies, but her support among the general public fell quickly. By late October, after a series of disastrous interviews with news networks and being skewered by late-night comedians, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 55 percent of Americans felt she was not qualified to be president. McCain lost to Obama in the general election, garnering almost 46 percent of the popular vote and only 173 of the 538 Electoral College votes. Besides losing the traditional swing states of Ohio and Florida, McCain narrowly lost the red states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. The campaign was often sidetracked by extraneous issues, but in the end, the massive public rejection of the Bush presidency and the details of the growing economic crisis that came to light that fall helped to secure Obama’s victory. After the election, the Republican Party and right-wing conservatives began a series of public and private deliberations to determine the future course of the party. John Day Tully See also: Bob Jones University; Campaign Finance Reform; Clinton Impeachment; Contract with America; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Gay Rights Movement; Palin, Sarah; Religious Right; Republican Party; Same-Sex Marriage; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Alexander, Paul. Man of the People: The Life of John McCain. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Drew, Elizabeth. Citizen McCain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. McCain, John, with Mark Salter. Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir. New York: Random House, 2008. ———. Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2002. Schecter, Cliff. The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him—and Why Independents Shouldn’t. Sausalito, CA: PoliPointPress, 2008. Welch, Matt. McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
M c C a r t hy, E u g e n e Enigmatic and often unpredictable, U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) attracted national attention in 1968 when he carried the banner for antiwar forces by challenging President Lyndon B. Johnson in that year’s first Democratic primary. His stunning showing
in New Hampshire (42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent) rested on the work of a legion of students who got “Clean for Gene” and waged a door-to-door campaign. McCarthy’s White House bid altered the political landscape: Johnson withdrew from the presidential campaign, and Robert F. Kennedy declared his candidacy. Temperamentally conservative and introspective, McCarthy did not fit the pattern of a 1960s political activist. His Vietnam stance during the New Hampshire campaign was vague, and he attracted more votes from those who thought Johnson was insufficiently hawkish than from those who wanted immediate withdrawal. On the other hand, he proposed radical solutions for some of the nation’s pressing social and economic issues. Born on March 29, 1916, in Watkins, Minnesota, Eugene Joseph McCarthy grew up in a deeply religious Catholic household. He attended St. John’s University (BA, 1935) and the University of Minnesota (MA, 1941), taught public school, and was briefly a Benedictine novice (1942–1943). His deep belief in Catholic social activism soon led him into politics. In 1948, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party nominated him to oppose the Republican incumbent of Minnesota’s Fourth Congressional District. He won the election and served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1949–1958), followed by two terms in the U.S. Senate (1959–1971). Despite a generally unimpressive legislative record, he was well regarded by congressional colleagues, though many were surprised by his decision to challenge Johnson in 1968. After the New Hampshire results, the race for the Democratic nomination became a three-way contest among McCarthy, Kennedy (who soon emerged as the front runner), and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy’s assassination in June left McCarthy dispirited and unfocused, his campaign lagging. He remained aloof after Humphrey was nominated, giving the vice president only a lukewarm, last-minute endorsement. McCarthy retired from the Senate in 1971, a decision he seemed later to regret. In retirement, McCarthy taught, lectured, and wrote poetry, political commentary, and other works. He tried more than once to restart his political career, occasionally renewing old political connections or acting on old grudges, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and running an ill-fated independent campaign for president in 1976. He died on December 10, 2005, remembered primarily for his major role in the political drama of 1968. Gary L. Bailey See also: Catholic Church; Cronkite, Walter; Democratic Party; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
McC ar thy, Joseph
Further Reading LaFeber, Walter. The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Larner, Jeremy. Nobody Knows: Reflections on the McCarthy Campaign of 1968. New York: Macmillan, 1969. McCarthy, Eugene J. First Things First: New Priorities for America. New York: New American Library, 1968. Rising, George. Clean for Gene: Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential Campaign. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Sandbrook, Dominic. Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
M c C a r t hy, J o s e p h In the culture wars, the name Joseph McCarthy is associated with the 1950s red scare and political witch hunts referred to as McCarthyism. As a Republican U.S. senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy staked his political reputation on fighting communist subversion in the U.S. government, but in the end he was censured by his Senate colleagues for the manner in which he conducted that attack. Although most historians and political commentators remember McCarthy for publicly accusing individuals of disloyalty by making use of hearsay and insubstantial evidence for the purpose of political grandstanding, leaving ruined careers in his wake, over the years some conservative revisionists have defended his memory in a quest to rehabilitate his public image. While most observers regard him as a demagogue, a passionate few argue that he was the victim of a liberal media. Born into a large Catholic family on November 14, 1908, near Grand Chute, Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy grew up poor on a farm. Later, he obtained a law degree at Marquette University (LLB, 1935), took up the practice of law, and sought to launch a political career. Although unsuccessful in campaigning as a Democrat for Shawano County district attorney (1936), he later won a nonpartisan race for the state’s tenth judicial circuit court (1939). Following a stint as a Marine Corps intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II, he won a U.S. senate seat after narrowly defeating the progressive Robert M. La Follette, Jr., in the 1946 Republican primary. He was elected to a second term in 1952. McCarthy died on May 2, 1957, in Bethesda, Maryland, from liver failure due to alcoholism. McCarthy’s notoriety began on February 9, 1950, during an address to a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he made the accusation that many in the U.S. State Department were communists or communist sympathizers. After an investigation by the Tydings Committee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings (D-MD), McCarthy’s charges were dismissed as groundless—although some Republicans
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denounced the Democratic-controlled proceedings as a whitewash. Tydings later that year lost his reelection race during a campaign in which McCarthy passed out fliers with a photograph of the Maryland legislator juxtaposed with one of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party of the United States. Meanwhile, on June 1, 1950, with McCarthy clearly in mind, freshman senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-MA) delivered her “Declaration of Conscience” speech on the Senate floor, arguing that those who “shout the loudest about Americanism” ignore “some of the principles of Americanism” when they convert the Senate into “a forum of hate” and violate the Constitution by using the tactic of “trial by accusation.” As chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, under the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations, McCarthy continued to make headlines as he hunted for communists in various parts of the government, including the Voice of America, the U.S. Information Libraries, the Government Printing Office, and the Army Signal Corps. His tactics were called into question by the renowned television journalist Edward R. Murrow in “Report on Senator McCarthy,” a See It Now program aired on March 9, 1954. The following month, the Senate began holding the Army-McCarthy hearings to investigate McCarthy’s allegations of communist espionage in the army and the countercharge that the senator had sought preferential treatment from the army for one of his committee staff members who had been drafted. McCarthy’s rude and ruthless manner and constant interruptions during the televised proceedings shocked many of the 20 million viewers, adding drama and poignancy to the moment when army counsel Joseph Welch pointedly asked McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” A public backlash against McCarthy ensued, including a spirited recall drive in Wisconsin. The senator’s detractors began wearing “Joe Must Go” and “McCarthy for Fuehrer” buttons. As the army hearings were winding down in June, Senator Ralph Flanders (VT-R) introduced a resolution to censure McCarthy, and on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 65–22 to condemn McCarthy for actions “contrary to senatorial traditions.” During the 1960s, the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy Educational Foundation, founded by members of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wisconsin, began a campaign to address “the lies by politicians, educators and members of the news media” about the late senator. The founders began hosting annual graveside services and remembrance dinners, and called for a commemorative McCarthy postage stamp and a national holiday in his honor. In the same town, from January 2002 to January 2004, the Outagamie Museum offered the nation’s first exhibit on McCarthy, using a purposefully ambiguous title: “Joseph McCarthy: A Modern Tragedy.” In perhaps what was the first major defense of
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cCarthyism, the conservative activist William F. BuckM ley (with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell) published McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954), arguing that McCarthy’s anticommunism was “a movement around which men of goodwill and stern morality can close ranks.” John A. Stormer, a member of the John Birch Society, followed with the best-seller None Dare Call It Treason (1964), a work supportive of McCarthy in that it warned that the United States was losing the Cold War because of communist subversion in American society. Medford Evans, also a member of the John Birch Society, wrote The Assassination of Joe McCarthy (1970); and years later his son, M. Stanton Evans, a writer for the National Review, published Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). In Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (2000), Arthur Herman, a one-time staffer at the Smithsonian Institution, argues that McCarthy was simply guilty of “making a good point badly.” These works attempt to vindicate McCarthy by suggesting that though he made “mistakes,” the danger of communism was real and something liberals generally refuse to acknowledge. In Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003), the conservative pundit Ann Coulter asserts that “McCarthy’s crusade” benefited the country by making it a “disgrace” to be a communist. Roger Chapman See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Coulter, Ann; John Birch Society; La Follette, Robert, Jr.; Marxism; McCarthyism; Murrow, Edward R.; Republican Party; Revisionist History; Taft, Robert A.
Further Reading Cunningham, Jesse G., and Laura K. Egendorf, eds. The McCarthy Hearings. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2003. Evans, M. Stanton. Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Joseph McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies. New York: Crown Forum, 2007. Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. New York: Little, Brown, 1998. Thelen, David P., and Esther S. Thelen. “Joe Must Go: The Movement to Recall Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 49:3 (1965–1966): 185–209.
M c C a r t hy i s m The term “McCarthyism” was coined by cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock) in the March 29, 1950, edition of the Washington Post to refer to the campaign to root out alleged communists from American institutions. Not many were amused, however, during
the anticommunist crusade of the 1950s as personified by the grandstanding of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI). McCarthy quickly became a symbol for the myriad efforts by American politicians and selfproclaimed patriots to outdo each other in exposing and ruining communists and other suspicious groups, policies, and lifestyles. It was generally believed that the “containment” of Soviet advances abroad—the mandate of the “cold war” inaugurated by President Harry Truman in March 1947—necessitated similar vigilance at home. The term “McCarthyism” continues to circulate today in the political rhetoric of the culture wars, referring to the kind of fear tactics, unsupported accusations, and demagoguery employed during the Red Scare.
The “Brown Scare” and Formation of HUAC In light of the fascist takeover in several European countries during the 1920s and 1930s, Americans had begun to wonder whether such a thing might happen in their country, making conditions ripe for a “Brown Scare” (a reference to the brown shirts worn by Nazi storm troopers). Threats to democratic ideals seemed evident, given the appearance of the German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts, and other pro-Nazi groups. Although none of these organizations appeared ready to lead a fascist revolution in America, several politicians, President Franklin Roosevelt among them, chose to play on public fears. The political advantages became evident, for instance, when the America First Committee, a broad coalition of pacifists opposed to the U.S. military buildup and aid to Great Britain, was cast as a union of Nazi sympathizers—Roosevelt even had the FBI illegally tap the phones of its leaders. Progressive Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, Jr., upset many conservatives when he used his congressional probe, set up to investigate violations of the National Labor Relations Act (1935), to paint anti-union industrialists as an equivalent danger to New Deal community rebuilding. In this context, the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) was made permanent in 1938. The body had been created by liberal Democrats in 1934 to investigate the success of fascist propaganda. Conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies, who chaired HUAC from 1937 to 1944, made exaggerated, unsubstantiated claims about the extent and scope of American fascism like his liberal predecessors. Under Dies’s leadership, HUAC also began to target the radical and liberal left. It used the specter of communist infiltration as a means to dismantle New Deal agencies conservatives had long opposed, including the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which was shut down in June 1939 after HUAC interrogation. With the 1946 Republican takeover of Congress, Dies’s successors looked to work more aggressively in exposing communism in America. Freshmen
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In a 1954 Herblock cartoon during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joe McCarthy holds a “doctored photo” and “faked letter” that he claimed were FBI documents. (A 1954 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation)
senators Richard Nixon (R-CA) and Joseph McCarthy (who ousted La Follette) would join in this task.
“Red Scare” Politics and Culture After the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, U.S. access to Soviet archives and the Venona surveillance project (secret U.S. eavesdropping on Soviet communications during and after World War II) suggest that Americans had more cause to dread “red” subversion than “brown.” While official Communist Party numbers in the United States peaked around 100,000 in 1939, members were loyal to the Soviet Union. In turn, they were used to recruit and plant spies in key government agencies. During the 1930s “Popular Front” supporters, trying to ground socialism in American domestic policies, had become an important and visible wing of the New Deal coalition. By some estimates, 10 million American workers belonged to unions with communist leadership in 1947. The second Red Scare (the first took place during World War I) began to coalesce when HUAC launched an investigation of Hollywood in 1946. Committee members targeted a broad political spectrum of entertainers for accusations of disloyalty—although it was true that nine of the Hollywood Ten charged with contempt for refusing to testify had been members of the Communist Party. HUAC Republicans felt vindicated when, after having lambasted New Deal Democrats for harboring Soviet spies, they received testimony from former Krem-
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lin operative turned anticommunist journalist Whittaker Chambers that such had been the case. Chambers named Harvard-educated New Dealer Alger Hiss, who convincingly refuted the charges before HUAC, leading Truman to condemn the committee’s partisanship. Chambers then came out with copies of State Department documents that Hiss had reportedly passed to him. Hiss went to prison for perjury, and Democrats were perceived as being “soft on communism.” With the help of the liberal anticommunist think tank Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Republicans went on to drive Popular Front liberals out of prominence. The transformation of anticommunism into a mass cultural panic was further aided by the revelation of espionage activity that passed on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union—e.g., the cases of Klaus Fuchs (a former Manhattan Project scientist) and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Congress added to HUAC the Senate Internal Security Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which together considered over one hundred cases between 1949 and 1954. The Smith Act (1940), originally targeting fascist plots to overthrow the U.S. federal government, was used to prosecute twelve Communist Party leaders in 1948. This antisubversion law was strengthened by the Internal Security or Mc Carran Act (1950) and the Communist Control Act (1954). The FBI and Loyalty Review Boards, as part of Truman’s Loyalty Program (1947), would investigate millions of federal employees well into the 1950s, resulting in thousands of resignations and dismissals but no formal charges of espionage. In addition, a number of teachers and lawyers were fired without explanation after the FBI began leaking confidential findings to employers. In 1947, U.S. attorney general Tom Clark added to his initial “list” of pro-German and pro-Japanese groups up to 154 communist and “front” organizations. The Taft-Hartley Act (1946), along with widely circulated publications such as Red Channels (1950) put out by former FBI agents, empowered citizens to ensure that communists and “fellow travelers” would no longer serve in labor unions, Hollywood, or television.
McCarthy’s Rise and Fall The “scare” aspect of the anticommunist campaign was directly attributable to the rhetoric and tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy beginning in the early 1950s. Having watched from behind as fellow Republican Richard Nixon led the initial congressional charge against Soviet penetration, McCarthy was provoked by the unexpected fall of China to communists in 1949 to launch a broader campaign. In a Lincoln Day speech in February 1950, he claimed to have compiled a list of 205 known communists then working for the U.S. State Department. Some of these names were of individuals who had failed to pass security screenings in 1946,
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mostly for reasons other than ties to the Communist Party, as the Democratic-controlled (Millard) Tydings Committee later established. This committee unwit tingly gave McCarthy a platform to spin more stories of communist destruction of the American way of life. Still seeking revenge for the profiling of political conservatives as Nazis during World War II, McCarthy and Republicans found the post-Hiss Democratic administration an easy target. Before long, television cameras would be capturing McCarthy’s complaints that President Truman, secretary of state Dean Acheson, and former secretary of state George Marshall had more or less orchestrated China’s “enslavement.” Winning the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, McCarthy became an even more polarizing figure. He was a crystallizing center for popular opposition to New Deal planning, public health programs, the United Nations, and homosexuals (even though his top aide was bisexual). A 1954 poll suggested that 50 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of the senator. He especially found friends among fellow Catholics, including William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and an early voice of the conservative resurgence. All the same, the liberal ADA painted McCarthy as a reckless, self-interested demagogue. Members of his own party, like Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith, publicly condemned McCarthy’s “character assassinations” as unbecoming of the country he claimed to defend. In The Crucible (1952), blacklisted playwright Arthur Miller revisited the seventeenth-century Salem witch hunts to insinuate the similarly irrational essence of McCarthyism. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” concluded CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow in his 1954 See It Now indictment of the senator. The backlash against McCarthy in 1954 signaled a temporary halt to McCarthyism. Having been united by anticommunism but then divided by McCarthy, Democrats and Republicans once again united when McCarthy turned on Eisenhower appointees and various military personnel. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings in April were the senator’s final undoing. During a dramatic episode, after McCarthy revealed that an assistant investigative attorney years earlier had been a fleeting member of the leftist National Lawyers’ Guild, attorney for the army Joseph Welch asked him, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Thinking he did not, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him in December. McCarthy died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.
McCarthyism Continued In a renewed interest in civil liberties, a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases in 1957 and 1958 curbed the anticommunist powers of Congress and the White House. Also, in 1962, the blacklisting of entertainers came to an end—one of the Hollywood Ten (screenwriter Dalton
Trumbo) even received screen credit for Exodus (1960) and Spartacus (1960). Nonetheless, the federal government did not cease its campaign against perceived political subversion. For example, in 1956, the FBI began its Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to disrupt the Communist Party, which by that time had only about 3,000 members. By the 1960s, COINTELPRO agents were infiltrating, intimidating, and sometimes attacking protest groups, mostly leftist ones, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panthers. In 1974, President Richard Nixon, who earlier had politically benefited by exploiting the fear of communism, resigned from office in order to avoid impeachment for his abuse of executive power in the Watergate scandal. During the 1980s, media watchdog and political conservative Reed Irvine, began Accuracy in Academia (AIA), enlisting student volunteers to anonymously monitor class lectures on college campuses and report “liberal bias.” This type of surveillance of academia later became the forte of neoconservatives, including David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes, who founded organizations such as Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch. These organizations named names of professors thought to be biased and misleading, and the Internet became a tool for singling out liberal professors. Horowitz also published a book entitled The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006). All of this, opponents have argued, amounts to a campaign in the spirit of McCarthyism. Indeed, it is difficult to peruse political blogs and not find occasional references to McCarthyism. Some opponents of drug testing, for example, refer to the practice as “chemical McCarthyism”; others critical of health checks for obesity refer to that idea as “medical McCarthyism.” To characterize any public policy or proposal as Mc Carthyism—whether it be zero-tolerance law enforcement, proposals for a national ID card, antismoking restrictions, or virtually any perceived form of “Big Brother” monitoring—is to suggest that it is sinister, unfair, a threat to individual freedom, and driven by ulterior motives. Some civil libertarians castigated President George W. Bush for his response to terrorism following the attacks of September 11, arguing that he took advantage of public fear to advance his conservative agenda while unfairly portraying his opponents as “soft on terrorism.” The USA PATRIOT Act (2001), which Bush persuaded Congress to pass, was quickly characterized by critics as being in the tradition of the Smith and McCarran Acts because of perceived harm to civil and academic freedoms in the name of national security. In response to such charges, conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote Treason (2003), accusing liberals of trying to impede counterterrorism efforts by resorting to unfair comparisons to McCarthyism. This did not stop film actor George Clooney from offering a tribute to Edward R. Murrow in the film Good Night,
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and Good Luck (2005), which some reviewers interpreted as a kind of editorial that praised one who directly opposed McCarthy in order to speak out against the post-9/11 political climate. Mark Edwards See also: Academic Freedom; Chambers, Whittaker; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Hiss, Alger; Hollywood Ten; Horowitz, David; Irvine, Reed; Labor Unions; McCarthy, Joseph; Murrow, Edward R.; Neoconservatism; Nixon, Richard; USA PATRIOT Act.
Further Reading Cole, David. “The New McCarthyism: Repeating History in the War on Terrorism.” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 38 (Winter 2003): 1–30. Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Haynes, John E. Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Heale, M.J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press, 2003. Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.
M c C l o s key, D e i r d r e After nearly three decades as a respected male economist and academic, Donald N. McCloskey underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1996, took the name Deirdre N. McCloskey, and subsequently began writing from a feminist perspective. Born on September 11, 1942, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, McCloskey attended Harvard University (BA, 1964; PhD, 1970), and built a reputation by arguing that economists rely unduly on statistics and mathematical formulas, that persuasion and rhetoric play a central role in human decision making, and that the field of economics is more art than science. McCloskey has held teaching positions at the University of Chicago (1968–1980), University of Iowa (1980–1999), and University of Illinois at Chicago (since 1999). In November 1995, at age fifty-three, McCloskey informed colleagues of the decision to become a woman, reportedly prompting the department chair at the University of Iowa to express deadpan relief that at least it was not something as drastic as renouncing capitalism for socialism. After the sex-change surgery and a sabbatical at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, McCloskey published The Vices of Economists, The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (1997), a work that criticizes economists, especially male ones, for relying on theory and statistics
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that fail to explain many aspects of human behavior. Although there are numerous references to gender in this work, the economist was a founding member of the International Association for Feminist Economics prior to the sex-change operations, suggesting some continuity of thought regardless of gender identity. McCloskey’s memoir Crossing (1999) explains the decision behind the sex-change operation and the subsequent ramifications, including a divorce after thirty years of marriage and other family problems. Laura A. McCloskey, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona and sister of the economist, tried to get her brother committed to a mental hospital, an action that was subsequently condemned in a resolution passed by the Social Science History Association. Deirdre McCloskey’s academic Web site has included personal references about her transgender experience, as well as links to GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition) and the International Foundation for Gender Education. Critics have charged McCloskey with perpetuating stereotypes about women. The economist claimed, for example, that changing genders made her gentler and more caring and that her teaching style became more affirming and less rude toward students. Her enthusiastic discussions on makeup and female friendship have led some women to wonder whether she is acting out womanhood from an unenlightened male perspective. Perhaps more controversial in the long run will be McCloskey’s academic work, such as The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), which maintains that capitalism is both morally good and good for morality. Roger Chapman See also: Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Jorgensen, Christine; Transgender Movement; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Balak, Benjamin. McCloskey’s Rhetoric: Discourse Ethics in Economics. New York: Routledge, 2006. McCloskey, Deirdre. Crossing: A Memoir. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ryan, Alan. “Is Capitalism Good for You?” New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006. Wilson, Robin. “Leading Economist Stuns Field by Deciding to Become a Woman.” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 16, 1996.
M c G ove r n , G e o r g e An anti–Cold War Democrat, the U.S. senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern of South Dakota called for reducing military spending in order to expand social programs. His defeat at the
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hands of incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972 represented a signal event in the culture wars because a major candidate had sought the White House—only to lose overwhelmingly—by rejecting a centrist campaign strategy for one that sought to build a coalition around minorities, women, and youth. Some suggested that McGovern’s campaign staff resembled the cast for Hair, the 1969 Broadway musical about the counterculture. In the end, McGovern received only 37.5 percent of the popular vote and the Electoral College votes of only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The hit country-and-western single “Uneasy Rider” (1973) by Charlie Daniels features a humorous stanza in which a southern redneck is falsely accused of having voted for McGovern. The son of a Methodist minister, George Stanley McGovern was born in Avon, South Dakota, on July 19, 1922. Following service as a bomber pilot in World War II (1943–1945) and finishing a degree at Dakota Wesleyan University (BA, 1946), McGovern pursued his interest in the social gospel while working as a student minister and attending Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois (1946–1947). He later studied history at Northwestern University (MA, 1949; PhD, 1953), taught at Dakota Wesleyan (1949–1953), and ended up as the executive secretary of the South Dakota
The landslide defeat of 1972 Democratic candidate George McGovern (right) became associated, in some circles, with liberal lost causes and defeatist foreign policy. Running mate Thomas Eagleton (left) withdrew after disclosures of electroshock treatment for depression. (Anthony Korody/ Getty Images)
Democratic Party (1953–1956). From there he launched a political career, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives (1957–1961) and the U.S. Senate (1963–1981), in between directing the Food for Peace program under the Kennedy administration (1961–1962). As a legislator, McGovern supported President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, civil rights reforms, school busing, increased federal spending for entitlement programs, and the nuclear test ban. One of the first senators to oppose the Vietnam War, which he characterized as a “terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation,” McGovern futilely attempted to end the conflict by utilizing the power of the legislative branch. In May 1970, he sponsored with Mark O. Hatfield (ROR) a Senate amendment to cut off war funding; the measure was defeated by a 62–29 vote. The following year, McGovern offered a similar amendment that failed 55–39; and in 1972, his amendment for a troop withdrawal was defeated 52–44. As a presidential candidate, McGovern campaigned primarily on the promise to end the war in ninety days and to grant amnesty to draft evaders. The Democratic nomination of McGovern for president was a consequence of the 1968 election, in which Nixon defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Later, McGovern wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Lessons of 1968” (January 1970), in which he called on the Democratic Party to reform its platform as well as its method of selecting its standard bearer in order to be more representative of women, minorities, and young people. Under the new rules drafted by the McGovernFraser Commission—McGovern shared the task with Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota—state central committees were no longer permitted to select the delegates to the national convention, but were required to hold open primaries or caucuses. This shifted power from the party bosses to rank-and-file Democrats, enabling a candidate such as McGovern, one of the most liberal of the party, to emerge as the nominee. After the presidency of Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), who likewise had been a political outsider, national party leaders instituted counter-reform measures for regaining some control. Still later, with the influence of Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party shifted more to the right to undo the McGovern legacy. It could be argued that McGovern’s loss was a combination of factors, not all ideological. Nixon’s campaign benefited from the May 1972 shooting of George Wallace, a segregationist whose withdrawal from the race as a third-party candidate ensured that the Republican vote would not be split. In addition, McGovern made mistakes during the campaign that gave voters the impression that he was indecisive and untrustworthy. For example, after it became known that his running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, had suffered depression and been
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treated with electric shock therapy, McGovern held a press conference and said he supported Eagleton “1,000 percent”—only to replace him later with R. Sargent Shiver, Jr. McGovern also backpedaled on a proposal for a guaranteed income after Republicans ridiculed it as a handout for people unwilling to work. As the McGovern campaign suffered the “dirty tricks” that were part of the Watergate conspiracy, it was being openly opposed by Democrats for Nixon, an organization spearheaded by the former Texas governor John Connally, who opposed isolationist foreign policy. Ultimately, Nixon undermined McGovern’s key issue by convincing voters that the war was winding down. In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, McGovern lost his Senate seat to James Abdnor, a Republican candidate heavily funded by abortion opponents. In 1984, McGovern was briefly a candidate for the party’s presidential nomination, promoting national health care and promising to decrease the military budget. Later, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Agencies in Rome, Italy (1998–2001), he promoted genetically modified food. McGovern has written a number of books, including A Time of War, A Time of Peace (1968), The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time (2001), and The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition (2004). He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. In the 2000s, McGovern voiced criticism of George W. Bush, rating him as the worst president in American history, including Nixon. “On just about every level I can think of, Bush’s actions are more impeachable than were those of Nixon,” he argued. McGovern drew parallels between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War, stating that “in both cases we went to war with a country that was no threat to us.” In April 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that the Democratic Party, in urging an American withdrawal from Iraq, was adopting the same losing platform offered by McGovern in 1972. Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Counterculture; Democratic Party; Great Society; Nixon, Richard; United Nations; Vietnam War; Wallace, George; Watergate; Wounded Knee Incident.
Further Reading Anson, Robert Sam. McGovern: A Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972. Brinkley, Douglas. “George McGovern.” Rolling Stone, May 3, 2007. Dougherty, Richard. Goodbye, Mr. Christian: A Personal Account of McGovern’s Rise and Fall. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1973.
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Leo, John. “The New McGovernites.” U.S. News & World Report, November 7, 2005. McGovern, George S. Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern. New York: Random House, 1977.
McIntire, Carl The fundamentalist radio preacher and ministry founder Carl McIntire became known in postwar America for objecting to conservative evangelical efforts to “modernize.” Most notably, he rejected the evangelical preacher Billy Graham for his willingness to coordinate his Crusades with nonevangelical churches and for his openness to preaching before racially mixed audiences. Incapable of political compromise or strategic coalition building, McIntire could never join the ranks of Jerry Falwell or Tim LaHaye as an effective player in the New Christian Right, but he did fight the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over his radio station for many years, protest the policies of the National Council of Churches (NCC), and make high-profile attacks against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists, thereby emerging as a controversial and highly charged symbol of old-school American fundamentalism. Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on May 17, 1906, Carl Curtis McIntire attended Southeastern State Teachers College in Durant, Oklahoma (1923–1926), Park College in Parkville, Missouri (BA, 1927), Princeton Theological Seminary (1928–1929), and Westminster Theological Seminary (ThB, 1931). Ordained in 1931 as a minister of the Presbyterian Church, he was stripped of his ordination five years later for his strident criticism of the church’s “liberal” missionary activities. In 1937, McIntire’s congregation in Collingswood, New Jersey, began identifying itself as the Bible Presbyterian Church. That same year, he established Faith Theological Seminary in Wilmington, Delaware, whose early graduates included the evangelical pastor and author Francis Schaeffer. McIntire went on to found the American Council of Christian Churches (1941) and the International Council of Christian Churches (1948) as alternatives to the NCC and the World Council of Churches, ecumenical Protestant organizations he condemned as “apostate” and hopelessly liberal. For decades, McIntire disseminated his religious and political views in the newspaper Christian Beacon (beginning in 1936) and a daily radio program, The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour (beginning in 1955). At its peak in the late 1960s, the half-hour radio show aired on more than 600 stations, including McIntire’s own WXUR, based in Media, Pennsylvania. In 1968, after years of fielding complaints from citizens offended by the program’s right-wing, racist orientation, the FCC moved to revoke McIntire’s broadcasting license for flagrant violation of the Fairness Doctrine. McIntire appealed the case, but the
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FCC’s decision was upheld in the 1972 federal District Court case of Brandywine v. Mainline Radio. An exceptional showman, McIntire first came to national media attention in 1953 when, along with fellow fundamentalist broadcaster Billy James Hargis, he unleashed thousands of Bible messages attached to balloons from West Germany over the Iron Curtain. McIntire also briefly ran a floating pirate radio station off the New Jersey coast (after first posing with eye patch and pirate hat for photographers on shore); held several “Victory in Vietnam” rallies in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s; and played table tennis in front of the White House to protest Nixon’s “Ping Pong diplomacy” with China in 1971. If his political efforts were largely ineffective, McIntire was, nonetheless, an accomplished culture warrior when it came to finding publicity for his right-wing causes. He died on March 19, 2002, in Voorhees, New Jersey. Heather Hendershot See also: Cold War; Federal Communications Commission; Fundamentalism, Religious; Graham, Billy; Hargis, Billy; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; Religious Right; Schaeffer, Francis; Vietnam War; World Council of Churches.
Further Reading Fea, John. “Carl McIntire: From Fundamentalist Presbyterian to Presbyterian Fundamentalist.” American Presbyterian 72:4 (Winter 1994): 253–68. Forster, Arnold, and Benjamin R. Epstein. Danger on the Right: The Attitudes, Personnel and Influence of the Radical Right and Extreme Conservatives. New York: Random House, 1964. Hendershot, Heather. “God’s Angriest Man: Carl McIntire, Cold War Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Radio.” American Quarterly 59:2 (June 2007): 373–96. Jorstad, Erling. The Politics of Doomsday: Fundamentalists of the Far Right. Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1970.
McLuhan, Marshall A controversial and highly influential Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” and famously stated that “the medium is the message” (and later, “the medium is the massage”), arguing that the impact of electronic communications is greater than the actual information being transmitted. Many academics viewed him as an intellectual charlatan; dubbed his provocative aphorisms “McLuhanisms”; and complained that his ideas on technological determinism were mere assertions, not supported by empirical data. The novelist Tom Wolfe, on the other hand, considered McLuhan in the same league as Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov. Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He studied English
at the University of Manitoba (BA, 1932; MA, 1934) and Cambridge University (BA, 1936; MA, 1939; and PhD, 1942), although he originally sought to be an engineer. McLuhan taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1936–1937), University of St. Louis (1937–1944), and Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario (1944–1946), before moving to the University of Toronto, where he taught for more than three decades (1946–1979). In 1963, he established the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto for studying “the psychic and social consequences of technologies and media.” McLuhan’s many published works include The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). He also co-authored The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), From Cliché to Archetype (1970), and City as Classroom (1977). He died in Toronto on December 31, 1980. McLuhan divided human history into broad periods on the basis of communications developments: the tribal age, the print age, and the electronic age. The tribal age, he argued, depended on speech, sound, nonlinear thinking, and direct human connection for obtaining information. The printing press ushered in the second age, characterized by importance of the eye and linear thinking but less need for immediate tribal contact because one could read in private. The electronic age, beginning with the wireless telegraph and continuing with radio and television, was viewed by McLuhan as a return to instantaneous communication that would foster retribalization and ultimately lead to a “global village.” He regarded TV as an acoustic medium, not a visual one, requiring nonlinear thinking. The electronic age, he warned, would change how people think and render less important the culture of print. These changes, which McLuhan regarded as inevitable, were not personally pleasing to him. As he said in a 1970 interview, “Only madmen would use radio and TV if they knew the consequences.” In fact, McLuhan blamed television for the decline in student test scores and literacy, declaring a print-based educational system with its linear thinking incompatible with the electronic age. Contrary to conventional wisdom, McLuhan did not regard watching television as a passive activity, but thought of TV as a “cool” medium requiring viewer involvement for filling in details. McLuhan also linked electric media with rock and roll and drugs. “One turns on his consciousness through drugs,” he said during a 1969 interview, “just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial.” McLuhan also observed that television would change political debate, giving the edge to candidates, like John F. Kennedy, who possess “cool, low-definition qualities.” The cool medium of television made long,
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protracted wars such as Vietnam less possible, he argued, because viewers will lose patience. Roger Chapman See also: Canada; Counterculture; Education Reform; Kennedy Family; Leary, Timothy; Medved, Michael; Postmodernism; Rock and Roll; Vietnam War; War on Drugs; Wolfe, Tom.
Further Reading McLuhan, Eric, and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan. New York: BasicBooks/HarperCollins, 1995. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Moss, George, and Linda M. Morra. At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985.
M c Ve i g h , T i m o t hy Before the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil was the April 19, 1995, truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bombing was planned and carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army veteran with ties to domestic right-wing extremist groups. Born on April 22, 1968, in Lockport, New York, Timothy James McVeigh grew up in a Catholic, middle-class family and was introduced to firearms by his grandfather. After a blizzard in 1977, the young man became interested in survivalist training; his personal ideology was an amalgamation of what he read in comic books, Soldier of Fortune magazine, and the writings of the militia movement and Ku Klux Klan. According to psychiatrists who examined him before trial, he had harbored fantasies of being a hero since his childhood. McVeigh enlisted in the army in May 1988 and participated in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, earning a bronze star and a combat infantry badge. While attending basic training, he befriended Terry Nichols and Michael J. Fortier, who would later be implicated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Although he intended to reenlist, McVeigh left the military in December 1991 after failing the Special Forces qualifications course. His return to civilian life was marked by a restless bitterness. Much of his time was spent attending gun shows and mixing with elements of the militia movement. The bombing of the federal building was revenge for the April 19, 1993, federal assault on the compound of the Branch Davidians, a Seventh-Day Adventist cult, near Waco, Texas, that left eighty-two dead. The
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Waco tragedy angered McVeigh because it started out as a federal investigation of firearms violations. Earlier he had read The Turner Diaries (1978), a terrorist novel by William Pierce, a white supremacist, in which the main character, Earl Turner, uses a truck bomb to blow up the FBI headquarters in Washington as a protest over stricter gun laws. McVeigh decided to turn fiction into reality. His bomb, in the form of a Ryder rental truck containing sixteen 55-gallon drums packed with 4,800 pounds (2,182 kilos) of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with liquid nitromethane, demolished the building, left 168 dead, and injured more than 400 others. Among the dead and injured were children who attended a day-care center on the second floor of the building. Afterward, borrowing a Pentagon euphemism from the Gulf War, McVeigh dismissed the children’s deaths as “collateral damage.” He never expressed remorse, explaining that Harry Truman did not apologize for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, a decision that also killed children. On June 2, 1997, McVeigh was found guilty of eleven counts of murder and conspiracy, and the jury recommended the death penalty. Appeals of the verdict and sentence were unsuccessful, and on June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. (Terry Nichols was convicted for his role in the incident in December 1997 and sentenced to life in prison; Michael Fortier, who testified against both McVeigh and Nichols, received a twelveyear sentence.) After McVeigh’s execution, conspiracy theories lingered. Some demolition experts argue that a single bomb could not have caused so much damage. The writer Gore Vidal and others suggested that there may have been a Muslim terrorist connection, with McVeigh serving as the “useful idiot.” Many agree that McVeigh, influenced by the antigovernment rhetoric of right-wing ideologues and the paranoia of the militia movement, saw himself as a freedom fighter and not a terrorist. Roger Chapman See also: Capital Punishment; Comic Books; Conspiracy Theories; Gun Control; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Militia Movement; Muslim Americans; September 11; Vidal, Gore; Vigilantism; Waco Siege; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Hoffman, David. The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror. Venice, CA: Feral House, 1998. Michel, Lou, and Dan Herbeck. American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. New York: Regan Books, 2001. Vidal, Gore. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press / Nation Books, 2002.
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Mead, Margaret Perhaps the twentieth century’s most famous social anthropologist, Margaret Mead stirred controversy with pioneering work that contrasted human social relations in traditional and Western societies, as exemplified in her initial book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), and later summary works, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and Male and Female (1949). Mead argued from research of isolated Pacific Island societies that child-rearing ideals, sex roles, marriage, sexual behavior, the nature of moral authority, and other social arrangements vary from culture to culture, and none is based on universal absolutes. Her conclusions infuriated social conservatives, who held her partly responsible for the excesses of the sexual revolution. Born in Philadelphia on December 16, 1901, Mead studied psychology at Bernard College (BA, 1923) and anthropology at Columbia University (MA, 1924; PhD, 1929). Her major fieldwork was conducted in Samoa (1925–1926), New Guinea (beginning in 1928), and Bali (1930s and 1950s). Long affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1926–1969), Mead also taught at a number of universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. She died on November 15, 1978. Traditionalists viewed Mead’s rejection of biodeterminism (the view that immutable biological differences largely dictate gender and social roles) as attacks on religion and society. Conservative commentators argued that her popularizing of “the fantasies of sexual progressives” contributed to the practice of casual sex, a higher rate of divorce, and an increase in abortion in America. The anthropologist Derek Freeman went so far as to characterize Mead’s Samoan ethnography as a “hoaxing,” but that critique, in turn, was criticized by the American Anthropological Association as “unscientific” and “misleading.” The dispute, which is ongoing, is referred to as the “Mead-Freeman controversy.” Mead also seeded controversy over generational conflict, the consequence of perhaps her most visionary work, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970, updated 1978), which disputed the primacy of adult authority over children. The eighty-page treatise crowns her career with a radical hypothesis: rapid demographic, social, and technological changes in modern society were rendering traditional adult values and authority obsolete. Mead argued that the older generation must adopt imaginative ways of understanding contemporary society and global change in order to effectively raise children for a future in which “there are no guides.” Parents who try to direct modern children with “simple assertions” such as, “Because it is right to do so, because God says so, or because I say so” (emphasis hers), must yield to “a world in which conflicting points of view, rather than orthodoxies, are prevalent and accessible.” Instead
of “anger and bitterness” at “the discovery that what they had hoped for no longer exists for their children,” Mead concluded, adults must embrace “consciously, delightedly, and industriously rearing unknown children for an unknown world.” Mike Males See also: Abortion; Family Values; Generations and Generational Conflict; Kinsey, Alfred; Race; Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading Freeman, Derek. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Researches. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Gewertz, Deborah, and Frederick Errington. “We Think, Therefore They Are? On Occidentalizing the World.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 635–55. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Mark, Joan T. Margaret Mead, Anthropologist: Coming of Age in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Shankman, Paul. “Culture, Biology, and Evolution: The Mead– Freeman Controversy Revisited.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 29:5 (2000): 539–56.
Media Bias The claim of bias in the American media is a common refrain in the rhetoric of the culture wars. The expectation that news reporting should be neutral and objective developed in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The question of whether the media should be, or even can be, unbiased has been intensely debated in recent decades. It is worth noting that accusations of media bias, while typically directed against political bias in news reporting, have also been directed against everything from sitcoms to cartoon strips to Hollywood films. Right-wing critics of the media tend to identify journalists as the source of media bias. The rise in criticism of journalists as liberal elitists has coincided with the growing voice of populist conservatism in the United States. One formative event in this development was Reed Irvine’s founding of the influential conservative watchdog organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) in 1969. That same year, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew described the media as home to “nattering nabobs of negativism.” More recently, conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and others have repeated the criticism. According to Coulter in How to Talk to a Liberal (2004), the typical journalist has only one standard: “Will this story promote the left-wing agenda?” Bernard Goldberg’s best-selling Bias (2002) argues that the personal views of journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, and that this gives a liberal shape to their news
Media B ia s
The Fox News Channel was launched in 1996 with the purpose of correcting the liberal bias perceived in mainstream television networks. Despite its slogan of “Fair and Balanced,” Fox has been accused by liberals and media watchdog groups of disseminating explicitly conservative opinion. (Katja Heinemann/Aurora/Getty Images)
stories. Goldberg further contends that the media denigrate and marginalize religious belief and are to the left of mainstream America on topics such as abortion, the death penalty, and homosexuality. Conservatives argue that they have succeeded in attracting attention—and adherents—to their view because they reflect the perception of the broader American public. Critics on the left have a different argument about media bias. Left-wing critics of the media tend to focus on the effects of economic power, especially the influence of corporate ownership and funding of the media. Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? (2003), a critical response to Bernard Goldberg, argues that while there is some merit to the charge that the media are liberal on social issues, there is clear conservative bias in the media when it comes to economic issues. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argue in Manufacturing Consent (1988) that various systemic features of the media work to muffle or prevent the publication of stories that would harm the interests of major corporations. They argue that the dependence of mainstream media on advertising dollars limits the degree to which the media can criticize corporations. They also stress that major media outlets are themselves part of corporations—NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric. Progressives argue that the idea of a liberal media is a conservative myth used to pressure journalists not to run stories that threaten those in power. One important institutional development for left-of-center media criticism was the founding of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog organization, in 1986. The visibility of left-wing criticism of mainstream media has
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grown considerably since 2000, with documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Outfoxed (2004) receiving significant attention. The form of media most commonly held under scrutiny is television news. Many conservative commentators hold that the nightly news shows of the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) display a strong liberal bias. Longtime CBS news anchor Dan Rather in particular was criticized by the right. The network most frequently singled out for criticism by liberal commentators is the Fox News Channel. Various other forms of media—e.g., National Public Radio, the New York Times, talk radio, and a wide assortment of other outlets—have been criticized as biased by those on the left and the right. The topic of media bias raises philosophical issues often associated with postmodernism. One central question concerns the language of objectivity and value-neutrality that has become part of the self-image of serious journalism and whether news coverage can ever be “merely” factual, in view of the fact that values are involved in selecting facts to report. Thus, disputes over media coverage concern not only whether what is reported is true but the question of which information reaches the screen or newspapers. One influential concept of bias-free reporting is the idea of showing a variety of perspectives on any given issue. This concept, taken to an extreme, means giving equal time to all sides of an issue regardless of the truth or credibility of the positions in question. Many of the devices of television news, especially those aimed at persuading the viewer of the authority, impartiality, and objectivity of the broadcast, have been parodied by such popular television programs as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. One important development in relation to media bias is the growth of narrowcasting—media aimed at a specific, homogeneous demographic group. Narrowcasting has encouraged news reporting that is both more willingly and more explicitly partisan and, as a result, has contributed to cultural polarization. Daniel Callcut See also: Chomsky, Noam; Coulter, Ann; Irvine, Reed; Moore, Michael; Murdoch, Rupert; National Public Radio; New Journalism; New York Times, The; Postmodernism; Public Broadcasting Service; Rather, Dan; Stewart, Jon; Talk Radio.
Further Reading Adkins-Covert, Twanya J., and Philo C. Wasburn. Media Bias? A Comparative Study of Time, Newsweek, the National Review, and the Progressive, 1975–2000. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Alterman, Eric. What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
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Goldberg, Bernard. Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002. Kallen, Stuart A., ed. Media Bias. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Streissguth, Thomas. Media Bias. New York: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2007.
Medical Malpractice “Medical malpractice” is a legal term that refers to negligent treatment, or failure to take appropriate action, on the part of a doctor or other medical practitioner that causes harm to a patient. An often rancorous partisan debate in the culture wars, the issue of malpractice suits has been labeled a “crisis” by the American Medical Association (AMA). In 1975, Newsweek magazine concurred, declaring malpractice “medicine’s most serious crisis.” From 1960 to the mid-1980s, the frequency of medical malpractice claims in America rose from 1 to 17.5 per every 100 physicians. During the same period, plaintiff awards in major cities such as Chicago and San Francisco rose from $50,000 to $1.2 million. In addition to the specific repercussions for the medical community, insurance companies, and the overall cost of health care, the debate on medical malpractice has touched on larger issues of tort reform. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2001 there were a total of 1,156 medical malpractice trials, including claims of permanent injury (67 percent) and death (33 percent). The overall success rate for plaintiffs was 27 percent, with a median award in jury trials of $431,000—up 50 percent from $287,000 just five years earlier. From 1992 to 2001, between 1 and 4 percent of successful plaintiff winners also received punitive damages, averaging about $250,000 per litigation. Many other cases were settled out of court. The AMA began earnestly addressing medical malpractice during the 1950s with the aim of reducing lawsuits by improving medical care, most notably by reforming hospital procedures and prompting standardization of medical records. (Of all malpractice suits at the time, 70 percent arose from incidents at hospitals.) Since surveys during that period found that most doctors did not consider medical malpractice lawsuits a major problem, AMA leadership began making them a topic of discussion in its Journal of the American Medical Association. By the 1960s, the AMA shifted its focus of attack to the legal system, blaming the surge in malpractice lawsuits on lawyers and plaintiffs. During this period, rules pertaining to the statutes of limitations had been liberalized in favor of injured patients (that is, allowing a longer filing period for a malpractice claim since resulting health repercussions are not always initially known). Although there was a rise in the number of malpractice
suits, it paralleled the increase in the number of physicians. The average award for medical malpractice in 1964 was $5,000, but several highly publicized cases gave successful plaintiffs windfalls of $100,000 or more. Malpractice suddenly became a high-profile public issue, covered in the mainstream press and made the subject of federal government inquiry. In November 1969, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Executive Reorganization issued a 1,060-page report on medical malpractice that asserted, albeit with no statistical support, “Most malpractice suits are the direct result of injuries suffered by patients during medical treatment or surgery. The majority have proved justifiable.” Critics questioned the claim of justifiability when 90 percent of malpractice cases that went to court were won by physician defendants. Citing the high cost of medical malpractice insurance, political conservatives generally favor reform measures to cap the amount of damages a person can receive for a medical mistake and to penalize and deter those who file “frivolous” suits. Malpractice claims, usually initiated in state courts, have been blamed in part for the spiraling cost of health care and for the trend toward “defensive medicine” to shield doctors from potential liability. In 1975, California passed a law capping noneconomic damages at $250,000; by the mid-1980s, several other states passed similar caps. From the mid-1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, it should be noted, personal-injury suits in America, including medical malpractice claims, have remained flat on a nationwide basis, while lawsuits against other businesses have more than tripled. Liberal advocacy groups such as Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen charge that the medical malpractice “crisis” is propaganda advanced by medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance lobbyists who seek legislative protection to shield their clients from accountability. According to a number of reports, the dramatic rise in medical malpractice insurance rates in the mid-1970s, mid-1980s, and late 1990s were the consequence of insurance underwriting and investment cycles (relating to interest rates and market-based investments) and had little to do with any rise in malpractice awards. In 2003, hospitals, doctors, and other health professionals paid $11 billion for malpractice insurance, a sum representing less than 1 percent of the total $1.5 trillion national health care cost. That same year, $27 billion was spent on automobile liability, $57 billion on workers’ compensation insurance premiums, and $5 billion for product liability insurance. Of the 900,000 practicing physicians in the United States that year, the average premium was $12,000 per doctor. However, the premiums do vary significantly from state to state—for example, doctors in Florida typically pay seventeen times more for malpractice insurance than doctors in Minnesota.
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Also, premium rates are typically higher for obstetrics and gynecology than for other medical specialties. States that have passed strict tort caps have not seen dramatic decreases in the cost of malpractice premiums. In California, doctors experienced a reduction in the cost of premiums after voters in 1988 approved Proposition 103, which regulated insurers and mandated policyholder refunds. Critics of the AMA’s campaign against malpractice suits emphasize that the primary problem is medical malpractice itself. The California Medical Insurance Feasibility Study of the mid-1970s, conducted by the California Hospital Association and the California Medical Association, found that doctors and hospitals in that state were responsible for injuring 140,000 patients, leading to 14,000 deaths, in 1974. Of the total number of injured, 24,000 were considered a consequence of medical malpractice. In the mid-1980s, Harvard University conducted a study on medical injuries in New York, concluding that there had been 27,000 injuries from medical malpractice in 1984. Harvard did another study in 1992, this time in Utah and Colorado, reaching similar results as in California and New York—that is, that the number of injuries from medical malpractice is far greater than the number of lawsuits filed for medical malpractice. In California, only one lawsuit was filed for every ten malpractice injuries; in New York, the ratio was one lawsuit for every seven malpractice injuries; and in Utah and Colorado, the ratio was one for every six. According to a November 1999 report issued by the U.S. Academy of Sciences, entitled To Err is Human, 98,000 people die from medical mistakes each year in the United States, more than the number killed in automobile and work-related accidents. Roger Chapman See also: Health Care; Nader, Ralph; Tort Reform.
Further Reading Baker, Tom. The Medical Malpractice Myth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Danzon, Patricia A. Medical Malpractice: Theory, Evidence, and Public Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Hogan, Neal C. Unhealed Wounds: Medical Malpractice in the Twentieth Century. New York: LFB Scholarly, 2003. Sloan, Frank A., et al. Suing for Medical Malpractice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Weiler, Paul C. Medical Malpractice on Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Medical Marijuana Advocates of medical marijuana argue that the main ingredient of the drug (THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol) is useful for treating nausea caused by chemotherapy
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in connection with cancer treatment, loss of appetite associated with AIDS, eye pain due to glaucoma, and spasms and seizures triggered by multiple sclerosis. Opponents of medical marijuana, suspecting that the attributed medicinal benefits have been exaggerated, note that cannabis has never been screened for efficacy and safety by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Furthermore, skeptics argue, smoking marijuana for the “benefit” of THC is questionable since it could be more safely delivered by pill, suppository, or nasal inhaler. Generally, political conservatives view medical marijuana as a purposeful step toward complete legalization of the drug. In contradiction of federal law, voters in a number of states have approved by wide margins ballot items allowing the possession and use of marijuana for medical treatment—Proposition 215 in California (1996); Proposition 200 in Arizona (1996); Question 8 in Alaska (1998); Measure 67 in Oregon (1998); Question 9 in Nevada (1998); Question 2 in Maine (1999); Amendment 20 in Colorado (2000); Initiative 148 in Montana (2004); and Proposal 1 in Michigan (2008). The District of Columbia approved a medical marijuana referendum in 1998, but Congress, exercising its oversight of the federal city, overturned the law. State legislatures have passed legislation permitting medical marijuana in Hawaii (2000), Maryland (2003), Rhode Island (2006), and New Mexico (2007). The General Assembly of Rhode Island overrode the veto of Governor Donald Carcieri, a Republican who argued that the law would only lead to more marijuana being sold on the streets. Robert Ehrlich, the governor of Maryland, was the first Republican elected official to approve such a measure. Tod H. Mikuriya, a California physician, was instrumental in getting his state to be the first to pass a medical-marijuana referendum, but colleagues criticized him for allowing his advocacy to cloud his professional judgment. In 2004, the California medical board fined Mikuriya $75,000 and placed him on probation for writing marijuana prescriptions for sixteen individuals without conducting appropriate physical examinations. By the time of his death in 2007, he had reportedly prescribed marijuana to some 9,000 individuals. The founder of the California Cannabis Research Medical Center (and its subgroup the Society of Cannabis Clinicians), Mikuriya openly admitted to routinely smoking marijuana with his morning coffee. As pharmacies have refused to sell medical marijuana, such prescriptions have instead been filled by “cannabis buyers’ clubs” that are listed as medical distributors. Many of these clubs have been raided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In the case of U.S. v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (2001), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the distributors, stating that “medical necessity” is not a legal defense against violation of federal
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law. In Gonzalez v. Raich (2005), the high court ruled 6–3 that the federal Controlled Substances Act, which outlaws the possession and distribution of marijuana, preempts state laws authorizing medical marijuana. Many political conservatives who generally prefer states’ rights over the power of the federal government make an exception when it comes to drug policies. Roger Chapman See also: Food and Drug Administration; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Ferraiolo, Kathleen. “From Killer Weed to Popular Medicine: The Evolution of American Drug Control Policy, 1937– 2000.” Journal of Policy History 19:2 (2007): 147–79. Marijuana Policy Project. State-by-State Medical Marijuana Laws: How to Remove the Threat of Arrest. Washington, DC: Marijuana Policy Project, 2007. Minamide, Elaine. Medical Marijuana. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2007.
M e d ve d , M i c h a e l An Orthodox Jew and liberal turned conservative, Michael Medved has participated in the culture wars as film critic, author, and radio talk show host. He came to public prominence with What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? (1976), a best-selling book co-authored with David Wallechinsky. Adapted into an NBC television series (1978), the book is a probing assessment of the counterculture generation, specifically the alumni of California’s Palisades High School who had been featured in Time magazine. Medved was born on October 3, 1948, in Philadelphia and grew up in San Diego and Los Angeles, California. After graduating from Palisades High School, he studied American history at Yale University (BA, 1969), where he also briefly studied law (1969–1970). This was followed by a creative writing program at California State University, San Francisco (MFA, 1974). Early jobs included teaching at a Hebrew school in New Haven, Connecticut (1969–1970), working as a speechwriter for various Democratic candidates (1970–1972), and writing for an advertising agency in Oakland, California (1972–1974). Other early writings include The Shadow Presidents: The Secret History of the Chief Executives and Their Top Aides (1979) and Hospital: The Hidden Lives of a Medical Center Staff (1983). For years a film critic for the Public Broadcasting Service (co-host of Sneak Previews, 1985–1996) and the New York Post (1993–1996), Medved emerged as a popular voice for social conservatives, including the Religious Right. After guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show, Medved began his own syndicated program in 1996, broadcasting at KVI-AM out of Seattle. His
autobiography, Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life (2005), provides some detail on his political about-face, from campaigning for Robert Kennedy to supporting Ronald Reagan. Daniel Lapin, an Orthodox rabbi and affiliate of the Religious Right, was Medved’s mentor. Sounding much like the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Medved has suggested that the medium of television, regardless of the programming, is its own message and one that erodes the values of the viewer. The counterculture generation, he continues, while it grew up watching such wholesome programs as The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–1959), Father Knows Best (1954–1960), and Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963), nonetheless failed to mature into responsible adulthood. According to Medved, those who watch television to excess are prone to be impatient, self-pitying, and superficial. Despite such theorization, Medved has devoted much of his career to critiquing the content of films and television shows. In Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (1992), he asserts that the values of Tinsel Town—which are belittling to religion and the sanctity of marriage and family—are out of sync with mainstream American values. He also contends that it would be more financially profitable for Hollywood to make more G-rated films and fewer R-rated ones. Although long concerned about violence in films, Medved defended Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (2004). Earlier, he collaborated with younger brother Harry in writing several whimsical works—beginning with Golden Turkey Awards (1980)—that rated the alltime “worst” films. Roger Chapman See also: Counterculture; Gibson, Mel; Kennedy Family; Lapin, Daniel; Limbaugh, Rush; McLuhan, Marshall; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right.
Further Reading Catanzaro, Michael J. “Michael Medved.” Human Events, February 20, 1998. Medved, Michael. “The Demand Side of Television.” In Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance, ed. Don Eberly, 416–23. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001. ———. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Michael Medved Web site. www.michaelmedved.com. “The Thorn in Hollywood’s Side.” Christianity Today, April 27, 1992.
M e n ’s M ove m e n t The men’s movement that developed in America in the 1970s, which sought to promote social and cultural
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changes that centered on understandings of manhood, gender relations, and family life, was not a unified coalition. The numerous groups clustered under this heading outlined a variety of issues and recommendations for social change. Scholars have generally viewed the men’s movement as a response to the feminist movement of the 1970s. In general, the men’s movement attempted to define masculinity and assert the importance of the roles of men in American society.
Reactions to Second-Wave Feminism A “men’s liberation movement” developed in the early 1970s alongside second-wave feminism. Applying feminist insights, its leaders concluded that contemporary understandings of gender roles were detrimental to men as well as to women. Although members of the men’s liberation movement frequently saw themselves as allies of feminism, some in the feminist movement believed that men’s liberation had the potential to undermine the radical potential of feminism by focusing on individuals rather than on the institutional structures of power that fostered women’s oppression. As the men’s liberation movement waned in the late 1970s, the “men’s rights movement” began to assert that feminist ideologies were damaging to men and that the male had become the victim. The men’s rights movement, building on feminist notions of gender roles, posited that the constraints of masculinity were more stringent and potentially damaging to men than notions of femininity were to women. Some advocates argued that men were the true victims of sexual harassment, pornography, false accusations of rape, and media bias. The “father’s rights movement” of the late 1980s argued in favor of men’s right to custody in cases of divorce, the elimination of alimony and child-support arrangements, and greater control in cases where a partner is considering abortion. Consequently, the men’s rights movement had important political ramifications. Most activists were white, middle-class males who felt threatened by what they viewed as a culture of entitlement for women and minorities. Such men tended to move to the right politically, thereby exacerbating the gender gap in the American electorate.
The Mythopoetic Movement The leaders of the “mythopoetic men’s movement” drew on myths and fairy tales to create gendered archetypes and encouraged men to analyze these stories in order to achieve personal insights. They argued that industrialization and modernization, rather than feminism, had a deleterious effect on American men and masculinity. Robert Bly in his best-seller Iron John (1980), one of the movement’s seminal texts, argues that pre-industrial societies were characterized by rituals through which
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fathers initiated their sons into manhood, but the Industrial Revolution feminized men by separating them from their fathers, leaving them to learn the meanings of masculinity from their mothers. Bly calls on men to embark on a “spiritual journey” through which they can discover their “deep masculine” natures. The attempts of participants in the mythopoetic men’s movement to recapture a pre-industrial masculinity often took the form of appropriations of Native American and nonWestern cultures. Men traveled to remote locations to take part in retreats that often involved Native American rituals, drumming, chanting, and an emphasis on notions of warriorhood. Mythopoetic leaders also touted the potential for such retreats to promote male bonding, an activity that they viewed as critical to men’s development in the absence of meaningful relationships between fathers and sons. Although some critics, including journalist Susan Faludi in Backlash (1991), argued that the mythopoetic men’s movement was a reaction against feminism, Bly and others maintained that the movement developed without reference to feminism—that it was about men rather than women. Leaders of the movement articulated a belief in essential differences between men and women; “deep” masculinity was portrayed as a timeless and unchanging phenomenon, although individual agency played a role in gender construction. Bly suggested that there were parallels between feminists and mythopoets, as both groups struggled against a society and culture that circumscribed their self-definitions and their day-to-day activities. However, the mythopoetic men’s movement was largely anti-intellectual and apolitical; its members focused on spirituality rather than on analysis of their activities. Critics claimed that, like the men’s liberation movement, it ignored institutions and power structures that worked to men’s benefit.
Return to Traditional Roles The Promise Keepers of the mid-1990s represented a more conscious effort to work against the changes brought about by feminism. The Promise Keepers aimed for a reassertion of masculinity and a return to men’s leadership in families. The movement was deeply rooted in conservative Christianity; one of its goals was the “remasculinization” of images of Jesus Christ. Their call for a return to traditional gender and family roles was premised on a belief in God-given biological characteristics, dictating that women are best suited to childrearing and other domestic duties, while men are meant to be breadwinners and community and family leaders. The Promise Keepers have drawn criticism for their apparently antigay and antifeminist agenda. Most Promise Keepers are middle-class, white, Protestant men, but the group has made efforts to reach across racial lines. Such efforts have generally been stymied,
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however, by the differing priorities of members of other ethnic and racial groups, particularly African-American men. The Million Man March, organized in October 1995 by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, was based on a declaration that black men intended to confront the crisis they perceived in black communities and families. The movement’s emphasis on the need for men to assume leadership roles echoed the ideas of the Promise Keepers, but participants used a language of gender equality that went beyond the framework of the Promise Keepers. While participants in the various men’s movements have articulated a shared sense that Americans must reexamine and redefine masculinity, there has not been a unified approach to achieving that end. Charlotte Cahill See also: Evangelicalism; Farrakhan, Louis; Feminism, SecondWave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Million Man March; Promise Keepers; Victimhood; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Claussen, Dane S., ed. The Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Griswold, Robert L. Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Hagan, Kay Leigh, ed. Women Respond to the Men’s Movement. San Francisco: Pandora, 1992. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. Magnuson, Eric Paul. Changing Men, Transforming Culture: Inside the Men’s Movement. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. Messner, Michael A. Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.
Mexico Given that Mexico and the United States share a common border and yet are vastly different in terms of political and social traditions, religion, and economic development, it was perhaps inevitable that Mexico would become a major battleground topic in America’s culture wars. The dominant issue during the 1990s was free trade, in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by the United States, Mexico, and Canada in 1992 and taking effect on January 1, 1994. Under the provisions of the agreement, goods and services would be exchanged freely, without tariffs, between the participating nations. Initially, support for NAFTA came from liberals, who maintained that increasing trade would lead to more jobs and more rapid
economic growth in Mexico; conservative opponents argued that untold numbers of American workers would lose their jobs as production moved across the border, where labor was cheaper. Subsequently, however, liberals came to express disillusionment with NAFTA (and globalization in general) because of its negative impact on small farmers and businesses as American products flooded the market and Wal-Mart stores displaced local tiendas. The controversy over illegal immigration from Mexico has been another ongoing debate in the culture wars, heightened by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the resulting wave of xenophobia. Many liberals and some conservatives have emphasized the economic plight of impoverished Mexicans who travel to the United States in search of work, as well as the benefits of cheap labor to American businesses. Some have called for amnesty or other legal mechanism to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain American citizenship. Most conservatives, however, view illegal aliens as lawbreakers who should be deported. Many Americans characterize illegal aliens from Mexico as invaders who smuggle drugs, take jobs from American workers, and enjoy social and medical services without paying taxes. Although liberals applaud the multiculturalism that Mexicans and other Latin Americans have brought to the United States, conservatives warn of “Mexifornia” (an overrunning of the state of California by Mexicans) and the threat of unchecked immigration to America’s Anglo-Protestant cultural and political identity. The movement to make English the official language of the United States is a response to the perceived cultural threat posed by the influx of Hispanics. The conservative camp of the culture wars has pushed for the completion of a wall at the southern border of the United States to prevent illegal aliens from turning America into another Third World nation. Such a wall, it is further argued, would strengthen America’s homeland security and serve as a protection against terrorism and drug smuggling. During the summer of 2005, to highlight dissatisfaction with the open border, civilian vigilante volunteers of the Minuteman Project patrolled the frontier between Mexico and Arizona to deter illegal crossings. The opposing camp maintains that the two countries must recognize their interdependence and work together to resolve the economic problems, such as unemployment and low wages, that lead so many Mexicans to cross the border into the United States. Sue Davis See also: Bush Family; Canada; Clinton, Bill; English as the Official Language; Globalization; Illegal Immigrants; Immigration Policy; Migrant Labor; September 11; Vigilantism; Wal-Mart; War on Drugs.
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Further Reading Cooper, Marc. “High Noon on the Border.” Nation, June 6, 2005. Domiguez, Jorge I., and Rafael Fernandez de Castro. United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict. New York: Routledge, 2001. Hanson, Victor Davis. “Frank Talk About ‘Mexifornia.’ ” Imprimis, November 2003. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Preston, Julia, and Samuel Dillon. Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.
Microsoft In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice, under President Bill Clinton, initiated an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, the world’s largest computer software company and the maker of the Windows computer operating system. The suit alleged that Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, and run by founder and CEO Bill Gates, had become a monopoly, illegally stifling competition and innovation. The public debate on the case focused on the rights of producers versus those of consumers. Gates maintained that what was good for Microsoft was good for computer and Internet users, but hackers who disagreed fought back by releasing computer viruses aimed at crippling Microsoft systems. The ubiquitous personal computer (PC) is only a few decades old. The first IBM PC became available in 1981. Foreseeing the personal computer’s potential far more clearly than his former bosses at “Big Blue,” who remained wedded to the mainframe, Gates shipped the initial copies of his Windows operating system in 1985. Windows 3.0, the first truly user-friendly version of Microsoft’s product, was released on May 22, 1990, and quickly became the industry standard, a position Gates’s company solidified five years later when it introduced Windows 95. Windows 95 was launched one week after Netscape, a tiny start-up company headquartered in Mountain View, California, went public. At the leading edge of what would become the dot-com boom (and subsequent bust), Netscape’s stock offering was wildly successful, as investors flocked to buy shares in the company that had acquired the rights to Mosaic, a browser for connecting to sites on the World Wide Web. Beginning in 1993, when Mosaic had only twelve users, Netscape transformed Mosaic into Navigator, the first “killer application” of the PC age. Two years later, Netscape’s browser completely dominated the market. Whether the release of Windows 95 was timed deliberately or not, 1995 marked the start of the “browser wars” and Microsoft’s protracted encounters with the an-
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titrust authorities of the United States and the European Union. The browser wars spilled over into the culture wars, as Microsoft’s products came under attack by some members of the “open-source community,” endorsers of the idea that the code for operating personal computers and the software applications running on them should be freely available to all. Resentful of Microsoft’s market dominance, hackers engaged in a campaign to disable Windows-based PCs by distributing viruses and worms over the Internet that exploited vulnerabilities in the operating system’s security defenses. Although Microsoft had been the subject of a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the provisions of licensing agreements with PC manufacturers in the early 1990s, Windows 95 drew the battle lines more sharply. That version of Microsoft’s operating system was bundled with the first edition of the company’s own Web browser, Internet Explorer, intended to compete directly with Netscape Navigator. Because Internet Explorer was included with Windows 95 at no charge and given a prominent place on PC desktops, Netscape complained to the Department of Justice that Microsoft was engaged in an unlawful attempt to drive it from the market. Joined by the attorneys general of twenty states and the District of Columbia, the Justice Department sued Microsoft in May 1998, charging that the company had monopolized the market for PC operating systems and had used its monopoly unlawfully in a variety of ways. Chief among the charges was that Microsoft had introduced Internet Explorer to prevent Navigator from becoming an alternative to Windows as a platform for running software applications. The federal judge who presided over the Microsoft case, Thomas Penfield Jackson, ultimately ruled in the government’s favor. Since Windows was preloaded on 90 percent of the new PCs shipped in the United States, and Microsoft’s large market share had created a barrier to entry by manufacturers of rival operating systems because most software applications were written for Windows, the judge concluded that the company possessed monopoly power. On June 28, 2001, Judge Jackson ordered Microsoft, within ninety days, to break itself into two separate firms, one devoted to operating systems and the other to software applications. That remedy was overturned on appeal, however, and the case eventually was settled in early 2003 on terms that preserved Microsoft’s organizational structure but imposed various restrictions on its business practices. As it turned out, Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market reached 85 percent by 2006, while Netscape, after its purchase by America Online, lost its position completely. However, open-source applications took off: Linux, the operating system written by Linus Torvals, steadily attracted users, as did the Web browser Firefox and e-mail client Thunderbird, both distributed
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at no charge by Mozilla.org. None of these developments were anticipated by Judge Jackson, who also excluded Apple’s MacIntosh operating system from the market he determined Microsoft to have monopolized. Microsoft’s legal troubles were far from over. In March 2004, the European Commission, concerned, among other things, about the competitive effects of Microsoft’s bundling Media Player with later versions of Windows, found that Microsoft had abused its dominance of the operating system market and fined the company half a billion euros. With the support of George W. Bush’s Justice Department, Microsoft appealed the commission’s fine. As Gates announced in 2006 that he was stepping down as the company’s CEO in order to devote more time to his philanthropic work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, EU Antitrust Commissioner Neelie Kroes threatened to levy more fines on Microsoft for failing to comply with the commission’s 2004 order. William F. Shughart II See also: Internet.
Further Reading Auletta, Ken. World War 3.0 and Its Enemies. New York: Random House, 2001. Heilemann, John. Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Liebowitz, Stan J., and Stephen E. Margolis. Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 1999. McKenzie, Richard B., and William F. Shughart II. “Is Microsoft a Monopolist?” Independent Review 3:2 (1998): 165–97. Rubinfeld, Daniel L. “Maintenance of Monopoly: U.S. v. Microsoft (2001).” In The Antitrust Revolution: Economics, Competition, and Policy, 4th ed., ed. John E. Kwoka, Jr., and Lawrence J. White, 476–501. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Migrant Labor Disagreements about migrant labor have been a constant in America’s culture wars. The migrant stream, which often originates in Mexico and south Texas, creates not only transnational and ethnic exchange but also cultural conflict. This interethnic exchange illustrates the increasing social diversity of the United States since the 1940s. A 1942 agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments created the Bracero Program, through which Mexican nationals legally entered the United States to work in agriculture. The program was originally intended to prop up U.S. industries threatened by labor shortages during World War II, but farm own-
ers quickly recognized the utility of cheap, compliant Mexican labor, which, after the braceros arrived at their intended destinations, remained largely unregulated. Braceros, who lived together in labor camps that were often only rudimentary places to eat and sleep, worked under temporary contracts. They often came to agreement with farm owners that they would work at the same farm in subsequent harvest seasons, returning legally through the Bracero Program or otherwise. By 1945, an estimated 50,000 braceros were working on American farms at any given time. Another 75,000 worked in the railroad industry under a separate program. Farm owners became so reliant on this pool of cheap labor that, although the program was intended to end with the conclusion of the war, many states continued importing braceros as late as 1964.
César Chávez and NFWA As large agribusinesses consolidated control of farm ownership in the mid-twentieth century, working conditions for migrant workers—who lacked protection by federal labor or collective bargaining law— steadily worsened. A young man working in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, César Chávez, took notice of the migrant workers’ plight and in 1962 began the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA), which organized California’s largely Mexican-American (Chicano) and Filipino farm workers into a formidable labor force. Previous attempts at organizing migrant workers had failed, but Chávez exuded a personal magnetism, due in large part to his devout Catholicism and his commitment to nonviolent social protest, which appealed to many workers. Thus, a cultural revolution had begun. Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving Day in 1960, television journalist Edward R. Murrow broadcast a documentary called Harvest of Shame, which revealed the poor living and working conditions faced by migrants. Thus, when Chávez launched the now-famous grape strike and boycott from the union’s headquarters in Delano, California, it did not take long for it to garner nationwide attention. After a highly publicized 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento in spring 1966, Chávez announced a nationwide boycott of table grapes. Support groups formed to assist the workers in cities across the nation, and the boycott finally broke the will of most California growers in July 1970, when many agreed to sign collective bargaining agreements with the union. The victory proved only temporary. When most of the contracts expired in 1973, the majority of California growers signed with the Teamster’s Union, and a bitter struggle between the two labor organizations ensued. It was in the 1970s that the farm workers’ movement began to disintegrate. Chávez ran afoul of many Chicano movement leaders when he issued public proclamations critical
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of illegal immigrants. Several union leaders became disillusioned with Chávez’s leadership. Antonio Orendain, the union’s original secretary-treasurer, broke away and formed the Texas Farm Worker’s Union in the Río Grande Valley in 1975. By the 1980s, the NFWA had lost much of its force, though Chávez remains a celebrated hero in the Mexican-American struggle for civil rights. His legacy survives not only in the United Farm Workers (formerly NFWA) but also in the spirit of farm labor organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida-based group that led a protracted nonviolent boycott against the fast-food chain Taco Bell in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In September 2004, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, resorting to Chávez-style boycotting, succeeded in unionizing most of the guest workers who harvest crops in North Carolina.
Post-9/11 Politics In addition to the many Mexicans in border cities who have “green cards” allowing them to commute daily across the border to work for U.S. employers, millions of illegal immigrants cross the border yearly in search of work. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the issue of illegal immigration has become deeply politicized, as many fear that fundamentalist Islamic terrorists will take advantage of the relatively porous U.S.-Mexican border to enter the United States. This fear led to the formation of the Minuteman Project, a volunteer group that patrols the border and assists the U.S. Border Patrol in capturing illegal immigrants. Some high-profile conservatives, such as media commentator Pat Buchanan, argued that President George W. Bush’s inability to address the “border problem” made the Minutemen an unfortunate necessity. Liberals, however, criticize the Minutemen for their abuse and harassment of immigrants. Although most Mexicans who cross the border illegally do so to participate in the U.S. workforce as well as consume goods made in the United States, many conservative lawmakers have proposed increasingly stiff penalties on illegal immigrants and the businesses that employ them. In protests during spring 2006, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Mexicans took to the streets in cities such as Dallas and Los Angeles. Illegal immigration and the future of migrant labor will be hotly debated for years to come. Timothy Paul Bowman See also: Chávez, César; Hispanic Americans; Illegal Immigrants; Immigration Policy; Labor Unions; Mexico; Militia Movement; Murrow, Edward R.; September 11; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2004.
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Gamboa, Erasmo. Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942–1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Herzog, Lawrence A. Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Austin: University of Texas, Center for Mexican American Studies, 1990.
M i l i t i a M ove m e n t The militia movement is a loosely organized network of paramilitary groups in the United States, most prominent in the early to mid-1990s but still active in the early twenty-first century. Militia members typically oppose gun control legislation, believing that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects individuals’ right to bear arms and that an armed citizenry is a crucial bulwark of liberty. Members also tend to distrust the federal government and fear that the United States is in danger of losing its sovereignty to a tyrannical “New World Order,” possibly to be ushered in by the United Nations. While militia rhetoric frequently includes calls for violent action, members do not consider themselves enemies of the United States. Rather, they see themselves as the true heirs of the nation’s founders in a country where most citizens no longer understand the meaning of liberty. They also embrace an account of the American Revolution that largely credits small groups of citizen soldiers with winning the nation’s independence. The militia movement is commonly associated with the Patriot movement, a broader social movement that includes gun advocates, tax protesters, survivalists, “sovereign citizenship” proponents, some white supremacist groups, some abortion opponents, and “Wise Use” militants who generally oppose environmental legislation such as the Endangered Species Act as infringements on property rights. The feature that distinguishes militias from other groups involved in the Patriot movement is their commitment to armed paramilitary groups. Militia members hold that such organizations are authorized by the Second Amendment and statutes that define most male (and some female) adults as members of the “unorganized militia.” Critics of the militia movement contend that it is a hotbed of racism and anti-Semitism and that its members embrace a faulty interpretation of the Constitution. Also, militias are criticized for teaching an inaccurate account of the American Revolution by exaggerating the effectiveness of militias in that struggle while ignoring the role of a professionalized Continental Army and assistance from France in securing independence. Although militia leaders have generally avoided explicitly racist appeals, critics note that many militia lead-
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ers have previously been members of white supremacist organizations such as Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus, the Ku Klux Klan, and a variety of Christian Identity groups, and that many militias have adopted these groups’ organizational structures and tactics. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, militia leaders have minimized racist rhetoric in order to broaden their appeal but without abandoning the underlying belief system. Critics also note parallels between conspiratorial accounts of the coming New World Order and earlier, explicitly antiSemitic conspiracy theories. The militia movement is part of a long history of paramilitary organizations in the United States and has intellectual precursors such as the John Birch Society’s critique of internationalism. Militia leaders transferred their conspiracy theories to the federal government after President George H.W. Bush, on the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, announced a new world order, followed shortly thereafter by the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s sole superpower. Gun control legislation as well as federal assaults against citizens at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, confirmed in the minds of militia leaders fears of “Big Brother” operating out of Washington. The Ruby Ridge incident in August 1992 involved an effort to arrest fugitive white supremacist Randy Weaver on weapons charges. Weaver’s son and wife were killed in the incident, as was a U.S. marshal. Before Weaver’s surrender, the standoff generated national attention and drew a crowd of outraged antigovernment protesters to the site. Similarly, a federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which ended on April 19, 1993, with at least seventy-five deaths, also provoked outrage. The federal government, in its quest to enforce gun control, was seen as repressive and willing to commit murder. Militia members were also troubled by the passage of the Brady Bill (1993), which imposed a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns, and a ban on assault rifles (1994). In response to the events at Ruby Ridge, a group met in October 1992 at Estes Park, Colorado, for a meeting called the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. There Larry Pratt, leader of the group Gun Owners of America, declared conventional political efforts to be ineffective and called for the formation of small, armed groups to resist federal oppression. In February 1994, the Militia of Montana was founded by John, David, and Randy Trochmann, friends of Randy Weaver. This group distributed instructions on how to form a militia group. Among the groups using these instructions was the Michigan Militia, established by Baptist minister and gun store owner Norman Olson and real estate agent Ray Southwell in April 1994; it quickly became the largest militia organization in the United States, with as many as 7,000 members.
Between 1994 and 1996, more than 400 militia groups were active in the United States. Estimates of total membership vary from 20,000 to 300,000. The movement began to decline after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, although the effect was not immediate. Although Timothy McVeigh, who was eventually executed for the bombing, was not a militia member, he had attended a Michigan Militia meeting and came to be associated with the movement in the public’s mind. In 1996, there was an eighty-one-day standoff between law enforcement officials and a group called the Montana Freemen, and in 1997 there was a seven-day confrontation with a group called the Republic of Texas; both ended peacefully after negotiations. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a distinct decline followed in the militia movement—the number of known groups fell below 200—with no significant resurgence. Thomas C. Ellington See also: Conspiracy Theories; Founding Fathers; Globalization; Gun Control; McVeigh, Timothy; Montana Freemen; Revisionist History; Ruby Ridge Incident; United Nations; Vigilantism; Waco Siege; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Chermak, Steven M. Searching for a Demon: The Media Construction of the Militia Movement. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. Crothers, Lane. Rage on the Right: The American Militia Movement from Ruby Ridge to Homeland Security. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Dees, Morris, with James Corcoran. Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Michael, George. Confronting Right-Wing Extremism in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mulloy, D.J. American Extremism: History, Politics, and the Militia Movement. New York: Routledge, 2004.
M i l k , H a r vey Elected in 1977 to the San Francisco board of supervisors, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician to hold office in a major American city. His assassination the following year by a political rival and the light prison sentence for the perpetrator (seven years and eight months) triggered a riot by gays and lesbians in San Francisco. In tape recordings, voicing a premonition of an early violent death, Milk expressed hope that “hundreds will step forward, so that gay doctors come out, the gay lawyers, gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects. I hope that every professional gay would just say ‘Enough.’” Harvey Bernard Milk was born on May 22, 1930, in Woodmere, New York. After graduating from New York
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State Teachers College at Albany (1951) and completing a tour in the U.S. Navy (honorably discharged in 1955), he worked as an insurance salesman and financial analyst in New York, maintaining politically conservative views, even campaigning for Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election. Over time, influenced by his participation in theater productions, he joined the counterculture movement and relocated to San Francisco in 1972. There he opened a camera shop in Castro, the city’s main gay district, and emerged as a leader of the growing gay community. Founding the Castro Valley Association, Milk represented local merchants in dealing with municipal government. Known as the “mayor of Castro Street,” he began to politically organize from his place of business, launching a voter registration drive. After losing three close races, Milk was finally elected to the city’s board of supervisors in 1977. Less than a year into his term, on November 27, 1978, he was shot and killed, while standing next to Mayor George Moscone, by a former city supervisor named Dan White. The murder was revenge for Milk and Moscone’s refusal to reinstate White to the board; he had formally resigned and then changed his mind. Although Milk wanted to be known as a “politician who happens to be gay” rather than a “gay politician”—he supported local unions, all minority groups, small businessmen against big business and the political “machines” of both parties, and worked to save neighborhoods from commercial development—the cause of gay rights was his abiding passion. In an era when being gay was considered a psychological perversity and many cities still had antihomosexual statutes on the books, Milk called on all gays to come out of the closet and assert their gay pride. He thought that if every homosexual, from bus drivers to doctors, refused to hide their sexual orientation, society would stop thinking of gays as sexual deviants. In the 1970s, however, there was still widespread opposition to gays and homosexuality—from Anita Bryant’s referendum drive in Florida to repeal an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation to John Briggs’s Proposition 6 in California, which would have prohibited any advocate of homosexuality from teaching in the public schools. During his brief tenure as a city supervisor, Milk faced Briggs, a state senator, in a televised debate on the proposition—which was decisively voted down by Californians in November 1978, just weeks before Milk’s assassination. E. Michael Young
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Millett, Kate A feminist activist, artist, and cultural and literary critic, Kate Millett is known primarily as the author of Sexual Politics: A Manifesto for Revolution (1970), a revised PhD outline that became an unlikely best-seller, landed Millett on the cover of Time magazine and provided the modern women’s liberation movement with its theoretical underpinnings. The book’s main thesis is that gender roles are socially constructed, imposed by a male-dominated society in order to subordinate women. Katharyn Murray Millett was born on September 14, 1934, to an Irish Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota. She studied literature at the University of Minnesota (BA, 1956), St. Hilda’s College at Oxford University (MA, 1958), and Columbia University (PhD, 1970). As an activist, Millett joined the National Organization for Women and chaired its Education Committee (1965–1968), but she was also involved in the civil rights movement, including the Congress of Racial Equality. She has taught at numerous institutions of higher learning, including Wasada University in Tokyo, Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, and California State University, Sacramento. Sexual Politics indicts romance, the family as a political unit, and monogamous marriage, and it critiques the literary canon through such writers as
See also: Bryant, Anita; Counterculture; Gay Rights Movement; Goldwater, Barry; Outing; Penn, Sean.
Further Reading Shilts, Randy. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
A leading theoretician of second-wave feminism, Kate Millett rose to prominence and gave impetus to the movement with the publication of her first book, Sexual Politics, in 1970. (Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)
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D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Charlotte Brontë, and Norman Mailer. The manifesto inspired Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971), in which he argues that males also have a sensitive side. The publication of Sexual Politics placed Millett at the forefront of second-wave feminism along with Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. Other books by Millett followed, focusing on contemporary world events and autobiographical experiences to analyze the intersection of interpersonal relationships and larger cultural attitudes and ideologies. Millett’s other works include The Prostitution Papers (1973), a defense of prostitute rights; Flying (1974), an autobiography that expresses discomfort with her celebrity role as feminist spokesperson; Sita (1977), an account of her affair with a woman; The Basement (1979), an examination of female-adolescent brutality; Going to Iran (1982), a report on her brief trip promoting Muslim women’s rights; The Loony Bin Trip (1990), a memoir in which she discusses her mental breakdown; The Politics of Cruelty (1994), a treatise on patriarchal state-sanctioned violence and torture; A.D.: A Memoir (1995), a reflection on her severed relationship with an aunt over her deception involving lesbianism; and Mother Millett (2001), an indictment on the institutionalization of the elderly through the story of the illness and death of Millett’s mother. Millett has faced criticism from conservatives and liberal feminists. While married to Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura for many years, she was also openly in relationships with women. Millett’s bisexuality, along with her reluctance to be cast as a “leader” of what was a large, grassroots movement, prompted “mainstream” feminists to look elsewhere for a representative voice, while gay rights activists admonished her for not coming out earlier. Culture critics such as Camille Paglia read Millett’s work as overly bitter and out of touch with a third-wave feminism that has moved beyond casting women as victims of patriarchy. Rebecca Nicholson-Weir See also: Civil Rights Movement; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Gay Rights Movement; Lesbians; Mailer, Norman; National Organization for Women; Outing; Sex Offenders; Steinem, Gloria; Victimhood.
Further Reading Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Moi, Toril. Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1985. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Million Man March One of the largest peaceful demonstrations ever held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Million Man March took place on October 16, 1995, led by the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. The purpose of the event, as conceived at the African American Leadership Summit in June 1994, was to inspire and unite the black male community. The Million Man March brought together hundreds of thousands of black men—estimates varied significantly—from more than 400 cities across America for “a day of atonement, reconciliation, and responsibility.” Participants gathered to hear prominent social activists and writers, such as Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Dick Gregory, Rosa Parks, and Maya Angelou, call for an end to racism, white supremacy, violence, substance abuse, crime, and underemployment. The day-long program, heralding the return of collective and peaceful civil rights actions, was reminiscent of the 1963 March on Washington led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Numerous organizations, including the National Black United Front, All African People’s Revolutionary Party, and Union Temple Baptist Church, pledged to continue the struggle for civil rights. Blacks were encouraged to register to vote, join local AfricanAmerican organizations, and become strong community activists. Farrakhan called for nothing less than the political, economic, and spiritual empowerment of African-American males. The Million Man March brought the discussion of discrimination back into the mainstream media and pitted conservative commentators against the more radical black press. Although it was generally considered a success, the march was marred by controversy. When the U.S. Park Police estimated the crowd at only 400,000, Farrakhan and other activists threatened to sue the National Park Service for attempting to undermine the significance of the movement. Some black feminists and scholars, namely Angela Davis and Marcia Gillespie, took issue with the male focus of the event. Some mainstream African-American organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to endorse the event due to the radical and politically incorrect nature of some of Farrakhan’s teachings. The black press faulted the rightist press for focusing too heavily on Farrakhan’s notoriety. Although planners repeatedly urged journalists to “separate the message from the messenger,” Farrakhan’s controversial character remained a prominent feature of the mainstream media coverage. As he promoted the event by speaking about self-determination and moral and spiritual improvement, Farrakhan undermined any potential broad appeal by simultaneously issuing anti-Semitic, sexist, and black supremacist statements. Consequently, his comments
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deterred many conservative Republicans from fully endorsing the march. Despite such controversies, the Million Man March presented a more positive image of African-American manhood to contrast with the negative media images fueled by the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which ended on October 3, 1995. The event inspired the Millions More Movement, which became heavily involved in administering aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina (2005), and the Million Mom March for gun control in 1999. Kelly L. Mitchell See also: Angelou, Maya; Civil Rights Movement; Farrakhan, Louis; Hurricane Katrina; Jackson, Jesse; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Men’s Movement; Nation of Islam; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; O.J. Simpson Trial; Parks, Rosa.
Further Reading Alex-Assensoh, Yvette M., and Lawrence J. Hanks, eds. Black and Multiracial Politics in America. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Clatterbaugh, Kenneth C. Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women, and Politics in Modern Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Madhubati, Haki R., and Maulana Karenga. Million Man March / Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996.
Miranda Rights As a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Miranda v. Arizona (1966), law enforcement officials in America are required to verbally communicate an individual’s “Miranda rights” to anyone questioned while in police custody. Miranda warnings consist of notification of the individual’s right to refuse to answer interrogative questions, a warning that any answers may be used by prosecutors at trial, and a guarantee upon request of the assistance of counsel during questioning. Inasmuch as issues of crime and punishment are central to ideological tensions in American society, liberals and conservatives disagree bitterly as to the impact of the Miranda case on crime-control policy and the jurisprudential foundations of this key limitation on police authority. Disputes about the applicability of Miranda rights occur whenever a criminal defendant during a trial challenges the admissibility of a verbal statement made while in police custody. In short, the assertion of a violation of Miranda rights centers on either an involuntary confession or a denial of legal counsel during police questioning. For conservatives, Miranda rights unduly “handcuff” police officers in the fight against crime.
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Furthermore, since evidence can be thrown out in court if it is determined that the defendant’s Miranda rights had been denied, conservatives argue that the “rights of criminals” allow loopholes for lawbreakers to escape justice. Liberals, on the other hand, see Miranda rights as safeguarding individual civil liberties against the strong arm of the government. Two years prior to the Miranda decision, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) established the basic framework for evaluating right-to-counsel claims. In that case, the high court held that denying a criminal suspect access to an attorney in the context of custodial interrogation violates the right-to-counsel provision of the Sixth Amendment and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, the Escobedo ruling announced a key implication of the Sixth Amendment’s language—at the moment police investigative efforts are trained on a particular individual, a right to counsel goes into effect and remains during all subsequent police procedures. Miranda, importantly, is distinct from the Escobedo case in at least two ways. First, Miranda rights were created to give meaning to the Fifth Amendment’s selfincrimination clause requiring that “No person shall . . . be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Second, Miranda rights dictate that police allow persons held in custody access to an attorney, at the government’s expense if necessary, during all periods of interrogation. Moreover, the Miranda ruling was an extension of the Escobedo principle to persons who are not the sole focus of a police investigation yet are subject to custodial interrogation. The Miranda decision established a heightened standard against which courts measure the admissibility at trial of a confession rendered during police custody. Prior to the mid-1960s, judicial rulings in state courts on the admissibility of confessions turned on various applications of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Consequently, the adoption of the Escobedo rules and, especially, the exacting Miranda rules were of revolutionary impact in the arenas of street-level police work and the nation’s courtrooms— settings where civil liberties and law enforcement activities often collide. Today, conservatives cite Miranda as an example of the unchecked liberal jurisprudence of the Warren Court, an impediment to effective law enforcement, and a decision with no foundation in constitutional text that ultimately empowers criminals. Supporters of the Miranda decision argue that such warnings are demanded by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, address the pragmatic goal of enhancing the reliability of confessions, and, perhaps ironically, ease prosecutors’ efforts to turn arrests into convictions. In 2000, much to the disappointment of the War-
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ren Court’s detractors, the Supreme Court in Dickerson v. U.S., reaffirmed the central role of Miranda rights in the American system of criminal justice. Rejecting conservatives’ invitation to review custodial confessions solely according to subjective measures of voluntariness, Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s opinion for the Court referred to the essential holding in Miranda as “part of our national culture.” Beyond technical constitutional claims, liberals continue to advance two positions that, if correct, effectively undermine Miranda’s critics. First, supporters of Miranda maintain that a large percentage of arrestees waive their Miranda rights and speak freely with police interrogators. Second, proponents of Miranda rights, particularly the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), point to scientific studies indicating that it is highly unusual for criminal defendants to successfully challenge a conviction on the grounds of a Miranda rights violation. Though conducted prior to the announcement of the Court’s decision in Dickerson, an interview with ACLU legal director Steven Shapiro on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in January 2000 captured the left’s perennial and most persuasive response to Miranda’s critics. “If anything,” Shapiro explained, “it makes it easier to admit confessions at trial, as long as police obey the rules.” Exhaustively debated for more than forty years, the subject of Miranda rights fuels a key ideological divide in American society. On opposite sides of the divide are two distinct cultural forces—one defined by a liberal ideology and supportive of limitations on the power of the state, the other conservative and suspicious of policies expanding the rights of persons accused of criminal wrongdoing. Though opposed, these positions are traceable to broader, persistent tensions among Americans on the issues of crime and punishment. Bradley Best See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Judicial Wars; Police Abuse; Rehnquist, William H.; Right to Counsel; Warren, Earl.
Further Reading Cassel, Paul G., and Richard Fowles. “Handcuffing the Cops? A Thirty Year Perspective on Miranda’s Harmful Effects on Law Enforcement.” Stanford Law Review 50 (1998): 1055–145. Leo, Richard A. “Inside the Interrogation Room.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86:2 (1996): 266–303. Samaha, Joel. Criminal Procedure. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wads worth, 1999. Shulhofer, Richard J. “Reconsidering Miranda.” University of Chicago Law Review 54 (1987): 435–61. Stewart, Gary L. Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2004.
M o n d a l e , Wa l t e r When he ran for president in 1984, Walter (“Fritz”) Mondale, a former U.S. senator (D-MN) and vice president to Jimmy Carter, was defeated by Ronald Reagan, who won a second term as president and lay claim to a conservative political realignment. Mondale was unable to resurrect a New Deal coalition that could bridge the generational and ideological gaps of the Democratic Party. Walter Frederick Mondale was born on January 5, 1928, in Ceylon, Minnesota. He attended the University of Minnesota, studying political science (BA, 1951) and law (LLB, 1956), in between completing a hitch in the U.S. Army. As a student, he helped manage Hubert Humphrey’s first successful bid for the U.S. Senate (1948). Mondale’s subsequent political career was rich and varied: Minnesota attorney general (1960–1964); U.S. senator (1964–1976); vice president (1977–1981); chair of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (1986–1993); U.S. ambassador to Japan (1993–1996); and U.S. special envoy to Indonesia (1998). After Senator Paul Wellstone’s sudden death in 2002, Mondale made an unsuccessful attempt to win that seat for the Democrats. Greatly influenced by his father’s liberal populism, Mondale as state attorney general emphasized consumer protection and civil rights, earning a reputation as a “people’s lawyer.” He took over Humphrey’s seat in the Senate after his mentor became Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president in 1964. Senator Mondale supported Johnson’s Great Society programs and pushed for such later progressive initiatives as a $2 billion child-care program that President Richard M. Nixon vetoed in 1971. As Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Mondale redefined the role of an office long considered unimportant. The staffs of the president and vice president were integrated for the first time, and Mondale became the first vice president to have an office in the West Wing of the White House, near the Oval Office. He met regularly with President Carter, had access to the same information, and was not sidelined with “busy work.” However, he proved unable to meaningfully shape the Carter presidency, as the administration’s policies were different from those of the New Deal and Great Society liberalism. With the emergence of “Reagan Democrats,” many voters deserted the Carter-Mondale ticket in 1980, electing Ronald Reagan to his first term as president. In 1984, Mondale was the Democratic presidential standard bearer. His selection of U.S. Representative Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY) as a running mate, the first female candidate for vice president, showed his willingness to include new elements of the Democratic coalition. But Reagan, running as a moderate conservative, drew support from many Democrats, and Mondale, facing the reality of inflation, openly stated during the campaign
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that if elected he would increase taxes. When the votes were tallied, Mondale carried only his home state and the District of Columbia. Diane Benedic See also: Adler, Mortimer J.; Carter, Jimmy; Democratic Party; Ferraro, Geraldine; Great Society; Humphrey, Hubert H.; Johnson, Lyndon B.; New Deal; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Wellstone, Paul.
Further Reading Gillon, Steven M. The Democrats’ Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Lewis, Finlay. Mondale: Portrait of an American Politician. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
Montana Freemen A white-supremacist group founded in 1992, the Montana Freemen (sometimes referred to as the Christian Freemen) rejected federal authority, asserting that the U.S. government based on the Constitution is illegal. Influenced by other right-wing militia and survivalist groups, including Posse Comitatus and Christian Identity, the Freemen were secessionists who refused to pay taxes and maintained that members of “the white race” are Israelites and subject only to the laws of the Bible (what they call “common law”). The Freemen movement, based near the northeastern Montana town of Jordan, achieved notoriety in the mid1990s for attempting to defraud banks and businesses of billions of dollars by writing bogus checks and money orders. They placed fraudulent liens on the assets of other individuals, especially public officials, to obtain collateral for carrying out illegal banking schemes. Freemen leaders were known for hosting workshops on how to engage in bank fraud, rationalizing it as legitimate activity against an “illegal” system. However, one prominent militia leader, Charles Duke of the Patriot movement, publicly dismissed the Freemen as “nothing but criminals.” In September 1995, the Montana Freemen “established” their own government, Justus [sic] Township, a 960-acre (390-hectare) compound consisting of four ranches in Garfield County about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Billings. The settlement attracted some individuals who had lost farms or ranches to foreclosures and sheriff auctions, but the group remained small in number. In May 1996, Leroy M. Schweitzer, Daniel Petersen, and eight other Freemen were indicted for trying to harm the national banking system. In June 1996, after an eighty-one-day standoff with 633 federal agents, the remaining sixteen of twenty-six Montana Freemen surrendered without firing a shot, ending one of the longest armed sieges in U.S. history. Federal agents
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were criticized for being overly patient with the Freemen, but the FBI was determined not to repeat the mistakes of Waco and Ruby Ridge, two earlier standoffs with other extremists that ended with lost lives. The federal government spent $7.5 million in apprehending the Freemen. Later, in federal court, it was determined that the Montana Freemen wrote 3,432 bogus checks totaling $15.5 billion. Although less than 1 percent of the checks cleared, the group was able to accumulate $144,000 in cash, along with an assortment of money orders and gold and silver coins. After two federal trials, the main leaders of the Freemen received prison sentences. In March 1999, Schweitzer, the Freemen’s founder, was sentenced to twenty-two-and-a-half years in prison. In other cases, individuals associated with the Freemen movement have been implicated in various criminal conspiracies, including a plan to bomb a mosque near Denver in 1999. A group in Michigan that included a former member of the Montana Freemen was convicted in December 2001 of issuing $550 million of counterfeit U.S. Treasury checks. Roger Chapman See also: Aryan Nations; Militia Movement; Ruby Ridge Incident; Waco Siege; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Jakes, Dale, Connie Jakes, and Clint Richmond. False Prophets: The Firsthand Account of a Husband-Wife Team Working for the FBI and Living in Deepest Cover with the Montana Freemen. Los Angeles: Dove Books, 1998. Shannan, J. Patrick. The Montana Freemen: The Untold Story. Jackson, MS: Center for Historical Analysis, 1996.
Moore, Michael Film producer and writer Michael Moore has achieved fame and fortune in the culture wars for a highly politicized series of documentary films that are unabashedly liberal and populist in both perspective and audience appeal. Relying on ambush interviews, news and archival footage, animation, satire, and comedy, Moore has taken on the interests of corporate America and the federal government (especially Republican administrations) on issues including industrial unemployment, gun culture, the war in Iraq, and health care. Opponents charge him with manipulating facts, distorting the sequence of events, and editing videotape to create false impressions. He has also been criticized for owning stock in some of the companies he has vilified in his productions. The son of a General Motors factory worker, Michael Francis Moore was born on April 23, 1954, in Davison,
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Populist documentary filmmaker Michael Moore (left) joins a fellow liberal foot soldier in the culture wars, comedianturned-politician Al Franken, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Michigan, a suburb of Flint. He attended Catholic schools until the age of fourteen and at one point considered becoming a priest. In 1972, at age eighteen, he was elected to the Davison County School Board. Ironically, he failed to complete his freshman year at the University of Michigan–Flint, dropping out to work in local radio and journalism. He began hosting a public radio program called Radio Free Flint and founded an alternative newspaper called the Flint Voice (later renamed the Michigan Voice). By 1985, Moore was a commentator at National Public Radio. Later, he was dismissed after a few months as an editor of the left-wing magazine Mother Jones (1986), but he used the windfall from an out-of-court settlement to start Dog Eat Dog Films, a documentary film production company. Moore’s films include Roger & Me (1989), about the decision of General Motors to close its factory in Flint, Michigan; Bowling for Columbine (2002), about the culture of guns and violence in America, in the wake of the 1999 student shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), about President George W. Bush in wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the decision to go to war against Iraq; and Sicko (2007), about the nation’s failing health care system. In addition to his films, Moore has written several books, including Downsize This! Random Threats from Unarmed America (1997), about corporate crime and the effects of corporate downsizing on working-class families; Stupid White Men, and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation (2002), about conservative politics during the Bush presidency; and Dude, Where’s My Country? (2003), which Moore called “a book of political humor” (and used at the expense of political conservatives). In Fahrenheit 9/11, perhaps his most controversial and popular film, Moore suggests that the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was launched on behalf of the
American oil industry, while portraying military recruitment efforts as exploitation of the economically disadvantaged. Moore grossed about $200 million worldwide from the release of the film, but his primary goal of thwarting Bush’s 2004 reelection bid failed. In fact, according to some critics, the film’s confrontational style led to a voter backlash that helped Bush defeat Democratic opponent John Kerry in 2004. Months prior to the election, the singer Linda Ronstadt was booed off the stage in Las Vegas after praising Moore and the film. Conservatives that year produced three film rebuttals to Fahrenheit 9/11, including Michael Moore Hates America, Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at which the Brain . . . Begins to Die, and FahrenHYPE 9/11. Jessie Swigger and Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Election of 2000; Gun Control; Health Care; Kerry, John; School Shootings; September 11.
Further Reading Larner, Jesse. Forgive Us Our Sins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Palash, Dave, and Christopher Hitchens. The Real Michael Moore: A Critical Biography. New York: Touchstone Books, 2008. Rapoport, Roger. Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast. Muskegon, MI: RDR Books, 2007. Schweizer, Peter. Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Toplin, Robert Brent. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How One Film Divided a Nation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
M o o r e , R oy S . A former chief justice of Alabama (2001–2003), Roy Stewart Moore is best known for defying a federal court order in August 2003 to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the state Supreme Court building in Montgomery—an act of defiance for which he was removed from office. Moore was born on February 11, 1947, in Gadsden, Alabama. Upon graduating from the U.S. Military Academy (1969), he served as a second lieutenant in Germany and then in Vietnam, where he commanded a military police unit. Following graduation at the University of Alabama School of Law (JD, 1977) and passing the bar exam, Moore served as deputy district attorney for Etowah County and then worked in private practice. In 1992, Governor Guy Hunt appointed Moore to finish out the term of a county circuit judge who died in office. Two years later, Moore defeated a Democratic challenger to win election to a full six-year term. It was in this position that Moore first gained significant public notice, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged his practice of beginning
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court sessions with prayer and his posting of the Ten Commandments in the courtroom. The ACLU filed suit against Moore in 1995, and the State of Alabama in turn filed suit on his behalf. The ACLU claim was eventually dismissed due to a lack of standing by the plaintiffs. Moore was elected chief justice of Alabama in 2000, having campaigned as the “Ten Commandments Judge.” On the night of July 31, 2001, Moore had a 2.5-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments installed in the rotunda of the Supreme Court building, while a crew from Coral Ridge Ministries videotaped the installation. Moore unveiled the monument the next morning and a number of groups, including the ACLU, responded by filing suit in federal court. The monument, they argued, amounted to a state endorsement of the Judeo-Christian deity and was thus a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The Ten Commandments, Moore countered, represent the moral foundation of American law, adding that his display was protected by the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and was in harmony with the Alabama Constitution’s acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty. The federal district court rejected Moore’s position and ordered him to remove the monument, and this ruling was upheld on appeal. Moore refused to comply, however, calling it an illegal order that he was duty-bound to disobey. On November 13, 2003, as a consequence of his refusal to comply with a federal court order, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed Moore from office. In 2006, Moore failed to win the Republican primary for the Alabama governorship. Thomas C. Ellington See also: American Civil Liberties Union; American Civil Religion; Church and State; Coulter, Ann; Fundamentalism, Religious; Religious Right; Ten Commandments.
Further Reading Coulter, Ann. “Man of the Year: Roy Moore.” Human Events, December 22, 2003. Davis, Derek H. “Religion and the Abuse of Judicial Power.” Journal of Church and State 39:2 (Spring 1997): 203–14. Green, Joshua. “Roy and His Rock.” Atlantic Monthly, October 2005. Moore, Roy, with John Perry. So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005.
Moral Majority The Moral Majority was a conservative political organization founded in 1979 by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and television evangelist based in Lynchburg, Virginia. Part of the Religious Right, the Moral Majority helped pave the
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way for a new level of participation and influence in American politics on the part of evangelicals. In its early years the Moral Majority claimed rapid growth, reporting 7 million members by 1983, though most observers believe that figure to be inflated. For instance, when the Moral Majority was at its peak in the early 1980s, some 750,000 people received copies of the group’s newspaper while direct-mail solicitations returned an average of only 10,000 contributions. The organization claimed to represent Christian Americans disheartened by the secular turn in American culture and politics. Falwell repeatedly argued that America faced certain peril if it were to abandon its Judeo-Christian heritage. The Moral Majority advocated positions that were largely cultural in nature and domestic in focus. It opposed abortion and supported school prayer. It was against sex education in public schools, arguing that knowledge of contraceptives would encourage young, unmarried people to be sexually promiscuous. The group criticized entitlement programs for the poor, linking welfare to the rise of children born out of wedlock. Deeming free enterprise as biblical, the group generally regarded welfare programs as socialistic. To a lesser degree, the Moral Majority also advanced certain foreign policy positions. The primacy of premillennial dispensationalism in fundamentalist thought, which holds that the reconstitution of Israel signals the end times, led the group to support policies favorable to the modern state of Israel. Indeed, the organization endorsed Ronald Reagan’s 1980 candidacy for president in large part because President Jimmy Carter had affirmed the Palestinian right to a homeland. The group also supported President Reagan’s efforts to defeat leftist guerrillas in Central America, wishing to curtail any potential establishment of an atheistic communist society. In addition to being the object of scorn by liberals, the Moral Majority was attacked by moderates and even members of the political right, including the syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick. Many detractors accused the Moral Majority of seeking to establish an American theocracy. As evidence, they pointed to the group’s support of policies said to undermine the separation of church and state. Detractors also viewed the Moral Majority as bigoted and intolerant, noting the group’s depiction of the AIDS epidemic as divine retribution for sinful lifestyles and Falwell’s vigorous support of the South African apartheid regime. In January 1986, Falwell announced that he was closing the Moral Majority and replacing it with the Liberty Foundation. The organization’s decline has been attributed to a number of factors, including competition from other Christian advocacy groups vying for financial contributions from evangelicals; the group’s shifting focus on issues not directly related to moral concerns; and Falwell’s controversial statements that repelled moder-
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ate and mainstream believers. The Liberty Foundation folded in 1989 and was superseded by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Although the Moral Majority was relatively shortlived, its formation and ascendancy was emblematic of the growing participation of evangelicals in politics. Many of the issues the Moral Majority advocated remain on the conservative political agenda, and some have been addressed through legislation. A number of states, for example, have restricted access to abortion and also passed laws permitting moments of silence (for prayer purposes) in schools. Carolyn Gallaher See also: Abortion; AIDS; Carter, Jimmy; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; Fundamentalism, Religious; Israel; Premillennial Dispensationalism; Religious Right; School Prayer; Sex Education.
Further Reading Fitzgerald, Frances. Cities on a Hill. New York: Touchstone, 1987. Snowball, David. Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority. New York: Praeger, 1991. Webber, Robert. The Moral Majority: Right or Wrong? Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1981.
M o r a l Re l a t i v i s m See Relativism, Moral
Morgan, Robin A feminist activist, lesbian, writer, and editor, Robin Morgan has been a major figure in promoting radical feminism, an ideology that links all social oppression to patriarchy. In 1967, she was a co-founder of the shortlived New York Radical Women and its political wing, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH). The following year, she was the principal organizer of the first protest against the Miss America beauty pageant. In 1979, she helped establish Women Against Pornography, arguing that pornography is the theory of the practice of rape. Morgan has also compiled and edited anthologies that advance radical feminism at the national level, Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (1970); at the international level (including the Third World), Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (1984); and into the twenty-first century, Sisterhood is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for a New Millennium (2003). While some have criticized her for being antimale, dogmatic, and loose with facts, others praise her for voicing a universal female rage. Robin Evonne Morgan was born on January 29, 1941, in Lake Worth, Florida, and grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. She had her own radio show, called Little
Robin Morgan, at the age of four, and became something of a child star on the 1950s television series Mama. After studying literature and writing at Columbia University (no degree, 1956–1959), she worked as a freelance book editor and agent in New York City. She had her first poems published in the early 1960s and contributed articles and essays to a number of counterculture publications of the period. In the early 1970s she began contributing to Ms. Magazine, which she later edited (1990–1993). Over the years, Morgan has played important roles in the founding of women’s aid organizations, and in 1984 she co-founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, a think tank. In 2007, she was named Humanist Heroine of the year by the American Humanist Association. During the1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Morgan led a group of about one hundred feminists in a widely publicized “guerrilla theater” demonstration, in which participants crowned a sheep as the pageant winner and tossed “instruments of torture to women”—bras, high-heeled shoes, and copies of Playboy magazine—into a designated Freedom Trash Can. In her public statement, titled “No More Miss America!” Morgan compared the contest to the judging of animals at the 4-H Club county fair, only more commercialized. She criticized the pageant for choosing only white women as Miss America, for its role as cheerleader for U.S. troops in the Vietnam War, and for imposing “Madonna-Whore” expectations on American women. Morgan was an early feminist critic of the New Left, arguing that it was controlled by a male hierarchy dis interested in women’s issues—a topic of her famous essay, “Goodbye to All That” (1970). In addition to advocating female separatism in the struggle for gender equality, she has made multiculturalism an aspect of feminism. In The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (1982), Morgan links feminism with the holistic movement, and in The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989), she argues that terrorism is the logical consequence of patriarchy. She has chronicled her personal development as a feminist in Going Too Far: The Personal Documents of a Feminist (1977); The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches 1968–1992 (1992); and an autobiography, Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (2001). Morgan has further explored feminism in her creative works, most notably her first volume of poetry, Monster (1972). Roger Chapman See also: Beauty Pageants; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Hefner, Hugh; Lesbians; Ms.; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; New Left; Pornography; Vietnam War; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Jay, Karla. “What Ever Happened to Baby Robin?” Lambda Book Report, June 2001.
Mothers A gain s t Dr unk Dr i v ing Morgan, Robin. “No More Miss America!” In The Radical Reader, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillan, 425–27. New York: The New Press, 2003. ———, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Random House, 1970. Willis, Pat. “Robin Morgan, 2007 Humanist Heroine.” Humanist, November–December 2007.
M o r r i s o n , To n i The writings of novelist, children’s author, essayist, and playwright Toni Morrison, the first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), address issues of history, identity, race, and gender from a black feminist perspective, asking readers to engage in “rememory” (remembering what has been forgotten). The subjects explored in her work—from slavery and its legacies to race relations to the O.J. Simpson trial— have made Morrison an active participant in the culture wars. Born Chloë Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, she was the first woman in her family to attend college, studying at Howard University (BA, 1953) and Cornell University (MA, 1955). She taught at Texas Southern University (1955–1957), Howard University (1957–1964), the State University of New York at Purchase (1971–1972), Yale University (1976–1977), the State University of New York at Albany (1984–1987), and Princeton University (1989–2006). In 1964, she became an editor at Random House. In 1970, she made her debut as a novelist. Morrison’s novels—The Bluest Eye (1969), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008)—largely draw on the African-American lore she heard growing up in a family with roots in the South. Her play Dreaming Emmett (1986) focuses on the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Black elites rallied around her work, and when Beloved failed to win the 1987 National Book Award, such prominent figures as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and others praised Morrison in an open letter to the New York Times. The novel did win the Pulitzer Prize (1988) and was made into a movie by Oprah Winfrey (1998). The Nobel Prize committee cited Morrison’s Beloved and other novels for their “visionary force and poetic import.” As an editor at Random House from 1964 to 1983, Morrison helped shape the canon of African-American literature, reaching out to other black authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Gayl Jones. She saw biographies of Muhammad Ali and Huey P. Newton get published and helped produce The Black Book (1974), a scrapbook of black hidden history.
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Morrison caused a stir in 1998 when she referred to President Bill Clinton as the “first black president.” Her participation in the culture wars, however, has been mostly at the academic level through her nonfiction books. In Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992), she focuses on the 1991 scandal surrounding allegations of sexual harassment against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. With Claudia Brodsky Lacour, she edited Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997), examining the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which Morrison believes was correctly judged by the jury. Her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) analyzes the “black character” in white literature, arguing that black characters serve as “metaphorical shortcuts” pertaining to what is dreaded and desired. Kirk Richardson See also: Angelou, Maya; Clinton, Bill; Feminism, SecondWave; Great Books; Hill, Anita; Literature, Film, and Drama; O.J. Simpson Trial; Race; Thomas, Clarence; Till, Emmett.
Further Reading Bloom, Harold. Toni Morrison. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2000. Fulz, Lucille P. Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Gillespie, Carmen. Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Mothers Against Drunk Driv ing Founded in 1980, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a nationwide grassroots organization that has lobbied successfully for tougher law enforcement against drunk driving. Widely viewed as an effective “do-gooder” organization that has helped reverse societal complacency toward drunk driving, MADD has nonetheless drawn criticism from those who think its positions are repressive. Originally known as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, MADD was started in California by Candy Lightner in reaction to the death of her thirteen-year-old daughter, Cari, a victim of a hit-and-run motorist who was drunk at the time and who had a record of repeated drunkdriving offenses. Back then about half of the 45,000 annual traffic fatalities in the United States were linked to drunk driving. In 1980, Lightner compelled California governor Jerry Brown to form a state commission to study the problem of drunk driving. Two years later, she persuaded President Ronald Reagan to do the same at the national level. Lightner served on both commissions,
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and her cause was further boosted by the 1983 airing of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers: The Candy Lightner Story, an NBC television movie. By 1985, MADD had 320 chapters in forty-seven states. With its headquarters in Hurst, Texas, MADD pushed for (1) reducing the trend for plea bargaining in which drunk-driving charges are dropped in exchange for admissions of lesser offenses; (2) imposing mandatory jail time, higher fines, and longer periods of driver license suspension/revocation for drunk driving; (3) lowering the legal limit for motorist blood alcohol count (BAC); (4) utilizing drunk-driving countermeasures such as random sobriety checkpoints at police roadblocks; and (5) raising the nation’s legal drinking age. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, heavily lobbied for by MADD, raised the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one. This was controversial because it meant that a young person old enough to vote or serve in the military would be denied the right to drink alcohol. According to MADD, 50,000 American teenagers had died in alcohol-related crashes from 1974 to 1984, roughly equivalent to the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Dismissing the argument that age eighteen represents adulthood, Lightner answered, “There are different age limits for different levels of responsibility: thirty-five for President, thirty for Senator, twenty-three for FBI agent. We just don’t feel that kids at eighteen, many of whom are just learning how to drive, should be allowed to drink too.” President Reagan, who regarded the bill as a violation of states’ rights, reluctantly signed it into law. In 1985, following reports questioning Lightner’s financial management of MADD, the organization’s executive committee voted to sideline her. Relations further deteriorated between MADD and its founder when, in 1994, Lightner became a lobbyist for the American Beverage Association, representing the alcohol industry. She also sided against MADD’s campaign to lower the national BAC limit from .10 to .08, arguing that existing laws simply needed to be enforced. In a 2002 interview with the Washington Times, Lightner characterized MADD as turning “neo-prohibitionist,” adding, “I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol . . . [but] to deal with the issue of drunk driving.” In 2008, much to the chagrin of MADD, 130 college presidents called for lowering the drinking age in order to reduce campus surreptitious drinking, which they said is linked to binge drinking. Those in favor of keeping the drinking age at twenty-one noted the 11 percent decline in alcohol-related deaths of young people since the passage of the 1984 law. Roger Chapman See also: Automobile Safety; Reagan, Ronald.
Further Reading Jacobs, James B. Drunk Driving: An American Dilemma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Liebschutz, Sarah F. “The National Minimum Drinking-Age Law.” Publius 15:3 (Summer 1985): 39–51. Mothers Against Drunk Driving Web site. www.madd.org. Reinarman, Craig. “The Societal Construction of an Alcohol Problem: The Case of Mothers against Drunk Drivers and Societal Control in the 1980s.” Theory and Society 17:1 (January 1988): 91–120. Sadoff, Mickey. Get MADD Again, America! Irving, TX: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 1991.
Motion Picture A ssociation of America Established in 1922, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is a nonprofit trade organization that serves as the advocate of the U.S. film, home video, and television industries. Originally called the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association, it was formed to promote the interests of the major movie studios and to safeguard against government intervention. The latter concern grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), which affirmed the right of states to establish film censorship boards. Much of the MPAA’s involvement in the culture wars stems from its film rating system, the voluntary industry standard. The MPAA instituted its Production Code in 1930 in response to increasing public complaints about film content. The guidelines, which some regarded as an attempt to censor the industry, were created out of fear that local authorities would ban the showing of films that they deemed immoral. This concern was enhanced when the Catholic Legion of Decency (CLD) declared a boycott of films it considered indecent. The Code mandated that films, prior to public release, receive a certificate from the MPAA. In the 1960s, filmmakers asserted that the Production Code was stifling their creativity, and movies began to be released without the MPAA certificate. Attempts by the CLD or other groups to boycott productions no longer represented a serious threat, and the MPAA responded by creating its “Suggested for Mature Audiences” rating in 1966. Due to its perceived lack of stringency the Production Code was abolished in 1967. The following year, after meeting with government representatives and the National Association of Theater Owners in response to public outrage about the content of certain films, the MPAA adopted a new ratings system. The initial designations were G, M, R, and X. The purpose was to rate the content of a movie to provide the public with guidance as to specific ele-
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ments: violence, sexuality, and harsh language. Later, the MPAA refined the ratings to include the nowfamiliar G (General Audiences), PG (Parental Guidance Suggested), PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned), R (Restricted; viewer must be age 17 or accompanied by a parent or guardian), and NC-17 (No One Under 17 Admitted). The MPAA rating system has been the object of diverse and ongoing complaints. Some filmmakers find that the system has had the unintended effect of forcing studios to change film content, as filmmakers consciously make alterations to obtain a particular rating for commercial purposes. In addition, independent distributors sometimes believe that their films are rated unfairly. They point to major studio productions that contain more violence, sex, and strong language than many of their films but receive a less-restrictive rating. According to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004, the standards used to determine movie ratings have been steadily declining. The result, according to the study, has been a significantly greater degree of sex, violence, and strong language in films between 1992 and 2003. Other groups, including the Conference of Catholic Bishops, an offshoot of CLD, have also noticed the trend, resurrecting concerns about film content. The independent documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2005) explores the widespread inconsistencies in the MPAA’s approach to film ratings; in the book The Movie Ratings Game (1972), Stephen Farber confronts the issue from an insider’s perspective. Despite criticism of the ratings system, many believe that it has generally benefited filmmakers more than it has hurt them. As the concerns grow on both sides of the issue, the MPAA and its ratings system no doubt will remain controversial. James W. Stoutenborough See also: Catholic Church; Censorship; Comic Books; Literature, Film, and Drama; Record Warning Labels; Zappa, Frank.
Further Reading Bernstein, Matthew. Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Black, Gregory D. The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940– 1975. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Farber, Stephen. The Movie Ratings Game. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1972. Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Motion Picture Association of America Web site. www.mpaa .org.
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M oy n i h a n , D a n i e l P a t r i c k Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a U.S. senator (D-NY) and sociologist whose ideas on poverty and race relations in America generated considerable controversy. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on March 16, 1927, he was raised in an impoverished neighborhood in New York City and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He attended Tufts University (BA, 1948; MA, 1949; PhD, 1961) and held various positions in New York state government during the 1950s. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him assistant secretary of labor, in which capacity he quickly emerged as a key figure in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Perhaps most controversial among Moynihan’s extensive writings was his 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” In it, he argued that the “deterioration of the Negro family,” particularly in urban areas, was responsible for the gap in incomes and living standards between African Americans and other Americans, and that these circumstances were impeding the progress of the civil rights movement. The Moynihan Report, as it was popularly known, further suggested that policymakers should rely more heavily on the research and methodologies of social scientists. Critics of the report charged that it blamed the victim rather than the cause of the problem, provided an excuse for inaction on the critical issues of race and poverty, and drew attention away from the real sources of these problems, but the Moynihan Report did mark a change in government approaches as policymakers moved away from their focus on legal issues and considered broader questions about African-American communities. Amid growing tensions with President Johnson, Moynihan resigned from the Department of Labor and in 1966 became a professor at Harvard University. The debate over the Moynihan Report caused him to question his commitment to liberalism, and in time he would become identified with the neoconservative movement. He returned to Washington in 1968 to serve in the Nixon administration as assistant to the president for urban affairs. Moynihan again became the center of controversy in 1970, after writing a memo to the president in which he outlined the significant gains in income and education level in the African-American community, contended that racial politics in America had become too highly charged to be constructive, and suggested that the “issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’” Critics cited the memo as evidence that Moynihan did not care about the problems of African Americans. Moynihan served as U.S. ambassador to India from 1971 to 1973 and as U.S. representative to the United Nations from 1975 to 1976. He used the latter position to promote the growth of liberal democracy around the globe. Although he was highly popular at home, he drew criticism from abroad for his relentless defense of
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American interests. Moynihan was elected to four terms in the U.S. Senate (1977–2001), where he became chair of the Finance Committee and cemented his reputation as a political maverick. Ever unpredictable, he was willing to criticize politicians and policies without regard for party loyalties. Although he supported the neoconservative push for a muscular Cold War foreign policy, Moynihan was also deeply concerned about human rights and criticized the Reagan administration’s policies in Latin America. Elected as a Democrat, he worked toward welfare reform and opposed President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals. Moynihan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. He died on March 26, 2003. Charlotte Cahill See also: Affirmative Action; Civil Rights Movement; Clinton, Hillary; Family Values; Great Society; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; Neoconservatism; United Nations; War on Poverty; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963. Katzmann, Robert A., ed. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Rainwater, Lee, and William L. Yancey. The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967. Schoen, Douglas. Pat. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
Ms. An alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.,” the honorific “Ms.” (pronounced Miz) promotes gender equality by providing women the female equivalent of “Mr.,” rendering marital status irrelevant in how one is addressed. During the 1970s, after Ms. emerged as a trademark of the women’s liberation movement, critics characterized it as “contrived” and “man-hating.” Feminists regarded the term as empowering because it defined a woman as an individual in her own right. With the trend of more brides retaining their maiden names (by 2000 that represented about 20 percent of college-educated women), Ms. became a more convenient designation as well. As early as 1952, the National Office Management Association recommended the designator Ms. to simplify recordkeeping and the drafting of correspondence. The term was consequently introduced in secretarial manuals, which drew the attention of feminists during the
1960s. In March 1970, the National Organization of Women (NOW) formally adopted Ms. as the appropriate title for any woman. The designation also inspired the name of a new feminist periodical, the influential Ms. Magazine. Founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem, Ms. stood out as a different kind of women’s magazine, one that was countercultural and independent, dismissing notions of beauty and domesticity and declaring a woman as having an identity not defined by her relationship to a man. Also in 1972, Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D-NY) introduced legislation that would have restricted the federal government from using Mrs. or Miss in correspondence or records. Although her bill did not pass, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Government Printing Office subsequently authorized the use of Ms. Also in 1972, feminists lobbied the New York Times to officially adopt Ms. for identifying women in news articles and editorials; the editors refused. In March 1974, women activists began what would be twelve years of random picketing outside the Times’s office in protest of the continued use of Miss and Mrs. The Times began questioning its policy on Ms. after Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York emerged as the Democrat’s vice presidential candidate in 1984. The influential political columnist and language expert William Safire suggested that since Ferraro, married to John Zaccaro, had kept her maiden name, it was not technically correct to refer to her as “Mrs. Ferraro.” On the other hand, he pointed out, identifying her as “Miss Ferraro” was likewise inaccurate. Thus, Safire concluded, it made sense to call her Ms. Ferraro. Ironically, although the candidate preferred to be addressed as “Congresswoman” or “Ms.,” during the campaign, she continued to use the conventional “Mrs.” for private matters. On June 19, 1986, the editors of the paper announced, “The Times believes that ‘Ms.’ has become a part of the language and is changing its policy.” As Ms. became assimilated in everyday speech as a courtesy title, the term was largely rendered apolitical. Some have concluded that this is because the feminist values of the 1970s have been adopted as mainstream. True or not, polls conducted over the years have indicated a lingering stereotype that women who use Ms. are more likely to be masculine, divorced, or less than ideal wives and mothers. The original Ms. Magazine ceased publication in 1989 but was resurrected the following year as a bimonthly, in smaller format, and without advertising. Roger Chapman See also: Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Ferraro, Geraldine; Gender-Inclusive Language; Marriage Names; Morgan, Robin; National Organization for Women; New York Times, The; Steinem, Gloria.
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Further Reading Atkins-Sayre, Wendy. “Naming Women: The Emergence of ‘Ms.’ as a Liberatory Title.” Women and Language 28:1 (2005): 8–16. Crawford, Mary, Amy C. Stark, and Catherine Hackett Renner. “The Meaning of Ms.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 22 (1998): 197–208. Farrell, Amy Erdman. Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Multicultural Conser vatism “Multicultural conservatism” is a term coined by political historian Angela D. Dillard in her book Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? (2001), an examination of conservative African Americans, Latinos, homosexuals, and members of other minority groups that usually align with the political left. Although members of ethnic or other minority groups, these conservatives typically reject the communal associations of multiculturalism and “identity politics.” Instead, they call for politics based on individualism, and they tend to support conservative positions on family values and free markets. Exemplars of multicultural conservatism include Bruce Bawer, Linda Chavez, Dinesh D’Souza, Alan Keyes, Richard Rodriguez, Phyllis Schlafly, Thomas Sowell, Andrew Sullivan, Clarence Thomas, and Condoleezza Rice, and organizations such as the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, Independent Women’s Forum, and Log Cabin Republicans. Multicultural conservatives also have close ties with the mainstream conservative movement, working within such larger conservative organizations as the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Hoover Institution. Multicultural conservatism is often associated with the rise of neoliberalism and the prominence of neoconservatives and the Religious Right within the Republican Party. Its adherents share the neoliberal aversion to government intervention in market policy and support low taxes, and at the same time they oppose what they see as the trend of secular humanism in American culture and its detrimental effects on traditional families, gender roles, and morality. It is their staunch opposition to affirmative action and other policies they perceive as giving preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality that place multicultural conservatives in the center of public consciousness—and often controversy. Multicultural conservatives see the elimination of legalized discrimination occasioned by the civil rights movement as sufficient to create equal opportunities for minorities and women. Critical of the identity politics of the “civil rights establishment,” multicultural conservatives view preferential social policies as an inversion of the goals
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of the civil rights movement. They advocate race-blind policies and often criticize minorities and homosexuals as lacking self-reliance and clinging to deviant or pathological beliefs, values, and institutions. Instead of attributing social or economic disparities to racism, sexism, or homophobia, multicultural conservatives often cite cultural deficiencies or individual inadequacies as explanations for the problems of minorities and women. They argue that policies promoting preferential treatment for women and minorities fuel a victim mentality in those social groups. Multicultural conservatives have faced occasional marginalization from the right and have complained that the mainstream conservative movement needs to increase its outreach efforts toward women and minorities. Critics on the left point out that some multicultural conservatives who oppose policies such as affirmative action have gained prominence within the conservative movement simply by virtue of their minority status. Critics of multicultural conservatives cite polling and public opinion data to suggest that their views are not representative of minorities and women generally. Ironically, such attacks have sometimes led multicultural conservatives to position themselves as misunderstood and victimized minorities within their own social groups. Corey Fields See also: Affirmative Action; Civil Rights Movement; D’Souza, Dinesh; Family Values; Heritage Foundation; Neoconservatism; Religious Right; Schlafly, Phyllis; Secular Humanism; Sowell, Thomas; Thomas, Clarence; Victimhood.
Further Reading Dillard, Angela D. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies Multiculturalism has been a contentious topic of the culture wars because it emphasizes pluralism over common heritage, challenging traditional views of Americanism. Instead of focusing on the nation as a whole, multiculturalists consider culture and history through the prisms of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and even sexual orientation. The view is that the United States is too vast and complicated to have one grand narrative, but rather it is a nation of many different groups with unique stories. Critics argue that multiculturalism undermines national unity, hinders integration, taints scholarship, distorts the past by making “fringe” history the central focus, instills victimhood status on minorities, dismisses individualism by relegating each person to a
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group, and imposes political correctness. Advocates of multiculturalism argue that it acknowledges America’s diversity; shows how the nation is richer and more expansive than its stock Anglo-Protestant heritage; opens space for other viewpoints to be presented and seriously examined; and fosters tolerance, understanding, and democracy. The debate on multiculturalism centers on two competing metaphors—the melting pot versus the salad bowl. The former emphasizes homogeneity, viewing America as composed of immigrants from all over the world, who are absorbed into the nation, acculturated as one people in accordance with the motto inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), as if all were put into one pot and made into an American stew. The latter emphasizes diversity, viewing America as one nation composed of many ethnic groups, like different ingredients made into a tossed salad, in which each kind of vegetable remains distinct, although each shares a common bowl and perhaps some dressing (made from constitutional principles and concepts of equal opportunity) adds some common flavoring. A movement began in the late 1960s to incorporate multiculturalism into higher education by introducing programs of ethnic studies. This developed out of a student protest movement at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College in 1968. The protesters, who formed a group called the Third World Liberation Front, demanded separate academic programs to focus on African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. The argument for ethnic studies programs was that the academic curriculum of the university was biased from a Eurocentric perspective, ignoring the history and culture of other ethnicities. By February 1969, after weeks of student violence, Governor Ronald Reagan called out the National Guard. Calm was not restored, however, until the following month, after both campuses opened ethnic studies programs. The Berkeley program started out offering thirty-four courses and had a student enrollment of 990. In 1983, Berkeley was the first institution to offer a doctoral program in ethnic studies. Two years later there were 500 black studies programs on the nation’s college campuses. In 1974 there were 200 ethnic studies programs. By the 1980s there was a resurgence of ethnic studies at schools across the nation. Beginning with San Diego State College in 1970, programs in women’s studies were introduced, operating on the rationale that the general curriculum is patriarchal. By 1975 there were 112 women’s studies programs across the country. Sexual diversity studies or sexuality studies programs, commonly known as LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, and queer) studies, were also founded. The City College of San Francisco established the first department of gay,
lesbian, and bisexual studies, which began with a gay literature class in 1978. Opposition to ethnic studies has centered on pedagogical issues. Some argue that these programs, by being ghettoized, unwittingly marginalize the study of minorities. It would have been far more effective, critics suggest, to integrate ethnic studies into the “regular” curriculum. The general trend has been that whites avoid ethnic studies, men avoid women’s studies, and heterosexuals avoid LGBTQ studies, meaning that these special programs have a narrow audience. With such awareness, some schools, including Bowling Green State University beginning in 1991, have mandated diversity courses as part of graduation requirements. The trend of required ethnic studies has often been at the expense of the western humanities, including its emphasis on the cultural canon or “great books.” Trading the great books for ethnic studies has been disheartening to social conservatives, who believe that the traditional values enshrined in the canon have historically been the basis of America’s greatness and cultural unity. Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Diversity Training; Gay Rights Movement; Great Books; Hispanic Americans; Multicultural Conservatism; Muslim Americans; National Endowment for the Humanities; Political Correctness; Race; Transgender Movement; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Bernstein, Richard. Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future. New York: Random House, 1994. Foster, Lawrence, and Patricia Susan Herzog. Defending Diversity: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives on Pluralism and Multiculturalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Goldberg, David Theo. Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Schoem, David Louis. Multicultural Teaching in the University. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Wood, Peter. Diversity: The Invention of a Concept. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003.
Mumford, Lew is A social philosopher, architectural critic, urban planner, and educator, the broadly influential Lewis Mumford is remembered especially for his warnings about the spiritual consequences of modernity and the dehumanizing aspects of technology. Born in Flushing, New York, on October 19, 1895,
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Mumford studied at the New School for Social Research (beginning in 1912), as well as City College of New York and Columbia University, but he never obtained a degree. After serving in the U.S. Navy (1917–1918), he worked as associate editor of the Sociological Review and then became a freelance writer. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Study of Utopias (1922), The Culture of the Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), The Conduct of Life (1951), The City in History (1961), The Myth of the Machine (1967–1970), and The Pentagon of Power (1971). He was the architectural critic for the New Yorker magazine for more than thirty years and, beginning in 1929, taught at such institutions as Dartmouth, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley. Many of Mumford’s writings on literature, cities, and architecture address the problems of modernity associated with the dehumanizing aspects of technology. Although he had once been optimistic about the assertion of the human spirit through technological advancements, he later changed his mind and warned about “technics,” the interweaving of high-tech innovation with the social fabric such that the goals and processes of technology take on a life of their own. He coined the term “megatechnics” to describe the constant, unrestricted expansion and replacement that robs manufactured artifacts of their quality and durability while creating the need for higher levels of consumption, advertising, credit, and depersonalization. In The Pentagon of Power, he cites New York City’s newly constructed World Trade Center as an example of “purposeless gigantism” and “technological exhibitionism” that threatens to dominate humanity. Mumford’s humanism and emphasis on the social aspects of urban development were in direct opposition to popular notions of progress and betterment of the human condition in the twentieth century. While some critics see Mumford as antitechnology, his views are more complex—he differentiated technology used to solve human problems from oppressive technology existing for its own sake. In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Mumford died on January 26, 1990, in Amenia, New York. Cynthia J. Miller See also: Literature, Film, and Drama; Mailer, Norman; Nuclear Age; Postmodernism; Science Wars.
Further Reading Miller, Donald L., ed. The Lewis Mumford Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Mumford, Lewis. Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. New York: Dial Press, 1982. Stunkel, Kenneth R. Understanding Lewis Mumford: A Guide for the Perplexed. Lewistown, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.
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Wojtowicz, Robert. Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.
Murdoch, Ruper t As chief executive of News Corporation—whose holdings include major newspapers, magazines, film studios, television stations, and other assets in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere—Rupert Murdoch is one of the most powerful figures in world media. His U.S. media enterprises, in particular Fox News, have heightened the culture wars by promoting a politically conservative agenda. He was born Keith Rupert Murdoch on March 11, 1931, in Australia, where his father was an influential newspaper executive. After attending Oxford University (MA, 1953), he returned to Australia to take over his father’s newspaper business, which he christened News Corporation. Over the next decade, Murdoch acquired a string of newspapers throughout Australia, and in 1964 he founded the country’s first national paper, the Australian. Murdoch’s goals of acquiring outlets in other types of media were restricted by Australia’s cross-media ownership laws, however, and his newspapers often carried editorials demanding advantageous changes to those laws. Murdoch moved to Great Britain in the mid-1960s and became a major force in newspapers there as well, acquiring the nation’s leading paper, the Times, in 1981. But he was best known for his tabloid newspapers, particularly the Sun in London, which featured topless models. In 1986 and 1987, he revolutionized the newspaper business in the UK by moving printing and production in-house to avoid the British printers’ unions. By the mid-1970s, Murdoch was breaking into American media ownership, first acquiring the San Antonio News in 1973 and the New York Post in 1976, while founding the supermarket tabloid the National Star in 1974. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 in order to satisfy a legal requirement that only Americans could own television stations. The following year, he founded the Fox television network, and in 1996 the twenty-four-hour cable station Fox News. He also founded the right-wing Weekly Standard magazine. By the beginning of the new millennium, Murdoch had expanded his holdings into satellite TV and the Internet. In 2004, he moved News Corporation’s base from Australia to the United States, apparently to take advantage of America’s more relaxed cross-media ownership laws. In 2007, the same year Fox Business Channel was launched, Murdoch spent over $5 billion acquiring the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch has aroused controversy with the purportedly conservative bias of reporting in his diverse media holdings. The most noteworthy incident occurred in
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November 2000, when Fox News called the presidential election in favor of George W. Bush before the votes had been accurately counted in Florida. The Robert Greenwald documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2005) provocatively showcases the conservative tilt of Fox News. Some commentators suggest, however, that Murdoch’s politics are more complex than a simple favoritism for the right wing, as he tends to support policies that further his business interests and profitability. Events or political developments that may negatively affect Murdoch’s profits are rarely reported by his news outlets, but his newspapers are infamous for giving glowing reviews of books and movies produced by his other companies. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: China; Election of 2000; Federal Communications Commission; Labor Unions; Media Bias; Neoconservatism; O’Reilly, Bill; Pornography; Republican Party; Weekly Standard, The.
Further Reading Chenoweth, Neil. Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard. New York: Crown Business, 2001. Kitty, Alexandra. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. New York: Disinformation, 2005. Page, Bruce. The Murdoch Archipelago. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Tuccille, Jerome. Rupert Murdoch: Creator of a Worldwide Media Empire. Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2003. Wolff, Michael. The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
help of a crack reporting team known as “Murrow’s boys,” the progress of the war until its conclusion in 1945. Later, it was argued by at least one writer that Murrow’s broadcasts drew America into the war. After returning to the United States, Murrow continued working for CBS, making the transition to the new medium of television beginning in 1950. He served as host of various programs, including the issues-oriented series See It Now. After leaving CBS in 1961, Murrow served under President John F. Kennedy as director of the United States Information Agency (1961–1963). In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Murrow died of lung cancer on April 27, 1965. Prior to challenging the veracity and methods of Senator McCarthy, Murrow spoke out critically against the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), stating in an October 1947 broadcast, “The right of dissent . . . is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail of totalitarianism.” See It Now, which Murrow co-produced with Fred W. Friendly, offered four hard-hitting broadcasts that were critical of the Red Scare and McCarthyism: “The Case of Milo Radulovich” (October 20, 1953), “An Argument in Indianapolis” (November 24, 1953), “Report on Senator McCarthy” (March 9, 1954), and “Annie Lee Moss Before the McCarthy Committee” (March 16, 1954). The exposé on Radulovich—an Air Force Reserve lieutenant facing dismissal because, although declared “loyal,” he was classified as a “security risk” due to his father’s and sister’s alleged radical politics—raised the
M u r r o w, E d w a r d R . A pioneer of radio journalism and television news for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Edward R. Murrow rose to prominence with his World War II broadcasts from Europe and made his mark in the culture wars by criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) on the air in March 1954. In turn, critics of Murrow castigated his news analysis as editorial opinion and labeled his station “the Red network.” Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born of Quaker parents on April 24, 1908, near Polecat Creek, North Carolina. He grew up in the state of Washington and graduated from Washington State College (BA, 1930). Elected president of the National Student Federation of America (1929), he later served as assistant director of the Institute of International Education (1932–1937). Murrow joined CBS radio in 1935 and two years later moved to London as director of European operations. With his signature opening, “This is London,” Murrow broadcast live reports of the events leading up to World War II and, with the
Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, seen here during election night coverage in 1952, became a paragon for subsequent generations of television reporters and investigative journalists. His great legacy in the culture wars was confronting McCarthyism. (CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images)
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issue of guilt by association. The Indianapolis story focused on the American Legion’s attempt to block the formation of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, raising the issue of the right of assembly. The report on McCarthy presented the senator “in his own words and pictures,” exposing his half-truths and unaccountability. The segment on Moss, a Pentagon cafeteria worker accused of having communist ties, raised the issue of due process of law. A subsequent viewer poll revealed strong agreement with Murrow about McCarthy. Murrow’s opposition to McCarthyism was the subject of the Hollywood film Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Murrow’s legacy, however, was about more than confronting the Red Scare. His influence is evident in the long-running CBS program 60 Minutes and other investigative “news magazine” shows, which borrowed the format of Harvest of Shame (1960), Murrow’s exposé on the plight of migrant workers. A critic of television and its increasing commercialism, Murrow advanced the concept of noncommercial broadcasting that helped lay the foundation for the Public Broadcasting Service. Many prominent journalists credit Murrow with inspiring them to strive for excellence in their reporting. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Communists and Communism; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Media Bias; Migrant Labor; National Public Radio; Public Broadcasting Service.
Further Reading Edwards, Bob. Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. Kendrick, Alexander. Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Ranville, Michael. To Strike a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch-Hunts. Troy, MI: Momentum Books, 1997. Rosteck, Thomas. See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Seib, Philip M. Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War. Washington, DC: Potomac, 2007.
Muslim Americans Muslim Americans, who by conservative estimates numbered 2.35 million in 2008, are part of the multicultural phenomenon of the United States. The growth of Islam in the country is largely due to the influx of immigrants from Muslim countries since 1965, spurred by the reform of federal immigration policies that relaxed restrictions on the influx of non-Europeans. To-
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day, however, approximately 35 percent of Muslims in the United States are native born. Since the majority religion among native-born Americans is Christianity, with Protestantism perceived as a dominant influence in American culture, Muslim Americans have lived in relative obscurity, though subjected to occasional misunderstanding and mistrust. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, such tensions have been heightened. Muslims have lived in North America since the era of transatlantic slavery. In the early twentieth century, a series of Middle Eastern Muslim families migrated to the United States, establishing several sizable Islamic communities in places such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Detroit, Michigan; and Sacramento, California. By century’s end, the majority of native-born Muslims were African American, with the remaining number composed of children of immigrants and converts from other backgrounds. In the United States, Muslims from the majority Sunni and minority Shi’ite sects generally have enjoyed peaceful, cooperative relations. A 2006 survey of Muslim registered voters found that 12 percent identified themselves as Shi’ite, 36 percent as Sunni, and 40 percent as “just a Muslim.” Of the more than 1,200 mosques across the United States in 2008, more than one-third were located in California (227) or New York (240). Most foreign-born Muslims are from the Middle East or North Africa, followed closely by Eastern Europe, and then Asia. There are few differences in earnings and educational levels between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors in the United States, in contrast to France, Germany, and England, where Muslims are 20 percent more likely to live in poverty. Among the several branches of Islam in AfricanAmerican communities is the Nation of Islam, founded in 1931 by Wallace Fard in Detroit. This religious movement is noted for contextualizing Islamic teachings to the political concerns of blacks living in a white-dominated society. Fard’s assistant, Elijah Muhammad, was more radical, calling on African Americans to renounce Christianity, which he characterized as the religion of the “white oppressor.” This message resonated with Malcolm Little, who after finishing a prison sentence in the early 1950s changed his name to Malcolm X (in order to discard his Christian slave name) and went on to propel the growth of the Nation of Islam through his dynamic oratory. Malcolm X’s message focused on separatism and economic self-help, in contrast to the goal of integration then being promoted by the Christian-inspired civil rights movement. He eventually gravitated toward Sunni Islam, as did most Nation of Islam followers. In New York, the minister Louis Farrakhan kept the Nation of Islam alive, often attracting controversy with his fiery rhetoric, including statements considered to be anti-Semitic. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, most
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Muslim Americans have reported a feeling of oppression, convinced they are under federal surveillance. There have also been occasional reports of random violence and hate crimes against Muslims, including vandalism and attacks on mosques. The case of the “American Taliban,” twenty-year-old John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, heightened official concern that Muslim centers in the United States were potential incubators for “homegrown terrorism.” Lindh, a white middle-class Californian who had converted to Islam after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), was persuaded to participate in a jihad in Afghanistan after studying Arabic in Yemen and Pakistan. Although he apologized for his actions (while having no connection with the September 11 attacks), Lindh was sentenced to twenty years in prison. California Muslims in 2007 were alarmed following disclosure of a counterterrorism effort by the Los Angeles Police Department to “map” Islamic enclaves in Los Angeles, but the ensuing outcry over “racial profiling” brought a halt to that undertaking. On the opposite coast, Mohammad Qatanani, a Palestinian who for a dozen years had served as imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, New Jersey, faced deportation proceedings in 2008 for not reporting on a green-card application his detainment several decades prior in Israel. Within the Muslim American community, cultural conflicts over the interpretation of Islam have been on the rise, often led by the younger American-born descendents of Muslim immigrants in opposition to the foreign-born imams. (Only 15 percent of American mosques are led by American-born imams.) Gender equality has been a divisive issue. The American-born journalist Asra Nomani, for example, refused to follow her mosque’s proscriptions that women must enter through the back door and pray behind the men—a controversy she publicly aired in her autobiographical work Standing Alone in Mecca (2005). Many such controversies over Islamic customs have arisen in the Muslim Student Associations, founded in 1963. Ingrid Mattson, director of the Islamic chaplaincy program at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, broke a gender barrier in 2006 when she became the first female president (as well as convert) of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States. In 2006, Keith Ellison, an African American, became the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress. A member of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Ellison later drew national attention, much of it negative, for taking his oath of office while placing his hand on the Koran, using a copy that once belonged to President Thomas Jefferson. Among the critics of this act was Congressman Virgil Goode, Jr. (R-VA), who expressed alarm over the growth of Islam in the United States, attributing it to “illegal immigration” and diversity visas for Middle Eastern immigrants. The Council on American-Islamic Relations requested an apology, but
Goode refused. Islamaphobic literature also targeted the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama by suggesting that he is a closeted Muslim, a smear parodied in a controversial New Yorker magazine cartoon cover (July 21, 2008) that portrays Obama as a flag-burning Muslim in Arabian dress and his wife, Michelle, as a gun-toting black nationalist. Susan Pearce See also: Ali, Muhammad; Farrakhan, Louis; Fundamentalism, Religious; Haley, Alex; Malcolm X; Montana Freemen; Nation of Islam; Obama, Barack; Saudi Arabia; September 11.
Further Reading Barrett, Paul M. American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Curtis, Edward, ed. The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, ed. Muslims of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kukis, Mark. “My Heart Became Attached”: The Strange Journey of John Walker Lindh. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003. Nomani, Asra Q. Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. Walker, Dennis. Islam and the Search for African-American Nationhood: Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2005.
My Lai Massacre My Lai-4, a hamlet located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of Saigon, was the site of a notorious American war crime during the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1968, between 400 and 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, were massacred during a search-and-destroy mission by U.S. Army infantrymen. In November 1969, the American investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh broke the story, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. Interpreting My Lai has been a polarizing issue of the culture wars, prompting debate on national virtue. For skeptics of American exceptionalism, including the view that the United States serves as a moral beacon to the rest of the world, My Lai reveals a national “heart of darkness.” For others, My Lai simply represents “a tragic aberration.” Motion picture director Oliver Stone, himself a Vietnam veteran, used My Lai as the basis for a pivotal scene in his Academy Award–winning film Platoon (1986). Later, during the Iraq War, some commentators compared the American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to the degeneracy of My Lai. The My Lai killings were carried out by members of the 11th Infantry Brigade, specifically Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry. Frustration and fear,
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as well as poor command, were said to be contributing factors to the moral lapse. In the Quang Ngai province where the village was situated, U.S. forces suffered many casualties at the hands of Vietcong who operated in and around the hamlets. In the two months preceding the massacre, nearly one-third of Charlie Company, headed by Captain Ernest Medina, had been killed or wounded. The locals, feigning lack of knowledge about the Vietcong, seldom cooperated with the Americans. After a sweep through the area turned up nothing, Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., the leader of 1st Platoon, ordered all villagers rounded up and killed. After witnessing the events from the air, Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., an army helicopter pilot, landed and directly confronted Calley. Thompson went on to evacuate some wounded civilians and later reported what he saw to his superiors. The incident was covered up, however, and the deaths that day were officially reported as Vietcong fatalities. A year later, Ronald L. Ridenhour, a discharged Vietnam veteran, wrote of the massacre to Congressman Mo Udall (D-AZ). In his letter, dated March 29, 1969, Ridenhour emphasized the importance of “principles of justice and the equality of every man, however humble” and urged “a widespread and public investigation on this matter.” Of the twenty-five men subsequently indicted by the military for murder, conspiracy, and/or perjury, charges were dropped for all but four. Medina and Calley were charged with murder, and their superiors, Colonel Oran K. Henderson and Major General Samuel Koster, were charged with dereliction of duty and cover-up. Only Calley was convicted. On March 29, 1971, a military jury declared him guilty of the premeditated murder of twenty-two civilians. According to a 1971 Newsweek magazine poll, 79 percent of Americans disapproved of the court-martial finding against Calley, largely viewing him as a scapegoat. Half of the respondents believed that My Lai represented a “common” event in Vietnam, while 24 percent classified it as “isolated.” Lieutenant Calley was originally sentenced to life in prison, later reduced to twenty years; he was paroled in 1974. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), the former president viewed My Lai as “inexcusable” but
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complained that many critics “were not really interested in the moral questions raised by the Calley case, as they were interested in using it to make political attacks against the Vietnam war.” In People of the Lie (1983), the noted psychiatrist M. Scott Peck characterizes the My Lai incident as an example of “group evil” and the initial cover-up as “a gigantic group lie.” Although decades passed, other My Lai–like atrocities of the Vietnam War eventually came to light. In 2003, the Toledo Blade published a series of articles detailing the killing of civilians, prisoner abuse, and corpse mutilations over a seven-month period in 1967 by a “Tiger Force” platoon of the 101st Airborne Division operating in the Quang Ngai province (the same region as My Lai). Lieutenant Colonel Anthony B. Herbert was relieved of his battalion command in 1969 after reporting a series of war crimes by the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade; internal military documents declassified in 1994 (and discovered by a researcher in 2006) confirmed his allegations of prisoner abuse and revealed that he was punished for being a whistleblower. In 2001, Bob Kerrey, a former U.S. senator (D-NE) and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, admitted to killing women and children during a 1969 U.S. Navy SEAL mission in the Mekong Delta, stating, “I have not been able to justify what we did . . . morally.” Roger Chapman See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; American Exceptionalism; Cold War; Human Rights; Nixon, Richard; Stone, Oliver; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam War; War Protesters; Whistleblowers.
Further Reading Bilton, Michael, and Kevin Sim. Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Viking, 1992. Herbert, Anthony B., with James T. Wooten. Soldier. New York: Dell, 1973. Hersh, Seymour. Cover-Up. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Olson, James S., and Randy Roberts. My Lai: A Brief History with Documents. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998. Sherman, Scott. “The Other My Lai.” Nation, March 1, 2004.
N a d e r, R a l p h As a consumerist and citizens’ advocate, Ralph Nader has long fought for tougher federal regulations to address automobile safety, work hazards, air and water pollution, tainted meat, food additives, product labeling, whistleblower protection, public access to government records, and so on. Conservatives and libertarians have faulted Nader for demonizing corporations while promoting the growth of government bureaucracy. Some critics have also denigrated Nader as a self-appointed gadfly, although over the years he has had an extensive base of support, albeit a liberal one. Up until the 2000 presidential election Nader was generally esteemed by progressives and even moderate Democrats, but that relationship soured after his third-party candidacy was blamed for facilitating George W. Bush’s defeat of Al Gore. Since then many of his once former supporters have vilified Nader as a political curmudgeon and ideological purist. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Ralph Nader was born on February 27, 1934, in Winsted, Connecticut. He studied government and economics at Princeton University (BA, 1955) and attended Harvard Law School (LLB, 1958). After graduation he served as a cook in the U.S. Army (1959), traveled overseas (1959–1961), taught history and government at the University of Hartford (1961–1963), and worked on the staff of Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1964). He then gained national attention with the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965). After a short stint teaching law at Princeton University (1967–1968), Nader began his public advocacy work, founding the Center for the Study of Responsive Law (1969) as well as other publicinterest groups, and serving as director of Public Citizen (1971–1980). On four occasions Nader ran for president of the United States as a third-party candidate (1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008). Haunted by an accident scene he came across in which a little girl in the car crash had been decapitated by a glove-box door, Nader during his last year of law school wrote an essay entitled “American Cars: Designed for Death,” which appeared in the Harvard Law Record. The following year he expanded on that topic in the Nation magazine with the article “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy.” That led to the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, which critiqued the design hazards of the Chevrolet Corvair and indicted the Detroit auto executives for callous disregard of automobile safety at a time when there were 50,000 annual traffic fatalities. In response to the public outcry
generated by Nader’s best-seller, Congress in 1966 conducted hearings on auto safety, requesting the author’s testimony. This led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966), which established the Highway Traffic Safety Administration and mandated seat belts and safety glass in windshields. General Motors had sought to discredit Nader, hiring private detectives to investigate his past, tap his phones, and entrap him with prostitutes. When this failed scheme came to light, federal lawmakers became ever more convinced to pass automobile safety legislation. Nader sued the company for violating his privacy and in 1970 accepted an out-of-court settlement of $284,000, using much of the proceeds for seed money in establishing consumerist organizations, such as the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). Nader was a reformer, not a revolutionary, and his approach was to emphasize research and reporting as opposed to demonstrations and civil disobedience. Young people joined Nader’s cause, establishing PIRG chapters on many college campuses and developing a network nicknamed “Nader’s Raiders.” Public Citizen, Nader’s umbrella organization, has been credited with being a driving force behind the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (1970), the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (1972). Nader’s public influence, however, was already waning by the time of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. This period was characterized by the undermining of the federal agencies and regulations that Nader’s organizations had fought to establish. Heading the regulatory bodies were political appointees who saw their role as curtailing government while aiding commerce. The succeeding decade continued to be disappointing for Nader as President Bill Clinton charted a centrist course, virtually ignoring the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. At a time when Nader was expressing concern that multinational corporations were violating worker rights and environmental protections with impunity, Clinton led the United States in accepting the North American Free Trade Agreement (1993) and joining the World Trade Organization (1994). During the 1970s Nader had turned down invitations to run for president as a third-party candidate, but his attitude changed by the 1990s as he came to regard the Democratic Party as having become “Demopublican.” He was a “none of the above” presidential candidate in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, but his first major run for president occurred four years later as a Green Party candidate tallying a mere 0.7 percent of the popular vote. In 2000, he increased his showing to 2.7 percent of the national total, in the process gathering 97,421 votes in Florida, where the election was ultimately decided by only 537 votes. Certain Nader had thrown the election to the Republicans, the normally staid Michael Dukakis 380
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at the time stated that he would “strangle the guy with my bare hands.” In his account of the 2000 election, Crashing the Party (2002), Nader further alienated Democrats by indicating no remorse. Nader’s 2004 and 2008 presidential bids as a Reform Party candidate generated scant public support. Roger Chapman See also: Automobile Safety; Clinton, Bill; Democratic Party; Election of 2000; Environmental Movement; Freedom of Information Act; Genetically Modified Foods; Globalization; Occupational Safety; Third Parties; Whistleblowers.
Further Reading Burt, Dan M. Abuse of Trust: A Report on Ralph Nader’s Network. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1982. Marcello, Patricia Cronin. Ralph Nader: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Martin, Justin. Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002. Nader, Ralph. Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002. ———. The Ralph Nader Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000. Young, Charles M. “Crashing the Party.” Rolling Stone, September 14, 2000.
Nation, The The oldest weekly magazine in the United States (founded in 1865), the Nation is known for independent but generally leftist, often dissenting, views on government, society, and culture. Although circulation increased from 20,000 (1970s) to more than 173,000 (2004), the magazine has often faced financial crises, forcing negotiations between strong-minded editors and wealthy publishers. In pieces by the likes of Wendell Phillips Garrison, Edward Godkin, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James, and W.E.B. Du Bois to those by Martin Luther King, Jr., Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman, Lani Guinier, Jonathan Schell, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Nation has commented forcefully on presidential impeachments, wars, and the persistent issues of race, class, and gender. It also has fostered controversy within its own pages among editors, columnists, and correspondents. Vital interests in international affairs (especially the Middle East), environmentalism, and the arts round out the Nation’s critiques of changing American culture. In the 1950s, when the magazine was facing declining circulation and constant conflict with Joseph McCarthy (New York City schools banned the magazine), West Coast correspondent Carey McWilliams assumed a
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central editorial role. Famous for his defense of migrant workers, McWilliams revitalized the publication with contributions from intellectuals like C. Wright Mills, Marxist historians, and new foreign commentators while creating dialogues between traditional leftists and emergent New Left voices. During his tenure as editor from 1950 to 1975, the magazine, in editorials and articles, called for mercy for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, despite their conviction for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; expressed disapproval over Levittown policies denying the sale of homes to blacks; deplored CIA activities in Cuba; endorsed the March on Washington in 1963; condemned California governor Ronald Reagan for suggesting that a “bloodbath” might be necessary for ending campus violence; and criticized the U.S. bombing campaign in the Vietnam War. Before becoming the publisher in 1995, Victor Navasky, editor from 1978 to 1994, steered the magazine through financial and political crises alongside other liberals including Paul Newman and E.L. Doctorow. The Nation Institute, founded in 1966, offers programs, internships, and awards for creative citizenship. Cruises, local conversation groups, and unique personal ads also cement the Nation’s reputation as both a human and media community of influence and liberal dissent. Under Navasky’s successor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the magazine adamantly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and broke the Valerie Plame leak story (pertaining to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq) in 2003. The Nation ran articles on corruption, mismanagement, and environmental issues throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, without excusing the perceived weakness or “cowardice” among Democrats and other opposition factions. Meanwhile, right-wing critics charged both the magazine and its contributors with being anti-American. Gary W. McDonogh See also: Bush Family; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Ehrenreich, Barbara; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; McCarthyism; Migrant Labor; New Left; Niebuhr, Reinhold; Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Said, Edward; Thompson, Hunter S.; Vidal, Gore.
Further Reading Horowitz, Irving Louis. “Shaping the Nation Magazine.” Sewanee Review 113:4 (Fall 2005): 648–54. McWilliams, Carey. The Education of Carey McWilliams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Nation Web site. www.thenation.com. Navasky, Victor. A Matter of Opinion. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Navasky, Victor, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, eds. The Best of the Nation: Selections From the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000.
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Nation of Islam
Nation of Islam The Nation of Islam, a black separatist organization whose members are known as Black Muslims, was founded by Wallace D. Fard in the early 1930s and grew under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad from the 1930s until his death in 1975. During the early 1960s, its most visible spokesperson was Malcolm X. The original organization was transformed into a more orthodox movement of Sunni Islam under Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace D. Muhammad. Resisting these changes, a splinter group led by Louis Farrakhan formed in the 1970s and retained the principles and name of the original organization. The two groups reconciled in 2000. In both forms, the Nation of Islam has rejected the integrationist doctrine of the civil rights movement, stressing black self-sufficiency and discipline, and the “evils” of white, “racist” America. The Nation of Islam drew its inspiration from nineteenth-century Pan-Africanism and the African nationalism proclaimed by Marcus Garvey in the early twentieth century. The Black Muslim movement owes its origin to Fard, or Fard Muhammad, a door-to-door silk peddler who hawked his wares and ideology in Depression-era Detroit. There he established the first Temple of Islam, its educational arms—the University of Islam and the Muslim Girls Training Class—and a paramilitary unit called the Fruit of Islam. Fard taught that American blacks are the descendents of a virtuous race of gods, members of the primordial tribe of Shabazz, and that, in rebellion against Allah, an evil renegade scientist called Yakub formed white people (“blue-eyed devils”) through genetic manipulation. Although whites have taken over the world, Fard explained, their 6,000-year reign expired in 1914, and the return of Allah in the person of Fard marks the process of resurrection of black people from a state of mental death. Elijah Poole, the son of a Baptist preacher, became Fard’s prophet and messenger, Elijah Muhammad, and led the movement after Fard’s disappearance in 1934. Muhammad was imprisoned for over three years during World War II on draft evasion charges, and jails and prisons became important recruiting grounds for the Nation of Islam. Its teachings offered an explanation for the racism and exploitation experienced by black inmates, also giving them the dignity, hope, and discipline needed to straighten out their lives. The most famous prison convert was Malcolm Little, renamed Malcolm X by Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm quickly established himself as the group’s foremost proselytizer and organizer of the 1960s. As minister of the Boston temple, he recruited Louis Walcott, later renamed Louis Farrakhan. Along with such groups as the Black Panther Party, the Black Muslims became media representatives of black nationalist rejection of white American values. In contrast, the media portrayed the
nonviolent civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr., as moderate, peaceful, and Christian. Relations between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad became strained in the early 1960s. Malcolm objected to Muhammad’s extramarital relations with his secretaries. Muhammad officially silenced Malcolm following the latter’s statement that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy had been “a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” Further, Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca convinced him that according to Islam, white people were not inherently evil. When Malcolm broke with the organization in 1964, he was vilified in the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. On February 21, 1965, assassins from the Newark mosque murdered Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Malcolm X was not the only antagonist from within the Nation of Islam. Elijah’s seventh son, Wallace D. Muhammad, had grown estranged from his father. During a three-year imprisonment, Wallace had studied traditional Sunni Islamic teachings and rejected key Nation of Islam doctrines, such as his father’s quasi-divine status as prophet and messenger of Allah, and the deity of Wallace Fard. Despite a series of expulsions from and returns to the fold, Wallace was anointed as the new leader of the Nation of Islam upon the death of his father in 1975 and quickly began transforming the group into an orthodox Muslim organization. He reinterpreted Fard and Elijah’s doctrines as masterful teachings designed to prepare black Americans for the truth of traditional Islam. He changed his name to Warith Deen Muhammad and moved the organization away from its radical anti-Americanism and racial separatism. The organization was renamed the World Community of al-Islam in the West (and later the American Muslim Mission). Warith’s transition to the mainstream was signaled by his invitation to offer the prayer of invocation before the U.S. Senate in 1992. The rapid transformation of the Nation of Islam led to membership losses, the revelation of grave financial problems, and the formation of a number of splinter organizations. Most significant was the resurrected Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan, whose supporters point to anecdotal evidence suggesting that he was Elijah’s true choice as successor. In November 1977, Farrakhan openly announced that he would reestablish the Nation of Islam in a form faithful to Elijah Muhammad’s teachings. Farrakhan maintained the original rhetoric of racial separatism and moral uplift and demonstrated the appeal of the new Nation of Islam to ghetto culture, drawing gang members and rap musicians into its orbit. Farrakhan supported the campaign of Jesse Jackson for nomination as the 1984 Democratic presidential candidate. When news reports revealed that Jackson had made anti-Jewish remarks, Farrakhan came to the candidate’s defense, referring to Judaism as a “dirty” religion. Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism was thereafter emphasized by the
National A ssoc iation for the Advancement of Colored People
media. But the success of the 1995 Million Man March, a rally of black men in Washington, D.C., to foster black unity, self-respect, and personal responsibility, more strongly established the Nation of Islam as a voice for the concerns of the African-American community at large. Since the 1980s, however, the Nation of Islam has been the only widely acknowledged black separatist voice in public discourse. Steve Young See also: Afrocentrism; Anti-Semitism; Black Panther Party; Civil Rights Movement; Farrakhan, Louis; Jackson, Jesse; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Million Man March; Muslim Americans; Race.
Further Reading Marsh, Clifton E. From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Resurrection, Transformation, and Change of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America, 1930–1995. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1996. Ogbar, Jeffrey O.G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African-American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Walker, Dennis. Islam and the Search for African-American Nationhood: Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2005.
National A ssociation for the Ad v a n c e m e n t o f C o l o r e d People Founded in 1905 by a group of black intellectuals led by W.E.B. Du Bois, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—now the oldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization—has been at the forefront of the culture wars in its long struggle to destroy the sociopolitical underpinnings of racial discrimination. As an activist organization, the NAACP directs legal and social campaigns designed to help African Americans and other marginalized groups by promoting racial equality, securing justice in the courts, fostering suffrage, and advancing education and employment opportunities. After World War II ended, the NAACP, which in 1945 had a membership of 450,000 (including 150,000 in its chapters in the South), worked to dismantle Jim Crow laws throughout the South and end school desegregation. White southerners viewed the growing NAACP rolls and the corresponding militancy of NAACP members as direct threats to the long-standing racial order of the South. NAACP spokespersons were typically characterized as outside radicals who, unaware of southern customs, were upsetting the amicable relations that blacks and whites had established since Emancipation.
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During the 1950s, the NAACP won some major victories. Its Legal Defense Fund, under the direction of Thurgood Marshall, challenged the long-standing doctrine of “separate but equal” and convinced the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that racial segregation in schools is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The following year, Rosa Parks, a local NAACP leader, initiated the Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott, sparking the modern civil rights movement. NAACP headquarters, local branches, and associated youth councils worked alongside other organizations during this period to challenge and eradicate Jim Crow as a formal legal impediment to black equality. By the 1960s, numerous activists in the civil rights movement began to question the NAACP’s tactics. Younger activists, wishing for speedier results, regarded the NAACP as overly cautious and conservative. They called into question the association’s tendency toward legal activism, economic boycotts, and political coalition building, arguing that such methods were too indirect and nonthreatening to white supremacy. Indeed, protest policies were largely shaped by the middle- and upperclass status of the organization’s older leadership, while the younger radicals who were willing to confront Jim Crow head-on by staging sit-ins accused their seniors of being complacent and acquiescent. The young radicals of the sixties found NAACP officials’ willingness to work with local, state, and federal government to bring about change as a sign that their elders had “sold out” to the establishment. Black nationalist leaders such as the Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X made similar complaints, chiding the NAACP and other civil rights organizations’ belief in civil disobedience as ineffective in battling virulent racists. Cold War politics presented further complications for the NAACP. Opponents charged the association with communist influences and infiltration during the height of McCarthyism. NAACP leaders were forced into silence when outspoken socialists such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois (who had long since left the organization) were targeted in communist witch hunts. The labeling of virtually all civil rights activists as potential or actual communists hindered the NAACP’s aggressiveness, thus reinforcing the young black activists’ impression that the association had lost its radical edge. Nonetheless, the cornerstones of the NAACP’s agenda—legal advocacy and legislative lobbying—led to significant courtroom and congressional victories. As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund continued to win key cases after Brown, the NAACP’s office in Washington, D.C., headed by Clarence Mitchell, Jr., helped secure passage of the monumental Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968.
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Despite the gains in racial equality that stemmed directly from the efforts of the organization, the prestige of the NAACP declined. The loss of influence was exacerbated by widely publicized internal conflicts and the overwhelming persistence of black poverty and unemployment, de facto segregation, job discrimination, police brutality, and the failures of school desegregation. By the 1970s and 1980s, such social problems seemed insurmountable under the conservative ideologies and policies of President Ronald Reagan. As government funding for social programs was severely reduced, blighted urban spaces and their residents found little protection in the NAACP. During the 1990s, as the organization faced financial problems, two of its leading officials were accused of fiscal improprieties. The NAACP rebounded, however, reestablishing its financial integrity and activist agenda under the leadership of Kweisi Mfume, a former U.S. representative (D-MD). The Legal Defense Fund continued to be active, offering legal support for the University of Michigan affirmative action cases that were heard by the Supreme Court in 2003. Meanwhile, the NAACP focused its energies on economic development and educational opportunities for black youth. It has openly opposed school vouchers, arguing that “school choice” programs will not result in quality education for all children but will lead to increased educational apartheid. The organization also redirected its attention to gun control legislation, women’s and gay rights, racial profiling, and black political participation as well as the issue of voting disfranchisement. The NAACP was directly involved in investigating alleged voting improprieties in the 2000 presidential election, placing it at odds with President George W. Bush. From 2001 to 2005, Bush refused to address the annual meeting of the NAACP, becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover to snub the invitation, and accused the association of being overly harsh and critical. In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service began an investigation of the NAACP’s tax-exempt status as a result of a speech given by the group’s chair, Julian Bond, in which he openly criticized the president. Subsequently, Bush met with NAACP leaders and addressed the 2006 NAACP national meeting. Despite the challenges and changing sociopolitical tides throughout its existence, the NAACP finds itself at the core of the nation’s culture wars in the twenty-first century. Robert S. Smith See also: Affirmative Action; Black Panther Party; Black Radical Congress; Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Busing, School; Civil Rights Movement; Du Bois, W.E.B.; McCarthyism; Nation of Islam; Parks, Rosa; School Vouchers; Voting Rights Act.
Further Reading Berg, Manfred. “The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Participation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Cortner, Richard C. A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Greenberg, Jack. Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Kellogg, Charles F. NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Vose, Clement E. Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.
National Endow ment for the Ar ts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent federal agency that provides grants in support of the visual, literary, and performing arts. A lightning rod in the culture wars, the NEA has long been opposed by political conservatives who think government funding of the arts is a bad idea in general. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NEA came under attack for sponsoring what critics regarded as “offensive” art. The NEA is a legacy of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It was established in September 1965 as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, with the mission “to foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in the United States and to broaden public access to the arts.” With that mandate, the NEA in its first forty years awarded more than 120,000 grants totaling $3.9 billion and has been a major force in the establishment of regional arts organizations, including theater, ballet, and opera companies, symphony orchestras, and museums. As annual funding of the NEA grew over the years—from $2.8 million at its inception to a peak of $175.9 million in 1992—fiscal conservatives bristled over what they called “cultural welfare.” Proponents of public funding of the arts, however, emphasize the economic benefits. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, they point out, the arts contributed $37 billion annually to the national economy, returning $3.5 billion in taxes. NEA supporters also note that federal grants to the arts are more than matched by donations from the private sector.
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From New Deal to Great Society Federal funding of the arts originated with President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although that New Deal program ended in 1943, various members of Congress in subsequent years floated bills for establishing a national arts program. Since some WPA projects, including public murals and plays, had been leftist in political orientation, conservatives were ambivalent about reviving arts funding. The Cold War eventually became a rationale for a federal arts program because of the desire to contrast American values, most notably freedom of expression, with those of the totalitarian Soviet Union. President Harry Truman in 1951 requested a report on the national arts, which was released two years later during the Eisenhower administration. In the meantime, art funds were appropriated for cultural presentations overseas. In 1955, Eisenhower recommended a Federal Advisory Committee on the Arts, but stressed that it should not dispense grants. During the Kennedy administration, a commissioned report by August Heckscher, director of the Twentieth Century Fund, recommended the creation of an Advisory Arts Council and the establishment of a National Arts Foundation for issuing federal grants to private organizations and state arts councils. In June 1963, acting on the Heckscher report, President Kennedy issued an executive order for establishing a national council on the arts. The federal government, Kennedy argued, “surely has a significant part to play in helping establish the conditions in which art can flourish.” If government can encourage science, he added, likewise it ought to encourage the arts. Although Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 halted momentum for the council he proposed, Congress in mid-1964 approved the National Council of the Arts, albeit without funding for grants. In 1965, Johnson followed up with legislation that would fund both the arts and the humanities. The Republican Policy Committee opposed the bill, arguing that the arts and humanities were already “thriving” and would continue to do so provided the “deadening hand of federal bureaucracy” was kept away. Over such objections, the NEA, with Roger Stevens as founding chairman (1965–1969), was established.
From Nixon to Reagan To the surprise of many, the NEA budget under the Nixon and Ford administrations expanded by 1,400 percent. With Nancy Hanks as chair (1969–1977), the NEA budget grew from $8.2 million in 1970 to $123 million in 1978, leading critics to suggest that Nixon had used the NEA to help soften his public image. By 1974, however, conservative senator Jesse Helms (RNC) was calling into question a $15,000 NEA grant to “a person named Erica Jong so that she could produce
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a reportedly filthy, obscene book called Fear of Flying.” Prior to that, there had been criticism of writer George Plimpton, another individual grant recipient, for the kinds of material he was compiling in a series of literary anthologies—one short story with a graphic sex scene was, at the urging of Hanks, excised from the third volume. The NEA during the Carter administration was stirred by a populism-elitism controversy. With Livingston L. Biddle, Jr., as chair (1977–1981), the NEA “decentralized” art funding by allocating half its grants to traditional American arts. This led to the establishment of the Folk Arts Program (1978) and the National Heritage Fellowships (1980), which came largely at the expense of programs geared to Western European classical arts. Critics accused Carter of politicizing the NEA by having funds spread around geographically, arguing that projects of higher artistic merit were being passed over. Carter supporters disagreed, charging that the Ivy League elitists of cosmopolitan New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles were just sulking. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan pledged that he would end the politicization of the arts. When Reagan entered the White House, his goal was to replace the NEA with a privatized corporation divested of public funding. Friend and fellow actor Charlton Heston was appointed co-chair of a task force to study public funding of the arts, but to Reagan’s chagrin, the commission stopped short of recommending the abolition of the NEA. During his first year as president, Reagan reduced arts funding from $158.7 million to $143.4 million—considerably less than his original proposal to slash the NEA budget by 51 percent. The tenure of NEA chair Francis S.M. “Frank” Hodsoll (1981–1989) brought a 28 percent increase in challenge monies, an effort to increase private giving. Under Reagan, interestingly, the pomp and pageantry of the NEA was expanded with the establishment of the annual National Medal of Arts (for outstanding artists) and the Presidential Design Awards (for federal projects). In 1985, the National Academy Awards presented the NEA with its own award, a special citation for twenty years of support of the arts. By 1989, the final year of Reagan’s second term, the NEA budget had grown to $169 million. That same year, Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson called the NEA “a highbrow pork barrel.”
The Helms Amendment Fiscal conservatives were in a conundrum because their desire to eliminate the NEA was kept in check by the elites who often supported conservative candidates but at the same time were major benefactors of the arts. This constituency, generally representative of the corporate sector, came to view the NEA as an essential partner in the arts. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, critics
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of the NEA, generally conservative Republicans, began shifting their arguments from fiscal concerns to moral ones, focusing attention on “offensive” art that had been funded by tax dollars. In 1984, Congressman Mario Biaggi (D-NY) protested a NEA-sponsored production of Verdi’s Rigoletto because of references to the Italian Mafia. Biaggi proposed an amendment to the NEA funding bill prohibiting grant recipients from using their work to “denigrate any ethnic, racial, religious or minority group”; the amendment was not passed. The following year, Texas Republican congressmen Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and Steve Bartlett protested the NEA’s sponsorship of “pornographic” poetry. The trio introduced an amendment to limit future arts funding to projects of “significant literary, scholarly, cultural or artistic merit” that are “reflective of exceptional taste.” This amendment was passed. The NEA under President George H.W. Bush faced a political crisis in 1989. Outrage was directed against Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in yellow urine. The artist had been a recipient of a $15,000 subgrant from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which had received its funding from the NEA. Around the same time, homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, part of a retrospective collection titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, were on a travel exhibit sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, made possible by a $30,000 NEA grant. The fact that Mapplethorpe, a homosexual artist, had recently died of AIDS, only added to the drama. Numerous members of Congress condemned the Serrano photograph, most notably Senator Alphonse D’Amato (R-NY) and Helms. In their letter of protest to the NEA, signed by a number of other colleagues, including Democratic Senator John Kerry (D-MA), they argued, “This matter does not involve freedom of artistic expression—it does involve the question whether American taxpayers should be forced to support such trash.” Meanwhile, in June 1989, officials at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., decided to cancel the Mapplethorpe exhibit rather than put in jeopardy its annual federal funding of $300,000. To protest what they regarded as an act of censorship, many artists withdrew their exhibits from the Corcoran and some benefactors withdrew monetary support. The Washington Project for the Arts, located down the street from the Corcoran, carried the Mapplethorpe exhibit, which in July was viewed by 50,000 visitors. The Religious Right, specifically Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, accused the NEA of supporting artwork that seeks to undermine Christian morality. Congress responded to the Serrano-Mapplethorpe
Members of the congressional Conservative Action Team, including Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX, at podium), call for the abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997. House Republicans slashed the NEA budget, citing “decency” issues. (Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/ Getty Images)
controversy in several ways. First, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) mounted a legislative effort to eliminate the NEA altogether; his bill was ultimately rejected. On July 26, Senator Helms introduced an amendment to the NEA appropriations bill prohibiting any future funding of “obscene” artwork. In September, the House and Senate rejected the Helms amendment by votes of 264–53 and 62–35, respectively. Instead, Congress passed Public Law 101–122, which incorporated some of the language of the Helms amendment, stipulating that NEA funds may not be used “to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which . . . may be considered obscene,” as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Sullivan (1973).
Continuing Controversies In 1990, Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, solo performing artists who would become known as the NEA Four, were rejected for NEA fellowships despite receiving recommendations from peer-review panels. The performances of these artists, three of them homosexual, focused on controversial themes, including the human body, abortion, AIDS, and sexual orientation. NEA chair John E. Frohnmayer (1989–1992) later admitted that his decision to decline funding for the four artists was based on decency standards. Later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), affirmed the constitutionality of the NEA to consider “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American people” in determining what art proposals to fund.
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In 1992, conservative Patrick Buchanan challenged President Bush on the NEA issue during the Republican presidential primary, arguing that the Serrano-Mapplethorpe crisis was proof that the incumbent was out of touch with the public. The criticism prompted Bush to ask his NEA chair, Frohnmayer, to resign. Buchanan ultimately endorsed the Bush candidacy, but at the same time delivered his famous “culture wars” speech at the Republican National Convention. During the presidential campaign that fall, Democratic candidate Bill Clinton—much like Reagan before him—accused his opponent of having politicized the NEA. President Clinton appointed actress Jane Alexander as chair of the NEA. During her tenure (1993–1997), Alexander reformed the process for issuing grants, shifting awards from nontraditional organizations to mainstream museums. In June 1994, a controversy erupted in response to a performance-artist show held in Minneapolis that featured Ron Athey, a homosexual who was HIV-positive, drawing blood from a fellow performer. In response to the Athey incident, Congress reduced the NEA budget by 2 percent. The following year, with Republicans in control of the House, the NEA budget was slashed from $162.3 million to $99.5 million, a 39 percent reduction. By 1997, moreover, Congress had become decidedly more active in its oversight of the NEA. Although the NEA budget increased in subsequent years—reaching $144.7 million in fiscal year 2008—its budget was still nearly $40 million less than what it was prior to the Serrano-Mapplethorpe scandal. NEA chair Dana Gioia, appointed in 2003 by President George W. Bush, declared his mission “to bring the agency beyond the culture wars to create an institution which Americans trust and esteem.” Under Gioia’s watch, Shakespeare festivals and jazz concerts were major NEA-sponsored events. Roger Chapman See also: Alexander, Jane; Censorship; Christian Coalition; Great Society; Helms, Jesse; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Literature, Film, and Drama; Mapplethorpe, Robert; Serrano, Andres; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Binkiewicz, Donna M. Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts 1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Brenson, Michael. Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of Visual Arts in America. New York: New Press, 2001. Jensen, Richard. “The Culture Wars, 1965–1995: A Historian’s Map.” Journal of Social History 29 (1995): 17–37. National Endowment for the Arts Web site. www.nea.gov. Zeigler, Joseph Wesley. Arts in Crisis: The National Endowment for the Arts versus America. Chicago: A Capella Books, 1994.
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National Endow ment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government founded in 1965—under the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, which also established the National Endowment for the Arts—to support research, education, and preservation programs in the humanities. The NEH pursues its mission chiefly by offering grants to cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, archives, colleges and universities, and public television and radio stations, as well as individual scholars and artists for research, writing projects, and media productions. According to the NEH, the humanities are vital to the nation in that they reveal “lessons of history” for gaining “wisdom” essential to a democratic republic. Beginning in the 1970s, political conservatives sharply criticized the NEH for sponsoring “leftist” programs and projects. During the 1980s and early 1990s, when Republican appointees were in control of the agency, liberals complained that the NEH was blocking innovative proposals for purely ideological reasons. The NEH was established in the midst of the Cold War, when it was argued that the arts and humanities, in addition to the sciences, should be enlisted in the campaign against world communism. In the first thirtyfive years of its existence, the NEH sponsored a total of 58,000 projects, issuing grants worth $3.72 billion while generating $1.63 billion in private donations. The NEH sponsored a wide range of projects, including a traveling exhibition of the treasures of King Tut’s tomb, Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series on the U.S. Civil War, the Papers of George Washington (projected to be ninety volumes when completed in 2016), and a number of research projects that led to award-winning books. The NEH has also appropriated $370 million to regional projects, including studies of the South and the Great Plains. Its American newspaper project had microfilmed 63.3 million pages of newsprint by the early 2000s, with a longer-term effort to convert the material into digital format and make it available online. Of the appointed chairpersons since the body’s inception—Barnaby C. Kenney (1966–1970), Ronald S. Berman (1971–1977), Joseph D. Duffey (1977–1981), William J. Bennett (1981–1985), Lynne V. Cheney (1986–1993), Sheldon Hackney (1993–1997), William R. Ferris (1997–2001), and Bruce Cole (2001–2009)— the two most controversial were those appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Bennett and Cheney, who saw it as their task to reel in the NEH and keep it from supporting liberal perspectives. In his book The De-Valuing of America (1992), Bennett devotes the first chapter, titled “The Fight Begins: Identifying the Enemy,” to the NEH. The “enemy,”
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according to Bennett, is a liberal academic elite whose disdain for traditional morality, patriotism, and the American Dream has left it out of touch with the pulse of the nation—and who ought not be eligible for NEH funding. Bennett was thus dismayed to learn that his agency, through the Wisconsin Humanities Committee, had sponsored a documentary film by the International Women’s Project, titled From the Ashes . . . Nicaragua Today (1982), that was sympathetic to the left-wing Sandinista rebels of Nicaragua. Bennett denounced the film, which later won an Emmy, as “unabashed socialist realist propaganda” and informed the heads of the state humanities councils that under his charge they were not to endorse “partisan” works. Cheney’s debut began with an attack on The Africans (1986), a nine-part NEH-supported film that linked the problems of modern Africa to the legacies of Western colonialism. Calling the documentary an “anti-Western diatribe,” Cheney demanded that the agency be removed from the film’s credits, despite the $600,000 in NEH funding. Scorning academic approaches to the humanities from the perspective of gender, race, and class, Cheney insisted that analysis should be based on “truths that pass beyond time and circumstance” and that the field not be reduced to texts about “politics” and “social power.” Cheney thus was accused of stacking the cards against liberal scholars, especially multiculturalists and feminists, who applied for NEH funding. Defenders, emphasizing the stiff competition, accused losing applicants of sour grapes. Indeed, in 1991, only 1,776 projects were financed out of a total 8,132 applications. Even so, the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed some NEH insiders who acknowledged that proposals were screened for political considerations. Cheney, like Bennett, deplored colleges and universities for deemphasizing the traditional Western canon and tended to back more traditional proposals. In her book Telling the Truth (1995), Cheney casts herself as a cultural warrior who as NEA chair suffered attacks from those who were politically biased, unfair, and irrational. Cheney’s successor, Hackney, led an initiative known as A National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity (1994–1997), whose goal was to carry out President Bill Clinton’s vision: “We must find in our diversity our common humanity.” Hackney later wrote that some perceived the initiative as “a bugle call—for cultural war.” Instead, he insisted, he wanted to create conditions for fostering a “civil society.” Conservatives accused Hackney of attempting to impose a multicultural ideology, while liberals accused him of seeking to impose a melting pot ideology. Conservative columnist George Will pooh-poohed the idea of a national conversation, stating, “Subsidizing talk about diversity today is akin to subsidizing crabgrass: the problem is a surplus, not a shortage.” The project moved forward at a cost of
$7.3 million, involving citizen groups, state humanities councils, and college campuses, and was the subject of the PBS documentary Talk to Me: Americans in Conversation (1997). In the meantime, both Cheney and Bennett recommended that the NEH be abolished, suggesting that the agency was beyond redemption. After Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, the House Budget Committee voted to eliminate the NEH, and the Senate Budget Committee voted to reduce its budget by 50 percent. The agency survived, but funding fell from $152 million to $93 million in just one year (1995 to 1996). Ferris, the next NEH chair, deplored the cuts, stating, “Where is the peace dividend if we win the Cold War but lose the battle for our souls?” After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the NEH under Cole initiated a program called We the People, which focused on American history and culture. “Our tolerance, our principles, our wealth, and our liberties have made us targets,” Cole declared in a 2003 speech. “To understand this conflict, we need the humanities.” Cole went on to assert that it was a matter of national security for Americans to overcome “amnesia” about their history and culture. In 2004, the NEH announced that the review process for grant proposals would no longer include assessments by independent specialists, a decision critics interpreted as ideology triumphing over quality. By 2006, the NEH budget stood at $141 million. Roger Chapman See also: Afrocentrism; Bennett, William J.; Cheney Family; Great Books; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; National Endowment for the Arts; Reagan, Ronald; Revisionist History; September 11; Will, George.
Further Reading Cheney, Lynne V. Telling the Truth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Hackney, Sheldon. One America Indivisible: A National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1997. Miller, Stephen. Excellence and Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. National Endowment for the Humanities Web site. www.neh.gov. Rediscovering America: Thirty-Five Years of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 2000.
National Organization for Wo m e n Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and efforts
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by John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (1963) to document the lives of women in postwar American society, a group of feminists attending a conference in June 1966 in Washington, D.C., founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). The organization, which included activists with backgrounds largely in the labor movement, focused initially on legal and political efforts to achieve gender equality in employment, education, and the media. The group’s attack on sexual discrimination represented a controversial challenge to the notion of fixed, distinct, traditional gender roles that dominated American society at the height of the Cold War. Its success in such areas as lobbying the federal government to use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to fight sexual discrimination in employment made NOW one of the most visible and enduring expressions of the rebirth of American feminism. As of 2007, the organization had more than half a million contributing members and 550 chapters across the United States. In addition to criticism from social conservatives that NOW was irrelevant, or even dangerous, the liberal feminists who formed the organization also increasingly drew opposition from radical feminists in the women’s liberation movement. While NOW relied on the efforts of middle-class, educated white women such as Friedan (its first president) to work for women’s rights, radical feminism often centered on younger women more interested in consciousness raising and revolutionary challenges to patriarchy than liberal reform. While some conflicts were irreparable, the tension between NOW and radical feminism also resulted in NOW’s eventual attention to issues such as the civil rights of lesbians, abortion rights, and the struggles of working-class women and women of color. By the late 1970s, NOW activists combined support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) with recognition that the personal was indeed political for American women. The result was a polarizing critique of American society that addressed issues related to marriage, family, violence, and sexuality. As NOW forged a modern American feminism, addressing gender equality in public and private life, political and social conservatives countered with their own organizations—such as Women Who Want to Be Women (WWWW), Happiness of Home Eternal (HOME), and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Conservatives from the New Right targeted NOW as a dangerous threat to American families and “traditional values,” and, by the 1980s, antifeminism contributed to the ascendancy of the Republican Party. Conservative opponents associated NOW with the supposed cultural excesses of the 1960s, and, despite the fact that millions of American women created professional and personal lives that spoke to the ongoing struggle for gender equality, “feminism” increasingly became a pejorative term. Results of the backlash included the demise of the ERA in 1982, the increased erosion of support for
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abortion rights and affirmative action, and a measurable gender gap among American voters in the last decades of the twentieth century. Rather than simply a battle between men and women, the continuing conflict over the role of NOW and feminism in American life became a protracted struggle over competing cultural ideals. Richard L. Hughes See also: Abortion; Affirmative Action; Civil Rights Movement; Equal Rights Amendment; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Gay Rights Movement; Gender-Inclusive Language; Lesbians; Ms.; Schlafly, Phyllis.
Further Reading Critchlow, Ronald. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage, 1980. National Organization for Women Web site. www.now.org. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000. Rymph, Catherine. Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
National Public Radio National Public Radio (NPR) is a nonprofit, publicly and privately funded media organization that produces and distributes radio programs to affiliate stations in the United States, providing an alternative to commercial broadcasting. While the organization does not broadcast a radio signal itself, NPR can be heard on more than 800 local radio stations in all fifty states. In the culture war controversy that surrounds NPR, the organization is variously described as either too liberal or not liberal enough in its reporting of the news. In the ongoing debate, economic and political actors take aim at NPR as a federally funded organization and create different political goals for it. Established in 1970 and initiating broadcasts the following year on ninety charter public radio stations, NPR has grown significantly as a media distributor over the years. In NPR’s first three decades of operation, its number of listeners climbed from tens of thousands to more than 26 million per week. Throughout its existence, NPR has struggled to reach diverse audiences and attain financial security. In 1983, however, it fell $7 million into debt after attempting to expand into other markets. Pacific Radio International and American Public Media, both rivals to NPR in public radio, gained from NPR’s overstretch and found a stable niche in the market. Cur-
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rently, NPR receives its funding from corporate gifts and grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the U.S. government, and other organizations. A third source of funding is the affiliate stations themselves, which pay their dues by holding on-air membership pledge drives. In 2004, NPR received a bequest of $236 million from the estate of Joan B. Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. The main branches of NPR are located in Washington, D.C., and Culver City, California, with nineteen smaller bureaus around the country and sixteen international offices. NPR has repeatedly found itself in the middle of the culture wars, at the nexus of liberal and conservative politics. Conservatives have consistently attacked NPR, referred to by some as National Precious Radio, for being overtly liberal, framing stories to favor liberals in general and Democrats in particular. Through the early and mid-1990s, especially, conservative politicians and talk show hosts charged that NPR’s story selection and content were unequivocally liberal. At the helm of this attack was Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Larry Pressler of the Senate Commerce Committee (RSD), and popular conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Among their accusations was that conservatives were routinely identified as “conservatives,” but that liberals were never labeled as “liberals.” More broadly, conservatives took issue with NPR’s program content, which they claimed was favorable to liberal social issues such as abortion and gay rights, and charged that liberal issues and candidates were cast in a favorable light and conservative issues and candidates in a negative light. In 1995, with the help of fellow Republicans, Gingrich and Pressler attempted to amend a bill so as to halt federal support for NPR. Citing free-market principles, Gingrich lamented government funding for public-media outlets and asserted the need for free competition in public radio. NPR countered by mobilizing local station managers to complain to their elected representatives. Gingrich finally lost support, and the amendment to end public funding of NPR was defeated on the floor of the House. Conservatives remained wary of NPR as a credible news source. From the other end of the political spectrum, liberal critics have sometimes bemoaned NPR as an elitist institution that caters to the upper class. NPR’s cultural programming, say these critics, inordinately represents the interests of the wealthy. Statistically, NPR listeners are much more likely to be professionals, have advanced degrees, and earn higher incomes than the general American population. As a public media organization with government funding, however, it is said that NPR should be more representative of the nation as a whole and more interesting to more people. In addition, NPR accepts corporate funding in exchange for underwriting spots (“brought to you by”
messages), yet some critics maintain that NPR fails to report on the misdeeds of its corporate sponsors. While underwriting messages are not strictly advertisements, they do tell listeners who funds NPR and may have the same effect as advertisements. NPR remains one of the nation’s most prominent media distributors. During the early twenty-first century, it had two of the three most popular radio programs in the country with Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Ryan Gibb See also: Abortion; Federal Communications Commission; Gay Rights Movement; Gingrich, Newt; Hill, Anita; Irvine, Reed; Limbaugh, Rush; Media Bias; Murrow, Edward R.; Public Broadcasting Service; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Engleman, Ralph. Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. McCauley, Michael. NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. McCourt, Thomas. Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Mitchell, Jack W. Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. National Public Radio Web site. www.npr.org.
N a t i o n a l R ev i e w Launched in November 1955, the weekly (later biweekly) National Review has played a vital role in the emergence and definition of post–World War II American conservatism. Under the guidance of founder and longtime editor William F. Buckley, Jr., the magazine provided an important venue for the consolidation of diverse conservative perspectives. Throughout the Cold War, the National Review remained staunchly anticommunist, often supporting an aggressive, confrontational approach to the Soviet Union. During the Vietnam War era, it rejected the message of the antiwar movement and criticized U.S. policymakers for failing to take a hard-line approach to winning the conflict. In domestic affairs, the magazine championed a free-market perspective and rejected the bureaucratic and ever-expanding administrative state as epitomized by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Its opposition to civil rights legislation during the same period also highlighted the magazine’s opposition to extensive government intervention. While supporting integration in principle, its criticism of civil rights legislation rested on the perception of government’s general incompetence to remedy social ills. In another sign of its distrust of big government,
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the National Review enthusiastically supported the 1964 presidential campaign of conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. After his landslide defeat at the hands of Johnson, the magazine turned its attention to Ronald Reagan, who gained national prominence during the campaign. The magazine proceeded to support Reagan in his successful bid for the California governorship and, in 1980, for president of the United States. Read widely in the Reagan White House, the National Review had a formative influence on young conservatives in that administration. Buckley’s Catholic sensibility was also evident in the magazine from the outset, although it was not unusual for editorials to be critical of church leadership, including American bishops for their pastoral letters on war and peace, and the economy. The magazine was openly critical of Pope Paul VI for his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which reasserted the church’s prohibition on artificial birth control. After thirty-five years as editor in chief (1955– 1990), Buckley stepped down and was replaced by John O’Sullivan (1990–1998). It was not until 2004, however, that Buckley officially relinquished control of the magazine by giving his majority share to a selfselected board of trustees. Rich Lowry (1998–) assumed the position of editor in chief with the departure of O’Sullivan. Given its conservative perspective, the National Review has been a constant opponent of progressive intellectual and political movements and has taken criticism from them. At times, however, it has also been the object of disapproval by conservatives. Jeffrey Hart, a senior editor at the National Review, has subtly criticized the magazine for “downplaying conservative ideas and arguments of various conservative strands of thought” in favor of a reportorial and topical focus under the editorial leadership of Rich Lowry. A former trustee of the magazine, Austin Bramwell, criticized the magazine for abandoning its long-held conservative principles in support of President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Todd Scribner See also: Birth Control; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Bush Family; Catholic Church; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Goldwater, Barry; Reagan, Ronald; Soviet Union and Russia; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Bramwell, Austin. “Good-bye to All That.” American Conservative, November 20, 2006. Hart, Jeffrey. The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005. National Review Web site. www.nationalreview.com.
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National Rifle A ssociation On the 135th anniversary of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 2006, President Sandra S. Froman detailed the mission of the organization: to defend the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, support law and order and the national defense, train citizens in the safe handling and efficient use of small arms, promote shooting sports and competitions, and support hunter safety and hunting as a conservation activity. The primary focus of the NRA is protecting the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which guarantees “the right of the people to bear and keep arms”), characterized by Froman as “the cornerstone and guarantor of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.” Established following the Civil War, the NRA initially maintained close relationships with state and local governments, which provided assistance to the organization. With increasing urbanization, however, U.S. public officials began to place limitations on the ownership of firearms in order to limit their use in criminal activity. As the U.S. Congress passed gun control legislation (in 1934, 1938, 1968, and 1993), NRA officials intensified their opposition to government limitations on firearms ownership. A distinct cultural divide developed between those who support more extensive limitations on gun ownership and use, and those who regard firearms ownership as a crucial ingredient to a free society. The NRA regards the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—the federal agency responsible for enforcing firearms legislation— with suspicion and at times with outright hostility. For example, Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, denounced the “heavyhanded” enforcement techniques that ATF agents reportedly used in 2005 at gun shows in Richmond, Virginia. One group the NRA considers a major opponent is the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control, Inc.), in which James and Sarah Brady have been active for many years—James Brady, the former White House press secretary, was shot in 1981 during an assassination attempt on President Reagan and has been wheelchair bound ever since. Another opposition group to the NRA is the Violence Policy Center, directed by Josh Sugarmann, who has called for an outright ban on handguns. NRA leaders proudly declare that they campaigned successfully for the election of George W. Bush to the White House and a congressional majority (Republican) sympathetic to their cause (up until 2006). Following Senate ratification in 2005 and 2006 of President Bush’s two Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts, Jr., and Samuel Alito, the NRA leadership announced that, with one additional Bush appointment, a five-justice majority could decide that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms—this was
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of firearms, seek regulation of the firearms industry, a crackdown on the illegal gun market, the establishment of product safety standards for firearms, and enhanced authority of the ATF to enforce regulations pertaining to firearms. Nonetheless, the NRA, a well-funded organization with more than 3 million members, has, with some exceptions, succeeded in preventing the adoption of additional firearms restrictions. Whether gun control supporters can compete effectively with the NRA may depend on their ability to raise funds, appeal to public opinion, and lobby effectively at various levels of government. Glenn H. Utter See also: Conspiracy Theories; Gun Control; Judicial Wars; United Nations.
Further Reading Actor Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, addresses the group’s national convention in May 1999, following the Columbine (Colorado) High School shootings. Heston said gun owners were being unfairly blamed for the incident. (Mark Leffingwell/AFP/Getty Images)
realized in 2008 with the Supreme Court ruling District of Columbia v. Heller. Holding that self-protection is “the most basic human right of all,” NRA officials have lobbied state legislatures to pass right-to-carry laws, which allow residents to carry a concealed weapon outside the home. The organization claims that in states with rightto-carry laws, the incidence of murder, rape, and robbery has declined significantly. As of 2007, forty states had passed such laws. The NRA also worked for congressional passage of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (2005), a measure that prohibits lawsuits against firearm manufacturers and retailers for the criminal use of their products. Also, the NRA lobbied the Florida legislature to pass the “Castle Doctrine” law (2005), which establishes the right of citizens to defend themselves by using deadly force and eliminates the “duty to retreat” when faced with force outside the home and in a place they have a right to be. By May 2006, three other states had passed Castle Doctrine legislation In the international realm, Wayne LaPierre (executive vice president and CEO of the NRA) claimed that a well-funded group was attempting to persuade the United Nations to ratify an International Arms Trade Treaty that would restrict private ownership of firearms in the United States and establish gun control on a global basis. He urged gun rights supporters to oppose any UN action to regulate the firearms trade. Gun control supporters, claiming that the NRA disregards the suffering caused by the easy availability
Froman, Sandra S. “President’s Column.” American Rifleman, December 2005. ———. “President’s Column.” American Rifleman, June 2006. LaPierre, Wayne. The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the U.N. Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights. Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006. National Rifle Association Web site. www.nra.org. Sugarmann, Josh. Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns. New York: New Press, 2001. ———. National Rifle Association: Money, Power and Fear. Washington, DC: National Press, 1992.
Nelson, Willie Willie Nelson is an iconic country music songwriter and performer from Texas whose unmistakable tremolo voice enlivens his recordings of such genre classics as “On the Road Again” (1980), “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” (1978, with Waylon Jennings), and “Always on My Mind” (1982). One of the originators and leaders of the “outlaw” movement in country music, Nelson is also an outspoken figure outside the entertainment area, making his views known on such issues as drugs, factory farms, the environment, and the war in Iraq. Born William Hugh Nelson on April 30, 1933, in Abbott, Texas, he later dropped out of high school, served eight months in the air force (1950), and briefly attended Baylor University. Nelson’s early musical career took him far and wide before he finally settled in Nashville, Tennessee, in the late 1950s in search of stardom. Although he succeeded as a songwriter—penning “Crazy” (1961) for Patsy Cline, “Hello Walls” (1961) for Faron Young, and “Night Life” (1962) for Ray Price—the proprietors of the Nashville studios deemed Nelson’s voice (and face) to be too offbeat for the upscale crossover audience they
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sought. In the 1970s, Nelson relocated to Austin, Texas, where he acted as a catalyst in a regional “hippie-redneck” subculture and style referred to alternately as “cosmic cowboy,” “progressive country,” “outlaw country,” or “redneck rock.” During this period, he cemented the crossover audience Nashville claimed he would never find, appealing to a younger, countercultural demographic with the concept albums Yesterday’s Wine (1971), Shotgun Willie (1973), Phases and Stages (1974), The Red-Headed Stranger (1975), and Wanted: The Outlaws (1976). His “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” won the 1976 Grammy Award for best single. Nelson also went on to appear in a number of films, including Honeysuckle Rose (1980), which was based on his life. Significantly, Nelson’s deviation from the Nashville norm constituted a sartorial as well as an auditory rebellion. He grew his hair long, wearing it in braids, sported a beard, and presided over a group of like-minded artists—Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Jerry Jeff Walker, among others—who brought a 1960s sensibility to a musical genre that had often been critical of the counterculture movement. Curiously, Nelson succeeded in carrying his music to a new, younger, and politically progressive audience without alienating the core of his more traditional supporters. Nelson also began to establish himself as a political populist in these years, appearing with the likes of both George Wallace and Jimmy Carter. In 1980, he sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at the Democratic National Convention, leaving out the words “And the rocket’s red glare,” prompting Republicans to accuse him of performing while under the influence. In 1985, Nelson organized the Farm Aid concert series to publicize the agricultural crisis threatening America’s family-owned farms. From 1985 to 2006, the Farm Aid concerts raised $29 million for farmers. In 1990, the Internal Revenue Service indicted Nelson for failure to pay millions of dollars in taxes, further cementing his reputation as a rebel. During the 2000 election, Nelson voiced support for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, and in 2004, he was one of the higher-profile supporters of and fundraisers for the antiwar Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. As an environmentalist, he has promoted Willie Nelson Biodiesel (or “BioWillie”), made from vegetable oils and animal fats produced on American farms. As a pot smoker—in Willie (1988), his autobiography, the singer boasts of once smoking a joint on the roof of the White House, unbeknownst to President Carter—he is a critic of the war on drugs and a backer of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). He came into conflict with the retail giant Wal-Mart over the marijuana leaf that graces the cover of his reggae album, Countryman (2005). In recent years, he has recorded a song critical of the war in Iraq
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(“Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth,” 2004) and one documenting the phenomenon of gay cowboys (“Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” 2006). Nelson remains a singular figure in the culture wars, as he maintains strong ties all along the cultural and political spectrum. The song “Highwayman” (1985), sung with Jennings, Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash, appealed to the New Agers with its allusion to reincarnation. With the conservative country singer Toby Keith, Nelson recorded “Beer for My Horses” (2002), a seeming lament on lawlessness and the anxiety of modern society but one that romanticizes lynching. Nelson strikes a pose of creative freedom that can, at times, seem to place him above ideological wrangling, and he has been invoked on more than one occasion as a fitting symbol of the nation itself. Perhaps no moment better encapsulates this than his appearance on the celebrity telethon held in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, concluding the program by leading all participants in singing “America the Beautiful.” Thus, Willie Nelson’s career as an artist and activist reveals much about the course of the culture wars in America, even as he confounds many of the assumptions regarding the much discussed red state–blue state divide. Jason Mellard See also: Counterculture; Country Music; Factory Farms; Lynching; Nader, Ralph; New Age Movement; Red and Blue States; Redneck; September 11; Wal-Mart; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Malone, Bill. Country Music U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Nelson, Willie, with Bud Shrake. Willie: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Reid, Jan. The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Willie Nelson Official Web site. www.willienelson.com. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: New Press, 2005.
Neoconser vatism Neoconservatism, which emerged in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, emphasizes ideological constructs of freedom and democracy as the primary agent of historical change. This form of Americanism, neoconservatives believe, may be wielded like a weapon to destroy evil and injustice in the world. Conversely, neoconservatives promote constant vigilance at home, lest undesirable ideas corrupt American institutions and culture. As a result of this philosophical foundation, neoconservatives tend to favor an activist and interventionist
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foreign policy and domestic policies that promote order, security, and the national interest. Unlike traditional conservatives, neoconservatives do not have an aversion to big government. However, they reject the liberal commitment to using big government to foster equality and social justice. From the neoconservative perspective, a large, powerful government is necessary for maintaining order and security at home and for promoting American interests abroad. Although they tend to be somewhat more liberal on many domestic issues than traditional conservatives—or “paleoconservatives,” as the neoconservatives call them—they do not immerse themselves very deeply in domestic affairs. A sort of tacit agreement seems to have prevailed in which conservatives, mostly Republican in party affiliation, give social and religious conservatives sway over domestic questions, and the intellectual neoconservatives control foreign affairs.
European Origins The origins of neoconservatism can be traced to Europe, in particular Weimar Germany (1919–1933). After the conclusion of World War I, many young Germans believed that liberal democracy had sapped the vitality of the German state and German culture. By the mid-1920s, a right-leaning nationalist reaction, which to some extent presaged the rise of National Socialism (Nazism), had emerged. Reactionary thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, and Carl Schmitt rejected both Bolshevism and Western-style liberal democracy as manifestations of historicism, scientism, and a licentious relativism that had, in their view, begun with the Enlightenment. As Europe drew closer to war in the 1930s, Heidegger’s Jewish students Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Lowith, and Hans-Georg Gadamer fled Germany for America. There, over the course of the next two decades, the émigrés’ philosophy entered American political thought, infusing older American traditions, on both sides of the political spectrum, with a new theoretical vitality. By the 1960s, for instance, Strauss had come to be identified with conservatism, while Marcuse was identified with the New Left. The theoretical character of the émigrés’ philosophy was highly attractive to many young intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s. Almost the entire first generation of neoconservatives gravitated toward academia, the law, and various literary pursuits. Among them are Willmoore Kendall, Albert Wohlstetter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz. Similarly, many of their students, protégés, and children, such as Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and John Podhoretz, have gone on to careers in the same fields. In the aggregate, their work imparted a cohesiveness, sophistication, and intellectual authority to neoconservative thought that is unmatched by other strains of conservatism.
American Beginnings Politically, the neoconservatives’ trajectory has taken them from the far left to the far right. Many of the first-generation neoconservatives had been young antiStalinist socialists who abandoned socialism for the conservative wing of the Democratic Party during the Truman administration. Staunch anticommunists during the 1950s, the neoconservatives began to break with mainstream liberalism during the 1960s. The advent of the counterculture, the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam, as well as the social pressures engendered by these events, seemed to them to echo the sort of societal breakdown that had characterized Weimar Germany. Some, like Harry Jaffa, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, became Republicans. It was Jaffa who in 1964 formulated Barry Goldwater’s famous declaration: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” As the decade proceeded, Kristol, Podhoretz, and other neoconservatives held forth in the pages of Commentary and the Wall Street Journal on subjects as diverse as civil rights, women’s rights, integration, the peace movement, the Great Society, and the generation gap. Other neoconservatives, however, remained aligned with the Democratic Party, albeit opposed to the anti– Vietnam War stance that the party adopted in 1968. Most of these neoconservatives—a name bestowed on them by leftist commentator Michael Harrington when they refused to support the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972—aligned themselves with Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-WA). One of the most senior and powerful figures in Washington, Jackson was an expert in defense matters, a staunch supporter of Israel’s interests, and a man with presidential ambitions. During the 1970s, Jackson made it his business to ensure that the Nixon administration did not give away too much as it pursued arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. In order to assist Jackson in his jousting with the administration, his chief of staff, Dorothy Fosdick, brought in talented young neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, Charles Horner, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Pipes to serve on or assist Jackson’s staff. The neoconservative assault on détente and arms control continued throughout the 1970s. Jackson shepherded the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (1974), which linked most favored nation trade status with increased Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. Albert Wohlstetter attacked arms control and charged that the CIA had consistently underestimated Soviet nuclear missile deployments. Irving Kristol, Theodore Draper, and others inveighed against the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations’ foreign policy and the effects on the American psyche of the “Vietnam syndrome.”
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Reagan Revolution For neoconservatives, 1980 was a watershed year. The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had dealt the deathblow to détente and the Carter administration. However, Jackson learned that he had terminal cancer and retired from the Senate. Those neoconservatives who had remained Democrats now prepared to support, many for the first time in their lives, a Republican candidate for president. Ronald Reagan’s call for a return to traditional values and his support for a muscular, confrontationist foreign policy resonated deeply with the neoconservatives. Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980 allowed many neoconservatives to gain positions in the administration. Perle, Abrams, and Feith, for instance, secured jobs in the Defense Department as assistant secretaries. Jeane Kirkpatrick was appointed ambassador to the United Nations. Wolfowitz, named director of policy planning at the State Department, brought in several of his former students and associates, including I. Lewis Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Alan Keyes, and Francis Fukuyama. Pipes was given the post of director of East European and Soviet affairs on Reagan’s National Security Council. On the domestic policy front, however, neoconservative representation was scant. Despite Reagan’s harsh, “evil empire” rhetoric, many neoconservatives were quickly disillusioned by the president’s reticence to launch a global crusade against communism. Irving Kristol, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called Reagan’s foreign policy a “muddle.” Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, detected an incipient “anguish” among neoconservatives. Many neoconservatives took their leave after Reagan’s reelection and an improvement in Soviet-American relations. Held at arm’s length by the less ideological administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, many neoconservatives and their allies spent their time outside government in think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute. They also formed several policy advocacy groups, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Project for a New American Century being the most significant. Returned to power with the presidency of George W. Bush, neoconservatives were the strongest promoters of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is widely acknowledged as a chief architect of the Bush administration’s decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The subsequent pressures generated by the outcome in Iraq caused divisions among neoconservatives, and some traditional conservatives, such as John McCain and Colin Powell, turned against the neoconservatives, who on past occasions had politically outmaneuvered them. The conflict among neoconservatives, given the movement’s cohesiveness over the years, surprised many observers. A notable example of the schism was a heated exchange between political scientist Francis Fukuyama
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and journalist Charles Krauthammer. In “The Neoconservative Moment,” an article in the conservative National Review, Fukuyama described a 2004 speech given by Krauthammer on Iraq as “strangely disconnected from reality . . . without the slightest nod towards the new empirical facts that have emerged in the last year or so.” Krauthammer, calling the criticism “bizarre,” accused Fukuyama of “denying the obvious nature of the threat” represented by radical Islam. Robert L. Richardson See also: American Century; Cheney Family; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Israel; Keyes, Alan; Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol; Pipes, Richard, and Daniel Pipes; Podhoretz, Norman; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; September 11; Soviet Union and Russia; Strauss, Leo; Think Tanks.
Further Reading Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Gerson, Mark. The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1996. Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press, 1995.
N e w A g e M ove m e n t The New Age and neopagan (or contemporary pagan) movements are new religious movements (NRMs) that postdate World War II. They are particularly indebted to the 1960s’ counterculture for their aesthetics, practices, and ideology, though they also have roots in earlier alternative religious movements such as theosophy, Western ceremonial magic, spiritualism, transcendentalism, and New Thought. The practices and beliefs of New Agers and contemporary pagans are highly eclectic and diverse. Common threads include a disillusionment with mainstream religion as repressive, inauthentic, or spiritually barren; a conception of life as a journey of self-development; an optimistic view of human nature; a focus on holistic healing, both spiritual and physical; a belief in reincarnation and karma (the notion that actions in this life have effects on the next); the use of ritual to contact spiritual entities; religious syncretism; and a desire to connect with and protect the natural environment. Most New Agers and many pagans adhere to a pantheistic worldview, believing that the divinity of the self and the interconnection of all things are the basis for an ethic of love, compassion, and social justice. The term “New Age” comes from the millennial belief that a new era of peace and prosperity will emerge from this evolutionary transformation of consciousness.
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The differences between pagans and New Agers often come down to aesthetics. Although pagans occasionally gather for large festivals, they tend to work in small, personal groups without hierarchical authority. Unless they do healing work professionally, for example, as psychotherapists or acupuncturists, many are reluctant to charge money for healing. Contemporary pagan practices are often strongly nature oriented and draw on ancient and indigenous religions for their gods and myths, with the Celtic, Greek, and Egyptian pantheons as popular choices. Accordingly, the scholarly reconstruction of ancient religions is taken seriously by many pagans. Some are polytheists as they understand ancient cultures to have been, seeing deity as fundamentally multiple. It is more common, however, to understand all gods as part of one entity, often conceived of as a goddess. Many pagans also consider themselves witches, that is, practitioners of nature-based magic, with Wicca being the most widely known form of religious witchcraft. New Agers, by contrast, tend to be more comfortable with professional–client relationships and with the exchange of money for healing work. They are less likely to call themselves witches, devote themselves to a particular pantheon, or practice a “tradition.” Reading groups, learning centers, and workshops are more likely gathering places for New Age practitioners than covens or ritual groups. New Agers are also more likely to embrace practices and beliefs that blend religion and science, such as Kirlian photography (the capturing of auras on film) or the Gaia hypothesis (that the earth operates as a single organism), although pagans also participate in these. Channeling, whereby a spirit is allowed to speak through a human medium, is popular among New Agers, who look to these spirits for advice and guidance. Particularly famous among channeled books are the best-selling A Course in Miracles (1976) and The Celestine Prophecy (1993). Evangelical Christians and rationalist skeptics are the most vocal critics of the New Age and contemporary pagan movements. Evangelicals have presented a host of biblical objections to New Age beliefs and practices, particularly targeting New Age assertions that Jesus is meant to be emulated, not worshipped; that human beings can attain their own wholeness or salvation; that acts that do no harm, such as consensual extramarital sex, cannot be considered wrong; that the divine can be experienced as feminine as well as masculine; and that evil is not an external force, but rather the product of an unnecessary disconnection from God. More sophisticated evangelical critiques, such as journalist Russell Chandler’s Understanding the New Age (1988), accuse the New Age movement of trivializing the problem of suffering as nothing more than an error in belief. Chandler also criticizes the moral relativism of some New Age writers, suggesting that the movement’s
intense individualism and lack of an external moral authority leave no basis for moral judgment. Elliot Miller’s A Crash Course on the New Age Movement (1989) suggests that the New Age emphasis on mysticism encourages a retreat from the external world and undermines the work of social justice. Skeptics such as Martin Gardner and Carl Sagan, in their books The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (1988) and The Demon-Haunted World (1995), respectively, assert that the emphasis on intuition and subjectivity in the New Age movement strips practitioners of the benefits of empirical fact checking. New Agers, they claim, are unable to distinguish science from pseudoscience and may subject themselves to useless or even dangerous practices. Historian Ronald Hutton’s largely sympathetic study The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999) agrees that an overemphasis on intuition over rationalism can lead to dismissal of important scientific and historical data. Some critics, for example, are skeptical of the Goddess movement’s theory of matriarchal prehistory. Some Native Americans have also been critical of New Agers and pagans, accusing them of irresponsible cultural borrowing. For Native Americans, the co-optation of their spiritual practices by such groups is part of an ongoing cultural imperialism by whites. As some commentators note, the pagan belief that acts of love and pleasure are the rituals of the Goddess has sometimes led to a hedonism that is anything but spiritual. Pagans, however, are dedicated to celebrating sexuality, the natural world, and the body, and serious practitioners complain of “festival pagans,” dabblers whose attendance at festivals is not based in regular religious practice or ethical commitments. Christine Hoff Kraemer See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Counterculture; Evangelicalism; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Leary, Timothy; Men’s Movement; Morgan, Robin; Postmodernism; Relativism, Moral.
Further Reading Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Boston: Beacon, 1986. Chandler, Russell. Understanding the New Age. Dallas, TX: Word, 1988. Heelas, Paul. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996. Miller, Elliot. A Crash Course on the New Age Movement. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989. Pike, Sarah M. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1995.
New Deal
New Deal The programs and policies for economic recovery and social reform advanced by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt were collectively known as the New Deal. Most New Deal programs were intended as short-term solutions to facilitate economic growth during the Great Depression. Others, such as Social Security, had a lasting impact on American institutions. Ultimately, the New Deal created federal and state institutions that significantly expanded the role of government in American life, and its legacy has been frequently debated as part of the culture wars. The New Deal originated in the Democratic Party, which was guided by its principles in the decades following the 1930s. Supporters of its programs and ideology were referred to as “New Deal Democrats” or members of the “New Deal coalition.” The New Deal coalition consisted of politicians, special interest groups, including labor unions, and voting blocs that supported New Deal initiatives. Over time, the coalition became increasingly fragmented, finally beginning to disintegrate in the mid-1960s. Critics opposed the New Deal on the grounds that it contained elements of socialism. Leading the opposition in the 1930s was Senator Robert Taft (R-OH), who believed that the New Deal placed too many restrictions on business. Taft argued that the New Deal would ultimately return the economy to a depression. The New Deal remains controversial among American politicians, economists, and historians to the present day. Critics point to expanded federal control of the economy, reliance on deficit spending, creation of the “welfare state,” and continued financial burdens of New Deal programs as negative legacies. Supporters point to New Deal programs as necessary and innovative responses to the Great Depression. They applaud programs such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Social Security as beneficial to economic stability. Support for the New Deal and its legacy has fallen primarily along party lines. Roosevelt’s immediate successor was his vice president, Harry Truman, who sought ways to apply New Deal policies to postwar America. In his “Fair Deal” plan, he proposed universal health care. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, resisted calls from his party to dismantle the social programs of the New Deal. John F. Kennedy began his political career as a New Deal Democrat and sought some form of its continuation in his plan for social reform, the “New Frontier.” Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, also a Democrat, promoted the “Great Society,” a program that called for expanded social reform. Although the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were created on his watch, Richard M. Nixon, a staunch Republican, was committed to the ideal of limited government,
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especially rolling back the legacies of the New Deal. Thus, many New Deal programs had already been downsized by the time Republican Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980. Although Reagan greatly admired Roosevelt, his tenure as president is often viewed as the antithesis of New Deal leadership, with its emphasis on limited government interference in big business and on supply-side economics. For political conservatives Reagan represented the heroic counterpart to FDR and a realignment force. This is why Representative Mark Souder (R-IN) in 2003 proposed replacing the image of Roosevelt on the dime with that of Reagan. (The proposal was withdrawn after Reagan’s widow, Nancy Reagan, voiced opposition.) President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, referred to a “New Covenant” between government and the American people. Clinton, an ardent admirer of Roosevelt, proposed a wide range of initiatives aimed at social reform, including an unsuccessful attempt to introduce universal health care. Under Clinton, however, federal welfare programs were downsized. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) in 2003 accused President George W. Bush, a Republican, of trying to “undo the New Deal,” and many other Democrats saw Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” as an effort to roll back the New Deal in favor of a system of privatized social services. His extensive tax cuts seemed to follow Grover Norquist’s plan to return to the days before the New Deal, including a widening of the wealth gap. Critics argue that Bush’s Medicare prescription drug plan, which favored privatization, and his proposal to offer private investment options as part of the Social Security system showed his antipathy toward the New Deal. But supporters of the Bush administration argued that the president approved an expansion, not a reduction, of entitlement programs, most notably the Medicare prescription drug plan. Following the collapse of the credit market in 2008, the Bush administration launched a $700 billion financial bailout, which critical observers suggested was a return to the New Deal. Melanie Kirkland See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Compassionate Conservatism; Great Society; Health Care; Norquist, Grover; Social Security; Supply-Side Economics; Taft, Robert A.; Wealth Gap; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Chafe, William H., ed. The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
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Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009.
New Jour nalism New Journalism emerged during the 1960s and 1970s as an innovative style of reporting in harmony with the counterculture movement. New Journalists saw themselves as taking over the role of the traditional novelist by addressing the broad social and cultural movements of their day, which they felt novelists had abandoned. While conventional journalists argued that a degree of objectivity could be achieved by maintaining a distance from their subjects, New Journalists contended that objective writing was not only untenable, but undesirable. By combining literary and journalistic devices, New Journalists hoped to create a more engaging and emotionally charged writing style that would go beyond answering the standard questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. In his introduction to The New Journalism (1973), Tom Wolfe defines the contours of New Journalism, explaining that it is a new literary form combining traditional reporting with novelistic devices such as telling stories using scenes rather than a chronological narrative; including conversational speech or full dialogue; adopting a personal point of view; and recording the details of everyday life. Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1963), which documents the LSD activities and cross-country escapades of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, is written in this style. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967) uses a similar approach as he describes his travels with this counterculture motorcycle gang. Other books that have been identified as leading examples of New Journalism include Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965); Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), a series of articles about life in San Francisco; and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), which documents his experience during a 1967 anti–Vietnam War march on Washington, D.C. Critics of New Journalism quickly argued that by combining the literary devices of novels and journalism, New Journalists corrupt both forms. The insertion of the reporter’s internal dialogue and worldview into a text labeled journalism, critics suggested, leads readers to assume that the reporter is an unreliable source. Such detractors dismissed New Journalism, with the reporter having a central role in the story, as symptomatic of the self-absorption of the 1960s counterculture. New Journalists countered that the goal of objectivity in reporting is patently unrealistic.
During the late 1960s, writers such as Hunter S. Thompson pushed the concept of New Journalism even further, arguing that reporters should not only be forthcoming about their perceptions, but they should experience the events they describe firsthand. As chroniclers of the counterculture, “Gonzo journalists”—practitioners of Thompson’s style of subjective, first-person narrative— often consumed copious amounts of alcohol and drugs as part of their work. This served as additional fodder for those who argued that New Journalists were simply self-indulgent. The legacy of New Journalism, with its emphasis on the role of the reporter in the construction and telling of a story, remains evident in such magazines as Rolling Stone. Jessie Swigger See also: Counterculture; Literature, Film, and Drama; Mailer, Norman; Thompson, Hunter S.; Wolfe, Tom.
Further Reading Weingarten, Marc. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution. New York: Crown, 2006. Wolfe, Tom, and E.W. Johnson, eds. The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
New Lef t The New Left movements that flourished during the 1960s and early 1970s challenged discrimination against blacks, ethnic minorities, and women; promoted freedom in dress, language, sexuality, and other aspects of personal expression; and opposed the nuclear arms race and the war in Vietnam. These movements exposed the fault lines in American society and politics by pressing for a radical extension of democracy to every person regardless of color, gender, sexual orientation, or origin. In foreign affairs, New Left activists challenged the consensus to contain communism at any cost by protesting a war that increasingly seemed without strategy, morality, or purpose. The New Left germinated during the conservative 1950s, when communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Old Left appeared moribund. It found scattered models of resistance in African-American struggles for civil rights; Christian pacifist groups such as the War Resisters’ League; and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, formed in 1957 to oppose nuclear testing. In the early 1960s, the New Left drew inspiration from black student sit-ins in the South and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which helped guide those campaigns. It drew, too, on the idealism of affluent Baby Boom youths eager to act on John F. Kennedy’s inaugural exhortation to “ask what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
New York Times, The
White college students were prominent in the emerging New Left because they were relatively privileged, articulate, sheltered from the demands of the work world, and part of a fast-growing cohort marked by a strong generational identity. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), originating as an offshoot of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, in 1962 circulated an influential reform vision, the “Port Huron Statement,” written chiefly by Tom Hayden, which urged “participatory democracy,” to let individuals shape decisions that affected them in a bureaucratized society dominated by corporations and the military. In 1964, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley applied this philosophy by staging nonviolent student sit-ins that restored student rights to engage in political activity on campus. Early New Left activists fit comfortably within the liberal Democratic coalition that enacted civil rights laws, advocated equal rights for women, expanded federal aid to education, and sought to empower the poor through community action programs. Beginning in March 1965, however, the sustained American bombing of North Vietnam and the deployment of ground troops to South Vietnam alienated New Left groups from the nation’s liberal leaders and a “system,” as Paul Potter of the SDS declared in April 1965, that “put material values before human values.” The New Left became larger, more diverse, and more radical during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael of the SNCC advocated Black Power based on militant racial solidarity rather than integration, liberal coalition, and nonviolence. Chicanos (Mexican Americans), Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and other groups also asserted their identity, pride, and grievances toward mainstream institutions and values. Opponents of the Vietnam War engaged in civil disobedience at draft induction centers, held the March on the Pentagon in October 1967, and drew half a million demonstrators to Washington, D.C., in November 1969. During a student protest at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970, National Guard troops killed four students, precipitating student “strikes” that shut down hundreds of colleges and universities. While Yippies (members of the Youth International Party) declared that “revolution is fun,” and some members of other New Left groups flirted with the idea of violent revolution, their extreme actions led to a backlash in public opinion; electoral shifts toward conservative Republicans over liberal Democrats; and repression by local police, the National Guard, and the FBI. In his successful campaign to become governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan branded activists at the University of California at Berkeley a disruptive “minority of hippies, radicals, and filthy speech advocates” who
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should be “thrown off campus—permanently.” When protestors outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968 met with police brutality, however, the American public was shocked by the city’s use of violence. But the backlash continued against the New Left, fed on resentment of all protests; hostility toward blacks, feminists, gays, and lesbians; tensions between blue-collar workers and more affluent antiwar demonstrators; and fears of violence stoked by ghetto riots and bombings by New Left splinter groups like the Weather Underground. The SNCC, the SDS, Yippies, and similar groups faded after the early 1970s, but in its brief heyday the New Left transformed American society and politics. It helped topple the South’s legalized racial caste system; established a new consensus that groups long on the margins of public life, including blacks and women, deserved rights, opportunities, and positions of authority; brought issues of gay and lesbian rights to the center of national politics; expanded the boundaries of acceptable cultural expression and relationships; and made dissent against U.S. foreign policy respectable even in wartime. Robert Weisbrot See also: Black Panther Party; Chicago Seven; Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Gay Rights Movement; Hayden, Tom; Hoffman, Abbie; Nuclear Age; Sexual Revolution; Students for a Democratic Society; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Gosse, Van. Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Isserman, Maurice, and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Miller, James. “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
N e w Yo r k T i m e s , T h e Founded in 1851 and often referred to as “the Gray Lady” (for its plain appearance and traditional status), the New York Times has for years been the nation’s most prominent newspaper. As such, it has unofficially functioned as the “newspaper of record,” providing American society with the “first draft of history” and acting as a sort of “fourth estate” of the national sphere. In 2009, as the paper boasted the largest staff of any other newsroom in the country (some 1,200 staffers) and maintained a daily print circulation of 1 million (with Sunday circulation of 1.4 million), the New York
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Times Company experienced severe financial strain ($1.1 billion in debt), which was exacerbated by a 7.7 percent decline in advertising revenue due to a faltering economy as well as the trend of more people relying on the Internet for their primary source of news. From its beginnings as the New York Daily Times, the paper sought to be more substantive and less sensational than the rival newspapers of the day, as then explained by founder Henry J. Raymond: “[W]e do not mean to write as if we were in a passion.” In 1896, the struggling paper was bought by Adolph S. Ochs. The new owner, wishing to set a course for higher journalism standards, added a motto to the paper’s masthead: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Within four years, the newspaper attracted more advertising and increased its circulation from 25,000 to 100,000 by bolstering market reports and coverage of government news. During the paper’s early years, the staff worked out of Times Tower on Broadway, a prominent location that came to be called Times Square. By the 1920s, circulation reached 330,000, with Sunday sales topping 500,000. Ochs remained publisher until his death in 1935, and all subsequent publishers have been his descendants: Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1935–1961), Orvil E. Dryfoos (1961–1963), Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger (1963–1992), and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. (1992–). Although the company began issuing stock during the 1960s, the family has retained majority control. In 2007, the paper moved its operation into a new fiftytwo-story neo-Gothic tower on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st streets in Midtown Manhattan.
Omissions and Biases The New York Times has been praised for its coverage of such landmark twentieth-century events as the sinking of the Titanic, the Armenian genocide during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and the two world wars. However, it has been criticized for inaccuracies and/ or omissions pertaining to the civil war following the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the Pinochet regime in Chile, and, most recently, the lead-up to the Iraq War. In 2003, Walter Duranty, a Stalin apologist who was a Times correspondent in Moscow during the 1920s and 1930s, was nearly posthumously stripped of his 1932 Pulitzer Prize for allegedly misleading his editors and readers about the Ukrainian famine. In the culture wars, the Times has been criticized by both conservatives and liberals alike. For those who are politically to the right, the Times is a liberal newspaper that fails to reflect the values of the larger American culture. The conservative Media Research Center, founded in 1987, maintains a “Times Watch” Web page “dedicated to documenting and exposing the liberal political agenda of the New York Times.” It can also be argued, however, that the editorial positions of the paper are largely in harmony with the
cosmopolitan mores of its immediate readership, the residents of New York City. Some have contended as well that the Times is often judged by the standards of advocacy journalism and narrowcasting rather than a dialectical “both sides” approach. In recent times, the Times’s op-ed page has included liberal columnists such as Maureen Dowd and the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman while also providing a rightward forum to former Weekly Standard editor David Brooks and globalization advocate Thomas Friedman. From 2007 to 2009, Bill Kristol, the leading figure of the neoconservative movement, was a regular columnist. Although the Times supported the adoption of the Twenty-second Amendment, a conservative initiative to limit a president to two terms of office in negative response to Roosevelt winning four terms, its editorial page has not endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, the Times was part of the small 16 percent of newspapers that endorsed John F. Kennedy for president in 1960. Writing in Newsday in 2000, Charles Krauthammer argued that the Times’s headline of September 7—“Gore Offers Vision of Better Times for Middle Class”—was what “Pravda used to run for Leonid Brezhnev’s campaigns.” That same year, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush was inadvertently caught on an open mike complaining about Times reporter Adam Clymer, whom he referred to with an expletive. In one of the most infamous attacks against the paper, the conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote in the New York Observer, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh [the bomber of the Oklahoma City federal building] is he did not go to the New York Times building” (August 26, 2002). As the late Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media earlier accused the paper of projecting a liberal bias, MIT professor Noam Chomsky was advancing the argument that the Times, by acting as an “agenda setter” of the mainstream media, has narrowed the spectrum of public debate to the point that what is considered liberal is actually quite conservative. conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has often ridiculed the paper, despite the fact that he has for years drawn material from it. Ironically, the liberal watch group Media Matters was displeased by an “egostroking profile” of Limbaugh that appeared in the New York Times Magazine (July 6, 2008), calling Zev Chafets, the reporter who wrote the piece, “a toothless tiger.” In February 1994, Limbaugh criticized the Times for not running a front-page article about Whitewater, a real estate scandal involving the Clintons, even though two years earlier the paper broke the story on page one. Liberals, in fact, accused the Times of having revived Whitewater, which had otherwise been a dead issue, and they point out that earlier the paper largely stood on the sidelines while the Washington Post investigated the Watergate scandal.
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Since Whitewater involved a Democratic administration and Watergate a Republican one, some liberal critics suggest an inconsistency.
An “Establishment” Paper For years the Times was regarded as an “establishment” newspaper. This is why it was chosen by the federal government in 1945 to write the history of the development of the atomic bomb. science reporter William Laurence was assigned this exclusive task and even accompanied the August 9 bombing mission of Nagasaki, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his eyewitness account of the devastation. On many occasions, the Times cooperated with American officials by either not publishing stories or delaying their release. In 1954, as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was about to launch a coup in Guatemala, the Times management ordered reporter Sydney Gruson out of that country—as later divulged, the decision was prompted by “security concerns” raised by CIA director Allen Dulles, who wanted the event left unreported. Later, as the CIA made preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the paper acquiesced to the Kennedy administration and held back on its coverage. Over the years, it was speculated that the paper was occasionally used as a cover for the CIA, a subject explored at length in Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (1980) by former Times reporter Harrison E. Salisbury. In 1956, the Times joined other American newspapers in declining China’s invitation to send correspondents because it did not wish to embarrass the U.S. government. Despite any perceived coziness with Washington officialdom, the Times had its conservative detractors who were displeased by the paper’s support of New Deal programs and the civil rights movement. The paper’s editorial stance, such as in 1951 when it sided with President Harry Truman in the firing of General Douglas MacArthur, would sometimes be out of sync with the prevailing public mood. In 1956, Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS) launched an inquiry of the Times, charging that 100 communists were on its staff. Ironically, this came after the Kremlin had publicly attacked the paper for distorting the policies of the Soviet government. Later, segregationists sued for libel after being inaccurately depicted in a political ad placed in the paper by a civil rights group. In the resulting U.S. Supreme Court decision, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the court ruled against the plaintiffs on the grounds that criticism of public officials does not warrant libel unless “actual malice” can be proven. Some believe that the paper’s liberal bias drove it in October 1965 to unnecessarily reveal that Daniel Burros, the New York head of the Ku Klux Klan and a member of the American Nazi Party, had been born Jewish but was keeping it concealed; Burros, who some thought was mentally disturbed, committed
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suicide following the publication of a front-page article on his background. During the Vietnam War, the paper became increasingly critical of American foreign policy. Beginning in 1962, Times reporter David Halberstam became the first war correspondent to offer a negative account of what was occurring in Vietnam; two years later he won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1966, Harrison E. Salisbury reported, in contradiction to official statements of the Lyndon Johnson administration, that American B-52s were bombing civilian targets in North Vietnam. Although an advisory board recommended Salisbury for the Pulitzer Prize, the decision was overruled by a 6–5 vote, apparently over disenchantment with the embarrassment caused for the government. In late 1969, frustrated by the growing antiwar sentiment of the news media, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew publicly denounced the biases of the “eastern establishment,” clearly counting the New York Times as one of the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” After the Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration sought a court injunction to halt the serialization, but in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court sided against the government, 6–3.
Iraq War In Off with Their Heads (2003), political consultant and Fox News analyst Dick Morris includes a chapter entitled “The New New York Times,” faulting the paper for failing to support President Bush after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Howell Raines, who became managing editor days prior to the terrorist attacks, is blamed by Morris for being a “partisan cheerleader, sending messages of dissent, and fanning the flames of disagreement on the left.” Conservative critics have also questioned the newspaper for labeling the unrest in Iraq a “civil war” and for the persistent usage of the term “insurgents” instead of “terrorists.” (Similarly, there was objection to articles that referred to Hurricane Katrina survivors as “refugees” instead of “evacuees.”) In an opposite conclusion, liberals such as Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post group blog fault the Times for its stenography-like reporting in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Huffington and others were especially condemning of Times reporter Judith Miller, believing that she quoted officials without doing real reporting. According to this critique, Miller in 2002 and 2003 played up the story on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (which later proved to be nonexistent), sanctioning the efforts of the Bush administration. In 2006, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that preventing the United States from winning the war on terror was “a major goal” of the New York Times. This judgment followed the Times breaking a news story that
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the U.S. government was tracking international banking data in an attempt to uncover terrorist funding. Vice President Cheney criticized the paper for disclosing “vital national security programs” and said that doing so would make it “more difficult . . . to prevent future attacks against the American people.” Defending itself in an editorial (June 28, 2006), the Times argued that terrorists obviously knew that transferring money by wire was subject to government monitoring. The real issue, the editorial continued, was “an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government.” Roger Chapman See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Clinton Impeachment; Coulter, Ann; Holocaust; Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol; Krugman, Paul; Limbaugh, Rush; Media Bias; September 11; Vietnam War; Washington Times, The; Watergate.
Further Reading Friel, Howard, and Richard A. Falk. The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy. New York: Verso, 2004. Hirschorn, Michael. “End Times.” Atlantic, January–February 2009. Morris, Dick. Off with Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business. New York: Regan Books, 2003. New York Times Web site. www.nytimes.com. Salisbury, Harrison E. Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times. New York: Times Book, 1980. Talese, Gay. The Kingdom and the Power. Behind the Scenes at the New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007. Tifft, Susan E., and Alex S. Jones. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. TimesWatch Web site. www.timeswatch.org.
News Repor ting See Media Bias
N i e b u h r, R e i n h o l d Identified by Time magazine in 1950 as “the number one theologian of United States Protestantism,” Reinhold Niebuhr spent an academic career critiquing domestic and foreign affairs through the prism of what he called “Christian realism.” Ever against any political idea, doctrine, policy, or movement that he regarded as excessively idealistic, naive, unjust, or showing signs of hubris, Niebuhr over the years criticized pacifism, the Christian social gospel, secular liberalism, fascism,
the American atomic bombings of Japan, Stalinism, Soviet aggression, McCarthyism, nuclear brinkmanship, southern segregation, and the Vietnam War. A neo-orthodox Protestant, Niebuhr in his writings, speeches, and sermons offered political analysis and social commentary that were infused with the doctrine of Original Sin and the belief that human beings are incapable of making an ideal society. Yet Niebuhr was not a conservative; he leaned to the left, affiliating for a time with the Socialist Party (1929–1941), embracing many of the tenets of Marxism, and eventually supporting New Deal liberalism. He believed that “children of light” should strive to make the world better even if it will always be less than perfect. As he once concluded, “Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” (early 1940s), which became engrained in American popular culture during World War II and the postwar years, expresses such views concerning human limitations. One version reads in part: “God, give us grace / to accept with serenity / the things that cannot be changed, / courage to change the things / that should be changed, / and wisdom to distinguish / the one from the other.” The poem was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, but Niebuhr’s authorship has been called into question— most recently in 2008 by a librarian at Yale University whose research uncovered examples of other individuals reciting similar prayers during the 1930s. Karl Paul Reinhold “Reinie” Niebuhr, the son of a German immigrant and pastor of the Evangelical Synod (Lutheran), was born on June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Missouri, and grew up in Lincoln, Illinois. After graduating as valedictorian at both Elmhurst College (1910) and Eden Theological Seminary (BD, 1913), near Chicago and St. Louis, respectively, he completed his studies at Yale University (BD, 1914; MA, 1915). A pastorate stint at the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit (1915–1928), where Niebuhr supported the cause of the labor movement and denounced the policies of Henry Ford, was followed by a long teaching career at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1928–1960). A prolific essayist, Niebuhr was a regular contributor to the Christian Century (1922–1940), the Nation (1938–1950), and the New Leader (1954–1970). In 1935, he founded Radical Religion (later renamed Christianity and Society), a journal of current affairs he edited for three decades. In 1941, he founded a second journal, Christianity and Crisis. Niebuhr also wrote nearly twenty books, including Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), a criticism of both secular and religious liberalism; The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941, 1943), his central work, which in two volumes presents a theory of history and the human condition; The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), an endorsement of democracy with a warning of its human limitations; and The Irony of American History
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(1952), a treatise that discusses the inherent weakness of national power. One of his later books, The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959), advocated U.S.-Soviet coexistence in the nuclear age. As a Cold Warrior, Niebuhr quit writing for the Nation because he thought its editorials were supportive of Stalinism. He was the first national chairman of the Union for Democratic Action, which in 1947 was renamed the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal organization staunchly committed to the Cold War policy of containment against the Soviet Union. He was consequently a booster of the Marshall Plan, believing it was prudent to help Western Europe rebuild after World war II in order to keep it safe for democracy. During the late 1940s, he was a chief adviser to the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, influencing Cold War strategists such as George Kennan, who called Niebuhr “the father of us all.” During this time, Niebuhr also worked closely with the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Although awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, Niebuhr was the subject of an FBI probe directed by President Richard Nixon after the theologian spoke out against the Vietnam War and expressed support for the civil rights movement. Niebuhr died on June 1, 1971. Today his ideas continue to influence activists on both the left and the right. Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Graham, Billy; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Labor Unions; Marxism; Nation, The; Nixon, Richard; Nuclear Age; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; Soviet Union and Russia; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Brown, Charles C. Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992. Fox, Richard Wightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Link, Michael. The Social Philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr. Chicago: Adams Press, 1975. Scott, Nathan A., Jr., ed. The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Sifton, Elisabeth. The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Tinsley, E.J., ed. Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892–1971. London: Epworth Press, 1973.
N i xo n , R i c h a r d One of the most influential and controversial figures in postwar American politics, Republican Richard M. Nixon served as congressman, senator, vice president,
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and thirty-seventh president of the United States. In 1974, he resigned the presidency to avoid impeachment over his cover-up in the Watergate scandal. A politically polarizing figure and a culture warrior in his own right, Nixon remains a topic of the culture wars into the twentyfirst century, as various factions debate the meaning of his presidency and his overall political legacy. Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California, and raised in a financially struggling Quaker household. After attending Whittier College (BA, 1934) and Duke University Law School (JD, 1937), Nixon served in World War II in the U.S. Navy. When the war was over, he returned to California and began his career in politics, winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives (1947–1950) and the U.S. Senate (1950–1953). After two terms as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961), Nixon lost the 1960 presidential race to Democrat John F. Kennedy by less than 113,000 votes out of 68 million ballots cast. Two years later, he lost the race for California governor to Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, only to make an amazing political comeback by twice wining the U.S. presidency (1968 and 1972). On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as president. For the remainder of his life he sought to rehabilitate his image and present himself as a statesman. He died on April 22, 1994.
“Red-Baiter” of Liberals Nixon’s various political campaigns shared the same elements: an emphasis on the dangers of America’s Cold War enemies and “red-baiting” of liberal opponents. He was first elected to public office in 1946 when he defeated Congressman Jerry Voorhis, a five-term Democratic incumbent from California’s Twelfth District. Nixon was catapulted into national celebrity in 1948 when, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he played an instrumental role in exposing Alger Hiss’s connection with the Communist Party while working in the U.S. State Department. Nixon became a hero of the political right and used that momentum to gain a Senate seat. In that campaign he again used a red-baiting strategy, referring to opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas as “pink right down to her underwear.” In response, Douglas branded Nixon with the “Tricky Dick” epitaph, which followed him for the rest of his life. Nixon’s popularity among Republicans led to his nomination as Eisenhower’s vice-presidential running mate in 1952. However, he was almost removed from the ticket after the media reported his personal use of an $18,000 political “slush fund.” He saved his reputation and place on the ticket with a paid televised response— his famous “Checkers Speech”—in which he detailed his household finances and explained that his wife did not
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Future Republican president Richard Nixon (far left) achieved national prominence—and a leading role in the culture wars— as a “red-baiting” congressman during the Alger Hiss spy case in 1948. (James Whitmore/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
own a fur coat but only a “a respectable Republican cloth coat”; the only political gift he ever accepted, he went on, was a cocker spaniel named Checkers, a dog he was not going to return because his children were attached to it. Perhaps Nixon’s most well-known moments as vice president were the stoning of his motorcade during a visit to Venezuela (1958) and the “kitchen debate” he had with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over capitalism versus communism (1959).
Defeats and Political Comeback Nixon’s plan to move into the Oval Office after the end of Eisenhower’s second term was dashed by Kennedy, who narrowly won the 1960 election. Critics charged that the Democrat victory was rooted in voter fraud, while others argued that Nixon’s defeat was the result of his poor performance in the country’s first televised presidential debate. Television audiences saw two very different politicians during that debate: JFK, who looked “presidential” and directly at the camera; and Nixon, who appeared ashen, unshaven, sweaty, and “shifty-eyed” as he could not decide whether to turn toward the camera or to the man he was addressing. Those who watched the debate on television said JFK had won; radio listeners felt Nixon outdid the young Democrat. Many believed that Nixon’s political career was over after his failed presidential run, which was followed by a losing race for the California governorship in 1962. At his farewell press conference, implying that liberal media bias was to blame for his two defeats, he bitterly told the reporters they would not have Nixon “to kick around anymore.” Some commentators have argued that
the lasting effects of those setbacks made Nixon a paranoiac, later leading him to keep an “enemies list” and to resort to illegal campaign tactics in order to maintain an edge over opponents. As the Vietnam War divided the country, Nixon returned to national politics in 1968 for a second try for the presidency. The Democratic Party was in a deep crisis—suffering infighting over the war and a serious backlash for its advocacy of civil rights legislation and other social programs. While President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection and the Democrats remained in disarray, Nixon promised to achieve “peace with honor” in Vietnam and to promote respect for law and order in American society. These two platforms appealed to many war-weary voters who were also unhappy with radical antiwar protests. With the support of “Middle America,” Nixon easily defeated Hubert Humphrey in the November election.
Domestic and Foreign Policies Historians critical of Nixon argue that when he assumed the presidency in 1969 he took advantage of the political and social divisions in the nation to advance his partisan ambitions. Referring to its supporters as the “great silent majority,” the Nixon administration dismissed the youth counterculture and antiwar movement as a loud minority that did not represent the values of “real” Americans. At the same time, it was said, Nixon tapped into the resentments of whites by delaying enforcement of civil rights in the South and refusing to endorse school busing. Such policies were often referred to as the Republican Party’s “southern strategy,” which used issues such as race to appeal to white southern voters in order to gain the electoral edge. On matters of race, however, Nixon’s policies were far nobler than his negative rhetoric. His tenure did see gains in school integration—whereas 68 percent of African-American children in the South and 40 percent in the nation as a whole attended all-black schools in 1968, the figures fell to 8 percent and 12 percent, respectively, only two years later. Nixon also spent significantly on civil rights enforcement, bolstering the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Whereas civil rights outlays in President Johnson’s final budget totaled $911 million, the 1973 budget drafted by Nixon called for $2.6 billion. Many conservatives look back on Nixon’s handling of domestic and economic issues and brand him a liberal. His administration oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); the introduction of automatic cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for Social Security recipients; and the establishment of the Supplementary Security Income (SSI), guaranteeing an
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annual income for the elderly, blind, and disabled. Controversially, Nixon dealt with inflation by instituting wage and price controls, a policy critics regarded as a violation of free-market principles. Under Nixon’s watch, for the first time since World War II, federal spending on social programs exceeded expenditures on defense. As a matter of consensus, Nixon’s greatest successes as president came in the area of foreign policy. He and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, set upon a policy that fundamentally changed the direction of the Cold War. This included establishing diplomatic relations with China (which some Democrats characterized as a strategy to overshadow the 1972 presidential campaign and strengthen Nixon’s reelection chances) and negotiating the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union in 1971. Thus, the Nixon era ushered in détente, a period of reduced tensions between the superpowers. In 1973, after engaging the United States in a secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger negotiated the long-awaited end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Perhaps only because of Nixon’s well-established anticommunist credentials was he able to pursue many of these foreign policies without being labeled an appeaser or simply soft on communism.
Watergate and Rehabilitation In August 1974, Nixon became the first American president to resign from office, the culmination of the Watergate scandal—the break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 and the subsequent cover-up and obstruction of justice by the Nixon White House. Had Nixon not resigned, he surely would have been impeached and most likely would have been removed from office. His subsequent pardon by President Gerald Ford caused an uproar and led to accusations that the two had made a secret deal. Adding to Nixon’s disgrace was the decision of Duke University not to allow its campus to be the site of the Nixon Presidential Library. (It would eventually be built in San Clemente, California.) Nixon did not fade away. In 1977 he collected $1 million for a series of taped interviews conducted by the British television personality David Frost. Although viewers heard Nixon argue that a course of action taken by the president is automatically legal, they also saw him express regret over Watergate. By the end of the decade, following the publication of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), the former president was living in Saddle River, New Jersey, to be near the political elites and news media outlets of the Northeast. Popularly received during travels to Paris, Jidda, and Beijing, Nixon struck the pose of an elder statesman and informally advised presidents from Reagan to Clinton. He also wrote numerous works on foreign affairs, including The Real War (1980), No More Vietnams (1987), and Beyond Peace (1994). At the re-
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quest of President Ronald Reagan, Nixon in 1981 joined Ford and Carter in representing the United States at the funeral of slain Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. In 1984, after addressing the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Nixon to his surprise received a standing ovation. The cover of the May 1986 issue of Newsweek magazine featured the former president with the title “The Rehabilitation of Nixon.” Nixon’s defenders, citing the foreign policy successes of his administration, argue that it is wrong to reduce his presidency to the Watergate scandal. Some conservatives have since blamed Nixon’s downfall on “liberals,” downplaying the enormity of the abuse of power. Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh has dwelled on the media bias against Nixon. Arguably, the intensification of the culture wars is one of Nixon’s major legacies. His White House staff included a number of people who would continue to wage the culture wars in other Republican administrations, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. In addition, Nixon appointed four justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, all of whom played a significant role in shaping the culture wars on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, and states’ rights. Most significantly, Nixon appointed perhaps the most conservative justice on the bench—William Rehnquist—who for fourteen years had been an associate justice before serving nineteen years as chief justice. Maria T. Baldwin See also: Agnew, Spiro T.; Busing, School; China; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Environmental Movement; Hiss, Alger; Judicial Wars; Presidential Pardons; Rehnquist, William H.; Republican Party; Silent Majority; Watergate.
Further Reading Ambrose, Stephen E. Nixon. 3 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987–1991. Greenberg, David. Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. MacMillan, Margaret. The Week that Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2007. Mitchell, Greg. Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas—Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. New York: Random House, 1998. Nixon, Richard. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978. Reston, James, Jr. The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.
N o r q u i s t , G r ove r As founder and executive director of the antitax lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform, established in 1985,
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Grover Norquist has worked to prompt elected officials to cut taxes for the ultimate goal of decreasing the size of the federal government. The New Deal, he argues, has left a negative legacy of an oversized public sector that has put a drag on the economy and hampered individual freedom. As Norquist has said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Critics maintain that Norquist’s antitax campaign has led to growing budget deficits, a reduction in the quality of life, and a widening of the wealth gap. The son of a senior executive at Polaroid, Grover Glenn Norquist was born on October 19, 1956, and grew up in the Boston suburb of Weston. His interest in conservative politics took shape during the Cold War, when at age thirteen he read J. Edgar Hoover’s book on communism, Masters of Deceit (1958), and Whittaker Chambers’s autobiography, Witness (1952). His father also instilled in him an outrage over taxes. Norquist attended Harvard University, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics (1978) and a master’s degree in business administration (1981). As a graduate student, Norquist volunteered in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, in the experience befriending Jack Abramoff, the future K Street lobbyist and convicted felon who was then a student at Brandeis University. He later helped Abramoff get elected chairman of the College Republicans. In 1985, Norquist established his niche at Americans for Tax Reform, an advocacy group in step with the philosophy of the Reagan administration. Norquist claims credit for President George H.W. Bush’s reelection defeat in 1992, declaring that it was retribution for breaking a promise not to raise taxes. Since then, his group has persuaded many candidates, including George W. Bush, to sign pledges not to increase taxes. Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) consulted with Norquist when crafting the Contract with America in 1994. Since then, Norquist has helped maintain a broad conservative coalition. Over the years his “Wednesday meetings” in Washington, D.C., attracted many prominent conservative activists and elected officials for strategizing policy and tactics. He has dubbed his political network the Leave Me Alone Coalition, explaining that the glue that bonds the disparate factions is the desire for less government intrusion. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Chambers, Whittaker; Contract with America; Federal Budget Deficit; Hoover, J. Edgar; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; Social Security; Tax Reform; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Americans for Tax Reform Web site. www.atr.org. Cassidy, John. “The Ringleader.” The New Yorker, August 1, 2005.
Easton, Nina J. Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Norquist, Grover. Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off of Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives. New York: W. Morrow, 2008.
N o r t h , O l i ve r Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, Jr., achieved notoriety during the televised Iran-Contra hearings in the summer of 1987 and went on to a career as a conservative political commentator and aspirant to elective office. A little-known member of the National Security Council (NSC) during the Ronald Reagan administration, Lieutenant Colonel North was implicated as a key player in a scandal that was a direct defiance of a federal law not to fund the Contras, or counterrevolutionaries, fighting to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The son of middle-class parents, Oliver Laurence “Larry” North, Jr., was born in San Antonio, Texas, on October 7, 1943. After studying at the State University of New York at Brockport (1961–1963), he attended the U.S. Naval Academy (BS, 1968). North saw combat in Vietnam (1968–1969) and was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts for his service. In November 1986, “Ollie,” as President Ronald Reagan called him, resigned his post along with the head of the NSC, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, when U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that sophisticated weapons systems had been sold to Iran and that money from the sales had been diverted to buy weapons for the Contras. Earlier, because the Contras had attacked Nicaraguan civilians and were charged with human rights abuses, Congress had cut off U.S. military aid.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North (left, with his attorney) testifies before congressional investigators in the Iran-Contra hearings of July 1987. Criminally convicted for his role in the affair, North was viewed by many as a scapegoat and by some as a hero. (Chris Wilkins/AFP/Getty Images)
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When congressional hearings investigating the scandal were carried live on television, the media spotlight glowed favorably over North, who just as easily could have been cast as the villain. Portrayed as the heroic, battle-weary soldier—media professionals described him as “fascinating”—North was successful at deflecting criticism for his role in the scandal, and the public generally viewed him as a scapegoat. Although North admitted to supplying the Contras in defiance of the congressional ban—action that was not only illegal but unconstitutional—his three felony convictions were overturned on a technicality because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress. North later founded a company that manufactures bulletproof vests and promoted his folk-hero status by writing an account of his military career, Under Fire: An American Story (1991). During the 1994 election, he was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, challenging Democratic incumbent Chuck Robb. Filmmakers were given access to North’s campaign, and the subsequent documentary, A Perfect Candidate (1996), features scenes of North expressing his born-again faith juxtaposed with footage of cynical political strategists plotting to use rumors of drugs and infidelity against Robb. During the campaign, North caused an uproar when he asserted that President Reagan all along “knew everything” about the diversion of funds to the Contras. Although North lost a close race, he reaffirmed his image as affable war hero and devoted family man. North went on to host Common Sense, a right-wing radio talk show on Radio America (1995–2003), and War Stories with Oliver North (2001–), a military history series on the Fox News Channel. In addition to appearing regularly on Fox as a political commentator, he has been a syndicated columnist, featured public speaker, and co-author of action novels. Robin Andersen See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Cold War; Human Rights; Iran-Contra Affair; Presidential Pardons; Reagan, Ronald.
Further Reading Andersen, Robin. A Century of Media, A Century of War. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Fried, Amy. Muffled Echoes: Oliver North and the Politics of Public Opinion. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Meyer, Peter. Defiant Patriot: The Life and Exploits of Lt. Colonel Oliver L. North. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Pasternak, Douglas. “Oliver North’s New Crusade.” U.S. News & World Report, June 6, 1994.
N o t D e a d Ye t The disability rights activist group Not Dead Yet was founded by Diane Coleman on April 27, 1996, after
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euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian was acquitted of murder charges in the deaths of two women with disabilities whom he had helped to commit suicide. Not Dead Yet believes that legalized euthanasia will lead to pressure to end the lives of people with disabilities. The group positioned itself against the Hemlock Society (since renamed Compassion and Choices), which has sought broadening assisted suicide laws to apply to people with nonterminal disabilities. The controversy associated with Not Dead Yet intensified because of its alliance with conservative religious groups in opposing euthanasia. The Terri Schiavo controversy galvanized this alignment in 1998. Schiavo, who had collapsed in her home in 1990 and was diagnosed as being in an irreversible persistent vegetative state, became the center of a dispute involving her husband’s decision to remove her feeding tube. He argued that it was what his wife would have wanted, despite the absence of a living will. Her parents argued that because she was Catholic, she would be opposed to euthanasia. Not Dead Yet filed amicus (friend of the court) briefs on behalf of the parents, advancing a disability rights position and denouncing the work of bioethicist Peter Singer, who has argued that the lives of cognitively impaired people are of lesser value than the lives of those who are unimpaired. After various appeals courts supported her husband’s decision, Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed in 2005, and she died almost two weeks later. In response to depictions in the critically acclaimed films Million Dollar Baby (2004) and The Sea Inside (2004), Not Dead Yet challenged the notion that disability is worse than death. The group staged demonstrations at the Chicago Film Critics Association awards and the Oscar ceremonies, sparking public debate. As in the Schiavo controversy, however, much of the disability rights message was drowned out by broader arguments between social conservatives and liberals. Not Yet Dead also took a stand against Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, in which state voters legalized physician-assisted suicide in 1994. The group supported federal legal attempts to overturn the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the measure in Gonzales v. Oregon (2006). Not Dead Yet criticized the Bush administration for failing to challenge the law from a disability rights perspective. Laura Hague See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Catholic Church; Kevorkian, Jack; Operation Rescue; Right to Die; Schiavo, Terri.
Further Reading Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Freida Fleischer. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
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Nuclear Age The $2.2 billion Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs used against Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, brought World War II to a close while ushering in the nuclear age. At the same time, it laid the groundwork for the Cold War and the mammoth U.S. military-industrial complex, including nuclear research and development, all of which shaped postwar domestic politics and contributed to the culture wars.
Big Science The making of the atomic bomb represented the partnership of the scientific community and the federal government, involving some 120,000 individuals. Although considerably downsized after the war, work continued at national laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and other sites used during the Manhattan Project. The federal commitment in this field meant that 60 percent of college physics programs in 1949 were financed by the U.S. government. Merle Tuve, an American physicist who during the 1940s had quit working in nuclear research because it had become “a business,” challenged the system with his 1959 Saturday Review essay “Is Science Too Big for the Scientist?” The year prior marked the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which headed rocket research and the manned space program. When President Dwight Eisenhower left office in 1961, he warned of a military-industrial complex, which included NASA and the nuclear industry. Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge lab from 1955 to 1973, coined the negative term “big science” in reference to expensive ongoing programs involving applied research for primarily warfare purposes. Weinberg’s Reflections on Big Science (1967) warned that these colossal projects have the potential of bankrupting society. It has been estimated that from the time of the Manhattan Project to the end of the Cold War the United States spent $5.5 trillion on its nuclear arsenal. Americans at first were proud of the atomic bomb, regarding the mushroom cloud as a symbol of progress and modernity. However, ambivalence and social tensions were apparent early on. As the country-and-western song “When the Atomic Bomb Fell” (1945) celebrated the defeat of the “cruel Jap,” the U.S. Army was dismissing reports of radiation sickness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “Jap propaganda.” The following year, the Hollywood docudrama The Beginning or the End portrayed the physicists of the Manhattan Project as heroes for saving lives by bringing the war to a speedy conclusion, while John Hersey’s nonfiction work Hiroshima presented a sobering account of the human suffering caused by the first bomb dropped on Japan. Indignant about the way government officials were downplaying the dangers of atomic science,
a group of Manhattan Project researchers in 1945 formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS)—soon renamed the Federation of American Scientists—and resorted to fear tactics in an attempt to convince the public that nuclear weapons should be placed under international control. According to historian Paul Boyer, the “politicization of fear” the scientists introduced backfired and ultimately led to a nuclear arms race.
Doomsday Clock In 1946, Bernard Baruch, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, submitted a plan (called the Baruch Plan) to create an international agency that would oversee all production facilities and research pertaining to atomic energy. This seemed exactly what the FAS wanted, but some observers saw the proposal as a ploy simply to make the Soviet Union look bad. Under the Baruch Plan, the United States would agree to turn over its atomic weaponry and open its pertinent research laboratories to international inspectors on the condition that other countries, including the Soviet Union, be subject to UN inspections as well. All nuclear activities would have to be licensed by the UN. In other words, the U.S. government wanted to prevent all other countries from breaking its nuclear monopoly. Although the UN General Assembly passed the Baruch Plan, the Soviet Union vetoed it when the measure came before the Security Council. At the time, the Soviets were busy at work secretly developing an atomic bomb. With hopes for international control of atomic energy dashed, the FAS the following year began publishing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in an effort to lift the veil of military secrecy and prompt public debate on the hazards of the nuclear age, something the scientists felt was not happening despite the creation of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1946), which purportedly placed atomic energy under civilian control. the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin introduced the so-called Doomsday Clock, showing how many “minutes before midnight,” or nuclear tragedy, the world stood. After the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, the clock was set at three minutes to midnight. On April 5, 1951, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, blaming them for “putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would” and emboldening the communists to start the Korean War. Earlier that year, the Federal Civil Defense Administration was established with the goal of establishing a nationwide fallout shelter program. In 1952, schoolchildren began watching the film Duck and Cover to learn how to dive under school desks during a sudden atomic attack. On November 1, 1952, the United States exploded a hydro-
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gen bomb at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific, pushing the Doomsday Clock up to two minutes to midnight. The Soviet Union responded with its own hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953.
H-Bomb to Nuclear Treaties The H-bomb introduced a new wave of nuclear protest, led by physicist Albert Einstein, philosopher Bertrand Russell, and Pope Pius XII. Following a U.S. test explosion on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll in Micronesia, nuclear fallout spread across the Pacific in areas that had not been cleared of shipping due to a shift in the winds. Consequently, twenty-three crew members of the Japanese fishing trawler Lucky Dragon suffered from radiation poisoning that resulted in one fatality. “Our fate menaces all mankind,” said one of the fishermen as he was being treated at the hospital. Fear and fascination about nuclear war and nuclear fallout were expressed in a number of popular novels—Dexter Masters’s The Accident (1955), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)—and movies—The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), and H-Man (1958). Meanwhile, in June 1957, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins and others established the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), urging a halt to nuclear testing. In 1958, others tried to disrupt nuclear tests by sailing ships into the Pacific proving grounds. Albert Bigelow, a former U.S. naval commander, was arrested as he headed The Golden Rule toward the forbidden waters, but Earle Reynolds managed to enter the area with his ship, Phoenix of Hiroshima. In 1954, the United States focused its attention on a nuclear delivery system, developing the B-52 longrange bomber. By 1956, nearly 2,000 bombers with 7,000 nuclear bombs were at the American ready. The new trend, however, was missile technology with nuclear warheads. This is why the successful Soviet launching of Sputnik in October 1957 greatly alarmed Americans. John F. Kennedy campaigned for president on the perception that there was a “missile gap” between the Soviets and the Americans, even though in 1960 the United States introduced the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, capable of launching a nuclear strike from the ocean depths. Later, in October 1962, the two superpowers had a tense standoff over medium-range missiles the Soviets had set up in Cuba to counter the U.S. longrange missile capability. After the Cuban missile crisis, there was a relaxing of tensions between Washington and Moscow, marked by the 1963 signing of a partial test-ban treaty that henceforth restricted nuclear testing to below ground. With the specter of the mushroom cloud seeming to fade, anxiety about the nuclear age subsided somewhat. The inherent danger remained very much alive in public
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consciousness, however, as reflected in the dark, satirical humor of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The politicization of fear in regard to atomic weaponry inspired the first television campaign attack ad. On September 7, 1964, the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential campaign ran the minute-long “daisy ad” on NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies. The commercial showed a little girl standing in a meadow, plucking petals from a daisy while counting aloud. At a given point, her voice melds into that of a man counting down to a nuclear explosion. “These are the stakes,” a message at the end warns. “To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or die.” Although the spot did not mention the name Barry Goldwater, the Republic presidential candidate, it was clear that he was being construed as an extremist who might unleash nuclear war. Republicans and others objected to the ad, which was run only once but played numerous times as a news story. Meanwhile, efforts to halt nuclear proliferation led to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, signed by the five nuclear powers at the time—the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China—as well as 140 non-nuclear countries (excluding Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, all of which later became nuclear powers). In 1972, the Nixon administration negotiated with the Soviets the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), establishing limits on missiles and bombers that deliver nuclear weapons to their targets. Further limits on delivery systems were imposed by SALT II (1979), which the U.S. Senate refused to ratify but was nonetheless followed by both the Carter and Reagan administrations.
Reagan to Yucca By the 1980s, the two superpowers possessed a total of 50,000 nuclear weapons, more than enough for mutual destruction. All the bombs dropped during World War II were the equivalent of 3 megatons (equal to 3 million tons of TNT), while in 1983 the combined U.S.Soviet nuclear arsenal represented 15,000 megatons. Despite these figures, Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency in part to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal. The nation’s nuclear capability should not be based on deterrence, he contended, but on defeating the enemy. As president, Reagan authorized 100 MX missiles, called for the development of the Trident submarine (each capable of carrying 24 missiles with a total of 336 warheads), reactivated plans for the B-1 bomber (which President Jimmy Carter had canceled), and announced a long-term space-based ballistic missile defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative. These developments alarmed many observers and emboldened a popular nuclear-freeze movement,
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which began in Europe and spread to New England town meetings. The dangers of the nuclear age were underscored by the radioactive fallout across Europe from the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Eventually, Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement (1987). In the years after Reagan, the two superpowers agreed to the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in 1991, followed by START II in 1993. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, which was signed by 71 nations (including Russia), bans all forms of nuclear testing, but the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it. Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union, concerns have been raised that Russian “loose nukes” might fall into the hands of terrorists, prompting the U.S. government to allocate funds to help Russia decommission its old atomic supply. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials reiterated their concern that a “dirty bomb” could be constructed out of Cold War–era nuclear material and detonated in a highly populated area, spreading lethal levels of radiation. In addition, the United States recommitted itself to missile defense. Meanwhile, environmentalists have been concerned about the problem of nuclear waste. As of 2008, nuclear waste was being stored at 121 temporary sites in nearly forty states. Plans were made for the Yucca Mountain underground storage facility in Nevada, located about 90 miles (145 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas, to be opened by 1986 for the purpose of burying the spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste from the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors as well as material waste from the military nuclear weaponry. (Each year the reactors produce 2,000
metric tons of spent fuel.) More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the project, projected a 2020 operation date for the facility. As of 2008, the estimated cost of the facility was $96.2 billion—up from $57.5 billion seven years earlier. Residents of Nevada and a number of elected officials and politicians have opposed the opening of the Yucca site. Roger Chapman See also: Cold War; Communists and Communism; Cuba; Enola Gay Exhibit; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kubrick, Stanley; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Postmodernism; Science Wars; Soviet Union and Russia; Strategic Defense Initiative; Teller, Edward; Three Mile Island Accident; War Protesters.
Further Reading Boyer, Paul. Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Web site. www.thebulletin.org. DeGroot, Gerard J. The Bomb: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Hughes, Jeff. The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atomic Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Newton, David E. Nuclear Power. New York: Facts On File, 2006. Schwartz, Stephen. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. Zeman, Scott C., and Michael A. Amundson. Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004.
for tax credits to the working poor and a measure that mandated videotaping of all interrogations conducted by state and local police forces. In 2000, he lost a primary race for Congress against Democratic incumbent Bobby Rush, a prominent civil rights leader. In 2004, Obama won an open U.S. Senate seat, defeating the conservative Republican Alan Keyes. Obama’s unlikely trajectory to the White House began with a 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. In that speech he deplored the culture wars, asserting that there is only one United States of America, not “a liberal America and a conservative America” and not “a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America.” He called on Americans to turn from the “politics of cynicism” and to participate in the “the politics of hope.” This postpartisan message was the theme of his presidential run, which was launched two years later with the publication of his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006).
Obama, Barack The first African American to be elected president of the United States, Barack Obama achieved his 2008 victory running as a self-described post-partisan candidate with a left-of-center message emphasizing “change” and “hope.” In that election, coinciding with two protracted wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Democrats not only won the White House but significantly expanded their majority in both houses of Congress. Some commentators immediately predicted that the election would go down in history as on par with the political realignments of 1932 and 1980. “Emphatically, comprehensively,” the New Yorker editorialized, “the public has turned against conservatism at home and neoconservatism abroad.” Obama became the forty-fourth president by defeating Senator John McCain (R-AZ), garnering nearly 53 percent of the popular vote and carrying the swing states of Ohio and Florida as well as such traditional red states as Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. In the end, Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden (the longtime senator from Delaware), won the Electoral College by 365–173 votes. This had been preceded by Obama’s surprising defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in a hotly contested Democratic primary.
Contentious Democratic Primary In the Democratic primary, Obama criticized Clinton, his main opponent, for her 2002 vote sanctioning the invasion of Iraq. Although not a U.S. senator at the time, he was publicly against that war from the onset. As a presidential candidate, he called for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Clinton, who refused to concede defeat until the very end, said the freshman senator did not have enough experience to be commander in chief. Obama’s supporters argued that their candidate would be “more electable” in the general election than Clinton, whom they viewed as politically polarizing. After the election, Clinton was appointed secretary of state in the Obama administration. Obama’s early campaigning was given a boost by the active support of Oprah Winfrey, the black television talk show host, who rallied voters during the Iowa caucus and South Carolina primary. As Obama’s campaign rallies drew throngs of people who were buoyed by his eloquent speeches calling for political “change,” critics dismissed his “feel good” messages as lacking in substance. Throughout the campaign, Obama faced attacks that suggested he was un-American. Certain detractors referred to him as “Osama” (alluding to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who masterminded the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) and emphasized his middle name (Hussein, like the name of the late Iraqi dictator). Some conservative conspiracy theorists on the Internet and talk radio communicated the notion that Obama was a secret Muslim, perhaps even an al-Qaeda “Trojan horse.” The New Yorker, in its cover cartoon of July 21, 2008, offered a satirical depiction of such fear, presenting the candidate in a robe and turban giving a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who was dressed as a rifle-toting
Early Life and Career The son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. When Obama was two, his parents separated and the father eventually returned to Africa. Obama spent part of his childhood in Djakarta, Indonesia (1967–1971), where his mother remarried, this time to an Indonesian. Obama was later raised by his maternal grandparents in Hawaii, where, going by the name of Barry, he attended the Punahou Academy prep school. He went on to study at Occidental University in Los Angeles (1979–1981) and then transferred to Columbia University in New York (BA, political science, 1983). Following graduation, Obama briefly worked on Wall Street before moving to Chicago, where he was a community organizer. After attending Harvard Law School (JD, 1991), where he served as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama returned to Illinois and directed PROJECT VOTE! (1992). He also joined a private law firm, published an autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), lectured at the University of Chicago, and served in the Illinois Senate (1997–2005). As a state senator, he sponsored legislation 411
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black radical. Supporters of Obama cried foul over the magazine’s sense of political humor, arguing that some readers would take the drawing literally. In the primary as well as the general election, the issue of race was raised frequently. After Clinton had spoken of the courageous accomplishment of President Lyndon Johnson in signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming that she would be that kind of forward-thinking president, Obama accused her of dismissing the efforts of the civil rights activists. Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984 and a Hillary supporter, suggested that Obama was receiving preferential treatment because of his race: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position.” When criticized for her comments, Ferraro retorted, “Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist. I will not be discriminated against because I’m white.” Rush Limbaugh, the king of conservative talk radio, satirized white supporters of Obama with the song “Barack the Magic Negro,” belittling them for supposing the election of a black president would assuage their guilt over slavery and other past wrongs. Civil rights activists such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson thought Obama was catering too much to white voters, but the candidate saw himself as part of the “Joshua Generation” of the civil rights movement, meaning a new kind of black leader for a new period. At one point the spotlight focused on some inflammatory statements of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the preacher at the Chicago church the Obamas had attended for many years. In one controversial sermon on racial injustice, Wright shouted, “God damn America!” Many began to ask how Obama could be a follower of such a spiritual leader. To diffuse the situation, on March 18, 2008, Obama gave a speech on race in America titled “A More Perfect Union” at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia, disagreeing with Wright (calling his remarks “distorted”) but refusing to disown him (although Obama later withdrew his church membership). Obama was praised by many for daring to candidly address the complexities of race, especially by sharing how his white grandmother, who raised him during his teenage years and loved him deeply, sometimes feared blacks. In that speech, Obama compared his mixed-race background to the larger American experience “that out of many, we are truly one.”
A New Era The strategy Obama used in defeating McCain was to link him with the policies of President George W. Bush. Desperate for political traction, McCain picked Sarah Palin, the popular conservative governor of Alaska, as his running mate. Pro-life, pro-gun, and Pentecostal, Palin temporarily breathed new life into McCain’s
campaign as the Religious Right rallied around her. For a short while, the McCain-Palin ticket actually led in the polls, but the momentum stalled after the vicepresidential nominee became a national laughingstock following some bungled television interviews. Obama, in the meantime, benefited by endorsements from Colin Powell, a former secretary of state under Bush, and writer Christopher Buckley, son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr. As the campaign peaked, the economy tanked and a financial crisis unfolded, which Obama blamed on years of Republican deregulation. During the last presidential debate, McCain tried to reenergize his campaign by calling attention to “Joe the Plumber,” a voter and small businessman in Ohio who had challenged Obama’s plan to increase taxes on the wealthy. Meanwhile, Palin heated up the culture wars by referring to her smalltown supporters as the “real America” and pointing out that Obama had earlier referred to rural Americans who cling to religious fundamentalism and guns as “bitter.” Obama weathered these and other attacks by accusing his opponents of having no fresh ideas, but simply the old politics of fear. On inauguration day, Obama declared a new era that would “set aside childish things.” The inaugural address was viewed by many as a repudiation of eight years of Bush. “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” said the new president. “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for too long have strangled our politics.” The speech, critics said afterward, was hardly post-partisan. Roger Chapman See also: Clinton, Hillary; Democratic Party; Election of 2008; Ferraro, Geraldine; Limbaugh, Rush; McCain, John; Neoconservatism; Palin, Sarah; Race; Red and Blue States.
Further Reading Asim, Jabari. What Obama Means—For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future. New York: William Morrow, 2009. Corsi, Jerome. The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. New York: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster, 2008. Ifill, Gwen. The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Lizza, Ryan. “Battle Plans.” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008. Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006. ———. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995. Silverstein, Ken. “Useful Idiots.” Harper’s Magazine, November 2008.
Obesit y Epidemic
Obesity Epidemic Since the mid-1990s, alarm in scientific circles and popular discourse over what has been called “the obesity epidemic” and “the obesity crisis” have coincided with the concern of health officials over the increasing body weight of Americans. In 2003, U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, concerned that fewer young people were meeting the physical fitness standards required of military recruits, declared obesity a threat to U.S. national security more dire than weapons of mass destruction. Although there is general agreement that Americans today are larger than those of previous generations, following a global trend, not everyone accepts “obesity” as a meaningful scientific categorization. Furthermore, regardless of any health risks posed by obesity, unanimity is lacking on what, if any, response is warranted on the part of individuals, the government, or the medical profession. Since a higher percentage of the poor, among them African Americans and Hispanics, tend to be overweight, some critics of anti-obesity campaigns view them as racial or class snobbery, especially since being overweight is often stereotypically linked with lack of discipline. Opinions about obesity often fall into two warring camps: one focuses on public health measures for the common good, and the other emphasizes freedom of choice and individual responsibility. Obesity is generally defined in terms of the body mass index (BMI), calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters (BMI = kg/m2 ). For adults age twenty and older, a person with a BMI of less than 18.5 is classified as underweight, 18.5–24.9 as normal weight, 25.0–29.9 as overweight, 30–39.9 as obese, and 40 and over as morbidly obese. For an adult who is 5 feet and 6 inches (168 centimeters) tall, a normal body weight would be in the range of 118–160 pounds (54–73 kilos), while a weight of 216 pounds (98 kilos) or more would be considered obese. Of course, these categories are somewhat arbitrary—Why should 159 pounds (72 kilos) be considered normal and 161 pounds (73 kilos) overweight? BMI can also be misleading, as in the case of professional athletes who would be classified as overweight or obese because they are extremely muscular. For children and adolescents age nineteen and younger, growth charts are used to evaluate a child’s weight-to-height ratio in relation to children of the same age and sex. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one-third of American adults were obese in 2006, double the percentage reported in 1980. Among U.S. children and adolescents (ages two to nineteen), obesity tripled between 1980 and 2002. In the view of most doctors, these statistics are cause for concern because obesity is generally associated with increased risk for many diseases as well as premature death. However, other researchers question whether obesity per se is a health risk, noting that it is prevalent in social
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groups (such as nonwhites and the poor) that have less access to health care, lead more stressful lives, and so on. Furthermore, while a 2004 study showed that obesity was second only to smoking as a cause of excess mortality, a study three years later suggested that overweight individuals were actually at lower risk of mortality than their normal-weight counterparts. Some blame increased obesity on a “toxic environment” in which unhealthy and fattening foods are readily available. This view has led to a number of lawsuits, the first filed in New York in 2002, claiming that fastfood producers should bear some responsibility for the weight gain and ill health suffered by those who order from their menus, analogous to claims against tobacco companies for the health problems of smokers. Although none of these suits had been successful, the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004 and 2005 approved the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act (known as the “Cheeseburger Act”) to shield the food industry and restaurants from liability claims by obese customers. Although the Senate let the bill die on both occasions, more than a dozen states, beginning with Louisiana in 2003, passed their own “cheeseburger laws.” Meanwhile, in 2006, the board of health in New York City unanimously passed an ordinance requiring restaurants to phase out artificial trans fats in the food they serve, arousing the ire of the National Restaurant Association. In 2008, California passed a law requiring restaurant chains to include food-calorie information on menus. The concern about childhood obesity, heightened by the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics to routinely screen individuals nineteen years and younger for weight problems, has led some school districts to begin reporting children’s BMI to parents, as was mandated in Arkansas in 2003. Although motivated by a concern for children’s health and welfare, BMI reports have been criticized for overemphasizing a single health measure at the risk of stigmatizing children who otherwise may outgrow being overweight, and providing insufficient contextual information for parents. Organizations such as Commercial Alert and the Kaiser Family Foundation have recommended a ban on “junk food” advertising to children and limitations on snack foods and soft drinks sold in schools. Although campaigns to prohibit television or print advertising have been unsuccessful, California, West Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and Texas have instituted restrictions on the sale of unhealthy food and drinks in school buildings. The debate on diet and personal responsibility was intensified by the release of the documentary Super Size Me (2004), which portrayed filmmaker Morgan Spurlock gaining 24 pounds (11 kilos) and seriously impairing his health after only a month of eating three meals a day at McDonald’s. Although McDonald’s discontinued its “SuperSize” meals due to negative publicity surround-
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ing Super Size Me, many viewers took issue with the film’s claim that fast food is inherently unhealthy. Other documentaries—including Bowling for Morgan (2004), made by Scott Caswell, and Me and Mickey D (2005), made by Soso Waley, an adjunct of the Competitive Enterprise Institute—offered the counterargument that a person may eat fast food and stay healthy, emphasizing the personal responsibility of the consumer in making intelligent choices. The Center for Science in the Public Interest and the World Health Organization have endorsed special taxes on fast food, analogous to the taxes on soft drinks and snack foods that already exist in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. Efforts to tax fast-food chains have not been successful, however, partly because of the difficulty of defining what constitutes fast food—for instance, taxing a salad at McDonald’s but not a hamburger at a formal restaurant is inconsistent. In addition, a fast-food tax has been criticized as interfering with individual freedom of choice and of disproportionately penalizing the poor. Sarah Boslaugh See also: Health Care; McCarthyism; Tobacco Settlements.
Further Reading Brownell, Kelly D., and Katherine Battle Horgan. Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Campos, Paul. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health. New York: Penguin, 2004. Critser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Metcalf, Tom, and Gena Metcalf. Obesity. Detroit, MI: Thomson/ Gale, 2008. Oliver, J. Eric. “The Politics of Pathology: How Obesity Became an Epidemic Disease.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49:4 (August 2006): 611–27.
Occupational Safety When President Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into law on December 29, 1970, he hailed the legislation as “the American system at its best.” The act established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) “to assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions.” Over the years, OSHA has come to symbolize the rift between those who look to the government to protect individuals and those who advocate a more libertarian society. In 2008, with more than 2,100 personnel and an operating budget of over $490 million, OSHA conducted nearly 40,000
workplace inspections for the purpose of enforcing worker safety. Occupational safety mandated by the government dates back to the 1870s, when Massachusetts passed laws for industrial safety. In 1913, the federal government became involved in improving working conditions with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Labor. Later, the passage of the Walsh-Healey Act (1936) gave government contract workers certain protections, including workplace safety and sanitation standards. The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) implicitly promoted worker safety by limiting the work week to forty-four hours and restricting child labor. In response to a number of accidents at coal mines, Congress passed the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act (1952). After television journalist Edward R. Murrow aired the documentary Harvest of Shame (1960), detailing the harsh working conditions of migrant farm workers, Congress passed the Migrant Health Act (1962). All of this set the stage for OSHA, which was designed to build on existing laws and efforts at both the federal and state levels. As an independent agency under the Department of Labor, OSHA works in concert with its research and education arm, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the latter an independent agency under the Department of Health and Human Services. The idea for federal regulatory bodies to improve occupational safety was proposed in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. At a time when the Vietnam War was raging, it was argued that the American workplace, averaging about 15,000 deaths, 7 million injuries, and 2 million disabilities annually, was exacting a heavier toll than the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Critics of OSHA later suggested that the decline in fatal on-thejob accidents was a trend well under way prior to federal involvement in occupational safety. In 1979, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce complained that fatal injuries on the job increased by 24 percent from 1976 to 1977, adding that businesses were forced to spend $25 billion between 1972 and 1979 to comply with “piles of more OSHA rules and paperwork.” In actuality, the 1977 spike of 5,560 work-related deaths was considerably lower than the pre-OSHA figures. After its first full year of operation, OSHA in 1973 was vilified by conservatives as an intolerable government intrusion on private enterprise. While the John Birch Society launched a flamboyant “Put OSHA Out of Business” campaign, arguing that the regulatory body was the first step toward the nationalization of the economy (in other words, communism), alarmist business leaders argued that “OSHAcrats” were violating the privacy of corporations by conducting workplace inspections. In reaction to the outrage of the business community, Congress introduced numerous bills to scale back OSHA. During the Reagan administration Thorne Auchter, a construction executive whose firm had been previously
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cited for safety violations, was put in charge of OSHA, prompting the consumer advocate Ralph Nader to declare the agency “shackled.” Over the years, critics have blamed OSHA for driving up the cost of doing business while reducing worker productivity. According to the findings of a 1987 study by Clark University economist Wayne B. Gray, about 30 percent of the overall drop in productivity experienced by the American manufacturing sector during the period 1958–1978 was the consequence of governmental regulation. However, proponents of federal oversight of occupational safety—in accord with the OSHA maxim “Safety is good business”—noted that in 2006 alone American employers paid $48.6 billion for job-related injuries, a business expense that could be reduced by improving worker safety. Conservatives, on the other hand, insist that they believe in safety just as strongly but think the matter should be left to voluntary compliance because businesses know more about their work environments than OSHA “desk jockeys” do. Business executives often complain that OSHA regulations fail to consider the unique situation of each workplace and instead issue “one size fits all” regulations. OSHA inspectors, critics charge, issue fines to companies that fail to meet some obscure regulation yet otherwise have an excellent safety record. In 2006, OSHA issued fines totaling about $85 million. While OSHA and NIOSH have given serious attention to worker exposure to uranium, lead, cotton dust, coal dust, asbestos, and chemicals, the most common OSHA violation pertains to scaffolding safety—the cause of 9,000 citations issued in 2006. Meanwhile, reducing repetitive stress injuries has been an ongoing concern of OSHA and NIOSH. Such injuries are common to workers in jobs that require the same motion over and over—it has been estimated that nearly four out of ten workers suffer from this kind of injury. With the advent of computers and more jobs requiring keyboarding, repetitive stress injuries have risen in recent years. In response, OSHA has emphasized ergonomic solutions, involving the design and placement of machinery and equipment. In March 2001, arguing that implementation costs would be too financially burdensome for businesses, Congress and President George W. Bush rescinded OSHA regulations that would have introduced comprehensive ergonomics in the workplace. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; John Birch Society; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Labor Unions; Migrant Labor; Murrow, Edward R.; Nader, Ralph; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Smoking in Public.
Further Reading Cullen, Lisa. A Job to Die For: Why So Many Americans Are Killed, Injured or Made Ill at Work and What to Do About It. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2002.
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Gray, Wayne B. “The Cost of Regulation: OSHA, EPA, and the Productivity Slowdown.” American Economic Review 77:5 (December 1987): 998–1006. Mintz, Benjamin W. OSHA: History, Law, and Policy. Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1984. Occupational Safety and Health Administration Web site. www.osha.gov.
O ’C o n n o r, S a n d r a D ay The first woman to serve as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor was born on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas. She grew up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona and graduated from Stanford University with a BA in economics in 1950. Two years later, she earned a law degree from Stanford Law School, where she served on the Stanford Law Review and graduated near the top of her class (which included future chief justice William Rehnquist). When O’Connor embarked on a career, law was extremely male dominated, and California law firms were unwilling to hire her, offering her only a position as a secretary. Turning to public service, she became deputy county attorney of San Mateo County, California (1952– 1953), and later a civilian attorney for Quartermaster Market Center in Frankfurt, Germany (1954–1957). She practiced law in the Phoenix area before serving as the state’s assistant attorney general (1965–1969), a stint that ended when she was appointed to the Arizona State Senate. A Republican, she served as a senator until 1975, when she was elected judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court. Four years later, she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals. On August 19, 1981, upholding a campaign promise to appoint the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, President Ronald Reagan nominated O’Connor. A month later, the Senate unanimously confirmed her appointment. As an associate justice on the Supreme Court, O’Connor was the object of criticism from diverse interest groups. Her approach was simple: She considered each case narrowly. She tried to limit the generality of her decisions, which would allow more latitude in future, similar cases. It was difficult to extrapolate broad ideological interpretations from her decisions because they tended to be restricted to the narrow confines of the specific issue before the Court. Women’s organizations were disappointed that O’Connor would not advance the cause of women’s rights more ardently. Many more were troubled because O’Connor’s votes on abortion cases were clearly pro-life. Her abortion decisions—particularly Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which narrowed the right to abortion by striking down provisions of a Pennsylvania state law—are regarded as her most controversial. Conservatives and Republicans were dismayed by
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some of O’Connor’s decisions. Because she was appointed by Reagan and a registered Republican, they felt confident that she would regularly side with them. As the Court became more conservative, O’Connor emerged as a centrist. She was often the deciding vote and was in the majority more often than any of her cohorts. Conservatives were particularly disappointed by her decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), in which the Court deemed unconstitutional a Texas law that made homosexual sodomy a crime. On July 1, 2005, O’Connor announced she would retire upon the confirmation of a successor to the bench. Originally, she was to be replaced by John Roberts, Jr., but the unexpected death of Rehnquist that September prompted President George W. Bush to renominate Roberts for the chief justice position. O’Connor delayed her retirement until the January 31, 2006, confirmation of Samuel Alito. Shortly after leaving the bench, in a speech at Georgetown University, she criticized Republican leaders who had been calling for judicial reform and warned that the lack of an independent judiciary is the hallmark of a dictatorship. James W. Stoutenborough See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Coulter, Ann; Gay Rights Movement; Judicial Wars; Planned Parenthood; Reagan, Ronald; Rehnquist, William H.; Sodomy Laws.
Further Reading Biskupic, Joan. Sandra Day O’Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice. New York: Ecco, 2005. Chemerinsky, Erwin. “The O’Connor Legacy.” Trial 41:9 (2005): 68–69. Herda, D.J. Sandra Day O’Connor: Independent Thinker. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1995. O’Connor, Sandra Day. The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice. New York: Random House, 2003.
William’s school. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor in Murray v. Curlett (1963), holding that school-sponsored prayer and Bible study were to be prohibited in all public schools. In the late 1970s, however, her bid to have the words “In God We Trust” removed from the national currency failed. In the midst of these struggles, O’Hair founded American Atheists as a civil liberties organization for nonbelievers. As the lifetime leader of American Atheists, she produced a radio program to spread her views and became involved in a number of lawsuits policing the appearance of religion in the public sphere. In 1980, William O’Hair became a born-again Christian, sparking a series of mutual renunciations between son and mother. Like the later religious conversion of Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe” of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling affirming a woman’s right to an abortion), William’s conversion was invoked by the Religious Right in their public relations strategy of reaching out to “victims” of liberal elitism and judicial activism. O’Hair was a contentious figure among secular progressives and within the community of atheist activists, many of whom regarded her as a fractious, ill-mannered militant. After the August 1995 disappearance of O’Hair from her home in Austin, Texas, rumors circulated that she had left the country or that she had died and her children were involved in a cover-up so that William could not subject his mother to the indignity of a Christian funeral. Slowly, evidence surfaced that ex-convict David Roland Waters, who had been loosely involved with American Atheists, had kidnapped and killed O’Hair, her son Jon, and her granddaughter Robin in order to steal over $500,000 in gold coins. After her death, email messages perpetuated a rumor, which first began in 1975, that O’Hair was petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to ban all religious references from television programming. Jason Mellard
O ’ H a i r, M a d a l y n M u r r ay A key figure in the battle over the separation of church and state, who was branded by Life magazine in 1964 as the “most hated woman in America,” Madalyn Murray O’Hair served as the public face of American atheism from the 1960s to her disappearance and death in 1995. Born Madalyn Mays on April 13, 1919, in Beechview, Pennsylvania, she was a U.S. Army cryptographer during World War II, attended Ashland College in Ohio (BA, 1948) and South Texas College of Law (JD, 1952), and began a career as a social worker. While living in Baltimore in the early 1960s, O’Hair filed a lawsuit protesting religious observances in her son
See also: American Civil Religion; Church and State; Cold War; Conspiracy Theories; Evangelicalism; Federal Communications Commission; Fundamentalism, Religious; Judicial Wars; Roe v. Wade (1973); School Prayer; Secular Humanism; Ten Commandments.
Further Reading Dracos, Ted. Ungodly: The Passions, Torrents, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. New York: Free Press, 2003. Le Beau, Bryan. The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Seaman, Ann Rowe. America’s Most Hated Woman: The Life and Gruesome Death of Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Harrisburg, PA: Continuum International, 2005.
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O. J. Simpson Tr ial The 1995 murder trial of former football star, actor, and television commentator O.J. Simpson revealed an abiding racial polarization in American society and brought fundamental issues of race and crime to the forefront of national discourse. On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson, the former wife of O.J. Simpson, and friend Ron Goldman were murdered in front of her condominium residence in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Police soon began to view O.J. Simpson as a suspect. After being formally charged on June 17, Simpson and friend Al Cowlings fled Los Angeles in his vehicle, a Ford Bronco. After being spotted in Orange County, he led a phalanx of police cars in a nationally televised low-speed chase that ended up back at Simpson’s own house. On July 22, Simpson pleaded “absolutely not guilty” to the murders, and on January 24, 1995, after months of jury selection and legal maneuvering, the trial got under way. The prosecution presented evidence that Simpson had physically abused Nicole during their marriage and contended that the abuse had escalated, culminating in the murders. Since there were no witnesses, confession, or fingerprints (a single bloody fingerprint was not detected in time to be included in the trial) and the murder weapon was never found, the prosecution’s case was based purely on circumstantial evidence. In such instances, the prosecution must not only prove its case “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but it must also disprove any plausible theory of innocence. According to the defense team, a racist detective of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Mark Fuhrman, disapproved of Simpson’s marriage to a white woman and moved incriminating evidence—a bloody glove—from the murder scene to Simpson’s home. To establish this, the defense invoked past racial statements by Fuhrman and noted that he had been the one to discover many of the key pieces of evidence in the case. On cross-examination, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey got Fuhrman to deny that he had ever used the “N word” (“nigger”) in the past ten years. Later in the trial, the defense presented tape recordings of recent conversations in which Fuhrman used the word frequently, expressed a general hostility toward blacks, and discussed planting evidence and framing men in interracial relationships. Fuhrman invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he had planted evidence in the Simpson case. The prosecution was ill prepared to counter this strategy, having built its case on the volume of circumstantial evidence amassed against Simpson. This included a trail of blood extending from Nicole’s house to Simpson’s car to Simpson’s property, and all the way inside his house up to his bedroom. Among the most incriminating evidence was a mixture of O.J. Simpson’s blood and Goldman’s blood found inside the defendant’s car. Testing also revealed that
The highly publicized double-murder trial of former football star O.J. Simpson in 1995 divided the nation along racial lines: African Americans felt that justice was served by the “not guilty” verdict; whites were convinced that Simpson had committed the crimes. (Vince Bucci/AFP/Getty Images)
carpet fibers found on Goldman’s body were identical to the carpet in Simpson’s car, and that fewer than 100 carpets like that existed. Because of a procedural error by the prosecution, however, the jury never heard the carpet evidence. Critics of the not-guilty verdict—rendered on October 2, 1995, after just three hours of jury deliberation— blamed the outcome on various missteps by Judge Lance Ito and prosecutors. One crucial decision by Ito was to exclude from the jury anyone who read a newspaper. Critics contended that this ensured a jury with a low intelligence level that would not be able to understand the complex scientific evidence about DNA that was central to the case. By virtually all accounts, race was a central element in the trial, its coverage in the media, and Simpson’s acquittal. Many observers believed that the lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, was ill suited to try the case. Once it was established that the jury would be composed primarily of black women, research by the prosecution’s own focus group found that black women in general did not like Clark, who was white, and did not subscribe to her domestic violence theory of the murders. Despite this, no effort was made to replace Clark or alter the prosecution’s theory of the case. Meanwhile, realizing the racial implications of the jury composition and the police misconduct theory, the defense replaced lead counsel Robert Shapiro with Johnnie Cochran, a prominent black lawyer. Clark was also admonished by her critics for failing to establish rapport with the jury and, at one point, for going three months without examining a witness. Also in terms of the racial dynamic, Clark’s informal banter
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with co-counsel Christopher Darden, who was black, was believed by some observers to have been alienating to the black women on the jury. The jury itself—sequestered in isolation for the duration of the trial—was paralyzed by infighting, some of which involved racial issues, even during the testimony phase. The announcement of the final verdict polarized the country along clear racial lines. Blacks cheered for what they regarded as a repudiation of racially driven police misconduct; whites were stunned to silence over what they regarded as the exoneration of a brutal killer. In a civil trial for wrongful death brought by the families of the two victims, Simpson was found liable in February 1997 and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. The reversal of outcome was widely explained by the lower standard of proof required to find against the defendant in a civil case (“a preponderance of the evidence”) than in a criminal case (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) and by differences in nuance, if not substance, in witness testimony. A new controversy erupted in late 2006 after ReganBooks announced that it would publish a book by Simpson—prospectively titled If I Did It—in which he offered an account of how he “might” have carried out the murders. In response to public outrage, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the publishing house, stopped the project. Simpson denied that the book was a confession to the crime, but he did concede that he was trying to capitalize on it—reigniting the outrage of those who believed he got away with murder. In August 2007, a Florida court awarded publication rights to the family of Ron Goldman as partial payment for Simpson’s unpaid civil judgment. The book was finally published later that year under the title If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, with comments by the Goldman family. In September 2007, Simpson was arrested for leading a raid and armed robbery at a casino hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Simpson claimed that he was retrieving stolen sports memorabilia that belonged to him. Later, a jury found him guilty of twelve felony counts. In December 2008, a Clark County District Court judge sentenced Simpson, then age sixty-one, to a prison sentence of nine to thirty-three years. Jackie Glass, the presiding judge, publicly stated that neither the jury nor the court had been influenced by the 1995 murder trial. Tony L. Hill and Roger Chapman See also: Morrison, Toni; Murdoch, Rupert; Race.
Further Reading Bosco, Joseph. A Problem of Evidence: How the Prosecution Freed O.J. Simpson. New York: William Morrow, 1996. Bugliosi, Vincent. Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away with Murder. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
Riccio, Thomas J. Busted! The Inside Story of the World of Sports Memorabilia, O.J. Simpson, and the Vegas Arrests. Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2008. Spence, Gerry. O.J.: The Last Word. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Toobin, Jeffrey. The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. New York: Random House, 1996.
O p e r a t i o n Re s c u e Operation Rescue, a Christian Fundamentalist directaction organization, uses graphic imagery, civil disobedience, and intimidation tactics in a campaign to prevent abortion in America. Between 1986 and 1994, the group’s “rescues” were some of the most high-profile examples of militant civil disobedience by the Religious Right. Operation Rescue argues that they are doing God-inspired work to prevent a “holocaust of unborn children.” They regard abortion as a perversion of God’s law that is indicative of a catastrophic diminution of biblical morality in society. Randall Terry, a born-again charismatic Christian, founded the group in 1986 in Binghamton, New York, and led it through its most controversial early years. Operation Rescue protesters used confrontation, intimidation, and physical harassment to prevent women and doctors from entering abortion clinics. Terry was arrested several times, once for arranging to have an aborted fetus delivered to presidential candidate Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. A Washington Post report estimated that over 40,000 people were arrested in Operation Rescue demonstrations between 1986 and 1990, one of the highest incarceration rates of any social movement organization in American history. After the mid-1990s, deep internal dissent, mounting legal costs, prison sentences, and leadership strife led to organizational splintering. Some members began to employ increasingly violent tactics. Several were convicted in the slayings of abortion clinic doctors, nurses, employees, and volunteers. Finally, Congress passed the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which prohibits the use of intimidation or physical force to discourage people from gaining access to reproductive health care facilities. Renamed Operation Save America (to distinguish it from various local Operation Rescue splinter groups, the organization carries on with a lower profile, maintaining an active Web site, producing exposés on abortion providers, and organizing prayer vigils outside clinics. In 1995, Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe” in the 1973 Supreme Court case upholding a woman’s right to have an abortion, Roe v. Wade) became a member of Operation Save America and was baptized by its leader, Reverend Phillip Benham. Operation Rescue has had critics across the political
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spectrum. Within the anti-abortion movement, some fear that the group’s inflammatory statements and illegal tactics have drawn too much negative attention to the pro-life cause. Pro-choice critics argue that the group’s ranks are filled with dangerous zealots whose tactics create a climate of fear that severely compromises women’s legal right to obtain a safe, medically supervised abortion. Both sides agree that Operation Rescue’s protests and tactics created a chilling effect on the available pool of medical personnel willing to perform abortions. Social and cultural analysts of abortion in American politics tend to focus on Operation Rescue’s seminal role in pushing Christian Fundamentalism into national politics and contributing to a “culture of violence” and a highly polarized discourse between pro-life and pro-choice camps. Steve G. Hoffman See also: Abortion; Clinton, Bill; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Religious Right; Roe v. Wade (1973); Rudolph, Eric.
Further Reading Blanchard, Dallas. The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Rise of the Religious Right: From Polite to Fiery Protest. New York: Twayne, 1994. Ginsburg, F.D. “Rescuing the Nation: Operation Rescue and the Rise of Anti-Abortion Militance.” In Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000, ed. Rickie Solinger, 227–250. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Maxwell, J.C. Pro-Life Activists in America: Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Risen, James, and Judy L. Thomas. Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
O p p e n h e i m e r, J . R o b e r t The American nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Manhattan Project during World War II and oversaw the production of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945. During the Cold War in the early 1950s, in response to Oppenheimer’s prior communist affiliation, his open opposition to development of the thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb), and his support for international controls of atomic weapons, a federal “loyalty” board stripped him of his security clearance. Julius Robert Oppenheimer, born on April 22, 1904, in New York City, graduated from Harvard University (1925), did postgraduate work at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, and received his PhD in physics from the University of Göttingen (1927) in Germany. There, he studied under the prominent physicist Max Born and met Werner Heisenberg, later the director
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of the Nazis’ short-lived nuclear weapons program at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. Oppenheimer taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology (1929–1947), taking leave to serve as director at Los Alamos in New Mexico (1943–1945). After the war, Oppenheimer served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University (1947–1966). For his role in developing the weapons that forced the Japanese surrender, Oppenheimer was given the Army-Navy Excellence Award (1945) and the Presidential Medal of Merit (1946). As director of the Manhattan Project during the war, Oppenheimer was decisive in recruiting scientists and engineers, acquiring materials, and developing the neutronsplitting fission weapons that would dramatically escalate the destructive capacity of America’s weapons. Despite his postwar antinuclear activism, while at Los Alamos he believed scientists should implement government directives and avoid influencing policy. He disallowed the circulation of physicist Leo Szilard’s petition recommending vaguely defined conditional-surrender terms prior to using uranium- or plutonium-based weapons in the Pacific War. Within months of the end of the war, however, Oppenheimer acknowledged the “sin” of the physicists who had developed the atomic bomb. In a 1965 television broadcast, Oppenheimer repeated the lamentation from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita that he had uttered after the initial atomic-test explosion: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” During the McCarthy era, Oppenheimer became a target of national security elites advocating modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal and a confrontational containment policy. Oppenheimer was serving as chair of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in October 1949 when he advised against development of the hydrogen bomb. That recommendation, as well as previous associations with the Popular Front and Communist Party (though he was never a member), led to speculation—stoked by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—that he was a security risk. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to resign, Oppenheimer requested a formal hearing. Based in part on the testimony of physicist Edward Teller, a chief advocate of the hydrogen bomb, the AEC Personnel Security Board ruled in 1954 to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, despite finding him “a loyal citizen” who had violated no laws. A catalyst of the nuclear age, as well as one of its most controversial figures, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967. Peter N. Kirstein See also: Cold War; Communists and Communism; Enola Gay Exhibit; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; LeMay, Curtis; McCarthyism; Nuclear Age; Science Wars; Teller, Edward.
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Further Reading Bernstein, Jeremy. Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Bird, Kai, and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. McMillan, Patricia J. The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race. New York: Viking, 2005. Strout, Cushing, ed. Conscience, Science, and Security: The Case of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963.
O ’ Re i l l y, B i l l Television and radio personality, columnist, and author Bill O’Reilly has contributed to the culture wars by hosting the Fox News Channel program The O’Reilly Factor (1996–), which became the highest-rated news show on cable television. A self-described “culture warrior,” O’Reilly places himself at the center of what he regards as a war between “traditionalists” and “secularprogressives.” His frequent targets include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Times, Hollywood, and the likes of philanthropist and political activist George Soros. O’Reilly defines his traditional principles as opposition to abortion, immigration rights, the death penalty, sex education, same-sex marriage, and the separation of church and state; and support for the War on Terror, limited government, greater privatization (in particular, of schools), and the use of coerced interrogation of suspected terrorists. Critics such as comedian and political commentator Al Franken, in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003), accuse O’Reilly of misrepresenting and fabricating the truth. O’Reilly has likewise been condemned for his practice of shouting down guests and cutting off their microphones when they disagree with him. The son of an accountant, William James “Bill” O’Reilly, Jr., was born into an Irish Catholic family on September 10, 1949, in Manhattan, New York, and was raised in nearby Long Island. He studied at Marist College (BA, history, 1971), Boston University (MA, broadcast journalism, 1975), and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (MA, public administration, 1995). After briefly teaching history and English at the Jesuit-run Monsignor Edward Pace High School in Opalocka, Florida (1971–1973), O’Reilly retooled himself and began a broadcasting career at WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pennsylvania. During the 1980s, after years of reporting local television news at some half-dozen locations across the country and winning two Emmys, he became a reporter at the network level at ABC and CBS. O’Reilly had his first popular success anchoring the syndicated entertainment program Inside Edition in 1989. His show on the Fox News Channel, originally called
The O’Reilly Report, coincided with Roger Ailes’s launch of the station itself for Australian News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch in 1996. Ailes, a former Republican consultant who worked in the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, made a concerted effort to offer a conservative news alternative to the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). O’Reilly’s program harmonized with that overall mission. By the 2000 election, The O’Reilly Factor was at the top of cable news ratings. By 2007, in its eleventh year, the show was drawing an audience of several million viewers per night. The O’Reilly Factor relies on the personality of its host for its appeal. O’Reilly presents himself as a righteously opinionated working-class hero taking on the intellectual elites, declaring his show a “no-spin zone.” He frequently responds to negative e-mail and letters on the air, and uses his “unpopularity” to bolster his image as an underdog. Specifically geared to counter a perceived left-leaning bias in the media, The O’Reilly Factor provides a predominantly but not exclusively conservative editorial perspective. In 2002, O’Reilly began hosting The Radio Factor, a daily afternoon radio program that soon was heard on more than 400 stations. He has produced a weekly syndicated newspaper column and has written several books, including the best-seller The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, & the Completely Ridiculous in American Life (2000), Culture Warrior (2006), and A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (2008). Critics cry foul over O’Reilly’s lack of concrete evidence at times, citing his presentation of blatantly untrue information. The media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) calls O’Reilly the “most biased name in news,” and Media Matters named him its “Misinformer of the Year” in 2004. The Media Matters Web site also lists specious claims from The O’Reilly Factor, including a statement that a woman could “never” be “in danger” from pregnancy complications, incorrect statistics on the dropout rates for black students, and labeling the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “a terrorist group.” A particularly notable example of O’Reilly’s on-air style was seen on February 4, 2003. His guest was Jeremy Glick, whose father had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. When Glick surprised O’Reilly by suggesting that some of the blame for 9/11 fell on the foreign policy of Republicans, Bill’s characteristic shouting (“I’ve done more for the 9-11 families . . . than you will ever hope to do . . .”) and baiting (“I hope your mom isn’t watching this . . .”) failed to rile Glick. After repeatedly screaming at the bereaved Glick to “shut up,” O’Reilly cut off his microphone. In 2004, a sex harassment suit filed against O’Reilly by one of his producers, Andrea Mackris, was settled for an undisclosed amount. Controversy surrounding
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the incident raised O’Reilly’s audience ratings by as much as one-third during the week the settlement was announced. Sue Salinger See also: Abortion; American Civil Liberties Union; Capital Punishment; Christmas; Church and State; Media Bias; Privatization; Republican Party; Same-Sex Marriage; September 11; Sex Education; Sexual Harassment; Soros, George.
Further Reading Hart, Peter, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Kitman, Marvin. The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Lemann, Nicholas. “Fear Factor.” The New Yorker, March 27, 2006. O’Reilly, Bill. Culture Warrior. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.
Outing Outing is the act of publicly exposing the sexual orientation of a gay person without his or her consent—it is short for taking someone “out of the closet.” Outing might also include identifying individuals living with HIV or AIDS. Since publicly proclaiming one’s homosexual identity is considered a very private and personal decision, members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community, including the gay press and national gay political and social organizations, generally oppose outing in strong terms. Some argue, on the other hand, that outing may be necessary for advancing gay rights in certain circumstances. Although outing began as a political tactic to garner national funding for AIDS education and awareness, opponents emphasize that it irresponsibly exposes individuals to potential antigay violence and stigma due to the fear of AIDS. Homosexuals, they argue, have the right to remain closeted in order to avoid personal harm or harassment. In the armed forces, outing can ruin the subject’s military career because the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy prohibits gays and lesbians from serving. More complicated is the issue of gay identity, which some view as self-ascribed and not solely a matter of same-sex activities. Proponents of outing, however, invoke the cause of gay liberation, arguing that homosexuals will never reach full political and personal freedom until their numbers are revealed and people no longer fear coming out of the closet. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, journalist Michelangelo Signorile, in the weekly gay and lesbian magazine OutWeek, outed a number of public figures, including multimillionaire and publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes,
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the son of conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly, and news correspondent Pete Williams. Signorile provided one of the first intellectual arguments justifying outing as a way to diminish homophobia in American society. To respect the rights of the closeted celebrity, he contended, is to respect homophobia. Others, both conservatives and liberals, have used outing for political purposes, to topple gays from power, or to expose the hypocrisy of the closeted gay who publicly opposes gay rights. In the case of the latter, in 2004 gay rights activist Michael Rogers outed Congressman Edward Schrock (R-VA), who was on record against same-sex marriage and gays serving in the military. Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, became the target of numerous gay activist groups who accused her of forsaking gay rights in order to run her father’s reelection campaign in 2004. In particular, she was criticized for remaining silent after the Bush administration backed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage—the Web site DearMary.com, spoofing a missing child notice, posted a photo of her on a milk carton under the title, “Have you seen me?” In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was criticized for outing Mary Cheney when he mentioned her sexual orientation during a televised debate, even though it was already public knowledge. Beginning in 2006, the sexuality of popular celebrities became a hot topic within the Internet blogging community. In short succession, Mario Lavandeira of PerezHilton.com outed three Hollywood celebrities— Lance Bass, Neil Patrick Harris, and T.R. Knight. All three publicly admitted to being gay after the site attacked them for remaining closeted. While some argue that the visibility of homosexuals in popular culture helps others who are dealing with their own sexuality, others argue that there is a big difference between outing a celebrity who is just living his or her life and outing politicians who affect public policy. Elizabeth M. Matelski See also: AIDS; Cheney Family; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in the Military; Gays in Popular Culture; Kerry, John; Lesbians; Privacy Rights; Same-Sex Marriage; Transgender Movement.
Further Reading Gross, Larry. Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Johansson, Warren, and William A. Percy. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. New York: Haworth Press, 1994. Mohr, Richard D. Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Signorile, Michelangelo. Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power. New York: Random House, 1993.
See also: Abortion; Clinton Impeachment; Hill, Anita; Thomas, Clarence.
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P a c k wo o d , B o b Republican politician Bob Packwood served twenty-six years as a U.S. senator from Oregon (1969–1995) before resigning in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal. Known for being independent minded, Packwood was a leader of upholding woman’s reproductive rights and environmental causes, voted against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, and was the only senator in 1993 to vote against mandatory life sentences for people convicted of a third violent felony. Born Robert William Packwood in Portland, Oregon, on September 11, 1932, he attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon (1950–1954), and New York University School of Law (1954–1957). Packwood had a private law practice in Oregon from 1957 to 1963 and was a member of the Oregon state legislature from 1963 to 1968. During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, he served as chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Republican Conference, and the Committee on Finance, and he was a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Oregon voters, who largely viewed Packwood as a man of principle, became disenchanted with him following allegations of his unwanted sexual advances toward at least twenty-nine women. When the Washington Post first broke the story in November 1992, Packwood denied the allegations and went so far as to attempt to discredit his accusers. He postponed giving requested evidence (a personal diary) to the Senate Ethics Committee until after the 1992 election. Later, when hard evidence was presented, he claimed not to remember the incidents because of alcohol abuse. Women’s groups that had once supported him, such as the National Organization for Women, lobbied for his resignation. The report of the Senate Ethics Committee confirmed the allegations as well as the fact that Packwood had altered evidence relevant to the committee’s inquiry. Packwood resigned in disgrace effective October 1, 1995. He then founded Sunrise Research Corporation, a lobbying firm, and played a key role in the 2001 fight to repeal the estate tax. Packwood’s role in the culture wars centered on the contradiction between his professional actions and his personal behavior. By choosing not to confirm Clarence Thomas, who had been accused of sexual harassment, to the U.S. Supreme Court, Packwood enforced a standard of personal conduct he could not meet. He also profited from his misconduct by publishing Senator Bob Packwood’s Secret Diary (1994). Cyndi Boyce
Kirchmeir, Mark. Packwood: The Public and Private Life from Acclaim to Outrage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Paglia, Camille Social critic, writer, professor, and self-described pro-sex feminist Camille Paglia entered the fray of the culture wars with the publication of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a controversial survey of Western literature and art. Her main thesis is twofold: (1) that sex differences between males and females are based on biological determinism; and (2) that the Western canon has served to subvert biology by culturally creating a variety of sexual personae. Criticized in publications of the right (such as Commentary) and the left (the Nation), Paglia has offended in equal measure the social sensibilities of liberals and conservatives with her eclectic ideas and assertions. Camille Anna Paglia was born into a Catholic family in Endicott, New York, on April 2, 1947. After graduating from the State University of New York at Binghamton (BA, 1968) and Yale University (MPhil, 1971; PhD, 1974), she taught at several institutions, including Bennington College (1972–1980), Wesleyan University (1980), Yale University (1981–1984), and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (1984–). After the debut of Sexual Personae, Paglia continued in the same vein with Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) and Vamps and Tramps (1994), compilations of essays originally published in national and international publications on a wide range of topics, including the pop star Madonna, academia, politics, the Internet, film, and music. This was followed by The Birds (1998), an analysis of the Alfred Hitchcock film by the same name; and Break, Blow, Burn (2005), an anthology of poems with commentary. She was a columnist for the online magazine Salon (1996–2001) and then became a contributing editor for Interview Magazine. Paglia’s support of pornography, her dismissive views on rape (arguing, for example, that there is a “fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape”) and sexual harassment (which she categorizes as “sexual banter”), and her romanticizing of the prostitute over the “desexed professional woman” have consistently placed her at odds with the feminist establishment. Instigating feuds with major feminists, including Naomi Wolf (who described her as “full of howling intellectual dishonesty”), Paglia has called the women’s movement the “Steinem politburo” while critiquing it as “infantilizing and anti-democratic” and embracing of victimhood. Although an advocate of homosexuality and transvestism, 422
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Paglia has characterized the gay rights movement as “Stalinist.” As for the political left, Paglia denigrates it as “white upper-middle-class elitism” that is “paternalistic and condescending.” She sees academic elites as engaging in class warfare, but argues that blue-collar men contribute more to society than male scholars. Paglia has also criticized humanities professors of the Ivy League for their inclusion of poststructuralist theory in the curriculum. She believes in educational reform that encompasses a balance between high art and popular culture. A libertarian, Paglia favors abortion, the legalization of prostitution, the reduction of the age of consent to fourteen, and the legalization of drugs. Gehrett Ellis See also: Abortion; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Great Books; Pornography; Sexual Assault; Sexual Harassment; Sexual Revolution; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism; Transgender Movement; Victimhood; Wolf, Naomi.
Further Reading James, Martin. “An Interview with Camille Paglia.” America, November 12, 1994. Menand, Louis. “Nietzsche in Furs.” Nation, January 25, 1993. Paglia, Camille. Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. New York: Vintage, 1994. Wolf, Naomi. “Feminist Fatale.” New Republic, March 16, 1992.
Palin, Sarah As governor of Alaska and the Republican Party’s first female vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin heated up the culture wars during the 2008 general election, campaigning as “an average hockey mom” who identified with “Joe Sixpack.” Her conservative profile— mother of five, Pentecostal, anti-abortion (even in cases of rape and incest), lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, and nemesis of environmentalism (opposed to listing the polar bear on the federal endangered species list, skeptical of the view that global warming is linked to human activities, and supportive of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge)—was to provide a boost to John McCain’s bid for the White House, but polls on election day revealed that 60 percent of voters found Palin unqualified for the vice presidency. She was born Sarah Louise Heath on February 11, 1964, in Sand Point, Idaho, and grew up in Alaska. She majored in journalism at the University of Idaho (BS, 1987), after having attended Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene,
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and Matanuska-Susitna College in Palmer, Alaska. At age twenty, she was runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant. After college she married her high school sweetheart, Todd Palin, and briefly worked as a television sports reporter in Anchorage, Alaska. Her political career began in 1992 when she was elected to the town council of Wasilla, her hometown of about 6,000. Later, she served as Wasilla’s mayor (1996–2002), lost a race for lieutenant governor (2002), and chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (2003–2004). In November 2006, campaigning for reform and ethics in state government, Palin was elected Alaska’s eleventh governor, becoming the first woman to hold the post. In July 2009, she abruptly resigned as governor. In a move that surprised political observers and even his own campaign advisers, McCain selected Palin to be his vice-presidential nominee in an attempt to appeal to his party’s conservative base, in particular the Religious Right. Observers noted a similarity to the 1988 selection by George H.W. Bush, wishing to assuage conservatives, of Dan Quayle for his running mate. McCain also hoped to draw the “Wal-Mart moms” demographic as well as women voters who were disappointed by Hillary Clinton’s failure to win the Democratic primary or be selected as Barack Obama’s running mate. In addition, since Palin had a record in Alaska of opposing her own political party (having reported several officials, including the state Republican chairman, for ethics violations), McCain regarded her as a kindred maverick. Immediately upon her insertion into the campaign, Palin ridiculed Obama’s experience as a community organizer, suggesting that it did not match her executive credentials as a former mayor and current governor. Presenting herself as a fiscal conservative who cuts government spending, she boasted of taking a reduction in pay as governor, putting a state jet up for sale on eBay, and halting the federally funded boondoggle known as the “Bridge to Nowhere.” (It was later reported that her salary cut had been followed by a raise, that the jet sold underpriced after finding no buyer on eBay, and that the money for the bridge was not returned to the federal government but spent elsewhere.) As the campaign progressed, Palin spoke of her red-state and small-town supporters as “the real America” and referred to the opposition as “elitists.” Over and over she accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” because he once sat on an antipoverty board with Bill Ayers, a university professor who years earlier had co-founded the radical Weather Underground. The “mommy wars” broke out almost immediately after Palin became a candidate. It was asked why this woman desired to be a national leader at a time when she was caring for a newborn with Down syndrome, a question her supporters argued would never have been raised had she been the father. The question was repeated when it was learned that one of her unmarried teenage daugh-
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ters was five months pregnant. As some pundits viewed the daughter as a case of conservative moral hypocrisy and an example of why schools need to teach about birth control, pro-lifers affirmed the daughter’s decision not to terminate the pregnancy. In another family matter, Palin was under investigation for using her office as governor to try to arrange the firing of her ex-brother-in-law, an Alaskan state trooper. The candidate argued that her family’s privacy had been violated, but her detractors answered that it was she who first used her family as a campaign prop. The major setback for Palin, however, was her failure to appear knowledgeable on television. In an ABC interview conducted by Charles Gibson, she did not seem to know about the controversial Bush Doctrine, a policy of preemptive war for opposing potential terrorist attacks. Worse was the CBS interview by the news anchor Katie Couric, which showed a candidate critical of Supreme Court rulings yet unable to name specific cases she regarded as judicial activism. In addition, Palin continued to insist that living in Alaska provided her with foreign-policy experience because of its close proximity to Russia. In skits that often were word-for-word from actual interviews, Palin was ruthlessly lampooned by Tina Fey on the television comedy show Saturday Night Live. (The Associated Press went on to name Fey the Entertainer of the Year.) Although Palin and her supporters dismissed the bad press—including reports that the campaign spent tens of thousands of dollars on Palin’s wardrobe at stores such as Saks and Bloomingdales and for a fashion consultant, hair stylist, and makeup artist—as proof of liberal media bias and gender bias, many conservatives and women publicly expressed doubts over McCain’s choice of a running mate. For example, in a Wall Street Journal column of October 17, 2008, Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, described Palin as “a person of great ambition” who has shown “little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office.” Palin, Noonan added, “does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation.” Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Clinton, Hillary; Election of 2008; Endangered Species Act; Global Warming; McCain, John; Media Bias; National Rifle Association; Obama, Barack; Religious Right; Republican Party; Stay-at-Home Mothers.
Further Reading Gibbs, Nancy. “#4 Sarah Palin.” Time, December 29, 2008. Gourevitch, Philip. “The State of Sarah Palin.” The New Yorker, September 22, 2008. Hilley, Joseph H. Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008.
Johnson, Kaylene. Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down. Kenmore, WA: Epicenter Press, 2008.
P a r k s , Ro s a A seamstress by trade, Rosa Parks was an activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) whose refusal in 1955 to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, inaugurated a year-long bus boycott by black residents, propelled the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence as a civil rights leader, supplied a blueprint for resisting segregation in the United States, and transformed the American civil rights campaign into a mass movement of national scope. Born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 14, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks moved, after her parents’ divorce, to Pine Level, Alabama, where she was homeschooled and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church. At age eleven, she attended the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery before entering an auxiliary institution of the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary instruction. Family illnesses forced her to leave school, and she did not receive her high school diploma until 1933. The previous year she married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber and NAACP activist, joined the Montgomery NAACP in December 1943, and served as chapter secretary until 1957. On December 1, 1955, Parks returned home from her job as a seamstress in a Montgomery department store on a municipal bus. A long-time municipal ordinance mandated segregation on public buses; white passengers enjoyed priority seating, while black passengers would sit, stand, or exit outright according to the placement of a “Colored” sign that limited seating for black passengers. Parks sat in the appropriate section until the number of white passengers exceeded the available seating. Driver James F. Blake then repositioned the “Colored” sign behind Parks and three other black passengers and demanded that they move; Parks alone refused. She was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. On December 5, she was tried, convicted, and fined fourteen dollars—a verdict she later appealed. Local NAACP president Edgar D. Dixon posted Parks’s bond and conceived a community-wide boycott of the Montgomery bus system. A citizens’ group called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed to coordinate the boycott, with local pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., chosen to lead that organization. The boycott began on December 5, 1955, and lasted 381 days, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that municipal bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.
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Rosa and Raymond relocated in 1957 to Detroit, where Rosa worked as a seamstress until 1965, when African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-MI) hired her as a secretary for his local office—a position she retained until her retirement in 1988. Parks spoke extensively, published memoirs in 1992 and 1995, and recaptured national attention in 1999 after the hip-hop music duo OutKast released a song titled “Rosa Parks” without her permission. Parks sued and, after multiple appeals, agreed in 2005 to an undisclosed settlement with the group and its affiliates. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005, after a year-long bout with progressive dementia. During the national funeral tribute, her body lay in state under the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.; it was the first time a woman was so honored. Kevin C. Motl See also: Civil Rights Movement; Homeschooling; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Race; Rap Music.
Further Reading Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. New York: Touchstone, 1989. Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks. New York: Penguin, 2005. Kohl, Herbert R. She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. New York: New Press/W.W. Norton, 2005. Parks, Rosa, with Jim Haskins. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Puffin Books, 1999.
Penn, Sean Actor, film producer, and Tinseltown activist, Sean Penn has stirred controversy over the years for his public pronouncements critical of American foreign policy. He accused President George W. Bush of committing impeachable offenses with respect to the Iraq War. Critics have branded Penn as a disloyal American for traveling overseas to meet with authoritarian leaders who are hostile to U.S. interests. In October 2005, the conservative magazine Human Events listed Penn number three in its top ten “unhinged celebrities,” explaining: “He’s the actor who claimed that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, shock jock Howard Stern and the U.S. government are greater threats to the American people than Osama bin Laden.” Penn was born into an acting family in Santa Monica, California, on August 17, 1960. His father, Leo Penn, a communist sympathizer or “fellow traveler,” was blacklisted for supporting the Hollywood Ten and refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At age fourteen, Penn made his acting debut on Little House on the Prairie, a television series directed
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by his father. After graduating from Santa Monica High School, Penn studied acting at the Repertory Theatre of Los Angeles and briefly attended Santa Monica Junior College. He emerged as Hollywood’s “bad boy” during his tempestuous marriage to the pop singer Madonna (1985–1989), a period in his life highlighted by drunkenness and fights with paparazzi. In 1987, Penn spent over a month in the Los Angeles County jail after assaulting a fellow actor who sought to take his photograph. Since 1996 he has been married to the actress Robin Wright. As an actor, Penn has often played loners, misfits, and desperate tough guys, starring in films that examine social problems or have political themes. He has played troubled youth, including a rebellious cadet at a military school (Taps, 1981); a surfer (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1982); a juvenile delinquent in reform school (Bad Boys, 1983); and a drug smuggler (The Falcon and the Snowman, 1984). He has portrayed men living on the edge, such as a street cop (Colors, 1988); an army sergeant in Vietnam who directs his men in a gang rape of a civilian (Casualties of War, 1989); a cocaine-snorting lawyer (Carlito’s Way, 1993); a killer on death row (Dead Man Walking, 1995); a disturbed Hollywood film director (Hurlyburly, 1998); a cynical army first sergeant in World War II (The Thin Red Line, 1998); and a mathematics professor in need of a heart transplant (21 Grams, 2003). In narratives about raw justice, Penn has been a mentally disabled man who seeks custody of his child (I Am Sam, 2001); an ex-con who seeks revenge for the murder of his teenage daughter (Mystic River, 2003), a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor; and a disillusioned businessman who attempts to hijack a plane and ram it into the White House in order to kill President Richard Nixon (The Assassination of Richard Nixon, 2004). Penn’s two political performances are his portrayals of Huey Long, the populist Louisiana governor (All the King’s Men, 2006), and of Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco elected official (Milk, 2008). In addition, Penn has directed a number of films, namely The Indian Runner (1991), based on a Bruce Springsteen song about two brothers, one who loses a farm to foreclosure and the other a war veteran returning from Vietnam; The Crossing Guard (1995), about a man who seeks homicidal revenge on a drunk driver who killed his young daughter; The Pledge (2001), about a man who seeks revenge on a child molester; and Into the Wild (2007), based on the true story of a young traveler who dies alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Over the years, Penn has been quoted in the media for his strong political views. He referred to President George H.W. Bush as a “murderer” for launching the invasion of Panama (1989) and the Gulf War (1991). He once called the pope a “monster” for rejecting the use of condoms to combat the AIDS epidemic. Critics have accused Penn of being a publicity hound, suggesting that
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this was why he ventured into Los Angeles during the riots sparked by the Rodney King police beating (1992) and why he visited New Orleans immediately following Hurricane Katrina (2005). By contrast, in Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary film about Katrina, When the Levee Broke, Penn is highlighted as a genuine rescuer. Sean Penn has been involved in several antiwar groups, including Not In Our Name, Artists United to Win Without War, and MoveOn.org. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, he placed a nearly full-page “open letter” to Bush in the Washington Post (October 19, 2002), asking the president to show restraint: “Defend us from fundamentalism abroad but don’t turn a blind eye to the fundamentalism of a diminished citizenry through loss of civil liberties, of dangerously heightened presidential autonomy through acts of Congress, and of this country’s mistaken and pervasive belief that its ‘manifest destiny’ is to police the world.” That December he traveled to Iraq, where in its capital he held a press conference denouncing the imminent American invasion. Later, in a full-page ad in the New York Times (May 30, 2003), he accused the Bush administration of bringing misery to Iraq while benefiting American war contractors. In December 2006, Penn was presented the first annual Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award and used the occasion to call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney over misrepresentations leading up to the Iraq War. Penn shocked his audience by arguing that if Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying about having oral sex with an intern, then to not impeach the Bush administration for lying about the war would be the equivalent of a semen stain on the American flag. Penn has visited such politically forbidden places as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, meeting with rogue dictators and outspoken critics of American neoconservative foreign policy, and afterward writing about his experiences for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Nation. In October 2008, he visited Venezuela and Cuba with historian Douglas Brinkley and journalist Christopher Hitchens. Raul Castro, the president of Cuba, gave Penn an exclusive interview. Venezuela and Cuba, Penn argued, have the right to be autonomous and “imperfectly their own.” Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Clinton Impeachment; Cuba; Hurricane Katrina; King, Rodney; Milk, Harvey; Neoconservatism; September 11; Stern, Howard; War Protesters; Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992.
Further Reading Hirschberg, Lynn. “What’s Sean Penn Angry About Now?” New York Times Magazine, December 27, 1998. Kelly, Richard T. Sean Penn: His Life and Times. New York: Canongate U.S., 2005. Lahr, John. “Citizen Penn.” The New Yorker, April 3, 2006.
Penn, Sean. “Conversations with Chávez and Castro.” Nation, December 15, 2008. Rabb, Scott. “Penn.” Esquire, September 2007.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), based in Norfolk, Virginia, was founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980 by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco for waging a campaign for the total elimination of animal “exploitation” worldwide. By its twenty-fifth year PETA was boasting 1.6 million members and operating on an annual budget of $29 million. The group views any use of animals for consumer products, medical and scientific needs, and entertainment as a selfish manipulation of the animal kingdom by human beings. PETA’s core philosophy calls for the elimination of human-centered thinking, and the group considers any measures to meet those ends valid. It also opposes the use of helper animals, such as Seeing Eye dogs and helper monkeys, as “speciesist” representations of a human-centric worldview. PETA promotes the health benefits of a vegan diet, offers free speakers and educational programming, funds other educational organizations, stages boycotts and protest campaigns, and accepts animals from those unable to care for them as an alternative to Humane Society shelters. PETA spends 40 percent of its income on advertising and promotion, inspiring both critical acclaim and derision with its message. Its headline-grabbing multimedia campaigns are targeted at all ages and have been supported by celebrities such as Paul McCartney, Dick Gregory, Al Sharpton, and Cornel West. One effort compared the treatment of livestock on farms to the abuse of American slaves and concentration camp victims. The group also suggested that it is healthier for college students to drink beer than milk. With the slogan “I’d rather go naked than wear fur,” accompanied by photos of nude women, PETA used a letter-writing campaign to scold television host Oprah Winfrey for featuring leather and fur clothing on her programs. A comic book suggested that children ask their mother “how many dead animals she killed to make her fur clothes,” showing a cartoon image of a woman smiling as she raises a bloody knife over a terrified rabbit. Such campaigns have been variously praised for promoting a more “cruelty-free” lifestyle and criticized for inaccurate information, disturbing imagery, objectification of women, and preying on children’s insecurities. Over the years, PETA has been accused of supporting violent behavior and even terrorism in the pursuit of its cause. Incidents range from encouraging the defacement of school displays that promote meat and dairy products in the cafeteria, to supporting individuals and groups classified by the Department of Homeland Security as
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terrorist threats. PETA has made donations to organizations such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Both the ALF and the ELF engage in “animal liberation” activities, such as stealing animals from zoos, circuses, and research laboratories to release them from captivity; firebombing research clinics and other facilities; and running harassment campaigns against researchers and animal-control agents. Opponents of PETA have complained that it is unethical to accept money donated for animal welfare activities and use it to support terrorist activities, and hypocritical to engage in violence against those one accuses of violence. Opposition to the group has increased with accusations that while PETA targets Humane Society employees and others involved in euthanizing stray animals, they have put to sleep many of the animals that they accept or rescue. In 2006, PETA employees were charged with administering lethal injections to animals that they had accepted with donations for their continued care, and of illegally dumping animal remains. Solomon Davidoff See also: Animal Rights; Ecoterrorism; Factory Farms; Fur; Sharpton, Al; West, Cornel; Winfrey, Oprah.
Further Reading Best, Steven, and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals. New York: Lantern Books, 2004. Guillermo, Kathy Snow. Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case That Launched the Animal Rights Movement. Washington, DC: National Press Books, 1993. Guither, Harold D. Animals Rights: History and Scope of a Radical Social Movement. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Newkirk, Ingrid. Free the Animals: The Story of the Animal Liberation Front. New York: Lantern Books, 2000. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Web site. www.peta.org. Workman, Dave. PETA Files: The Dark Side of the Animal Rights Movement. Bellevue, WA: Merril, 2003.
Perot, H . Ross A maverick Texas billionaire and political populist, H. Ross Perot was a third-party presidential candidate in the 1992 and 1996 elections. He left an indelible mark on the politics of that decade, shaping the 1992 election that sent Bill Clinton to the White House and inspiring the Republican Contract with America in 1994. The son of a cotton broker, Henry Ross Perot was born on June 27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas. After graduating from Texarkana Junior College (1949) and, as president of his class, the U.S. Naval Academy (1953),
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he served in the U.S. Navy (1953–1957). He went on to work as a data-processing salesman for IBM (1957–1962), finally leaving the company to found Electronic Data Systems (EDS), headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The company’s big break came when it won a contract to process Medicare claims. When EDS was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1968, Perot was suddenly worth $2 billion. In 1984, EDS was sold to General Motors for $2.5 billion, and two years later General Motors purchased Perot’s remaining shares for $700 million. In 1988, Perot founded Perot Systems Corporation, based in Plano, Texas; he remained chairman of that company until his retirement in 2004. In 1969, Perot leased two 707 jet airplanes to fly dinner, letters, and Christmas packages to American prisoners of war (POWs) in North Vietnam, but the communist regime blocked his plan. That same year he founded United We Stand, an organization that publicized the POW-MIA situation and gave support to President Richard Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy for a gradual U.S. troop withdrawal. In 1979, Perot was in the news again after successfully organizing a rescue of two EDS employees who had been taken captive in Tehran, Iran, by Islamic revolutionaries. In order to free them, Perot hired a retired Army Ranger and Green Beret to conduct a jail break, an exploit heralded in Ken Follett’s On Wings of Eagles (1983). As head of a Texas task force on the war on drugs during the 1980s, Perot enlisted the help of First Lady Nancy Reagan, who was inspired to launch the “Just Say No” campaign. In 1984 and 1985, Perot headed a Texas task force to study education reform. In the early 1990s, after speaking out with increasing frequency about the problems of the federal government, Perot was persuaded by the anti-incumbency activist Jack Gargan to run for president. On February 20, 1992, on the television interview program Larry King Live, Perot announced that he would run if volunteers gathered the necessary signatures for listing his name on the ballot in all fifty states. Viewers responded favorably, and Perot initiated an organization, called United We Stand America, to facilitate their efforts. Perot’s campaign would continue the strategy of direct televised appeals to spur grassroots activism among disaffected voters. A hallmark of the campaign was the “infomercials” in which Perot sat behind a desk and talked in a folksy manner about the economy and other issues while using a pointer with charts and graphs. During an address before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he offended his audience by referring to African Americans as “you people.” He also clashed with reporters who demanded more program specifics. Perot outlined his political ideas in a book titled United We Stand: How We Can Take Back Our Country (1992). Outraged by what was then a $4 trillion federal debt, he called for an end to deficit spending. He proposed a 15 percent cutback in federal discretionary spending,
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Texas entrepreneur and political maverick H. Ross Perot introduces himself to voters in this Oliphant cartoon during the 1992 presidential campaign. While some said he was short on specifics, the folksy third-party candidate emerged as a major contender. (OLIPHANT ©1992 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.)
a line-item veto, and a cut in the military budget. At the same time, he called for limiting tax deductions on interest to mortgages of $250,000 or higher, raising the marginal income tax on the wealthy from 31 to 33 percent, lifting the cap on income tax for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, increasing gas and cigarette taxes, and having Japan and Germany pay more for collective security. He encouraged political reform, including term limits, abolition of the Electoral College, the creation of an independent national health board to contain health costs, trade protectionism, and a libertarian social agenda (pro-choice and neutrality on gay marriage). The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) emerged as his key issue, about which Perot famously warned that there would be a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs leaving for Mexico if the treaty were enacted. In the end, Perot garnered 19 percent of the national vote, the best showing for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt’s run on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. Perot reportedly spent more than $72 million of his personal wealth on the campaign. Remaining active in politics through the 1990s, Perot returned to Larry King Live in 1993 to debate Vice President Al Gore over NAFTA, a debate most viewers thought Gore won. Congressman Newt Gingrich (RGA) conferred with Perot when crafting the conservative Contract with America legislative agenda in 1994. Perot ran for president again in 1996 as a candidate
for the Reform Party and gained 9 percent of the vote. Thereafter, however, he opted out of the Reform Party he had founded, mocking former wrestler Jesse Ventura’s bid for Minnesota governor under the party’s banner in 1998 and steering clear of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the party’s presidential nomination in 2000. Pundits noted the irony when Perot Systems announced in 2006 that it was opening an office in Guadalajara, Mexico, in order to take advantage of the lower costs in hiring engineers. Although Perot was no longer in charge of the company, it was being operated by his son, H. Ross Perot, Jr. Jason Mellard and Roger Chapman See also: Clinton, Bill; Contract with America; Federal Budget Deficit; Globalization; Gore, Al; Nixon, Richard; Tax Reform; Third Parties; Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Vietnam War; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Jelen, Ted, ed. Ross for Boss: The Perot Phenomenon and Beyond. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Mason, Todd. Perot: An Unauthorized Biography. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones–Irwin, 1990. Perot, H. Ross. My Life & the Principles of Success. Fort Worth, TX: Summit Group, 1996. Posner, Gerald. Citizen Perot: His Life and Times. New York: Random House, 1996.
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Phelps, Fred As founder and leader of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, the Reverend Fred Phelps has led antigay protests across the nation, proclaiming that God has punished and will continue to punish the United States as long as it shows tolerance toward and acceptance of homosexuality. Phelps claims that from 1991 to 2008 the Westboro church conducted more than 34,000 antihomosexual demonstrations. Fred Waldron Phelps was born on November 13, 1926, in Meridian, Mississippi. After attending John Muir College (AA, 1951), he moved to Topeka, Kansas, where he began a church while continuing his education at Washburn University (BA, 1962; JD, 1964). A primitive Baptist by his own definition, Phelps was originally ordained as a Southern Baptist. He practiced law for several years but reportedly was disbarred in 1979 for ethical misconduct. Phelps, who views himself as a prophet, has declared that divine retribution for gay culture lay behind the September 11 terrorist attacks and natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. The placards he and his followers have used at demonstrations are viewed as hateful by almost all observers, including conservative Christians: “God hates fags” is a common refrain. Other slogans include “Thank God for AIDS,” “No tears for queers,” and the like. In 1998, Phelps shocked the nation by chanting “Matt is in hell” during the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who had been brutally murdered in Wyoming. Later, Phelps and his followers protested at U.S. military funerals, attributing America’s war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan to God’s displeasure over sodomy. Some Evangelicals have expressed concern that “leftists” have unfairly tried to equate Phelps’s extremist message with mainstream Christian thought. The Westboro church, which meets in the leader’s home, is attended primarily by family members; Phelps is the father of some dozen adult children with children of their own. In cult-like gatherings, Phelps preaches a strict form of Calvinist theology, believing that all but a tiny elect are predestined to hell. At the church’s main Web site, GodHatesFags.com, visitors are referred to as “depraved sons and daughters of Adam.” To those who think his message against gays is harsh and unloving, Phelps argues that he is uncompromising about what the Scriptures teach concerning homosexuality. America’s “kissy-pooh preachers,” he maintains, have turned churches into “candy stores” and church members into “moral diabetics.” Phelps refers to his antigay protests as “Love Crusades” in which warnings are offered out of brotherly concern. Phelps’s actions have led to lawsuits, legislation, and numerous counter-protests. In November 2007, a jury in Baltimore, Maryland, ruled against the Westboro
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church and awarded nearly $11 million in damages to a family whose funeral service for their son, a U.S. Marine who had been killed in Iraq, was disrupted by antigay protesters. In April of that same year, Kansas passed a law requiring a protest-free buffer around military funerals. About a dozen other states passed similar legislation. On Memorial Day 2007, President George W. Bush signed a similar federal law, the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act. In the meantime, American Legion groups across the country formed motorcycle honor guards to protect the sanctity of military burial against protesters. In addition, a group calling itself FreeRepublic.com was formed to stage demonstrations against the Westboro demonstrators. Roger Chapman See also: Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Hate Crimes; Hurricane Katrina; September 11; Shepard, Matthew.
Further Reading GodHatesFags Web site. www.godhatesfags.com. Van Biema, David. “The Harley Honor Guard.” Time, May 8, 2006. Veenker, Jody. “Called to Hate?” Christianity Today, October 25, 1999.
Philadelphia, Mississippi Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town with about 7,300 residents, is remembered for the brutal slayings of three civil rights workers in 1964 as well as a controversial campaign stop by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980. Although rurally isolated, the town is a recognized symbol of the culture wars. On June 21, 1964, members of the local Ku Klux Klan beat and shot to death James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had come to the area as volunteers in the “Freedom Summer” black voter registration drive. The three men—two white and one black, all in their early twenties—were stopped for a minor traffic violation, temporarily jailed, and upon their release, ambushed by Klansmen organized by Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time Baptist minister. Their bodies were found weeks later buried under an earthen dam outside of town. In 1967, eighteen suspects were indicted on federal conspiracy charges in connection with the case, but only seven were convicted. Killen was set free because of a hung jury. Despite Philadelphia’s lingering stigma, it was the setting for Reagan’s first major campaign speech after gaining the Republican nomination for president. In his August 3, 1980, address at the Neshoba County Fair, Reagan proclaimed, “I believe in states’ rights” and promised that as president he would work to “restore to
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states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” Critics interpreted these remarks as signaling sympathy to white southerners for resisting federally imposed civil rights for African Americans. Defenders of Reagan say it is unfair to characterize the term “states’ rights” as code language for white segregation; they also point out that Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis spoke at the same fair in August 1988. Dukakis, however, did not defend states’ rights but pledged to “bring down the barriers to opportunity for all our people.” The emergence of new evidence in the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner led to a reopening of the case and a new trial in the town. On June 21, 2005, a jury found Killen, then eighty years old, guilty of three counts of manslaughter; he was promptly sentenced to sixty years in prison. That same month, the U.S. Senate issued a formal apology for having failed to enact antilynching legislation; Mississippi’s two Republican senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, were among the several who refused to co-sponsor the resolution. Although most Philadelphia residents welcomed the Killen trial, some saw it as reopening old wounds and believed that it was wrong to bring a man to trial four decades after the fact. The events of June 1964 and the original legal proceedings were depicted in the 1988 motion picture Mississippi Burning. The evidence that finally led to Killen’s conviction was turned up by investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell, with the help of an Illinois high school teacher and three students. Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Dukakis, Michael; Hate Crimes; Kennedy Family; Lott, Trent; Lynching; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Rockwell, Norman; Till, Emmett; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Ball, Howard. Justice in Mississippi: The Murder Trial of Edgar Ray Killen. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Cannon, Lou. Reagan. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982. Huie, William Bradford. Three Lives for Mississippi. Introduction by Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: New American Library, 1968. Mars, Florence. Witness in Philadelphia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Younge, Gary. “Racism Rebooted: Philadelphia, Mississippi, Then and Now.” Nation, July 11, 2005.
Pipes, R ichard, and Daniel Pipes Richard Pipes and Daniel Pipes, father and son, respectively, are neoconservatives known for their critiques on
the American enemy of the day—for the former, the Soviet Union; for the latter, Islamic fundamentalism. Richard Edgar Pipes was born on July 11, 1923, in Cieszyn, Poland, eventually immigrating to the United States with his parents. He was educated at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio (1940–1943), Cornell University (BA, 1945), and Harvard University (PhD, 1950). As a Harvard professor (1950–1996), he was an expert on Russian history and the Soviet Union, authoring or editing more than two dozen books, including Formation of the Soviet Union (1954); The Russian Intelligentsia (1961); Soviet Strategy in Europe (1976); Russia Observed: Collected Essays on Russian and Soviet History (1989); Communism, the Vanished Specter (1994); and Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1997). The 1917 communist revolution in Russia, he maintained, was not representative of the people’s will but simply the result of Lenin’s tenacity and audacity. Politically active during his academic career, Richard Pipes was an officer and member of the anticommunist Committee of the Present Danger (1977–1992) and served during the 1980s as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Critics accused him of being overly pessimistic toward the Soviet Union, including a lack of enthusiasm during arms limitation talks between Moscow and Washington. According to defenders, however, his influencing Reagan’s hard stance against the Soviets helped paved the way for the United States to win the Cold War. Born on September 9, 1949, in Boston, Massachusetts, Daniel Pipes studied at Harvard University (BA, 1971; PhD, 1978) and also attended schools in the Middle East, including the University of Tunis, University of Cairo, and Al-Azhar University in Cairo. From the 1970s through the 1990s, he held teaching and research positions at a number of prestigious universities and institutes, including Princeton University (1977–1978), the University of Chicago (1978–1982), Harvard University (1983–1984), the Naval War College (1984–1986), and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (1986–1993); he also served a stint on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State (1982–1983). Daniel’s early writings, including Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981) and In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), explained the history of Islam to those who were unfamiliar with its principles and teachings. In The Rushdie Affair: The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West (1990), he offered an explanation for the violent reaction of Islamic leaders to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1989 novel The Satanic Verses and suggested that the novelist should have anticipated the negative reaction. During the 1990s, Pipes wrote essays warning against the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism to the United States. Critics accused him
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of racism and repeated the charge following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when he updated and anthologized many of the essays, publishing them under the title Militant Islam Reaches America (2002). Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Daniel Pipes co-founded Campus Watch, a Web site dedicated to the study of Middle Eastern history and culture on college campuses. In 2002, Campus Watch published a list of academics whom Pipes judged to be overly critical of U.S. foreign policy. Many of the accused retaliated, calling Campus Watch and him anti-American. Several critics suggested that Pipes’s activities bore similarities to the Red Scare tactics of McCarthyism. Margaret Barrett and Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; American Century; Cold War; McCarthyism; Muslim Americans; Neoconservatism; Saudi Arabia; September 11; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Pipes, Daniel. Militant Islam Reaches America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Pipes, Richard. Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Schrecker, Ellen. “The New McCarthyism in Academe.” Thought & Action 21 (Fall 2005): 103–18.
Planned Parenthood The organization Planned Parenthood Federation of America, with nearly 900 centers across the nation, provides birth-control materials, abortion and sterilization procedures, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and screening for cervical and breast cancer. Twenty-five percent of American women reportedly use the services of Planned Parenthood at least once in their lives. According to its 2006–2007 annual report, Planned Parenthood performed 289,750 surgical abortions in 2006, representing 3 percent of the total services it provided. From the perspective of its 4 million activists, donors, and supporters, Planned Parenthood champions reproductive rights by offering women confidential counseling and safe options in rational family planning. Its pro-life detractors, on the other hand, regard the organization as primarily a network of abortion clinics responsible for the murdering of the unborn. Even some pro-choice advocates have been critical of Planned Parenthood, calling it the “Wal-Mart of abortion clinics” because it typically drives small-size abortion clinics out of business by providing cheaper but inferior services. Planned Parenthood was founded by the pioneering birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger, who coined the term “birth control.” The roots of the organization date back to 1916 when Sanger established a birth-control
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clinic in Brooklyn, New York. As an obstetrical nurse she became interested in birth control from working among immigrants in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This experience radicalized her to begin disseminating printed materials on birth control. She was later indicted for violating the Comstock Laws of 1878, which banned the use of the mail service for disseminating sexually related material or anything that could be broadly construed as pornographic. In her work Women and the New Race (1920), Sanger promoted birth control as a way to ensure a woman’s right to “voluntary motherhood.” In 1923, Sanger’s clinic became the basis of the American Birth Control League, which in 1942 was renamed Planned Parenthood. Controversially, Sanger as well as others in the birth-control movement advocated eugenics, including sterilization for the “unfit” (poor). Many of those designated poor were Catholic and Jewish immigrants as well as blacks. By the late 1930s the general public came to associate eugenics with Nazi racism, giving birth control a negative connotation. On the advice of a public relations consultant, Sanger’s organization adopted the name “planned parenthood” in lieu of “birth control.” In 1948, Planned Parenthood provided a research grant to the biologist Gregory Pincus, whose work ultimately led to the development of oral contraception, popularly known as “the pill.” On May 9, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill’s availability to the public. This new form of birth control proved to be more effective than condoms, diaphragms, or chemicals, resulting in greater sexual freedom for women minus the consequences of unplanned pregnancy. By 1965 onefourth of married women in the United States were using the pill. Oral contraception, most agree, was a major factor in precipitating the sexual revolution. Following the introduction of oral contraception, Planned Parenthood turned its attention to abortion. That effort was indirectly facilitated by a challenge of the Connecticut ban on contraceptives. The Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, headed by Estelle Griswold, took that issue to the Supreme Court, which in the ruling Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) overturned all such state laws on the grounds of privacy rights. Afterward, a number of states not only rescinded their laws banning contraceptives, but liberalized abortion laws as well. The Griswold decision was part of the cited case law that was used in Roe v. Wade (1973), the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared a woman’s right to abortion to be part of her constitutional right to privacy. After the legalization of abortion in 1973, Planned Parenthood became a target of derision by the pro-life movement. During the mid-1980s a number of Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation were bombed, set on fire, or vandalized. Later, Planned Parenthood lost ground in the judicial war over abortion. In Planned Parenthood
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v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court ruled against the requirement for spousal notification prior to an abortion procedure; however, the same decision upheld state law requiring a mandatory cool-off period for all abortions and parental notification in cases involving minors. In Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood (2007), the Supreme Court upheld the federal ban on D and X (dilation and extraction) abortion, which critics dub “partial-birth abortion.” Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Douglas, William O.; Food and Drug Administration; National Organization for Women; Operation Rescue; Roe v. Wade (1973); Sex Education; Sexual Revolution; Wal-Mart.
Further Reading Coates, Patricia Walsh. Margaret Sanger and the Origin of the Birth Control Movement, 1910–1930: The Concept of Women’s Sexual Autonomy. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2008. Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Grant, George. Immaculate Deception: The Shifting Agenda of Planned Parenthood. Chicago: Northfield, 1996. Johnson, John W. Griswold v. Connecticut: Birth Control and the Constitutional Right of Privacy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Planned Parenthood Federation of America Web site. www .plannedparenthood.org.
Podhoret z, Norman As editor of the magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995, Norman Podhoretz established the publication as an influential—if ideologically shifting—journal of opinion. At first, he published authors who shaped the emergence of the New Left in the early and mid-1960s. By the end of the decade, however, his magazine was opposing much of the radical agenda and shifting toward what would emerge as neoconservatism. The son of Jewish immigrants, Podhoretz was born on January 16, 1930, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His father, a milkman, wanted him to have a Jewish education, so in addition to attending a public high school during the day, he went to a night school where classes were taught in Hebrew. After completing high school in 1946, Podhoretz attended Columbia University (AB, 1950), where he studied with the distinguished critic and writer Lionel Trilling. At the same time, Podhoretz also studied Judaism and Jewish history at the College of Jewish Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary (BHL, 1950). He completed his formal studies at Cambridge University in England (MA, 1957). Upon completing service in the U.S. Army (1953–
As the editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine and author of several influential books, former leftist Norman Podhoretz emerged in the early 1970s as a leading voice of the fledgling neoconservative movement. (James Keyser/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
1955), Podhoretz joined the staff of Commentary, the journal of the American Jewish Committee, rising to the position of editor-in-chief in 1960. He was already active in leftist politics, supporting a nuclear test ban and disarmament. Under his editorship, contributions were published by such authors as Paul Goodman, Staughton Lynd, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown, thereby contributing to the intellectual foundations of the emerging New Left. By the late 1960s, Podhoretz had become disenchanted with what he regarded as the New Left’s anti-American, anti-Semitic, and totalitarian tendencies. Moving to the right politically, he described the New Left as “Stalinist,” declared Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty a failure, and opened the pages of his journal to critiques of the counterculture. By the early 1970s, nearly every issue of Commentary included an article by a disillusioned liberal. The magazine came to be regarded as a conservative rival to the New York Review of Books, whose editor, Jason Epstein, had had a falling out with Podhoretz. Although Commentary addressed a wide range of issues, novelist Gore Vidal argued in a 1986 article that Podhoretz was interested primarily in Israel, wanting to use American influence to advance its cause, and had little genuine interest in other matters. Podhoretz, however, believed that he was challenging the “appeasement” culture of the left.
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In addition to editing Commentary and writing articles, Podhoretz published several books, among them a trilogy of memoirs recounting his political passage and its consequences—Making It (1967), Breaking Ranks (1979), and Ex-Friends (2000)—and an autobiography, My Love Affair with America (2002). From 1981 to 1987, he worked for the United States Information Agency. After leaving Commentary in 1995, he joined the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, where he was a senior fellow until 2003. His son, John, was appointed editor of Commentary in 2007. Gary Land See also: Anti-Semitism; Ginsberg, Allen; Israel; Mailer, Norman; Neoconservatism; New Left; Vidal, Gore; War on Poverty.
Further Reading Gerson, Mark. The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1996. Jeffers, Thomas L., ed. The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s Through the 1990s. New York: Free Press, 2004. Vidal, Gore. “The Empire Lovers Strike Back.” Nation, March 22, 1986. Winchell, Mark Roydon. Neoconservative Criticism: Norman Podhoretz, Kenneth S. Lynn, and Joseph Epstein. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Police Abuse Police abuse has been a divisive topic of the culture wars, placing law and order in tension with individual rights. Prior to the 1960s, concern about police abuse generally centered on corruption, but later attention shifted to police brutality, coercive interrogation, the planting of false evidence, unlawful search and surveillance, and racial profiling. In most debates on police abuse, conservatives generally defend law enforcement agencies, stressing the hazards of police work—from 1946 to early 2009, 4,565 police officers were shot and killed in the line of duty— and its importance in maintaining law and order. When questions arise over police conduct, conservatives tend to give the officers the benefit of the doubt. Accusations of police abuse, many conservatives feel, are grossly exaggerated. Liberals emphasize that law and order must be applied to all segments of society, including its 800,000 law enforcement personnel. The rights of the accused, which liberals believe are important safeguards against police abuse, are considered “criminal rights” by many conservatives who fear that an excessive focus on such matters hinders police from doing their job. Public perception of police abuse is polarized by race, with a higher percentage of blacks than whites viewing it as a major problem.
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Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have promoted the establishment of civilian review boards to provide external investigations when citizens file complaints of police abuse, such as racial profiling and police brutality. Opponents of the review boards argue that police should be judged by other police, not individuals who lack training in law enforcement and who have never dealt with the everyday realities of police work. Although most of the nation’s largest cities now have these boards in place, critics argue that their limited power makes them ineffective. In conjunction with review boards is the trend for the videotaping of arrests and interrogations in order to provide a “record” should there later be accusations of excessive force. Police corruption was a major concern during the 1960s and 1970s. It often involved police officers accepting bribes from criminal syndicates that were involved with gambling, prostitution, illegal alcohol, and the fencing of stolen goods. The bribed police would shield the syndicate, which would in turn pledge not to commit any robberies within the city limits. In 1961, there was a major investigation of such a corrupt bargain in Kansas City, Missouri. That same decade the Chicago police force underwent a major reform and established an internal investigation division to address corruption within its ranks. Frank Serpico made headlines during the late 1960s and early 1970s by reporting the corruption he witnessed while serving as an officer of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Occasional news items continue to report of police officers who are “on the take” and providing protection to drug dealers and their operations. Police brutality emerged as a public issue during the 1960s and 1970s in connection with the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. On March 3, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, police repulsed young civil rights marchers with high-pressured fire hoses and attack dogs. Since this event was televised, many Americans saw it on the evening news. Birmingham’s chief of police, Eugene “Bull” Connor, appeared on camera and vowed that his men would do it all over again if the “outside agitators” continued to stir trouble. Another iconic event in the annals of police brutality took place in Chicago during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention. Police descended upon the protesters with clubs and indiscriminately attacked all who stood in their path—a “police riot” was the official verdict and several police officers were indicted on charges of abuse of power. Nearly forty years later, in 2004, police in New York City reacted to a smaller group of demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention protesting the Iraq War. Using little discretion, the NYPD arrested nearly 2,000 protesters and bystanders. Most were herded into holding pens in the city’s jails and held without charge until the convention was over. Conservatives argued that
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such “preventive detention” was appropriate to protecting government officials and preserving law and order. Liberals complained that imprisonment without timely charges was an outrage. Over the years much controversy has been stirred over police surveillance. In numerous cases, the police were found to have been monitoring political groups as opposed to criminal suspects. Most notorious was the FBI’s “counter intelligence program,” known as COINTELPRO, which was active between 1956 and 1971. This federal dragnet primarily targeted liberal and leftist groups, including organizations affiliated with the civil rights movement. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there were a number of reports of police monitoring of antiwar groups. Most controversies pertaining to police abuse, however, are not related to politics as much as they are to the manner in which law enforcement officials interact with the local citizenry. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) became notorious for the rough treatment of minority suspects, especially African Americans and Latinos. Between 1963 and 1965, Los Angeles police officers shot and killed a total of 60 blacks; 25 were unarmed and 27 were shot in the back. This pattern of behavior was one of the triggers for the Watts Riots of 1965, which began when a white police officer stopped a black motorist and subjected him to an abusive interrogation in public. More than twenty-five years later, in 1991, a bystander videotaped members of the LAPD clubbing and kicking African American Rodney King after a high-speed chase. When the officers were acquitted of charges in the beating in 1992, the city erupted into the most destructive urban rioting in decades. From 1980 to 1991, nearly 280 LA officers or sheriffs had been accused of assaulting civilians. The LAPD was involved in a scandal of a different kind in 1998. Some thirty police officers in the antigang unit of its Rampart Division were accused of beating citizens, planting guns and drugs on suspects, stealing drugs and guns, taking bribes, conducting illegal searches, and imprisoning people on false evidence. The scandal resulted in overturned convictions in more than 100 cases, and in 2000, the city signed an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to carry out major reforms. The effect of police conduct on criminal convictions was strongly emphasized in 2000, when Governor George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, imposed a moratorium on the state’s use of the death penalty. He went a step further in 2003, commuting the sentences of all 167 death row inmates in the state. Ryan said that these actions were the result of evidence of widespread police and prosecutorial abuse, which included the torturing of suspects to extract confessions. Joseph A. Rodriguez See also: King, Rodney; Racial Profiling; Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992.
Further Reading Blum, Lawrence N. Stoning the Keepers at the Gate: Society’s Relationship with Law Enforcement. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books, 2002. Cole, David. No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System. New York: New Press, 1999. Geller, William A., and Hans Toch. Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Klinger, David. Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004. McShane, Larry. Cops Under Fire: The Reign of Terror Against Hero Cops. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999. Weitzer, Ronald John, and Steven A. Tuch. Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Political Correctness Political correctness, otherwise known as PC, has been used in the culture wars as a pejorative epithet to characterize what critics deem a destructive political ethos in American society since the 1980s. While accusations of PC have often focused on university practices, they are by no means limited to this venue. Since the early 1980s, the PC debate has attracted a national audience, framing much of the discussion of, among other things, race relations, public education, and citizenship. Most often, the ethos that is attacked as politically correct is understood to be “liberal,” while those who do the attacking tend to be identified as “conservatives”— even though some PC developed as a critique of liberalism as much as an extension of it, and liberals frequently join with conservatives in making accusations of PC. While the types of practices decried as instances of PC are familiar enough, it is often difficult to discern their commonality. Thus, some have claimed that it is simply an all-purpose pejorative epithet used by conservatives to attack any and all liberal practices of which they disapprove. Still, it is possible to present a coherent account or narrative of what critics might call the “Ideology of Political Correctness” (IPC).
Ideology of Political Correctness IPC arises from taking the liberal principle of equal respect to absurd lengths. Classical liberals saw equal respect as embodied in a series of individual rights—the right to own property, the right to compete in the marketplace, the right to participate in the political process. While equal rights entailed (a rough) equality of opportunity, it was never intended to ensure equality of outcomes; acceptance of equal rights was not intended to entail equality of worthiness. The IPC champions not only equality of outcome but construes equal respect as equal worthiness, and equal worthiness to require a kind of positive affirmation.
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But the individual whose worth the IPC is concerned to affirm is not just any individual. In fact, the IPC represents a shift from classical liberalism’s emphasis on the individual qua individual to the individual qua group member, as embodied in the movements of multiculturalism and identity politics. The groups the IPC is concerned to affirm are those that historically have been discriminated against and excluded primarily on the basis of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. The flip side of the affirmation of those oppressed and excluded is the denigration of the “oppressors,” namely white European males. This may take a variety of forms, notably revisionist history and a rejection of the unique accomplishments of “Western” civilization” (as embodied, for example, in the “Western canon”). This rejection is supported by the ethos of multiculturalism, which sometimes exaggerates the accomplishments of non-European cultures, as well as by moral relativism, which denies the existence of universal standards according to which diverse cultural achievements can be assessed.
Speech Codes and Western Canon During the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of universities, responding to complaints of discrimination and harassment on campuses throughout the country, began formulating what came to be known as “campus speech codes.” By 1995, more than 350 public colleges and universities regulated certain types of “hate speech” in one form or another. Such codes have been denounced as instances of PC largely because of the emphasis placed on protecting women and minorities from speech deemed to create a hostile campus environment. To supporters, such codes are necessary to stop speech that is the equivalent of an assault on personal dignity (not unlike a physical assault) and that creates a hostile learning environment. Such codes recognize that some individuals have been, and continue to be, the target of past and present discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. For example, to call a fellow student “nigger” would be a violation of a campus speech code. On the other hand, to casually call a woman a “girl” might also be regarded as a violation of the speech codes. Detractors of speech codes see them as an attempt to forcibly impose the politically correct ethos of positive affirmation of groups historically discriminated against by suppressing legitimate speech. Accusations of PC have been fueled by the fact that some campus speech codes appeared to go beyond prohibiting offensive racial epithets directed at specific individuals, for example, to proscribing the expression of certain points of view (according to critics, those that are “politically incorrect”). Some liberal advocates of expansive free speech rights have joined conservative critics in attacking such codes, several of which have been challenged in court and held to be unconstitutional.
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In 1984, Secretary of Education William Bennett published a report titled “To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education,” in which he argued that Western civilization should be the core of the American college curriculum “because it is a source of incomparable intellectual complexity, diversity, and depth; [and] because it is under attack.” The “attack” of which Bennett warned was the development of a more “multicultural-,” gender-, and race-conscious curriculum at American colleges and universities and a move away from teaching the “traditional” canon of “great” Western books. To those who approve the shift in emphasis, the traditional curriculum reflects a “white European male political bias” that systematically dismisses the philosophy, literature, and art of non-European cultures as “inferior.” To those who oppose the changes in curriculum as a manifestation of PC, such changes are an attempt to both denigrate the accomplishments of the writers who comprise the Western canon—“the oppressors”—and to exalt “the oppressed” by including works largely on the basis of the race or ethnicity or gender of the author (rather than on the merits of his or her works). On the other hand, some who argue to keep the canon proposed expanding it to include previously neglected writings.
Revisionist History and National Identity The controversy over the canon has been replicated in the controversy surrounding accusations of “politically correct” (or “revisionist”) history, as it concerns both academic history and the content of college and public school education. A notable example of the former is the firestorm surrounding the publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1989), which expounds the hypothesis that ancient Greece, and hence Western civilization, derives much of its cultural roots from Afroasiatic (Egyptian and Phoenician) cultures. While Bernal’s hypothesis remains controversial among scholars, it has been denounced as a work of politically correct, revisionist, “Afrocentric” history by many involved in the PC debate (who often appear ill equipped to pass judgment on the scholarly merits—or lack thereof—of the work). Debates over teaching history in the public schools have focused on the charge that PC has transformed the teaching of American history into a one-sided story of racist and sexist exploitation by white European males, or the charge that American history is sometimes not taught at all but replaced by “multicultural history” (including “Afrocentric” history), emphasizing the story and accomplishments of non-European peoples. In The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1998), historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., argues that multicultural education, both in colleges and universities and in the public schools, and multiculturalism in general, pose a threat to American culture by
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rejecting a unifying national identity based on citizenship and replacing it with a fragmenting plurality of identities based on racial and ethnic differences. What is particularly ironic, Schlesinger argues, is that ascribing such importance to racial and ethnic identity is representative of the racist legacy of American history that progressive liberal democrats have fought to overcome. Defenders of multiculturalism argue that American national identity, far from transcending cultural and ethnic particularity, in fact embodies the cultural particularity of Anglo-Saxon Protestant males. Attempts to “assimilate” indigenous and immigrant ethnic and cultural minorities through public education in an American national identity are viewed as attempts to force them to abandon their own particular cultural identity for another particular (Anglocentric) cultural identity. Evan Charney See also: Afrocentrism; Bennett, William J.; D’Souza, Dinesh; Great Books; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Revisionist History; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; Speech Codes.
Further Reading Berlinerblau, Jacques. Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Berman, Paul, ed. Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. New York: Dell, 1992. D’Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Macmillan, 1991. Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Wilson, John. The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on High Education. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
P o r n o g r a p hy Pornography was perhaps most famously defined by U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart in his concurring opinion in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), where he wrote, simply, “I know it when I see it.” Even that rather vague definition of pornography is appropriate for the wide-ranging political debate over obscene images and sexuality that has been a cornerstone of the culture wars since the second half of the twentieth century. Making strange bedfellows of groups as disparate as Christian conservatives and radical feminists, the antipornography movement has led to a flurry of legal and political activity restricting sexual expression on behalf of women, children, and civilization. On the other side, pornographers, free-speech advocates,
and sex radicals have argued that the government is stifling free speech and regard the antipornography movement as part of a broader antisex agenda on the part of conservatives. The contemporary pornography industry in American has been much influenced by the growth of a massmedia empire that includes conventional publishing, such as magazines, as well as a booming film and video industry and, since the 1990s, the Internet. Pornography became a major mainstream commercial enterprise in part via the Playboy enterprise, in which founder Hugh Hefner not only began selling the men’s magazine Playboy in 1953, but opened a chain of Playboy lounges and popularized the “Playboy lifestyle.” Other media entrepreneurs benefited from the more permissive sexual environment of the 1960s and 1970s with more hard-core magazines like Penthouse and Hustler. During that same period, the film industry produced “porn flicks” of huge commercial success, including Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973). The advent of VHS tape was a further boon to the industry, providing a cheap medium that could be delivered to private homes. The commercial success of the pornography industry prompted a strong legal and political backlash at the local, state, and federal levels. The beginnings go back to Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), in which the Supreme Court declared that pornography was not an automatic protected category of speech. This was followed by Roth v. United States (1957), which ruled that “community standards” could be applied to determine if questionable material was “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Finally, in Miller v. California (1973), the high court established clearer parameters for states to regulate obscenity in accordance with community standards. In addition, two federal studies on the pornography industry were launched—the 1970 Commission on Obscenity and Pornography and the 1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. The first recommended bolstering sex education and further study of the effects of pornography, findings denounced by both Congress and the White House. The second study, headed by U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese of the Reagan administration and produced by mostly antipornography crusaders, recommended more active enforcement of federal and state anti-obscenity laws. The Religious Right, specifically the Moral Majority, took aim at the pornography industry, encouraging legislation and boycotts of prominent chain stores that sold pornographic magazines. One of the most high-profile conflicts occurred between televangelist Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt, the editor of Hustler magazine. In response to Falwell’s public campaign against his magazine, Flynt published a satirical liquor ad using Falwell’s likeness and describing, in grotesque detail, Falwell losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued for
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The issue of pornography—including a lack of consensus over its very definition—has been one of the central, defining battles in America’s culture wars. Here, antipornography demonstrators organized by the Moral Majority take to the streets of Dallas, Texas, in 1985. (Shelly Katz/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
libel and the case eventually reached the Supreme Court, where Flynt’s political speech was protected under the First Amendment. During the course of the trial, an apparent supporter of Falwell shot Flynt, leaving him partially paralyzed for life. In spite of Falwell’s limited success in curbing pornography, many groups have been politically and culturally effective in organizing campaigns against obscenity. Beginning in the late 1970s, for example, Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association voiced opposition to many facets of the pornography culture by organizing boycotts of convenience stores that sold pornographic materials, criticizing mainstream television shows with gratuitous sexuality, and challenging the National Endowment for the Arts for funding “obscene” artwork. Wildmon was joined in the fight by the Family Television Council and the Concerned Women for America. Not all antipornography activists were on the political right, however. Prominent feminists such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography has a disproportionate impact on women in both the production of pornographic materials and the effects of them on male behavior. Their assertions were bolstered by porn star Linda Lovelace, who claimed that her performance in Deep Throat was under duress—including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by husband-director Chuck Traynor. MacKinnon and Dworkin argued that pornography is bad for all women because it sexualizes male domination. The antipornography feminists were successful in building a large feminist movement against pornography, including Women Against Pornography. In the 1980s, they successfully lobbied for new laws at the
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local level, with MacKinnon, an attorney, working with municipalities to draft strict antipornography measures. One such law, in Indianapolis, explicitly cited the protection of women as grounds for banning pornography, and even sanctioned lawsuits against pornography producers for damages done to women; the ordinance was struck down in federal court. Not all feminists agreed with the antipornography position. So-called sex radicals or pro-sex feminists believed that the arguments against pornography victimize women by robbing them of agency in their sexuality. Some feminists have sought political alliances with sex workers and the gay and lesbian movements, arguing that feminists have common ground with persons society views as sexually deviant. Groups such as FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) worked to oppose legislation and litigation against pornography on the basis of free speech. In addition, pro-sex feminists have been critical of the political ties mainstream feminists established with right-wing activists, whom they regarded as part of a broader agenda to limit access to birth control and abortion. The antipornography campaign in the 1990s shifted to the Internet, where pornography images were more easily and cheaply transmitted and, presumably, more likely to reach children. In addition, many recognized that the Internet allows for greater ease and anonymity in the exchange of child pornography. Congress made several attempts to regulate the Internet, including the Child Online Protection Act (1998), which was struck down by a lower federal court on the grounds of speech rights, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (2002). Claire E. Rasmussen See also: Dworkin, Andrea; Falwell, Jerry; Feminism, SecondWave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Flynt, Larry; Hefner, Hugh; Internet; MacKinnon, Catharine; Moral Majority; National Endowment for the Arts; Sexual Revolution; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report. Vols. I and II. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 1986. Califia, Pat. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1994. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1967) Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970. De Grazia, Edward. Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, 1992. Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
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Lynn, Barry W. Polluting the Censorship Debate: A Summary and Critique of the Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. Washington, DC: American Civil Liberties Union, 1986.
Postmodernism Although not easily defined, the term “postmodernism” refers to the contemporary period in Western culture— “after” modernism—and the corresponding view among scholars, cultural critics, and philosophers that new modes of thought and expression in the post–World War II era have broken down or transcended established rules and categories. Trends and concepts associated with postmodernism include the dominance of mass media, globalization and cultural pluralism, the blurring of national boundaries, artistic eclecticism and the mixing of genres, skepticism toward science and progress, parody and self-reference, a rejection of traditional concepts of knowledge, and a world of many equal and competing ideologies and “isms.” Any serious approach to understanding postmodernism begins with two foundational works, Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). According to Jameson, the essence of postmodernism is the commercialism of culture, characterized by a consumerist demand for increasingly novel productions of art and knowledge, and a proliferation of texts that blur high culture and low culture without regard to authority or the cultural canon. According to Lyotard, postindustrial societies, due to computerization, have created a postmodern condition by altering the status of knowledge and power, rendering the end of the “grand narrative” in which knowledge is seen as whole and giving way to multiple narratives in which knowledge is fragmented. In the American culture wars, social conservatives have generally equated postmodernism with moral and cultural relativism, which they blame on liberals. Critics charge that postmodern thought contradicts itself by making arguments that rely on the same conventional hermeneutics and epistemology it claims to reject—a theory and methodology that rejects theory and methodology. Opponents of postmodernism typically vilify proponents for failing to affirm traditional values and narratives. Part of this response is a call for a return to the cultural canon, or “great books.” Cultural literacy, it is said, is about shared values necessary for social cohesion among members of society. Thus, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism is linked to the desire for certainty in postmodern times. Even some leftists have expressed contempt for postmodernism, seeing it as a threat to political activism. Without agreed-upon norms,
they argue, it is difficult to organize mass movements for promoting social justice. Critics of postmodernism generally take a dim view of revisionist history, multicultural studies, and in particular literary analysis involving deconstructionism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, all of which they regard as being connected with intellectual anarchy and confusion. Especially worrisome to critics are the postmodern assertions that (1) language is signification of reality, not reality itself; (2) texts are subjective facsimiles of reality; and (3) much of what we feel and experience in our mass-communication society is an illusion, a “hyperreality” based on simulation, including a type of simulation (“simulacra”) that has no corresponding reality. Proponents of the postmodern influence on higher learning argue that the “dead white men” celebrated in traditional accounts of history and represented in the literary canon comprise only one strand of the national narrative. They regard the trend to incorporate considerations of race, class, and gender into the classroom as emancipating and democratic because it gives voice to the previously marginalized and opens space for other narratives. Postmodernists also emphasize that every text, whether a book, speech, song, painting, film, or other creative expression, is essentially incomplete, a fragment, and that much can be learned by considering what was left out. Defenders of postmodernism emphasize that grappling with complexity enlarges human understanding while developing the critical thinking skills necessary for the information age. The postmodern critique of science, including a rejection of Enlightenment principles and optimism about human progress, is a reaction to the development of atomic weapons and the use of them on Japan at the end of World War II. Postmodernism sees science as having limitations, and scientists as being guided by ideology and blinded by hubris. Whereas modernism is said to have emphasized rational thought—or the need for it— postmodernism stresses the importance of emotion and feelings. In reaction to the postmodern attack on science, physicist Alan Sokal in the 1990s debunked critics by succeeding in getting a postmodern journal to publish his hoax essay which nonsensically asserted that physical reality is simply a social construct. On the other hand, years earlier Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) reasonably argued that the scientific community depends fundamentally on groupthink and ritual, and is characterized by a reluctance to think outside the prescribed paradigm. In the American political arena, the postmodern trend is reflected in less party loyalty and the rise of independent voters—with a corresponding, and paradoxical, rise in partisanship. While there is more information available about government, opinion polls show that it has not increased knowledge about what government is
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doing. Information is largely communicated in sound bites, even as government and other institutional Web sites post PDF files containing thousands of documents and reports. There is a prevailing sense that issues are too complex, contributing to the popularity of pundits who simplify issues and events, narrowcasting media that construct narratives for a specialized ideological audience, and Internet bloggers who challenge the conventional media hierarchy. Politics lapses into entertainment, with actors and professional wrestlers getting elected to high office and presidential candidates obligated to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It has been argued that postmodernism is a condition of contemporary life; like the weather, it is not something an individual accepts or rejects. That attribute was described early on by Alvin Toffler in his best-seller Future Shock (1970), which details the short-lived nature of products, families, and relationships in the contemporary world. Even before that, media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned of postmodern developments then under way, pronouncing in the 1960s that “the medium is the message” and predicting a “global village” of instantaneous communication. In the twenty-first century, the Internet is said to epitomize postmodernism, offering a vast storehouse of knowledge at the global level—culture that is both high and low, entertainment and commercialism, a mishmash of visual images, competing narratives, and communication that is characteristically fragmentary and fleeting. Roger Chapman See also: Deconstructionism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Great Books; Internet; McLuhan, Marshall; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Nuclear Age; Relativism, Moral; Revisionist History; Science Wars; Sokal Affair; Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.
Further Reading Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Lyon, David. Postmodernity. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Powell, Jim. Postmodernism for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1998.
Premillennial Dispensationalism The term “premillennial dispensationalism” refers to the eschatological (“last things” or end times) belief system embraced by millions of Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Pentecostal Protestants. As pre-
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millennialists, they believe that the return of Christ will precede (pre) the establishment of a thousand-year (millennial) kingdom on earth (based on a literal interpretation of Revelation 20:1–6). As dispensationalists, they divide history into a number (usually seven) of distinct periods (dispensations). Many contemporary premillennial dispensationalists are convinced that human history is nearing the end of the second-to-last dispensation (the “church age”); as the largest constituency of the Religious Right, they support political positions that line up with their view of eschatology. They are often criticized for accepting as literal the figurative and metaphorical language of the Bible, such as insisting that references to Israel pertain to the modern secular nation rather than God’s spiritual followers. In interpreting current events, premillennial dispensationalists seek “signs of the times” in an attempt to pinpoint the fulfillment of specific prophecy from various apocalyptic biblical texts, including Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation. They teach of the “rapture,” in which Christians who are alive will be “caught up” to heaven (based on an interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17) and spared having to experience the “great tribulation” (a term found in Matthew 24:21). The tribulation, a terrible cataclysmic upheaval but with a relatively short duration, is said to be followed by the millennium, characterized by Christ reigning with 144,000 Jews. The end of the world comes with a literal battle of Armageddon (referred to in Revelation 16:16), in which Christ and the Jews successfully defend Jerusalem against the armies of a reconstituted Roman Empire (world government). Then there is the Final Judgment, with Satan (also known as the Antichrist, who had misguided many by posing as a peacemaker) being eternally damned along with his followers while God’s people are ushered into the kingdom of heaven. American culture was introduced to dispensationalism by the Anglo-Irish evangelist John Nelson Darby, a leader of the Plymouth Brethren sect, who conducted seven preaching tours in the United States (1867–1882). reeling in the aftermath of the Civil War and undergoing social upheaval by industrialization and urbanization, the United States proved a fertile ground for this new teaching. Unlike progressive postmillennial eschatology that foresaw human civilization improving generation after generation to the point where it would usher in a Christian golden age culminating with the Second Coming, premillennial dispensationalism offered a grim picture of the future: wars, famine, natural calamities, and escalating human wickedness. Darby’s dispensational system was further disseminated by (1) the Scofield Reference Bible (1909, 1917, 1967), a highly popular annotated edition of the King James Version; (2) The Fundamentals (1910–1915), texts sanctioning premillennial dispensationalism as fundamentalist or-
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thodoxy; and (3) fundamentalist Bible schools such as the Moody Bible Institute (1889), Dallas Theological Seminary (1924), and Bob Jones University (1927). Graduates of the latter two institutions were instrumental in making premillennial dispensationalism a part of popular culture: Hal Lindsey, the author of the bestseller The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970), is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary; and Tim LaHaye, the co-author (with Jerry Jenkins) of the best-selling Left Behind fiction series (beginning in 1995), is a graduate of Bob Jones University. Perhaps equal in effectiveness at introducing premillennial dispensationalist theology to the masses has been Jack T. Chick, who in 1970 began producing cartoon tracts infused with the doctrine—over half a million copies have been sold. In the culture wars, the politics springing from premillennial dispensationalism tend to be antiprogressive, antiscientific, and infused with an otherworldly pessimism about human potential. As time draws near to the end, society is expected to become more depraved and immoral—precisely how premillennial dispensationalists have interpreted the counterculture, feminist, and gay rights movements. In addition, an apostasy is to occur within the mainline churches, which premillennial dispensationalists see as being possibly carried out by the Christian ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches. Efforts toward world peace and the reduction of nuclear arms are regarded as swimming against the tide of biblical prophecy and perhaps causing an unwanted delay of the Second Coming. Since prophecy suggests that the Antichrist will establish a world dictatorship, premillennial dispensationalists opposed the Soviet Union and the international communist movement, just as they have been negative toward the Roman Catholic Church, the United Nations, the European Economic Community, multinational corporations, and any form of governmental centralization. Since premillennial dispensationalists anticipate the rebuilding of the Jewish temple on the old site in Jerusalem (which for them would be a sign that the rapture is near), they lobby for an American foreign policy that highly supports the security of Israel. Roger Chapman See also: Bob Jones University; Chick, Jack; Counterculture; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Israel; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; Nuclear Age; Religious Right; Soviet Union and Russia; World Council of Churches.
Further Reading Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. Clark, Victoria. Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: “Left Behind” in Evangelical America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kieruff, Stephen. “Belief in ‘Armageddon Theology’ and Willingness to Risk Nuclear War.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30:1 (March 1991): 81–93.
Presidential Pardons A presidential pardon is a grant of release from the punishment or consequences of a federal offense prior to or after conviction. President George W. Bush issued 189 pardons and commuted eleven prison sentences, the lowest number of any two-term president since World War II. In comparison, Harry S. Truman, who served eighty-two days short of two full terms, issued the most pardons, commutations, and remissions of fines in the postwar era, totaling 2,044. Dwight D. Eisenhower issued 1,157 in two terms; John F. Kennedy 575 in less than one term; Lyndon B. Johnson 1,187 in less than two terms; Richard Nixon 926 in less than two terms; Gerald R. Ford 409 in less than one term; Jimmy Carter 566 in one term; Ronald Reagan 406 in two terms; George H.W. Bush 77 in one term; and Bill Clinton 459 in two terms. Although most presidential pardons are noncontroversial, in the culture wars certain pardons have been publicly perceived as a political abuse of power. The president’s authority to issue pardons is established by Article II, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution: “The President . . . shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” The U.S. Supreme Court in Ex parte Grossman (1925) affirmed that the president is authorized to grant pardons before, during, or after a trial. In Schick v. Reed (1974), the high court ruled that a president’s power to pardon is provided exclusively by the Constitution and “cannot be modified, abridged or diminished by Congress.” With few exceptions, pardons are processed by the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice. Despite the lack of constitutional restrictions on the conferring of pardons, specific federal guidelines are in place to ensure an orderly review of pardon requests, with recommendations forwarded to the White House. Shortly after Eisenhower became president in 1953, he announced a new policy of openness in the granting of pardons, using the occasion to indirectly criticize Truman for issuing a number of pardons without first consulting with the Justice Department. The most controversial pardon was the one Ford granted to Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal. On September 8, 1974, in a national telecast announcing the decision, Ford explained that he was pardoning Nixon for “any offenses against the United States, which he . . . has committed or may have committed while in office” in order to help the nation heal. Since Nixon had personally chosen Ford to succeed Spiro T. Agnew (who
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resigned the vice presidency while under a legal cloud), many suspected a quid pro quo—that is, that Ford was chosen as vice president with the understanding that he would issue Nixon a pardon once becoming president. Ford denied the accusation, but he did divulge that the Nixon administration had discussed the possibility that Nixon had the power, while still president, to pardon himself. Ford also admitted that certain Nixon staffers had approached him on the matter of a possible pardon. But Ford maintained that there had been “no deal” and that his decision to pardon Nixon was “out of my concern to serve the best interests of my country.” The pardon virtually ended the Watergate investigation, leading critics such as Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) to declare Ford’s action “the cover-up of the cover-up.” The political fallout from that decision is probably the main reason Ford lost the 1976 election to Carter. Less controversial was Ford’s 1977 pardon of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, also known as Tokyo Rose. Her pardon came long after she completed more than six years in prison for treason, specifically for broadcasting Japanese propaganda to American servicemen during World War II. Without offering an explanation, Ford pardoned her on his last day in office, restoring her U.S. citizenship. Ford also began pardoning individuals who had been convicted of draft evasion during the Vietnam War—a policy dramatically expanded by Carter, who, on his first day in office, granted unconditional amnesty to an estimated 10,000 draft dodgers. Veterans’ groups were angered by Carter’s blanket pardon, and Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) called it “the most disgraceful thing that a president has ever done.” Although Truman had earlier pardoned a number of individuals who had violated the Selective Service Act or deserted during World War II, most had already completed prison time. The pardon granted to Nixon was not the only political pardon. In 1953, Truman pardoned two former congressmen: J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), once head of the powerful House Committee on Un-American Activities, and Andrew J. May (D-KY), both of whom had been convicted of fraud. In 1971, Nixon commuted the prison sentence of James R. “Jimmy” Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who had been convicted of jury tampering and fraud; this was a controversial decision because of Hoffa’s earlier support of Nixon. Reagan was under pressure to pardon certain figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, including Oliver North, but declined to do so. In 1980, Reagan did pardon two FBI officials, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, both convicted of directing the 1972–1973 break-ins, without search warrants, of suspected hideouts of Weather Underground fugitives. Felt probably would not have been pardoned had his identity as Deep Throat, the Watergate informant, then been known. (He revealed that role in 2005.) On December 24, 1992, nearing the
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end of his presidency, George H.W. Bush pardoned six individuals connected with the Iran-Contra scandal, including former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, who was scheduled to go on trial. The prosecutor of the Iran-Contra scandal, Lawrence Walsh, charged that Bush’s action amounted to a cover-up and that the outgoing president was simply hiding his own involvement in the scandal. President-elect Bill Clinton, commenting on Bush’s Iran-Contra pardon, stated, “I am concerned by any action that sends a signal that if you work for the government, you are beyond the law.” Eight years later, however, Clinton caused a brouhaha by issuing 140 pardons on his last day in the White House. Most controversial was the pardon of Marc Rich, a fugitive financier under federal indictment for evading $48 million in taxes. The press quickly learned that Rich’s pardon was lobbied for by his ex-wife, Denise Rich, a generous financial contributor to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Presidential Library. Not wishing to be accused of quid pro quo, President George W. Bush in December 2008 pardoned an individual who had been convicted of real estate fraud, but shortly afterwards rescinded the pardon after learning that the individual’s family had provided donations to the Republican Party. Although Bush issued relatively few pardons, he set off his own controversy on July 2, 2007, when he granted clemency to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, his vice president’s former chief of staff, sparing him from going to prison for perjury and obstructing justice. Libby had been implicated during an investigation of the 2003 leaking of the identity of a CIA operative after her husband had written an op-ed piece accusing the Bush administration of misleading the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Roger Chapman See also: Agnew, Spiro T.; Bush Family; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Felt, W. Mark; Ford, Gerald; Iran-Contra Affair; Nixon, Richard; North, Oliver; Truman, Harry S.; War Protesters; Watergate.
Further Reading Krent, Harold J. Presidential Powers. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Moore, Kathleen Dean. Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Ruckman, P.S., Jr. “Executive Clemency in the United States: Origins, Development and Analysis (1900–1993).” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27 (1997): 251–71.
Pr ison Refor m For more than three decades, since the early 1970s, the United States has undergone an unprecedented wave
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of prison expansion, building and filling prisons faster than at any time in human history. In 1972, federal and state prisons held 196,000 inmates, with another 130,000 in local jails. Since then, the national inmate population has dramatically risen. By 2008, 2.3 million people were behind bars in America—far exceeding any other nation in the world—and costing taxpayers $60 billion annually. Many politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, designed and continue to support incarceration policies that mandate long prison terms even for victimless crimes. In many respects, the packed jails and prisons (holding 751 people for every 100,000 of the population) are symbolic of the culture wars. Advocates of “tough on crime” policies assert that the decline in crime rates proves that incarceration is the best way to preserve law and order. Even so, a wide range of professionals in the criminal justice system, from police officers and judges to legal aid workers and prison wardens, are in favor of reforming the current prison system. They argue that there are less expensive, more humane, and more effective ways to solve crime at the community law-enforcement level. Those concerned with social and racial injustice, together with the expanding numbers of family and community members affected by what critics call the U.S. incarceration binge, are also vocal supporters of prison reform. Much of the increase in the U.S. prison population can be attributed to mandatory minimum sentencing, such as the “three strikes and you’re out” law passed in California in 1994 (calling for twenty-five years to life for any felony conviction following two prior convictions). In 2003, lawyers challenged the constitutionality of that law in two cases heard before the U.S. Supreme Court—Ewing v. California and Lokyer v. Andrade. In one case, a man was found guilty of stealing videotapes worth $153 from a retail store on two separate occasions and sentenced to fifty years to life. The other man stole three golf clubs from a sporting goods store and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. The justices ruled that the law did not represent cruel and unusual punishment and let the sentences stand. Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project, one of the main groups advocating prison reform, noted that, as a consequence of those rulings, California taxpayers would spend well in excess of $1 million to keep the two men in jail. The policies adopted in the mid-1980s that declared a “war on drugs” have also led to a spike in the incarceration rate. Increased criminalization for drug possession resulted in long prison terms for many low-level dealers and drug addicts. From 1985 to 2000, nonviolent drug offenses alone accounted for 65 percent of the rise in the federal prison population. During the same period, violent criminals accounted for only 6 percent of the overall increase. From 1980 to 2008, the number incarcerated
for drug-related crimes increased from about 40,000 to nearly 500,000. With 70 percent of funding for the war on drugs directed to law enforcement that results in high arrest rates, treatment options for addicts became less available. Doctors and others in public health argue that drug addiction should be considered a medical problem rather than a crime, and believe that lack of treatment for addicts exacerbates demand. Those in favor of continued criminalization argue that the lifting of harsh sanctions will result in more addicts. Even though the vast majority of drug users and a majority of dealers are white and live in the suburbs, street-level law enforcement has been carried out primarily in urban minority neighborhoods characterized by severe underemployment. In his book Breaking Rank (2005), former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper exposed racial profiling and the targeting of young African Americans. Critics argue that this approach to selective law enforcement has led to the disproportionate arrest and imprisonment of minorities and explains why, by the 2000s, nearly half of all prison inmates were African Americans. In the era of prison expansion, meanwhile, crime dramas and high-profile violent crimes involving homicides were commonplace in U.S. television programming. Between 1990 and 1998, the number of crime stories on the network evening news rose from 542 to 1,392. Media watch groups have likewise documented dramatic increases in stories about homicide, even while the actual murder rate dropped 20 percent. Being “tough on crime” was considered a winning electoral strategy for both political parties, so campaigns that emphasized the need for “law and order” became election-year standards. While public fear of violent criminals and unsafe streets generates political support for long prison terms, statistics about the real jail population belie that concern. During the 1990s, for example, more than half of new inmates incarcerated in state and federal prisons were convicted of nonviolent drug and property offenses. After more than three decades, reformers believe that changes in U.S. prison policy could be on the horizon. In an era of falling crime rates, crime seems to have lost some of its potency as a political “hot-button” issue—a trend that may bode well for agents of change. Financial concerns have drawn attention to the escalating costs of prisons at the expense of education and other social services. And the failure of the war on drugs to substantially reduce substance abuse, along with the recognition that drug criminalization policies increase economic distress in poor minority communities, has led to an openness toward exploring alternative policies. Amid continuing budgetary shortfalls in California, for example, Corrections Management Quarterly (1997) published a study demonstrating that almost a quarter of incoming prisoners could
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be diverted to community-based programs, at a savings of up to 20 percent for new prison admissions. In 1999 and 2000, voters in Arizona and California, respectively, approved legislation designed to handle thousands of low-level drug offenders through treatment rather than imprisonment. Robin Andersen See also: Gilmore, Gary; Horton, Willie; War on Drugs; Zero Tolerance.
Further Reading Bennett, W. Lance. News: The Politics of Illusion. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. Donziger, Steven R. The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996. Mauer, Marc. Race to Incarcerate. New York: New Press, 2006. Stamper, Norm. Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing. New York: Nation Books, 2005.
Privacy Rights Privacy rights protect individuals from government intrusion into their personal affairs. The right to privacy is controversial in the United States not least because there is no language in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that explicitly guarantees such a right, yet it has been invoked by the Supreme Court to justify contentious decisions on hot-button social issues. By declaring that reproductive rights, abortion rights, and gay rights are protected by a constitutional right to privacy, the high court has thrust itself into the middle of the culture wars. The Bill of Rights, consisting of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, explicitly enumerates the individual freedoms and limits on government power referred to as civil liberties. While the right to privacy is not among them, Justice Louis Brandeis argued in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928) that the document was intended to embody the principle of limited government and therefore conferred “the right to be let alone.” Yet the right to privacy was not formally recognized in constitutional law until Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), involving a state ban on the distribution of information about and the use of contraceptives. The majority opinion, written by Justice William O. Douglas, declared the law unconstitutional, claiming that a married couple’s reproductive rights are protected from government interference by implied “zones of privacy.” These privacy rights, while not specifically enumerated, were said to be found in the “penumbras” of individual freedoms guaranteed by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth amendments.
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The Griswold decision opened the door to subsequent rulings that extended privacy rights beyond the issue of marital reproduction. First, Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) guaranteed the right of unmarried couples to contraception. This was immediately followed by the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which relied on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down a Texas state law prohibiting abortions and extended implied privacy rights to a woman’s right to choose. This ruling represents one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in American history and catalyzed the polarization of society. The constitutional protection of privacy rights occupies a particularly contentious position in the culture wars because it has incited battles on two fronts. The first involves the political and moral implications of the Supreme Court’s decisions, which set social conservatism’s commitment to traditional and transcendent principles against progressive liberalism’s dedication to the freedom of personal lifestyle choices. This struggle has primarily played out in the context of abortion debates. On one side are social conservatives self-defined as pro-life, who believe that abortion is morally wrong because all life is sacred and begins at conception. This position is represented by the Religious Right and groups such as the National Right to Life Committee and Operation Rescue. On the other side are liberals self-defined as pro-choice, who argue that women have a guaranteed right to complete control over their individual body, including reproduction. This position is represented by groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood. The second front on which the culture war over privacy rights is fought involves the procedural, and ultimately political, issue of how the Supreme Court arrived at these controversial decisions. Specifically, social conservatives have called into question the legitimacy of the high court by branding justices who have supported the constitutional protection of privacy rights as “judicial activists.” This pejorative term connotes the willingness of justices to “disregard” the language of the Constitution and intent of the framers, and to base decisions on their own political convictions. In the words of Robert H. Bork, a conservative denied Senate confirmation as a Supreme Court nominee in 1987, liberal justices “invent a general right of privacy.” This controversy was again inflamed when a Court majority returned to the issue of privacy rights in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The majority opinion in this case, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, upheld the constitutional protection of sexual privacy, declaring a state antisodomy law an “intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.” Advocates for gay rights celebrated the decision as a major victory. Conversely, social conservatives pointed to the decision as evidence
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of rampant judicial activism and rallied around Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, which claimed “the Court has taken sides in the culture war” and “largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” During the 2004 presidential election campaign, Republican incumbent George W. Bush roused the overwhelming support of social conservatives by suggesting that judicial activism and the Supreme Court’s constitutional protection of privacy rights threaten the two principles they held most dear—the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of human life. This strategic use of the culture wars for political gain helped deliver Bush a second term in the White House. Richard Gibbons Holtzman See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Bush Family; Douglas, William O.; Gay Rights Movement; Judicial Wars; Operation Rescue; Planned Parenthood; Religious Right; Roe v. Wade (1973); Sodomy Laws.
Further Reading Bork, Robert H. The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. New York: Free Press, 1990. Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. O’Brien, David M. Privacy, Law and Public Policy. New York: Praeger, 1979. Roosevelt, Kermit, III. The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Tribe, Laurence H. “Lawrence v. Texas: The ‘Fundamental Right’ That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” Harvard Law Review, 117:6 (2004): 1894–955. Warren, Samuel V., and Louis D. Brandeis. “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4:5 (1890): 193–220.
Privatization A topic of the culture wars since at least the 1980s, privatization in contemporary America refers primarily to government outsourcing (contracting out) of public services to private companies, or, more radically, the full transfer of business ownership from the public to the private sector (government divestiture.) A governmentissued school voucher that can be used to pay for education at a private school is one form of privatization. Supporters of privatization typically assert that government is a public monopoly that raises money through taxation and consequently lacks the incentive to reduce cost and improve performance. With privatization, they argue, the entrepreneurial virtues of choice, competition, and efficiency can be injected into the delivery of public services. Critics of privatization argue that public
services, which are generally intended to improve the quality of life, invariably suffer when the profitability of the provider is the primary aim. In addition, it is said, outsourcing has sometimes led to corruption, lax governmental oversight, and increased costs to taxpayers (including user fees). Early proponents of American privatization included Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and author of Capitalism and Freedom (1962); Gordon Tullock, the public-choice theorist and author of Private Wants, Public Means (1970); Anthony Downs, the Brookings Institution fellow and author of Inside Bureaucracy (1967); William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute and author of Bureaucracy and Representative Government (1971); and Peter Drucker, the specialist on modern management and author of The Age of Discontinuity (1968). It was Drucker who coined the term “reprivatization.” In 1969, after New York City municipal workers were slow in clearing the streets of a major snowfall, recommendations were made for contracting out municipal services, including a proposal for privatized garbage collection. However, the initiative was nixed after labor unions and others raised objections. During the 1970s, Robert W. Poole, Jr., of the Reason Foundation, launched a promotion of privatization via the newsletter Fiscal Watchdog (later renamed Privatization Watch). By the 1980s, municipalities across the nation began outsourcing services—according to a survey of 596 American cities, privatization increased by 121 percent from 1982 to 1992, with 28 percent of municipal services being carried out by private firms. By 1992, about half of the nation’s large cities were contracting out solid-waste collection, with privatized prisons on the rise as well, beginning in 1984 in Hamilton County, Tennessee. Long-term privatization of public water utilities increased from 400 in 1997 to 1,100 in 2003. Controversy has occasionally erupted over contracting out services to foreign companies—as in 2006, when Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, leased for seventy-five years the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road to an Australian-Spanish consortium for $3.8 billion. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan announced a federal initiative for privatization. He had been following events in Great Britain, where privatization had been introduced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was swayed by arguments of the Adam Smith Institute. During her tenure, many state-owned companies were privatized, from British Petroleum (1979) to Rolls Royce (1987). In addition, in 1988 the British government began requiring competitive bidding for all local government services. Although Reagan’s efforts led to the sale of few government-owned entities (one exception was the 1987 divesture of the freight railroad, Conrail), there was an increase in the outsourcing of many federal
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support services, including data processing, building maintenance, guard services, and food services. President George W. Bush, who viewed himself as continuing the “Reagan revolution,” tried to extend the privatization argument to Social Security. In championing what he called the “ownership society,” Bush recommended that each American worker be allowed to opt out of the public Social Security system and have the amount that is normally deducted from his or her paycheck placed in a private account that is owned and controlled by the individual. In the face of public skepticism, the proposal floundered. Bush’s presentation, observers noted, avoided mentioning that, in addition to providing old-age income, Social Security is an insurance program that provides death and disability benefits—something privatized accounts would fail to match. Concern over the dismantling of the safety net is directly related to the controversy over governmental outsourcing—the workers of private firms performing the tasks previously done by government employees in many cases receive lower salaries and fewer benefits, a common method for reducing operational costs. In 2000, the Economic Policy Institute reported that 10 percent of the 1.4 million federal-contractor workers in the United States were receiving wages below the poverty level. Although Bush failed to reform Social Security, federal outsourcing increased during his presidency, from $207 billion in 2000 to $400 billion in 2006. According to the Federal Procurement Data System, private contracting in 2005 amounted to $268.43 billion for the Department of Defense, $5.49 billion for the Department of State, and $10.33 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. Of all federal contracts issued in 2005, only 48 percent were competitive. In 2007, a no-bid contract worth up to $52 million was awarded by the Justice Department to the consulting firm owned by John Ashcroft, who had resigned as attorney general in 2005—an award called into question by the Democratic-controlled House. There was also criticism aimed at Halliburton, the military contractor formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, as its government contracts increased by 600 percent during the first five years of the Iraq War. In the viewpoint of many observers, privatization is especially prone to political corruption. From 2000 to 2007, according to one report, the top twenty federal contractors in America spent $300 million on lobbying and $23 million on contributions to political campaigns. Opponents argue further that privatization tends to make government activities less transparent, sometimes making it seem that government is being reduced when in fact it is being increased by proxy. By the fifth year of the Iraq War (2007), the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, with 850 operatives in the war zone, had garnered more than $1 billion in no-bid federal
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contracts. That same year, there were 163,000 nonmilitary personnel in Iraq (including 6,467 armed-security personnel), working as contractors for the Pentagon. Such reliance on the private sector, critics argued, was a way for the Bush administration to avoid implementing the draft by hiring “mercenaries”; at the time, contractors represented 10 percent of the American presence in Iraq. Moreover, it was argued, since the battle-zone fatalities of contractors—more than 1,000 by 2007—are not part of the official tally of war dead, privatization enabled the U.S. government to minimize the true scale of the war’s human cost. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Charter Schools; Cheney Family; Compassionate Conservatism; Friedman, Milton; Reagan, Ronald; School Vouchers; Social Security; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Kahn, Si. Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005. Rasor, Dina. Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reason Foundation Web site. www.reason.org. Roland, Gérard. Privatization: Successes and Failures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Savas, E.S. Privatization and Public Private Partnerships. New York: Chatham House, 2000. Shichor, David. Punishment for Profit: Private Prisons / Public Concerns. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
P r o g r e s s i ve C h r i s t i a n s U n i t i n g Progressive Christians Uniting (founded in 1996 as Mobilization for the Human Family) is an ecumenical organization launched by John Cobb, Jr., and George Regas in the Los Angeles area to provide resources for Christian clergy, laity, and congregations that promote progressive political activism. Eager to debunk the presumption that Christian theology is the exclusive preserve of Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson and James Dobson, the group challenges the Religious Right’s appropriation of the Bible and Jesus to promote goals such as organized prayer in schools, pro-life legislation, and the teaching of intelligent design. In Progressive Christians Speak (2003), the organization denounces the Christian Right for promoting a “politics of nostalgia and fear” and a mythical past when the United States was “harmonious, paternal and hierarchical.” Progressive Christians Uniting denies that such a past ever existed while questioning its theological justification. Several contributors to Getting on Message (2005) lament that religious progressives have allowed the Religious Right to “hijack Jesus” for causes utterly
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inconsistent with the spirit of Christ. The group seeks to reclaim the progressive Jesus of scripture and discern biblical mandates for diversity, egalitarianism, reconciliation, economic justice, and equity. Progressive Christians Uniting argues that progressives are more faithful to the import of scripture because the Bible is an intrinsically progressive text. A core set of theological beliefs, articulated in the group’s Confession of Faith, inform the organization’s work: (1) While professing commitment to scripture, the sacraments, and Christian history, Christian progressives should also read scripture in light of the best modern research. (2) Embracing, rather than resisting, contemporary scholarship is the most responsible way to apply Christian faith to the questions and concerns of present-day society. By belief and temperament, the organization is largely optimistic with regard to human will and potential. The group envisions progressive Christians—sustained by the Holy Spirit and informed by the tolerant principles of the Enlightenment—challenging and replacing conservative religious, ethical, and social norms with an inclusive and justice-centered option for society’s marginalized and disinherited. Progressive Christians Uniting publications, conferences, and mobilization efforts have stressed the need for criminal justice reform implementing restorative models, antisweatshop campaigns, treatment rather than incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders, gender equity, more accommodating immigration policies, and environmental protection. The organization was highly critical of the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, in particular the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Richard C. Goode See also: American Civil Religion; Campolo, Anthony “Tony”; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Dobson, James; Evangelicalism; Fundamentalism, Religious; Religious Right; Robertson, Pat; School Prayer; Sider, Ron; Wallis, Jim.
Further Reading Cobb, John B., Jr., ed. Progressive Christians Speak: A Different Voice on Faith and Politics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Laarman, Peter, ed. Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel. Boston: Beacon, 2005. Progressive Christians Uniting Web site. www.progressivechristiansuniting.org.
P r o m i s e Ke e p e r s An evangelical men’s movement based in Denver, Colorado, Promise Keepers was created to help men remain faithful to their Christian ideals and to influence the
Members of Promise Keepers, a men’s evangelical Christian group that promotes traditional family values, moral integrity, and personal spiritual commitment, attend a gathering of 25,000 adherents in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 2005. (Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)
surrounding culture. Although promoted as a ministry, Promise Keepers has a political aspect that has placed it squarely in the midst of the culture wars. Bill McCartney, former coach of the University of Colorado men’s football team, started Promise Keepers in 1990 after attending a banquet of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes that March. The organization’s first national men’s conference was held in 1992, attracting attendance of more than 22,000. The movement grew quickly after McCartney appeared on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio show in June 1992. Two years later, Focus on the Family published the group’s manifesto, “Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper.” During the summer of 1996, twenty-two Promise Keepers conferences were conducted in outdoor stadiums, attended by over a million men. The height of the group’s national prominence came on October 4, 1997, with a rally in Washington, D.C., called “Stand in the Gap,” which attracted an estimated 600,000 men. Rooted in the tradition of revivalism, Promise Keepers maintains the mission of “igniting and uniting men to be passionate followers of Jesus Christ” through seven promises. A Promise Keeper agrees to read the Bible regularly, bond with other males, practice sexual purity, build a strong marriage, serve his local church, break down racial barriers, and transform the world through moral and spiritual integrity. Although membership peaked in 1996, Promise Keepers continues to hold conferences and develop resources in North America and internationally. In 2003, after years of the group struggling financially, board member Thomas S. Fortson, Jr., replaced McCartney as president. In a press conference in April 2004, Fortson announced that Promise Keepers was moving from a “movement” to a “mission.” He encouraged
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evangelical men to “prepare for battle” and “fight the culture war” for America’s soul. Fortson’s overt politicization of the ministry reaffirmed its connections to the Christian Right. Promise Keepers maintains ties with such evangelical leaders as James Dobson, Bruce Wilkinson, Jack Hayford, and Charles Swindoll. Although the Nation magazine has referred to the Promise Keepers as a “third wave” of the Religious Right, taking over for the late Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, the organization’s leadership argues that its stand is not political but moral. Groups such as the National Organization for Women have argued that the Promise Keepers’ commitment to traditional patriarchal family roles, its opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage, and its “manly” ethos are a threat to women and democracy. Defenders point out that there is no uniform gender ideology among its adherents and that Promise Keepers calls on men to treat their wives as equal partners, contribute more actively to the care of children, and encourage spouses to pursue vocational goals. While Promise Keepers has committed itself to breaking down racial barriers, others argue that its evangelical reliance on individual relationships and moral legalism prevent it from addressing the systemic causes of institutionalized racism. Kurt W. Peterson See also: Dobson, James; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; Family Values; Focus on the Family; Men’s Movement; Million Man March; Moral Majority; National Organization for Women; Religious Right.
Further Reading Bartkowski, John P. The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Conason, Joe, Alfred Ross, and Lee Cokorinos. “The Promise Keepers Are Coming: The Third Wave of the Religious Right.” Nation, October 7, 1996. Hardisty, Jean V. Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Hayford, Jack, et al. Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper. Nashville, TN: W Publishing, 1999. Promise Keepers Web site. www.promisekeepers.org. Williams, Rhys H., ed. Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001.
Public Broadcasting Ser v ice A nonprofit public television broadcasting network, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) operates under the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Founded on November 3, 1969, PBS is a legacy of President Lyndon
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B. Johnson’s Great Society. In 2009, the PBS network consisted of 356 member stations across the nation and U.S. territories, reaching more than 65 million people. Political conservatives who are philosophically opposed to federal funding of television think PBS should be privatized, arguing that the advent of cable and satellite TV as well as the Internet has rendered public television obsolete. In addition, conservatives have for years complained that PBS has a liberal bias. PBS supporters, liberals and moderates alike, argue that public television enriches society by offering meaningful programming that profit-driven broadcasters would never be motivated to produce or air. From its broadcast inception of October 5, 1970, PBS has grown into an extensive and sophisticated network. Broadcasts have included children’s programs (Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Barney and Friends, and the like); cultural programs (such as Masterpiece Theatre, American Playhouse, and Live from the Met); British television series (such as Upstairs, Downstairs); science programs (Nova and Cosmos); news programs (namely NewsHour with Jim Lehrer); and a heavy schedule of documentary programs. For fiscal year 2009, CPB awarded PBS $196.7 million for station grants and $76.8 million for programming. About 20 percent of PBS funding comes from the federal government; the rest derives from state and local governments, corporate underwriting, individual viewers, and the marketing of PBS merchandise. PBS was founded for the purpose of bringing varied programming to the airways at a time when there were only three commercial broadcasters (ABC, CBS, and NBC). In a speech on May 9, 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minnow denounced commercial television as “a vast wasteland” that offers a “steady diet” of “westerns and private eyes.” Such programming, Minnow said, is “obviously not in the public interest” and fails to cater to the “special needs of children.” Six years later, the report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television warned that educational television, then consisting of 182 stations nationwide, would cease to exist without federal funding. In that context, the CPB was founded. Upon signing the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, President Johnson spoke idealistically about the “revolutionary” power of television to “change our lives.” He expressed the hope that the public broadcasters would “direct that power toward the great and not the trivial purposes” in order to “help make our Nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens.” He also stressed the need for the CPB to be “representative” and “responsible.” Ultimately, Johnson believed that public television and radio would “enrich man’s spirit” by offering “more than just material wealth.”
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The CPB originally partnered with National Educational Television (NET), which was founded in 1952 with funding from the Ford Foundation. However, NET had produced some provocative documentaries about the Vietnam War and race relations, rankling conservatives. That is when the CPB decided to form PBS. Later, NET was absorbed by WNDT New York (and renamed WNET) and became an important PBS affiliate, along with KCET Los Angeles, WGBH Boston, and WQED Pittsburgh. Although it was envisioned for PBS to be independent of government control, that seemed tenuous after Congress balked at providing an automatic earmark tax for public broadcasting. Consequently, the CPB would have to make a budget request every year. The CPB board, moreover, was made up of political appointees. Beginning with President Richard Nixon, who regarded PBS as part of the “liberal establishment,” attempts were made to get the CPB to dictate programming. At the same time, Nixon pushed for PBS to decentralize (accede more power to local stations) so that “grassroots localism” would dilute the East Coast liberal bias. In 1973, PBS won a partnership agreement from the CPB to standardize funding distribution to guard against political interference. In 1975, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Financing Act, providing a two-year advance appropriation to the CPB to further protect editorial independence. This was a compromise on President Gerald Ford’s recommendation of a five-year advance authorization. PBS came under repeated attack during the 1980s. The documentary series Frontline was often criticized by conservatives, who wanted every program to show “both” sides of an issue. PBS officials, however, thought in terms of an overall programming balance. Indeed, a 1975 District of Columbia Circuit Court ruling affirmed this position, stating that balance is to be judged by the overall program schedule and not a single production or even a series. Meanwhile, conservative activist David Horowitz formed the Committee on Media Integrity to document the “leftist slant” of PBS programs on foreign affairs. Similarly, Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media criticized the “communist” perspective of the thirteen-part PBS documentary Vietnam: A Television History (1983). On the other side, liberals noted that PBS had aired a number of conservative programs, from Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr., to Milton and Rose Friedman’s ten-part Free to Choose (1980). Following the 1995 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, Speaker Newt Gingrich (RGA) called public broadcasting “an elitist enterprise” and announced his goal to “zero out” its public funding. Gingrich was joined in that pledge by Representative Larry Pressler (R-SD), who two years later lost reelection in a campaign in which detractors passed out bumper stickers
that read, “Let’s Keep PBS and ‘Privatize’ Pressler.” In time, Gingrich admitted that Republicans had under estimated public support for PBS. During the presidency of George W. Bush there was renewed controversy when Kenneth Tomlinson, the appointed chairman of the CPB, called on PBS to reflect “the Republican mandate.” Tomlinson later resigned under a cloud, but not until after he singled out the program NOW with Bill Moyers as being too liberal. PBS has been in the spotlight of controversy with respect to televised presidential debates, ten of which have been moderated by PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer. During the 2000 campaign, Lehrer wrapped up the first debate (held at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on October 3) by asking Republican candidate George W. Bush, “Are there issues of character that distinguish you from Vice President Gore?” For some observers, that question lent support to Bush’s partisan “values campaign.” When Gore suggested redirecting the discussion to focus on the nation’s problems, Lehrer asked, “Are you saying all this is irrelevant, Vice President Gore?” For some observers, that episode made Lehrer seem less than neutral. Later, during the 2008 presidential election, observers called into question the neutrality of Gwen Ifill, a senior correspondent for the NewsHour, in connection with her moderating the vice-presidential debate (held on October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri). An African American, Ifill at the time was finishing a book on Barack Obama scheduled to be released on inauguration day—The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (2009)—which she had not disclosed upfront to the debate commission. Roger Chapman See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Federal Communications Commission; Friedman, Milton; Great Society; Horowitz, David; Irvine, Reed; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Media Bias; National Public Radio; Nixon, Richard; Privatization; Rusher, William A.
Further Reading Auletta, Ken. “Big Bird Flies Right.” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004. Bullert, B.J. Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting. A Public Trust. New York: Bantam, 1979. Day, James. The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Engelman, Ralph. Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. PBS Web site. www.pbs.org. Stewart, David. The PBS Companion: A History of Public Television. New York: TV Books, 1999.
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P u n k Ro c k Outrageous, confrontational, and outside the mainstream of conventional rock-and-roll culture, punk rock conjures images of ripped T-shirts, Mohawk haircuts, and safety pins. This youth subculture, however, has involved more than music and fashion. Railing against corporate culture, suburbia, and conservative politics in the late 1970s and 1980s, punks were primarily young, white, middle-class males. Through “in your face” music and lifestyle, punks attempted to merge the shock of avant-garde rebellion and New Left protest traditions at a time when liberalism was on the wane. With a do-ityourself (DIY) ethic of self-production, punks rejected the corporatization of music, the Reagan Revolution’s conservative values, and the mainstream media’s negative stereotypes of punk. The roots of punk rock extend to the mid-1960s garage rock of Link Wray, and late 1960s fringe rock bands such as the Stooges and the MC5. Punk rock itself originated in the mid-1970s with a group of New York City musicians inspired by beatniks, the Velvet Underground, and its patron, Andy Warhol. Congregating at CBGB-OMFUG, a bar in New York’s Bowery District, early punks such as Patti Smith and Richard Hell took a populist stance similar to that of their hippie forebears. Their minimalist fashion sense and avant-garde approach to music formed the foundation for the DIY ethic, while the New York Dolls brought glamour and intensity to the movement. At a 1975 CBGB showcase, punk received international press attention. Record companies were particularly interested in the Ramones, whose music was sparse and powerful, and who would push the punk movement beyond the artistic realm. On a British tour in 1976, the Ramones brought American punk sensibilities to that country’s youth. British punk took the New York framework and created an outlet for working-class rage. This often anarchic expression of generational discontent was epitomized by the Sex Pistols, who reveled in confrontation and shock value. In 1976, the Sex Pistols’ anthem “Anarchy in the UK” helped create the impression that punk rock was to be feared. In a June 1977 NBC news report on punk in Britain, the movement was represented as violent and nihilistic, a threat to mainstream society. The report brought attention to American punks and inadvertently created a social phenomenon. While the American artistic punk scene mellowed into the New Wave (epitomized by Blondie) by the early 1980s, a harder, more political punk filled the void. This angrier, more extreme punk (known as hardcore) came from punks who refused to fall prey to the cooptation that had begun to take place with media exposure, especially with the spread of cable television channels such as MTV. Hardcore punk emerged in Los Angeles, San Francisco,
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and Washington, D.C., with bands such as Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys (fronted by Jello Biafra), and Minor Threat. Mass media quickly picked up the hardcore stereotype of anarchy dressed in ripped jeans; punks were demonized on film (Class of 1984, 1982) and television (Quincy, 1982). To the mainstream, hardcore threatened the social order. Punks fought this misrepresentation in their music and in “zines” (noncommercial fan magazines), the most well known being Maximum RocknRoll. Such DIY communication networks were outlets for punk political and social action in going against the Establishment. To punks, Reaganism merged with the evils of corporatization. This disdain was counter to Reagan-era optimism, as actualized by punk’s use of “direct action” in which radical protest strategies of the 1960s, like guerrilla theater, were made more aggressive. For example, in one particular demonstration, punks staged “die-ins” (mass mock deaths), posed as fanatical Christians, and threw fake blood at fur stores. This culminated in a mass-action day called “No Business As Usual Day” (NBAU) on April 29, 1985. Aimed at the escalating arms race, NBAU concerts and die-ins were staged in cities across the country, including Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco. Political activity grew between 1984 and 1986: Positive Force, a punk political organization with chapters across the United States, arranged concerts for community and international causes such as anti-apartheid; and a road show called Rock Against Reagan toured the country. Punks were keen to act but were not interested in sophisticated intellectual analysis and lacked long-term political vision. Anarchy may have formed the movement’s core, but voluntary cooperation was the goal, not chaos. Because of the movement’s ahistorical perspective, a coherent plan for political change could never be achieved. Punks used New Left protest tactics but did not see the legacy that informed these actions as something to be built upon to obtain their own goals. As punk political action peaked, the subculture’s limits crystallized. Commercialism and commodification were the source of punk ire and anxiety. Many youths were drawn not to the movement’s activism but to its style. Punk rock could not hold back consumerism, and the subculture was opened to the masses. Bands such as Green Day made the “new” punk—grunge—a corporate success. Like the counterculture a generation before it, punk became exclusionary, going underground as conservatism rose and consumer culture embraced rebellion. Anna Zuschlag See also: Biafra, Jello; Counterculture; Family Values; Fur; Generations and Generational Conflict; Rap Music; Reagan, Ronald; Record Warning Labels; Rock and Roll; Warhol, Andy; Zappa, Frank.
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Further Reading Friedlander, Paul. Rock & Roll: A Social History. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2006. MacLeod, Dewar. “‘Social Distortion’: The Rise of Suburban Punk Rock in Los Angeles.” In America under Construction: Boundaries and Identities in Popular Culture, ed. Kristi S. Long and Matthew Nadelhaft, 123–37. New York: Garland, 1997.
Mattson, Kevin. “Did Punk Matter? Analyzing the Practices of a Youth Subculture During the 1980s.” American Studies 42:1 (Spring 2000): 69–97. Szatmary, David P. Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-andRoll. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Q u ay l e , D a n As the forty-fourth vice president of the United States (1989–1993), former U.S. representative and senator Dan Quayle (R-IN) personified the young conservatives of the New Right. Critics viewed him as a political lightweight; supporters argued that he was a victim of liberal media bias. The son of a wealthy newspaper publisher, John Danforth “Dan” Quayle was born on February 4, 1947, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied at DePauw University (BS, political science, 1969) and Indiana University of Law (JD, 1974), serving along the way in the Indiana National Guard (1969–1975) and various positions in the state government (1970–1974). Entering politics during the Reagan ascendancy, Quayle served two full terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977–1981) and one and a half in the Senate (1981–1989). During his years on Capitol Hill, he sponsored only one major piece of legislation, a job-training bill co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA). In 1988, Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush selected Quayle as his running mate; many criticized this decision, saying the Hoosier was too inexperienced and lacked intellectual heft. Quayle’s 1988 vice-presidential campaign was marked by unusually intensive media scrutiny. His poor academic record at DePauw was uncovered (he was a C student and failed his first attempt at the final exam in political science); he was accused of using family connections to get into the National Guard in order to avoid the Vietnam War; and questions circulated about an overnight golfing event involving an attractive female lobbyist. One of Quayle’s most embarrassing moments came during his vice-presidential debate with Democratic counterpart Lloyd Benson in Omaha, Nebraska. After Quayle stated that he had more experience than John Kennedy when he was nominated in 1960, Benson retorted, “I knew Jack Kennedy . . . Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Quayle was left speechless as the studio audience cheered. He became fodder for late-night talk shows and partisan magazines as his misstatements—many apocryphal—were chronicled. The most famous gaffe took place during his vice presidency when, at a gradeschool appearance, he misspelled the word “potato” (as “potatoe”) on the chalkboard. Quayle partially redeemed his reputation by performing well in the 1992 campaign debate with Al Gore and with the publication of his wellreceived autobiography, Standing Firm (1994). Many conservatives remained loyal, saying the press unfairly pounced on his every minor mistake. Further,
Vice President Dan Quayle delivers an attack on the “liberal media” and the Democratic Party during an August 1992 God and Country rally organized by the Christian Coalition to promote family values. (Chris Wilkins/AFP/Getty Images)
they praised Quayle’s consistent support for reduced government spending and lower taxes, a strong military and the Strategic Defense Initiative (missile defense), and traditional family values. It was this last issue that most engaged Quayle in the culture wars. In a now famous 1992 speech in which he criticized Murphy Brown, a popular television series character, for having a baby out of wedlock, he was lambasted by liberals for being intolerant. (He said the show represented a “poverty of values.”) Conservatives countered that Quayle had spoken the truth about the importance of fathers and claimed that the negative trend of fatherless families in America was the root cause of poverty and crime in inner cities. E. Michael Young See also: Bush Family; Family Values; Gore, Al; Kennedy Family; Media Bias; Palin, Sarah; Republican Party; Strategic Defense Initiative; Tax Reform; Vietnam War; Woodward, Bob; Zappa, Frank.
Further Reading Broder, David C., and Bob Woodward. The Man Who Would Be President: Dan Quayle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Fenno, Richard F., Jr. The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1998. Quayle, Dan. Standing Firm: A Vice Presidential Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Quayle, Dan, and Diane Medved. The American Family: Discovering the Values That Make Us Strong. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Queenan, Joe. Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else. New York: Hyperion Books, 1992.
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Race With its founding years steeped in slavery, the United States built a legal and social system around the concept of “race,” with legacies that continue to the present day. A set of practices known as de jure segregation, or the social separation of groups based on racial difference and backed by law, followed the abolition of slavery. Historically, use of the word race as a term to classify human groups is a relatively recent one. It first came into use in late eighteenth-century Europe and was understood as group identity based on common ancestry and shared physical traits. By the 2000s, de jure segregation had been abolished in the United States, but informal de facto segregation remained widespread even though the concept of race as a definitive biological marker was being questioned. Despite the improvement of “race relations,” people of color by and large fall short of full political and economic equality. Although physical anthropologists and biologists had attempted to categorize Homo sapiens by such racial types as “Caucasoid,” “Negroid,” “Mongoloid,” and “Australoid,” by the late 1900s anthropologists had reached a consensus that race is an arbitrary social construct and not a scientific designator. At one time, even Irish, Italians, and Jews were considered nonwhite. Sociologists and anthropologists today prefer the term ethnicity, which refers to a group that shares cultural affinities, such as geographical and ancestral roots. Despite the discrediting of the scientific category, American society has continued to grapple with issues of race and racism. Laws against interracial marriage were abolished; the “one-drop rule” method of determining blackness discontinued; and people of color were elected to public office at local, state, and federal levels, all while social integration and equal opportunity have remained out of reach for many minorities. A trend toward the de facto resegregation of cities has been evident, ironically exacerbated by the upward mobility of African Americans and the phenomenon of “black flight” (in the wake of “white flight”) to the suburbs. In major metropolitan areas, neighborhoods and schools have redivided along racial lines, characterized by economic disparities between whites and people of color, while those who can afford to do so relocate for better school districts and areas with less crime. The highest indices of whiteblack segregation are concentrated in the Northeast and northern Midwest. In developing scientific measurements of population, the U.S. Census Bureau played a role in nineteenth-century race categorization, carefully examining whites for
traces of nonwhite ancestry. By the end of the twentieth century, racial classification became more complicated with greater diversity from new immigrant waves and the rise of interracial marriage. The 2000 Census allowed respondents to identify themselves by choosing more than one race from a list of fifteen choices, and to check “some other race” if none applied. Critics deplored the omission of “Arab” from the list, wondering why they were subsumed under “white” or “some other race.” Perhaps most problematic from a statistical point of view was the recording of the Latino population: while some checked “some other race” (believing themselves “Indian,” as they were known in their home countries), 48 percent identified themselves as “white” and 2 percent “black.” Political advocacy groups objected to the census list, fearing it would artificially lower the number of people of color and ultimately affect affirmative action decisions and electoral districting. The concept and meaning of “race” has entered prominently into the debates of the culture wars. As sociologists and scientists were reaching a consensus on the meaninglessness of racial identity (except as a social construction), Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray caused controversy by asserting in The Bell Curve (1994) that differences in I.Q. test scores were evidence of biologically inherited racial differences in intelligence. A barrage of detractors responded, charging that the authors made assumptions about “essentialist” biological differences between groups, misinterpreted data, erred in reasoning, conflated social class with race, and ignored research that cast doubt on strong links between genetics and intelligence. Meanwhile, the post-1960s rise of new scholarship to include voices of people of color, revise historical texts to correct bias, and create new theory resulted in a burgeoning interest in cross-disciplinary fields such as critical race studies, whiteness studies (examining the social invention of “whiteness”), postcolonial studies, and AfricanAmerican, Latino/a, and Asian studies. “Culture studies” departments were established, providing curricula that critically attempted to “de-center” scholarly perspectives and examine the academy’s disciplinary regimes of power, using the terminology of French philosopher Michel Foucault. At the forefront of the discussion was often the perspective of the “canon” or the so-called “great books.” While multiculturalists argued for scrapping the study of inherited Western, “Eurocentric” works (or to at least augment it with contributions and critical perspectives of marginalized groups, the global south, and the colonized), traditionalists such as Allan Bloom (author of the 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind) charged that to abandon the canon was to abandon America’s founding religious and moral principles and to devolve into moral relativism. The question of race explosively reentered the Ameri452
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can public sphere in the 2008 Democratic presidential election primary with the success of U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful Barack Obama, son of African immigrant and white parentage. Revealing the unsettled state of the definition of race in American public culture were the questions: “Is America ready for a black president?” and “Is he black enough?” Throughout his candidacy, Obama walked a fine line between an attempt to appeal to groups across the racial divides and his stated commitment to address the disparities that communities such as African Americans continued to endure. He offered the color-blind proclamation that “there is not a black America and a white America. . . . There’s the United States of America,” but became ensconced in a spring 2008 controversy over language in a sermon by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that was critical of white America. Although Obama went on to win not only the Democratic primary, but the general election, becoming the first black man elected president of the United States, there was no consensus on how this historic milestone was to be interpreted with respect to the everyday lives of ordinary people of color. Susan Pearce See also: Afrocentrism; Bell Curve, The; Civil Rights Movement; Great Books; Hispanic Americans; Loving, Richard, and Mildred Loving; Lynching; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Obama, Barack; Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Baum, Bruce. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Livingstone, Frank B. “On the Non-Existence of Human Races.” In The Concept of Race, ed. Ashley Montagu, 46–60. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Spickard, Paul R. “The Illogic of American Racial Categories.” In Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P.P. Root, 12–23. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.
Racial Profiling Racial profiling involves the action of law enforcement officials based on race, ethnicity, or national origins rather than individual behavior or specific information about alleged criminal activity. Incidents of racial profiling typically occur in the context of traffic stops, neighborhood patrolling, and airport screening. African Americans and Hispanics have often been subject to this practice, especially by officers concerned about drug or immigration enforcement. Being pulled over by the police for questioning is such a common experience
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for African Americans that they characterize it as being stopped for DWB—“driving while black.” Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, people of Middle Eastern descent have experienced a greater amount of police searches and surveillance. In the culture wars most people agree that racial profiling is wrong, but there is no consensus over what actually constitutes the practice. Law scholars maintain that the Fourth Amendment (protecting against unreasonable searches) and the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing equal protection under the law) render racial profiling unconstitutional. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975), for example, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for border officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to single out people of Mexican descent for additional questioning. Conservatives argue that purely discriminatory racial profiling occurs much less frequently than liberals claim. What one side calls racial profiling, the other views as criminal profiling. Public figures generally reject “hard profiling” (using race as the sole criterion), but “soft profiling” (using race as part of a larger profile) remains a contentious issue because the line drawn between the two can be subjective. Conservatives, emphasizing law and order, argue that common sense would allow police to use racial and ethnic characteristics to identify possible suspects. They note that federal officials, fearing they would be guilty of racial profiling, failed to adequately investigate the influx of Arab students enrolling at flight schools prior to September 11. Criticism of racial profiling is sometimes seen as avoidance to address the disproportionate rate of criminality in certain racial and ethnic communities. Liberals who are skeptical of soft profiling suggest that hidden prejudice looms larger than what law enforcement officials would care to admit. They also maintain that the rate of criminality should not be misconstrued with the rate of arrest, especially if certain segments of society are subjected to greater police scrutiny. Critics of racial profiling argue that police in America have historically targeted minorities for more intensive policing because of blatant racism. As recently as 1999, a drug sting in Tulia, Texas, a town of 5,000 people with a small African-American community, resulted in the arrests of forty black males—about a third of the town’s total. The arrests, based on the testimony of one undercover narcotics officer, proved to have been made with fraudulent evidence. Nearly all the suspects were released, but many served several years in prison. The case became the subject of several films, depicting an example of blatantly biased police work in the drug war. Historically, most police officers in the United States have been white; some harboring strong biases against African Americans and other minorities. One solution has been to recruit more nonwhites as police officers, particu-
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larly in cities and towns with large nonwhite populations. While this has helped reduce animosity between police and minorities in many cases, studies show that even minority police officers may police nonwhites more intensely. Beginning in the 1950s, civil rights groups such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began campaigning against bias and profiling in police work. More radical groups, such as the Black Panthers and Brown Berets, joined the campaign the following decade, some seeking to incite anger and resistance to law enforcement. The 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California, was triggered by an incident that was regarded by the black community as police racial profiling. Racial profiling emerged again as a national issue during the 1980s, as a rapid rise in the use of cocaine led to a sharp increase in violent crimes in major U.S. cities. The federal government intensified the war on drugs, and police throughout the country targeted illegal drug dealers and users. Arrest rates in poor, inner-city neighborhoods soared, and jails soon were filled with alleged drug offenders. More than 75 percent of them were black or Hispanic. In the mid-1980s, new anticrime legislation allowed police to confiscate the property of drug dealers and other criminals, including cars, houses, and other possessions. In the 1990s, states passed three-strikes laws and long mandatory sentences for repeat felony offenders. Civil rights groups and minority leaders complained that the laws prescribed longer sentences for the sale or possession of crack cocaine (most often used by minorities) than for possession or sale of powdered cocaine, which is much expensive and more often used by whites. In the 1980s, criminologists argued that if police enforce “quality-of-life” laws against graffiti, panhandling, jaywalking, loitering, vandalism, littering, disorderly conduct, and minor motor vehicle violations, it would send a message that a neighborhood was under surveillance and thereby dissuade more serious criminality. In practice, police began detaining individuals for minor infractions and searching on computer databases for outstanding warrants. During the 1990s, crime rates in many large cities declined, most remarkably in New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, encouraged the police to enforce quality-of-life laws. In 1994, Giuliani’s first year in office, New York’s crime rate fell by 12 percent. After an unexplained rise in 1995, it continued to decline during his eight years in office. Critics charged that quality-of-life policing encouraged the police to harass minority residents and go on “fishing expeditions” in search of illegal guns or drugs. Conservatives pointed to opinion polls indicating that most citizens living in high-crime areas supported the enforcement of quality-of-life laws. In the early 2000s, people in many parts of the country began noticing increasing populations of Hispanic
residents in their towns and cities. An undetermined number had entered the country illegally, and others had overstayed their visas. In response to the demographic shift or local complaints about it, police stepped up their inquiries of suspects who appeared to be Hispanic. In some regions they began asking for identity papers to check immigration status. Along the border with Mexico, border police stepped up efforts to stop the flow of illegal drugs and other contraband and to curtail the flow of illegal immigrants. Since it was not practical to search every person at border crossings, customs officials also checked minority travelers at an increased rate. Of all women searched by customs officers in 1999, for example, 46 percent were black and only 23 percent were white. Controversy over racial profiling erupted again after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Travelers who appeared to be Middle Eastern or Muslim came under intense law enforcement scrutiny, particularly in and around U.S. airports, with Middle Eastern passengers being screened more frequently. The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act allowed the U.S. attorney general to detain alien suspects for a week without charge. The government proceeded to jail 762 aliens, most of them from Arab nations, on immigration violations. Proponents argued that fighting terrorism justifies close scrutiny of anyone of Middle Eastern origin. Opponents claimed that targeting Muslims or Middle Easterners for questioning was discriminatory and unconstitutional and increased the risk of other terrorists going undetected. Joseph A. Rodriguez See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Hispanic Americans; Illegal Immigrants; Muslim Americans; Race; USA PATRIOT Act; War on Drugs; Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992.
Further Reading Harris, David A. Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work. New York: New Press, 2002. Heumann, Milton, and Lance Cassak. Good Cop, Bad Cop: Racial Profiling and Competing Views of Justice. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. MacDonald, Heather. Are Cops Racist? Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Meeks, Kenneth. Driving While Black: Highways, Shopping Malls, Taxicabs, Sidewalks: How to Fight Back if You are a Victim of Racial Profiling. New York: Broadway Books, 2000. O’Reilly, James T. Police Traffic Stops and Racial Profiling: Resolving Management, Labor and Civil Rights Conflicts. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2002.
R a n d , Ay n A novelist-philosopher, Ayn Rand developed a brand of atheistic libertarianism known as Objectivism, empha-
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sizing objective reality, rationalism, heroic individualism, self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism, boldly declaring selfishness moral. Although Rand’s writings have influenced millions, the academic community has remained ambivalent about Objectivism, with many scholars saying it lacks rigor. Early on, Rand’s ideology was rejected by conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Whittaker Chambers due to its atheistic basis. Rand’s followers, often regarded as cultish, have been routinely denigrated as “Randoids.” Rand was born Alyssa Zinovievna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, into a middle-class Jewish family. In her youth she developed a love of heroic, strong-willed individuals from reading French novels and studying the philosophy of Aristotle and Nietzsche. She graduated from the University of Petrograd with a degree in history (1924) and immigrated to America in 1926. Prior to working in Hollywood, she chose the name Ayn (after a Finnish novelist) Rand (after her Remington-Rand typewriter) to conceal her identity and protect her family in the Soviet Union. After writing the dystopian, anti-Leninist novels We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938), Rand reached her philosophical mark with The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In The Fountainhead, which was made into a Warner Brothers film starring Gary Cooper (1949), the hero Howard Roark, an architect, exemplifies Objectivist individualism by refusing to design buildings that conform to societal aesthetic norms, going so far as to detonate a construction site rather than to see his plans altered. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, is a similarly decisive figure. Respondents to a 1991 poll by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club rated Atlas Shrugged, only after the Bible, as the most influential book they had ever read. Nathaniel Branden (born Blumenthal), a disciple who had an adulterous affair with Rand, in 1958 founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute to systematize and promote Objectivism. In 1968, however, Rand dismissed him from the movement. Her most famous disciple, a member of what she jokingly called “the Collective,” was Alan Greenspan, who went on to chair the Federal Reserve Board (1987–2006). Many of Rand’s essays published in the Objectivist Newsletter (1962–1966), the Objectivist (1966–1971), and the Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976) were later developed into books—For the New Intellectual (1961), The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967), The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), The Romantic Manifesto (1971), and Philosophy: Who Needs It? (1982). Rand died on March 6, 1982, in New York City. Although some credited her with helping pave the way for the conservative resurgence of the 1980s, Rand rejected Ronald Reagan because of his alignment with the
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Religious Right. Rand’s literary heir, Leonard Peikoff, in 1985 founded the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in Marina del Rey, California. In April 1997, ARI activists demonstrated at the presidential summit on volunteerism in Philadelphia, protesting, “I Have No Duty to Sacrifice Myself.” Andrew J. Waskey See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Chambers, Whittaker; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; Secular Humanism; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Ayn Rand Institute Web site. www.aynrand.org. McDonald, Marci. “Fighting over Ayn Rand.” U.S. News & World Report, March 9, 1998. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Sharlet, Jeff. “Ayn Rand Has Finally Caught the Attention of Scholars.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 1999. Walker, Jeff. The Ayn Rand Cult. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.
Rap Music With origins in the 1970s hip-hop culture of urban New York, rap music became part of the culture wars after gaining commercial success and reaching audiences beyond America’s black ghetto and urban centers. The stereotypical rap song that has caught attention in the culture wars is storytelling delivered with fast rhyme, alliteration, and an accompanying beat, expressing concerns of the black underclass with lyrics that can be raw, boastful, aggressive, violent, sexist, homophobic, obscene, and mocking. Having emerged from hip-hop culture (along with break dancing, deejaying, and graffiti), contemporary rap music also reflects a cultural dichotomy. On one hand, rap songs are often political, focusing on drugs, gangs, street violence, rape, police brutality, and the like, offering a message of defiance rather than hope. On the other hand, some rap music offers a utopian message of racial unity—though this form is often obscured by the dialogue of the culture wars and by rap music institutions themselves. Outside of hip-hop subculture, the deeper cultural influences on rap include Jamaican “dub” and reggae culture, African “griot” music, funk, soul, disco, and even German “krautrock.” A key moment in the American scene occurred when MCs (emcees) in urban neighborhood block parties (especially in the Bronx) transitioned from entertaining between songs or acts to “rapping” into the next song. Commercial success for rap began with the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), which sold several million copies and spawned other rap singles in the early 1980s, including number one hits by artists
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outside the hip-hop culture, such as Blondie, Falco, and the Pet Shop Boys. Rap music almost immediately became a political vehicle. As an art form, rap offered a musical outlet to those formally untrained or unable to sing, and it was fairly easy and simple to produce. Its violation of traditional tropes of popular music also gave a musical freedom rarely afforded in other music forms. As such, rap music emerged as a liberating experience for the artist, who had an amplified voice to speak his or her mind about current issues, not the least of which were race and class. One early master of rap, Afrika Bambaata, promoted a quasireligious utopian message while organizing block parties in the Bronx. Other politically minded rappers emerged, including Lawrence Krisna Parker (known as KRS-One), The Coup, Success-N-Effect, and Public Enemy. While rap was being appropriated by white culture for mainstream success, “gangsta rap” emerged on the West Coast. Most notably, LA rapper Ice T’s debut gangsta rap album, Rhyme Pays (1987), was a top-30 hit record and the first rap album to be sold with a “parental advisory” warning label. The following year, the N.W.A. album Straight Outta Compton (1988) prompted a protest from the FBI in reaction to a song title featuring an obscene epithet against the police. Gangsta rap’s lyrical themes focus on the urban realities avoided by pop music and earlier rap music, and it is often accused of glorifying gang violence. In 1990, obscenity laws were enforced by the state of Florida with the arrest of a record retailer for selling copies of the 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989). Their music legally defined as “obscene,” the members of the group that same year were arrested for performing at a Fort Lauderdale nightclub. The album’s first single, “Me So Horny,” became a top-30 hit with little radio play, and the album eventually went on to sell more than three million copies, largely due to notoriety from the controversy. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, social activist and minor hip-hop music personality Sister Souljah (Lisa Williamson) commented, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, in a speech before the Rainbow Coalition, publicly denounced Souljah’s remark as reverse racism, comparing it to the hate speech of a white supremacist. Jesse Jackson dismissed Clinton’s comments as political posturing, while Souljah countered that Clinton was acting as a racist. From this episode was coined the term “Sister Souljah moment,” defined as the use of a “straw man” for political grandstanding against a perceived extremist view. In 1994, the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Calvin Butts, began a crusade against “morally degraded” rap music, citing its negative influence on black youth. Princeton professor Cornel West, who
has recorded hip-hop CDs, has argued that rap music is an expression of marginalized blacks who are victims of capitalism and racism. Christopher D. Rodkey See also: Censorship; Clinton, Bill; Gangs; Heavy Metal; Jackson, Jesse; Parks, Rosa; Police Abuse; Punk Rock; Record Warning Labels; Watts and Los Angeles Riots, 1965 and 1992; West, Cornel.
Further Reading Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: Picador/St. Martin’s Press, 2005. George, Nelson. Hip Hop America. New York: Penguin, 2005. Light, Alan, ed. The Vibe History of Hip Hop. New York: Random House, 1999. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/ University Press of New England, 1994. Sieving, Christopher. “Cop Out? The Media, ‘Cop Killer,’ and the Deracialization of Black Rage.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 22:4 (1998): 332–53. Watkins, S. Craig. Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
R a t h e r, D a n Longtime television journalist Dan Rather signed off from his final broadcast as anchorman and managing editor of the CBS Evening News on March 9, 2005, bringing to a close a career that spanned a half-century and included firsthand coverage of virtually every major event and issue in the postwar era—from the civil rights movement and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the Vietnam War, Watergate scandal, and post-9/11 world. He wrote several books, including The Camera Never Blinks (1977); its sequel, The Camera Never Blinks Twice (1994); and Deadlines and Datelines (1999). His influence enabled him to secure interviews with such controversial figures as Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein. Through all of this, he also encountered at least his share of controversy. Indeed, his retirement in 2005 came amid charges of political bias and shoddy journalism in reporting on the politically charged issue of President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard during the 1960s. Daniel Irvin Rather was born in Wharton, Texas, on October 31, 1931, to Byrl and Irwin “Rags” Rather. He later credited his father with cultivating his interest in journalism and shaping his understanding. He once described Rags as an “impulse subscriber” and remembered his childhood home as always filled with local and national newspapers. As a teen, Rather reported on sports
Rather, Dan
for the school newspaper. His interest continued to grow in the early 1950s, after enrolling at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, Texas, with a major in journalism. While still in college, he worked as a reporter for local wire services and radio stations. After earning his degree in 1953, he worked for the Houston Chronicle and radio station KTRH in that city. A major turning point in Rather’s career came in 1961, when he was hired as director of news and public affairs by KHOU-TV, CBS’s Houston affiliate. For the next four decades CBS would be Rather’s professional home. Following the national recognition obtained from covering President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Rather was named the network’s White House correspondent and went on to cover the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations. In 1974, Rather was named anchor and chief correspondent for the show CBS News Special Reports and, in 1975, a correspondent for the popular television news “magazine” 60 Minutes. In 1981, upon the retirement of the legendary Walter Cronkite, Rather took over as the network’s prime-time news anchor and managing editor. Known as an aggressive investigative journalist and interviewer with a sometimes volatile personality, Rather was the center of national controversy on several occasions during his career. In 2002, 60 Minutes colleague Andy Rooney stated in a television interview that Rather was “transparently liberal”—echoing a longtime and widely held view. In the context of the culture wars, Rather had come to epitomize a perceived bias in the media and was accused of harboring an agenda that was both anticonservative and antigovernment. Indeed, since his early days as a White House correspondent, Rather had struggled to overcome claims that personal politics influenced his reporting. The most famous example came in 1974, when, as White House correspondent, Rather traded words with President Richard Nixon at the peak of the Watergate scandal. The exchange took place at a press conference when, after Rather rose to ask a question, Nixon wryly asked if the reporter was “running for something.” Put on the spot, Rather responded in kind: “No, sir, Mr. President, are you?” The exchange cast Rather in the spotlight and had an enduring effect on his reputation as a journalist. Despite Rather’s claim that his “job is to inform, not persuade,” this was not the last time he was caught in the political crossfire. Rather’s ability to endure and overcome criticism from public figures as well as fellow members of the media came to an end in 2005, in the aftermath of the so-called Bush Memogate scandal. The controversy began in September 2004, when Rather reported a story on 60 Minutes that documents had been discovered in the files of President Bush’s former commanding officer in the Texas Air Guard indicating that Bush had been
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CBS television anchorman Dan Rather, a mainstay of the network from the early 1960s, resigned in March 2005 over a purported case of liberal media bias: a mistaken report on President George W. Bush’s service record during the Vietnam War. (John Chiasson/Getty Images)
barred from flying after failing to report for physical examination. The authenticity of the papers was immediately called into question and, despite Rather’s insistence on the highest journalistic standards, they were soon proven to be spurious. CBS was forced to retract the story and, after an internal investigation, fired several producers associated with the story. Rather, who had been planning to retire anyway, stepped down amid uncertainty over whether he was asked to leave as a direct consequence of the incident. In any event, the scandal was pegged as yet another example of a liberal bias in the mainstream media. In 2008, Rather filed a lawsuit against CBS, seeking millions of dollars. Liam van Beek See also: Bush Family; Iran-Contra Affair; Media Bias.
Further Reading Goldberg, Bernard. Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. New York: Warner Books, 2003. Rather, Dan. The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist. New York: William Morrow, 1977. ———. The Camera Never Blinks Twice: The Further Adventures of a Television Journalist. New York: William Morrow, 1994. ———. Deadlines and Datelines: Essays at the Turn of the Century. New York: William Morrow, 1999. Weisman, Alan. Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
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Reagan, Ronald
Re a g a n , Ro n a l d The fortieth president of the United States (1981–1989) and leader of a conservative revolution in American politics, former film actor and governor of California (1967–1975) Ronald Reagan has played a central and enduring role in America’s culture wars. Essential to understanding that role is acknowledging Reagan’s lifelong struggle against communism, his opposition to the expansion of the federal government, and his somewhat contradictory positions on issues of moral controversy. Far from being monolithically conservative on the issues most important to moral and religious traditionalists, the Reagan record is quite nuanced, with much of his rhetoric focusing on the war against communism rather than on abortion, homosexuality, or feminism.
Early Life and Emerging Ideology Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois. In 1932, he graduated from Eureka College, where he majored in sociology and economics. After a short stint working as a radio sports broadcaster, he passed a screen test with the Warner Brothers film studio in Hollywood and was hired as an actor in 1937. He appeared in more than fifty motion pictures, with a hiatus during World War II, when he narrated training films for the armed forces. In 1947, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), serving as head of that Hollywood union until 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960. Also in 1952, three years after a divorce from the actress Jane Wyman, he married the actress Nancy Davis. Moving into television during the 1950s, he became a host and regular performer on General Electric Theater and, later, the western series Death Valley Days. A New Deal Democrat during the 1930s and early 1940s, Reagan spoke out on behalf of President Harry Truman’s government-centered efforts to contain inflation and unemployment created by military demobilization after World War II. During the course of the 1950s, however, Reagan’s views began to change. As president of SAG, he developed a reputation as a staunch anticommunist. In fact, he was later identified as a primary source of information for FBI files opened on hundreds of suspected Hollywood communists during the McCarthy era. Indeed, Reagan’s activities during this period—including testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities—reflect his commitment to the Cold War struggle that would become a major theme of his presidency. Reagan’s work as SAG president dovetailed into his next series of ideological battles, this time over the size and scope of the federal government. As his film career began to wane, he found work as a national spokesman for the General Electric Company in the late 1950s. Regular duties included visits to local GE plants throughout the year, providing experiences that led to a major shift in
political views and, later, party affiliation. Central to this was a growing concern that government was taxing American workers to excess. A belief that the Republic Party was more vigilant against the spread of communism led Reagan to support the presidential candidacies of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and of Richard Nixon in 1960. By the early 1960s, Reagan’s experiences with GE and his perception that the Democratic Party was becoming ever more liberal on the issues of government regulation and taxation led him to take a more active role in the GOP. His initial foray into politics came in October 1964, when he delivered a nationally televised address—titled “A Time for Choosing”—in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid. Although he had established his reputation as a Hollywood anticommunist crusader, Reagan used the speech to express his concern on a different matter: the idea of government expansion as a necessary evil in postwar America. On the strength of that address, California Republican leaders courted Reagan to challenge the incumbent Democratic governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, in 1966. Running on similar themes outlined in his 1964 Goldwater speech, Reagan defeated Brown by more than one million votes.
Political and Cultural Issues His background as an anticommunist and his first foray into Republican politics are central to an understanding of Reagan’s role in the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. His original and primary political concerns centered on the threats to individual freedom and responsibility posed by communism and big government. Contrary to the views of some culture wars adversaries, he did not establish his political identity as an antiabortion crusader or national moralist. Indeed, in his eight years as California governor, Reagan supported at least three policies antithetical to conservatives in the culture wars to come. The first was a liberalization of state abortion laws, for which Reagan argued that women have the right to protect themselves from the health risks associated with pregnancy. The new legislation widened the accepted definition of pregnancy risk to include mental and psychological stresses, resulting in an increase in the number of legal abortions sought and preformed. The second policy permitted no-fault divorce in the Golden State. And the third barred discrimination against homosexual public school teachers. Reagan is lionized in conservative circles to this day for his generally “pro-life” position as president, successfully appealing to the Religious Right in the 1976, 1980, and 1984 elections by opposing abortion rights (except in cases of rape and incest). It should not be overlooked, however, that in the late 1970s he was forced to apologize for the abortion law he signed as governor of California.
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A moderate tone and hints of political conciliation came through at various times during Reagan’s presidency. In July 1981, he appointed the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court—Sandra Day O’Connor. Continuing his relatively supportive position on gay rights, Reagan, via daughter Maureen, maintained cordial relations with the Log Cabin Republicans (a national gay and lesbian GOP organization). At the same time, however, he came under fire in his second term for ignoring the growing AIDS crisis and giving little attention to the issue of unequal pay for women.
Legacy President Ronald Reagan left office in January 1989 amid Democratic criticism—which has endured—that his conservative fiscal policies inflicted serious, longterm damage on the national economy by implementing major tax cuts (especially for the rich) at the same time that he was dramatically increasing military spending. During his presidency, the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was reduced from 70 percent to 50 percent and finally to 28 percent. According to the rationale known as Reaganomics—referred to as “supply-side economics” by proponents and “trickle-down economics” by opponents—a reduced tax burden for the richest Americans would enable them to invest more and thus stimulate the economy. Critics came to refer to the Reagan years as the “Second Gilded Age” for the windfall it brought the economic upper class. While the federal debt tripled to $2.7 trillion during his presidency, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest widened: the share of total national wealth owned by the nation’s richest 1 percent of families increased from 27 percent in 1981 to 39 percent in 1989. Although the final demise of the Soviet Union did not come until after Reagan left office, conservatives and others credit him with winning the Cold War. According to the conventional wisdom, Soviet communism finally collapsed because the Kremlin could not keep up economically with the American arms buildup during the Reagan years. It is argued, for example, that Reagan’s support for developing a missile shield known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (referred to as “Star Wars” by critics) forced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to give up the nuclear arms race. According to critics, however, Reagan’s foreign policy was reckless, putting the world at risk of nuclear war, and prolonged the Cold War due to the negative impact of his actions on Soviet hardliners. During his White House tenure, Reagan was mockingly called the “Teflon president” by his critics, who regarded him as like a nonstick cooking pan because he was never stuck with blame for failed adventures—such as putting U.S. Marines in harm’s way in Lebanon (where 241 were killed in a 1983 terrorist attack) and the IranContra affair (in which arms were secretly sold to Iran
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and the proceeds illegally diverted to anticommunist Contra forces in Nicaragua). So enduring was his political influence, however, that as recently as 2008—some two decades after he left office and four years after his death on June 5, 2005—Republican candidates vied for the claim of being in the conservative tradition of Ronald Reagan. Brian Calfano See also: Abortion; AIDS; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Gay Rights Movement; Goldwater, Barry; IranContra Affair; Religious Right; Republican Party; Strategic Defense Initiative; Supply-Side Economics; Tax Reform.
Further Reading Arquilla, John. The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. Collins, Robert M. Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Diggins, John Patrick. Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Skinner, Kiron K., Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds. Reagan: A Life in Letters. New York: Free Press, 2003. Troy, Gil. Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
R e c o r d Wa r n i n g L a b e l s Warning labels on recorded music albums, cassettes, and compact discs (CDs) with the words “Explicit Lyrics—Parental Advisory” were adopted in 1990 by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the industry’s leading trade group. The labeling system, instituted as a result of lobbying by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), was intended to restrict child access to music with “offensive” lyrics. The PMRC was founded in 1985 by the wives of several members of Congress and senior Reagan administration officials. Its spokespersons were Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator Al Gore (D-TN), and Susan Baker, the wife of then-Secretary of State James Baker. In December 1984, Tipper Gore had bought Prince’s album Purple Rain (1984) for her daughter and listened to the song “Darling Nikki,” which contained a description of masturbation. Finding such content inappropriate for children, Gore decided to mount a public campaign. The PMRC goal was to inform parents of offensive lyrics and to protect children from the dangers of “porn rock.” Along with the National Parent-Teachers Association, the PMRC lobbied the RIAA to develop guidelines similar to those that govern the movie industry. The RIAA was a fifty-five-member trade group whose constituent companies produced more than 90
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percent of the records sold in the United States. Although warnings had appeared on many albums prior to 1985, the wording varied and the design was often indistinct from the album cover. The PMRC hoped to institute uniform and visible labels that warned of explicit violence, the glorification of alcohol and illegal drugs, occultism, and explicit sexuality. The organization also sought to have all song lyrics printed on the record jackets of all albums so that parents could screen the content of their children’s records. The PMRC’s attempt to regulate the lyrical content of rock-and-roll albums was informed by a number of other discourses on youth sexuality, including the 1985–1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (AGCP), which viewed pornography as corrupting children and contributing to sexual violence against children. Borrowing language from the AGCP report, the PMRC’s media campaign asserted that “rock music has become pornographic” and harmful to minors. Following a publicity campaign about the dangers of “porn rock,” the PMRC used its political connections to secure a hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in September 1985. As Tipper Gore testified, one of the committee members at the hearing was her husband. At the hearing, the PMRC was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and popular musicians John Denver, Dee Snider, and Frank Zappa. The musicians asserted that labeling was a form of censorship. Zappa declared that the efforts of the PMRC were “the equivalent of treating dandruff with decapitation.” Although the Senate committee claimed that the hearing was strictly informational, the proceeding raised the possibility of future legislation, which placed pressure on the RIAA to adopt the labels voluntarily. At the same time, the RIAA was lobbying for passage of the Home Audio Recording Act, which would impose a tax on blank audiotape and home recording equipment, generating hundreds of millions of dollars for the RIAA members’ companies. Critics of record labeling believed that the RIAA strategically agreed to the PMRC’s demands because the husbands of four PMRC members sat on the Senate committee that heard arguments on the proposed tax legislation. On November 1, 1985, shortly after the first hearings on the Home Audio Recording Act, the RIAA and the PMRC announced that they had brokered a deal that would require labels with uniform wording, design, and placement to be affixed to all records with explicit lyrics. Regulation was to be conducted by the record companies. However, the labeling system was not implemented with regularity and uniformity by the companies until May 1990, when the RIAA publicly promised to enforce its own labeling system in order to stave off pending legislation in nineteen states that would have required even
more stringent warning labels. Major retail outlets such as Wal-Mart refuse to carry music with warning labels, thus pressuring artists to produce music with unobjectionable lyrics or to distribute “clean” versions of some albums. The PMRC’s campaign to institute record labeling was linked to other social struggles over issues such as sex education and pornography. Protecting the young from explicit sex also had implications for sexual expression among adults. Gill Frank See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Biafra, Jello; Censorship; Counterculture; Gore, Al; Heavy Metal Music; Pornography; Rap Music; Reagan, Ronald; Rock and Roll; Sexual Revolution; Wal-Mart; Zappa, Frank.
Further Reading Gore, Tipper. Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1987. Nuzum, Eric. Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Web site. www.riaa.com.
Red and Blue States The tinting of states as either “red” or “blue” during a presidential election has been the media’s way of indicating which of the two dominant parties won the corresponding Electoral College votes. Such color-coded map displays—designating red for Republican and blue for Democratic—distort the reality of how people voted because of the “winner take all” voting system. Used as shorthand in the culture wars, the two colors have come to symbolize binary opposites: red for conservative and blue for liberal, another oversimplification. The red-blue demarcation calls attention to the Electoral College system and how it gives greater weight to historically constituted geographies than to the actual population. Each state, no matter how small its population, is allotted a minimum of three votes in the Electoral College—based on the constitutionally guaranteed two seats for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives. Since there are a total of 435 seats in the House and each state is allowed at least one, the remaining seats are divided among the states in accordance with population. Thus, rural states have an advantage in that they are guaranteed a minimum number of Electoral College votes in a given presidential election; states with large urban populations divide the remainder among themselves. There has not previously been a consistent attribution of color to particular parties in the postwar era. Clearly, the use of red and blue are taken from the colors of the U.S. flag to signify the inherent nationalism in both of the parties. Television, print media, and the Internet
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have been the primary purveyors of reductive voting patterns that paint states in a broad swath of color rather than the micro-variation in the actual precinct results. In the highly contentious and legally contested election of 2000, the electoral map of red and blue states was consistent across major television networks, newspapers, and Internet sites for well over a month, a phenomenon that appears to have permanently pigmented the two major parties. Moreover, it contributed to a rancorous political divide within American society. The polar color schemata have loaded ideological resonances. In most postwar iconography, red was always associated with communism, revolution, insurgency, and passion. Blue was often associated with the status quo, the Union Army, and rationality, but sometimes depression. Red is traditionally used to note the left in European politics. Blue is sometimes associated with parties that are proponents of capitalism and conservativism, such as the British Conservative Party. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 began to dissipate the traditional color associations, but the polarization of political opinion and ad hominem style of broadcasting and print punditry since that time have certainly reinforced the association of red for Republican and blue for Democratic. The red and blue color coding has served as a proxy for generalizations about the beliefs, culture, and ideology of a state’s population. Red states are said to favor conservative, moral-driven policies and to oppose government regulation, social spending, public ownership, stem-cell research, abortion, and gay marriage. Blue states, in contrast, are said to support personal liberties, government intervention in the economy, public broadcasting, Social Security, scientific research, access to abortion, and gay rights. The generalizations are even extended to people and their consumption habits: blues are said to live in the “Porn Belt” and “debauched dystopias,” drive Volvos, and drink lattes; reds reside in the “Bible Belt” and the “sticks,” drive pickup trucks, tote guns, watch NASCAR, and drink Coca-Cola. Such characterizations are also seen in Web sites such as “Blue State of Mind” and “A Red Mind in a Blue State.” While the broad abstractions have been thoroughly debunked by social scientists and political analysts, pundits still rely on these easy stereotypes, and they continue to have resonance in public discourse. Tom Mertes See also: Abortion; Democratic Party; Election of 2000; Gay Rights Movement; Privatization; Republican Party; SameSex Marriage; Science Wars; Stem-Cell Research; Transgender Movement.
Further Reading Fiorina, Morris. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Longman, 2005.
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Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Gelman, Andrew. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
R e d f o r d , Ro b e r t The acclaimed film actor and director Robert Redford is renowned for his work in such popular hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), The Natural (1984), and Ordinary People (1980, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director), as well as for his role in championing independent filmmaking in America. Since the 1970s, Redford has also been prominent as an environmentalist and supporter of Native American rights. The son of a milkman (later accountant), Charles Robert “Bob” Redford, Jr., was born on August 18, 1937, in Santa Monica, California. In 1955, he attended the University of Colorado to play on its baseball team, but he lost his athletic scholarship because of drinking problems. In 1958, after working in the oil fields of Southern California and roaming Europe (studying art in France and Italy), Redford moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute of Art and Design. But it was while taking classes in set design at the America Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan that Redford discovered acting and began his professional career. After performing on Broadway—most notably in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (1963)—and various television series, he turned to film in the mid-1960s, achieving superstar status for his starring role (with Paul Newman) in Butch Cassidy. Not coincidentally, a number of Redford’s films have resonated in the culture wars for their recurring theme of mistrust of the federal government, or American institutions in general. Such works include The Candidate (1972), which portrays the compromises and disillusionment of an idealistic young candidate for the U.S. Senate; The Way We Were (1973), about the 1950s Red Scare in Hollywood; Three Days of the Condor (1975), about a sinister CIA conspiracy; All the President’s Men (1976), about the Washington Post investigative reporters who uncover the Watergate scandal (Redford plays Bob Woodward); and Quiz Show (1994, director), about the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s and 1960s. Redford has also played in or directed several pictures with a strong environmental theme, such as Jeremiah Johnson (1972), about a mountain man in the American West during the mid-1800s; The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), about a struggle between a poor farmer and rich developers; and A River Runs Through it (1992), about fly fishing and growing up in Montana. In the 1970s, while making his home outside Holly-
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Redneck
wood, Redford began buying property near Provo, Utah, in a gorge of the Wasatch Mountains. Proceeds from a ski resort he bought in the area—renamed Sundance Ski Resort, after his character in the 1969 film—helped support the nonprofit Sundance Institute he opened in 1981. As an alternative to the commercialism of Hollywood production, the Sundance Institute was founded as a resource center for aspiring filmmakers, screenwriters, and theater artists, providing financial and technical assistance for creative artistic development. Beginning in 1985, the institute began promoting independent films through the Sundance Film Festival, held annually in Park City, Utah. The Sundance Festival quickly became the largest independent film festival in the United States, and today it remains the world’s premier venue for showcasing new independent motion pictures. Redford’s interest in environmentalism began in 1970 when he successfully fought a proposal for an eight-lane highway near his home in Provo. In 1975, he opposed plans to construct a $3.5-billion coal-fired power plant in southern Utah—a position for which he was burned in effigy by 500 pro-growth state residents who referred to the actor as “the hypocritical obstructionist.” Later, as part of a coalition of activists, he supported the permanent preservation of the area as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Redford’s interest in ecological issues also led to his involvement in Native American rights. In his documentary Incident at Oglala (1992), Redford condemns the federal justice system for prosecuting Leonard Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and activist, for the 1975 murders of two FBI agents. Jacob W. Olmstead and Roger Chapman See also: American Indian Movement; Environmental Movement; Hollywood Ten; McCarthyism; Watergate; Woodward, Bob.
Further Reading Downing, David. Robert Redford. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Quirk, Lawrence J., and William Schoell. The Sundance Kid: An Unauthorized Biography of Robert Redford. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2006. Spada, James. The Films of Robert Redford. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1977.
Re d n e c k The term “redneck” as a description of rural, workingclass whites may date back to British usage but is now most commonly associated with poor whites in the American South. It is derived from the sunburned skin acquired from outdoor manual labor. Although “redneck” is often a pejorative, southern
populists and coal miners’ unions in the early twentieth century adopted the term as an emblem of class solidarity. Newspapers of the day used “redneck” interchangeably with “communist” and “Bolshevik” in describing violent or rebellious unionists in central Appalachia. The term took on more widespread popularity during the Depression, as southern poverty began to receive unprecedented national attention. In the civil rights era, “redneck” retained a class-based undertone but was used, most notably by Malcolm X, specifically to describe white racists. The conflation of racial politics and white class identity was heightened in the late 1960s, when opponents of integration made racially charged appeals to working-class whites in both the South and the North, as George C. Wallace did during his presidential campaigns. Amid the subsequent emergence of identity politics, whites readopted the term for themselves to describe a conservative, anti-intellectual ideal. As selfapplication of the word increased in popularity, “redneck” took on a greater cultural significance at the expense of racial, political, and economic connotations. The word has been frequently used in country music lyrics since the 1970s to portray a masculine working-class counterculture. Because of its discursive malleability, “redneck” has remained a commonly used word on both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives have used the term positively to convey an impression of white populism and negatively to dissociate the Republican Party from rightwing fringe groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Liberals have used the term to disparage opponents, particularly those from “red states,” regarding issues such as gun control, abortion rights, and public displays of the Confederate flag. And many people use the term “redneck” for whites who fail to conform to bourgeois standards of living. Some commentators condemn the use of “redneck” because it promotes class stratification. They argue that the word’s dual role as a cultural and economic signifier justifies depictions of poverty as a lifestyle choice. Jim Goad’s polemic The Redneck Manifesto (1997) attempted to reestablish “redneck” within a context of radical class consciousness among poor whites, and to reprimand urban liberals for ignoring economic inequality among white Americans. T.R.C. Hutton See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Civil Rights Movement; Confederate Flag; Country Music; Gun Control; Labor Unions; Malcolm X; Race; Red and Blue States; Republican Party; Wallace, George.
Further Reading Boney, F.N. “The Redneck.” Georgia Review 25:3 (1971): 333–42. Goad, Jim. The Redneck Manifesto. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Reed , Ralph
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Huber, Patrick J. “Redneck: A Short Note from American Labor History.” American Speech 69:1 (1994): 106–10. ———. “A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of Southern White Masculine Identity.” Southern Cultures 1:2 (1995): 145–66. Jarosz, Lucy, and Victoria Lawson. “‘Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks’: Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West.” Antipode 34:1 (2002): 8–27.
Re e d , R a l p h Ralph Reed, a conservative political activist and leader of the Religious Right during the 1990s, came to prominence when Pat Robertson named him as the first executive director of the Christian Coalition in 1989. Reed’s work at that fundamental Christian advocacy group heralded a new era of political sophistication for evangelicals in America, translating their concerns into a political platform. Allegations of financial impropriety ultimately tarnished Reed’s reputation among the evangelical faithful, however, and he left the Coalition in 1997 to start a political consulting firm and otherwise promote a right-wing fundamentalist agenda—only to become embroiled in another financial scandal. The son of a U.S. Navy surgeon, Ralph Eugene Reed, Jr., was born on June 24, 1961, in Portsmouth, Virginia. Raised a Methodist, he became an evangelical Christian while attending the University of Georgia (BA, history, 1985). As an undergraduate, Reed devoted much of his time to GOP causes, serving as executive director of the College Republican National Committee (1982–1984) and as president of the National College Republicans (1983). Working to align Republican and evangelical concerns, he was mentored by several prominent GOP strategists, namely Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff. Reed completed his education at Emory University (PhD, U.S. history, 1991). During his tenure at the Christian Coalition, based in Chesapeake, Virginia, Reed focused on grassroots organizing by establishing local and state affiliates to help Christian activists develop a political capacity. He circulated voter guides at conservative churches to show where the candidates stood on abortion, gay rights, funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, school prayer, and school vouchers, with the goal of increasing votes for Republicans. He also encouraged Christians to run for local office and developed workshops to train Christians for advocacy work. At the 1996 Republican National Convention, Reed successfully thwarted an attempt by some delegates to remove from the party’s platform a position supporting a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Reed resigned from the Christian Coalition in April 1997, after the group’s chief financial officer, Judy Liebert, informed federal prosecutors that he had allowed a close friend and contractor to over-bill the coalition. At the same time, the coalition was under investigation by
Named executive director of the Christian Coalition at age twenty-eight, Ralph Reed played a key role in translating evangelical principles into a viable political agenda. He left the organization over allegations of financial impropriety in 1997 and launched a consulting firm. (AP Images/Dennis Cook)
the Federal Election Commission for alleged violations of federal campaign law in distributing voter guides and directly supporting Republican campaigns, including the reelection of Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Oliver North’s U.S. Senate bid in Virginia. Upon leaving the Christian Coalition, Reed formed Century Strategies, an Atlanta-based lobbying firm with a Republican clientele. He also served as chairman of the Georgia Republican Party (2001–2003) and headed the Southeast regional reelection campaign for President George W. Bush (2003–2004). In 2005, Reed once again became ensnared in scandal, this time involving a former mentor, super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who bilked Indian tribal clients of $80 million. Federal investigators found evidence that Abramoff paid Reed to organize evangelical opposition to a proposed Indian casino that a rival tribal casino (and client of Abramoff’s) regarded as a threat. Reed claims to have been unaware that his work was helping an existing gambling facility. Many evangelicals expressed disappointment in Reed. Marvin Olasky, editor of the evangelical World magazine, wrote that Reed’s involvement in the Abramoff affair repudiated the moral principles Reed had fought for at the Christian Coalition. Political commentators believe that his involvement in the scandal led to his defeat in the 2006 Republican primary for lieutenant governor of Georgia. Carolyn Gallaher See also: Abortion; Campaign Finance Reform; Christian Coalition; Gingrich, Newt; Indian Casinos; National Endowment for the Arts; Norquist, Grover; North, Oliver; Religious Right; Republican Party; Robertson, Pat; School Prayer; School Vouchers.
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Further Reading Gerson, Michael J. “Christian Coalition in Unprecedented Crisis.” U.S. News & World Report, February 16, 1998. Reed, Ralph. Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics. New York: Free Press, 1996. ———. Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics. Dallas, TX: World, 1994.
Re h n q u i s t , W i l l i a m H . As an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1972–1986) and as the sixteenth chief justice of the United States (1986–2003), William H. Rehnquist was associated with some of the most conservative rulings of that body and left the high court a more conservative judicial body than the one he had joined more than three decades before. Rehnquist presided over the Supreme Court in two of the most contentious proceedings in America’s culture wars—the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999 and the case of Bush v. Gore (2000), which effectively decided a presidential election. Born William Hubbs Rehnquist on October 1, 1924, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he attended Kenyon College (1942) before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. Upon returning home, he attended Stanford University on the GI Bill, earning degrees in political science (BA, 1947; MA, 1948). After earning another master’s degree, in government, at Harvard University (1949), Rehnquist returned to Stanford to complete his education in law (LLB, 1952). Graduating as class valedictorian, he was offered a prestigious clerkship for U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson (1952–1953), during which time the court heard initial arguments in the landmark school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist wrote a memorandum to Jackson in which he argued that the court should defer to the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson and allow states to exclude blacks from public schools under the “separate but equal” principle. Rehnquist later claimed that he had written the memo on behalf of Justice Jackson, but legal experts have suggested that the memo represented Rehnquist’s own view. After working in private practice in Arizona and becoming active in Republican politics, Rehnquist moved to Washington, D.C., in 1969 to service as assistant attorney general in the Richard Nixon administration. Upon the retirement of Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan in 1971, Nixon nominated Rehnquist to the high court. Senate Democrats, regarding him as too conservative, criticized the nominee for his Brown memo nearly twenty years earlier and noted other questionable incidents from Rehnquist’s past. Among these was a deed to his summer home that prohibited the sale or lease of the house to any Jewish person, and a deed to his Phoe-
nix home in the 1960s that barred nonwhites from the property. Although some Democrats resisted the nomination, many recognized that Rehnquist’s intelligence and experience would make him a more than capable justice. Republicans saw him as a member who might shift the high court in a more conservative direction. The Senate confirmed Rehnquist’s appointment by a vote of 68–26, and he took his seat in January 1972. It soon became clear that Justice Rehnquist would be as conservative as Nixon had hoped. He was a staunch believer in the principle of federalism, trusting that local governments would be more likely than the federal government to reflect their constituents’ views. Thus, whenever possible, Rehnquist stressed the importance of states’ rights and interpreted the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment more narrowly than the liberal justices who preceded him. in his early years on the bench, Rehnquist became the justice with the most sole dissents on the (Warren) Burger Court; he was also one of two justices to dissent in the historic case of Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion in America. As chief justice—appointed by President Ronald Reagan to replace the retiring Warren Burger in 1986—Rehnquist, along with fellow Republican appointees, indeed shifted the Supreme court rightward. The first notable conservative ruling came during Rehn quist’s first term as chief justice in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987). In a 5–4 decision, the court refused to overturn the death sentence of Warren McCleskey, a black man, even though solid statistical evidence showed that the race of McCleskey’s murder victim likely was an important factor in handing down the death penalty. Then in Wards Cove Packing v. Antonio (1989), the justices ruled that a company did not discriminate against minorities even though strong statistical discrepancies existed regarding the races of employees and the positions they held. And in Shaw v. Reno (1993), the high court declared that North Carolina could not create a district that would increase the state’s percentage of minority representation, even though U.S. attorney general William Barr had ordered the state to adopt just such a measure. All of these rulings marked a departure from the Supreme Court’s previous broad definition of racial discrimination. Nearly a year after it was announced that he was suffering from thyroid cancer, William Rehnquist died on September 3, 2005, at age eighty. He was the first Supreme Court justice to die in office since Robert Jackson, for whom he had clerked, in 1954. In the interim, in large measure due to Rehnquist’s influence, the Court little resembled the liberal (Earl) Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s, nor even the more moderate Burger Court of the 1970s and 1980s. Rehnquist’s tenure was a boon to conservatives, who had grown tired of what they perceived as the Supreme Court’s “judicial activism.” They regarded Rehnquist as
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a chief justice who helped reduce the influence of what they considered unnecessary or unjust programs such as affirmative action. They also applauded his concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore (2000), which ensured that conservative Republican George W. Bush would win election to the White House over his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore. Liberals, on the other hand, criticized Rehnquist not only for his consistent positions on curbing defendant rights (in the name of law and order) and against civil rights and labor, but also for his failure to build a legislative consensus beyond his own conservative bloc. The Rehnquist Court was known for an unusual number of 5–4 and 6–3 verdicts, resulting in a high number of dissenting arguments that thereby weakend the strength of court precedents. Liberals further accused the Rehnquist Court of engaging in right-wing “judicial activism,” as it declared more federal laws unconstitutional per year than any other judiciary in American history. Aaron Safane See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Bush Family; Capital Punishment; Civil Rights Movement; Election of 2000; Gore, Al; Judicial Wars; Kennedy Family; Warren, Earl.
Further Reading Davis, Sue. “Federalism and Property Rights: An Examination of Justice Rehnquist’s Legal Positivism.” Western Political Quarterly 39:2 (1986): 250–64. Keck, Thomas M. The Most Activist Supreme Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Kennedy, Randall L. “McCleskey v. Kemp: Race, Capital Punishment, and the Supreme Court.” Harvard Law Review 110:7 (1988): 1622–61. Lawson, Steven F. Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
Re l a t i v i s m , M o r a l Moral relativism encompasses the view that there is no single true morality and that, instead, ethical norms depend on the society to which a person happens to belong. Therefore, according to the relativist, there is no absolute morality that applies to all people everywhere. The term “moral relativism” is employed with a wide range of meanings in nonacademic contexts, where it is used as everything from a synonym for tolerance to a synonym for immorality. Despite this range of uses, the term has taken on considerable symbolic importance. Many regard America’s culture wars as a battle between moral absolutists and moral relativists.
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Conservative commentators occasionally accuse others of moral relativism or moral laxity if someone’s wrongdoing seems to be punished too lightly. Television commentator Bill O’Reilly, for example, has argued that moral relativism is the world’s greatest danger. Sometimes moral relativism is depicted as the inevitable result of the secularization of ethics, and colleges are frequently identified as intellectual sources of moral relativism, although many conservatives now see it as pervasive in American culture. According to Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), virtually all college students believe that truth is relative. William J. Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (2002) argues that moral relativism has become today’s conventional wisdom. The term is often used to describe and criticize the 1960s counterculture and its effects. It was widely used in this way during the debates surrounding the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998–1999. For some of his critics, Clinton was a symbol of moral relativism. Journalist Joe Klein, for example, observed that the first of the Baby Boom generation’s “alleged sins” is “moral relativism.” The term also received attention when, shortly before he was elected pope in 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger claimed that the world was moving toward “a dictatorship of relativism.” The term “cultural relativism” is sometimes used synonymously with “moral relativism,” but it more specifically expresses the more modest descriptive claim that moral beliefs vary from culture to culture. The term “moral subjectivism” refers to the view that moral truth is relative to the individual. Moral relativism tends to be identified as a form of moral skepticism and is often mistakenly identified with moral pluralism. Daniel Callcut See also: Bennett, William J.; Catholic Church; Clinton, Bill; Clinton Impeachment; Counterculture; Fundamentalism, Religious; O’Reilly, Bill; Postmodernism; Secular Humanism; September 11.
Further Reading Callcut, Daniel. “The Value of Teaching Moral Skepticism.” Teaching Philosophy 29:3 (2006): 223–35. Klein, Joe. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Moser, Paul K., and Thomas L. Carson. Moral Relativism: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Shafer-Landau, Russ. Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Re l i g i o u s F u n d a m e n t a l i s m See Fundamentalism, Religious
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Re l i g i o u s R i g h t By the late 1970s, three important conservative constituencies or pressure groups had emerged within the Republican Party: fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, and religious conservatives—the last widely known as the Religious Right. A counter to the ecumenical Christian National Council of Churches and the liberal Protestant and Catholic clergy, the Religious Right represents a loose coalition of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; the movement has been dominated, however, by conservative Protestants (chiefly “born-again Christians”). In the close presidential elections of both 2000 and 2004, the Religious Right has been credited with providing the margin of victory to Republican George W. Bush. Like Ronald Reagan before him, Bush had openly courted religious conservatives. Leaders of the Religious Right present themselves as patriotic Americans who champion the traditional values that made the nation great. Critics warn that the Religious Right is a threat to individual liberty and cultural diversity as it seeks to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. Some opponents charge that the chief aim of the Religious Right is to establish a theocracy. Within Christian circles, there are those who criticize the Religious Right for fostering the view that there is only one divinely approved position on political and social issues. Religious critics of the Religious Right argue further that the work of churches is to win people through evangelism and charity, not divide them by engaging in political activities. The Religious Right began to form in the context of the Cold War, which took on religious dimensions as American politicians emphasized the inherent atheism of communism. After the surprise Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957, which marked the beginning of the U.S.-Soviet space race, the American government began emphasizing science in school curricula, which rankled Christian fundamentalists who disagreed with the theory of evolution, including the concept of an “old earth,” and were philosophically opposed to federal interference in local classrooms. In the 1960s, religious conservatives were also alarmed by the burgeoning youth counterculture, with its loose sexual mores, indulgence in drugs, student protests, and disdain for authority. Likewise, religious conservatives were generally hostile toward the civil rights movement (and the mixing of races), the new wave of feminism (and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment), and the fledgling gay rights movement. U.S. Supreme Court rulings that banned school prayer (Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington School District v. Kemp in 1963) and legalized abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), combined with the decision of the Internal Revenue Service to strip private schools of their tax-exempt status if they practiced racial discrimination (1970) and President Jimmy Carter’s decision to withdraw tax exemptions from
private schools that were set up to avoid court-ordered public school desegregation (1978), further contributed to the outrage of religious conservatives. Notable figures in the Religious Right since the 1970s have included the following: • Robert J. Billings, a graduate of Bob Jones University, founder of the National Christian Action Coalition (1978), a critic of government interference in religious schools, an administrator in the Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, and a founding organizer of the Moral Majority; • James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family (1977), a participant in the White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter (1980), and a panel member of the Commission on Pornography under President Reagan (1986); • Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority (1979); • Robert Grant, a graduate of Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary; a founder of the American Christian Cause (1975), Christian Voice (1978), and the American Freedom Coalition (1987); and the publisher and distributor of “moral-issues report cards” on elected officials; • Bob Jones, Sr., founder of Bob Jones University (1926); • Beverly LaHaye, wife of Tim LaHaye, a Baptist and founder of Concerned Women for America (1979), which rallied to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment; • Tim LaHaye, a Baptist minister and author of the antisecularist work The Battle for the Mind (1980), a co-founder of Christian Heritage College in San Diego (1970), founder of Californians for Biblical Morality (1980) and the American Coalition for Traditional Values (1983), and a prominent Reagan supporter; • Clarence E. Manion, a Roman Catholic, conservative radio commentator (Manion Forum of the Air, 1950s– 1960s), dean of the college of law at Notre Dame University, a founding member of the John Birch Society, and the inspirer and publisher of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative (1960); • Edward A. McAteer, a Memphis-based marketing specialist and active Baptist, founder of the Religious Roundtable (1979) who influenced the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention (1979) and backed the election of Reagan; • Ralph Reed, executive secretary of the Christian Coalition (1989–1997), publisher, distributor of “Christian” voter guides, and conservative political strategist; • Pat Robertson, Baptist-turned-charismatic evangelical; founder of the Virginia-based Christian
Reparation s, Japanese Inter nment
Broadcasting Network (1960), Regent University (1977), and the Christian Coalition (1989); • James Robison, a Baptist and founder of the Texasbased James Robison Evangelistic Association (1965); televangelist preacher; an organizer of the Religious Roundtable; and a vocal opponent of abortion, gay rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and secular humanism; • Francis A. Schaeffer, a Presbyterian recognized as the father of modern fundamentalism, author of the antisecular A Christian Manifesto (1981), and an advocate of Christian activism to stop abortion; • Robert H.W. Welch, Jr., founding president of the John Birch Society (1958), a disseminator of communist conspiracy theory, and an advocate of limited government; • Paul Weyrich, a Roman Catholic and chief organizer of the Religious Right, headed the Washington, D.C.–based Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (1974), coined the term “moral majority,” and conceived the organization that later bore that name; • Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister; monitor of television programming for moral content; founder of the National Federation for Decency (1977), later renamed the American family Association; and close associate of Jerry Falwell. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Religion; Church and State; Dobson, James; Falwell, Jerry; Focus on the Family; John Birch Society; LaHaye, Tim, and Beverly LaHaye; Moral Majority; Reed, Ralph; Republican Party; Robertson, Pat; Schaeffer, Francis; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Balmer, Randall. Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Diamond, Sara. Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Martin, William. With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1996. Viguerie, Richard A. The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead. Falls Church, VA: Viguerie, 1981. Wallis, Jim. Who Speaks for God? An Alternative to the Religious Right—A New Politics of Compassion, Community, and Civility. New York: Delacorte Press, 1996.
Re p a r a t i o n s , J a p a n e s e Inter nment In early 1942, shortly after America entered World War II, the U.S. government undertook a massive pro-
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gram of relocation and internment of people of Japanese ancestry—including U.S. citizens (about 60 percent of the total) as well as resident aliens. This coincided with a smaller effort affecting German and Italian resident aliens. During the postwar period, with the success of the civil rights movement, the emergence of a new multicultural perspective, and the clarity of retrospection, the injustice of Japanese internment and the issue of reparations became a matter of national debate. The relocation program banned people of Japanese ancestry from residence in 137 areas on the West Coast and the southwestern border of the United States. In accordance with Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942, approximately 5,000 Japanese were relocated outside the prohibited areas, and another 120,000 men, women, and children were interned in one of ten relocation centers run by the War Relocation Authority; the centers were not closed until June 1946. Although the ostensible purpose of the internment was to protect the United States from sabotage or other disloyal acts in support of Japan’s war effort, no effort was made to determine whether any individual or organization in fact posed such a threat; people of Japanese heritage were targeted as a group. A presidential commission established by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 to study the matter reported to Congress that the internment was “motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Although some Americans at the time opposed internment, the vast majority accepted this usurpation of the civil liberties of Japanese Americans. And in Korematsu v. United States (1944), the U.S. Supreme Court found the internment constitutional—a judgment that has never been reversed. After the war, the U.S. government maintained a list of potential subversives (although not based on ethnicity) and a detention plan in case of a national emergency. When forced to relocate, many Japanese Americans lost not only their liberty but also their homes, businesses, and other property. In the aftermath, some initial restitution was paid for actual property losses, but it was not until passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that reparations were made to all those who had been interned or relocated. Beginning in 1990, each surviving internee was given a $20,000 cash payment, along with a letter of apology from the government. The official apology, signed by President George H.W. Bush, read in part: “We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.” Although many Americans have looked back on the internment with a sense of shame and regret, the 1988 reparations legislation met with some resistance on the
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part of World War II veterans and such organizations as the American Legion. And in a conservative backlash after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, some suggested that the Japanese internment provided a model for detaining suspects in America’s “war on terror.” Larry W. DeWitt See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Civil Rights Movement; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Revisionist History; September 11; Victimhood.
Further Reading Daniels, Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Hayashi, Brian Masaru. Democratizing the Enemy: The JapaneseAmerican Internment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Malkin, Michelle. In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Re p u b l i c a n P a r t y The Republican Party, founded in 1854 in reaction to the expansion of slavery, has maintained identifiable cultural positions throughout its history, and since the 1960s has increasingly been identified as the political home of conservatism. Soon after its inception, the party dominated the North, a region that was home to two-thirds of the nation’s population. This enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to capture the presidency in 1860 without any southern electoral votes. Lincoln’s Civil War legacy maintained a Republican majority in the North, where the organization gained the nickname “Grand Old Party” (GOP). But the “party of Lincoln” was unable to make inroads into the culturally conservative white South until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1860s and 1870s, the GOP was identified with racial liberalism. But after the end of Reconstruction, the massive immigration of non-Protestants, and the rise of industrial capitalism, the party shifted to the right. Thereafter, Republicans received support mainly from conservative groups: native-born Protestants (especially evangelicals); people of British, German, and Scandinavian ancestry; business; and the upper socioeconomic classes. To please these constituencies, the GOP promoted policies prohibiting alcohol, restricting immigration, suppressing inflation, and protecting domestic industry through tariffs. Although the party was split between conservatives and progressives on some economic and
foreign policies, it maintained a nationwide electoral majority until the Great Depression.
1930s to 1960s From the 1930s through the 1960s the Depression’s legacy caused most Americans to reject the GOP’s conservative economic policies in favor of the Democrats’ New Deal programs, as even President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, conceded in the 1950s. Consequently, the GOP increasingly focused on cultural conservatism to attract white southerners, Catholics, and other conservatives away from the Democratic Party. Early in the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and other Republicans achieved some success by attacking Democrats’ loyalty. When Democrats professed staunch patriotism during this period, Republicans sought other wedge issues. By 1960, race had become a divisive issue between liberals and conservatives, but it was not yet a partisan concern. In 1964–1965, however, the national Democratic Party under President Lyndon B. Johnson supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. This began a chain reaction causing many cultural conservatives to abandon the Democratic fold. During the 1960s, many Republicans embraced cultural conservatism to win over conservative Democrats. In the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater’s (RAZ) opposition to the Civil Rights Act helped him win five southern states. In addition, the tumultuous cultural events of the 1960s—the Black Power movement, urban rioting, rising crime, the counterculture, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the Vietnam War protests— combined with a strong economy to shift voters’ concerns to cultural issues. In 1968, GOP candidate Richard M. Nixon successfully pursued a culturally conservative “southern strategy,” denying the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, any southern electoral votes except in Texas. Since the Nixon era, Republicans have increasingly identified their party as the political home of cultural conservatism. As president, Nixon eschewed openly racial statements to avoid offending moderates, but he won over culturally conservative Democrats by using code words that let them know he was on their side. For example, he promoted “traditional values” and “law and order,” launched a “war on drugs,” and denounced abortion rights, affirmative action, Vietnam antiwar protestors, “forced busing” to integrate public schools, and “activist judges” who ordered desegregation and protected abortion and defendants’ rights. Nixon’s success in shifting the country rightward was mixed, mainly because Democrats controlled Congress. He did effect some culturally conservative changes: pushing through crime and drug laws, nominating conservatives to the courts, and expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Still, many conservatives mistrusted Nixon
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because he was not a right-wing ideologue; he was a calculating politician. Consequently, much of his cultural conservatism was merely rhetorical, and he followed a generally moderate line in economic and foreign policy. Moreover, the Watergate scandal undermined Republicans’ identification with “traditional morality.” Nevertheless, Nixon’s legacy bolstered conservative influence in the GOP. On the one hand, he served as a rallying point for conservatives who admired him and hated the liberals who despised him. On the other hand, right-wing ideologues were pleased that the disgrace of Nixon, whom they viewed as a closet moderate, opened the way for them to dominate the GOP.
1970s to 1980s Since the 1930s, conservative intellectuals, politicians, and strategists had been working to take over the GOP. By the late 1970s, the backlash to the Democrats’ liberal cultural, economic, and foreign policies had boosted the conservative movement. For example, the populist New Right reinforced cultural conservatism at the grassroots level, especially among white southerners and evangelical Protestants. At the same time, Republican operatives disseminated right-wing ideas to the rank and file through targeted mailing, fundraising appeals, and television commercials. By 1980, conservatives had united behind Republican Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the most culturally conservative president since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s. He emphasized religion, supported organized prayer in public schools, and wooed conservative televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Reagan imbued his hawkish nationalistic foreign policy with religious imagery, peppering his speeches with “God Bless America” and strongly denouncing the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” He also pleased cultural conservatives by professing “family values”; venerating the military; increasing the defense budget; and opposing abortion, affirmative action, busing, crime, drugs, the environmental movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and pornography. Because of Democratic opposition and his own focus on economic issues, however, Reagan managed just a few culturally conservative results: appointing conservatives to the judiciary, escalating the “war on drugs,” and cutting back affirmative action programs. Nevertheless, the Reagan era increased partisan polarization in the culture wars, and Republicans became increasingly identified with conservatism. Reagan’s successor, Republican George H.W. Bush, also espoused culturally conservative rhetoric. In his 1988 campaign, Bush denounced his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, for supporting abortion rights, opposing the outlawing of flag desecration, and allowing prisoner furloughs as Massachusetts governor. Bush’s campaign connected the latter issue with race through an ad showing Willie Horton, an African-American convict
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who had raped a white woman while on furlough. As president, however, Bush faced a Democratic majority in Congress and cultural moderates in his own party, and he achieved little of substance culturally besides appointing conservative judges. He also presided over the U.S. victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
1990s to 2000s Despite Republicans’ inability to enact significant culturally conservative laws, social conservatives remained loyal. They considered Democrats irredeemably liberal, and the GOP aggressively courted them. The lack of tangible results energized cultural conservatives to fight harder within the GOP against moderates and libertarian conservatives, who argued that government should not intervene in cultural matters. Despite their differences, Republicans and the conservative movement united against Democrats, a stance that hardened after Bill Clinton captured the presidency in 1992. Cultural conservatives disliked Clinton’s support for abortion rights, feminism, affirmative action, and allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military. The GOP focused its attacks on the president’s “immoral character,” using the federal government to investigate his finances, womanizing, lying, and “criminal behavior.” By the mid-1990s, the Republicans had achieved an electoral majority in the South, and nationwide, by applying conservative rhetoric and attacks on Clinton’s character. GOP congressional candidates united behind Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” (1994), which proposed a number of culturally conservative policies, although it avoided divisive issues such as abortion. In the 1994 elections, the Christian Coalition and other rightwing groups helped the GOP capture Congress. Once in power, however, Republicans failed to enact many culturally conservative laws. Moreover, Clinton undercut them by supporting popular conservative measures. Additionally, former wedge issues like affirmative action, busing, crime, and immigration lessened in political salience during the 1990s economic boom. Consequently, Republicans rallied cultural conservatives by maintaining their attacks on Clinton, even impeaching him in 1998. The bitterness of the Clinton era widened the gap between the major parties in the culture wars. Partisan polarization increased during the presidency of George W. Bush. In the 2000 campaign, Republicans united behind Bush, a staunch conservative whose evangelical religious beliefs shaped his worldview. In order to win, however, Bush needed the support of moderate independents, so he presented himself as a “compassionate conservative” and “a uniter, not a divider.” Nevertheless, polls showed that he owed his success to conservatives, who supported him by an 81–17 margin. Bush’s victory in the disputed 2000 election intensified the culture wars because it was ultimately decided by a Supreme Court
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dominated by Republican appointees. As president, Bush gave rhetorical support to cultural issues but focused on economic ones, especially tax cuts. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, Republicans inflamed nationalistic feelings to gain support for the Iraq War (beginning in 2003), but the ongoing difficulties there once again polarized the nation, as did the contentious 2004 election, which Bush won narrowly. By the end of the Bush era, the Republican Party was a conservative bastion in the culture wars. George Rising See also: Bush Family; Cheney Family; Christian Coalition; Civil Rights Movement; Compassionate Conservatism; Contract with America; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Goldwater, Barry; Moral Majority; Neoconservatism; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; September 11; Vietnam War; Watergate.
Further Reading Barone, Michael. Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Free Press, 1990. Berman, William C. America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Edsall, Thomas Byrne, and Mary D. Edsall. Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Gerring, John. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mayer, George H. The Republican Party, 1854–1966. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Schaller, Michael, and George Rising. The Republican Ascendancy: American Politics, 1968–2001. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2002.
R ev i s i o n i s t H i s t o r y Broadly defined, revisionist history refers to efforts by scholars to revise the shared, conventional understanding of the past based on the examination or reexamination of historical evidence. In the context of the culture wars, revisionist history has taken on a pejorative connotation. Referred to in the negative sense, historical revisionism is any attempt to revise historical understanding through political and ideological dishonesty. Historians who do work labeled “revisionist” are accused of pursuing scholarship driven by ideological goals—that is, begin with a thesis and then manipulate or manufacture evidence to support it.
American historians such as Howard Zinn, Eric Foner, and Ronald Takaki, among others perceived as “liberal” or “leftist,” have been derided by critics and praised by supporters as “revisionists.” Yet how one applies the term, in either its negative or its positive sense, depends largely on one’s political context. Typically, critics on the right disparage any type of history labeled revisionist. Their opposition is generally based on an ideological position according to which America’s “traditional history”—a collection of heroic narratives— represents the true, objective, usable past. The concept of a single shared past is politically useful to the right when traditionalism comes under attack, in reality or in perception, by those who seek to dishonor its inherent values. Said to be at stake in this debate is a sense of national identity that depends on particular historical narratives instilled in citizens. In 1994, for example, the conservative writer Lynn Cheney (wife of Dick Cheney, the future vice president) criticized the proposed National History Standards for public education in America for presenting a “grim and gloomy” portrayal of the nation’s history. The proposed standards, which addressed certain areas of U.S. history that had been commonly neglected, became the subject of national debate, prompted in part by Cheney’s preemptive editorial strike. In an article titled “The End of History,” Cheney maintained that a war for America’s heritage was being waged. Right-wing intellectuals and pundits such as Cheney, televangelist Pat Robertson, and others characterized their opponents as tenured radicals and liberals, entranced with moral relativism, postmodern philosophy, and a “politically correct” agenda—eliciting countercharges of intolerance and elitism. In the culture wars, proponents of conservatism have repeatedly framed themselves as defenders of the past as it “truly happened.” Among historians who have been criticized as revisionists, conversely, the view of history as a single, shared, agreed-upon past is dismissed as a ridiculous construct. Historians such as Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States (1980), a text frequently assailed by critics on the right, argue that the work of any historian is necessarily interpretive. All historical evidence, according to Zinn and like-minded others, must be selected and interpreted in order to make sense of the past. This viewpoint emphasizes that history is always constructed. Even according to revisionists, however, arguing that history is interpretive does not negate the historian’s commitment to accuracy, rigorous documentation and verification, and a balanced reconstruction of events. Historical education and responsible citizenship, it is said, require open inquiry, healthy skepticism, and open-mindedness to new perspectives. Zinn, for example, approaches history from the perspective of minorities and the working class rather than solely the heroic and elite figures that
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have been typically portrayed in traditional accounts. Rather than an example of history being “rewritten,” as his critics charge, Zinn maintains that his work offers a renewed clarity through the exploration of perspectives that have been routinely marginalized. Likewise, much of the work done in recent years that has been derided as “revisionist” involves feminist or ethnic histories. Even as critics of these perspectives charge that popular history is being “hijacked,” revisionists contend that they are responding to oversights in the historical record. As Ronald Takaki has noted, history can be seen as a mirror, and, in the case of socially marginalized populations, it is necessary to hold up a different mirror to reflect these silenced stories. Revisionist historians contend that some stories have been systematically left out of mainstream historical accounts, ironically arguing that traditionalists have essentially been engaging in revisionist history of their own. For example, traditional accounts of the lives of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison focus solely on their positive attributes and great accomplishments, whereas more complete accounts would examine their relationship to slavery, colloquial provincial interests, political ambitions, and personal rivalries. The nation’s founders, in short, have been characterized as icons of democracy, while in reality they were individuals with human frailties, complex motivations, and even contradictory behavior. Conservative advocates sometimes argue that the traditional and prevailing view of the founders as heroes helps engender civic pride and responsibility among the people. While proponents of traditionalism argue that the perpetuation of these virtues is vital to national identity and pride, revisionists argue that the interests of contemporary citizens themselves should be reflected in the study of history. Furthermore, they argue, if historians do not continue to reanalyze the past, the study of history will become stagnant, discouraging new scholarship and intellectual curiosity. Zinn and his contemporaries argue that history should constantly reexamine the past and thereby improve understanding of the present. Despite such serious academic disagreements, “revisionism” in the context of the culture wars generally remains a dirty word. Arguments on the right tend to paint the controversy as one of dishonest, agenda-driven ideologues who manipulate the past to promote their own views. By way of example, one may point to Holocaust deniers, who seek legitimacy by referring to themselves as “revisionists” while shamelessly manipulating the facts in pursuit of an anti-Semitic agenda. Examples of extreme dishonesty aside, understanding the necessity of revisionism in the historical method is key to understanding the real stakes in the controversy. Neil Shepard
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See also: Academic Freedom; American Exceptionalism; Cheney Family; Columbus Day; Deconstructionism; Enola Gay Exhibit; Founding Fathers; Great Books; Holocaust; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Postmodernism; Williams, William Appleman; Zinn, Howard.
Further Reading Nash, Gary B., Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn. History on Trial: The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
R ight to Counsel In the American criminal justice system, the right to counsel means that a person suspected or formally accused of committing a crime must be offered the assistance of a licensed attorney. The right to counsel protects the accused from the complexities of the criminal justice process and the vast legal resources possessed by the state. Although in theory this right is universally supported, the question of how to practically apply it has led to contentious debate, highlighting the tension between the protection of civil liberties and the enforcement of law and order. Right to counsel protections stem from language in the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Recognized by the Supreme Court in Powell v. Alabama (1932) as one of the chief expressions of the principle of due process, the right to counsel protections apply to criminal suspects and defendants in federal and state jurisdictions. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, the constitutional right to counsel applies in any instance where a person is subject to questioning by police while under the physical control of law enforcement officials (Escobedo v. Illinois, 1964; Miranda v. Arizona, 1966), in a police line-up (U.S. v. Wade, 1967), at trial (Johnson v. Zerbst, 1938; Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963; Argersinger v. Hamlin, 1972), or in the appeals process (Douglas v. California, 1963). Current doctrine holds that the right to legal counsel begins at the time of arrest and police questioning and extends to all stages of the criminal justice process after prosecutors have made a formal accusation against the arrestee. Although the right to counsel is considered one of the Constitution’s most fundamental liberties, questions about its ultimate reach are controversial. Many court observers argue that right to counsel protections suffered noticeably at the hands of conservative justices during the Rehnquist Court (1986–2005). Liberals are especially critical of decisions that have made it more difficult for defendants to claim on appeal that their convictions re-
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sulted from the ineffectiveness of counsel at trial. Liberals argue that because the poorest defendants are typically represented by public defenders or court-appointed attorneys burdened with heavy or even overwhelming caseloads, the spirit of the right to counsel is violated at trial and again when avenues of appeal are blocked. Several cases examining Sixth Amendment issues pertaining to the right to counsel—e.g., Texas v. Cobb (2001) and Mickens v. Taylor (2002)—produced narrowly divided decisions and revealed strong ideological tensions on the Court that have shaped the outcome in interpreting defendants’ rights. Some criminologists suggest that the debate on the right to counsel reflects the opposing “crime control theologies” held by liberals and conservatives. According to this argument, conservatives emphasize the importance of the fear of punitive measures in promoting individual lawfulness, while liberals emphasize environmental factors as the underlying cause of criminality and believe that rehabilitation is better than punishment. Critics of that analysis, however, remind everyone that the right to counsel is a right of the accused and that a presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of American law. Bradley Best See also: Judicial Wars; Miranda Rights; Rehnquist, William H.
Further Reading Dudley, Mark. E. Gideon v. Wainwright (1963): Right to Counsel. New York: Twenty-First Century Books, 1995. Smith, Christopher E. The Rehnquist Court and Criminal Punishment. New York: Garland, 1997. Spaeth, Harold J., and Jeffrey A. Segal. The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Taylor, John B. The Right to Counsel and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination: Rights and Liberties Under the Law. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Walker, Samuel. Sense and Nonsense about Crime and Drugs. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998.
R ight to Die Whether people have a right to die is one of the most controversial issues in modern American society. The rightto-die movement is a political and legal campaign that seeks respect for the desires of terminal, suffering, or persistently vegetative individuals, and to empower them (or their surrogates) in ways that help them maintain a measure of control over the time and manner of their death.
Competing Worldviews and Categories of Physician Assistance The right-to-die debate is often framed by two competing worldviews: the “sanctity of life” versus “quality of
life.” Advocates of the “sanctity of life” viewpoint generally oppose any termination of human life, through either active or passive means. This position is often premised on the religious belief that since humans are created in the image of God, they consequently possess intrinsic dignity. The “sanctity of life” argument can also be founded on a rational, secular concept of life as a basic good to which all human beings, regardless of disease or disability, have an inviolate right. In contrast, the “quality of life” approach holds that the good of life is balanced by the realities of human suffering and bodily deterioration. Advocates of this position argue that, in some instances, an individual’s quality of life has deteriorated so much that death becomes a benefit. They support the right of terminally ill patients who are enduring serious suffering but are still mentally competent to make a life-and-death decision to seek a physician’s assistance in committing suicide. One form of physician assistance is actual, direct administration of a voluntarily requested lethal dose; in such cases, the act is commonly referred to as “voluntary active euthanasia.” Similarly, a physician may assist by merely supplying the patient with a requested lethal dose of medication. The latter act is typically classified as “physician-assisted suicide,” for the patient is the one who actually commits the suicidal act. The distinction between these two types of assisted suicide can be seen in the actions of euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian, a physician who helped a number of people commit suicide. If a terminally ill patient requested his assistance, Kevorkian would typically attach the patient to a homemade suicide machine that injected a lethal dose of drugs when the patient activated the mechanism. Kevorkian evaded criminal conviction until he moved beyond merely facilitating a patient’s suicide and instead actively administered a lethal injection to an individual who no longer had use of his arms or legs. This constituted voluntary active euthanasia and led to Kevorkian’s conviction and imprisonment for second-degree murder. A third category is “passive euthanasia,” which includes the withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatments, such as ventilators and feeding tubes. Each of these three categories raises highly contested moral, medical, and legal questions regarding concepts of patient autonomy, state paternalism, and “quality of life” versus “sanctity of life.”
Legal Landmarks: Quinlan to Schiavo The modern right-to-die movement was sparked by the landmark New Jersey Supreme Court decision In re Quinlan (1976), a case involving passive euthanasia. At the age of twenty-two, Karen Ann Quinlan collapsed and ceased breathing for two fifteen-minute periods, depriving her brain of oxygen that left her neurologically devastated. Quinlan was diagnosed as being in a persis-
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tent vegetative state (PVS), requiring twenty-four-hour intensive nursing care, a respirator, a catheter, and artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) received through a feeding tube. Convinced that his daughter had no chance of cognitive recovery and that a slow, inevitable deterioration was not in her best interests, Quinlan’s father initiated court action seeking to turn off his daughter’s respirator. The attending physicians refused, at least in part out of fear that they could be criminally liable for participating in the death of their patient. The court ruled in favor of Quinlan’s father, holding that because his daughter did not have the mental capacity to exercise her independent right of choice, she was entitled to a surrogate decisionmaker who would act in her best interests. Moreover, of significant relevance to physicians, the court distinguished between “the unlawful taking of the life of another and the ending of artificial life-support systems as a matter of self-determination.” This reassured doctors facing similar scenarios that they would not be held criminally liable. Following the court victory, Quinlan’s father had the respirator removed but not the feeding tube, and she lived for another ten years. An incompetent patient’s right to die versus a state’s interest in promoting life’s sanctity was the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health (1990). The case was about Nancy Cruzan, who on January 11, 1983, at age thirty, was involved in a car accident that caused a deprivation of oxygen to her brain. The lack of oxygen left Cruzan neurologically impaired, with no chance of regaining her mental faculties, and she was diagnosed as being in a PVS. After rehabilitation efforts failed, Cruzan’s parents asked the hospital to withdraw the feeding tube that had been keeping her alive. The hospital’s refusal to honor their request was backed by Missouri governor John Ashcroft, setting in motion a legal battle that wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices held that a state may assert an “unqualified interest in the preservation of human life,” affirming Missouri’s requirement that clear and convincing proof of the patient’s desire to withdraw ANH must be demonstrated before such action can be taken. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in her concurring opinion in Cruzan, noted: “Artificial feeding cannot readily be distinguished from other forms of medical treatment.” Even so, thirty years after Quinlan, in the Terri Schiavo case, those opposing removal of her feeding tube equated such an act with a cruel and unusual death by starvation not fit for a convicted murderer on death row or a rabid pit bull. Provocative rhetoric notwithstanding, by 2005, however, the legal, medical, and ethical consensus was nearly unanimous that ANH is not the moral equivalent of ordinary care, but a life-prolonging medical treatment no different from a respirator or other
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mechanical device. Such was the rationale repeatedly articulated by the Florida judiciary as it sought to resolve the intractable dispute between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her parents over the question of whether to cease provision of ANH. Schiavo spent over fifteen years in PVS before her feeding tube was removed in March 2005; she died about two weeks later. Her case was the focus of unprecedented international media coverage, prompting a surge in public attention to end-of-life decision making and debates regarding the appropriateness of legal, political, judicial, religious, and medical interventions.
State Interests and Individual Liberties Controversies surrounding the right to die in the United States have not been limited to passive euthanasia and PVS patients. When it passed the Death with Dignity Act in 1994, Oregon became the first state to legalize physicianassisted suicide. Under this law, physicians are permitted to prescribe lethal drugs if a written request is made by an adult patient who desires to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner and who has been determined by the attending physician and a consulting physician to be suffering from a terminal disease. The legislation went into effect in 1997, having survived a repeal attempt and a federal court challenge to its constitutionality. During its first three years of operation, sixty-nine Oregonians died from lethal medication obtained pursuant to the procedures set forth in the Death with Dignity Act. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill that the use of a physician in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty protected by the Constitution. The Court held that a state’s interest in preserving and protecting human life—regardless of a terminally ill patient’s desire—is a rational and legitimate state interest, and that state prohibitions against physician-assisted suicide appropriately reflect this commitment to life. These rulings were championed by many who believe in the “sanctity of life” and that protections are needed for vulnerable populations including the elderly, the poor, and people with disabilities. Organizations such as Not Dead Yet argue that euthanasia implicitly devalues those who are different, which may ultimately lead to abuse, neglect, and murder of vulnerable members of society. In 2001, U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft ordered a revocation of the medical licenses of physicians in Oregon who prescribed lethal substances, arguing that to do so was neither a legitimate medical practice nor lawful under federal drug control legislation. However, in Gonzalez v. Oregon (2006), the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of states to regulate medical practice, holding that the attorney general did not have authority to prohibit physicians from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide procedures permitted under state law.
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Questions about the role of medicine in the process of death are related to the role of medicine in procreation, abortion, and research on fetal tissue. Consequently, questions about the meaning of life become politically charged. As an unprecedented percentage of the American population becomes elderly, and as technology increases the sustainability of physiological existence without “quality of life,” questions related to living and dying well—particularly regarding alleviation of pain—are expected to increase in number and intensity. Joshua E. Perry See also: Abortion; Health Care; Kevorkian, Jack; Medical Marijuana; Not Dead Yet; O’Connor, Sandra Day; Rehnquist, William H.; Schiavo, Terri; Stem-Cell Research.
Further Reading Brock, Dan W. “Voluntary Active Euthanasia.” Hastings Center Report (March–April 1992): 10–22. Dworkin, Ronald. Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Gostin, Lawrence O. “Deciding Life and Death in the Courtroom: From Quinlan to Cruzan, Glucksberg, and Vacco—A Brief History and Analysis of Constitutional Protection of the ‘Right to Die.’ ” Journal of the American Medical Association 278: 18 (1997): 1523–28. Keown, John. Euthanasia, Ethics, and Public Policy: An Argument Against Legalisation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kilner, John F., Arlene B. Miller, and Edmund D. Pellegrino, eds. Dignity and Dying: A Christian Appraisal. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. Quill, Timothy E. “Death and Dignity: A Case of Individualized Decision Making.” New England Journal of Medicine 324:10 (1991): 691–94. Velleman, J. David. “Against the Right to Die.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 17:6 (1992): 665–81.
Ro b e r t s o n , P a t Televangelist and former Baptist minister Pat Robertson, a prominent leader of the Christian Right, greatly influenced American politics in the 1980s and 1990s. He also founded the nation’s first Christian television network, launched the country’s most popular and longest-running Christian talk show, created the largest and most successful Christian Right lobbying organization, started a university, ran for president, and wrote more than a dozen books. But he attracted widespread criticism from people who thought he violated the separation of church and state. Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson was born on March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia. His father, Absalom,
had been a member of Congress. Robertson graduated from Washington and Lee University (BA, 1950), Yale Law School (JD, 1955), and New York Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1959), in between serving as a U.S. Marine lieutenant in Korea (1950–1952). Originally intending to pursue a career in law or business, Robertson changed plans after experiencing a religious conversion in 1956. Five years later, although connected with the charismatic movement, he was ordained as a minister by the Southern Baptist Convention. The year of his ordination, Robertson purchased a television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, using it to start the Christian Broadcasting Network. This undertaking eventually included not only religious programs but also a range of family movies and news analyses, including The 700 Club, a news talk show that Robertson began in 1966 and hosted for over forty years. By the mid-1980s, his television network, charitable organizations, and other ministerial operations had become a $230 million operation. The televangelist became a lightning rod for criticism after announcing his candidacy for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Although he portrayed himself as a responsible conservative slightly to the right of President Ronald Reagan, critics voiced concern that he would not respect the separation of church and state. He claimed in 1985 that his prayer changed the course of a hurricane, confirming his decision to run for president. That same year, he said that only Jews and Christians were qualified to hold office, and implied that as president he might ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion. Many conservative evangelicals, especially members of charismatic churches, appreciated Robertson’s support for organized school prayer and family values, and his opposition to secular humanism. Born-again Christians enabled him to raise more money than any of his Republican opponents. Robertson won a few state party caucuses and a handful of delegates but received only 9 percent of the national Republican presidential primary vote. With the help of Ralph Reed, a young Republican activist, Robertson in 1989 launched the Christian Coalition. Earlier Christian Right organizations, such as the Moral Majority, had attracted a lot of press coverage but achieved only minimal legislative or electoral influence. In contrast, the Christian Coalition focused on winning control of party organizations at the local level. Consequently, the Christian Coalition obtained far more electoral influence than its predecessors and became a powerful Christian Right pressure group within the GOP, forcing Republicans to maintain their opposition to abortion and gay rights in exchange for the Coalition’s continued assistance in mobilizing evangelical support for Republican candidates. The Christian Coalition, at its peak in the mid1990s, claimed 4 million members and had an operating budget of $25 million, but it experienced a rapid decline after Reed left the organization in 1997.
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Further Reading Boston, Rob. The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996. Donavan, John B. Pat Robertson: The Authorized Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Foege, Alec. The Empire God Built: Inside Pat Robertson’s Media Machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. Pat Robertson: A Personal, Religious, and Political Portrait. New York: HarperCollins, 1988. Martin, William. With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1996. Watson, Justin. The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Rock and Roll Televangelist Pat Robertson, an ordained Baptist minister and charismatic evangelical, founded the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Christian Coalition. He has been a leading light and controversial spokesman of the Religious Right since the 1970s. (Marty Katz/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Robertson viewed the Christian Coalition as only one component in a broader strategy to oppose liberal interest groups that he felt threatened Christian religious liberty. Regent University, which he founded in Virginia Beach in 1977, opened a law school in 1986 in order to give evangelicals legal training from a Christian perspective. This was followed four years later by the founding of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a counterpoint to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which Robertson regarded as hostile to public expression of religion. With the turn of the twenty-first century, Robertson became an increasingly controversial figure, even among evangelicals. The National Association of Religious Broadcasters’ board of directors voted in 2006 not to renew Robertson’s board membership because of their objections to his polemical statements, which included a call for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s assassination and a pronouncement that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was God’s punishment for authorizing a withdrawal from the West Bank. Although Robertson remains a renowned figure because of his formative role in launching the Christian Right, his influence has waned. Daniel K. Williams See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Christian Coalition; Christian Radio; Church and State; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Moral Majority; Religious Right; Republican Party; Televangelism.
More than a musical movement, rock and roll follows generations through life, changing in beat, lyrics, and style to reflect the cultural and social needs of its listeners. At its core, rock symbolizes youthful struggles for a voice in popular culture and politics. Teenage disaffection with parental control in the 1950s imbued early rock music. When that rebellion turned hostile and radical, rock and roll became the vehicle for challenging authority in the decades that followed. With roots in the South, rock and roll was a mix of rhythm and blues, and country music, sounds from the margins where black and white subcultures coexisted uneasily. Northern radio stations catered to new audience tastes, playing the music carried north by black migration in the forties. In 1951, Alan Freed, a Cleveland disc jockey, used the term “rock and roll” to describe the hybrid music his multiracial audience craved. Freed organized rock concerts where black artists such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard performed for integrated audiences. Young white listeners showed their appreciation by flocking to record stores. The trend did not go unnoticed. With an eye to the racial climate, Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records in Memphis, believed that a white performer with “black style” could help rock and roll corner the white music market. With “That’s All Right, Mama” in 1954, Elvis Presley proved Phillips’s intuition correct. White rock and rollers like Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, covering black artists, brought the music to ever wider audiences and commercial success. Cold War America saw the birth of the teenager, a new social demographic that enjoyed levels of security and affluence unknown to previous generations. With more leisure time and disposable income, teens in the 1950s became a bastion of consumerism, courted by the entertainment industry. Rock and roll’s brash beat and suggestive lyrics spoke of experiences beyond staid parental lifestyles. With Presley’s breakthrough television
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appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, rock and roll was entrenched in youth culture. Cold War anxieties had created a rigid atmosphere of social and political homogeneity in the nation. Concomitant with this was a rise in racial tension as blacks pushed for equality. With its bold references to sex and rebellion, rock music faced the ire of authorities. Critics decried the erosion of teen morality through rock “leerics” and lewd performances. Interracial concert audiences concerned Christian fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan, who called for a ban on the “devil’s music” to prevent the spread of juvenile delinquency and the “mongrelization” of white teens. Anti–rock-and-roll campaigns stretched across the country, culminating in the payola scandal of the late 1950s, in which the Federal Communications Commission targeted disc jockeys, like Freed, for accepting bribes to play specific rock songs. Chastened by critics and controversy, rock and roll’s brazen edges were smoothed over by the early 1960s when clean-cut teen idols (the likes of Frankie Avalon) were showcased on parentally approved television programs such as American Bandstand. Folk music provided the poignant social commentary missing from the new “wholesome” rock. As the civil rights movement turned violent and the Vietnam War accelerated, folk musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez injected politics into their lyrics. Folk music merged with rock in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” released in 1965. Dylan’s intense lyrics, and use of electric guitar, opened the door for rock and roll to be a vehicle for political views. The enormous success of the Beatles in the mid1960s solidified rock and roll’s resurgence. It also reinvigorated claims that rock was damaging American teens. John Lennon’s 1966 statement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus caused a literal firestorm of protest, with record burnings held in states like South Carolina. To fundamentalists, rock music foreshadowed Christianity’s destruction and was connected to communist plots to corrupt young America, as detailed in Christian polemics such as Rock and Roll: The Devil’s Diversion (1967) by the televangelist Bob Larson. Performers such as Frank Zappa were deemed to be akin to the anti-Christ and faced calls for censorship. The Nixon administration carried on the crusade with a politically motivated campaign linking drug use to rock and roll. The politicization of rock corresponded with the growth of the counterculture. Music was a common reference point for intersecting causes such as civil rights and the anti–Vietnam War movement. Psychedelic rock groups such as the Grateful Dead reflected the experimental attitude toward lifestyle and drugs emerging in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, a gathering place for countercultural adherents. Eastern philosophy informed an intergenerational identity that, at its base, reflected a general “us” versus “them” mentality. In 1967, the “Sum-
mer of Love” displayed the hippie lifestyle and sounds in albums such as Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow and the eponymous debut album, The Grateful Dead, as young Americans converged on San Francisco. The gap between the mainstream and the counterculture widened as the 1960s radicalized. Rock and roll’s mocking of authority transformed into a direct challenge to conservative America’s way of life. Vietnam galvanized rockers against the dominant political establishment. Songs like “Eve of Destruction” (1965, Barry McGuire) and “Ohio” (1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) protested militarism and became antiwar anthems. Black artists such as Jimi Hendrix, steeped in the Black Power movement, called for revolution. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, a massive three-day event in upstate New York in 1969, underscored the importance of rock festivals as countercultural political forums. With defeat in Vietnam, rock and roll in the 1970s fell victim to the cultural and economic malaise that blanketed the nation. Activism gave way to hedonism. Glam rock and disco fed the decade’s decadence. Rock was reborn with MTV’s debut in 1981. Political and social commentary returned with Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. (1984). Although embraced by the ultraconservative Reagan administration, the liberal album addressed the suffocating shadow of Vietnam. Springsteen, along with U2’s Bono, has been instrumental in returning activism to rock music. Benefit concerts such as Live Aid in 1985, Live 8 in 2005, and Live Earth in 2007 pushed listeners to engage in social action. Rock and roll as a political medium continued with MTV’s Rock the Vote. Springsteen coordinated the Vote for Change tour, a critical response to President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. Though fragmented across many genres, rock and roll is still a strong musical and cultural force. Censorship campaigns continue, with record warning labels introduced to combat supposedly obscene lyrics. Cooptation of elements from the punk and rap subcultures kept rock and roll relevant through the 1990s, though a waning New Left may have blunted rock’s political impact. Tastes change, but rock and roll’s core is intact; it remains a communal experience and a beacon of freedom for all listeners. Anna Zuschlag See also: Baez, Joan; Bono; Censorship; Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Dylan, Bob; Federal Communications Commission; Generations and Generational Conflict; Record Warning Labels; Springsteen, Bruce; Vietnam War; War Protesters; Young, Neil; Zappa, Frank.
Further Reading Altschuler, Glenn C. All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Rock well , Nor man Bennett, Andy. Cultures of Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University, 2001. Friedlander, Paul. Rock & Roll: A Social History. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard Books, 1993. Martin, Linda, and Kerry Segrave. Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: DaCapo Press, 1993.
Ro c k we l l , G e o r g e L i n c o l n A striking figure as he strode the streets of Washington, D.C., in full Nazi-style regalia, George Lincoln Rockwell saw the battle for control of America as a continuation of the struggle of his hero, Adolf Hitler. Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, gaining much publicity but negligible support. At his northern Virginia headquarters in Arlington, Rockwell draped a large Nazi swastika flag and trained a unit of uniformed storm troopers that marched in demonstrations, which he led dressed in a suit and tie while puffing on a corncob pipe. Rockwell traveled nationwide to promote his views, often drawing counterdemonstrators and occasionally sparking violence. The son of vaudeville performers, Rockwell was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 9, 1918. An extrovert as a teenager, Rockwell had a rebellious spirit that led to disciplinary problems at school and a mediocre academic record, but he entered Brown University in 1938 on the strength of exceptionally high aptitude test scores. Leaving college in 1941 to enlist as a U.S. Navy aviator, Rockwell served in the Pacific theater during World War II. He left active military service as a Naval Reserve lieutenant commander in 1945 and worked in Maine as a commercial artist while extending his skills at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Recalled to active duty for the Korean War, Rockwell became a supporter of the anticommunist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). Becoming convinced that Marxism sought to organize inferior masses of people, Rockwell embraced Hitler’s political tract Mein Kampf and his theories of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. In 1962, Rockwell traveled to England and, with British neofascist Colin Jordan, formed the World Union of National Socialists. Returning to America, Rockwell helped establish nineteen chapters. He renamed his group the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP) in 1967. On August 25 of that year, Rockwell was assassinated in Arlington, Virginia, by a disgruntled former member of the organization. Several NSWPP associates went on to form white supremacist groups that reached national prominence. Frank Collin led the National Socialist Party of America, gaining international attention in 1977 by threatening a
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march of neo-Nazis through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb that was home to many Jewish Holocaust survivors. William L. Pierce founded the National Alliance, which in the 1990s grew to prominence in part because of the success of an Internet-based, mail-order, whitepower music business. Under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries (1978), a work that partly inspired Timothy McVeigh’s truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Chip Berlet See also: Anti-Semitism; Cold War; Conspiracy Theories; Holocaust; Marxism; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; McVeigh, Timothy; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Schmaltz, William H. Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1999. Simonelli, Frederick J. American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
R o c k we l l , N o r m a n Magazine illustrator and painter Norman Rockwell recorded the simplicity and nobility of American life through six decades of the twentieth century. Social conservatives esteemed Rockwell for his idealized renderings of old-fashioned, small-town family life, while progressives admired later works expressing support for the civil rights movement. Norman Percevel Rockwell was born in New York City on February 3, 1894. He enrolled in the National Academy of Design in 1910 and soon thereafter in the Art Students League, both in New York. His first cover for the Saturday Evening Post was published in 1916, and over the next forty-seven years, he would produce more than 320 covers for that magazine, including the 1943 series of four paintings on the “Four Freedoms” espoused by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a charter of universal human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. His cover art also appeared on such popular periodicals as Look, Life, and Literary Digest. Rockwell used his mastery of style and color, along with his sense of humor, to portray the themes and experiences of everyday life in small-town America. While some critics ridiculed his work for being overly optimistic, Rockwell explained, “I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be, and so painted only the ideal aspects of it.” Before 1963, most of his subjects were white people—of his hundreds of paintings on magazine covers, only three featured blacks. This changed during the civil rights era, however, when
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editors encouraged him to be more daring in addressing the starker realities of American culture. On one 1964 cover of the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With depicted four U.S. marshals escorting a young black girl to school. On a wall in the background are painted the words “nigger” and “KKK,” along with red splotches from thrown tomatoes. The following year, the magazine published Southern Justice (which Rockwell called Murder in Mississippi), a reaction to the previous summer’s murder of three civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The painting depicts two men, a white and a black, comforting each other with a fallen comrade at their feet. During his long career, Rockwell was commissioned to paint portraits of several U.S. presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He died on November 8, 1978, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. William T. Walker See also: Civil Rights Movement; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Family Values; Human Rights; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Further Reading Claridge, Laura. Norman Rockwell: A Life. New York: Random House, 2001. Gans, Herbert J. “Can Rockwell Survive Cultural Elevation?” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2000. Marker, Sheery. Norman Rockwell: Unabridged. New York: World, 2004. Rockwell, Norman, as told to Tom Rockwell. Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator. New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1994.
Ro d m a n , D e n n i s The antics and personality of Dennis Rodman, a talented but persistently controversial player in the National Basketball Association (1986–2000), generated much debate during the course of his career, raising broader issues about the public image of athletes and whether or not they have an obligation to be role models. Born on May 13, 1961, in Trenton, New Jersey, Dennis Keith Rodman was raised in poverty. After playing basketball at Cooke County Junior College in Dallas (1982–1983) and Southeastern Oklahoma State University (1983–1986), he was drafted by the Detroit Pistons in 1986. During his rookie year, Rodman became a key component in the Pistons’ success. Nicknamed “the Worm,” he was an “old school” player who played defense and rebounded with ferocity. He was one of the few players
who could slow down such opposing stars as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird while fitting into his team’s “bad boy” style of play. Late one night during the 1992–1993 NBA season, Rodman’s tenure with the Pistons took a turn for the worse when team officials found him locked inside his pickup truck with a loaded shotgun. Rodman later described it as the moment the old Dennis died and the new Dennis emerged, when he stopped caring about the popular image of a black NBA star and decided to be himself—whether expressed by his tattoos, his ever changing hair colors, or his willingness to speak his mind. Shortly thereafter, the Pistons traded him to the San Antonio Spurs, where his play was marked less by his greatness as a rebounder and defender than by technical fouls, ejections, league fines, and suspensions. After the 1994–1995 season, the Spurs traded him to the Chicago Bulls. Rodman’s on-the-court prowess helped propel the Bulls to three straight championships, but with his behavior falling short of cultural expectations of the idealized sports figure, he was often criticized for his “selfish disrespect” for the game. He matched neither the image of the corporate, racially transcendent player, such as Michael Jordan, nor the image of the hip-hop street baller, such as Allen Iverson. Whereas in the media Jordan was “the good black,” Rodman was “the bad black” because of his look and style. He regarded himself as “a real person,” unwilling to conform to a contrived “normal” identity. Challenging homophobia, he sat for interviews at gay bars and sometimes crossdressed, all the while flaunting his heterosexuality and interracial relationships with the singer Madonna and model-actress Carmen Electra. On the court, he was no less controversial, racking up technical fouls and once kicking a cameraman in the groin,which led to an eleven-game suspension and a $1.1 million fine. He sometimes treated basketball as a burden that intervened with his party life, and he once described the NBA as 50 percent sex and 50 percent money. He made headlines for skipping practices and missing a playoff game. Although often mentioned in tabloid magazines, Rodman is not remembered with the NBA greats. He and others believe this is due not to his basketball talents but to widespread disapproval of his image and behavior on and off the court. Rodman’s autobiography As Bad as I Wanna Be (1997), widely viewed as a rationalization of irresponsibility and an attempt to shock readers, offers a testimony of individuality and a rejection of corporate basketball interests that seek to promote a contrived image of players. David J. Leonard See also: Counterculture; Madonna; Race; Transgender Movement.
Roe v. Wade (1973 )
Further Reading Barett, Lindon. “Black Men in the Mix: Badboys, Heroes, Sequins, and Dennis Rodman.” Callalloo 20:1 (1997): 102–26. Lefrance, Melisse, and Genevieve Rail. “Excursions into Otherness: Understanding Dennis Rodman and the Limits of Subversive Agency.” In Sports Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity, ed. David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson. London: Routledge, 2001. Remnick, David. The Devil Problem and Other True Stores. New York: Random House, 1996.
R o e v. Wa d e ( 19 73 ) Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case establishing a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion during the first two trimesters of pregnancy, has been a persistent and highly contentious debate in the American culture wars from the moment it was handed down. The case originated in March 1970 in Texas, where Norma McCorvey, an unmarried pregnant women using the alias “Jane Roe” to protect her privacy, filed suit against Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade to be allowed to have an abortion. McCorvey’s lawyers, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, argued that an 1856 Texas law forbidding abortion unless the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life violated Roe’s right of privacy. Their argument was based on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which ruled that a Connecticut statute prohibiting the use of birth control was unconstitutional because its enforcement violated “the zone of privacy” created by the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment. These protections, the attorneys contended, gave Roe and other citizens the right to privacy in sexual and reproductive matters. District Attorney Wade argued that a fetus is a separate human being and has the right to live. Although the three-judge federal district court ruled for “Jane Roe,” it refused to outlaw enforcement of the 1856 Texas law. Both “Jane Roe” and Wade appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case was argued in October 1971 and reargued the following year. In 1973, after much debate, the Court ruled 7–2 in favor of “Jane Roe,” thereby legalizing abortion in America. The majority opinion, written by Richard M. Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun, found that the privacy right to abortion, grounded in the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” during the first trimester. In the second trimester, the state could regulate abortion if the pregnancy endangered the mother’s life but could not otherwise prevent the procedure. Only during the third trimester could a state prohibit abortion altogether. Associate justices William H. Rehnquist and
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Byron White criticized the ruling, arguing that there was “no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislature of the States.” From the beginning, the Roe decision evoked support and opposition, further polarizing an electorate already divided over the issue of abortion. “Pro-choice” groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) insist that women have a “fundamental right” to decide whether to have an abortion. Arguing that life begins at conception, the Catholic National Right to Life Committee, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and other “pro-life” organizations have rallied against the decision. McCorvey eventually revealed her identity and in 1995 converted to Christianity. She subsequently joined the pro-life movement, believing that abortion is harmful to women. In 2005, she unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside the Roe decision on the basis that abortion procedures can cause harm to women. Although unable to overturn the 1973 ruling, conservative politicians have succeeded in making it more difficult for women to have an abortion. Three years after the Roe decision, for example, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which barred federal funding for abortion. In 1989, Missouri legislators voted to deny the use of public facilities and employees to assist or perform abortions, a measure upheld by the Supreme Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989). In 2003, Congress passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act, outlawing lateterm abortions carried out by a procedure known as “intact dilation and evacuation”; this law was upheld by the Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Carhart and Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood (2007). In 2006, the South Dakota state legislature and Mississippi’s House Public Health Committee approved bills making it illegal for doctors to perform abortions. By the early 2000s, thirty-four states had passed legislation requiring minors to obtain parental consent or notify parents before having an abortion. These measures limited the scope of the Roe decision and suggested further erosion in the future. Bruce E. Stewart See also: Abortion; Birth Control; Catholic Church; Equal Rights Amendment; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Judicial Wars; Moral Majority; National Organization for Women; Operation Rescue; Planned Parenthood; Rehnquist, William H.; Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading Faux, Marian. Roe v. Wade: The Untold Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Decision That Made Abortion Legal. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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Hull, N.E.H., and Peter Charles Hoffer. Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Ro s e n b e r g , J u l i u s , a n d Ethel Rosenberg The only American civilians executed for espionage, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an enduring cause célèbre of the Cold War era, memorialized by the left as martyrs to McCarthyite hysteria and reviled by the right as traitors who gave atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. revelations by former KGB operatives and the U.S. government’s release of decoded Soviet communications from the 1940s have led to a consensus among historians that Julius Rosenberg did engage in spying. Controversy lingers over several aspects of the case, however— notably the fairness of the trial and the extent of Ethel’s involvement. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg, born on May 12, 1918, and September 28, 1915, respectively, grew up politically radical in New York City and met there in 1936 through the Young Communist League. Julius Rosenberg, a graduate of the City College of New York (1939) and an electrical engineer, worked as a civilian for the U.S. Army Signal Corps but was fired in 1945 for his past communist association. Ethel Greenglass, who worked as a secretary for a shipping company, became active in the labor movement. The couple married in 1939. Their prosecution arose from the arrest in 1950 of David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother and an army machinist who worked on the U.S. atom bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Charged with providing notes and sketches of bomb components to Soviet agents, Greenglass told the FBI that Julius had recruited him into a spy ring. Ethel was also arrested in the hope that her prosecution would pressure Julius into confessing. The Rosenbergs were convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 in a March 1951 trial that launched the public career of anticommunist attorney Roy Cohn. Judge Irving Kaufman imposed the death penalty, asserting that the Rosenbergs had committed “worse than murder” and bore responsibility for the Korean War. After a series of failed appeals, and despite international calls for clemency, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing prison in New York. For decades after their execution, the Rosenbergs were widely viewed as victims of a witch hunt. The fact that Cohn had helped steer the case to Kaufman, that the judge agreed with authorities beforehand to impose the death sentence, and that Ethel was directly linked to the case only by Greenglass’s claim that she typed up meeting notes (which he recanted fifty years later), fueled feelings that the Rosenbergs had been railroaded. Political activ-
ists, liberal celebrities, and the couple’s orphaned sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, campaigned to reopen the case. The Rosenbergs, particularly Ethel, were treated sympathetically in the best-selling novels The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow (1971) and The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1977) and Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America (1993). In 1983, historians Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton renewed debate on the case with their book The Rosenberg File, which concluded that Julius had been a Soviet agent. In the 1990s, U.S. government declassification of portions of the files of the Venona project, a U.S.-British decryption program of Soviet intelligence communications during and after World War II, and revelations by former KGB agents further implicated Julius in running a spy ring. His guilt—but not Ethel’s—is now generally accepted by historians, as is the notion that others played a greater role in advancing the Soviet atomic program. Andy Markowitz See also: Capital Punishment; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Hiss, Alger; Kushner, Tony; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Nuclear Age; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Carmichael, Virginia. Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Meeropol, Robert. An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Radosh, Ronald, and Joyce Milton. The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Roberts, Sam. The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair. New York: Random House, 2001.
R ove , K a r l A controversial Republican campaign strategist, Karl Rove was credited as the “architect” of George W. Bush’s election victories—for governor of Texas in 1994 and 1998, and for president of the United States in 2000 and 2004—and often identified as “Bush’s brain” for his role in shaping White House policy to appeal to the Republican Party’s conservative base. During the first six years of the Bush administration, admirers called Rove a “political genius” for developing a winning electoral alliance out of a loose coalition of neoconservatives, libertarians, corporate leaders, and religious right groups, despite the many issues that otherwise divided them. In contrast, detractors labeled Rove “an evil genius,” regarding him as an unprincipled operator who escalated the culture wars. In 2006, after
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Democrats for the first time since 1994 gained control of the House of Representatives, effectively dashing Republican hopes for a GOP ruling majority lasting a generation or longer, Rove was cast as the scapegoat by members of his party who blamed his polarizing tactics for triggering a voter backlash. At that point, Rove was disparaged as the architect of Republican defeat. Karl Christian Rove was born on February 25, 1950, in Denver, Colorado. He grew up in a dysfunctional family (learning as a young adult, for instance, that his biological father was not the man married to his mother), leading biographers to speculate that his attraction to politics was rooted in a search for belonging. This view has been supported in part by those who, observing him up close, suggest that Rove does not have passionate ideological conviction but thinks purely in terms of political strategy. From 1969 to 1977, Rove attended the University of Utah, University of Maryland, George Mason University, and University of Texas but never completed the degree in political science he sought. His political education was obtained outside the classroom, serving as the executive director of the College Republicans (1971–1972), chair of the College Republicans (1973–1974), and special assistant to the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush (1973). By the mid1970s, Rove was working as a political consultant in Virginia while serving as finance director of the Virginia Republican Party. At Bush’s request, Rove moved to Texas for the purpose of fundraising for a presidential exploratory committee.
Political strategist Karl Rove (right) engineered the ascendancy of George W. Bush from Texas to the White House. Rove sought to build a conservative Republican coalition that would last a generation; he resigned from the Bush administration amid scandal. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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In 1977, Rove did campaign work for both Bushes as well as Bill Clements, who was elected Texas governor. After serving as Clements’s chief of staff (1977–1981), Rove ran an Austin-based marketing firm, Karl Rove & Co. (1981–1991), raising the funds that enabled Republicans to gain control of Texas. Essentially a party boss, Rove picked the Republican candidates to financially support. As the linchpin of George W. Bush’s political career, Rove was his political adviser and chief strategist (1993–2001) and later senior White House adviser (2001–2007) and deputy chief of staff (2005–2006). Following the 2004 election, Bush was designated Time magazine’s “Man of the Year,” with Rove as runner-up. Rove’s political instincts enabled him to tap into issues that resonated with suburban swing voters. Accordingly, he directed his candidates to support tax cuts, welfare reduction, tort reform, improvement in education, and family values. His strategy was simple: build a large campaign war chest (for example, Bush outdid all other Republican challengers in 2000, raising $36 million) and repeat a simple message (during the 2004 presidential election, a central theme of the Bush reelection campaign was that Kerry, the Democratic rival, was a “waffler” on the War on Terror). Rove was considered a master of voter turnout strategy and is credited with developing issues that attracted evangelical voters to the polls in 2004. During that campaign, Rove arranged for the Republican National Convention to be held in New York City, not far from Ground Zero, in order to cast his candidate as the strong avenger of terrorism. Later, Rove organized Bush’s push for Social Security privatization, but the issue failed to gain traction. Rove’s critics focus on his hardball campaign tactics, arguing that unethical practices date back to his College Republican days when he worked closely with Lee Atwater, the mastermind of the “whisper campaign” (an anonymous or “off the record” spreading of malicious gossip about a rival candidate) and “push polling” (telephone “polls” of prospective voters in which the questions provide negative and inaccurate information about the political opposition). In one early campaign trick, directed at a Democratic candidate running for Illinois state treasurer in 1970, Rove printed and distributed stolen campaign stationery advertising “free beer, free food, girls and a good time.” Critics have made numerous allegations against Rove for taking the political low road, but none has been substantially proven. Among other things, he is accused of involvement in a whisper campaign suggesting Texas governor Ann Richards was a lesbian (1994); the distribution of negative fliers against a Republican candidate running for the Alabama Supreme Court for the purpose of duping voters into believing the Democratic opponent was resorting to smear tactics (1996); a whisper campaign against John McCain during the South
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Carolina Republican presidential primary in which questions were raised about the former POW’s mental health (1999); and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign attack against the war record of Bush’s Democratic rival John Kerry (2004). Rove came under suspicion in the 2003 CIA leak case in which an agent’s identity—Valerie Plame—was illegally divulged to the press after her husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, had publicly accused the Bush administration of fabricating evidence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Rove was not charged with breaking federal law, but his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was indicted, tried, and found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. (Libby’s sentence was subsequently commuted by President Bush.) After leaving the White House, Rove came under a legal cloud over the improper firing of attorneys at the Justice Department (they had been removed for ideological reasons and replaced by Republican Party loyalists) and over his refusal to testify about it before Congress. In the meantime, the former political strategist was working as an analyst and commentator for Fox News and other media outlets. Roger Chapman See also: Atwater, Lee; Bush Family; Education Reform; Election of 2000; Neoconservatism; Privatization; Republican Party; September 11; Social Security; Tax Reform; Tort Reform; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Alexander, Paul. Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove. New York: Modern Times/Macmillan, 2008. Barnes, Fred. “Karl Rove, White House Impresario.” In The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995–2005, ed. William Kristol, 152–60. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Moore, James. The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. New York: Crown, 2006.
R u by R i d g e I n c i d e n t Ruby Ridge is the name of a bluff in Boundary County, Idaho, where a deadly confrontation erupted in 1992 between federal agents and a forty-five-year-old survivalist and former Green Beret named Randy Weaver. Weaver had moved his family to Ruby Ridge in the mid-1980s and embraced Christian Identity, an anti-Semitic belief system. He also occasionally visited Richard Butler’s then nearby Aryan Nation compound. Scholars believe that the incident at Ruby Ridge, and a similar standoff in Waco, Texas, the following year, sparked the rise of the modern-day militia movement. The government’s aggressive responses at Ruby Ridge and Waco were held up by nascent militia organizers as a testament to an out-of-control federal govern-
ment. Militia leaders complained that federal agencies such as the FBI and the U.S. Marshals were illegally using military force against American citizens, and they encouraged potential recruits to arm themselves for a showdown with the government. Some militia recruiters also used racist language to encourage white men to “take back” their country from minorities, foreigners, and the United Nations. The event that would become the militia movement’s rallying cry began when an undercover federal agent approached Weaver for help purchasing sawed-off shotguns. Weaver delivered two guns in 1989 and was threatened with arrest. The agent offered to withhold charges if Weaver became an undercover informant on the Aryan Nations compound. Weaver refused and was formally arrested in January 1991. He failed to show up for his court date in February, although evidence suggests the wrong trial date was printed on the summons. The U.S. Marshal’s office decided to arrest Weaver and to that end set up a surveillance operation on the perimeter of Weaver’s property to monitor his movements. On August 21, 1992, federal marshal William Degan was scouting terrain near the house when the family dog began barking. Randy Weaver, his son Samuel, and Kevin Harris, a friend living at the compound, went to investigate. A shootout ensued and Degan and Samuel were mortally wounded; Harris badly injured. Weaver claimed the government fired the first shot; the government asserted that it was returning fire. The next day, the rules of engagement were changed to permit agents to shoot to kill any armed male on the property, but somehow FBI sharpshooter Lon Horiuchi killed Vicky Weaver as she held the door open for her husband. Horiuchi claimed he was aiming at Randy Weaver, who surrendered nine days later. Weaver’s supporters argued that the government overstepped its constitutional authority by using military tactics to apprehend him and, in the process, murdered his son and wife, both unarmed. Some militia leaders regarded the government’s refusal to accept blame as evidence of a Zionist plot to co-opt the executive branch of the U.S. government. For the nascent militia movement, the siege at Ruby Ridge represented federal tyranny, requiring a defense against it that was best provided by the citizens’ militia. Detractors argued that while the deaths of Vicky and Samuel Weaver were tragic, Weaver was responsible because he broke the law and refused to answer the charges against him in a court of law. Detractors noted that the Weavers espoused a violent ideology that defined African Americans and Jews as subhuman and called for their expulsion from the country. In 1995, the Weaver family settled a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice. The government did not acknowledge wrongdoing but paid the family $3
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million to compensate for the shooting deaths of Vicky and Samuel Weaver. Carolyn Gallaher See also: Aryan Nations; McVeigh, Timothy; Militia Movement; Montana Freemen; Waco Siege; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Dees, Morris. Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Gallaher, Carolyn. On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Levitas, Daniel. The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Walter, Jess. Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family. New York: ReganBooks, 2002.
Rudolph, Eric Widely identified in the media as a “Christian terrorist,” Eric Rudolph was sentenced in 2005 to life imprisonment without parole for four bombings in the 1990s that killed two people and injured more than a hundred others. Among his targets were the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, and abortion clinics in Georgia and Alabama. Eric Robert Rudolph was born on September 19, 1966, in Merritt Island, Florida. Following his father’s death in 1981, the family moved to North Carolina. Homeschooled during his teens, Rudolph passed the GED and briefly attended Western Carolina University in Sylva (1985–1986). He served in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division (1987–1989), but was discharged early because of insubordination and marijuana use. He then took up work as a carpenter. According to various sources, Rudolph was influenced by the ideology of the Christian Identity movement, which teaches that Jews are descendents of Satan, responsible for homosexuality, and part of an abortion conspiracy to end the white race. Rudolph’s bombing spree included the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, killing a woman and injuring over a hundred others (July 27, 1996); the Sandy Springs Professional Building, a complex housing the Northside Planning Services abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb, injuring six (January 16, 1997); the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar in Atlanta, injuring five (February 21, 1997); and the New Woman All Women Health Care, an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing an off-duty police officer and maiming a nurse (January 29, 1998). For more than five years, despite being on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List with a $1 million bounty, he evaded arrest, living in the Appalachian wilderness of western North Carolina. In May 2003, he was finally captured
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in Murphy, North Carolina. Rudolph, now incarcerated at the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, avoided the death penalty through a plea bargain in which he agreed to disclose his hidden stockpiles of explosives. The bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, his most dramatic offense, was intended to embarrass the federal government for allowing abortion on demand. He hoped to defy the $303 million security operation and force the cancellation of the games, which he felt promoted the “despicable ideals” of “global socialism.” He later apologized for that bombing but not the others. After his arrest, Rudolph, claiming only Catholic affiliation, denied any formal link with the Christian Identity movement. In an eleven-page statement, he denounced the U.S. federal government as illegitimate for legalizing abortion. He characterized the Republican Party as “the Pharisaical sect,” its pro-life supporters as duped, and President George W. Bush as a “coward” despite his talk about the “culture of life.” Rudolph argued that the “plastic people” of America were hypocrites for supporting the war in Iraq while deploring violence against the U.S. government to stop the “murder” of unborn American citizens. As for homosexuality, he stated that violence should be used to keep it out of the public square. Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Anti-Semitism; Aryan Nations; Capital Punishment; Catholic Church; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Homeschooling; Lesbians; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Schuster, Henry, with Charles Stone. Hunting Eric Rudolph. New York: Berkeley Books, 2005. Vollers, Maryanne. Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
R u s h e r, W i l l i a m A . Convinced that the massive U.S. federal bureaucracy was a form of authoritarian collectivism sliding into socialism, William A. Rusher spent more than fifty years advocating a rollback of the policies and projects initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Rusher served from 1957 to 1988 as publisher of the magazine National Review, edited by William F. Buckley, Jr. His views were well circulated through a syndicated newspaper column, “The Conservative Advocate,” begun in 1973, and regular appearances on television and radio as a commentator and political analyst. Rusher frequently wrote magazine articles and authored five major books. Born in Chicago on July 19, 1923, Rusher mostly grew up in New York City. After graduating from
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Princeton University (AB, 1943), where he was active in a campus Republican organization, he served in the U.S. Air Force in India during World War II, advancing from second lieutenant to captain. After earning a law degree at Harvard University (JD, 1948), he worked for seven years as an attorney for a Wall Street law firm and then as associate counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (1956–1957), where he probed the alleged network of communists and subversives and others caught up in the Cold War and McCarthyism. Rusher helped Buckley establish the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom (1960), and then with a handful of other conservatives began the process of convincing Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) to run for president in 1964. Although Goldwater was defeated by a wide margin, conservative campaign workers such as Phyllis Schlafly formed the nucleus of what would become the New Right, which came to power with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. From 1965 to 1970, Rusher was vice chair of the American Conservative Union, which had emerged from the Goldwater campaign. Rusher regularly appeared on the PBS debating series The Advocates (1969–1973), produced in response to the Nixon administration’s criticism that television had a liberal bias. When polling data in the mid-1970s indicated that more voters identified themselves as conservatives than liberals, Rusher set out to organize conservatives to create a third major political party to challenge the Republican Party, which he saw as having been hijacked by opportunistic politicians, including President Richard M. Nixon, whom Rusher felt had betrayed conservative principles. Rusher’s The Making of the New Majority Party (1975) was one of a handful of books that sparked interest in and served as a blueprint for the conservative political resurgence. Rusher eventually (and reluctantly) joined forces with those conservatives who successfully took over the Republican Party. From 1980 forward, Rusher continued his political activism as a senior statesman of the American conservative movement and as a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute in California. In The Coming Battle for the Media (1988), he accuses a “media elite” of infusing news coverage with a liberal bias. Chip Berlet See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Goldwater, Barry; McCarthyism; Media Bias; National Review; Public Broadcasting Service; Republican Party; Schlafly, Phyllis; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; Student Conservatives.
Further Reading Brennan, Mary C. Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Schoenwald, Jonathan M. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ryan, George Prior to his April 2006 conviction on eighteen federal counts of racketeering, mail fraud, tax evasion, and false statements, George Ryan, the one-term governor of Illinois (1999–2003), dramatically ended his political career by declaring a moratorium on state executions, emptying out the state’s death row. While critics accused him of trying to bolster his legacy in the face of a political corruption scandal, foes of capital punishment praised him for focusing attention on the arbitrary and capricious nature of the death penalty. Although nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and lauded in song by Illinois First, a Chicago rock band, Ryan in September 2006 was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for a bribery scandal involving the issuance of commercial driver’s licenses when he was secretary of state. A native of Kankakee, Illinois, a small town 60 miles (97 kilometers) south of Chicago, George Homer Ryan was born on February 24, 1934. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he studied pharmacy at Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan, graduating in 1961. For the next several years, he helped his father run the family’s chain of drugstores but later opted for a career in Republican state politics. Advancing from the Kankakee county board (1968–1973) to the Illinois House of Representatives (1973–1983), he went on to hold statewide office as lieutenant governor under Governor James Thompson (1983–1991), secretary of state (1991–1999), and governor (1999–2003). For most of his political career, he took conservative to moderate positions on most issues. On January 31, 2000, following new evidence that exonerated thirteen men on the state’s death row, Ryan declared a halt to executions in Illinois. This led to the establishment of the Capital Punishment Commission, which studied 5,310 first-degree murder convictions in the state from 1988 to 1997. In its report of April 15, 2002, the commission offered eighty-five suggestions for reform, noting that the death penalty should be abolished if reform was not implemented. The commission found that those who murdered an African American were 60 percent less likely to receive the death penalty than those who murdered a white, and of the less than 2 percent of murder defendants who received the death penalty, the majority were poor, uneducated, and minorities. In addition, it was found, a number of death row inmates had been represented by attorneys who were later disbarred. Clemency hearings in the wake of the report led Governor Ryan on December 19, 2002, to pardon three men who had been wrongfully convicted of murder. He pardoned four others on January 10, 2003, stating that
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they had confessed to murders they did not commit after being tortured by the Chicago police. Finally, on January 11, 2003, forty-eight hours before concluding his term, the governor commuted the death sentences of 167 inmates, relegating all but three to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In announcing the decision, Ryan stated, “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.” Roger Chapman See also: Capital Punishment; Race.
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Further Reading Buchanan, Patrick J. “George Ryan’s Pathetic Farewell.” Human Events, January 20, 2003. Sarat, Austin. Mercy on Trial: What It Takes to Stop an Execution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Shapiro, Bruce. “Ryan’s Courage.” Nation, February 3, 2003. Warden, Rob. “Illinois Death Penalty Reform: How It Happened, What It Promises.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 95:2 (2005): 381–426.
Said, Edward Edward Said was an influential and controversial Palestinian American literary theorist and critic whose life was as much an object of dispute as his scholarship and his pro-Palestinian politics. Of his twenty-three books, the best known is Orientalism (1978), a critical attack on the Eurocentric attitudes found in Western scholarship, art, education, and policymaking as well as the West’s perspective of the Orient as the “Other”—the binary opposite of the West. Edward Wadie Said was born on November 1, 1935, in Jerusalem to affluent Christian parents. He attended school in both Cairo and Jerusalem until the 1948 ArabIsraeli War made refugees of his extended family. He moved to the United States in 1951, earned degrees from Princeton University (BA, 1957) and Harvard University (MA, 1960; PhD, 1964), and became a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University (1963–2003). Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, wrote a highly publicized article in 1999 that challenged the details of Said’s biography. Weiner contended that Said’s family never lived in Jerusalem, that he never studied there, and that the 1948 Arab-Israeli War therefore could not have rendered his family refugees. Said and a number of defenders vigorously refuted those accusations. Despite this controversy, it is for Orientalism that Said is best known. Said defines the term “Orientalism” as the intellectual and editorial means by which scholars, writers, and political officials have defined, restructured, and dominated the East while obfuscating the inherent and universal humanity present in it. Orientalists define the Islamic World and Asia as static, backward, tyrannical, incapable of reform, and empirically inferior—racially and culturally—to the more advanced West. Said blames colonization and its associated modes of thought for encouraging this uneven comparison, explaining Orientalism in terms of binary opposition and a pervasive postNapoleonic state of colonial inequality. Said proposes that the only honest portrayal of the non-European world is one that emphasizes humanity and individuality without relying on generalization and categorization to define one population in terms of the other. Said did not confine his criticism to historical texts but also attacked contemporary scholarship. The public exchange between Said and Bernard Lewis, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, debated the merits of Orientalism in numerous academic journals. Critics continue to attack Said’s thesis as a profoundly flawed
account of Western scholarship, while Said’s supporters contend that Western scholars remain so heavily influenced by Orientalist tradition that they are unable to present a fair and clear image of their subjects. A passionate supporter of Palestinian statehood, Said served as an independent member of the Palestinian National Council until Yasir Arafat threw the Palestinian Authority’s support behind Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. At that point, Said became an increasingly vocal critic of Arafat’s leadership. Shortly after Said’s death from leukemia on September 25, 2003, Columbia University established the Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies. In 2006, it was revealed that Said had been under FBI surveillance since 1971. J.D. Jordan See also: Israel; Lewis, Bernard; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Muslim Americans; Saudi Arabia; September 11.
Further Reading Said, Edward. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Singh, Amritjit. Interviews with Edward W. Said. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Weiner, Justus Reid. “‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said.” Commentary, September 1999. Williams, Patrick, ed. Edward Said. 4 vols. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Same -Sex Marriage Same-sex marriage has been a significant issue in American law and politics since the early 1990s, when the Supreme Court of Hawaii in Baehr v. Lewin (1993) declared that the denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples was a form of sex discrimination and in violation of the state’s constitution. Hawaii and other states responded with a popular referendum that amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as the legal union between a man and a woman. The Hawaii court decision sparked a maelstrom of cultural controversy and led to concern that courts in other states would challenge the heterosexual basis of marriage. Politically, same-sex marriage emerged as an important issue at the federal level with the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which was passed by an overwhelming majority in Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law declared that the federal government may not recognize same-sex marriages for any purpose, and that no state can be compelled to recognize a same-sex marriage even if performed in another state. (The act also clarified that polygamous marriages would not be recognized.) As of 2007, forty-two states had passed a law or constitutional amendment restrict486
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ing marriage to heterosexual unions. Several states also passed “SuperDOMAs,” denying recognition not only of same-sex marriages but also of civil unions and domestic partnerships. The debate was briefly rekindled in 1999 when Vermont’s Supreme Court declared that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples is a violation of equal protection under the law. The state legislature and the governor, Howard Dean, responded with a civil union bill that defined marriage as heterosexual but granted equal state benefits to same-sex couples. Most of the debate between 2000 and 2003 occurred at the state level, as individual states considered and usually passed DOMAs. Neither of the two major political parties made the approval of same-sex marriage a part of its platform, and few national politicians spoke out in favor of it. However, in 2002 the Alliance for Marriage, with the help of conservative legal scholar Robert Bork, drafted a federal marriage amendment that would define marriage in the U.S. Constitution as between a man and a woman. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all statelevel bans on sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), samesex marriage once again became a high-profile issue at the national level. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that overturning the criminalization of sodomy would result in the overturning of marriage laws. The state of Massachusetts affirmed his fear in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), when its Supreme Judicial Court declared that the state’s marriage laws violated equal protection guarantees and ordered the state to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Following the Massachusetts decision, conservative leaders such as James Dobson and Pat Robertson pressured Republican politicians to pass the federal marriage amendment. The plan drew public support from President George W. Bush and many Republican members of Congress, although Bush and others did not push for immediate passage of the amendment. Bush’s opponent in the 2004 election, John Kerry, opposed the amendment but supported civil unions rather than same-sex marriage. In the key state of Ohio, where a state amendment banning same-sex marriage was also on the ballot in the 2004 election, voter turnout was high, especially among conservatives. The Ohio amendment passed by a wide margin, and Bush narrowly won Ohio’s electoral college votes. While the general public’s interest in same-sex marriage waned after the 2004 election, the issue remained an important one to the Religious Right, which continued to press for the federal amendment as well as further state provisions. Same-sex marriage was entangled with a number of other issues important to conservative Christians, such as the role of the courts, abortion, and sexuality. The issue is often cited in the right’s indictment of “activist
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judges,” meaning judges whose rulings are viewed as contrary to conservatives’ understanding of settled law or the popular will. Some opponents of same-sex marriage argue that recognizing nonheterosexual unions would imply state endorsement of same-sex relationships, in violation of the conscience of the majority of Americans and their religious views. Others, drawing on conventional wisdom about the family, argue that marriage between a man and a woman represents the most stable environment for rearing children. A two-parent household is more economically stable, it is argued, and the erosion of gender norms in nontraditional households is psychologically harmful to children. While many social conservatives are united in their opposition to same-sex marriage, some conservatives and Republicans have voiced support for same-sex marriage or civil unions. Libertarian conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan argue that same-sex marriage would promote a stable family environment for gays and lesbians and discourage promiscuity. Monogamy and familial stability through marriage, it is argued, are more important goals than maintaining marriage as a heterosexual institution. Gay and lesbian activists have generally lined up in support of same-sex marriage, and most major gay rights organizations, including the Lambda Defense League, have been involved in political and legal struggles in support of same-sex marriage. However, many others have expressed reservations about making same-sex marriage the central component of the gay rights movement. Some activists worry that working for same-sex marriage may interfere with the achievement of other important goals, such as antidiscrimination measures. Others, such as gender activist Michael Warner, argue that the marriage debate attempts to normalize gays and lesbians and demonize alternative sexual expression. Self-described queer activists worry that the gay rights movement has turned its back on the sexual liberation aspirations of the 1970s and has internalized heterosexist norms of the family. Claire E. Rasmussen See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Dean, Howard; Dobson, James; Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Hay, Harry; Judicial Wars; Kerry, John; Religious Right; Robertson, Pat; Sexual Revolution; Sodomy Laws.
Further Reading Eskridge, William N., Jr., and Darren R. Spedale. Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse? What We’ve Learned from the Evidence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan. The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
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Mello, Michael. Legalizing Gay Marriage. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Wardle, Lynn, ed. Marriage and Same-Sex Unions: A Debate. New York: Praeger, 2003. Wolfson, Evan. Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Sanders, Bernie For many years the only independent in the U.S. House of Representatives, Bernard “Bernie” Sanders has been the rare radical political activist who has managed to carry his ideas into mainstream politics during an era of conservative dominance. A self-described democratic socialist, he was Vermont’s only member of the House from 1991 to 2007. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006. The son of Polish immigrants, Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the University of Chicago (BA, 1964), where he spent much of his time in political activism. He moved to Vermont in 1964 and entered politics in the 1970s as a member of the leftist Liberty Union Party. During that decade, he ran twice for senator under the party banner and twice for governor as an independent, in each case unsuccessfully. In 1981, running as an independent, he won the first of four consecutive terms as mayor of Burlington, the state’s largest city, which some began calling “the People’s Republic of Burlington.” Mayor Sanders successfully pushed for a number of social, cultural, and economic programs, ranging from a public day care center to tax reform and the creation of an arts council. Early in Sanders’s mayoralty, a local political party, the Progressive Coalition, was formed to support his programs. The Vermont Progressive Party grew out of this effort. One of its candidates succeeded Sanders as mayor, and other party members won seats to the state legislature as well as local offices. Sanders’s local political career helped galvanize the state’s progressive elements. Sanders was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, defeating a first-term incumbent Republican. He increasingly worked with House Democrats, caucusing with them and being counted with them for such administrative purposes as committee assignments. He was a co-founder and first chairperson of the House Progressive Caucus; all other members were Democrats. He emphasized issues such as universal health care, veterans’ issues, and the damaging effects of free trade, and he supported a variety of measures intended to address corporate influence in politics and the media. In 1999, to dramatize the problem of high-cost prescription drugs, he led a well-publicized bus trip in which a group of Vermonters went to Canada to buy the less expensive
Calling himself a “democratic socialist,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont—posing before a portrait of socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs—was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1990. After serving eight terms in the House, he was elected to the Senate in 2006. (Steve Liss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
medications available there. Other members of Congress soon followed suit. Critics on the far left argue that Sanders has so compromised his principles that he is effectively a Democrat. His supporters contend that he has consistently emphasized his core values, representing the interests of working families, farmers, low-income families, veterans, students, and others underrepresented by a corporate-dominated political system. His populist policies have drawn support across the political spectrum, aided by his iconoclastic, outspoken style and no-nonsense practicality, and he has won a surprisingly enduring popularity in a traditionally Republican state. Gary L. Bailey See also: Democratic Party; Globalization; Health Care; Republican Party.
Further Reading Conroy, W.J. Challenging the Boundaries of Reform: Socialism in Burlington. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Rosenfeld, Steven. Making History in Vermont: The Election of a Socialist to Congress. Wakefield, NH: Hollowbrook, 1992. Sanders, Bernie, and Huck Gutman. Outsider in the House. New York: Verso, 1997. Vermont Progressive Party Web site. www.answers.com.
Saudi Arabia The largest country in the Middle East, comprising fourfifths of the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia possesses 20 percent of the world’s known petroleum reserves and
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is perhaps the strictest fundamentalist Islamic society. Over the years, the United States has guaranteed the security of Saudi Arabia, providing military protection from first the Soviet Union and later Iraq and Iran, to safeguard the flow of oil. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals, Americans in greater numbers began questioning the wisdom of this strategic partnership. Critical observers charge that the Saudi monarchy sowed the seeds of al-Qaeda by fostering religious extremism. King Ibn Saud, who founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, based the laws of his society on Wahhabism, a puritanical Sunni Muslim doctrine that emphasizes jihad, or holy war. After Saud’s death in 1953, his successors pursued the same course, infusing Wahhabi ideology in the nation’s mosques, schools, and political system. Annually, Western monitors cite Saudi Arabia for human rights violations, but the U.S. government has avoided pressing the issue. Public worship other than Islam is outlawed, even for foreigners living inside the country. Non-Muslims are not allowed to be buried in the country because the ground, being the birthplace of Islam, is considered too sacred. Saudi Arabia is also known for imposing brutal punishment on lawbreakers, from amputation of limbs to decapitation. Between 1979 and 2008 there were over 1,800 executions in Saudi Arabia, of which more than half were foreign migrant workers. The British docudrama Death of a Princess (1980), based on the 1977 execution of a Saudi princess and her lover for adultery, aroused strong objection by Saudi Arabia when it was aired in the United States by PBS. The American media have criticized Saudi Arabia for practicing “gender apartheid.” Out in public a woman is required to wear a headscarf and a floor-length black garment called an abaya. Women are not allowed to drive and out in public must be escorted by male family members. Females may only attend all-girl schools. At restaurants women must eat in “family” sections, separated from single men. McDonald’s Corp. and Starbucks Coffee Co. have been criticized for allowing their franchises in Saudi Arabia to operate with gender-segregated zones. American service women stationed in Saudi Arabia have also been subjected to some of these gender rules, prompting a 2001 lawsuit by Lieutenant Colonel Martha McSally, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, who objected to wearing a headscarf. (Congress rescinded the headscarf regulation, but the U.S. military still prohibits its female service members from driving while in Saudi Arabia.) A Saudi woman who in 2006 had been gang-raped was sentenced by a Saudi court to 200 lashes for being alone in an automobile with a non-relative male, but the negative foreign media attention led to her receiving a pardon. Some American women who married Saudis and were later divorced have been frustrated by Washington’s lack
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of intervention after their children were kidnapped in the United States and flown to Saudi Arabia, prompting books such as Patricia Roush’s At Any Price: How America Betrayed My Kidnapped Daughters for Saudi Oil (2003). As the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites (Mecca and Medina), Saudi Arabia has extended its religious influence to the larger Muslim world, even using oil proceeds to fund nations (primarily Egypt and Syria) and movements (such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization) that oppose Israel. During the 1980s Saudi males in large numbers, with the monarchy’s blessings, traveled to Afghanistan to fight in a jihad against the Soviet Union. The United States through the CIA assisted some of those fighters, including Osama bin Laden, who in the late 1980s formed the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Its members have since committed terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia, denouncing the monarchy for religious complacency that permitted U.S. forces to marshal in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. According to an October 2001 confidential poll of Saudi males (ages twenty-five to forty-one), 95 percent approved of bin Laden’s jihad against the West. Protecting the oil fields of the Middle East was the U.S. objective of the Gulf War, specifically to counterbalance Iraq, which had the largest military in the Middle East, and to force its withdrawal from Kuwait. American ties to Saudi Arabia date back to 1933 when Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company) received a concession agreement giving it oil rights until 1999. In the early 1970s, however, Saudi authorities withdrew the concession. In 1973, oil was for the first time used as a political weapon, prompting Americans to coin the phrase “energy crisis.” Members of the oil cartel OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), founded thirteen years earlier and dominated by the Saudi regime, imposed an oil embargo against the United States and other Western nations for supporting Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Despite such political twists and turns, between 1973 and 1980 the U.S. government allowed the Saudis to purchase $34 billion of American military hardware. During the early days of the Reagan administration, after acrimonious debate and a narrow 52–48 Senate vote, the United States agreed to sell Saudi Arabia AWACS—Airborne Warning and Control System—radar aircraft for monitoring the Saudi skies against surprise attack. Since September 11 and the subsequent Iraq War, some liberal culture warriors have accused the Bush family of sinister ties with the Saudi monarchy—for example, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 (2004) and Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud (2004). In the meantime, conservatives who have long advocated oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and offshore drilling along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have argued that increasing domestic oil production would allow the
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United States to end its energy dependency on authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Cold War; Fundamentalism, Religious; Israel; Muslim Americans; Reagan, Ronald; September 11.
Further Reading Baer, Robert. Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude. New York: Crown, 2003. Bronson, Rachel. Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Commins, David. The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Posner, Gerald L. Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection. New York: Random House, 2005. U.S. Congress. U.S. Relations with Saudi Arabia: Oil, Anxiety, and Ambivalence: Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Washington, DC: US GPO, 2008.
ministry, which culminated in 1955 with the founding of L’Abri (The Shelter) in Switzerland. There Schaeffer taught Christian apologetics and helped establish the International Council of Christian Churches, a conservative counterpart to the World Council of Churches. (One of his students at L’Abri was Michael Ford, the son of President Gerald R. Ford.) Schaeffer wrote a number of books, including Escape from Reason (1968), The God Who Is There (1968), True Spirituality (1971), and How Then Shall We Live? (1976). His book A Christian Manifesto (1981) and the film series it inspired were criticized for offering a simplified rendering of Western history and philosophy. Some critics found him unscholarly; evangelical historian Mark Noll argued that Schaeffer’s work presented a “simplified myth of America’s Christian past.” Schaeffer died of leukemia on May 15, 1984, in Rochester, Minnesota. L’Abri centers still operate in Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, South Korea, Canada, and the United States; and Schaeffer’s teachings continue to influence many fundamentalists and other conservative Christians. Andrew J. Waskey
S c h a e f f e r, F r a n c i s The evangelical philosopher and Presbyterian pastor Francis Schaeffer, once dubbed the guru of fundamentalism, fortified the Religious Right by linking secular humanism to pornography, the breakdown of the family, abortion, and the expansion of government. He blamed America’s moral decline on the waves of immigrants that, after 1848, were lacking a Reformation background due to their largely Roman Catholic affiliation. He encouraged “true believers” to rise up in civil disobedience to cast aside immoral laws and reclaim the nation’s Christian—that is, Protestant—heritage. Francis August Schaeffer was born on January 30, 1912, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He attended Hampden-Sydney College, graduating magna cum laude in 1935, and married Edith Seville, whose parents had served as missionaries with the Inland China Mission. He also attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (1935–1937), founded in the wake of a modernist-fundamentalist conflict at Princeton Theological Seminary and in opposition to the trend toward a liberal theological interpretation of the Bible. Orthodox Presbyterian leaders, among them Carl McIntire, organized Westminster, which eventually led to the formation of the Presbyterian Church in America. A new split established the Bible Presbyterian Church and its Faith Theological Seminary. Schaeffer graduated from the latter in 1938 and became the new denomination’s first ordained pastor. From 1938 to 1948 Schaeffer served in pastorates in several states. He then moved to Europe to start a youth
See also: Abortion; American Exceptionalism; Catholic Church; Evangelicalism; Ford, Gerald; Fundamentalism, Religious; Immigration Policy; Koop, C. Everett; McIntire, Carl; Pornography; Religious Right; Secular Humanism; World Council of Churches.
Further Reading Duriez, Colin. Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008. Ruegsegger, Ronald W., ed. Reflections on Francis Schaeffer. Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1986. Schaeffer, Francis A. The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview. 5 vols. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1985. Wellman, Sam. Francis and Edith Schaeffer: Defenders of the Faith. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour, 2000.
S c h i avo , Te r r i Terri Schiavo garnered international attention as a symbol of what religious conservatives described as the “culture of death” and what end-of-life activists viewed as a person’s right to die. For fifteen years, in a persistent vegetative state, she received nutrition and hydration through a feeding tube while a vitriolic legal battle was fought between her husband and her parents over whether to end that care. Her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, sought to remove the tube, claiming it was consistent with his wife’s medical prognosis and her wishes. Mary and Robert Schindler, the woman’s parents, took
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The highly charged case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state since 1990, pitted her husband, who asked that life support be discontinued, against her parents and anti-euthanasia groups. Schiavo died in 2005, thirteen days after the removal of her feeding tube. (Matt May/Getty Images)
legal action to block removal of the feeding tube because of their commitment to the sanctity of life and their belief that she might one day be restored to health. Schiavo was twenty-six years old when, on February 25, 1990, she collapsed in the couple’s apartment. Paramedics found her unconscious, not breathing, and without a pulse. A cause was never determined. Unable to swallow, Schiavo underwent surgical placement of a feeding tube for the delivery of nutrients. By the end of 1990, she was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, having never regained consciousness. In 1998, after years of unsuccessful rehabilitation efforts and on the advice of his wife’s physicians, Michael Schiavo petitioned the court to cease his wife’s medical treatments, including the feeding tube. Removal of the feeding tube was opposed by the Schindlers, leading to a complex series of court battles and political interventions. The Schindlers were aided by an array of organizations and personalities—including Not Dead Yet, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, and actor Mel Gibson—who joined in an attempt to “save Terri” through an Internet-based public relations campaign marked by disability rights rhetoric and antiabortion slogans. The scheduled removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube in
October 2003 and again in March 2005 created a media frenzy and ignited a political firestorm. Special laws designed to block the court-ordered removal and to provide federal judicial oversight of the Florida state court proceedings were passed by the Florida legislature and the U.S. Congress and signed, respectively, by Governor Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush. Despite these unprecedented legislative and executive interventions in an end-of-life court proceeding, the courts continued to uphold the decision of Schiavo’s husband. Schiavo died on March 31, 2005, thirteen days after removal of the feeding tube. In his Focus on the Family newsletter, James Dobson argued, “Terri’s killing signifies conclusively that the judicial system in this country is far too powerful and . . . out of control.” But a majority of legal, medical, and bioethical commentators found the Schiavo case a model of thorough legal proceedings, careful medical analysis, and appropriate protections of a patient’s right to self-determination. Joshua E. Perry See also: Bush Family; Dobson, James; Evangelicalism; Focus on the Family; Gibson, Mel; Jackson, Jesse; Judicial Wars; Not Dead Yet; Operation Rescue; Right to Die.
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Further Reading Dobson, James. “Life, Death and Judicial Tyranny.” Focus on the Family Action Newsletter, April 2005. Perry, Joshua E., Larry R. Churchill, and Howard S. Kirshner. “The Terri Schiavo Case: Legal, Ethical, and Medical Perspectives.” Annals of Internal Medicine 143:10 (2005): 744–48. Schiavo, Michael. Terri: The Truth. New York: Dutton, 2006. Schindler, Mary, and Robert Schindler. A Life That Matters: The Legacy of Terri Schiavo—A Lesson for Us All. New York: Warner Books, 2006.
S c h l a f l y, P hy l l i s Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent antifeminist leader best known for her relentless opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), has actively participated in the conservative wing of the Republican Party since the 1950s. She has been called the “Gloria Steinem of the Right.” Phyllis McAlpin Stewart, born on August 15, 1924, in St. Louis, Missouri, was raised in a Catholic home and attended a female parochial school. She studied government and politics at Washington University in St. Louis (AB, 1944) and Radcliffe University (MA, 1945). Returning to Washington University decades later, she studied law (JD, 1978). On October 20, 1949, she married Fred Schlafly, Jr., of Alton, Illinois, a wealthy attorney and political conservative, and together they had six children. Schlafly’s marriage reinforced her growing conservatism, and during the 1950s and 1960s, she and her husband formed a dynamic couple in Illinois Republican Party politics. In 1952, she ran unsuccessfully for Congress and helped organize a GOP meeting in Alton on behalf of presidential hopeful Robert Taft, a U.S. senator from Ohio. The Schlaflys co-founded the Catholic anticommunist Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in 1959. At some point Phyllis Schlafly was a member of the John Birch Society. During the 1964 presidential campaign, she wrote A Choice Not an Echo to promote the presidential drive of Barry Goldwater. In 1970, she once again failed at a bid for Congress. Although she was exceptionally active in Republican Party politics at the state and local levels, it was her opposition to the ERA that propelled Schlafly into the national spotlight. Her initial opposition was based on the perception that the ERA was a threat to the family, which she defined in the February 1972 issue of the Phyllis Schlafly Report as “the basic unit of society, which is ingrained in the laws and customs of our Judeo-Christian civilization [and] is the great single achievement in the history of women’s rights.” With this basic philosophy, she and other conservative women in September 1972 founded Stop Taking Our Privileges (STOP ERA) to counter the ERA movement.
Through STOP ERA and later the Eagle Forum, founded in 1975, Schlafly articulated her opposition to the proposed amendment. If the ERA passed, she warned, courts would reinterpret legislation passed to protect women; abortion would continue unimpeded; women would be forced into combat situations through the draft; homosexual rights would be grafted into the Constitution; and laws governing child support, alimony, and divorce would be put in jeopardy. Any intended good of the ERA, Schlafly argued, was already provided by the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. Critics characterized her efforts as impeding the progress of women’s rights. Schlafly voiced her arguments against the ERA at protest rallies, congressional hearings, and lobbying sessions right up to the June 30, 1982, ratification deadline. In the decades after the amendment’s defeat, she remained a strong voice in the conservative ranks of the Republican Party, publishing her monthly newsletter and writing a number of books on education, the courts, politics, and defense policy (she once described the atomic bomb as “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God”). In May 2008, students and faculty at Washington University protested against Schlafly being awarded an honorary doctorate degree. Matthew C. Sherman See also: Abortion; Equal Rights Amendment; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Goldwater, Barry; Judicial Wars; National Organization for Women; Same-Sex Marriage; Stay-at-Home Mothers; Taft, Robert, Jr.
Further Reading Critchlow, Donald T. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Felsenthal, Carol. The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schlafly. New York: Doubleday, 1981. Hoff-Wilson, Joan, ed. Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
S c h l e s i n g e r, A r t h u r M . , J r. Historian, author, adviser to presidents, and political activist Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., spent the second half of the twentieth century championing liberalism and defending the legacies of the New Deal. Schlesinger is perhaps best known for his cyclical theory of American political history, which suggests that the United States has a tradition of swinging back and forth between periods of reform and conservative resurgence. Similarly, he observed a tension between two views of the nation, the Puritan model (American exceptionalism and the belief
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of predestined national greatness) and the Founding Fathers model (a nation of bold experimentation, but nonetheless a nation among nations). Himself the son of a prominent Harvard historian, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., was born on October 15, 1917, in Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of Harvard University (AB, 1938), he served during World War II with the Office of War Information (1942–1943) and the Office of Strategic Services (1943–1945). Despite not obtaining a doctoral degree, Schlesinger had a distinguished academic career at Harvard (1946–1961) and the City University of New York (1966–1995). In addition to teaching, Schlesinger served as a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) and President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1964), and acted as a campaign adviser to Adlai Stevenson and Robert Kennedy. Schlesinger died in New York City on February 28, 2007. A self-described “noncommunist leftist,” Schlesinger helped found the liberal anticommunist organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA, 1947), opposed McCarthyism and “Nixonism,” warned against the “radical Right,” and later declared the Vietnam War a “moral outrage.” In defense of liberalism, Schlesinger argued that it serves as the “vital center” between the totalitarian extremes of communism and fascism. During a 1961 debate with conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review, Schlesinger asserted that the welfare state is “deeply consistent with the American tradition” and is also “the best security against communism.” That remark was scorned by Republicans and conservative Democrats, including Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL), who characterized it as “a crisis in the mental history of Arthur Schlesinger.” Schlesinger is the author of many books, including The Age of Jackson (1945), a work placing Andrew Jackson in the liberal tradition, and which won a Pulitzer Prize; The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), a defense of postwar liberalism; The Age of Roosevelt (1957, 1959, 1960), a three-volume work extolling the bold experimentation of the New Deal; A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965), a behind-thescenes account of the Kennedy administration that won a Pulitzer Prize for Biography; The Imperial Presidency (1973), an analysis of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies and the abuse of executive power; and The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1991), a repudiation of “politically correct” history, including black studies and Afrocentrism. Over the years, Schlesinger’s harshest critics accused him of violating the objectivity of the historian by allowing partisanship to color his work, but he suggested that history is “the quest for an unattainable objectivity” and gained a wide following for his perceptive analyses. Roger Chapman
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See also: Afrocentrism; American Exceptionalism; Communists and Communism; Founding Fathers; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy Family; McCarthyism; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; New Deal; Nixon, Richard; Political Correctness; Revisionist History.
Further Reading Depoe, Stephen P. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Ideological History of American Liberalism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Diggins, John Patrick, ed. The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
School of the Americas The School of the Americas (SOA)—renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC) in 2001—was founded in 1946 at the onset of the Cold War for the purpose of training Latin American military officers in tactics used for fighting communist insurgency. A U.S. Army facility operated in Spanish under Pentagon oversight, it was known as the Latin American Training Center until 1963. Originally located at Fort Gulick in Panama, the SOA was relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984, after the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty. Since 1990 the school has been the scene of an annual protest led by Catholic activists. From 1963 to 1996, the SOA trained 61,000 soldiers from eleven South and Central American countries. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the facility became the object of public criticism because some of its graduates were linked to right-wing terror, death squads, and military takeovers. For example, SOA graduate General Romeo Lucas García was the dictator of Guatemala from 1978 to 1982, during which time that nation witnessed some 5,000 political murders and 25,000 civilian deaths; three Honduran generals, also SOA graduates, in the 1970s formed an army death squad called Battalion 3-16; and nearly all of the officers responsible for overthrowing the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, were SOA graduates. It was the tarnished reputation of the SOA that compelled the Pentagon to rename it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The existence of the SOA became more widely known after the shooting deaths of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador on November 16, 1989. Of the twenty-six soldiers implicated in the murders, nineteen were later found to have been trained by the SOA. On the first anniversary of the massacre, Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, accompanied by protestors Charles Liteky and Patrick Liteky,
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entered SOA headquarters and poured blood over the photographs on display of the school’s distinguished graduates. All three men were jailed, but their act of civil disobedience gave birth to the advocacy group School of the Americas Watch. Into the twenty-first century, that organization has continued protesting the operation of the training center, which it dubs the “School of the Assassins” and the “School of Coups.” Each November, SOA Watch conducts a massive protest outside the gates of Fort Benning. A 1992 internal Department of Defense investigative report, never intended for public dissemination, revealed that between 1982 and 1991 “torture manuals” had been a part of the SOA’s curriculum. Newspapers across the country responded with editorials calling for the dismantling of the training center. In 1996, SOA Watch established an office in Washington, D.C., with the goal of lobbying Congress to do just that. In 1999, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 230–197 to reduce the school’s funding from $4.5 million to $2 million, but the Senate opposed the reduction. In 2000, the House failed to pass a measure that would have shut down the school entirely. In the wake of the post–September 11 abuse of prisoners and detainees by American service personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, critics have pointed to the SOA as proof of a long-standing and institutionalized darker side of the U.S. military system. Roger Chapman See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Catholic Church; Central Intelligence Agency; Cold War; Human Rights.
Further Reading Gill, Leslie. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack. School of Assassins: Guns, Greed, and Globalization. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Quigley, Bill. “The Case for Closing the School of the Americas.” BYU Journal of Public Law 20:1 (2006): 1–34. School of the Americas Watch web site. www.soaw.org. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation web site. www.benning.army.mil/whinsec.
S c h o o l P r aye r A test of the separation between church and state, the issue of mandatory prayer in public schools has been an ongoing and often controversial issue in the United States since the Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s. The matter came to a head in the early 1960s, after a number of individuals filed federal lawsuits against public school districts for conducting prayer in the classroom and requiring students to take part. In several major rulings at
that time, the U.S. Supreme Court declared such official rituals unconstitutional. While a bitter grievance of the Religious Right ever since, school prayer has not been an issue of utmost concern to most Americans. Nonetheless, a Gallup poll as recent as August 2005 showed that 76 percent of Americans support a constitutional amendment permitting voluntary school prayer.
Cold War Era Before the Supreme Court ban on state-sponsored school prayer, only about one-third of the public schools in postwar America actually conducted classroom prayer. Some regions were more “prayer oriented” than others: 80 percent of elementary schools conducted prayer in the South and East; 38 percent did so in the Midwest; and only 14 percent in the West. State courts banned school prayer in Washington, California, South Dakota, Nebraska, Louisiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The controversy surrounding school prayer emerged partly as a function of the Cold War, a time when many Americans equated atheism with communism. In this context, the phrase “In God We Trust” was inscribed on legal tender, and the words “under God” were inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance. In 1952, Congress directed the president to establish a National Day of Prayer. Although some school systems had a tradition of prayer and Bible reading dating back to the nineteenth century, others did not introduce devotional exercises until the Cold War era. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5–4 majority interpreted the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ”—as requiring a “wall of separation” between church and state. With the doctrine of separation in place, the high court in McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) then declared it unconstitutional for public schools to offer religious instruction. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the high court declared mandatory prayer in public schools unconstitutional. This was followed by Abington v. Schempp (1963) and Murray v. Curlett (1963), which outlawed mandatory Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools.
The Engel Case In July 1958, the Herricks School Board in Nassau County on Long Island (New York) directed its teachers to recite the State Board of Regents’ prayer each school day. Drafted in November 1951, the prayer read, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” New York governor Thomas Dewey endorsed the prayer, saying that it was useful for opposing “the slave world of godless commu-
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nism.” New York educational associations also endorsed the prayer, believing that it could serve as an antidote to “narcotics and alcohol.” Protestant and Catholic leaders endorsed the recitation as well. Opposing the prayer directive were the liberal denominational magazine Christian Century (which warned that rote prayer can become an “empty formality”); the United Parents Association (which argued that students should not be forced to recite “what they do not even understand”); and several major Jewish organizations (which called it a violation of the separation of church and state). After Herricks High School announced plans for implementing regular prayer, twenty-eight parents, representing thirty-nine students, requested that their children be excused from participating. In the legal case that ensued, Engel v. Vitale, the five plaintiffs, all Jewish parents, had one child each enrolled in the high school. Steven Engel opposed the Board of Regents’ prayer after his son told him he should not have to attend synagogue since he was praying in school. Another plaintiff, Lawrence Roth, was an atheist who had painful memories of a brother being lynched in Pennsylvania for being a Jew, and did not want his son to be subjected to religious indoctrination. Roth, who had made the initial contact with the New York Civil Liberties Union over the matter, would receive hundreds of threatening phone calls and letters, many with anti-Semitic remarks; his driveway would later be the scene of a cross-burning. Another father, Monroe Lerner, regarded the prayer as a “mockery” and an “imposition,” arguing that the provision allowing a student not to participate in the prayer only served to mark him or her as a “pariah.” Daniel Lichtenstein op-
High school football players in Odessa, Texas, bow their heads in prayer before a game in September 2000. The prayer session was unsanctioned by the school because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that banned such activity as unconstitutional. (Joe Raedle/Newsmakers/Getty Images)
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posed the prayer because of his belief in the separation of church and state. The only female plaintiff, Lenore Lyons, was of Jewish descent but a member of the Unitarian Church.
The Abington and Murray Cases As Engel wound its way through the lower courts, the Abington and Murray cases were also under way. In 1956, sixteen-year-old Ellery Frank Schempp, whose religious affiliation was Unitarian, objected to the daily ritual at Abington Senior High School (in a Philadelphia suburb) of reading ten verses out of the Protestant King James Version Bible and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Schempp did not agree with a literal reading of the Bible, thought the devotional was a violation of the Establishment Clause, and, with his parents’ permission, filed a lawsuit with the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1960, Madalyn Murray, a social worker and an atheist, sued the Baltimore public school system for exposing her son, William, to daily Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer—morning devotionals she characterized as “brainwashing.” In all three cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled official school prayer a violation of the Establishment Clause. In Engel, the justices held, 6–1, that “daily classroom invocation of God’s blessings as prescribed in the Regents’ prayer . . . [is] a religious activity.” The decisions in the Abington and Murray cases were consolidated, with the justices ruling, 8–1, that Bible reading and prayer in the present instances constituted “religious exercises, required by the States in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion.” Justice Potter Stewart dissented in both rulings, arguing that Thomas Jefferson’s “sterile metaphor” about a “wall of separation” was “a fallacious oversimplification of the Establishment Clause.” Americans, he went on, “are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Justice William O. Douglas, while siding with the majority, nevertheless admitted certain inconsistencies. In his Engel concurring opinion, the liberal Douglas wrote, “What New York does on the opening of its public schools is what we do when we open court. Our Crier has from the beginning announced the convening of the Court and then added ‘God Save the United States and this Honorable Court.’ That utterance is a supplication, a prayer in which we, the judges, are free to join, but which we need not recite any more than the students need to recite the New York prayer. What New York does on the opening of its public schools is what each House of Congress does at the opening of each day’s business.”
Aftermath The general public voiced strong disagreement with the Engel decision. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education
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(1954), which banned school segregation, the outlawing of school prayer further convinced the right wing that Chief Justice Earl Warren should be impeached. The ultra-right John Birch Society, which responded to Brown by mounting a billboard campaign against Warren, used the issue of school prayer to bolster its argument. “Remove Warren, Restore God” was the slogan of a different group, the Committee to Restore God and Prayer in Our Schools. A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine depicted Whistler’s Mother embroidering a pillowcase with the words, “Impeach Earl Warren.” In the wake of Engel and Abington, several attempts were made to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow school prayer. In spring 1964, at the urging of U.S. congressman Frank Becker (R-NY) of Long Island, the House Judiciary Committee conducted hearings on school prayer amendments. The “Amen Amendment,” introduced by Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL), failed a Senate vote on September 21, 1966. A second prayer amendment, offered by Congressman Chalmer Wylie (R-OH), was rejected by the House on November 8, 1971. And the Senate failed to approve President Ronald Reagan’s prayer amendment on March 20, 1984. Since the 1970s, state and local governments, emboldened by the influence of the Religious Right, have been testing the legal boundaries of the separation of church and state. In June 1978, Kentucky legislators mandated that public schools display the Ten Commandments, but the law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Stone v. Graham (1980). Alabama mandated a “moment of silence” each day in its school system, but the Supreme Court in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985) overturned that mandate on the grounds that its purpose was inherently religious. Clergy-led prayer at public high school commencement exercises was ruled unconstitutional in the high court ruling of Lee v. Weisman (1992). And in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), the Supreme Court ruled against student-led prayers before the start of school football games. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Church and State; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Douglas, William O.; John Birch Society; Judicial Wars; O’Hair, Madalyn Murray; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; Warren, Earl.
Further Reading Dierenfield, Bruce J. The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. “Pro and Con: Return Prayer to Public Schools?” U.S. News & World Report, September 15, 1980.
Solomon, Stephen D. Ellery’s Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
School Shootings Since the 1990s, deadly shootings on school grounds and college campuses across America have prompted much reaction from culture warriors who have linked the tragedies to various perceived social problems: lax gun control, media violence, declining family values, abandonment of religious instruction, rejection of personal responsibility, and victimization. On April 20, 1999, the worst school shooting to date took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold utilized homemade bombs, shotguns, a carbine rifle, and a TEC-DC9 pistol to kill twelve fellow students and one teacher while wounding thirty-three others before taking their own lives. The deadliest college shooting occurred at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) on April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean immigrant and senior at the school, used Glock and P22 pistols to shoot to death thirty-three (including himself) while wounding twenty-three others. Both of these attacks, as well as numerous others, involved assailants who were socially alienated, in some cases alleged victims of peer bullying, and struggling with mental health problems. With each new incident, there is widespread debate over how society should best react to school shootings— specifically, the 333 fatalities between September 1992 and April 2008, as documented by the National School Safety Center. One side argues that media hype has ignored or downplayed statistics showing a decline in school-related shootings. Of the total youth homicides during that time period, less than 1 percent involved school shootings. In addition, of the nation’s 30,000 annual shooting deaths, only a handful occur on college campuses. The media fixation on violent news events, they argue, inspires “copy cat” attacks (Cho of Virginia Tech, for example, referred to the Columbine assailants as “martyrs,” while the Columbine attackers seemed to have been partially inspired by the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) and provides posthumous infamy (on the day of his attack, Cho mailed tapes and other materials to NBC News). In addition, they argue, too much attention on school shootings diverts limited financial resources from more serious social problems (such as violence that occurs off school grounds), leads to an oppressive school environment (involving metal detectors, surveillance cameras, lockdown drills, zero tolerance policies, and student snitching), and falsely suggests that adolescents are the main perpetrators of gun violence. Those who think the focus on school shootings has been overblown point out that such violence is not new.
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On January 29, 1979, for example, sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer fired a .22-caliber rifle into a crowd at the Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, across the street from her home, killing two and wounding seven. (Spencer’s explanation for the crime—she said she did not like Mondays—inspired the 1979 single “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the UK new wave band Boomtown Rats.) The first major college shooting occurred on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman, a former altar boy, Eagle Scout, and U.S. Marine, perched himself on the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin and conducted sniper fire (he was equipped with Remington rifles, an M1 carbine, a shotgun, and other weapons), killing fourteen and wounding thirty-one before being gunned down by Austin police. Ten years later, on July 12, 1976, Edward Charles Allaway committed the so-called library massacre at California State University (Cal State), Fullerton, fatally shooting seven and wounding two with a .22-caliber rifle. Regardless of these earlier incidents, many believe that the 1990s represented something new and concur with former CBS News anchorman Dan Rather who, following the tragedy at Columbine, pronounced school shootings a “national epidemic.” This assessment was based on the increase of school rampage shootings in contradiction to the otherwise general trend of declining school violence. In the eighteen months preceding Columbine, school shootings killed three and wounded seven at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi (October 1, 1997); killed three and wounded five at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky (December 1, 1997); killed five and wounded ten at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas (March 24, 1998); killed one and wounded three at Parker Middle School in Edinboro, Pennsylvania (April 24, 1998); killed two and wounded one at Philadelphia Elementary School in Pomona, California (April 28, 1998); killed one at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, Tennessee (May 19, 1998); killed two and wounded twenty-two at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon (May 21, 1998); and wounded two at Armstrong High School in Richmond, Virginia (June 15, 1998). Those advocating special action to curb rampage shootings have conceded that the saturation media coverage has been a factor in inspiring further violence, but they stress the importance of public awareness for foiling plots. Unlike typical school shootings of the past, rampage shootings are usually planned well in advance and even talked about ahead of time. In 2001, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, “Although school-associated violent deaths remain rare events, they have occurred often enough to allow for the detection of patterns and the identification of potential risk factors.” Many of the proposed solutions for preventing school shootings betray a continuation of the culture wars, such as mandating moments of silence and displaying the Ten
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Commandments in schools; enforcing zero tolerance and requiring school uniforms; arming teachers and making guns more available; making guns less available; banning violent video games; and identifying alienated and disaffected individuals and victims of student bullying. Bowling for Columbine (2002), the polemical documentary film by Michael Moore, has linked school shootings to the National Rifle Association (which weeks after Columbine held an abbreviated annual meeting in Denver), the military-industrial complex (the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, it is noted, is the chief employer of Littleton), and class struggle. (Unlike others, Moore rejects the view that the music of Marilyn Manson and violent video games such as Doom were inspirational factors in the Columbine attack.) In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre—succeeded by the February 14, 2008, shooting at Northern Illinois University, in which Steven Kazmierczak used a shotgun and Glock pistol to kill seven (including himself) and injure fifteen others—many colleges across the country have bolstered campus security and implemented “alert messaging” systems that include panic buttons on computers. Roger Chapman See also: Family Values; Gun Control; Manson, Marilyn; McVeigh, Timothy; Moore, Michael; National Rifle Association; Rather, Dan; School Prayer; Ten Commandments; Victimhood.
Further Reading Gabarino, James. Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them. New York: Free Press, 1999. Lebrun, Marcel. Books, Blackboards, and Bullets: School Shootings and Violence in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2009. Moore, Mark Harrison. Deadly Lessons: Understanding School Violence. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2003. Newman, Katharine S., Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth. Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Zoba, Wendy Murray. Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2000.
S c h o o l Vo u c h e r s Promoted as “school choice,” school voucher programs give parents the option of sending their children to private or parochial schools instead of public schools by offering a voucher, tax credit, or scholarship to cover part or all of the tuition. The debate on school vouchers has raised fundamental questions regarding the purpose, control, and funding of public education in America. Voucher proponents advocate market-based freedom of choice, arguing that it will increase educational op-
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portunities for students attending failing public schools, as well as produce more effective schools and better educational outcomes for all children. Voucher programs, backers insist, promote equity by providing low-income families the option to leave underperforming schools—an option previously available only to families with greater financial means. Proponents also argue that school choice programs encourage increased parental involvement and more efficient educational organizations because the money allocated to parents and students flows directly from the parent to the school rather than through the local, state, or federal bureaucracy. Opponents of school vouchers maintain that such programs lead to greater economic, racial, and religious stratification; weaken public schools; undermine the education profession; and threaten public school systems’ ability to offer all children equal access to quality education. In general, opponents regard vouchers as part of the privatization movement that seeks to dismantle public services, including universal education. Critics of vouchers also point out that private schools are effectively out of reach to the poorest students because vouchers, tax credits, and other scholarship programs often do not cover the entire cost of tuition. Moreover, private schools, unlike public ones, have the right to reject students; thus, having a voucher does not necessarily mean having a choice. The most controversial school choice programs allow parents to use vouchers to pay tuition at religious schools. One such program is the Cleveland (Ohio) Scholarship and Tutoring Program. Of all voucher students in Cleveland in the early 2000s, 99.4 percent attended religious schools. Opponents of government-subsidized faith-based programs view them as a violation of the separation of church and state. In the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), however, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cleveland’s school voucher program, ruling that vouchers can be used to pay for tuition at sectarian schools without violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Almost all existing school voucher programs have been the subject of legal challenge, with varying results. They have been upheld by state courts in Arizona, Illinois, Maine, Ohio, and Wisconsin but overturned in Vermont and Florida. Given the variations in the state programs, the divergent interpretations of state constitutional provisions, and the need to improve public schools, the debate over education and the efficacy of school voucher programs no doubt will continue. Traci L. Nelson See also: Academic Freedom; Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Busing, School; Charter Schools; Education Reform; Faith-Based Programs; Privatization.
Further Reading Lupu, Ira C., and Robert W. Tuttle. “Zelman’s Future: Vouchers, Sectarian Providers, and the Next Round of Constitutional Battles.” Notre Dame Law Review 78 (2003): 917–94. Merrifield, John. The School Choice Wars. London: Scarecrow, 2001. Omand, H. Lillian. “The Struggle for School Choice Policy After Zelman: Regulation v. Free Market.” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 495, October 29, 2003. Ravitch, Diane, and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds. Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us About School Reform. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Smith, Colleen Carlton. “Zelman’s Evolving Legacy: Selective Funding of Secular Private Schools in State School Choice Programs.” Virginia Law Review 89:8 (2003): 1953–2004.
S c h w a r z e n e g g e r, A r n o l d The Austrian-born former world champion bodybuilder and Hollywood film star Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California in November 2003 after winning an election the previous month in which the incumbent, Democrat Gray Davis, was recalled. A Republican, fiscally conservative but socially liberal, Schwarzenegger went on to win reelection to a full term in 2006. His background has prompted comparison to both Ronald Reagan (an actor turned California governor, 1967– 1975) and Jesse Ventura (a professional wrestler turned Minnesota governor, 1999–2003). In the culture wars, Schwarzenegger positioned himself as a political moderate, claiming to be “post-partisan.” The son of a Nazi army veteran, police chief, and champion curler, Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger was born in Graz, Austria, on July 30, 1947. He briefly served in the Austrian army (1965) and then went on to win thirteen world champion bodybuilding titles, including Mr. Olympia, Mr. World, and Mr. Universe (1965–1980). In the late 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles and by the 1970s was appearing in Hollywood movies. After studying at the University of Wisconsin at Superior (BA, business and international economics, 1980), Schwarzenegger became an American citizen in 1983. Three years later he married Maria Shriver, a television journalist and a member of the Kennedy clan. (Her mother was Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of the late president John F. Kennedy.) Beginning in the early 1980s, Schwarzenegger starred in a run of blockbuster action films, including Conan the Barbarian (1982), The Terminator (1984), Predator (1987), Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2 (1991), and Terminator 3 (2003). Before becoming governor, he served on national and state physical fitness councils. Some believe that Schwarzenegger’s attraction to public service was motivated in part to defuse criticism about the violent nature of his films. He cultivated a “family values” persona with his starring role in Kinder-
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garten Cop (1990) and a $1 million donation to promote a California ballot initiative to increase after-school programs for children. Later, while a candidate for governor, his wholesome image was tarnished by reports of sexual misconduct against several young women. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he served on a board to provide for the family victims of the World Trade Center disaster. Ironically, the release date of his film Collateral Damage (2001), about a terrorist plot in the United States, was delayed because of the real attacks in New York. As governor, Schwarzenegger came to be known as the “Governator,” a play on his popular Terminator character. In November 2005, Schwarzenegger flabbergasted Sacramento Republican circles when he announced that Susan P. Kennedy, a prominent local Democrat and lesbian, would be his chief of staff. Kennedy (no relation to Shriver) had been a deputy chief of staff for Governor Davis but agreed to work for Schwarzenegger because of his $222 billion plan to improve the state’s infrastructure without raising taxes. The appointment of Kennedy followed a largely unsuccessful year for Schwarzenegger, in which he attempted to undermine the power of Democratic legislators (whom he called “girlie men”) and steer the state in a more conservative direction by introducing four ballot measures—to extend probation for new public school teachers, restrict union political spending, alter legislative boundaries, and introduce a cap on the state budget—all of which the voters rejected. Despite that setback, Schwarzenegger overwhelmingly won reelection in November 2006. Since then, members of his own party have criticized him for moving to the left, as characterized by his endorsing an increase in the minimum wage, mandating a reduction in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, moving some nonviolent female criminals from jail to rehabilitation programs, and backing universal health care. Opponents of capital punishment were disappointed by his refusal to commute the death sentence of former Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams in December 2005. Roger Chapman See also: Capital Punishment; Family Values; Gangs; Global Warming; Health Care; Prison Reform; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; September 11; Sexual Harassment; Ventura, Jesse.
Further Reading Cooper, Marc. “Is the Terminator in Freefall?” Nation, October 31, 2005. Leamer, Laurence. Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Wilentz, Amy. I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in an Age of Schwarzenegger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
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S c i e n c e Wa r s The wide-ranging political and religious conflicts over science in contemporary America—the “science wars”—reflect differences between the consensus view of a particular scientific community or discipline on the one hand, and the Religious Right, corporate economic interests, or advocates of a political ideology, usually conservative, on the other hand. The overarching context of the contemporary science wars is the growth of the federal government in the post–World War II era, leading to federal involvement in local education to bolster science curricula; a body of federal regulations regarding the environment, health, communication systems, transportation, and other areas of everyday life; and government spending on research and development for military-industrial endeavors. The religious science wars, in particular, are fought over such issues as evolution versus creationism, stem-cell research, and the science of sexuality. Science wars driven by economic interests include the long struggle of the tobacco companies to deny the health risks of cigarettes and secondhand smoke, and the petroleum industry’s support for skeptics of global warming. Conflicts between those espousing a conservative political agenda and the scientific community include those surrounding the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or the “Star Wars” antimissile defense system) proposed during the Reagan administration in the 1980s but viewed by most scientists as impractical. Such is the prestige of science in modern society, however, that none of the opposition groups has declared itself directly in opposition to science. Instead, they typically claim to be the proponents of a more true and valid science than that of a corrupt or politicized scientific establishment. Collaboration between business interests, political conservatives, and the Religious Right on various issues has strengthened the antiscience movement. In Congress, it has been strongest among Republicans. Various GOP presidential administrations, particularly those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have been known for supporting political positions that are in opposition to the mainstream scientific consensus. Among the most prominent corporate science wars of the postwar era have been those waged in response to the environmental and public health movements. In both cases, scientific data and research findings have been ignored or attacked by corporate interests because of their negative commercial implications. The tactic was pioneered by the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign against scientific research linking smoking to cancer and other diseases. Another early example was the organized response of chemical and pesticide industries to Rachel Carson’s environmentalist classic Silent Spring (1962), which highlighted the harmful effects of the insecticide DDT. Tactics used by commercial interests
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have included outright denial, character assassination, and the use of “fringe” scientists, often directly or indirectly compensated by the commercial interests themselves, to cast doubt on the mainstream position. Several conservative think tanks have been especially associated with the science wars, among them the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the George C. Marshall Institute. These and other corporate-funded policy and research organizations issue scientific reports and technological assessments with the goal of making the mainstream view on certain issues seem inconclusive or in dispute. All three of the above-mentioned groups, for example, remain skeptical regarding the threat of global warming. In media coverage, the conventions of journalistic “evenhandedness” and balance often cause reporters to present the scientific consensus and the claims of opponents on an equal footing. Corporate-backed science warriors have also developed a distinctive rhetoric, using terms such as “junk science” to condemn their opponents, while describing their own views as “sound science.” By no means are all environmental science wars driven by the political right. One issue that pits the scientific mainstream against forces on the environmentalist left is genetic modification of food crops. While organizations such as Greenpeace cast doubt on the safety of such foods, their relative lack of financial resources has made it harder for them to have an impact on this issue. The religious science wars have centered primarily on the life sciences and spilled over into the social sciences. Among the oldest and most contentious issues, of course, is evolution, pitting the religious view, based on a literal account of creation in Genesis, against the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community that life has evolved in a natural process over billions of years. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), the evangelical academic Mark Noll titles one chapter “Thinking about Science,” in which he laments “the damaging intellectual habits of fundamentalism” with its fixation on so-called creation science. Other major and recurring concerns for conservative Christians are the ethical and religious issues raised by advances in medicine and the life sciences—or “bioethics.” These range from the debate on abortion and the use of embryonic stem cells for scientific research to in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and the use of medical equipment to sustain brain-dead patients. Religious science warriors often place their struggles in a cultural context, claiming that the real enemy is secularism and its “culture of death.” They have sometimes forged alliances of convenience with postmodernists to attack established scientific truth in favor of intellectual pluralism, notably in the campaign to teach the “intelligent design” theory of the development of life alongside the scientific theory of evolution. Christian religious
activists have also opposed the scientific consensus in denying the effectiveness of condoms in preventing AIDS, asserting a link between abortion and breast cancer, and supporting “abstinence only” sex education. Hostilities between the Republican Party and ideological conservatives on the one hand, and the nation’s scientific community on the other hand intensified in the 1990s, particularly after the GOP won a majority in both houses of Congress in 1994. The new Republican Congress dismantled that body’s respected scientific advisory body, the Office of Technology Assessment, in 1995. But the science wars reached new heights during the administration of George W. Bush, which was powerfully influenced by both religious conservatives and corporate interests. Bush’s strongly conservative politics combined with his effort to subordinate nonpolitical executive branch appointees, including scientists, to political officials. The political appointees were often former industry lobbyists, Religious Right figures, or professional Republican operatives lacking scientific credentials and convinced that the scientific community was an enemy. One major struggle in the Bush administration involved global warming. Climate researchers throughout the federal government complained that political pressure was put on them not to speak openly about climate change. References to global warming were often omitted from press releases, reports, and Web sites, while politically appointed supervisors controlled or blocked the scientists from speaking with the media. The issue was a politically sensitive one in the Bush administration, given that the president’s rival in the 2000 election, Al Gore, had emerged as the world’s most prominent advocate for changes in environmental policy. In 2004, opposition to the Bush administration in the scientific community was voiced in a statement by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eventually, forty-eight Noble laureates and many other distinguished American scientists would associate themselves with the statement. Many of the signatories and other scientists organized in support of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign for president. William E. Burns See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Biotech Revolution; Carson, Rachel; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Food and Drug Administration; Fundamentalism, Religious; Genetically Modified Foods; Global Warming; Nuclear Age; Postmodernism; Religious Right; Smoking in Public; Sokal Affair; Strategic Defense Initiative; Think Tanks.
Further Reading Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross. Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sec ular Humanism Glantz, Stanton A., John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes, eds. The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Mooney, Chris. The Republican War on Science. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Noll, Mark A. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.
Secular Humanism Secular humanism, a philosophy that looks to reason and science as the basis for moral decision making and cultural expression, has become a highly charged issue in America’s culture wars. Those who espouse secular humanism generally regard organized religion, particularly traditional Christianity, as a threat to rationality and human progress. The Religious Right has attacked secular humanists for promoting a type of religion that eschews God, faith, moral rectitude, and traditional values. The American Humanist Association, an organization founded to promote humanism, details its secular philosophy in Humanist Manifesto I (1933), Humanist Manifesto II (1973), and Humanist Manifesto III (2003). The first document, endorsed by the philosopher John Dewey and some thirty others, espoused “religious humanism” as a twentieth-century alternative to traditional religion. While not rejecting theism, the manifesto elevated “modern science” over “supernatural or cosmic guarantees.” The second manifesto went on to denounce “traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human need or experience” and dismissed the notion of “divine purpose or providence for the human species.” Firing a shot in the culture wars, the document validated birth control, abortion, and divorce, while largely blaming sexual repression on religion. Humanist Manifesto II was signed by a number of prominent individuals, including feminist Betty Friedan, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, and science writer Isaac Asimov. Humanist Manifesto III defined humanism as “a progressive philosophy of life . . . without supernaturalism,” emphasizing science and reason, and declared ethical values “derived from human need and interest as tested by experience.” Some of the signatories of the previous manifestos later endorsed “A Secular Humanist Declaration” (1980), which was drafted by philosopher Paul Kurtz and appeared in the debut issue of the Free Inquiry, the organ of the newly established Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (later shortened to the Council for Secular Humanism). Kurtz was largely reacting to the Religious Right and its claim that secular humanism is a religion. His manifesto identified “democratic secular humanism” with “free inquiry” and maintained that people can lead wholesome lives without religion.
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Kurtz’s critics regard his “free inquiry” as disingenuous, since it rejects theism outright. Conservative Christians voiced their opposition to secular humanism in a variety of writings, among them Homer Duncan’s Secular Humanism: The Most Dangerous Religion in the World (1979), Tim LaHaye’s The Battle for the Mind (1980), Francis A. Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto (1981), Josh McDowell and Don Stewart’s Understanding Secular Religions (1982), and John W. Whitehead’s The Stealing of America (1983). Opponents maintain that secular humanism is intolerant of JudeoChristian beliefs and promotes moral relativism. Since secular humanism operates as a nontheistic religion, they argue, it should be subjected to the same constitutional constraints imposed on all other religions. In the U.S. Supreme Court decision Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), secular humanism was classified as a religion in a footnote. This inspired the Religious Right to challenge the teaching of secular humanism in public schools, arguing that any promotion of its tenets in the classroom is a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. This argument was put to the test in Mobile, Alabama, in a legal showdown pitting Pat Robertson’s National Legal Foundation against People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union. In Douglas T. Smith et al. v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County (1987), U.S. District Court Judge W. Brevard Hand ruled that the Mobile school system had established “a religion of secularism” and ordered the removal of more than forty “secularism” books from the classroom. On appeal five months later, however, the ruling was overturned. The Religious Right continues to argue that if public schools are allowed to advance the values of secular humanism while suppressing Judeo-Christianity, then the absence of a genuine marketplace of ideas renders by default a public religion of secular humanism. This viewpoint has resonated with many conservative Christian parents, propelling the homeschool movement. Fundamentalists have equated the teaching of evolution with secular humanism, arguing that the marketplace of ideas should require that the theory of intelligent design also be taught in the classroom. Some critics of the Religious Right argue that it labels anything not in accord with its perspective as secular humanism. Traditional religion and secular humanism, since they share some basic values, perspectives, and points of view, are not strictly binary opposites. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Book Banning; Church and State; Creationism and Intelligent Design; Evangelicalism; Friedan, Betty; Fundamentalism, Religious; Homeschooling; Relativism, Moral; Religious Right; Robertson, Pat; Schaeffer, Francis.
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Further Reading Deckman, Melissa M. School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. Ingber, Stanley. “Religion or Ideology: A Needed Clarification of the Religion Clauses.” Stanford Law Review 41:2 (1989): 233–333. Kurtz, Paul. In Defense of Secular Humanism. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1983. Tourney, Christopher P. “Evolution and Secular Humanism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61:2 (1993): 275–301. Webber, Robert E. Secular Humanism: Threat and Challenge. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982.
S e e g e r, P e t e Renowned folk musician and social activist Pete Seeger has been a major figure in leftist causes, advocating the formation of labor unions, civil rights, the end of the Vietnam War, and environmental protection. He was also a driving force behind the socially conscious American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, making the folk song an instrument of protest. In more recent times, he has influenced the music of Bruce Springsteen and others. Born on May 3, 1919, Peter R. Seeger was the son of musicologist Charles Seeger and violinist Constance Seeger in New York City. Dropping out of Harvard at age nineteen, he traveled across the nation collecting songs for the musicologists John and Alan Lomax. A talented musician with an affinity for the working class, Seeger often sang at migrant camps and labor rallies during the Depression. In 1940, he met folk singer Woody Guthrie and that December formed a folk band, the Almanac Singers, with Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell. During this time, Seeger joined the Communist Party and was highly critical of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for not strongly supporting labor causes. An avowed pacifist but also a hater of fascism, Seeger served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After his discharge, he founded People’s Song, Inc. (1946), which published union songs and folk songs. He also formed the Weavers (1948), another folk singing group. By 1950, the group was under surveillance by the FBI and the McCarran Committee for alleged communist activities. Blacklisted in 1952, the Weavers disbanded. His detractors called Seeger “Khrushchev’s songbird.” In 1955, though five years earlier he had quit the Communist Party, he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Showing his disdain for the investigation but proclaiming that he had nothing to hide, he refused to answer questions, citing the First Amendment rather than the Fifth Amendment, which
would have protected him from self-incrimination. Consequently, he was convicted of ten counts of contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. All was overturned on appeal. Seeger continued his music and activism throughout the 1950s and 1960s, becoming involved in the civil rights movement and the folk music revival, and introducing Martin Luther King, Jr., to his version of “We Shall Overcome.” His songs “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (1961) and “Turn, Turn, Turn” (1966) were a part of the Vietnam War protests. In his later years, Seeger also became involved in environmental causes, especially along the Hudson River in New York. In his mid-eighties, he actively opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Bruce Springsteen’s album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), which includes folk and protest songs that Seeger performed, was created in tribute to the artist. In 2009, Singer performed with Springsteen in an outdoor concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial in celebration of the election of Barack Obama as president. Rachel Donaldson See also: Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Environmental Movement; Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie; Labor Unions; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Springsteen, Bruce; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Bromberg, Minna, and Gary Alan Fine. “Resurrecting the Red: Pete Seeger and the Purification of Difficult Reputations.” Social Forces 80 (June 2002): 1135–55. Dunaway, David King. How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Seeger, Pete. Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies. Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out, 1993. Wilkinson, Alec. “The Protest Singer.” The New Yorker, April 17, 2006. Winkler, Alan M. “To Everything There Is a Season”: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
S e p t e m b e r 11 On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists hijacked four American commercial passenger aircraft and crashed three of them into high-profile targets in the United States. Two planes flew directly into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing the buildings to collapse completely within a few hours. A third plane plowed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., damaging one of its five sides. The fourth plane failed to reach its target in Washington,
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crashing in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Passengers on that plane challenged the hijackers after learning about the earlier attacks, and the hijackers apparently responded by crashing the plane before being overpowered. Altogether, the attacks resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, including all onboard the four planes.
Initial Reaction Americans responded to the attacks with a rush of patriotism, sympathy for the many victims, and anger at those who supported and carried out the attacks. In New York and Washington, the response of police and firefighters, many working around the clock at the indescribable disaster scenes, made them national heroes. President George W. Bush became a spokesman for the country’s sorrow and rage, vowing that those responsible would be brought to justice. His approval rating soared to 86 percent, the highest ever attained by a U.S. president. New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani became a national figure almost overnight as a spokesman for the city that sustained the most damage. Within hours of the attacks, government investigators traced several of the hijackers to the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, directed international terror attacks from a headquarters in Afghanistan, under the protection of the ruling Taliban party, a fundamentalist Muslim group. Al-Qaeda had already been implicated in an earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, in which a powerful bomb was detonated in the underground parking garage, causing six deaths and more than a thousand injuries as the smoke-filled towers were evacuated. In 1998, bin Laden publicly called for the killing of American civilians. His organization is believed to have planned and carried out a series of subsequent attacks. In 1998, terrorists carried out coordinated bombing attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, both in eastern Africa; 12 Americans and more than 200 others were killed in the bombings. Two years later, terrorists rammed an improvised bomb against the side of the USS Cole, a U.S. Navy ship anchored in the harbor of Aden, the capital of Yemen at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Seventeen U.S. naval personnel were killed, and forty others were injured. The Bush administration reported that al-Qaeda was motivated by a hatred of freedom and Western-style democracy. Bin Laden attributed the attacks to particular actions and policies of the U.S. government, including support of Israel against its Arab adversaries and the presence of U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s most sacred places, since the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. Bin Laden also accused the U.S. government of sowing discord among Muslim people; propping up cruel Middle Eastern regimes,
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including the Saudi monarchy; and exploiting Muslim countries to gain access to their huge oil reserves. The Bush administration responded to the attacks by declaring a global “War on Terror” with the express goals of destroying al-Qaeda, bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, and preventing the further expansion of international terror networks. The primary tools of this campaign would be increased international intelligence and law enforcement, combined with economic sanctions and military action against states harboring terrorist groups. The first battle in this campaign began in early October 2001, when the U.S. led an international coalition on an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, which had been harboring al-Qaeda, and to search for bin Laden and his lieutenants. The invasion succeeded in removing the Taliban from power, and the occupying authority set up a new Afghan government. Al-Qaeda and bin Laden slipped away, however, establishing new camps in the remote mountains of western Pakistan, near the Afghan border. A year and a half later, the United States led a less inclusive coalition of countries in an invasion of Iraq that sought the removal of Saddam Hussein and the confiscation of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) he was said to possess. The Bush administration claimed that there was a link between the Iraqi dictator and the September 11 attacks; although the president later backed down from that position, many Americans remain convinced of the initial allegations. Critics of the Bush administration and the Iraq War believe that the supposed tie was a fabrication to garner public support for the 2003 invasion.
Laying Blame In struggling to understand the attacks, some Americans blamed the Islamic faith itself and its millions of adherents. Others blamed Muslims of Arab or Middle Eastern descent. In the weeks following the attack, a number of Arabs and natives of other Muslim countries were victims of hate crimes in several U.S. cities and towns. Others were subjected to verbal abuse and community suspicion. American Muslim organizations condemned the al-Qaeda attack and denied that their members were involved as participants or sympathizers. Saudi Arabia, where fifteen of the nineteen attackers were born, launched a public advertising campaign in the United States, condemning the attacks and pointing out that al-Qaeda had also committed terrorist acts on Saudi territory and against the Saudi government. A few conservative American religious leaders attributed the September 11 attacks not only to Islam but to moral decay in the United States. The prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell blamed the attacks on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way (a
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liberal lobbying group), and all “secularists.” Whereas certain leaders of the Religious Right attributed the attacks to some form of divine punishment, the social conservative Dinesh D’Souza, in The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (2007), asserts that Muslim anger against the United States is a “visceral rage” against American leftist cultural excesses. Many found meaning in the works of the academics Bernard Lewis, Benjamin R. Barber, and Samuel P. Huntington. For years leading up to September 11, the Near Eastern scholar Lewis had maintained that Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction against secularism and modernism. Furthermore, as he explained in his seminal Atlantic Monthly essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (September 1990), Muslims feel aggrieved by their “lost superiority” as their societies lag further behind the West in power and wealth. It was Lewis who coined the phrase “clash of civilizations” to describe this conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and Western culture. After the September 11 attacks, Lewis elaborated on his thesis in What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002). The political theorist Barber, in Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), had earlier emphasized a conflict between “tribalism” and “globalism.” The political scientist Huntington, borrowing a key phrase from Lewis, had written The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), which predicted global instability in the wake of the Cold War due to cultural differences. These authors were frequently quoted by commentators who, in the aftermath of September 11, tried to make sense of “why they hate us.” Liberal critics found fault with U.S. military and foreign policy, charging that it had contributed to the rise of militant terrorist groups. In 9-11 (2001), the MIT professor Noam Chomsky, a longtime radical critic of U.S. policy, asserted that basic American foreign policy had contributed to the September 11 tragedy. He argued that the U.S. record of imperialism and abuse of other countries was sure to arouse violent and terrorist responses. In fact, he argued, the United States itself can be considered “a leading terrorist state.” The former New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer, in All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003), likewise makes the argument that American foreign adventures laid the groundwork for September 11. These views of Chomsky and Kinzer harmonize with the thoughts of Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist, who in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000) suggests that the U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan during the Cold War acted as the “midwife” in giving birth to al-Qaeda. One of the most controversial “laying blame” assessments was offered by Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his 2001 Internet essay “Some People Push Back: On the
Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill argued that certain victims of the World Trade Center were not so innocent because they had been serving as “technocrats of empire.” The September 11 attacks, he suggested, were a “befitting” way to harm “the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers.” These comments caught the attention of Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, who gave Churchill so much negative publicity that it led to the professor’s firing in 2007. In another dramatic episode, again in outrage over the argument that the terrorist attacks were retribution for American foreign policy, O’Reilly in a February 4, 2003, broadcast angrily yelled at his on-air guest Jeremy Glick, whose father had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks.
Antiterrorist Measures and their Critics The U.S. government enacted several significant and controversial pieces of legislation in the wake of the September 11 attacks. One action involved a major reorganization of the executive branch to place nearly all domestic security agencies under a single cabinetlevel organization, the new Department of Homeland Security. Although many commentators welcomed the reorganization, the department got off to a rocky start. One of its first acts was to create a Homeland Security Advisory System, a five-tier, color-coded threat scale to indicate the danger level of new terrorist attacks and trigger specific actions by federal and local authorities. The system was soon criticized because there were no publicly announced criteria for setting danger levels, and the nature of supposed threats was never disclosed. Critics complained that the threat scale could be used for political purposes—for example, to increase or decrease public apprehension about danger before an election or to pressure legislators to pass or vote down specific legislation. Other Homeland Security documents became targets for comedians and satirists. For example, a document recommending actions in case of a terror attack suggested that a house be sealed with plastic tape or duct tape to protect inhabitants from a chemical or biological attack. Even prior to the establishment of the new security department, the government proposed and strongly pushed the USA PATRIOT Act, giving the president and executive departments sweeping powers to carry out the War on Terror. Critics charged that in providing for increased surveillance of terrorist suspects, the act allowed for the invasion of privacy of U.S. citizens and allowed illegal domestic intelligence gathering without court approval. Critics also complained that the provisions for detaining terrorist suspects recalled the Alien Registration Act of 1940, which was used after the United States entered World War II in 1941 to justify the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese resident aliens. The USA PATRIOT Act was used to justify the fingerprint-
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ing and registration of approximately 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants to the United States and the detention of roughly 5,000 foreign nationals. A number of other countries also passed antiterror legislation, froze the accounts of suspected terrorists and their associates, and arrested thousands suspected of being members of terrorist cells. Al-Qaeda and Taliban combatants, or suspects who were captured by allied forces in Afghanistan or by antiterror agents in other parts of the world, were designated “illegal enemy combatants.” The U.S. government asserted that these individuals did not qualify for the protections extended to prisoners of war under international law and established a special detention center for them at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The government further maintained that the prison was not subject to international law since it was neither part of the United States nor under the control of the government of Cuba. Thus, interrogation methods, prisoner welfare, and criminal procedure would be decided solely by the executive branch of the U.S. government. Investigations later revealed that other “unofficial” prisons were being operated by U.S. intelligence agencies in other parts of the world. These prisons housed suspects who had been captured by “extraordinary rendition”—apprehension and removal by international intelligence officers with or without the cooperation of local law enforcement agencies. The treatment of prisoners in these undocumented prisons was not subject to review of any kind. In fact, the United States (and other governments suspected of cooperating) denied the existence of the prisons altogether. Many of the government claims under the USA PATRIOT Act and related executive actions were later rejected by federal courts in cases brought by Guantánamo detainees, forcing changes in procedure in trying “enemy combatants.” In 2008, the status of the Guantánamo Bay prison itself became an issue in the presidential campaign. Democratic candidate Barack Obama, who condemned the prison, was elected in November. Soon after his inauguration in January 2009, he issued an order that the prison be closed within one year. Meanwhile, the events of 9/11 continued to bewilder many Americans. One conspiracy theory suggests that the U.S. government had prior information about the attack but failed to prevent it. Another suggests that agents of the United States actively planned and executed the attack, presumably to gain some benefit in international position or in dictating domestic policy. In 2004, Michael Moore’s documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 suggested that the business relationship between the Bush family and the ruling Saud family of Saudi Arabia complicated the prevention of the attack and its later investigation. J.D. Jordan and Roger Chapman
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See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Bush Family; Central Intelligence Agency; Cheney Family; Chomsky, Noam; Conspiracy Theories; Falwell, Jerry; Moore, Michael; Muslim Americans; Saudi Arabia; September 11 Memorial; USA PATRIOT Act.
Further Reading Chomsky, Noam. 9–11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. Churchill, Ward. On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003. Clarke, Richard. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press, 2004. May, Ernest R. The 9/11 Commission Report with Related Documents. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2007. Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Meyssan, Thierry. 9/11: The Big Lie. London: Carnot USA Books, 2002.
S e p t e m b e r 11 M e m o r i a l In January 2004, a design titled Reflecting Absence, by architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker, was announced as the winner of an international competition to create a memorial plan for the World Trade Center site in New York City. The project was headed by the newly established Lower Manhattan Development Company (LMDC), whose aim was to rebuild ground zero and create a permanent memorial to the victims and heroes of the terrorist attacks of February 26, 1993, and September 11, 2001. At the heart of the project was a belief that the memorial should reflect both individual sacrifice and the shared values that had been threatened by the attacks. The LMDC also sought to shape a commemorative process that was unprecedented in its attention to public sentiment. Esteemed artists and architects, including the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Maya Lin, made up the jury that chose the winning design, but the panel also included scholars, a widow of the September 11 attack, a resident, and a local business owner. Despite the attempts to accommodate a variety of interest groups, the project generated heated controversy. The design criteria set out by the LMDC were motivated by several immutable factors, among them the limits of the space itself. In February 2003, Memory Foundations, the concept of Studio Daniel Libeskind, was selected as the principal element in the project to rebuild Lower Manhattan. Although the design preserved certain elements of the original site, including a remaining wall, it was also meant to inspire a sense of rebirth. The centerpiece was a 1,776-foot (541-meter) building known as the Freedom Tower. While Libeskind’s plan was separate from the commemorative project, the structure
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would provide the physical context for the memorial. More important, the LMDC, with input from residents, survivors, and victims’ families, developed a series of guiding principles for the design. The foremost goal was to create a place that underscored the compassion and honor of those who had sacrificed and to reaffirm American strength and commitment to freedom. Despite criticism that the eight finalists had produced somewhat banal and similar concepts, Arad and Walker’s proposal was said to best capture the central principles of the memorial project: enhance the physical landscape, preserve the “footprints” of the Twin Towers, incorporate the names of the dead, and include a below-ground cultural center and museum to tell the personal stories of the attacks. Still, problems quickly emerged that challenged the sought-after cohesion of the commemorative process. In particular, some New Yorkers began to question what the memorial would say about the event itself and its historical implications. Reflecting Absence, particularly in contrast to the overt patriotism of the Freedom Tower, seemed to focus too intently on grief and loss. Some detractors even argued that the design sanitized and de-historicized the memory of September 11 by avoiding comment on the horror of the attacks. Dissatisfaction with certain concept elements crystallized in a debate over the presentation of the names of the dead. Arad and Walker had chosen a random arrangement, believing that this would reflect the “haphazard brutality” of the terrorist strike. However, many of the city’s firefighters believed that the attempt to universalize victimization failed to account for the distinctive sacrifice and courage of the first responders. This was not the first time that the city’s most well-known heroes had challenged the process of commemoration. One monument, to be erected outside the Fire Department Headquarters in Brooklyn, was proposed to commemorate the firefighters who had died on September 11. The bronze statue would be based on a photograph taken by Thomas E. Franklin of the Record (a Bergen County, New Jersey, newspaper) in the aftermath of the attacks. The now-famous image was of three firemen hoisting an American flag over the rubble at ground zero. Often compared to Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, the image represented for many the patriotism and unity of all Americans. Nevertheless, in January 2002, debates raged about the decision to portray the group as racially diverse. Although the photograph was of three white men, professional models—one white, one black, and one Hispanic—were hired to pose for a more multicultural rendition. Incensed, local firefighters and residents protested the development of what they regarded as a politically correct “melting pot sculpture.” Indeed, many saw the move as a political action that undermined the
historical authenticity of Franklin’s original image. Ultimately, the design was abandoned in the hope of finding a more politically neutral monument. The only group more vocal about the commemorative process was that of the families of the victims, particularly regarding the World Trade Center site. While their criticisms ranged from the placement of the names to the proposed symbolism of a below-ground memorial, their greatest battle came after the announcement of the International Freedom Center (IFC). Proposed as part of the site’s cultural complex, the IFC would contain exhibits highlighting core American values and principles, as well as displays examining historical struggles for freedom in the United States and the world. Despite claims that the IFC would remain nonpartisan, fears quickly emerged that the museum would become a venue for leftists, academics, and protesters to denigrate the United States. The plan was finally stymied in 2005, after a successful “Take Back the Memorial” campaign was spearheaded by the families. While many concluded that the fight for freedom in America and abroad should be told, they believed that the World Trade Center site was not the place to do so. Not unlike that of the ground zero memorial or the unsuccessful firefighter’s statue, the IFC controversy revealed the tensions inherent in the commemorative process. In different ways, the debates facing each of these sites exposed the complicated relationship between memory and history. More important, they illustrated the larger difficulty in attempting to universalize and make palatable the still evolving experience of September 11. Perceptions of the overall design and its meaning no doubt will continue to change as interpretations of the terrorist attacks themselves also evolve. Liam van Beek See also: Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; September 11; Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Further Reading Greenberg, Judith, ed. Trauma at Home After 9/11. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Web site. www. renewnyc.com. Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Serrano, Andres The New York artist and photographer Andres Serrano became the center of a furious culture wars dispute over public exhibition of his notorious photograph, provocatively titled Piss Christ (1987), of a plastic crucifix in a transparent container of urine. Since Serrano had been
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awarded a fellowship from an art gallery sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a debate soon erupted over the use of public funds to subsidize “offensive art.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 15, 1950, Serrano grew up in a Catholic home of African-Haitian and Honduran heritage. Serrano had formal training in painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum Art School (1967–1969), but he did not complete a degree program. His photography exhibits, which have shown at galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, include The Unknown Christ (1986), Nomads (1991), KKK Portraits (1991), The Morgue (1992), Budapest (1994), The Church Series (1994), A History of Sex (1998), and Body and Soul (2000). Serrano is known for works that use human bodily fluids for visual effect, including blood, milk, urine, and even sperm. In 1986, Serrano was awarded a $15,000 fellowship from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The fact that the NEA did not directly dispense the grant to Serrano was immaterial to conservatives such as Senators Alphonse D’Amato (R-NY) and Jesse Helms (R-NC). In 1989, Piss Christ had been brought to the attention of Congress by the Tupelo, Mississippi–based American Family Association, a religious media watchdog, which declared the very title of the work blasphemous. Senator D’Amato pronounced the Serrano work “a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity” and insisted, “This is not a question of free speech. This is a question of abuse of taxpayers’ money.” In accordance with that view, Senator Helms in July 1989 introduced an amendment to the NEA appropriations bill for the purpose of prohibiting public funding of art deemed “obscene or indecent” or denigrating to religion or people. The amendment did not carry, but the final funding legislation included language calling on artists to meet “general standards of decency.” The following year, the NEA began requiring grant recipients to sign an “obscenity pledge.” NEA officials sought to provoke a legal challenge, believing that it would ultimately result in a judicial decision affirming artistic freedom. That strategy backfired when the U.S. Supreme Court in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) ruled that the NEA may apply decency standards in determining what art projects to fund. Meanwhile, debate continues over the meaning of Serrano’s work. While some insist that a religious symbol immersed in urine is defiling, others believe the artist when he states that his intention was to provide a satire of religious kitsch. It has also been argued that, since the gospel itself is the story of Christ being degraded, the degradation of a symbol of Christ constitutes a retelling of the gospel. Another similar dispute over religious imagery occurred in 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibited Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (1996), a
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work featuring an African Virgin Mary partially painted with elephant dung. Roger Chapman See also: Censorship; Helms, Jesse; Mapplethorpe, Robert; National Endowment for the Arts; Religious Right; Warhol, Andy; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Baum, Joan. “On the Edge with Andres Serrano, Contemporary Photography’s Artist Bad Boy.” Art Review, December 20, 2000. “Comments on Andres Serrano by Members of the United States Senate.” Congressional Record, May 18, 1989. Rambuss, Richard. “Sacred Subjects and Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano, and Ofili.” ELH 71:2 (Summer 2004): 497–530. Serrano, Andres. Andres Serrano, Works 1983–1993. Curated by Patrick T. Murphy. Essays by Robert Hobbs, Wendy Steiner, and Marcia Tucker. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994.
Sex Education The sensitive association between children and sexuality has made sex education one of the most heated debates in the American culture wars. Questions of who should teach what about sex in public schools have been debated throughout the post–World War II era, perhaps most intensely since the 1980s. While America’s relatively high rates of teenage pregnancy and the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs, also known as sexually transmitted infections, or STIs) have made sex education appear to be a practical necessity, the rise of the Christian Right has placed particular emphasis on the moral dimensions of sex education. As a consequence, sex education in America has become a political issue impacting debates at every level from local to national and, in part, facilitating the rise of the Christian Coalition’s grassroots efforts to build a political coalition from school boards up to higher offices.
Historical Background Sex has been a part of the public school curriculum and a subject of debate since at least the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, moral crusaders such as Anthony Comstock sought a total ban on any “sexually explicit” material, including sex education materials. Reformers, primarily women’s groups and Protestant organizations, sought to educate children about the moral dangers of sex. The primary advocates for sex education were sex hygienists, often led by medical professionals, who sought greater public knowledge about sexuality in order to prevent the spread of STDs. The limited curricula adopted at the time tended to fo-
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cus primarily on sexual restraint, with an emphasis on the biology of sex and the dynamics of family life. In the 1950s, family life curricula were widely adopted and approved by professional associations. In 1964, a small group of professionals concerned that information on sexuality and sexual activity was not readily available formed the Sexuality Information and Educational Council of the United States (SIECUS). The council adopted primarily a sexual hygiene curriculum, aimed at delivering scientifically factual information about pregnancy, STDs, and the science of sex. While eschewing moralizing language, SIECUS believed that promoting open dialogue about sex—including issues of birth control, pleasure, and desire—was the best way to ensure self-regulation. Prompted by SIECUS and other physicians and educators, the federal government began devoting significant resources to sex education. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) made sex education a requirement in public schools. The legislation encouraged an approach known as comprehensive sex education, which attempted to inform students about the physical, moral, and psychological components of sex so as to enable them to make informed decisions. SIECUS was led by Dr. Mary Calderone, the former medical director of Planned Parenthood, an organization devoted to addressing issues of family planning and birth control. The curriculum design for ESEA generally attempted to remain morally neutral in presenting the facts and scientific evidence about sexuality. It took the position that issues of sexual morality were best left to individuals and parents. Conservatives organized resistance to the new curriculum almost immediately despite its relatively conservative approach. At the time, social conservatives were also sensitive to the signs of a growing sexual revolution. The first birth-control pill had been made commercially available in 1961, raising widespread apprehension that it would lead to a decline in moral behavior and family values. In public education, social conservatives were also concerned about the teaching of evolution and court decisions limiting or ending prayer and religious instruction in public schools. In the 1970s, conservative opponents of sex education produced counter-educational materials focusing on moral issues and sexual abstinence. Led by members of conservative Christian churches, the movement put up candidates for local school boards and local governments, emphasizing their stance against value-neutral sex education. The movement warned that sex education was encouraging teenage sexuality, often spreading stories of teachers encouraging sexual experimentation in the classroom and, later, that teachers were promoting homosexuality. Proponents of comprehensive sex education were generally less organized and less politicized. In 1979, Planned Parenthood created an education ser-
vices department that provided information about sex education and birth control, but these efforts were less organized than the political and cultural pressures of the Christian Right. By the 1980s, with the election of President Ronald Reagan and more conservative legislators across the country, the opposition to comprehensive sex education had well-placed allies in political positions, resulting in new legislation and greater funding for sex education programs that promoted abstinence. Abstinence education focused on teaching sexual restraint until marriage, often using fear tactics about the moral and health consequences of adolescent sexuality. In 1981, conservative senators Jeremiah Denton (R-AL) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) sponsored the Adolescent and Family Life Act, popularly known as the Chastity Act, which provided funds to create and support abstinence-only sex education. The reach of these programs was extended in 1996, when as a part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform, states were given block grants to implement abstinence-only or abstinence-plus programs that encouraged abstinence and offered minimal introductions to birth control and STD prevention. These programs were allowed to present information about contraception usage, but only in terms of failure rates, not in terms of obtaining contraception or its proper use. Educators were encouraged to discuss the damaging psychological consequences of sexual activity. In 2005, President George W. Bush increased funding for abstinence-only sex education by 25 percent. In 2005 and 2007, Representative Barbara Lee (DCA), a proponent of a more comprehensive approach, introduced the Responsible Education About Life Act to provide funds for broadening sex education beyond abstinence-only programs, and especially to inform young people that condoms can prevent STDs, including HIVAIDS. Conservative opposition succeeded in blocking passage of the bill in the 110th Congress. The pro-abstinence position also become a part of conservative foreign policy, which required, for example, that part of the money earmarked in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief be used to promote sexual abstinence. In 2009, however, during his early days in office, President Barack Obama withdrew some restrictions on the distribution of foreign aid for health and family planning. “For too long,” he said, “international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate. It is time that we end the politicization of this issue.”
Current Trends and Viewpoints Today, sex education curricula vary significantly, but abstinence-plus programs like Sex Respect remain widely
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popular. These programs encourage abstinence until marriage and often use fear as a means of encouraging students to refrain from sexual activity. Many curricula emphasize the failure rate of contraception, resisting peer pressure, and the psychological and physical risks of sexual activity. For example, in a video entitled “No Second Chance” used in Sex Respect, an educator compares sex outside of marriage to Russian roulette, but with a greater chance of getting killed. A survey by the Kaiser Foundation in 2002 showed that as many as onethird of schools in America were taking an abstinenceonly approach—the only one that allows a state school system to qualify for federal assistance. Since that time, several states have declined federal funds in order to teach comprehensive sex education. Advocates for comprehensive sex education point out that the United States has a relatively high rate of teenage pregnancy. Pregnancy rates among teenagers have generally declined since 1991, but the United States compares poorly to industrialized countries that offer more comprehensive sex education. The abstinence-plus approach was also challenged by the AIDS epidemic. The use of condoms during sexual intercourse can prevent this most feared STD, but the noncomprehensive programs teach only about their failure rate (which is very small), subjecting teenagers who may be sexually active in spite of the program to the danger of contracting AIDS from unprotected sex. Data on the effectiveness of differing programs are not conclusive. According to a 2007 study commissioned by Congress comparing groups that had received abstinence-only education to groups that had not, on average both groups had the same proportion of students who remained abstinent (about 50 percent) and who engaged in sex during the study period. Those who did have sex in the two groups were equally likely to use condoms or other contraceptives. The study called into question the effectiveness of the abstinence programs used by the groups in the study but shed no light on the effectiveness of comprehensive sex education. Proponents of comprehensive sex education also point out that a large majority of parents favor comprehensive sex education over abstinence-only programs. The Guttmacher Institute reports that as many as 80 percent of parents wished their children had exposure to more information in the classroom. Even so, sex education in the schools remains a sensitive issue, and little has been done to shift from the abstinence-only approach. Advocates of comprehensive sex education may gain support from the results of the 2008 election, in which Democrat Barack Obama was elected president and Democrats elected majorities in both houses of Congress. SIECUS has continued to promote and produce comprehensive sex education materials, and Planned Parenthood has also continued promoting the approach, but its role
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in the abortion debates has limited its ability to act as an advocate for sex education reform. Christian conservatives, on the other hand, continue to apply pressure to maintain sex education that concentrates on morals and values. Claire E. Rasmussen See also: Abortion; AIDS; Birth Control; Bush Family; Christian Coalition; Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Kinsey, Alfred; Koop, C. Everett; Planned Parenthood; Religious Right; Sexual Revolution; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Campos, David. Sex, Youth, and Sex Education: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Deckman, Melissa M. School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. Irvine, Janice. Talk About Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Levine, Judith. Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Luker, Kristin. When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Moran, Jeffery P. Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Sex Offenders A sex offender is an individual who has confessed to, or been convicted of, committing a sex crime, including rape, child molestation, and/or downloading from the Internet or distributing child pornography. Beginning in the 1990s, many states have passed strict tracking and residency laws in an attempt to protect society, especially children, from convicted sex offenders. Opinion polls show that most Americans support these measures, but a number of constitutional experts and public-policy consultants believe that such laws violate privacy rights, impose double jeopardy, waste funds, and fail to address the problem of sex offenders in the most constructive manner. Although sex offenses in the United States have been on the decline since 1992, fear of sex offenders on the part of the general public has increased during the 2000s. As part of Operation Falcon (2005–2006), the U.S. Justice Department in a single day arrested some 1,600 unregistered or wanted sex offenders across twenty-seven states. Of the 190,000 federal prisoners in 2006, 11,000 were sex offenders. In 90 percent of cases, according to experts, child molestation is committed by family members, not
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strangers. Even so, most laws aimed at curbing pedophilia target the stranger. In 1990, Washington became the first state to require sex offenders to register with police. Other states followed suit, and it became a federal requirement with passage of the Jacob Wetterling Act (1994), named after a missing child. Also in 1994, New Jersey passed Megan’s Law, requiring community notification of any sex offender who takes up residency. Megan’s Law was named after sevenyear-old Megan Kanka, a kidnap-rape-murder victim of a neighbor with prior convictions for sex offenses. Other states and localities adopted variations of Megan’s Law, leading to legal inconsistencies in the definition of sex offender and how information is to be collected and released to the public. Such confusion prompted passage in 2006 of the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, named after the murdered son of John Walsh (the host of Fox Television’s America’s Most Wanted ), which established national standards for registering, reporting, and public notification. By 2006, there were more than 560,000 registered sex offenders nationwide. Laws against convicted sex offenders include the registration of all names in publicly accessed databases, the collection of DNA samples, state laws restricting where sex offenders can live and work, and the indefinite confinement of certain sex offenders to psychiatric centers after the completion of prison terms. As of 2006, eighteen states had laws allowing for the continued detention of sex offenders following the completion of their prison sentences. A few states have classified sex crimes as a capital offense. In addition, efforts have been made to regulate the Internet to thwart sexual predators. Civil libertarians and other critics of sex-offender registries raise the issue of individual liberties, arguing that convicts who have served time for their offenses should be able to resume life as a citizen free from harassment. Some sex offenders have been rendered homeless because residency laws, like the one enacted in Georgia in 2006, have made it illegal for them to live near schools, parks, playgrounds, bus stops, churches, or any other place where children might gather. In certain cases, sex offenders have listed Wal-Mart parking lots as their official residence. When sex offenders are uprooted, health professionals warn, their treatment typically gets interrupted. Not only does this raise the risk of a repeat offense, but it also makes it more difficult for law enforcement officials to keep track of them. Since, in some states, persons convicted of having underaged consensual sex while in high school are officially listed as sex offenders, individuals who may pose no real danger to society can be adversely impacted by these measures. As widespread access to the Internet has increased, some sex offenders have used it as a medium for illegally sharing and viewing child pornography. Social networking sites, where users create profiles and/or join
chat groups, have also created a medium for finding and stalking potential victims. The problem came to light in 2004, largely due to exposure on the NBC television series To Catch a Predator. Working in collaboration with law-enforcement officials and the online watchdog group Perverted Justice, the show identifies predators online and, when they solicit sex from minors and arrange encounters with them, a camera crew shows up to wait for the predator to arrive. Critics of the show believe the exposé technique enables offenders to claim forced entrapment in a court of law, not to mention that it pushes the margins of ethical journalism. In its first three years, however, the program led to the arrest of more than 200 sex offenders. Another important set of events surrounding sex offenders are the child molestation scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church in recent years. John Geoghan, a priest for thirty years and a significant figure in the Catholic Church sex scandals, was accused of sexual abuse by more than 130 individuals, defrocked in 1998, and sentenced to prison in 2002. He was later murdered in his prison cell by another inmate. Geoghan’s case became the catalyst for a public interrogation of clergy sex abuse and concealment of information by church officials. It later inspired a string of similar court cases and a shift in church policy. Today, the archdiocese of Boston and the Vatican require members of the clergy and volunteers to report any accusations of child abuse to the proper authorities; however, the Vatican maintains the privacy of accused child abusers. The Catholic Church has acknowledged that from 1950 to 2007 there were 13,000 credible accusations of sex abuse by its priests in the United States. Jennifer Lyn Simpson, Merrit Dukehart, and Roger Chapman See also: Bradley, Bill; Catholic Church; Pornography; Sexual Assault; Sexual Harassment.
Further Reading Greenblatt, Alan. “Sex Offenders.” CQ Researcher, September 8, 2006. Jenkins, Philip. Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Perverted Justice Web site. www.Perverted-Justice.com. Terry, Karen J. Sexual Offenses and Offenders: Theory, Practice, and Policy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2006.
Sexual A ssault Sexual assault is a category of criminal behavior that includes any sexual contact in the absence of uncoerced consent. While the legal definition of sexual assault is now widely accepted, the causes and consequences, ap-
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propriate prevention methods, and what constitutes a fitting social response remain contested. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sexual assault may include inappropriate touching; vaginal, anal, or oral penetration; rape; attempted rape; incest; or child molestation. Sexual assault does not require physical contact and may be perpetrated verbally, visually, or in any other way that forces someone to engage in unwanted sexual contact or attention. Specific laws governing what constitutes consent and at what age an individual is able to give it freely vary by state. According to the Violence Against Women Grants Office, an estimated one in six women and one in thirtythree men have experienced an attempted or completed rape as either an adult or child. The rape/sexual assault rate for people ages sixteen to nineteen is nearly twice as high as for all other age groups. Rape and sexual assault are also among the most underreported of crimes due to the significant emotional trauma and enduring social stigma they produce. Rates of reported rape may be even lower for men than for women because of this stigma. Since the 1970s, a large number of groups and organizations have formed to reduce and ultimately end sexual assault, though they have pursued a wide variety of approaches. Some, including AWARE (Arming Women Against Rape and Endangerment) and the Women’s Self Defense Institute, have focused on promoting selfdefense and increasing awareness for potential victims. These groups seek to prevent assaults by strangers (24 percent of assaults fall into this category, according to the 2002 National Crime Victimization Survey) and advocate “safe” behavior such as avoiding poorly lit areas, traveling with friends or companions (using the “buddy system”), and avoiding “provocative” behavior. The prevention efforts of other groups—such as the YWCA, National Sexual Violence Resource Center, RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), and MASV (Men Against Sexual Violence)—emphasize the prevention of acquaintance or “date” rape (76 percent of cases), changing cultural systems, the importance of educating men (who remain the most frequent perpetrators of sexual assault), and responsible bystander behavior to intervene in inappropriate or unwanted behavior among peers before an assault occurs. These groups also often challenge “victim blaming,” arguing that because sexual assault is an act of violence and domination, not lust, it cannot be “provoked.” “Take Back the Night” rallies marked the first significant organized public protests of violence against women, first in England and then the United States in the late 1970s. These events are characterized by groups of women walking in solidarity through the streets to “reclaim” the night as safe for women and raise awareness about sexual violence. In the 1990s, the entire month of
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April was designated Sexual Assault Awareness Month; events are now held on college campuses and in communities across the country to raise awareness about sexual assault prevention. In 1998, The Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler founded V-Day as “an organized response against violence toward women,” arising from a demand that “rape, incest, battery, genital mutilation and sexual slavery must end now.” Issues of sexual assault have influenced the debate over other politically charged issues as well. In the abortion debate, for example, some states that otherwise prohibit or restrict abortions make exceptions in the case of rape or incest; others do not. Jennifer Lyn Simpson See also: Abortion; Sexual Harassment; Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading Buchwald, Emilie, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth. Transforming a Rape Culture. rev. ed. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005. Foubert, John D. The Men’s Program: A Peer Education Guide to Rape Prevention. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Thornhill, Randy, and Craig T. Palmer. A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Sexual Harassment Sexual harassment includes a range of behaviors that subject persons to unwanted sexual attention. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that constitutes a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In educational institutions, sexual harassment is also a violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. While it may take many forms, two broad categories of behavior can be identified as constituting sexual harassment: quid pro quo demands for sexual attention, or behavior in exchange for rewards or protection from punishment; and behavior that is disturbing to the point of inhibiting work performance or creating undue stress in the workplace by creating a hostile environment. The sexual harassment debate today centers largely on free speech issues and the question of whether restricting speech can or will fundamentally alter the culture of sexism that gives rise to sexual harassment. From 1997 to 2006, the number of cases reported annually to the EEOC declined by just under 25 percent, from almost 16,000 to just over 12,000. During the same time period, cases filed by men increased from 11.6 percent of total cases to 15.4 percent. Since sexual harassment is widely believed to be underreported because of fear of retaliation, reliable figures are hard to obtain.
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According to a 2006 report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), “Nearly two-thirds of college students experience sexual harassment at some point during college, including nearly one-third of firstyear students.” The origins of the term “sexual harassment” can be traced to a 1974 Cornell University case in which a female laboratory employee quit her job after a scientist made regular unwanted sexual advances, and was denied unemployment insurance on the grounds that she did not have “good cause” to leave her job. The term was first used in a legal ruling in the federal district court case of Williams v. Saxbe (1976), which recognized sexual harassment as a form of discrimination under Title VII. Since then there have been numerous court decisions clarifying its definition and scope. Several episodes in the early 1990s brought the issue of sexual harassment prominently into public discourse: the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, in which University of Oklahoma law school professor Anita Hill gave testimony that Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the EEOC; the 1991 Tailhook convention of navy and marine corps aviators, and subsequent claims that seven men and eightythree women had been sexually assaulted or harassed at the two-day event in Las Vegas, Nevada; and the 1994 sexual harassment lawsuit by Paula Jones against President Bill Clinton, alleging that he had sexually propositioned her when he was governor of Arkansas and she was a state employee. Media coverage of these widely reported events galvanized and sometimes polarized public conversation on the issue of sexual harassment in America. While the term “sexual harassment” is broadly understood to include injurious and appalling behaviors, the definition of “offensive” behavior can vary by individual and context. The amorphous and ambiguous edges of sexual harassment policy have been widely criticized by defenders of free speech, by libertarian “small government” groups, and by feminist groups such as Feminists for Free Expression, who reject the notion that curtailment of speech will fundamentally change the culture of gender discrimination that gives rise to sexual harassment. Jennifer Lyn Simpson See also: Civil Rights Movement; Clinton Impeachment; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Hill, Anita; MacKinnon, Catharine; Sexual Assault; Thomas, Clarence; Women in the Military.
Further Reading Brant, Clare, and Yun Lee Too, eds. Rethinking Sexual Harassment. Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1994. Langalan, Martha. Back Off: How to Stop and Confront Sexual Harassers. New York: Simon & Schuster/Fireside, 1993.
MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Reva B. Spiegel, eds. Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Mink, Gwendolyn. Hostile Environment: The Political Betrayal of Sexually Harassed Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Zimmerman, Jean. Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
S e x u a l R evo l u t i o n The sexual revolution was an outburst of experimentation with sexual norms and practices that took place mainly during the 1960s. Participants in this liberalization viewed pleasure as the guiding criterion of sexual life. Opponents defended more conservative values of sexual modesty, premarital chastity, and self-control.
Origin in the 1950s While the sexual revolution is often perceived as a generational struggle pitting 1960s nonconformists against the puritanical morality and middle-class “family values” of the previous decade, in fact the climate for sexual expression had been significantly liberalized during the 1950s. From Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering studies of human sexual behavior to Elvis Presley’s pelvic gyrations, from risqué films such as Baby Doll (1956) to tabloid coverage of transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine (founded in 1953) to scandalous works of literature such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956), American culture of the period was marked by the highly visible, if controversial, presence of sexuality. The nostalgia for the 1950s evident in many attacks on the sexual revolution launched by social and religious conservatives is thus ironic, since the 1960s capitalized on the already growing openness of the postwar environment, admittedly pushing it to extremes of expression and conduct that could hardly avoid provoking a backlash. Sexual explicitness in art increased markedly during the 1960s, prompted by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down censorship efforts aimed at banning literary works by the likes of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. The trickle-down effect of these decisions was to legitimate a wide range of sexual expression in cinema and print, including the surfacing of the porn industry from a shadowy underground. More daring competitors to Playboy magazine appeared, such as Al Goldstein’s Screw and Larry Flynt’s Hustler, and by the early 1970s, hard-core films such as Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) were enjoying unprecedented critical and commercial success. Meanwhile, rock-and-roll music was promoting anti-establishment attitudes among contemporary youth, including an embrace of drugs and premarital sex.
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By the mid-1960s, a counterculture of “hippies” had emerged on college campuses and in major cities, advocating “free love,” among other things. In 1967, they launched the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, inaugurated by a massive “Human Be-In” that featured public nudity and casual sex.
Advent of the Pill Popular views of sexual morality were also relaxed by the advent of accessible birth control through the invention of oral contraceptives, approved for use by the FDA in 1960 and popularly known as “the Pill.” Unlinking sex from reproduction meant that casual sex bore fewer obvious penalties, especially for women. As popular best-sellers such as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962) offered advice on how best to capitalize on the newly permissive environment, personal pleasure became the guiding standard for sexual ethics. Consequently, the institution of marriage suffered while divorce rates climbed, cohabitation became more widespread, and nonmonogamous behaviors grew. Some couples experimented with “swinging” practices such as spouse-swapping and “open” relationships. Bastions of traditional morality such as the Catholic Church inveighed against this sudden eruption of licentiousness: Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), for example, denounced all forms of “artificial” birth control as tending to undermine marital commitment. Even so, the sexual revolution continued undaunted. One of its most controversial elements was the increasing visibility of a self-confident and unapologetic homosexual minority. During the 1950s, gay and lesbian subcultures had thrived in urban areas, and nascent “homophile” groups, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, had begun to advocate for mainstream acceptance. The youth counterculture and the antiwar movement of the 1960s, however, tended to promote more militant attitudes among those who sought conformity to conservative social norms. Tensions exploded in the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, when homosexuals in New York City’s Greenwich Village struck back against police harassment. The riots spawned a vocal coalition for “gay liberation.” Gay and lesbian rights activists released incendiary manifestos, mounted freedom marches in major cities, and decried homophobic stereotypes in the mass media. At the same time, mainstream culture was pioneering more positive depictions of gays and lesbians in films such as The Boys in the Band (1970). In another battle with sexual orthodoxy, some more openly explored their bisexuality.
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exploitation as sexual objects. Anne Koedt’s landmark essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1970) discussed an autonomous female sexuality centered on clitoral pleasure, and lesbian feminists defended homosexuality as a political option for all women tired of “sleeping with the enemy.” At the same time, feminist activists mounted powerful critiques of sexual objectification and violence, attacking the growing sex industry, picketing beauty pageants for commercializing women’s bodies, and mounting consciousness-raising efforts to combat sexually degrading images of women throughout mainstream popular culture. Radical feminists converged with the Religious Right in their denunciations of pornography. Reactions against the sexual revolution have been largely conservative in nature. Advocates of “family values” have opposed the sexual license of 1960s culture, defending the importance of traditional marriage. Religious conservatives have decried the “moral relativism” that allows sex to be viewed as a purely naturalistic act centered on personal gratification. Renewed efforts at censorship have taken aim at popular pornography and graphic works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, while an antigay backlash has denounced the mainstreaming of homosexuality, sometimes pointing to AIDS as proof of the penalties for pursuing unfettered sexual pleasure. Still, there can be little doubt that popular attitudes toward sexuality underwent a massive transformation during the 1960s. The legacy of the sexual revolution is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Rob Latham See also: Birth Control; Book Banning; Brown, Helen Gurley; Counterculture; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Generations and Generational Conflict; Hefner, Hugh; Kinsey, Alfred; Planned Parenthood; Pornography; Relativism, Moral; Religious Right; Rock and Roll; Sex Education.
Further Reading Allyn, David. Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution—An Unfettered History. New York: Little, Brown, 2000. Escoffier, Jeffrey, ed. Sexual Revolution. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003. Heidenry, John. What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
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An ambivalent response to the sexual revolution was displayed by second-wave feminism, which embraced women’s newfound freedoms while condemning their
An outspoken African-American Baptist minister and political activist, the Reverend Al Sharpton emerged as a national figure during the 1980s and 1990s for orchestrat-
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ing militant street protests in New York City in response to hate crimes, police brutality, and other perceived social injustices. Called “the Riot King,” “Al Charlatan,” and “the Reverend Soundbite” by those who believe he lacks substance and sincerity, Sharpton portrays himself as a political outsider who represents disenfranchised blacks. He has publicly criticized the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a former mentor, as a political insider who has abandoned his ideals for expanding civil rights. After surviving a stabbing by a white man during a street protest in 1991, Sharpton spoke of undergoing a spiritual transformation that has made him conciliatory and mainstream. Since then, he has used political campaigns to air his views, running as a losing candidate in several Democratic primaries—U.S. Senate (1992, 1994), mayor of New York (1997), and the U.S. presidency (2004). Alfred Charles “Al” Sharpton, Jr., was born on October 3, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York. A “wonder boy preacher” beginning at age four, he was ordained as a minister of the Pentecostal Church in 1964. Sharpton’s social consciousness developed during childhood after his divorced mother was forced to move the family from a middle-class neighborhood of Queens to the projects in Brooklyn. The poverty of ghetto life shocked Sharpton, who found the political complacency of its occupants confounding. He graduated from Tilden High School in Brooklyn (1972) and then attended Brooklyn College (1973–1975). After serving as youth coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC’s) Operation Breadbasket in New York (1969–1971), Sharpton founded and directed the National Youth Movement (later renamed the United African Movement) (1971–1986). In 1991, he founded the National Action Network, Inc., also located in New York. In 1993, he was appointed coordinator of the minister division of Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition. In 1994, he left the Pentecostal Church and became the associate minister of Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Sharpton has been criticized for focusing on violent crime committed by whites against blacks, while virtually ignoring what the conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and others call a more extensive problem: “black-on-black crime.” Sharpton is further blamed for inflaming racial tensions and in some cases sparking riots, while others agree with him that New York is “perhaps the most racist city in the country,” presenting situations that require extremist activism. Sharpton conducted protests in reaction to the incident involving so-called subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, who in December 1984 shot four blacks who approached him for money in a New York subway car. Following the December 1986 murder of Michael Griffith, a black youth who had entered the white section of Howard Beach in Queens, Sharpton organized street protests to pressure the city to appoint a special prosecutor, which led to the eventual prosecution
The Reverend Al Sharpton, a high-profile activist for AfricanAmerican justice, speaks to the media about the case of Amadou Diallo in 2000. Diallo, who had been unarmed, was shot forty-one times by four New York City police officers. (Manny Ceneta/AFP/Getty Images)
of the white assailants. Sharpton stood behind the allegations of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager who claimed that several white men had kidnapped and raped her in November 1987, although a subsequent investigation revealed that her story was a hoax to avoid punishment by her stepfather for staying out too late; Sharpton later had to pay $65,000 in damages for having accused a white attorney of being one of Brawley’s assailants. Sharpton has led demonstrations against police brutality on several occasions, including the February 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo—an unarmed African man who was shot by four white NYPD officers forty-one times after reaching into a pocket for his wallet. During the 1980s, unknown to the people he was leading in street demonstrations, Sharpton was working as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This came about because of his association with boxing promoter Don King, who had alleged ties to organized crime involving the laundering of drug money; the FBI threatened Sharpton with criminal prosecution if he did not cooperate with their investigation. Later, Sharpton was accused of spying on black radicals. He maintained that he forwarded information to the FBI only on suspected drug dealers, but the New York newspaper Newsday reported in 1998 that he provided the FBI with information that led to the arrest of a black man suspected in the shooting of a New Jersey state trooper. Roger Chapman See also: Goetz, Bernhard; Hate Crimes; Jackson, Jesse; Limbaugh, Rush; Police Abuse; Thurmond, Strom.
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Further Reading Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Klein, Michael. Man Behind the Sound Bite: The Real Story of the Rev. Al Sharpton. New York: Castillo International, 1991. Sharpton, Al. “What I’ve Learned.” Esquire, January 2005. Sharpton, Al, and Karen Hunter. Al on America. New York: Dafina Books, 2002. Sharpton, Al, and Anthony Walton. Go and Tell Pharaoh: The Autobiography of the Reverend Al Sharpton. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Sheen, Fulton J. One of the most popular clerics in U.S. history, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen helped fashion Roman Catholicism as part of the American mainstream with his highly rated prime-time television broadcasts during the 1950s. He condemned communism for its atheistic ideology, and he framed the Cold War as a cosmic struggle that would end with Russia returning to its Christian roots. Sheen converted thousands, including public personalities such as Heywood Broun, Clare Booth Luce, and Henry Ford II, as well as the former communists Louis F. Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley. Born in El Paso, Illinois, on May 8, 1895, Fulton John Sheen grew up in nearby Peoria. After earning degrees at St. Viator College in Bourbonnais, Illinois (AB, 1917; MA, 1919), he received ordination in September 1919. He then continued his education in theology and philosophy at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (STL and JCB, 1920), and the University of Louvain in Belgium (PhD, 1923). From 1926 to 1950, he taught at Catholic University of America, but it was his broadcast ministries—beginning with the national radio program The Catholic Hour in 1930 and the prime-time television show Life Is Worth Living, which ran from 1952 to 1957—that made him a household name. The hosting of Life Is Worth Living, which won Sheen an Emmy in 1952, enabled him to promote religion and American values by speaking—sometimes humorously— on such diverse topics as modernity, fatigue, science, handling teenagers, psychiatry, and God. As he had done since the 1930s, Sheen continued to denounce Marxism as a counterfeit religion. In 1953, coincidentally nine days before the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Sheen presented a televised eulogy that parodied Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Friends, Soviets, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Stalin, not to praise him.” In the tract Smokescreens (1983), Christian fundamentalist producer Jack Chick argues that Sheen’s anticommunism was part of a postwar Vatican conspiracy to shift attention away from the Catholic
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Church’s support of the Nazis and to create a common enemy for forging a sense of unity between Catholics and Protestants. From 1950 to 1966, Sheen served as national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. As head of missionary activities for U.S. Catholics, he gained a strong sense of the needs of the disadvantaged poor, at home and abroad. This made him an advocate of social and racial justice in the American South. In the late 1950s, he began advocating governmental foreign aid, saying that “missionaries will not sell America, nor will they win military pacts. But America will gain by it in the end.” In 1958, he spoke on the subject during a White House visit with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He also brought concerns for social justice to Vatican Council II (1962–1965) as a member of the commission on missions. Sheen died on December 9, 1979. Tim Lacy and Roger Chapman See also: Budenz, Louis F.; Catholic Church; Chick, Jack; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Marxism; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Televangelism.
Further Reading Reeves, Thomas C. America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001. Riley, Kathleen L. Fulton J. Sheen: An American Catholic Response to the Twentieth Century. Staten Island, NY: St. Paul’s / Alba House, 2004.
S h e l l ey, M a r t h a A radical feminist gay rights activist and controversial writer, Martha Shelley spearheaded the separatist radical lesbian-feminist movement in postwar America. Inspired by the Stonewall Riots of 1968, Shelley’s influential articles “Notes of a Radical Lesbian” (1969), “Gay is Good” (1970), and “Lesbianism and the Women’s Liberation Movement” (1970) offered a radical link between the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements. In her characteristically angry tone, she asserted that lesbians must strive for understanding, rather than toleration and superficial acceptance. For Shelley, true women’s liberation is connected with the practice of lesbian sexuality because only in the complete rejection of patriarchy can women find their freedom. Martha Shelley (née Altman) was born into a Jewish family on December 27, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York. A self-described “loner” in high school, she felt like an outsider until she joined the New York chapter of the lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and became part of the fledgling gay rights movement. By
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the late 1960s, the young radical had found her voice. She legally changed her name to Martha Shelley in honor of her favorite poet, Percy Shelley, became the president of the DOB, participated in numerous antiwar protests, and joined the more radical Student Homophile League on the Barnard College campus. When the league failed to adequately address lesbians’ concerns, Shelley and other young militants formed the anarchical and shortlived Gay Liberation Front in 1969. She later moved to Oakland, California, where she worked briefly with the ill-fated California Women’s Press Collective. She has continued to publish articles, essays, and poems, including the verse collections Crossing the DMZ (1981) and Lovers and Mothers (1982). Shelley defied the conservatism creeping into some of the nation’s most high-profile consciousness-raising organizations. By appropriating the language of other civil rights activists, she likened the situation of lesbians in the women’s and gay rights movements to the state of African Americans in larger society. In the late 1960s, radical lesbians found themselves at a crossroads. Believing that it could undermine the credibility of the entire women’s movement itself, Betty Friedan’s National Organization of Women (NOW) took a decidedly hostile approach to lesbianism. Gay rights organizations had similarly considered lesbianism something of a distraction. In response, Shelley co-founded the Lavender Menace, later renamed Radicalesbians, with NOW defector Rita Mae Brown in 1970. The organization’s founding manifesto, titled “The Woman-Identified Woman,” called for the inclusion of lesbians in the larger women’s liberation movement. Although Radicalesbians folded the following year, NOW incorporated lesbian rights into its charter.
Shepard, Matthew Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old college student in Wyoming, was brutally murdered in October 1998, the victim of an antigay hate crime, a robbery, or both, depending on who tells the story. Publicity surrounding the murder brought national attention to the issue of hate crimes. Born on December 1, 1976, in Casper, Wyoming, Matthew Wayne Shepard grew up in a middle-class home and attended the American School in Switzerland. In 1995, after studying at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and Casper College, he enrolled as a political science major at the University of Wyoming. Sometime after midnight on October 7, 1998, Shepard got a ride with two men he had met at a bar and who may have lured him away by pretending to be gay. He was driven to a rural area of Laramie and subsequently robbed, severely beaten and pistol-whipped, and left to die tied to a fence in freezing weather. Eighteen hours later, he was found barely alive by a passerby. Shepard, who suffered extensive lacerations and a fractured skull, died at Poudre Valley Hospital, in Ft. Collins, Colorado, on October 12. At Shepard’s funeral, the notorious “Reverend” Fred Phelps shocked the nation by staging an antigay protest, carrying inflammatory placards with slogans such as “GOD HATES FAGS.” Shepard’s attackers were Russell Henderson, who pleaded guilty to felony murder and kidnapping, and Aaron McKinney, who was found guilty at trial. The two gave conflicting statements about their motives for the crime. During the trial, they used the “gay panic defense,” arguing temporary insanity caused by homophobia after Shepard had
Kelly L. Mitchell See also: Counterculture; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Gay Rights Movement; Lesbians; National Organization for Women; Sexual Revolution; Stonewall Rebellion.
Further Reading Clendinen, Dudley, and Adam Nagourney. Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Marcus, Eric. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945–1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Shelley, Martha. “Gay is Good.” In Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young, 31–34. New York: New York University Press, 1992. ———. “Notes of a Radical Lesbian.” In Women’s Rights in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox, 283–84. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student viciously murdered in 1998, is memorialized in a candlelight vigil. The incident became a cause célèbre in the gay rights movement and spurred demands for stronger federal hatecrime legislation. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images)
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propositioned them. At one point, they stated that the motive behind the crime was strictly robbery, a detail some later emphasized in arguing that the incident did not rate as a hate crime. Both men were sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, McKinney without the possibility of parole. Shepard’s parents later founded the Matthew Shepard Society, dedicated to promoting tolerance. In 2002, the murder and its aftermath were the subject of two television films, The Matthew Shepard Story by NBC and The Laramie Project by HBO, the latter based on an offBroadway play. In 2007, Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Act (officially the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act), but it was vetoed by President George W. Bush (as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill). The measure would have expanded federal hate-crime law to include incidents motivated by bias against gender, sexual orientation, or disability. Michael Johnson, Jr. See also: Gay Rights Movement; Hate Crimes; Phelps, Fred.
Further Reading Loffreda, Beth. Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Lynch, John. “Memory and Matthew Shepard: Opposing Expressions of Public Memory in Television Movies.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31:3 (July 2007): 222–38. Matthew Shepard Society Web site. www.matthewshepard .org. Ott, Brian L., and Eric Aoki. “The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5:3 (Fall 2002): 483–505. Patterson, Romaine, and Patrick Hinds. The Whole World Was Watching: Living in the Light of Matthew Shepard. New York: Advocate Books, 2005.
Shock Jock s “Shock jocks,” provocative radio talk show hosts or disc jockeys, are known for speaking in a deliberately offensive manner and treating their callers rudely. Most commonly associated with controversial radio personality Howard Stern, the term has become a pejorative label for irreverent broadcasters whose on-air behavior is meant to shock and offend the general listener. Although such radio shows remain popular, they have been increasingly subjected to fines and sanctions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a trend that caused Stern to move his show to an unregulated satellite radio station. Typically, shock jocks engage their audience in conversations about the more prurient aspects of sex as well as
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topics that promote racism, homophobia, exploitation of women, and the ridicule of disabled people. While many angry listeners simply file complaints with the FCC, others have taken more dramatic action. The number of suspects in the 1984 murder of Denver-based shock jock Alan Berg was so great that sixty police officers had to be assigned to the case. Berg’s violent death brought national attention to the shock jock phenomenon and was the basis for Eric Bogosian’s award-winning play Talk Radio (1987; film version, 1988). Shock jocks are especially popular among young adult males. In addition to Stern, the most audacious radio personalities include Steve Dahl, a Chicago DJ who proposed making a “cocktail” of the corpses left floating after Hurricane Katrina; Mike Church, a regular target of the Southern Anti-Defamation League for his distasteful comments against the South; Todd Clem, also known as Bubba the Love Sponge, arrested in 2001 after slaughtering a live pig on the air; Opie and Anthony, fired after joking that Boston mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in an automobile accident; Tom Leykis, who revealed the name of the woman who accused basketball star Kobe Bryant of rape in July 2003; and Mancow Muller, who sent rival talk show host Howard Stern a box of excrement. A handful of women have managed to succeed in the field. One is Liz Wilde, a Floridian who promotes “Blow It Out Yer Ass” Fridays. Another is “The Radio Chick,” Leslie Gold, whose New York show features titillating skits like “20 Questions with a Hooker.” Some critics blame shock jocks for a “renaissance of vulgarity” in American society. Others see shock jocks as a by-product of a society that has lost its moral compass. Radio and television pioneer Steve Allen speculated in his Vulgarians at the Gate (2001) that Stern and his “toilet talk fraternity” were being used by media conglomerates to grab ratings. Civil discourse may not sell, but controversy certainly does. Most shock jocks started out as Top 40 DJs and continue to serve the same commercial interests. While Congress continues to boost FCC fines to more than $300,000 per violation, free speech advocates equate the tighter restrictions with a new brand of McCarthyism. Survey research suggests that a majority of listeners prefer radio personalities who “push the limits.” Many argue that radio is no more explicit than network television or cable programs. In fact, some First Amendment experts have complained that shock jocks are being punished for broadcasting sexually explicit bits that are perfectly acceptable on daytime TV. Cindy Mediavilla See also: Censorship; Federal Communications Commission; Hurricane Katrina; McCarthyism; Political Correctness; Speech Codes; Stern, Howard; Talk Radio.
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Further Reading Allen, Steve. Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio—Raising the Standards of Popular Culture. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001. Hilliard, Robert, and Michael C. Keith. Dirty Discourse: Sex and Indecency in American Radio. Ames: Iowa State Press, 2003. O’Connor, Roy. Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio. San Francisco: AlterNet Books, 2008.
S i d e r, Ro n The Canadian-born theologian and author Ron Sider became prominent among Christian evangelicals during the 1970s for his attacks on the wealthy, on indifference toward poverty, and on the perceived complacency of many North American Christians. As a professor at Philadephia’s Messiah College, he wrote Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), a polemical work that sold more than 350,000 copies and generated intense debate over the relationship between Christianity and economics, and over the relative impact of structural factors and personal choices in determining individual success or failure. Like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis, Sider combined evangelicalism and leftist politics in a way that earned great popularity on college and seminary campuses, as well as rebukes from all points on the political spectrum. Ronald James Sider was born on September 17, 1939, in Stevensville, Ontario, and raised in a Brethren in Christ household. An offshoot of the Mennonites, the Brethren in Christ sect emphasizes pacifism, simple living, and the importance of community, ideas that inform all of Sider’s later work. He received his BA from Waterloo Lutheran University, Ontario, and his Master’s of Divinity and PhD in history from Yale University. In 1968, he took up his teaching position in Philadelphia, choosing to live in an impoverished neighborhood of that city. In 1972, Sider served as secretary of Evangelicals for McGovern and the following year helped found Evangelicals for Social Action, an organization that called for a biblical response to combating racism and poverty. His appeal at the 1984 Mennonite World Conference to send nonviolent Christian peacekeeping forces into zones of conflict led to the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that has participated in sometimes controversial interventions in the Middle East, Chechnya, Haiti, and Chiapas, Mexico. Sider has published more than twenty books, including three updated versions of Rich Christians, as well as numerous articles for Christianity Today, Sojourners, PRISM, and other moderate and progressive religious serials. His work is unified by its attention to the systemic forces that underlie individual and regional poverty, the hypocrisy he sees in evangelicals who ignore issues of social justice, and the need for enhanced
government programs—in conjunction with charitable giving—in order to redress economic inequalities. These views, along with his sometimes strident criticisms of American society, have led detractors to accuse him of anti-Americanism, simplistic and utopian economic theorizing, and/or outright Marxism. Religious conservatives have mounted a sustained attack against Sider since the mid-1970s, most notably through Christian reconstructionist David Chilton’s Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (1981). Sider has modified aspects of his views in response to these criticisms. Later writings reflect a growing appreciation for market economies and an increasing emphasis on the impact of personal choice on individual success. The link between individual morality and poverty, along with his belief in the ability of Christianity to transform economically detrimental personal behavior, has led Sider to support faith-based social programs. This endorsement, along with his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, has drawn condemnation from liberals within and beyond the Christian community. Robert Teigrob See also: Abortion; Campolo, Anthony “Tony”; Canada; Christian Reconstructionism; Compassionate Conservatism; Evangelicalism; Faith-Based Programs; Marxism; Religious Right; Same-Sex Marriage; Wallis, Jim; Wealth Gap.
Further Reading Chilton, David. Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ron Sider. Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1981. Martin, Paul. “Prophet or Siren? Ron Sider’s Continued Influence.” Religion & Liberty 10:1 (January and February 2000): 11–13. Robbins, John. “Ron Sider Contra Deum.” Trinity Review (March–April 1981): 1–6. Sider, Ron. Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999. ———. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977.
Silent Majority The term “Silent Majority” was a rhetorical device first used by President Richard Nixon in a televised speech on November 3, 1969, to cast the protesters of the Vietnam War as not representative of average Americans. The context was his attempt to restore public support for his policy to seek “peace with honor” rather than immediately withdraw U.S. forces. In that address, Nixon appealed to “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” and asked them to help him “end the war in a way that we could win the peace.” His strategy was to make the antiwar demonstrators seem like a small
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but loud minority out of step with the rest of American society, which believed in the fight to stop the spread of communism in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. During his first months in office in 1969, the president established the Nixon Doctrine for implementing “Vietnamization,” a plan to shift the war burden from the U.S. military to Vietnamese armed forces. Later, Nixon traveled to the region and met with American troops and the president of South Vietnam. Despite his efforts to decrease American involvement in the increasingly unpopular conflict, antiwar protests continued at home. Moreover, newspaper revelations of the My Lai massacre (in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers had been killed by U.S. soldiers) inflamed protesters, further complicating efforts to secure public support for his war agenda. It did not go unnoticed by Nixon that the protest movements included some of the same youthful, counterculture elements that were part of the earlier civil rights movement. He and many conservative politicians believed that media coverage of these “agitators” had skewed the public perception of their breadth and popularity. Most Americans, Nixon argued, were not only loyal supporters of the Cold War policy of containment but also opponents of the domestic riots and marches that threatened the social status quo of race relations and gender roles. Nixon’s speech also appealed to veterans of past wars, many of whom viewed war protesters as unpatriotic. In general, Nixon’s argument resonated with bluecollar workers. On May 8, 1970, in a show of support for Nixon’s war policies, helmeted construction workers, in a demonstration organized by the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council, wielded wrenches against antiwar students in New York City. After beating up students, the workers then marched to city hall and raised the American flag that had been lowered to halfmast to mourn the victims of the Kent State shootings four days earlier. The “Silent Majority” claim was an integral part of the Republican strategy to win support of the white working class, especially in the Midwest and the South. Strategists also argued that media coverage of the war was unbalanced, offering excessive coverage to dissenting groups and thus displaying a liberal media bias. Similarly, when Jerry Falwell established the Moral Majority, the idea being communicated was that anything not in accord with the conservative viewpoint was outside the mainstream. Angie Maxwell See also: Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Falwell, Jerry; Media Bias; Moral Majority; My Lai Massacre; Nixon, Richard; Republican Party; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
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Further Reading Black, Conrad. Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007. Genovese, Michael A. The Nixon Presidency: Power and Politics in Turbulent Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990. McNamara, Robert S. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.
Simpsons, The The Simpsons, an animated television series created by cartoonist Matt Groening, has been highly popular and controversial since its premiere in 1989. In following the lives of Homer, Marge, and their children, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, The Simpsons pokes fun at a variety of social, political, and economic issues, including juvenile delinquency, alcoholism, race relations, gender roles, consumerism, and class divisions. The show’s social commentary generally draws criticism from conservatives and praise from liberals, but its depiction of a modern family has found allies on the political right as well. In 2007, the cartoon series was the basis for the movie, The Simpsons, which was widely received. Groening’s series first appeared as a recurrent segment on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–1990) and then became a weekly series on the Fox television network in 1989. Each member of the Simpson family provides fodder for satirical humor. Homer is more interested in drinking Duff Beer and eating donuts than in interacting with his family. Marge is an understanding, patient housewife but has a darker side and is secretly ambitious. Bart is an irreverent, self-described underachiever and is continuously in trouble for bucking authority. Lisa is a budding feminist, saxophone player, and vegetarian. The other residents of the Simpsons’ fictional hometown—Springfield, USA—also play a significant role in many of the storylines. Homer works at a nuclear power plant under the management of the greedy Mr. Burns and his assistant Mr. Smithers, allowing for plot lines exposing the sinister side of capitalism. Krusty the Klown, the children’s favorite entertainer, is an off-stage alcoholic and compulsive gambler, which the show often uses to comment on the hypocrisy of entertainment and the media. Ned Flanders, the Simpsons’ neighbor, is an evangelical Christian who is constantly trying to save Homer and his family. In a 2005 episode, Marge’s sister Patty falls in love, comes out as a lesbian, and decides to marry. Although Simpsons satire often comes at the expense of the political right, some conservatives have commended the show’s portrayal of a stable nuclear family and of religion. Homer and Marge’s marriage is often depicted as dysfunctional, but the couple continues to stay together. The character of Ned Flanders also finds support among conservatives. Although he is an evangelical Christian and
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is often ridiculed for his perpetual positive attitude, he is also portrayed as empathetic and kind. With its commitment to satirizing everyone, The Simpsons has found audiences on both sides of the political fence, and the series has drawn the attention of scholars as well. Jessie Swigger See also: Campolo, Anthony “Tony”; Comic Books; Comic Strips; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Lesbians; Nuclear Age; Race; Stay-at-Home Mothers.
Further Reading Groening, Matt. The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997. Irwin, William, Mark T. Conrad, and Aeon J. Skoble, eds. The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’Oh of Homer. Chicago: Open Court, 2001. Pinsky, Mark, and Tony Campolo. The Gospel According to the Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
Smok ing in Public Beginning in the 1970s, the issue of smoking tobacco in indoor public facilities has pitted libertarians against health advocates across the United States. For many opponents of government-imposed restrictions on smoking, lighting up a cigarette symbolizes individualism and freedom of choice. Smoking bans thus are seen as an attack on civil liberties and an example of “Big Brother” policing. On the other hand, for those concerned about the health risks of involuntary (secondhand) smoking— otherwise known as environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)—the public good warrants smoking bans in public transportation facilities, workplaces, and even restaurants and bars. By 2007, half of all Americans lived in states or local communities that had implemented smoking ordinances. U.S. Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney in 1957 became the first U.S. federal official to declare a causal link between smoking and lung cancer, but it was not until seven years later that smoking was officially declared a health hazard. A report issued in January 1964 by Surgeon General Luther L. Terry’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health compelled Congress the following year to require health warning labels on all cigarette packages. By 1972, the Surgeon General’s office began warning about ETS. In 1986, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, as well as the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, produced the results of a number of studies that linked ETS with lung cancer in nonsmokers. Reiterating the health risks of ETS, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1993 classified secondhand smoke
as a “Group A” carcinogen. In 2006, Surgeon General Richard Carmona warned that ETS is “more pervasive than we previously thought” and “a serious health hazard that can lead to disease and premature death in children and nonsmoking adults.” Carmona argued that ventilation systems like the ones used in restaurants do not eliminate secondhand smoke. In the wake of the first warnings against smoking by the Surgeon General’s office, the tobacco industry in 1958 founded the Tobacco Institute, a think tank that would devote itself to disputing the scientific data on smoking. Its efforts would be offset, however, by those of various antismoking groups in the late 1960s and 1970s, including Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), founded in 1968; Group Against Smokers’ Pollution (GASP), founded in 1971; and Fresh Air for Non-Smokers (FANS), founded in 1979. The antismoking lobby scored an early victory in 1972, when Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, became the first municipalities in the nation to restrict smoking in public buildings. The anti-ETS movement was bolstered four years later by a ruling of the New Jersey Superior Court that affirmed the right of Donna Shimp, an employee of Bell Telephone and the plaintiff in the case, to work in a smoke-free office environment. In 1986, the U.S. General Services Administration banned smoking in federal buildings. In 1988, Congress banned smoking on domestic airline flights of two hours or less, extending the ban two years later to longer flights. By the mid-1980s, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was publishing editorial advertisements in national publications in an attempt to block pending smoking ordinances across the country. Titles included “Smoking in Public: Let’s separate fact from friction,” “Second-Hand Smoke: The Myth and the Reality,” “Workplace Smoking Restrictions: A trend that never was,” “The Second-Hand Smokescreen,” and the like. In a two-pronged approach, the campaign cast doubt on scientific claims about the health risks associated with ETS by suggesting that the data are inconclusive, and framed the issue of smoking in public as one that can be resolved by individuals applying “common sense” and “politeness.” One ad characterized smoking bans as a form of “segregation,” implying that smokers were being stripped of their civil rights. Perhaps most controversial has been the debate over smoking in restaurants and bars. In 1995, tobacco giant Philip Morris provided the seed money for the establishment of the Guest Choice Network (later the Center for Consumer Freedom), a lobbying organization to oppose, among other things, government-imposed smoking bans in restaurants. Generally, the hospitality industry has emphasized market principles, arguing that proprietors should have the authority to decide whether or not to allow smoking in their establishments and that custom-
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ers can decide for themselves whether or not to patronize them. In 1994, controversially, California became the first state to pass legislation that banned smoking in all buildings open to the public, including bars and restaurants (though the measure did not fully go into effect until 1998). New York City’s 2003 smoking ordinance also banned smoking in bars and restaurants. One of the strictest smoking bans went into effect in Hawaii in 2006, forbidding outdoor smoking less than 20 feet (6.1 meters) from any door, window, or ventilation system of a hotel, restaurant, or bar. Roger Chapman See also: Koop, C. Everett; Science Wars; Tobacco Settlements.
Further Reading Hilts, Philip J. Smokescreen: The Truth behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-up. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Schaler, Jeffrey A., and Magda E. Schaler, eds. Smoking: Who Has the Right? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. Sullum, Jacob. For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health. New York: Free Press, 1998. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking: Lung Cancer and Other Disorders. Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1993. U.S. Surgeon General. The Health Consequences of Involuntary Smoking. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1986.
Socarides, Charles Psychiatrist and author Charles Socarides argued in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) “sacrificed our scientific knowledge” when it stopped listing homosexuality as a mental illness. Regarding same-sex desire as a “neurotic adaptation,” Socarides devoted his career to the “treatment and prevention” of homosexuality. A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, Charles William Socarides was born on January 24, 1922. At age thirteen, inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud, he decided to become a psychiatrist. A graduate of Harvard College (1945), New York Medical College (1947), and the psychoanalytical clinic and research center at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (1952), he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. While maintaining a private practice in New York City, he taught psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx (1960–1996). Near the end of his career, in 1992, Socarides co-founded the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, based in Encino, California, a nonprofit group “dedicated to affirming a complementary, malefemale model of gender and sexuality.” After APA members in April 1974 voted 5,845 to 3,810 (out of 17,910 eligible voters) to uphold the 1973
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board decision to declassify homosexuality as a psychological malady, Socarides and seven other psychiatrists demanded a second vote. APA members, they argued, had been misled because a letter about the referendum mailed to them by the board and signed by APA leaders was conceived and paid for by the National Gay Task Force. Indeed, the task force, which had been formed in October 1973 to “work for liberation of gay people and a change in public attitudes,” spent $3,000 on printing and mailing the letter, a detail that was not at the time disclosed to the APA rank and file. In May 1975, an ad hoc committee of the APA rejected the request for a new vote, ruling that it was “opposed to the use of referenda to decide on scientific issues.” But Socarides’s faction saw the first vote as a case in which a scientific issue had been decided by a referendum—and one manipulated by political activism. His detractors (much of the mental health profession as well as gay rights activists) believed that Socarides perpetuated the suffering of his patients by convincing them that homosexuality was something that had to be “fixed.” His supporters (social conservatives and certain religious groups) regarded him as a brave scientist who followed where his research findings led and offered “reparative therapy” to help people overcome a pathological illness. Critics dismissed his claim to have “cured” 35 percent of his gay patients. Socarides wrote numerous books, including The Overt Homosexual (1968) and Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far (1995). His gay son, Richard, was a White House adviser on lesbian and gay issues to President Bill Clinton. Socarides, who died on December 25, 2005, was convinced that he had failed his son by not providing the kind of family atmosphere necessary for heterosexual development. Roger Chapman See also: Clinton, Bill; Gay Rights Movement; Gays in the Military; Hay, Harry; Milk, Harvey; Lesbians; Same-Sex Marriage; Science Wars; Sodomy Laws; Stonewall Rebellion; White, Reggie.
Further Reading Bayer, Ronald. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Erzen, Tanya. Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversion in the Ex-Gay Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Socarides, Charles W. “How America Went Gay.” America, November 18, 1995.
Social Security The Social Security program—signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935—was created to
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provide retired workers with a stable income. It has grown into one of the largest economic responsibilities of the U.S. federal government, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the government’s annual spending. From the program’s inception to 2008, over $10 trillion was paid out in benefits. Social Security is a form of social insurance to which workers and their employers contribute a percentage of the workers’ wages. Upon the retirement, disability, or death of a worker, the federal government pays a regular cash benefit to the worker or his or her surviving dependents. Benefits are not computed strictly on an actuarial basis (returns are not based strictly on considerations of individual equity), but elements of social policy are factored in as well (what policymakers call concern for social adequacy). For example, Social Security benefits are weighted so that the retirement benefit is proportionately higher for low-wage workers than for high-wage workers.
History The Social Security Act of 1935 created only a retirement benefit and only for the individual worker. Only about half the jobs in the economy were covered under the original 1935 legislation. Major amendments adopted in 1939 changed the nature of the system from an individual retirement program to a family-based benefit, by the addition of dependent and survivor benefits. The provision of spouses’ benefits, in particular, was premised on the model of the typical 1930s-era family, which featured a working father and a stay-at-home mother. Between 1950 and 1972, the program expanded dramatically, providing coverage to new classes of occupations, significantly increasing the value of benefits, and adding new types of benefits. Cash disability benefits were made available in 1956, and health insurance for the elderly was provided under Medicare in 1965. In 1972, the program allowed for regular annual increases in benefits to keep pace with the cost of living. Since then, financing concerns have slowed policy expansion. The impact of Social Security on the economic status of the elderly has been dramatic. Prior to the program, the majority of the elderly in America lived in some form of economic dependency—they were too poor to be self-supporting. In 2006, only 10 percent of the nation’s elderly were living in poverty, a much lower rate due in large part to Social Security. It is also the nation’s principal disability program, with 8 million people receiving disability benefits in 2006 and another 7 million receiving survivors’ benefits. Of Social Security’s 48 million beneficiaries in 2006, more than 3 million were children receiving benefits as dependents of insured workers. In 2008, some 50 million people received $600 billion in annual benefits under the program.
Ideological Viewpoints As America’s largest and most expensive social welfare program, Social Security has been a source of almost constant contention in the culture wars. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, referred to the Social Security program as “the inner fortress of the welfare state” that the conservative movement would seek to dismantle. Social conservatives believe that the family rather than the government ought to provide such economic support. However, because the program is designed around the family as the economic unit, some social conservatives have been won over. Gary Bauer, the founder of the socially conservative Family Research Council and a Republican candidate for president in 2000, defended Social Security on the grounds that its benefit structure (especially the spousal benefit) encourages traditional families. Fiscal conservatives complain that Social Security taxes are onerous, and that government is an inefficient provider of economic security compared to private markets. They argue that America would be better served by a privatized system of economic security rather than one sponsored by the government. Advocates of small government, such as libertarians, opposed on principle to government involving itself in issues of economic security, characterize Social Security and similar programs as part of a patronizing “nanny state.” Liberals, on the other hand, argue that government has an obligation to ensure a basic foundation of economic security for its citizens. Social Security has long been viewed as a principal achievement of the liberal welfare state and is fiercely defended by the Democratic Party as one of its signal political achievements. Some on the political left complain that the program is not generous enough, and that it should be structured more like traditional European social welfare programs. Linking benefits to work means that existing inequities in the workplace—such as lower wages and participation rates for African Americans and women—will be mirrored in the retirement benefits under the system. Accordingly, some liberals complain that the program does not provide compensatory features for women and minorities to offset prior discrimination in the workplace. Feminists argue that the spousal benefit implicitly supports patriarchal families. Some critics argue that the system is unfair to African Americans because their shorter life expectancies mean less in retirement benefits. The division between private versus governmentsponsored social support is one of the main political fault lines in the culture wars. It pits the conservative ideals of individual responsibility and the pursuit of individual equity against the liberal ideals of collective responsibility and concern for the less fortunate. The designers of the Social Security program tried to strike a balance between
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these two sets of ideals, with elements of both built into the system. But attacks from both ends of the political spectrum have been commonplace throughout Social Security’s history. Since about the late 1980s, the critiques from the left have tended to fade, and the critiques from fiscal conservatives and libertarians have tended to be more prominent than critiques from social conservatives.
Long-Term Solvency and the Push for Privatization The most active criticism of the Social Security system revolves around fiscal issues. The fiscal critique has gained traction in the early twenty-first century given the uncertain future solvency of the system. Because the financing of Social Security is highly sensitive to demographic changes, as the Baby Boom generation enters its prime retirement years, the financial demands on the system will be severe. In its 2007 report, the board of trustees for the system projected that the program will fall short of full funding by the year 2041. Social Security thus faces a long-range solvency challenge that may require a tax increase or benefit reductions in the future. Debates about the future of Social Security are likely to involve issues of cost and intergenerational fairness, as future taxpayers may be asked to bear greater burdens or future beneficiaries to accept lesser benefits than prior cohorts. Such uncertainty has provided a renewed opportunity for conservative critics to argue for privatization of the system. Privatization means that some or all of the tax revenues financing the program would be diverted from the government’s accounts and invested in the stock market. Thus, a private equity account of some type would replace some or all of the benefits offered by the Social Security program. In 2001, newly installed President George W. Bush signaled his intention to transform the system by shifting large segments of its financing to the private equity market. Bush appointed a special commission of experts to recommend ways to introduce private accounts into the system and campaigned hard for this idea at the start of his second term in 2005, but he was unable to generate a political consensus in support of his proposals. Although there have been critics of the program throughout its history, Social Security has enjoyed a remarkable degree of public support. Its design has seemed to accord well with the values of the majority of American workers and taxpayers. Whether this consensus will endure as the solvency problem deepens remains to be seen. Larry W. DeWitt See also: Bush Family; Federal Budget Deficit; Generations and Generational Conflict; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
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Further Reading Altman, Nancy J. The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Berkowitz, Edward D. America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Diamond, Peter A., and Peter R. Orszag. Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2004. Ferrara, Peter J., and Michael Tanner. A New Deal for Social Security. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998. Social Security Administration Web site. www.socialsecurity .gov.
S o d o my L a w s Sodomy laws prohibiting various forms of nonreproductive sexual activity once existed in the penal codes of every U.S. state, but only fourteen maintained them by 2003, the year in which the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas declared all such laws unconstitutional on the grounds that they violated a person’s right to privacy. Because of the sexual practices they targeted, sodomy laws effectively criminalized gays and lesbians and thereby hindered their inclusion in mainstream society as respectable, law-abiding citizens. Sodomy laws have both religious and historical roots. Prohibitions against same-sex intercourse, for example, are found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. English law criminalized such behavior, establishing a precedent for colonial American jurisprudence to do the same. The mid-twentieth century, however, saw increasing divergence among the states regarding sodomy laws. Led by Illinois in 1961, certain states rescinded their sodomy laws for consenting adults. Others expanded the scope of these laws to include some heterosexual behaviors as well as same-sex acts between women. One notable battle over such laws occurred in California in 1975, when sodomy was decriminalized by a one-vote margin in the state senate. The conservative backlash led to the Briggs Amendment ballot initiative in 1978, which sought (but failed) to deny employment to gay and lesbian schoolteachers in California. Sodomy laws continued to be a flashpoint for social conservatives and gay rights groups. During the peak of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, when male-male sex acts were under attack as a health risk, the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) upheld the states’ prerogative to criminalize sodomy. The Court thereby resisted recognizing a right to privacy for gays and lesbians expansive enough to protect consensual sexual activity, as it had done previously for heterosexuals. Social conservatives, already wary of the Court’s expansive interpretation of privacy so key to the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision on abortion, embraced the Bowers ruling.
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Although sodomy laws were rarely enforced by the 1980s, in some areas openly gay citizens were automatically presumed to be guilty of sodomy, and thus were regarded by some as criminals. Such stigmatization led to a number of court decisions depriving gays and lesbians of child custody rights or adoption privileges. Others lost their jobs for allegedly practicing sodomy. Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which overturned Bowers after just seventeen years, was therefore monumental in ending the association of homosexuality with criminality. In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia criticized the majority decision, complaining that the Court “has taken sides in the culture war” in favor of the “so-called homosexual agenda.” Scalia went on to argue that the Lawrence decision means state laws against same-sex marriage, bigamy, adult incest, and prostitution are now subject to being challenged. Phil Tiemeyer See also: AIDS; Bryant, Anita; Douglas, William O.; Family Values; Gay Rights Movement; Judicial Wars; Milk, Harvey; Roe v. Wade (1973); Same-Sex Marriage.
Further Reading Eskridge, William N., Jr. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003. New York: Viking, 2008. Franke, Katherine M. “The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas.” Columbia Law Review 104:5 (June 2004): 1399–1426. Ireland, Doug. “Republicans Relaunch the Antigay Culture Wars.” Nation, October 20, 2003.
Sokal Affair The “Sokal Affair” of the late 1990s was a literary conflagration that followed the publication of New York University physicist Alan Sokal’s paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text. Sokal revealed that the piece was a hoax, designed to determine if a leading journal would “publish . . . nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” A front-page article in the New York Times announced that the answer was “yes,” setting off a heated debate over the intellectual substance of postmodernism. A dedicated physicist and unabashed old leftist (he frequently quotes Noam Chomsky and taught math for the Sandinistas), Sokal had been disturbed by claims that the “academic left” no longer believed in the ability of science to obtain objective truth. (If one concedes that truth is simply an artifact of power, Sokal argued, it would be impossible to criticize power as being untruthful.) After considering the best way to respond, he finally settled on parody. Sokal spent several months writing
a comic pastiche that combined “vague rhetoric about ‘nonlinearity,’ ‘flux’ and ‘interconnectedness’” while insisting “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” In footnotes, he claimed that the mathematical axioms of choice and equality stemmed from pro-choice, pro-equality “liberal feminists” and that New Age theories of the collective unconscious were the basis of cutting-edge research into quantum gravity, citing Rebecca Goldstein’s novel The Mind-Body Problem (1983) as a definitive text on the subject. More important, perhaps, the submission lavished praise on the editors of Social Text and called for scientists and mathematicians to subordinate their work to the left-wing political program. After Social Text published the paper in its spring/ summer 1996 issue on “The Science Wars,” Lingua Franca published Sokal’s essay revealing the hoax in its May/June issue. The editors of Social Text responded by calling Sokal a “deceptive” and “difficult, uncooperative author,” and his article as “a little hokey,” “somewhat outdated,” and “not really our cup of tea.” (At the same time, one editor refused to believe it was a hoax, instead maintaining that Sokal simply had “a folding of his intellectual resolve.”) They refused to publish Sokal’s afterword defending and explaining his paper. Meanwhile, the Sokal hoax was invoked by countless popular and academic critics of postmodernism as definitive proof of the field’s vacuousness. Still, Sokal was at pains to point out that “at most it reveals something about the intellectual standards of one trendy journal” and to insist there should not be a “science war” but an “exchange of ideas . . . to promote a collective search for the truth.” The following year, Sokal and French physicist Jean Bricmont together published Fashionable Nonsense, a booklength critique of the misuse of science by prominent postmodernists and a philosophical defense of scientific realism. The book led to more critiques of postmodernism in the popular press, but little response from the cultural studies community, which had largely written off Sokal as a mocking critic. Aaron Swartz See also: Anti-Intellectualism; Foucault, Michel; Postmodernism; Science Wars.
Further Reading Bérubé, Michael. Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Editors of Lingua Franca. The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2000. Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador, 1998.
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Soros, George A billionaire financier, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, George Soros is known not only for several highprofile financial deals but also for his writings on politics and economics. In the late 1970s, he began his long campaign of promoting social and political reform in Eastern Europe, but at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, his outspoken opposition to the policies of President George W. Bush made him a prominent figure in the American culture wars. Born György Schwartz on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, Soros experienced the Nazi occupation and escaped the Holocaust by concealing his Jewish ethnicity. At age seventeen, he moved to England, where he earned a degree from the London School of Economics (1952) and came under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper. After immigrating to the United States in 1956, he worked for a number of years as an arbitrage trader and then co-founded Quantum Fund (1969), which emerged as one of the world’s most lucrative hedge funds. This was followed by the establishment of Soros Fund Management (1973), a highly successful international investment fund he continues to chair. Two of its controversial deals were a currency speculation in the British pound and the Malaysian ringgit during the 1990s that resulted in the devaluation of both currencies. In the former case, he was said to have earned $1 billion in one day by speculating that the pound would decline in value. His best-selling book The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (1988) is a treatise on investing. Profoundly influenced by Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Soros applied his wealth to fostering reform in “closed societies” such as South Africa, China, and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc. His Open Society Institute (OSI) was founded in 1979 to champion the creation of civil societies in countries shedding totalitarian systems. Operating in more than fifty countries, OSI continues to support education, human rights, economic development, women’s concerns, and public health. His founding of Central European University in his native city of Budapest in 1991 was with the intention of training new public and academic leaders in the rapidly transforming countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Opening the Soviet Union (1990), Soros claimed some credit for the downfall of communism; he had supported the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland and the Charter 77 human rights organization in Czechoslovakia, both of which helped foster the demise of the Soviet bloc. In the United States, OSI has initiated programs to promote reform in criminal justice, immigration, and youth empowerment. Some of Soros’s positions have run counter to the viewpoints of political conservatives, such
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as his advocacy of needle exchange programs, medical marijuana, and medical-assisted suicide. The American public became more familiar with him during the 2004 presidential election, when he donated millions of dollars to organizations such as MoveOn.org to oppose the reelection of George W. Bush. In The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (2003) and The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror (2006), Soros has characterized the Bush administration’s foreign policy as delusional, arguing that it has undermined America’s greatness through violations of human rights and actions representative of closed societies. Susan Pearce See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Bush Family; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Globalization; Holocaust; Human Rights; Medical Marijuana; Prison Reform; September 11; Soviet Union and Russia; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Carter, Terry. “Mr. Democracy.” ABA Journal, January 2000. Kaufman, Michael T. Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Open Society Institute Web site. www.soros.org.
S o u t h e r n B a p t i s t C o nve n t i o n Organized in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the second-largest religious group in the United States (after the Roman Catholic Church), and the largest Baptist group in the world. In 2008, the SBC claimed more than 16 million members, worshipping in over 42,000 churches in the United States. Although SBC churches are highly concentrated in the American South, the denomination has expanded to include congregations in every U.S. state and throughout the world. The SBC has figured prominently in the rise of the Christian Right since the 1980s, but historically it has been minimally involved in American politics. Southern Baptists faced controversy in their early history (over slavery, denominational structure, and missionary activity that split Northern and Southern Baptists, for example), but had little capacity or inclination for political-cultural engagement before the mid-twentieth century. The traditional marginalization of the South weakened SBC capability for national influence before post–World War II economic renewal. Moreover, Southern Baptists encountered difficulties in national mobilization due to their decentralized church polity (congregational, associational, confessional) and some internal tendencies toward separatism.
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Southern Baptists first strongly embraced politicalcultural engagement after evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, Carl F.H. Henry, and Charles Fuller spearheaded efforts to bring national revival and cultural renewal in the 1940s. Enthusiasm for confronting secularism was later bolstered by supporting Christian intellectual rationale, such as Richard John Neuhaus’s book on church-state relations, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1984). As SBC willingness to engage with society grew, denominational transformation brought the organization into the political and cultural spotlight. Beginning in 1961, the denomination split between theologically liberal/moderate and conservative/fundamentalist camps, with the former holding ascendance until 1979 and the latter maintaining preeminence in the years since. In the so-called Conservative Resurgence or Fundamentalist Takeover, conservatives from 1979 on engineered successive SBC presidential victories and installed supporters in key positions on boards and seminaries. In addition, conservatives reformed denominational institutions to enable greater unity on doctrinal orthodoxy, especially biblical inerrancy and infallibility. The SBC today remains largely conservative, albeit with internal tension between liberals/moderates and old-line conservatives (who object to perceived SBC creedalism and centralization) that operate through local and national splinter entities. The internal SBC theological struggle has had political implications as well, explaining such seeming paradoxes as the SBC’s initial support and later criticism of Roe v. Wade (1973) and the competing ranks of politically liberal members (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Richard Gephardt, Al Gore) versus conservative ones (Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott). Since 1979, the SBC has become more politically active, typically supporting conservative causes through agencies like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Although the SBC includes members with diverse political leanings and endorses political activism according to biblical values over party lines, it has also proven to be an important Republican Party constituency. The SBC opposes abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, electively aborted embryonic stem-cell research, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, sexuality and violence in the media, gambling, and alcohol/tobacco/drug use. It supports homeschooling, school choice, voluntary prayer and religious expression in public schools, capital punishment, and the appointment of conservative federal judges. Some SBC resolutions have been relatively uncontroversial, supporting environmental care, human rights, hunger relief, voluntary organ donation, disaster assistance, and benevolence (prison, homeless, and AIDS victim ministries); while renouncing sex trafficking, genocide,
religious persecution, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Other resolutions, however, proved to be polarizing, including affirmations of Ronald Reagan, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Boy Scouts of America’s leadership policies, the ban on homosexuality in the military, border control (though with social and economic justice for legal and illegal immigrants), and Israeli sovereignty (though calling for internationally just treatment of Israelis as well as Palestinians). The SBC has also stirred controversy for boycotting the Walt Disney Company and subsidiaries for pro-gay policies and programs (1997–2005), confining pastoral leadership to men, and stating that wives should submit graciously to their husbands (just as husbands must love their wives as Christ loved the church). Although the SBC is politically conservative overall, its size, structure, and diffuseness has over the years allowed for variation in political approaches among leaders, members, and affiliated organizations. Thus, SBC resolutions are suggestive but nonbinding. The large tent of the SBC has accommodated those with nontraditional theological positions (i.e., Pat Robertson’s Charismaticism) and those with vastly differing political positions (from Jerry Falwell to Rick Warren). Erika Seeler See also: Boy Scouts of America; Falwell Jerry; Gays in the Military; Graham, Billy; Immigration Policy; Israel; Pornography; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; Right to Die; Robertson, Pat; Roe v. Wade (1973); Same-Sex Marriage; Stem-Cell Research; Walt Disney Company; Warren, Rick; Women in the Military.
Further Reading Ammerman, Nancy. Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Dockery, David S., ed. Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1993. Southern Baptist Convention official Web site. www.sbc.net. Yarbrough, Slayden A. Southern Baptists: A Historical, Ecclesiological, and Theological Heritage of a Confessional People. Brentwood, TN: Southern Baptist Historical Society, 2000.
S ov i e t U n i o n a n d R u s s i a After centuries of autocratic czarist rule, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution brought Russia under communist control, leading to the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Following the Soviet regime’s implosion, triggered by reforms initiated by Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR in 1991 fragmented into a dozen independent republics with Russia as the dominant country. Whether Czar-
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ist Russia, Red Russia, or New Russia, this nation has traditionally been mistrusted by Americans and often characterized as the polar opposite of the United States. Long before it became a communist dictatorship, Russia was widely viewed by Americans as a land of tyranny—Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858), for instance, referred to Russia in this fashion. Earlier, the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and its assertion of American dominance of the Western Hemisphere was formulated in part as a warning to Russia, which at the time was colonizing Alaska and maintaining a fort as far south as what is today Sonoma County, California. And in his much-quoted study Democracy in America (1820–1840), Alexis de Tocqueville refers to the United States and Russia as “two great nations in the world, which started from two points,” the former by “the plowshare” and the latter by “the sword.”
World War I to Early Cold War Although the American journalist and socialist John Reed wrote a celebratory account of the Bolshevik Revolution—Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)—most of his countrymen regarded the communist takeover of Russia as a tragedy. Moreover, Russia’s unilateral withdrawal from World War I and its signing of a separate peace with Germany (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918) were viewed as an act of treachery to the Western alliance, in particular Great Britain and the United States. With a civil war raging in Russia, the United States kept a military intervention force inside the country from 1918 to 1920. Meanwhile, the first Red Scare in the United States led to the roundup of “radicals” of Eastern European descent and their deportation to Russia on a ship nicknamed the “Soviet Ark.” Not until 1933, under President Franklin Roosevelt, did the United States formally recognize the Soviet government. During the decade of the Great Depression, many progressives were negatively labeled “fellow travelers” and “pinks” for making investigatory trips to the Soviet Union and then writing favorable assessments of planned economy. Violent labor disputes, such as the 1934 Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, were denigrated by conservative businessmen as “Bolshevik.” In 1939, the Soviet government signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazi regime in Germany, inspiring the term “red fascism.” Following Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia, however, the Soviet Union became an ally, as heralded in the U.S. government’s “Why We Fight” film, The Battle of Russia (1943). At the same time, Hollywood produced a number of positive films about Russia, including Mission to Moscow (1943), The North Star (1943), and Song of Russia (1944). Nonetheless, the U.S.-Soviet wartime alliance was characterized by mutual mistrust. On July 25, 1945, after the United States’ first successful atomic bomb test,
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President Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb.” As it turned out, Soviet espionage penetrated the Manhattan Project, which would enable Russia to accelerate its own development of atomic weaponry. Once Russia acquired the bomb— which it tested successfully for the first time on August 29, 1949—the two superpowers embarked on a nuclear arms race. Already the Cold War had begun, largely due to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
Culture Wars As the Cold War played out and became a part of the culture wars, Americans largely regarded Russia as the opposite of what the United States stood for. The term “un-American” was a synonym for communist, meaning like the Soviet Union. Conservative culture warriors often branded their liberal opponents as being un-American or “far left.” As the Soviet Union’s official atheist stance was emphasized, the phrase “one nation under God” was inserted in the American flag pledge in 1954, and “In God We Trust” inscribed on U.S. currency in 1957, precipitating debates on the separation of church and state. The first stirrings of the Religious Right were related to the Christian opposition to Soviet curtailment of religious freedom, as evangelists such as Billy Hargis preached against communism (in 1964 he published The Far Left, and Why I Fight for a Christian America) and conducted ministry activities such as releasing hot air balloons with attached Bible verses over Soviet bloc nations. For many cold warriors, the authoritarian Soviet system with its restrictions on individual freedom was what America was opposing. That was the message of the Freedom Train, which from 1947 to 1949 traversed the United States, stopping at major cities so that Americans could view original copies of the Bill of Rights and other “documents of liberty.” In 1950, Life magazine reported the forty-eight-hour “communist takeover” of Mosinee, Wisconsin, a drama staged by the American Legion to underscore the freedom that would be lost under a Sovietlike system of government. The lesson was even less subtle in Red Nightmare (1957), a U.S. government propaganda film. Meanwhile, Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958) prompted an intellectual debate over the distinction between negative liberty (freedom from restraint of the state, which the United States emphasized) and positive liberty (freedom to have what is necessary to reach one’s full potential, which communists claimed to advance). Americans largely viewed Russia as totalitarian and barbaric, based on news reports about its secret police (the Committee for State Security, known as the KGB), Stalinist purges, system of concentration camps (the gulag), harassment and imprisonment of dissidents (such as writers,
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scientists, and intellectuals), and tight control over Eastern Europe (including the brutal crackdowns on Hungary in 1957 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). Nikita Khrushchev, who became the Soviet leader after Stalin’s death in 1953, reinforced this negative image when he banged his shoe on a table during a debate at the General Assembly of the United Nations on October 12, 1960, and at various times said of the capitalist Western world, “We will bury you.” The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, an American television cartoon show that aired from 1959 to 1964, satirically portrayed the stereotype of sinister Russian behavior with the characters Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, an unsavory espionage duo that was hopelessly evil as well as incompetent. Some Americans thought President Ronald Reagan was too provocative when on March 8, 1983, he publicly declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” but many agreed with him when he denounced as “savagery” the 269 deaths caused by the Soviet downing of a South Korean commercial airliner on September 1, 1983, after it had veered into Russian air space. Americans long regarded Russians as backward and technologically inferior. This was despite the Soviet achievements of detonating a hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953; launching the first artificial satellite on October 4, 1957; and conducting the first manned orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961. During the July 1959 “kitchen debate” at a trade exhibition in Moscow, U.S. vice president Richard Nixon boasted of the superiority of American consumer goods while hinting that the Soviet Union was below Western standards. The film comedy The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966), about a Russian submarine accidentally running aground off of Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, conveyed the view that the Soviets posed a danger that was canceled out by their own incompetence. For observant Americans, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 underscored Soviet vulnerability as the Kremlin sought some tactical way to offset the disadvantage of its lagging weapons delivery systems. When the two superpowers conducted the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, some Americans grumbled that NASA had to give away trade secrets in order for the joint space venture to work. The Soviet space station Mir (1986–2001) was the butt of American jokes, even the subject of slapstick humor in the Hollywood film Armageddon (1998), because of its patchwork repairs and various mishaps, including a fire. The explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on April 26, 1986, which spewed radiation across Europe, was later attributed to Soviet design flaws as well as mismanagement. Many conservatives remain convinced that a main reason the Soviet Union came to a sudden end is that it was unable to keep up with American technological advances, especially after Reagan’s March 1983 announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based antiballistic missile system.
Hope and Disappointment In a commencement address at American University on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy called on Americans to reexamine their attitudes about the Soviet people. “No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue,” Kennedy said. Although communism is “repugnant,” he went on, Americans may nevertheless “hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.” Both sides, he insisted, have a “mutual abhorrence of war.” Later, during the Moscow summit of May 1972, President Nixon offered similar sentiments, stating, “In many ways, the people of our two countries are very much alike . . . large and diverse . . . hard-working . . . a strong spirit of competition . . . a great love of music and poetry, of sports, and of humor . . . open, natural, and friendly. . . .” Both sides, explained Nixon, want “peace and abundance” for their children. Such hope was the theme of “Leningrad” (1989), a song by Billy Joel about two Cold War kids who grow up on different sides of the Atlantic but later meet in Russia, share a laugh, and embrace. Perhaps one of the greatest American disappointments during the Cold War was the 1978 Harvard commencement address by the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973), among other works, Solzhenitsyn used the occasion to criticize Soviet tyranny but also to argue that Western society, due to its “spiritual exhaustion,” was no model to follow. Since Solzhenitsyn had for two years been living in exile in the United States, his words were taken as a condemnation of American culture in particular. Later, during the 1980s, as Gorbachev introduced the reforms of glasnost (openness about social problems) and perestroika (restructuring of the economy), Americans gradually hoped that their former rival might become Westernized. After the demise of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, President George H.W. Bush suggested that the United States and the new Russia could begin a long era of friendly cooperation. By Western democratic standards, the first leaders of post-USSR Russia—Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999), Vladimir Putin (2000–2008), and Dmitri Medvedev (2008– ) —have proven to be autocratic. The Yeltsin years were characterized by “economic shock therapy” and “bandit capitalism” in which oligarchs and mafia ruled over a chaotic shift toward privatization. In October 1993, Yeltsin dissolved the Duma (Russian parliament) and then ordered tanks to shell the building when some of the legislators refused to leave. Stephen Cohen, a professor of Russian studies, at the time deplored the Bill Clinton administration for “supporting” Yeltsin’s behavior. Cohen and others also criticized the “missionary economists”
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from the West who pushed for market reforms in Russia with apparently little concern for the consequent social upheaval. In September 2000, the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress issued a 209-page report titled Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People, which concluded: “Russia today is more corrupt, more lawless, less democratic, poorer, and more unstable than it was in 1992.” Eight years later, after two terms of the George W. Bush administration, an equally negative report could have been issued about “Putinism.” After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Russia gave tacit approval to the United States to use air bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia in the military campaign to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and to search for Osama bin Laden. However, Russia did not approve of the United States going to war against Iraq in 2003. Relations between the two countries have suffered primarily due to the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2001, in conjunction with its intention of setting up a missiledefense system in Eastern Europe. In May 2007, Putin referred to the foreign policy of the United States and its NATO allies as kin to that of the Third Reich. U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates responded that “one Cold War was quite enough.” Looking back in July 2007, Gorbachev observed, “We all lost the Cold War,” explaining that the subsequent American “winner complex” has led Washington to adopt an aggressive and misguided foreign policy. Some Russian intellectuals have dubbed the United States “the new Soviet Union.” Roger Chapman See also: American Exceptionalism; Central Intelligence Agency; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Cuba; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Hiss, Alger; Marxism; McCarthyism; Rosenberg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg; Strategic Defense Initiative.
Further Reading Cohen, Stephen. Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of PostCommunist Russia. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Fried, Richard M. The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Goldgeier, James M., and Michael McFaul. Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2006. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Ostrovsky, Arkady. “Enigmas and Variations: A Special Report on Russia.” Economist, November 29, 2008.
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S o we l l , T h o m a s An African-American economist who favors laissez-faire policies, Thomas Sowell has studied race, politics, and economics from an international perspective while castigating liberals (whom he dubs “the anointed”) for striving to build a society that offers economic justice (which he denigrates as “cosmic justice”). A multicultural conservative, Sowell has been at odds with black activists who resent his strong attacks on affirmative action programs. Often called a polemicist by critics, he has been accused of overstating his arguments and for showing little empathy for the plight of the economically disadvantaged. Others view him as a brave iconoclast who has attacked political correctness with candor and logic. The culture wars, according to Sowell, represent a continuation of a battle that has been waged for the past two hundred years between two opposing ideological conceptions of human nature: the “constrained” versus the “unconstrained.” As explained in his writings, the constrained view (adopted by conservatives) regards human nature as tragically flawed and social problems as a fact of life; the unconstrained view (adopted by liberals) regards human nature as perfectible and social problems as challenges that can be solved. Sowell was born on June 30, 1930, in Gastonia, North Carolina, and grew up in New York. After serving in the U.S. Marines (1951–1953), he attended Howard University (1954–1955), Harvard University (AB, 1958), Columbia University (am, 1959), and the University of Chicago (PhD, 1968). At the last institution, Sowell came under the sway of Milton Friedman, the leading exponent of laissez-faire economics. Although Sowell worked as an economist for the U.S. Department of Labor (1961–1962) and the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (1964–1965), he spent most of his career in academia, teaching at Rutgers University (1962–1963), Howard University (1963–1964), Cornell University (1965–1969), Brandeis University (1969–1970), and the University of California at Los Angeles (1970–1980). He has also been long affiliated with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Since the 1980s, he has been a widely syndicated newspaper columnist and has written articles for major magazines and journals. His books include Affirmative Action: Was It Necessary in Academia? (1975), The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective (1983), Preferential Politics: An International Perspective (1990), The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995), The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999), Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (2004), Black Rednecks and White Liberals: And Other Cultural and Ethnic Issues (2005), and A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (2007). He has also published an autobiography, A Personal Odyssey (2000).
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In his writings and lectures, Sowell has denounced as fallacious the assumption that economic disparities constitute discrimination per se. Inequality, he insists, is largely due to negative “cultural patterns” that undermine self-development. He has been especially critical of affirmative action, labeling it reverse discrimination. Such policies, he asserts, contribute to racial tensions, nurture political grievances, confer victimhood status on their recipients, and in the end make minorities economically worse off. Sowell has also been critical of the American education system, believing that standards have been lowered in order to accommodate political correctness. He has been critical of Harvard’s affirmative action program, stating that it has been harmful to many blacks by putting them in a situation for which they were not academically prepared. Sowell insists that since other minority groups have been mainstreamed in American society, including the Irish and Italians, the same opportunity exists for blacks. Roger Chapman See also: Affirmative Action; Bell Curve, The; Friedman, Milton; Multicultural Conservatism; Political Correctness; Race; Victimhood.
Further Reading Kilson, Martin. “Anatomy of Black Conservatism.” Transition 59 (1993): 4–19. Magalli, Mark. “The High Priests of the Black Academic Right.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 9 (Autumn 1995): 71–77. Sowell, Thomas. A Personal Odyssey. New York: Free Press, 2000. ———. “A Personal Odyssey from Howard to Harvard and Beyond.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 30 (Winter 2000/2001): 122–28. Stewart, James B. “Thomas Sowell’s Quixotic Quest to Denigrate African American Culture: A Critique.” Journal of African American History 91:4 (Fall 2006): 459–66.
Speech Codes Speech codes, as adopted by many American colleges and universities, prohibit “hate speech” by faculty, staff, or students, with the purpose of promoting a positive education environment free of expressions that could be regarded as “marginalizing” racial and ethnic minorities, women, homosexuals, and others. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), founded in 1998, has over the years joined the American Civil Liberties Union in opposing campus speech codes, arguing that they violate the First Amendment. Speech codes were introduced by university administrators beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to incidents of bigotry on college campuses.
The intention was to curb the “soft racism” that creates a “hostile environment” for learning. According to arguments rooted in critical race and legal theories, overt hostility toward minorities by the dominant culture tends to suppress the speech rights of those belonging to socially marginalized groups. Generally, speech codes were part of the larger goal of promoting multiculturalism. By 1997 half of college campuses had promulgated some form of speech codes, which were largely patterned on restrictions against sexual harassment. The catalyst for speech codes was the news media’s sensational coverage of campus episodes, including the 1990 expulsion of a student at Brown University who was found to have used slurs against blacks, homosexuals, and Jews. Earlier, in 1986, a Yale University student made the news for spoofing the school’s annual Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days (GLAD) by passing out satirical fliers advertising BAD (for Bestiality Awareness Days). While speech codes generally do not bar all offensive speech, they have sought to prevent and punish speech directed at and found offensive by the listener due to his or her respective race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexual orientation. The issue is often about etiquette and to what extent it should be codified. The controversy surrounding campus speech codes centers on the restriction of speech and expression that critics believe undermines academic freedom during discussions on social issues that pertain to minority populations. Many conservatives argue that speech codes typically favor liberal discourse at the expense of conservative and libertarian viewpoints. Some of the same critics, however, called for the dismissal of Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who provoked controversy after characterizing the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks as “little Eichmanns.” Proponents of speech codes equate offensive expression with “fighting words,” or speech not protected by the U.S. Constitution. In 1942, for instance, the Supreme Court in Chaplinksy v. New Hampshire ruled against fighting words that “tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Opponents dismiss speech codes as “political correctness” thats restrict offensive opinions, which they regard as a violation of individual freedom and the central tenet of American political and social life that allows the airing of unpopular viewpoints. College Republicans, in a bold challenge to the restrictions imposed by speech codes, have held “affirmative action bake sales” in which cookies are sold to whites at a higher price than to minorities. Such demonstrations offer a purposefully hostile message to not only teach against affirmative action, but to flaunt free speech. U.S. courts have invalidated speech codes when they have been found to be too vague, too broad, or discriminatory toward a particular viewpoint. Speech codes are deemed too vague when an individual must guess as
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to what conduct is or is not prohibited. In an effort to prohibit nonprotected speech (such as fighting words), they penalize individuals for protected speech such as political advocacy or expressions of opinion; and they are discriminatory if otherwise constitutionally protected speech or expression of opinion is punishable because the governing body considers the message politically offensive or distasteful. Earlier versions of speech codes were struck down at both the state and federal levels. In Doe v. University of Michigan (1981), a federal district court ruled against the university’s speech codes, which were used against someone who had argued that women are biologically programmed to be caregivers. The same court in UWM Post Inc. v. Board of Regents of University of Wisconsin (1991) rejected the Board of Regents’ argument that speech codes were necessary to stop harassment of minorities, stating that the “commitment to free expression must be unwavering” despite the “many situations where, in the short run, it appears advantageous to limit speech to solve pressing social problems, such as discriminatory harassment.” The ruling went on to declare “the suppression of speech” as “governmental thought control.” In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), the U.S. Supreme Court indirectly weighed in on the controversy of campus speech codes when it overturned a municipal ordinance that criminalized the display of any symbol likely to provoke “anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, creed, religion or gender.” This case focused on the actions of a juvenile who had allegedly burned a cross on the lawn of an African-American neighbor. The Court ruled that prohibiting symbols such as a burning cross or swastika constituted viewpoint discrimination, a violation of the First Amendment. In the wake of that ruling, many campuses had to modify or discard their speech codes. The same year of that decision Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) introduced legislation that would have cut off federal funding to any college that imposes speech rules. In 2003, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights entered the debate on speech codes when it stipulated that speech codes focusing on harassment “must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.” During the mid-2000s an estimated 700 American colleges and universities maintained some form of speech codes. A great many lower-level schools have also enforced speech codes as part of bans on offensive conduct and harassment. Some schools have begun experimenting with “free speech zones,” select areas of campus where student protests and demonstrations can be carried out with minimal disrupting potential. Traci L. Nelson
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See also: Academic Freedom; American Civil Liberties Union; Censorship; Churchill, Ward; Diversity Training; GenderInclusive Language; Hate Crimes; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Race; Sexual Harassment; Victimhood; Zero Tolerance.
Further Reading Cleary, Edward J. Beyond Burning the Cross: The First Amendment and the Landmark R.A.V. Case. New York: Random House, 1994. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Understanding Words That Wound. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. FIRE—Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Web site. www.thefire.org. Gould, Jon B. Speak No Evil: The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Shiell, Timothy C. Campus Hate Speech on Trial. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.
Spock , Benjamin Referred to as “Dr. Spock, the baby doc,” pediatrician and psychiatrist Benjamin Spock became a leading authority on childrearing with his best-selling book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), which has sold tens of millions of copies in nearly forty foreign languages. Many social conservatives blame Spock’s permissive childrearing principles for the excesses of the counterculture generation. Spock further alienated conservatives by demonstrating against the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race in the 1960s and 1970s. Benjamin McLane “Benny” Spock was born on May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Connecticut. During his undergraduate years at Yale University (BA, 1925), he won a gold medal in rowing at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. After attending the Yale University School of Medicine (1925–1927), and Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (MD, 1929), he completed residencies in pediatrics and psychiatry at two New York hospitals. He served as a psychiatrist in the U.S. Navy during World War II and, after publishing his landmark work on childrearing, went on to hold positions at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota (1947–1951), University of Pittsburgh (1951–1955), and Western Reserve University in Cleveland (1955– 1967). By the mid-1950s, Dr. Spock was an influential public figure with several magazine columns and his own television show. He died on March 15, 1988, in San Diego, California. Spock was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories of child development and brought these concepts to a broad audience, using everyday language and a friendly tone. He questioned the widely accepted view that parents should limit the amount of praise or affection
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they show children, and argued against the rigid feeding schedules advocated by most pediatricians. Although opponents charged that his “child-centered” model spoils children and exhausts parents, Spock’s ideas were widely adopted. Spock entered the political arena in 1960 by announcing his support for John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid. Two years later, amid mounting concern over nuclear testing, he joined the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE, or Scientists Against Nuclear Energy). In 1967, he marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., against the Vietnam War. That year Spock resigned from SANE, as his increasingly radical stance alienated its leadership circle. The following year, Spock was convicted in federal court of aiding and abetting the draft-resistance movement and sentenced to two years in prison; the verdict was later overturned. In 1972, Spock ran for president of the United States as the nominee of the People’s Party, getting on the ballot in ten states and winning nearly 80,000 votes on a platform of disarmament, free university education and health care, and the legalization of abortion and marijuana. Spock’s critics argued that his “permissiveness” was to blame for the social upheaval of the 1960s. In a widely publicized sermon, for example, conservative Christian preacher Norman Vincent Peale charged that Spock’s childrearing advice had resulted in a lack of respect for authority on the part of baby boomers. Concurring, James Dobson, an evangelical who would later establish Focus on the Family, wrote Dare to Discipline (1970) to counter Spock. In the 1970s, Spock faced criticism by such feminists as Gloria Steinem, for proposing that girls and boys should be raised differently and for assigning the majority of parenting responsibilities to women. Although he apologized for his sexism, Spock never accepted the charge of permissiveness and argued that critics misunderstood the balance between freedom and boundaries that he endorsed. Manon Parry See also: Abortion; Counterculture; Dobson, James; Family Values; Generations and Generational Conflict; Health Care; Kennedy Family; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Nuclear Age; Steinem, Gloria; Third Parties; War Protesters.
Further Reading Bloom, Lynn Z. Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972. Maier, Thomas. Dr. Spock: An American Life. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Spock, Benjamin, and Mary Morgan. Spock on Spock: A Memoir of Growing Up with the Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Spr ingsteen, Bruce Musician, songwriter, and sometime social commentator Bruce Springsteen was born on September 23, 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey. After growing up in an unhappy, uncommunicative, blue-collar family and being deemed ineligible for the military draft, he signed with Columbia Records in 1972 and assembled his legendary E Street Band. Two albums with relatively poor sales were followed by Born to Run (1975), which captured a huge audience. As the band’s concert performances reached unprecedented success, fanfare increased to near-manic heights with its seventh album, Born in the USA (1984). Although he began as an apolitical chronicler of a New Jersey adolescent culture of cars, boardwalks, and ennui, Springsteen eventually was drawn closer to social issues and politics. In 1981 Springsteen began his long sponsorship of Vietnam Veterans of America, using his concerts to champion local food banks, condemn plant closings, and alert audiences to the poverty and despair that lay beneath the American dream. “Born in the USA,” Springsteen’s 1984 anthem, was a lament for the shoddy treatment of Vietnam veterans. Yet both Democratic and Republican politicians, and even intellectual pundits such as George Will, misinterpreted the song to be a jingoistic celebration of America. After Ronald Reagan tried to enlist him in his “Morning in America” reelection campaign, Springsteen became more outspoken in his opposition to Reaganomics, plant closings, and hypocritical expressions of patriotism. Tiring of the pressures of rock superstardom, Springsteen explored less popular musical avenues after 1986. In doing so, he deepened his connections to both contemporary and earlier leftist causes. In 1985, he supported the Live Aid performances to bring attention to Third World poverty and lent his voice to the Sun City protest against apartheid. He was also a leader of an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the closure of a 3M factory in his old hometown. Some of his later albums, such as The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), paid tribute to the idealistic radicalism of novelist John Steinbeck and folksinger Pete Seeger. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Springsteen revived his connection to heartland sensibilities in The Rising (2002). In 2004, publicly endorsing a candidate for the first time, Springsteen gave an eleven-state “Vote for Change” concert tour on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The following year, Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate blocked a resolution commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the album Born to Run. Later, Springsteen condemned President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina, calling him “President Bystander.” During the 2008 presidential election he performed at campaign rallies in support of Barack Obama’s
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candidacy, in between songs imploring crowds, “I want my country back, I want my dream back.” Perhaps Springsteen’s most important contribution in the culture wars has been to popularize a class analysis of American life and opportunity. Most notably, he has portrayed the blue-collar characters of his songs as clinging desperately to their version of the American dream in the face of depredation from powerful interests and an uncaring government. Douglas Craig See also: Bush Family; Globalization; Hurricane Katrina; Kerry, John; Obama, Barack; Reagan, Ronald; Seeger, Pete; September 11; Steinbeck, John; Supply-Side Economics; Vietnam War; Will, George.
Further Reading Corn, David. “Springsteen for Change.” Nation, October 25, 2004. Cowie, Jefferson, and Lauren Boehm. “Dead Man’s Town, ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ Social History, and Working-Class Identity.” American Quarterly 58:2 (June 2006): 353–78. Levy, Joe. “Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, November 1, 2007. Marsh, Dave. Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts. New York: Routledge, 2004.
S t a r Wa r s See Strategic Defense Initiative
S t a r r, Ke n n e t h As an independent counsel beginning in August 1994, Kenneth Starr directed the federal investigation into an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater that had involved Bill Clinton before he became president. The $52 million probe revealed a sex scandal that led to Clinton’s impeachment. The 445-page Starr Report (1998), issued by Starr’s office and later released over the Internet by the Republican-controlled Congress, recounted in salacious detail Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Kenneth Winston Starr, the son of a Church of Christ minister, was born on July 21, 1946, in Vernon, Texas. He grew up in San Antonio and later attended George Washington University (AB, 1968), Brown University (MA, 1969), and Duke University School of Law (JD, 1973). After serving as a law clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger (1975–1977), he practiced with a private firm in Washington, D.C., before taking a position in the U.S. Justice Department (1981–1983) during the Ronald Reagan administration. Reagan appointed him as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1983–1989), a position he resigned to
Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr testifies to the House Judiciary Committee in November 1998 that President Bill Clinton had engaged in obstruction of justice during the investigation into his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. (Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images)
serve as President George H.W. Bush’s solicitor general of the United States (1989–1993). On August 5, 1994, a three-judge panel called on Starr to replace Robert B. Fiske in the Whitewater investigation, a federal probe into a failed real estate development in Arkansas during the 1970s that involved Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was no secret that Republicans were displeased with Fiske’s initial findings, and political pressure was brought to bear in finding a more aggressive figure to serve as independent counsel. Other matters came up during the course of the investigation, including the allegedly improper termination of staff at the White House travel office (referred to as Travelgate) and purported White House mishandling of FBI files (Filegate). In 1994, an Arkansas resident named Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against President Clinton, claiming that he had sexually harassed her when he was the governor. Jones’s lawyers, financed by conservative operatives, questioned Clinton about his relationship with various women, including Lewinsky, in an effort to establish a pattern about his behavior that would give credence to their client’s charge. Under oath, Clinton denied having illicit relationships with the women. Starr then shifted his investigation to prove that Clinton had committed perjury in the Jones case. Although Starr did in the end prosecute some figures involved with Whitewater, Clinton’s impeachment had nothing to do with the real estate scandal but centered on perjury and
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obstruction of justice about a consensual sexual relationship with Lewinsky. In a 1998 nationally televised interview, First Lady Hillary Clinton referred to Starr and his investigation as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Defenders of the president, such as political adviser James Carville, regarded Starr as “sex-obsessed.” Critics in general characterized the Starr investigation as a “sexual inquisition.” Joe Conason in Big Lies (2003) dismissed The Starr Report as “conservative public pornography.” Indeed, wire reports quoting the document warned that the contents “may be OFFENSIVE to some readers,” as every sexual episode between the president and the intern was recorded at least twice, in some cases three and four times. Critics viewed Starr’s investigation as “slash and burn” politics, a witch hunt that, in pornographic detail and at great expense to taxpayers, crossed lines of decency in delving too far into the private life of an individual. Defenders of Starr argue that the person to blame is Clinton, who perjured himself to hide his moral shortcomings. In The Death of Outrage (1998), the conservative commentator William J. Bennett hailed Starr as a man of great integrity and suggested that outrage should be directed at Clinton’s impropriety. While Starr’s critics emphasize a need in politics to separate the public figure from the private person, noting that a president’s job performance is what is important, Starr’s supporters emphasize that the private person is inseparable from the public figure and that a president’s character is vitally linked to job performance. Starr, who in 2004 became the dean of Pepperdine University School of Law, has characterized himself a victim of undeserved notoriety, lamenting that the political fallout from his investigation has harmed his chances of ever being appointed to the Supreme Court. In a 2005 interview he said that, throughout the investigation, he compared his plight with that of Apostle Paul but made it his aim to be “upbeat” like Teddy Roosevelt. Starr is the author of First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life (2002). Roger Chapman See also: Bennett, William J.; Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Clinton Impeachment; Helms, Jesse; Pornography; Sexual Harassment; Thomas, Clarence; Victimhood.
Further Reading Bennett, William J. The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. New York: Free Press, 1998. Schmidt, Susan, and Michael Weisskopf. Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Toobin, Jeffrey. A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Brought Down a President. New York: Random House, 1999.
S t ay - a t - H o m e M o t h e r s “A woman’s place is in the home,” goes the old adage, but for years American women of all income levels have worked inside and outside the home, providing for their families in myriad ways. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, debates about stay-at-home mothers and working mothers became a central cultural issue. While many women worked outside the home during World War II, they were expected to become housewives and consumers once the fighting stopped. Some rebelled against this cultural expectation, and the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s placed working women in the center of a political debate. Outspoken feminists such as Betty Friedan advocated for women’s right to be employed outside the home and to receive equal pay and status with men in the workplace. A popular cultural image of the 1980s and 1990s was working mothers as “supermoms” who balanced full-time work, home life, and child care. The number of working mothers continued to rise through the 1980s and peaked in the mid-1990s. Still, First Lady Hillary Clinton’s remark in 1992 that “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession” caused outrage among many social conservatives. By the early 2000s, media articles were highlighting reports about women who left high-powered careers to become stayat-home moms. The stay-at-home mom movement drew women who never worked outside the home as well as those who chose to temporarily or permanently leave careers in order to care for young children. This movement sought to gain recognition for the work women perform inside the home, and for the role they play in facilitating the lives of all family members. According to some analysts, the market value of a stay-at-home mom is roughly equivalent to a professional salary. Thus, for some families, a stay-at-home parent may be more economically and socially feasible than having two working parents. Some observers argue that professional women who leave their careers to become stay-at-home moms do so because American society has not provided adequate support for dual-income families, such as affordable child care. Unlike European societies that are structured around family needs, the American system is based on the outdated model that full-time employees have a partner at home responsible for childrearing, social obligations, and the household. Also, since working mothers are still disproportionately in charge of the majority of home and child care duties, an extra burden falls on them. Expensive child care options, lack of family-friendly policies in the workplace, long commutes, schools that dismiss before the end of the work day, lack of flexibility from a spouse’s employer, poor maternity/paternity leave op-
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tions, and lack of support from spouses all may contribute to a woman’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom, or a man’s decision to be a stay-at-home dad. Tanya Hedges Duroy See also: Christian Coalition; Clinton, Hillary; Equal Rights Amendment; Family Values; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Focus on the Family; Friedan, Betty; Palin, Sarah; Religious Right.
Further Reading Bolton, Michelle K. The Third Shift: Managing Hard Choices in Our Careers, Homes, and Lives as Women. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000. McKenna, Elizabeth Perle. When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore: Women, Work, and Identity. New York: Dell, 1998. Morgan Steiner, Leslie. Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and CareerMoms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. New York: Random House, 2006. Peskowitz, Miriam. The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? Emeryville, CA: Seal, 2005.
Steinbeck , John The novelist and social commentator John Steinbeck, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He attended Stanford University (1919–1925) but never graduated. A New Deal Democrat, Steinbeck used his writing to explore economic and moral problems. Although his writings were generally praised for how they portrayed the poor and downtrodden with dignity and compassion, critics on the right accused him of being overly critical and unpatriotic. Critics on the left found him either too sentimental or not radical enough. Steinbeck’s first literary success was Tortilla Flat (1937), a collection of stories about a band of Mexican Americans in Monterey coping with the Great Depression. The economic downturn of the 1930s greatly shaped the author’s art and politics. So, too, did his first wife, a Marxist and Communist Party member. During this period, Steinbeck attended radical meetings and labor rallies and even visited the Soviet Union. His novels of the Depression, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), focus on the struggles of common people in an unjust economic system. His stories were based on labor unrest he actually witnessed, but the mostly Mexican migrants he encountered were changed to white characters. Steinbeck is known most of all for The Grapes of Wrath, which depicts Depression-era Americans struggling for a better life. The work was condemned in Congress and today remains one of the nation’s top fifty banned books. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was released as a major
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motion picture starring Henry Fonda in 1940. The main character of the novel lives on in Woody Guthrie’s song “Tom Joad” (1940) and Bruce Springsteen’s album The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). After a stint as a war correspondent, Steinbeck published the novel Cannery Row (1945), a subtle condemnation of Monterey’s middle-class hypocrisy and materialism. Progressives condemned the book for failing to expose the system as he did in The Grapes of Wrath. Conservatives complained that he was criticizing American society at a time when soldiers were sacrificing their lives in World War II. Feminists criticized the misogynistic portrayal of the character Kate Ames in East of Eden (1952), a Cain and Abel morality tale set in California’s Salinas Valley. The work reached a wide audience as a 1955 film starring James Dean. The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck’s last fiction work, was a reaction to the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s and explores the theme of moral relativism. The nonfiction works Sea of Cortez (1941) and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), which record his adventures collecting marine samples, established Steinbeck’s place as an early advocate of the environmental movement, emphasizing the interconnectivity of all living things. His travelogues Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966) explore physical and cultural aspects of the United States. In the former, he bristles at a racist incident he witnessed in New Orleans involving white women intimidating a black child as she enters a previously segregated school. In one of his last controversies Steinbeck was criticized by war protesters for wearing army fatigues during a 1966 visit to Vietnam. Shortly before Steinbeck’s death in New York City on December 20, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Roger Chapman See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Environmental Movement; Feminism, Second-Wave; Guthrie, Woody, and Arlo Guthrie; Labor Unions; Marxism; Migrant Labor; New Deal; Relativism, Moral; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Penguin, 1990. Wartzman, Rick. Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008.
Steinem, Glor ia Feminist, activist, writer, and longtime editor of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem first earned notoriety for a 1963 article detailing her undercover experience as a
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“bunny” at the New York Playboy Club. She went on to become the public face of American feminism. Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, where she had a middle-class upbringing. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College (1956) and a postgraduate fellow in India (1957–1958), she devoted her career to writing and editing, first for the Independent Service for Information (1959–1960), which turned out to be funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and then for the magazines Glamour (1962–1969), New York (1968–1972), and Ms. (1972–1987). Her books include the essay collections Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), Revolution from Within (1992), and Moving beyond Words (1993), as well as a biography of Marilyn Monroe entitled Marilyn (1986). Steinem first encountered the feminist movement in 1969 during an assignment for New York magazine, covering an abortion speak-out and rally sponsored by the Redstockings, a radical feminist group. The event resonated with Steinem, who secretly had had an abortion while in college. The rally also illuminated and connected issues of sexism and patriarchy for her, fundamentally changing the direction of her life. In December 1971, a committed feminist, Steinem helped launch the first issue of Ms., as a supplement to New York magazine. Ms. was established in its own right the following year, with Steinem as editor. The publication proved highly successful at first, but its popularity dwindled by the 1980s. While receiving praise and attracting previously uninterested women into the second-wave feminist movement, Ms. was also under constant criticism from both feminists and antifeminists. Radical feminists disapproved of the magazine’s carrying advertisements, arguing that it was too conservative, mainstream, and slanted toward white women. Others complained that it focused excessively on lesbianism. Whatever the controversies, the popularity of the magazine brought public attention to Steinem, whose intelligence, composure, sense of humor, and charm helped make her a media darling. Through her public appearances and writings, she argued for legalized abortion and crusaded against sexism, while making women’s liberation seem logical and beneficial for both sexes. Many of Steinem’s feminist peers accused her of hijacking the movement, however, denigrating her as a late arrival to the cause, criticizing her less-than-aggressive style, and attempting to discredit her achievements and activism by criticizing her femininity and physical attractiveness. The Redstockings and Betty Friedan, the well-known feminist activist and co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), falsely accused Steinem of having worked for the CIA (a distortion based on the secret subsidy of the media organization she earlier worked for) and using Ms. to collect personal information about feminists. Steinem also stirred controversy in
2000, when, at age sixty-six, after stating for years that a woman did not need a man, she married. Alexandra DeMonte See also: Abortion; Central Intelligence Agency; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Friedan, Betty; Hefner, Hugh; Lesbians; Morgan, Robin; Ms.; National Organization for Women; Pornography.
Further Reading Daffron, Carolyn. Gloria Steinem. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Farrell, Amy Erdman. Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Stern, Sydney Landensohn. Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics and Mystique. Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1997.
S t e m - C e l l Re s e a r c h Stem cells are present in all animal life forms. In humans, they possess two important properties that differentiate them from most other cells in the human body: (1) they are unspecialized but under the right conditions can develop into many of the almost 200 different types of specialized cells in the body (such as brain cells or red blood cells); and (2) they are able to divide and renew themselves for long periods of time. Because of these properties, stem cells have the potential to grow replacements for cells that have been damaged or that a person’s body no longer creates on its own. This, according to scientists, could lead to revolutionary treatments or cures for many diseases and conditions that have long stymied medical science, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, heart disease, burns, spinal cord injury, diabetes, and arthritis. However, the therapeutic promise of stem cells is tempered by the moral objections many people have to one of the most promising areas of stem-cell research, that involving human embryonic stem cells (hESC).
Science There are two types of stem cells in the human body: adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells, also called somatic cells, are found in small numbers among differentiated cells and are used by the body to repair and replace the cells needed in the tissue in which they are found: for instance, hematopoietic stem cells are found in the bone marrow and can differentiate into all the types of blood cells found in the body. Research and treatments involving adult stem cells are much less controversial than those involving hESC,
Stem - Cell Research
and therapies such as bone marrow transplantation (hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation, practiced since the 1960s) have become commonplace in modern medicine. Scientific use of adult stem cells is relatively uncontroversial because the cells come from consenting adult donors or from umbilical cord blood and do not require destruction of an embryo. However, their therapeutic potential is limited because each type of adult stem cell can develop only into limited types of cells, and because adult stem cells are relatively rare in the body and are not easily cultured (duplicated) in the laboratory. Embryonic stem cells are believed to hold much greater therapeutic promise because of their ability to differentiate into any type of cell and because they are easy to culture in the lab. Mouse embryonic stem cells (mESC) were first isolated and cultured in 1981 by the British scientist Sir Martin John Evans, and independently that same year by Gail R. Martin, a professor of anatomy at the University of California in San Francisco. Human embryonic stem cells were first successfully cultivated in 1998, when James Thomson, a cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin, successfully generated hESC from blastocysts (pre-embryonic balls of cells).
Controversy It is the source of human embryonic stem cells, rather than their therapeutic potential, that makes them controversial. As the name implies, hESC are created from human embryos, and the process of creating hESC destroys the embryo. For persons who believe that life begins at conception (the official position of the Catholic Church and many fundamentalist denominations), destroying an embryo is as repugnant as killing an adult human being. Advocates of hESC argue that this is selective morality (or political grandstanding) because opponents of stem-cell research seem not to be bothered by the fact that thousands of embryos are destroyed annually by fertility clinics, simply because they are no longer wanted or needed. Such embryos are created through in vitro fertilization (fertilization of an egg by a sperm outside a woman’s body, in a test tube or the equivalent) in order to help infertile couples conceive, and many more embryos are created than will be needed for each individual couple. Advocates of hESC argue that couples should be allowed to donate the excess embryos to scientific research rather than have them destroyed. Stem-cell research is not prohibited in the United States, but for a period of time was severely limited by restrictions on federal funding. In August 2001, President George W. Bush announced that federal funding for hESC research would be limited to the stem-cell lines (populations of cells grown from a single embryo) already in existence, a decision he justified as a compromise: it would not encourage further destruction of embryos, but
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it allowed research to continue (since the original embryos used to create existing stem-cell lines were already dead). Nevertheless, the restrictions were viewed as serious impediments to the development of stem-cell research in the United States, because many of the existing stemcell lines proved unsuitable for research and because the federal government is a major source of funding for most medical research. Many prominent scientists spoke out in favor of removing these restrictions, as did celebrities affected by diseases targeted by stem-cell researchers, including actor Michael J. Fox (Parkinson’s disease), the late actor Christopher Reeve (spinal cord injury), and former First Lady Nancy Reagan (whose husband suffered from Alzheimer’s disease). Two arguments often put forward for raising the restrictions in federal funding are that allowing individual religious beliefs to restrict scientific research is a violation of the separation of church and state, and that it is immoral to restrict potentially life-saving research due to the objections of a few individuals (who, after all, would themselves be allowed to benefit from any cures thus discovered). President Bush remained firm in his refusal to expand federal funding for stem-cell research, and in July 2006 and June 2007 vetoed bills that would have permitted federal funding for research using new stem-cell lines. Given the vacuum created by the restrictions on federal funding, some U.S. states devoted substantial funding to promote stem-cell research, hoping to become scientific leaders in the field and to cash in on the profits available from successful therapies, as well as being poised to capitalize on federal funding when it becomes available. California was the first state to do so, passing Proposition 71 (the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative) in November 2004. The measure provided $3 billion in funding for stem-cell research, to be allocated to California universities and research institutes. New York State followed suit by earmarking $600 million in the state budget over ten years to support stem-cell research. In New Jersey, however, a bill that would have provided $450 million for stem-cell research was defeated by voters in November 2007, partly due to a well-organized opposition campaign supported by, among others, New Jersey Right to Life (an anti-abortion organization) and the Catholic Church. In November 2007 two scientists, Junying Yu in Wisconsin and Shinya Yamanaka in Tokyo, announced that they had independently developed a technique, called “direct reprogramming,” that processes human skin cells so that they take on many of the qualities of stem cells, most important being capable of differentiating into any type of cell in the body. While this discovery may provide a means to develop hESC therapies without requiring the destruction of embryos (and was hailed as such by spokespersons for the Bush administration and the Catholic Church), much more research will be required before it is known
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if the direct reprogramming technique will result in the development of useful therapies. Shortly after becoming president, Barack Obama rescinded Bush’s restrictions on stem-cell research. Sarah Boslaugh
See also: Censorship; Federal Communications Commission; Political Correctness; Shock Jocks.
Further Reading
Herold, Eve. Stem Cell Wars: Inside Stories from the Frontlines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Humber, James M., and Robert F. Almeder, eds. Stem Cell Research. Totawa, NJ: Humana Press, 2004. Parson, Ann B. The Proteus Effect: Stem Cells and Their Promise for Medicine. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2004.
Cegielski, Jim. The Howard Stern Book: An Unauthorized, Unabashed, Uncensored Fan’s Guide. Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1994. Colford, Paul D. Howard Stern: King of All Media—The Unauthorized Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Lucaire, Luigi. Howard Stern, A to Z: The Stern Fanatic’s Guide to the King of All Media. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Menell, Jeff. Howard Stern: Big Mouth. New York: Windsor, 1993. Stern, Howard. Miss America. New York: Regan Books, 1995. ———. Private Parts. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
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Stewar t, Jon
America’s most prominent shock jock, talk show host Howard Stern has pushed the limits of social discourse on the radio while claiming to champion liberty and freedom. Popular especially among young white males, Stern’s raunchy and provocative syndicated morning show has consistently ranked number one in audience ratings. Howard Allen Stern was born on January 12, 1954, on Long Island, New York. After studying communications at Boston University (BS, 1976), where he was fired from the campus radio station for broadcasting a racially inappropriate skit called “Godzilla Goes to Harlem,” Stern began a career as a professional disc jockey. For about a decade, he perfected his irreverent radio persona at several stations on the East Coast. In 1985, he moved to New York City’s WXRK-FM, where his outrageous style was allowed to flourish. In 2005, his show was syndicated in forty-five media markets. His employer, Infinity Broadcasting, paid a steep price for Stern’s unbridled creativity, however. In the twenty years he worked there, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined Infinity over $2 million for indecency. To his fans, Stern is a master of his craft, has helped to liberate American culture from puritanical oppression, and is one of radio’s most skilled interviewers. His critics argue that his crude, “in your face” style has debased society. The self-proclaimed “King of All Media” abandoned traditional radio in early 2006, opting instead to join Sirius satellite radio, where he could broadcast unfettered by federal regulations. It remains to be seen whether his show will thrive in an uncensored environment. As veteran comic Tom Dreeson commented before Stern’s first satellite broadcast, Howard’s “kind of humor might only be funny because it was forbidden.”
The American actor, writer, and comedian Jon Stewart is best known for his work as the host of a “fake news” program on the cable television channel Comedy Central. Born Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz on November 28, 1962, in New York City and raised in New Jersey, he attended the College of William and Mary (BS, psychology, 1984) and then held a series of odd jobs before launching a career in New York as a stand-up comedian in 1986. He went on to work on various television and film projects and published a volume of comic essays, Naked Pictures of Famous People (1998), before becoming host of The Daily Show in 1999. On the nightly program, Stewart satirizes current events and popular culture; his usual targets are politi-
See also: Abortion; Bush Family; Catholic Church; Science Wars.
Further Reading
Cindy Mediavilla
Jon Stewart hosts a half-hour satirical news program called The Daily Show on cable television’s Comedy Central channel. Viewer polls suggest that the show is an important source of news among young people. (Frank Micelotta/Getty Images for Comedy Central)
Stone, Oli ver
cians and the media. The show’s popularity skyrocketed as a result of its special “Indecision 2000” coverage of the 2000 presidential election and since then has won several Peabody and Emmy awards. George W. Bush’s reelection inspired the sequel, “Indecision 2004.” Although The Daily Show has poked fun at people of many political persuasions, conservatives have charged that most of its humor comes at the expense of Republicans. When television and radio host Bill O’Reilly interviewed Stewart on his Fox News show in September 2004, he accused Stewart of playing to a left-leaning audience, despite Stewart’s declaration that his program does not have “an agenda of influence.” Although media watchers note that The Daily Show has cultural and political significance—primarily for getting young people to think about politics and current events— Stewart insists that his program is strictly intended as comedy. Nevertheless, The Daily Show has become an increasingly popular venue for important figures in politics and the press. Democratic politicians have found it an especially congenial environment; both John Edwards and John Kerry made appearances on the show prior to their 2004 bids for the White House, for example. Stewart further circulated his brand of political satire with his best-selling America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004), a work he co-authored with Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum. Publisher’s Weekly named America book of the year, commending it for offering “a serious critique of the two-party system, the corporations that finance it and the ‘spineless cowards in the press’ who ‘aggressively print allegation and rumor independent of accuracy and fairness.’ ” But Wal-Mart refused to carry the book in its stores because it features a doctored photograph with the heads of the Supreme Court justices attached to naked bodies. The opposite page has paper-doll cutouts of robes, and the reader is asked to “Restore their dignity by matching each justice with his or her respective robe.” Charlotte Cahill See also: Bush Family; Campaign Finance Reform; Censorship; Election of 2000; Kerry, John; Media Bias; O’Reilly, Bill; Republican Party; Talk Radio; Wal-Mart.
Further Reading Peyser, Mark, and Sarah Childress. “Red, White, and Funny.” Newsweek, December 29, 2003. “10 Questions for Jon Stewart.” Time, September 27, 2004.
S t o n e , O l i ve r Controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone has raised important social questions and explored many topics that have been part of the culture wars. His film on John F. Kennedy’s assassination was criticized for its loose portrayal of real
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events and for presenting the assassination as a vast conspiracy. Eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., argued that some of Stone’s productions amount to “dramatic license . . . corrupted by ideology.” Stone, whose father was a Jewish-American stockbroker and his mother a French Catholic, was born in New York City on September 15, 1946. After a year attending Yale University (1964–1965), Stone wrote the semiautobiographical novel A Child’s Night Dream, which did not get published until 1997. He taught English in Saigon, Vietnam, then served a year in the merchant marine and traveled to Mexico. In 1967, Stone joined the U.S. Army and was soon deployed to Vietnam, where he was twice wounded in battle. Afterward, he studied film under director Martin Scorsese at New York University, graduating in 1971. With Midnight Express (1978), a film about an American drug smuggler’s ordeal in a Turkish prison, Stone won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Stone wrote and directed the horror film The Hand (1981) and wrote the screenplays for Conan the Barbarian (1982), Scarface (1983), Year of the Dragon (1985), and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). In 1986, drawing on his experiences in Vietnam, Stone wrote and directed Platoon, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In that production, Stone aimed to debunk the “sacred mission” concept of war and instead show the “true and gritty, from the inside out.” In a surreal scene that reflects the My Lai massacre, a Vietnamese village is gratuitously razed and its inhabitants murdered. Stone also won an Academy Award (Best Director) for Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a film that features the struggles of a paraplegic Vietnam veteran who becomes an antiwar activist. Stone’s Heaven and Earth (1993), which explores the war from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman, was not as successful as his other films about the Vietnam War. Stone’s films also criticize American culture and challenge historical interpretations of events. In Wall Street (1987), he sharply criticizes the greed that infests the American marketplace. In Talk Radio (1988), he explores the anger and rage of shock jocks and many Americans. The Doors (1991) romanticizes rock singer Jim Morrison while highlighting the excesses of the counterculture. Natural Born Killers (1994) is a satirical commentary on American violence and its connection with mass media. Stone’s JFK (1991), based on the book Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs (1989), created a firestorm of controversy. The film implies that the government was culpable in a vast conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy in order to prevent the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Nixon (1995), a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the Watergate president, was criticized for its nebulous implication that Nixon was involved in the CIA assassination plot against Castro that was somehow connected with the Kennedy assassination.
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Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) is based on the experience of two Port Authority officers trapped under the debris of one of the collapsed towers following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City. It received praise for its poignant and patriotic undertones and has been criticized by those who believe the film’s release was the exploitation of a tragedy. As President George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House drew to a close, Stone came out with W (2008), a biopic work of the forty-third president that a reviewer in The New Yorker declared “soulless.”
than symbolic importance for the gay rights movement. It also signified the movement’s embrace of “gay liberation,” which was characterized by more radical goals and militant tactics than the assimilationist aspirations and peaceful political strategies of other gay rights activists. The movement made several major breakthroughs on the heels of Stonewall and the activism that it inspired, including the 1973 decision of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Gary Mucciaroni
Matthew C. Sherman and Roger Chapman
See also: Civil Rights Movement; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Parks, Rosa; Police Abuse; Socarides, Charles; Transgender Movement; Vietnam War.
See also: Bush Family; Conspiracy Theories; Counterculture; Kennedy Family; My Lai Massacre; Nixon, Richard; Revisionist History; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; September 11; Shock Jocks; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam War; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Riordan, James. Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Silet, Charles P., ed. Oliver Stone: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Toplin, Robert Brent. Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Stonewall Rebellion The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall rebellion, took on mythic importance for the gay rights movement. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in Greenwich Village, New York City. Raids of nightclubs and other venues frequented by gays were common in large American cities during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when repression of homosexuality and gender-bending were at their height. Bar patrons ordinarily complied with orders to leave the premises and passively accepted arrest if they were unable to produce identification. On this particular night, however, the patrons, many of whom were transvestites, resisted the police action, and a raucous crowd joined them outside the bar. Part of the legend of Stonewall is that the mood of some of the gay patrons was especially sour because of the recent death of Judy Garland, a gay icon whose funeral had been held in New York earlier that day. The riots lasted for six days, with police and gays locked in violent clashes that included throwing bricks and other objects, setting fires, and damaging police vehicles and other property. Much like Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a bus, the Stonewall rebellion came to symbolize the active resistance of an oppressed group. But Stonewall had more
Further Reading Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Plume, 1994. Marotta, Toby. The Politics of Homosexuality. New York: Twayne, 1995. Teal, Donn. The Gay Militants. New York: Stein and Day, 1971.
S t r a t e g i c D e f e n s e I n i t i a t i ve A Cold War defense program initiated in the early 1980s by President Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—popularly referred to as “Star Wars”—was based on a plan to use space-based weapons to shoot down potential incoming missiles from the Soviet Union. While some blamed the program for heightening Cold War tensions and intensifying the nuclear arms race, others credited it for hastening the decline of the Soviet Union. The primary focus of SDI was to be large lasers orbiting Earth that could shoot down airborne Soviet missiles before they could enter American territory. Reagan inaugurated the program in a speech on March 8, 1983, stating, “I call upon the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace; to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” About two weeks later, Reagan delivered another speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” These two speeches launched a period of new intensity in the nuclear arms race. The nickname “Star Wars,” which was given to the program by its critics, brought complaints from filmmaker George Lucas, creator of the hugely popular movie series of the same name, which features intergalactic battle but with an ultimate message of compromise and cooperation. Although opponents of SDI used the name Star Wars to deride the program as science fiction, some proponents also used the term, in the belief that science fiction has inspired many real-life technologies.
Strau ss, Leo
SDI originated with the development of a laser that made use of nuclear and x-ray technologies. The laser was brought to fruition in the late 1970s at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, by scientist Peter Hagelstein. The development team, called the O Group, was descended from the efforts of Edward Teller, who had co-founded the laboratory in 1949 for research on advanced weapons systems. SDI was to use laser technology against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could deliver nuclear warheads. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established in 1984 to foster further research. The organization was headed by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General James Adam Abrahamson, a former director of the NASA Space Shuttle program. No SDI system was ever fully implemented, but research by SDIO led to technological advances in computer technology, sensors, and miniaturized components that have found other applications in military development and communications. The doctrine underlying SDI was “strategic defense,” as opposed to the Cold War offensive strategy of “mutually assured destruction.” Among the critics of SDI was physicist Hans Bethe, who had worked on development teams for the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb in the early years of the Cold War. Bethe and others claimed that a space-based laser system would be scientifically impractical and prohibitively expensive, and the Soviets could easily destroy it or eliminate its usefulness by deploying decoy missiles. Based on his experience with weapons of mass destruction, Bethe believed that the Cold War could be resolved through diplomacy rather than new technologies. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev strongly opposed SDI, and the program became a major agenda item at his October 1986 summit with Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland. In December 1987, the two leaders signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which proponents of SDI regarded as a sign of success. Supporters of the program later suggested that it helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the very threat of a space-based system shed light on the deficiencies of Soviet defenses. Opponents of SDI instead argue that Gorbachev’s reforms and larger sociopolitical trends are responsible for the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Some even suggest that SDI prolonged the Cold War because it galvanized the Kremlin hardliners, hindering Gorbachev’s reforms and overtures for peace. President George H.W. Bush kept the SDI project alive, but President Bill Clinton in 1993 shifted the focus from missile-based global to ground-based regional defense systems and redesignated SDIO as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). Also in 1993, it was revealed that a breakthrough SDI test in 1984 had been faked—the targeted missile carried a homing beacon that enabled the interceptor to shoot it down easily. The Star Wars concept was revived by President George W.
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Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, this time under the title National Missile Defense; the name was changed to Ground-Based Midcourse Defense in 2002. New technologies developed under this program remain in the testing stage. Benjamin W. Cramer See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Nuclear Age; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Reagan, Ronald; Science Wars; September 11; Soviet Union and Russia; Teller, Edward.
Further Reading Broad, William J. Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the Young Scientists Behind Our Space Age Weaponry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. FitzGerald, Frances. Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Lakoff, Sanford, and Herbert F. York. A Shield in Space? Technology, Politics, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Linenthal, Edward T. Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Strauss, Leo A political philosopher cited as one of the intellectual leaders of American neoconservatism, Leo Strauss was born September 20, 1899, near Marburg, Germany. He studied classical and political philosophy under such prominent figures in the field as Ernst Cassirer, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. His study of Thomas Hobbes led him to England, where he remained after the rise of Nazism, taking a teaching position at Cambridge University. In 1937, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City (1938–1948) and the University of Chicago (1949–1968). By the time of his death on October 18, 1973, Strauss had come to influence a number of conservative-oriented American intellectuals and political activists, including Allan Bloom, William J. Bennett, Irving and William Kristol, Alan Keyes, Carnes Lord, and Norman Podhoretz, all founding members of neoconservatism. Many of Strauss’s followers were strong promoters of President George W. Bush’s plan to invade Iraq. Critics of the neoconservative movement claim that it represents a Straussian “conspiracy” to control American foreign policy, and some liberals claim that Strauss’s theories are antidemocratic and encourage a “fascist” tyranny of the “wise.” Supporters of Strauss have suggested that his critics are guided by anti-Semitism.
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Str uc turalism and Pos t-Str uc turalism
Strauss himself engaged in no political activity, preferring the life of a scholar-philosopher. He was critical of modern philosophy and social science. Instead, he sought a return to the earlier perspectives of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle and Jewish tradition as reflected in the Bible. His studies of the seventeenth-century philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes led him to conclude that modern philosophy and science did not refute the claims of religion, and that the conflict between religion and science is fated to remain perpetual. Strauss distrusted liberalism, modernity, and multiculturalism. He argued that uncritical praise of democratic culture leaves unchallenged the weaknesses of “mass culture,” which diminishes the value of the pursuit of excellence as a human ideal. To learn about humanity’s highest values, Strauss and many of his followers encourage a return to the “great books” of the ancient and medieval tradition. Martin J. Plax See also: American Century; Anti-Semitism; Bennett, William J.; Bush Family; Great Books; Keyes, Alan; Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol; Neoconservatism; Podhoretz, Norman.
Further Reading Drury, Shadia B. Leo Strauss and the American Right. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Lenzner, Steven, and William Kistol. “What Was Leo Strauss Up To?” Public Interest, Fall 2003. Norton, Anne. Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. West, Thomas. “Leo Strauss and American Foreign Policy.” Claremont Review of Books, April 25, 2005.
Structuralism and PostStructuralism Structuralism is a method of analysis and philosophical approach to the understanding of human endeavors from language to literature and politics. According to this perspective, all of human-created reality, despite any apparent complexity, can be reduced to more simple basic facts or principles that remain the same regardless of a person’s race, culture, gender, or ethnicity. This stands in direct opposition to poststructuralist methodologies, especially deconstructionism, which harshly criticize structuralism and insist that humanity is far less unified than the structuralist would suppose. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is the originator of structuralism. Saussure’s most important work, Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), begins by distinguishing between langue and parole (roughly “language” and “speech”). Parole (the spoken or written word) is public, and langue is
its underlying system. Whereas parole is arbitrary, langue is structured. For example, although two persons may use different parole (such as a case in which one speaks English and the other Chinese), they nonetheless share the same langue. The same thought process gives rise to different forms of speech. Thus, the work of the linguist committed to the tenets of structuralism is to cut through the surface parole and discover the underlying langue. The impact of Saussure’s methodology for understanding human language cannot easily be overstated. Almost immediately upon its publication, Saussure’s Cours swept through higher education on both sides of the Atlantic, and into other fields such as anthropology, literature, and psychology. Saussurian linguistics bred a sense of optimism into the humanities and human sciences, as it was seen as offering a new form of progress for studies in these fields. By way of example, if language is rule-governed, and if works of literature are but extended acts of language, then works of literature are also rule-governed. So, despite the fact that in literature there are a myriad of different characters, events, and narrative styles, the structuralist would maintain that they all contain the same, or very similar, structures. The Marxist structuralist might claim that works of literature create their plot and corresponding tension by combining or juxtaposing different social classes. All stories that address romantic love between two people of different social classes, for example, share the same structuralist core. A Freudian structuralist might hypothesize that the structure beneath such stories is a psychological one playing off our pre-linguistic egos, especially the desire to preserve one’s life. This approach contrasts sharply with multicultural interpretations of texts, in which it is presupposed that autobiographical details of both the author and reader of a text make any single, universal meaning impossible. It contrasts even more sharply with deconstructionist methodologies that remove the author completely from the realm of meaning. According to such methodologies, meaning is created by the reader alone, and in no case does a reader uncover a preexisting meaningful structure created by the author. Structuralism became especially influential in the field of anthropology. In such works as The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind, 1962), French anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss utilized structuralist methodology to address core issues in anthropology. He argued, for example, that both the scientific engineer and the pre-scientific “savage” share the same theoretical core. The concept of kinship, he argued further, is reducible to the exchange of women consistent with the prohibition against incest; bound by that prohibition, the exchange encourages social cooperation and peaceful communication across clans. Thus, Lévi-Strauss concludes, kinship can be used
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to explain the origins of much larger phenomena such as politics and even religion. In another realm, Joseph Campbell applied structuralistic methodology to the study of myth, arguing in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) that all hero myths, regardless of culture, have the same structure. Specifically, they involve a hero born in an ordinary world who is called to an extraordinary one. Upon entering the extraordinary world, the hero wins a battle and returns to the ordinary world with newly acquired gifts and skills that he bestows on friends or clansmen. A major blow to structuralism came at the height of its European popularity when, in 1966, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida delivered a paper that was highly critical of the movement. Derrida’s paper prompted persistent questioning regarding the theoretical core of structuralism. Chief among the concerns of objectors is the strong disavowal of history and historical circumstance that pervades structuralist studies. Structuralists, it is said, view the facts of particular cultures as the unnecessary, arbitrary parole and that the essence lies in the langue that lies beneath—though it is not clear why historical or cultural facts are to be minimized or labeled “arbitrary.” Others criticize the structuralist approach for its unwarranted insistence upon “essential” properties of human phenomena. For example, some structuralist critiques seem to assume that there is a genuine property of “maleness” and “femaleness” such that all persons have just one or the other, and that the two are complete, clearly defined categories. Postmodern feminists, among others, object to this view, regarding it as a veiled attempt to buttress arbitrary, culturally defined values. The methodologies that replaced structuralism tend to capitalize on these objections. Post-structuralism and postmodern methodologies emphasize, contrary to structuralist tenets, the importance of contingent cultural and historical artifacts upon meaning. Deconstructionists directly challenge the alleged immutability of the so-called structure that underlies an observed system, and attempt to show how anything “beneath” the surface text can itself be deconstructed. Craig Hanson See also: Deconstructionism; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Paglia, Camille; Postmodernism; Relativism, Moral.
Further Reading Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structure of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1998.
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S t u d e n t C o n s e r v a t i ve s If at times less vocal than their liberal and radical counterparts, student conservatives have stood at the social, political, and intellectual vanguard of the American culture wars since at least the 1960s. During that tumultuous decade, they clashed with the New Left and the hippie counterculture, which they viewed as a radical, permissive, and secular movement corrosive to the traditions and values of American society. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, student conservatives broadened their efforts to combat issues such as abortion, feminism, and gay rights. In these disputes, they enjoyed the increasingly lavish support of conservative benefactors and institutions. This support, and the centrality of universities to the culture wars, nurtured a growth in the number, organization, and influence of student conservatives during this period. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the first significant conservative student organization, played a vital role in the 1960s. Guided by adult conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., and William Rusher, YAF brought together a diverse group of conservative students from hundreds of college campuses. Its founding document, the Sharon Statement (1960), stressed the importance of a limited government to the preservation of liberty, moral order, and tradition. The 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater energized conservative students, and YAF members such as Robert Croll and John Kolbe worked aggressively to spread Goldwater’s conservative message. YAF’s student journal, the New Guard, publicized the group’s political activities and provided a forum for the discussion of conservative ideas on campus. Young conservatives responded aggressively to the emergence of a new cadre of student radicals in the 1960s. The New Left and the hippie counterculture capitalized on a growing opposition to the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s to advance their political and cultural agenda on many college campuses. Student conservatives, many themselves opposed to the draft, answered by staging counterdemonstrations in support of the war and in opposition to the student radicals. “Bleed-ins” encouraged students to donate blood for the troops, and “bake-ins” raised money to send them cookies. College conservatives challenged the protests of student leftists at places such as Columbia University in 1968, when they blocked student radicals from taking over the university library. They led a campaign against the National Student Association, which they believed had become a political front for the New Left. Other organizations such as the Free Campus Movement, founded at the University of Southern California in 1968, and the Community of the Right, organized at Stanford University in 1969, provided opportunities for student conservatives to counter the collegiate left.
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R. Emmett Tyrrell, a graduate student in history at Indiana University, founded in 1967 a conservative journal, The Alternative, which used satire and mockery in its attack on the New Left’s influence at IU. He later helped orchestrate an electoral victory for conservatives and the removal of the leftists from key student government positions at the school. The journal proved even more successful. Later renamed the American Spectator, the journal continued to target the New Left and youth counterculture while playing an ecumenical role of sorts for conservatism. Anticipating larger trends in the American right, its pages brought traditionalist and libertarian conservatives together with a new group of disenchanted liberals called neoconservatives, united behind a growing disgust over the cultural and political direction of American liberalism. Hostility to abortion rights, the feminist movement, gay rights, affirmative action, busing, and the drug culture nurtured a growth in the number of conservative students in the 1970s and 1980s. Christian student conservatives found abortion, legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), a particularly galvanizing issue. Many students on the right, especially young women, participated in annual Right to Life marches and rallies on campuses and in capital cities. In the 1970s, young conservative women also fought against the feminist movement and the Equal Rights Amendment, which they believed would undermine the biological roles of the sexes and threaten the traditional family structure. Some female students, such as Mary Eberstadt at Cornell University and Heather MacDonald at Yale University, in the early 1980s shifted rightward in reaction to liberal ideas they encountered during their undergraduate and graduate years. Many future conservative leaders worked for rightwing campus periodicals. At Dartmouth College, for example, Dinesh D’Souza developed his writing skills as editor of the Dartmouth Review, an independent conservative student publication that relentlessly assailed liberal stances, particularly the women’s and gay rights movements. D’Souza would become a leading culture warrior and conservative commentator in the 1990s and 2000s. While attending the University of Virginia during the late 1980s, Rich Lowry, a future editor of the National Review, wrote for the conservative Virginia Advocate (founded in 1986). Overall, there was a dramatic expansion in the number of conservative student publications at the campuses of Harvard, Yale, and Duke, among others. These student periodicals proved effective training grounds for future conservative leaders of the culture wars. Since the 1980s, student conservatives have continued to fight on the front lines of the culture wars, particularly over the issues of abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action. For the cause of battling liberalism, they have been provided grants, fellowships, and
internships by a growing body of conservative think tanks and foundations, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (1953), the Heritage Foundation (1973), and American Collegians for Life (1988). In addition, Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute (1979) has provided leadership training, while James Dobson’s Focus on the Family Institute (1995) has assisted evangelical conservative students. Conservative colleges such as Hillsdale College in Michigan and Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and Catholic conservative colleges like the University of Dallas and Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, have provided safe havens for the training of student conservatives and future culture warriors. conservative Christian colleges, such as Indiana Wesleyan University and Taylor University in Indiana, have also contributed to training articulate young conservatives. The founding in 2000 of Patrick Henry College, a conservative Christian college in Purcellville, Virginia, dedicated to changing American culture, testifies to the continued salience of student conservatives to the culture wars. Daniel Spillman See also: Affirmative Action; Buckley, William F., Jr.; Counterculture; Equal Rights Amendment; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Heritage Foundation; Hillsdale College; Neoconservatism; New Left; Roe v. Wade (1973); Rusher, William A.; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Andrew, John A., III. The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Eberstadt, Mary, ed. Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys. New York: Threshold Editions, 2007. Lantzer, Jason S. “The Other Side of Campus: Indiana University’s Student Right and the Rise of National Conservatism.” Indiana Magazine of History, June 2005. Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Schneider, Gregory. Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Students for a Democratic Society Founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1960, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a radical student organization that flourished in the last half of the 1960s. It was the largest and most influential organization of the New Left movement, which called for radical social and political change in the 1960s and early 1970s.
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The SDS grew out of the student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist educational organization. The group’s founding members drew inspiration from both the civil rights movement and organized labor. At the initial meeting in Ann Arbor, they elected Robert Alan Haber as president (officially field secretary). At the group’s first convention in June 1962, it approved the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto (named for the town in which the gathering was held) drafted chiefly by cofounder, staff member, and Haber’s successor as president, Tom Hayden. Beginning with the often-quoted words, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” the document declared an “agenda for a generation”: working for full civil rights for African Americans, an end to poverty, more political involvement on the part of college students, and the pursuit of true democracy and freedom in the world. In its early years, the SDS focused its efforts largely on economic inequality. One of its better-known efforts was the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a campaign for community organizing among unemployed whites in major northern cities. At the group’s 1964 annual meeting, a split developed between supporters of ERAP and those who wanted to emphasize campus organizing. The majority sided with the ERAP supporters, but the drive toward campus activism would become increasingly important for SDS members. The group did not focus heavily on the Vietnam War until 1965, after President Lyndon Johnson escalated the conflict under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The group’s membership grew slowly between 1960 and 1965, but the spike in U.S. troop deployment to Vietnam resulted in a massive increase in SDS membership. Local SDS chapters sprang up all over the country, mostly as a result of student opposition to the war. Members organized demonstrations on college campuses to protest U.S. involvement and the draft, and teach-ins to educate fellow students. The SDS staged one of the first national demonstrations against the war in April 1965, a protest that drew around 20,000 people to Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, the organization itself was changing in dramatic ways. Members voted to remove the anticommunist planks from the SDS charter, and the organization moved its headquarters from New York to Chicago, reflecting the desire of many members to make the group more national. The year 1968 was also important for the SDS. In the spring of that year, members waged a series of rallies, teach-ins, and marches to protest continuing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. On April 26, the organization sponsored a one-day strike in which approximately one million students participated. At Columbia University in New York City, the local SDS chapter joined with other groups to protest the school’s involve-
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ment with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research outlet affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense. The conflict escalated when Columbia officials announced plans to build a new gymnasium on land originally intended for low-cost housing in Harlem. The protests, including the takeover of several university buildings, finally prompted the administration to scrap plans for the gymnasium and end its affiliation with the IDA. The widely publicized events at Columbia also put the SDS in the public spotlight and attracted new members to the organization. The growing influence of the SDS on American college campuses convinced many of its supporters that a social revolution was possible. As expectations rose, however, the group became increasingly divided. As early as 1966, the Progressive Labor Party (PL), a Maoist group committed to communist principles, had begun using SDS as a recruitment vehicle and organized the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) to push its agenda. Although the vast majority of SDS members were anticommunist, they were also reluctant to expel communists from the group. The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), led by Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, and others, organized in opposition to the WSA and tried to prevent what its leaders viewed as a hostile takeover of the organization by the WSA. They were particularly troubled by the hostility of many WSA members toward the Black Panthers. The conflict came to a head at the 1969 SDS national convention in Chicago, where the WSA moved to take control of the national SDS. Led by Dohrn, the RYM faction voted to expel the PL from the convention and subsequently walked out of the building, leaving the SDS with two sets of leaders. The split at the 1969 convention was the death knell for SDS, which would hold no further annual conventions. The RYM faction formed the radical Weather Underground Organization, known popularly as the Weathermen, organized around the goal of a revolution that would overthrow the U.S. government. Believing that a revolutionary political party per se would be ineffective, the group’s leaders called for militant direct action to bring about the demise of the federal government. The Weathermen remained active until 1975, at which time the New Left effectively collapsed. Decades after its demise, however, the SDS continued to influence the social and cultural changes that transformed America. By organizing students around an agenda of radical social and political change, the group helped lay the groundwork for the cultural battles that would be a legacy of the 1960s. Indeed, in 2006, a group of former SDS members teamed with college students to advocate a revival of the group. They envisioned a multiissue organization that would unite students across the country to support an agenda of leftist causes, including opposition to various forms of military action, support for protective environmental legislation, and a critique
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of global current trade agreements. By the end of 2006, the new SDS boasted hundreds of chapters on college campuses and thousands of members. Blake Ellis See also: Black Panther Party; Chicago Seven; Civil Rights Movement; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Hayden, Tom; Hoffman, Abbie; Marxism; New Left; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987. Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Miller, James. Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.
S u m m e r s , L aw r e n c e An economist, academic, and former government official, Lawrence “Larry” Summers served five years as president of Harvard University before resigning in February 2006 after a series of disputes with school faculty over sensitive political and social issues. Born Lawrence Henry Summers on November 30, 1954, in New Haven, Connecticut, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, 1975) and Harvard (PhD, 1982), where in 1983 he became the youngest tenured professor. After serving as chief economist of the World Bank (1991–1993) and secretary of the treasury (1999– 2001) in the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was appointed president of Harvard. Although some attributed his demise as president to failing to apply a corporate approach in campus governance, and others blamed his shielding of a fellow Harvard economist accused of defrauding the federal government while serving as a consultant for Russian market reform, many portrayed him as a victim of the culture wars. Summers’s tenure as university president was characterized by a series of public gaffes. Most incendiary was his January 2005 statement that women are underrepresented in the fields of mathematics and science for reasons of “intrinsic aptitude.” In 2001, he had challenged the prominent African-American professor Cornel West to apply more scholarly rigor in his work. An insulted West left Harvard for what he regarded as a more respectful environment at Princeton University. The following year, Summers offended Muslim students by characterizing them as anti-Semitic for lobbying Harvard to divest stock in companies that do business in Israel. Although the student body, by a margin of three to
one, sided with the president in the 2005 public dispute, the faculty of the arts and sciences, by a vote of 218 to 185 (with 18 abstentions), formally expressed its lack of confidence in Summers’s leadership. When a second vote of no confidence was scheduled the following year, he announced that he would step down at the end of the 2006 school year. Supporters of Summers regard him as a reformer who made enemies on campus because he violated “political correctness” and speech codes while demanding higher academic standards and denouncing grade inflation. His opponents argue that he was primarily undone by his arrogant and insensitive behavior and top-down management style. Roger Chapman See also: Academic Freedom; Anti-Semitism; Israel; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Muslim Americans; Political Correctness; Soviet Union and Russia; Speech Codes; Victimhood; West, Cornel.
Further Reading Bradley, Richard. Harvard Rues: Lawrence Summers and the Battle for the World’s Most Powerful University. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Lewis, Harry. Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Wilson, Robin. “The Power of Professors.” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 3, 2006.
Supply-Side Economics Supply-side economics is an approach pioneered in the 1970s that stresses the role of tax cuts in creating economic incentives and in fostering economic growth. Supply-side economics is commonly set in opposition to the demand-side perspective of Keynesian and monetarist economics. The intellectual foundations of supply-side economics are attributed to economist Arthur Laffer’s work, and especially to a drawing executed on a cocktail napkin that Jude Wanniski later called the “Laffer Curve” in his book The Way the World Works (1978). The curve depicts a relationship between tax rates and tax revenue, showing that each level of tax revenue corresponds to two levels of tax rates, one high and one low. Supply-siders argue that the tax rates prevailing in the United States are in the top section of the curve. They argued at the time that a decrease in those rates would not only increase people’s income and incentives to work but also increase the amount of tax revenue collected by the government. Thus, a tax cut would pay for itself without requiring any adjustment in government spending. Supply-side economics is often referred to as “trickledown” economics because it is hypothesized that a de-
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crease in the marginal tax rate will provide incentives for entrepreneurs to hire more workers, as they receive higher revenues and profits. Thus, the increase in income created by the decrease in tax rates would be passed on to the rest of society from the top down. Supply-side assumptions formed the economic foundation of Ronald Reagan’s campaign platform in 1980 and were heavily implemented throughout his presidency. Despite its endorsement by Nobel Prize laureate Robert Mundell, supply-side economics found relatively little support in the academic community. The Nobel Prize–winning economist and liberal commentator Paul Krugman has been one of the most vocal opponents of supply-side economics. In his book Peddling Prosperity (1994), Krugman observes that no economics department at any major American university has a specifically supply-side orientation. Through his books and op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Krugman has sought to convince the American public that supply-side economics is an ideology disguised as scientific theory. This sentiment echoed George H.W. Bush’s characterization of supplyside economics in 1980 as “voodoo economics” and the confession of Reagan budget director David Stockman in The Triumph of Politics (1986) that supply-side economics was a ploy to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. In the realm of popular culture, Al Franken introduced “SupplySide Jesus,” a cartoon figure portraying Jesus Christ as a wealthy individual providing employment to poorer people through his thirst for luxury items. The emphasis on tax cuts in the economic policies of President George W. Bush, in particular the elimination of the estate tax and the reduction of the tax on capital gains, has been interpreted by some as a revival of supplyside economics. In each year of the Bush administration following the first tax cuts in 2002, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast long-term budget deficits and increased national debt. The Democratic Leadership Committee, interpreting the CBO reports to mean that the tax cuts had failed to generate new wealth, declared the death of supply-side economics in 2003. Quentin Hedges Duroy See also: Bush Family; Democratic Party; Federal Budget Deficit; Franken, Al; Krugman, Paul; Norquist, Grover; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Tax Reform; Wall Street Journal, The.
Further Reading Bartlett, Bruce, and Timothy P. Roth, eds. The Supply-Side Solution. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1983. Krugman, Paul. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Stockman, David. The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
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Wanniski, Jude. The Way the World Works: How Economies Fail and Succeed. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
S y m b i o n e s e L i b e r a t i o n A r my The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a militant political group that carried out a series of violent crimes, including murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, and the planting of bombs, in the San Francisco Bay area during the first half of the 1970s. “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people” was the group’s slogan. Although the SLA was denounced by the Berkeley student newspaper and most leftist radicals, conservatives regarded it as symptomatic of counterculture excesses. At the time, some radicals hypothesized that the SLA was a creation of the FBI to discredit the left. Made up of about a dozen members, predominantly white and middle class, the SLA proclaimed the goal of unifying “oppressed people” to fight against “the capitalist state and all its value systems.” The group’s logo was a seven-headed cobra, symbolizing the seven principles of Kwanzaa. Their leader, known as Field Marshal Cinque, was Donald DeFreeze, a black escaped convict and purported schizophrenic. The notoriety of the SLA was based on two dramatic crimes. One was the assassination on November 6, 1973, of Marcus Foster, the black superintendent of the Oakland school system, because he favored student identification cards. The second was the February 4, 1974, kidnapping of Patricia “Patty” Hearst, the nineteen-year-old heiress of the Hearst newspaper chain. In compliance with her captors’ ransom demand, Hearst’s parents established a $2 million charity fund and distributed food to over 30,000 people. In April, however, the SLA released a tape in which Hearst declared that she had taken the name Tania and enlisted in the terrorist army. She was photographed participating in a bank robbery that left one bystander dead, and a warrant for her arrest was issued immediately. She was captured in September 1975 and convicted of bank robbery six month later despite her claims of being brainwashed. Her seven-year prison sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter after she had served twenty-one months. She was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton in January 2001. Six SLA members were killed in a shootout with Los Angeles police on May 17, 1974. After two more bank holdups, the group disbanded, its remaining members either arrested or gone underground. In 1999, former SLA member Kathleen Soliah, alias Sarah Jane Olson, was arrested. In October 2001, fearing that a fair trial would be impossible in the post-9/11 climate, she reluctantly pleaded guilty to having placed bombs under police cars in 1977 with the intention to kill. In November 2002, the last known SLA fugitive, James Kilgore, was
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captured in South Africa. And in February 2003, four former SLA members were given prison sentences for the 1975 robbery murder in which Hearst had participated; some of them had earlier served time for the Hearst kidnapping. Roger Chapman See also: Clinton, Bill; Conspiracy Theories; Counterculture; Kwanzaa; Marxism; Presidential Pardons; September 11; Stone, Oliver; Victimhood.
Further Reading Graebner, William. Patty’s Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Hearst, Patricia, with Alvin Moscow. Every Secret Thing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982. Pearsall, Robert Brainard, ed. The Symbionese Liberation Army: Documents and Communications. Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1974.
See also: American Century; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Health Care; Kerouac, Jack; Labor Unions; McCarthy, Joseph; McCarthyism; Neoconservatism; New Deal; Republican Party; Schlafly, Phyllis.
Ta f t , Ro b e r t A . Nicknamed “Mr. Republican,” Robert A. Taft was a conservative U.S. senator from Ohio who opposed the New Deal, advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy, and supported McCarthyism Robert Alphonso Taft was born on September 8, 1889, in Cincinnati, the eldest son of William Howard Taft (the only person to have served as both president of the United States and chief justice of the Supreme Court). Educated at Yale University (BA, 1910; MA, 1936) and Harvard Law School (LLB, 1913), Taft practiced law and set his sights on the White House but failed to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1940, 1948, and 1952. Taft had a full public career: assistant counsel for Herbert Hoover’s U.S. Food Administration (1917–1919); Ohio House of Representatives (1921–1926); Ohio Senate (1931–1932); and U.S. Senate (1939–1953). He began his tenure in the Senate opposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which he regarded as socialistic, and in the postwar period he worked to reduce Roosevelt’s legacy. Thus, with Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. (R-NJ) as co-author, he introduced the Taft-Hartley Act, a measure to curb labor activity by scaling back the Wagner Act (1935). Passed on July 23, 1947, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Taft-Hartley included a provision requiring unions to adhere to an eighty-day “cooling off” period prior to going on strike during times of national emergencies. That same year, Taft campaigned against a plan for compulsory health insurance, denouncing it as “the federalization of medicine.” Taft urged the United States to maintain a strong military without diplomatic alliances and foreign entanglements. He put forth his views in A Foreign Policy for Americans (1951). One of his concerns was that that the Cold War might turn the United States into a “garrison state” with the undermining of national liberty. Taft was staunchly against communism, but he supported the Marshall Plan with misgivings and opposed Senate ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The postwar Red Scare brought out Taft’s strongest partisan instincts. After Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) alleged that the State Department had been infiltrated by communists, Taft encouraged him to “keep talking.” It is believed that Taft counseled Eisenhower not to stifle McCarthy because McCarthy’s claims were damaging to Democrats. Taft died of cancer in New York City on July 31, 1953. At least one biographer is convinced that had Taft still been a member of the Senate, he would not have voted to censure McCarthy in 1954. Roger Chapman
Further Reading Hayes, Michael T. “The Republican Road Not Taken: The Foreign-Policy Vision of Robert A. Taft.” Independent Review 8:4 (2004): 509–25. Kirk, Russell, and James McClellan. The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft. New York: Fleet, 1967. Patterson, James T. Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Robinson, Phyllis. Robert A. Taft: Boy and Man. Cambridge, MA: Dresser, Chapman and Grimes, 1963.
Ta l k R a d i o A daily staple of millions of Americans, talk radio since the late 1980s has emerged as one of the most influential media in the United States. Indeed, by 2007, more than 80 percent of all AM radio stations included at least one talk show in their broadcast lineup. In fact, talk radio during the first decade of the twenty-first century was so popular that it supported more than 1,200 “all-talk” shows. These programs are often political in nature, usually polemical, and make little effort at being objective. Although some historians credit regional call-in shows and early game shows as the inspiration behind talk radio, the format was not widely adopted until the 1960s, when stations such as KABC in Los Angeles and KMOX in St. Louis switched to all talk. Pioneering talk radio personalities included Long John Nebel, whose offbeat broadcasts featured discourses on UFOs and voodoo; Joe Pyne, a political conservative who supported the Vietnam War and abhorred hippies; Mort Sahl, a liberal political satirist who enjoyed poking fun at Richard Nixon; and Bill Ballance, host of the “Feminine Forum,” the first so-called topless or sex talk program. In talk radio, show hosts typically begin their broadcasts by introducing a provocative topic, often taken from that day’s headlines or instigated as part of a conversation with an on-air guest. Listeners are then encouraged to call in with their comments and questions. Depending on the host, content may focus on one or more of the following topics: general issues, politics, sports, “hot talk” (also known as “shock jock”), popular culture, finance, home improvement, psychology and relationships, and “specialty” topics such as computers, cars, and travel. Fans generally tune in to hear how their favorite host will react to caller comments. The most popular topic of on-air conversation by far has been politics. Of Talkers Magazine’s top 100 talk radio hosts in 2007, 40 percent identified their programs as 549
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politically conservative, moderate, or progressive. Until 1987, all radio content in the United States was regulated by the Fairness Doctrine, a federal law requiring broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of important controversial issues. Once the law was repealed, however, many hosts felt free to begin promoting specific political and social agendas, resulting in some decidedly onesided programming. As Mary Beal, on-air personality and former board member of the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts, once said, “I don’t care if I have a balanced viewpoint, because any opinion can be challenged by the people who call in.” The true power of unregulated talk radio became apparent in 1992, when presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Ross Perot both made optimum use of the medium in their campaigns. According to a Congressional Quarterly study, listeners learned more about the nominees through talk radio than any other medium. Many voters who had felt disenfranchised by the electoral process suddenly felt empowered because the candidates had come to them. Rush Limbaugh, a leading figure in American talk radio since the 1980s, is an outspoken conservative who vociferously expounds on the “evils” of homosexuality, feminism, environmentalism, and liberalism in general. In 1992, his syndicated program the Rush Limbaugh Show was heard on 529 stations across the country. Within three years, he not only had expanded his reach to 660 stations, but he was credited with single-handedly helping the Republicans regain control of Congress. “I believe that the most effective way to persuade people is to speak to them in a way that makes them think that they reached certain conclusions on their own,” he has said. By 2007, Limbaugh was the most popular radio broadcaster in the nation, with more than 13 million people tuning in to his show at least once a week. Despite his popularity, Limbaugh is by no means the only conservative voice on the radio dial. During the first decade of the 2000s, right-wing commentator Sean Hannity had a weekly audience of 12 million, while the self-proclaimed “firebrand conservative” Michael Savage spoke regularly to more than 8 million listeners. On the more liberal side has been Ed Schultz, a “progressive” broadcasting from Fargo, North Dakota; as well as Randi Rhodes, a mainstay of the left-leaning radio network Air America. Other well-known radio talk show personalities include “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger, who dispenses family advice as well as political opinions; Christian broadcaster Mike Gallagher; and “shock jocks” Howard Stern, Mancow, and Opie & Anthony. Talk radio has been called “the working people’s medium.” According to a 2004 Pew Research Center study, 17 percent of the American public regularly tune in to call-in radio shows. Of these, most are middle-aged men who are well educated and consider themselves conservative. Talkers Magazine’s 2007 talk radio survey
revealed that nearly 75 percent of listeners voted in the 2006 election and that 58 percent were registered as independents. National Public Radio personality Diane Rehm has described talk radio as America’s “electronic backyard fence,” where listeners can discuss issues anonymously over the air. On the other hand, she warned, talk radio can be “a provocative and even dangerous medium, capable of representing an extreme form of democracy,” particularly in the hands of radio hosts “who attempt to use talk shows to spread their own political or social dogma.” Especially worrisome are the “radio activists” who agitate their audiences by emphasizing only one side of whatever issue they are discussing. Newsday media critic Paul Colford has asserted that these types of on-air hosts are nothing more than “ambassadors in the culture of resentment.” Likewise, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times has called Limbaugh and his imitators the “tough guys and mean girls of AM talk,” who use bullying tactics, instead of solid reasoning, to get their point across. Cindy Mediavilla See also: Bennett, William J.; Clinton, Bill; Donahue, Phil; Federal Communications Commission; Limbaugh, Rush; Media Bias; National Public Radio; Perot, H. Ross; Shock Jocks; Stern, Howard; Terkel, Studs.
Further Reading Douglas, Susan J. “Letting the Boys Be Boys: Talk Radio, Male Hysteria, and Political Discourse in the 1980s.” In Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, 485–503. New York: Routledge, 2002. Godfrey, Donald G., and Frederic A. Leigh, eds. Historical Dictionary of American Radio. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Hoyt, Mike. “Talk Radio: Turning Up the Volume.” In Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Mass Media and Society, ed. Alison Alexander and Janice Hanson, 62–67. 2nd ed. Guilford, CT: Dushkin, 1995. Pease, Edward C., and Everette E. Dennis, eds. Radio: The Forgotten Medium. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995.
Ta x R e f o r m Taxes have been the subject of political controversy in the United States since the founding of the nation. From 1776 to World War I, tariffs and excise taxes were the primary sources of revenue for the federal government. The income tax was unknown until the Civil War, when it was implemented briefly, then discontinued until 1894. President Grover Cleveland convinced Congress to lower tariffs and substitute a modest tax on incomes to recoup revenues, but in 1895 the Supreme Court
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ruled the income tax unconstitutional, at least if it was based on income derived from property (Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company). As a reaction to the government’s inability to balance the federal budget in the ensuing years, Congress proposed the Sixteenth Amendment, giving it the power to lay and collect taxes on any form of income; the amendment was ratified in 1913. The modern tax reform movement is often said to have been launched in 1978 with the passage of Proposition 13 in California, a ballot referendum that dramatically lowered property taxes in the state. Proposition 13 was successful in part because there had been dramatic increases in the state property tax just prior to the ballot measure. The California government had not actually increased tax rates, but huge increases in property values had suddenly pushed property assessments much higher than they had been. Since property taxes are based on a proportion of assessed value, Californians were paying considerably more in property taxes even without an increase in the property tax rates. Tax reduction referenda also succeeded in a number of other states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Buoyed by the success of these state tax reform measures, conservatives sought to reduce taxes even further following the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. The Reagan budget of 1981 represented a major ideological shift from the budgets over the previous half century and was one of the most significant presidential legislative initiatives in American history. The tax cuts in the 1981 federal budget were the largest to that time, representing over 2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). Another significant change in policy during the Reagan years came with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which made major changes in how income was taxed. The measure simplified the tax code, broadening the tax base and eliminating a number of tax shelters and other preferences. The top tax rate was lowered from 50 percent to 28 percent, and the bottom rate was raised from 11 percent to 15 percent—the only time in U.S. history that the income tax rate was reduced for the top tier while simultaneously increased in the bottom tier. The act also reduced the capital gains tax to the same rate for ordinary income, and it increased incentives to invest in owner-occupied housing rather than rental housing, thus raising the home mortgage interest deduction. The legislation, which was seen as revenue neutral, passed by a large bipartisan majority in Congress. Deficit levels increased dramatically during the 1980s, and President George H.W. Bush was faced with record deficits. Despite having campaigned in 1988 on a pledge of “read my lips, no new taxes,” Bush reluctantly agreed in a budget summit to a deficit reduction package in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990. The law raised taxes and imposed new user fees in return for entitlements
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cuts. Despite the measure’s unpopularity, however, the 1990 budget laid the groundwork for a significant reduction in the deficit after Bush left office. Early in the administration of President Bill Clinton, Congress passed the 1993 Budget Reconciliation Bill, which attempted to reduce the federal budget deficit through both tax increases and spending cuts. Clinton’s call for a tax increase was a direct repudiation of the economic philosophies of his two Republican predecessors, suggesting that the tax policies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush came at the price of high deficits. Clinton raised most of the new revenue with an array of higher taxes on upper-income Americans and corporations, and more than half of the new taxes fell on families making more than $200,000 a year. President George W. Bush made cutting taxes the top priority of his administration after he was inaugurated in 2001. His plan reduced all federal income tax rates, raised the child credit, gave a break to married couples, and repealed the federal tax on large estates. The largest portion of the cuts, however, came from lowering the income tax rates for all income groups—from 15 percent, 28 percent, 31 percent, and 36 and 39.6 percent to 10 percent, 15 percent, 25 percent, and 33 percent, respectively. A controversial tax reform enacted in 2001 was a reduction in the federal estate tax. Since the estate tax is imposed on an estate only after someone has died, critics of the estate tax refer to it as the “death tax.” Before the 2001 cuts, the estate tax was imposed on only those estates valued at more than $1 million. As of 2006, the figure was raised to $2 million, and as of 2009 to $3.5 million, with the tax scheduled to disappear completely in 2010 and then resume in 2011 at the 2001 level. Thus, under the legislation, the effective transfer tax rate fell from a peak of 55 percent in 2001 to 50 percent in 2002 and to 45 percent by 2007, but it would rise again to 55 percent in 2011. Proponents of the estate tax argue that it is an important source of revenue for the federal government and is necessary to a system of progressive taxation because it affects large estates only. Opponents of the legislation argued further that a higher effective transfer tax encourages the wealthy to make billions of dollars in charitable donations each year, since the donations substantially reduce taxes on large estates. Patrick Fisher See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Bill; Contract with America; Corporate Welfare; Norquist, Grover; Privatization; Reagan, Ronald; Social Security; Supply-Side Economics; Wall Street Journal, The.
Further Reading Peters, B. Guy. The Politics of Taxation. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.
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Steinmo, Sven. Taxation and Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Wildavsky, Aaron, and Naomi Caiden. The New Politics of the Budgetary Process. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 2001.
Te l ev a n g e l i s m With ties to mid-nineteenth-century tent revivals, televangelism in contemporary America pursues new converts through the mass media. Widely associated with bombastic preaching, gospel revelry, and sometimes faith healing, the “electronic church” is not merely the business of evangelical Christians. As a particularly North American phenomenon, it also reflects social, cultural, and economic currents. At its core, televangelism is socially conservative, underscoring the traditional nuclear family in its anti-abortion, antigay, and antifeminist stances. Promoting the Religious Right’s social and political agenda to a mostly lower-middle-class audience, televangelism plays a major role in mobilizing conservative Christians, ushering them into the political arena to press for legislated morality. While liberal Protestants tend toward relativism, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists believe in salvation only for those “born again” in accordance with their exacting interpretation of the Bible—a simple theological message conducive to broadcasting. In the 1920s, secular radio stations gave free airtime to religious programs; mainline Protestant and Catholic groups filled most of it, forcing evangelical and fundamentalist Christians to pay for their broadcasts. Frustrated, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1944 formed the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) to fight the radio monopoly held by liberal churches. This arrangement remained in place until 1960, when all airtime was made available for purchase. Stations tended to favor conservative Christian televangelists, who were eager to pay, and the situation quickly changed. Since that time, evangelicals have dominated the religious airwaves in America. In the 1950s, evangelical preachers began a shift from radio to television. Among the first to do so was the Reverend Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist and the television preacher of choice for mainline evangelicals. In televising his “crusades,” Graham showed that TV was a medium that could be used to stir up religious enthusiasm. Gaining celebrity status as the spiritual adviser to American presidents from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Graham legitimized evangelicalism, on the wane since the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925. During his Cold War crusades, Graham proselytized using American fears of nuclear annihilation, as evidenced by such sermon titles as “The End of the World” (1950) and “Will God Spare America?” (1953). Graham proved to be a role model for other evange-
lists hoping to use the airwaves to expand their flock. In 1960, Southern Baptist minister Pat Robertson purchased a television station in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and formed the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)— now the Family Channel and the largest religious network in America. During a 1963 telethon, Robertson asked for 700 people to pledge money to keep the station solvent. These designated saviors became the foundation of Robertson’s show The 700 Club, which premiered in November 1966 with the Reverend Jim Bakker as host. Bakker, a Pentecostal, also co-hosted a CBN show with his singer-wife, Tammy Faye. The Bakkers left CBN for the Trinity Broadcasting Network, where they began the PTL (for Praise the Lord) Club, a variety show emulating the Tonight Show. The program and the Bakkers moved to their own PTL Network, founded in 1974. Also joining the ranks of televangelists in the 1960s were the Reverend Jerry Falwell, an independent Baptist, and his Old-Time Gospel Hour, as well as Jimmy Swaggart’s Pentecostal show, the Jimmy Swaggart Telecast. The 1980s ushered in an era of politically oriented televangelism. Initially against mixing politics and religion, Falwell changed his position with the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979. An evangelical political lobby group, the Moral Majority gained a pulpit for its views on Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour. Touting American exceptionalism and the wickedness of secular humanism, Falwell pushed for social and political change as the group’s leader, making valuable connections with Republicans, especially President Ronald Reagan. Seeking the support of the Religious Right, Reagan hosted televangelists at the White House and gave his 1983 “evil empire” speech (applying that term to the Soviet Union) at an NAE meeting. Indeed, politically minded televangelists like Falwell took credit for Reagan’s election victory in 1980. Fearing televangelists’ political influence over their viewers, liberals responded by forming a progressive advocacy group, People for the American Way, to protest the blurring between church and state. At the same time, the 700 Club added Robertson’s ultra-conservative political opinions on feminism, abortion, gay rights, and labor unions to his apocalyptic predictions. Robertson’s first foray into politics came in April 1980 with “Washington for Jesus,” a day of prayer and conservative political messages. In 1986, he began a grassroots campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate. With his “invisible army” of viewers, Robertson said he would run if 3 million people petitioned and offered monetary support for a campaign. In 1987, he formally announced his intentions to run, leaving CBN to his son. Controversy dogged Robertson’s bid, as questions over his education and military service uncovered falsehoods, and it was clear by 1988 that victory was impossible. Robertson threw his support behind
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George H.W. Bush, returned to CBN, and founded the Christian Coalition in 1989. The late 1980s was a difficult time for televangelists, as Robertson’s campaign was hurt by sex and money scandals surrounding televangelist superstars Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. In 1987, Bakker was accused of paying off a woman with whom he had had extramarital sex. The following year, he was indicted on charges of fraud and tax evasion for allegedly diverting millions of dollars through Heritage USA, PTL’s investment arm. Convicted on twenty-four criminal counts, he was sentenced to fortyfive years in prison (of which he served five). Also in 1988, Jimmy Swaggart, whose Pentecostal Assemblies of God ministry was said to have generated $150 million annually at its peak, became the object of another sex scandal, as photos of him with a prostitute surfaced. Swaggart resigned from his ministry after confessing an obsession with pornography during a tear-soaked telecast. In the pursuit of “getting right with God,” televangelists implore their viewers to contribute to their ministries so they can fulfill the tenets of the “health-andwealth” gospel: faith in God will bring material rewards. For critics, televangelism and the gaudy lifestyle of its practitioners symbolize unadulterated greed—a view reflected in a significant decline in viewer ratings and lampooned in the Genesis hit single, “Jesus He Knows Me” (1991). The rock star and international humanitarian Bono, among others, has criticized televangelists for practicing a faith devoid of social justice. Revived in the 1990s, televangelism remains very much alive and politically active in the United States. Both Robertson and Falwell were visible during the 1992, 1996, and 2000 national elections. The old guard may have given way to new televangelists, such as Joel Osteen and his “prosperity gospel,” but liberals continue to warn of televangelism’s influence over Christian voters and to criticize its narrow view of American society. Anna Zuschlag See also: American Exceptionalism; Christian Radio; Church and State; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; Fundamentalism, Religious; Graham, Billy; Reagan, Ronald; Religious Right; Robertson, Pat; Secular Humanism.
Further Reading Alexander, Bobby C. Televangelism Reconsidered: Ritual in the Search for Human Community. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994. Bruce, Steve. Pray TV: Televangelism in America. New York: Routledge, 1990. Frankl, Razelle. Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Hadden, Jeffrey K. “The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (May 1993): 113–30.
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Howley, Kevin. “Prey TV: Televangelism and Interpellation.” Journal of Film and Video 53:2–3 (2001): 23–37. Sine, Tom. Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.
Te l ev i s i o n See Media Bias
Te l l e r, E d w a r d A physicist whose work led to the development of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller was also a primary visionary of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). He is remembered by his detractors as “Dr. Strangelove”—the unstable presidential adviser in the Stanley Kubrick film of the same name (1964)—while admirers credit him with helping the United States win the Cold War. Born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary, Teller obtained his doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of Leipzig in Germany (1930) but left Germany for Denmark and then the United States with the rise of Adolf Hitler. He taught at George Washington University (1935–1941) and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II to help develop the atomic bomb. He remained at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico after the war, later moving to the University of California, Berkeley (1953–1970). A cofounder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, he served as its associate director (1954–1958, 1960–1975) and director (1958–1960). Teller testified against physicist and former Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer at a 1954 security board hearing, and Oppenheimer eventually lost his security clearance. Observers believed that Teller wished to topple Oppenheimer for not fully supporting his efforts to develop the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer had chaired the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which in 1949 advised against proceeding with the H-bomb, citing moral and technical concerns. In 1952, however, the United States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb, based in part on Teller’s design. Teller faced widespread condemnation for his testimony against Oppenheimer. Known for opposing nuclear test bans, downplaying the effects of radioactive fallout, and designing submarine-launched nuclear bombs, Teller faced a hostile counterculture movement on the Berkeley campus. Student activist Jerry Rubin once threw a custard pie in his face. More serious was the student tribunal of November 23, 1970, which conducted a hearing, attended by hundreds, to discuss campus ties to the military-industrial complex. Teller was singled out as “a leading sparkplug . . . for an even greater nuclear arsenal,” and police had
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to hold back a rowdy crowd that attempted an assault on the physicist’s home. In 1979, after an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, Teller testified before Congress in defense of atomic energy and to counter statements by Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader against the nuclear industry. The next day, Teller suffered a heart attack, which he later blamed on Fonda in a two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal (July 1, 1979). Equally controversial was Teller’s lobbying for SDI, the nuclear defense system widely referred to as Star Wars. The system was to use laser devices stationed in outer space that would shoot down incoming missiles. Although many scientists regarded SDI as technically unfeasible, Teller was able to persuade Defense Department officials and President Reagan, who announced a longterm development program in March 1983. Teller died on September 9, 2003, in Stanford, California, just weeks after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Roger Chapman See also: Cold War; Counterculture; Fonda, Jane; Kubrick, Stanley; McCarthyism; Nader, Ralph; Nuclear Age; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Reagan, Ronald; Science Wars; Strategic Defense Initiative; Three Mile Island Accident.
Further Reading Goodchild, Peter. Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Teller, Edward, with Judith L. Shoolery. Memoirs: A TwentiethCentury Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001.
Te n C o m m a n d m e n t s The culture wars have brought an ongoing series of legal battles and public debates between the Religious Right and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union over the appropriateness and constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property such as schools, courthouses, and capitol grounds. According to the Hebrew Bible (or Christian Old Testament), the Ten Commandments—also known as the Decalogue (Greek for “ten words”)—are part of the Law that Moses received on stone tablets from God on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20:2–14; Deuteronomy 5:6–18). Since there are different ways of numbering the commandments (Roman Catholics and Lutherans have one system, while Jews and the Orthodox and Reformed churches have another), the way in which one displays the Decalogue may betray a religious preference. The Ten Commandments, all sides agree, specify duties toward God (prohibition of polytheism and the making of idols, the proper use of God’s name, and observance of the Sabbath) and duties
Members of the Religious Right kneel in prayer at a monument to the Ten Commandments inside the state courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2003. Chief Justice Roy S. Moore was removed from office for defying a federal court order to remove the monument. (Gary Tramontina/Getty Images)
toward other humans (honoring parents and prohibitions against murder, adultery, stealing, giving false testimony, and coveting). The Decalogue emerged as a potent symbol during the Cold War with the release of the Hollywood film The Ten Commandments (1956). The director of the film, Cecil B. DeMille, viewed the story of the Decalogue as a metaphor of American freedom in contrast to the Soviet Union. In the film’s prologue, DeMille explains, “The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by God’s law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator. . . . Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.” In the meantime, with financial backing from DeMille, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles donated thousands of Decalogue statues across the country, including a six-foot (1.8-meter) granite monument that was placed on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin in 1961. Although the New Testament deemphasizes the Hebrew Law, certain conservative Christians favor the Ten
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Commandments. Some assert that the Decalogue inspired the Bill of Rights, and many argue that the Ten Commandments were the basis of common law and American jurisprudence—a view most legal scholars regard as an exaggeration at best. The Christian Reconstructionist Rousas J. Rushdoony, in his two-volume commentary on the Ten Commandments, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), argues that the Decalogue is foundational for establishing a Christian theocracy. The Religious Right, although influenced by Rushdoony, mainly sought to bolster its argument that America was founded as a Christian nation. In Stone v. Graham (1980), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Kentucky law that required a copy of the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom of its public schools, with the notation: “the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States.” The court ruled that such a requirement had no secular purpose and promoted religion rather than the teaching of history. That decision did not settle the matter, however, because it suggested that displaying the Decalogue in a different context might be permissible. Following the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a number of states proposed the posting of the Ten Commandments in historical displays at public schools. In 2003, Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore was removed from the bench for defying a higher court’s order to remove a 2.5-ton (2,273-kilo) granite Decalogue monument inside his courthouse. Although Moore’s appeal to the Supreme Court went unanswered, other Decalogue cases were later heard. In McCreary County, Kentucky et al. v. ACLU (2005), the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 against two Kentucky county executives who ordered framed copies of the Ten Commandments, in the language of the King James Bible, displayed in two courthouses. Based on the wording of the enabling resolution, the majority of the justices saw this action as promoting religion. In contrast, the same court in Van Orden v. Perry (2005) ruled 5–4 that the granite Decalogue memorial on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin is constitutionally permissible because the context of its placement was not religious. The fact that the Texas monument was installed by a private group and had been in place for over four decades without public objection contributed to the favorable ruling. Moreover, the Texas monument depicts a Jewish Star of David as well as a Christian symbol and features eleven, possibly twelve, commandments, all indicative of nonsectarianism. Proponents of the public display of the Decalogue argue that the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., includes the Ten Commandments as part of its decor, making it appropriate as well for lower courts across the land. Opponents answer that nowhere does the ornamentation in the Supreme Court give prefer-
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ence to Moses and his Law. The eastern pediment at the back outside of the building, they point out, features the three great lawgivers of ancient Eastern civilization: Confucius, Moses (holding a tablet without inscription), and Solon. The pediment also includes allegorical figures, all symbolic of law. The wooden doors of the courtroom have a design depicting two tablets, one engraved with the Roman numerals I through V and the other VI through X, otherwise without inscription. The marble frieze bordering the high ceiling inside the courtroom depicts eighteen lawgivers in history: Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Confucius, and Octavian (the south wall); Justinian, Mohammed, Charlemagne, King John, Louis IX, Hugo Grotius, William Blackstone, John Marshall, and Napoleon (north wall). Directly above the seat of the chief justice on the east wall, there are two figures, one with tablets, whom proponents of the Decalogue say represents Moses with the Ten Commandments. According to a letter by the designer Adolph Weinman, dated October 31, 1932, the two figures represent “Majesty of the Law and the power of Government” and the “figure of Law, resting on the tablet of the ten amendments [sic] to the Constitution known as the ‘Bill of Rights.’” Because of that letter, some suggest that the engravings on the wooden doors symbolize the Bill of Rights and not the Ten Commandments. Undaunted, Decalogue proponents have questioned the authenticity of the Weinman letter, which is on file in the Supreme Court archives. Roger Chapman See also: Christian Reconstructionism; Cold War; Moore, Roy S.; Religious Right.
Further Reading Green, Steven K. “The Fount of Everything Just and Right? The Commandments as a Source of American Law.” Journal of Law and Religion 14:2 (1999–2000): 525–58. Nadel, Alan. “God’s Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War ‘Epic.’” PMLA 108:3 (May 1993): 415–30. Pollitt, Katha. “Stacked Decalogue.” Nation, September 22, 2003. Wright, Melanie J. Moses in America: The Use of Biblical Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Te r ke l , S t u d s Writer, journalist, and broadcaster Studs Terkel won popular and critical acclaim for his published interviews of ordinary Americans who shared their life experiences, reflecting on the Great Depression, World War II, race, working life, the American Dream, and death and dying. Many of his oral histories were the product of the Studs Terkel Program (1952–1997), a five-day-a-week
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radio show on station WFMT in Chicago. Terkel, who characterized his own ideology as “socialism with a human face,” often used his interviews to draw out liberal themes. He liked to joke that he and Richard Nixon had one thing in common: recognition of the importance of the tape recorder. In October 2007, Terkel published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that criticized President George W. Bush’s domestic surveillance program. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Louis Terkel was born in the Bronx, New York, on May 16, 1912, and he grew up in Chicago—where he would spend much of his life. As a young man, he was nicknamed after Studs Lonigan, a character in the trilogy of novels about life in that city by James Farrell. During the Great Depression, Terkel attended the University of Chicago (PhB, 1932; JD, 1934) and worked briefly with the Chicago Repertory Theater (1937) and the radio division of the Federal Writers’ Project (1938). After overseas duty with the Red Cross during World War II, he hosted Studs’ Place (1949–1953), a folksy current events show on the new medium of television. During the McCarthy era, he was briefly accused of past communist activities (because he had signed petitions against Jim Crow and the poll tax), but with no lasting impact on his career. In 1956 he published his first book, Giants of Jazz, a series of biographical sketches of jazz artists. The collection of oral histories for which Terkel became best known began with Division Street: America (1967), presenting Chicago as a microcosm of contemporary American life. This was followed by Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People Talk about What They Do and How They Feel about What They Do (1974), which became controversial for its uncensored language and frank views. He returned to investigating Americans’ views of their nation in American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980), focusing on the hopes and disillusionment that have come with the American Dream. Terkel won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984). Deeply critical of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for their opposition to labor causes and their contempt of New Deal legacies, he revisited the idea of American dreams in The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988), focusing on the effects of social division. He continued on the theme of American social divisions in Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992). In the years since, he published Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who Lived It (1995) and Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for Faith (2001). He also conducted a post–September 11th investigation on how people respond to difficult times in Hope Dies Last (2004). Terkel also turned the microphone on himself,
publishing an oral history about his life’s observations, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977). Years later this was followed by other self-reflections: Touch and Go (2007) and P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening (2008). In a revised edition of Talking to Myself, Terkel ends with “The Ultimate Fantasy: My First Inaugural Address.” In this “speech,” pretending to have been an independent candidate elected as the forty-first president of the United States, he promises: “I shall not at any time during this brief talk use the words Family, Flag, God, or Country. Nor shall I use the phrase Standing Tall. I am your President, not your Phys Ed instructor. I assume . . . that you believe in the faith and in those ideas that evoke the spirit of free thoughtful beings in a free, thoughtful society.” Denigrating the Reagan administration, the period of which he characterizes as a time when the nation’s intelligence was “assaulted,” he goes on to attack the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. “May I add a personal note here?” he continues. “Mine will not be an Imperial Presidency.” Terkel died at age ninety-six on October 31, 2008. Rachel Donaldson and Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Cold War; Labor Unions; McCarthyism; New Deal; Nixon, Richard; Nuclear Age; Reagan, Ronald; Watergate.
Further Reading Baker, James T. Studs Terkel. New York: Twayne, 1992. Barsamian, David. “Studs Terkel.” Progressive, November 2004. Chambers, Aaron. “History from the Bottom Up.” Illinois Issues, December 2001. Parker, Tony. Studs Terkel: A Life in Words. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Terkel, Studs. Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. ———. Touch and Go: A Memoir. New York: New Press, 2007.
T h a n k s g i v i n g D ay An American national holiday observed annually on the fourth Thursday of November, Thanksgiving is typically a time in which families gather to partake of a large meal featuring roasted turkey with all of the trimmings. Since the history of Thanksgiving is rooted in different places and dates, culture warriors have debated its meaning. Presidents on occasion have politicized the holiday by associating it with their agendas, and Native Americans have used the occasion to offer revisionist history pertaining to the European conquest of North America. Determining when and where the first American
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Thanksgiving was held is a controversy that has divided red states and blue states. Traditionally most Americans associate the origins of Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims sharing a harvest feast with native peoples at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621. In Virginia, officials point to an earlier date, December 4, 1619, as the first Thanksgiving; on that day, it is said, colonists at Berkeley Plantation, on the James River near current-day Charles City, offered prayers of thanks for their safe arrival in the New World. Multiculturalists suggest even older Thanksgivings, pointing to events that occurred by the French in Florida (1564) and the Spanish in Texas (1598). All agree that days of thanksgiving were observed at different times in many parts of the American colonies and early republic. George Washington announced official days of thanksgiving in 1789 and 1795. After some important Union victories during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday of November 1863 as a nationwide day of gratitude, although some southerners would thereafter refer to the national holiday as “a damned Yankee institution.” While social conservatives argue that Christianity and “family values” represent the true meaning of Thanksgiving, others insist that the holiday is strictly secular. In his painting Freedom from Want, part of a 1943 series on the Four Freedoms, Norman Rockwell presents a Thanksgiving scene of a family gathered around a table with a turkey platter. Although Rockwell does not offer any overt signs of religiosity, that aspect is readily apparent in Newell Conyers Wyeth’s painting The Thanksgiving Feast (1945), a scene of the Pilgrim Thanksgiving with a Puritan elder holding a Bible. Religious conservatives emphasize the theistic wording of Thanksgiving proclamations issued over the years, including ones by Washington and Lincoln. Those who regard Thanksgiving as a secular holiday argue that harvest festivals were not generally viewed as sacred events. Some academics recognize Thanksgiving as a part of American civil religion with the turkey dinner symbolizing a sacramental meal. In 1939, swayed by retailer lobbyists seeking to extend the Christmas shopping season, President Franklin Roosevelt moved up the date of Thanksgiving by one week. This prompted criticism from traditionalists, including the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, who argued that the date for “a sacred religious day” should not be changed “on the specious excuse that it will help Christmas sales.” Some state governors refused to comply with the calendar change, while pundits dubbed the competing dates “Democratic Thanksgiving” and “Republican Thanksgiving.” After Roosevelt announced in 1941 that he would restore the traditional date, Congress made it law. In the years since, the holiday occasionally became politicized by presidential speeches. In 1966, for example, President Lyndon B. Johnson made his Great Society program the theme for his Thanksgiving address,
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prompting Time magazine to editorialize that it was “one of the most palpably political Thanksgiving messages.” The following year, the liberal Christian Century refused for the first time to publish a presidential Thanksgiving address, objecting to Johnson’s use of the occasion to promote the Vietnam War. In 1970, Native American groups began the tradition of a Thanksgiving protest vigil at Plymouth, calling the holiday a “Day of Mourning.” In 2005, members of the Wailkikie tribe met at San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island to hold an “Unthanksgiving Day” ceremony. Bear Lincoln of the tribe stated, “It was a big mistake for us to help the Pilgrims survive that first winter. They betrayed us once they got their strength.” In her essay on the meaning of Thanksgiving, the Rutgers University anthropologist Janet Siskind argues, “The stuffed turkey represents the Native Americans, sacrificed and consumed in order to bring civilization to the New World.” Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Religion; Christmas; Columbus Day; Founding Fathers; Great Society; Red and Blue States; Rockwell, Norman.
Further Reading Appelbaum, Diana Karter. Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History. New York: Facts On File, 1984. Sigal, Lillian. “Thanksgiving: Sacred or Profane Feast?” Mythosphere 1:4 (1999): 451–61. Siskind, Janet. “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality.” In Food in the USA: A Reader, ed. Carole M. Counihan, 41–58. New York: Routledge, 2002.
T h i n k Ta n k s A think tank is a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that devotes a significant portion of its activities to public policy analysis. Think tanks identify policy issues, evaluate ideas, and design public policies. As originally employed, the term “think tank” referred to secret locations where U.S. military planners and scientists met to discuss strategy during World War II. Use of the term in reference to organizations for the clandestine meeting of minds did not come into widespread use until the proliferation of such institutions in the mid-1970s. Until then, they were commonly referred to as policy-planning organizations, policy-planning groups, elite policy-planning networks, public policy institutes, government policy consultants, policy scientists, research institutes, research brokers, issue networks, civil society organizations, public interest groups, research centers, or public policy research organizations. Early think tanks in America that remain prominent to the present day include the Brookings Institution (1916),
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an independent social science and public policy research organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace (1919), founded by Herbert Hoover at Stanford University, his alma mater.
Orientation and Funding Think tank independence is derived from the organizations’ IRS classification—501(c)3—which forbids any nonprofit organization from engaging in partisan campaign activities, challenging political candidates, or influencing legislation as a significant part of its activities. At times they are originators of policy, at other times merely consultants to legislators. Still, many think tanks have an explicit ideological proclivity that orients their research. A case in point, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, founded in 1978, considers individual responsibility and a greater role for the private sector the impetus behind its policy positions for stronger criminal penalties; a corporation-friendly legal system; school vouchers; tax relief; and an end to welfare, disability benefits, and race- and gender-based affirmative action. Ideologically oriented think tanks forge ties with funders who value a range of policy viewpoints. For example, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberaloriented think tank of economic analysis, receives threequarters of its revenues from foundations and unions that support a robust welfare state and equitable distribution of resources. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative counterpart of EPI, generates research in support of freemarket principles, a limited welfare state, individual responsibility, and a strong national defense. Heritage’s institutional funding from foundations and corporations represents 25 percent ($9 million) of its budget, but considerably more than EPI’s $3.7 million annual budget.
Functions Think tanks also function as repositories of policy expertise where analysts, based on their technical knowledge and experience, seek to inform, clarify, dissuade, and persuade policymakers and the public. They serve as a kind of revolving door for federal bureaucrats and politicians, who find a home there when their government careers are over. Former President Gerald Ford, Judge Robert Bork, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) all have found second careers at conservative think tanks. Think tanks also train young minds for future careers as congressional staffers or appointed bureaucrats in the executive branch. Whether as training grounds for future public officials or institutional homes to former ones, think tanks succeed in extending their policy preferences when former staffers join or rejoin the federal government. Such senior of-
ficials and high-level advisers in the George W. Bush administration as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had been members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank founded in 1997 that called for the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. As members of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were in a position to sway foreign policy. Aside from ideology, think tanks differ in terms of their focus on local, national, or foreign policy issues. As of 2008, there were more than 3,500 think tanks located around the world, with more than half based in the United States. A majority of U.S. think tanks are located in academic communities, and about one-third—the most visible ones—are located in Washington, D.C. An integral part of the “third sector” between government and the private (for-profit) sector, think tanks maintain an important relationship with the public. Their staff members are often perceived as third-party or neutralpolicy spokespeople—intellectuals who are not beholden to partisan, industry, or special interests. They inform, educate, and at times advocate policy viewpoints, presumably with the public’s interests in mind. Their ideological preferences, however, are mediated in large measure by their policy position vis-à-vis the economy. Conservative and libertarian think tanks advocate a limited welfare state and an unfettered market, with the idea that this is the kind of environment in which individual responsibility and success will flourish. Liberal and mainstream think tanks tend to be critical of the market’s shortcomings, especially in regard to the distribution of resources (wealth, education, health care, etc.) and the federal government’s role (or lack thereof) in facilitating their distribution. Whether located in academic settings or not, think tanks engage in basic social science research similar to that done in universities. President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, for example, was heavily influenced by government and think tank research. Two decades later, think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published research that questioned the legitimacy of the welfare state and general assistance in particular, leading to sweeping reforms. Think tanks are differentiated from their academic research counterparts by several organizational features. Members of think tanks do not have teaching duties, and their writings and general performance are not scrutinized through the peer-evaluation system. Much of their uncomplicated research is aimed at policymakers, newspaper editors, and the public. The research methodology may be less than rigorous at times, but there is little to stop “think tankers” or journalists from reporting erroneous information or misleading conclusions. Moreover, media access and training place them in the spotlight more often than their academic counterparts. Thus, think tankers’
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See also: Affirmative Action; Education Reform; Global Warming; Heritage Foundation; Immigration Policy; Privatization; School Vouchers; Social Security; Tax Reform; War on Poverty; Wealth Gap; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading
President Ronald Reagan addresses a meeting of the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., in 1986. The policy research organization was founded in 1973 but rose to prominence during the Reagan administration. (Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)
policy ideas have a distinct advantage over those of their academic counterparts. Despite their media access, think tanks engage in a variety of other activities to disseminate their messages. They organize conferences, seminars, and policy briefings for media and policymakers alike, at which panels of experts comment on proposed or pending legislation. Many of these events are co-sponsored with similarly oriented think tanks, which cite each other’s work in support of a particular viewpoint—though not always objectively or accurately. For example, a misleading claim by the Heritage Foundation that $5.4 billion had been spent on welfare since the War on Poverty was cited in the research of such like-minded think tanks as the CATO Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis and repeated in many newspapers and television news broadcasts. Think tanks also promote their views and findings by submitting opinion pieces to newspaper editorial pages. And they also write succinct policy briefs with marketable messages for federal officials, intended to sway legislators and executive branch policymakers. Among the many key issues on which think tanks have helped influence public perceptions, legislation, and policymakers are global warming (both concern and skepticism); incarceration rates; standardized educational testing; privatization of Social Security; economic inequality analysis; restrictive welfare reform; energy and telecommunications deregulation; regressive and progressive taxation; increased immigration restrictions; free-trade treaties; and foreign military intervention. Sergio Romero
Abelson, Donald E. Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002. Burch, Philip H. Reagan, Bush, and Right-Wing Politics: Elites, Think Tanks, Power, and Policy. Part A: The American Right Wing Takes Command: Key Executive Appointments. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1997. McGann, James G., and R. Kent Weaver, eds. Think Tanks and Civil Societies: Catalysts for Ideas and Action. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000. Ricci, David M. The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Stefancic, Jean, and Richard Delgado. No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
T hird Par ties Third parties in American politics, also referred to as independent parties, are minority political organizations offered as alternatives to the Democrat and Republican mainstream. Although their candidates generally have little chance of winning a major election—in the entire history of American national elections, only eight thirdparty presidential candidates earned more than 10 percent of the popular vote—third parties field candidates to raise issues and perspectives that might otherwise go unaddressed in a political campaign. Controversially, third-party candidates can be “spoilers” in a close contest, handing victory to the party that would have otherwise placed second. The culture wars, it can be argued, have been fostered by a two-party system that has represented the middle of the political spectrum with no serious competition from the far left or far right, creating conditions in which both Republicans and Democrats feel that it is imperative to elevate partisanship and exaggerate differences in order to attract voters. True or not, this has not prevented third parties in the post–World War II era from providing an outlet for fringe groups, dissenters, independents, and those whose ideology falls outside the political mainstream. Still, most postwar third parties have been ad hoc and short-lived, often dominated by a high-profile figure and passing from the scene with changing political circumstances. In 1948, the Democratic Party, headed by incumbent President Harry Truman, experienced dissension in its ranks, leading to the creation of two independent parties:
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the Progressive Party and the States’ Rights Democratic Party (or “Dixiecrats”). The former, led by former Vice President Henry Wallace, took an anti-anticommunist position, opposing Truman’s Cold War policies and his tough stance against the Soviet Union. The latter, headed by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, was a result of several southern Democrats walking out of that year’s Democratic National Convention in protest over proposals to repeal Jim Crow. Polls and pundits predicted that Truman would lose the race against the Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey. Fortunately for Truman, the Progressive Party suffered the stigma of being supported by the Communist Party USA. As for the threat posed by Thurmond, it was strictly limited to the South and turned out to be less damaging than expected. Truman won with 49.5 percent of the popular vote. Thurmond, however, remained popular enough in his state to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1954 to 2003, first as a Democrat, then as a Republican. In 1968, a new pro-segregationist party, the American Independent Party (later renamed the American Party), ran George Wallace for president, the frequent Democratic governor of Alabama. Wallace’s strategy was to press the issue of racial segregation and prevent Democrat Hubert Humphrey or Republican Richard Nixon from attaining a majority of the Electoral College vote, forcing the election to be decided by the House of Representatives. Wallace won 46 Electoral College votes and 13.5 percent of the popular vote, essentially undermining Humphrey’s support; Nixon won by about a half-million votes. During the 1972 election, in which Nixon won reelection by a landslide, the American Party ran California congressman John Schmitz as its candidate, winning more than 1 million votes. The Libertarian Party, which would later become the largest third party in the United States, nominated California philosopher John Hospers as its candidate but would appear on the ballot in only two states. Although Hospers received only 3,700 votes, an elector from Virginia, Roger MacBride, cast his vote for Hospers and his running mate, Theodora Nathan. Also in the 1972 election, Gus Hall made his debut as Communist presidential candidate, receiving 25,595 votes; he would run for the office three more times (1976, 1980, and 1984). In 1980, former House Republican chairman John Anderson, a U.S. representative from Illinois, garnered 6.6 percent of the popular vote as an independent presidential candidate, taking away votes primarily from the Republican Party; this barely detracted from Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter, however. Libertarians, meanwhile, fared better than in the past, gaining just over 1 percent of the vote with candidate Ed Clark; and the Citizens Party, a liberal Democratic splinter group led by scientist and environmentalist Barry Commoner, gained 0.3 percent of the vote.
The 1992 presidential election marked a return for a large number of third-party candidates, particularly among conservatives. Independent Texas billionaire Ross Perot was a true “spoiler” in the election, winning almost 20 million popular votes, many of which would have gone to the incumbent George H.W. Bush, whose 39 million votes fell short of Bill Clinton’s nearly 45 million. Perot, who ran a strong campaign against the federal budget deficit, global free trade, and Washington “insider” politics, actually led the pre-election polls at one point in the months leading up to the election. In the end, Perot did not win any Electoral College votes despite garnering 18.9 percent of the popular vote. Other third-party candidates taking Republican votes that year were Libertarian Andre Marrou, Populist Bo Gritz, and Howard Phillips of the U.S. Taxpayers Party (later renamed the Constitution Party). In 1998, Ross Perot returned with a new third party, the Reform Party, this time pulling only slightly more than 8 million votes. Also emerging that year was Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and former Democrat who was drafted by the liberal environmentalist Green Party, spent $5,000 on his campaign, and won just under 700,000 votes (or 0.7 percent). New Age scientist John Hagelin was nominated by the liberal Natural Law Party, winning 0.1 percent of the vote. Beyond the presidential election, the Reform Party that same year successfully ran professional wrestler Jesse Ventura for the governorship of Minnesota. In the 2000 presidential election, third parties were a key factor in the outcome. Although losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore by 543,895 votes, Republican nominee George W. Bush won the Electoral College 271 to 266. Nader took 2.7 percent of the popular vote—a total of 2.8 million—for the Green Party, which many analysts believe tipped the election to Bush. The Reform Party, which was successful enough in 1996 to get federal funding for its campaign, split in two and nominated two different candidates at the same party convention. Republican Pat Buchanan, one Reform Party nominee, took 450,000 votes, and liberal Reform nominee John Hagelin took 83,700 votes. The Electoral College decision came down to the state of Florida, which was plagued by logistical problems. In the end, Bush was officially declared the winner in that state by 537 votes. Christopher D. Rodkey See also: Commoner, Barry; Communists and Communism; Democratic Party; Election of 2000; Hall, Gus; Nader, Ralph; Perot, H. Ross; Republican Party; Ventura, Jesse; Wallace, George.
Further Reading Bibby, John F., and L. Sandy Maisel. Two Parties—Or More? The American Party System. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003.
T homa s, C larence Klobuchar, Lisa. Third Parties: Influential Political Alternatives. Minneapolis, MN: Compass Point Books, 2008. Lentz, Jacob. Electing Jesse Ventura: A Third-Party Success Story. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2002. Reynolds, David. Democracy Unbound: Progressive Challenges to the Two Party System. Boston: South End Press, 1997.
T homas, Clarence The second African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court (1991), one of its most controversial nominees, and among its most conservative members, Clarence Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia. Raised by his grandfather, he was taught to believe that hard work is the path to success. After a brief stint at a Catholic seminary in Missouri, Thomas earned a bachelor’s degree (1971) from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he co-founded the Black Student Union. He earned a law degree from Yale Law School in 1974. Following law school, Thomas was assistant attorney general in Missouri (1974–1977), corporate counsel for the Monsanto Company (1977–1979), legislative assistant for U.S. Senator John Danforth (1979–1981), assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education (1981–1982), and chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1982–1990). In 1990, President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. With the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall— the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court—President Bush saw an opportunity to place a decidedly conservative jurist on the Court and nominated Thomas to fill the position in 1991. The move outraged many in the black community, who regarded it as a slight to have Thomas replace the man who, as an attorney for the NAACP, had won the landmark 1954 school segregation case Brown v. Board of Education. Thomas’s nomination was opposed by such organizations as the NAACP, Urban League, and National Bar Association because of his opposition to affirmative action and general fears that he would undermine the gains achieved by the civil rights movement. The National Organization for Women and other groups supporting women’s access to abortion were concerned that Thomas would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. The American Bar Association expressed reservations about his judicial ability, citing his lack of experience, and gave him a split rating between “qualified” and “not qualified.” During Thomas’s confirmation proceedings, Democratic staffers leaked an FBI report to the press concerning sexual harassment charges filed against the nominee by a former employee at the Office of Civil Rights, Anita Hill. Television coverage of hearings by the Senate Judiciary
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Committee preempted daytime soap operas and competed with the World Series for viewers. The ensuing investigation, which drew national attention to the issue of sexual harassment, revealed a number of contradictory statements by both sides, resulting in a “he said, she said” situation. Years later, journalist David Brock dramatically confessed his role in a conservative disinformation campaign to smear Hill in support of Thomas. After the Judiciary Committee ended its investigation, Thomas’s nomination was sent to the full Senate without a recommendation. On October 15, 1991, Thomas was confirmed by a 52-48 vote, the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court nominee in the twentieth century. On the Court, Thomas applies a strict constructionist approach to interpreting the Constitution, believing that Court rulings should be based on what the Constitution literally states, rather than on inference. He argues that the intent of the drafters of the Constitution weighs more heavily than stare decisis, or the record of previous Court decisions. Some commentators have suggested that Thomas has no judicial philosophy of his own but merely follows the opinions of the rigorous conservative and textualist Justice Antonin Scalia. According to Scalia, Thomas “doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period” but is very willing to reexamine precedent if he thinks the “line of authority is wrong.” For this reason, critics view Thomas as a justice guided by ideology rather than by established case law. Justice Thomas’s voting record has been conservative, as he has ruled against race-based affirmative action programs, school busing, partial-birth abortion, prison reform, gay rights, and minority voting districts. He also tends to have a narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause (Article I, section 8) but a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment. In Kelso v. City of New London, Connecticut (2005), he dissented from the majority who gave a broad interpretation of the eminent domain provision of the Fifth Amendment. In Bush v. Gore (2000), he voted with the majority in overruling Florida’s electoral procedures, thereby throwing his support to the son of the man who had appointed him to the Supreme Court. Thomas’s jurisprudence does not prevent him from adopting a liberal position on very specific issues. He has been known to promote a broad interpretation of the First Amendment’s free speech provision, except when it concerns cross burnings. In U.S. v. Bajakajian (1998), he joined the Court’s four liberals in the first-ever decision to strike down a federal statute based on the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause. He also believes in a broad interpretation of the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause. In U.S. v. Hubbell (2000), he argued that self-incrimination should be expanded to include revealing incriminating evidence. James W. Stoutenborough
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T hompson, Hunter S .
See also: Affirmative Action; Brock, David; Bush Family; Busing, School; Election of 2000; Gay Rights Movement; Hill, Anita; Judicial Wars; Lynching; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; National Organization for Women; Prison Reform; School Vouchers.
Further Reading Foskett, Ken. Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas. New York: Morrow, 2004. Gerber, Scott Douglas. First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Hill, Anita Faye, and Emma Coleman Jordan. Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Merida, Kevin, and Michael Fletcher. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Thomas, Clarence. My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 2007.
T hompson, Hunter S. The eccentric and iconoclastic journalist Hunter S. Thompson emerged in the late 1960s as a voice of the counterculture with a unique and irreverent perspective on random subject matter—from the Hell’s Angels and the Kentucky Derby to the Las Vegas gambling scene and presidential election campaigns—while inventing a genre of New Journalism known as “gonzo journalism.” Thompson was a hard-drinking, drug-using free spirit who once ran for county sheriff in Colorado as the “Freak Party” candidate, maintained his membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA), and for years served as a board member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). The son of an insurance agent, Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18, 1937. After a stint in the air force (1956–1958), he wrote for newspapers in New York and New Jersey. This was followed by work as a South American correspondent for the National Observer (1961–1963). Later, Thompson developed his journalism style as a contributor to alternative periodicals, chiefly The Nation (1964–1966) and Rolling Stone (1970–1999), and was also a syndicated columnist for the San Francisco Examiner (1985–1989). Thompson’s magazine work was the basis for his many books—Prince Jellyfish (1960); Hell’s Angels (1966); Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972); Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973); The Great Shark Hunt (with Ralph Steadman, 1979); The Curse of Lono (1983); Generation of Swine (1988); Songs of the Doomed (1999); Screwjack (1991); Better Than Sex (1993); The Proud Highway (1997); The Rum Diary (1998); Fear and Loathing in America (2000); and Kingdom of Fear (2002). Thompson’s career breakthrough came in 1966,
when The Nation magazine published his gritty but conventional account of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. Gonzo journalism per se is said to have been born in 1970 when Thompson, on assignment for Scanlan’s Monthly, submitted his raw notes for an essay on the Kentucky Derby and his editor deemed the manuscript brilliant. The same style, with the drunk or stoned author raging at the center of the narrative, became a staple of Rolling Stone magazine, which originally published the two “Fear and Loathing” works that came to be regarded as commentaries on the death of the American Dream. In the Las Vegas piece, which introduces the author as Raoul Duke, Thompson covers an antidrug conference while constantly stoned himself. In the latter piece, his coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign was primarily a satire on the homogenous mainstream media. Although some have compared Thompson with Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, and even F. Scott Fitzgerald, insisting that the raucous storyteller was an American original who provided an antidote to the inauthentic aspects of modern society, others characterize his writings as druginduced egocentric outpourings. Thompson’s public persona, featuring a cigarette holder, dark sunglasses, garish attire, and stoned demeanor, was satirized as the Uncle Duke character in the Doonesbury comic strip by Gary Trudeau. On February 20, 2005, Thompson shot himself to death in Woody Creek, Colorado; a few weeks later, his comic-strip counterpart did the same. The escapades of Hunter S. Thompson have been the subject of several films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980), starring Bill Murray as Thompson; a screen adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp; Alex Gibney’s documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008); and another adaptation of a Thompson book, The Rum Diary (2010), again starring Depp. Roger Chapman See also: Comic Strips; Counterculture; McGovern, George; Nation, The; National Rifle Association; New Journalism; War on Drugs; Wolfe, Tom.
Further Reading McKeen, William. Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Nocera, Joseph. “How Hunter Thompson Killed New Journalism.” Washington Monthly, April 1981. Perry, Paul. Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004. Thompson, Anita. The Gonzo Way. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2007. Wenner, Jann, and Corey Seymour. Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson: An Oral Biography. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
T hur mond , Strom
T h r e e M i l e I s l a n d Ac c i d e n t The worst nuclear accident in U.S. history occurred in March 1979, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, Unit 2 (TMI-2), near Middletown, Pennsylvania, triggering vigorous public debate about the safety of nuclear power. Throughout the 1970s, prior to the accident, nuclear power had been widely hailed as a clean source of energy. Despite opposition by some antinuclear protest groups, the air of optimism was exemplified by the nation’s seventy-two operating nuclear power plants and nearly a hundred others under construction. Early in the morning of March 28, the steam generators of TMI-2, used to remove the intense heat created by nuclear reaction, broke down when an unidentified malfunction caused their water supply to stop. Pressure inside the nuclear reactor began to increase. Plant operators attempted to reduce the pressure by opening a valve at the top of the reactor, but afterward the valve failed to close promptly. Water that cooled the reactor’s core began to leak out, causing the core to overheat and release an unknown quantity of radiation into the air. Experts from state and federal agencies arrived within hours to monitor radiation levels and determine the cause of the accident. Two days later, as scientists from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) researched the possibility of a hydrogen explosion inside the reactor, Governor Richard Thornburgh advised expectant mothers and young children to leave the area. Although it was determined the following day that a lack of oxygen within the reactor would prevent any explosion, thousands of people had already fled the area. On April 1, with the situation under control, President Jimmy Carter visited the site, inspiring confidence and relief among government officials and civilians alike. In the aftermath of the accident, many Americans expressed a heightened fear of nuclear power and distrust of the government. The sentiments were reinforced by a recently released film, The China Syndrome (1979), starring Jane Fonda, about a near meltdown at a nuclear plant. Due in part to a wave of local activism, TMI-2 was permanently closed and by 1993 completely defueled. In the meantime, power companies experienced a decline in private investment across the board. Lobbyist groups and picket lines of local residents spearheaded a political movement that resulted in new legislation on nuclear regulation and modifications within the NRC. Citizens across the country organized campaigns to prevent the nuclear industry from entering their communities. The effects of radiation around TMI-2 were carefully monitored in the years following the accident. Some area residents claimed to have suffered from skin irritation, nausea, and an increase in cancer rates. More than a dozen independent studies, however, supported the government’s claim that health effects were minimal. Radiation
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exposure from the accident was said to be akin to receiving a full set of chest x-rays, while psychologists attributed the residents’ physical symptoms to an increase in stress following the event. Although the medical effects of the accident were a matter of some dispute, the sociopolitical consequences were clearly felt in the farthest reaches of government, industry, and society. Gwendolyn Laird See also: Carter, Jimmy; Environmental Movement; Fonda, Jane; Nuclear Age; Teller, Edward.
Further Reading Goldsteen, Raymond L., and John K. Schorr. Demanding Democracy After Three Mile Island. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991. Houts, Peter S., et al. The Three Mile Island Crisis: Psychological, Social, and Economic Impacts on the Surrounding Population. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Fact Sheet: The Accident at Three Mile Island. Washington, DC: Office of Public Affairs, 2004.
T hurmond, Strom The Democratic governor of South Carolina from January 1947 to January 1951, a 1948 third-party presidential candidate, a U.S. senator for forty-eight years (from December 1954 to December 2002, except for nine months), first as a Democrat and then as a Republican, Strom Thurmond in 1997 became the longest-serving member in the U.S. Senate to that time. (His record was broken in 2006 by Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.) Thurmond served in the Senate until shortly after his one-hundredth birthday. He was involved in many issues during his decades as a legislator, but as a central figure in southern politics during a period of sweeping change, he was best known for his opposition to desegregation. James Strom Thurmond was born on December 5, 1902, in Edgefield, South Carolina, the son of a locally prominent Southern Baptist family. He graduated from Clemson College (BS, 1923), returned home to farm and teach school, was tutored in law by his father (an attorney and politician), and practiced law. He entered politics, resigned a judgeship to serve in World War II, and in 1946 was elected governor of South Carolina. He generally was progressive, even on race, but then opposed integration of the military. In 1948, he opposed the Democratic Party’s strong civil rights plank and ran unsuccessfully for president as a member of the breakaway Dixiecrats (or States’ Rights Democrats). Thurmond was appointed to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1954, completing the term of Charles E.
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revealed that he had fathered a biracial daughter when he was in his early twenties—confirming a rumor that had been circulating for years. Essie Mae WashingtonWilliams announced that she had been born in 1925, the daughter of Thurmond and Carrie Butler, a young maid in the Thurmond household. Although she indicated receiving monetary support from the senator over the years, including payment of her college tuition, some observers speculated that the maid might have been raped. In 2007 it was revealed that the great-grandfather of the Reverend Al Sharpton, a black activist from New York, had been the slave of one of Thurmond’s ancestors. Abraham D. Lavender See also: Byrd, Robert C.; Civil Rights Movement; Democratic Party; Goldwater, Barry; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Lott, Trent; Race; Republican Party; Sharpton, Al; Thomas, Clarence; Truman, Harry S.
Further Reading Opposing the anti–Jim Crow plank of the Democratic Party platform in 1948, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat. He went on to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1954 to 2002, eventually switching from Democrat to Republican. (Tony Linck/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images)
Daniel, who had resigned. Thurmond stepped down in April 1956 to fulfill a campaign promise, won reelection without opposition that November, and was returned to office every six years for the next seven terms. In 1964, as the civil rights movement swept the nation, Thurmond switched from Democratic to Republican, supported Barry Goldwater against Lyndon Johnson for president, and from that point forward played a major role in the “southern strategy” to maintain segregation. As African Americans became registered voters in increasing number, however, Thurmond gradually softened his position on race, hired black staff members, supported the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, voted in favor of Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991, and provided dedicated constituent service equally to whites and blacks. Even so, some continued to remember the 1948 presidential race. In 2002, during the senator’s one-hundredth birthday celebration, Republican senator Trent Lott of Mississippi publicly boasted that Thurmond had won Alabama in 1948, adding, “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” A media firestorm followed, with even President George W. Bush calling Lott’s comments inappropriate. Six months after retiring from the Senate, Thurmond died on June 26, 2003. In December of that year, it was
Bass, Jack. Strom: The Turbulent Political and Personal Life of Strom Thurmond. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Cohodas, Nadine. Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994. Washington-Williams, Essie Mae. Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond. New York: Regan Books, 2005.
Till, Emmett The death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American who was brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, in Mississippi for speaking to a white woman, caused widespread outrage and gave impetus to the civil rights movement. The quick acquittal of the two accused murderers, both white men, made the case a symbol of southern injustice. Born on July 25, 1941, Emmett Louis Till was raised by his Mississippi-born mother in the integrated suburbs of Chicago. When visiting his uncle’s family in Money, Mississippi, he failed to take seriously the Jim Crow ways of the South. A few days after arriving in the summer of 1955, Till and some other teenagers visited a grocery store to buy candy. Exactly what happened inside the store is uncertain, but it was reported that Till either whistled at, flirted with, or physically grabbed the white woman behind the counter, Carolyn Bryant. When the woman’s husband, Rob Bryant, returned from out of town a few days later, he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, allegedly dragged Emmett out of bed at 2:30 in the morning, took him to a nearby farm, beat him brutally, and shot him to death. Three days later, Till’s body, tied with barbed wire to a 70-pound (32-kilo) cotton-gin fan, was found in the Tallahatchie River.
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The public funeral for Emmett Till, held back in Chicago, was attended by 50,000 mourners. His mother, Mamie Till, refused to have a closed casket because she wanted to “let the world see what I’ve seen.” Her son’s face had been beaten beyond recognition. A picture of the open casket was published in Jet magazine, searing the memory of all who viewed it. The murder, occurring one year after Brown v. Board of Education and a few months prior to the Montgomery bus boycott, contributed to the burgeoning sentiment in the African-American community to actively oppose institutionalized racism. The trial of Bryant and Milam, which began on September 19 at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, received national attention and was closely monitored by the NAACP and African-American journalists. An eighteen-year-old farm boy testified that he saw a pickup truck pull up to a shed; Bryant, Milam, and two other whites sat in the cab, with Emmett and two black men sitting in the back. Later, screams were heard coming from the shed. The boy’s uncle identified Milam and Bryant as the kidnappers. An all-white jury heard the evidence and delivered its not-guilty verdict in a little over one hour. Four months afterward, Bryant and Milam, then safe from prosecution, admitted to the murder in a paid interview for Look magazine. Nearly fifty years after the murder, based on new evidence in Keith Beauchamp’s documentary film The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (2004), the federal government launched an investigation. According to the film, Bryant and Milam had accomplices, some of whom were still living. Although new criminal charges could not be filed under federal law because of the statute of limitations, they could be pursued at the state level. In March 2006, the FBI forwarded its updated findings to Mississippi officials for possible legal action, but the following year a state grand jury closed the case without issuing any new indictments. E. Michael Young and Roger Chapman See also: Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Civil Rights Movement; Hate Crimes; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Lynching; Morrison, Toni; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Parks, Rosa; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look, January 1956. Metress, Christofer. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of a Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: One World Ballantine Books, 2003.
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To b a c c o S e t t l e m e n t s Faced with legal proceedings in the 1990s, major American cigarette manufacturers decided to settle out of court, paying state governments billions of dollars to offset the taxpayer cost of treating diseases related to smoking. These tobacco settlements raise philosophical questions about corporate responsibility and personal responsibility. Not only is there the ambiguity of counting the fiscal cost of smoking, but not all of the settlement money has been used for its intended purposes. Furthermore, the settlements have greatly benefited the major tobacco companies. On March 23, 1994, in the first government lawsuit of its kind, Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore sued the major U.S. cigarette producers to recover costs incurred by his state in treating smoking-related diseases. The defendants were blamed for placing cigarettes into the “stream of commerce” despite knowing that they were hazardous even when used as intended, that some smoking-related health care costs would be shifted to the taxpayers, and “that the State itself thereby would be harmed.” Prior to the Mississippi lawsuit, complaints seeking compensation for damages caused by exposure to harmful substances, such as asbestos, were brought as private class actions. By 1998, bolstered by damaging documents released after the cigarette manufacturer Liggett broke ranks in early 1996, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas had joined Mississippi in settling similar lawsuits. In November of that year, the attorneys general of the remaining forty-six states finalized the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), resolving all of their outstanding claims against the tobacco companies. The MSA had two related purposes: to reimburse the states for their past smoking-related health care costs, incurred mainly under the Medicaid program, and to fund programs aimed at reducing smoking in the future. Including the four separately negotiated settlements, the defendants agreed to pay out $246 billion to the states over twenty-five years. Other provisions of the MSA imposed restrictions on tobacco advertising and lobbying, required the tobacco companies to pay for tobacco education and smoking cessation and prevention programs, and granted compensation to tobacco farmers for lost sales caused by cigarette price increases—of forty to forty-five cents per pack—permitted to fund the settlement pool. In return, the states pledged not to seek recovery of smoking-attributable public health care costs incurred after 1998. The tobacco settlements were negotiated against the backdrop of a broader culture war between smokers and nonsmokers, a war launched in 1964 when the surgeon general issued the first official report linking cigarette smoking to coronary and lung disease. While smokers argue that they have a right to consume a legal product, nonsmokers argue that they have a right to avoid exposure to tobacco
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smoke. But the key issue for public policymakers in the tobacco settlements was that smokers use taxpayer-financed health care services for which they do not fully pay. The $246 billion payout was based on estimates of gross increases in public health care costs. The amounts the states recovered were not offset by savings they realized in the form of lower pension benefits for smokers or by the considerable public revenue generated by state sales and excise taxes on cigarettes. Nor were any adjustments made for the Medicaid program’s matching provision, whereby the federal government pays at least half of the costs states incur in serving their eligible populations. Moreover, studies show that only 53 percent of the $39.4 billion dispersed by the tobacco companies through 2004 was allocated to state programs directly related to smoking and health—the remainder was spent elsewhere, either held in reserve or budgeted for other uses, such as teacher pay raises. Perhaps the biggest winners were the tobacco companies. Because nonparticipating cigarette manufacturers must start contributing to the settlement pool if their market share exceeds a predetermined threshold, the MSA protects the major companies against expansion by competitors and new entry. In the meantime, cigarette price increases have more than offset the settlement costs. William F. Shughart II See also: Health Care; Smoking in Public; Tort Reform; Whistleblowers.
Further Reading Dixon, Lee, and James Cox. State Management and Allocation of Tobacco Settlement Revenue, 2002. Washington, DC: National Conference of State Legislatures, 2002. Gruber, Jonathan. “Tobacco at the Crossroads: The Past and Future of Smoking Regulation in the United States.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 15:2 (2001): 193–212. McKinley, Andrew, Lee Dixon, and Amanda Devore. State Management and Allocation of Tobacco Settlement Revenue, 2003. Washington, DC: National Conference of State Legislatures, 2003. Stevenson, Taylor P., and William F. Shughart II. “Smoke and Mirrors: The Political Economy of the Tobacco Settlements.” Public Finance Review 34:6 (2006): 712–30. Viscusi, W. Kip. Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Wilson, Joy Johnson. Summary of the Attorneys General Master Tobacco Settlement Agreement. Washington, DC: National Conference of State Legislatures, 1999.
To r t Re f o r m Tort reform refers to the trend toward limiting large monetary awards in liability cases concerning individu-
als and corporations. Traditionally, monetary punitive damages have a twofold purpose: to provide compensatory relief to the victim and, perhaps more important, to punish the guilty party severely enough to discourage a repeat of the infraction. Beginning in the 1970s, tort reform has been promoted by political conservatives, backed by the lobbying of corporate interests, who argue that American society has been suffering a “litigation explosion” characterized by “fraudulent lawsuits.” According to those in favor of limiting the punishment in tort cases, private enterprise (including the medical profession) is preyed upon by greedy trial lawyers, who collect on average 20 percent of the award, which leads to an overall increase in the price of goods and services. This perspective regards tort cases as “litigation tyranny.” The other side, which argues that liability lawsuits are a means to hold injury-causing parties accountable, refers to tort as “corporate accountability.” consumer activist Ralph Nader, in fact, has characterized the “reform” of tort reform as a euphemism for “the perversion of justice” by corporations. In short, the controversy of tort reform pits economic interests against consumer interests. The tort reform movement was formally launched in 1986 with the formation of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which was backed by hundreds of manufacturers, trade associations, and insurance companies. In 1994, after Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in decades, efforts for tort reform were pushed hard. In the Senate, however, filibustering in 1994, 1995, and 1998 prevented tort-reform legislation from going to the floor for a vote. In 1996, a tort-reform bill was passed by both houses, but it was vetoed by President Bill Clinton. Two years later a watered-down tort-reform bill was heading to passage, but it was ultimately defeated after Senator Trent Lott (R-AL) tried to quietly insert a handwritten provision that would have added further liability protection to Baxter Healthcare Corporation, a large biomedical company in his state. The case that has often been cited as an example of why there needs to be tort reform is the $2.7 million verdict issued in 1994 in New Mexico to a woman who sued McDonald’s after receiving third-degree burns from a spilt cup of coffee that had been served at the restaurant’s drive-through window. Often left out of the telling of this story is the fact that the elderly woman (she was seventy-nine when the injury occurred) had initially sought $10,000 to pay for her medical bills (her injuries led to painful skin grafts on her thighs, groin, and buttocks, as well as eight days in the hospital), but McDonald’s refused to settle. During the subsequent trial it was learned that over a ten-year period the restaurant chain had received 700 complaints about injuries pertaining to coffee that was served hotter than at most other
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restaurants. The jury decided on $2.7 million for punitive damages because that was the amount McDonald’s takes in for two days’ worth of coffee sales. Afterward, the judge reduced the amount to $640,000. In the end, the plaintiff and McDonald’s settled out of court, probably for a lower amount. Tort reform gained momentum during the George W. Bush administration, which asserted that limiting liability was necessary for decreasing the overall costs of medical care. It was argued that tort reform would lead to a more efficient health care system because doctors would not have to do extra procedures to “cover” themselves from possible liability and would not have to pay so much for malpractice insurance. Bush’s call for capping awards at $5 million led to the passage of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, allowing federal oversight of certain kinds of class-action lawsuits. the question of liability has been an ongoing controversy for years. Since cigarette packs dating back to 1965 have had health-warning labels, tobacco companies steadfastly maintained that smokers have only themselves to blame for ignoring the risks of smoking. Juries more often than not agreed, as from the 1950s to the early 1990s the tobacco companies won all but two of the 930 lung-cancer cases. Beginning in the 1980s, however, stricter liability standards were put in play. This led to the $246 billion Master Settlement Agreement (1998) between forty-six states and the major tobacco companies. States were to use the settlement funds to offset the medical costs of smoking-related diseases and to educate young citizens about the dire consequences of smoking. Critics of the tobacco settlement noted the high fees the tort attorneys garnered from the deal—five attorneys involved with the Texas tobacco settlement, for example, collected $3.3 billion in fees. Similar criticism was aimed at John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee and 2008 presidential candidate, who as a trial lawyer had earned millions of dollars trying product liability cases. Edwards was able to deflect criticisms of profiting on the suffering of others by relating personal stories of individuals harmed by faulty products or medical malpractice. Tort law, he insisted, was a way to hold corporations accountable. He thus framed tort reform as motivated by “corporate greed” and the desire not to be held accountable for misdeeds. There are those who believe that tort law should be strengthened because the legal process, as currently practiced, allows corporations to lessen the sting of accountability. For instance, the large awards juries require corporations to pay are routinely reduced on appeal. In most cases the parties eventually agree to confidential outof-court settlements. In addition, by forcing the silence of the plaintiff in these settlements, the corporation avoids being held publicly accountable, and hence its business practices are not held in question. Business interests have
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the advantage over the harmed individual as they use time and legal maneuverings to wear down the person, inducing individuals to accept a lower amount and agree to silence in order to bring the legal dispute to an end. Anthony C. Gabrielli and Roger Chapman See also: Medical Malpractice; Nader, Ralph; Tobacco Settlements.
Further Reading Abraham, Kenneth. The Liability Century: Insurance and Tort Law from the Progressive Era to 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bogus, Carl T. Why Lawsuits Are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Levy, Robert. Shakedown: How Corporations, Government, and Trial Lawyers Abuse the Judicial Process. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2004. Nader, Ralph. No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America. New York: Random House, 1996. Olson, Walter. The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit. New York: Truman Talley Books, 1992. Ruschmann, Paul. Tort Reform. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006.
T r a n s g e n d e r M ove m e n t The umbrella term “transgender” refers to people who express their gender differently from the cultural norm. The transgendered include (1) cross-dressers and transvestites (sometimes known as drag queens and drag kings), individuals who adopt gender expressions culturally inconsistent with their gender (such as wearing apparel and accessories associated with the opposite sex); (2) transsexuals, those who have opted for hormone treatments and sex-reassignment surgery to physically alter their sex; (3) the intersexed, persons who were born with sexual anatomy that is both male and female (constituting one out of every 2,000 individuals); and (4) gay men and lesbians who identify themselves as transgendered. In the culture wars the transgender movement has campaigned to promote civil rights for people who do not fall into the traditional male/female dichotomy and to put a stop to what they call “transphobia” and “gender terrorism,” the societal pressure (including violence) to enforce “gender normativity.” The transgender movement in the United States dates back to the 1966 riots at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, involving some fifty protesters opposing perceived prejudice against the transgendered. Three years later there was a riot at the Stonewall Inn nightclub on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, New
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York, involving transgendered and homosexual patrons resisting a police raid of their social hangout. Prior to that, Christine Jorgensen’s sex-reassignment surgery in 1952 was widely publicized, and she remained in the public spotlight with a nightclub act and the publication of her life story (1967), which was made into a movie in 1970. During the early 1970s Jorgensen spoke on many college campuses, telling of how she had been born a “female” in a male body (and initially named George). In the meantime, there was the debut of Virginia Prince’s Transvestia magazine (1960). Further legitimating the transgendered were medical texts such as Harry Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) and John William Money and Richard Green’s Transexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969). The transgender movement did not coalesce politically until the 1980s and 1990s, even though people have been challenging gender stereotypes throughout history. Since then, some dozens of cities have enacted laws protecting the rights of the transgendered. In 1991, Minnesota was the first state to pass such an antidiscrimination measure. This was followed by Rhode Island, New Mexico, California, Illinois, Maine, Hawaii, Washington, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, Iowa, Vermont, Colorado, and Oregon. Some activists have pushed for hate crime legislation to punish those who violently target the transgendered. Transgender rights have been promoted by various organizations, including the International Foundation for Gender Education (founded in 1984), the Transgender Law and Policy Institute (founded in 2000), and the National Center for Transgender Equality (founded in 2003). Ironically, the transgender movement has faced resistance from certain members of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. Whereas the transgender movement is about gender identity, the gay rights movement is about sexual orientation: although there are transgender people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, others see themselves as heterosexual. But by and large transgender rights have been part of the broader gay rights movement. People who are physically transitioning and modifying their bodies through hormone treatments and/or surgical procedures can face difficult challenges such as employment and housing discrimination—for instance, in 2007 the City Commission of Largo, Florida, voted to dismiss its city manager after he announced plans to have sex-change surgery. There have also been cases in which the transgendered have been denied medical care or mistreated by health care professionals—the 2001 documentary film Southern Comfort tells the story of a female-to-male transsexual who had difficulty getting treatment for his cervical and ovarian cancer. The transgender movement has been dedicated to working with health care professionals, lawmakers, and public-service
sectors to educate people about transgender issues. The goal is to achieve dignity in public policies, court systems, media, literature, and corporations. In their quest to remove any lingering stigma, activists have raised questions about the diagnostic term that the American Psychiatric Association continues to apply to transgender cases: “gender identity disorder.” Health professionals view this heading, which is published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as necessary and positive, for it enables access to medical care, some of which is covered by health insurance. The transgender movement sees this appellation as implying that transgendered people are abnormal or pathological. Jordon Johnson See also: Androgyny; Gay Rights Movement; Jorgensen, Christine; Kinsey, Alfred; McCloskey, Deirdre; Rodman, Dennis; Stonewall Rebellion; Women’s Studies.
Further Reading Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Califia, Pat. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997. Currah, Paisley, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter. Transgender Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warrior: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle. The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Truman, Harr y S. An unassuming Democratic senator from Missouri, compromise choice as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944, and thirty-third president of the United States upon FDR’s death the following year, Harry Truman proved to be a highly and enduringly controversial figure for several reasons, including his order to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II and setting the United States on the course of the Cold War to “contain” the Soviet Union. Truman was deeply committed to the New Deal and argued for a continuation of domestic reform in the closely contested election of 1948, which he won against all odds. The son of a livestock farmer, Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. He did not attend college, but served in World War I as a commander of an artillery battalion in France. Upon returning to Missouri, he worked in banking, shared a haberdashery business, tended a farm, and entered politics as part of Tom Pendergast’s Democratic machine in Kansas City. After serving as a Jackson County judge (1922–1924, 1926–
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1934), he was elected to the U.S. Senate (1935–1945) as the candidate of the state Democratic machine. Senator Truman made a mark during wartime mobilization as chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (widely known as the Truman Committee), which rooted out fraud and waste in government contracting, saving taxpayers an estimated $15 billion. During the 1944 presidential campaign, he was chosen as Roosevelt’s running mate to replace the controversial vice president Henry A. Wallace. The Democrats easily won that election, but Roosevelt died of a massive stroke only five months later. On April 12, 1945, Truman was sworn in as president, having served a mere eighty-two days as vice president. He won the presidency in his own right in 1948, upsetting Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman died at age eighty-eight on December 26, 1972, in Kansas City. Truman’s first major decision as president was to use atomic weapons against Japan, ending World War II with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Later, revisionist historians would question the morality of that decision and Truman’s motives. In his memoirs, Truman argued that he authorized the bombings to save American lives by bringing the war to an end at the earliest possible time. Critics have questioned whether the cost in civilian lives—estimated in the hundreds of thousands— was justified, whether the Japanese populace should have been warned in advance of the attack, and whether the Japanese might have been close to surrendering anyway. Still others have posited that the ulterior motive for dropping the bombs was a show of force to the Soviet Union, seen as a prospective rival in the postwar era. Indeed, as he served out the remainder of Roosevelt’s term, President Truman took measures to “contain” the spread of communism. The Truman Doctrine, articulated by the president in a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, argued for economic and military aid to nations struggling against communism so as to keep them out of the Soviet sphere of influence. Truman also helped create the modern U.S. military and intelligence communities with the National Security Act of 1947, which merged the various war departments into the Department of Defense and established both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman’s containment doctrine garnered ongoing criticism in American society, especially during America’s later involvement in the Vietnam War. Despite public opinion polls and the predictions of virtually every political commentator, Truman defeated Dewey in the 1948 presidential contest by a margin of 49.5 percent to 45.1 percent, earning the nickname “Give ’em hell Harry” for his campaign style and tenacity. In his mind, the campaign was a mandate on the New Deal. In a cross-country “whistle stop” tour, he addressed crowds from the back of a railroad car, presenting himself as a
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fiery populist. Calling the GOP “the party of privilege,” he characterized the Republican record from 1921 to 1933 as one of “depression, poverty, and despair” and blamed his own political woes on the “do-nothing” Republican-controlled Congress. Democrats, Truman argued, believe that “prosperity begins with looking after the little fellow.” The day after the election, Truman was captured in a photograph that would become an icon of modern American politics: holding a copy of the Chicago Tribune, a conservative newspaper he loathed, Truman beamed at the erroneous front-page headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Within two years, the United States would be bogged down in the unpopular Korean War, a conflict that would end in stalemate. “To err is Truman” was a common refrain during his last years in office. His decline in popularity was hastened by his firing of General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 for persistently advocating more drastic measures against the Korean communists. In April of the following year, Truman nationalized the U.S. steel industry to avoid a strike and maintain production during the war; the U.S. Supreme Court declared the move unconstitutional. President Truman gained a reputation for sticking to his convictions through thick and thin; a sign on his desk in the Oval Office emphasized presidential responsibility: “The buck stops here.” Eric J. Morgan See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Cold War; Democratic Party; Enola Gay Exhibit; Health Care; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; New Deal; New Left; Nuclear Age; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Soviet Union and Russia; Third Parties; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hamby, Alonzo. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Spalding, Elizabeth Edwards. The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Making of Liberal Internationalism. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955–1956.
T u r n e r, Te d The place of media mogul Ted Turner in America’s culture wars is difficult to categorize. As a rugged individualist and wealthy proponent of free enterprise, he is often identified with the conservative right. Through his generous philanthropy, directed largely at promot-
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ing world peace and environmentalism, he is also widely identified with left-leaning causes. Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III was born on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Savannah, Georgia, where his father ran a successful billboard-advertising company. He attended Brown University (1956–1959), but did not graduate. After his father’s suicide in 1963, Turner took over the business and increased its profitability so much that he soon acquired three southern radio stations and an Atlanta television station (1968–1970). Taking advantage of emerging satellite and cable technologies, Turner turned his TV station into one of America’s first national “superstations” (1976–1979), challenging the supremacy of the ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcast networks. Turner took an even bolder step in 1980 by launching the Cable News Network, a 24-hour news channel that transformed television journalism. Since its founding, CNN has been accused of bias—both liberal and conservative—further complicating Turner’s position in the culture wars. Based on CNN’s success, the Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) established other news and entertainment outlets, including the Cartoon Network, Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies, and the Cable Music Channel (a short-lived attempt to counter what he regarded as the immorality of MTV). In 1995, when TBS merged with Time Warner, Inc., Turner became vice chairman of the latter company. He resigned the position in 2003, however, disenchanted with Time Warner’s merger with America Online (AOL). Beginning in 2002, Turner has expanded his business interests to include solar energy and eco-friendly restaurants. In addition to his success as a media mogul, Turner has also prospered as a sports entrepreneur. In 1976, he acquired the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team—and later the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team—partly for his love of athletic competition and partly to provide programming for his media empire. In addition, Turner has long been a world-class yachtsman, captaining the yacht Courageous to victory in the 1977 America’s Cup sailing championship. Turner has been married and divorced three times: to Judy Nye (1960–1964), Jane Smith (1965–1988), and actress Jane Fonda (1991–2001). Turner’s relationship with Fonda, the former leftist activist, raised additional questions about his political and cultural allegiances. Sometimes calling himself a conservative liberal and sometimes a liberal conservative, Turner has regularly defied convention and expectations. An avid hunter, he also strongly supports conservation and sustainability, particularly on the 2 million acres (809,000 hectares) he owns in six states and Argentina (making him the largest private landowner in North America). Turner surprised many observers in 1998 by pledging $1 billion to support the work and causes of the United Nations around
the world. Other philanthropic causes he has supported include environmental education, protecting endangered species, and reducing nuclear proliferation. Known variously as “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth from the South” for speaking his mind, Turner seems to have enjoyed putting his money where his mouth is. James I. Deutsch See also: Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Fonda, Jane; Media Bias; Nuclear Age; United Nations.
Further Reading Auletta, Ken. Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Bibb, Porter. It Ain’t as Easy as It Looks: Ted Turner’s Amazing Story. New York: Crown, 1993. Goldberg, Robert, and Gary Jay Goldberg. Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
T we n t y - S e c o n d A m e n d m e n t The Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on February 26, 1951, prohibits a president from being elected more than twice, or serving as chief executive beyond two full terms plus two years of an inherited term. It was the first constitutional amendment of the postwar era, in the aftermath of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected an unprecedented four times (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944). Limiting a presidency to two terms was a priority of the 80th Congress (1947–1948), the first time since 1931 that Republicans controlled both houses. Democrats at the time accused the GOP of seeking revenge against Roosevelt and the legacy of the New Deal. The vote on House Joint Resolution 27, which later became the Twenty-Second Amendment, followed party lines—with Republicans unanimously in favor in both houses and Democrats overwhelmingly opposed. Of the forty-seven Democrats in the House who voted with the Republicans, all were southern opponents of the New Deal. Congressman Adolph Sabath (D-IL) characterized the vote as a “pitiful victory over a great man now sleeping on the banks of the Hudson.” A combination of Republicandominated and southern state legislatures ensured the necessary support from three-quarters of the states. After the amendment was ratified, Rep. Joseph Martin (R-MA) declared it “a victory for the people and . . . a defeat for totalitarianism and the enemies of freedom.” Proponents of presidential term limits argue that George Washington established a precedent by stepping aside after two terms as chief executive, an unwritten rule that was followed by all presidents until FDR. The Twenty-Second Amendment, they believe, corresponds
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with the intentions of the nation’s founders to safeguard the presidency from becoming a dictatorship. Opponents of the amendment argue that it weakens the executive branch, reducing a president to lame-duck status immediately following reelection. Furthermore, they contend, such a restriction limits the power of the people to decide and may force an unwanted change of leadership during a time of national crisis. Presidents of both parties have criticized the Twenty-Second Amendment, among them Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Truman and Eisenhower were in favor of term limits for members of Congress but not for the president. Roger Chapman
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See also: Clinton, Bill; Contract with America; Democratic Party; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Founding Fathers; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party; Truman, Harry S.
Further Reading Lemelin, Bernard. “Opposition to the 22nd Amendment: The National Committee Against Limiting the Presidency and Its Activities, 1949–1951.” Canadian Review of American Studies 29 (1999): 133–48. Neale, Thomas H. “Presidential and Vice Presidential Terms and Tenure.” Congressional Research Service Report, February 26, 2001. Reagan, Ronald, et al. Restoring the Presidency: Reconsidering the Twenty-Second Amendment. Washington, DC: National Legal Center for the Public Interest, 1990.
Unabomber Dubbed the Unabomber after his early choice of targets (un = universities; a = airlines), recluse and former mathematics professor Ted Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others in a nationwide bombing spree that spanned nearly two decades (1978–1995). The rationale behind the attacks was an antitechnology ideology that Kaczynski outlined in a 35,000-word manifesto—“Industrial Society and Its Future”—as published by the Washington Post and New York Times in September 1995. In his treatise, the Unabomber argued that technology aids big government and big business and fosters tyranny, all of which must be opposed by revolutionaries advancing “WILD nature.” He criticized both conservatives and liberals, the former for supporting technology that erodes traditional values and the latter for advocating social solutions dependent upon technology. Some have speculated that the Unabomber issued his manifesto to regain the spotlight after the media began focusing attention on the Oklahoma City bombing, but it led to his arrest in April 1996 after his younger brother, recognizing Kaczynski’s writing style, tipped off authorities. Theodore John Kaczynski, born in Chicago on May 22, 1942, was raised in an atheistic, blue-collar family in a Chicago suburb, where he graduated from high school at age sixteen as a National Merit Scholarship finalist; his IQ had been measured at 167. He went on to study mathematics at Harvard University (BS, 1962) and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (MS, 1965; PhD, 1967). After a short time teaching mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley (1967–1969), he surprised his colleagues by abruptly resigning. Kaczynski eventually took up residence in a small, primitive cabin near Lincoln, Montana. Even in this rustic setting he could not escape from the technological society, whether it was snowmobilers in the nearby woods or commercial airliners flying overhead. After a logging company built a road near his cabin, he turned violent. Kaczynski’s homemade bombs, most bearing the initials “FC” for Freedom Club, were packages either mailed or hand placed. They caused injuries on or near the campuses of Northwestern University (1978, 1979), Vanderbilt University (1982), the University of California at Berkeley (1982, 1985), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1985), the University of California at San Francisco (1993), and Yale University (1993). A bomb ignited but did not explode inside the cargo hold of an American Airlines jet (Chicago–Washington, D.C., flight, 1979), while another exploded at the Chicago home of the president of that same airline company
(1980). Finally, Kaczynski was responsible for the deaths of a computer-store owner (Sacramento, California, 1985), an advertising executive who worked for a company that handled Exxon’s public relations following the Exxon Valdez oil spill (New Jersey, 1994), and a timber lobbyist (Sacramento, 1995). Other bombs were defused or detonated without injury. In January 22, 1998, after a federal judge refused to allow Kaczynski to act as his own counsel, he pleaded guilty to the bombings in order to thwart his attorneys, who planned to present a “mental defect” defense. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without parole. In March 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Unabomber’s appeal for a new trial. Two competing views of Kaczynski have persisted in the public dialogue. According to one, he was an “evil genius” who reduced people to abstract figures and killed them for supporting the advancement of the technological society. Thus, he has been widely characterized as an anarchist, libertarian, eco-terrorist, “product of the sixties,” and a man with views on the environment like those of Al Gore or Lewis Mumford. According to the other view, Kaczynski is mentally ill, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who in childhood suffered as a social misfit, later suffered harm as a guinea pig in an extensive Harvard psychological experiment that may have been part of a CIA mind-control program (known as MKULTRA), and once considered having a sex-change operation to be able to get close to a woman, all of which reduced him to hate-filled rage. Roger Chapman See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Ecoterrorism; Gore, Al; McVeigh, Timothy.
Further Reading Chase, Alston. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Gibbs, Nancy, Richard Lacayo, Lance Morrow, Jill Smolowe, and David Van Biema. Mad Genius: The Odyssey, Pursuit, and Capture of the Unabomber Suspect. New York: Warner Books, 1996. Kaczynski, Theodore John. The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future. Berkeley, CA: Jolly Roger Press, 1996. Waits, Chris, and Dave Shors. Unabomber: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski. Helena, MT: Helena Independent Record/Montana Magazine, 1999.
United Nations Founded in 1945 and headquartered in New York City, the United Nations (UN) is an international organization that promotes collective security, human rights, economic and cultural exchange, and humanitarian re572
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lief. The organization, with an annual operating budget of over $4 billion, is staffed by 8,900 civil servants and directed by a secretary general. From its inception through 2008, the UN grew from a body of 52 member states to 192. Each member state has one vote in the General Assembly, but the organization’s power resides in the fifteen-seat Security Council, on which the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China have permanent membership status that includes veto power. Over the years the United States has played a major role in the UN while providing on average 25 percent of its funding. In the culture wars, conservatives are generally critical of the UN, believing that it is too bureaucratic, sometimes corrupt, and a threat to American sovereignty. Liberals often emphasize multilateralism as opposed to unilateralism, arguing that the UN is the last best hope for world peace. Most Americans, despite earlier tendencies toward isolation, initially regarded the establishment of the UN as a positive development. According to a 1947 Gallup poll, 65 percent wanted their country to “take an active part in world affairs.” In 1949, the UN was regarded with either general or qualified approval by 61 percent. As the Cold War intensified, a 1950 poll indicated that half of Americans believed a reorganized UN minus the membership of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations would be better able to maintain world peace, but five years later only 35 percent clung to that position. Indeed, 59 percent of the public indicated in 1965 that without the UN there probably would have already been World War III. However, Cold War politics hampered the functionality of the UN as the Soviet Union exercised its veto power more than any other member of the Security Council—103 times during the organization’s first two decades. In the early 1960s the John Birch Society was stridently conducting its “Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US” campaign. According to group leader Robert Welch, communists had conceived the UN for the ultimate purpose of establishing a world government. Welch denigrated the UN as “The House That Hiss Built,” a reference to Alger Hiss, a State Department official who had been a delegate at the founding of the UN in San Francisco and who five years later was convicted of falsely testifying that he had not passed classified information to the Soviet Union. In addition, G. Edward Griffin, a member of the John Birch Society, wrote of the “Communist infiltration” of the UN in The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations (1964). Religious fundamentalists such as Billy Hargis and Carl McIntire also cast the United Nations as part of a communist conspiracy. They were later joined by Hal Lindsey, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and Pat Robertson, all of whom framed the issue in an eschatological fashion, suggesting a link between Satan and the UN. The “one
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world body” foretold in the Book of Revelation might signify the UN, they explained. Later, President George H.W. Bush unwittingly reinforced the suspicions of the Religious Right when he pronounced at the end of the Cold War a “new world order.” Robertson’s New World Order (1991) offered updated commentary. Meanwhile, a network of rural gun enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists, alarmed over the prospect of a world government perhaps ushered in by the UN, formed the militia movement for the purpose of preparing for battle. The major opposition to the UN, however, has not been the radical right but mainstream conservatives and moderates. After 1962, with the UN’s infusion of new member states from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the United States no longer had an automatic majority and often lost votes in the General Assembly. Reflecting a North-South split rather than the Cold War East-West split, the UN began voicing criticism of the superpowers (especially the United States) and multinational corporations. Under such circumstances, the General Assembly officially equated Zionism (Jewish self-determinism) with racism, and authoritarian countries such as Libya took turns chairing the human rights committee. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served a short stint as a U.S. representative to the UN, afterward wrote A Dangerous Place (1978) to tell what he thought of that world body. In 1984, denouncing the “tyranny of the Third World,” Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) persuaded her colleagues to approve her amendment limiting the U.S. contribution to the UN and its agencies from 25 percent to 20 percent unless consensus-basis decision making were introduced. From 1966 to 1990, the United States exercised the veto seventy-two times, more than any other member of the Security Council. In 1992, Washington refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the UN initiative on global warming. By the end of the Cold War, conservatives had reached a consensus that the UN needed to be either reformed or abandoned. During the 1990s, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) began blocking the U.S. dues to the UN. In 1996, Helms wrote an article in Foreign Affairs arguing that the UN, a “quasi-sovereign entity” that “represents an obvious threat to U.S. interests,” cannot be “radically overhauled . . . without the threat of American withdrawal.” In contrast, the following year the broadcaster Ted Turner established the United Nations Foundation with a $1 billion personal contribution, the amount of membership payments the United States was in arrears. Turner indicated that the United Nations was one of his favorite organizations, and he credited it with helping the world survive the Cold War. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq renewed debate about the effectiveness of the United Nations. Supporters of the Bush administration argue that following the
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Gulf War (1991), the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had defied with impunity numerous UN resolutions. Moreover, the Oil for Food scandal, involving Iraqi bribery of UN officials, proved the extent of corruption in the UN bureaucracy. However, critics of Bush’s unilateral action say it tragically diminished the authority of the UN. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction proved nonexistent, corroborating what UN inspectors had said all along. John Calhoun and Roger Chapman See also: Cold War; Hargis, Billy; Helms, Jesse; Hiss, Alger; Human Rights; Israel; John Birch Society; Kyoto Protocol; Militia Movement; Moynihan, Daniel Patrick; Premillennial Dispensationalism; Soviet Union and Russia; Turner, Ted.
Further Reading Gold, Dore. Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos. New York: Crown Forum, 2004. Helms, Jesse. “Saving the UN: A Challenge to the Next Secretary-General.” Foreign Affairs 75:5 (September–October 1996): 2–8. Mingst, Karen A., and Margaret P. Karns. The United Nations and the Post–Cold War Era. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005. Montgomery, David. New World Government Exposed! Sultan, WA: Montgomery, 2002. O’Sullivan, Christopher. The United Nations: A Concise History. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 2005. Shawn, Eric. The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America’s Security. New York: Sentinel, 2006.
U S A PAT R I O T Ac t In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress passed legislation referred to as the USA PATRIOT Act—Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism—precipitating a political clash over national security and civil liberties. While proponents of the measure emphasized the need for strong counterterrorism measures, critics warned of a wholesale expansion of domestic surveillance. The PATRIOT Act, amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and other federal statutes, was overwhelmingly passed by Congress—357–66 (House) and 98–1–1 (Senate)—and signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. Although there was no public hearing or congressional debate on the legislation, a sunset proviso was added due to concerns raised about civil liberties. In March 2006, the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act was
The USA PATRIOT Act divides Americans between those who believe its surveillance provisions are an unacceptable violation of privacy rights—such as this protester at the 2004 Democratic Convention—and those who believe they are vital to national security. (Michael Springer/Getty Images)
passed—280–138 (House) and 89–10 (Senate)—making permanent all but two of the original sections of the law. Under the PATRIOT Act’s counterterrorism provisions, federal authorities (generally the FBI) are granted greater latitude to tap telephone calls (including voice mail) and Internet communications; search financial, tax, medical, library, and school records; monitor the activities of foreigners inside U.S. borders; and conduct “sneak and peek” searches of homes or businesses (including virtual networks). By issuing a National Security Letter (NSL), federal investigators may demand certain information from an institution without court approval. In addition, the new criminal designation of “domestic terrorism” was established, raising concern among civil libertarians that it could be used for inappropriate purposes against political activists (such as abortion protesters, environmental activists, and antiwar demonstrators). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) opposed the USA PATRIOT Act from its inception, raising particular concern about the monitoring of libraries, under Section 215, which allowed federal agents to access information on the reading activities of patrons. The ACLU also objected to Section 206, pertaining to “roving” wiretaps—under this provision, the government may obtain a warrant to monitor all communication devices used by a suspect (including those shared with others) with no safeguards to restrict the monitoring of actual communication activities. Concerns about government surveillance were heightened on December 18, 2005, when the New York Times broke a story that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been conducting eavesdropping since early 2002, without search warrants, of international telephone calls and electronic mail originating from the United States. In response, Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), the Senate’s
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sole nay voter of the original PATRIOT Act, proposed a motion of censure against President Bush. Justifying his actions based on the 2001 congressional resolution authorizing him to carry out the War on Terror, Bush admitted to authorizing the NSA wiretaps. “Why did we bother debating the Patriot Act if President Bush could make up his own rules about spying on U.S. citizens?” the ACLU bristled in a full-page ad in the New York Times (January 5, 2006). According to a Washington Post–ABC opinion poll that week, two out of three Americans believed the government was violating privacy rights; 75 percent of Republicans considered it acceptable, while 61 percent of Democrats deemed it unacceptable. Roger Chapman
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See also: American Civil Liberties Union; New York Times, The; Privacy Rights; September 11.
Further Reading Ball, Howard. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001: Balancing Civil Liberties and National Security: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Etzioni, Amitai. How Patriotic is the Patriot Act? Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Foerstel, Herbert N. The Patriot Act: A Documentary and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. Gerdes, Louis I. The Patriot Act: Opposing Viewpoints. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2005.
See also: Abortion; Buchanan, Pat; Christian Coalition; Gay Rights Movement; Humphrey, Hubert H.; Medical Marijuana; Schwarzenegger, Arnold; Third Parties; Wellstone, Paul.
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Ve n t u r a , J e s s e Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler and actor, was unexpectedly elected governor of Minnesota in 1998 as the Reform Party candidate. Born James George Janos on July 15, 1951, the son of a steamfitter and a nurse, Ventura is a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he attended public school. He served as a U.S. Navy Seal from 1969 to 1975, including active duty in Vietnam. He attended community college during the mid-1970s but dropped out after one year. It was around this time that he took up bodybuilding and, after a series of odd jobs (including a brief stint as bodyguard for the Rolling Stones) became a professional wrestler under the name Jesse “The Body” Ventura. By the early 1980s, he was one of the most popular “bad guys” in the World Wrestling Federation. After blood clots in his lungs ended his wrestling career, he appeared in several action films, including two with another future governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ventura began his political career as mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota (1991–1995), and later worked as a radio talk show host. Running for Minnesota governor on a platform of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, he won a stunning victory on election day. He served from 1999 to 2003 and did not seek a second term. As governor, Ventura also found time to work as a commentator for pro wrestling and the XFL football league, and he wrote several books. When the Reform Party came under the influence of Pat Buchanan and drifted toward a more conservative platform, Ventura quit the party in 2000, ultimately aligning himself with the Independence Party of Minnesota. Ventura’s decisions as governor attracted bipartisan criticism, though mostly from the right for his support of medical marijuana, gay rights, and abortion rights, as well as his opposition to organized religion and the flag pledge. He stirred further controversy when he sharply criticized pundits on both sides who politicized the 2002 funeral for Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone. Ventura was the subject of a popular satire by Minnesota-based humorist Garrison Keillor, who released a book featuring a Ventura-like character named Jimmy “Big Boy” Valente who becomes a politician. After leaving office, Ventura hosted a short-lived cable TV talk show called Jesse Ventura’s America, and in 2004 he was recruited by a fellow navy veteran for a lecture series and study group at Harvard University. Ventura also served on the board for Operation Truth, a support organization for veterans of the Iraq War. Benjamin W. Cramer
Keillor, Garrison. ME: By Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente. New York: Viking, 1999. Lentz, Jacob. Electing Jesse Ventura: A Third-Party Success Story. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Ventura, Jesse. Do I Stand Alone? Going to the Mat Against Political Pawns and Media Jackals. New York: Pocket Books, 2000. ———. I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up. New York: Villard Books, 1999. Ventura, Jesse, and Heron Marquez. Jesse Ventura Tells It Like It Is: America’s Most Outspoken Governor Speaks Out About Government. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2002.
Victimhood Victimhood entails the experience of suffering, which sometimes serves as the basis of legal, political, and/or cultural claims. At least since the 1970s, recognizing a group’s cultural distinctiveness, including the injuries it has sustained, has emerged as a central demand of social movements on the American left. Second-wave feminists declared that the “personal is political,” calling on survivors of rape and incest to transform their private experiences into public speech. Other identity groupings followed suit: gays and lesbians “came out” en masse; families and friends who lost loved ones to AIDS created massive quilts to bear witness to their loss; and the descendants of African slaves invoked the legacy of the Middle Passage. In response to these developments, conservatives warned against a “culture of victimhood” overshadowing American national identify and turning the country into “a nation of victims.” In a society where identity politics has become increasingly central, victimhood offers moral authority, visibility, and, in some cases, political clout. It says to a public composed largely of strangers: “Attention must be paid to us. You must recognize and honor that which makes us different from you, and you must be acquainted with our culture and history, including our sufferings.” Before the rise of the gay liberation movement, for example, the stories of gay and lesbian lives were private and personal; today, the “coming-out story” has become a master narrative of collective identity. Even so, not all individuals who have suffered have identified themselves as victims, such as the many victims of rape who never come forward to report their injuries for fear of stigma or retaliation. The relationship between individual experiences of pain and suffering and claims to group victimhood is not straightforward. Being a member of a victimized group does not necessarily make that individual a victim. Some 576
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groups identify on the basis of past victimhood even though many members of those groups did not themselves endure pain or suffering. American-born Jews, for example, may identify with the victims of the Holocaust even though they did not personally experience the tragedy. Similarly, blacks who did not personally suffer from slavery argue that they are nonetheless victims of its legacies; for that reason many African-American leaders have called for reparations. One important controversy surrounding the politics of victimhood has centered on the question of whether traumatic events can be forgotten and then remembered later in life. That debate has focused on memories of childhood sexual abuse, though it extends to other traumas as well. A “repressed memory” is a memory of an event, frequently traumatic, that is stored by the unconscious mind but outside conscious awareness. Some theorize that such memories may be “recovered” and integrated into consciousness years or decades after the event, often through therapy. The accused and their allies, on the other hand, have tried to demonstrate the relative ease with which “false memories” have been deliberately implanted by therapists and other authority figures. Conservatives such as radio talk show host and writer Charles Sykes have been critical of victimhood status, believing it is used to justify irresponsible behavior. In A Nation of Victims (1992), Sykes argues that “I am not responsible; it’s not my fault” is a common refrain employed by compulsive gamblers, co-dependents in dysfunctional relationships, and even obese people “oppressed” by narrow airline seats. Sykes and other conservatives excoriate the psychiatric profession for inventing new “disease” categories and creating a “therapeutic culture” that turns everyday difficulties into certified psychological problems. There are those on the left who find fault with victim-based politics as well. For example, the sociologist Frank Furedi has decried efforts relegating victimization as “a kind of disease” that can be passed on to the next generation; and the feminist/queer theorist Lauren Berlant has suggested that the pervasiveness of “victim-talk,” and the personalization of political discourse in general, is impoverishing the public sphere. Most liberals maintain, however, that the politicization of victimhood signals a democratization of culture. They argue, for example, that the Holocaust in American consciousness is a response to the earlier suppression of the subject—much like the suppression of talk of homosexuality, sexual abuse, and other previously taboo topics. Before victimhood was widely discussed in public, individual and group injuries were stigmatized and hidden. By highlighting victimization, identity groups turn stigma into honorable marks of difference. In a multicultural society, they contend, the distinctiveness of group identities, which may be linked to a history of injury or persecution, should be preserved. Moreover,
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they maintain that it is society’s ethical duty to recognize and even identify with the suffering of others. Arlene Stein See also: AIDS; Anti-Semitism; Civil Rights Movement; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Rights Movement; Holocaust; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Race; Sex Offenders; Sexual Assault.
Further Reading Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Furedi, Frank. Therapy Culture. London: Routledge, 2003. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Prager, Jeffrey. Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Sykes, Charles. A Nation of Victims. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Vidal, Gore The novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Gore Vidal has provoked considerable controversy as a public intellectual with iconoclastic views, including his major thesis that the United States has drifted from a republican form of government to an empire—specifically, “a garrison state.” American aggression, Vidal maintains, provoked the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, actions he regards as justifiable. Openly homosexual, Vidal was one of the first American writers to treat same-sex preference as normal; other public figures scorned him for his sexual orientation. The son of an airline executive and an actress, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., was born on October 3, 1925, in West Point, New York. After graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy (1943) and serving in the U.S. Army during World War II (1943–1946), he worked briefly as a book editor at E.P. Dutton while beginning a writing career in earnest. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in New York (1960) and later for a Senate seat in California, losing the primary to Jerry Brown (1982). He served as a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts (1961–1963), hosted the television program Hot Line (1964), and co-founded the New Party (1968–1971) and co-chaired the People’s Party (1970–1972), both centered on opposition to the Vietnam War. Vidal is the grandson of the progressive Oklahoma senator Thomas P. Gore and is a distant cousin of Al Gore. The author of nearly fifty books, he has published two autobiographies, Palimpsest (1995) and Point to Point Navigation (2006).
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An early public controversy Vidal faced was the brouhaha over The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first novels that treated homosexuality as mainstream. Although it was a best-seller, most reviews were negative. For a time, Vidal’s subsequent novels did not sell well, partly because literary critics refused to review any books by an author who would promote the gay lifestyle. Later, in the essay “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Vidal suggested that the persecution of homosexuals was on par with anti-Semitism. Vidal returned to the theme of homosexuality in the satirical novel Myra Breckenridge (1968), about a Hollywood homosexual male who has a sex-change operation. This was followed by its sequel, Myron (1974). In 1968, while on live television during the coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vidal and the conservative activist William F. Buckley, Jr., verbally clashed: Buckley, after being called a “pro-crypto-Nazi,” denounced Vidal as a “queer.” After writing a critical review on Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971), calling it “three days of menstrual flow,” Vidal appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, where Mailer accused him on the air of ruining the Beat writer Jack Kerouac by going to bed with him. Other than his essays—he won the National Book Award for United States: Essays, 1952–1992 (1993)—Vidal’s long-term reputation will most likely be staked on his “Narratives of Empire” series, consisting of seven historical novels that offer a revisionist perspective: Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1997), and The Golden Age (2000). These works tell the story of two fictional American families across the generations while focusing on the development of the United States into an empire. In the essay collection Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003), Vidal demythologizes the founders. A recurring theme in his writing is political ambition and the acquisition of power. This was explored in the plays The Best Man (1960), based on his novel about the behind-the-scenes doings of a presidential nomination, and An Evening with Richard Nixon (1972). Likewise in the novel Messiah (1955), the author tells the story of a future American dictator who comes to power by the aid of an adoring media. More recently, Vidal has stirred controversy with political essays on American foreign policy, domestic security, and terrorism. These anthologized writings, including The Last Empire: Essays, 1992–2000 (2001), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004), condemn neoconservatism and the expansion of federal domestic security. Vidal links the federal attacks at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993) with Operation Desert Storm (1991) and U.S. foreign intervention in general. Waco, he argues, was “the largest massacre of Americans by their own government
since 1890, when a number of Native Americans were slaughtered at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.” Timothy McVeigh’s truck bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City (1995) was a “revolutionary act” in revenge for Waco, maintains Vidal, who nonetheless thinks much of the real story has been suppressed. The attacks of September 11 he categorizes with the Oklahoma City bombing: just recompense. Some have criticized Vidal for promoting conspiracy theories in much of his analysis, including his assertion that President George W. Bush knew the attacks of September 11 were coming. Roger Chapman See also: Buckley, William F., Jr.; Conspiracy Theories; Gay Rights Movement; Kerouac, Jack; Mailer, Norman; McVeigh, Timothy; Revisionist History; Ruby Ridge Incident; September 11; Waco Siege; War Protesters; Wounded Knee Incident.
Further Reading Altman, Dennis. Gore Vidal’s America. Malden, MA: Polity, 2005. Harris, Stephen. Gore Vidal’s Historical Novels and the Shaping of American Consciousness. Lewistown, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Kaplan, Fred. Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
V i e t n a m Ve t e r a n s A g a i n s t t h e Wa r The organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), founded in 1967 by members of the U.S. armed forces returning home from the Vietnam War, opposed the continuation of American involvement in what it regarded as a civil war that posed no threat to U.S. security. Although most of its members had volunteered for military service, they became radicalized after concluding that the war was immoral and not winnable. They considered themselves “winter soldiers,” in contrast to the “sunshine patriots” who offered bravado without confronting “the ugly truth” about the Vietnam War. The Oliver Stone film Born on the Fourth of July (1989) is based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic, a Vietnam “wheelchair” veteran, and concludes with the VVAW protest march during the 1972 Republican National Convention. The organization, which never disbanded, inspired the formation of the Iraq Veterans Against the War in 2004. An antiwar advertisement in the February 1971 issue of Playboy helped double VVAW membership to 20,000; 10 percent were soldiers still deployed in Vietnam. Stories circulated of entire platoons belonging to the VVAW, with some soldiers wearing its insignia—an upside-down rifle with a helmet on top (the symbol of death)—on their
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uniforms. The group’s membership peaked in 1972 at 25,000. Although they were latecomers to the antiwar movement, VVAW activists were generally more radical and angrier than student protesters. U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, who served under President Richard M. Nixon during the height of the antiwar movement in the early 1970s, publicly denounced the VVAW as the most dangerous group in the United States. The FBI, through its controversial Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), monitored the VVAW practically from its inception and over the years infiltrated many chapters with informants. In July 1972, eight VVAW leaders were indicted for conspiring to disrupt the upcoming Republican National Convention in Miami. A week-long demonstration by the VVAW in the nation’s capital in April 1971, culminating in a ceremony in which decorated veterans threw away their medals, came to be regarded as a pivotal protest event of the era. The incident was restored to public attention in 2004 when John Kerry, a former navy lieutenant and VVAW activist, ran as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. In that election, a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised questions about Kerry’s war record and at the same time condemned him for his role as a VVAW spokesman, specifically his April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he raised the issue of American war crimes. The book Unfit for Command (2004) and film documentary Stolen Honor (2004) were part of this attack against Kerry. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Cold War; Fonda, Jane; Kerry, John; My Lai Massacre; Nixon, Richard; Silent Majority; Stone, Oliver; Vietnam War; War Protesters; Watergate; Wayne, John.
Further Reading Hunt, Andrew E. The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Kerry, John, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The New Soldier. New York: Collier, 1971. Vietnam Veterans Against the War Web site. http://www. vvaw.org.
V i e t n a m Ve t e r a n s M e m o r i a l Located on the Washington Mall in the nation’s capital, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a V-shaped, black granite wall, measuring 400 feet (122 meters) long, inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 veterans who lost their lives in the Vietnam War, listed in the chronological order in which they died. Designed by Maya Lin, who at the time was an architectural student
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at Yale University, the $8 million, privately financed monument was dedicated on November 13, 1982. The most visited memorial in Washington, D.C., the site was baptized by fire in the culture wars. The memorial was the inspiration of Jan Scruggs, who had served in the war as a rifleman. He envisioned a memorial that listed by name every military person who died in the conflict, spanning the years 1957 to 1975. Eventually, a total of 650,000 individuals made monetary donations for the project. On July 1, 1980, President Jimmy Carter approved the allocation of two acres (0.81 hectares) on Constitution Gardens (located between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial) for the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Although the idea for the memorial was widely favored, the unveiling of Lin’s design led to acrimonious debate. Opponents argued that it reflected an attitude of shame toward the war. The design called for the wall to be set into an embankment, and critics argued that it should be built above ground, not below. They also contended that the color should be white, not black. Moreover, the austere monument was said to lack patriotic ambience. Those in favor of Lin’s design—many of whom preferred a nonpolitical memorial, so as not to honor war—said that it reflected the nobility of sacrifice. The New York Times praised the “extreme dignity and restraint” of Lin’s vision, but industrialist and later presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who donated $160,000 for the design competition, regarded the winning entry as a disgrace. Novelist Tom Wolfe denounced the design as “a tribute to Jane Fonda” and the committee that approved it the “Mullahs of Modernism.” The conservative magazine National Review declared it “Orwellian glop” and called on the Reagan administration to halt the project. Others described it as “a black gash of shame.” James Watt, the secretary of the Department of Interior, resisted issuing a groundbreaking permit and did so only after demanding that an American flag and statue be added. In another compromise, two brief inscriptions, a prologue and epilogue, were added to the wall of names. After a three-day prayer vigil at the National Cathedral in which the names of all the war dead were read, the memorial was officially dedicated in a ceremony attended by more than 150,000 people. The flag, on a sixty-foot (18.3-meter) staff, was added in 1983, and Frederick Hart’s bronze sculpture of three American soldiers was installed the following year; both were placed to the side of the wall, rather than in front of it, as Watt had desired. After years of more debate, a sculpture honoring women veterans was added in 1993. A plaque was placed in the plaza area in 2004, stating, “We honor and remember their sacrifice.” In 2006, an underground visitor center was approved, but some veterans denounced it as a reminder of Viet Cong tunnels. For most visitors over the years, however, the power of
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Designer Maya Lin stands alongside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial shortly after its dedication in 1982. The innovative original design met with resistance, and several elements were added. (James P. Blair/National Geographic/Getty Images)
walking along the wall, finding the name of a loved one inscribed on the surface, and reaching out to touch it has triumphed over the design dispute. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Religion; Anti-Intellectualism; Fonda, Jane; National Review; Perot, H. Ross; September 11 Memorial; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam War; Watt, James; Wolfe, Tom; World War II Memorial.
Further Reading Scruggs, Jan C., and Joel L. Swerdlow. To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.
V i e t n a m Wa r Only one war over Vietnam ended when North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon in April 1975. Conflict over the meaning of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the implications of it continued to be waged in American culture and politics for the rest of the twentieth century and into the early years of the twenty-first. The U.S. military presence in Vietnam began in the 1950s, when the first aid and advisers were sent to support the Diem regime in Saigon, South Vietnam,
in the struggle against communist North Vietnam. Combat troops arrived in 1965 and reached a peak of almost 550,000 in 1969. By the time U.S. troops were withdrawn after the Paris peace accords of 1973, almost 58,000 had died. The fact that the war was so long and so costly, ending essentially in American defeat, yielded historical interpretations that evolved very differently from those of other American wars. Initial journalistic and scholarly accounts in the aftermath of previous conflicts typically highlighted the nobility of U.S. interests, the bravery of U.S. armed forces, and the strength of national effort and support. The first reflections on the Vietnam War, by contrast, evinced a sense of disillusion and frustration.
Historical Interpretation and Conservative Revision Even before the fighting was over, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote about the folly of Washington policymakers, who had an unreasonable confidence in America’s ability to shape global affairs and little appreciation for how local issues affected the Third World. Such misperceptions were magnified by an unshaken belief that communist movements had to be fought everywhere and at all times. By 1979, with the publication of George Herring’s America’s Longest War, a standard historical interpretation of the Vietnam experience had
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formed: the war was wrong, the war was unwinnable, and U.S. policymakers pursued it out of a flawed commitment to contain global communism at all costs. The conventional wisdom on the Vietnam War was challenged in the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s. Revisionist historians asserted that America had been morally obligated to support the South Vietnamese. They also argued that the U.S. military could have won the war had it not been hampered by civilian leadership, the antiwar protest movement, and the media’s portrayal of the war on television. No grand consensus has emerged between the two camps and the competing views of the war, though historians generally favor the standard interpretation. In any event, the place of the Vietnam War in America’s culture wars is not entirely reflected in the evolution of scholarship and academic interpretation. During the early stages of U.S. involvement, it was generally expected that the outcome would be another in a long line of noble American victories. The ultimate failure of the U.S. military effort thus prompted a deep questioning of the nature of America itself. In the years following the war, with the help of movies, television, novels, and public rhetoric, the nation created a set of evolving and competing collective memories of Vietnam and its lessons. Pundits and politicians on both sides of the culture wars began to draw very different conclusions about the nature of America’s role in world affairs. For those on the left, one of the lessons of Vietnam was that U.S. military force should be used only sparingly and with a clear purpose in the world arena, lest the tragedy of Vietnam be repeated. For those on the right, the failure in Vietnam rested with those who protested U.S. involvement and failed to allow the armed forces to complete the job. During the early years of the Vietnam War, presidential rhetoric called for Americans to unite and not to second-guess the decision of American intervention. In 1975, a few weeks before the final North Vietnamese victory, President Gerald Ford told Americans that the pre-Vietnam “sense of pride” could not be achieved by “refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” President Jimmy Carter tended to avoid broad discussions of the legacy of Vietnam, focusing instead on the plight of veterans. In his final State of the Union address, Carter boasted about the nation’s ability to “separate the war from the warrior” and provide Vietnam veterans with a proper, if deferred, homecoming. The rhetoric of President Ronald Reagan urged a new slant on the meaning and public perception of the conflict. During the 1980 presidential campaign, he called the Vietnam War a “noble cause” and urged Americans not to submit to “feelings of guilt” about it. In 1985, President Reagan contended that America “did not lose the war” after all, arguing that the U.S. military had won
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every engagement with the enemy. The media had been responsible for distorting the truth, he maintained, and the cause was not lost until the United States withdrew in 1973 and then failed to supply the South Vietnamese army. President George H.W. Bush, in his inaugural address in 1989, returned to Ford’s theme, declaring that “the lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” President Bill Clinton affirmed that view when, during the announcement of the normalization of relations with Vietnam in 1995, he said: “Whatever divided us before let us consign to the past.” President George W. Bush, however, returned to the idea that the United States had withdrawn from the war too soon.
Cinematic Interpretations and the Vietnam Syndrome Many Americans have acquired their understanding of Vietnam from films made about the war. Cinematic representations of Vietnam, mediated through the eyes of screenwriters and directors, have mirrored and influenced the wider cultural and political memories. The Green Berets (1968) was John Wayne’s effort to portray the honorable nature of America’s role in Vietnam; this was a hard sell during the same year as the Tet Offensive, as American public opinion was turning rapidly against the war. It was not until the late 1970s that major studio productions about the war began to appear—among them such notable releases as Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979). Each of these films echoed the growing national sense that the war was a mistake. The first two focused on the treatment of veterans. The Rambo series and Red Dawn exemplify the 1980s conservative challenge to the conventional wisdom about Vietnam. In First Blood (1982), the first of the Rambo movies, the lead character is a Vietnam veteran who complains that “somebody wouldn’t let us win” and bristles over the lack of respect accorded to returning veterans. In the sequel, Rambo: First Blood II (1985), and a series of other mid-1980s movies, the heroes go back to Vietnam to rescue soldiers still held in Vietnamese prisons. Red Dawn (1984), depicting an invasion of America’s heartland by Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan forces after U.S. withdrawal from NATO and a communist takeover in Mexico, attempted to show the consequences of the left’s reluctance to adopt an aggressive foreign policy after Vietnam. The issues raised by the Vietnam movies of the 1980s corresponded with the ongoing political debate about the “Vietnam syndrome” and Reagan’s foreign policy objectives. Conservative intellectuals led an assault on the Vietnam syndrome, shorthand for a collective sense of caution about America’s involvement in the world. For the left, that sense of caution seems a positive legacy of the
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Vietnam experience, helping avert other reckless military adventures, injecting a sense of realism into the choice of national interests, and focusing attention on the moral consequences of American foreign policies. For the right, the Vietnam syndrome fosters undue restraint on military and covert actions and impedes the pursuit of American interests in the world. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan called on the nation to “rid ourselves of the Vietnam syndrome” in order for America to regain its rightful place as leader of the free world. His administration’s failure to gain congressional or widespread public support for its actions in Central America suggests, however, that Reagan was unsuccessful in changing the national mood. By the end of his term, a national defense commission wrote that the loss in Vietnam “still casts a shadow over U.S. intervention anywhere.” Almost all public opinion polls since 1969 have shown that a majority of Americans believe the Vietnam War to have been a mistake. That belief, it has been suggested, has influenced the public’s perception of most or all American military actions since 1975. But policymakers on the right, particularly the neoconservatives, have tried to reshape the lessons of the Vietnam War. Following the U.S. victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush declared that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” The caution that was a legacy of Vietnam resurfaced, however, after the collapse of the humanitarian mission to Somalia in 1993. And surprisingly, conservatives resisted President Bill Clinton’s use of military action in Eastern Europe to stop ethnic cleansing in the civil wars that erupted as Yugoslavia disintegrated into independent nations. In the run up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, protestors again raised the specter of Vietnam, but a majority of Americans supported President George W. Bush’s plan to invade a foreign country. The ensuing counterinsurgency and civil war in Iraq eventually turned public opinion against U.S. involvement there, and many Americans contemplated the possible parallels with the Vietnam War. John Day Tully See also: American Century; Carter, Jimmy; Cold War; Communists and Communism; Ford, Gerald; My Lai Massacre; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Revisionist History; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam Veterans Memorial; War Powers Act; War Protesters.
Further Reading Hellman, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Herring, George. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.
Martin, Andrew. Receptions of War: Vietnam in American Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. McMahon, Robert. “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975–2001.” Diplomatic History 26:2 (2002): 159–84. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Summers, Harry G., Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982. Turner, Fred. Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.
Vigilantism In the United States, extralegal justice—or taking the law into one’s own hands—has been associated with civil rights abuses such as lynching. But in the 1960s and 1970s, different vigilante activities were used to protest laws and practices that discriminated based on race, ethnicity, and gender. New forms of vigilantism that have emerged in recent years include cyber-vigilantism, in which the focus is online sexual predators, terrorists, and fraudulent activities on the Internet. Members of the legal community view vigilantism as a social reaction to a perceived breakdown in law. Political scientists define it as violence aimed at changing the current political establishment. Psychologists tend to consider a vigilante’s motive before judging whether the action is antisocial or in the interest of society. Nevertheless, several typical, shared characteristics generally define vigilantism. It is more often a group activity than an individual act, for the purpose of changing or maintaining the status quo, often through force or violence. Since the overall goal is to restore or preserve the social order rather than destroy it, vigilante organizations are not necessarily considered hate groups, gangs, or terrorists. Also, since vigilante activity typically ceases once its immediate goal is fulfilled, vigilantism is not regarded as a social movement. A common target of vigilantes is perceived criminals. Many vigilantes seek to punish individuals they believe have broken the law but have not been brought to justice. These vigilantes believe that the criminal justice system fails to mete out appropriate punishments. This type of vigilantism is contradictory in nature because the vigilante responds to violence with violence. Crime-control vigilantes tend to favor capital punishment and oppose gun control laws, and some believe that self-defense is legally justified not only in response to direct threats to personal safety but also in response to minor trespassing on personal property. Some vigilantes see themselves as moral crusaders. They might oppose abortion or deny civil rights for ethnic minorities or immigrants. For example, the activities
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of the Minuteman Movement, which has patrolled the U.S.-Mexican border to curtail the flow of illegal immigrants, was castigated by President George W. Bush as vigilantism. In 1998, New York governor George Pataki called the murder of an abortion doctor “an act of terrorism.” Vigilantism can be viewed as both constructive and destructive. It is destructive because it undercuts due process so that the targets of vigilantism are persecuted without being proven guilty in a court of law. Vigilantism is often violent. Unlike the use of force by police, which is subject to rules and regulations, vigilante violence is uncontrolled. Liberals who support a justice system that protects due process rights for the accused tend to regard vigilantism as unwarranted and destructive. Others believe that vigilantes provide a necessary service to society. To some, vigilantes are victims of society who seek retribution for their suffering. Some view vigilantism as useful because it tries to correct societal and governmental flaws. Since the rise of television, movies, and comic books after World War II, cultural icons such as the Lone Ranger, Superman, Rambo, and Dirty Harry suggest that extralegal violence is a legitimate way to solve problems. Political conservatives, especially those who favor harsh punishments for crime and oppose abortion and gun control, are more likely to see vigilantism as constructive. Some supporters of these causes see vigilantism as a legitimate way of addressing what the law does not currently criminalize. Some political analysts foresee an increase in vigilantism if more Americans favor personal responsibility for actions over ensuring the due process rights of those accused of crimes. While no hard data exist on the frequency of vigilantism, the increase in political polarization of citizens suggests a trend in support of vigilante activity. Changes in public perception of crime may also increase support for vigilantism. While crime rates have decreased significantly in recent years, fear of crime among Americans has increased, with personal handgun sales rising as a result. In response to this increased fear of crime, harsher punishments for street crimes have been implemented, primarily based on demands by conservative politicians and their constituents. These harsh laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and “three strikes” laws, are seen as excessive by political liberals. Conservatives who support these laws may be more likely to support vigilantism that uses harsh punishments above those specified by law. Definitions of vigilantism vary, but most scholars agree that vigilantism involves the extralegal use of force to either change or maintain the status quo. The debate regarding vigilantism is whether it is a constructive or destructive activity. Conservatives are more likely to see vigilantism as a useful way to supplement legal forms of
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social control, while liberals view vigilantism as a violation of the due process rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Vigilantism may become a more politically charged issue as conservative politicians continue to run on platforms that support harsh penalties for crime and the criminalization of illegal immigration and abortion. Stephanie L. Kent and Candace Griffith See also: Civil Rights Movement; Comic Books; Ecoterrorism; Gangs; Goetz, Bernhard; Guardian Angels; Hate Crimes; Illegal Immigrants; Lynching; Militia Movement; Operation Rescue; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Rudolph, Eric; Sex Offenders.
Further Reading Culberson, William C. Vigilantism: Political History of Private Power in America. New York: Greenwood, 1990. Hine, Kelly D. “Vigilantism Revisited: An Economic Analysis of the Law of Extra-Judicial Self-Help, or Why Can’t Dick Shoot Henry for Stealing Jane’s Truck?” American University Law Review 47 (1998): 1221–55. Johnston, Les. “What Is Vigilantism?” British Journal of Criminology 36 (1996): 220–36. Tucker, William. Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America. New York: Stein and Day, 1985.
Vo e g e l i n , E r i c A political philosopher, Eric Voegelin specialized in the Western political and spiritual ideas that he called “the Mediterranean tradition.” He contributed to the American culture wars by arguing that liberalism has links with totalitarianism. Born Eric Herman Wilhelm Voegelin on January 3, 1901, in Cologne, Germany, he studied and taught at the University of Vienna (PhD, 1922) before escaping from Nazi Austria in 1938. He became an American citizen in 1944 and held positions at Louisiana State University (1943–1958), the University of Munich (1958–1969), and the Hoover Institution (1969–1985). Although many of Voegelin’s writings, including the multivolume Order and History (1956–1987), are beyond the reach of general readers, conservative leaders such as William F. Buckley, Jr., succeeded in popularizing the philosopher’s indictment of utopian schemes and, by extension, liberal politics. In his study of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity, Voegelin concluded that Gnosticism (an early variant of Christianity) was the consequence of alienation resulting from the failed quest to find spiritual transcendence in the material world. He extended his conclusion to the modern era, suggesting that totalitarianism, or any other situation in which leaders of a state attempt to create an ideal society, is Gnostic in essence.
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Conservative intellectuals, co-opting his ideas to advance their political undertakings, typically quote from chapter four of Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952), where he criticizes attempts to create heaven on earth: “The problem of an edios [form] in history . . . arises only when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized [literalized]. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton [the fulfillment of end times], however, is a theoretical fallacy.” Exploiting that reflection as a condemnation of liberalism, Buckley recast it in soundbite form: “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton!” This Voegelin-inspired nugget was Buckley’s campaign slogan in his 1965 bid to become mayor of New York, running against the Republican liberal candidate John Lindsay. Buckley, a candidate of the newly formed Conservative Party, received only 13 percent of the vote. The group Young Americans for Freedom, which Buckley helped form in 1961, also made use of the slogan. The twentieth-anniversary issue of Buckley’s National Review credited Voegelin with helping to establish the philosophical foundations of the modern American conservative movement. Ironically, Voegelin, a rejecter of “isms,” did not wish to be associated with conservatism. Voegelin’s assertion that the misappropriation of religious symbols constitutes the major error of modern times can serve as a critique against the conservative movement’s embrace of the Religious Right. Christian conservatives have criticized Voegelin’s writings for reflecting a negative bias against Christianity and failing to highlight its positive contributions to Western civilization. Voegelin died on January 19, 1985, leaving political theorists with texts to ponder. It has been argued that his writings are actually radical and not conservative. Some have associated Voegelin with the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who also emigrated to America while fleeing from Nazism. Roger Chapman See also: American Civil Religion; Buckley, William F., Jr.; National Review; New Deal; Religious Right; Student Conservatives; Strauss, Leo.
Further Reading Federici, Michael P. Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002. Jardine, Murray. “Eric Voegelin’s Interpretation(s) of Modernity: A Reconstruction of the Spiritual and Political Implications of Voegelin’s Therapeutic Analysis.” Review of Politics 57 (1995): 581–605. Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
Vo t i n g R i g h t s Ac t On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed
into law the Voting Rights Act (VRA), passed by Congress two days earlier to protect the rights of black voters. Although the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870, granted the right to vote without regard to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” African Americans in the South were often denied this right, even after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. The VRA prohibited any voting requirements with a discriminatory purpose or effect, and gave the federal government unprecedented authority to reject any election practices that could keep minorities from voting. Since its initial passage, the VRA has been extended and amended in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006. On March 7, 1965, millions of Americans watched on television as state troopers using tear gas, bullwhips, and billy clubs spurred their horses into a crowd of peaceful civil rights protestors marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The marchers had been demonstrating for black voter rights in the South. At a joint session of Congress eight days later, President Johnson adopted the refrain of the anthem of the civil rights movement, stating, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” The voting rights bill that Johnson sent to Congress on March 17 sought to reverse almost a century of opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. Critics of the VRA objected to the federal government’s interference in the state and local election process. Further, southern whites knew that it represented the potential for a tremendous shift in political power. In Selma, for example, home to 15,000 blacks and 14,000 whites, the enfranchisement of minority voters gave African Americans new and real political opportunity. Almost immediately after being into signed into law, the VRA was challenged in federal court by several southern states. In the case of South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legislation, ruling that Congress did have the power to suspend literacy tests previously required of African-American voters, particularly since illiterate whites had never been denied the vote. Passage of the VRA inspired creative political responses at the state level. Redistricting, for example, became a tactic used by politicians eager to control the outcome of statewide elections. Redrawn boundary lines sometimes created predominately white or AfricanAmerican districts whose proponents were accused of gerrymandering. The city of Atlanta, Georgia, with a 52 percent African-American population, was split into three smaller, predominantly white districts that opponents argued gave whites an unfair number of congressional seats. When the U.S. Department of Justice intervened,
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the districts were redrawn yet again to give African Americans more representation. Critics have argued that the tendency to carve “minority” congressional districts results in political polarization based on race because, in the “majority” districts, the usually white elected members to Congress can safely ignore issues that are important to minority voters because they are not of equal concern to constituents. Although Congress voted in July 2006 to reauthorize the VRA for another twenty-five years, some critics, mostly Republican, suggested that the law had outlived its usefulness. They contended that the provision requiring certain jurisdictions to seek permission from the U.S. Justice Department prior to making any change in local election laws was bureaucratic overkill. Certain critics also objected to the VRA’s multilingual requirement for when there are many foreign-speaking voters, believing that ballots written in English should suffice. Despite the objections, President George W. Bush signed the extension on July 27. In the meantime, states such as Indiana passed laws requiring voters to bring to the polls governmentproduced picture identification cards (e.g., a driver’s license), arguing that such a measure would reduce voter
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fraud. Liberal critics believe that this trend goes against the spirit of the VRA, arguing that the true motive behind the requirement for ID cards is to place obstacles in the way of largely Democratic voters—minorities, the poor, and the elderly (people less likely to have a driver’s license and naturally reluctant to spend money acquiring the necessary documentation). That concern was rebuffed 6–3 by the Supreme Court, which in April 2008 upheld the Indiana law. Sara Hyde See also: Civil Rights Movement; English as the Official Language; Great Society; Johnson, Lyndon B.
Further Reading Epstein, David L., Richard H. Pildes, Rodolfo O. de la Garza, and Sharyn O’Halloran, eds. The Future of the Voting Rights Act. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. Grofman, Bernard, and Chandler Davidson, eds. Controversies in Minority Voting: The Voting Rights Act in Perspective. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1992. Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Wa c o S i e g e The Waco siege of February–April 1993, a fifty-oneday standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidians, a religious cult led by David Koresh, outside Waco, Texas, was one of the longest and largest police actions in U.S. history, involving nearly 700 local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. The fiery end of the situation was viewed by many political conservatives, especially those of the militia movement, as the result of an unnecessary and inordinate use of government force. The Branch Davidians, a sect of the Seventh Day Adventists dating to 1929, had come under federal scrutiny for alleged firearms violations. Taking a millennialist interpretation of the Bible, believing in a restoration of the Davidic Kingdom, Koresh and his followers lived in a secluded community they called Mount Carmel, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) east of Waco, where they awaited the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Koresh, who became the group’s leader in 1988, emphasized apocalyptic doctrines, focusing on the Book of Revelation and the meaning of its Seven Seals. Revelation predicts that a chosen one, identified as the “Lamb of God,” will open the seals and initiate an apocalyptic confrontation with God. Koresh claimed to have had a vision in 1989 in which it was revealed that he was this chosen one and that God’s confrontation would be with the United States. On February 28, 1993, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) attempted to serve warrants to search the Davidian compound for illegally stockpiled weapons and to arrest Koresh for abusing children. As warrants were being served, however, gunfire from the compound was said to have resulted in the deaths of four ATF agents and the wounding of more than a dozen others. In addition, five Davidians were killed and four others, including Koresh, were injured in the exchange. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took over as the lead law enforcement agency at the site. Negotiators tried to convince Koresh over the telephone to surrender peacefully while a hostage rescue team surrounded the compound with tanks. The situation became a standoff when, on the second day of negotiations, Koresh reneged on an agreement that he come out of the compound in exchange for a one-hour airing of his teachings on the Seven Seals over the Christian Broadcasting Network. After the broadcast, minutes before he was to come out, Koresh claimed that God spoke to him and told him to wait. This brought the negotiations to an impasse and produced a conflicting view of the situation—as well as a kind of culture clash—between the
cult members inside and federal agents outside. The FBI viewed it as a barricade situation, in which the Davidians were seen as perpetrators who shot and killed federal law enforcement officers, possessed hundreds of firearms and countless rounds of ammunition, and were led by a man whose mental stability was in question. The Davidians, on the other hand, saw themselves as standing on a moral and spiritual high ground against the earthly law of the U.S. government. For the Branch Davidians, surrendering meant either renouncing their beliefs or literally handing themselves over to Satan. Twenty-two days into the standoff, federal agents began using tactics to coax the Davidians out, such as cutting the electricity and flooding the area at night with bright lights and annoying sounds to cause sleep deprivation. On the forty-fifth day, Koresh promised to come out after he had documented his understanding of the Seven Seals. By that time, however, U.S. attorney general Janet Reno had approved a plan to force the Davidians out with tear gas. During the raid on the morning of April 19, the compound caught fire. According to the FBI, thirty-five people left the compound during the standoff, nine survived the fire, five bodies were found freshly buried (from the gunfight on February 28), and seventy-five were found burned to death. Several issues concerning the standoff were disputed in the aftermath, including the purpose of the Davidians’s large inventory of weapons, which side shot first on February 28, and which side was responsible for the April 19 fire. The FBI initially denied charges that it had fired pyrotechnic grenades into the compound but later admitted that it had. The incident also generated sympathy for the Davidians among various members of the citizens’ militia movement, including Timothy McVeigh, whose April 1995 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was, in part, revenge for what happened at Waco. Robert R. Agne See also: Gun Control; Liddy, G. Gordon; McVeigh, Timothy; Militia Movement.
Further Reading Docherty, Jayne Seminare. Learning Lessons from Waco: When the Parties Bring Their Gods to the Table. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Lewis, James R., ed. From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. Tabor, James D., and Eugene V. Gallagher. Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Wright, Stuart, ed. Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 586
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Wa l l S t re e t J o u r n a l , T h e With an average daily paid circulation of more than 2 million, the Wall Street Journal is the second-widestcirculating newspaper in the United States (exceeded only by USA Today) and, with the Financial Times of London, the most influential financial daily in the English-speaking world. The New York–based paper was first published in 1889, converted from a stock and bond trade sheet called the Customer’s Afternoon Letter. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Journal— published by Dow Jones & Company until December 2007, when it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation—emerged as one of the nation’s most respected dailies, read and relied on by business leaders, government officials, and professionals. Although known for its rigidly neoconservative editorial page, the Journal over the years has enjoyed a sterling reputation among readers of all political stripes for its balanced and informative news and business articles, as well as long and sometimes whimsical feature pieces, all packaged in a gray and dull format without sports section, comics, or photographs. The financial information and publishing firm Dow Jones & Company, of which the Wall Street Journal was the longtime flagship, was founded in 1882 by three journalists, Charles H. Dow, Edward D. Jones, and Charles M. Bergstresser. The company was purchased
The venerable Wall Street Journal, America’s leading financial daily, is guided by unabashedly “free market and free people” principles. Here the paper reports on the takeover of its parent corporation, Dow Jones & Company, by media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 2007. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)
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in 1902 by Clarence Walker Barron, who eventually left his publishing companies, including the Journal, to his adopted daughter, Jane Waldron Bancroft. In 2007, Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch—owner of the conservative Fox News Channel among many other holdings—acquired Dow Jones & Company for more than $5 billion (paying $60 per share for stock that had been trading for $36). Under the ownership of the Bancroft family, the Journal had been allowed to operate with a level of editorial independence cherished by the staff, which made the News Corporation takeover a source of concern to it. Before the deal was completed, therefore, the Bancroft family exacted an agreement from Murdoch that the Journal’s editorial page would retain its independence and that a wall would be maintained between the editorial and news departments. Some observers nevertheless predicted that it was only a matter of time before Murdoch would compromise the journalistic integrity of the paper, making it “more Wall Street, less journal.” The Wall Street Journal became a major American newspaper under the guidance of managing editor Bernard Kilgore (1942–1967), who broadened its focus from the traditional emphasis on business, stocks, and bonds to encompass domestic and international economics, politics, and society. Near the end of Kilgore’s watch, the paper’s circulation surpassed 1 million. Although typically conservative in its editorial pronouncements— supportive of tax cuts and supply-side economics and against welfare programs, communism, and tort attorneys—the Journal has at times gone against the grain of conservative thinking. In 1968, for example, the paper recommended an end to the Vietnam War. The Journal also supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) legalizing abortion. Robert L. Bartley, chief of the Journal’s editorial page from 1972 to 2002, created controversy by putting his conservative stamp on the paper, once declaring, “Journalistically, my proudest boast is that I’ve run the only editorial page in the country that actually sells newspapers.” Some African Americans, however, have charged that the Journal’s stance against major civil rights legislation, affirmative action programs, and the Martin Luther King, Jr., national holiday signifies long-running racism. The Journal has taken significant heat in recent years on the issue of immigration, supporting a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens, which many conservatives regard as “amnesty” for lawbreakers. Todd Scribner and Roger Chapman See also: Affirmative Action; Civil Rights Movement; Immigration Policy; Media Bias; Murdoch, Rupert; Neoconservatism; Roe v. Wade (1973); Supply-Side Economics; Vietnam War.
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Further Reading Dealy, Francis X. The Power and the Money: Inside the Wall Street Journal. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1993. Rosenberg, Jerry Martin. Inside the Wall Street Journal: The History and the Power of Dow Jones & Company and America’s Most Influential Newspaper. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Scharff, Edward. Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal. New York: A Plume Book, 1986. “Waiting for Gigot: Blacks May Applaud the Changing of the Guard at the Wall Street Journal.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 36 (Summer 2002): 72–74. Wall Street Journal Web site. www.online.wsj.com.
Wa l l a c e , G e o r g e One of the most controversial political figures of the 1960s and 1970s, George Wallace was a Democratic governor of Alabama notorious for his outspoken defiance of antisegregationist policies and court orders before settling on a more moderate conservative agenda. As a populist figure, he was one of the first politicians to resonate with white blue-collar voters, who lauded him as a southerner who stood up to federal encroachments on states’ rights and rebuffed hippie hecklers in his campaign appearances. Others loathed him as a racebaiter and potential fascist. Some believe that Wallace’s main role in the culture wars was as a harbinger of the conservative agenda of Richard Nixon, and later Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Born George Corley Wallace in Clio, Alabama, on August 25, 1919, he studied law at the University of Alabama (LLB, 1942). A lawyer, part-time boxer, and flight engineer in the Pacific Theater during World War II (1942–1945), Wallace began his political career as a progressive Democrat. Returning to Alabama after the war, he served as assistant attorney general (1946–1947), representative in the state assembly (1947–1953), and judge in the third judicial district (1953–1959). His lifelong dream of becoming governor was shattered, if only temporarily, when John Patterson defeated him in the 1958 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Wallace attributed the defeat to his opponent’s extreme views on race relations, which he copied in his successful 1962 bid for the governorship against “Big Jim” Folson. Wallace occupied the governor’s office for a total of four terms (1963–1967, 1971–1979, and 1983–1987), while entering national politics as a presidential aspirant four times (1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976). As governor, Wallace became a leading opponent of the civil rights movement. In his January 14, 1963, inaugural address, he famously pledged to uphold “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” Another promise to oppose desegregation in schools, by standing at the schoolhouse door if necessary, led to a televised confrontation at the University of Alabama later that year in which he attempted to bar two
black students from entering; he finally stepped aside at the behest of a federal attorney and the National Guard. Claiming that he was defending states’ rights from federal judicial activism, Wallace was popular among white Alabamians, but two further incidents marred his reputation nationwide. In September 1963, four black girls died after white extremists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; Wallace was accused of fanning the racial hatred that led to the incident. And in March 1965, demonstrators marching in support of black voting rights were violently dispersed by police as they crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; again, blame accrued to the state’s segregationist governor. Barred by the Alabama state constitution from running for a second term as governor in 1966 (a restriction later lifted), Wallace convinced his wife, Lurleen Burns Wallace, to run for the office, which she won. She died two years later, however, and George Wallace was reelected in his own right in 1970. After serving two more terms, and a hiatus in the early 1980s, Wallace put together an unlikely coalition of blacks and whites, recanted his segregationist past, and won a final term in 1982. In national politics, meanwhile, Wallace had run for president in 1964 as a conservative defender of “law and order” and family values, and an opponent of welfare, communism, and the youth counterculture. He avoided the overtly racist rhetoric he had used as governor, but critics asserted that his attacks against “welfare queens” and inner-city riots were thinly veiled racial slurs. Still, Wallace’s skill and wit on the campaign trail attracted significant support in his campaigns for president. In 1964, he made a surprisingly strong showing in the Wisconsin primary, but lost the Democratic nomination to Lyndon Johnson. Running as a third-party candidate in 1968, representing the American Independent Party, he came close to throwing the election to the House of Representatives when he carried five southern states despite vice-presidential running mate Curtis LeMay’s unpopular stance on the use of nuclear weapons. Running as a Democrat again in 1972, he won the Florida primary but was felled in an assassination attempt while campaigning that May, leaving him partially paralyzed for life. He became a born-again Christian in the late 1970s, and his racial views mellowed with age. In private encounters, he apologized to civil rights leaders Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Coretta Scott King, and Ralph Abernathy for his segregationist policies and rhetoric. Wallace died in Montgomery on September 13, 1998. Philippe R. Girard See also: Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Democratic Party; Gingrich, Newt; Johnson, Lyndon B.; LeMay, Curtis; McGovern, George; Parks, Rosa; Race; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Party.
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Further Reading Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Lesher, Stephen. George Wallace: American Populist. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Rohler, Lloyd. George Wallace: Conservative Populist. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Wallace, George C. Stand Up for America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
Wa l l i s , J i m Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine, is an evangelical pastor-activist whose work is devoted to applying biblical principles to causes of poverty and social justice. He is known for his prophetic style in addressing social problems. Wallis was born into an evangelical family, affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren, on June 4, 1948, near Detroit, Michigan. Exposed to the 1960s counterculture during his youth, he quit the Boy Scouts, grew his hair long, and was profoundly unsettled by the Detroit race riots in 1967. He attended the University of Michigan (BS, 1970), where he joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and participated in the antiwar and civil rights movements. Sensing that evangelicalism was ignoring real-life concerns, Wallis turned to the Sermon on the Mount for his guide. At Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois (1970–1972), he and other students formed a Christian community emphasizing radical discipleship and started the magazine Post-American, later renamed Sojourners. The group, called the Sojourners Community, eventually moved to the nation’s capital to address injustice at local and national levels. Sojourners has devoted itself to concerns of the urban poor such as housing, food, tutoring children, and gentrification. In 1995, Wallis helped form a national “Call to Renewal,” uniting faith-based communities and leaders across the theological spectrum to overcome poverty. Based in evangelical Protestantism but with political commitments at the progressive end of the political spectrum, he has been consistently critical of the politics of the Religious Right. At the same time, he insists that Democrats must incorporate a concern for moral values. His double-edged sword approach to political criticism is evident in his best-selling book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (2004). Wallis’s activism has aroused opposition in fundamentalist and conservative Christian circles; Jerry Falwell, for example, likened him to Hitler. Sojourners in 2006 launched “The Covenant for a New America” campaign to address social responsibility for such recurring problems as the breakdown of
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the family, persistent poverty in the United States, and global poverty. Wallis has advocated on behalf of these causes through a nationwide lecture circuit in a townmeeting style to stimulate discussion about issues of faith and social justice. Many of his social concerns are shared by the evangelists Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, and Rick Warren. Susan Pearce See also: Boy Scouts of America; Campolo, Anthony “Tony”; Civil Rights Movement; Counterculture; Evangelicalism; Falwell, Jerry; Fundamentalism, Religious; Religious Right; Sider, Ron; Students for a Democratic Society; Vietnam War; Warren, Rick.
Further Reading Mangu-Ward, K. “God’s Democrat.” Weekly Standard, April 11, 2005. Wallis, Jim. God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. Revive Us Again: A Sojourner’s Story. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983. ———. The Soul of Politics: A Practical and Prophetic Vision for Change. New York: New Press, 1994. ———. Who Speaks for God? An Alternative to the Religious Right—A New Politics of Compassion, Community, and Civility. New York: Delacorte, 1996.
Wa l - M a r t A retailer that sells consumer goods and groceries at low prices, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., in 2008 operated more than 4,000 stores in fifty states with 1.4 million employees (while also maintaining 3,000 overseas stores with 620,000 employees), making it the world’s largest company and private-sector employer. Known for its large, box-shaped stores—including Wal-Mart supercenters and discount stores, Neighborhood Markets, and Sam’s Club warehouses—the company has for years been a source of controversy in the American culture wars. Although designated the “most admired company” by Fortune magazine (2003 and 2004), hailed by investors for its eleven 100 percent stock splits (1971–1999), mentioned approvingly in Gretchen Wilson’s debut hit single “Redneck Woman” (2004; with its lines, “Victoria’s Secret, well their stuff’s real nice / But I can buy the same damn thing on a Wal-Mart shelf half price”), and praised by conservative think tanks for saving the average American family $2,500 annually (2007), Wal-Mart has also been a subject of vilification. The company has been spoofed as “Stuff Mart” in the VeggieTales animation film Madame Blueberry (1998), portrayed as a mistrusting and ungenerous employer in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed (2001), criticized for lacking social responsibility in Robert Greenwald’s “mockumentary” film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), and
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lampooned as an Orwellian nightmare in the musical satire Walmartopia (2007). In the mid-2000s, the company began an effort to soften its public image by adding three women and two blacks to its board of directors; announcing improved health benefits for its employees; calling for an increase in the federal minimum wage; and promising major environmental initiatives, some of which provoked social conservatives to criticize Wal-Mart for capitulating to “political correctness.” Founded in 1962 by Sam Walton and based in Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart is a company operating with “red state” values, having originated in the South and originally restricting store openings to small towns with population sizes of 5,000 or less. From the onset, women employees were paid less than men and not considered for management positions because it was assumed that they were farm wives, not “bread winners” or careerists. The anti-union Walton designated his employees “associates” to promote management and store workers as a team. As he bought in bulk from producers (not wholesalers), he passed on the discount to consumers, realizing that it would lead to higher sales volume and greater profitability. Also, in terms of stocking its shelves, the company has relied on “family values” as a guide, following red-state sensibilities (media materials containing nudity and any recorded music with parental warning labels are banned; as was the “morning after” or Plan B contraceptive pill until courts overruled). Soon after Walton retired as chief executive officer in 1988—he was succeeded by David Glass (1988–2000), H. Lee Scott, Jr. (2000–2009), and Michael T. Duke (2009– )—the company rose to higher levels, becoming the nation’s number one retailer in 1990 and opening its first overseas store in Mexico City the following year. By 1995, Wal-Mart was present in all fifty states, operating 1,200 stores. In the 2000s, as Wal-Mart expanded in major urban centers of the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and West Coast, criticism of the company ramped up. Fostering the negative image of Wal-Mart has been the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which in 2005 launched the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign. In 2000, the meat cutters at a Wal-Mart store in Jacksonville, Texas, had actually voted to join this union, but soon afterwards Wal-Mart headquarters announced that it no longer needed butchers since it would start buying prepackaged “case-ready” meat from wholesalers. (On the overseas side, Wal-Mart in 2005 closed a profitable store in Quebec, Canada, after employees voted to unionize, but in 2006 it reluctantly agreed to accept unionization of its stores in China.) The debate concerning Wal-Mart is largely about American-style capitalism in the era of globalization and to what degree social responsibility is to be connected with it. Critics fault Wal-Mart for (1) price-squeezing its 56,000 suppliers and accelerating outsourcing for
cheaper labor costs (sometimes using sweatshops) at the expense of American jobs (and consequently providing China an easy in-road to the U.S. market); (2) providing inadequate pay and benefits to its workers (wages often near the federal poverty level), encouraging them to rely on government social services (in 2008, only 52 percent of Wal-Mart employees were on company-sponsored health insurance), discriminating against female and minority employees (in 2001, a nationwide class-action lawsuit pertaining to gender discrimination was filed against Wal-Mart on behalf of 1.6 million past and present female employees), and sometimes cheating workers of pay that is due (in 2008, the company agreed to an out-of-court settlement of between $352 million and $640 million for violating wage and labor laws in forty-two states); (3) disrupting the social fabric of local communities by driving “mom-and-pop” stores out of business while exacting enormous tax breaks (about $4 million per site, according to a 2004 estimate); and (4) monopolizing retailing to the point that consumer choices are limited (dubbed “Wal-Martization”) while policing American culture by refusing to carry items it finds objectionable. Critics such as Wal-Mart Watch suggest that the consumer savings the company provides are undermined by the burden that is placed on taxpayers. From this perspective, Wal-Mart is not paying its fair share since it relies on government—federal, state, and local—to subsidize its operation through tax abatements (which are seldom granted to small businesses) and social services provided to Wal-Mart employees who are not receiving a living wage. According to Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, a February 2004 report prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Education and Workforce Committee, Wal-Mart employees that year possibly cost the federal government $2.5 billion in social services including Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, and free school lunches. Defenders of WalMart dispute the report, calling it partisan research, and emphasize the $4 billion the company paid in taxes that year. No matter, they say, Wal-Mart is not obligated to pay higher wages and benefits for unskilled labor. Some state governments, however, think Wal-Mart should be forced to pay for social services utilized by its employees if it refuses to upgrade benefits. In 2006, for example, Maryland, specifically targeting Wal-Mart, passed a law requiring any company with 10,000 or more employees to devote 8 percent of its payroll toward health insurance or else reimburse the state for medical services rendered; the measure was later overturned for violating federal law. Roger Chapman See also: Censorship; China; Environmental Movement; Family Values; Globalization; Health Care; Illegal Immigrants; Labor Unions; Red and Blue States; Wealth Gap.
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Further Reading Bianco, Anthony. The Bully of Bentonville: How the Cost of WalMart’s Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America. New York: Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Head, Simon. “Inside the Leviathan.” New York Review of Books, December 16, 2004. Vedder, Richard K., and Wendell Cox. The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big-Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2006. Wake-Up Wal-Mart Web site. www.wakeupwalmart.com. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Web site. www.walmartstores.com.
Wa l t D i s n ey C o m p a ny Synonymous with the best and worst of American culture, depending on who is being asked, the Walt Disney Company—originally called Walt Disney Productions—continues to flourish long after the death of its namesake in 1966. Launched in 1923 as a producer of silent cartoons, the company has gone on to produce and market motion pictures, television programs, theme parks, music, books, comics, and character merchandise under one internationally renowned brand name. Those businesses, combined with its ownership of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), cable networks, film studios, sports franchises, and other leading brands and companies, have made Disney a leading “multimedia corporation” of the twenty-first century. As adored as its movies and theme parks remain for millions of consumers worldwide, however, the company has not escaped ridicule for its commercialism, pop-culture romanticism, and unfair labor practices. Beginning in 1996, Disney was boycotted for more than eight years by the conservative Southern Baptist Convention because of its support of gay rights and for permitting “Gay Days” at Disney World. The first major breakthrough for the California-based company came in 1928 with the appearance of a scrappy little mouse named Mickey in the cartoon animation Steamboat Willie. Over the next decade, Mickey Mouse starred in almost a hundred films, ensuring economic stability for the company despite the Great Depression. Further success came with Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which became the highest-grossing movie of its time and won a special Academy Award for “screen innovation.” Profits from the film were used to build Disney Studios in Burbank, California. One of the first major motion picture producers to go into television, Disney launched the series Disneyland on ABC in October 1954. An entertaining mix of cartoons and live-action features, the show unabashedly promoted upcoming Disney films and the new theme park Disneyland, which opened in 1955 in Anaheim, California. Family-oriented Disney films included 20,000 Leagues
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Under the Sea (1954), Old Yeller (1957), Toby Tyler (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Son of Flubber (1963), and That Darn Cat! (1965). Disney and ABC tapped into the growing baby boom market by premiering the Mickey Mouse Club, an hour-long children’s afternoon program that ran five days a week from 1955 to 1959. Not only did the Club help guarantee Mickey Mouse’s place in popular culture, but it also proved to be a bonanza for advertisers, who used Disney characters to sell a myriad of kid-friendly products. Jack Gould, TV critic for the New York Times, groused that he had never seen “a children’s program—or an adult’s for that matter—that was quite as commercial as Mr. Disney’s.” Almost everything associated with the Disney name became an instant success. In 1966 alone, some 240 million people watched a Disney movie, 100 million a week watched a Disney television show, 80 million read a Disney book, 50 million listened to Disney records, and 7 million visited Disneyland. The New York Times eulogized Walt Disney as “probably the only man to have been praised by both the American Legion and the Soviet Union.” Indeed, one of the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s disappointments about his 1959 visit to the United States was his inability to visit Disneyland due to security concerns. Despite this popularity—or perhaps because of it— the company has consistently attracted critical scrutiny. In a 1965 letter to the Los Angeles Times, UCLA librarian and faculty member Frances Clarke Sayers famously accused Disney of debasing the “traditional literature of childhood.” “Every story is sacrificed to the ‘gimmick’ . . . of animation,” she argued, and called Disney’s “cliché-ridden” books “laughable.” Since then, the terms “Disneyfication” and “Disneyization” have been used as pejoratives to describe places and concepts that are overly simplified, sanitized, or blatantly romanticized. Disney theme parks, including Disney World in Orlando, Florida (which opened in 1971), have been especially maligned for presenting an unrealistically homogenized world in which everyone is happy. Disney World’s EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which opened in 1982, has been criticized for its uncritical promotion of “futuristic technologies,” its excessively advertised corporate sponsorship of particular pavilions, and its sugar-coated “American Adventure” history lesson, which presents a national narrative void of controversy. For many, “The Happiest Place on Earth” is actually a ruthless corporation that exploits its workers and goes to “greedy” lengths to enforce its copyright protections. In 1993, as Disney faced criticism for underpaying its lower-level workers and taking advantage of sweatshops in developing countries, corporate head Michael Eisner was the highest-paid CEO in the United States, receiv-
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ing a $203 million salary-and-benefits package. Over the years, various nonprofits have called for a boycott of Disney products. In 2001, the company held the dubious distinction of being named “Sweatshop Retailer of the Year” by the Canadian Labour Congress. The National Labor Committee in New York, which tracks American corporate use of sweatshop labor, once called Disney one of the “greediest sweatshop abusers.” Also generating negative publicity has been the company’s aggressive approach in going after violators of Disney copyright. In 1989, for example, it threatened legal action against three day-care providers in Florida for having unauthorized murals with Disney characters. In 1997, the company demanded remuneration from the U.S. Postal Service for plans to print commemorative postage stamps with Disney characters; the stamps were never issued. Christian groups, such as the American Family Association and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, have also attacked Disney for abandoning its “wholesome” image by releasing violent and controversial films, such as Pulp Fiction (1994) and Priest (1995), through its subsidiary production company Miramax. Controversy also centered on some the content of certain animated films—including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), in which Jessica Rabbit’s dress blows up, revealing that she is not wearing underwear, and Lion King (1994), with its alleged homosexual characters and a dust cloud that spells “SEX.” In 1996, the national convention of Southern Baptists voted to boycott all Disney theme parks and stores after the company agreed to offer health care coverage to the partners of gay employees and because of its unofficial hosting of “Gay Days” (every first Saturday in June since 1991) at Disney World. In 1997, when the company’s TV network ballyhooed Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out as a lesbian on the sitcom Ellen, the ban was expanded to include all Disney publications, movies, and radio and television shows. The boycott, which lasted until 2005, had no apparent impact on Disney, however, as the popularity of its products continued to soar. Cindy Mediavilla See also: Blackface; Family Values; Gay Capital; Labor Unions; Outing; Southern Baptist Convention; Wildmon, Donald.
Further Reading Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Griffin, Sean. “Curiouser and Curiouser: Gay Days at Disney Theme Parks.” Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, ed. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch, 125–50. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Schweizer, Peter, and Rochelle Schweizer. Disney: The Mouse Betrayed. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1998. Smoodin, Eric, ed. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Wa r o n D r u g s As a much-debated culture wars issue, the U.S. war on drugs has engendered two opposing positions: generally speaking, conservatives emphasize law enforcement, while liberals emphasize rehabilitation treatment and education. For the first group, the drug problem is a criminal issue that necessitates a reduction in the supply of all illegal substances—tracking down and arresting distributors; seizing their supplies; and carrying out military interdiction wherever necessary, including foreign countries, to eliminate the source of drugs. For the second group, the drug problem is primarily a public health issue that is best solved by curbing the demand for drugs. Beyond issues of emphasis and ideology, the two sides have also debated vigorously over the very success or failure of the war on drugs: while one side points to the decline in drug abuse by young people, the other notes that Americans continued to lead the world in consumption of marijuana and cocaine in 2008. Although federal regulation of illicit drugs dates to the early 1900s, when the Harrison Narcotics Act (1914) limited the manufacture, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine to medical and scientific uses, the modern war on drugs began during the administration of President Richard Nixon. A disdainer of the counterculture movement, in particular its permissiveness and irreverence toward authority, Nixon singled out drugs as “a serious national threat” during a speech to Congress on July 14, 1969. The following year, Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, consolidating the nation’s drug laws and establishing five categories of illegal substances and the penalties for their distribution. On June 17, 1971, declaring illicit substances “public enemy No. 1,” Nixon called for a “war on drugs.” In 1973, he established by executive order the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to head the federal effort in “an all-out global war on the drug menace.” During the 1980s, as cocaine use became more prevalent in American society, Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (1984), establishing mandatory prison sentences for drug offenders and broadening the government’s ability to seize the assets of drug dealers. The provision for stiffer federal penalties, following a trend introduced by New York in the 1970s, led to a lengthening of the average drug-related prison sentence from 48.1 months in 1980 to 84 months in 1990. Between 1985 and 1992, federal law enforcement agencies hauled in billions of dollars from seized assets, but not without complaints about violations of due process as agents confiscated money and vehicles often based on circumstantial evidence. Following the fatal cocaine overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias in 1986, Congress, at the urging of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill,
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Jr. (D-MA), passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Controversially, this new law brought race politics into the mix by making a legal distinction between crack cocaine and powder cocaine, establishing stiffer penalties for possession of the former, which was especially prominent among poor urban blacks. (Following years of acrimonious debate, federal mandatory sentencing guidelines for crack were reduced in 2007.) The decade of the 1980s marked the beginning of a major effort to warn schoolchildren of the harm of drugs. In 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department began the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) pilot program, aimed at fifth and sixth graders, to teach against substance abuse. The program would later expand to other grade levels and be adopted nationally as well as overseas. In 1984, First Lady Nancy Reagan introduced the slogan “Just Say No” as a public campaign to combat the peer pressure often associated with drug usage. Five years later, with heroin emerging as the new problem drug, President George H.W. Bush bolstered efforts at drug deterrence by creating the Office of National Drug Control Policy and appointing William J. Bennett as the nation’s first “drug czar.” Skeptics over the years have characterized the various antidrug programs as alarmist and ineffectual. Others cite a University of Michigan survey titled Monitoring the Future, which indicated that while 54.2 percent of high school seniors used illicit drugs in 1979, the figure dropped to 38.5 percent in 1988 and 32.5 percent in 1990, rose to 42.4 percent in 1997, and then declined to 36 percent in 2007—all said to be the result of the war on drugs. Some have argued that the war on drugs has been an inordinate economic burden. According to the New York Times, the federal government in 2007 spent $1.4 billion on foreign antidrug assistance, including aerialspray eradication of coca crops in the Andes; $7 billion on drug enforcement overseas and at home; and $5 billion on education and treatment to curb American drug use. Although the annual budget of the DEA increased from less than $75 million in 1973 to $2.4 billion in 2008, and its manpower expanded from 1,470 special agents to 5,235 during that same period, cocaine, heroin, and other illicit substances continued to be smuggled into the country. (Many drugs also originate in the United States, including marijuana, PCP, mescaline, ecstasy, methamphetamine, and various prescription painkillers.) Meanwhile, the number of drug-related federal incarcerations increased from 40,000 in 1980 to nearly 500,000 in 2008. In the period from 1985 to 2000, nonviolent drug offenses accounted for 65 percent of the rise in the federal prison population. In 2008, federal and state governments spent nearly $55 billion keeping 2.3 million drug offenders behind bars. New York that year spent $500 million housing its drug-related convicts.
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Staunch critics of the war on drugs regard it as a failure on par with Prohibition and recommend that marijuana, the most commonly used illicit drug, be decriminalized or legalized. According to the National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health, 20.4 million Americans (8.3 percent of the population) engaged in illegal drug use in 2006. Of those, 14.8 million people (representing 6 percent of the population) used marijuana, which accounted for nearly 44 percent of the total 1.8 million drug arrests. Since marijuana is officially considered a “gateway drug” that leads to the abuse of more dangerous substances—and since it is increasing in potency (between 1999 and 2006 the plant’s active ingredient, THC or tetrahydrocannabinol, reportedly doubled from 4.6 percent to 8.8 percent)—calls for its legalization are met with sharp rejoinders. Roger Chapman See also: Bennett, William J.; Counterculture; Drug Testing; Hoffman, Abbie; Leary, Timothy; Medical Marijuana; Nixon, Richard; Prison Reform; Reagan, Ronald; Zero Tolerance.
Further Reading Benavie, Arthur. Drugs: America’s Holy War. New York: Haworth Press, 2006. Bennett, William J., John J. Dilulio, and John P. Walters. Body Count—and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Jonnes, Jill. Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs. New York: Scribner, 1996. Miller, Joel. Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America. Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004. Provine, Doris Marie. Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Wa r o n P ove r t y The War on Poverty, an effort by President Lyndon Johnson to reverse what he regarded as a vicious cycle in American life, was part of the Great Society domestic agenda. In his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, Johnson announced, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” The war, he explained, would be fought “in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks and in migrant labor camps, on Indian reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the old, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.” At the time, an estimated one out of five American families—or nearly 35 million residents—was living in poverty. In March 1964, the White House sent to Congress the Economic Opportunity Act, a $970 million measure,
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President Lyndon Johnson beams with pride after signing the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a centerpiece of his War on Poverty and Great Society. The expansion of federal social programs in the 1960s gave way to a major ideological shift by the 1980s. (Arnold Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/ Getty Images)
representing 1 percent of the total federal budget. Republican opponents of the bill advised southern Democrats that the antipoverty program was primarily a civil rights package tailored for blacks, hoping the issue of race would undermine Dixiecrat support. But Senator Robert F. Kennedy denied that blacks were the principal recipients, arguing, “After all, Negroes comprise only 20 percent of the poor in this country.” The measure eventually passed. In many respects, the War on Poverty was politically conservative in orientation. The program addressed poverty as the consequence of too many individuals without adequate job skills and/or proper work habits. Thus, the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity aimed to increase self-reliance by having local “community action” organizations train poor people. A more liberal program would have guaranteed citizens an annual income, strengthened the rights of labor unions, penalized businesses for shifting factories to regions of cheap labor, and addressed the problem of corporate downsizing due to automation. In fact, leftists generally regarded the War on Poverty as essentially an effort to stifle social unrest. Statistics show that between 1965 and 1969, the official poverty rate in the United States dropped from 17.3 percent of the population to 12.1. It is estimated that only 10 percent of that reduction was due to rising employment and the overall improvement of the economy. On the other hand, the “manpower training” aspect of the program did not seem to help because some
people were displaced from jobs as others were lifted to gainful employment. The financial costs of the Vietnam War ultimately undermined the War on Poverty, but many of the programs associated with it continued after Johnson left office. In a diary entry when he was president, Ronald Reagan expressed his intention to undo Johnson’s Great Society (rather than the New Deal). “LBJ’s war on poverty,” Reagan wrote, “led us to our present mess.” Another conservative Republican icon, Barry Goldwater, likewise stated in a 1986 interview, “A lot of our present problems stem from what Lyndon Johnson had passed by the Congress.” Reagan’s remedy was to cut back on government social programs and allow supply-side economics, activated by tax cuts for the wealthy, to stimulate business growth and create jobs. According to Reagan conservatives, the War on Poverty expanded the welfare rolls, institutionalized poverty, and reinforced the “social pathology” of the ghetto. Roger Chapman See also: Compassionate Conservatism; Ehrenreich, Barbara; Goldwater, Barry; Great Society; Harrington, Michael; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Migrant Labor; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; Supply-Side Economics; Tax Reform; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Collins, Sheila. Let Them Eat Ketchup! The Politics of Poverty and Inequality. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996. Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Unger, Irwin. The Best of Intentions: The Triumph and Failure of the Great Society Under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Witkin, Gordon. “Great Society: How Great Has It Been?” U.S. News & World Report, July 2, 1984.
Wa r P o we r s Ac t Introduced by Senator Jacob K. Javits (R-NY) after the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia, the War Powers Act (or Resolution) of 1973 was an attempt by Congress to limit presidential war-making powers and to ensure greater congressional control of the nation’s armed forces. In a larger context, the act represented a desire on the part of legislators to recoup some of its authority over the military that had been lost to the executive branch since the start of World War II in 1941. As scholars contend, the act was not just a reaction to the Vietnam War, but the fruition of an evolutionary debate on the war powers of Congress and the president that had been going on for decades. The War Powers Act was passed over President Richard Nixon’s veto on November 7, 1973, with the House of Representatives and the Senate voting 284–135
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and 75–18, respectively. The law requires the president to consult Congress before military forces are sent into combat abroad or to areas where hostilities are likely. It also requires the president to report in writing fortyeight hours after troops are deployed. Under the act, the president must end the use of military force within sixty days, and for another thirty days beyond that if the president certifies to Congress in writing that the safety of the force so requires. Unless Congress authorizes a continuation of the deployment through a declaration of war, a concurrent resolution, or appropriate legislation, it cannot be continued beyond ninety days. Nixon believed that the law could potentially harm the nation in times of crisis. He argued further that it granted Congress authority over troop deployments in violation of Article II of the Constitution, which explicitly grants such powers to the executive. Proponents of the measure regarded it as a check on the power of the president to commit the country to military action by exercising the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war under Article I. In April 1975, President Gerald Ford became the first commander in chief to adhere to the act, submitting four reports to Congress that announced the use of armed forces to evacuate refugees and U.S. nationals from Cambodia and Vietnam. Again on May 15, 1975, President Ford reported to Congress that he ordered U.S. forces to rescue the crew of the ship Mayagüez, which had been seized by Cambodian navy patrol boats. All told, presidents have submitted approximately 120 such reports to Congress under the legislation. Despite its flaws and controversies, the War Powers Act has not been amended since its passage. The constitutionality of the law, however, has been debated vigorously. Arguments range from the claim that it violates the separation of powers to the claim that a congressional declaration of war applies only to total war and not a military police action. Nevertheless, in every instance since passage of the act, presidents have been granted their requests for authorization to use force consistent with the provisions of the resolution without a formal declaration of war. Michael A. Vieira See also: Ford, Gerald; Nixon, Richard; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Bobbitt, Philip. “War Powers: An Essay on John Hart Ely’s War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath.” Michigan Law Quarterly 92:6 (May 1994): 1364–400. Fisher, Louis. Presidential War Powers. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1995. Stern, Gary M., and Martin Halperin, eds. The U.S. Constitution and the Power to Go to War: Historical and Current Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
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Wa r P r o t e s t e r s In the aftermath of World War II, as the United States sought a return to normal life, the Cold War and nuclear arms race fractured the peace and created a growing fissure in American society. War protesters emerged to oppose the growing strategic reliance on atomic weaponry and then to oppose the Vietnam War (1964–1975). Between June 1963 and May 1968, a total of 104 antiwar demonstrations were held across the United States, involving 680,000 participants and 3,258 arrests. Later came protests against the Gulf War (1990–1991) and the Iraq War (2003– ). Throughout the postwar era, the American peace movement itself has often been motley, with participants ranging from pacifists who oppose war in general to activists who simply oppose a particular war. In addition, solidarity has been strained when other “social justice” issues—such as civil rights, feminism, globalization, environmentalism, and animal rights— have been incorporated into the protest. At the same time, to protest war while troops are deployed in combat is viewed by many as unpatriotic and unconscionable. On occasion, war protesters have been accused of bringing aid and comfort to the enemy—as in the actress Jane Fonda’s July 1972 visit to North Vietnam, during which she met with North Vietcong officials and sang an antiwar song while posing for pictures in front of an anti-aircraft gun. War protesters insist that dissent is a privilege and an expression of democracy, and claim that they truly care for the soldiers because they seek their quick and safe return. Nevertheless, “Support the Troops” bumper stickers are widely understood as political statements against those who would voice antiwar sentiments.
Radioactive Fallout and the Rise of the New Left The American antinuclear movement was spurred in the 1950s by the research of Washington University biologist Barry Commoner, who documented the ecological consequences of radioactive fallout from above-ground nuclear testing. In 1957, Norman Cousins (editor of the Saturday Review), A.J. Muste (formerly of the American Workers Party), and Benjamin Spock (the popular pediatrician and author) founded the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in opposition to atomic testing. SANE is credited with encouraging adoption of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and went on to play an active role in the anti–Vietnam War effort. During the 1980s, SANE began its Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, seeking to pressure the United States and the Soviet Union to stop producing and upgrading atomic weapons. SANE opposed the Gulf War in the early 1990s and changed its name to Peace Action in 1993. Old Left groups such the War Resisters League
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(WRL), founded in 1923, were the first to mobilize against the Vietnam War. In New York City on May 16, 1964, the WRL sponsored an antiwar demonstration involving a dozen young men who burned their draft cards. The major thrust of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, however, was the rise of the New Left, specifically SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), founded by Tom Hayden in 1962; and the Yippies (Youth International Party), founded by David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin in 1967. The latter group was largely responsible for coordinating the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) and its massive three-day protest in Washington, D.C., in October 1967. Billed as “Stop the Draft Week,” the event involved the burning of draft cards outside the U.S. Justice Department and a march from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the front of the Pentagon. This protest marked a militant, if peaceful, turn in the 1960s peace movement, with a stated purpose to “Confront the War Makers.” According to various estimates, the protesters numbered between 70,000 and 200,000. In front of photographers who made the image famous, the protesters placed flowers in the barrels of the rifles held by soldiers guarding the complex. Signs bearing the face of President Lyndon B. Johnson read: “WAR CRIMINAL.” More than 680 participants were arrested, including novelist Norman Mailer, who went on to write Armies of the Night (1968), a Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the demonstration.
“Rage” and Counterculture In August 1968, Yippie and SDS leaders organized a major demonstration in Chicago in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention. Richard Daley, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, was also against the war but assured those attending the convention: “As long as I am mayor of this city, there’s going to be law and order in Chicago.” Approximately 6,000 National Guardsmen were mobilized, and there was violence in the street when the protesters violated the 11:00 p.m. curfew or ventured where they did not have a permit to demonstrate. At one point, a riotous confrontation outside the convention hall was captured by television news cameramen as municipal police clubbed protesters in the head and dragged them into paddy wagons. There were a total of 668 arrests during the week of protests. The following year, organizers of the demonstration, known as the Chicago Eight (later Chicago Seven), were put on trial for conspiracy and inciting riots. While the court trial was taking place, the Weathermen, a splinter of the SDS, launched the “Days of Rage” street protest in Chicago (October 8–11, 1969). “Bring the War Home” was their slogan as they resorted to violence and vandalism. Meanwhile, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initiated a secret counterintelligence
program called COINTELPRO to disrupt the Weathermen and other protest groups. The counterculture movement in opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft was fueled as well by the songs of some of the most popular musicians of the day, from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (1965), and Pete Seeger’s “Knee Deep in the Big Muddy” (1967) to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (1967), The Doors’ “Unknown Soldier” (1968), and Glen Campbell’s “Galveston” (1969). A highlight at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in August 1969 was the electric-guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” performed by Jimi Hendrix (a former paratrooper), which mimicked the sounds of falling bombs and air raid sirens. Meanwhile, country singer Merle Haggard released “Okie from Muskogee” (1969), an antiprotest song featuring the lines, “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.” In 1969, John Lennon of the Beatles and his wife, Yoko Ono, conducted a widely publicized “Bed-In for Peace” at hotels in Amsterdam and Montreal, dramatizing the popular antiwar slogan of the time “Make love, not war” and offering a new one: “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” That same year, Lennon and Ono conducted a Christmastime antiwar billboard campaign across the United States as well as in Europe—the signs read “WAR IS OVER! / IF YOU WANT IT / Happy Christmas from John & Yoko”—and released a hit single titled “Give Peace a Chance.” In 1971, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released the song “Ohio,” with the somber lyrics “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming” and “four dead in Ohio,” alluding to the National Guard shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.
Gulf War and Iraq War The Gulf War was over and done before peace activists had time to effectively mobilize. On January 12, 1991, Congress voted to authorize military action to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and by February 27, 1991, the war was declared finished. Nevertheless, demonstrations against U.S. involvement were held in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. A number of soldiers who refused to go to war were given legal assistance by the WRL. The recognized “anthem” of the Gulf War was Bette Midler’s Grammy-winning single “From a Distance” (1990), with the lines (written by Julie Gold), “From a distance / I just cannot comprehend / What all this fighting’s for” and “God is watching us / From a distance.” Although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, generally unified the country, an antiwar movement quickly got under way. The Washington, D.C.– based Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) was founded three days after the attacks. This group, designating itself anti-imperialist, led a number of peace
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rallies in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. The progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org, founded in 1998, quickly launched the MoveOn Peace campaign, calling for a “restrained and multi-lateral response to the attacks.” In November 2002, the California-based CODEPINK: Women for Peace was formed, launching its activist activities with a four-month, all-day vigil in front of the White House. As the George W. Bush administration mobilized for war against Iraq, protesters coined the slogan “No Blood for Oil.” At that point, however, many Americans identified with the sentiments of county singer Toby Keith’s post–September 11 fight song, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” (2002). In 2003, ten days before the start of the Iraq War, country radio stations stopped playing the songs of the Dixie Chicks after band member Natalie Maines commented during a London concert that she was “ashamed” that President George W. Bush was from her state of Texas. Ted Koppel, the anchor of ABC’s Nightline, found himself in controversy in 2004 when his program took forty minutes to read the names of the Americans who had so far died in the Iraq War; critics saw this as a thinly veiled antiwar message. In August 2005, Cindy Sheehan, who had lost a son in Iraq, camped outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, maintaining a twentysix-day vigil with thousands of others. One newspaper columnist in the Indianapolis Star referred to the war demonstrations as “adolescent temper tantrums.” Others called the protesters “anarchists.” Sheehan was scorned by conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh with the words “We all lose things.” Roger Chapman See also: Chicago Seven; Commoner, Barry; Counterculture; Fonda, Jane; Hoffman, Abbie; My Lai Massacre; New Left; Rock and Roll; September 11; Students for a Democratic Society; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vietnam War.
Further Reading CODEPINK Web site. www.codepink4peace.org. DeBenedetti, Charles, and Charles Chatfield. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Epstein, Barbara. “The Antiwar Movement during the Gulf War.” Social Justice (1992): 115–37. Garfinkle, Adam. Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Harris, Nancy, ed. The Peace Movement. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2005. Katz, Milton S. Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. New York: Praeger, 1987. Sheehan, Cindy. Peace Mom: A Mother’s Journey Through Heartache to Activism. New York: Atria Books, 2006.
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Wa r Toy s During the 1950s, the widespread use of plastics enabled American toy manufactures to cheaply expand their line of products, including new designs of war toys. Although most boys have played with toy soldiers since ancient times, a debate on the appropriateness of war toys accelerated as the Vietnam War turned unpopular in the mid-1960s. The debate continues to the present, with opponents arguing that war toys glorify violence, manipulate patriotic symbols, and impose military socialization. Moreover, critics believe, they promote aggression and antisocial behavior in children. Defenders of war toys insist that they give children a healthy outlet for acting out good over evil and provide a healthy catharsis for violent impulses. In 1964, which marked the debut of Parents for Responsibility in the Toy Industry and their annual protest at the American Toy Fair in New York, the toy manufacturer Hassenfeld Brothers (later renamed Hasbro) introduced what would become the most recognized war toy in American history: the GI Joe “action figure.” An 11.5-inch (29-centimeter) boy’s doll with twenty-one bendable joints, the masculine-looking polyvinyl GI Joe, featuring a facial scar, sported a U.S. military uniform (with elements from all four services) and could be outfitted with a variety of plastic war “accessories” (sold separately). Two years later, a group of mothers at the toy fair demonstrated in Mary Poppins costumes and brandished black umbrellas carrying the inscription, “Toy Fair or Warfare.” Also in 1966, the Children’s Peace Union, founded by a fifth grader, demonstrated in front of a department store on Fifth Avenue in New York City carrying signs that read, “War Toys Kill Minds” and “Constructive Toys, Not Destructive Toys.” In 1969, Parents Against the Encouragement of Violence picketed the American Toy Fair, calling into question the social benefit of war toys. It was during this period that the Sears catalog stopped offering war toys. As the news from Vietnam worsened, the GI Joes grew beards and were retooled into the “Adventure Team” to hunt wild animals or search for buried treasure. In 1971, California passed legislation, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan, that prohibited the manufacture or sale of “torture toys,” including toy bombs and grenades. At the 1972 American Toy Fair, a group of Vietnam veterans joined Parents for Responsibility in the Toy Industry to discourage retailers from stocking their shelves with war toys. Although some observers thought war toys were making a comeback during the Christmas season of 1974, a spokesman for the Toy Manufacturers of America reported that there were fewer on the market then than in the mid-1960s. By 1978, GI Joe was temporarily pulled off of the market, unable to compete with Kenner’s 4-inch- (10-centimeter-) tall Star Wars action figures, establishing the trend for smaller figures.
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The decade of the 1980s witnessed the introduction of new lines of action figures, including Mattel’s He-Man and Masters of the Universe (1981), Tonka’s GoBots (1983), and Hasbro’s Transformers (1984). Critics said they were even more violent than GI Joe. The War Resisters League, known for its logo of a broken rifle, picketed Coleco of Hartford, Connecticut, for introducing the Rambo doll, an action figure based on the main character of Sylvester Stallone’s films First Blood (1982) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). On the West Coat, the Eugene, Oregon– based Families for Survival began hosting Peace Toy Fairs to publicize alternatives to war toys, capping off events with a burial ceremony in which war toys are given last rites. In actuality, thanks to government deregulation pushed by President Ronald Reagan, changes in children’s television programming made possible by the relaxation of content rules by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave war toys a commercial resurrection. Although the Federal Trade Commission in 1977 concluded that some television advertising aimed at children is inherently unethical, the FCC permitted the airing of violent war cartoons featuring toy products as the main characters. In 1982, a GI Joe cartoon commercial promoted the toy’s rebirth (at 3.5 inches [9 centimenters]), and Marvel comics began publishing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1982–1994). These were followed by two GI Joe cartoon mini-series on television, A Real American Hero (1983) and The Revenge of Cobra (1984); and later, five times a week, The Pyramid of Darkness (1985) and Arise, Serpentor, Arise (1986). In 1986, Hasbro enjoyed $185 million in sales for GI Joes, and the following year saw the release of G.I. Joe: The Movie (1987). The success of the GI Joe TV series inspired other war programs, including a cartoon promoting Transformers (1984–1987) that reportedly averaged eighty-three acts of violence per episode. The Illinois-based National Coalition on Television Violence reported a 350 percent increase in the sale of war toys from 1982 to 1985, noting that the five top-selling products of the mid-1980s all had their own violent cartoon program. In 1984 alone, some 214 million units of action figures were sold. In 1988, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act to curb the involvement of toy manufacturers in children’s programming, but President Reagan vetoed the legislation on First Amendment grounds. Meanwhile, toy guns, some in the shape of military assault rifles, began to look so realistic that children waving them were occasionally shot by law enforcement officers who thought they were acting in self-defense. Thus, a number of states passed legislation during the 1980s aimed at regulating toy guns. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, as well as a number of municipalities, simply outlawed the manufacture or sale of toy guns. Congress approved the Federal Toy Gun Law (1988), requiring toy guns to feature a bright orange plug. Despite this remedy, police continued to mistake
toy guns for real ones. In 1994, after a boy in Brooklyn, New York, was fatally shot by police who mistook his toy gun for a genuine weapon, Toys “R” Us announced that it would stop selling realistic toy guns. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the start of the War on Terror, the debate on war toys continued afresh. CODEPINK, a women’s peace movement founded in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq War, protested against retailers selling war toys, including violent video games. During the 2005 Christmas season, CODEPINK launched Operation “Stick It to ’Em” by encouraging its followers to place warning stickers on toys in stores: “Surgeon General’s Warning: Violent Toys = Violent Boys.” The group also recommended a “buy and return” tactic in order to register complaints to store managers about violent toys while creating longer lines in customer service departments. Roger Chapman See also: Barbie Doll; Comic Books; Federal Communications Commission; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Chapman, Roger. “From Vietnam to the New World Order: The GI Joe Action Figure as Cold War Artifact.” In The Impact of the Cold War on American Popular Culture, ed. Elaine McClarnand and Steve Goodson, 47–55. Carrollton: State University of West Georgia, 1999. Clark, Eric. The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battles for America’s Youngest Consumers. New York: Free Press, 2007. Paige-Carlsson, Nancy, and Diane E. Levin. Who’s Calling the Shots? How to Respond Effectively to Children’s Fascination with War Play and War Toys. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990. Regan, Patrick. “War Toys, War Movies, and the Militarization of the United States, 1900–85.” Journal of Peace Studies 31:1 (February 1994): 45–58.
Wa r h o l , A n d y The painter, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Andy Warhol was a prominent figure in the Pop Art movement beginning in the 1960s. Determined to achieve fame and fortune through commercial art, Warhol massproduced his works, which focused on food, money, sex, violence, and celebrity. Noted for his trademark silver wig and the observation that “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” Warhol remains a controversial cultural figure. The son of Czechoslovakian immigrants, he was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After obtaining a fine arts degree in 1949 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, he went to New York and earned a reputation for the blotted-line technique he used in commercial advertisements in Glamour, Vogue, and
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Harper’s Bazaar magazines. He won the Art Director’s Club Medal for a shoe advertisement in 1957 and was later hailed by Women’s Wear Daily as “the Leonardo da Vinci of the shoe trade.” From the 1960s onward, Warhol pursued his career as a pop artist and gained international acclaim for his canvases depicting popular consumer items such as Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, mocking the banality of commercial homogenization. In 1962, he founded a New York City studio called The Factory, where his “art workers” silk-screened hundreds of superstar images, including ones of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In 1968, having survived a gun blast from the radical feminist Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), Warhol turned to deathimage art on race riots, car accidents, electrocutions, and the atomic bomb. Condemned by some critics as lifeless, nihilist, and even dangerous, his work was lauded by others as a powerful representation of a consumerist culture driven by mass advertising and obsessions with sex and violence. A prolific film producer, Warhol made sixty-one underground movies from 1963 to 1972. Many of his projects, such as Blow Job (1963) and Chelsea Girls (1966), deal with pornographic and homoerotic themes (Warhol himself was gay). Although sometimes tedious and lacking a storyline, but with brilliant color photography and in-camera editing, his movies attracted a generation of experimental filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard and Norman Mailer. Warhol died on February 22, 1987, in New York City after gall bladder surgery. Selina S.L. Lai See also: Cold War; Counterculture; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gay Capital; Mailer, Norman; Nuclear Age; Pornography.
Further Reading Bockris, Victor. The Life and Death of Andy Warhol. New York: Bantam Books, 1989. Pratt, Alan R., ed. The Critical Response to Andy Warhol. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997.
Wa r r e n , E a r l The fourteenth chief justice of the United States (1953– 1969), Earl Warren became a lightning rod in the culture wars for the controversial decisions issued by the Supreme Court during his tenure. The most notable cases, addressing issues of civil rights, individual freedom, separation of church and state, and voting rights, were seen as shifting the high court—and the nation— in a liberal direction, prompting conservative critics to deplore what they regarded as “judicial activism.” He was born on March 14, 1891, in Los Angeles to
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a Norwegian immigrant father and a Swedish immigrant mother. After studying law at the University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1912; JD, 1914), he worked for the Associated Oil Company and later a law firm. His career was interrupted by service in World War I (1917–1918), after which he entered politics in his home state, serving as district attorney (1925–1939), state attorney general (1939–1943), and governor (1943–1953). His election to the governorship followed his support of President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; he later expressed regret for that position in his autobiography, published after his death. In 1948, Warren ran as Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential nominee in the Republican Party. He sought the GOP nomination for president in 1952, but lost to Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed him to the Supreme Court because of his loyalty in delivering California’s votes. Later, Eisenhower remarked that the Warren appointment was his greatest mistake as president. The year after becoming chief justice, Warren presided over the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a unanimous decision that declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. The ruling, which Warren wrote, overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine on which institutional segregation had been legally based since the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Warren’s interpersonal skills enabled the justices to reach unanimity in Brown, all the more remarkable considering the ideological divisions and personality conflicts that were represented on the bench. Associate justices Hugo Black and William Douglas initially favored a forceful ruling that would declare school segregation unconstitutional, while factional rivals Robert Jackson and Felix Frankfurter, though morally opposed to school segregation, were unsure as to whether or not the Constitution allowed the judiciary to outlaw it. Moderates on the court, including Harold Burton and Tom Clark, could have ruled either way on Brown. Warren believed that the justices had to reach a unanimous decision in order for the ruling to carry weight. He knew that white southerners would fight any attempts by the federal government to desegregate schools, and he feared that any dissenting or even separate concurring opinions could spur greater resistance. Thus, Warren wrote a concise majority opinion that declared school segregation to be unconstitutional, but also allowed the South to desegregate its schools gradually. Years later, some liberals would criticize Brown for being too moderate and accommodating toward segregationists; others believed that the ruling spurred a white southern backlash more than it helped desegregate schools. Over time, most conservatives and liberals would concede that the decision was inherently correct. The Warren Court issued several other important rulings that broadly interpreted the Constitution and
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The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren (front row, center)—posing here in 1953—is said to have marked a distinct shift toward liberal “judicial activism.” Its historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended school segregation. (George Tames/New York Times Co./ Getty Images)
increased the Supreme Court’s power to protect minorities and individuals’ rights. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the justices held that the First Amendment’s guarantee of the separation of church and state made even nondenominational school prayers unconstitutional—a ruling that many Americans criticize to the present day. Also in 1962, the Warren Court declared in Baker v. Carr that states must divide their electoral districts proportionally to ensure that every person’s vote counts equally; this marked a departure from a 1946 ruling in which the high court stated that federal courts could not interfere with states’ apportionment of districts. The Warren Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that married couples can purchase contraceptives, a historic and far-reaching opinion that declared a constitutional right to personal privacy for the first time. And in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the court declared that the law requires police officers to inform suspects of their right to remain silent and have an attorney present during questioning. Conservatives roundly criticized Warren for many of these decisions. They criticized the Griswold ruling for extrapolating a right to privacy not explicitly granted in the text of the Constitution. And the Miranda decision, they feared, would make it too difficult for police officers to fight crime. In these and other landmark rulings, they charged Warren with engaging in “judicial activism” and overstepping the limits of the Supreme Court’s authority. In 1957, in fact, Senator William Jenner (R-IN) proposed legislation that would limit the appeals the court could accept, so that some of the Supreme Court’s power would be transferred to the executive and legislative branches.
Conservatives mounted a campaign to “Impeach Earl Warren,” and Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968 made the Warren Court and judicial activism an issue in his campaign. In the meantime, Warren had also become associated with the commission he headed—which was named for him—under appointment by President Lyndon Johnson in 1963 to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that November. The commission’s report, issued in September 1964, became ever controversial for its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in carrying out the shooting. Earl Warren retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, succeeded as chief justice by Warren Burger. To conservatives, he represented the wrongs of liberal America and pushed the country away from law and toward disorder. Liberals, on the other hand, applauded the major rulings of the Warren Court. While they recognized that Warren might not have been the outstanding legal scholar that some other justices were, they saw him as the first chief justice to take an active role in enforcing minority and individual rights, even if he had to issue unpopular verdicts to do so. Not long after Warren retired, Yale professor Joseph Bishop argued that few of the Warren Court’s important decisions were “palatable to a large segment of the population, including a great many highly vocal politicians. . . . But in these areas it is my judgment . . . that (1) the Court was right, and (2) most people knew it was right.” To Warren, the Constitution guaranteed certain basic rights for all Americans, and with the Supreme Court’s verdicts in cases like Brown, Engle, Baker, Griswold, and Miranda, he helped grant them. Warren died on July 9, 1974. Aaron Safane See also: Birth Control; Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Church and State; Communists and Communism; Conspiracy Theories; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; John Birch Society; Judicial Wars; Kennedy Family; Miranda Rights; Nixon, Richard; Reparations, Japanese Internment; School Prayer.
Further Reading Lewis, Frederick P. The Context of Judicial Activism: The Endurance of the Warren Court Legacy in a Conservative Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pollack, Jack Harrison. Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Powe, Lucas A., Jr. The Warren Court and American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Tushnet, Mark, ed. The Warren Court in Historical and Political Perspective. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Warren, Earl. The Memoirs of Earl Warren. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
Washington Times, The
Wa r r e n , R i c k A Southern Baptist pastor, popular evangelical preacher, and best-selling writer, Rick Warren is the founder of a West Coast megachurch called Saddleback and the author of The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2002). A theological and political conservative, Warren is also widely viewed as an alternative voice to the Religious Right. The son of a minister, Richard Duane “Rick” Warren was born on January 28, 1954, in San Jose, California. He was educated at California Baptist College (BA, 1977), Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (MA, 1979), and Fuller Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1989). In 1980, he founded the Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, California, near Los Angeles, which twenty-five years later had more than 80,000 members. Prior to establishing Saddleback, Warren served as youth evangelist at the California Southern Baptist Convention, Fresno (1970–1974); associate pastor at First Baptist Church of Norwalk, California (1974–1976); and assistant to the president at the International Evangelism Association in Fort Worth, Texas (1977–1979). Warren has been viewed as an alternative to the Religious Right for a message perceived as more inclusive and less negative. The Purpose-Driven Life, which sold 22 million copies in its first two years of publication, has inspired Christians for its “can-do” message. Rather than focus primarily on abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research, and liberal judges, Warren has spoken out on the plight of the poor, whom he says are mentioned some 2,000 times in the Bible. Interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006, Warren complained, “[T]he last 100 years . . . the church has just been a mouth. And mostly, it’s been known for what it’s against,” adding, “I’m so tired of Christians being known for what they’re against.” Warren has launched a ministry to address the problem of poverty and AIDS in Africa, using 90 percent of his book royalties to fund such projects. To the disappointment of the Religious Right, he joined a handful of other evangelicals in petitioning President George W. Bush to address the problem of global warming and participated in a United Nations prayer event. Earlier, Warren had gained notoriety for taking the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to court and inadvertently jeopardizing federal tax exemptions for clergy housing (which costs the U.S. government as much as $500 million annually). After the IRS determined in 1996 that Warren’s “parsonage exemption” exceeded the rental value of his new home, the pastor filed suit to protest the cap on the amount of the deduction. The U.S. Tax Court ruled in Warren’s favor in 2000, but the IRS appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, which began questioning the constitutionality of the deduction itself. In the meantime, Congress unanimously passed the Clergy Housing Clarification Act
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of 2002, signed into law by President Bush. The legislation authorized the IRS to impose a “fair market rental” cap from that day forward, but to allow past excessive deductions to stand. Satisfied, the IRS withdrew its appeal of the Warren case, avoiding the issue of church-state constitutionality. During the 2008 presidential election Warren hosted a forum at Saddleback in which he separately interviewed John McCain and Barack Obama. The questions largely pertained to social issues, such as when human life begins and the definition of marriage. Warren also asked each candidate to describe their greatest moral failings. Some observers criticized the event as imposing a “religious test” on presidential candidates. Later, Obama caused a furor among certain liberals, including gay activists, for choosing Warren to deliver the invocation during the inauguration. Warren’s political visibility, some observers have suggested, casts him as the Billy Graham of the twenty-first century. Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; AIDS; Bush Family; Campolo, Anthony “Tony”; Church and State; Global Warming; Judicial Wars; Religious Right; Same-Sex Marriage; Southern Baptist Convention; Tax Reform; United Nations.
Further Reading Darman, Jonathan. “An Inexact Analogy.” Newsweek, January 12, 2009. Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Cellular Church.” The New Yorker, September 12, 2005. Mair, George. A Life with Purpose: Reverend Rick Warren, the Most Inspiring Pastor of Our Time. New York: Berkeley Books, 2005. Steptoe, Sonja. “The Man with the Purpose.” Time, March 29, 2004.
Wa sh i n g t o n T i m e s , T h e The newspaper equivalent of the Fox News Channel in terms of conservative ideology, the Washington Times was founded in May 1982 by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, whose followers are sometimes referred to as Moonies. The previous year, the Washington Star ceased operations after 128 years of publication, giving the Washington Post a monopoly status in the nation’s capital at a time when London and Paris had nine and thirteen daily newspapers, respectively. In founding the Washington Times, Moon sought to fill the void left by the Star and increase his church’s political influence in American culture. The paper began publication one day after he was convicted of tax fraud, an offense that led to an eighteen-month prison sentence. Known as the “Moonie paper” by its detractors,
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the Washington Times has been a prominent voice in the culture wars, promoting the pro-life movement, sexual abstinence, and family values while criticizing political correctness, feminism, gay rights, rap music, and public schools. Its conservative editorials are mirrored by its op-ed columns, which are written by conservatives such as L. Brent Bozell, Georgie Anne Geyer, Nat Hentoff, John Leo, Oliver North, A.M. Rosenthal, Cal Thomas, and Thomas Sowell. In 1997, the paper began publishing a weekly section called “Family Times,” providing a forum for, among others, James Dobson and his evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family. The Unification Church’s interference in the newspaper’s editorials led to the resignation of James Whalen, the paper’s first editor, in 1984. Three years later, editorial page editor William Cheshire quit for the same reason, as have others. The Washington Times was a strong voice against communism during the last decade of the Cold War, supporting President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and launching a public fundraiser for the Contra fighters in Nicaragua after Congress ended federal support. “Read the Paper Moscow Hates” was one of its early advertisement slogans. The paper also had a role in the events leading to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Its first article about Clinton’s alleged extramarital affairs, written by Jerry Seper, appeared on July 30, 1991, seven years before the Monica Lewinsky story broke. The paper published nearly 400 articles about Whitewater, the Arkansas real estate deal with which the Clintons were associated prior to his presidency. The paper was also consistently critical of the Clinton administration’s policies. It is estimated that the Unification Church spent up to $1 billion in the Washington Times’s first decades to keep afloat a paper that never exceeded a circulation of 126,000, while the Post was enjoying profitability with 750,000 daily copies sold. Even so, the Washington Times has been influential by providing a forum for conservative agenda setters. President George W. Bush praised the paper, calling it “the conscience” of the nation’s capital. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Clinton, Hillary; Clinton Impeachment; Cold War; Dobson, James; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Iran-Contra Affair; North, Oliver; Sowell, Thomas; Strategic Defense Initiative.
Further Reading Edwards, Lee, ed. Our Times: The Washington Times 1982– 2002. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002. Gorenfeld, John. Bad Moon Rising: How the Reverend Moon Created The Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right. Sausalito, CA: PoliPointPress, 2008. Washington Times Web site. www.washtimes.com.
Wa t e r g a t e Watergate is the popular designation for the dramatic political scandal and constitutional crisis that culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon as president of the United States on August 9, 1974. The sequence of events got its name from the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C., where five burglars were caught in June 1972 breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The break-in and White House cover-up that ensued led to a constitutional showdown between the executive branch and Congress in televised public hearings by a Senate investigating committee in spring and summer 1973 and a series of revelations, in both those hearings and the media, that deeply shook the American people’s faith in government. The entire incident brought an intensification of the culture wars due to Nixon’s lack of political transparency and the lasting bitterness of many Republicans toward the Democrats who demanded White House accountability. The road to Watergate began in 1971 with the formation of the White House Plumbers, a secret investigative force tasked to prevent the disclosure of classified information to the media. The group was established in reaction to the leak of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times by former Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg in June 1971. Members of the Plumbers group were enlisted during Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign to obtain sensitive campaign information from the Democratic opposition. It was later revealed that a plan to conduct electronic surveillance of DNC headquarters in the Watergate building was approved by U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, who also chaired the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP or “CREEP”). During the early morning of June 17, 1972, municipal police were called to the Watergate complex after a security guard noticed a piece of tape on a door latch that kept it unlocked. Upon entering the DNC offices, the police discovered five men hiding under desks, carrying fifty rolls of film and equipment used for electronic surveillance—unconventional gear for burglars. These men and two others were indicted by a grand jury for burglary and attempted interception of telecommunications. One of the men arrested at the Watergate was James McCord, Jr., who had worked for the CIA and FBI, and was now officially employed as chief of security for CRP. A notebook he was carrying proved especially damaging, as it contained the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt, who directed the break-in and had direct ties to the White House. As was later revealed, the White House quickly began its cover-up of the incident by buying the silence of the Watergate burglars. The obstruction of justice continued in succeeding months, involving senior White House officials, including John Dean, counsel to the president; H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief
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of staff; John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs; Jeb Magruder, deputy director of CRP; and, ultimately, President Nixon himself. The White House remained untouched into the fall and Nixon won a landslide reelection, but matters began to unravel in March 1973 after McCord sent a letter to Judge John J. Sirica, who was presiding over the case, stating that the Watergate defendants were under political pressure to plead guilty and that other unidentified persons were also involved in the break-in. Later McCord named names, including Dean and Magruder, exposing the depth of the political scandal. After Dean was implicated in the scandal, he sought immunity in exchange for testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. In dramatic televised testimony in June 1973, Dean directly implicated President Nixon in the cover-up and indicated that there was a secret tape-recording system in the Oval Office. The latter claim was verified by White House deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield, touching off a battle for the tapes between the Senate and the president, who refused to turn them over on grounds of executive privilege. The constitutional showdown climaxed in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, in which Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had issued a subpoena for the case, was fired and high-level Justice Department officials resigned. The White House did turn over transcripts of the tapes, albeit edited and with gaps. Both the Senate and the general public were outraged, leading to calls for Nixon’s impeachment. In July 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over all the pertinent tapes, which ultimately proved the president’s involvement in a cover-up. Any lingering support the president had in the Senate evaporated, ensuring that he would be convicted under the articles of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974. Nixon resigned on August 9, before the matter reached the full House. President Gerald Ford, who succeeded to the presidency, promptly granted Nixon a blanket pardon for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, sparing him a possible prison sentence. By accepting the pardon, Nixon confirmed his guilt. The legacy of Watergate continues to cast a long shadow on American politics, leaving many citizens less trusting of government. Many people have continued to argue that Nixon was no different than most other politicians; he just happened to get caught. Indeed, that lack of trust has revealed itself during the course of subsequent political scandals involving the White House, whose very nomenclature evokes Watergate—Contragate (the Iran-Contra Affair), Koreagate, Travelgate, Monicagate, and others. With regard to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it has been suggested that the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton in 1998–1999 represented political retribution on the part
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of a Republican-controlled Congress for the Democrats’ handling of Watergate. Maria T. Baldwin See also: Clinton Impeachment; Colson, Chuck; Democratic Party; Felt, W. Mark; Ford, Gerald; Iran-Contra Affair; Liddy, G. Gordon; McGovern, George; Nixon, Richard; Presidential Pardons; Republican Party; Woodward, Bob.
Further Reading Emery, Fred. Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Genovese, Michael A. The Watergate Crisis. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Kutler, Stanley. Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes. New York: Touchstone, 1998. Lasky, Victor. It Didn’t Start with Watergate. New York: Dell, 1977. Olson, Keith W. Watergate: The Presidential Scandal that Shook America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Wa t t , J a m e s As President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior (1981–1983), James Watt infuriated environmentalists for advocating the exploitation of natural resources, championing the development of federal land, and loosening environmental regulations. He once likened the philosophy of the environmental movement to that of Nazi Germany. During the first year of his tenure in the Interior Department, the Sierra Club wilderness advocacy group organized a “Dump Watt” campaign, gathering 1.1 million signatures on a petition calling for his dismissal. In the end, however, it was his controversial remarks about political correctness that led to Watt’s abrupt resignation. James Gaius Watt was born on January 31, 1938, in Lusk, Wyoming. After attending the University of Wyoming (BS, 1960; JD, 1962), he began his political career as a legislative assistant and later a speechwriter to U.S. Senator Milward L. Simpson (R-WY). Watts went on to various positions in the federal government, including deputy assistant secretary of the interior (1969–1972). He also directed the Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation (1977–1980), a property rights organization affiliated with the anti-environmental Wise Use Movement. One of two members of the New Right in Reagan’s first cabinet, Watt became a focus of controversy for opposing many of the environmental regulations that the Department of the Interior was bound to uphold. In 1982, the department announced plans for selling 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of federal land, but the ensuing storm of criticism from both liberals and conservatives forced him to withdraw the proposal. He also supported the removal of environmental restrictions on offshore
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oil drilling, attempted to open Alaska and other coastal and wilderness areas for energy exploration, curtailed the expansion of the national park system, and halted new additions to the endangered species list. Watt’s policies grew out of his commitment to the commercial development of lands controlled by the federal government. In support of this outlook, he cited the Bible, saying it “calls on us to occupy the lands until Jesus returns.” Watt was also controversial for his socially conservative views, which were related to his Christian fundamentalism. He once declared that there were two types of people in the country, “liberals” and “Americans.” He tried to ban female employees at his department from wearing pantsuits. In 1982, he invoked his authority over the National Mall in Washington in order to cancel a Beach Boys concert scheduled to take place there, arguing that the group did not represent American values. During a press conference on September 21, 1983, he sarcastically highlighted the diversity of an advisory panel that he had appointed, explaining, “We have every kind of mix you can have . . . a black . . . a woman, two Jews, and a cripple,” adding, “And we have talent.” Watt resigned on October 9 of that year, a consequence of the public backlash prompted by those remarks. After leaving the government, Watt worked as a business consultant, only to be indicted in 1995 on eighteen felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice related to an investigation of his lobbying practices. He eventually pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge, for which he was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 500 hours of community service. Charlotte Cahill See also: Arnold, Ron; Endangered Species Act; Environmental Movement; Forests, Parklands, and Federal Wilderness; Fundamentalism, Religious; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Political Correctness; Reagan, Ronald; Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Further Reading Bratton, Susan Power. “The Ecotheology of James Watt.” Environmental Ethics 5 (Fall 1983): 225–36. “James Watt Lashes Back at Critics.” U.S. News & World Report, June 14, 1982. Short, C. Brant. Ronald Reagan and the Public Lands: America’s Conservation Debate, 1979–1984. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. Watt, James, and Doug Wead. Courage of a Conservative. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.
Wa t t s a n d L o s A n g e l e s R i o t s , 19 6 5 a n d 19 92 For six days in August 1965, and again for six days in April and May 1992, violence erupted in the Watts
neighborhood of south-central Los Angeles. The outbreaks sparked extensive debate among scholars, the media, and the general public. At the center were the issues of race and economic inequality in America. The 1965 riots began with a routine traffic stop on the evening of August 11 that triggered violence between residents and the police. After five more days of street fighting, looting, burning, and other destruction, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in some 16,000 National Guard troops to quell the rioting. The uprising officially left 34 people dead, more than 1,100 injured, and over $200 million in property damage. President Johnson and California governor Edmund (Pat) Brown established commissions to determine the cause of the rioting. Their reports, as well as the studies of a number of scholars, pointed to several underlying issues. Police brutality was central to most explanations. The Los Angeles Police Department was regarded as perhaps the most violent and virulently racist in the United States; the city’s African-American and Mexican-American communities had complained about city police for years. Inadequate, overcrowded, segregated housing, segregated schools, high unemployment and poverty, and the lack of effective antipoverty programs all contributed to the feelings of isolation and helplessness that led many blacks in Watts to participate in the violence. One of the important social consequences of the Watts riots of 1965 was a white backlash. Days prior to the outbreak of violence, President Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the riots erupted, many whites retreated from support of further civil rights initiatives, and many of Johnson’s Great Society programs, particularly those aimed at cities and racial minorities, faced increasing opposition. White flight from downtown urban centers to suburban neighborhoods gained momentum after Watts and subsequent rioting in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere in 1966–1968. In April 1992, Los Angeles again exploded in violence over issues of race and police brutality. The riots of 1992 were larger and broader in scope than those of 1965, resulting in 52 persons killed, some 2,300 injured, and over $1 billion in property damage. This time, however, more Latinos than blacks participated in the riots, and the violence took place throughout the city of Los Angeles, not just in Watts. Despite some fundamental differences between the events, the similarities were clear to many observers— as noted in the film documentary Straight from the Streets (1999), produced by Keith O’Derek and Robert Corsini. The 1992 rioting was triggered by a not-guilty verdict against the police officers who had beaten black motorist Rodney King in an incident captured on videotape and viewed by the general public through media coverage. Issues of race and economic inequality once again outraged the city’s poor minority communities. The rioters were
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primarily blacks and Latinos who felt left out of American society. The economy of south-central Los Angeles had been in steep decline, with unemployment and poverty chronically high and getting worse. One of the strongest similarities between the 1965 and 1992 riots was that both set off a national debate over racial inequality, poverty, and the role of the federal government. President George H.W. Bush and other conservatives blamed the violence on the legacies of the Great Society and other federal attempts to aid residents of inner cities. In their view, the promises of federal programs created unrealistic expectations among inner-city residents, as well as a culture of dependency on government. Liberals blamed the federal retrenchment and abandonment of the cities in the 1980s, arguing that it was the reduction of Great Society programs by the Reagan administration, not the programs themselves, that had led to the frustrations and anger that boiled over again in Los Angeles. The debates surrounding the riots reflected a political, cultural, and racial divide in the United States. In 1965, many whites, especially conservatives, responded to the events in Los Angeles by blaming blacks for their own conditions and urging a return to law and order. Blacks and liberal whites encouraged more economic aid to inner cities to improve the prospects for housing and employment. Twenty-seven years later, conservatives blamed black and Latino residents and liberal social programs for inner-city ills, while liberals blamed the lack of federal participation in those areas. Robert Bauman See also: Bush Family; Compassionate Conservatism; Great Society; Hispanic Americans; Johnson, Lyndon B.; King, Rodney; Police Abuse; Reagan, Ronald; War on Poverty; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Gooding-Williams, Robert, ed. Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge, 1993. Horne, Gerald. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Viorst, Milton. Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Way n e , J o h n Born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, the film star John Wayne—popularly referred to as “the Duke”—was a cultural icon who appeared mostly in westerns and war movies. His rugged, masculine image and the heroic frontier individualism of many of his roles were said to epitomize the American spirit. In the culture wars, Wayne is remembered for his
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Film icon John Wayne—seen in his Oscar-winning role as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969)—was a staunch Republican and a larger-than-life symbol of patriotism, heroism, and traditional American values during the antiwar turbulence of the 1960s. (Keystone/Getty Images)
cinematic support of the Vietnam War, even though he had declined to serve in World War II. Wayne began his career as a fill-in and stunt actor at local studios in California. He dropped out of college to pursue acting and had his first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). Appearing in more than 250 films—and starring in 142 of them—he, perhaps more than any other actor, tapped into the folklore of the American West and the imagery of a new frontier. Most often, he was a gun-wielding, whiskey-drinking hero who imposed his will in a quest for righteousness, whether on the frontier or the battlefront. His characters championed good over evil, overcame adversity at great odds, and gallantly opposed all foes in films that generally offered stereotyped portrayals of Indians, women, and others. Among his western classics are John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Searchers (1956); Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959); and Henry Hathaway’s True Grit (1969), for which Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Wayne was well on his way to establishing himself in Hollywood when World War II broke out in December 1941. Unlike other actors his age, such as Clark Gable and Henry Fonda, Wayne chose not to enlist in the armed forces, fearing that he would be too old to make a comeback in movies after the fighting. The decision elicited sharp criticism, which perhaps led him to cultivate the persona of a super patriot. Wayne’s staunch Republican and anticommunist views extended into his work. In 1951, he appeared in Big Jim McLain, which gave a favorable impression of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its pursuit of communists. In 1968, Wayne co-directed
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and starred in The Green Berets, one of the few films of the time to openly support the Vietnam War. Critics thought the film too political, considering the high casualty rate of the war, but Wayne was intent on displaying his support for the troops with a film tribute. To right-wing supporters of the war and the U.S. government, Wayne was a hero once again. Others contended that his own patriotic role in the film, as well as in the public eye, attempted to deflect attention from the fact that he avoided wartime service. Wayne died of lung and stomach cancer on June 11, 1979. Margaret Dykes See also: Cold War; Communists and Communism; McCarthyism; Political Correctness; Republican Party; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. John Wayne: American. New York: Free Press, 1995. Wills, Gary. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
We a l t h G a p The term “wealth gap” refers to the economic disparity between the richest people in the United States— the top 10 percent—and the rest of the population. The wealth gap has widened considerably since the late 1970s, with each decade resulting in the rich having a larger percentage of the nation’s total wealth. In the culture wars, this phenomenon has been the subject of vigorous debate and statistical interpretation. Liberals argue that the widening wealth gap represents an unhealthy trend, entrenching privilege and power while retarding equal opportunity and social mobility. Those sharing this concern suggest that tax reform is necessary to narrow the wealth gap, since those who have benefited the most from society should be required to give more back. Long-term inequities should be addressed, some argue, by policies such as affirmative action to foster greater competition. Conservatives argue that since more wealth is being created, the ones responsible for making this happen should enjoy the direct benefit and not be punished with higher tax rates. Affirmative action, they contend, is reverse discrimination that inhibits competition and fails to address the behavioral and cultural differences that are the root cause of the wealth gap. According to 2004 statistics issued by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the wealthiest 10 percent of American families owned 63 percent of the nation’s total family assets. By other indicators, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans in 2003 owned 85 percent of all outstanding stocks and financial securities and 90 percent of all business assets. At the same time, 10 percent of the least well off owned few or no assets.
A major contributing factor to the wealth gap is the income gap. According to 2005 federal tax data, the combined income of the top 300,000 Americans was nearly equivalent to the total income of the bottom 150 million of the nation. The top income group had earnings 440 times higher than the average individual of the bottom half; thus, the top 1 percent received nearly 20 percent of the total national income. Also in 2005, 12.6 percent of the population, representing 37 million people, was officially classified as poor (earning below $19,806 for a family of four). All told, the income gap in America nearly doubled between 1980 and 2005, a chasm wider than at any time since the late 1920s. While it is universally agreed that free enterprise enriches more people than any other system of exchange, it is also argued that the capital used for investment purposes, which stimulates economic growth, is largely connected with income inequality and the related problem of “wage stagnation.” Even more problematic than income inequality, however, is the intergenerational transmission of assets and liabilities, which results in concentrations of wealth for the few and debt for many. In the long run, critics argue, such entrenched disparity has the potential to undermine both capitalism and democracy because the “have nots” constituting the majority of the population will have fewer economic opportunities and less political influence. Bill Gates, Sr., executive director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and father of the richest man in America, contends that estate taxes are a “valuable tool of democracy” because they serve as an economic recalibration. During the presidency of George W. Bush, however, the federal estate tax was eliminated, allowing the wealthy to pass on more of their inheritance to their heirs and thus perpetuating the widening wealth gap. Those who disagree with Gates emphasize individual liberty, arguing that personal life choices play a major role in economic affairs. For example, studies of Americans who have achieved millionaire status indicate that a stable marriage is an important factor of economic success; the poorest households, by contrast, are inordinately headed by single parents, usually female. Critics of Gates’s “tool of democracy” argument, such as the late economist Milton Friedman, argue that increasing taxes serves only to increase the power of the central government and, therefore, the threat to personal liberty. In any event, the clear trend in America since the 1980s has been significant tax cuts on unearned income, such as inheritances and capital gains, and tax hikes on wage income. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Internal Revenue Service reported that a growing number of wealthy Americans avoid paying federal taxes by utilizing intricate tax shelters, exemption schemes not possible for people of lower incomes. From 1979 to 1997, the richest 1 percent of Americans
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enjoyed a more than 250 percent increase in after-tax income (from $263,700 to $677,900), while their share of all federal tax payments climbed from 15.5 percent to 23 percent. Many argue that the wealth gap not only separates Americans by socioeconomic class, but also increases segregation among ethnic groups. In the early 2000s, an estimated 7 million Americans were living in “white” gated communities, while homelessness was on the rise— up 100 percent from the previous decade, according to some estimates. Residential segregation increases the exposure of poor and ethnic minorities to the problems that plague high-poverty neighborhoods. Declining public health, job prospects, and environmental conditions in urban areas where the poor and minorities are increasingly concentrated have cumulative effects that substantially impact all aspects of development, as well as the future income potential of the children being raised in those communities. Thus, poverty is passed on from generation to generation while at the top strata of society wealth concentration increases. Indeed, the black-white wealth gap is the most persistent and well-documented cleavage in American society. According to New York University economist Edward Wolff in 2003, the average American black family takes in just 60 percent of the earnings and holds a mere 18 percent of the wealth of the average white family. And according to a 2005 study, black children make up 90 percent of the long-term poor in the United States and continue to be alienated from the experience of upward mobility within and across generations that is the privilege of white children. A child born in poverty has about a 7 percent chance of reaching the top fifth of income earners, while a child born to the top fifth of income earners has a 42 percent chance of being in the top fifth as an adult. Holona LeAnne Ochs and Roger Chapman See also: Affirmative Action; Bankruptcy Reform; Executive Compensation; Friedman, Milton; Great Society; Tax Reform; War on Poverty; Welfare Reform.
Further Reading Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves. Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Danziger, Sheldon, Peter Gottschalk, Russell Sage Foundation, and Population Reference Bureau. “Diverging Fortunes: Trends in Poverty and Inequality.” In The American People: Census 2000, ed. Reynolds Farley and John Haaga, 449–72. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. Lardner, James, and David A. Smith, eds. Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences. New York: Free Press, 2005.
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Munger, Frank. Laboring Below the Line: The New Ethnography of Poverty, Low-Wage Work, and Survival in the Global Economy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Neckerman, Kathryn M. Social Inequality. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004.
We e k l y S t a n d a rd , T h e First published on September 18, 1995, the Weekly Standard is a neoconservative magazine with a circulation of about 55,000 and a reported annual deficit of $1 million or more. The magazine’s debut was inspired by the 1994 federal elections, which for the first time in four decades gave the Republican Party control of Congress. Interpreting that result as a sea change in American politics—signaling a “lasting” political realignment—the neoconservative commentator William Kristol decided to start a magazine of “opinion journalism” for the primary purpose of influencing Washington policymakers to help set the nation on a new path. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the Standard was said to be the White House’s magazine of choice. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the Weekly Standard is by its own definition an “iconoclastically conservative” counterpart to the “iconoclastically liberal” New Republic. Edited by Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Standard is primarily a neoconservative platform that promotes an aggressive U.S. foreign policy in harmony with Kristol’s Project for a New American Century. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the magazine, which reportedly had been on the brink of folding, gained a renewed sense of purpose. The following September, conservative journalist and politician Pat Buchanan announced the start-up of his own magazine, the American Conservative, wishing to offer a competing conservative voice to the Standard. Buchanan complained, “The movement has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist, open-borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement I grew up with.” To mark the tenth anniversary of his magazine, Kristol edited a collection of what he deemed the best reflective political essays he had published to date, titled The Weekly Standard: A Reader, 1995–2005 (2005). In the foreword, Kristol notes that numerous people speak of his magazine as if it were part of a sinister conspiracy, replete with articles published “in code . . . to advance a surreptitious agenda.” Dismissing the conspiracy theorists, he writes, “Sometimes a magazine is really just a magazine.” Over the years, the magazine has advised the Republican Party to discard its anti-abortion plank (editorial, September 1995); castigated Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village (article by P.J. O’Rourke, February 1996); mocked and ridiculed President Bill Clinton throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal (capped by David Tell’s
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parody of an Italian opera, March 1999); urged regime change in Iraq as early as November 1997 (“Saddam Must Go” editorial by Kristol and Robert Kagan); articulated the importance of American protection of Israel (article by Charles Krauthammer, “At Last Zion,” May 1998); and defended the torture of terrorism suspects (a cover article by Krauthammer, December 2005). Roger Chapman See also: Abortion; Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; American Century; Buchanan, Pat; Clinton Impeachment; Contract with America; Gingrich, Newt; Israel; Kristol, Irving, and Bill Kristol; Murdoch, Rupert; Neoconservatism; September 11.
Further Reading Alterman, Eric. “Kristolizing the (Neoconservative) Movement.” Nation, February 12, 2007. Kristol, William, ed. The Weekly Standard: A Reader, 1995–2005. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. McConnell, Scott. “The Weekly Standard’s War.” American Conservative, November 21, 2005. Weekly Standard Web site. www.weeklystandard.com. “What Is Bill Kristol Up To?” Human Events, December 21, 1995.
We l f a r e Re f o r m The debate over welfare in America for much of the twentieth century was characterized by variations of two opposing arguments: the progressive or liberal concern of collective responsibility versus the conservative resistance to individual dependency. These two positions on the topic of public assistance have continued to be debated in America’s culture wars, despite evolving social understandings of motherhood, family, and the government’s role in the economy. Prior to the New Deal, state-sponsored pensions for mothers were largely premised on the idea of providing stable homes for children of widows. Yet even these popular programs, implemented in forty-four states by 1930, faced the criticism that cash assistance inevitably corrupts its recipients by destroying their work ethic and, in turn, their children’s work ethic. Even during the Great Depression, cash relief was limited out of a concern, expressed even by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that its fostering of dependency undermines individual integrity and self-sufficiency. Aid to Dependent Children, created in 1935 under the Social Security Act, allowed substantial state control over the size of payments and eligibility rules in an effort not to violate local norms of deservedness. Despite the debate over deserving versus undeserving poor, a distinction that relied heavily on race and subjective evaluations of recipients’ lifestyles, federally backed welfare continued
through the mid-twentieth century without dramatic changes. Welfare was tolerated by conservatives largely because of the preponderance of local control and the modest financial impact on local economies. By the early 1960s, middle-class whites and Washington policymakers were influenced by Michael Harrington’s best-selling book on poverty, The Other America (1962). President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in 1964, and welfare came to be seen as an entitlement—something deserved by poor families that met formal eligibility requirements. With a significant push from community organizers and the U.S. Supreme Court, the status of welfare as a “property right” was cemented around 1970. By the early 1970s, however, disillusioned liberals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, peeled away from the left, forming the neoconservative movement, in reaction to this new trend toward entitlements. Neoconservatives thought the excesses of welfare had corrupted liberalism and that a new perspective was needed. They argued for greater personal responsibility and more reliance on market incentives. In time, this movement would lead conservatives such as George Gilder and Charles Murray to call for welfare’s abolition, attacking what they took to be welfare’s perverse incentives for nonwork and out-of-wedlock childbearing. By the time Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, talk of “welfare queens” was common. And indeed, there would be poster children for the cause. Jacqueline Williams, a mother of fourteen children receiving welfare in the District of Columbia, engaged in a public spat with Washington Mayor Marion Barry. The mayor publicly criticized her fertility, but Williams claimed a God-given right to reproduce. In 1987, while pregnant with her fifteenth child, she commented to a Washington Post reporter, “I don’t intend to stop until God stops me. . . . I don’t want to mess up my body with birth control.” Opponents of welfare could not have imagined a better case to bolster their argument. Although liberal scholars such as William J. Wilson have linked underlying social structures to persistent poverty and the emergence of an urban underclass, the general public seemed more persuaded by conservatives’ explanations that focused instead on the counterproductive behaviors of poor people. Never amounting to more than 1–1.5 percent of the federal budget, welfare garnered a disproportionate share of public attention through the 1980s and 1990s. President Bill Clinton’s effort to govern from the center and his mantra of “ending welfare as we know it” represented an attempt to have it both ways. Welfare was to take on the trappings of reciprocal responsibility through work requirements and personal responsibility agreements, and there would be a sixty-month maximum lifetime limit. In a return to mid-twentieth-century practice, welfare authority was substantially transferred to the
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states, working within loose federal parameters. Devolution to the states facilitated a renewed role for local norms in determining welfare eligibility. Although this was not stepping back in time to the overtly discriminatory days of the 1940s and 1950s, it nonetheless put state policymakers in a position to tailor their welfare programs. Liberals’ concern that states would become much stingier in providing welfare was largely allayed by a provision in the law that required states to substantially maintain the level of investment they had been making in their respective welfare programs prior to 1996. In addition, robust economic growth through the end of the 1990s helped achieve a more than 50 percent reduction of the national welfare caseload by the end of that decade. Instead of crediting the economy, however, conservatives pointed to mandates in the law as the primary cause of the caseload reduction. Studies of people leaving welfare show that postwelfare employment is sporadic for many, low-paying for nearly all, and often without health insurance. If liberals feel a sense of vindication by such findings, conservatives tend to claim that even low-level employment is better than a lifestyle of unemployment and welfare dependency. Debates about welfare have moved largely off the public stage and into seminar rooms, where the outcomes of the 1996 legislation have been dissected by policy analysts. Media attention has faded, and much of the public assumes the problem has been fixed. This is reflected in a decline in the number of newspaper stories on the subject as well as in public opinion polls. In that respect, the waxing and waning public attention to the issue of welfare follows a well-known trajectory. Greg M. Shaw See also: Clinton, Bill; Compassionate Conservatism; Contract with America; Corporate Welfare; Faith-Based Programs; Harrington, Michael; Health Care; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Neoconservatism; New Deal; Reagan, Ronald; War on Poverty.
Further Reading Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Kilty, Keith M., and Elizabeth A. Segal, eds. The Promise of Welfare Reform: Political Rhetoric and Reality of Poverty in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Haworth Press, 2006. Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950– 1980. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Wilson, William J. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
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We l l s t o n e , P a u l Considered the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate at the turn of the twenty-first century, Democrat Paul Wellstone of Minnesota represented the populist left until his tragic death in a plane crash on October 25, 2002. He spoke out for the working poor, backed universal health care, opposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and twice voted against going to war in Iraq (1991, 2002). The controversy over his funeral reflected the intensity of the culture wars at the time. Paul David Wellstone, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, was born on July 21, 1944, in Washington, D.C., and raised in northern Virginia. After receiving a BA (1965) and a PhD (1969) in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he taught political science at Carleton College, a small liberal arts institution in Northfield, Minnesota (1969–1990). In 1981, Wellstone co-authored Powerline: The First Battle in America’s Energy War, presenting the viewpoint of farmers opposed to a power line crossing agricultural fields in west-central Minnesota. After running unsuccessfully for state auditor in 1982, Wellstone achieved his first electoral victory in the 1990 Senate race. Endorsed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), he defeated Rudy Boschwitz, a two-term Republican incumbent who had become increasingly conservative. Boschwitz committed a damaging tactical error during the campaign by issuing what came to be known as the “Jew letter,” a mailing that went out to thousands of Jewish voters calling Wellstone a “bad Jew” for marrying a gentile and not raising his children as Jews. (Boschwitz was Jewish, too.) The letter is said to have had a negative effect. Wellstone’s very arrival in Washington, D.C., was rancorous, beginning with his refusal to shake hands with archconservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). (During his college days in North Carolina, Wellstone had come to loathe Helms for his opposition to the civil rights movement.) In one of his most controversial moments, Wellstone held a press conference at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to denounce U.S. participation in the Persian Gulf War. (Wellstone voted against the use of force before Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and before the Iraq War in 2002.) The memorial had never been used for a political purpose, and veterans’ groups voiced disapproval. Wellstone comfortably won reelection in 1996, again facing off with Boschwitz, who made an unsubstantiated charge that as a college student the incumbent had burned the American flag. Wellstone later ran an exploratory campaign for the presidency and published The Conscience of a Liberal (2001), an intentionally ironic play on Barry Goldwater’s title, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960). In his third run for the Senate, Wellstone was opposed by Norman Coleman, the former mayor of St.
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Paul. In the midst of the campaign, while on the way to a funeral, Wellstone, his wife, daughter, and five others died in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. The memorial service, held in Minneapolis and nationally televised, was marred by politically charged eulogies and the booing of certain Republicans, prompting a walkout by Governor Jesse Ventura and others. Some linked the Democrat’s subsequent loss of the Senate to that fracas. In the words of Garrison Keillor, host of the radio program Prairie Home Companion, “The Democrats stood up in raw grief and yelled and shook their fists and offended people.” Coleman easily defeated former vice president Walter Mondale, the DFL’s replacement candidate, for the Senate seat. Tony L. Hill See also: Civil Rights Movement; Conspiracy Theories; Democratic Party; Flag Desecration; Franken, Al; Goldwater, Barry; Health Care; Helms, Jesse; Mondale, Walter; Ventura, Jesse; Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Further Reading Lofy, Bill. Paul Wellstone: The Life of a Passionate Progressive. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. McGrath, Dennis J., and Dane Smith. Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington: The Inside Story of a Grassroots U.S. Senate Campaign. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Wellstone, Paul David. The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda. New York: Random House, 2001.
We s t , C o r n e l Scholar and theologian Cornel West, a prominent African-American voice in the culture wars, advocates a progressive Christianity that incorporates some Marxist ideals, believing that the black community in particular has accepted a religious worldview that is too politically conservative. This has been the theme of many of his writings, including Black Theology and Marxist Thought (1979), Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982), and The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991). Cornel Ronald West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in a Baptist household. He spent his teenage years in Sacramento, California, where he was attracted to the black nationalism of Malcolm X and participated in civil rights demonstrations. He later attended Harvard University (AB, 1973) and Princeton University (MA, 1975; PhD, 1980). West has taught philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1977–1983, 1988), the Yale Divinity School (1984–1987), Princeton University (1988–1994, 2002–present), and Harvard University (1994–2002). Race Matters (1993), West’s best-known work, is
Professor and author Cornel West decries the “racist patriarchy” of American society and the negative stereotypes it has placed on the black community. West has referred to himself as a “non-Marxist socialist” and “radical democrat.” (Richard Alan Hannon/Getty Images)
required reading on many college campuses. In it he argues that African Americans have accepted the negative stereotypes imposed on them by white Americans and have consequently suffered from a lack of self-worth and hope for the future that has descended into cultural nihilism. In his judgment, as articulated in Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (1993), the solution depends on the revival of a “race-transcending” progressive political coalition. West has criticized black churches for supporting gender inequality and for being hostile to homosexuals. He is also critical of whites, particularly Jews, for abandoning blacks after the heyday of the civil rights movement, a topic further discussed in a work he coauthored with Rabbi Michael Lerner, Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (1995). In Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004), the sequel to Race Matters, West accuses and condemns American political leaders for participating in worldwide economic exploitation, state repression, and political imperialism. Following the publication of Race Matters, West was invited to join the African and African American Studies program at Harvard. He left in 2002 after the newly installed university president, Lawrence Summers, criticized him for engaging in too many nonscholarly activities in the political and pop culture arenas. West had worked on the Million Man March in 1995, served as an adviser to Bill Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign, and recorded hip-hop CDs. Upon returning to the Princeton University faculty, he continued his outside pursuits, such as making a cameo appearance in the film Matrix Reloaded (2003) and supporting Al Sharpton’s 2004 presidential bid.
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Conservatives such as David Horowitz have charged West with publishing writings of poor quality and fostering relativism and political correctness on campus. In spite of such criticisms, West continues to receive numerous campus speaking invitations, furthering the view of conservatives that American academic life is dominated by the left. Martin J. Plax See also: Academic Freedom; Bradley, Bill; Horowitz, David; Malcolm X; Marxism; Million Man March; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Neoconservatism; Rap Music; Relativism, Moral; Sharpton, Al; Summers, Lawrence.
Further Reading Cowan, Rosemary. Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption. Malden, MA: Polity, 2003. Horowitz, David. “Cornel West: No Light in His Attic.” Salon, October 11, 1999. Johnson, Clarence Sholé. Cornel West and Philosophy: The Quest for Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2003. Kimball, Roger. “Dr. West and Mr. Summer.” National Review, January 28, 2002. West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
Wey r i c h , P a u l M . One of the architects of the New Right, social activist and political commentator Paul Weyrich was instrumental in shaping the message of American conservatives. A key figure in several organizations, including the Krieble Institute (a training ground for democratic reformers in Eastern Europe), and a variety of causes, such as tax reform, he was best known for his defense of social conservative values, including opposition to abortion and homosexuality. Weyrich viewed America as a cultural battleground where competing ideologies pit conservatives against liberals. Though Catholic, Weyrich was widely seen as an important strategist for the Religious Right. Born Paul Michael Weyrich on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, he attended the University of Wisconsin at Parkside (AA, 1962) and began his career in journalism, reporting for the Milwaukee Sentinel and for radio station WAXO in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 1973, Weyrich and Edwin Feulner—with financial backing by Joseph Coors of the beer-brewing family—created the Heritage Foundation, a public policy research institute in Washington, D.C. He followed this up with the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, an organization that explored the fundraising possibilities of direct mail and discovered a resource for political activism: the recruiting and training of evangelical Christians to campaign for conservative candidates and
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causes. Weyrich continued to cultivate the Christian base among political conservatives, joining with the Reverend Jerry Falwell to create the Moral Majority in 1979. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Weyrich also tapped into the power of mass media, writing for and co-publishing the Conservative Digest and hosting a daily television talk show called Direct Line. In 1993, to counter what many conservatives consider a liberal bias in media, he launched National Empowerment Television (NET), an issues-orientated cable network with a conservative perspective on politics. Weyrich later left the network, renamed America’s Voice, when he clashed with network head Bob Sutton over a plan to include both liberal and conservative views on NET. In February 1999, Weyrich issued an open letter to conservative leaders in which he called for a major shift in the focus of political efforts. American society could not be rescued from the corrupting influence of liberalism, he wrote, and social conservatives should therefore redirect their energies from reforming America to segregating themselves from society at large. They should create “a sort of quarantine,” Weyrich said, creating their own schools and other institutions. His letter was precipitated by the Senate’s failure to remove President Bill Clinton from office in 1999 following his impeachment in the House. If a “moral majority” truly existed, he lamented, then Clinton should have been driven out of office. Consequently, he continued, “I believe that we probably have lost the culture war.” In his latter years, Weyrich worked to influence public policy under the auspices of the Council for National Policy and the Free Congress Foundation, organizations that include some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States. He died on December 18, 2008. Daniel Melendrez See also: Abortion; Clinton Impeachment; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Heritage Foundation; Media Bias; Moral Majority; Religious Right.
Further Reading Cromartie, Michael, ed. No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1993. Gizzi, John. “Weyrich’s Back!” Human Events, November 10, 2000. Utter, Glenn H., and James L. True. Conservative Christians and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Weyrich, Paul M., and Connaught Marshner, eds. Future 21: Directions for America in the 21st Century. Greenwich, CT: Devin-Adair, 1984.
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W his tleblowers
W h i s t l e b l o we r s Individuals who report misdeeds involving fraud, waste, or abuse in government agencies and private corporations are known as whistleblowers. More formally identified as “ethical resisters” and often recognized as the political descendants of muckrakers, whistleblowers are generally credited for putting the good of society ahead of the organization that would benefit by wrongdoing. At the same time, however, whistleblowers are sometimes viewed as suspect characters (informants, traitors, or simply disgruntled employees) operating with ulterior motives (political partisanship, revenge against a supervisor, the desire to collect reward money, etc.). Laws have been passed to shield whistleblowers from employer retribution, but that has not always kept them from being harassed, transferred, demoted, or fired. Prominent whistleblowers in the culture wars have included the medical researcher A. Dale Console, who in 1960 informed Congress of deceptive drug testing by the pharmaceutical industry; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971; New York City police officer Frank Serpico, who in the early 1970s exposed corruption in the department; W. Mark Felt, the Watergate informant known as Deep Throat; Karen Silkwood, the technician who documented safety violations at an Oklahoma nuclear power plant in 1974; Jeffrey Wigand, a former tobacco executive who in 1995 revealed the manipulation of nicotine levels in cigarettes; Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who reported a failure of the bureau to investigate terrorist leads weeks prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001; and army captain Ian Fishback and specialist Joseph Darby, both of whom turned over information about detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. During the Civil War, whistleblowers were encouraged to report government contractors selling “shoddy” war supplies to the Union army. With that in mind, Congress passed the False Claims Act (1863), authorizing citizens and civil servants to sue fraudulent contractors for a portion of the recovered money. That law, in an updated form, remains in effect to the present day. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress in 1978 passed the Civil Service Reform Act, giving protections to federal whistleblowers. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush approved a bill establishing an office of special counsel to investigate alleged incidents in which federal whistleblowers were punished for making disclosures. Whistleblower protection was added to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to protect private-sector employees who report violations of federal health, safety, and environmental laws. In one dramatic episode of the mid-1960s, two former staffers of Senator Thomas Dodd (D-CT) copied incriminating documents from the files of their old boss and handed them over to syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. The records indicated that
Dodd had spent more than $200,000 of campaign funds for personal use. When the story broke, much negative attention was focused on those who leaked the information, and the whistleblowers ultimately were criticized in a report by the Senate Ethics Committee for “a breach of the relationship of trust between a Senator and his staff.” The evidence was so damaging, however, that on June 23, 1967, the Senate passed a motion of censure against Dodd. The following year, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a civilian financial analyst at the Pentagon, informed a congressional subcommittee headed by Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) that the Lockheed Corporation’s development of the air force C-5A cargo plane was leading to cost overruns of some $2 billion. Fitzgerald’s testimony came after his superiors had told Congress that there were no concrete figures to report on that project. This incident underscored the collusion that sometimes occurs between the Pentagon and defense contractors—officers who are not strict about reducing costs and addressing quality control are more likely to land a job with a private contractor following retirement from the military. Attempts were made to oust Fitzgerald, but he won in court with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1981, he and others formed the Project on Military Procurement to aid whistleblowers in reporting waste and inefficiency in defense contracting. The consumer activist Ralph Nader, who had been assisted in the 1950s and 1960s by insiders of the automotive industry when he investigated car safety, was one of the first to defend whistleblowers. In January 1971, Nader promoted the cause of whistleblowers at the Conference on Professional Responsibility held in Washington, D.C. In his report, Nader hailed whistleblowers as society’s “last line of defense . . . against . . . secretive and powerful institutions.” Nader went on to establish the Coalition to Stop Government Waste, which was largely a support organization for whistleblowers. His call for the legitimization of whistleblowers also inspired the founding in 1977 of the Project on Official Illegality (later renamed the Government Accountability Project), which provided the legal defense for Daniel Ellsberg over his release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers. The most controversial whistleblowers are those dealing with national security issues. In 1971, six months after Nader’s endorsement of whistleblowers, Ellsberg became a cause célèbre for exposing government deceptions on the Vietnam War by turning over to the New York Times the Vietnam Study Task Force’s secret history (1945–1967), otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers. The work, comprising forty-seven volumes, was written by thirty-six analysts and historians and revealed a behind-the-scenes analysis that the war was not going well and that—contrary to what the American public was being told at the time—it probably could not be won. In
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2006, the New York Times reported an illicit eavesdropping program being carried out by the National Security Agency, while the Washington Post broke the story of a secret network of overseas CIA detention centers. In all three of these incidents, individuals without authorization provided secret information to the media for the purpose of exposing government abuse. From the perspective of officials within the executive branch of government, such individuals are engaging in sabotage. Others contend that on too many occasions the government uses security classification to avoid public accountability. Much whistleblowing is a natural consequence of the increase in federal regulation of the business sector, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s with the establishment of new federal agencies (such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration, and Consumer Product Safety Commission) to protect workers, consumers, the general public, and the natural environment. Often it has been whistleblowers who have reported violations of federal law—either workers in a firm that failed to follow regulations or bureaucrats whose federal agency was derelict in enforcement. Roger Chapman See also: Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; Central Intelligence Agency; Felt, W. Mark; Nader, Ralph; New York Times, The; Occupational Safety; Privatization; September 11; Tobacco Settlements; Tort Reform; Vietnam War; Watergate.
Further Reading Alford, C. Fred. Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Devine, Thomas. “The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989: Foundation for the Modern Law of Employment Dissent.” Administrative Law Review 35 (1999): 531–79. Glazer, Myron Peretz, and Penina Migdal Glazer. The Whistleblowers: Exposing Corruption in Government and Industry. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Johnson, Robert Ann. Whistleblowing: When It Works—and Why. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003. Katel, Peter. “Protecting Whistleblowers.” CQ Researcher, March 31, 2006.
W hite, Regg ie One of professional football’s greatest defensive players, Reggie White made headlines in the culture wars when he equated homosexuality with the nation’s moral decline and said that he found offensive any comparison of the gay rights movement with the civil rights movement. Reginald Howard White, an African American and an ordained Baptist minister, was born on December 19, 1961, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. During his collegiate
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playing days at the University of Tennessee, he earned the nickname “Minister of Defense” for his dual identity as a minister and hard-charging lineman. After a false start with the Memphis Showboats of the now defunct United States Football League, he played in the National Football League with the Philadelphia Eagles (1985–1992), Green Bay Packers (1993–1999), and Carolina Panthers (2000). He was elected to the Pro Bowl a record thirteen straight times (1986–1998) and twice was named NFL defensive player of year (1987 and 1998). He helped the Packers win Super Bowl XXXI (January 1997). Upon retirement, he held the NFL record for most career sacks. In 2006, he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Throughout his football career, White practiced his faith openly and with evangelical fervor. He initiated regular post-game prayer circles and, after tackling players on the field, would ask them, “Are you all right with Jesus?” Off the field, he devoted his time to inner-city religious charities and reaching out to gang members, drug addicts, and convicts. In 1992, he spoke at the Billy Graham Greater Philadelphia Crusade, urging racial unity and cooperation between urban and suburban churches. In reaction to the spate of arsonist attacks on black churches throughout the South during the 1990s, he challenged American society to address the nation’s race problem and confront white supremacists. His critics, emphasizing a side of White they regarded as bigoted and hateful, noted that in his March 1998 address to the Wisconsin state legislature, he listed the “gifts” of different races in what were perceived as primitive stereotypes. Gays and lesbians were especially offended by his statement, “Homosexuality is a decision; it’s not a race.” The Religious Right, in particular the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family, rallied behind White, commending him for the courage to declare his biblical convictions and not fret over political correctness. Others, however, suggested that the largely white conservative groups exploited White to advance “pro-family” positions that otherwise smacked of bigotry. On December 26, 2004, at age forty-three, White suddenly died of pulmonary sarcoidosis, a respiratory disease. Roger Chapman See also: Censorship; Christian Coalition; Civil Rights Movement; Focus on the Family; Fundamentalism, Religious; Gay Rights Movement; Graham, Billy; Political Correctness; Religious Right; Speech Codes; Stern, Howard; White S upremacists.
Further Reading White, Reggie, with Jim Denney. Reggie White in the Trenches: The Autobiography. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997. White, Reggie, with Andrew Peyton Thomas. Fighting the Good Fight: America’s “Minister of Defense” Stands Firm on What It Takes to Win God’s Way. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1999.
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W hite Supremacists Political groups based on the ideology that whites constitute a superior race are known as white supremacists, though they typically view themselves as white nationalists. Such movements comprise disparate elements, representing a complex array of racist positions. While some white supremacists advance their cause through peaceful means, utilizing free speech and seeking to appear mainstream (emphasizing that they are about “heritage” and not hate), many others overtly resort to violence against minorities and openly identify themselves as racist. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, which since 1971 has been monitoring “hate groups,” there are six major categories of white supremacists in America today: Ku Klux Klan (KKK), white nationalist, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, and Christian Identity.
Ku Klux Klan An obvious player in the white supremacist movement is the KKK, which originated during post–Civil War Reconstruction and violently enforced Jim Crow segregation throughout the South. The Klan had an unexpected resurgence during the 1920s, as it spread into the Midwest as part of the “nativist movement,” opposing blacks, Eastern European and Asian immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and even flappers. The third era of the Klan began largely in response to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned school segregation. In 1955, Eldon Lee Edwards in Georgia founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klans (U.S. Klans). On September 29 of the following year, the U.S. Klans held a rally of 3,000 with a pageant cross-burning on Stone Mountain, Georgia, site of the 1915 rebirth of the KKK. By the late 1950s, the organization had spread to nine states, and its members were responsible for carrying out assaults, bombings, and cross-burnings. The largest KKK organization in the 1960s and 1970s was the United Klans of America (UKA), headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and led by imperial wizard Robert Shelton. At its peak in 1965, the UKA had an estimated membership of 30,000. In its violent opposition to the civil rights movement, the UKA beat up Freedom Riders and firebombed their buses in Anniston, Alabama (May 14, 1961); dynamited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls and injuring over twenty others (September 15, 1963); and murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo near Selma, Alabama (March 25, 1965). Operating independently of the UKA, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi, committed similar violence, including the slaying of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi (June 21, 1964).
During the 1970s, the UKA was active in Michigan through the efforts of grand dragon Robert Miles, who ended up serving prison time for a plot to bomb empty school buses to thwart integration through busing. The Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1974 by David Duke, attempted to bring the Klan above ground and mainstream (“from the cow pasture to hotel meeting rooms” was the theme) by emphasizing nonviolence and legal means for advancing white nationalism. Catholics were now deemed acceptable, though not Jews. Duke was more likely to be seen in a suit and tie than in a white robe and hood, but he also sold books denying the occurrence of the Holocaust. Duke’s loose network included Bill Wilkinson’s Louisiana Knights, Don Black’s Alabama Knights, Louis Beam’s Texas Knights, and Tom Metzger’s California Knights. Dissension was the norm for these individuals. At odds with Duke’s vision of a “moderate” KKK, Wilkinson in 1975 formed the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, which committed itself to violently confronting civil rights marchers. In the early 1980s, Metzger left to form the neo-Nazi underground group the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), enlisting violent racist skinheads. The 1970s marked the decline of the KKK, but not its disappearance. According to the SPLC, in 2008 there were 155 KKK groups in thirty-four states with a total membership of 5,000–8,000. The states with the most KKK chapters were Texas (20), Tennessee (12), Mississippi (11), Ohio (10), and Kentucky (8).
White Nationalist and Neo-Confederate Groups In 1980, David Duke founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), which he billed as a civil rights group for whites that was no more racist than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In contrast to Duke’s outwardly peaceful approach, F. Glenn Miller of the North Carolina Knights founded in the same year the paramilitary organization the White Patriot Party, which would become unraveled by 1987 with its leader on the lam after violating his probation by declaring “total war” on Jews, African Americans, and the federal government. Meanwhile, in 1989, Duke was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives as a Republican, despite the opposition of national party leaders. In 1990, he lost a race for a U.S. Senate seat. During that campaign, Duke said, “I believe the time has come for equal rights for everyone in this country, even for white people.” Calling for segregation of the races, Duke in 1984 produced a national map designating eight peripheral regions for “unassimilable minorities” and the remainder of the land (the vast majority) to be inhabited by whites. The proposed eight minority states were Francia
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(a tract of land near the Maine-Canada border for French Canadians); West Israel (Long Island and Manhattan for Jews); Minoria (the non-Jewish part of metropolitan New York for Puerto Ricans, southern Italians, Greeks, and people from the eastern and southern Mediterranean); New Cuba (Miami and Dade County, Florida, for Cuban Americans); New Africa (the southern half of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida for African Americans); Alta California (a sliver of the Southwest from California to the tip of Texas for “documented” Mexican Americans); Navahona (a portion of New Mexico for American Indians); and East Mongolia (Hawaii for Asian Americans). Many whites over the years have joined the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which is considered to be the largest white nationalist group. The St. Louis, Missouri–based organization was founded in 1985. The group’s lineage, detractors note, is the former Citizens’ Councils of America, which during the 1950s and 1960s opposed desegregation. CCC officials insist that their group is not racist, but the group’s Web site does identify the United States as a “European country” and Americans as “a European people,” an unmistakable expression of whiteness. According to the SPLC, in 2008 there were 125 white nationalist groups in thirty-four states plus the District of Columbia. Of the total white nationalist groups, about fifty were CCC chapters, operating in twenty-one states. Another white nationalist group with state chapters is the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), founded in 2000 by David Duke and initially called the National Organization for European-American Rights (NOFEAR). The neo-Confederate groups, mostly centered in the South and largely represented by the League of the South (LOS), could be classified as espousing white regionalism. Founded in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1994 by Michael Hill for the stated goal of “a free and independent southern republic,” the LOS asserts that southern culture, due to its Anglo-Celtic heritage, is distinctive and superior to mainstream American culture. The LOS is a nonviolent organization, but critics suggest that white supremacy is its main agenda. In 2001, there were an estimated 9,000 members nationwide. In 2008, the SPLC counted 104 LOS chapters in eighteen states, including South Carolina (29), Florida (14), and Georgia (9).
Neo-Nazi, Racist Skinhead, and Christian Identity Groups Anti-Semitism is the tie that binds neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, and Christian Identity adherents. The neoNazi movement champions the ideals of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, expresses hatred of Jews, and warns of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy, even asserting that the United States federal government is a ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government). The European-inspired racist
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skinheads, who are known to physically attack minorities and homosexuals as well as desecrate synagogues, view themselves as the shock troops that will usher in the neo-Nazi revolution. Christian Identity is a religious ideology (a mutated version of British Israelism) that places whites (the Aryans) as the true children of Israel, Jews as the mixed-race children of Satan, and people of color as subhuman. Many adherents of Christian Identity belong to the militia network Posse Comitatus, which rejects state and federal authority, based on the notion that the county is the highest level of government and the sheriff the top law enforcement official—numerous Posse members, who refuse to pay federal income tax, have had shootouts with federal agents. The early lineage of the radicalized right can be traced to William Dudley Pelley, founder of the Silver Legion (or Silver Shirts), centered in Asheville, North Carolina (1933); Gerald L.K. Smith, founder, among other things, of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, headquartered in St. Louis (1942); Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, located in California (1955); Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, established in Indianapolis (1958); and Robert DePugh, founder of the Minutemen, based in Norborne, Missouri (early 1960s). These groups embraced global conspiracy theories, with most linking communism to Jews. With such radicalism in mind, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech on November 18, 1961, in which he called critical attention to “those fringes of our society” that “sow the seeds of doubt and hate” and launch “crusades of suspicion.” Although the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts disbanded after the United States became involved in World War II (and Pelley in 1942 went to prison on sedition-related charges), its influence would continue with many of its former followers in California and the Pacific Northwest joining the Christian Identity movement. In addition, former Silver Shirts member Henry Beach in 1969 founded a Posse group in Portland, Oregon. During the 1950s and 1960s Wesley Swift, a former Klansman and associate of Smith, was the most influential Christian Identity preacher with his Church of Jesus Christ-Christian (CJCC) in California. Swift inspired Robert Butler, the one-time national director of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, to establish the Aryan Nations (1973), which was run as the political arm of the CJCC from a compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. For years, prior to forfeiting its property after losing a lawsuit in 2000, the Aryan Nations annually hosted the largest gathering of white supremacists. In 1959, George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Movement in Arlington, Virginia, calling for the extermination of “Jewish traitors” and the expulsion of blacks to Africa. The group was renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party, but it imploded following the assassination of Rockwell by a disgruntled member (August 25, 1967). In 1970, Frank
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Collin founded the National Socialist Party of America, which made the news that same year by attempting a demonstration march in Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago. American television viewers got a glimpse of racist turbulence in November 1988 as it watched talk show host Geraldo Rivera get his nose broken while trying to break up an on-air brawl involving neo-Nazi skinheads of the American Front, antiracist skinheads, blacks, and Jews. One of the most notorious neo-Nazis was William Pierce, a former physics professor and follower of Rockwell. In 1970, he joined the National Youth Alliance, originally Willis Carto’s Youth for Wallace. Pierce, who envisioned a United States inhabited only by white people for the preservation of the race, led a faction in establishing the neo-Nazi group National Alliance (1974). Under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, he published the race-war novel, The Turner Diaries (1978). Five years later, the Order (or Silent Brotherhood) was formed by Robert Mathews in Metaline Falls, Washington, patterning itself on a cell by the same name featured in Pierce’s novel. The Order went on to engage in robbery, counterfeiting, and murder, including the gunning down of Alan Berg (June 18, 1984), a Denver radio talk show host who criticized neo-Nazism. Later, Timothy McVeigh, inspired by a passage in The Turner Diaries, carried out the truck bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people (April 19, 1995). According to the SPLC, in 2008 there were 207 known neo-Nazi groups in forty-two states, with the most concentrated in California (13), Texas (12), and Michigan (11). there were also ninety racist skinhead groups in twenty-six states, including California (21), Pennsylvania (11), New Jersey (12), and Florida (6). Of the thirty-six Christian Identity groups scattered across twenty-five states, considerably weakened following the 2004 death of Robert Butler, some 20 percent were based in California (7). Roger Chapman See also: Anti-Semitism; Aryan Nations; Civil Rights Movement; Confederate Flag; Duke, David; Militia Movement; Montana Freemen; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Race; Rockwell, George Lincoln; Ruby Ridge Incident; Vigilantism.
Further Reading Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Newton, Michael. The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence and Activities of America’s Most Notorious Secret Societies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Ridgeway, James. Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990.
Schlatter, Evelyn A. Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970–2000. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Southern Poverty Law Center Web site. www.splcenter.org. Young, Mitchell. White Supremacy Groups. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008.
Wildmon, Donald The founder and executive director of the American Family Association (AFA), an evangelical Christian organization, the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon pioneered the use of boycotts by conservative Protestants and fundamentalists against advertisers on television programs with content identified as offensive to traditional Christian moral standards. He later expanded his watchdog activities to other entertainment and artistic media. In the culture wars, Wildmon’s highest achievement was drawing public attention to the controversial art photos of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano in the 1980s, which led to a national debate on the public funding of the arts by the National Endowment for the Arts. Wildmon has also called for eliminating government funding of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Donald Ellis Wildmon was born on January 18, 1938, in Dumas, Mississippi. He graduated from Millsap College in Jackson, Mississippi (BA, 1960) and Emory University in Atlanta (MDiv, 1965). After serving in the U.S. Army (1961–1963), he was ordained in the United Methodist Church (1964) and pastored at congregations in various Mississippi towns until 1977, when he established the National Federation for Decency, predecessor of the AFA. Organizationally, the Tupelo-based AFA consists of a legal arm, the AFA Center for Law and Policy, and an advocacy arm, AFA Action. The nonprofit organization syndicates a half-hour radio program called AFA Report, aired by some 1,200 stations; and the AFA itself operates about 200 stations through noncommercial educational licenses controlled by the American Family Radio Network, launched in 1987. Wildmon has taken advantage of federal law to operate his stations at full power and broadcast over several of the “liberal and secular” National Public Radio (NPR) stations. Wildmon has written more than eighteen books, primarily in the genre of Christian inspiration, including Stand Up to Life! A Man’s Reflection on Living (1975) and Following the Carpenter: Parables to Inspire Obedience in the Christian Life (1997). His book The Home Invaders (1985) offers an analysis of television and the general media, which the jacket proclaims a “mind-polluting tide seeking to submerge us all!” The People for the American Way, often in opposition to the AFA, suggests that Wildmon’s definition of “indecent” means anything not in accordance with his Christian
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worldview and political preferences, including “television, the separation of church and state, pornography, ‘the homosexual agenda,’ premarital sex, legal abortion, the National Endowment for the Arts, gambling, unfiltered Internet access in libraries, and the removal of schoolsponsored religious worship from public schools.” Over the years, Wildmon’s boycott and decency campaigns have targeted such corporations as Allstate Insurance, American Airlines, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Company, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo., and Wal-Mart; such television shows as Desperate Housewives, Ellen, Nightline, NYPD Blue, Roseanne, and Saturday Night Live; the film Last Temptation of Christ and others; and pop culture figures including radio “shock jock” Howard Stern and singer Madonna. Critics maintain that AFA boycotts are largely ineffective and serve primarily to generate publicity and funds for the organization. Chip Berlet See also: Censorship; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Mapplethorpe, Robert; Media Bias; National Endowment for the Arts; National Public Radio; Public Broadcasting Service; Religious Right; Serrano, Andres; Sexual Revolution.
Further Reading AFA Online Web site. www.afa.net. Boston, Rob. “In Don We Trust?” Church & State, May 2001. Dedman, Bill. “Bible Belt Blowhard.” Mother Jones, October 1992. Wildmon, Donald, with Randall Nulton. Don Wildmon: The Man the Networks Love to Hate. Wilmore, KY: Bristol Books, 1989.
Will, George An influential political commentator, George Will has provided a conservative perspective on American politics and culture as well as international affairs since the 1970s. His eloquent, self-confident style and strong opinions have generated criticism from both the left and the right. George Frederick Will was born on May 4, 1941, in Champaign, Illinois. He received his education at Trinity College (BA, 1962), Oxford University (MA, 1964), and Princeton University (PhD, 1967). After teaching political philosophy at Michigan State University and the University of Toronto, he served from 1970 to 1972 on the staff of U.S. Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO). Will began his career in journalism as Washington editor for the conservative journal National Review from 1972 to 1975. As a member of the Washington Post Writers Groups beginning in 1974, his columns became syndicated in more than 450 newspapers across the United
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States. In 1976, he also became a weekly columnist for Newsweek. Expanding his commentary to television, he joined Agronsky and Company (1977–1984) and ABC’s This Week (1981–present). In addition to publishing several collections of his columns, Will has written several books on politics and world affairs, including Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (1983); The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (1987); Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992); The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America’s Fabric: 1994–1997 (1997); With a Happy Eye But . . . : America and the World, 1997–2002 (2002); and One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation (2008). A committed Chicago Cubs fan who frequently makes references to baseball in his commentary, he also wrote about the sport in Men at Work (1992) and Bunts (1998). Will has won a number of journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. Strongly influenced by Aristotle, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, and Benjamin Disraeli, Will rejects the libertarian version of conservatism in favor of traditionalism, sometimes called “Tory conservatism.” His emphasis on the public good over individual interest, and the values of justice and equality of opportunity, has led him to oppose uncontrolled free-market capitalism and support certain taxes, welfare programs, and civil rights laws. Will’s desire to use government to achieve social ends has its limits, however, as evidenced by his opposition to efforts to bring about racial equality through affirmative action, busing, and quotas. As a traditionalist, Will has sought to preserve historic practices, institutions, and values and promote individual virtue. Government, in his view, has the responsibility to regulate activities, such as pornography, drugs, abortion, and surrogate motherhood, that threaten these elements. He also argues for limitations on freedom of speech and states that some forms of sexual behavior should not be tolerated. Will carries these views of domestic affairs into his understanding of foreign policy, where he advocates a nationalist stance and the need for U.S. leaders to explain to Americans why and when the citizenry must sacrifice personal interests for the security of the larger community. Libertarian conservatives have criticized Will’s support of big government and rejection of the free market. Liberals have argued that he is inconsistent and has an inadequate concept of justice. He has also been accused of ethical lapses, particularly for his undisclosed participation in Ronald Reagan’s preparation for the 1980 campaign debate with Jimmy Carter and his commentary on the 1996 presidential race while his wife served in the campaign of Republican nominee Robert Dole. Gary Land
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See also: Abortion; Affirmative Action; Carter, Jimmy; National Review; Reagan, Ronald; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Burner, David, and Thomas R. West. Column Right: Conservative Journalists in the Service of Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Chappell, Larry W. George F. Will. New York: Twayne, 1997. Francis, Samuel T. “The Case of George Will.” Modern Age 30:2 (1986): 141–47. Neuchterlein, James. “George Will and American Conservatism.” Commentary 76 (1983): 35–43. Rozell, Mark J. “George F. Will’s ‘Tory Conservatism.’ ” In American Conservative Opinion Leaders, ed. Mark J. Rozell and James F. Pontuso, 13–28. Boulder, CO: Westside, 1990.
Williams, William Appleman Issuing a devastating—some said “un-American”— reinterpretation of U.S. foreign relations, William Appleman Williams became a leading figure in the “revisionist school” of American diplomatic history. As opposed to the standard depictions of the United States as a benevolent and benign Cold War power containing Soviet aggression, from Williams’s pen came the chronicles of a conniving imperialist tyrant driven to global expansion by its own economic avarice. Born on June 12, 1921, in Atlantic, Iowa, Williams seemed the quintessential patriotic young American, enrolling at the U.S. Naval Academy and late in World War II serving as an executive officer in the Pacific, where he earned a Purple Heart. His outlook began to change after the war, however, when the navy reassigned him to flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he recognized the injustice of racial segregation and began to work with African Americans, Quakers, and communists to promote integration. For his efforts, his superiors reprimanded him, the FBI threatened him, and local officials physically assaulted him. After his military discharge, he earned a PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1950) and later served on its faculty (1957–1968). He taught history at a number of institutions, chiefly Oregon State University (1968–1988), from which he retired. In most history books of the time, the United States unintentionally acquired global power as a consequence of World War II. Catapulted into power by the war, the story went, isolationist and peace-loving Americans had little choice but to develop a “realist” foreign policy and pragmatically wield power for good in the containment of the Soviet Union. Thus, global politics forced an unwilling and disinterested America to serve as the architect and enforcer of a new world order, a mission the United States never sought and often detested. Williams, instead, described a long-term pursuit
of empire. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), he outlined late-nineteenth-century policies, such as the Open Door policy in China, that belied the image of a nation averse to global power. In The Contours of American History (1961), Williams expanded his critique, locating the designs of American imperialism in antebellum mercantilism and leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. In The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969), Williams attributed the nation’s imperialism during the Gilded Age to agricultural interests rather than simply industrial concerns. Thus, he presented the United States as a nation with a history of voluntarily selling its democratic birthright for a mess of capitalist pottage. Once set on the path to empire, the American nation had little choice but to suppress national liberation movements—a betrayal of the ideals of the American Revolution. Critics such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., have denounced Williams’s interpretation of U.S. imperialism as dogmatic and poorly documented. Schlesinger and others have noted, for example, that Williams’s research did not include manuscript collections outside the United States that might have challenged his unilateral depiction of U.S. imperialism. The Organization of American Historians elected Williams president of the professional association in 1980. That same year, he published his retrospective, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative, using it to challenge Reagan conservatism. He died two years after his retirement from teaching, on March 8, 1990. Richard C. Goode See also: American Exceptionalism; Chomsky, Noam; Cold War; Reagan, Roland; Revisionist History; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Berger, Henry W. A William Appleman Williams Reader. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. Buhle, Paul M., and Edward Rice-Maximin. William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Wilson, Edmund Once praised by Gore Vidal as “America’s best mind,” Edmund Wilson was a widely respected literary critic and social commentator. His most commercially successful work, a collection of stories titled Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), was for a time banned as obscene. As a political progressive, Wilson participated in the culture wars as a critic of capitalism, the Cold War, and the increasing specialization of literary studies.
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The bookish Wilson, whose ancestors enjoyed prominence in Puritan New England, was born on May 8, 1895, in Red Bank, New Jersey. After studying literature at Princeton University (AB, 1916), where he befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald, he served in World War I as a hospital orderly in France. After the war, he served as editor of Vanity Fair magazine (1920–1921) and later worked on the staffs of the New Republic, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. His works of criticism, many of them collections of magazine articles, focused primarily on literature, politics, and culture, and earned him a reputation as the preeminent cultural critic of his time. Fascinated with Marxism, Wilson wrote To the Finland Station (1940), tracing three centuries of socialist development, capped by Vladimir Lenin’s arrival in Russia at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Patriotic Gore (1962), he analyzes American literature of the Civil War era, concluding that the nation’s desire for order is based largely on a hunger for power. In reaction to personal difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service— he refused to file tax returns from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s—he wrote The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963), complaining that high taxes were a consequence of the Vietnam War. In The Fruits of the MLA (1968), he scorns that organization’s “hyphen-hunting” (emphasis on “ethnic” literature) and output of academic editions of unimportant literary works. His critique inspired the creation of the Library of America editions. Wilson’s cause célèbre was Memoirs of Hecate County, published by Doubleday in 1946. In it, the unnamed male narrator, while offering misogynistic stories that take place in a fictitious New York suburb, graphically recounts numerous sexual relations. During the obscenity trial initiated by the New York Society for the Improvement of Morals, literature professor Lionel Trilling argued that the book’s redeeming value was its study of good and evil. Wilson lost the case on appeal in 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a 4–4 decision, with one justice not participating. The book was therefore banned in New York State for several years. Wilson died at the age of seventy-seven on June 12, 1972. Roger Chapman See also: Book Banning; Censorship; Cold War; Great Books; Kubrick, Stanley; Marxism; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Pornography; Tax Reform; Vidal, Gore; Vietnam War.
Further Reading Karolides, Nicholas J., Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova. 100 Banned Books: Censorship History of World Literature. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999. Menand, Louis. “Missionary.” The New Yorker, August 8 and 15, 2005. Meyers, Jeffrey. Edmund Wilson: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
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W i n f r ey, O p r a h Television superstar, magazine publisher, actress, and writer Oprah Winfrey, widely known by her first name alone, is said to be the highest-paid entertainer in the world, the first African-American billionaire (net worth exceeding $1.4 billion in 2006), and the most influential woman in the media industry. Although Winfrey’s wealth and influence derive in large measure from ownership of her own multimedia production company, called Harpo, the foundation of her success is said to be the ability to connect on a personal level with audiences of her Emmy-winning daytime talk show and the readers of her magazine. At the same time, her emotioncentered approach and the ways in which she has used her influence have also made her the target of criticism in the culture wars. Orpah (later spelled Oprah) Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. After studying speech communication and performing arts at Tennessee State University (BA, 1976), she spent several years in broadcasting and became the host of WLS-TV’s AM Chicago in 1984. It soon became the highest-rated talk show in Chicago, and two years later, renamed the Oprah Winfrey Show, entered national syndication. Winfrey went on to star in film adaptations of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1985) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998), which she co-produced. In 1996, she introduced a segment on her television show called Oprah’s Book Club, which dramatically increased the sale of books she recommended (many of them the “great books”), a phenomenon that came to be called the “Oprah Effect.” In 2000, she founded O, The Oprah Magazine, which reached a paid monthly circulation of 2.7 million copies within two years. In 2004, Winfrey became the first African American to be included in BusinessWeek’s list of the Fifty Most Generous Philanthropists. In 2006, she announced a three-year deal with XM Satellite Radio to launch a new channel called Oprah & Friends. And in 2008, she announced plans for a new cable TV network: OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. The Oprah Winfrey Show began with a somewhat sensationalist bent, featuring such provocative guests as nudists, transsexuals, white supremacists, sex offenders, and the like. As the program found its niche and audience, it became less provocative, but nonetheless gained a reputation as a “group-therapy session.” Oprah added a personal touch with frank confessions, talking about her weight problem and revealing that she had been sexually abused as a child and tried crack cocaine as a young adult. In 1996, she was sued by a group of Texas cattle producers for airing a show on mad cow disease, after which beef sales declined significantly at grocery stores nationwide. Winfrey was accused of unfairly disparaging beef by having an animal rights activist on the program
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and raising public awareness of mad cow disease, which had infected millions of cows in Great Britain. Supporters argued that she was exercising her right to free speech; critics said she was guilty of making unreasonable and unsubstantiated claims regarding beef. The case was thrown out by the U.S. District Court in Amarillo, Texas. In 2007, with Winfrey drawing 60 million viewers to her program every day, critics contended that she was not doing enough to effectuate progressive social change. Her unwillingness to address complex social issues, such as racism, sexism, and class warfare, earned her the label “Mammy” from cultural critics such as the University of Maryland sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. Rather than lead nuanced discussions on social and structural inequities in American society, Oprah focused on the promotion of “self healing” and “personal change.” Such an approach, argued her critics, ignores the long-standing societal structures that enable social ills to continue and fails to promote the necessary social or political transformation. On the other hand, Winfrey’s expressions of concern about sexual predators led to federal legislation in 1993. Meanwhile, an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show became a must for any candidate seeking success on the presidential campaign trail. The host rarely uttered a word regarding her own political preferences until 2007, when she publicly endorsed Barack Obama, the U.S. senator from Illinois. Her appearances with Obama during the Democratic primary campaign drew large crowds, and her support was regarded as especially influential among women voters. Even Winfrey’s philanthropic efforts have been the subject of debate. In 2007, she opened an all-girls school in South Africa to much fanfare, with skeptics disparaging the venture from the outset as a publicity stunt and public relations tactic. When allegations of physical and sexual abuse emerged shortly after the school’s opening, critics charged that Oprah had failed by not properly screening and monitoring the staff. Her philanthropic efforts, meanwhile, had been far-reaching for years. Since its founding in 1998, Oprah’s Angel Network alone had raised more than $50 million for international charity. In 2005, BusinessWeek estimated Oprah’s philanthropic contributions at some $250 million.
Illousz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Oprah.com: Live Your Best Life Web site. www.oprah .com. Squire, Corrinne. “Empowering Women? The Oprah Winfrey Show.” In Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, 98–113. New York: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Wo l f, N a o m i Feminist author Naomi Wolf is known for her best-selling first book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (1991), regarded as one of the central texts of third-wave feminism. The “beauty myth,” she argues, is not about physical appearance but the conditioning of female behavior in order to maintain male dominance in society. Through an examination of the cosmetic industry, fashion magazines, eating disorders, diets, silicone breast implants, and cosmetic surgery, Wolf argues that such cultural controls make women subject to outside approval and censure, replacing traditional religious and sexual taboos with new forms of repression. Moreover, she sees the “beauty myth” as part of a backlash against the gains of the feminist movement. Wolf calls for a reinterpretation of beauty as “noncompetitive, nonhierarchical, and nonviolent.” Born on November 12, 1962, in San Francisco, Wolf studied English literature at Yale University (BA, 1984)
Danielle R. Vitale and Valerie Palmer-Mehta See also: Animal Rights; Blackface; Doctor Phil; Donahue, Phil; Great Books; Morrison, Toni; Obama, Barack; Sex Offenders; Transgender Movement; White Supremacists.
Further Reading Garson, Helen. Oprah Winfrey: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Harris, Jennifer, and Elwood Watson. The Oprah Phenomenon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Third-wave feminist Naomi Wolf argues in her acclaimed 1991 book The Beauty Myth that “beauty” is a paternalistic social construct perpetuated by popular culture, industry, and the legal and medical communities to exploit and suppress women. (Michael A. Smith/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
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and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1984–1987). A prolific writer of both books and essays, Wolf has been interviewed extensively in print and on television. Her other writings include Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-first Century (1993), which examines the feminist movement and argues that “victim” feminism must be replaced by “power” feminism that “hates sexism without hating men”; Promiscuities: The Secret Struggles of Womanhood (1997), which decodes popular culture’s mixed sexual messages that stigmatize girls and women; Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (2001), which discusses how society simultaneously sentimentalizes pregnancy and fails to support mothers; The Tree House: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See (2005), which recounts the advice of her father, writer Leonard Wolf, on living and creativity; and The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (2007), which warns how America could slip into fascism. Because her writings bridge journalism and academics, Wolf has been variously criticized for self-indulgent reflections, overstating statistics, and watering down feminism to make it more inclusive. Her stint as a paid consultant to Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign raised eyebrows, and Gore received unfavorable publicity after Time magazine reported Wolf’s advice to have the candidate dress as an “alpha male” to attract female voters. In 2004, Wolf accused the literary critic Harold Bloom of sexually inappropriate behavior when she was an undergraduate at Yale. Two years later the Jewish feminist was again in the news when she reported having a vision, under hypnosis, of Jesus Christ, a claim questioned by both the Religious Right and the Jewish community. Rebecca Nicholson-Weir See also: Beauty Pageants; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Gore, Al; Paglia, Camille; Religious Right; Sexual Assault; Stay-at-Home Mothers; Victimhood.
Further Reading Foster, Patricia. Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Gotschall, Mary G. “Poisoned Apple.” National Review, July 8, 1991. Greene, Gayle. “The Empire Strikes Back.” Nation, February 10, 1992. Wolf, Naomi. “The Silent Treatment.” New York Magazine, March 1, 2004.
Wo l f e , To m A leading exponent of “New Journalism,” and famous for wearing white suits at every public appearance, the flamboyant author Tom Wolfe has chronicled many as-
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pects of American society, targeting some of its most enduring institutions while snubbing liberal orthodoxy. A social conservative, Wolfe famously dubbed the 1960s the “Me Decade.” Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., born on March 2, 1931, in Richmond, Virginia, earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University (1951) and a PhD in American Studies from Yale (1957); his doctoral dissertation focused on communist influences on American writers from 1929 to 1942. Wolfe worked as a journalist for various newspapers, but he is best known for his magazine articles, essays, nonfiction books, and novels; several of the latter were made into Hollywood films. In 1963, Wolfe investigated Southern California’s custom car culture for Esquire magazine but struggled to write an article. Facing a deadline, he wrote a long letter to his editor explaining what he had found, and the letter was subsequently printed almost verbatim, launching Wolfe on what he called “New Journalism,” a style also used by writers such as Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer. Unlike traditional journalism, in which the reporter remains an inconspicuous observer and objective nonentity, New Journalism interjects the writer’s personality and subjective point of view. Wolfe took this approach in several books documenting the radical youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby (1965), a collection of nonfiction pieces, was Wolfe’s first longer work of New Journalism, though he gained greater notoriety with the publication of The Electric KoolAid Acid Test (1968) and The Pump House Gang (1968). Novelistic treatments of real events, these works provided a descriptive account of the lifestyle of the 1960s counterculture. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine (1976) included one of his most widely cited essays, or at least its catchphrase, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Wolfe addressed race relations in Radical Chic and Mau-Mau-ing the Flak-Catchers (1970) and A Man in Full (1998), sexual mores in Hooking Up (2000), modern art and architecture in The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), and the hedonism of college campuses in the novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004). His portrayal of NASA and its fledgling space program, as well as the mores and exploits of the astronauts training for the moon missions, was the focus of The Right Stuff (1979), which won a National Book Award and was made into a popular movie. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a fictional indictment of the greed of the 1980s, was also made into a film. The audiobook Ambush at Fort Bragg (1997), promoted as a negative critique of television newscasters, was a morality tale against gays in the military. Wolfe has been frequently interviewed for his views on cultural issues. His opinions range from the humor-
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ous to the caustic, showing particular disdain for liberal academics, the New Left, anticapitalist pontifications, and political correctness. He once stated that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago will be regarded as one of the most important works of history because it unalterably linked socialism and concentration camps. Kirk Richardson and Roger Chapman See also: Civil Rights Movement; Communists and Communism; Counterculture; Gays in the Military; New Journalism; New Left; Political Correctness; Race; Sexual Revolution; Thompson, Hunter S.
Further Reading Bloom, Harold. Tom Wolfe. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Ragen, Brian Abel. Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Scurra, Dorothy, ed. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Shomette, Doug, ed. The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.
Wo m e n i n t h e M i l i t a r y American women have been part of the nation’s regular standing forces since passage of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act in 1948, but it was not until the abolition of the separate women’s corps in each of the major service branches in the 1970s and the introduction of mixed-gender basic training by the air force (1976), navy (1992), and army (1993) that the U.S. armed forces have approached anything near gender integration. By 2000, women made up 20 percent of all military personnel. Opponents of gender integration in the military have argued that the lowering of physical requirements necessary to accommodate women diminishes force strength and readiness, and that combat effectiveness is compromised by the complications of mixing men and women in the field. Proponents dismiss such arguments as antiquated, believing that proper tactics, training, and use of technology can more than compensate for female physical limitations. Men and women, they argue further, can effectively work together if that is the professional expectation communicated and enforced by all leaders. Proponents of women serving fully in all military roles, including combat, argue that commanders should not be restricted in how to deploy their troops. Major changes were instituted during the 1970s, as Congress opened the federal service academies to women; the army, navy, and air force began admitting women to flight training; and several discriminatory regulations and policies were revised, including the practice of discharg-
ing pregnant servicewomen. The number of women in the U.S. armed services more than doubled over the course of the decade. Despite the reforms, however, the movement toward gender equality stopped short of allowing women to hold combat positions. Moreover, until 1994, women could not be assigned anywhere there was even the threat of combat, hostile fire, or capture equal to that of a combat area, regardless of their vocations. Between 1992 and 1994, restrictions against women serving on combat aircraft and naval vessels were lifted (submarines excluded); such restrictions remained in place for direct ground combat, leaving women still ineligible for positions in infantry, armor, field artillery, and all special operations divisions. Such exclusions have not kept American servicewomen out of harm’s way, however, as eleven of the fifteen women who died in the Persian Gulf War (1991) fell in combat situations. And as the 2003 experiences of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War dramatically attest, keeping women out of combat occupations does not always shield them from direct ground combat. Captured in Iraq on March 23, 2003, the twenty-year-old Lynch was the only survivor of an insurgent attack on her Humvee in a maintenance convoy on the road near Nasiriyah. In releasing the video of her rescue, the Pentagon acknowledged the extraordinary interest the public had taken in Lynch’s plight. The extensive coverage of her ordeal was seen by some as a reflection of public ambivalence about daughters serving in combat situations. Between 2003 and 2007, over 160,500 women served in Iraq and Afghanistan, meaning in those theatres of war one in seven soldiers were female. In Iraq during that period, seventy-one female soldiers died and another 450 were wounded. The U.S. military has often been accused of holding its women to different standards of conduct than it does its men. Throughout the 1980s, for example, female service members were investigated and dismissed under suspicion of homosexuality at a much higher rate than their male counterparts. Lt. Kelly Flinn, the first bomber pilot in the Air Force, resigned in 1997 under threat of court-martial for adultery. Her defenders argued that while she had engaged in an affair with a married man, adultery was routinely ignored among male officers; thus, it was said, prosecuting Flinn for that offense was sexist and discriminatory. Flinn’s critics countered that it was her failure to follow orders in continuing the affair that constituted an untenable breach of military order, and that such an offense was uniformly punished regardless of gender. A series of scandals in the 1990s and early 2000s revealed the extent of sexual harassment and abuse of women in the services, and the consistent failure of their commanders to prosecute offenders. Dozens of women went public in June 1991 with accounts of sexual assault at the September 1990 convention of Tailhook, a popular
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private organization for naval aviators. Although many of these women had reported the incidents to their commanders, there had been no investigation. Public embarrassment over this failure was great enough to prompt the resignation of Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett, but, according to a report issued by the inspector general in September of 1992, the navy’s subsequent investigation of the allegations was poorly conducted and concealed evidence in an effort to avoid bad publicity. Four years later, the army suffered its own scandal when it was reported that male drill sergeants had demanded sex from female trainees at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Throughout the Iraq War, which began in 2003, there were reports numbering in the thousands of sexual harassment and rape of female soldiers by men in their units. In 2004, Spc. Suzanne Swift was courtmartialed for desertion after she went AWOL from the army while home on leave from Iraq; she claimed she had been forced into sexual relations with a commanding officer and did not want to return to duty. Critics of gender integration in the military, such as senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Charles Robb (D-VA) during the 1990s, blamed sexual misconduct on policies that place men and women in the same training situations. After the Tailhook and Aberdeen incidents, Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) introduced a bill to ban co-ed basic training, but the proposal was opposed by the heads of the major service branches. Proponents of integrated military training and units, such as Senator Olympia Snow (R-MA), argue that women will be treated with less respect if they are not subject to the same regime as their male counterparts. Holly Alloway See also: Gays in the Military; Sexual Harassment; Southern Baptist Convention.
Further Reading Fenner, Lorry M., and Marie de Young. Women in Combat: Civic Duty or Military Liability? Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. Mitchell, Brian. Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster. Washington, DC: Regency, 1998. Nelson, T.S. For Love of Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Abuse in the U.S. Military. New York: Hawthorn Maltreatment and Trauma Press, 2002. Zeigler, Sara L., and Gregory G. Gunderson. Moving Beyond G.I. Jane: Women and the U.S. Military. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005.
Wo m e n ’s S t u d i e s Women’s studies, with roots in the feminist and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, is an interdisci-
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plinary academic discipline that focuses on the lives and experiences of women, as well as theories about gender. More than 700 programs have been offered on college campuses nationwide in the three decades since the inception of the first women’s studies program at San Diego State University in 1969. In the meantime, the National Women’s Studies Association was founded in 1977 to promote women’s studies at all levels of education, from preschool to doctorate programs. Proponents of women’s studies cite inclusiveness and the expansion of knowledge as justification for the field, whereas critics suggest that such an approach fosters political correctness while unwittingly marginalizing the study of women by ghettoizing it as a narrow field of academe. In the 1960s, as scholars and activists explored areas of interest and research that included female voices and perspectives, there was a demand to integrate these new findings in higher education. There was likewise a desire to create a formal space in the academic world, which had been largely dominated by male history, achievements, and perspectives, to include the study of women, gender, and women’s achievements. At the same time, there was a sense that women’s studies could boost female representation on college faculties. From these concerns and interests grew women’s studies classes that dealt with international women’s issues in history, literature, art, and feminist theory. Many colleges and universities now have women’s studies programs and departments, and students are able to pursue a major, minor, or graduate degree in women’s studies. As American academia has come under attack by conservatives since the 1980s for being too liberal and overly concerned with the study of minorities and women, the field of women’s studies—in particular its feminist content—has been widely criticized as radical. The negative stereotypes associated with feminists have often been directed at the faculty, students, and curriculum of women’s studies. Critics argue, for example, that women’s studies is largely antimale and against traditional values. “Why is there not men’s studies?” they ask. Those who support the inclusion of women’s studies in academia contend that mainstream classes generally focus on men and male culture, making them normative. Another widely debated issue has to do with the balance between scholarship and activism. While the advent and growth of women’s studies as an academic discipline has been influenced by the feminist movement, some individuals believe women’s studies focuses unduly on social activism rather than intellectual advancement. On the other hand, many radical proponents feel that women’s studies is too theoretical and elitist, minimizing its real-world effectiveness. The designation “women’s studies” itself has been the subject of debate. Some think the term is too limiting, considering that much of current theory and research
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has to do with broader issues of gender, femininity, and masculinity, thereby encompassing the experiences and identities of women, men, and transgendered persons rather than just women. To reflect this multifaceted approach, programs at some institutions have been renamed “women’s and gender studies” or simply “gender studies.” Those who prefer to keep “women” (or some form of it) in the designation are fearful that referring only to “gender studies” will diminish the emphasis on women, both in the program of study and in the academic space for them. Alexandra DeMonte See also: Academic Freedom; Feminism, Second-Wave; Feminism, Third-Wave; Men’s Movement; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; Transgender Movement.
Further Reading Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Boxer, Marilyn. When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women’s Studies in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan, eds. An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, 2002. Howe, Florence, ed. The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers. New York: Feminist, 2000.
Wo o d w a r d , B o b As a reporter for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward helped to break the story of the Watergate scandal, leading to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation and ushering in a new era of hard-charging investigative journalism. Woodward later evolved into an “insider journalist” known for his prolific output of books on powerful people and institutions in the nation’s capital. The son of a judge, Robert Upshur Woodward was born on March 26, 1943, in Geneva, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Wheaton. A graduate of Yale University (1965), he served in the U.S. Navy as a communications officer (1965–1970). After one year as a reporter for the Montgomery Sentinel in Rockville, Maryland, he joined the Washington Post. On June 17, 1972, ten months after being hired by the Post, Woodward began collaborating with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein on investigating the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged pursuit of the details, after many other reporters lost interest, eventually revealed connections between the burglars and the White House. In 1973, the Post was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for its Watergate coverage. In August 1974, Nixon resigned from office to avoid impeachment. The young investigative duo followed up their newspaper series with the best-selling book All the President’s Men (1974), an overview of their Watergate investigation, and The Final Days (1976), an account of Nixon’s resignation. In the movie version of All the President’s Men (1976), Robert Redford plays Woodward. In 1990, the executive director of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, called Woodward “not a responsible journalist” and indicated that he would be denied access to the library’s holdings—a statement that was later retracted, but an indication of lasting bitterness. In 2003, Woodward and Bernstein sold their Watergate papers to the University of Texas at Austin for $5 million. In 2005, Watergate again became the focus of national debate when W. Mark Felt, the former associate director of the FBI, revealed himself as “Deep Throat,” Woodward’s secret inside source during the investigation. After Watergate, Woodward became an editor at the Post and was allowed to pursue special projects. His embarrassment as an editor in overseeing Janet Cooke’s 1980 coverage of a child heroin addict, a story that won a Pulitzer Prize but later turned out to be a fabrication, was later offset by his team coverage of the September 11 attacks that earned the Post a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Most of his time as an editor has been spent writing books: Wired: The Short and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984); Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987 (1987); The Commanders (1991); The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (1994); The Choice: How Clinton Won (1996); Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (1999); Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom (2001); Bush at War (2002); Plan of Attack (2004); The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat (2005); State of Denial (2006); and The War Within: A Secret White House History 20062008 (2008). He also co-authored The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (1979) and The Man Who Would Be President: Dan Quayle (1992). Woodward’s books rely on anonymous “deep background” interviews with top officials. Critics, such as David Corn of the Nation magazine, contend that such an approach relegates Woodward to the role of a stenographer, and one who can be easily manipulated by political players who parcel out information and “spin” the story in accordance with a rehearsed message. In the introduction of The Agenda, Woodward maintains, “I believe there is a place for reporting that aspires to combine the thoroughness of history with the immediacy of journalism.” In Bush at War and Plan of Attack, Woodward provided laudatory accounts of the George W. Bush administration and its decision to invade Iraq in 2003, but State of Denial and The War Within were more hardhitting books.
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Woodward had been criticized for holding back information from the public. For example, he did not expose the illegal sale of arms to the Contras in the 1980s until after a congressional investigation was launched. And he did not reveal Colin Powell’s opposition to Operation Desert Storm, the name for the 1991 attack on Iraq, until after Congress voted approval. When Bush administration officials wanted to leak the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to retaliate against her husband, Joseph Wilson, for his criticism of their rationale for invading Iraq in 2003, Woodward was one of the first reporters to receive the information, although he did not make use of it. He did not reveal his knowledge of the leak until well after Plame’s identity became public, but his critics saw it as confirming his chumminess with the Bush administration. Roger Chapman See also: Bush Family; Central Intelligence Agency; Felt, W. Mark; Iran-Contra Affair; Liddy, G. Gordon; Media Bias; Nixon, Richard; September 11; Watergate; Whistleblowers.
Further Reading Corn, David. “Who’s in Charge?” Nation, March 3, 2003. ———. “Woodward Revised.” Nation, October 2, 2006. Evan, Thomas, Rich Wolffe, and John Barry. “The Woodward War.” Newsweek, October 9, 2006. Havill, Adrian. Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1993. Jensen, Carl. Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000.
Wo r l d World magazine, established in 1986, is a national weekly news magazine that serves as a conservative Christian counterpart to Time and Newsweek. Its editor, Marvin Olasky, popularized the phrase “compassionate conservatism,” served as an adviser to Texas gubernatorial candidate George W. Bush in the mid-1990s, and later became the provost of King’s College, an evangelical school in Manhattan. The magazine has been controversial in the culture wars for its rigid stance on family values, abortion, and homosexuality. World describes itself as striving for “factual accuracy and biblical objectivity, trying to see the world as best we can the way the Bible depicts it,” and notes: “Journalistic humility for us means trying to give God’s perspective.” In 1999, the publishers of World founded the World Journalism Institute with the aim of training its reporters; it has since expanded its mission to “recruit, equip, place and encourage journalists who are Christians in the mainstream newsrooms of America.” The institute has been criticized for teaching “directed reporting,” or skewing objectivity with religious beliefs. For example,
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factual coverage of same-sex marriages might be combined with the position that such marriages are inherently wrong and ungodly. Conservative Christians who subscribe to World regard it as a spiritual alternative to the secular news media that ignores the Bible. Liberal readers, both Christian and non-Christian, argue that such a religious focus can lead to reporting that is biased and inaccurate. Nevertheless, World continues to interpret the news in its unique fashion, offering many readers conservative Christian guidance in their understanding of current affairs. Joseph Gelfer See also: Bush Family; Compassionate Conservatism; Evangelicalism; Family Values; Fundamentalism, Religious; Media Bias; Religious Right; Same-Sex Marriage; Secular Humanism; Washington Times, The.
Further Reading Beckerman, Gal. “God Is My Co-Author.” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2004. Moll, Rob. “World Journalism Institute Changes Its Focus.” Christianity Today, June 7, 2004. Olasky, Marvin. Telling the Truth: How to Revitalize Christian Journalism. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1996. World Magazine Web site. www.worldmag.com.
Wo r l d C o u n c i l o f C h u r c h e s The World Council of Churches (WCC) is an international ecumenical organization dedicated to many social justice issues, including pacifism and peaceful conflict resolution, the eradication of poverty, the rights of oppressed peoples, and environmental preservation. The stated goal of the WCC is to promote Christian unity, which it advances through ecumenism, an effort to bring all churches into a visible unity in one faith and one eucharistic fellowship. Critics, however, characterize it as a leftist organization masking a radical socialist or communist agenda behind acts of faith. Founded in August 1948, the World Council of Churches now represents approximately 550 million Christians in 340 churches, denominations, and fellowships from 100 countries and territories worldwide— including most orthodox churches, and many Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, and Protestant Reformation denominations. The Roman Catholic Church, although it shares a relationship with the WCC through a joint working group, is not a member. An assembly and 158-member central council whose officers make up an executive committee govern the WCC, which has no legislative power over its member organizations. The WCC is intended to facilitate dialogue among internal member and other external organizations.
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To this end, the WCC has convened the Programme to Combat Racism and many convocations bringing together various religions, all aimed at providing a theological response to pluralism. Though the bulk of the WCC’s membership resides in developing nations in the Southern Hemisphere, its primary donors are European Protestant churches. Due in part to its membership constituency and active political advocacy, the WCC often adopts positions counter to those of the United States and other Western developed nations. The WCC has increasingly become involved in international public policy matters, taking many controversial positions. During the 1970s, for example, it received criticism for its Programme to Combat Racism and alleged funding of liberation movements, guerrillas, and terrorist groups, including the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe. In recent years, the WCC has urged divestment from Israel; called for a relaxation of U.S., British, and European Union sanctions on the Hamas government in Palestine; apologized for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling it a violation of norms of justice and human rights; criticized the U.S. position on global warming; registered disapproval of United Nations’ reforms backed by the United States; deplored global economic disparities, calling on developed nations to forgive foreign debt; and blamed racism for the half-hearted response to the global HIV/AIDS crisis and the Hurricane Katrina disaster on the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. Traci L. Nelson See also: AIDS; Catholic Church; Global Warming; Hurricane Katrina; Israel; McIntire, Carl; Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies; United Nations.
Further Reading Lefever, Ernest W. Nairobi to Vancouver: The World Council of Churches and the World, 1975–1987. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. Vermaat, J.A. Emerson. The World Council of Churches and Politics. New York: Freedom House, 1989. World Council of Churches Web site. www.wcc-coe.org.
Wo r l d Wa r I I M e m o r i a l After years of debate, the National World War II Memorial, located in the heart of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on Memorial Day in 2004. Designed by Friedrich St. Florian, the $195 million memorial has been criticized for its imperial grandiosity (some suggest reminiscent of Nazi architecture) and for crowding the civic space between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, a perceived desecration of the American core values the vista has traditionally venerated. Others argue that the memorial is appropriately designed and positioned, affirming
the nation’s values by paying homage to the men and women who fought in the war to preserve freedom. Inspiration for the memorial is credited to Roger Durbin, a World War II army veteran who in 1987 complained to U.S. representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) that the Marine Corps Iwo Jima statue, the sole “good war” monument in Washington, D.C., does not adequately honor all of those who fought in the war. On May 25, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed legislation authorizing a national World War II monument; two years later, he dedicated the mall site for the project. The design, site selection, and fundraising process prompted a number of lawsuits and twenty-two rounds of acrimonious public hearings. Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book The Greatest Generation (1998), a tribute to World War II veterans, gave a timely boost to the memorial’s backers. A sunken granite and bronze complex in the classical architectural style, the memorial is situated on 7.4 acres (3.0 hectares) adjacent to the Rainbow Pool on the eastern end of the Reflecting Pool. It features two five-story arches with 10-foot-wide (3-meter) bronze laurel wreaths overhead (representing the Atlantic and Pacific theaters); fifty-six pillars adorned with oak and wheat wreaths (for the industrial and agricultural war output of each state, territory, and the District of Columbia); 4,000 gold stars on the Freedom Wall (each representing 100 war dead); twenty-four bas relief panels (depicting Americans during the war, overseas and at home); four bronze eagles; a victory medal inlayed on the floors; Americans flags on poles; and various fountains and inscriptions. A majority of the funding was provided by corporations and private individuals, the result of a drive spearheaded by Senator Robert Dole (R-KS), himself a decorated veteran of the war. Opposition to the memorial was mounted by the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, World War II Veterans to Save the Mall, conservation groups, architects, and civil rights activists. These groups wanted the memorial located off to the side, in Constitution Gardens, arguing that the space between the shrines honoring the two greatest presidents—the founder of the nation (Washington) and the emancipator of the slaves (Lincoln)—should not be disrupted by a massive structure having nothing to do with national development. As a compromise, St. Florian modified the memorial’s silhouette by lowering the plaza and fountains six feet (1.8 meters) below ground level. Regarding World War II as the pivotal event that ushered in the American Century, establishing the United States as a redeemer nation to the world, proponents countered that the center of the mall was a perfectly appropriate site for the memorial. Roger Chapman See also: American Century; American Civil Religion; Brokaw, Tom; Clinton, Bill; Generations and Generational Conflict; September 11 Memorial; Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
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Further Reading Goldberger, Paul. “Down at the Mall.” The New Yorker, May 31, 2004. Mills, Nicolaus. Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial. New York: Basic Books, 2004. National WWII Memorial Web site. www.wwiimemorial. com. Tolson, Jay. “Scenes from the Mall.” U.S. News & World Report, September 18, 2000.
Wo u n d e d K n e e I n c i d e n t During the early months of 1973, the village of Wounded Knee, located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, was the scene of a seventy-one-day armed rebellion against the federal government by militants of the American Indian Movement (AIM) led by activist Russell Means. A highly charged site for Native Americans, Wounded Knee was the scene of an 1890 bloody standoff between a group of the Oglala Sioux and the U.S. Army’s Seventh Calvary in which between 150 and 200 Indian men, women, and children were killed (along with about 25 soldiers)—an incident variously referred to as the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Battle of Wounded Knee, depending on who is recounting the episode. The 1973 incident drew international attention, exposing the lingering tension between American Indians and the federal government as well as rifts among Indian peoples themselves. On February 28, 1973, between 200 and 300 Indian activists, primarily armed with deer-hunting rifles, seized Wounded Knee to protest the poor living conditions on Indian reservations and the perceived corruption of reservation officials. One of the first acts of the protesters was to visit and pray over the mass grave of 1890. Others raided the reservation’s trading post and museum, destroying artifacts such as a nineteenth-century government ledger of cattle receipts in which Indian recipients were listed by made-up vulgar names. AIM members believed that the Wounded Knee tribal chairman Richard (Dick) Wilson and his supporting Sioux council represented an illegitimate puppet regime, which they referred to as “white Wounded Knee.” Protest leaders presented three demands to the U.S. government: (1) restore and honor 371 broken treaties; (2) reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); and (3) conduct an investigation of the corruption at Wounded Knee. The ultimate goal of AIM was to secure self-government for
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Native Americans, apart from federal rule, in order to reestablish a traditional tribal organization centered on the chiefs and spiritual leaders. The senior U.S. senator of South Dakota, Democrat George McGovern, freshly defeated in the 1972 presidential election, arrived at the scene of conflict only to be largely rebuffed by AIM. McGovern was remembered for having stated that past wrongs against Native Americans should be forgotten. “It is ridiculous to talk about treaties abrogated by an act of Congress over a hundred years ago,” he had complained. During the standoff with federal authorities, AIM declared the independence of the Oglala Sioux Nation and specified that its boundaries were in accordance with the Treaty of Laramie (1868). The government side of the standoff was being handled by the Department of Justice. Because the occupiers were armed, President Richard Nixon chose to deploy hundreds of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Marshals Service agents. However, being acutely aware of public empathy with the activists, he sought to resolve the situation peacefully; despite those intentions, two AIM members were killed during the siege. As the negotiations ensued, federal agents carried out a series of paramilitary operations designed to exhaust the occupiers. The protesters finally surrendered on May 8, accomplishing little more than publicizing their grievances. Nixon’s supporters praised the federal government’s patience and restraint throughout the ordeal. In the aftermath of the incident, 185 activists were indicted by federal grand juries for their part in the rebellion, Wilson’s government remained intact, hostility between AIM and the FBI continued, and Indians disagreed over the tactics employed by AIM. Gwendolyn Laird and Roger Chapman See also: American Indian Movement; Deloria, Vine, Jr.; McGovern, George; Nixon, Richard.
Further Reading Dewing, Rolland. Wounded Knee: The Meaning and Significance of the Second Incident. New York: Irvington, 1985. Hendricks, Steve. The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006. O’Neal, Floyd A., June K. Lyman, and Susan McKay, eds. Wounded Knee 1973: A Personal Account by Stanley David Lyman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Yo u n g , N e i l Since his debut in the mid-1960s, the Canadian-born singer, songwriter, and guitarist Neil Young has been known for some of the most powerful social protest songs in rock music, targeting with his unmistakable high, warbly voice everything from commercialism to war to racism to drug abuse. His artistic output includes almost five dozen albums, as well as song videos and films. Regarded as one of the premier rock guitarists of all time, nominated for an Oscar, a member of the board of directors of Farm Aid (an organization that helps small, family-owned farms survive in an era of factory farming), and a part owner of the model-train company Lionel, Young is considered the godfather of grunge music. Throughout his eclectic career, he has participated in the culture wars while offering commentary in his original way. He was born Neil Percival Young on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Canada. By the time he was in high school, he was a fixture on the music scene of Winnipeg, where he became friends with future band mate Stephen Stills and the folksinger Joni Mitchell. In 1966, Young’s band Buffalo Springfield, playing out of Los Angeles, scored a hit with “For What It’s Worth,” one of the most acclaimed antiwar songs of the 1960s. In 1970, as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, he wrote “Ohio” in response to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970. The song was banned on many radio stations because of its harsh stance against the Vietnam War and open contempt for President Richard M. Nixon. Years later, in concert, Young dedicated “Ohio” to the
Chinese students who died in the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Young’s songs “Southern Man”—from the album After the Gold Rush (1970)—and “Alabama”—from Harvest (1972)—painted the picture of a South filled with ignorance and racial prejudice. In rebuttal, the southern band Lynyrd Skynyrd produced the rock classic “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974). Young also spoke out against the drug scene, as in his recording “The Needle and the Damage Done” (1972). “I am not a preacher,” he explained, “but drugs killed a lot of great men.” MTV banned the music video of Young’s “This Note’s for You” (1988) because it lampooned artists shilling goods for money. He produced “Let’s Roll” (2001) as a tribute to the passengers of Flight 93 who tried to retake the plane from the terrorists who had hijacked it on September 11, 2001. And on his album Living with War (2006), he recorded “Let’s Impeach the President” in response to President George W. Bush’s policies and the war in Iraq. Kirk Richardson See also: Bush Family; Canada; Censorship; China; Dylan, Bob; Factory Farms; Nelson, Willie; Rock and Roll; September 11; Vietnam War; War on Drugs; War Protesters.
Further Reading McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Petridis, Alexis. Neil Young. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000. Rogan, Johnny. Neil Young: The Complete Guide to His Music. London: Omnibus, 2006. Williamson, Nigel. Journey Through the Past: The Stories Behind the Classic Songs of Neil Young. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2002.
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Zappa, Frank A politically active, highly prolific, internationally acclaimed rock musician and composer, Frank Zappa, founder of the “freak rock” band Mothers of Invention (1966–1969) and a longtime solo performer, produced more than sixty albums, including Freak Out! (1966), the first double rock album; Absolutely Free (1967); We’re Only in It for the Money (1968); Lumpy Gravy (1968); Sheik Yerbouti (1979); Tinsel Town Rebellion (1981); and Jazz from Hell (1986). His two biggest hits were “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” (1974) and “Valley Girl” (1982). Zappa’s output was characterized by an eclectic blend of rock, rhythm and blues, jazz, doo-wop, classical music, and avant-garde music, as well as irreverent and satirically smutty lyrics. His songs offered satirical commentary on everything from police states, human sexuality, televangelists, Catholics, “Jewish princesses,” hippies, and cocaine users to commercialism, suburbia, war protesters, the Beatles, and anything else he considered hypocritical or banal. Born Frank Vincent Zappa into a Catholic ItalianAmerican family on December 21, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, he spent his formative years in California, where he became interested in musical composition, arrangement, and recording production. In 1962, still a struggling artist, he was set up by a San Bernardino undercover police detective to produce an audio-only sex tape, leading to ten days in jail for “conspiracy to commit pornography.” That run-in with the law made Zappa a lifelong cynic toward authority and a champion of free speech. Fear of arrest made him militantly intolerant of drug use in his band. In the culture wars, Zappa opposed the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), founded in 1985 by Tipper Gore, the wife of then senator Al Gore, and other concerned mothers to lobby against “porn rock”; the PMRC called for warning labels with “decency” ratings to appear on record covers. Zappa spent $70,000 on a personal campaign against PMRC, viewing it as a threat to free speech. In September 1985, he testified before the Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation Committee, denouncing PMRC for imposing the values of religious fundamentalism; he later referred to PMRC and its supporters as “cultural terrorists.” In the months after his testimony, he released the album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, which features “Porn Wars,” a twelve-minute track of sound bites from the hearing, juxtaposed in a way to make his opponents sound ridiculous.
During the late 1980s, Zappa, who was strongly anticommunist, took an interest in the political changes taking place in Eastern Europe and visited the Soviet Union for the first time. In 1990, he was especially welcomed in Czechoslovakia, where he enjoyed cult status and befriended Václav Havel, the leader of the Velvet Revolution. When the country was under Soviet control, Zappa’s antitotalitarian song “Plastic People” (1967) had inspired the first underground Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe. Havel briefly appointed Zappa the country’s Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture, and Tourism, a mission that ended abruptly after Zappa publicly referred to U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle as “stupid,” triggering a protest from U.S. secretary of state James Baker (whose wife was a co-founder of PMRC). Zappa died of prostate cancer on December 6, 1993, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Roger Chapman See also: Catholic Church; Censorship; Counterculture; Fundamentalism, Religious; Pornography; Quayle, Dan; Record Warning Labels; Rock and Roll; Soviet Union and Russia.
Further Reading Miles, Barry. Zappa: A Biography. New York: Grove, 2004.
Z e r o To l e r a n c e Zero tolerance indicates a strict enforcement of rules or laws and that behaviors such as drug use, sexual harassment, or academic cheating will not be acceptable under any circumstance. Such “get tough” policies are implemented in a wide range of settings, from schools to courts to the workplace. Zero tolerance may be formally codified in rules or laws, but the term is also used informally to imply that certain behaviors are completely forbidden. Schools are a primary site of zero tolerance policies, due to the passage of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act of 1994, which requires all schools receiving federal funding to expel any student who brings a weapon or drugs to school. By 1998, three out of four of the nation’s schools had zero tolerance policies in place. In response, suspension and expulsion rates rose nationwide. However, actual rates of school crime remained flat during the 1990s, leading critics to question whether increasing punishment was really the appropriate policy change. Stories emerged of students suspended for drawing pictures of weapons, pointing fingers like guns, or bringing overthe-counter medications to school. Many school administrators, parents, and the general public tend to support strict policies in the name
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of school safety and protecting children. High-profile school shootings, such as the one at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, created the impression that schools across the country were no longer safe, even in communities with little violence. Such incidents encourage the public to favor tough penalties for minor offenses in hopes of preventing similar tragedies. The American Bar Association has opposed zero tolerance policies, charging that the “one size fits all” punishments deprive people of their basic due process rights. Zero tolerance, whether in schools, courts, or other settings, ignores the critical factor of context. Without careful examination of circumstances, civil liberties advocates contend, uniform punishments may be applied unfairly. In addition to education scholars and civil liberties groups, zero tolerance has conservative critics. A National Review article charges that zero tolerance is an outgrowth of “political correctness,” noting that a Kansas student was suspended for drawing a Confederate flag and his parents’ licensed gun was confiscated. Some critics from the right have suggested that zero tolerance policies exist so that people of color cannot complain that they are being punished unfairly, and thus everyone receives severe punishments. While supporters of zero tolerance policies argue that they promote fairness, people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to use legal recourse to challenge rigid applications of rules or laws. Karen Sternheimer See also: American Civil Liberties Union; Confederate Flag; Drug Testing; National Review; Political Correctness; School Shootings; War on Drugs.
Further Reading Derbyshire, John. “The Problem with ‘Zero.’ ” National Review, May 28, 2001. Halloway, John H. “The Dilemma of Zero Tolerance.” Educational Leadership 59 (2001): 85. Skiba, Russel J., and Reece L. Peterson. “The Dark Side of Zero Tolerance: Can Punishment Lead to Safe Schools?” Phi Delta Kappan 80 (1999): 372–76. Sternheimer, Karen. Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today’s Youth. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Zinn, Howard Since the early 1960s, Howard Zinn has been an activist intellectual, practitioner of civil disobedience, and America’s foremost radical historian. More so than even Eric Foner or Noam Chomsky, Zinn has been the
oracle of the left in the realm of historical interpretation. He has played a prominent role in the civil rights movement, antiwar movements, and other social causes. Born on August 24, 1922, to an immigrant workingclass family in Brooklyn, New York, Zinn was a shipyard worker as a young adult. World War II altered the direction of his life, however, as he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a bombardier. His service included the devastating napalm bombing of Royan, France, shortly before the war’s end, an experience that lastingly informed his view of war. Taking advantage of the postwar GI Bill, Zinn earned a PhD in history from Columbia University in 1958. Shortly before finishing his degree requirements, Zinn accepted a teaching position at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. He eventually became chair of the history department. Living in the South during the early stages of the civil rights era, Zinn quickly immersed himself in the movement. When young activists launched the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, they invited Zinn to serve on the advisory executive board. He chronicled the organization’s early work in SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). One year before that book appeared, however, Zinn’s involvement in regional and campus activism led the Spelman administration to fire him for “insubordination.” He then taught political science at Boston University. Continuing his involvement in the struggle for civil rights, he participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964) and the Selma March (1965). With the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, Zinn added antiwar protest to his activism, writing Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967). More than thirty years and twenty books later, still highly active, Zinn was a leading critic of President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” Zinn’s magnum opus is A People’s History of the United States (1980), which retells the nation’s history from the perspective of oppressed and disenfranchised groups— from Native Americans and slaves to immigrant laborers and women—rather than the ruling elites. In it, Zinn eschews any pretense of “objectivity” or “neutrality,” instead striving to reintroduce voices long concealed from cultural consciousness by orthodox histories. The mission of the historian, he believes, is to take sides, giving voice to the racially, economically, and philosophically disinherited of America’s past. To counteract the stultifying effects of conventional and militaristic history, Zinn celebrates the life and deeds of rebels and dissidents. These marginal and “unimportant” individuals can be seen as the real heroes who gave life to authentic democracy. Far from being a pessimistic rant against injustice, Zinn’s work is decidedly optimistic about the future. Critics, of whom there
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are many, regard A People’s History as overly simplified revisionist history. They say that in Zinn’s book, economic avarice explains nearly every U.S. war, and that most of the civil rights movements are presented without appreciation for their theological vision. Despite its detractors, however, the work remains required reading in many college history programs and has appeared in numerous revised editions and reprints. Richard C. Goode
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See also: Academic Freedom; Civil Rights Movement; Revisionist History; September 11; Vietnam War; War Protesters.
Further Reading Joyce, Davis. Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2003. Kazin, Michael. “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons.” Dissent, Spring 2004. Zinn, Howard. The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.
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B ibliog raphy Yarbrough, Slayden A. Southern Baptists: A Historical, Ecclesiological, and Theological Heritage of a Confessional People. Brentwood, TN: Southern Baptist Historical Society, 2000. Yates, Michael D. Why Unions Matter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Yeun, Eddie, George Katsiaficas, and Daniel Burton-Rose. Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001. Young, Jonathan M. Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Washington, DC: National Council on Disability, 1997. Young, Mitchell. White Supremacy Groups. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Young, Mitchell, ed. Culture Wars. Detroit, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Zakin, Susan. Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement. New York: Viking, 1993. Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Zarkin, Kimberly A., and Michael J. Zarkin. The Federal Communications Commission: Front Line in the Culture and Regulation Wars. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Zeiger, Hans. Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005. Zeigler, Joseph Wesley. Arts in Crisis: The National Endowment for the Arts versus America. Chicago: A Capella Books, 1994. Zeigler, Sara L., and Gregory G. Gunderson. Moving Beyond G.I. Jane: Women and the U.S. Military. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. Zelnick, Bob. Gore: A Political Life. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999. Zeman, Scott C., and Michael A. Amundson. Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004. Zimmerman, Jean. Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Zimmerman, Jonathan. Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. ———. The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997. Zoba, Wendy Murray. Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2000. Zucker, Marjorie B., ed. The Right to Die Debate: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Web Sites Adbusters: Culture Jammers Headquarters Web site. www .adbusters.org. AFA Online Web site. www.afa.net. American Civil Liberties Union Web site. www.aclu.org. American Indian Movement Web site. www.aimovement.org. Americans for Tax Reform Web site. www.atr.org. Answers in Genesis Web site. www.answersingenesis.org. Ayn Rand Institute Web site. www.aynrand.org. Black Radical Congress Web site. www.blackradicalcongress .org. Bob Dylan Official Web site. www.bobdylan.com. Bob Jones University Web site. www.bju.edu.
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Boy Scouts of America Web site. www.scouting.org. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Web site. www.thebulletin.org. The Carter Center Web site. www.cartercenter.org. Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise Web site. www .cdfe.org. Central Intelligence Agency Web site. www.cia.gov. The Chalcedon Foundation Web site. www.chalcedon.edu. Christian Coalition of America Web site. www.cc.org. Circle of Life Web site. www.circleoflifefoundation.org. CODEPINK Web site. www.codepink4peace.org. Common Cause Web site. www.commoncause.org. Death Penalty Information Center Web site. www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. Federal Communications Commission Web site. www.fcc.gov. FIRE—Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Web site. www.thefire.org. Focus on the Family Web site. www.family.org. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Web site, National Park Service. www.nps.gov/fdrm. Freedom Center Web site. www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org. G. Gordon Liddy’s Official Web site. www.liddyshow.com. GodHatesFags Web site. www.godhatesfags.com. Guardian Angels Web site. www.guardianangels.org. Heritage Foundation Web site. www.heritage.org. Institute for Media Education Web site. www.drjudithreisman .com. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia Web site. www .ferris.edu/jimcrow. John Birch Society Web site. www.jbs.org. Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction Web site. www.indiana.edu/~kinsey. Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Web site. www .renewnyc.com. Madonna Official Web site. www.madonna.com. Marilyn Manson Web site. www.marilynmanson.com. Matthew Shepard Society Web site. www.matthewshepard .org. Media Matters Web site. www.mediamatters.org. Michael Medved Web site. www.michaelmedved.com. Mothers Against Drunk Driving Web site. www.madd.org. Motion Picture Association of America Web site. www.mpaa .org. Nation Web site. www.thenation.com. National Endowment for the Arts Web site. www.nea.gov. National Endowment for the Humanities Web site. www.neh .gov. National Organization for Women Web site. www.now.org. National Park Service Web site. www.nps.gov. National Public Radio Web site. www.npr.org. National Review Web site. www.nationalreview.com. National Rifle Association Web site. www.nra.org. National WWII Memorial Web site. www.wwiimemorial.com. New York Times Web site. www.nytimes.com. Newt Gingrich Web site. www.newt.org. NoLogo Web site. www.nologo.org. Norman Lear Web site. www.normanlear.com. Occupational Safety and Health Administration Web site. www.osha.gov. Official Al Franken Web site. www.al-franken.com. Official Kwanzaa Web site. www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org. Open Society Institute Web site. www.soros.org.
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Oprah.com: Live Your Best Life Web site. www.oprah.com. Panda’s Thumb Web site. www.pandasthumb.org. PBS Web site. www.pbs.org. People for the American Way Web site. www.pfaw.org. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Web site. www.peta.org. Perverted Justice Web site. www.Perverted-Justice.com. Planned Parenthood Federation of America Web site. www .plannedparenthood.org. ProEnglish Web site. www.proenglish.org. Progressive Christians Uniting Web site. www.progressivechristiansuniting.org. Project for the New American Century Web site. www. newamericancentury.org. Promise Keepers Web site. www.promisekeepers.org. Rainbow PUSH Coalition Web site. www.rainbowpush.org. Reason Foundation Web site. www.reason.org. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Web site. www.riaa.com. School of the Americas Watch web site. www.soaw.org.
Social Security Administration Web site. www.socialsecurity.gov. Southern Baptist Convention official Web site. www.sbc.net. Southern Poverty Law Center Web site. www.splcenter.org. TimesWatch Web site. www.timeswatch.org. Tom DeLay Web site. www.tomdelay.com. Toward Tradition Web site. www.towardtradition.org. U.S. English, Inc., Web site. www.us-english.org. U.S. Food and Drug Administration Web site. www.fda.gov. Vermont Progressive Party Web site. www.answers.com. Vietnam Veterans Against the War Web site. www.vvaw.org. Wake-Up Wal-Mart Web site. www.wakeupwalmart.com. Wall Street Journal Web site. www.online.wsj.com. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Web site. www.walmartstores.com. Washington Times Web site. www.washtimes.com. Weekly Standard Web site. www.weeklystandard.com. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation web site. www.benning.army.mil/whinsec. Willie Nelson Official Web site. www.willienelson.com. World Council of Churches Web site. www.wcc-coe.org. World Magazine Web site. www.worldmag.com.
Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations AAUP. See American Association of University Professors AAUW. See American Association of University Women ABA. See American Bar Association Abbey, Edward, 1:120, 149, 163, 188–89, 190 Abbott, Jack Henry, 2:335 Abdnor, James, 2:347 Abernathy, Ralph, 2:588 Abington v. Schempp (1963), 1:18; 2:466, 494, 495, 496 ABOR. See Academic Bill of Rights abortion, 1:1–3 ACLU and, 1:19 antipornography campaigners and, 2:437 biotech revolution and, 1:42 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Bryant, Anita, and, 1:55 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56, 62 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:62 Bush, George W., and, 1:63 Campolo, Anthony “Tony,” and, 1:68 Canada and, 1:69 Catholic Church and, 1:75, 76 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian Identity movement and, 2:483 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 counterculture and, 1:122 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Dobson, James, and, 1:138, 139 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 Election of 2008 and, 1:156 ERA and, 1:165 evangelicalism and, 1:68, 166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171; 2:503 family values and, 1:172 FDA and, 1:187 feminism and, 1:177, 179 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:179 Focus on the Family and, 1:184 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:188 Friedan, Betty, and, 1:199 generational conflict and, 1:212 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:247
abortion (continued) human rights and, 1:265, 266 judicial wars and, 1:289, 290 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 LaHaye, Tim and Beverly, and, 1:313 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 Madonna and, 2:333 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 media and, 2:351 men’s movement and, 2:355 militia movement and, 2:359 Moral Majority and, 2:367, 368 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386 NOW and, 2:389 NPR and, 2:390 O’Connor, Sandra Day, and, 2:415 Operation Rescue and, 2:418–19 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:423 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:423 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:428 Planned Parenthood and, 2:431–32, 509 privacy rights and, 1:19, 140, 289; 2:431, 443, 573 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:445 Promise Keepers and, 2:447 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458, 469 red and blue states and, 2:461 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 Religious Right and, 2:466, 467 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 right to die and, 2:474, 491 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474, 552 Roe v. Wade and, 2:479 role of medicine in, 2:474 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 science wars and, 2:500 secular humanism and, 2:501 sexual assault and, 2:511 Sider, Ron, and, 2:518 social theory on, 1:268 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 Steinem, Gloria, and, 2:536 stem-cell research and, 2:537 student conservatives and, 2:543, 544 televangelism and, 2:552
I -1
abortion (continued) Thomas, Clarence, and, 1:252; 2:561 Ventura, Jesse, and, 2:576 vigilantism and, 2:418, 483, 582, 583 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 Washington Times and, 2:602 Weekly Standard and, 2:607 Weyrich, Paul M., and, 2:611 Will, George, and, 2:617 World magazine and, 2:625 See also birth control Abrahamson, James Adam, 2:541 Abrahamson, Jill, 1:252 Abramoff, Jack, 1:67, 132, 314; 2:406, 463 Abrams, Elliot, 2:394, 395 abstinence, 1:14, 63, 75; 2:508, 509, 602 Abu Ghraib, 1:3–5; 2:378, 494, 612 Abzug, Bella, 1:199; 2:372 Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR), 1:5, 7, 264 academic freedom, 1:5–7 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Commager, Henry, and, 1:108–9 gender-inclusive language and, 1:210 Hillsdale College and, 1:253 Holocaust and, 1:259 homeschooling and, 1:261 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:280; 2:344 Pipes, Daniel, and, 2:431 revisionist history and, 2:470–71 September 11 and, 1:92–93; 2:344, 504 speech codes and, 2:530 Accuracy in Academia (AIA), 1:280; 2:344 Accuracy in Media (AIM), 1:279; 2:350, 400, 448 Acheson, Dean, 1:27; 2:344 ACLJ. See American Center for Law and Justice ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union acquired immune deficiency syndrome. See AIDS ACT UP. See AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power ACTV. See American Coalition for Traditional Values ADA. See Americans for Democratic Action Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (2006), 2:510 Adams, John, 1:192
I-2
Index
Adams, Robert McCormick, 1:161 Adams, Samuel, 1:192 Adbusters, 1:128 Addams, Jane, 1:17 Adequate Income Act (1971), 1:86 Adkins, Janet, 1:297 Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1:7–8, 228, 229, 230, 271 Adolescent and Family Life Act (1981), 2:508 advertising, 1:77, 80, 122; 2:591, 599, 616 Advocates, The (TV program), 2:484 AEI. See American Enterprise Institute AFA. See American Family Association affirmative action, 1:8–10 Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 Bush, George W., and, 1:63 Bush, Jeb, and, 1:62 Democratic Party and, 1:136 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:144 Duke, David, and, 1:146 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:188 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 NAACP and, 2:384 NOW and, 2:389 race and, 2:452 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:465 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 Sowell, Thomas, and, 2:529, 530 speech codes and, 2:530 student conservatives and, 2:544 think tanks and, 2:558 Thomas, Clarence, and, 1:252; 2:561 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 wealth gap and, 2:606 Will, George, and, 2:617 Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 1:203 Afghanistan, 1:4, 73, 77, 78, 98, 101, 102, 117, 123, 157, 201, 213, 296, 317; 2:378, 395, 429, 489, 503, 504, 505, 529, 622 AFL. See American Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, 1:85, 243, 244, 267, 311, 312 See also American Federation of Labor; Congress of Industrial Organizations Africa, 1:10, 11, 14, 48, 60, 72, 274, 282, 601; 2:388, 573, 601 African, The (Courlander), 1:235 African Americans ACLU and, 1:18 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 AIDS and, 1:13 basketball and, 2:478 “black flight” and, 2:452 Black Panther Party and, 1:44 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 communism and, 1:111 Confederate flag and, 1:114, 115, 115 conservatism and, 1:298; 2:373 culture studies and, 2:452 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 Election of 2000 and, 1:154
African Americans (continued) Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 158, 159 evangelicalism and, 1:165, 166 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:172–73 Founding Fathers and, 1:193 Great Books and, 1:229, 230 Guardian Angels and, 1:231 Hill, Anita, and, 1:252 Israel and, 1:281 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282–83 Jewish Americans and, 1:29 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Kwanzaa and, 1:308 Lee, Spike, and, 1:317–18, 318 lynching and, 1:330 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334 Malcolm X and, 2:335–36 men’s movement and, 2:356 Million Man March and, 2:362–63 Morrison, Toni, and, 2:369 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 MTV and, 1:283 Muslim Americans and, 2:377, 378 Nation of Islam and, 2:382–83 New Left and, 2:398 O.J. Simpson trial and, 2:369, 417–18, 417 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 police abuse and, 1:44, 45, 94, 95, 300, 301–2; 2:426, 434, 584, 588, 604 prison and, 2:442 racial profiling and, 1:301–2; 2:384, 442, 453, 454 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:430 Rockwell, Norman, and, 2:477–78 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:513–14, 514 Social Security and, 2:522 U.S. military and, 1:210 victimhood and, 2:576, 577 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584–85 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Weaver, Randy, and, 2:482 white supremacists and, 2:614–15 Williams, William Appleman, and, 2:618 See also civil rights; race, racism African diaspora, 1:10, 25, 235 See also Afrocentrism African Origin of Civilization, The (Diop), 1:11 Africans, The (film), 1:11, 82; 2:388 Afrika Bambaata, 2:456 Afrocentrism, 1:10–11, 308; 2:335, 382, 435, 493 Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Sontag), 1:325 age discrimination, 1:11–12, 240 See also senior citizens Age Discrimination in Employment Act, 1:11 Age of Discontinuity, The (Drucker), 2:444 Agent Orange, 1:148, 279 Agnew, Spiro Theodore, 1:12–13, 27, 187, 279, 288; 2:350, 401, 440 Agozino, Rich, 1:90 Agricultural Labor Relations Act (1975), 1:81
Agriculture Department, U.S. (USDA), 1:162, 168, 185 AIA. See Accuracy in Academia AIDS, 1:13–14 Bono and, 1:48 Brown, Helen Gurley, and, 1:53 comic strips and, 1:108 conspiracy theories and, 1:117 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 FDA and, 1:186 feminism and, 1:179 Foucault, Michel, and, 1:191, 192 gay rights and, 1:206 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hudson, Rock, and, 1:208 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 Kushner, Tony, and, 1:307 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 Mapplethorpe, Robert, and, 2:337, 386 medical marijuana and, 2:353 Moral Majority and, 2:367 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386 outing and, 2:421 Penn, Sean, and, 2:425 Reagan, Ronald, and, 1:14; 2:459 science wars and, 2:500 sex education and, 2:508, 509 sexual revolution and, 2:513 sodomy laws and, 2:523 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 victimhood and, 2:576 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 AIDS Action Council, 1:24 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), 1:186, 192, 206, 323 Ailes, Roger, 1:265; 2:420 AIM. See Accuracy in Media; American Indian Movement Air America radio network, 1:196; 2:550 Air Force, U.S., 1:209, 210, 247, 318; 2:376, 489, 541, 622 al-Qaeda, 1:78, 87, 117, 201; 2:489, 503, 504, 505 ALA. See American Library Association Albert, Richard, 1:121 Albright, Madeleine, 1:17 Alcatraz Island, 1:22, 184; 2:557 Alcoholics Anonymous, 2:402 Alexander, Jane, 1:14–15; 2:387 ALF. See Animal Liberation Front Algeria, 1:194 Ali, Muhammad, 1:15–16; 2:369 “Alice’s Restaurant” (Guthrie), 1:233; 2:596 Alien Registration Act (1940), 2:504 Alinksy, Saul, 1:310 Alito, Samuel, 1:74, 290; 2:391, 416 All in the Family (TV program), 1:316 All the President’s Men (film), 1:15; 2:461 All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Kinzer), 2:504 Allaway, Edward Charles, 2:497 Allen, James, 1:330
Index Allen, Steve, 2:517 Allen, Woody, 1:325 Allende, Salvador, 1:78; 2:493 Alliance for Bio-Integrity, et al. v. Donna Shalala, et al. (2000), 1:214 Alperovitz, Gar, 1:254 Alpert, Richard, 1:317 Alterman, Eric, 2:351, 381 Altman, Robert, 1:121 AMA. See American Medical Association Amaechi, John, 1:208 Ambush at Fort Bragg (Wolfe), 1:210; 2:621 America Online (AOL), 2:357, 530 “America the Beautiful” (Berlin), 1:233 American Academy of Pediatrics, 1:245; 2:413 American Airlines, 2:572, 617 American Anthropological Association, 1:276; 2:350 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 1:5–6, 7, 253 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 1:37; 2:512 American Bandstand (TV program), 2:476 American Bar Association (ABA), 1:71; 2:561, 630 American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), 1:18–19; 2:475 American Century, 1:16–17, 21; 2:626 See also Project for the New American Century American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 1:17–20, 18 Academic Bill of Rights and, 1:5 Americans with Disabilities Act and, 1:24 Boy Scouts and, 1:49 Budenz, Louis F., and, 1:59 capital punishment and, 1:70, 215, 216 Christmas and, 1:91 church and state and, 1:92; 2:366–67 comparable worth and, 1:113 creationism and intelligent design and, 1:124, 125 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171; 2:503 homosexuals and, 1:207 judicial wars and, 1:290 Loving, Richard and Mildred, and, 1:329, 329 Manson, Marilyn, and, 2:336 Miranda rights and, 2:364 Murrow, Edward R., and, 2:377 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 police abuse and, 2:433 record warning labels and, 2:460 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:475 school prayer and, 2:495 secular humanism and, 2:501 speech codes and, 2:530 Ten Commandments and, 2:554 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574, 575 whistleblowers and, 2:612 American civil religion, 1:20–21, 193; 2:557 American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV), 1:313, 314; 2:466
American Conservative magazine, 1:57; 2:607 American Conservative Union, 1:81; 2:484 American Dilemma, An: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Myrdal), 1:60 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 1:200, 298; 2:373, 395, 500, 558 American exceptionalism, 1:20, 21–22; 2:378, 492, 552 American Family Association (AFA), 1:15, 49, 91, 171, 205, 207, 208, 290, 325; 2:337, 386, 437, 467, 507, 592, 616–17 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 1:311 American Federation of Teachers, 1:80, 312 American Humanist Association, 1:297; 2:368, 501 American Independent Party, 1:319; 2:560, 588 American Indian Movement (AIM), 1:22–24, 105, 133, 276; 2:462, 627 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), 1:23 American Legion, 1:161; 2:377, 429, 468, 527 American Library Association (ALA), 1:49 American Medical Association (AMA), 1:1, 243–44, 245; 2:352, 353 American Mercury magazine, 1:57, 227 American Nazi Party, 2:477, 615 American Psychiatric Association (APA), 1:206, 209, 320; 2:521, 540, 568 American Psychological Association (APA), 1:211 American Public Health Association, 1:244, 304 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 1:26 American Spectator, 1:51, 99; 2:544 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 1:110, 203; 2:343, 344, 403, 493 Americans for Tax Reform, 2:405–6 Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), 1:11, 24, 109 America’s Longest War (Herring), 2:580 Amish, 1:260 Amnesty International, 1:4, 34, 48, 69, 266 Amos ‘n’ Andy (TV program), 1:46 AN. See Aryan Nations Andersen, Margaret, 1:229 Anderson, Jack, 1:279; 2:612 Anderson, John, 2:560 androgyny, 1:24–25, 139, 283; 2:422 Angelou, Maya, 1:25–26; 2:362, 369 Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Kushner), 1:307–8; 2:480 Anglicans, 1:192 Animal Liberation Front (ALF), 1:148, 149, 164; 2:427 animal rights, 1:26–27, 149, 168, 197, 202; 2:426–27, 595, 619 Annis, Edward R., 1:244 Answers in Genesis, 1:125, 125 anthropology, 2:542 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 2:529
I-3
Anti-Defamation League, 1:29, 239, 314, 315 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986), 2:593 anti-intellectualism, 1:8, 27–28, 68; 2:462 anti-Semitism, 1:28–29 Aryan Nations and, 1:31 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57, 155 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian Identity movement and, 2:482 Christian radio and, 1:89 Demjanjuk, John, and, 1:134 Duke, David, and, 1:146 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173; 2:382 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 hate crimes and, 1:28, 29; 2:495 Holocaust and, 1:258–59 Israel and, 1:281 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:283 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 militia movement and, 2:359, 360 Million Man March and, 2:362 Muslim Americans and, 2:377 Podhoretz, Norman, and, 2:432 revisionist history and, 2:471 Rockwell, George Lincoln, and, 2:477 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 speech codes and, 2:530 Summers, Lawrence, and, 2:546 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:578 white supremacists and, 2:614, 615–16 See also Holocaust; Israel; Jews AOL. See America Online APA. See American Psychiatric Association; American Psychological Association apartheid, 1:171, 298; 2:339, 367, 449, 532 Apocalypse Now (film), 2:581 Apple, 2:358 Aptheker, Herbert, 1:236 Aquinas, Thomas, 1:7 Arab Americans, Arabs, 1:239, 281; 2:454, 503, 505 Arab-Jewish War, 1:280 Arabian American Oil Company, 2:489 Arad, Michael, 2:505, 506 Arafat, Yassir, 1:29, 282; 2:486 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, 1:164, 190; 2:423, 489, 609 Arendt, Hannah, 2:394 Argentina, 1:213; 2:570 Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972), 2:471 Argonne National Laboratory, 1:239 Aristotle, 2:542, 617 Armageddon (film), 2:528 Armey, Dick, 1:118, 195; 2:386, 386 Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (Mailer), 2:334, 398, 596 arms control, 1:102, 144, 249; 2:346, 394, 430, 432, 440, 449, 531, 532, 556, 595 Army, U.S. Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 civil rights movement and, 1:94 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 drama and, 1:326
I-4
Index
Army, U.S. (continued) gays in the military and, 1:208, 210 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341, 343, 344 McVeigh, Timothy, and, 2:349 My Lai massacre, 2:378–79 nuclear age and, 2:408 School of the Americas and, 2:493 torture of prisoners by, 1:3 women and, 2:622, 623 Arnold, Hap, 1:161 Arnold, Ron, 1:29–30, 163 Arrow, Tre, 1:30–31 Arthur, Beatrice, 1:316 Aryan Nations (AN), 1:31; 2:360, 482, 615 Asante, Molefi Kete, 1:10 Ashcroft, John, 2:445, 473 Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (2002), 2:437 Asia, 1:10, 221, 274; 2:377, 486, 573 Asian Americans, 1:135, 144, 203, 204; 2:374, 399, 452, 467, 614 Asimov, Isaac, 2:501 ASPCA. See American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Assassination of Joe McCarthy, The (Evans), 2:342 assisted suicide. See right to die AT&T, 1:175 At Any Price: How America Betrayed My Kidnapped Daughters for Saudi Oil (Roush), 2:489 ATF. See Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. Athey, Ron, 2:387 Atkins v. Virginia (2002), 1:71 Atlantic Monthly magazine, 1:248; 2:504 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 1:58; 2:455 atomic bomb. See Hiroshima and Nagasaki; nuclear age Atomic Energy Commission, U.S., 2:408, 419, 553 Atsinger, Edward, III, 1:90 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, 2:436, 460 Atwater, Harvey Leroy (Lee), 1:31–32, 32, 265; 2:481 Auchter, Thorne, 2:414 Audacity of Hope, The: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Obama), 2:411 Audio Home Recording Act (1992), 2:460 Australia, 1:125, 215, 221; 2:375, 490 Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1:235; 2:378 automobile industry, 1:32–33, 259, 284; 2:380, 612 automobile safety, 1:32–33, 130, 198; 2:380, 612 Avalon, Frankie, 2:476 Away Down South (Cobb), 1:114 Ayers, William, 1:158; 2:423 B-1 bomber, 1:73; 2:409 B-52 bomber, 2:409 Baby Boom Generation, 1:212, 213, 286, 323; 2:398, 465, 523, 532, 591 Baby Doll (film), 2:512 Backlash (Faludi), 2:355
Baden-Powell, Robert S.S., 1:50 Baehr v. Lewin (1993), 2:486 Baez, Joan Chandos, 1:33, 121, 147, 233, 242; 2:476 Bahnsen, Greg, 1:90 Bailey, F. Lee, 2:417 Baker, Howard, 1:164, 177 Baker, James, 2:629 Baker, Josephine, 1:194 Baker, Susan, 1:246; 2:459, 629 Baker v. Carr (1962), 2:600 Bakke, Allan, 1:9 Bakker, Jim, 1:108, 166, 171; 2:552, 553 Bakker, Tammy Faye, 1:171; 2:552 Baldwin, James, 2:334 Baldwin, Roger, 1:17 Ball, Robert, 1:244 Ballance, Bill, 2:549 Balmer, Randall, 1:165 Bambara, Toni Cade, 2:369 Bamboozled (film), 1:46 Bancroft, Jane Waldron, 2:587 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (2005), 1:34, 35–36 Bankruptcy Act (1898), 1:35 Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act (1984), 1:35 bankruptcy reform, 1:34–36 Bankruptcy Reform Act (1978), 1:35 Banks, Dennis, 1:22 Baraka, Amiri, 1:318 Barber, Benjamin R., 2:504 Barbie doll, 1:36–37, 37 Barnes, Fred, 2:607 Barnes, Roy, 1:115 Barnett, Marilyn, 1:299 Barnum, P.T., 1:38 Barone, Michael, 1:216 Barr, Bob, 1:100 Barr, Judi, 1:149 Barr, William, 2:464 Barrett, J. Michael, 1:322 Barron, Clarence Walker, 2:587 Barry, Marion, 2:608 Bartlett, Roscoe, 2:623 Bartlett, Steve, 2:386 Bartley, Robert L., 2:587 Baruch, Bernard, 2:408 Barzun, Jacques, 1:211 baseball, 1:62, 208; 2:570, 617 Bases v. Rees (2008), 1:71 basketball, 1:50, 208; 2:478, 570 Basquiat, Jean, 1:226 Bass, Lance, 2:421 Batista, Fulgencio, 1:127 Batman, 1:106 Battistone, Sam, 1:46 Battle for the Mind, The (LaHaye), 1:313; 2:466 Battle of Little Bighorn, 1:133 Battle of Russia, The (film), 2:527 Bauer, Gary, 1:290, 314; 2:522 Baumgardner, Jennifer, 1:179 Bawer, Bruce, 2:373 Bay of Pigs, 1:78, 102, 127, 292; 2:401 Beach, Henry, 2:615
Beach Boys, 2:604 Beal, Mary, 2:550 Beam, Louis, 2:614 Beasley, David, 1:115 Beat Generation, 1:217, 246, 294–95, 324, 325; 2:449 Beatles, 1:77, 121; 2:476 Beauchamp, Keith, 2:565 Beauty Myth, The: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (Wolf), 2:620, 620 beauty pageants, 1:38–39; 2:513 See also Miss America pageant Becker, Frank, 2:496 Beginning or the End, The (film), 2:408 Behe, Michael J., 1:39–40, 125 Belarus, 1:28 Belgium, 1:160 Bell, Jamie, 1:25 Bell, Terrell, 1:150 Bell Curve, The: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Herrnstein and Murray), 1:40–41, 2:452 Bell Telephone, 2:520 Bellah, Robert, 1:20, 193 Bellecourt, Clyde, 1:22 Beloved (Morrison), 1:230; 2:369, 620 Ben-Shalom v. Secretary of the Army (1980), 1:209 Benedict XVI (Pope), 1:76, 125 Benham, Phillip, 2:418 Benjamin, Harry, 2:568 Bennett, Janet M., 1:138 Bennett, Milton J., 1:138 Bennett, William John, 1:8, 41, 87, 193, 229, 253, 305; 2:387, 388, 435, 465, 534, 541, 593 Benson, Lloyd, 2:451 Bentley, Elizabeth, 1:111; 2:515 Benton-Banai, Eddie, 1:22 Berg, Alan, 2:517, 616 Berg, Nick, 1:4 Berg v. Claytor (1977), 1:209 Bergstresser, Charles M., 2:587 Berlant, Lauren, 2:577 Berlin, Isaiah, 2:527 Berlin Wall, 1:103, 292 Berman, Ronald S., 2:387 Bernal, Martin, 1:11; 2:435 Bernstein, Carl, 1:131, 176–77; 2:624 Bernstein, Leonard, 1:28 Berry, Chuck, 2:475 Berthold, Richard, 1:7 Bessie, Alvah, 1:257 Bethe, Hans, 2:541 Beulah (TV program), 1:46 Bhagavad Gita, 2:419 BIA. See Bureau of Indian Affairs Biafra, Jello, 1:41–42; 2:449 Biaggi, Mario, 2:386 Bias, Len, 2:592 Bias (Goldberg), 2:350 Biberman, Herbert J., 1:257 Bible, 1:211; 2:336, 365, 439, 445, 455, 495, 526, 542, 552, 604 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 Biddle, Livingston L., 2:385 Biden, Joe, 1:157, 158; 2:411
Index Big Jim McLain (film), 2:605 Big Lies (Conason), 2:534 Bigelow, Albert, 2:409 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2:358, 606 Billings, Robert J., 2:466 Billy Elliot (film), 1:25 bin Laden, Osama, 1:78, 87, 201, 296, 321; 2:411, 489, 503, 529 bioethics, 2:500 biological determinism, 2:350, 422 biotech revolution, 1:42–43, 213–14; 2:500, 526 See also stem-cell research Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (2002), 1:67, 109 birth control, 1:43–44 abortion and, 1:1, 3 ACLU and, 1:19 antipornography campaigners and, 2:437 biotech revolution and, 1:42 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Catholic Church and, 1:74–75 China and, 1:85 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 FDA and, 1:186, 187; 2:513 feminism and, 1:177 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:247 judicial wars and, 1:289 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334 Moral Majority and, 2:367 National Review and, 2:391 Packwood, Bob, and, 2:422 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:424 Planned Parenthood and, 2:431 privacy rights and, 1:44, 140, 289; 2:431, 443, 600 role of medicine in, 2:474 secular humanism and, 2:501 sex education and, 2:508, 509 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Supreme Court and, 1:44; 2:479, 600 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 See also abortion; condoms Birth of a Nation (film), 1:317 Bishop, Joseph, 2:600 Black, Don, 2:614 Black, Hugo, 2:599 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Bernal), 1:11; 2:435 Black Book, The, 2:369 “Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, The” (Baldwin), 2:334 Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (Madhubuti), 1:116 Black Panther Party (BPP), 1:18, 44–45, 83, 96, 121, 127, 184, 264, 308; 2:344, 382, 454, 545 Black Power movement, 1:10, 15, 44, 96; 2:399, 468, 476 Black Radical Congress (BRC), 1:45–46
Black Sabbath, 1:246 black separatism, 1:172–73, 173; 2:377, 382–83 blackface, 1:46–47 Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (Evans), 2:342 blacklisting, 1:258, 325; 2:338, 344, 425, 502 Blackmun, Harry, 2:479 Blackwater Worldwide, 2:445 Blackwell, Morton, 2:544 Blake, James F., 2:424 Blanco, Kathleen, 1:270 Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an ExConservative (Brock), 1:51, 252 Block, Herbert, 2:342, 343 Blondie (comic strip), 1:107, 108 Bloom, Allan, 1:8, 229, 298; 2:394, 452, 465, 541 Bloom, Harold, 1:218; 2:621 Bloom County (comic strip), 1:108, 145 blue laws, 1:135 Blumenthal, Sidney, 1:141 Bly, Robert, 2:355 Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie County v. Earls (2002), 1:143 Bob Jones University, 1:47, 47–48, 227, 260, 300, 313, 327; 2:339, 440, 466 Boeing Company, 1:29, 119 Bogosian, Eric, 2:517 Bohnet, Newell, 1:46 Boland Amendment (1983), 1:278, 279 Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe (1954), 1:54 Bolshevik Revolution, 2:526, 527, 619 Bond, Julian, 2:384 Bono, 1:48, 248; 2:476, 553 book banning, 1:49, 76; 2:501, 512, 535, 618, 619 Book of Daniel, The (Doctorow), 2:480 Bookchin, Murray, 1:162 Boomtown Rats, 2:497 Boondocks (comic strip), 1:108 Border Patrol, U.S., 2:359 Borjas, George, 1:273 Bork, Robert H., 1:19, 290, 293, 323; 2:443, 487, 558 Born, Max, 2:419 Born in the USA (album), 2:476, 532 Born on the Fourth of July (film), 2:539, 578 Boschwitz, Rudy, 2:609 Boumediene v. Bush (2008), 1:4 Bourgeois, Roy, 2:493 Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), 1:206; 2:523, 524 Bowie, David, 1:24–25 Bowling for Columbine (film), 1:69; 2:336, 351, 366, 497 Bowling for Morgan (film), 2:414 Boy George, 1:25 Boy Scouts of America (BSA), 1:49–50, 178, 206; 2:526, 589 Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act (2002), 1:50 Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), 1:50, 206
I-5
Boyce, William D., 1:49 Boyer, Paul, 2:408 Boys in the Band (film), 2:513 Bozell, L. Brent, 1:57; 2:342, 602 BPP. See Black Panther Party bra burning, 1:38; 2:368 Bracero Program, 1:272; 2:359 Bradlee, Ben, 1:280 Bradley, Tom, 1:301 Bradley, William Warren, 1:50–51; 2:610 Brady, James and Sarah, 1:232, 232; 2:391 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993), 1:232, 232, 2:360 Bramwell, Austin, 2:391 Branch Davidians, 2:349, 586 Brandeis, Louis, 1:140; 2:443 Branden, Nathaniel, 2:455 Brando, Marlon, 1:295, 325 Brandywine v. Mainline Radio (1972), 2:348 Braun, Wernher von, 1:258 Brawley, Tawana, 2:514 Brazil, 1:213, 231 BRC. See Black Radical Congress Breaking Rank (Stamper), 2:442 Breathed, Berke, 1:108, 145 Breaux, John, 1:327 Bremer, L. Paul, 1:249 Brennan, William J., 1:6, 181 Brentar, Jerome, 1:134 Bricmont, Jean, 2:524 Brig, The (Brown), 1:326 Briggs, John, 2:361 Briggs Initiative, 1:55; 2:523 Briggs v. Elliott (1952), 1:54 Bright Room Called Day, A (Kushner), 1:307 Brinkley, Douglas, 2:426 Briseno, Theodore, 1:301, 302 Broadcast News (film), 1:52 Brock, David, 1:51–52, 252; 2:561 Brokaw, Tom, 1:52, 212; 2:626 Brontë, Charlotte, 2:362 Brooke, Edward, 1:104 Brookings Institution, 2:444, 557 Brooks, David, 2:400 Brooks, Garth, 1:123 Broomfield, Nick, 1:181 Broun, Heywood, 2:515 Browder, Earl, 1:111; 2:341 Browder v. Gayle (1956), 2:424 Brown, David, 1:53 Brown, Dee, 1:121 Brown, Edmund G. “Pat,” 2:403, 458, 604 Brown, Helen Gurley, 1:36, 52–53; 2:513 Brown, Jerry, 2:369 Brown, Kenneth, 1:326 Brown, Michael, 1:270 Brown, Norman O., 2:432 Brown, Oliver, 1:53 Brown, Rita Mae, 1:320; 2:516 Brown Berets, 1:256; 2:454 Brown Scare, 1:310; 2:342–43 Brown University, 2:530 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), 1:18, 53–54, 60, 64, 65, 94, 111, 115, 153, 256, 276, 289; 2:383, 464, 495–96, 561, 565, 599, 600, 614 See also segregation
I-6
Index
Brownmiller, Susan, 1:261 Bryan, William Jennings, 1:201 Bryant, Anita, 1:55, 172; 2:361 Bryant, Carolyn, 2:564 Bryant, Kobe, 2:517 Bryant, Rob, 2:564, 565 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1:16 BSA. See Boy Scouts of America Buchanan, Patrick Joseph, 1:12, 13, 56, 56–57, 58, 62, 134, 155, 177, 196, 220, 273, 274; 2:359, 387, 428, 560, 576, 607 Buchwald, Art, 1:194 Buck Rogers (comic strip), 1:107 Buckley, Christopher, 2:412 Buckley, William Frank, Jr., 1:8, 13, 57–58, 58, 215, 229, 253, 286, 295; 2:342, 344, 390, 391, 448, 455, 483, 484, 493, 543, 578, 583, 584 Budapest, Hungary, 2:525 Budde, Ray, 1:79 Buddhism, 1:121, 218, 295 Budenz, Louis Francis, 1:58–59, 111; 2:515 Budget Enforcement Act (1990), 2:551 Budget Reconciliation Bill (1993), 2:551 Bullard, Robert Doyle, 1:59–60 Bunche, Ralph, 1:60 Bundy, Ted, 1:183 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. (ATF), 2:391, 392, 586 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 1:23; 2:627 Burger, Warren E., 2:464, 533, 600 Burgess, Anthony, 1:307 Burke, Edmund, 2:617 Burney, Leroy E., 2:520 Burros, Daniel, 2:401 Burroughs, William S., 1:120, 217, 246, 294 Burton, Dan, 1:262 Burton, Harold, 2:599 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Brown), 1:121 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 1:61–62 ACLU and, 1:19 affirmative action and, 1:9 Americans with Disabilities Act and, 1:24 Angelou, Maya, and, 1:26 Atwater, Lee, and, 1:31, 32, 32 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Brokaw, Tom, and, 1:52 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:81 China and, 1:85 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 Cold War and, 1:102, 103 comic strips and, 1:108 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 ecoterrorism and, 1:148 environmental movement and, 1:59 FDA and, 1:186 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:180 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217
Bush, George Herbert Walker (continued) Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 Horton, Willie, and, 1:264, 265 Iran-Contra affair and, 1:279 Japanese internment and, 2:467 judicial wars and, 1:290 King, Rodney, and, 1:301 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 Liddy, G. Gordon, and, 1:322 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 militia movement and, 2:360 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386, 387 neoconservatism and, 2:395 Norquist, Grover, and, 2:406 Penn, Sean, and, 2:425 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:560 presidential pardons and, 1:62, 279; 2:440, 441 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:423, 451 Republican Party and, 2:469 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:552 Soviet Union and, 2:528 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:541 supply-side economics and, 2:547 tax reform and, 1:62; 2:406, 551 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 Thomas, Clarence, and, 1:251, 330; 2:561 United Nations and, 2:573 Vietnam War and, 2:581, 582 War on Drugs and, 2:593 Watts and Los Angeles riots and, 2:605 whistleblowers and, 2:612 Bush, George W., 1:62, 63–64 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:16 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 bankruptcy reform and, 1:35 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 Bono and, 1:48 Bradley, Bill, 1:51 Brokaw, Tom, and, 1:52 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 censorship and, 1:77 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:82 civil liberties and, 2:344 Cold War and, 1:103 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113, 114; 2:625 counterculture and, 1:122 Cronkite, Walter, and, 1:126 Cuban Americans and, 1:224 Dean, Howard, and, 1:129 Dean, John, and, 1:131 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Dixie Chicks and, 1:123; 2:597 Dobson, James, and, 1:139 education reform and, 1:150 Election of 2000 and, 1:153–55; 2:376, 380, 448, 465, 560 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 158 faith-based programs and, 1:169–70 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173 federal budget deficit and, 1:173, 174 forests, parklands, and federal wilderness and, 1:190–91
Bush, George W. (continued) France and, 1:194 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217 global warming and, 1:218, 219 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227, 228; 2:552 gun control and, 1:233 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 health care and, 1:245 Hightower, Jim, and, 1:250 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 illegal immigrants and, 1:272; 2:359 Japan and, 1:284 judicial activism and, 2:444 judicial wars and, 1:289, 290 Kerry, John, and, 1:295, 296 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:309 Lee, Spike, and, 1:318 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327; 2:564 Madonna and, 2:333 Matthew Shepard Act and, 2:517 McCain, John, and, 2:339, 340 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 Mexico and, 2:356 Microsoft and, 2:358 military funerals and, 2:429 Moore, Michael, and, 2:366 NAACP and, 2:384 Nation, The, and, 2:381 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:387 National Review and, 2:391 neoconservatism and, 2:395, 541 New Deal and, 2:397 New York Times and, 2:400, 401 Norquist, Grover, and, 2:406 NRA and, 2:391 Obama, Barack, and, 2:412 obscenity and, 1:176 occupational safety and, 2:415 PBS and, 2:448 Penn, Sean, and, 2:425, 426 presidential pardons and, 2:440, 441 privatization and, 2:445 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:446 Rather, Dan, and, 2:456, 457, 457 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Religious Right and, 1:91; 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:469 rock and roll and, 2:476 Rove, Karl, and, 2:480, 481 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 Schiavo, Terri, and, 2:491 September 11 and, 2:503 sex education and, 1:14; 2:508 Social Security and, 2:523 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:532 stem-cell research and, 2:537 Stewart, Jon, and, 2:539 Stone, Oliver, and, 2:540 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:541
Index Bush, George W. (continued) supply-side economics and, 2:547 Supreme Court and, 2:416 tax reform and, 1:63; 2:397, 470, 547, 551, 606 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574, 575 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:578 Vietnam War and, 1:62, 287; 2:456, 457, 457, 581, 582 vigilantism and, 2:583 Voting Rights Act and, 2:585 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 Washington Times and, 2:602 Weekly Standard and, 2:607 Woodward, Bob, and, 2:624 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630 Bush, John Ellis (Jeb), 1:62–63, 154; 2:491 Bush, Prescott Sheldon, 1:61 Bush, Samuel Prescott, 1:61 Bush Doctrine, 1:64; 2:424 Bush family, 2:505 Bush (G.H.W.) administration, 1:24, 41, 304; 2:533 Bush (G.W.) administration American Century and, 1:16, 82 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57 Canada and, 1:69 CIA and, 1:78, 82; 2:441, 482 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 conservative social policy and, 1:63 conspiracy theories and, 1:117 Dean, John, and, 1:131 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 157 faith-based programs and, 1:170 federal budget deficit and, 1:173 global warming and, 1:219 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 Iraq and, 1:82 Krugman, Paul, and, 1:306 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 New York Times and, 1:401–2 Penn, Sean, and, 2:426 privatization and, 2:445 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 right to die and, 2:407 Rove, Karl, and, 2:480, 481 Russia and, 2:529 same-sex marriage and, 2:421 science wars and, 2:499, 500 September 11 and, 2:503 special-interest groups and, 1:67 think tanks and, 2:558 tort reform and, 2:567 torture and, 1:3–4 United Nations and, 2:573, 574 war protesters and, 2:597 Woodward, Bob, and, 2:625 Bush v. Gore (2000), 1:155; 2:464, 465, 561 Bushnell, Ben, 1:215 business, 1:97, 110, 162, 245, 282; 2:397, 414, 468, 572, 594, 613 See also corporations
busing, school, 1:64–65, 136, 188, 260, 293, 327; 2:346, 404, 468, 469, 544, 561, 614, 617 Butler, Carrie, 2:564 Butler, Judith, 1:192 Butler, Richard, 2:482 Butler, Richard Girnt, 1:31 Butler, Robert, 2:615, 616 Butterfield, Alexander, 2:603 Butts, Calvin, 2:456 Byrd, James, Jr., 1:239, 330 Byrd, Robert C., 1:65–66; 2:441, 563 Byrds, The, 2:596 Cabey, Darrell, 1:222, 223 Caen, Herb, 1:295 Calderone, Mary, 2:508 California war toys and, 2:597 white supremacists and, 2:616 California, University of at Berkeley, 2:334, 374, 399, 547, 553, 572 at Davis, 1:9 at Los Angeles, 1:277 at San Francisco, 2:537, 572 California State University, 2:497 Californians for Biblical Morality, 1:313; 2:466 Calley, William L., Jr., 2:379 Cambodia, 1:264; 2:405, 468, 594, 595 Camp David Accords, 1:73 campaign finance reform, 1:67–68, 77, 109, 119, 132, 250; 2:339, 499 Campbell, Glen, 2:596 Campbell, Joseph, 2:543 Campolo, Anthony “Tony,” 1:68; 2:518, 589 Campus Watch, 1:6; 2:344, 431 Canada, 1:30, 69, 84, 127, 146, 160, 163, 213, 220, 231, 272, 303–4; 2:348, 356, 488, 490, 590, 596, 628 cancer, 1:185, 214, 328; 2:334, 353, 499, 500, 520, 567 capital punishment, 1:69–71, 70; 2:434 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Bush, George W., and, 1:62 Canada and, 1:69 Christian reconstructionism and, 1:90 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 Gilmore, Gary, and, 1:215–16 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 human rights and, 1:265 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:335 McVeigh, Timothy, and, 2:349 media and, 2:351 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 police misconduct and, 2:434 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, and, 2:480 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 Ryan, George, and, 1:71; 2:434, 484–85 Saudi Arabia and, 1:69; 2:489 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 sex offenders and, 2:510 social theory on, 1:268 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 vigilantism and, 2:582
I-7
capitalism, 1:75, 85, 119, 135, 200, 203, 229, 306, 311; 2:338, 345, 404, 455, 456, 468, 519, 528, 547, 590, 606, 618, 622 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman and Friedman), 1:200; 2:444 Capote, Truman, 1:295, 324; 2:398, 621 Capp, Al, 1:107 Captain America (comic), 1:106 Carcieri, Donald, 2:353 Carlin, George, 1:176 Carmichael, Stokely, 1:121, 310; 2:399 Carmona, Richard H., 2:413, 520 Carroll v. Princess Anne (1968), 1:18 Carson, Rachel Louise, 1:71–72, 110, 162; 2:499 Carter, Fred, 1:84 Carter, James Earl, Jr., 1:72–74 China and, 1:85 Christian radio and, 1:89 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:97 Dean, Howard, and, 1:129 Democratic Party and, 1:136; 2:346 education reform and, 1:150 environmental movement and, 1:72, 149 evangelicalism and, 1:166 FDA and, 1:186 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:188 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Huntington, Samuel P., and, 1:269 Israel and, 1:281 Japanese internment and, 2:467 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Liddy, G. Gordon, and, 1:322 Love Canal and, 1:328 Mondale, Walter, and, 2:364 Moral Majority and, 2:367 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:393 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405 nuclear age and, 2:409 presidential pardons and, 1:73, 322; 2:440, 441, 547 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:560, 617 Religious Right and, 2:466 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Three Mile Island and, 2:563 Vietnam Veterans Memorial and, 2:579 Vietnam War and, 2:581 Carter administration, 1:24; 2:385, 394, 395, 409 Carto, Willis, 2:615, 616 Carver, Raymond, 1:325 Carville, James, 2:534 Cash, Johnny, 2:393 Cassady, Neal, 1:218, 295 Cassavetes, John, 1:325 Cassirer, Ernst, 2:541 “Castle Doctrine,” 2:391 Castro, Fidel, 1:78, 102, 127, 224, 292, 293; 2:456 Castro, Rául, 1:127 Caswell, Scott, 2:414 Catch-22 (Heller), 1:247, 248 Catholic Church, 1:74–76 abortion and, 1:1–2; 2:479
I-8
Index
Catholic Church (continued) American founding and, 1:192 biotechnology and, 1:42 birth control and, 1:44 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57 Budenz, Louis F., and, 1:59 Chávez, César, and, 1:80; 2:358 Chick, Jack, and, 1:84 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian radio and, 1:89; 2:515, 552 church and state and, 1:92 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 comic books and, 1:106 creationism and intelligent design and, 1:124, 125 Democratic Party and, 1:135 discrimination and, 1:169 drama and, 1:326 evangelicalism and, 1:166 film industry and, 1:215, 325; 2:370, 371 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Ginsberg, Allen, and, 1:218 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:295 Kevorkian, Jack, and, 1:297 LaHaye, Tim, and, 1:314 Madonna and, 2:333, 333 McCarthy, Eugene, and, 2:340 McCarthyism and, 2:344 National Review and, 2:391 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 presidential elections and, 1:86 Religious Right and, 2:466, 467 Republican Party and, 2:468 right to die and, 2:407 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 School of the Americas and, 2:493–94 school prayer and, 2:495 sex offenders and, 2:510 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 size of, 2:525 social theory on, 1:268 stem-cell research and, 2:537 white supremacists and, 2:614 World Council of Churches and, 2:625 Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, 1:91; 2:592 Cato Institute, 2:444, 559 CBN. See Christian Broadcasting Network CCC. See Council of Conservative Citizens CDC. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDFE. See Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise Celestine Prophecy, The, 2:396 censorship, 1:76–77 academic, 1:5, 6 ACLU and, 1:19 Biafra, Jello, and, 1:42 book banning and, 1:49 comic books and, 1:106 FCC and, 1:174–76
censorship (continued) film industry and, 1:258 Guthrie, Woody, and, 1:233 Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:247 homosexuals and, 1:207 Kubrick, Stanley, and, 1:307 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 MPAA and, 2:370–71 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:336–37, 385, 386, 437, 507 New York Times and, 2:401 record warning labels and, 2:459–60 rock and roll and, 2:476, 628 sexual revolution and, 2:512, 513 shock jocks and, 2:517 Soviet Union and, 2:527–28 Stern, Howard, and, 2:538 Census of 2000, 1:321, 329; 2:452 Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE), 1:29, 163 Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 1:5, 7, 264 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. (CDC), 1:13, 44; 2:413 Central America, 1:278; 2:367, 582 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1:77–79 American Century and, 1:16 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57 Bush administration and, 1:78, 82; 2:441, 482, 625 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:82 Cold War and, 1:101 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 Cronkite, Walter, and, 1:126 Cuba and, 1:127 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 LSD and, 1:317 Nation, The, and, 2:381 neoconservatism and, 2:394 New York Times and, 2:401 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 secret prisons and, 1:4 Steinem, Gloria, and, 2:536 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Unabomber and, 2:572 Watergate and, 1:177; 2:602 Central Intelligence Agency Information Act (1984), 1:197 CFR, The (Courtney), 1:116 Chafets, Zev, 2:400 Chambers, Whittaker, 1:59, 78, 111, 256; 2:343, 406, 455 Chandler, Russell, 2:396 Chandler Act (1938), 1:35 Chandler v. Miller (1997), 1:143 Chaney, James, 1:29, 330; 2:429, 430 Chao, Elaine, 1:249 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), 2:436, 530 Charen, Mona, 1:126 Charles, Norman, 1:23
charter schools, 1:79–80, 152 Chávez, César, 1:80–81, 256, 311; 2:358–59 Chavez, Hugo, 2:475 Chavez, Linda, 1:272; 2:373 Chayefsky, Paddy, 1:326 Chechnya, 2:518 chemical industry, 1:72, 162, 186, 214, 328; 2:499 Cheney, Lynne Ann, 1:11, 81–83, 82; 2:387, 388, 470 Cheney, Mary, 1:81, 82, 83, 298, 320; 2:421 Cheney, Richard Bruce, 1:16, 81–83, 82, 131, 156, 176, 197, 219, 298, 320, 321, 323; 2:347, 402, 405, 421, 426, 445 Chernobyl, 2:410, 528 Cheshire, William, 2:602 Chiang Kai-shek, 1:85 Chicago, University of, 1:200, 271, 303 Chicago Seven, 1:83–84, 218, 242, 257; 2:596 Chicago Tribune, 2:569 Chick, Jack Thomas, 1:84–85; 2:440, 515 child care, 1:86, 132, 172, 287; 2:364, 488, 534, 608 Child Online Protection Act (1998), 1:278; 2:437 Children’s Defense Fund, 1:97, 232 Children’s Internet Protection Act (2000), 1:278 Children’s Television Act (1988), 2:598 Chile, 1:78; 2:400, 493 Chiles, Lawton, 1:62 Chilton, David, 1:90; 2:518 China, People’s Republic of, 1:85–86 anticommunist movement and, 1:258 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 capital punishment and, 1:69 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Cold War and, 1:101, 102 communism and, 1:111 FDA and, 1:187 genetically modified foods and, 1:213 global warming and, 1:219 globalization and, 1:221, 222 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:249 John Birch Society and, 1:286 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:309 marriage names in, 2:337 McCarthyism and, 2:343, 344 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:348 New York Times and, 2:401 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:338, 405 nuclear age and, 2:409 Robertson, Pat, and, 1:88 Soros, George, and, 2:525 United Nations and, 2:573 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Williams, William Appleman, and, 2:618 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 China, Republic of, 1:85, 102 China Syndrome, The (film), 1:184, 242; 2:563 Chirac, Jacques, 1:194
Index Chisholm, Shirley Anita St. Hill, 1:86 Cho, Seung-Hui, 2:496 Choice Not an Echo, A (Schlafly), 1:116 Chomsky, Avram Noam, 1:86–88, 87, 103, 259, 321; 2:351, 400, 504, 524, 630 Chong, Tommy, 1:143 Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), 2:466, 474, 475, 552, 586 Christian Century magazine, 1:166, 227; 2:402, 495, 557 Christian Coalition, 1:68, 88–89, 92, 139, 171, 290; 2:368, 386, 447, 463, 463, 466, 469, 474, 475, 475, 507, 552, 613 Christian Coalition, The: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition (Watson), 1:88 Christian Heritage College, 1:313; 2:466 Christian Identity movement, 1:31; 2:360, 365, 482, 483, 614, 615 Christian Manifesto, A (Schaeffer), 2:467, 490 Christian radio, 1:89–90, 104, 138, 183, 201, 314; 2:347–48, 466, 515, 550, 552, 616 Christian reconstructionism, 1:90–91; 2:518, 555 Christianity Today magazine, 1:166, 227 Christmas, 1:91, 91 Christopher, Warren, 1:301 Chrysler, 1:312 Church, Frank, 1:78 Church, Mike, 2:517 church and state, 1:92 ACLU and, 1:18–19 American civil religion and, 1:20–21 Boy Scouts and, 1:50 Bush, George W., and, 1:63 Catholic Church and, 1:74 Christian radio and, 1:89 Christian reconstructionism and, 1:90 Christmas and, 1:91, 91 clergy housing and, 2:601 Cold War and, 2:527 compassionate conservatism and, 1:114 creationism and, 1:124 Democratic Party and, 1:135 education reform and, 1:150, 152 faith-based programs and, 1:169–70 Founding Fathers and, 1:192, 193 homeschooling and, 1:260–61 judicial wars and, 1:288–89 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 Moore, Roy S., and, 2:366–67 Moral Majority and, 2:367 O’Hair, Madalyn Murray, and, 2:416 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 Religious Right and, 2:466 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 school prayer and, 2:494–96 school vouchers and, 2:498 secular humanism and, 2:501 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 stem-cell research and, 2:537 Supreme Court and, 1:92, 193; 2:416, 600 televangelism and, 2:552
church and state (continued) Ten Commandments and, 2:554–55 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599 Church of Jesus Christ-Christian (CJCC), 1:31; 2:615 Churchill, Ward LeRoy, 1:7, 92–93; 2:504, 530 Churchill, Winston, 1:100, 103 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Citizens Party, 1:109; 2:560 Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. (USCIS), 1:274 City and the Pillar, The (Vidal), 2:578 City College of San Francisco, 2:374 City Lights Publishers, 1:121, 218 “City of New Orleans” (Goodman), 1:234 civil liberties, 1:3, 57, 63–64, 109, 195, 204, 226, 290, 310, 316; 2:344, 363, 377, 416, 443, 461, 467, 471, 510, 520, 574, 630 See also American Civil Liberties Union; domestic spying; free speech; libertarianism; specific constitutional amendments Civil Liberties Act (1988), 2:467 civil rights, 1:93–96 ACLU and, 1:17–18 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:15, 16 American Indian Movement and, 1:22 Angelou, Maya, and, 1:25 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Black Panther Party and, 1:44–45 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 Bork, Robert, and, 1:290 Boy Scouts and, 1:50 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Bush, Prescott, and, 1:61 Chávez, César, and, 1:81 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Commager, Henry, and, 1:109 communism and, 1:111, 116 compassionate conservatism and, 1:114 counterculture and, 1:120, 121 Deloria, Vine, and, 1:133 Democratic Party and, 1:135–36 disability and, 1:276 domestic spying and, 2:434 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 DuBois, W.E.B. and, 1:144 Duke, David, and, 1:146 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 Dylan, Bob, and, 1:147 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 environmental movement and, 1:59–60 evangelicalism and, 1:166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 feminism and, 1:178 gay rights and, 1:96; 2:516 generational conflict and, 1:212 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 “Greatest Generation” and, 1:52 hate crimes and, 1:239; 2:564 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hoffmann, Abbie, and, 1:257
I-9
civil rights (continued) homosexuals and, 1:205, 206, 207, 210 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262, 263 human rights and, 1:265–66 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:266, 267 Israel and, 1:281 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282 Japanese internment and, 2:467 Jews and, 1:29 John Birch Society and, 1:286 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:299–300 King, Rodney, and, 1:302 Ku Klux Klan and, 2:614 labor unions and, 1:312 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 lesbians and, 1:320 literature and, 1:324 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 Loving, Richard and Mildred, and, 1:329 lynching and, 1:330 MacKinnon, Catharine, and, 2:332 Malcolm X and, 1:235; 2:335 Marxism and, 2:338 McGovern, George, and, 2:346 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347 Mexican Americans and, 2:359 Millett, Kate, and, 2:361 Million Man March and, 2:362 Mondale, Walter, and, 2:364 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 Muslim Americans and, 2:377 NAACP and, 2:383 Nation of Islam and, 2:382 National Review and, 2:390 neoconservatism and, 2:394 New Left and, 2:398, 399 New York Times and, 2:401 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:403 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404 NOW and, 2:388, 389 Obama, Barack, and, 2:412 Parks, Rosa, and, 2:424 Philadelphia, Miss., and, 2:429–30 police abuse and, 1:95, 300; 2:433 racial profiling and, 2:454 Rather, Dan, and, 2:456 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:465 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:476 Rockwell, Norman, and, 2:477–78 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 “Silent Majority” and, 2:519 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 Thomas, Clarence, and, 2:561 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:563–64 transgender movement and, 2:567–68 vigilantism and, 2:582 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584
I-10
Index
civil rights (continued) Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 War on Poverty and, 2:594 war protesters and, 2:595 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599 Watts riots and, 2:604 West, Cornel, and, 2:610 White, Reggie, and, 2:613 Will, George, and, 2:617 World War II memorial and, 2:626 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630, 631 See also discrimination; gay rights; race, racism Civil Rights Act (1964), 1:95, 96 affirmative action and, 1:8–9 age discrimination and, 1:11 Americans with Disabilities Act and, 1:24 Brown v. Board of Education and, 1:54 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 Democratic Party and, 1:136 ERA and, 1:165 faith-based programs and, 1:169 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Great Society and, 1:230 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Malcolm X and, 2:335 NAACP and, 2:383 NOW and, 2:389 Obama, Barack, and, 2:412 Republican Party and, 2:468 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 sexual harassment and, 2:511 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584 Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (1980), 1:24 Civil Service Commission, 1:206 Civil Service Reform Act (1978), 2:612 Civil War, U.S., 1:20, 21, 114, 115, 135, 165, 180; 2:391, 439, 468, 550, 557, 612, 619 CJCC. See Church of Jesus Christ-Christian Clark, Ed, 2:560 Clark, Kenneth, 1:54 Clark, Marcia, 2:417 Clark, Tom, 1:111; 2:343, 599 Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, The (Huntington), 1:103, 269; 2:504 class, social, 1:40, 150, 152, 177, 179, 310, 321; 2:373, 389, 390, 399, 413, 423, 438, 452, 456, 462, 468, 470, 497, 519, 533, 535, 552, 607, 608, 620 Class Action Fairness Act (2005), 2:567 Clay, aka Ali v. United States (1971), 1:15 Clean Air Act (1969), 1:159 Clean Air Act (1970), 1:148, 162, 163 Clean Water Act (1972), 1:148, 162 Clean Water Act (1977), 1:159 Clear Channel Communications, 1:76–77, 175 Clearwater, Frank, 1:23 Cleaver, Eldridge, 1:45 Clem, Todd, 2:517 Clements, Bill, 2:481
Clergy Housing Clarification Act (2002), 2:601 Cleveland, Grover, 2:550 Cleveland Elementary School, 2:497 Clinton, Chelsea, 1:98 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 1:96, 97, 97–99, 99 Brock, David, and, 1:51 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 157–58; 2:411, 412, 423 family values, 1:172 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:180 health care and, 1:245 Kennedy family and, 1:294 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 marriage names and, 2:337 McCain, John, and, 2:339 New Deal and, 2:397 New York Times and, 2:400 Starr, Kenneth, and, 2:533–34 stay-at-home mothers and, 2:534 Weekly Standard and, 2:607 Clinton, William Jefferson Blythe, IV, 1:96–97 Angelou, Maya, and, 1:25 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Brock, David, and, 1:51 Brokaw, Tom, and, 1:52 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Bush family and, 1:61, 62 Bush, George H.W., and, 2:560 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 Campolo, Anthony “Tony,” and, 1:68 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 China and, 1:85 Cold War and, 1:103 Contract with America and, 1:118 Democratic Party and, 1:136; 2:346 Drudge Report and, 1:141, 142, 278 Election of 2008 and, 1:158 environmental movement and, 1:60 FDR memorial and, 1:196–97, 196 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 forests, parklands, and federal wilderness and, 1:190 Founding Fathers and, 1:193 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 gay rights and, 1:206, 209; 2:521 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216, 217 global warming and, 1:219 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Great Society and, 1:230 gun control and, 1:232 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 health care and, 1:243, 245 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hightower, Jim, and, 1:250 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and, 1:98 Hillsdale College and, 1:253 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282, 283 judicial wars and, 1:290 Kwanzaa and, 1:308 Liddy, G. Gordon, and, 1:322 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323
Clinton, William Jefferson Blythe, IV (continued) Microsoft and, 2:357 Morrison, Toni, and, 2:369 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:372 Nader, Ralph, and, 2:380 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:387 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 neoconservatism and, 2:395 New Deal and, 2:397 New York Times and, 2:400 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 presidential pardons and, 2:440, 441, 547 rap music and, 2:456 Republican Party and, 2:469 same-sex marriage and, 2:486 sexual harassment and, 1:51, 99, 100; 2:512 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Starr, Kenneth, and, 1:97, 99, 100; 2:533–34, 533 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:541 talk radio and, 2:550 tax reform and, 2:551 Terry, Randall, and, 2:418 tort reform and, 2:566 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:571 Vietnam War and, 2:581, 582 Weekly Standard and, 2:607 welfare and, 2:608 World War II memorial and, 2:626 Clinton administration, 1:14, 48, 118; 2:528, 546 Clinton impeachment, 1:51, 66, 96, 97, 99–100, 120, 132, 136, 141, 142, 182, 195, 278, 326, 327; 2:339, 426, 464, 465, 469, 533–34, 533, 602, 603, 611 Clooney, George, 2:344 Closing Circle, The: Nature, Man, and Technology (Commoner), 1:110 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 1:229; 2:452, 465 Clymer, Adam, 2:400 CNP. See Council for National Policy Coast Guard, U.S., 1:127, 270 Cobb, James C., 1:114 Cobb, John, Jr., 2:445 Cochran, Johnnie, 2:417 Cochran, Thad, 1:331; 2:430 CODEPINK: Women for Peace, 2:597, 598 Coffee, Linda, 2:479 Coffin, William Sloane, 1:316 Cohen, Stephen, 2:528 Cohn, Roy, 1:308; 2:480 Cold War, 1:101–4 academic freedom and, 1:6 Afghanistan and, 2:504 American Century and, 1:16 American civil religion and, 1:20 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 arts funding and, 2:385
Index Cold War (continued) Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57 Bush family and, 1:61 censorship and, 1:76 Chambers, Whittaker, and, 1:79 China and, 1:85 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Christmas and, 1:91 CIA and, 1:77, 78 comic books and, 1:106 Commager, Henry, and, 1:108 communism and, 1:110, 111 conspiracy theories and, 1:115 country music and, 1:123 Cuba and, 1:102, 224 drama and, 1:326 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 environmental movement and, 1:148 feminism and, 2:389 film and, 1:325 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Fukuyama, Francis, and, 1:269 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227; 2:552 health care and, 1:243 Heller, Joseph, and, 1:248 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, 1:254 Hiss, Alger and, 1:256 Hollywood Ten and, 1:257–58 human rights and, 1:265 Hutchins, Robert M., and, 1:271 Islamic fundamentalism and, 1:201 Israel and, 1:280 Japan and, 1:284 John Birch Society and, 1:286 King, Martin Luther, Jr. and, 1:300 Kubrick, Stanley, and, 1:307 labor unions and, 1:311 LeMay, Curtis, and, 1:318–19 literature and, 1:324 LSD and, 1:317 Marxism and, 2:338 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:342 McCarthyism and, 2:342 McGovern, George, and, 2:345 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 NAACP and, 2:383 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:387 National Review and, 2:390 Nazis and, 1:258 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:403 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403, 405 Norquist, Grover, and, 2:406 nuclear age and, 2:408–10 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, and, 2:419 Pipes, Richard, and, 2:430 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458, 459 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:475, 476 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, and, 2:480 Rusher, William A., and, 2:484 School of the Americas and, 2:493 school prayer and, 2:494 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515
Cold War (continued) “Silent Majority” and, 2:519 Soviet Union and, 2:527 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 1:102; 2:540, 541 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 Teller, Edward, and, 2:553 Ten Commandments and, 2:554 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 third parties and, 2:560 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:560, 568 United Nations and, 2:573 war protesters and, 2:595 Washington Times and, 2:602 Williams, William Appleman, and, 1:102; 2:618 Wilson, Edmund, and, 2:618 Cole, Bruce, 2:387 Cole, Lester, 1:257 Cole, USS, 2:503 Coleman, Diane, 2:407 Coleman, Norman, 1:196; 2:609, 610 Coler, Jack, 1:23 Colford, Paul, 2:550 Collateral Damage (film), 2:499 Collier, Peter, 1:264 Collin, Frank, 2:477, 616 Collins, Judy, 1:83 Collins, Patricia Hill, 2:620 Colmer, William M., 1:327 colonialism, 1:10, 11, 60, 82, 201; 2:338, 388, 486 Color Additive Amendments (1960), 1:185 Colorado, University of, 1:7, 92, 93, 105; 2:504, 517, 530 Colson, Charles Wendell, 1:104–5, 177 Columbia University, 1:7, 153, 218; 2:486, 543, 545 Columbine High School, 1:132, 260; 2:336, 392, 496, 497, 555, 630 Columbus Day, 1:105 Combs, Roberta, 1:88–89 Comedy Central, 2:538, 538 comic books, 1:84, 106–7; 2:349, 440, 583, 598 comic strips, 1:107–8, 145; 2:562 Coming Battle for the Media, The (Rusher), 2:484 Coming Home (film), 1:184; 2:581 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 2:350 Commager, Henry Steele, 1:102, 108–9 Commentary magazine, 1:218, 305; 2:394, 395, 422, 432–33, 432 Commerce and Labor Department, U.S., 1:174 Commerce Department, U.S., 1:169 Commission on Civil Rights, U.S., 1:276 Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 2:436 Commission on Pornography, 2:466 Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), 1:177, 322; 2:602 Common Cause, 1:109 Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, The (Spock), 1:183; 2:531 Commoner, Barry, 1:109–10, 2:560, 595 Communications Act (1934), 1:89
I-11
Communications Decency Act (1996), 1:278 communism, communists, 1:110–12 academic freedom and, 1:6 ACLU and, 1:17, 59 America–China relations and, 1:85 American civil religion and, 1:20 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57, 58 Budenz, Louis F., and, 1:58–59 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Bush, Prescott, and, 1:61 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Catholic Church and, 1:74 censorship and, 1:76 Chambers, Whittaker, and, 1:79 Cold War and, 1:100–104 comic books and, 1:106 Commager, Henry, and, 1:108 conspiracy theories and, 1:58, 91, 101, 111, 115–16, 148 Cuba and, 1:127, 224 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 FCC and, 1:175 film and, 1:325 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:187 Foucault, Michel, and, 1:191 France and, 1:194 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Galbraith, John Kenneth, and, 1:203 gay rights and, 1:205 Gingsberg, Allen, and, 1:217, 218 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hiss, Alger, and, 1:256 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 Hollywood Ten and, 1:257–58 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262, 263 human rights and, 1:265 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Iran-Contra affair and, 1:278, 279 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279, 280 Japan and, 1:284 John Birch Society and, 1:286 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:295 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 La Follette, Robert, Jr., and, 1:310 labor unions and, 1:311 Marxism and, 2:338 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341–42 McCarthyism and, 2:342–45 Moral Majority and, 2:367 NAACP and, 2:383 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:387 National Review and, 2:390 neoconservatism and, 2:394, 395 New Left and, 2:398 New York Times and, 2:401 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405
I-12
Index
communism, communists (continued) nuclear age and, 2:408 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, and, 2:419 Penn, Sean, and, 2:425 Pipes, Richard, and, 2:430 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458, 459 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Religious Right and, 2:466, 467 rock and roll and, 2:476 Rockwell, George Lincoln, and, 2:477 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, and, 2:480 Rusher, William A., and, 2:484 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493, 539 School of the Americas and, 2:493 school prayer and, 2:494 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Soviet Union and, 2:526–28 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 third parties and, 2:560 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 United Nations and, 2:573 Vietnam War and, 2:580–81 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Washington Times and, 2:602 Wayne, John, and, 2:605 white supremacists and, 2:615 Williams, William Appleman, and, 2:618 Zappa, Frank, and, 2:629 See also McCarthyism; Marxism; Red Scare; socialism; Soviet Union Communist Control Act (1954), 2:343 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 2:338 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), 1:17, 59, 79, 110–12, 144, 235–36, 241, 257, 258, 262, 264, 315; 2:338, 341, 343, 344, 403, 419, 502, 535, 560 comparable worth, 1:113, 179, 299; 2:459, 534 compassionate conservatism, 1:63, 113–14, 132; 2:397, 469, 625 Compassionate Conservatism (Olasky), 1:114 Comprehensive Crime Control Act (1984), 2:592 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (1970), 2:592 Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980), 1:328 Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (1996), 2:410 Comstock, Anthony, 2:507 Comstock Act (1873), 1:43 Comstock Laws (1878), 2:431 Conason, Joe, 2:534 Concerned Women for America (CWA), 1:90, 313, 314; 2:437, 466
condoms, 1:14, 139, 304; 2:425, 500, 508, 509 Confederate flag, 1:114–15; 2:462, 630 Confessore, Nicholas, 1:306 Conflict in Education, The (Hutchins), 1:151 Congo, 1:15, 78 Congress, U.S. abortion and, 1:2; 2:418, 479 academic freedom and, 1:7 African Americans in, 1:86, 104 arts funding and, 2:385 automobile safety and, 2:380 bankruptcy reform and, 1:34–36 Boy Scouts and, 1:50 Buchanan, Patrick, and, 1:134 Bush, George W., and, 1:63 campaign finance reform and, 1:67–68 capital punishment and, 1:71 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81 children’s television and, 2:598 China and, 1:85 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian radio and, 1:90 civil rights movement and, 1:95 clergy housing and, 2:601 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Clinton impeachment and, 1:100; 2:533, 603 Cold War and, 1:101 Contract with America and, 1:118 corporate welfare and, 1:119 Dean, Howard, and, 1:129 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132–33 Democratic Party and, 1:136, 137 Dobson, James, and, 1:138–39 education reform and, 1:150 Election of 2008 and, 1:159; 2:411 Endangered Species Act and, 1:160 English as the Official Language and, 1:160 environmental movement and, 1:164 ERA and, 1:165 faith-based programs and, 1:169 FCC and, 1:175; 2:517 FDA and, 1:185, 186 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:179 flag desecration and, 1:180, 181 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:187–88 forests, parklands, and federal wilderness and, 1:190 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197–98 General Accounting Office of, 1:186 genetically modified foods and, 1:214 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216, 216, 217 global warming and, 1:219 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 Gulf War and, 2:596, 625 gun control and, 1:232–33; 2:391 hate crimes and, 1:239, 240; 2:517 health care and, 1:243, 244, 245 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249, 250 Hiss, Alger, and, 1:256 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 Hollywood Ten and, 1:257–58 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262
Congress, U.S. (continued) human rights and, 1:278 illegal immigrants and, 1:272 Indian casinos and, 1:275 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and, 1:277 Iran-Contra affair and, 1:19; 2:406, 407 Japanese internment and, 2:467 Kerry, John, and, 1:296 Kevorkian, Jack, and, 1:298 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:300 La Follette, Robert, Jr., and, 1:310 logging and, 1:30 McCarthyism and, 2:342–44 medical marijuana and, 2:353 military recruiting and, 1:210 Muslim Americans and, 2:378 National Air and Space Museum and, 1:161 National Endowment for the Arts and, 1:15, 248; 2:336, 337, 386, 386, 387, 507 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 Nicaragua and, 2:406 nuclear age and, 2:554 occupational safety and, 2:414, 415 PBS and, 2:448 Pledge of Allegiance and, 1:20 pornography and, 2:436 Puerto Rico and, 1:255 Republican Party and, 2:468–69, 550, 607 right to die and, 1:63 Rove, Karl, and, 2:482 Russia and, 2:529 same-sex marriage and, 2:486, 487 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488, 488 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 Schiavo, Terri, and, 2:491 School of the Americas and, 2:494 school prayer and, 2:494 science wars and, 2:499, 500 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 sex education and, 2:508, 509 smoking and, 2:520 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 tax reform and, 2:550–51 Thanksgiving Day and, 2:557 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:570 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574–75 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584, 585 War on Drugs and, 2:592–93 War on Poverty and, 2:593 War Powers Act and, 2:594–95 Watergate and, 2:602 whistleblowers and, 2:612 women in the military and, 2:622 See also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S. Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 1:111, 310, 311 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 1:86, 93, 94, 223, 282; 2:361, 614 Congressional Quarterly, 2:550 Connally, John, 2:347
Index Connor, Eugene (Bull), 1:94, 95; 2:433 Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater), 1:223; 2:466, 609 Conscience of a Liberal, The (Krugman), 1:306 Conscience of a Liberal, The (Wellstone), 2:609 Console, A. Dale, 2:612 conspiracy theories, 1:58, 91, 101, 111, 115–17, 134, 146, 148, 281, 286, 300, 310, 315, 322, 323, 325; 2:349, 359, 360, 392, 411, 416, 467, 482, 505, 515, 539, 547, 573, 578, 615 Constitution, U.S. ACLU and, 1:18 American civil religion and, 1:20 bankruptcy reform and, 1:34 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 capital punishment and, 1:69 church and state and, 1:92 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 English as the Official Language and, 1:160 ERA and, 1:164–65 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 Felt, W. Mark, and, 1:177 flag desecration and, 1:180–81 Founding Fathers and, 1:192, 193 Heritage Foundation and, 1:250 judicial wars and, 1:288–89 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341 Montana Freemen and, 2:365 NRA and, 2:391 presidential pardons and, 2:440 privacy rights and, 2:443 right to die and, 2:473 segregation and, 1:54 speech codes and, 2:530 Thomas, Clarence, and, 2:561 War Powers Act and, 2:595 Warren Court and, 2:599–600 See also specific amendments consumer culture, 1:41, 107, 128, 162, 165, 194, 202, 221, 222, 304, 324, 325; 2:375, 449, 475, 519, 534, 535, 590, 591, 599, 628 consumer movement, 1:32, 35; 2:364, 380, 566, 612, 613 Consumer Product Safety Commission, 2:380, 613 containment, 1:101, 110, 265; 2:342, 398, 403, 419, 519, 568, 569, 581, 618 Contemporary Christian Music, 1:48, 84, 117–18, 286 contraceptives. See birth control Contract with America, 1:88, 118, 118–19, 216, 217, 249; 2:339, 406, 427, 428, 469 Contract with the Earth, A (Gingrich), 1:216 Contras, 1:116, 278, 279; 2:602, 625 See also Iran-Contra affair Controlled Substances Act (1970), 2:354 Conyers, John, 2:425 Cooke, Janet, 2:624 Coolidge, Calvin, 2:469 Cooper, Gary, 2:455 Coors, Joseph, 1:249; 2:611
Coover, Robert, 2:480 CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality Corn, David, 2:624 Cornell University, 2:512 corporate welfare, 1:119, 190 Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), 1:230, 326; 2:390, 447 See also Public Broadcasting Service corporations bankruptcy reform and, 1:34–36 campaign finance reform and, 1:67, 250; 2:488 Catholic Church and, 1:75 censorship and, 1:77 Cuba and, 1:127 Democratic Party and, 1:135 diversity training and, 1:137 drug testing and, 1:142–43 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and, 1:152 environmental movement and, 1:163 executive compensation and, 1:167 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 globalization and, 1:38, 221 Holocaust and, 1:258–59 homosexuals and, 1:205 Krugman, Paul, and, 1:306 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:309 media and, 1:87, 175; 2:351 Moore, Michael, and, 2:365, 366 Nader, Ralph, and, 2:380 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:385 National Public Radio and, 2:390 New Left and, 1:242; 2:399 occupational safety and, 2:414–15 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 Rove, Karl, and, 2:480 science wars and, 2:499–500 tax reform and, 2:551 think tanks and, 2:558 tobacco settlements and, 2:565–66 tort reform and, 2:566–67 United Nations and, 2:573 whistleblowers and, 2:612 See also corporate welfare; globalization; Microsoft; Wal-Mart; Walt Disney Company Correll, John T., 1:161 Corsini, Robert, 2:604 Corvair, 1:32; 2:380 Cosby, Bill, 1:46 Cosell, Howard, 1:15 Cosmopolitan magazine, 1:52, 53 Coughlin, Charles, 1:89 Coulter, Ann Hart, 1:119–20, 126, 196, 306; 2:342, 344, 350, 400 Council for National Policy (CNP), 1:313; 2:611 Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), 1:327; 2:615 counterculture, 1:120–22 American Indian Movement and, 1:22 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Atwater, Lee, and, 1:31 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Biafra, Jello, and, 1:41–42
I-13
counterculture (continued) Black Panther Party and, 1:44–45 Chicago Seven and, 1:83–84 Christian music and, 1:117 country music and, 1:122 culture jamming and, 1:128 Democratic Party and, 1:136 drug testing and, 1:143 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 Dylan, Bob, and., 1:147 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 France and, 1:194 generational conflict and, 1:212 Ginsberg, Allen, and, 1:217–18 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 graffiti and, 1:226 Guthrie, Woody, and, 1:233 Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:246–47 Heller, Joseph, and, 1:247–48 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 homeschooling and, 1:260 Jesus People and, 1:285 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:294, 295 Kubrick, Stanley, and, 1:307 Leary, Timothy, and, 1:316–17 lesbians and, 1:320 Liddy, G. Gordon, and, 1:322 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334 McGovern, George, and, 2:346 Medved, Michael, and, 2:354 Milk, Harvey, and, 2:361 moral relativism and, 2:465 Morgan, Robin, and, 2:368 Ms. and, 2:372 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:393 neoconservatism and, 2:394 New Age movement and, 2:395 New Journalism and, 2:398, 562 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404, 592 Pordhoretz, Norman, and, 2:432 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 punk rock and, 2:449 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:476 Rodman, Dennis, and, 2:478 sexual revolution and, 2:513 “Silent Majority” and, 2:519 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:316, 531 Stone, Oliver, and, 2:539 student conservatives and, 2:543, 544 Symbionese Liberation Army and, 2:547 Teller, Edward, and, 2:553 Thompson, Hunter S., and, 2:562 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 war protesters and, 2:596 Wolfe, Tom, and, 2:621 country music, 1:122–23; 2:392–93, 462, 475, 596, 597 Couric, Katie, 2:424 Courlander, Harold, 1:235 Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure), 2:542 Course in Miracles, A, 2:396 Court of Appeals, U.S., 1:10, 84, 176; 2:601
I-14
Index
Courtney, Phoebe, 1:116 Cousins, Norman, 2:409, 595 Cowlings, Al, 2:417 Cox, Archibald, 2:603 Cox, Chris W., 2:391 CPB. See Corporation for Public Broadcasting CPUSA. See Communist Party of the United States of America Craig, Larry, 2:531 Cramer, James, 1:306 Crash Course on the New Age Movement, A (Miller), 2:396 Creation Museum, 1:125 creationism and intelligent design, 1:39– 40, 47, 63, 77, 92, 123–26, 134, 165, 201; 2:339, 445, 499, 500, 501 See also evolution CREEP. See Committee to Re-elect the President Crepuscular Dawn (Virilio and Lotringer), 1:42 Crick, Francis, 1:110 crime, criminal justice Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 capital punishment and, 1:69 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 comic books and, 1:106 counterculture and, 1:176, 242, 317; 2:423, 547–48 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 gun control and, 1:232 guns and, 2:391, 392 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:263 Horton, Willie, and, 1:265 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 militia movement and, 2:365 Million Man March and, 2:362 Miranda rights and, 2:363–64 New Right and, 2:451 O.J. Simpson trial and, 2:417 police corruption and, 2:433 prison reform and, 2:442 race and, 2:452 racial profiling and, 2:453–54 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 right to counsel and, 2:471, 472 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 Soros, George, and, 2:525 think tanks and, 2:558 vigilantism and, 1:222–23, 231; 2:582–83 War on Drugs and, 2:592–93 white supremacists and, 2:614, 615, 616 zero tolerance and, 2:629 Crips, 1:204; 2:499 Crisis of Conscience (Franz), 1:285 Croll, Robert, 2:543 Cronkite, Walter Leland, Jr., 1:126; 2:457 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 2:476, 596, 628 Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (Marrs), 2:539
Crossing (McCloskey), 2:345 Crowell, Henry C., 1:89 Crucible, The (Miller), 2:344 Cruel Peace, The (Inglis), 1:112 Crumb, Robert, 1:121 Cruzan, Nancy, 2:473 Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health (1990), 2:473 Cuba, 1:22, 78, 101, 102, 116, 126–27, 224, 249, 255, 266, 292; 2:338, 381, 401, 409, 426, 494 Cuban Missile Crisis, 1:102, 127, 292, 293, 307; 2:409, 528 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch), 1:229 Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (Mead), 2:350 culture jamming, 1:77, 127–28 Culture Warrior (O’Reilly), 1:91 Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Hunter), 1:268 currency, U.S., 1:19; 2:527 Custer, George Armstrong, 1:133 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Deloria), 1:22, 133 CWA. See Concerned Women for America Czechoslovakia, 1:258; 2:525, 528, 629 Daddy’s Roommate (Willhoite), 1:49 Dahl, Steve, 2:517 Daily Show, The (TV program), 2:351, 538–39, 538 Daily Worker (newspaper), 1:59, 79, 112, 233 Dale, James, 1:50 Daley, Richard, 1:83, 267; 2:596 Dallacroce, Michelle, 1:272 Dallas Theological Seminary, 1:201; 2:440 D’Amato, Alphonse, 2:386, 507 Dangerous Place, A (Moynihan), 2:573 Daniel, Charles E., 2:564 Daniels, Charlie, 2:346 Daniels, Mitch, 2:444 Danson, Ted, 1:46 Darby, John Nelson, 2:439 Darby, Joseph, 1:3; 2:612 Darden, Christopher, 2:418 Dare to Discipline (Dobson), 1:138, 183; 2:532 Dartmouth College, 1:276; 2:544 Dartmouth Review, 1:143; 2:544 Darwin, Charles, 1:124, 125, 200 Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Behe), 1:39 Das Kapital (Marx), 2:338 Dash, Samuel, 1:100 Daughters of the American Revolution, 1:34, 106, 180 Daughters of Bilitis, 1:206; 2:513, 515, 516 Davies, John W., 1:54 Davis, Angela, 1:137–38, 236, 362 Davis, Benjamin, 1:235 Davis, Gray, 1:182; 2:498, 499 Davis, Rennie, 1:83 Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952), 1:54
Dawkins, Richard, 1:125 Day, Dorothy, 1:237 Dayan, Moshe, 1:281 DDT, 1:71, 72, 148, 162; 2:499 De Genova, Nicholas, 1:7 De Haven, Hugh, 1:32 De-Valuing of America, The (Bennett), 1:41; 2:387 Dead Kennedys, 1:41–42; 2:449 Dean, Howard Brush, III, 1:129, 129, 278; 2:487 Dean, James Byron, 1:33, 130, 295; 2:535 Dean, John Wesley, III, 1:130–31; 2:602, 603 Death of Outrage, The (Bennett), 1:41; 2:534 death penalty. See capital punishment Death with Dignity Act (1994), 2:473 Death with Dignity Act (1997), 1:298; 2:407 Debord, Guy, 1:128 Debs, Eugene V., 2:488 Declaration of Independence, 1:20 Decline of American Power, The (Wallerstein), 1:16 deconstructionism, 1:8, 10–11, 131–32, 194, 325; 2:335, 438, 542, 543 Decter, Midge, 2:394 “Deep Throat,” 1:176–77; 2:441, 612, 624 Deep Throat (film), 2:436, 437, 512 Deer Hunter, The (film), 2:581 defense, defense spending, 1:101, 135, 136, 158, 226, 249, 322; 2:391, 394, 405, 428, 451, 469, 492, 558, 612 See also Strategic Defense Initiative Defense Department, U.S., 1:4, 209, 277; 2:395, 445, 494, 502, 545, 554, 569, 612, 622 Defense of Marriage Act (1996), 2:486 DeFreeze, Donald, 2:547 Degan, William, 2:482 DeGeneres, Ellen, 1:207, 320; 2:592 DeLay, Thomas Dale, 1:72, 132–33; 2:386 Dellinger, David, 1:83; 2:596 Deloria, Vine Victor, Jr., 1:22, 133–34 DeMar, Gary, 1:90 Dembski, William A., 1:125 D’Emilio, John, 1:205 DeMille, Cecil B., 2:554 Demjanjuk, John, 1:134 Democracy for America, 1:129 Democratic Leadership Committee, 2:547 Democratic Leadership Council, 1:96, 136, 225, 237 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 1:72, 104, 129, 129, 130, 176–77, 322; 2:602, 624 Democratic National Convention of 1968, 1:83, 136, 218, 242, 257, 279; 2:335, 399, 433, 578, 596 Democratic National Convention of 2004; 2:574 Democratic Party, U.S. abortion and, 1:1 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:50 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56
Index Democratic Party, U.S. (continued) Byrd, Robert, and, 1:65, 66 campaign finance reform and, 1:67; 2:339 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:72–73 China and, 1:85 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Clinton impeachment and, 1:100; 2:603 Cold War and, 1:100, 101, 102 communism and, 1:110, 111 Confederate flag and, 1:115 Contract with America and, 1:118 Cuba and, 1:127 Cuban Americans and, 1:224 Dean, Howard, and, 1:129–30, 129 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 education reform and, 1:150 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 Election of 2000 and, 1:153–55; 2:380 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 157–59, 157; 2:509 FCC and, 1:175 FDA and, 1:186 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:179–80 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:188 forests, parklands, and federal wilderness and, 1:190 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197 Galbraith, John Kenneth, and, 1:203 gay rights and, 1:207, 209 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216, 216, 217 global warming and, 1:219 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 gun control and, 1:232 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 health care and, 1:243, 245 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hightower, Jim, and, 1:250 Hill, Anita, and, 1:251 Hispanic Americans and, 1:311 Horton, Willie, 1:264–65 HUAC and, 2:342 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:266–67 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 Israel and, 1:281 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282–83 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 judicial wars and, 1:290 Kennedy family and, 1:292–94 Kerry, John, and, 1:295, 296, 296 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:309 labor unions and, 1:311, 312 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322, 323 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:335 Malcolm X and, 2:335 McCarthy, Eugene, and, 2:340
Democratic Party, U.S. (continued) McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341 McCarthyism and, 2:343–44, 549 McGovern, George, and, 2:345–47, 346 Mondale, Walter, and, 2:364 Moore, Michael, and, 2:366, 366 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:372 Nader, Ralph, and, 2:381 Nation, The, and, 2:381 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:387 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:393 neoconservatism and, 2:394, 395 New Deal and, 2:397 New Left and, 2:399 New York Times and, 2:400 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404–5 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411–12 presidential pardons and, 2:441 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458, 459 red and blue states and, 2:460 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 Republican Party and, 2:468–69 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481, 482 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 segregation and, 1:95 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 Social Security and, 2:522 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:532 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Stewart, Jon, and, 2:539 third parties and, 2:559–60 Thomas, Clarence, and, 1:330; 2:561 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:563–64, 564 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:568–69 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:570 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:575 Voting Rights Act and, 2:585 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Watergate and, 2:602, 603 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609–10 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 1:152, 237 Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), 1:196, 267; 2:340, 378, 609 Demon-Haunted World, The (Sagan), 2:396 Deng Xiaoping, 1:85 Denmark, 1:288 Dennis, Eugene, 1:111, 235 Dennis v. U.S. (1951), 1:236 Denny, Reginald, 1:301, 302 Denton, Jeremiah, 2:508 Denver, John, 2:460 DePugh, Robert, 2:615 Dereliction of Duty (Patterson), 1:210 Derrida, Jacques, 1:131; 2:543 Dershowitz, Alan, 1:87 Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 1:149, 189 détente, 1:102, 188, 305; 2:394, 395, 405 Devil in Miss Jones, The (film), 2:436, 512 Dewey, John, 1:90; 2:501 Dewey, Thomas E., 1:101, 263; 2:494, 560, 569, 599
I-15
DFL. See Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), 1:121 Diallo, Amadou, 2:514 Dick Tracy (comic strip), 1:107 Dickerson v. U.S. (2000), 2:364 Didion, Joan, 2:398 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 1:78 Dies, Martin, 1:175; 2:342 Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry is Killing Us (Cook), 1:168 Digital Dirt (film), 1:142 Dillard, Angela D., 2:373 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 1:11 Dirksen, Everett, 2:493, 496 Dirty Harry, 2:583 disability, 1:69, 71, 196, 197, 231, 240, 276–77, 294, 304; 2:405, 407, 473, 491, 517, 522, 558 See also Americans with Disabilities Act discrimination affirmative action and, 1:8–10 age, 1:11–12 AIDS and, 1:13–14 anti-Semitism and, 1:28 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 Boy Scouts and, 1:50 Brown v. Board of Education and, 1:53–54 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 capital punishment and, 1:71 Catholic Church and, 1:75 civil rights movement and, 1:93–96 comparable worth and, 1:113 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 ERA and, 1:164–65 faith-based programs and, 1:169–70 Hillsdale College and, 1:253 homosexuals and, 1:55, 205–7 housing and, 1:64–65 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:299–300 MacKinnon, Catharine, and, 2:332 Million Man March and, 2:362 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 NAACP and, 2:383–84 Native Americans and, 1:275 New Left and, 2:398–99 NOW and, 2:389 political correctness and, 2:435 racial profiling and, 2:453–54 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 same-sex marriage and, 2:486, 487 sexual harassment and, 2:511–12 Sowell, Thomas, and, 2:530 speech codes and, 2:530–31 tax-exempt status and, 1:47, 73; 2:260, 466 transgender movement and, 2:568 vigilantism and, 2:582 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 women in the military and, 2:622 See also civil rights Disraeli, Benjamin, 2:617 District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), 1:232 Disuniting of America, The: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Schlesinger), 2:435 diversity training, 1:137–38, 280; 2:374
I-16
Index
divorce, 1:165, 183, 247; 2:355, 458, 492, 501 Dixie Chicks, 1:77, 123; 2:597 Dixiecrats, 1:27, 95, 110, 135, 266, 327; 2:336, 560, 563, 564, 594 Dixon, Edgar D., 2:424 DJ Danger Mouse, 1:77 Dmytryk, Edward, 1:257, 258 DNA, 1:71, 213; 2:417, 510 DNC. See Democratic National Committee Do the Right Thing (film), 1:317, 318 Dobson, James Clayton, 1:89, 132, 138–39, 183–84, 290, 314; 2:446, 447, 466, 487, 491, 532, 544, 602 Doctorow, E.L., 2:381, 480 Dodd, Christopher, 1:157 Dodd, Thomas, 2:612 Doe v. Bolton (1973), 1:140 Doe v. University of Michigan (1981), 2:531 Doerfer, John, 1:175 Dogma (film), 1:325 Dohrn, Bernardine, 2:545 Doings and Undoings (Podhoretz), 1:295 Dole, Robert, 1:85, 88, 175, 217; 2:617, 626 domestic spying, 1:64, 78, 198, 262, 266, 278, 293; 2:342, 434, 441, 486, 504, 556, 574, 574, 613 Dominican Republic, 1:78, 255 Donahue, Phillip John, 1:139–40 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” 1:97, 209, 209, 210; 2:421 Doomsday Clock, 2:408–9 Doonesbury (comic strip), 1:107–8; 2:562 Doors, The, 1:121; 2:596 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 1:121 Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 2:403 Douglas, Kirk, 1:307 Douglas, William Orville, 1:140, 175; 2:443, 495, 599 Douglas T. Smith et al. v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County (1987), 2:501 Douglas v. California (1963), 2:471 Dow, Charles H., 2:587 Dow Jones & Company, 2:587, 587 Dowd, Maureen, 2:400 Downs, Anthony, 2:444 Dr. Phil, 1:140–41 Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (film), 1:307, 319; 2:409, 553 draft, military, 1:15, 19, 69, 73, 81, 86, 96, 122, 165, 178, 188, 215, 233, 304; 2:346, 382, 399, 441, 445, 492, 532, 543, 545, 596 Draper, Theodore, 2:394 Dreeson, Tom, 2:538 Dresden, Germany, 1:254 dress codes, 1:77; 2:497 Drinan, Robert F., 1:195 Drinnon, Richard, 1:121 Drucker, Peter, 2:444 Drudge, Matt, 1:278, 323 Drudge Report (Web site), 1:99, 141–42, 142 Drug Abuse Control Amendments (1965), 1:186
Drug Efficacy Amendment (1962), 1:186 Drug Efficacy Study Implementation (1968), 1:186 Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. (DEA), 2:353, 592, 593 Drug Free Workplace Act (1988), 1:142 drug testing, 1:142–43; 2:344 drugs, illegal AIDS and, 1:13, 14 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57 Canada and, 1:69 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 comic strips and, 1:107, 108 counterculture and, 1:120, 121 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Foucault, Michel, and, 1:192 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 gangs and, 1:203, 204 heavy metal and, 1:246 Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:247 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:294, 295 King, Rodney, and, 1:301 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 Leary, Timothy, and, 1:316–17 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:324 literature and, 1:324 Manson, Marilyn, and, 2:336 McLuhan, Marshall, and, 2:348 Mexico and, 2:356 Million Man March and, 2:362 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:392, 393 New Journalism and, 2:398 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:423 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:446 racial profiling and, 2:453 rap music and, 2:455 Republican Party and, 2:469 rock and roll and, 2:476 sexual revolution and, 2:512 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 student conservatives and, 2:544 Thompson, Hunter S., and, 2:562 U.S. military and, 1:142 vigilantism and, 2:583 Will, George, and, 2:617 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 Zappa, Frank, and, 2:629 zero tolerance and, 2:629 See also marijuana, medical; War on Drugs Dryfoos, Orvil E., 2:400 DSA. See Democratic Socialists of America D’Souza, Dinesh, 1:143–44, 2:373, 504, 544 Du, Soon Ja, 1:301 DuBois, William Edward Burghardt, 1:54, 93, 144–45, 230; 2:381, 383 Duck and Cover (film), 1:64, 101, 180; 2:408 due process, 2:363, 377, 443, 471, 583, 592, 630 Duffey, Joseph D., 2:387
Duffy, Warren, 1:90 Dukakis, Michael Stanley, 1:19, 31, 32, 61, 145, 238, 264, 265, 282, 296, 304; 2:380, 430, 469 Duke, Charles, 2:365 Duke, David Ernest, 1:145–46, 259; 2:614, 615 Duke, Michael T., 2:590 Duke University, 1:240; 2:405, 544 Dulles, Allen, 2:401 Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Bullard), 1:59 Dungy, Tony, 1:208 Durang, Christopher, 1:326 Duranty, Walter, 2:400 Durban, Dick, 1:4 Durbin, Roger, 2:626 Dworkin, Andrea Rita, 1:146, 247; 2:332, 437 Dylan, Bob, 1:34, 121, 147, 233; 2:476, 596 Eagle, Jimmy, 1:23 Eagle Forum, 1:165; 2:389, 492 Eagleton, Thomas F., 2:346–47, 346 Earle, Steve, 1:123 Earth Day, 1:148, 163, 262 Earth First!, 1:148, 149, 163, 188–89, 252, 253 Earth in the Balance (Gore), 1:72, 225 Earth Liberation Front (ELF), 1:30, 149, 164; 2:427 East of Eden (film), 1:130; 2:535 Eastern Wilderness Act (1975), 1:148 Eastland, James O., 1:111; 2:401 Easy Rider (film), 1:121 Eberstadt, Mary, 2:544 Eckerd, Jack, 1:104 Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (Foreman), 1:149 Economic Opportunity Act (1964), 2:593, 594 Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 2:445, 558 Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981), 1:174 Ecotage (handbook), 1:149 ecoterrorism, 1:29, 30, 148–50, 163, 188–89, 253; 2:426–27, 572 Ecuador, 1:255 Ed Sullivan Show (TV program), 1:267; 2:476 education academic freedom and, 1:5–7, 27 affirmative action and, 1:8–10 AIDS and, 1:14 anti-Semitism and, 1:28 book banning and, 1:49 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57–58 capital punishment and, 2:484 Catholic Church and, 1:74 censorship and, 1:77 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Christian fundamentalism and, 1:47 Christian reconstructionism and, 1:90 church and state and, 1:92 civil rights movement and, 1:94, 95 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96
Index education (continued) compassionate conservatism and, 1:113 counterculture and, 1:122 creationism and intelligent design and, 1:40, 124–25 disability and, 1:276–77 drug testing and, 1:142–43 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:143–44 gay rights and, 1:55, 206, 210 Great Society and, 1:230 Heritage Foundation and, 1:250 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Hutchins, Robert M., and, 1:271 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282 Jehovah’s Witnesses and, 1:285 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322 McLuhan, Marshall, and, 2:348 moral relativism and, 2:465 multiculturalism and ethnic studies and, 2:374 NAACP and, 2:384 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:387, 388 New Left and, 2:399 NOW and, 2:389 political correctness and, 2:434–35 privatization and, 2:444 race and, 2:452 Religious Right and, 2:466 revisionist history and, 1:105; 2:435, 470 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 school busing and, 1:64–65 science and, 1:101, 124; 2:466, 499 secular humanism and, 2:501 segregation and, 1:53–54 sexual harassment and, 2:511, 512 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Sowell, Thomas, and, 2:530 speech codes and, 1:143, 280; 2:435, 530–31 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 structuralism and, 2:542 student conservatives and, 2:543–44 think tanks and, 2:558, 559 War on Drugs and, 2:593 Washington Times and, 2:602 women’s studies and, 2:623–24 zero tolerance and, 2:629–30 See also education reform; school prayer; school vouchers Education Amendments (1972), 2:511 Education Bureau, U.S., 1:150 Education Department, U.S., 1:41, 73, 150, 169, 229, 260; 2:466, 531 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), 1:276 education reform, 1:150–52 Adler, Mortimer, and, 1:7–8 Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Bush, George W., and, 1:62, 63 Bush, Jeb, and, 1:62 charter schools and, 1:79–80 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:82
education reform (continued) Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 Great Books and, 1:229 homeschooling and, 1:260–61 hooks, bell, and, 1:261 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:423 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 Educational Wastelands (Bestor), 1:151 Edward, J. Gordon, 1:162, 163 Edwards, Bob, 2:377 Edwards, Douglas, 1:126 Edwards, Edwin, 1:146 Edwards, Eldon Lee, 2:614 Edwards, John, 1:157; 2:539, 567 Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), 1:124 EEOC. See Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Egypt, 1:280; 2:489 Ehrenreich, Barbara Alexander, 1:114, 152; 2:381, 589 Ehrlich, Paul, 1:110 Ehrlich, Robert, 2:353 Ehrlichman, John, 1:130; 2:603 Eichmann, Adolph, 1:92 Eighth Amendment, 1:69, 70, 71; 2:561 Einstein, Albert, 2:409 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 1:153 American civil religion and, 1:20 American exceptionalism, 1:21 American Indian movement and, 1:22 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Cold War and, 1:101, 102, 103 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 education reform and, 1:150 FCC and, 1:175 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 John Birch Society and, 1:286 McCarthyism and, 2:344 New Deal and, 2:397, 468 New York Times and, 2:400 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403, 404 nuclear age and, 2:408 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, and, 2:419 presidential pardons and, 2:440 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 Rockwell, Norman, and, 2:478 segregation and, 1:53, 54, 94 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:571 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599 Eisenhower administration, 1:127, 197; 2:385 Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), 2:443 Eisner, Michael, 2:591 El Norte (film), 1:272 El Salvador, 1:239, 272, 278; 2:493 Election of 2000, 1:27, 62–63, 67, 113, 136, 153–56, 154, 224, 225, 225, 226, 277; 2:376, 380, 381, 384, 393, 448, 461, 464, 465, 466, 469–70, 480, 500, 539, 553, 560, 610, 621 Election of 2004, 1:83, 129, 142, 251, 287, 289, 295–96; 2:366, 366, 421, 466, 470, 476, 480, 481, 487, 500, 525, 532, 539, 579, 610
I-17
Election of 2008, 1:98–99, 129, 156–59, 157; 2:411–12, 423–24, 448, 453, 505, 509, 532 Electoral College, 1:154, 155, 159, 224, 226; 2:340, 346, 411, 428, 460, 560 Electric Auto-Lite strike, 1:59; 2:527 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 2:398, 621 Electronic Freedom of Information Act (1996), 1:198 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), 1:150, 151, 287; 2:508 ELF. See Earth Liberation Front Ellen (TV program), 1:205, 207; 2:617 Ellis, John Prescott, 1:154 Ellis, Warren, 1:106 Ellison, Keith, 2:378 Ellsberg, Daniel, 1:104, 322; 2:602, 612 employment affirmative action and, 1:8–10 age discrimination and, 1:11–12 Americans with Disabilities Act and, 1:24 Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 civil rights movement and, 1:95 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 faith-based programs and, 1:169–70 feminism and, 1:177 globalization and, 1:220–21 homosexuals and, 1:55, 204, 206; 2:523 immigration policy and, 1:274 La Follette, Robert, Jr., and, 1:310 Million Man March and, 2:362 Moore, Michael, and, 2:365 NAACP and, 2:384 NOW and, 2:389 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 Social Security and, 2:522–23 transgender movement and, 2:568 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 War on Poverty and, 2:594 Watts and Los Angeles riots and, 2:604, 605 wealth gap and, 2:607 welfare and, 2:609 See also labor, labor unions End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), 1:103, 112, 269 endangered species, 1:26 Endangered Species Act (1973), 1:148, 159–60, 163, 190; 2:359 Enemy at Home, The: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (D’Souza), 1:144; 2:504 energy, renewable, 1:162 Energy Department, U.S., 1:73; 2:410 energy policy Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81, 82 Election of 2008 and, 1:157, 159 Engel, Steven, 2:495 Engel v. Vitale (1962), 1:18, 74, 92, 288; 2:466, 494, 495, 496, 600 Engels, Friedrich, 2:338 England, 1:38, 49, 149, 231 See also Great Britain
I-18
Index
English as the Official Language, 1:160–61, 217, 274; 2:356, 585 Enlightenment, 1:265; 2:438, 446 Enola Gay exhibit, 1:161, 284 Enron Corporation, 1:34, 119, 167 Ensler, Eve, 2:511 environmental movement, 1:159–60, 162–64, 189–91 animal rights and, 1:26 Arnold, Ron, and, 1:29, 30 Carson, Rachel, and, 1:71–72 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:82 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Commoner, Barry, and, 1:109–10 counterculture and, 1:121 Deloria, Vine, and, 1:133 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Earth Day and, 1:148 ecoterrorism and, 1:148–50, 188–89 Election of 2000 and, 1:155 factory farms and, 1:168 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 generational conflict and, 1:213 genetically modified foods and, 1:214 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216 global warming and, 1:219 globalization and, 1:38, 220 Gore, Al, and, 1:225–26 government regulation and, 1:160, 218, 219, 308–9; 2:499 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Hightower, Jim, and, 1:250 Hill, Julia “Butterfly,” and, 1:252–53 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 human rights and, 1:266 immigration policy and, 1:274 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:308–9 Leopold, Aldo, and, 1:319 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 Love Canal and, 1:328 McCain, John, and, 2:339 militia movement and, 2:359 Nation, The, and, 2:381 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:392, 393 New Age movement and, 2:395 nuclear age and, 2:410, 563 Packwood, Bob, and, 2:422 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:423 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:446 race and, 1:45, 59–60 Redford, Robert, and, 2:461, 462 Republican Party and, 2:469 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 science wars and, 2:499, 500 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 Turner, Ted, and, 2:570 Unabomber and, 2:572 war protesters and, 2:595 Watt, James, and, 2:603–4 whistleblowers and, 2:612, 613 World Council of Churches and, 2:625 See also ecoterrorism; global warming
Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. (EPA), 1:59, 72, 82, 132, 148, 163, 186; 2:380, 397, 404, 520, 613 EPI. See Economic Policy Institute Epperson, Stuart, 1:90 Epperson v. Arkansas (1969), 1:124 Epstein, Jason, 2:432 Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1972), 1:11; 2:492 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, U.S. (EEOC), 1:9, 24, 230; 2:404, 511, 512, 561, 613 Equal Pay Act (1963), 1:11, 113; 2:492 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 1:2, 55, 164–65, 172, 177–78, 179, 199, 239, 313; 2:389, 466, 467, 469, 492, 544 Erikson, Erik, 1:199 Ervin, Sam, 1:177 Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), 2:363, 471 Espionage Act (1917), 2:480 Esquire magazine, 1:80, 247, 248; 2:334, 621 Ethiopia, 1:147 eugenics, 2:431 EURO. See European-American Unity and Rights Organization Europe academic freedom in, 1:6 anti-Semitism in, 1:28 Chernobyl and, 2:410, 528 child care and, 2:534 Cold War and, 1:100, 101, 102, 103 colonialism and, 1:10, 105, 201 communism and, 1:111, 112 DDT and, 1:72 Duke, David, and, 1:146 fascism in, 2:342 genetically modified foods and, 1:214 Ginsberg, Allen, and, 1:218 globalization and, 1:221 Green Party and, 1:121 Internet and, 1:278 Islamic fundamentalism and, 1:201 Israel and, 1:280 Murrow, Edward R., and, 2:376 Muslim Americans and, 2:377 neoconservatism and, 2:394 nuclear age and, 2:409, 410 Obama, Barack, and, 1:158 race and, 2:452 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 social welfare and, 2:522 Soros, George, and, 2:525 war protesters and, 2:596 World Council of Churches and, 2:625 Europe, Eastern, 1:4, 100, 102, 103, 111, 112; 2:430, 528, 529, 582, 611, 629 European Union, 1:69; 2:357, 358, 626 European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), 1:146; 2:615 evangelicalism, 1:165–66 abortion and, 1:1, 2 ACLU and, 1:18 Bono and, 1:48 Campolo, Anthony “Tony,” and, 1:68 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:72, 73 Chick, Jack, and, 1:84
evangelicalism (continued) Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian music and, 1:117 Christian radio and, 1:89–90 Christmas and, 1:91 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 counterculture and, 1:122 country music and, 1:122, 123 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Dobson, James, and, 1:138 Election of 2008 and, 1:158, 159 Focus on the Family and, 1:183–84 Founding Fathers and, 1:192 gender-inclusive language and, 1:211 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227–28 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 heavy metal and, 1:246 homeschooling and, 1:260 homosexuals and, 1:83 Hunter, James Davison, and, 1:268 Israel and, 1:281 Jehovah’s Witnesses and, 1:285 Jesus People and, 1:285–86 Jones, Bob, Jr., and, 1:47 LaHaye, Tim and Beverly, and, 1:313–14, 313 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347 Moral Majority and, 2:367–68 New Age movement and, 2:396 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:439 Promise Keepers and, 2:446–47, 446 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463, 463 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474, 475, 475 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 Sider, Ron, and, 2:518 Simpsons, The, and, 2:519 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:525–26 student conservatives and, 2:544 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 Weyrich, Paul M., and, 2:611 Wildmon, Donald, and, 2:616 See also fundamentalism, religious; Religious Right; televangelism Evans, M. Stanton, 2:342 Evans, Martin John, 2:537 Evans, Medford, 2:342 Evans, Sherman, 1:114 Evers, Medgar, 1:147 Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, et al. (1947), 1:92, 193, 288; 2:494 Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart (report), 2:590 evolution, 1:18, 39–40, 63, 84, 92, 104, 123–25, 132, 134, 166, 200, 260; 2:466, 499, 500, 501, 508 See also creationism and intelligent design; Scopes “Monkey” Trial Ewing v. California (2003), 2:442
Index Ex parte Grossman (1925), 2:440 Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer), 1:70, 216; 2:335 executive branch, 2:504–5, 570–71, 594–95, 602, 603, 613 executive compensation, 1:36, 167 existentialism, 1:194, 324 Exner, Judith Campbell, 1:292 extraordinary rendition, 1:64; 2:505 Exxon Valdez oil spill, 2:572 ExxonMobil, 1:167 Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Drinnon), 1:121 factory farms, 1:26, 168–69; 2:392, 426, 489 Fahrenheit 9/11 (film), 1:215; 2:351, 366, 505 FAIR. See Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Fair Deal, 1:101, 243; 2:397 Fair Housing Amendment Act (1988), 1:24 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), 2:414 Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (1966), 1:186 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 1:280; 2:351, 420 Fairness Doctrine, 1:175, 236, 323; 2:347, 550 faith-based programs, 1:104, 113, 114, 169–70, 322; 2:498, 518 False Claims Act (1863), 2:612 Faludi, Susan, 2:355 Falwell, Jerry Lamon, 1:170, 170–71; 2:466, 467 abortion and, 1:2; 2:479 ACLU and, 1:19 AIDS and, 1:13 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 comic strips and, 1:108 evangelicalism and, 1:166 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 Founding Fathers and, 1:193 homosexuals and, 1:207, 208 LaHaye, Tim, and, 1:313, 314 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 McCain, John, and, 2:339 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347 Moral Majority and, 2:367, 519 pornography and, 2:436–37 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:445 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Republican Party and, 2:469 September 11 and, 1:184; 2:503 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 televangelism and, 2:552, 553 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Weyrich, Paul M., and, 2:611 Family Channel, 2:552 Family Leave and Medical Emergency Act (1993), 1:50, 97 Family Matters (Guterson), 1:260 Family Research Council, 1:138, 171, 183, 290; 2:522
family values, 1:171–72 book banning and, 1:49 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Cheney family and, 1:83 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Dobson, James, and, 1:138–39 Dr. Phil and, 1:141 drama and, 1:326 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 ERA and, 1:165 evangelicalism and, 1:166 feminism and, 1:177, 178 film and, 1:325; 2:354 Focus on the Family and, 1:183–84 González, Elián, and, 1:224 Gore, Al, and, 1:225, 226 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249 homeschooling and, 260–61 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 LaHaye, Tim and Beverly, and, 1:313 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 men’s movement and, 2:355 Millett, Kate, and, 2:361 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 NOW and, 2:389 Promise Keepers and, 2:446–47, 446 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 Rockwell, Norman, and, 2:477 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:389, 492 school shootings and, 2:496 sex education and, 2:508 sexual revolution and, 2:512, 513 Simpsons, The, and, 2:519 Social Security and, 2:522 stay-at-home mothers and, 2:534 televangelism and, 2:552 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Washington Times and, 2:602 Wildmon, Donald, and, 2:616–17 World magazine and, 2:625 Farber, Stephen, 2:371 Fard, Wallace D., 2:377, 382 Farm Aid, 1:147; 2:393, 628 Farmer, James, 1:86 farming, farmers, 1:80–81, 82, 111, 250, 272, 327; 2:356, 358–59, 565, 609 See also factory farms; United Farm Workers Union Farrakhan, Louis Abdul, 1:172–73, 173; 2:356, 362, 377, 382 Farris, Michael, 1:260, 261 FAS. See Federation of Atomic Scientists fascism, 2:342, 343, 402, 493, 502, 621
I-19
Fashionable Nonsense (Sokal and Bricmont), 2:524 fast food, 2:413–14 Fast Food Nation (Schlosser), 1:168 Faubus, Orville, 1:94 Faurisson, Robert, 1:87, 259 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation FCC. See Federal Communications Commission FCC v. Pacifica (1978), 1:176 FDA. See Food and Drug Administration Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson), 1:121; 2:562 Fear of Flying (Jong), 2:385 Fearful Master, The: A Second Look at the United Nations (Griffin), 2:573 FEC. See Federal Election Commission federal budget deficit, 1:156, 173–74, 213, 216, 226, 306; 2:397, 406, 427, 459, 547, 551, 560 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) American Indian Movement and, 1:23; 2:462, 627 Black Panther Party and, 1:44–45 Brown Scare and, 2:342 Budenz, Louis F., and, 1:59 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 civil rights movement and, 1:95 Clinton administration and, 1:99; 2:533 communism and, 1:6, 112 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 Counter Intelligence Program of, 1:262; 2:344, 434, 579, 596 Dean, John, and, 1:130 ecoterrorism and, 1:149, 164, 189 environmental movement and, 1:30 FCC and, 1:175 Felt, W. Mark, and, 1:176–77; 2:624 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262–63 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 lynching and, 1:330 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:343 McCarthyism and, 2:343 Montana Freemen and, 2:365 New Left and, 2:399 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:403 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, and, 2:419 presidential pardons and, 2:441 rap music and, 2:456 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, and, 2:480 Ruby Ridge Incident and, 2:365, 482 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 Said, Edward, and, 2:486 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 Thomas, Clarence, and, 2:561 Till, Emmett, and, 2:565 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574 Waco siege and, 2:586 Watergate and, 2:602 whistleblowers and, 2:612 Williams, William Appleman, and, 2:618 See also Hoover, John Edgar Federal Coal Mine Safety Act (1952), 2:414
I-20
Index
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 1:18, 76–77, 109, 174–76, 323; 2:347, 348, 416, 447, 476, 517, 538, 598 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 2:397 Federal Election Campaign Act (1971), 1:67 Federal Election Commission (FEC), 1:67; 2:463 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 1:116, 270, 327 Federal Firearms Act (1938), 1:232 Federal Flag Desecration Law (1968), 1:180 Federal Food, Cosmetic, and Drug Act (1938), 1:185 Federal Reserve Board, U.S., 2:455, 606 Federal Toy Gun Law (1988), 2:598 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 1:76; 2:357, 598 Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS), 2:408 Feingold, Russell, 1:67; 2:574 Feis, Herbert, 1:102 Feith, Douglas, 2:394, 395 Felt, William Mark, 1:176–77; 2:441, 612, 624 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Agency Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 1:177, 198, 199; 2:388 feminism abortion debate and, 1:1 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Barbie and, 1:36, 37 beauty pageants and, 1:38 Brown, Helen Gurley, and, 1:53 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:81 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Christmas and, 1:91 civil rights movement and, 1:96 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:97, 98 comparable worth and, 1:113 counterculture and, 1:121, 122 country music and, 1:123 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:136 drama and, 1:326 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and, 1:152 ERA and, 1:164–65 evangelicalism and, 1:166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171; 2:503 family values and, 1:171–72 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:179–80 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Fonda, Jane, and, 1:184 Foucault, Michel, and, 1:191, 192 France and, 1:194 Friedan, Betty, and, 1:198–99 fur industry and, 1:202 gay rights and, 1:205 gender-inclusive language and, 1:210–11 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237
feminism (continued) Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:246, 247 hooks, bell, and, 1:261 human rights and, 1:265, 266 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282 King, Billie Jean, and, 1:299 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 lesbians and, 1:320 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 literature and, 1:325 MacKinnon, Catharine, and, 2:332 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:335 marriage names and, 2:337 Marxism and, 2:338 McCloskey, Deirdre, and, 2:345 men’s movement and, 2:355 Millett, Kate, and, 2:361–62, 361 Million Man March and, 2:362 Morgan, Robin, and, 2:368 Morrison, Toni, and, 2:369 Ms. and, 2:372 NAACP and, 2:384 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 neoconservatism and, 2:394 New Age movement and, 2:396 New Left and, 2:398, 399 NOW and, 2:389 O’Connor, Sandra Day, and, 2:415 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:422–23 pornography and, 2:436, 437 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:446 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458, 459 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 revisionist history and, 2:471 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:552 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 1:165; 2:389, 492 second-wave, 1:177–78 secular humanism and, 2:501 sexual harassment and, 2:512 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Shelley, Martha, and, 2:515–16 “Silent Majority” and, 2:519 Social Security and, 2:522 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 stay-at-home mothers and, 2:534 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Steinem, Gloria, and, 2:535–36 structuralism and, 2:542, 543 student conservatives and, 2:543, 544 televangelism and, 2:552 third-wave, 1:178–79 victimhood and, 2:577 war protesters and, 2:595 Washington Times and, 2:602 West, Cornel, and, 2:610 Winfrey, Oprah, and, 2:620 Wolf, Naomi, and, 2:620, 621 women’s studies and, 2:623 See also Equal Rights Amendment; women
Ferguson, Niall, 1:17 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 1:120, 217, 218 Ferraro, Geraldine, 1:179–80; 2:364, 372, 412 Ferris, William R., 2:387, 388 Feulner, Edwin J., 1:250; 2:611 Fey, Tina, 2:424 50 Cent, 1:204 Fifteenth Amendment, 2:584 Fifth Amendment, 1:19, 180, 257; 2:363, 417, 443, 471, 502, 561 filibuster, 1:290; 2:335, 566 Filipinos, 2:358 film industry, films, 1:76, 181, 194, 207, 208, 214–15, 257–58, 317–18; 2:354, 365–66, 370–71, 407, 425–26, 436, 459, 461–62, 498–99, 539–40, 554, 581, 583, 591–92, 599, 605–6 Financial Times, 2:587 Finley, Karen, 2:386 Fiorina, Morris, 1:268 FIRE. See Foundation for Individual Rights in Education firefighters, 2:503, 506 Firing Line (TV program), 1:8, 57, 229, 295; 2:448 First Amendment, 1:49, 50, 77, 91, 92, 93, 140, 146, 175, 176, 180, 181, 182, 240, 246, 278, 288, 330; 2:332, 336, 367, 437, 443, 494, 495, 498, 501, 502, 517, 530, 531, 561, 598, 600 fiscal conservatism, 1:171, 174, 248, 249; 2:384, 385, 423, 447, 498, 522, 523, 576 fiscal liberalism, 1:66, 135, 136 Fish, Hamilton, Jr., 1:322 Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. (USFWS), 1:159, 163, 202 Fishback, Ian, 2:612 Fiske, Robert B., 2:533 Fitzgerald, A. Ernest, 2:612 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1:194; 2:562, 619 flag desecration, 1:19, 62, 76, 136, 145, 180–81, 257; 2:469, 609 flag pledging, 1:18, 20, 92, 285; 2:494, 527, 576 Flag Protection Act (1989), 1:181 Flanders, Ralph, 2:341 Flash Gordon (comic strip), 1:107 Fleck, John, 2:386 Fleiss, Heidi, 1:181–82 Flinn, Kelly, 2:622 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 1:17 Flynt, Larry Claxton, 1:100, 171, 182–83; 2:436–37, 512 Focus on the Family, 1:14, 49, 83, 88, 139, 171, 183–84, 208, 290, 302, 313; 2:466, 532, 602, 613 Focus on the Family (radio program), 1:89, 138; 2:446 Focus on the Family Institute, 2:544 Focus on the Family newsletter, 2:491 folk music, 1:4, 34, 147, 233; 2:476, 502, 596 Follett, Ken, 2:427 Folson, “Big Jim,” 2:588 Fonda, Henry, 2:535, 605
Index Fonda, Jane, 1:34, 184, 185, 242; 2:554, 563, 570, 579, 595 Foner, Eric, 2:470, 630 Food Additives Amendments (1958), 1:185 Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (2004), 1:214 Food and Drug Act (1906), 1:185 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 1:63, 185–87, 213; 2:353, 431, 513 Foote, Shelby, 1:114 Forbes, Malcolm, 2:421 Forbes, Steve, 1:139 Ford, Gerald Rudolph, 1:12, 52, 73, 81, 86, 89, 102, 103, 136, 140, 187–88, 197; 2:405, 440–41, 448, 490, 558, 581, 595, 603 Ford, Henry, 1:28; 2:402 Ford, Henry, II, 2:515 Ford, John, 2:605 Ford, Michael, 2:490 Ford administration, 1:24, 56; 2:385, 394 Ford Corporation, 1:259, 284; 2:617 Ford Foundation, 1:271; 2:448 Foreign Affairs journal, 1:101, 269; 2:573 foreign aid, 1:14; 2:508, 515, 569, 580 Foreman, Dave, 1:149, 188–89 Foreman, George, 1:15 Forest Service, U.S., 1:30, 163, 188, 189, 319 forests, parklands, and federal wilderness, 1:29, 30, 148–49, 159–60, 162–64, 188, 189, 189–91, 252–53, 319; 2:603–4 Forman, Milos, 1:182 Fortier, Michael J., 2:349 Fortson, Thomas S., Jr., 2:446 Fosdick, Dorothy, 2:394 fossil fuels, 1:218, 219, 250 See also oil industry Foster, Marcus, 2:547 Foster, Vincent, 1:98, 99, 323 Foster, William Z., 1:17, 111, 235 Foucault, Paul-Michel, 1:82, 191–92; 2:452 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), 1:6; 2:530 Founding Fathers, 1:20, 192–93; 2:471, 493, 571 Fountainhead, The (Rand), 2:455 Four Freedoms, 1:21, 265; 2:477, 557 Fourteenth Amendment, 1:10, 54, 69, 71, 155, 240, 256, 329; 2:363, 383, 443, 453, 464, 471, 479 Fourth Amendment, 1:143; 2:443, 453, 479 Fox, Michael J., 2:537 Fox News, 1:66, 69, 93, 126, 142, 154, 196, 216, 224, 265, 283, 322; 2:351, 351, 375, 376, 407, 420, 482, 504, 539, 601 France, 1:186, 191, 194, 325; 2:337, 359, 377, 409, 573 Francione, Gary, 1:26 Frank, Barnett, 1:195 Franken, Alan Stuart, 1:120, 195–96, 250, 322, 323; 2:366, 420, 547
Frankenchrist (album), 1:42 Frankfurter, Felix, 1:54, 92, 256; 2:599 Franklin, Benjamin, 1:192 Franklin, Karl, 1:31 Franklin, Thomas E., 2:506 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, 1:52 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, 1:196–97 Franz, Raymond, 1:285 Fraser, Donald M., 2:346 Frederick, Ivan, II, 1:3 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 1:6 free market, 1:57, 85, 103, 113, 119, 163, 168, 171, 172, 199, 200, 243, 249, 253, 269, 272, 306, 311, 322; 2:367, 373, 390, 405, 497, 529, 558, 606, 617 free speech ACLU and, 1:18 book banning and, 1:49 Brokaw, Tom, and, 1:52 censorship and, 1:76–77 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Commager, Henry, and, 1:108 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 English as the Official Language and, 1:161 flag desecration and, 1:180–81 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 generational conflict and, 1:212 Internet and, 1:278 MacKinnon, Catharine, and, 2:332 Manson, Marilyn, and, 2:336 Mapplethorpe, Robert, and, 2:337 pornography and, 2:436, 437 sexual harassment and, 2:511, 512 shock jocks and, 2:517 Thomas, Clarence, and, 2:561 white supremacists and, 2:614 Will, George, and, 2:617 Winfrey, Oprah, and, 2:620 Zappa, Frank, and, 2:629 See also speech codes Free to Choose (TV program), 1:200; 2:448 free trade, 1:38, 97, 306, 312; 2:356, 428, 488, 559, 560 See also globalization; North American Free Trade Agreement Freed, Alan, 2:475 Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Montana Office of Rural Health (2004), 1:170 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) (1994), 1:2; 2:418 Freedom of Information Act (1966), 1:197 Freedom of Information Act (1974), 1:109 Freedom Riders, 1:94; 2:614 Freeman, Derek, 2:350 Freud, Sigmund, 2:521, 531 Freundel, Barry, 1:314 Friedan, Betty Naomi, 1:53, 121, 177, 178, 198–99, 313, 320; 2:362, 388, 389, 501, 516, 534, 536 Friedman, Milton, 1:199–200; 2:444, 448, 529, 606 Friedman, Rose D., 1:200; 2:448
I-21
Friedman, Thomas L., 1:103, 221; 2:400 Friendly, Fred W., 2:376 Frist, Bill, 1:290 Frohnmayer, John E., 2:386, 387 Froines, John, 1:83, 84 From the Ashes. . .Nicaragua Today (film), 2:388 From Dawn to Decadence (Barzun), 1:211 Froman, Sandra S., 2:391 Frontline, 2:448 FrontPageMagazine.com, 1:7, 264 Frost, David, 1:228; 2:405 Frost, Robert, 1:25 Frye, David, 1:267 FTC. See Federal Trade Commission Fuchs, Klaus, 1:112; 2:343 Fuhrman, Mark, 2:417 Fukuyama, Francis, 1:16, 42, 103, 112, 269; 2:394, 395 Fuller, Charles E., 1:89; 2:526 fundamentalism, religious, 1:200–202 ACLU and, 1:18 Bob Jones University and, 1:47, 47 Campolo, Anthony “Tony,” and, 1:68 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:72, 73 Chick, Jack, and, 1:84; 2:515 Christian reconstructionism and, 1:90 Christmas and, 1:91 creationism and intelligent design and, 1:124–26 Deloria, Vine, and, 1:134 evangelicalism and, 1:165–66 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:170–71 FCC and, 1:175 globalization and, 1:220 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227–28 Hauerwas, Stanley, and, 1:240–41 heavy metal and, 1:246 homeschooling and, 1:260, 261 Hunter, James Davison, and, 1:268 Islamic, 1:21, 200, 201, 321; 2:430, 489, 503, 504 Israel and, 1:280 Jehovah’s Witnesses and, 1:284–85 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347–48 Moral Majority and, 2:367–68 Obama, Barack, and, 2:412 Operation Rescue and, 2:418–19 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 postmodernism and, 2:438 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:439 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 Religious Right and, 2:466–67 rock and roll and, 2:476 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 secular humanism and, 2:501 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 stem-cell research and, 2:537 televangelism and, 2:552 United Nations and, 2:573 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Watt, James, and, 2:604 Zappa, Frank, and, 2:629 See also evangelicalism; Religious Right
I-22
Index
fur, 1:26, 149, 197, 202; 2:426, 449 Furedi, Frank, 2:577 Furman v. Georgia (1972), 1:70, 215 Future of Human Nature, The (Habermas), 1:43 Future Shock (Toffler), 2:439 Gable, Clark, 2:605 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2:394 Gaddis, John Lewis, 1:102, 103 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1:110, 199, 203 Gallagher, Mike, 2:550 Gambia, 1:235 gambling, 1:138, 171, 274–75; 2:463, 519, 526, 577 Gandhi, Mohandas, 1:80 gangs, 1:173, 203–4, 231, 262; 2:382, 455, 456, 499, 613 Gantt, Harvey, 1:248 García, Romeo Lucas, 2:493 Gardner, John W., 1:109 Gardner, Martin, 2:396 Gargan, Jack, 2:427 Garland, Judy, 2:540 Garrett, H. Lawrence, 2:623 Garry, Charles, 1:83 Garvey, Marcus, 2:335, 382 Gates, Bill, 2:357, 358 Gates, Bill, Sr., 2:606 Gates, Daryl, 1:301 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 1:230; 2:369 Gates, Robert, 2:529 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), 1:207, 325 gay capital, 1:204–5 Gay Liberation Front, 1:241; 2:516 Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), 1:14 gay rights, 1:205–7 AIDS and, 1:13 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Bryant, Anita, and, 1:55, 172 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56, 62 Canada and, 1:69 Cheney family and, 1:83 civil rights movement and, 1:96 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96, 97 counterculture and, 1:121, 122 Dobson, James, and, 1:138, 139 drama and, 1:326 evangelicalism and, 1:2, 166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 family values and, 1:172 feminism and, 1:178 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 gay capital and, 1:205 gays in the military and, 1:209 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 hate crimes and, 2:516 Hay, Harry, and, 1:241 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 human rights and, 1:265, 266 judicial wars and, 1:289 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 lesbians and, 1:320 Marxism and, 2:338
gay rights (continued) McCain, John, and, 2:339 Milk, Harvey, and, 2:360–61 Millett, Kate, and, 2:362 NAACP and, 2:384 NPR and, 2:390 outing and, 2:421 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:423 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 privacy rights and, 1:140, 289; 2:443–44 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:459 red and blue states and, 2:461 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 Religious Right and, 2:466, 467 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474, 552 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Shelley, Martha, and, 2:515–16 Socarides, Charles, and, 2:521 sodomy laws and, 2:523–24 Stonewall rebellion and, 2:513, 540 student conservatives and, 2:543, 544 Thomas, Clarence, and, 2:561 transgender movement and, 2:568 Ventura, Jesse, and, 2:576 Walt Disney Company and, 1:90, 205, 207; 2:526, 591, 592 Washington Times and, 2:602 White, Reggie, and, 2:613 See also homosexuality, homosexuals; lesbians; outing; same-sex marriage; sodomy laws; transgender movement gays in popular culture, 1:207–8 gays in the military, 1:97, 136, 205, 206, 208–10, 209; 2:421, 469, 526, 621 Gebhart v. Belton (1952), 1:54 gender-inclusive language, 1:210–11 General Electric, 2:351, 458 General Motors (GM), 1:32, 259, 284; 2:366, 380, 427 General Services Administration, U.S., 2:520 Generation X, 1:212, 213 Generations (Strauss and Howe), 1:211 generations and generational conflict, 1:130, 131, 211–13, 237, 316; 2:350, 364, 394, 398, 449, 475–76, 512–13, 523, 532 Genesis Flood (Whitcomb and Morris), 1:124 genetically modified foods (GMF), 1:213–14; 2:347, 500 Geneva Convention, 1:3, 4 Genovese, Eugene, 1:112 Gentleman’s Agreement (film), 1:28 Gentry, Kenneth, 1:90 Geoghan, John, 2:510 George C. Marshall Institute, 2:500 Gephardt, Richard, 2:526 Gere, Richard, 2:337 Germany, 1:28, 101, 134, 258–59, 262; 2:343, 377, 394, 428, 467, 490, 527 Getino, Octavio, 1:325 Gettysburg Address, 1:20, 21 Geyer, Georgie Anne, 2:602 G.I. Generation, 1:212, 213 See also “Greatest Generation” GI Joe, 1:36; 2:597, 598
Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 1:208 Giancana, Sam, 1:292 Giant (film), 1:130 Gibbs, Lois, 1:328 Gibney, Alex, 2:562 Gibson, Charles, 2:424 Gibson, Mel Columcille Gerard, 1:214–15, 314; 2:354, 491 Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), 2:471 Giger, H.R., 1:42 Gilchrist, James, 1:272 Gilder, George, 2:608 Gillespie, Marcia, 2:362 Gilligan’s Island (TV program), 1:176 Gilmore, Gary Mark, 1:70, 215–16; 2:335 Gingrich, Newton Leroy McPherson, 1:20, 62, 97, 100, 114, 118, 161, 195, 216, 216–17, 249, 323; 2:390, 406, 428, 448, 463, 469, 526, 558, 588 Ginsberg, Irwin Allen, 1:20, 83, 121, 217–18, 242, 294, 295, 317; 2:512 Gioia, Dana, 2:387 Girl Scouts, 1:50, 178 Girlfight (film), 1:25 Gitmo. See Guantánamo Bay Detention Center Giuliani, Rudolph, 1:98, 156; 2:454, 503 GLAAD. See Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Glamour magazine, 1:252; 2:598 Glass, David, 2:590 Glass, Jackie, 2:418 Glazer, Nathan, 1:237 Glick, Jeremy, 2:420, 504 “global village,” 2:348, 439 global warming, 1:72, 163, 184, 218–20, 221, 225, 225, 226, 270, 308–9, 323; 2:423, 499, 500, 559, 573, 601, 626 globalization, 1:220–22 American Century and, 1:17 Battle of Seattle and, 1:37–38 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 China and, 1:86 Cold War and, 1:103 corporate welfare and, 1:119 culture jamming and, 1:128 diversity training and, 1:137 drama and, 1:326 family values and, 1:172 France and, 1:194 global warming and, 1:219, 221 Hightower, Jim, and, 1:250 human rights and, 1:266 Japan and, 1:284 Klein, Naomi, and, 1:303–4 Krugman, Paul, and, 1:306 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:309 Marxism and, 2:338 Mexico and, 2:356 New York Times and, 2:400 Newton, Huey, and, 1:45 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:428 postmodernism and, 2:438 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 war protesters and, 2:595 See also corporations; Seattle, Battle of
Index Globalization and Its Discontents (Stiglitz), 1:221 GM. See General Motors GMF. See genetically modified foods GMHC. See Gay Men’s Health Crisis Goad, Jim, 2:462 Goals 2000: Educate America Act (1994), 1:151 Gobie, Stephen, 1:195 God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Buckley), 1:57 Godard, Jean-Luc, 2:599 Godfather, The (film), 1:325 Goetz, Bernhard Hugo, Jr., 1:222–23; 2:514 Goff, Kenneth, 1:116 Gold, Julie, 2:596 Gold, Leslie, 2:517 Goldberg, Bernard, 2:350–51 Goldberg, Whoopi, 1:46 Goldman, Ron, 2:417, 418 Goldstein, Al, 1:139; 2:512 Goldstein, Rebecca, 2:524 Goldwater, Barry Morris, 1:56, 57, 58, 85, 188, 200, 223, 223–24, 228, 236, 286; 2:339, 361, 391, 394, 409, 441, 458, 466, 468, 484, 492, 543, 564, 594, 609 Gonzales, Alberto, 1:164 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 1:256 Gonzales v. Oregon (2006), 2:407 González, Elián, 1:224–25 Gonzalez v. Carhart (2007), 2:479 Gonzalez v. Oregon (2006), 2:473 Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood (2007), 2:432, 479 Gonzalez v. Raich (2005), 2:354 “gonzo journalism,” 2:398, 562 Good Night, and Good Luck (film), 2:345, 377 Goode, Virgil, Jr., 2:378 Goodell, Charles, 1:288 Goodman, Andrew, 1:29, 330; 2:429, 430 Goodman, Ellen, 1:36 Goodman, Paul, 1:162; 2:432 Goodman, Steve, 1:234 Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), 2:487 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 1:52, 102, 305; 2:410, 459, 526, 528, 529, 541 Gore, Albert Arnold, Jr., 1:225–26 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:50, 51 Cuban Americans and, 1:224 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Election of 2000 and, 1:63, 153–55; 2:380, 465, 560 environmental movement and, 1:72; 2:500, 572 global warming and, 1:218, 219 Horton, Willie, and, 1:265 Internet and, 1:277 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:428 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:577 Wolf, Naomi, and, 2:621
Gore, Thomas P., 2:577 Gore, Tipper, 1:225, 246; 2:459, 460, 629 Gotti, John, 1:231 Gotti, John A., Jr., 1:231 Gottlieb, Alan, 1:30, 163 Gould, Jack, 2:591 Gould, Stephen Jay, 1:125 government, big, 1:200, 243; 2:390, 394, 397, 440, 458, 483, 490, 499, 572, 593, 605 See also Great Society; New Deal; social programs; welfare government, limited, 1:90, 135, 156, 223, 322, 323; 2:397, 406, 420, 443, 451, 461, 467, 512, 522, 543 Government Printing Office, 2:341, 372 graffiti, 1:204, 226–27 Graham, Bill, 1:121 Graham, William Franklin, Jr. “Billy,” 1:47, 48, 89, 166, 201, 227–28, 286, 303, 304; 2:347, 526, 552, 601, 613 Grant, Amy, 1:117 Grant, Robert, 2:466 grapes, boycott of, 1:80; 2:358 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 2:535 Grateful Dead, 1:121; 2:476 Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), 1:10, 63 Gravel, Mike, 1:157 Gray, L. Patrick, 1:130, 176 Gray, Wayne B., 2:415 great books, 1:7–8, 41, 82, 131, 228–30, 253, 271, 325; 2:361, 369, 374, 388, 422, 435, 438, 452, 542, 619 Great Books of the Western World (Encyclopedia Britannica), 1:7, 8, 228–29, 229, 230, 271 Great Britain, 1:103, 112, 186, 210, 246, 259, 292; 2:342, 375, 377, 409, 444, 449, 477, 490, 511, 523, 525, 527, 573, 620, 626 Great Depression, 1:79, 80, 107, 135, 166, 196, 200, 212, 230, 311; 2:397, 462, 468, 502, 527, 535, 555, 591, 608 Great Society, 1:136, 150, 203, 230–31, 266, 267, 287; 2:346, 364, 384, 390, 394, 397, 447, 557, 593, 594, 604, 605 Great White Hope, The (play), 1:14–15 Greater Generation, The: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (Steinhorn), 1:212 “Greatest Generation,” 1:52, 212, 316; 2:626 See also G.I. Generation Greece, 1:101 Green, Bob, 1:55 Green, Richard, 2:568 Green Berets, The (film), 2:581, 606 Green Day, 2:449 Green Party, 1:30, 42, 121, 155, 250; 2:380, 393, 560 Greenglass, David, 2:480 Greenpeace, 1:148, 163, 214; 2:500 Greenspan, Alan, 1:306; 2:455 Greenwald, Robert, 1:257; 2:376, 589 Greer, Germaine, 2:362 Greer, Will, 1:241 Gregg v. Georgia (1976), 1:70, 215
I-23
Gregory, Dick, 2:362, 426 Grenada, 1:101, 102, 108, 266 Griffin, David Ray, 1:117 Griffin, G. Edward, 2:573 Griffin, Michael F., 1:2 Griffith, D.W., 1:317 Griffith, Michael, 2:514 Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), 1:9 Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), 1:19, 44, 140, 289; 2:431, 443, 479, 600 Groening, Matt, 2:519 Growth of the American Republic (Commager and Morrison), 1:108 Gruson, Sydney, 2:401 Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), 1:10, 63 Guantánamo Bay Detention Center (Gitmo), 1:3–5, 4, 82; 2:494, 505 Guardian Angels, 1:223, 231 Guarino, Michael, 1:42 Guatemala, 1:77, 101, 127, 153, 272; 2:401, 493 guerrilla theater, 1:257; 2:449 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? (Dillard), 2:373 Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 1:127 Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, 1:210 Gulag, 1:4; 2:527 Gulag Archipelago, The (Solzhenitsyn), 2:622 Gulf War, 1:51, 61, 81, 108, 122, 148, 201; 2:349, 360, 425, 469, 486, 489, 503, 526, 574, 578, 582, 595, 609, 622, 625 gun control, 1:231–33, 232 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Canada and, 1:69 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Democratic Party and, 1:136 gangs and, 1:203, 204 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 McCain, John, and, 2:339 McVeigh, Timothy, and, 2:349 militia movement and, 2:359–60 Million Man March and, 2:363 Moore, Michael, and, 2:365 NAACP and, 2:384 NRA and, 2:391–92 Ruby Ridge Incident and, 2:482 school shootings and, 2:496–97 toy guns and, 2:598 vigilantism and, 1:222–23; 2:582, 583 Waco siege and, 2:586 zero tolerance and, 2:629, 630 Gun Control Act (1968), 1:232 Gunn, David, 1:2 Gustavson, E. Brandt, 1:90 Guterson, David, 1:260 Guthrie, Arlo, 1:233–34; 2:596 Guthrie, Woodrow Wilson, 1:233–34; 2:502, 535 Gutiérrez, José Angel, 1:256, 311 Guyana, 1:116 habeas corpus, 1:3, 64, 265 Haber, Robert Alan, 2:545
I-24
Index
Habermas, Jürgen, 1:43 Hackney, Sheldon, 2:387, 388 Hagelin, John, 2:560 Hagelstein, Peter, 2:541 Haggard, Merle, 1:122; 2:596 Haiti, 1:13; 2:518 Halberstam, David, 2:401 Haldeman, H.R., 2:602 Hale, Sarah, 1:308 Haley, Alex Palmer, 1:235 Hall, Gus, 1:112, 235–36, 262; 2:560 Halliburton, 1:81, 119; 2:445 Halperin, David, 1:192 Halprin, Lawrence, 1:196 Halsey, William, 1:254 Halter v. Nebraska (1907), 1:180 Ham, Ken, 1:125 Hamburger, Christian, 1:288 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), 1:4 Hamilton, Alexander, 1:192 Hamilton College, 1:93 Hammer, Armand, 1:225 Hand, W. Brevard, 2:501 Handler, Ruth, 1:36, 37 Hanks, Nancy, 2:385 Hannity, Sean, 2:550 Hantze, Karen, 1:299 Harbison, John, 1:4 Hardaway, Tim, 1:208 Hargis, Billy James, 1:236–37; 2:348, 527, 573 Harlan, John Marshall, 2:464 Harlins, Latasha, 1:301 Harper’s Bazaar magazine, 2:599 Harper’s magazine, 1:108; 2:346 Harrington, Edward Michael, 1:121, 152, 237, 242; 2:394, 608 Harrington, Michael F., 1:195 Harris, Eric, 2:496 Harris, Katherine, 1:154 Harris, Kevin, 2:482 Harris, Neil Patrick, 2:421 Harrison Narcotics Act (1914), 2:492 Harry, Deborah, 2:337 Harry Potter (Rowling), 1:49 Hart, Frederick, 2:579 Hart, Gary Warren, 1:237–38 Hart, Jeffrey, 2:391 Hart, Lois, 1:320 Hartley, Fred A., Jr., 2:549 Harvard University, 1:41, 144, 203, 249, 256, 269, 298, 317; 2:353, 430, 528, 530, 544, 546, 572, 610 Harvest of Shame (TV program), 2:358, 377, 414 Harvey, David, 1:16 Harvey, Paul, 1:238–39 Harwit, Martin, 1:161 Hatch, Orrin, 2:508 Hatcher, Richard, 1:163 Hate Crime Statistics Act (1990), 1:239 hate crimes, 1:239–40 African Americans and, 1:239; 2:564–65 AIDS and, 1:13–14 anti-Semitism and, 1:28, 29; 2:495 civil rights and, 1:239; 2:564 homosexuality and, 1:239, 240; 2:516, 516
hate crimes (continued) human rights and, 1:265 Ku Klux Klan and, 2:614 Muslim Americans and, 2:378, 503 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 speech codes and, 2:531 Thomas, Clarence, and, 2:561 transgender movement and, 2:568 white supremacists and, 2:614, 615 See also lynching Hatfield, Mark O., 2:346 Hathaway, Henry, 2:605 Hauerwas, Stanley Martin, 1:240–41 Havel, Václav, 2:629 Hawks, Howard, 2:605 Hay, Henry, Jr., 1:241–42 Hayakawa, S.I., 1:160 Hayden, Thomas Emmett, 1:83, 121, 184, 242; 2:399, 545, 596 Hayes, Denis, 1:163 Hayford, Jack, 2:447 Haynes, John Earl, 1:112 Hays, Lee, 2:502 Hays, Samuel P., 1:162 Head Start program, 1:230 Health, Education, and Welfare Department, U.S., 1:185 health, health care, 1:242–45 access to, 2:418 age discrimination and, 1:12 AIDS and, 1:13 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Canada and, 1:69 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Election of 2008 and, 1:157, 159 Fair Deal and, 2:397 globalization and, 1:222 government regulation and, 2:499 Great Society and, 1:230 human rights and, 1:265 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Koop, C. Everett, and, 1:304 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 medical malpractice and, 2:352–53 Moore, Michael, and, 2:365, 366 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:372 obesity and, 2:413 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:428 right to die and, 2:472–74 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 smoking and, 2:520, 565–66 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 think tanks and, 2:558 tort reform and, 2:567 transgender movement and, 2:568 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 welfare and, 2:609 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609 whistleblowers and, 2:612 See also Medicare Health and Human Services Department, U.S., 1:63, 169, 185; 2:414, 511
Health Maintenance Organization and Resources Development Act (1973), 1:244 Hearst, Patricia, 2:547, 548 Hearst, William Randolph, 1:227 Heath, Joseph, 1:128 heavy metal, 1:245–46; 2:336 Heckscher, August, 2:385 Hefner, Christie, 1:247 Hefner, Hugh Marston, 1:246–47; 2:332, 436, 512 Heidegger, Martin, 1:43; 2:394, 541 Heisenberg, Werner, 2:419 Hell, Richard, 2:449 Heller, Joseph, 1:52, 247–48 Hellman, Lillian, 1:184 Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Thompson), 2:398, 562 Helms, Jesse Alexander, Jr., 1:14, 15, 48, 85, 224, 240, 248–49; 2:336, 337, 385, 386, 507, 526, 573, 609 Help America Vote Act (2002), 1:155 Hemenway, David, 1:233 Hemingway, Ernest, 1:194 Henderson, Oran K., 2:379 Henderson, Russell, 2:516–17 Hendrix, Jimi, 1:246; 2:476, 596 Henry, Carl F. H., 1:68; 2:526 Hentoff, Nat, 2:602 Herbert, Anthony B., 2:379 Heritage Foundation, 1:41, 92, 249–50; 2:373, 500, 544, 558, 559, 559, 611 Herman, Arthur, 2:342 Herman, Edward S., 1:87; 2:351 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell), 2:543 Herring, George, 2:580 Herrnstein, Richard J., 1:40; 2:452 Hersey, John, 1:254, 284; 2:408 Hersh, Seymour, 1:78; 2:378 Heston, Charlton, 2:385, 392 Hightower, James Allen, 1:250–51 Hill, Anita Faye, 1:51, 251, 251–52, 290; 2:512, 561 Hill, Julia “Butterfly,” 1:252–53 Hill, Michael, 2:615 Hillsdale College, 1:253; 2:544 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 1:305; 2:394 Hirabayashi v. U.S. (1943), 1:17 Hiroshima (Hersey), 1:284; 2:408 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1:161, 253–54, 284; 2:401, 402, 408, 419, 438, 568, 569 See also nuclear age Hirsch, E.D., Jr., 1:229 Hispanic Americans, 1:80–81, 96, 135, 159, 203, 204, 231, 255–56, 269, 273, 282, 310–11; 2:358–59, 373, 374, 413, 434, 452, 453, 454, 604, 605 Hiss, Alger, 1:59, 79, 103, 111, 256–57; 2:343, 403, 404, 573 history, revisionist. See revisionist history History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 1:191, 192 Hitchcock, Alfred, 2:422 Hitchens, Christopher, 2:426
Index Hitler, Adolf, 1:106, 145, 258, 259, 292, 307; 2:477, 527, 615 See also Nazis, German HIV. See human immunodeficiency virus Hobbes, Thomas, 2:542 Hodges, Jim, 1:115 Hodsoll, Francis S.M., 2:385 Hoffa, James R., 2:441 Hoffman, Abbott Howard, 1:83, 121, 143, 257 Hoffman, Julius, 1:83–84, 257 Hofstadter, Richard, 1:109 Holliday, George, 1:301 Hollywood, 1:17, 166, 181, 194, 208, 257–58; 2:343, 344, 420, 425, 455, 458 See also film industry, films Hollywood Ten, 1:17, 257–58; 2:343, 344, 425 Hollywood the Dream Factory (Powdermaker), 1:325 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 1:256 Holocaust, 1:28, 87, 134, 146, 215, 258–59, 280; 2:400, 471, 477, 525, 577, 614 Holt, John, 1:260 Holy Virgin Mary (artwork), 2:507 Homeland Security Department, U.S., 1:66, 270; 2:426, 445, 504 homeschooling, 1:47, 65, 89, 90, 125, 139, 152, 172, 260–61, 314; 2:424, 483, 501, 526 homosexuality, homosexuals AIDS and, 1:13, 14 American Psychiatric Association and, 1:206, 209, 320; 2:521, 540 androgyny and, 1:25 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 book banning and, 1:49 Boy Scouts and, 1:49, 50 Brock, David, and, 1:51 Catholic Church and, 1:75, 76 Cheney family and, 1:83 Chick, Jack, and, 1:84 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian Identity movement and, 2:483 Christian radio and, 1:90 Christian reconstructionism and, 1:90 conservatism and, 1:207; 2:373 country music and, 1:123 creationism and, 1:125 Democratic Party and, 1:135 diversity training and, 1:137, 138 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171, 207, 208; 2:503 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173, 173 film and, 1:325 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Foucault, Michel, and, 1:191–92 gay capital and, 1:204–5 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Ginsberg, Allen, and, 1:218 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 hate crimes and, 1:239, 240; 2:516, 516 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:263
homosexuality, homosexuals (continued) Jehovah’s Witnesses and, 1:285 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Kinsey, Alfred, and, 1:302–3 Kushner, Tony, and, 1:307–8 LaHaye, Tim, and, 1:313 lesbians and, 1:321 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323 Mapplethorpe, Robert, and, 2:337 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:344 media and, 2:351 men’s movement and, 2:355 Milk, Harvey, and, 2:360–61 multiculturalism and ethnic studies and, 2:374 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386, 387 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:393 New Left and, 2:398, 399 outing and, 2:421 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:422 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 political correctness and, 2:435 pornography and, 2:332, 437 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458, 459 Rodman, Dennis, and, 2:478 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 sex education and, 2:508 sexual revolution and, 2:513 shock jocks and, 2:517 social theory on, 1:268 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 speech codes and, 2:530 Stonewall rebellion and, 2:540 televangelism and, 2:552 transgender movement and, 2:568 victimhood and, 2:576, 577 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:577–78 Warhol, Andy, and, 2:599 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 West, Cornel, and, 2:610 Weyrich, Paul M., and, 2:611 White, Reggie, and, 2:613 white supremacists and, 2:615 women in the military and, 2:622 World magazine and, 2:625 See also gay rights; lesbians; outing; samesex marriage; sodomy laws Honduras, 2:493 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (2007), 1:327 hooks, bell, 1:261–62 Hoover, Herbert, 1:101, 197; 2:384, 549, 558 Hoover, John Edgar, 1:44–45, 112, 176, 239, 262–64, 263, 295, 300; 2:406, 419, 596 See also Federal Bureau of Investigation Hoover Institution, 1:143, 268; 2:373, 529, 557, 583 Hopwood v. Texas (1996), 1:10 Horiuchi, Lon, 2:482 Horn, Clayton, 1:218 Horner, Charles, 2:394 Horowitz, David Joel, 1:5, 7, 122, 242, 264; 2:344, 448, 611
I-25
Horton, William Robert (Willie), 1:32, 61, 145, 264–65; 2:469 Hospers, John, 2:560 House of Bush, House of Saud (Unger), 2:489 House of Representatives, U.S. Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Christian radio and, 1:89 Christmas and, 1:91 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Clinton impeachment and, 1:99; 2:533, 611 Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of, 1:17, 79, 111, 241, 256, 257, 258, 262, 271, 310, 325; 2:338, 342–43, 376, 403, 425, 441, 458, 502, 605 Contract with America and, 1:118 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Election of 2006 and, 2:481 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 159 electoral system and, 2:460, 560, 588 Endangered Species Act and, 1:159 Enola Gay exhibit and, 1:161 ERA and, 1:178 Ethics Committee of, 1:67 flag desecration and, 1:180, 181 food industry and, 2:413 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216, 216, 217 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 health care and, 1:243, 244 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 McCain, John, and, 2:339 McCarthy, Eugene, 2:340 McGovern, George, and, 2:346 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386, 387 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403 NPR and, 2:390 PBS and, 2:448 privatization and, 2:445 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 record industry and, 1:77 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488, 488 School of the Americas and, 2:494 school prayer and, 2:496 Select Committee on Assassinations of, 1:300 tort reform and, 2:566 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 War Powers Act and, 2:594 Watergate and, 2:603 See also Congress, U.S.; Senate, U.S. housing, 1:59, 61, 64–65, 86, 95, 230, 282; 2:381, 551, 568, 589, 590, 604, 605 Housing and Urban Development Department, U.S., 1:230 How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (Coulter), 1:120; 2:350
I-26
Index
Howe, Neil, 1:211, 212 “Howl” (Ginsberg), 1:218; 2:512 HUAC. See House of Representatives, U.S., Committee on Un-American Activities of Huckabee, Mike, 1:156 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 1:49 Hudson, Rock, 1:208 Hudson Institute, 2:395, 433 Huffington, Arianna, 2:401 Hughes, Holly, 1:88; 2:386 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 1:13–14, 209, 315; 2:387, 421, 508 See also AIDS human rights, 1:265–66 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 animal rights activism and, 1:26 at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, 1:3 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 biotech revolution and, 1:42 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Bono and, 1:48 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Catholic Church and, 1:75 China and, 1:85 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Cold War and, 1:102 globalization and, 1:220, 222 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:249 Holocaust and, 1:259 Iran-Contra affair and, 1:278 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279 Kristol, Bill, and, 1:306 McCain, John, and, 2:339 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:372 Nicaragua and, 2:406 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, and, 2:477 Saudi Arabia and, 2:266, 489 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 United Nations and, 1:265; 2:572, 573 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 Human Rights Watch, 1:85, 266 Humane Society, 2:426, 427 Humphrey, Hubert Horatio, Jr., 1:12, 24, 41, 110, 266–68; 2:340, 346, 364, 404, 468, 560 Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act (1978), 1:267 Hungary, 1:103; 2:528 Hunt, E. Howard, 1:116; 2:602 Hunt, Michael, 1:16 Hunter, James Davison, 1:268–69 Huntington, Samuel Phillips, 1:103, 269, 273; 2:504 Hurley v. Irish American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (1995), 1:206 Hurricane Katrina, 1:114, 117, 164, 269–71, 270, 318, 327; 2:363, 401, 426, 429, 517, 532, 626 Hurt, William, 1:52 Hussein, Saddam, 1:61, 64, 123, 148, 282, 321; 2:456, 486, 503, 558, 574 Husserl, Edmund, 2:541
Hustler magazine, 1:100, 171, 182, 247; 2:436, 512 Hustler v. Falwell (1988), 1:182 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 1:7, 228, 229, 271 Hutchinson, Asa, 1:47 Hutton, Ronald, 2:396 Huxley, Aldous, 1:121 Hyde, Henry, 1:77, 100 Hyde Amendment, 1:2; 2:479 “I Don’t Like Mondays” (song), 2:497 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), 1:25 IBM. See International Business Machines Ice T, 2:456 Iceland, 1:163; 2:541 If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer (Simpson), 2:418 Ifill, Gwen, 2:448 illegal immigrants, 1:272–73, 273; 2:356, 359 See also migrant labor Illinois, University of, 1:276 Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), 1:92 IMF. See International Monetary Fund immigrants Catholic Church and, 1:74 Democratic Party and, 1:135 English language and, 1:160, 161 gangs and, 1:203, 204 Jewish, 1:28, 258 labor unions and, 1:312 multiculturalism and ethnic studies and, 2:374 Sanger, Margaret, and, 2:431 white supremacists and, 2:614 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630 immigration Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57, 62 Cuba and, 1:127 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Duke, David, and, 1:146 Election of 2008 and, 1:156 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217 globalization and, 1:221, 222 Heritage Foundation and, 1:250 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 Huntington, Samuel P., and, 1:269 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Millennial Generation and, 1:213 Muslim Americans and, 2:377, 378 O’ Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:446 race and, 2:452 racial profiling and, 2:453, 454 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 September 11 and, 2:505 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 vigilantism and, 2:582–83 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 See also illegal immigrants; migrant labor
Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), 1:273 Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. (INS), 1:224, 274; 2:453 immigration policy, 1:273, 273–74; 2:559 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 1:272 Improving America’s Schools Act (1994), 1:150, 151 In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Capote), 1:324; 2:398 In re Gault (1967), 1:19 In re Quinlan (1976), 2:472 In the Belly of the Beast (Abbott), 2:335 In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Mathiessen), 1:23 In Whose Honor? (film), 1:276 Incident at Oglala (film), 2:462 Inconvenient Truth, An (film), 1:219, 225, 226 India, 1:219, 221, 309; 2:409 Indian casinos, 1:274–76; 2:463 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (1988), 1:275 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 1:22 Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act (1975), 1:23 Indian sport mascots, 1:23, 133, 276 Indiana University, 1:302; 2:544 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (1975), 1:24, 276–77 Indochina, 1:194 Indonesia, 1:78, 101 Industrial Revolution, 2:355 Infinity Broadcasting, 2:538 Information Agency, U.S., 1:58; 2:376 Inglis, Fred, 1:103, 112 Ingraham, Laura, 1:7 Inhofe, James, 1:160, 219 Innis, Roy, 1:223 INS. See Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. Inside Bureaucracy (Downs), 2:444 Institute for Creation Research, 1:124, 125, 313 Institutes of Biblical Law, The (Rushdoony), 1:90; 2:555 insurance industry, 1:32, 97, 244, 245; 2:339, 352–53, 566 intelligent design. See creationism and intelligent design Interior Department, U.S., 2:579, 603 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, 2:410, 541 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 1:47, 73, 236, 260; 2:384, 393, 466, 601, 606, 619 Internal Security Act (1950), 1:258 International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 2:358, 441 International Business Machines (IBM), 1:259; 2:357 International Council of Christian Churches, 2:347, 490 International Foundation for Gender Education, 2:345, 568
Index International Monetary Fund (IMF), 1:16, 315 International Women’s Project, 1:11; 2:388 Internet, 1:277–78 academic freedom and, 1:93; 2:344 censorship and, 1:77 Clinton impeachment and, 2:533 creationism and intelligent design and, 1:125 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 globalization and, 1:221–22 Gore, Al, and, 1:27, 225 Guardian Angels and, 1:231 Microsoft and, 2:357 Murdoch, Rupert, and, 2:375 Nazism and, 2:477 New York Times and, 2:400 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411 outing and, 2:421 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:422 PBS and, 2:447 politics and, 1:129, 129, 141 pornography and, 2:436, 437 postmodernism and, 2:439 red and blue states and, 2:460–61 right to die and, 2:491 sex offenders and, 2:509, 510 vigilantism and, 2:582 interventionism, 1:16–17, 58, 98, 101, 102, 122, 201, 249, 255, 300; 2:393, 395, 489, 527, 559, 578, 580, 581, 582, 607, 610, 618 See also Iraq War; Vietnam War Inuit, 1:202 Iran, 1:69, 72, 73, 77, 101, 102, 127, 146, 153, 259, 278; 2:406, 426, 427, 489 Iran-Contra affair, 1:17, 19, 62, 73, 78, 99, 198, 278–79; 2:406–7, 406, 441, 459 Iranian Revolution, 1:78, 192, 201 Iraq Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:99 Israel and, 1:280 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 United Nations and, 2:574 weapons of mass destruction in, 1:64, 78; 2:401, 441, 482, 503, 574 Weekly Standard and, 2:608 See also Abu Ghraib; Gulf War Iraq Veterans Against the War, 2:578 Iraq War academic freedom and, 1:7 American Century and, 1:16 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bush, George W., and, 1:62, 64, 103 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 Canada and, 1:69 censorship and, 1:77 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:82 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 comic strips and, 1:108 conspiracy theories and, 1:117 corporate welfare and, 1:119 Cronkite, Walter, and, 1:126
Iraq War (continued) Dean, Howard, and, 1:129, 129 Dean, John, and, 1:131 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139 Election of 2000 and, 1:155 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 157, 159 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173 France and, 1:194 Franken, Al, and, 1:196 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Japan and, 1:284 Kerry, John, and, 1:296 Klein, Naomi, and, 1:304 Kristol, Irving and Bill, and, 1:305–6 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 Millennial Generation and, 1:213 Moore, Michael, and, 2:365, 366 My Lai massacre and, 2:378 Nation, The, and, 2:381 National Review and, 2:391 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:392, 393 neoconservatism and, 2:395, 541 New York Times and, 2:400, 401 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411 Penn, Sean, and, 2:425, 426 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 privatization and, 2:445 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:446 Project for the New American Century and, 2:558 protests and, 2:433 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Republican Party and, 2:470 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 Russia and, 2:529 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 September 11 and, 2:503 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 torture and, 1:3, 4 United Nations and, 2:573–74 Ventura, Jesse, and, 2:576 Vietnam War and, 2:582 war protesters and, 2:595, 597, 598 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609 women in the military and, 2:622, 623 Woodward, Bob, and, 2:624, 625 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 Ireland, 1:74 Iron John (Bly), 2:355 Iron Man (comic book), 1:106 IRS. See Internal Revenue Service Irvine, Reed John, 1:279–80; 2:344, 350, 400, 448 Irving, David, 1:259 “Is Science Too Big for the Scientist?” (Tuve), 2:408 Is Segregation Scriptural? (Jones), 1:47 Islam, 1:15, 21, 31, 73, 84, 144, 157, 200, 201, 235, 269, 280, 321; 2:349, 377–78, 427, 430, 486, 489, 503–4 See also Muslim Americans; Nation of Islam
I-27
isolationism, 1:57, 101; 2:347, 549, 573, 618 Israel, 1:280–81 academic controversy and, 1:6, 7 anti-Semitism and, 1:28–29 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Christian Identity movement and, 2:615 Demjanjuk, John, and, 1:134 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Holocaust and, 1:258–59 Islamic fundamentalism and, 1:201 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Moral Majority and, 2:367 Muslim Americans and, 2:378 neoconservatism and, 2:394 nuclear age and, 2:409 Podhoretz, Norman, and, 2:432 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:439, 440 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:475 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 September 11 and, 2:503 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Summers, Lawrence, and, 2:546 Weekly Standard and, 2:608 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 See also anti-Semitism; Jews Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, The (Mearsheimer and Walt), 1:281 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, 1:73 It Takes a Family (Santorum), 1:98, 172 It Takes a Village (Clinton), 1:98, 172; 2:607 Italian Americans, 1:105, 105; 2:467 Italy, 1:74, 77 Ito, Lance, 2:417 Ivins, Molly, 1:250, 323 Iwo Jima, 2:506, 626 J. Edgar Hoover: Private and Confidential (film), 1:263 Jackson, Alan, 1:123 Jackson, Andrew, 2:493, 618 Jackson, Henry M., 2:394, 395 Jackson, Janet, 1:76, 77, 176 Jackson, Jesse, Jr., 1:250, 283 Jackson, Jesse Louis, 1:29, 86, 166, 173, 282–83, 304; 2:362, 382, 412, 456, 491, 514 Jackson, Michael, 1:283–84 Jackson, Robert, 2:464, 599 Jackson, Thomas Penfield, 2:357, 358 Jackson-Vanik Amendment (1974), 2:394 Jacob Wetterling Act (1994), 2:510 Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), 2:436 Jaffa, Harry, 2:394 Jaffe, Sam, 1:126 Jameson, Fredric, 2:438 Japan, 1:106, 107, 197, 231, 253–54, 284, 292, 306, 318; 2:343, 408, 419, 428, 438, 441, 504, 568, 569 See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki; reparations, Japanese internment
I-28
Index
Japanese Americans, 1:273; 2:504, 599 Javerbaum, David, 2:539 Javits, Jacob K., 2:594 Jay-Z, 1:77 Jefferson, Thomas, 1:18, 135, 174, 192, 193; 2:378, 471, 495, 618 Jefferson Airplane, 1:121; 2:476 Jeffreys, Sheila, 1:320 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1:18, 20, 84, 91, 92, 284–85 Jenkins, Jerry B., 1:281, 314; 2:440 Jenkins, Philip, 1:21 Jenner, William, 2:600 Jennings, Waylon, 2:393 Jesus Christ Superstar (album), 1:285 Jesus People movement, 1:117, 118, 285–86 Jet magazine, 2:565 Jews, 1:28–29 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57 Christian Identity movement and, 2:483 creationism and, 1:124 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Election of 2000 and, 1:155 Election of 2008 and, 1:159 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173, 173 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Holocaust and, 1:258–59 homeschooling and, 1:260 Israel and, 1:280–81 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 religious fundamentalism and, 1:200, 201 Religious Right and, 2:466 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 school prayer and, 2:495 social theory on, 1:268 Soviet emigration of, 2:394 United Nations and, 2:573 victimhood and, 2:577 Weaver, Randy, and, 2:482 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609 West, Cornel, and, 2:610 white supremacists and, 2:614, 615–16 Wolf, Naomi, and, 2:621 See also anti-Semitism; Israel JFK (film), 2:539 jihad, 1:201; 2:489 Jihad vs. McWorld (Barber), 2:504 Jim Crow laws, 1:9, 25, 52, 289; 2:383, 556, 560, 564, 564, 614 Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, 1:46 Jocko: A Legend of the American Revolution (Kroger), 1:46 Joel, Billy, 2:528 John Birch Society, 1:28, 58, 91, 148, 286–87, 313; 2:341, 342, 360, 414, 466, 467, 492, 496, 573, 615 John Paul II (Pope), 1:62, 195 Johnson, Gregory, 1:180 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 1:287–88 affirmative action and, 1:8–9 Bryant, Anita, and, 1:55 civil rights and, 1:95, 96 Clinton, Hillary, and, 2:412
Johnson, Lyndon Baines (continued) Cold War and, 1:102 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 Cronkite, Walter, and, 1:126 Democratic Party and, 1:136 education reform and, 1:150 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197 Galbraith, John Kenneth, and, 1:203 Gardner, John W., and, 1:109 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223, 223, 224 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 Great Society and, 1:230; 2:397 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and, 2:545 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 health care and, 1:244 Heritage Foundation and, 1:250 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:263 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:266, 267 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:300 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334 Marxism and, 2:338 McCarthy, Eugene, and, 2:340 McGovern, George, and, 2:346 Mondale, Walter, and, 2:364 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:384, 385 National Review and, 2:390, 391 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404 nuclear age and, 2:409 occupational safety and, 2:414 PBS and, 2:447 Podhoretz, Norman, and, 2:432 presidential pardons and, 2:440 Republican Party and, 2:468 Rockwell, Norman, and, 2:478 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 Thanksgiving Day and, 2:557 think tanks and, 2:558 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:564 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 War on Poverty and, 2:593, 594 war protesters and, 2:596 Warren, Earl, and, 2:600 Watts riots and, 2:604 welfare and, 2:608 Johnson, Michael, 1:160 Johnson, Phillip, 1:125 Johnson administration, 2:401, 457 Johnson v. Zerbst (1938), 2:471 Johnston, Jill, 1:320 Johnston, William, 1:137 Jones, Bob, Sr., 1:227; 2:466 See also Bob Jones University Jones, Dean, 1:104 Jones, Edward D., 2:587 Jones, Gayl, 2:369 Jones, James, 1:52 Jones, Jim, 1:116 Jones, Paula Corbin, 1:51, 99, 100; 2:512, 533 Jones, Steven E., 1:117 Jones Act (1917), 1:255 Jong, Erica, 2:385 Jordan, Barbara, 1:316
Jordan, Colin, 2:477 Jordan, June, 2:369 Jordan, Michael, 2:478 Jorgensen, Christine, 1:288; 2:512, 568 Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (Herman), 2:342 Journal of the American Medical Association, 1:243, 285; 2:352, 497 Juba, Charles, 1:31 Judas Priest, 1:246 Judeo-Christian values, 1:56, 193, 253, 300; 2:367, 492, 501, 523 judicial activism, 1:56, 165, 232, 250, 289, 298, 322; 2:405, 416, 424, 443–44, 464–65, 468, 469, 487, 492, 526, 561, 588, 599, 600, 600, 601 judicial wars, 1:288–91 abortion and, 1:1–3; 2:431–32, 479 affirmative action and, 1:9–10 Boy Scouts and, 1:50 capital punishment and, 1:69–71 drug testing and, 1:143 gun control and, 2:391–92 Miranda rights and, 2:363–64 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405 privacy rights and, 2:443–44 right to counsel and, 2:471–72 right to die and, 2:472–74, 490–91 same-sex marriage and, 2:486–87 segregation and, 1:53–54 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599–600 See also Supreme Court, U.S. Junger, Ernst, 2:394 Jungle Fever (film), 1:318 Justice Department, U.S., 1:76, 83, 134, 175, 293, 330; 2:352, 357, 358, 404, 434, 440, 445, 482, 509, 584, 585, 596, 603, 627 Justice For All Act (2004), 1:71 juvenile delinquency, 1:106; 2:519 juveniles, capital punishment and, 1:71 K Street Project, 1:67, 132 Kaczynski, Ted. See Unabomber Kagan, Robert, 1:16, 17; 2:608 Kanka, Megan, 2:510 Kaptur, Marcy, 2:626 Karenga, Ron “Maulana,” 1:308 Karlin, Ben, 2:539 Karols, Kenneth E., 1:209 Kassebaum, Nancy, 2:573 Katz, Lawrence, 1:273 Kaufman, Irving, 2:408, 480 Kazan, Elia, 1:130 Kazmierczak, Steven, 2:497 Keating, Kenneth, 1:293 Keeling, Charles David, 1:218 Kefauver, Estes, 1:185 Keillor, Garrison, 2:576, 610 Keith, Toby, 2:393, 597 Kelly, Walt, 1:107, 108 Kelsey, Frances, 1:186 Kelso v. City of New London, Connecticut (2005), 2:561 Kemp, Jack, 1:314 Kendall, Willmoore, 2:394
Index Kennan, George F., 1:100–101; 2:403 Kennedy, Caroline, 1:158, 294 Kennedy, Edward Moore, 1:150, 158, 244, 292, 293–94; 2:451 Kennedy, John, Jr., 1:294 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1:292–93 affirmative action and, 1:8 American Century and, 1:16 American exceptionalism and, 1:22 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Catholic Church and, 1:74, 86 Cold War and, 1:101–2, 103 Cuba and, 1:127 FDA and, 1:186 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 Galbraith, John Kenneth, and, 1:203 health care and, 1:243 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:263 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 McLuhan, Marshall, and, 2:348 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 Murrow, Edward R., and, 2:376 New Deal and, 2:397 New Left and, 2:398 New York Times and, 2:400 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403, 404 NOW and, 2:389 nuclear age and, 2:409 presidential pardons and, 2:440 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 Rockwell, Norman, and, 2:478 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 Soviet Union and, 2:528 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 white supremacists and, 2:615 Kennedy, Joseph, II, 1:294 Kennedy, Joseph Patrick, 1:292 Kennedy, Joseph Patrick, Jr., 1:292 Kennedy, Patrick, 1:294 Kennedy, Randall, 1:328 Kennedy, Robert Francis, 1:42, 98, 232, 262, 267, 292, 293; 2:340, 354, 493, 594 Kennedy, Susan P., 2:499 Kennedy administration, 1:95, 116; 2:346, 371, 385, 401, 493 Kennedy family, 1:61, 263, 292–94; 2:498 Kennedy (J.F.) assassination, 1:42, 116, 126, 187, 236, 244, 292, 293, 307; 2:335, 382, 385, 456, 457, 539, 600 Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), 1:69 Kenney, Barnaby C., 2:387 Kent State University, 2:399, 519, 596, 628 Kentucky Derby, 2:562 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 1:168 Kenya, 2:503 Kerouac, Jack, 1:120, 121, 217, 218, 294–95; 2:334, 562, 578 Kerr, Robert, 1:243 Kerrey, Bob, 2:379 Kerry, John Forbes, 1:83, 129, 141, 142, 251, 287, 289, 295–97, 296; 2:366, 386, 421, 481, 482, 487, 500, 532, 539, 579 Kesey, Ken, 1:120, 121; 2:398
Kessler, David, 1:186–87 Kevorkian, Jack, 1:297–98; 2:407, 472 Keyes, Alan Lee, 1:298–99, 305; 2:373, 395, 411, 541 Keyes, Maya, 1:298 Keyhoe, Donald, 1:116 Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), 1:6 Keynesian economics, 1:174, 199; 2:546 KGB, 2:480, 527 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 2:395 Khmer Rouge, 1:4, 264 Khrushchev, Nikita, 1:112; 2:404, 528, 591 Kilgore, Bernard, 2:587 Kilgore, James, 2:547 Killen, Edgar Ray, 2:429, 430 Kilpatrick, James J., 2:367 Kimball, Roger, 1:7, 122 King, Billie Jean, 1:299 King, Coretta Scott, 2:588 King, Don, 2:514 King, Larry, 1:299 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1:299–301 assassination of, 1:232, 267 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Black Panther Party and, 1:44 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 civil rights movement and, 1:94–96; 2:424 communism and, 1:111 DuBois, W.E.B., and, 1:144 Dylan, Bob, and, 1:147 evangelicalism and, 1:166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 Founding Fathers and, 1:193 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 Kevorkian, Jack, and, 1:297 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 Malcolm X and, 2:335 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347 media and, 2:382 Million Man March and, 2:362 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Spock, Benjamin, and, 2:532 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:564 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 King, Rodney Glen, 1:301–2; 2:426, 434, 604 King, Stephen, 1:325 King v. Smith (1968), 1:19 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 1:178 Kinsey, Alfred Charles, 1:205, 209, 241, 302–3; 2:512 Kinsey (film), 1:302 Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences (Reisman), 1:303 Kinzer, Stephen, 2:504 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 1:305; 2:395, 558 Kirstein, Peter N., 1:7 Kissinger, Henry, 2:405, 558 Kitzmiller, Tammy, 1:125 Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board (2005), 1:40, 125
I-29
KKK. See Ku Klux Klan Klebold, Dyland, 2:496 Klehr, Harvey, 1:112 Klein, Joe, 2:465 Klein, Naomi, 1:128, 221, 303–4 Kloss, Ilana, 1:299 Knight, T.R., 2:421 Knorr, Nathan Homer, 1:285 Koch, Edward I., 1:231 Koedt, Anne, 2:513 Kolbe, John, 2:543 Koon, Stacey, 1:301, 302 Koop, Charles Everett, 1:14, 304–5; 2:520 Kopechne, Mary Jo, 1:293 Kopp, James, 1:2 Koppel, Ted, 1:142; 2:597 Koran, 2:378 Korea, North, 2:338, 409 Korea, South, 2:490, 528 Korean War, 1:85, 101, 111, 153; 2:408, 480, 569 Korematsu v. United States (1944), 2:467 Koresh, David, 2:586 Kosovo War, 1:283 Koster, Samuel, 2:379 Kovic, Ron, 2:578 Kraft Foods, 1:214; 2:617 Kramer, Rita, 1:151 Krassner, Paul, 1:121 Krauthammer, Charles, 2:395, 400, 608 Kreis, August B., 1:31 Kristofferson, Kris, 2:393 Kristol, Irving William, 1:237, 305, 305–6; 2:394, 395, 541, 607, 608 Kristol, William, 1:298, 305, 305–6; 2:340, 394, 400, 541 Kroc, Ray and Joan B., 2:390 Kroes, Neelie, 2:358 Kroger, Earl, 1:46 Kroker, Arthur, 1:43 Krugman, Paul Robin, 1:200, 273, 306; 2:400, 547 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 2:614 ACLU and, 1:17, 18 anti-Semitism and, 1:28, 29, 31 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 civil rights movement and, 1:94, 95 comic strips and, 1:107 Confederate flag and, 1:114 Duke, David, and, 1:145–46 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262 lynching and, 1:330 McVeigh, Timothy, and, 2:349 militia movement and, 2:360 New York Times and, 2:401 Philadelphia, Miss., and, 2:429 “rednecks” and, 2:462 rock and roll and, 2:476 Kubrick, Stanley, 1:307, 319; 2:409, 553 Kucinich, Dennis, 1:157, 214; 2:393 Kudlow, Laurence, 1:306 Kuhn, Thomas S., 2:438 Kunstler, William, 1:84 Kurpiel, Robert, 1:7 Kurtz, Howard, 1:142 Kurtz, Paul, 2:501 Kurzweil, Ray, 1:42
I-3 0
Index
Kushner, Tony, 1:307–8; 2:480 Kuwait, 1:61, 282; 2:489, 596 Kwanzaa, 1:11, 308; 2:547 Kyoto Protocol, 1:219, 221, 308–9; 2:573 La Follette, Robert Marion, Jr., 1:310; 2:341, 342 La Raza Unida, 1:256, 310–11 labor, labor unions, 1:311–12 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Brown Scare and, 2:342 Budenz, Louis F., and, 1:59 campaign finance reform and, 1:67 Catholic Church and, 1:75 Chávez, César, and, 1:80–81 China and, 1:85 civil rights movement and, 1:95 class and, 2:462 communism and, 1:111; 2:343, 527 Democratic Party and, 1:135 education reform and, 1:150 FCC and, 1:175 globalization and, 1:38, 220, 222 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Hall, Gus, and, 1:235 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 health care and, 1:243, 244 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 human rights and, 1:265, 266 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 illegal immigrants and, 1:272, 273 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 Klein, Naomi, and, 1:304 La Follette, Robert, Jr., 1:310 LaRouche, Lyndon H., Jr., and, 1:315 Marxism and, 2:338 McCarthyism and, 2:343 Mexico and, 2:356 migrant labor and, 2:358–59 Murdoch, Rupert, and, 2:375 New Deal and, 2:397 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:402 NOW and, 2:389 privatization and, 2:444 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:465 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:552 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 Taft-Hartley Act and, 1:111, 311; 2:343, 549 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Walt Disney Company and, 2:591 War on Poverty and, 2:594 See also AFL-CIO; employment; migrant labor; United Automobile Workers Labor Department, U.S., 1:9, 137; 2:371, 414 Lacour, Claudia Brodsky, 2:369 LaFerber, Walter, 1:102 Laffer, Arthur, 2:546 LaHaye, Beverly Jean, 1:312–14; 2:466, 573
LaHaye, Timothy F., 1:47, 201, 281, 312–14, 313; 2:347, 440, 466, 573 Lakota, 1:23 Lamb, Edward, 1:175 Lambda Legal, 1:207; 2:487 Lamonte, Buddy, 1:23 Lampell, Millard, 2:502 Land and Water Conservation Act (1964), 1:162 Landrum-Griffin Act (1959), 1:312 Lane, Mark, 1:116 Lang, K.D., 1:25 LAPD. See Los Angeles Police Department LaPierre, Wayne, 1:233; 2:391 Lapin, Daniel, 1:215, 314–15; 2:354 Laramie Project, The (TV program), 2:517 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 1:257 LaRouche, Lyndon Hermyle, Jr., 1:315 Larry King Live (TV program), 2:427, 428 Larson, Bob, 2:476 Last Temptation of Christ, The (film), 1:325; 2:617 Late, Great Planet Earth, The (Lindsey), 2:440 Latin America, 1:274, 325; 2:337, 338, 372, 493 Laurence, William, 2:401 Lavandeira, Mario, 2:421 Lavender Menace, 1:320; 2:516 law and order Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Election of 2008 and, 1:156 illegal immigrants and, 1:272 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404, 468 NRA and, 2:391 police abuse and, 2:433–34 prison reform and, 2:442 racial profiling and, 2:453 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:465 Republican Party and, 2:468 right to counsel and, 2:471 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Watts and Los Angeles riots and, 2:605 Lawrence, Cynthia, 1:36 Lawrence, D.H., 2:362, 512 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2:541, 553 Lawrence v. Texas (2003), 1:19, 140, 206, 289; 2:416, 443, 487, 523, 524 Lawson, John Howard, 1:257 lawyers, 1:67; 2:339, 566, 567 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 1:255, 311 Lear, Norman Milton, 1:315–16 Leary, Timothy Francis, 1:83, 121, 295, 316–17, 322 Lebanon, 1:73, 278; 2:459 Led Zeppelin, 1:246 Lee, Barbara, 2:508 Lee, Robert, 1:175 Lee, Shelton Jackson “Spike,” 1:46, 317–18, 318; 2:335 Lee v. Weisman (1992), 2:496 Left Behind series (LaHaye and Jenkins), 1:47, 281, 313, 314; 2:440
Legacy of Luna, The (Hill), 1:252 Lehrer, Jim, 2:448 Lehrer, Tom, 1:267 LeMay, Curtis Emerson, 1:318–19; 2:588 Lenin, Vladimir, 1:148; 2:430, 619 Lennon, John, 1:91, 198; 2:476, 596 Leo, John, 2:602 Leopold, Rand Aldo, 1:162, 189, 319–20 Lerner, Michael, 2:610 Lerner, Monroe, 2:495 lesbians, 1:320–21 androgyny and, 1:25 Bryant, Anita, and, 1:55 Cheney, Mary, and, 1:81, 83 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171; 2:503 feminism and, 1:178 Friedan, Betty, and, 1:199 gay capital and, 1:204–5 gay rights movement and, 1:205–7 gays in the military and, 1:209, 209 hate crimes and, 1:240 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 King, Billie Jean, and, 1:299 Milk, Harvey, and, 2:360 Millett, Kate, and, 2:362 Morgan, Robin, and, 2:368 Ms. magazine and, 2:536 multiculturalism and ethnic studies and, 2:374 New Left and, 2:399 NOW and, 2:389 outing and, 2:421 popular culture and, 1:207–8 pornography and, 2:437 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Shelley, Martha, and, 2:515–16 Simpsons, The, and, 2:519 transgender movement and, 2:568 victimhood and, 2:576 See also gay rights; homosexuality, homosexuals; outing; same-sex marriage Levi-Strauss, Claude, 2:542 Levine, Lawrence, 1:230 Lewinsky, Monica, 1:68, 97, 98, 99, 100, 141, 195, 253, 283; 2:533, 533, 534, 602, 603, 607 Lewis, Anthony, 1:323 Lewis, Bernard A., 1:321; 2:486, 504 Lewis, C.S., 1:104 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 2:475 Lewis, John, 1:95; 2:588 Leykis, Tom, 2:517 Libby, I. Lewis (Scooter), 1:16, 82; 2:395, 441, 482 Libertarian Party, 2:560 libertarianism, 1:33, 57, 86, 87, 156, 200, 246; 2:414, 423, 428, 444, 454–55, 480, 512, 520, 522, 523, 544, 558 See also civil liberties Liberty, USS, 1:281 Liberty Foundation, 2:367–68 Liberty Under the Soviets (Baldwin), 1:17
Index Liberty University, 1:170, 314 Libya, 2:573 Lichtenstein, Daniel, 2:495 Licklider, J.C.R., 1:277 Liddy, George Gordon Battle, 1:177, 317, 321–22 Liddy, James G., 1:322 Liebert, Judy, 2:463 Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Franken), 1:120, 195–96; 2:420 Life magazine, 1:16, 101; 2:416, 527 Lightner, Candy, 1:33; 2:369–70 Li’l Abner (comic strip), 1:34, 107 Lilies of the Field (film), 1:325 Limbaugh, Rush Hudson, III, 1:4, 52, 98, 99, 141, 142, 148, 322–24, 323; 2:339, 350, 354, 400, 405, 412, 514, 550, 597 Limited Test Ban Treaty, 2:595 Lin, Maya, 2:505, 579, 580 Lincoln, Abraham, 1:20, 21, 185; 2:468, 527, 557, 626 Lincoln, Bear, 2:557 Lindbergh, Charles, 1:28 Lindh, John Walker, 1:123; 2:378 Lindsay, John, 2:584 Lindsey, Hal, 1:201; 2:440, 573 Lingua Franca journal, 2:524 Linux, 2:357 Lipstadt, Deborah E., 1:259 Liston, Sonny, 1:15 Liteky, Charles and Patrick, 2:493 literature, film, and drama, 1:46, 120–22, 228–30, 247–48, 257–58, 307, 324–26; 2:369, 398, 408, 409, 422, 512, 527, 528, 562, 577–78, 581, 589–90, 618–19, 621–22 See also film industry, films Lithuania, 1:28 Little, Rich, 1:267 Little Orphan Annie (comic strip), 1:107 Little Richard, 2:475 Liuzzo, Viola, 2:614 Live Aid, 1:48, 147; 2:476, 532 Livingston, Robert, 1:100, 182 Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2007), 2:517 Lockheed Corporation, 2:612 Lockheed Martin, 2:497 Lockyer v. Andrade (2003), 2:442 Log Cabin Republicans, 1:207; 2:373, 459 logging, 1:26, 29, 30, 160, 163, 164, 188, 190, 252; 2:572 Lolita (film), 1:307 Lolita (Nabokov), 2:512 Lomax, Alan, 1:233 Longwell, Robert, 1:210 Lord, Carnes, 2:541 Lord, M.G., 1:37 Los Alamos, N. Mex., 1:254; 2:408, 419, 480, 553 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 1:301–2; 2:378, 417, 434, 547, 593, 604 Lotringer, Sylvère, 1:42
Lott, Chester Trent, 1:4, 326–28, 330; 2:430, 526, 564, 566 Louisiana Purchase, 1:194 Love Canal, 1:225, 328 Lovelace, Linda, 2:437 Loving, Richard Perry and Mildred Delores, 1:328–29, 329 Loving v. Virginia (1967), 1:328, 329, 329 Lowell, Robert, 1:324 Lowith, Karl, 2:394 Lowry, Rich, 2:391, 544 Lucas, George, 2:540 Luce, Clare Booth, 2:515 Luce, Henry, 1:16, 21 Luciano, Felipe, 1:256 Ludlam, Charles, 1:326 LULAC. See League of United Latin American Citizens Lumumba, Patrice, 1:78 Lynch, Jessica, 2:622 lynching, 1:329–31; 2:393, 429–30, 495, 582 Lynd, Staughton, 2:432 Lynyrd Skynyrd, 2:628 Lyons, Lenore, 2:495 Lyons, Lisa, 2:337 Lyotard, Jean-François, 2:438 MacArthur, Douglas, 1:101, 269; 2:401, 569 MacBride, Roger, 2:560 Macdonald, Andrew, 2:477, 616 MacDonald, Heather, 2:544 Machen, J. Gresham, 1:201 MacKinnon, Catharine Alice, 1:146, 247; 2:332, 437 Mackris, Andrea, 2:420 mad cow disease, 1:141; 2:619 Madame Blueberry (film), 2:589 MADD. See Mothers Against Drunk Driving Maddoux, Marlin, 1:89 Madhubuti, Haki R., 1:116 Madison, James, 2:471 Madonna, 2:332–34, 333, 422, 425, 478, 617 Mafia, 1:231, 262, 293; 2:386 Magnet, Myron, 1:113 Magruder, Jeb, 2:603 Mailer, Norman Kingsley, 1:52, 70, 83, 120, 216, 295; 2:334–35, 362, 398, 578, 596, 599, 621 Maines, Natalie, 1:123; 2:597 Makbeth (play), 1:326 Making of the New Majority Party, The (Rusher), 2:484 malaria, 1:72 Malaysia, 2:525 Malcolm X, 1:44, 60, 127, 172–73, 235, 610; 2:335–36, 377, 382, 383, 462 Malcolm X (film), 1:318; 2:335 Malthus, Thomas, 1:110 Maltz, Albert, 1:257 Mamet, David, 1:326 Manchester, William, 1:52 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 2:558
I-31
Manhattan Project, 1:112, 254; 2:343, 408, 419, 527, 553 Manifest Destiny, 1:133 Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Baumgardner and Richards), 1:179 Manion, Clarence E., 2:466 Mankes v. Boy Scouts of America (1991), 1:50 Mann, Horace, 1:90, 150 Mannheim, Karl, 1:211, 212 Manson, Charles, 1:121 Manson, Marilyn, 2:336, 497 Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (film), 1:87 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Chomsky and Herman), 1:87; 2:351 Mao Zedong, 1:85 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 1:88, 248; 2:336– 37, 386, 387, 513, 616 March on the Pentagon, 2:399 March on Washington, 1:60, 95, 147, 228, 300; 2:362, 381 Marcuse, Herbert, 1:120, 162; 2:394, 432 marijuana, medical, 1:51, 57; 2:353–54, 576 See also drugs, illegal Marines, U.S., 2:429, 459, 512, 626 Marou, Andre, 2:560 marriage, interracial, 1:328–29, 329; 2:452 marriage names, 1:179; 2:337–38, 372 Marrs, Jim, 2:539 Marshall, George C., 1:153; 2:344 Marshall, John, 1:192 Marshall, Robert, 1:189 Marshall, Thurgood, 1:53–54, 66, 330; 2:383, 561 Marshall Plan, 1:101, 194, 258; 2:403, 549 Marshals, U.S., 2:482, 627 Martin, Gail R., 2:537 Martin, Joseph, 2:570 Marvel Comics, 1:106; 2:598 Marx, Karl, 1:110 Marxism, 2:338–39 Afrocentrism and, 1:10 American communism and, 1:111 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Black Panther Party and, 1:44 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Cuba and, 1:127 DuBois, W.E.B., and, 1:144 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and, 1:152 Foucault, Michel, and, 1:191, 192 Great Books and, 1:229 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Horowitz, David, and, 1:264 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 Kwanzaa and, 1:308 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 Nation, The, and, 2:381 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:402 Rockwell, George Norman, and, 2:477 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 Sider, Ron, and, 2:518
I-32
Index
Marxism (continued) Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 West, Cornel, and, 2:610, 610 Wilson, Edmund, and, 2:619 See also communism, communists Mary Worth (comic strip), 1:107 Maryland, 1:12, 264; 2:353, 590 Mashantucket Pequot, 1:275 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1:21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 1:87, 87 Masters and Johnson, 1:139, 313 Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (Hoover), 1:112, 262; 2:406 Mathews, Robert, 2:616 Matlovich v. Secretary of the Air Force (1978), 1:209 Mattachine Society, 1:206, 241; 2:513 Mattel, Inc., 1:36, 37; 2:598 Matthiessen, Peter, 1:23 Mattson, Ingrid, 2:378 Maude (TV program), 1:316 Mauer, Marc, 2:42 Max, Peter, 1:121 Maxxam Corporation, 1:252 May, Andrew J., 2:441 Mayer, Jane, 1:252 McAteer, Edward A., 2:466 McCain, John Sydney, III, 1:4, 67, 156, 157, 158, 175, 245, 296; 2:339–40, 395, 411, 412, 423, 481–82, 601 McCain-Feingold Bill, 1:67; 2:339 McCarran Act (1950), 1:17; 2:343, 344 McCarran Committee, 2:502 McCarthy, Eugene Joseph, 1:267; 2:340–41 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond, 1:27, 61, 101, 112, 153, 175, 236, 239, 293, 305, 310; 2:341–42, 342, 343, 343, 376, 377, 381, 468, 477, 549 McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (Buckley and Bozell), 1:57; 2:342 McCarthyism, 1:6, 52, 58, 76, 79, 107, 108, 112, 153, 236, 241, 258, 264, 271, 280, 295; 2:341–42, 342–45, 376, 376, 383, 419, 431, 458, 480, 484, 493, 517, 549, 556 See also Red Scare McCartney, Bill, 2:446 McCartney, Paul, 2:426 McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), 1:71; 2:464 McCloskey, Deirdre, 2:345 McCloskey, Laura A., 2:345 McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), 2:494 McCord, James, Jr., 2:602, 603 McCorvey, Norma, 1:212; 2:416, 418, 479 McCreary County, Kentucky et al. v. ACLU (2005), 2:555 McDonald, Lawrence P., 1:286 McDonald’s Corporation, 1:168; 2:390, 413, 489, 566 McDowell, Arthur, 1:279 McFarlane, Robert, 1:278, 279 McGovern, George Stanley, 1:238; 2:345–47, 346, 394, 627
McGruder, Aaron, 1:108 McGuire, Barry, 2:476 McIntire, Carl Curtis, 1:18, 175; 2:347–48, 490, 573 McKenna, Kenneth, 1:246 McKenzie, Linsey Dawn, 1:278 McKinney, Aaron, 2:516–17 McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982), 1:124 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall, 2:348–49, 439 McNabb, Donovan, 1:324 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 1:89, 165 McSally, Martha, 2:489 McVeigh, Timothy James, 2:349, 360, 477, 496, 578, 586, 616 McWilliams, Carey, 2:381 Me and Mickey D (film), 2:414 Mead, Margaret, 1:303; 2:350 Means, Russell, 1:22; 2:627 Mearsheimer, John J., 1:281 media Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 AIDS and, 1:13 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Brock, David, and, 1:51 Brokaw, Tom, and, 1:52 censorship and, 1:76–77 Chick, Jack, and, 1:84 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Christian radio and, 1:89–90 civil rights movement and, 1:94, 95; 2:519 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Clinton impeachment and, 1:99 Common Cause and, 1:109 Contract with America and, 1:118 Coulter, Ann, and, 1:120 counterculture and, 1:121, 122 crime and, 2:442 Cronkite, Walter, and, 1:126 culture jamming and, 1:127–28 Dean, Howard, and, 1:129 Drudge Report and, 1:141, 142 Election of 2000 and, 1:154 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 158 environmental movement and, 1:30 evangelicalism and, 1:166 family values and, 1:172 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173 FCC and, 1:174–76 feminism and, 1:178, 179 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Franken, Al, and, 1:195–96 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197 fur industry and, 1:202 gangs and, 1:204 Generation X and, 1:212–13 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217 globalization and, 1:222 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249, 250
media (continued) Hightower, Jim, and, 1:250 Hill, Julia “Butterfly,” and, 1:252 homosexuals and, 1:205, 206, 207–8; 2:513 hooks, bell, and, 1:261 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 intelligent design and, 1:125 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279–80 Jesus People and, 1:285 Jorgensen, Christine, and, 1:288 King, Rodney, and, 1:301 Kristol, Bill, and, 1:305 Lee, Spike, and, 1:317–18 lesbians and, 1:320–21 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322–24 Lott, Trent, and, 2:564 Love Canal and, 1:328 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341, 342 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347–48 McLuhan, Marshall, and, 2:348–49 Medved, Michael, and, 2:354 men’s movement and, 2:355 Million Man March and, 2:362–63 Murdoch, Rupert, and, 2:375–76, 587, 587 Nation of Islam and, 2:382 Native Americans and, 1:22 New York Times and, 2:399–402 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403–4, 405 North, Oliver, and, 2:407 NOW and, 2:389 NPR and, 2:389–90 O.J. Simpson trial and, 2:417 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420–21 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:424 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 PETA and, 2:426 pornography and, 2:436–37 postmodernism and, 2:438, 439 prisoner abuse and, 1:4 punk rock and, 2:449 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 Rather, Dan, and, 2:456–57, 457 red and blue states and, 2:460–61 Republican Party and, 2:469 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 Rodman, Dennis, and, 2:478 Rusher, William A., and, 2:483, 484 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 Schiavo, Terri, and, 2:473, 491 school shootings and, 2:496–97 science wars and, 2:500 sexual harassment and, 2:512 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 shock jocks and, 2:517 Simpsons, The, and, 2:519–20 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 speech codes and, 2:530 Steinem, Gloria, and, 2:536 Stern, Howard, and, 2:538 Stewart, Jon, and, 2:539 Stone, Oliver, and, 2:539 talk radio and, 2:549–50 televangelism and, 2:552–53 think tanks and, 2:558–59
Index media (continued) Thompson, Hunter S., and, 2:562 Turner, Ted, and, 2:569–70 Unabomber and, 2:572 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:578 Vietnam War and, 2:581 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Walt Disney Company and, 2:591–92 Watergate and, 2:602 Watts and Los Angeles riots and, 1:301; 2:604 welfare and, 2:609 Weyrich, Paul M., and, 2:611 whistleblowers and, 2:613 Wildmon, Donald, and, 2:616 Winfrey, Oprah, and, 2:619–20 women in the military and, 2:622 World magazine and, 2:625 See also Christian radio; talk radio; television media bias, 2:350–52, 351 Media Matters for America, 1:51; 2:400, 420 Media Research Center, 1:280; 2:400 Medicaid, 1:230, 243–44, 245; 2:565, 566, 590 medical malpractice, 2:352–53 Medicare, 1:230, 243–44, 250, 287; 2:397, 427, 428, 522 Medina, Ernest, 2:379 Medved, Michael, 1:215, 314; 2:354 Medvedev, Dmitri, 2:528 Meeropol, Robert and Michael, 2:480 Meese, Edwin, 1:249; 2:406, 436 Meet the Press (radio program), 1:256 Meet the Press (TV program), 1:52 Megan’s Law, 1:51; 2:510 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 2:477 Memoirs of Hecate County (Wilson), 2:618, 619 Memorial Day, 1:20 Méndez v. Westminster (1946), 1:255–56 Menino, Thomas, 2:517 men’s movement, 2:354–56, 446–47, 446 Merchant, Natalie, 1:295 Mere Christianity (Lewis), 1:104 Mesa-Bains, Amalia, 1:262 Metalious, Grace, 1:324 Metzger, Tom, 2:614 Mexican Americans, 1:80, 255, 256, 311; 2:358–59, 399, 453, 535, 604 Mexico, 1:127, 220, 266, 272; 2:356–57, 358–59, 428, 454, 518, 583, 590 MFN. See most favored nation Mfume, Kweisi, 2:384 Miami and the Siege of Chicago (Mailer), 2:335 Miami Herald, 1:238 Michigan, University of, 1:10, 63, 230; 2:384, 531, 572, 593 Mickens v. Taylor (2002), 2:472 Microsoft, 1:83; 2:357–58 Middle East Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87
Middle East (continued) evangelicalism in, 2:518 immigration policy and, 1:274 Israel and, 1:280–81 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 Muslim Americans and, 2:377, 378 Nation, The, and, 2:381 Obama, Barack, and, 1:158 postcolonialism and, 1:10 racial profiling and, 2:453, 454 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Saudi Arabia and, 2:488–90 September 11 and, 2:503 study of, 1:6, 7, 321; 2:431 United Nations and, 2:573 Midler, Bette, 2:596 Migrant Health Act (1962), 2:414 migrant labor, 1:80–81; 2:358–59, 377, 381, 414, 535 See also illegal immigrants; immigration Mikuriya, Tod H., 2:353 Milam, J.W., 2:564, 565 Miles, Robert, 2:614 military, U.S. ACLU and, 1:18, 19 affirmative action and, 1:8 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:15 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Brown Scare and, 2:342 capital punishment and, 1:69, 70 Churchill, Ward, and, 1:93 Cold War and, 1:102 drug testing and, 1:142 ecoterrorism and, 1:148 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 fitness and, 2:413 Fonda, Jane, and, 1:184 GI Joe and, 2:597 Heller, Joseph, and, 1:247–48 Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, 1:253–54 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 Internet and, 1:277 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279 Japan and, 1:284 Jehovah’s Witnesses and, 1:285 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Jorgensen, Christine, and, 1:288 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:294, 295 Kristol, Bill, and, 1:306 Kubrick, Stanley, and, 1:307 LeMay, Curtis, and, 1:318 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 McCarthyism and, 2:344 McGovern, George, and, 2:345, 347 Moore, Michael, and, 2:366 My Lai massacre and, 2:378–79 New Left and, 2:399 Nicaragua and, 2:406 Nixon Doctrine and, 2:519 nuclear age and, 2:408 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 post-World War II, 2:458 privatization and, 2:445 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:459 recruitment by, 1:210 Republican Party and, 2:469
I-33
military, U.S. (continued) Saudi Arabia and, 2:489, 503 School of the Americas and, 2:493–94 segregation in, 1:153; 2:563 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:541 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 think tanks and, 2:557 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Vietnam War and, 2:580–82 War on Drugs and, 2:592 War Powers Act and, 2:594–95 whistleblowers and, 2:612 See also Air Force, U.S.; Army, U.S.; gays in the military; Marines, U.S.; Navy, U.S. military-industrial complex, 1:16, 87, 153; 2:399, 408, 497, 499, 553 militia movement, 1:116, 286; 2:349, 359–60, 365, 482, 573, 586, 615 Milk, Harvey Bernard, 2:360–61, 425 Millennial Generation, 1:212, 213 Miller, Arthur, 1:326; 2:344 Miller, Edward S., 2:441 Miller, Elliot, 2:396 Miller, F. Glenn, 2:614 Miller, Frank, 1:106 Miller, Henry, 2:362, 512 Miller, James, 1:192 Miller, Judith, 2:401 Miller, Tim, 2:386 Miller, Zell, 1:115 Miller v. California (1973), 1:278; 2:436 Miller v. Sullivan (1973), 2:386 Millett, Katharyn Murray (Kate), 1:261; 2:335, 361, 361–62 Milliken v. Bradley (1974), 1:65 Million Dollar Baby (film), 2:407 Million Man March, 1:172–73; 2:356, 362–63, 383, 610 Mills, C. Wright, 2:381 Mills, Wilbur, 1:243, 244 Milosevic, Slobodan, 1:283 Milton, Joyce, 2:480 Mind-Body Problem, The (Goldstein), 2:524 Minersville School v. Gobitis (1940), 1:18 Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration, 2:613 Minnow, Newton N., 1:176; 2:447 Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, 1:272; 2:583 Minuteman Project, 2:356, 359 Minutemen, 2:615 Mir, 2:528 Miracle on 34th Street (film), 1:91 Miramax, 1:205; 2:592 Miranda rights, 2:363–64 Miranda v. Arizona (1966), 1:19; 2:363–64, 471, 600 Miss America pageant, 1:38–39, 55; 2:368 Mississippi Burning (film), 2:430 Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), 1:65 MIT. See Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mitchell, Clarence, Jr., 2:383 Mitchell, George, 1:22
I-3 4
Index
Mitchell, Jerry, 2:430 Mitchell, John, 2:579, 602 Mitchell, Joni, 2:628 MLA. See Modern Language Association Mod Squad, The (TV program), 1:121 Modern Language Association (MLA), 1:210 Mohegan Nation, 1:275 Mondale, Walter Frederick, 1:8, 179, 238; 2:364–65, 610 monetarism, 1:200 Money, John William, 2:568 Monkees, The (TV program), 1:121 Monkey Wrench Gang, The (Abbey), 1:149, 163 Monroe, Marilyn, 1:247 Monroe Doctrine, 2:527 Monsanto, 1:162, 213, 214; 2:561 Montana, 1:189; 2:353, 360, 572 Montana Freemen, 2:360, 365 Moody, Dwight L., 1:165 Moody Bible Institute, 1:47, 89; 2:440 Moon, Sun Myung, 1:314; 2:601 Moore, Alan, 1:106 Moore, Michael, 1:38 Moore, Michael Francis (filmmaker), 1:69, 215, 250, 325; 2:336, 365–66, 366, 489, 497, 505 Moore, Mike, 2:565 Moore, Roy Stewart, 1:314; 2:366–67, 554 Moraga, Cherríe, 1:178 Moral Majority, 1:2, 73, 88, 90, 139, 166, 170, 170, 171, 182, 193, 247, 313; 2:367–68, 436, 437, 447, 466, 467, 474, 479, 519, 552, 611 moral relativism. See relativism, moral Morgan, Robin Evonne, 2:368–69 Mormons, 1:200, 201 Morris, Dick, 2:401 Morris, Errol, 1:325 Morris, Henry M., 1:124 Morris, John, 1:124 Morrison, Jim, 1:55; 2:539 Morrison, Samuel Eliot, 1:108, 109 Morrison, Toni, 1:179, 230; 2:369, 619 Morse, Wayne, 1:113 Mosaic, 1:277; 2:357 Moscone, George, 2:361 Moskos, Charles, 1:209 Moss, Annie Lee, 2:377 Moss, John, 1:197 most favored nation (MFN), 1:85; 2:394 Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), 1:33; 2:369–70 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 1:325; 2:370–71 MoveOn.org, 1:290; 2:525, 597 Movie Ratings Game, The (Farber), 2:371 Moyers, Bill, 1:197 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 2:371–72, 380, 573, 608 Mozilla, 2:357 MPAA. See Motion Picture Association of America Ms. (honorific), 2:372–73 Ms. Magazine, 1:165, 179, 210; 2:368, 372, 535, 536 MTV, 1:283; 2:333, 449, 476, 570, 628
Muhammad, Elijah, 1:172–73; 2:335, 377, 382 Muhammad, Warith Deen, 1:173; 2:382 Muir, John, 1:189 Muller, Mancow, 2:517, 550 multicultural conservatism, 1:143–44, 298; 2:373, 529–30 multiculturalism and ethnic studies, 2:373–74 Adler, Mortimer, and, 1:7, 8 Afrocentrism and, 1:10–11 American Indian Movement and, 1:22 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:81 Christmas and, 1:91 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 Columbus Day and, 1:105 Commager, Henry, and, 1:109 communism and, 1:236 counterculture and, 1:122 diversity training and, 1:137–38 drama and, 1:326 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:143–44 English as the Official Language and, 1:160–61 feminism and, 1:178–79 gays in popular culture and, 1:208 globalization and, 1:221, 222 Great Books and, 1:228, 229 Hillsdale College and, 1:253 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255–56 Huntington, Samuel P., and, 1:269 immigration policy and, 1:274 Japanese internment and, 2:467 literature and, 1:325 Mexico and, 2:356 Morgan, Robin, and, 2:368 Muslim Americans and, 2:377 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 political correctness and, 2:435–36 postmodernism and, 2:438 race and, 2:452 Said, Edward, and, 1:10; 2:486 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 September 11 Memorial and, 2:506 speech codes and, 2:530 Strauss, Leo, and, 2:542 structuralism and, 2:542 Thanksgiving Day and, 2557 victimhood and, 2:577 Watt, James, and, 2:604 West, Cornel, and, 2:610 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 Mumford, Lewis, 2:374–75 Mundell, Robert, 2:547 Murdoch, Keith Rupert, 2:375–76, 418, 420, 587, 587, 607 Murphy Brown (TV program), 1:172; 2:451 Murray, Charles, 1:40; 2:452, 608 Murray v. Curlett (1963), 1:18; 2:416, 494, 495 Murrow, Edward Roscoe, 2:341, 344–45, 358, 376, 376–77, 414 Muslim Americans, 1:15, 172–73, 173, 239, 260, 281; 2:335, 377–78, 382– 83, 454, 505, 546 See also Islam; Nation of Islam
Muste, A.J., 1:59; 2:595 Mutual Broadcasting System, 1:89 Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), 2:370 My Lai massacre, 2:378–79, 519, 539 Myrdal, Gunnar, 1:60 “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, The” (Koedt), 2:513 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nabokov, Vladimir, 1:307; 2:512 Nader, Ralph, 1:32, 42, 119, 155, 214, 250, 251; 2:352, 380–81, 393, 415, 554, 560, 566, 612 NAE. See National Association of Evangelicals NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nagin, Ray, 1:270 Naked Public Square, The: Religion and Democracy in America (Neuhaus), 2:526 NARAL Pro-Choice America, 1:290; 2:443 see also National Abortion Rights Action League; National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws “Narratives of Empire” series (Vidal), 2:578 NASA. See National Aeronautics and Space Administration Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 1:280 Nathan, Theodora, 2:560 Nathanson, Bernard, 1:2 Nation, The magazine, 2:380, 381, 402, 403, 422, 426, 447, 562, 624 Nation at Risk, A (report), 1:80, 151, 229 Nation of Islam, 1:15, 172–73, 173, 235; 2:335, 356, 362, 377, 382–83, 383 Nation of Rebels (Heath and Potter), 1:128 Nation of Victims, A (Sykes), 2:577 National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), 1:1, 2 National Academy of Sciences, 1:214, 218–19; 2:520 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 1:116, 126, 258; 2:408, 528, 621 National Agricultural Chemicals Association, 1:72 National Air and Space Museum, 1:161, 284 National Archives and Records Administration, 1:198 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 2:383–84 ACLU and, 1:17 blackface and, 1:46 Brown v. Board of Education and, 1:53–54; 2:561 capital punishment and, 1:70, 215, 216 civil rights and, 1:93, 94 Confederate flag and, 1:114, 115 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 DuBois, W.E.B., and, 1:144 Goetz, Bernhard, and, 1:223 Loving, Richard and Mildred, and, 1:329 Million Man March and, 2:362
Index National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (continued) Parks, Rosa, and, 1:94; 2:383, 424 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 racial profiling and, 2:454 Thomas, Clarence, and, 1:251; 2:561 Till, Emmett, and, 2:565 National Association for the Advancement of White People, 1:146; 2:614 National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), 1:1, 177, 199 National Association of Evangelicals, 1:47, 102; 2:552 National Association of Religious Broadcasters, 2:475 National Audubon Society, 1:163 National Bar Association, 2:561 National Center for Science Education, 1:124 National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 1:70 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 1:276 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), 1:121; 2:398, 409, 532, 595 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1:2, 75 National Council of Churches (NCC), 1:201; 2:347, 466 National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC), 1:243, 244 National Education Association (NEA), 1:113, 150, 260, 276, 312 National Educational Television (NET), 2:448 National Empowerment Television (NET), 2:611 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 1:14, 15, 88, 132, 230, 248, 287, 326; 2:336, 384–87, 386, 437, 463, 507, 616 National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), 2:386, 507 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 1:11, 41, 81, 82, 230, 268, 287; 2:387–88 National Environmental Policy Act (1969), 1:159, 162 National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA), 2:358 National Firearms Act (1934), 1:232 National Football League, 1:208; 2:613 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 1:207, 210; 2:521 National Guard, 1:62, 94, 287, 301; 2:374, 399, 451, 456, 457, 588, 596, 604 National Highway System Designation Act (1995), 1:33 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 1:32 national identity, 1:269; 2:435–36, 470, 471, 576 National Labor Relations Act (1935), 2:342
National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), 1:159 National Minimum Drinking Age Act (1984), 2:370 National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1:242; 2:596 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2:404 National Office Management Association, 2:372 National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), 2:393, 562 National Organization for Women (NOW), 1:1, 53, 113, 165, 176–77, 198, 199, 313, 320; 2:361, 372, 388–89, 422, 447, 479, 516, 536, 561 National Parent-Teacher Association, 1:150; 2:459 National Park Service, 1:30, 162; 2:362 National Park Service Act (1916), 1:189, 190 National Public Radio (NPR), 1:42, 251, 279; 2:351, 366, 377, 389–90, 550, 616 National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), 1:89, 90; 2:552 National Restaurant Association, 2:413 National Review, 1:57, 79, 253, 286, 295; 2:340, 342, 344, 390–91, 395, 483, 493, 544, 579, 584, 617, 630 National Review Online, 1:120 National Rifle Association (NRA), 1:232, 233; 2:391–92, 392, 423, 497, 562 National Right to Life Committee, 1:2; 2:443, 479 National Science Foundation, 1:124 national security Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Cold War and, 1:101 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197, 198 George W. Bush administration and, 1:63, 64 globalization and, 1:222 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 gun control and, 1:232 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279 Kerry, John, and, 1:296 Mexico and, 2:356 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:344, 574, 574 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:578 whistleblowers and, 2:612 National Security Act (1947), 2:569 National Security Agency (NSA), 2:574, 575, 613 National Security Council (NSC), 1:101, 278–79; 2:395, 406, 569 National Socialist Party of America, 1:18; 2:477, 616 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966), 2:380 National Trails System Act (1968), 1:162 National Treasury v. Von Raab (1989), 1:143 National Wildlife Federation, 1:163 National Youth Alliance, 2:616
I-35
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), 1:23, 133 Native Americans, 1:93, 96, 105, 121, 133, 135, 184, 202, 204, 266, 275, 276, 325; 2:355, 374, 396, 399, 461, 462, 463, 556, 557, 605, 627, 630 See also American Indian Movement; Indian casinos; Indian sport mascots nativity scenes, 1:91, 91, 92 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Navasky, Victor, 2:381 Navy, U.S., 1:209, 254; 2:379, 503, 512, 622, 623 Nazis, German, 1:4, 28, 100, 106, 107, 110, 134, 258–59; 2:342, 394, 419, 431, 515, 525, 527, 603 Nazism, 1:17, 18, 28, 31, 89, 114, 125, 134, 145, 246; 2:342, 344, 401, 477, 541, 584, 614, 615–16 NCAA. See National Collegiate Athletic Association NCC. See National Council of Churches NCSC. See National Council of Senior Citizens NEA. See National Education Association; National Endowment for the Arts Nebel, Long John, 2:549 NEH. See National Endowment for the Humanities Nelson, Cary, 1:6 Nelson, Gaylord, 1:148, 163 Nelson, William Hugh (Willie), 2:392–93 neoconservatism, 2:393–95 academic freedom and, 2:344 American Century and, 1:16 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 American Spectator and, 2:544 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:57 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:16, 81, 82 Cold War and, 1:103 communism and, 1:112 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113 counterculture and, 1:122 Election of 2000 and, 1:155 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 human rights and, 1:266 Huntington, Samuel P., and, 1:269 Hutchins, Robert M., and, 1:271 Japan and, 1:284 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Kristol, Irving and Bill, and, 1:305–6, 305 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371, 372 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 New York Times and, 2:400 Penn, Sean, and, 2:426 Pipes, Richard and Daniel, and, 2:430–31 Podhoretz, Norman, and, 2:432, 432 Rove, Karl, 2:480 Strauss, Leo, and, 2:541–42 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:578 Vietnam War and, 2:582
I-3 6
Index
neoconservatism (continued) Weekly Standard and, 2:607–8 welfare and, 2:608 NET. See National Educational Television; National Empowerment Television Netherlands, 1:46; 2:345, 490, 596 Netscape, 2:357 Neuhaus, Richard John, 2:526 Nevins, Allan, 1:109 New Age, The: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (Gardner), 2:396 New Age movement, 1:84, 121, 134, 226, 260; 2:393, 395–96, 524, 560 New Deal, 1:8, 57, 135, 174–75, 196, 200, 223, 224, 225, 230, 242, 256, 287, 310, 311; 2:342, 343, 344, 364, 385, 397–98, 401, 402, 406, 458, 468, 492, 493, 535, 549, 556, 568, 570, 608 New Frontier, 2:397 New Journalism, 1:324; 2:334, 398, 562, 621 New Left, 1:83, 127, 136, 162, 178, 203, 236, 237, 242, 262, 264, 281, 310; 2:334, 368, 381, 394, 398–99, 432, 449, 476, 543, 544–45, 596, 622 New Mexico, University of, 1:7 New Pearl Harbor, The (Griffin), 1:117 New Republic magazine, 1:108; 2:607, 619 New Right, 2:389, 451, 469, 484, 603, 611 New Science of Politics, The (Voegelin), 2:584 “New World Order,” 1:116–17; 2:359, 360 New World Order (Robertson), 2:573 New York Conservative Party, 1:58; 2:584 New York Dolls, 2:449 New York Observer, 1:120; 2:400 New York Police Department (NYPD), 1:143; 2:433, 514, 612 New York Radical Women, 1:38; 2:368 New York Review of Books, 2:432, 619 New York Times, The, 1:19, 54, 78, 81, 87, 98, 103, 108, 120, 148, 179, 188, 200, 279, 280, 295, 298, 306, 323; 2:351, 369, 372, 399–402, 420, 426, 524, 547, 556, 572, 574, 575, 579, 591, 593, 602, 612, 613 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), 2:401 New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), 2:401 New Yorker magazine, 1:72, 120, 254; 2:375, 378, 411, 496, 540, 619 Newkirk, Ingrid, 2:426 Newman, John Henry, 2:617 Newman, Paul, 2:381 news reporting. See media NewsCorporation, 2:375, 587, 607 See also Fox News Newsday, 1:251; 2:400, 514 Newsweek magazine, 1:90, 141, 200, 212, 278, 288; 2:352, 379, 385, 405, 617, 625 Newton, Huey P., 1:44, 45; 2:369 Next Christendom, The: The Coming Global Christianity (Jenkins), 1:21
NHTSA. See National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Nicaragua, 1:77, 101, 102, 116, 266, 278; 2:388, 406, 602 Nichols, Terry, 2:349 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Ehrenreich), 1:114, 152; 2:589 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 1:227, 303; 2:402–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1:43, 192 Nightline (TV program), 2:597, 617 9–11 (Chomsky), 1:87; 2:504 1999: Victory Without War (Nixon), 1:78 Nineteenth Amendment, 1:164 Ninth Amendment, 1:298; 2:443, 479 Niskanen, William, 2:444 Nixon, Richard Milhous, 2:403–5, 404 ACLU and, 1:19 affirmative action and, 1:9 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 American Indian Movement and, 1:22, 23; 2:627 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Chambers, Whittaker, and, 1:79 child care and, 2:364 China and, 1:85 CIA and, 1:78 Cold War and, 1:102 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 comic strips and, 1:107 Dean, John, and, 1:130–31 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Earth Day and, 1:148 Endangered Species Act and, 1:159 FDA and, 1:186 Felt, W. Mark, and, 1:176–77 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:187 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227, 228 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 health care and, 1:243, 244 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:266, 267 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 labor unions and, 1:312 Leary, Timothy, and, 1:316 Liddy, G. Gordon, and, 1:322 Lott, Trent, and, 1:326 Marxism and, 2:338 McCarthyism and, 2:343, 344 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:348 My Lai massacre and, 2:379 New Deal and, 2:397 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:403 occupational safety and, 2:414 PBS and, 2:448 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 presidential pardons and, 2:440–41 Rather, Dan, and, 2:457 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:628 Rusher, William A., and, 2:484
Nixon, Richard Milhous (continued) Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 “Silent Majority” and, 2:518–19 Soviet Union and, 2:528 talk radio and, 2:549 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 Wallace, George, and, 2:560, 588 War on Drugs and, 2:592 War Powers Act and, 2:594, 595 Warren, Earl, and, 2:600 Woodward, Bob, and, 2:624 See also Watergate Nixon administration, 1:12, 56, 58, 67, 81, 106, 116, 176–77, 198, 247, 305, 322; 2:371, 385, 394, 401, 409, 457, 464, 476, 484, 579 Nixon and the CFR (Courtney), 1:116 Nixon Doctrine, 2:519 NMFS. See National Marine Fisheries Service No Child Left Behind Act (2001), 1:45, 50, 63, 150, 151, 152 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Klein), 1:128, 303 NOAA. See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Nobel Peace Prize, 1:60, 73, 219, 225, 226, 299; 2:484 Nobel Prize in Economics, 1:199, 306 Nobel Prize in Literature, 2:369, 535 Noll, Mark, 2:490, 500 Nomani, Asra, 2:378 None Dare Call It Treason (Stormer), 2:342 Noonan, Peggy, 2:424 Norell, James O. E., 1:232 Norman, Larry, 1:117 NORML. See National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Norquist, Grover Glenn, 2:397, 405–6, 463 North, Gary, 1:90 North, Oliver Laurence, Jr., 1:17, 19, 108, 278; 2:406, 406–7, 441, 463, 602 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 1:33, 57, 97, 220, 221; 2:356, 380, 428 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 1:16, 101, 153, 194; 2:529, 549 Northern Illinois University, 2:497 Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co. (1984), 1:35 Northwest Forest Plan (1994), 1:190 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 1:18 Not a Love Story (film), 1:304 Not Dead Yet, 2:407, 473, 491 Nova Express (Burroughs), 1:246 NOW. See National Organization for Women NOW with Bill Moyers (TV program), 2:448 NPR. See National Public Radio NRA. See National Rifle Association NRB. See National Religious Broadcasters NRC. See Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. NSA. See National Security Agency NSC. See National Security Council
Index Nu South Apparel, 1:114, 115 nuclear age, 2:408–10 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Cold War and, 1:101, 102, 112, 127, 148, 292, 318–19, 343; 2:394, 403, 459, 480, 527, 528, 540–41, 568, 569, 588, 595 counterculture and, 1:130, 218, 242; 2:398, 595 environmental movement and, 1:110, 148, 162, 163; 2:595 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:224 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227; 2:552 literature, film, and drama and, 1:130, 184, 242, 307, 324 Oppenheimer, Robert J., and, 2:419 postmodernism and, 2:438 power plants and, 1:110, 217, 219, 242; 2:519, 563, 612 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 Teller, Edward, and, 2:553–54 See also arms control; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Los Alamos, N. Mex.; Manhattan Project Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), 2:409 Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. (NRC), 2:563 Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, 1:110 Nunn, Sam, 1:97, 208 Nutritional Labeling and Education Act (1990), 1:187 Nye, Judy, 2:570 NYPD. See New York Police Department O.J. Simpson trial, 2:363, 369, 417, 417–18 Oak Ridge, Tenn., 2:408 Oakes, Richard, 1:22 Obama, Barack Hussein, 1:4, 98, 129, 130, 156, 157–58, 157, 180, 198, 245, 251, 282, 283, 294; 2:339, 340, 378, 411–12, 423, 448, 453, 502, 505, 508, 509, 532, 601, 620 Obama, Michelle, 2:378, 411 obesity, 2:344, 413–14, 577 objectivism, 1:58; 2:454–55 obscenity Biafra, Jello, and, 1:41, 42 book banning and, 1:49 drama and, 1:326 film and, 1:325 Ginsberg, Allen, and, 1:218 MacKinnon, Catharine, and, 2:332 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:336–37, 507 rap music and, 2:456 rock and roll and, 2:476 Roth, Philip, and, 1:324 shock jocks and, 2:517 Supreme Court and, 1:278, 324 Wilson, Edmund, and, 2:618, 619 See also pornography occupational safety, 2:380, 414–15, 612, 613 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 2:380, 397, 414, 613
Ochs, Adolph S., 2:400 Ochs, Phil, 1:83, 121 O’Connor, John D., 1:177 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 1:290; 2:415–16, 459, 473 O’Derek, Keith, 2:604 O’Donnell, Rosie, 1:320 Oestereich v. Selection Board No. 11 (1968), 1:19 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 1:49; 2:535 Of Paradise and Power (Kagan), 1:16 Off with Their Heads (Morris), 2:401 Office for National Service, 1:113 Office of Economic Opportunity, 1:81; 2:594 Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2:593 Ofili, Chris, 2:507 O’Hair, Madalyn Murray, 1:139; 2:416, 495 O’Hair, William, 2:416, 495 Oil for Food scandal, 2:574 oil industry Bush family and, 1:61, 62 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81 corporate welfare and, 1:119 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 environmental movement and, 1:148, 164 forest, parklands, and federal wilderness and, 1:190 global warming and, 1:219 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 Moore, Michael, and, 2:366 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:423 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:428 Saudi Arabia and, 2:488–90 science wars and, 2:499 September 11 and, 2:503 Watt, James, and, 2:604 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609 Oklahoma, University of, 1:252, 276; 2:512 Oklahoma City, Okla., 2:349, 360, 477, 570, 577, 578, 586, 616 Olasky, Marvin, 1:113; 2:463, 625 Older Workers’ Benefit Protection Act (1990), 1:11 Oliphant, 2:428 Olmstead v. United States (1928), 2:443 Olson, Norman, 2:360 “On the Pulse of Morning” (Angelou), 1:25 On the Road (Kerouac), 1:121, 218, 295 On Wings of Eagles (Follett), 2:427 Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 1:194, 294 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 1:121 One Nation After All (Wolfe), 1:268 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 1:162 O’Neill, Paul, 1:48 O’Neill, Thomas P. (Tip), 1:217; 2:592 Ono, Yoko, 2:596 OPEC. See Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 2:525
I-37
Operation Breadbasket, 1:282; 2:514 Operation Rescue, 1:2, 297; 2:418–19, 443, 491 Opie and Anthony, 2:517, 550 Oppenheimer, Julius Robert, 1:254; 2:419–20, 553 Oprah Winfrey Show (TV program), 1:141, 207; 2:619–20 O’Reilly, William James, 1:69, 91, 93, 196, 306; 2:350, 420–21, 465, 504, 539 Orendain, Antonio, 2:359 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 1:73; 2:489 Orientalism (Said), 1:10; 2:486 Origin of Species (Darwin), 1:124 Ornitz, Samuel, 1:257 O’Rourke, P.J., 2:607 Osbourne, Ozzy, 1:246 OSHA. See Occupational Safety and Health Administration Osteen, Joel, 2:553 O’Sullivan, John, 2:391 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 2:600 Other America, The (Harrington), 1:237; 2:608 Our Bodies, Ourselves, 1:121 Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Fukuyama), 1:42 Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (Richburg), 1:11 Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (film), 1:126; 2:351, 376 outing, 1:50, 195, 206, 207, 208, 299, 320; 2:361, 362, 421 OutKast, 2:425 Outland (comic strip), 1:108 Owens, Bill, 1:93 Pachauri, Rajendra K., 1:226 Pacheco, Alex, 2:426 pacifism, pacifists, 1:241, 282, 285; 2:342, 394, 398, 402, 502, 595, 625 See also war protesters Packer, Arnold H., 1:137 Packwood, Robert William, 1:53; 2:422 paganism, 1:84, 121, 171; 2:395, 503 Page, Jim, 1:4 Paglia, Camille Anna, 1:322; 2:362, 422–23 Paideia Project, 1:8, 229 Paigen, Beverly, 1:328 Pakistan, 1:69, 266; 2:378, 409, 503 Palestine, Palestinians, 1:6, 29, 60, 87, 201, 258, 280–81, 293; 2:367, 378, 486, 526, 626 Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Carter), 1:73, 281 Palestinian Liberation Organization, 1:29, 282; 2:489 Palin, Sarah Louise, 1:158; 2:339, 412, 423–24 Palin, Todd, 2:423 Pallone, Dave, 1:208 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 1:262 Pan-Africanism, 1:10; 2:382
I-3 8
Index
Panama, 1:81, 108; 2:425, 493 Panama Canal, 1:73, 216 Panay, USS, 1:107 Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), 1:246; 2:459, 460, 629 Parker, Charlie, 1:295 Parks, Raymond, 2:424 Parks, Rosa Louise, 1:94, 298, 300; 2:362, 383, 424–25, 540, 588 Parran, Thomas, 1:243 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (2003), 1:63; 2:479 Partisan Review, 1:324 Passion of Michel Foucault, The (Miller), 1:192 Passion of the Christ, The (film), 1:214, 215, 314; 2:354 Pat Sajak Show (TV program), 1:323 Pataki, George, 1:93; 2:583 PATCO. See Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization Patrick Henry College, 1:261; 2:544 Patriot movement, 2:359, 365 Patterson, John, 2:588 Patterson, Laslo, 1:31 Patterson, Robert (Buzz), 1:210 Patti, Sandi, 1:117–18 Paul, Alice, 1:164 Paul, Ron, 1:156 Paul VI (Pope), 2:391, 513 PBS. See Public Broadcasting Service Peace Corps, 1:292 Peale, Norman Vincent, 2:532, 557 Pearl Harbor, 1:77, 106, 197 Peck, M. Scott, 2:379 Peckinpah, Sam, 1:325 Peddling Prosperity (Krugman), 1:306; 2:547 Peikoff, Leonard, 2:455 Pelley, William Dudley, 2:615 Peltier, Leonard, 1:23; 2:462 Pendergast, Tom, 2:568 Penis Landscape (painting), 1:42 Penn, Leo, 2:425 Penn, Sean, 2:334, 425–26 Penry, Johnny, 1:71 Penry v. Johnson (2001), 1:71 Penry v. Lynaugh (1989), 1:71 Pentagon, 2:502 See also Defense Department, U.S. Pentagon of Power, The (Mumford), 2:375 Pentagon Papers, 1:322; 2:401, 602, 612 Penthouse magazine, 1:39, 182, 247; 2:436 People for the American Way, 1:92, 171, 251, 290, 316; 2:501, 503, 552, 616 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 1:26, 168, 202; 2:426–27 People of the Lie (Peck), 2:379 People v. Larry Flynt, The (film), 1:182 People’s History of the United States, A (Zinn), 1:121; 2:470, 630–31 People’s Temple, 1:116 Pepper, Claude, 1:113 PepsiCo., 1:283; 2:333, 617 Perdue, Sonny, 1:115 Perfect Candidate, A (film), 2:407
Perkins, Tony, 1:290 Perle, Richard, 1:305; 2:394, 395 Perot, H. Ross, Jr., 2:428 Perot, Henry Ross, 1:96, 220, 221, 323; 2:427–28, 428, 550, 560, 579 Perry, Elizabeth Cheney, 1:81, 82–83, 82 Perry, Phillip, 1:82–83 Perry, Rick, 1:250 personal responsibility, 1:113, 172, 200, 249; 2:496, 558, 583, 608 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), 1:51; 2:508 Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, 2:413 Pesticide Chemical Amendments (1954), 1:185 pesticides, 1:71–72, 80, 132, 148, 162, 185, 328; 2:499 PETA. See People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Peter, Paul, and Mary, 1:121 Petersen, Daniel, 2:365 Peyton Place (Metalious), 1:324 pharmaceutical industry, 1:186, 214, 245; 2:352, 612 Phelps, Fred Waldron, 2:429, 516 Philadelphia, Miss., 1:29, 95, 330; 2:429–30, 478, 614 Philadelphia Plan, 1:9 Philip Morris, 2:520 Philippines, 1:77 Phillips, Howard, 2:560 Phillips, Sam, 2:475 Pierce, William L., 2:349, 477, 616 Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), 1:92 Pietrzykowski, Zbigniew, 1:15 Pinchot, Gifford, 1:189, 190 Pincus, Gregory, 2:431 Pinochet, Augusto, 2:400 Pinsky, Robert, 1:218 Pipes, Daniel, 1:6; 2:344, 430–31 Pipes, Richard Edgar, 1:305; 2:394, 395, 430–31 PIRG. See Public Interest Research Group Piss Christ (artwork), 2:337, 386, 506, 507 Pius XI (Pope), 1:75 Pius XII (Pope), 2:409 Plame, Valerie, 1:78, 82; 2:381, 482, 625 Plan B, 1:187 Planned Parenthood, 1:1, 43, 290; 2:431–32, 443, 508, 509 Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), 2:415, 432 Plantky, Anita, 1:241 Plath, Sylvia, 1:324 Plato, 2:542 Platoon (film), 2:378, 539 Plausible Denial (Lane), 1:116 Playboy magazine, 1:73, 182, 235, 246, 247; 2:332, 368, 436, 512, 578 Pledge of Allegiance. See flag pledging Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 1:53, 54, 94, 289; 2:464, 599 Plimpton, George, 2:385 PMRC. See Parents’ Music Resource Center Podhoretz, John, 2:394
Podhoretz, Norman, 1:218, 295; 2:334, 394, 395, 432, 432–33, 541 Pogo (comic strip), 1:107, 108 Poindexter, John, 1:278, 279; 2:406 Poitier, Sidney, 1:325 Poland, 1:28, 74, 134, 231; 2:525 police Battle of Seattle and, 1:37–38, 220 civil rights movement and, 1:94, 95, 300 comic books and, 1:106 gangs and, 1:203, 204 graffiti and, 1:227 hate crimes and, 1:240 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 homosexuals and, 1:206; 2:513, 540, 568 Miranda rights and, 2:363–64, 600 New Left and, 2:399 O.J. Simpson trial and, 2:418 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411 racial profiling and, 2:453–54 rap music and, 2:456 right to counsel and, 2:471 September 11 and, 2:503 sex offenders and, 2:510 toy guns and, 2:598 vigilantism and, 1:231 war protesters and, 1:267; 2:596 Zappa, Frank, and, 2:629 See also Los Angeles Police Department; New York Police Department police abuse, 1:44, 45, 94, 95, 300, 301–2; 2:384, 399, 426, 433–34, 455, 485, 514, 583, 584, 588, 596, 604 political correctness, 2:434–36 Afrocentrism and, 1:11 blackface and, 1:46 censorship and, 1:77 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:82 Christmas and, 1:91 Columbus Day and, 1:105 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:143 Enola Gay exhibit and, 1:161 FDR memorial and, 1:197 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 gender-inclusive language and, 1:210 Hillsdale College and, 1:253 Indian sport mascots and, 1:276 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:280 Kwanzaa and, 1:308 multiculturalism and ethnic studies and, 2:374 revisionist history and, 1:105, 161; 2:435–36, 470 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 September 11 Memorial and, 2:506 Sowell, Thomas, and, 2:529, 530 speech codes and, 2:530 Summers, Lawrence, and, 2:546 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Washington Times and, 2:602 Watt, James, and, 2:603 West, Cornel, and, 2:611 White, Reggie, and, 2:613 Wolfe, Tom, and, 2:622 women’s studies and, 2:623 zero tolerance and, 2:630
Index Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company (1895), 2:551 pollution, 1:59–60, 82, 148, 149, 162, 163, 169, 190; 2:380 Pombo, Richard, 1:190 Poole, Robert W., Jr., 2:444 Popper, Karl, 2:525 Popular Front, 1:241; 2:343, 419 populism, 1:108, 250, 267; 2:364, 366, 385, 393, 427, 449, 462, 469, 488, 560, 569, 588, 609 pornography, 1:19, 88, 136, 138, 146, 171, 172, 182, 183, 247, 278, 304, 325; 2:332, 333, 336, 355, 368, 386, 422, 431, 436–38, 437, 459, 460, 469, 490, 509, 510, 512, 513, 526, 534, 553, 599, 617, 629 See also obscenity Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Dworkin), 1:146 Port Huron Statement, 1:237, 242; 2:399, 545 Posner, Richard A., 1:232; 2:332 Posse Comitatus, 1:31; 2:360, 365, 615 Postal Service, U.S., 2:592 postcolonialism, 1:10, 178, 325; 2:452 Postmaster General, Office of, 1:174 Postmodern Condition, The: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard), 2:438 postmodernism, 1:10, 81, 104, 131, 132, 194, 229, 261, 271, 325; 2:351, 438–39, 470, 500, 524 Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson), 2:438 Potsdam Conference, 1:100 Potsdam Declaration, 1:254 Potter, Andre, 1:128 Potter, Paul, 2:399 poverty AIDS and, 1:13 Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 Biafra, Jello, and, 1:41 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Bono and, 1:48 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Bush, Prescott, and, 1:61 capital punishment and, 2:484 Catholic Church and, 1:75 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113, 114 crime and, 1:231 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and, 1:152 evangelicalism and, 1:166 free-market system and, 1:172 globalization and, 1:220 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 illegal immigrants and, 1:272 immigration policy and, 1:274 Indian casinos and, 1:275 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:299, 300
poverty (continued) Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 Muslim Americans and, 2:377 NAACP and, 2:384 New Left and, 2:399 New Right and, 2:451 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411 obesity and, 2:413, 414 privatization and, 2:445 racial profiling and, 2:454 “rednecks” and, 2:462 right to counsel and, 2:472 right to die and, 2:473 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, and, 1:196 Sanger, Margaret, and, 2:431 Sharpton, Al, and, 2:514 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 Sider, Ron, and, 2:518 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:532 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 voting rights and, 2:585 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 War on Drugs and, 2:593 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 Watts and Los Angeles riots and, 2:604, 605 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609 World Council of Churches and, 2:625 See also War on Poverty; wealth gap; welfare Powdermaker, Hortense, 1:325 Powell, Colin, 1:82, 97, 209, 210; 2:395, 412, 625 Powell, Laurence, 1:301, 302 Powell v. Alabama (1932), 2:471 Powers, Richard Gid, 1:263 Pratt, Larry, 2:360 premillennial dispensationalism, 1:165, 201, 281; 2:367, 439–40, 586 Prescription Drug User Fee Act (1992), 1:186 presidential pardons, 1:62, 73, 176, 188, 279, 322; 2:405, 440–41, 603 Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act (1974), 1:198 Presidential Records Act (1978), 1:198 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 2:508 Presley, Elvis, 2:475, 512 Presley, Lisa Marie, 1:283 Pressler, Larry, 2:390, 448 Prevention First Act (2005), 1:98 Price, George Macready, 1:124 Priest (film), 1:325; 2:592 Prince, 2:459 Prince, Virginia, 2:568 Prince Valiant (comic strip), 1:107 Princeton Theological Seminary, 1:200; 2:490 Printz v. United States (1997), 1:232 prison reform, 1:45, 104, 145, 216, 264–65; 2:441–43, 446, 469, 499, 559, 561, 592 prisoner abuse, 1:3–4, 78, 82; 2:378, 379, 420
I-3 9
Prisoner of Sex, The (Mailer), 2:335, 362, 578 prisoners of war, 1:4; 2:339, 505 prisons CIA, 1:4, 78; 2:613 gangs and, 1:204 Nation of Islam and, 2:382 U.S. military, 1:3–4; 2:378, 505 War on Drugs and, 2:593 privacy rights, 1:19, 44, 140, 142, 143, 260, 278, 288, 289; 2:431, 443–44, 479, 504, 509, 523, 574, 600 Private Wants, Public Means (Tullock), 2:444 privatization, 1:198, 216, 217; 2:385, 397, 420, 444–45, 447, 461, 481, 498, 522, 523, 528, 559 Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (Chilton), 2:518 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), 1:312 Professors, The: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Horowitz), 1:264; 2:344 Progressive Christians Uniting, 2:445–46 Progressive magazine, 1:152, 310 Progressive Party, 1:101, 111, 310; 2:488, 560 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), 1:16–17, 82, 103; 2:395, 558, 607 Promise Keepers, 1:183; 2:355, 356, 446, 446–47 prostitution, 1:181–82, 195; 2:332, 422, 423, 437, 524 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (2005), 1:233; 2:391 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1:281 Proxmire, William, 2:612 PTL ministry, 1:171; 2:552, 553 Public Broadcasting Act (1967), 2:447 Public Broadcasting Financing Act (1975), 2:448 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1:41, 57, 200, 224, 279, 280; 2:354, 364, 377, 387, 388, 447–48, 484, 489, 616 Public Burning, The (Coover), 2:480 Public Citizen, 2:352, 380 Public Enemy (film), 1:204 public health, 1:142, 233; 2:344, 413, 442, 525, 592, 607 Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), 1:214; 2:380 Publishers Weekly, 1:49; 2:539 Puerto Ricans, 1:255, 256; 2:399 Puerto Rico, 1:231 Pulitzer Prize, 1:64, 70, 108, 216, 235, 264, 307; 2:334, 335, 369, 378, 400, 401, 493, 535, 556, 617, 624 Pulp Fiction (film), 2:592 punk rock, 1:41; 2:449–50, 476 Puritans, 1:21, 192; 2:492 Purple Rain (album), 2:459 Purpose-Driven Life, The: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Warren), 2:601 “push polling,” 2:481 Putin, Vladimir, 1:52; 2:528, 529 Pyne, Joe, 2:549
I-4 0
Index
Qatanani, Mohammad, 2:378 Quakers, 1:192; 2:618 Quayle, John Danforth, 1:27, 32, 61, 172, 305; 2:423, 451, 629 queer theory, 1:192; 2:577 Quindlen, Anna, 1:36 Quinlan, Karen Ann, 2:472–73 Quintero, Angel, 1:114 R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, 1:77; 2:520 Rabe, David, 1:326 race, racism, 2:452–53 affirmative action and, 1:8–10 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:15 American Indian Movement and, 1:23 Aryan Nations and, 1:31 Atwater, Lee, and, 1:32 Barbie and, 1:37 beauty pageants and, 1:39 Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 birth control and, 2:431 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 blackface and, 1:46 Brown v. Board of Education and, 1:53–54 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 capital punishment and, 1:69, 70–71; 2:484 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Clarence Thomas hearings and, 1:62; 2:561 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:98 comic strips and, 1:107, 108 conspiracy theories and, 1:116–17 crime and, 1:231 Democratic Party and, 1:135–36 diversity training and, 1:137, 138 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:143–44 DuBois, W.E.B., and, 1:144 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 Duke, David, and, 1:145–46 Dylan, Bob, and, 1:147 Earth Day and, 1:148 education reform and, 1:150 environmental, 1:45, 59–60 film and, 1:325 gangs and, 1:203–4 gay rights and, 1:206, 207 Goetz, Bernard, and, 1:222–23 Great Books and, 1:8 Haley, Alex, and, 1:235 hate crimes and, 1:239, 240; 2:564–65, 614 heavy metal and, 1:246 Hillsdale College and, 1:253 Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, 1:254 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 homeschooling and, 1:260 hooks, bell, and, 1:261–62 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262 Horton, Willie, and, 1:264–65 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270, 270 immigration and, 1, 273, 1:274 Indian sport mascots and, 1:276 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and, 1:277
race, racism (continued) Islam and, 2:486 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:299–300 La Raza Unida and, 1:310 labor unions and, 1:312 Lee, Spike, and, 1:317–18, 318 lesbians and, 1:321 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:324 literature and, 1:324 marriage and, 1:328–29 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:347 militia movement and, 2:359–60, 482 Millennial Generation and, 1:213 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 multiculturalism and ethnic studies and, 2:373–74 NAACP and, 2:383–84 Nation, The, and, 2:381 New Left and, 2:399 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404 NOW and, 2:389 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411–12, 453 obesity and, 2:413 Pipes, Daniel, and, 2:431 police abuse and, 2:433 police and, 1:301–2 political correctness and, 2:434–36 postmodernism and, 2:438 prison reform and, 2:442 Promise Keepers and, 2:446, 447 public television and, 2:448 rap music and, 2:455, 456 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 revisionist history and, 1:10, 133; 2:452, 470, 471 rioting and, 1:301 rock and roll and, 2:475, 476 school busing and, 1:64–65 school vouchers and, 1:384; 2:498 September 11 Memorial and, 2:506 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 shock jocks and, 2:517 Sider, Ron, and, 2:518 “Silent Majority” and, 2:519 Simpsons, The, and, 2:519 social theory on, 1:268 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Sowell, Thomas, and, 2:529–30 speech codes and, 2:530–31 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 structuralism and, 2:542 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:555, 556 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:563, 564 United Nations and, 2:573 vigilantism and, 2:582 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 War on Drugs and, 2:593 War on Poverty and, 2:594 Watts and Los Angeles riots and, 2:604–5 wealth gap and, 2:607 welfare and, 2:608 West, Cornel, and, 2:610, 610 White, Reggie, and, 2:613
race, racism (continued) Winfrey, Oprah, and, 2:620 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 zero tolerance and, 2:630 See also African Americans; civil rights; discrimination; white supremacists Race Matters (West), 1:252; 2:610 racial profiling, 1:301–2; 2:378, 384, 433, 442, 453–54 Radical Reformation, 1:241 Radicalesbians, 1:320; 2:516 radio, 2:348, 376, 387, 416, 447, 556, 619, 628 See also Christian radio; National Public Radio; talk radio Radio Act (1927), 1:174 Radio America, 1:322; 2:407 Radio Communications Act (1912), 1:174 Radosh, Ronald, 2:480 Radulovich, Milo, 2:376–77 Rainbow Coalition, 1:282; 2:456, 514 Raines, Howell, 2:401 Rambo series (films), 2:581, 583, 598 Ramones, 2:449 Ramparts magazine, 1:121, 264 Ramsey, JonBenét, 1:39 Rand, Ayn, 1:58; 2:454–55 Randall v. Orange County Council, Boy Scouts of America (1998), 1:50 Randolph, A. Philip, 1:8 rap music, 1:173, 203, 204, 324; 2:382, 425, 455–56, 476, 602 rape. See sexual assault Rashid, Ahmed, 2:504 Rasul v. Bush (2004), 1:4 Rather, Daniel Irvin, 1:3; 2:351, 456–57, 457, 497 Ratzinger, Joseph, 2:465 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), 2:531 Ray, James Earl, 1:300 Ray, Nicholas, 1:130 Ray family, 1:13–14 Raymond, Henry J., 2:400 Raymond, Lee R., 1:167 Reader’s Digest magazine, 1:78, 265 Reagan, Maureen, 2:459 Reagan, Nancy, 2:397, 427, 458, 537, 593 Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 2:458–59 affirmative action and, 1:9 AIDS and, 1:14 American Century and, 1:16 American exceptionalism and, 1:22 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 approval ratings and, 1:100 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Brady, James, and, 1:232; 2:391 Brokaw, Tom, and, 1:52 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:57, 58 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73; 2:560 Chambers, Whittaker, and, 1:79 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:81 China and, 1:85 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Cold War and, 1:102, 103 communism and, 1:112 counterculture and, 1:122
Index Reagan, Ronald Wilson (continued) creationism and, 1:124 Democratic Party and, 1:136 drug testing and, 1:142 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:143 ecoterrorism and, 1:149 education reform and, 1:150–51 evangelicalism and, 1:166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171; 2:552 FCC and, 1:175; 2:598 FDA and, 1:186 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 Felt, W. Mark, and, 1:176 flag desecration and, 1:181 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:188 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:198 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223, 224 Great Society and, 1:230 gun control and, 1:232 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249 Iran-Contra affair and, 1:279 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279 Israel and, 1:280 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287; 2:594 judicial wars and, 1:290 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 labor unions and, 1:312 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322, 323 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 Marxism and, 2:338 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 Medved, Michael, and, 2:354 Mondale, Walter, and, 2:364 Moral Majority and, 2:367 Mothers Against Drunk Driving and, 2:369, 370 NAACP and, 2:384 Nation, The, and, 2:381 national drinking age and, 1:33 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:385, 387 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:387 National Review and, 2:391 neoconservatism and, 2:395 New Deal and, 2:397 New Left and, 2:399 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405 Norquist, Grover, and, 2:406 North, Oliver, and, 2:407 nuclear age and, 2:409 O’Connor, Sandra Day, and, 2:415 Philadelphia, Miss., and, 2:429–30 Pipes, Richard, and, 2:430 presidential pardons and, 1:176; 2:440, 441 privatization and, 2:444 Rand, Ayn, and, 2:455 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 Religious Right and, 1:2; 2:466
Reagan, Ronald Wilson (continued) Republican Party and, 2:469 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 Rusher, William A., and, 2:484 school prayer and, 2:496 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:498 sex education and, 2:508 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 Soviet Union and, 2:528 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:476, 532 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 1:102; 2:409, 459, 499, 528, 540, 541, 553, 554 student protests and, 2:374 supply-side economics and, 2:547 tax reform and, 1:174; 2:458, 459, 547, 551 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 think tanks and, 2:559 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:571 Vietnam War and, 2:581 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Washington Times and, 2:602 welfare and, 2:608 Will, George, and, 2:617 Williams, William Appleman, and, 2:618 Reagan administration, 1:56, 62, 108, 109, 151, 217, 218, 247, 278–79, 304, 305, 306, 307; 2:372, 391, 406, 409, 414, 436, 466, 476, 489, 499, 522, 533, 556, 559, 579, 603, 605 Reagan Revolution, 1:61–62; 2:380, 395, 445, 449 Real Anita Hill, The: The Untold Story (Brock), 1:51, 252 Rebel Without a Cause (film), 1:130, 295 Reconstruction, 2:468, 614 record warning labels, 1:225, 246; 2:456, 459–60, 476, 590, 629 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 1:76; 2:459, 460 Rector, Robert, 1:250 red and blue states, 1:51, 70, 155, 217; 2:393, 412, 423, 460–61, 462, 557, 590 Red Dawn (film), 2:581 Red Lion Broadcasting Company v. Federal Communications Commission (1969), 1:175 Red Nightmare (film), 2:527 Red Scare, 1:27, 58, 101, 174–75, 205, 236, 262, 310; 2:338, 341, 342, 343, 376, 377, 527, 549 See also McCarthyism Redford, Charles Robert, Jr., 1:326; 2:461–62, 624 Rediscovering God in America (Gingrich), 1:20, 217 redistricting, 1:86; 2:452, 464, 561, 584, 600 redneck, 2:462–63 Redneck Manifesto, The (Goad), 2:462 Reds (film), 1:112 Reds Promote the Racial War (Goff), 1:116 Redstockings, 1:178; 2:536 Reece, B. Carroll, 1:303
I-41
Reed, John, 1:112; 2:527 Reed, Ralph Eugene, 1:88; 2:463, 463–64, 466, 474 Reeve, Christopher, 2:537 Reflections on Big Science (Weinberg), 2:408 Reform Party, 1:56, 220; 2:381, 428, 560, 576 Regas, George, 2:445 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), 1:9, 10 Regnery, Alfred, 1:302 regulation, government Contract with America and, 1:118 corporate welfare and, 1:119 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Endangered Species Act and, 1:160 FCC and, 1:77, 174–76; 2:517, 538, 598 FDA and, 1:185–87 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 Galbraith, John Kenneth, and, 1:203 global warming and, 1:218, 219 globalization and, 1:220, 221 Krugman, Paul, and, 1:306 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:308–9 Obama, Barack, and, 2:412 occupational safety and, 2:414–15 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 red and blue states and, 2:461 science and, 2:499 think tanks and, 2:559 whistleblowers and, 2:613 Will, George, and, 2:617 Rehabilitation Act (1973), 1:11, 24 Rehm, Diane, 2:550 Rehnquist, William Hubbs, 1:290; 2:364, 405, 415, 416, 464–65, 471, 479 Reisman, Judith, 1:303 relativism, moral, 2:465 Adler, Mortimer, and, 1:8 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56 Cheney, Lynne, and, 1:82 counterculture and, 1:122 deconstructionism and, 1:131 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 homeschooling and, 1:260 Kristol, Bill, and, 1:305 multiculturalism and, 2:452 New Age movement and, 2:396 political correctness and, 2:435 postmodernism and, 2:438 revisionist history and, 2:470 secular humanism and, 2:501 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 West, Cornel, and, 2:611 religious fundamentalism. See fundamentalism, religious Religious Right, 2:466–67, 611 abortion and, 1:2; 2:443 ACLU and, 1:18–19 American civil religion and, 1:20 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 book banning and, 1:49 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56
I-42
Index
Religious Right (continued) Bush, George W., and, 1:63 Campolo, Anthony “Tony,” and, 1:68 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Catholic Church and, 1:74 censorship and, 1:77 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Christian reconstructionism and, 1:90 Christmas and, 1:91 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 communism and, 1:110 compassionate conservatism and, 1:114 counterculture and, 1:122 Dean, Howard, and, 1:129 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Dobson, James, and, 1:138–39 drama and, 1:326 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:170–71, 170 Focus on the Family and, 1:183–84 Founding Fathers and, 1:192, 193 gay rights and, 1:55, 205 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227, 228 homeschooling and, 1:260 Hunter, James Davison, and, 1:268 Israel and, 1:281 Jesus People and, 1:286 John Birch Society and, 1:286 judicial wars and, 1:290 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 LaHaye, Tim and Beverly, and, 1:313–14, 313 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 MacKinnon, Catharine, and, 2:332 McCain, John, and, 2:339 Medved, Michael, and, 2:354 Moral Majority and, 2:367–68 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386 O’Hair, Madalyn Murray, and, 2:416 Operation Rescue and, 2:418 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:412, 423 pornography and, 2:436, 513 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:439 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:445 Promise Keepers and, 2:447 Rand, Ayn, and, 2:455 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474–75, 475 Rove, Karl, and, 2:480 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 Schaeffer, Francis, and, 2:490 school prayer and, 2:494, 496 science wars and, 2:499, 500 secular humanism and, 2:501 September 11 and, 2:504 sex education and, 2:507, 508, 509 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:525 Soviet Union and, 2:527
Religious Right (continued) televangelism and, 2:552 Ten Commandments and, 2:554, 554, 555 United Nations and, 2:573 Voegelin, Eric, and, 2:584 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 White, Reggie, and, 2:613 Wolf, Naomi, and, 2:621 World magazine and, 2:625 See also evangelicalism; fundamentalism, religious Religious Right, The: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America (AntiDefamation League), 1:314 Renewing American Compassion (Olasky), 1:114 Reno, Janet, 1:97, 224; 2:586 reparations, Japanese internment, 2:467–68, 599 Republican National Convention of 1984, 1:180 Republican National Convention of 2004; 2:433 Republican Party, U.S., 2:468–70 abortion and, 1:1, 2, 68 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 American Century and, 1:16 Atwater, Lee, and, 1:31–32, 32 Brock, David, and, 1:51, 252; 2:561 Buchanan, Pat, and, 1:56–57, 56 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bush family and, 61–64 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 campaign finance reform and, 1:67 Cheney family and, 1:82 China and, 1:85 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Clinton impeachment and, 1:99, 100; 2:533, 603 Cold War and, 1:101, 102, 103 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 communism and, 1:110, 111 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113, 114 Confederate flag and, 1:115 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 Contract with America and, 1:118, 118 Cuba and, 1:127 Cuban Americans and, 1:224 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:135–36 Dobson, James, and, 1:139 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 Drudge Report and, 1:142 Duke, David, and, 2:614 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 Election of 2000 and, 1:153–55; 2:380 Election of 2008 and, 1:156–57, 157, 158–59 Enola Gay exhibit and, 1:161 environmental movement and, 1:163–64
Republican Party, U.S. (continued) evangelicalism and, 1:166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:170; 2:552 FCC and, 1:175 FDA and, 1:186–87 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 feminism and, 1:178 Ferraro, Geraldine, and, 1:180 flag desecration and, 1:181 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:187–88 Fox News and, 2:420 Frank, Barney, and, 1:195 Freedom of Information Act and, 1:197 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 gay rights and, 1:207 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216, 216, 217 global warming and, 1:219 globalization and, 1:220 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223, 223, 224 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227–28 gun control and, 1:233 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 health care and, 1:243, 245 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249 Hill, Anita, and, 1:252 Hispanic Americans and, 1:311 homeschooling and, 1:261 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:263 Horton, Willie, and, 1:264–65 HUAC and, 1:342 illegal immigrants and, 1:272 Israel and, 1:281 judicial wars and, 1:290 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 La Follette, Robert, Jr., and, 1:310 LaHaye, Tim, and, 1:314 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:323; 2:550 Lott, Trent, and, 1:326, 327 lynching and, 1:331; 2:430 McCain, John, and, 2:339–40 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341 McCarthyism and, 2:343–44 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 medical marijuana and, 2:353 Million Man March and, 2:363 Moore, Michael, and, 2:365 Moore, Roy S., and, 2:366 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:337, 385, 386, 386, 387 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:387, 388 National Review and, 2:391 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:393 neoconservatism and, 2:394, 395 New Deal and, 2:397 New Left and, 2:399 New York Times and, 2:400, 401 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403–4, 404, 405 North, Oliver, and, 2:407
Index Republican Party, U.S. (continued) NOW and, 2:389 NPR and, 2:390 NRA and, 2:391 nuclear age and, 2:409 Obama, Barack, and, 2:412 O’Connor, Sandra Day, and, 2:415–16 Packwood, Bob, and, 2:422 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:423–24 PBS and, 2:448 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 presidential pardons and, 2:441 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458–59 red and blue states and, 2:460 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464, 465 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Religious Right and, 1:68; 2:466 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 Rove, Karl, and, 2:480–82, 481 Rudolph, Eric, and, 2:483 Rusher, William A., and, 2:484 Russia and, 2:529 Ryan, George, and, 2:484 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488 Schlafly, Phyllis, and, 2:492 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:498, 499 science wars and, 2:499, 500 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 speech codes and, 2:530 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:476, 532 Stewart, Jon, and, 2:539 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 third parties and, 2:559–60 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:563–64, 564 tort reform and, 2:566 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:570 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:575 Voting Rights Act and, 2:585 War on Poverty and, 2:594 war protesters and, 2:578, 579 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599, 600 Watergate and, 2:602, 603 Wayne, John, and, 2:605, 605 Weekly Standard and, 2:607 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:610 Will, George, and, 2:617 Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act (2007), 2:429 Responsible Education About Life Act, 2:508 Restructuring of American Religion, The (Wuthnow), 1:268 Reuther, Walter, 1:244 revisionist history, 2:470–71 Afrocentrism and, 1:10 Cold War and, 1:102–3 Columbus Day and, 1:105 communism and, 1:110, 112 counterculture and, 1:121 Enola Gay exhibit and, 1:161 Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, 1:254; 2:569
revisionist history (continued) Holocaust and, 1:134, 258, 259; 2:471 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341, 342 militia movement and, 2:359 Native Americans and, 1:133 political correctness and, 1:105, 161; 2:435–36, 470 postmodernism and, 2:438 race and, 1:10, 133; 2:452, 470, 471 Thanksgiving Day and, 2:556 Truman, Harry S., and, 1:254; 2:569 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:578 Vietnam War and, 2:581 Williams, William Appleman, and, 1:102; 2:618 Zinn, Howard, and, 1:121; 2:470, 471, 630–31 Revolutionary War, U.S., 1:165, 192; 2:359 Reynolds, Earle, 2:409 Rhodes, Randi, 2:550 Rhyme Pays (album), 2:456 RIAA. See Recording Industry Association of America Ribicoff, Abraham, 1:28 Rice, Condoleezza, 1:17, 323; 2:373 Rice, Donna, 1:238 Rich, Adrienne, 1:320 Rich, Marc and Denise, 2:441 Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Sider), 2:518 Richards, Amy, 1:179 Richards, Ann, 1:62; 2:481 Richardson, Bill, 1:157 Richardson, Elliot, 1:12 Richburg, Keith, 1:11 Ridenhour, Ronald L., 2:379 Rifkin, Jeremy, 1:43 Riggs, Bobby, 1:299 right to counsel, 2:363, 471–72 right to die, 1:63, 76, 265, 297–98; 2:407, 472–74, 490–92, 491, 500, 525, 526 See also Schiavo, Terri Rigoletto (opera), 2:386 Ritchie, Guy, 2:333, 334 Ritzer, George, 1:221 Rivera, Geraldo, 2:616 RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, 2:379, 405 Robb, Charles, 2:407, 623 Roberts, John, Jr., 1:290; 2:391, 416 Roberts, Oral, 1:108 Robertson, Marion Gordon “Pat,” 2:466–67, 474–75, 475 ACLU and, 1:18, 19 capital punishment and, 1:62 Christian Coalition and, 1:88–89 Colson, Chuck, and, 1:104 comic strips and, 1:108 evangelicalism and, 1:166 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 Founding Fathers and, 1:193 judicial wars and, 1:290 Lapin, Daniel, and, 1:314 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 McCain, John, and, 2:339 Moral Majority and, 2:368
I-43
Robertson, Marion Gordon “Pat” (continued) National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:386 Progressive Christians Uniting and, 2:445 Reed, Ralph, and, 2:463 Republican Party and, 2:469 revisionist history and, 2:470 same-sex marriage and, 2:487 secular humanism and, 2:501 September 11 terrorist attacks and, 1:184 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 televangelism and, 2:552–53 United Nations and, 2:573 Robeson, Paul, 2:383 Robison, James, 2:467 rock and roll, 1:24–25, 84, 147, 171, 183, 236, 245–46, 283, 285–86; 2:332–34, 336, 348, 449, 459–60, 475–77, 512, 596, 628, 629 Rock and Roll: The Devil’s Diversion (Larson), 2:476 Rockefeller, Nelson, 1:188 Rockefeller Foundation, 1:302, 303 Rockwell, George Lincoln, 1:28; 2:477, 615 Rockwell, Norman, 2:477–78, 557 Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (TV program), 2:528 Rodman, Dennis Keith, 2:478–79 Rodriguez, Michelle, 1:25 Rodriguez, Richard, 2:373 Roe v. Wade (1973), 1:1–2, 19, 68, 75, 140, 165, 171–72, 177, 199, 212, 289, 316; 2:416, 418, 431, 443, 464, 466, 479–80, 523, 526, 544, 561, 587 Roemer, Buddy, 1:146 Rogers, Michael, 2:421 Rohrabacher, Dana, 2:386 Rolling Stone magazine, 1:121, 147; 2:336, 398, 562 Rolling Stones, 1:24 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Romney, Mitt, 1:156 Ronstadt, Linda, 2:366 Rooney, Andy, 2:457 Roosevelt, Ann, 1:196 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1:110, 165, 197, 258, 265 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano affirmative action and, 1:8 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 anti-Semitism and, 1:28 arts funding and, 2:385 Brown Scare and, 2:342 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 Cold War and, 1:100, 102–3 comic strips and, 1:107 communism and, 1:111–12 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 Four Freedoms and, 2:477 Hiss, Alger, and, 1:79, 103, 256 Holocaust and, 1:258 human rights and, 1:265
I-4 4
Index
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (continued) Japanese internment and, 2:467 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Kennedy, Joe, and, 1:292 memorial to, 1:196–97, 196 New Deal and, 2:397 Rusher, William A., and, 2:483 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Social Security and, 2:521 Soviet Union and, 2:527 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 Thanksgiving Day and, 2:557 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:568, 569 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:400, 570 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599 welfare and, 2:608 Roosevelt, James, 1:196 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1:185, 189; 2:428, 534 Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Haley), 1:235 Roots (miniseries), 1:25, 235 “Roots of Muslim Rage, The” (Lewis), 2:504 Roper v. Simmons (2005), 1:71 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 1:112, 140, 308; 2:343, 381, 408, 480 Rosenberg, Susan, 1:93 Rosenberg Files, The (Radosh and Milton), 2:480 Rosenstein, Jay, 1:276 Rosenthal, A.M., 1:280; 2:602 Rosenthal, Joe, 2:506 Roswell, N. Mex., 1:116 Roth, Lawrence, 2:495 Roth, Philip, 1:324 Roth v. United States (1957), 1:324; 2:436 Rouche, George C., III, 1:253 Roush, Patricia, 2:489 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1:20 Rove, Karl Christian, 1:31, 217, 250; 2:480–82, 481 Rowley, Coleen, 2:612 Royko, Mike, 1:282 RU-486, 1:63 Rubin, Jerry, 1:83, 121, 257; 2:553, 596 Ruby Ridge incident, 1:116; 2:360, 365, 482–83, 578 Rudd, Mark, 2:545 Rudolph, Eric Robert, 2:483 Rumsfeld, Donald, 1:3, 4, 16, 81, 82, 197, 323; 2:405, 558 Rush, Bobby, 2:411 Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations (Franken), 1:195, 323 Rush to Judgment (Lane), 1:116 Rushdie, Salman, 2:430 Rushdoony, Rousas J., 1:90; 2:555 Rusher, William A., 1:57; 2:483–84, 543 Russell, Bertrand, 2:409 Russell, Charles Taze, 1:285 Russert, Tim, 1:52 Russia, 1:28, 204, 266; 2:410, 430, 515, 526–29, 546, 573 See also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 1:112; 2:400
Russians Are Coming!, The Russians Are Coming!, The (film), 2:528 Rutherford, Joseph Franklin, 1:285 Rutten, Tim, 2:550 Ryan, George Homer, 1:71; 2:434, 484–85 Ryan, Leo, 1:116 Sabath, Adolph, 2:570 Sadat, Anwar, 2:405 SADD. See Students Against Drunk Driving Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act (1994), 2:629 Safire, William, 1:12; 2:372 Sagan, Carl, 2:396 Sahl, Mort, 2:549 Said, Edward Wadie, 1:10, 269, 321; 2:381, 486 St. Florian, Friedrich, 2:626 Saint Foucault (Halperin), 1:192 Salem Communications, 1:89, 90 Salisbury, Harrison E., Jr., 2:401 SALT, 1:102; 2:405, 409 SALT II, 1:73; 2:409 same-sex marriage, 1:63, 68, 75, 76, 83, 129, 138, 165, 205, 206, 208, 268, 296, 298; 2:339, 420, 421, 428, 447, 461, 486–88, 518, 524, 526, 601, 625 Samuel K. Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association et al. (1989), 1:143 Samuelson, Robert, 2:385 San Diego State University, 2:374, 623 San Francisco State College, 2:374 San Quentin Prison, 1:204, 257 Sanchez, George I., 1:310 Sand County Almanac, A (Leopold), 1:162, 319 Sanders, Bernard, 2:488, 488 Sandinistas, 1:278; 2:388, 406, 524 Sandlin, Andrew, 1:90 SANE. See National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy Sanger, Margaret, 1:43; 2:431 Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), 2:496 Santorum, Rick, 1:98, 172; 2:623 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), 2:612 Sarbin, Theodore R., 1:209 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 2:430 Saturday Evening Post magazine, 2:477, 478 Saturday Night Live (TV program), 1:195; 2:424, 617 Saturday Review, 2:408, 409, 595 Saudi Arabia, 1:69, 266; 2:488–90, 503, 505 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 2:542 Savage, Michael, 1:142; 2:550 savings and loan crisis, 1:119; 2:339 Savio, Mario, 1:121 Sayers, Frances Clarke, 2:591 Scaife, Richard Mellon, 1:99, 249 Scalia, Antonin, 2:444, 487, 524, 561 Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, The (Noll), 2:500 Schaeffer, Francis August, 1:171, 304; 2:347, 467, 490
Schell, Paul, 1:38, 51 Schempp, Ellery Frank, 2:495 Schiavo, Michael, 2:490, 491 Schiavo, Terri, 1:63, 132, 215, 314; 2:407, 473, 490–92, 491 Schick v. Reed (1974), 2:440 Schindler, Mary and Robert, 2:490, 491 Schlafly, Fred, Jr., 2:492 Schlafly, Phyllis McAlpin Stewart, 1:116, 165, 178; 2:373, 389, 421, 484, 492 Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr., 1:212 Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr., 1:102, 109, 212; 2:403, 435, 436, 492–93, 539, 580, 618 Schlesinger, James, 1:3 Schlessinger, Laura, 2:550 Schlosser, Eric, 1:168 Schmitt, Carl, 2:394 Schmitz, John, 2:560 School of the Americas, 2:493–94 School Daze (film), 1:317 School District v. Gobitis (1941), 1:92 school prayer, 1:18, 41, 62, 74, 77, 88, 92, 136, 166, 171, 236, 268, 288–89; 2:367, 368, 416, 445, 463, 466, 469, 474, 494–96, 497, 508, 526, 600 school shootings, 1:69, 132, 246, 260; 2:336, 366, 392, 496–97, 555, 630 school vouchers, 1:41, 62, 92, 170, 200, 250; 2:384, 444, 463, 497–98, 526, 558 School-to-Work Opportunities Act (1994), 1:151 schools, private and parochial, 1:47, 73, 74, 92, 150, 170, 236, 250, 260; 2:444, 466, 497–98 Schrock, Edward, 2:421 Schultz, Ed, 2:550 Schuster, Sharon, 1:37 Schwartz, Sherwood, 1:176 Schwarzenegger, Arnold Alois, 1:275; 2:498–99, 576 Schweitzer, Leroy M., 2:365 Schwerner, Michael, 1:29, 330; 2:429, 430 science education and, 1:37, 101, 124; 2:466 nuclear age and, 2:408 postmodernism and, 2:438, 524 red and blue states and, 2:461 secular humanism and, 2:501 sex education and, 2:508 Strauss, Leo, and, 2:542 Summers, Lawrence, and, 2:546 See also technology science wars, 2:499–501 creationism and intelligent design and, 1:123–26 environmental movement and, 1:71–72, 163 global warming and, 1:218–19, 221 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:308–9 smoking and, 2:520–21 stem-cell research and, 2:536–38 SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership Conference Scofield, Cyrus, 1:201
Index Scopes “Monkey” Trial, 1:18, 47, 124, 165, 201; 2:552 Scorsese, Martin, 1:325; 2:539 Scott, Adrian, 1:257 Scott, Eugenie, 1:124 Scott, H. Lee, Jr., 2:590 Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 2:458 Screw magazine, 1:139; 2:512 Scruggs, Jan, 2:579 Scruggs, Richard F., Jr., 1:327 SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative SDS. See Students for a Democratic Society Sea Inside, The (film), 2:407 Seale, Robert, 1:44, 83–84 Seattle, Battle of, 1:37–38, 220, 303 SEC. See Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S Second Amendment, 1:116, 231–32; 2:359, 391, 561 secular humanism, 1:8, 42, 43, 90, 91, 110, 132, 166, 201, 228, 253, 260; 2:373, 402, 467, 474, 490, 500, 501–2, 504, 552 Secure Fence Act (2006), 1:272 Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. (SEC), 1:167, 171 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 1:192 Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham), 1:106 See It Now (TV program), 2:341, 344, 376 Seeger, Peter R., 1:83, 233, 234; 2:502, 532, 596 segregation abolition and, 2:452 Bob Jones University and, 1:47 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 civil rights movement and, 1:93–94, 95 comic books and, 1:106 communism and, 1:110, 111 Confederate flag and, 1:115 Democratic Party and, 1:136 disability and, 1:276–77 Dylan, Bob, and, 1:147 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 France and, 1:194 Gore, Al, Sr., and, 1:225 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 Hargis, Billy, and, 1:236 health care and, 1:243 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 homeschooling and, 1:260 Jackson, Jesse, and, 1:282 judicial wars and, 1:288, 289 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:299–300 Ku Klux Klan and, 2:614 Lott, Trent, and, 1:326, 327 Malcolm X and, 2:335 NAACP and, 2:383 neoconservatism and, 2:394 New York Times and, 2:401 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404, 468 Parks, Rosa, and, 2:424 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:430 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464
segregation (continued) Republican Party and, 2:468 school busing and, 1:64–65 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 third parties and, 2:560 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:563, 564 U.S. military and, 1:210 Wallace, George, and, 1:266; 2:588 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599, 600 Watts riots and, 2:604 wealth gap and, 2:607 white supremacists and, 2:614, 615 Williams, William Appleman, and, 2:618 See also Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) SEIU. See Service Employees International Union Selanikio, Joel, 1:322 Semel, Terry S., 1:167 Seminoles, 1:275 Senate, U.S., 1:28, 104 Armed Services Committee of, 1:4 Bush, Prescott, and, 1:61 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:65, 66 Clarence Thomas hearings in, 1:62 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Clinton impeachment and, 1:99–100; 2:611 Committee on Armed Services of, 1:98 Contract with America and, 1:118 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 159 electoral system and, 2:460 Endangered Species Act and, 1:159 Enola Gay exhibit and, 1:161 environmental movement and, 1:148 ERA and, 1:165, 178 FCC and, 1:174 flag desecration and, 1:181 food industry and, 2:413 gays in the military and, 1:208 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217 global warming and, 1:219 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 health care and, 1:243, 244, 245 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hill, Anita, and, 1:251, 251 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 judicial wars and, 1:290 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293–94 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Kennedy, Robert, and, 1:293 Kerry, John, and, 1:296; 2:579 La Follette, Robert, Jr., and, 1:310 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 Lott, Trent, and, 1:327 lynching and, 1:330; 2:430 Malcolm X and, 2:335 McCain, John, and, 2:339 McCarthy, Eugene, and, 2:340 McCarthy, Joseph, and, 2:341, 344 McCarthyism and, 2:343 McGovern, George, and, 2:346 medical malpractice and, 2:352
I-45
Senate, U.S. (continued) Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:372 Muhammad, Warith Deen, and, 2:382 National Endowment for the Arts and, 1:248; 2:336, 337, 386 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:403 NPR and, 2:390 nuclear age and, 2:409, 410 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411 O’Connor, Sandra Day, and, 2:415 Packwood, Bob, and, 2:422 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 record industry and, 1:246; 2:460, 629 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488, 488 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 School of the Americas and, 2:494 school prayer and, 2:496 Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of, 1:78 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:532 Subcommittee Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency of, 1:106 Taft, Robert A., and, 2:549 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:560, 563–64, 564 tort reform and, 2:566 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 United Nations and, 2:573 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574 War Powers Act and, 2:594 Watergate and, 1:131, 177; 2:602, 603 Wellstone, Paul, and, 2:609 whistleblowers and, 2:612 See also Congress, U.S.; House of Representatives, U.S. senior citizens, 1:243, 244; 2:405, 473, 474, 522, 585 See also age discrimination Seper, Jerry, 2:602 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 2:502–5 Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and, 1:3 academic freedom and, 1:6, 7, 92, 93, 264 ACLU and, 1:19 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 Bennett, William, and, 1:41 Bush, George W., and, 1:63, 64; 2:344 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:82 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 CIA and, 1:78 Clinton, Hillary, and, 1:98 Cold War and, 1:103 conspiracy theories and, 1:115, 117 Coulter, Ann, and, 1:120 country music and, 1:123 Democratic Party and, 1:136 detainees and, 2:468 domestic spying and, 2:434 D’Souza, Dinesh, and, 1:144 ecoterrorism and, 1:148–49 Election of 2008 and, 1:156
I-4 6
Index
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of (continued) Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 Focus on the Family and, 1:184 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 hate crimes and, 1:239 Homeland Security Department, U.S., and, 1:270 Huntington, Samuel P., and, 1:269 illegal immigration and, 2:359 Israel and, 1:281 Kerry, John, and, 1:296 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 Mexico and, 2:356 militia movement and, 2:360 Millennial Generation and, 1:213 Moore, Michael, and, 2:366 Muslim Americans and, 2:377, 378 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:388 Nelson, Willie, and, 2:393 New York Times and, 2:401 nuclear age and, 2:410 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 Phelps, Fred, and, 2:429 Pipes, Daniel, and, 2:431 political climate following, 1:30, 37, 208; 2:345, 549, 574, 598 racial profiling following, 2:453, 454 Rather, Dan, and, 2:456 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Republican Party and, 2:470 Russia and, 2:529 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 School of the Americas and, 2:494 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and, 2:499 speech codes and, 2:530 Springsteen, Bruce, and, 2:532 Stone, Oliver, and, 2:540 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:541 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:577, 578 war protesters and, 2:596 Weekly Standard and, 2:607 whistleblowers and, 2:612 Woodward, Bob, and, 2:624 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 September 11 Memorial, 2:505–6 Serbia, 1:282 “Serenity Prayer,” 2:402 Serpico, Frank, 2:433, 612 Serrano, Andres, 2:337, 386, 387, 506–7, 616 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 1:312 700 Club (TV program), 1:19, 171; 2:474, 552 Sex and the Single Girl (Brown), 1:36, 53; 2:513 sex education, 1:3, 14, 49, 63, 75, 183, 236, 247, 260, 302, 304; 2:367, 420, 431, 436, 460, 500, 507–9 sex offenders, 1:51, 75, 182, 231, 241, 247, 283, 285, 303; 2:362, 460, 509–10, 577, 582, 620
Sex Pistols, 2:449 Sexton, Anne, 1:324 sexual abuse, 1:179; 2:437 sexual assault, 1:69, 71, 146; 2:355, 368, 422, 455, 489, 509, 510–11, 514, 517, 576, 623 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Kinsey), 1:302 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey), 1:209, 241, 302 sexual harassment, 1:51, 53, 62, 88, 179, 251–52, 251, 290, 330; 2:332, 355, 369, 420, 422, 499, 511–12, 530, 533, 561, 621, 622–23, 629 Sexual Perversity in Chicago (play), 1:326 Sexual Politics: A Manifesto of Revolution (Millett), 2:335, 361–62, 361 sexual revolution, 2:512–13 androgyny and, 1:24–25 birth control and, 1:44; 2:431 Brown, Helen Gurley, and, 1:53 counterculture and, 1:120 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139 family values and, 1:172 feminism and, 1:178 Focus on the Family and, 1:183 France and, 1:194 Hefner, Hugh, and, 1:246–47 Jorgensen, Christine, and, 1:288 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:294, 295 Kinsey, Alfred, and, 1:302–3 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 literature and, 1:324 Mead, Margaret, and, 2:350 New Age movement and, 2:396 New Left and, 2:398 Paglia, Camille, and, 2:422–23 pornography and, 2:436, 437 Religious Right and, 2:466 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:476 Roe v. Wade and, 2:479 sex education and, 2:508 Wolfe, Tom, and, 2:621 sexuality, study of, 1:191–92 Sexuality Information and Educational Council of the United States (SIECUS), 1:14; 2:508, 509 Shachtman, Max, 1:237 Shalikashvili, John M., 1:210 Shanker, Albert, 1:80 Shapiro, Robert, 2:417 Shapiro, Steven, 2:364 Sharon, Ariel, 2:475 Sharpton, Alfred Charles, Jr., 1:223; 2:426, 513–15, 514, 564, 610 Shaw v. Reno (1993), 2:464 Sheehan, Cindy, 2:597 Sheen, Fulton John, 1:59; 2:515 Sheen, Lyle P., 1:116 Shelley, Martha, 1:320; 2:515–16 Shelton, Robert, 2:614 Shepard, Matthew Wayne, 1:239; 2:429, 516, 516–17 Shepard, Sam, 1:326 Shimp, Donna, 2:520
shock jocks, 1:176; 2:517–18, 538, 539, 550 Shriver, Maria, 2:498 Shriver, R. Sargent, Jr., 2:347 Shultz, George, 1:9 Shut Up and Sing (Ingraham), 1:7 Sider, Ronald James, 1:68; 2:518, 589 SIECUS. See Sexuality Information and Educational Council of the United States Sierra Club, 1:29, 163, 169, 189, 190; 2:603 Signorile, Michelangelo, 2:421 “Silent Majority,” 1:148, 187; 2:404, 518–19 Silent Scream (film), 1:2 Silent Spring (Carson), 1:71, 72, 162; 2:499 Silkwood, Karen, 2:612 Silver, Tony, 1:227 Silvers, John, 1:143 Simcox, Chris, 1:272 Simpson, Nicole Brown, 2:417 Simpsons, The (TV program), 2:519–20 Singer, Peter, 1:26; 2:407 Singularity Is Near, The: When Humans Transcend Biology (Kurzweil), 1:42 Sioux, 1:22, 23 Sirhan, Sirhan, 1:293 Sirica, John J., 2:603 Siskind, Janet, 2:557 Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Durang), 1:326 Sister Souljah, 2:456 Situationists International, 1:128 Sixteenth Amendment, 2:551 Sixth Amendment, 2:363, 471, 472 60 Minutes (TV program), 1:3, 297; 2:377, 457 Skinheads, 1:204; 2:615–16 Skinner, B.F., 2:501 SLA. See Symbionese Liberation Army slavery, 1:135, 165, 173, 235; 2:369, 377, 452, 468, 471, 525, 576, 577, 630 Slepian, Bernard, 1:2 Sliwa, Curtis, 1:231 Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Didion), 2:398 Smith, Adam, 1:199 Smith, Al, 1:86 Smith, Gerald L.K., 2:615 Smith, Jane, 2:570 Smith, John, 1:93 Smith, Margaret Chase, 2:341, 344 Smith, Neil, 1:16 Smith, Patti, 2:337, 449 Smith, William Kennedy, 1:294 Smith, Willis, 1:248 Smith Act (1940), 1:17, 111, 235; 2:343, 344 Smokescreens (Chick), 2:515 smoking, 1:91, 197, 304; 2:344, 413, 428, 499, 565–66, 567 in public, 2:520–21 See also tobacco snail darter, 1:159–60, 163 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Index Snelling, Richard, 1:129 Snider, Dee, 1:246; 2:460 Snow, C.P., 1:324 Snow, Olympia, 2:623 Snow, Tony, 1:323 Sobibor, Poland, 1:134 Socarides, Charles William, 2:521 Socarides, Richard, 2:521 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 1:20 social programs, 1:172, 249; 2:345, 384, 405, 461, 551, 594 See also Great Society; New Deal; welfare Social Security, 1:21, 73, 135, 196, 200, 213, 217, 223, 243, 244, 250, 272, 298; 2:397, 404, 428, 445, 461, 481, 521–23, 559 Social Security Act (1935), 2:522, 608 Social Text journal, 2:524 socialism, 1:21, 86, 87, 110, 144, 152, 194, 233, 237, 242, 243; 2:343, 367, 383, 394, 397, 399, 402, 483, 488, 545, 549, 610, 619, 622 See also communism, communists Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), 1:178; 2:599 Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 1:128 sodomy laws, 1:19, 140, 206, 289; 2:416, 443, 487, 523–24 See also gay rights soft money, 1:67, 250 Sojourners magazine, 2:589 Sokal, Alan, 2:438, 524 Sokal Affair, 2:524 Solanas, Fernando, 1:325 Solanas, Valerie, 1:178; 2:599 Soliah, Kathleen, 2:547 Solomon Amendment (1996, 1999, 2001), 1:210 Soloveichik, Meir, 1:314 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 2:528, 622 Somalia, 2:582 Sombart, Werner, 1:21 Sontag, Susan, 1:120, 325; 2:381 Soros Fund Management, 2:525 Souder, Mark, 2:397 Souls of Black Folk, The (DuBois), 1:144 Souter, David, 1:62 South ACLU and, 1:18 affirmative action and, 1:8 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Atwater, Lee, and, 1:31 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bush family and, 1:61 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 civil rights movement in, 1:94, 95 comic strips and, 1:107 communism and, 1:111 Confederate flag and, 1:114–15 country music and, 1:122, 123 Democratic Party and, 1:135–37 discrimination in, 1:52, 59, 60 drug testing in, 1:142 Dylan, Bob, and, 1:147 Election of 2008 and, 1:159 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228
South (continued) Great Society and, 1:230 hate crimes and, 1:239; 2:564 health care and, 1:243 Hurricane Katrina and, 1:270 interracial marriage and, 1:329 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:300 labor unions and, 1:311 lynching and, 1:330 Morrison, Toni, and, 2:369 NAACP and, 2:383 National Endowment for the Humanities and, 2:387 New Left and, 2:398, 399 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:429–30 “rednecks” and, 2:462 Republican Party and, 2:468, 469 rock and roll and, 2:475 school prayer and, 2:494 Sheen, Fulton J., and, 2:515 shock jocks and, 2:517 “Silent Majority” and, 2:519 Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:525 third parties and, 2:560 Thurmond, Strom, and, 2:563–64 Twenty-second Amendment and, 2:570 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599 White, Reggie, and, 2:613 white supremacists and, 2:614–16 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630 South Africa, 1:171, 213, 231, 298; 2:339, 367, 525, 548, 620 South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), 2:584 Southeast Asia, 1:77, 78 Southern Baptist Convention, 1:68, 165, 166, 201, 205, 227; 2:466, 474, 525–26, 552, 591, 592, 601 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 1:25, 94, 95, 282; 2:514 Southern Comfort (film), 2:568 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), 1:31, 239; 2:360, 614, 615, 616 Southwell, Ray, 2:360 Soviet Union, 2:526–29 ACLU and, 1:17 American Century and, 1:16 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 arts and, 2:385 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Chambers, Whittaker, and, 1:79 China and, 1:85 CIA and, 1:77, 78 Cold War and, 1:100–103 communism and, 1:110–12 conspiracy theories and, 1:116 counterculture and, 1:120 Cuba and, 1:127 DeMille, Cecil B., and, 2:554 Demjanjuk, John, and, 1:134 Donahue, Phil, and, 1:139
I-47
Soviet Union (continued) Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 FCC and, 1:175 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:188 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227, 228 Hall, Gus, and, 1:235, 236 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, 1:254 Hiss, Alger, and, 1:256 Horowitz, David, and, 1:264 Islamic fundamentalism and, 1:201 Israel and, 1:280 John Birch Society and, 1:286 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Kristol, Irving, and, 1:305 La Follette, Robert, Jr., and, 1:310 LeMay, Curtis, and, 1:319 literature and, 1:324 Marxism and, 2:338 McCarthyism and, 2:342, 343 militia movement and, 2:360 National Review and, 2:390 neoconservatism and, 2:394, 395 New York Times and, 2:401 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:402, 403 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405 nuclear age and, 2:408–10 Pipes, Richard, and, 2:430 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 prisons in, 1:4 Rand, Ayn, and, 2:455 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:459, 469 Republican Party and, 2:469 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, and, 2:480 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 science education and, 1:124, 151 Soros, George, and, 2:525 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:459, 528, 540, 541 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:560, 568, 569 United Nations and, 2:573 war protesters and, 2:595 Williams, William Appleman, and, 1:102; 2:618 Zappa, Frank, and, 2:629 See also Russia Sowell, Thomas, 1:323; 2:373, 529–30, 602 Spain, 1:74; 2:337 Spanish-American War, 1:126, 255 Spartacus (film), 1:307; 2:344 special-interest groups, 1:51, 67, 68, 109, 132, 163, 183, 198, 233, 261, 281, 290; 2:370, 391–92, 397, 445, 520, 558 speech codes, 1:143, 210, 280; 2:435, 530–31, 546 Spencer, Brenda, 2:497 Spinks, Leon, 1:15 Spinoza, Baruch, 2:542 SPLC. See Southern Poverty Law Center Spock, Benjamin McLane, 1:183, 262, 316; 2:531–32, 595 SpongeBob SquarePants (TV program), 1:208
I-4 8
Index
sport utility vehicles (SUVs), 1:33 sports, homosexuals and, 1:208 spotted owl, 1:159, 160, 164, 190 Spring, Rick, 1:31 Springsteen, Bruce, 1:233; 2:476, 502, 532–33, 535 Spurlock, Morgan, 1:325; 2:413 Sputnik, 1:101, 124, 151, 295, 324; 2:409, 466 stagflation, 1:199 Stained Glass (album), 1:246 Stalin, Joseph, 1:100, 110, 254, 264; 2:394, 400, 402, 403, 432, 515, 527, 528 Stallone, Sylvester, 2:598 Stamper, Norm, 2:442 Standing Alone in Mecca (Nomani), 2:378 Stanford University, 1:41, 229, 230, 276; 2:543, 558 Stanford v. Kentucky (1989), 1:71 Stapleton, Ruth Carter, 1:182 Starbucks, 1:38; 2:489 Starr, Kenneth Winston, 1:97, 99, 100; 2:533, 533–34 START. See Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty State Department, U.S., 1:85, 103, 111, 112, 198, 256, 258, 298, 322; 2:341, 343, 395, 403, 445, 549, 573 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, 1:5–6, 7 states’ rights, 1:135; 2:430, 464, 588 stay-at-home mothers, 1:165, 199; 2:355, 423, 522, 534–35, 608 Steadman, Ralph, 2:562 Steal This Book (Hoffman), 1:257 Steal This Movie! (film), 1:257 Steal This Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America (Hoffman and Silvers), 1:143 Steinbeck, John, 2:532, 535 Steinem, Gloria, 1:53, 98, 165, 182, 199; 2:362, 372, 532, 535–36 Steinhorn, Leonard, 1:212 stem-cell research, 1:42, 63, 76, 139, 215, 313; 2:339, 461, 474, 499, 500, 526, 536–38, 601 Stennis, John, 1:163 Steppenwolf, 1:246 Stern, Howard Allen, 1:77, 176; 2:517, 538, 550, 617 Stevens, David, 1:235 Stevens, George, 1:130 Stevens, John Paul, 1:140 Stevens, Roger, 2:385 Stevenson, Adlai, 1:27, 203; 2:493 Stevenson, Adlai, III, 1:315 Stewart, Jon, 2:538, 538–39 Stewart, Potter, 2:436, 495 Sticks and Bones (Rabe), 1:326 Stiglitz, Joseph, 1:221 Stockman, David, 2:522, 547 Stokes, Carl, 1:163 Stolen Honor (film), 2:579 Stone, Oliver, 1:182; 2:378, 539–40, 578 Stone v. Graham (1980), 2:496, 555 Stonewall Democrats, 1:207 Stonewall rebellion, 1:206; 2:513, 515, 540, 567
Stop Taking Our Privileges (STOP ERA), 1:165; 2:492 Storer, George B., 1:175 Stormer, John A., 2:342 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1:144 Straight from the Streets (film), 2:604 Straight Outta Compton (album), 2:456 Strange Justice (Mayer and Abrahamson), 1:252 Strasberg, Lee, 1:130, 184 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. See SALT Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), 2:410 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 1:81, 102; 2:409, 451, 459, 499, 528, 540–41, 553, 554, 602 Strauss, Leo, 1:305; 2:394, 541–42, 584 Strauss, William, 1:211, 212 Streamers (Rabe), 1:326 Street v. New York (1969), 1:19, 180 structuralism and post-structuralism, 1:178, 191–92, 194, 324–25; 2:423, 438, 542–43 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 2:438 student conservatives, 2:543–44 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 1:44, 94–95, 147, 178, 242, 257, 282, 300; 2:398, 399, 630 Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD), 1:33 Students for Academic Freedom, 1:5, 6, 264; 2:344 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1:121, 152, 178, 237, 242, 315; 2:334, 344, 399, 544–46, 589, 596 Stuntz, Joe, 1:23 Style Wars (film), 1:227 suffrage, women’s, 1:164, 177, 178 Sugarhill Gang, 2:455 Sugarmann, Josh, 2:391 suicide, teen, 1:246; 2:336 “Suicide Solution” (Osbourne), 1:246 Sullivan, Andrew, 2:373, 487 Sullivan, William C., 1:262 Sullivan Dangerous Weapons Act (1911), 1:232 Sulzberger, Arthur Hays, 2:400 Sulzberger, Arthur Ochs, Jr., 2:400 Sulzberger, Arthur Ochs “Punch,”; 2:400 Summers, Lawrence Henry, 1:48; 2:546, 610 Sundance Film Festival, 1:326; 2:462 Super Bowl, 1:76, 176 Super Size Me (film), 2:413–14 Superfund. See Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act Superman, 1:106; 2:583 supply-side economics, 1:174, 249, 306; 2:397, 459, 546–47, 587, 594 Support Our Scouts Act (2005), 1:50 Supreme Court, U.S. abortion and, 1:1, 2; 2:431–32, 466, 479 academic freedom and, 1:6 ACLU and, 1:17, 18, 19
Supreme Court, U.S. (continued) affirmative action and, 1:9–10 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:15 bankruptcy reform and, 1:35 birth control and, 1:44; 2:479 Bob Jones University and, 1:47, 327 Boy Scouts and, 1:50 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:62 Byrd, Robert, and, 1:66 capital punishment and, 1:69, 70, 71, 215 Catholic Church and, 1:74 censorship and, 1:77; 2:370, 512 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 church and state and, 1:92, 193; 2:416, 600 communism and, 1:111, 236 creationism and, 1:124 Demjanjuk, John, and, 1:134 Democratic Party and, 1:136 Douglas, William O., and, 1:140 drug testing and, 1:143 Election of 2000 and, 1:154, 154, 226; 2:470, 561 Endangered Species Act and, 1:160 environmental movement and, 1:82, 163 evangelicalism and, 1:68 faith-based programs and, 1:170 Falwell, Jerry, and, 1:171 FCC and, 1:175, 176, 236 flag desecration and, 1:180–81 gay rights and, 1:184, 206; 2:523–24 genetically modified foods and, 1:214 Graham, Billy, and, 1:227 gun control and, 1:232; 2:391–92 hate crimes and, 1:240 homeschooling and, 1:260 internment and, 2:467 interracial marriage and, 1:328, 329 judicial wars and, 1:288–90 Kennedy, Edward, and, 1:293 LaRouche, Lyndon, and, 1:315 McCarthyism and, 2:344 medical marijuana and, 2:353–54 Miranda rights and, 2:363–64, 600 National Endowment for the Arts and, 2:507 New York Times and, 2:401 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:405 obscenity and, 1:278, 324; 2:386, 619 O’Connor, Sandra Day, and, 2:415–16 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:424 pornography and, 1:182, 278; 2:436–37 presidential pardons and, 2:440 prison reform and, 2:442 privacy rights and, 1:19, 44, 140, 143, 288, 289; 2:431, 443–44, 600 race and, 1:86 racial profiling and, 2:453 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:459 Rehnquist, William H., and, 2:464–65 Religious Right and, 1:313 Republican Party and, 2:470 right to counsel and, 2:471 right to die and, 2:407, 473 Robertson, Pat, and, 2:474 same-sex marriage and, 2:487
Index Supreme Court, U.S. (continued) school prayer and, 2:466, 494–96, 495 school vouchers and, 1:170; 2:498 secular humanism and, 2:501 segregation and, 1:53, 54, 60, 64–65, 93–94, 256; 2:424, 599, 600 speech codes and, 2:530, 531 Starr, Kenneth, and, 2:534 Stewart, Jon, and, 2:539 tax reform and, 2:550–51 Ten Commandments and, 2:496, 555 terrorist detainees and, 1:4 Thomas, Clarence, and, 1:51, 53, 251–52, 251, 330; 2:422, 512, 561, 564 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Unabomber and, 2:572 Voting Rights Act and, 2:584, 585 Warren, Earl, and, 2:599–600, 600 Watergate and, 2:603 welfare and, 2:608 See also judicial wars Surgeon General, U.S., 1:14, 243, 304; 2:413, 520, 565 survivalists, 2:349, 359, 365, 482 Sutton, Bob, 2:611 Swaggart, Jimmy, 1:108, 166, 171, 316; 2:552, 553 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District (1971), 1:64–65 Sweatt v. Painter (1950), 1:94 Sweden, 2:490 Sweeney, John, 1:312 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (film), 1:325 Swift, Suzanne, 2:623 Swift, Wesley, 1:31; 2:615 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 1:296; 2:579 Swindoll, Charles, 2:447 Switzerland, 1:161 Sykes, Charles, 2:577 Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), 2:547–48 Syria, 1:280, 282; 2:489 Szilard, Leo, 2:419 Table Mountain Indians, 1:275 tabloid newspapers, 2:375, 512 Taft, Robert Alphonso, 1:101, 223, 295; 2:397, 492, 549 Taft-Hartley Act (1947), 1:111, 311; 2:343, 549 Tailhook convention, 2:512, 622–23 Taiwan. See China, Republic of Taiwan Relations Act (1979), 1:85 Takaki, Ronald, 1:254; 2:470, 471 Tales from the Crypt (comic book), 1:106 Taliban, 1:90, 123; 2:378, 503, 505, 529 Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Rashid), 2:504 talk radio, 1:41, 196, 231, 238–39, 250, 298, 322–23, 323; 2:351, 354, 407, 411, 412, 420, 517, 538, 549–50, 576 See also Christian radio; shock jocks Talk Radio (Bogosian), 2:517
Tanzania, 2:503 Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on U.S. Media (Tyson), 1:279 Tarzan (comic strip), 1:107 tax reform, 2:550–52 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:62; 2:406 Bush, George W., and, 1:63; 2:397, 470, 547, 551, 606 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81, 82 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 corporate welfare and, 1:119 DeLay, Tom, and, 1:132 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 158 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216, 217 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322 McCain, John, and, 2:339 militia movement and, 2:359 Mondale, Walter, and, 2:365 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 Norquist, Grover, and, 2:405–6 Obama, Barack, and, 2:411, 412 Packwood, Bob, and, 2:422 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:428 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 Reagan, Ronald, and, 1:174; 2:458, 459, 547, 594 Republican Party and, 2:470 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481 Sanders, Bernie, and, 2:488 school busing and, 1:64, 65 Social Security and, 2:523 supply-side economics and, 2:546–47 think tanks and, 2:558, 559 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 wealth gap and, 2:606–7 Weyrich, Paul M., and, 2:611 Will, George, and, 2:617 Wilson, Edmund, and, 2:619 Tax Reform Act (1986), 1:50; 2:551 Taxi Driver (film), 1:325 Taylor, Zachary, 1:73 technology age discrimination and, 1:12 environmentalism and, 1:109–10, 162 feminism and, 1:179 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 globalization and, 1:221 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 Internet and, 1:277–78 Japan and, 1:284 labor unions and, 1:312 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334 Mead, Margaret, and, 2:350 Microsoft and, 2:357 Millennial Generation and, 1:212 Mumford, Lewis, and, 2:375 nuclear age and, 1:254 occupational safety and, 2:415
I-4 9
technology (continued) postmodernism and, 2:438 right to die and, 2:474 Soviet Union and, 2:528 Strategic Defense Initiative and, 2:541 Unabomber and, 2:572 war toys and, 2:597 Telecommunications Act (1996), 1:175, 176 Teletubbies (TV program), 1:171, 208 televangelism, 1:46, 48, 88, 108, 126, 139, 154, 166, 170–71, 170, 176, 205–7, 236, 313, 316, 326; 2:467, 469, 475, 552–53 television, 1:313, 315–16, 325; 2:343, 348, 351, 351, 354, 370, 375, 376–77, 376, 387, 403–4, 405, 409, 420, 437, 442, 447–48, 460–61, 474, 515, 517, 519–20, 528, 535, 538–39, 561, 570, 583, 591, 598, 611, 616, 619–20, 621 See also televangelism; specific networks Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story (TV program), 1:280 Tell, David, 2:607 Teller, Edward, 2:419, 541, 553–54 Telling the Truth (Cheney), 1:82; 2:388 Ten Commandments, 1:18, 51, 77, 90, 92, 132, 314; 2:366–67, 496, 497, 554, 554–55 Ten Commandments, The (film), 2:554 Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed), 2:527 Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978), 1:163 tenure, 1:5–6, 7, 253 Terkel, Louis “Studs,” 1:52; 2:555–56 term limits, 2:428 terrorism, terrorists Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 Bush, George W., and, 2:344 Cheney, Dick 1:81 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:97 counterculture and, 1:122 country music and, 1:123 Election of 2008 and, 1:156, 159 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:217 globalization and, 1:222 gun control and, 1:232 Hart, Gary, and, 1:238 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Horowitz, David, and, 1:264 illegal immigration and, 2:359 Iran-Contra affair and, 1:278 Israel and, 1:281 Lewis, Bernard, and, 1:321 McVeigh, Timothy, and, 2:349 Mexico and, 2:356 Morgan, Robin, and, 2:368 Muslim Americans and, 2:378 New York Times and, 2:401–2 nuclear age and, 2:410 O’Reilly, Bill, and, 2:420 Palin, Sarah, and, 2:424 racial profiling and, 2:454 religious fundamentalism and, 1:201 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489
I-5 0
Index
terrorism, terrorists (continued) Southern Baptist Convention and, 2:526 torture of suspected, 1:3–4 USA PATRIOT Act and, 2:574 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:577, 578 vigilantism and, 2:582 Weekly Standard and, 2:608 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 See also ecoterrorism; September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of; War on Terror Terry, Luther L., 2:520 Terry, Randall, 2:418, 491 Tet Offensive, 1:279, 287; 2:581 Teters, Charlene, 1:276 Texas, University of, 1:10; 2:497, 624 Texas v. Cobb (2001), 2:472 Texas v. Johnson (1989), 1:180, 181 thalidomide, 1:186 Thanksgiving Day, 1:308; 2:556–57 Thatcher, Margaret, 2:444 theology, 1:240–41; 2:402–3, 518 think tanks, 1:29, 200, 249–50, 271, 305; 2:395, 500, 544, 557–59, 559, 589 Third Amendment, 2:443 third parties, 2:380, 381, 427, 428, 428, 532, 559–61, 563, 576, 588 This Film Is Not Yet Rated (film), 2:371 “This Land Is Your Land” (Guthrie), 1:233 Thomas, Cal, 2:602 Thomas, Clarence, 1:19, 51, 53, 62, 66, 88, 251–52, 251, 290, 329, 330; 2:369, 373, 422, 512, 561–62, 564 Thomas, J. Parnell, 2:441 Thomas, Norman, 1:17 Thomas Road Baptist Church, 1:170, 171 Thompson, Fred, 1:156 Thompson, Hank, 1:123 Thompson, Hugh C., Jr., 2:379 Thompson, Hunter Stockton, 1:121; 2:381, 398, 562, 621 Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), 1:71 Thomson, James, 2:537 Thornburgh, Richard, 2:563 Three Mile Island accident, 1:242; 2:554, 563 Thriller (album), 1:283 Thurmond, James Strom, 1:31, 65, 115, 266, 326, 327, 328; 2:526, 560, 563–64, 564 Tiananmen Square, 1:85 Tibet, 1:85, 220 Tijerina, Reies López, 1:256 Till, Emmett Louis, 1:330; 2:369, 564–65 Till, Mamie, 2:565 Time magazine, 1:16, 73, 79, 80, 83, 109, 163, 207, 212, 216, 240, 285, 294; 2:354, 361, 402, 481, 557, 621, 625 Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), 1:19 To Catch a Predator (TV program), 2:510 tobacco, 1:187, 222, 225; 2:413, 499, 520, 612 See also smoking tobacco settlements, 2:565–66, 567 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1:21, 194; 2:527 Today (TV program), 1:52, 99 Toffler, Alvin, 2:439 Tokyo Rose, 2:441
Tolson, Clyde A., 1:263 Tomlinson, Kenneth, 2:448 tort reform, 1:62; 2:352–53, 481, 566–67, 587 torture, 1:3–4, 64, 78, 82, 266; 2:339, 494, 608 Torvals, Linus, 2:357 totalitarianism, 2:583–84 Townsend, Kathleen Kennedy, 1:294 Toyota, 1:284 trade, 1:200, 226, 306; 2:488, 546 See also most favored nation; North American Free Trade Agreement Tragedy of American Compassion, The (Olasky), 1:113 Transexualism and Sex Reassignment (Money and Green), 2:568 transgender movement, 1:25, 179, 204, 205, 207, 288, 321; 2:332, 345, 374, 421, 540, 567–68, 624 Transjordan, 1:280 Transmetropolitan (comic book), 1:106 Transportation Department, U.S. (USDOT), 1:32, 142, 230 Transsexual Phenomenon (Benjamin), 2:568 Traynor, Chuck, 2:437 Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Coulter), 1:120; 2:342, 344 Treasury Department, U.S., 2:372 Trident submarine, 2:409 Trilling, Lionel, 2:432, 619 Tripp, Linda, 1:99 Triumph of the Moon, The: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Hutton), 2:396 Triumph of Politics, The (Stockman), 2:547 Trochmann, John, David, and Randy, 2:360 Trudeau, Gary, 1:107, 108; 2:562 True Grit (film), 2:605 Trujillo, Rafael, 1:78 Truman, Harry S., 1:8, 17, 77, 100, 101, 111, 135, 150, 165, 227, 243, 244, 254, 256, 263, 269, 280; 2:342, 343, 344, 385, 394, 397, 401, 440, 441, 458, 527, 549, 552, 559–60, 568–69, 571 Truman administration, 1:85 Truman Doctrine, 1:101, 258; 2:569 Trumbo, Dalton, 1:257; 2:344 Tucker, Karla Faye, 1:62 Tullock, Gordon, 2:444 Turkey, 1:101, 125 Turner, Robert Edward (Ted), III, 1:184; 2:569–70, 573 Turner Diaries, The (Pierce), 2:349, 477, 616 Tuve, Merle, 2:408 Twain, Mark, 2:562 Twentieth Amendment, 1:109 Twenty-second Amendment, 2:400, 570–71 “Two Concepts of Liberty” (Berlin), 2:527 2 Live Crew, 2:456 2M, 1:4 Tydings, Millard, 2:341, 344
Tyrrell, R. Emmett, 2:544 Tyson, James L., 1:279 U2, 1:48; 2:476 Udall, Mo, 2:379 UFW. See United Farm Workers Union Ukraine, 1:28, 134 UN. See United Nations Unabomber, 2:572 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 1:144 Underground Railroad, 1:235 Understanding the New Age (Chandler), 2:396 “Uneasy Rider” (Daniels), 2:346 Unemployment Relief Act (1933), 1:8 Unfit for Command (O’Neill), 2:579 unfunded mandates, 1:118, 277 Unger, Craig, 2:489 Unification Church, 1:314; 2:601, 602 Union of Concerned Scientists, 2:500 United Automobile Workers (UAW), 1:244, 267 United Farm Workers Union (UFW), 1:80, 256, 311; 2:359 United Methodist Church, 1:1, 276 United Nations (UN), 2:572–74 American Century and, 1:16 anti-Semitism and, 1:28 Atomic Energy Commission of, 2:408 automobile safety and, 1:32 Buckley, William F., Jr., and, 1:58 Bunche, Ralph, and, 1:60 Bush, George H.W., and, 1:61 China and, 1:85 conspiracy theories and, 1:115–16 France and, 1:194 Helms, Jesse, and, 1:248 Hiss, Alger, and, 1:79, 256 human rights and, 1:265 Israel and, 1:258, 280 John Birch Society and, 1:91, 286 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Khrushchev, Nikita, and, 2:528 Kyoto Protocol and, 1:309 McCarthyism and, 2:344 McGovern, George, and, 2:347 militia movement and, 2:359, 482 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371 neoconservatism and, 2:395 NRA and, 2:391 premillennial dispensationalism and, 2:440 Turner, Ted, and, 2:570 Warren, Rick, and, 2:601 World Council of Churches and, 2:626 United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975), 2:453 United States v. Eichman (1990), 1:180, 181 United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group (2000), 1:176 United We Stand: How We Can Take Back Our Country (Perot), 2:427 Universal Studies, 1:208 University of Wisconsin at Madison Post v. Board of Regents of University of Wisconsin (1991), 2:531 Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Nader), 1:32; 2:380
Index Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, The (film), 2:565 unwed mothers, 1:40, 172, 250, 298, 304; 2:333, 367, 451, 479, 507, 509, 608 urban areas, 1:54, 65, 203, 204, 249, 324; 2:384, 391, 442, 451, 452, 454, 455, 456, 462, 468, 513, 540, 545, 589, 590, 593, 604, 605, 607, 608, 613 Urban League, 2:454, 561 U.S. v. Bajakajian (1998), 2:561 U.S. v. Hubbell (2000), 2:561 U.S. v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (2001), 2:353 U.S. v. Seeger (1965), 1:19 U.S. v. Wade (1967), 2:471 U.S.-Mexican War, 1:255 USA PATRIOT Act (2001), 1:266, 278; 2:344, 454, 504, 505, 574, 574–75 USA Today, 1:88; 2:587 USCIS. See Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. USDOT. See Transportation Department, U.S. USFWS. See Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Ussher, James, 1:124 Vacco v. Quill (1997), 2:473 Vadim, Roger, 1:184 Vagina Monologues (Ensler), 2:511 Van Doren, Mark, 1:79 Van Orden v. Perry (2005), 2:555 Van Patter, Betty, 1:264 Van Peebles, Melvin, 1:325 vanden Heuvel, Katrina, 2:381 Vanity Fair magazine, 1:176; 2:619 Velvet Underground, 2:449 Venezuela, 2:404, 426 Venona Project, 1:112; 2:343, 480 Ventura, Jesse, 2:428, 498, 560, 576, 610 Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton (1995), 1:143 veterans, 1:3, 161, 296; 2:468, 519, 532, 539, 576, 578–80, 581, 597, 609, 626 VH1; 2:333 Vices of Economists, The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie, The (McCloskey), 2:345 victimhood, 1:113, 141; 2:355, 362, 373, 422, 496, 530, 576–77, 621 Vidal, Eugene Luther Gore, Jr., 1:58; 2:349, 381, 432, 577–78, 618 Vietnam: A Television History (TV program), 1:280; 2:448 Vietnam, South, 1:269 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), 1:296; 2:578–79 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 2:505, 579–80, 580, 609 Vietnam War, 2:580–82 ACLU and, 1:19 affirmative action and, 1:9 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:15 American Century and, 1:16 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Bush, George W., and, 1:62, 287; 2:456, 457, 457
Vietnam War (continued) Canada and, 1:69 Carter, Jimmy, and, 1:73 censorship and, 1:77 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81 Chicago Seven and, 1:83–84 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Chomsky, Noam, and, 1:87 CIA and, 1:178 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 Cold War and, 1:101, 102 comic books/comic strips and, 1:106, 107 Commager, Henry, and, 1:109 Common Cause and, 1:109 Coulter, Ann, and, 1:120 counterculture and, 1:120 country music and, 1:122 Cronkite, Walter, and, 1:126 Democratic Party and, 1:136 drug testing and, 1:142 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 ecoterrorism and, 1:148 environmental movement and, 1:163 evangelicalism and, 1:166 flag desecration and, 1:180 Fonda, Jane, and, 1:184, 185 Ford, Gerald, and, 1:187, 188 Foreman, Dave, and, 1:188 France and, 1:194 Galbraith, John Kenneth, and, 1:203 gangs and, 1:204 generational differences and, 1:52, 212 Gibson, Mel, and, 1:215 Ginsberg, Allen, and, 1:218 Gore, Al, and, 1:225 Graham, Billy, and, 1:228 Great Society and, 1:230 Guthrie, Arlo, and, 1:233 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 Hayden, Tom, and, 1:242 Heller, Joseph, and, 1:248 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:266, 267 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279; 2:280 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, and, 1:287; 2:557 Kennedy, John F., and, 1:292 Kerouac, Jack, and, 1:295 Kerry, John, and, 1:295, 296, 296 King, Martin Luther, Jr., and, 1:299, 300 Klein, Naomi, and, 1:304 Kubrick, Stanley, and, 1:307 labor unions and, 1:312 Lear, Norman, and, 1:316 LeMay, Curtis, and, 1:319 Lennon, John, and, 1:91 literature and, 1:324 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334 Marxism and, 2:338 McCain, John, and, 1:156; 2:339 McCarthy, Eugene, and, 2:340 McGovern, George, and, 2:346, 347 McIntire, Carl, and, 2:348 McLuhan, Marshall, and, 2:349 Morgan, Robin, and, 2:368 My Lai massacre and, 2:378–79 Nation, The, and, 2:381
I-51
Vietnam War (continued) National Review and, 2:390 neoconservatism and, 2:394 New Left and, 2:398, 399 New York Times and, 2:401 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:402, 403 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404, 405 Pentagon Papers and, 1:322 Perot, H. Ross, and, 2:427 presidential pardons and, 2:441 public television and, 2:448 Quayle, Dan, and, 2:451 Rather, Dan, and, 2:456 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:476, 628 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 Spock, Benjamin, and, 1:262; 2:531, 532 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Stone, Oliver, and, 2:539 student conservatives and, 2:543 Students for a Democratic Society and, 2:545 talk radio and, 2:549 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:569 Vidal, Gore, and, 2:577 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 War on Poverty and, 2:594 War Powers Act and, 2:594, 595 war toys and, 2:597 Wayne, John, and, 2:605, 606 whistleblowers and, 1:322; 2:602, 612 Wilson, Edmund, and, 2:619 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630 See also Agent Orange; My Lai massacre; Tet Offensive; war protesters vigilantism, 1:222–23, 231, 300; 2:349, 356, 582–83, 614–16 Village Voice newspaper, 1:121; 2:334 Vinson, Fred M., 1:54 Violence Policy Center, 2:391 Virgin Islands, U.S., 1:231 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2:496, 497 Virilio, Paul, 1:42 Voegelin, Eric Herman Wilhelm, 2:583–84 Volcker, Paul, 1:51 Vonnegut, Kurt, 1:52, 121 Voorhis, Jerry, 2:403 voting, voting rights, 1:60, 94, 95, 109, 282, 300; 2:384, 429, 452, 464, 561, 599, 600 Voting Rights Act (1965), 1:29, 66, 95, 136, 230, 287, 327; 2:468, 584–85, 604 Vulgarians at the Gate (Allen), 2:517 VVAW. See Vietnam Veterans Against the War Waco siege, 1:116; 2:349, 360, 365, 482, 578, 586 Wade, Henry, 1:212; 2:479 wages, 1:113, 223; 2:522, 590, 606, 609 Wagner Act (1935), 2:549 Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, 1:243
I-52
Index
Wal-Mart, 1:86, 91, 114, 119, 142, 169, 246; 2:356, 393, 460, 510, 539, 589–91, 617 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (film), 2:589 Waley, Soso, 2:414 Walker, Alice, 2:369, 619 Walker, Dorothy, 1:61 Walker, George Herbert, 1:61 Walker, Jerry Jeff, 2:393 Walker, Peter, 2:505, 506 Walker, Rebecca, 1:179 Wall Street Journal, The, 1:51, 252; 2:375, 394, 395, 401, 424, 554, 587, 587–88 Wallace, George Corley, 1:18, 27, 47, 53, 122, 136, 266, 312, 319; 2:346, 393, 462, 560, 588–89 Wallace, Henry A., 1:101, 111; 2:560, 569 Wallace, Lurleen Burns, 2:588 Wallace, Michelle, 1:261 Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), 2:496 Wallechinsky, David, 2:354 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1:16 Wallis, Jim, 1:68, 166; 2:518, 589 Walmartopia (musical), 2:590 Walsh, John, 2:510 Walsh, Lawrence, 2:441 Walsh-Healey Act (1936), 2:414 Walt, Stephen M., 1:281 Walt Disney Company, 1:90, 205, 207; 2:526, 591–92 Walton, Sam, 2:590 Waltz v. Tax Commission (1970), 1:18 Wanniski, Jude, 2:546 War on Drugs, 1:41, 108, 142, 282; 2:393, 427, 442–43, 454, 468, 469, 592–93 War on Poverty, 1:136, 203, 230, 237, 250, 287, 300; 2:371, 432, 558, 559, 593–94, 594, 608 War on Terror, 1:4, 6, 63–64, 78, 201, 210, 266, 296, 322; 2:401, 420, 468, 481, 503, 504, 575, 598, 630 War Over Iraq, The (Kaplan and Kristol), 1:305 War Powers Act, 2:594–95 war protesters, 2:595–97 academic freedom and, 1:7 ACLU and, 1:19 Agnew, Spiro, and, 1:12 Ali, Muhammad, and, 1:15, 16 anti-intellectualism and, 1:27 Baez, Joan, and, 1:34 Battle of Seattle and, 1:38 censorship and, 1:77 Chicago Seven and, 1:83–84 CIA and, 1:78 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96 comic books and, 1:106 counterculture and, 1:121, 122 country music and, 1:122 Dworkin, Andrea, and, 1:146 Dylan, Bob, and, 1:147 environmental movement and, 1:163 Fonda, Jane, and, 1:184 generational conflict and, 1:212 Harrington, Michael, and, 1:237 Heller, Joseph, and, 1:248
war protesters (continued) Hoffman, Abbie, and, 1:257 Hoover, J. Edgar, and, 1:262 human rights and, 1:266 Humphrey, Hubert, and, 1:267 Irvine, Reed, and, 1:279 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Kerry, John, and, 1:296 Lennon, John, and, 1:91 literature and, 1:324 Mailer, Norman, and, 2:334, 335 McCarthy, Eugene, and, 2:340 New Journalism and, 2:398 New Left and, 2:399 Nixon, Richard, and, 2:404 Penn, Sean, and, 2:426 police abuse and, 2:399, 433 Republican Party and, 2:468 rock and roll and, 2:476 Seeger, Pete, and, 2:502 sexual revolution and, 2:513 Shelley, Martha, and, 2:516 “Silent Majority” and, 2:518–19 Steinbeck, John, and, 2:535 Vietnam Veterans Against the War and, 1:296; 2:578–79 Wallis, Jim, and, 2:589 Young, Neil, and, 2:628 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630 See also pacifism, pacifists War Resisters League (WRL), 2:398, 595, 596, 598 war toys, 2:597–98 Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Antonio (1989), 1:9; 2:464 Warfield, B.B., 1:201 Warhol, Andy, 1:36, 121, 178; 2:337, 449, 598–99 Warner, Michael, 2:487 Warren, Earl, 1:54, 136, 286; 2:363, 464, 496, 599–600, 600 Warren, Richard Duane, 2:526, 589, 601 Warren Commission, 1:187; 2:600 Washington, D.C., 1:54, 153, 232, 261, 329; 2:353, 362, 365, 448, 449, 503, 558, 568, 579, 596, 597, 608, 626 Washington, Denzel, 1:318 Washington, George, 1:20, 192; 2:471, 557, 570, 626 Washington Post, 1:11, 78, 88, 176, 177, 279, 280; 2:342, 400, 418, 422, 426, 572, 601, 608, 613, 624 Washington Times, The, 1:51, 99, 195; 2:370, 601–2 Washington University, 2:492 Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), 2:473 Washington-Williams, Essie Mae, 2:564 Watchmen (comic book), 1:106 Watergate, 1:12, 52, 67, 72, 99, 102, 104, 109, 126, 130–31, 176–77, 187, 188, 197, 198, 228, 322, 327; 2:344, 347, 400–401, 403, 405, 440–41, 456, 457, 469, 602–3, 612, 624 Waters, David Roland, 2:416 Watkins, Calvert, 1:211 Watson, James, 1:110 Watson, Justin, 1:88
Watt, James Gaius, 1:29, 149, 189; 2:579, 603–4 Watts and Los Angeles riots, 1965 and 1992, 1:172, 301–2; 2:426, 434, 454, 456, 604–5 See also King, Rodney Glen Wavy Gravy, 1:121 Way the World Works, The (Wanniski), 2:546 Wayne, John, 2:581, 605, 605–6 wealth gap, 1:38, 40, 60, 65, 94, 128, 144, 150, 167, 203, 233, 300; 2:338, 371, 397, 406, 452, 459, 462, 498, 518, 530, 545, 558, 559, 604, 606–7, 626 See also poverty; welfare Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 1:199 Weather Underground, 1:93, 121, 176, 242, 317; 2:399, 423, 545, 596 Weaver, Randy, 2:360, 482, 483 Weaver, Samuel, 2:482, 483 Weaver, Vicky, 2:482 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 2:479 Weddington, Sarah, 1:212; 2:479 Weekly Standard, The, 1:248, 253, 305, 305; 2:375, 607–8 Weinberg, Alvin, 2:408 Weinberg, Jack, 1:212 Weinberger, Caspar, 1:279; 2:441 Weiner, Justus Reid, 2:486 Weiner, Lee, 1:83, 84 Weinglass, Leonard, 1:84 Weinman, Adolph, 2:555 Welch, Joseph, 2:341, 344 Welch, Richard, 1:78 Welch, Robert H.W., Jr., 2:467 Welch, Robert W., Jr., 1:58, 286; 2:573, 615 welfare, 2:608–9 Bell Curve, The, and, 1:40 Bradley, Bill, and, 1:51 Cheney, Dick, and, 1:81 Chisholm, Shirley, and, 1:86 Clinton, Bill, and, 1:96, 97 compassionate conservatism and, 1:113, 114 Contract with America and, 1:118 counterculture and, 1:122 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Dukakis, Michael, and, 1:145 Duke, David, and, 1:146 faith-based programs and, 1:169 family values and, 1:172 federal budget deficit and, 1:174 Friedman, Milton, and, 1:200 Gingrich, Newt, and, 1:216 Goldwater, Barry, and, 1:223 Gore, Al, and, 1:226 Great Society and, 1:230 Harvey, Paul, and, 1:239 Heritage Foundation and, 1:249, 250 immigration policy and, 1:274 Johnson, Lyndon B., and, 1:287 Keyes, Alan, and, 1:298 Limbaugh, Rush, and, 1:322 McGovern, George, and, 2:346 Moral Majority and, 2:367 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, and, 2:371, 372
Index welfare (continued) New Deal and, 2:397 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, and, 1:196 Rove, Karl, and, 2:481 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., and, 2:493 sex education and, 2:508 Social Security and, 2:521–23 social theory on, 1:268 think tanks and, 2:558, 559 Wall Street Journal and, 2:587 Wallace, George, and, 2:588 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 War on Poverty and, 2:594 Will, George, and, 2:617 See also poverty; Social Security; wealth gap Wells, Jonathan, 1:125 Wells, Kitty, 1:123 Wellstone, Paul David, 1:51; 2:364, 576, 609–10 Wertham, Frederick, 1:106 West, Cornel Ronald, 1:252; 2:426, 456, 546, 610, 610–11 West Side Story (musical), 1:28, 203, 204 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), 1:20, 92 Westminster Theological Seminary, 1:201; 2:490 Weyrich, Paul Michael, 1:99; 2:467, 611 Whalen, James, 2:602 whaling, 1:163 What Liberal Media? (Alterman), 2:351 What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? (Medved and Wallechinsky), 2:354 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver), 1:325 What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Lewis), 1:321; 2:504 Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (film), 1:304 When the Levees Broke (film), 1:318; 2:426 whistleblowers, 1:3, 176–77, 322; 2:379, 380, 602, 612–13 Whitcomb, John, 1:124 White, Byron, 2:479 White, Dan, 2:361 White, Kevin, 1:195 White, Mel, 1:171 White, Reginald Howard, 2:613 White, Ryan, 1:13 “white flight,” 1:54, 65, 260; 2:452, 604 White House Conference on Families, 1:138, 183; 2:6 White House tapes, 1:131 white nationalist movement, 2:614–15 “White Negro, The” (Mailer), 1:295; 2:334 white supremacists, 1:18, 28, 29, 31, 114, 135, 145–46, 182, 204, 327, 330; 2:335, 349, 359, 360, 362, 365, 383, 477, 613, 614–16 Whitewater scandal, 1:97, 98, 99; 2:400–401, 533, 602 Whitman, Charles, 2:497 Whitman, Christine Todd, 1:82 Whitman, Walt, 1:295
Whittle, H. Chris, 1:80 WHO. See World Health Organization Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Huntington), 1:269 Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (Sombart), 1:21 Why Johnny Can’t Read (Flesch), 1:151 Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (Bennett), 1:41, 87; 2:465 Wiener, Jon, 1:198 Wigand, Jeffrey, 2:612 Wild Bunch, The (film), 1:325 Wild One, The (film), 1:295 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), 1:162 Wilde, Liz, 2:517 Wilderness Act (1964), 1:162, 190 Wilderness Society, 1:188, 189–90, 319 Wildmon, Donald Ellis, 1:290; 2:386, 437, 467, 616–17 Wilke, John, 1:2 Wilkinson, Bill, 2:614 Wilkinson, Bruce, 2:447 Wilkinson, J. Harvey, III, 1:232 Will, George Frederick, 1:122, 295; 2:388, 532, 617–18 Will & Grace (TV program), 1:205, 207 William, Pat, 1:189 Williams, Damian, 1:302 Williams, Hank, Jr., 1:123 Williams, Jacqueline, 2:608 Williams, Jody, 1:222 Williams, Jonathan, 1:31 Williams, Pete, 2:421 Williams, Ronald, 1:23 Williams, Stanley Tookie, 2:499 Williams, Tennessee, 1:326 Williams, Vanessa, 1:39 Williams, Walter, 1:323 Williams, William Appleman, 1:102; 2:618 Williams, Willie, 1:302 Williams v. Saxbe (1976), 2:512 Wilson, Edmund, 2:618–19 Wilson, Gretchen, 1:123; 2:589 Wilson, James, 1:192 Wilson, Joseph C., IV, 1:78, 82; 2:482, 625 Wilson, Pete, 1:301 Wilson, Richard, 2:627 Wilson, William J., 2:608 Wilson, Woodrow, 1:21 Winchell, Walter, 1:288 Wind, Timothy, 1:301, 302 Winfrey, Oprah Gail, 1:46, 139, 141; 2:369, 411, 426, 439, 619–20 Wisconsin, University of, 1:319; 2:531, 537 Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993), 1:240 Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), 1:260 Wise Use Movement, 1:29–30; 2:359, 603 Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (Salisbury), 2:401 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Allen), 1:330 Witness (Chambers), 1:79; 2:406 Wohlstetter, Albert, 2:394 Wolf, Leonard, 2:621 Wolf, Naomi, 2:422, 620, 620–21
I-53
Wolfe, Alan, 1:268 Wolfe, Thomas, 1:295 Wolfe, Thomas Kennerly, Jr., (Tom), 1:210, 324; 2:348, 398, 579, 621–22 Wolff, Edward, 2:607 Wolfowitz, Paul, 1:16, 305; 2:394, 395, 558 women affirmative action and, 1:8, 9, 10 Black Radical Congress and, 1:45 body image and, 1:36, 37, 39, 202; 2:620, 620 Catholic Church and, 1:75 Christian Coalition and, 1:88 comic books and, 1:106 comic strips and, 1:107 diversity training and, 1:137, 138 Election of 2008 and, 2:423, 424 Farrakhan, Louis, and, 1:173 Flynt, Larry, and, 1:182 fur industry and, 1:202 gangs and, 1:204 globalization and, 1:221 John Wayne films and, 2:605 lesbians and, 1:321 literature and, 1:325 McCain, John, and, 2:339 multicultural conservatism and, 2:373 Muslim Americans and, 2:378 PETA and, 2:426 political correctness and, 2:435 postmodernism and, 2:438 Promise Keepers and, 2:447 Saudi Arabia and, 2:489 sex education and, 2:507 sexual assault and, 2:511 sexual revolution and, 2:513 shock jocks and, 2:517 Social Security and, 2:522 social theory on, 1:268 Soros, George, and, 2:525 speech codes and, 2:530, 531 Summers, Lawrence, and, 2:546 Wal-Mart and, 2:590 Watt, James, and, 2:604 Winfrey, Oprah, and, 2:620 Wolf, Naomi, and, 2:620, 620, 621 Zinn, Howard, and, 2:630 See also Equal Rights Amendment; feminism; stay-at-home mothers Women Against Pornography, 2:368, 437 women in the military, 2:512, 526, 579, 622–23 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act (1948), 2:622 women’s rights. See feminism women’s studies, 1:152, 229, 261–62, 280; 2:374, 623–24 Wood, Judy, 1:117 Woodson v. North Carolina (1976), 1:70 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1:121, 234; 2:476, 596 Woodward, Robert Upshur, 1:131, 176–77; 2:461, 624–25 Word Records, 1:117 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 2:385
I-5 4
Index
World Bank, 1:16; 2:546 World Community of Al-Islam in the West, 1:173; 2:382 World Council of Churches, 2:347, 440, 490, 625–26 World Health Organization (WHO), 1:72, 117; 2:414 World Is Flat, The: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Cen\tury (Friedman), 1:103, 221 World magazine, 1:113; 2:463, 625 World Trade Center, 2:375, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506 See also September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of World Trade Center (film), 2:540 World Trade Organization (WTO), 1:37–38, 220, 303; 2:338, 380 World War I, 1:21, 194, 196, 273, 285, 307; 2:394, 400, 527 World War II affirmative action and, 1:8 American exceptionalism and, 1:21 China and, 1:85 CIA and, 1:77 Cold War and, 1:102 comic books and, 1:106 communism and, 1:111 Demjanjuk, John, and, 1:134 Democratic Party and, 1:135 Eisenhower, Dwight D., and, 1:153 evangelicalism and, 1:166 France and, 1:194 gays in the military and, 1:205, 209 “Greatest Generation” and, 1:52, 212 health care and, 1:243 Hispanic Americans and, 1:255 Holocaust and, 1:28, 134, 258; 2:400 human rights and, 1:265 interventionism and, 2:618 Japan and, 1:161, 253–54, 284, 318; 2:408, 419, 438, 441, 568, 569
World War II (continued) Japanese internment and, 1:273; 2:467, 504, 599 Kennedy family and, 1:292 labor and, 1:311; 2:358 literature, film, and drama and, 1:247, 248, 307, 325; 2:535 McCarthyism and, 2:343, 344 Muhammad, Elijah, and, 2:382 Murrow, Edward R., and, 2:376 Nazism and, 2:615 New York Times and, 2:400 Niebuhr, Reinhold, and, 2:402 nuclear age and, 1:161, 253–54, 284, 318; 2:408, 409, 419, 438, 568, 569 postmodernism and, 2:438 Reagan, Ronald, and, 2:458 Soviet Union and, 2:343, 480, 618 stay-at-home mothers and, 2:534 Terkel, Studs, and, 2:556 think tanks and, 2:557 Truman, Harry S., and, 2:458, 568, 569 War Powers Act and, 2:594 Wayne, John, and, 2:605 World War II memorial, 2:626–27 WorldCom, 1:34 Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (Dean), 1:131 Wounded Knee incident, 1:23, 133; 2:578, 627 WPA. See Works Progress Administration Wright, Jeremiah, 1:158; 2:412, 453 Wright, Jim, 1:217 Wright, Richard, 1:261 Wright, Robin, 2:425 Wright, Susan Webber, 1:100 WRL. See War Resisters League WTO. See World Trade Organization Wuthnow, Robert, 1:268 Wyeth, Newell Conyers, 2:557 Wylie, Chalmer, 2:496 Wyman, Jane, 2:458
Wynette, Tammy, 1:123 X-Files, The (TV program), 1:116 XYZ affair, 1:194 YAF. See Young Americans for Freedom Yahoo, 1:167 Yale University, 1:57, 61, 62, 254; 2:402, 530, 544, 572 Yalta Conference, 1:102–3, 111 Yamanaka, Shinya, 2:537 Yarborough, Ralph, 1:250 Yard, Robert Sterling, 1:189 Yates v. United States (1957), 1:17, 111 Yeltsin, Boris, 2:528 Yemen, 2:378, 503 Yoder, John Howard, 1:240 Yom Kippur War, 2:489 Yoshimura, Fumio, 2:362 Youk, Thomas, 1:297 Young, Frank, 1:186 Young, Neil Percival, 2:628 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), 1:56, 58; 2:484, 543, 584 Young Romance (comic book), 1:106 Youth International Party (Yippies), 1:83, 121, 257; 2:399, 596 Yu, Junying, 2:537 Yugoslavia, 1:194; 2:582 Yupik Eskimos, 1:160 Zaccaro, John, 1:179, 180; 2:372 Zahniser, Howard, 1:190 Zaire. See Congo Zambia, 1:266 Zappa, Frank Vincent, 2:460, 476, 629 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), 2:498 zero tolerance, 1:227; 2:344, 497, 629–30 Ziggy Stardust, 1:25 Zimbabwe, 1:266; 2:626 Zinn, Howard, 1:52, 121; 2:470, 471, 630–31
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