Chapter 42
The American People
Face a New Century
I. Economic Revolutions
• Opening 20th century:
• United States steel was the flagship business of
America’s booming industrial revolution
• Generation later it was General Motors
– Annually producing millions of automobiles
– Characteristic American corporation
• Shift to the mass consumer in the 1920s
• Flowered in the 1950s
• After World War II the rise of International Business
Machines (IBM)
• Later Microsoft Corporation led transformation to the
fast-paced “information age”: the storing, organizing,
and processing of data became an industry.
I. Economic Revolutions
(cont.)
• 21st century the growth of the Internet—communications revolution
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New corporate giants like Google
Social networking like Facebook and Twitter
Peoples rocketing down the “information superhighway”
Toward the uncharted terrain of an electronic global village
Speed and efficiency of the new communications tools
threatened to wipe out entire occupational categories
– Now businesses could be “outsourced” to other countries
• Scientific research propelled the economy
– New scientific knowledge raised new moral dilemmas and
provoked new political arguments
– The threshold of a revolution in biological engineering
I. Economic Revolutions
(cont.)
– The Human Genome Project established the DNA sequence
–the way to radical new medical therapies
– The cloning industry—legitimacy of applying cloning
technology to human reproduction, human stem cells
research
• Resulting in unprecedented ethical questions:
– What principles should govern the allocation of human
organs for lifesaving transplants?
– Was it wise to spend money on such costly procedures?
– Should resources be better spent on improved sanitation,
maternal and infant care, nutritional and health education?
– Should society regulate the increasingly lengthy and often
painful process of dying? (see pp. 994-995)
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II. Affluence and Inequality
• Americans were an affluent people at the beginning
of the 21st century:
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–
–
Median household income reached $49,400 in 2011
Most enjoyed a higher standard of living than 2/3 people
Americans were no longer the world’s wealthiest people
The richest 20% of Americans raked in ½ the national
income
The poorest 20% received a little over 3% (see Table 42.1)
This trend was evident in many industrial societies
The Welfare Reform Bill of 1996:
» Restricted access to social services
» Requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to find work.
There were signs of widening inequality
» Numbers of those who had health care or did not
» Those who remained in poverty
II. Affluence and Inequality
(cont.)
– Indictment of the inequities afflicting an affluent and
allegedly egalitarian republic (for comparative data, see
Figure 42.1)
• What caused the widening income gap?
– The tax and fiscal policies from Reagan to the Bushes, which
favored the wealthy (see Table 42.2)
– The intensifying global economic competition
– The shrinkage in high-paying manufacturing jobs for semiskilled and unskilled workers
– The greater economic rewards commanded by educated
workers in high-tech industries
– The decline of unions
– The growth of part-time and temporary work
– The rising tide of relatively low-skill immigrants
II. Affluence and Inequality
(cont.)
– The increasing tendency of educated men and women to
marry one another and both work, creating households with
very high incomes
– Educational opportunities perpetuated inequality:
» The underfunding of many schools in poor urban areas
» The soaring costs of higher education
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Table 42-1 p992
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Figure 42-1 p993
Table 42-2 p993
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Figure 42-2 p995
III. The Feminist Revolution
– Women in the workplace:
• Beginning of the 20th century, women made up about
20% of the workforce
• Constantly increasing their presence in the workplace
over the next five decades
• Increased during World War II
• Beginning in the 1950s women’s entry accelerated
dramatically
• By the 1990s nearly half of all workers were women
• Most astonishing was the upsurge in employment of
mothers
• In 1950s most mothers with children stayed at home.
III. The Feminist Revolution
(cont.)
• By the 1990s a majority of women with children as
young as one year old were wage earners (see Table
42.3)
• Women brought home the bacon and then cooked it
• By 2008 population of American women in the
workforce was higher than most countries except
Russia and China (see Figure 42.3)
• In the 1960s all-male strongholds—Yale, Princeton,
West Point, southern military academies like Citadel
and Virginia Military Institute—opened to women
• By the 21st century women were piloting airplanes,
orbiting the earth, governing states and cities, and
writing Supreme Court decisions.
III. The Feminist Revolution
(cont.)
– Yet many feminists remained frustrated:
• Women continued to received lower wages
• Tended to concentrate in low-prestige, low-paying
occupations (the “pink-collar ghetto”)
• Accounting for ½ the population in 1990, they were:
– 32% of lawyers and judges (up from 5% in 1970)
– 32% of physicians (up from 10% in 1970)
• Overt sexual discrimination explained some of this
occupational segregation:
– Most, however, attributed to the role of motherhood
– Helped for the persistence of a “gender gap” in voting
behavior.
III. The Feminist Revolution
(cont.)
• Most voted for Democrats:
– Women perceived them as more willing to favor
government support for health and child care, education,
job equality, and more vigilant to protect abortion rights
• 20th century men’s roles changed as well:
– Some employers provided paternity leave in addition to
maternity leave
– More men assumed traditional female responsibilities
– Congress passed the Family Leave Bill in 1993:
» Mandating job protection for working fathers as well as
working mothers who needed to take time off from
work for family-related reasons.
Table 42-3 p996
Figure 42-3 p996
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IV. New Families and Old
– The traditional family suffered heavy blows in
modern America:
• By the 1990s one out of every two marriages ended in
divorce:
– Seven times more children were affected by divorce
– Kids who commuted between separated parents were
commonplace
• Traditional families were increasingly slow to form in
the first place:
– Adults living alone tripled in the four decades after 1950
– By the 1990s nearly one-third of women aged 25-29 had
never married
IV. New Families and Old
(cont.)
– By the 1960s, 5% of all births were to unmarried women
– Three decades later:
» One out of four white babies
» One out of three Latino babies
» Two out of three African American babies
» Were born to single mothers.
– Every fourth child in America was growing up in a household
that lacked two parents
– The collapse of the traditional family contributed to the
pauperization of many women and children
» As single parents (usually mothers) struggled to keep
their households economically afloat
» Single parenthood outstripped race and ethnicity as the
highest predictor of poverty in America.
IV. New Families and Old
(cont.)
– Childrearing, the family’s foremost function
• Being increasingly assigned to “parent-substitutes”
– To day care centers or schools
– To television and DVD players
• Parental anxieties multiplied with the Internet
– Where youngsters could “surf” through poetry and problem
sets as well as pornography
• If the traditional family was increasingly rare, the
family itself remained a bedrock of American society
in the early twenty-first century:
• As viable families now assumed a variety of forms:
– Children in household led by single parent, stepparent, or
grandparent
IV. New Families and Old
(cont.)
– Children with gay and lesbian parents
– Gay marriages took place when Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court ruled them legal in 2003.
• Teenage pregnancy
– A key source of single parenthood, was on the decline after
the mid 1990s
• Divorce
– Rates appeared to ebb a bit
– With 3.4 divorces per thousand people in 2008, down from
5.3 per thousand in 1981
• The family was not evaporating, but evolving into
multiple forms
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V. The Aging of America
– Old age was to be a lengthy experience
• Americans were living longer
– Someone born in 2000 could anticipate a life span of
seventy-five years.
– The census of 1950 recorded that women for the first time
made up a majority of Americans
– Miraculous medical advances lengthened and strengthened
lives
– Noteworthy, the development of antibiotics after 1940
– Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery in 1953 of a vaccine against a
dreaded crippler, polio
• Longer lives spelled more elderly people
– One American in eight was over 65 in 2009
V. The Aging of America
(cont.)
– Projected that one in every five would be in the “sunset
years” by 2050
• Host of political, social, and economic questions
about older Americans:
– They form a potent electoral bloc that lobbies for senior
citizens
– The share of GNP spent on healthcare for people over sixtyfive more than doubled in three decades after the
enactment of Medicare in 1965
– The growth in medical payments for the old outstripped the
growth of educational expenditures for the young
– As late as 1960s over ¼ lived in poverty, three decades only
one in ten did
V. The Aging of America
(cont.)
– Triumphs for senior citizens brought fiscal strains
• Especially on Social Security and Medicare systems
– Social Security payments to retirees did not represent reimbursement for contributions that the elderly had made
during their working lives
– The Social Security payments of current workers into the
Social Security system funded the benefits to current generations of retirees.
– The problem intensified with the soaring rise of health-care
costs
– The huge wave of post-World War II baby boomers that
approached retirement age
– What the government is taking in is not matching or covering what is being paid out:
» Might rise above $7 trillion.
V. The Aging of America
(cont.)
– The “third rail” of American politics:
•
•
•
•
The electoral power of older Americans
Social Security
Medicare
Which politicians touched only at their peril (see
Figure 42.4)
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Figure 42-4 p999
VI. The New Immigration
– Newcomers continued to come in waves that
numbered 1 million persons per year:
• Europe contributed fewer than did Asia and Latin
America (see Figure 2.5)
• They settled in the traditional ethnic enclaves in cities
and towns
• And in sprawling suburbs, where many of the new
jobs are located
– What prompted new immigrants to America?
• Many came for the same reason as the old ones did
• Left countries where the population was growing
rapidly
VI. The New Immigration
(cont.)
• From countries where agricultural and industrial
revolutions were shaking people loose
• In search of new jobs and economic opportunity
• Some came with skills and even professional degrees
and found their way into middle-class jobs
• Most came with fewer skills, and less education, seeking work as janitors, nannies, farm laborers, lawn
cutters, or restaurant workers.
• The Southwest felt the immigrant impact especially
sharply—Mexican migrants
• Latinos made up nearly 1/3 of the populations of
Arizona, Texas, and California
– 40% in New Mexico (See, pp. 1002-1003)
VI. The New Immigration
(cont.)
• Mexican American have succeeded in creating a
cultural zone.
• Some old-stock Americans worry about the capacity
of the modern United States to absorb these new
immigrants.
• The Immigration Reform and Control Act, 1986:
– Attempted to choke off illegal entry by penalizing employers
of undocumented aliens
– And granted amnesty to many of those already in the U.S.
• Only 13% of the American population in 2007 were
immigrants
VI. The New Immigration
(cont.)
– Critics of immigration:
• They robbed citizens of jobs
• They dumped themselves on the welfare rolls at
taxpayers’ expense
– Some worry about unscrupulous employers who
might take cruel advantage of alien workers
– Debates over immigration were complicated by
the problem of illegal immigrants
• Bush and a bipartisan group of legislators proposed a
law to establish a guest-worker program
• Anti-immigrant forces condemned the plan as
“amnesty”
VI. The New Immigration
(cont.)
• Business interests protested that it would put too
great a burden on employers to verify the right to
work
• Immigrant right advocates claimed it would create
“second-class citizens”
• Legislators in Arizona, provoked by continuing
immigrant flows over the state’s long desert border
with Mexico:
– Placed a harsh anti-immigrant law in 2010 requiring local
police to detain people if there was “reasonable suspicion”
that they were illegal
– “Racial profiling”
• Congress rejected the DREAM Act
Figure 42-5 p1000
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Figure 42-6 p1003
VII. Beyond the Melting Pot
– Latinos were becoming an increasingly important
minority
• The United States was home to about 47 million
– 31 million Chicanos, or Mexican Americans
• They elected mayors in several cities
• The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee
(UFWOC) headed by Cesar Chavez
– Succeeded in improving working conditions for the mostly
Chicanos “stoop laborers” who followed the cycle of
planting and harvesting across America
• Increased influence by the presence of Spanishlanguage ballots and television broadcasts
VII. Beyond the Melting Pot
(cont.)
• Latinos became the largest ethnic minority,
outnumbering even African Americans in 2003
– The Chicano population of America’s largest state,
California, led the Anglo population
– In 2003 most newborns in California were Latinos
• By 2010 the Census Bureau counted four “majorityminority” states:
– No ethnic group commanded a majority: Texas, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii
– Nationwide, the birthrate for nonwhites in 2010 was poised
to eclipse the white birthrate for the first time in history.
VII. Beyond the Melting Pot
(cont.)
– Asian Americans
• By 1980s they were America’s fastest growing
minority
• Numbering 15 million by 2008
• Once called the “yellow peril,” they were now
counted among the most prosperous Americans
• Their political influence was heralded in 1998 election
– When Oregon’s Taiwan-born David Wu was the first Chinese
American to serve in the House of Representatives.
– Indians, the original Americans
• Numbered more than 2.5 million in the 2010 census
• Half have left the reservations to live in cities
VII. Beyond the Melting Pot
(cont.)
• Unemployment and alcoholism had blighted reservation life
• Many tribes took advantage of their special legal
status as independent nations to open bingo halls and
gambling casinos for the general public on reservation
land
• But the cycle of discrimination and poverty proved
hard to break
VIII. Cities and Suburbs
• American cities
• Crime was the greatest scourge of urban life
• Violent crimes reached an all-time high in the druginfested 1980s and leveled off in the 1990s
• America imprisoned a larger fraction of its population
than almost any other nation
• The migration from the cities to the suburbs were
swift and massive
– Creating a majority of American who were suburban
dwellers (see Figure 42.7)
– Jobs became suburbanized
• The nation’s brief “urban age” lasted 7 decades after
1920
VIII. Cities and Suburbs
(cont.)
– There was a new fragmentation and isolation in American
life
– By the first decade of the 21st century, the suburban rings
around big cities were becoming more racially and ethnically diverse
» Through individual schools and towns were often
homogeneous
• Suburbs grew faster in the West and Southwest
– In the outer orbits of Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and
Phoenix
– Newcomers came from both the nearby cities and other
regions of the United States
VIII. Cities and Suburbs
(cont.)
• Some major cities exhibited signs of renewal:
– New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and even the
classic “city without a center,” Los Angeles
– Most did not become genuine cities of residential
integration
– Cities remained as divided by wealth and race as the
suburban social landscape surrounding them.
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IX. Minority America
– Racial and ethnic tensions exacerbated the problems of American cities:
• These stresses were especially evident in Los Angeles
– A magnet for minorities
– Especially immigrants from Asia and Latin America
– The Los Angeles riots of 1992 testified to black skepticism
about the American system
– In 1995 O. J. Simpson’s murder trial fed white disillusionment with the state of race relations
• American cities have always held an astonishing
variety of ethnic and racial groups:
– By the 20th century minorities made up a majority of the
population of American cities, as whites fled to the suburbs
IX. Minority America
(cont.)
• The most desperate black ghettos, housing a hapless
“underclass,” were problematic
– Successful blacks who had benefited from the
civil rights revolution of the 50s and 60s
• Followed whites to the suburbs
• Leaving a residue of the poorest poor in the old
ghettos
• The inner cities, plagued by unemployment and drug
addiction, seemed bereft of leadership, cohesion,
resources and hope.
IX. Minority America
(cont.)
• Single women headed about 45% of black families in
2009, three times more than whites
• Many African American women, husbandless and jobless, struggled to feed their children
• Many fatherless, impoverished African American
children were consigned to suffer from educational
handicaps too difficult to overcome
• Some African American communities did prosper
• Black elected officials had risen to 9,000
– Some three dozen members of Congress
» Mayors of several large cities
» And president—Barack Obama.
IX. Minority America
(cont.)
• By the 20th century blacks had advanced in
education
– Still, the educational gap between blacks and
whites persisted
– The political assault against affirmative action in
California and elsewhere
• Compounded the obstacles to advance
• Won a key case involving the University of Michigan
• The Court preserved affirmative action in university
admission policies.
Figure 42-7 p1005
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X. E Pluribus Plures
• Controversial issues of color and culture
pervaded the realm of ideas
– The creed of “multiculturalism”
– “Cultural pluralists” like Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne
embraced it
– It celebrated diversity for its own sake
– And stressed the need to preserve and promote, rather than
squash, a variety of distinct ethnic and racial cultures in the
United States
• The nation’s classrooms became battlegrounds for the
debate over America’s commitment to pluralism
X. E Pluribus Plures
(cont.)
• Multiculturalists attacked the traditional curriculum
as “Eurocentric”
– Advocated greater focus on the achievements of African
Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans
– Critics:
» Too much stress on ethnic difference would come at the
expense of national cohesion
» And an appreciation of common American values
• The Census Bureau enlivened the debate in 2000
when it allowed respondents to identify themselves
with more than one of the six standard racial
categories:
– Black, white, Latino, American Indian, Asian, and Native
Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
X. E Pluribus Plures
(cont.)
• 7 million Americans chose to describe themselves as
biracial or multiracial
• As of the 1960s interracial marriage was still illegal in
sixteen states
– Mixed marriages of golfer Tiger Woods and actress Rosario
Dawson
– By the 21st century many Americans were proclaiming their
mixed heritage as a point of pride.
XI. The Postmodern Mind
• Americans in the 21st century:
– Read more, listened to more music, and were
better educated
• Colleges awarded some 3 million degrees annually
• Educated people lifted the economy to advanced
levels, creating more consumers of “high culture”
• Every year millions of Americans:
– Visited museums
– Patronized hundreds of opera companies and symphony
orchestras
– As well as countless popular music groups.
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
– Postmodernism generally refers to:
• A distrust of rational, scientific descriptions of the self
or the world
• And the insistence that human beliefs and realities
are socially “constructed.”
• In place of modernism’s faith in certainty, objectivity,
and unity
– Postmodernism stresses skepticism, relativity, and
multiplicity
• Postmodernism has enormously influenced contemporary philosophy, social theory, art, architecture, and
literature, among other fields.
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
– Postmodern architecture made the most visible
footprint
• Robert Venturi and Michael Graves revived the decorative details of earlier historical style
• Postmodernists celebrated a playful eclecticism of
architectural elements
• Frank Gehry used luminous, undulating sheets of
metallic skin—
– Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Bilbao, Spain
– The Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
– Postmodern sensibility carried over into art
forms
• John Adams and John Zorn:
– Broke down boundaries between “high” and “low” styles
– Blended diverse musical genres and traditions in an
experimental mix
• Choreographers Steve Paxton and Twyla Tharp:
– Paired everyday movements with classical techniques and
gave contemporary dancers license to improvise
• Hip hop artists Biz Markie to Jay-Z “sampled” beats
and overlaid them with complex “rapping” schemes.
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
• “Mash-up” artists
– Cleverly fusing fragments from songs of different musical
genres
– Remixing one song’s vocal track over another song’s
instrumentals.
• Visual artists also felt the eclectic urge:
– Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker combined old and
new media to confront, confound and even offend the
viewer
– Jeff Koons and Shepard Fairey borrowed industrial materials
and pop culture imagery to blur the hidebound distinction
between highbrow and lowbrow cultures.
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
– Postmodern literature
• William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas
Pynchon:
– Pioneered the use of non-linear narratives, pastiche forms,
parody and paradox in their fiction
• Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Zadie Smith:
– Adapted these techniques for contemporary audiences
• David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001) and
Freedom (2010)
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
• Toni Morrison:
– Wove a bewitching portrait of maternal affection in Beloved
(1987)
– In 1993 became the first African American woman to win
the Nobel Prize for literature
• E. Annie Proulx:
– Comical yet tender portrayal of a struggling family in The
Shipping News (1993)
• James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo and
Sherman Alexie:
– Contributed to a Native American literary renaissance that
sought to recover the tribal past while reimagining its
present
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
– Immigrant writers:
• Playwrights David Hwang, novelist Amy Tan
• Chinese-born Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
• Jhumpa Lahiri explored the painful relationship
between immigrant Indian parents and their
American-born children
• Latino writers:
– Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao (2007)
– On stage:
• Political themes and social commentary
predominated
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1991)
XI. The Postmodern Mind
(cont.)
• Jonathan Larson’s Tony Award-winning musical Rent
(1996)
• Eve Ensler espoused feminist empowerment and an
end to violence against women
• Cuban American Nilo Cruz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003
for Anna in the Tropics
– Films continued to flourish:
• George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and
Spike Lee
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XII. The New Media
– Internet
• First created by the government for Cold War
intelligence sharing
• Spread into American homes, schools, offices
• To communicate, shop, work, electronically bond with
family and friends
• The “dot-com” explosion of Internet-based high-tech
companies drove the tremendous economic boom
• Giants in retail (Amazon.com), information gathering
(Google), and even finance (E*Trade)
• Reshaped the corporate world
XII. The New Media
(cont.)
• Internet has democratizing effect:
– Spreading power and information
– Young people and social-networking sites—Facebook,
Twitter to make connections
– YouTube allowed everyday users to post home videos
– “Weblogs,” “blogs”
» Presented challengers to traditional media—especially
newspapers
» “New Media”: Supporters—added fresh voice and new
perspectives. Critics—questioned bloggers’ expertise
and accused them of spreading misinformation.
– Americans became ever less willing to read
– Internet made the 24-hour news cycle a reality
– The Internet drove major readjustments in modern
American economic, social, and cultural life.
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XIII. The American Prospect
– Problems that confronted the Republic
• Women still fell short of first-class economic
citizenship
– Groped for ways to adapt the traditional family to the new
realities of women’s work outside the home
• Civil rights
– Full equality remained an elusive dream for countless
Americans of color
• Powerful foreign competitors challenged America’s
premier economic status
• Americans began to fear for their economy
• Environmental worries clouded the country’s future
XIII. The American Prospect
(cont.)
– Coal-fired electrical-generating plants contributed to
greenhouse effects
– Problem of radioactive waste disposal hampered the
development of nuclear power plants
– The planet was being drained of oil
– Disastrous accidents
– The cry for alternative fuel sources had given way to public
frustration with solar power and windmills, etc.
– Energy conservation an elusive strategy
» Kyoto treaty, Copenhagen Climate Conference
– Cleaning the earth of its abundant pollutants
• Other problems:
– Ways to resolve the ethnic and cultural conflicts
– New opportunities—outer space, inner-city streets, etc.
XIII. The American Prospect
(cont.)
– Unending quest for social justice, individual fulfillment, and
international peace
• The terrorist attack on America on September 11,
2001—another challenge to the United States
– Finding ways to preserve its security without altering its
fundamental democratic values and ways of life
– Danger of terrorism:
» In fighting it, Americans would so compromise their
freedoms at home
» And so isolate the country internationally that it would
lose touch with its own guiding principles
• The capacity to nurture progress abroad
– Depends on the ability of Americans to improve their own
country, to do so in the midst of new threats to their
security.