Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture
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family
forms, roles and challenges that constitute contemporary American society. Many
conservatives have claimed that the lack of family values results in homosexuality single-
parent families,
teenage
pregnancy drug abuse, sexual abuse and domestic violence. Still,
given the emotional and ideological appeal of the family it becomes a particularly
divisive way of phrasing issues, especially when touted by white men with unstable
marriages.
GARY McDONOGH
CINDY WONG
Farina, Richard
b. 1937; d. 1966
Poet, composer, folk-singer and novelist of IrishCuban heritage. His
Been Down so
L
ong it Looks Like Up to Me
(1966) has been recognized as a classic of post-
b
eat
generational unease. With his wife Mimi (sister of Joan
Baez
), he explored folk music,
ballads and political satire before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident.
GARY McDONOGH
Farmer, James
b. 1920; d. 1999
Alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph
Abernathy
and Bayard
Rustin,
Farmer is
considered one of the principal leaders of the
civil-rights
movement. He helped found
CORE
in 1942 and became its director, leading
sit-ins
and the
freedom rides
.
Freedom
When?
(1965) revealed his continuing commitment to non-violent resistance, though he
began to support some tenets of
Black Power,
such as black self-determination and local
control. He left CORE in 1968 and stood for Congress, losing to Shirley
Chisholm,
and
was appointed assistant secretary of Health, Education and Welfare by
Nixon
in 1969,
but resigned from this position after a year.
ROBERT GREGG
farms and farm life
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 406
Since the early days of the Republic, yeoman farmers and farm families have been seen
as repositories of American values and traditions, as well as backbones of
economics
and
politics. To foreign observers like De Toqueville or Crevecouer, or the philosopher-
president Thomas Jefferson, such farmers epitomized American ideals of
freedom,
hard
work and
individualism
in a new nation, 86 percent of whose inhabitants were rural.
Generations of literature, art, political discourse and, in the twentieth century, movies
have contrasted rural virtue and urban decay (even though America’s great “sin,” slavery,
was essentially rural). Contemporary “country style” decor and crafts and weekend
farmers affirm this ideological presence even in an urbanizing nation in which farm life
has declined radically in both economic value and numbers of citizens living on the
family
farm.
Government policies, technology, corporate expansion and globalization since the
Second World War have vastly changed the function and meaning of the family farm.
Hence a modern novel/movie like Jane Smiley’s
1000 Acres
resituates
Kïng Lear
as a
tragedy of a farm family destroyed by ambitious expansion and modernization. FARM
AID concerts, which began in 1985, have allowed artists like Willie Nelson, Bob
Dylan
and John Mellencamp to call attention to rural debt and loss of lands to agribusiness and
urban sprawl. These concerts have distributed $14.5 million in direct aid and more in
research on long-term solutions for family farms and communities.
Farms in the US are generally defined as lands that produce or are capable o
f
p
roducing 11,000 in sales. Most such farms are still family owned (90 percent), although
these include family corporations that hire outside labor (for instance, migrant workers
are the norm in
California
). Yet, their involvement in American economic and social life
has also changed in important ways in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
First, the diversified and self-sufficient farm, with notable exceptions like the
Amish,
is a relic of the past. Where in the 1950s, for example, the average dairy holding was 5.8
cows—suitable for family and local needs—
b
y the 1990s it had risen to 61, reflecting a
move towards more efficient specialized production. Farmers specialize in one crop
oriented to national and global markets—grains like wheat and corn, meat, fruit,
tobacco,
even specialized truck or organic produce for urban markets. Agricultural sciences have
dramatically increased productivity per farm laborer in all of these since the 1940s,
making the US the precursor to a global green revolution.
Production is linked to wider networks of support and consumption. Since Franklin
Roosevelt’s
response to the collapse of the Dust Bowl, government policies have sought
to control prices and a regular supply of food to consumers, while also supporting
farmers—an incipient conflict met by conflicting regulations. Sometimes, for example,
farmers were subsidized to retire land from production, leading to charges of huge
subsidies for growing nothing. Since 1992, these policies have changed to even out and
limit support without forcing land to be vacant.
Railroads and
trucking
have tied farmers as well to wide national markets for decades.
Hence, fruit from California, Texas and Florida appears year-round in
New York
City
and
Chicago, IL,
while production of beef, sugar and chicken has also been regionally
Entries A-Z 407
concentrated. Transportation has allowed exports of American surplus in grains and other
agricultural goods, but has also opened markets to agricultural goods from other nations
that are competitive in terms of price, variety or quality Again, the intertwining of family
farms and global markets produces both expanded possibilities and new vulnerability.
In the twentieth century, farmers also increased cultural links to wider American
populations as
automobiles, radios, televisions
and
computers
have ended enforced
isolation that once deeply constrained women and families. Indeed, some farms are now
linked to rural-suburban combinations (“ruburbs”), where big-
b
ox stores like Walmart,
technology supplies and urbane conveniences have eclipsed small-town values once
associated with, and reinforcing, farm life. New technologies of farming, whether
fertilizers and insecticides, newly bred or engineered crops, or expanded production, also
demand more expertise—state universities support large agricultural teaching and
research establishments—and yet also create dependence on corporate supplies, capital
flow and markets.
These changing connections and values of the family farm reached a crisis in the
1970s, when downward prices and the energy crisis hit many farms, especially those that
had expanded under younger and more educated owners. While the family farm may
continue as a cultural icon, in fact, numbers have decreased from 6 million in the 1940s
to roughly 2 million in the 1990s, while the percentage of Americans living on farms
slipped from 23 percent in 1940 to under 2 percent. The consolidation of larger corporate
agribusiness, the increasing competition of foreign producers and the spread of urban
land uses also threaten both this image and reality of the American dream.
Further reading
Goreham, G. (ed.) (1997)
Encyclopedia of Rural America,
Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO (a
basic initial resource for any research on American farm life).
GARY McDONOGH
CINDY WONG
Farrakhan, Louis
b. 1933
Louis Walcott grew up in
Boston, MA
where he became an accomplished musician,
playing in the city’s nightclubs. In 1955 he was recruited by
Malcolm X
for the
Nation
of Islam,
and became Louis X (referred to in Malcolm X’s
Autobiography
(1965)). He
was given the name Farrakhan by Elijah Muhammad about the same time that he
replaced Malcolm as head of the Black Muslim Temple in
Harlem, New York
and as
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 408
national spokesman for the organization. Three years after not being picked to succeed
Elijah Muhammad on his death in 1975, Farrakhan broke with Wallace Muhammad and
established his own Nation of Islam, which he said was the legitimate successor to the
earlier organization. Unlike Muhammad, Farrakhan has engaged in politics extensively
supporting Jesse
Jackson
for president in 1984, taking positions in international affairs
supporting Libya’s Khadafi and making a series of widely reported anti-Semitic remarks.
His influence extends beyond the Nation of Islam, as shown in his organization of the
1996 Million Man March in
Washington, DC
.
ROBERT GREGG
fashion
Fashion in America can be discussed from two different perspectives—as a general
statement about American styles, based on generally casual conformity or in terms of the
growth of an art and industry of couture as artifice. In the latter realm, American
designers freed themselves during and after the Second World War from slavish imitation
of European models to compete in a global market that ranges from Paris and Milan to
Tokyo and Hong Kong. In either case, fashion tends to be a highly gendered, classed and
racialized enterprise where commodities transform bodies, sexuality and identity.
An American style, in the broader sense, has been less defined by aesthetics than by
comfort and mass consumption. In the twentieth century Americans bought more than 9
b
illion items of clothing annually but they do not necessarily stress individual panache in
everyday dress. Workplaces tend to mean conventional clothes (uniforms or pseudo-
uniforms, like dark suits and white shirts).
Teenage
conformity long has been epitomized
by the dominance of blue jeans and T-shirts as basic wardrobes, but also reflects trends in
apparel, accessories and style (see
Clueless,
1989), as well as
race
relations. Hip hop
b
aggy pants and baseball caps have different meanings on white suburban college
students and black, inner-city youths; minorities also display designer labels as marks o
f
status and identity
Clothing needs are met by a variety of prices and qualities of merchandise, with
competition for brand name recognition pitting
GAP,
J.Crew, Express, Limited, Delia
and others against each other, for example, for the youth market. Other brands have
established reputations for conservative clothes for the workplace—Brooks Brothers,
Anne Klein, Talbot, etc. Names have also created wider markets by moving from clothes
to perfumes, accessories and household goods. Many people buy clothes according to
what they can afford, whether in boutiques,
department stores,
discount stores or thrift
shops, or via
catalogs
and online commerce. Still, the appeal of vintage clothing or sales
shopping allows consumers to extend budget and style.
While certain Americans may have gained global reputations for their individual
Entries A-Z 409
senses of style—Wallis Simpson, Grace
Kelly,
Jackie Kennedy
Onassis
—other
prominent women have been embraced for their “sensible” look—like
First Ladies
Mamie Eisenhower, Pat Nixon, Barbara
Bush
or even the power-suited Hillary Clinton.
Hollywood
stars are often taken as the epitome of male fashion, from Cary Grant to
Denzel
Washington
. For men not directly involved in fashion or media of display an
interest in fashion is often taken as anomalous, or even a failing in
masculinity
. Despite
the “Peacock Revolution” of the 1960s, which introduced
hippie
clothes, colors and
extravagant styles, American male fashion in public realms remains conservative and
unobtrusive.
Despite these consistencies in general choices and ideal types, the American fashion
industry has offered more and more new choices and forms of consumption and display
since the end of the Second World War rationing. It has also aggressively asserted an
American ethos in fashion—and fashion production—in distinction to European couture.
The pioneer designers of the 1960s included Halston, Mary McFadden and Anne Klein,
who extended their influence through ready-to-wear clothes, many of which appealed to
middle-class
women entering the workforce, balancing jobs and style. The 1960s were
also marked by more idiosyncratic fashions associated with hippies and imported
Carnaby Street designs, as well as the rise of designer jeans.
Subsequent decades saw the rise and globalization of many important American
designers. Donna Karan designed clothes for the professional woman, Ralph Lauren
offered classic, “preppy clothes,” while Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis and others established
visible looks and trademarks. The 1980s, according to Silverman (1986), became an era
to celebrate aristocratic clothes in design as well as exhibits—and in the presidential style
of the
Reagan
White House.
Designers continued to emerge and change in the 1990s. Tommy Hilfiger has appealed
to the youth market, while Vera Wang and others competed in specialty gowns. New
designers debut at New York’s Fashion Week or outside Bryant Park. Production o
f
many of these labels, however, has moved offshore. Americans also continue to buy from
European designers: elite shopping areas like
New York’s
Fifth Avenue,
Los Angeles’
Rodeo Drive or
Miami’s
Bal Harbour offer boutiques for Chanel, Prada, Fendi, Gucci,
Armani, Zegna and other global fashion logos. Meanwhile, American designers have
been hired to revitalize staid European lines.
Many of these designers, in fact, offer multiple divisions to reflect differential
purchasing power. While Donna Karan’s name marks her expensive line, for example,
DKNY provides a pricey but mass market alternative; Calvin Klein and CK follow the
same division, reinforcing a design empire through multiple products and sales, although
also risking over-extension.
While these lines reinforce divisions of
class
and gender, fashion also raises important
questions about age and
race
. High fashion often offers clothes that look good on the
young, but often only the older rich can afford them. Certainly, female fashion models,
who have emerged as celebrities in their own right, have tended to offer young, thin and
sometimes exotic looks and bodies. This has led to complaints about the objectification o
f
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 410
the female body and the negative impact on female self-images. Male fashion models
only gained some celebrity recognition in the 1990s with brooding, lean and muscled
b
odies whose display remains linked to questions of sexuality and identity as well as
clothes. In both groups, exotic racial mixtures have been highlighted without serious
integration of the design establishment or couturier clients. Design remains dominated by
white males.
Fashion is constantly tied to other media. Stars at the Academy
Awards
become
advertisements for designers and “looks.” Media events such as the phenomenal success
of
Titanic
(1997), Clark Gable’s appearance without an undershirt in
It Happened One
N
ïght
(1934), or the King Tut
blockbuster
exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum all had an
impact on design and taste in subsequent seasons. Other tie-ins occur through celebrities
and labels: Michael
Jordan
is linked to both Warner Brothers’ character clothing and
sneaker endorsements, while logos of sports teams are popular in male casual wear.
Some of these trends, of course, may be lamented by those who attend New York’s
Fashion Week or those who have pontificated on American fashion from the pages o
f
major periodicals like
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar,
or the more trade-oriented
Women’
s
Wear Daily
. Nor will they be preserved, perhaps, in museum collections devoted to
fashion like that of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Nonetheless, they embody rather
literally, the complexity and creativity of American life.
Further reading
Hollander, A. (1994)
Sex and Suits,
New York: Alfred Knopf.
Laver, J. (1983)
Fashion,
New York: Oxford.
Silverman, D. (1986)
Selling Culture,
New York: Pantheon.
GARY McDONOGH
CINDY WONG
fast food
Food defined by speed of service, responding to the needs of a population on the go—
b
y
automobile,
between errands, or in fragmented family visits. Food combinations
stressing meat, carbohydrates and sugar provide rapid satisfaction (with attendant dangers
of obesity and other health problems). Franchises mean
food
is also standardized,
familiar and relatively cheap.
Toys
lure
children,
while
teenagers
(and the elderly) find
part-time jobs in fast-food outlets. Whether offering hamburgers,
pizza,
tacos, French
fries, sodas, icecream, or even salads, chains like
McDonald’s,
Taco Bell, Kentucky
Fried Chicken
and many others have also become symbols—albeit incomplete—o
f
Entries A-Z 411
American food and eating abroad.
GARY McDONOGH
CINDY WONG
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
For much of its history the FBI has been linked inextricably in the public mind with its
first director, J.Edgar
Hoover
. Since the 1970s, critics have highlighted many o
f
Hoover’s excesses and introduced periodic reforms. But, with his passing, the agency
reshaped its public image without examining some fundamental questions about the
relationship between a police organization and a democratic society. Praising Hoover for
creating a strong law-enforcement agency the organization has been slow to eliminate all
of his unconstitutional practices. Subsequently it has used some of the same fears that
created Hoover’s organization to forestall change, calling it into question in cases like its
assaults on
militias
and on the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco, TX,
as well as its
responsiveness to outside oversight.
The FBI’s roots were planted in the aftermath of the First World War, a period o
f
widespread violation of constitutional rights in the name of national security. Anxieties
engendered by the 1917 Russian Revolution, concerns about domestic radical
organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the association in the
mind of many Americans of socialism and anarchism with immigrants, allowed
AttorneyGeneral
A.Mitchell Palmer, and his assistant, Hoover, to undertake widespread
arrests and deportations. The first “red scare,” however, was insufficient to provide
legitimacy for a large federal police organization. The fears of the early 1920s gave way
to late 1920s complacency. During the early 1930s, therefore, the organization’s director,
Hoover, turned to another stereotype of
immigration,
the identification of immigrants
with
organized crime,
for his bureau’s meal ticket. In this process he was helped
significantly by the efforts of
Hollywood
in the early 1930s, and particularly the movies
of James Cagney (
Public Enemy,
1931), Edward G.Robinson (
Little Caesar,
1931) and
George Raft (
Scarface,
1932), depicting dangerous, larger-than-life gangsters. Lined up
against these villains were Hoover’s
G-Men
(1935). The FBI director undertook a
massive publicrelations campaign to create an image of the federal agent as fearless and
incorruptible, presenting his agents as clean-cut, white and
middleclass
men. Events like
the killing of Dillinger became public spectacles, virtual lynchings, with trophies from
the shooting displayed on the director’s desk. Just as lynching established particular
social practices in the
South,
Hoover’s publicly performed law-enforcement practices
normalized the role of the FBI agency.
The Second World War brought a new role of locating the foreign agent on American
soil, but the most significant modern developments for the growing FBI occurred in
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 412
response to the emergent
civil-rights
movement. The movement arose in part out of a
new relationship between the federal government and segregationist southern states, and
this relationship required increased federal police intervention. The FBI was very slow to
fulfill this new role, notwithstanding movie portrayals as in
Mississippi Burning
(1988),
which erroneously depicted the Bureau as a key force for change. Only when freedom
riders refused to halt their journeys through the South, and when other civil-rights
activists refused to stop their work registering rural blacks, forcing the
Kennedy
administration to protect them, did FBI agents act. Civil-rights activists themselves often
believed that the FBI remained on the sidelines until after their beatings.
But the FBI once again used events to bolster its public image. The murders of three
activists (two of them white) in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, led to a very public
investigation undertaken by the FBI, which eventually unearthed the bodies of the young
men who had been killed with the collusion of local police authorities. This performance,
reassuring as it was for many northern liberals, and played for all its worth to
television
audiences in the Hoover-endorsed
FBI
series (ABC, 1965–74), masked Hoover’s other
more sinister work during this period.
This work involved the wiretapping of Martin Luther
King,
Jr.’s home and office on
the assumption that he was working with known communists. Endorsed by the Attorney-
General Robert Kennedy (who worried about his brother’s identification with civil-rights
leaders), this wiretapping revealed no “reds” under beds, but did produce salacious
material that Hoover could add to his files (which most likely also covered John
Kennedy’s philandering).
Hoover also turned to his counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate
b
lack militant organizations, the new left and the antiwar movement. The growing
number of
race riots
in the mid-1960s led to the establishment of a “Ghetto Informant
Program” in 1968, in which 3,250 agent provocateurs were employed to infiltrate
organizations like the
Black Panthers
. Just as Hoover had helped create a “red scare” in
the 1920s by sometimes creating organizations where there were none, so the FBI
contributed to the exacerbation of racial tensions in black
ghettos
.
This work is now generally acknowledged as part of Hoover’s excesses. What is less
clearly recognized is the manner in which such actions contributed to the understanding
of the direction in which the movement towards racial equality was moving, and the
extent to which their legacy has scarred American society. Hoover’s vision that the riots
were the result of the work of
Black Power
advocates was in direct contrast to the
arguments of the
Kerner Commission,
which recognized the social roots of discontent.
While Hoover has been vilified for his work during this period, his understanding of the
period has survived, contributing to the
backlash
that occurred against the Civil Rights
movement.
During the
Watergate
years, many of the FBI and
CIA’s
illegal activities came to
light. Reforms occurred to such an extent that many conservatives began to feel that the
federal policing agencies had been eviscerated, leaving the nation vulnerable. Now the
Bureau benignly advertises itself as an enforcement agency complementing other local
Entries A-Z 413
and state police forces, providing a sophisticated laboratory (to which
Homicide,
(NBC,
1993–9) detectives could turn when necessary) for studying fingerprint, DNA and other
forensic evidence. It also undertakes investigation of telemarketing fraud, security fraud,
bombings and major art thefts—not to mention the paranormal, as seen on the
X-Files
(FOX, 1993–). Yet the feeling that there may have been some legitimacy to Hoover’s
methods has been rekindled among many Americans by events like the bombing of the
federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and fears associated with
“foreign” (usually cast as Muslim, sometimes also immigrant) threats associated, once
again, with increased involvement of American forces overseas. However, as in the case
of the FBI’s handling of the Waco confrontation with the Branch Davidians and the
apparent cover-up of its agents’ use of incendiary tear gas, such sentiments of legitimacy
are quickly turned to excess.
Further reading
Bennett, C. (1948)
The F.B.I. The Basis of an American Police State,
Girard: Haldeman-
Julius Publications.
Breuer, W.B. (1995)
J.Edgar Hoover and his G-men,
Westport: Praeger
Garrow, D.J. (1981)
The FBI and Martin Luther Kïng, Jr,
New York: W.W. Norton.
Kessler, R. (1993)
The FBI,
New York: Pocket Books.
ROBERT GREGG
Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
Governmental unit that oversees the communications industry. Its chairperson and
members are appointed by the
president,
subject to congressional approval. The
Commission began with the Communications Act of 1934, which reorganized the
p
revious Federal Radio Commission. Although the importance and activity of the FCC
varies, its stance towards
telecommimications
and broadcasting industries has remained
constant: it protects the ability of business to utilize public airwaves for profit. While its
charter demands that it protect the public interest and access to its airwaves, in effect, the
FCC has favored corporate conglomeration in allocating broadcasting licenses and
decisions not to ensure a growing place on the broadcasting spectrum for public and
educational broadcasting. Currently, the FCC, while fining disc jockeys like Howard
Stern for obscenity is also involved in trying to assert “decency” on the
Internet
. Such
endeavors again might promote larger corporate interests.
EDWARD MILLER
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 414
femininity
There has been and continues to be a considerable amount of disagreement as to the
precise nature of “femininity” in contemporary America. While there is a general
consensus as to the stereotypical meaning of “femininity” (
p
assive, emotional, delicate,
irrational, mysterious, nurturing, maternal, submissive, heterosexual and strongly linked
to nature—qualities that have been largely devalued in favor of their stereotypical
masculine counterparts), the origin of this “femininity” is not as clear.
In general, the contemporary American mainstream believes that “femininity” is
b
iologically determined. This ideology which has dominated for centuries, conceives o
f
“femininity” as a biological imperative inherently embedded in being “female.” In other
words, “femininity” is not socially constructed; it is hard-wired into female bodies.
Certain feminists support this position, seeing traditionally feminine qualities as
indicative of the power women may wield over men. This largely heterosexual model
p
osits that women, with their mysterious sexuality and deep ties to the Earth mother,
inherently control men, who crave the elusive emotionality and feminine eroticism that is
missing from their own biologically determined
masculinity
.
On the other hand, most feminists agree that “femininity” and other gender categories
are socially constructed. According to this position, “femininity” is a gender category that
society has assigned to female individuals. In other words, gender corresponds to the
social constructs “woman,” “womanliness” and “femininity;” and to “man,” “manliness”
and “masculinity” Biology is reserved for sex, which is defined in terms of the biological
categories “male” and “female.”
Social constructivists counter the claims of biological determinists by stating that
“femininity” cannot be biological because not all women are feminine. Indeed, some
feminist theorists state that there is no such thing as a “woman,” since there is no single,
unified experience which brings all females together. “Women” are just
people,
these
theorists assert, and gender categories have been imposed upon individuals as a means o
f
social control. Feminists also point to the mutability of “femininity” in order to argue in
favor of social constructivism.
In its current practical application, “femininity” has become increasingly difficult to
p
inpoint. With the gradual relaxation of dress codes for women since the beginning of the
twentieth century, women’s entrance en masse into the paid workforce in the 1960s, and
the second mobilization of the feminist movement, traditional “femininity” has lost hold
as a meaningful descriptor of modern womanhood. Today, an American woman may
deviate from the conventional definition of femininity and still be considered a
“feminine” woman. Unlike in the past, a “feminine” woman of the 1990s may wear pants
and other traditionally “masculine” attire, have her own career and embrace an active
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