"Born in the U.S.A." became the first compact disc manufactured in the United States for commercial release when CBS and Sony opened its CD manufacturing plant in Terre Haute, Indiana in September 1984. Columbia Records' CDs previously had been imported from Japan. Although Springsteen had been a well-known star for almost 10 years before the album was released, Larry Rodgers from the "Arizona Republic" wrote "it was not until he hit the gym to get buffed up and showed off his rear end in Annie Leibovitz's famous cover photo for "Born in the U.S.A." that he became an American pop icon", touching off a wave of "Bossmania", as author Chris Smith called it. According to Bryan K. Garman, in his book "A Race of Singers – Whitman's Working-Class Hero From Guthrie to Springsteen", this new image helped Springsteen popularize his persona on a new scale, but also brought him a decisive attachment to political and sociocultural issues, in the times when Ronald Reagan was reviving a patriotic pride by reaffirming the values of prosperity, expansion, and world domination of the United States "within a decidedly masculine framework."