Deindustrializing America, 1980-1992

Deindustrializing America: 1980-1992

Chapter Questions

• How did deindustrialization influence U.S. politics and society?

• What were the Reagan administration's legacies?

• Why did the consumer economy thrive while economic inequality spiraled upward?

• What were the origins and significance of the culture wars?

Introduction: The Rust Belt and Silicon Valley

• Flint, Michigan:

  • Birthplace of the United Auto Workers (1936-1937), symbolizing high-paying, secure employment for skilled American workers.

  • Experienced white middle-class flight to suburbs, draining tax revenues and decaying public amenities.

  • General Motors (GM) automated production, relocated factories to Mexico, and laid off thousands due to competition from fuel-efficient Japanese cars in the early 1980s.

  • Became a symbol of urban deindustrialization.

• National and Global Forces:

  • Contributed to the transformation of the traditional industrial zone into the "Rust Belt."

  • California's rural Santa Clara Valley transformed into Silicon Valley.

• Reagan's Policies:

  • Accelerated deindustrialization, white flight, and urban decay.

  • Renewed the Cold War and strengthened the military, leading to an economic boom and growing conservative influence.

  • Income inequality, poverty, and homelessness increased.

Time Line (1980-1992)

• 1980: Ronald Reagan wins the presidency in a landslide election.

• 1981:

  • Congress begins deregulation and slashes taxes.

  • Reagan implements the Reagan Doctrine.

  • Sandra Day O'Connor is appointed to the Supreme Court.

  • 750,000 Americans protest nuclear arms buildup.

  • First AIDS cases are observed.

• 1982:

  • Hezbollah attacks U.S. and French barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

  • Economy commences twenty-four-year-long Great Expansion.

  • Hispanic and white neighbors negotiate life together in sitcom, Condo.

  • Congress cuts 25 billion dollars from welfare programs.

• 1984:

  • Reagan slows deregulation and is re-elected in a landslide.

  • Apple transforms personal computing with Macintosh release.

  • Jesse Jackson becomes the first Black American to run for nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for president.

• 1985: Soviet Union undertakes reform of economy and political system

• 1986:

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II is released.

  • Iran-Contra scandal breaks.

  • Reagan's war on drugs begins.

• 1987:

  • Reagan and Gorbachev agree to nuclear arms reduction.

  • ACT UP publicizes AIDS crisis and government inaction.

  • Toni Morrison explores slavery's psychological impact in Beloved.

• 1988: Homeless Americans number 402,000, up almost 300,000 since 1980

• 1989:

  • Los Angeles-based N.W.A popularizes gangsta rap.

  • George H. W. Bush elected president.

  • Supreme Court preserves abortion rights.

• 1990:

  • U.S. invades Panama.

  • Half of all U.S. households own video game systems.

  • Federal law protects Americans with disabilities.

• 1991: Bush reneges on promise not to raise new taxes

• 1992:

  • Operation Desert Storm pushes Iraq out of Kuwait.

  • Riots erupt in Los Angeles after police officers acquitted of brutally beating Black motorist, Rodney King.

New Directions: Disillusionment and Immigration

• Disillusionment in 1980:

  • Many Americans were disillusioned with the direction of their lives and the nation.

  • Oil shocks of the 1970s, rising prices, and high unemployment.

  • President Jimmy Carter seemed to offer no respite.

• Immigration:

  • Millions of Asian and Hispanic immigrants entered the country legally in search of prosperity or freedom from persecution.

  • Immigrants and native-born citizens celebrated the renewal of American multiculturalism.

  • Some worried immigrants were taking jobs, collecting welfare, and threatening traditional American values.

The Faltering Economy

• The spectacular thirty-year period of economic growth and low unemployment that had ended in 1973 had yet to return.

• Steel, automotive, and other industries were shrinking and losing valuable markets to more-efficient European and Japanese manufacturers.

• Inflation mounted to almost 14 percent, and productivity sank to its lowest rate since 1940.

• The stock market was down, and unemployment was at a high of around 7.5 percent.

• Confidence in the government remained low several years after Watergate and the communist victory in Vietnam.

• Faith in business, the press, the legal profession, the military, and the medical establishment had also hit an all-time low.

• Confidence in public schools was also down sharply.

• For the first time since World War II, most Americans believed that their quality of life and future prospects had dimmed over the previous five years.

The New Immigration

• Between 1965 and 1980, over 8 million people had immigrated legally to the United States

• The flow of both legal and illegal immigrants accelerated in the new decade.

• The great majority were from Latin America or Asia (generally, China, the Philippines, and South Korea).

• As in earlier eras, the new immigrants brought with them few assets but an excellent work ethic and a fierce will to succeed.

• Most found employment in the service industries, low-skilled manufacturing, or agriculture-sectors eschewed by most citizens.

• Immigration surge from Mexico after economic shocks.

• Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans crossed the border in search of agricultural work.

• A half million others looked for work in the maquilas (assembly plants) that General Motors and other U.S. manufacturers had established in northern Mexico, along the border.

• Managers widely employed young rural women who were entering the workforce for the first time, fearing that male workers would demand higher wages and unionize

• Mexican men flowed across the border in search of work.

Crossing Borders

• America's demographic and cultural makeup was transformed, especially in the Southwest, where the number of Mexican Americans tripled between 1970 and 1990, and in the West, where the Asian American population increased sixfold.

• Not since the Progressive Era had the country been as linguistically and culturally diverse.

• Immigrants introduced Americans to new cuisines and created fusion cuisines, such as Tex-Mex.

• Univision, Spanish-language television that had grown from a single station in San Antonio, Texas, in 1955 to a regional network by 1980, became a truly national phenomenon, available from coast to coast.

• The children's television show Sesame Street actively promoted multiculturalism.

• Schools developed curricula to help immigrants settle in.

• Some Americans objected to the influx of people who neither spoke English nor were northern European, wondering what impact the newcomers would have on their way of life.

• Hispanics faced discrimination and hostility in California and elsewhere.

• Immigration became-and remains one of the most controversial political questions of the times.

Conservative Revival

• As the economy and Carter's presidency continued to stall in 1980, a variety of conservative organizations began attracting mass membership and significant cash donations.

• Building on the electronic ministries of the late 1970s, the Reverend Pat Robertson and fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell drew millions more viewers and mounted passionate attacks on welfare programs, abortion, and homosexuality.

• Conservative Catholics agreed that gays, feminists, and liberals were unraveling the nation's moral fiber.

• By 1990, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, founded the previous year, counted 1.6 million members and dominated the Republican Party in more than a dozen states.

• Subscriptions to the conservative National Review rocketed.

• Research and advocacy institutes known as think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, advanced the theory of supply-side economics, which held that lowering taxes would grow the economy and thereby bring in more tax revenue. Paul Krugman described this theory as crank doctrine.

• By mid-1980, every indicator suggested that the U.S. economy was the worst it had been since the Great Depression.

• Heading into the election of 1980, both the struggling economy and President Carter's pessimistic outlook proved a boon to Republicans.

• Optimistic, charismatic, and reassuring, Reagan evoked an allegedly simpler, more prosperous period of the nation's history: the 1950s.

• At the same time, his campaign successfully connected the Democrats with the tumultuous 1960s.

• On television, Reagan's communication skills, acting experience, and star quality inspired sorely needed confidence.

Politics and Entertainment

• Campaigning for president, Reagan picked up on many white Americans' dislike of the liberal Supreme Court and the Black freedom and anti-war movements.

• He also drew directly on popular anti-tax sentiment.

• Reagan lamented that the government had become unwieldy and too expensive and that a thicket of regulations was snarling free enterprise. Deregulation of the economy would allow business to prosper once more.

• It would have what he called a "trickle-down effect," freeing business to hire more workers, raise wages, and produce better goods and services.

• Poverty and crime would be solved if the poor took responsibility for themselves rather than depend on gover"make Amnment "handouts."

• Reagan said it was time to erica great again."

• Reagan swept to power over Carter with 489 electoral votes (91 percent of the total).

Reversing the New Deal

• In the name of "less government," Ronald Reagan set about cutting taxes and abolishing many of the costly regulations to which business was subject.

• Although he slashed anti-poverty welfare programs, he was unable or unwilling to cut Medicare and other middle-class entitlement programs on which many of his voters depended.

• Unexpectedly, federal spending grew during these years, as the president followed through on his promise to rebuild and expand the military.

• With lawmakers unable to balance the budget, the United States borrowed heavily, becoming a debtor nation for the first time since World War I.

• Deregulation fiercely eroded labor union power-a primary goal of conservatives.

• But scandals and popular discontent with environmental deregulation impeded the administration from carrying out its agenda, leaving many key New Deal programs intact.

Cutting Taxes, Shrinking Government

• Reagan laid out his ambitious agenda on January 20, 1981.

• He assembled a team of advisers who favored supply-side economics and the related theory of trickle-down economics-the idea that wealth created by deregulation and lower taxes would ultimately find its way down the economic ladder to workers in the form of higher wages.

• Congress embraced this approach, which became known as Reagonomics, and passed the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which cut all tax levels and dropped the wealthiest Americans' annual rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. In 1985, Congress halved the latter to just 28 percent for top earners, a historic low.

• Congress also lowered taxes on corporate profit, inherited wealth, and other forms of income.

• Shrinking government and trimming spending proved far more challenging, mostly because Reagan was determined to grow national defense.

• The president secured massive spending increases for nuclear and conventional weaponry and salary hikes for most military personnel.

• Beginning in 1983, the government also spent billions on the president's controversial new Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars, a missile defense system that would allegedly use satellite weaponry to intercept incoming Soviet missiles.

• All told, military spending swelled by 2 trillion dollars during Reagan's presidency.

• The administration paid the growing defense bill, in part, by diverting dollars from Great Society welfare programs, such as food stamps, school lunches, and low-income housing.

• Reagan officials painted the poor as parasites who lived lazily at the expense of hardworking taxpayers and seized on the stereotype of single, urban, Black mothers as so-called welfare queens.

• Middle-class entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security cost taxpayers far more than antipoverty programs did, but the administration feared that cutting these would alienate middle-class voters.

The U.S. Debt

• The United States has carried government debt since 1792. But it was only in the 1980s that the debt began to spiral, more than tripling during that decade and quintupling again by 2012.

• In the 1980s, the combination of higher spending, especially in defense, and lower tax revenue led the government to borrow an unprecedented 3 trillion dollars, or 5.9 trillion dollars today.

• Paradoxically, the rocketing debt was an indicator of investors' confidence that the economy was growing. Eager to profit from the interest on the loans, and certain that the government could easily repay them, investors gladly extended credit.

• As tax revenues dropped and government spending soared, the federal government's budget deficit ballooned from 100 billion dollars in 1980 to 150 billion dollars in 1981.

• Unable to rebalance the budget, the administration was forced to borrow. Beginning in 1981 and continuing for the next nine years, the government racked up a record 3 trillion dollars in debt, borrowed from a mix of foreign and domestic lenders.

• By the end of the decade, the world's largest creditor nation would become the most indebted.

Empowering Corporations

• Reagan radically accelerated the process of deregulation that President Jimmy Carter had initiated in 1978, targeting environmental, safety, consumer, and labor standards in particular.

• The administration appointed sympathetic officials to each of the federal regulatory agencies and ordered cost-benefit analyses of all new regulatory initiatives. Only those regulations whose benefits outweighed their costs were to be enforced.

• The administration also pruned agencies' funding by an average of 12 percent, laying off about 15 percent of their staffs by 1984.

• Automakers and the energy sector prevailed on Reagan to delay the implementation of planned safety and environmental protections, including emissions standards.

• Of all the sectors, finance and banking were the most aggressively deregulated.

• Reagan weakened the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission to effectively oversee the stock market, on the grounds that the agency was stifling the creative forces of investment.

• Relaxation of the rules governing consumer credit led to a boom in credit card use and the rapid growth of consumer debt.

• Small savings and loan associations (S&Ls), which were originally intended to offer middle-class families affordable mortgages, were now authorized to offer a range of services. This new flexibility encouraged many S&Ls to pursue large profits and to take on higher and more complex levels of risk.

• Thousands of S&Ls failed, leaving taxpayers with a 164-billion-dollar bill (344 billion in today's dollars).

• Although some institutions repaid the bailout in the 1990s, taxpayers footed over two-thirds of the final bill.

Media and Information

• In communications, the government dropped its long-standing insistence that the airwaves belong to the people and that commercial broadcasters must serve the public.

• The Federal Communications Commission gave broadcasters a free hand to determine the quality and quantity of programming and advertising.

• Most important, cable television was authorized to compete fully with broadcast television.

• With the start-up of new genre stations-Music Television (MTV), Cable News Network (CNN), Quality Value Convenience (QVC), and many others-a new age of televised mass culture dawned.

• The big three broadcast networks-NBC, CBS, and ABC-began losing audiences to the new cable channels (including Fox News, which Australian newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch founded in 1996).

Weakening Organized Labor

• Together with deindustrialization, which accelerated in the 1980s, Reagan's policies helped turn the decade into the most disastrous for organized labor since the 1920s.

• Labor unions lost millions of members and much of their status and power.

• The federal government successfully implemented anti-union policies that encouraged employers to disregard unions and the principles laid down in Walter Reuther's Treaty of Detroit in 1950.

• When thirteen thousand air traffic controllers struck in 1981 over stagnating salaries, Reagan fired them all, broke their union, and temporarily put the military in charge of air traffic.

• Many employers treated Reagan's audacious move, and his appointment of anti-unionists to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Department of Labor, as a permission note to ignore key labor laws.

• Workers who tried to unionize were illegally fired, and employers replaced hundreds of thousands of unionized employees with temps (temporary laborers who were nonunionized and not entitled to costly benefits).

• The unions filed grievances, but the NLRB often stood back, halving its pro-union rulings.

• Such policies encouraged the new phenomenon of downsizing, by which large corporations dodged labor laws and laid off some 45 million workers between 1979 and 1995.

• Most of those laid off found new employment, though it was unlikely to be unionized work with benefits.

• By 1990, almost 60 percent of married mothers were employed outside the home, compared to less than 50 percent in 1980.

• Reagan's anti-union policy was wildly successful.

• Union membership, already declining, plummeted. Whereas almost one in four employees in the private sector had belonged to a union in 1979, fewer than one in ten employees were unionized in 1988.

• State and federal workers, who were generally well protected by law, continued to join unions at the same or a greater rate during these years and would not be targeted for deregulation until the twenty-first century.

The Environment and the Limits of Deregulation

• By 1981, Reagan believed that environmental regulation, like other government controls, was stifling business.

• The Western rangers, mining companies, and large property holders who had demanded that the federal government give federal land back to the states (for development) and voted for Reagan in 1980 now demanded that the president make protected federal land available for ranching and development.

• Reagan rewarded Western developers' support by naming them to key positions in the government's environmental agencies.

• One such appointee, former anti-environmental attorney and secretary of the interior James Watt, made no secret of his contempt for environmentalism or his intention to open all unused federal land to mining and oil drilling

• Watt quintupled the amount of land leased to mining companies and significantly expanded offshore drillixzng.

• Another anti-environmentalist, Colorado corporate attorney Anne Gorsuch, headed the Environmental Protection Agency, which proceeded to drop lawsuits against polluters and relax anti-pesticide and clean air regulations.

• And the heads of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management opened previously protected land to mining and forestry.

• This swift reversal of policy enraged environmentalists and stunned the public.

• Increased drilling, mining, and timber felling threatened not only the natural world but also the billion-dollar wilderness recreation business and millions of jobs.

• Concerned Americans joined the Sierra Club and other environmental groups in droves and loudly protested environmental and other forms of deregulation.

• Not wishing to alienate large numbers of voters, the Reagan administration began ratcheting back its deregulation policy in the election year of 1984.

• In his second term, Reagan would settle for ensuring that Congress passed no new environmental regulations.

Renewing the Cold War

• In foreign policy, expanding the military and reasserting U.S. power became Reagan's primary objectives.

• Reagan framed a simple, broadly appealing approach. The United States must use its military might and diplomatic power to confront Soviet communism, he asserted, while actively improving the world for all.

• Reagan justified massive increases in military spending both in stark terms, painting the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and in lofty rhetoric that appealed to Americans' sense of national mission.

• Reagan's bluntly anti-Soviet policy rekindled the Cold War, reversing more than a decade of U.S. foreign policy that had emphasized the need for peaceful coexistence with the United States's superpower rival.

• The new approach also went beyond the older doctrine of containment, which had sought to block the spread of communism, to the total defeat of Soviet communism. U.S. military buildup, reasoned the president and his advisers, would force an arms race that would bankrupt the Soviet economy and spark an anti-communist revolution.

• In 1981 the president slapped trade sanctions on the Soviet Union after Poland's communist government suppressed an independent workers' organization, named Solidarity.

• Fighting communism and socialism, wherever they were in power or seemed to be taking root, once again became a goal of U.S. foreign policy.

• Reagan renewed U.S. financial and covert military operations against communist and other leftist movements, and he sided with extreme, right-wing governments, dictatorships, and rebels.

• Announcing the Reagan Doctrine, the president declared America's support for those he called "freedom fighters" in the global struggle against communism.

• The United States accelerated financial and military aid for the anti-communist mujahidin who were battling Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan. The Afghan fighters forced a stalemate and, in 1988, Soviet withdrawal.

• The administration applied the Reagan Doctrine most rigorously in Central America and the Caribbean.

• In Nicaragua, leftist nationalists known as the Sandinistas had overthrown the pro-U.S. dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza García in 1979.

• When the Sandinistas, in 1981, extended their revolution to neighboring El Salvador, Reagan authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly fund, arm, and train thousands of right-wing, anti-Sandinista soldiers known as Contras.

• El Salvador descended into a bloody civil war in which Contra death squads eventually killed over forty thousand civilians and Sandinistas.

• Two years later, Reagan sent U.S. troops to overthrow Grenada's socialist government (which had recently staged a violent coup).

• In 1984, Congress prohibited the U.S. government from directing military aid to the anti-Sandinista Contras.

• In 1982, U.S. soldiers deployed to war-torn Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force.

• Two truck bombs exploded at the U.S. and French barracks, killing 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers. An organization later known as Hezbollah, a militant Shi'a Islamic group funded by Iran, claimed responsibility for the Beirut barracks bombing.

• This new kind of enemy, however, would prove far more elusive than traditional enemies, such as the Soviet Union, and such groups would steadily expand through the turn of the century.

Morning in America

• Reagan faced significant challenges as campaigned for re-election in 1984.

• The Democrats nominated Walter Mondale, vice president under Jimmy Carter, and (for the first time in history) chose a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, for vice president.

• Mondale railed at Reagan for starting a nuclear arms race, pursuing economic policies that favored the rich, and racking up a crushing federal debt.

• Reagan rejected what his campaign managers called Mondale's "typical tax-and-spend, gloom-and-doom" assessment of the state of the nation.

• The economy had recovered from the recession of 1981-1982 and was growing faster than at any other point since the 1950s.

• More men and women were employed than ever before, mortgage rates and inflation were down, marriage rates were up, and "our country is prouder and stronger and better."

• A majority of voters agreed, delivering forty-nine states and 59 percent of the popular vote to Reagan in a landslide election.

Law-and-Order Presidency

• Abandoning his deregulation drive, in his second term the president focused on passing immigration reform, waging a large-scale war on drugs, and building a more conservative Supreme Court.

• The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made it an offense to knowingly hire immigrants who had entered the country illegally but granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants.

• The same year, the president signed a powerful law enforcement bill that significantly toughened the penalties for drug offenses and poured 2 billion into policing. First Lady Nancy Reagan, meanwhile, led an anti-drug campaign urging youth to "Just Say No" to drugs.

• In his first term, the president had nominated Sandra Day O'Connor, an Arizona judge who hewed to New Federalism.

• In his second term, Reagan nominated the brilliant rhetorician and New Federalist, Antonin Scalia, who believed that judges should interpret the Constitution according to the intentions of its framers.

• The Senate drew the line, however, at Reagan's next nominee, Robert Bork, a harsh critic of civil rights, women's rights, and the right to privacy, whereupon Reagan nominated another New Federalist, Anthony Kennedy, who had worked with the president when the former was California governor.

• The court's conservative turn was all but assured with the confirmation of William Rehnquist as Chief Justice in 1986.

• Over the next nineteen years, Rehnquist would steer the Court in an aggressively conservative direction, overseeing an end to court-ordered busing, limiting the scope of federal laws, loosening protections for prisoners, and declaring capital punishment constitutional.

• Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy had unexpectedly become swing votes, sometimes voting with the conservatives and other times against them.

Cold War Thaw

• Although Reagan made law and order the key focus of his second term, it came to light in late 1986 that high-ranking administration officials had been secretly selling anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in exchange for Iran's help in freeing seven American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

• The proceeds from these arms sales were illegally used to fund right wing, anti-Sandinista Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

• Top advisers oversaw the arrangement, and President Reagan probably knew of it.

• When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal, however, a lower-ranked officer, marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, took responsibility.

• In 1985, a young Mikhail Gorbachev took power, pledging to implement a policy of perestroika-restructuring of the depressed Soviet economy along market-oriented lines. Gorbachev also promised a new era of glasnost, or political openness, and moved to suspend the Soviet Union's costly nuclear arms program.

• Seeking an arms reduction agreement, Gorbachev and Reagan convened in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986. Under the resulting treaty, the two superpowers agreed to destroy all midrange missiles in Europe.

• Reagan stopped referring to the Soviet Union as the evil empire and advocated cooperation instead.

• The end of the Cold War was imminent.

The New Gilded Age

• Reaganomics and deregulation had mixed but lasting results.

• Consumer culture expanded dramatically, breaking into new territory such as the classroom and medicine, and consumers enjoyed greater choice and much lower prices for goods and services.

• The infusion of income at the highest ranks stimulated consumption, and prompted the culture industries to promote and extol consumerism and affluent lifestyles.

• Business leaders and other wealthy people benefited far more than middle-income Americans, whose relative income stagnated. The poorest Americans grew significantly poorer.

The Great Expansion

• Although the first three years of Reaganomics had resulted in a towering national debt and rising budget deficits, by 1983 the economy was booming and inflation had declined.

• For the next twenty-four years, the economy underwent what economists call the Great Expansion.

• Gross domestic product grew by about 6 percent a year for the next eight years-the longest peacetime expansion on record.

• Interrupted only by two eight-month recessions, the boom lasted until the Great Recession of 2007-2009

• Some of the new growth came from traditional sectors, such as automobiles and steel, but most was generated by service industries. Banking and finance, electrical and other trades, information services, restaurants, entertainment, and tourism led the boom.

• Media companies merged, with just fifty conglomerates owning almost all movie companies, publishing enterprises, and broadcasting outlets by 1990.

• By then, most Americans subscribed to cable TV and owned a video recorder. Almost half had also acquired a video game system.

• Heavy industry and manufacturing lost more ground to foreign producers. In 1984, for the first time since 1915, the United States imported more goods and money than it exported.

• Much of the trade deficit arose from Japan's phenomenal rise as one of the world's leading producers of cars and electronics.

• American factories closed, and once-prosperous towns went into steep decline.

• Desperate to cut costs in order to compete, American manufacturers invested in automation, developing new machine vision, spot welding, and other labor-saving technologies, and throwing more skilled workers out of their jobs.

• In 1984, the PC enjoyed its first major commercial success with the release of Apple's Macintosh.

• Meanwhile, software designers Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a powerful new operating system, MS-DOS, the precursor to Microsoft Windows, which went on to be used on the vast majority of the world's PCs.

Celebrating Affluence

• Much like their Gilded Age counterparts, many of the wealthiest Americans engaged in conspicuous consumption, purchasing expensive European cars, constructing lavish mansions, and throwing posh parties.

• Books, movies, advertisements, TV shows, and clothing styles exalted affluence, stimulating the desire among less-well-off Americans to emulate the good life.

• TV shows such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous paid homage to excess as a positive value.

• Americans also thrilled to the stories of successful corporate titans.

• Among them was Lee Iacocca, Chrysler's CEO, who had saved the foundering automaker (with the help of a 1.5-billion-dollar loan from the U.S. government) and made it profitable again.

• Fashion also emphasized excess.

• White women lopped off their natural locks and opted for voluminous blow-dried and permed hairstyles.

• Male rock bands, such as Def Leppard, followed suit.

• Women's clothing, embellished with shoulder pads, ruffles, and rhinestones, emphasized glamour. For men, formal black-tie dinner suits made a comeback.

• Designer jeans and underwear became must-have fashion statements.

Revising History

• Concurrently, a nostalgic vision of the 1950s predominated in mass culture.

• President Reagan appealed to Americans to restore what he imagined as the affluent, decent 1950s.

• Hollywood movies reinforced this artificial memory of the fifties with movies such as Back to the Future (1985) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

• One popular movie, The Big Chill (1983), tells the story of a group of old friends from the 1960s who reunite in 1982 after the suicide of a college buddy.

• In Top Gun (1986), the decade's most popular movie, an airman whose father went missing in action during the Vietnam War, confronts his inner demons by becoming an ace fighter pilot, using the latest technology to shoot down enemy planes.

• Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) also attempted to cure the Vietnam syndrome-Americans' loss of confidence in the nation's ability to win a war.

New Frontiers of Consumerism

• Thanks to deregulation, advertisers could aim program-length commercials at children.

• Ads starring a licensed movie or TV action figure, such as Darth Vader, spurred product sales, more than quintupling the sales of licensed characters by 1990.

• Toy companies and fast-food interests collaborated to offer children "free" gifts, such as plastic cups and plates featuring favorite TV and movie characters.

• A new cable TV station, Nickelodeon, aimed content specifically at children, while hundreds of corporations distributed free products and services in schools in exchange for adding their brand names to curricula.

• Large-scale malls and gallerias with movie theaters displaced Main Street businesses and turned once-busy downtowns into ghost towns.

• A new species of themed chain stores and restaurants (including Hooters and Hard Rock Cafe) turned the malls into multiuse spaces where entertainment, browsing, dating, and family time blended with the shopping experience.

• Americans also went deeper into debt to maintain their spending levels, expending an average of 20 percent more of their income on installment debt plans than they had in the 1970s.

Hot Commodities: Pac-Man and the Gaming Revolution

• Pac-Man revolutionized gaming, created a mass market, and over a decade before the spread of the Internet introduced millions of Americans to virtual reality.

• People had never seen or heard anything like it.

• Contrary to industry expectations, Pac-Man fever turned the game into the best-selling arcade game of all time.

• Pac-Man's mass appeal lay partly in its reinvention of the player's role from noninteractive to active participant in a virtual world.

• All these features made Pac-Man a perfect match for a culture that emphasized instant gratification. It proved irresistible not only to existing video gamers-the vast majority of whom were boys-but also to new participants, including girls.

New and Old Inequalities

• Although the economy surged and the average American's paycheck fattened during the 1980s, the majority fell behind relative to overall growth of income.

• For the first time since the 1920s, the lion's share of the new prosperity went to the wealthiest 1 percent of citizens.

• The average American's pretax income increased 7 percent during the decade, whereas the top percent's income shot up by an astounding 107 percent.

• The affluence gap between the wealthiest and the majority had been greater only in the Gilded Age.

• Overall poverty rates rose between 1980 and 1988, from 11.7 percent to 13.5 percent, the highest level since the 1950s.

• Black and female-headed households (some of which were also Black) were especially hard hit.

• Children's poverty rate rose from about 18 percent to almost 20 percent overall, or 50 percent in the case of Black Americans.

• The number of homeless Americans more than tripled between 1980 and 1988 from 125,000 to 402,000, the highest rate since the Great Depression.

Reinventing Dissent

• Convinced that the 1980s was an unmitigated triumph for conservatives and that consumerism had destroyed the gains of the 1960s, many left-leaning baby boomers checked out of politics.

• Others, however,