Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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CINDY WONG

Nixon, Richard M

b. 1913; d. 1994

United States president, 1969–74, Richard Nixon began his political career as a

conservative McCarthyite member of Congress from

California

who pursued Alger Hiss.

He twice served as

Eisenhower’s

vice-

resident and then narrowly lost the presidential

election to John F.

Kennedy

in 1960. Following an embarrassing defeat in the California

gubernatorial election of 1962, he seemed finished. But the resilient and resourceful

Nixon bounced back to win the 1968

Republican Party

nomination, fending off his

more conservative and liberal adversaries (Ronald

Reagan

and

Rockefeller,

respectively), stealing a page from the racist demagogue George

Wallace

in fashioning

what he later called “The Great Silent Majority of Americans,” and squeezing out a

surprisingly close victory over a Hubert

Humphrey

battered and bruised by the events o

1968 (the

Vietnam War,

urban riots,

campus

disorder, the chaos of the

Chicago

Democratic Convention).

Nixon built a

Southern

strategy which thrived on the resentments experienced by

many white Southerners and white, ethnic workers in the North. He slowed the pace o

school integration, attacked “forced

busing,”

tried unsuccessfully to appoint

segregationists to a

Supreme Court

which would support

abortion

rights in

Roe v.

Wade

(1973) and, ingeniously supported

affirmative action

as a wedge issue to divide

trade unions from minorities.

Nixon’s domestic programs were remarkably liberal, in part because of the

Democratic

congressional majorities he confronted. Under his watch,

Congress

passed

significant legislation regarding the

environment,

senior citizens, Social Security worker

safety; important proposals regarding healthcare and a guaranteed national income

(Family Assistance Plan) were considered before faltering. Nixon appropriated

Keynesian measures to address mounting economic problems exacerbated by the OPEC

oil boycott of 1973.

Foreign policy however, was Nixon’s preferred domain. He campaigned with a “secret

plan” to end the war in Indochina. His efforts included: a contradictory mixture of great

ower and diplomacy (efforts to woo both the Soviets and the Chinese to impose a

settlement on the Vietnamese); a madman approach which tried, unsuccessfully to bluf

the Vietnamese into concessions by threatening to use nuclear weapons; Vietnamization,

which sought to sustain domestic support through cutting US forces and, therefore,

casualties and relying on air power; and, finally a more hawkish agenda which included

the secret bombing of Cambodia, complicity in the overthrow of Sihanouk, the invasion

of Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971, the mining of Haiphong harbor and the

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Christmas bombings of 1972. Finally, he and his “odd couple” aide, Henry

Kissinger,

fashioned a peace agreement which provided a “decent interval”

efore, in 1975, the

Vietnamese communists crushed their Saigon adversaries and reunified Vietnam.

Nixon’s greatest accomplishment was his recognition of

China

and his efforts to

achieve deténte with the Soviets. These were countered by his Vietnam failures and his

support for right-wing dictatorships, for example Marcos, the Shah, South African

apartheid and his complicity in the military coup which overthrew the democratically

elected Socialist Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.

Finally the

Watergate

scandal revealed Nixon’s least attractive qualities—his

aranoia, his bigotry his resentments. The investigations uncovered illegal campaign

funding, abuses of power and conspiracy to cover up crimes. Nixon’s taping system

provided the “smoking gun” which finally forced him to resign in disgrace in August

1974.

Further reading

Garreau, J. (1991)

Nine Nations of North America,

Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gottman, J. (1961)

Megalopolis,

New York: Twentieth Century

GARY McDONOGH

Notre Dame

colleges and universities; Roman Catholics

novel

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 820

For that nineteenth-century Anglo-American practitioner, Henry James, the novel was a

loose and baggy monster. This genre, literally the

new

inheritor of the romance tradition

and the cultural consequence of, among other things, the rise of a

middle class,

has such

an extraordinary breadth of forms and formats that definition necessarily gives way to

description. Customary designations of the novel may involve length, linguistic tradition,

regional or national identification, established historical epoch or period, experimental

correlation with developments in other disciplines or spheres, or close association with

cultural movements—often those considered radical, in the mathematical sense of that

word. Many of these categories of description have particular application to the American

novel as one constituent element of a national literary tradition that Marius Bewley

labeled

“The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel”

(1959, italics

added).

One of the earliest written prototypes of the American novel was a New Republic-era

experiment by the nation’s pioneering professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. In

Wieland; or, The Transformation

(1798), Brown introduced themes which have resonated

for two centuries: a reading of the then “untamed,” unfamiliar American landscape as

Gothic wilderness; the preoccupation with madness, guilt and the nightmarish; a

fascination with murder and suffering as acts of divine retribution; and an inexplicable

alliance with the preternatural. From that 1798 narrative, one can easily trace a trajectory

from Edgar Allen Poe’s

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

(1838) and Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s

House of the Seven Gables

(1851) to Flannery O’Connor’s

Wise Bloo

(1952).

Much of American literature has been a Bildungsroman, or novel of education, both in

the literal journeys of individual characters and the nation’s own symbolic

coming o

age

. A very significant component of that journey from innocence to experience has been

the encounter with multiple landscapes of ever-changing national

orders. In his five

novels known as the

LeatherStocking Tales

(1823–41), James Fenimore Cooper narrated

the exploits of Natty Bumpo and the Native chief, Chingachgook, in the confines of the

allegedly “civilized” world and the philosophical textbook of the

frontier

. Such concerns

would return a generation later in the works of American transcendentalists such as

Emerson and Thoreau, while the journey to experience underpins Mark Twain’s

picaresque

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(1884), considered by many the pre-eminent

American novel. For some, the frontier/wilderness was a mythic space in which one’s

mettle was tested and one’s character honed by the struggle for survival. For Herman

Melville, that frontier was an ocean expanse where Captain Ahab in

Moby Dick

(1851)

battled for dominion against Job’s Leviathan. For Tomas Rivera, however, the natural

world was the concrete terrain in which the

migrant

workers of…

y no se lo trago la

tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him

(1971) interwove their achronological and

elusive impressions with the recurrent cycles of the farmworker’s growing seasons. For

John Steinbeck, writing about the forced emigrations of Midwestern farmers in the

Depression era (

The Grapes of Wrath,

1939), nature was an equal partner in an archetypal

story about survival against the odds.

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In an entirely different landscape—the sophisticated world of the European salon—

Henry James described the search for an American identity and a home. James, himsel

an American

expatriate,

painstakingly chronicled that same quest in such novels as

The

merican

(1877) and

The Portrait of a Lady

(1881). Incisive critiques of American

manners also found elegantly nuanced expression in the novels of Edith Wharton,

particularly in

The Age of Innocence

(1920).

Whether sketching out sumptuously appointed drawing rooms or virgin prairies,

American writers often discovered a wilderness of interior exile. The oeuvres of Ernest

Hemingway

and F.Scott Fitzgerald contributed significant portraits to such a gallery

ella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson captured the loneliness of racial identity

confusion in

Passing

(1929) and

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

(1912). In

The

Surrounded

(1936) and

House Made of Dawn

(1968), D’Arcy McNickle and N. Scott

Momaday described painful attempts to reconcile twinned Native and American cultures

which often seemed and functioned as antagonistic or foreign to each other. Gish Jen’s

Typical American

(1991) used

humor

to talk about the problematic cost of

Asian

American

forms of apparently successful identity negotiation, while Bharati Mukherjee’s

fiction asked uncompromising questions about becoming American. The complex

choreography of sexual identity also offered a “queered” reading of the American

consciousness in such works as Djuna Barnes’

Nightwood

(1936) and James

Baldwin’s

Giovanni’s Room

(1956).

Narratives by voluntary as well as involuntary immigrants simultaneously explored the

border crossings from

birth

to physical as well as legal and social adulthood in a new

order. Anzia Yezierska’s

Bread Givers

(1925) pursued the psychological clash between a

father’s old vistas and a daughter’s new world ideals in a narrative about Yiddish cultural

transplantation. A consistent and sardonic critique of the nation’s repressive

infantilization of boys demanding recognition of their full adult status appeared in

Richard Wright’s

Native Son

(1940) and Ralph

Ellison

Invisible Man

(1952).

Intermingling both the pain

and

the beauty of life in the American crucible, the sighted

legatees of Ellison pierced the veil intended to disregard the humanity of the other in such

lyrical prose poems as Sandra

Cisneros’s

The House on Mango Street

(1984). Sometimes

this demythologizing project involved a compelling, incisive and genderforegrounded

interrogation of the constraints on women’s imaginative, fiscal, intellectual and psycho-

sexual independence that surfaced in Kate Chopin’s

The Awakening

(1899) and Theodore

Dreiser’s

Sister Carrie

(1900). Novelists such as Toni

Morrison,

Amy

Tan,

Gloria

Naylor

and Maxine Hong

Kingston

created new dynastic trinities of grandmothers,

mothers and daughters in

Sula

(1974) and

Song of Solomon

(1977),

The Joy Luck Club

(1989),

Mama Day

(1988) and

The Woman Warrior

(1976).

American narrative experimentalists—Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, William

Burroughs,

William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Donald

Barthelme,

Toni Cade

Bambara,

Kurt

Vonnegut,

Ismael Reed, Leslie Marmon

Silko,

Norman

Mailer,

Thomas

Pynchon, Don DeLillo,

Toni Morrison and others—often made use of the conflation o

genres or the construction of fabulation to confront simultaneously the future, the

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inherited and the invented past. Hence, Louise

Erdrich’s

trilogy traces almost a century

of recollections about family stories; for those whose histories have been erased, distorted

or discounted, fiction-as-historiography has become a compelling genre all of its own.

Rememory and the haunting of buried secrets permeate such texts which make

whitewater of streams-of-consciousness. Other writers like Frances Ellen Watkins

Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Upton Sinclair used fiction as a site of testimony

where one could make a public and prophetic record of that which demanded

documentation.

From the preoccupation with the sighting of whales to the haunting power of wraiths

and the remembered, American novels have served as a moveable feast.

LINDA-SUSAN BEARD

nuclear age

America formally ushered in the “nuclear age” on August 6, 1945 when it dropped an

atomic bomb on Hiroshima,

Japan,

to end the Second World War. Nuclear weaponry

had been the American military’s long-sought goal during the war as the government

devoted over 2 billion dollars to the top secret “Manhattan Project,”

ased in Los

Alamos, New Mexico. At the bomb’s first test, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the controversial

scientific director of the project, called upon Hindu writings and famously commented:

“Now I am become death; destroyer of worlds.” This ominous sense of doom pervaded

America’s and ultimately the world’s relationship to the new technology. Initially

roduced within a climate of warfare, nuclear energy never lost the trappings of awe and

fear that surrounded its birth despite years of attempts to reshape public perceptions.

Initially, America held sole rights to the nuclear age and took advantage of its short-

lived technological superiority to establish itself as an unchallenged international military

ower. When the Soviet Union successfully tested their own nuclear weapon in 1949, the

arms race between what were now two superpowers began in earnest. Over the next forty

years, America and the Soviet Union devoted an extraordinary amount of financial and

political capital to building more, as well as more advanced, nuclear-weapons systems. In

America, this arms race and the war games that detailed how such weapons might be

used became the stuff of popular culture, with phrases like “first strike capability” and

“MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction”—concepts that originated on the desks o

military planners—entering the common vocabulary.

For many years, Americans maintained an absorbing political focus on nuclear

weaponry. Generals and the public genuinely debated whether to use nuclear bombs in

both the

Korean War

and in Vietnam. In the 1960 election John

Kennedy

falsely

accused the

Eisenhower

administration of permitting a “missile gap” to arise which

enefited the Soviets. As president, Kennedy himself engaged in nuclear brinkmanship

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with the Soviet Union over

Cuba

. In 1964 Lyndon

Johnson

implied in a famous

television

commercial that, if elected,

Republican

opponent Barry Goldwater would

cause a nuclear war. The

bomb-shelter

craze that swept the country in the late

1950s/early 1960s reflected this public obsession, as did the regular “nuclear attack”

drills held in schools which urged children to “duck and cover” should a bomb fall in the

vicinity.

Although continuing to accelerate nuclear arms development and production,

American political leaders simultaneously called for other countries—

articularly the

Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of

China

—to slow down and limit their nuclear

arsenals. To that end, Kennedy for example, proposed a nuclear test-

an treaty in 1963.

During his first term, Richard

Nixon

focused on a policy of détente with the Soviet

Union—an attempt to cool down

Cold-War

tensions—and negotiated the SALT

(Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) I accord. President

Reagan

reversed this course in the

1980s by denouncing the SALT II agreement negotiated under the

Carter

administration

(although never ratified by the Senate) and extensively funding research into a new,

highly speculative missile defense system set in the Earth’s orbit, known popularly as the

“Star Wars” initiative.

Subsequent presidential administrations defunded this project, but the proliferation o

nuclear weapons around the world and the absence of genuine multilateral arms-

limitation agreements reflects the long-term impact of the fact that America abandoned

nuclear disarmament (outside of the Russia-US arena) as an important policy goal.

Yet, nuclear weapons are but one aspect of America’s tormented relationship with the

nuclear age. American policy-makers attempted to transform the public relationship with

nuclear power from one of terror to one of affection. Public utilities saw the possibilities

of a cheap energy source and began a campaign to convince Americans to welcome

nuclear power plants. Initially the public relations efforts had some success and plants

began to dot the American landscape in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, just as grassroots “Ban

the Bomb” movements had helped reshape disarmament goals in the 1960s, so too did

resistance to nuclear energy on environmental and safety grounds begin to take hold in

the 1970s. Protestors challenging the image of a safe, benign nuclearenergy capability

received the proof they needed in 1979 when a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island

in western Pennsylvania experienced a serious nuclear accident and exposed millions to

the risk of radiation poisoning. This was enough to convince many that their communities

should remain “nuclear free” as a growing political movement in the 1980s argued.

Movies like

China Syndrome

(1979) and

Silkwood

(1983) reflected this growing

opposition to nuclear energy.

In fact, the effects of the nuclear age have been a standard in American popular culture.

Not surprisingly the 1950s proved to be the high-water mark for cinematic

representations of nuclear disaster. Countless B-movies showed the impact of radiation

on the natural world. Although exposure to radiation usually produced massive and

deadly growth (giant ants in

Them

and a giant woman in

The Attack of the 50 Foo

Woman

), sometimes it led to diminution

(The Incredible Shrinking Man)

. These now

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pleasurably “campy” films provide ample evidence of an American culture trying to

come to terms with a new and frightening technology.

Although the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 has freed some Americans from

their longstanding anxiety over an imminent nuclear holocaust, others have pointed to the

unchecked proliferation of nuclear weaponry by many smaller countries as an even

greater source of concern. The longstanding American security policy of “Mutually

Assured Destruction”—which argued that the United States and the Soviet Union could

not risk a war because no one would be left at the end—is of no interest to many nations

who currently have nuclear-weapons capability. Their conflicts are more local and the

attraction of nuclear weaponry more tactically engaging. In the eyes of many the real

“nuclear age” has only now just begun.

SHARON ULLMAN

nurses

Often portrayed in

mass media

as subservient female helpers to the male physician,

American nurses fought in the last half of the twentieth century to be recognized as

skilled care-givers whose roles include assessment and diagnosis of health situations as

well as the care-giving process itself, which may establish intimate and crucial bonds

with patients. In the early twenty-first century nursing remains predominantly female

(roughly 95 percent) and

white

(90 percent), although male and minority participation are

growing.

Demands for recognition have been accompanied by increasing professionalization as

hospital two-year apprentice-based programs have been replaced generally by two- and

four-year programs in

colleges and universities

. The nursepractitioner, who may operate

in basic healthcare settings where physicians are not readily available, represents another

strengthening of nurses’ roles since the 1960s. Meanwhile, medical service workers have

taken over roles not related to healthcare expertise (office management, maintenance

services, etc.).

The 2.6 million registered nurses in the US have a strong lobbying and professional

association in the American Nurses Association, which has sought to situate nurses

within ongoing healthcare reforms and public consciousness. Recognition of nurses in

military settings like Vietnam has also increased. Nonetheless, while

medical shows

and

movies in the 1990s developed images of stronger nurse characters, with more gender

and racial diversity, these shows often make nursing roles secondary, caught in romantic

as well as medical subplots.

GARY McDONOGH

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