Introduction: The 1970s



Introduction: The 1970s

From: The 1970s, Eyewitness History.

The 1960s Counterculture as a Backdrop to the 1970s

The 1970s were preceded by one of the greatest periods of social and political upheaval in American history: the 1960s counterculture. Counter means "against," and in this instance, the counterculture was a movement against mainstream culture. It consisted of a widespread, largely uncoordinated array of people and groups who were rebelling against societal standards and practices—everyone from hippies, who wanted to create an alternative society that was founded on psychedelic enlightenment and communal relations, to New Leftists, who wanted to overthrow the existing political system and replace it with a populist one that was rooted in socialism or, even more extreme, Marxism or anarchy.

The counterculture had its roots in the 1950s, a decade when the cold war—with its emphasis on a foreign enemy that had to be confronted and contained—gripped America and encouraged conformity. Suburbia displayed this sameness: look-alike houses, cars with big tail fins, television shows that were whiter than white. And it appeared in the harsher, starker forms of racism, censorship, and blacklists.

Conformity, however, was shaken by an expanding youth culture that was evident in the rise of rock and roll and more so by the Civil Rights Movement. For the counterculture generation—mainly those who reached their teens in the 1960s—a transcendent moment came in 1960 when black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. The television and newspaper coverage of the event stirred African-American and white youths across America. To these young people, the reaction of white segregationists to the sit-in made society seem undemocratic and cruel. Consequently, they decided to take the lead in making America live up to its professed ideals. With this upsurge, there emerged the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, under whose direction college-age activists traveled to Mississippi and other southern states to work for black voting rights. These volunteers experienced oppression and reactionary violence firsthand. In their effort, they learned tactics and strategies for fighting injustice, such as marches, sit-ins, and boycotts. Thus the Civil Rights movement propelled America into the counterculture.

The Vietnam War reinforced the sense of injustice, of a country gone astray from its professed democratic and humanitarian ideals. To the massive number of young people who populated America amid a post–World War II "baby boom," the Vietnam War may have been the strongest influence in creating the counterculture. The deaths from the war and the government lies connected to it made society's oppression and corruption naked, or so young people believed. Moreover, television provided unparalleled exposure to the war's violence and bloodshed, thus further fomenting discontent, while the draft made young people see the war as a palpable threat to their lives.

To many of these youths, the anvil of American industry and the brainpower of American technocrats who created ever-greater prosperity produced an impersonal machine that was concerned more with maintaining cold-war social stability than correcting society's deficiencies. "This is the time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part," said student protest leader Mario Savio. He continued:

You've got to put your bodies upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.1

Machine, apparatus, odious—the words fell on receptive ears, young people who felt oppressed and restive. So the counterculture emerged—hippies and college-based political activists who were tied to a New Left; black activists; female activists; those with serious agendas and those with frivolous ones; those aiming for political change; those aiming for cultural change.

Music changed. At first, young people flocked to folk music with its social and political consciousness; then they turned to the early Beatles with their innocent lyrics and upbeat outlook; they listened to psychedelic rock with its hallucinogenic imagery; they finally switched to harsher, politicized rock as antiwar protests grew heated and the gulf between counterculture and straight society widened.

Artists experimented. They used happenings, performance art, psychedelic images, posters. They produced movies with no plot, with little plot, with amateur actors, with rock soundtracks. Nudity appeared in Broadway shows; musicals declared the Age of Aquarius.

Politics, cultural influences, social practices all tumbled together. All cascaded in a countercultural rush and a tremendous challenge to authority. In the late 1960s, the political activists hardened, and some radicals, such as a group called Weatherman, sought a violent overthrow of the government.

Some historians believe that the counterculture went through stages: an early stage, prior to 1968, when the Civil Rights movement worked its greatest influence and young people expressed optimism about change; a middle stage, from 1968 to 1970, when society polarized and the core within both the counterculture and society at large no longer held; and a late stage, after 1970, when new activist groups came to the fore, stirred by the previous developments.

Thus, the counterculture of the 1960s continued past 1969 and into the 1970s, although in different form, with some elements in retreat and others advancing. For example, women's liberationists emerged from the counterculture and embraced its spirit and drive in the early 1970s to push for reform.

As the counterculture expanded, the lines between it and mainstream society both widened and blurred. Mainstream society railed against "unwashed," "drug-crazed," and "long-haired" "hippies" and against the decline of moral values. Yet, movies and television changed to reflect countercultural values; middle-aged Americans wore bell bottoms, and commercials promoted products through psychedelic images.

The counterculture's pervasive influence, the discontent, and the extensive questioning of givens, of authority, of what those in power handed down as wisdom appeared in comments made in 1968 by a high school student. He said:

The main thing that's taught us in school, is how to obey rules, dress in our uniforms, play the game, and no, don't be uppity! Oh, we're trained for participating in the democratic process—we have our student governments—they can legislate about basketball games and other such meaningful topics. Don't mention the curriculum. They'll tell us what to learn.2

In challenging mainstream ideas and practices, the counterculture—hippies, New Leftists, and assorted others—challenged authority and the basic premises of what the United States stood for. In The Movement and the Sixties, author Terry H. Anderson states: "The counterculture believed that the nation had become a Steppenwolf, a berserk monster, a cruel society that made war on peasants abroad and at home beat up on minorities, dissidents, students, and hippies. America the Beautiful was no more; it had been replaced by America the Death Culture."3

The questions and challenges that were raised by the counterculture continued into the 1970s, but given the view that America represented a "Death Culture," out to destroy dissidents, the counterculture became splintered, harsher, less willing to compromise, and less optimistic. For its part, mainstream society saw in the counterculture an invading horde about to destroy the values and institutions that had made America great. A deeply divided, polarized country entered the 1970s.

The 1970s as a Forgotten Decade

The 1970s sometimes have been called the forgotten decade, squeezed between the more tumultuous and exciting sixties and the more economically expansive and nationalistic eighties. At other times, the 1970s have been called the decade better forgotten.

It was, the argument goes, a terrible period filled with everything the 1960s could offer as backwash: the defeat in Vietnam with the horrible scenes of Vietnamese refugees trying desperately to flee their country; Watergate with the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the subsequent distrust of government that came from it and from the lies surrounding the Vietnam War; economic problems that ranged from an oil embargo (and escalating oil prices) to stagflation (the debilitating combination of high inflation and high unemployment); polarized views as conservatives derided the countercultural excesses and liberals derided mainstream hypocrisy; presidential ineptitude as Jimmy Carter struggled mightily and with much failure to deal with a demoralized society; war in the Middle East as Arabs and Israelis went to battle and nearly dragged the United States and the Soviet Union into a military conflict; embarrassment and rage as revolutionaries in Iran held Americans hostage; fear as a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania almost collapsed into meltdown; even pop-culture decay as disco seemed to make music vacuous and mindless.

There were, however, many positive accomplishments: manned journeys to the Moon and to the Skylab space station; reforms that advanced women's rights; treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union that addressed the spread of nuclear weapons; a decrease in tension between the United States and Communist China; provocative books and artful movies; and the everyday accomplishments of people who were holding their families together, enjoying their personal relationships, and taking satisfaction in doing their jobs.

Although the 1960s counterculture continued deep into the 1970s, at least from the mid-1970s onward, there was a pronounced movement away from the more idealistic features of the counterculture, especially its emphasis on harmony and community. To use the somewhat shopworn but still perceptive observation of novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe, the 1970s became the "Me Decade." Wolfe wrote:

One only knows that . . . great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me. . . Me. . . Me. . . Me. . .4

Dividing the 1970s into several broad categories helps to summarize some of the decade's more notable developments. Those categories follow below.

Militancy

Both peaceful and violent protests shaped the decade and thus directly continued the spirit of the 1960s counterculture. Antiwar protests, for example, captured nationwide attention with the tragic shooting of college students by the national guard at Kent State University in Ohio and the terrorist bombing by radicals at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But two groups more than any others kept alive the countercultural protests into the 1970s: Native Americans and women. Both determined they would fight for the rights long denied them.

Radical Indians turned to the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was organized in 1968. AIM modeled itself after the militant Black Panthers and, at first, focused on monitoring police actions in urban Indian ghettos to prevent false arrests, harassment, and brutality. It then expanded its efforts to Indian reservations and sought to protect Native American treaty rights. AIM's protests included a "countercelebration" in 1971 atop Mount Rushmore in South Dakota to expose what the group called the forcible and illegal taking of the mountainous terrain from the Oglala Lakota in the 19th century; a march in 1972 in Gordon, Nebraska, to publicize the refusal of the local authorities to file charges against two white men who were implicated in the murder of an Oglala Lakota; and, in 1973, a standoff with federal agents at Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, to prevent the granting of concessions to white ranchers on the reservation and the expansion of uranium mining that would likely contaminate the land.

For women, the fight for rights that had been long denied them dated back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, a crusade that resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women suffrage when it was ratified in 1920. The suffrage amendment, however, left many discriminatory laws and practices in place. Consequently, women were denied equal educational and job opportunities, equal pay, and equal justice. In reaction to this oppression, in the late 1960s, women activists began what became called a second wave of feminism, to extend the first wave of feminism that was embodied in the suffrage movement. The second wave ranged from moderates, who emphasized equal rights, to radicals, who emphasized dismantling the male-dominated capitalist economic system along with traditional family structures that supported male supremacy and placed women in a subservient position. The second wave took form in a diverse array of protests, some advocating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, others advocating lesbian rights. As with so many of the protest movements rooted in the 1960s, the women's movement of the 1970s displayed the tumult and controversy characteristic of a society shaped by the pervasive counterculture.

Politics

When Richard Nixon ran for the presidency in 1968, he tried to distance himself from the lies of the outgoing president, Lyndon Johnson. He promised: "Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth—to see it like it is, and tell it like it is—to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth."5 But on June 17, 1972, operatives for the Nixon reelection campaign broke into the Democratic party headquarters in Washington, D.C., at an apartment and office complex that was called Watergate. Their capture unraveled the secrets and lies that permeated the Nixon administration; moreover, it weakened trust in the country's political system and leaders, a weakening that had been underway since the mid-1960s. In his book Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell likened Nixon's politics to the performance of an evil magician: The president appeared to be open, compassionate, and truthful while, in actuality, he was secretive, hateful, and deceitful. Americans now applied this description to nearly every politician.

When Gerald Ford followed Richard Nixon into the White House, he seemed to be operating with the same deceit when he pardoned his predecessor. While Jimmy Carter projected a benevolent and open image, he found himself hampered by the distrust that had grown so extensive (and was burdened by his own incompetence). That distrust and, with it, Americans turning their backs on politics characterized the politics of the decade.

Economics

An editorial cartoon drawn in 1976 showed the oversize face of an Arab sheik with the acronym OPEC (for Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) affixed to his forehead and his cavernous mouth swallowing whole a huge automobile emblazoned with the caption American Lifestyle. To many Americans, it appeared as if the Arab oil nations, through a yearlong embargo of oil shipments to the United States that was followed by increased oil prices, had combined with other bewildering forces to devour a once-prosperous economy.

By the middle of 1974, prices for heating oil and gasoline had risen as much as 33 percent. By 1980, the price of crude oil was nearly seven times higher than it had been 10 years earlier. Although Americans still paid less for oil than did people in other industrialized countries, the crisis worsened an already intense feeling of despair and decline that flowed from the debacle in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.

Caused in part by the problems with oil, and more by long-term developments, such as increased foreign competition, factories reduced their workforces or shuttered their doors. Chrysler, for example, closed 13 plants and cut 31,000 jobs. While the Northeast "Rust Belt" suffered the most, every region experienced losses, and although 27 million new jobs were created in the 1970s, laid-off factory workers watched and worried as America's shift to a service economy forced many of them to flip burgers in low-pay, fast-food eateries or stock shelves in discount stores.

Inflation added to the miseries, reaching double digits by the end of the 1970s and contributing to a decline in living standards. By 1980, the typical family had only 7 percent more real purchasing power than a decade earlier—and that increase came in 1970–73, before OPEC's oil embargo and the cavernous mouth that swallowed the economy whole.

The Environment

Two events served as symbols for the nation's environment, one a symbol of hope, the other of despair. The hope: On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans celebrated the first Earth Day, showing their support for environmental reform. At about the time of this event, Congress passed several clean air and water acts, and many states passed similar legislation. In December 1970, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Endangered Species Act of 1973 pledged the federal government to protect species and their habitats threatened with extinction.

Between 1974 and 1977, clean-air laws reduced the number of unhealthy days in 25 major cities by 15 percent and the number of highly unhealthy days by 35 percent. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter and Congress established a $1.6 billion superfund to clean up abandoned chemical-waste sites. By executive order, he protected about 100 million acres of land in Alaska as national parks, forests, or wildlife refuges. The accomplishments amounted to what some historians have called the golden age of environmentalism.

The despair: In 1979, the near meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, reinforced the threat that had been posed by modern technology and confirmed long-held environmentalist views about the danger of using nuclear energy to generate electricity. And with the economy being so weak, Congress lowered many environmental standards to promote manufacturing and employment. Even President Carter deserted his strong environmentalism and relaxed the enforcement of federal antipollution standards.

Nuclear Arms

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an enormous buildup of nuclear weapons as part of their cold-war strategy. The 1970s produced efforts to control the spread of those weapons, efforts the leaders of both countries, especially President Richard Nixon and Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, sought to expand through a spirit of cooperation, or détente.

In 1972, prolonged negotiations led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT I, which set a ceiling on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), while a related agreement limited both nations' employment of antiballistic missile systems. SALT I, however, said nothing about multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), where one missile carried several nuclear warheads, each programmed to a different target, and, as a result, both nations added more of them to their arsenals. Although in 1973 Brezhnev and Nixon signed a statement called the Prevention of Nuclear War, Henry Kissinger spoke hard politics when he said privately: "The way for us to use [SALT] is for us to catch up."6 Soon, the United States had 10,000 nuclear warheads; the Soviet Union, 4,000.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed SALT II with the Soviet Union. The treaty restricted the number of MIRVs and froze the number of delivery systems. The U.S. Senate rejected it, however, and the decade ended at best with a mixed record on containing the spread of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war.

Education

Schools in the 1970s bore the brunt of reform campaigns that were meant to correct failures from the 1960s or to change traditional practices. Reform came on the heels of disturbing news: Between 1970 and 1974, the verbal score on the average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) fell 16 points; in just one year, from 1974 to 1975, it dropped another 10. Additionally, the average math score, which had dropped eight points from 1970 to 1974, plunged another eight.

Although part of the decline could be attributed to the increased number of students taking the test, the trouble went deeper. Experts blamed the results on family instability, youthful alienation, declining attention spans, and poor teaching.

In several localities, busing raised a tremendous fury and harmed race relations. In 1971, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education whereby the justices ruled unanimously that federal courts could require busing to desegregate schools.

In Boston, white parents, mainly Irish-American, vehemently fought busing. They used marches and sit-ins and chanted "Hell, no! We won't go!" Nationally, as busing and other desegregation measures took effect, middle-class whites fled public schools for private ones, or they fled to the suburbs, creating a racial imbalance the court decision had intended to correct.

Racial controversy enveloped colleges, too, as the federal government pursued affirmative-action programs to boost black-student enrollment. In a court case involving Alan Bakke, a white student, the Supreme Court in a divided vote ruled that schools could consider race as one factor in setting admissions standards.

Federal programs and regulations raised the specter of communities losing control over their public schools. Between 1965 and 1977, such regulations increased from 92 to nearly 1,000. A Gallup poll found that, by a two-to-one margin, adults believed the national government should allow school districts to spend federal monies as local officials saw fit. Yet, the trend toward more federal regulations, unleashed in the 1970s, continued to accelerate, reaching a much higher level in the early 2000s.

Popular Culture

Nostalgia, pessimism, escapism—these characterized 1970s popular culture. People in their twenties especially looked longingly back to the 1950s and early 1960s, the supposedly tranquil and happy decade when they grew up. They flocked to the movie American Graffiti in 1973, whose story told about a group of small-town teenagers the night after they graduated from high school, in 1962, in a world untouched by the Vietnam War, the tumultuous developments of the counterculture years, or the hardships of the 1970s.

According to a survey conducted by the University of Michigan, the "level of worry" among young people 21 to 39 years old climbed from 36 percent in 1967 to 50 percent in 1976. This worry and pessimism could be seen in the popularity of such books as The Closing Circle (1971) by Barry Commoner, which portrayed a country and a world facing collapse from environmental degradation, and in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, by Robert L. Heilbroner, which presented high birthrates, excessive armaments, and an unbalanced distribution of wealth as threats to human survival. "Is there hope for man?" Heilbroner asked. He provided his own answer: a sharp, unequivocal "no."

Escapism could be found at discos, first appearing in the late 1960s in New York City's black and Latin neighborhoods. Unlike rock and roll, disco made the audience important, making the dancers the center of attention. One music historian has called discos narcissistic; as to why people flocked to them, one culture analyst commented: "They are depressed by taxes and inflation. They want to party. . . . I call it 'The music that fiddles while Rome burns.'"7

Self-indulgence commanded the decade. Americans immersed themselves in self-actualization programs, such as EST, as never before. Wolfe's "Me . . . Me . . . Me . . . Me" dominated social relationships. Whatever the self-indulgence, however, in many ways America seemed exhausted in the 1970s, economically prostrate, politically bankrupt, and socially spent. For many, life had been reduced from pursuing ideals to, as the Bee Gees sang, "staying alive."

(Hamilton, Neil A. "Introduction: The 1970s." The 1970s, Eyewitness History. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006. American History Online. Facts On File, Inc. ?

ItemID=WE52&iPin=EH70sEssay00&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 22, 2011).)

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