Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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she reached the top of the country charts as a singer-songwriter with songs like “Here

You Go Again” and “Jolene.” She received good reviews when she moved into acting

with

9 to 5

(1980), also a crossover hit song for her, and the later

Steel Magnolias

(1989).

In her home state, a theme park named Dollywood (founded 1986) keeps her legend

alive.

EDWARD MILLER

party machines

Before the turn of the century strong political

parties

were a prominent feature o

American

cities

. These party machines, as they were called, recruited citizens, especially

new immigrants, to vote for their party. These organizations were not particularly

ideological; instead, they recruited through an elaborate system of patronage run by

“bosses.” Those who supported the party were rewarded with jobs or other services. Party

machines were largely eliminated at the turn of the century by the Progressive movement,

a group consisting largely of upper middle-class reformers determined to clean up city

politics.

EMILY CLOUGH

patriotism

A nation of immigrants might be expected to manifest considerable fragmentation and

widespread expression of ethnic or regional loyalties, rather than vociferous declarations

of love of country; however, this has not been so. Social elites in the United States have

often “incorporated” notions of “Americanness” to establish their own legitimacy and

have used their understanding of patriotism to attempt to either reshape or restrict

immigration

. For

African Americans

and other immigrants, then, patriotism has been

oth a vehicle aiding advancement or an obstacle placed in their way In times of war

(including the

Cold War

), members of many ethnic groups along with African

Americans showed their loyalty to the United States through service in the armed forces.

Groups might also use patriotism to distinguish themselves from others who do not

elong to the dominant white culture. Yet patriotism can also promote more inclusive

social change. Thus, a

Civil Rights movement

is patriotic because it strives to help

Americans reach their “highest ideals.”

In recent years, debates swirling around issues of patriotism have both intensified and

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become confused. The lack of clear-cut

enemies

after the Cold War and increased

globalization have confused obvious identification with the nation. Instabilities resulting

from such developments, however, have led to the use of patriotism to justify nativist

acklashes against immigrants, demands for protection and opposition to NAFTA

(particularly from the AFL-CIO) and increased hostility towards the World Trade

Organization. US involvement in wars from the

Reagan

administration to the present has

also intensified patriotic fervor, spilling over into the demand (particularly from

Republican

politicians and especially loud during the

Gulf War

) for a constitutional

amendment to ban the burning of the American flag.

ROBERT GREGG

Pauling, Linus

b. 1901; d. 1994

Scientist, activist and the only figure to have won two unshared

Nobel prizes

Pauling’s scientific work originally focused on the nature of chemical bonds and their

impacts on complex formations like proteins for which he received the Nobel Laureate in

Chemistry (1954). He also worked against the spread of atomic weapons, organizing a

1958 petition to the UN signed by 11,000 scientists. This work led to the Nobel Peace

rize in 1962. In his later years, he became absorbed by the possibilities of Vitamin C in

fighting

cancer

and extending human life, an enthusiasm other scientists did not share.

GARY McDONOGH

PBS/Public Broadcasting System

In November 1967 the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law by President Lyndon

Johnson

. This Act established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as an

independent, non-governmental body formed to serve as the umbrella organization for

ublic broadcasting in the United States. Over thirty years, PBS has produced hits and

changed broadcasting, while being charged with both elitism and middlebrow, safe tastes.

After the Second World War, the FCC had ensured that a certain number of stations

would be reserved for educational broadcasting, but securing the money to run these was

difficult. Initially, stations were usually affiliated to universities and other large

institutions. In the 1960s, 125 educational

television

stations reached 6 million viewers.

Notable stations included WQED in

San Francisco, CA,

which had begun in 1950; in

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1955 it came up with an innovative form of fundraising—the on-air auction. This became

a mainstay of both its programming and fundraising schedules and is used by other local

ublic stations that remain reliant upon donations, especially after recent government

cutbacks.

With the 1967 Act, a place on the broadcast spectrum for educational non-commercial

television was secured. Within the decade, the number of public stations doubled and 30

million homes would enjoy access to public broadcasting. Today 99 percent o

Americans have access to public broadcasting. The CPB was authorized to develop

educational broadcasting and finance facilities to link the independent public television

stations, but was restricted from owning stations, systems, or networks. The CPB

established the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1969 to manage the interconnection

of independent public and educational broadcasting facilities. PBS is owned by its

member stations; each member station is accountable to its local community

Programming originates from a local station and is shared by member stations. For

example,

Electric Company,

the award-winning

children’s

show, was produced by the

Boston

station WGBH, but shown nationwide. The related production company Children

Television Workshop, produced

Sesame Street

for New York. Each station within the

umbrella is free to produce and buy its own programming, but increasingly stations’

rogramming mimics that of other stations, so that PBS resembles a commercial network.

Commercial networks never registered any protest to PBS; they quickly realized that

PBS was appealing to a different segment of the market. PBS showed dynamic fare such

Eyes on the Prize,

a groundbreaking documentary on the

Civil Rights movement,

and

n American Family,

an innovative show that followed the life of a California middle-

class white family. It also became the venue for many Ken Burns documentaries—from

baseball

radio

. Shows like

Nature

and

Nova

made it popular with educators just as

Sesame Street

and

Mr Roger’s Neighborhood

made it a must-see with kids. English

shows were imported via the programs

Mystery

and

Masterpiece Theatre,

while

opera

and ballets were telecast live as ways to appeal to the high-

row population. At the same

time, some more daring programming was also produced, such as

Alive from Off-Center,

which showed work from avant-garde artists and performers. Both, however, redefined

ublic as elite rather than popular (or even local). Although commercial advertisements

are not broadcast on PBS, stations and programs are allowed to announce the

corporations and foundations who have underwritten particular shows. This has increased

as government cutbacks (spurred on by the right wing) have eroded the financial

structure. Corporations are able to portray themselves through PBS as interested in the

arts, concerned about the environment and involved in the technological future without

having to resort to anything as gauche as a traditional advertisement. Some fear that this

corporate patronage has hindered the stations’ ability to develop programming free from

censorship

and to produce innovative shows as the system did in its first few years.

EDWARD MILLER

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Peace Corps

Proposed by John

Kennedy

on the campaign trail in 1960. The idea of American

volunteers scattering around the world to promote democracy and development came to

epitomize the sometimes contradictory youthful commitment and liberal initiatives within

Cold-War

framework. Organized by Sargent Shriver and Bill Moyers in 1961, the

Peace Corps recruited 70,000 volunteers over the next decade. It sent them out after

training rather weak in language and skills and strong on theory and physical and

sychological training. Once abroad, these Americans found themselves less pioneers and

saviors than uneasy participants in negotiations about the future that called into question

their own values and identities—especially among minorities and women cast into

unfamiliar settings. The Peace-Corps process became cooperative and open rather than

developmental; in this way it may have helped shift American awareness of the non-

European world towards a more complex global consciousness as Fritz Fischer argues in

aking Them Like Us

(1998). In later decades, the Peace Corps improved training and

selection for useful skills, while operating on a smaller scale, especially under hostile

Republican

regimes. Its alumni found places in the

Carter

administration and in

academic and policy circles.

Further reading

Fischer, F. (1998)

Making Them Like Us,

Washington, DC: Smithsonian.

GARY McDONOGH

Peale, Norman Vincent

b. 1898; d. 1993

Methodist

minister and apostle of self-improvement, Peale gained wide exposure as

pastor of

New York

City’s Marble Collegiate Reformed Church, as well as through his

radio and television appearances. His

Power of Positive Thinking

(1952) was the

forerunner of many

self-help

texts of the 1980s and 1990s.

GARY McDONOGH

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Peckinpah, Sam

b. 1925; d. 1984

Film and television

director,

writer and producer. Most famous for his revisionist

western

films of the 1960s and 1970s, Peckinpah was also a pioneer of the adult western

television

dramas of the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote such programs as

Gunsmoke

and directed and produced the critically acclaimed series

The Westerner

(1960). In his

film masterpiece,

The Wild Bunch

(1969), his experiments with editing, slow motion,

dialogue and the choreographic depiction of violence and death have been copied and

emulated by a generation of action and western film-makers, most notably Walter Hill.

EDWARD MILLER

Pei, I

(Ieoh) M

(Ming)

b. 1917

Architect born in Canton,

China,

becoming a US citizen in 1954. His global works are

characterized by both rational modern style and serene elegance in the interplay of planes

of glass and stone/ concrete. Among his best-known works are

Boston’s

John Hancock

Tower (1972), the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in

Washington, DC

and the

Bank of China in Hong Kong which reunites his modernist vision with Chinese

symbolism. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1983.

GARY McDONOGH

PEN/Faulkner Award

Founded by writers in 1980 to honor their peers, the PEN/Faulkner Award has become

the largest juried award for fiction in the United States. Its name recognizes both

Nobel

laureate William Faulkner, who used his prize-money to create an award for young

writers, and its affiliation with the international writers’ organization PEN (Poets,

Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists). Every year the award judges, themselves

fiction writers, select five books. The top book earns a $15,000 award, while the rest

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 860

receive $5,000 each. Funded by donations, in 1987 the PEN/Faulkner Foundation

established an endowment for future awards.

COURTNEY BENNETT

pension

retirement; strikes; Social Security; stocks and bonds; unions

Pentagon

The National Security Act of 1947, establishing the

president’s

overriding responsibility

for both defense and foreign policy, created the Secretary of Defense, the

Central

Intelligence Agency

and the National Security Council, centralizing the armed forces in

the Pentagon. The Act aimed to end the rivalry among the military services by combining

them under one power, which, theoretically at least, would be able to subordinate

parochial interests and economize by ending duplication. Over time, the massive five-

sided building in Northern Virginia, with miles of corridors and offices, has become

symbolic of the strengths and weaknesses of American military force and planning.

With the president constitutionally enthroned as commander-in-chief, civilian control

of the armed forces was secure. But the growth of forces during the Second World War,

the prospect of conflicts arising with the Soviet Union and a perceived need to balance

political concerns with military strategy led

Truman

to bolster his position with the

establishment of a Cabinet-level Secretary of Defense to oversee all the military.

Korea firmly established the Pentagon within the American political system. While

still dominated by military men, the Pentagon began to move towards civilian politics,

embodied in the conflict between Secretary of Defense George

Marshall

(supported by

Truman) and General

MacArthur

in Korea, which led to the latter’s dismissal. By the

time President

Eisenhower

retired from office, a system, which he termed the “military-

industrial complex,” was firmly entrenched. While this term suggested a threat to a

democratic society, it also denoted a system in which the three elements (economic,

political and military) of C.Wright Mills’

Power Elite

(1956) collaborated in a loose

balance.

A more sinister Pentagon emerged in the 1960s under President

Kennedy

and Robert

McNamara, his Secretary of Defense. Kennedy had made the “missile gap” central to his

political campaign against

Nixon

in 1960 and so, following his victory, he emphasized

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military build-up, unrestrained by economic and political advisability. In addition,

McNamara brought to the Department of Defense his experience as the CEO of Ford.

Hence, he promoted approaches that had seemed to be working in the Big Three

Automakers and other corporations (many of which produced goods for the Pentagon).

These would soon be shown to be woefully inadequate for a changing political and

economic landscape.

McNamara instituted industrial management in the federal government with the

Secretary of Defense in control of a huge network of enterprises. As in multi-division

firms, a Central Management Office was established to administer the “militaryindustrial

empire.”

ow the federal government began to direct production of over $44 billion in

goods and services aimed for military use, instead of merely contracting out projects. In

other words, the federal government did not merely regulate; it actually took over the

business.

Moreover, what workers at the Pentagon called “missile-gap madness” legitimized

almost any expenditure to complete a project. Cost overruns, malfunctioning parts and

basic tools and supplies bought at exorbitant rates became common. The C-5A transport

lane came in with a $2 billion cost overrun. Forty percent of Minuteman II missiles were

found to be defective after test failures had been covered up. Finally, an electronics unit

for the F-III fighter (McNamara’s pet project), budgeted at $750,000 per plane, ended up

costing $4.1 million per plane. McNamara had encouraged centralization partly to cut

back on waste, but he created the exact opposite.

Civilian control under Kennedy and Johnson also established the number-crunching

mentality of McNamara and his technocrats. This mindset even influenced the way

engagements were carried out, especially Vietnam. Rather than achieving strategic

objectives, securing particular pieces of land or gaining other tactical advantages,

American sol-diers were trained to fight wars of attrition. In the language of the industrial

world, this meant producing maximum bodies among the enemy at a minimum of cost in

bodies for Americans. This gave rise, as Philip Caputo recounted in

Rumor of War

(1977), to the infamous “body counts.” Monthly goals were set, a ratio calculated that

would secure victory (believed to be twelve Vietnamese for every one American) and

operations were even designed to ascertain numbers of dead on each side. That this was

the period of lowest morale in the history of the American armed forces is not surprising.

Moreover, since the Pentagon was being run as a business,

public relations

were

needed. What Senator J.William

Fulbright,

Chairperson of the Committee on Foreign

Relations, called the Pentagon Propaganda Machine was an extremely elaborate

advertising

agency selling what the Pentagon was doing to the public. Disaster came not

so much on the battle field as in the war of images waged on

television

. The Pentagon’s

campaign was shown to be seriously flawed when slogans like “The Light at the End o

the Tunnel” were followed by setbacks like the

Tet Offensive,

or when General

Westmoreland’s roseate news briefings were disturbed by nearby shelling.

The war resulted in the

“Vietnam Syndrome,”

or the belief that American

governments would be reluctant to undertake military engagements in the future. This

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 862

was not simply due to lack of public support or the media overstepping their bounds. The

McNamara-designed Pentagon proved unable to reach even its own distorted objectives,

let alone other strategic objectives a president might set. President

Carter’s

1980 disaster

attempting to rescue the American hostages in Teheran looked worse against the crisp

efficiency of the Israelis flying into Entebbe (1976) to rescue their hostages.

Hollywood

decided to make movies of the Israelis, not the Americans!

Reagan attempted to refashion the Pentagon, partly by “throwing money at the

problem” in another military build-up. His Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger,

elieving that the problem lay in the extent of civilian control at the Pentagon itself,

attempted to diminish this element. In the eyes of many, however, this left a vacuum in

lace. The armed forces merely continued to think in terms of old foes, like the Soviet

Union, rather than reorienting themselves towards new conflicts worldwide.

Engagements in

Grenada

under Reagan, and then

Panama

under Bush, re-established a

sense of the American armed forces as a viable fighting force. Newer, sophisticated

weapons and machines seemed vastly superior to what the Soviets had available, while

Soviet forces became mired in their own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. The long-held belie

that the Red Army had western Europe at its mercy was shown to be entirely erroneous.

Towards the end of Reagan’s administration, changes began to occur at the Pentagon.

Frank Carlucci replaced Weinberger as Secretary of Defense and General Colin

Powell,

relative military visionary was appointed to head the National Security Council. Carlucci

suggested a more conciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union, which was beginning

to collapse, while Powell began to plan for what he saw as the likely conflicts of the

future, particularly those focusing on resources like

oil

This culminated in the

Gulf War

in 1991, one of the first military engagements for

which American military strategists were actually prepared in advance. In the process,

Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf re-established the superiority of US armed

forces. It was not merely the fact that the Americans defeated Saddam Hussein’s forces, it

was the manner in which they did so, leaving an army of tanks utterly devastated.

Under President Bill

Clinton

the Pentagon has once again been subordinated to

olitical considerations. While there were at first hopes of reorienting the economy in the

aftermath of the

Cold War,

the perceived need to intervene abroad militarily has kept the

military budget growing, and defense contractors, albeit less in the heavyindustry sector

and more in high technologies, have remained producing. In addition, such military

intervention, like Clinton’s, has been undertaken with one eye on public reaction,

evidenced by the

polls

Somalia

was a necessary humanitarian intervention until a few

American lives were lost; the Rwandan genocide had to be overlooked because of the

disaster in Somalia. Similarly intervention in Kosovo was necessary because of the

failure to act in Rwanda. All the while, actions against Iraq seemed to occur based on a

schedule set by the

Independent Counsel

Starr, rather than global strategic

considerations.

But such politicization is almost inevitable in a world where the old Cold-War

certainties no longer remain. Indeed, Powell’s visionary approach to shaping the

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Pentagon was not simply to prepare for a new kind of war against a new enemy in the

Middle East; it was rather to prepare for all kinds of wars against many potential enemies.

As such, the message has not been to diminish civilian control, since this is required of a

democracy; rather it is that McNamara’s approach, where everything is subordinated to

the bottom line of efficiency or a Clinton approach, where there is no bottom line (as in

the debate over gays in the military), are no longer acceptable in a world where

allegiances are shifting, people are migrating across boundaries and new kinds o

globalization are taking place.