from the very industries that the department was
charged with regulating. Watt cut funding and per-
sonnel for some regulatory programs and sought to
open some coastal lands and wilderness areas to ex-
ploration for resource development.
Impact Within four months of his appointment,
activist environmental groups such as the Sierra
Club were calling for Watt’s removal. By the summer
of 1981, even the more moderate National Wildlife
Federation was calling for Watt to step down. By Oc-
tober, 1981, the Sierra Club’s “Dump Watt” petition
drive had delivered to Congress over one million sig-
natures calling for Watt’s firing. Despite the heavy
criticism of Watt’s policies, the immediate cause of
his resignation was the furor over a remark he made
in a speech in September, 1983, in which he de-
scribed the personnel of a Senate oversight commit-
tee with which he worked. He referred to the gen-
der, ethnic backgrounds, and physical disability of
committee members in a way that was perceived as
bigoted. The Senate began considering a resolution
calling for Watt’s removal, but he resigned before
being forced out. Watt announced his resignation
on October 9, 1983, and left the Interior Depart-
ment on November 8, 1983.
Further Reading
Kraft, Michael E., and Norman J. Vig. “Environmen-
tal Policy in the Reagan Presidency.”Political Sci-
ence Quarterly99, no. 3 (Fall, 1984): 415-439.
Watt, James G., with Doug Wead.The Courage of a
Conservative. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.
Mark S. Joy
See also Conservatism in U.S. politics; Environ-
mental movement; Reagan, Ronald; Scandals.
Wave, the
Definition Mass gesture involving spontaneous
coordinated movement by an audience, usually
at a sporting event, mimicking the appearance
of a large wave
The wave became popular at sporting events across North
America and eventually across the world during the 1980’s.
“The wave,” also known as the “audience wave” or
“Mexican wave,” involves large numbers of partici-
pants standing and raising their arms in succession
to create a wave of movement through an assembled
crowd. The origins of the wave are unclear, having
been traced to various possible sources, including a
hockey game in Alberta, Canada, in 1980; an Ameri-
can League baseball playoff game in October, 1981;
and a football game at the University of Washington
later that month. Having no apparent connection
with a single sport or team, the wave was less a cheer
than a mass communal gesture akin to the popular
act of bouncing a beach ball through the crowd at a
concert or sporting event. Although generally con-
sidered innocuous, the wave has been criticized for
its meaningless nature and for causing food, bever-
ages, and other objects to be thrown or spilled into
the participating crowd.
Although sometimes performed by specific
groups of spectators, the wave was more often a non-
partisan action in which spectators were compelled
by peer pressure to participate. Waves often traveled
around a stadium or arena or back and forth across a
section of grandstands numerous times before dying
out as spontaneously as they had begun when the
crowd became weary of them. Variations on the stan-
dard wave, including the simultaneous creation of
two oppositely rotating waves and successive waves
performed at various predetermined speeds, were
sometimes performed in settings conducive to pre-
planning and crowd discipline, such as student sec-
tions at collegiate sporting events.
The wave grew rapidly in popularity during the
early 1980’s, partly as a result of mass media coverage
of sporting events, and it was a standard feature of
American and Canadian sporting events by the mid-
1980’s. The 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles,
California, exposed an international audience to
the wave, which subsequently achieved global prom-
inence during the 1986 World Cup soccer tourna-
ment in Monterrey, Mexico. As a result, the cheer be-
came known in many parts of the world as the
“Mexican wave.”Impact Although a fixture of sporting events by
the end of the 1980’s, the wave was essentially an act
devoid of meaning or context, and as such exerted
little discernible cultural influence. It became the
subject of research by scholars studying crowd psy-
chology and social phenomena and, despite its even-
tual international popularity, has been cited as an
example of cultural conformity in 1980’s America.
The wave waned in popularity after the 1980’s but1034 Wave, the The Eighties in America