UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION

subsidiary of USX Corporation (q.v.). The economy Harvesting corn on a farm near Alden, north-central Iowa. The United States is the world's greatest economic power in terms of gross national product (GNP) and is among the greatest powers in terms of GNP per capita. The nation's wealth is partly a reflection of its rich natural resources. With only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States produces nearly one-fifth of the world's output of coal, copper, and crude petroleum. The agricultural sector produces nearly one-half of the world's corn (maize); nearly one-fifth of its beef, pork, mutton, and lamb; and more than one-tenth of its wheat. The United States owes its economic position more to its highly developed industry, however, than to its natural resources or agricultural output. Despite its relative self-sufficiency, the United States is the most important single factor in world trade by virtue of the sheer size of its economy. Its exports represent more than 10 percent of the world total. The United States impinges on the economy of the rest of the world not only as a trading power but also as a source of investment capital. Direct investment abroad by U.S. firms is a dominant factor in the economies of Canada and many Latin-American countries and is also important in Europe and in Asia. Government and private enterprise The U.S. government plays only a small direct part in economic activity, being largely restricted to such agencies as the U.S. Postal Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Enterprises that are often in public hands in other countries, such as airlines and telephone systems, are run privately in the United States. A principal effort of the government traditionally has been the fostering of competition through enforcement of antitrust laws. These are designed to combat collusion among companies with respect to prices, output levels, or market shares and, where feasible, to prevent mergers that significantly reduce competition. The vigour with which antitrust laws and regulations are to be enforced is a matter of perennial political debate. The major area of government regulation of economic activity is through fiscal and monetary policy. The government also exerts considerable leverage on certain sectors of the economy as a purchaser of goods, notably in the aircraft and aerospace industries. Proposals for governmental controls of prices and incomes have been a frequent source of much controversy. Farming is a field in which the government strongly influences private economic activity. It endeavours to support farm incomes through payments to farmers, controls on output, price supports, and the provision of storage and marketing facilities. One disadvantage of the system is that payments are related to farm output, so that the benefit often goes to the larger commercial farms rather than to the so-called family farms that were originally the main object of governmental concern. The land The Colorado River in Marble Canyon at the northeastern end of Grand Canyon National Park, The two great sets of elements that mold the physical environment of the United States are, first, the geologic, which determines the main patterns of landforms, drainage, and mineral resources and influences soils to a lesser degree, and, second, the atmospheric, which dictates not only climate and weather but also in large part the distribution of soils, plants, and animals. Although these elements are not entirely independent of one another, each produces on a map patterns that are so profoundly different that essentially they remain two separate geographies. (Since this article covers only the coterminous United States, see also the articles Alaska and Hawaii.) Relief The centre of the coterminous United States is a great sprawling interior lowland, reaching from the ancient shield of central Canada on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. To east and west this lowland rises, first gradually and then abruptly, to mountain ranges that divide it from the sea on both sides. The two mountain systems differ drastically. The Appalachian Mountains on the east are low, almost unbroken, and in the main set well back from the Atlantic. From New York to the Mexican border stretches the low Coastal Plain, which faces the ocean along a swampy, convoluted coast. The gently sloping surface of the plain extends out beneath the sea, where it forms the continental shelf, which, although submerged beneath shallow ocean water, is geologically identical to the Coastal Plain. Southward the plain grows wider, swinging westward in Georgia and Alabama to truncate the Appalachians along their southern extremity and separate the interior lowland from the Gulf. West of the Central Lowland is the mighty Cordillera, part of a global mountain system that rings the Pacific Basin. The Cordillera encompasses fully one-third of the United States, with an internal variety commensurate with its size. At its eastern margin lie the Rocky Mountains, a high, diverse, and discontinuous chain that stretches all the way from New Mexico to the Canadian border. The Cordillera's western edge is a Pacific coastal chain of rugged mountains and inland valleys, the whole rising spectacularly from the sea without benefit of a coastal plain. Pent between the Rockies and the Pacific chain is a vast intermontane complex of basins, plateaus, and isolated ranges so large and remarkable that they merit recognition as a region separate from the Cordillera itself. These regionsthe Interior Lowlands and their upland fringes, the Appalachian Mountain system, the Atlantic Plain, the Western Cordillera, and the Western Intermontane Regionare so various that they require further division into 24 major subregions, or provinces (see map). The people Spectators are showered with confetti during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. As the 20th century drew to a close, the majority of the U.S. population had achieved a high level of material comfort, prosperity, and security. Americans were not, however, prepared to cope with the unexpected problems of relative affluence or with the persistent difficulties created by residual pockets of poverty. Crime, racial conflict, urban decay, proliferation of nuclear weapons, pollution of the environment, drug abuse, and rising costs of living remained continuing subjects of concern. Many Americans perceive social tensions as the products of their society's failure to extend the traditional dream of equality of opportunity to all the people. Ideally, social, political, economic, and religious freedom would assure the like treatment of all persons, so that all could achieve goals in accord with their individual talents, if only they worked hard enough. A shared belief in this idea is the strongest bond that has united Americans through the centuries. The fact that some ethnic groups have not achieved full equality troubles many citizens. Ethnic distribution The ethnics Although current usage confines the term ethnic to the descendants of the newest immigrants, its proper, more comprehensive meaning applies to all groups unified by their cultural heritage and by their experience in the New World. In the 19th century, Yankees formed one such group, marked by common religion and by habits shaped by the original Puritan settlers. From New England, the Yankees spread westward through New York, northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and on to Iowa and Kansas. Tightly knit communities, firm religious values, and a belief in the value of education earned them prominent positions in business, in literature and law, and in cultural and philanthropic institutions. They long identified with the Republican Party. Southern whites and their descendants, by contrast, generation after generation remained preponderantly rural as migration took them westward across Tennessee and Kentucky to Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. These people remained primarily rural until the industrialization of the South in the 20th century, and they preserved affiliations with the Democratic Party until the 1960s. The colonial population also contained other elements that long sustained their identities as groups. The Pennsylvania Germans, held together by religion and language, still pursue their own way of life after three centuries. The great 19th-century German migrations, however, contained a variety of elements that dispersed in the cities as well as in the agricultural areas of the West; to the extent that ethnic ties have survived they are largely sentimental. That is also true of the Scots, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and Dutch, whose colonial nuclei received some reinforcement after 1800 but who gradually adapted to the ways of the larger groups among whom they lived. Distinctive language and religion have preserved some coherence among the descendants of the Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Icelandic newcomers of the 19th century. Where these people clustered in sizeable settlements, as in Minnesota, they transmitted a sense of identity beyond the second generation; and emotional attachments to the lands of origin lingered much longer. Religion was a powerful force for cohesion among the Roman Catholic Irish and the Jews, both tiny groups before 1840, both reinforced by mass migration thereafter. Both have now become strikingly heterogeneous, displaying a wide variety of economic and social conditions as well as a degree of conformity to the styles of life of other Americans. But the pull of external concernsin the one case, unification of Ireland; in the other, Israel's securityhave helped to preserve group loyalty. More recently established ethnic groups have preserved greater visibility and greater cohesion. Indeed, by the 1970s and '80s, ethnic had come to be used to describe the Americans of Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Slovakian, and other extraction, most of whom live in the northern and Midwestern cities. They tend to be Roman Catholic and middle-class. Most workers are either part of the blue-collar labour force or holders of low-level white-collar jobs. The neighbourhoods in which many of them live have their roots in the Little Italys and Polish Hills established by the immigrants. Their strong ethnic ties are apparent in the pattern of their lives: spouses, friends, neighbours, fellow churchgoers, and even coworkers often are also Polish, Italian, or Slovakian. Their ethnic group identity is not, however, merely a holdover from the era of mass immigration. It is based not only upon a common cultural heritage but also on the common interests, needs, and problems they face in the present-day United States. White ethnics are concentrated in the inner cities, though increasingly less so, and are affected by high crime rates, deteriorating municipal services, inferior schools, and urban unrest. They fear losing their jobs and neighbourhoods to other minority groups. Neither rich nor poor, they anxiously watch their purchasing power being diminished by inflation and rising taxes. As the children and grandchildren of immigrants, they have been taught to believe that the road to success in the United States is achieved through individual effort. They believe in equality of opportunity and self-improvement, and they attribute poverty to the failing of the individual and not to inequities in society. This attitude makes them largely unsympathetic to the demands of blacks, to student protest (which they tend to view as the antics of spoiled children of the rich), and during the Vietnam War, to the peace movement, which they regarded as un-American, especially since their own sons, many of whom did not attend college, made up a large percentage of the fighting force in Vietnam. As the ethnics have become more vocal, the public has become aware of the problems and concerns of the urban ethnic minorities and stopped dismissing them as merely racist or uneducated. Ethnic groups have begun to be included in the planning and administration of social-welfare programs of government or foundations, and an ethnic identity is no longer looked upon as somehow un-American and vaguely shameful. It has become legitimate to be an ethnic.