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Freedom, according to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, can be thought of in a negative and a positive sense. The former, which can be traced back to the classical liberal philosophy of Bentham and Mill, is the absence of obstacles and barriers that would prevent individuals from realizing their various goals and aspirations. Here, promoting liberty is primarily a matter of removing, or at least minimizing, the constraints on what a person is allowed to do. Positive liberty on the other hand, is a broader sense of the term, and arises from a view of the individual as having a potential that requires active assistance in order to be realized. Fostering positive liberty entails providing individuals with the goods and services that they would require in order to achieve their aspirations.
Since the Second World War, there has been a fierce ongoing debate about the proper role of institutions, both public and private, for furthering these different senses of freedom. In large part the debate has been centered on questions of negative liberty especially with regard to the following topics: recreational drugs, abortion, guns, gambling and pornography. These issues have divided people into those who believe that the government should remove its restraints with regard to one of these issues and those who feel that, at least with regard to this particular subject, the government must impose some restriction on individual behavior in order to promote the public good.
There has been a general trend towards increasing individual liberty with regard to these topics, but this has not been constant. For example, while many drug laws were liberalized in the 1970s, there was a backlash against this in the 1980s and 1990s with a large increase in federal and state penalties for drug-related activities.
The debate about positive liberty has been less prominent, but it regularly crops up.
With regard to this the most significant period is clearly Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” (1963–7). This was the largest attempt, since Roosevelt’s New Deal, to create an active role for the state. The goal was to provide its citizens with freedom from sickness, poverty hunger and ignorance so that they might achieve their greatest potential.
Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, public broadcasting, food stamps and many other programs were either instituted or initiated during this period. Much of the political and social momentum since then has been against this approach, although the prominence of the debate over nationalizing healthcare in the 1990s demonstrated that the issues are far from settled.
While the distinction between negative and positive liberty is useful, it can also be misleading as it may imply a sharp division between the two. However, what began as a struggle to achieve a greater level of negative freedom may later turn into a battle for more extensive positive freedom. For example, perhaps the most important struggle for freedom in the postwar United States was the civil-rights crusade. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was initially concerned with removing the institutional barriers that had restricted minorities from voting and had radically constrained where they could live, eat, work, or attend school. Eventually many of these obstacles against African Americans were eliminated through Supreme Court decisions, like Brown v. Board of Education, and federal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965.
As these barriers were removed, however, there were others who felt that their removal alone would not be adequate in promoting genuine freedom for African Americans. They argued for a more activist role for institutions through such programs as affirmative action and economic opportunity zones in poorer neighborhoods.
Industry:Culture
Freemen, also known as Constitutionalists, believe that white Christian males are sovereign citizens beyond the jurisdiction of governmental authority. Freemen have established their own renegade judicial system, known as common-law courts, autonomous townships and their own monetary system, which makes use of fraudulent financial instruments. They derive their beliefs from segments of the Bible, the Magna Carta, Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution. Freemen have been implicated in a variety of offenses ranging from fraud to armed robbery In 1996 a group of Freemen and their followers were engaged in an eighty-one-day stand-off with the FBI in Brussett, Montana. In June 1996 the Freemen peacefully surrendered to the FBI.
Industry:Culture
From 1945 until 1989 the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in what came to be called a “Cold War.” Although characterized as “cold” rather than “hot” because it involved little direct military engagement between the two parties, this conflict nevertheless proved enormously costly to not only the two primary countries involved, but also to the numerous surrogate nations who bore the struggle’s most severe effects.
This period of extreme tension had a monumental impact on both the international geopolitical scene and American domestic life and thought.
The Cold War dates from the collapse of the victorious Second World War alliance.
Never particularly happy bedfellows, the United States and Western European allies had temporarily joined forces with the Soviet Union in order to defeat their common enemy Germany. Having successfully repelled Germany from its soil, the Soviet army drove Hitler’s troops back to Berlin and occupied the eastern half of Germany, including the capital. During their western sweep, the Soviets also recaptured much of Eastern Europe, and proved reluctant to release their prizes. The Cold War emerged from this struggle to reshape the postwar political map.
Whatever sense of alliance America felt with the Soviet Union during the war rapidly disappeared after it ended. At the Yalta Conference of the major successful powers in February 1945, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, had agreed in principle to hold free elections in the liberated countries as soon as possible. None happened, however, and within two years the Eastern European bloc—countries whose connection lay primarily in their shared political and economic allegiance to the Soviet Union—had solidified. The former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in 1946 to describe the Soviet Union’s hold over Eastern Europe.
In 1947 President Harry Truman declared an American responsibility to respond to the yearnings of “free peoples” around the world. This “Truman Doctrine” was aimed specifically at countries with a perceived potential for “becoming” communist. In the same year, policy expert George Kennan wrote an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, which encouraged the United States to counter what it viewed as Soviet expansionism by engaging the Soviet Union in local conflicts. This policy known as “containment,” came to dominate American foreign policy for the next forty years. It called for American involvement in countries throughout the world if a threat of communism was identified. It was this policy of “containment” that most profoundly determined the “Cold War.” This policy was first played out on the Korean Peninsula from 1950 until 1953. The Cold War became “hot” as the Americans, Russians and Chinese engaged in the first of several “surrogate” conflicts that pitted the Americans against communist enemies— some real, some less so. Although a “surrogate” conflict, over 33,000 American soldiers died in Korea and a precedent for armed intervention was set.
America’s containment imperative drove it to many other controversial policy decisions. For example, the Eisenhower administration toppled leaders in Iran and Guatemala with whose policies they disagreed. “Containment” also provided American leaders with the ideological justification to fund initially the French efforts to put down anti-colonial nationalists in Southeast Asia in the 1950s. Ultimately, America took over that war; between 1963 and 1975, 56,000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam War.
While the international geopolitical impact of this ideological competition became self-evident, its effect on domestic policy proved equally profound. American fear of communism produced an obsessive concern that communists living in America might somehow bring down the country’s democratic institutions. Determined to resist such a fate, American leaders compulsively searched for anyone espousing views that they felt resembled ideas promoted by communism. Everything from discussions of economic disparity to concerns over racial prejudice came under the heading of suspect ideas.
People speaking such thoughts became suspect themselves. Actual communists were arrested and many who held strong views on social justice, whether communist or not, found themselves under investigation as well. Although this assault on free speech is often credited to Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, a particularly virulent anticommunist senator, anti-communist persecution was a bipartisan activity. Both Democrats and Republicans engaged in ferocious violations of civil liberties and human rights in their quest to “preserve” democratic institutions in America. The legacies of this Cold War in America included years of suspicion and thousands of ruined lives.
One can also trace the shattered remnants of civil society in the 1960s to a controversial foreign policy abroad. American youth began to resist the apparently endless struggle against a communist enemy who seemed to offer little direct threat. By the end of the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of protestors angrily voiced loud dissent at Cold War strategies. From the so-called “war at home” over Vietnam to the growing antinuclear movement, the “Cold War consensus” (the presumed domestic support for containment policies) began to unravel.
The official collapse of the Soviet Union as a dominant communist state provides the “date” for the end of the Cold War. Faced with a weakened economy and the forces of the international global marketplace, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier, began a policy of “glasnost” (openness) in the mid-1980s. By 1989 it became clear that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev would no longer enforce iron discipline on its satellites. When the Berlin Wall (erected by the Soviets in 1961) began to come down in November 1989, the end was near. Within a few months, the Soviet “monolith” had collapsed—its authority undermined throughout the Eastern bloc and communism itself rejected within what soon came to be “Russia.” Attitudes towards Cuba, nonetheless, reflect this lingering heritage.
The cultural meanings of the Cold War are legion as well—from the definitions of American family, home and values in media to the blacklisting of suspect communists in Hollywood. One also sees its schizophrenia at work in cultural works, exhibitions and ideologies projecting American values into global competition, whether directly or indirectly in Hollywood, and concerns at home with dire and subversive threats. These concerns, again, could be expressed directly (in mysteries, spy movies and related genres or films like The Manchurian Candidate, 1962), while also underpinning the unease of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. Cultural critics, including academics, media makers and activists, also attacked policies and mentalities of the Cold War in a range of resistance from Noam Chomsky to Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr Strangelove (1962).
Indeed, the Cold War became intimately enmeshed with both high culture and everyday life for decades.
The Cold War dominated American foreign and domestic policy for over forty years.
Its impacts are still being felt as the United States remains uncertain as to its role in the world if it is not engaged in an ideological battle with an overarching enemy.
Industry:Culture
From 1955 to 1975, Gunsmoke, the longest running prime-time ensemble drama in television history, told stories of a sheriff, his sidekicks, Miss Kitty in the saloon and other drifters through a Western city. In the heyday of the TV western, literature and prior films spurred a plethora of cowboys, rugged landscapes and moral issues of the frontier for viewers every week. These series both launched stars—Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, James Garner—and showcased cinematic legends like Barbara Stanwyck, confronting a male world in The Big Valley (ABC, 1965–9). While no major shows followed Gunsmoke, the impact of the western nonetheless lingers.
The Brauers (1975) have categorized the television western by three phases. The first horse phase included cowboys and chases with heroes like Roy Rogers (NBC, 1951–7), the Lone Ranger (ABC, 1949–57) and the Cisco Kid (syndicated, 1950–6). This family entertainment (including Saturday morning fare) offered comical sidekicks and idealistic cowboys. Rogers merged public and private life with Dale Evans, while the Lone Ranger introduced a terse Indian companion, Tonto, and Sky Kïng (ABC, 1953–4) substituted a plane for a horse.
The second, adult evolution of the western followed the gun (e.g. Gunsmoke, CBS, 1955–75), with increased violence and retribution. The sheriff or some honest man versus criminals and occasional Indians recapitulated themes of freedom, justice and gunplay found in movies such as High Noon (1952). Moral ambiguities and irony crept in with the gambling Maverick family (ABC, 1957–62) as well as Bat Masterson (NBC, 1959–61) and his cronies. The Wild, Wild West (CBS, 1965–9) paired the western formula with James Bond-like espionage, humor, vamps and toys.
The consummate example of property was the vast Ponderosa ranch, owned by Ben Cartwright and his boys in Bonanza (NBC, 1959–1973), another top show. But this was echoed by both Stanwyck and Lee J. Cobb in The Virginian.
In all these melodramas of “Americanness,” strong, independent and virtuous men overcame obstacles for weak and evil men as well as forces of nature—floods, stampedes, blizzards—that tempered their character. Indians were not so badly defined as in earlier Hollywood westerns, but were rarely central to action or perspective. Hispanics also had a slight presence in the nebulous West; Asians were drawn between Bonanza’s faithful cook, Hop Sing, and David Carradine’s later half-Chinese Caine, wandering the West dispensing justice and wisdom in Kung Fu. Females tended to be love interests, domestic or flirtatious, until a stronger female/family perspective emerged with Little House on the Prairie (NBC, 1974–83). In the 1990s, however, the only longrunning western, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, cast a female star in a professional role.
While the Hollywood western was rekindled in the 1990s by films that introduced dark lines into heroes amidst epic grandeur, no such rebirth hit television. Yet westerns retain an impact in other ways. Star Trek (NBC, 1966–9) is heavily indebted to this schema on “the final frontier.” Moreover, prime-time soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest, all set in the West (the latter including a faithful Chinese servant), recalled the freewheeling property and even guns of older days, although in boardrooms rather than saloons and corrals.
Industry:Culture
From a purely medical perspective, infertility is “the inability to conceive after a year of unprotected intercourse or the inability to carry a pregnancy to term” (INCID 1997).
Infertility however, has also become a symbol of the lifestyle and social values adopted by white baby boomers. While some theories suggest that the documented increase in infertility may result from environmental toxins affecting both men and women, infertility is often viewed popularly as the cost to women of choosing career over family.
By postponing childbirth until thirty-five years and older, women are placed at a statistically higher risk of infertility The difficulty and expense of adopting white infants has increased the demand for infertility treatment.
An array of fertility services such as infertility clinics, donor egg and surrogacy services, legal services, sperm banks, newsgroups and support organizations, as well as drug treatments, surgical procedures and assisted reproduction technologies (ART) have emerged to satisfy the growing demand for babies from the affluent middle class. This constellation of services and technologies embodies the modern paradox created by the desire for a scientific, technological fix to satisfy what appear to be traditional American family values. But this technological fix also touches upon the deeply felt dilemma that advances in science pose as infertility treatments, procedures and ARTs appear to be meddling with “nature” and “God’s work.”
Industry:Culture
From its inception as entertainment during the Roman Empire, the circus has come to represent broadly any form of extravaganza that includes trained animal acts and human feats of strength and skill. Growing out of the decline of the sprawling, disreputable fairs of the eighteenth century the modern circus’ most common venue is the three-ring “Big Top,” an enormous tent with temporary stadium seating that travels from town to town by rail or truck. Several different types of acts, such as trick horse riding, clowns and trapeze artists, may run simultaneously. Ringling Brothers, combined with Barnum & Bailey, has come to be the best-known traveling circus in the US. Circuses now face dilemmas from restrictions on animals to corporate control.
Industry:Culture
From its inception in the 1930s and 1940s, American studies scholars have debated the definition, purpose and methodology of the field. Early scholarship fomented international recognition of American art, literature, and music, whereas post-Second World War nationalism and Cold War anxieties kindled scholarship that focused on history, policy and the American character. Seeking to interpret the United States to its citizens and to the world, the “myth and symbol” model of American studies linked texts to larger symbolic meanings in US culture. In applying literary criticism and historical analysis, scholars discussed themes, social patterns and institutional configurations that made the United States unique or exceptional.
In the late 1960s and 1970s notions of American exceptionalism were challenged by the Civil Rights movement, feminism and the Vietnam War. American studies embraced and critiqued social science, anthropology, art history folklore, local studies, philosophy, music and psychology. In the early twenty-first century, American studies competes with but is complementary to, other interdisciplinary programs in ethnic studies, women’s studies, gender studies, gay studies, postcolonial studies and cultural studies. The definition of American studies now may include the study of Canada and Latin America, and the field considers their global presence in business, diplomacy and popular culture. These changes are reflected in American Quarterly and American Studies, two of several American studies publications that feature new scholarship, discuss methodology and pedagogy, and link academic study to social change. New technologies are enhancing teaching and research, and offer ways to enhance further the interdisciplinary and international focus of the field.
Industry:Culture
From its invention through the space race, aviation continually invokes speed, progress and futurity. Yet American air travel has been shaped by longstanding patterns of government-fostered markets in public goods and competition among corporations and cities for consumers. Unlike other nations, the US government never established or controlled its own flagship carrier. Instead, Pan Am, TWA, American, Delta, Eastern, US Air, United, Northwest and others emerged through private entrepreneurship. Yet, as in mass media, governments have regulated safety, pricing, routing and traffic control while providing vital infrastructures. Moreover, military involvement in developing planes and technology (and training pilots) has underpinned constantly changing operations. Yet, while airlines have become mass transportation, with 500 million passengers annually, they also face complaints about responsiveness and complexity erupting into a congressional Passenger’s Bill of Rights in 1999.
America’s first commercial flight connected St. Petersburg and Tampa in 1914. For the next decade, emergent airlines competed with minimal regulation. In 1927 the post office shifted airmail from military aircraft, systematizing routes and sustaining passenger flights (6,000 passengers flew in 1926). In 1934, however, the postmaster general and major domestic carriers American, Eastern, TWA and United faced collusion charges (Pan Am, meanwhile, was spreading American air power to Latin America and China). In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Act established close regulation of airlines (on the earlier model of trains). Prices, routes and competition became tightly controlled; this system also prevented losses and fostered development instead of cost control.
Airline usage grew from 3 million passengers annually in 1940 to 19 million in 1950 and 58 million by 1960. Postwar four-engine aircraft and jets (1959) reduced flight time and increased seating, while other technologies improved safety. Yet, jumbo jets proved devastating expenses, outstripping demand and provoking a 1970s crisis despite 170 million passengers.
Deregulation in 1978 made the market cutthroat, swamping companies like Pan Am and Eastern despite growth on domestic and international routes. It also permitted new upstart companies—People’s Express (later incorporated into Continental), Air West, Southwest, etc.—as nearly 300 million passengers flew annually by 1980. Discount fares broadened clientele but demanded cost-cutting that favored hub-and-spoke models, based around symbiosis of airlines and particular airports, covering more routes through interconnecting flights, but creating the sort of chain reaction delays which today still plague modern travelers.
Mass marketing has created cultural meanings of air travel as well. Early airline travel, domestic and international, was elegant, elite and, at times, dangerous. Even after the Second World War, the model traveler was a white male businessperson, served by young attractive female stewardesses, while a white male pilot flew—these themes were stressed in infamous, sexually slanted advertising campaigns. Discount fares, the corollary decline of competing systems (trains and buses) and family travel have made air travel more heterogeneous, although some remain excluded. Class differences can still be bought and marked both in general service and in access to charter or private planes.
Brand loyalty in such a large, diverse market is sought through frequent-flyer mile programs, executive clubs and business privileges and upgrades, as well as special relations like Delta’s links with Disneyworld.
In the early twenty-first century, airline connection prices, specials and reservations often seem a daunting morass: fares change and compete while passengers complain that food and service have deteriorated. The deregulated “democratic” market of American airlines makes travel a complex, sometimes frustrating bazaar as it connects and divides the nation and the world.
Industry:Culture
From the early Republic, America has touted itself as a land without kings or nobles, however patrician the Founding Fathers might be in education, holdings and connections.
Throughout American history, the idea of dominant groups able to reproduce its control of wealth and power over generations has been a cause for alarm. Muckraking studies by Gustavus Myers and Ferdinand Lundberg and populist rhetoric decried any attempt to publicly condone the existence of an American upper class. Yet, the ability to rise to wealth is central to the American dream, whether embodied in Benjamin Franklin, John D. Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates or Vito Corleone. The tension between social mobility and social reproduction produces a convoluted discourse of perhaps nowhere more tortured than in describing an American upper class.
In fact, euphemisms underscore this ambivalence. Since the Second World War, for example, it has been easy to talk about “elites” in a way that conveys a synergy of expertise, intelligence or even style rather than a substrate of mere wealth; or scholars divide “political,” “economic,” “social” and “intellectual” elites as if these were parallel categories. Popular American sociology has also focused on status—and the markers of status that permeate consumerism in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, when Gucci can be bought at outlet malls—rather than a Marxist analysis of power, which often has held sway among academics.
Such elites are also divided by race and ethnicity. Jewish, Catholic and African American elites—whether defined by political power, cultural presence or wealth—have established separate institutions, family associations and even vacation spots. While there are some indications of coalescence in government, corporations and other institutions, these families also underscore the general WASPish cast of American elites. Gender, too, has played a role—women’s positions have tended to be defined socially rather than politically or economically; not as founders or managers of wealth and power, but instead as mediators like Eleanor Roosevelt in relation to Franklin Roosevelt.
In the end, though, whether looking at tax reforms, Ivy League alumni publications or presidential politics, America has an upper class that Americans are ashamed to talk about. One way of avoiding this is through a belief in circulation of wealth—“Old Money” slowly disappears over time, “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.” While Puritan Boston seems distant, however, one notes that institutions like Harvard and family lines and foundations have continued over centuries. New money becomes old— Dupont, Rockefeller, Ford and Mellon—through shared political economic interests and shared social and cultural institutions. Education, marriage, patronage and foundations all mingle economic and cultural capital—one need only think of universities bearing names like Johns Hopkins (Quaker merchant), Vanderbilt (shipping), or Duke (tobacco).
This does not deny new resources, industries and opportunities—trade, oil and tobacco have given way over time to finance, computers and media. Hence, names like Gates, Annenberg, Turner, Spielberg, Trump and Eisner, among others, control resources, fame and increasing attributes of older upper classes, including roles of civic patronage, foundations and public service. Relations of power, money and celebrity in politics also underscore meshings of elites. Indeed, can upper classes be defined in national terms, given multinational corporate interests and cultural ties? Can Rupert Murdoch belong to the American upper class? His descendants? Issues from taxation to battles over government control of resources like media and computers to definitions of “approved” places, pedigrees and behaviors continue to bridge from old to new. Indeed, they suggest interesting questions that should be addressed to subsequent generations of new wealth and the reconstitution of upper classes.
Industry:Culture
Games for children reflect the culture, everyday life, social mores and technology of society. Some games are spontaneous, requiring only imagination, and easily passed on through generations. Others involve technological literacy and virtual reality Games are part of the 122.6 billion toy industry in the United States; video games constitute another $5.5 billion. Some games also continue through adult life.
Psychologists view playing games as a useful enterprise for developing imagination and vocabulary and learning rules and interpersonal skills. General categories for games include card and tile, board, word and picture, target, war and fantasy and electronic (video and computer) games. Educational and religious games also use the same formats. Yet some popular children’s games that do not fit into these categories include hide and seek, steal the bacon and duck duck goose. These games require no special equipment and provide safe but stimulating entertainment for young children.
Popular card games for children include old maid, crazy eights and Uno. Other card games like rummy pinochle, poker and bridge may be acquired as children age, and are frequently played among adults as well as in families or gendered social gatherings.
Related tile games include dominoes, scrabble and mah-jong, with the last popular among both Chinese Americans and some Jews as an adult game. Scrabble and dominoes also attract adult and tournament players.
Board games have existed since the 1700s, but their popularity has grown at the end of the century, in part because of their lasting play value and character. They also do not require batteries or many mechanical parts and have simple goals: to win a race or achieve a certain number of points. Some are games of luck, while others require considerable decision making. Popular first board games include Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. Parcheesi, Monopoly Clue, Battleship, Careers and Risk attract older children while introducing them to the worlds of real estate, work, war and crime.
Milton Bradley is one of the foremost American producers of such games; its Monopoly in fact, used the streets of Atlantic City to constitute its original board. Children of all ages love checkers and chess, primarily games of skill which become more serious pursuits for older adults, in tournaments and at play in city parks.
Word and picture games engage the imagination and verbal skills of the child. Twenty questions and hangman are popular informal children’s games of this category; Pictionary Trivial Pursuit and Boggle again bridge to more adult play Jigsaw puzzles are also popular among many age groups.
War games and fantasy games have almost cultlike followings. War games may be played on boards or through simulations that are very accurate. Dungeons and Dragons has enjoyed immense popularity among adolescents. While fantasy games die out among adults, war reenactments have a large following.
Target games include pin the tail on the donkey and attempting to break a piñata, both often associated with birthday parties. Darts and horseshoes survive as adult games, often among men.
Video games and online computer games have changed the concept of children’s games and also have influenced adult purchases and play Children have a huge smorgasbord of computerized and video fare from which to choose. They can enjoy puzzle games and matching games appropriate for toddlers on up, as well as trivia games or contests in which the player is pitted against the computer, as in Chessmaster or Solitaire. They can kill humans or aliens in the privacy of their own computer station or interact with other players at home or in other sites. As war games did in the past, these have alarmed parents and politicians because of their violence and addictive appeal, although the evidence of direct impact is not clear.
As noted, adolescent and adult games tend to emerge from the formats of these basic categories. They may be matured by wagers (see gambling and lotteries), drinking or sexual activity or by complexities of rules, strategy and knowledge. Yet they still tend to recreate family and community in rather similar ways.
Industry:Culture
