The seventies, p.1
The Seventies, page 1
Also by Bruce J. Schulman
FROM COTTON BELT TO SUNBELT
Federal Policy, Economic Development, and theTransformation of the South, 1938–1980
LYNDON B. JOHNSON AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM
THE FREE PRESS
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Copyright ©2001by Bruce J. Schulman
“Feels Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” copyright 1965 Alkatraz Corner Music, words and music by Joe McDonald.“Mohammed’s Radio” copyright 1978 Zevon Music. Merle Haggard’s “Are the Good Times Really Over?” copyright 1981 Sony/ATV Songs LLC; all rights reserved; used by permission; the context surrounding this lyric is strictly conjecture. Bobby Braddock’s “I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again” copyright 1973 Sony/ATV Songs LLV (Renewed); all rights reserved; used by permission; the context surrounding this lyric is strictly conjecture. Merle Haggard and Roy Burris’s “Okie From Muskogee” copyright 1969 Sony/ATV Songs LLC (Renewed)); all rights reserved; used by permission; the context surrounding this lyric is strictly conjecture. Sylvester Stewart's "Everyday People" copyright 1969 (Renewed) Mijac Music (BMI); all rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.; all rights reserved; used by permission. Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" copyright 1978 Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (PRS), Sex Pistols Residuals (ASCAP) & Glitterbest Ltd.; all rights ob/o Warner Chappell Music Ltd. & Sex Pistols Residuals administered by WB Music Corp. (ASCAP); all rights reserved; used by permission. Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime" 1979 Index Music, Inc. (ASCAP) & Bleu Disque Music Co., Inc. (ASCAP); all rights administered by WB Music Corp.; all rights reserved; used by permission. Randy Newman's "Political Science" copyright 1972 (Renewed)Unichappell Music Inc.; all rights reserved; used by permission. Sylvester Stewart's "Stand" copyright 1970 (Renewed) Mijac Music (BMI); all rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.; all rights reserved; used by permission. BGs' "Stayin' Alive" copyright 1977 Brothers Gibb B. V.; all rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.; all rights reserved; used by permission. Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" copyright 1974 Universal-Duchess Music Corporation, Universal-On-Backstreet Music, Inc. and E MI Longitude Music; all rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.; all rights reserved; used by permission. “Hurricane” copyright 1975 Jacques Levy and Bob Dylan.
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ISBN-10: 0-7432-1948-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1948-8
For My Friends,
Fellow Children of the Seventies
contents
Preface
Introduction: The Sixties and the Postwar Legacy
PART I “WE’RE FINALLY ON OUR OWN,” 1969–1976
1. “Down to the Nut-Cutting”: The Nixon Presidency and American Public Life
2. E Pluribus Plures: From Racial Integration to “Diversity”
3. “Plugging In”: Seeking and Finding in the Seventies
4. The Rise of the Sunbelt and the “Reddening” of America
PART II “RUNNIN’ ON EMPTY,” 1976–1979
5. Jimmy Carter and the Crisis of Confidence
6. “This Ain’t No Foolin’Around”: Rebellion and Authority in Seventies Popular Culture
7. Battles of the Sexes: Women, Men, and the Family
PART III “HIP TO BE SQUARE,” 1978–1984
8. “The Minutemen Are Turning in Their Graves”: The New Right and the Tax Revolt
9. The Reagan Culmination
Conclusion: End of the Seventies, End of the Century
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
preface
A GENERATION AGO WILLIAM E. LEUCHTENBURG PUBLISHED HIS evocative, popular histories of the 1920s and the 1930s. Appearing just two decades after the events he chronicled, The Perils of Prosperity and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal mapped out what was then the very recent past. The author and his audience had lived through and vividly remembered the events that these books retold. Leuchtenburg cut a broad swath through American history, leavening the standard account of politics and policy with tales of mah-jongg tournaments and labor unrest, Broadway musicals and crackpot pension schemes. The books were also decidedly personal. Leuchtenburg never injected himself into the text, but readers could detect that he had grappled with his own, and his generation’s, coming of age. 1
This book follows, haltingly, in those footsteps. It attempts a rich, evocative-portrait of the United States in the 1970s. It analyzes not only presidential politics and national policy but the broader social and cultural experiences of the recent past: the agonies of busing, the shake of disco, the new power and consciousness of the elderly, the rise of the Sunbelt, and the brie, chardonnay, and BMWs of yuppies. The narrative allows readers to relive familiar moments, stumble on forgotten, surprising incidents from their lifetimes, and rethink both from a broader, deeper, historical perspective. It dissects the meaning and analyzes the enduring influence of those not-so-bygone days.
Of course, when Leuchtenburg completed his history of the 1930s, he felt no need to justify his topic. Americans understood the Great Depression as a life-altering, world-shattering event. The New Deal remained vividly alive; every day millions of Americans cashed social security checks, deposited them in federally insured bank accounts, and used the proceeds to repay GI bill mortgages and guaranteed student loans. The Roosevelt coalition—the odd alliance of African Americans, labor, farmers, and urban white ethnics that FDR had assembled—still dominated American politics. The nation’s leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, measured themselves against FDR’s achievements. 2
The task of a historian writing about the 1970s seems much less clear. Most Americans regard the Seventies as an eminently forgettable decade—an era of bad clothes, bad hair, and bad music impossible to take seriously. Contemporaries dismissed it as a “Pinto of a decade,” referring to Ford’smysteriouslyexploding compact car. “The perfect Seventies symbol,” one critic complained, “was the Pet Rock, which just sat there doing nothing.” 3
“Of all the decades of the twentieth century,” recalled another Seventies chronicler, “it would be hard to pick out one with a less distinctive, recognizable character.” 4 The very term the Sixties conjures a whole set of political, social, and cultural associations. So does the Eighties. References to a “Sixties veteran” or an “Eighties outlook” evoke knowing nods and clear, if stereotyped, images. But the term Seventies sensibility elicits only laughter. It dredges up vague reminiscences of wild fashions and vapid dance music. It calls forth a “wasted generation,” a rootless youth culture wavering between the political commitments of the 1960s and the career ambitions of the 1980s—a generation that spent much of its uncertain time “wasted.”
To the extent that the Seventies recall more serious concerns, they form a dreary catalogue of depressing events: hostages in Iran and defeat in Vietnam, double-digit inflation and lines at the gas pumps. The era seems to have accomplished nothing worth remembering, and nothing remains except the stuff of harmless nostalgia—nostalgia nourished by the remoteness and apparent insignificance of those years.
This impression could hardly be more wrong. The Seventies transformed American economic and cultural life as much as, if not more than, the revolutions in manners and morals of the 1920s and the 1960s. The decade reshaped the political landscape more dramatically than the 1930s. In race relations, religion, family life, politics, and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern U.S. history, the beginning of our own time. One year alone, 1973, witnessed the end of American intervention in Vietnam, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the exposure of the Watergate conspiracies, the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee, and the first Arab oil shock. Billie Jean King won the Battle of the Sexes, The Godfather swept the Academy Awards, and a young evangelical preacher named Jim Bakker appeared on the airwaves, intent on creating “God’s television.”
Americans might have stopped talking about revolution, ceasing the utopian blather that filled the air and the airwaves during the late 1960s. But the era witnessed fundamental changes. Over the course of the long 1970s, the nation’s center of gravity shifted south and west. Political power, economic dynamism, and cultural authority more and more emanated from the sprawling, entrepreneurial communities of America’s southern rim. When SenatorBarry Goldwater galloped out of the Southwest in 1964, preaching a brash mixture of patriotism and militarism, libertarian disregard for big government and reactionary solicitude for states’ rights, the northeastern establishment sniggered. Old-line Republicans, the scions of Wall Street and the captains of Rustbelt industry, like New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, were dumbfounded that the upstart Arizonan had captured their party’s presidential nomination. The nation’s political and cultural elites, and the vast majority of voters, thought Goldwater simply nuts. He had spent too much time out in the desert sun.
Only in the Deep South did Goldwater find support, where his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and hostility to federal intervention won him the votes of hard-line segregationists. Yet Dixie’s embrace of Goldwater only deepened the dominant North’s scorn and loathing. The South seemed even more benighted than the desert Southwest t
Southern politics was surely colorful, but it had little to teach the nation. Beset by demagogues and one-party rule, its racial obsessions, disdain for taxes and social programs, and virulent anticommunism seemed out of step with Sixties America. True, the region controlled a sizable bloc of votes on Capitol Hill and several key congressional committees. But it could merely obstruct, rather than create, national policy. Lyndon Johnson had long believed the country would never elect a southerner president. Even after he gained the White House, he complained about the condescending chauvinism of the “Harvards” who ran the American establishment. 5
During the 1960s southern culture won even less respect than southern politics. Most Americans regarded the region as a land of moonshine and fiddle music, racism and possum stew—a place they passed through as quickly as possible on the way to Florida. Being a white Southerner in those days, journalist Blanche McCrary Boyd recalled, was “a bit like being Eichmann’s daughter: people don’t assume you’re guilty, but they wonder how you’ve been affected.” 6
Then during the Seventies, the tides of American life turned. A booming economy and burgeoning population transformed the South and Southwest. Renamed the Sunbelt, this outcast region wrested control of national politics,sending the winning candidate to the White House in every election after 1964. The region’s power centered no longer in the recalcitrant, segregationist Deep South but along its periphery—in the skyscrapers of Atlanta, the space centers and shopping malls of Houston, the sprawling subdivisions of suburban Charlotte and northern Virginia, the retirement centers of Florida. In 1972, a half million people swarmed President Richard Nixon’s motorcade route along Peachtree Street in Atlanta. The South, Nixon confessed, had always formed a crucial element in his electoral game plan. But the president denied cynically exploiting the racial resentments of white southerners. He had pursued “an American strategy,” he claimed, not a “Southern strategy.” After all, the president explained, Michigan cared about busing and military strength as much as Alabama did. The Sunbelt South’s issues and outlook, Nixon recognized, would soon define the contours of an emerging new majority in American politics. 7
During the Seventies, this influence would extend far beyond the political arena. Shorn of the most overt forms of racial brutality, a domesticated white southern culture flourished. Country music and southern rock, cowboy boots and pork rinds, even Pentecostal churches and the Confederate flag appeared throughout the nation. In 1973, the Country Music Association held its annual convention in Manhattan, and Mayor John Lindsay declared Country Music Day in New York City. “There’s a swing over to the simple, the clean, to the healthy,” a Yankee convert to the Nashville sound enthused. “Country music celebrates the goodness in America, faith in America, patriotism.” 8 The brash, freewheeling boosterism of the Sunbelt South gradually enveloped the nation; by the time of the Los Angeles Olympics and Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, it had become the national style.
This southernization of American life also translated into new-found respect for religion—a broad, nationwide interest in the experience of spiritual rebirth. “Not too long ago,” one southern minister explained in 1974, “the Gospel according to Billy Graham was strictly a southern product. Now, that gospel of individual salvation . . . appeals to persons throughout the land who struggle with the torment of littleness, trying to gain some sense of instant worth and welcome from an indifferent civilization that is too complex for their coping.” As the old-line Protestant churches—the calm, rational, polite observances of the Northeast and Midwest—declined during the Seventies, an arc of ecstatic religious enthusiasm spread across the nation from the Baptist revivals of Virginia to the New Age retreats of California. 9
These changes in latitude encouraged broader changes in attitudes.Around the globe, the 1970s witnessed declining faith in government programs—skepticism about large-scale public efforts to remake the world. Economic malaise and political crisis sent the welfare state into retreat and prompted new respect for capitalism throughout the industrialized world. But in the United States, these international trends played out in distinctive ways and followed unusual directions. Americans developed a deeper, more thorough suspicion of the instruments of public life and a more profound disillusionment with the corruption and inefficiency of public institutions. The ideal of social solidarity, the conception of a national community with duties and obligations to one’s fellow citizens, elicited greater skepticism during the 1970s, while the private sphere commanded uncommon, and sometimes undeserved, respect.
Seventies Americans developed an unusual faith in the market. More and more, they turned to the private sphere, relying on business rather than government to provide essential services and even to construct the spaces where ordinary Americans would meet, shop, and socialize. Businessmen, management guru Peter Drucker rightly prophesied in 1973, would soon realize their fondest wish: “that the United States employ private enterprise, rather than government, to satisfy the country’s social and economic needs.” 10
Increasingly, all sorts of Americans, even those with dreams of radical reform, looked to the entrepreneur and the marketplace as the agent of national progress and dynamic social change. Richard Nixon uncovered this sentiment in 1972, beginning his push for a new conservative American majority. Ronald Reagan completed it in 1984 amid the celebrations of the Los Angeles Olympics, the first staged entirely without public support.
But the transformations of the Seventies amounted to more than a conservative, southern ascendancy. The era ushered in another sort of change in latitude. Hair was no longer an issue. Fashions became outrageous, sexual behavior less restrained. A new ethic of personal liberation trumped older notions of decency, civility, and restraint. Americans widely embraced this looser code of conduct. Even those who had never been hippies, or never even liked hippies, displayed a willingness to let it all hang loose.
In 1979, New York Times correspondent Robert Reinhold journeyed to middle America. Reporting from Des Moines, Iowa, Reinhold found evidence of a new informality everywhere he looked. Even the police force had let its hair down; Iowa police officers wore long hair, beards, and mustaches. Previouslyanyone who admitted ever using marijuana could not be considered for a job on the force. Now, Reinhold learned, the department had recently changed its regulations. If prospective officers just promised to obey the law after they donned the uniform—wink, wink—they remained eligible for the police academy. 11
Americans enjoyed the freedom to reinvent themselves. “All sorts of people,” one journalist noted, “suddenly appeared as other than they were: stockbrokers dressed up as for safari; English professors looked like stevedores; grandmothers in pant suits, young girls in granny dresses.” Not just the government, but all sources of authority became targets for distrust and mockery. Academe, the legal and medical professions, and professional athletes all lost credibility and public trust. Even science, the triumphant force that had landed a man on the moon, seemed increasingly suspect. 12
Seventies popular culture, from the iconoclastic cinema of Martin Scorcese and Roman Polanski, to the outrageous lyrics and ear-shattering screams of punk rock, to the irreverent comedy of Saturday Night Live, revealed a contempt for authority, a sense that the powers that be had rotted to the core. Even the era’s partisans of decency, including the self-styled Moral Majority, eschewed the decorum, the formality, the courtesy of their forebears and adopted a defiant, in-your-face style. During the Seventies, the forces of God and the forces of Mammon refused to show deference to established leaders and institutions.
