American Yawp Chapter 28

Woodstock West

Woodstock had shown the world the power of peace and love and American youth. Altamont was supposed to be "Woodstock West.

--vs. Woodstock idyll

Woodstock music festival captured the idyll of the sixties youth culture, Altamont revealed its dark side. There, drugs and music and youth were associated not with peace and love but with anger, violence, and death

LBJ's escalation in Vietnam

Johnson administration escalated American involvement by deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to prevent the communist takeover of the South.

"living room war"

Vietnam was the first "living room war."6 Television, print media, and open access to the battlefield provided unprecedented coverage of the conflict's brutality. Americans confronted grisly images of casualties and atrocities.

Cam Ne; Mai Lai

Stories like CBS's Cam Ne piece exposed a "credibility gap," the yawning chasm between the claims of official sources and the increasingly evident reality on the ground in Vietnam. In 1969, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that U.S. troops had massacred and/or raped hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai.

"credibility gap"

Cam Ne piece exposed a "credibility gap," the yawning chasm between the claims of official sources and the increasingly evident reality on the ground in Vietnam

Vietnamization

Nixon sought, on the one hand, to appease antiwar sentiment by promising to phase out the draft, train South Vietnamese forces to assume more responsibility for the war effort, and gradually withdraw American troops. Nixon and his advisors called it "Vietnamization.

"madman strategy"

Public assurances of American withdrawal, however, masked a dramatic escalation of conflict. Looking to incentivize peace talks, Nixon pursued a "madman strategy" of attacking communist supply lines across Laos and Cambodia, hoping to convince the North Vietnamese that he would do anything to stop the war.

Jackson & Kent

Police and National Guard troops killed six students in separate protests at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and, more famously, Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.

Paris Peace, 1973

After Nixon threatened to withdraw all aid and guaranteed to enforce a treaty militarily, the North and South Vietnamese governments signed the Paris Peace Accords in January of 1973, marking the official end of U.S. force commitment to the Vietnam War.

--Vietnam government?

By 1975, despite nearly a decade of direct American military engagement, Vietnam was united under a communist government.

--Archie

All in the Family, became an unexpected hit among "middle America" The show's main character, Archie Bunker, was designed to mock reactionary middle-aged white men, but audiences embraced him

--rap

And by the end of the decade African American musical artists had introduced American society to one of the most significant musical innovations in decades: the Sugarhill Gang's 1979 record, Rapper's Delight. A lengthy paean to black machismo, it became the first rap single to reach the top 40. Just as rap represented a hyper-masculine black cultural form, Hollywood popularized its white equivalent.

--riots

No longer confined to the anti-black terrorism that struck the southern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, publicly visible violence now broke out among blacks in urban riots and among whites protesting new civil rights programs. Urban riots, though, rather than anti-integration violence, tainted many white Americans' perception of the civil rights movement and urban life in general. Civil unrest broke out across the country, but the riots in Watts/Los Angeles (1965), Newark (1967), and Detroit (1967) were most shocking. In each, a physical altercation between white police officers and African Americans spiraled into days of chaos and destruction. Tens of thousands participated in urban riots. Many looted and destroyed white-owned business. There were dozens of deaths, tens of millions of dollars in property damage, and an exodus of white capital that only further isolated urban povert

Kerner

In 1967, President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of America's riots. Their report became an unexpected bestseller.

DNC in Chicago, 1968

Protesters converged on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August, 1968, when a bitterly fractured Democratic Party gathered to assemble a passable platform and nominate a broadly acceptable presidential candidate. Demonstrators planned massive protests in Chicago's public spaces.

--Daley

Many of the assembled students had protest and sit-in experiences only in the relative safe havens of college campuses, and were unprepared for Mayor Richard Daley's aggressive and heavily armed police force and by National Guard troops in full riot gear.

Silent Majority

The Republican nominee's campaign was defined by shrewd maintenance of his public appearances and a pledge to restore peace and prosperity to what he called "the silent center; the millions of people in the middle of the political spectrum." This campaign for "the Silent Majority" was carefully calibrated to attract suburban Americans by linking liberals with violence and protest and rioting. Many embraced Nixon's message; a September 1968 poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed public order had "broken down."

Nixon Doctrine/détente?

Once installed in the White House, Richard Nixon focused his energies on American foreign policy, publicly announcing the "Nixon Doctrine" in 1969. He was turning America away from the policy of active, anti-communist containment, and toward a new strategy of "détente." détente sought to stabilize the international system by thawing relations with Cold War rivals and bilaterally freezing arms levels.

Oil crisis

November 1973, Nixon appeared on television to inform Americans that energy had become "a serious national problem" and that the United States was "heading toward the most acute shortages of energy since World War II."27 The previous month Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel of the world's leading oil producers, embargoed oil exports to the United States in retaliation for American intervention in the Middle East. The embargo launched the first U.S. energy crisis.

Pentagon Papers

In 1971, the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to sue the New York Times and the Washington Post to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a confidential and damning history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam commissioned by the Defense Department and later leaked. The Papers showed how presidents from Truman to Johnson repeatedly deceived the public on the war's scope and direction.

War Power Res.

In 1973, it passed the War Powers Resolution, which dramatically reduced the president's ability to wage war without congressional consent.

Watergate

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate Complex in downtown Washington, D.C. After being tipped by a security guard, police found the men attempting to install sophisticated bugging equipment. One of those arrested was a former CIA employee then working as a security aide for the Nixon administration's Committee to Reelect the President (lampooned as "CREEP").

"urban crisis"/deindustrialization

But, general prosperity masked deeper vulnerabilities. Perhaps no case better illustrates the decline of American industry and the creation of an intractable "urban crisis" than Detroit. As the automobile industry expanded and especially as the United States transitioned to a wartime economy during World War II, Detroit boomed. When auto manufacturers like Ford and General Motors converted their assembly lines to build machines for the American war effort, observers dubbed the city the "arsenal of democracy. Some cities partly deindustrialized themselves. Municipal governments in San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia banished light industry to make room for high-rise apartments and office buildings.

--African Americans

Industrial restructuring decimated all workers, but deindustrialization fell heaviest on the city's African Americans. Although many middle class blacks managed to move out of the city's ghettoes, by 1960, 19.7 percent of black autoworkers in Detroit were unemployed, compared to just 5.8 percent of whites

Fear of "Big Labor"

Conservative politicians meanwhile seized on popular suspicions of "Big Labor," stepping up their criticism of union leadership and positioning themselves as workers' true ally.

"hate strikes"

In Detroit and elsewhere after World War II, white workers participated in "hate strikes" where they walked off the job rather than work with African Americans. White workers similarly opposed residential integration, fearing, among other things, that black newcomers would lower property values.

Recession causes

By the mid-1970s, widely-shared postwar prosperity leveled off and began to retreat. Growing international competition, technological inefficiency, and declining productivity gains stunted working- and middle-class wages. As the country entered recession, wages decreased and the pay gap between workers and management began its long widening. At the same time, dramatic increases in mass incarceration coincided with the deregulation of prison labor to allow more private companies access to cheaper inmate labor, a process that, whatever its aggregate impact, impacted local communities where free jobs were moved into prisons

Rust Belt

Factories shuttered in the North and Midwest, leading commentators by the 1980s to dub America's former industrial heartland the "the Rust Belt." outhern states' hostility toward organized labor beckoned corporate leaders. The Taft-Hartley Act in 1949 facilitated southern states' frontal assault on unions. Thereafter, cheap, nonunionized labor, low wages, and lax regulations pulled northern industries away from the Rust Belt.

Sun Belt

they contrasted the prosperous and dynamic "Sun Belt." refers to the swath of southern and western states that saw unprecedented economic, industrial, and demographic growth after World War II

--causes of growth?

Skilled northern workers followed the new jobs southward and westward... The Sun Belt inverted Rust Belt realities: the South and West had growing numbers of high-skill, high-wage jobs but lacked the social and educational infrastructure needed to train native poor and middle-class workers for those jobs.

Sexual revolution

The sexual revolution continued into the 1970s. Many Americans—feminists, gay men, lesbians, and straight couples—challenged strict gender roles and rejected the rigidity of the nuclear family.

--marriage/divorce

sexuality was considered a private matter yet rigidly regulated by federal, state, and local law. Statutes typically defined legitimate sexual expression within the confines of patriarchal, procreative marriage. Interracial marriage, for instance, was illegal in many states until 1967 and remained largely taboo long after. Same-sex intercourse and cross-dressing were criminalized in most states, and gay men, lesbians, and transgender people were vulnerable to violent police enforcement as well as discrimination in housing and employment._______________ Between 1959 and 1979, the American divorce rate more than doubled. By the early 1980s, nearly half of all American marriages ended in divorce.49 The stigma attached to divorce evaporated and a growing sense of sexual and personal freedom motivated individuals to leave abusive or unfulfilling marriages. Legal changes also promoted higher divorce rates. Before 1969, most states required one spouse to prove that the other was guilty of a specific offense, such as adultery.

--Roe

First, the Supreme Court's 7-1 ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973) struck down a Texas law that prohibited abortion in all cases when a mother's life was not in danger. The Court's decision built upon precedent from a 1965 ruling that, in striking down a Connecticut law prohibiting married couples from using birth control, recognized a constitutional "right to privacy."

--Miller

ound that sexual privacy could be sacrificed for the sake of "public" good. Miller v. California (1973), a case over the unsolicited mailing of sexually explicit advertisements for illustrated "adult" books, held that the first amendment did not protect "obscene" material, defined by the Court as anything with sexual appeal that lacked, "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."45 The ruling expanded states' abilities to pass laws prohibiting materials like hardcore pornography. However, uneven enforcement allowed pornographic theaters and sex shops to proliferate despite whatever laws states had on the books. Americans debated whether these represented the pinnacle of sexual liberation or, as poet and lesbian feminist Rita Mae Brown suggested, "the ultimate conclusion of sexist logic."

Title VII

Thanks partly to the work of black feminists like Pauli Murray, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned employment discrimination based on sex, in addition to race, color, religion, and national origin. "If sex is not included," she argued in a memorandum sent to members of Congress, "the civil rights bill would be including only half of the Negroes."

Sexual rights

full impact came about slowly, as women across the nation cited it to litigate and pressure employers to offer them equal opportunities as men. For one, employers in the late sixties and seventies still viewed certain occupations as inherently feminine or masculine. The National Organization for Women (NOW) organized airline workers against a major company's sexist ad campaign that showed female flight attendants wearing buttons that read, "I'm Debbie, Fly Me" or "I'm Cheryl, Fly Me." The battle for sexual freedom was not just about the right to get into places, though. It was also about the right to get out of them—specifically, unhappy households and marriages

--Stonewall

Perhaps no single incident did more to galvanize gay and lesbian activism than the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village. Police regularly raided gay bars and hangouts. But when police raided the Stonewall in June 1969, the bar patrons protested and sparked a multi-day street battle that catalyzed a national movement for gay liberation. Seemingly overnight, calls for homophile respectability were replaced with chants of "Gay Power!"

--Falwell

A leader of the ascendant religious right, Jerry Falwell, said in 1980 that, "It is now time to take a stand on certain moral issues .... We must stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the homosexual revolution. We must have a revival in this country."

ERA

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

--vs. Schlafly

Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA organization ("Stop Taking Our Privileges") trumpeted the value and lived advantages of being a homemaker and mother.Marshaling the support of evangelical Christians and other religious conservatives, Schlafly worked tirelessly to stifle the ERA. She lobbied legislators and organized counter-rallies to ensure that Americans heard "from the millions of happily married women who believe in the laws which protect the family and require the husband to support his wife and children. The failed battle for the ERA uncovered the limits of the feminist crusade. And it illustrated the women's movement's inherent incapacity to represent fully the views of fifty percent of the country's population, a population riven by class differences, racial disparities, and cultural and religious divisions.

Carter

former one-term Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a nuclear physicist and peanut farmer who represented the rising generation of younger, racially liberal "New South" Democrats, captured the Democratic nomination. He ran on no great political issues, letting his background as a hardworking, honest, Southern Baptist navy-man ingratiate him to voters around the country, especially in his native South, where support for Democrats had wavered in the wake of the civil rights movement.

--economy

Carter took the oath of office on January 20, 1977, however, he became president of a nation in the midst of economic turmoil. Oil shocks, inflation, stagnant growth, unemployment, and sinking wages weighed down the nation's economy. Some of these problems were traceable to the end of World War II, when American leaders erected a complex system of trade policies to help rebuild the shattered economies of Western Europe and Asia. After the war, American diplomats and politicians used trade relationships to win influence and allies around the globe.

--human rights

Carter's human rights policy achieved real victories: the U.S. either reduced or eliminated aid to American-supported right-wing dictators guilty of extreme human rights abuses in places like South Korea, Argentina, and the Philippines.

--foreign policy (Panama; Shah; Doctrine?)

In September 1977, Carter negotiated the return to Panama of the Panama Canal, which cost him enormous political capital in the United States. A year later, in September 1978, Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. And yet Carter's dreams of a human rights-based foreign policy crumbled before the Cold War and the realities of American politics.