Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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Independent African American

director-producer,

Dash has faced many problems in

funding that have limited her output. Nonetheless, her lyrical vision, synthesizing poetry

and music, underpins master works like

Four Women

(1978), while

Illusions

(1982)

explores a black woman passing for white in 1940s

Hollywood

Daughters of the Dust

(1992), a stunning prelude to the

African American

great migration, set on the Gullah

coast, was the first feature-length general release film by an African American woman.

However, even after its critical success, Dash could not finance another feature; she has

worked on musical shorts and a project on Zora Neale Hurston.

CINDY WONG

Davis, Bette

b. 1908; d. 1989

A grande dame of bitchiness, Davis brought intelligence and skill rather than beauty to

her roles as a powerful woman whose goals conflict with social codes, whether in

antebellum

New Orleans, LA

(

Jezebel,

1938, Oscar) or twentieth-century

Boston, MA

(

Now Voyager,

1942). While popular with female fans, Davis ran afoul of studios, suing

Warner Brothers in 1936 for an unjust contract, which she lost. The studio, however,

treated her with more respect, and put her in demanding roles. There were striking gaps

in her career as she matured, despite her success as an older actor in

All About Eve

(1951)

and her reinvention as an even older matriarch of horror (

What Ever Happened to Baby

ane,

1962), as well as in Disney fantasies. Davis’ unique voice, artful gestures

(especially with a cigarette) and indomitable roles made many of her lines proverbial

references among generations of American filmgoers, while her style created iconic

status among gay commentators as well.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Davis, Miles

b. 1926; d. 1991

Jazz musician Miles Davis cut his musical chops on be-

op and nurtured his musicality

in the

New York

City

jazz

lifestyle colored by American

race

relations. As a trumpet

layer, Miles was not known for a conventional virtuosity but rather for the ways in

which he used the trumpet with his raspy muted sound (not unlike his own voice) to add

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 326

color and nuance to his music. Davis’ music was often the precursor of change and the

avant-garde in jazz music. His recording,

Kind of Blue

(1959), remains one of the best

examples of his unique musicianship. Davis politicized jazz music along racial lines and

encouraged an ambivalent relationship with his audiences, particularly his white

audience.

Further reading

Carner, G. (ed.) (1996)

The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary,

New York: Schirmer Books; London: Prentice Hall International.

Davis, M. (1989)

Miles, the Autobiography. Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe,

New York:

Simon & Schuster.

Davis, M. (1959)

Kind of Blue

[sound recording], KCS 8163, S.1: Columbia Records.

STEVE FERZACCA

Day, Doris

b. 1924

If Bette

Davis

and Joan

Crawford

defined bitchiness on screen, Doris Day (born Doris

Von Kappelhoff) came to epitomize virginal niceness for American society in the 1950s

and 1960s—a nonsexual tease (ironically often paired with Rock

Hudson

in romantic

comedies) whose independent career and sophistication melted at the altar. Her 1975

autobiography

Doris Day: Her Own Story,

revealed that this charmed comedic life was as

far from her own story as it was from that of many other struggling American women in

those decades.

GARY McDONOGH

Day, Dorothy

b. 1897; d. 1980

Day a

Roman Catholic

social activist, sought to reconcile her early socialism with her

1927 conversion to Catholicism. She did this through the Catholic Worker’s Movement,

which offered hospitality to the homeless and hungry from the Depression onwards, and

the newspaper

Catholic Worker

(founded 1933). Throughout her life, Day brought her

deep faith and conscience to bear on issues of labor,

race

and pacifism. Since her death,

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some have sought to propose her as a fitting saint for the American century. Her

autobiography

The Long Loneliness,

appeared in 1952.

GARY McDONOGH

daycare

babies; children

Dean, James (Byron James)

b. 1931; d. 1955

Andy

Warhol

called him “the damaged but beautiful soul of our time” (McCann

1993:125). Three starring roles—two in movies released after his

death

in a car crash—

seared Dean in American and global consciousness as the consummate

teenage

rebel

(

East of Eden,

1955;

Rebel without a Cause,

1955;

Giant,

1955). Dean embodied the

anxieties of teenagers in his life and screen presence, which have made him an enduring

legend for subsequent generations and highlighted the dark side of

family values

and

Hollywood

success.

Further reading

McCann, G. (1993)

Rebel Males,

New Brunswick: Rutgers.

GARY McDONOGH

death

Repulsed and fascinated by death, Americans struggle to grasp its physical, psychological

and social impact through both a medical understanding of bodily degenerative processes

and philosophical and cathartic explorations of its meaning.

Americans avoid the signs of death, age and disease through their love of youth

culture, “fitness” and

plastic surgery

. Biotechnical innovations, cryogenics, genome

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 328

mapping and cloning have become a new

religion

that allows Americans to entertain

fantasies of immortality

ld age

and death are profoundly medicalized; age is a medical “problem,” death is a

iotechnological failure to preserve life. The other sign of death, disease, is exemplified

by the

AIDS

epidemic. Without cure, AIDS is death; the ultimate eros/thanatos

combination where physical pleasures evoke necrophilia. But death is sometimes better

than debilitation, a key debate when considering the euthanasia practices of “Dr Death,”

Jack Kevorkian.

Most Americans will die in hospitals or nursing homes; dying, grieving and disposing

of the dead are hidden and institutionalized events, sanitized processes managed by

specialized workers. Jessica Mitford’s

The American Way of Death

(1963) pinpointed the

exploitative practices of funeral professionals as they dispose of the dead at high costs to

the bereaved. Mitford’s work was revelatory but American funerals are still cherished,

expensive and necessary rituals.

Death anxiety is expressed in American media culture where mass deaths, at home or

afar, are a spectacle. National news coverage and photos of the fiery death of David

Koresh and Branch Davidian followers in

Waco,

Texas, are rivaled only by details and

images of murders shown nightly on local

television

news. The extermination o

opulations in Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia, international airplane crashes and

earthquake and flood disaster sites are common foci of American media interest, as the

fascination with these images competes with discourses of prevention and aid.

Films like

Death Becomes Her

(1992) explore and parody dreams of youth and

immortality alongside

tabloid

celebrations of serial murders and blockbusters advertising

mass death and destruction. Death is evil and asocial, an offense to American sensibilities

in Coppola’s

Apocalypse Now

(1979) and Kubrick’s

Full Metal Jacket

(1987), which

display death for voyeurism, moralizing and catharsis within the “exotic” realm of war.

The

Faces of Death

(1978–91) series and “real” underground images of death in “snuf

films” emphasize the precarious pleasures of exploring death anxiety in a society often so

intent on containing and obfuscating it.

Death images of Marilyn

Monroe,

John F.

Kennedy

Elvis

Presley

and Princess Diana

regularly circulate through tabloid news and

Internet

sites, the bizarre circumstances o

their unexpected deaths meticulously reviewed. As public domain, celebrity deaths

exacerbate American death anxiety.

In the end, despite its grotesque finery death in contemporary America remains what it

always has been—a primitive finality inseparable from rituals and representations

designed to draw meaning from its summons. As each national holiday is marked by a

ritualistic recitation of

highway

and

alcohol

-related death statistics, death is implicit to

American life, an anxiety embedded deeply within the American psyche and cultural

practices.

ee also:

cemeteries and crematoria

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Further reading

Anderson, P. (ed.) (1996)

All of Us: Americans Talk About the Meaning of Death,

New

York: Delacorte Press.

Nuland, S. (1994)

How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter,

New York: A.A.

Knopf, distributed by Random House, Inc.

Mitford, J., (1963)

The American Way of Death,

New York: Simon & Schuster.

RAMONA LYONS

debts

banks and banking; bankruptcy; consumerism; credit and credit cards

deep ecology/Earth First!

Known for publicity-attracting acts of “eco-tage” or “monkey-wrenching,” Earth First!

takes direct action, under the credo “no compromise in defense of mother Earth!,” against

destructive environmental practices. Earth First! attracts not only

hippies,

who are drawn

to its deep ecology message of biocentric equality and personal selfrealization, but also

western

rednecks

who wish to recapture

cowboy

mythology in the face of rapid western

industrial development. Although most Americans disapprove of monkey-wrenching—

especially when humans are injured—the radical positions of Earth First! make

mainstream environmental groups appear very moderate and reasonable.

BRAD ROGERS

Dees, Morris S.

b. 1936

In 1967 Dees founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery Alabama,

guiding it for years despite arson and death threats. Victories against

segregation

at the

Montgomery YMCA (1969) and in the Alabama State Police led to nationwide work

against

race

and gender discrimination and brutality in prisons, for fair housing, fair

medical care, worker rights and safety and just taxation. Since 1980, Dees and the Center

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 330

have fought organized hate groups. An education program called “Teaching Tolerance”

discourages the spread of hate, while legal victories, establishing that hate groups can be

held collectively responsible for

hate crimes

committed by individual members, have

bankrupted the Alabama

Ku Klux Klan

(1981) and the White Aryan Resistance

Movement (1991).

SHARON ANN HOLT

defense

Pentagon; war, etc.

deindustrialization

Deindustrialization refers to the long-term economic and political shift whereby the

United States has been steadily transformed from a manufacturing economy into a service

economy Where once manufacturing made up over a quarter of all employment in the

nation, by the mid-1990s it made up just over 15 percent. In the place of these jobs, once

the bedrock of a unionized,

middleclass

workforce, there has emerged a massive increase

in the

“service sector”

(approximately three-quarters of the workforce today), whose

obs tend to be non-union, low-paid and unstable.

While deindustrialization has been almost wholly naturalized in the mainstream press

and media, an inevitable product of an equally “natural” globalization, in fact it has been

the product of political decisions as well as workings of economic markets. The

resurgence of Europe and Asia—in part funded by the United States—after the Second

World War ultimately created competitors to America’s industrial dominance.

Technology also made labor-intensive industries such as steel—a foundry of America’s

industrial might—more “efficient” with the use of automated machinery and

computers

But this process has also been encouraged in recent years as politicians on both the

Left

and

Right

have embraced free trade as the answer to America’s declining economic

dominance. In the 1980s and 1990s,

NAFTA

—the North American Free Trade

Agreement—galvanized both those who saw free trade as a way to spur American

exports and those—led by the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor/Congress o

Industrial Organization)—who saw the legislation as paving the way for further flight o

industry to cheap-labor countries. While America remains the leading industrial power,

obs in traditional manufacturing bases continue to flee to Asia and to Central and South

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America.

The results of deindustrialization transformed the social and cultural landscape o

urban America in the last quarter of the twentieth century. One could stand on Broad

Street in the midst of North

Philadelphia, PA,

to take just one example, turn around 360

degrees, and see where 100,000 wellpaid, and unionized, jobs had once been. Empty

shells are all that remain. The economic power and associated political power have fled

downtown to the financial and legal enterprises housed in skyscrapers and to the

suburbs

and exurbs, where those who could fled.

Artists and writers of all types have necessarily responded to a powerful new

landscape. Where once the bustling factory complexes and unworldly machinery was a

staple of American art—in, for example, the paintings of Ford’s River Rouge plant in

Detroit, MI

by Charles Scheeler—now the empty factory and its declining

neighborhood

define the urban views of the late twentieth and early twenty-first

centuries. The wonder at America’s industrial might has been replaced by the more

troubled views of urban America in a state of apparently steady decline. The works o

writers such as Nelson Algren and Claude Brown, and later, John Edgar Wideman, to

name just a few, take as their setting and theme the declining fate of the industrial

American city. Perhaps the most powerful recent portrait of deindustrialization was

Michael Moore’s tragicomedy of the decline of Flint, Michigan, once a bastion o

General Motors.

Roger and Me

(1989) portrays the social upheaval and physical

collapse—from eviction to demolition of factories to the return of grass and trees—of a

once-thriving industrial city.

Further reading

Bluestone, B. and Bennett, H. (1982)

The Deindustrialization of America,

New York:

Basic Books.

Vergara, C. (1995)

The New American Ghetto,

New Brunswick: Rutgers University.

MAX PAGE

DeLillo, Don

b. 1936

Author of eleven novels, including

White Noise, The Names, Mao II, Underworld

and

mericana,

the title of which announced his gradually emerging project. DeLillo has

atiently assembled individual and group portraits since the 1950s. He knows American

quirks of character, especially quirks of

language:

no American writer alive has a better

ear. Incomparably craft-conscious (humble before punctuation), DeLillo shames poets

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 332

with his rhythmic, mouth-oriented prose and sometimes scares readers with his ability to

access our internal modems, to appropriate and make art of our unspoken broken English.

Other writers’ narrators talk to themselves; his DeLilloquize.

DANIEL BOSCH

Democratic Party

The Democratic Party’s origins are in the party created by Thomas Jefferson and James

Madison in response to the pro-British, active government strategy of Alexander

Hamilton’s Federalists. It was later more fully democratized by Andrew Jackson in the

1820s and 1830s. This new democracy was a states’ rights, pro-Southern coalition o

state

parties which maintained its identity through the crisis of the Civil War and

Reconstruction at the cost of its predominance at the national level.

From 1861 to 1929, the Democrats were subordinate to the pro-

usiness strategies o

the

Republican Party

and suffered from contradictions between what, in the 1920s,

became its “wet” and “dry” city and country wings. There was little cohesion in a party

whose leadership had included Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan and Grover

Cleveland. However, by 1928, the Democrats had fashioned a new, urban constituency

made up of turn-of-the-century immigrants and their

children,

mostly Southern and

Eastern Europeans,

Roman Catholics

and

Jews,

who rallied to the nation’s first Catholic

candidate for

president,

Al Smith from

New York

Smith’s defeat, with the important intrusion of the Great Depression, spawned the New

Deal coalition of Franklin D.

Roosevelt,

which dominated the nation until 1968. Under

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry

Truman,

John F.

Kennedy

and Lyndon

Johnson,

the

Democrats, building on the Progressive legacy constructed a distinctively American

version of the

welfare

state:

Social Security,

the rights of labor, regulation, moderate

social planning, Keynesian economics,

healthcare,

unemployment, disability and modest

welfare provisions. What the New Deal marginalized

African Americans

and other

minorities, and women—the Fair Deal, New Frontier and “Great Society” addressed.

The Democrats successfully claimed the mantle of “The Common Man,” and

excoriated the GOP as the party of

Hoover,

the Depression and “economic royalists”

until the volcanic explosions of the 1960s subverted their mandate. Republican

conservatives, sparked by the demagogic, populist appeal of George

Wallace,

which

Richard

Nixon

parlayed into his “Silent Majority” were able to take advantage of the

decade’s dislocations (e.g. the

Vietnam War, race riots, campus

disorders and rising

crime

rates). The Democrats lost support among “ethnics,” the descendants of turn-of-

the-nineteenth-century immigrants and white Southerners.

Aside from the anomaly of the 1976 post

Watergate

victory of Jimmy

Carter,

the

Democrats floundered, holding on to their congressional domination, but losing,

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especially in the new

suburbs,

to more conservative Republicans. Between

Reagan’s

1980 triumph and the Newt

Gingrich

-engineered congressional wins of 1994, the

Democrats, perceived as a “tax and spend” and dovish party seemed divided between a

liberal wing, devoted to both New Deal and social movement-

ased policies (ranging

from universal healthcare to gay rights), and a more conservative to moderate wing,

organized by the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing for a more prodefense,

modified welfare state, pro-suburban strategy. Bill

Clinton

in both his 1992 and 1996

victories marked the seeming victory of the latter approach.

The Democratic Party remains the party of trade unionists, most minorities, liberal

professionals and what critics called “identity politics,”

ut under Clinton, who declared

that “the era of Big Government is over,” it sought to become a “new” Democratic Party

committed to inclusion, modified racial policies, tougher approaches to crime and foreign

olicy The federal government, albeit smaller and smarter, remained an article of faith

and policy for the Democrats in the twentieth century

Further reading

Edsall, T. and Edsall, M. (1991)

Chain Reaction,

New York: Norton.

Fraser, S. and Gerstle, G. (eds) (1989)

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order,

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Brinkley A. (1995)

The End of Reform,

New York: Alfred A.Knopf.

PAUL LYONS

De Niro, Robert

b. 1943

A consummate actor whose roles have often explored the meaning of urban ethnic

(Italian American)

life in America, especially in collaboration with directors Martin

Scorsese and Francis Ford

Coppola

. Repeatedly nominated for Academy

Awards

recognition of his finely engraved portraits of small-time hoods, dreamers and losers, De

Niro won Oscars for his work in

The Godfather Part II

(1974) and

Raging Bull

(1980).

He also created haunting, desperate characters in

Mean Streets

(1973),

Taxi Drive

(1976),

The Deer Hunter

(1978),

True Confessions

(1981),

Kïng of Comedy

(1983) and

Cape Fear

(1991), while showing an ability to laugh at this image in

Analyze This

(1999). He also directed

A Bronx Tale

(1993).

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 334

Denver, CO

Denver (1998 metropolitan population estimate 2,365,345), capital of Colorado, emerged

in the mid-nineteenth century as a center for gold, railroads,

ranching

and exchange for

the plains and

Rocky Mountain

states. Remaining relatively small, it boomed after the

Second World War as a federal center, including the Mint, multiple regional offices and

military and aerospace interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, Denver underwent a further

renaissance as a center for energy interests, including coal,

oil,

gas and oil shale, which

transformed the skyline and underpinned the narrative of the night-time

soap opera

ynast

(ABC, 1981–9). The city also emerged as a center for

Sunbelt

development o

the mountainous West around winter sports, environmentalism and natural landscapes.

The “Mile-High City” boasts professional franchises in

football

(Broncos),

basketball

(Nuggets) and

baseball

(Rockies), whose names evoke the history and images of the city

dramatically echoed in the peaks of it.

GARY McDONOGH

department stores

Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, Marshall Fields, NiemanMarcus and other stores emerged in

cities

across the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as palaces o

desire. They not only offered myriad goods, but also created a powerful sense of need

within the household, especially for its ideal shopper—the

middle-class

housewife.

Macy’s filled nine stories with goods, becoming a mythic reference in movies (

Miracle

on 34th Street,

1947) and a

New York

City, NY institution through its Thanksgiving

parade

. It even offered its own bank.

Great stores and their owners became philanthropists and tastemakers. Marshall Fields

was not only a store, but also a

Chicago, IL

philanthropist after whom the city’s natural

history museum is named. In smaller cities, families and stores proved just as central—

Rich’s in

Atlanta, GA,

Nieman-Marcus in

Dallas, TX,

Adler’s in

Savannah, GA

—

many reflecting the vision of pioneering Jewish merchants and their families. Less

restigious stores like J.C.Penney, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck extended

consumption outside the city through

catalogs

that offered clothes, tools, household

goods and even prefabricated houses.

suburbs

expanded, department stores vaulted from downtown to

malls

. Suburban

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