Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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structured neighborhood events. Nonetheless, such outdoor spaces (sometimes indoors)

often generate noise and conflict.

Since the 1980s,

New Urbanism

has championed the porch and yard as spaces o

sociability Urbanists have also played with attaching aban-doned urban-spaces to nearby

homes and institutions to create a fabric of domesticated nature in the city. Yet the

dialectic of public and private, individual ownership and community, are continually

played out in complicated ways in these interstices of home and nature.

GARY McDONOGH

homelessness

For at least 150 years, Americans have used the adjective “homeless” to describe those

without a domicile and to indicate an absence of ties to family or to a place and the

eople settled there. Understood in this broad sense of uprootedness, homelessness has

een a recurrent (if not defining) feature of American life, particularly as the coincidence

of livelihood,

family

and place declined with the rise of the market, the extension of the

frontier

and relentless urbanization. Indeed, by the 1870s, intermittent

migration

and

precarious housing circumstances were such common hardships of working-class life that

they warranted scarce comment. But note, too, an exotic, romantic strain in the

understanding of homelessness in the tramp, at once a figure of menace and colorful

resistance to industrial discipline, or legendary folk heroes who were homeless men like

the Maine logger Paul Bunyan or the southwestern

cowboy

Pecos Bill. The term could

encompass even the unmarried women who moved to the city for work in increasing

numbers after the Civil War, or, during the Great Depression, families who, though

housed, failed to meet state settlement (residency) requirements for public aid and thus

were conveniently made federal charges. “Homeless” covered a big territory including

routine hardship, defiance, adventure and even bureaucratic expedience

This diffuse understanding of the term persists in popular culture; it is traced easily

enough in the annals of labor, American bohemia, or the survivalist right. It is used now

more than ever to define a bureaucratic category. During the 1980s, with a renaissance o

shelterless poverty unlike any seen since the 1930s, the word was given a technical cast

by scholars and policy-makers needing to bound survey samples and target eligibility for

special services and housing benefits. They constructed a narrow, operational definition

that counted as homeless only people living in shelters, out of doors, or in places not

meant for human habitation. Whatever injustice it does to history, however it scants the

subtle cultural work of ambiguous words, this definition has the stamp of authority.

Numbers

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 556

Estimates of the size of America’s homeless population came to be based on this literal

notion of houselessness. These estimates, some as low as 250,000, rapidly became

controversial because they were based on one-night surveys and seemed to many to

minimize the extent of homelessness, even when narrowly defined. However, by the

early 1990s, the development of computerized data systems in some US jurisdictions

made it possible to amass unduplicated counts of shelter users over stretches of time, thus

providing a dynamic enumeration of this population. Data from big cities like

New York

City and

Philadelphia, PA

and smaller cities and counties in

New England,

the

Midwest

and

California

showed that between 4.4 percent and 13 percent of the local

oor made use of public shelter annually during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A

national telephone survey found that between 2.4 percent and 3.1 percent of the adult

population—that is, between 4.4 million and 5.7 million adults—had been homeless at

some time between 1985 and 1990. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that

homelessness grew rapidly during the 1980s and had assumed massive proportions by

1990. No evidence suggests that the situation has changed in subsequent years. As in

revious generations, periodic displacement and resort to a public bed has become a

common feature of life for poor Americans.

Causes

The homelessness that became so visible in the early 1980s resulted, at bottom, from the

increasing numbers of individuals and families who could no longer afford to purchase

housing. In large part, this was a consequence of a precipitous decline after 1974 in real

wages, work opportunities and employment levels for a growing pool of

baby-boom

generation workers, particularly poorly educated people of minority status. Similarly the

real value of most income maintenance benefits plummeted after 1974. In the 1980s

many

states

or local jurisdictions dramatically curtailed or eliminated altogether General

Assistance, the only welfare program available to able, non-elderly single men and

women or couples without

children

in their custody—hence their disproportionate

presence in shelters. After the mid-1970s, then, the poor became more numerous and they

got poorer. Not only could fewer poor people establish and maintain independent

households, but also friends and kin could not so readily afford to take them in for

extended periods. Thus, time-honored traditions of mutual aid began to buckle,

particularly in

African American

communities.

At the same time, the nation’s supply of low-cost rental housing was shrinking as the

result of changes in the federal tax structure, rising interest rates and faltering federal

commitment to the production and maintenance of public housing. While ample growth

occurred in the national housing stock throughout the 1980s, the number of low-end units

fell dramatically and the vacancy rate in that sector of the market became increasingly

small. By 1989 there was a 5 million unit shortfall in housing affordable to poor people.

Part of the “affordable housing gap” consisted of a dearth of “marginal housing,”

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mainly the singleroom occupancy

hotels

that had for generations provided regular shelter

for the alcoholics, substance abusers and mentally ill persons who had always comprised

some portion of the desperately poor. Such disreputable structures were systematically

destroyed by

urban-renewal

projects and private

gentrification

. This has had an

important impact on the characteristics of today’s homeless population, of which perhaps

30 to 40 percent suffer from a current major mental disorder or a substance use disorder.

The erosion of marginal urban habitats coincided with laws passed in most states in the

1970s which made it difficult for persons with a mental illness to be committed to a

sychiatric hospital or to be retained there for more than a few days. Similar laws

eliminated the commitment of alcoholics and addicts and jail sentences for public

drunkenness. This process of “deinstitutionalization”—a

de facto

change in housing

policy—was intended to be accompanied by readily available residential care in local

areas. Yet, after twenty years (longer in states like

California

and New York),

community

care remains an unfulfilled promise.

Further reading

Baumohl, J. (ed.) (1996)

Homelessness in America,

Phoenix: Oryx.

Hopper, K. and Baumohl, J. (1994) “Held in Abeyance: Rethinking Homelessness and

Advocacy”

American Behavioral Scientist

37(4): 522–52.

JIM BAUMOHL

homophobia

If capitalism necessarily operates on a cultural logic of difference (i.e. masculine

competition), the homosexual/heterosexual binaries serve as capitalism’s

de jure

oppositional categories of

sexual

difference. The late nineteenth century’s rapid and

urgent framing of the normative from the non-normative required a rhetoric (medical,

uridical, popular) that imbued the latter as an object of fear and disdain. Along with any

number of cultural “non-normatives” of this period, the homosexual was marked as a

disgusting anathema to the bourgeois sanctity of the heterosexual

family

. Moreover,

because the homosexual body was scientifically and popularly presented as an “invert” (

woman trapped in a man’s body or vice-versa), the feminized male body (in particular)

threatened the foundation of American

masculinity

. Thus, one might consider

homophobia not so much a fear of the homosexual

as such

. More precisely homophobia

may be more fruitfully considered as a response to the particular nineteenth-century

concept of what a homosexual was, i.e. the “effeminized” male.

Historians as diverse as George Chauncey in

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture,

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 558

and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940

(1994) and Edmund Morris in

The

ise of Theodore Roosevel

(1979) have demonstrated the castrating effect that the

effeminized male body had on American notions of hetero-masculinity. If the body of the

homosexual was generated as a site of perversity the body of the normative masculine

heterosexual American male was manufactured with similar gusto. Theodore Roosevelt’s

radical shift from dilettantish statesmen to rugged

cowboys

is one of America’s more

brilliant accounts of masculine heterosexual “invert” anxiety.

Even with the contemporary rethinking of the political, scientific and popular place o

the homosexual in the twentieth century, the masculinized hatred towards homosexuals

(often played out in crippling and deadly acts of violence) continued to occur. In the late

1990s, in so-called “post-gay” culture and complacent assimilation of/ by the

“homosexual lifestyle” in “mainstream” society, homosexuals have signed a Faustian

act. In order to dispel homophobia, sexual difference has been veiled. Homosexuals, in

other words, must necessarily present themselves as “normal” so as to avoid the violence

that accompanies homophobia. In contemporary parlance, he or she is insisted upon to act

“straight.” One can be “out” as long as one does not act

too

gay With difference

effectively erased and the masculine/feminine order of things perforce in place,

homophobia curiously repeats its nineteenth-century beginnings. It is clear that the louder

and more egregiously one speaks the love that dare not speak its name, the stronger the

challenge to hetero-normative culture’s purported acceptance of homosexuality.

Further reading

George Chauncey G. (1994)

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of

the Gay Male World, 1890–1940,

New York: Basic.

Morris, E. (1979)

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,

New York: Ballantine.

DAVID GERSTNER

homosexual

gay and lesbian life and politics

hooks, bell

b. 1952

“Black feminist”

intellectual,

noted for such works as

Ain’t I a Woman

(1981),

Talking Back

(1981) and

Outlaw Culture

(1994), in which she synthesizes

race, class

and

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gender to examine

African American

culture, which she locates in a society shaped by

“white

supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” In her writings she outlines the limits o

feminist solidarity divided along the lines of race and class, as well as the corresponding

limits of racial and class solidarity. Born Gloria Watkins, she writes under the name o

her great-grandmother; the use of lower-case letters in her name deflects attention from

her identity onto her ideas.

ROBERT GREGG

Hoover, J.Edgar

b. 1895; d. 1972

Director of the

FBI

from its creation as the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 until his

death in 1972. Hoover was responsible for placing the FBI at the heart of American

government by undertaking a rigorous process of professionalization, bureaucratization

and highly publicized investigations of communists, gangsters and alleged spies.

Following the war, Hoover extended his range and power beyond these areas into more

controversial definitions of anti-Americanism, orchestrating a smear campaign against

Martin Luther

King,

Jr. and using undercover agents to infiltrate the

Black Panthers

. It

is also widely believed that he had gathered damaging information on most of the

postwar

presidents,

which inclined them to keep him on at the Bureau. After his death,

more questions arose about the power he had amassed at the FBI and his personal life,

including his crossdressing proclivities (in stark contrast to the image of the straight-laced

G-man).

ROBERT GREGG

Hope, Bob

b. 1903

Although English-born, Hope amused Americans for decades with sharp one-liners on

the stage, screen, television and the golf course. In movies, he was known for his

partnership with Bing

Crosby

in comic “road”

ictures in exotic locales; he also hosted

the Academy Awards. Many knew him through television specials, including decades o

entertaining American troops abroad with caustic but ultimately patriotic wit. Hope was

also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

GARY McDONOGH

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 560

horror films

While rooted in European myths and classic cinema

(Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu),

the horror genre reveals dark recesses of American culture—so much so that other

nations have tried to ban these

Hollywood

products from the 1930s onwards. To read

these as reflections of American society (and even as causes of changes) is tempting, yet

this relationship of image and society is constantly complicated by powerful artists,

technological innovations, marketing and intertextual relations with other media.

Moreover, horror also speaks to continuing “positive” themes of American culture—

nation committed publicly to heaven (sometimes on Earth) also believes in hell.

American horror were already set high standards by the 1930s, when actor Lon Chaney

Sr and

director

Tod Browning had established careers. Studies of physical deformity and

the supernatural skirted the edges of the “respectable”

roduction code, which tinkered

with lines or images but avoided these often primal figures. The year of 1931 alone saw

archetypal figures in Tod Browning’s

Dracula

(with Bela Lugosi), James Whale’s

rankenstein

(with Boris Karloff) and

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

. Even Tod Browning’s

1932

Freaks,

mingling human deformity with vengeance mutilation, played (with cuts)—

while European nations, closer to the horrors of the First World War, objected to the

onslaught.

Horror film production continued through the Second World War (with occasional

attempts to read distorted violence as European). It gained a new life with the Cold War

when it intersected with

science-fiction films

exploring new technologies. Creatures

distorted by nuclear holocaust swarmed the screen after

Godzilla

(1954) arrived from

Japan—giant tarantulas, shrews, ants, etc. Other menaces came from space—not only

UFOs but mind-controlling Martians. Still other dangers lurked within the hearts o

people embodied by compelling

actors,

such as Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, aided

by new technologies like 3-D and Percepto (which supplied electric shocks to the

audience at a crucial moment in

The Tingler,

1959). Films like I

was a Teenage Werewol

(1957) courted the

baby boom;

David Skal cites a California physician in that era who

felt horror movies were “self administered psychiatric therapy for America’s

adolescents” (1993:256). Serving this “need,” American International Pictures emerged,

with director Roger Corman, as the home of rapid and cheap B-movies based on blood

rather than character or technology. At the same time,

television

and magazines helped

keep alive classic older traditions.

In subsequent decades, monsters became more invasive and devastating. In 1968

osemar

’s Baby

introduced demonized middle-class

children

who would disturb

movies like the

Exorcist

(1973) or the

Omen

(1976). Women’s roles have become

stronger than brides or victims of the 1930s and 1950s, but horror still tends to be a man’s

Entries A-Z 561

game as demon or slayer—the

Alien

series (1979–) is an exception.

Increasing violence again made those outside America queasy. Explicit violence,

resent since the late 1950s, grew over decades in slasher movies as well as mainstream

cinema. Physical distortions based on foam latex and digitalization also expanded the

genre. Horror films, moreover, intertwined with works by authors like Stephen

King

Anne Rice. King, in Brian De Palma’s vision of

Carrie

(1976) created horror from an

erstwhile center of American everyday life—

high school

. Both King and Rice root evil

in American places and traditions in streams of novels that echoed the growing

serialization of horror films, where

Halloween

(1978–) uses a shared American children’s

holiday as its ongoing framework. Meanwhile, in the 1970s,

blaxploitation

flicks like

lacula

(1972) and

Abby

(1974) provided separate but equal demonics. At the same time,

horror has been seen as an attractive lure for the increasingly important

teenage

market.

The 1990s, by contrast, saw a resurgence of quality horrors (instead of B-movies),

reflecting and mining traditions. The Vietnam generation (for whom

Jacob’s Ladder

(1990) provides an especially chilling memorial) grew up to an Oscar-sweeping

Silence

of the Lambs

(1991), found humor in the

The Addams Family

(1991) and style in

Coppola’s

Dracula

(1992) or the reflective

Gods and Monsters

(1998). New special

effects have buoyed remakes like

The Mummy

(1999) and

Godzilla

(1998), while extreme

violence and distortion were serialized in

Hellraiser

(1987) and the teen-oriented

I Know

What You Did Last Summer

(1998). One might read these 1990s productions as

apocalyptic, but for every Hannibal Lecter there is another romance or Disney flick.

Horror is part but not all of American psyche—the temptation of the forbidden, but also a

desensitized experience of the modern, mapped out in the American everyday

Further reading

Skal, D. (1993)

The Monster Show,

New York: W.W. Norton.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

horses

A century ago horses were common in work and sport throughout urban and rural

America. In transportation and myriad occupations, they filled streets, linked farms and

towns and extended human labor. Moreover, an infrastructure of trading, care and shelter

formed part of human settlement, as it has for millennia. Yet, within decades, the

automobile

turned the horse into a rarer animal of leisure. Although the horse figures

prominently in

Hollywood

and

television

through the popularity of the western and

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 562

historical pieces, it has disappeared from everyday life. The

Amish

maintain it as a

rimary work/ transport animal. Mounted police, carriage tours and similar roles remain

in some cities. Yet, even on

ranches,

the ease of a pick-up

truck

means a horse is

sometimes carried rather than carrier. Meanwhile, maintaining a horse has become an

expensive, specialized occupation, especially in urban areas.

Riding is still popular among many Americans, especially those who live in open areas

and the West. Stables and trails are also maintained in great city parks like Philadelphia’s

Fairmount Park. Ranches may maintain horses for recreation and work; dude ranches

specialize in this union of man and nature.

Horse shows showcase precision horsemanship in equitation and more complex riding

skills in dressage, jumping, reining and related events. Major official shows, sanctioned

by the American Horse Show Association, include the National in

New York

City, the

Devon Horse Show, near

Philadelphia, PA

and the American Quarter Horse Congress in

Oklahoma. Specialized breeding groups and riding associations appear in pageants like

the Rose Bowl

parade

Racing also remains a primary area in which humans meet the contemporary horse.

Both harness and flat racing are popular in the US, the latter having been established

since the seventeenth century. In some states, only on-track betting is permitted; New

York and other areas allow people to bet at state centers as well. Racing usually takes

place on a one-mile oval dirt track, although races themselves vary in distance and prizes.

Among the most important horse races in the US are those of the Triple Crown: the

Kentucky Derby (Churchill Downs,

Louisville

), the Preakness (Pimlico,

Baltimore

) and

the Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park, New York. Other race-tracks in Florida and

California take advantage of warm winter weather. Famous horses of the postwar period

include Man o’ War, Secretariat and Northern Dancer, while Eddie Arcaro and Willie

Shoemaker became well-known jockeys.

Winning horses prove profitable after their racing careers through breeding fees.

Thoroughbred sales occur annually in Kentucky and at Saratoga Springs (New York);

reeding is controlled through the Jockey Club and the American Stud Book. Breeding

and training require knowledge, investments and commitment.

American horse breeding has contributed to the development of several important

strains of horses, including the American Quarter Horse, Appaloosa, Standardbred,

American Saddlebred, Morgan and Mustang. Wild horses are found still on western

ranges and on islands off the Atlantic coast.

There are also problems associated with horses. Policies regarding over-

reeding o

horses for sport, over-use of public lands by wild horses and horses used in the

harmaceutical industry (i.e. for production of the drug Premarin) continue to be

controversial. Americans have strong prejudices against eating horseflesh, although it is

used in dog food. Some horses live out their days on retirement farms, but many also face

industrial disposal.

GARY McDONOGH

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hotels

In a mobile nation, hotels and

motels

have become way-stations, luxurious homes and

markers of despair. While public lodging is not unique to America, the range of its

meanings nonetheless deserves scrutiny as keys to a changing landscape

Hotels once invited travelers to any town that claimed a train stop and a future.

Luxurious accommodations and

celebrities

have been associated with metropolitan

hotels of global prestige since the nineteenth century—the Plaza and Waldorf-Astoria in

Manhattan, the Willard in

Washington, DC,

Palmer House in

Chicago, IL,

the St.

Francis in

San Francisco, CA

and the Beverly Hills Hotel in

Los Angeles,

among

others. Downtown hotels originally catered to businessmen, although wives and families

were reunited at exurban resorts like the Breakers in Palm Beach and the Greenbriar in

West Virginia which offered elegant accommodations, fine meals and select company.

Divisions of gender and

class

in both hotels and ever-expanding resorts have changed

along with the workforce and family travel since the Second World War. Elite hotels

have also figured as settings for novels, plays and movies, with the Plaza a favorite for

children

(

Eloise,

Kay Thompson, 1955;

Home Alone,

1990), and adults’ (

laywright Neil

Simon’s

Plaza Suite,

movie 1971); the St. Francis was a model for television’s 1980s

series

Hotel

Hotels have

created

the landscape of resort cities like

Las Vegas

and

Miami

Beach. In

smaller cities, historic luxury once perhaps subsidized by local governments seeking

restige, has become part of downtown revitalization, while new hotels nationwide

compete for architectural renown and business. Hence, John Portman’s

Atlanta

Peachtree Plaza became associated with atrium hotels, while the Bonaventure in Los

Angeles became the type specimen for

postmodernism

to Fredric

Jameson

. Specialized

boutique hotels and family-run bed and breakfasts are perceived to provide a more

European ambience.

Hotel chains have played a major role in this commerce. Major chains linked

ownership and management of urban prestige hotels by the 1920s, although most

operated under independent names. Conrad Hilton expanded between the wars from a

Texas base to buy the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and other prestige hotels while

extending his scientific management through leases and management contracts

worldwide in the postwar period; many hotels carried the Hilton name. Other major

American-

ased chains include the Sheraton ITT and luxury specializations like the

Omni, Westin and the global Ritz-Carlton. Hotel and motel properties have also been

targets for foreign investment, as well as 1990s incursions of upscale chains like Nikko

and Swissotel.

Hotels also have reflected divisions in American society—luxury is available for a

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 564

price that distinguishes a suite in the Beverly Wilshire from a night’s accommodation at

the

YMCA

. Hotels also were segregated in many major American cities—small Southern

towns might have no public accommodations for blacks at all until the Inter-state

Accommodations Act of 1965. Despite their urban fame, Americans have also been

prejudiced against hotels as places to “live,” whose residents seemingly reject the

domestic

home

and its duties. Residential hotels were discouraged in most cities by the

turn of the nineteenth century Later, SRO (single room occupancy) and welfare hotels

became known as urban blights. Literature, films (

Midnight Cowboy,

1969;

Barton Fink,

1991;

LA Confidential,

1994) and crime television have used a range of hotels to map out

social diversity division and trajectories in the city.

Further reading

Groth, P. (1994)

Living Downtown,

Berkeley: University of California.

GARY McDONOGH

hot rods

Taking standard production model cars and making them faster as well as more

distinctive produced its own look, culture, magazines and music, especially among

teenagers,

from the 1950s onwards. These were displayed in “shows” among peers and

in drag races (racing over short distances from a fixed start, illegal when conducted on

public streets). This culture permeates contemporary films like

Rebel without a Cause

(1955) and the later, nostalgic

Grease

(1978).

GARY McDONOGH

House Committee on UnAmerican Activities

(HUAC)

Immediately following the Second World War, the federal government fought what it

considered to be a growing communist menace within the United States. In part as a

reaction to President Harry

Truman’s

strong anti-communist rhetoric, Congress

developed its own program to fight internal subversion, stepping up the hearings and

investigations of the existing House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC). The

Entries A-Z 565