Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D
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DIFF’RENT STROKESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
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calling from the years in Weimar, and embarked on a new, successful
career as an international cabaret star. Although her singing voice was
criticized, Dietrich’s delivery was a full-blown stage cabaret show.
Her repertoire embraced sexy songs, often originally written for male
singers, allowing her worldly charm and eroticism full range. Num-
bers recorded by Dietrich include ‘‘One for My Baby,’’ ‘‘One More
for the Road,’’ and ‘‘Makin’ Whoopee.’’ The older image of Dietrich
as femme fatale was soon supplemented by a newer strand of anti-war
songs including ‘‘Sag mir wo die Blumen sind’’ (Where Have All the
Flowers Gone), as well as other Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan songs.
During her concert in Israel she broke the taboo against the German
language by singing her cry against wars in her mother tongue. She
also went back to Germany, despite the fact that the voices calling her
a traitor had not stopped. The concert was a success.
Dietrich paid a price for her decades of working and the self-
fashioned myths around her. More and more scotch accompanied her
touring. Finally, she ended her stage career when she broke a leg on
stage in 1975. With many of her old friends dead, including her
husband from her Weimar years, Dietrich led a lonely existence
in Paris.
For decades, she had been a focal point for the famous. Her
rumored lovers included Ernest Hemingway, Greta Garbo, and Jean
Gabin. At the end of her career, she claimed that it was not vanity that
made her camera-shy, but her need to sustain and nurture the myth of
what she had become—an icon of glamour, ambivalent sexuality,
erotic sophistication, and unknowable mystery. Her skill was well
rewarded. Later generations of artists have plundered and recycled
the rich image of Dietrich. Her most well-known ‘‘interpreter’’ has
become Madonna—another star of ambivalence and mystery.
In her book ABC, Dietrich writes: ‘‘Dietrich—In the German
language the name for a key that opens all locks. Not a magic key. A
very real object, necessitating great skill in the making.’’ Even her
death did not erase this fascinating object.
—Petra Kuppers
F
URTHER READING:
Bach, Steven. Marlene Dietrich—Life and Legend. New York,
William Morrow, 1992.
Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Spoto, Donald. Marlene Dietrich. New York, Doubleday, 1992.
Diff’rent Strokes
For eight seasons and 189 episodes, Americans tuned in to
Diff’rent Strokes, a sitcom chronicling the family life of a wealthy
white industrialist who adopts two African American children. The
tepid comedy’s lengthy television run made many cultural observers
wonder if its creators had made a deal with the devil. Certainly the
show’s trinity of child stars seems to have spent the ensuing years in
show business purgatory.
Developed by Norman Lear, the brains behind All in the Family,
Diff’rent Strokes began as a well-meaning, if patronizing, look at
America’s racial and economic divides. Conrad Bain, a veteran of
Lear’s Maude, was cast as Philip Drummond, the white Daddy
Warbucks to black ragamuffins Arnold and Willis Jackson, played by
(From left) Gary Coleman, Dody Goodman, and Conrad Bain in a scene
from Diff’rent Strokes.
Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges. Stringy Dana Plato rounded out the
main cast as Drummond’s natural daughter, Kimberly. A succession
of brassy housekeepers, vanguarded by Charlotte Rae, commented
mordantly on the goings-on.
Conceived as an ensemble, Diff’rent Strokes quickly became a
star vehicle for the adorable Coleman, a natural comedic talent
relegated to Lilliputian stature by a congenital kidney condition.
‘‘What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?,’’ Coleman’s Arnold would bellow
repeatedly at his older, worldlier sibling. Eventually this interrogative
came to be something of a catch phrase, flung promiscuously by
Coleman at any of the show’s characters and accompanied by a
mugging double take. As the years went by, however, Coleman’s
stunted growth began to take on an eerie, side show quality. Only at
the very end of the eight-year run was his character allowed to grow
up, ‘‘dramatically speaking,’’ date girls, and behave like something
other than a mischievous eight-year-old. Coleman was 17 at the time.
Medical oddities aside, Diff’rent Strokes was little more than
light entertainment for the home-on-Saturday-night crowd. It did,
however, occasionally tackle meaningful subject matter. In one
memorable episode, Arnold converted to Judaism after attending a
friend’s bar mitzvah. Likening the solemn ceremony to a ‘‘Jewish
Academy Awards,’’ and pleased with his complimentary ‘‘yamaha,’’
the diminutive adoptee was dissuaded from his change of faith only
after Drummond engineered a visit from Milton Berle as a wisecrack-
ing rabbi. Terrified by the prospect of Hebrew School and Jewish
dietary obligations, the impressionable tyke opted to forego his
opportunity to celebrate ‘‘Harmonica.’’
DILBERT ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
710
Not all series installments, however, addressed weighty issues
with such rampant insensitivity. Rotund WKRP fixture Gordon Jump
played a child molester (all too believably) in one topical episode,
while First Lady Nancy Reagan herself dropped by for a memorable
1983 show about drug abuse. The jaded Coleman was non-plussed by
the visit from the power-suited astrology enthusiast, who stiffly
hugged a group of child actors for the cameras and accepted a pair of
Diff’rent Strokes tee-shirts from Conrad Bain before departing in a
four-car motorcade. ‘‘It was just another show,’’ Coleman shrugged
after Reagan’s visit. ‘‘We didn’t talk about much. She came in, did
her job, and left.’’
When the program’s three young stars made their exits follow-
ing Diff’rent Strokes’ 1986 cancellation by ABC, they had no way of
knowing that a living tabloid hell awaited them. Dana Plato posed
nude for Playboy in 1989 to pay off her mounting personal debt, then
robbed a Las Vegas video store at gunpoint in 1991 after being turned
down for a job cleaning toilets. Her career reached a nadir in 1997
with an appearance in a porno film entitled Different Strokes: The
Story of Jack and Jill . . . and Jill. (Plato died of an accidental drug
overdose in 1999.) Todd Bridges was arrested for cocaine possession
and later for shooting an accused drug dealer in a crack house. (He
was subsequently acquitted of the latter crime.) He later blamed his
problems on a cocaine habit dating back to 1982.
Even Gary Coleman, the little pixie with the atrophied kidney,
could not escape controversy. In 1989 he sued his real-life adoptive
parents and his former business manager, claiming they had stolen
more than $1 million from him. Tabloid rumors began to circulate
reporting that Coleman had legally changed his name to Andy Shane
and asked a female housemate if he could suck her toes. In 1998, the
tubby actor, now working as a mall security guard, was himself sued
by a Los Angeles bus driver who alleged that he had assaulted her
after she asked him for an autograph.
‘‘The world don’t move to the beat of just one drum,’’ went the
theme to Diff’rent Strokes, the television show. ‘‘What might be right
for you, may not be right for some.’’ The program’s troubled stars
seem to have been following a rhythm all their own in their personal
lives as well.
—Robert E. Schnakenberg
F
URTHER READING:
Armstrong, Lois. ‘‘For Gary Coleman, Acting with the First Lady Is
No Big Deal.’’ People Weekly, March 28, 1983.
Sporkin, Elizabeth. ‘‘Diff’rent Strokes, Fallen Stars.’’ People Week-
ly, March 25, 1991.
Dilbert
Dilbert’s subject matter ‘‘strikes a nerve,’’ as Newsweek’s cover
story shouted in August of 1996, because it ‘‘portrays the bedrock
truth of the American workplace, at least in the white-collar caverns
where clerks, engineers, marketers, and salespeople dwell.’’ This
comic strip presents aspects of the corporate culture that veterans of
the cubicle easily identify with: company monitoring of employee
e-mail; management double talk; carpal tunnel syndrome; endless and
pointless meetings; inane team-building exercises; and lower back
pains resulting from excessive hours in front of the computer screen.
Since his initial appearance in the early 1990s as the brain-child of
MBA-trained former Pacific Bell software engineer Scott Adams,
Dilbert, a nerdy engineer and the strip’s main character, has become a
sort of corporate everyman.
The strip centers around an anonymous company where Dilbert
is employed in an unnamed department. With co-workers, he strug-
gles to meet deadlines, withstand management trends, and endure
other indignities. Each of the strip’s main characters is described in
Adams’ 1997 retrospective Seven Years of Highly Defective People,
and was inspired and shaped by bits and pieces of Adams’s own
experience at Pacific Bell. Much of the subject matter is supplemen-
ted by ‘‘war stories’’ taken directly from reader e-mail and visitors to
the ‘‘Dilbert Zone,’’ Adams’ web site. Each character, therefore,
embodies some facet of actual corporate reality, which is probably
why readers familiar with the environment identify with the strip’s
material so readily.
The more significant of Dilbert’s co-workers are Wally, a fellow
engineer and ‘‘thoroughly cynical employee who has no sense of
company loyalty and feels no need to mask his poor performance or
his total lack of respect,’’ and Alice, a no-nonsense go-getter known
for her ‘‘pink suit, her fluffy hair, her coffee obsession, her technical
proficiency, and her take-no-crap attitude.’’ Other characters include
the ‘‘generic guy’’ Ted, whose manic work habits go unnoticed by the
company bigwigs, and Tina, the technical writer who resents the
engineers for their failure to appreciate her talents.
This motley cast struggles to withstand the whimsical machina-
tions and inane directives of Dilbert’s dog, the annoying know-it-all
Dogbert; his cat, the head of the Evil Human Resources, Catbert; the
troglodytes of the Accounting Department; the Teflon-coated PR
types in marketing who have no clue about what engineers do; and
ultimately, the ‘‘Pointy-Haired Boss,’’ whose coif reflects his ulti-
mately demonic stature as a figure of management inanity and
cluelessness. Together, these characters represent the worst face of
corporate culture, and are frequently seen drafting dehumanizing
policies, issuing obscure directives, arbitrarily demonstrating their
authority, and generally making miserable the lives of the employees
who nonetheless ‘‘see through’’ their motives.
The reality of Dilbert’s world isn’t too different from that of his
audience of real-life counterparts who identify with his struggle to
maintain his sanity. In the mid 1990s, Dilbert became a hot topic for
discussion among management strategists and human resource offi-
cers, and a voice of late-capitalist corporate worker cynicism. Man-
agement Consultant Tom Brown notes that Adams’ strip ‘‘take(s)
virtually every HR issue of the past 20 years and catapults it to the top
of many management agendas via trenchant cartoons and scathing
essays in books.... Dilbert is about human rights, human purpose,
and human potential. It’s what the human resources profession is
about, or ought to be, as well.’’ Indeed, recent years have seen
Adams’ comic lampoons of corporate America achieve their status
as mandatory reading for those in the management and human
resource professions.
Along with his stature as an embodiment of worker frustration,
Dilbert has also become a prosperous commodity as a merchandising
icon. In the late 1990s, the nerdy engineer’s visage could be found on
everything from ties to mouse pads to coffee mugs, and his website
was both the bane and the boon to other corporations, some of whom
advertised on it while others blocked employee access to it. An
Economist article from April 1997 observed that ‘‘There are Dilbert
Dolls, Dilbert calendars and ties, a $20m contract for another five
Dilbert books, plus plans for Dilbert-based television programmes
and computer software. There is even talk of a Dilbertland theme
DILLARDENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
711
park, complete with boss-shooting galleries. Mr. Adams only real
worry is over-exposure—and, as he happily points out, ‘you can’t get
to over-exposure without going through filthy rich first.’’’ The
prediction of a television show came true in 1999, when the pilot for
Dilbert was aired on the Fox network.
Given its run of success, the strip has inevitably prompted
criticism from those who see it as yet another management tool. Its
critics argue that it nothing less than a statement that champions the
virtues of efficacy, good sense, and common sense by assailing
foolish bureaucracy, reductive company policy, and faddish but
ineffective management schemes. In his 1997 critique The Trouble
with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh, author
Norman Solomon contends that with Dilbert, ‘‘corporate America is
not selling us the rope to hang it with; corporate America is selling us
the illusions to exculpate it with. To mistake pop-culture naughtiness
for opposition to the corporate system is an exercise in projection—
and delusion.’’ Others have also found it easy to point to the strip’s
popularity and overexposure as signs that it represents not a paean to
disenfranchised workers, but just another capitalist success story.
Within its series of strategies for avoiding work while still
looking busy, Dilbert’s ultimate message is that the greater the
technological and organizational sophistication in the workplace, the
more opportunities exist to create the false image of actual productivi-
ty, as well as the documentation to validate it as production. Whether
it be regarded as a subversive attack on the corporation or merely as a
‘‘steam valve’’ to give release to the corporate worker’s frustrations,
Dilbert continues to provide an important voice in the dialogue
between the corporation and those at the lower levels who make it run.
—Warren Tormey
F
URTHER READING:
Adams, Scott. The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of
Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Af-
flictions. New York, HarperBusiness, 1996.
———. Seven Years of Highly Defective People: Scott Adams’
Guided Tour of the Evolution of Dilbert. Kansas City, Missouri,
Andrews McMeel, 1997.
‘‘The Anti-Management Guru: Scott Adams Has Made a Business of
Bashing Business. Why Does the Hand He Bites Love to Feed
Him?’’ The Economist. April 5, 1997, 64.
Brown, Tom. ‘‘What Does Dilbert Mean to HR?’’ HRFocus. Febru-
ary, 1997, 12-13.
‘‘The Dilbert Zone.’’ http:\www.dilbertzone.comcomicsdilbert.
June 1999.
Levy, Steven. ‘‘Working in Dilbert’s World.’’ Newsweek. August 12,
1996, 52-57.
Solomon, Norman. The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Cul-
ture Gets the Last Laugh. Monroe, Maine, Common Courage
Press, 1997.
Dillard, Annie (1945—)
One of the best-known writers of the twentieth century and
winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, Annie
Dillard developed a following unique among writers. Her readers
embrace her mixture of literary, philosophical, theological, and
scientific themes regardless of the genre in which they appear, from
the essays of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a
Stone to Talk, to the poetry of Tickets for a Prayer Wheel and
Mornings Like This, and from the autobiographical prose of Encoun-
ters with Chinese Writers, An American Childhood, and The Writing
Life to the literary criticism of Living by Fiction and the fiction of The
Living. In part, Dillard achieved her popularity because of her
ongoing interest in spiritual experience, interdisciplinary knowledge,
and aesthetic creation, all topics that mirror the concerns of a growing
segment of the reading public.
Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 30,
1945, Dillard was the oldest of Frank and Pam Doak’s three daugh-
ters. She spent her youth reading books, studying the natural world,
and “getting religion,” experiences she recounts in detail in An
American Childhood. After graduating from the Ellis School in
Pittsburgh, she attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where
she received her B.A. (1967) and M.A. (1968) in English literature.
While there, she met her first husband—her writing teacher, Richard
Dillard—whom she married in 1965 and whose name she retained
after the marriage ended.
Her first book, the slim volume of poetry titled Tickets for a
Prayer Wheel (1974), was well received, but its publication was
overshadowed by Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), released only a few
months later. Described by Dillard, quoting Thoreau, as “a meteoro-
logical journal of the mind,” the book recounts the year (1972) she
spent walking, reading, and journal-keeping while living on Tinker
Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. After advance
chapters were published in Harper’s and the Atlantic, the book was
widely and enthusiastically reviewed, launching its 29-year-old au-
thor into instant literary celebrity.
Disturbed by the attention she was receiving, especially after
winning the Pulitzer Prize, Dillard accepted a position as scholar-in-
residence at Western Washington University in 1975 and moved to an
isolated island in Puget Sound. There she wrote Holy the Firm (1977),
a short but powerful prose narrative about the relationship between
beauty and violence, a topic she had previously begun to explore in
Pilgrim. Inspired by a plane crash in which a neighbor’s child was
badly burned, the book relates Dillard’s process of coming to terms
with the seeming contradiction between the existence of human
suffering and the idea of a loving and all-powerful God.
In 1979, Dillard took up a new post as visiting professor of
creative writing at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut,
where she subsequently remained as writer-in-residence. Having
divorced her first husband in 1975, Dillard married anthropologist
Gary Clevidence in 1980. In 1982 she published two books, Teaching
a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters and Living by Fiction.
The first, a collection of essays, received excellent reviews; the
second, a work of literary criticism, garnered more muted praise. She
followed these two works in 1984 with Encounters with Chinese
Writers, an account based in part on her visit to China in 1982 as a
member of a cultural delegation.
In 1988, having published An American Childhood (1987),
Dillard divorced Gary Clevidence and married Robert D. Richardson,
Jr., whom she had met after reading his biography, Henry Thoreau: A
Life of the Mind (1986). At this time she also worked on The Writing
Life (1989), a description of the writing process and the creative
energies it entails.
DILLER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
712
Dillard published her first novel, The Living, in 1992. Expanding
a short story of the same name that she had written for Harper’s in
1978, the story spans 42 years, from 1855 to 1897, and explores the
frontier history of Whatcom, a town on Bellingham Bay in Washing-
ton State. Although the tale is related by an omniscient narrator, The
Living nonetheless reflects Dillard’s continuing concerns throughout
her books with the arbitrariness of death, the insignificance of
individuals in an indifferent universe, and the necessity of faith
despite the knowledge of these uncomfortable truths.
The popularity of Dillard’s writing during the late 1980s and
1990s can be judged by the frequency with which her work was
reprinted during these decades. As well as excerpts included in multi-
author collections, the four-volume Annie Dillard Library appeared
in 1989, followed by Three by Annie Dillard (1990), and The Annie
Dillard Reader (1994). During these years, she also served as the co-
editor of two volumes of prose—The Best American Essays (1988),
with Robert Atwan, and Modern American Memoirs (1995), with
Cort Conley—and crafted Mornings Like This: Found Poems (1995),
a collection of excerpts from other writers’ prose, which she refor-
matted into verse.
Though a minor work, Mornings Like This could be said to
encapsulate all of the qualities that have made Dillard’s work consis-
tently popular among readers: clever and playful, it displays her wide
learning and eclectic tastes, her interest in the intersection of nature
and science with history and art, and her desire to create beauty and
unity out of the lost and neglected fragments of human experience.
—Daniel J. Philippon
F
URTHER READING:
Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. New York, Harper and
Row, 1987.
———. The Annie Dillard Reader. New York, HarperCollins, 1994.
———. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper’s Magazine
Press, 1974.
Johnson, Sandra Humble. The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in
the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, Ohio, Kent State University
Press, 1992
Parrish, Nancy C. Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A
Genesis of Writers. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University
Press, 1998.
Smith, Linda L. Annie Dillard. Boston, Twayne, 1991.
Diller, Phyllis (1917—)
Comedienne Phyllis Diller occupies a unique position in the
annals of American stand-up comedy as the first woman to make her
name in that previously all-male preserve. Remarkably, her show
business career began in 1955 when she was 37 years old. In four
decades, Diller progressed from being the only touring female come-
dienne within the United States to one of the world’s most successful
and best-loved comics, and the acknowledged forerunner to the many
female comics who have followed her.
Diller was born Phyllis Ada Driver in Lima, Ohio. She studied
classical piano at the Sherwood Conservatory of Music and received a
music education degree from Bufferton College, but shelved her
music career to marry Sherwood Diller and start a family. It wasn’t
until almost fifteen years and five children later, in California, when
desperation rather than dormant ambition drove her to reconsider a
stage career.
As a housewife and mother, Diller’s life began to fall apart in
1953. Her husband had lost his job, bills were past due, and it began to
look as if the family would lose their house. Gathering her courage,
Diller found herself a job writing for a local radio station; two years
later, turning courage into chutzpah, she quit that job to pursue a
career as a stand-up comic. She auditioned at San Francisco’s Purple
Onion, and, though female comedians were extremely rare, she was
engaged for a two-week stint. Her instant popularity with audiences
turned the two weeks into an 87-week run. In 1959 she appeared
before the nation on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, and in 1960 she
performed at Carnegie Hall, not at the piano, but on it—vamping and
slithering, and singing satirical songs interspersed with rapid-fire
comic patter.
Calling her comedy “tragedy revisited,” Diller based her act on
her experiences as a housewife. Dressed in outrageous costumes, with
wildly disheveled bleached-blonde hair and a raucous maniacal
laugh, she lampooned housework, her neighbors, a fictitious husband
she called “Fang,” and, most of all, herself. She has always written her
own material, and the jokes come fast and furious, sometimes as many
as twelve punch lines a minute. She takes pride in the fact that her
jokes are “clean,” though she has been criticized by feminists for her
self-deprecating put-downs of her own looks and abilities. Though
“Fang” is a creation of her act and, she claims, not based on either of
her two husbands, the family of her first husband once brought an
unsuccessful lawsuit against her for denigrating him in her routine.
Diller continued to perform her comedy act in arenas as diverse
as Las Vegas supper clubs and Madison Square Garden. She did,
however, return to her classical music roots from 1971 to 1982, when
she played as a soloist with over a hundred different symphony
orchestras around the country, using the “virtuoso” name, Illya
Dillya. She has also performed in stage shows and many films. Her
one dramatic role was a surprising tour de force as the wife of Zero in
the film version of Elmer Rice’s expressionistic play, The Adding
Machine (1969); while a high point of her stage career was on
Broadway in 1970 where, for several months, she played Dolly Levi
in Hello Dolly!
Though it was the comedic projection of herself as a frumpy
grotesque that won Diller her fame and fortune, her image covered an
intense insecurity about her looks. Determined to change the things
she did not like about her face and body, she became notorious for her
relationship with cosmetic surgery. Blatantly outspoken, she has
always admitted to having herself “fixed,” saying, “I used to be young
and ugly. Now I’m old and gorgeous.” Her very public admission of
her many procedures—facelifts, nose job, tummy tuck, cheek im-
plants, and straightened teeth among them—have caused plastic
surgeons to hail her as a boon to their business. She has written humor
books, and made many best-selling comedy albums. A gourmet chef,
she turned entrepreneur to market her own chili and has sold her
own lines of cosmetics and jewelry. There is, however, another
side to Phyllis Diller. Like many celebrities, she has used her
fame and wealth to support humanitarian causes and has been
honored accordingly.
—Tina Gianoulis
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713
FURTHER READING:
Borns, Betsy. “Phyllis Diller.” Interview. Vol. 16, September, 1986, 25.
Smith, Ronald L. “Diller’s Choice.” Writer’s Digest. Vol. 62, No-
vember, 1982, 20.
Dillinger, John (1903-1934)
During the Great Depression, many Americans, nearly helpless
against forces they didn’t understand, made heroes of outlaws who
took what they wanted at gunpoint and stole from the institutions that
they felt were oppressing them. Of all these lurid desperadoes, John
Dillinger came to evoke this Gangster Era, and stirred mass emotion
to a degree rarely seen in this country.
In truth, Dillinger was not the leader of a crime syndicate but was
merely a brutal thief and a cold-blooded murderer. From September,
1933, until July, 1934, he and his violent gang terrorized the Midwest,
killing 10 men, wounding seven others, robbing banks and police
arsenals, and staging three memorable jail breaks, killing a sheriff
John Dillinger
during one and wounding two guards in another. He became some-
thing of a folk hero for successfully thwarting his pursuers for a time.
John Herbert Dillinger was born on June 22, 1903, in the middle-
class Oak Hill section of Indianapolis. His father, a hardworking
grocer, raised him in an atmosphere of disciplinary extremes, harsh
and repressive on some occasions, but generous and permissive on
others. John’s mother died when he was three, and when his father
remarried six years later, John resented his stepmother.
In adolescence, Dillinger was frequently in trouble. Finally, he
quit school and got a job in a machine shop in Indianapolis. Although
intelligent and a good worker, he soon became bored and often stayed
out all night. His father, worried that the temptations of the city were
corrupting his teenaged son, sold his property in Indianapolis and
moved his family to a farm near Mooresville, Indiana. However, John
reacted no better to rural life than he had to that in the city and soon
began to run wild again.
After being arrested for auto theft, Dillinger was given the
opportunity to enlist in the Navy. There he soon got into more trouble
and deserted his ship when it docked in Boston. Returning to
Mooresville, he married 16-year-old Beryl Hovius in 1924 and
moved to Indianapolis. Dillinger, finding no work in the city, joined
the town pool shark, Ed Singleton, in his quest for easy money. They
tried to rob a Mooresville grocer, but were quickly apprehended.
Singleton pleaded not guilty, stood trial, and was sentenced to two
years. Dillinger, following his father’s advice, confessed, was con-
victed of assault and battery with intent to rob and conspiracy to
commit a felony, and received joint sentences of 2-to-14 years and 10-
to-20 years in the Indiana State Prison. Stunned by the harsh sentence,
Dillinger became a tortured, bitter man in prison.
Dillinger’s notoriety grew when he made a successful prison
break. On May 10, 1933, he was paroled from prison after serving 8-
1/2 years of his sentence, and almost immediately Dillinger robbed a
bank in Bluffton, Ohio. Dayton police arrested him on September 22,
and he was lodged in the county jail in Lima, Ohio, to await trial. In
frisking Dillinger, the Lima police found a document outlining a plan
for a prison break, but the prisoner denied knowledge of any plan.
Four days later, using the same plans, eight of Dillinger’s friends
escaped from the Indiana State Prison, using shotguns and rifles that
had been smuggled into their cells and shooting two guards.
On October 12, three of the escaped prisoners and a parolee from
the same prison, Harry Pierpont, Russell Clark, Charles Makley, and
Harry Copeland, showed up at the Lima jail where Dillinger was
incarcerated. They told the sheriff that they had come to return
Dillinger to the Indiana State Prison for violation of his parole. When
the sheriff asked to see their credentials, one of the men pulled a gun,
shot the sheriff, and beat him into unconsciousness. Then, taking the
keys to the jail, the bandits freed Dillinger, locked the sheriff’s wife
and a deputy in a cell, and, leaving the sheriff to die on the floor, made
their getaway.
Dillinger and his gang pulled several bank robberies and also
plundered the police arsenals at Auburn, Indiana, and Peru, Indiana,
stealing several machine guns, rifles, and revolvers, a quantity of
ammunition, and several bulletproof vests. On December 14, John
Hamilton, a Dillinger gang member, shot and killed a police detective
in Chicago. A month later, the Dillinger gang killed a police officer
during the robbery of the First National Bank of East Chicago,
Indiana. Then they made their way to Florida and, subsequently, to
Tucson, Arizona. There on January 23, 1934, a fire broke out in the
hotel where Clark and Makley were hiding under assumed names.
Firemen recognized the men from their photographs, and local police
DILLINGER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
714
arrested them, as well as Dillinger and Harry Pierpont. They also
seized three Thompson submachine guns, two Winchester rifles
mounted as machine guns, five bulletproof vests, and more than
$25,000 in cash, part of it from the East Chicago robbery.
Dillinger was sequestered at the county jail in Crown Point,
Indiana, to await trial for the murder of the East Chicago police
officer. Authorities boasted that the jail was ‘‘escape proof,’’ but on
March 3, 1934, Dillinger cowed the guards with what he claimed later
was a wooden gun he had whittled. He forced them to open the door to
his cell, then grabbed two machine guns, locked up the guards and
several trustees, and fled in the sheriff’s car, hightailing it to nearby
Illinois. The stunt earned headlines around the world and put Dillin-
ger as a top priority on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s hit list.
By stealing the sheriff’s car and driving it across a state line,
Dillinger had violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which
made it a Federal offense to transport a stolen motor vehicle across a
state line. A Federal complaint was sworn charging Dillinger with the
theft and interstate transportation of the sheriff’s car, which actively
involved the FBI in the nationwide search for Dillinger.
Meanwhile, Pierpont, Makley, and Clark were returned to Ohio,
convicted of the murder of the Lima sheriff, with Pierpont and
Makley being sentenced to death, and Clark to life imprisonment. But
in an escape attempt, Makley was killed and Pierpont was wounded.
A month later, Pierpont had recovered sufficiently to be executed.
Hoover protégé Melvin Purvis was put in charge of capturing
Dillinger, and in late April, ‘‘Nervous’’ Purvis received a tip-off that
the bandit was holed up at Little Bohemia, a lakeside resort in
Wisconsin. Purvis and his team blundered onto the resort grounds and
blazed away indiscriminately at what proved to be innocent custom-
ers leaving a restaurant.
While an agent was telephoning about the debacle, the operator
broke in to tell him there was trouble at another cottage about two
miles away. FBI Special Agent W. Carter Baum, another FBI agent,
and a constable went there and found a parked car which the constable
recognized as belonging to a local resident. They pulled up and
identified themselves. Inside the other car, ‘‘Baby Face’’ Nelson, a
member of Dillinger’s gang, was holding three local residents at
gunpoint. He turned, leveled a revolver at the lawmen’s car, and
ordered them to step out. But without waiting for them to comply,
Nelson opened fire. Baum was killed, and the constable and the other
agent were severely wounded. Nelson jumped into the Ford they had
been using and fled.
For the second time in three weeks, Dillinger had made the Feds
look like fools. Hoover appointed a trusted Washington inspector,
Sam Cowley, to take thirty handpicked men and form a special
Dillinger squad in Chicago, though Purvis remained Agent in Charge.
Dillinger was rated Public Enemy Number One and was featured on
Wanted posters all over the United States. Eliminating him had
become a public relations imperative, despite the lack of proof that he
personally had ever killed anyone.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, July 21, 1934, the madam of a
brothel in Gary, Indiana, contacted one of the police officers with
information. This woman called herself Anna Sage; however, her real
name was Ana Cumpanas, and she had entered the United States from
her native Rumania in 1914. Because of the nature of her profession,
she was considered an undesirable alien by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, and deportation proceedings had started.
Anna was willing to sell the FBI some information about Dillinger for
a cash reward, plus the FBI’s help in preventing her deportation.
At a meeting with Anna, Cowley and Purvis were cautious. They
promised her the reward if her information led to Dillinger’s capture,
but said all they could do was call her cooperation to the attention of
the Department of Labor, which at that time handled deportation
matters. Satisfied, Anna told the agents that a girl friend of hers, Polly
Hamilton, had visited her establishment with Dillinger. Anna had
recognized Dillinger from a newspaper photograph.
Anna told the agents that she, Polly Hamilton, and Dillinger
probably would be going to the movies the following evening at either
the Biograph or the Marbro Theaters. She said that she would notify
them when the theater was chosen. She also said that she would wear a
red dress so that they could identify her.
On Sunday, July 22, Anna Sage called to confirm the plans, but
she still did not know which theater they would attend. Therefore,
agents and policemen were sent to both theaters. At 8:30 p.m., Anna
Sage, John Dillinger, and Polly Hamilton strolled into the Biograph
Theater to see Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Purvis phoned
Cowley, who shifted the other men from the Marbro to the Biograph.
Cowley also phoned Hoover for instructions, who cautioned
them to wait outside rather than risk a shooting match inside the
crowded theater. Each man was instructed not to unnecessarily
endanger himself and was told that if Dillinger offered any resistance,
it would be each man for himself.
At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger, with his two female companions on
either side, walked out of the theater and turned to his left. As they
walked past the doorway in which Purvis was standing, Purvis lit a
cigar as a signal for the other men to close in. Dillinger quickly
realized what was happening and acted by instinct. He grabbed a
pistol from his right trouser pocket as he ran toward the alley. Five
shots were fired from the guns of three FBI agents. Three of the shots
hit Dillinger and he fell face down on the pavement. At 10:50 p.m. on
July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was pronounced dead in a little room in
the Alexian Brothers Hospital.
The agents who fired at Dillinger were Charles B. Winstead,
Clarence O. Hurt, and Herman E. Hollis. Each man was commended
by J. Edgar Hoover for fearlessness and courageous action. None of
them ever said who actually killed Dillinger. The events of that sultry
July night in Chicago marked the beginning of the end of the Gangster
Era. Eventually, 27 persons were convicted in Federal courts on
charges of harboring and aiding and abetting John Dillinger and his
cronies during their reign of terror. ‘‘Baby Face’’ Nelson was fatally
wounded on November 27, 1934, in a gun battle with FBI agents in
which Special Agents Cowley and Hollis also were killed.
Dillinger was buried in Crown Point Cemetery in Indianapolis,
Indiana. It has long been rumored that his supposedly generously
endowed member was kept in storage at the Smithsonian. In his 1970
book The Dillinger Dossier, Jay Robert Nash, citing flaws in the
autopsy evidence and detailed testimony, even offers the thesis that
Dillinger did not die in Chicago at all, but rather an underworld fall
guy sent to take his place.
In 1945, former bootleggers turned filmmakers, the King Broth-
ers, Frank and Maurice, produced a low budget, largely non-factual
biography of Dillinger called Dillinger, which starred Lawrence
Tierney and was scripted by famous front Philip Yordan. It surprised
the film industry by turning a tidy profit. A third of the film consisted
of stock footage lifted from other classic gangster films, from Howard
Hawks’ Scarface to Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once. The film’s non-
stop action set a pattern for future gangster epics from the 1960s
onward, but was unique for its time.
DIMAGGIOENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
715
Writer-director John Milius made his film debut with another
biography of Dillinger called simply Dillinger (1973) and starring
Warren Oates, though it too owes little to the actual facts of Dillin-
ger’s life. Dillinger’s noted demise also inspired Lewis Teague’s film
The Lady in Red (1979; also known as Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin),
scripted by John Sayles with Robert Conrad playing the famed bank
robber. Other treatments of Dillinger on film include Young Dillinger
(1965), Dillinger and Capone (1995), and a documentary, Appoint-
ment with Death: The Last Days of John Dillinger (1971).
Dillinger’s legacy continued to be enshrined in song and story.
Hoover put a plaster cast of the gangster’s face on display at FBI
headquarters and for years Hoover’s reception room contained a .38
automatic that was purported to be Dillinger’s gun, even though the
particular make of Colt did not leave the factory until December 1934,
five months after the Dillinger shooting. Dillinger had been inflated
from a simple bank robber into a legend, and remains one to this day.
—Dennis Fischer
F
URTHER READING:
Cromie, Robert, and Joseph Pinkston. Dillinger: A Short and Violent
Life. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1962.
Girardin, G. Russell. Dillinger: The Untold Story. Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1994.
Nash, Jay Robert. The Dillinger Dossier. Highland Park, Illinois,
December Press, 1983
Nash, Jay Robert, and Ron Offen. Dillinger: Dead or Alive? Henry
Regnery, 1970.
Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J.
Edgar Hoover. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993.
Toland, John. The Dillinger Days. New York, Random House, 1963.
DiMaggio, Joe (1914-1999)
Joe DiMaggio is one of the few athletes who truly transcend their
sport. His Hall of Fame career, leading the Yankees to nine World
Series in 13 years, bridged two great eras of baseball—the post-war
days of Babe Ruth and the post-integration days of Jackie Robinson.
But he will always be best known as ‘‘Joltin’ Joe,’’ whose record-
breaking 56 game hitting streak in 1941 captivated the country.
DiMaggio’s fame only grew after retirement, with his brief, but
highly publicized marriage to movie star Marilyn Monroe, and
frequent public appearances. The cool, classy ballplayer was immor-
talized in music and literature, as an enduring symbol of decency and
order during a confusing era. In the words of the New York Times on
the day of his retirement, DiMaggio had ‘‘something that no baseball
averages can measure.’’
He was born Joseph Paul DiMaggio in San Francisco in 1914,
one of nine children; his parents were part of a wave of Sicilian
immigrants to emigrate to the United States at the turn of the twentieth
century. The shy, unsociable DiMaggio was expected to get an
education, but his only true interest was baseball, so he dropped out of
school at age 16 . . . a decision he would later regret. The story of
DiMaggio’s discovery has become baseball legend; a member of the
San Francisco Seals organization spotted the thin 17 year old peaking
through a hole in the outfield fence, hoping to find his brother Vince, a
Seals player. The Seals offered the talented sand-lot player an
opportunity to play, and he stayed for four years, becoming a hero in
the Italian community in San Francisco. The year 1933 proved to be a
harbinger of things to come; DiMaggio chalked up a minor league
record with his 61 game hitting streak.
At the end of the 1935 season, the New York Yankees signed
DiMaggio, hoping he would lead the team into the post-Ruth era.
Despite the pressures of following Ruth, DiMaggio had a fabulous
rookie season in 1936, hitting .323 with 29 home runs, 125 RBIs, and
a league leading 15 triples. Writers across the country marvelled at his
exceptional clutch hitting, skilled base running, and graceful defen-
sive play. The shy, conservative DiMaggio, a sharp contrast from the
wild gregarious Ruth, became an instant celebrity. He led the Yankees
to four straight World Series titles from 1936 to 1939 and constantly
appeared among the leaders in batting, home runs, and RBIs. He
became the most popular player in baseball, although he angered fans
in 1938, sitting out the beginning of the season due to a contract
dispute, a theme prevalent throughout his career. Despite the new
celebrity status, DiMaggio continued to live a very normal life,
returning to San Francisco to live with his family during the winter. At
the end of the 1939 season, DiMaggio married Dorothy Arnold, and
two years later, they had a son, Joe Jr.
All of the fanfare could not prepare DiMaggio for the 1941
season. DiMaggio collected a hit in every game from May 15th to July
14th, an astonishing stretch of 56 games. Never before did an
individual sports record receive so much public attention; radio
stations across the country regularly interrupted broadcasts to give
updates on ‘‘the streak.’’ It seemed to come at a perfect time for a
nation on the brink of war. Songwriter Alan Courtney wrote ‘‘Joe,
Joe, DiMaggio, we want you on our side,’’ as if his hitting streak
could protect America from the turmoil overseas. DiMaggio himself
joined the Air Force at the end of the 1942 season, while in the prime
of his baseball career. Like many ballplayers, he saw no combat,
spending the majority of his service time entertaining the troops in
exhibition games. But the distance from his family was frustrating,
and in 1944 Dorothy DiMaggio filed for divorce.
When DiMaggio returned to baseball in 1946, his finest years
were clearly in the past. He did, however, add to his fame by
constantly playing though injury. In 1949, he made a remarkable
comeback from a leg injury and ‘‘took his place in that select circle of
athletes, like Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, who are no only adored
but beloved,’’ according to Life Magazine. DiMaggio continued to
show flashes of his former brilliance, but lost consistency and fought
with Yankee manager Casey Stengal. At the end of the 1951 season,
DiMaggio retired having amassed a .325 lifetime average and 361
career home runs in 13 seasons. That same year, he was immortalized
in the Ernest Hemingway classic The Old Man and the Sea, the tale of
an tired, aging fisherman, stuck at seas for days, and turning to ‘‘the
Great DiMaggio’’ for solace.
Unlike many former players, DiMaggio had little trouble adjust-
ing to life without baseball. He spent his first year of retirement
working as a broadcaster for the Yankees, and went on to work in
public relations with a variety of companies and charitable founda-
tions. DiMaggio reentered the public consciousness in 1952 when he
met a young Marilyn Monroe. The relationship between these two
very different celebrities—the quiet, conservative former ballplayer
and the beautiful but troubled movie star—was instant front page
news. They married on January 14, 1954, but constantly fought over
DiMaggio’s traditional views of marriage and views of the Holly-
wood life, and divorced just nine months later. DiMaggio remained a
close, dependable friend to Monroe, right until her death in 1962. He
DIME NOVELS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
716
Joe DiMaggio
made all the funeral arrangements, excluding the Hollywood crowd in
the hope it would restore some dignity to her tragically short life.
In 1967, DiMaggio was introduced to a new generation of
Americans by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s ‘‘Mrs. Robinson,’’ a
sad lament to lost innocence from the film The Graduate. Simon and
Garfunkel asked ‘‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?,’’ looking
for a hero to guide them through troubled times. More than 25 years
after the magical summer of 1941, Joltin’ Joe became a symbol of
fundamental good to a confused generation. His image continued to
grow through the 1970s and 1980s, through his charitable work and
public appearances. DiMaggio died on March 8, 1999, after a bout
with cancer.
—Simon Donner
F
URTHER READING:
Allen, Meary. Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio: The Story of
America’s Last Hero. New York, E. P. Dutton and Compa-
ny, 1975.
Moore, Jack B. Joe DiMaggio: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Con-
necticut, Greeenwood Press, 1986.
Schoor, Gene. Joe DiMaggio: A Biography. New York,
Doubleday, 1980.
Seidel, Michael. Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41. New
York, McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Whittingham, Richard, editor. The DiMaggio Albums: Selections
from Public and Private Collections Celebrating the Baseball
Career of Joe DiMaggio. New York, G.P. Putnam and Son, 1989.
Dime Novels
A popular form of literary entertainment in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, dime novels were works of sensational
fiction published in paper-covered booklets, issued at regular inter-
vals, and priced at five to ten cents. Profitable mainstays of the
DIME STORES/WOOLWORTH’SENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
717
American publishing industry for many years, dime novels gradually
waned as pulp magazine consumption increased, and by 1915, motion
pictures had replaced dime novels as inexpensive forms of entertain-
ment. Since that time, dime novels have become significant resources
for examining the development of American popular culture in that
they exemplify early printing methods, serve as rudimentary forms of
genre fiction, and reflect aspects of the social history of the United States.
Published in four basic formats between 1860 and 1915, dime
novels usually possessed pictorial covers with black-and-white or
colored illustrations, ranged in size from four by six inches to eight by
12 inches, and varied in length from 32 to 250 pages. Initially
produced for an adult market, early versions detailed life on the
American frontier. Later publications, however, featured detective
mysteries, adventure stories, and science fiction tales and were
primarily read by juveniles.
The idea of producing cheap paper-covered novels in a continu-
ous series was conceived by Irwin P. Beadle. In 1860, Beadle, along
with his older brother, Erastus, and Robert Adams, established the
publishing firm of Beadle & Adams in New York City and launched
Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Mrs. Ann S.
Stephens, as the first entry in a series entitled Beadle’s Dime Novels.
Achieving success with the publication of this story and others,
Beadle & Adams were for a time the principal publishers of dime
novels until competitors George P. Munro, his brother Norman L.
Munro, Frank Tousey, and Street & Smith began to publish dime
novels as well.
Dime novel authors had strict guidelines to follow—stories had
to be exciting, entertaining, and moral. Each of the major publishers
employed regulars who wrote for a particular series. In some instanc-
es, authors published stories for several firms. Prolific contributors to
Beadle’s Dime Novels (1860-1874) included Mrs. Ann S. Stephens,
Mrs. Metta Victor, Edward S. Ellis, Edward L. Wheeler, Philip S.
Warne, and Ned Buntline. George P. Munro’s Old Sleuth Library
(1885-1905) highlighted the detective adventures of Old Sleuth, a
pseudonym for Harlan Page Halsey, and other authors. His brother,
Norman, published works by W. I. James in the Old Cap Collier
Library (1883-1899), another dime-novel detective series. Frank
Tousey’s small group of authors wrote under so many pseudonyms
that the amount of contributors to the Wide Awake Library (1878-
1898) appeared greater than it actually was. Street & Smith, as the last
major publishing firm to produce dime novels, featured authors
Horatio Alger, Jr., Ned Buntline, Gilbert Patten, and Colonel Prentiss
Ingraham, among others, in several series between 1883 and 1899.
When dime-novel production ceased, most of the once prolific
authors faded into obscurity.
Often, characters appearing in dime-novel series were better
known than their authors were. Ned Buntline’s famous western hero,
Buffalo Bill, based on United States scout and performer William
Frederick Cody, appeared in numerous publications by Beadle &
Adams, Street & Smith, and Frank Tousey. Amateur detective Nick
Carter proved to be so popular after his first appearance in The Old
Detective’s Pupil (1886), that Street & Smith featured his adventures
in three different series between 1891 and 1915, The Nick Carter
Library, The New Nick Carter Weekly, and Nick Carter Stories.
Similarly, the exploits of Deadwood Dick, Kit Carson, Jr., Jesse
James, Old Sleuth, Young Wild West, Frank Reade, Jr., Tiger Dick,
and Frank Merriwell appeared in more than one dime novel.
Covering a wide variety of subjects, dime novels promoted
traditional American values of patriotism, rugged individualism, and
moral behavior. Many of the early dime novel stories focused on
historical events such as the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and
conflicts with Native Americans. Others were set in gold mining
camps or towns within the expanding western frontier, and featured
gunfighters, villains, and damsels in distress. Reflecting the urbaniza-
tion of cities, the industrial revolution, and increased transportation
modes, subsequent dime novel subjects included circuses, railroad
workers, firefighters, sports, science fiction, fantasy, sea or polar
explorations, and mysteries with detectives from every walk of life.
Moving beyond the borders of America, a few detail adventures in
distant places.
In the 1990s, few original dime novels exist outside of libraries
and personal collections. Moreover, owing largely to their sheer
numbers and past popular appeal, dime novels are seldom considered
by literary scholars to be good examples of American literature. Their
value as historical artifacts, however, is considerable.
—Marlena E. Bremseth
F
URTHER READING:
Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working
Class Culture in America. London, Verso, 1987.
Johannsen, Albert, The House of Beadle & Adams and Its Nickel and
Dime Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature. Vol. 1. Norman,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.
Sullivan, Larry E., and Lydia C. Schurman. Pioneers, Passionate
Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paper-
backs. New York, The Haworth Press, Inc., 1996.
Dime Stores/Woolworth’s
Dime Stores, or five-and-dimes, maintained a central place in
American life from before 1900 until after World War II. Woolworth’s
was the original and dominant dime-store chain. In the first half of the
twentieth century, the main street of virtually every town and city in
the United States featured a Woolworth’s; it was the first place many
people went to look for basic merchandise of all sorts. Woolworth’s
offered its customers a wide assortment of very affordable household
items and the working class appreciated finding basic things at basic
prices. The dime store’s lunch counter was a common meeting place,
its toys made it a favorite destination of children, and its endless
locations meant it served as the neighborhood store for many.
Although part of Woolworth’s appeal was in its ubiquitous presence,
local stores were also encouraged to remain local institutions. They
varied widely from region to region and from city to town. Each filled
a particular role and developed its own character.
In 1919, when F. W. Woolworth died, his chain of five-and-
dimes consisted of 1,081 stores in the United States and Canada. At
that time, department stores were all regional; Woolworth’s was one
of a very few nationwide chains. Department stores were also notably
more lavish and expensive than dime stores. Millions of working
people depended on Woolworth’s and other five-and-dimes for many
basic needs. As the nation’s largest food-service retailer by the 1940s,
Woolworth’s maintained nearly a thousand inexpensive lunch coun-
ters across the United States before the first McDonald’s opened.
Before Woolworth, shopping meant bartering. Merchandise was
kept behind counters or on inaccessible shelves and customers had to
ask clerks to show them an item. Fixed pricing had begun appearing in
DIME STORES/WOOLWORTH’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
718
An F. W. Woolworth Co. five and dime store.
a few places, notably Michigan, in the 1870s, but was sporadic and
unorganized. Other merchants had set up five-cent counters from time
to time for limited runs, but no one had worked hard to make it
consistently profitable, and certainly no one had devoted an entire
variety store to the same fixed price. Frank Woolworth was not a
natural salesman or bargainer, but he held a strong Yankee work ethic
and recognized and exploited a good idea. He assiduously sharp-
ened his bargaining skills until he became known for them. They
helped him negotiate endless deals with wholesalers which allowed
Woolworth’s to make a profit on items under 10¢.
He had opened his first ‘‘5¢ store’’ in Utica, New York, on
February 22, 1879, with $350 loaned him by his former employer.
That first store barely turned a profit, but it spawned twenty more over
the next ten years, twelve of which were partnerships and five of
which failed within a few months. His fourth store, opened in
Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 6, 1880, was the first ‘‘5-&-
10¢ store.’’ Frank Woolworth never stopped opening or buying new
stores: he ran twelve in 1890, fifty-four in 1900, two hundred thirty-
eight in 1910, and three hundred nineteen by the December 1911
merger that created F. W. Woolworth & Co. Combined with his
brother Charles’s fifteen stores, his cousin Seymour Knox’s ninety-
eight, Fred Kirby’s ninety-six, Earle Charlton’s thirty-five, and
William Moore’s two, Woolworth became the first retail company to
operate stores in all forty-eight states. As he planned for the merger
that created F. W. Woolworth & Co., Frank Woolworth also oversaw
the construction of the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. The tallest
building in the world at the time of its completion in 1913, Woolworth
insisted that it surpass the Metropolitan Life Building, which compa-
ny had refused him a policy when he was laying the foundation for
his empire.
Frank Woolworth said that he aimed ‘‘to open a store in every
civilized town throughout the world.’’ He expanded into England
in 1909, then Germany, Canada, South Africa, and elsewhere.
Woolworth’s critics complained that Woolworth’s was creating a
monopoly and Congressman John J. Cochran championed legislation
that would have taxed Woolworth’s into collapse. Many people were
dismayed by ‘‘the chain store menace’’ of Woolworth’s in the 1930s,
just as many recoiled when Wal-Mart built stores in their communi-
ties in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1935 Representative Cochran led a
congressional investigation into the ‘‘super-lobby’’ of chain store
interests. Woolworth’s and drug-store chain A&P were the primary
targets. Fortunately for the chains, a 1939 bill that would have broken
them up died in committee. Woolworth’s did indeed try to drive out or
buy out much of its competition. The company knew that many of the
towns and districts where they opened could not support more than
one dime store.