Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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sparked conversations in families, schools and offices even if

Roots

did not evoke the

racial catharsis some contemporary commentators predicted. Nor did the popular sequel

oots: The Next Generation

(1979) or

Queen

(1993) change the overall problems o

African Americans

in television.

Other thematic clusters in miniseries include the Second World War (NBC’s

olocaust,

1978, or

The Winds of War,

1983, and ABC’s

War and Remembrance,

1988–

9, based on novels by Herman Wouk), the West (especially work by Larry McMurtry like

onesome Dove,

1989), crime (CBS’

Helter Skelter,

1976) and exotic historical locales

(feudal Japan in

Shogun,

1980, and Australia in

The Thorn Birds,

1983). The immense

popularity of the last two earned star Richard Chamberlain the nickname “King of the

Miniseries.”

The miniseries continued as a programming tool in the 1980s and 1990s without its

initial fanfare. Religious and fantasy themes have cropped up beside lengthy romances,

historical recreations and other genres. One might also ask how these intersect with

popular PBS

documentary

series by Ken Burns like

The Civil War

(1990) and

Baseball

(1994).

GARY McDONOGH

Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN

Twin cities at the head of the Mississippi River (combined metropolitan population

(1998) of 2,831,234). Founded in the early nineteenth century, they have become centers

for progressive arts, music and

education

as well as

economics

and politics in the upper

Plains. St. Paul, an industrial/commercial center, is the state capital. Minneapolis is

known for the University of Minnesota, progressive politics and its extensive urban lakes

and

parks

. Active professional sports include

football

(the Minnesota Vikings),

baseball

(Twins) and

basketball

(Timberwolves), as well as winter activities. Nearby, in

Bloomington rises the Mall of America, projected to expand to 10 million square feet.

GARY McDONOGH

miscegenation

The mixing of races, especially the

marriage

or cohabitation between a white person and

a member of another race. Miscegenation has been susceptible to changing meanings

insofar as racial categories have altered over time (see

race and ethnicity

). By the early

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 746

twentieth century, as racial difference came to revolve around categories of

white,

black

and Asian, and

American Indian,

notions of miscegenation balanced culturally

constructed temptations. Certainly until the

Civil Rights movement,

black and white

liaisons remained illegal and disturbing for many Americans, closely connected to the

institution of lynching. In the aftermath of civil rights and changing

immigration

quotas

in 1965, a revaluation of notions of color and race has occurred, with the result that

miscegenation no longer carries the same weight as it once did.

ROBERT GREGG

Miss America pageant

The Miss America pageant is an annual beauty contest, taking place each September in

Atlantic City, NJ,

and broadcast on

television

. Beauty- contest champions from each

state

throughout the United States travel to Atlantic City to compete against each other

for the “Miss America” title and accompanying prizes. The first official Miss America

pageant took place in Atlantic City on September 7, 1921.

Further reading

Riverol, A.R. (1992)

Live from Atlantic City: The History of the Miss America Pageant

Before, After and in Spite of Television,

Bowling Green: Bowling Green State

University Popular Press.

NICOLE MARIE KEATING

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

(MFDP)

An outgrowth of the

Freedom Summer

of 1964, the MFDP was formed when leaders o

the umbrella

civil-rights

organization in Mississippi, the Council of Federated

Organizations (COFO), realized that it could not register sufficient

African Americans

for the state’s

Democratic

primaries to make any difference to the system of racial

segregation

and discrimination. Instead, COFO enrolled disenfranchised blacks in the

MFDP, affiliated the new organization to the Democratic National Committee and sent

delegates to

Atlantie City

for the 1964 Democratic Party convention. Debate at the

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convention

about whether to recognize the MFDP delegates instead of those of the

Mississippi Democratic Party was quashed by President

Johnson,

who feared white

southerners would stampede to the

Republican Party

. While Fannie Lou

Hamer

argued

assionately for the rights of MFDP delegates, Johnson argued that blacks needed to

show him gratitude for passing the

Civil Rights Act

. The black convention movement

was one of the legacies of the work of the MFDP.

ROBERT GREGG

mobile homes and trailer parks

The mobile home (trailer or recreational vehicle) would seem successfully to synthesize

two great American twentieth-century obsessions:

freedom/

mobility

and

automobiles

Certainly, the emergence of automotive campers and trailers before the Second World

War as well as accommodations for these compact homesteads offered this promise. Yet,

during wartime shortages and their aftermath, a second vision came to dominate the

industry—that of mobile homes as pre-manufactured alternative housing. By the 1980s,

90 percent of mobile homes remained stationary after their initial move; moreover, they

represented one out of every three new single-family homes sold. Rather than mobility

ironically they are identified with the lack of it, socially as well as literally in retirement

complexes, marginal housing or, at best, temporary or secondary dwellings. “Trailer

parks,” communities built to accommodate these homes, have gained especially negative

imagery reinforced by urban restrictions and limitations on financing.

The American origins of these homes preceded automobiles—in the covered wagons

of westward migrations (commemorated in a 1929 commercial trailer), in elite train cars

or even

gypsies

(the “motorized Gypsy van” was another prototype name). Generally

early mobile homes were individual modifications on existing transportation.

Commercial production expanded in the 1930s, including the classic Airstream with sleek

modern lines. Interiors were cramped, although aerodynamic fittings provided basic

house services in ingenious ways. Some were residential but others roamed expanding

highways

and tourist sites—the 1939 New York World’s Fair offered 1,200 trailer spaces

in the Bronx.

The Second World War restricted gas and travel. Yet population displacements for

industry and military meant new uses for the trailer home as “temporary housing.” Truly

temporary usage continued through the 1990s on construction sites, film locations, dorms

and classrooms. Yet permanence also changed production and use. From the 1950s

onwards, production moved towards larger units with private rooms and more extensive

facilities. These included expandable structures and homes based on multiple sections.

Once moved by trucks to a site they became permanent—sunk into the ground, built onto

(carports, additional rooms) and landscaped. By the late 1990s, this manufactured

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housing cost from 110,000 to more than $100,000; even the latter remains “affordable”

compared to new home construction.

In the 1990s, nearly half of all mobile homes resided in 24,000 “parks” scattered from

expanding

Sunbelt

and metropolitan fringes to

New York

City (Staten Island). Parks

have grown from 40–60 lots in the postwar era to an average of 200 sites. These

developments often show concern with fostering

community

through decoration,

streetscapes or recreational facilities. Half of mobile homes occupy private lots, including

second homes for resorts or retirement.

Settlements have not eliminated movement, although these faced further setbacks with

the fuel crisis of the 1970s. Compact recreational vehicles like the Winnebago, campers

and modified of pickup trucks have restated the mobile-home ideal in terms of access to

the outdoors through automotive freedom.

Yet the social and media connotations of these homes remain clear—although they

foster privacy and domesticity they are non-standard, cheaper, impersonal and associated

with transience. News coverage emphasizes weather damage and frailty (the

American

Association of Retired Persons,

in 1999, said 75 percent of owners had complaints).

Fictional media use them as settings for immigrants, the poor or outcasts; the epithet

“trailer trash” conveys a sneer that might not be voiced politely in ethnic or class terms.

Further reading

Wallis, A. (1991)

Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes,

Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins University.

GARY McDONOGH

Model Cities

Instituted by President

Johnson

in 1966 as an urban campaign within the

War on

Poverty,

the Model-Cities program sought to coordinate fed-eral, state and local

authorities in social reform of slum-housing, poverty disease, dependency and crime.

Model Ccities soon faced challenges to its scale within cities and about how many cities

could claim its scarce funds. By 1974 a more anti-urban

Nixon

presidency could point to

its lack of accomplishments and shift funding to block grants. Nonetheless, individual

programs and

community

leaders arising from them attest to the ideal, if not the

realization of this program.

GARY McDONOGH

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model minority

“

”

see

Asian Americans; immigration; race and ethnicity

modernism

To understand postwar American modernism one needs to consider the dynamic field o

cultural production that preceded the postwar global hegemony of American culture. In

fact, the postwar activity and dissemination of this modernism was arguably a cumulative

endpoint of several decades of enthusiastic and creative energy around a particular brand

of modernism. As Ann Douglas points out in

Terrible Honesty,

“[the] modern world as

we know it today all the phenomena that to our minds spell the contemporary…arrive on

the scene [in the 1920s], and although these phenomena have been extended and vastly

empowered in the decades since, they have not fundamentally altered” (1995:192).

The opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 signaled America’s commitment to

modernist tendencies in the creative arts of the twentieth century. But the term, modern,

is a highly contentious one. If it is an impossible task to define and date precisely

international “modernism,” it may be possible, however, to trace the discursive terrain

that manufactured

American

modernism. In other words, late nineteenth and early

twentiethcentury ideas of the modern (and, thus, modernism) in America can be sketched

as a complicated discourse that brings together a hyper force of creativity with vast

amounts of capital, a fascination with

nature

and machine, an uncertainty of the use o

rural

and urban spaces, the failures and successes of efficient mechanical reproduction

and assembly-line production and a dream of a recognizable American art. This

amalgamation of disparate cultural activity played itself out in the creative forms o

poetry,

novels, painting,

photography,

film-making,

dance

and

architecture

The most influential voice for American modernism was that of the nineteenth-century

poet Walt Whitman (1819–92). His elegiac poetry and prose fused the tropes of machine

and

nature

in order to present his vision of an ideal America. In his

Democratic Vistas

(1870), Whitman eschewed the tradition of Europe as the driving force behind America’s

own creative enterprise. America, he claimed, needed to find its own unique national

voice. Stripped bare of what he saw as the

dilettanti

art of Europe, Whitman proposed a

creative sensibility that was manly in virtue and neither effeminate nor decadent in form

and content. American art, in other words, should combine the heartiness of nature with

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 750

the precision and function of a machine. Whitman’s call did not go unheard.

American artists such as photographers/filmmakers Paul Strand and Pare Lorentz, and

photographers Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz, painters Robert Henri, Georgia

O’Keefe

and Charles Sheeler, and architect Frank Lloyd

Wright

acknowledged Whitman as an

important creative force in their work. These artists forged a modernist sensibility that

sought to represent the American work of art as an intermingling of

Midwest

ruggedness

with the promise of modernage machinery American artists, especially after the First

World War, succeeded in producing an image that streamlined nature and machine while,

more strikingly it masculinized the parameters of American creativity.

“The general opinion is,” wrote critic Henry McBride in 1922, “that [the new

American artists] are to be as lusty as those that Walt Whitman prophesied for us.” Lusty,

ut strong, virile, efficient and undeniably American, one need only look at the

collaborative film project based on a Whitman poem (“Man(a)hatta,” 1920) between

Strand and Sheeler to see the poet’s dream of a sublime American modern art come to

fruition.

This lusty and virile American modernism wended its way through the twentieth

century where it found its apogee in the work of abstract expressionist painter, Jackson

Pollock

(1912–56). Trained by the hand of regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton

(1889–1975), Pollock (along with art critic Clement Greenberg in the late 1940s and

early 1950s) championed an American art that, like Whitman, refused the “effeminate”

European tradition and sensibility of art. Garbed in jean jacket, T-shirt and

cowboy

boots,

Pollock exhibited both himself and his work as the pure American masculine ideal o

artist and art. As Pollock saw it, he and his work were the profound (American)

conjunction of man, nature and art. In 1944 he told painter Hans Hofmann, with perfect

Whitmanesque sublimeness, “I am Nature.”

To this day, the encomiums continue to be sung for this apparent modernist tradition

extant between Pollock and Whitman. Carter Ratcliff, for example, states that Pollock’s

work “[evokes] a sense of the limitless possibility the best of his canvases gave us—for

the first time—a pictorial equivalent to the American infinite that spreads through Walt

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” (1996:3).

With Pollock, America had hoped to find its “pure” national voice, while it

hegemonically positioned his work as

the

international representation of Modern Art. As

Serge Guilbaut argues, Pollock’s paintings emerged precisely at the moment when post-

Second World War American culture began to saturate the world. Pollock’s paintings

now sell for millions of dollars and hang in many major international corporate centers

and

museums

To be sure, the tension underscoring the notion of American modernism is riddled with

complicated conflict. But the masculinist (and arguably misogynist and homophobic)

influence of Whitman as it is reworked by twentieth-century artists cannot be

underestimated. But there were interesting cracks in this earnest version of American art.

While admiring the work of Whitman, artists such as poet Charles Henri Ford resisted the

heteromasculinizing of American art by championing a convergence of multiple strains

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of creative practice. His art journal,

View

(1940–7), co-edited with Parker Tyler, explored

the perverse strains of surrealism, magic realism, the analytic art of Marcel Duchamp and

the pleasures of the

Hollywood

film. Painter Paul Cadmus and photographer George

Platt-Lynes also embraced a non-American modern aesthetic.

Carl Van Vechten (photographer/impresario) along with painter Florine Stettheimer

carried the exotic visions of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe to America. Van Vechten

was also instrumental in launching the careers of several young writers (Langston

Hughes, for example) who would later become associated with the

Harlem

Renaissance.

Along with Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen penned a new literature and

poetry that evoked the creative energies of life in 1920s Harlem. During the 1950s, film-

makers/ artists Kenneth Anger and Joseph Cornell compiled the waste from culture

industry production and adorned their films and

objets d’art

with it. Bebop and swing

azz,

modern dance,

advertising,

movies and egregious camp aesthetics were other vital

forces of American modernism. Painters Robert

Rauschenberg

and Jasper

Johns

also

turned away from the “pure” notions of abstract expressionism in order to present

America to itself as a well-worn tradition of symbols and junk.

After Pollock’s death, the 1960s witnessed a reinvestment and interest in European art

movements such as Futurism and Surrealism—Andy

Warhol

and pop being, of course,

the most visible transgression of the “pure” American art movement. Warhol’s ability to

play with representation within the quick and ever-(r)evolving universe of technology

and media loosened the old-guard terms for American modernism. Many have argued

that the 1960s can be marked as the historical break between modernism and

post-

modernism

. Like modernism, postmodern is yet another term burdened with varying

definitions of ideological weight.

Further reading

Douglas, A. (1995)

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s,

New York:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Guilbert, S. (1983)

How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,

Chicago.

McBride, H. (1922) “American Art is Looking Up,”

New York Herald

October 15.

Ratcliff, C. (1996)

The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock

and Postwar American Art,

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

DAVID GERSTNER

mom-and-pop stores

Small retail establishments serving urban

neighborhoods,

these “corner” stores offer

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 752

groceries and sundries, services and sociability as well as occasional credit, for those

beyond downtown commercialism. The nickname underscores the convergence of

family

and business in ownership, residence and self-exploitation, as spouses and children work

long hours for limited profits. Nonetheless, these have been a respected step in economic

mobility (as in

Dobie Gillis,

CBS, 1958–63).

white flight

altered urban neighborhoods, these establishments were trapped. Those

who did not close sometimes found themselves isolated by

race

or language. While new

neighbors saw their higher prices as indications of exploitation rather than commercial

marginalization, aging owners worried about

crime

and hatred. This tension has

remained when new immigrants buy out these family stakeholds (e.g. Korean

shopkeepers and

African Americans

Los Angeles, CA

). Spike

Lee

portrays both the

old and new stores in

Do the Right Thing (1989)

GARY McDONOGH

Mondale, Walter Frederick (“Fritz”)

b. 1928

Liberal

Democratic

senator of Norwegian American descent from Minnesota who

became

vice-president

under Jimmy Carter (1977–81). After Carter’s defeat, Mondale

gained the 1984 presidential nomination, but he and running-mate Geraldine

Ferraro

were trounced by Ronald

Reagan

. Under Bill

Clinton,

Mondale returned to national

public service as ambassador to

Japan

(1993–7) and special envoy to Indonesia.

GARY McDONOGH

Monk, Thelonious Sphere

b. 1917; d. 1982

Visionary composer and pianist who was part of the select group of musicians who

created the postwar

jazz

genre of bebop, and whose influence continued into the post-

bebop era. Moving to

Harlem

at the age of five, he studied with the great pianist Mary

Lou Williams and started performing in 1934. Although his compositions and

performance styles were valued by his peers, Monk was under-appreciated by jazz fans

and critics during his early career. He was quirky unorthodox and sparse as a composer,

improvising at times from the melodic line and not the chordal structure. He employed

abrupt tempo changes and melodic twists to invigorate his unorthodox playing—his

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signature stylings served to inspire other mavericks.

EDWARD MILLER

Monroe, Marilyn

b. 1926; d. 1962

Vulnerable, funny, alluring but not threatening, this platinum blonde with pouty lips

and breathy voice remains the ultimate sex symbol of the postwar era decades after her

mysterious suicide. Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she suffered through a horrendous

childhood of abuse before escaping into

marriage,

modeling and film, where she debuted

in 1948. Stardom came in the 1950s along with marriages to American

baseball

icon Joe

Di Maggio and the playwright Arthur

Miller

. Along the way Marilyn produced movies,

characters and even scenes that live vividly in the American imagination—

roduction

numbers from

Gentleman Prefer Blondes

(1953), a blowing skirt from

The Seven Year

tch

(1955), the naive Sugar from

Some Like it Hot

(1959). Psychological problems and

drugs marred her last years before her death from an overdose. This has been linked

subsequently to her involvement with President John

Kennedy,

to whom she had offered

a famous birthday tribute (“Happy Birthday Mr President”) before the lives of two icons

of the 1960s were cut short. We do not forget either.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Moore, Mary Tyler

b. 1936

Female actor, dancer and comedian; her longrunning

sitcom

roles personified changing

images of American females. As Laurie Petrie, suburban wife and mother on the

Van Dyke Show

(1961–6), Moore projected innocence and enthusiasm. These qualities

were tempered as she portrayed a single woman in a

television

newsroom in the

Mary

Tyler Moore Show

(1970–7); Moore won multiple Emmys in both roles. Her joint

roduction company with husband Grant Tinker, also contributed television milestones

Hill Street Blues

(NBC, 1981–7). Her later career has seen expansion to dramatic

roles in film (Oscar nomination for

Ordinary People,

1980) and stage, alongside deep

personal tragedies.

GARY McDONOGH

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 754

CINDY WONG

moral majority

Nixon, Richard

Mormons

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church,

or the LDS Church, has over 10 million members. Mormons are found in 155 countries

and territories throughout the world in more than 22,000 congregations and there are

currently over 50,000 missionaries preaching worldwide. Over half of the members live

outside of the United States. The largest nonUS Mormon populations are in South

America and

Mexico,

followed by Asia, Europe, Central America, the South Pacific,

Canada, Africa and the

Caribbean

. The church has a male lay priesthood and, except for

an extremely small number of general authorities, no paid clergy Church members, both

men and women, assist in the administration and spiritual sustenance of the

congregations. Members are voluntarily tithed at 10 percent of their income. Participation

in congregations, community service and missionary work extend well beyond Sabbath

worship.

Joseph Smith, Jr., founder and first prophet, organized the church in 1830 at Fayette,

ew York. Persecution drove the Mormons from New York to Ohio, Missouri and

Illinois where Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred in 1844. Following his death,

Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, led the main body of the church west in the Mormon

ioneer exodus that ended in the building of the Mormon Zion in Utah. Large numbers o

European converts migrated west. Mormons were important colonizers of the western

United States and, despite disputes over the economic structuring of Mormon society

(strongly communitarian) and the practice of plural marriage among some church

members (discontinued in 1890), Utah was granted statehood in 1896. Despite difficulties

with the federal government and anti-Mormon sentiment nationally the Mormon Church

exemplified nineteenth-century American idealism. Mormonism can be seen as the

embodiment of manifest destiny and the American dream.

In the post-Second World War period, the LDS Church has experienced a period o

rapid growth, organizational consolidation and financial security Currently it is

undergoing the transition from an American to a global

religion

. Doctrinally the church

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