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The Ku Klux Klan is America’s oldest terrorist hate group. It was founded in December 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by several well-educated exConfederate soldiers. The group took its name from the Greek word kukios meaning circle. The organization started as an adult fraternity devoted to performing weird rituals and practical jokes. It quickly evolved into a secretive regional terrorist and political organization countering new civilrights laws and the federal military occupation of the post-Civil War South.
Led by ex-Confederate general and slaveholder, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the group gained over half-a-million members throughout the South. Hooded nightriders terrorized and killed African American activists and their sympathizers in addition to transplanted Northerners, while groups, such as the Louisiana-based Knights of the White Camilla, undertook similar activities. With increased public outcry and the threat of congressional hearings and legislation looming, Forrest disbanded the group in 1869. Not all factions followed his order. The Klan withered during the 1870s after a series of high-profile prosecutions and changes in the political landscape. When northern troops withdrew, the need for terrorism against blacks became less pressing as Jim Crow laws restricting the social, economic and political activities of Southern blacks were passed.
The second incarnation of the Klan took place in 1915, spurred by the racist pro-Klan motion picture, Birth of a Nation (1915), and resurrected by a roving preacher-salesman, William Simmons. The new Klan under Simmons barely stood out from the variety of conservative organizations of the day. In 1920 two Atlanta publicists signed on and changed its tone to be much more vitriolic against “immoral whites” and minorities, particularly Catholics. By the mid-1920s, the Klan had 4.5 million members and exercised considerable political influence, particularly in Indiana. After 1925, the Klan was plagued by more internal power struggles, a loss of political influence and bad publicity over horrendous crimes.
During the Civil Rights movement, the Klan emerged anew, leading to numerous murders, assaults, arsons and bombings in the 1950s and 1960s. While never regaining their former membership or political power, these white-hooded bands remain visible symbols of hate which have appeared sporadically in the 1980’s and 1990’s northern cities and suburban rallies, as well as outbursts against ongoing changes in the South.
Using publicity as much as terror, they have sometimes claimed rights of free speech to legitimize their presence and voice their beliefs.
Industry:Culture
With port access to Lake Michigan, Milwaukee developed in the nineteenth century as a major Midwestern producer of metals, machinery capital goods and beer (Miller, Pabst).
German immigration in the mid-1800s, followed by Poles and Italians in the late 1800s, provided labor for emerging industries. Milwaukee was a hotbed for unionism, including many strikes. City government was dominated by socialist reformers from the turn of the nineteenth century until 1960.
A strong philanthropic spirit supports performing arts, summer festivals and museums.
Recreation includes professional sports (baseball (Brewers), basketball (Bucks)) and lakefront activities. Milwaukee was the setting of popular television comedies Happy Days (1974–84) and Laverne and Shirley (1976–83). The 1998 population estimate was 571,364.
Industry:Culture
The last gasps of the American revolutionary spirit were choked out in the Civil War, when the most conservative form of liberal government ever invented unhinged its jaws and swallowed its antithetical self, the South, whole, only to have to regurgitate some of its bones, of course, every twenty years or so since 1865. The lesson is that no revolution, no matter how revolting, can avoid the voracious maw of a stable Democratic republic that will assimilate, digest and even grow fat on anything.
The political is the poetical. America is so huge that any revolution will find its audience here and none can possibly disturb it. Our pilgrim Protestantism is our special handicap: American poets believe in a personal poetics the way Luther believed in a personal God; alas, we usually skip any dreary reading of the scriptures on our way to revelation. (American poets start reading poetry only after they have started writing “poems.”) American poets don’t even really like poetry (cf. Marianne Moore); it’s a subject to avoid, like politics or religion.
We cannot agree on what makes poems good. We cannot agree on what defines the craft. We may praise our diversity publicly, but when we do so we deny our divisiveness.
We bond, when we do, through our dislikes, and we will not be led, or defined, by anything but our personal constituencies. “Don’t Tread On Me” and “Live Free or Die!” were the slogans on American revolutionaryera snake flags; those snakes were severed.
The unity in American poetry can be heard in our relatively democratic, demotic voices. Yet even a plain-speaking American poet is apt to dislike two or more of the following “schools” for one or more reasons: beat poetry (too loose structure, antiestablishment rhetoric, often bisexual or homosexual as if that were interesting); formalist poetry (uptight structure for its own sake, dead white pseudo-establishment rhetoric, often homosexual); L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (nonce or non-traditional structure, arhetorical—the last thing it wants to do is convince anyone of anything, asexual); slam poetry (dramatic structure, antiestablishment rhetoric enhanced by screaming, pan-sexual); world poetry (sounds like translation, employs traditional European rhetorics, often bior homosexual as if that didn’t matter); and the poetry of personal growth (loose structure, earnest anti-establishment rhetoric, pan-sexual—all in fear of casting judgment). Some poets do cross over: in the Haight-Ashbury for instance, it used to be cool to hate Ashbery; no more.
Gil Scott-Heron didn’t know how right he was when he forecast that “the revolution will not be televised.” He didn’t know he was pointing to the impossibility of revolution in a country where everything is televisual. (Seeing Los Angeles, CA burn puts out fires in Atlanta; Mark Strand on the Internet encourages a beatnik in Seattle.) American poetry of the future will certainly be polyglot (the dominance of English will recede), published in cyberspace (less and less print) and defined by performances (preserved on CD and DVD) instead of text. Everything will be possible and nothing will matter to us all.
Industry:Culture
Synthetic turf first used in Houston’s Astrodome, completed in 1965, to replace grass when it was learned that grass would not grow well in indoor stadiums. It was quickly brought into every indoor and many outdoor stadiums around the country, and was often used on porches and patios to give the appearance of perfect grass.
Thirty years later, astroturf is considered a very inadequate playing surface and is a cause of many major injuries, particularly in football since the surface itself provides only a thin padding over concrete. It has now fallen out of favor, like the multipurpose dome in which it “grew.” Most baseball teams are now demanding more traditionallooking stadiums with real grass.
Industry:Culture
The majority of Americans believe in some form of life after death. Often, this is shaped by Christian traditions of eternal reward for a moral life. Other religions also offer some form of enlightenment or reincarnation that has found followers outside of the faith community as well. Religious practices and beliefs, moreover, have intersected with scientific examinations of “out-of-body” experiences and attempts to communicate with the dead through spiritualism and mediums. This has been a goldmine for popular publications as well as theological speculation.
This topic has also been a rich area of speculation for American media. Horror films, for example, have long explored malign elements of evil and revenge associated with widespread concepts of hell and Satan; threats of Satanism have also flared in community witch-hunts across the country (sometimes focused on childcare). While these concepts are not as popular nor as well-defined as heaven, they nonetheless remain part of a substrate of American theology.
Meanwhile other, lighter films and television have focused on the activities of angels in everyday life, from Frank Capra’s classic postwar angelic alternative to noir, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), to several television series of the 1980s and 1990s (Highway to Heaven, 1984–91, Touched by an Angel, 1996–). Angels, drawing on European representations, have also become widely marketed jewelry items, sometimes divorced from any particular religious meaning.
Other versions of heaven also stand out for their differences in time and perspective.
These would include all-black heavens as Hollywood minstrelsy (Cabin in the Sky, 1943), a spate of yuppie heavens, involving litigation (Defending your Life, 1991) and technicolor consumption (What Dreams May Come, 1999). Diane Keaton also created Heaven (1987), a talkative documentary with interviews and film clips. Reincarnation has also been used to tackle issues of gender stereotyping in All of Me (1984) and Switch (1991). While these are scarcely philosophical reflections, their use of normative expectations underscores the pervasiveness of the basic tenets of civic religion in the nation.
Industry:Culture
The Amish were named after Jacob Ammann, a seventeenth-century Swiss Mennonite Bishop, who inspired his followers to establish communities governed by strict rules of behavior and dress. The Amish moved from Europe to the Pennsylvania colony in the early eighteenth century and currently live in many rural parts of the US, where they practice old-fashioned farming techniques and eschew the trappings of modern life, including electricity automobiles, television and higher education. The Amish are notable for successfully perpetuating theocratic societies which exist largely outside the control of federal and state laws. The Amish figured prominently in the film Witness (1984).
Industry:Culture
While competition among local English-language newspapers has almost disappeared from American cities, small-scale weekly tabloids often provide different viewpoints and extensive investigative coverage of local events. New York’s Village Voice, originally a community newspaper responding to Greenwich Village’s artistic and liberal residents, is probably the dean of this press; others emerged in response to the Vietnam War and other divisive social issues. Some proved shortlived, based on outrage more than systematic coverage, but others became important political and economic interlocutors. In the 1990s, many were consolidated in national corporations scarcely distinguishable from the mainstream press.
Industry:Culture
The Civil Rights movement spanned two decades (c.1948–68) in the historic battle for African American freedom in the United States. Its impacts were regional, nationwide and international. The movement was a unique partnership among local activists, national civil-rights organizations and the federal government, especially the federal courts. This partnership flourished most visibly between 1948 and 1965. During those seventeen years, the post-Reconstruction Southern system of race control was dismantled.
The movement is by far the largest interracial mass movement in American history. It changed the basic practice of race relations in the nation. The movement brought dignity, self-respect and national admiration to poor black people who had long been repressed and ignored, especially in the South. The movement also redefined the meaning of freedom in America. It established the right of the individual to protection from state or privately instituted discrimination. More importantly, it established the obligation of the federal government to serve as primary protector of individual rights.
The movement caused millions of Americans to embrace and celebrate the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment. For the first time in national history a significant majority of the people believed the goals of freedom, justice and equality for all could be realized. While it would not fulfill the expectations of many especially among African Americans, the movement still eradicated permanently the national acceptance of overt racist assumptions and practices.
Haphazard, erratic and disruptive throughout its course, its leadership often divided in conflict; nevertheless the movement managed to articulate certain commonly shared goals. Most central were the elimination of Jim Crow segregation and black disenfranchisement in the former Confederate States. These specific goals determined the origins, strategies and tactics of the movement during its most active phase.
The movement emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War because of changes in the African American population, in the Federal Government and in international affairs. Hundreds of thousands of black Americans had migrated to northern cities where they could vote, while enjoying lessened discrimination and better employment. Tens of thousands of black men had fought in the War and experienced the liberating influences of new, less racist environments. They and their families were no longer willing to suffer the institutionalized terror of Southern white racism. During this same era, the Depression and the War had increased the scope and size of the federal government. Most importantly the national government had evolved an expanding role as protector of citizen rights, primarily in the economic arena up to 1945. With the coming of the Cold War, the United States claimed leadership of the “Free World,” competing with the Soviet bloc for the allegiance of the underdeveloped, predominantly colored nations of the world. America’s treatment of its own citizens of color was believed to be a potential determining factor in this international contest.
The convergence of these larger socio-political forces ignited the movement and a series of dramatic episodes ultimately resulting in landmark civil-rights legislation. The desegregation of the military in 1948 is less renowned than the later Brown decision of the Supreme Court, a case brought by the NAACP. Nonetheless, military desegregation incorporated all the forces that came to work in the movement for the next decades and, like them, had consequences far broader than anticipated. President Truman’s executive order integrating the armed services coincided with efforts by liberal Democrats to attract new black voters in northern cities. The Cold War necessitated a large, standing military Black men were needed as career soldiers, but they would not submit to the racist treatment that had previously characterized the military. Much of the newly integrated force was stationed in the South, undermining the racial mores of the surrounding segregated communities. As veterans re-entered the civilian sector, many of the whites brought with them new acceptance of African Americans as coworkers, even supervisors, and many of the blacks developed new self-confidence and assertiveness in integrated settings.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott resulted in further evolution of the local black activist/federal government alliance and revealed the basic strategy of the movement. The targets for change would be southern segregation and voter discrimination. This strategy enabled movement activists to appeal to the majority of white Americans who lived outside the South. The movement’s demands were presented simply as appeals to basic constitutional rights guaranteed to all. Participants in the movement also invoked the rhetoric of Christian salvation for this secular cause. Thus the movement incorporated two of the strongest impulses in the American character—belief in democratic principles and in Protestant Christianity.
The tactic of non-violent, direct action challenged Southern segregation and disenfranchisement as protesters refused to obey manifestly “unjust laws.” Leaders (for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin) skillfully used the media, especially television, to contrast the dignity and righteousness of the abused demonstrators with the brutal and profane behavior of white police and citizenry Through the boycott of city buses or department stores, local black activists utilized economic pressure to divide the white community while energizing and giving a sense of empowerment to their working-class supporters.
In the original bus boycott, victory resulted from a combination of the municipal surrender to black demands and the federal court decision outlawing segregated buses.
Sit-ins and withholding of patronage led to gradual desegregation of some chain stores.
The Freedom Rides of the early 1960s ultimately provoked the intervention of the federal courts and the Justice Department, even though they could not immediately end segregation in interstate transportation, and, throughout the 1950s, Southern public schools remained overwhelmingly segregated.
The high-water mark of the Civil Rights era—the March on Washington on August 28, 1963—epitomized the movement’s strengths and weaknesses. It was a magnificent spectacle. Two hundred thousand black and white Americans joined together peacefully professing shared social and religious visions and demanding specific reform that they believed would ennoble all Americans and provide a model to the rest of the world. There were, however, many discordant voices at the march. Many complained that the declared goals were too circumscribed, that African Americans needed protection from de facto discrimination and economic impoverishment in the North, as well as from de jure segregation in the South. Local leaders complained that the march had been co-opted by the nationally heralded leaders and white authorities.
No concrete change followed immediately from the march. In fact, some Southern opponents redoubled their efforts to defeat civil-rights reform. Nevertheless, the partnership embodied by the march prevailed. Within two years, the first significant civilrights legislation since 1876 was enacted: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After these legislative successes, the movement began to dissipate for several reasons.
Most important was that many whites in the civil-rights partnership, including those in the federal government, believed that the principal goals of the movement had been achieved. Segregation in public accommodations was outlawed, the courts had been empowered to force school desegregation and the Justice Department could now intervene to guarantee fair elections throughout the South. Because of the movement’s achievements, the demand for equality was taken up in northern black ghettos, among the poor, women, gays and lesbians and other national minorities. But opponents of change became better organized and effective, using the movement’s techniques in their struggles, for example, to end busing or abortion. At the same time, white liberals redirected much of their energies to opposing the war in Vietnam. They also experienced confusion and anger at the rise of black cultural nationalism among African Americans despondent at the nation’s failure to create a non-racist society.
Despite unfulfilled goals, the Civil Rights movement demonstrated the power of ordinary citizens to force permanent change when societal circumstances and the courage of both common people and their leaders converge to achieve an end. The movement transformed the meaning of freedom nationally and internationally. It established that governments are responsible for guaranteeing the rights of their citizens and that they may be legitimately resisted when they do not. Within the United States, the movement ended the right of white people to publicly humiliate black people. It invalidated claims to privilege based on color. It altered the basic practice of race relations, if not always the basic prejudices underneath. It has inspired freedom movements abroad from Eastern Europe to South Africa to China. The movement clearly sparked determined resistance to continued change by privileged elites in America. Nevertheless, the movement transformed and elevated Americans’ expectations of themselves. That may be its most lasting consequence.
Industry:Culture
War and political strife have been the reasons Southeast Asians find themselves in the United States. With the declaration of war between Spain and the United States in 1898 Americans entered into the affairs of Southeast Asians in the Philippines. Americans moved there and Filipinos later followed colonial relationships and education to the US.
The Vietnam War brought several “hill tribes,” particularly the Hmong, from Laos and Vietnam to the United States for resettlement because of their involvement with US counter-insurgency campaigns (sponsored by the CIA and US military) against the North Vietnamese. After the end of US involvement in the war, many south Vietnamese “escaped” Vietnam by boat (known as “boat people”) for refugee camps located throughout Southeast Asia, later to be resettled in the United States. Political upheavals in Cambodia and along its borders with Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have also fostered Southeast Asian immigration to the US.
Southeast Asian groups living in the US, then, are for the most part refugee populations. In the racial politics that continue to shape the US social structure, Southeast Asians (except for established Filipinos) have little political power or representation apart from “Asian American” status and politics. Compared with other Asian groups, like the Chinese and Japanese “model minorities,” they are still closer to the margins of the US social and economic system, working in low-paying or informal jobs and sometimes relying on welfare.
Industry:Culture
The service sector has provided a cushion to millions of Americans who have lost manufacturing jobs since the 1970s. The service sector includes firms whose final outputs are intangible. The value of a service depends primarily on the skills or knowledge used in its creation, not in any physical good provided to consumers. In most cases, workers facilitate the process by dealing directly with customers in selling or providing services.
When Americans think of the service sector, they often think of young, low-paid, parttime, unskilled workers. Visions of McDonald’s employees flipping hamburgers or GAP salespeople hawking the latest fashion trends dominate contemporary thought. In reality, lawyers, doctors, entertainers and athletes are all employees of the service sector. The residual nature of the sector’s definition groups individuals who have little in common.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies wholesale and retail trade, finance, entertainment and recreation, professional services, public administration and many other categories as service industries.
Regardless, the stereotypical unskilled worker is the most vulnerable in the service economy The growth of “McJobs” has struck fear in the minds of young Americans embarking on uncertain careers. Businesses have commoditized work, treating employees as interchangeable and accepting the accompanying high turnover and low commitment.
Part-time employment is widespread in the United States. While convenient for young workers and working parents, the growth limitations and lack of benefits inherent in unskilled service professions (sometimes called “dead-end jobs”) are worrisome.
The ephemeral nature of service goods creates a fear that the US economy relies on non-productive activities for economic growth. Nonetheless, the prosperity of the post-Second World War period created consumer markets for a vast array of services.
Specialization led Americans to rely on others for dry cleaning, food preparation and professional advice.
Service industries now represent over three-quarters of the American labor force.
Manufacturing employment has fallen 10 percent to 19.7 million between 1979 and 1996, while employment in the services has risen 44 percent to 83.8 million. The Walmart department store chain is the fourthlargest US corporation, employing 720,000 primarily in low-skilled retail sales positions. Many such jobs are located in remote suburban settings, creating difficulties for struggling inner cities and their inhabitants.
As Jeremy Rifkin argues in The End of Work (1998), however, the rash of downsizings and consolidation in the service industry has yet to reach its peak. While services will always require human assistance (if only to program computers), innovation in voicerecognition technology threatens phone operators, Internet commerce threatens salespeople and just-in-time inventory threatens warehousing jobs. As jobs are eliminated through automation, the social safety net of extended families, government welfare and low employment may not be as guaranteed as it appeared in the past.
Industry:Culture
