I. An Era of Limits |
|
A. |
Energy Crisis |
|
|
1. |
Once the world’s
leading producer, the
United States
had become heavily dependent on imported oil, mostly from the
Persian
Gulf. |
|
|
2. |
When Middle Eastern
states threw off the remnants of European colonialism, they demanded
concessions for access to the fields. In 1960 oil-rich developing countries
formed a cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). |
|
|
3. |
Conflict between
Israel
and the neighboring Arab states of
Egypt,
Syria,
and
Jordan
politicized OPEC between 1967 and 1973. In
the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
Egypt
and
Syria
invaded
Israel
to regain territory lost in the 1967 conflict.
Israel
prevailed, but only after
being resupplied by an emergency American airlift. |
|
|
4. |
Resentful of American
support for
Israel,
the Arab states in OPEC declared an oil embargo in October 1973. |
|
|
5. |
The
United States
scrambled to meet its
energy needs in the face of the oil shortage. Congress imposed a national speed
limit of 55 miles an hour to conserve fuel and Americans began to buy smaller,
more fuel-efficient foreign cars |
|
|
6. |
Sales of American
cars slumped. With one of every six jobs in the country generated directly or
indirectly by the auto industry, the effects rippled across the economy. |
|
|
7. |
Compounding the
distress was the raging inflation set off by the oil shortage; prices rose by
nearly 20 percent in 1974 alone. |
|
B. |
Environmentalism |
|
|
1. |
The energy crisis
drove home the realization that the earth’s resources were not limitless. |
|
|
|
2. |
The environmental
movement was an offshoot of sixties activism, but it had numerous historical
precedents. The movement had received a hefty push back in 1962 when biologist
Rachael Carson published Silent Spring,
a stunning analysis of the impact of the pesticide DDT on the food chain. |
|
|
3. |
In 1970, on the heels
of the
Santa Barbara
oil spill, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which created
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). |
|
|
4. |
A spate of new laws
followed: the Clean Air Act (1970), Occupational Health and Safety Act (1970),
Water Pollution Control Act (1972), and Endangered Species Act (1973). |
|
|
5. |
Corporations resented
environmental regulations, as did many of their workers, who believed that
tightened standards threatened their jobs. By the 1980s, environmentalism
starkly divided Americans. |
|
|
6. |
By 1974, utility
companies were operating forty-two nuclear power plants, with a hundred more
planned. Environmentalists, however, publicized other dangers of nuclear power:
a meltdown would be catastrophic, and so, in slow motion, might be radioactive
wastes. |
|
|
7. |
These fears seemed to
be confirmed in March 1979, when the reactor core at the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant near
Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, came close to
meltdown. This near-catastrophe enabled environmentalists to win the battle
over nuclear energy. |
|
|
8. |
After
Three Mile Island, no new nuclear plants were authorized.
Today, nuclear reactors account for 20 percent of all
U.S.
power generation—substantially
less than several European nations, but still fourth in the world. |
|
C. |
Economic Transformation |
|
|
1. |
In addition to the
energy crisis, the economy was beset by a host of longer-term problems.
Government spending on the Vietnam War and the Great Society made for a growing
federal deficit and spiraling inflation. In the industrial sector, the country
faced more robust competition from
West Germany
and
Japan.
America’s
share of world trade dropped from 32 percent in 1955 to 18 percent in 1970 and
was headed downward. |
|
|
2. |
Many of these
economic woes highlighted a transformation in the
United States: from an
industrial-manufacturing economy to a postindustrial-service one. |
|
|
3. |
In the short run, the
economy was hit by a devastating combination of unemployment and inflation—stagflation. |
|
|
4. |
For ordinary
Americans, the reality of stagflation was a noticeable decline in their
standard of living. None of the three presidents of the decade—Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter—had much luck tackling stagflation. |
|
|
5. |
Nixon’s New Economic
Policy imposed temporary price and wage controls in 1971 in an effort to curb
inflation. He removed the
United
States
from the gold standard, allowing the dollar
to float in international currency markets. The underlying weaknesses in the
U.S.
economy
remained, however. |
|
|
6. |
Ford’s “Whip
Inflation Now” (
WIN) campaign
urged Americans to cut food waste and to do more with less but was deeply
unpopular. |
|
|
7. |
Carter’s policies would
be similarly ineffective. |
|
|
8. |
America’s economic woes struck
hardest at the industrial sector, which began to be dismantled. Worst hit was
the steel industry, as foreign steel flooded into the
United States
during the 1970s. |
|
|
9. |
The steel industry
was the prime example of what became known as deindustrialization. The country was in the throes of an economic
transformation that left it largely stripped of its industrial base. Deindustrialization
threw many blue-collar workers out of well-paid union jobs. |
|
|
10. |
Deindustrialization
dealt an especially harsh blow to the labor movement, which had facilitated the
postwar expansion of that middle class. |
|
|
11. |
Instead of seeking
higher wages, unions now mainly fought to save jobs. Union membership went into
steep decline. With labor’s decline, a main buttress of the New Deal coalition
was coming undone. |
|
|
12. |
Middle-class flight
to the suburbs continued apace, and the “urban crisis” of the 1960s spilled
into the “era of limits.” Facing huge price inflation and mounting piles of
debt—to finance social services for the poor and to replace disappearing tax
revenue—nearly every major American city struggled to pay its bills in the
1970s. |
|
|
13. |
Cities faced
declining fortunes in these years for many reasons, but one key was the
continued loss of residents and businesses to nearby suburbs. |
|
|
14. |
Suburbanization and
the economic crisis combined powerfully in what became known as the “tax
revolt,” a dramatic reversal of the postwar spirit of generous public
investment. The premier example was
California’s
Proposition 13, an initiative that would roll back property taxes, cap future
increases for present owners, and require that all tax measures have a
two-thirds majority in the legislature. |
|
|
15. |
Proposition 13
hobbled public spending in the nation’s most populous state, inspired tax
revolts across the country, and helped conservatives define an enduring issue:
low taxes. |
|
D. |
Politics in Flux, 1974–1980 |
|
|
1. |
A search for order
characterized national politics in the 1970s as well. Liberals were in retreat,
but conservatives had not yet put forth a clear alternative. |
|
|
2. |
Seventy-five new
Democratic members of the House came to Washington after the 1974 midterm
elections, in which they made Watergate and Ford’s pardon of Nixon their top
issues. |
|
|
3. |
Democratic majorities
in both houses of Congress eliminated the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) and reduced the number of votes needed to end a filibuster
from 67 to 60. Democrats dismantled the existing committee structure, which had
entrenched power in the hands of a few elite committee chairs, and passed the
Ethics in Government Act. |
|
|
4. |
Ironically, the
post-Watergate reforms made government less efficient and more susceptible to
special interests—a diffuse power structure actually gave lobbyists more places
to exert influence. Influence shifted to party leaders and with little
incentive to compromise, the parties grew more rigid, and bi-partisanship
became rare. |
|
|
5. |
Despite Democratic
gains in 1974, liberalism proved unable to stop run-away inflation or speed up
economic growth. Conservatives in Congress used this opening to articulate
alternatives, especially economic deregulation and tax cuts. |
|
|
6. |
Deindustrialization
in the Northeast and Midwest and continued population growth in the
Sunbelt shifted power toward the West and South. |
|
|
7. |
James E. Carter won
the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. Trading on Watergate and his
down-home image, Carter pledged to restore morality to the White House. Carter defeated
Ford with 50 percent of the popular vote. |
|
|
8. |
But Carter’s
inexperience showed. Disdainful of the Democratic establishment, Carter relied
heavily on inexperienced advisers from
Georgia
, leading to chilly
relations with congressional leaders. |
|
|
9. |
Carter was an
economic conservative, and his efforts proved ineffective at reigniting
economic growth. Then, the Iranian Revolution curtailed oil supplies, and gas
prices jumped again. By then, Carter’s approval rating had fallen below 30
percent. |
II. Reform and Reaction in the 1970s |
|
A. |
Civil Rights in a New Era |
|
|
1. |
Among the most
significant efforts to address the legacy of exclusion against minorities and
women was affirmative action. |
|
|
2. |
Affirmative action,
however, did not sit well with many whites, who felt that the deck was being
stacked against them. Much of the dissent came from conservative groups that
had opposed civil rights all along. They charged affirmative action advocates
with “reverse discrimination.” |
|
|
3. |
A major shift in
affirmative action policy came in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white man, sued the
University of
California
at
Davis
Medical
School
for rejecting him in favor of less-qualified, minority-group candidates. |
|
|
4. |
Bakke v.
University of
California upheld affirmative action but rejected a quota system, and thereby also called
it into question. Future court rulings and state referenda in the 1990s and
2000s would further limit affirmative action. |
|
|
5. |
Another major civil
rights objective—desegregating schools—produced even more controversy and
fireworks. |
|
|
6. |
Where schools
remained highly segregated, the courts endorsed the strategy of busing students
to achieve integration. In some, black children road busses from their
neighborhoods to attend previously all-white schools. In others, white children
were bused to black or Latino neighborhoods. |
|
|
7. |
In the North, where
segregated schooling arose from suburban residential patterns, busing orders
proved less effective. Postwar suburbanization had produced in the North what
law had mandated in the South—segregated schools. |
|
B. |
The Women’s Movement and Gay Rights |
|
|
1. |
Much of women’s
liberation activism focused on the female body. The women’s health movement
founded dozens of medical clinics, encouraged women to become physicians, and
educated millions of women about their bodies. |
|
|
2. |
To reform
anti-abortion laws, activists pushed for remedies in more than thirty state
legislatures. Women’s liberationists founded the antirape movement, established
rape crisis centers around the nation, and lobbied state legislatures and
Congress to reform rape laws. |
|
|
3. |
Buoyed by this flourishing of activism, the women’s movement renewed the fight
for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Congress adopted the
amendment in 1972 and within just two years, thirty-four of the necessary
thirty-eight states had ratified it, and the ERA appeared headed for adoption. |
|
|
4. |
Credit for putting
the brakes on ERA ratification goes chiefly to a remarkable woman: Phyllis
Schlafly, a lawyer long active in conservative causes. Despite her own
flourishing career, Schlafly and her organization, STOP ERA, advocated
traditional roles for women. |
|
|
5. |
The women’s movement
had another major goal: winning reproductive rights. Activists pursued two
tracks: legislative and judicial. In the early 1960s, abortion was illegal in
virtually every state. A decade later, a handful of states, such as
New York,
Hawaii,
California, and
Colorado,
adopted laws making legal abortions easier to obtain. |
|
|
6. |
The judicial track
culminated in Roe v. Wade (1973).
In that landmark decision, the justices nullified a
Texas law that prohibited abortion under any
circumstances, even when the woman’s health was at risk, and laid out a new
national standard: abortions performed during the first trimester were
protected by the right of privacy. |
|
|
7. |
For the women’s
movement, Roe v. Wade represented a
triumph. For evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, Catholics, and
conservatives generally, it was a bitter pill. Roe polarized what was already a sharply divided public and
mobilized conservatives to seek a Supreme Court reversal limitation of abortion
rights. |
|
|
8. |
The gay rights movement
had achieved notable victories as well. These, too, proved controversial. No
one embodied the combination of gay liberation and hard-nosed politics better
than a
San Francisco
camera-shop owner named Harvey Milk. Milk managed to mobilize the “gay vote”
into a powerful bloc, and finally won a city supervisor seat in 1977. After he
helped to win passage of a gay rights ordinance in
San Francisco, he was assassinated—along with
the city’s mayor, George Moscone—by a disgruntled former supervisor named Dan
White. |
|
C. |
The Supreme Court and the Rights
Revolution |
|
|
1. |
After Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the court
increasingly agreed to hear human rights and civil liberties cases. |
|
|
2. |
This shift was led by
Earl Warren, appointed chief justice in 1953 by Eisenhower. The
Warren Court lasted
from 1954 until 1969 and established some of the most far-reaching liberal
jurisprudence in
U.S.
history. |
|
|
3. |
Right-wing activists
detested the
Warren Court,
accusing its decisions of contributing to social breakdown and rising crime
rates. |
|
|
4. |
President Nixon came
into the presidency promising to appoint conservative-minded justices to the
bench. Between 1969 and 1972, he was able to appoint four new justices to the
Supreme Court, including the new chief justice, Warren Burger. However, the
Burger Court
refused to scale back the liberal precedents set under
Warren. |
|
|
5. |
Other decisions
advanced women’s rights. In 1976, the Court ruled that arbitrary distinctions
based on sex in the workplace and other arenas were unconstitutional, and in
1986 that sexual harassment violated the Civil Rights Act. |
|
|
6. |
In all of their
rulings on privacy rights, however, both the Warren and Burger Courts confined
their decisions to heterosexuals. The justices were reluctant to move ahead of
public attitudes toward homosexuality. |
III. The American Family on Trial |
|
A. |
Working Families in the Age of
Deindustrialization |
|
|
1. |
One of the most
striking developments of the 1970s and 1980s was the relative stagnation of
wages. Hardest hit were blue-collar and pink-collar workers and those without
college degrees. |
|
|
2. |
Between 1973 and the
early 1990s, every major income group except the top 10 percent saw their real
earnings (accounting for inflation) either remain the same or decline. Women
streamed into the workforce and Americans were fast becoming dependent on the
two-income household. |
|
|
3. |
For a brief period in
the 1970s, the trials of working men and women made a distinct imprint on
national culture. Reporters wrote of the “blue-collar blues” associated with
plant closings and the hard-fought strikes of the decade. |
|
|
4. |
Across the nation,
the number of union-led strikes surged, even as the number of Americans in the
labor movement continued to decline. In most strikes and industrial conflict,
workers won a measure of public attention but typically gained little economic
ground. |
|
|
5. |
When Americans turned
on their televisions in the mid-1970s, the most popular shows reflected the
“blue-collar blues” of struggling families. All
in the Family was joined by The Waltons,
set during the Great Depression. Good
Times, Welcome Back Kotter, and Sanford and Son dealt with poverty in
the inner city. The Jeffersons featured
an upwardly mobile black couple. Laverne
and Shirley focused on working girls in the 1950s and One Day at a Time on working women in the 1970s making do after
divorce. |
|
|
6. |
The most-watched
television series of the decade, 1977’s eight-part Roots, explored the history of slavery and the survival of African
American culture and family “roots” despite the oppressive labor system. Not
since the 1930s had American culture paid such close attention to working-class
life. |
|
|
7. |
The decade also saw
the rise of musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Paycheck, and John
Cougar (Mellencamp), who became stars by turning the hard-scrabble lives of
people in small towns and working-class communities into rock anthems that
filled arenas. Meanwhile, on the streets of Harlem and the South Bronx in New
York, working-class African American young men experimenting with dance and
musical forms invented break dancing and rap music—styles that expressed both
the hardship and the creativity of working-class black life in the
deindustrialized American city. |
|
B. |
Navigating the Sexual Revolution |
|
|
1. |
By the 1960s, sex
before marriage had grown more socially acceptable—an especially profound
change for women—and frank discussions of sex in media and popular culture had
grown more common. |
|
|
2. |
In that decade, three
developments dramatically accelerated this process: the introduction of the birth
control pill, the rise of the baby-boomer–led counterculture, and the influence
of feminism. Widely available in the
United States
for the first time in
1960, the birth control pill gave women an unprecedented degree of control over
reproduction. |
|
|
3. |
Women’s rights activists
reacted to the new emphasis on sexual freedom in at least two distinct ways. |
|
|
4. |
For many feminists,
the emphasis on casual sex seemed to perpetuate male privilege. They argued
that while men could now freely explore numerous sexual relationships without
social sanction, women remained trapped by a culture that still required them
to be “innocent” and not to “sleep around”—the old double standard. Moreover,
sexual harassment was all too common in the workplace, and the proliferation of
pornography continued to commercialize women as sex objects. The sexual
revolution, these women argued, was by and for men. |
|
|
5. |
On the other hand,
many feminists remained optimistic that the new sexual ethic could free women
from those older moral constraints. They called for a revolution in sexual values, not simply behavior, that would
end exploitation and grant women the freedom to explore their sexuality on
equal terms with men. |
|
|
6. |
In the 1970s, popular
culture was suffused with discussions of the sexual revolution. Mass-market
books with titles such as Everything You
Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Human
Sexual Response, and The Sensuous Man shot up the best-seller list. |
|
|
7. |
Hollywood took advantage of the new sexual
ethic by making films with explicit erotic content that pushed the boundaries
of middle-class taste. Films such as Midnight
Cowboy (1969), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Shampoo (1974), the
latter starring
Hollywood’s
leading ladies’ man, Warren Beatty, led the way. |
|
|
8. |
In the second half of
the decade, networks both exploited and criticized the new sexual ethic. In
frivolous, light-hearted shows such as the popular Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company, and The Love Boat, heterosexual couples explored the often confusing,
and usually comical, landscape of sexual morality. At the same time the major
networks produced more than a dozen made-for-TV movies sensationalizing the
potential threats to children posed by a less strict sexual morality. |
|
|
9. |
Many Americans
worried that marriage itself was threatened. What defined a healthy marriage in
an age of rising divorce rates, changing sexual values, and feminist critiques
of the nuclear family? Only a small minority of Americans rejected marriage
outright. But many people came to believe that they needed help as marriage
came under a variety of stresses—economic, psychological, and sexual. |
|
|
10. |
A therapeutic
industry arose in response. Churches and secular groups alike established
marriage seminars and counseling services to assist couples in sustaining a
“healthy” marriage. A popular form of 1960s psychotherapy, the “encounter
group,” was adapted to marriage counseling: Couples met in large groups to
explore new methods of communicating. Americans increasingly defined marriage
not simply by companionship and sexual fidelity but by the deeply felt
emotional connection between two people. |
|
C. |
Religion in the 1970s: The Fourth Great
Awakening |
|
|
1. |
Evangelical churches emphasized an intimate, personal salvation (being “born again”), focused on the literal
scripture of the Bible, and regarded the death and resurrection of Jesus as the
central message of Christianity. These tenets distinguished evangelicals from
mainline Protestants as well as from Catholics and Jews, and they flourished in
a handful of evangelical colleges, Bible schools, and seminaries in the postwar
decades. |
|
|
2. |
No one did more to keep the evangelical fire burning than Billy Graham. A
graduate of the evangelical
Wheaton
College in
Illinois,
Graham cofounded Youth for Christ in 1945 and then toured the
United States
and
Europe
preaching the gospel. |
|
|
3. |
Graham and other evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for
the Fourth Great Awakening. But it was the secular liberalism of the late 1960s
and early 1970s that sparked the evangelical revival. |
|
|
4. |
Many Americans regarded feminism, the counterculture, sexual freedom,
homosexuality, pornography, divorce, and legalized abortion not as distinct
issues, but as a collective sign of moral decay in society. |
|
|
5. |
To seek answers and find order, more and more people turned to evangelical
ministries, especially Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, and Assemblies of God
churches. |
|
|
6. |
As mainline churches lost about 15 percent of their membership between 1970 and
1985, evangelical church membership soared. Much of this astonishing growth
came from the creative use of television. Graham had pounded the pavement and
worn out shoe leather to reach his converts. But a new generation of preachers
brought religious conversion directly into Americans’ living rooms through
television. |
|
|
7. |
These so-called “televangelists” built huge media empires through small
donations from millions of avid viewers—not to mention advertising. |
|
|
8. |
Of primary concern to evangelical Christians was the family. Drawing on
relevant passages from the Bible, evangelicals believed that the nuclear
family, and not the individual, represented the fundamental unit of society.
The family itself was organized along paternalist lines: father was breadwinner
and disciplinarian, mother was nurturer and supporter. |
|
|
9. |
Wherever one looked in the 1970s and early 1980s, American families were under
strain. Nearly everyone agreed that the waves of social liberalism and economic
transformation that swept over the nation in the 1960s and 1970s had destabilized
society and, especially, family relationships. |
|
|
10. |
But Americans did not agree about how to restabilize
families. Indeed, different approaches to the family would further divide the
country in the 1980s and 1990s, as the New Right would increasingly make
“family values” a political issue. |