Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture
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b. 1917
Biologist whose initial concerns with cellular activity led him to become a public
activist in postwar environmental issues, which he views as problems caused by human
beings to be overcome by thoughtful intervention and changes. Commoner’s work on the
effects of radiation made him an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons and testing.
Over time, his concerns have encompassed production and consumption—
p
esticides,
automobiles,
energy—as they affect a global ecological balance. Commoner founded the
Center for the Biology of Natural Systems and the Citizens’ Party which ran him for
president
. His significant works include
The Closing Circle
(1971) and
Making Peace
with the Planet
(1980).
SHARON ANN HOLT
communes
America has incorporated a long history of people choosing to embrace alternative
communal societies, from the initial vision of Pilgrims through later groups, including the
Shakers, the Oneida communities,
Mormons
and socialists. This heritage was revitalized
in the 1960s by youths using communal settings as support to escape commercialism and
other American values. Some were religious, with a special fascination with Eastern
religion
. Others, both ephemeral and longer-enduring, were defined by lifestyles, new
values of
gender and sexuality, “nature”
and simplicity or vague countercultural
ideologies.
Further reading
Hayden, D. (1976)
Seven American Utopias,
Cambridge, MA: MIT (gives a historical
perspective).
GARY McDONOGH
communism
Communism has occupied quite diverse and conflicting positions in modern American
culture. In the 1930s, during the years of the non-sectarian Popular Front against fascism
in the world Communist movement, the Communist Party in the United States
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 276
contributed to the development of powerful organizing campaigns in favor of Social
Security racial equality and industrial unionism. In the early years of the Great
Depression, a number of prominent writers and
intellectuals,
including Theodore
Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard
Wright,
John Dos Passos and Edmund
Wilson,
wrote favorably about communism, the American Communist movement and the Soviet
Union. However, the Communist Party itself remained committed to a Leninist “militant-
minority” methodology of social change, and usually adhered in public to the “line” o
f
Soviet foreign policy In the years just before the Second World War, the development o
f
powerful moral critiques of Stalinism seriously began to complicate many intellectuals’
interest in and enthusiasm for the “Soviet Experiment.”
Partly as a consequence of its close association with Soviet communism, American
communism has been both favored and abhorred by advocates of economic equality the
welfare state and labor unionism. Both the friends and enemies of
civil rights
and civil
liberties have invoked anti-communism. Especially at the height of the
Cold War
in the
1950s, the American Communist Party was ritually denounced by members of the
educational, religious, political and cultural establishments, and communists or anyone
associated with communism as an indigenous social movement were often persecuted or
denied employment. However, few American elites believed that the American
Communist Party was ever a real threat to the security of American institutions. Instead,
communism and communists often came to represent the racial, ethnic and even gendered
“other” in the midst of conflicts over what constituted “Americanism” in American
political discourse.
Following the Second World War, conservative politicians were able to connect
communism with New Deal liberalism in the popular imagination by exploiting populist
undercurrents of resentment against state intervention and “social experimentation.”
The conviction of Alger Hiss, a former mid-level official in the
Roosevelt
administration, for perjury in a spy case (1950) allowed
Republicans
to associate the
N
ew Deal with the disloyalty or incompetence of liberal policy elites. Following the
conviction and subsequent executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for atomic spying
(1950–3), communism was linked more firmly than ever in the popular imagination with
subversion, even though there is little evidence that either Hiss or the Rosenbergs
seriously compromised American security. Large majorities of Americans came to
b
elieve that the Communist Party in the US should be outlawed and that communists
should not be allowed to teach.
In the 1970s and 1980s, communism retained elements of its racial,
class,
ethnic and
treasonous identifications for many Americans, and American politicians continued to
more-or-less successfully portray world communism as America’s most dangerous
external enemy. Following the end of the Cold War and the fall of communist regimes in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, some astute critics even claimed to detect a loss o
f
American national purpose.
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Further reading
Denning, M. (1996)
The Cultural Front,
London: Verso.
Schrecker, E. (1998)
Many are the Crimes,
Boston: Little, Brown.
EDWARD JOHANNIGSMEIER
community
Community has a longstanding positive, albeit nebulous, value reiterated in American
social sciences as well as political rhetoric. “Community groups,” “community boards”
and “faith community” all underscore civic virtues of cooperation, unity and citizenship
in contrast to potentially divisive images of
clubs, neighborhoods,
or religious sects.
Community service is an increasingly common requirement for
high-school
and
college
students in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, while “community” appears
in analyses and politics as an alternative to politics and government—a real America.
While community has thus entered the sacrosanct mythology of mom and apple pie for
many Americans, these usages also betray certain negative aspects that demand attention.
First, community may easily be used in an exclusionary fashion. Preserving
“community,” for example, sounds better than resisting integration or newcomers.
Appeal to “community standards” also has a long career in
censorship
of American art
and literature, from Joyce’s
Ulysses
to the nudes of Robert
Mapplethorpe
.
Second, community can also be an imposition on others. To speak of the “black” or
“Asian American”
community
(avoiding race) or “gay and lesbian” community implies
a unity of action and experience, much less volition that does not reflect the lives or
p
olitics of individuals and groups that constitute these segments of American society
While Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community arising through shared
media can provide insights into American nationhood as well as Southeast Asia, we must
always watch who does the imagining.
Finally community can be used in ways that are patently false. Sales brochures refer to
suburbs
and walled developments as residential or
gated communities,
despite the
alienation that often characterizes them.
Nonetheless, the stress on building shared interests and dialogues—“community
video/
television”
or “community activism”—underscores the creative processes of American
society and change, at times in opposition to inherited structures or government/corporate
control. In the decline of government safety nets in health, education and welfare,
“community service” also forces many Americans to confront the dualization o
f
contemporary society and its consequences.
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 278
Further reading
Baltzell, E. (ed.) (1968)
The Search for Community in Modern America,
New York:
Harper & Row.
GARY McDONOGH
community colleges/junior colleges
Two-year college programs, often focused on vocational goals, have grown rapidly since
the Second World War to encompass more than 10 million students (about half part-time)
in 1,100 institutions—about 44 percent of American undergraduates. Community
colleges grant nearly half-a-million degrees annually, plus thousands of certificates.
Programs are either terminal (AA/AS—Associate of Arts or Sciences) or preparatory for
attendance at a four-year college. From
Philadelphia
Community College or East
Los
Angeles
Community College to Native American institutions like Oglala Lakota College
in South Dakota or New Mexico’s Navajo-
b
ased Dine College, community colleges have
created unique opportunities to democratize college and incorporate diverse students into
its academic life.
While private junior colleges had emerged to fulfill these roles in the early twentieth
century,
“community”
colleges were established after the Second World War as part o
f
educational restructuring on the part of state universities to reach lesseducated students,
while not diluting their central
campuses
as research and teaching universities. They
were intended to be located within commuting distance for high-school graduates as well,
thus decentralizing state education, and to offer flexible schedules and cheaper classes
(sometimes at the expense of professors). In the 1960s, these colleges became central to
the planning of systems in
California,
Kentucky and
Midwestern
states and later
expanding into the
Sunbelt
. Often envisioned for rural areas and small towns, they were
also incorporated into urban education, including the
CUNY
system in
New York
. They
have also taken on responsibilities in professional retraining, adult education and
welfare
-to-work programs.
In 1996 California had more than 1.8 million students enrolled in 106 public
community colleges; it was followed by Illinois,
Texas
and
Florida
. Of this total,
roughly 137 colleges are private; technical institutes and private schools owned by
families or corporations constitute a rather gray area in this educational branch. Some o
f
these junior colleges, for example, specialize in women’s education or the arts; Kilgore
College in Texas has become known nationwide for its precision drill team, the
Rangerettes.
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While community colleges have proven immensely popular, they have also been easy
targets for attack because of the non-academic nature of their vocational classes: the most
p
opular programs tend to be in health services (registered nurse, dental hygiene, physical
therapist), business, telecommunications and mechanical fields. The need for remedial
programs in
language
and
math
that face many of the colleges also denigrates students
and institutions as inferior rather than serviceoriented (a frequent charge in New York
City reforms). Community colleges are also involved in education and class, drawing
p
oorer, minority immigrant and working students rather than the pool of elite liberal arts
students or other four-year course students–55 percent are
Hispanic
and Native
American students. Their continuing success, on both an individual and a collective level,
underscores both the opportunities and demands of American education in the early
twenty-first century.
Further reading
Sutton, R. (1970)
Community College or Four Year Program?,
Lexington: University of
Kentucky.
http://www.aacc.nche.edu (American Association of Community Colleges)
GARY McDONOGH
CINDY WONG
community organization
Community-
b
ased organizations have been a distinctive feature of American democratic
life since the founding of the Republic, one that Alexis de Tocqueville praised as
evidencing Americans’ unique ability for what he called, “the art of association.” Such
organizations have been thought of as integral to American civic life, knitting together an
ethnically diverse population through mediating between localities and
neighborhoods
and the more formal institutions of government. In contemporary usage, the term
“community organizing” very often refers to a form of community-
b
ased action, which,
like labor
union
movements, relies primarily on the use of confrontational tactics.
Although collective action certainly existed in urban neighborhoods prior to the
development of this model, community organizing in the US today remains most closely
associated with the figure of Saul Alinsky (1909–72). Alinsky developed his model o
f
direct action based on his experiences as a labor union organizer with the Council o
f
Industrial Organizations (CIO). In contrast to community development work undertaken
in many other national contexts, which usually relies primarily on governmental sources
for funding and which tends to emphasize service delivery Alinsky called for community
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organizations to raise their own funds and to remain politically autonomous.
His legacy lives on in many neighborhoods around the United States, although very
few of the organizations existing today were actually founded by either Alinsky or his
direct “heirs.” The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), based in
New York
City, NY,
continues to train organizers according to Alinsky’s model. In any case, despite a variety
of organizational structures and a multiplicity of different kinds of tactics and
philosophies, Alinsky remains a seminal figure.
Over the past twenty years, there has been such an outpouring of works on the Citizen
Action movement in the United States that it would be impossible to include mention o
f
them all here. The best sources for an overview of the nature and role of both Alinsky-
style neighborhood organizations and many other types of grassroots movements as well
are books by H.C.Boyte. See: Boyte, H.C. (1989)
CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen
P
olitics,
New York: The Free Press; Boyte, H.C. (1984)
Community is Possible:
R
epairing America’s Roots,
New York: Harper and Row; Boyte, H.C. (1980)
The
B
ackyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement,
Philadelphia: Temple
University Press; Boyte, H.C. and Kari, N. (1996)
Building America,
Philadelphia:
Temple University Press; and Evans, S. and Boyte, H.C. (1986)
Free Spaces: The Source
of Democratic Change in America,
New York: Harper & Row.
Further reading
Bailey, R. (1972)
Radicals in Urban Politics: The Alinsky Approach,
Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Silberman, C. (1964)
Crisis in Black and White,
New York: Vintage Books (includes a
discussion of the work of the Temporary Woodlawn Organization (TWO), Alinsky’s
first project in an African American neighborhood (located on the south side of
Chicago)).
Slayton, R.A. (1986)
Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy,
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
SUSAN BRIN HYATT
commuting/mass transit
The sprawling of many postwar American
cities
has made the movement of massive
numbers of people from home to work, school and other places an everyday planning
nightmare, especially when done by car. Nevertheless, while mass commuting is
constantly proposed as a solution to resultant dilemmas of cost, time and pollution, it is
not an effective reality in most cities.
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Some metropolitan areas, in fact, have inherited infrastructures of subways,
trains
and
streetcars that, with
buses,
underpin extensive and viable systems in
New York
City,
Boston, MA,
Chicago, IL
and
Philadelphia, PA
—although the latter is continually
losing ridership. Other cities have invested in subway—
b
us combinations in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century including
Atlanta, GA, San Francisco, CA,
Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD
and
Los Angeles, CA
; some of these systems are
only skeletal. Light-rail systems have also gained popularity as investments in
Miami,
FL
and
Portland, OR
.
Yet, much of mass commuting in the end seeks to ameliorate the impact of the
automobile
through car-pooling, high-occupancy lanes on highways and
incentives/disincentives for employers. Transportation-oriented development, in the
longer run, may systematize connections to reduce automotive dependence, but American
lifestyles and choices make effective mass commuting a tough sell politically and
economically
GARY McDONOGH
computers
The theoretical foundations of modern computing machines were laid in the early
twentieth century when mathematical philosophers in Europe and the United States,
spurred by the invention of internally consistent, non-Euclidean geometries, explored
p
roblems of rationality provability and logic machines. These explorations culminated in
the 1930s with the invention of idealized, hypothetical, general computing machines. The
exigencies of the Second World War brought state funding to these mathematicians, and
electronic calculating machines were built based on their theoretical designs. In Britain
these machines were used to break German codes; in the US research was geared towards
atomic-bomb production.
After the Second World War, British development of calculating machines languished,
while in the US developers created private corporations and sought markets for their
p
roducts. However, the secrecy of the previous research, the enormous government
funding behind it and the narrow focus of their application had produced machines which
were huge, complex, expensive and difficult to adapt or program. Markets for these
machines were difficult to find and at first limited to government agencies, including the
Department of Defense and the Census Bureau. In an attempt to create market
consciousness, Remington Rand lent one of its machines, the UNIVAC, to CBS to assist
in predicting the outcome of the 1952 presidential election. When it forecast the landslide
results more accurately than human experts, the computer entered popular consciousness
as an omniscient “electronic brain.”
Its use spread to large corporations in dataintensive industries such as banking and
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 282
insurance. International Business Machines
(IBM),
renowned as the epitome of white,
male, crew-cut, button-down efficiency quickly became the dominant manufacturer o
f
computing equipment. Payroll management became one of the earliest data-
p
rocessing
service industries. During this period, the instruction sets which guided the computer’s
operations, and the data on which the computer operated, were stored on “punch cards.”
These were pieces of cardboard, measuring about 2.5 inches by 6 inches, through which
small rectangular holes were punched. The pattern of the holes represented a particular
instruction or data point. They were fed into the computer by high-speed mechanical
devices which frequently jammed. To prevent such jams, punch cards had to be handled
carefully and were often imprinted with the phrase “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.”
These cards became the mediator between millions of people and the world’s largest and
most powerful institutions. They became symbolic of computers themselves—vast
storehouses of
information
—used by people who didn’t really understand them to
p
erform calculations of a complexity far beyond human capabilities, producing
inscrutable and incontestable decisions. They were the embodiment of bureaucratic
oppression. Bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaimed “I am a human being. Do not fold,
spindle, or mutilate.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several technological and social changes occurred
which altered the popular involvement with, and perceptions of, the computer. The first
of these was the development of transistors, integrated circuits and microchips which
p
ermitted miniaturization, standardization and mass production of processors. The second
was a development of a play rather than work, culture around computers. This latter
development proceeded, in part, from the increased availability of computers to college
students on a time-share basis. As these students began to experiment with programming
languages, humanmachine interfaces and multiple-user machines, they developed very
simple two-person games. Hobbyists also began to buy computer kits publicized through
p
opular magazines and to build machines, which, though rudimentary, had an adaptable
design and public technical specifications. Thus computer use spread from corporate
culture into the
middle-class,
college-educated, young male culture of the early 1970s.
In 1977 two of these men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, produced the Apple II in a
suburban
garage. At first marketed through hobbyist clubs, it became the first mass-
market personal computer (PC). Originally useful only for word processing and game
playing, it was not until the invention of business-oriented spreadsheet programs that the
“PC revolution” started to take off. In 1984 Jobs and Wozniak introduced the
Apple
Macintosh, marketing it to both home and office users. Symbolically positioned against
institutionalized, even totalitarian, bureaucratic power, the Macintosh was advertised as
“the machine for the rest of us.” This marketing approach was fabulously successful.
Fortunes were made in computers, software and peripherals, and the new money was
conspicuously young, male and west coast.
IBM, in a hurried attempt to extend their dominance from mainframe computing into
the new realm of PCs, entered into non-exclusive license agreements with Intel (for
microprocessors) and Microsoft (for operating-system software). IBM branding provided
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the assurance necessary to convince millions of users to make the substantial economic
investment that a personal computer represented, and the Intel/Microsoft configuration
b
ecame an industry standard, competing with Apple for the hearts and minds (and
dollars) of US personal computer users. By the mid-1990s, IBM had lost its market share
of PCs to other manufacturers, even though the technical standard was still referred to as
“IBM-compatibility.” Despite much of the hype surrounding the “PC revolution,” the
social diffusion of these machines in the early twenty-first century remains
predominantly white, middle-class and male.
As PCs replaced mainframes in offices, internal networks linked individual machines
to central data servers, reasserting centralized surveillance and control. Bill
Gates,
as the
founder and principal stockholder of Microsoft, became the richest man in the US, his
fortune rivaling those of Rockefeller, Carnegie and the Vanderbilts. Thus PCs, originally
imagined as machines for
freedom
and individuality are again implicated in historically
deep-seated reactions against big money and corporate power.
These tensions between centrality of power and diffusion, between freedom and
domination, are exacerbated as processors are further miniaturized and incorporated into
such amenities as cars and appliances, and as networking technologies and practices
increasingly link these processors in various topologies of communication and control.
Further reading
Ceruzzi, P.E. (1998)
A History of Modern Computing,
Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Kling, R. (ed.) (1996)
Computerization and Controversy,
2nd edn, San Diego: Academic
Press.
Levy S. (1984)
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,
Garden City:
Anchor/Doubleday
DAVID J.PHILLIPS
computer/video games
Atari, an American company formed in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell, a University o
f
California engineering graduate, became the first major company to dominate the
computer and video-game market. Building on popular games like Pong, Asteroids and
Breakout, Atari became the leading name in consoles for
televisions,
video-arcade games
and personal
computers
. This lasted until 1984 when Atari unsuccessfully began to
stress computer over console production at a time when the personal computer market
was undergoing great change with considerable competition between the
Apple
Macintosh and
IBM
clones, partly because the console market itself had reached
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 284
saturation point from over-production.
Into the vacuum moved Japanese companies like Nintendo, Sega and Sony who now
dominate the American computer-game and arcade market. Nintendo markets popular
games for its consoles and “game boys,” while Sega’s Genesis machine and Sony’s
PlayStation have grabbed a large share of the American market. Depicting street combat,
wrestling
or Kung Fu, the level of
violence
associated with these games has intensified,
while the graphics have improved, sparking widespread fears that children are being
desensitized to killing. The increased sophistication of personal computers, with the
added possibility of downloading popular games like a new Pokémon craze, makes this a
volatile marketplace, economically and culturally.
ROBERT GREGG
conceptual art
An international avant-garde visual arts movement that emerged in the mid- to late 1960s,
conceptual art was concerned with the idea of art, and questioned the extent to which the
production of objects was necessary. In this sense, it extended
minimalism’s
focus on the
architectural conditions of aesthetic experience into an interrogation of broader
institutional and linguistic conditions. Works that existed only as instructions or as
p
hotographic documentation of activities emphasized the idea of an artwork over its
status as an object, and sought to explore conditions, such as viewers’ expectations o
f
institutional spaces like
museums,
or the relations between perception and the
language
used to describe it. Central figures included the British group Art & Language, Robert
Barry Mel Bochner, the Australian Ian Burn (also in collaboration with Mel Ramsden),
the German Hanne Darboven, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Le Witt, Adrian
Piper and Lawrence Weiner. In a characteristically conceptual statement of October 12,
1969, Weiner wrote, “1. The artist may construct the work. 2. The work may be
fabricated. 3. The work need not be built.” Despite its critique of art as an elitist field,
conceptual art met considerable resistance from popular audiences, but it has been a
significant influence on subsequent developments in
contemporary (postmodern) art
.
Further reading
Meyer, U. (ed.) (1972)
Conceptual Art,
New York: E.P. Dutton.
FRAZER WARD
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