Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D
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CONDOMSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
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Workers of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis hand out free Valentine’s condoms and AIDS information.
different shapes, colors, flavors, lubrications, and sizes. Some are
equipped with ribs, bumps, dots, or raised spirals to enhance stimula-
tion. The safe-sex message originally associated with condoms is now
being complemented by the marketing strategy claiming that using
condoms is fun, and some are even intended to be used for entertain-
ment only (and not for protection from disease or pregnancy).
Once seen as a great turn off, the condom has appeared with
increasing frequency in (mainly) gay porno movies, especially,
although not exclusively, in the educational safer-sex shorts produced
by AIDS charities and groups of activists. As Jean Carlomusto and
Gregg Bordowitz have summarized, the aim of these safer-sex shorts
is to make people understand that ‘‘you can have hot sex without
placing yourself at risk for AIDS.’’ This has raised important ques-
tions about the possibility of using pornography as pedagogy. This
new use of pornography as a vehicle for safer-sex involves, as safer-
sex short director Richard Fung has pointed out, a ‘‘dialogue with the
commercial porn industry, about the representation of both safer-sex,
and racial and ethnic difference.’’
Looking at the dissemination of ‘‘condom discourse’’ one might
be tempted to conclude that society has finally become more liberat-
ed. There are condom shops, condom ads, condom jokes, condom
gadgets such as key-rings, condom shirts, condom pouches, condom
web-sites with international condom clubs from where chocolate
lovers can top off their evening with the perfect no-calorie dessert: the
hot fudge condom. Yet how effective really is this ‘‘commodification
of prophylaxis’’ (to use Gregory Woods’s words) in terms of preven-
tion and saving of human lives? Is it, in the end, just another stratagem
to speak about everything else but health care and human rights?
—Luca Prono
F
URTHER READING:
Carlomusto, Jean, and Bordowitz, Gregg. ‘‘Do It! Safer Sex Porn for
Girls and Boys Comes of Age.’’ A Leap in the Dark. Edited by
Allan Klusacek and Ken Morrison. Montréal, Vehicule Press, 1992.
Chevalier, Eric. The Condom: Three Thousand Years of Safer Sex.
Puffin, 1995.
Fung, Richard. ‘‘Shortcomings: Questions about Pornography as
Pedagogy.’’ Queer Looks—Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay
Film and Video. Edited by Martha Gever, John Greyson, and
Pratibha Parmar. New York, Routledge, 1993.
CONEY ISLAND ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
580
Panzer, Richard A. Condom Nation—Blind Faith, Bad Science.
Westwood, Center for Educational Media, 1997.
Woods, Gregory. ‘‘We’re Here, We’re Queer and We’re Not Going
Catalogue Shopping.’’ A Queer Romance—Lesbians, Gay Men
and Popular Culture. Edited by Paul Burston and Colin Richard-
son. New York, Routledge, 1995.
Coney Island
Coney Island, with its beach, amusement parks, and numerous
other attractions, became emblematic of nineteenth- and early- twen-
tieth-century urban condition while at the same time providing relief
from the enormous risks of living in a huge metropolis. On Coney
Island, both morals and taste could be transgressed. This was the place
where the debate between official and popular culture was first
rehearsed, a debate which would characterize the twentieth century
in America.
Discovered just one day before Manhattan in 1609 by explorer
Henry Hudson, Coney Island is a strip of sand at the mouth of New
York’s natural harbor. The Canarsie Indians, its original inhabitants,
had named it ‘‘Place without Shadows.’’ In 1654 the Indian Guilaouch,
who claimed to be the owner of the peninsula, traded it for guns,
gunpowder, and beads, similar to the more famous sale of Manhattan.
The peninsula was known under many names, but none stuck until
people called it Coney Island because of the presence of an extraordi-
nary number of coneys, or rabbits.
Coney Island, 1952.
In 1823 the first bridge which would connect Manhattan to the
island was built, and Coney Island, with its natural attractions,
immediately became the ideal beach resort for the ever-growing
urban population of Manhattan. By the mid-nineteenth century large
resort hotels had been built. Corrupt political boss John Y. McKane
ruled the island, turning a blind eye to the gangsters, con men,
gamblers, and prostitutes who congregated on the west end of the
island. In 1865 the railroad finally allowed the metropolitan masses
their weekend escape to Coney Island, and the number of visitors
grew enormously, creating a great demand for entertainment and
food. The hot dog was invented on Coney Island in the 1870s. In 1883
the Brooklyn Bridge made the island even more accessible to the
Manhattan masses, who flocked to the island’s beach, making it the
most densely occupied place in the world. The urban masses demand-
ed to be entertained, however, thus the need for pleasure became
paramount in the island’s development. Typical of the time, what
happened on Coney Island was the attempt to conjugate the quest for
pleasure and the obsession with progress.
The result was the first American ‘‘roller coaster,’’ the Switch-
back Railway, built by LaMarcus Adna Thompson in 1884. In 1888,
the short-lived Flip-Flap coaster, predecessor of the 1901 Loop-the-
Loop, used centrifugal force to keep riders in their seats, and an
amazed public paid admission to watch. By 1890 the use of electricity
made it possible to create a false daytime, thus prolonging entertain-
ment to a full twenty-four hours a day.
The nucleus of Coney Island was Captain Billy Boyton’s Sea
Lion Park, opened in 1895, and made popular by the first large Shoot-
the-Chutes ride in America. In competition with Boyton, George C.
Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park in 1897, where science and tech-
nology came together for pleasure and Victorian inhibitions were
lifted. The park was centered around one of the most popular rides on
Coney Island, the Steeplechase Race Course, in which four couples
‘‘raced’’ each other atop wheeled, wooden horses. Steeplechase Park
burned in 1907, but Tilyou rebuilt and reopened it the following year,
and it remained in operation until 1964.
When Boyton went broke, Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy
took over Sea Lion Park, remodeled it and opened it as Luna Park in
1903. Luna was a thematic park where visitors could even board a
huge airship and experience an imaginative journey to the moon from
one hundred feet in the air. Coney Island was the testing ground for
revolutionary architectural designs, and Luna Park was an architec-
tural spectacle, a modern yet imaginary city built on thirty-eight acres
and employing seventeen hundred people during the summer season,
with its own telegraph office, cable office, wireless office, and
telephone service. For Thompson, Luna Park was an architectural
training ground before he moved to Manhattan to apply his talent to a
real city. Luna Park eventually fell into neglect and burned in 1944.
The land became a parking lot in 1949.
In the meantime, Senator William H. Reynolds was planning a
third park on Coney Island, ‘‘the park to end all parks.’’ The new park
was aptly called Dreamland. In Reynolds’s words, this was ‘‘the first
time in the History of Coney Island Amusement that an effort has
been made to provide a place of Amusement that appeals to all
classes.’’ Ideology had got hold of entertainment. Opening in 1904,
Dreamland was located by the sea and was noticeable for its lack of
color—everything was snow white. The general metaphor was that
Dreamland represented a sort of underwater Atlantis. There were
detailed reconstructions of various natural disasters—the eruption of
Vesuvius at Pompeii, the San Francisco earthquake, the burning of
CONFESSION MAGAZINESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
581
Rome—as well as a simulated ride in a submarine, two Shoot-the-
Chute rides, and, interestingly, the Incubator Hospital, where prema-
ture babies were nursed. Other Dreamland attractions were the Blue
Dome of Creation, the ‘‘Largest Dome in the World,’’ representing
the universe; the ‘‘End of the World according to the Dream of
Dante’’; three theaters; a simulated flight over Manhattan—before
the first airplane had flown; a huge model of Venice; a complete
replica of Switzerland; and the Japanese Teahouse. One of the most
important structures of Dreamland was the Beacon Tower, 375 feet
high and illuminated by one hundred thousand electric lights, visible
from a distance of more than thirty miles. Dreamland was a success
insofar as it reproduced almost any kind of experience and human
sensation. In May 1911, just before a more efficient fire-fighting
apparatus was due to be installed, a huge fire broke out fanned by a
strong sea wind. In only three hours Dreamland was completely
destroyed. It was Coney’s last spectacle. Manhattan took over as the
place of architectural invention.
In 1919, Coney Island seemed to regain a sparkle of its old glory
when the idea circulated of building a gigantic Palace of Joy—a sort
of American Versailles for the people—which would be a pier
containing five hundred private rooms, two thousand private bath
houses, an enclosed swimming pool, a dance hall, and a skating rink.
Sadly, the Palace of Joy was never built. Soon, the main attraction of
Coney Island became again its beach, an overcrowded strip of land. In
the hand of Commissioner Robert Moses, the island fell under the
jurisdiction of the Parks Department. In 1957, the New York Aquari-
um was established on the island, a modernist building which had
nothing of the revolutionary, dreamlike structure of the buildings of
Reynolds’s era. By now 50 percent of Coney Island’s surface had
become parks again. Nature’s sweet revenge.
—Anna Notaro
F
URTHER READING:
Creedmor, Walter. ‘‘The Real Coney Island.’’ Munsey’s Magazine.
August 1899.
Denison, Lindsay. ‘‘The Biggest Playground in the World.’’ Munsey’s
Magazine. August 1905.
Griffin, Al. ‘‘Step Right Up, Folks!’’ Chicago, Henry Regnery, 1974.
History of Coney Island. New York, Burroughs & Co., 1904.
Huneker, James. The New Cosmopolis. New York, 1915.
Long Island Historical Society Library. Guide to Coney Island. Long
Island Historical Society Library, n.d.
McCullough, Edo. Good Old Coney Island. New York, Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1957.
Pilat, Oliver, and Jo Ransom. Sodom by the Sea. New York,
Doubleday, 1941.
Confession Magazines
During their first 175 years of existence, American magazines
preached long and occasionally in loud tone on personal morality, but
rare was the published foray into the real lives of lower-class
Americans. That oversight ended in 1919 with the introduction of
True Stories, the first of what came to be known as confession
magazines. Founded by health and physical fitness zealot Bernarr
Macfadden, True Stories ‘‘had the conscious ring of public confes-
sion, such as is heard in a Salvation Army gathering, or in an old-
fashioned testimony meeting of Southern camp religionists,’’ accord-
ing to Macfadden’s first biographer Fulton Oursler.
It and other confession magazines were ‘‘a medium for publish-
ing the autobiographies of the unknown,’’ as one editor explained, a
substitute among the poor for lawyers, doctors, and educators. Al-
though True Stories eventually reached a circulation of 2.5 million
during the 1930s, it cost less to produce than most other magazines,
and therefore earned as much as $10,000 a day for its founder. True
Stories and other confession magazines also provided a valuable
outlet for otherwise disconnected people to learn appropriate private
and public social behavior. During times of rapid change, these
magazines helped women to re-establish their identities through the
experiences of other women like themselves. Most importantly, in an
era when sex was rarely mentioned in public, the confession maga-
zines taught both women and men that sex was natural, healthy, and
enjoyable under appropriate circumstances.
The first American magazines were written for upper-class men.
Beginning in the 1820s, sections and eventually titles were aimed at
upper-class women, but they were written in a highly moralistic tone
because women were considered to be the cultural custodians and
moral regulators of society. Belles lettres, popular moralistic fiction,
became the staple of mid-nineteenth century women’s magazines
such as Godey’s Ladies Book and Peterson’s. Writers sentimentalized
about courtship and marriage but offered little practical information
on sex to readers. Another generation of women’s magazines ap-
peared after the Civil War, including McCall’s, Ladies Home Jour-
nal, and Good Housekeeping. These magazines attracted massive
circulations, but were focused on the rapidly changing domestic
duties of women, still carried a highly moralistic tone, and had little to
say about sex. Even into the twentieth century, the advertising and
editorial content of women’s magazines reflected prosperity, social
status, and consumerism; hardly the core problems of everyday
existence for the lower classes.
The first confession magazine publisher was born August 16,
1868, in Mill Springs, Missouri. Before Bernarr Macfadden was ten,
his father had died of an alcohol-related disease and his mother from
tuberculosis. Relatives predicted the sickly, weak boy would die
young as well. Shifted from relative to relative, the young Macfadden
dropped out of school and worked at an assortment of laborer jobs,
learning how to set newspaper type in 1885. But he was drawn into the
world of physical culture as a teen. He studied gymnastics and
physical fitness in St. Louis and developed his body and health as he
coached and taught others. To raise money to promote his ideas on
exercise and diet, he wrestled professionally and promoted touring
wrestling matches. In 1899 he founded Physical Culture, a magazine
that was devoted to ‘‘health, strength, vitality, muscular development,
and the general care of the body.’’ It was the forerunner of contempo-
rary health and fitness publications. Macfadden argued that ‘‘weak-
ness is a crime’’ and offered instruction on physical development.
Macfadden’s diets were opposed by medical authorities and the nude
or nearly nude photographs in his magazine and advertising circulars
came under the scrutiny of obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock
and his followers. Macfadden was fined $2,000 for a Physical Culture
article in 1907 and the magazine is considered to be the start of the
nude magazine industry.
Physical Culture was immensely popular, climbing to a circula-
tion of 340,000 by the early 1930s. Macfadden made large profits
with it and other publishing ventures including books such as What a
CONFESSION MAGAZINES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
582
Young Husband Ought to Know and What a Young Woman Ought to
Know. His wife Mary later claimed that she suggested he expand his
publishing horizons beyond physical fitness around the time of World
War I. She had read the thousands of letters to the editor that poured
into Physical Culture detailing why punching bags, lifting dumbbells,
and doing deep knee bends did not always change an individual’s love
life. Other letters revealed how so-called fallen women who had
discovered physical culture had found new lives for themselves as
wives and mothers. ‘‘The folly of transgression, the terrible effects of
ignorance, the girls who had not been warned by wise parents—a
whole series of tragedies out of the American soil were falling, day
after day, on the desk of [Physical Culture’s] editor,’’ Macfadden’s
biographer Fulton Oursler explained.
In May 1919, the first issue of True Story appeared with the
motto ‘‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’’ For 20 cents a copy, twice the
price of most other magazines, readers received 12 stories with titles
such as ‘‘A Wife Who Awoke in Time’’ and ‘‘My Battle with John
Barleycorn.’’ Most of the protagonists were sympathetic characters,
innocent, lower-class women who appealed to a feminine readership.
Instead of drawings, live models were photographed in a clinch of
love or clad in pajamas while a man brandished a pistol, adding more
realism to the confessions. The first cover featured a man and woman
looking longingly at each other with the caption, ‘‘And their love
turned to hated!’’ The magazine also offered ‘‘$1,000.00 for your life
romance,’’ a cheap price compared to what many magazines paid for
professional contributions. The result was an immediate success,
selling 60,000 issues, and the circulation quickly climbed into
the millions.
Between 1922 and 1926, Macfadden capitalized on True Stories
by producing a host of related titles, including True Romances, True
Love and Romances, and True Experiences. Young Hollywood
hopefuls such as Norma Shearer, Jean Arthur, and Frederic March
were used in True Story photographs. Movie shorts featuring dramati-
zations of the magazine’s stories were shown in theaters simultane-
ously with publication. A weekly ‘‘True Story Hour’’ started on
network radio in 1928, and editions were published in England,
Holland, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. Imitators
quickly appeared, each using some combination of the words true,
story, romance, confessions, and love. The most successful was True
Confessions, founded by Wilford H. Fawcettin 1922, who was a one-
time police reporter for the Minneapolis Journal. Fawcett’s first
publication, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, started as a mimeographed
naughty joke and pun sheet in 1919, and went on to become the male
magazine metaphor for the 1920s decline of morality and flaunting of
sexual immodesty. Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang was memorialized in
fellow Minnesotan Meredith Willson’s 1962 Broadway musical
Music Man in a recitation attached to the song ‘‘Trouble.’’ True
Confessions attracted a circulation in the millions and became the
cornerstone of Fawcett Publications, which eventually included titles
such as Mechanix Illustrated and comic books like Captain America.
By its own 1941 account, True Story and its imitators were
magazines for the lower classes, readers too unsophisticated, unedu-
cated, and poor to be of interest to other magazines or advertisers.
They ‘‘made readers of the semi-literate’’ as the wife of one editor
said. Still, a rise in the standard of living during the 1920s meant that
lower-class readers finally had enough income to buy magazines. The
confession magazines gave them a forum to air their concerns and
share solutions in ways not possible in any other publications.
Magazine historian Theodore Peterson maintained that confession
magazines were not a new innovation, just another spin on the old rule
that sex and crime sell. Before confession magazines there was sob
sister journalism, the sentimentalized reporting of crimes of passion
and other moral tales in newspapers. Before newspapers, there were
fictionalized first-person narratives detailing the temptations of young
women such as Moll Flanders. And before novels there were seven-
teenth-century broadsides, written in the first person with a strong
moralizing tone, describing the seductions and murders of scullery
maids and mistresses. Bernarr Macfadden and his wife Mary simply
rediscovered an old formula and applied it the magazine industry.
The mainstream press was predictably critical of confession
magazines. At their best, they were considered mindless entertain-
ment for the masses. At their worst, confession magazines parlayed to
the worst common denominator of the lower classes; sex and repro-
duction. Time maintained that True Story set ‘‘the fashion in sex
yarns.’’ A writer in Harper’s complained that ‘‘to pound into empty
heads month after month the doctrine of comparative immunity
cannot be particularly healthy’’ and that ‘‘it is impossible to believe
that the chronic reader of ’confessions’ has much traffic with good
books.’’ Interestingly, a 1936 survey of True Story readers showed
that a majority believed in birth control, thought wives shouldn’t
work, opposed divorce, and were religious yet tolerant of other faiths.
A study of True Story between 1920 and 1985 revealed that the
magazine reinforced traditional notions of motherhood and feminini-
ty, and challenged rather than supported patriarchal class relations.
Macfadden continued to champion genuine reader confessionals
in his publications during the 1920s and ordered that manuscripts
should be edited for grammatical mistakes only. Subsequent editors
established more control over their productions, beginning with True
Stories’ William Jordan Rapp in 1926. Professionals were hired to
rewrite and create stories, especially after Macfadden was successful-
ly sued for libel in 1927. Still, a survey of 41 True Story contributors
in 1983 revealed that 16 had written of personal experiences, had
never published a story before, and did not consider themselves to be
professional writers. Macfadden lost interest in his confession maga-
zines, becoming involved in the founding of the New York Daily
Graphic newspaper in 1924, ‘‘the True Confessions of the newspaper
world.’’ The newspaper failed in 1932, losing millions of dollars but it
created a sensation among lower- class newspaper readers.
By 1935, the combined circulation of Macfadden’s magazines
was 7.3 million, more than any other magazine publisher, but he was
forced to sell his holdings in 1941 following accusations that he had
used company funds to finance unsuccessful political campaigns,
including a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1936.
Macfadden died a pauper in 1955, succumbing to jaundice aggravated
by fasting, failing to live 150 years as he had predicted. True Stories
took a more service-oriented path after World War II, offering food,
fashion, beauty, and even children’s features. The major confession
magazines had an aggregate circulation of more than 8.5 million in
1963. The successors of Macfadden Publications acquired the major
contenders to True Stories; True Confessions in 1963 and Modern
Romances in 1978, and continue to publish confessional magazines,
but circulation and advertising revenues have dropped. Soap operas,
made-for-television movies, and cable channels such as Lifetime and
the Romance Channel compete for potential readers along with
supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer. As well, lower-
class readers are better educated and have more options for guidance
or help in their personal lives. In the end, the ultimate legacy of the
confession magazines, beyond giving readers information on sex and
CONIFFENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
583
appropriate social behavior, will be that they truly put the word mass
in mass media.
—Richard Digby-Junger
F
URTHER READING:
Cantor, Muriel G., and Elizabeth Jones. ‘‘Creating Fiction for Wom-
en.’’ Communication Research. January 1983, 111-37.
Emery, Michael, and Edwin Emery. The Press and America: An
Interpretive History of the Mass Media. 7th ed. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1992, 283-86.
Fabian, Ann. ‘‘Making a Commodity of Truth: Speculations on the
Career of Bernarr Macfadden.’’ American Literary History. Sum-
mer 1993, 51-76.
History and Magazines. New York, True Story Magazine, 1941, 42.
Hunt, William R. Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr
Macfadden. Bowling Green, Ohio, Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1989.
Hutto, Dena. ‘‘True Story.’’ In American Mass-Market Magazines,
edited by Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie. New York, Green-
wood Press, 1990, 510-19.
Macfadden, Mary Williamson, and Emile Gauvreau. Dumbbells and
Carrot Strips: The Story of Bernarr Macfadden. New York, Henry
Holt and Co., 1953.
Oursler, Fulton. The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden. New York,
Lewis Copeland, 1929, 213-14.
Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana,
University of Illinois Press, 294-303.
Simonds, Wendy. ‘‘Confessions of Loss: Maternal Grief in True
Story, 1920-1985.’’ Gender and Society. Spring 1988, 149-71.
Sonenschein, David. ‘‘Love and Sex in Romance Magazines.’’
Journal of Popular Culture. Spring 1970, 398-409.
Taft, William H. ‘‘Bernarr Macfadden: One of a Kind.’’ Journalism
Quarterly. Winter 1968, 627-33.
Wilkinson, Joseph F. ‘‘Look at Me.’’ Smithsonian Magazine. Decem-
ber, 1997, 136-44.
Yagoda, Ben. ‘‘The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden.’’ American
Heritage. December, 1981, 22-9.
Coniff, Ray (1916—)
Through a unique combination of genuine musical talent fused
with a keen sense of both commercial trends and evolving recording
technologies of the 1950s, arranger/conductor/instrumentalist Ray
Coniff emerged as one of the most popular and commercially success-
ful musicians during the dawn of the stereo age in the late 1950s.
Coniff carried on the big band sound long beyond the music’s original
heyday in the 1940s, and charted 53 albums between 1957 and 1974,
including two million-sellers, and 13 other LPs that reached the Top
Ten and/or went gold.
Coniff was born into a musical family in Attleboro, Massachu-
setts, on November 6, 1916, and followed in his father’s musical
footsteps when he became the lead trombonist of the Attleboro High
School dance band (in which he also gained his first arranging
experience). After graduating in 1934 he pursued a musical career in
Boston, and in 1936 moved to New York where he became involved
with the emerging swing movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s,
playing, arranging, and recording for such top names as Bunny
Berigan, Bob Crosby, Glen Gray, and Artie Shaw. With the advent of
World War II, Coniff spent two years in the army arranging for the
Armed Forces Radio Service, and upon his discharge in 1946 contin-
ued arranging for Shaw, Harry James, and Frank DeVol.
But by the late 1940s the Big Band swing era in which Coniff
had made his first mark was coming to an end, and, as one source put
it, ‘‘Unable to accept the innovations of bop, he left music briefly
around 1950.’’ While freelancing at various nonmusical jobs to
support his wife and three children, Coniff also made a personal study
of the most popular and commercially successful recordings of the
day in an effort to develop what he hoped might prove a new and
viable pop sound. His efforts paid off in 1955 when Coniff was hired
by Columbia Records. At Columbia he was soon providing instru-
mental backup for chart-toppers by the label’s best artists, among
them Don Cherry’s ‘‘Band of Gold,’’ which hit the Top Ten in
January 1956, Guy Mitchell’s ‘‘Singing the Blues,’’ Marty Robbins’s
‘‘A White Sport Coat,’’ and two million-sellers by Johnny Mathis.
His singles arrangements led to Coniff’s first album under his
own name: S’Wonderful! (1956) sold half a million copies, stayed in
the Top 20 for nine months, and garnered Coniff the Cash Box vote
for ‘‘Most promising up-and-coming band leader of 1957.’’ Coniff’s
unique yet highly commercial sound proved irresistible to both
listeners and dancers (and stereophiles) and S’Wonderful! launched a
long series of LPs, the appeal of which has endured into the digital age.
The classic sound of the Ray Coniff Orchestra and Singers was a
simple, but unique, and instantly recognizable blend of instrumentals
and choral voices doubling the various orchestral choirs with ‘‘oooos,’’
‘‘ahs,’’ and Coniff’s patented ‘‘da-da-das.’’ His imaginative arrange-
ments were grounded in the solid 1940s big band sound of his early
years, while now placing a greater emphasis on recognizable melody
lines only slightly embellished by improvisation. Touches of exotic
instrumentation such as harp and clavinet sometimes also found their
way into the orchestrations. This jazz-tinged but accessibly commer-
cial sound was backed up by danceable, sometimes electrified mod-
ern beats derived in equal parts from the classic shuffle rhythms
which Coniff made his own, and more contemporary Latin and rock-
derived rhythms. Coniff’s initially wordless backup chorus soon
graduated to actual song lyrics and, as the Ray Coniff Singers,
recorded many successful albums on their own.
The emergence of commercial stereo in the late 1950s emphati-
cally influenced the new Coniff sound, and his Columbia albums
brilliantly utilized the new stereophonic, multitrack techniques. Even
today they remain showcases of precise, highly defined, and proc-
essed stereo sound. Coniff’s popularity on records during this period
led to live performances, and with his popular ‘‘Concert in Stereo’’
tours the maestro was among the first artists to accurately duplicate
the electronically enhanced studio sound of his recordings in a live
concert hall setting.
Coniff’s best and most enduringly listenable albums date from
the period of his initial popularity on Columbia Records in the late
1950s and early 1960s: among them, Say It with Music (1960),
probably his best and glossiest instrumental album, and It’s the Talk
of the Town (1959) and So Much in Love (1961), both with the Ray
Coniff Singers. These albums and much of Coniff’s original Colum-
bia repertory were drawn mostly from the popular, Broadway, and
movie song standards that also had been favored in the big band era.
CONNORS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
584
Coniff also recorded two Concert in Rhythm albums showcasing
rhythmic pop adaptations of melodies by Tchaikovsky, Chopin,
Puccini, and other classical composers. But as his popularity and
repertory grew, an increasing emphasis was placed on the contempo-
rary Hit Parade. ‘‘Memories Are Made of This’’ (1963), with its
calculated awareness of ‘‘Top 40’’ teen hits, was a prophetic album in
this respect. By the late 1960s Coniff exclusively recorded contempo-
rary songs, and two vocal albums, It Must Be Him, and Honey, both
went gold.
Coniff’s sales fell off after 1962 but were revived in 1966 by the
release of Somewhere My Love. The album’s title tune was a vocal
adaptation of French composer Maurice Jarre’s orchestral ‘‘Lara’s
Theme’’ from the popular 1965 film version of the Boris Pasternak
novel Doctor Zhivago, and the LP won Coniff a Grammy, hitting No.
1 on both the pop and easy listening charts. While Somewhere put
Coniff back on the charts, it also ensconced his sound in the ‘‘easy
listening’’ mode which would more or less persist throughout the rest
of his prolific recording career. (It also might be noted that in 1966
Coniff shared the million-seller charts with the Beatles, the Monkees,
and the Mindbenders.)
Coniff continued recording and performing his popular interna-
tional tours and Sahara Hotel engagements at Lake Tahoe and Las
Vegas through the 1980s and 1990s. In March of 1997, at age 80 and
after a 40-year collaboration with Columbia/CBS Records/Sony
Music that resulted in more than 90 albums selling over 65 million
copies, Coniff signed a new recording contract with Polygram Rec-
ords which released his one hundredth album, I Love Movies. My
Way, an album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra, was re-
leased in 1998.
—Ross Care
F
URTHER READING:
Kernfeld, Barry, editor. New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. London,
Macmillan Press Limited, New York, Grove’s Dictionaries of
Music Inc., 1988.
Murrells, Joseph, editor. Million Selling Records from the 1900s to
the 1980s: An Illustrated History. New York, Arco Publishing,
Inc., 1985.
Connors, Jimmy (1952—)
Born September 2, 1952 in East St. Louis, Illinois, James Scott
(Jimmy) Connors started playing tennis at the age of two, and grew up
to become one of the most recognizable and successful pros in the
history of the sport. His rise to the top of the game helped spark the
tennis boom that took place in America in the mid-1970s, bringing
unprecedented numbers of spectators out to the stands. Like his
equally competitive (and even more temperamental) compatriot John
McEnroe, tennis fans either loved Connors or hated him. His determi-
nation, intensity, and will to win could be denied by no one, and his
penchant for becoming embroiled in controversial disputes over tour
policy was legendary.
As was the case with his one-time fiance, American tennis
legend Chris Evert, Connors was raised to play the game by a
determined parent who also happened to be a teaching pro. Gloria
Thompson Connors had her son swinging at tennis balls even before
he could lift his racket off the ground; this early training, combined
Jimmy Connors
with Connors’ natural ability and never-say-die attitude, paved the
way for his later success. At the 1970 United States Open in Forest
Hills, an 18-year-old and still unknown Connors teamed with his
much older mentor Pancho Gonzalez to reach the quarterfinals in
doubles. A year later, while attending the University of California at
Los Angeles, Connors would become the first freshman ever to win
the National Intercollegiate Singles title. But neither that honor, nor
his All-American status, was enough to prevent him from dropping
out of school in 1972 to become a full-time participant on the men’s
pro circuit.
Connors finished 1973 sharing the number one ranking in the
United States with Stan Smith. The next year he reigned supreme, not
just in the States but around the world. Winner of an unbelievable 99
out of 103 matches, and 14 of the 20 tournaments he entered
(including the Australian Open, Wimbledon, the United States Open,
and the United States Clay Court Championships), Connors totally
dominated the competition in a sport that was exhibiting spectacular
growth. Two surveys taken in 1974 showed an eye-popping 68
percent hike in the number of Americans claiming to play tennis
recreationally, and a 26 percent jump in the number of those saying
they were fans of the pro circuit. As a result, tournament prize money
increased dramatically. In 1978, Connors became the first player to
exceed $2 million in career earnings.
CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING GROUPSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
585
Although many potential fans refused to jump on the Connors
bandwagon—his behavior towards umpires, linesmen, and opposing
players was often reprehensible, and he repeatedly refused to partici-
pate in the international Davis Cup team tournament—few tennis
lovers could resist watching him perform. Bill Riordan, Connors’
shrewd manager, capitalized on his client’s charismatic persona by
arranging a pair of made-for-television exhibition singles matches
dubbed the ‘‘Heavyweight Championship of Tennis.’’ Connors,
never one to shy away from the spotlight, won them both (years later,
he would defeat Martina Navratilova in a gimmicky ‘‘Battle of the
Sexes’’ handicap match). The unprecedented media coverage of these
much-hyped events landed Connors a Time magazine cover photo in
1975. Riordan was also behind the highly publicized $40 million
antitrust suit Connors brought against the Association of Tennis
Professionals and Commercial Union Assurance (sponsor of the ILTF
Grand Prix) a year earlier. It was alleged that these organizations were
conspiring to monopolize professional tennis by barring any player
who had signed up to play in the newly formed World Tennis League
from competing in the 1974 French Open. Thus, Connors was denied
his shot at the elusive Grand Slam that year. By the end of 1975,
Connors split with Riordan and dropped the hotly contested lawsuit;
only then did his relations with fellow tour players begin to improve.
None of Connors’ off-court battles had an adverse effect on his
game in the 1970s. Though he lacked overpowering strokes, Connors
was a dynamic shotmaker with the mentality of a prizefighter. His
trademark two-fisted backhand, along with an outstanding return of
serve, surprising touch, and the ability to work a point, all contributed
to his success. Number one in the world five times (1974-78),
Connors won a total of eight Grand Slam singles championships,
including five United States Opens. He is also the only player to have
won that title on three different surfaces (grass, clay, and hard courts).
In 1979, Connors disclosed that he and former Playboy Play-
mate-of-the-Year Patti McGuire had gotten married in Japan the
previous year. Around this time his game suffered something of a
decline. He failed to reach the final round of the United States Open
for the first time in six years, and his once-fierce rivalry with Bjorn
Borg lost its drama as he got crushed by the Swede four times. But
predictably for someone of his competitive spirit, Connors recommit-
ted himself, and won two more United States Open titles in the 1980s.
For a long time, it seemed certain that Connors’ biggest contri-
bution to American culture would be the sense of mischief and
passion he brought to the once aristocratic game of tennis. But his
determination to postpone retirement and continue fighting on court
in the latter stages of a storied 23-year career gave him a new claim to
fame, as he endeared himself to older spectators and even non-tennis
fans. At age 39, Connors rose from number 936 in the world at the
close of the previous year to make it all the way to the semifinals of the
United States Open in 1991. En route, he came from way behind to
defeat a much younger Aaron Krickstein in dramatic fashion. Ironi-
cally, it is likely that the match people will remember most is the one
that came in a tournament he did not win. Considering that Connors
holds 109 singles titles—tops in the Open era—along with 21 doubles
titles, this is nothing for him to lose any sleep over. In 1998, Connors
was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
—Steven Schneider
F
URTHER READING:
Burchard, Marshall. Jimmy Connors. New York, G.P. Putnams,
1976.
Collins, Bud, and Zander Hollander, editors. Bud Collins’ Modern
Encyclopedia of Tennis. New York, Doubleday, 1980.
Consciousness Raising Groups
A tactic usually associated with the U.S. Women’s Liberation
Movement (WLM) and other feminist-activist groupings born in the
late 1960s, consciousness raising involved a range of practices that
stressed the primacy of gender discrimination over issues of race and
class. Grounded in practical action rather than theory, consciousness
raising aimed to promote awareness of the repressed and marginal
status of women. As proclaimed in one of the more enduring activist
slogans of the 1960s—‘‘The personal is political’’—consciousness
raising took several forms, including the formation of devolved and
non-hierarchical discussion groups, in which women shared their
personal (and otherwise unheard) experiences of everyday lives lived
within a patriarchal society. Accordingly, the agenda of conscious-
ness raising in the early days very often focused on issues such as
abortion, housework, the family, or discrimination in the workplace,
issues whose political dimension had been taken for granted or
ignored by the dominant New Left groupings of the 1960s.
As a political tactic in its own right, consciousness raising
received an early definition in Kathie Sarachild’s ‘‘Program for
Feminist Consciousness Raising,’’ a paper given at the First National
Convention of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Chicago, in
November 1968. Many of those involved in the early days of WLM
had been politicized in the Civil Rights struggle and the protests
against the Vietnam War. But they had become disenchanted with the
tendency of nominally egalitarian New Left organizations, such as the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS), to downplay or omit altogether the
concerns of women, and had struck out on their own. When chal-
lenged on the position of women within his organization in 1964,
SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael had replied that ‘‘The only position
for women in SNCC is prone.’’ As late as 1969 SDS produced a
pamphlet that observed that ‘‘the system is like a woman; you’ve got
to fuck it to make it change.’’ The frustration of feminist activists in
the 1960s produced a new women’s movement, which stressed the
patriarchal content of New Left dissent, almost as much as it raised
awareness about gender and power in the everyday arenas of home
and work.
As a political strategy, consciousness raising placed a high value
on direct, practical action, and like much political activism of the
1960s and early 1970s, it produced inventive outlets for conducting
and publicizing political activity. In 1968 the WLM took conscious-
ness raising to the very heart of New Left concerns by conducting a
symbolic ‘‘burial’’ of traditional femininity at Arlington Cemetery—
the site of many protests at the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. As an
exercise in consciousness raising, the mock funeral aimed to publi-
cize the patriarchal tendency to define grieving mothers and bereaved
widows in terms of their relationships with men. Similar guerilla style
demonstrations marked the high point of consciousness raising as a
form of direct action during the late 1960s. The New York Radical
Women (NYRW) disrupted the Miss America pageant at Atlantic
City in September 1968; the WITCH group protested the New York
Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden on St. Valentines Day 1969.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
586
Other groups who employed similar tactics during this period includ-
ed the Manhattan-based Redstockings, the Feminists, and the New
York Radical Feminists.
The emphasis which early WLM consciousness raising placed
upon small groups of unaffiliated women shows its roots in the anti-
organizational politics of the New Left against which it reacted. The
WLM may have reacted sharply against what it saw to be the
patriarchal politics of SDS, but it shared with the New Left an
emphasis on localized political activity exercised through small
devolved ‘‘cells,’’ which valorized the resistance of the individual to
institutional oppression. In common with certain tendencies of the
New Left, the premium placed upon an overtly personal politics has at
times served to obscure the original commitment of consciousness
raising to a more collective revolution in social definitions of gender
and gender roles. One of the more visible legacies of consciousness
raising can be seen in the proliferation of Women’s Studies courses
and departments at universities and colleges during the closing
decades of the twentieth century.
—David Holloway
F
URTHER READING:
Buechler, Steven M. Women’s Movements in the United States:
Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond. New Brunswick,
Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: A Contemporary History. New
York, New York University Press, 1990.
Whelehan, Imelda. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second
Wave to Post-Feminism. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University
Press, 1995.
Conspiracy Theories
Once the province of the far right, conspiracy theories have
gained a wider cultural currency in the last quarter of the twentieth
century, and have become widely disseminated in our popular culture
through diverse sources. Spanning every topic from UFOs to ancient
secret societies to scientific and medical research, conspiracy theories
are frequently disparaged as the hobby of ‘‘kooks’’ and ‘‘nuts’’ by the
mainstream. In fact, many theories are well substantiated, but the
belief in a ‘‘smoke-filled room’’ is a patently uncomfortable thought
for most. Although the populace has generally shown a preference for
dismissing conspiracy theories en masse, nevertheless it is now a
common belief that a disconnect exists between the official line and
reality. Crisis and scandal have left their mark on the American
psyche, and popular culture—especially film and television—have
readily capitalized on public suspicions, becoming an armature of the
culture of paranoia.
What exactly is a conspiracy theory? Under its broadest defini-
tion, a conspiracy theory is a belief in the planned execution of an
event—or events—in order to achieve a desired end. ‘‘At the center
[of a conspiracy] there is always a tiny group in complete control,
with one man as the undisputed leader,’’ writes G. Edward Griffin,
author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, a work on the Federal
Reserve Board which, in passing, touches on many conspiracy
theories of this century. ‘‘Next is a circle of secondary leadership that,
for the most part, is unaware of an inner core. They are led to believe
that they are the inner-most ring. In time, as these conspiracies are
built from the center out, they form additional rings of organization.
Those in the outer echelons usually are idealists with an honest desire
to improve the world. They never suspect an inner control for other
purposes.’’ This serves as an able definition of conspiracy, but for a
conspiracy to be properly considered as conspiracy theory, there must
be a level of supposition in the author’s analysis beyond the estab-
lished facts. Case in point: the ne plus ultra of conspiracy theories, the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. Regardless of who was responsible
for his murder, what is germane is the vast labyrinthian web of
suspects that writers and researchers have uncovered. It is these
shadowy allegations that comprise a conspiracy theory. The validity
of different arguments aside, in the case of JFK, it is the speculative
nature of these allegations which has left the greatest impression on
popular culture.
Conspiracy theories tend, in the words of James Ridgeway,
author of Blood in the Face, ‘‘to provide what seems to be a simple,
surefire interpretation of events by which often chaotic and perplex-
ing change can be explained.’’ While it would be comforting to be so
blandly dismissive, in the end, a conspiracy theory can only be as
sophisticated as its proponent. Naturally, in the hands of a racist
ideologue, a theory such as a belief in the omnipotence of Jewish
bankers is a justification for hatred. Furthermore, as conspiracy
theorists are wont to chase their quarry across the aeons in a quest for
first causes, their assertions are often lost in the muddle, further
exacerbated by the fact that more often than not, conspiracy theorists
are far from able wordsmiths. Yet, as the saying goes, where there’s
smoke there’s fire, and it would be injudicious to lump all conspiracy
theories together as equally without merit.
A brief exegesis of one of the most pervasive conspiracy theories
might well illustrate how conspiracy theories circulate and, like the
game of telephone—in which a sentence is passed from one listener to
the other until it becomes totally garbled—are embellished and
elaborated upon. At the close of the eighteenth century, the pervasive
unrest was adjudged to be the work of Freemasons and the Illuminati,
two semi-secret orders whose eighteenth-century Enlightenment theo-
ries of individual liberty made them most unpopular to the aristocra-
cy. These groups were widely persecuted and then driven into hiding.
But waiting in the wings, was that most convenient of scapegoats,
the Jews.
The Jews had long been viewed with distrust by their Christian
neighbors. Already viewed as deicides, in the Middle Ages it was also
commonly believed that Jews used the blood of Christian children in
their Sabbath rituals. Communities of Jews were often wiped out as a
result. Association, as it had so often been for the Jews, was sufficient
to establish guilt. Early in the nineteenth century, a theory developed
propounding an international Jewish conspiracy, a cabal of Jewish
financiers intent on ensnaring the world under the dominion of a
world government. The Jews were soon facing accusations of being
the eminence grise behind the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and with
complete disdain for the facts, the French Revolution.
Stories of an international Jewish cabal percolated until, in 1881,
Biarritz, a novel by an official in the Prussian postal service, gave
dramatic form to them. In a chapter entitled ‘‘In the Jewish Cemetery
in Prague,’’ a centennial congregation of Jewish leaders was depicted
as they gathered to review their nefarious efforts to enslave the
Gentile masses. The chapter was widely circulated in pamphlet form
and later expanded into a book, The Protocols of Zion, used as
inflammatory propaganda and distributed by supporters of the Czar.
Distributed widely throughout Europe and America, Hitler would
CONSUMER REPORTSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
587
later cite The Protocols as a cardinal influence in his mature
political beliefs.
The Jewish conspiracy made its way to America in the 1920s,
where the idea was taken up by a rural, white, nativist populace
already convinced the pope was an anti-Christ, Jews had horns, and
all non-Anglo foreigners were agents of Communism. The industrial-
ist Henry Ford fanned the flames by demonizing Jews in his newspa-
per, the Dearborn Independent, in which he published sections of The
Protocols. Whether directly associated with Jews or not, the theory
that American sovereignty was being slowly undermined became an
enduring feature of the nativist right wing. It would be used to explain
everything from the two world wars to the Bolshevik Revolution to
the establishment of the IRS. Unfortunately, alongside the most rabid
anti-Semitic screed there sits many an assertion, both accurate and
well documented, and it is this indiscriminate combination of fact and
fantasy that makes the allegations so disturbing.
For mainstream America, one could properly say that the age of
the conspiracy theory began in the 1950s. More than any obscurantist’s
diatribe, movies gave life and breath to the conviction that civilization
was governed from behind the scenes. Movies were a release valve in
which the fears of that era—fears of Communist invasion, nuclear
annihilation, UFOs—found release, sublimated into science fiction or
crime dramas. The 1950s gave us films with a newfound predilection
for ambiguity and hidden agendas—film noir. Films like Kiss Me
Deadly, The Shack out on 101, North by Northwest, and The
Manchurian Candidate explicate a worldview that is patently con-
spiratorial. They are a far cry from anything produced in the previous
decades. The angst and nuances of film noir carried over to the
science fiction genre. No longer content with fantasy, the frivo-
lousness of early science fiction was replaced by a dread-laden
weltanschauung, a world of purposeful or malevolent visitors from
another planet: visitors with an agenda. The Day the Earth Stood Still,
Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, and Them are standouts of the era, but
for each film that became a classic, a legion of knockoffs stood
arrayed behind.
By the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Americans were look-
ing at world events with a more jaundiced eye. The movement from
Kennedy to Watergate, from suspicion to outright guilt, was accom-
panied by a corollary shift in media perception. The United States
government was directly portrayed as the enemy—no longer intuited
as it had been in the oblique, coded films of the 1950s. Robert Redford
and Warren Beatty made films—All the President’s Men, Three Days
of the Condor, and The Parallax View—that capitalized on the
suspicion of government that Watergate fostered in the public.
It wasn’t until the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK that conspiracy
theories made a reentry into the mainstream. Shortly thereafter, the
phenomenally popular TV series The X-Files, a compendium of all
things conspiratorial—properly sanitized for middle-class sensibili-
ties—made its auspicious debut in 1992. For a generation to whom
the likelihood of UFOs outweighed their belief in the continuance of
social security into their dotage; for whom the McCarthy Era was
history, Watergate but a distant, childhood memory, and JFK’s
murder the watershed in their parents’ history, conspiracy theories
received a fresh airing, albeit heavy on the exotic and entirely free of
racism, xenophobia, and government malfeasance. The show’s suc-
cess triggered a national obsession for all things conspiratorial, and a
slew of books, films, and real-life TV programming made the rounds.
There was even a film titled Conspiracy Theory starring the popular
actor Mel Gibson as a paranoid cabby whose suspicions turn out to be
utterly justified.
By their very nature conspiracy theories are difficult to prove,
and this fact in and of itself largely explains their popularity. They
inhabit a netherworld where truth and fiction mingle together in an
endless dance of fact and supposition. They tantalize, for within this
symbiosis explanations are set forth. After all, it is easier to acknowl-
edge a villain than to accept a meaningless absurdity. Therefore, as
the world grows increasingly complex, it is likely that conspiracy
theories will continue, like the game of telephone mentioned earlier,
to mutate and multiply—serving a variety of agendas. Their presence
in the cultural zeitgeist, however, is no longer assailable: paranoia is
the mainstream.
—Michael J. Baers
F
URTHER READING:
Allen, Gary. None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Seal Beach, Concord
Press, 1971.
Bramley, William. Gods of Eden. New York, Avon Books, 1989.
Epperson, A. Ralph. The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the
Conspiratorial View of History. Tucson, Publius Press, 1985.
Griffin, G. Edward. The Creature from Jekyll Island. Appleton,
American Opinion, 1994.
Moench, Doug. The Big Book of Conspiracies. New York, Paradox
Press, 1995.
Mullins, Eustace. The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of
Parasitism. Staunton, Ezra Pound Institute of Civilization, 1985.
Quigley, Carrol. Tragedy and Hope. New York, MacMillan, 1966.
Ravenscraft, Trevor. The Spear of Destiny. New York, G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1973.
Ridgeway, James. Blood in the Face. New York, Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 1990.
Still, William. New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Socie-
ties. Lafayette, Huntington House Publishers, 1990.
Consumer Reports
Published since 1936, Consumer Reports has established a
reputation as a leading source of unbiased reporting about products
and services likely to be used by the typical American. It counts itself
among the ten most widely disseminated periodicals in the United
States, with a circulation in 1998 of 4.6 million. In all of its more than
sixty years of production, the journal has never accepted free samples,
advertisements, or grants from any industry, business, or agency.
Maintaining this strict independence from interest groups has helped
make Consumer Reports a trusted source of information.
Consumer Reports is published by Consumers Union, a not-for-
profit organization based in Yonkers, New York. Along with the print
monthly, Consumers Union also creates and distributes many guide
books for consumers, such as the Supermarket Buying Guide and the
Auto Insurance Handbook, as well as newsletters about travel and
health issues, and a children’s magazine called Zillions. There are
Consumer Reports syndicated radio and television shows, and a
popular and successful web page with millions of subscribers. Stating
its mission as to ‘‘test products, inform the public and protect
CONSUMER REPORTS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
588
consumers,’’ Consumers Union has more than 450 persons on its staff
and operates fifty test labs in nine departments: appliances, automo-
biles, chemicals, electronics, foods, home environment, public serv-
ice, recreation and home improvement. The Union operates three
advocacy offices, in Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas, and San
Francisco, that help citizens with questions, complaints, and legal
action about products and services. Consumers Union was also
instrumental in the formation of the Consumer Policy Institute in
Yonkers, which does research in such areas as biotechnology and
pollution; and Consumer International, founded in 1960, which seeks
to unite worldwide consumer interests. All together, the organizations
that comprise Consumers Union have been pivotal in the creation of a
consumer movement and have been responsible for many defective
product recalls, fines on offending industries, and much consumer-
protection legislation.
The history of the founding of Consumer Reports gives a
condensed picture of the consumer movement in the United States. In
1926, Frederick Schlink, an engineer in White Plains, New York,
founded a ‘‘consumer club,’’ with the goal of better informing
citizens about the choices of products and services facing them. With
the industrial revolution not far behind them, consumers in the 1920s
were faced with both the luxury and the dilemma of being able to
purchase many manufactured items that had formerly had to be
custom made. Schlink’s club distributed mimeographed lists of
warnings and recommendations about products. By 1928, the little
club had expanded into a staffed organization called Consumers’
Research, whose journal, Consumers’ Research Bulletin, accepted no
advertising. That same year Schlink and another Consumers’ Re-
search director, engineer Arthur Kallet, published a book about
consumer concerns called 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in
Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics.
In 1933, when Schlink moved his organization to the small town
of Washington, New Jersey, he was confronted with his own ethical
dilemmas. When some of his own employees formed a union, Schlink
fired them, prompting a strike by forty other workers demanding a
minimum-wage guarantee and reinstatement of their fired colleagues.
Schlink responded by accusing the strikers of being communists and
by hiring scabs. In 1936, the Consumers’ Research strikers formed
their own organization with Arthur Kallet at its head. They called it
Consumers Union. Their original charter promised to ‘‘test and give
information to the public on products and services’’ in the hopes of
‘‘maintaining decent living standards for ultimate consumers.’’
Early Consumers Union product research was limited because of
lack of funds to buy expensive products to test, but they did research
on items of everyday concern to Depression-era consumers, such as
soaps and credit unions. Within three months of its formation,
Consumers Union published the first issue of Consumers Union
Reports, continuing the tradition of refusing commercial support.
Along with information on product safety and reliability, the new
journal maintained a leftist slant by reporting on social issues such as
business labor practices. Its first editorial stated, ‘‘All the technical
information in the world will not give enough food or enough clothes
to the textile worker’s family living on $11 a week.’’ Threatened by
this new progressive consumer movement, business began to fight
back. Red-baiting articles appeared in such mainstream journals as
Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping. Between 1940 and 1950,
the union appeared on government lists of subversive organizations.
By 1942, Consumers Union Reports had become simply Con-
sumer Reports to broaden its public appeal. Both consumption and the
purchase of consumer research had been slowed by the Depression
and World War II, but with the return of consumer spending after
1945, the demand for Consumer Reports subscriptions shot up. In the
postwar economic boom, businesses had very consciously and suc-
cessfully urged citizens to become consumers. Having learned to
want more than food and shelter, people also learned to want more in
less material arenas. They wanted something called ‘‘quality of life.’’
They wanted clean air and water, they wanted to be able to trust the
goods and services they purchased, and they wanted their government
to protect their safety in these areas.
In the boom economy of the 1950s and 1960s, business felt it had
little to fear from organized consumers and did little to fight back.
This, combined with the rise of socially conscious progressive
movements, gave a boost of power and visibility to the consumer
movement. In 1962, liberal president John F. Kennedy introduced the
‘‘consumer bill of rights,’’ delineating for the first time that citizens
had a right to quality goods. The same year, Congress overcame the
protests of the garment industry to pass laws requiring that children’s
clothing be made from flame-resistant fabric. In 1964, the Depart-
ment of Labor hired lawyer Ralph Nader to investigate automobile
safety, resulting in landmark vehicle-safety legislation. A committed
consumer activist, Nader joined the Consumers Union board of
directors from 1967 through 1975.
In 1962, Rachael Carson sparked a new view of the environment
with her ecological manifesto, Silent Spring, a work so clearly
connected to the consumer movement that Consumers Union pub-
lished a special edition. The new environmentalists did research that
resulted in the passage in 1963 of the first Clean Air Act and in 1965
of the Clean Water Act.
The consumer movement and the movement to clean up the
environment attracted much popular support. By 1967, the Consumer
Federation of America had been formed, a coalition of 140 smaller
local groups. The long-established Consumers Union opened its
office in Washington, D.C. to better focus on its lobbying work.
Working together, these groups and other activists were responsible
for the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the
Consumer Product Safety Commission, and countless laws insti-
tuting safety standards, setting up fair business practices, and
regulating pollution.
The thriving consumer movement is one of the most significant
legacies of the turbulent period of social change that spanned the
period from the 1950s through the 1970s. As more and more products
and services have been introduced, activists have continued to insti-
gate legislation and create organizations and networks to help con-
sumers cope with the flood of options. From its roots as a club for
consumer advice, Consumers Union has grown into a notable force
for consumer and environmental protection, offering research and
advice on every imaginable topic of interest to consumers from
automobiles and appliances to classical music recordings, legal
services, and funerals. It has retained a high standard of ethics and
value pertaining to the rights of the common citizen. For most of
them, thoughts of a large purchase almost inevitably lead to the
question, ‘‘Have you checked Consumer Reports?’’ The organization
has clung to its progressive politics while weathering the distrust of
big business about its motivations and effectiveness.
—Tina Gianoulis
F
URTHER READING:
‘‘Consumer Reports.’’ http://www.consumerreports.org. May
1999.