❤️❤️ CH 28 The Unraveling

Introduction

December 6, 1969: Altamont Motor Speedway concert, meant to be "Woodstock West," but was a disorganized disaster with violence and death.
The 1970s saw a growing anxious, conservative mood in the U.S.
Divisive remnants of a failed war (Vietnam), the country’s greatest political scandal (Watergate), and an intractable economic crisis.

The Strain of Vietnam

Vietnam War: A major cause of public disillusionment.
Johnson administration escalated involvement, deploying troops to prevent a communist takeover.
Stalemates, body counts, hazy war aims, and the draft led to antiwar movements and protests.
Protesters burned draft cards, refused to pay income taxes, occupied buildings, and delayed trains.
1967: Antiwar demonstrations drew hundreds of thousands; some were arrested after surrounding the Pentagon.
Vietnam was the first “living room war,” with unprecedented media coverage of the conflict’s brutality.
CBS Evening News aired a segment showing U.S. Marines burning the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne in 1965.
The U.S. government painted a deceptive image of the war, claiming they were winning, but journalists exposed a credibility gap.
The 1968 Tet Offensive exposed the hollowness of the claims as communist forces attacked over one hundred American and South Vietnamese sites.
1969: Seymour Hersh revealed the My Lai Massacre.
Growing unpopularity of the war led President Johnson to announce he would not seek reelection in 1968.
Republican Richard Nixon ran on a platform of “law and order” and a plan to end the war.
Nixon’s "Vietnamization" plan aimed to phase out the draft, train South Vietnamese forces, and gradually withdraw American troops.
He also appealed to the “silent majority” for an “honorable” end to U.S. involvement.
Nixon pursued a “madman strategy” of attacking communist supply lines in Laos $(\text{Laos})$ and Cambodia without public knowledge, which failed to spur peace.
Police and National Guard troops killed six students in separate protests at Jackson State University and Kent State University in 1970.
Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, marking the official end of U.S. force commitment to the Vietnam War.
By 1975, Vietnam was united under a communist government.
The Vietnam War poisoned Americans’ perceptions of their government.
Many Americans continued to regard the war as just and grew worried about the rapid social changes.

Racial, Social, and Cultural Anxieties

The civil rights movement fractured in the 1970s with the rise of the Black Power movement.
Assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X fueled disillusionment.
American “mass” culture shattered into smaller, segmented subcultures.
Marketers targeted products to smaller population segments, including African Americans.
Subcultures revolved around musical styles like pop, disco, hard rock, punk rock, country, or hip-hop.
The seventies saw a resurgence of cultural forms appealing to the white working class.
Country hits like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” evoked simpler times.
The television sitcom All in the Family became a hit, with main character Archie Bunker representing reactionary middle-aged white men.
Black cultural forms assumed new prominence in the 1970s.
Disco was a new, optimistic, racially integrated pop music.
African American musicians brought their background in church performance to their own recordings and collaborations with white artists.
The Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 record, Rapper’s Delight, was the first rap single to reach the Top 40.
Films like 1971’s Dirty Harry captured a darker side of the national mood.
Clint Eastwood’s character delivered violent justice, appealing to Americans anxious about “law and order.”
Increasingly visible violence associated with the civil rights movement fueled American anxiety.
Public violence broke out among Black Americans in urban riots and among whites protesting new civil rights programs.
In the mid-1970s, protests over busing in Boston led to racial violence.
Urban riots in Watts/Los Angeles (1965), Newark (1967), and Detroit (1967) were shocking.
The Kerner Commission investigated the causes of America’s riots.
The commission cited Black frustration with the hopelessness of poverty as the underlying cause of urban unrest.
White conservatives blamed a liberal culture of permissiveness.
Many white moderates and liberals saw the violence as a rejection of nonviolence.

The Crisis of 1968

Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, leading to riots in over a hundred American cities.
Robert F. Kennedy was killed in June 1968, representing the last hope of liberal idealists.
Students shut down college campuses and government facilities in protest of the Vietnam War.
Protesters converged on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Violent clashes between protesters and police were televised, reinforcing the belief that civil society was unraveling.
The violence of 1968 represented the death of a dream for many sixties idealists.
Conservatives saw it as confirmation of their fears, and Americans wanted peace, stability, and “law and order.”

The Rise and Fall of Richard Nixon

President Johnson opted against reelection in March 1968 due to an unpopular war, inflation, and domestic unrest.
The presidential election was shaped by Vietnam and unrest.
Nixon’s campaign was defined by maintaining public appearances and promising to restore peace and prosperity.
He appealed to the “silent majority” and linked liberals with violence and rioting.
80% of Americans believed public order had “broken down.”
Nixon won 43.3 percent of the popular vote, narrowly besting Humphrey.
Wallace carried five states in the Deep South.
Nixon earned 302 electoral votes.
Democrats retained control of both the House and Senate.
Nixon announced the Nixon Doctrine in 1969, asserting the supremacy of American democratic capitalism.
He promoted détente, seeking to stabilize the international system by thawing relations with Cold War rivals.
In 1972, Nixon became the first American president to visit communist China and the Soviet Union.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I).
In November 1973, Nixon announced that the United States was heading toward an energy crisis.
Arab members of OPEC embargoed oil exports to the United States in retaliation for American intervention in the Middle East.
The global price of oil quadrupled.
The oil crisis extended into the late 1970s.
Government scandals in the 1970s and early 1980s sapped trust in America’s public institutions.
In 1971, the Nixon administration tried to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution.
The Watergate scandal unraveled public trust.
On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate Complex.
Nixon distanced himself publicly and won a landslide election victory in November 1972.
Information tied the burglaries ever closer to the CIA, the FBI, and the White House.
Nixon refused to comply with orders to produce tapes from the White House’s secret recording system.
In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill to impeach the president.
Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on impeachment.

Deindustrialization and the Rise of the Sunbelt

American workers had made substantial material gains throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
During the so-called Great Compression, Americans of all classes benefited from postwar prosperity.
Segregation and discrimination perpetuated racial and gender inequalities.
Unemployment continually fell and a highly progressive tax system and powerful unions lowered general income inequality.
Working-class standards of living nearly doubled between 1947 and 1973.
Detroit boomed during World War II but began to deindustrialize after the war.
Municipal governments banished light industry.
Manufacturing firms sought to reduce labor costs by automating, downsizing, and relocating to areas with “business friendly” policies.
Between 1950 and 1958, Chrysler cut its Detroit production workforce in half.
East Detroit lost ten plants and over seventy-one thousand jobs between 1953 and 1960.
Overt discrimination in housing and employment confined African Americans to segregated neighborhoods.
Few could afford to follow industry as it left the city.
Detroit devolved into a mass of unemployment, crime, and crippled municipal resources.
In 1967, 25 to 30 percent of Black residents between ages eighteen and twenty-four were unemployed.
Manufacturing jobs fell from 338,400 to 153,000 between 1947 and 1977.
Deindustrialization fell heaviest on the city’s African Americans.
By 1960, 19.7 percent of Black autoworkers in Detroit were unemployed, compared to just 5.8 percent of whites.
Labor organizations accepted labor-management accords.
Management encouraged employee loyalty through privatized welfare systems.
Bureaucracy and corruption increasingly weighed down unions.
Conservative politicians criticized union leadership.
Liberals forsook working-class politics and saw poverty as stemming from individual failure.
Internal racism also weakened the labor movement.
Growing international competition, technological inefficiency, and declining productivity gains stunted working- and middle-class wages.
The tax code became less progressive.
Unions represented a third of the workforce in the 1950s but only one in ten workers as of 2015.
Geography dictated much of labor’s fall, as American firms fled pro-labor states.
Factories shuttered in the North and Midwest, leading commentators to dub America’s former industrial heartland the Rust Belt.
The term Sun Belt refers to the swath of southern and western states that saw unprecedented economic, industrial, and demographic growth after World War II.
During the New Deal, the American South was declared “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.”
Sun Belt politicians lobbied hard for military installations and government contracts.
Cheap, nonunionized labor, low wages, and lax regulations pulled northern industries away from the Rust Belt.
Skilled northern workers followed the new jobs southward and westward.
Poor white and Black southerners found themselves mostly excluded from the fruits of the Sun Belt.
White southern politicians channeled federal funding away from public education and toward high-tech industry and university-level research.
By 1972, southern and western Sun Belt states had more electoral votes than the Northeast and Midwest.

The Politics of Love, Sex, and Gender

The sexual revolution continued into the 1970s.
Americans challenged strict gender roles and rejected the rigidity of the nuclear family.
Cohabitation without marriage spiked, couples married later, and divorce levels climbed.
Sexuality, decoupled from marriage and procreation, became a political cause.
Two landmark legal rulings in 1973 established the battle lines for the “sex wars” of the 1970s.
Roe v. Wade (1973) struck down a Texas law that prohibited abortion.
The Court’s decision built on precedent from a 1965 ruling that recognized a constitutional “right to privacy.”
$(\text{Roe v. Wade}):$ States could not interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy.
Miller v. California (1973) held that the First Amendment did not protect “obscene” material.
Of more tangible concern for most women was the right to equal employment access.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned employment discrimination based on sex.
NOW organized airline workers against sexist ad campaigns.
Women sued to gain access to traditionally male jobs.
Protests prompted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to issue more robust protections.
Between 1959 and 1979, the American divorce rate more than doubled.
The stigma attached to divorce evaporated.
Legal changes also promoted higher divorce rates.
In 1969, California adopted the first no-fault divorce law.
Inspired by the burgeoning radicalism of the Black Power movement, the New Left protests of the Vietnam War, and the counterculture movement for sexual freedom, gay and lesbian activists agitated for a broader set of sexual rights.
When police raided the Stonewall in June 1969, the bar patrons protested and sparked a multiday street battle that catalyzed a national movement for gay liberation.
In the following years, gay Americans gained unparalleled access to private and public spaces.
A step towards the normalization of homosexuality occurred in 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness.
In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Transgender people were often banned from participating in Gay Pride rallies and lesbian feminist conferences.
In 1977, activists in Dade County, Florida, used the slogan “Save Our Children” to overturn an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Jerry Falwell said in 1980 that it was time to stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the homosexual revolution.
Conservative Americans defeated the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA organization trumpeted the value and advantages of being a homemaker and mother.
In 1982, the time limit for ratification expired—and along with it, the amendment.

The Misery Index

Watergate continued to weigh on voters’ minds.
Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter captured the Democratic nomination.
Carter 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.
Carter’s wholesome image was painted in direct contrast to the memory of Nixon, and by association with the man who pardoned him.
When Carter took the oath of office on January 20, 1977, 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.
After the war, American diplomats and politicians used trade relationships to win influence and allies around the globe.
As the American economy stalled, Japan and West Germany soared.
By 1970, the United States began to run massive trade deficits.
Growing trade deficits sapped the United States’ dominant position in the global economy.
The Nixon administration allowed rising industrial nations to continue flouting the principles of free trade.
They maintained trade barriers that sheltered their domestic markets from foreign competition while at the same time exporting growing amounts of goods to the United States.
Carter, like Ford before him, presided over a hitherto unimagined economic dilemma: the simultaneous onset of inflation and economic stagnation, a combination popularized as stagflation.”
Investment capital fled the United States looking for overseas investments.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, Carter had touted the “misery index, ” the simple addition of the unemployment rate to the inflation rate, as an indictment of Gerald Ford and Republican rule.
Carter failed to slow the unraveling of the American economy, and the stubborn and confounding rise of both unemployment and inflation damaged his presidency.
Carter’s human rights policy achieved real victories.
The United States either reduced or eliminated aid to American-supported right-wing dictators guilty of extreme human rights abuses.
In September 1977, Carter negotiated the return to Panama of the Panama Canal, which cost him enormous political capital in the United States.
One year later, In September 1978, Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
When the shah was deposed in November 1979, revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two Americans hostage.
The Carter Doctrine not only signaled Carter’s ambivalent commitment to de-escalation and human rights, it testified to his increasingly desperate presidency.

Conclusion

American politics and society remained in flux throughout the 1970s.
A groundswell of anxieties and angers brewed beneath the surface.
The world’s greatest military power had floundered in Vietnam and an American president stood flustered by Middle Eastern revolutionaries.
American weakness was everywhere.
By 1980, many Americans felt a nostalgic desire for simpler times and simpler answers.
Carter’s utter failure to stop the unraveling of American power and confidence opened the way for a new movement with new personalities and a new conservatism.