Educational and Racial Differences in Birthrates

Белые рожают чаще африканцев, некоторые отказываются от детей ради крутого образования и карьеры. Все, хватит.

1.3 Growth through Natural Increase: Deaths

Fertility rates are not the only factor influencing population growth. The population also grows when people are healthier and therefore live longer. Just as the birthrate has been steadily declining in the United States, so, too, has the death rate.

American babies are healthier than ever before in this country’s history and 99.3 percent will survive to their first birthday. Although the records from a century ago are incomplete, they indicate that only 84 percent of infants survived their first year. And a century before that, about 80 percent of infants may have lived to their first birthday. Most of the improvement in infant health has come in the 20th century and is due to improved childcare, better medical care for mothers and children, better sanitation, and the development of antibiotics.

Children born in 2002 can expect to reach age 74.5 if they are male and age 80.2 if they are female. Around the turn of the 20th century, the average life expectancy for women was 48, and for men it was 46. A century earlier, when childbirth was more dangerous, women had the lower life expectancy, around 35, compared with 37 for men.

Americans are living longer because medical care and public sanitation have improved substantially. However, infant survival and life expectancies are lower in the United States than in other developed countries because of disparities in wealth, education, and access to health care. In Japan in 2002, men could expect to live to age 77.7 and women to 84.3; in Sweden men could expect to live to age 77.2 and women to 82.6. In western Europe, the infant mortality rate is about 5 deaths per 1,000 births; in Japan it is 3.8; in the United States it is 6.7.

In the American population, wealthier people live longer, healthier lives than do poorer people. Great differences between rich and poor can produce poor health for the poorest citizens. From the 1920s to the early 1970s, America experienced an expansion of the middle class. Since then, the rich have nearly doubled their share of the country’s wealth. Hopelessness and rage can lead to substance abuse, violence, and mental depression, which can negatively affect health and longevity. More direct effects of poverty that shorten life spans for the poorest populations include malnutrition, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and lack of medical attention.

More cohesive communities with a more equitable distribution of income and goods, even if relatively poor, tend to have better overall health than those with great disparities in wealth. For example, in the early 1990s the District of Columbia, where there are great disparities between the wealthy neighborhoods and the majority of poor neighborhoods, had an overall life expectancy of 62 for men and 74 for women. In Kansas, where the median household income was below that of Washington, D.C., but where the social differences are less sharply defined, the life expectancy was 73 for men and 80 for women.

Life expectancies also differ substantially by ethnicity and race. In 1999, whites, who tend to be wealthier, had a life expectancy of 77.3, and blacks, who tend to have less wealth, had a life expectancy of 71.4. This is, however, a smaller gap than once existed.

As noted earlier, women have a longer life expectancy than men. This is because women have a somewhat stronger immune system and suffer less from stress-related illnesses and from alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence. Because of the longer female life span, the U.S. population had more women than men in 2002—143.3 million women compared to 137.3 million men. Up to age 30, however, men outnumbered women in the United States, for two reasons: slightly more males are born than females, and slightly more young men immigrate into the United States than women.

Еще четыре подраздела. Обойдемся без них.

2. Age of U.S. Population

America’s population is growing because more people are being born than are dying and because immigrants, most in their late teens or early 20s, are still coming to the United States. This combination means that the American population is younger than in other developed nations. In 2001, 21 percent of the population in the United States was under the age of 15 This compares with 18 percent in Europe and 15 percent in Japan. Because the U.S. population is young, education costs are higher in the United States. Another effect of the increased number of young people is the larger market for goods and services. Furthermore, these young people will eventually be contributing to Social Security to help support the elderly. A younger population also indicates a smaller proportion of older people. In 2001, 13 percent of the U.S. population was over age 65, compared with 18 percent in Japan, and 15 percent in Europe.

The average age of the American population is, however, older than it once was, and projections indicate the percentage of the population over 65 will continue to increase through the first quarter of the 21st century. In the first census of the United States, taken in 1790, about half of the white male population was under the age of 16. This extremely youthful society was a result of the high birthrate and the relatively low life expectancy that prevailed in the 18th century. No figures exist on the elderly at that time, but the percentage was undoubtedly quite small. By 1890 the proportion of the population under age 15 had fallen to 35.5 percent, in large part because of the declining birthrate. Only 3.9 percent of the population was over age 65. The median age of the population—that is, the age at which half the people are older and half are younger—had risen to 22. By 2001, the proportion of the population under age 15 had fallen to 21.1 percent, while 12.6 percent of the population was over age 65. The median age in 1990 was 32.8, and according to estimates it had increased to 35.9 by 2001.

The rapid increase in the median age between 1990 and 2000 was the result of the aging of the baby-boom generation—people who were reaching their 30s, 40s, and 50s. The percentage of those under age 5 increased by 4.5 percent during these years, while the percentage of the population between 50 and 54 increased by some 55 percent. The numbers of those between 65 and 69 years of age actually decreased between 1990 and 2000, a reflection of the decline in birthrate during the 1930s depression.

Age differences also vary by ethnicity and race. The median age in 2000 for the non-Hispanic white population was 37.7, for non-Hispanic blacks 30.2, for Native Americans 28.0, for Asian and Pacific Islanders 27.5, and for Hispanics was 24.6. These differences stem in large measure from differences in birthrates.

Economists look carefully at the proportions of the population under age 15 and over 65. They assume people in these age groups do not hold paying jobs and therefore depend for support on those of working age (between 16 and 64). The proportion of dependents (meaning nonworking people) to working-age people suggests the productive capacity of the economy and the social expenses of providing for the nonworking population. In 1790 the proportion of workers to dependents was roughly 50-50. Supporting so many dependents absorbed substantial proportions of social resources and thus slowed economic growth. By 1890 the proportion in America had shifted in favor of those of working age, and about 40 dependents existed for every 60 workers. In the late 1990s there were 35 dependents for every 65 workers.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the proportion of elderly people in the population was increasing, meaning that there were fewer workers per dependent over 65. With the oldest members of the baby-boom generation expected to reach retirement age in 2011, the ratio of workers to dependents will drop even further. This aging of the population poses complex questions, such as how to provide funding for the Social Security system, whether to make medical insurance more widely available, determining who should pay for long-term care of the elderly, and questioning the meaning of retirement. It is unclear how old age will be experienced in the future. The division of social resources between the youngest and the oldest Americans, for example, between schools and retirement communities, has become a matter of considerable debate.

Within the United States, the age structure of the population varies from one region to another and is influenced by people moving into and out of particular regions as well as by the residential choices immigrants make. People tend to move between the ages of 15 and 25 as they attend schools and universities away from home, find apprenticeships and training programs, and seek job opportunities. After age 35 many people have established careers, started families, and made friends and connections, and are less likely to move.

The states that attract newcomers, such as Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, tend to have the highest proportion of young people and the smallest proportion of older people. Job opportunity is the most frequent reason for moving, although recreational and environmental considerations are also important. Those who move also consider the available housing stock and the cost of living. Of all the states, Utah had the largest portion of young people at the beginning of the 21st century, largely because of high birthrates among its predominantly Mormon population. The states that experience more people leaving than arriving tend to have fewer young people and more older ones. Such states include Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and North Dakota. Similarly, many northeastern cities have large elderly populations, while suburbs in the Southeast and Southwest have large populations of younger people. Florida is an exception to these trends, because it attracts many retirees as well as younger Cubans, Haitians, and other immigrants.

3. Geographic Distribution of U.S. Population

In 2000 almost two-thirds of the U.S. population lived in states along the three major coasts—38 percent along the Atlantic Ocean, 16 percent along the Pacific Ocean, and 12 percent along the Gulf of Mexico. The smallest numbers lived in the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, particularly in the central and northern Great Plains. While the Rocky Mountain and plains states account for about half of the landmass of the United States, only 34 percent of the population resides in these areas.

Americans are highly mobile and move an average of 11 to 13 times in their lives, although in the 1980s and 1990s Americans moved less often than they did in the era immediately following World War II. At the beginning of the 21st century the fastest-growing areas were in the Southeast, especially Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida; in the Rocky Mountains, including Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho; and along the West Coast. Washington State was the fastest growing of the West Coast states.

Since World War II, people have moved to the Southeast, Southwest, and West Coast for many reasons. The economies of these areas were growing. The South and California, in particular, received a disproportionate share of military and government spending during the Cold War. These expenditures created many jobs. A relatively cheap, nonunion labor force in many parts of the South also attracted industry from other parts of the country. In addition, the increasingly widespread ownership of automobiles made moving to rural areas easier. Air conditioning made the South more attractive, as did low housing costs and improved public health conditions, once malaria, hookworm, and other diseases associated with warm climates were reduced or eliminated.

Starting in the 1950s, the areas around the Great Lakes and in the Northeast, which had been major manufacturing centers, lost jobs as industries moved overseas or to other parts of the country. This trend accelerated in the 1970s. The area around the Great Lakes became known as the Rust Belt because of its closed, deteriorating factories. Some of the region’s major 19th-century industrial towns—Detroit, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; Akron, Ohio; Cleveland, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Buffalo, New York—lost significant population. The cities that suffered the greatest declines were the ones most dependent on manufacturing. Other cities in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago—retained their importance as centers of finance, service, government, education, medicine, culture, and conventions, even though population growth slowed or stopped once the industrial base disappeared.

The older cities have a number of problems. Roads built decades ago cannot easily accommodate today’s commuter traffic and commercial trucking. School systems designed to train the next generation for industrial jobs, which are now disappearing, have struggled to meet the educational requirements of new technology-based occupations. Housing, commercial offices, and manufacturing facilities are outmoded, and the cost of land and building is relatively high. In spite of these problems, about one-third of all Americans at the beginning of the 21st century still lived around the Great Lakes and in Northeastern states, and the corridor stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C., remained the most densely settled part of the United States.

During the latter part of the 20th century, the largest streams of migrants within the United States were from New York to Florida, New Jersey, and California; from Texas to California; from California to Washington State, Arizona, Texas, and Oregon; and from New Jersey to Florida and Pennsylvania. These streams were not one-way: About 20 percent of these people later returned to their original states, so that many states are losing some people and gaining others. In the 1990s a third of Americans lived in a different state than the one in which they were born, up from a quarter of the population in the late 19th century. Others moved within states.

3.1 Migration and diversity

Americans’ propensity to move helps break down ethnic affiliations and homogenize American society. Ethnic enclaves, with their own churches, social groups, newspapers, schools, and languages, are difficult to reproduce after a move. Intermarriage increases, mingling formerly distinct cultural traits. Over time, ethnic neighborhoods gradually shrink and are replaced by residential areas that are more mixed ethnically, although at the same time newer immigrants are creating their own ethnic enclaves. Migration generally tends to weaken the strong sense of community inherent in ethnic enclaves—neighbors may not know one another, extended family ties break down, and friendships are more transitory.

Racial differences between African Americans and European Americans, however, are so deeply rooted in the American psyche that they continue to be replicated, even in rapidly growing areas. Local laws no longer mandate segregation as they did before the 1950s, but it persists in residential patterns, in primary and secondary schools, and in religion, although it is disappearing in politics, entertainment, higher education, and in some employment sectors.

Although migration has caused some cultural differences to disappear as people blended, many ethnic identifiers have remained, spreading across the country as people migrated from one place to another. Today they have become part of America’s cultural heritage. Ethnic influences can be seen in music, food, sports, and holidays. Jazz, the blues, bluegrass, Cajun, and other forms of music have spread beyond their original locales because of migration. As these American forms of music spread, they are influenced by still other musical traditions. Foods that immigrants from around the globe introduced to this country are commonly found in many supermarkets. Such foods include pizza, tacos, salsa, bagels, dim sum, sushi, couscous, and spaghetti. As food traditions blend, they sometimes produce oddities, such as jalapeno bagels and pizza with snow peas. Many American sports, such as hockey, football, and lacrosse, have origins in other cultures and countries. Christmas holiday traditions stem from German and Dutch influences, and Jewish and African American groups maintain alternatives to Christmas celebrations. Even American architectural styles often have foreign origins—chalets from Switzerland, log cabins from northern Europe, and bungalows from India are just a few examples. The richness of American civilization comes from adopting and adapting different traditions.

America has its own homegrown traditions ranging from popular musical styles such as Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musicals, and rock and roll, which little resemble Old World models. Indigenous foods, including turkey, pumpkins, and cranberries, characterize the celebration of Thanksgiving, a day that, along with the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, has meaning for Americans of many religions, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

4. Urbanization of America

The early United States was predominately rural. According to the 1790 census, 95 percent of the population lived in the countryside. The 5 percent of Americans living in urban areas (places with more than 2,500 persons) lived mostly in small villages. Only Philadelphia, New York, and Boston had more than 15,000 inhabitants. The South was almost completely rural. After 1830 the urban areas of the country grew more rapidly than the rural areas. By 1890 industrialization had produced substantial growth in cities, and 35 percent of Americans lived in urban areas, mostly in the northern half of the United States. The South remained rural, except for New Orleans and a few smaller cities. The number of Americans living in cities did not surpass the number in rural areas until 1920. By the 1990s three out of four Americans lived in an urban setting, and since World War II the southern half of the country has become increasingly urbanized, particularly in Texas, Arizona, and the states along the eastern seaboard.

4.1 Growth of cities

Until the middle of the 19th century, the center of the city was the most fashionable place to live. Merchants, lawyers, and manufacturers built substantial townhouses on the main thoroughfares within walking distance of the docks, warehouses, offices, courts, and shops where they worked. Poorer people lived in back alleys and courtyards of the central city. Markets, shops, taverns, and concert halls provided services and entertainment. The middle classes lived a little farther from the center, and other poor people lived in the suburbs, farther from the economic and governmental centers and away from urban amenities such as town watches, water pumps, and garbage collection. Cities were densely populated, as people had to live within walking distance of work and shops. Streets were narrow, just wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and wagons.

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries transformed urban life and gave people higher expectations for improving their standard of living. The increased number of jobs, along with technological innovations in transportation and housing construction, encouraged migration to cities. Development of railroads, streetcars, and trolleys in the 19th century enabled city boundaries to expand. People no longer had to live within walking distance of their jobs. With more choices about where to live, people tended to seek out neighbors of similar social status, if they could afford to do so. The wealthy no longer had to live in the center of the city, so they formed exclusive enclaves far from warehouses, factories, and docks. Office buildings, retail shops, and light manufacturing characterized the central business districts. Heavier industry clustered along the rivers and rail lines that brought in raw materials and shipped out finished products. Railroads also allowed goods to be brought into downtown commercial districts. By the second half of the 19th century, specialized spaces—retail districts, office blocks, manufacturing districts, and residential areas—characterized urban life.

The wealthy created separate neighborhoods for themselves by building mansions on large plots of land at the edges of the cities or in the countryside. Housing developments of similar-looking single-family or multiple-family dwellings, built by speculators, sprouted on the edges of cities. These often catered to a new middle class of white-collar employees in business and industry. The houses faced broader streets and increasingly had plots of grass in front and sometimes in the rear. New apartments were spacious and often had balconies, porches, or other amenities. By 1900 more than a third of urban dwellers owned their own homes, one of the highest rates in the world at the time.

As the middle classes left the bustle and smoke of cities, poorer people—newcomers from the countryside and immigrants—moved into the old housing stock. Landlords took advantage of the demand for housing by subdividing city houses into apartments and by building tenements, low-rent apartment buildings that were often poorly maintained and unsanitary. Immigrants gravitated to the cheap housing and to the promise of work in or near the center of cities or around factories. Now the rich lived in the suburbs and the poor near the center of cities.

In the 50 years from 1870 to 1920, the number of Americans in cities grew from 10 million to 54 million. Into the 20th century, cities grew in population and expanded geographically by absorbing nearby communities. In 1898 New York City acquired Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx as boroughs, political divisions that are like counties. Chicago grew from about 300,000 inhabitants in 1870 to more than a million in 1890. Three-quarters of the city's residents were born outside the United States, and while some found work and a comfortable existence, many suffered severe poverty. That poverty, however, was largely invisible to the rich living on the outskirts of the city, since the poor were concentrated in distant neighborhoods.

The growth of cities outpaced the ability of local governments to extend clean water, garbage collection, and sewage systems into poorer areas, so conditions in cities deteriorated. Cities in the late 19th century were large, crowded, and impersonal places devoted to making money. Not surprisingly, corruption was rampant in city government and city services, in the construction industry, and among landlords and employers. High rents, low wages, and poor services produced misery in the midst of unprecedented economic growth.

The Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries succeeded in reducing some of the corruption and in establishing housing codes, public health measures, and civil service examinations in city governments. Progressive, regulatory approaches to the problems of cities expanded during the New Deal in the 1930s and during the War on Poverty in the 1960s, but cost-cutting political movements in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s reduced funding or eliminated many regulatory programs. As a result of local reform movements throughout the 20th century, corrupt officials were periodically voted out of office and replaced with reformers.

Upward mobility, home ownership, educational opportunities, and cheap goods softened many of the disadvantages of 19th-century urban life. Beautification programs, electrification, and construction of libraries, parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools, gradually improved the quality of urban life in the 20th century, although poor areas received fewer benefits. Poverty, particularly among new arrivals, and low wages remained problems in the cities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. American reform movements, such as the settlement house movement, have typically been more interested in treating the effects of poverty—housing, health, and corruption—than the causes of poverty—unemployment, underemployment, poor skills, and low wages. Labor unions helped raise wages and benefits for many workers, particularly the most skilled, from 1900 to 1950, but since then replacement of skilled factory work by service employment has reduced both wage levels and the influence of labor unions. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the average annual wages of American working men fell from $31,317 in 1979 to $33,244 in 1999 (adjusted for inflation). Wages fell further for those without high school diplomas.

Although murder was rare in the nation in the late 19th century, rates rose in cities. Robbery and theft were commonplace, and prostitution flourished more openly than before. Cheap newspapers exaggerated increases in crime with sensational stories. Professional police forces were created in the late 19th century to keep order and to protect property. The Prohibition period, 1920 to 1933, had the unintended effect of increasing organized crime in America, as manufacturing, importing, and selling illegal alcohol provided a financial windfall for gangs of criminals in the cities. The money was used to expand the influence of organized crime into gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and some legitimate businesses. Police and judges were sometimes bribed. Federal prosecutions of criminals in the 1950s and 1960s helped weaken organized crime. The rise in drug use since the 1970s increased the incidence of violent crime, most visibly in cities, although the majority of drug customers are from the suburbs. This has led to increased professionalization of city police forces, including more weapons, increased training, and higher educational requirements for officers. Higher employment rates at the end of the 1990s have helped to reduce crime rates.

Urban areas have continued to expand, but city boundaries have with few exceptions been set since the early 20th century. City populations increased until the 1950s. Then factories began to move to areas where labor was cheaper: to the South, Latin America, and Asia. As jobs in cities disappeared, cities began to shrink. In the second half of the 20th century, the most rapidly growing urban areas were those outside city limits.

4.2 Move to Suburbia

Suburbs began to appear in the 18th century when wealthy people built second homes in the country to escape the crowded, sweltering city during the summer. As roads improved in the early part of the 19th century, more people built summer houses. A few began living outside the city full time and commuting by carriage to town. Commuting into the city to work became easier and cheaper in the late 19th century, when commuter railroad lines were built, radiating out from the central city. New suburbs developed that were almost entirely residential and depended on the economic resources of the central city. Because railroad fares were relatively high, most of these suburbs remained the preserve of the wealthiest Americans until after World War II, although a few working-class suburbs sprang up around large manufacturing complexes or ports.

The United States experienced a housing shortage in the late 1940s, as recently married war veterans sought places to live. The GI Bill—which provided unemployment and education allowances and home, farm, and business loans for millions of World War II veterans—enabled a flood of home purchases. Several developers applied the principles of mass production to housing, creating nearly identical houses on moderate-sized lots. These suburban developments were targeted to narrow segments of the broad middle class. Some were home to professionals and executives, some to middle management, some to the lower middle class, some to working-class Americans. Each development was substantially uniform in social status and sometimes in religion and ethnicity.

Suburbanites were similar in other ways. Married couples were generally just starting their families. The baby boom meant that there were large numbers of children in the suburbs. Women were housewives and husbands commuted to jobs in the city. Families valued privacy and were separated from other relatives, who either remained in the city or lived elsewhere. It was both comfortable and isolating. The family was often on its own, knowing few neighbors, watching television in the evening, driving everywhere in private cars to anonymous shopping centers. Some people living in these new suburbs depended on rail lines to get to work, although more took advantage of the automobile as a form of transport. The federal government contributed to suburbanization by subsidizing mortgages for veterans and building highways that made travel between cities and suburbs easier.

As the suburbs grew, more and more of the middle classes abandoned the cities. The suburbs were attractive for many reasons: They were cleaner, newer, had better-funded schools, were socially homogeneous, and provided a sense of security. They provided what city dwellers had long been seeking—bigger yards and more privacy. The perceived problems of the city—crowding, high taxes, crime, and poverty—could be left behind. And because the suburbs were politically independent of the core city, the layers of bureaucracy and corruption could be replaced by smaller, friendlier, and presumably more honest government.

As millions moved to the suburbs, stores followed so that residents did not have to go into the city to shop. By the mid-1950s the shopping mall had appeared. Some large, enclosed malls in the 1980s and 1990s became centers for both consumption and entertainment. Other, smaller strip malls contained shops that sold basic items, such as food and hardware, or provided services, such dry cleaning and film processing.

Suburban housing also underwent changes in the 1980s and 1990s. Townhouses and apartment complexes began to characterize the suburbs as much as houses on lots. Retired couples needed smaller places, high divorce rates created single-adult households, and poorer individuals wanted to share some of the benefits of a suburban lifestyle.

Once the population shifted to the suburbs, employers eventually followed, though more slowly than residents. Because employees might live in any suburb surrounding a city, a central business location in the city had always been convenient. Increased traffic congestion in the city centers, and the promise of lower corporate taxes and less crime in the suburbs, eventually pushed corporations out to the suburbs as well. Office complexes and corporate campuses brought white-collar jobs closer to the suburban areas where many workers lived. Warehouses, light industry, and other businesses were increasingly located in the suburbs. These new locations were poorly served by public transportation. Workers had to commute by car. This trend appeared as early as the 1950s and 1960s in the rapidly growing metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and Dallas and later in the older large cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

Traffic congestion is an increasing problem in cities and suburbs, and Americans spend more and more of their time commuting to work, school, shopping, and social events, as well as dealing with traffic jams and accidents. By the late 1990s rush-hour traffic patterns no longer flowed simply into the city in the morning and out of the city in the evening. Traffic became heavy in all directions, both to and from cities as well as between suburban locations. Suburban business locations required huge parking lots because employees had to drive; there were few buses, trains, or trolleys to carry scattered workers to their jobs. The hope of reduced congestion in the suburbs had not been realized; long commutes and traffic jams could be found everywhere.

Suburbanization has not affected all aspects of American life. Some functions have largely remained in the central cities, including government bureaus, courts, universities, research hospitals, professional sports teams, theaters, and arts groups. Trendy shopping, fine restaurants, and nightlife, which expanded in the booming economy at the end of the 20th century, have become popular in many cities, revitalizing a few urban neighborhoods.

In the 20 largest cities and urbanized areas of the United States, 41 percent of the local population, on average, lives in the city, and 59 percent lives in the surrounding suburbs, towns, and associated rural areas. Hoping for more privacy, more space, and better housing, people continued to look to the fringes of urban areas. In the 1990s it became apparent that older suburbs were losing population to newer suburbs and to the so-called exurbs, rural areas bordering cities.

With these new suburbs springing up on the fringes of major urban centers, older suburbs face many of the hardships of cities. As the young and the more affluent seek the newest housing developments, tax bases in the cities and in older suburbs erode. The housing stock deteriorates because of age and perhaps neglect, and housing prices stagnate or fall, causing tax revenues to decline. The elderly—many on limited incomes and in poor health—are more likely to stay in the older suburbs, a trend that not only diminishes tax revenues but increases demand for social services. Schools, no longer supported by the same strong property tax base, suffer in quality, causing even more people to move out. Poorer people then move into the cheaper housing of the older suburbs. As poverty increases in the older areas, so does crime. Older suburbs are often in more desperate financial straits than the central city, because their economic base is less diverse.

The peace and security that suburbanites originally sought became more elusive near the end of the 20th century, and the trend toward gated and walled housing developments was the most visible sign of anxiety about external threats. The next major trend may be a movement out of large cities and suburbs and into small towns and the countryside as Americans avoid commuting and seek more leisure time and a stronger sense of community. New information technologies such as e-mail and computer networking will probably contribute to the dispersal of the population out of the cities, although a sharp and sustained rise in gasoline prices could reverse current trends by making the private automobile and extensive commuting too expensive.

5. Religion in the United States

The variety of religious beliefs in the United States surpasses the nation’s multitude of ethnicities, nationalities, and races, making religion another source of diversity rather than a unifying force. This is true even though the vast majority of Americans—83 percent—identify themselves as Christian. One-third of these self-identified Christians are unaffiliated with any church. Moreover, practicing Christians belong to a wide variety of churches that differ on theology, organization, programs, and policies. The largest number of Christians in the United States belong to one of the many Protestant denominations—groups that vary widely in their beliefs and practices. Roman Catholics constitute the next largest group of American Christians, followed by the Eastern Orthodox.

Most Christians in America are Protestant, but hundreds of Protestant denominations and independent congregations exist. Many of the major denominations, such as Baptists, Lutherans, and Methodists, are splintered into separate groups that have different ideas about theology or church organization. Some Protestant religious movements, including Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, cut across many different Protestant organizations.

Roman Catholics, the next largest religious group in the United States, are far more unified than Protestants. This is due in part to Roman Catholicism’s hierarchical structure and willingness to allow a degree of debate within its ranks, even while insisting on certain core beliefs. The Eastern Orthodox Church, the third major group of Christian churches, is divided by national origin, with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church being the largest of the branches in the United States.

Among many Protestant denominations, blacks and whites generally maintain distinct organizations and practices, or at least separate congregations. Even among Roman Catholics the residential segregation in American society produces separate parishes and parish schools.

Judaism is the next largest religion in the United States, with about 2 percent of the population in 2001. It is also divided into branches, with the largest being Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative. Other religions practiced in America include Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Islam is among the fastest-growing religious groups; its members were just about 1 percent of the U.S. population in 2001.

Large numbers of Americans do not have a religious view of the world–some 8 percent are nonreligious, secular, or are atheists; that is, they do not believe in a god or gods. Adding these to the nonpracticing Christian population means that slightly more than a quarter of the American population is unaffiliated with any church or denomination. This mixture of multiple religious and secular points of view existed from the beginning of European colonization.

5.2 Religious discrimination

Although religious toleration is a cornerstone of American society, religious discrimination has also been a part of America’s history. Most Americans, from early colonists to members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 20th century, have viewed Native American spiritual beliefs as superstition. Even the most well-intentioned of American policy makers sought to replace traditional native beliefs with Christianity by breaking up native families, enforcing the use of English, and educating children in boarding schools dedicated to Christianization and Americanization.

European immigrants also sometimes faced religious intolerance. Roman Catholics suffered from popular prejudice, which turned violent in the 1830s and lasted through the 1850s. Americans feared that the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church was incompatible with democracy. Many felt that separate parochial schools meant that Roman Catholics did not want to become Americans. Irish Catholics were thought to be lazy and prone to heavy drinking. At its peak, the nativist movement—which opposed foreigners in the United States—called for an end to Catholic immigration, opposed citizenship for Catholic residents, and insisted that Catholic students be required to read the Protestant Bible in public schools. The nativist American Party, popularly called the Know-Nothings because of the secrecy of its members, won a number of local elections in the early 1850s, but disbanded as antislavery issues came to dominate Northern politics.

In the early part of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan sought a Protestant, all-white America. The Klan was a white supremacist organization first formed in the 1860s. It was reorganized by racists in imitation of the popular movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), which romanticized Klansmen as the protectors of pure, white womanhood. The Klan preached an antiblack, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic message and sometimes used violence to enforce it. Burning crosses, setting fires, and beating, raping, and murdering innocent people were among the tactics used. Many Protestant congregations in the South and in the Midwest supported the Klan. The Klan attracted primarily farmers and residents of small towns who feared the diversity of the nation’s large cities. Anti-Catholic feelings reappeared during the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Alfred E. Smith in 1928 and in the 1960 presidential campaign, in which John F. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic president.

Jews were subjected to anti-Semitic attacks and discriminatory legislation and practices from the late 19th century into the 1960s. The Ku Klux Klan promoted anti-Semitic beliefs, there was an anti-Semitic strain in the isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s, and the popular radio sermons of Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, spread paranoid fears of Jewish conspiracies against Christians. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the target of anti-Semitic attacks, despite the fact that he was not a Jew. Both the fight against fascism during World War II and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped to diminish anti-Semitism in the United States. Court decisions and civil rights legislation removed the last anti-Jewish quotas on college admissions, ended discrimination in corporate hiring, and banned restrictive covenants on real estate purchases. Far right-wing movements at the end of the 20th century have revived irrational fears of Jewish plots and promoted anti-Semitic statements, as have some African American separatist groups. However, right-wing militias and Klan groups have paid less attention to American Jews than to African Americans, homosexuals, and conspiracies allegedly funded by the federal government.

In the 1990s, the demise of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” (as President Ronald Reagan named it in 1983) left a void in American political life that has been partially filled by a sporadic antagonism towards certain Muslim nations. Foreign policy crises have coincided with an influx of Muslims into the United States and popular revulsion at the antiwhite rhetoric of the American Nation of Islam. An oil crisis created in the 1970s when Arab oil-producing nations raised prices astronomically triggered anti-Arab, anti-Muslim diatribes in the United States. International crises in the Middle East during the 1980s continued these sentiments. There were outbursts of anti-Muslim feeling during the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991), and many Muslims felt the war was an attack on Islam rather than a dispute with the government of Iraq. This sense that U.S. policy was attacking the Islamic faith was a factor when the World Trade Center in New York City was bombed in 1993 and destroyed in 2001.

American ideals of religious toleration and freedom of conscience have not always been endorsed in particular cases and in certain periods of American history, but the goal of inclusiveness and liberty remains an important theme in the development of the United States.

6. Family Life

There has never been a typical or single traditional family form in the United States. In the early 21st century, the ideal family is a vehicle for self-fulfillment and emotional satisfaction. The family in early America had different functions as producers of food, clothing, and shelter. There has always been a gap between the ideal family and the more complicated reality of family relationships. While Americans value their families and resent outside interference, they have also been willing to intervene in the family lives of those who seem outside the American ideal.

Native Americans had a variety of family organizations, including the nuclear family (two adults and their children), extended households with near relatives, clans, and other forms of kinship. Family organizations might be matrilineal, where ancestry is traced through the mother’s line, or patrilineal, where ancestry is traced through the father’s line. In general, Native Americans had a great deal of freedom in sexuality, in choosing marriage partners, and in remaining married. After conversion to Christianity, some of the variety in family forms decreased. In the early 20th century, the United States government broke up many Native American families and sent the children to boarding schools to become Americanized, a policy that was disastrous for those involved and was largely abandoned by the middle of the 20th century.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16