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COUNTRY MUSICENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
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followed. Jimmie Rodgers sold between 6 and 20 million records (by
various estimates) before his death in 1933. The blues were hit hard as
a commercial medium by the depression, but country music did well
in the 1930s. Radio, a more viable medium for white music, kept
country music in the public ear with various local ‘‘barn dance’’
programs, including the phenomenally successful Grand Ole Opry,
which started in 1925.
One singer who emerged from regional radio in the 1930s to
reshape country music was Gene Autry. Autry, who had scored a hit
record in 1931 with ‘‘That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,’’ a senti-
mental song in the Jimmie Rodgers mode, was summoned to Holly-
wood in 1934, as the answer to a Republic Studios mogul’s brain-
storm: The hottest new trend in movies was the musical talkie, like
The Jazz Singer, and perennial cinema moneymaker was the Western.
With Autry’s enormous success as a singing cowboy in films,
‘‘country’’ became ‘‘country and western.’’ Gene Autry became the
first country star to gain an audience beyond the rural South and West,
even drawing a million fans at a 1939 performance in Dublin, Ireland.
Rather than authentic western songs, Autry sang music composed by
Hollywood songwriters, calculated to appeal to audiences that lis-
tened to Cole Porter and Irving Berlin as well as Jimmie Rodgers and
the Carter Family. The new songs succeeded so well that Berlin
would ultimately write his own cowboy song, ‘‘Don’t Fence Me In.’’
This was country’s first flirtation with the mainstream of Ameri-
can music. Roy Rogers followed Autry’s path to success, and soon
they were imitated by a multitude of lesser singing cowboys. There
was no country music industry as such in the 1930s, but this outsider/
mainstream dichotomy would remain an issue throughout country’s
history. The other significant innovation in the country music of the
1930s also came from the West, and was another unlikely fusion. In
Texas, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys blended jazz and country to
create a new and infectious dance music.
In the 1940s, country music had its own hit parade, as Billboard
magazine created its first country chart in 1944. First called the ‘‘folk
music’’ chart, it became the ‘‘country and western’’ chart in 1949,
and its first number one hit was Al Dexter’s ‘‘Pistol Packin’ Mama.’’
‘‘Folk music’’ being loosely defined, the early charts included artists
like Louis Jordan, Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole, and Bing Crosby. But country
was starting to amass its first generation of major stars—singers like
Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Red Foley—and the new sound of blue-
grass music, which had been popularized by Bill Monroe in the 1930s,
but gained its full maturity when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined
Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in the mid-1940s.
In an important sense, country’s key figure in the 1940s was Roy
Acuff. Acuff joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and not long after
became the Opry’s host, presiding over its period of greatest populari-
ty. In 1942, Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose started a music publish-
ing company, Acuff-Rose, which signed country songwriters, and
created a new standard of professionalism in the field. The Opry and
Acuff-Rose were, together, the most significant factors in solidifying
the place of Nashville as the country music capital of America. World
War II brought a lot of young GIs from the north down to army bases
in the South, where they heard Acuff’s music and broadened coun-
try’s listening base even further.
In 1946, Acuff-Rose signed Hank Williams to a writing contract,
and in 1947 Williams had his first chart hit, ‘‘Move It on Over.’’ He
joined the Louisiana Hayride, the second most influential of the
country radio shows (Elvis Presley also began his career on the
Hayride), in 1948, and came to the Opry in 1949. With Hank
Williams, country had a star who outshone all who came before, and
who set the standard for all who came after. His songs (like Rodgers’
were deeply blues-influenced) were as simple as conversation, but
unforgettable. ‘‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’’ ‘‘Hey, Good Lookin’,’’ ‘‘Cold,
Cold Heart,’’ and ‘‘I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You’’ are
just a few Williams’ tunes that are still classics. Williams, like his
contemporaries, jazzman Charlie Parker and poet Dylan Thomas,
lived out the myth of the self-destructive, tormented artist and died
too young in the back seat of his limosine on the way to a concert on
New Year’s Day in 1953; he was 29 years old.
As the 1950s began, mainstream American popular music was
becoming moribund. The creative energy of the ‘‘Tin Pan Alley’’
songwriters, the New York-centered, Broadway-oriented popular
song crafters, seemed to be flagging. Singers like Tony Martin, Perry
Como, Teresa Brewer, and the Ames brothers were only marginally
connected to the pulse of the new generation. Country music and
rhythm and blues both began to make inroads into that mainstream,
but at first it was only the songs, not the singers, that gained
popularity. Red Foley had a number one pop hit with ‘‘Chattanoogie
Shoe Shine Boy’’ in 1950, but for the most part it was pop singers like
Tony Bennett and Jo Stafford, the McGuire Sisters and Pat Boone
who took their versions of country and R&B songs up the pop charts.
At the same time, country and R&B music were making an
alliance of their own. Nashville was now entrenched as the capital of
the country music establishment, but the new music came from Sun
Records in Memphis, where Sam Phillips recorded Elvis Presley, Carl
Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. It was called rock ’n’ roll,
and the country music establishment did not like it. Elvis began his
career as ‘‘The Hillbilly Cat,’’ and was featured on Louisiana
Hayride, but he never sang on the Opry, and rock ’n’ roll, denounced
by Roy Acuff, never made an impact there. Racism certainly played a
part in the country establishment’s rejection of rock ’n’ roll. The new
music was widely denounced throughout the South by organizations
like the White Citizen’s Council. At the same time, however, country
music was beginning to outgrow its raffish, working-class roots.
Eddie Arnold, the biggest star of the late 1940s and early 1950s, called
himself ‘‘The Tennessee Plowboy,’’ a nickname he had acquired
early in his career, but he was no plowboy. He wore a tuxedo on stage,
and had only the barest trace of hillbilly nasality in his voice.
Perhaps the city of Nashville exerted an influence, too. Although
Acuff-Rose and other music companies had made Music Row the
symbol of Nashville everywhere else in the country, it was an
embarrassment to Nashville society. When a Tennessee governor in
the mid-1940s was quoted as saying, ‘‘hillbilly music is disgraceful,’’
Roy Acuff responded by announcing his candidacy for governor (he
never followed through), but there was a growing feeling that
country’s image should not be too raw or ‘‘low-class.’’ So while
rhythm and blues performers responded to rock ’n’ roll by joining it,
the country establishment rejected it. This was the first of a series of
decisions that had the effect of marginalizing what might have
become America’s dominant musical style. The country establish-
ment has always sought status and recognition, but until the 1990s, it
consistently made the wrong choices in following that ambition. As
rock ’n’ roll’s hard edge took over not only the United States but the
world, country music became softer and smoother. Brilliant musi-
cians and producers, such as guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins, pooled their
considerable talents and came up with The Nashville Sound, a string-
sweetened Muzak that was suited to the stylings of Arnold, Jim
Reeves, and Patsy Cline, but not to the grittiness of Presley, Perkins,
Lewis, and Cash.
COUNTRY MUSIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
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Contrary to the popular stereotype, country music has not always
been associated with political conservatism. One of the Opry’s first
stars, Uncle Dave Macon, was a fiery radical leftist. Even Gene Autry,
early in his career, recorded ‘‘The Death of Mother Jones,’’ a tribute
to the legendary left-wing labor organizer. But New Deal populism
was replaced, over the years, by entrenched racism, Cold War
patriotism, and the growing generation gap. By the 1960s, youth,
rebellion, and rock ’n’ roll were on one side of a great divide, and
country music was on the other.
The anthems of 1960s country conservatism were Merle Hag-
gard’s anti-hippie ‘‘Okie From Muskogee’’ and chip-on-the-shoulder
patriotic ‘‘Fightin’ Side of Me.’’ But Haggard, an ex-convict who had
been in the audience when Johnny Cash recorded his historic live
album at Folsom Prison, represented his own kind of rebellion. Along
with Buck Owens, Haggard had turned his back on not only the
Nashville Sound but Nashville itself, setting up their own production
center in the dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, and
making music that recaptured the grittier sound of an earlier era.
Haggard and Owens, for all their right-wing posturing, were adopted
by the rockers. The Grateful Dead recorded Haggard’s ‘‘Mama
Tried,’’ and Creedence Clearwater Revival sang about ‘‘listenin’ to
Buck Owens.’’
The conservative cause stood in staunch opposition to the
women’s movement, but in the 1960s women gained their first major
foothold in country music. There had been girl singers before, even
great ones like Patsy Cline, but now Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette,
and especially Dolly Parton established themselves as important
figures. Lynn and Parton wrote their own songs, often with incisive
lyrics about the female experience, and Parton handled much of her
own production. Country music has been described as ‘‘the voice of
the inarticulate,’’ and these singers gave a powerful voice to a
segment of the population that had never had their dreams and
struggles articulated in this way.
The Nashville establishment was still hitching its wagon to a star
that shone most brightly over Las Vegas. Still distrustful of rebellion
and rough edges, they looked to Vegas pop stars for their salvation. In
1974 and 1975, John Denver and Olivia Newton-John swept the
Country Music Association Awards (Denver was Entertainer of the
Year in 1975). Country’s creative edge moved away from Nashville
to Bakersfield and elsewhere. Singer-songwriters Willie Nelson and
Waylon Jennings grew their hair long and hung out with hippies and
rockers at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas. They
made the country establishment nervous, but it did eventually accept
the so-called Outlaw Movement, and by 1979, Nelson was Entertain-
er of the Year. The real working-class music of the new generation of
Southern whites never got that acceptance. Although the 1950s
rockabilly rebels like Cash, Lewis, and the Everly Brothers now
played country venues, the young rockers still scared Nashville.
There was too much Jimi Hendrix in their music, too much hippie
attitude in their clothes and their hair. The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd
Skynyrd, and others played something called Southern Rock that
could have been called country, but wasn’t. Nevertheless, the kid at
the gas station in North Carolina was listening to them, not to John
Denver or Barbara Mandrell. By cutting them out (along with white
Midwestern working-class rockers like Bob Seger), country music
lost a large portion of its new generation of potential listeners.
The country establishment still sought the Vegas crossover
secret, and they seemed to find it in 1980, when the movie Urban
Cowboy created a craze for yoked shirts and fringed cowboy boots.
Records by artists like Mickey Gilley, Johnny Lee, and Alabama shot
up the pop charts for a short time, but the ‘‘urban cowboy’’ sound was
passing fad, and country music seemed to disintegrate with it. In
1985, The New York Times solemnly declared that country music was
finished as a genre, and would never be revived.
However, it was already being revived, by going back to its
roots. Inspired by the example of George Jones, a country legend
since the late 1950s, who is widely considered to possess the greatest
voice in the history of country music, country’s new generation came
to be known as the New Traditionalists. Some of its most important
figures were Ricky Skaggs, a brilliant instrumentalist who brought
the bluegrass tradition back into the mainstream, Randy Travis, a
balladeer in the style of Jones, the Judds, who revived country
harmony and the family group, and Reba McEntire, who modernized
the tradition of Parton, Wynette, and Lynn, while keeping a pure
country sound. The late 1980s brought a new generation of outlaws,
too, singer-songwriters who respected tradition, but had a younger,
quirkier approach. They included Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and
Steve Earle. These musicians gained a following (Earle, who self-
destructed on drugs, but gradually rebuilt a career in the 1990s,
remains the most influential songwriter of the era). However, country
radio, the center of the country establishment, gave them little air
time, and they moved on to careers in other genres.
There had always been country performers on television, Ten-
nessee Ernie Ford in the 1950s, Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash in
the 1960s, and Barbara Mandrell in the ‘‘urban cowboy’’ days of the
early 1980s. The 1980s also brought cable television, and in 1983,
The Nashville Network went on the air with an all-country format of
videos, live music, and interview shows. In 1985, TNN broadcast
country music’s Woodstock—Farm Aid, a massive benefit organized
by Willie Nelson for America’s farm families. TNN broadcast the
entire 12 hours of Farm Aid live, and audiences who tuned in to see
the rock stars like Neil Young and John Mellencamp who headlined
the bill, also saw new country stars like Dwight Yoakam.
The creative energy that drove country music in the 1980s, had
settled into a formula by the 1990s, and it was the most successful
formula the genre had ever seen. In 1989, Clint Black, became the
first performer to combine the traditionalism of Travis and George
Strait, the innovation of Lovett and Earle, and MTV/TNN-era good
looks and video presence. Close behind Black came Garth Brooks.
With Brooks, the resistance to rock which had limited country’s
potential for growth for four decades finally crumbled completely.
Brooks modeled himself after 1970s arena rockers like Journey
and Kiss, and after his idol, Billy Joel. Rock itself was floundering in
divisiveness, and audiences were excited by the new face of country.
In a 1991 interview, Rodney Crowell said, ‘‘I play country music
because I love rock ’n’ roll, and country is the only genre where you
can still play it.’’ Brooks’ second album, Ropin’ The Wind, debuted at
number one on the pop charts, swamping a heavily hyped album by
Guns ’n Roses, rock’s biggest name at that time. Pop music observers
compared the new country popularity to the ‘‘urban cowboy’’ craze,
and many predicted it would fizzle again. However, with country
finally catching up to rock ’n’ roll, 40 years late. Country music had
taken on a lot of the trappings that had been associated with rock—
sexy young singing idols, arena tours, and major promotions. Country
music’s audience had also broadened; the kid at the gas station joined
the country traditionalists and country’s new suburban audience.
Country music has as many faces as American society itself, and no
doubt will keep re-inventing itself with each generation.
—Tad Richards
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FURTHER READING:
The Country Music Foundation, editors. Country—The Music and
the Musicians. New York, Abbeville Press, 1994.
Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country
Music. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Horstman, Dorothy. Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy. Nashville,
Country Music Foundation Press, 1985.
Leamer, Laurence. Three Chords and the Truth. New York,
HarperCollins, 1997.
Malone, Bill C. Country Music USA, Revised Edition. Austin, Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1985.
Mansfield, Brian, and Gary Graff, editors. Music Hound Country:
The Essential Album Guide. Detroit, Visible Ink, 1997.
Nash, Alana. Behind Closed Doors: Talking With the Legends of
Country Music. New York, Knopf, 1988.
Richards, Tad, and Melvin B. Shestack. The New Country Music
Encyclopedia. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Cousteau, Jacques (1910-1997)
Jacques Cousteau is the world’s most acclaimed producer of
underwater film documentaries. His adventurous spirit and undersea
explorations, documented in over forty books, four feature films, and
more than one hundred television programs, popularized the study of
marine environments, and made him a household name in many parts
of the world. As principal developer of the world’s first aqualung
diving apparatus and underwater film cameras, he opened up the
world’s waters to millions of scuba divers, film makers, and tele-
vision viewers. A pioneering environmentalist, Cousteau brought
home to the public mind the importance of the world’s oceans and
inspired generations of young scientists to become ecologists
and oceanographers.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born on June 11, 1910, in the
market town of St.-Andre-de-Cubzac, France. Following service in
the French Navy, he became commander of the research vessel
Calypso in 1950. The Calypso, where most of his subsequent films
were produced, served as his base of operations. His first book, The
Silent World, sold more than five million copies in 22 languages. A
film of the same name won both the Palme d’Or at the 1956 Cannes
International Film Festival and an Academy Award for best docu-
mentary in 1957. Television programs bearing the Cousteau name
earned 10 Emmys and numerous other awards. In the 1950s and
1960s, Cousteau established a series of corporations and nonprofit
organizations through which he financed his explorations, promoted
his environmental opinions, and championed his reputation as the
world’s foremost underwater researcher and adventurer. He died in
Paris on June 25, 1997.
—Ken Kempcke
F
URTHER READING:
Madsen, Axel. Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography. New York,
Beaufort, 1986.
Munson, Richard. Cousteau: The Captain and His World. New York,
Morrow, 1989.
Covey, Stephen (1932—)
Stephen Covey, one of America’s most prominent self-help
gurus, owes much to Dale Carnegie, whose best-selling book, How To
Win Friends and Influence People, and its corresponding public
speaking course are models upon which Covey built his success. The
first of numerous books written by Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly
Effective People, was published in 1989 and helped his rise to the
position of unofficial consultant to the leaders of corporate America,
and guru to those in the lower levels of corporate management. His
company, the Covey Leadership Center, founded in 1983, subse-
quently capitalized on the success of 7 Habits, which became a catch
phrase for any number of simplistic and appealing ideas dealing with
personal happiness and efficiency in the workplace.
Covey was born into a Mormon family in Provo, Utah. During
the 1950s he completed a bachelor’s degree in business administra-
tion at the University of Utah and an M.B.A. at Cambridge. In
between his academic studies, he served as a missionary in Nottingham,
England, training the leaders of recently formed Mormon congrega-
tions, and thus became aware of what it meant to train and motivate
leaders. As a result of the particular nature of his training experience,
a combination of religious and family values formed the core of his
programs and writings. Covey taught at Brigham Young University
where, in 1976, he earned a Ph.D. in business and education, but left
that institution in 1983 to start the Covey Leadership Center.
The Center had an immediate, and almost exclusive appeal to the
corporate culture, partly due to its marketing strategies, but also
because of the timbre of the times. Corporate America was in a state
of unease and flux, and workers and managers were ripe for guidance
in their search for a sense of stability in their jobs and careers. The
Covey Leadership Center promised solutions to their problems, and
both managers and employees were as eager to attend Covey’s
programs as the corporate leaders—hoping for improved efficiency
and morale of their personnel—were to send them. When The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People was published, six years after the
inception of the Center, it became hugely popular, appearing on the
New York Times bestseller list for well over five years. The book
stood out from the vast quantity of positive-thinking books available
in the late 1980s, partially because of Covey’s already established
credibility, and partly because, as with the courses and programs,
there was a real need for his particular take on self-help literature. The
sales of the book increased the already sizable interest and enrollment
in his leadership programs. Throughout the 1990s, according to
Current Biography, ‘‘hundreds of corporations, government agen-
cies, and universities invited Covey to conduct seminars with, or
present talks to, their employees.’’
While many people attended these seminars and workshops, it is
the 7 Habits book that defines Stephen Covey’s identity as a self-help
guru. Initially an integral part of corporate management literature, the
appeal of Covey’s message, as transmitted in his book, spread to
people in all walks of life. Its popularity was such that magazine and
newspaper editors, in their bids to increase circulation, would play on
the ‘‘Seven Habits’’ theme in headlines and articles in much the same
way that the title of Robert Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance spawned countless sophomoric imitations
in the print media.
Stephen Covey was the first to admit that there is nothing new in
his writing; indeed the very simplicity of his philosophy has account-
ed both for its popular acclaim, and for the not insubstantial negative
COWBOY LOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
622
criticism it has attracted in certain quarters. Each ‘‘habit’’ presented
in the book (‘‘Be proactive,’’ ‘‘Begin with the end in mind,’’ ‘‘Put
first things first’’) draws on time-tested truisms and age-old common-
sense principles. Covey’s fans applauded him for putting these adages
into print, in a useful modern context; detractors blasted him for
repackaging well-worn and well-known information. Covey himself
claimed that his book is based on common sense ideas, but that they
needed to be restated, because, as he said in an interview in the
Orange County Register, ‘‘. . . [W]hat is common sense isn’t
common practice.’’ Another criticism frequently leveled at Covey is
that, in his effort to show that each person is responsible for his or her
own success, he trivializes the effects that flaws in the larger corpo-
rate system may have on performance. Thus, any failure is blamed
only on the individual.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has transcended the
corporate world and entered into the American collective psyche. The
Covey Leadership Center, which merged with the Franklin Quest
Company in 1997 to form the Franklin Covey Co., has turned itself
into a cottage industry, supplying customers with all manner of
related merchandise: magazines, audiotapes, videos, and, perhaps
most pervasively, ‘‘day-planners’’. Once the chief product of the
Franklin Quest company, these trendy signs-of-the-times began, after
the merger, to include quotes from Covey’s books. In addition to the 7
Habits book, Covey wrote a number of other books on related topics,
including First Things First, and Principle-Centered Leadership. In
1997, he published a ‘‘follow-up’’ to his popular book, entitled The 7
Habits of Highly Effective Families, which promptly landed on the
New York Times best-seller list. Redirecting the thrust of his wisdom
towards problems between family members, Covey seemed to antici-
pate the changing mood and tone of America, which, in the wake of
contradictory political messages, had become, by the late 1990s, more
concerned with ‘‘family values.’’
Stephen Covey is, perhaps, not quite a household name, but the
‘‘7 Habits’’ phrase, and the concept and book from which it origi-
nates, has become an emblem of the American people’s desire for
stability and self-improvement, in their careers and in their personal
lives. It represents the people’s search for an antidote to the confusing,
contradictory and often disturbing events in the corporate and politi-
cal worlds during the 1990s. The extent to which ‘‘7 Habits’’ has
permeated the culture shows a desire, in the face of growing and
changing technology, for simple truths, and for courses of action that
can be easily understood and executed.
—Dan Coffey
F
URTHER READING:
Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families:
Building a Beautiful Family Culture in a Turbulent World. New
York, Golden Books, 1997.
———. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York, Simon
& Schuster, 1992.
Current Biography. New York, H.W. Wilson. January, 1998, 19-21.
Smith, Timothy K. “What’s So Effective About Stephen Covey?”
Fortune. December 12, 1994, 116-22.
Walker, Theresa. “Stephen Covey.” The Orange County Register.
March 3, 1998.
Wolfe, Alan. “Capitalism, Mormonism, and the Doctrine of Stephen
Covey.” The New Republic. February 23, 1998, 26-35.
The Cowboy Look
The cowboy look is a fanciful construction of an ideal cowboy
image. Originally, cowboy clothing provided primarily function over
fashion, but through America’s century-long fascination with this
romantic Great Plains laborer, image has surpassed reality in what a
cowboy ought to look like. With the supposed closing of the frontier
at the end of the nineteenth century, the ascendancy of the Cowboy
President, Theodore Roosevelt, and the growing popularity of artists
such as Frederick Remington and Charley Russell, who reveled in a
nostalgia for cowboy life, wearing cowboy clothes became akin to a
‘‘wearing of history’’ as twentieth-century Americans tried to hold
onto ideals of individualism, opportunity, and adventure supposedly
tied to the clothes’ frontier heritage.
Of primary importance in the construction of cowboy fashion
are the highly stylized cowboy boots. A mass-produced and mail-
order footwear near the turn of the century, these boots protected
against rough vegetation with their durable cowhide uppers and
provided ease of movement in and out of stirrups with their flat soles
and high wooden heels. As cowboys became heroes through the
massive popularity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century and later through Hollywood
films, cowboy clothing came into vogue in popular culture. Boots in
particular started to assume a sense of personalized fashion as
specialized bootmakers cropped up in the West, especially in Texas.
These bootmakers produced boots from hides as far-ranging as
ostrich, elephant, eel, or stingray. The fancy stitching, colored leather,
and occasional inlaid precious stone lent these custom boots an air of
fashionable individuality. Custom cowboy boots, among those wealthy
enough to afford them, became a distinctive mark of an individual’s
flair combined with a sense of Western spirit.
But cowboy boots were only a single part of Western fashion
popular throughout most of the twentieth century. Necessary fashion
accouterments included denim jeans, a Western shirt (usually with
designs on the shoulders), large belt buckles, and a broad-brimmed
cowboy hat. This fashion remained essentially the same, barring
various preferences for shirt designs and boot styles, throughout the
twentieth century. Early Western film stars like William S. Hart and
Tom Mix popularized the cowboy look, perpetuating the myth of the
cowboy hero (always clad in a white hat) over the image of the ranch
hand laborer. From the 1930s to the mid-1950s, the cowboy look
found immense popularity among children. This trend coincided with
the popularity of cowboy movie stars and singers Gene Autry and Roy
Rogers who, according to Lonn Taylor and Ingrid Maar in The
American Cowboy, acted as surrogate fathers for children whose
fathers were away fighting in World War II. As television Westerns
became more popular in America in the 1950s, the image of a noble
and righteous cowboy fighting for justice and ideological harmony on
the American frontier found a resurgence once again as America
turned its attention to the Cold War.
Along with the popularity of the cowboy look from 1950s
television, country music’s presence in popular culture became
notable; though most country music from this era sprang from the
South, the fashion of the time was essentially Western and demanded
cowboy boots and hats. But with the popularity of rock ’n’ roll during
the late 1950s and 1960s, cowboy fashion faded from the mainstream
of popular culture. By the early 1970s, however, the boots, hats, tight
jeans, and plaid work shirts of cowboy fashion started to appear in
more urban settings. Growing from the seemingly timeless myth of
COWBOY LOOKENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
623
John Travolta and Madolyn Smith in a scene from the film Urban Cowboy that illustrates the cowboy look.
the cowboy loner—epitomized in 1902 by Owen Wister’s The
Virginian—, the cowboy look now hit city streets less as a costume
and more as a fashion statement. This look culminated with the 1980
release of Urban Cowboy, starring John Travolta as an unlikely
cowboy figure who finds romance and country dancing in late 1970s
Texas honky tonks.
The cowboy look also benefitted from the resurgence in the
popularity of country music music between the mid-1980s and the
mid-1990s. Without any major changes in the foundations, the
cowboy look became the Western look, incorporating into the basic
clothes some Hollywood glitz and rhinestones, Southwestern Hispan-
ic and Native American styles such as silver and turquoise, and a new
kind of homegrown, rural sensibility. The jeans became tighter, the
shirts louder, and hats took on the personalized importance of boots.
As country music became more popular, huge Western clothing
super-stores opened throughout America dedicated solely to supply-
ing the fashion needs of country music’s (and country dancing’s)
new devotees.
The icon of Western fashion could no longer be found in movies.
Instead, country music stars such as George Strait or Reba McEntire
presented the measure for the new cowboy look. The new cowboy
look did not focus on the Western hero, the knight in the white hat so
popular in the early part of the century, but rather was aimed at the
American worker who gets duded-up to play on the weekend. This
new cowboy look was used to sell fishing equipment and especially
pick-up trucks to people aspiring toward country or Western life-
styles. Though this country look still appeared as a ‘‘wearing of
history,’’ its devotees found in this new fashion a distillation of the
American work ethic (that allowed for outlets on Friday and Saturday
nights) that had supposedly grown from a country ranching and
farming lifestyle. The cowboy look no longer represented the hero,
but the American rural laborer, albeit in an overly sanitized fashion.
Like the popular country music that spurred this fashion trend, the
cowboy look now affected rural authenticity over urban pretensions,
valued family and the honor of wage labor, and, like its earlier
permutations, elevated American history and culture over any
other traditions.
—Dan Moos
F
URTHER READING:
Beard, Tyler. The Cowboy Boot Book. Layton, Utah, Gibbs Smith, 1992.
Savage, William W., Jr., The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American
History and Culture. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.
Taylor, Lonn, and Ingrid Maar. The American Cowboy. New York,
Harper and Row, 1983.
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Cox, Ida (1896-1967)
Billed as the ‘‘Uncrowned Queen of the Blues,’’ Ida Cox (born
Ida Prather) never achieved the fame of her contemporaries Bessie
Smith and Gertrude ‘‘Ma’’ Rainey. Though she spent most of the
1920s and 1930s touring the United States with various minstrel
troupes, including her own ‘‘Raisin’ Cain Revue,’’ she also found
time to record seventy-eight sides for Paramount Records between
1923 and 1929. Among these was her best known song, ‘‘Wild
Women Don’t Have the Blues,’’ which was identified by Angela
Y. Davis as ‘‘the most famous portrait of the nonconforming,
independent woman.’’
Noted record producer John Hammond revitalized Cox’s career
by highlighting her in the legendary ‘‘Spirituals to Swing’’ concert at
Carnegie Hall in 1939. Cox continued her recording career until she
suffered a stroke in 1944. Six years after a 1961 comeback attempt
that produced the album Blues for Rampart Street, Ida Cox died
of cancer.
—Marc R. Sykes
F
URTHER READING:
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude
‘‘Ma’’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York,
Pantheon, 1998.
Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s.
New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Cranston, Lamont
See Shadow, The
Crawford, Cindy (1966—)
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, Cindy
Crawford was America’s most celebrated fashion model and one of
the most famous in the world, embodying the rise of the ‘‘super
model’’ as a late twentieth century cultural phenomenon. Although
there had been star models in previous decades—Twiggy in the
1960s, for example, or Lauren Hutton and Cheryl Tiegs in the
1970s—they did not sustain prolonged mainstream recognition. Cin-
dy Crawford and her contemporaries (Kate Moss and Naomi Camp-
bell among them) no longer merely posed as nameless faces on
magazine covers, calendars, and fashion runways but, rather, became
celebrities whose fame rivaled that of movie stars and rock musicians.
Cindy Crawford stood at the forefront of this insurgence.
Although she found fame through her physical appearance, the
brown-haired, brown-eyed Crawford first distinguished herself through
her intellectual attributes. A native of DeKalb, Illinois, who was born
Cynthia Ann Crawford on February 20, 1966, she was a fine student
and class valedictorian at her high school graduation. She enrolled in
Chicago’s Northwestern University to take a degree in chemical
engineering, but her academic career proved short-lived when, during
her freshman year, she left college to pursue a modeling career. Her
entrance into the tough, competitive world of high fashion was eased
by her winning the ‘‘Look of the Year’’ contest held by the Elite
Cindy Crawford
Modeling Agency in 1982. Within months the statuesque (five-foot-
nine-and-a-half inches), 130-lb model was featured on the cover
of Vogue.
The widespread appeal of Cindy Crawford lay in looks that
appealed to both men and women. Her superb body, with its classic
34B-24-35 measurements, attracted men, while her all-American
looks and trademark facial mole stopped her short of seeming an
unattainable ideal of perfect beauty, and thus she was not threatening
to women. Furthermore, her athletic physique was in distinct contrast
to many of the overly thin and waif-like models, such as Kate Moss,
who were prevalent during the 1990s.
Cindy Crawford stepped off the remote pedestal of a celebrity
mannequin or a glamorous cover girl when she began to assert her
personality before the public. She gave interviews in which she
discussed her middle-class childhood, her parents’ divorce, and the
trauma of her brother’s death from leukemia. These confessions
humanized her image and made her approachable, and she went on to
host MTV’s House of Style, a talk show that stressed fashion and
allowed her to conduct interviews that connected with a younger
market. The Cindy Crawford phenomenon continued with her in-
volvement in fitness videos, TV specials, commercial endorsements,
and film (Fair Game, 1995, was dismissed both by audiences and
critics, but did little to diminish her popularity.) Meanwhile, her
already high profile increased with her brief 1991 marriage to actor
Richard Gere. The couple was hounded by rumors of homosexuality,
fuelled after Crawford appeared on a controversial Vanity Fair cover
with the openly lesbian singer k.d. lang. She later wed entrepreneur
Rande Gerber.
CRAWFORDENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
625
After the arrival of Cindy Crawford, it was not uncommon to see
models promoting a vast array of products beyond fashion and
cosmetics. Crawford herself signed a multi-million dollar deal to
promote Pepsi, as well as her more conventional role with Revlon.
Her status was so high that ABC invited her to host a special on teen
sex issues with the provocative title of Sex with Cindy Crawford. The
opening of the Fashion Café theme restaurant in the mid-1990s
marked the height of the super model sensation sparked by Crawford.
The café’s association with Crawford and other high profile models
revealed the extent to which the ‘‘super model’’ had become a major
figure in American culture. By the end of the twentieth century, Cindy
Crawford was still the best known of these celebrities due to the
combination of her wholesomely erotic image and her professional
diversification through the many available media outlets.
—Charles Coletta
F
URTHER READING:
‘‘Cindy.com.’’ http://www.cindy.com. April 1999.
Crawford, Cindy. Cindy Crawford’s Basic Face. New York, Broad-
way Books, 1996.
Italia, Bob. Cindy Crawford. Edina, Minnesota, Abdo and Daugh-
ters, 1992.
Crawford, Joan (1904?-1977)
From her 1930s heyday as a leading MGM box-office draw, to
her 1962 performance in the horror classic and cult favorite Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?, Joan Crawford incarnated, in the words of
Henry Fonda, ‘‘a star in every sense of the word.’’ The MGM style of
star packaging emphasized glamour, and Crawford achieved her
luminous appearance through an extensive wardrobe and fastidious
presentations of her gleaming, trademark lips, arched eyebrows,
sculpted cheek and jaw bones, and perfectly coiffured hair. Crawford
herself famously said, ‘‘I never go out unless I look like Joan
Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go
next door.’’
Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23,
1904, Crawford embarked on a dancing career when only a teenager.
She worked cabarets and travelling musical shows until her discovery
in the Broadway revue The Passing Show of 1924. It would not be
long before an MGM executive noted her exuberant energy and
athletic skill. Exported to Hollywood on a $75.00/week contract,
Lucille changed her name as part of a movie magazine promotion that
urged fans to ‘‘Name Her and Win $1,000.’’ This early link between
her professional life and fan magazines presaged a union that would
repeatedly shape her long movie star tenure. Throughout five dec-
ades, she appeared in magazine advertisements endorsing cosmetics,
food products, and cigarettes. She dutifully answered fan letters and
once fired a publicity manager who turned away admirers at her
dressing room door. Her first marriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.,
turned into a publicity spectacle. It was a reported feud between
Crawford and co-star Bette Davis that was used to generate interest in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? A conflation of Crawford’s roles
and fan magazine publicity with her personal life formed both the
public view of her and her own sense of identity.
Joan Crawford
Crawford garnered her first film role in 1925 and made over 20
silent pictures before 1929, the year of her first hit Untamed. Her early
career coincided with Hollywood’s investment in the production and
cultivation of stars as bankable assets. One of the industry’s earliest
successes, Crawford mutated her star persona over the decades to
retain currency. Her first image was as a ‘‘flapper,’’ a 1920s free-
spirited woman who danced all night in speakeasies and jazz clubs. In
the 1928 movie Our Dancing Daughters, Crawford’s quintessential
flapper whips off her party dress and dances the Charleston in her slip.
Her date asks, ‘‘You want to take all of life, don’t you?’’ Crawford’s
character replies, ‘‘Yes—all! I want to hold out my hands and catch at
it.’’ Crawford’s own dance-till-dawn escapades frequently provided
fodder for the gossip columns.
In the wake of the Depression Crawford transformed into a
1930s ‘‘shopgirl’’—a willful, hard-working woman determined to
overcome adversity, usually on the arm of a wealthy, handsome man
played by the likes of Clark Gable or second husband, Franchot Tone.
With this new character type, song-and-dance movies gave way to
melodramatic fare, in which she uttered lines like this one from the
1930s movie Paid: ‘‘You’re going to pay for everything I’m losing in
life.’’ To encourage fan identification with Crawford’s ‘‘shopgirl’’
image, MGM promoted Crawford’s own hard-luck background,
highlighting her travails as a clerk at a department store in Kansas
City, Missouri. In 1930, she was voted most popular at the box office.
Inherent to this genre was a literal rags-to-riches metamorphosis.
Possessed, produced in 1931, begins with Crawford working a
factory floor in worn clothing and charts her rise in status through
increasingly extravagant costume changes. This particular formula
CRAY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
626
teamed her with haute couture designer Adrian, and together they
sparked fashion trends. In Paid, Crawford dons a huge, black fur-
collared coat that, by virtue of her appearance in it, turned into a best-
selling item in clothing stores along fifth Avenue in New York. The
most famous instance occurred in 1932 with the Letty Lynton dress,
reportedly the most frequently copied film-gown in American mov-
ies. Featuring enormous, ruffled sleeves and layers of white organdy,
the Letty Lynton dress-craze confirmed Hollywood’s place as show-
case for fashion. The Letty Lynton phenomenon also marked the
debut of Crawford’s clothes-horse image. The importance of how
Crawford looked in a movie soon eclipsed the significance of how
she acted.
Crawford’s popularity diminished in the 1940s as younger
actresses claimed the best MGM parts. She responded by retooling
herself into a matriarchal, self-sacrificing businesswoman, her strength
symbolized by shoulder pads and dramatically tailored suits. To
brook this transition, Crawford departed glamour-factory MGM in
1943 and signed with the crime picture studio, Warner Brothers. The
role of the driven self-made restaurateur in the 1945 film noir,
Mildred Pierce, earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. At
the end of this period, she began portraying desperate, emotionally
disturbed women like the lover-turned-stalker Possessed (1947), and
the neat-freak homemaker whose obsession turns to madness in the
title role of Harriet Craig (1950). Movie culture in the 1950s
expressed anxiety over dominant, self-sufficient female roles, popu-
lar in World War II and immediate post-War America, by straight-
jacketing Crawford—literally—in Straight Jacket, produced by ‘‘B’’
horror film king William Castle in 1964. The 1960s limited her to
cheap horror films—I Saw What You Did, Beserk, Trog—and traded
on her now severe, lined face and its striking contrast with her trim,
dancer’s figure. Crawford’s late career also ushered in the Hollywood
use of product placement. As an official representative of Pepsi-
Cola—her fourth and last husband, Howard Steele, was a Pepsi
executive—Crawford featured displays of Pepsi-Cola signs and mer-
chandise in several of her last films. For example, while probing a
series of ghoulish murders at a circus owned by Crawford in a scene
from Beserk (1968), investigators pause under a ‘‘Come Alive! With
Pepsi’’ banner.
In Mommie Dearest, a movie based on an expose written by
Crawford’s adopted daughter and featuring Faye Dunaway, Crawford
is depicted as a bizarrely cruel disciplinarian. The movie not only
made a horrific joke of Crawford, but it also maligned Dunaway’s
acting ability. Portions of the movie became staple skits on late-night
television shows like the satiric Saturday Night Live. The 1980s and
1990s, however, turned her into a favorite icon of gays and lesbians
with Internet websites celebrating her masculine performances in, for
example, Johnny Guitar (1954). In this movie she plays a gun-belted,
top-booted saloon keep whose show-down is against another man-
nish-looking woman.
—Elizabeth Haas
F
URTHER READING:
Considine, Shaun. Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud. New York, E.P.
Dutton, 1989.
Gledhill, Christine, editor. Stardom: Industry of Desire. New York,
Routledge, 1991.
Thomas, Bob. Joan Crawford: A Biography. New York, Simon &
Schuster, 1978.
Walker, Alexander. Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Star. London,
Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd., 1983.
Cray, Robert (1953—)
Robert Cray’s fusion of blues, R & B, jazz, pop, and soul music
earned him critical acclaim and widespread recognition as a critical
figure in the ‘‘blues boom’’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, his
original approach to the genre brought an entirely new audience to
what had been considered a dying art form. Though blues purists
dismissed him as a ‘‘tin-eared yuppie blues wannabe,’’ Cray nonethe-
less enjoyed success unmatched by any other blues artist.
Born into an army family in 1953, Cray had the opportunity to
live in many different regions of the United States before his family
settled in Tacoma, Washington, when Cray was fifteen years old.
Already a devotee of soul and rock music, Cray became interested in
blues after legendary Texas guitarist Albert Collins played at his high
school graduation dance. Cray formed his first band in 1974, and this
group eventually became Collins’s backing band, touring the country
with him before striking out on its own.
After a series of moves—to Portland, Seattle, and finally to San
Francisco—the Robert Cray Band signed a record deal with Tomato
Records and released its first album, Who’s Been Talking? (later re-
released as Too Many Cooks), in 1980. Though the album featured
convincing performances of classic blues songs, it generated little
excitement. Cray and his band subsequently toured with Chicago
Robert Cray
CREATIONISMENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
627
legend Muddy Waters and were featured on the Kings of the Boogie
world tour with John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon.
In 1983, Cray tried a different approach with the funky, original
Bad Influence, released on the HighTone label. His follow-up effort,
False Accusations, proved to be the breakthrough. The album made
Newsweek’s list of top ten LPs and shot up to number one on the
Billboard pop music charts. That same year, Alligator Records
released the Grammy Award-winning Showdown!, which featured
Cray collaborating with now-deceased blues guitarists Collins and
Johnny Copeland.
Success earned Cray the support of a major label, Mercury, and
his debut effort for the company is widely believed to be the best work
of his career. Released in 1986, Strong Persuader was certified
platinum (sales of more than one million copies) and put Cray’s
picture on the cover of Rolling Stone. The success of the album also
ensured more high-profile collaborations, such as an appearance in
the concert and film tribute to Chuck Berry, ‘‘Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’
Roll!’’ produced by Keith Richards. After covering Cray’s ‘‘Bad
Influence’’ on his August album, Eric Clapton invited Cray to appear
on his Journeyman and 24 Nights albums. Cray also appeared in the
Tina Turner video ‘‘Break Every Rule,’’ becoming a familiar face on
the MTV network.
Cray continued to experiment with soul music on 1990’s Mid-
night Stroll, which featured the legendary Memphis Horns, and
showed a jazzier side on I Was Warned, released two years later.
Albert Collins joined Cray and his band on the 1993 album Shame + a
Sin, the most traditional of Cray’s later works. Cray continued to be in
demand as a guest performer, appearing on three John Lee Hooker
albums including the Grammy-winning The Healer, as well as B. B.
King’s Blues Summit. Cray’s 1997 release Sweet Potato Pie featured
a return to the Memphis soul that had characterized his sound from the
early 1980s. Despite being panned by the ‘‘bluenatics,’’ as Cray
labelled the blues purists, the album achieved significant sales,
confirming Cray’s continuing commercial viability.
—Marc R. Sykes
F
URTHER READING:
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. New York, Hyperion, 1995.
Russell, Tony, ed. The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray.
New York, Schirmer, 1997.
Creationism
Creationism is a Christian doctrine holding that the world and
the living things in it—human beings in particular—were created by
God. There have been a variety of creationist viewpoints, and some of
these viewpoints are in conflict with mainstream scientific theories,
especially the theory of evolution.
After Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859),
which not only defended the pre-existing theory of evolution but also
maintained that evolution took place through natural selection, many
fundamentalist Christians reacted with horror. Then as now, anti-
evolutionists maintained that evolution was contrary to the Bible, that
it was atheistic pseudo-science, and that, by proposing that man
descended from lower animals, it denied man’s spiritual nature.
Evolutionists denounced creationists for allegedly misinterpreting
both the Bible and the scientific evidence.
In the 1920s, William Jennings Bryan, a former Nebraska
Senator, Presidential candidate, and U.S. Secretary of State, joined
the movement to prevent the teaching of evolution. In response to
lobbyists like Bryan, the state of Tennessee passed a law making it a
crime for a public-school teacher or state college professor to teach
the allegedly un-Scriptural doctrine that man evolved from a lower
order of animals. However, under the Butler Act (and similar laws in
other states), it remained permissible to teach the theory of evolution
as applied to species other than humans.
A test case of the Tennessee law was arranged in Dayton,
Tennessee, in 1925. A teacher named John Thomas Scopes was
charged with violating the law. Bryan was brought in to help the
prosecution, and an all-star legal defense team, including famed
attorney Clarence Darrow, was brought in to defend the young
teacher. Scopes was convicted after a highly-publicized trial, but his
conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Tennessee Su-
preme Court. A play based on the Scopes Monkey trial, Inherit the
Wind, was turned into a movie in 1960. Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly,
and Frederic March were among the cast of this popular and anti-
creationist rendering of the trial. The movie altered some of the
historical details, but the movie version of the trial was probably
better-known than the actual trial.
Arkansas had also passed a ‘‘monkey law’’ similar to Tennes-
see’s Butler Act. In 1968, the United States Supreme Court ruled that
the Arkansas law was designed to promote religious doctrine, and that
therefore it was an unconstitutional establishment of religion which
violated the First Amendment. The Epperson decision had no effect
on the Tennessee Butler law, since that law had been repealed in 1967.
Since the Scopes trial, the views of some creationists have been
getting closer to secular scientific position. Scientists who were
evangelical Christians formed an organization called the American
Scientific Affiliation (ASA) during World War II. ASA members
pledged support for Biblical inerrancy and declared that the Christian
scriptures were in harmony with the evidence of nature. Within this
framework, however, the ASA began to lean toward the ‘‘progressive
creation’’ viewpoint—the idea that God’s creation of life was accom-
plished over several geological epochs, that the six ‘‘days’’ of
creation mentioned in Genesis were epochs rather than literal days,
and that much or all of mainstream science’s interpretation of the
origins of life could be reconciled with the Bible. These ‘‘progressive
creation’’ tendencies were articulated in Evolution and Christian
Thought Today, published in 1959. Some of the contributors to this
volume seemed to be flirting with evolution, with two such scientists
indicating that Christian doctrine could be reconciled with something
resembling evolution.
Other creationists moved in another direction entirely—towards
‘‘flood geology.’’ This is the idea that God had created the world in
six 24-hour days, that all species, including man, had been specially
created, and that the fossil record was a result, not of evolution over
time but of a single catastrophic flood in the days of Noah. George
McCready Price, a Canadian-born creationist, had outlined these
ideas in a 1923 book called The New Geology. At the time, Price’s
ideas had not been widely accepted by creationists outside his own
Seventh Day Adventist denomination, but in 1961 Price’s ideas got a
boost. Teacher John C. Whitcomb, Jr. and engineer Henry M. Morris
issued The Genesis Flood, which, like The New Geology, tried to
reconcile the geological evidence with a strong creationist viewpoint.
In 1963, the Creation Research Society (CRS) was formed. The
founders were creationist scientists (many of them from the funda-
mentalist Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), and voting membership
CREDIT CARDS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
628
was limited to scientists. The CRS was committed to Biblical inerrancy
and a creationist interpretation of the Bible, an interpretation which in
practice coincided with the doctrine of flood geology.
The CRS and others began lobbying for the inclusion of creationist
ideas in school curricula. This was a delicate task, on account of the
Epperson decision of the Supreme Court, which prohibited the
introduction of religious doctrines into the curriculum of the public
schools. Creationists campaign all over the country, trying to get
creationism (now often dubbed ‘‘creation science’’) into textbooks on
an equal basis with evolution. Some states allowed the use of
creationist texts like Henry M. Morris’ Scientific Creationism. The
Texas Board of Education required that textbooks used by the state
must emphasize that evolution was merely a theory, and that other
explanations of the origins of life existed. On the other hand,
California—which together with Texas exerted a great influence over
educational publishers due to its mass purchasing of textbooks—
rejected attempts to include creationism in school texts.
Laws were passed in Arkansas and Louisiana requiring that
creation science get discussed whenever evolution was discussed.
However, the federal courts struck down these laws. The U.S.
Supreme Court struck down the Louisiana law in 1987, on the
grounds that creation science was a religious doctrine that could not
constitutionally be taught in public schools.
In Tennessee, home of the Scopes trial, the legislature passed a
law in 1973 which required that various ideas of life’s origin—
including creationism—be included in textbooks. A federal cir-
cuit court struck down this law. An 1996 bill in the Tennessee
legislature, authorizing school authorities to fire any teacher who
taught evolution as fact rather than as theory, was also unsuccessful.
But in Tennessee and other states, the campaign for teaching
creationism continues.
—Eric Longley
F
URTHER READING:
de Camp, L. Sprague. The Great Monkey Trial. Garden City, New
York, Doubleday, 1968.
Edwards v. Aguilland, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).
Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968).
Harrold, Francis B., and Raymond A. Eve, editors. Cult Archeology &
Creationism. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1995.
Irons, Peter. The Courage of Their Convictions. New York, Free
Press, 1988.
Johnson, Robert C. ‘‘70 Years After Scopes, Evolution Hot Topic
Again.’’ Education Week. March 13, 1996.
———. ‘‘Tenn. Senate to Get New Chance to Vote on Evolution
Measure.’’ Education Week. March 27, 1996.
Kramer, Stanley, producer and director. Inherit the Wind, motion
picture (original, 1960). Culver City, California, MGM/UA Home
Video, 1991.
Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind. New York,
Random House, 1955.
Mitchell, Colin. The Case for Creationism. Grantham, United King-
dom, Autumn House, 1995.
Numbers, Ronald L. The Creationists. New York, Borzoi, 1992.
Sommerfeld, Meg. ‘‘Lawmakers Put Theory of Evolution on Trial.’’
Education Week. June 5, 1996.
Webb, George E. The Evolution Controversy in America. Lexington,
University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
Credit Cards
The small molded piece of polyvinyl chloride known as the
credit card has transformed the American and the world economy and
promises to be at the heart of the future economic system of the world.
Social scientists have long recognized that the things people buy
profoundly affect the way they live. Microwave ovens, refrigerators,
air conditioners, televisions, computers, the birth control pill, antibi-
otics—all have affected peoples’ lives in profound ways. The credit
card has changed peoples’ lives as well, for it allows unprecedented
access to a world of goods. The emergence of credit cards as a
dominant mode of economic transaction has changed the way people
live, the way they do things, the way they think, their sense of well
being, and their values. When credit cards entered American life,
ordinary people could only dream of an affluent life style. Credit
cards changed all that.
Credit cards were born in the embarrassment of Francis X.
McNamara in 1950. Entertaining clients in a New York City restau-
rant, Mr. McNamara reached for his wallet only to find he had not
brought money. Though his wife drove into town with the money,
McNamara went home vowing never to experience such disgrace
again. To guarantee it, he created the Diners Club Card, a simple
plastic card that would serve in place of cash at any establishment that
agreed to accept it. It was a revolutionary concept.
Of course, credit had long been extended to American consum-
ers. Neighborhood merchants offered credit to neighborhood custom-
ers long before McNamara’s embarrassing moment. In the 1930s oil
companies promoted ‘‘courtesy cards’’ to induce travelers to buy gas
at their stations across the country; department stores extended
revolving credit to their prime customers. McNamara’s innovation
was to create a multipurpose (shopping, travel, and entertainment)
and multi-location card that was issued by a third party independent of
the merchant. He took to the road and signed up merchants across the
country to save others from his fate.
McNamara’s success led to a host of imitators. Alfred
Bloomingdale of Bloomingdale’s department store fame introduced
Dine and Sign in California. Duncan Hines created the Signet Club.
Gourmet and Esquire magazines began credit card programs for their
readers. But all of McNamara’s early imitators failed. Bankers,
however, saw an opportunity. Savvy as they are about giving out
money for profit, bankers were more successful in offering their own
versions of national cards. Success came to Bank of America and
Master Charge, who came to dominate the credit card business in the
1960s. In the late 1970s Bank Americard became VISA and Master
Charge became MasterCard. In 1958, American Express introduced
its card. Their success the first year was so great—more than 500,000
people signed up—that American Express turned to computer giant
IBM for help. Advanced technology was the only way for companies
to manage the vast numbers of merchants and consumers who linked
themselves via their credit cards, and in the process created a
mountain of debt. Technology made managing the credit card
business profitable.
To make their system work, credit card companies needed to get
as many merchants to accept their cards and as many consumers to use
them as they possibly could. They were aided by the sustained