Reagan Years Research Articles

We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics by Neil J. Young

Reviewed by: We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics by Neil J. Young Ronit Y. Stahl We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. By Neil J. Young. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xvi, 412. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-19-973898-4.) As Donald Trump gained momentum in the 2016 Republican primary race, many wondered how religious conservatives could vote for a man whose personal life and political views seemed so distant from their own. Neil J. Young’s We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics answers this question by making two interrelated arguments. First, he compellingly demonstrates [End Page 863] that the Religious (Christian) Right was a shaky political, rather than sturdy theological, alliance. Second, he highlights that the fractious and precarious confederation of evangelical, Catholic, and Mormon interests meant that its constituents are neither uniform nor consistently in line with their institutional leadership. “Their union,” he reflects, “more closely resembled a loose braid than the indestructible cord: separate threads brought together in tension, they overlapped in some places and rested closely but independently aside each other in others” (p. 8). Conviction and pragmatism strained to find a middle ground on which conservative Christians could mobilize to fight late-twentieth-century culture wars and social change; the political force of this uneasy alliance was weaker than typically assumed. We Gather Together begins in mid-century with conservative religious resistance to interfaith unity. There was some interest in subgroup cooperation, but the underlying threat of loosening doctrinal certainty pushed evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons toward separation and isolation rather than cooperation and partnership. The problem, Young shows, was theological: competing exclusive truth claims left little room for collaboration. While suspicion of early-twentieth-century liberal Protestant ecumenism and mid-century tri-faith pluralism lingered, the value of political networks grew as American cultural politics shifted in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In fact, when this religious trio “perceived themselves as outsiders fighting the cultural and political consensus” (p. 3), they could collaborate. The Second Vatican Council played a crucial role in creating the possibility of conservative interfaith activity. The “Decree on Ecumenism” not only relaxed the long-standing Catholic view of other Christians as heretics but also insisted on inviting “separated brethren” to worship and work together to fulfill Christ’s mission. Evangelicals and Mormons each saw a little potential and a lot of problems in this new direction. But constitutional challenges to school prayer, “God is Dead” theology, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment fertilized the soil of ecumenical conservatism and pollinated the buds of the Moral Majority. These fights also highlight Young’s point: even as conservative Christians united to pursue political action in line with their values, distinctive theological commitments challenged, cracked, and eroded coalitions. Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign to unite against the ERA, which brought together Catholics, Mormons, evangelicals, and fundamentalists, looked more diverse “from a national vantage point [and] obscure[ed] the divisions that remained at the grassroots” (p. 156). And if the Reagan years represented a harsh right turn for liberals, they were a disappointingly slow veer rightward for this league of religious conservatives. The 1990s Christian Coalition picked up the pieces and tried again to puzzle out conservative interfaith unity; the Clinton years brought evangelicals and Catholics closer together, while Mormons remained on the edge. Gay marriage offered a tantalizing opportunity to ally, while Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign again exposed the limits of cooperation. A teetering affinity has proved more constant than a stable alliance. Writing about a triangle of religious groups that engaged in dialogues but rarely interacted simultaneously is a massive task, made even more so by the theological [End Page 864] gulfs that informed and strained the developing relationships. Overall, Young handles this task deftly, although at times the extensive detail overwhelms the narrative. Nevertheless, this is a significant reinterpretation of the rise and frailty of the Religious Right that deserves the attention of religious, political, and cultural historians. It also helps explain the present moment, implicitly reminding us that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” motto streamlines Pat Robertson’s clunky...

Why the Poor Stay Poor

William julius wilson’s book is the most thoughtful study of urban poor blacks to appear in many years. But it is cause for dismay as well as optimism. On the one hand, the book represents a significant departure from most writings on poverty published during the Reagan years. Wilson effectively challenges prevailing conservative arguments that discount the need for major new government initiatives. . .. A self-described “social democrat,” Wilson nevertheless adopts some of the assumptions and vocabulary of his conservative opponents, thereby remaining within the narrow ideological boundaries that constrict contemporary debate on domestic social issues. . ..[Wilson’s] use of the term “underclass” marks a considerable departure from the notion once common among liberals that the poor were best understood as unemployed members of the working class rather than part of an enduring subculture characterized by the absence of the skills or attitudes required for success in the labor market. Wilson suggests that liberals cannot expect to have a serious impact on national policy until they admit the existence of this ghetto underclass, a heterogeneous catch-all which, according to him, includes those who “experience long-term unemployment or are not members of the labor force, individuals who are engaged in street crime and other forms of aberrant behavior, and families that experience long-term spells of poverty and/or welfare dependency.”In explaining why conditions in the inner city have worsened, he accepts the thesis, often put forward by conservatives, that the ghetto underclass is not the result of present-day racism. . ..While he acknowledges the existence of an underclass, he sees it primarily as a product of bad social policy rather than of the attitudes of the poor. While he discounts the importance of civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation as a means of addressing ghetto problems, he nevertheless acknowledges that forceful federal action is needed to address those problems. Wilson demolishes the arguments of Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground, who concluded that Great Society programs not only failed to reduce poverty but actually exacerbated the plight of the poor. Rejecting the notion that the underclass is characterized by an economically dysfunctional culture of poverty, he prefers instead to emphasize the concept of social isolation, which he believes better expresses the source of distinctive attitudes that persist among the urban black poor. For example, rather than attributing the rise in the number of single mothers and female-headed households to a self-destructive rejection of white middle-class values or to “permissive” liberal welfare policies, Wilson argues that economic trends have reduced job opportunities for black urban residents, which in turn reduces the number of employable and thus marriageable black males.Yet, while impressed by Wilson’s desire to provide a sound intellectual basis for a renewed assault on poverty, I remain troubled by what Wilson leaves out of his discussion of the causes of and strategies for combating the problem. Wilson tends to examine the black ghetto from the outside, as a problem to be solved through liberal social engineering, rather than as a complex community capable of being transformed from within as well as from without.

American Pastorals : horizons et origines imaginaires dans Days of Heaven, Heaven’s Gate et Matewan

Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) and John Sayles’ Matewan (1987) differ greatly in their cinematographic and aesthetic projects. Yet all share a similar calling into question of the pastoral ideal as the cradle of the American cultural and political imagination. Operating on vastly different scales and production contexts, the three movies nonetheless converge towards a rehabilitation of the American pastoral imagination in the disenchanted context of the late 1970s or the triumphant materialism of the Reagan years. What this article examines is how these films reappropriate the pastoral mode as a means of reevaluating an artistic, historic and generic heritage, while challenging narrative and aesthetic practices, ultimately investigating and investing new forms of artistic and political involvements.

Book Review: William Stringfellow: Essential Writings

William Stringfellow: Essential Writings. Selected with an Introduction by Bill Wylie-Kellermann. Modem Spiritual Masters Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2013. 256 pp. $22.00 (paper).Surprisingly little has been published about William Stringfeilow since he died in 1985, despite his seminal influence on such thinkers and activists as Walter Wink, Jim Wallis, and Elizabeth McAlister. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a Methodist pastor and activist who serves an Episcopal parish in Detroit, has offered arguably the best introduction to date to the life and work of the radical Episcopal lawyer and lay theologian who articulated a biblical theology of the powers and served many of his generation as a prophetic voice against the ubiquitous forces of domination afflicting church, society, and politics. Wylie-Kellermann, who edited a longer Stringfeilow anthology two decades ago, more recently helped direct the project to reprint the works of his friend and mentor through Wipf and Stock.The introduction briefly sketches Stringfeilow s life, setting up the judiciously selected primary text excerpts to follow. Raised in New England by working class parents, Stringfeilow studied debate at Rhodes College and became a leader in ecumenical student Christian work. After earning a Harvard law degree, he spumed more lucrative prospects to practice street law in East Harlem, where he confronted the principalities of racism and poverty head on. During Karl Barths U.S. visit in 1962, the young attorney stunned the Swiss theologian and the audience at a panel discussion with his penetrating questions on the vocation of the churches amid the contemporary American political scene. A cradle Episcopalian, Stringfeilow immersed himself, often notoriously, in controversies that roiled the denomination in the 1960s and 70s: he defended his friend Bishop James Pike when brought up on heresy charges, and advised the first women ordained to holy orders. Racked by health problems and desiring to live a more monastic existence, in 1967 he moved with his partner, the poet Anthony Towne, to Block Island, Rhode Island, where he became a gadfly to local politicians. Stringfeilow and Towne sheltered the Jesuit peace activist Daniel Berrigan, who was pursued by the FBI for his role in the 1968 draft-records-buming protest in Catonsville, Maryland. Berrigan and Stringfeilow piloted an underground seminary to empower a radical discipleship of resistance and of the rehumanization of those on the margins. Such commitments shaped Stringfellows most systematic and influential treatise in moral theology, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1974). He performed a public exorcism of the Nixon administration after the Presidents second inauguration, and his final book was a scathing critique of the ersatz bourgeois spirituality of the Reagan years. …

The Politics of Bureaucracy

The Politics of Bureaucracy Nancy Beck Young (bio) Joanna L. Grisinger. The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. vii + 309 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $88.00 (cloth); $31.99 (paper); $26.00 (Adobe eBook Reader). Gail Radford. The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. vii + 218 pp. Illustration, maps, appendix, notes, and index. $85.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper). Why does a country with so many governing entities and countless overlapping jurisdictions—this is a construct that goes beyond the simple local, state, federal and the legislative, executive, judicial dichotomies—have a population that thinks in a singular grammatical construction about “the government”? This is a difficult question in no small part because historians have just begun to tackle questions regarding governing entities not defined in the Constitution. Popular visions of governance are linked to what the Founders created, and indeed our language for discussing government comes from the early national period when the Constitution was adopted. Writings in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison help frame how Americans often think about government. Hamilton's observation in Federalist No. 81 speaks to the importance of the Constitution: “The Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution.” Beyond the Constitution, governmental structure is probably the second significant marker in the way citizens think about government. Hamilton and Madison spoke positively about the division of government: In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people, is submitted to the administration of a single government; and usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people, is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each, subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises [End Page 327] on the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other; at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.1 Madison believed this structure would ensure a measured, deliberative process wherein change would be cumbersome and slow in coming—anything but the structures of governance that Joanna L. Grisinger and Gail Radford explicate. For scholars working today on appointed governing entities, the meaning of the Constitution and the division of government are central underlying themes, but little in political history has addressed these matters. Until recently, the historiography of American politics has been focused on one or more of the following: sociocultural issues, ideology, the construction and impact of legislation, grass-roots social movements, institutions like Congress and the courts, biographies, and supposedly discrete political eras (for example, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan years). Aside from presidential and sometimes congressional studies, less attention has been given to questions about who is doing the governing, for what purpose, and how that governing is happening. Instead such scholarship has more often been the domain of political scientists and public administration scholars. At the federal level, a mushrooming bureaucracy, mostly a twentieth-century development created in part by legislation that Congress passed and in part by presidential executive order, has assumed quasi-legislative, executive, and even judicial functioning without the democratic accountability under which the three branches of government operate. Some scholars, particularly Brian Balogh, have found credible evidence of an activist federal government in the nineteenth century, raising a host of questions regarding how we define government activism.2 This twentieth-century bureaucracy, though, is different; it includes entities that are hybrid creatures, partially governmental and partially private. The situation becomes even more complex at the state and local levels. Two new books—Gail Radford's The Rise of Public Authority and Joanna L. Grisinger's The Unwieldy American State—provide much-needed relief to this historiographic problem. Grisinger's book, published in 2012, explicates federal-level administrative law in the years since the 1930s, with the focus on the 1940s and 1950s. Her concern is less with...

The Segmented Third Rail: The Politics of Social Security from Carter to Obama

AbstractSocial Security is widely known as “The Third Rail of American Politics” and the program has proved been remarkably stable and politically resilient, over time. While true, this basic story about the institutional stability of Social Security in the US should not hide the segmented, discontinuous nature of its politics over the last four decades. As suggested in this article, the changing nature of Social Security politics is reflected in the variety of the policy options debated, which range from incremental benefit cuts and revenue increases adopted during the Carter and the Reagan years to structural, path-shifting proposals associated with the idea of Social Security privatization, which only became a mainstream policy alternative during the Clinton years. The following analysis explores the debate about these diverse policy alternatives, if and when they entered the federal policy agenda during the periods under consideration.

Feeling your pain Pain A Political History Keith Wailoo Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 292 pp.

Feeling your pain <b>Pain A Political History</b> <i>Keith Wailoo</i> Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 292 pp.

Selling Rhinebeck: Confrontation, Profit, and the “Mass-Anxiety Attack” of the Northeast Craft Fair

In 1966, the American Craft Council's Northeast Assembly exulted in the success of its “Confrontation Craft Fair” in Stowe, Vermont, reporting sales of about $17,000. At its successor event, the 1981 Northeast Craft Fair at Rhinebeck, however, sales reached nearly $5,000,000 and the Fair was hailed as a triumph of craft marketing.The unprecedented success of “the Rhinebeck Fair,” as it became known in the 1970s, was the catalyst for a broader transformation—the creation of a mass market for American studio craft. There was (and still is) widespread ambivalence about these changes. Some craftspeople, gallerists, retailers, and collectors welcomed the increased accessibility and profitability of craft, whereas others regretted the end of the “hippy days.”The transformation of the Northeast Craft Fair from a countercultural attraction to a multi-million-dollar trade market put new and unique pressures on the aesthetic and social values of craftspeople and their supporters. Because of its compounding success, the community of artisans and their supporters experienced acute growing pains that forced them to evaluate their ideals. As a group, 1960s craftspeople identified themselves largely with the counterculture, but with the growing profitability of craft markets, they were increasingly compelled to engage with both mainstream commerce and the social elite. In this we can also observe a broader transformation—that of the youth counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s into the boom-economy entrepreneurial ethos of the Reagan years.

Smile Orange: Melba Liston in Jamaica

A switchboard operator answers calls while applying eye shadow. Two waiters exchange stories in the kitchen backroom. The new busboy learns to use deodorant while proudly wearing a bright orange vest. An assistant manager telephones home to speak to his wife who casually converses while lying in bed stroking the family gardener. Welcome to the Mocho Beach Hotel that serves as the setting for Smile Orange (1971), Trevor D. Rhone's (1940-2009) comedy stage play about Jamaican tourism. The fictional third-rate hotel is located on the north coast of Jamaica where, as a New York Times reviewer put it, the are and and the natives who serve and exploit them are and (Eder 1976). However, Jamaican author Rhone wrote Smile Orange in an auspicious moment that was not at all crass or funny in the minds of most Jamaicans. Signs were already abundant that political tides would turn in the next national election, when People's National Party candidate Michael Manley would become the next Prime Minister. Indeed, the plot of Smile Orange reflects the urgency of one priority of Manley's platform: the need for Jamaica to resist economic domination of western superpowers. Interactions between workers and tourists in Smile Orange expose the plight of black Jamaicans seeking economic advancement in spite of the imbalance of power emblematic of the tourist economy of a formerly colonized nation. In 1976, the same year Manley was elected to a second term, Smile Orange was adapted as a film, Smile Orange: The Jamaican Experience. Shot in the style of a U.S. blaxploitation film, Smile Orange was, nevertheless, distinctly Jamaican, with some aspects reflecting the flowering of Jamaican culture that accompanied Manley's broader social and economic programs for national autonomy. Not only was it filmed entirely in Jamaica, but its score veered from those of other films in the genre by featuring Jamaican folk music forms and newer Jamaican popular music styles, including reggae and ska. The composer, however, was not Jamaican, but an African-American woman with a very different relationship to Jamaican culture than to the tourists represented in the film, whose asymmetrical power relations mirrored those of the respective nations. Melba Liston had moved from Los Angeles to Kingston in 1973, the year after Manley's ascendance to Prime Minister, to accept a position as director of a contemporary performing arts program. She was soon busy contributing to the national celebration of Jamaican culture of the 1970s in a number of roles. Three years after composing the musical score for Smile Orange: The Jamaican Experience (1976), she served as composer/arranger and musical director for The Dread Mikado (1979), a historically significant theater production that would be celebrated as emblematic of the Jamaican cultural revolution, though it ran during a less optimistic moment in the Manley government. With the economy crumbling around him, Manley accepted assistance from the IMF in 1978--a fundamental contradiction to his ideals for an independent Jamaica. He negotiated with the IMF for conditions that would protect Jamaican autonomy, yet was forced out of office in 1979, a year earlier than the scheduled elections, in a moment of violence and disillusionment that many attribute to CIA interference (Marable 1993,4). In the same year, Liston returned to the U.S., ending her Jamaican period. There is much scholarship on Jamaican and U.S. economic and political relations during the turbulent decade of 1970-80. This paper will not revisit that ground, though it is important to have a sense of the context of the Manley years, the dramatic shifts since the triumphant first election, the relationship between economic independence and the cultural revolution, and the role of the U.S. in exerting economic and political pressures that brought Manley's second term to a grinding halt just in time for the Reagan years. …

How Impressionable Were the Younger Reagan Cohorts?

AbstractYounger voters today, defined as under the age of 30 and often labeled the Millennial Generation, have shown high support for Barack Obama and for certain statements about activist government. Are we witnessing some generational effect for a significant percentage of the Millennials, stemming from their growing up during impressionable years under first George W. Bush and then Obama? To study this question with a historical analogy, I use the ANES to compare under-30 cohorts under Jimmy Carter as a benchmark and then Ronald Reagan much more extensively. I find evidence consistent with categories advanced by Sears (1983). The Reagan years disproportionately shifted this age group’s symbolic attitudes, including partisanship, self-reported ideology, and approval of Reagan himself, but not most specific policy opinions. If this finding generalizes, recent events may leave a Democratic imprint on the Millennials, but their current measures of policy liberalism should not be attributed overmuch to Obama’s influence.

A turn toward experimentalism? Rethinking security and governance in the twenty-first century

AbstractConventional understandings of security cooperation are rooted in the state-centric and materialist assumptions dominant in the Cold War and subscribe to the dictum of the Reagan years, ‘trust but verify’. In today's more complex setting, however, governance arrangements with the most potential to address constantly mutating security threats, such as the concern over nuclear terrorism, may not be those solely designed to ensure compliance, but rather those that are better equipped to identify and solve new problems. This article draws on a burgeoning literature on ‘new’ or ‘experimental’ governance and advances an analytical framework to consider the extent to which states and other actors might be turning toward an alternative set of mechanisms that rely more heavily on non-binding standards and recommendations, peer review, increased participation, and experimentation to generate new knowledge about the challenges they face, even in the ‘hard’ case of security cooperation. It then explores this potential reorientation in two separate, but complementary cases that have emerged as key tools in preventing illicit nuclear proliferation: the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), which seeks to bolster states' counter-financing of terrorism systems, and the UNSC Resolution 1540 Committee, which guides efforts to fill the governance gaps in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Although both cases on paper contain more traditional enforcement components, in practice they rely increasingly on experimental governance. The article concludes with an evaluation of the promise and limits of an experimentalist framework in understanding the evolution of governance arrangements in response to a more complex security environment and suggests potential avenues for future research.

The American Dream: A Cultural History by Lawrence R. Samuel (review)

Reviewed by: The American Dream: A Cultural History by Lawrence R. Samuel Tess Evans (bio) The American Dream: A Cultural History. By Lawrence R. Samuel. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Pp. 241. $24.95 cloth) James Truslow Adams coined the term, “American Dream” in his book, The Epic of America (1931), which explores how the concept of “American” evolved throughout our history and argues for a vision of what the American Dream should be. In The American Dream: A Cultural History, Lawrence R. Samuel takes up where Adams left off to present a myriad of perspectives that have shaped and reshaped the definition of the American Dream over the past eighty years. Samuel acknowledges not only the existence of the American Dream prior to 1931 but also its tenacity, arguing “that the term ‘American Dream’ was created in the darkest days of the Great Depression was all the more interesting given that many feared it no longer existed” (p. 13). Given that the nation is experiencing the next-worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American Dream is a timely topic to revisit. In The American Dream, Samuel has created a chronological collage of quotes and discussion on the subject, as presented by journalists mostly in print media. Between the introduction and the conclusion, Samuel has divided the years from 1931 to 2011 into roughly “six eras of mythology” covering six chapters. “The Epic of America” is the era of the Great Depression, which left Americans dreaming for some version of “Sunnyville,” a mythical place with few social or economic problems. “The Status Seekers” era is the postwar drive towards financial gain and materialism, as Americans tried to forget years of thrift and sacrifice. “The Anti-Paradise” is an era of counterculture resistance to the strains of the Vietnam War, economic recession, the energy crisis, and racial issues. “Born in the U.S.A.” is an era of renewed patriotism and optimism sparked by the Reagan years, when recessions were persistent [End Page 274] and yet expectations continued to rise. “The Anxious Society” is an era of the 1990s boom times that, ironically, left Americans feeling less in control over their lives. Finally, “American Idol” is the era that ushered in the highs-and-lows of the early twenty-first century, with the resilience of the American Dream as its theme. Samuel’s predominant use of discussions in the popular media as the barometer of the Dream clearly indicates an attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience less interested in complex analysis than in a practical synopsis of trends in American culture. Most of the citations within the work come from print sources, especially major newspapers. The New York Times dominates the discussion with more than one hundred citations. The next-most-cited source is the Los Angeles Times, with less than fifty references, followed by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Hartford Courant, with less than thirty references each. Published commentary about the “American Dream” is the focus of Samuel’s study, rather than editorial and advertising content appealing to the ever-shifting Dream. By limiting his sources to these discussions, rather than analyzing more tangible manifestations of the American Dream, Samuel’s own discussion becomes at times difficult to follow. He does try to clarify abstract concepts by reverting to material symbols; for example, the achievement of racial equality is discussed in terms of whether barriers to suburban neighborhoods are removed so that African Americans can buy houses there. In his effort to take on the whole concept of the American Dream over such a long time frame in such a short work, rather than focus on one aspect or one moment in time, Samuel presents an entertaining, if surface-skimming, overview. Yet The American Dream is a timely effort to generate discussion about the future of the Dream in a nation still reeling from recent economic setbacks. [End Page 275] Tess Evans Tess Evans graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in 2012 with a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her dissertation, “The Persuasion of Many within a Moderate Length of Time,” examines the intersections of classical, religious, and scientific rhetoric during the rise...

Affirmative Action and the Occupational Advancement of Minorities and Women During 1973–2003

The share of minorities and women comprising high‐paying skilled occupations such as management, professional, and technical occupations has been increasing since the 1960s, while the proportion of white men in such occupations has been declining. What has been the contribution of affirmative action to the occupational advancement of minorities and women from low‐wage unskilled occupations into high‐wage skilled ones in U.S. firms? I examine this by comparing the occupational position of minorities and women at firms holding federal contracts, and thereby mandated to implement affirmative action, and noncontracting firms, over the course of 31 years during 1973–2003. I use a new longitudinal dataset of over 100,000 large private‐sector firms across all industries and regions uniquely suited for the exploration of this question obtained from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. My key findings show that the share of minorities and women in high‐paying skilled occupations grew more at federal contractors subject to affirmative action obligation than at noncontracting firms during the three decades under study, but these advances took place primarily during the pre‐ and early Reagan years and during the decade following the Glass Ceiling Act of 1991.

From Countercultures to Suburban Cultures: Frank Zappa after 1968

This article extracts and addresses the theme of suburbia in the recorded work of Frank Zappa, with particular attention paid to the period around the turn of the 1980s and the onset of the Reagan years. During this period, suburban concerns – mostly of a sexualised nature – come to the fore in a number of critically ignored or derided albums. These advance a conception of suburban cultures as coloured by a dissipated and problematic legacy of the freedoms gained in the countercultural phase, and so track the trajectory from the Summer of Love, and “Freak” cultures, to the onset of neoliberalism and “Valley Girl” cultures. In terms of the wider scope of Zappa’s work, and with Zappa considered as a one-time commentator of the countercultural phase, the engagement with suburbia comes to represent both the terminus of a period of liberation and ideological radicalism, and of Zappa’s satirical project.

Conference Report: Masculinities Between the National and the Transnational, 1980 to the Present: An International Conference (Kent State University, August 5-7, 2011)

Phyllida Lloyd's recent award-winning film, The Lady (2012), which depicts former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her rise to power, features a montage in which Thatcher is seen dancing with U.S. president Ronald Reagan. The short sequence is an eerie yet fitting emblem of the 1980s and a fascinating (gender) image on a number of levels, not just because both political leaders are impersonated by actors in this danse macabre, but because their individual political careers have been read as masculinity performances- on the one side, the B-movie Cowboy-turned-President, and on the other the Iron Lady, whose alleged lack of femininity was constantly levelled against her and became part of her public image. A conference on British and American Masculinities since 1980 inevitably has to deal with the long shadow cast by the Thatcher and Reagan years, and many of the papers presented during the three-day conference, Masculinities Between the National & the Transnational, 1980 to the Present, held at Kent State University, August 5-7, 2011, indeed addressed the diverse cultural and political ramifications of this era. It was the second of three conferences to emerge from the ongoing research project, Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies, a transatlantic cooperation initiated by Prof. Stefan Horlacher (Dresden University of Technology) and Prof. Kevin Floyd (Kent State University), sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Kent State University. Having already welcomed scholars from three different continents in Dresden in 2010 in order to offer transnational perspectives on masculinity and the intersections between literary production and gendered identities in the post-war era up until the beginning of the Thatcher/Reagan years, this time, global developments in masculinities of the past thirty years were interrogated by scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, New Zealand, and Germany. In his opening address, conference co-organiser and host Kevin Floyd (Kent State) summarised the current state of research in the field of Masculinity Studies which has undergone both diversification and differentiation in recent years, moving from the groundbreaking work in the 1980s which focused on (monolithic) masculinity as a response to feminism towards post-1990s differentiation, which is dominated by a pluralised conceptualisation of masculinities. With a number of influential studies on male images, representations and embodiments of male identity having been published in recent years, Floyd stressed that there was an increased need not just to re-address traditional questions, but to interrogate masculinities from a transnational and international perspective in the political climate of the past thirty years. He argued that the emphasis of this conference would also have to include perspectives outside the strictly delineated field in order to examine how the neoliberalist movement which started with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan in the U.K. and in the U.S., respectively, has shaped male identity politics in contemporary narratives. Following a short welcoming address by Timothy S. Moerland, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University, the first conference panel (entitled Handle with Care) invested much thought into the fragility of male identity constructions, but also addressed the perception of monstrous embodiments of masculinity in popular media. Seth Friedman (DePauw University) dealt with the disguises of male movie villains in Constructing the Perfect Cover, focusing on the way contemporary misdirection films- narratives with twist endings-force the viewers not only to reinterpret the events they have been presented, but also to question their beliefs about gender. Characteristically, the protagonist of misdirection films is male and finds out that he has been living a dream or a hallucination. The villains in both Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) and Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000), on the other hand, reveal a paradoxical constellation at the heart of these narratives. …

The Radical Sixties

The Radical Sixties David Farber (bio) Robert Cohen. Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 312 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, and index. $34.95. To start with a banality: a lot happened in the 1960s. And the historiography of the era has come to mirror that banal observation. The Sixties has become a capacious subject, so much so that, I have come to think, we have lost “the Sixties” in writing about the Sixties. On this topic, as I have contributed to that capacious banality, I am a man in a glass house. Right now historians seem to be taking the Sixties in several different directions, all at the same time. Many of us are invested in writing a history of the transnational Sixties, which is not surprising given the herd-like movement in the transnational direction by historians-at-large. And cattiness aside, I am convinced that the “transnational Sixties” will prove to be a fruitful approach.1 Similarly, I think (obviously, given my own work) that a “Conservative Sixties” is a useful angle.2 At the same time, a few historians have begun to re-emphasize the liberal triumphs of the era, with a focus on national civil rights policy and the war on poverty. Given the long conservative policy ascendency that followed the Kennedy-Johnson years, I think these historians are right to argue that liberals were not the soulless, sell-out compromisers some have made them out to be. They were not just impediments, in other words, to greater social justice.3 Then, too, we are all now convinced that the social changes and political challenges associated with the “Sixties” really transpired over a much longer time frame, making the events that happened to occur in the 1960s less important, or at least less causal, than earlier accounts often made them seem. So we all now acknowledge that the civil rights movement was a “long” movement and not a historical subject best understood as being just of the 1960s or best characterized by the now-legendary Southern protests of the 1960–65 years. Similarly, historians are convincing us to see many of the other classic Sixties-identified historical processes, such as the sexual revolution, as being born of a longer, decade-defying process.4 A “long” Sixties, then, extending from World War II through the 1970s, makes a certain amount of sense—although why the “Sixties” label should be retained, in that case, is [End Page 712] hard to defend.5 In my own course on “The American Sixties,” I find myself beginning with the New Deal and ending sometime during the Reagan years. It seems to make sense when I do it, but I worry that, in my attempt to contextualize and explain historical trajectory, I have begun to forget the point of talking about a historical subject called “The Sixties.” Robert Cohen, in his new work, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, wants to remind us what that point might be, what it should be. And given his provocative, even mysterious use of the word radical in his book title to modify the word legacy, I think he wants us to think what the meaning of “the Sixties” could be even now and ever after. In specific, Robby Cohen tells us how and why a brilliant young man born into a conventional Catholic American family in New York City in 1942 became a self-described radical and why the kind of radicalism he championed made the “Sixties” seem so exciting and threatening and explosive to many Americans living through those years. Here is the Sixties as a time of radical thought and radical action consciously pursued by young, white, self-identified radicals out to remake the world. This approach to the history of the Sixties is so old it is new. I read Freedom’s Orator while I was also reading a collection of essays on the 1970s that treated “the Sixties” as something like a carnival that came to town and left right before everyone began to reach for their wallets. This particular collection was...

Regulatory Review by the Executive Office of the President: An Overview and Policy Analysis of Current Issues

Regulatory Review by the Executive Office of the President: An Overview and Policy Analysis of Current Issues

La promoción de la democracia en América Latina

This paper is a review of Thomas Carothers' work on the Reagan administration's policy towards Latin America and his contribution to the democratization of the region (In the Name of Democracy. U.S. Policy Towards Latin America in the Reagan Years). What the book raises about political assistance and democracy promotion programs is mainly criticized. Reference is made to this matter highlighting the importance and validity of this type of programs. It is argued that although these point to formal aspects of democracy, they influence a series of other factors that effectively help its establishment and consolidation.

The Single-Series Monograph: A New Approach to TV Studies

The Single-Series Monograph: A New Approach to TV Studies David Thorburn (bio) M*A*S*H by David Scott Diffrient. Wayne State University Press 2008. $14.95 paper. 152 pages Bewitched by Walter Metz. Wayne State University Press 2007. $14.95 paper. 160 pages I Love Lucy by Lori Landay. Wayne State University Press 2010. $14.95. 119 pages Miami Vice by James Lyons. Wiley-Blackwell 2010. $19.95. 177 pages The Sopranos by Dana Polan. Duke University Press 2009. $22.95. 232 pages Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 194] Reading Walter Metz’s disagreements with other interpreters of Bewitched (ABC, 1964–1972), I found myself smiling at how nuanced and granular the professional study of television has become, not to mention how optimistic many publishers seem to be about the commercial prospects of books devoted to a single TV series. The monographs from three different press series considered here all reflect (to differing degrees) a level of seriousness and specialization in TV studies that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. All aim to understand the institutional contexts of television production, and all recognize that television shows are ambivalent, multivoiced, sometimes contradictory expressions of their culture. Formatted with attractive modesty as general introductions, the Milestones volumes aim to appeal both to students enrolled in TV courses and to a popular audience interested in favorite shows. But it’s difficult to believe the three titles under review will satisfy either audience. Imagine a fan’s encounter with this sentence from David Scott Diffrient’s book on M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–1983): “The rise of Alda’s star status and its eventual decline during the Reagan years thus marked a paradigm shift in the epistemological terrain subtending masculinity studies.”1 As this discouraging sentence suggests, Diffrient’s prose is often imprecise and jargon ridden; he speaks of the “motivic focus” of the series and sometimes relegates the substance of his argument to parenthetic clauses in meandering sentences that turn into entire paragraphs.2 This verbal imprecision mirrors and surely intensifies a recurring conceptual imprecision, in which suggestive and potentially significant arguments come to seem simplistic or overly general. But if these limitations make it an unlikely choice for fans or for teachers considering texts for their courses, the book nonetheless has value for scholars and serious readers. Its most original contribution is its treatment of the series’ ambiguous relation to the Korean War. As Diffrient notes, despite its ostensible setting during that conflict, the series was widely seen—even by its writers—as a response to the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, M*A*S*H ’s third year on the air. Diffrient recognizes that the show’s antiwar sentiments reflect the Vietnam era. But he also claims that the program “did more to inscribe the idea of ‘Korea’ in America’s collective unconscious than any other cultural production of the twentieth century.”3 The unprovable grandeur of this assertion—which he first makes in his introduction and then repeats verbatim ninety-five pages later!—may feel excessive, but Diffrient’s chapter on the Korean elements in the series is instructive and levelheaded. Drawing on a range of scholarship on the representations of [End Page 195] Asians in American media and on his own readings of specific episodes, Diffrient demonstrates that M*A*S*H was “simultaneously regressive and progressive” in its treatment of Korean characters and culture.4 His narrative of the general evolution of the series emphasizes the way in which its central characters deepened as the program itself became less satiric and antiauthoritarian, the high jinks and antiwar satire yielding to a focus on personal relationships and multicultural pieties. Diffrient’s background in ethnic and gender studies explains what’s valuable in his book but also its limitations; his readings are essentially thematic and ideological, and even his perceptive account of the series’ growing interest in character underestimates the significance of the cumulative, accretive power inherent in the series format, a power that M*A*S*H was among the first television programs to exploit seriously. Metz tells us early on that...

Overview of “The past as prologue? Decarceration in California then and now”

Overview of “The past as prologue? Decarceration in California then and now”