{"id":82,"date":"2023-06-19T15:33:38","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T15:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/?page_id=82"},"modified":"2023-06-19T19:28:18","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T19:28:18","slug":"28-the-unraveling","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/28-the-unraveling\/","title":{"rendered":"28. The Unraveling"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Photograph<\/a>
Abandoned Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, Michigan. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here<\/a> to improve this chapter.*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. Introduction<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

On December 6, 1969, an estimated three hundred thousand people converged on the Altamont Motor Speedway in Northern California for a massive free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones and featuring some of the era\u2019s other great rock acts. ((Acts included Santana; Jefferson Airplane; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The Grateful Dead were scheduled but refused to play.)) Only four months earlier, Woodstock had shown the world the power of peace and love and American youth. Altamont was supposed to be \u201cWoodstock West.” ((Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 18))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Altamont was a disorganized disaster. Inadequate sanitation, a horrid sound system, and tainted drugs strained concertgoers. To save money, the Hells Angels biker gang was paid $500 in beer to be the show\u2019s \u201csecurity team.\u201d The crowd grew progressively angrier throughout the day. Fights broke out. Tensions rose. The Angels, drunk and high, armed themselves with sawed-off pool cues and indiscriminately beat concertgoers who tried to come on the stage. The Grateful Dead refused to play. Finally, the Stones came on stage. ((Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s<\/em>, updated ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 304\u2013305.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crowd\u2019s anger was palpable. Fights continued near the stage. Mick Jagger stopped in the middle of playing \u201cSympathy for the Devil\u201d to try to calm the crowd: \u201cEverybody be cool now, c\u2019mon,\u201d he pleaded. Then, a few songs later, in the middle of \u201cUnder My Thumb,\u201d eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter approached the stage and was beaten back. Pissed off and high on methamphetamines, Hunter brandished a pistol, charged again, and was stabbed and killed by an Angel. His lifeless body was stomped into the ground. The Stones just kept playing. ((Owen Gleibman, \u201cAltamont at 45: The Most Dangerous Rock Concert,\u201d BBC, December 5, 2014, http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/culture\/story\/20141205-did-altamont-end-the-60s.<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the more famous Woodstock music festival captured the idyll of the sixties youth culture, Altamont revealed its dark side. There, drugs, music, and youth were associated not with peace and love but with anger, violence, and death. While many Americans in the 1970s continued to celebrate the political and cultural achievements of the previous decade, a more anxious, conservative mood grew across the nation. For some, the United States had not gone nearly far enough to promote greater social equality; for others, the nation had gone too far, unfairly trampling the rights of one group to promote the selfish needs of another. Onto these brewing dissatisfactions, the 1970s dumped the divisive remnants of a failed war, the country\u2019s greatest political scandal, and an intractable economic crisis. It seemed as if the nation was ready to unravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. The Strain of Vietnam<\/h1>\n\n\n
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\"Photograph<\/a>
Vietnam War protestors at the March on the Pentagon. Lyndon B. Johnson Library via Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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. Stalemates, body counts, hazy war aims, and the draft catalyzed an antiwar movement and triggered protests throughout the United States and Europe. With no end in sight, protesters burned draft cards, refused to pay income taxes, occupied government buildings, and delayed trains loaded with war materials. By 1967, antiwar demonstrations were drawing hundreds of thousands. In one protest, hundreds were arrested after surrounding the Pentagon. ((Jeff Leen, \u201cThe Vietnam Protests: When Worlds Collided,\u201d Washington Post<\/em>, September 27, 1999, http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-srv\/local\/2000\/vietnam092799.htm<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vietnam was the first \u201cliving room war.\u201d ((Michael J. Arlen, Living-Room War<\/em> (New York: Viking, 1969).)) Television, print media, and open access to the battlefield provided unprecedented coverage of the conflict\u2019s brutality. Americans confronted grisly images of casualties and atrocities. In 1965, CBS Evening News<\/em> aired a segment in which U.S. Marines burned the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne with little apparent regard for the lives of its occupants, who had been accused of aiding Vietcong guerrillas. President Johnson berated the head of CBS, yelling over the phone, \u201cYour boys just shat on the American flag.\u201d ((Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation<\/em>, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 190.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the U.S. government imposed no formal censorship on the press during Vietnam, the White House and military nevertheless used press briefings and interviews to paint a deceptive image of the war. The United States was winning the war, officials claimed. They cited numbers of enemies killed, villages secured, and South Vietnamese troops trained. However, American journalists in Vietnam quickly realized the hollowness of such claims (the press referred to afternoon press briefings in Saigon as \u201cthe Five o\u2019Clock Follies\u201d). ((Mitchel P. Roth, Historical Dictionary of War Journalism<\/em> (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 105.)) Editors frequently toned down their reporters\u2019 pessimism, often citing conflicting information received from their own sources, who were typically government officials. But the evidence of a stalemate mounted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stories like CBS\u2019s Cam Ne piece exposed a credibility gap, the yawning chasm between the claims of official sources and the increasingly evident reality on the ground in Vietnam. ((David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 109.)) Nothing did more to expose this 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. Subsequent stories and images eroded public trust even further. 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. ((Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 325\u2013326.)) Three years later, Americans cringed at Nick Ut\u2019s wrenching photograph of a naked Vietnamese child fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm attack. More and more American voices came out against the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reeling from the war\u2019s growing unpopularity, on March 31, 1968, President Johnson announced on national television that he would not seek reelection. ((Lyndon B. Johnson, \u201cAddress to the Nation Announcing Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam and Reporting His Decision Not to Seek Reelection,\u201d March 31, 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, http:\/\/www.lbjlib.utexas.edu\/johnson\/archives.hom\/speeches.hom\/680331.asp<\/a>.)) Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy unsuccessfully battled against Johnson\u2019s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, for the Democratic Party nomination (Kennedy was assassinated in June). At the Democratic Party\u2019s national convention in Chicago, local police brutally assaulted protesters on national television.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201claw and order\u201d and a vague plan to end the war. Well aware of domestic pressure to wind down the war, Nixon sought, on the one hand, to appease antiwar sentiment by promising to phase out the draft, train South Vietnamese forces to assume more responsibility for the war effort, and gradually withdraw American troops. Nixon and his advisors called it \u201cVietnamization.\u201d ((Lewy, America in Vietnam<\/em>, 164\u2013169; Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America\u2019s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War<\/em> (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 81\u201382.)) At the same time, Nixon appealed to the so-called silent majority of Americans who still supported the war (and opposed the antiwar movement) by calling for an \u201chonorable\u201d end to U.S. involvement\u2014what he later called \u201cpeace with honor.\u201d ((Richard Nixon, \u201cAddress to the Nation Announcing Conclusion of an Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam,\u201d January 23, 1973, American Presidency Project<\/em>, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=3808<\/a>.)) He narrowly edged out Humphrey in the fall\u2019s election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public assurances of American withdrawal, however, masked a dramatic escalation of conflict. Looking to incentivize peace talks, Nixon pursued a \u201cmadman strategy\u201d of attacking communist supply lines across Laos and Cambodia, hoping to convince the North Vietnamese that he would do anything to stop the war. ((Richard Nixon, quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography<\/em> (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 163\u2013164.)) Conducted without public knowledge or congressional approval, the bombings failed to spur the peace process, and talks stalled before the American-imposed November 1969 deadline. News of the attacks renewed antiwar demonstrations. Police and National Guard troops killed six students in separate protests at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and, more famously, Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another three years passed\u2014and another twenty thousand American troops died\u2014before an agreement was reached. ((Geneva Jussi Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 257.)) 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. Peace was tenuous, and when war resumed North Vietnamese troops quickly overwhelmed southern forces. By 1975, despite nearly a decade of direct American military engagement, Vietnam was united under a communist government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Vietnam War profoundly influenced domestic politics. Moreover, it poisoned many Americans\u2019 perceptions of their government and its role in the world. And yet, while the antiwar demonstrations attracted considerable media attention and stand today as a hallmark of the sixties counterculture, many Americans nevertheless continued to regard the war as just. Wary of the rapid social changes that reshaped American society in the 1960s and worried that antiwar protests threatened an already tenuous civil order, a growing number of Americans turned to conservatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. Racial, Social, and Cultural Anxieties<\/h1>\n\n\n
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\"A<\/a>
Los Angeles police violently arrest a man during the Watts riot on August 12, 1965. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The civil rights movement looked dramatically different at the end of the 1960s than it had at the beginning. The movement had never been monolithic, but prominent, competing ideologies had fractured the movement in the 1970s. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The political evolution of the civil rights movement was reflected in American culture. The lines of race, class, and gender ruptured American \u201cmass\u201d culture. The monolith of popular American culture, pilloried in the fifties and sixties as exclusively white, male-dominated, conservative, and stifling, finally shattered and Americans retreated into ever smaller, segmented subcultures. Marketers now targeted particular products to ever smaller pieces of the population, including previously neglected groups such as African Americans. ((Cohen, Consumer\u2019s Republic<\/em>).)) Subcultures often revolved around certain musical styles, whether pop, disco, hard rock, punk rock, country, or hip-hop. Styles of dress and physical appearance likewise aligned with cultures of choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the popular rock acts of the sixties appealed to a new counterculture, the seventies witnessed the resurgence of cultural forms that appealed to a white working class confronting the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. Country hits such as Merle Haggard\u2019s \u201cOkie from Muskogee\u201d evoked simpler times and places where people \u201cstill wave Old Glory down at the courthouse\u201d and they \u201cdon\u2019t let our hair grow long and shaggy like the hippies out in San Francisco.\u201d (Haggard would claim the song was satirical, but it nevertheless took hold.) A popular television sitcom, All in the Family<\/em>, became an unexpected hit among \u201cmiddle America.\u201d The show\u2019s main character, Archie Bunker, was designed to mock reactionary middle-aged white men, but audiences embraced him. \u201cIsn\u2019t anyone interested in upholding standards?\u201d he lamented in an episode dealing with housing integration. \u201cOur world is coming crumbling down. The coons are coming!\u201d ((Quotes from \u201cLionel Moves into the Neighborhood,\u201d All in the Family<\/em>, season 1, episode 8 (1971), http:\/\/www.tvrage.com\/all-in-the-family\/episodes\/5587<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Photograph<\/a>
The cast of CBS’s All in the Family<\/em> in 1973. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

As Bunker knew, African Americans were becoming much more visible in American culture. While Black cultural forms had been prominent throughout American history, they assumed new popular forms in the 1970s. Disco offered a new, optimistic, racially integrated pop music. Musicians such as Aretha Franklin, Andra\u00e9 Crouch, and \u201cfifth Beatle\u201d Billy Preston brought their background in church performance to their own recordings as well as to the work of white artists like the Rolling Stones, with whom they collaborated. By the end of the decade, African American musical artists had introduced American society to one of the most significant musical innovations in decades: the Sugarhill Gang\u2019s 1979 record, Rapper\u2019s Delight<\/em>. A lengthy paean to Black machismo, it became the first rap single to reach the Top 40. ((Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 45 RPM: The History, Heroes and Villains of a Pop Music Revolution<\/em> (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2003), 120.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as rap represented a hypermasculine Black cultural form, Hollywood popularized its white equivalent. Films such as 1971\u2019s Dirty Harry<\/em> captured a darker side of the national mood. Clint Eastwood\u2019s titular character exacted violent justice on clear villains, working within the sort of brutally simplistic ethical standard that appealed to Americans anxious about a perceived breakdown in \u201claw and order.\u201d (\u201cThe film\u2019s moral position is fascist,\u201d said critic Roger Ebert, who nevertheless gave it three out of four stars. ((Roger Ebert, \u201cReview of Dirty Harry<\/em>,\u201d January 1, 1971, http:\/\/www.rogerebert.com\/reviews\/dirty-harry-1971<\/a>.)))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the strongest element fueling American anxiety over \u201claw and order\u201d was the increasingly visible violence associated with the civil rights movement. No longer confined to the antiblack terrorism that struck the southern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, publicly visible violence now broke out among Black Americans in urban riots and among whites protesting new civil rights programs. In the mid-1970s, for instance, protests over the use of busing to overcome residential segregation and truly integrate public schools in Boston washed the city in racial violence. Stanley Forman\u2019s Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning photo, The Soiling of Old Glory<\/em>, famously captured a Black civil rights attorney, Ted Landsmark, being attacked by a mob of anti-busing protesters, one of whom wielded an American flag as a weapon. ((Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s<\/em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban riots, though, rather than anti-integration violence, tainted many white Americans\u2019 perception of the civil rights movement and urban life in general. Civil unrest broke out across the country, but the riots in Watts\/Los Angeles (1965), Newark (1967), and Detroit (1967) were the most shocking. In each, a physical altercation between white police officers and African Americans spiraled into days of chaos and destruction. Tens of thousands participated in urban riots. Many looted and destroyed white-owned business. There were dozens of deaths, tens of millions of dollars in property damage, and an exodus of white capital that only further isolated urban poverty. ((Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 58\u201359, 85\u201393.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1967, President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of America\u2019s riots. Their report became an unexpected best seller. ((Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North<\/em> (New York: Random House, 2008), 348. )) The commission cited Black frustration with the hopelessness of poverty as the underlying cause of urban unrest. As the head of the Black National Business League testified, \u201cIt is to be more than na\u00efve\u2014indeed, it is a little short of sheer madness\u2014for anyone to expect the very poorest of the American poor to remain docile and content in their poverty when television constantly and eternally dangles the opulence of our affluent society before their hungry eyes.\u201d ((Cohen, Consumer\u2019s Republic<\/em>, 373. )) A Newark rioter who looted several boxes of shirts and shoes put it more simply: \u201cThey tell us about that pie in the sky but that pie in the sky is too damn high.\u201d ((Ibid., 376. )) But white conservatives blasted the conclusion that white racism and economic hopelessness were to blame for the violence. African Americans wantonly destroying private property, they said, was not a symptom of America\u2019s intractable racial inequalities but the logical outcome of a liberal culture of permissiveness that tolerated\u2014even encouraged\u2014nihilistic civil disobedience. Many white moderates and liberals, meanwhile, saw the explosive violence as a sign that African Americans had rejected the nonviolence of the earlier civil rights movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unrest of the late sixties did, in fact, reflect a real and growing disillusionment among African Americans with the fate of the civil rights crusade. In the still-moldering ashes of Jim Crow, African Americans in Watts and other communities across the country bore the burdens of lifetimes of legally sanctioned discrimination in housing, employment, and credit. Segregation survived the legal dismantling of Jim Crow. 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. Black neighborhoods became traps that too few could escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Political achievements such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were indispensable legal preconditions for social and political equality, but for most, the movement\u2019s long (and now often forgotten) goal of economic justice proved as elusive as ever. \u201cI worked to get these people the right to eat cheeseburgers,\u201d Martin Luther King Jr. supposedly said to Bayard Rustin as they toured the devastation in Watts some years earlier, \u201cand now I\u2019ve got to do something . . . to help them get the money to buy it.\u201d ((Martin Luther King, quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference<\/em> (New York: Morrow, 1986), 439. )) What good was the right to enter a store without money for purchases?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. The Crisis of 1968<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

To Americans in 1968, the country seemed to be unraveling. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968. He had been in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. (Prophetically, he had reflected on his own mortality in a rally the night before. Confident that the civil rights movement would succeed without him, he brushed away fears of death. \u201cI\u2019ve been to the mountaintop,\u201d he said, \u201cand I\u2019ve seen the promised land.\u201d). The greatest leader in the American civil rights movement was lost. Riots broke out in over a hundred American cities. Two months later, on June 6, Robert F. Kennedy was killed campaigning in California. He had represented the last hope of liberal idealists. Anger and disillusionment washed over the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. Protests enveloped the nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. Demonstrators planned massive protests in Chicago\u2019s public spaces. Initial protests were peaceful, but the situation quickly soured as police issued stern threats and young people began to taunt and goad officials. Many of the assembled students had protest and sit-in experiences only in the relative safe havens of college campuses and were unprepared for Mayor Richard Daley\u2019s aggressive and heavily armed police force and National Guard troops in full riot gear. Attendees recounted vicious beatings at the hands of police and Guardsmen, but many young people\u2014convinced that much public sympathy could be won via images of brutality against unarmed protesters\u2014continued stoking the violence. 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. Chicago\u2019s brutality overshadowed the convention and culminated in an internationally televised, violent standoff in front of the Hilton Hotel. \u201cThe whole world is watching,\u201d the protesters chanted. The Chicago riots encapsulated the growing sense that chaos now governed American life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many sixties idealists, the violence of 1968 represented the death of a dream. Disorder and chaos overshadowed hope and progress. And for conservatives, it was confirmation of all of their fears and hesitations. Americans of 1968 turned their back on hope. They wanted peace. They wanted stability. They wanted \u201claw and order.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. The Rise and Fall of Richard Nixon<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
Richard Nixon campaigns in Philadelphia during the 1968 presidential election. National Archives<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Beleaguered by an unpopular war, inflation, and domestic unrest, President Johnson opted against reelection in March 1968\u2014an unprecedented move in modern American politics. The forthcoming presidential election was shaped by Vietnam and the aforementioned unrest as much as by the campaigns of Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and third-party challenger George Wallace, the infamous segregationist governor of Alabama. The Democratic Party was in disarray in the spring of 1968, when senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy challenged Johnson\u2019s nomination and the president responded with his shocking announcement. Nixon\u2019s candidacy was aided further by riots that broke out across the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the shock and dismay experienced after the slaying of Robert Kennedy in June. The Republican nominee\u2019s campaign was defined by shrewd maintenance of his public appearances and a pledge to restore peace and prosperity to what he called \u201cthe silent center; the millions of people in the middle of the political spectrum.\u201d This campaign for the \u201csilent majority\u201d was carefully calibrated to attract suburban Americans by linking liberals with violence and protest and rioting. Many embraced Nixon\u2019s message; a September 1968 poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed public order had \u201cbroken down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Humphrey struggled to distance himself from Johnson and maintain working-class support in northern cities, where voters were drawn to Wallace\u2019s appeals for law and order and a rejection of civil rights. The vice president had a final surge in northern cities with the aid of union support, but it was not enough to best Nixon\u2019s campaign. The final tally was close: Nixon won 43.3 percent of the popular vote (31,783,783), narrowly besting Humphrey\u2019s 42.7 percent (31,266,006). Wallace, meanwhile, carried five states in the Deep South, and his 13.5 percent (9,906,473) of the popular vote constituted an impressive showing for a third-party candidate. The Electoral College vote was more decisive for Nixon; he earned 302 electoral votes, while Humphrey and Wallace received only 191 and 45 votes, respectively. Although Republicans won a few seats, Democrats retained control of both the House and Senate and made Nixon the first president in 120 years to enter office with the opposition party controlling both houses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once installed in the White House, Richard Nixon focused his energies on American foreign policy, publicly announcing the Nixon Doctrine in 1969. On the one hand, Nixon asserted the supremacy of American democratic capitalism and conceded that the United States would continue supporting its allies financially. However, he denounced previous administrations\u2019 willingness to commit American forces to Third World conflicts and warned other states to assume responsibility for their own defense. He was turning America away from the policy of active, anticommunist containment, and toward a new strategy of d\u00e9tente. ((Richard M. Nixon, \u201cAddress to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,\u201d November 3, 1969, American Experience<\/em>, http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/americanexperience\/features\/primary-resources\/nixon-vietnam<\/a>\/<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Promoted by national security advisor and eventual secretary of state Henry Kissinger, d\u00e9tente sought to stabilize the international system by thawing relations with Cold War rivals and bilaterally freezing arms levels. Taking advantage of tensions between communist China and the Soviet Union, Nixon pursued closer relations with both in order to de-escalate tensions and strengthen the United States\u2019 position relative to each. The strategy seemed to work. In 1972, Nixon became the first American president to visit communist China and the first since Franklin Roosevelt to visit the Soviet Union. Direct diplomacy and cultural exchange programs with both countries grew and culminated with the formal normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations and the signing of two U.S.-Soviet arms agreements: the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I). By 1973, after almost thirty years of Cold War tension, peaceful coexistence suddenly seemed possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, though, a fragile calm gave way again to Cold War instability. In November 1973, Nixon appeared on television to inform Americans that energy had become \u201ca serious national problem\u201d and that the United States was \u201cheading toward the most acute shortages of energy since World War II.\u201d ((Richard Nixon, \u201cAddress to the Nation about Policies to Deal with Energy Shortages,\u201d November 7, 1973, American Presidency Project<\/em>, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=4034.<\/a>. )) The previous month Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel of the world\u2019s leading oil producers, embargoed oil exports to the United States in retaliation for American intervention in the Middle East. The embargo launched the first U.S. energy crisis. By the end of 1973, the global price of oil had quadrupled. ((Office of the Historian, \u201cOil Embargo, 1973\u20131974,\u201d U.S. Department of State, https:\/\/history.state.gov\/milestones\/1969-1976\/oil-embargo<\/a>.)) Drivers waited in line for hours to fill up their cars. Individual gas stations ran out of gas. American motorists worried that oil could run out at any moment. A Pennsylvania man died when his emergency stash of gasoline ignited in his trunk and backseat. (( \u201cGas Explodes in Man\u2019s Car,\u201d Uniontown (PA) Morning Herald<\/em>, December 5, 1973, p. 12.)) OPEC rescinded its embargo in 1974, but the economic damage had been done. The crisis extended into the late 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the Vietnam War, the oil crisis showed that small countries could still hurt the United States. At a time of anxiety about the nation\u2019s future, Vietnam and the energy crisis accelerated Americans\u2019 disenchantment with the United States\u2019 role in the world and the efficacy and quality of its leaders. Furthermore, government scandals in the 1970s and early 1980s sapped trust in America\u2019s public institutions. In 1971, the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to sue the New York Times<\/em> and the Washington Post<\/em> 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. The papers showed how presidents from Truman to Johnson repeatedly deceived the public on the war\u2019s scope and direction. ((Larry H. Addington, America\u2019s War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History<\/em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 140\u2013141. )) Nixon faced a rising tide of congressional opposition to the war, and Congress asserted unprecedented oversight of American war spending. In 1973, it passed the War Powers Resolution, which dramatically reduced the president\u2019s ability to wage war without congressional consent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, no scandal did more to unravel public trust than 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. After being tipped off by a security guard, police found the men 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\u2019s Committee to Re-elect the President (lampooned as \u201cCREEP\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s financial supporters. The names could then be given to the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to conduct spurious investigations into their personal affairs. Nixon was also recorded ordering his chief of staff to break into the offices of the Brookings Institution and take files relating to the war in Vietnam, saying, \u201cGoddammit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.\u201d ((Schulman, Seventies<\/em>, 44.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. But, thanks largely to two persistent journalists at the Washington Post<\/em>, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, information continued to surface that tied the burglaries ever closer to the CIA, the FBI, and the White House. The Senate held televised hearings. Citing executive privilege, Nixon refused to comply with orders to produce tapes from the White House\u2019s 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. He became the first and only American president to resign from office. ((\u201cExecutive Privilege,\u201d in John J. Patrick, Richard M. Pious, and Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Guide to the United States Government<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 227; Schulman, The Seventies<\/em>, 44\u201348. ))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as his successor and a month later granted Nixon a full presidential pardon. Nixon disappeared from public life without ever publicly apologizing, accepting responsibility, or facing charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VI. Deindustrialization and the Rise of the Sunbelt<\/h1>\n\n\n
\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
Abandoned Youngstown factory. Stuart Spivack, via Flickr<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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, but unemployment continually fell and a highly progressive tax system and powerful unions lowered general income inequality as working-class standards of living nearly doubled between 1947 and 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. When auto manufacturers like Ford and General Motors converted their assembly lines to build machines for the American war effort, observers dubbed the city the \u201carsenal of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the war, however, automobile firms began closing urban factories and moving to outlying suburbs. Several factors fueled the process. Some cities partly deindustrialized themselves. Municipal governments in San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia banished light industry to make room for high-rise apartments and office buildings. Mechanization also contributed to the decline of American labor. A manager at a newly automated Ford engine plant in postwar Cleveland captured the interconnections between these concerns when he glibly noted to United Automobile Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther, \u201cYou are going to have trouble collecting union dues from all of these machines.\u201d ((Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis<\/em>, 132.)) More importantly, however, manufacturing firms sought to reduce labor costs by automating, downsizing, and relocating to areas with \u201cbusiness friendly\u201d policies like low tax rates, anti-union right-to-work laws, and low wages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Detroit began to bleed industrial jobs. Between 1950 and 1958, Chrysler, which actually kept more jobs in Detroit than either Ford or General Motors, cut its Detroit production workforce in half. In the years between 1953 and 1960, East Detroit lost ten plants and over seventy-one thousand jobs. ((Ibid., 136, 149.)) Because Detroit was a single-industry city, decisions made by the Big Three automakers reverberated across the city\u2019s industrial landscape. 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. Between 1947 and 1977, the number of manufacturing firms in the city dropped from over three thousand to fewer than two thousand. The labor force was gutted. Manufacturing jobs fell from 338,400 to 153,000 over the same three decades. ((Ibid., 144.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Industrial restructuring decimated all workers, but deindustrialization fell heaviest on the city\u2019s African Americans. Although many middle-class Black Detroiters managed to move out of the city\u2019s ghettos, by 1960, 19.7 percent of Black autoworkers in Detroit were unemployed, compared to just 5.8 percent of whites. ((Ibid., 144.)) Overt discrimination in housing and employment had for decades confined African Americans to segregated neighborhoods where they were forced to pay exorbitant rents for slum housing. Subject to residential intimidation and cut off from traditional sources of credit, few could afford to follow industry as it left the city for the suburbs and other parts of the country, especially the South. Segregation and discrimination kept them stuck where there were fewer and fewer jobs. Over time, Detroit devolved into a mass of unemployment, crime, and crippled municipal resources. When riots rocked Detroit in 1967, 25 to 30 percent of Black residents between ages eighteen and twenty-four were unemployed. ((Ibid., 261.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This accord held mixed results for workers. On the one hand, management encouraged employee loyalty through privatized welfare systems that offered workers health benefits and pensions. Grievance arbitration and collective bargaining also provided workers official channels through which to criticize policies and push for better conditions. At the same time, bureaucracy and corruption increasingly weighed down unions and alienated them from workers and the general public. Union management came to hold primary influence in what was ostensibly a \u201cpluralistic\u201d power relationship. Workers\u2014though still willing to protest\u2014by necessity pursued a more moderate agenda compared to the union workers of the 1930s and 1940s. Conservative politicians meanwhile seized on popular suspicions of Big Labor, stepping up their criticism of union leadership and positioning themselves as workers\u2019 true ally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While conservative critiques of union centralization did much to undermine the labor movement, labor\u2019s decline also coincided with ideological changes within American liberalism. Labor and its political concerns undergirded Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal coalition, but by the 1960s, many liberals had forsaken working-class politics. More and more 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. Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal might have attempted to rectify unemployment with government jobs, but Johnson\u2019s Great Society and its imitators funded government-sponsored job training, even in places without available jobs. Union leaders in the 1950s and 1960s typically supported such programs and philosophies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Internal racism also weakened the labor movement. While national CIO leaders encouraged Black unionization in the 1930s, white workers on the ground often opposed the integrated shop. In Detroit and elsewhere after World War II, white workers participated in \u201chate strikes\u201d where they walked off the job rather than work with African Americans. White workers similarly opposed residential integration, fearing, among other things, that Black newcomers would lower property values. ((Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, \u201cThe Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,\u201d International Labor and Working-Class History<\/em> 74 (Fall 2008), 1\u201332, esp. 9.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. At the same time, dramatic increases in mass incarceration coincided with the deregulation of prison labor to allow more private companies access to cheaper inmate labor, a process that, whatever its aggregate impact, impacted local communities where free jobs were moved into prisons. The tax code became less progressive and labor lost its foothold in the marketplace. Unions represented a third of the workforce in the 1950s, but only one in ten workers belonged to one as of 2015. ((Quoctrung Bui, \u201c50 Years of Shrinking Union Membership in One Map,\u201d February 23, 2015, NPR, http:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/money\/2015\/02\/23\/385843576\/50\u2013years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geography dictated much of labor\u2019s fall, as American firms fled pro-labor states in the 1970s and 1980s. Some went overseas in the wake of new trade treaties to exploit low-wage foreign workers, but others turned to anti-union states in the South and West stretching from Virginia to Texas to Southern California. Factories shuttered in the North and Midwest, leading commentators by the 1980s to dub America\u2019s former industrial heartland the Rust Belt. With this, they contrasted the prosperous and dynamic Sun Belt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"In<\/a>
Urban decay confronted Americans of the 1960s and 1970s. As the economy sagged and deindustrialization hit much of the country, Americans increasingly associated major cities with poverty and crime. In this 1973 photo, two subway riders sit amid a graffitied subway car in New York City. National Archives (8464439).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Coined by journalist Kevin Phillips in 1969, the term Sun Belt<\/em> refers to the swath of southern and western states that saw unprecedented economic, industrial, and demographic growth after World War  II. ((Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republic Majority<\/em> (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), 17.)) During the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the American South \u201cthe nation\u2019s No. 1 economic problem\u201d and injected massive federal subsidies, investments, and military spending into the region. During the Cold War, Sun Belt politicians lobbied hard for military installations and government contracts for their states. ((Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938\u20131980<\/em>, 3rd printing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, southern states\u2019 hostility toward organized labor beckoned corporate leaders. The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 facilitated southern states\u2019 frontal assault on unions. Thereafter, 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, lured by cheap housing and a warm climate slowly made more tolerable by modern air conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The South attracted business but struggled to share their profits. Middle-class whites grew prosperous, but often these were recent transplants, not native southerners. As the cotton economy shed farmers and laborers, poor white and Black southerners found themselves mostly excluded from the fruits of the Sun Belt. Public investments were scarce. White southern politicians channeled federal funding away from primary and secondary public education and toward high-tech industry and university-level research. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, more jobs meant more people, and by 1972, southern and western Sun Belt states had more electoral votes than the Northeast and Midwest. This gap continues to grow. ((William H. Frey, \u201cThe Electoral College Moves to the Sun Belt,\u201d research brief, Brookings Institution, May 2005. )) Though the region\u2019s economic and political ascendance was a product of massive federal spending, New Right politicians who constructed an identity centered on \u201csmall government\u201d found their most loyal support in the Sun Belt. These business-friendly politicians successfully synthesized conservative Protestantism and free market ideology, creating a potent new political force. Housewives organized reading groups in their homes, and from those reading groups sprouted new organized political activities. Prosperous and mobile, old and new suburbanites gravitated toward an individualistic vision of free enterprise espoused by the Republican Party. Some, especially those most vocally anticommunist, joined groups like the Young Americans for Freedom and the John Birch Society. Less radical suburban voters, however, still gravitated toward the more moderate brand of conservatism promoted by Richard Nixon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VII. The Politics of Love, Sex, and Gender<\/h1>\n\n\n
\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
Demonstrators opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment protest in front of the White House in 1977. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The sexual revolution continued into the 1970s. Many Americans\u2014feminists, gay men, lesbians, and straight couples\u2014challenged 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. Sexuality, decoupled from marriage and procreation, became for many not only a source of personal fulfillment but a worthy political cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. Interracial marriage, for instance, was illegal in many states until 1967 and remained largely taboo long after. Same-sex intercourse and cross-dressing were criminalized in most states, and gay men, lesbians, and transgender people were vulnerable to violent police enforcement as well as discrimination in housing and employment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two landmark legal rulings in 1973 established the battle lines for the \u201csex wars\u201d of the 1970s. First, the Supreme Court\u2019s 7\u20132 ruling in Roe v. Wade<\/em> (1973) struck down a Texas law that prohibited abortion in all cases when a mother\u2019s life was not in danger. The Court\u2019s decision built on precedent from a 1965 ruling that, in striking down a Connecticut law prohibiting married couples from using birth control, recognized a constitutional \u201cright to privacy.\u201d ((Griswold v. Connecticut<\/em>, 381 U.S. 479, June 7, 1965.)) In Roe<\/em>, the Court reasoned that \u201cthis right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman\u2019s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.\u201d ((Roe v. Wade<\/em>, 410 U.S. 113, January 22, 1973.)) The Court held that states could not interfere with a woman\u2019s right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy and could only fully prohibit abortions during the third trimester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other Supreme Court rulings, however, found that sexual privacy could be sacrificed for the sake of \u201cpublic\u201d good. Miller v. California<\/em> (1973), a case over the unsolicited mailing of sexually explicit advertisements for illustrated \u201cadult\u201d books, held that the First Amendment did not protect \u201cobscene\u201d material, defined by the Court as anything with sexual appeal that lacked, \u201cserious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.\u201d ((Miller v. California<\/em>, 413 U.S. 15, June 21, 1973.)) The ruling expanded states\u2019 abilities to pass laws prohibiting materials like hard-core pornography. However, uneven enforcement allowed pornographic theaters and sex shops to proliferate despite whatever laws states had on the books. Americans debated whether these represented the pinnacle of sexual liberation or, as poet and lesbian feminist Rita Mae Brown suggested, \u201cthe ultimate conclusion of sexist logic.\u201d ((Rita Mae Brown, quoted in David Allyn, Make Love, Not War\u2014The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2001), 239.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of more tangible concern for most women, though, was the right to equal employment access. Thanks partly to the work of Black feminists like Pauli Murray, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned employment discrimination based on sex, in addition to race, color, religion, and national origin. \u201cIf sex is not included,\u201d she argued in a memorandum sent to members of Congress, \u201cthe civil rights bill would be including only half of the Negroes.\u201d ((Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 121.)) Like most laws, Title VII\u2019s full impact came about slowly, as women across the nation cited it to litigate and pressure employers to offer them equal opportunities compared to those they offered to men. For one, employers in the late sixties and seventies still viewed certain occupations as inherently feminine or masculine. NOW organized airline workers against a major company\u2019s sexist ad campaign that showed female flight attendants wearing buttons that read, \u201cI\u2019m Debbie, Fly Me\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m Cheryl, Fly Me.\u201d Actual female flight attendants were required to wear similar buttons. ((Ibid., 129.)) Other women sued to gain access to traditionally male jobs like factory work. Protests prompted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to issue a more robust set of protections between 1968 and 1971. Though advancement came haltingly and partially, women used these protections to move eventually into traditional male occupations, politics, and corporate management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The battle for sexual freedom was not just about the right to get into<\/em> places, though. It was also about the right to get out of them\u2014specifically, unhappy households and marriages. Between 1959 and 1979, the American divorce rate more than doubled. By the early 1980s, nearly half of all American marriages ended in divorce. ((Arland Thornton, William G. Axinn, and Yu Xie, Marriage and Cohabitation<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 57.)) The stigma attached to divorce evaporated and a growing sense of sexual and personal freedom motivated individuals to leave abusive or unfulfilling marriages. Legal changes also promoted higher divorce rates. Before 1969, most states required one spouse to prove that the other was guilty of a specific offense, such as adultery. The difficulty of getting a divorce under this system encouraged widespread lying in divorce courts. Even couples desiring an amicable split were sometimes forced to claim that one spouse had cheated on the other even if neither (or both) had. Other couples temporarily relocated to states with more lenient divorce laws, such as Nevada. ((Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 135\u2013139.)) Widespread recognition of such practices prompted reforms. In 1969, California adopted the first no-fault divorce law. By the end of the 1970s, almost every state had adopted some form of no-fault divorce. The new laws allowed for divorce on the basis of \u201cirreconcilable differences,\u201d even if only one party felt that he or she could not stay in the marriage. ((Ibid., 161\u2013165; Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and Family in the United States and Western Europe<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 188\u2013189.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gay men and women, meanwhile, negotiated a harsh world that stigmatized homosexuality as a mental illness or an immoral depravity. Building on postwar efforts by gay rights organizations to bring homosexuality into the mainstream of American culture, young gay activists of the late sixties and seventies began to challenge what they saw as the conservative gradualism of the \u201chomophile\u201d movement. 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 that emphasized an assertive notion of liberation rooted not in mainstream assimilation but in pride of sexual difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps no single incident did more to galvanize gay and lesbian activism than the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City\u2019s Greenwich Village. Police regularly raided gay bars and hangouts. But 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. Seemingly overnight, calls for homophile respectability were replaced with chants of \u201cGay Power!\u201d ((David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution<\/em> (New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2004), 147.))<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
The window under the Stonewall Inn sign reads: \u201cWe homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village–Mattachine.\u201d Photograph 1969. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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. Citing statistics that sexual secrecy contributed to stigma and suicide, gay activists urged people to come out and embrace their sexuality. A step towards the normalization of homosexuality occurred in 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. Pressure mounted on politicians. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. More than eighty cities and nine states followed suit over the following decade. But progress proceeded unevenly, and gay Americans continued to suffer hardships from a hostile culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. They, in turn, mobilized to fight the high incidence of rape, abuse, and murder of transgender people. A 1971 newsletter denounced the notion that transgender people were mentally ill and highlighted the particular injustices they faced in and out of the gay community, declaring, \u201cAll power to Trans Liberation.\u201d ((Trans Liberation Newsletter<\/em>, in Susan Styker, Transgender History<\/em> (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), 96\u201397. ))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As events in the 1970s broadened sexual freedoms and promoted greater gender equality, so too did they generate sustained and organized opposition. Evangelical Christians and other moral conservatives, for instance, mobilized to reverse gay victories. In 1977, activists in Dade County, Florida, used the slogan \u201cSave Our Children\u201d to overturn an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. ((William N. Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861\u20132003<\/em> (New York: Viking, 2008), 209\u2013212. )) A leader of the ascendant religious right, Jerry Falwell, said in 1980, \u201cIt is now time to take a stand on certain moral issues. . . . We must stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the homosexual revolution. We must have a revival in this country.\u201d ((Jerry Falwell, Listen, America!<\/em> (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 19. ))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much to Falwell\u2019s delight, conservative Americans did, in fact, stand against and defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), their most stunning social victory of the 1970s. Versions of the amendment\u2014which declared, \u201cEquality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex\u201d\u2014were introduced to Congress each year since 1923. It finally passed amid the upheavals of the sixties and seventies and went to the states for ratification in March 1972. ((Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman\u2019s Crusade<\/em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 213\u2013216. )) With high approval ratings, the ERA seemed destined to pass swiftly through state legislatures and become the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. Hawaii ratified the amendment the same day it cleared Congress. Within a year, thirty states had done so. But then the amendment stalled. It took years for more states to pass it. In 1977, Indiana became the thirty-fifth and final state to ratify. ((Ibid., 218\u2013219; Joel Krieger, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World<\/em>, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 256.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1977, anti-ERA forces had successfully turned the political tide against the amendment. At a time when many women shared Betty Friedan\u2019s frustration that society seemed to confine women to the role of homemaker, Phyllis Schlafly\u2019s STOP ERA organization (\u201cStop Taking Our Privileges\u201d) trumpeted the value and advantages of being a homemaker and mother. ((Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism<\/em>, 219. )) Marshaling the support of evangelical Christians and other religious conservatives, Schlafly worked tirelessly to stifle the ERA. She lobbied legislators and organized counter-rallies to ensure that Americans heard \u201cfrom the millions of happily married women who believe in the laws which protect the family and require the husband to support his wife and children.\u201d ((Phyllis Schlafly, quoted in Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present<\/em> (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 340. )) The amendment needed only three more states for ratification. It never got them. In 1982, the time limit for ratification expired\u2014and along with it, the amendment. ((Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism<\/em>, 281.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The failed battle for the ERA uncovered the limits of the feminist crusade. And it illustrated the women\u2019s movement\u2019s inherent incapacity to represent fully the views of 50 percent of the country\u2019s population, a population riven by class differences, racial disparities, and cultural and religious divisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIII. The Misery Index<\/h1>\n\n\n
\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
Supporters rally with pumpkins carved in the likeness of President Jimmy Carter in Polk County, Florida, in October 1980. State Library and Archives of Florida via Flickr<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Although Nixon eluded prosecution, Watergate continued to weigh on voters\u2019 minds. It netted big congressional gains for Democrats in the 1974 midterm elections, and Ford\u2019s pardon damaged his chances in 1976. Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a nuclear physicist and peanut farmer who represented the rising generation of younger, racially liberal \u201cNew South\u201d Democrats, captured the Democratic nomination. Carter did not identify with either his party\u2019s liberal or conservative wing; his appeal was more personal and moral than political. He 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, where support for Democrats had wavered in the wake of the civil rights movement. Carter\u2019s wholesome image was painted in direct contrast to the memory of Nixon, and by association with the man who pardoned him. Carter sealed his party\u2019s nomination in June and won a close victory in November. ((Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974\u20132008<\/em> (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 69\u201372.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When 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\u2019s 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. After the war, American diplomats and politicians used trade relationships to win influence and allies around the globe. They saw the economic health of their allies, particularly West Germany and Japan, as a crucial bulwark against the expansion of communism. Americans encouraged these nations to develop vibrant export-oriented economies and tolerated restrictions on U.S. imports.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
The 1979 energy crisis panicked consumers who remembered the 1973 oil shortage, prompting many Americans to buy oil in huge quantities. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This came at great cost to the United States. 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 value of American exports dropped and the prices of its imports skyrocketed. Coupled with the huge cost of the Vietnam War and the rise of oil-producing states in the Middle East, growing trade deficits sapped the United States\u2019 dominant position in the global economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American leaders didn\u2019t know how to respond. After a series of negotiations with leaders from France, Great Britain, West Germany, and Japan in 1970 and 1971, the Nixon administration allowed these 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. By 1974, in response to U.S. complaints and their own domestic economic problems, many of these industrial nations overhauled their protectionist practices but developed even subtler methods (such as state subsidies for key industries) to nurture their economies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>.\u201d ((Ibid., 75.)) Neither Ford nor Carter had the means or ambition to protect American jobs and goods from foreign competition. As firms and financial institutions invested, sold goods, and manufactured in new rising economies like Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, and elsewhere, American politicians allowed them to sell their often cheaper products in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As American officials institutionalized this new unfettered global trade, many American manufacturers perceived only one viable path to sustained profitability: moving overseas, often by establishing foreign subsidiaries or partnering with foreign firms. Investment capital, especially in manufacturing, fled the United States looking for overseas investments and hastened the decline in the productivity of American industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Carter had touted the \u201cmisery index,\u201d 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, and the stubborn and confounding rise of both unemployment and inflation damaged his presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Carter failed to offer or enact policies to stem the unraveling of the American economy, his idealistic vision of human rights\u2013based foreign policy crumbled. He had not made human rights a central theme in his campaign, but in May 1977 he declared his wish to move away from a foreign policy in which \u201cinordinate fear of communism\u201d caused American leaders to \u201cadopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries.\u201d Carter proposed instead \u201ca policy based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision.\u201d ((Jimmy Carter, \u201cUniversity of Notre Dame\u2014Address at the Commencement Exercises at the University,\u201d May 22, 1977, American Presidency Project<\/em>, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=7552<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carter\u2019s 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 places like South Korea, Argentina, and the Philippines. In September 1977, Carter negotiated the return to Panama of the Panama Canal, which cost him enormous political capital in the United States. ((Wilentz, Age of Reagan<\/em>, 100\u2013102.)) A year later, in September 1978, Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The Camp David Accords\u2014named for the president\u2019s rural Maryland retreat, where thirteen days of secret negotiations were held\u2014represented the first time an Arab state had recognized Israel, and the first time Israel promised Palestine self-government. The accords had limits, for both Israel and the Palestinians, but they represented a major foreign policy coup for Carter. ((Harvey Sicherman, Palestinian Autonomy, Self-Government, and Peace<\/em> (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 35.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet Carter\u2019s dreams of a human rights\u2013based foreign policy crumbled before the Cold War and the realities of American politics. The United States continued to provide military and financial support for dictatorial regimes vital to American interests, such as the oil-rich state of Iran. When the President and First Lady Rosalynn Carter visited Tehran, Iran, in January 1978, the president praised the nation\u2019s dictatorial ruler, Shah Reza Pahlavi, and remarked on the \u201crespect and the admiration and love\u201d Iranians had for their leader. ((Jimmy Carter, \u201cTehran, Iran Toasts of the President and the Shah at a State Dinner,\u201d December 31, 1977, American Presidency Project<\/em>, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=7080<\/a>.)) When the shah was deposed in November 1979, revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two Americans hostage. Americans not only experienced another oil crisis as Iran\u2019s oil fields shut down, they watched America\u2019s news programs, for 444 days, remind them of the hostages and America\u2019s new global impotence. Carter couldn\u2019t win their release. A failed rescue mission only ended in the deaths of eight American servicemen. Already beset with a punishing economy, Carter\u2019s popularity plummeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carter\u2019s efforts to ease the Cold War by achieving a new nuclear arms control agreement disintegrated under domestic opposition from conservative Cold War hawks such as Ronald Reagan, who accused Carter of weakness. A month after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, a beleaguered Carter committed the United States to defending its \u201cinterests\u201d in the Middle East against Soviet incursions, declaring that \u201can assault [would] be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.\u201d The Carter Doctrine not only signaled Carter\u2019s ambivalent commitment to de-escalation and human rights, it testified to his increasingly desperate presidency. ((Jimmy Carter, \u201cThe State of the Union Address,\u201d January 23, 1980, American Presidency Project<\/em>, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=33079<\/a>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. \u201cI want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy,\u201d Jimmy Carter said in a televised address on July 15, 1979. \u201cThe threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IX. Conclusion<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Though American politics moved right after Lyndon Johnson\u2019s administration, Nixon\u2019s 1968 election was no conservative counterrevolution. American politics and society remained in flux throughout the 1970s. American politicians on the right and the left pursued relatively moderate courses compared to those in the preceding and succeeding decades. But a groundswell of anxieties and angers brewed beneath the surface. The world\u2019s greatest military power had floundered in Vietnam and an American president stood flustered by Middle Eastern revolutionaries. The cultural clashes from the sixties persisted and accelerated. While cities burned, a more liberal sexuality permeated American culture. The economy crashed, leaving America\u2019s cities prone before poverty and crime and its working class gutted by deindustrialization and globalization. American weakness was everywhere. And so, by 1980, many Americans\u2014especially white middle- and upper-class Americans\u2014felt a nostalgic desire for simpler times and simpler answers to the frustratingly complex geopolitical, social, and economic problems crippling the nation. The appeal of Carter\u2019s soft drawl and Christian humility had signaled this yearning, but his utter failure to stop the unraveling of American power and confidence opened the way for a new movement, one with new personalities and a new conservatism\u2014one that promised to undo the damage and restore the United States to its own nostalgic image of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X. Primary Sources<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

1. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riots rocked American cities in the mid-late sixties. Hundreds died, thousands were injured, and thousands of buildings were destroyed. Many communities never recovered. In 1967, devastating riots, particularly in Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, captivated national television audiences. President Lyndon Johnson appointed an 11-person commission, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, to explain the origins of the riots and recommend policies to prevent them in the future.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Statement by John Kerry of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1971)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On April 23, 1971, a young Vietnam veteran named John Kerry spoke on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations. Kerry, later a Massachusetts Senator and 2004 presidential contender, articulated a growing disenchantment with the Vietnam War and delivered a blistering indictment of the reasoning behind its prosecution.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Nixon Announcement of China Visit (1971)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Richard Nixon, who built his political career on anti-communism, worked from the first day of his presidency to normalize relations with the communist People\u2019s Republic of China. In 1971, Richard Nixon announced that he would make an unprecedented visit there to advance American-Chinese relations. Here, he explains his intentions.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Barbara Jordan, 1976 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address (1976)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 12, 1976, Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. As Americans sensed a fracturing of American life in the 1970s, Jordan called for Americans to commit themselves to a \u201cnational community\u201d and the \u201ccommon good.\u201d Jordan began by noting she was the first Black woman to ever deliver a keynote address at a major party convention and that such a thing would have been almost impossible even a decade earlier.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Jimmy Carter, \u201cCrisis of Confidence\u201d (1979)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 15, 1979, amid stagnant economic growth, high inflation, and an energy crisis, Jimmy Carter delivered a televised address to the American people. In it, Carter singled out a pervasive \u201ccrisis of confidence\u201d preventing the American people from moving the country forward. A year later, Ronald Reagan would frame his optimistic political campaign in stark contrast to the tone of Carter\u2019s speech, which would be remembered, especially by critics, as the \u201cmalaise speech.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Gloria Steinem on Equal Rights for Women (1970)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923, but the push for the amendment stalled until the 1960s, when a revived women\u2019s movement thrust it again into the national consciousness. Congress passed and sent to the states for ratification the ERA on March 22, 1972. But it failed, stalling just three states short of the required three-fourths needed for ratification. Despite popular support for the amendment, activists such as Phyllis Schlafly outmaneuvered the amendment\u2019s supporters. In 1970, author Gloria Steinem argued that such opposition was rooted in outmoded ideas about gender.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Native Americans Occupy Alcatraz (1969)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November 1969, Native American activists occupied Alcatraz Island and held it for nineteen months to bring attention to past injustices and contemporary issues confronting Native Americans, as state in this proclamation, drafted largely by Adam Fortunate Eagle of the Ojibwa Nation.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. New York City Subway (1973)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUrban Decay\u201d confronted Americans of the 1960s and 1970s. As the economy sagged and deindustrialization hit much of the country, many Americans associated major cities with poverty and crime. In this 1973 photo, two subway riders sit amid a graffitied subway car in New York City.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. \u201cStop ERA\u201d Protest (1977)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, conservative Americans defeated the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). With high approval ratings, the ERA\u2013which declared, \u201cEquality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex\u201d\u2014seemed destined to pass swiftly through state legislatures and become the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, but conservative opposition stopped the Amendment just short of ratification.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

XI. Reference Material<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

This chapter was edited by Edwin Breeden, with content contributions by Seth Anziska, Jeremiah Bauer, Edwin Breeden, Kyle Burke, Brent Cebul, Alexandra Evans, Sean Fear, Anne Gray Fischer, Destin Jenkins, Matthew Kahn, Suzanne Kahn, Brooke Lamperd, Katherine McGarr, Matthew Pressman, Adam Parsons, Emily Prifogle, John Rosenberg, Brandy Thomas Wells, and Naomi R. Williams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended citation: Seth Anziska et al., \u201cThe Unraveling,\u201d Edwin Breeden, ed., in The American Yawp<\/em>, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended Reading<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics.<\/em> Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Cowie, Jefferson R. Stayin\u2019 Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.<\/em> New York: New Press, 2010.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women\u2019s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left.<\/em> New York: Vintage Books, 1979.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Flamm, Michael W. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s.<\/em> New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Formisano, Ronald P. Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s.<\/em> Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Greenberg, David. Nixon\u2019s Shadow: The History of an Image.<\/em> New York: Norton, 2004.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.<\/em> Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1989.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Jenkins, Philip. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Kalman, Laura. Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974\u20131980.<\/em> New York: Norton, 2010.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Lassiter, Matthew D. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.<\/em> Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • MacLean, Nancy. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace.<\/em> Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.<\/em> New York: Viking, 2011.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s.<\/em> New York: Harper and Row, 1984.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Murch, Donna Jean. Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.<\/em> Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945\u20131974.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.<\/em> New York: Norton, 2003.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Phelps, Wesley. A People\u2019s War on Poverty: Urban Politics, Grassroots Activists, and the Struggle for Democracy in Houston, 1964\u20131976.<\/em> Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture.<\/em> Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Roth, Benita. Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America\u2019s Second Wave.<\/em> New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Sargent, Daniel J. A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s.<\/em> Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics.<\/em> New York: Free Press, 2001.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Springer, Kimberly. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968\u20131980.<\/em> Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s.<\/em> New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.<\/em> New York: Pantheon Books, 2016.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Zaretsky, Natasha. No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline.<\/em> Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Notes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    *The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.* I. Introduction On December 6, 1969, an estimated three hundred thousand people converged on the Altamont Motor Speedway in Northern California for a massive free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones and featuring some of the era\u2019s other great rock acts. ((Acts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-82","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/82\/revisions\/83"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}