_America

In close-up

_America

In close-up

ECKHARD FIEDLER REIMER JANSEN MIL NORMAN-RISCH

Pearson Education Limited

Edinburgh Gate, Harlow,

Essex CM20 2]E, England

and Associated Companies throughout the world.

www.longman-elt.com

© Longman Group UK Limited 1990

All rights reserved; no part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

expect in those cases explicity allowed by local law,

without the prior written permission of the Publishers.

ISBN 0582 74929 8 First published 1990 Tenth impression 2001

British Library Cataloging in Publication Data

Fiedler, Eckhard

America in close-up.

1. United States. Social life

I. Title II. Jansen, Reimer III. Norman-Risch, Mill 973.927

Set in 10/12 pt. Palatino

Printed in China EPC/10

_Contents

		Index of Part В Texts	8
		Introduction	10
UNIT	1	The Making of a Nation	13
UNIT	2	American Beliefs and Values	25
UNIT	3	Regionalism vs. Americanization	43
UNIT	4	The U.S. Economy	59
UNIT	5	The Urbanization of America	81
UNIT	6	Law, Crime, and Justice	97
UNIT	7	Minorities	112
UNIT	8	The Changing Role of Women	127
UNIT	9	The Political System	142
UNIT	10	America's Global Role	170
UNIT	11	Education	188
UNIT	12	Religion	205
UNIT 13		The Arts	225
UNIT	14	Sports	245
UNIT	15	The Media	261
		Some Facts about the States	278
		Presidents and Vice-Presidents
		of the United States	279
		Index	280

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_{part в Texts}

UNIT 1 The Making of a Nation

1. "America". Lyrics from the musical West Side Story by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein

2. New York - A Melting Pot. The text is taken from the back cover of MAYOR by Edward Koch.

3. Immigration Today: A Case Study. From Newsweek.

4. A Newsweek Poll on Immigration.

UNIT 2 American Beliefs and Values

1. The American Idea by Theodore H. White. From The New York Times magazine.

2. American Dreams: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Florence Scala. From American Dreams: Lost and Found by Studs Terkel.

3. A Discussion of American Beliefs and Values. An interview with four young Americans.

4. Put Out No Flags by Matthew Rothschild. From The Progressive.

UNIT 3 Regionalism vs. Americanization

1. The Cooling of the South by Raymond Arsenault. From the Wilson Quarterly.

2. Southern Women - Still Ladies? by Cora McKinney

3. The Nation's Most Strongly Defined Region. From "New England's Regionalism and Recovery" by W. Street and H. Gimlin in American Regionalism edited by Hoyt Gimlin.

4. What is a Middle Westerner? From "The Middle West" by John Fraser Hart in Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

5. "Just Like the Rest of Us, Only More So." From "California: Living Out the Golden Dream" by R. Kipling and W. Thomas in American Regionalism edited by Hoyt Gimlin.

UNIT 4 The U.S. Economy

1. Peter Drucker on Entrepreneurs. From U.S. News & World Report.

2. Inside Bell Labs by Gene Bylinsky. From Dialogue.

3. A French Fry Diary: From Idaho Furrow to Golden Arches by Meg Cox. From American Character: Views of America from the Wall Street journal.

4. The Forgotten Farmer by Danny Collum. From Sojourners.

5. Economics vs. Ecology: Problems with Solutions to Pollution by Robert W. Haseltine. From USA Today.

UNIT 5 The Urbanization of America

1. Small Town Life by Berton Roueche. From Special Places, In Search of Small Town America.

2. Revival of a City's Virtues — Why a young single woman moves to the city by Mildred Norman-Risch.

3. Neighborhoods. From A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.

4. Children of Poverty - Crisis in New York by Andrew Stein. From The New York Times magazine.

5. Pittsburgh - A New City. From Dialogue.

UNIT 6 Law, Crime, and Justice

1. A Brother's Murder by Brent Staples. From The New York Times magazine.

2. Arming Citizens to Fight Crime by Frank Borzellieri. From USA Today.

3. The Death Penalty: Legal Cruelty? by Donald B. Walker. From USA Today.

4. Thoughts on the Supreme Court — excerpts from an interview with Tom Clark. From Perspectives.

5. How a Case Reaches the Supreme Court. From Perspectives.

UNIT 7 Minorities

1. I Am the Redman/My Lodge by Duke Redbird.

2. Brothers by Sylvester Monroe. From Newsweek

3. Jessie de la Cruz. From American Dreams: Lost and Found by Studs Terkel.

4. Lucky ОГ Sundowners by Peter Black. From The Observer.

5. Where There's Smoke. From Time.

UNIT 8 The Changing Role of Women

1. Second Thoughts on Having It All by Tony Schwartz. From New York.

2. The Choices That Brought Me Here by Amanda Spake. From Ms.

3. How to Have a Successful Christian Family by Jerry Falwell. From a Moral Majority Publication

INDEX OF PART В TEXTS 9

4. Families. Statistics from the National Education Association.

5. Husband's Hazard - For Middle-Aged Man, A Wife's New Career Upsets Old Balances by Mary Bralove. From American Character: Views of America from the Wall Street Journal.

UNIT 9 The Political System

1. Perspective of a Public Man - excerpts from an interview with Hubert Humphrey. From Perspectives.

2. A President's Mission — extracts from George Bush's nomination acceptance speech.

3. The Human Side of Congress - Representative Jim Wright. From Perspectives.

4. Lobbyists and Their Issues a) American Israel Public Affairs Committee by Thomas Dine b) The Wilderness Society by Rebecca Leet. From Perspectives.

5. "If Conservatives Cannot Do it Now ..." — an interview with Irving Kristol. From U.S. News & World Report.

6. Reagan/Bush '84. The text is taken from the Reagan/Bush campaign leaflet for the 1984 presidential election.

7. Keynote Address by Governor Cuomo to the Democratic National Convention July 1984 (excerpts).

8. Americans Vote for Divided Government. From the Washington Post.

UNIT 10 America's Global Role

1. America and the World: Principle and Pragmatism by Henry Kissinger. From Time.

2. American Policy in Vietnam; Peace Without Conquest. From a speech by Lyndon B. Johnson.

3. Top Dogs and Underdogs by J. William Fulbright. From /. William Fulbright.

4. Exporting American Culture. From Public Opinion.

UNIT 11 Education

1. American Educational Philosophies by Diane Ravitch. From "American Education: Has the Pendulum Swung Once Too Often?" in Humanities.

2. What Makes Great Schools Great? From US News & World Report.

3. An American Senior High School — an American student talks about his high school.

4. Attendance Policy and Procedures - Quincy Senior High Attendance Policy for 1984 to 1985.

5. What Students Think About Their Schools.

6. Universities in Transition by David Riesman. From the Wilson Quarterly.

UNIT 12 Religion

1. Sunday in Hope by Berton Roueche. From Special Places — In Search of Small Town America.

2. I Have a Dream - an extract from Martin Luther King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 1963.

3. Breaking New Ground on War and Peace by Paul Bock. From USA Today.

4. Power, Glory - And Politics. From Time.

5. School Prayer - excerpts from President Reagan's remarks to the Annual Convention of National Religious Broadcasters.

UNIT 13 The Arts

1. Toward a National Theater by Howard Stein. From Dialogue.

2. A Dozen Outstanding Plays of the Past Quarter Century. From Dialogue.

3. An Interview with Jack Nicholson by Beverly Walker, From Film Comment.

4. Literary Hollywood by Stanley Kauffman. From The New Republic.

5. The Chairman and the Boss by Jay Cocks. From Time.

UNIT 14 Sports

1. Interview: High School Sports - Steve Peter, an American exchange student who spent a year in a German school, talks about high school sports.

2. Sports in America: Colleges and Universities. From Sports in America by James A. Michener.

3. Baseball. From The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games.

4. Running for Your Life by Matt Clark and Karen Springen. From Newsweek.

5. Lousy at Sports by Mark Goodson. From The New York Times magazine.

UNIT 15 The Media

1. The Case for Television Journalism by Eric Sevareid. From Saturday Review.

2. The Nature of TV in America by Richard Burke.

3. Television. The text is the television column from The Herald-Telephone.

4. This Is Not Your Life: Television as the Third Parent by Benjamin Stein. From Public Opinion.

5. The Likability Sweepstakes by Richard Stengel. From Time.

6. Dilemmas. From Public Opinion.

_Introduction

_Aims

America in Close-up is a refreshingly different type of book for use by advanced students of English in the upper grades of secondary schools and on the more basic courses in colleges and universities. By combining the two functions of reader and reference book it aims to offer students the most complete possible introduction to American life and institutions, and because of its design is unusually flexible both in the classroom and as a self-study aid.

Content and Organization

Each unit of America in Close-up is divided into three sections:

Part A: factual background information

Part B: authentic texts

Part C: exercises

The texts in Part В form the reader and the focus is on contemporary America.

Taken from individual writers with lively and divergent views, the texts

explore a wide range of issues and accumulatively paint an authentic picture

of current trends and debates.

It is the factual information in the Part A sections which provides the historical and cultural context necessary for the students to understand these issues. Taken together, these build into a comprehensive work of reference that covers almost all major areas of American life.

The Part С exercises—linked to the texts in Part B —are designed to provoke discussion and to develop language skills such as comprehension and text analysis. Some exercises reflect explicitly the important cross-cultural objective which underlies this book. It is our belief that by studying American life, students will become not only more sensitive to their own environment but also better able to understand and accept cultural differences wherever they meet them.

^{How to Use the Book}

America in Close-up can be used in a number of different ways. Some of these are listed below.

• Because of the breadth of historical and contemporary information that it contains, America in Close-up is the ideal basic coursebook for an American Studies program. It is suitable both for classroom use and for self-study and individual research.

INTRODUCTION 11

The authentic reading material and the wide variety of exercises inAmerica in Close-up make it a stimulating textbook for use in advanced English language classes where the U.S. is the topic under consideration. Teachers will decide for themselves how much of the background information in the Part A sections to draw in; indeed, some may prefer to concentrate on these for a more systematic and factual approach.

America in Close-up can be used equally well as a general companion to the study of other fictional (and non-fictional) texts —for example, to provide the socio-economic background to a poem, drama, short story or complete novel. Again the option is there for classroom use or individual study. Used selectively, America in Close-up offers teachers and students information and reading material on a given aspect of America as and when this is appropriate.

The Making of a Nation

^{PART A Background Information}

NATION OF IMMIGRANTS

FIRST IMMIGRANTS

The United States is a society of immigrants. Since its early days, the country has admitted more than 50 million newcomers, a larger number of immigrants than any country in history. Most people came, and still come today, for wealth, land, and freedom.

Stories of the New World's gold attracted the first Spanish explorers, who in the 1500s established outposts in what is now Florida. Prospects of wealth also motivated French fur traders, who set up trading posts from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River. The British, who were the first to colonize on a large scale, came for profit and also for religious freedom. The first successful English colony founded at Jamestown, Virginia, was financed by a London company that expected to make money from the settlement. English Puritans, Protestants who disagreed with the teachings of the Church of England, established settlements in the northeastern region. In the New World they could worship as they pleased.

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s permanent settlements were rapidly estab­lished all along the east coast. Most of the early settlers were British. These early immigrants were soon joined by people of other nationalities. German farmers settled in Pennsylvania, Swedes founded the colony of Delaware, and the Dutch settled in New York. Africans, America's unwilling immigrants, provided slave labor in the southern colonies. Immigrants also came from France, Spain, and Switzerland.

When they settled in the New World, many immigrants tried to preserve the traditions, religion, and language of their particular culture. The language and culture of the more numerous English colonists, however, had the over­riding influence. American society was predominantly English—white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP). Those immigrants who did not want to feel separate from the dominant WASP culture learned English and adopted English customs.

Puritan: a member of an English sect of Protestants, who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advocated simplification of the creeds and ceremonies of the Church of England and demanded strict religious discipline.

WASP: W(hite) A(nglo)-S(axon) P(rotestant); an American of British or northern European ancestry who is a member of the Protestant church. WASPs are frequently considered to form the most privileged and influential group which formerly dominated U.S. society.

14 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

AMERICAN INDIANS

OLD IMMIGRATION

SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEANS

European settlement changed the fate of America's only non-immigrants, the Native American Indians. Europeans arrived in great numbers and needed land and game for their survival. They seized Indian lands through war, threats, and treaties, and they hunted game, cut forests, and built big cities. To the Indians the white men were unwanted trespassers. They did not want the "white man's civilization." They had their own which had been successful for centuries. The clash of cultures led to many battles, among them General Custer's famous Last Stand at Little Bighorn in 1876. By the end of the nineteenth century disease and warfare had almost wiped out the Indian population. Those that remained tried to resist the U.S. government's efforts to confine them to reservations. The Plains Indians' final defeat in 1890 at the Battle of Wounded Knee symbolized the end of the Indians' traditional way of life. From the Indians' perspective, the story of European immigration is a story of struggle and displacement.

Between 1840 and 1860, the United States received the greatest influx of immigrants ever. During this period, 10 million people came to America. By the middle of the century the United States, with over 23 million inhabitants, had a larger population than any single European country. The proportion of newcomers increased rapidly so that by 1860 about 13 of every 100 persons in the U.S. were recent immigrants.

In the mid-1800s, thousands of Chinese emigrated to California, where most of them worked on the railroad. Up until 1880, the overwhelming majority of immigrants, however, came from northern or western Europe. Many left Europe to escape poor harvests, famines or political unrest. Between 1845 and 1860, a serious blight on the potato crop in Ireland sent hundreds of thousands of Irish people to the U.S. to escape starvation. In one year alone—1847— 118,120 Irish people settled in the U.S. German immigration was especially heavy. During the peak years of German immigration, from 1852 to 1854, over 500,000 Germans came to live in the U.S. The northern and western Europeans who arrived between 1840 and 1880 are often referred to as the "old immigration."

A new wave of immigration began in the late 1800s. Northern and western Europe were no longer providing the majority of the immigrants. The new immigrants were Latin, Slavic, and Jewish peoples from southern and eastern Europe. Among these new arrivals were Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Rumanians, and Greeks, all people whose languages, customs, and appearance

Custer, George A.: (1839-76), U.S. general who fought the Indians, and was killed in the battle of the Little Bighorn.

Little Bighorn: a river flowing northward from Wyoming to join the Bighorn in southern Montana where Custer and his men were massacred by Indians in 1876.

Plains Indian: a member of the mostly nomadic tribes of Indians who once inhabited the Great Plains of the United States and Canada. They were also called Buffalo Indians.

Wounded Knee: the battle at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, marked the final act in the tragedy of the Indian wars. Shortly after the famous Indian leader Chief Sitting Bull (1834-90) had been killed, soldiers opened fire upon unarmed Indian men, women, and children leaving more than 200 dead.

railroad: the building of railroads played an important role in the opening up of the American West. Private companies supported by both state and private funds competed in this enterprise and hired vast numbers of laborers, especially during the great wave of railroad building in the 1850s.

THE MAKING OF A NATION 15

NATIVIST SENTIMENT

ASSIMILATION PROCESS

RECENT IMMIGRATION

set them apart conspicuously from the earlier immigrants of Celtic or Teutonic origin. This new wave of immigration was so great that in the peak years of unlimited immigration between 1900 and 1920 the number of immigrants sometimes rose to as many as a million a year.

The flood of immigration affected American cities. Immigrants were crowding into the largest cities, particularly New York and Chicago, often forming ethnic neighborhoods—"Little Italys" or "Chinatowns"—where they preserved their language and customs. These ethnic enclaves grew at an astonishing rate. In 1890 New York was a city of foreigners: eight out of ten of its residents were foreign-born. In 1893 Chicago had the largest Czech population in the world and almost as many Poles as Warsaw.

The assimilation of these new southern and eastern peoples was a source of conflict. Many Americans treated them with prejudice and hostility, claiming racial superiority of the Nordic peoples of the old immigration over the Slavic and Latin peoples of the new immigration. Religious prejudice against Catholics and Jews was another factor underlying much of the resentment towards immigrants. Many old stock Americans observed with alarm that the ethnic composition of the country was changing and feared that America was losing its established character and identity. Growing industrialization in the late nineteenth century led industries to favor an "open door" immigration policy to expand the labor force. Many American workers resented new immigrant laborers who were willing to work for lower wages. Americans feared the immigrants were taking away their jobs. The government responded to the prejudices of an older wave of immigrants. In the 1920s Congress passed quota restrictions which favored immigration from northern and western Europe and drastically limited the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Chinese immigration to the Pacific coast had already been halted in 1882.

The descendents of these turn-of-the-century arrivals were gradually assimi­lated into American society. The first generation typically faced obstacles to assimilation on both sides: society's discrimination and their own reluctance to give up their language and culture. Their children, however, were better able to identify themselves as Americans. By the second generation, these families spoke mostly English and they practiced fewer ethnic traditions. Members of the third generation, usually no longer able to speak the language of their grandparents, often became nostalgic about family heritage, desiring to regain the ethnic identity before it was lost. By the fourth or fifth generation, intermarriage between ethnic groups usually worked against any yearnings towards reestablishing the ethnic identity.

Although immigration dropped after the 1920s, the numbers have again risen dramatically, so that recent statistics indicate an increase to perhaps 600,000 or even 700,000 per year, when refugees are included. America is again faced with an assimilation problem. The majority of the newest immigrants come from Mexico, Latin America, or Asia. Among these newcomers, the Asians seem most willing to assimilate. Many are Cambodian and Vietnam refugees who fled the destruction and upheaval of the Vietnam War. Cambodians and Vietnamese have usually shown a drive to succeed as Americans. They en­courage their children to speak accentless English and play American games.

Vietnam War: a conflict (1954—75) between South Vietnam, aided by the United States, and the Vietcong (a Communist-led army and guerrilla force in South Vietnam) and North Vietnam, receiving military aid mainly from Communist China.

16 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

REFUGEES

ILLEGAL ALIENS

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION

Cubans, many of whom were wealthy property owners before Castro's regime, often show a similar drive to fit in and become prosperous. Mexican-Americans, now comprising about one-fifth of California's total population, are not so easily assimilated. They generally have a strong sense of their own culture and often marry among themselves

Under the 1980 Refugee Act the United States has admitted some 50,000 refugees per year who, as defined by this act, are fleeing their country because of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. Some Americans, most notably activists in the church sanctuary movement, would like to broaden the concept "refugee" to include economic refugees, i.e. persons suffering from severe poverty. American society, they point out, has always given people the oppor­tunity to help themselves. The argument against recognizing and admitting economic refugees is that the nation's resources could not accommodate a sudden influx of the world's poor and provide them with jobs and assistance.

In the years between 1980 and 1985, about 600,000 immigrants were legally admitted each year. In addition, hundreds of thousands of persons entered the country illegally, most of them fleeing poverty or war in Mexico or Latin America. Many illegal aliens supply cheap labor as farm workers at harvest time or work at menial tasks which Americans shun. Up to 1986 the law forbade illegal immigrants to work in the United States but did not penalize employers for hiring them. These circumstances encouraged many people to risk illegal employment in the U.S. However, an immigration law passed on October 17, 1986 attempted to stamp out the incentive for aliens to enter the country illegally by imposing strict penalties on businesses hiring illegal aliens. In addition, this law provided the opportunity for aliens who had lived and worked in the U.S. since 1981 to apply for status as permanent residents. As many as half the nation's estimated 3 to 5 million illegal immi­grants became able to apply for legal status.

In the 1980s immigration, both legal and illegal, had a substantial impact on U.S. population growth. When both legal and illegal entries were counted, close to one half of all growth was attributable to immigration. America's future ethnic composition and population growth will clearly be affected by the immigration and population policies the government pursues.

Americans continue to debate the issue of immigration. Some groups in favour of tightening immigration restrictions argue that overpopulation is a threat. Based on current rates, U.S. population could double in only 40 years. Restricting immigration would curb the rate of growth. Other arguments for restricting immigration are rooted in the same fears that aroused nativist sentiment at the turn of the century. Many Americans fear that immigrants may lower the quality of life in America by taking away Americans' jobs and by importing the same social and economic ills that exist in the countries they left. Furthermore, they argue that tightening restrictions is a necessary measure to preserve America's national identity. On the other hand, many Americans more optimistically emphasize the cultural wealth and diversity which im­migrants have been bringing to the nation since its conception.

Castro, Fidel: born 1927, Cuban revolutionary and prime minister since 1959.

church sanctuary movement: a movement of American churches helping refugees and illegal immigrants by giving them shelter and protection from eviction.

nativist: protecting the interests of natives against those of immigrants.

THE MAKING OF A NATION 17

\ IDENTITY

\CRISIS V—

The debate over immigration comes at a time when Americans are wrestling with the problem of identity. In the past, the majority of Americans considered themselves WASPs. Many groups, for example blacks, whose ancestors were brought over as slaves, were not regarded by the majority as true Americans. Newcomers were expected to assimilate and live on the majority's terms. The mass migration at the turn of the century brought a new heterogeneity to American society which challenged WASPs to acknowledge that Americans could be Catholic or Jewish, almond-eyed or olive-skinned. Still, in the early 1900s, America's policy towards Americanizing immigrants stressed assimilation into WASP culture, and, still, the country's leaders were old stock American Protestants. Before John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to be elected President of the United States in 1960, all other presidents were Protestant.

Since the 1960s, as the ethnic composition changed even more, with fewer and fewer people able to claim WASP status, Americans' attitudes towards ethnic and religious differences have altered. Pressure on immigrants to Americanize and altogether forget their background has relaxed. High political offices are held by non-whites and non-Protestants.

Americans are aware that the national ethnic, religious identity—WASP — which once unified the country under certain shared assumptions and values, has disappeared. In a country where currently 6 percent of the population is foreign-born, where more than 10 percent speaks a language other than English at home, and where newcomers are crossing the borders daily in droves, diversity is a major characteristic. The well-known picture of America as a melting pot where all groups come together, creating a new, distinct American type, is not an adequate metaphor. On the whole, a more accurate picture of American society today, one that conveys its astonishing variety of cultures, each preserving its own distinctiveness, is vegetable soup.

MILLIONS

How Many Came? (Immigration by decade, 1821 -1980)

1821 1831 1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1941 1951 1961 1971 -1830 -1841 -1850-1860-1870 -1880-1890 -1900-1910-1920-1930-1940 -1950-1960-1970-1980

Who WereThey? (Immigrants by Region, 1821-1980)

100%-

7У1

/y

VZ-

1821-60

1861-1900

1901-30

1931-60

1961-70

:: ' ' ■ '

Mill I

1971-80

Asia

Latin America