The Cultural Deindustrialization of New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 339-386
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
White Collar ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Economic Insecurity ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

Chapter 8 examines New York’s publishing and broadcasting sectors, which underwent significant deindustrialization during the postwar period. Even as intellectuals and social commentators heralded the rising tide of affluence, supposedly epitomized by white-collar workers engaged in cultural production, in fact tens of thousands employed in the city’s culture industries experienced considerable economic insecurity and inequality. The production of primetime television entertainment largely left the city for Southern California during the 1950s, and attempts during the 1960s at revitalizing New York as a production center were unsuccessful. The structural crisis of the city’s print media led to the closing of multiple daily newspapers during the mid-1960s, followed a few years later by major magazines like Life. Although a new wave of feminist activists combatted workplace discrimination as well as sexist media content, the weakened position of unions and the more general economic retrenchment of the 1970s limited their gains.

The Making of the American Creative Class

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

During most of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United States. Within a few square miles were the headquarters of broadcast networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of book and magazine publishers, major newspapers, and advertising and design agencies. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, secretaries, and other white-collar workers made advertisements, produced media content, and enhanced the appearance of goods in order to boost sales. While this center of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labor. This book examines these workers and New York’s culture industries throughout the twentieth century. As manufacturers and retailers competed to attract consumers’ attention, their advertising expenditures financed the growth of enterprises engaged in the production of culture. With the shock of the Great Depression, employees in these firms organized unions to improve their working conditions; launched alternative media and cultural endeavors supported by public, labor, or cooperative patronage; and fought in other ways to expand their creative autonomy. As blacklisting and attacks on unions undermined these efforts after the Second World War, workers in advertising, design, publishing, and broadcasting found themselves constrained in their ability to respond to economic dislocations and to combat discrimination on the basis of gender and race in these fields of cultural production.

The Emergence of White-Collar Unionism in New York’s Culture Industries

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-97
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Professional Workers ◽  
White Collar Workers

Chapter 2 explores the development of white-collar unionism in New York’s culture industries during the Great Depression. Culture workers responded to the crisis with new organizing initiatives, many of which eventually gravitated toward the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Larger groups of workers received charters from the CIO as affiliated international unions, such as the American Newspaper Guild, with the New York locals containing a substantial share of total national membership. Organizing efforts in cultural fields that were more concentrated in the metropolitan area, like the Book and Magazine Guild and the American Advertising Guild, became local unions within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO affiliate with a general jurisdiction covering white-collar workers. This chapter also examines the important role of women activists in white-collar organizing as well as unionists’ participation in the broader Popular Front social movement of the 1930s.

Translating New York

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regina Galasso
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The City

The cultural production of Spanish-speaking New York is closely linked to the Caribbean and to Latin America at large, but the city also plays a pivotal role in the work of a host of authors from the Iberian Peninsula, writing in Spanish, Catalan, and English. In many cases, their New York City texts have marked their careers and the history of their national literatures. Drawing from a variety of genres, Translating New York recovers cultural narratives occluded by single linguistic or national literary histories, and proposes that reading these texts through the lens of translation unveils new pathways of cultural circulation and influence. Looking beyond representations of the city's physical space, Translating New York suggests that travel to the city and contact with New York's multilingual setting ignited a heightened sensitivity towards both the verbal and non-verbal languages of the city, garnering literary achievement and aesthetic innovation. Analyzing the novels, poetry, and travel narratives of Felipe Alfau, José Moreno Villa, Julio Camba, and Josep Pla, this book uncovers an international perspective of Iberian literatures. Translating New York aims to rethink Iberian literatures through the transatlantic travels of influential writers.

White-Collar Work, the Culture Industries, and the Origins of the Creative Class

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-54
Author(s):  
Shannan Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New Technology ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Related Development ◽  
The Media

Chapter 1 surveys the growth of the white-collar workforce during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the related development of the culture industries centered in New York. The fundamental relationships that linked advertisers to the media took shape during these years, as manufacturers’ need to reach potential consumers fueled the expansion of existing newspapers and magazines, quickly dominated the new technology of radio, and pushed firms to become more attentive to the design and appearance of products. Even as the culture industries swelled to meet the imperatives of consumer capitalism, economic inequality constrained consumer demand, contributing to the onset of the Great Depression. Although business interests attempted to defend capitalist principles and to maintain their control over the advertising and media enterprises, the severity and duration of the Depression incited radical critiques of both the working conditions within the culture industries and the content that they produced.

Back to Work

2018 ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Young People ◽  
First Century ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

The final chapter briefly touches on Richardson’s second divorce but focuses on her difficulties finding and keeping employment. After holding a series of jobs in various corporate and not-for-profit agencies, Richardson eventually earned a permanent civil service position with the City of New York, where she worked until the twenty-first century. In one way or another, all her jobs involved some kind of social justice. Over the last five decades, Richardson has paid close attention to social change movements, including Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and this chapter discusses her thoughts about them, particularly her view that young people have the capability and vision to lead the nation to greater freedom, just as young people did in the 1960s. She advises them to replicate the group-centered and member-driven model student activists employed in the early 1960s and to avoid becoming ideological.

scholarly journals Rubella in the developing world

1991 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Rubella Infection ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
Congenital Rubella ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City ◽  
In Pregnancy

Before Gregg's historic observation [1] rubella was not considered to have clinical or epidemiological importance in any country. In the western world epidemics occurred at varying intervals but with little morbidity and apparently only minor complications. Despite confirmation of Gregg's findings from many quarters, it was not until the worldwide outbreaks in the 1960s that the aftermath of rubella infection in pregnancy was fully realized. As a result of the 1964 outbreak in New York City, more than 1000 children were born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) and over 300 pregnancies either aborted spontaneously or were terminated for rubella infection [2]. The number of children affected represented 1% of births in the city; if extrapolated to the whole country this gave an estimated total of 30000 cases of CRS. No such disasters have so far been reported from the developing world.

scholarly journals Description of the American Community of John Steinbeck’s Adventure in Novel Travels with Charley in Search of America 1960s

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Abbas Abbas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
Research Data ◽  
American People ◽  
Eastern Region ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

This article aims at describing the social life of the American people in several places that made the adventures of John Steinbeck as the author of the novel Travels with Charley in Search of America around the 1960s. American people’s lives are a part of world civilizations that literary readers need to know. This adventure was preceded by an author’s trip in New York City, then to California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, Saint Lawrence, Quebec, Niagara Falls, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, North Dakota, the Rocky Mountains, Washington, the West Coast, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, New Orleans, Salinas, and again ended in New York. In processing research data, the writer uses one of the methods of literary research, namely the Dynamic Structural Approach which emphasizes the study of the intrinsic elements of literary work and the involvement of the author in his work. The intrinsic elements emphasized in this study are the physical and social settings. The research data were obtained from the results of a literature study which were then explained descriptively. The writer found a number of descriptions of the social life of the American people in the 1960s, namely the life of the city, the situation of the inland people, and ethnic discrimination. The people of the city are busy taking care of their profession and competing for careers, inland people living naturally without competing ambitions, and black African Americans have not enjoyed the progress achieved by the Americans. The description of American society related to the fictional story is divided by region, namely east, north, middle, west, and south. The social condition in the eastern region is dominated by beaches and mountains, and is engaged in business, commerce, industry, and agriculture. The comfortable landscape in the northern region spends the people time as breeders and farmers. The natural condition in the middle region of American is very suitable for agriculture, plantations, and animal husbandry. Many people in the western American region facing the Pacific Ocean become fishermen. The natural conditions from the plains and valleys to the hills make the southern region suitable for plantation land.

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