Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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midwifery

Long-established practices of

birth

assistance by knowledgeable females, reinforced in

the nineteenth century by immigrant cultures, were effectively challenged in the early

twentieth century by medical professionalization and concerns about health and hygiene.

Midwife-attended births fell from 40 percent in 1915 to 10.7 percent in 1935—the latter

generally non-white. The Frontier Nursing Service and other programs focused on the

disadvantaged sparked a new professionalization of midwifery in conjunction with

nursing in the 1930s. This foundation expanded after the 1970s, when midwives came to

be perceived as less intrusive, “natural,” home-

ased and even feminist alternatives to

male-dominated obstetrics. More than 5,000 certified nurse-midwives, and other direct-

entry practitioners (without nursing training) assist in prenatal and post-natal care for

150,000 births annually roughly 7 percent of all births in 1998. While serving rural and

other areas where physicians are inaccessible, midwives tend to operate in hospitals and

birthing centers rather than in homes, with limited responsibility in difficult cases.

CINDY WONG

Mies Van Der Rohe, Ludwig

b. 1886; d. 1969

His phrase “Less is More” epitomized the International Style. His buildings expressed

twentieth-century industrial society through skin-and-

ones construction. Before

emigrating to the US, he worked for Peter Behrens, then Germany’s leading architect,

and became associated with the Deutscher Werkbund and director of the Bauhaus from

1930 until it closed in 1933. He was appointed director of the School of Architecture at

the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1937. Among his most famous works are the

German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona Exposition and the Seagram Building in

New

York

City (1958), designed with Philip

Johnson

. His style influenced the American

skyscraper throughout the twentieth century.

ee also:

architecture

ISABEL KRIEGEL

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 736

migrant labor

Generally, migrant laborers are brought to the United States by employers who employ

their services for a short time or for a specific job and then send them home until they are

needed again. Often cyclical in nature, therefore, such

migration

creates a pool of cheap

labor whose workers receive no benefits or protection offered to American citizens. The

cost of reproducing the labor force is also borne by the laborers themselves whose

families reside, like reserves of labor in virtual bantustans, in another country

In many respects, migrant labor developed as a means to get around the problems

associated with the emancipation of slaves. Southern planters’ attempts to hire

Chinese

Americans

and South Asian laborers during Reconstruction, for example, were thwarted

by northern

Republicans

who, for a brief period at least, wanted to protect the freed

people of the

South

. Required to employ

African American

laborers, Southerners

instead used

violence,

prison labor, debt peonage and

segregation

to re-establish their

cheap labor system. Elsewhere in the country there were fewer restraints placed on the

use of migrant laborers. Chinese, Japanese, Mexican Americans and

Caribbean

citizens

were all used. In the northeast, Italian

immigration

began as a cyclical, migrant labor

system, with large numbers of Italians working in construction trades (often going to

Argentina when production slackened in the winter) and sending money home to their

families. While others have changed their status, laborers from Central America and the

Caribbean are now a major part of this large pool of migrant labor in the United States.

Not surprisingly migrant labor is often associated with

agriculture

. On

farms

the

intensity of the productive system varies during the year, with planting and harvesting

seasons demanding the most labor. Many farmers supply cheap housing (often merely

dormitories) for workers. During intensive periods, farmers will supplement their migrant

labor force with a “day-haul operation,” choosing among laborers assembled at

designated pick-up points. While almost all farms rely on some migrant labor,

Texas

has

the largest population of migrant workers, mainly employed in the growing and picking

of vegetables and citrus fruits. Others pick winter fruits in

Florida

. Many of these same

farmers will move north to the

Great Lakes

region, Pennsylvania and Connecticut

during the summer.

The nature of the labor (and conditions of migration) are such that it is difficult for

migrant laborers to organize for higher pay and better working and living conditions.

Consequently most earn incomes well below the official poverty level. Early attempts by

Cesar

Chavez

to organize

California

farm workers in the 1960s and 1970s, like

union

attempts to organize a strike among mushroom pickers in Eastern Pennsylvania during

the early 1990s, met with limited success. Yet most migrant laborers remain vulnerable in

the face of opposition and hostility from many in American society.

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Over the past century, opposition to migrant labor has represented a strange mixture o

humanitarian concern for the laborers combined with nativism (the desire to protect

native-

orn laborers from competition with cheaper labor) and outright racism. A recent

manifestation of hostility to such migrants can be found in California’s Proposition 187,

which attempted to deny illegal immigrants and their families school, healthcare and

other welfare. Such opposition, however, has been constrained by the farming bloc which

persuades

Congress

to safeguard the system, and by the desire of American consumers

for the cheap commodities that such labor brings.

Predicting the future for migrant labor is difficult. Farming constituencies are declining

in power nationally but retain their strength at the

state

level. As such, particular states

ecome more embattled in the face of a federal government that is committed to

establishing

trade agreements,

like NAFTA, with countries in the Western hemisphere,

which ultimately should reduce the discrepancy between the price of labor in the United

States and elsewhere and diminish the attractiveness of such transient labor.

ROBERT GREGG

migration/mobility

Migration in the United States since the Second World War has often been associated

with “the American dream” of upward mobility. Such identification is often mistaken,

and assumes that migrants make rational choices, are always seeking better opportunities

and generally experience such mobility. Although it is true that the growth of

suburbs

gave the appearance of great upward mobility, the myth of the American dream ignores

the experiences of the large numbers of

refugees

who have no choice but to come to the

United States, and of others who are forced to move within the country owing to some

form of displacement (losing jobs, losing land, and so forth). In addition, migration is

often not linked to either upward mobility or to displacement, but is rather a question o

life cycle

changes fundamental to maintaining status within the

middle class

. Middle-

class Americans move frequently from the time the young adult goes off to

college or

university

until he or she moves into a retirement colony.

The origins of belief in an American dream are longstanding. Nineteenth-century

Republican ideology was founded on the notion that Americans could improve their

social condition by moving away from a place of oppression to one where opportunities

were more abundant. The popular Horatio Alger stories cemented the ragsto-riches story

in the popular consciousness. Although social historians since the 1960s have brought

into question the veracity of this myth (showing in many instances that few Americans

who were born laborers really did make their way out of the

working class

), nevertheless

the myth has remained powerful, and has helped inspire many migrations, both among

immigrants arriving at US ports and among native-

orn Americans within the country.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 738

Even

African American

migration into northeastern cities, which began prior to the First

World War and continued through the Second World War, and which radically altered

such cities, is often spoken of in terms of an “exodus” out of the segregated

South

to the

“promised land.” Such characterizations gained hold in spite of the fact that the later

years of this migration coincided with the

deindustrialization

of many cities and resulted

in economic plight for many of the migrants.

The dangers of assumptions about the “American dream” lie most clearly in the fact

that migrations (and perceptions about them) are often closely connected. The “success”

of one set of migrants or immigrants is seen in contrast to the experience of others, and is

often mobilized in political discourse through notions of “model minorities” or peoples

marked by a “tangle of pathology” As such, these assumptions fit neatly into or even

frame beliefs about

race

and

ethnicity

that become mobilized in public-

olicy debates.

This is especially clear in the case of the migration of whites out of cities to the

“crabgrass frontier” following the Second World War. Often labeled

white flight,

since

the migration occurred partly in response to this influx of African Americans, many white

city dwellers began to move to

suburbs

. Spurred on by the easy availability of mortgages

for GIs returning from service in the Second World War (which African Americans have

sometimes characterized as a “white ethnic handout,” since benefits were often withheld

from black

veterans)

and by the construction of networks of

highways

promoting

automobile

culture rather than public transportation, large numbers of the children o

immigrants moved away from urban

neighborhoods

to live in the newly developed

suburban tracts. While such whites reaped the perquisites of suburban lifestyle, the

marker of their success, most African Americans remained trapped in

ghettos

characterized by limited opportunities. What the

Kerner Commission

would see as the

emergence of “two societies” was a product of the emergence of a racial divide that was

not just spatial (suburban/ urban), but was also one framed by migration narratives (those

who assimilated/those who could not do so because of an assumed “culture of poverty”).

Other migrations of great significance to post-Second World War American society

occurred as a result of the rapid development of the western United States, spurred by

military expansion and the growth of the

oil

industry. In the aftermath of the restrictions

on immigration passed between the 1880s and 1920s, very few migrants entering states

California, Texas,

New Mexico and Arizona were first- and second-generation

immigrants from Europe and China, the origins of many earlier migrants. Instead, many

were of Mexican origin (exceptions to restrictions being made for immigrants coming

from within the Western Hemisphere) for whom the region had long been familiar and

marked by strong family and

community

ties crossing the boundaries of the nation state

(many such “migrants” even questioned the legitimacy of those boundaries). In addition,

migrants began leaving the “dust bowl” of Oklahoma to work as fruit pickers in

California’s

farming and wine industries (as in

The Grapes of Wrath,

1939), and these

were followed after the war by the kinds of migrants depicted in

The Lucy Show

(CBS,

1962–74), northeastern urbanites leaving their homes and making their way to the “land

of opportunity.” The movie industry too had established itself in

Hollywood

earlier in the

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century with the migration of prominent Jewish movie moguls west from

New York

City, and, focused on their own westward migration rather than the northern and earlier

eastward migrations, the movie industry tended to promote images of Californian

rosperity and opportunity. Such westward migrations diminished with the end of the

Cold War

and the decline of federal funding for the defense industry.

The easing of quotas in 1965 returned immigration to levels witnessed in the years

efore the First World War. Along with refugees flooding into the country following

American involvement in the

Vietnam War

and support for regimes that were

overthrown (Nicaragua and

Iran

), these immigrants have radically altered the

demographic character of the country. Prior to the 1960s, Americans were largely o

European and African American origin, with Chinese, Japanese,

Latinos

and

American

Indians

represented by regional concentrations. Now, throughout the US,

South Asian,

Asian and Hispanic communities are growing rapidly with the proportion of Europeans

and African Americans declining.

Seeking cheaper land and labor, along with reduced

taxes,

corporations have moved

steadily into the

Southern

and

Southwestern

regions, now often labeled the

Sunbelt,

and they have been followed by many northeastern and

Midwestern

workers seeking

obs. The economic revival and a perceived end to the racial turmoil that had been

associated with these regions have made them more attractive to outsiders.

Finally older Americans have continued to migrate, sometimes into a nearby retirement

home, but frequently also to areas of the country like

Florida,

that have large post-

retirement populations. Attractive to older Americans, especially during the winter

months, Florida’s identification with retirement-age Americans is seen in both movies,

(e.g.

Cocoon,

1985) and

sitcoms

(

Golden Girls,

NBC, 1985–92).

Further reading

Hart, J.M. (1998)

Border Crossings,

Wilmington: Scholarly Resources.

Jackson, K.T. (1985)

Crabgrass Frontier,

New York: Oxford University Press.

Lemann, N. (1991)

The Promised Land,

New York: A.A.Knopf.

Pedraza, S. and Rumbaut, R.G. (1996)

Origins and Destinies,

Belmont: Wadsworth.

ROBERT GREGG

Military Industrial Complex

army, US; Eisenhower, Dwight David; Korean War; Pentagon; war

militias

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 740

Sanctioned—theoretically—by the 2nd Amendment of the

Bill of Rights,

the militia

movement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has primarily attracted

die-hard, right-wing patriots. They support the right to bear arms and have a strong

distrust of government; militias are especially strong in the

West

. Many advocate a white

nation, excluding people of color,

Jews

and homosexuals. The militia movement has

manipulated the media successfully in incidents like Ruby Ridge, where federal agents

killed the wife of a militia activist. They have also used small media, including

video

and

the

Internet

to further their mission and recruitment, from bomb-making manuals to

political statements.

CINDY WONG

milk

Cow’s milk, subject to strict government gradation and price controls, is an obsessive

element of American diets, touted as the “perfect food.” It also provides a national

imagery of dairy farms and chores that typifies wholesome American life. The Dairy

Council has produced years of effective advertisements supporting consumption,

including a famous series showing celebrities from Spike

Lee

to Health and Human

Services’ Donna Shalala with a milk moustache. Nonetheless, it is no longer

recommended for children under the age of one and Americans not of Northern European

descent may be lactose-intolerant as adults.

GARY McDONOGH

Milk, Harvey

b. 1930; d. 1978

Gay rights advocate and representative of

San Francisco, CA’s

Fifth District on the

Board of Supervisors. After being discharged from the military, Milk eventually migrated

to San Francisco where he set up a business in the Castro district and organized the

Castro Valley Association. After multiple campaigns, he became the city’s first openly

gay individual to gain high public office in 1977. Milk helped pass a city ordinance

forbidding discrimination against gays and lesbians, but was assassinated at City Hall in

ovember 1978 by a former supervisor named Daniel White, who shot Milk five times

after killing then-Mayor George Moscone. After his death, nonetheless, Milk continued

to be a symbol of both gay pride and the toll of homophobia in political actions in San

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Francisco and the nation.

The Times of Harvey Milk

(1984) provides a compelling visual

record of the man, his context and impact.

KATE M.KENSKI

Milken, Michael

b. 1946

Michael Milken helped forge the corporate junk bond concept that fueled explosive

profit earnings for

Wall Street

securities traders in the 1980s. After amassing a personal

fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Milken was arrested for his involvement in

an illegal, insider-trading scheme with Ivan

Boesky

. He pleaded guilty to securities fraud

in 1990 and served two years in federal prison, in addition to paying millions in

government fines and civil damages. The Boesky—Milken scandal raised public

awareness of the growing threat of

white-collar

crime. Since his release from jail,

Milken has endeavored to establish a Consortium for Prostate

Cancer

Research.

SARAH SMITH

Miller, Arthur

b. 1915

A leading American playwright since the success of

All My Sons

(1947) and

eath of a

Salesman

(1949), the latter earning him a

Pulitzer Prize

. His dramas are often familial in

setting, but engage with political concerns. The early plays dealt with issues arising out o

the postwar prosperity, suggesting that this often brought with it unacceptable moral

compromises, the 1947 play describing a man who had profited at the expense of the

lives of American soldiers,

Death

focusing on the emotionally sterile life of a salesman in

New York

City (Miller’s birthplace). In

The Crucible

(1953) Miller wrote about the

Salem witch-trials, implying a parallel with the intolerance of the ongoing

McCarthy

trials, while

A View from the Bridge

(1955) questioned US

immigration

laws.

Remembered also for a short-lived marriage to Marilyn

Monroe,

Miller has continued to

be a prolific writer and outspoken political and cultural critic.

ROBERT GREGG

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 742

millionaires/billionaires

One million dollars has long seemed the threshold of American plutocracy even if John

Rockefeller

passed the billion dollar mark in 1913. Yet

Forbes

magazine noted that in

1996 more than 110,000 families reported incomes of over 1 million, while the number o

millionaire families topped 5 million at the end of the century and is expected to

quadruple by 2010. Reflecting both prosperity and inflation, this benchmark now

regularly figures in multimillion dollar contracts for sports figures,

Hollywood

stars,

executives and the “young self-made millionaire” entrepreneurs of

Silicon Valley

. Yet it

is also portrayed as an accessible goal for a typical American person in coverage o

lotteries

as well as

television

programs that promise wealth through

game shows

televised marriage. Meanwhile,

Forbes

also noted that their list of billionaires had

skyrocketed from 13 in 1982 to 267 Americans in 1999, led by Bill

Gates

(roughly $100

illion), whose personal charitable foundation alone has assets of over $21 billion. While

affirming the American myth of rags to riches, these plateaus also raise questions about

equality

class

and opportunity for many Americans.

ee also:

upper class

Further reading

D’Souza, D. (1999) “The Billionaire Next Door,”

Forbes

October 11, 1999.

GARY McDONOGH

Milwaukee, WI

With port access to Lake Michigan, Milwaukee developed in the nineteenth century as a

major

Midwestern

producer of metals, machinery capital goods and beer (Miller, Pabst).

German

immigration

in the mid-1800s, followed by Poles and Italians in the late 1800s,

rovided labor for emerging industries. Milwaukee was a hotbed for unionism, including

many

strikes

. City government was dominated by socialist reformers from the turn of the

nineteenth century until 1960.

A strong philanthropic spirit supports performing arts, summer festivals and

museums

Recreation includes professional sports (

baseball

(Brewers),

basketball

(Bucks)) and

lakefront activities. Milwaukee was the setting of popular

television

comedies

Happy

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ays

(1974–84) and

Laverne and Shirley

(1976–83). The 1998 population estimate was

571,364.

MARC BALCER

minimalism

Avant-garde visual arts movement that emerged in the early 1960s, characterized best by

three-dimensional objects in simple geometric shapes. Central figures included Carl

Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Morris. These artists drew on early

twentieth-century avant-garde art by Marcel Duchamp and Soviet artists to develop an art

of serial repetition of units, made of common industrial materials, including plywood,

steel, Plexiglass, fluorescent light tubes and bricks. These artworks were often fabricated

in commercial workshops. This was in part a critical response to the dominance o

abstract expressionist styles that emphasized the private experience of the artist, and the

gesture of the artist’s hand. As against modernist critical dicta, which held that the field

of art was the exploration of its specific media, minimalism implied that art was

equivalent to other, industrial forms of labor. The minimalists were theoretically

sophisticated and wrote about their work in art journals, and some were concerned that

their work should draw attention to the architectural conditions of the experience of art.

By the 1970s, when minimalism was established as a style, in the hands of some artists it

degenerated into corporate lobby decoration.

ee also:

architecture

FRAZER WARD

mining

Among American resources, those lying underground—

oil

and gas as well as minerals

and water—have been critical elements in the economic and social transformation of the

landscape. While mining may first evoke gold strikes that spurred settlement o

California

in 1849, longer-term development has also been associated with exploitation

of lead, zinc, iron and coal. This exploitation, however, has gone beyond minerals

themselves to include the men and women who worked them and the environment left

ehind. Hence, mining often has been a symbol of the promise and failure of organized

labor in the US (as it has been worldwide).

Mines brought together immigrants from many races and backgrounds. Whites and

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 744

blacks worked together in the

South

. Women, while not active in the mines as workers

until the 1970s, sustained mining families and provided vital support for worker

solidarity. Towns from Leadville, Colorado to Anthracite, Pennsylvania were organized

around the mine, the company the church and school—and little else.

Coal mining was associated with the

Appalachians,

especially as trains and roads

opened access to Southern coal fields. Here, communities lived and died by the mines—

through both fluctuating prices and fatal disasters. These communities also suffered from

mechanization in the 1940s, which laid off many workers, and from later drives towards

cleaner fuels. At the same time, working conditions decimated miners with black lung

and other medical conditions. Meanwhile, strip mining, which took off top layers in order

to gouge out useful coal, despoiled the landscape and waterways of the region.

The United Mine Workers of America united coal miners in 1890; it later split from the

AFL in the 1930s under John L.Lewis (rejoining in 1989). Labor organization faced

continuing problems, nonetheless, of racial division and owner opposition erupting into

violence. Moreover, the union itself has faced charges of corruption and

mismanagement—most notably in the 1970s when president Tony Boyle was implicated

in the murder of reformist opponent Joseph Yablonski.

Television generally has portrayed mining only in news items about unions or

environmental degradation. Mines have provided rich movie themes, however, generally

viewed from the

Left

. These include Barbara Koppel’s

Harlan County, USA

(1976), a

documentary

about a 1972 strike, and John Sayle’s

Matewan

(1987), which recreated

issues of 1920s West Virginia unrest.

ee also:

environmentalism

GARY McDONOGH

miniseries

Popular

television

format since the 1970s, involving 4–15 hours of narrative, somewhere

between one-time specials and regular series. Miniseries offer flexible responses to

market trends (including news items, historical reflections and popular novels) and may

target audiences during

ratings

“sweeps.” They also allow more character and plot

development and lush use of exotic locales; they have attracted major cinematic

stars,

reinforcing their cachet. Sometimes linked to

PBS

Masterpiece Theatre,

miniseries tend

to be relentlessly middle-brow—evident from one of the earliest, Irwin Shaw’s

Rich Man,

oor Man

(ABC, 1976) or

Upstairs, Downstairs

(PBS, 1975–80).

oots

(ABC, 1977) remains the watershed (if not the first)—the highest rated

miniseries ever and among the most watched television programs. Beginning January 23,

ABC broadcast this 12-hour dramatization of Alex Haley’s family history for eight

successive nights. Vivid images of capture, slavery punishment, separation and love

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