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traditional themes-the injustice done to Native Americans. Yet these films also display a willingness to explore the roles of women and ethnic minorities. They are also far more inclined toward moral ambiguity, suggesting-in keeping with the emergent "sensitive male" ideal of the late twentieth century-that there is little redemption in violence, and that a new standard for the definition of manhood and masculin ity is needed in a postindustrial society trying to redefine gender relations.

B I B LIOGRAPHY

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999.

Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. New York: l. B. Taurus, 1 997.

Hardy, Phil. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Western. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1994.

Luhr, William. "The Scarred Woman Behind the Gun: Gender, Race, and History in Recent Westerns." Bilingual Review 20, no. 1 ( 1 995): 37---42.

Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1 992. FURTHER READING

Aquila, Richard. Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 996.

Buscombe, Edward, and Roberta E. Pearson, eds. Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western. London: British Film Institute, 1998.

Mac Reynolds, Douglas J. "Alive and Well: Western Myth in Western Movies." Literature Film Quarterly 26, no. I ( 1998): 46-52. Studlar, Gaylyn, and Matthew Bernstein. John Ford Made Westerns:

Filming the Legend in the Sound Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001 .

Wellmann, Jeffrey. The Western: Parables of the American Dream. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1 999.

RELATED ENTRIES

Boone, Daniel; Cold War; Cooper, Gary; Cowboys; Crockett, Davy; Eastwood, Clint; Gilded Age; Heroism; Hollywood; Industrialization; Leatherstocking Tales; Nativism; Populism; Progressive Era; Television; Urbanization; Victorian Era; Vietnam War; Violence; Wayne, John; Western Frontier

-Walter F. Bell

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Throughout u.s. history, whiteness as a marker of racial iden tity, like masculinity as a gender identity, has often been asso ciated with power, dominance, and the marginalization (and sometimes oppression) of others. Both whiteness and male ness have often derived their cultural force and power from being represented as universal categories, rather than expressly acknowledged as simply signifiers of race or gender. Whiteness and manhood have reinforced one another in U.S. society, usually through attempts by white males in power to deny that nonwhite males are true "men;' and thereby to exclude them from the privileges, rights, and opportunities associated with manhood in American culture.

Whiteness and Masculinity: 1619-1 840

During the seventeenth century, as white indentured servants and African slaves coexisted in colonial America, and as colonial societies were still in a state of social flux, definitions of mas culinity were not explicitly tied to whiteness. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, the decline of indentured servitude and the racialization of unfree labor were accompanied by an increasingly close link between free dom and manhood on the one hand and whiteness on the other.

By the 1 780s commentators consciously tied manhood to whiteness. The independent producer and property owner cel ebrated by J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur in his Letters From An American Farmer ( 1 782) was both male and white. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1 776 that all men are created equal, he was referring to white men. In Notes on the State o/Virginia ( 1784), Jefferson declared nonwhites unfit for republican citi zenship and participation in a form of government based on political equality. The U.S. Constitution, written in 1 787, enacted the notion of the ideal citizen as a white male subject who is protected in his right to acquire property-including the right to own blacks as slaves. The Naturalization Act of 1 790 limited the privilege of naturalization, and therefore the rights of political manhood, to those who were white.

Political change further reinforced the ideological link between whiteness and male citizenship and showed that white masculinity, despite its exclusionary functions, had powerful assimilative consequences along class lines. By 1 820 all the U.S. states had adopted universal white-male suffrage. States such as Connecticut ( 1 8 1 8) and New York ( 1 82 1 ) , for example, further limited the rights of free blacks as they expanded the rights of free white men. Connecticut excluded blacks from suffrage, and New York imposed property quali fications and prohibitive residence requirements on black

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suffrage. In effectively making class insignificant as a deter minant of who counted as a citizen, universal white-male suffrage-and the concept of democratic manhood it gener ated-magnified the importance of, and the association between, whiteness and masculinity.

Competition in the capitalist marketplace-from which women and nonwhite men were largely excluded-served as another arena for affirming the identification of manliness with whiteness. Among middle-class Americans, the market revolu tion generated a model of masculinity that emphasized bread winning, economic advancement, and domesticity, and which was closely associated with whiteness. White middle-class men generally denied that women and nonwhites possessed the "masculine" characteristics-rationality, industry, sobriety, and thrift-necessary for success in the emerging market economy. But because free rivalry among men in the marketplace meant that some would gain while others would lose, the market revo lution set in motion processes of social differentiation and class formation that assigned some white men positions of mascu line, entrepreneurial power over other white men in the work place. Working-class men complained that they were being reduced to the status of "wage slaves;' a choice of words that implied that their whiteness entitled them to the economic independence they deemed necessary to full manhood. Whiteness Challenged and Affumed: 1 840-1924 Antebellum immigration, ushering in nearly eighty years of high rates of immigration, further fueled attempts to affirm the association between masculinity and whiteness. Scientists of the 1 840s and 1 850s argued that Americans were a mixed white race of Anglo-Germanic, or Teutonic, origin. Irish immigrants, arriving in large numbers during the 1 840s and 1850s, were depicted in American public discourse-particularly in the rhetoric of the nativist movements that emerged during the period-not as white Anglo-Saxons, but as uncivilized "Celts" lacking the qualities of true manhood and unfit for citizenship. Indeed, they were often called the "black Irish," building on European associations between blackness and evil, and grouped with African Americans. Mexicans incorporated into the United States after the Mexican War ( 1846-48) were simi larly perceived as insufficiently white and masculine to merit the privileges and opportunities accorded men in American society. Indeed, the ideology of Manifest Destiny by which Americans justified the conquest of Mexican territory assumed that only white men were capable of guiding the political and economic development of North America. Under the U.S. gov ernment, many Mexicans lost title to their land, considered by many Americans to be a key signifier of manhood.

The extension of suffrage rights to black males under the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 prompted new affirmations that only white males were true men. Especially in the South, white men responded with new ways of denying black men the priv ileges and rights of manhood on the basis of race. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1 866 in Tennessee, espoused an ideology of white male supremacy and sought to intimidate, socially disci pline, and murder African Americans, and black men in partic ular. In addition, southern states began to implement a system of social segregation through so-called Jim Crow laws, which were sanctioned by their respective constitutions after 1 890. While the limitations of these laws applied to both black men and black women, the penal system, including convict leasing, chain gangs, and peonage, specifically sought to curtail the privileges and immunities of black men as citizens.

Outside the South, other groups of males defined as non white were treated similarly. In part, such treatment grew out of the concern that urbanization and industrialization had sapped the physical vigor of white middle-class males and undermined their ability to compete with nonwhite men (who were arriving as immigrants in growing numbers) in the struggle for existence and social supremacy. White males responded by seeking in several ways to reinforce the link between whiteness and masculinity. Many cultural spokesmen advocated an ideal of the "strenuous life," which they felt would reinvigorate masculinity and promote the survival of the white Anglo-Saxon race. Similarly, many American men looked to competitive sport, particularly boxing, for demon strations of white men's physical superiority.

Another response was to limit immigration by peoples defined as nonwhite. In 1 882, Congress passed its first Asian exclusion law, eliminating further immigration from China and Japan and denying Asian men the access to American eco nomic opportunity that white men enjoyed. At the same time, the Spanish-American War ( 1 898), the Philippine-American War ( 1899-1902), the rise of the United States to the status of a world power, and the often imperialistic foreign policy of the U.S. government during the early twentieth century provided new outlets to apply the belief that only white males were capa ble of global leadership. The "Great White Fleet" sent around the globe by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1 908 to demon strate U.S. naval and military power was clearly intended to assert a specific militaristic brand of white manliness.

Whiteness Expanded and Weakened: 1 924-1965 During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the tradi tional association between masculinity and whiteness in American society was both strengthened and challenged. The

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Johnson-Reed Act (or Native Origins Act) of 1 924, which excluded further immigration from southern and eastern Europe and privileged immigrants from northern and western Europe, was grounded in longstanding notions of which immi grants counted as white, and therefore as men. Yet at the same time, this legislation prompted a demographic settling of the population and reduced native-born Americans' previous ten dency to regard Jews, Italians, and Irish as nonwhite. Instead, whiteness became a broader category affirming the national belonging and the manliness of ethnic populations. AI Jolson's character in The Jazz Smger ( 1927), Jakie Rabinowitz, illustrates this process when he becomes the blackface actor Jack Robin a transformation that conceals his Jewish identity, accentuates his whiteness, and facilitates his assimilation. Meanwhile, the Nineteenth Amendment ( 1920), which granted women the right to vote, de-emphasized masculinity as the basis for the rights of citizenship, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), established in 1 909, increasingly pressed for extending the privileges of man hood to African-American men.

However, as white masculinity became more ethnically inclusive, the lines of racial difference persisted. Important labor and welfare legislation of the New Deal, such as the 1934 Federal Housing Act, the 1 935 Social Security Act, and the 1936 National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act, all intended to bolster the male role of breadwinner and provider, privileged whites. Many other New Deal programs, especially in the South, were segregated by race. This exclusive association of whiteness with masculinity did not go unchallenged. In the 1 930s the Communist Party of the United States of America ( CPUSA) called on white male workers to join blacks in defending a vision of manhood grounded in class rather than race. But the CPUSA's limited appeal underscored the power of white identity among American workers.

The identification of masculinity with whiteness began to erode substantially during World War II. As Nazi Germany and its allies promoted a racist and patriarchal ideology, U.S. wartime propaganda de-emphasized whiteness and sought to highlight the racial inclusiveness of American society. The growing signif icance of civil rights groups, such as the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and federal measures such as the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 196 1 , reflected a growing effort in the United States to extend rights once associated with whiteness to nonwhites as well. Books such as Ashley Montagu's Race: Man's Most Dangerous Myth ( 1 942), Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma ( 1 944), and Franz Boas' Race and Democratic Society ( 1 945) argued that whiteness should not be made the basis for special treatment in

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a democratic society. Yet whiteness remained a basis for privilege. The wartime relocation imposed on Japanese Americans in the West, for instance, was never imposed on German Americans.

During the postwar period, amid Cold War emphases on political conformity and conventional male domestic roles, cultural critics grew increasingly concerned that white mas culinity was narrow, bland, and self-repressed. In response, a growing number of white men embraced the image of the nonconformist white man, represented most effectively by James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley. The centrality of whiteness to this new masculine image was particularly apparent in Jack Kerouac's On the Road ( 1957), in which main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty reject middle-class conformity and find masculine fulfillment only through cul tural contact with African Americans and Mexicans. Equally telling was white Americans' concern to appropriate rock and roll, a controversial new musical form pioneered by blacks, through the crowning of Elvis Presley as its "king.»

The civil rights and black nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1 960s delivered a powerful blow to traditional asso ciations of manhood with whiteness. In ways ranging from the nonviolent, moralistic, and Christian approach of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., to the militancy of Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X to the aggressive, arms-bearing posture of the Black Panther Party, African Americans asserted their claims to equal status with whites in American society. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1 964 and Voting Rights Act of 1 965 signified that whiteness would no longer entail privileged legal and political status.

Whiteness on the Defensive: 1 965-Present

The 1 965 Immigration and Nationality Act amendments, overturning the restrictive quota system of the 1 924 National Origins Act, inaugurated a new period in the history of white ness and masculinity in American history. Ethnic differences became increasingly less important for reinforcing masculin ity, yet race remained a significant parameter for manliness.

In American culture, white masculinity was increasingly depicted as being on the defensive in the face of growing civil rights and multiculturalism. White men in U.S. culture began to cast themselves as victims of circumstances beyond their control, thus inhabiting a stereotypically nonmasculine, nonwhite position. This tendency is evident in a number of popular culture images of the late twentieth century, includ ing the character Archie Bunker of the television series All in the Family ( 1 971-79); the boxer Rocky Balboa in the Rocky film series, who rises from urban obscurity to success only through intense and physically brutal struggle; and the white

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rap musician Eminem, who rose to fame during the 1 990s by celebrating his cultural victimization. Likewise, in social real ity, white supremacist groups enjoyed growing success in appealing to young white men who felt victimized by non whites and sought the empowerment to which they feel enti tled by American tradition.

Conclusion

Complicated by streams of immigration and the subsequent incorporations of ethnic populations into U.S. society, as well as by tendencies to celebrate a more multicultural soci ety, white masculinity has become a progressively more problematic, and somewhat less influential, identity marker over the course of the twentieth century. Powerful, yet some how victimized, the white male finds it increasingly difficult to stabilize his identity around male (hetero ) sexuality, race, and class. What has been portrayed as a late-twentieth-cen tury "crisis of masculinity" may be the uneasy emergence of a fragmented, postmodern self that transcends signifiers such as gender, race, and sexuality and shatters the long standing association between whiteness and masculinity in American life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1 998.

Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 1963.

Reprint, New York: Schocken, 1965.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge,

1995.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1 998.

Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1 995.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1 99 1 .

Savran, David. Taking I t Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso,

1990.

WHITE SUPREMACISM

The belief i n white supremacy forms a n integral part o f U.S. history. It is inherent in the country's founding, and gave shape to its social, political, and economic institutions in both subtle and explicit ways. The assertion of white supremacy is based on a belief in the innate superiority of white manhood, and the dominance of white manhood has historically served as both the proof and guarantee of white racial supremacy. Given the centrality of manhood to the constitution of white supremacy, challenges to white male power and authority have been viewed as threats to white supremacy itself. White supremacist movements have thus been primarily concerned with the maintenance of white male authority in both public and private spheres, insisting upon the essential nature of this authority while voicing anxieties over its instability or demise. Ideologies and Institutions of White Supremacy For much of its history, the United States has defined citizen ship through the notion of white male independence and authority, and it conferred political and economic rights accordingly. In a country whose founding doctrines assert the inalienable rights of the individual, the institution of slavery