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The Social Security Act of 1935, part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was drafted in response to a need to address financial insecurity in old age.
While it did provide public assistance for the aged poor, it more notably legislated a national social-insurance system to provide pensions for retirees. Although not made explicit at the time, it is commonly believed that the legislation was also intended to address the problem of unemployment by removing a significant number of persons from the jobless statistics. While improving income security for older Americans, it simultaneously and unintentionally set the stage for a form of age discrimination by insinuating that older adults do not have a place in the labor force, a sentiment still held by some today. Maximum payments in 1999 are set at $1,373 dollars for fully vested individuals, although benefits vary widely in terms of amount of contribution, time of withdrawal and additional income.
The Old-Age Assistance component of the Social Security Act, Title I, is funded through general tax revenues, and guarantees public assistance to poor elders regardless of employment history In contrast, Title II, which mandates universal pensions for retired workers, is financed through a payroll tax shared equally by employee and employer.
When first enacted in 1935 only workers in commerce and industry were covered, representing approximately 60 percent of the labor force (Myers 1987). It wasn’t until the 1950s that subsequent legislation broadened the scope of the program to include most of those previously excluded, such as farm workers and the self-employed.
Social Security pension benefits were originally and deliberately portrayed as having been earned by the elderly through premium-like payments into the system during their working years. However, it has become increasingly understood that the Social Security system is a tax on today’s generation of workers to support those who are currently retired—not an insurance program. There are, in reality no reserves of accrued premiums—a deliberate feature of the program. Thus, there exists an arrangement whereby elderly recipients are, in a sense, at the mercy of the current workforce and their continued commitment to supporting the program as it now stands. Many fear that the sense of obligation to perpetuate the system will diminish, which will usher in momentous modifications to its structure and potentially undermine its solvency A further threat to the Social Security system is the changing demographic profile of the American people. As an aging society the United States is experiencing an increase in the elderly dependency ratio, the number of dependents over sixty-five per hundred persons aged eighteen to sixty-five. This figure for the year 2030 is projected to be twice what it was in 1960 (Pifer and Bronte 1986), reflecting an increasing pool of Social Security beneficiaries dependent upon a significantly smaller cohort of labor-force participants. Given a design founded on resource redistribution, not insurance, this connotes high and increasing costs for maintaining the elderly The potential for strained relations among generations is apparent.
There is significant debate over the future of the Social Security program. Many still subscribe to the belief that the structure will collapse due to inadequate funding to perpetuate the system, despite significant legislated improvements in 1983. Public confidence has declined drastically in light of such commentary. In reality the ability of the nation to keep the system solvent is not in question and there is, in fact, a substantial surplus of funds at present. The question is, therefore, not whether the United States can guarantee the continued existence of the Social Security system but how Those who have subjected the program to critical scrutiny answer that question with solutions ranging from minor tweaking to a significant overhaul (Dentzer 1999). Regardless, the critical issues to be addressed include the formula used to collect the necessary funding, the amount of benefits to be distributed to individuals, the criteria under which benefits are distributed and the source of financing.
Future retirees across the generations are deeply concerned about the ongoing successful management of the Social Security program and fear that they may receive no benefits in exchange for their years of contributions. Today’s politicians recognize the alarm among the populace and are crafting various proposals to “fix” the system. Some are acting out of a sincere concern for their constituents while others, perhaps, merely see the universal fear as an opportunity for political gain. The politicization of the issue has been both beneficial, by drawing needed attention to the matter, and harmful, by generating undue panic over the continued solvency of Social Security Debates, both political and scholarly over the matter of adjusting benefit levels based upon the relative economic status of beneficiaries have contributed to the polarization of the American public. At the heart of the matter is the question of whether means-testing is a useful method of improving the financial health of the Social Security system or simply a path towards the further division of the American populace along class lines.
Those in support of the latter position argue that better ways of modifying the program exist (Scharlach and Kaye 1997).
Industry:Culture
The 49th state, Alaska represents a vast, mythic territory for many Americans, embodying images of opportunities, of the last frontier and of the struggle of humans against nature. Since its purchase from Russia in 1867, it has been a place of extremes, epitomized in its initial label as “Seward’s Folly” by those who found the wealth of Cuba much more appealing. In size, Alaska dwarfs all other states: its 615,230 square mile area surpasses the combined acreage of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada and Utah. Thirty-one thousand miles of coastal inlets dwarf the entire Eastern seaboard. Yet its population remains tiny—615,900—and only 160,000 acres have been cleared for development. Alaska’s largest city Anchorage, despite amassing nearly half of that population (257,780), barely tops the size of small cities in the lower 48. Nonetheless, the riches of the state, from nineteenth-century gold rushes to its fisheries to oil fields since the 1960s, also conjure visions of wealth and opportunity despite a high cost of living produced by sheer size and transportation costs.
Images of vast plains of snow, bays of glaciers and the nation’s highest mountain also evoke a vivid and unyielding landscape torn by volcanoes and earthquakes (more than 1,000 a year above 3.5 on the Richter scale). Yet Alaska also encompasses ecological zones as distinct as its marshy interior, southern rainforests and arctic tundra.
Alaska’s Aleutian islands constituted the original land bridge by which the earliest inhabitants crossed from Asia to North America. Various indigenous populations adapted thereafter to its climate and geography—most notably the Eskimos (Inuit) who live in northern Alaska and Canada. The gentler southern coasts, interior and lower panhandle were also home to Athabaskan tribes like the Tlingit and Haida, linked to populations of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Aleuts still live in the southern islands that bear their name, which have also seen strong military development.
The panhandle area became the first point of contact between Native Americans and Europeans with Russian colonization in 1714; monuments of the Russian capital of Sitka still illustrate this heritage of 150 years of domination. The panhandle remained the center of the state’s population into the twentieth century, as well as the site of the current capital, Juneau.
The potential of the northern reaches of the state, however, were explored by fishermen, trappers and miners, and especially by those lured to the state by gold strikes from 1848 onward. These spurred the development of Anchorage in the late nineteenth century, although the city really only took shape as a midpoint on the railroad from the ice-free port of Seward to the interior mining capital of Fairbanks, 200 miles south of the Arctic circle. By 1920 Anchorage still had only 1,865 people, growing significantly only after military and economic investment during and after the Second World War.
The opportunities of Alaska, incorporated as a US territory in 1912, also delayed its statehood by those who feared taxes or limitations on fisheries and free enterprise. Bills to admit the state were successfully thwarted for generations before responsibilities of citizens to pay for local government were clarified in the 1950s and the state admitted in 1959. This also opened the state to increasing private land ownership after nearly a century of domination by the US government; issues of public and private land, as well as Native American claims, have continued to shape development. Alaskan politicians tended to be Republican and often have defended development.
Alaskan state development thereafter was shaped by oil and gas, which now account for 85 percent of tax revenues, including a roughly $1,000 dividend returned to citizens each year under the Alaska Permanent Fund (established 1980). While petroleum has been extracted from various points, most now comes from fields on the North Slope, beginning with Prudhoe Bay in 1968, which had produced 9 billion barrels by 1996 with an estimated reserve of 3.1 billion in addition to natural gas resources. These reserves on the Arctic sea were connected to US markets by the transAlaska Pipeline, 800 miles in length, constructed by a consortium of oil companies between 1974 and 1977. The oil industry has also spurred concerns for environmental protection both in the pipelines’ intrusion into wilderness and horrific spills like the Exxon Valdez disaster.
These spills also directly influence Alaska’s second-largest industry, tourism. Over 1 million visit annually for cruises or explorations of the state’s extensive park system and other resources. Prime attractions include Glacier Bay National Park, Katmai National Park and Denali National Park, as well as the 1,100 mile dog sled race on the Iditarod Trail, run since 1973. Tourism also stimulates a growing service and construction sector alongside traditional industries like fishing (Alaska supplies more than half the US catch) and forestry.
Tourists, moreover, reaffirm the image of Alaska reinforced by television (Northern Exposure’s 1990–5 portrayal of the cockeyed town of Cecily, CBS) or movies from Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925) to The Edge (1997) and Limbo (1999). These, like literary memoirs including Joe McGinnis’ Going to Extremes (1980) and Larry Kaniut’s Danger Stalks the Land (1999) continually stress the agonistic elements of the frontier state, eclipsing the everyday struggles and creations of a special place and culture within America.
Industry:Culture
While the word may refer to any spectacular event, from an automobile sale to specialized museum exhibits (like the touring Cezanne retrospective of 1996) that draws crowds and media attention, it has come to be applied in a special sense to the production and marketing of movie packages in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Hollywood. Blockbusters are expensive vehicles, generally based on both star power and special effects, that dominate multiple screens and box offices over weeks. Often released in summer to capture the leisure time of the youth market, these movies determine the release date and competing strategies of other films, generally in complementary genres (romance, more adult films, etc.) as well as recreating spectatorship. Moreover, they become tied to synergistic marketing through music, books, toys, promotional events and fast food. spending a sizable portion of the total original cost on promotions. In fact, the scale of promotions has become one of the defining features of the genre. As these definitional features suggest, they are also known more by their gross revenue than by themes or quality.
Blockbusters have become renowned for both their revenues in originals and sequels (Jaws, 1975–1987; Jurassic Park, 1993–2000; Star Wars, 1977–; Independence Day, 1997; Men in Black, 1999; Titanic, 1998); and for spectacular disappointments, (Godzilla, 1998; Wild Wild West, 1999). Such high-stakes gambles, however, have reshaped Hollywood, allowing different versions of the same product to be distributed through numerous media. Nonetheless, these films seldom garner respect as “quality” films, and few have won Oscars, except for the technical awards.
Industry:Culture
Women have influenced and participated in American politics as voters, symbols, activists, campaigners and elected officials. Since the Second World War, women have broadened the definition of political work, though they did not begin winning numerous electoral contests until the 1980s.
The non-partisan League of Women Voters, founded after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, has long advocated good government and informed voter participation. In 1960 the League began sponsoring its popular televised election-year presidential debates.
Direct activism in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s around international peace, human rights, civil rights, education, labor unions, anti-nuclear issues and general environmental protection brought formative political experience to women, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Jessie Lopez De La Cruz and Jane Fonda, who would otherwise have been excluded from politics. Increasing participation in waged labor politicized many middleclass women by making systematic wage disparities, open sex discrimination in job placement and training, and choices in family life and reproduction into political issues.
These economic changes and the reinvigorated feminism of the 1960s and 1970s helped bring female experiences to the center of political debates and produced some successful electoral campaigns by women.
A small early group of elected leaders, including US representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm and senators Margaret Chase Smith and Nancy Kassebaum, grew substantially after 1980. EMILY’s List, an organized fundraising group created in 1985 to elect pro-choice Democratic female candidates, has helped especially to bring highlevel financing to women’s campaigns. Between 1975 and 1995, women went from 4 to 10 percent of the US Congress and from 8 to 21 percent of state legislators.
Beginning with Eleanor Roosevelt, who bridged suffrage and feminism in her own life, First Ladies have been lightning rods for cultural debates and have helped to shape the image of political womanhood. Some worked on timely national issues, for example Lady Bird Johnson’s tireless efforts at highway beautification and Nancy Reagan’s championing of her husband’s “War on Drugs.” Pat Nixon’s very low, and loyal, public profile in the 1970s enhanced the Republican Party’s appeal to what her husband called the “Silent Majority” of social conservatives. Nixon’s successors, Betty Ford and Rosalyn Carter, acted more independently and were admired for it. Ford encouraged many to seek help with addiction problems by publicly admitting her own. Carter’s controversial role as her husband’s advisor set the stage for the even more controversial 1990s White House career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Between Democrats Carter and Clinton, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush tried to re-establish a more formal role for the First Lady echoing the growing conservatism of the Republican political platform.
American women, from famous First Ladies to individual activists, have helped define modern politics as well as influence it, galvanizing voters as well as representing them.
Industry:Culture
This state capital, founded in 1610, embodies the sometimes conflicting heritages of Native American peoples, Spanish colonialism, American railroad expansion and automotive tourism that have created the Southwest. Although small (55,859) in the mid-1990s, Santa Fe has been a tourist center for decades, altering its cityscape to meet these expectations. In addition to cultural facilities from opera and colleges to museums and Indian handicrafts, it is also a gateway to outdoor recreation and artistic retreat, identified with nearby Taos. Santa Fe has also been taken as an emblem of Southwestern style in architecture, design and food.
Industry:Culture
Thomas Wolfe, one of its most famous practitioners, popularized the phrase in the 1960s, referring to a new style of non-fiction writing, the product of growing dissatisfaction with traditional reporting and a spirit of experimentation taking hold of American literature more generally. New Journalists began to develop their own innovations, for example a more personalized writing style, to produce their stories. The movement’s opponents charged that these journalists were either promoting news-as-propaganda or skirting dangerously close to confusing fact and fiction. These criticisms sharpened with the discovery that 1981 Pultizer prize winner Janet Cooke, using something like the New Journalism writing style in a series of stories on an eleven-year-old drug pusher, had in fact concocted the story. Although many of the techniques used by New Journalists persist in American journalism and in much modern American fiction or literary nonfiction, the term itself has become less popular.
Industry:Culture
Soaring in neon exuberance over the hostile Southwestern desert, Las Vegas represents a fantasy of gambling, glamour and license to more than 30 million tourists annually Jobs created by this fantasy in turn, have made it one of America’s fastest growing cities, reaching an estimated population of 404,288 in 1998, a 56 percent increase over 1990.
The spectacle city of the Strip, Elvis, slot machines, cheap buffets and wedding chapels faces new demands for civic identity.
Las Vegas emerged from obscurity through water (artesian wells), power (Hoover Dam, 1928) and gambling, which Nevada legalized in 1931. By 1940 this 10,000–citizen resort had a Western flavor; northern Reno, the state capital, was more famous for gambling and divorce. Vegas’ creation myth (recrafted in the 1991 movie Bugsy) cites mobster Bugsy Siegel as the genius who synthesized Los Angeles modernism and motels in the rebuilt Flamingo before his “untimely” death in 1947. Underworld connections, a continual concern of the Nevada gaming commission, were largely purged by the 1960s.
Las Vegas’ subsequent development has challenged boundaries of neon, architecture, spectacle and taste. In the 1960s, Howard Hughes shaped the city as both ownerdeveloper and reclusive billionaire. In 1966 Caesar’s Palace established theme-park models, later followed by MGM Grand, Excalibur (medieval), Luxor (Ancient Egypt), Bellagio (artistic Italian) and Caesar’s own archeological invention, complete with talking statues. In Circus Circus, another 1960s creation, high-wire acts flew over slot machines, prefiguring a shift to “family” entertainment in the 1990s. The late 1960s also saw the beginning of corporate Las Vegas, with ever-larger and more complicated casino-resorts, traded as joint-stock corporations by entrepreneurs like Steve Wynn and William Bennett.
Alongside neon cascades, erupting volcanoes and pirate battles, Las Vegas also meant show business. Frank Sinatra and his “rat pack,” Elvis Presley, Liberace (who left his museum behind) and Barbra Streisand are identified with the city as are bejeweled and befeathered chorus lines, lounge singers, magicians, call girls and animal trainers.
Celebrities, in turn, use the city as a backdrop for films, television, marriages and divorces.
Beyond the glitter, Las Vegas faces the complexities of other American cities, including 1992 riots (after Rodney King) that underscored the dilemmas of its African American population. A significant Mormon population and growing families place demands on schools and other resources. New civic buildings, including a library/performing-arts center by Michael Graves and the University of Nevada, have created a city beyond the Strip. Even casinos are adding “reality”—Wynn’s touted collection of European art—to glitter.
Yet for millions who know the city through media and visits, Las Vegas remains a city of dreams (Elvis’ Viva Las Vegas, 1966; the James Bond thriller Diamonds are Forever, 1969; Sister Act, 1981) and nightmares (Show Girl, 1996; Leaving Las Vegas, 1997).
Industry:Culture
The “Charm City” dominates Chesapeake Bay and its waterfront recapitulates America’s urban transformation. From a Roman Catholic colonial refuge, Baltimore became a mercantile port, guarded by Ft McHenry (where Francis Scott Key composed the “Star-Spangled Banner”). Industrial and commercial use took over in the nineteenth century giving way in the late twentieth century to a new inner-harbor festival marketplace, hotels, cultural attractions and sports facilities, including the neo-traditional Camden Yards (home of baseball’s Orioles). Yet critics worry that this recreation zone, like splendid old suburbs, such as Roland Park, and the verdant campus of the Johns Hopkins University or its renowned Hospital and Medical School, does not reflect the problems of race and poverty that have plagued the modern city. Its population has dropped to 641,468 (2000 estimate), although the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, encompassing rural towns, suburbs and planned communities like Columbia, Maryland, has become the fourth largest in the country (7,285,846).
Despite a series of dynamic mayors, including Donald Schaefer and Kurt Schmoke, analyst David Rusk has used the city as a case study of the need for shared metropolitan taxation and planning. Half the city’s neighborhoods are poor, incomes represent only 59 percent of suburban averages and the burdens of both poverty and an inadequate tax base fall hardest on a black urban majority (Baltimore Unbound, 1996).
Perhaps Baltimore’s cultural reflections find a balance among past glories and contemporary dilemmas. John Waters, for example, has produced remarkably individualistic films that explore race, sex, aesthetics and neighborhood in the postwar city. Barry Levinson has also dealt with neighborhood and nostalgia in films like his Jewish family epic Avalon (1990), while observing the gritty reality of center city in the ABS series Homicide (1993–9).
Industry:Culture
The talk show as a broad generic category is one of the oldest and more durable electronic media forms, with roots dating back to the early days of radio in the US. Quite simply talk shows are performative conversations featuring a host and some combination of experts, celebrities and/or “average citizens.” They cover a wide array of subjects including news, politics, current events, sports, religion, hobbies, the arts, gossip, tips for home-makers, self-help therapy, as well as advice. As Rose (1985) notes, although it appears to be the loosest and most casual of genres, the talk show is carefully and purposefully crafted, based on the concept of “controlled spontaneity” and adhering to a predictable progression of situations and segments.
According to Wayne Munson (1993), talk shows of various sorts constituted between 15 and 25 percent of the total schedule during radio’s golden age, and their popularity has increased steadily over time. While the earliest programs consisted mainly of monologues by hosts and experts or celebrity guests, radio quickly embraced the concept of audience participation and by the early 1960s call-in “talk radio” had gained a permanent foothold in the schedule. Initially focused on current affairs and targeting an older male audience, in the 1970s talk radio fragmented to include several discrete subgenres that attracted women and younger listeners: talk/service and psychological advice; sports talk; the news/talk “gripe” show (sometimes known as “hot talk,” exemplified first by The Joe Pyne Show and then later by Rush Limbaugh); and “non-controversial” talk such as The Larry Kïng Show, which combines issue and celebrity interviews with call-ins.
On television, the talk show was traditionally devoted to either light entertainment, with comedy skits, music and celebrity guests, or to more serious discussion of news and public affairs among experts. In the early 1950s, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) developed the longrunning late-night celebrity talk/variety Tonight Show, the news/talk Today Show and an afternoon program geared towards home-makers called The Home Show. More serious interview programs like Mike Wallace Interviews and Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person also appeared on network prime time during the 1950s, early forerunners of a long line of male-oriented political talk shows such as Face the Nation, Firing Line and Crossfire.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of daytime (and early evening) variety chat shows, often known by the name of their host, including Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore, and girl talk, popular among middle-class female audiences.
This remains a volatile field for stars in the 1990s where failures (Whoopi Goldberg, Chevy Chase) are constantly replaced by new hosts and packages like Rosie O’Donnell or Roseanne.
The late 1960s also witnessed the debut of The Phil Donahue Show, the first of what would become a popular daytime format featuring a participatory studio audience and “ordinary people” as panelists (along with experts and the occasional celebrity). For almost two decades, Donahue was the only nationally syndicated program of its kind on the air. Eventually however, concommitant with the rise of “reality-based” programming more generally, Donahue was joined by Sally Jessy Raphael, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera and Montel Williams. By the mid-1990s there were more than a dozen different daytime talk shows available in syndication from which local broadcasters might choose.
Most talk shows highlight “ordinary people” talking about their personal experiences.
Some shows are more serious and restrained, focusing on issues with a social or policy dimension such as sexual harassment, teen pregnancy, or gang violence; others are more sensational or tabloid, centered on interpersonal conflict and confronta-tion (love triangles, cheating spouses, or family feuds). Among the most controversial tabloid talk shows are those of Jerry Springer, whose guests and audience members routinely argue, shout and even come to physical blows, and Jenny Jones, whose onstage confrontations have had serious real-life consequences, including murder.
Industry:Culture
Used in many private schools, school uniforms are becoming increasingly popular in public schools across the country. Supported by President Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address, school uniforms are used in several school districts in twenty-one states. Although some claim that uniforms make schools safer by eliminating gang markings through clothing and leveling the appearance of material wealth, some individuals have challenged school-uniform policies, claiming that they infringe upon students’ 1st Amendment freedom of expression rights.
Industry:Culture
