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Cities are units of taxation, representation, service and identity. All these demand governance, which, since the American Revolution, has been vested in locally elected officials at City Hall. Over the centuries, patricians have given way to immigrant bosses, reformers, politicians and outsiders. In the early twenty-first century, a mayor, city council or city manager must manage conflicting factions and guide a city, while shaping regional, national and international images. Hence, mayors have included charismatic and controversial figures on the frontline of politics—LaGuardia and Giuliani in New York City, NY, Alioto and Feinstein in San Francisco, CA, the Daleys in Chicago, IL, etc.
Only two American mayors, however (Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge), have become president.
City governments vary widely in their constitution and powers, set by states (or the federal government for Washington, DC). Urban administration generally must appoint officers, set agendas and budgets (on the basis of local revenues and, in the postwar era, increasing federal inter-vention) and manage services including parks, security education and ceremonial visits. Strong mayors control—or delegate to department heads and managers—most functions of government; others, however, share functions with their elected city councils, which may represent neighborhoods or interest groups. Depending on the city charter (itself often dependent on the state), police chiefs, Boards of Education, and somewhat autonomous institutions dealing with water, housing, transportation and health may further divide responsibility. Moreover, the complexities of urban laws and records mean that even small cities have bureaucracies that endure long after any mayor leaves office. Finally, city government must balance interests of state and federal government, competing regional interests and divided citizens. This becomes critical as development and welfare programs have become areas of shared responsibility or in emergent policy questions—environment or immigration—in which the city cannot control policies, although it must deal with consequences. The need for coordination also underscores the impact of suburbs on city administrations: cities are swamped by, yet cut off from, metropolitan growth. The era of annexation ended well before the Second World War, although few real consolidated planning and governance structures have emerged in expanding metropolitan areas. Suburbanites, in turn, may be more likely to identify a charismatic urban leader than the bureaucrats generally charged with the planning and politics of sprawl. Hence, mayors negotiate constantly—with other governments, unions, businesses and citizens.
Traditional mayors tend to be found in large American cities, older cities and the Northeast. Such mayors are intensely political, often within a highly partisan framework (although socialists dominated Milwaukee and reform candidates have beaten the system elsewhere). For most of the twentieth century mayors were identified with political machines that organized, coerced and bought votes—with money or patronage—in order to promote party interests; Chicago’s Richard Daley was such a kingpin. Local organization, from ward politics and political clubs through urban patronage, can play a strong role in state and national elections as well. The urban dead, according to folklore, have voted many times in Chicago and Philadelphia, PA. Civil-service reforms and other watchdogs have been used to control such party bosses.
Yet the immediacy and intensity of city government has made it an area of breakthroughs for those outside the system, including minorities and women. In the turnof-the-nineteenth-century South, for example, Jewish mayors were elected as reformers from Savannah, GA to New Orleans, LA. Irish and Italian ethnics also made mayoralties stepping stones to urban recognition. Later, in the 1970s, African American mayors spoke to changing majorities optimistically or defensively; Hispanic mayors in San Antonio, TX and Miami, FL also have marked changes in urban demographics.
Women have most readily gained urban power in small cities, but San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, DC all have elected women mayors.
Yet one must not over-emphasize macro-politics. In fact, most American cities have only figurehead mayors, eschewing personality and corruption for a professional city manager. This format, in which city councilors contract an administrator, was first adopted in Dayton, Ohio in 1913. It remains most common in the West and in cities of under 100,000, although these have become Sunbelt metropoles. City managers are apolitical, without the community roots mayors rely on; nor can they set policy independently.
Strong or weak, the mayor often shapes the image of the city in significant ways. In the 1960s, liberal Republican John Lindsay was stylish for New York, while Ed Koch proved down to earth and David Dinkins, as an African American, recognized the new minority mosaic in the city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani focused on creating a “civil” city, sometimes crossing the line between quality of life and denying those who mar the clean city. By contrast, Mayor Marion Barry’s arrest for crack possession seemed to epitomize the decay of Washington. Symbolism and power converge in the effectiveness of decisions, actions and planning.
Mass media are also critical. City government gains constant attention—political, economic and personal—in local newspapers and television. Mayors become spokespersons and lightning rods in crises: Tom Bradley addressed both fellow citizens and national media to calm a rioting Los Angeles, CA. Fictional media seem rather unsympathetic: movies and literature have concentrated on corruption and bossism from the 1930s onwards. Later cinematic mayors face crime or disaster until the “real” hero arrives—a Batman scenario. In television’s Spin City (ABC, 1996–), in fact, a bumbling New York City mayor is completely managed by the administrators around him.
Industry:Culture
Citizens of Texas often say Texas is not a state, but a state of mind. Perhaps no other state has been represented more in popular culture than Texas—yet stereotypes of the oil baron, cowboy, superpatriot and cheerleader distill (and conceal) com plex, dynamic histories. As an economic powerhouse and the birthplace of two postwar presidents (Eisenhower and Johnson) and home of a third presidential family (Bush), the myths and changes of Texas influence all of America.
The 28th state in the Union and largest of the continental states, Texas was annexed on December 29, 1845. Americans had settled there after 1821 in territory ruled by Mexico.
Tensions between colonizers and the state eventually meant war, including the famous 1836 Battle of the Alamo (San Antonio), where frontier heroes Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and William Travis died. Films and books have kept this memory alive, although, as Holly Brear suggests in Inherit the Alamo (1995), this shrine also divides Mexican American and Anglo-American consciousness. Prior to annexation, Texas was the only state in the union that had been an independent nation (1836–45).
The nickname “Lone Star State” also suggests a conception shared by Texas citizens and others in the United States and abroad. Texas, called the “Third Coast,” is characterized by vast spaces, freedom, opportunity and more nationalistic sentiment than in the United States itself. This independent ethos is supported by history and through economic success and population growth that have made Texas the third-largest state in the country. Oil and gas lead the way in the twentieth century; the international success of the prime-time soap opera Dallas made Texas oil-millionaires global stereotypes.
Metropoles like Dallas and Houston, and burgeoning San Antonio, El Paso and Austin, TX have incorporated more economic diversity, including agriculture and livestock, shipping, retail, military development, electronics, communications and tourism.
Growth complicates a potentially conflictive cultural landscape. While sharing a long border with Mexico, the large Mexican American population was repressed for generations. African Americans reflect the state’s slave heritage as well as its attraction for blacks who sought opportunities as cowboys or oil workers. Both have gained more prominence since the civil-rights era, although many argue that they have been left out of postwar wealth and power. Other older immigrant groups include Germans and Czechs, while new immigration from Vietnam, China and Latin America continues to change the state’s Sunbelt agglomerations.
Many outside Texas would reduce its culture to mythic characters and spaces. Yet Texas also has a large and well-funded state university system, which has made cities like Austin cosmopolitan enclaves, in addition to elite private schools like Rice (Houston). Its wealthy cities and citizens have built museums and concert halls and contributed to modern architecture. Sports are also part of Texas culture: football’s Dallas Cowboys (“America’s Team”), the basketball champion San Antonio Spurs and the Houston Astrodome represent this prominent role. Yet the small-town independence of Texas may be better captured in college and high-school football, chronicled in Bissinger’s Friday Nïght Lights (1990).
Money population and dynamism made Texas an electoral prize even before the Second World War, when the state was solidly Democrat. While Johnson kept it in Kennedy’s camp, Texas has subsequently become a powerhouse of conservative Republicans in Congress as well as the middle-of-the road Bush family. Governor George Bush, Jr.’s ability to raise $36 million in the first quarter of his campaign shows both local power and national attention that make Texas a major region and actor in the American future.
The University of Texas Press produces excel-lent works on state history and culture.
Industry:Culture
Civil-rights organization formed in 1960, following the success of the sit-ins. Ella Baker, executive director of SCLC, convened a group of student activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. Encouraging them to maintain their independence of SCLC, Baker helped establish one of the most radical organizations created by the Civil Rights movement. At first including white and black members, the organization remained largely committed to the King vision of non-violence, supporting the freedom rides and carrying out registration drives. With the election of Stokely Carmichael as chairperson to replace John L. Lewis, the organization became increasingly radical. Carmichael adopted Black Power as his slogan, leading many white members to leave the organization. Following the election of H. Rap Brown, SNCC was renamed the Student National Coordinating Committee, shedding its last connections with the civil-rights movement. Under Brown’s leadership the organization became virtually defunct.
Industry:Culture
Civil-rights organization founded in 1942 by several white students at the University of Chicago, along with black activists like James Farmer. CORE drew its inspiration from methods Gandhi employed in India, and developed the tactic of sit-ins, before their widespread adoption and success in 1960. Under Farmer’s leadership, it organized the freedom rides in 1961, which succeeded (after SNCC intervened to continue them to their conclusion) in pushing the Interstate Commerce Commission to prohibit segregated facilities at bus terminals.
CORE’s influence began to founder over the issue of the organization’s interracialism (much of its membership had been white and many leadership positions were not held by African Americans). Exasperated by the sluggishness of reform in the South, many blacks in CORE began to promote black nationalism, a shift that became explicit with the election of Roy Innis to national director in 1968. Innis moved the organization away from civil rights altogether, and, after centralizing the organization under his control, began to promote self-segregation and black capitalism. Attempts by old leaders to regain control of the organization failed, and it has become a bastion of black conservatism.
Industry:Culture
Class and status anxiety in an apparently egalitarian society have created ample opportunity for social advisors to judge correct behavior, especially with regard to formal ritual occasions like weddings and funerals. At the same time, etiquette as a social code of the elite was also identified with assimilation through mass media, permitting a series of published social arbiters to flourish from generation to generation. Emily Post’s 1920s Etiquette, for example, drew on the cachet of old money to advise on problems dealing with servants, accents and travel, as well as special occasions. Amy Vanderbilt, with another established name, took on a similar role for the postwar middle class.
While many baby boomers rejected such stylized behaviors as inauthentic in the 1960s, the uncertainties of multicultural lives as well as ongoing life crises have produced new figures for millennial behavior. These again cater to individuals without family guidance or education in such social traditions. Miss Manners (Judith Martin) in her columns and books adapts an ironic Victorian voice to current questions of shifting gender, family and ethnic conjunctions; Martha Stewart, while focused on style, conveys guidance in living for the leisured middle class. Etiquette has also been conveyed by mass media as part of the portrayals of class, as well as explorations of character, issues of marriage, bereavement, etc.
There are, of course, class and ethnic differences in behavior, ranging from expectations of participants in ritual events to issues of loudness, assertiveness or presentations of self in social situations that continuously divide multicultural and intergenerational gatherings. In such a setting, formality (derived from European models) may constitute a neutral ground or an additional layer of repression or exclusion.
Industry:Culture
Clubs emerged as elite meeting places in the nineteenth century along the male, upperclass and highly segregated lines of comparable British institutions. Some of these, ensconced in landmark buildings, continue to play a role in the social organization and business of cities like New York (Metropolitan Club), Philadelphia, PA (Union Club) and San Francisco, CA (Union Pacific Club). Other clubs also handle issues of elite reproduction, like debutante balls, although these declined after the 1960s; some specialized in athletic events like rowing, cricket and yachting. Professional associations (National Press Club or Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC) and alumni organizations represented similar prestige associations and edifices.
As automobiles moved people away from urban centers, country clubs emerged as complementary institutions, promoting social cohesion but adding on such features as more spacious clubhouses, golf, tennis and other recreational events, dining rooms and accommodations. In some cases, these clubs served to stimulate growth and define elite suburban districts. While these clubs tended to incorporate women and families (often around a male member or proprietor), they remained exclusive—not permitting African Americans, Jews or Catholic ethnics, depending on their locations. Some of these groups, in fact, organized alternative clubs delineating new suburban geographies.
After the Second World War and the Depression, many country clubs faced economic straits and pressures from development that engulfed them. This forced movements, consolidations, rebuilding and expanding membership to incorporate a broader middle class. Changing tastes in recreation meant crowding on golf courses and demands for pools, tennis and fitness facilities, as well as dining and dancing (while facilities were adapted for air-conditioned indoor spaces). Modernist clubhouses set the scene for many 1950s and 1960s depictions of suburban life and rites of passage such as weddings and anniversaries.
By the 1960s, social pressures also challenged exclusionary rules. Single women and businesswomen sued for access to both urban and country clubs, which they saw as locations for deal-making as well as recreation. Ethnic and racial barriers fell more slowly and bitterly—in 1990 the Professional Golf Association threatened Birmingham (Alabama)’s Shoals Country Club with loss of the PGA championship in order to open the club to blacks. Politicians also came under scrutiny for exclusive policies, forcing either changes in the clubs or loss of influential members.
While the economic expansion of the late twentieth century renewed many clubs, they remain exclusive because of entrance fees and annual payments as well as waiting lists for memberships. Hence, in many metropolitan areas, they still indicate gradations within the upper and middle classes based on heritage (old versus new money as well as lingering ethnic divisions).
Industry:Culture
Coined as a critical term in relation to the work of Wassily Kandinsky abstract expressionism generally refers to the artistic movement that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, known more broadly as New York School Painting. Born of a confluence of European immigration and American regionalism, abstract expressionism, or, as the critic Harold Rosenberg dubbed it, “Action Painting,” ranged from the intricately woven paint skeins of Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” abstractions to the gestural violence of Willem de Kooning’s figurative female portraits.
Originally celebrated as an unmitigated triumph of American cultural ascendancy, most resoundingly and enduringly in the contemporaneous criticism of Clement Greenberg, and retrospectively in the art historical work of Irving Sandler, in the 1970s, revisionist social art historians explored the degree to which its success stemmed from the easy metaphoric affinity of the presumed individuality and freedom evinced in its surfaces with the rhetoric of Cold War political ideology.
More recent feminist scholarship has excavated and interrogated the ways in which gender and identity shaped both the production and reception of New York School Painting, as is powerfully emblematized in a juxtaposition of “Jack the Dripper,” who “spread paint like seed,” upon the prone canvas with the Color-Field painter Helen Frankenthaler, who “bled” upon the unprimed canvas with her painterly “stains” and “flows.”
Industry:Culture
Coin-operated machines that allow the user to select and play recorded music. Offshoots of nineteenth-century coin-operated player pianos, jukeboxes appeared in the 1930s, although sales took off after the war. People became mesmerized by styling details, including animated bubble tubes, revolving color columns and a revealed recordchanging mechanism that enticed customers to play their favorites on the Wurlitzer or Rockola.
Jukeboxes became ubiquitous in bars and malt shops from the 1940s to the 1960s; they remain symbols of those eras. They have reappeared in recent years due to nostalgia, although they now play CDs instead of 78s and 45s.
Industry:Culture
Collections of animals, fish and natural curiosities open to the public have consistently intersected with and reinforced the societies that created them. America’s more than 160 credited zoos and aquaria receive more than 100 million visitors annually. They also speak to changing values of US society.
Victorian zoos, emerging around private menageries and urban modernization, became showplaces for architecture and landscapes as well as animals, exemplified in the Philadelphia, PA zoo’s elaborate buildings or Frederick Law Olmsted’s planning for Boston, MA’s Franklin Zoo and Manhattan’s marvelous pocket menagerie in Central Park. The last was redone by Robert Moses in the 1930s, a period in which other zoos were expanded under Works Progress Administration (WPA) patronage.
In the 1960s, zoos were criticized for their cramped cages and unnatural displays.
These attacks, as well as scientific evolution, shifted the impetus of many zoos from collection towards conservation, where US zoos became world leaders. Placards discussing breeding programs, genetic engineering and habitat preservation have complemented open exhibits and complex habitats. At the same time, zoos use “blockbuster” attractions like Philadelphia’s white lions or the Washington, DC National Zoo’s giant pandas, fruit of Nixon’s rapprochement with China.
America’s other great contemporary zoos, defined by size, programs and resources, include the San Diego Zoo, Chicago, IL’s Lincoln Park, New York City’s Wildlife Conservation Society (including the Bronx Zoo) and the National Zoo in Washington, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Nearly half of all zoos are municipal projects, although they must also rely on foundation assistance and wider civic memberships.
Nonetheless, such zoos represent regional and global tourist attractions—the St. Louis, MO Zoo gained wide media exposure through television’s Wild Kingdom, featuring its director, Marlin Perkins, while Miami, FL’s Metrozoo merited a Frederick Wiseman documentary.
Large-scale public zoos also have been shadowed by smaller private and commercial collections, ranging from a few animals imprisoned beside a highway to larger exhibits like South Carolina’s Brookgreen Gardens, created by Archer Huntington and his wife in 1931 on their estate. As America sprawled along newly paved interstates, larger enterprises—safari parks, reptile-lands and Disney’s Wild Kingdom—followed. Zoos and acquaria have also become features of (and taken as characteristics of) amusement parks.
Aquaria, less attractive than zoos, began with Washington’s National Aquarium, located in the Department of Commerce building. Other early aquaria opened in Battery Park, Manhattan (1895, moved to Coney Island in 1957) and Belle Isle (Detroit, MI, 1904). Many declined after the Second World War, but 1980s waterfront development spurred renewed interest in Baltimore, MD, New Orleans, LA and other cities. These scientific collections also have competed with private commercial venues like the Sea World chain, which specializes in marine circus acts.
The Victorian zoo highlighted exoticism and hierarchy in humans’ domination of fierce nature and other humans. The modern American zoo, by contrast, has become a center of ecological concern and pedagogy as much as display—yet this, too, reflects the changing cultural meanings of both nature and its viewers.
Industry:Culture
Combinations of multiple acts—singing, dancing, comedy and drama—strung together by a genial host like Milton Berle linked early television to Vaudeville and radio. In subsequent decades, variety shows have gone through cycles of popularity and innovation as well as decline in the 1990s.
Ed Sullivan, who moved from Broadway columnist to famously wooden host, created the classic variety show (Toast of the Town, CBS 1948–55; The Ed Sullivan Show, 1956– 71). While known for bizarre juxtapositions—“Next Week, the Beatles and the Pietà”— Sullivan also showcased Elvis Presley, Broadway, Vaudevillians and emergent black performers between acrobats and hand puppets. Other classic early shows include the Ernie Kovacs Show (various networks), Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1954–7) and the long-running Tonight Show (see late-night television).
Subsequent shows have tended to use comedy or music as a skeleton for skits and spotlight appearances. While white male-dominated, variety shows’ eclecticism has created mass media entrée for African American performers, including hosts Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Flip Wilson, who had their own shows from the 1950s through the 1970s. Strong women like female comedian Carol Burnett (CBS, 1967–78) also have made their mark.
Other shows marketed Las Vegas, NV (Dean Martin), rock (Hullabaloo), Nashville (Hee-Haw) and puppets (the Muppet shows). Variety shows nonetheless rarely looked beyond Americans and occasional British celebrities (until the arrival of cable chains like Univision). Meanwhile, linkages of television to other fields have fostered guest spotlights to promote film, music and celebrity sports.
Given television’s orientation towards mass audiences, variety-show comedy is often tame, involving take-offs on television or movies or suggestive soundbites like those of the rapid-fire Rowan and Martin Laugh-in (NBC, 1968–73). Political humor did appear in the 1960s with the short-lived satirical review That Was the Week that Was (NBC, 1964–5). Later, the controversial Smother’s Brothers Comedy Hour (CBS, 1965–7) brought countercultural performers on screen while attacking the Vietnam War and other sensitive issues before CBS pulled the plug. Sexual humor was more controlled but safe, although Flip Wilson (NBC, 1970–4) challenged categories of gender and propriety.
Other variety shows, in fact, promoted the merging of politics and entertainment— Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In, while Bill Clinton campaigned on latenight shows. Sonny Bono, who moved from music to variety shows with wife Cher, later became a mayor and a member of Congress.
In the 1990s, variety shows seem to have played out their popularity except for latenight viewers. Saturday Night Live, begun in the 1970s, offers a hip sensibility in ensemble television that has produced star comics for the baby boomers and Generation X, with hot musicians and guest hosts ranging from Joe Namath to Jesse Jackson.
Despite this network decline, MTV, cable television networks like E! and even talk shows have picked up some of the elements that made variety shows a showcase, nursery and sales department for American entertainment.
Industry:Culture
