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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Countercultural visionaries who have become consummate symbols of the 1960s.
Abjuring business and suburban conformity hippies envisioned alternatives that included freedom, shared possessions, experimentation in drugs, sexuality and lifestyles and a return to nature. While some have maintained this commitment, for others—and for media representations of the 1960s—hippies have been reduced to flowing colorful clothes, psychedelia and exotic symbolism and memories of a drug culture, undercutting the ideas of political and economic reform that also underpinned “tuning in, turning on and dropping out.”
Industry:Culture
Country music emerged in the postwar period as one of the most popular forms of American music. Although its first fans and performers were working-class and rural whites of the South, it is now popular worldwide.
Country music’s most recent influences are bluegrass music, cowboy music and western swing; its roots can be found in Scottish and English folk music, Cajun music and African American spirituals and blues. The music is renowned for plaintive songs about betrayed love, rendered in regional accents by voices often raw with emotion. The word “twang” has come to describe the vocal style of most country singers. The musical arrangements favor the steel guitar, the fiddle and the guitar, but the voice is always foreground. Concerts highlight singers and bands; the visual style of some of the performers—leather, lace and fringe—is also quite remarkable.
Most country performers remain white. Only two artists have challenged this norm: the black singer Charlie Pride, who was popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and the lesbian singer k.d.lang, who emerged in the 1980s and borrowed freely from country forms in order to create her own persona.
Since the war, country music can be divided into a few distinctive styles: honky tonk, the Nashville sound, outlaw country and urban cowboy music. In the 1940s and 1950s, the great Hank Williams, who sang of love and loss in robust, rough and ironic tones, epitomized the honky tonk style. Other popular honky tonk stylists were Lefty Frizzel and Kitty Wells. The Nashville sound was slicker, more produced and centered around the renowned Grand Ole Opry theater.
The silky smooth voices of Gentleman Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold embodied this style in the 1950s and enlarged the fan base of country Singers like Patsy Cline combined honky tonk with the Nashville sound and paved the way for other female singers like Loretta Lynn. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard came to prominence in the late 1960s and established the style of outlaw country—a mixture of honky tonk with southern rock, which expressed a defiant blue collar perspective.
By the 1970s, country music began to go urban with Dolly Parton’s crossover hit “9 to 5” and the success of Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt and others who mixed country with more mainstream pop. Following upon the pop-influenced new country of Reba McEntire and Randy Travis in the 1980s, Garth Brooks became in the 1990s a country-based crooner with mass sex appeal, bringing country music to its largest audience ever.
Despite its great popularity at the century’s end, country music has lost some of its emotive poetry substituting polish for rougher tales of poverty and unfaithful lovers.
Industry:Culture
Cow’s milk, subject to strict government gradation and price controls, is an obsessive element of American diets, touted as the “perfect food.” It also provides a national imagery of dairy farms and chores that typifies wholesome American life. The Dairy Council has produced years of effective advertisements supporting consumption, including a famous series showing celebrities from Spike Lee to Health and Human Services’ Donna Shalala with a milk moustache. Nonetheless, it is no longer recommended for children under the age of one and Americans not of Northern European descent may be lactose-intolerant as adults.
Industry:Culture
Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger for Detective Comics in May 1939, Batman soon transcended the comic book to become an American icon, appearing in war bond promotion and an antiJapanese film serial. The McCarthyite 1950s saw Batman and Robin accused of promoting homosexuality while the 1966 television series, notorious for its camp humor, revived the character for the pop generation. Batman was dramatically reinvented in Frank Miller’s “graphic novel” The Dark Knight Returns (1986), and again in Tim Burton’s 1989 feature film. The blockbuster sequels which followed demonstrate the character’s undiminished cultural potency in the early twentyfirst century.
Industry:Culture
Created by Congress in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the primary intelligence agency of the United States government. Its activities range from political and economic analysis to spying and covert operations. By law the CIA is limited to foreign operations; it is not supposed to undertake activities within the US—an operation left to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the mid-1990s, “the Agency” as the CIA is sometimes called, was estimated to have about 17,000 employees—the number is classified.
Public and media interest in the CIA has varied over time, but from its inception the CIA’s very nature has raised perplexing questions about how a clandestine agency and a democracy can coexist. The secrecy that surrounds many CIA operations has also made it a favorite target of conspiracy theorists, a frequent inspiration for suspense novelists and a phobia for the pathologically paranoid.
The CIA came into existence at President Harry Truman’s urging with relatively little notice in the early days of the Cold War, its establishment being just one item in a massive law reorganizing the nation’s defense operations. The CIA’s forerunner was the Office of Strategic Services, which functioned during the Second World War, but the US had never had a permanent agency devoted exclusively to intelligence before the CIA was created.
Throughout the 1950s, the CIA engaged in numerous covert activities overseas that received little public notice and even less criticism. It helped overthrow the leftist prime minister of Iran in 1953, installing the Shah in his place. It also participated in a coup in Guatemala in 1954 to eliminate a reformist government there. Both actions were seen as part of an effort to stymie the Soviet Union.
One of the most successful CIA-sponsored efforts to spy on the Soviet Union itself— fly-overs by U-2 spy planes, which began in 1956—ended up shattering the agency’s sheltered existence when one of the planes was shot down and the pilot captured in 1960.
To make matters worse, Soviet leaders were able to prove that President Dwight Eisenhower had initially lied to the American public about the operation—an early inkling of the credibility crises that were to plague Eisenhower’s successors.
The U-2 affair was followed in 1961 by the far more disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, an ill-fated CIA-sponsored attack on Cuba designed to overthrow Fidel Castro. The invasion was just the most public debacle in a series of CIA plans to get rid of Castro, which involved everything from fomenting unrest in Cuba to assassinating Castro.
Throughout the 1960s, the CIA was heavily involved in US operations in Vietnam, helping, for example, to overthrow the South Vietnamese government in 1963. But the CIA was also one of the most cautious federal agencies concerning Vietnam, its analyses frequently raising questions about the underlying assumptions of American policy.
In the end, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal (in which the CIA had abetted the cover-up) provoked the first detailed public and congressional scrutiny of the CIA. In 1975 special congressional investigations probed and publicized the darker side of CIA activities, including covert operations, assassination attempts and illegal spying on domestic dissidents. As a result, Congress set up permanent committees to oversee the CIA for the first time and put in place clear procedures to ensure that covert operations had presidential approval. In addition, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order prohibiting any federal employee from plotting or carrying out an assassination.
With its morale and prestige in tatters, the CIA limped through the remainder of the 1970s until President Reagan began strengthening the agency. But the CIA’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair led to another series of charges and investigations as the 1980s drew to a close.
The CIA began to remake itself yet again in the 1990s as the Cold War came to an end—an end that the CIA should have better foreseen, according to the agency’s critics.
But, while putting its house in order, the CIA discovered that it had been the home of several double agents, most notoriously Aldrich Ames, who had revealed to the Soviets the details of fifty-five clandestine operations and the names of thirty-four secret agents.
Ames received a life sentence in 1994.
Industry:Culture
Created by parents and muscular dystrophy sufferers in 1950 to combat neuromuscular diseases, the MDA now represents a major fundraiser in this area, as well as a significant partnership of citizens and scientists supporting research and care worldwide. It has been especially active in gene-therapy research on a number of neuromuscular syndromes.
Since 1965 its public face has been particularly associated with a Labor Day weekend telethon hosted by comedian (and MDA national chairperson) Jerry Lewis. While the telethon raised more than $1 billion, the growing consciousness of the disabled as citizens has also led to criticism that it treats MDA sufferers paternalistically.
Industry:Culture
Created in 1967 following the merger between the National and fledgling American Football Leagues, in which the champions of the leagues would play each other. The NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, attached Roman numerals to the games to further associate the game with a gladiatorial contest. The first contests were easy victories for the NFL team and not great spectacles (as few Superbowls end up being), but the 1969 game in which Joe Namath’s AFL New York Jets defeated the favored Baltimore Colts stimulated the public’s interest in this event.
Condensing a season into a single contest has made this game more significant than baseball’s World Series and the NBA’s Championship Series, which are spread over a week or more’s play. The fact that more than 50 percent of American people watch the game, meeting for parties and gambling furiously (adding to the statistical rise in domestic violence on this Sunday), has meant that broadcasters and advertisers have had a bonanza. The NFL charges the networks more than $20 million for the game and this money is recouped by charging upwards of $1.2 million for each 30-second commercial.
Industry:Culture
Creations of cities and states rather than the federal government, public libraries have been beacons of knowledge and refuges for generations of Americans, from children to the elderly immigrants and the homeless. Libraries also have been sites of struggle over materials—censorship remains a constant threat—and social division, as segregated libraries scarred cities of the South. Some, like those of New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Chicago, IL and Los Angeles, CA, have become international resource centers and architectural monuments to a vision of the city as well as important public spaces. Others serve towns or small neighborhoods with books, meeting places, educational and career guidance and, increasingly Internet access. Public libraries have earned the deep love of many Americans who treat them as a right to knowledge even as demands of service, finances and use challenge many systems to maintain their integrity Libraries vary in origins and extensions. The oldest circulating library in the US, the Library Company of Philadelphia, for example, was founded by the Junto Society and Benjamin Franklin in 1731; a public free library was chartered by the city 160 years later (1891). New York’s Astor Library founded by a merchant philanthropist, merged with others to constitute the New York Public Library in 1895. New Orleans assembled a public library with the help of nineteenth-century commercial lenders, while San Francisco, CA’s Board of Supervisors appropriated $24,000 for 6,000 books the public might read (but not borrow) in 1878–9.
Other libraries grew out of state initiatives: Vermont provided $100 to towns that would provide a matching $25 in 1896, and the Georgia Public Library there grew up in stores and homes of a small capitalist town.
Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) patronized the construction of more than 2,500 library buildings—solid marble palaces with memorials to Western sages constitute an enduring image of “the library” These buildings housed children’s facilities, reference services and government documents, as well as public spaces. Their growth has been linked in turn to the ongoing professionalization of librarians and definitions of knowledge within an American community; libraries created a symbolic Bill of Rights against censorship in 1939. Many have faced constant flare-ups about materials on race, sex and gender that may be found on children’s and adults’ shelves.
By the 1990s, libraries number over 8,000 nationwide and offer electronic services, audio-visual materials and reference assistance. This does not mean all are served well.
While some older suburbs have strong systems, others have developed beyond existing rural facilities and do not find increasing state or local support. In the past, bookmobiles served outlying communities but now students may rely on schools rather than community spaces. Urban libraries face constant threats to budgets for staff as well as books; hours were severely curtailed in the New York system during the city’s financial crisis.
Libraries also must respond to multiple constituencies in terms of language and interests: romance readers, civic advocates and high schoolers all have different demands that may entail scores of items checked out to each client. Books for the blind and foreign-language collections speak to other visions of citizenship. Electronic resources constitute a major issue in planning for the future, as they do in college and research libraries. More debates over censorship have been ignited by potential Internet access to objectionable sites.
Industry:Culture
Creolization refers to the development of new forms of language and expression from contact among diverse cultures. Black English vernacular, for example, represents a creolized linguistic form that has developed stable forms centuries after first contact, while Spanglish and Chinglish refer to contemporary transnational creoles. The recombination of various identities has made creolization a fundamentally American process from Broadway stage to popular music to visual arts to food.
Creole, however, is not used to categorize settlers in the US as it was in Latin America.
As an ethnic term, it refers primarily to descendants of French creoles in Louisiana, whose dilemmas of ethnicity race and class are detailed by Virginia Dominguez in White by Definition (1985).
Industry:Culture
Cricket and cucumber sandwiches in Hollywood come to mind, with an English actor like David Niven (in his autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon, 1972) left wondering why he is able to find work with not much talent to draw on besides a cute accent. Or the life, death, traveling exhibits and collectibles of Diana Windsor, part of a surrogate royal family for Americans, who, like the Peter Sellars character in Being There (1979), just like to watch.
But the English in America have not merely been aristocrats, and their country is more than fodder for public broadcasting, like Masterpiece Theater, in which England is portrayed as fundamentally white with rather quaint and even charming ideas about class divisions. Americans often respond viscerally to such television fare. Indeed, the Republican Party’s assault on public broadcasting has had some genealogical connection with the old mid-western populist and middle-American suspicion of things British.
The United States has had a love—hate relationship with the country from which it sprung in revolution and from which many claim descent, and the English in America have needed to learn the nature of this relationship as they endeavor to exploit the country to their full advantage. The hate part is clearly understood—revolution is a source of powerful animus indeed. Additionally the largest immigrant groups in the United States were the descendants of Irish and Germans, the former linked to anticolonial nationalism and the latter from a nation that contested European sovereignty Later, immigrants from British colonies—South Asia, the Caribbean, Hong Kong—also have ambivalent feelings towards the English.
Love came from sharing constitutional ideas with the British, and from fighting alongside them in two world wars (though the first one saw Americans shedding their blood in defense of the British Empire in the most unpopular war ever fought by the US).
Since the Second World War, and certainly since the Suez crisis, Britain has been a junior partner, a base for American planes and cruise missiles. Americans have felt fairly comfortable envisioning Britain as a former empire, seeing themselves as the inheritors of British global dominance. Hence Americans could buy London Bridge and rebuild it in the middle of a desert (even if it turned out to be the wrong bridge). And if a Margaret Thatcher was still a potent enough force to motivate a wimpy president to go to war with a tin-pot dictator, so much the better.
But wealthy English speculators, under the cloak of their irrelevance, also sneaked into the United States during the 1980s to buy up major parts of American real estate— newspapers, companies, banks. While Americans were anxiously eyeing the Japanese and Germans, the English undertook far larger transactions of their own. Indeed, Thatcher’s virtually bankrupt Britain became a profitable haven for privateers who could play on the markets across the ocean.
But perhaps “the Brits” felt that this was merely payment for the debt the United States owed them in the realm of popular music and culture. Apart from highbrow television, the English invasion was most noticeable from the mid-1960s to the present in wave after wave of innovative music. Beginning with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, following through the psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd and Yes, through singer/songwriters as diverse as David Bowie (who became closely involved with artists producing the Philadelphia sound), Elton John and Joan Armatrading, and continuing with a dissonant crash with the punk excesses of the Sex Pistols, the English contribution to American music has been profound, in many instances fitting within the process of co-opting and commercializing African American music. The success of Mike Myers’ spoof on 1960s Britain in the “Austin Powers” movies pays tribute, in a rather warped way to this legacy The excesses of Thatcher and Reagan have given way to the centrists Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The old partnership of the 1950s has been revived, with Blair coming to the support of Clinton at every available opportunity and Clinton returning the favor whenever this might be of use to the prime minister.
Moreover, the old 1890s liaison—the “cute accent” gets the “All-American girl”—has returned as a match too. The hugely successful Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) established a template for the Anglo-American, all-white lovefest. This was then repeated in James Cameron’s (1997) remake of “Love Boat”, with a sinking feeling, followed by The Parent Trap remake (1998), in which it was shown that Americans and English truly were very rich twins divided at birth. The love affair has been reprised once again in the whitest Notting Hill (1999) ever captured on camera. Of course, this celebration of Anglo-American hegemony forgets one important fact: the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.
Industry:Culture
