International business

There have been times when the United States followed an isolationist foreign policy, but in business matters the United States has been strongly internationalist. Ever since the 1790s, when American entrepreneurs began shipping furs to China, American firms have sought markets in other countries. The American business presence abroad has been a source both of strength and of controversy for many decades.

American diplomacy has often helped to open doors for American business abroad. That is what happened in China after 1899 when the American government adopted what became known as the "Open Door" policy. (At the time, other industrial nations were carving out spheres of influence in China and trying to shut out foreign competitors.) But the relation between business interests and diplomacy has worked both ways. American political leaders have often encouraged American businesses to invest abroad as a way of strengthening the American diplomatic hand. Early in the 20th century, for example, the policy known as

"Dollar Diplomacy" favored American investments in parts of the world that had a strategic interest for American policy-makers.

Not surprisingly, the American business presence has received a mixed welcome in the rest of the world. Many people—especially those who are critical of United States foreign policy—see American business activities as an extension of its diplomacy. Critics charge American firms with using their economic power to influence foreign governments into adopting policies that serve United States political and economic interests rather than local interests.

On the other hand, many people in other countries have welcomed investments by American firms as a means of raising their own standards of living. Foreign investments, whether by American firms or by companies from other nations, help to spread new technology and promote economic growth on a worldwide scale. By investing abroad, American businesses have provided many new jobs and new products for people who lacked access to the benefits of modern industrial society. They have opened up new avenues for advancement and new outlets for the ideas and energies of millions of people.

By injecting new capital into other countries, American investors are doing what British, French and other European investors did for the United States in the last century. They are improving the local economy and setting in motion powerful forces—economic forces that transcend the immediate goals of investors and policymakers. Once in motion, such forces take on a life of their own. Their ultimate effect is completely unpredictable.

Indeed, some Americans are concerned by the thought that, in investing abroad, American businesses are merely building up the competition that industries in the United States must face. They note that American government policies after World War II fostered the economic resurgence of Japan. American business firms helped out by sharing technology and by sending experts to Japan to teach such practices as quality control— practices that the Japanese have since carried to new, and profitable, heights.

Certainly, American industries have had to face mounting competition from producers in the rest of the world in recent years. The competitiveness of the worldwide economy can be expected to intensify in the years ahead. American business people can draw upon their long experience with the give-and-take of free- market forces to sharpen their competitiveness and help them to make a good showing. But the competition is certain to be rigorous.

BUSEVESS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

Americans have what might be called a love- hate relationship with business. People tend to admire the drive and ingenuity of business people and the material benefits of their endeavors. However, some people harbor an image of the business person as a greedy manipulator who will stop at nothing in the never-ending pursuit of profit.

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of the American television show "Dallas" has glimpsed an extreme caricature of business' image. The show depicts manipulation and dealings in the Texas oil industry, as the

members of a wealthy Dallas family connive and scheme against one another and against other business rivals. Such extremes rarely occur in the reality of U.S. business.

On the other hand, works that cast business people as heroes have also been produced. The 19th-century author Horatio Alger wrote a series of popular books for boys that played endless variations on a "rags-to- riches" theme. Alger's heroes were young men who gained success in business by virtue of hard work and frugal living. Those same virtues are widely hailed as a path to success today. The lists of best-selling books often include works by successful business people relating their personal formulas for getting ahead.

Business organizations in the United States have been eager to spread the message of free enterprise to new generations of Americans. Through a variety of means, they carry their message into the schools and onto the television screens of the nation. One of many activities sponsored by United States businesses is a nationwide program called Junior Achievement. Local business people help high-school-age "junior achievers" to organize small companies, sell stock to friends and parents, produce and market a product (key chains, perhaps, or wall decorations) and pay stockholders a dividend. The same young people act as company officers, salespeople and production workers. The idea is to give young people a deeper appreciation to the role entrepreneurship plays in a capitalist society and to give them experience in business practices.

The values promoted by Junior Achievement are widely respected in American society. But sometimes business values come into conflict with other social values and business people feel themselves to be on the defensive.

Take the role of advertising as an example. In the eyes of the business world and of many economists, advertising serves an indispensable function. It helps consumers to choose among competing products. Also, by spurring demand for products, it extends the possibilities of mass production and thus leads to economies of scale and to lower consumer costs. Indeed, advertising is sometimes depicted as "the engine of prosperity." From another perspective, however, advertising goes against important social values. It promotes self-indulgence and thus counters moral and religious teachings that urge selflessness. It creates false "needs" and encourages waste.

This inevitable tension between business values and other social values often spills over onto the political stage, with the institutions of government struggling to resolve a point at issue. Should there be limits on the types of products that business people can advertise? Should advertisers be forced to mention the hazards as well as the attractions of a product such as cigarettes? Should advertisers be required to substantiate their glowing claims? The give-and-take of the democratic political process provides answers to such questions in a continuing process of adjustment and change—increasingly offering protection to the consumer against false or harmful advertising.

It would be difficult to overestimate the role of business and industry in underpinning the democratic political system in the United

States. By spreading economic decision­making among many levels of society, the American economic system has helped to avoid the concentration of political and economic power in a few hands. By providing a constantly expanding "pie" of material wealth, business and industry have helped to smooth out the inevitable conflicts over how the "pie" should be divided. Political debate has generally focused on how to fine-tune the distribution of wealth, not on drastic proposals for change. This does not mean that all Americans are satisfied with things as they are many are not. But thanks to the affluence provided by business and industry, Americans have been able to contemplate their difference: with a certain detachment, largely avoiding the desperation and extremism that are the enemies of democratic discourse.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Galbraith, John K.

The Affluent Society. 4th ed.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Mayr, Otto and Robert C. Post.

Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American

System of Manufactures.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982.

Novak, Michael.

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Porter, Glenn, ed.

Encyclopedia of American Economic History. New York: Scribner, 1980.

Sevareid, Eric and John Case. Enterprise: The Making of Business in America.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

LABOR IN AMERICA

The Industrial Revolution was dawning in the United States. At Lowell, Massachusetts, the construction of a big cotton mill began in 1821. It was the first of several that would be built there in the next 10 years. The machinery to spin and weave cotton into cloth would be driven by water power. All that the factory owners needed was a dependable supply of labor to tend the machines.

As most jobs in cotton factories required neither great strength nor special skills, the owners thought women could do the work as well as or better than men. In addition, they were more compliant. The New England region was home to many young, single farm girls who might be recruited. But would stern New England farmers allow their daughters to work in factories? The great majority of them would not. They believed that sooner or later factory workers would be exploited and would sink into hopeless poverty. Economic "laws" would force them to work harder and harder for less and less pay.

THE LOWELL EXPERIMENT

How, then, were the factory owners able to recruit farm girls as laborers? They did it by building decent houses in which the girls could live. These houses were supervised by older women who made sure that the girls lived by strict moral standards. The girls were encouraged to go to church, to read, to write and to attend lectures. They saved part of their earnings to help their families at home or to use when they got married.

The young factory workers did not earn high wages; the average pay was about $3.50 a week. But in those times, a half-dozen eggs cost five cents and a whole chicken cost 15 cents. The hours worked in the factories were long. Generally, the girls worked 11 to 13 hours a day, six days a week. But most people in the 1830s worked from dawn until dusk, and farm girls were used to getting up early and working until bedtime at nine o'clock.

The factory owners at Lowell believed that machines would bring progress as well as profit. Workers and capitalists would both benefit from the wealth created by mass production. For a while, the factory system at Lowell worked very well. The population of the town grew from 200 in 1820 to 30,000 in 1845. But conditions in Lowell's factories had already started to change. Faced with growing competition, factory owners began to decrease wages in order to lower the cost—and the price—of finished products.

They increased the number of machines that each girl had to operate. In addition, they began to overcrowd the houses in which the girls lived. Sometimes eight girls had to share one room.

In 1836, 1,500 factory girls went on strike to protest wage cuts. (The girls called their action a "turn out.") But it was useless. Desperately poor immigrants were beginning to arrive in the United States from Europe. To earn a living, they were willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions. Before long, immigrant women replaced the "Yankee" (American) farm girls.

To many people, it was apparent that justice for wage earners would not come easily. Labor in America faced a long, uphill struggle to win fair treatment. In that struggle, more and more workers would turn to labor unions to help their cause. They would endure violence, cruelty and bitter defeats. But eventually they would achieve a standard of living unknown to workers at any other time in history.

GROWTH OF THE FACTORY

In colonial America, most manufacturing was done by hand in the home. Some was done in workshops attached to the home. As towns grew into cities, the demand for manufactured goods increased. Some workshop owners began hiring helpers to increase production. Relations between the employer and helper were generally harmonious. They worked side by side, had the same interests and held similar political views.

The factory system that began around 1800 brought great changes. The employer no longer worked beside his employees. He became an executive and a merchant who rarely saw his workers. He was concerned less with their welfare than with the cost of their labor. Many workers were angry about the changes brought by the factory system. In the past, they had taken great pride in their handicraft skills; now machines did practically all the work, and they were reduced to the status of common laborers. In bad times they could lose their jobs. Then they might be replaced by workers who would accept lower wages. To skilled craft workers, the Industrial Revolution meant degradation rather than progress.

As the factory system grew, many workers began to form labor unions to protect their interests. The first union to hold regular meetings and collect dues was organized by Philadelphia shoemakers in 1792. Soon after, carpenters and leather workers in Boston and printers in New York also organized unions. Labor's tactics in those early times were simple. Members of a union would agree on the wages they thought were fair. They pledged to stop working for employers who would not pay that amount. They also sought to compel employers to hire only union members.

CONSPIRACY LAWS

Employers found the courts to be an effective weapon to protect their interests. In 1806, eight Philadelphia shoemakers were brought to trial after leading an unsuccessful strike. The court ruled that any organizing of workers to raise wages was an illegal act. Unions were "conspiracies" against employers and the community. In later cases, courts ruled that almost any action taken by unions to increase wages might be criminal. These decisions destroyed the effectiveness of the nation's early labor unions.

Not until 1842 was the way opened again for workers to organize. That year several union shoemakers in Boston were brought to trial. They were charged with refusing to work with nonunion shoemakers. A municipal court judge found the men guilty of conspiracy. But an appeal to a higher court resulted in a victory for labor unions generally. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled that it was not unlawful for workers to engage peacefully in union activity. It was their right to organize, he said. Shaw's decision was widely accepted. For many years following this decision, unions did not have to fear conspiracy charges.

UNION STRUGGLES

In the next two decades, unions campaigned for a 10-hour working day and against child labor. A number of state legislatures responded favorably. In 1851, for example, New Jersey passed a law calling for a 10-hour working day in all factories. It also forbade the employment of children under 10 years old.

Meanwhile trade unions were joining together in cities to form federations. A number of skilled trades organized national unions to try to improve their wages and working conditions. The effort to increase wages brought about hundreds of strikes during the 1850s. None was as extensive, however, as a strike of New England shoemakers in 1860. The strike started in Lynn, Massachusetts, when factory workers were refused a three- dollar increase in their weekly pay. It soon spread to Maine and New Hampshire. Altogether, about 20,000 workers took part in the strike. It ended in a victory for the shoemakers. Similar victories were soon won by other trade unions. These successes led to big increases in union membership. Yet most American workers were generally better off than workers in Europe and had more hope of improving their lives. For this reason, the majority did not join labor unions.

In the years following the Civil War (1861-1865), the United States was transformed by the enormous growth of industry. Once the United States was mainly a nation of small farms. By 1900, it was a nation of growing cities, of coal and steel, of engines and fast communications. Though living standards generally rose, millions of industrial workers lived in crowded, unsanitary slums. Their conditions became desperate in times of business depressions. Then it was not unusual for workers to go on strike and battle their employers. Between 1865 and 1900, industrial violence occurred on numerous occasions.

Probably the most violent confrontation between labor and employers was the Great

Railway Strike of 1877. The nation had been in the grip of a severe depression for four years. During that time, the railroads had decreased the wages of railway workers by 20 percent. Many trainmen complained that they could not support their families adequately. There was little that the trainmen could do about the wage decreases. At that time, unions were weak and workers feared going on strike; there were too many unemployed men who might take their jobs. Yet some workers secretly formed a Trainmen's Union to oppose the railroads.

Then, in 1877, four big railroads announced that they were going to decrease wages another 10 percent. In addition, the Pennsylvania line ordered freight train conductors to handle twice as many cars as before. On July 16, a strike began on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia. The strike quickly spread to other lines. On July 19, Pennsylvania Railroad workers at Pittsburgh refused to let freight trains move. (The strikers let passenger trains move freely because they carried United States mail.) The next day the governor sent state militiamen to oust the strikers from the freight yard. But these men were from Pittsburgh. They had many friends and relatives among the strikers. Soon they were mingling with the crowd of men, women and children at the freight yard.

The next day 600 militiamen arrived from Philadelphia. They were ordered to clear the tracks at the freight yard. The soldiers advanced toward the crowd and shooting erupted. In the aftermath, 20 people in the crowd lay dead. Many more were wounded. News of the killings triggered rioting and fires in the Pittsburgh railyards. President Rutherford Hayes ordered federal troops to Pittsburgh to end mob violence. When they arrived, the fighting had already ended. In the smoking ruins, they found the wrecks of more than 2,000 railroad cars. Dozens of buildings lay in ashes.

Many strikers were sent to jail and others lost their jobs. A large part of the public was shocked by the violence in Pittsburgh and other cities. Some people were convinced that miners, railroad workers and other laborers were common criminals. Legislatures in many states passed new conspiracy laws aimed at suppressing labor. But the Great Railway Strike of 1877 helped the workers in some ways. A few railroads took back the wage cuts they had ordered. More important was the support given to the strike by miners, iron workers and others. It gave labor an awareness of its strength and solidarity.

KNIGHTS OF LABOR

The Railway Strike led many workers to join a growing national labor organization. It had a grand name—the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. It was founded in 1869 by a small group of Philadelphia clothing workers. Their union had been unable to organize effectively. The reason, they believed, was that its members were too well-known. Employers fired them and then put their names on a "blacklist." Other employers would not hire anyone whose name appeared on the list. The garment workers came to two conclusions:

• Secrecy was needed to protect union members against employer spies.

• Labor organizations would fail if they were divided into separate craft unions. Instead, labor should be organized in one big union of both skilled and unskilled workers.

Membership in the Knights of Labor was open to wage earners over 18 years of age regardless of race, sex or skill. New members had to take an oath of secrecy. They swore that they would never reveal the name of the order or the names of its members.

The program of the Knights of Labor called for: an eight-hour working day, laws establishing a minimum weekly wage, the use of arbitration rather than strikes to settle disputes, laws to protect the health and safety of industrial workers, equal pay for equal work an end to child labor under 14 years of age and government ownership of railroads, telegraph; and telephones.

It was impossible for the Knights to operate in complete secrecy. Rumors of their activities reached the press. Newspaper stories usually exaggerated the strength of the order. Under pressure from public opinion, the Knights began to operate openly. But they we still forbidden to reveal the name of any member to an employer.

Membership in the Knights increased slowly. By 1884, the order had only 52,000 members. But that year workers led by Knights of Labor organizers went on strike against two big railroad companies. Both strikes ended in complete victories for the Knights. Now workers everywhere rushed to join the order. Within two years membership in the Knights rose to 150,000. Newspapers warned their readers about the power of the Knights. One с them said, "Their leaders can shut most of the mills and factories, and disable the railroads." Many people associated the order with dangerous radicals.

Later railroad strikes by the Knights met with defeat. The order was not nearly as powerful as it had seemed. Workers began to leave it in great numbers. Within 10 years of its greatest victories, the Knights of Labor collapsed.

BREAD AMD BUTTER" UNIONISM

As the Knights declined, a new labor organization began to challenge it for supremacy. This was the American Federation of Labor (AFL). It was formed in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, a leader of the Cigarmakers' Union.

Gompers believed that craft unions с skilled workers were the best kind. Unskilled workers were easily replaced when they went on strike. Craft workers could not be replaced easily. Gompers ha no use for the Knights of Labor, which combined all workers in one big union.

The American Federation of Labor began with a core of six craft unions. They were cigarmakers, carpenters, printers, iron molders, steel molders and glassmakers. The new organization was not an immediate success. For 10 years, the AFL and the Knights battled each other. They invaded each other's territory encouraged revolts and welcomed each other's members into their own ranks. They even supplied strikebreakers against each other. But the tide was running against the Knights. The AFL, led by Gompers, grew steadily in size and power

By 1904, it had 1.75 million members and was the nation's dominant labor organization.

At this time, many workers in Europe were joining revolutionary labor movements which advocated the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a new socialist economic system. Most American workers, however, followed the lead of Gompers, with his highly pragmatic approach to problems of labor. They strove to organize strong unions so that they could demand a greater share in the wealth that they helped to produce. They were not interested in destroying the economic structure of the country but in making it work more effectively for their benefit.

Gompers believed that unions should be primarily concerned with the day-to-day welfare of their members and should not become involved in politics. He also was convinced that socialism would not succeed in the United States but that practical demands for higher wages and fewer working hours could achieve the goal of a better life for working people. This was known as "bread and butter" unionism.

There was one outstanding exception to the pragmatic "bread and butter" approach to unionism which characterized most of American labor. This was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary labor union launched in Chicago in 1905 under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. The IWW demanded the overthrow of capitalism through strikes, boycotts and sabotage. Particularly strong among textile workers, dock workers, migratory farmers and lumberjacks, the union reached its peak membership of 100,000 in 1912. The IWW had practically disappeared by 1918, because of federal prosecutions and a national sentiment against radicalism which began in 1917.

In the early years of the 20th century, a powerful reform movement called Progressivism swept the country. Its leaders were college professors, ministers, journalists, physicians and social workers. Their goal was to improve conditions for all Americans. They wanted to make the political system more egalitarian. They also wanted to make the nation's economic system more democratic. Those who owned the nation's resources, they said, should share some of their wealth with the less fortunate. The movement appealed to farmers, small businessmen, women and laborers. It cut across political party and regional lines. The Progressive Movement had the support of three United States presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson.

The Progressives were concerned about labor's problems. They were alarmed by the growing use of court rulings to halt strikes. In 1890, for example, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act. Its purpose was to punish big business corporations that combined to prevent competition. Yet more and more it was being used as a weapon against unions. The Progressives were unhappy about the use of federal troops and state militia against strikers. They were outraged by inhuman conditions in factories and mines.

The Progressives and the AFL pressured state governments for laws to protect wage earners. Almost all states passed laws forbidding the employment of children under 14 years old. Thirty-seven states forbade children under 16 years old to work between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. Nineteen states established the eight-hour day for children under 16 in factories and stores.

The Progressives were also concerned with the hours worked by women in industry. Forty-one states wrote new or improved laws to protect women workers. Most limited the work day to nine hours, or the work week to 54 hours.

One of the greatest concerns of the Progressives was the problem of industrial accidents. They wanted workers to be paid for accidents regardless of cause. The cost of insurance to cover accidents, they said, should be paid by employers. By 1917, 13 states had passed workers' compensation laws. Many states passed laws to improve safety regulations.

The alliance of Progressives and the AFL also campaigned for federal laws to aid labor. In response, Congress passed laws to protect children, railroad workers and seamen. It established a Department of Labor in the president's Cabinet. Most important of all, Congress passed the Clayton Act of 1914. Its purpose was to halt the use of antitrust laws and court injunctions against unions.

During World War I, organized labor made great advances. The federal government created the War Labor Board to settle disputes by arbitration. Generally the Board was favorable to wage increases, the eight-hour day and collective bargaining. This led to a big increase in union membership. In January 1917, the AFL had 2,370,000 members. By January 1919, it had 3,260,000 members.

RED SCARES AND DEPRESSION

As the 1920s began, organized labor seemed stronger than ever. It was successful in getting Congress to pass laws that restricted immigration to the United States. Unions believed that a scarcity of labor would keep wages high. But events that took place in Europe were already threatening labor's gains. In 1917, a communist revolution overthrew the government of Russia. Communists also attempted revolutions in Germany, Hungary and Finland.

Immigrants entering the United States at this time were primarily from southern and eastern Europe. Many of them, in response to the economic hardship and social inequality which they found in America's industrial cities, were attracted to the Utopian promises of socialist, communist and other radical political groups which advocated a drastic change in American society. There was widespread fear—almost hysteria—among more established Americans that a revolution might break out in the United States. In response to this fear, the federal government launched a series of raids which resulted in the arrest and sometimes the deportation of aliens who were members of socialist, anarchist or communist organizations. About 500 aliens, including Russian-born anarchist

"Red Emma" Goldman, were deported during this period. A number of them, like Goldman, rejected Bolshevism as they experienced it in the Soviet Union and later returned to the United States.

Meanwhile, workers were striking for higher wages all over the United States. Many Americans believed that these strikes were led by communists and anarchists. During the Progressive era, the public had sympathized with labor. Now the public became hostile to it. Employers encouraged anti-union movements, or created company unions that they sought to control. Courts found legal openings in the Clayton Act and issued rulings against union activity. The courts also found ways to use the Sherman Antitrust Act against unions. Opposed by public opinion, business and the courts, union membership fell. The number of AFL members dropped to 2,770,000 by 1929. This decline took place even though the number of workers in industry rose by almost seven million.

For most Americans, the 1920s were prosperous years. But in October 1929, the New York stock market "crashed," and the value of stocks went way down. The crash, part of a worldwide economic decline, led to the worst economic depression in the nation's history. People lost their jobs, their farms and their businesses. By 1932, 13 million men and women were unemployed. This was one out of every four in the work force. Many more workers had only part-time jobs. In the cities, jobless men stood on long lines for a handout of bread and soup. Many of them lived in shanties near garbage dumps. Men and boys roamed the country, hoping to find work.

In the past, depressions had usually hurt unions. Unemployment meant a sharp drop in workers' dues. Then unions became almost powerless to prevent decreases in wages or long working hours. But in the Great Depression of the 1930s, unions actually benefited. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, promised Americans a "New Deal." He pledged to help the "forgotten man"—the worker who had lost his job, or the farmer who had lost his land.

Under Roosevelt, Congress passed laws to revive business and create jobs. To help labor, Congress passed the Wagner Act. It guaranteed workers the right to join unions and bargain collectively. The law created a powerful National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Board could order elections in which workers voted for the union they wanted to represent them. (Workers could vote against joining any union, if they wished.) The NLRB could also order a stop to unfair practices used by employers against unions.

Union leaders hailed the Wagner Act. It provided a great opportunity to increase union membership. But the drive was delayed at first by a dispute within the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was made up mainly of skilled workers organized into craft unions. But millions of unskilled workers were in giant industries like steel, autos, rubber and textiles. Some labor leaders believed that a single union should represent all the workers, skilled and unskilled. One big industrial union would be much stronger than a dozen different craft unions, they said.

FROM THE CIO TO TAFT-HARTLEY

Most leaders of the AFL were opposed to the idea of industrial unions. They made no effort to organize them. Finally Lewis and other union leaders broke away from the AFL. They formed a new labor organization that became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

One of the first targets of the CIO was the auto industry. Workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, eagerly joined the CIO's United Automobile Workers (UAW) union. They demanded that the company recognize the UAW. But officers of General Motors refused to meet with union representatives. This was a violation of the Wagner Act. In January 1937, the UAW called a strike against the company.

The tactics used by the auto workers took the company by surprise. The workers refused to leave the factories. Instead, they put away their tools and sat down. They did this to prevent strikebreakers from taking their jobs. At night the men slept on the seats of new cars. Food was passed to them through windows by their families.

General Motors tried to force the workers out. The company shut off the heat in the factories. It was winter, but the workers stayed. Police tried to break into one of the factories. The strikers drove them back by throwing soda bottles, coffee mugs and iron bolts. Then the police charged with tear gas bombs. This time the workers drove them back by turning fire hoses on them.

Finally General Motors went to court and got a ruling against the strikers. The workers were ordered to leave the GM factories by February 3. The National Guard (militiamen) was alerted to enforce the order. Everyone expected a big battle on February 3, but it didn't happen. Governor Frank Murphy refused to order an attack on the strikers. Instead, he ordered General Motors officers to hold peace talks with the UAW. President Roosevelt also asked for a peaceful end to the strike. A week later General Motors recognized the union and agreed to bargain with it. The UAW and the CIO had won a major victory.

Within two years, the CIO organized 3,750,000 industrial workers. The AFL met the challenge of the CIO with an organizing drive of its own. By the end of 1937, the AFL had 3,400,000 members.

During the 1930s, Congress enacted other reforms that benefited labor:

• The Social Security Act of 1935 created a system of government-sponsored unemployment insurance and old-age pensions.

• The Fair Labor Standards Act regulated wages and hours. Minimum wages were established to help workers maintain a decent standard of living. Hours were shortened to give them more time for leisure. The law also forbade the labor of children under 16 in most occupations.

Unemployment in the United States remained high until the United States entered World War П in 1941. Then, defense industries boomed, and millions of men entered the armed forces. By 1943, unemployment ended and industry was faced with a shortage of labor. During the Great Depression, women were urged not to take jobs. Now they were encouraged to go to work. Before long, one out of four workers in defense industries was a woman.

During World War II, labor cooperated with government and industry. Its spirit was expressed by John L. Lewis, president of the CIO. "When the nation is attacked," he said, "every American must rally to its defense."

When peace came, a wave of strikes for higher wages swept the nation. Employers became alarmed. They said that the Wagner Act had given labor too much power. A majority in the United States Congress agreed with them. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft- Hartley Act. It contained a number of provisions to limit organized labor. One of them outlawed the "closed shop" agreement which required employers to hire only union members. It also permitted the states to pass "right to work" laws. These laws forbade agreements that required workers to join a union after they were hired.

Labor leaders bitterly denounced the Taft- Hartley Act. They said it was meant to destroy unions. Despite their fears, membership in unions continued to grow. By 1952, it had increased to 17 million.

Leaders of the AFL and the CIO merged their organizations in 1955. The combined organization became the AFL-CIO.

LABOR TODAY

In recent years there has been a steady decline in the percentage of workers who belong to labor unions. In 1945, 35 percent of the work force were union members. In 1988, less than 17 percent of the labor force—or 17 million workers—were unionized. There are several reasons for this, including:

• The decline of heavy industry, once a stronghold of unionism, and the increase of advanced-technology industries.

• Automation and other technological changes that have displaced many blue-collar workers.

• Foreign competition, which has depressed some United States industries and increased unemployment.

• The transition to a "post-industrial" economy in the United States. Ever increasing numbers of workers are employed in service-providing businesses, such as hotels, restaurants and retail stores.

Despite the decline in members, organized labor in the United States remains strong and conditions of America's labor force have steadily improved. The length of the work day has been shortened. Many agreements between employers and wage earners now call for less than 40 hours of work a week. Most agreements have generous "fringe" benefits. These include insurance, pensions and health care plans. As the number of union members has decreased as a percentage of the total work force, unions have responded by broadening their organizing efforts to include employees of federal, state and local governments as well as other professionals. Organizers have also waged long campaigns to unionize and win better conditions for such diverse groups as public school teachers and seasonal farm workers.

By the early 1990s, the work force was changing. First, the pool of workers was no longer expanding as rapidly as in the past. And, second, the composition of the labor force was different, consisting of a larger percentage of minorities and women than before. Employers are adapting to this work

force diversity in several ways. Some sponsor education and training programs for potential recruits. Many, in an attempt to attract and accommodate women workers, provide on-site child care, and flexible hours. Others make special arrangements so they can hire more handicapped workers. One hotel chain, for example, uses lighted telephones and vibrating beepers so they can hire more hearing- impaired people.

As the work force has changed, so have some—but not all—labor-management issues. Unions now want laws to strengthen their right to strike by prohibiting companies from hiring permanent replacements for striking workers. Employers want the right to test workers for drug use. There is also growing sentiment that all employers should be required to provide adequate health insurance to their workers— which most, but not all, already do. Many workers are fighting for the right to take unpaid leave when they have babies or when a family member is ill and needs extensive care. And, as the unemployment rate has climbed (over 6 percent in 1990), there is growing sentiment that the government should help create jobs—through public works programs, job training programs and tax credits for employers in areas of high unemployment.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

From the earliest days, the sight of farmers working the land has been at the heart of the American experience. If an observer had trudged through the forests of eastern North America on the eve of the arrival of European colonists, he would have found stump-strewn clearings in which Native American, or "Indian," communities were growing crops such as maize ("Indian corn"), beans and squash. Today, from a plane soaring high above the Great Plains in the center of the North American continent, the observer can look down upon vast, rolling fields of wheat, corn, soybeans and other crops.

Outward forms have changed, but the vital importance of agriculture has not. Now, as then, agriculture provides the sustenance that meets people's most basic needs. Agriculture and its related industries serve as the foundation of American economic life, accounting for a larger portion of the United States' GNP (Gross National Product) than any other endeavor. Agriculture represents a bond of continuity between present and past, linking new generations with the rhythms and dreams of generations of long ago.

From the nation's infancy, American leaders have extolled the virtues of the hardy, self- sufficient farmer as those most worthy of emulation by the people as a whole. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, put it this way: "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its interests by the most lasting bonds."

Farmers have never truly been as self- sufficient as myth suggests, dependent as they are on the whims of weather and the marketplace and on the nature of government policy. Nonetheless, American farmers have shown a spirit of individualism and egalitarianism that the rest of society has widely admired. To a large extent, agricultural values have been adopted and celebrated by the society as a whole.

American agriculture assumes a richness and variety unmatched in most other parts of the world. In part, this is due to the vastness of the nation itself; in part, it is due to the generosity of nature. Only in a relatively small area of the West are rainfall and snowfall so limited that deserts exist. Elsewhere, rainfall ranges from modest to abundant, and rivers and underground water allow for irrigation where necessary. Large areas of level or gently rolling land—especially in the eastern Great Plains— provide ideal conditions for large-scale agriculture. Today the average American farm comprises 462 acres (187 hectares).

The leap from the small, subsistence farms of the past to the modern-day mixture of small family and high-technology "mega-farms" has been great. To understand it, we shall trace the development of farming in the United States and explore the strengths and shortcomings of American agriculture as it exists today.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The first American farmers, the Native Americans, helped European settlers to adapt European methods and crops to the soil and climate of North America. The settlers achieved this adaptation with relative ease. They found it harder, however, to transplant the European systems of land ownership with

which they were familiar. The English system, under which a landed gentry owned vast estates and most farmers were tenants, was ill-suited to the colonies, although officials and landowners sometimes tried to reproduce it.

In the end, land was too abundant and labor too scarce for such a system to work. Except for slaves, farm laborers were free to take city jobs or to acquire land of their own, and many did. North American agriculture came to be based upon a multitude of small freeholdings or "family farms," with tenancy practiced only on a relatively minor scale. Except in a few heavily settled areas, American farms tended to be scattered and isolated, rather than clustered around villages. This contributed to the individualism and self- reliance of the American farmer.

While the abundance of land had positive social effects, it also had its dark side. Free to move on whenever the land wore out, American farmers often plowed up more land than they could readily cultivate. They "mined" the land by removing nutrients without replacing them through the use of fertilizers. They laid their furrows carelessly, even up and down hillsides, and, when the inevitable hard rains came, the water often gouged deep gullies down the rows. Careless farmers did not worry too much about the consequences, for they could always move west, or south, or at least somewhere else. The more conscientious farmers—and there were many—labored under the burden of competing against their "rip-and-run" neighbors, whose costs, of course, were lower.

One way to compete was to improve efficiency and output, and many agriculturists devoted close attention to such matters. Owners of large properties—for example, Thomas Jefferson, who was a southern planter as well as president—had the leisure to devote to scientific studies of farming. Jefferson kept careful records of weather patterns and left

detailed notes on many aspects of agriculture.

Prominent agriculturists like Jefferson helped to popularize ideas of a more scientific approach to farming being advanced by European advocates. Such practices as crop rotation and the liming of fields (to reduce acidity) spread rapidly in the years after American independence. Their spread was made easier by the growth of agricultural societies and the founding of farm journals. On the local level, annual fairs gave farm families a chance to share ideas and demonstrate their accomplishments (they could win prizes for their hay, their livestock or the products of their kitchens). They could also learn of new developments in farm technology.

Technology played a key role in the rapid growth of farm output in the United States. Throughout the 19th century, one new invention or tool followed another in rapid succession. The scythe and cradle replaced the sickle for harvesting grain, then gave way to Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper beginning in the 1840s. The wooden plow gave way to the cast-iron plow and then (by 1845) to the steel plow. By the time of the Civil War (1861-1865) machines were taking over the tasks of haying, threshing, mowing, cultivating and planting. A large agricultural industry had grown up, centered around the city of Chicago, Illinois, in the region known as the Midwest. (The region runs across the northern middle of the United States from Ohio and Michigan west to the Rocky Mountains. Even today, the Midwest remains the main production center for American farm machinery.)

American agriculture raised its output by leaps and bounds during the second half of the 19th century. One factor was the rapid flow of settlers westward across the Mississippi, "opening" new lands, or replacing Native American ("Indian") farmers with non-Indian ones. The federal government promoted this westward movement in a variety of ways. For one thing, it negotiated treaties with Indians or used military force to confine the Indians to reservations (areas reserved or set aside exclusively for the Indians). The federal government also made free land available to settlers and gave grants of land to railroad builders to encourage the rapid extension of railroad lines.

The government act establishing the free- land policy was known as the Homestead Act. Adopted in 1862, while the Civil War was raging, the act offered a farm, a "homestead," of 160 acres (85 hectares) of land to each family of settlers. Any head of family who was at least 21 years of age and a United States citizen (or even a citizen-to-be) could acquire free property by moving onto a piece of public land and living on it for five years. If the family was in a hurry, it could buy the land after six months for $1.25 an acre. In later years, the government provided means by which families could acquire still larger acreages at little or no cost. These policies were possible because the United States government considered itself to be the owner of almost all land west of the Mississippi, through purchase, as a result of war, or both.

The Homestead Act confirmed the existing pattern of small, family farms. It helped to drain surplus population away from the eastern states and to build up the population of independent farmers. The number of people who owned or worked on farms rose

throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, reaching a peak of 13.6 million (14 percent of the United States population) in 1916.

While free or cheap land helped establish the family farm firmly, it had other, unforeseen consequences. By encouraging settlement on prairie lands that received sparse or sporadic rainfall (generally, lands west of present-day Oklahoma City), the passage of the Homestead Act trapped many families in a shaky, hand-to-mouth existence. Many families from eastern states who considered 160 acres to be a more than ample homestead found when they moved west that they could barely eke out a living on that amount of land. Their crops of dry land grain were too small; their livestock too hungry. In desperation, prairie farmers plowed up and planted even marginal land. When rains were adequate, their crops glutted the market, and the prices they received were low. When the rains failed, wind whisked away their dusty topsoil and impoverished the land.

Overproduction became a major problem in the years after the Civil War ended in 1865. Not only was more land being put to the plow, but improved machines were making American farms more and more efficient. Gang plows allowed several furrows to be turned at a time. Giant machines called combines performed several of the operations of grain harvesting. With production increasing faster than consumption, the prices that farmers received for their products began to decline. The years from the 1870s until about 1900 were especially hard ones for American farmers.

Discontent among farmers sparked the growth of political action groups like the Patrons of Husbandry (1870s) and the Populist Party (1890s). Members of the Patrons of Husbandry, commonly known as Grangers, campaigned against the high rates and monopolistic practices of the railroads. Their efforts led to the adoption of "Granger laws" in many states, setting up governmental bodies to regulate such things as railroad freight rates. Grangers also set up cooperative societies to run stores, warehouses and other businesses serving farm communities. Although many Granger cooperatives failed due to the inexperience of their operators, others survived to set a pattern that is followed to some extent even today. California lemon growers who market their produce under the "Sunkist" name do so on a cooperative basis, and in many communities, cooperative stores compete against privately owned ones in the buying and selling of farm- related goods.

The Populist Party wove the Grangers and many other largely rural groups into a major movement of political protest that called attention to some of the inequities of life in the United States. The Populists reached the peak of their influence in the 1892 presidential election, winning about eight percent of the popular vote. Such Populist goals as the free coinage of silver (to pump more money into the economy) became a focus of national debate and were adopted by the Democratic party in 1896. Although the Democrats lost that race, the farmers and their allies had brought their concerns to the forefront of the political agenda. Politicians respected the political power of the farmers, and would continue to pay close attention to farm issues.

A GROWING ROLE FOR GOVERNMENT

Farmers campaigned for a wide variety of government policies, although they did not always agree on which policies to support. Early frontier farmers, for example, supported a system of national roads, to help get their crops to market. They supported other internal improvements as well—canals, river dredging and eventually grants of land to railroad companies. Land policies represented a major divergence between the views of frontier farmers and those of farmers in older sections of the country. Frontier farmers wanted cheap—or free—land for expansion. Established farmers often preferred things as they were; they might suffer from lower prices if farm expansion should glut the market with excess produce.

Up to the 1860s, few federal policies were aimed directly at farmers. Agricultural affairs fell under the jurisdiction of the commissioner of patents, who collected agricultural statistics and conducted a limited range of farm experiments. But in 1862, Congress created the Department of Agriculture, raising it to cabinet status in 1889. (Cabinet status meant that the head of the department gained the title Secretary of Agriculture and became one of the president's staff of chief advisers.) Thenceforth, the national government took a direct role in agricultural affairs.

The Department of Agriculture at first had few face-to-face dealings with farmers. Its activities were mainly the promotion of research and the collection of statistics. After 1900, Congress gave the department other responsibilities, such as protecting forests and enforcing safe food standards.

A few weeks after it created the Department of Agriculture, Congress passed the historic Morrill Act, granting thousands of acres of federal land to each state government for the purpose of endowing a system of agricultural and technical colleges. In the years that followed, the states created 69 such institutions (called "land-grant colleges"). Land-grant colleges have played a key role in advancing agricultural research and in educating successive generations of farmers.

Around 1900, agricultural leaders began to worry that the government's research findings were not reaching the farmers who could apply them. Many farmers distrusted governmental advice. Proudly, they followed the methods their parents or grandparents had followed, scorning such "newfangled" ideas as crop rotation and seed selection. To demonstrate the value of the newer techniques, government officials set up a limited number of "demonstration farms." They joined with local business and farm groups to hire "demonstration agents" who would go from farm to farm to show how the new ideas might help farmers improve their yields and their incomes. In 1914, Congress gave such programs a national scope by establishing a new "agricultural extension service." Financed jointly by the federal government and each state's land grant colleges, the service hired "county agents" to establish offices in each county (local governmental district) to provide advice to farmers and their families.

The extension service began at a time of prosperity for American farmers. Farm prices had increased between 1900 and 1914, and they increased even more rapidly as World War I created a pressing demand for farm products. Far from the battlefields, and benefiting from a relative abundance of labor-saving equipment, American farmers had no trouble stepping up production. Farm prices doubled from 1914 to 1918 and kept rising until 1920.

This period of great prosperity ended, however, and American farmers entered a new time of crisis. Prices declined in the 1920s, and worse times lay ahead. In 1932, the average level of farm prices dropped to less than one- third of the 1920 level. Farmers by the thousands failed to meet their mortgage payments and saw their lands taken over by banks or other creditors. Farmers were not alone. The Great Depression of the 1930s was rippling through the world economy, causing hundreds of thousands of factory and office workers to lose their jobs and presenting national leaders with urgent political and economic problems.

The government's response to the Great Depression began a new era in American agricultural life. Many present-day farm policies have their roots in the desperate decade of the 1930s and in the programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served from 1933 until his death in 1945. Those programs were part of what Roosevelt called a "New Deal" for the American people.

CURRENT FARM POLICIES

A maze of legislation governs the agricultural policies of the United States government. Congress debates and passes a basic "farm bill" once every four years. In addition, many aspects of agricultural policy emerge as byproducts of legislation targeted on other goals. Tax laws, for example, help to channel private investment money into specific aspects of agriculture.

• Acreage Limitations. On the theory that overproduction is a chief cause of low farm prices, the government encourages farmers to plant fewer acres. This policy began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, a key New Deal law that offered special subsidies to farmers who agreed to remove part of their land from production.

• Price Supports. Certain basic commodities are eligible for price supports, which come in the form of a loan from a government agency. Here is how the system works: Congress sets a price—say $2.55 a bushel for corn (one bushel = 35.2 liters)—-to represent the supposed value of a crop. Corn farmers who agree to acreage restrictions may borrow $2.55 for every bushel of corn they turn over to the government. In effect, the borrowers pledge their crop to the government as collateral for the loan. If the price of corn rises above $2.55, the farmers can reclaim their corn, sell it on the open market, and pay off the loan. The farmers keep the extra profit. If the price stays below $2.55, the farmers may decide to default on their loans— an action that carries no penalty. The government merely takes over ownership of the corn and either keeps it in storage or sells it at a loss. There is no upper limit on price-support loans to any one farmer.

• Deficiency Payments. More important than price-support loans are deficiency payments, which are a direct form of income support for farmers. Congress sets a "target price" for

various crops. Again, to receive any benefit, farmers must take some of their land out of production. If the market price that the farmers receive when they sell the crop falls short of the target price, they receive a check from the government to make up the difference. Deficiency payments are limited to $50,000 a year.

Price supports and deficiency payments apply only to such basic commodities as grains, dairy products and cotton. Many other crops are not federally subsidized.

There has been some criticism of these farm subsidy programs on the grounds that they benefit large farms most and accelerate the trend toward larger—and fewer—farms. In 1987, for example, farms with more than $250,000 in sales—only five percent of the total number of farms—received 24 percent of government farm payments.

• Marketing Orders. A few crops, including lemons and oranges, are subject to outright restrictions on marketing. So-called "marketing orders" limit the amount of a crop that a grower can send to market week by week. By restricting sales, such orders are intended to increase the prices that farmers receive. The restrictions are applied by committees of producers within a particular state or region. Marketing arrangements are set up after being approved in a vote of the farmers concerned. Upon certification by the Secretary of Agriculture, the arrangements become mandatory. Thereafter, a farmer who ignores marketing restrictions may be prosecuted in court.

• Farm Credit. Access to borrowed money has always been regarded by farmers as crucial to their operations. As early as 1916, the federal government began to provide assistance to private and cooperative farm credit programs. New Deal legislation, particularly the Farm Credit Act of 1933, stepped up the government's role. Today, farmers have access to a range of private, cooperative and government lending institutions. One major cluster of institutions is known as the Federal Farm Credit System. It contains three types of banks that serve specific purposes—making loans on real estate, making loans for such production needs as the purchase of seed and fertilizer and making loans to cooperatives. The country is divided into 12 districts, each containing three federal banks, one for each of the three purposes. The banks finance their operations by selling bonds to investors, just as a business corporation might do. Because the banks have traditionally had a high credit rating, they have been able to borrow at low interest rates, and this has served to keep farm credit costs low. Another source of farm credit is the Farmer's Home Administration, a sort of "lender of last resort" for farmers who cannot get credit elsewhere.

• Soil Conservation. Some federal programs are aimed specifically at promoting soil conservation. Under one program, for example, the government shares with farmers the cost of seeding unused land to grass or legumes in order to reduce the danger of erosion.

• Providing Water for Irrigation. A federal system of dams and irrigation canals provides water at subsidized prices to farmers in 16 western states. Subsidized water helps to grow 18 percent of the nation's cotton, 14 percent of its barley, 12 percent of its rice and three percent of its wheat.

The government's wide-ranging agricultural programs have developed a strong base of support over the years. Members of Congress from farm states regularly win congressional approval for program after program aimed at satisfying a variety of farm interests. Yet these farm programs have often been attacked. Among other things, critics charge that different programs often work against one another. For example, they say, the government pays some farmers for removing one piece of land from production while giving them tax breaks for plowing up and planting another piece of land.

Some legislators and presidents have urged Congress to cut back the government's role in agriculture and have urged a gradual reduction in farm subsidies and the eventual elimination of government programs to store crop surpluses and to make direct loans to farmers. Some feel these programs represent undue government interference in the operation of a free market. Important economic interests defend many aspects of current farm policy, and proposals to change the system have stirred vigorous debate in Congress.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE TODAY

As the 20th century nears its end, many Americans have been contemplating the successes and shortcomings of the country's agriculture. They have found much to be proud of, but they have also raised some nagging questions.

The successes of American agriculture are easy to see—and many farmers are quick to boast of them. In parts of the Midwest, signs along major highways remind motorists that "one farmer feeds 75 people." Thanks to nature's bounty and to the effective use of machines, fertilizers and chemicals, American farmers are virtually unrivaled in producing crops cheaply and in quantity. The United States produces as much as half of the world's soybeans and corn for grain, and from 10 to 25 percent of its cotton, wheat, tobacco and vegetable oils.

American agriculture is, by any standards, big business. Indeed, the term "agribusiness" has been coined to reflect the large-scale nature of agricultural enterprise in the modern U.S. economy. The term covers the entire complex of farm-related businesses, from the individual farmer to the multinational maker of farm chemicals. Agribusiness includes farmer cooperatives, rural banks, shippers of farm products, commodity dealers, firms that manufacture farm equipment, food-processing industries, grocery chains and many other businesses.

Both American and foreign consumers benefit from the American farmer's low-cost output. American consumers pay far less for their food than the people of many other industrial countries. Moreover, one-third of the cropland in the United States is planted in crops destined for export—to Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Agricultural exports were 35.6 thousand million in 1989. Agricultural imports lag far behind, leaving a surplus in the agricultural balance of trade.

The standard of living of American farmers is generally high. Incomes of farm families average about three-quarters of those of nonfarm families, but because farm families'

living expenses are lower, their standard of living is close to the national average. Although farm living once meant isolation from the comforts of modern life, this is no longer the case.

The readiness of many farmers to adopt new technology has been one of the strengths of American agriculture. Computers are but the latest in a long line of innovations that have helped American farmers to cut costs and improve productivity. Yet farmers have been traditionalists as well as innovators. They preserve a deep conservatism and respect for tradition that has helped to lend stability to rural communities in times of rapid change.

However, American agriculture has a dark side as well as a bright side. Farmers in the United States go through alternating periods of prosperity and recession and some farm practices have raised environmental and other concerns.

While the high productivity of American agriculture has kept food prices low for consumers, farmers have been perhaps too successful. Crop surpluses and low prices have made it hard for many farmers to make a profit. The cost of the products farmers buy—tractors, fertilizers, pesticides—has risen faster than the prices they receive for their crops. High interest rates have added to the farmers' burden.

A period of economic difficulty began in the early 1980s. Agricultural exports declined, partly due to the high value of the United States dollar (which raised the cost of American products to foreign buyers). Crop prices fell and interest rates rose. Many farmers found themselves hard-pressed to keep up payments on loans and mortgages taken earlier when prices (and income) were higher. As in the 1930s, some farmers lost their farms and equipment, which were sold off to satisfy the farmers' debts. In dozens of farm communities, the crisis caused the closing of banks, farmer cooperatives and small businesses. A variety of governmental and private programs helped to ease the suffering, but many farmers wondered whether the good times had finally come to an end.

In 1987, there were slightly more than 2 million farms in the United States—down by about 7 percent from the number just five years earlier. Slightly more than 86 percent of the total number of farms are owned by individuals or families. Some 67,000 farms—or 3.2 percent of the total—are owned by corporations, but most of those corporations are owned by families. Although family farms are not disappearing—as some people fear—smaller farms are disappearing. People who farm small pieces of land find they cannot invest in the modern equipment they need to make the farms pay. Often, they sell their land—sometimes to other farmers, sometimes to developers who build houses on it. According to the Department of Agriculture, the number of small farms—those with under $50,000 in annual sales—dropped by 120,000 between 1982 and 1987.

Many farm owners—especially owners of smaller farms—do not work on the farms full- time. Forty-five percent of the people we call farmers actually have other occupations. And not all farmers own their land. Some 240,000 are tenant farmers—who either rent their land for cash or pay the owner a share of the crops they grow. On large farms, many of the workers are hired only for a specific chore— such as picking crops. Many of these seasonal workers travel from farm to farm, staying only until the crops are picked. They are known as migrant workers. Some are housed under poor conditions, have inadequate health care, and are paid low wages. In recent years, there has been an effort on the part of government and others to improve the lives of these workers.

Critics accuse both corporate and family farmers of damaging the environment. Since the 1940s, American farmers have multiplied their use of artificial fertilizers and chemicals designed to kill weeds and insect pests and to protect against crop diseases. Such farming aids have played an indispensable role in increasing crop output, but they have also caused problems. Rainfall that seeps through or runs off the soil has carried fertilizers into ground water, rivers and lakes, damaging water quality and promoting the growth of undesirable water plants. Toxic farm chemicals, some linked to cancer and other diseases, have at times found their way into the nation's water, food and air, although constant vigilance by government officials at the state and federal levels is taken to protect these resources. Some have caused harm to farmers and farm workers—although chemical companies insist that their products are safe when used according to directions. Over the years, many farm pests have developed a resistance to milder chemicals, so farmers have had to resort to stronger and costlier ones.

_INTO THE FUTURE

As they face the future, American farmers can be sure of only one thing—that more changes lie ahead. Ambitious programs of research and development now going on in university, corporate and government laboratories promise to continue the trends of recent years.

Many innovations are being considered. One is "no-till" farming, in which farmers plant a new crop directly into the stubble of the old, without turning the soil with a plow. "No-till" depends heavily on chemical weed­killers, and thus has drawn criticism. However, it can reduce erosion and trim the costs of labor and fuel, and many farmers have eagerly embraced the practice.

Other innovations are flowing from biotechnology, the application of biological science to practical ends. A number of companies are taking the lead in using such techniques as "gene-splicing" to design new plants and animals with desirable traits. (Gene-splicing is the artificial alteration of the genes that carry the hereditary characteristics of organisms.) Will the future see the development of hardier, more productive plants that need less fertilizer and carry greater resistance to disease and insects? Biotechnologists hope so. Among other things, they predict that their work will allow farmers to reduce their reliance on toxic chemicals, thus helping preserve a safer environment for everyone.

Though responding to innovation and evolving with the passage of time, agriculture remains the foundation upon which American well-being and prosperity are based. This bond linking past, present and future is fundamental to the American way of life.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Ebeling, Walter. Farm Policy:

The Politics of Soil, Surpluses, and Subsidies. Washington: Congressional Quarterly. 1984.

Ebeling, Walter.

The Fruited Plain:

The Story of American Agriculture.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.

MacFadyen, J. Tevere. Gaining Ground:

The Renewal of America's Small Farms. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.

National Planning Association. Food and

Agriculture Committee.

State of American Agriculture 1984.

Washington: National Planning Association, 1984.

United States Department of Agriculture. Office of Information.

AMERICAN YOUTH

What is it like to be a young person in the United States?

At 18 years of age, young people in the United States can take on most of the rights and the responsibilities of adulthood. Before this occurs, however, the American teenager (a common name for a young person between the ages of 13 and 19), goes through the period of adolescence. Psychologists (specialists who study the science of human behavior) say that most young people experience conflict during this period of their lives. They are changing rapidly, both physically and emotionally and they are searching for self-identity. As they are growing up and becoming more independent, teenagers sometimes develop different values from those held by their parents. American teenagers begin to be influenced by the values expressed by their friends, the media (newspapers, television, magazines, etc.) and teachers. During this period of their lives, young people also begin to participate in social activities such as sporting events and church group projects, as well to do more things in the

company of members of the opposite sex and fewer things in the company of their families.

While the teenage years for most American young people are nearly free of serious conflict, all youths face a certain number of problems. Some young people have difficulties in their relationships with their parents or problems at school which may lead to use of alcohol or drugs, the refusal to attend school or even to running away from home. In extreme cases, some might turn to crime and become juvenile delinquents (a lawbreaker under 18).

However, for every teenager experiencing such problems many more are making positive, important contributions to their communities, schools and society. Millions of young people in the United States are preparing for the future in exciting ways. Many teenagers are studying for college entrance exams or working at part- time jobs after school and on the weekends. Others are volunteering at hospitals, helping the handicapped, exhibiting projects at science fairs or programming computers.

A LOOK BACK AT YOUTHS IN AMERICA

Imagine leaving your home, family and friends to come to a strange new country. That is just what many young people (sometimes with their families, but often alone) have done for more than 350 years in coming to the New World. For many immigrants (people who arrive in a new country), the New World offered hope of a better life; for all new arrivals, the change was traumatic.

In the 1600s, many children of poor European immigrants were apprenticed (contracted) to work without wages as servants for wealthier people until they were between 18 and 21 years of age.

Beginning in 1619, blacks were brought to North America as slaves to work for the few early European settlers. Young people as well as adults served as slaves until 1865, following the Civil War, when the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, which abolished slavery.

Later, the United States experienced major periods of immigration. The first occurred from about 1840 to 1880. During that time, most of the immigrants were from northern and western Europe. Most were fleeing poverty, or political or religious persecution. The second major period began in the 1880s. While immigrants still came from northern and western Europe, the majority now came from southern and eastern Europe, largely for the same reasons as the first group. Many found work in large cities such as New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh.

At the time of these major periods of immigration, children of all ethnic groups often worked long hours in factories, coal mines, mills or on farms. There were no laws regulating child labor until the 1900s.

However, many new Americans saw that education was their best chance for prosperity. In the 1900s, boys and girls began to attend schools in increasing numbers. Many stayed in school until they were about 15 years old. Work became less of an influence on young people. They were now being influenced more by their schools, churches and families.

At the beginning of the 1900s, new factories had been built, the western frontier was being conquered and the economy was growing rapidly. Though society still fell short of their ideals, youths—and their elders— believed that improvement and progress toward a better world was inevitable and unstoppable. The staggering shock and losses brought by World War I (1914-1918), however, caused disillusion. During the 1920s, youths in America determined to live life to its fullest in anticipation of an uncertain future, went "on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history" wrote novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some young people tended to reject their parents' values and turned to the new jazz music, to dancing and to having a good time.

The Great Depression, beginning in 1929, put an end to this era. About 12 million people lost their jobs. Many people had a hard time

providing enough food for themselves. As a result, many children had to quit school to find work. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's direction, programs under the National Youth Service created jobs for many young people. Some three million young men took part in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), working to maintain forests and parks throughout the United States.

World War II (1939-1945) restored a feeling of national purpose and hope, and after the war the United States experienced the biggest baby boom in history. Extending into the 1950s, this increase in the birth rate produced the generation of young people known as the "baby boom" that reached adulthood in the 1960s and early 1970s.

During the 1960s, many youths met President John F. Kennedy's challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." They volunteered to help the handicapped, the poor and the needy at home and also in foreign countries through the Peace Corps. The decade of the 1960s was also a time of growing political awareness, turbulence and rebellion. On many college campuses, young people protested the country's involvement in the Vietnam War. They demonstrated and worked against racial segregation and against poverty. Some young people developed their own subculture, which included styles of dress, music and ideas about independence which were different from those of their parents.

Some women began calling for equality with men and developed the beginnings of what is now known as the women's liberation movement. Increasing discord in family life was openly discussed as divorce rates climbed and young people who couldn't agree with their parents' attitudes and values talked about the "generation gap."

Television programs and films introduced an unaccustomed openness about sexuality in the United States during this period. Many young people became involved in activities that once only some adults participated in, such as the use of drugs and alcohol.

By the 1970s, the times were different and the focus of youths' attention had been drawn elsewhere. Gone were the violent protests of the previous decade. The American involvement in the war ended and after military conscription was stopped in 1973, many protests died away.

In the 1980s, young people generally became more conservative and interested primarily in working toward success in their careers. One writer called the 1980s "the new age of realism." Others dubbed the young people of the 1980s "the me generation."

YOUTHS AND THEIR FAMILIES

The United States Census Bureau defines a family as two or more people who are related by blood, adoption or marriage, living together. Most American families include members of just two generations: parents and their children, though many extended families do include more than two generations. There are about 65.8 million families in the United States. What is the purpose of a family? Experts agree that the family structure should provide emotional, physical and educational support. The role of the family in a young person's life has changed in the past 100 years.

Families 100 years ago were large, partly because children were needed to work and earn additional money for the family. Now, young children no longer work and earn wages; in addition, providing an education and life's necessities for children is very expensive. As one result, American families are much smaller than in previous decades. In 1989, the average size of a family was 3.16 people.

In what types of families are children growing up? In 1989, the United States Census Bureau reported that while most families retain the traditional structure, including a father, a mother, children and sometimes a grandparent, 22 percent of all families with children under 18 years old are one-parent families (families with only a father or only a mother; the other parent not living with the family). Why? High divorce rates, separation and birth of children to unmarried women are a few reasons. In cases of separation or divorce of the parents, the parent not living with the children usually provides child-support payments. Most of the families in this category—five out of six—are headed by women. And one-parent families headed by women are usually poorer than other families. In 1989 the median family income in the United States was $32,191. For families headed by women, the median income was less than half—$15,346.

Some of these difficulties are relieved by government programs providing help to low- income families. One such program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), helps poor parents with school-aged children. Another, the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children, provides food to low-income women before and after childbirth. Still, poverty affects the way in which the children in these families grow up. Another change in family life is that more wives and mothers work outside the home. In 1988, women made up 45 percent of the national work force. And 65 percent of those women had children under 18.

What do American teenagers think about their families? According to a national survey taken during the mid-1980s, between one-half and two-thirds of all American youths have a "comfortable" or "happy" relationship with their parent or parents. Their traditional disagreements are over such things as: curfew (time to come home at night), whether or not to attend religious services; doing work around the house; and the friends with whom the young person spends his/her leisure time. A survey entitled, "The Mood of American Youth," published by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, also indicates that the majority of young people agree with the opinions and values of their parents.

STUDENTS AND THEIR SCHOOLS

The typical American student spends six hours a day, five days a week, 180 days a year in school. Children in the United States start preschool or nursery school at age four or under. Most children start kindergarten at five years of age.

Students attend elementary schools (grades one through six) and then middle school or junior high school (grades seven through nine). Secondary, or high schools, are usually 10th through 12th grades (ages 15 through 18).

In 1988, about 45.4 million students were enrolled in schools (elementary and secondary) in the United States. Students may attend either public schools or private schools. About 83 percent of Americans graduate from secondary schools and 60 percent continue their studies and receive some form of post-high school education. Approximately 20.3 percent graduate from four-year colleges and universities.

School attendance is required in all 50 states. In 32 states, students must attend school until they are 16 years old. In nine other states, the minimum age for leaving school is 17. Eight states require schooling until the age of 18, while one state allows students to leave school at 14.

How are American schools changing? The quality of education in the United States has often been debated in the course of American history. During the 1960s and 1970s, many schools offered a wide variety of nonacademic courses, such as "driver's education" and "marriage and family living." Educators were worried that students were not taking enough "academic" courses, such as mathematics and English. Many other reports soon came out with recommendations calling for stricter high school requirements.

In the early 1980s, the United States National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a report called "A Nation at Risk," reporting that "a rising tide of mediocrity threatens our very future as a nation." Educators were worried that students were not learning as much as they should. Scores on high school seniors' Scholastic Aptitude Tests (college entrance examinations) had declined almost every year from 1963 to 1980. "A Nation at Risk" also reported that 13 percent of 17-year-olds were functionally illiterate (unable to read and write).

Schools began to answer the challenge. Most states and school districts have passed new, more demanding standards that students must meet before they can graduate from high school. Most high schools now require four years of English, three years each of mathematics, science and social studies, one- and-one-half years of computer science and up to four years of a foreign language.

Business organizations, realizing that their future employees needed skills that could be learned in schools, pitched in to help. In Boston, for example, the business community offered jobs and scholarships to students who stayed in school to graduate. In other communities, companies "adopted" certain schools, usually in low-income areas, and provided tutoring, scholarships and other help. By 1988, there were 141,000 educational "partnerships." According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 40 percent of the nation's schools and 9 million students are involved in some sort of partnership program. Corporations have also given grants to universities to improve teacher education.

Educators believe these and other methods to improve education are beginning to show results, and that U.S. schools are at least reversing the previous decline. Tests showed that student achievement in science and mathematics, which had declined during the 1970s, improved during the 1980s—although performance in reading and writing either declined or stayed the same. Average scores on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (college entrance exams) increased by a significant ten points between 1980 and 1990—although they were still substantially below the average in 1970. But scores on the verbal section of the test hovered around the 1980 level—more than thirty points below the 1970 level. Critics point out that U.S. students consistently score lower on academic tests—especially in math and science—than their counterparts in Europe and Japan. They believe the longer school year and more rigorous requirements in those other countries produce superior achievement. And they cite a study by the National Institute of Mental Health which showed that high school seniors had spent more time in front of a television screen (15,000 hours) than they had spent in school (11,000 hours).

High school students can take vocational courses that prepare them to perform specific jobs, such as that of a carpenter or an automobile mechanic. Advanced courses prepare other students for university or college study. Special education (for the handicapped student) is offered in most schools. Schools enroll about three million handicapped students.

At least 85 percent of all public high schools have computers. Students are writing computer programs and creating charts, art and music on computers.

Many parents are involved in working for better quality education in the United States. Parents are joining parent-teacher organizations, tutoring their children, raising money for special programs and helping to keep schools in good repair.

LEISIRE A!\D ACTIVITIES

Schools provide American students with much more than academic education. Students learn about the world through various school-related activities. More than 80 percent of all students participate in student activities, such as sports, student newspapers, drama clubs, debate teams, choral groups and bands.

What are the favorite sports of American young people? According to the survey "The Mood of American Youth," they prefer football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, tennis, soccer, boxing, hockey, track and golf.

During their leisure time, students spend much time watching television. They also listen to music on the radio and tape players. The average American teenager listens to music on the radio about three hours every day. Without a doubt, rock-and-roll music is the favorite of teenagers in the United States.

America's young people are mostly hardworking. Many have after-school jobs. One poll indicated that nine out of 10 teenagers polled said they either had a job or would like one.

Child labor laws set restrictions on the types of work that youths under 16 years old can do. Many youths work part-time on weekends or after school at fast-food restaurants, babysit for neighbors, hold delivery jobs or work in stores.

Many youths are involved in community service organizations. Some are active in church and religious-group activities. Others belong to youth groups such as Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts. About three million girls aged six to 17 years old belong to Girl Scouts, for example. They learn about citizenship, crafts, arts, camping and other outdoor activities.

Thousands of young people volunteer to help take care of the elderly, the handicapped and hospital patients. Many help clean up the natural environment.

YOUTH'S PROBLEMS

To some observers, teens today may seem spoiled (undisciplined and egocentric) compared to those of earlier times. The reality, however, is different. While poverty has decreased and political turmoil has lessened, young people are still under many types of stress. Peer pressure, changing family conditions, mobility of families and unemployment are just a few reasons why some young people may try to escape reality by turning to alcohol or drugs. However, most young people in the United States do not have problems with drinking, drug abuse, teen pregnancies or juvenile delinquency. Drug use (marijuana and cocaine are the most commonly used drugs) has decreased among young people in the United States within the last 10 years, though alcohol abuse has increased.

According to a 1991 government survey, about 8 million teenagers are weekly users of alcohol, including more than 450,000 who consume an average of 15 drinks a week. And, although all 50 states prohibit the sale of alcohol to anyone under 21, some 6.9 million teenagers, including some as young as 13, reported no problems in obtaining alcohol using false identification cards. Although many teenagers say they never drive after drinking, one-third of the students surveyed admitted they they has accepted rides from friends who had been drinking.

Many young Americans are joining organizations to help teenagers stop drinking and driving. Thousands of teenagers have joined Students Against Driving Drunk (SADD). They sign contracts in which they and their parents pledge not to drive after drinking. In some schools, students have joined anti-drug programs. Young people with drug problems can also call special telephone numbers to ask for help.

Aside from drug abuse, another problem of America's youths is pregnancy among young women. One million teenagers become pregnant each year. Why are the statistics so high? The post-World War II baby boom resulted in a 43 percent increase in the number of teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s. The numbers of sexually active teens also increased. And some commentators believe that regulations for obtaining federal welfare assistance unintentionally encourage teenage pregnancies.

Many community programs help cut down on the numbers of teenage pregnancies. Some programs rely on strong counseling against premarital sex and others provide contraceptive counseling. The "Teen Health Project" in New York City has led to a decline of 13.5 percent in the rate of teenage pregnancies since 1976. Why? Their program offers health care, contraceptive counseling, sports programs, job referrals and substance abuse programs.

About one million young people run away from home each year. Most return after a few days or a few weeks, but a few turn to crime and become juvenile delinquents. In 1989, approximately one-third of those

arrested for serious crimes were under 18 years of age. Why are young people committing crimes? Among the causes are poor family relationships (often the children were abused or neglected while growing up), bad neighborhood conditions, peer pressure and sometimes, drug addiction.

Laws vary from state to state regarding juvenile delinquents. Once arrested, a juvenile must appear in a juvenile court. Juvenile courts often give lighter punishments to young people than to adults who commit the same crime. Juvenile courts hope to reform or rehabilitate the juvenile delinquent.

New programs to help troubled youths are created every year. For example, the city of New York and the Rheedlen Foundation provide an after-school program at a junior high school to help keep teens from becoming juvenile delinquents. Young people can go after school and talk with peer counselors (people their own age), receive academic tutoring or take part in athletic and social activities. One New York community's library offers weekday evening workshops in dance, art, music and theater. They also sponsor social events, such as theater productions, in which young people can participate. Another group, the "Youth Rescue Fund" has a celebrity peer council of 15 teenage actors and actresses who volunteer their time to increase teen crisis awareness. As one young television actress said: "Teenagers are an important resource in improving the quality of life for all people."

THE FUTURE

Most American youths look forward to their future with hope and optimism. According to the survey "The Mood of American Youth," teenagers "place a high priority on education and careers. While filled with high hopes about the years before them, today's students are not laboring under any misconceptions about what they must do to realize their aspirations. They admit that hard work lies ahead and claim they are willing to make the sacrifices needed to reach their goals."

Many young people are headed toward four-year colleges and universities. More than half of all students in the United States plan to earn a college degree. Many others look forward to getting a job after high school or attending a two-year junior college. Others plan on getting married. The median age for males getting married for the first time is 26.2 years old, for females, 23.8 years old.

Other young people intend to join the armed forces or volunteer organizations. For some, travel is the next step in gaining experience beyond high school.

During the early 1980s, career success was the prime goal of most young people. But, by the end of the decade, attitudes were changing and young people were becoming more idealistic. A 1989 survey of high school leaders showed that "making a contribution to society" was more than twice as important to young people as "making a lot of money."

American youth are concerned about problems confronting both their own communities and the world around them. In a 1990 poll, American young people said that the most important issues they had to face were: drug abuse, AIDS, and environmental problems.

Young people in the United States are also concerned with global issues such as nuclear war and world hunger. They care for other people around the world, as is evident by such efforts as "The Children for Children Project," in the course of which a group of New York City children worked to raise $250,000 to help the starving children of Ethiopia in 1985. Then they challenged other students in the United States to join in the fund-raising activities. Also in 1985, a benefit called "Live Aid" staged two rock music concerts simultaneously in England and the United States and raised about $50 million to bring relief to starving people in Africa.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bremner, Robert H. et al., eds. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. Vol 1:1600-1865. Vol. 2:1866-1932.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971

George, Patricia L., ed. The Mood of American Youth.

Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals, 1984.

Gordon, Michael, ed.

The American Family in Social-Historical

Perspectives. 3rd ed.

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Osterman, Paul.

Getting Started: The Youth Labor Market. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.

Youth Problems: Timely Reports to Keep Journalists, Scholars and the Public Abreast of Developing Issues, Events and Trends. Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1982.

LITERATURE: 1600 TO 1914

The first explorers and settlers who came to North America from Europe wrote little beyond practical reports, sent back to the Old World, describing the continent's natural beauty, its unique plants and animals, and the customs of the dark- skinned inhabitants already there. They did not note the rich local folklore—an oral, not written, tradition—which was really the first American literature.

PRACTICAL BEGINNINGS

Leaders of the earliest permanent settlements, in the first years of the 1600s, kept detailed accounts of the lives of their little groups of colonists. Their purpose was not only to tell their friends back home what the new land was like; they also wanted to describe what was in effect a social experiment. Captain John Smith (1580- 1631), who organized the English colony of Jamestown (in what is now the state of

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as "Mark Twain," wrote in a distinctly American style—rich in metaphor, newly invented words and drawling rhythms. His Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been called the greatest novel in American literature.

Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum

Virginia), wrote books in which he outlined carefully the economic and political structure of his settlement. Farther north, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Governor William Bradford (1590-1657) recorded the experiences of the Pilgrims who had come from England and Holland seeking religious freedom. His history of the Plymouth plantation focused on their hardships, on their spiritual response to life in a remote wilderness, and on the religious meaning of those events. This account was written only for his own reflection.

For a long time, however, there was little imaginative literature produced in the colonies. At first, the settlers' waking hours were occupied nearly totally with efforts to ensure survival. Later, the community discouraged the writing of works such as plays because these weren't "useful" and were widely considered to be immoral. In the North, where the communities were run by the religious Protestants generally called Puritans, hard work and material prosperity were greatly valued as outward signs of God's grace. Making money was also important, for other reasons, to the merchants of the growing cities of New York and Philadelphia and to the farmers of large tracts of land in the southern colonies.

The population of the colonies increased rapidly, and by the middle of the 17th century these colonies were no longer crude outposts. In 1647, Massachusetts began to require towns of 50 families or more to establish elementary schools. Excellent colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary were founded throughout the colonies for training religious leaders. In 1640, the Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in America; by the early 1700s, newspapers were appearing. As the latest books arrived on ships from Europe, colonists involved themselves in various European religious and political controversies. Puritan sermons, such as those of Increase Mather and his son Cotton in the late 1600s, or of Jonathan Edwards in the mid-1700s, were often highly intellectual discussions of theology, responding to arguments in the English church. These were not inevitably dry, sterile lectures. Edwards' famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," for example, was full of imagery and passion.

METAPHYSICAL POETS

The Puritan notion that God should be seen in every phase of daily life also gave rise to poetry. Anne Bradstreet published a volume of fine poems, chiefly religious meditations, in 1650. Edward Taylor, who wrote at about the same time but did not publish his poems during his life, used imagery in the same bold, witty, original way as did English religious poets John Donne and George Herbert. These writers were known as the "Metaphysical" poets. Taylor's poems belong to the literary tradition of the individual focusing on his interior life. Anne Bradstreet's poems represent yet another important element of American literature: From the beginning, women were active literary figures in the New World.

ENUGHTENMENT INFLUENCES

As a philosophical movement called the Enlightenment swept over Europe in the 18th century, its rational logic and its ideas on human rights were eagerly adopted in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a printer and publisher in Philadelphia, was a model Enlightenment figure. He was an author, scientist, inventor, common-sense philosopher, and a statesman and diplomat in his later years, during the colonies' fight for independence. Franklin's Autobiography, written about his life from 1731 to 1759, displays worldly wisdom and wit, along with satire and a practical dose of advice on daily living.

By the mid-1700s, the colonies had enough printing presses to publish a great number of newspapers and political pamphlets, most of them echoing the ideology of the Enlightenment. These political writings helped arouse the colonists to wage war against the British government that ruled them. In 1776, the colonists' position was formally stated in the Declaration of Independence, which was chiefly the work of a wealthy young Virginia landowner and lawyer, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Although he wasn't a writer by profession, Jefferson was a brilliant thinker, and the strong, clear, fervent language of the Declaration makes it a prose masterpiece. After the colonies won their independence from Britain in 1783, Jefferson campaigned for Constitutional provisions protecting individual rights, which were embodied in the Bill of Rights (the Constitution's first 10 Amendments). He also served as the new country's third president.

With independence, energies that had gone into fighting the war were channeled instead into building the new United States. That included the development of a "native" culture. Colonists had imported new plays and novels from Europe before the war; now they hoped for American writers to give them similar literature, dealing with American subjects. A new literature could not, of course, spring up overnight. What often happened was that American writers strained to copy British works. The first American plays were mostly romantic melodramas, usually set during the recent war. The first novelists generally imitated popular European novels. Many women wrote sentimental love stories modeled upon British novelist Samuel Richardson's (1689-1761) Pamela and Clarissa. American author Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) wrote a sprawling satire, Modern Chivalry, which was similar to the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote, except that it was set on the American frontier. Charles Brockden Brown's (1771- 1810) Wieland and Ormond were imitations of the suspenseful "Gothic" novels then being written in England.

The leading poet of the early republic was Philip Freneau (1752-1832), a personal friend of many important leaders of the American Revolution. Freneau's early poems were glowingly patriotic, either celebrating American victories or commenting passionately upon the issues facing the new democracy. After the turn of the century, however, he wrote instead about nature, following the trend in Europe, where the "Romantic" movement was just beginning.

AMERICAN STYLES

Freneau was perhaps the first professional writer in America, but his fame did not spread beyond his native shores. In 1819, however, a cultured young New Yorker named Washington Irving (1783-1859) published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, a volume of stories that was read just as eagerly in Europe as in the United States. Irving was known in New York as part of a circle of literary men-about-town called "the Knickerbocker Wits," but his travels in Europe and his friendship with major literary figures abroad had given him a more cosmopolitan viewpoint. The Sketch Book contains such classic American stories as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." To Europeans, these tales from the New World seemed exotic, yet they were written with a European polish and humor.

Only two years after The Sketch Book, another American writer began to attract attention—James Fenimore Cooper (1789- 1851). His books included a series of frontier novels, such as The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, and several gripping sea novels. Cooper used the "exotic" settings of the new continent, but he went beyond that to create a distinctively American style of hero—an uneducated man, close to nature, who survived on his instincts, honesty and common sense.

In 1828, Noah Webster published an American dictionary, defining what made the English language spoken in America different from British English. The election of frontier hero Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1829 symbolized to many the achievement of a real democracy, and political cartoons and satiric humor blossomed in newspapers. The spread of public schools through the states ensured a large reading public. Educator William Holmes McGuffey's (1800-1873) publishing of a series of primers, which were widely used in those schools, ensured that the general population shared a common store of literary material—poems, moralistic tales and quotations from literature. After 1836, more than 120 million copies of the "McGuffey Readers" were printed, and they influenced generations of Americans.

TRANSCENDENTALISTS

The country was expanding westward, but in the older cities of the northeastern states—still referred to as "New England"—the influence of early Puritan teachings remained strong. However, sue! authoritarian religious organizations inevitably produce dissenters. In 1836, an ex-minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published a startling book called Nature. In this volume, Emerson claimed that by studying and responding t nature individuals could reach a higher spiritual state without formal religion. For the next several years, Emerson's essays made him extremely influential, not only upon other thinkers and writers, but upon the general population as well, thanks to ; growing popular lecture circuit that brought controversial speakers to small towns across the country. In effect, Emerson's lectures were like sermons, with their direct, motivating language. In his poetry Emerson developed a free-form, natural style, using symbols and imagery drawn from nature. His work had an immense impact on other poets of the time.

A circle of intellectuals who were discontented with the New England establishment soon gathered around Emerson. They were known as "the Transcendentalists," based on their acceptance of Emerson's theories about spiritual transcendence. One of Emerson' most gifted fellow-thinkers was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).

Thoreau was passionate about individuals' learning to think for themselves and being independent, both traditional American values. He carried out this idea by going to live by himself for two years in a simple cabin beside a wooded pond, where he survived essentially by his own labors and meditated in solitude. The book he wrote about this experience, Walden, was published in 1854, but many of its statements about the individual's role in society— simply put, that the dictates of an individual's conscience should take precedence over the demands, even the laws, of society—sound radical even today

POWER OE IMAGINATION

While these New England intellectuals presented perspectives of literature and life other writers were concentrating upon human imagination and emotion rather th the intellect. A young Virginian, Edgar Allan Рое (1809-1849), was publishing poems of musical language and extravagant imagery, which made him a worthy rival < the European Romantic poets. Brilliant but unstable, Рое earned his living as a journalist, often writing devastating reviews of other writers' work. In 1835, h also began writing bold, original short stories, such as "The Pit and the Pendulum and "The Fall of the House of Usher." These suspenseful, sometimes terrifying tales plunged deep into human psychology and explored the realms of science fiction and the mystery story long before such genres were recognized.

Meanwhile, in 1837, a young writer in New England named Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) published a volume called Twice-Told Tales, stories rich in symbolism and peculiar incidents. Although he knew

the Transcendentalists, Hawthorne did not share their beliefs. His way of rebelling against the traditional New England outlook on life was to write imaginative "romances," stories and novels which were not necessarily realistic but which were designed to explore certain moral themes such as guilt, pride and emotional repression. His masterpiece was The Scarlet Letter, a novel published in 1850. Set in the Puritan past, it is the stark drama of a woman harshly cast out from her community for committing the sin of adultery.

Hawthorne's writing had a profound impact upon another writer, originally from New York, who was living at the time in New England. Herman Melville (1819- 1891), whose wealthy father had gone bankrupt, had worked at many jobs before signing on in 1839 for the first of several sea voyages. Seven years later, he began writing accounts of his adventures on the open seas and in exotic ports, which won him instant success. Yet Melville longed to write something more serious. Inspired by Hawthorne's example, he began writing novels which were fundamentally allegories on politics and religion. The public rejected them, however, and, discouraged, Melville published little except poetry for the rest of his life. Ironically, the very books that proved unacceptable during his lifetime are the ones most admired today. Moby Dick, published in 1851, uses a story of a whaling voyage to explore profound themes such as fate, the nature of evil, and the individual's struggle against the universe. It is considered an American masterpiece.

nEW VISIONS OF AMERICA

Рое, Hawthorne and Melville all struggled to find their individual voices, and through them American literature began to acquire its own personality. One more figure emerged in the 1850s to assert a truly American voice, one that celebrated the American landscape, the American people, their speech and democratic form of government. His name was Walt Whitman (1819-1892), and like so many other of these writers, he had had to work hard for a living as a schoolteacher, printer and journalist. In 1848, he took a trip to the southern city of New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, that great waterway flowing through the heart of the country. There Whitman gained a new vision of America and began writing poetry that would embody this vision. In 1855, he published a ground-breaking book called Leaves of Grass. Readers were amazed by the free-flowing structure of this poetry, with its long irregular lines. Like Melville in Moby Dick, Whitman ventured beyond traditional forms to meet his need for more space to express the American spirit. Some readers were disturbed by Whitman's egotism (one main poem in Leaves of Grass is called "Song of Myself'), but Whitman dwelt on himself simply because he saw himself as a prototype of "The American." Startling as this poetry was, it won Whitman admirers across America and in Europe. Throughout the rest of his life, he kept rewriting and republishing editions of Leaves of Grass. He celebrated a sweeping

panorama of the American landscape and sang almost mystically of the rhythms of life uniting all citizens of the democracy.

The most popular poet in America at this time, however, was a much more traditional writer—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Although his style was conservative, with strict meter and rhymes, his themes were deliberately American, and he was intent upon giving American history the dignity of classical mythology. The same year that Whitman .first published Leaves of Grass, Longfellow published The Song of Hiawatha, a long epic poem about a young warrior of an American Indian tribe.

Longfellow was one of a popular group called the "Fireside Poets" because they often depicted the lives of simple New Englanders in gentle, nostalgic verse. Although they came from old New England families—a sort of American "aristocracy"—Longfellow and his circle were dedicated to America's democratic ideals.

PEFORM AND LIBERATION

New England intellectuals had, in fact, a tradition of involvement in liberal reform. In the 1850s, this took the form of a movement to end the institution of slavery, which by that time was practiced chiefly in the southern states. In 1852, a New England woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, an antislavery novel that galvanized political opinion across the nation. Sentimental and melodramatic as it was, Uncle Tom's Cabin portrayed black slaves as sympathetic, suffering figures, and created an image of the cruel slaveowner in the character of Simon Legree. Largely as a result of this best-selling novel, the slavery question became a passionately debated political issue. Eventually the Southern states determined to secede from the Union and to establish themselves as an independent country in order to preserve their way of life, which included an agrarian economy based in great part on slave labor. The result of Northern reaction to this secession was the Civil War (1861-1865), fought to preserve the Union. One consequence of the South's defeat in that war was the abolition of slavery in the United States.

REGIONALISM

In many ways, this bloody, divisive war dimmed American optimism, and for a time writers retreated from national themes. The country had been growing; as pioneers settled new territories in the West, writers now focused on the differences between the various regions of the United States rather than on a single vision of the expanding country. One of the most important leaders of this "regionalism" movement was William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who in 1866 became editor of the influential Atlantic magazine. Howells published stories from all over the United States, and in his literary reviews he praised writers who described local life realistically. In New England, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) and

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) wrote fine novels and stories about small-town life. Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) wrote colorful stories about the South, such as his "Uncle Remus" stories, in which the strong southern accent was written in dialect. The central part of the country, the wide plains and rolling farmlands of the Midwest, were depicted in John Hay's Pike Country Ballads and Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster. And the raw mining camps and settlements of the far West were brought to life by storytellers such as Bret Harte, in "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and a newspaper correspondent named Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. He grew up in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River and received only a basic public school education. He began working in a printer's shop when he was still a boy, and this experience led to a series of newspaper jobs in the Midwest and the West. Twain was a new voice, an original genius, a man of the people, and he quickly won readers. He captured a peculiarly American sense of humor, telling outrageous jokes and tall tales in a calm, innocent, matter-of-fact manner. He sometimes used local dialect for comic effect, but even his normal prose style sounded distinctively American—rich in metaphor, newly invented words and drawling rhythms.

Twain had a cynical streak that matched the country's skeptical post-Civil War mood. He soon developed beyond merely "regional" stories and turned to comic novels. His shrewd social satire was most apparent in books such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but perhaps his greatest book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). This is the story of a boy running away from home and steering a raft down the Mississippi River, but it is more than that. The people the boy meets cover the entire spectrum of humanity, and his voyage down the river becomes a metaphor for a journey through life. Funny, powerful, humane and laced with social commentary and criticism, Huckleberry Finn has been called the greatest novel in American literature.

HIDDEN POETS

While prose fiction in the United States was developing in vital and imaginative ways, poetry seemed to recede as an art form. The poetic giants, Longfellow and Whitman, both died in the 1880s, as did two poets who have been admired by later generations, but who were barely known while they lived. One was southerner Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), who mourned the romantic ideal of the "Old South," which he felt had been shattered by the Civil War. Lanier held strong theories about poetry's relationship to music, and his rhythmic, singing verse reminded many people of the poetry of Edgar Allan Рое. The other unrecognized poet was Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a shy, brilliant New England woman who lived almost as a recluse in her family home. After a batch of her poems were rejected by one editor, she wrote only for herself, or sent verses as gifts to friends and relatives. They were typically short, reflective poems, with regular meter and rhyme and fresh, closely observed images. Although at first they appear to be traditional love poems or religious meditations, upon closer reading Dickinson's poems reveal a religious skepticism and psychological shrewdness that is surprisingly modern.

A NEWWAVE

As the wounds of the Civil War slowly healed, many Americans became discontented with the growing materialism of society in the United States. Henry Adams (1838-1918), a thoughtful historian and social critic, wrote two social novels in the 1880s (although today they are not as well read as his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams). Henry James (1843-1916), an American who lived in Europe, examined American society by observing the divergence between American and European culture in novels like The American and Portrait of a Lady. In 1888, one of the most widely read American books was Edward Bellamy's (1850-1898) Looking Backward, a portrait of an imaginary future society which embodied all of Bellamy's ideas for social, economic and industrial reorganization. These books signalled a return to social discussion in fiction.

"Regional" writers began to drop their narrow provincial focus, while still using realistic descriptions of everyday life. As they concentrated increasingly upon the grimmer aspects of reality and a deterministic view of life, they were called "naturalists," linking them to European naturalists such as French novelist Emile Zola. Again, William Dean Howells led the American realistic movement, both with his magazine criticism and with his own novels, such as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), a probing but sympathetic portrait of an American businessman.

In 1881, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) published Main-Travelled Roads, a gritty portrayal of the farming communities of the upper Midwest, where he had grown up. It went beyond regionalism to condemn the economic system that, in his opinion, kept these people poor. Stephen Crane's (1871- 1900) Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, in 1893, and Theodore Dreiser's (1871-1945) Sister Carrie, in 1900, were considered shocking because they described young urban women who fell into sexual sin. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) was set during the Civil War. By limiting itself to a young soldier's confused impressions of battle, it became the first impressionistic novel in America. Frank Norris' McTeague (1899) was the story of a dentist's despairing life; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) exposed the horrible lives of meat-packing factory workers. Jack London's Call of the Wild (1903), the tale of a sled dog, was set in the snowy wilderness of the Northwest, where the discovery of gold had caused a rush of greedy prospectors. In this novel and other celebrated tales set in Alaska and in the South Pacific, London expressed his sense that primitive urges underlie all of life, reducing even humans to the level of animals.

While these controversial books disturbed the reading public, other writers were quietly exploring the fate of the individual. After the turn of the century, Henry James, still living in Europe, wrote three brilliant novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, in which he plunged deep into the characters and personalities of his subjects. These were chiefly wealthy, cultured Americans living in Europe, but, like the lower-class characters of the naturalists' novels, James' people were trapped in their environment, struggling to find happiness. James' interest was psychological rather than social, however. Recording the most minute details of perception, he drew his readers close to his characters' mental and emotional processes. His writing style became increasingly complex, but this focused attention away from action and setting and onto what the characters were feeling.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was one of James' close friends and literary followers. She came from a socially prominent New York family and had married into an equally important Boston family. This high-toned social circle disapproved of her writing, but eventually she defied her peers and produced insightful novels and stories. One of her finest books, The House of Mirth (1905), tells the tragic story of a fading beauty hunting desperately for a rich husband. Wharton exposed her upper-class world as only an insider could, but her characters were her main interest.

SYMPATHETIC VIEWS

Three other women, in different parts of the country, were also writing sympathetic psychological studies. Though influenced by regionalism, they didn't emphasize setting so much as they did their characters, individuals who often felt out of place in their environments. Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) is set in the heart of the South, in New Orleans; Ellen Glasgow's The Voice of the People (1900) is a realistic portrait of provincial Virginia society; and Willa Cather's О Pioneers! (1913) depicts life on the sweeping plains of midwestern Nebraska. Glasgow and Cather went on to write several novels and establish themselves as major American writers, but Chopin stopped writing after her book was condemned by literary critics.

By the first decade of the 20th century, even writers of popular fiction were concentrating their attention upon the lower levels of society. One of the most successful of these writers was O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910), who churned out hundreds of clever magazine stories, usually with an ironical surprise ending. Midwesterners Ring Lardner (The Love Nest and Other Stories) and Booth Tarkington (Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons), were less sentimental and more satirical than O. Henry, but they too wrote humorous popular fiction about the unglamorous lives of everyday people.

American literature entered the 20th century not as optimistic or patriotic as it had been a century earlier, yet full of democratic spirit. There were some voices still to be heard, however. Black Americans were just beginning to make their mark in literature in the wake of the Civil War's having freed them from slavery. One gifted black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), published a few volumes of poetry during the 1890s which were discovered and admired by white readers. Most of his poems, however, used the black dialect of folklore for humorous effect; only a few poems express the painful struggle of his short life. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois (1869-1963) published Souls of Black Folk, a series of sketches of the common lives of his people which was the first glimpse many white Americans had had of the social condition of blacks since slavery. In 1912, poet James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote a novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which also depicted blacks building a new culture after slavery. But it would still be a few years before black literature would burst into flower.

Similarly, technical innovations in both poetry and prose were just getting under way, perhaps as a reaction to the plain style of the realists and naturalists. In 1909, an American woman named Gertrude Stein, who had settled abroad in Paris, France, published an experimental work of prose called Three Lives that would influence an entire generation of younger writers. In 1912, in the major midwestern metropolis of Chicago, Harriet Monroe founded a magazine called Poetry, through the pages of which she would discover and encourage a whole group of masterful new poets. But these were still underground currents in 1914, when war broke out in Europe—a war so devastating that the entire world was swept up in it.

Suggestions for Further Reading Brooks, Van Wyck.

The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981 (cl936).

Chase, Richard.

The American Novel and Its Traditions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, (cl957).

Ellmann, Richard, ed.

The New Oxford Book of American Verse.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Litz, A. Walton, ed.

Major American Short Stories.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Parrington, Vernon L.

Main Currents in American Thought: An

Interpretation of American Literature from the

Beginnings to 1920. 3 volumes.

San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955-1958.

LITERATURE: 1914 TO 1990

By Holly Hughes

(Managing Editor, Successful Meetings)

The central distinguishing element of American literature is a strong strain of realism, seen earlier in perhaps America's greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain and also in its greatest, or at least, most extensive work of poetry, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). Also, at its best there is a high moral tone to American literature reflected in the constant anguish over the loss of ideals and failure of the American dream to provide opportunity for all. This same concern for spiritual or moral well-being is evident in the rebellion against the stultifying elements of small-town American life.

REBELLIOUS SPIRITS

In the first decades of the 20th century the United States became increasingly urban. Three major works of literature expressed this new attitude of rebellion against the limited life of the typical small American town. The first work, written in 1915, was Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. The Spoon River poems all took the form of gravestone inscriptions from the cemetery of an imaginary midwestern town. In each short poem, one buried person recounted his or her life experience in ironic, sometimes bitter statements, full of regret. The overall message was one of tragically wasted lives.

In 1919, a writer named Sherwood Anderson published a book of short stories called Winesburg, Ohio. Like Spoon River Anthology, this was a series of portraits of different personalities in one midwestern town, creating an overall impression of narrow-minded ignorance and frustrated dreams.

The third "revolt from the village" work was a novel called Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920. Again, the setting was a small midwestern town, this one called Gopher Prairie, a name that suggested crudeness and lack of culture. In this book, and in others such as Babbitt and Arrow smith, Lewis drew vivid caricatures and satirized the traditional "American dream" of success. To urban Americans and Europeans both, Lewis seemed to sum up what small-town America was all about. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the first American to be so honored.

TНЕ POETS

With growing sophistication in literature came a resurgence of American poetry. Many poets first became known by having work published in Poetry magazine in Chicago, though the writers themselves came from various regions of the country. The one thing they had in common was technical skill and originality.

On one hand there were social satirists like Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Robinson wrote melancholy, ironic portraits of American characters, often set in a small town, a New England version of Masters' Spoon River. On the other hand, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg poured out exuberant verse that sang proudly of America.

Robert Frost's lyric poems about the New England countryside seemed simple and traditional in form, although underneath there ran a darker vision. On the other side of the continent, in the western state of California, Robinson Jeffers was writing, in sprawling free verse, more openly pessimistic poetry set against a grimmer image of nature.

THE MODERNISTS

One important literary movement of the time was "Imagism," whose poets focused on strong, concrete images. New Englander Amy Lowell poured out exotic, impressionistic poems; Marianne Moore, from the midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri, was influenced by Imagism but selected and arranged her images with more discipline. Ezra Pound began as an Imagist but soon went beyond, into complex, sometimes obscure poetry, full of references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature. Living in Europe, Pound influenced many other poets, especially T.S. Eliot.

Eliot was also born in St. Louis but settled in England. He wrote spare, intellectual poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. His 1922 poem, "The Waste Land" spun out, in fragmented, haunting images, a pessimistic vision of post-World War I society. From then on, Eliot dominated the so-called "Modern" movement in poetry. Another Modernist, e.e. cummings, called attention to his poetry by throwing away rules of punctuation, spelling, and even the way words were placed on the page. His poems were song-like but satiric, humorous and anarchistic. Wallace Stevens, in contrast, wrote thoughtful speculations on how man can know reality. Stevens' verse was disciplined, with understated rhythms, precisely chosen words and a cluster of central images. The poetry of William Carlos Williams, with its light, supple rhythms, was rooted in Imagism, but Williams, a New Jersey physician, used detailed impressions of everyday American life.

LOST GENERATION

In the aftermath of World War I many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment. Some lived abroad and were known as "the Lost Generation." F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's great theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, was of youth's golden dreams turning to disappointment. His prose was exquisite, yet his vision was essentially melancholy and nostalgic. John Dos Passos came home from the war to write long novels that attempted to portray all of American society, usually with a critical eye. In three novels combined under the title U.S.A., he interwove many plots, characters and settings, fictional and non- fictional, cutting back and forth between them in a style much like the new popular art-form, motion pictures.

War had also affected Ernest Hemingway. Having seen violence and death close at hand, Hemingway adopted a moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values of strength, courage and honesty. In his own writing, he cut out all unnecessary words and complex sentence structure, concentrating on concrete objects and actions. His main characters were usually tough, silent men, good at sports or war but awkward in their dealings with women. Among his best books were The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He eventually won the Nobel Prize and is considered one of the greatest American writers.

Another expatriate, Henry Miller, used a comic, anecdotal style to record his experiences as a down-and-out artist in Paris. Miller's emphasis on sexual vitality made his books, such as Tropic of Cancer (1934), shocking to many, but others felt that his frank language brought a new honesty to literature.

Southerner Thomas Wolfe felt like a foreigner not only in Europe but even in the northern city of New York, to which he had moved. Though he rejected the society around him, he did not criticize it—he focused obsessively on himself and on describing real people from his life in vivid characterizations. His long novels, such as Of Time and the River and You Can't Go Home Again, gushed forward, powerful, romantic and rich in detail, although emotionally exhausting.

Another southerner, William Faulkner, found in one small imaginary corner of the state of Mississippi, deep in the heart of the South, enough material for a lifetime of writing. His social portraits were realistic, yet his prose style was experimental. To show the relationship of the past and the present, he sometimes jumbled the time sequence of his plots; to reveal a character's primitive impulses and social prejudices, he recorded unedited the ramblings of his or her consciousness. Some of his best novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Faulkner, too, won a Nobel Prize.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

The 1920s also saw the rise of an artistic black community centered in New York City in Harlem, a fashionable black neighborhood. African-Americans had brought a lively, powerful music called jazz with them as they moved to northern cities; the jazz clubs of Harlem became chic night spots in the 1920s. The nation suddenly discovered "the new Negro," an articulate urban black, conscious of his or her racial identity. Magazines and newspapers dedicated to black writing sprang up. New poets such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Arna Bontemps wrote about what it meant to be black. They used exotic images drawn from their African and slavery pasts, and incorporated the rhythms of black music such as jazz, blues and the folk hymns called "spirituals." Many of these poets also wrote novels, such as Toomer s Cane (1923), McKay s Home to Harlem (1928) and Bontemps' Black Thunder (1936). Cullen and James Weldon Johnson published anthologies of black poetry. The Harlem Renaissance gave African-American culture prominence and an impetus to grow.

NEW DRAMA

There was another burst of intense literary activity in the 1920s—in drama. Although the premiere theater town was the large eastern cit of New York, most cities had their own theaters. Professional actors toured the United States, performing British classics, musical entertainments or second-rate melodramas. Bu there had not yet been an important American dramatist. Then, in 1916, a company called the Provincetown Players began to produce the works of Eugene O'Neill—plays that were more than just entertainment.

O'Neill borrowed ideas from European playwrights, such as August Strindberg. Like the Modernists, he used symbolism, adapted stories from classical mythology and the Bible, and drew upon the new science of psychology to explore his characters' inner lives. What made O'Neill unique was his incorporation of all these elements into a new American voice and dramatic style. His characters spoke heightened language—not realistic, yet not flowery. He described elaborate stage sets that stood as dramatic symbols. To express psychological undercurrents, he had characters speak their thoughts aloud or wear masks, to represent the difference between public self and private self. He wrote frankly about sex and family relations, but his greatest theme was the individual's search for identity. Among his major plays were Desire Under the Elms (1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1956). O'Neill won a Nobel Prize in 1936 for literature.

By the 1930s, the country was plunged into a severe economic depression, and O'Neill's emphasis on the individual was replaced by other playwrights' social and political consciousness. Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest, Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing and Sherwood Anderson's Winter set, all written in 1935, were marked by this new awareness of the individual's place and role in society. Even comedies acquired biting wit and social awareness, as in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story and S. N. Behrman's No Time for Comedy. Yet the Depression made many people long for tender humor and the affirmation of traditional values; this they found in Our Town, Thornton Wilder's panorama of an American small town, and The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan's optimistic look at an assortment of outcasts gathered in a saloon

DEPRESSION REALISM

The Depression caused novelists, too, to focus on social forces. In the South, Erskine Caldwell took a satiric look at poor southern life in Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. In the Midwest, James T. Farrell depicted the harsh city slums of Chicago in a trilogy of novels about a young man named Studs Lonigan. In the West, John Steinbeck told sympathetic stories about drifting farm laborers and factory workers. His 1939 masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, depicted an impoverished midwestern family joining a stream of poor farm laborers heading west to the "land of opportunity," the state of California. By interweaving chapters of social commentary with his story, Steinbeck made this portrait of the Joad family into a major statement about the Depression.

In New York, humorists Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and Ogden Nash carried on a tradition of witty, urbane, cynical writing in magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. This was followed by a crop of novelists and short story writers, whose literary territory was on the east coast, in sophisticated suburbs or city neighborhoods, populated by the upper middle class. J. P. Marquand established his reputation with The Late George Apley (1937). John O'Hara wrote a stream of short stories, as well as novels such as Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. John Cheever's masterful short stories, beginning in the early 1940s, defined what has become known as "the New Yorker story"—an understated, elegantly written tale of modern lives.

As the seedy underside of society began to acquire a perverse glamour, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler elevated the detective story from the status of cheap fiction to literature. Hammett's most famous detective hero was tough guy Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1930); Chandler's was Philip Marlowe, who first appeared in The Big Sleep (1939).

ESCAPISM AND WAR

Historical fiction became increasingly popular in the Depression, for it allowed readers to retreat to the past. The most successful of these books was Gone With the Wind, a 1936 best­seller about the Civil War by a southern woman, Margaret Mitchell.

The western novel became popular in the 1940s. The earliest westerns had been adventures of cowboys and Indian fighters, published in cheap fiction magazines in the late 19th century. Owen Wister's novel The Virginian (1902) had introduced a rugged, self- contained cowboy hero, who embodied the American ideal of the individualist. Even in the hands of a master like Zane Grey {Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912), however, western novels were written to a formula, colorful and action- packed but rarely thought-provoking. Then in 1940 Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Oxbow Incident examined the rights and wrongs of frontier justice and Jack Shafer's Shane, published in 1948, was a sensitive study of a boy's hero-worship of a frontier loner.

In 1939, war broke out in Europe, and eventually the entire world was embroiled in conflict again. The United States joined the war in December 1941, fighting both in Europe and in the Pacific. Right after the war, a series of young writers wrote intelligent novels showing how the pressures of war highlight men's characters. These included Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny and James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. By 1961, Joseph Heller published his satiric war novel Catch-22, in which war is portrayed as an absurd exercise for madmen.

POSTWAR VOICES

After World War II, southern literary pride gave rise to a host of new southern writers, all with a skill for rich verbal effects and a taste for grotesque or violent episodes. These included Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), Eudora Welty (The Wide Net), Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms), Robert Penn Warren (All The King's Men), William Styron (Lie Down in Darkness), Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood) and James Agee (A Death in the Family).

Science fiction had for years existed in cheap popular magazines, offering readers a fantastic escape from their own world. Yet in the 1950s, "sci-fi" became serious literature, as Americans became more and more concerned about the human impact of their advanced technological society. Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicles, 1950), Isaac Asimov (Foundation, 1951), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano, 1952), and Robert Heinlein (Stranger in A Strange Land, 1961) imaginatively portrayed future worlds, often with a moral message for the writer's own era.

The new receptivity of American society to a diversity of voices incorporated black writers and black protest into the mainstream of American literature. Richard Wright's disturbing novel Native Son, published in 1940, revealed a new black hero, whose character had been warped by his violent and cruel society. The hero of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), is also driven underground by the values of white society. James Baldwin's characteristic themes, hatred of racism and celebration of sexuality, were expressed in novels like Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953) and in essays like The Fire Next Time (1963). Beginning with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Gwendolyn Brooks wrote haunting poetry of life in a Chicago black ghetto. Lorraine Hansberry dramatized the tensions pulling apart a poor black family in her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. Black writing grew even more political in the 1960s, as the struggle for equal rights for blacks grew into a more general "black power" movement. Some of this anger could be seen in the poetry, plays and essays of Imamu Amiri Baraka (formerly known as Leroi Jones). Black political figures produced stirring books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), written with Alex Haley, and Soul On Ice (1968) by Eldridge Cleaver. Women poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans and Nikki Giovanni expressed their black pride in less violent, but still bitter, language.

American Jews also began to raise their literary voices at this time. Writers such as Saul Bellow (The Adventures ofAugie March, 1953), Bernard Malamud (The Assistant, 1957), and Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959) not only focused upon Jewish characters and social questions, they brought a distinctively Jewish sense of humor to their novels. Their prose often carried echoes of Yiddish, the language used by European Jews which had helped preserve Jewish culture, isolated but intact, until the early 20th century. Another Jewish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland but had emigrated to the United States in 1935, continued to write in Yiddish, though his stories were quickly translated into English and became part of the national literature. Both Singer and Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the theater, Tennessee Williams, beginning with The Glass Menagerie (1945), expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in an insensitive environment. Arthur Miller portrayed the common man pressured by society; his greatest play, Death of a Salesman (1947), turned a second-rate traveling salesman, Willy Loman, into a quasi-tragic hero. William Inge's psychological dramas, such as Picnic (1952), explored the secret sorrows in the lives of an ordinary small town.

TOWARD A "REAT GENERATION"

Post-war poets, such as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke and Howard Nemerov, emphasized traditional form, polish and precision, yet they could be emotional and moving, as some of Roethke's love poems or Lowell's personal "confession" poems show. Other poets experimented with new poetic effects.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the leading figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, wrote topical poems specifically to be read aloud in local coffeehouses. By making art a public event, artists like Ferlinghetti hoped to shake middle-class America out of a lifestyle they viewed as self-centered, materialistic and conformist.

The San Francisco writers were also part of a larger group called the "Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to their sense that society was worn out, and to their interest in new forms of experience, through drugs, alcohol or Eastern mysticism. Poet Alan Ginsberg's Howl (1956) set for them a tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy, in elaborate language reminiscent of Whitman. Other poets included Gregory Corso (Gasoline, 1958) and Gary Snyder (Riprap, 1959). Novelist Jack Kerouac, with On the Road (1957), celebrated the reckless lifestyle of the Beats. Other Beat-inspired novels included William Burrough's Naked Lunch (1959), a hallucinatory look at the subculture of drug addiction, and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), an anarchic satire on life in a mental hospital.

While other writers did not espouse the lifestyle of the Beats, they also viewed the world in a comic, absurd light. In J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a sardonic teenage boy resists the hypocrisies of adult society. Funny as the novel is, there is something tragic in the boy's hopelessness about his world. This same combination of wild comedy and despair, often touched with a nightmare surrealism, appeared in novels like John Barth's The End of the Road (1961),

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), John Hawkes' The Blood Oranges (1970), and also in the work of two European emigrants, Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, 1951) and Polish-born Jerzy Kosinski СThe Painted Bird, 1965).

JOURMLISTIC APPROACHES

The line between journalism and fiction began to blur in the 1960s, as magazine reporters such as Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) explored the various subcultures developing in America. Both used subjective viewpoints, slang and colloquial rhythms to convey the feeling of these lifestyles. In turn, novelists created "non-fiction novels," reporting on real incidents using the techniques of fiction: dialogue, descriptive prose and step-by-step dramatic suspense. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) told the detailed story of a family murdered on their midwestern farm; Norman Mailer's The Executioner s Song (1979) was about a social misfit and the path that led him to violent crime and a death sentence.

DARK DRAMA

In the theater, dramatists competed against movies and television by featuring the kind of strong language, illogical events and satirical subject matter that didn't often appear in commercial film and TV. Edward Albee's dark comedies, such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, used a barrage of witty dialogue to keep audiences disoriented. Arthur L. Kopit, in plays such as Indians, wrote funny, energetic satires. Sam Shepard's strong dramas—Buried Child and True West— used outrageous jokes and boisterous physical action on stage to make audiences aware that they were watching live actors, not filmed figures. David Rabe (Hurlyburly), David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross) and Lanford Wilson (The Fifth of July) began with realistic groups of characters in typical situations, which then exploded with confrontations, physical violence and rich, rapidly flowing dialogue.

PERSONAL POETRY

The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s fueled creative energies for many women writers. Poets Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, with their searingly personal poetry, revealed some of the pain and joy of being a woman. Novelists like Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays), Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time) and Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) were consciously social critics, with a feminist perspective. As the women's movement gained more acceptance, however, women wrote less in protest and more in affirmation— particularly black women writers, such as Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1988), Gloria

Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place, 1980), Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982) and Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow, 1983), who portrayed strong black women as the source of continuity, the preservers of values, in black culture.

NEW AMERICAN VOICES

Only in the 1970s did other ethnic groups begm to find their literary voice. Magazines and anthologies were dedicated to the works of American Hispanics, who had come largely from Mexico and the Caribbean. The new Hispanic poets included Tino Villanueva, Ronald Arias, Carlos Cortez and Victor Hernandez Cruz. N. Scott Momaday, an American Indian, wrote about his Native American ancestors in The Names (1976). Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston also wrote about her ancestors in the books The Woman Warrior and China Men. And writers from foreign ethnic backgrounds did not occupy the fringe of American literature—they were very much in the mainstream. Amy Tan, a Chinese-American writer, told of her parents' early struggles in California in The Joy Luck Club (1989), which quickly climbed to the top of the best-selling book list. In 1990, Oscar Hijeulos, a writer with roots in Cuba, won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In 1991, Russian-born Joseph Brodsky was appointed poet laureate of the United States.

While turbulent social changes of the 1960s and 1970s unsettled American culture, several writers kept a steady eye on basic values and main traditional plot, characterization and lucid prose style. John Updike, following in John Cheever's footsteps, wrote polished stories for magazines such as The New Yorker, and in novels such as Rabbit Run (1960) and Couples (1968) crystallized a view of contemporary America. Evan Connell, in a pair of novels called Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, sensitively painted a portrait of a middle-class family. For many years William Kennedy's novels were neglected, but with the publication of Ironweed in 1983, his tender, keen-eyed social panorama of Albany, New York, was finally brought to public attention.

Both John Irving (The World According to Garp, 1976) and Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, 1983) portrayed eccentric American families, in comic, even surrealistic episodes. Anne Tyler, in novels such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and Breathing Lessons (1989), painted a gently humorous picture of misfits on the shabby fringes of middle-class society. Bobbie Ann Mason's short stories, which first appeared in the early 1980s, depicted life in the rural southern state of Kentucky with an unsentimental and yet sympathetic eye. The spare, understated stories of Raymond Carver have helped establish a "minimalist" school of fiction writing that has proven influential. Some contemporary writers, such as Peter Taylor (A Summons to Memphis, 1987) Peter Dexter (Paris Trout, 1988), and Mary Gordon (The Other Side, 1989) bring fresh perspectives to the time-honored themes of fiction: love, death, family relationships and the quest for justice. Other young writers take real events and actual people as inspiration for their novels. Joanna Scott's Arrogance (1990) focuses on Egon Schiele, a controversial

Austrian artist of the early twentieth century. And John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990) looks at an actual news event through the prism of African-American consciousness.

While it is difficult to predict which of these writers will endure as major figures of American literature, their optimism, strong sense of place, love of the absurd and delight ii the individual, however eccentric, place them firmly within the American tradition.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Cerf, Bennett, ed. Plays of Our Time.

New York: Random House, 1967.

Cowley, Malcolm.

A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation. New York: Viking, 1973.

Emanuel, James A. and Theodore L. Gross. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America. New York: Free Press, 1968.

Hoffman, David, ed. Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Kazin, Alfred.

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. (© 1942).