confidence, its moral compass, and much of its luster. But “more than Watergate and Vietnam,” wrote the historian Edward Berkowitz in
Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies
, “the economy was the factor that gave the seventies its distinctive character.”
The seventies saw two major recessions, one beginning in 1973 and the other in 1978. Each involved a sudden spike in the price of oil. Incomes, after rising strongly for decades, were flat, factoring out inflation—even for married couples, and even though married women were entering the workforce in record numbers. Inflation averaged nearly 9 percent a year for the decade as a whole.A third recession, induced by the Fed to arrest inflation as the 1980s began, brought the unemployment rate into the double digits. The economy had mostly recovered by 1983, but prosperity remained elusive for many until the mid-1990s.
The economic challenges that America faced in the 1970s bear some faint resemblance to those the country faces today. Exports failed to keep pace with rising imports (1971 was the first year in the twentieth century in which the United States ran a trade deficit), and American industrial workers felt the sting of international competition. But for the most part, both the origins of the period’s economic weakness (oil and agricultural shocks, slowing growth in productivity) and the particular manifestations of weakness (“stagflation”) were different from those of today.
Nonetheless, the 1970s are the only other modern period in which the United States experienced long stagnation, punctuated by punishing setbacks. They are instructive primarily for the long-lasting social and political changes that stagnation eventually produced.
In
Something Happened
, Berkowitz describes the burst of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, following John F. Kennedy’s death. But, he notes, that “hopeful legacy began to sour after 1972,” as the economy began to sink. The ’60s were hardly innocent of white anger over civil rights, but in the ’70s, white grievances intensified and spread throughout the country. Conflict grew over busing to achieve racial balance in schools, and protests in Boston turned violent. (One iconic newspaper photo showed young white men trying to impale a black man with an American flag.)
Legal challenges to civil-rights policies began to meet with success. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
that race-based affirmative action was, in some cases, illegal. At the beginning of the ’70s, writes the historian Bruce J. Schulman in
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
, most blacks said they wanted to live in integrated neighborhoods and send their children to integrated schools. By the decade’s end, more than two-thirds said they felt more kinship with black Africans than with white Americans.
In previous decades, writes Schulman, “American politics and culture had acted like a universal solvent: dissolving ethnic and regional loyalties, diluting sectarian strife and religious enthusiasm.” But in the ’70s, he says, these same forces acted as a centrifuge, spinning people and communities further apart. Rising individualism, the decline of the WASP social order, and a sexual revolution—themselves inseparable, it might be argued, from the economic transition away from industry and corporate hierarchy and toward a flatter, more creative information age—sowed confusion and concern. Years of economic stagnation, meanwhile, leached away respect for political leaders.
Throughout the ’70s, anti-immigrant groups grew stronger. In his 1978 novel,
The Turner Diaries
, William Pierce imagined violent revolution and the extermination of nonwhites. The novel drew a large following across the next decade, as white-supremacistmovements and antigovernment militias proliferated. The extremism that hard times nourished in
Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies
, “the economy was the factor that gave the seventies its distinctive character.”
The seventies saw two major recessions, one beginning in 1973 and the other in 1978. Each involved a sudden spike in the price of oil. Incomes, after rising strongly for decades, were flat, factoring out inflation—even for married couples, and even though married women were entering the workforce in record numbers. Inflation averaged nearly 9 percent a year for the decade as a whole.A third recession, induced by the Fed to arrest inflation as the 1980s began, brought the unemployment rate into the double digits. The economy had mostly recovered by 1983, but prosperity remained elusive for many until the mid-1990s.
The economic challenges that America faced in the 1970s bear some faint resemblance to those the country faces today. Exports failed to keep pace with rising imports (1971 was the first year in the twentieth century in which the United States ran a trade deficit), and American industrial workers felt the sting of international competition. But for the most part, both the origins of the period’s economic weakness (oil and agricultural shocks, slowing growth in productivity) and the particular manifestations of weakness (“stagflation”) were different from those of today.
Nonetheless, the 1970s are the only other modern period in which the United States experienced long stagnation, punctuated by punishing setbacks. They are instructive primarily for the long-lasting social and political changes that stagnation eventually produced.
In
Something Happened
, Berkowitz describes the burst of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, following John F. Kennedy’s death. But, he notes, that “hopeful legacy began to sour after 1972,” as the economy began to sink. The ’60s were hardly innocent of white anger over civil rights, but in the ’70s, white grievances intensified and spread throughout the country. Conflict grew over busing to achieve racial balance in schools, and protests in Boston turned violent. (One iconic newspaper photo showed young white men trying to impale a black man with an American flag.)
Legal challenges to civil-rights policies began to meet with success. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
that race-based affirmative action was, in some cases, illegal. At the beginning of the ’70s, writes the historian Bruce J. Schulman in
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
, most blacks said they wanted to live in integrated neighborhoods and send their children to integrated schools. By the decade’s end, more than two-thirds said they felt more kinship with black Africans than with white Americans.
In previous decades, writes Schulman, “American politics and culture had acted like a universal solvent: dissolving ethnic and regional loyalties, diluting sectarian strife and religious enthusiasm.” But in the ’70s, he says, these same forces acted as a centrifuge, spinning people and communities further apart. Rising individualism, the decline of the WASP social order, and a sexual revolution—themselves inseparable, it might be argued, from the economic transition away from industry and corporate hierarchy and toward a flatter, more creative information age—sowed confusion and concern. Years of economic stagnation, meanwhile, leached away respect for political leaders.
Throughout the ’70s, anti-immigrant groups grew stronger. In his 1978 novel,
The Turner Diaries
, William Pierce imagined violent revolution and the extermination of nonwhites. The novel drew a large following across the next decade, as white-supremacistmovements and antigovernment militias proliferated. The extremism that hard times nourished in
Similar Books
