Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

because of his work with the

CIA

and his close alliance with the United States. He also

amassed a fortune through involvement in the US drug trade. Yet, his continued rule in

Panama became unacceptable for American authorities when he refused to help them

fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Invoking the drug trade, in 1989, President

Bush

sent an invasion force of 27,000 into Panama to capture and replace Noriega.

Brought to

Florida

and not allowed to reveal all his connections with the American

intelligence community during his trial, Noriega was jailed, although the drug trade was

largely unhampered.

ROBERT GREGG

paperbacks

publishing; romance novels

parades

Whether celebrating ethnic heritages, sporting events, political candidates or

controversial causes, parades reclaim urban thoroughfares as public spaces for

expressions of group identity Often, these carry memorial/patriotic associations—the

ands, flags, military troops and heroes of 4th of July reverberate through media and

political imagery. Others—the spectacles inaugurating Christmas shopping or celebrating

bowl games

—convey commercial messages through elaborate floats and televisual

coverage.

Disney,

as well, promotes nightly events to sanctify its imagery of small-town

America. Yet parades challenge as well as affirm; the legacy of

civil-rights

marches

underpins contemporary Gay Pride parades and new ethnic celebrations demanding space

in the American landscape.

GARY McDONOGH

Parent Teacher’s Associations (PTAs)

Founded a century ago, these school-

ased groups bring parents into closer contact with

their children’s

education,

support extra school activities and lobby for educational

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 846

issues. In the 1950s and 1960s, they stressed classroom life and fundraising events like

ake sales. The National Association of Colored Parents merged with the older

association in 1970, focusing concern with desegregation. As tax reforms and social

problems like

violence

have challenged both educational budgets and quality, these

associations have taken on more important supplementary roles, although involvement

varies according to

class

and gender, with women being predominant.

GARY McDONOGH

parks, national and state

The concept of a protected natural area under national ownership originated in the United

States in 1870 with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park. Protecting areas o

outstanding scenic beauty quickly grew into a cherished aspect of national policy. The

ational Park Service, created in 1916 to administer the national park system, has

responsibility over more than 350 separate areas totaling about 81 million acres (32.5

million hectares), visited by nearly 290 million people annually. Besides famous and

majestic national parks, the system also includes and preserves monuments, recreation

areas, seashores, lake shores, parkways, forts, bridges and scenic trails as well as historic

arks, sites and battlefields. State parks and municipal parks and playgrounds are equally

diverse and sizable.

New York

City’s urban park system alone contains some 10,530

hectares.

highways

spanned the United States and

automobile

ownership was democratized,

national parks changed from wildernesses or playgrounds for the wealthy to accessible

and affordable vacation destinations for average Americans and foreign visitors. Crowds

make cursory seasonal visits, peering at scenic vistas from car windshields: tours of the

parks of the

Southwest

and

West

constitute

family

pilgrimages rivaling journeys to

Disneyland

and Disneyworld. Extended families use them as gathering places for

reunions. Caravans and retired elderly people cruise between campgrounds redesigned

for large recreational vehicles.

National and large state parks, as multiple-use enclaves, have become pivotal

attlegrounds for the innate tensions between conservation and use. Dependent for their

very existence on

tourism

and stimulated by public interest in

nature

and recreation,

arks, paradoxically, are involved in a constant struggle to preserve natural beauty and

wildlife by attempting to control use. Those interested in

environmentalism,

ackpacking and preserving a more pristine wilderness become pitted against others who

prefer to open parks to more recreational and year-round pursuits such as boating,

fishing, hunting,

rock climbing, recreational vehicles and mountain bikes. In the West,

arks have also become controversial sites of animal management, fire control, grazing,

forestry

and subsurface rights.

Entries A-Z 847

Chronically under-funded by

Congress,

the Park Service must mediate these

competing national impulses. Parks serve as classrooms providing educational programs

on naturalistic, historical and environmental issues. Environmentalists seek presentations

that encourage preservation and heighten awareness of pollution. Historians and minority

groups want greater accuracy and socially inclusive historical explanations. Pressure to

commercialize and privatize park facilities, meanwhile, is unrelenting. Corporate

financial sponsorship of programs and capital improvements, which many view as

intrusive, selfserving public relations, is a constant temptation.

Lobbyists

push pork-

barrel projects and commercial development under the guise of improving

arks. While

Americans view national parks with reverence, they also regard recreational activities as

a civic right. Hence, utilization policies must balance political pressure for special and

narrow uses with simultaneous protection of a heritage for the future.

Further reading

Fisher, R. (1984)

Our Threatened Inheritance,

Washington, DC: National Geographic.

MacNeice, J. (1990)

A Guide to National Monuments and Historic Sites,

New York:

Prentice Hall.

JAMES KRAUS

Parks, Rosa

Widely known as the woman who, tired after a long day’s work, refused to give up her

seat when ordered to do so by a Montgomery, Alabama bus driver. In fact, prior to her

defiance on December 1, 1954, Parks was a local secretary for the

NAACP

and had

heard Rev. Martin Luther

King,

Jr.’s sermons saying that

segregation

needed to be

challenged. She was not the first African American to challenge segregated

buses,

but

E.D.Nixon, head of the local NAACP, believed she could withstand the threats and

pressures and so organized a boycott of Montgomery’s buses. The Montgomery

Improvement Association formed quickly with King appointed as the leader, and within a

year the bus company was forced to desegregate. Rosa Parks was later awarded the

Presidential Medal of Honor by Bill

Clinton

ROBERT GREGG

parks and playgrounds, municipal

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 848

The types and locations of municipal parks are as varied as those of the people who use

them. They include ecological reserves, green spaces, beaches, cement slabs, sports fields

and reclaimed factories, ranging in size from a tiny plaza to many acres. Central Park in

New York

City is perhaps the most famous with its acres of

lawns,

lakes and forest in

the middle of Manhattan. These green parks serve as a relief from busy

cities;

an escape

to the country without going there. Others, like Gas Works Park in

Seattle, WA,

have

converted abandoned industrial sites into urban recreational facilities. On a smaller scale,

vest-

ocket parks are small green spaces squeezed onto empty lots or between two

uildings. Outside cities, metropolitan parks tend to be larger, as they have not had to

compete with real-estate interests for land.

Children’s playgrounds are common in all areas, existing by themselves or within

larger parks. Standard playground equipment includes swings, jungle gyms, merry-go-

rounds, see-saws, slides and sandboxes. Safety is a major concern.

Parks’ conditions range from well-maintained lawns and facilities to dismal scenes o

roken equipment and struggling plants. Funding has been problematic for many

municipalities as limited budgets rank other services above public parks. Many parks,

especially those of historic significance, have private

community

activist groups, who

work to make up for shortcomings in municipal funding and maintenance. Safety is

another concern as people tend to feel that parks are dangerous after dark, and providing

adequate lighting and supervision is expensive and difficult for many cities.

Parks generally serve two main purposes: maintaining open space and providing a

place for

children

and adults to play exercise and spend active time outdoors. They are

commonly used as spaces for concerts, festivals, political rallies and other community

events. Factors affecting the public’s use of parks include available leisure time,

transportation, education and income levels. Quantity of leisure time has had the most

impact on recreational activity—as work weeks have become shorter and people have

more flexible schedules, many cities have seen a rise in park use.

Parks have changed according to the needs and attitudes of the general public in the

century since cities first began to sponsor them. The first public parks were either for

children’s active play or adults’

assive promenades. In the second half of the twentieth

century many parks included

basketball

and

tennis

courts and

baseball

diamonds as a

desire for more active recreation spread among all age groups. Parks face new challenges

as recreational preferences continue to change—

skateboarding

and

in-line skating

are

rough on park equipment. Some municipalities have built skating parks, the latest

evolution in public recreation, ramps and jumps specially built for new high-impact,

high-energy activities.

Further reading

Cranz, G. (1982)

The Politics of Park Design; a History of Urban Parks in America,

Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Entries A-Z 849

Eriksen, A. (1985)

Playground Design: Outdoor Environments for Learning and

Development,

New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

BIANCA T SIEGL

parochial schools

The

Roman Catholic

parochial school system in the United States, the largest

private

school

system in the country and in the world, educates elementary through secondary

students in schools affiliated with Catholic parishes. The system of parochial schools

developed in the nineteenth century as a result of concerns within Catholic circles about

the dominant Protestant sensibility. Catholics viewed the public schools not as secular,

but as non-denominational Protestant, and sometimes audaciously anti-Catholic,

especially where nativist attitudes were strong. The Catholic Church believed that

attendance in public schools would lead to a decline in Catholic identity among the

immigrant Catholic communities.

At the midpoint of the twentieth century, the official position of the Catholic hierarchy

was that all education for Catholics should be religious in orientation and controlled by

the Church, a position held by the majority of Catholics as well. The number of schools

in the parochial school system doubled between 1940 and 1960, when it reached its peak

in population and percentage of Catholics. The predominance of parochial schools in the

Catholic

community

sustained a culture of Catholicism that imbued much of the activity

of the community. From May Queen processions to beginning the school day with Mass,

such socializing resulted in various attitudes among Catholics and perceptions of the

Catholic community. The schools were known for their strict discipline, for children

wearing

uniforms,

and for the religious sisters who tended to run the schools. While

there were abuses of discipline resulting in many true and apocryphal stories about

students surviving Catholic schools, the schools were effective in inculcating Catholic

values in the students and making it more likely that they would remain Catholic in their

later years.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, as Catholics, as a group, have become more

acculturated into mainstream society parochial schools have shifted their focus. While the

majority of schools used to be urban, the majority of Catholics have now moved into the

suburbs

. Thus, schools have been built in the suburbs for the moving population and the

numbers of

inner-city

schools have declined. The remaining inner-city parochial schools

educate increasing numbers of nonCatholics and minorities, following the Catholic

Church’s concern for the poor in the inner cities, especially for

African American,

Latino

and new immigrant populations. For inner-city families, parochial schools offer a

low-cost and high-reward alternative to the decaying

public-school

structure. While

urban parochial schools spend less per student than the local public school, they

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 850

demonstrate higher rates of learning.

In recent years, parochial schools have become the touchstone for traditionalist

religious forces. Foes of the secular public-school system promote parochial schools’

values, and supporters of parochial schools often align themselves with the burgeoning

force for tax-supported vouchers.

Further reading

Bryk, A.S., Lee, VE. (contributor) and Holland, P.B. (1993)

Catholic Schools and the

Common Good,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Greeley A., McCready, W.C. and McCourt, K. (1976)

Catholic Schools in a Declining

Church,

Kansas City: Sheed and Ward.

ERIC A.ZIMMER

parties and elections

The American election system is one of the oldest in the world. It has undergone many

changes, but the basic system has remained much the same since it was written into the

Constitution. The electorate has been slowly expanded through a series of constitutional

amendments; additional impediments to voting, such as poll

taxes

and literacy tests, have

een eliminated; and local and state laws governing the operation of parties have changed

over the years. Demands for campaignfinance reform will no doubt change the system

further, yet it remains highly unlikely that the system’s most essential features will be

changed.

Basic structure of elections

Candidates may run for three different types of office at the national level: membership in

the Senate, membership in the House of Representatives and the

presidency

. In elections

to most offices, the winner is the candidate who receives a plurality of votes; a majority is

not required to win an election. Elections for national office take place on the first

Tuesday in November of every even year (1992, 1994, 1996, etc.). Elections for

membership in the Senate take place every six years on a statewide level. Each state has

two senators and the elections are staggered so that both Senate seats will not be

contested during the same election. Elections for membership in the House o

Representatives take place every two years. Each state gets one member in the House o

Representatives for every 500,000 citizens. States are broken down into districts

Entries A-Z 851

containing 500,000 citizens and campaigns are run at this level.

Presidential elections take place every four years. The winner of the presidential

election is not decided merely by calculating which candidate received the most votes

nationwide; instead, a somewhat complicated system called the electoral college is used.

Under this system, each state is granted one electoral vote for each representative and

senator from that state. If a presidential candidate receives a plurality of votes in a given

state, then he or she receives all of the electoral votes from that state. The candidate with

the majority of electoral votes wins.

With the exception of most of the general guidelines mentioned above, which are

written into the US Constitution, many of the laws governing the operation of elections

are written and enforced at the state level. Laws governing the nomination of candidates

for office, ballot access and the division of the state into congressional districts are

created by the state. Even the decision to divide states into districts was originally a

decision made by the state; in theory states could elect representatives to the House using

proportional representation, or any other method they chose.

It is worth noting that elections for local and state office are often not run the same way

as elections for national office. Sweeping election reform at the end of the nineteenth

century eliminated partisanship from approximately three-quarters of local elections. In

these elections, candidates must run for office without party backing.

Ballot access laws and nomination procedures

Ballot access laws are set by the states. Generally speaking, parties that have received a

certain percentage of the votes in the last election are guaranteed a place on the ballot in

the next election. The

Republican

and

Democratic

Parties,

then, are always assured of a

space on the ballot. For those candidates and parties that cannot maintain the required

ercentage, getting on the ballot is often an arduous process. Generally thousands o

signatures must be collected and submitted to the state months before the election

actually begins. To gain status as an official political party a group usually needs

consistently to win a certain percentage of the votes in a statewide election. This means

that parties officially exist only at the state level. Individual states declare that a group is

a party; the nation as a whole has no way of officially recognizing the existence of a

political party.

Those parties assured of a place on the ballot choose who will run as their candidate

either through primaries or caucuses, or some combination thereof; state law dictates

which technique is to be used. Primaries usually take place a couple of months prior to

the general election. In a primary, members of the party’s rank and file vote for the

candidate they want to represent them. Generally, only those citizens who are registered

as members of a given political party are allowed to vote in that party’s primaries. The

power to nominate rests with the rank and file of the political parties, not with the party’s

leadership, as it does in many European countries.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 852

Conventions

Primaries lead to summer conventions in which nominations are fought (or, more

recently nominees are enthroned), party platforms hammered out and party identity

celebrated in

mass media,

urban festivals and more private parties. These have also

become sites of confrontation with those outside the party as in

Chicago, IL

1968, or the

party elite, as in Atlantic City 1964.

Campaign finance

Unlike many European countries, the United States has a very limited system of public

finance for national elections; some money is granted to presidential candidates, but only

if those candidates receive a rather large percentage of the national vote. Campaigns are

financed, then, almost completely by private sources. Corporations, labor unions and

interest groups all are major contributors to campaigns. Fundraising is primarily the

responsibility of individual candidates, not the political party Politicians spend a great

deal of time soliciting funds and attending functions in order to raise money for

increasingly costly campaigns. Presidential campaigns can begin nearly a year before the

actual election, and potential candidates must spend years raising funds to get the

millions necessary for running the television campaign advertisements that are deemed

necessary to win.

Campaign finance has become a big issue in American politics. There is a general

feeling among voters that too much is spent on campaigns and that candidates are being

“bought” through campaign contributions from corporations and large interest groups.

Some attempt has been made to limit the amount that can be donated to campaigns;

however, much of the legislation that has managed to be passed has been struck down by

the

Supreme Court

for violating the freedom of speech clause in the 1st Amendment o

the US Constitution, and techniques have been devised for getting around what remains

of the legislation. The issue has become particularly salient again as allegations have

risen that President

Clinton

and Vice-President Al

Gore

illegally raised funds from

foreign investors and officials (particularly Chinese government officials) during the

1996 election.

Political parties in America

The Republican and Democratic Parties have dominated the political scene in America

since 1856, when the Republicans replaced the Whigs as one of the two major parties.

Though the parties have shifted their ideological stances over the years, they have

remained more or less stable since the 1930s. Since this period, the Democratic Party has

Entries A-Z 853

taken on the role of the liberal party the closest major party equivalent to the labor parties

of Europe. The party has traditionally aligned itself with labor unions and the working

class. It has generally supported the expansion of

civil rights

and a woman’s right to

choose an

abortion,

as well as the traditional provisions of the welfare state. The

Republican Party on the other hand, supports the expansion of the free market economy

and the dismantling of the welfare state. It has generally opposed a woman’s right to an

abortion and has worked to promote traditional religion through government.

Though generalizations like these do hold, there is little consistency across the country

when it comes to the beliefs that parties or their candidates hold. Because election laws

are made and enforced on a state level and many elections take place at this level, parties

are organized at the state level. Although a national convention occurs every four years

(just before the presidential election) and each of the major parties has a national

committee, most of the strength rests with the state parties. It is often said that the United

States has fifty different party systems. Because parties are organized primarily at the

state level, the ideological stances of parties can be highly regional. The best example o

this is the Southern Democrats. Despite fairly conservative tendencies among voters, the

South

has remained a Democratic stronghold since the Civil War, when Abraham

Lincoln, a Republican president, declared war on the seceding South. These tendencies

were later confirmed when a Republican

resident was responsible for enforcing

integration of schools and other public places. Southern Democrats are generally more

conservative than the Democratic Party as a whole.

Even within a state or region, it is sometimes difficult to find much ideological

consistency. Without the power to choose who will run for office, and with little control

over campaign funds, parties possess little control over candidates. Individual candidates

decide which issues they want to support in a campaign and the direction in which they

will vote when they eventually make it to

Congress

. A political party may agree on some

sort of national agenda, but candidates are not bound to that agenda. A number o

prominent Republicans, for instance, support a woman’s right to an abortion. An already

elected politician may also switch partisan affiliation in the middle of his or her term in

office. Political parties do not possess the kind of ideological unity that is seen in many

countries in which parties possess more control over the nomination and funding

processes, and where parties are organized at a national level.

This focus on individual candidates makes it important that the candidate be able to

create a name for himself or herself independent of the party Political campaigns rely

heavily on television advertisements, which are both expensive and convey little

information about the candidate involved; however, television can create name

recognition for a candidate more quickly than other media. Many scholars worry that

citizens have come to rely too heavily on campaign advertisements when making political

decisions.

The persistence of the two-party system in America

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 854

It is notable that, despite Americans’ dissatisfaction with the current political system and

arties, no third party has consistently managed to gain electoral office. The US has been

dominated by two political parties since shortly after its creation; furthermore, it has been

dominated by the same two political parties for nearly a century and a half. While smaller

olitical parties and independent candidates made some breakthroughs in the twentieth

century they all sunk into obscurity shortly after their campaigns. Two of the most recent

and remarkable breakthroughs of this kind were George

Wallace’s

campaign for

president in 1968 and Ross

Perot’s

run for the presidency in 1992. In both cases, the

candidates gained a fairly large percentage of the national vote without capturing a single

electoral vote. While third-

arty or independent candidates sometimes manage to get

elected to local or state positions, these victories are usually fairly isolated.

What prevents third parties from gaining office? This has been debated for some time,

ut the answer probably lies in American electoral institutions. As mentioned earlier,

allot access laws make it difficult for parties that are not well established to get their

candidates on the ballot. Running a presidential campaign would require adhering to fifty

sets of varying electoral rules. Once on the ballot, the increasing cost of campaigning

makes it difficult for candidates from smaller parties to keep up with their major party

competitors; established politicians from established parties are far more able to raise the

large amount of cash necessary Finally an electoral system which rewards only those

candidates who get the plurality of votes in their districts almost insures that a third-

arty

candidate will not gain office.

Further reading

Aldrich, J. (1995)

Why Parties?,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beck, P. (1997)

Party Politics in America,

New York: Longman Press.

Jacobson, G. (1992)

The Politics of Congressional Elections,

New York: HarperCollins.

Key V.O. (1964)

Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups,

New York: Crowell.

Polsby, N. and Wildavsky A. (1996)

Presidential Elections,

Chatham: Chatham House

Publishers.

Sorauf, F. (1992)

Inside Campaign Finance,

New Haven: Yale University Press.

EMILY CLOUGH

Parton, Dolly

b. 1946

Born in poverty in rural Tennessee, Dolly Parton started her singing career at ten. With

her trademark big blonde hair, her often-made-fun-of big bosom and her clear high voice,

Entries A-Z 855