Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 5: U-Z
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Alabaiso, Vincent, Kelly Smith Tunney, and Chuck Zoeller, editors.
Flash! The Associated Press Covers the World. New York,
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———. Member Editorials on the Monopoly Complaint Filed by the
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Collins, Henry M. From Pigeon Post to Wireless. London, Hodder
and Stoughton, 1925.
Diehl, Charles Sanford. The Staff Correspondent. San Antonio, Clegg
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Goldstein, Norman, editor. The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel
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Gordon, Gregory, and Ronald E. Cohen. Down to the Wire: UPI’s
Fight for Survival. New York, McGraw Hill, 1990.
MacDowall, Ian, compiler. Reuters Handbook for Journalists. Bos-
ton, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1992.
Mungo, Raymond. Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with
the Liberation News Service. Boston, Beacon Press, 1970.
Read, Donald. The Power of News: The History of Reuters. New
York, Oxford University Press, 1992.
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO). News Agencies, Their Structure and Operation. New
York, UNESCO, 1969.
Wister, Owen (1860-1938)
Owen Wister was one of a long line of lawyer-writers in
American literary history. This Pennsylvania-born, Harvard-educat-
ed patrician became one of America’s first and most prominent
writers of the Western genre. Popular in his own time, Wister
developed his reputation as a short story writer. He began to publish
his Western stories in 1895 and was acclaimed by many, including
Rudyard Kipling. In 1902 he wrote his most famous novel, one that is
said by many to define the Western genre: The Virginian: A Horse-
man of the Plains. Loren D. Estleman wrote in the Dictionary of
Literary Biography that: ‘‘Most if not all of the staples associated
with the western genre—fast-draw contests, the Arthurian code, and
such immortal lines as ‘‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us’’
and ‘‘When you call me that—smile!’’—first appeared in this
groundbreaking novel about one man’s championship of justice in the
wilderness. Wister’s interpretation of the West as a place where few
of the civilized concepts of social conduct apply separated his stories
from the sensational accounts then popular.’’
Wister was the only child of Sarah Butler and Owen Jones
Wister. His father was an intellectual, his mother the daughter of a
19th-century actress, Fanny Kemble. Her family had many literary
and musical connections in Europe. Wister, known as ‘‘Dan’’ to
friends and family, went to a private school near his home and then to
Harvard. There he continued a literary bent shown in earlier years by
writing for the college paper, the Crimson, and dabbling in light
opera. Although his mother encouraged his musical talents, she never
seemed happy with his writing work. A review of Wister’s corre-
spondence reveals that neither parent ever seemed fully pleased with
this capable, well-rounded Harvard Phi Beta Kappa.
After his 1882 graduation, Wister studied music in Europe and
his piano virtuosity was touted by no less than Franz Lizst. His father
opposed the young man’s love of music and pushed his own desire to
see him established in a business career in Boston. Ever the obedient
son, he returned to the United States. While the talented young Wister
languished in his position at the Union Safe Deposit Vaults of Boston,
he wrote a novel with a cousin but did not submit it for publication.
Although Wister formed many literary-minded friendships and
enjoyed the men’s clubs in Boston, his health began to deteriorate.
Following the orders of his doctor, in 1885 Wister summered in
Wyoming. The clean air revived his physical powers and ignited a
love of the West that would guide his future career. It was on the
frontier that he found his métier, both creatively and spiritually.
Wister once wrote: ‘‘One must come to the West to realize what one
may have most probably believed all one’s life long—that it is a very
much bigger place than the East and the future of America is just
bubbling and seething in bare legs and pinafores here—I don’t
wonder a man never comes back (East) after he has been here a
few years.’’
According to biographer Darwin Payne, ‘‘Wister’s deep sense of
the antithesis between the civilized East and the untamed West was
constant.’’ He did return East to study and then practice law, but ever
after he regularly vacationed in the West. Law school gave Wister a
chance to renew old Harvard friendships: he corresponded with
Robert Louis Stevenson and became close friends with Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes. But none of his letters from that period seem to indicate
any real interest in law, even after he began his practice as member of
the Pennsylvania bar in Philadelphia in 1890. The law seemed only
something to do in between trips to the West.
In 1891, after an evening with friends lamenting that the Ameri-
can West was known in the East only through rough ‘‘dime’’ novels,
Wister said that he regretted the lack of an American Rudyard Kipling
to chronicle what he called ‘‘our sagebrush country.’’ As they spoke
Wister suddenly decided to take action himself and become that sage.
He completed his first story that very night. Soon after he sent ‘‘How
Lin McLean Went West’’ and ‘‘Hank’s Woman’’ to Harper’s
magazine. ‘‘Hank’s Woman’’ is the story of an Austrian servant girl
who, fired in a visit to Yellowstone Park, marries a worthless man and
is then driven to murder. The story of McLean describes a cowboy’s
return to Massachusetts, where his mean-spirited brother finds him an
embarrassment. Both were published and found instant popular and
critical acclaim.
These tales used the same style and formula that would charac-
terize all of his Western works. The stories were based on anecdotes
he had heard, used vernacular language in dialogue-based actual
speech (which Wister painstakingly recorded in his own notebooks),
and were full of descriptions of the West. Others had already written
Western tales but it was Wister who defined the heroic, Arthurian
character of the Western hero and gave him substance.
Wister’s popularity and Western topics brought him into col-
laboration with Frederick Remington. The two worked together on a
story for an 1895 issue of Harper’s, about the evolution of the cow
puncher. Their friendship and collaboration was a ‘‘natural,’’ since
many critics both past and present felt that Remington expressed in
bronze and with paint the same feeling about the West that Wister
evoked with words. Harvard chum Theodore Roosevelt labeled
Wister an ‘‘American Kipling’’ and arranged for him to meet Kipling,
WIZARD OF OZ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
162
then a Vermont resident, in the spring of 1895. Upon meeting Wister,
Kipling blurted out, ‘‘I approve of you thoroughly!’’ His approbation
was great balm for Wister, who suffered much of his life without the
approval of his parents—despite the fact that he now had a
national reputation.
Not long after his father’s death in 1896, Wister began to date a
second cousin, Mary Channing ‘‘Molly’’ Wister. A practical young
woman, Molly had a career in education underway when they married
on April 28, 1898, the same day the United States declared war on
Spain. For their honeymoon the Wisters toured the United States,
making a long visit to Charleston, South Carolina, where Wister’s
grandfather had signed the U.S. Constitution, and trekking to the state
of Washington so that Molly could see her ‘‘Dan’’ in his beloved
West. Molly was supportive of his writing and he supported her
activities in education. Wister’s writing flourished and their family
grew—they had three boys and three girls.
Wister soon decided to write a longer work and he began to study
the art of the novel. In 1902, Wister published The Virginian, with its
nameless hero, his schoolteacher sweetheart Molly, and the villain,
Trampas. Payne reports that the New York Times Saturday Review of
Books, in its review of The Virginian claimed: ‘‘Owen Wister has
come pretty near to writing the American Novel.’’ Henry James wrote
enthusiastically about the novel, which Wister had dedicated to his
friend, Theodore Roosevelt. The Virginian was a financial, critical,
and popular success. Wister himself turned it into play and it
continued to be popular long after his death. According to Estleman,
‘‘If the importance of a work is evaluated by the number of people it
reaches, The Virginian stands among the three or four important
books this century has produced. By 1952, fifty years after its first
publication, eighteen million copies had been sold, and it had been
read by more Americans than any other book.’’
Four movies were made of the book during the century, in 1914
(with a screenplay by D. W. Griffith), 1923, 1929, and 1946. Of the
four movie versions, the best known was the 1929 version starring
Gary Cooper in the title role and directed by Victor Fleming. Cooper
seemed best to capture the near-mythic nature of Wister’s hero. The
nameless Virginian is an American knight—a soft-spoken gentleman
who is ready and able to survive and even tame the travails and
splendid chaos of the West. Wister’s novel defined our mythic
Western hero as a quiet but volcanic strong man who plays by the
rules. The story was also adapted for the small screen in a television
series that ran from 1962 to 1966. The Virginian was thus one of the
few stories that shaped Americans’ understanding of the American
West and of the place of individuals within it.
Most of his later fiction deals with the conflict between the good
and the bad within the West. According to Jane Tompkins in West of
Everything, his work is realistic in setting, situation, and characters—
more so than rival fiction of the period—but still tending toward the
sentimental and melodramatic. Wister tried to expand his writing
style by writing his own ‘‘novel of manners,’’ modeled on Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary but set in genteel Charleston, South Carolina. The
novel, Lady Baltimore, was not critically acclaimed and had moderate
sales in its time. In 1913, his wife died and he no longer wrote fiction.
He began several projects and then took the path of political and non-
fiction writing in the era just before World War I.
His major post-Virginian achievement was a biography of his
old friend, Theodore Roosevelt, and many articles about his past
acquaintances and friendships. At the end of his life Wister was no
longer remembered as a great literary figure. He died on July 21,
1938, just seven days after his 78th birthday. His reputation was
resuscitated late in the century by the Western Writers of America,
which named a major award after Wister, and by an increasing
number of scholars willing to take his work seriously.
—Joan Leotta
F
URTHER READING:
Cobbs, John L. Owen Wister. Boston, Twayne, 1984.
Estleman, Loren D. The Wister Trace: Classic Novels of the American
Frontier. Ottawa, Illinois, Jameson Books, 1987.
Folsom, James K., editor. The Western: A Collection of Critical
Essays, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1979.
Payne, Darwyn. Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of
the East. Dallas, Texas, Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.
Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. New York, Oxford University
Press, 1992.
White, G. Edward. The Eastern Establishment and the Western
Experience: The West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roose-
velt, and Owen Wister. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1989.
Wister, Owen. Owen Wister’s West: Selected Articles, edited by
Robert Murray Davis. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico
Press, 1987.
———. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. New York,
Macmillan, 1902.
The Wizard of Oz
The 1939 Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) film The Wizard of
Oz, based on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book was hugely influential. Its
simple message—that there is no place like home, and that you have
the power to achieve what you most desire—had a general appeal to
the American public. Starting in 1956, a new generation of American
children was annually entranced by the television showing of Doro-
thy’s journey down the Yellow Brick Road.
In the film, after a cyclone carries her to Oz, Dorothy meets the
Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, and they set
off together for the Emerald City in search of what they most desire:
for Dorothy, a home; for the Scarecrow, a brain; for the Tin Wood-
man, a heart; and for the Cowardly Lion, courage. When they kill the
Wicked Witch of the West and go to the Wizard for their promised
reward, they discover he is nothing but a humbug. Nevertheless, he
supplies them with the symbols of what they already possess—a
degree for the Scarecrow, a ticking heart-shaped clock for the Tin
Woodman, and a medal for the Cowardly Lion. Glinda the Good
Witch helps Dorothy use the magic in the ruby slippers she has been
wearing all along to whisk her back to Kansas.
The film was made during the heyday of the studio system and
the golden era of MGM. Directed by Victor Fleming (among others),
it starred Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Frank
Morgan, and Margaret Hamilton. From the beginning, it was a
production beset by trouble: cast changes, director changes, injuries,
and script rewrites kept cast and crew busy for 23 weeks, the longest
shoot in MGM history.
The opening and closing Kansas scenes were filmed in black-
and-white, while the Oz scenes were done in sumptuous (and expen-
sive) Technicolor. Dorothy’s amazement at entering the world of
WIZARD OF OZENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
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A scene from the film The Wizard of Oz, with Judy Garland as Dorothy.
WKRP IN CINCINNATI ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
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color mirrored audiences’ feelings about the new technology. The
importance of wonder did not stop there: Jack Haley (the Tin
Woodman) created the breathless, slightly stilted way he and Ray
Bolger (as the Scarecrow) would speak to Dorothy. Haley told Victor
Fleming, ‘‘I want to talk the way I talk when I’m telling a story to my
five-year-old son,’’ and Bolger agreed, saying later ‘‘I tried to get a
sound in my voice that was complete wonderment.’’ Haley, Bolger,
and Lahr (the Cowardly Lion) came out of the vaudeville tradition and
filled the movie with the kind of jokes and physical humor with which
stage audiences were already familiar.
Frank Morgan, as the Wizard, perfectly embodied the harmless-
trickster aspects of his character. Margaret Hamilton, as the Wicked
Witch of the West, scared many youngsters with her bright green skin
and high-pitched cackle. L. Frank Baum, the original author of the
story, had wanted to create a fairy tale that eliminated ‘‘all the horrible
and blood-curdling incidents’’ of fairy tales, one that ‘‘aspires to
being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are
retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.’’ The
Wicked Witch, however, terrorized children in the audience—the
scene where Dorothy watches Aunt Em in the crystal ball dissolve
into the Witch has been interpreted by psychologists to symbolize the
unpleasant fusion of good and bad mother figures.
The film was released in 1939 to receptive audiences, but was
overshadowed by the epic Gone with the Wind and did not start to turn
a real profit until CBS bought it for television in 1956. From then on, it
was shown annually, and by the year 2000 held seven of the places in
a list of the top 25 highest-rated movies on network television (no
other film held more than one spot.) The aggregate audience from
1956 until the year 2000 was more than one billion people. In 1998,
The Wizard of Oz was re-released on the big-screen.
The songs, by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, were hugely
popular from the start. ‘‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’’—Judy
Garland’s plaintive song of a place where ‘‘the dreams that you dare
to dream really do come true’’—became a jazz standard in the United
States and an anthem of hope in England during World War II.
Garland’s version remains the most famous, but pop artists as diverse
as Willie Nelson, Tori Amos, and Stevie Ray Vaughan recorded
covers. After gay icon Garland’s death, the rainbow in her song
became a gay coat-of-arms.
The Wizard of Oz spawned numerous remakes and sequels,
including animated cartoons, a Broadway show, ‘‘Oz on Ice,’’ and
The Wiz, an all-black, urban revision of the original film, starring
Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. Many
films, including Star Wars, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and John
Boorman’s Zardoz, contain major allusions to The Wizard of Oz—
minor references to it are pervasive in American movies. In literature,
dark revisionist fantasies, including Geoff Ryman’s Was, a bleak Oz
story that incorporates AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syn-
drome), child abuse, and Judy Garland’s childhood, and Gregory
Maguire’s Wicked, an Oz prequel written from the witch’s point of
view, owe great debts to the film. It was also influential in popular
music—Elton John titled an album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,
Ozzie Osbourne titled one Blizzard of Oz, and Electric Light Orches-
tra’s Eldorado album cover showed a pair of green hands reaching for
Dorothy’s ruby slippers, with no explanation required.
The Wizard of Oz film seeped into the everyday life of Ameri-
cans in countless ways. Dunkin’ Donuts named its donut-hole crea-
tions ‘‘Munchkins’’ after the little-people inhabitants of Munchkinland,
where Dorothy’s house lands in Oz. Quotes from the movie—‘‘Toto,
I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore’’; ‘‘Lions, and tigers, and
bears, oh my’’; ‘‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain’’—
were emblazoned on t-shirts. A 25-cent postage stamp depicting
Dorothy and Toto was released in 1989 as part of the United States
Postal Service ‘‘Classic Films’’ series. References to the film showed
up in political cartoons, advertisements, and greeting cards. There
was an Oz theme park, an Oz fan club, and a series of Oz conventions.
During the Watergate scandal, Nixon was compared more than once
to the humbug Wizard. The plot of the first episode of the 1970s
television program H.R. Pufnstuf was unmistakably borrowed from
The Wizard of Oz. And in the 1980s and 1990s, self-help gurus used
the Yellow Brick Road as a metaphor for the quest for self-knowledge.
Popular myths also sprung up about the film, such as its
supposed synchronicity with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon
album, and exaggerated stories of the Munchkin actors’ bad behavior
on the set. A myth about a Munchkin suicide visible in the back of one
scene persists despite being debunked numerous times.
When the film was originally released, with the tagline ‘‘The
Greatest Picture in the History of Entertainment,’’ MGM launched an
aggressive merchandising campaign; objects from this campaign now
fetch high prices as collectors’ items. Memorabilia from the film is
also extremely valuable: one pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers is
on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C., at the National Museum of American History; another pair was
auctioned at Christie’s for $165,000 in 1988.
Film critic Roger Ebert attempts to explain the movie’s populari-
ty, saying: ‘‘The Wizard of Oz fills such a large space in our
imagination. It somehow seems real and important in a way most
movies don’t. Is that because we see it first when we’re young? Or
simply because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some
buried universal note, some archetype or deeply felt myth?’’ Ebert
leans toward the last possibility, and indeed, Baum deliberately set
out in 1900 to create a uniquely American fairy tale, one with timeless
appeal to all the ‘‘young in heart.’’ The film—and all that followed—
made his dream come true.
—Jessy Randall
F
URTHER READING:
Baum, Frank Joslyn, and Russell P. Macfall. To Please a Child: A
Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz. Chicago,
Reilly & Lee, 1961.
Fricke, John, Jay Scarfone, and William Stillman. The Wizard of Oz:
The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History. New York,
Warner Books, 1989.
Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of ‘‘The Wizard of Oz.’’ New York,
Delta, 1989.
Hearn, Michael Patrick. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. New York,
Clarkson Potter, 1973.
Shipman, David. Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American
Legend. New York, Hyperion, 1993.
Vare, Ethlie Ann, editor. Rainbow: A Star-Studded Tribute to Judy
Garland. New York, Boulevard Books, 1998.
WKRP in Cincinnati
The sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati mirrored late-1970s American
culture through the lives and antics of the employees of a small AM
WOBBLIESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
165
radio station. In its four-year run on CBS from 1978 to 1982, WKRP
developed one of the best ensemble casts on television and produced
some of the more memorable scenes from the period. The show’s
ability to build contemporary issues into many of the stories makes it a
time capsule for the period, as it dealt with issues such as alcoholism,
urban renewal, drugs, infidelity, crime, guns, gangs, elections, and
even other television shows. In a classic episode about a Thanksgiv-
ing promotion gone bad, Les Nesman’s report—a dead-on take from
the Hindenburg disaster—and Arthur Carlson’s trailing words—‘‘As
God is my witness I thought turkeys could fly’’—crackle with the
show’s characteristic intelligence and humor.
—Frank E. Clark
F
URTHER READING:
Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory to Prime
Time Network TV Shows. 5th Edition. New York, Ballantine, 1992.
Kassel, Michael. America’s Favorite Radio Station: WKRP in Cin-
cinnati. Bowling Green, Popular Press, 1993.
McNeil, Alex. Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Pro-
gramming from 1948 to the Present. 3rd edition. New York,
Penguin Books, 1991.
Wobblies
A radical labor union committed to empowering all workers,
especially the nonskilled laborers excluded from the American
Federation of Labor (AFL), the so-called Wobblies, members of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), played a pivotal role in
America’s labor history. Believing that the nation’s most exploited
and poorest workers deserved a voice, the Wobblies called for ‘‘One
Big Union’’ that would challenge the capitalist system first in the
United States and later worldwide.
In 1905 a group of two hundred radical labor activists met in
Chicago and formed the IWW. The group was overwhelmingly leftist
and called for the ultimate overthrow of capitalism worldwide.
Immediately feared by most and despised by AFL leader Samuel
Gompers, the Wobblies challenged the status quo and fought for the
rights of America’s working poor. The Wobblies planned to do what
no union had tried before: unite blacks, immigrants, and assembly-
line workers into one powerful force.
IWW leaders included some of the most famous names in
American labor history, such as Big Bill Haywood, head of the
Western Federation of Miners; Mary ‘‘Mother’’ Jones; and Eugene
Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party. Initially, the ranks of the IWW
were filled with western miners under Haywood’s control. These
individuals became increasingly militant as they were marginalized
by the AFL. Traveling hobo-like by train, IWW organizers fanned out
across the nation. Wobbly songwriters like Joe Hill immortalized the
union through humorous folk songs. The simple call for an inclusive
union representing all workers took hold. At its peak, 1912-1917,
IWW membership approached 150,000, although only 5,000 to
10,000 were full-time members.
Long before the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the courageous
and militant Wobblies were calling for a socialist revolution and
began organizing strikes around the nation as a prelude to a general
worldwide strike among the working class. The strikes often turned
bloody, but the Wobblies continued to fight. They were attacked by
the newspapers, the courts, the police, and goon squads formed to
protect the interests of corporations. The IWW led important strikes at
Lawrence, Massachusetts (1912); Paterson, New Jersey (1913); and
Akron, Ohio (1913). As the Wobblies battled for free speech and
higher wages across the nation, a legendary folklore developed
regarding the union because of the violence and mayhem that seemed
to follow them everywhere. The Wobblies became the scourge of
middle-class America, especially in the highly charged atmosphere of
World War I and the postwar Red Scare. The IWW, according to labor
historian Melvyn Dubofsky in We Shall Be All, became ‘‘romanti-
cized and mythologized.’’ The reality was that the Wobblies mixed
Marxism and Darwinism with American ideals to produce a unique
brand of radicalism.
As the Wobbly ‘‘menace’’ became more influential, American
leaders took action to limit the union’s power. World War I provided
the diversion the government needed to crush the IWW once and for
all. Anti-labor forces labeled the IWW subversive allies of both
Germany and Bolshevik Russia; one senator called the group ‘‘Impe-
rial Wilhelm’s Warriors.’’ President Woodrow Wilson and his attor-
ney general believed the Wobblies should be suppressed. On Septem-
ber 5, 1917, justice department agents raided every IWW headquarters in
the country, seizing five tons of written material. By the end of
September nearly two hundred Wobbly leaders had been arrested on
sedition and espionage charges. In April 1918, 101 IWW activists
went on trial, which lasted five months and was the nation’s longest
criminal trial to date. All the defendants were found guilty, and fifteen
were sentenced to twenty years in prison, including Haywood, who
jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union where he died a decade later.
The lasting importance of the IWW was bringing unskilled
workers into labor’s mainstream. After the demise of the Wobblies,
the AFL gradually became more inclusive and political. The Con-
gress of Industrial Organizations, founded in 1935 by another mining
leader, John L. Lewis, successfully organized unskilled workers. In
1955 the AFL and CIO merged to form the AFL-CIO, America’s
leading trade union throughout the second half of the century.
The heyday of the IWW lasted less than twenty years, but in that
short span it took hold of the nation’s conscience. Nearly forgotten
today, the Wobbly spirit still can be found in novels by John Dos
Passos and Wallace Stegner, as well as numerous plays and movies.
By the 1950s and 1960s, IWW songs, collected in the famous Little
Red Song Book, were rediscovered by a new generation of activists
fighting for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.
—Bob Batchelor
F
URTHER READING:
Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood.
New York, W. W. Norton, 1983.
Conlin, Joseph R., editor. At the Point of Production: The Local
History of the IWW. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1981.
Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial
Workers of the World. Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace,
the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York,
Oxford University Press, 1987.
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166
Wodehouse, P. G. (1881-1975)
P. G. Wodehouse’s best known creations are upper-class incom-
petent Bertie Wooster, and his capable servant, Jeeves, who first
appeared in the story ‘‘Extricating Young Gussie’’ in 1917. His
satirical view of the Jazz Age is both affectionate and incisive; he
pokes fun at such emblems of the inter-war period as flappers,
gangsters, the fascist ‘‘Black Shirts,’’ and the dreaded moralizing
aunt. Born Pelham Grenville Wodehouse in Guildford, Surrey, and
educated at Dulwich College in London, he took United States
citizenship in 1955, having lived there from 1909. A journalist and
writer of over ninety books, Wodehouse also worked as a lyricist and
writer with such luminaries as Jerome Kern and George Gershwin.
Aged ninety-three, newly knighted, and with a waxwork of himself in
Madame Tussaud’s in London, he declared himself satisfied. He died
the same year.
—Chris Routledge
F
URTHER READING:
Green, B. P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography. London, Pavilion
Books, 1981.
Wodehouse, P. G. Over Seventy: An Autobiography with Digressions.
London, Jenkins, 1957.
Wolfe, Nero
See Stout, Rex
Wolfe, Tom (1931—)
Since the 1960s, American journalist Tom Wolfe has been one
of the chief chroniclers of the times. Known for analyzing trends and
exposing inherent cultural absurdities, Wolfe has coined terminology
such as ‘‘radical chic’’ and ‘‘the Me decade.’’ He has the knack for
pinpointing an age, wrapping it up in vivid and readable prose, and
presenting it back to society as a kind of mirror. Wolfe was one of the
first in a cadre of writers—among them, Jimmy Breslin, Truman
Capote, Hunter Thompson, and Gay Talese—to adopt a style called
the New Journalism, the practice of writing nonfiction with many of
the traditional storytelling elements of fiction. In addition, Wolfe
distinguished himself by his frequent use of unorthodox punctuation
and spelling and by peppering his text with interjections and ono-
matopoeia. Some of his most famous works include The Kandy-
Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby (1965), The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the
Flak Catchers (1970). He was also applauded for his 1979 portrait of
the early era of the American space program, The Right Stuff, and for
his first, and so far only, novel, 1987’s social satire Bonfire of the
Vanities. Over a decade later, in late 1998, Wolfe again won warm
critical reception with his second novel, A Man in Full, which shot to
the top of the best-seller lists.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. was born on March 2, 1931, in
Richmond, Virginia. In high school, Wolfe was the editor of his
student newspaper, and he went on to serve as sports editor of the
campus paper at Washington and Lee University in Lexington,
Virginia, where he also cofounded the literary quarterly Shenandoah.
He received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1951. After that, he
went on to obtain a doctoral degree in American studies at Yale
University in 1957. Meanwhile, eager to begin a professional writing
career, he sent out one hundred letters to publications, but received
just three responses—two of them negative. He thus went to work at
the Springfield Union in Massachusetts from 1956 to 1959, then
moved to the Washington Post in June of 1959, where he won awards
for reporting and humor.
In 1962 Wolfe began working at the New York Herald Tribune.
There, he had the opportunity to contribute to its Sunday supplement,
New York, which later became an independent magazine. During a
newspaper strike, Wolfe landed an assignment for Esquire writing
about the custom car craze in California. Though he was enamored of
his subject matter—the chrome-laden, supercharged vehicles and
their young enthusiasts—Wolfe told his editor that he could not
manage to construct a story. He was told to type up his notes and send
them in so that another writer could do the job. The editor was so
struck with Wolfe’s lengthy stream-of-consciousness descriptions
and musings that he ran it unaltered. This became ‘‘There Goes
(Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Stream-
line Baby,’’ which Wolfe later included in his 1965 collection of
essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby. The
article’s fertile detail, hip language, and unusual punctuation became
Wolfe’s trademarks.
Early on, Wolfe’s style was characterized as gimmicky, but also
applauded as the best way to approach some of the wacky topics he
covered for his pieces. How better to record the rise in LSD and
growth of the hippies than to use the language of the people about
whom he wrote? Indeed, Wolfe eloquently outlined the 1960s drug
era in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in documenting the antics of
novelist Ken Kesey and his ‘‘Merry Pranksters,’’ a group of LSD
users on the West Coast who personified hippie culture. Subsequent-
ly, Wolfe delighted some and angered others in Radical Chic and
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, actually two separate long essays.
Radical Chic was his bitingly humorous depiction of a fundraising
party given by the white bourgeois in support of the Black Panthers.
His satiric observations cut too close to the bone for some white
liberals and black activists; still others were appalled by his seemingly
cruel mimicry. However, many critics praised his sharp eye and
sociological approach.
Wolfe toned down his style somewhat to pen The Right Stuff in
1979, a best-seller explaining the rise of NASA and the birth of the
program to send an American into space. Much of the book’s focus
was on the people involved, from Chuck Yeager, the Air Force pilot
who first broke the sound barrier, to the Apollo Seven astronauts and
their families. It gave a personal, behind-the-scenes look at the lives
affected by the space program, painting the men not only as heroes
with the requisite ‘‘stuff’’ needed to fulfill such a duty, but as regular
humans with failings and feelings as well. Wolfe’s nonfiction through-
out his career was as gripping as fiction due to his use of the genre’s
devices: dialogue, a shifting point-of-view, character development,
and intensive descriptions of setting and other physical qualities in a
scene. He finally tried his hand at a novel in 1987, publishing the
widely praised Bonfire of the Vanities, a keen and darkly witty profile
of 1980s Americana, from the bottom social strata to the top. His
second novel, A Man in Full (1998), dealt with similar themes of race
and class in late-twentieth-century America, but took place in the up-
and-coming metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia. A Man in Full was
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167
trademark Wolfe, featuring encylopedic knowledge of a variety of
subcultures and incisive observations about each. It, too, was a
popular and critical success.
Being one of the most visible purveyors of the art known as New
Journalism, Wolfe co-edited and contributed to an anthology titled
The New Journalism in 1973. A staple in some college journalism
courses, the volume expertly collects some of the finest examples of
the practice from top names in the field and explained the constructs
involved. Wolfe has also served as a contributing editor of Esquire
magazine since 1977. Though his novel was considered a fine
achievement, his contribution to the field of literature generally rests
on his nonfiction sociocultural examinations.
—Geri Speace
F
URTHER READING:
Lounsberry, Barbara, ‘‘Tom Wolfe.’’ Dictionary of Literary Biogra-
phy, Volume 152: American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth
Series. James Giles and Wanda Giles, editors. Detroit, Gale
Research, 1995.
McKeen, William. Tom Wolfe. New York, Twayne, 1995.
Salamon, Julie. The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes
to Hollywood. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Scura, Dorothy M., editor. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson,
University of Mississippi Press, 1990.
Shomette, Doug, editor. The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe. Westport,
Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1992.
Wolfe, Tom, and E.W. Johnson, editors. The New Journalism. New
York, Harper, 1973.
The Wolfman
The Wolfman—a bipedal, cinematic version of the werewolf
archetype—dramatically embodies the Jekyll/Hyde (superego/id) di-
chotomy present in us all. The Wolfman first took center stage in
Universal’s Werewolf of London (1935), starring Henry Hull in a role
reprised decades later by Jack Nicholson (Wolf, 1994). Soon after,
Curt Siodmak (Donovan’s Brain) finished the screenplay for Univer-
sal’s latest horror classic, The Wolf Man (1941), directed by George
Waggner. Lon Chaney, Jr. starred as Lawrence Talbot, an American-
educated Welshman who wants nothing more than to be cured of his
irrepressible lycanthropy. Make-up king Jack Pierce devised an
elaborate yak-hair costume for Chaney that would come to serve as
the template for countless Halloween masks. Siodmak’s story dif-
fered from previous werewolf tales in emphasizing the repressed
sexual energy symbolically motivating Talbot’s full-moon transfor-
mations. Four more Chaney-driven Wolfman films came out in the
1940s; numerous imitators, updates, and spoofs have since followed.
—Steven Schneider
F
URTHER READING:
Skal, David. ‘‘‘I Used to Know Your Daddy’: The Horrors of War,
Part Two.’’ The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.
New York, W.W. Norton, 1993, 211-227.
Lon Chaney Jr. in character in the film Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.
Twitchell, James B. ‘‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Werewolf.’’ Dreadful
Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York, Oxford
University Press, 1985, 204-257.
Wolfman Jack (1938-1995)
With his trademark gravelly voice and howl, disc jockey Wolfman
Jack became a cultural icon over the airwaves during the 1960s and
was integral in popularizing rock music. The first radio personality to
introduce rhythm-and-blues music to a mainstream audience, he
opened the doors for African American artists to reach widespread
success in the music world. The Wolfman did more than announce
songs over the radio; his unique personality lent a context to the sound
of a new generation and made him the undisputed voice of rock
and roll.
Wolfman Jack was born Robert Weston Smith in Brooklyn, New
York, on January 21, 1938 and grew up in a middle-class environ-
ment. Always fond of music, as a teenager he would pretend he was a
disc jockey using his own stereo equipment. After some odd jobs
selling encyclopedias and Fuller brushes, Wolfman Jack attended the
National Academy of Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. He got his
professional start in 1960 at WYOU in Newport News, Virginia, a
station that catered to a mostly black audience. There, the Wolfman
began experimenting with on-air characters, and off the air, hosted
dance parties. In 1962, he crossed the border to begin airing a show on
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168
Wolfman Jack
Mexican radio’s XERF, which held an extremely powerful 250,000-
watt signal that reached across much of the continent. At this job, Bob
Smith developed his Wolfman Jack persona.
Wolfman Jack’s raspy voice and on-air howls and commands to
‘‘get nekkid’’ caught the attention of young music fans across the
country. Unfortunately, the Federal Trade Commission was interest-
ed in his advertisements for an array of products over his show,
including drug paraphernalia and sugar pills that supposedly helped
with sexual arousal, which led to the demise of the station’s profits.
Meanwhile, however, the Wolfman became known for playing a
range of black artists such as Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Clarence
Carter, and more, leading to the crossover of African American artists
into white culture. Though record company executives were pleased
to see their markets broadening, not everyone was thrilled with the
development, since integration was still a new concept. Later, when
Wolfman Jack moved back to Louisiana and hosted racially mixed
dances, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on his lawn. Subsequently,
Bob Smith kept Wolfman Jack within the confines of the studio to
avoid hostility.
Later, Wolfman Jack moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where
he ran a small local station and sent taped shows down to XERF.
Wishing to resume live on-air performances, in 1966 he and a partner
opened their own station on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, which
flourished until 1971. After that folded, Wolfman Jack accepted a
humble salary at KDAY and also began hosting the television show
Midnight Special on NBC, airing from 1972 to 1981. He appeared in
most of the episodes. He also had a part as himself in the hit George
Lucas film American Graffiti, a nostalgia movie about a group of
teenagers in the early 1960s. The appearance finally put a face to the
name for fans, who were reassured to discover that the Wolfman
looked every bit the part, with bulging eyes and a bushy beard,
sideburns, and hairstyle. Wolfman Jack used this publicity to land
jobs on commercials and appearing at concerts and conventions. He
was also a guest on Hollywood Squares, and began working on
WNBC in New York City hosting a radio show. In addition, he lent
his voice to the rock song ‘‘Clap for the Wolfman’’ by the Guess Who.
In the early 1990s, Wolfman Jack flew from his home in North
Carolina to Washington, D.C. each Friday to host the syndicated radio
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169
oldies program Live from Planet Hollywood on WXTR-FM. In 1995,
he published his autobiography, which related the ups and downs of
his career, from hobnobbing with other celebrities to his battle with a
cocaine addiction. Shortly after completing a 20-day tour to promote
the book, he died of a heart attack at his home in Belvidere, North
Carolina, on July 1, 1995. He was survived by his wife of 34 years,
Elizabeth ‘‘Lou’’ Lamb Smith, and his two children, Todd Weston
Smith and Joy Renee Smith.
—Geri Speace
F
URTHER READING:
Stark, Phyllis. ‘‘Wolfman Dies on Cusp of Greatness.’’ Billboard.
July 15, 1995, 4.
Wolfman Jack with Byron Lauren. Have Mercy! Confessions of the
Original Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. New York, Warner Books, 1995.
Woman’s Day
Begun during the 1930s depression, Woman’s Day magazine
‘‘like the supermarket. . . helped to change the habits of the American
family,’’ according to Helen Woodward in The Lady Persuaders.
Woman’s Day began as a giveaway menu leaflet, the ‘‘A&P Menu
Sheet,’’ published and distributed to its customers by the Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. The sheet ‘‘told the housewife how
to get the most for her food dollar, then how to use the food purchased
to provide her family with appetizing and nourishing meals,’’ James
Playsted Wood reported in Magazines in the Twentieth Century. It
included suggested menus for families with adequate as well as for
those with meager and less-than-meager budgets. The first issue in
1934 offered menus for a family of four ranging from eleven to
thirteen dollars a week to five to six dollars a week. The April 30,
1934, sheet contained ‘‘menus especially adapted to the needs
of children.’’
The menu sheet was so successful and so expensive to produce
that two A&P executives, Frank Wheeler and Donald P. Hanson,
developed plans to make a women’s service magazine of it. A
subsidiary was founded, and in October 1937 the first 815,000 copies
of Woman’s Day were ready for sale for three cents in A&P grocery
stores. Six of the 32 pages were devoted to recipes and menus. Other
pages included advertising for products chiefly found in the A&P, an
article that told ‘‘What to Do about Worry,’’ and another that asked,
‘‘Is Football Worthwhile?’’ From its beginning, the magazine con-
tained how-to-do-it articles, expanded in 1947 to a complete how-to
section, ‘‘How to Make It—How to Do It—How to Fix It.’’ By 1940
the magazine was able to guarantee advertisers a circulation of
1.5 million.
In 1943, Mabel Hill Souvaine began her fifteen-year tenure as
editor, and under her management the magazine grew in circulation to
nearly five million. By 1952, Woman’s Day was distributed in 4,500
A&P stores and, like its arch rival, Family Circle, was, as reported in
Business Week, ‘‘hard on the heels of the big women’s service
magazines.’’ In the 1950s, Woman’s Day told stores which dress
patterns it would feature and then told readers which stores stocked
fabrics appropriate for those patterns. In 1958, after a federal judge
dismissed a suit brought by several food companies that alleged the
magazine engaged in discriminatory practices that guaranteed it
advertising revenues, A&P sold Woman’s Day to the Fawcett Company.
Of the many store-distributed magazines founded in the 1930s,
Woman’s Day and Family Circle emerged as the hardiest and most
prosperous. With a readership of nearly 20 million in the late 1980s,
Woman’s Day was a close competitor to the ‘‘world’s largest wom-
en’s magazine,’’ Family Circle, which boasted a readership of more
than 21 million. By the 1990s, Woman’s Day continued to be one of
the most popular sources of information designed specifically for
women and their daily life.
—Erwin V. Johanningmeier
F
URTHER READING:
‘‘Food-Store Magazines Hit the Big Time.’’ Business Week. No.
1171, February 9, 1952.
Taft, William H. American Magazines for the 1980s. New York,
Hasting House Publishers, 1982.
Wood, James Playsted. Magazines in the United States. New York,
Ronald Press, 1956.
Woodward, Helen. The Lady Persuaders. New York, Ivan
Obolensky, 1960.
Wonder, Stevie (1950—)
In the 1970s, as pop music fractured into a thousand competing
subgenres, Stevie Wonder blended pop, jazz, soul, rock, funk, and
reggae without trivializing or pastiching. As he grew from child
prodigy to music’s foremost ambassador, he topped the charts while
winning three consecutive Album of the Year Grammy awards. A
producer, arranger, composer, singer, and master of numerous instru-
ments, Wonder also did more than anyone to tame the synthesizer,
transforming it from special effect to musical instrument. Lyrically,
he addressed everything from social inequity to romance and heart-
break, from Plant Rights to the birth of his daughter; and topped it all
off with unrelenting good humor.
Born prematurely on May 13, 1950, Stevland Judkins (later
Stevland Morris) lost his sight while in a hospital incubator. From his
earliest years he demonstrated an aptitude for music, banging on
anything he could get his hands near until his family managed, despite
their poverty, to acquire some instruments for him to play. When he
was ten years old, a family friend introduced the boy to Motown
founder Berry Gordy, who promptly signed the youth he soon
renamed ‘‘Little Stevie Wonder.’’ In addition to performing and
recording, Wonder also took music lessons from Motown’s legendary
studio band, the Funk Brothers. Though two early singles flopped, the
boy’s exuberance and showmanship came through on a 1963 live
recording, ‘‘Fingertips Part Two,’’ that soon became a number one
single; the album, Recorded Live—The Twelve Year Old Genius, also
rose to number one, a first for Motown.
A couple of lean years followed before Wonder displayed an
ability to write his own songs: his 1965 composition ‘‘Uptight’’
became a major hit and Gordy, who usually discouraged artists from
writing their own material, assigned songwriters to help the budding
genius. Over the next few years, hits included ‘‘For Once in My
Life,’’ ‘‘I Was Made to Love Her,’’ and a cover of Bob Dylan’s
‘‘Blowin’ in the Wind’’ which marked Wonder’s (and Motown’s)
first take on social themes. Wonder’s ‘‘My Cherie Amour’’ was
recorded in 1966 but only saw release in 1969 as a ‘‘B’’ side; it proved
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170
Stevie Wonder
Motown’s Quality Control department wrong when it soared up the
charts. As he grew, Wonder became increasingly disenchanted with
Motown’s assembly line approach to hit-making, though he had more
freedom than most of the label’s artists. He was allowed to start
producing some of his own music starting in 1968, and in 1970 won a
Best R&B (rhythm and blues) Producer Grammy for Signed, Sealed
& Delivered.
But in 1971, when he reached the age of majority and received a
ten-year backlog of royalties, he did not re-sign with the company.
Instead, he invested much of his fortune in new synthesizers and
devoted himself to recording at Electric Lady Studios, designed by
fellow sonic explorer Jimi Hendrix. Shocked that Wonder would
consider abandoning the Motown family, Gordy negotiated a new
contract that gave the artist unprecedented artistic freedom, including
his own music publishing company. Wonder responded with a run of
the most innovative, popular, and critically praised albums in Motown
history, starting with two albums in 1972: Music of My Mind and
Talking Book, which spawned two number one singles, the ballad
‘‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’’ and the funk tune ‘‘Supersti-
tion.’’ The astonishing diversity of the material and the ear-opening
range of synthesized sounds (programmed by associate producers
Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil) were to become trademarks
of Wonder’s adult career. The following three albums, Innervisions,
Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and the double album Songs in the Key of
Life each won Album of the Year Grammies, and contained hit singles
like ‘‘Livin’ for the City,’’ ‘‘You Haven’t Done Nothin’,’’ ‘‘I Wish,’’
and ‘‘Sir Duke.’’ The combination of trenchant political lyrics set to
breathtaking melodies, unorthodox harmonies, and satisfying rhythms
set a high-water mark for pop music; his positive, engaging manner
kept the material from dragging the listener down.
Wonder was the foremost contributor to a trend in 1970s soul
music (also upheld by Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers, and
War, among others) that shined a bright light on social problems but
always with spirituality, a constructive attitude, and musical innova-
tion. His do-it-yourself approach inspired a generation of artists who
wrote and produced their own material (Prince being the most
prominent example), and his unwillingness to take the easy way out
has resulted in a book of compositions frequently played and recorded
by top jazz musicians. Wonder’s easy good cheer refuted the stereo-
type of the troubled, harassed superstar.
After Songs, however, his fame began to fade. A 1979 soundtrack
to the film version of the bestselling non-fiction book The Secret Life