UNITED STATES COURT OF MILITARY APPEALS

court created by the U.S. Congress in 1950 as the supreme court for military personnel. It hears appeals brought to it from cases originally adjudicated in military tribunals, in which the presiding members are all service-connected. The Court of Military Appeals consists of three civilian judges appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a term of 15 years. In the late 20th century the Supreme Court ruled that many of the constitutional procedural safeguards that have not historically been considered applicable to military cases may, indeed, apply. Congress has also enacted legislation imposing these safeguards on military trials. Cultural life The New York City Ballet performing The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center, New York City. The culture that endures in the United States, as in any country, is made not by vast impersonal forces but by uniquely talented men and women; and many of the most gifted artists in the United States, as elsewhere, have chosen to make their art far from the shared realities of daily life. The work of some of the greatest American artists and writers has been done in deliberate seclusion and has taken as its material the interior life of the mind and heart that shapes and precedes national experience. Even if it is true that these habits of retreat are, in turn, themselves in part traditions and are culturally shaped, it is also true that the least illuminating way to approach the poems of Emily Dickinson or the paintings of Winslow Homer, to take only two imposing examples, is as the consequence of large-scale mass sociological phenomena. Still, many, perhaps even most, American artists have chosen to situate themselves in the common life of their country. Their involvement with the problems they share with their neighbours has given their art a common shape and often a common substance. For most of the 20th century the common quarrel that has absorbed many American artists and thinkers has been one between the values of a mass, democratic popular culture and those of a refined elite culture accessible only to the fewthe quarrel between low and high. In part, this was a problem that science left on the doorstep of the arts: beginning at the turn of the century, the growth of the technology of mass communicationsmotion pictures, the phonograph, radio and, eventually, televisioncreated a potential audience for stories and music and theatre larger than anyone could previously have imagined. At the beginning of the 20th century, new machines began to appear that made it possible for music and drama and pictures to reach more people than had ever before been possible in human history. People in San Francisco could look at the latest pictures or hear the latest music from New York City months, or even moments, after they were made; a great performance now demanded a pilgrimage no longer than the trip to a corner movie theatre. Some of these machines were invented in Europe, and their story is as much a story of the Old World as of the New. But in the United States the growth and dissemination of the new means of mass communication had a special excitement, for the new machines came not simply as a new or threatening force but also as the fulfillment of an American dream. Mass culture seemed to promise a democratic culture, a cultural life directed not to an aristocracy but to all men and women. It was not that the new machines produced new ideals, but that they made the old dreams seem suddenly a practical possibility. Much American art at the turn of the century and through the 1920s, from the paintings of Charles Sheeler to the poetry of Hart Crane, hymned the power of the new technology and the dream of a common culture. By the mid-20th century, however, many people recoiled in dismay at what had happened to the American arts, high and low. The new technology of mass communications for the most part seemed to have achieved not a generous democratization but a bland homogenization of culture. Many people thought that the control of culture had passed wholly into the hands of advertisers, people who used the means of a common culture just to make money. It was not only that most of the new music and drama that had been made for motion pictures and radio, and later for television, seemed shallow; it was also that the high, or serious, culture that had become available through the means of mass reproduction seemed to have been reduced to a string of popularized hits, which concealed the real complexity of art. Culture, made democratic, had become too easy. As a consequence, many intellectuals and artists at the end of World War II began to try to construct new kinds of elite culture, art that would be deliberately difficultand to many people it seemed that this new work was merely difficult; much of the new art and dance seemed puzzling and deliberately obscure. Difficult art happened, above all, in New York City. During World War II, the city had seen an influx of avant-garde artists escaping Adolf Hitler's Europe, including the painters Max Ernst and Piet Mondrian and the composer Igor Stravinsky. They imported many of the ideals of the European avant-garde, particularly the belief that art should always be difficult and ahead of its time. It is a paradox that the avant-garde movement in Europe had begun in the late 19th century in rebellion against what artists thought were the oppressive and stifling standards of high official culture in Europe and that Europeans had often looked to American mass culture for inspiration. In the United States, however, the practice of avant-garde art became a way for artists and intellectuals to isolate themselves from what they thought was the cheapening of standards. Yet this counterculture had, by the 1960s, become in large American cities an official culture of its own. For many intellectuals and thinkers at that time, this gloomy situation seemed to be permanent. One could choose between an undemanding low culture and an austere but isolated high culture. For much of the 20th century, scholars saw these two worldsthe public world of popular culture and the private world of modern artas irreconcilable antagonists and thought that American culture was too often defined by the abyss between them. But more and more scholars have begun to see in the most enduring inventions of American culture patterns of cyclic renewal between high and low. It has become apparent, as scholars study particular cases instead of abstract ideas, that the contrast has often been overdrawn. Instead of a simple opposition between popular culture and elite culture, it is possible to recognize in the prolix and varied forms of popular culture innovations and inspirations that have enlivened the most original high American culture and to see how the inventions of high culture circulate back into the street in a spiraling, creative flow. In the achievements of American jazz musicians, who took the songs of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical and inflected them with their own improvisational genius; in the works of great choreographers like Paul Taylor and George Balanchine, who found in tap dances and marches and ballroom bebop new kinds of movement that they then incorporated into the language of high dance; in the shadow boxes of the artist Joseph Cornell, who took for his material the mundane goods of the five-and-ten and the department store and used them as private symbols in surreal dioramasin the work of all of these artists and many more can be seen the same kind of inspiring dialogue between the austere discipline of avant-garde art and the enlivening touch of the vernacular. Perhaps this circular traffic between high and low also helps account for another remarkable feature of American cultural life since World War II. It is the phenomenon that the cultural historian Thomas Bender has called the triumph of the culture of the eye and ear. Since World War II, American achievements in dance, music, and painting have been among the most remarkable in the world. This seems paradoxical: precisely those parts of American cultural life that might have seemed most threatened by mass means of cultural communication have been the most triumphantly successful. Yet perhaps it is the provocative distance between the high European traditions of dance and art and the low desire to take part in American life, the distance between the studio and the street, that has challenged and inspired so many choreographers and painters. Literature Because the most articulate artists are, by definition, writers, most of the arguments about what culture is and ought to do have been about literaturewhich can skew the perception of American culture, since the most memorable American art has not always appeared in books, novels, stories, or plays. In part, perhaps, this is because writing was the first art form to undergo a revolution of mass technology; books were being printed in thousands of copies while to hear a symphony or see a painting required a trip for most Americans. The basic dispute between mass experience and individual experience has therefore perhaps been less keenly felt as an everyday fact in writing in the 20th century than it has been in other art forms. Still, writers have seen and recorded this quarrel as a feature of the world around them, and the evolution of American writing since World War II has shown some of the same basic patterns that are found in painting and dance and the theatre. In the United States after World War II, many writers, in opposition to what they perceived as the bland flattening-out of cultural life, made their subject the things that set Americans apart from one another. Although, for many Americans, ethnic and even religious differences had become increasingly less importantholiday rather than everyday materialas the century developed, many postwar writers seized on these differences to achieve a detached point of view on American life. Beginning in the 1940s and '50s, three groups in particular seemed to be outsider-insiders, who could bring a special vision to fiction: Southerners, Jews, and blacks. Each group had a sense of uncertainty, mixed emotions, and stifled aspirations that lent a questioning counterpoint to the general chorus of affirmation in American life. The SouthernersWilliam Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor in particularthought that a noble tradition of defeat and failure had been part of the fabric of Southern life since the Civil War; at a time when official American culture often insisted that the American story was one of endless triumphs and optimism, they told stories of tragic fate. Jewish writersmost prominently the Chicago novelist Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Rothfound in the golden exile of Jews in the United States a juxtaposition of surface affluence with deeper unease and perplexity that seemed to many of their countrymen to offer a common predicament in a heightened form. For black Americans the promise of American life had in many respects never been fulfilled. What happens to a dream deferred? the poet Langston Hughes asked, and many black writers attempted to answer that question through stories that mingled pride, perplexity, and rage. Black literature achieved one of the unquestioned masterpieces of 20th-century American fiction in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). More recently, the rise of feminism as a political movement has given many women a sense that their experience, too, is rich and important; since the 1970s there has been an explosion of women's fiction, including the much-admired work of Toni Morrison (Beloved; 1987), Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist; 1985), and Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine; 1984). Perhaps precisely because so many novelists sought to make their fiction from experiences that were deliberately imagined as marginal, set aside from the general condition of American life, many other writers had the sense that fiction, and particularly the novel, might no longer be the best way to record American life. For many writers, the novel seemed to have become above all a form of private, interior expression that could no longer keep up with the extravagant oddities of the United States. Many writers took up journalism with some of the passion for perfection of style that had once been reserved for fiction. The exemplars of this form of poetic journalism included the masters of The New Yorker magazine, most notably A.J. Liebling, whose books included The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a study of an election in that state, as well as Joseph Mitchell, who in his books The Bottom of the Harbor (1959) and Joe Gould's Secret (1965) offered dark and perplexing accounts of the American metropolis. The dream of combining facts and lyrical fire also achieved a masterpiece in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an account of sharecropper life in the South that is a landmark in the struggle for imparting to nonfiction the beauty and permanence of poetry. As the century developed, this genre of imaginative nonfiction (sometimes called the nonfiction novel or documentary novel) took on different forms. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), for example, recreated a multiple murder in Kansas. By contrast, Tom Wolfe, whose influential books included The Right Stuff (1979), an account of the early days of the U.S. space program, and Norman Mailer, whose books included The Armies of the Night (1968), a ruminative piece about the political conventions in 1968, took on huge public events and made them subject to the insights (and, many people thought, the idiosyncratic whims) of a personal sensibility. As the nonfiction novel often pursued extremes of grandiosity and hyperbole, the short story assumed a previously unexpected importance in the life of American writing; the short story became the voice of private vision and private lives. The short story, with its natural insistence on the unique moment and the glimpse of something private and fragile, came to have a new prominence. The rise of the American short story is bracketed by two remarkable books: J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories of 1953 and Raymond Carver's collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), almost exactly a quarter century later. Salinger inspired a generation by imagining that a serious search for a spiritual life could be reconciled with an art of gaiety and charm; Carver confirmed in the next generation their sense of a loss of spirituality through an art of taciturn reserve and cloaked emotions.