The thirty-sixth president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) took office after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963). A Democrat, Johnson was elected in a 1964 landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater (1909–1998). Johnson did not run for reelection in 1968, instead returning to his home state of Texas.
Two major issues—the Vietnam War (1957–1975) abroad and civil rights at home—dominated Johnson’s turbulent five years in the White House. As president, LBJ, as he became known, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark pieces of federal civil rights legislation that outlawed discrimination against African-Americans and removed the legal barriers that had prevented black citizens from voting. In addition, Johnson signed legislation greatly expanding the federal benefits available to citizens—the socalled welfare state. Medicare, Medicaid, and federal assistance to public schools all date back to the LBJ presidency.
Still, it was the unpopular conflict in Vietnam that eventually forced Johnson to retire from the White House in 1968 and has clouded his legacy ever since. American involvement in Vietnam began under President Kennedy, but Johnson and his headstrong secretary of defense, Robert McNamara (1916–), greatly increased the American military presence in Southeast Asia in the name of preventing the spread of communism.
With casualties mounting, American public opinion began to turn against the war in the mid-1960s. Johnson responded by deploying even more troops. He initially planned to run again in 1968, but polled so poorly in early Democratic primary states that he was forced to abandon his candidacy.
Johnson remains a deeply polarizing politician in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas. Liberals applaud his Great Society programs expanding the welfare state, while conservatives see them as the quintessence of government waste. Likewise, LBJ is still harshly criticized for expanding American involvement in Vietnam.
1. Among the other civil rights milestones achieved during his administration, Johnson appointed the first black cabinet secretary, Robert C. Weaver (1907–1997), and the first black US Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993).
2. Johnson won the Texas Democratic primary in his first race for the US Senate by a scant eighty-seven votes, earning him the sarcastic nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”
3. McNamara later regretted his Vietnam strategy and wrote the book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). The subsequent film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
For most of its history, the manpower of the United States Army in times of war was supplied by a draft that forced military-age men to serve in the armed forces. The abolition of the draft in 1973 and the subsequent creation of an allvolunteer army reflected a significant shift in the way American wars are fought and the way American society relates to the military.
American attitudes toward the military have varied over time, reflecting the country’s changing values. The Founders, including George Washington (1732–1799), regarded standing armies and navies with deep suspicion. Rather than fund an army, which reminded many Americans of monarchial oppression, the early United States depended on state-organized volunteer militias for its defense.
However, conscription became necessary during the Civil War (1861–1865), when the country ran short of soldiers. The Civil War–era draft was patently unfair, allowing the wealthy to buy their way out of service for a fee. It was also extremely unpopular and sparked draft riots in New York City in 1863.
The draft was reinstated during both World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945) and remained in effect during the Cold War and until 1973. For a generation of American men, dealing with local draft boards became a rite of passage. Singer Elvis Presley (1935–1977) and boxer Muhammed Ali (1942–) were infamously drafted at the pinnacle of their fame. Presley was inducted into the army in 1958 and served two years, primarily in Germany, but Ali, drafted in 1967, refused to serve during the Vietnam War (1957–1975).
Although much reformed since the Civil War, the Vietnam-era draft was riddled with unfairness. Rich and connected men often won deferments. Indeed, the unpopularity of the draft contributed to the resistance to the war.
The current all-volunteer army also has detractors, who feel the nation should share equally in the sacrifice of military service. Several Democratic members of Congress routinely introduce legislation to reinstate the draft, although the proposals never attract more than a handful of votes.
1. Although unused since the Vietnam era, the bureaucracy for the draft remains in place, and all American men are required to register with Selective Service at age eighteen in case conscription is reinstated.
2. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1981 that it was legal to exempt women from the draft.
3. During wartime, men who could prove a religious or moral objection to all war, not just the war being fought, could avoid military service by earning classification as a “conscientious objector.”
The most famous Mexican-American civil rights leader in United States history, Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) campaigned tirelessly for the rights of poor Hispanic farmhands in California and organized the first major labor union for migrant agricultural workers in 1965. Millions of Americans, appalled by the low wages and abusive working conditions on California farms exposed by Chavez and his union, joined a grape boycott in the late 1960s that forced growers to meet major union demands.
Born in rural Arizona, Chavez learned to farm on his family’s small ranch during the worst years of the Great Depression. In 1937, the family lost their property to foreclosure, and for the next several years they traveled across the West looking for work harvesting grapes, carrots, melons, and cotton. Chavez joined the US Navy in 1946 and then returned to California, settling in the San Joaquin River valley, a major agricultural center.
At the time, conditions for migrant farmworkers like Chavez were abysmal. Paid less than $1.50 an hour, they received no benefits or job security, were subject to arbitrary pay cuts, and were often exposed to toxic pesticides. Past efforts to unionize the farmhands, most of them Mexican-Americans or Filipinos, had failed.
In 1958, Chavez formed the National Farm Workers Association union (in 1972 renamed the United Farm Workers of America and commonly called the UFW). As a union leader, Chavez devoted his life to the cause and accepted only a $5-a-week salary. The union’s most notable success came in 1968, when Chavez asked Americans to boycott table grapes from the San Joaquin valley until growers recognized the union. The boycott was a huge success—about 17 million Americans stopped buying grapes—and in 1970, planters were forced to sign union contracts.
To Chavez, the purpose of the union was not solely economic. By demanding that growers respect the basic human dignity of their Hispanic workers, he was a hero and inspiration to a marginalized sector of American society.
1. Because his family moved so often in search of work, Chavez attended thirty-eight different elementary schools before dropping out for good after the eighth grade.
2. President Bill Clinton (1946–) awarded Chavez a posthumous Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, the year after his death.
3. California made Chavez’s birthday, March 31, an official state holiday in 2000.
Under the leadership of its founder, Ray Kroc, the fast-food chain McDonald’s changed the way Americans eat. Starting in 1955, Kroc (1902–1984) assembled a global empire of inexpensive restaurants famous for their golden arches logo, speedy service, and food of questionable healthfulness. By the time Kroc died, he had built McDonald’s into the country’s biggest restaurant chain and a global symbol of American cuisine.
The first McDonald’s opened in San Bernardino, California, in 1940 as a hot dog stand and barbecue place. Its owners, Dick and Mac McDonald, eventually sold the business to Kroc, a franchisee. By locating his restaurants in the growing American suburbs and advertising relentlessly, Kroc made the chain one of the most visible brands in the country.
The basic conceptual innovation of McDonald’s was to apply the assembly-line logic of automaker Henry Ford (1863–1947) to food. Unlike its competitors, McDonald’s originally did not make food to order. Kroc placed his emphasis on speed, efficiency, and quantity; for many years, the McDonald’s billboard displayed the number of burgers the chain had sold as it climbed into the billions.
McDonald’s has been highly controversial, especially in its foreign incarnations. In many countries, McDonald’s is regarded warily as an American interloper. Domestically, McDonald’s has been criticized for its low wages and high-fat food, which is sometimes blamed for the nation’s ongoing obesity crisis.
Nevertheless, the company remains highly profitable and served as an inspiration for almost all the modern chain restaurants that now dominate American dining.
1. Original prices at the first McDonald’s were fifteen cents for a hamburger, ten cents for french fries, and twenty cents for a milkshake.
2. McDonald’s parent company also operates the Chipotle Mexican Grill chain and owned Boston Market until 2007.
3. Ray Kroc owned the San Diego Padres major league baseball team for the last ten years of his life.
The federal government was forced to evacuate parts of Niagara Falls, New York, in 1978 after the discovery of toxic levels of pollution in the Love Canal section of the city. Dominating national news, the evacuation of Love Canal was a major environmental tragedy that alerted many Americans for the first time to the dangers lurking in industrial sites in their neighborhoods. In the wake of Love Canal, the government started an effort, still ongoing, to clean up the toxic legacy of the industrial age at factory sites across the nation.
Beginning in the 1920s, Love Canal was used as a toxic waste dump by chemical companies. Then, in 1953, the owner filled in the sixteen-acre site and sold it to the city, which built about 100 homes and an elementary school on the property. The workingclass residents who moved into Love Canal had no idea their homes were built on top of leaking drums of deadly chemicals, including cancer-causing benzene. For decades, babies born in Love Canal had higher-than-average levels of birth defects and miscarriages, and the cancer rate in the community was extremely high.
When researchers finally pieced together the clues connecting the waste dumps with Love Canal’s health problems, President Jimmy Carter (1924–) declared Love Canal a federal emergency area in the summer of 1978. The school on the site was demolished, and some residents were evacuated. Eventually, the government reimbursed hundreds of residents who were forced out of the neighborhood, most of which was then bulldozed.
In 1980, motivated by Love Canal, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, more commonly known as Superfund, which provided federal funds to clean up the most hazardous polluted sites. More than 1,000 locations across the United States—from nail factories in Massachusetts to abandoned mines in Montana—were placed on the list in an effort to protect the public from public health emergencies like Love Canal.
1. Originally, chemical companies were taxed to pay for Superfund cleanups, but now the cleanups are paid for by taxpayers at large.
2. Part of the Love Canal area was declared safe and reopened for construction in the 1990s.
3. The neighborhood was named for William T. Love, a nineteenth-century entrepreneur who wanted to build a canal bypassing nearby Niagara Falls that would generate hydroelectric power.
Thomas Pynchon (1937–) is among the most critically acclaimed contemporary American authors, known for his byzantine, incomprehensible novels and reclusive lifestyle. He has written six books over about four decades, from V. in 1963 to Against the Day in 2006. Pynchon’s influence is huge, and he is considered one of the leading postmodern writers in American literature.
A recluse, few details of Pynchon’s life are known. Born in Glen Cove, New York, he served in the US Navy, graduated from Cornell University in 1959, and worked briefly for Boeing as an engineer. His first book, V. was a literary sensation for its provocative symbolism—what does V. really stand for?—and his writing style; it won him the Faulkner First Novel Award in 1963. The Crying of Lot 49, his most widely read book, was published in 1966.
Next came his famous, 760-page epic, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). A landmark of twentieth-century American fiction, the novel starts in the late stages of World War II (1939–1945), during the German rocket bombardment of London, and continues beyond Germany’s surrender into the war-torn landscape of continental Europe. Gravity’s Rainbow has divided critics for more than three decades; it won the National Book Award in 1974 but the same year was dismissed as “unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene” by the Pulitzer Prize committee. Pynchon’s writing contains countless references to obscure songs, calculus equations, comic books, movies, and other cultural ephemera, and many readers rely on a concordance to decipher the book.
After the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow and the controversy that surrounded the book, Pynchon literally disappeared, his whereabouts unknown for most of the next two decades. He resurfaced in 1990 with the publication of Vineland, a slightly more accessible story of burnt-out ex-hippies in Northern California. He published Mason & Dixon in 1997. This novel is a retelling of the story of Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), the British surveyors who mapped the Mason-Dixon line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. In Pynchon’s fictionalized account, which he wrote in archaic English to mimic the style of the eighteenth century, the two men encounter many of the Founding Fathers in their travels, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
1. Pynchon was a passing acquaintance of Bob Dylan (1941–), on whom one of the minor characters in V. is based.
2. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), one of Pynchon’s ancestors was a judge at the Salem witch trials.
3. According to legend, Pynchon wrote the first draft of Gravity’s Rainbow in longhand on graph paper.
The Godfather, a film directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1939–) and released to critical acclaim in 1972, was a huge hit that launched the movie career of Al Pacino (1940–) and cemented the legendary reputation of Marlon Brando (1924–2004), who won that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the aging Mafia kingpin Vito Corleone. The movie itself won the Best Picture Oscar.
The epic, three-hour movie, set in the 1940s and 1950s, follows the fortunes of the Corleone crime family in New York City’s bloody mob wars. Based on the bestselling 1969 novel of the same title by Mario Puzo (1920–1999), The Godfather features characters loosely inspired by actual mob figures from the “Five Families” that ruled New York’s criminal underworld.
In addition to Brando and Pacino, the movie starred James Caan (1940–) and Robert Duvall (1931–) in supporting roles. All four were nominated for Oscars for their performances.
Although the dark, atmospheric cinematography of The Godfather is outstanding, critics credit the bravura acting performances of Brando and Pacino for transforming The Godfather into a timeless classic. The New York Times, reviewing the movie in 1972, immediately recognized the film’s accomplishment, calling it “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.”
The film is not without detractors. Some critics have argued that The Godfather romanticized organized crime and fostered negative stereotypes of Italian-Americans. Still, the film nearly always finished at the top of lists of the century’s greatest American movies, second only to Citizen Kane (1941) in the estimation of many critics.
1. The film’s major competitor at the Oscars was Cabaret (1972). It won Best Director (Bob Fosse, 1927– 1987), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli, 1946–), and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey, 1932–).
2. Part of The Godfather was shot on Sicily, the Italian island considered the birthplace of the Mafia.
3. The Godfather, Part II (1974) also won the Academy Award for Best Picture.