The Strain of Vietnam

• Perhaps no single issue contributed more to public disillusionment than the Vietnam War

  • As the war deteriorated, the Johnson administration escalated American involvement by deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to prevent the communist takeover of the south

• With no end in sight, protesters burned draft cards, refused to pay income taxes, occupied government buildings, and delayed trains loaded with war materials

• The Vietnam War was different in that television, print media, and open access to the battlefield provided unprecedented coverage of the conflict’s brutality

  • The White House and military nevertheless used press briefings and interviews to paint a deceptive image of the war

  • Nothing did more to expose this credibility gap than the 1968 Tet Offensive

    • In January, communist forces attacked more than one hundred American and South Vietnamese sites throughout South Vietnam, including the American embassy in Saigon

    • While U.S. forces repulsed the attack and inflicted heavy casualties on the Vietcong, Tet demonstrated that despite the repeated claims of administration officials, the enemy could still strike at will anywhere in the country, even after years of war

  • In 1969, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that U.S. troops had raped and/or massacred hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai

• For many Americans, the violent clashes outside the convention hall reinforced their belief that civil society was unraveling

  • Republican challenger Richard Nixon played on these fears, running on a platform of “law and order” and a vague plan to end the war

    • He narrowly edged out Humphrey in the fall’s election

• Public assurances of American withdrawal, however, masked a dramatic escalation of conflict

  • Another three years passed (and another twenty thousand American troops died) before an agreement was reached

  • 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 1973, marking the official end of U.S. force commitment to the Vietnam War

• Vietnam poisoned many Americans’ perceptions of their government and its role in the world and ended up pushing many Americans toward conservatism

Racial, Social, and Cultural Anxieties

• The civil rights movement looked dramatically different at the end of the 1960s than it had at the beginning

  • The rise of the Black Power movement challenged the integrationist dreams of many older activists as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X fueled disillusionment and many alienated activists recoiled from liberal reformers

• The lines of race, class, and gender ruptured American “mass” culture

  • Marketers now targeted particular products to ever smaller pieces of the population, including previously neglected groups such as African Americans

  • While Black cultural forms had been prominent throughout American history, they assumed new popular forms in the 1970s

• Perhaps the strongest element fueling American anxiety over “law and order” was the increasingly visible violence associated with the civil rights movement

  • Publicly visible violence now broke out among Black Americans in urban riots and among whites protesting new civil rights programs

    • Urban riots tainted many white Americans’ perception of the civil rights movement and urban life in general

  • In 1967, President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate 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 blasted the conclusion that white racism and economic hopelessness were to blame for the violence

      • They claimed the violence was the logical outcome of a liberal culture of permissiveness that tolerated nihilistic civil disobedience

• The perseverance into the present day of stark racial and economic segregation in nearly all American cities destroyed any simple distinction between southern de jure segregation and nonsouthern de facto segregation

• The goal of economic justice proved as elusive as ever

The Crisis of 1968

• To Americans in 1968, the country seemed to be unraveling

  • Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968

    • The greatest leader in the American civil rights movement was lost, riots broke out all over the country

  • Two months later, on June 6, Robert F. Kennedy was killed campaigning in California

    • He had represented the last hope of liberal idealists

  • As the Vietnam War descended ever deeper into a brutal stalemate and the Tet Offensive exposed the lies of the Johnson administration, students shut down college campuses and government facilities

• 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

  • Initial protests were peaceful, but the situation quickly soured as police issued stern threats and young people began to taunt and goad officials

  • Clashes spilled from the parks into city streets, and eventually, the smell of tear gas penetrated the upper floors of the opulent hotels hosting Democratic delegates

The Rise and Fall of Richard Nixon

• The Republican nominee’s campaign was defined by shrewd maintenance of his public appearances and a pledge to restore peace and prosperity

• Once installed in the White House, Richard Nixon focused his energies on American foreign policy, publicly announcing the Nixon Doctrine in 1969

  • Turned America away from the policy of active, anti-communist containment, and toward a new strategy of détente

• An oil crisis began, and by the end of 1973, the global price of oil had quadrupled

• Furthermore, government scandals in the 1970s and early 1980s sapped trust in America’s public institutions

  • 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

  • In 1973, Congress 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

  • They were 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 Re-elect the President

• While there is no direct evidence that Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in, he had been recorded in conversation with his chief of staff requesting that the DNC chairman be illegally wiretapped to obtain the names of the committee’s financial supporters

• Whether or not the president ordered the Watergate break-in, the White House launched a massive cover-up

  • Administration officials ordered the CIA to halt the FBI investigation and paid hush money to the burglars and White House aides

  • Nixon distanced himself from the incident publicly and went on to win a landslide election victory in November 1972

• However, in part to two persistent journalists at the Washington Post, information continued to surface that tied the burglaries ever closer to the CIA, the FBI, and the White House

  • The Senate held televised hearings and 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, but Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on it

  • He became the first and only American president to resign from office

Deindustrialization and the Rise of the Sunbelt

• During the so-called Great Compression, Americans of all classes benefited from postwar prosperity

  • 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

  • Detroit boomed during World War II

  • After the war, automobile firms began closing urban factories and moving to outlying suburbs

  • When auto companies mechanized or moved their operations, ancillary suppliers like machine tool companies were cut out of the supply chain and likewise forced to cut their own workforce

    • Lots of jobs were lost

    • Industrial restructuring decimated all workers, but deindustrialization fell heaviest on the city’s African Americans

• Deindustrialization in Detroit and elsewhere also went hand in hand with the long assault on unionization that began in the aftermath of World War II

  • Lacking the political support they had enjoyed during the New Deal years, labor organizations such as the CIO and the UAW shifted tactics and accepted labor-management accords in which cooperation, not agitation, was the strategic objective

  • By that point, many liberals had forsaken working-class politics

    • Many saw poverty as stemming not from structural flaws in the national economy, but from the failure of individuals to take full advantage of the American system

• Internal racism also weakened the labor movement

  • 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

• 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 expanded, reversing three decades of postwar contraction

  • Dramatic increases in mass incarceration coincided with the deregulation of prison labor to allow more private companies access to cheaper inmate labor

• Southern states’ hostility toward organized labor beckoned corporate leaders

  • The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 facilitated southern states’ frontal assault on unions

  • Cheap, nonunionized labor, low wages, and lax regulations pulled northern industries away from the Rust Belt

  • The South attracted business but struggled to share their profits

    • 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

The Politics of Love, Sex, and Gender

• Many Americans challenged strict gender roles and rejected the rigidity of the nuclear family

  • Cohabitation without marriage spiked, straight couples married later (if at all), and divorce levels climbed

• At the turn of the decade, 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

• Two landmark legal rulings in 1973 established the battle lines for the “sex wars” of the 1970s

  • First, the Supreme Court’s 7–2 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 on precedent from a 1965 ruling that recognized a constitutional “right to privacy”

    • The Court held that states could not interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy and could only fully prohibit abortions during the third trimester

  • 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”

    • The ruling expanded states’ abilities to pass laws prohibiting materials like hard-core pornography

• Of more tangible concern for most women, though, was the right to equal employment access

  • Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned employment discrimination based on sex, in addition to race, color, religion, and national origin (thanks to Black feminists)

• The battle for freedom also encompassed the right to get out of unhappy households and marriages

  • The stigma attached to divorce evaporated and a growing sense of sexual and personal freedom motivated individuals to leave abusive or unfulfilling marriages

  • Before 1969, most states required one spouse to prove that the other was guilty of a specific offense, such as adultery, but the emergence of no-fault divorce laws made it easier to get a divorce

• Gay men and women, meanwhile, negotiated a harsh world that stigmatized homosexuality as a mental illness or an immoral depravity

  • Young gay activists of the late sixties and seventies began to challenge what they saw as the conservative gradualism of the “homophile” movement

  • 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

    • When police raided the Stonewall in June 1969 (which happened regularly), 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

    • Gay activists increasingly attacked cultural norms that demanded they keep their sexuality hidden

    • A step towards the normalization of homosexuality occurred in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness

• Like all social movements, the sexual revolution was not free of division

  • 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

The Misery Index

• Although Nixon eluded prosecution, Watergate continued to weigh on voters’ minds

  • It netted big congressional gains for Democrats in the 1974 midterm elections, and Ford’s pardon damaged his chances in 1976

• When Jimmy 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

• As the American economy stalled, Japan and West Germany soared and became major forces in the global production for autos, steel, machine tools, and electrical products

  • By 1970, the United States began to run massive trade deficits

• The result was that 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

  • 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, but Carter failed to slow the unraveling of the American economy

• The collapse of American manufacturing, the stubborn rise of inflation, the sudden impotence of American foreign policy, and a culture ever more divided: the sense of unraveling pervaded the nation