Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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increasing penalties and decreasing the discretionary power of the

judiciary,

the

FBI

was

given increased authority to wiretap and infiltrate suspicious groups and there was a

substantial increase in the use of the death penalty.

One prominent and ongoing feature of the debate about violence in America has been

the role of the media. The quantity and graphic nature of violent images in most forms o

media, especially those targeted at younger consumers, increased dramatically from the

1950s into the 1990s. The release of John Carpenter’s

Halloween

(1978) introduced a

whole new genre of violent horror movies known as “slasher” films (e.g.

Nï

htmare on

lm Street; Friday the 13th; Scream

) in which several characters per film were brutally

slaughtered in explicit detail. Many of the bestsellers of the 1980s and 1990s were by

authors who frequently employed violent imagery in their work such as Stephen

King,

Clive Barker, and R.L.Stein.

Supreme Court

decisions in the late 1960s that struck

down many

censorship

laws thereby increased availability of

pornography,

which then

subsequently increased the amount of sexually violent material. Although television

resented less graphic images than movies, it was frequently cited as a major cause o

violence in society both because of the high number of violent crimes presented in news

and entertainment shows and because of its enormous audience (see

violence and

media)

However, social-science researchers were unable effectively to demonstrate causal

connections between violence in the media and actual incidents of violence. There were

several studies associating extensive exposure of young males to violent television

images with an increased probability of aggressive behavior, but even here there have

een a number of challenges as to the strength of the evidence to support this claim.

Some researchers concluded that the most significant effect of violence in the media was

the perception it created of criminals in American society and how this perception

translated into increasingly violent and severe criminal-justice policies.

Further reading

Gurr, T.R. (ed.) (1989)

Violence in America,

Newbury Park: Sage.

Zimring, F. and Hawkins, G. (1997)

Crime is Not the Problem,

New York: Oxford.

RODGER JACKSON

violence and media

Since early this century debate has raged among American academics, parents, media

producers, network officials, the

FCC,

the PTA and mentalhealth organizations about the

effects of viewing violent images. Most discussion and research on violent imagery has

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limited itself to studying

television

(although video games, movies and music are

increasingly targeted). Television differs from other media in its pervasiveness—in the

average American home it is on 6 hours daily In addition, the audience includes many

children

(who are presumed to be more vulnerable to its effects than adults). The

mimetic quality of the television is also thought to present realistic portrayals that can

serve as powerful socializing agents.

The

Kefauver

congressional hearings of the 1950s investigating juvenile delinquency

implicated violent TV images as a potential cause. TV violence was not to banned, but

networks

were pressured to be more accountable in their program development.

Networks intended that the family viewing hours from 19:00–21:00 would air less violent

programming. The prolonged focus on media violence legitimized it as a public-

olicy

matter with increased budget funding and calls for further research.

During the 1960s, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Crime

and the

Surgeon General

published reports addressing possible connections between

violence in media and real life. Since then, researchers have formulated a number o

competing arguments as to the existence and nature of violent media effects. Among

them are claims that violent media: desensitize the viewer; stimulate or arouse the

viewer; disinhibit the viewer so that violent inclinations are more readily expressed; or

rovoke a catharsis that alleviates aggressive impulses. For instance, studies investigating

the stimulation and arousal theory have sought to determine if exposure to aggressive

stimuli will increase the level of physiological and emotional arousal which, in turn, will

increase the probability of aggressive behavior. Proponents of the imitation theory

suggest that people may learn aggressive behavior by observing aggression in media

ortrayals. Proponents of cultivation theory suggest that fear and paranoia lead to

violence and, more generally, that TV cumulatively and progressively shapes the

perception of the audience by instilling a particular view of the world—not by directly

influencing behavior.

Numerous studies, however, have produced inconsistent research findings, leaving it

unclear as to what effects, if any there are from viewing violent media images. The

competing findings reflect different definitions of violence and other methodological

choices, as well as the concerns of investigators. Researchers have conducted lab

experiments that manipulate the subjects’ exposure to violence. Some field experiments

have tried to measure more real-life settings. Researchers have also relied on surveys to

measure real-life exposure to violent media images. Each of these methodological

approaches contains certain weaknesses and strengths and can provide, at best, only a

artial answer. Yet the debate continues among politicians and educators amid lurid

newspaper coverage and occasional abashed concessions from television and movies

before summer blockbusters roll around again.

JESSICA FISHMAN

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Virgin Islands

The United States purchased more than fifty islands from Denmark for $25 million in

1917. Today these constitute the territory of the US Virgin Islands (as distinct from

British holdings), whose 101,800 citizens are US citizens, although they do not vote in

presidential elections. The three main islands—St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John—offer

safe American centers for

Caribbean

resort life, which is the backbone of the local

economy Despite this successful modern incorporation, tensions of race have become

apparent in both local development (and the role of the predominantly Afro-Caribbean

population) and in treatment of Caribbean migrants.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Visa

credit and credit cards

VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America)

ee War

on Poverty

visual arts

Prior to the Second World War, Paris remained the most important center of modern art,

while American art labored under a sense of relative cultural impoverishment. By the

mid-1950s, however, with the emergence on the international scene of

abstract

expressionism,

a specifically American form of avant-garde painting (also known as the

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1178

New York School), dominance moved from Paris to New

York

City, NY. The central

individual figure in this shift was the painter Jackson

Pollock,

whose canvases covered in

“allover” compositions of dense skeins and swirls of dripped and thrown paint remain the

most familiar icons of abstract expressionism. His stylized machismo and early death in a

car accident provided a powerful image of the American artist as a hard-drinking, hard-

living individualist driven by existential angst.

The abstract expressionists and a subsequent generation of American abstract artists

were championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, whose essay “Modernist

Painting” (1961) became the most influential account of a version of modernism that

seemed largely devoid of social content—its criticality lay in the degree of autonomy it

could achieve through the rigor of its reflection upon the essential qualities of a specific

medium.

Pollock himself had been associated with the Works Progress Administration’s New

Deal public art projects, and with leftist Mexican muralists like David Siqueiros, as well

as the conservative American regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton. But both

Pollock’s rugged individualism and Greenberg’s formalism were able to be used, in the

political context of the

Cold War,

to promote the dynamism of American liberalism and

to generate cultural capital to match America’s military and industrial dominance. Hence

the interest of the CIA in such exhibitions as the survey of modern art in the United

States that toured Europe in 1955–6 (see Guilbaut 1985).

The case of abstract expressionism and the ideological service into which it was

ressed set the tone for the role of the visual arts in American culture after 1945. The

visual arts have frequently provided stakes in contests, ostensibly to do with questions o

artistic form or social engagement, which were as much political as aesthetic.

The political content of American visual arts has not always been explicit. Younger

American artists in the mid-1950s, among them Robert

Rauschenberg

and Jasper

Johns

(see

neo-Dada

), and later in the 1960s Andy

Warhol,

unburdened themselves of the

ortentousness of abstract expressionist heroism. They opened their work up to the

contingency of the everyday contesting the separation of high and mass cultures. In the

mid-1960s, the minimalists’ simple, geometrical objects deflected viewers’ attention

away from themselves towards the immediate physical conditions of aesthetic perception.

This facilitated subsequent investigations of the institutional production of aesthetic

value, in opposition to traditional, ideologically weighty notions of universal or

transcendent values.

In other instances, however, it has been very clear what was at stake in battles over the

value of particular forms of representation. Artists provided imagery in support of the

Civil-Rights movement and anti-

Vietnam War

protests. The

Feminist Art

movement o

the 1970s, including artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, directly

challenged assumptions about who could make art, and what constituted appropriate

subject matter. This introduced such taboo or undervalued aspects of women’s experience

as menstruation and domestic labor. They were especially critical of the ways in which

women were commonly represented, both in art and mass culture, and concerned with

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asserting a right to self-representation. Some artists staged confrontational performances

in public to dramatize and criticize conventional representations of women, while others,

such as Mary Kelly made theoretically sophisticated work examining the psychological

mechanisms of patriarchal domination.

Ronald

Reagan’s presidency

saw the elaboration of various forms of critical visual

arts practice, grounded in developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Individually or in

collaboration with activist organizations like

ACT UP

(AIDS Coalition To Unleash

Power), artists attempted to turn massmedia techniques to different, politically

oppositional purposes. But the 1980s also saw a resurgence of traditional styles o

painting

(neoexpressionism),

and the art market boomed along with the stock market, as

if to re-emphasize art’s historical relation to privilege.

The stock market fell and the boom subsided. In the late 1980s, a body of work

emerged that was grounded in “identity politics,” that is, in the specific experiences o

artists who saw themselves as members of ethnic and other minorities. This pointed to a

history of limited access to the institutions of art, but it had the unintended consequence

of specifying and fixing identities in categories.

The election of

Republican

George

Bush,

after two terms of Reagan, encouraged

Democratic politicians to begin to move towards centrist positions on economic issues.

This would eventually contribute to the election of

Democratic

President Bill

Clinton

Meanwhile, riding an ideological tide propelled by a conservative Christian minority and

claiming to be disgusted by artistic representations of anti-normative identities,

Republican leaders including Senator Jesse

Helms

seized upon “traditional values” and

“morality” issues for political leverage. One highly visible result of this was the “culture

war” of the late 1980s and early 1990s (though it might be observed that few Democratic

oliticians defended culture very strongly). Sexually explicit art by openly gay artists

such as Robert

Mapplethorpe

and David Wojnarowicz, which had appeared in

institutions or exhibitions supported in part by federal funds, became a political football

as conservatives attacked the funding organization, the

National Endowment for the

Arts

. They succeeded in cutting the NEA budget dramatically and in changing its

procedures for making awards.

Federal support for the arts in America was already relatively very low among

developed nations (American artists and institutions rely relatively heavily on

foundations,

the philanthropical support of corporations and the wealthy). So, in the light

of the electoral success of congressional Republicans in the mid-1990s, perhaps what was

most significant about the “culture wars” was that they demonstrated again the

relationship in the American context between the desire to control representation (who

represents whom and what, and how), and the desire to control, influence or maintain

social values. In the 1990s, when American arts institutions must compete globally for

tourist revenues and are confronted by increasingly diverse local audiences, such contests

seem bound to become increasingly complex.

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Further reading

Bolton, R. (ed.) (1992)

Culture Wars,

New York: New Press.

Broude, N. and Garrard, M. (eds) (1994)

The Power of Feminist Art,

New York: Abrams.

Foster, H.

The Return of the Real,

Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Gibson, A. (1997)

Abstract Expressionism,

New Haven: Yale.

Greenberg, C. (1986–93)

Collected Essays and Criticism,

vols 1–4, edited by John

O’Brian, Chicago: University of Chicago.

Guilbaut, S. (1985)

How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,

Chicago: University of

Chicago.

Krauss, R. (1986)

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,

Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Wallis, B. (ed.) (1984)

Art After Modernism,

New York: New Museum of Contemporary

Art.

FRAZER WARD

volleyball

Invented in 1895 at the Holyoke, Massachusetts

YMCA

by William G Morgan, the

expansion of volleyball traces global interests in the twentieth century. Taken up in the

Philippines and Cuba when these were colonies, volleyball was played by soldiers on the

western front after the United States joined the First World War. It expanded through out

Asia and into Latin America, often through the YMCAs, between the wars; during the

Second World War further expansion occurred from the South Pacific to Western

Europe.

At the Tokyo games in 1964, volleyball was accepted as an

Olympic

sport, with the

Soviet Union winning among the men and the Japanese winning among the women.

Since then Latin American teams like Brazil have grown in stature, while the end of the

Cold War

led to a decline in East European teams and a rise in American fortunes.

For many Americans, volleyball means the beach. This game is played informally at all

resorts around the country but recently has become a major televised sport, with its base

California

. In the early 1920s, courts were put up at Santa Monica, and volleyball

quickly became a popular recreational sport, sometimes associated with European nudist

camps. By the 1950s, tournaments were held regularly at five beaches in California, and

the sport became linked to

surfing

and

teenage

culture. Since 1974, when Winston

cigarettes sponsored a tournament in San Diego, beach volleyball has been a commercial

sport. In 1986 professional beach volleyball made its network debut on ABC’s

Wide

World of Sports

and, at the Atlanta Games in 1996, beach volleyball became an Olympic

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sport. It is still dominated largely by Californians, like Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes

among the men, and Karolyn Kirby and Liz Masakayan among the women.

ROBERT GREGG

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.

b. 1922

Writer whose continual mixture of broad American incisive satire and apocalyptic

warning has made him a guru to generations of youths since the 1960s. Vonnegut’s

novels mingle techniques and voices from memoir,

science fiction

and journalistic essays

in books that range from imaginative universes to dialogues with the reader about the

problems of a changing world.

Slaughterhouse-5

(1969), which revolves around his own

experiences of the bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, exemplifies this

mixture. Vonnegut has also considered themes as diverse as religion, the end of the world

(

Cat’s Cradle,

1963) and politics (

Slapstick,

1976).

GARY McDONOGH

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Act passed by

Congress,

at President

Johnson’s

behest, following the attack by state

troopers and white extremists on Martin Luther

King,

Jr. and

civil rights

marchers in

Selma, Alabama. King had been demonstrating the disparity between eligible black

voters and the number registered in the counties around Selma.

The Act made all testing for literacy character, or constitutional awareness illegal,

allowing only age, residence and citizenship for determining eligibility to vote.

Reinstating powers for the federal government that had not been seen in the

South

since

Reconstruction, the

Attorney-General

was empowered, where necessary to appoint

federal examiners to register voters.

ROBERT GREGG

Voudou

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A religion with origins in West Africa, practiced in the Americas due to the large-scale

displacement of Africans during the slave trade. Voudou thus combines elements o

Roman Catholicism

and native West Indian practices with traditional African rituals. It

is characterized by worship of the spirit world of ancestors, and ritual practices include

prayers, ecstatic trances, drumming, dancing, feasts and “fits of possession.” A priest or

riestess acts as a medium, works charms and curses, and recalls zombies, otherwise

known as the “living dead.”

Despite both social and legal repression, Voudou has continued to thrive, particularly

in among

Haitian American immigrants

ICOLE MARIE KEATING

Waco (Branch Davidians)

The Branch Davidians are an offshoot fringe group of the Seventh Day Adventist

denomination founded in 1935. On February 28, 1993 the Branch Davidians, led by their

Patriarch, David Koresh (aka Vernon Howell), were involved in a deadly shootout with

federal agents at the groups’ fortified compound near Waco,

Texas,

attempting to execute

a warrant for weapons violations. A fifty-one-day siege with federal authorities ensued

until the

FBI

attempted to drive members out by ramming the compound with tear gas

equipped armored vehicles. In response the Davidians apparently shot some of their own

members and set their own structure on fire killing seventy-eight people including many

children. Waco soon became a rallying of an emerging political movement distrustful o

government known as the “Militia” or “Patriot” movement. In 1999 revelations about the

failure of federal authorities to disclose various details about the siege reignited debate on

the topic. Nonetheless, a Texas jury cleared the federal government of responsibility in

2000.

BRIAN LEVIN

Walker, Alice

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b. 1944

Novelist and poet, born a sharecroppers’ daughter in Eaton, Georgia. After dismissal

from Spelman College for participating in

civil rights

demonstrations, she transferred to

Sarah Lawrence, but went south to Mississippi to participate in the 1966 registration

drive. She taught at Tougaloo and Wellesley while publishing short stories (

ove an

Trouble,

1973). Influenced by Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O’Connor, Walker

focused on the experiences of

African Americans

in the segregated

South

. In 1982 she

published

The Color Purple

(which Steven

Spielberg

filmed in 1985). Her work also

explores the interaction between race and gender—the plight of her women characters

shaped not merely by racism but by oppressive relationships with men. Since 1985, she

has published

The Temple of My Familiar

(1989),

Possessing the Secret of Joy

(1992)

and

By The Light of My Father’s Smile

(1998).

ROBERT GREGG

Wallace, George

b. 1919; d. 1998

Fiery segregationist politician. Losing the Alabama governorship to a racist contender

in 1958, Wallace became a vehement segregationist who would be elected in 1962, 1970,

1974 and 1982, with his wife Lurleen becoming an interregnum governor in 1966.

Wallace began his first term promising “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow!

Segregation forever!” He tried to bar blacks from the University of Alabama and faced

Martin Luther

King, Jr

. in the

state

capital. Wallace unsuccessfully attempted to parlay

his fame into the Democratic presidential nomination in 1964; as candidate of the

American Independent Party in 1968 he received 10 million votes (13.5 percent of the

popular total), underscoring growing racial concerns outside the

South

. In 1972 he

reemerged as a

Democratic

“regional” law and order contender, again showing strength

in the

Northeast

and

Midwest

as well as the South; this campaign was cut short by an

assassination

attempt that left him paralyzed. Thereafter, he stayed with his Alabama

ower base, gradually developing a more inclusive development platform that even

attracted black votes before his 1987 retirement.

GARY McDONOGH

Wallace, Michele

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1184

b. 1953

African American feminist scholar first noted for

Black Macho and the Myth of the

Superwoman,

her 1979 study of the effects of sexism and racism on

African American

women. Much criticized within the black community the work dissected the racial

stereotypes associated with black

masculinity

and

femininity

that trap black women in

roles that simultaneously require them to be assertive and successful, and blame them for

being emasculating. In

Invisibility Blues

(1990), Wallace continues her work on the

intersection of race and gender in African American visual and popular culture.

ROBERT GREGG

Waller, Robert James

b. 1939

Writer, photographer, musician and former business-school professor. His novel

The

ridges of Madison Count

was a slow, phenomenal bestseller and 1995 hit film starring

Clint

Eastwood

and Meryl Streep. The tale of two midlife characters involves a four-day

love affair that changes the life of an Iowa farmer’s wife. The enduring popularity of a

simple love story took the publishing world by stealth turning to storm. Waller also

authored

A Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

(1993),

Old Songs in a New Cafe

(1995),

Border

usic

(1995) and

Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

(1995); his recording

The Ballads of Madison

County

was released by Atlantic Records.

EDWARD MILLER

Wall Street

Wall Street is the modern American “Street of Dreams,”

uilt on the remains of a

seventeenthcentury fort wall. It is the financial capital of the United States, spanning a

seven-block stretch of downtown Manhattan,

New York

City, NY. The district

surrounding Wall Street is home to numerous investment banks (Goldman Sachs, JP

Morgan), securities firms (Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch) and insurance companies

(Metlife). Additionally the New York Stock Exchange and other major exchanges are

located here. Wall Street embodies highs and lows of American life, economic prosperity

and tickertape parades or Depression, recession and corporate greed (in the movie

Wal

Street,

1987).

MARC BALCER

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